WebWorld (1.3)

Well, we bloody found out.

And it all started out so small, so tiny. I remember walking home from work and just happening to glance down at the gutter and notice this string of something white and spongy. It was a bit weird, but only worth a quick glance over my shoulder as I kept walking. Not worth squatting down and looking closer, touching, taking a piece. I suppose I could have done all that at the time, who knows what would have happened to me? Infected? Dead? Maybe I would just have had one hell of a souvenir. But what I did was adjust my headphones, glance over at the road I was about to cross, and continue on towards home.

Zara worked at the library back then. Her shifts were more regular than mine – and better paid. She was home that afternoon when I walked in. It was early in the autumn, with the trees just blushing into reds and oranges, and there was a smell of apples and cinnamon in the flat. Zara: cooking dinner. A mini roast lamb, to be followed by stuffed and baked apples. I used to tease her about that, her cooking, how traditional I thought it made her. Make somebody a good little wife someday and all that.

Memory has a will of its own, doesn’t it? I guess that’s why I remember the little gingham lace dress she was wearing that day, and the big padded headband, and that tiny little smudge of her lipstick.

“Who’s been kissing you?”

“You.”

“What’s this smudge here…?”

“You.”

“No, it’s-“

“You.” When she wanted to be imperious, she was imperious.

We sat down to dinner and the news was on in the background. There was a story that mentioned a floating mould found on a river somewhere – in a part of Eastern Europe that’s almost Asia, I think – just floating there on the surface, bubbly and fluffy like clouds. Nobody knew why. Samples taken. To be analysed. And then the coverage moved onto something about a lost dog, and then something about a small fall in the stock exchange. And then onto the sports news. The things we thought were important back in those times.

I told her, “I saw some of that stuff on the way home tonight.”

She shook her head, “no you didn’t.”

“Seriously. I walked right past it.”

“Where?”

“On Bridie street. Just past the chemist.”

“No, you didn’t,” she grinned, she teased.

“No, really. It looked just like that.”

“Some people can’t do without the attention.”

“You wait. It’s coming for us” Those were my words. All full of what was going to become some fucked-up dramatic irony.

“Uh-huh.”

“You should have listened to me.”

“You should have stamped it out when you had the chance. This is all going to be your fault now.” And she leaned to kiss me, a quick peck on the tip of the nose. She was ridiculously graceful. She was a fairy-tale fairy.

And here, here’s a confession for you: I looked at her in that moment, with the light shining in from a big window behind her, her face dwarfed in that halo effect, and I thought: I’m going to marry her. It was too early on to propose, to even consider it, but I kept that thought and filed it away in my mind. When the time was right, I was going to go buy a ring and kneel down in front of her, and just do it. She was looking at me, all innocent, having no idea what was going through my mind.

#

But time overtook us. Events, and all that.

And it happened really fast.

The next day I got home from work to find the TV on, and the news showing pictures from all over the world. A popcorn snowfall of unexplained fungus; it bubbled out of the oceans, erupted through the sand of beaches, lapped overland and coiled around trees, around roads and buildings and bridges. People were waking up to find swathes of this stuff just draped over everything, taking over.

There was this one article that set something off in my stomach: the filming – on someone’s phone – of this stuff actually growing. There was no stop-motion, no fast-forward. In real-time you could actually see it growing, forming slowly like icicles - pixels and particles at a time - but growing, expanding. There were traces of something almost goldish inside, and odd, dappling shadows. It felt as if there was a small, cold lump of iron in my guts. That sudden fist of dread.

“What’s up?” Zara said, behind me.

“Look,” I gestured up at the screen.

“I saw some,” she answered, “on the way home from work.”

Maybe she was expecting some sort of a smug I-told-you-so, but I didn’t have one in me right then. I felt threatened. Her words made me feel as if this had become a personal danger. “How much?” was what I asked her.

“In that ditch, along Hazel Row, the whole thing looked as if somebody had jam-packed it with clouds or something. And I heard somebody say that they’d seen some in the river, and someone else say it was washing up on the beach.”

“Fuck,” I said.

“Weird, huh?”

“I don’t like this. I feel like we’re living in interesting times.”

“Somebody has to.”

“It doesn’t have to be me. I was happy living in boring times where I could come home every night and eat dinner and watch TV. This feels like it’s getting… big.”

“Or it’ll go as fast as it came.”

“What? Just visiting?”

“Exactly.”

“I think you’re enjoying this.”

“I could be. It’s… interesting.”

I mock-shook my finger at her. “Those are words to eat, my darling. You just wait and see.”

She showed how seriously she took me by biting at my finger.

#

But I was actually rattled.

And I was a bit of semi-nerd back then. I had a touch of the conspiracy theory. And I spent more time gaming, and haunting desolate backwoods chatrooms, than a guy should admit to. I got online, and I started looking things up. There were already pictures of this stuff running through streets as if they were a river in flood. Actual rivers choked with it. A train engulfed at a station. People were posting footage and tagging it WTF!!??.

I caught up with a guy who call-signed himself ‘Droopus’.

What you heard? I typed when I saw his icon come up on the list of who’s online.

It’s everywhere. This is amazing.

Dangerous, argued SunDiv3r.

Drawn in, I typed: How so?

Some people who ate it got really sick.

They ATE it?

No accounting for morons.

Did anybody die?

Not yet. But they might.

What is this stuff?

Droopus said, Nobody knows. Not even the scientists.

Should I be worried? I already was.

Some people are calling the apocalypse.

Are you?

I’m getting there.

Yeah, it’s like, overnight: wham, it’s there.

You see that footage of it growing?

Yeah. WTF right? At this rate it could smother the world in days.

A new name, FancyGirl posted, Scaremongering. This will blow over like all the other times the world was going to end and didn’t.

Droopus: Do the math. It’s been a day.

FancyGirl: Algal bloom. Look it up.

FancyGirl: Look up ‘drama queen’ while you’re at it?

Droopus: You look up Noah’s Ark. Plus unicorn.

A new commentator, MobyRick: Titanic. Plus iceberg.

SunDiv3r: Have you seen that footage of the Thames?

Me, stupidly: London?

Because, right, the other Thames.

SunDiv3r: Yeah.

Droopus: What about those pictures of it growing out of people’s hands.

FancyGirl: That’s fake.

Droopus: I’ve got one. This guy who tried to take it home with him. This is his car. These are his hands, that rash, that’s all gum.

Me: Gum?

Droopus: That’s what they’re calling it. Or stretch? Or Lastine? Go figure.

SunDiv3r: Look, they’ll poison that shit. They’ll spray the fuck out of it.

Droopus: Along with all the waterways and the dirt we grow our food in. Nice one.

SunDiv3r: Well, they can’t not do it.

FancyGirl: Do you know how much weedkiller…?

MobyRick: Hey, funny if the weedkiller made it, like, grow exponentially.

Hilarious.

Droopus: And the cure is worse than the disease…

SunDiv3r: Is it though? Look at how this stuff is just erupting everywhere. We’re already behind.

Droopus: We’re already fucked.

#

I went to bed. It was about two o’clock in the morning. Zara rolled over and wrapped me in her arms. “I love you,” she murmured, still making it sound like it was just something to be assumed.

“It’s getting scary.”

“Hm?”

“That white stuff. Out there.”

“You need to read less.”

“I’m not sure. I think we should be worried.”

“In the morning,” her voice was soft and drowsy and warm-honey-like.

Her warm skin was something I wanted to dive into. I wanted to be alone inside her and forget everything else. But I couldn’t. Something was happening out there, and I was catching on now to how serious it was.

“In the morning,” was her answer. Her lullaby voice enticed me into a half-sleep.

#

In the morning. There were more articles, more stunning and terrifying pictures. There were the first signs of rioting and panic-buying and political unrest in places already vulnerable to it. When I went and stood at the window, I could see what looked like a dusting of snow over the asphalt, but wasn’t.

“Zara,” I drew her to the window.

“No way.”

“This is happening.”

“Okay then. Maybe it is.”

The news footage flashed something closer to home. Randwick bay, with a huge line of this unknown fungus stretched between surf and sand. It looked like a massive, pregnant, blurry white caterpillar. I could feel my chest tighten.

Zara, the old Zara, turned to look at me. “Field trip?” she said, holding up her car keys.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work