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The apocalypse was a quiet affair, or perhaps it’d only been so in the aftermath. There had been many quiet periods on Earth in the wake of meteors and great floods and ice ages of long past. In that way it was always a quiet that stemmed from great loss.
This time was no different.
Though this time it started with the food.
There was no great immediate disaster, just the slow crawling evolution of fungi. There’d been stories about such things before the fall— viruses that made puppets of people, fungi that took over the cerebrum, hoards of zombies that wandered through the wastes of civilizations, and the people that survived despite it all.
Most of the time the people who got bit in those stories died: sometimes to the infection, sometimes to other humans. Sometimes they wouldn’t die at all: whether because they were immune or special in some other strange way.
But never in those stories was there a case like Charlie’s.
“You-you should be dead.”
Charlie didn’t feel very dead.
In fact, he felt more alive than he had in all his years. He studies his hands, flipping them this way and that in a strange wonderment. It was as if he was seeing himself properly for the first time, as if he was witnessing humanity properly for the first time.
He felt endless and old as the Earth. He felt more than himself, he was more than himself. He had seen countless civilizations rise and fall, had bore witness to the ceaseless cycle of life and death and life again. He who had been here before humanity— he who would be here long after.
He had been bitten. Something had changed. But it wasn’t the sort of change that anyone had been expecting.
He should be dead.
He is instead alive in billions of incomprehensible ways.
He is a mushroom. He is a mold. He is the zombie trudging through the alley outside. He is a spore drifting through dead air. He is the dying electrical pulses of the creature that’d bit him, the one that turned him— that should have turned him.
Tommy had shot it in the head eleven hours ago. Still, Charlie could feel every pulse of its not-life like the beating of his own heart, could feel the way it clung to existence— and would yet still cling until the very last of its body had become nourishment for Charlie— or, not Charlie, not quite, but still something inexplicably a part of him.
“Why aren’t you dead?” Tommy demands. Charlie can see the way his hands shake around the gun in his hands. The new part of him recognizes Tommy. He’s killed many of them before— the hive mind, the zombies.
Tommy has never killed a living human though. If he’d turned like they’d both expected him to, Charlie would have been the first. But Charlie had not turned.
Tommy should be relieved.
He is scared instead.
It has only been Tommy and Charlie for a long while now— though really it’s been but a blip in the lifespan of the everything.
Charlie wants to explain it to Tommy— the new part of him wants to show Tommy. But Charlie knows that showing him would not go as well for Tommy as it had for Charlie. They would not accept Tommy the same way they’d accepted Charlie.
“I don’t know,” he says instead of explaining. And he doesn’t, not really, even the everything doesn’t know. Charlie is different. Charlie is the first. Charlie, perhaps, is simply the slow crawling evolution of humanity. Though he does not feel so human anymore. He’s more than that. He’s part of the everything.
Charlie looks at his hands again, studies the crescent shape of the bite that’d started all of this. “Maybe I’m immune.” He isn’t. He knows this. But it gives Tommy something to cling to.
Charlie should’ve turned hours ago. He hadn’t.
Tommy should have killed him hours ago. He also hadn’t.
Tommy hadn’t wanted to shoot him before he turned. He was scared. Charlie had been too. But Charlie isn’t scared anymore.
Even in death, he knows he would live on within the everything.
Charlie wonders what Tommy sees when he looks at him now. Had something changed? Physically speaking? He pulls the grimy glasses from his face but he can’t see any better than he had before. He clean them, puts them back on. Had his eyes changed colors? Was he sprouting mushrooms from his hair? Was his every breath an exhale of spores?
Charlie thinks Tommy would’ve shot him by now if any of that were the case. Maybe. But Charlie would be able to sense those parts of himself if they did exist. He pushes himself up.
Tommy watches him warily, finger twitching against the trigger of the gun still in his hands. Charlie can tell he’s torn.
“It won’t be safe to stay here much longer.” They’d never meant to stay here long. It was supposed to be a quick in and out before Charlie had been bit. Now he can sense more of himself converging on them, slow— because there is never a need to rush these things— but converging nonetheless. The everything is curious about Charlie.
“But—” They were only a week out from the settlement they’d been heading to before all this— a safe haven outside the city. They’d be able to keep Tommy safe there— so long as Charlie didn’t stay with them.
It wouldn’t be safe for Tommy, not while the everything was still so interested in its strange, new connection. He can feel the pulse of the network echo through him like a song eternal. He wants to sing back to it— wants to join the chorus of the everything. He won’t until Tommy’s safe.
It’s easy enough to convince Tommy they need to move. He’s scared still. He wants to believe in the lie Charlie had told— wants to believe that Charlie’s immune to the bite if only so it meant he wouldn’t be left on his own.
Tommy studies the bite for himself later, once Charlie has successfully led them outside the city. The rest of the trek is the easiest they’ve had in weeks of slowly picking their way towards the rumored settlement— because Charlie can sense where the others are and that makes them very easy to avoid.
The bite on his hand does not look infected. It has begun to scab over in the time since he was bitten. It looks red and tender, still oozing whenever he moves it wrong, but not infected. It settles Tommy’s inner turmoil a little more.
“You really are immune,” Tommy breathes, carefully squeezing Charlie’s hand as if to assure himself that this is real. That he’s not dreaming. “Fuck, man,” Tommy curses, bowing his head to hide what Charlie imagines is tears. “Don’t fuckin’— don’t do that to me again.”
Charlie thinks he might’ve known what to say to that once. Might’ve met the tears with a joke or quip of some kind, but that was before the network.
It was everything, but it was not human. And it did not know how to be human, only how to puppet their empty shells.
But Charlie was a part of it now. And Charlie was a human. Still, he wondered if he was forgetting how to be human— wondered if he was losing himself within the all of it.
“I won’t do it again.”
Charlie doesn’t sleep the same way he did before the everything. Resting is still necessary, of course. But when he sleeps— he disappears from his body. He enters the network, becomes it.
He is the myxomycete, the amanita muscaria, the ophiocordyceps unilateralis. He is mycelium growing beneath the damp of the soil— he is laetiporus rooting himself to the surrounding trees.
Every morning he wakes, he is less human than the day before.
He is no longer himself— he is everything.
“I am a human,” Charlie murmurs in the dawn before Tommy rouses. “I am a human.” He hopes that saying it will make it more true.
He hopes that by saying it he will hold onto himself a little longer.
Tommy walks backwards down the trail, not quite watching where he’s going. “So we’re assuming you’re immune, right?” he says, “but like— I don’t know maybe the one that bit you was just fuckin’ weird, ya know?” He half stumbles over a crack in the road, but catches himself before he can fall. “I mean we just kinda jumped to you bein’ the weird one, but it could’ve been the other way around, ya know.”
Charlie likes listening to Tommy talk. Likes watching him do all of his usual human things. It reminds Charlie how to do them when he starts to feel too much like the everything— when his sense of self stretches too thin within the miles of mycelium.
Tommy turns, falling back to walk side by side with Charlie. He presses his hand to his chin. “Then again, maybe you ate shrooms as a child or something.” Tommy doesn’t so much as give him a chance to respond when he suddenly lights up with another idea. “Maybe something happened to you in the womb.” He laughs.
Charlie bares his teeth back in the approximation of a smile, and laughs to mimic him.
Tommy grins, shoving him playfully away. “You’re so weird, man,” Tommy cackles. Because for as long as they had known each other, Charlie always had been a little strange. This much more would not make a noticeable difference.
They draw closer to the settlement. Days pass into nights pass into days. Tommy is happier than he has been in all the time that Charlie has known him.
“I reckon there’ll be a lot of ladies there,” Tommy proclaims. He’s laid out on his sleeping bag across from Charlie, hands folded behind his head. The stars are beautiful. They’ve been even more so since the fall. “I bet you I’ll have so many wives within the week.” He yawns. “What time do you reckon we’ll get there?” He sounds half asleep. He yawns again.
“Late afternoon,” Charlie guesses. He is also on his back, hands folded over his stomach, watching the stars. The sight reminds him of the network, where every star is another living part of himself.
Tommy mumbles something incomprehensible. Charlie knows not to reply to this.
They hadn’t seen anymore zombies since the city, but Charlie can sense them out there, drifting like spores across the grasslands they’d been hiking through for the last half day. They are far enough that Charlie believes they won’t be a problem.
Tommy is sleeping now. So Charlie closes his eyes to sleep as well.
He is a mushroom, he is a mold. He is a spore being carried down the river. He is a hyphae laying root in rotting wood. He is a creature lumbering patient and slow through the grasses in search of himself— finding more than himself.
Charlie jolts back into his body all at once, scrambling for awareness, scrambling for the gun at his side because he knows what is to happen next. He fires without looking, without seeing. He is still untangling himself from the everything, still so thoroughly intertwined with the network that when the bullet connects with its target, Charlie can feel the wound as if it were his own.
The everything howls, its beautiful choir dissolving into dissonance.
He is everything, he is nothing, he has existed forever and yet no time at all. He is human. He is human. He is human. He has killed part of himself. He has killed part of the everything.
Tommy is scrambling out from under the corpse, yelling something Charlie can’t parse out past the dissonance.
“Fuck! Fuck! What the fuck?!”
He cannot feel Tommy in the network. He hasn’t been infected. He hasn’t been brought into the fold.
He is human. He is human.
Tommy gags, throws up into the grass by his bedroll.
Charlie wishes he could feel something other than the dying pulses of electricity from the part of him he’d killed. He’d cut off a limb, one of billions, but still, a limb.
He stands, unable to take his eyes off it. “It’s dead,” he tells Tommy. “It didn’t infect you. You are human,” he says, “You are human.”
He doesn’t know who he’s saying it to.
They leave just before dawn, Charlie guiding them away from the pieces of the network he can feel. Tommy doesn’t question it, just keeps his hand at his holster, eyes and ears peeled for danger.
There is none. Only the wide, swaying grasslands they’ve been wading through and the corpse of himself they’d left behind. Still, the night had unsettled him, had unsettled both of them.
Charlie thinks that perhaps they should talk about it, perhaps it would settle both of their nerves. But there, in the distance, a wall appears.
Tommy lights up at the sight, the terror from last night forgotten in an instant at the prospect of safety, of new friends, of a home forged from the husk of a shattered civilization.
Life and death and life again— just like with the everything.
Tommy runs towards it, backpack slamming into him with each step. Charlie goes after him, laughing when Tommy laughs, smiling when Tommy smiles, both slowing to a stop once they’re close enough to be heard. Tommy cups his hands together and yells with all the breath in his lungs. “HELLOOOOOO! WE’RE HERE TO CONTACT YOU ABOUT YOUR CAR’S EXTENDED WARRANTY!” Tommy laughs, bright and infectious.
Charlie finds he doesn’t have to force himself to laugh too.
A head peaks over the top of the wall from what looks like a walkway, a teenager close to Tommy’s age. “We don’t accept solicitors!” He bellows down at them.
Tommy bellows back: “WHAT ABOUT HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA?!” He’s grinning wider than Charlie’s ever seen him.
There’s a considering pause as the teen looks down at them. “I don’t know, you look awfully short from up here!”
Tommy gapes, offended. “FUCK YOU!” He flips them off with both hands.
There’s another short pause, as the teenager disappears for a moment before coming back to announce: “They’re opening the gate!” He calls. “Hope your short ass legs can get there in time!”
Tommy looks as insulted as he does excited. Charlie thinks he’s perhaps already made his first friend. That’s a very good thing. Tommy will need friends here.
Tommy tugs at his arm with a grin, not looking back. “Let’s go!”
“Tommy.” He doesn’t budge when the teen tries pulling him along.
Tommy looks back at him then, excitement waning into confusion at the seriousness of his voice. “What’s wrong?” A pause, “Hey, me and that other guy were just messin’ around, we weren’t—” His blue scan Charlie with a growing sense of unease. “What is it?”
“I’m not going with you.” It’s the last thing Charlie thinks he ever wanted to say to Tommy. Especially here. Especially after last night.
For the last year and a half they’d only had each other for company, for protection. It was them against the world, and the zombies, and the people that were sometimes worse than the zombies.
But the everything is angry still, the melody they sing: dissonant and haunting. It was surely going to come for Charlie. His only chance was to avoid the network long enough for it to forget what he’d done within the vastness of the everything else.
Until then, however, Tommy would only ever be in danger with him. And wasn’t that the worst part of it all?
Tommy’s mouth opens, closes. Charlie waits for him to find his voice again. “What the fuck do you mean, you’re not going? We-we came all this way and you’re just going to— to leave?”
‘To leave me?’ seems to be the silent question there. Even with his slipping humanity, Charlie can deduce that much.
“If—” Tommy cuts himself off, sounding choked, “If this is about last night I swear to you it-it won’t happen again man. I-I promise I’m not a liability or anything like that and—”
Charlie cuts him off. “I was bit.” It isn’t what he wants to say. He wants to explain everything properly, wants to tell Tommy about the world as he sees it now, about the everything, about the network. About what exactly it was he’d done in order to protect Tommy last night—
Instead he flashes the still healing bite on his hand. “I’m immune, but they don’t know that.”
“We could—” Tommy swallows, eyes flickering frantically over him, “We could explain—”
Charlie smiles, ruffles Tommy’s hair in the familiar way he remembers doing before the everything. “I’ll come back once the wound’s healed—” Charlie reassures him, “Tell them a feral blond kid bit me,” he teases in an old, familiar way.
Tommy’s bottom lips wavers. He pokes Charlie in the chest. “You better fucking swear it to me. Promise you’ll come back,” He demands. He looks angry, upset. Charlie wishes he could hear what Tommy was thinking— wishes he could understand the silent plea in the boy’s eyes in the same way he can feel the mycelium beginning to creep beneath the soles of his shoes— reaching out to him, curious and angry.
That want in itself was dangerous.
“Promise,” Tommy snaps.
“I will come back,” Charlie tells him.
He hopes it isn’t a lie.
“I promise.”