The Apocalypse Started Today, but I've Lived It for Ten Year

The Spore Node

"Tell me there's something," Ruth said. "Anything."

I stood there with the axe hanging from one hand and looked at Dale's arm. The black lines had reached his elbow. They moved while I watched, a slow crawl under the skin, like something alive and in no hurry.

There was one thing. I hadn't wanted to remember it.

In year one, in a basement under a collapsed church in Queens, I had watched a woman named Teodora save her husband with something she cut out of a dead man. Nobody was proud of it. Nobody talked about it afterward. But her husband lived another six years, and every desperate person who heard the story tried it, and about half of them got it right.

"There's a way," I said. "It's ugly."

"I've worked trauma for eleven years," Ruth said. "Try me."

"The infected carry something in their chests. A gland, about the size of a walnut, yellow. It's what the Spores grow around. If you cut it out of a fresh one, grind it, and give it to someone in the first half hour, it triggers the body's own response. It doesn't cure anything. It buys a day."

Silence. Halloran, the pharmacist, had gone gray.

"You want to feed him a piece of one of those things," Ruth said slowly.

"Yes."

"Do you know how insane that sounds?"

"Yes. I also know the alternative." I looked at Dale, who was watching me with his pale, yellowing eyes. "It has to be fresh. It has to come from one I kill myself. And we have about fifteen minutes."

Ruth looked at Dale's arm. Then she looked at her own hands, as if checking whether they would still be steady for this.

"What do you need?" she asked.

"A sharp knife. A clean bowl. A mortar and pestle, if you have one." I turned to Halloran. "Do you?"

He did. It was the one thing in that shop that hadn't been bought out. He fetched it from a shelf behind the counter along with a surgical scalpel from a sealed drawer. His hands were shaking, but he gave them to me without a word.

"I'll go outside and find one," I said. "Ruth, keep him talking. Keep him awake."

"Where are you going?"

"Not far."

I didn't have to go far. The shuffling at the corner had been getting louder for five minutes, and when I eased the pharmacy door open, three of them were already coming up Ninth Avenue. They had been office workers. One still wore a lanyard. The nearest had a gray suit torn open at the chest, and its left arm hung in a long, wrong curve, the fingers dragging along the pavement.

The Spores had done their work. Their eyes were yellow, wide, empty. They moved the way sleepwalkers move, slow and certain.

I stepped out and shut the door behind me.

I took the first one fast. The axe came down across its collarbone and it dropped without a sound. The second reached me before I could recover the blade, so I let go of the haft, caught its wrist, and drove the pick into its temple with my free hand. It fell against the pharmacy window and slid down the glass.

The third hesitated. I had time to see it clearly: a young woman in a green blazer, mouth hanging open, a gold chain at her throat. She was maybe twenty-five. Her yellow eyes met mine, and for a second I saw something behind them that had not finished leaving.

"I'm sorry," I said.

Then I ended it as cleanly as I could.

[Infected slain ×3.]

[Essence gained. Hollow Crown: Essence Tithe applied.]

I knelt by the one in the gray suit, because he was the largest and the most recent. The first cut was the worst. I opened the shirt, found the sternum, and worked the scalpel along the line I remembered from Teodora's basement. The flesh was cold and dry. When I spread the ribs, the thing was there, nested in the cavity where a lung should have been, a dull yellow node that pulsed once, weakly, against my fingers.

I cut it free. It came away with a wet sound and sat in my palm, warm and heavier than it looked.

[Item acquired: Spore Node (Crown-touched).]

"Crown-touched," I muttered. "What does that mean?"

The System didn't answer. I wiped my hands on the dead man's coat, wrapped the node in a clean cloth, and carried it back inside.

Ruth had set up on the counter. Dale was lying on a row of three chairs with his head on a folded coat. His breathing had gotten shallow and quick. The dark lines had crossed his shoulder and started up his neck.

I ground the node in the mortar until it was a thick, glistening paste. Ruth mixed it with saline in the bowl, stirring until it turned the color of weak tea. She looked at me once, a long look.

"If this kills him," she said, "I will never forgive you."

"I know."

"If it works, I want a full explanation."

"You'll get one."

She lifted Dale's head and held the bowl to his lips. He drank, coughing, spilling some down his chin. His face twisted. For ten long seconds nothing happened, and I stood there with my hands useless at my sides, hearing my own pulse.

Then the lines stopped.

They did not recede at first. They simply stopped, as if something had put a hand against them. Then, very slowly, they began to pull back from his neck, from his shoulder, from his elbow, retreating along the veins the way a tide goes out. The yellow cleared from his eyes. His breathing slowed and deepened. His fingers, which had been curled into a claw, relaxed.

Dale opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

"I had a very strange dream," he said hoarsely. "I was in a field. It was so quiet."

Ruth let out a breath that was half a laugh. She sat down hard on the stool, put her face in her hands, and stayed there a minute.

I felt something in my chest give way, something I had been holding too tightly for too long. I leaned against the counter and shut my eyes.

That was when the Crown spoke.

It didn't use the System's flat voice. It was quieter, closer, a pressure behind my sternum, and a window opened in the dark behind my eyelids.

[Hollow Crown: Dominion partially unlocked.]

[Dale Whitmore has consumed a Crown-touched core. A bond is forming.]

[Accept the bond? Accept / Refuse.]

[Time remaining: 00:30.]

I opened my eyes. The window hung in the air in front of me, silver and patient, the countdown ticking down at the corner.

Across the room, Dale smiled at me, tired and grateful, and said, "Ethan. I think I can feel you. Isn't that weird? I can feel where you're standing."

Twenty seconds.

I knew exactly what that button did. I had watched it done to a thousand people in the Eastern Wastes. They had all smiled just like that, right up until the day the man who held their bonds told them to walk into the fire.

If I refused, I didn't know what would happen to Dale. The node was already in him. The bond was already half formed. Cutting it might kill him, or it might do nothing at all.

Ten seconds.

Accept, and I would become the thing I had spent four years hunting.

My thumb hovered over a button that wasn't there.