Earlier
By the time they found Steve in the mansion's basement, Steve was gone. The splash of skull-matter on the wall had curdled into paste, but the flesh and bone had knit back together, seamless. Still, there was nothing human left in the kid—just pure animal rage. Steve watched them, his pupils thin slits, the sclerae red from a dozen burst capillaries. He snarled and gnashed his sharp, too-big-for-his-mouth teeth, and nearly tore a chunk out of Jill's neck when she'd made the mistake of straying too close; but a net of slick, black tendrils caught Steve around the arms and legs, reeled him back and stuck him to the wall, and held him there. Someone was looking out for her.
"Ashford's not controlling those things," Jill said aloud, watching Steve ripping at the sundew-things with his shark-teeth, only to have the tendrils grow back thicker, tackier. "She wouldn't be restraining him like this."
"Then who is it?" demanded Chris.
Jill shook her head. Doesn't fucking matter, we're too late. Beside her, Claire was watching Steve with an inconsolable look, tears pricking her eyes. "He's gone," said Jill. "Mutated. And clearly shooting him isn't gonna put the poor kid outta his misery." Steve's body had swollen with muscle, his skin tinged a putrid greenish-gray color and webbed with dark bleed-lines of varicose veins. Jill added, "Someone already tried." She pointed at the mess on the wall. "His brains are on the goddamn wall."
"We have to do something," said Claire, turning to her. She wiped her pink, wet eyes on the back of her wrist. "Jill, we can't just leave him like this."
"Shooting him in the head didn't do anything, Goober," said Chris, slipping an arm across her shoulders and pulling her into his side. "We can't stay here."
"He'll… when the facility blows, it'll be over for him," said Jill, because it was the only comforting thing she could think to say without outright lying to Claire. She put her hand on Claire's arm. "Come on," she said, gently. "We gotta go."
Claire gazed at Steve for a moment, then nodded. She slid out from under Chris's arm, and slipped from the room without a word.
As they stepped into the basement hallway, Jill froze when she heard an agonized shriek. It almost sounded human, like a man in unfathomable pain. She put her hand up: wait. Chris and Claire waited behind her. Down the hallway, the shadows resolved into the hulking shape of something that might have been a man once. Donald McNally.
Donald's body had mutated to the point that his size had quickly outpaced the growth of his skin, and in several places, his skin was torn and shredded, muscle and bone glittering wetly underneath the tatters of his coveralls. Half his face was mangled, ripped to pieces, and his eyes bulged obscenely, as if slowly being squeezed out of his skull. His lips had been skinned away, mouth frozen in a permanent, bloody skull-grin.
"Where is Ashford?" the Donald-thing snarled, hands the size of platters pressing against the walls as he heaved his considerable bulk forward. His bones, Jill decided, were probably struggling to support the immense weight of his body against the perpetual push of gravity, or they'd been crushed, and had awkwardly healed, at some point. Something tumbled from a torn pocket on what was left of his coveralls as he maneuvered toward them, but Donald didn't seem to notice it, his feral gaze fixed on them.
"Shit," said Jill, pulling her gun and training it on the creature. She wasn't sure how they were going to get past Don to reach the stairs; he was so big that he took up the whole of the hallway, like a giant wall of meat. Bigger they are, the harder they… Jill aimed, squeezed the trigger, unloading half her mag into the guy's right kneecap. McNally threw his head back, something in his neck giving way with a loud, visceral crunch, and howled in agony.
Claire and Chris followed her lead, unloading their guns into Donald's legs until the asshole doubled over and pitched headlong to the floor with a wail, his kneecaps reduced to grapefruit pulp. The three of them ran, vaulting over him—and Jill snapped up the thing he'd dropped and bolted for the stairs.
McNally didn't stay down for long, though. Jill could hear him hauling himself toward the stairs, unwinding a spool of expletives, a low, inhuman pitch to his voice that reminded her of Hollywood demons. Although Donald couldn't move as quickly or as readily as they could, he still hobbled along fast enough that Jill considered it problematic.
When they reached the mansion foyer, Jill locked the gate (it was a large gate on the back of the main stairwell) with the keycard she'd gotten from Steve. The gate wouldn't hold Donald long, she knew, but maybe it would hold him long enough that, if they moved fast, it would buy them enough time to leave the mansion without further confrontation—although Jill didn't relish the idea of going back that way again.
" Grayson."
The voice—Alexia's, he realized—came over him like apophenia. His hand, he noticed, was glued to the wall, lost under a tacky, black layer of Mold. The shapes swimming in his vision resolved themselves into Alexia's face. She was watching him with a mix of fear and fascination.
"Grayson, what are you doing?" she asked.
Helping people, I think. He peeled his hand off the wall; it came away like something being peeled off fly-tape. "Not sure," he answered, honestly. "I saw—they found Steve." His head throbbed, felt like a zit ready to burst. "Did… did my eyes change?"
"Yes," said Marigold, just ahead of them. They were standing in a hallway of the mansion, the wainscoting webbed with hyphae. Grayson couldn't remember ever moving from the room in which he and Alexia had awakened. "You lost yourself for a moment, dear," she said to him, a maternal edge in her tone. She looked paler, sicker, than before, and she was leaning very carefully on Alfred.
"It's the Mold," said Alexia, frowning. "His connection to it is becoming stronger. To the point he won't soon need a client to access the network—to continue with the computer analogy, for simplicity's sake." She looked back at Marigold, then said, "We need to get him out of proximity to the mycorrhiza, or he might lose himself in the Mold, so to speak."
"All the more reason to reach this bloody safe-room and leave ," groused Alfred.
"We need to go to my brother's old study," said Marigold, and before anyone could ask why, she and Alfred were already pacing ahead.
Grayson looked at Alexia. "'Lose myself in the Mold,'" he repeated, furrowing his brow. He wasn't stupid, and was relatively sure he knew what she'd meant; but Grayson wanted a confirmation, for her to say it.
"Over time," began Alexia, nudging him to walk alongside her, "those exposed to the Mold become stretched a bit too thin—until the tension breaks, and there's nothing left but shreds. The Mold does that to the people connected to it. Like data that slowly corrupts over time."
"So the longer I'm exposed to it, the less myself I am," he said.
Alexia nodded. "I can't speak, however, if the effects are the same with the infected's physical body." She studied him, watching with her pale eyes. "And the Mold doesn't affect everyone the same. You're a unique case, given your control over it—because of your parentage." Alexia paused for a moment, as if considering something very carefully. Then, "It's possible your body simply becomes a husk, and your mind is simply sent adrift across the mutamycete's network."
"That sounds fucking horrible," he said, frowning.
"It's only a possibility," she reminded him, gently. "Nothing is certain—least of all for you, my darling."
