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38.
"Yessir," Blake said in response to Lee Collwood's instruction to hunt down the being that had been Henry Morton—or so Collwood claimed—the men were still skeptical but keptt their doubts to themselves. "Okay, you guys, mount up. You heard the man. Flashlights and side arms. Let's move out."
The door rolled up. Bristling with weapons, the van roared out of the garage. Collwood left the door standing open so that starlight could be seen twinkling over the moonless desert dunes. He quickly lost ear contact with the quiet, powerful van. He hoped they had four wheel drive, for they'd need it.
The question on everyone's lips was: How nuts is this guy?
Blake had the driver stop. "Listen, you guys. We're professionals, here to do a professional job. Our employer believes there is a thing out here that looks like his late business partner who gnawed his way out of the trunk of his car. We go find that partner and bring him back. If he tries to eat your hand off, kill him. It's that simple. Got that?"
"Right," they all said. Each was an independent agent hand-picked for this job. They thought highly of Blake, and he thought highly of them or they wouldn't be here.
"So if you were a walking fungus mimicking a man, where would you be right now?" Blake asked.
"This guy have dogs?" a man asked. "He got dogs, we let them loose, and we just follow as they hunt down Mr. Button."
"No dogs," Blake said. "But listen."
They heard a distant sound like laughter—silly, yippity, spilling giggly laughter.
"Coyotes."
"Yeah."
"We let them do the hunting for us."
"Yeah."
"We ditch the van. Blake, can you stay here and play base?"
Blake shook his head. "I want to be in on this." He pointed to a man he thought might make a good second. It was a Chinese named Lo. "You stay here to guard the truck. Watch your back."
"Yeah, boss." Lo was a small but solid guy, wearing a watch cap jammed low. He carried an assault rifle slung over his right arm. He wore a dark wool sweater and black jeans, the kind cut baggy enough at the legs to fit over boots, which he wore also, black engineer boots.
Blake liked the scent of the desert at night, and the promise of the hunt. He'd enjoyed this in Saudi Arabia at an oasis with some royal princes many years ago, hunting lion at night. Nevermind the lion were largely extinct, and game wardens released them for the princes' pleasure. It was still a taste of ancient Arabia. Blake said: "Let's go, guys. Good luck!"
The six men melded into the darkness. There was no moon, but the desert still glowed with reflected ambient light, mostly starlight. They knew their eyes would get used to it. There was precious little to stumble over but some creosote bushes and the like. Sparse, tough vegetation.
Blake wished they were on horseback. Still, it was refreshing, invigorating, and exciting to be tracking at night like this. He liked the smell of the Southern California desert at night, when the day's heat was done, and a cool wind played over the scrub and coaxed wildlife out of their lairs.
"Wish we had dogs," said one man; "this could take a week."
"And horses," another said.
"We'll give it an hour or two," Blake said wisely, "and if nothing turns up, we'll go back and tell Mr. Money we need a chopper and some sniper rifles. That's how I'd do it."
"Yeah," they all said in unison, thinking it a bully idea.
Back at the van, Lo paced slowly on a low ridge above the parked vehicle. From this vantage point, he had a good view of the tops of the dunes for a mile around. Gradually it dawned on him that the brighter night light higher up was impairing his vision of the darker shadows among the dunes flowing around his feet like waves of the sea. The van looked solid and boxy, and he decided to stick with his high vantage point.
Unseen by Lo, the being that had been Henry Morton stepped out of the shadows near the van. It had its hands in its pockets, and seemed to be wearing the clothing Morton had worn in the trunk. It wore a dark suit, a slouchy dark hat, and a white shirt with a dark vest over it. It had on the most absurdly large brown shoes, and it was intently hunting for what it needed. It heard the breathing of the man atop the dune, and stood in the shadows of the van to watch him pace back and forth in the dim light.
Lo paced up and down, hoping the others would come back soon. He had spent a little time in the Libyan desert at one point in his checkered mercenary career, but he considered himself a Taiwan city boy. He'd been selected for urban duty in San Diego, and this desert nomad stuff was like something out of a movie. He didn't like it.
The creature stalking the man on the dune moved slowly and deliberately forward. Suddenly it heard a man speaking.
"Lo, this is Blake. Are you okay?"
"Blake, this is Lo. Bored stiff, but happy. You find our allegedly weird mushroom man?"
"Not a medium rare chance. We'll call it off in another hour."
"Very good."
Was-Morton heard all this and made a great effort to adjust its vocal chords. "Blah," it croaked softly trying to say Blake.
Lo whirled. "Is someone there?" He listened.
"Blah," someone said.
"Blake?"
"Lo, this is Blake."
"Yeah? Where are you?"
"I'm down here by the van."
"I thought you said another hour."
"It is baloney. I'm coming in early. The others will follow."
"Gotcha. Hey, got a cigarette?"
"Yes, right here."
"Be right down. Hold your fire."
"I am holding it."
When Lo clambered down the sandy slope to the van, his eyesight took time to adjust. He still saw dark muddy blobs as he groped his way along the side of the van. "Blake, you there?"
"Here."
Lo rounded the front of the van. "Oh, hey, there you are!"
One second he saw the man's dark figure looking the other way. The next second the figure turned and it wasn't Blake but that scruffy guy they were hunting. He had his mouth shaped in an 'o' and before Lo could bring the assault rifle around, blew a stream of dark air over Lo's face. Lo saw no reason to keep the gun, and dropped it. Smiling, he waited for the dark figure to act.
Was-Morton had the collective DNA, but also the collective memories quite separately obtained from brain material, of Morton, and before that Tidjman, and before that a Peruvian merchant sailor, and before that an Andean Indian. Was-Morton had a compendium of experience stored up, and knew better than to lie here sucking out this man's genetic material, when his fellows might arrive at any time. So it threw the anaesthetized Lo into the back of the van, started the engine, and drove off.
Forty minutes later, Blake and the first stragglers arrived.
"Wasn't the van here?" a man asked.
"Yeah, look, there's the tracks."
"I'm afraid we've been had," Blake said. "Either our employer has played a trick on us, or this business is far more serious than we ever gave it credit to be."
When they arrived on foot near dawn, banging on Lee Collwood's steel rollup door, he almost didn't want to answer.
Collwood waited until they were all seated sheepishly around his pool. A catering service brought in Mexican fast food—it was the only thing available at this hour—while Collwood harangued them. "You've lost one of your men, and you lost your vehicle. Big deal. I can send a chopper up and have them find the van. I guarantee what we'll find. Dammit, now do you believe me? We're up against something diabolical."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Collwood," said Blake, "we really didn't take it seriously enough, and here I am, minus a good man. I feel bad about that. Makes me want to find this mushroom crap and flush it down the toilet. Only I know it's not going to be that easy."
"Right," Collwood said. "You've had your first encounter with Homo Mycotus, and he killed your guy and stole your van. Hopefully by now you have enough common sense to understand you are up against one of the most successful biological adaptations in history."
Somewhere out in the desert stood an abandoned van. In it, a bracket fungus stretched along the back wall. It contained the DNA of Lo and Henry Morton and Captain Tidjman and many other souls, and was preparing to become a spore launcher—not in the secondary reproductive cycle of mimicked humans, but the species' real, native way of reproducing, in which each bracket community released an endless series of billions of spores.
As a red sun swimming in yellow clouds rose, and the cold night air began to warm up, a figure walked along a rural highway. Eventually, a bus came by and slowed to a stop with a pop of air brakes. The bus opened its doors with a pneumatic hiss. The former mercenary Lo climbed on board, heading toward San Diego.
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