Decay exists as an extant form of life

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  It is to my great pride and joy that I grabbed, primed, and aimed a bomb before the second “sentence” left the thing emerging from the lack.

  Hello I’m here You’re here and I’m your Friend

  But… I don’t throw it. I can’t.

  It’s my friend.

  “What… what the fuck?”

  I turn to stare at Jay, his eyes wide, his hands empty of grenade, the knife starting to fall slack.

  “Fucking run!” I yell, shoving him back-

  And curse as he starts running not toward the door, but to the side, as if torn between the shove and running towards the figure rising from the lake.

  “No, you need to-”

  To what?

  It’s safe with me I’ll protect you its not scary here

  There’s danger here. I’m panicking for a reason. I am, I know I am, and that reason is-

  Three people here. Me, Jay, and our friend. There’s mold, in all of the darkness, the shadows, the thing that I felt on the other side of the building? What is it?

  I’m afraid.

  I’m-

  I’m holding my grenade. It’s here, in my hand, and I was ready to throw it, and I haven’t, because…

  Come here it’s safe here you’ll be safe just come here it’s secure its hidden its-

  My ears are ringing, like tinnitus turned up to eleven, roaring through my head. A voice that isn’t a voice, a voice that’s wrong, it’s like- it’s like the others. The others that-

  What others?

  There’s three people here. Me, Jay, and my friend-

  I turn to Jay, I try to ask a question, but it dies in my throat, a breath unreleased. What- what was I going to ask? I trust Jay. Jay is my friend. I trust my friend. I-

  Jay. He’s stumbling, as confused as I am. He’s in distress. He’s worried. He’s looking at me, looking at my friend, looking at- stumbling. Stepping towards our friend-

  Our.

  We… do we have mutual friends? We don’t hang out in each other’s social group much, do we? Do we have one? I sure as shit don’t, not outside of work, but Jay must. I-

  Thump-thump.

  An interruption.

  Thump-thump.

  My heartbeat.

  Her heartbeat.

  A pulse, beating a rhythm, like a drum. Thump-thump, thump-thump, loud and strident, louder than it should be. I wasn’t- was I running? Was I panicked?

  My heart beats so hard that I feel it against my ribcage.

  Don’t listen it’s safe it’s with me I’m here it’s safe-

  Don’t listen.

  Heartbeat.

  Thump-thump. Repeated, insistent, making demands, sending little shocks through my body that make me want to move, make me want to breathe, make me awake. It’s like when you remember you’re breathing, the way that it suddenly takes up room in your mind, and it pushes the other thoughts away, distracts me for just a moment.

  Focus.

  Something is wrong here, and I can see it. I can.

  I came here with Jay. I walked in here with two knives, one for me, one for Jay. I gave Jay a grenade.

  Jay is my friend.

  I came in here with my friend.

  My friend wasn’t waiting in here for me. Nothing was in here. It was empty, except for me, and Jay, and the mold, and-

  I turn to look, catching sight of Jay out of the corner of my eye, shaking his head as he staggers towards-

  Look.

  Look.

  GLIMPSE BEYOND HAS GROWN

  It looks human.

  It likely was human, at some point. Just as mortal and mundane as the rest of the creatures we’ve seen, taken over by the mold, made into something else. Whoever it used to be is dressed for work, only its torso out of the water, wearing a long-degraded high-vis vest and fish-eaten shirt, the remains of a hard-hat still strapped around its “neck”. The body is bloated, swollen with sea-life and the softness of decay, such that it looks obese, draped over itself like clay.

  Where there once were eyes, now there is only mold. Grey-on-grey, not death, but life of death- and it’s looking at me, those empty eyes and expressionless, slack-jawed clay face looming out of the water.

  “Jay, get down!”

  I hesitate exactly long enough to see him register my words, see my upraised hand, and duck.

  I let the grenade loose.

  The idea of a bomb is simple- make something unstable in such a way that it breaks outwards. This can be achieved through many forms and with many materials- the most common, in the modern age, being gunpowder.

  I don’t have gunpowder. I had to get creative with it.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  The grenade arcs past where Jay has ducked down, out past the edge of the open doorway, but my aim is shit. It only barely clears the lip into the water, ending up a good six feet away from the friendly mold. I start fumbling for a second one as it lifts itself out of the water a bit higher, exposing more moldy flesh and starting to whisper louder-

  The sound is like a dozen whips cracking at the same time, mixed with a sound like tearing fabric. One second, the lumber mill is strangely intact, as if preserved against any and all effects, and the next, the edges of the doors to the water are peppered with little splinters, fragments of chicken bone launched as shrapnel through the air.

  The corpse isn’t quite so lucky. The muscles I wrapped tight enough to hurt, and then pinned in place with the bones, unwound all at once, violently, and stretched out in a way I’m pretty sure isn’t usually possible, tearing strips of old clothing and soggy corpse-flesh off of the creature. I keep hearing the whispers anyways, an ongoing thing that isn’t interrupted even as wormy, off-colored intestines slip free from the torn-open stomach- but it does shift backwards, its “face” orienting towards me as it falls over back into the water.

  “Jay, we’re going, we are fucking running this way!”

  He doesn’t hesitate- whether it’s the sound of the grenade or the panic in my voice, he picks me over the influence, overcoming it to sprint back into the dark towards the doorway we came in from. I’m hot on his heels, but he’s skinnier and faster than I am, overtaking me even from his start closer to the water.

  HELLO HELP ME IT’S SAFE PROTECT YOU FIND FRIENDS

  The voice is louder now, like a shriek instead of a whisper. I can still feel that tinnitus ringing, my heart pumping, but they don’t drown out the noise of that thing calling. Briefly, the thought flashes through my head if this is how deep-sea fish feel, experiencing the brightness of an anglerfish’s lure- their instincts subverted to bring them into the jaws of a hungering predator.

  I hear water slosh messily over the lip of the logging bay, and decide that I can theorize later.

  The shadows feel alive in a very different way now. The mold, previously a static thing, is writhing, squirming like fat caterpillars in overlong bodies, furry and alive. I feel it against my shoes, the ground roiling, trying to trip me, make me stumble or fall.

  But it’s… surprisingly easy to get away. The ground is unstable, but not enough to throw me off my feet directly, and judging from the sloshing I can hear over my shoulder, it’s taking a while for the corpse to get up.

  I pass Jay, wondering if this thing is just a sort of ambush-

  I turn and hit the brakes hard enough to make something in my angle yell in protest, reaching out to grab for Jay. He’s looking around as if confused, his gaze darting from the figure crawling up onto the mill floor and me.

  “Ilia? I… why are we running? We need to-”

  “We need to get out!” I grab his shoulder, gripping the jacket and yanking him my way. “Come on!”

  He grabs back at me, shakes off my arm. “Don’t grab me! It’s- it’s someone in trouble, shouldn’t we stop to help?”

  “I-”

  Wait. That’s not what it sounds like to me at all.

  “What do you mean? Who needs help?”

  “Wha- him! He’s fucking half-drowned, we have to-”

  No time for explanations. I punch him in the boob as hard as I can.

  “OW! Ilia, what the fuck?”

  “Focus on me. You’re pushing through, but it’s still got you. It’s saying what you want to hear so that it can feed on you, just like with the rat and the spider. We need to go, now.”

  I can see the way that the words hit his head and stick, but I can also tell the moment that the whispering starts to get to him again, burying the sense beneath the siren-call of the corpse-mold. The other voices, the other lures, they talked about warmth, food, comfort, but this one seems tailored. I’m hearing things about friends, safety, protection- and Jay, apparently, is hearing someone who needs help.

  That… doesn’t quite fit the theme, but he can deal with that in therapy later. Right now, priority is getting him out.

  Which… yeah, fuck it.

  I pull out my second grenade.

  “Woah, WAIT-”

  He hesitates, torn between tackling me and jumping the fuck away from the live explosive. It’s all I need to pull the pin and throw.

  This one is worse than the last. It hits the floor way too early, bounces at an awkward angle, and makes me wonder if I should need to practice one of the most basic, fundamental human evolutions or just curl up and die of cringe- but it goes off without a hitch.

  One bounce, two, and then the bone-pins are far enough out that the whole thing unravels, throwing shrapnel in all directions and whipping strands of meat out hard enough to cut gouges into the floor. They cut just as easily into the corpse-mold, veins of the stuff splattering grey and off-white ooze from where they’re torn apart, and their lure fares just as badly. I see the loose, floppy skin of the corpse’s shins tear open, hamstrings and semi-functional ligaments snapping like old rope as it falls to the ground.

  The sound it makes as it collapses is wet, exhausted, like hearing wet gelatin hit a wall.

  But it keeps moving.

  The roiling of the mold pushes it forward, shifts its body so that it’s being pushed even as it drags itself forward. The mouth lols open, and the smell that pours out is like water that’s gone still, that’s been left still so long it has grown whole worlds in it, and-

  YOU WILL BE PROTECTED WITH ME

  And I stop.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  What if…

  It doesn’t seem very strong. It doesn’t even seem particularly threatening, the way it is now, oozing like a slug, like a gargantuan snail from the depths coming towards us. The eyes of the corpse stare at me, and it’s not my friend, it was never my friend, but-

  But what? How could it protect me?

  Could it?

  This is what it does. This is how it gets you, the way it finds what you want and promises it, whisper-screams it in my ears and in my nose and my mouth and eyes and behind my eyes, where I try to think-

  There’s a heartbeat, but it’s faint, it fades into the background with the sound of my thinking. I… I came here to get something from this. I got a sample already. What if I take a piece with me?

  That’s… actually doable. I could make something modular, something that could feed the mold while the rest of me stays quarantined. What faster way to study its effects? If I just-

  If I let it change my body. If I just give it permission to touch me.

  The shudder of revulsion that comes with that thought is violent enough I almost drop my bag.

  No.

  Don’t touch her.

  Don’t touch me.

  I really wish I had a gun right now. It would make for a very impactful moment, cocking and unloading it at the end of that little revelation.

  As it stands, I improvise instead, and grab for the third grenade.

  The one in Jay’s pocket.

  He grabs my wrist, his eyes wide- but he looks at me, instead of at the crawling thing. He blinks.

  “I…”

  “It isn’t looking for help, Jay. It wants to use you.”

  He doesn’t move. Just stares at me.

  There’s a second where I think that he’s going to freeze… but then something clicks. Behind his eyes, I see the moment a wheel turns, a weight finally shifts into place.

  He takes the grenade out, pulls the pin, and lobs it directly at the corpse.

  Seriously, it’s like… perfectly centered, the bastard.

  The third and final detonation tears through the tissue all along the corpse’s spine, severing strands of mold that grow out from it onto the ground. Through the hole it makes, I can see bits of bone shot into its inner organs, gouges carved into the pale white of its spinal cord- and I see the wriggling tendrils of mold there, growing out from between its vertebrae. They squirm in the air, like worms dragged up out of the soil.

  And the corpse pulls back.

  Its body undulates, the movement having no need to mimic how the body usually works. It pulls backwards, retreating, still slug-like even as the dead face turns to look at us, limp like a wet mask. The whispers keep going- but Jay grabs hold of my sleeve, digging his nails into his own wrist with the other hand, and stands firm.

  Slowly, it oozes away from us, back towards the water.

  “Well. That’s…”

  Click.

  The door opens behind us.

  Click.

  The heel of a shoe, hitting the floor as someone walks in.

  Jay and I both turn, knives out, pointing towards the door. Jay fumbles his flashlight back on, turning it towards the pitch black of the way we came in- where stands a tall man, wearing a threadbare suit.

  He stands there, covered in dust and bits of mold, decorating his suit with little patches of discoloration. Dark on dark, black-on-grey, his hands resting at his sides the most human part of him. Even then, the nails on them are painted black, as if he’s been digging through soil or through some sort of industrial oil.

  But his face…

  He’s not bloated. Not melting off the bone.

  But his eyes are empty, and in their sockets, I see mold.

  Good afternoon. State your business for transaction purposes. Trespassing is not allowed in the Mill.

  7-8 ish (it's fluctuating with this week's mad dash!) chapters on Patreon and more to come!

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