Agents of Dreamland(7)
He takes a drag on his cigarette and glances at the empty briefcase lying open on the bed, yawning like the jaws of a stylish, toothless carnivore.
I can’t forget it. I’m still hungry, says Ellen Andrews, speaking from the celluloid ghost of 1934. And then the Signalman’s restless mind slips back to Friday again, that moment when he draws his revolver and steps through the doorway, crossing the threshold, and, sure, he knows better because he’s already relived, replayed, revisited it all a hundred times by now, but he does it anyway.
The house is full of sunlight and shadows.
And the smell of toadstools.
He’s right behind Vance, close enough he can see the beads of perspiration standing out on her brow and upper lip, and he’s wondering why she’s on point. Coming up the drive, wasn’t she two cars behind him? Crossing that maze of drooping cacti and rusted automobiles, wasn’t he in the lead?
There’s nothing much in the front room but broken furniture and even more dust and sand, he thinks, than there is outside. He follows Vance into the kitchen and spots a dead scorpion in the sink, belly up atop a stack of filthy dishes. Off the kitchen, there’s a narrow hallway, and now he can hear television static coming from one of the bedrooms. The mushroomy stink is worse back here. A lot worse.
“Place is empty,” says someone behind him, Malinowski or one of the FBI mooks who haven’t yet figured out they’re in way over their pay grade and over their heads. “We missed him. Shitbird’s probably halfway to f*cking Tijuana by now.”
There’s a calendar on the wall by the fridge, the sort you get free at Chinese restaurants. Someone’s circled July third. He looks up to find that Vance is already in the hallway, and the Signalman hesitates, starts to call her back, opens his mouth, then shuts it again. He winces at a sudden burst of white noise from the radio Velcroed to his bulletproof vest. That hall, it makes him think of a slaughterhouse chute. No room to turn around in there. No room to f*cking fight.
You getting the heebie-jeebies, old man? Aren’t you the one who never flinched?
“Wait,” he says, but his voice seems very small in the heat and the reek, small and entirely devoid of authority. “Hold up, Vance, I want to get eyes on—”
Cool as shit through a polar bear, wasn’t that you?
And then he sees the look on her face, and even without seeing whatever she sees, he knows it’s bad. “Oh my god,” she whispers. “Oh god. Fuck me . . .”
The Signalman picks up the remote and turns off the TV. He stubs out his cigarette and goes to the bathroom. His urine is dark, concentrated, the color of apple juice. He wonders how long until he winds up with kidney stones. His old man had them. Howled in pain like a dying hound dog, and isn’t that something to look forward to? He washes his hands with a tiny bar of Ivory soap, then pauses to stare at himself in the mirror. The fluorescent lights make his skin seem thin as vellum, and he rubs his fingers over the salt-and-pepper stubble on his cheeks and chin. He should shave. He won’t feel like it in the morning, hungover and late for his train. If he shaves now, it’s an excuse not to go back to the dossier on Drew Standish and all the nightmares contained therein, all the warning signs nobody heeded until, as they say, it was too late.
If he concentrates on shaving, maybe he can stave off the memory of what they found at the end of that hallway and, a little later, huddled on the roof. The sight of those bodies, and the smell.
It’s actually a number of species of fungus existing together in a symbiotic mass, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, often referred to by a more colorful and more pronounceable moniker, zombie fungus. It attacks a particular family of tropical ants, known as camponitids, or carpenter ants, entering the hosts’ bodies during the yeast stage of its complex reproductive cycle. The fungus spreads through an ant’s body, maturing inside its head—and this is where things really get interesting. It eventually takes control of the infected insect, forcing it to latch on to the underside of a leaf and bite down in what we call the grip of death. Then atrophy sets in, quickly, completely destroying the sarcomere connections in the ant’s muscle fibers and reducing its sarcoplasmic reticula and mitochondria. At this point, the ant is no longer able to control the muscles of the mandible and will remain fixed in place. The fungus finally kills the ant and continues to grow as hyphae penetrate the soft tissues and begin to structurally fortify the ant’s exoskeleton. Mycelia sprout and securely anchor it to the leaf, at the same time secreting antimicrobial compounds that ward off competition from other Ophiocordyceps colonies.
In the mirror, his eyes seem more gray than blue, and the broken capillaries in his nose are as good as a road map, tracing decades and countless drinking binges. But he’s a prime asset, and as long as he gets the job done, Albany is happy to overlook the booze. With luck, they’ll squeeze another ten years out of him. He turns on the tap and splashes warm water across his face, then reaches for the can of shaving cream he left on the back of the toilet.
And get this, okay? These doomed ants, these poor dying bastards, they always climb to a height of precisely twenty-five point twenty plus or minus two point forty-six centimeters above the jungle floor, in environments where the humidity will remain stable between ninety-four and ninety-five percent, with temperatures between twenty and thirty Celsius. And always on the north side of the plant. In the end, sporocarps, the fungal fruiting bodies, erupt from the ant’s necking, growing a stalk that releases spores that’ll infect more ants. It’s evolution at its best and, yeah, at its most grisly, too. Mother Nature, when you get right down to it, she’s a proper cunt.