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79.
As he lay on the cooling desert sand as night fell, Lee Collwood finally admitted to himself it was the end of the road. This could all have been over already.
He had sat at his desk in the loneliness of his office at the main plant outside Brawley, held his Glock to his head, and thought about pulling the trigger. He thought about calling this one or that one of his ex-wives, but they hated him and would laugh at his suffering now. He didn't have the courage to do the deed, and put the gun down. He forgot about it as he rose.
He'd thought of the captain of the Lima Voyager, Tidjman. Poor stiff, he thought. It was rare that Lee Collwood felt sorry for anyone but himself. It wasn't my fault, he thought. The whole episode had come to a bad turn because nobody had known the fungus was so powerful, and that it would seize the day. It wasn't his fault, like everything wasn't his fault, but this time he was too tired to fight anymore. Subpoenas and indictments were on the way, and he didn't feel like fighting them because he knew cash was running out and he didn't have the brains to figure out any way to save the company.
So he'd filled his canteen with water, stuffed a bag full of crackers and peanut butter, and set out into the desert outside the Brawley plant.
Somewhere out there, he knew, rested the bracket colony created when Thomas Blake's mercenary Lo encountered the mushroom person that Tidjman had become…the same Tidjman whom Collwood had battled in the hallway of his home in University City with the spooky severed head looking on from across the room.
Lee Collwood walked out into the desert into the area where he knew Lo had lost his life to Tidjman's ghost. Somewhere out here in a safe and secure place chosen by was-Lo, a bracket colony lay nestled and waiting for its birth as a gill man.
Lee had drunk himself to a near stupor, but now that was starting to wear off. He turned over so that he could see the sun turn red in the sky and decline toward the horizon. It was cooler in the desert around this hour, and things that had boiled in the sun now cooled off and emitted sweet smells.
When he heard the snap of a twig behind him, he turned and laughed. "Just when it was getting good," he muttered in a faint voice, meaning how sweet and beautiful a place like this desert could smell in the cool of evening.
The being coming at him with outstretched hands was covered with snail-like gills. Collwood assumed that, behind that stony mask, some faint memory of Tidjman survived, and that the ghost of Tidjman felt considerable rage toward Collwood for sending him into such a dangerous situation without warning. As he had done much of his life, Lee laughed. When the creature took him by the head and snapped his neck, Lee's last thought in sinking toward peaceful oblivion was "Thanks."
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