Speaker 1: I shot the buck just after dusk, beneath the stand
of ash trees mottled with rot. The sound of the
rifle cracked through the quiet in that empty stretch of forest,
and for a second everything stilled. Then the insects resumed.
It was in sport, It never was. The thing limped
when it moved back, Legs swollen at the knee, left antless,
split and jagged at the base, eyes already clouding. From
fifty feet away, I could smell the sickness. I've worked
enough control jobs to know the signs of chronic wasting
disease see w D for short. Before the field tests
confirmed it. Wasting is slow. It hollows them out from
the inside, leaves them standing in creeks with their mouths open,
drinking nothing. The state's mandate was clear. Any deer with
visible symptoms was to be put down and reported. I
approached with gloves on tug the usual post mortem photos
and recorded the GPS coordinates, marked the tag number AH
DASH seven seven sixty nine, clipped beneath the skin fold
near the right shoulder, standing insert deep enough that scavengers
wouldn't reach it easily. The retrieval team was scheduled to
arrive by morning to haul the body in for testing
and disposal. I stayed long enough to watch the flies settle.
Then I hiked back through the thinning trees and drove
to the ranger's lot, where I kept my temporary log book.
Entry made time, recorded, another task finished. The next morning,
I got a call. Nothing there, the guy said, through
the crackling line. Some bone scatattered, no hide, no carcass.
I told him. I bagged it clean, tagged it myself,
gave the coordinates again. Most have been coyotes or a bear.
You know how quick they are this time of year.
I also knew what was normal and what wasn't. Predators
don't clean up after themselves. There was no fur left,
no drag marks, no prints in the soil around the site.
They logged it as unrecovered. Told me not to worry.
These things happen. Still, I wrote a secondary entry in
my personal field notes, separate from the agency forms mail
estimate five years left ant LA fracture swollen rear joined
tracking tag ardas seven seven sixty nine confirmed, no retrieval,
carcass missing. It wasn't the first time something went off
script out here, but this one wouldn't leave me. Something
about the way it looked just before I pulled the trigger.
Not startled, not wide eyed, just still. Later that evening,
while transferring photos for filing, I noticed the last one
in the series, a frame taken just before I shouldered
the rifle. The bugs standing there, angled toward me, head tilted.
It almost looked like it was waiting. I wasn't even
thinking about it when it showed up again. It was
nearly midnight when I sat down with a trail camp footage.
We rotate through drives every few days, set up motion
triggered camps across the perimeter to catch anything sick or
staggering through the zone after hours. The forrest goes dead
quiet at night, but that's when the worst ones move.
The late stay each wonderers the ones the diseases already
hollowed out. That was my part of the job. Tracked
sig deer and called the population to reduce the spread.
We had an on site lap working on possible treatments
at the same time. I clicked through without much focus,
just background noise. While I compiled sample logs. One camera
had flagged motion across the ravine three nights prior. The
footage was grainy, black and white, timestamped just after one
a m. A deer across from right to left, angling
downhill through a dried creek bed limber but slow. I
paused on the third frame. Something about the shape caught me.
I zoomed in, rear legs slightly raised, the joint bulged
front left antler crooked backward at the base, not broken off,
but walked like the cor had splint. I already knew
what I was looking at before the shape got closer
to the camera. There was a faint glint behind the shoulder.
One of our tracking tags, iridescent under infrared, positioned exactly
where I had inserted our dash seven seven sixty nine.
It was the same buck the one I shot, no mistake,
same wound, same tag, same stance. I leaned forward, rewound
and let it play again. But this time I noticed
something else. The gate was wrung. The rear leg didn't
drag in the twitchy spasmodic way late stage CWD sofferers
usually moved. It swung smooth, unbroken, too clean. There was
no tension in the neck either. The head stayed level
even as it walked uneven terrain, as if something else
was moving the limbs, but not from within. No bobbing,
no tension through the spine. It was as if the
body was being pulled forward in segments, carried, not powered.
I went cold. I checked the GPS location embedded in
the file. It was within a quarter mile of the
same stand of ash where I'd shot it days ago.
It has the same elevation and the same forest density.
I crossed reference the tree formations behind the figure, thin
lines of leafless branches, a birch with a split trunk,
and matched them to my phone photos from the calling sight.
Too close, too precise. There's a coincidence, and then there's this,
which meant either the shot had missed somehow or something
else was walking around with a dear skin. I didn't
sleep much that night. I lay in my cot with
my laptop screen still open, paused on the frame of
that buck, standing still in the ravine, head, low limbs,
straight eyes, barely catching the light. It was facing the camera.
The footage kept coming. Each morning, brought a new flagged clip.
Each time, the same buck, same shattered antler, and the
same crooked back leg, always alone, always after midnight, always
brushing at the edge of the camera's infrared beam, as
if it knew just how much it could show without
being caught full on. At first I thought I was
looking for patterns out of paranoia, but by the third
night I started marking the appearances on a field map.
The dots were scattered at first, too scattered to mean much,
But on the fifth entry I saw it. It was
moving in a slow arc, not a wondering loop, not
lost or disoriented pattern. There was structure to it. The
deer was following a wide perimeter path around the zone.
Not random, not frantic, steady, predictable, as if it were
circling something or someone. I checked the camera's placement again,
laid out the route, and drew the circle. It wasn't perfect,
but it was closing. In the last three appearances had
all been a little tighter. I followed the progression and
placed a pushpin at the rough center. It was us
the base camp trailer, which meant either this thing was
tracking me or retracing the path of its own death,
maybe both. I packed a small kit and headed out
at first light, telling the team I was following a
trail report that was an unusual I'd done solo follow
ups before, and no one questioned it. I hiked about
forty minutes to reach the spot where i'd put the
buck down. The ash trees were still there, same slope,
same wingcarved patch of dead earth with the undergrowth had
never fully returned after the fires a few years back.
But there was no blood, no drag marks, not even
a disturbed pile of leaves. What I found instead was
a shallow depression in the dirt, ringed with brush and sticks.
Not a scrape, not a bedding spot. Something had arranged
the space intentionally. In the center a crude pile of
gathered debris, small bones, some snapped bird feathers, the twisted
remains of something that looked like a jaw. It was
almost organized. It had a rough symmetry, though not in
a way a deer should be capable of. They don't build,
they don't nest, they don't collect, which meant it was
acting on instinct. Something in it, whatever was walking that
body was aware, deliberate, maybe even learning. I took photos,
sent them to my field laptop, and marked the area
for follow up. But I didn't send the images to
the department, not yet. I wasn't ready to explain why
I was chasing a deer that should have been rotting
under six inches of dirt. When I packed up and
turned to leave, I swore I heard something shift behind
the tree line. Not the crash of a startled animal,
just the slow, deliberate shift of weight, as if something
waited until I looked away. I didn't turn around. I
walked back to camp with the sense that whatever this
thing was, it had built something, and it was only
the beginning. It was nearly three a m. When something
hit the cabin wall. Not a scratch or scrape, a thud,
heavy and direct. No follow up, no scurry of retreating hoofs,
just one single deliberate impact. The sound jolted me upright.
I stayed frozen for a moment, ear straining. Then another
noise came, much softer, this time a slight creak of
the pine frame settling or something leaning into it. I
grabbed the laptop and flipped through the most recent footage.
The cabin camp facing the entry showed nothing, just the
unmoving trail of crusted grass and the steel bare box.
I clicked over to the rear feed, one I'd set
up mostly to monitor raccoon activity. That's where I saw it.
Not close up, not detailed, but enough. The deer stood
just within the infrared glow, upright, not on all fours, standing.
Its rear legs were locked to the joints, thin but rigid.
The rest of the body sacked forward, front, limbs dangling
like dead weight. Its chest was bowed, the rib cage compressed.
The head hung far too forward before slowly lifting. Stiff
and unsure. It took one step forward, then another. Every
movement was strained, trembling with the effort to balance. It
moved like a puppet strung by hands that had never
seen a living thing. But it kept its head upright.
Even in the poor resolution, I could see it tracking
the lens. Its face had changed. The snout was partly
caved in, no longer a clean line of bone and fur.
Skin slumped over one side, sagging down past the jaw.
It looked heavier than before, swollen or softened. No glint
of eyes, just the hollows where they used to sit.
It didn't graze, didn't sniff, just stood there watching. This
wasn't a scavenger wearing a carcass. It was an instinct.
It was tracking something me. I closed the laptop and
went to the filing crate under the bunk. I dug
out the original kill log, the handwritten one, but not
the digital report I filed later. It had blood on
the corner from the tagging knife, but everything else was clean. Coordinates, time,
tag code, a quick field sketch, and then I saw
it scrawled in the side margin, a faint pencil, nearly
scrubbed away burn after disposal. I hadn't noticed it. The
retrieval crew had never shown there was an instruction left
by the lad team. I had missed, which meant whatever
that thing was, whatever was walking around in the hollowed
out body of that deer, I had left it there.
I had given it time. I grabbed the heavy lock
from the gear chest and bolted the front door, pushed
the chair under the handle out of some new tiless instinct.
He wouldn't stop anything with real weight behind it, but
it made me feel like I was doing something outside.
The wind had dropped, no forest movement, no insects ticking
against the window glass. It felt like the woods had
emptied out, like the normal rules of wilderness had paused.
I didn't sleep. I sat in the corner with the
camera feed open, staring at the second angle, waiting for
it to return. But it never did. Morning light led
through the close curtains. The print out still sat on
the counter, half crumpled burn after disposal. I hadn't shown
it to anyone, who would I tell. I just kept
refreshing the trail camp and waiting for another ping. Nothing yet.
My head was starting to hurt, probably from the stress.
My sinnesses felt swollen and pressure was mounting. Still, I
needed to see it again, not through a screen. I
needed something to confirm it was just the deer, some
rational explanation, something my brain could pin down. I hiked
back to the clearing in the late afternoon with the
same gear and the same boots. The air felt heavier
out there, still but watchful. I stepped carefully, scanning the
brush around the old kill site. No body, of course,
that was gone the first time, but something else had
been left behind. Near a thicket, I found a patch
of fur snagged along a thorn bush, dark coarse, unmistakable.
A few feet beyond that, I spotted a smear of
something dark on the flat side of a spilled rock.
Looked dry and waxy, not rot exactly, almost preserved I
pulled the sample with tweezers, wrapped it in foil, and
packed it for the walk. Back in my cabin, I
set up my old field scope. It was an high end,
barely better than a biology student's training model, but it
could still read enough at low magnification. I sliced the
sliver from the waxy tissue and placed it on a
slide with a sailine drop. The second I looked through
the lens, I felt the back of my neck go cold.
There were seams, not cuts, not scars, seam lines, tiny
symmetrical striations crossing in a grid pattern just below the surface.
The cells weren't dried out either. They were alive. More
than alive, they were organized, pulsing faintly. Something was knitting
them together, as if the tissue had been rebuilt rather
than preserved, which meant it hadn't died the way I thought,
or if it had, it hadn't stayed that way. No
dear tissue behaves like that, especially not after sitting exposed
to weather or scavengers for days. It should have been
dust by now. I set up a quick test with
what I had, some ammonia base cleaner and a few
protein indicators crude, sure, but good enough for basic reactivity.
I placed another tissue sliver in a shallow dish, added
the cleaning agent, and watched. The reaction was instant, violent bubbling,
a hiss of vapor, and a reek like scorched air
and formaldehyde. The tissue turn black, curling in on itself
like it had nerves. The smell was chemical, but sharp
enough to sting behind my eyes. I rinsed the dish
and flushed the sample. My hands were shaking, but I
couldn't stop thinking. I couldn't stop asking myself what regenerative
mechanism could survive that reaction? What kind of biology could
fake life that cleanly? I searched for anything similar, fungal colonies,
synthetic graphs, parasitic worms that repurpose host tissue, but nothing matched.
By nightfall, I was just staring at the wall, mind blank.
The camera feed pinged. I tapped on the app the
clearing cam had triggered. There it was again. The deer
stood at the tree line, just standing. But something was different.
This time. I had to squint to see it, but
I couldn't unsee it. Once I noticed it. The left
foreleg was gone, not chewed or torn, just missing. The
skin along the shoulder was smooth, pale under the moonlight,
stretched tight like clay. But the thing didn't limp. It
stood evenly, shifting its weight like the limb had never
been there at all. I assumed. In further, as much
as the grainy frame would allow, the deer turned toward
the camera. I froze. The neck didn't turn smoothly. It
cracked sideways, fast and unnatural, the rest of the body
remaining still a snap in the joint or somewhere deeper.
But it didn't recoil, didn't blink. It just stared directly
at the lens, and for a moment I had the
horrible impression it saw me, not the camera me. Then
it walked off screen, not limping, not struggling, just walking purposefully.
I shut the app and sat there until sunrise. No
new alerts came in that night. I stopped sleeping for
more than an hour at a time. The headaches were worse, now,
full pressure behind the eyes, like something swelling beneath my skull.
My nose wouldn't stop bleeding that morning. It was just
a thin trickle that ran whenever I tilted forward. I
couldn't hold food, couldn't hold a thought. I told work
I was sick. I didn't go in. I didn't tell
them why. I just wanted to be alone to figure
it out, to run the test again. I kept telling
myself this was chronic wasting disease. I had studied it,
after all, that's why we were here. But this didn't
match the spread pattern, no drooping ears, no emaciation, and
the regeneration didn't make sense. The movement, the fact that
it stood. I pulled up the trail camarchive, a new
ping two nights ago, camera twelve, the farthest one facing
the southern edge where the old logging road ends. At
first I thought it was a poacher, human shape movement,
slow head tilted too far down, but the figure was shirtless,
stumbling with hands twitching at his side, knee stiff. Then
he turned slightly toward the lens and I froze. I
recognized him, not the face, the posture, the build, the
way one shoulder hunts slightly from an old break. It
was Nathan, one of the seasonal hires who helped with
retrieval and sight clean up. He hadn't shown up the
base in over a week. New angle camera thirteen, same
clearing thirty seconds long. The deer came through first from
the left, limping, dragging one hind leg. Then it stopped,
just stood there. Seconds later, the man entered from the
opposite side, crawling hands and feet in the dirt. He
stopped a few feet from the deer. Neither reacted. There
was no fear, no sound. They simply coexisted, standing and
swaying in the same poisoned wind. That was the last clip.
No new alerts came after that. I closed the app.
I sat there for hours, waiting for another pin. The
room was still, but I couldn't hear birds anymore, no
buzz of summer insects outside the cabin. Even the trees
looked off. The underbrush is too low, too quiet. I
checked my nose, another streak of blood on the back
of my hand. I hadn't even felt it. I felt woozy,
so I lay down and passed out. The final trout
cam clip was still frozen on screen. When I woke
I shut the laptop. My nose had started bleeding again,
slow and steady. Using a warm smear down past my
upper lip, I wiped it with a sleeve of my hoodie,
staring at the wall for a moment as my breath
came in shallow polls. The air felt too heavy, or
maybe my lungs were slowing down. I tried calling Nathan,
the assistant I thought I had seen in the footage.
A call rang twice, then cut the voicemail. The backup
tablets still had access to the DNR field office network.
I logged in and pulled the remote track of logs.
No check ins for thirty six hours, not from the
monitoring team, field counters or even the auto flagged deer cams.
Nothing hyping the emergency contacts. All three admin names came
up offline. In the bathroom mirror, I didn't look right.
The skin under my eyes was drawn and waxy. My
face pale in a way that life couldn't explain. A
red burst had crept into the white of my left eye.
Capillaries bloomed outward like roots. When I pressed a knuckle
to my cheekbone, the pressure dulled slowly, without edge. I
didn't need a blood panel to confirm it. Whatever was
in the deer, whatever it kept it moving, was in
me now too, And if I was infected, it meant
I was on a timer. I didn't bother calling the
office again. I didn't report symptoms. There wasn't anyone left
to explain it to. If I waited for help, I'd
be a walking corpse before anyone arrived. I packed fast
cold packs, the preserved sample trail notes, ammonia strips, and
field accelerants, every drive that had footage, a USB with
basic microscope imaging software, enough canned food to last a
few days if I needed them. The wind outside had
gone still. The cabin didn't creak. No birds called, no insects,
just the low hum of trees remembering their weight. The
main lab was seventy miles north d n R, affiliated
but independent. It had a backup generator, cold storage, and
a sterilization hood. If I could get there before my
symptoms worsened, maybe I could finish what I started, trace
the spread, burn out whatever I had learned to wear skin.
I locked the cabin door behind me one last glance
at the tree line. Nothing moved, but the silence felt aware.
I got in the truck, started the engine and drove
without checking the rear view. If I didn't make it
in time, no one would. I reached the lamb just
past dusk. The trees pressed in tight along the road,
branches clawing at the truck as I rolled up the
gravel path. No signs of field biologists or late shifts,
just the wind and the low hum of the backup generator,
struggling to keep rhythm. The front doors were unlocked. Inside,
the overhead fluorescence flickered behind stained plastic covers. A couple
bulbs buzzed in their sockets, casting long, uneven shadows across
the tiled floor. The air smelled faintly of bleach and
something else, something deeper, damp, iron, sweet. No voices greeted me,
No motion, just the slow, steady beap of a security
door stuck half a jar. In the back hallway, the
reception desk was abandoned, a mug of coffee. They still
steamed faintly. The room stained with a half finished sip.
A pair of reading glasses sat beside it, folded neatly,
as if someone meant to return. They hadn't. I moved
deeper into the facility. The surveillance room was unlocked, which
wasn't protocol. The wall of monitors stuttered with looping footage
from around the building. Front gate, access hall generator room
exterior trails. One feed caught my attention. A shape crouched
in the tree lined behind the lab, not human, broad shouldered, hunched, unmoving.
Another monitor showed a figure walking shirtless down a staff hallway,
bare feet, pale skin. He was dragging something behind him,
a metal pool clattering against the tile. There wasn't a
patient wing in this building, no beds, no IV stands,
but I knew what I saw. I killed the feeds,
no need to watch more than I had to. The
freezer lab was worse. The door stood open a few inches,
cold air spilling out inside. The stainless steel racks were
half empty. Tray overturned vials cracked across the floor in
a fine glitter of broken glass and thawed residue. The
walls glistened with condensation. Fingerprints smeared into the frost. I
found a catalog of samples similar to the ones I
collected myself. Had they been working on this the whole time?
If so, to what end? I checked the surrounding shells
for any signs of tampering. One broken violet spilled down
the side of the unit. The trails stopped at the floor,
but didn't pull instead it split streaks, drawn outward by
something moving low and slow. That's when I saw the prince,
not boot treads, hoof prints, but not natural ones. Each
was split, yes, but too long, too narrow. The pressure
pattern was wrung, centered toward the toe, as if whatever
made them had been balancing, creeping. They led away from
the freezer, across the lab floor, right to the wall.
Vent I stepped closer, the cover was off, bent to
the corners. Inside the docked was streaked dark. A few
long strands of fur clung to the inner rim, not
dear fur, something coarser, almost wirelike something had already been
here before me, or someone had led it in. I
stood a moment listening somewhere in the back wing. Something
metal scraped across tile, then nothing. I closed the freezer
and sealed the remaining samples in my personal cold case.
My hands were shaking as I locked the lab door
behind me, and now I wasn't sure who or what
had ever been running this place. By morning, my hands
were shaking. It started small, just the fingers, but I
couldn't get a cap off a vial without fumbling. My
vision kept slipping out of focus, not constantly, just in
rhythmic flickers in the mirror above the lab sink. I
watched my pupils expand and shrink, back and forth, like
they couldn't decide whether they were supposed to do. My
gums had started to wake. I tore a sheet from
the back of an abandoned chart and pinned it to
my jacket. If I loose speech, burn the body, do
not touch the skin. Then I made for the biology wing.
Only the emergency lights were working in this part of
the lab, casting dim, jittering gold across the tiles. The
carts were overturned, papers had been scattered, trampled, or soaked
through from a broken pipe in the ceiling. Breath fogged
in the air. It was cold. I pulled the log
book from the wreckage of a desk. Most of the
pages were useless notes about wildlife counts, nutrition breakdowns, half
finished hypotheses. I flipped to the back. There, wedged between
two damp pages was a loose sheet of paper with
sharp handwriting. Secondary hosts showed accelerated symptoms after exposure to
decomposing infected tissue, delayed infection, corald with chemical disruption, ammonia
and alcohol treatments. I stopped. My symptoms started after handling
the sample, but I had stumbled and using ammonia while
doing rudimentary tests. Whatever concoction I had accidentally breathed in
hadn't cured me, but it delayed what had happened to
the seasonal higher I saw skulking with the deer. It
bought me time a buffer. The others they worked under
protocol sterile precise direct exposure. I followed the note and
slipped it into my jacket. There wasn't a cure, but
at least I now understood why I was still walking,
and this inspired my makeshift idea. I found one last
working autoclave near the end of the wing. It rumbled
to life when I keyed in the over. I scraped
together everything I could, what remained of the preserved tissue,
anything I touched, old gloves, even the container, and loaded
it all into the chamber. The inside was coated with
black residue, not mold, something else. Maybe someone had already
tried this. I set the burn, locked the hatch, and
stepped away before the heating cycle could even start. My
legs were slower now, not numb, just heavy. Every step
felt delayed, like the signals were moving through sludge. I
touched the glass in the hallway. I couldn't feel it.
I couldn't feel the chill against my fingers. I left
through the back. The woods were still gray, The clouds
hung low over the canopy, and somewhere behind me pissed
with steam. I didn't know if the sterilization would do anything,
didn't know if it was too late. But I had
one more thing to do. I packed everything I needed
and worked on the move, not a cure, just a
final step, and started walking where it all began. I
didn't follow the trail cameroots this time. The clearing where
I shut the book with a carcasse vanished where I
should have burned it. I carried everything with me, my pack,
an improvised cocktail cleaning ammonia and accelerants. I cobbled together
materials for a makeshift device, powdered rust scraped from the
back of hinges of old equipment, and aluminium shavings pulled
from trail signs. It wasn't a perfect There might mix,
but it would ignite enough to burn tissue, enough to
destroy whatever was rewriting it. The walk was longer than
I remembered, or maybe I was slower. My joints ate,
my fingers tingled. The fever behind my eyes pulsed in waves,
clouding the corners of my vision. But I was still
thinking clearly. I could still make decisions. That meant I
still had time. I used this time to make improvised devices,
crude but functional. The trees changed before the path did.
At first I thought it was just fog settling through
the branches, but the bark had a sheen, not wet waxed.
A fine spread of pale threads ran between the trunks,
and when I brushed past one, it stuck to my jacket.
I reached the clearing, it wasn't a nest anymore. It
had blown, and the glade was a full sprawl of
organic spires, sinew and fungal bloom. Long venous threads ran
between trees and into the undergrowth. The dirt looked bruised.
There were thick nodules the size of fists half buried
in the soil, throbbing fungal stalks that had grown into warped,
ribbed structures, almost like cages. But I couldn't tell if
they were meant to keep something in or out. The
smell was worse than any rot i'd encountered, a mix
of iron fermentation and something vaguely sweet, like ripe fruit
gun sour. The wildlife was gone, no birds, no insects.
But around the perimeter the ground was littered with corpses, rodents,
a raccoon, something small and canine, maybe a fox. Some
of them were twitching, breathing, spasming, as if their bodies
hadn't caught up with the fact that they were already dead.
One of them, a rabbit, jerked his head upright, jaw
twitching open. A sound came out, not a breath, a click,
maybe an attempted speech. I didn't stay close enough to listen.
This was what it had been doing, not hunting, cultivating.
It was rewriting the instructions that told muslin bone how
to be. In the center of the glade was a
mound flesh, hair, antler, segments of deer skull fused with
what looked like vertebrae, human ribs, tangled legs, some still
clothed in remnants of field pants. A name patch peeked out,
half fused into the tissue. I didn't go closer to
read it. I already knew. I dropped to my knees,
opened my pack, began assembling the ammonia. The heat was
rising in me, now internal pressing. I was sweating hard.
My tongue was thick in my mouth. The ammonia stung
my nose, but I needed it. I poured carefully, trying
to keep my hands steady. Just a few minutes, just
one successful ignition. I heard the footsteps before I saw them,
not hoofs, not claws, feet. I turned slowly. A fir
might charge. Half assembled in my lap. Three figures stepped
out from behind the edge of the nest. People, or
what it used to be my field team. Harris from
my old labrotation, Jenna, the intern who logged samples, and
one of the rangers I used to check in with
on morning rounds. Their skin looked spongy, water logged, and
blotched with gray patches that pulse beneath the surface. Their
veins ran black and branched across their arms and neck.
All three of them stared at me through clouded white eyes.
Lips parted in slow, shallow breaths that didn't sound like
breathing at all. They weren't charging. They didn't groan or howl.
They just stepped forward, their arms stiff, their heads tilting,
and their mouths slack, like they were still trying to
remember how movement worked to them. I just looked like
another infected returning to the hive. I took a shaky breath,
raised a hand without meaning to. I'm sorry, I said.
For a second, something flickered behind Harris's eyes, a twitch
in the cheek. His jaw shifted. I saw his lips
try to form a word, but all that came out
was a wet rasp, a throat too soft to carry sound.
There was still sympathy, a glimmer of humanity that was
rapidly fading. Then came the deer. They had no such feelings.
They emerged slowly, deliberately and confident from the trees behind
the team. The upright one leaned forward with a step,
spine trembling with effort, but its limbs moved cleanly. Now
behind it crawled another shoulder twisted, dragging its weight along
the patch of exposed roots. The last one moved worst
of all. It dragged a fuse limb that wasn't fully deer,
part bone, part human muscle strung together with the wrong tension.
They made no noise. Their heads cocked with a mechanical curiosity.
All eyes locked on me, and they saw what I
was doing. Ahlf puffed out from their nostrils as they
ready to charge hoofs bracing to sprint. My hands shook
as I reached for the striker. The first scrape gave nothing,
The second sparked on a third it caught. I lit
the smallest flask of ammonia and hurled it at the
edge of the nest. It hissed on contact. The fungal
web sizzled, the black, veiny threads pulling back from the
chemical burn like they were alive. That did it. The
reanimated abominations stumbled forward, not toward me, but toward the
patch I'd hit. Twitching, compelled, pain, instinct rage, I couldn't tell,
but it told me something important. They had a choice.
They didn't lunge at me, not yet. They went for
the fire. I didn't give them time to rethink it.
I lit the thermite and hurled it toward the center
of the nest. The flash was instant and vicious. A
column of heat tore through the fungal bed, charring it
in a heartbeat. A few deer were caught in the process.
The smell made my vision swim, something between spoiled meat
and plastic insulation. Instinct kicked in, and my old crew
sprang into action, rushing to save their colony. The mound
in the center shrieked, not with sound, but with pressure.
A thick static humb filled the air. My eyes pulsed,
my ears rang. Harris screamed, not a human sound, just
a rupture of voice. He collapsed midstep. Jenna followed, limbs
still jerking on the ground like fish on a dark
The upright deear tried to flee, but collapsed as soon
as their connection severed. I lit the final charge, the
biggest one, and rolled it into the heart of the nest.
It ignited on contact. The second explosion was worse than
the first. Trees caught, Flames raised up the stalks. The
sinew network snapped and curled in on itself. A line
of fungus tried to retreat down the roots, but the
fire chased it. But most importantly, all the bodies caught flame,
destroying any remnants of this horror. I stumbled back, coughing
into my sleeve. My vision smeared. One eye darkened, hi white,
did it, but my hand came back red blood. The
glade thrashed like a body in seizure. Then it went still.
I stood there until the flames reached the ridge, until
the entire bloom turned black and brittle, until the heat
burned the smell away. Only then did I turn and walk, burned, sick,
bleeding from both eyes, but lighter than I'd felt in weeks,
because I'd done something real, because I'd ended it, or
at least made sure it wouldn't spread any farther. And
if I was wrong, if something crawled out later, I
wouldn't be here to see it. I sat slumped in
the truck, throat raw, eyes blurred, my fingers barely were.
They kept slipping on the recorder's button before I finally
managed to press it down. Sample sterilized, the sauce, nest burned.
Secondary host transmission confirmed my voice didn't sound like mine
any more. I waited for a long moment, letting the
silence settle, before speaking again. My name is Elias ward Field.
I D seven two six o one dashbe contracted wild
life biologist, stayed assigned. I acted alone. I have destroyed
all known infated samples. The growth site has been neutralized.
There are no survivors. I paused, listened, nothing but the
low wind through the ridge. No movement in the trees,
no footsteps in the brush. If anyone finds this log,
do not come looking for survivors. There is nothing left
worth recovering. I clicked the recorder off and let it
drop into my lap. My head rested against the window.
The cold glass felt steady, almost grounding. The woods outside
were still chocked in ash and fog. I took the
cassette and sealed it in a weather proof specimen case,
marked it clearly, left it outside near the truck, but
not too close. If any one did find this place,
they'd find the truth first. Then I sat back inside
and looked at the keys of my palm. I lied
I hadn't destroyed all traces. There was still one left me,
but that we'd be dealt with shortly. The fermite was rigged,
crude but functional, set beneath the seat, tied to the ignition.
I checked the fuse three times earlier before my vision went.
When the key turned, the reaction would start heat metal flame,
nothing left to spread. I took a final breath, no
last words, no dramatic farewell. I just turned the key