Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

God help me, I’d wanted my last perfect night.

“Maria from reception. We had her meet your wife in the parking lot and say she’d bought too many peaches. It was going to get you to come around to our way of thinking, but Megan, the fruit is safe, I promise you—”

“Have there been any issues with contamination of the samples? Mold or fungus or anything like that?”

There was a long pause before Henry said, “That’s classified.”

“What kind of mold, Henry?”

“That’s classified.”

“How fast does it grow?”

“Megan—”

“Does it grow on living flesh?”

Silence. Then, in a small, strained voice, Henry said, “Oh, God.”

“Did it get out? Did something get loose in the orchard? Who decided testing genetically engineered food on human subjects was a good idea? No, wait, don’t tell me, because I don’t care. How do I kill it, Henry? You made it. How do I kill it?”

“It’s a strain of Rhizopus nigricans —bread mold,” said Henry. “We’ve been trying to eliminate it for weeks. I…we thought we had it under control. We didn’t tell you because we thought we had it under control. We didn’t want to trigger one of your episodes.”

“How kind of you,” I said flatly. “How do I kill it?”

His voice was even smaller when he replied, “Fire. Nothing else we’ve found does any good.”

“No anti-fungals? No poisons? Nothing?”

He was silent. I closed my eyes.

“Who decided to give it to my wife?”

“I did.” His voice was so small I could barely hear it. “Megan, I—”

“You’ve killed her. You’ve killed my wife. She’s melting off her own bones. You may have killed us all. Enjoy your pie.” I hung up the phone and opened my eyes, staring bleakly at the wall for a long moment before realizing that the nurses whose station I’d borrowed were staring at me , mingled expressions of horror and confusion on their faces.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “Maybe you should go home now. Be with your families.” There wasn’t much else left for them to do. For any of us to do.

Rachel was in a private room, with a plastic airlock between her and the outside world. “The CDC is on their way,” said Dr. Oshiro, watching me and Nikki. Anything to avoid looking at Rachel. “They should be here within the day.”

“Good,” I said. It wasn’t going to help. Not unless they were ready to burn this city to the ground. But it would make the doctors feel like they were doing something, and it was best to die feeling like you might still have a chance.

The bed in Rachel’s room was occupied, but where my wife should have been there was a softly mounded gray thing , devoid of hard lines or distinguishing features. Worst of all, it moved from time to time, shifting just enough that a lock of glossy black hair or a single large brown eye—the right eye, all she had left—would come into view, rising out of the gray like a rumor of the promised land. Nikki’s hand tightened on mine every time that happened, small whimpers that belonged to a much younger child escaping her throat. I couldn’t offer her any real comfort, but I could at least not pull away. It was the only thing I had to give her. I could at least not pull away.

The doctors moved around the thing that had been Rachel, taking samples, checking displays. They were all wearing protective gear—gloves, booties, breathing masks—but it wasn’t going to be enough. This stuff was manmade and meant to survive under any conditions imaginable. They were dancing in the fire, and they were going to get burnt.

All the steps I’d taken to keep my family safe. All the food I’d thrown away, the laundry I’d done twice, the midnight trips to the doctor and the visits from the exterminator and the vaccinations and the pleas…it had all been for nothing. The agent of our destruction had grown in the lab where I worked, the lab I’d chosen because it let me channel my impulses into something that felt useful. I hadn’t even known it was coming, because people had been protecting me from it in order to protect themselves from me. This was all my fault.

Dr. Oshiro was saying something. I wasn’t listening anymore. One of the nurses in Rachel’s room had just turned around, revealing the small patch of gray fuzz growing on the back of his knee. The others would spot it soon. That didn’t matter. The edges told me that it had grown outward, eating through his scrubs, rather than inward, seeking flesh. The flesh was already infected. The burning had begun.

“Mom?” Nikki pulled against my hand, and I realized I was walking away, pulling her with me, away from this house of horrors, toward the outside world, where maybe—if we were quick, if we were careful—we still stood a chance of getting out alive. Nikki was all I had left to worry about.

Rachel, I’m sorry , I thought, and broke into a run.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

Kids, you know?

Tough to raise a kid in almost any household.

Tough to raise a kid with all the shit going on in the world.

You can’t lie to them and say it’s all going to be okay, because pretty much it’s not all going to be okay. There’s stuff that’s never going to be okay. Neither well-intentioned rationalization, protective lies, or outright bullshit is going to make it all right.

Bad stuff happens to good people.

That’s one of those immutable laws, like saying “everybody dies.” They do. Some things are going to happen no matter how much we don’t want them to. Even despite a lot of serious effort to prevent them from happening.

Rape happens.

Murder happens.

Abuse happens.

Go bigger: Wars happen. Poverty happens. Famine happens.

Take it from an arbitrary perspective: Tsunamis happen. Earthquakes and tornados happen.

Shit happens.

And it happens, a lot of the damn time, to good people. To the innocent. To the unprotected. To the undeserving.

Try to tell a kid otherwise and they know you’re lying.

Lie too much about it and they stop believing anything you tell them.

They stop believing you.

They stop believing in you, which is worse.

They stop believing in themselves, which is worst of all.

I see what happens when parents cross that line.

When they call me in, the kid has crossed some lines of his own. We’re not talking about “acting out.” It’s not selling dope to earn fun money or selling yourself as the fun guy. It’s not fucking everyone who comes within grabbing distance as a way of making a statement. It’s not getting a tattoo or fifteen piercings or going Goth.

We’re talking a different set of lines.

When they call me in, the kids have crossed a line that maybe they can’t cross the other way. Either they’re so lost they can’t find it, or they’re so lost they don’t think there ever was a line. All they can see is the narrow piece of ground on which they’re standing in that moment. Everything else is chaos. They don’t want to move because who would step off of solid ground into chaos? So they stay there.