Chapter Seventeen

Sarah ran a finger across the top of a water heater and stared at the dust that came up, a thick felt-like layer of forgotten time.

She started to reach for the soapstone in her pocket and stopped herself. Whatever Ptolemy might have to say to her she knew she didn’t want to hear. She had essentially used him as a diversion to save her own skin. He was smart enough not to appreciate that.

Ayaan was dead. Nothing mattered.

She knew what she was doing, and how wrong it was. She couldn’t stop, though. Or rather she couldn’t start. Leaving the basement would mean engaging the horrors outside. It would mean the possibility of dying. She’d been taught how to survive, had been taught so well, in fact, that her body would go on doing what it needed to do to keep living even if she stopped thinking altogether. It would take real willpower to go against that training, to throw herself into the fray.

In the back of the basement the building’s superintendent had set up a little personal lounge: a broken-springed recliner, a coffee table holding an ashtray full of old cigarette butts, a record player and a pair of speakers. All of it dead, rotting with age, covered in dust. She found a stack of plastic crates full of old records. She took out a few and studied the album cover art. She tried not to listen for air horns or screams or sounds of violence outside. If there had been power in the basement she could have played music to block out the sounds. That might be nice. To go back in time for a little while. To pretend like her whole life had never happened yet, that it was thirty years prior. It would be nice to...

She dropped the record she was holding and it slapped on the naked concrete floor, not breaking. White fur had sprouted inside the gate-fold cover. It grew longer as she watched, soft-looking tendrils that reached for the moist air.

She had to turn around and look at the door, make sure it was locked. She needed to make sure it was locked because if it wasn’t, she still had time to go and lock it. Fear took her over, though. It was like a spotlight blazing into life in a still, dark night. She couldn’t move, she was dazzled by the fear. Then adrenaline poured into her circulatory system and flipped every switch to ON.

In one corner of the basement a tiny patch of mushrooms nursed on a wet patch of floor. They were getting bigger. She ran. No, more like she jumped, like an antelope running from a cheetah.

She found a stairway in the corner of the basement farthest from the mushrooms. She stomped up the stairs, flew up them two at a time. At the first landing she finally managed to turn and look back. A broad brown stain was creeping across the concrete floor. The wood banister of the stairwell was cracked. Trumpet-shaped fungi peeked out of that crevice. Sarah ran again, upward, away from the basement. She could hear rustling down there. The sound of rot and blight and smut growing at a horribly accelerated pace.

If it touched her, if she got any of it on her, it would eat her skin. It would get in her mouth, her nose, her lungs. It would fill up her insides and burst her open like a wet, stringy pumpkin. She ran.

Ground floor. The stairwell door opened into another, broader stairwell that lead up into darkness. Office space surrounded her on every side, some of it empty, some full of abandoned furniture. All of those offices were dead ends. She pushed through a glass door and into the building’s foyer. A thick bluish slime covered the front door, colored the light coming in through the frosted glass.

Back to the stairwell. She had only one direction to go. Up. Up and away, away from the monster. She climbed, her breath already coming in ragged gasps.

A bloom of mold ran along one wall, chased her up the steps. Sarah pushed herself, pushed harder. Every step made her knees creek, her shins burn.

Come on. Come on. Come on.

The refrain sounded stupid even inside her own head but she kept it up. Second floor—more offices, a little light from a window at the far end. Nothing she could use. Third floor identical to the second except that little stars were flashing before her eyes. Just how badly out of shape was she? She had gotten plenty of excercise while living with Ayaan. Could four flights of stairs really make her this desperate for a lungful of air?

No.

No, they couldn’t. The mold was already in her. The dust she’d breathed in, down in the basement. It must have already been full of spores. And now the Fungal Freak was causing them to bloom inside her body, just by being near her.

A door slammed down in the basement. She had forgotten to lock it and now the monster was inside. C’mon c’mon c’mon. Sarah gasped for breath and pounded up the stairs, almost ran into a door with a metal release bar at hip-height. She pushed the bar and the door opened up on blue sky. Sarah’s arms shot out to help her keep balance but the door wasn’t just opening on empty space. She had come to the roof. She looked out across the tarpaper and gravel, stared at the clogged-up ventilation hoods like tiny minarets. The roof. Last stop.

There was nowhere to go. The buildings on either side were too low to leap to, she would break her legs. The fire escape didn’t reach the roof.

Last stop. Sarah looked back and saw something drippy and wet on the stairs below her. She stepped out into the sunlight and tripped over a hidden step.

She fell forward, her hands outstretched to catch her but they just slid across loose gravel. Her chin smacked the tarpaper and she lost blood. Dark spots blobbed across her vision. She couldn’t seem to get her breath, couldn’t seem to move her arms, her legs, she felt like a dead spider with her limbs up in the air.

Slowly, very slowly she relaxed her body, her stiff limbs. Slowly, very slowly she sucked in breath through one nostril. She closed her eyes and saw green flashes. She opened them again and saw her fingernails had turned yellow. Faint black spots swam down there in the quick. As she watched her thumbnail creased down the middle—fungus underneath was pushing up against it. The nail turned white and started to split. Pain made her screech.

She heard a heavy tread on the stairs. Someone was coming up, coming after her.

She focused on the pain in her thumb. Used it. She saw it as a white sparkle, a sunburst in her hand. This wasn’t her special sight, it was just pure visualization, but it worked. She used that energy to propel her back up to her feet. She drew her Makarov, flicked off the safety, assumed a firing stance with her arm outstretched and pointed at the doorway she’d just come through. She yanked breath into her filling lungs, fought her own body to stay upright long enough to put one bullet through whoever came through that door.

The tarpaper beneath her started to vibrate. It had to be a hallucination, she decided. Not enough oxygen was getting to her brain and it was starting to break down but she couldn’t let that stay her hand, she couldn’t...

It wasn’t a hallucination. If it was it was the most convincing one she’d ever had. The whole roof was shaking, the whole building. She focused on the black rectangle of the doorway, she focused on the green splotches that were blossoming on her sweatshirt, anything to keep her mind steady.

The stairwell door split into pieces and then disappeared into a yawning gulf of empty space. Down, it went down. Half the building collapsed with a sudden roar like the world’s back breaking, a prolonged snapping and squealing and rumbling as stone and brick and steel twisted in on itself and cascaded down the stairs. The wooden beams supporting the upper floors had given way to fungal rot and half the roof just fell in and Sarah was in the air, her feet weren’t touching anything, and something pinched her arm, she looked, and half the roof was on top of her arm and then it was gone, half of the building and half of the roof was gone.

Sarah was a little surprised that she didn’t go with it. She was on a part of the roof that remained, tilting down at a slight angle but stable for the moment. She was lying on her side under a heap of rubble and her right elbow was shattered. There was blood, a lot of blood, and pieces of bone sticking out of her arm. Oh no, she thought, but there wasn’t a lot of emotion there. She was too stunned. She would get infected, she knew, wounds like that always did. She would get a secondary infection and there were no more antibiotics in the whole world. She was going to die.

The demon—the lich—the monster put one hand up on the remaining part of the roof and hauled herself up to stand over Sarah. She had no mouth. The monster had no mouth. Was it going to eat her? Or maybe they would just make her one of those handless ghouls she’d seen.

The monster leaned forward. Pieces of mold and fungus fell from it, vegetative debris that pelted Sarah’s chest and face. Sarah couldn’t breathe. This close... this close the monster could kill you just by default. Sarah’s lungs were full, her chest kept heaving like it was trying to vomit something out but she was stuffed full of softness and dampness. She was choking to death on mold and slime. She felt like someone had pushed rags down her throat until she couldn’t hold anymore.

The monster reached down and touched her face with one enormous hand. The fingers stuck to Sarah’s cheek where they touched and made a wet suction-cup sound.

You can hear me, can’t you? the monster said, inside of Sarah’s head. You have the gift.

Sarah tried to nod. She couldn’t move the muscles of her neck, they were too clenched with the effort of trying to get some oxygen in her lungs.

You can hear me… I can’t tell you how much I need someone like you. Someone to talk to. I can’t save your life, now. But I can bring you back to be with me. I won’t let them change you, not so much. Would you… would you like that, to be my... friend?

Sarah lifted her left arm. It was hard. The arm fell back to flop on the tarpaper. Try harder, she told herself.

She lifted her left arm, with the Makarov’s incredible weight in her unwieldy hand, and shoved the barrel into the thick layer of mold and fungus over the monster’s forehead. She squeezed the trigger, waited for the weapon to cycle, and squeezed again. Cycle. Again. Cycle. Again.