Plants of The Estate - Part 4 of 4

I dragged her through the corridor where I was surprised by the damage that had occurred in such a short time. It was as if the wall plaster in the walls was disintegrating, falling apart like wet cake, leaving only the skeleton of old wooden studs and the circulatory pipes and cables behind. There was at least two inches of sludge on the floor, and more alarmingly it was feeling far more spongy than usual.  It occurred to me this stuff coming up through the building must be corrosive. My skin was blotchy red, but there was no discomfort yet, so the most important thing to do right now was still getting some place safe.

I allowed us a moment to catch our breath at the door to the internal stairwell, all the noise seemed further away now. We were dripping sweat and slime.

‘Are you ok, Alice?’

She nodded, her straight black hair lacquered to her head and face.

‘The way I see it,’ I said, panting, ‘we have two options. We can take the stairs down, maybe somebody has managed to clear the obstruction, and if not we can use the part of the fire escape that hasn’t collapsed, or we can go up to the roof and wait for the fire department.‘

‘Did you call the fire department?’

‘No… but, someone should have, right?’

‘Down… I want to go, please.’ She said, her eyes rolling up to the ceiling and the wet patchy walls.

The stairwell was darker than usual because a number of overhead lights had shorted out. The air was even hotter than before, and even lower on oxygen. In the pressing dark we had to move slowly, and the ghostly sound of foot fall and voices down below, though spooky, also reminded us we were not alone. I held Alice’s cold, bony hand for comfort and safety as we moved down. As we descended the air became fouler.  

The slime had been raining down from above, and now it coated everything in a thick layer. Blobs of it hung from banister, the stairs above our heads, and some of it was so extremely viscous it came away in long strings when touched. It was warm and smelt like bog and rotting plant material. I suspected it was some organic substance, protoplasm perhaps, but there was no likely explanation for what was happening, for why it was coming up through the plumbing.  Nor was there an explanation for what now blocked our path.

Several bulbous growths had formed on the staircase and surrounding walls. They were approximately a meter and half in diameter.  Each semi-cylindrical mass had send out a hundred tendrils, either to anchor it in place, or to explore its surroundings. They spread out a couple of meters in a chaotic web, complete with what looked like the bumpy knuckles of supernaturally long fingers.  Most horrifyingly, the things where beautiful, their vibrant yellow captured the attention, and the shine reflected the world.

Then out from the gloom behind them, a sound began to grow, a flitting, splashing sound, coming closer. My skin turned to ice and my chest clenched in terror. Alice ran, leaving me there, alone.

They came from over the top of the shining bulbs, barely visible in dim light because they were translucent, and tinted in the same yellow great as the slime through which they propelled themselves with squirming tendrils. They reached out, stretching their bodies thin, and then contracting them into fat egg sized bumps. They moved faster than I expected, and they were attracted to me. Once they reached out for me, standing erect of the mounds of yellow matter. Without eyes, they must taste the air, or sensing the warmth. Then they started down the mound and up the stairs toward me.

Quick as a bunny I was back the last flight of stairs and through the stairwell door. There was the number 05 stencilled on the wall.

Alice was waiting for me. He eyes questioned.

‘I don’t know what it was… they looked like super large amoeba, or protists. Those big lumps of yellow stuff, I think that is Slime Mould, which is more like a fungus than a mould, and even more like a Protista than a fungus.’

‘The slime, it is everywhere,’ she said.

‘Yes, I can’t explain that, maybe a build-up in the sewer system?’

‘Is it dangerous?’ she asked, but her eyes spread wide in horror, and tracing her gaze, she was looking at my hand pressed again the stairwell, where a branch and shiny yellow matter had spread, and was growing. Its intricate branching web of tendrils were so fine in places they turned the red door orange. When I pulled my hand away in shock there was a perfect representation left behind where the mould had not spread. We watched the fine threads close in the space, fading the impression, though it still remained.

‘I don’t think it is dangerous to touch. But the building doesn’t hold up very well to it. And look,’ I said, and indicated the open doors of apartments on this level, the ruined walls, and rotted wooden floors. ‘There are no people left here, I think they are got out somehow. Maybe the fire escape is fine here.’

The wall paper of this floor hung from what remained of the wall in soggy strips. The slime must have a corrosive effect on this kind of matter, disintegrating the bonds in the wood or the plaster, or whatever it came in contact with. The floor was spongy, and in some places the carpet sagged as if the floor beneath it had given way. We stayed closer to the walls because it felt safer than the centre of the corridor. We made our way to the west side of the building, hoping the fire escape would still be intact this far down the building. Alice was leading me now, I felt a little proud of her. I held her hand. The building rumbled and complained around us. When a quake shook the building we pressed our back against the wall, it was a rather futile gesture. My fear was that the building would collapse; that the floor of one level would collapse in onto the one below, which would cause that floor to fail and fall, and so on until there was a catastrophic failure. We had been hearing the straining wood whine, and debris falling all the way from the stairwell, but this latest round of rumbling was very close overhead, and as we listened it come rushing down.

The room behind us was sudden torn away by a falling bathtub, followed by bricks, beams of wood, general debris and a slide of slimy mud, carpets, pipes and a surprising array of stuffed animals. The wall we had been seeking refuge near was stripped to the bones, and it was only luck that stopped the floor beneath us from disintegrating with the rest. Alice and I could only hug each other and the remaining frames of the wall and wait for the deluge to stop. We were barely recognisable by the end. Only our eyes and teeth, which had been shielded, were now visible through the thick, black, layer of gritty, sticky slime.  The next steps we took were tentative and exploratory; there was no way to tell how the remaining floor would respond to us. It held our wait, and we wasted no time talk or complaining, we continued on our way to the fire escape.

Our hearts sank when we finally opened the exit door to see the tangled wreck of the escape structure ruined and beyond our reach, having been wrenched off the face of the building. But more of the interior of the building was beginning to collapse, the crashing and rumbling was nearly constant behind us. We clung to the frame of the exit door, five stories above the ground, feeling hopeless. I reached for her and she met my hand with her, we intertwined our fingers, desperate to know each other. I had been so afraid to touch her for so many years, and only now when there was nothing left to hope for was I able to reach out. I closed my eyes and just focused on the feel of her cold, bony, gritty fingers, and they were the warmest, softest things I could ever hope for. She closed her eyes and we were both at peace for a few precious moments.

It was a normal day, grey skies, above a grey concrete cityscape, and below us, our little patch of green lawn acting as a moat around our building, dwarfed by the parking lot that served several of these old high rise apartment blocks in the estate. The only difference between today and any other day was the large crowd gathered to witness our deaths. There were people running about this way and that, many more sat in the car park, seemingly injured, and many were work to release people trapped by a section of fire escape that had made it to the ground. I could hear the fire engines in the distance, sounding their sad sirens. They were a cruel sound, too far to help; they would not be here in time for us. But I had Alice, and Alice had me, and together we had this door frame.

Then time came for the whole building to collapse. We could feel it coming, the vibration and rumble was now through the entire building. It knocked us to our knees. While clutching the frame we each wrapped our arms around the other and we embraced, and we kissed. The building was tipping over, but we would not let go, even while the entire contents over every apartment shifted and then joined destructive unison, forming an avalanche on the interior of the building. Dozens of floors fell past us, but there progress was only observed in the periphery of our vision, we only had eyes for each other.

And then the rumbling died down. The exterior of the building still stood, and when we finally opened our eyes we understood, the build had not collapsed, but only tilted, and now stood at a precarious 70 degree angle, enough for us to use the pipes and gutters to climb down this face of the building, all the way to the ground.

Several other who had been trapped at windows and exit doors had gotten the same idea. Some sections we had to slide down for a few feet and the threat of missing the foot and hand holds was real, but Alice and I helped one another, and down we went. Finally reaching the ground, greeted by cheers from an onlooking crown and being helped away from the rubble at the base of the building. EMTs took us to a triage area where we would were tended to by volunteers, given water and blankets, then a man gave us oxygen and woman who said she was a nurse cleaned our faces and eyes.

In the following whirlwind, Alice and I each held on to the others hand. We each had someone no, and we knew how easy it would be to lose, so we held on tight, tight as we could.

‘Ah, Jimmy, nice couple,’ called Mrs Chang, weaving through the crowd beaming a grey toothed smile, waving frantically, ‘you handsome couple.’