Vern clutched the damp sheet surrounding her. A fungus. All this time, that was what had been in her, causing the hauntings, the strength, the endurance. “So you’re saying I’m better now, right?”
Gogo’s lips, already full, swelled as she puckered them out in thought. “You’re awake. You’re talking. You’re drinking. But better? Technically, your condition hasn’t changed. Your heart rate is at thirty beats per minute. Your temperature is still at a level I’d call heatstroke—one hundred and twelve. But you’re not dying. Your body has simply,” she said, pausing to think of the right word, “adapted.”
Since leaving Cainland, Vern had lived every moment with the secret fear that it might be her last, but she had come to the brink and was, as far as she understood it, fine. “So the fungus is still in me?”
“Yes. Still in you. Still…” Gogo hesitated. “Changing you? Or your body is changing in response to it? It’s only been a few days, so we’ve not been able to find out much, but we’re working on it,” she said, chewing on the nail of her thumb.
“But how does that explain my passenger?” asked Vern. Gogo stared at Vern blankly. “You know, the thing. The growth. What did your aunt call it? A tetra…”
Gogo perked in recognition. “Teratoma. A type of tumor that can have teeth, hair, and, yes, bones. But like I said before. This isn’t that. The tests we took suggest the fungus is—”
Gogo exhaled warily. Vern guessed this wasn’t a usual occurrence for her, to be confronted with something that left her speechless.
Vern didn’t have time for her reticence. She’d been living with strangeness for most of her life and didn’t have time to stumble in its presence. “Please, God of Cain, just spit it out.”
“It’s fruiting. The fungus is fruiting on your back.”
Vern felt her eyebrows hitch up at that. She could still be surprised, it turned out.
“It’s like a polypore,” Gogo said. “I don’t know if the placement and design of it is a coincidence—maybe it’s that shape because it’s primarily drawing nutrients from your bones, breaking them down in order to support itself—but the growth is a conk mushroom forming an exoskeleton around you.”
She was explaining to herself as much as to Vern, going by the questioning tone in her voice.
On the way to the cabin, Vern had seen a great antlered beast in her haunting, but it was not a flash of the past the way Lucy was or any of the other visions. That creature had been present, real.
That creature had been like Vern, a picture of her future. A warning.
“I can’t stress enough how dead you should be. Part of me is thinking—maybe it’s the fungus’s enzymes, you know? It should be breaking you down, I mean, it is breaking you down, but maybe it also triggered otherwise dormant genes in your body? There’s documented evidence of that happening, though not in humans, that I know of.”
There was a haggard beauty to all of this. Fungi consumed and consumed, but Vern’s body had refused to be devoured. She was being fed on but not rotting. Together, her body and the fungus had fused into a sickly monstrosity. Would she loom as terrifyingly large as the creature in her haunting one day?
She understood now the ravenous hunger she felt before the worst of the sickness had started. It was everything inside her body trying to hold on to itself despite the fungus’s wolfish appetite.
The last ten days had been the peak of the sickness, and her body had come out the other side of it something new. Vern wanted to see exactly who that was. She twisted to her side in order to stand, but grunted upon noticing the IV in her arm and the catheter in her urethra.
“I’ll take care of those. Just let me wash my hands,” said Gogo, and left the room.
Alone, Vern reveled in her aliveness. All this time she’d thought death was coming for her, but perhaps it was she who was death coming for everyone else.
* * *
VERN WALKED using a pair of crutches Bridget had lying around from an old injury. “Take it slow,” Gogo ordered.
Vern stumbled into the living room, then used the arm of the sofa to lower herself to the floor. With what strength she had remaining, she crawled over to the pallet Bridget had made for the children in front of the woodstove and nested herself between Howling and Feral. “Missed you,” she whispered, and despite her determination to stay awake—she wouldn’t sleep away any more days—in a matter of moments she was passed out again in a cocoon made of her sleeping babes.