The Night was loud and filled with horrors. Horrors, munitions, and death.

Valny closed the doors behind him. It was a wonder the glass-paned things hadn’t shattered already. The sound echoed off the portico’s gray, granite columns.

The two men stepped away from the doors and walked to the curb. With Zelen out, the Stovolsk Mycological Institute could finally join the rest of Stovolsk Technical University in eternal slumber. Dr. Zelen Slavaa had been the last to stay. Everyone else had fled. Most of the other divisions of the University’s Court of Sciences were dead and empty, though a few lights could still be seen, most of all in the dome of the university Library. The shining aberrations were out of place in the land of the dead.

The city of Stovolsk was crumbling. Nearly two-thousand years of history were written into its streets. The city was a child of ruin—born from the death of the first Lassedile Church to crown Odensk’s wintry heaths—and now, to ruin it returned.

Its death was not a peaceful one—and, as a virologist, Zelen Slavaa knew a thing or two about unpeaceful death.

The sky was blighted. Blighted by smoke, by dust from bombed earth and shattered concrete, and by drifts of spores. Fire and lead spat thunderclaps over the city, flashing white, gray, and brown in the haze. Dust rained like ash onto the asphalt streets, mixing with the mud and the spore-dusted snow. The Green Death cast the bodies into the streets—battered parkas, frozen earmuffs, dying madmen, naked and afraid—to be slowly buried beneath the gently falling debris, and—perhaps—by a coat of fresh snow. The Green Death was Madness itself. It changed the people, even as it killed them. It changed the land, even as it befouled it. And the once-great city had changed with them: now and forever, to be a tomb.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” Valny asked.

“What else can I do?” Zelen replied.

Dr. Slavaa eyed the bulky, black plastic case Valny gripped in his woolen gloves. The container was on its last legs—some of the corrugations in the plastic were held together by mere duct tape—but it was the best that Zelen could find on short notice.

Tank-fire and artillery boomed in the distance. A great mushroom cloud blossomed as a commercial aerostat liner crashed on Monk’s Hill, painting fire’s fury over the concrete apartment complexes. The force of the sound shook Zelen’s skull.

Very short notice.

Dr. Slavaa received the message from Dr. Skorbinka on an emergency line just two days ago, though it felt like a lifetime. Mistelann’s request to prepare the experimental mycophage treatment for mass production in Trenton was one of the main reasons Zelen had stayed behind. Most of his colleagues thought it was pointless—there was no chance it would work, and their lives would be better spent fleeing as far and fast as they could. But Zelen had stayed, and for Mistelann’s sake—but not just Mistelann’s sake.

“There’s no time,” Valny said, opening the truck’s rear passenger door.

Zelen’s ride was consistent with his expectations. It was lumpen and tire-treaded, the bastard child of an SUV and a tank. It brayed its horn. The dull red paint peeled off in psoriatic patches, revealing the dusky, silvery metal underneath. Reinforced metal plates had been hastily fastened to its side, blocking up the rear seats’ windows.

“C’mon,” Valny said, beckoning the scientist with a wave of his hand, “get in.”

The mercenary—for Valny could be nothing else—was almost as heavily padded as the vehicle itself. Dark, bulky equipment encrusted him from his cleated boots to the intimidating gas-mask on his head. The man within couldn’t have been more different: tall and slender, with kind eyes. A father’s eyes—bloodshot, though they were.

Zelen hopped into the backseat. He tugged at his long, pale, laboratory coat, pulling its hem into the vehicle from where it stuck out from underneath his pillowy yellow parka.

The somewhat portly driver looked over his shoulder, through the open door “Who’s this?” His sparse stubble seemed to prickle on his tired jowls.

Valny answered by slamming the back door shut and darting through the front door to take his seat up front. “He’s our contact, Nitsky.”

The cabin light flickered off seconds after the door shut. Outside, the military’s bombardment of the city continued unabated, barely muffled even by the truck’s reinforced walls.

Nistky glared at his partner. “Then why is he coming with us? Was the package not ready?” Nitsky asked.

“No, it’s ready,” Valny said, slapped the case where it rested in his lap.

A jolt shot all the way down Zelen’s spine. “Please, be careful!” He sat up straight and leaned forward. “There’s a refrigeration unit in there. It’s… delicate.”

Nitsky coughed. It was an awful cough: it wracked his whole body. Zelen could hear the man’s fluid-filled lungs crinkle. It was like tinfoil crumpling. It took him a moment to realize the man was laughing.

“You gotta be kidding me!” Nistky said. “All this way, through all this shit, just for that dinky little thing?”

“This dinky little thing might be our best chance at beating the Green Death,” Zelen said, hoping fate would bear him out.

Nistky glanced back at the virologist, his eyebrow peaking.

“This is the cure?”

Zelen shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.” He shook his head. “We won’t know until we try.”

“Then why are we sending this to Trenton? There are plenty of hospitals here in Stovolsk. All those people…”

Zelen inhaled, sharply. He tried to keep his gaze fixed on Nitsky, but he couldn’t muster the courage. His eyes turned downward as he muttered his would-be retort: “The army firebombed the fucking hospital…”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Yeah,” Nitsky said, as if that was normal to him, “but what’s that have to do with you comin’ along.” He sized up the virologist. “You some kind of comedian or somethin’?” He pointed at Zelen’s parka and coat. Like Valny, Nitsky was decked out in high-tech gear. “You think you’ll be able to make the journey like that? That get-up of yours is bulky as fuck. You might as well have put a bullseye on your back.”

The Brotherhood honors its debts, Nitsky.” Valny cleared his throat, coughing even from within his gas mask. “Comrade Mistelann’s delivery will arrive to him as promised, and Dr. Slavaa here is more useful to him and the rest of the world if he’s there to help, alive and well. Now, come on, let’s get out of here. If your sloppy driving gets me killed by one of those fucking traitors,” Valny stabbed his finger at the window, “my ghost will shit on your grave.”

“Well, your ghost’ll have to wait at the back of the line,” Nitsky replied.

“Pissed off that many folks, have you?”

“I fuckin’ majored in it,” Nitsky said, pulling the stick shift and revving the car into high gear.

Zelen’s wandering eyes soon noticed the badge sewn into the shoulder of Valny’s armor. It sent a shiver down his spine. He’d seen enough footage of Marshall Paldi’s soldiers to know what it meant.

“Are you military?” he asked.

Valny let out a long sigh that crashed into a small coughing fit before it was even halfway through.

“Once, I would have said ‘yes’, and proudly so. But not anymore.” The soldier-turned-mercenary shook his head. “A soldier who kills the people he swore to protect is a waste of a human being, and I don’t care what the reason is. I don’t care if they’re afraid, or if they swallowed Paldi’s propaganda. And, it seems, neither does the Hallowed Beast. The Green Death is the flyswatter. We’re the flies.”

Aghast, Zelen rapidly made the Bondsign. “How can you say that? That’s blasphemy!”

Valny laughed bitterly. “Oh no,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m actually all in favor of it.” He coughed. “Let the Hallowed Beast reap a dread harvest. We deserve it. Well,” he chuckled, “at least most of us do.” Looking over his shoulder, Valny locked eyes with the virologist. “I am a patriot, Dr. Slavaa. I’d rather see my country die than watch it do evil just to tickle a madman’s ego. The good apples will pick up whatever pieces are left.” He pointed at Dr. Slavaa. “Good apples like you.”

Zelen cleared his throat. “You said there’s an aerostat flight waiting for me?”

Nitsky coughed. “So long as God doesn’t screw us over, yeah, there should be. We’ll be hitching a ride at SXA, on one of the last aerostat flights out of the city. The kind of flight that only stupid money can buy.” He tightened his grip on the steering wheel as he turned the car down a corner. “I just hope the military hasn’t already beaten us there.”

There was a long silence after that, one that Dr. Slavaa didn’t dare break. In the quiet, he peered out through the windows, watching his city burn. The rogue army’s munitions had made skeletons of the shoddy buildings the Directorate, in its tinpot wisdom, had erected all across the country. Leave it to an atheistic dictatorship to come up with as divinely inspired an idea as to have walls that were somehow both paper thin and solid concrete. In them, in the Winter, you froze, and in the Summer, you burned. Shots from artillery or even infantrymen’s rifles gave the concrete monoliths their long-awaited reason to crumble, keel over, and die. At least now, with the apartment units blown open, their walls no longer had to pretend to protect the people from the elements.

Fierce coughs wracked through Nitsky’s body as he drove. They were bad enough that the driver had to stiffen his arms to jam his head into the seat’s headrest to keep his eyes on the road. He had to be careful, here. High speeds were not the best match for the narrow, agèd, angular streets that threaded through Stovolsk Technical University like capillaries to the city’s broad boulevards.

Zelen could have fled days before, but he hadn’t. He’d done it as a favor to Mistelann. But that wasn’t the only reason. It wasn’t even the first reason.

Throwing himself into his work had helped Dr. Slavaa push the first reason to the edge of his thoughts. However, as he sat in the SUV in the war-torn Night, the first reason reasserted itself with a vengeance.

Zelen shivered at the feeling of ragged breaths tickling at his ear. He turned his head ever so slightly. Enough to look, but not to be seen looking.

The empty seat at Zelen’s left was empty no longer. A living corpse now occupied it, and her gaze was terror and judgment. Black, mycelial lightning poked out from the ulcers the Green Death had eaten into her arms, back, shoulders, and neck. The fungus rose up from her rot and necrosis, crowning her with its glory. Filaments pushed their way out through her pupils and corneas, as if her eyes had been shot through by splinters.

Her lab coat no longer bore its name-tag. She’d ripped it off when her NFP-20 infection made her run around like a wild animal for a while, crawling and growling before she wound down and turned still, twitching slightly as her life slowly burned out.

Ekatrina.

She’d been a wonderful lab assistant.

With a shudder, Zelen lowered his gaze and closed his eyes, trying to will her away.

Ekatrina was the oldest of Dr. Slavaa’s ghosts, and the only one he’d known in life. At first, Zelen had maintained his iron rule of keeping the laboratory door locked tight, particularly after Ekaterina started showing symptoms of infection. But his attitude changed after her death—after he’d had to lock her in a side room when she’d gone feral, not long after the military arrived. Watching her lose her mind and go wild within the confines of those four, transparent walls rusted Zelen’s iron rule and made it crumble. Ekaterina’s death had convinced Dr. Slavaa of two truths. First: that there was no surviving this. The Green Death was the end; the last gasp of the world as he’d known it. A long Night was rising, one which civilization would not survive, though, with the Angel’s grace, perhaps mankind might yet endure. Second: Since this was the end, there was no reason not to show mercy. It was the only kindness the damned would ever know. And there was vanishingly little time left to give it.

Especially when the military was killing its own civilians. Just the day before yesterday, Field Marshal Akaky Paldi toppled the Oligarchy in a military coup, in the third consecutive revolution to overthrow the government of Odensk and replace it with something that was still not a democracy. In his first act as the newly self-proclaimed President of Odensk, Paldi had ordered the military to shell Stovolsk and bomb its suburbs, so as to clear the way for the troops to march in and scour the plague from the earth.

The fungus… reacted to that. It did not take kindly to President Paldi’s show of force.

Zelen’s first sight of it had been through one of his lab’s windows. The minor perk of having a good view from the third floor laboratory turned out to benefit Dr. Slavaa in ways he couldn’t have anticipated.

It was like something out of a horror video game.

The infected ran through the streets—fast zombies—attacking nearly anyone who fought back or resisted. Ekaterina had always been an excellent assistant. Had she lived to finish graduate school, she would have made for a wonderful researcher. Even her death provided valuable insight, because it had shown Dr. Slavaa that, however violent the infected might be, he had nothing to fear from them. And though he wasn’t perfectly certain, the virologist was willing to bet the reason the infected didn’t attack him was because he, himself, was dead. His pristine living corpse of a body was acting up like a bad internet connection. Nothing seemed to work right, and it frustrated him to no end. Helping others distracted him from that, and from the dreadful waiting that came whenever the samples had to be incubated, which was often.

So he let them in—the refugees. They’d knocked on Zelen’s door—on the door to the Institute—and he’d let them in, one by one. They didn’t seem sick, but Zelen knew that was only temporary; they’d turn feral soon enough. And though that scared him, the least he could do was keep those poor souls company in their final hours, and to give them company that they needn’t be afraid of hurting. It was only when Ekaterina’s tormented, fungus-blighted spirit appeared to him that Dr. Slavaa bothered to check whether or not the refugees huddled on the floor by his laboratory door were actually there, in the flesh—and, as it turned out, they weren’t.