Damm, stop the van right here, Nara said. Let me contact my superiors and see what we can work out.
You can do that once we arrive at our destination. I dont want any surprises from the Mitsuki Tactical Unit.
As the van closed on the ramp entrance, the crowds blocking its path scattered, revealing those who were beyond scattering. Piles of bodies lay on the ground, both around the entrance and some distance down the ramp where they had been tossed.
The driver revved his engine and shifted into four-wheel to plow through the mounds of obstacles. Beyond the mounds there were no more people, alive or dead, just a long gray, sloping tunnel.
After a few minutes of travel, more red-painted walls appeared in the high beams. This time they were decorated with black and white skulls and crossbones. No security gate blocked their way, just a big sign hanging from the ceiling that warned Slime Zone 100 Yards.
“You can’t take us below condensation level!” Nara protested. “We don’t have biohazard suits.”
“Relax, Jurascik,” Damm said. “We’ve got an environment already prepared and waiting. As long as we arrive there in under seven minutes, no one will die.”
“This is insane.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m counting on.”
Ahead, a dense white fog filled the tunnel. The driver slowed to a crawl. As he entered the cloud, visibility dropped to zero and the air became so heavy it was difficult for Ryan to breathe. When they emerged on the other side of the fog, the heat and humidity jumped off the scale. As sweat squirted from Ryan’s face, he choked on the overwhelming smell of ammonia.
The van’s headlamps lit up the end of the ramp below red walls, gray floor and ceiling turning into a rectangle of pitch-black. As they rolled beyond the foot of the ramp, into a gallery of tremendous width, if not height, the tires made wet, squishing sounds.
The glistening heaps of green-black covered everything.
Bulging masses of it clung to the walls; it hung in colossal drapes from the roof, and between the green on the ground, and the green swaying from the ceiling, airspace was at a premium.
“What is that shit?” Ryan asked.
“It’s the only fellow traveler on the planet that we haven’t found a way to kill,” Damm said.
“It’s cyanobacteria, genetically tailored to function in low levels of light,” Nara told Ryan. “We’ve relied on it for food production for a decade, since our other forms of agriculture collapsed. Three years ago, the bacteria got out of control. After it escaped from the processing plants, it spread through all the megacities and we’ve had to abandon huge areas to it.”
“People, too,” Damm said. “Sealed them off behind concrete walls trying to stop the spread. Didn’t do any good, though. The stuff eventually eats right through concrete. The only thing that kept it from taking over Gloomtown and the CEO level was the condensation layer we passed through back there. Above that, the climate’s not optimum for agrobacteria.”
Ryan watched a world of green slide by. The van slushed and wallowed through drifts that were four-foot-deep in places. There were no other signs of life. “Pretty deadly, huh?” he said.
“Unprotected out there,” Damm said, “you would grow a nice, furry green coat in about half an hour. You would vanish from sight shortly thereafter. Of course you wouldn’t notice it because you’d already be long dead. We can breathe the concentrated spores for only a few minutes before lung and heart damage begins. After that, the bacterial reproduction cycle really kicks off. It’s pretty hard to suck air with twenty pounds of slime packing each lung.”
“After that siren alarm started, a sec man in the first wag coughed his lungs up all over me,” Ryan said. “He didn’t have anything green in him that I could see.”
“Different bug,” Damm said. “That was a carniphage. It was developed from a naturally occurring beastie that normally lives in the deep ocean offshore. The species first started showing up in our industrialized salt marshes when I was a kid. Turns out, the carniphage can be either a plant or an animal, depending on the living conditions it finds. It really liked the nitrite pollution from our industrial outflow. Once it was settled in nicely along our coastal shorelines, it started hatching out on a daily basis. And when it hatched out, it killed and ate plants, fish, birds, land animals, everything it came in contact with.