The infinity cure, p.12
The Infinity Cure, page 12
“My brother,” she said, frowning. “Something’s changed with him. He’s awake and worried.” She took a last longing look at the tank, but there had been no noticeable change in Faith; she hung listlessly in the cloudy fluid. “I’ll go check on him and the woman and give them more sedative if they need it.”
Demonte ducked back behind the table, but Villanna didn’t even turn in their direction. She hurried away, but Bruno was locked in to her now and the three of them followed her with their minds.
Before she could touch the door, however, it flew open and two people burst in. Villanna stumbled back.
Bruno’s intuition told Hiroe and Demonte that one of the two was Louvin, though he was unrecognizable by now.
“Villanna!” he cried, speaking with effort, his voice sounding muffled. “Oh god. Don’t touch me.”
“What?” she said. “Oh. It’s fine, my hazard suit protects me. But what are you doing out of bed, Louvin? You need to rest!”
He scrubbed a fungus-coated hand across his mask of a face. “Hiroe—she’s gone,” he said in a dazed tone. He pointed to the other person who had entered. “I woke up when he came in, and she was gone.” He looked around. “Is she here? What’s going on?”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” said the person behind him in a choked voice. Bruno turned his focus to Agent Brooks as he surveyed the last of the human remains in the trays. “What the fuck is this?” Louvin took in the scene as well; Bruno could sense his rising horror and confusion. Brooks recovered and drew a weapon. “FBI—nobody fucking move!”
“Everyone calm down,” Villanna said in a commanding voice. “Let me explain.”
Just then, her colleague made a break for it, pushing her aside, stumbling over the wheelchair as he ran for the door. Brooks aimed his weapon and fired it at the man’s chest. It made a quiet high-pitched tone and a flash of light and created a round, smoking hole in the doctor’s hazard suit. He cried out and fell, feet from the door. Brooks pointed his lethal device at the man’s head and discharged it again. His body jerked a few times before going still.
Bruno’s reaction to the murder felt like it pierced Hiroe’s and Demonte’s temples. Brooks heard their cries of pain and turned toward the table. “All right, who’s back there?” Brooks called. “Come out with your hands up.”
Hiroe and Demonte reluctantly withdrew their hands from Bruno and emerged from their hiding place, arms raised.
“Stop,” Brooks commanded, and they did as he said, hearts thumping with fear. Just then the agent’s knees buckled and he fell to the floor, revealing Louvin behind him, wielding a long metal bar.
He raised it again, but Brooks was clearly knocked out. Louvin dropped his weapon and turned to Villanna, swaying slightly. “What is going on here, sis?” he said. The last word came out like fiff from his fungus-filled mouth.
“It’s okay,” she said soothingly. “You’re going to be fine, and I can explain everything to you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Fine?” he said in a muffled groan. “Look at me. Look at her.” He pointed at Hiroe. “We’re going to die, Villanna.”
“Of course you’re not,” she said. “You probably don’t have aquamycosis, and even if you do, we’ve got the cure now. And Hiroe couldn’t have caught it.”
It was Hiroe’s turn to break in incredulously. “But it can spread to humans now,” she said with effort in a muffled, slurring voice, gesturing to the tank where Faith Benedict still hung limply from the sling. “And I do have it. It’s all over me.” She once again tried unsuccessfully to swallow, gagging at the thick numb feeling of her tongue and the inside of her mouth.
As she did, a few pieces of fungus became dislodged and fell out of her mouth. She coughed and more came loose. Parts of her tongue were now exposed. She tried scraping more out but it was difficult with her thickly coated hand.
Villanna raised her hands as if quelling a large unruly audience. “Have you experienced any of the symptoms that come along with the fungus? Weakening of the limbs, difficulty breathing, muscle pain? Of course not. What you have is a mild poisoning that mimics the visible symptoms,” she said. “The fungus on you is annoying but harmless, and it won’t last long. It’ll fall off soon.”
Hiroe felt a flash of hope but also suspicion and confusion. “What do you mean? How do you know?”
Villanna smiled tightly. “Because I gave it to both of you, silly. Or rather, you gave it to yourselves.”
“I knew it!” Demonte burst out, and everyone turned to look at him. “Well, I did,” he muttered. “It was those goddamn shots, wasn’t it?”
Villanna nodded. “Yes, but it was to save both of them, I swear,” she said.
“From what?” Demonte said sarcastically. “Seems like you were trying to put them and me out of commission to save yourself.”
Villanna sighed. “Look,” she said. “What we’re doing is very important—life or death actually—for my people. We’ve isolated a certain genetic marker in some humans that, when their matter is applied topically to bodies afflicted with aquamycosis, causes it to retreat and die. We’ve never tried to wipe out a serious case until now—what we’re doing tonight is historic—and we didn’t want to try it on Faith until we’d tested it more.
“But when she began to deteriorate, we had to move quickly and we needed a lot of matter—more than could be taken from living humans; we needed several full bodies’ worth. Most people’s DNA is recorded in databases, so it didn’t take long to identify humans with the gene we were looking for. We then chose people no one would miss. The lottery was a way to bring some of them here without arousing suspicion.
“Your meddling put our entire cause in danger. I could never kill my brother, even if he might ruin everything I’ve worked for”—she managed a glare at him—“but others on my team might, if they saw no other choice. I had to stop you to protect you.”
“And you think that’s fine?” Demonte said. “You’re proud of working for people that would murder your brother and—” he gestured at the carnage around them “—do whatever the fuck this is?”
“To humans,” Villanna spat. “Humans, who overran Earth and destroyed it, then damaged our oceans, then tried to annex what’s left of them.” She glared at them. “Did you know when humans first encountered aqueans, you captured us and put us on display on Earth? We were treated as freaks, even as we sickened and died, unable to acclimate to dry land or even communicate our pain. Humans have always treated us, the first people of Earth, the only true Earthlings, as second-class citizens.”
“And isn’t that how your people thought of your brother?” Demonte retorted. “You’re cool with knowing they’d have killed him?”
“Sometimes a few smaller evils are necessary to achieve the greatest amount of good,” Villanna said, with a slight hesitation. “Anyway, I protected my brother.”
“Villanna!” Louvin cried. His voice still sounded muffled. He coughed, leaned forward, and spat out some of the fungus. It was less brightly colored than before and appeared to be withering. “How could you do this? Evil can’t be countered with evil!”
Her lip curled. “And what would counter evil? Huh? Pretty words and speeches, paid for handsomely with humans’ currency?” She scoffed angrily. “While you were putting on a show for the rich humans, I was back here doing the real work to help our people. The dirty work. The ugly work.” She took the hood of her hazard suit off and threw it to the side defiantly. “I’m the revolutionary. Not you.”
“What did you mean?” Hiroe broke in before Louvin could answer. All eyes turned toward her. She was shedding browning fungus faster than Louvin—patches of her skin were visible on her arms, face, and neck—and her speech was almost completely clear.
No one seemed to know what she meant, so she tried again. “Villanna, why did you say I couldn’t get aquamycosis? I was exposed to it, possibly, just like Louvin.”
Villanna hesitated. “Nothing,” she said. “I made a mistake.”
“How could you forget something like that?” Demonte asked. “You’ve been taking care of a human who’s got it.”
Just then they all heard a chilling noise, like someone thickly clearing a throat but inexpressibly alien-sounding. They turned toward it, toward the tank. Faith’s ghastly face floated just above the liquid, staring at them through the glass.
“Nahh,” she growled. She reached out for the side of the tank and began to hoist herself out of the fluid and over the side. They watched with sick fascination.
Though she moved slowly, it was a feat that would be beyond the ability of an elderly woman, let alone one who’d been bedridden, wheelchair-bound, and mostly catatonic the entire night. There was a strangely agile, strong quality to her movements. She was still coated head to toe in brilliant hues of fungus. Her remaining strands of silver hair were pasted against the growths on her head.
“What’re you saying, Faith?” Louvin asked. He backed away slowly as she dropped heavily from the side of the tank onto the floor, crouching slightly as she hit. Murky fluid dripped slowly and thickly from the fungus and puddled on the floor around her.
She turned slowly. Her face was a mask, her eyes glittering from deep within it. Her mouth worked for a bit, grotesquely misshapen by the fungus that coated her lips, the inside of her mouth, and her tongue. “Nahh hwooman.”
Villanna’s voice broke the confused silence. “She’s saying that she isn’t fully human. She’s part aquean. She’s one of us, Louvin.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Is that possible?” Hiroe breathed, her gaze momentarily torn from the mesmerizing spectacle of Faith’s transformed body.
“It is,” Villanna said. “It’s very rare. Our species aren’t very compatible in that way and don’t often conceive when we have sex. And usually the children don’t survive long even if they aren’t miscarried. Those that do have a strong genetic tie to one parent or the other, so they look either aquean or human. As a result they end up being mistaken for—or passing for—the species they look like.”
“But how—did that happen? And how has Faith kept it a secret?”
Villanna glanced at the figure. She looked down almost absently at her discarded helmet. “Faith told me what she’d heard whispers of growing up. That her parents had hired a young aquean man to be a nanny for her older brother and sister, and her mother became infatuated with him.”
Faith had stopped moving. Her arms hung limp by her sides. The angle she held herself at seemed unnatural somehow. She stood, swaying softly, as if listening intently.
Villanna continued. “Her mother thought she was past child-bearing years, and she probably didn’t even know there was a chance of conceiving with an aquean. There was even more ignorance then. Although Faith was born looking human, her mother’s husband knew what she was, because he and his wife had not been intimate for years. Her birth father disappeared one day and was never heard from again, and her father decided to raise her as his own.”
Louvin spit more dead fungus from his mouth, rubbed some from his arms. “When did you find all this out?”
“After I’d worked here a while,” Villanna said. “When I first interviewed for the job, she asked me many questions about my family history. She said she was fascinated by our complex family structures.
“I later found out the reason she asked such in-depth questions was that she was always trying to find members of her real father’s family tree. And she found one, in me.” She smiled at Louvin. “In you, brother.”
He was at a loss for words, so she went on. “Faith knew only a few things about her birth father: his first name and the general part of the ocean he was from. She eventually figured out his family name, traced his lineage, and discovered that I was blood related to her.”
Tears sprang into Villanna’s eyes as she looked tenderly at Faith. “She always felt drawn to the ocean, and when aquamycosis ravaged our people, she worked tirelessly to help find a cure, even before she was stricken herself.
“One day she revealed everything and told me about our connection. She asked me to keep it a secret so she could wield her human privilege to help our people more than she ever could if people knew.” Villanna sighed. “I understood that she was right, so I agreed to keep it to myself, even though I longed to tell you, brother. I don’t regret any of it. We’ve finally found the cure, you see? Look how strong she is—she hasn’t stood by herself in weeks! She’s getting better.”
Demonte broke in. “She still looks completely fucked up to me. Plus, even if that’s true, are you really saying we liquefy a dozen humans for every sick aquean?”
Villanna sent him a scathing glance. “Of course not,” she said. “Faith’s disease has progressed far more—she’s lived with it far longer, thanks to our care—than anyone else has ever experienced, so we knew an intense dose was her only hope of recovering. We’ll be able to give a smaller dose to people with less advanced forms of it, and once we discover what works about it, we’ll be able to synthesize it. No more humans will need to die for the cure.”
“What’s she doing?” Louvin asked. His strangely calm voice caught all of their attention.
Villanna paused as everyone turned their eyes to Faith. She appeared to have grown several inches in all directions since she first emerged from the tank. She still stood in an unaccountably odd posture, and the riotously colorful fungus that covered her head to toe seemed to emit a faint glow.
“Faith?” Villanna said, with rising dread. “Auntie? You need to get back in the tank—it looks like you’re about to spore!”
“Nahh aan-tie,” Faith grated out through her furred mouth. “Nahh Fayh.”
She stood straighter and walked toward them—if the bizarre set of movements that brought her closer to them could even be called walking. The group instinctively backed away as she approached. Villanna paused to pick up her helmet; her shaking fingers dropped it and she tried again.
The nahh-Fayh creature reached her and put its hands on her shoulders. Villanna looked up, her eyes like saucers. It leaned closer and suddenly breathed heavily into her partly opened mouth with a guttural hiss. Villanna screamed, shoved at it, and fell. She skittered away, half crawling, half sliding on the smooth clinic floor, clutching her hands to her mouth, and sat in a corner, shaking her head and moaning inarticulately.
The thing stood tall once again. The countless rows and frills of fungus swelled and moved. Demonte felt nausea rising but couldn’t look away.
“She’s going to spore!” shouted Louvin, stumbling toward the door of the lab. He grabbed his sister’s arm but she pulled away.
“Didn’t you see what just happened?” Villanna responded desperately. “The cure didn’t work and she infected me. Stay away from me or you’ll be dead too. Just get out!”
“Uh, guys?” Demonte gestured to Louvin’s bag, which he’d dropped by his hiding place. The top had been forced partly open. Bruno was glowing an urgent yellow and spilling out of it.
Louvin made a movement as if to run over, then faltered. Faith, or whatever she’d become, stood between him and the rest of them.
“See what it wants!” he shouted to the man instead.
Demonte didn’t hesitate this time. He ran over and laid his hand on the part of Bruno that bulged out of the opening.
Villanna was still sitting on the floor, staring at Faith. “I’ve never seen this much presporing activity on anyone!” she said. “This is going to be massive. Louvin, please, leave. Your friends will be fine, and I’m already gone.”
Louvin paused longer, his eyes flicking over the scene. Hiroe had overheard enough of what Villanna had said. She ran over to him, sidestepping Faith, bits of dried fungus flaking off her as she did. “Come on,” she said. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him toward the door.
“Okay,” Demonte said, looking down at Bruno. “You got it, buddy.” Something about his resolute tone made the others stop and turn their attention to him.
He unfastened the bag and held the top open with both hands. Then he swung it back and heaved it forward, directly at Faith, who was about five feet away from him. He kept a grip on the bag, but Bruno slipped out and went flying through the air, a quivering, shifting yellow mass, landing squarely on Faith’s fungus-crusted head.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The frills bristled all over her, as if sensing a foreign threat. Bruno was undeterred. It quickly thinned and spread until there was a yellowish, nearly transparent coating covering Faith head to toe. The others could still see the pulsing glow of her fungus through it. Bruno’s own luminescence had faded as it stretched to paper thinness.
Everyone was frozen, transfixed. Faith’s fungus swelled even more, as if trying to puncture Bruno like a balloon. But it remained whole, clinging to every inch of her.
The Faith-creature gave an inhuman screech of frustration. She flung her head back and the cry reached an earsplitting level.
Suddenly the fungus erupted from her skin, finally breaking Bruno’s barrier, tearing him into shreds. Small bits of Bruno-covered fungus flew everywhere, spraying the room and splattering all the onlookers.
Hiroe saw Louvin wiping his face and chest. He’d been hit by a lot of it. Her heart sank. To have found out he probably didn’t have aquamycosis, only to see him undoubtedly catch it in real time right before her eyes, was devastating.
But Louvin didn’t seem to comprehend that, not at the moment. She realized he was trying to salvage pieces of Bruno, without success. The combined slime and fungus were fast turning into a viscous substance that oozed through his fingers and onto the floor. It was happening throughout the room. Louvin looked up at her with a panicked expression.
“You have to help me find Bruno, please!” he said. “It can’t all be gone!”
She realized it was too late to try and extract Louvin from the situation unscathed, so she acquiesced. Demonte helped too, scouring the floor, equipment and anywhere the explosion had hit for any recognizable bits of Bruno. Villanna stood mournfully over the mangled, lifeless remains of Faith Benedict, whose body had been destroyed by the violent sporing.
