Unnatural

Watching your world degrade is an experience unlike any other. It’s like watching your bed begin to burn while you are trying to sleep in it. In a way, it’s a nuisance because you want to sleep and you are tired, but it’s obvious you are about to die unless you choose to do something drastic.

Logan Collins had always frowned or ‘tutted’ when he noticed an empty plastic water bottle bouncing over the high-street pavement like it was going somewhere, or a shopping bag waltzing high in abandonment with the gusts through an alleyway. He knew he wasn’t perfect, because who was? He enjoyed all the usual ‘things’ in plastic, all the treats and disposable pleasures afforded him to break up the day – plastic meant convenience, but it was also a dopamine hit. People shed plastic like a second skin, leaving it like dying leaves in gutters, gardens, and bubbling river courses, but unlike leaves, it festered, it tangled, and did not die and disintegrate into the world. Sometimes when he was on a train or on those rare occasions, a plane flying somewhere, he would stare out the window at organised, manicured fields, rows of houses and huge grids of streets, like the world was a giant human nest and nothing more. There was far more manmade stuff on Earth than nature could accommodate.

But collective guilt was real, like an addict with hidden vodka in every corner of the house, craving praise for abstaining for a single day and admitting they were diseased. No wonder, it had been such a popular positive news story when the bioengineers at GeoSafe Labs announced their trials of a new plastic-eating fungus. The fungus was originally bottled in mosquito-swarmed marshes deep inside the Amazon jungle, the prize from heavily funded expeditions to explore and exploit.

This wasn’t the first time a plastic-eating fungus had been discovered. Pestalotiopsis microspore, had also been found in Amazonian rainforests and could attack plastic, and there was Aspergillus terreus and Engyodontium album, which had the ability to break down polypropylene. But there was a big difference.

This fungus, named more endearingly as the Saviour Strain for the PR, was a whole other kind of proposition and opportunity. With a little adjustment in the substance’s genetic code, they realised they could make it more voracious and predatory on materials that were forged instead of grown. When it was time for the trials, they set it loose in filth-clogged hotspots, and it instantly began to clear the countryside and seas of our plastic detritus. It was the speed of the clear-up that had the science team eyeing up awards entry forms. It worked fast, so fast that you could watch the rubbish that hung from branches in the forests and embedded in the sand of the beaches, disintegrate before your eyes. It was as if invisible locusts were devouring it with insatiable appetites. What remained of litter was sticky trails of lumpy brown gunge but it was safe as a biological byproduct, and incredibly, scientists said that the fungal lumps acted like a superfood for fauna, a gift for eco-systems and a win-win for balancing the scales with nature.

The fungus was hungrier than anyone could have foreseen. It moved with rapacious stealth beyond the wilderness areas they sought to protect, to root in villages, towns and cities, to embed in highways and urban cul-de-sacs – which had been reduced to a food source as the fungi consumed the unnatural. The litter in shop doorways curled into a mush, and as time passed, the pavements began to vanish too. No one knew what to do, it felt like an act of revenge, an annihilation of all human evidence.

Logan recalled the first time he saw bricks turn to dust in walls, and where people were slow, it would attach to them. Watches on wrists would break into pieces and fall to the ground, clothes on bodies would unwind their threads to the shrieks and confusion of shoppers. Cars faltered to a stop as they dismantled, causing gridlocks and crashes. Building collapses occurred with chilling regularity and synchronicity when floors and rooves evaporated into a brown haze. Governments began to panic. People were dying. They tried to burn it with thermite showers dropped from huge bombers, hastily dumped on populated streets, in acts of state desperation. The long trails of fizzing lights were like fireworks to onlookers, until they connected with the ground and seared it to back ash. But the lifeform was resilient, fungal spores were airborne, so there was no stopping it. It was a creeping tsunami washing away all human works, a sweeping eraser of imposter materials.

The horizon was terrifying. Logan had been on the road for a solid day and night but had stopped for rest and to take stock at a deserted tourist attraction, a castle, nestled on the lakeside, a fortification a distance away from the city edge. He did not feel safe leaning on the wall, from his vantage point on a rampart, but he had to see how the fungus had accelerated its charge across his home city.

There were plumes of smoke and flickers of flame. He could make out screams, car horns and sirens, the noise of panic and loss. Where the planes had fallen from the sky, there were still some jagged pieces not yet transformed, bobbing in the lake. The tallest buildings were helpless to what was being called the ‘Swiss cheese’ effect, a matrix of tiny holes appearing, connecting and growing all at once. The city was being demolished systematically, forensically; huge, towering office towers rumbled in complaint as they sank into massive, angry, grey clouds of their own making. Gas pipes eroded causing explosions in the city. Watching it from the lofty vantage point, he could see the place he loved shrink and die in a brown and black mist.

Logan skipped with urgency down the stone steps from the rampart and ran across the grassy courtyard to the safety of the van. He was dressed in the same grey hoody and jeans he had worn for the last three days and he felt unclean. Inside the vehicle were his closest friends, John and Gail McCain, friends he had known for years, even before they decided to marry each other. They were usually so light and full of laughter, but they sat anxiously, waiting for his update. There was palpable confusion emanating from them.

John looked tired, yet wide-eyed, but he was tough. Years spent working outside in construction had hardened his resolve and outlook to the point of managing most situations at a healthy pace. He had a five o’clock shadow and his hair was thinning, somehow Logan always thought of John as a loveable gangster. Gail was a different animal, thin, pale and nervous – she looked permanently wounded now, her eyes were more in retreat, infected with horror and a refusal to accept what was happening. She had lived a life of academic study at City University, a geologist with several published papers under her belt, she was a name in her circles but the University was gone, her computer with all its work was gone, everything was gone. It was too much to wonder what knowledge, what progress was being wiped away by a simple mistake of nature.

Logan had recently lost his wife and he was doing everything he could not to dwell on it – to deal with problems he could solve that were in front of him, not ones that he had failed to address. He had called her on his mobile when the stuff began to truly eat the city. There was nothing he could do but listen to her panic, she was working on the fifth floor of a steel and glass office building when the fungus began to crawl into its pillars and foundations.

Many of those who survived with injuries after the initial destruction lost their lives soon after as the hospitals collapsed. There was no sanctuary. As it spread, many ran or just sat in the patches of brown ooze where the rubble was being disintegrated. With the winter on their heels, some froze to death, died of exposure or withered into unconsciousness because they didn’t know what to do or how to live anymore.

The modern world was over.

Gail had cracked a joke earlier – it was a geologist’s joke, so not really funny at all.

“One planet says to the other,” she had quipped, “I’m ill, I’ve got a bad case of the humans. So the other planet says, don’t worry, that will clear itself up, all by itself…”

The way she told it was like she was remembering a colleague, and sure enough her voice broke, and the tears came shortly after she delivered it. They were all feeling raw.

Logan nearly leapt into the driver’s seat so the whole cabin bounced, and shook his head negatively, his hands gripping the plastic steering wheel like a shield.

“It’s close, I’d guess we are half a day ahead of the fungal wave. I’ll drive fast. It will catch us, but until then we have to scavenge, and we need to be in a safe place without anything manmade when it reaches us, with natural resources, trees, water, you get the picture…”

Without waiting for them to buckle their seat belts, he floored the accelerator, and they lurched back onto the dirt road they were following, through the broken open gate of the tourists’ entrance to the castle grounds.

They glanced with dread at the sign by the roadside, ‘Revisit a bygone medieval age’.

“Logan, listen to me, the lake is a good spot when the fungus catches up to us, we should stay here,” screeched Gail.

“No, we haven’t got food or enough shelter. We need to get supplies while we can, from a food store that’s not been raided and find a cave or forest or something, the castle could fall. The lake looks a bad colour. We need a source of running water, a river or stream. Look, I know the area up here and I have an idea. People are turning on each other so we don’t want to be exposed in a place where buildings are falling and people are scared. We saw it when we left the city. It was not looters, there was nothing to loot, it was just violence because people resort to that when they have nothing and when the laws don’t matter anymore.”

He became aware he was ranting a little like some maniac. It was a symptom of panic. He closed his mouth to focus on driving.

The truth was Logan wanted to avoid the inevitable dominance of the fungus as long as possible.

The rust-gnawed old white tradesman’s van bumped and jostled up the road, its near-bold tyres slipping a little with uneven ground.

“You’re heading to that wilderness shop!”, shouted John, getting the plan. “I know the one. Woodland Wayfarers. You think there will be anything left?”

“We need to try it. The place is usually empty this time of year, people have to travel to get there. I reckon it will have food and gear we can use, in the short term anyway.”

A roe deer sauntered into the road and Logan slammed on the brakes so the van squealed to a juddering halt. The animal’s black eyes were accusing, regarding the truck as unwelcome in its territory. As they caught their breath from the shock, Gail noticed something change in Logan’s resolve, she watched him compose himself, she could see the cogs turning in his head, a realisation dawning on his mind. They would need fresh food.

Logan gritted his teeth and in a reversal of instinct, hit the pedal hard with the ball of his boot, accelerating from a wheel spin he mercilessly turned toward the stunned beast, and ploughed the bumper into it so it sucked under the front wheels. They watched its hooves twitch and thrash in the air for a second with the impact. After two bumps under the tyres, he stopped the van again to the onset of heavy silence.

Gail’s gloved hands were clasped in shock over her mouth, her eyes almost surreal in their enlarged aperture.

Logan looked over at her quivering face, a little in shock himself, he knew he needed to explain fast.

“We can eat this. There will soon be nothing on the shelves, the wrappings, the containers, even the shelves themselves, they will be gone. We have to be practical… Haul it in the back, John.”

John stared at the dying, mangled creature in the van’s side mirror. It was groaning its last hot breaths in the dirt, and he shot his gaze back to Logan, pondering whether he knew his friend at all.

“…Sure…” he replied, with a voice drained flat of any soul.

“Why the fuck are we going to a shop for supplies if you’re killing for food?!” Gail yelled at him, straight into his ear, making him recoil in his seat. For a moment he thought she would strike him, slap his head violently in rebuke. Her hands were now thrashing in the air in rage.

He had to make the case again, so she heard it.

“I don’t know what’s left out there, what if there is no food, or people are guarding it? You know the fungus is going to eat through any containers or wrappings, eventually. This animal, this is food we can count on. We have to be ready for anything and take advantage of any opportunity. We have to think differently, Gail. I’m sorry, this is about surviving now.”

She was staring at him with sad anger, partly absorbing his truth.

John returned to break the moment, with blood smothered on his hands, he was anxious and a little disturbed. When he caught Logan’s eye contact, he also felt an instinctual anger well up, and it wasn’t just about the deer, or even Logan’s act of practical cruelty.

“This is a nightmare…” he signed, rubbing his brow with the back of his wet, red hand.

They carried on with a little less haste up the dusty road as if to let the shock distil, until a signpost for the supplies shop pointed the way, into the darkness of the treelined backroad.

For somewhere so remote, it was a large outpost of a retailer with pictures of garish cartoon bears and leaping, smiling salmon on its walls, quiet and eerily devoid of shoppers. The light was on. It didn’t seem right. Propped up against the front of the shop’s main window on a raised decking above the parking bays, were long spindly fishing rods, waterproof gear on clothes racks, and various rifles and shotguns for hunting. Despite the lack of people, the door was wide open, inviting them in like the open mouth of a seafloor ambush predatory.

They waited and watched for a quiet and long five minutes. They listened hard but there was only the hum of the engine ticking over and their laboured breaths.

“Gail, take the wheel, stay in the car and keep the engine running. John and I will go in quick, grab what we can and then we’ll get out of here and ditch the van. Fifteen minutes up the road is the nature reserve’s main car park, we can walk with what supplies we have, and that deer, to the forest valley. There are caves on the riverside there – I remember them from when I was a kid. It’s a hike but we can manage it.”

John nodded and Logan alighted the van from the driver’s side, moving with purpose toward the entrance. Before entering he peered in sheepishly to scan the interior, wondering if he might get his head blown off. John crept up on the raised decking at the entrance and quietly scooped up a shogun leaning on the glass, a price tag dangling in the breeze of its trigger guard. It was not loaded, so he would need to find a box of cartridges inside the shop, behind the counter. He guessed it was smart to take any weapon that presented itself.

Logan edged into the aisles, grabbing a deep wire basket as he walked. He passed the colourful sweets aisle and hastily unwrapped and crammed a chocolate bar into his mouth to stave his insatiable hunger.

He recalled a zombie movie he once watched as he filled his basket, those films always had a ‘help-yourself’ supermarket run by the protagonists, a moment where everything was free when the world was overrun.

John craned his neck over the shelves in the store. “Anyone here?” he asked the silence.

The cartridges were easy to find, not even behind a locked glass cabinet but on the counter with the lid open. He noticed some were missing and that made him instantly nervous and alert. Flicking his eyes up and around in feverish scans of his surroundings, he crammed them into the chamber with shaky stained fingers.

Logan was piling food tins into the basket; new potatoes, beans, honey, remembering reading somewhere that honey was one of the few foods that could sustain a body without any other. Sustenance over taste, that was important. His instincts were firing like pistons in the cranky engine of his brain.

Then it happened. The voice they were waiting for, the trap they suspected.

The voice was male, gritty and had a strong local accent, it simply instructed: “Stop… Drop the gun, and drop the basket…”

They listened to the unmistakable sound of a pump action loading a cartridge. The man was not alone. Two of his gruff companions appeared like ghosts from recesses in the wall. They had atypical plaid fleece-lined shirts, well-worn baseball caps and the swagger of men that didn’t take any shit. If you could pick out ‘preppers’ from a line-up these guys would stick out a mile from just what they wore, head to toe in the uniform of outdoorsmen.

The tall guy giving the instructions had yanked away John’s firearm in seconds, not hesitating, not giving John a moment to decide to aim the barrel. When he retreated a few steps for safe distance he dropped John’s gun on the floor to steady his own at the intruders.

Logan and John glanced at each other as if in a last look of recognition and apology. Like the deer, they had frozen to the spot, right at the moment that would have counted.

Gail’s shrieks elevated the standoff’s tension as she was dragged by the collar into the store by one of the three brutes.

“Hey, take it easy!” protested John, waving one flat palm at the gun holder. “We’re just here to get food.”

“Yeah. Sure. That’s why you went for the weapon first…”

“Well, you never know who you’re going to meet at the end of the world.”

John said it with a smile, as if he were trying to probe for common ground.

“Get on your knees…” was the blunt response.

The three obeyed slowly, the threat palpable. Time was slowing visibly.

The gun-toting survivalist had one of those cruel humourless faces. Logan had met his type before, he would always be ‘right’. He was someone who’d use the volume of his voice to drown others out, to force upon them his overbearing, self-serving opinion. If that failed he would resort to a dose of violence to solve everyday problems.

“The fungus is nearly here… You know that, right?” croaked Logan, his hands clasped behind his head in submission.

“Yeah. Sure. And when it gets here we’re gonna need a supply of food real quick. Get my drift. There ain’t no future with a fridge or freezer, so it’s all gonna be fresh meat from now on.”

“Hey, wanna make a deal?” Gail winced.

“No deal you can make,” he grunted, his gun wavering in her direction now she was talking.

“We have a deer in the van, take it, just let us go…”

He laughed mockingly, in tune with his snickering sidekicks.

“Oh! I get it! You think this is a negotiation? Now, close your eyes and say your goodbyes, sweetheart.”

He was about to pull the trigger but the trigger was no longer there. His index finger probed but the metal curl was gone.

“Shit!” he declared. “It’s here!”

The barrel began drooping, losing its integrity until it slopped to the floor into sludge. He looked down in surprise and realised the floor was starting to collapse under all of them, slanting then cracking in protest.

“Get out!” he yelled at his menacing friends.

On the shelves, the food was oozing through dissolving packaging. The roof began to creak and complain.

Logan, Gail and John took their cue to get on their feet and sprint for the door over crumbling floorboards.

Despite the fading light, when they emerged outside they could see that the van tyres had deflated and were beginning to pool as if the van was melting into the road. More bizarrely, their three assailants were clutching at the remains of their disappearing clothes which were sliding off them like water.

John looked down at his body and the same mysterious process was happening. His jacket sleeves slipped off his arms. The unpleasant sensation of his jeans and shirt liquifying made him claw at himself in desperation, an unseeable force was attacking him.

Meanwhile, Logan coughed up some of the weird substance, perhaps the highly processed chocolate bar he had eaten. He peered up and saw the others were doing the same, regurgitating and vomiting, clutching their naked bellies. It was the result of plastic ingested over the years. They were being forcibly cleansed.

One of the thugs had wrapped his hands tightly around his concave calf muscle as if to hold his leg together, as the steel rods and screws inside, the result from a previous misadventure, began to change in their nature. Everything manmade was disintegrating around them; the signposts, the fence, the decking, the vehicle. The air smelled like manure or was it seaweed? It was a strong, muddy, pungent odour that was inescapable.

John knew what to do – and would be the first to emerge from panic. As his captors flailed in confusion, John grappled a large, sharp-edged stone from the dirt and walked calmly toward the leader of the three who only moments ago was going to shoot them each in cold blood on a shop floor.

The naked, slob of a man, was now revealed, weak, afraid, and also distracted, wiping his torso down when he noticed John approach. He backed away, this time with no bravado or cocky authority but trapped in the primal fear of being helpless to something he could not dominate with his normal tricks of the trade.

“Hey buddy, wait a minute, we can work something out…Please, wait a…”

John rushed into his personal space so the man slipped and fell back, one hand on the ground, the other defensively held up as a barrier. John brushed aside his arm like it was a reed, to smash the rock in the man’s face twice, hard, definitively. There was one shrill noise and then the crunching and splattering. The threat the ‘piece of shit’ had made to his wife was still fresh in his ears. The rage that channelled through him was pure, undiluted, natural.

When John had finished, where there had been facial features, were pulpy, split-open skull dents. The man gurgled up the short remains of his life from his injured windpipe. He was done.

The other two locals were scrambling away, one dragging his injured companion, who now had a flap of flesh where one leg had been. John was like a statue as he observed them flee. There was something so basic and terrifying about the figure of the glistening man, clasping a bloody rock, with no remorse about him.

Logan stomped naked in the mud towards John, beckoning him to be calm. The fungus had accelerated faster than he had anticipated, or perhaps it had come from a different direction. As they looked closer at the gunge they could see bright green spotting in it emerge, tendrils of plant life sprouting from it in fringes of colour. The world was rebooting.

“I’ll get the deer carcass from the remains of the van…” said Logan, stunned but trying to take action, to keep momentum. In his head, movement was a sign they had a purpose, movement was life. He scooped off handfuls of the sludge that used to be his vehicle to find the protruding hooves of his earlier kill.

Gail was covering herself as best she could with her hands but it was useless. “We can’t live like this… No… No… We’re not going to do that.”

Back in the mess of the collapsed shop they could see the previously canned foodstuffs, the bread, the brands they had been so used to eating every day, had become a lumpy material of inedible goop. All that processed food, ingredients, and preservatives detected by the fungus as unnatural.

“We need to go into the woods. We have to forget everything we knew and start again as pure… Like we are animals.”

It sounded weird to the couple like Logan was starting some cult he had just invented in his mind.

“But we’re not animals, Logan, John – we’re not…”

Her eyes fell to something in her peripheral vision, something by John’s side, and realised she was watching blood drip from her husband’s fingers.

“The sun’s down, and those men or other men, they might come back… Come on, we have to go into the woods.”

Logan grabbed the fine-haired leg of the deer carcass and slung the body over his shoulders. His breath manifested into plumes of fog with the onset of the chill of the night. It was time to leave.

They found the forest edge and filed into the darkness, and within moments they had disappeared from sight of the onlooking world, into the black foliage of a true wilderness.

The sounds of birds erupted from the woodland canopy near them, as they disturbed the bushes with clumsy footfalls.

Logan thought it were as if they were celebrating, no, something else, it was definitely something else, Logan mused. It was as if, they were victorious.

The End