It's a temperate, muggy summer evening in the forest. Tens of yards away from your camp, fireflies are slowly blinking–the sun's just gone down, bringing with it a soft breeze off the nearby lake. You untie your flannel from your waist and drape it over your shoulders, barely too warm to shrug your arms through the sleeves.
You, your girlfriend, and your best friend have spent the day foraging for mushrooms while hiking through the woods towards the group of huts you now find yourself camping at. Armed with two guidebooks, you've finally gathered enough safe-looking fungi to make a fairly substantial meal once paired with the rest of your [[supplies]].The campfire pit comes with a grille at this site. You would say your friends have been hard at work preparing food for the past twenty minutes, but really, it's not that backbreaking to watch hotdogs slowly cook on a metal rack or mushrooms bake on tinfoil. Dessert, which is of //course// s'mores, will probably be more work.
Your girlfriend skewers a hen-of-the-woods and blows on it a few times. She takes a cautious nibble, then breaks out into a grin.
[["Dinner's ready!"]]The food is good. Delicious, even. You and your friends gorge yourselves on the bounty of the woods, every so often pairing a grilled morsel with nuts or a granola bar. You find that peanut butter and mushrooms are //really// good together and it takes all of your willpower to stow the jar so you'll still have sandwiches tomorrow instead of using it all right now.
Before you know it, there's one mushroom left on the serving platter. It's bite-size: too small to divide in half. Your girlfriend is already sharpening a stick to toast marshmallows with, but your best friend is about to finish what's on his plate, and you know he'll go for any seconds he can find.
[[Take it before he can!]]
[[Let him have the last bite.]]Quickly, you pop it into your mouth while your friend's head is turned, only chewing once before swallowing. You don't want to look mean, after all.
The combination of dim firelight and your quick action meant that you didn't actually get to see what you were eating. It doesn't taste similar to anything you've had tonight. In fact, you're disappointed at how bland it is–what an unsatisfying last bite.
The taste persists after dinner. You can't even enjoy the s'mores: it's almost like the mushroom's coated your mouth with a layer of dull-flavoured residue, preventing you from tasting anything else.
Your girlfriend notices you looking down.
"Hey, is anything wrong?"
[["I think I ate something weird." |confess]]
[["It's fine, I'm just tired." |silent]]
He picks up the mushroom and squints at it, then pops it into his mouth.
"Tastes a bit gross," he says after a few chews, and makes a face before spitting it out into the fire. It blackens and shrivels into a tiny curl of carbon. "Maybe we didn't cook that one long enough."
He says he's feeling tired and going to bed early, so you scoot next to your girlfriend to cook a few s'mores. Around the campsite, the other groups slowly retire.
When you've both sat in comfortable silence for a while, watching the fire get lower and lower, you pour a bucket of water into the firepit and poke the coals with a stick to disperse them. As you ensure the fire's safely out, your girlfriend packs up the food.
[[Go to bed.|Go to bed 2]]
"I think I ate something weird," you confess. "The last mushroom I had tasted really bland, but now my whole mouth tastes like that."
She frowns and pulls out one of the foraging guidebooks. "Do you remember what it looked like?"
"No," you admit. "It was... small?"
"That's what she said!" your friend calls around a mouthful of marshmallow.
You roll your eyes.
"Listen, we checked every mushroom before picking it, so I'm sure it's nothing to worry about. Maybe it's like cilantro and you just have the soap gene."
Your girlfriend nods. "Besides, mushroom poisons tend to taste bitter or even burn your tongue. If you didn't immediately want to spit it out, it probably won't kill you, especially if it was small."
"And I can still speak just fine," you add, feeling more confident. "So it's not a nerve agent or anything."
"Yeah, you'll be fine," your friend tells you. "If it's anything serious, we're not that far from the highway."
[[Go to bed.]]"It's fine, I'm just tired," you say.
Your girlfriend sighs and leans into you. "It //was// a long day, yeah. Let's go to bed soon, we'll need all our energy to hike out to the waterfall tomorrow and make it back before sundown."
[[Go to bed.]]Your friend pours a bucket of water into the firepit, sending up a hiss of steam, then pokes the coals with a stick to disperse them. As he ensures the fire's safely out, your girlfriend packs up the food. You head inside to set up the sleeping bags, where you unclip the rolls from the backpacks and lay them on the floor, then the sleeping bags on top of them.
Luckily, the cabin's not a tight squeeze. You put your bed as far away from the other two as you can: you love your friends, but they're snorers, and after scouring your bag you discover you forgot to bring earplugs.
But the forest isn't too quiet: the soft breeze whistles through cracks in the cabin, and you can hear all manner of insects: cicadas, crickets, bugs that you'd think were birdsong if it weren't the middle of the night. Hopefully they'll drown out the snoring and you'll get a good night's sleep before the hike to the falls tomorrow.
Your girlfriend turns out the lights, and after a few minutes of rustling into your sleeping bags, one by one you and your friends drift off to [[sleep]].You sit straight up in your sleeping bag, covered with sweat. Just a nightmare. //Just a nightmare.//
It's dark, but not pitch-dark: moonlight filters into the room through the glass window in the door. You try watching the shadows of leaves sway in the breeze to ground yourself, but they're hazy, indistinct.
There's movement deeper in the cabin: someone's woken up.
A female voice says something you can't make out. A body shuffles towards you, and then //screams//.
[[Speak]]Opening your mouth takes effort, like it's glued shut from within. You can feel something //snapping// like rubber bands as you widen your jaw. When you breathe, the air feels like it's going through a mesh down your throat. It settles thickly into your lungs and doesn't want to leave.
Your words come out as through cotton. Though it's not like you can call the strangled wheezes you produce "words". Your tongue refuses to move: you feel spongy threads anchoring it to the roof and sides of your mouth.
What were you going to say, anyways?
[[Your mind is fuzzy.]]It's later than you thought. Hopefully, you'll still get a good night's sleep before the hike to the falls tomorrow.
The two of you tiptoe into the cabin. Your friend's huddled in the corner, snoring somewhat irregularly.
No matter how much you try to focus on the noise of the wind and bugs outside, you can't fall asleep. As soon as you think you're drifting off, another snore breaks into your consciousness and you're transported back to the cabin.
Then, he starts [[coughing|Get woken up]].You tiptoe over to your friend, trying to not wake up your girlfriend. She's awake anyways and sits up in her sleeping bag as you pass.
"Are you alright?" you whisper, tapping his shoulder.
He turns to you and you physically recoil. Even in the dim light, you can see a pale web of veins over his face and clothes. One of his eyes is bulging out of its socket, slowly rolling in a different direction from the other one which stares through you, glazed over.
His mouth hangs slack. He coughs and a small cloud of particles comes out, glittering in the moonlight.
Whatever's happening, he needs hospital care, and fast. You check your phone. You don't have signal–and your girlfriend's got the same provider, so she wouldn't either–but someone around here might.
[[Go for help.]]
[[Tell your girlfriend to go for help.]]"What's wrong–" your girlfriend calls, sleepy.
"He's sick. I'm gonna get help, stay here with him." You grab a flashlight and rush outside.
Though it's the middle of the night, there's another hut in the campsite with the light on. You can see two people walking around aimlessly. They're probably drunk, but that's better than nothing.
"Hey there," you call. "Do either of you have cell service? My friend's sick, and–"
You don't get any further. Despite how far away they are, once your flashlight's beam falls on them you can tell they're not just drunk.
Clothes hang in rags off their emaciated bodies. You see red through the holes: muscle, but no blood. Strange growths protrude from places they shouldn't: shoulders and elbows grow sickeningly organic spikes. The most clearly defined of these you easily recognize as mushrooms.
One of them turns towards you: its abdominal cavity is deformed, with bloated intestines bulging through skin stretched to its limit. There are holes in the skin as with the clothes: places where mushrooms have pushed through and sprouted, then decayed or fallen off as quickly as they grew. As you watch, another cluster bursts from the stomach.
It lumbers in your direction, and its partner follows.
[[Run!]]
[[Fight!]]"Find someone with cell service or a radio. I'll stay with him." You know CPR and it looks like
"I'll be back," she says, voice wavering. She pulls on her boots. "I'll get the ranger and he'll call for an airlift and it'll–it'll all be fine."
The door slowly closes behind her, and you're left alone with the laboured breathing of your best friend.
[[Sit on the other side of the room.]]
[[Try to help him.]]You sprint back towards your cabin. Your best friend might be parasitized too, but at least he isn't trying to //kill you//. At least he still looks //human//. You'll figure out how to help him, and fix him, before–before––
You open the door, panting, and slam it shut behind you. Before you, your flashlight illuminates a terrible scene.
"Help!" your girlfriend screams. Her voice is muffled by the //thing// on top of her, pinning her to the cabin wall, its head obscuring her face.
You don't have time to think. All you can do is [[grab your friend's hiking stick and hit the creature as hard as you can|kill him]]."Please."
You drop to your knees and clutch your head. Your temples softly give way under your fingers.
The pain is lessening, and even through the delirium, you know that doesn't mean you're getting better.
A dark amber flashes in your vision: the pattern of blood vessels to the beat of your pulse. Mycelial roots burrow deeper into your ears, deeper up your nose and down your throat, deeper behind your eyes. As you gasp in breaths, throat closing up, the skin of your cheeks stretches and stretches and tears open like pantyhose.
"Do it," you slur, wheezing out a cloud of spores. They film over your eyes which no longer blink.
She's crying. You can't comfort her.
"I'm sor––"
ENDYou don't have a weapon! You whirl around, searching for a stick, a rock, //anything// to do some damage to these creatures.
The edge of the woods is nearby. You know you won't find a single stick there: it took forever to find fuel for your campfire, earlier this evening. It feels like an eternity ago.
And then you remember: your campfire! You'd dispersed the embers with a strong stick. You sprint over, at least putting some distance between yourself and those... //things//, and pick up your fire-poker. It's long and has a good heft, but you have to set your flashlight down to use it as a weapon.
You take a swing at the first creature that comes within range. The stick makes a meaty //thump// when it hits, lodging into the side of its chest.
And then it doesn't come out.
When you tug on the stick, it pulls the creature towards you too. You stumble backwards, stepping on your flashlight. You slip.
Pain shoots up your leg from your ankle and across the rest of your body as you fall onto the packed earth around the firepit. Something soft and squishy falls on you, pinning you to the floor.
You scream and fight and kick and push against the weighted blanket of fungal meat that falls over you. A fist punches through, reaching air on the other side, but mycelium grows back into the hole it made and anchors it in place. Seconds later, you lose feeling in your arm.
At some point, fungus enters your mouth. You try to gasp around it, but soon enough black spots begin to dance in your vision as less and less air enters your lungs.
It's a mercy, really, that consciousness slips away from you before the end.
ENDIts head tears from the rest of it with the ease of ripping play-doh. Some of its skin sticks to your weapon; the rest of it falls to the floor. A few seconds later, the body follows.
You stand still, panting with exertion. And then you realize that there's no fourth body in the room.
"Fuck–was that––"
You drop the stick and stare at the body, a mass of flesh sculpted into inhuman shapes. Organic spikes protrude from its head, some more recognizably caps and others new growths. The tear at its neck does not bleed; it looks like the mushrooms that you had cut for dinner just hours ago.
But its flesh bulges around the sports jersey that your friend wears to bed every night.
The only thing that can ground you is your girlfriend. She steps over his body and hugs you tight, letting you settle against her. She's crying, or maybe you are. Maybe you both are.
Behind you, the doorknob rattles.
[[There's no time to mourn.]]You look down at your left arm. The nutrients have been drained from the muscle tissues; ectomycorrhizas, your new veins, wrap around and root into your bones. New growths bulge out from the joints that were once an elbow, a wrist, knuckles.
They are fruiting. They are ready to propagate.
Legs–flesh that seems less your own than the hyphae burrowing into it–carry you towards the human wrapped in nylon before you. You do not //see// it, with your useless eyes, but //sense// it, sense that pulsing life and the warmth it exudes and the millions of metabolic reactions all travelling towards a single end.
The right arm, still mobile, reaches and plucks a fruiting body from where it has pushed through an eye socket, nourished by the delicious organs in the skull. You extend the arm, sending spores puffing around like clouds from the mushroom's gills as tremors wrack the hand holding it.
Another stumbling step towards the quivering biomass. The legs quickly lose their movement as the muscles atrophy. And then, suddenly, you find yourself on the ground, fragmented. The biomass retreats beyond your perception.
You will not take another step, but all will be well. Already, you feel your hyphae snake down to the wooden planks beneath you. They contain nutrients. They can rot. They will nourish you when your body wastes away.
Soon, your network will surround the cabin. It will merge with the mycelium in the ground. It will not matter what you could not consume when you were mobile. Soon, your body...
ENDYou dream of skies opening into teeth, devouring anything in their paths.
[[Wake up.]]His breathing's not right: that's something you can probably help with. If there's something in his airway, you can try to dislodge it.
You move behind him and crouch down to wrap your arms around his chest, forming a fist with one hand and holding it with the other in preparation for the Heimlich. You nestle it below what you think is his ribcage, though it's a bit hard to tell for some reason.
"I'm gonna squeeze you on three to get that junk outta your throat. One, two––"
On //three//, you compress what should be his abdomen and meet no resistance. Your arms go deep into his body–deeper–and eventually //through// until they collide with your own.
He retches, spewing out a thicker cloud of spores.
Too late, you realize this is beyond your control. You let go of his torso and try to extricate yourself from him. But your legs won't work.
You realize you can't feel them at all.
You shove your friend's body off of yours, trying to ignore the dull //thud// it makes when it hits the ground. Fungal veins crawl up your legs, already at your thighs, binding them to the greater network carpeting the floor beneath you.
They're not //on// your legs, though. They're //in// your legs, burrowing through your pants both into and out from the flesh beneath.
You look down at yourself. Your arms are crisscrossed with hyphae, and there's an imprint over your abdomen, intensity like a heatmap of where you pressed your friend to your body in an attempt to save him.
But you couldn't save him. And now, you can't save yourself. All you can hope is for the fungus to burrow into your chest and stop your heart before your girlfriend comes back.
ENDWhatever's wrong with him, it's probably infectious–and if not, better safe than sorry. Truth be told, you've probably already inhaled some of the spores. You've got a strong immune system, you tell yourself. You'll be fine as long as you don't take any more risks.
You can't look away from him in the same way you can't look away from a plane crash. His right eye, webbed over with fungal growth, quivers in its socket. And then–impossibly–it bulges out.
Beneath it is a stalk. Over the course of seconds, or minutes, it pushes upwards, ever so slowly but unsettlingly //steadily//, and the eye deforms into a mushroom's cap. At some point, you blink–and at once can no longer see it as an eye. It's completely opaque, tinged a dull brownish purple, and the bottom has flared out. Fungal gills ripple with the slow lolling of his head.
After what seems like an eternity, the mushroom has fully grown. He unbends his body to stand and takes a single, lurching step towards you. Then another.
By the time you realize you should've positioned yourself closer to the door, he's closed the distance. He reaches a skeletal arm up to the mushroom sprouting from his face and claws it off. In his hand, it looks more alive than he does.
His body is far, far too close to yours for comfort. His skin is no longer warm when he grabs your throat with his free hand. The other, he forcefully extends towards your face. You close your mouth, not even wanting to breathe so as to not inhale the spores.
You don't want to hurt him. You don't think you have a choice. But he was always stronger than you, and even against his parasitized, atrophying body, you barely stand a chance. You claw at his arms only to see them knit back together.
It's hard to struggle without taking a breath. Eventually, you have to gasp, and it's like he was waiting for that moment as he shoves the mushroom into your mouth[[––]]And then there's a wet //thump// and his head is no longer in front of yours. You spit the mushroom from your mouth and breathe.
His body lurches to the side and collapses to the floor belatedly. Behind it stands your girlfriend, a tree branch gripped like a club in her shaking hands.
"I couldn't–the ranger was–" she gasps out between sobs. "Oh my God, is he dead?"
You stagger towards her and hug her, working her white-knuckled fingers from the branch as you sway in an embrace. "It's not your fault," you tell her, all the while feeling as though it's your own. "He was dead before you–before you got back."
She hugs you back with one hand but keeps a death grip on the branch. And then you feel her freeze.
"Shit–the door–"
You drop her and make a lunge towards the door, then immediately take three steps back. Two //creatures//, mushrooms sprouting from their every limb, crowd around the threshold.
But before they can enter, your girlfriend grabs the tree branch, features harder than steel. She slams one's head to the side and caves its face in. The second she spears through its hanging-open mouth. Her yell of effort breaks you out of your trance and you finally //move// to slam the door shut.
Other than the panting between the two of you, it's dead silent.
[["We need to fortify," she says.]]"We need to fortify," she says. "We–we just need to last a bit longer."
"What do you mean?"
"These things–the bodies under them–they're wasting away. We just need to wait until they've been" – she shudders – "totally drained of nutrients. They won't be able to move."
She points to the body of what was once your best friend before turning away in a sob. You can barely handle it without retching, but she's right. Already, most of his chest has been eaten away to the bone, feeding a fungal network that spreads across half of the floor.
She pries up boards from the cabin floor and you use the hilt of a Swiss army knife to hammer them over the door. All the while, you ignore the tingling in your throat.
//It's just a bit dusty in here.//
But the night wears on with no sign of it abating. You curl up next to her in the corner farthest from your friend's body and try not to cough.
Neither of you can sleep. Neither of you dares to talk, fearful of alerting whatever creatures that haven't been totally cannibalized by the fungus. You spend hours in each other's arms, waiting for the sun to rise. Surely, that will end the nightmare.
It grows harder and harder to [[breathe]]. You dream of a forest of mushrooms and spores falling like leaves in autumn.
[[Wake up.|wake2]]You dream of a body that is not yours, a flesh-consuming rot, a fire that burns you as you lay, unable to move, on a metal grille––
[[Wake up.|Wake up]]When the itch in your throat is unbearable, you cough into your hand. Mixed with the saliva are organic structures that look like small white veins.
But coughing once multiplies the itch tenfold, and it's all you can do to swallow before your body can betray you. Now that you've seen the hyphae, you can picture exactly what they look like snaking down your throat, branching into your lungs and your stomach, pushing ever farther into your body.
It may be phantom. You hope it's phantom. But you feel a pressure building behind your eye.
She ought to have noticed by now. You see her face change into one of worry. It's selfish, but you bury your face in her shoulder as the pain increases.
[[Just a few minutes longer with her.]]
It's going to kill you. Now that you know what's happening, it's impossible to ignore the pulsing in your lungs, your stomach, your head.
Abruptly, you stand up and pull away from her to fish through your backpack. She makes a soft noise of protest and stands to meet you.
The face you fell in love with distorts into unimaginable fear when you take out the hatchet and turn to face her. You press it into her hands. Both of you are shaking.
"No–"
[[Beg.]]You wedge the hiking stick against the door to keep it shut, though it won't hold for long.
"Should we–should we run?" your girlfriend whispers, voice hoarse.
You don't know how far this infection's spread, but you don't trust your odds against the rest of the campsite alone.
"The things I saw outside" – your voice breaks; you don't want to associate your friend with those //things// – "the really far-gone ones, they looked like they were starving. If we can just last until the morning, their muscles will waste away. We can outrun them then."
You sound more confident than you feel.
"So we should get a stronger barrier than that stick." With that, you drop to the ground and begin [[pulling at a loose floorboard.]]
Thinking about it too hard makes you want to throw up. A few hours ago, you watched your friend pick the stick while you were hiking in the woods. And now it's got his grey matter all over it.
"If we–get this floorboard out–with the nail–you can hammer it–into the door," you grunt, trying to distract yourself. With a final heave, it comes away, both nails attached.
She rummages in the bag for a Swiss army knife. You're about to say it's a nail, not a screw, but she uses the hilt to bluntly hammer at the wood until the door's boarded up.
When she finishes, neither of you dare to speak, as if silence will will the scratching and pounding at the door into silence too.
And, eventually, it does. You whisper to her that you'll wait until the sunrise to be safe, and she nods against you, head buried in your shoulder.
Absentmindedly, you run your fingers through her hair. And then you feel something soft and bulbous.
[[You freeze.]]"What's wrong?" she asks, voice cracking. Tears well up in her eyes. You think she already knows.
"You're–"
You can't say it, can't will it into existence. //No.// It can't end like this. There has to be another way.
//Fungus is fairly soft, right?//
"Lie down," you tell her, and she complies without a word, shaking. You get your first aid kit and, for good measure, your knife. "Close your eyes." You don't want to scare her.
You cut her hair away to see where the infection's spread already, at each patch tugging until she twitches in response. It's agonizingly long before she does, but you can finally make a cut, carving away flesh until you reach a patch that bleeds.
And then you get to the base of her skull and it continues down her neck.
"I'm sorry," you whisper, unbuttoning her shirt. She moves to help you, but one of her hands brushes you with fingers too soft to be flesh. "Stay still. I'll fix you right up."
You cut away her clothes. In any other context, you straddling her like this would be downright romantic.
It feels like hours that you debride the flesh, trying to find bone that offers any resistance to your knife. But the longer you work away at her, the less and less she responds. The less and less she [[bleeds]].After lying motionless for so long you half-thought she was dead, she struggles under you.
"Stop..."
You sit back just in time: a cough wracks her entire form, and you realize she's been holding it in for the last hour, trying to not infect you. But now it all comes out, a cloud of spores from every heave her small body makes.
You haven't saved her. Every time you've cut to muscle, it was like cutting an apple–ten minutes later, the fungus had reclaimed it, and you had to shave off another layer. You've carved down to the bone–hell, you've cut her entire arm off, though she didn't notice, or at least didn't seem to–her ribs are showing, her //bone// ribs. All the while, her utterances of pain had grown more infrequent. Until now.
She sits up and looks down at herself, tracing her remaining hand across her broken body, defiled by metal and mycelium alike. Then she looks at you.
Her face makes you want to cry. There's a patch of exposed skull surrounding her eye. You didn't want to touch it when you first saw it twitching, and now you wish you had: it's wide-open, unseeing, webbed with veins that aren't her own. //You// did this to her.
Tears brim in her good eye.
"Kill me," she tells you, then dissolves into another coughing fit. "Cut my throat. Ma–make it quick."
[["I can't."]]"I can't," you tell her, and feel tears streak down your own face.
"Then give me the knife." Her voice wavers, but she props herself onto her knees and reaches towards your hand.
An inch away, she stops short and freezes. Her good eye glazes over.
You scoot backwards and grip the knife with both hands just before she lunges for you with a terrible [[death-rattle]].[[Spore-clumps fall from the sky like snowflakes.]]
[[The ground squishes under your feet.]]All around you is an apocalypse: mushrooms sprout from everything that was once living. Grass has become hyphae; trees have become stems for garangutan caps that replace branches and leaves. Bodies lie on the ground, wasted, skeletal structures contorted into inhuman final poses. Pustules on the ground spew fine clouds of sporules into the air.
Behind you, your girlfriend's body emerges from the cabin. Even the walls have been transformed into a striated screen of soft fiber. You did push through them to escape, didn't you?
Her face is not hers. It's not even human, with one and a half mouths and three eyes and hair falling out in clumps. But through your tears, you can pretend it's her.
You let her come to you and embrace her, and when you collapse to the ground and close your eyes, you can pretend the body next to you is your best friend's.
It's like you're all back together again.
END[[You close your eyes and bring the knife down.]]
When you open them again, her head has been cleaved in two. The infection had already spread to her brain: there is no pink or even grey inside her skull, but a white network of fibers.
You drop the knife. There is no blood, or even viscera, on it.
And again you have no time to mourn as from one half of her head the fungus begins to knit back together into a cruel mockery of her face.
All you can do is push your way through the door and run [[outside]]––