Phmmm.
Coral looked back up the shaft as a stream of red-hot lava ran down from the steadily lengthening hole, congealing in waves at the base of the laser cutter. A waft of warm air reached her as the charge built slowly for the next pulse.
At least her clothes had dried out after the downpour, she thought, and she turned back to the wall she was examining.
Phmmm.
* * *
Tim waded back to the entrance of the fungus room. Was it his imagination, or was the water level higher? The flow seemed faster too. He watched it tug at the sides of a small piece of rock salt before carrying it away, tumbling it end over end down the smooth-walled passage. Before, the water had been close to the tops of his shoes. Now it was ankle deep.
He climbed back into the fungus room and checked on Alkemy. She was resting and seemed comfortable enough, but tendrils of fungus had begun attaching themselves to the side of her face. They pulled away easily enough, but he didn’t like the way it seemed to be growing on her. When he brushed it from her skin, it left tiny pockmarks.
‘Alkemy? Alkemy, can you hear me?’
She stirred and sighed lazily.
‘Try and keep this stuff off your face, OK? Just give it a wipe now and then.’
‘Mmm,’ she said.
He reached down to take off his cold wet shoes and found a young possum staring at him, its large brown eyes dark pools in the torchlight. It was less than a metre away. It blinked back at him and yawned.
‘What the heck?’
Possums were wild creatures, but not this one, apparently.
He reached out a hand to it. It sniffed at him cautiously then backed away.
‘How did you get in here?’
He moved towards it. It shuffled backwards, not comfortable, but not really taking fright.
A thought struck him: it had gotten in, so there must be another way out. The one place they hadn’t explored was the far end of this chamber. He picked up his torch and followed the possum.
The roof at the back tapered sharply to the floor. At first sight it looked like a seamless line of fungus, but as he drew closer, Tim saw there was a gap about a hands-breadth wide between the ceiling and the ground. He could smell something too. Fresh air. There was some sort of opening or vent back there.
The air seemed to revive the possum. It took a long sniff then suddenly seemed to remember it should be scared of humans and scampered away, racing through the gap and disappearing up a small hole in the rocks behind.
Tim reached out and pulled the fungus away from the sides of the opening. It was much too small for him, but the fresh air smelled good and he sat back wondering what was going on.
Something gave way beneath him. A slight shift in the heavy fungus mat. Curious, he started tearing it up.
He dug deeper. The stuff was half a metre thick, but he finally managed to pull out enough to make a decent hole. He found his torch, shone it down, then started back in alarm.
Bones.
Hundreds of them.
Thousands.
The bones of small animals stripped completely bare, the roots of the fungus wrapped round and round them.
He suddenly realised the awful secret of the fungus and rushed back to Alkemy, calling her name, desperately. ‘Alkemy, wake up. Wake up, we can’t stay here!’
The tendrils had grown back over her face. He swept them aside.
‘The fungus, it’s carnivorous,’ he gasped. ‘The smell makes you sleepy. Like an anaesthetic. You fall asleep, then it eats you.’
He could imagine the far end of the opening where the possum had crawled in. A fissure in a rock face or an opening in a cave somewhere in the bush that surrounded Gizzard Gully. Drawn by the alluring scent of the place, a procession of small animals — rabbits, possums, rats, mice, weasels and stoats — had come down here to rest and fall asleep. And die. Thousands upon thousands of them over the years. And the fungus fed on their remains.
Back at the entrance of the fungus room, water was lapping round the lower rocks. The level was rising steadily. It took him a moment to register what was happening, then he realised his mistake. Filing the passages with salt had been a good defensive move. Too good, because now the Sentinels were trying to flush them clean.
‘We really are going to have to move,’ he told Alkemy.
Torn scraps of fungus floated in the pooling water. Tim had an idea. He tore off a thicker piece and submerged it. It bobbed to the surface.
‘Yes!’ he muttered and got busy, tearing off a mat of the stuff then securing it around Alkemy. Hopefully, away from its roots, it would lose its carnivorous tendencies. And if it didn’t, well, it probably wouldn’t matter now.
By the time he was finished, there was five centimetres of water in the base of the room and Alkemy was already partly floating. He zipped up his jacket, stuffed some more bits of fungus inside to help his own buoyancy, then made for the exit, guiding Alkemy along behind him, her head cradled on a pillow of the stuff.
The passage outside was now one-third full. The current was steady and growing swifter, sweeping back towards the junction and the barred grilles beyond. He didn’t want to get caught against them if it got any deeper, so he struggled against the flow and guided Alkemy back to the short passage they’d first entered. The water there was just as deep, but it was a dead-end. That meant there was no current.
Alkemy slept on, floating on her fungus life raft.
The level was up to his waist now and kept rising. Tim shivered and wondered how much deeper it would get.
* * *
‘Ah, the relief. I can feel it already.’
‘Yes, much better. And we might even get some explosive accompaniment.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When the monkey with the memory module dies, it will self-destruct, remember?’
‘Ha, yes! I’d forgotten that. Just a pity we can’t watch it happen.’
* * *
The torch bobbed about near the top of the tunnel, illuminating the last few centimetres of air. At least the rising water let him check the upper edge of the closed entrance door. Before, it had been an awkward stretch. Now, with his fungus-padded jacket acting like a life preserver, it was easy to make a minute examination of the rock wall.
Not that he expected to find anything. But at least it kept his mind occupied.
And then he saw it: a pinhole on the left-side disguised by a fold in the surface. It was near the roof. A perfect circle of darkness barely a millimetre wide.
Of course! It all made sense now. He thought of the Sentinel driving him away with finely pointed antennae tips. Such gooey creatures would have trouble with regular buttons or switches, but they could make fine, jabbing needles. He could still feel some of the wounds it had inflicted.
And that was all he needed. A needle. A pin. A paperclip. A piece of wire. He searched his pockets. String, coins, bits of soggy paper, the leftover scanner block already falling to bits from the damp. The stub of a pencil, some forgotten chewing gum — but nothing he could use.
He took another breath. His nose was pressed against the ceiling now. And still the water kept rising. He could feel it lapping round his mouth. One or two deep breaths was all he had left.
He tilted his head, pressed his face to the glassy ceiling, and filled his lungs. The water closed over him, leaving a few tantalising bubbles of air in the surface of the passage, but that was all. When this breath was gone, that would be it. His struggles would be over.