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67.
As night fell, the invasion of the mushroom people entered into the ultimate phase. Professor Shaun Nolan was one his way home for a change of clothes and a shower. He felt exhausted and wished for a good night's sleep. He was stuck in traffic at the foot of Washington Street and India Streets, when he saw a sight that made him recoil in abject horror.
Of course. It had to be. He stepped from his car, oblivious to danger, as the monstrous being walked past him. He saw a being unlike anything ever seen on earth—about six feet tall, with two legs and two arms as the human segment of its DNA map would dictate. Looking at it from the front as it approached was hideous enough. Its skin was brown and scaly, with green and yellow fuzz indicating some kind of secondary fungal infestation, like the world's worst case of eczema on a human—or better yet, total psoriasis to the extent that it looked like barnacles.
This nightmare thing had to be the senior partner of the formerly human crew members walking about. It was naked, had no visible sexual organs. Its face was a sort of tin-can mask with a slit for a mouth, from which a flat mycorrhyzal organ like a snake's tongue, but with multiple fringes rather than a split into two points, flicked around sampling the air for smells. It had two black button eyes with white sclera that darted left and right as it looked for—what? Enemies? Prey? What was that on its back? Looked like foot-long brown wings or fins or something, trailing in the shape of the entire body. Legs, arms, torso, even head, had this brown structure trailing like rotting goldfish fins. Those must be gills, the sporing organ, like the grotesquely magnified underside of a button mushroom. Straggling human refugees, seeing its rear side, started screaming.
When the being walked past, Shaun Nolan felt a visceral fear, loathing, and disgust he had never imagined possible as he got a better look. Its entire back was composed of one entire mass of gills that yawned slowly open and shut, as if breathing, and a clouds of microscopic spores emanated from among the gill slits. Hundreds of fine gill edges were visible amid the brown structures like pea pods that opened and closed like kelp waving underwater. The being was heading north along Pacific Highway. Out of town. To spread this horror as far as possible. More of its kind would roost in hidden places in the form of bracket fungi with human DNA, until they had grown into something like this creature, and then those would walk another ten or a hundred miles or whatever. It would not take long before these creatures populated the entire earth.
The perfect mimics of humans were the first stage in this reproductive cycle. Call them Offensors Lite. These other monstrosities were the real Offensor, the B-52 bomber of the fungal domain of life.
Coughing—the spores must be bad for human respiratory organs, possibly fatal, but that would remain to be seen—Shaun got back into this car. He now understood the full life cycle of the mushroom people. The final wave of their attack had begun. All else until now had merely been prelude.
As he drove around the harbor district in helpless fascination, hypnotized by morbid curiosity, he saw more and more of them. They lumbered away from their hiding places in small warehouses in the harbor district. According to Navy reports, gate guards had seen at least one truck pull in at the Lima Voyager and offload unknown objects—probably the bracket fungi.
Nolan got out of his car, half crazy, and walked the streets. He saw one after another of the creatures. He saw one take a screaming woman, blow black air in her face, and put its tube in her neck as Linsey and Jack Simon and more lately others had described. The little kid, Jimmy Mendez, had been right. His father had become the victim of the Offensor, and had next taken Jimmy's mother's life. Each time this happened, a bracket colony was left behind and that became a true Offensor.
Nolan saw one Offensor climbing out of a bedroom window in a cheap hotel. He saw another smashing a store window to enter because it saw a light in back and assumed it would find a human inside to eat.
When he had seen enough, Nolan wanted to return to his car. Instead, he suddenly screamed in blind panic, and ran across a street like a horse fleeing a fire by running into the burning barn. Better to die than see another of these things, or worse yet, be touched by it, have that tube in one's neck. As he ran across the street, he heard a screech of brakes and felt an impact against his side that sent him flying—into darkness.
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