The Spores' Call

Primordials.

That was the name for the monstrous things you were guaranteed to meet if you ever set foot in a Darkzone—and if you planned to keep crawling back out alive, ready for the next drop.

Calling all of them monsters was a stretch, honestly. Wander enough Darkzones and you ran into things that were clearly not alive at all. And that wasn't even the half of it. Sometimes there was no entity whatsoever—just a phenomenon, a wrongness with no body attached.

We called them Primordials all the same. They didn't exist in the real world, but inside a Darkzone they were everywhere you looked. Evils that had taken the Darkzone as their soil and grown up from the roots, one careful inch at a time.

"Pssshhhhhh…"

And right now, one of those countless roots of evil was standing on the other side of a single steel door.

I signaled Lucy in silence, warning her to fall back, then finished opening the cafeteria entrance.

Screeeeee—

A thoroughly grating noise spilled out. Something standing beyond the door whipped around with unnatural speed and snarled.

"Grrrrrrr!"

It sounded exactly like a man in the last stage of lung cancer—a pack a day for half his life—raking his throat raw. I watched in silence as it started to move, joints popping and grinding after standing locked stiff under the beating sun.

Not a Smoker.

Smokers showed up a lot in fog-heavy themes, and at least those still had a human shape. The thing hunting for the source of the noise in front of me was a completely different animal. More than half its head had been swallowed by a mass of deep-green spores, leaving only a mouth and a nose, and every breath it let out flung spore-dust in a constant spray.

If I had to compare it to something, it was close to the thing we'd met in that lab full of contaminated air—only this one looked more dangerous.

I figured there'd be Spores. Just didn't think I'd run into one right here.

The spore-contaminated zone we'd hit the moment we dropped in came back to me. I'd been a little relieved that at least the atmosphere across the whole map wasn't poisoned. Of course nothing was going to be that easy.

I sent Lucy another signal to stay put—she was watching me with a look that said, so what now?—then stepped in tight beside the Spore as it walked through the doorway. I locked it in a hug, wrenched its neck, and drove my military combat knife into the spore-mass on its head.

Pssh—! Pssshhhhhhhhhh…

A feeble noise, like a giant balloon dumping all its air at once, and the body collapsed.

"Is it over?"

"Yeah."

I flung the Spore's corpse deeper into the cafeteria, pulled out a spray disinfectant, and hosed myself down. I'd have preferred a proper decon shower or a dedicated sanitizing item to get fully clean. This was the best I could do right now.

"The second your oxygen filter hits ten percent, you swap it. No hesitation. A filter that's already burned through ninety percent of its life won't give you a real seal the moment you hit something seriously toxic—it'll punch straight through to your lungs."

"I'm still at about seventy percent, so I should be all right."

"Good."

I flicked a glance at the remaining filter life on my gas-mask goggle HUD and scanned the grounds outside the cafeteria.

Finding a Spore means there's a hive nearby at minimum. So this place is following EFD canon after all—the people here got hit by Primordials and ended up the same way?

Even with the tenth-anniversary update, the fact that it was still tracking the official lore I knew was pretty encouraging. It meant I could use what I knew as-is. That said, from here on I needed to be a lot more careful about how I moved.

"Ah—I forgot to explain. The thing I just put down is a Primordial called a Spore. Easiest way to think of it is a cordyceps that learned how to walk on two legs."

Yeah. Cordyceps was the right word for a Spore. Humans infected by the toxic spores in this place grew a spore-mass from the inside out, and in the end the thing punched through the skull and took over as the brain. Because of that mass they had no vision, so they could look like an easy fight at a glance. In practice, the constant spray of toxic spores and the gimmick that came with them made them a serious pain.

To put one down you had to ambush it quiet and destroy the head in a single strike. Fail, and you got something in the same family as a Screamer. A Screamer screamed loud enough to carry across a huge area and pulled every Primordial in range. A Spore dumped a massive burst of pheromone-laced spores the instant it was attacked, to tell ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the hive there was a hostile on site.

Which raised the question. If you got made, which was worse—a Screamer or a Spore?

A Spore. No contest.

The reason I'd given myself a quick spray-down was to wipe off the spores it'd released before it died. And if you were coated head to toe in pheromone-heavy spores? Until you escaped, or until you got every inch of yourself properly washed, every hive Primordial in the area would be tracking your position in real time.

The first time the game pulled that on me, I was so goddamn pissed.

I'd figured it was just a mob that chewed through your oxygen filter a little faster than usual. I died on that assumption more times than I could count, and by the time I finally cracked the clear I was grinding my teeth. Getting good enough at this game to call yourself a veteran was a real son of a bitch.

"There are a lot of other buildings around the cafeteria. That one in the center of the base camp looks pretty big… maybe a temporary command post?"

"Looks like it."

Communications antennas on the roof, plus several solar panels. Definitely higher priority than the other buildings. High-priority buildings were usually more dangerous—that was the rule. So what? If we wanted to get out of here in one piece, we needed to pack the bags first.

There was a small problem with just walking inside, though.

"Spore saturation around the building is pretty high."

Even I got a little sick looking at it. Spore-masses that were supposed to parasitize plants and animals were plastered all over the exterior walls. Look closer and you could see a pale-green translucent membrane wrapped around each cluster, and underneath it, something like flesh feeding the spores.

No pain, no growth. No sacrifice, no victory.

I put myself against the door, locked down with a chain and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠padlock, and started trying keys one by one.

Click!

Luckily neither the keys nor the lock had rusted out. It opened without much trouble. The moment the door swung wide, a huge volume of spores billowed out of the pitch-dark interior.

"Filter swap."

I stepped back first and swapped in a fresh oxygen filter. Lucy naturally took point again. I'd just shown her how to kill a Spore myself. She shouldn't have any trouble handling it.

"Whew. This is vile."

The second Lucy put a flashlight on the interior, an enormous grave of bones filled the beam. Dozens of skeletons, easy, piled inside. The blackened bloodstains crusted underneath them had dried a long time ago, the surface gone rough and grainy.

Even playing for maximum efficiency, the risk here looked a little steep.

"…Five minutes. That's all we spend in here."

Lucy nodded without a word and stepped in first. I drew my pistol and followed carefully, covering our flanks. Ordinarily I'd be backing her up with the compound bow or Pretty, but indoors the acoustics were different from outside. A pistol was the better call.

The sheer number of dead it had taken to pile bones this high was startling enough. I noticed something even more disturbing. If a group started losing people to infection, the usual move was to dump the bodies in an unused warehouse, a temporary bunkhouse, or a hole in the ground outside.

Using the building that looks like the most important one on site as a mass grave means the first infection started right here.

Old-model hazmat suits and gas masks showed up here and there among the bones. Proof these people had tried, in their own way, to follow quarantine procedure right up until they died. The Spore wandering around outside by itself? That was probably one of the survivors who'd turned this place into a burial ground and then waited out in the "safe" open air for rescue.

So if I stitched the timeline together, the story ran something like this. First, a mass infection had broken out inside the command building for reasons unknown. The uninfected had then isolated the infected inside the already-contaminated post. To keep the worst from happening, they'd sealed the building completely and dug in outside. While they were holding out, Primordials had hit them—more dead, more infections. After that, either a total wipe, or a handful had made it out.

In the game, the internal situation came out through audio logs and comms records.

I looked around. No recorder in sight. Just a lot of bullet holes—used to put suffering people out of their misery first, or to put down the ones already turning into Spores.

No point hoping for weapons or ammo.

The place was too contaminated for that anyway, and the casings scattered across the floor told me how much they'd already burned through. The survivors who'd designated this as a burial site had almost certainly stripped every remaining weapon and round on their way out. Expecting anything was a waste of time.

"Leader."

At Lucy's quiet call I stopped picking over the traces and closed up on her. She pointed at a symbol at the end of the hall: a red cross on a white field. Not text, and not a pattern laced with anomalous properties, so the Blind Feature hadn't triggered?

"Infirmary. Think there'll be anything useful?"

"If they all died because they couldn't stop the outbreak here, the medicine might actually still be intact, don't you think?"

"Fair point."

Not like they'd had a vaccine against toxic spore infection. They wouldn't have had a real treatment either.

Lucy checked the gap around the door carefully for booby traps or Primordials, then pushed open a wooden door that was already half-rotted and went in. The infirmary looked exactly like you'd expect of a room that had been torn through for emergency care. Bandages, gauze, disinfectant—almost all used up, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠nothing left but scraps scattered everywhere. On the other hand, the vials and boxes whose labels the Blind Feature blacked out were in relatively good shape.

"Skip the oral capsules. Prioritize ampoules you can push with a syringe."

Those were sealed tighter. Even in an environment this filthy, I could be reasonably sure the contents were still good.

Just in case, I went over to the medical officer's desk and checked the powered-down PC. If the solar panels were still working—if the building still had power—maybe I could pull something off it.

Click. Click.

Yeah, no.

I mashed the power button a few times. Nothing. The internals had probably rotted out a long time ago. No point telling Crazy Clock to pull the contents off the hard drive directly.

Fast. Felt like we'd just walked in, and a full minute was already gone. They said that inside a Darkzone your sense of time and your biorhythm both went to pieces, and a prisoner's Sanity Gauge could crater without warning. Turns out they weren't wrong.

Lucy had gathered the ampoules into a box, packed the box into her backpack without a wasted inch of space, and was just starting to stand when the pitch-dark room lit up all at once.

Crack! Crunch! Shatter!

"Oh, fuck!"

Nobody had touched a switch. The infirmary lights came on by themselves, failed to handle the sudden surge and the worn-out circuitry, shorted, and blew. Lucy and I both went rigid, straining to listen.

Then the indoor speaker mounted in the corner of the infirmary ceiling crackled and started bleeding static.

The speaker cut out.