No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories

—Not just then, anyway…

  Through the autumn and into winter, events seemed to slow down a little. Contra the initial suspicion and police enquiries, I had taken a six-lobed leaf from Sellick’s Ivy (as I’d named it) in to Kew to have the real experts look it over. And three days later I was told that the leaf was as fresh as ever; it seemed it didn’t want to die! But there was so much going on at Kew at that time—so many peculiar specimens had come in, mostly from within a twenty mile radius of my home in Surrey—and so much work was being done on them—that I simply lost track of the thing, stopped asking after it.

  But guilty? For taking that single leaf in? No, the poison was already there in the guise of all those mutant species; my guilt lay in refusing to convert to Galactica! In that…and in the fact that I’m a botanist in name only.

  There, I’ve admitted it. And therein lies my guilt: in not having been able to recognize and accept a seedling from space when I was shown one. Oh, I had my qualifications, achieved by sheer hard work and good fortune—by learning things one day and forgetting them the next, after the examinations—but my leanings led elsewhere. My forte was seen to be administration, hence my “exalted” position. And in that position I should have pushed and fought and done more. But as I’ve already stated, I believe the war was lost before we even started to fight back, lost on the morning that damned thing crashed down in old Colonel Sellick’s garden.

  So where was I? Ah, yes: the winter, two years ago. And the months passing by, and season following season…

  But if the winter had slowed things down, the spring accelerated them almost beyond belief! So that this time when the police called me in it was to act as their local expert!

  At last the government had surrendered to increasing public concern and pressure. MAF and their GM experiments had been accused, found guilty without trial, and thrown to the wolves; and as possible saviours of the situation, the botanists had become the new elite. Even then it had been only a “situation”, not a full-blown disaster, and despite that I and a handful of others at Kew and similar institutes had been given a free hand, still we were seen by many as nothing more than scaremongers.

  In May a resurgent MAF issued a statement: their “experts” were certain that given time, perhaps a year, the alien effects would be “diluted by absorption”, or some such claptrap. To the best of my knowledge no one believed them, and rightly so. And all GM experiments were banned worldwide, irrevocably, now and forever.

  Well, and it might have had something to do with GM—might just have—but mainly it was Sellick’s meteorite. By then they had cut it open; it could be seen that it was most definitely a thing of “alien” or universal nature, spawn of Megagaia.

  There were chambers inside: a honeycomb of minute chambers, connected by microscopic tubes to the outer surface. Heat, friction with Earth’s atmosphere, would have caused any materials—liquids, gases—that were inside to expand, would have driven the living plasma along the tubules under pressure. And moments before impact the pressure would have shattered a brittle heat-shield sheath, releasing—

  —All hell on Earth, as it turns out…

  A cold breeze blew on my mind, sending the ripples on my mental pond fleeing ever faster. Memories that in the main didn’t want to be remembered surfaced, fragmented like confetti shapes in a kaleidoscope, reformed into new, even less acceptable pictures.

  In June something macabre. I was called to a local cemetery where the police had roped off a twenty foot perimeter around a family plot: mother, father, and small girl child, victims of a bad traffic accident. They had been buried just five days ago, but already the three graves had sprouted huge fungi, covering them with a canopy of thick fleshy parasols. Mushrooms were my department; I knew more about fungi than anything else in the botanical world. These were boletus, but mutated of course.

  Boletus satanus, yes: “Satan’s mushroom…poisonous when raw.” Or in this case just pure poison.

  Whereas the more common variety—the original variety—was rarely more than eight or nine inches across the cap, these uncommon growths were up to two or three feet across and leaned outwards from clumps so tightly packed that it was difficult to see the borders of the plot they were shading…in which their fat, barrel-shaped stipes were rooted. And they issued a sickly sweet stench promoting dizziness and nausea in anyone standing too close to them. Several relatives of the deceased were present, stretched out moaning on a gravel path, being looked after by a doctor in a gas mask. The police were wearing masks, too.

  The doctor, a good distance from this abnormality, offered me his mask; I put it on and was approaching the graves when a man, probably another relative, came staggering down the lanes between plots. He was green, looked ill, had vomit on his shirt and carried an axe. “Bloody bastard things!” he gasped, breaching the cordon.

  Then the smell, the alien scent, got to him. He went to his knees, choking, and the axe fell from his hand, the flat of its blade thumping against an outer stipe, one of the fat pink mushroom stems. Then the horror:

  The skin of the cap less than twelve inches from the fallen man’s face peeled back; a sphincter appeared, opened, hosed out a jet of some vile ichor. The man screamed, shot upright, stumbled away hissing and frothing. His face was melting! He crashed to the ground, stone dead!

  The stench must have increased tenfold…anyone not wearing a gas mask was driven almost physically back…the doctor cried, “My God! Oh God! Oh God! Cadaverine, it can only be!”

  I dragged him away, helped him to sit, said, “Cadaverine?”

  “That’s…what…it…smelt like!” he said, shudderingly, looking at me with streaming eyes, his mouth sucking at air that was at least a little cleaner. “Cadaverine: the loathsome juices that ferment in corpses!”

  We called in a spray truck, turned everything to slush with twenty gallons of fungicide, then sprayed the whole area with a fine sulphuric acid mist.

  And while all that was going on—thinking of the boletus, of what they must be feeding on—I found myself a place to be sick behind someone’s mausoleum. Even back there I had no lack of company; before I was done the doctor and one of the policemen had joined me…

  In July the French closed the Channel Tunnel and banned all imports from the United Kingdom…well, what else was new? Remembering my dandelion seeds, however—not to mention an entire year’s contact of one sort or another—it was too little, too late. In August the Germans embargoed France, and a week later, right across Europe, everyone else was forbidding contact with everyone else.

  Until then America had been just a little complacent, distant, casual; then, suddenly, she was hit! The wheat, barley and maize—all the cereal crops—infected, poisoned by the same disease or “condition”. And worse to come: a three-hundred-mile wide cloud of lethal, choking pollen and granular dust drifting east and south-east from the vast cereal “prairies”, taking out entire towns and cities in its darkening path. Quincy, Chicago, Logansport, Lafayette and Bloomington…all gone. While fifty per cent of the population in the trapesium of Nashville, Pittsburgh, and the Appalachians was evacuated by presidential order into territory east of the Great Lakes. As for the other fifty per cent: they defied the order, stayed and faced death.

  Once again the sleeping giant had been awakened, only this time there was no one to hit out at.

  By mid-October millions of sheep were dead in New Zealand, the paddy fields were smoking alkaline swamps across China and the Far East, the Australian Aborigines had wisely chosen to go walkabout, but no longer in the bush…now they did it in the desert, the only safe place. For now, at least…

  Then it was winter again, but you would hardly know it. The weather was mutating along with the flora! Climatic change accelerated by what was happening to the green stuff, by weird new greenhouse gases. But at least the winter gave us a much-needed break, enabling our retreat into the towns and cities, allowing us to regroup, try to sort out some kind of defence. These mass evacuations were li
ke scenes from one of the Great Wars, except there were no tanks in the streets, just tanks of herbicide and acid, and no distant rumbles of man-made thunder. (No, allow me to correct myself…we did in fact bomb several forests, which only served to spread it that much faster.)

  And finally it was “spring”—last spring, perhaps the last spring—by which time all Mankind was under siege.

  But enough, my mind was almost numb, memories merging, the ripples blurring into a froth on my mental pond. And yet a last few scenes continued to surface, despite that they were things I really didn’t want to remember…

  In April of this last year, months after the evacuations, old man Sellick called me at Kew. Most of the land-lines were down (the rampant vines and ivies) but he had retained my cellphone number from the old days. Even so he was lucky to get through; the atmospherics were that bad.

  “You’re still at home?” I could scarcely credit it. Just a day or two before what was to have been his forced evacuation, he’d told me he was heading north to his sister in Edinburgh.

  “Yes,” came his reply, almost drowned in static. “I fooled ’em, stayed on. Surrender? Me? No, no! Out of the question! Eh, what? But I’ve had it now. I’m tired. Can’t win. So then…I know it’s a tall order, but is there any chance you can get me out of here?”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said. “But I can’t promise. You’re deep in the heart of it—the very heart of it—and to tell the truth I don’t know how you’ve survived.”

  “Well I have—until now,” he told me, “but now it’s fighting back—deliberately! Roots come up in the night, from under the floorboards. Searching, I suppose. I hear them groping. And the garden: I’ve taken it out, burned most of it to the ground. It’ll make for a fine big black helipad for the chopper, that’s if you have one. I know I’m asking a lot, but—”

  “I’ll see what can be done,” I told him, before the static overwhelmed us.

  I got on to Surveillance and was told that a chopper would be going out that way in a few days time. They picked me up; we sped out over the Green; at Sellick’s place they put me down in a flurry of ashes in what had once been his garden. I was in my protective gear: the man from Mars in an NBC suit, gas mask and all. Next door, my old house was invisible under a green mound, sagging under the weight of foliage. Sellick’s place, too.

  But the colonel’s big magnolia was still standing—God, it was still in leaf!—there in the one last patch of what looked like normal garden. I went down the old scorched path at a run, then skidded to a halt under the tree’s now ominous canopy.

  I just couldn’t believe what I saw sitting there. Or rather I could for I’d seen its like before; it was just that I didn’t want to believe. And in that grim grey-and-green wasteland deserted by all animal life, devoid of creature sounds, I stood on rubbery legs, gazing through eyes round as pennies, and reached out a trembling rubber-gloved hand to touch Sellick’s mutilated, transfigured face.

  Why did I do that? I don’t know. Probably to confirm with a second sense the evidence I’d almost refused to accept from the first. But no, I wasn’t nightmaring. It was all too real.

  Old Sellick. Sometime in the last day or two he must have gone out into what was left of his garden, and as was his wont nodded off to sleep on the bench with his back against the magnolia. Then the attack…probably not of the green stuff; more likely the old boy’s heart, because he was sitting there clutching his left arm, his head back and mouth wide open. I think it must have been that way—a heart attack—because he wouldn’t have just sat there and let all…all of this happen.

  The ivy: growing up his trousers and bulging out his shirt; entering him somewhere—I hate to think where!—and issuing forth from his dislodged eyes, from his ears, his gaping mouth. And the old colonel all dried up, wrinkled like a walnut—like a kernel!—with all the good sucked out of him, and the veins in the ivy’s six-lobed leaves tinted pink with his liquids!

  There was no point in staying. I used avgas to set fire to Sellick and the magnolia, returned to the chopper still hovering there, and went back with the patrol to London…

  Intelligence. It’s a crazy idea…or is it? l mean, how does this thing, or these things, propagate? With no more—or damn few—birds, bees, wasps, flies, how do they do it? Is the wind sufficient, or do they help each other? I remember what Colonel Sellick told me: about roots coming up through his floorboards, searching through the house.

  And then there’s what happened to David Johnson. For just a few weeks ago, David got his.

  He was the last man out of Kew, a rearguard left behind to ensure that everything we had once nurtured was destroyed. Last to go would be that area of his own special interest, of course, the Mediterranean section. But after he’d been left there—on his own, for three days—finally someone remembered that David hadn’t called.

  So we called him, and got no answer.

  We found him in the hothouse, examined him and figured out how he had died. A squirting cucumber had got him in the eyes: the blackened sockets and the blisters on his face told us that much. Backing off, he must have staggered into a patch of previously inoffensive cactus…they’d shot poisonous spines into him, and his body was puffed up like a balloon. And finally the mandrakes had got to him…they were sprouting in his decaying flesh. I didn’t attempt to pull one.

  As we opened up with the flamethrowers, the whole place was thrashing and seething—“screaming” if you like—in all its silent fury…

  I became aware of someone standing at the foot of the podium. A young man, recently arrived, probably a driver. The chairs were mostly filled now; the empty ones…would wait until we found replacements.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “The stores are open, sir,” he said. “The toshers are waiting outside, and the transport is ready up top.”

  I nodded, said, “Good, thank you,” and then got on with it. I had promised them I’d be brief, and now I kept my word; kept things even shorter by omitting to read the names of those men they’d no longer be seeing. Why should I drench, or even drown, these already dampened spirits? Instead, the names of our dead, brave former comrades-in-arms would be posted where they could be read privately, allowing the living to deal with their losses in their own way in their own time.

  There were eight platoons; I assigned four of them to a continuation of yesterday’s work, the other four to an invasion on a brand new front.

  “It’s the sewers,” I told them. “Fungus and a black alga. I don’t know how the latter survives without sunlight, but in any case it’s your job to ensure it doesn’t survive. The fungus is a mutant species of puff- or earth-ball that grows in enormous clumps; it’s yellow, warty, and the fruiting bodies are full of black spores. There’s evidence that these spores will take root in flesh and produce mycelia, fungus strands that will spread through your tissues like wildfire! We got that evidence from an abundance of dead rats; in fact you won’t find any live rats down there! Which just about says it all.

  “You’ll have gas masks, of course, but with the various gas pockets you are liable to encounter it’s obvious that you won’t be able to use flamers. So I’m afraid it’s algicides and fungicides, and that’s your lot. So, if anyone has an even slightly suspicious gas mask, get it changed!

  “As for the algae: it crawls, however slowly. So every hour or so you’ll surface and get your suits hosed down. Now listen, I know all this is new and strange to you, but you won’t be on your own. In the old days—I mean the really old days, back in the 19th century—there were workers called ‘toshers’ down in the sewers. Scavengers mainly, they searched for valuables that had been flushed away. Well, we’ve been recruiting toshers, reinforcing our modern-day ‘flusher’ gangs, the workers who keep the sewers clean and in good order. Now they’re working in tandem, but they’re not so much treasure-hunting or repairing the sewers as cleaning them out—searching for the Green so that you can destroy it! But I’m not going to understate the dange
r: there’s a lot of this stuff down there, and it’s deadly. If we let it get up into our homes and buildings…” I tailed it off, let it go at that. And finally:

  “Okay, that’s it. But always remember: safety first! Suits, masks, equipment—check ’em all out. And tomorrow morning let me see all your ugly faces looking right back at me, just like today.”

  They began to leave, some faster, more eager, than others. The eager ones would be new to this…they wouldn’t be quite so eager tomorrow. And I knew I wouldn’t be seeing all of their ugly faces.

  That thought was like an invocation.

  The man in the front row, the squad leader—the man with the crisped hair and gnarly hands, whose coughing had made me think his lungs were suffering from the blown-back heat of the flame-throwers—had lurched to his feet. He coughed yet again, gurgling at me like a drain, and stumbled forward. I saw that his eyes were starting out, his hands clawing at thin air.

  I jumped down off the podium, but too late to catch him as he fell over. He writhed on the floor, almost vibrating there, but only for a moment or two. And then he lay still.

  Some of his men had come forward, staring transfixed, babbling half-formed questions. Waving them back, I got down on my knees beside the fallen man. He wasn’t breathing. I put my ear to his chest. Nothing.

  Then something:

  A hooked green tendril with a bud at its tip uncurled from his right nostril! It elongated vertically to about six inches in length, swaying there. Then the bud turned in my direction where I lay frozen, with my head on the dead man’s chest. And the damned thing opened and hissed at me!

  Someone cried out, stepped forward with clippers, snipped the bud off so that it fell on the floor. As it writhed there, other men came forward and dragged me away. More tendrils were emerging from his ears, his mouth; there was nothing for it but to hose him down with sulphuric acid spray, reducing everything to slop…