Micro

“If the rescue effort fails, the reward for each of you will be one share of Nanigen ground-floor stock. When Nanigen goes public, a single share will be worth at least a million dollars. Get it?”

The men just looked at him with eyes as flat as the parking lot.

But they got it. He was sure of that.

“You’re venture capitalists now,” Drake said, slapping Telius on the shoulder as he left.

The rain ended as quickly as it had begun. A steamy golden glow filled the forest as the clouds broke, and the water quickly receded as the rivulets emptied, and the rain ran off into the stream that drained the Manoa Valley. They had lost a lot of their gear, scattered by the water. And Jenny had disappeared. They collected themselves together in a group, and when everyone was accounted for, they spread out looking for their gear and, most of all, for Jenny. They went downhill, following the water flow, using the two headset radios to keep in touch.

“Jenny! Are you there? Jenny!” they shouted, but there was no answer and no sign of her.

“I found the harpoon,” Rick said. It hadn’t traveled far. His darts had been in a plastic case inside his duffel bag, and the bag turned up wedged against a stone. Even the chinaberry was found, underneath the edge of a leaf, glowing yellow.

Karen King moved along with a sense of dread as they searched for Jenny Linn. She was shaking; she had seen the look on Jen’s face when she went down that last time.

The worst horrors are the human ones. What had Jenny seen?

Then Karen spotted something pale, soft, draped under a twig. A human hand. She had found Jenny. Her body was pinned under the twig, crushed and oddly twisted, and speckled with mud, with the forsaken look of the drowned, her broken arm flung akimbo and contorted like a wet rag. Jen’s eyes were open, vacant. Her body was covered with spaghetti-like threads, which crisscrossed and draped her like a veil. They were threads of fungus, already beginning to grow.

Karen knelt by the body and pulled a thread from Jen’s face, and closed Jen’s eyes, and wept.

The others gathered around. Rick found himself weeping, and it embarrassed him. He tried to control his tears, but it didn’t work. Peter put his arm around Rick, and Rick shook him off.

“I tried so hard,” Danny said, and cried. “I just couldn’t save her.”

Erika enfolded Danny in her arms. “You are a brave man, Danny. I never realized it until now.”

There was a creaking sound. The veil of fungus threads that covered Jen’s body seemed to twitch.

“What was that?” Erika said…and her eyes widened with horror as she saw a thread of fungus bend and wave, like a crooked finger, and the tip of the thread touched Jen’s skin. It went in through the skin, making a scratchy sound, piercing the body, probing for nutrients. The fungus veil had already begun to consume the body. Erika cringed, and stood up.

Peter spoke. “We need to bury her-quickly.”

Using the harpoon and the machetes, they hacked apart the soil. It was soft and rich, and alive with small creatures moving and squirming. The soil was almost a living organism in its own right. The only nonliving thing was seemingly Jenny. They lowered her into the grave they’d dug, and crossed her arms over her chest, arranging the broken arm. They tried to clear the fungus off her, but the threads had tightened, clamping themselves to the body, penetrating it everywhere.

Erika Moll wept uncontrollably. Peter cut a part of a petal from a fallen hibiscus flower lying on the ground, and he laid the piece of petal over Jenny like a white shroud. It covered the activity of the fungus beneath it.

Then Erika suggested that they say a prayer. She wasn’t a religious person, at least she didn’t think she was, but she had been raised a Catholic, and had been taught by nuns in a nursery school in Munich. The nuns had taught her how to say the twenty-third Psalm in German. “Der Herr ist mein Hirte,” Erika began, haltingly, trying to remember it.

Peter picked it up in English: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…

“Magical incantations,” Danny commented. “The words have no reference to so-called ‘reality,’ but possibly they help us in a psychological way. I suspect praying stimulates primitive parts of the brain. Actually, it even makes me feel a little better.”

Then they piled soil on top of Jenny. The body would not last long, and would soon be consumed by the fungus and nematode worms; it would be digested by bacteria, and devoured by the soil mites that crawled everywhere. Soon there would be no trace of Jenny Linn left in the soil, her remains swallowed and recycled, her body returned to the bodies of other creatures. In the micro-world, no sooner had life ended than it became life again.

Afterward, Peter gathered the group, and spoke to them, trying to rally their spirits. “Jenny wouldn’t want us to give up. She went on bravely. We can honor her by looking to our own survival now.”