“What’s going on?” Pel rose to her feet. Her dark stockings were taut against her legs. “Is something wrong?” Her yellow skirt pooled on the shag carpeting.

“I’m coming,” Rayph said. “I’m coming!”

More footsteps came thumping from around the corner of the hallway—socks squeaking on the hardwood floor. Jules skittered up to the couch and grabbed the remote where it lay as her brother came out into the living room.

Jules entered the numbers for CBN. “We’ve gotta see this!”

Henrichy’s newscaster desk set-up was replaced by a different-looking set-up as the channel changed.

Rayph rubbed his eyes. “Have to see what?”

“I heard about it on Socialife,” Jules explained.

As had I.

“DAISHU’s censors are probably gonna cut it off the air any moment now,” she added.

A headline ran along the bottom of the screen; ghastly white text against a blood-red background.

CBN Exclusive: Terrifying Footage.

The words “The Ilzee Rambone Show” flashed across the screen, but instead of passing to the feed from the console at the journalist’s home office, or to some pre-recorded broadcast, the next thing Pel, Jules, and Rayph saw was live footage of Ilzee herself at her desk. The word “LIVE” flashed in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.

“Aren’t these shows always live?” Rayph asked.

“I guess the producers felt it was worth mentioning.”

Pel didn’t need to ask why; it was obvious enough.

The world was falling apart.

Ilzee Rambone wasn’t herself. Her face was pale; her short-cut hair was completely disheveled. Her eyes darted about restlessly. The quality of the audio and video feed was mediocre, at best. A persistent static gnawed at the background as the camera quivered.

She stared at the camera dead-on.

“To anyone out there, if you haven’t seen it already… the footage we’re about to show was recorded no more than an hour ago. I don’t know how long it will be before DAISHU quashes it, but I’m willing to bet that the Green Death caught them off guard just as badly as everyone else.” Ilzee nodded. “Please, wherever you are, if you can see and hear this, record it! Record it, share it. Spread the word. The people deserve to know!”

Clenching her teeth, the journalist slapped her desk.

Jules pressed the Record button.

“I…” Ilzee’s voice trailed off. She brought her trembling fingers to her mouth as she stared off into the distance.

Off-screen, a voice called out. “Zee?”

Ilzee turned to the side and waved her hand. “Just roll it. Roll the tape.” She nodded. “And barricade the doors!”

The video began to play.

The footage showed a hallway inside an apartment complex, though, with none of the interior lights working, it was so dark and dreary that it might as well have been an abandoned subway tunnel. The only source of light came from bulbs of green and yellow whose pale glow cast vague shadows on the walls. A green tint glinted in the air. The floor of the hallway was littered with piles of indistinct objects, perhaps furniture, clothes, and miscellaneous containers. Or maybe something else, entirely.

It must have stunk all the way to Paradise.

Though the broadcasters had lowered the sound on the footage, Pel, Jules, and Rayph could still hear the panic in the voices of the young people who’d had made the recording, whispering in shock. The footage shook in their hands.

And then, someone turned on the lights.

Jules and Pel gasped; Rayph yelped. My wife stumbled onto the sofa behind her as she tottered back.

The hall was a ruin of corpses. They lay slumped against the wall, or splayed out on the floor—on the shag carpeting dusted by green spores.

Five, six, seven…—no one wanted to count the corpses.

Their flesh was like wet paper left out to foul. Dark masses of what could only be called fungus split open their limbs, heads, and chests, spilling out through cracks the infection’s ulcers had eaten into their skin and bones. The masses rose up in crowns and bulbs—fungal inflorescences.

The person holding the camera screamed as one of the crowns popped and sprayed out green, spreading spores.

Rayph leapt up onto the sofa and yanked hold of his mother’s hand. Jules stared at it, trying to be brave. She grit her teeth and clenched her hands into fists, fighting the primal urge within her to jump up and yell “Turn off the lights! Turn off the lights!”

Her mother felt it, too.

“Turn off the lights!” Rayph yelled. “Run!”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

But, of course, it was too late for them.

Somewhere in the distance—several floors down—there was a thud, then a crash. It was barely audible, muffled by the suite’s insulation, and the apartment building’s steel and concrete tissue.

For a moment, the line between television and reality disappeared.

Pel’s heart leapt as the people filming the footage screamed more.

And then… something responded. It made a sound unlike anything anyone had ever heard before.

It was polyphony. Multiple lines of sound interwove in a stream of harmonies as otherworldly as the green death itself. It was deep strings murmuring in dark hymnody; it was woodwinds high and low, warbling, warm waxy tones. Reverb crackled and buzzed. The sound continued incessantly, repeating the same harmonies and fragments again and again, as if to make a demand.

Or, perhaps, in a desperate plea to be heard.

Near the back of the hall, a door creaked all the way open, prodded by a massive snout. The rest of the head followed—longer than a human arm outstretched—and then a long neck. The sounds changed their rhythms and harmonies as a creature struggled to pry the rest of its body free from the room on the other side of the doorway. It pushed and clawed against the hallway’s wallpaper with an arm that was swollen and deformed, but still recognizable as having once been human.

Five fingers. Lingering patches of pale, human skin.

There was no doubt as to what the wyrm had once been, and nothing could stand in stark contrast to what it had become—to what it, perhaps, was yet still becoming.

The wyrm wriggled through the doorway until enough of its body was in the hall that it could slithered out the rest of the way. Its hairless, finely scaled dark green hide scraped softly against the doorsill. Its serpentine body was almost as wide as the hallway itself, forcing the creature to bend and zigzag as it tried to move and turn.

Traces of clothes clung to the wyrm’s body, though, by now, they were little more than a tattered, woebegone shirt wrapped around the more human of its two arms. Still more of it slithered out, scales rustling against the shag carpeting. The wyrm must have been at least as long as two cars, bumper to bumper—perhaps longer. Flanges protruded from its back like shelf fungus shelves from dying trees, forming a ridged mane. Fungus crested up in fruiting bodies at the back of the wyrm’s head, giving an impression of antlers or horns.

Pel muttered prayers under her breath and made the Bond-sign.

The wyrm didn’t have a jaw, nor even a mouth. Instead, its snout was covered in an arrangement of muscular holes—nostrils—through which it breathed. Some of the holes on its snout constricted; others widened. Their configuration changed from one moment to the next, altering the sounds of the wyrm’s unearthly song. The holes puffed out wisps of swirling green spore-clouds with the wyrm’s every breath.

Six eyes blinked and swerved on the wyrm’s head, a row of three on either side of its head, one behind the other. The eyes were beautiful: featureless orbs of unbroken gold. They seemed to glow with an inner light.

It slithered forward, awkwardly, ungainly, turning its head, failing its arms, and scrunching its prodigious length, frustrated by its own body. The feed turned around and ran. Hideous coughs cracked through the air along with screams of human pain as the camera fell, and then cut to black with a crunch as digital snow blossomed on the screen.

“No…” Pel shook her head. “No no no… This can’t be happening,” she whispered. “This can’t be real.” The decorative folds of her blouse quivered above her heaving breaths.

She thought of the creature she’d encountered at the Gilman’s that morning.

Pel started to sob. “No… No…”

My wife and children embraced one another. Rayph and Jules asked their mother if they were going to be okay, but she had no answer for them, only incoherent mumbles.

“Mom?” Rayph asked. “Mom?” He didn’t understand her.

Pel plopped onto the couch, staring blankly at the TV.

Rayph and Jules sat on the shag carpet, leaning against the couch. The black leather was so soft.

“The World-Curse is bloomed,” Pel muttered, quoting scripture. “As Perdition floods the fields, the Angel shall return to harvest the good fruit.”

“You think…” Jules looked her mother in the eyes, mystified and terrified. “You think that verse foretold this?”

“Th-that…” Rayph gulped. “Was that a… a…?”

“Demon Norm,” Pel said, softly. “I… I…”

Staring up at the ceiling Eye, Pel made the Bondsign. Jules and Rayph mimicked her nervously.

Their mother closed her eyes and recited more scripture.

“The faithless will know nothing, for they have hardened their hearts to the Angel’s love. Would that they have burned out their ears and plucked out their eyes, rather than cut themselves off from He who is truth itself.” Pel shuddered. “Holy Angel… what’s going to happen to your father?” Pel looked Jules in the eyes. “What’s going to happen to you? I don’t want my children…” her voice was barely above a whisper now, “my husband… to… to go to… Hell…” She ended in a whimper.

Despite the many storms we’d weathered, Pel still thought highly of me, though more in the abstract than she used to. The passion in our relationship had simmered, yes, but she still cared a great deal for me. That’s why it hurt her so much whenever I let her down.

But now?

“I just want him to be okay…” Pel muttered. “But… I…”

The desolation in Pel’s expression scared Jules as much as the wyrm she’d seen on TV. Maybe even more than it. This wasn’t just any person, it was her mom—the infinitely resourceful Pelbrum Marcia Revenel Howle.

“Mom,” she said, “what are you saying? Look at us. The Gilman’s became a freaking hellscape, and we still made it through, and if we can get through that, can’t we get through this? And won’t Dad get through it, too?”

“Jules…” Pel said, shaking her head, “honey… this isn’t some…” My wife’s voice trailed off as she looked up at the ceiling Eye. “It’s in the Godhead’s hands, now. We can’t change it. We can’t stop it. It has been fated to happen since the beginning of time, etched into the Tablets of Destiny by the Moonlight Queen’s own hand. All we can do is wait for the end.”

“No…” Jules got up with a start and skittered back on the carpet. “This can’t be happening. It can’t be.” She shook her head. “This is real life. This isn’t mythology! This isn’t one of Dad’s fucking mangas! Monsters aren’t real; they’re just other people, or things we don’t understand.”

Jules felt her chest tighten; she couldn’t breathe. She was hyperventilating. In that moment, it was as if she’d been flung across space and time, back to the supermarket, staring death itself in the face. All the terror she’d buried on the quiet trip back home bursted free. Jules sank to her knees and cried. She shook and she cried.

Pel joined her daughter on the floor, guiding her, calming her—just as she had once calmed me.

Over the thunder of her breaths, Jules turned to the TV and watched, in a daze, as Ilzee appeared back on camera. The journalist stared, slack-jawed, eyes veering left and right as she coughed.

“Ardon,” Ilzee asked, “are we still on air?”

There was a cough. “Yeah, the feed’s unbroken. They haven’t cut us off.”

Ilzee clearly couldn’t believe it. Slowly, she spun around in her swivel chair, wheezing out a shaky stream of air. She ran her hands through her short, boyish hair.

“Shit,” Ilzee hissed. “Shit shit shit…” She looked off to the side. “You get what this means, don’t you?” She looked straight at the camera. “DAISHU’s falling apart. Everything’s falling apart. That creature you saw, folks? That used to be somebody. From the looks of things, either the Green Death kills you, or it turns you into one of those creatures. So… yeah,” she slapped her desk, “I guess that’s a thing, now.“

Pel pressed the Power button on the remote. The screen went black as the TV console shut off.