Chương 10: Fun with Nature

Whatever it was he was following, he was getting close. Close enough to catch the occasional snap of foliage ahead, or flash of movement through the trees. After another twenty minutes of stalking, he started to hear a commotion up ahead, a creature screaming, and then several shrieks. He picked up the pace, moving through the underbrush and circling right to a small rise, where he laid down on a patch of bare rock and dropped the bipod on his rifle.

Pressing his cheek to the stock, he reached up and adjusted the zoom on his optic for a better view. Maybe 150 meters through the forest, three figures hunched down over something Cole couldn't see. They were humanoid, and two of them wore clothes—or at least the tatters of clothes. Not recruits, then. Locals. And beyond feral, by the look of it. Cole thumbed his safety off.

Before he could decide what to do, he heard the distant report of automatic small arms fire, reduced to a low-frequency rattle by long distance. His targets heard it too, and one of them shot to its feet. It spun away from him, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound, and Cole got his first real look. The thing was certainly human, once. But it had been infested with the same fungal growths that marred the trees in the forest. It was chewing on a chunk of pelt—what looked like deer or close-to—as it scanned.

Its eyes swept past Cole's position, but without a scope or eyesight better than his own, it looked right past him. It let out a rasping growl. The middle figure stood up, and while vaguely human in shape, it was clear that it had never been so to begin with. It had fibrous, blue-veined bark-like skin and was covered head to foot in patches of orange wood ear fungus. It hissed at the once-human, and both returned to their meal.

Cole gave a wary glance to one of the infested trees near his position, realizing for the first time how the mass of parasitic growths eating into the bark was uncomfortably close to human proportions. Suddenly, Jefferson's insistence on holding on to the anti-fungals made a lot more sense. The small arms sounded again. This time, all three figures shot to their feet, now having the bearing of the sound fixed.

If another recruit was in the middle of a fire fight, the last thing they needed was this pair of zombies and a bark-skinned fungus monster coming to join the party. He lined his crosshair up on the head of the bark and mushroom man and fired. The top half of the thing's head burst apart and splattered the two zombies with wet, orange paste. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to stop it, as it spun and raised its hand in Cole's direction.

The two half-decayed infested humans turned at the gesture, hissing, and sprinted directly toward his position. Cole fired at the closest of the two, but they weren't the slow shambling movie zombies he had hoped for. The two fungal unfortunates bounded like 4-legged creatures, tearing through the undergrowth at frightening speeds. Cole shot again and again, finally catching one above the knee where the serrated bullet amputated the whole limb. It continued to drag itself along, but at a fraction of the speed.

The other was still a problem, and Cole shifted as he dropped his magnification back to zero to reacquire a target that was now less than fifty meters from his position and closing fast. Tempted to forego fire discipline and switch to full auto, he managed to continue picking his shots and was rewarded with a score to the chest and another to the midsection before his magazine ran dry, both of which slowed the creature.

Before it could close the rest of the distance, he pushed up from prone, dropped the empty magazine, and slotted a fresh one. The muscle memory was almost the same as with his M4, though the over-wide magazines felt slightly clumsy in his fingers. He'd never had to rapid-reload his hunting rifle. By the time he dropped the bolt on his new magazine, the fungal zombie was at the base of his rise, scrabbling its way up the soft loam with claws like ice picks.

Cole leaned over the edge—twisting his weapon slightly to use the offset sights Jeff had mounted at a forty-five-degree angle. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. The zombie snarled up at him right up until its face exploded. Remembering how that hadn't stopped big fungus, he continued to pepper the creature until it flopped back to the forest floor, twitching. Oh, shit, where did the big one go?

A roar from behind immediately preceded Cole being picked up and tossed across the forest floor. He went one way, his rifle another. As he spun through the air, he caught glimpses of the mostly-headless fungus creature stalking its way towards him on narrow, blackened legs with the texture of tree bark. He hit the ground and continued to roll until he hit a tree, acutely aware of the ceramic plates digging into his back and side.

Nothing felt broken, but it had definitely knocked the wind out of him, and the creature was stalking towards him again. Now closer to him than his rifle, there was no way Cole would be able to get past the tall, lanky creature. The first shot had opened up its head like a flower, which meant that if it had a brain, that wasn't where the damn thing kept it. It raised its claws for a swipe down at his belly.

Cole scrambled away, feeling the wind of the passing strike that carved into the tree he'd just been thrown against. The wood groaned in protest and shed leaves. Blue veins started snaking out from where the claws had dug through the bark. Do NOT get scratched by those, he told himself. The creature had height, reach, and apparently superior strength over him.

It was lucky that he'd been able to take out its minions before they reached him as well, because he doubted his ability to hold off this guy and a fungal zombie. Of his three disadvantages, there was one he could rectify. Cole reached down to his belt and opened a sleeve that held a pair of hard wooden sticks capped with six inches of riveted steel sleeve. He hefted the two light-weight clubs, each one giving him another half-meter buffer between him and those infected claws.

He might not know how to fence with a sword, but everyone knew how to hit something with a stick. Cole dodged left as the creature swiped at his right side, keeping the tree between them. When the fungal monster tried to circle the other way, shrieking with the remnants of its inhuman mouth, Cole smashed down on its wrist with one of his clubs. The reverberation back through the hardwood almost made him drop the club, as it felt like swinging a bat into solid granite.

But the monster's wrist shattered in a spray of wood chips, leaving the hand to dangle loosely as it recoiled in pain. Cole pressed his advantage, coming around the tree and smashing the arm again as the creature raised it to block, and then dipping out from a swipe that would have disemboweled him before driving back in and bringing both clubs against the thing's upper arm and elbow on the other side.

The bark man might have been fast, but Cole was still faster, thanks to the speed bonus he got from his first level-up. And close-in fights were all about keeping the initiative, keeping the pressure up, and not giving your opponent the chance to fight on their own terms. If the monster were smarter, it would never have picked him up and thrown him, giving him space to regroup. It would have pounced on his back, pinned him down, and eviscerated him. Cole wouldn't make the same mistake.

Now that he had the advantage, he wasn't giving this motherfucker an inch of leeway. He could feel the increased celerity from the Lewis Field hastening his movements, and his sharp eyes caught every twitch and telegraph. He kept the pressure up, dropping beneath the claws again to smash a steel cap into the side of its knee, causing the creature to buckle.

When it stumbled forward, he brought the other club up against the bottom of its jaw, shattering teeth and cutting off the constant shrieking from its alien vocal chords. The next blow fell on the top of its already shattered head, sending up a cloud of spores, but forcing the creature down further, exposing its back.

Cole lifted his foot and stomped, driving the creature down into the dirt before swinging his clubs over and over, breaking its arms, shattering its knees, and leaving it completely incapable of moving under its own power. Orange goo oozed from abrasions all over it and dripped from the steel sleeves of his clubs. Panting and heaving with exertion, he finally stepped away from the fungus creature—who was still trying to stand.

His arms were like heavy iron bars, and his fingers had long-since cramped up from gripping the sticks as they sent shocks back up through his own bones. Stumbling away, he recovered the rifle that he'd dropped. The magazine still had several of the bladed rounds in it, so he brought it back with him to the wooden fungal man.

"Bets on where your brain is?" he mused.