Jeff VanderMeer

Here’s some stuff wot got cut out on the last couple passes through Finch. Frags and jetsam, bobs and weaves. Just not doing its job, really. Had to go.

**

He’d cut across a couple neighborhoods to get there. The only signs of life from the houses the gray caps had put up. Hostile faces had stared down at him. He’d kept his gun out. On display. Still not quite able to believe people would live in places that breathed. Bliss’s words were still in his thoughts. Still didn’t know what to do with them.

**

Just the color of it provided a terrible contrast to what surrounded them. Mostly stray dogs. A naked child peeking out from a boarded up husk of a house. Next to a shadow Finch hoped was the child’s mother. Later on, the startling sight of vegetable gardens sprouting among torn up cobblestones. Flowering trees that smelled faintly of nectar that had fought their way through the gravel to the light. They saw deer and a small grunting pig-like animal that made Wyte snort in delight. Even some kind of wary brown fox. Here, too, though, obscenely unreal: the food-drug mushrooms. Tall. Thick. Red-capped. In straight rows. Their shadows long against the ground.

**

“Ridiculous profundity,” Dapple said, impressing Finch.

“That means we’re near,” Wyte said. Stood slanted forward, hands in pockets, as if the Quarter called to him. Was pulling him toward it. There was too much under Wyte’s overcoat. Too much by far.

“We can still. Still turn back,” Dapple said.

“Then turn back,” Finch said, disappointed again. “You’re free to go. Tell them hello back at the station.”

“I meant all of us,” Dapple said.

“We’re going forward,” Finch said. Exchanged a glance with Wyte that said, Keep an eye on that one. He’s going to get us killed. Realized Wyte might be happy there was someone along more fucked up than him. In a way.

**

They came finally to a place the wall had failed, split open from the assault. Like a charging army, a confusion of ferns, mushrooms, fungus, and lichen had smashed through. Spilled out onto the street. Thick, green, like a single organism. Dotted with purple-and-white mushroom caps. It was so still. Drenched in sunlight. The fluttering flash of butterfly wings. Sparking dust motes like fireflies. And through the entanglement lay the distant echo, the distant shadows, of cupolas and minarets. Like a dream. Like a trap.

***

Once, Finch had seen a cloud of vermillion spores form in mid-air and settle down over a building. Stretch across its bricks or wood or stone like a second skin, before moving on.

**

Stalling. What to reveal, what to leave out? This was an interrogation. Finch knew that. You put off interrogators by giving them something. Just not everything.

**

Finch turned to the new case notes on his desk. In Blakely’s hand. A domestic dispute. A mugging. Someone had stolen someone else’s food. Someone’s dog had gone missing. A lot of dogs went missing, usually in the days before the red mushrooms let their drug-food fall into the waiting hands of addicts. Amazing how the mundane shit never ended. Not even in the face of impending doom. The city could descend into anarchy tomorrow and he’d still have some little old lady filing a missing persons report on behalf of her pet.

**

Finch pulled the curtain back a sliver. Looked out with one eye shut against the glare. Dazzling sunlight. The grainy gray of the wall, and a curving narrow strip of archway. Showing the street beyond. Weeds between sidewalk tiles. A row of dank, rotting warehouses on the other side. A lone tree, crooked and bare of leaves.

If he had watchers, they’d get impatient after awhile. They’d have to come in closer. Especially if they had another reason.

**

Soon encountered a group of former camp prisoners. Still wearing their uniforms. Some had crutches. A few were bandaged around the head or arms. All thin. Most with that pinched, withdrawn look around the eyes from hunger, stress, or worse. Birthmarks they’d picked up in the camps shone mossy and bright in the final burst of sunlight before dusk. Seeing them pass made him think of the rebel retreat six years ago. Staring ahead to a future they couldn’t imagine. Occupying a city that would’ve been more comfortable if they’d put on street clothes and disappeared into the backdrop.

He fell in behind them to the pop, crackle, and bark of gunfire. From all across the city. Sporadic but sustained. Black smoke swirled and chugged into the sky. Rising above the rooftops.

Grim-looking men and women careened past in forbidden motored vehicles. Armed with everything from pitchforks and kitchen knives to rifles and semi-automatics. Rendered monstrous by their spore masks.

Street battles glimpsed down alleys—Partials in gun battles with ragtag spontaneous militias wearing blue ribbons round their arms. The pop and roar of bullets. Newly minted flyers that urged “the citizens of Ambergris” to rise up against the Rising. Each stamped with the official seal of the Lady in Blue. Whose confusion, Finch wondered, would win out? The gray caps’ or the rebels’?

Peeled away from the camp survivors when they began to veer off toward the southeast end of the bay. Abandoned Bliss’ advice now that it was dark. Irrationally. Took a series of alleys. Came out on Manzikert Avenue.

The apartment building seemed unreal now. Still far enough from the bay that it hadn’t been cordoned off. But the street outside the bodies of those who hadn’t worn gas masks. Slumped. Strewn. Spasming in something between agony and ecstasy. An acrid smell lingered from whatever had poisoned them.

Passed through the double doors. Inside, no one in the corridors. The floor no longer slick. No one on the landings.