The hotels still towered, along the shoreline, the concrete chipped and crumbling, most of the glass shattered and swept away, but the steel mostly intact. They were stable. The bizarre thing is, after all that happened, people were still walking round with that sense of entitlement they had in the past. Like the world owed them something. I guess it’s what made places like this thrive still: peoples’ refusal to change. Can’t complain though. I work hard and I get a ‘home’ to stay in and a ‘wage’, in the meals I eat, and a little more they total and I can trade in. And every so often you get a day off.

It wasn’t often you got to swim in the sea anymore, but the water was so blue; it was one of the few things that hadn’t really changed and lost its attraction in this now-ugly world. I say ugly, but it didn’t really get any better. This was the resort in the part of the city that was still protected, inside the walls.

Just my luck. I swam as fast as I could back for the shore, but you know, people just weren’t used to it anymore.

The bite didn’t hurt at first, just a brief sensation like handful of needles being pulled from your skin. A little blood seeped from each of the holes left behind, but the air quickly dried them off. I lay on the shingle beach, mostly made of the splintered and smashed concrete, panting. I could hear the life-guards, each on the end of their pier, shooting at it, as the rest of the tourists realised what was happening and fled out of the purity of the water. Sometimes the sharks didn’t let go. I’d been lucky.

It was true what they’d been saying, the whispers on the wind: the attacks had been getting more frequent. Something was forcing them out of their usual waters, and further towards the warmer climes.

The dappled tingle began to grow, soon burning and swelling, the muscle spasms flitting from my elbow in both directions along my arm. I needed help.

There was a hospital about fifteen minutes from the shore walking, but I was there in less than ten. No ambulances anymore, I just had to run. My knees were grazed now, from the handful of times my legs had given way, but help was finally within reach. The hallucinations had started to get more severe. I blinked and found myself on a stretcher, belted around the waist to keep me from falling.

I blinked again, my eyelids moving in slow-motion, my gaze meeting with that of a balding, black doctor. His smile reassured that I’d be alright.

“You’ll be alright: we’ll get you fixed up.” His mouth blurred these words to me. I blinked again, my focus shifting towards a woman, through the metal shutter-blind beyond a cracked glass window. She had straight brown hair, curling inwards towards its shoulder-length ends, and calm, reassuring eyes. Something about that face, those eyes, that smile, was disconcerting. Those eyes. I blinked again.

I was in a makeshift operating theatre now, with three needles in my arm. An almost clear liquid coursed through the rubber tubes connecting them to plastic packs, tied with twine to a coat rack. The same doctor held my arm upright, the swelling much reduced now.

“You might feel nauseous for a little while” He said, “but the damage shouldn’t be permanent. You’re probably the luckiest we’ve had all month for that.”

He gestured towards my work-pass and shirt on the table, neatly folded, and opened his mouth to speak, before a commotion in the corridor rumbled past. Stretchers, and nurses in a blast of noise; a second doctor leant through the open door, clutching the wooden frame as though to fight the current dragging him.

“Hurry, explosion, help,” were the only words he’d managed to knock from his lungs before being dragged away.

“I have to go. Just leave when you’re ready. Pop back in a few days to let us know how you are.” And with that, he was gone. Thirty minutes later, so was I, heading straight home.

I was preparing for work three days later. My shirt over my head, a banging rattled my small room, unsettling dust from the fissures in the ceiling. Again: a thumping at my door, accompanied by a muffled yelling.

I answered to the swept-away doctor, his face distraught, eyes under-shadowed. He was looking away, down the corridor, and took a second to stop his hand pounding the now empty space. His stare locked to mine without hesitation.

“Did she have eyes?”

“What?”

“Her eyes, you saw them?”

“Who?”

“The woman behind the glass”

“I saw them”

“Are you sure?”

I blinked, and for the second my eyes closed, the woman appeared before me. Hollow eye-sockets cried from a grieving face, silent behind the glass. Only the words “help me” lip-spoken from her down-arched pain-snagged mouth rang clear. I knew then I was in trouble.

“No. I can’t be sure. Why?” I reached a hand to, guide the panicked man inside, and withdrew it as he flinched away.

“You need to leave. Something bad is happening here. Or about to happen. We all need to leave, but you especially.”

The man handed me a pack, mostly emptied, but weighed down and sagging with a few label-less food tins, some overripe fruit, and a loaded gun.

“You’ll need this,” his eyes darted along the corridor again, “I’ll be leaving in an hour through East Gate 3, and if you’re still here, be there. But you really shouldn’t be. Go now.”

Something echoed in that man’s eyes. I knew he was serious.

I asked him again, “Why?”

“That woman was his wife. Not the first and definitely not the last. You were going to be next. But not the last.”

On these words, a jolt in his expression brought him the realisation that he was still human, and still in danger. He snatched and shook my hand, and reminded me: East Gate 3, in one hour. I never intended to go that way, but I’d planned for the day I would leave the city, and now it was here.

I opened the pack, and emptied the contents, replacing them with my sleeping bag, and whatever clothes I wasn’t going to leave wearing, before putting the tins back in, and the gun in my pocket. I pulled my jacket down over the hilt of my new pistol, and slung the now sufficiently padded bag on my bag. I grabbed the can of spray paint from by my door as I left.

I headed north, into the forest, past skeletons of trees, some beginning to shoot and flourish into new life. The grit and loose mud-rubble became more stone and shale-slag as I moved further into the hills, my feet sweating in my shoes. I didn’t see anyone for at least the first three days I spent hopping between empty houses, and abandoned homesteads. All the people from anywhere nearby had flocked into the city once the wall was finished anyway.

The fourth day almost done, I came across a simple plank-boarded house, without a marked door. I gently pressed open the door, stepped inside, and met with the first of them. We’d all heard about the ‘ceps’, been told the stories as children that if we stayed out too late, or misbehaved, we’d get caught up on and get caught. They never really told us what to expect though.

They stood there, almost stark naked, only the tattered remains of rotting clothing was stuck-hung from the hard to digest elastics and plastics. Their paled, dying skin bulged, half bloated and half desiccated, segmented by the black mycelia, almost oozing from each of the recesses where flesh had been eaten underneath. They remained motionless, loosely huddled, maybe for warmth, or some other primal need; they were no longer human in any sense of the word, save for their shape, and their face, and their eyes, black and staring, but still white around the edges of their pupils. It seemed this was the only part of them which the fungus didn’t take. They stood still as I, waiting for any movement. Nothing. Maybe they hadn’t seen me, despite facing exactly the direction I’d entered. One shuffled left and right, feet squelching and sodden, before settling silent again. An unmarked door was shut, on the other side of the room. I could edge round, and make it. Besides I had a gun.

You weren’t meant to kill them tough, just do what it takes to get away without getting touched. As soon as they were dead, the real metamorphosis began. It took only a few days for the enzymes already slowly breaking up the flesh and bone, to multiply and finish their job. All that was left was a sorry, mushy bag of skin, filled with a slowly digesting soup of organs and bone, the white and black eyes still watching, like some kind of vigilant stoppers holding it all in. After that the fruiting bodies would grow. Sprouting from any weak points in the skin, or focal points of the mycelial growth, they’d reach about head height in a few hours and wait. No-one really knew how they’d sense you were there, heat, or sound, or just your footsteps trembling through the floorboards, but as soon as you were close enough they’d bloom, spreading their spores over every nearby surface, including you. That’s how they got in, after all: through your eyes. Cordyceps, they’d called it after something from the past, but that took too long to say, so just ‘ceps’.

I took a step into the room, and heard a sound behind the open door.

“Shhh.” Just a hushed whisper, “They’re sleeping, or something.”

I turned to see two men, one built but slender, and another more rotund, scrawling furiously into a notebook made from bleached newspaper, glancing up every second, before continuing.

“We’re looking for a cure” said the taller of the two.

I asked if they’d been through the door to the rear of the room yet. They said they hadn’t. It led to some stairs, and some supplies, a few tins of food, and some clear water in sealed bottles. I headed back down with these spoils, to find the two cure-searchers outside. I turned to close the door behind us, and caught the eyes of one of the creatures. Maybe they’d been a family, or maybe they’d been travellers looking for food and supplies but something in those eyes, some pain or longing left behind, compelled me to stop.

“Thanks,” I whispered under my breath, pulling the door closed. I took my spray-paint, and marked the door, with the same mushroom symbol I’d seen on other now empty houses: a semicircle, flat edge down, and a stalk underneath. A warning to others, of what lay within. Underneath, a diagonal cross, to signal there was nothing of value left inside.

I offered the fair share of the supplies I’d taken to the others, both of which politely refused. Their reasoning, they said, was that they’d take it when they needed it, and that I was sticking with them. Safety in numbers, I supposed, as we travelled on.