Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

Nikki tugged on my hand again. I realized that I was drifting.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I said softly, and hunched down a little further. My plastic “moon suit”—made of Hefty bags cut to fit and held together with electrical tape—crinkled with every move I made.

Nikki’s suit was identical to mine, just smaller, and even tighter around the joints. When I was suiting up myself I could usually stop wrapping the tape after three full layers. With her, I would keep going until she said stop—and that happened later and later these days, sometimes after I’d gone through an entire roll of tape. Our supplies were running low. We’d have to make another scavenging run soon if we didn’t start rationing. But when my daughter looked at me and said, “More,” I couldn’t tell her no. Not here. Not now. Not when her safety was at stake.

“Are we moving?”

It was a good question, and it deserved a better answer than I had. All Nikki’s questions deserved better answers than I could give her anymore, than I had been able to give her since I saw my wife—her second and better mother—melting off her own bones in an isolated hospital bed. My Rachel had been the first victim of the genetically “improved” R. nigricans created by the careless bastards I used to work with on Project Eden, back when I thought that we were going to save the world, not destroy it.

The street looked clear. I had seen no motion in the time we had spent crouching, watching the storefronts, and thanks to the relative lack of rain recently—bless you, drought conditions, bless you—the sidewalks hadn’t been wetted down in weeks. At least one shop window had been broken. Bits of broken glass glittered on the pavement, and the fact that they hadn’t been swept up was a sign in our favor.

“We’re moving,” I said finally. I didn’t want to, but if we wanted to eat tonight, we needed to take the risk. “Mask on.”

Nikki nodded, and pulled the cotton surgical mask that always hung around her neck up over her mouth and nose. She didn’t wait to be told before pulling down her goggles, covering her eyes. I handed her a fresh shower cap, watching to be sure that her scalp and ears were fully protected, before I began putting my own gear in place. Nikki first, always. She was the only thing left in the world that was worth saving, and if I failed her the way I had failed Rachel . . .

No. Even thinking about it was enough to make my skin crawl, and we couldn’t afford to sit here while I shredded my suit and scrubbed myself down for the third time today. Too much sanitization was as much of a risk as not enough; it could cause dryness and cracks in the skin, and cracks were the way that the danger got inside. The sun would be past its zenith soon, and the danger would grow. We had to go.

“Now,” I said. Nikki retook my hand, and together we ran for the gleaming paradise of the 7-Eleven across the street.

My name is Megan Riley. I am a molecular biologist. Until very recently, I was employed by a large biotech firm as part of a team that was developing hardier, healthier, easier-to-grow fruit and vegetables designed to thrive in our changing climate. It was going to change the world, for the better.

Except that there was cross-contamination in the labs, resulting in a strain of bread mold becoming part of the process. Hardier, healthier, easier-to-grow bread mold, that was resistant to virtually every fungicide and sterilizing agent we knew.

Except that my team members hid the existence of the contamination from me, because they were afraid of my reaction; afraid that I would report them to senior management and get the whole project canceled. They justified it to themselves by saying that my OCD would make me unreasonable about what was, really, such a small thing, and after all, they were going to change the world.

They succeeded.

Every night in my dreams my dead wife comes to me, beautiful and laughing, with ribbons in her long, dark hair. And then the mold comes for her, spreading out from a tiny cut on her finger, swallowing her alive, until all that’s left are her eyes, and her flesh is falling off her bones, eaten away by something I should have seen, should have stopped, should have never allowed to escape from its artificial womb. Rachel was the first documented victim of R. nigricans, which was a greater success than we had ever hoped our engineered fruit would be. It could thrive anywhere. It could consume virtually anything. It loved the taste of flesh, and it didn’t need to wait for its food to die.

We had created the world’s first fungal apex predator, and while that might be an achievement for the history books, it wasn’t one that I was particularly proud of. I’ve added quite a few entries to the list of “things I am not proud of” since the day I found a bowl of moldy fruit sitting in my kitchen, but none of them mattered—not even running out of the hospital where Rachel’s flesh was being eaten off her own bones by a monster I had helped, however passively, to create. I knew Rachel would have felt the same way, if she’d still been around to tell me so.

As long as I kept Nikki safe, nothing else mattered.

The 7-Eleven’s window was intact, covered by a thin layer of dust and grime. I pulled one of my precious remaining cans of compressed air out of my pocket and blew away the dirt, creating a small porthole into the gloom. Nikki pressed up against me as I peered into the store. Her own eyes would be scanning the street, watching for signs of motion, for danger, for anything that could mean that we were no longer alone.

The shelves nearest to the door had been picked clean, but what I could see included no dark splotches, no irregularly shaped patches of tile or shelving that didn’t match their surroundings. We were still taking a risk by going inside. We didn’t know how many survivors were in this neighborhood, or why the store had been left so intact.

My stomach was a hard stone, compressed in on itself like a peach pit, tight and aching with the need for sustenance. Worse, our bottled water was on the verge of running out, and we couldn’t trust the taps; couldn’t trust anything moist or fertile. We had to go inside.

I tried the door first. The habits of civilization died hard—harder, it sometimes seemed, than civilization itself, which had folded up over the course of a single summer as R. nigricans rampaged across the face and flesh of the world. The idea that I could have been partially responsible for ending the world as we knew it seemed almost impossibly arrogant to me. So far as I knew, the mold hadn’t managed to escape the Americas—might not even have made it out of Mexico, where there were long stretches of desert and open land that would give it very little to feed upon. But if it reached the rainforests, it would never die. These continents would never belong to men, or to mammals, ever again.

Of course, “so far as I knew” was a statement of ignorance, and not information. The newspapers had stopped printing; the television stations had gone off the air; even the local ISPs had died, effectively killing the Internet. The whole world could be strangling in gray for all I knew, and it would all be the same from where I was standing.

Tugging the door resulted only in a clunk as the deadbolt held fast. The looting must have happened early, then, before the proprietor locked up. The fact that the proprietor had been able to lock up spoke well for the safety of the store’s contents: if he or she had been too far gone, they would have left the door open. Snickers and M&Ms for all, here at the end of the world.

“Head down,” I said, pulling the crowbar out of my bag. Nikki ducked, putting her hands over the back of her neck as I swung and smashed out the glass body of the door. Most of the shards flew inward. The few that bounced back onto the street landed safely on the pavement, avoiding me and my daughter entirely.