The Grim Work

It smelled of stale humidity outside, like a basement shower stall left to fester. Dank and rot and mold. Fuzzy spores floated like black snow leaving dark streaks on the sky like the walls of a filthy aquarium. Trees rose, dry and naked, black twisted things like burned matchsticks marking the sporefall-buried road.

Two figures in environmental suits trekked through the hostile air and alien landscape like divers walking the sea floor. They marched single-file: the older one one carrying a dinged-up bolt-action rifle took point, the bright red scarf wrapped around his neck shone like a beacon in the murky air for the other to follow, trailing behind in his tattered suit with sewn-on patches of frayed fabric where the Kevlar had buckled.

The man in the scarf stopped and slung the rifle to his back while he waited for the younger one to catch up. Thick and heavy air obscured and reduced the world to shadows and vague shapes beyond the immediate. The edges of his scarf flapped limply, unweaving and fraying from where bits of it had been cut away.

"Quit screwing around," said the man, turning the boy around and checking the valves on his air tanks to be sure that they were as open as they could be.

The young man said, "Is there something wrong with my air?"

"You got enough to get where you're going," said the older man. "Just don't lag behind."

He ran his gloved finger over the rubber seal of his respirator and the younger man touched his own respirator in ignorant imitation. He didn't know why the older man had done it and it heaped one more thing on the pile of that which the young man didn't understand. He was born after everyone had already been chased underground. He'd been raised there. He had only ever known fluorescent lights and a ceiling above him. Before today, he'd never been to the surface, didn't know what it meant to have open air above, never saw a blue and cloudless sky. He had never seen the sky at all, never seen the world as it was before the clouds turned sick and green and rained choking fungus on everything. He never saw how tall the cities rose, never saw Babylon's towers before they fell.

"Where are we going?" the boy asked.

The old man grunted and shifted the pack on his shoulder. "They didn't tell you?" He rumbled, voice close-echoed under his respirator.

"They didn't tell me anything. They just said to go with you. Didn't even ask if I wanted to."

"Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to," said the old man. Then after a moment he said, "We're headed to another settlement."

"There's another settlement?"

"Sure."

"Have you been there before?"

"Sure."

"I never heard of another settlement."

"Son, we ain't the only ones who managed to live in this world. Anything you worked out, someone else already figured."

"What are we going to do there?"

"Get medicine."

The boy didn't need to be told what the medicine was for. In his time below ground, he had seen enough infections. People poisoned by the spores, scratching at the green lesions spidering up their skin and the black tumors growing at the base of the skull, writhing and compulsively screaming for help until a doctor would ration out enough sedative to render them dead-eyed and drooling, pain frozen on their face, teeth clenched and grinding, the last image of the person before they were euthanized, draped in a sheet and taken to be burned somewhere on the surface. Before today, that’s all the surface meant to the boy. That’s where dead people go. It was all a new world to the boy taking it in slowed his steps, distracted by the shadow of distant grass fanning in a warm breeze or by the movements of birds in the sky, dark figures auguring omens to which he was illiterate.

"I thought there wasn't any medicine..." said the boy.

"We already talked about what you thought and what that's worth," said the man, adjusting his scarf.

A spot of skin on the boy's ankle burned. With each step, he grazed it with his passing boot to scratch without it being noticed, but that only irritated it further. He dropped behind a few paces to kneel and ball up the cloth of his pant leg to rub against and quell the burning, pretending to tie his boot.

Something moved beneath the carpet of sporefall. It rippled, then stopped, then rippled again. Short quick bounds, its movements muted by the puffy fungus like a snake under sand. It changed direction and meandered toward the motionless boy and leaped at him. The boy fell over out of the way, and the creature sailed through the air where he'd been. Quick as if he'd been waiting for this moment, the older man turned, dropped to one knee, brought the rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger before the creature landed. The report shattered the air and kicked spores up, floating down the path of the bullet. Intercepted by the shot, the creature adopted its direction and fell limp away from the boy. 

The older man worked the bolt on the rifle, caught the ejected shell casing and put it in his pocket. He stepped over to where the creature lay, fog from his breathing crawling up the glass on his respirator mask and threatening to eclipse his cloudy, tired eyes. He kicked the creature's corpse to make sure it was dead before picking it up. Limp tongue hanging from an open mouth, blood draining from the hole shot clear through its body. The old man pried the animal's tumored mouth open with the barrel of the rifle and inspected the green threads visible on the pink flesh behind its teeth. He huffed disappointment and hooked it to a clip on his belt while the boy recoiled from the dead thing.

"What is it?" said the young man.

"It's a fox," said the older one. "Or was, anyway."

"What do you plan to do with it?"

"Can't eat it, if that's what you're thinking."

It wasn't what he was thinking. The young man had never eaten an animal, only ever heard older people mention meat as a food. It sent a flash of heat through his skin and sank a stone in his stomach to think of eating the diseased and bleeding thing on the ground.

"That was scary," said the boy. "Is it always like this?"

"It's usually quieter," said the man.

They walked on. They moved like ghosts through the stained world, no traces of where they'd passed, their presence not felt. Muted daylight through the filter canopy of algal clouds cast no shadows and spores rushed in to fill their footprints behind them. They passed what had been a forest, neat rows of skinny trees planted by people who had to abandon them, knotted and brittle and discolored and leafless, thin mossy sheets draped from their skeletal limbs. Under them no ferns or wildflowers, no small things, no young things grew, smothered under layers of sporefall and too many seasons without sun.

They came to the ruins of a town. Walls standing like tombstones for the buildings they once were, masonry sieged, not yet fallen to the creeping moss eating the lime from the mortar keeping it standing. Motionless shells of cars marked the channels of the streets that used to be. Hulks of things no longer what they were, once selected for their color, now rust-bloomed flaking steel rendered them uniform. Rubber eaten, pins and hinges swollen and bent, doors and hoods and trunks missing or misfitted, those that had windows left to them were clouded and streaked with dark slime.

As the two men walked the road between the wrecks, asphalt crumbled under their slow steps. Unseen pebbles and debris skittered in tiny ripples under the blanket of sporefall sending bright sounds careening into the world. A pebble struck something. It gave a metallic ping and a rattle and the oscillating sound of something round grinding to rest. The boy knelt and felt around with the numb skin of his gloved hand until it found the object and raised it above the sporefall blanket. It was an aerosol can. Corrosion had eaten the label and the button cap had fallen off leaving only the stem pipe of the actuator. He pressed it with his finger and a jet of aerosolized fluid shot out. It startled him and he fell back against a car with a dull, hollow thud. The old man again wheeled with his rifle ready to fire, but relaxed when the boy climbed to his feet.

He handed the can to the old man who sprayed it like the younger man had done, though with less surprise. He brought it close to his face, forgetting for a moment that his suit and respirator prevented him from smelling it. He then sprayed it into a divot on a car until a small pool had collected and set it on fire with the butane lighter from his pack. He watched the thin bright line of blue dancing over the pool of clear fluid for a moment, then smothered it with his ragged scarf.

"What is it?" asked the young man.

"Not sure," said the older one. "Could be a lot of things. It's flammable, anyway." He handed it back to the boy to stow and admonished him not to play with it. Best not to waste something that is still useful.

They rested to eat under a wall of green-carpeted masonry. The boy traced the shapes of the moss and lichen with his finger like a child wondering over a map of some ancient battle where territory changed hands between armies of imaginary soldiers, where gallantry prevails and no one suffers or dies and everything is right in the end. The old man pierced a nutrient pouch with the intake tube of his suit and sucked it flat. He told the boy to not wander off, then stood and patrolled the footprint of the building the wall once belonged to as though it still kept the inside safe from what was outside.

The boy retched and choked when the nutrient paste made its way to his tongue. Dim day kept the printed expiration date from being read, but that must have been the problem. It had to have expired. It was the fault of the pouch, not the boy. He scratched at his ankle and set the pouch down unfinished. He stared at it a long time and weighed his hunger against the wretched taste and whether weakness or sickness was preferable. In the end, he choked it down and hoped his nausea would pass.

A high weak voice called from somewhere in the murky distance.

"Who is that?" asked the boy, but the old man held out his hand to silence him.

From somewhere in the opaque distance again the voice called out, vague and plaintive, like a wounded woman or a frightened child. Twigs snapped and fallen bits of concrete tinkled brightly as it ground against bits of masonry and asphalt under heavy weight. Rusting springs groaned and squeaked as it slithered over the rotting shells of the cars in the road. A black form came into view, disappearing against the dim sky and only visible by those places where it blotted out remnant walls and rotting cars and what else touched the ground. From the end of one of its many limbs radiating in all directions it wore a dangling body in ragged banners of torn clothes that did nothing to conceal the body's pale, flaking skin or the green network of infected venation under it. As it moved, the creature forced air through the corpse's throat and manipulated the dead mouth on its slack face like a hand in a puppet: "Help," it groaned as the mass pointed the face into the gloom, sweeping it from side to side like a sentinel patrolling with a lantern as it followed the path the two men had taken. It drew closer, squealing of rusted springs shrieked its coming as it heaped its weight onto the dead cars on its way down the path the man and the boy had taken, thin tendrils sniffing at the ground they had walked.

The old man knelt down and rummaged through the boy's pack for the aerosol can they'd found. The rifle cradled in his arms wagged absently while he worked, black open mouth of the barrel passing in front of the boy's face. After he'd found what he was looking for, the old man unhooked the fox from his belt and dropped it on the ground.

"If it comes for you, throw this and run," he said then slung the rifle to his back and ran off.

The creature turned. All of its black tendrils whipped to follow the sound of the man's feet. It shifted and moved to follow, tentacles sprouting from its central mass, rising into the air and crashing into the ground in front of it to drag itself forward.

At the base of the wall, the boy shrank, staring at the dead thing left there by the man. Its green-stained tongue draped over its teeth, the hole cut through its body by the man's bullet revealed its tumorous insides. It was a repulsive thing and the man had told him he would need to pick it up. He reached out and prodded the limp thing with his finger and recoiled in panic when it wiggled under his touch. "Wait!" the boy shouted.

The creature halted and reached out in all directions, tracing thick black lines against black sky, bobbing and sniffing until they found the boy with whatever perception they possessed and began their dreadful roll toward him.

The boy froze as more of the approaching black mass grew in front of him like the mouth of a whale opening to swallow the sea. He turned and fell to the ground to pick up the dead fox. It was no more appealing now, nor had his desire to touch it increased, only the need. Though he did not want to, he grasped the dead animal by the tail and flung it into the air spinning like a grisly wheel come free of its felloes. Its path arched askew of the shapeless creature and a dozen tentacles rose, reaching out to trace the flight of the small corpse like an eager audience pointing at a fireworks spectacle. As he'd been told, the boy took the time the fox had bought him and scrambled to a run.

Forward and away the boy ran. Through the building ruins, off the plates of crumbling blacktop, through the soft ground, green mossy crust breaking black under every footfall. He kept his head forward. He did not look back. The thing chasing him like a beast in a nightmare, crashing through soil and steel and masonry, drawing closer and whipping ropey lines of itself to snare him. He could not face it. To face it is to let it catch him, to let it touch him, to let the infection in, let it run through all the soft parts of his body and wear his limp corpse to call out to others in an attempt to lure them close enough to share that fate. So he ran.

A ball with a burning tail arced through the air like a comet, dripping flames behind it. It fell from the sky and landed on the creature and in an instant it hissed and burst, sending bits of flaming shrapnel flying and crawling embers through sporefall fuzz to expire on damp earth. A hollow scream was forced through the dangling corpse's mouth while the creature writhed in wild flame-feathered luminous whips, rolling and folding itself, unable to smother its burning skin.

"Move your ass!" the old man shouted as he stomped past and the boy scrambled to follow. Together they ran until they could neither see nor hear the monster, the violence and fire of the burning thing disappearing in thick haze and black smoke behind them.

The old man stopped first. He gasped for air, spraying breath against the hollow of his respirator in heavy rhythm.

"Did you see?" said the young man. "I did it! I threw the fox! I didn't want to touch it, but I did anyway!"

"Yeah, I saw," said the old man between breaths. "You did good."

The boy fell quiet and caught his breath. His throat was hot and tasted sharp and green like grass. He knelt and scratched his leg. Sweat crawled under his suit and inflamed his skin. The lesion had grown. Sensitive. Worse.

The old man pawed at the naked and vulnerable shoulders and neck of his suit to adjust the scarf that was no longer there. Something of himself left behind with the monster and fire. Something hissed, high and constant. He grabbed the tubes feeding air into his respirator and he walked his hands up the length of them until the sound stopped, then cinched his hand around it.

"Get the tape out of my pack," he said to the boy who did as he was told, fishing for the roll of fabric tape in the old man's pack in the space between clanking cans of petroleum fuel. Once found and handed to the man, it was spun around the coils of his breathing apparatus.

"Check your tubes, make sure they're not hissing or anything," the man said.

The boy did and said, "I think they're fine," but that didn't satisfy the old man and he turned the boy around and checked the gauges on the air tanks himself.

"What about you? Do you have enough air left?" the boy said, but the old man only told him not to worry about it.

###

Time passed unaccountably in the dim sky the sun a glowing form wandering without compass while they tracked their way back to the path they'd been walking. The old man led them down what remained of the blacktop road beyond where the trail reached through the green-carpeted spongy soil, a procession of two following a cleft marched into the world by now-absent feet. They saw no more apparitions or monsters, only each other.

They came upon the line in the world where green earth gave way to black. The crackling floor of moss and lichen plates abated to naked soil stained of carbon and ash, sooty broken bones rose from the ground like stalks standing in a grim harvested field. Sporefall disappeared when it touched the dark wet dirt, black falling on black left no trace of itself.

"How much further is it going to be?" said the boy.

The old man stopped and the boy imitated him without understanding what for, and when the old man dropped to one knee, again so also did the boy. Scanning the horizon, the old man turned his head and squinted, then pointed at something distant. Under the glow in the cloud cover where the faintest marks of the sun beyond penetrated a form undulated and wriggled and unbecame itself to reform in a new and indiscernible shape. The boy had heard of birds and seen them in the farms and photos in books, but had never seen one in flight. He squinted like the old man as though that might make his eyes see clearer that formless thing struggling in the sky.

The old man raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired, cracking the still, heavy air with its report.

Green ran through the boy's blood. Bright threads of green on red. There wasn't anything the boy knew that someone else hadn't already figured.

The man picked up the ejected shell casing, put it in his pocket, and slung the rifle to his back. Its purpose served. He then walked over to the fallen boy, closed the valves on his air tanks and detached them from the boy's respirator, then held his breath as he swapped the full tanks for his own. He emptied the cans of petroleum fuel from his pack onto the boy's corpse, standing clear of where it pooled, then lit it and stayed long enough to be certain the fire took

The old man loaded his shoulders with the things the boy had carried. He never liked that part, carrying two packs and two air tanks all the way back home, but it was what he was told to do. And some things you have to do, even if you don't like it.