Blanket of Black Mold

I feel healthy. Like I finally have plenty of room to breath and grow. I’ve become my own ecosystem, feeding on an environment spanning across what are now four desolate towns in an area I understand to be called “England”.

These towns are connected via a series of underground tunnels, where I was able to quickly spread by following the dark paths and feeding on the bags of white powder and squirming meat in wooden crates lining the dirt walls. A small piece from my main body was unknowingly transported by a scared businessman’s failed attempt at an escape from the nearby city. This city was targeted as the man’s latest business venture in expanding his mining operation, and while fleeing at the sight of my apocalyptic takeover, passed by a section of my body embedded in a gravel road where a new batch of dispersed spores attached to ride along.

My reproduction at that point was inevitable after accumulating the necessary energy from rooting in lampposts, streets, and buildings, coating everything in the black fuzz that is my body. People ran in panic, breathing me into their lungs, collapsing on the sidewalks where their dead bodies became a part of me as I continued to feed.

My branches extending out into the city stem from a central point housing my consciousness. A small building, home to the local newspaper where the chief editor became contaminated by touching that morning’s edition with a new front page he hadn’t approved, but harbored more of my spores. He arrived at work to find his assistant dead under my original blanket of black mold, stretching across the room and over the printing press in search for more nourishment. Wondering what was clinched in the assistant’s hand, the chief carefully reached out and plucked what he found to be the mockup for the new front page of that day’s paper, detailing information the chief was startled to read, and upset to learn was real.

As the assistant editor watched me blossom from patches in his skin, eating him from the inside out, realizing he was not going to live, he used his final moments to explain in writing the origin of all this. Before birthing me as a sentient being, I existed as a clump of cells within his body. Before emerging as a full organism, I grew from the internal conflict he felt about sharing what he’d witnessed that night, knowing it might not have been real.

The assistant editor had left for work late that night from an opium den, putting the value of getting high above making sure the next day’s newspaper is printed on time. While smoking on his pipe, he thinks he recognizes the man across the room, but in this drug induced state, he can’t be sure it’s him. He looked like that new man in town, the one promising the impoverished steady work and steady pay. He looked like that new man in town, the one vying for the permission to set up a new branch for his mining company. If it is that new man in town, his company was a ruse. Those tunnels weren’t made for mining, they were made for smuggling because the assistant editor sees this man across the room dealing drugs and prostituting kids.