Cordyceps Trilogy (Book 2): Cordyceps Resurgentis Read online

  ALSO BY IAN DUNCAN

  AVAILABLE FROM HAMMERDOWN PRESS

  The Cordyceps Trilogy:

  Cordyceps

  Cordyceps Resurgentis

  Cordyceps Victoriosis

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, organizations, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Ian Duncan

  All rights reserved.

  www.IanDuncanBooks.com

  Cover design by Jared Hall

  ISBN: 978-1-7342822-3-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019919848

  For the Salmon King

  “Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.”

  C.S. Lewis

  Prologue

  —from the memoirs of General Nicolaus Trubilinski, Chief Federal Representative of the Florida Quarantine

  THERE ARE HORRORS in the natural world—unthinkable horrors kept from our species by nothing more than a genetic technicality. There are water-borne parasitic worms that infect crickets and grasshoppers, growing in their gut like a coil of rope until they make their hosts drown themselves—all so that the worm can slowly wriggle free from their dead bodies and return to the water.

  There are wasps that lay eggs on paralyzed prey and allow their hatchlings to swarm over the victim, eating it alive. Ant lions that dig steep-walled pits and wait beneath the sand at the bottom. Mantids that snatch other insects in their vise-grip arms and calmly chew their heads off.

  And until the very hour of the first outbreak in Florida, Cordyceps was only a tropical oddity among insects, a fungus transmitted through the air, only a tiny spore until its mycelia grow into the host’s brain, where it—and here is the true horror, beyond science—where Cordyceps somehow knows how to synthesize proteins and neurotransmitters that mimic the brain’s own signals.

  Cordyceps takes control. It makes them climb. It feeds off the innards of the host—selectively among the lesser tissues lest it should kill too quickly. It knows how to do this. When it is done, the dead host is left contorted as though in seizure around some high branch, a long green tendril sprouted from its head, and above it, a billion spores released to the wind, a nightmare in miniature. But the host is only an ant, only a lowly insect. Plodders and tunnelers, builders of grainy empires. Were it not for our hubris, we might have realized that we, in our teeming cities, were not so very unlike them.

  They called me the Nightmare Man. It fell to me to remain unsurprised by the unthinkable, to have a plan—not to come up with a plan, but to have a plan ready in advance, the ark built before the first raindrop fell. Our government retained me for the contingencies it scarcely imagined possible, those atavistic fears lurking at the periphery of consciousness: what a child fears in the dark, what adults have learned, by careful practice, to disbelieve.

  My own nightmares are not so varied now. The outbreaks and nuclear meltdowns and biological attacks have all been replaced by the hideous, upraised face of that one pestilence for which it seemed our race was destined. For which it may yet be destined.

  In 1348, when the Black Death came to Europe, it did not come only once. It came in waves. Cascading outbreaks that eventually took the lives of twenty-five million. This, too, is Cordyceps’ strategy. In evolutionary terms, every successful pathogen must achieve a balance between lethality and transmissibility. If it kills too suddenly, its supply of hosts will be exhausted. Victims must remain mobile long enough to flee to outlying villages for help, inadvertently spreading the plague further and further. In this way, the terror of an outbreak—the swollen buboes, the septic pustules, the flesh black with necrosis—the terror itself becomes an evolutionary advantage as panicked refugees become vectors for the transmission of the disease.

  But even the Black Death was not the rival of Cordyceps. Its soldiers were merely rats and fleas. The face of this new superkiller is our own. Our own perfect destruction. All our intelligence and resourcefulness turned against us. Even our accomplishments, our technology, our transportation networks: the ability of a traveler to wake on one continent and eat dinner on another. Urban density. Globalization.

  The way before the disease had been perfectly prepared.

  Yet Cordyceps failed. I will not say that I succeeded. When I wake in the night, it is with the thought that perhaps Cordyceps did not so much fail as relent. That the south Florida quarantine—the largest quarantine in recorded history—was little more than the first taste of our kind for Cordyceps. A debut.

  But then I remind myself of the thing I know for certain, as many survivors of the outbreak must upon waking from nightmares: I saw Cordyceps die. The militaris strain is no longer virulent among humans. I watched through a microscope as live cultures of the virus within Cordyceps exploded the fungus at a cellular level, that angry mitosis bursting the cell walls again and again, like a riot in a bubble. I saw it.

  In the camps I saw men with the dullness of death in their eyes released to new life. With my own eyes I confirmed, with chest X-rays and CT scans, that the initial threads of Cordyceps mycelia in their lungs had broken apart, digested and borne away by their own blood cells. Dissolved. Gone.

  I return to bed and dream again. This time I see their bodies festooning the high places of every city. Like so many dead insects. They have climbed to the tops of light poles and billboards, binding themselves there with glue and rope and tape. Caught in the uppermost branches of trees. Draped across the pinnacle of every rooftop. From each of their heads it is the same—always from the eye—disgorging from the socket in the motionless hours after death, dark and green and slick with that viscous afterbirth, quietly unfurling and rising until, high over them, the fully bloomed anther gives off its dust in the wind. Every new spore contagious. Every new infection fatal.

  When I rise in the morning I look in the mirror and repeat to myself that it is over. I destroyed it. I killed it. But then I consider the resurgence of bacterial strains—only made stronger in the failed attempts to kill them, and I imagine that somewhere, in some godforsaken crevice of the zone, a single host has survived, that the militaris strain did not fully die, but only adapted, mutated, learned—but it is unthinkable.

  The press called the south Florida quarantine my Waterloo, my retirement a mercy much like Napoleon’s house arrest at St. Elba. For a time I reminded them that Napoleon lost at Waterloo—I did not. But it was the killing they despised me for. The million dead. But I accomplished the task the government entrusted to me, and for that reason my critics are still alive to despise me. In the aftermath, when many of the details of Final Phase came to light, the same news organizations that had once hailed me as the last defender of humanity called me a “terrible man for terrible times.” But my virtue lies more in practicality than heroism. Brutally simple practicality. I am not the lion in winter. I am the axe behind the glass.

  They will break it again when the need arises.

  One

  HE LIKED THE WAY she held the rifle. Guys across the range seemed to like it too, forgetting themselves when she stepped up to the firing line in those cutoffs and that wifebeater, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her legs like something airbrushed.

  With a self-conscious glance at him she began to load the magazine backwards.

  “Other way.” He stepped up to show her, guiding her hand to turn the thirty-round magazine into the correct position.


  “What?” Khava said, her lips curling into a mock pout, “I can’t do it the backwards way if I want?”

  Andy grinned. Her accent drove him absolutely nuts. Good nuts. He never teased her or pointed out her little mistakes with English, the way she said “what” like whot or the way she sometimes pluralized words that were already plural, like Andy, have you seen my underwears?—just because he hoped she would never stop saying it that way.

  Khava rocked the magazine into the AK-47’s magazine well, and Andy had the fleeting thought that not many first-timers knew to do that—knew that AK magazines had to be angled in to seat properly. She turned the rifle over and Andy pointed to the bolt to show her how to release it, but her fingers were already there.

  The action leapt forward.

  Khava shouldered the rifle and sent five rounds downrange in rapid fire while Andy watched, open-mouthed. She stepped into an aggressive stance, leaning into the recoil, her ponytail jerking and the spent casings flipping past her, the earmuffs on her head huge, and the ludicrous image of this petite blonde rapid-firing his AK-47 belied by her deft competence with the weapon.

  She lowered the rifle. Andy looked downrange to the man-sized silhouette. Daylight shone through five holes, each about six inches apart, ascending up the target’s chest, the last hole centered neatly in the ovate head.

  “What the fuck?” Andy said it good naturedly, grinning in disbelief. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

  Khava handed him the rifle with both hands and averted her eyes. “Movies.”

  SHE HAD SEEMED surprised—even uncomfortable—when he first drew it out of the canvas bag and handed it to her, a Yugoslavian under-folder he had bought at a gun show in Richmond for six hundred dollars.

  “You are allowed to have this?”

  “Technically I’m not supposed to have it on campus. I keep it locked in my trunk.”

  “But you have—license?” Khava ran her hand appreciatively over the stamped metal receiver.

  “Just a driver’s license. You don’t have to have a special permit here. Unless it’s an automatic. This is just semi.”

  “Oh, this is not auto-Kalashnikov?” Khava seemed disappointed, examining the fire-selector switch that is only a safety in the semi-automatic version. “I like automatic.”

  “Yeah? Loan me thirty thousand bucks and I’ll get one.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars? That’s enough to buy you a dozen new cars.”

  Andy looked at her suddenly, not quite offended, and Khava started laughing. She liked teasing him about his ’92 Honda Accord, the speakers that rattled with the slightest bass, the missing hubcaps, the clear coat finish peeling from the hood like a sunburn.

  “I’m a man with priorities,” Andy said defensively. “Check this out.” He spread the mouth of the canvas duffel.

  Khava bit her lip and glanced in. There were at least a dozen magazines for the AK-47—all loaded—a sheath knife, a combat-grade LED flashlight, a few pouches of freeze dried food, paracord, a Ziploc bag that held kitchen matches and Bic lighters, and two identical items Andy had invested in since the Cordyceps outbreak in south Florida: a pair of HEPA respirators with heavy-duty rubber masks, cartridge filters, and elastic straps.

  “This is for what, the zombie invasion?”

  “For when the shit hits the fan,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Khava looked into the bag and raised her eyebrows superciliously. “What, no Playboys, no fake pussy?”

  Andy grinned. “Well, see, that’s where you come in.” He made a show of grabbing her by the ankle and trying to stuff her in the bag while she cackled and punched him in the shoulder. He kissed her while the guys across the range passed them envious glances and fiddled with an old single-shot .22. The next time they walked out to examine their target, Khava plucked a tall stickweed and threaded the stem through two of the bullet holes, rendering a crude Cordyceps stalk above the silhouette’s head.

  HE HAD MOMENTS to wonder about her, driving back from the range that afternoon with the windows rolled down, blond wisps floating around her face in the wind blowing through the car and her hand on the back of his neck, playing with his hair while he drove. She had won her student visa by writing an essay in English. She had showed it to him. Cursive handwriting on ruled notebook paper. The winner out of five thousand entries, something like that.

  She was not Russian. Even though her accent sounded much like it. Even though her surname had been Russified. Those were points Khava had emphasized adamantly from the outset, and Andy had never pressed her for an explanation, never explored the reason for all that underlying emotion. It was mysterious enough to him that he was in love with a woman born on the other side of the world, in some Eastern Bloc nation, the kind of place mentioned on the nightly news without any real Western comprehension, its unhappy citizens always demonstrating in the streets and fighting guerilla wars; it was mystery enough to him that those years growing up as a typical American kid—playing with green plastic soldiers and watching episodes of G.I. Joe—that even then he was destined to fall in love with a woman with an accent straight from a James Bond movie. In a way she was only as strange as love itself.

  Andy rolled up the windows and turned on the air conditioning after he noticed her wiping sweat from her face. She never complained, never seemed to notice the petty discomforts that annoyed other girls. He loved her for that. He walked his fingers across the console and up her thigh until she smiled and took his hand in her lap and clucked her tongue sanctimoniously.

  The road bore them away from the public firing range at the edge of the Shenandoah National Forest, a gently curving corridor through the trees, sunlight and shadows. Their afternoon in the stultifying heat left them both dreamy and quiet until an ambulance passed, lights flashing, traveling in the opposite direction, followed, seconds later, by a police cruiser accelerating in a blur of blue lights and speed.

  “Somebody called 9-1-1,” Khava said, turning in her seat to watch.

  “Tourists are always dying in the park,” Andy said wryly. “Heart attacks on Old Rag.”

  “Is it pretty from the top?”

  “Yeah, it’s nice.”

  “But not heart-attack pretty?”

  He squeezed her leg. “Not like you.”

  Khava rolled her eyes and Andy looked back to the road in time to see an approaching red pickup creeping over the double-yellow line. He favored the shoulder on his side to make more room. He was still smiling dreamily, still in love, when he looked through the windshield at the driver of the oncoming truck, when he saw the man’s hands roll over the top of the steering wheel, jerking it, veering into the Accord, and the last thing Andy had time to think before the impact was deliberate.

  Two

  THE SEATBELT STRUCK Khava across the chest like a bar of iron, her head and arms whiplashed forward, the very breath chastised from her lungs. The Accord spun once and stopped, the engine dead, the onset of silence as sudden as the impact itself. The windshield before her was scarified white like frozen water.

  Air rushed through some opening—her own gasping for breath. Her hands clawed at the seatbelt in a drowning panic before her lungs opened, the air in them like fire. She blinked and swallowed. Her vision seemed to lag, her senses scattered. The burnt scent of hot oil and coolant. Through her window she saw the tree line: cool and green and unmoved, the red pickup across the road with its front corner smashed and its rear wheels in the ditch.

  She saw a hand beside her. An arm. Limp across the console. In the seat where Andy had been, only seconds before, was the disarranged tableau of a crash-test dummy, blood streaking his face and the steering wheel and dashboard crushed against him as though by hydraulic force.

  “Andy?” Her voice came low and fractured, only a foray into the new reality, the question only a test, a nudge that might wake them both from the nightmare.
br />   Outside, something moved. Khava turned her head. The pickup’s door stood open. The driver slid out slowly, gripping the door, his feet searching for balance. Khava looked back to Andy. He hadn’t moved or even moaned.

  9-1-1. Dial 9-1-1.

  Her cell phone was in her book bag in the back seat. She tried to unfasten her seat belt, pressing her thumb against the release button, but it seemed to be locked or jammed. She twisted painfully in her seat, trying to reach into the back. Andy’s canvas bag had flown forward against the seatbacks. Her own bag was nowhere to be seen. Maybe in the floorboard beneath it.

  When Khava looked back, the driver was limping away from his truck—coming to help them, she thought—his left knee a bloody rosette and one hand clutching his ribs. His face was bearded, a pained but determined expression in his eyes, already fixed on Khava as he limped across the road.

  He was holding something in his other hand, Khava realized, her senses returning. Down by his side. Something he was bringing to help her. Khava looked at it. Like a football with a stem. Mottled yellow.

  She both knew this object and did not know it. Where had she seen it? Everything was surreal.

  The driver limped closer, his expression unchanged.

  Khava turned to Andy. “Andy! Can you hear me?” She stretched toward him, wriggling free of the shoulder belt and placing two fingers against his carotid. At first nothing. She pressed harder and felt it, shallow and fast—more fluttering than steady rhythm.

  Behind her, someone was jiggling the passenger door handle. Khava turned. The bearded man was there, his silhouette filling her window. He was trying to open her door. She tried to help him, pulling at the chrome handle. It would not open.