Utterly Mad

     L drew her pistol, a small two shot Catnip knew as a “fastball” and L called her “deringer,” and then hesitated. “Shoot it!” Catnip cried, snatching up a heavy pry bar laying nearby. The scorpion seemed to hear them, and tried to turn. “I can’t Nip, it might-” The scorpion showed what it might do by suddenly shivering, causing itself to erupt in a cloud of dark grey dust. L screamed, “Mycus! Mycus! Mycus!” and skipped back. A breeze caught the cloud of spores and whiffed it away, revealing the charging scorpion, tail up, claws bared. “Shoot it!” Cat cried again, catching a bit of the panic being exuded by the Misling. The scorpion came on, claws snapping at L, who did little more than shriek in what Catnip saw as unreasonable horror. In truth, L was nearly out of her mind with terror. Catnip didn’t know it, but the creature before her was infested with the greatest threat the lands west of the rockies knew.

     Catnip swung her bar, making hard contact with one huge claw and cracking the unnaturally softened chitin. A small puff of dust flew from the surface of the over sized insect, and the tendrils on it’s back seemed to reach for her. L next cry was one of angry dismay, and the next sound from her direction was the sound Catnip hoped to hear; a pair of gunshots. The first shot found it’s home in one swollen grey eye, while the second simply struck at an odd angle and glanced off. The thing simply ignored the damage to it’s eye and spun on Catnip, trying to sting her. The tail was fast, and Catnip was barely faster. She rolled and dropped her improvised cudgel, taking up instead the remains of a car door which she placed between she and it. The tail came in again and again, trying to inject not poison, but the filthy grey ick that had supplanted it. The scorpion was driven on by the malignant growth in it’s body, driven to spread the otherworldly fungal bloom, infest other creatures with it. The scorpion's tail struck the door again, and this time it came through the window and missed the ratling by inches. It was fortunate that the tail then hooked on the window frame, but unfortunate that the scorpion shivered again at that moment. Another billowing cloud of grey dust, stinking unpleasantly of mold and decay, consumed Catnip. It burned her lungs until the breeze cleared it, and she saw that the scorpion was having difficulty dislodging the door. Kyle had emerged and was racking the sawed off mossberg he’d brought along from the truck. He fired once, twice, and three times. With each shot, the scorpion jerked and catnip saw the thick grey soup of it’s blood fly. With the third, the infested scorpion simply lay in the sand, and died. “Is it-” Catnip began to ask, wanting to know if it was dead, when suddenly the scorpion’s back bloated out, and burst, disgorging about a dozen small grey balloon like things. Kyle fired at them, reloading thrice and blowing each one away in a puff of thick moldy smoke.

     “Well, that was exciting. I guess I need a-” Catnip started, but L tackled her to the ground. “Ohgodohgodohgod!” She said, the words streaming from her like vomit, “KYLE! KYLE!” Kyle didn’t need to be called, he sprinted to the cab of the truck he’d been trapped in and grabbed his bag, then hastily brought it to L. She dumped the contents out and seized a plastic bag of grainy white powder. Catnip struggled against her, and she swore. “IT’S FOR YOUR GOOD CATNIP! EAT IT! EAT IT YOU BITCH! I’M SORRY!” The stuff was foul and dry and L was dumping it down her throat while Kyle held her mouth open. For good measure, L also downed a handful, as did Kyle. They let her go, and Catnip scooted away from them on her butt, spitting and sputtering, “What the fuck!? Why-” Kyle stopped her, gently, and tried to explain, while L tried her best to curl up and look small, some past trauma now plainly visible in her bearing. “Mycus Catnip. Don’t you know what Mycus is?” She shook her head slowly, distrustfully. Kyle looked to L skeptically, but there was no help there so he went on. “It’s a fungus… thing. It takes over your body and spreads itself around, invading everything. Everything in the east is covered in it. That’s why no one has been beyond the rockies. I don’t know how you got here Catnip, but if you are telling the truth, then you can’t be here. No one gets through the rockies without succumbing to the Mycus. It completely erases who you are and takes your body. You might as well be dead.” Kyle sat down before making his final point, “I’m sorry we had to force that shit on you Nip, I swear it was for your own good. It’s antifungus from Rat King, it’ll kill the Mycus and keep it from taking hold.” The implication was obvious to Catnip at once. She was far from home and the one thing keeping her away from the farm, her friends, and her Kathrine, was a mountain of deadly mold. “All of it?” She asked, “there isn’t a way around?”

     Kyle could only shake his head slowly, and L shivered on, reliving memories of a terror too great to detail.