Nightcrawlers

36

They had Godfrey right where they wanted him and he knew it.

He’d fought free of them for a time but they had him cornered now and he realized with a sinking feeling in his chest that he’d only gotten away because they’d allowed him to. He’d been backing away from them deeper into the tunnels and now he was in some kind of cocoon of fungi. It was like a pocket of the stuff. There was no way out. The mutants were ringed around the opening, just waiting, just watching for what would happen next. They grinned with pulpy faces, making whispering sounds.

The fungi cocoon was vaguely pulsating and to Godfrey it felt like the beat of some great heart.

Yes, because this isn’t some accidental mutation, it’s on purpose. You’re in a womb of the stuff.

He realized then the relationship between the fungus and the descendants of Clavitt Fields. They had merged and become one. Elena had it right, at least some of it. She told them a very, very old story of a meteorite falling from the sky—a huge flaming stone… a piece of star… fell from the sky many centuries ago—and burying itself in the earth and how the people of Clavitt Fields had biologically degenerated, becoming these things he was looking upon now. He remembered Kenney mentioning radiation and that seemed a good, if far-fetched, bet at the time. And maybe there was radioactivity involved, but it was more than that because there had been something living in that piece of falling star, something that crawled down into the ground and blighted the entire area, maybe gradually remaking the inhabitants of Clavitt Fields into things more like itself. Elena had spoken of some old drunk many years ago seeing something made of eyes and crawling lights coming out of the Ezren well, something that blinded him permanently just looking on it.

It was still here.

It still lived.

The mutants were part of it, they had achieved some morbid symbiosis with it.

And Godfrey was trapped not in a cocoon of fungi, but in a cocoon of its flesh… this entire underworld was infested by the thing.

And these were the revelations that occurred to him in his final moments as he looked the gorgon in the face and prepared for his end.

The pink cocoon was much like the mutants themselves, made of some gelid, spongy material, but while they were bleached and bloodless things in some advanced stage of abiotrophic decline, the cocoon itself was pink and juicy and unnaturally healthy. He could see an elaborate system of veins or arteries branching out just beneath its surface. It was sticky and unpleasant and he knew if he stayed in one position long, he would be glued to it.

It began to move.

The mutants began to murmur excitedly.

It began to move around him, vibrating and pulsing. Tiny flaccid ripples passed through its mass as it seemed to contract and expand in peristaltic waves. That’s what Godfrey felt right before it began consuming him, right before it put out tiny wire-thin filaments that were bloodred and glistening and he shrieked in agony as they crawled up his pant legs and punctured his skin, sliding beneath his fingernails and entering his ass and sliding up the shaft of his penis and drilling in through his navel. Within seconds, he was securely webbed and securely impaled, a thrashing figure whose screaming mouth ejected a mist of blood.

The thing had him and it was ingesting him.

His flesh began to liquefy, his face coming apart in dripping ribbons, oozing from the skull beneath like snot. Now it was not just those filaments working on him, but creepers of gray jelly big around as a thumb. They emerged from the cocoon mass, coiling and constricting and pushing their way beneath his dissolving skin and he continued to scream, his mouth dripping now like hot tallow.

Godfrey was barely human by this point, some writhing and animate puppet rooted to the cocoon. He was wound in creepers. They fed from his eyes and mouth and fingertips. With one last burst of strength and survival instinct, he tried to fight free and it sounded like weeds being pulled from the earth.

The cocoon let out a high, piping cry.

Great white rootlets pierced him now, pulling him back down into the fleshy bed of his own biologic ruin.

He was human in form only, the alien tissue owning him, snaking and wriggling within and without him. Every time the hole of his mouth attempted to open, jellied tendrils spread from it in a blossoming congestion like rootlets of woodrot. White and looping fingers of fungi undulated like whips from his fingertips, tasting the air and seeking new flesh to despoil, which was only his own.

This was communion with the mother organism.

And the most appalling part of it was that he was not dead.