Cordyceps Resurgentis Book 2 Of Cordyceps Trilogy – Ian Duncan

Mason turned to the others. “Have you guys heard where the quarantine line is?” “The quarantine line?” Josh repeated through his duct-taped mask. “The edge of the zone,” Mason said, “where survivors go to be processed.” “You mean like they did in Florida?” Dave said. “They never announced anything about it. They never said where the boundaries were or how we could get out or anything.

We just had the blue screen telling us to stay put.” Mason turned back to face the road. Khava heard him quietly swearing inside his respirator, the bubble of his good humor burst. “What does it mean?” Khava wanted to know. “The zone is too big?” Mason shook his head. “I think it means we’re on our own.” Mason turned back to the others again. “Everybody keep your eyes open for some kind of weapon. Even a piece of steel or a heavy stick or something, okay?”

“Oh my god, are we going to have to fight?” Nicole whimpered. “I can’t fight!” Even Mason didn’t answer her now. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to sneak up there and search those cars for weapons. Everybody keep low and quiet.

We draw attention before we get a chance to arm ourselves, we’ll be SOL.” “What’s SOL?” Nicole said. “Shit out of luck,” Josh said, his glazed eyes shining in the artificial light. “Do you think they’ll send in the Reapers? My brother knew a guy that was one of them.”

“They said they’d never do it again,” Mason said, not exactly answering the question. Khava touched Mason’s shoulder and pointed across the road, where evergreens had been planted to conceal the scaffolding of an enormous set of bleachers. “We should cross over first, stay close to the trees.” Mason nodded and got to his feet. “Let’s go all at once and get it over with.” “Wait, what are we doing?”

Nicole asked. “We’re all going together,” Mason said. “At the same time.” “What’s our rally point?” Dave asked. “Just in case we get separated.” Mason looked at him. “There is no rally point, bro. We’re in the zone. No place is secure. Just try to stay close.” Khava and Mason jogged out under the yellow glare of the streetlights, heading, by mutual instinct, for the corner of a single-story maintenance building behind a row of shrubs.

They crossed a sidewalk and a short strip of grass before they bunched together under the eaves, Mason looking around the corner and Khava thinking, for a moment, that she might have heard coughing—hard to tell how far—maybe from the soccer field on the other side of the bleachers.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, organizations, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2013 by Ian Duncan All rights reserved. www.IanDuncanBooks.com Cover design by Jared Hall ISBN: 978-1-7342822-3-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019919848 OceanofPDF.com For the Salmon King OceanofPDF.com “Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.”

C.S. Lewis OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com PROLOGUE —from the memoirs of General Nicolaus Trubilinski, Chief Federal Representative of the Florida Quarantine THERE ARE HORRORS in the natural world—unthinkable horrors kept from our species by nothing more than a genetic technicality. There are water-borne parasitic worms that infect crickets and grasshoppers, growing in their gut like a coil of rope until they make their hosts drown themselves —all so that the worm can slowly wriggle free from their dead bodies and return to the water.

There are wasps that lay eggs on paralyzed prey and allow their hatchlings to swarm over the victim, eating it alive. Ant lions that dig steep- walled pits and wait beneath the sand at the bottom. Mantids that snatch other insects in their vise-grip arms and calmly chew their heads off. And until the very hour of the first outbreak in Florida, Cordyceps was only a tropical oddity among insects, a fungus transmitted through the air, only a tiny spore until its mycelia grow into the host’s brain, where it—and here is the true horror, beyond science—where Cordyceps somehow knows how to synthesize proteins and neurotransmitters that mimic the brain’s own signals.

Cordyceps takes control. It makes them climb. It feeds off the innards of the host—selectively among the lesser tissues lest it should kill too quickly. It knows how to do this. When it is done, the dead host is left contorted as though in seizure around some high branch, a long green tendril sprouted from its head, and above it, a billion spores released to the wind, a nightmare in miniature. But the host is only an ant, only a lowly insect.

Plodders and tunnelers, builders of grainy empires. Were it not for our hubris, we might have realized that we, in our teeming cities, were not so very unlike them. They called me the Nightmare Man. It fell to me to remain unsurprised by the unthinkable, to have a plan—not to come up with a plan, but to have a plan ready in advance, the ark built before the first raindrop fell.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 4b67eb95de280b20
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,863,113 bytes (1.777 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781734282238
• Pages: 460
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 515.14 minutes
• Total Words: 103,028
• Total Characters: 591,770
• Average Words per Page: 223.97
• Average Characters per Page: 1286.46

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