The End Has Come (17 page)

Rachel had thought about this for a moment longer before she said, “I guess I’ll be eating double melon.” Then she had dipped her fork into my bowl, and I had seen the future unspooling in front of me like a beautiful dream. It had taken another three years before I could convince her to marry me. It had been worth every single day of trying.

Rachel had understood that for me, the compulsions were always second to the obsessions. I knew, in the place where most people know that gravity works and the atmosphere is unlikely to be sucked off into space, that if I made a mistake — just one — it would be the end of everything. I had known it since I was a child, when I had accidentally skinned my knees on the playground and ruined my new jeans, and my parents had told me they were getting a divorce that same night. I wasn’t the most important person in the world. I wasn’t special. I was just the one whose mistakes mattered more than anyone else’s.

And here was the proof: the all-consuming softness, which had spread from the lab
I
managed, consuming
my
wife before it went on to satiate its hungers on everything else. The mistake had been mine: I had believed that my people would trust me, that they would tell me if something was going wrong in Project Eden. But like so many others before them, they had seen only the compulsions, only the cleanliness and order. They had seen me as the end of their grand experiments, and they had stayed silent.

If I had reviewed their work more closely, I might have been able to spot the holes where they hadn’t fully documented their research. If I hadn’t trusted them to trust me, my wife and daughter might still have been alive. All my life, the whispers in my head had said “you will destroy everything you love.” And they had been right. They had been right all along.

My tears dampened the mud, but they couldn’t wash it away. That was only fair. In a world that had sunk into a mess of my own making, I never deserved to be clean again.

• • • •

Time was an inconsequential thing in this well-lit, semi-sterile room, with mud on the floor and the machines quietly, contentedly whirring along behind me. As long as I didn’t open my eyes it could have been an hour, or it could have been a lifetime. The IV was keeping me hydrated, which would stave off death by dehydration. As my veins began to re-inflate and remember what it was to be whole, the rest of my body began sending signals that I would have been happier to ignore. Starvation had been my constant companion since Nikki left me, held back only by
(the black dog, running, gray strands on its fur, so trusting, so condemned)
what little I could scavenge out of the gray world. I had eaten more out of penance than out of hunger. I didn’t deserve to die before the soft could claim me. If I waited long enough, if it ate enough of the world, it would find a way to swallow me as well.

All I’d needed to do was wait. But now here I was, and the gray was far away from me, and my penance was denied.

The IV fluids had restored enough of my bodily equilibrium that all the tears I hadn’t been able to shed for the past few months were leaking out at once. They kept the mud on my cheek from drying completely, turning it wet and terrible as they fell. Every time they stopped I could feel it harden and crack, and then the tears would start again, until it started to seem like the IV was a useless affectation: I was pumping moisture out faster than I could possibly have been taking it in. Everything was white and bright and terrible. I had grown unaccustomed to hard lines and clean edges, spending my days walking through the soft gray world. I didn’t know how to handle them anymore.

(“I’ll be eating double melon,” Rachel had said, and she’d dipped her fork into the bowl, and I had been so consumed with loving her — so eaten alive by my own desires — that I hadn’t stopped her, not then and not ever, even though I knew the melon was cursed. I had allowed her to cross so many lines, to break so many rules that I knew would lead to ruin. It had all begun with double melon. It had ended with the death of everything I’d ever loved.

I should have seen this coming. I should have known there would be consequences.)

I had no way of knowing how long I lay there, crying but failing to wash the mud from my face, so overcome with hopelessness that the very idea of movement seemed like a cruel joke. At least if I had died outside I would eventually have gone into the gray and been reunited with my family. But I had allowed Rachel to eat the melon; I hadn’t stopped her, even though I’d known there would be consequences. There were always consequences. My first and greatest mistake had been believing I could somehow avoid them forever.

The door hissed softly as it was opened. They probably had some sort of airlock system to keep the mold out; positive pressure combined with sufficiently thorough sterilization would do it. The anti-fungal drugs that had been in use at the beginning of the gray world hadn’t worked, but if people had continued to search for better options — working even as their flesh dissolved into softness — they would have been able to find something. Human ingenuity always found a way, even if the cure was sometimes worse than the disease.

That led to a new, cruel thought, chilling as a hypodermic needle sliding under my skin: if I hadn’t run, I could have been one of those researchers. I could have steered their work along the lines that had already been pioneered by Project Eden, and whatever advances they had made would have been immediately available to Nikki. Nikki, who had been uninfected when I pulled her out of the hospital and into the short, bitter life of a fugitive. I had done what I thought was best for her at the time, but how much of that had been my fear speaking? Fungus was messy. It was inherently unclean. I hadn’t been prepared to live with a world where I could never be clean again, and so I had run, and I had damned my daughter in the process.

“Have you moved at all?” Colonel Handleman sounded more curious than anything else, like this was somehow a surprise. She had my files. She knew what she was doing with the mud on the floor — the mud on my
face
 — and yet she was still surprised when she realized she had incapacitated me. “Don’t you have to go to the bathroom?”

“Yes,” I said, without opening my eyes.

“But you haven’t moved.”

“There’s mud on my face,” I said, like that explained everything — and it did, to me. If Rachel had been here, she could have translated for me. She could have pulled Colonel Handleman aside and said that this was not the way to make me answer questions or follow rules. But Rachel wasn’t here. Rachel was part of the gray world, and the gray world was beyond me now.

“I see.” There was a clank, and a sloshing sound. The smell of bleach became suddenly overpowering, washing everything else away. Something wet and warm hit my chest. I stiffened, terrified to find out what it was. After the mud, I wouldn’t put anything past these people.

Colonel Handleman sighed. “Open your eyes, Dr. Riley. I promise it’s something you’ll like this time.”

I opened my eyes.

The sponge was bright orange in the way of very artificial things, things that had been born in sterile rooms, crafted from synthetic polymers and steamed in a hundred cleansing vats before they were released into the messy, complicated world. It was covered in small, delicate soap bubbles, which popped even as I stared at them. The smell of bleach wafted off of it, and the smell was good.

“It’s not a trick,” said Colonel Handleman. “It’s a mixture of bleach and Simple Green. Probably not great for your skin, and you shouldn’t drink it, but it gets the job done surprisingly well. The adult fungus doesn’t like Simple Green. The spores don’t like the bleach.”

“Bleach won’t kill them,” I said, forcing my hands to stay flat by my sides. I itched to grab that sponge, to scrub my face clean before starting on the rest of the room. I didn’t trust her not to snatch it away as soon as I gave in. “I bleached the bowl that held the fruit that killed my wife, and the fungus just grew back.” It sounded like a line from a children’s song, misshapen and ugly in my mouth.

“Bleach won’t kill them
all,”
corrected Colonel Handleman gently. “It kills some. It kills enough to be useful.”

There were two kinds of spore, reproductive and resting. Reproductive spores would be smaller, weaker, and more plentiful. Resting spores — chlamydospores — would be bigger, stronger, designed to survive in even the cruelest of conditions. They would be so much harder to kill. The structure of the fungus was a mixture of manmade and natural; it was as much a cousin to the plastic sponge on my chest as it was to the mushrooms that grew on the lawn after a stiff rain. It ate them too, those mushrooms; I had seen shelf fungus and toadstools decaying under a thick layer of soft grayness. Project Eden’s accidental creation was as opportunistic as they came.

“Have you found a way to kill the chlamydospores?” I asked, despite myself. I looked toward her as I spoke. She had changed her uniform; the mud was gone, although I could still see it coating the floor, staining and profaning this clean place.

Colonel Handleman smiled, and while there was no joy in her expression, there was a certain cold triumph. “Not yet,” she said. “Get yourself cleaned up. I’ll be back in a little while.”

She turned and walked out of the room. I glanced down automatically, to see what had made the sloshing noise when she first arrived.

The bucket of bleach and soapy water was the most beautiful thing I had seen since Nikki died. I was crying again. This time, I didn’t care.

Getting out of bed was hard. My body was weak, worn down by months of wandering through the gray and waiting for it to take me. In the end, the only way to rise was to fall, pulling the IV out of my arm before tumbling gracelessly into a heap of skeletal limbs and bruised flesh beside the bed. I crawled to the bucket, the sponge in one hand, and I washed the mud from my face, and I began to wash the mud from the world.

I should have worn gloves. I should have worn thick jeans to protect my knees and legs from the chemical cleaners. All I had was a thin hospital gown and my bare skin, which had been dirty for so long. All I wanted was to be clean. So I knelt on the stained linoleum, bare skin to cold floor, and I scrubbed until my fingers were cracked and bleeding, until all traces of the mud had been long since obliterated; until I was washing the floor for the third time, and what little water remained in my bucket was as dark and muddy as day-old coffee. I cried the whole time. I was undoing the IV drip’s good work, and that was fine, that was fine, because I was
clean.

When I could scrub no more I dropped the sponge and collapsed where I was, face against the floor, surrounded by the good clean smell of bleach. For the first time since I had held my daughter’s frail, fungus-ravaged skull in my hands, I did not dream.

I did not dream at all.

• • • •

Colonel Handleman woke me with a toe to my ribs, prodding hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough to leave a bruise. “How’re you feeling there, Dr. Riley? A little better? A little more like being a reasonable human being? Or shall we leave you to wallow in your own regrets for a few more days? I warn you, my superiors won’t like it.”

“Your superiors sent you to find me and arrest me for treason.” I rolled over onto my back, staring at the ceiling, the blessedly clean, blissfully sterile ceiling. There wasn’t so much as a spider’s web to break the lines of the walls. Paradise. “I’m not sure what they could tell you to do to me.” Even as I spoke the words I knew that I was wrong, and felt the weight of my mistake press down on me like a mountain.

They could lock me in a room filled with sewage. They could talk about the six billion dead, the end of civilization, and when that didn’t hurt enough, they could find every picture of Nikki and Rachel that had been preserved on computers and in school records. They could play me an endless slideshow of what I had lost. They could sit down and explain, in slow, cruel detail, how all of this was my fault, and I would believe them, because they would be telling the truth. There was so, so
much
that they could do to me, and I would deserve every agonizing bit of it. I always had.

“They could tell me to release you,” said Colonel Handleman calmly. “You would always know that there was a safe haven somewhere in the world, a place where things were still — what’s the word? Ah, yes. Clean. You would know that you had been rejected, and when we inevitably fell to the rot, you would know that it was your fault. The world would collapse, and if you lived long enough to see it, you would be fully aware that every person who succumbed did it with your name on their lips.”

I stared at her. “You wouldn’t.”

There was no mercy in her eyes; no forgiveness. There was only the same bleak look that had graced the black dog before I brought the crowbar down on its skull; the emptiness that had lurked in Nikki’s face as the softness leeched her life away. “Try me.”

I sat up, hands slipping on the still-damp floor. “What do you
want?
You say I should start acting like a reasonable human being, but you haven’t given me anything to be reasonable
about.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Dr. Riley; I assumed that you would have figured it out by now, a smart lady like you.” She leaned closer. “You made this mess. We want you to clean it up.”

I blinked at her slowly. “What?”

“We want you to fix it. Whatever you require will be provided, and at the end, you’ll walk away a free woman. No charges, no consequences, just your own conscience. We’ll even keep your role in the original outbreak quiet. It’s easier now, with most of the media destroyed. You could be a hero, if that was what you wanted.”

It wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was a little house with an art studio in the spare bedroom, and a laughing, dark-eyed woman eating the melon I couldn’t bring myself to touch. What I wanted was a teenage girl curling her lip at the sight of her mothers dancing around the living room like goons. What I wanted was dead and gone and buried, and it was never coming back.

But there was a mess to be seen to. There was a mess, and there was a secret somewhere that would give me the right combination of chemicals, the right sequence of enzymes, to clean it up and beat it back. I sat up.