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45.
Joe Walesky was standing at a hot dog stand near the Convention Center. His Harbor Police cruiser sat parked at headquarters nearby. He was in uniform, armed, and taking a much deserved lunch break. He'd written 30 tickets, made three arrests, written six reports, and issued 20 warnings including several heated verbal exchanges with inebriated tourists who couldn't hear a kindly reproach but had to make a scene. He still had ten reports to write, during lunch break.
Joe was waiting behind a few tourists in the hot sun to order a ballpark frank and a huge-gulp root beer. He was having a fairly slow day, and felt relaxed. In his mind was a whirl of thoughts including family matters. His brother Ernie was still missing, although he'd phoned Nellie and told her he had some kind of flying job to bring in a little extra money. Ernie usually went on a bender for a few days after each cruise on a merchant ship, so this actually seemed more positive than usual—taking a small aircraft piloting job rather than winding up drunk in some barrio tavern and getting rolled. Joe had picked him up more than once and taken him home, snoring and with a black eye. This time, something was different, and Joe had a twinge of worry. Something was different, but that didn't mean things were necessarily okay. He wondered if Ernie had gambled all this money away and was trying to make it up by running drugs in from Mexico, or some other dumb scheme.
Joe had been with the force for nearly 15 years and had seen San Diego's downtown area blossom. When Joe and Ernie were kids in National City, San Diego had been in its last long, slumbering decades as a Navy town. One could still, in the late 1900s, drive north along Pacific Highway. Passing the Navy yard at 32nd Street, one would come through the city's civilian rail yards, freight yards, factories, and warehouses before entering the modest and quiet downtown area around lower Broadway. Today, the freight areas were mostly gone—a few old brick walls with fading signs kept for historical purposes, absorbed into new structures like Petco Park. The Convention Center dwarfed the dockside west of the Gaslamp Quarter. A small, futuristic city of high-rise condos, hotels, and office buildings had sprung up. In any nook where they could be fitted were small parks with fountains and shady walks. The red trolley had two rail lines going through here, with stations every few blocks. The huge hotels tied in with the Convention Center had vast, fanciful lobbies. A new building style had emerged—Joe liked to call it Comic Book Gothic. Others might call it neo-Victorian Fantasy, playing off the Victorian era flavor of the Gaslamp Quarter. The lobby reception desk dwarfed its uniformed concierge and clerks. Above them towered an odd mix of neo-pastoral wall murals showing rural scenes from Louis XIV's France (maybe). On either end of the desk were enormous bracket-shaped lanterns taller than a man and curving from desk to ceiling like the rear ends of large sailing ships. These lanterns consisted of a wrought iron grid with panes of soft yellowish glass like soapstone inset. The building style was no longer functional, like that of the 1900s, but fanciful. A tall building might have one corner rise straight vertically, and another sloping downward like the edge of a pyramid, or upward and outward in defiance of gravity. Some buildings rose straight up, but had high levels sticking out like hat brims, suggesting futuristic landing pads or bridges to other buildings. To Joe—who liked to read old comic books and moldering SF books, which he'd collected all his life for considerable side money—it was the future foreseen in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, finally arriving after the ugly decades of the Cold War and culminating in the disasters around the turn of the century.
Joe got his ballpark wiener and his tall root beer, sauntered over to a free spot at a little concrete table and bench, and started eating in the deep shade of an oak tree. He enjoyed the cool breeze that smelled of the sea and of jasmine. His phone chirped, and he answered. "Yeah?"
"Joe, it's Ernie."
"Ernie, how are you, man. Are you sober?"
"I'm sober. I need to see you."
"Sure. I'm having lunch. Where are you?"
"Lima Voyager."
"The ship?"
"Yes."
"I'll eat my hot dog and come over. You sure you're okay?"
"I will wait."
Joe sighed. He was glad to hear from his brother, although Ernie sounded kind of funny, as if he had a very dry throat or something. Joe hurried through his lunch. He rose, tossed his trash in a container, wiped his hands and tossed the paper napkin after the rest, and headed over to his car. The reports would have to wait, which meant he'd probably be doing overtime unless he could check in early if things stayed slow.
It was a short drive, about two miles, through the familiar gate manned by sailors and Marines at 32nd Street. Joe drove slowly down the gravel street that stretched between high fences. With his customary policeman's eye, he observed all around him. It was an instinctive scanning to look for people or things out of whack. It might be a civilian who looked rumpled and out of place, a sailor wavering along drunk, a workman who looked like he'd stolen something and had that tight, furtive walk. It could be a lot of things and you didn't know what they were until they floated into your field of vision—if you stayed alert and open to the unusual that grew out of the usual. Fifteen years had given Joe Walesky a finely honed sense for the unusual. Nobody could stay a cop that long without developing a kind of sixth sense for trouble.
Everything here looked so normal and quiet that it positively spooked Joe. Nothing in the world could be this normal. There had to be something unusal here. Maybe its name was Ernie. That might explain his feeling of apprehension. He tried to relax a bit. Being uptight was a perfect way to tighten up the sphincter on that unusualness-lens in a cop's eye.
He pulled to a stop at the dock and got out. The freighter's steel hull loomed over him. "Ernie?" he called out.
Silence. Wind tattered in his ears. Gulls sailed through the air over the water several hundred feet away. Not a bird sat on this dock anywhere. Joe sniffed. What was that smell?
"Joe," said a voice at the rail of the ship.
Joe saw his brother. "Hey, Ernie. What's up with you?"
Ernie wore a baseball cap and sunglasses. He wore a khaki work suit like a gardener, and heavy gloves. "Come on up, Joe."
Joe had misgivings, but started up the metal gangway that led t the main deck, a climb of about thirty feet over a nasty drop into blackish water between ship and dock. He guided himself up along a chain strung over metal posts for that purpose.
Another figure appeared beside Ernie—another heavily clad man with sunglasses and baseball cap.
"Who's your friend?" Joe asked, holding the chain with his left hand, and instinctively keeping his other hand near his service handgun.
"Meet Lo," Ernie said.
"Hello," said Lo.
"Hello," said Joe.
As he neared the deck, Ernie reached out a gloved hand as if to help him. Joe reached for the hand and felt Ernie pulling him aboard. The hand felt a little funny, as though something came loose as Joe's weight tugged at it—several fingers, it felt like, but Joe dismissed the thought as absurd. At the same time, Lo stepped forth and extended both hands as if to help. Joe thought this was a bit strange as he swung onto the deck. "So, guys," Joe started to say. Both men stepped close, suddenly, so their faces were near Joe's. Black air streamed from their mouths.
Joe felt very distant, as if he were just going to sleep, and the two men grabbed him and pulled him back on board as he started to topple over backwards over that long drop into the cold water. As Joe fell asleep, he felt Lo carrying him like a mannequin toward the dark heart of the ship.
The things that happened deep in the bowels of the ship were strange and pleasant. Ernie came to say goodbye—just a brief exchange of looks, nothing said—and went away. Lo wrapped his arms around Joe and pressed him against the bottom of a rusty steel wall that smelled mushroomy at first but became fragrant somehow as Joe began liking the smell. Lo put his mouth against Joe's neck and bit him gently, spitting out a wad of dripping pulp. Lo's mouth had a bitter coagulant that Joe could smell, and the bleeding stopped. The coagulant came with an anaesthetic so there was no pain when the long black tube slid from Lo's mouth into Joe's jugular and traveled down into the pits of Joe's bowels looking for the stem cells it needed. Along the way, it sampled all the important organs to make sure it could match the blood type as the exchange took place.
Joe went through a blurry phase where it felt as though he were in both bodies for a time, and then only in the new one. Lo's body morphed into a new Joe. It was a perfect copy of Joe except the eyes were a little funny, but that could be helped by wearing sunglasses. Lo's body had begun to age already, and felt stiff like styrofoam or cardboard at first, but with the new DNA from Joe, and all that fresh blood and brain fluid, the new body was as spry and powerful as Joe's old body.
The thing that had been Joe realized a lot of things now, like these bodies aged at various rates, and so it had only from 2 days to a week to live before it had to find a new host. It was now no longer human, but a spore. It must immediately begin cultivating the next human to inherit this mantle of glory, while its remains then became a bed of bracket mushrooms to sexually birth billions of spores and take over the world.
The thing that had had been Lo had now merged with the soggy remnants of the old Joe-body, including the skeleton and some throwaway body parts the mushroom people didn't need. As new-Joe (or was-Joe) slept a golden sleep in which it felt it was being welcomed into mushroom heaven, the old body deteriorated and became a colony of bracket mushrooms. These would reproduce the other way (sexually, with the fruiting body producing both male and female spores which then would fuse in the gills under the bracket heads and become new mushroom spores). Many fungi can reproduce sexually in this manner, but can also reproduce asexually through some form of cell division that still involves producing a spore to carry the genetic material. The latter was the function that the Peruvian jungle mimic species had devised to enhance their species' survival.
When was-Joe awoke, it felt great. It was free now. Free at last. The new body was already a little stiff, but it felt very strong. It felt right to be part of this community of living things, as opposed to being one lonely human spending years, if not decades, seeking to find a mate for a few hours of frenzied pleasure followed by dismal, declining years of being bad at everything, from burned barbecues to failed soapbox derbies to having your teenager call you a rat and walk out in tears slamming doors…not to mention divorce, alimony, more tears, more arguments, more slammed doors…surely the ways of the mushroom people were far better. Was-Joe felt righteous as it stomped up the rusty stairs in a series of dust clouds that it barely noticed. It slammed open the door, put on it sunglasses, and looked around at the world in a new way.
First, it called work. The dispatcher answered. It said: "This is Joe Walesky. I am going home sick."
"Sorry to hear, Joe. Just park the car and drop off the keys."
"Thank you." Next, it called home. Its wife answered. It told her: "Honey, I am going on a little trip. I'll be back soon."
"Joe? Are you feeling okay?"
"I have never felt better."
"You sound strange. Are you eating something?"
"I am just so very happy."
"Joe, is there another woman?"
"I won't be needing to address such bullshit anymore." It dropped the cellphone overboard.
Then it strode down the gangway. It didn't need to hold on to the chain. In a few days it might, as this new host body aged and needed replenishing. For now, it felt as if it had been pumped full of a new drug that made the world seem to be of shining silver, and made every fiber of its mushroom innards seem to tingle with electrical power.
It climbed into the police car and made a Y-turn on the wooden dock. It drove off down the gravel path at just the posted speed limit. No need to attract attention from these skin-bags. It got a nice salute going out the gate, which it returned with a smug little grin. It drove north to the Harbor Police headquarters by the Convention Center, and parked the car.
It spotted Cleve Bartlett, and waved.
Cleve waved back. "Hey, what's up, man?"
"I just came from the Lima Voyager."
"Oh, really?" Cleve hurried over. "What's going on, man?"
Might as well get on with it, was-Joe thought. "I found the most amazing thing down in the hold.
"Oh really? What is it?"
"I'm not sure. Maybe you would like to come and take a look. Then we can write a report together."
"Oh, man," Cleve said, "Linsey would be so thrilled to know we helped break the case. Yeah, I'll just—"
"No, don't go inside," was-Joe said.
"Why? I have to let my superv-"
"There isn't time," was-Joe said. "Don't worry about it. We'll cover that base later. Just get in, and I'll take you there."
Cleve looked at the building as if he knew he should do something in there—let someone know where he was going—but was-Joe was already in the patrol car and starting the engine. Cleve shrugged and got in at the passenger side.
"It's just a mile down the road," was-Joe said. "We'll be done and back before you know it." It backed out of the parking space and drove off down Pacific Highway between the Convention Center on the right and the Gaslamp Quarter and Petco Park on the left. Ahead lay Barrio Logan and the 32nd Street Navy Yard.
"So what is this thing you found?" Cleve said.
Was-Joe looked at Cleve and exhaled a cloud of black air.
Cleve sat back with a dreamy look, and felt contented.
Was-Joe felt an intense pleasure at its conquest—so soon, so well done—and the black tube came out of its mouth prematurely a few inches as if to look at the neck it was about to enter. It was all was-Joe could do to swallow the tube back down in order to get through the gate at 32nd Street without incident.
You will be so happy, it thought-emanated at the immobilized was-Cleve.
I already feel the joy, was-Cleve emanated back.
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