Grunt Traitor (16 page)

“Are you crazy? You need this.”

“You don’t understand. It’s too late.” He held up his black-gloved hands, covered in gray powder. “This is spore. It’s already all over me.”

My eyes widened. “But how? It’s just a little break.”

He gestured to a dead young girl lying not five feet away. Her face was dirty, but placid. Long red hair clung to her skin, partially covering the left side of her face. Dozens of round tuberous ascocarps covered her shoulders and neck. Each and every one had burst like a puff mushroom.

“It’s all inside my mask.” He got to a knee, then stood a little shakily as he began to fumble at the helmet.

I reached around behind him and pressed the locking mechanism. Then I twisted and lifted. The helmet came away easily.

His dark brown hair lay flat against his head. Gray powder made a rectangular shape on his face. He concentrated as he removed his gloves, then peeled the suit down and stepped out of it. “Now I know where the term
monkey suit
comes from.” He shook his head and
tsked
. “Last time I was this uncomfortable was at my senior prom.”

“Because you took your mom?”

He glanced at me. “Because Rebecca said she’d let me into her pants that night and I’d gone out and bought my first condom. It was in my pocket the whole time and I could have sworn every teacher knew it was there.”

He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face as clean as he could. Then he sighed heavily. His shoulders sagged. His arms fell straight to his sides as he stared morosely at the ground.

“Do you want to go back?” I asked.

He took a moment to look at the dead children and shook his head. “They turned these children into vectors. If it’s up to them, they’ll turn the entire planet into a vector. No, let’s Charlie Mike while I’m able. I was sent here to see the locus of the fungus, and by God I want to see it.”

I grinned and squeezed his shoulder. “Okay, then.”

I went over to where Sandi squatted by Phil. “How is he?”

“Dead. Neck’s broken.”

His head was turned at an impossible angle.

“I see you’re broken up about it.”

She stood. “Piece of shit should have suffered more.” Her eyes flicked in Dupree’s direction. “What about him?”

“His helmet broke. He’s a walking vector. Do we know how long he has?”

Sandi shrugged. “We’re going to find out.”

I glanced to where Dupree was taking inventory of his remaining equipment. “What about the flame thrower?”

“I’m not going to carry that heavy-ass thing.” She pushed by me. “You want it, you carry it.”

I watched her go and wondered what was going on inside her mind. I’d seen tough girls before. Some were authentically tough, a product of the streets. But others—most others, I’d found—used their toughness as a shield. It was far easier to hate things than it was to love things. Hatred required no nurturing. Hatred allowed no disappointment.

I followed and soon the three of us were heading up the other side of the pit, without Phil and without the flame thrower. I was better with my weapons than that monstrosity. Next time I had to fight something, I wanted to be able to do it with a weapon I was familiar with. I was first. Dupree walked in the middle, constantly scribbling in his notebook, and Sandi brought up the rear.

Over the lip of the pit it was only a few hundred feet of empty ground to Irwindale Avenue. There wasn’t a soul in sight, which suited me just fine. We crossed the empty roadway and into the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area. We could make out the encroaching alien vine over the tops of the trees. I guessed that the vine was topping out about a hundred feet off the ground. Where it wasn’t clinging to something, it had trunks the size of hundred year old trees. We were less than a mile from the leading edge, which seemed to be seeking the water of the dammed lake.

Bodies of dead animals and a few people littered the ground. Fungal growths had sprouted from every one of them, creating an other-worldly terrain of skeletal alien bushes. After Dupree took a moment to inspect one coming out of what had once been a large raccoon, we avoided them.

A path rimmed the entirety of the lake. We took the northern arm. I was hyperaware, looking from the water to the sky to the ground. This close to the alien flora I didn’t know what to expect.

Twice I saw something moving through the woods, but it wasn’t letting us see it fully. The third time I saw it, I called our little party to a halt, then knelt and examined the forest through my scope. I took a full minute, then another. I was about to quit when I saw the slightest of movements. It turned out to be a tail. Long and tan, it was attached to the large body of a mountain lion, placidly staring back at me. I’d heard of them carrying hikers and bikers away, higher in the mountains. I guess with the population decline, they were getting bolder. With a touch of black on its face and an undercoating of white fur, it looked magnificent. I played my forefinger over the trigger, knowing I couldn’t let this creature dog us. If we had to leave in a hurry, it could pick one of us off. It might just try and do the same as we approached the alien vine. Still, it broke my heart to kill something so imperious.

It growled, the sound reverberating over the water.

I watched as it leaped, not towards us, but away from something in the woods. It clawed and spat as it reared back and away from... a squirrel. Check that; not one squirrel, but dozens, and each marked with spiky fungal growths.

The mountain lion swatted one away, but another landed on its back and bit down. Still another was crushed by a paw, but two more latched onto its side. In a world without alien spore the mountain lion would’ve killed every one of them. But this wasn’t that world. The infected squirrels had already done what the fungus had programmed them to do. It was only a matter of time before the mountain lion became a spiker, too. I couldn’t let that happen. It seemed sacrilegious somehow, and I didn’t want to have to face a mountain lion who wasn’t capable of showing fear or running away because of the silent demands of an alien fungus.

So I fired, catching it in the side of the head, sending it hard to the earth. I watched the confused squirrels gather themselves, searching for a new source to attack, then climb once more into the tree. Had they seen us, I had no doubt they’d have come for us.

“You could do that to me, too,” Dupree said. “I know you could.”

“But I won’t,” I said, almost believing the lie.

He made a sad face. “Maybe you should.”

I clasped him on the back. “Where’s that happy guy who couldn’t wait to see the aliens? Look.” I pointed across the lake. “They’re right there.”

He sighed. “Might as well, I suppose,” he said reluctantly. “We’ve come all this way.”

We finally came to the leading edge of the alien vine. I’d seen pictures of it and seen the actual plant from afar, but this was the first time I was able to get a close-up look. The leaves were a deep black, even the undersides.

“Look there.” Dupree pointed. “You can actually see the stolons moving.”

I watched as an arm-thick length of vine snaked along the ground toward us. I glanced left and right and saw hundreds of the runners, slowly pushing forward along the ground. Here and there one would halt as it knotted, sending feelers into the ground. Then it would continue outward from the knot.

Additional runners hung from the vines overhead, grabbing trees, wrapping themselves around trunks. Further in I could see where they’d actually penetrated the sides of the trees and the foliage was already wilting and falling away.

Dupree stepped over the stolons and beneath the canopy.

Sandi followed him. Seeing I wasn’t moving, she turned and raised her eyebrows.

“All right, all right.” Slow as it moved, I was sure I could flee if needed. But the fact that I could see it moving at all left me ill at ease. I held my rifle at high ready, prepared to shoot if necessary—as if shooting the alien vine would do anything at all. Still, it made me feel better.

Once underneath the alien vine, I felt immediately cool. The canopy almost completely blocked out the light. I stepped carefully.

“What exactly are we looking for?” I asked, drawing even with Dupree. It was odd seeing him without the hazmat suit. He seemed just fine.

“Looking for?” His grin had returned full beam. “Anything. Everything.” He knelt and touched one of the runners. “Realize that I’m touching something that was created on another planet.” He held up the runner to show tiny hair-like filaments extending from it. “Look at these rhizomes. They’re very active. I bet if I continued to hold this, they’d bore into my skin.” When he put the runner down, the filaments sunk into the earth.

“This is a botanical wonder,” he continued. “Our own alien vine, kudzu, is an invasive species. We used to say that the way you can tell where the American South began and ended was to look for the alien vine. That old
don’t stand still
joke is for real with this stuff.”

A shot went off.

I spun towards the sound.

Sandi stood, aiming down her rifle. A woman lay on the ground, but a man and a child continued to run our way.

Oh great. A family. Exactly the thing I’d wanted to kill when I woke up this morning.
I raised my rifle and shot the man, while she shot the child.

Dupree acted as if we hadn’t done anything. Killing mom, pop, and little Sally was the new norm, just like black was the new green. He kept moving forward until he spied a group of mushrooms growing on the side of an arm-thick vine like a group of warts. He ran to them, excitement bubbling out of him.

“Look here,” he cried. “This is it.” He grabbed a twig and pushed at them. “They’re like lichen. This is the source of the spore. It grows in symbiosis on the vine and by the looks of it nowhere else.”

“Except in the rotting corpses of the...” My voice trailed off.

“Yes, and there too,” he said, grinning.

That grin.

He took several samples and then packed them away.

We moved on. Two more times we were forced to fire, but it was against individuals. We could handle the fungees in ones and twos. What I dreaded was a horde of them—like in
The Walking Dead
, but fast.

We came to a windowless concrete building, probably a shed. It had a metal door with a sturdy lock. That wasn’t what interested Dupree. He ran up and examined the vines that festooned the concrete and seemed to be intent on covering it.

Dupree said something, but I missed it. I asked him to repeat it.

“I said
multitasking
. Not only does the alien vine host the fungus, but it’s destructive. Look.”

I leaned in and noted that the filaments had buried themselves in the concrete as easily as the dirt. In some places the concrete had already started to crumble.

“It might destroy the concrete,” I said, “but I doubt it could do anything to the metal.”

“Which would allow a suitably advanced alien race to get to the metal easier. Imagine finding an entire world covered with ore that’s already been refined into metal and just sitting there to be taken. This is fascinating.”

“Hurry up with your fascinating,” Sandi said. “Just a reminder that your fungee clock is ticking. You’re only good to us like you are now.”

He never stopped grinning. “Noted.” He circled the structure several times, then came back to me. “I want to get up there,” he said, pointing to the flat roof.

I looked around.

Sandi merely shrugged.

I leaned the rifle against the side of the building, then made a sling with my hands. He put one hand on my shoulder, then a foot on my gloved hands, and I lifted. He was heavier than I suspected, but I managed to get him to the point where he could reach the tip of the roof. He grasped it with both hands, then I centered beneath him so he could put both feet on my shoulders and heave himself upwards. He disappeared over the lip of the roof.

I grabbed my rifle and backed away so I could see him.

He pulled a specimen box from his pack and knelt out of sight.

My eyes were suddenly drawn to a set of leaves high above us that seemed to be moving independently. Then it happened in another place. Then another. Soon there were seven areas where the leaves were moving strangely. Then the leaves began falling.

Was the plant dying?

Could we be that lucky?

I flashed to that scene in
War of the Worlds
where the giant machines started to collapse as bacteria killed the aliens.

Then I saw the movement for what it was. They weren’t leaves, but some sort of bird. Worse, they were all converging on the top of the building where Dupree was.

“Dupree! Look out!”

His head popped up. A look of surprise painted his face.

He held out his hand to stop one of the birds. It dodged his hand and landed on his outstretched arm. Through my scope it looked about the size of a parrot. Its black wings looked velvety.

Then another landed on him.

Then another.

“Are you okay?” I called up.

“They’re moths.”