I attracted quite a few stares as I pulled out of the parking garage and onto Garden Court Drive. I tried my best to ignore them, and focus on the task at hand.

Though cracked in places and pitted where spore-breath had eaten through the setts, Garden Court Drive was drivable again. I pushed on the accelerator with my weave.

Ours was a convoy of five: two buses, two armored military transports, and my car. Merritt had slithered up alongside the transports, and was currently watching me, hands folded politely against her chest, as I drove up into fifth place.

Using the third finger on my left hand, I gennnnntly tapped the center of the steering wheel.

Honk honk!

We'd settled on the car horn as our "signal".

The buses and transports matched the L85's horn with honks of their own. The wyrms trumpeted too. Looking up, I saw Brand lift off and take flight. He moved somewhat ungainly, teetering this way and that—also, the end of his tail drooped down a bit—but… fudge.

He was really flying.

He belted out joyous noise.

Merritt looked up at him worriedly. I, too, was anxious just thinking about what all his noise might do, but, as they say, what's done is done.

As I pulled up behind the second bus, alongside Merritt, my dashboard console perked up, indicating an incoming call. Voice only.

"I can't believe I'm sayin' this," Heggy said, speaking through the call, "but… is everybody ready to go?"

Many voices spoke in assent.

"As ready as I'll ever be," I said.

A moment passed before Heggy asked a rather strange question: "Uh, Genneth, are you there?"

"Yes, I'm here."

A moment later: "Can somebody go check on Dr. Howle?" Heggy asked.

What?

Why couldn't they hear me?

I sped up my thoughts. It took me about a minute of me-time for me to figure it out. Once I did, I almost slapped myself, but didn't, for fear of what my claws might do to my still-human face.

The answer was my magic fishbowl helmet. It had done such a good job of containing my spores, it had contained all the sounds I made, too.

Focusing, I redirected the plexus lines to form a small aperture at the top of the weave.

"Can you hear me now?" I said.

"There you are!" Ani said. "What happened?"

"Fishbowl trouble," I said.

My words were met with silence. I opened my mouth to give the necessary context, when Heggy interrupted me.

"Never mind, as long as you've got things under control."

"I do."

"Then let's roll," she replied, with a cough. "Everyone, follow me—and stay in formation!"

Then the call ended.

For safety's sake, I closed the hole in my magic fishbowl.

And then we were off.

We entered the Crusader Hill tunnel one by one. The sensors on my car brought up the high-beam headlights the instant they detected the tunnel's darkness.

Oh boy…

It was hard not to stare.

The road was cracking where fungal roots had broken through to the surface. Growths rose up from the roots like solidified foam. Fungal wood dripped down the tunnel's walls.

The car shuddered as I drove over a clumps of fungus extruding from the ground. I would have bashed my head against the cabin's ceiling, were it not for my fishbowl spell.

The view as we came out the other side of the tunnel was both more and less than what I'd been expecting. Death had come to the city of Elpeck and moved on to richer pastures; everything was aftermath. Cars and corpses littered the streets where they'd been left to die. The old-new and new-old buildings crowding the streets obscured the view, forcing me to look up over their rooftops, toward the skyscrapers, where my imagination ran wild.

Clouds of smoke towered over the far side of the city. Red tints were creeping into the air as the sun began its rise. I saw the Fendmiss Building reduced to a chimney, broken and overgrown. Flames stuck their tongues out its windows, denouncing the dawn with ashen curses. Explosions echoed up and down its length where the fungus' spores ignited,

A cluster of explosions rocked the distant skyline. A skyscraper fell, toppling like a redwood.

The city had changed, just like the rest of us. The fungus had conquered the urban jungle's steel, glass, and stone. Here and there, dark things slithered across the skyscrapers, slipping between smoke and shadow. Every plant in sight had been reworked into something twisted and unnatural. The trees on our autumn streets stood bare and leafless, their trunks and branches distended from the fungus that had grown through and replaced them. The swollen protuberances flexed like lungs, breathing, in and out, pumping spores into the air. A smattering of wyrm-headed trees grew without regard to sense or place, branching out in the middle of streets or from the sides of buildings, casting weird shadows in the flickering neon light.

A day before, there had still been a meaningful military presence in the skies over Elpeck, but no longer. The fungus' victory was nearly complete. The golden eyes of wyrms coiled around spires or darting through the smoke were the only real trace of sentience remaining in the airspace. The rest was the fungus and its silver-eyed conscripts, and the final stragglers of the hold, human order.

I heard even more than I saw.

At most, I'd catch a glimpse of hide weaving between or above the tallest buildings, except for those wyrms with glowing growths on their bodies—shining vesicles, moss-stalks capped in light. Fungal chiropterans flocked through the air, profaning the morning. A few aerostats could be seen roving above the ruins, though they probably wouldn't last an hour.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The monsters would make quick work of them. As I watched, one got swarmed by fungal fliers. The aircraft careened to the side, and crashed into a building, detonating them both.

I'd never imagined I'd see the city like this. Like a war-zone.

Kurt followed behind us, minding the rear. He stuck to the ground, slithering with his forepart raised, bringing his head close to ten feet off the ground.

Worrying about what his spores might do to my car—or to my family, if any of the particles managed to stowaway inside—I gritted my teeth and carefully maneuvered around Ani's bus. The convoy turned at another intersection not long after that, giving me the opportunity to roll up to the front of the pack, right alongside Heggy's bus.

Unfortunately, being at the front of the convoy meant that I now had a fully unobstructed view of Elpeck's ruined streets. The sight almost made me return to the back of the line.

Stores had been broken into, looted and burnt. Fungus grew up the sides of buildings like architectural tumors, branching up and up. Death was everywhere. Wyrmsong filled the air in the skyward distance behind it, as if to welcome the dawn.

Soon, the sun would climb over the rooftops.

We passed a troop transport truck. It had been parked by the roadside at a skew angle. The corpses of a handful of soldiers lay around it, dismembered or torn in half. Green spore mists clung to the inside of the transport, as if hinting at what lay inside. Was it a monster, or just more of the dead?

I didn't want to find out.

On several occasions, Merritt, Brand, and Kurt worked to clear abandoned vehicles off the streets, among other obstructions.

It was just after pushing a bus onto a sidewalk that we heard a shriek of wyrmsong, far too close for comfort.

I looked up.

Two aerostats zoomed overhead, chasing after a silver-eyed wyrm.

Were they nuts?

Yes, yes they were: the two aircraft started firing on the wyrm, pelting it with a stream of white hot bullets.

With a roar, the wyrm soared upward and looped around and back, charging at its attackers. It crashed into one of the aerostats, snout-first. Metal screamed as the wyrm tore its claws through the aircraft's body. A moment later, the aerostat exploded, raining flak onto the convoy.

Wreathing itself in psychokinesis, the wyrm blasted out of the smoke and fire and breathed a concentrated stream of spores directly into the second aerostat's cockpit.

The folks on the bus yelled: "Go! Go!"

The silver-eye slipped away like a fish darting upstream.

The second aerostat veered to the side as it moved along the street, quickly losing altitude, but that stopped mattering when it slammed into the side of an old brownstone apartment building, spraying fire all around. For an instant, all I saw was the explosion, but then, slowing time slightly, I realized it was the least of my worries.

The apartment building was seriously infected. Fungal boughs stuck out of the windows and roof, sharing their smoking sporestacks and bioluminescent bulbs for all to see.

The aerostat's flaming wreck fell down the building's side of the building, right into the path of one of the sporestacks.

It was a total blow-out. The building lit up like a torch. Explosions blasted through every window, raining glass down onto the street.

And not just glass.

Bricks came loose, too, with entire sections of the building following soon thereafter, toppling onto the street. One of our transports screeched to a stop at the last possible moment, just barely avoiding being crushed by a falling wall.

The thunderous spore explosions hid the screams—not ours, but the zombies'. Dozens of feral infected streamed out of the building as it erupted. Several stumbled down the stoop in front of the entrance, but most were simply flung down onto the street by the blast, along with everything else, landing in piles of broken, but still-motile flesh.

The bodies were aflame. They traipsed on the street in a demented terpsichore. Even the ones cast down from the upper stories tried to shudder their way across the pavement, despite their broken limbs.

Then came the flood.

Doors and windows flew open left and right, and in the adjacent buildings; zombies streamed out into the last moments of night. They flooded the street, blocking the way forward.

Our military transports opened their windows. People on the buses grabbed the guns they'd brought.

Briefly slowing time to let myself think, I opened up a hole at the top of my fishbowl spell and used a thimble's worth of plexus lines to press down on the button that controlled the driver's side window, and then stuck my head and neck out the window and yelled: "No, don't shoot!"

Not only would the fungus ooze inside the zombies eat away at our vehicles, it would further trigger the fungus' defense mechanisms and turn everyone in the convoy into a zombie, too.

The zombies surrounded the bus on all sides. They flailed and squirmed and shoved, tearing through each others' skin as they tried to climb up and enter the bus' broken windows.

I knew Heggy had heard me because I saw her dash toward the back of her bus, but she was too late. A doctor by one of the broken windows at the back had already started to fire, as had the people in the military transport behind me to my left. Bullets mowed down the carpet of zombies, reducing them to kibbles of broken bones and fleshy paste.

Merritt and Brand had already seized upon the crowd of zombies from two sides. Kurt weaved his way through the buses and transports not far behind. The zombies stuck to their bodies as if their scales were glue. The infected flesh cracked and writhed as my friends' otherworldly physiology broke down their biomass and incorporated it into themselves.

I thickened my wyrmsight, while hyperphantasizing away the threads of my fishbowl. The auras of every zombie in sight bore the magenta stain that signified the fungus' will. Worse, the taint was spreading. I could barely make it out inside the bodies of the people in the military transport, likely due to the vehicle's thick metal-plated armor, but it was there, like a cancer, and it was only a matter of seconds before they went completely feral.

Just as bad, if not worse, the aura of the doctor at the back of Heggy's bus was already halfway overwritten by the fungus, and Heggy was still running toward him.

Through the smoke, flames, spores, and debris, I could see the building's ruins, and they were alive. The structural components the fungus had replaced shrugged off the explosion as if it was nothing.

It had to be because of their thick, woody texture. The fungal wood texture acted like armor, making the rest of it seemingly impervious to harm, much like wyrms' minute, resilient scales.

On a whim, I tried using my necromantic abilities to rein the zombies in, but to no avail. Without Andalon to serve as a conduit between her greater self and I, there was no way for me to use &alon's power to hijack the fungus' control.

That left me with only one option.

I was not about to let a dear friend and mentor get turned into a zombie!

I stuck out my neck even further, until my head had cleared over the roof of my car, and then I let time and power flow, wrapping a plexus around the gun-toting physician at the back of the bus. Heggy and several others staggered as my psychokinesis launched the man out through the broken window like a rocket. The high speed, narrow space, and jagged glass edges shaved his arms off his torso. He landed in the street like a stone skipped across a pond, bowling a hole in the zombie horde.

With perfect timing, Kurt came up from behind and slammed himself—chest, arms, and flanks—into the horde, removing nearly a dozen more zombies from play.

The engine of the troop transport at my left revved as the vehicle shot forward, plowing through the zombies, leaving a trail of ooze sizzling in its wake. Its wheels screeched as it veered across the street and slammed into one of the fungal columns outlining the ruined skyscraper's wall. The fungus split the vehicle down the middle, triggering a second explosion as one of the burning zombies made contact with its exposed engine.

The blast tore through the zombies and scattered the pieces. One of the pieces splattered across my windshield, making me yelp.

But then I realized, the explosion had cleared the way forward.

"Go!" I yelled. "Go!"

Closing up the hole in my plexus helmet, I reeled my head and neck back into my car and conjured a force-thimble to raise the window shut. I turned the windshield wipers on with a flick of a claw, and the soap and water spray with another.

My windshield turned into watercolor of red and black and speckled green as engines revved and wheels roared.

And then I put the pedal to the metal.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.