Sporebound
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Chapter 3
The storm came ashore at two in the morning and did not so much arrive as take possession.
It struck the coast first, hurling itself against the sea stacks and the drowned beaches, tearing the spray off the waves and flinging it half a mile inland. Then it climbed the ridges, and the old forest took the blow the way it had taken a thousand blows before, with a vast groaning of trunks and a hiss of wind through the high needles that sounded like the ocean standing on its hind legs. Branches came down. Entire hemlocks, long dead and hollow, leaned slowly over and fell with a sound like distant artillery.
Noah was awake for all of it. He sat on the edge of his cot in the dark, boots laced and rifle across his knees, listening to the cabin work. Logs flexed and settled. The stovepipe sang. Water poured off the eaves in solid ropes. He had built the place to stand against exactly this, and he trusted it the way he trusted very few things, which was to say not entirely.
At a quarter to four, between one gust and the next, he heard a sound that was not the wind.
It was a long, shrill shriek of tearing metal, carried from half a mile west on the back of the gale, and it ended in a crash he felt through the floor.
He was out the door before the echo faded.
The outpost had lost a third of its roof.
He saw it by flashlight from the edge of the clearing: a ragged hole where the western corner of the module had been, the sheet metal peeled back like the lid of a tin can, a sheared crossbeam swinging in the wind. Rain poured into the gap in a white, roaring cataract. Beyond it, one of the greenhouses had lost three of its polycarbonate panels, and the others flexed and rattled in their frames. The solar array on the roof was still intact, but a loose section of flashing was dragging across it with a scraping screech, and Noah knew, with the dull certainty of a man who had warned of this for two years, that it would not hold.
He crossed the clearing at a run, head down, the storm shoving at him like a hand.
Willow was already inside, soaked to the skin, her hair plastered flat against her skull. She had a headlamp strapped on and a plastic tub in her arms and she was shouting something at nobody. When she saw him she stopped. For a moment neither of them said anything. The roar of the water filled the module, rattling the glass, drowning the voice of the wind. The beam of her lamp swept across the ceiling, across the dripping hole, across the long wet slashes of light that fell on the lab benches.
“The bus,” Noah shouted. “Cut the power.”
“I know! I tried! The breaker’s—” She jerked her head toward the corner where the electrical panel stood, and he saw the water streaming down the wall behind it and understood. He crossed the room in four strides and threw the main switch with his bare hand, ignoring the bite of current that crawled up his wrist. The lights went out. The hum of the compressor died. For a few seconds there was only the storm.
Then a flashlight came on, and another, and the work began.
It took them until dawn.
They moved the cultures first, carrying armloads of dishes and racks and sealed jars from the failing west wall to the dry room at the back of the module. It was a windowless closet of a space, three paces wide, with a concrete floor and a steel door that Noah had once called the only sensible thing the government had installed. They stacked what they could on the shelves and wedged the rest between the incubator and the supply racks. They hauled the microscope, the centrifuge, the laptop in its padded case, the reference binders swollen with notes. They dragged tarps across the open corner and weighted them with sandbags, and the tarps bellied and snapped and threatened to tear away, and Noah lashed them down with rope and a roofer’s knots while Willow held the ladder against the gale.
At one point a gust took the ladder entirely, and Willow lunged and caught his belt, and for a few seconds it was the only thing between him and the ground. Neither of them mentioned it afterward.
The greenhouse was worse. When the panels went, the wind had driven rain straight across the beds, and it had brought something else with it. Willow found it with her lamp, kneeling in the mud among the broken glass, her hand hovering above a tray of chard. A faint web of orange threads had begun to bloom across the soil. It was very fine, no thicker than hair, and it glistened in the beam like frost.
“Don’t touch it,” Noah said, behind her. He had come up without a sound.
“I know.” She withdrew her hand slowly. “I know. It’s the compost. The imported bed. The grove soil kills it, but this—” She gestured at the tray. “I brought this in from outside, two winters ago. It’s never been exposed to the root zone. The storm must have blown the spores over from the east boundary in sheets.”
“How much?”
She counted in the lamplight, her lips moving. “A third of the beds. Maybe more.” Her voice was quite level, which told him how badly it hurt. “I’ll have to burn them.”
He nodded. “Tomorrow, once the wind drops. Not before.”
She did not thank him for his help, and he did not offer more. But he stayed beside her in the wet and dark, holding the lamp steady while she lifted the trays out one by one and set them on a tarp for burning. When it was done, she sat back on her heels with her arms wrapped around her knees and looked at the ruined beds, and said very quietly, “It was going so well.”
“It’s going to go well again.”
She looked up at him, surprised.
“Come on,” he said, with the gruffness of a man who had overspoken. “There’s more to carry.”
By six in the morning the storm had not eased, and it was plain that no one was leaving the module.
Noah stood in the doorway of the dry room, soaked and shivering, and looked out at a world gone to water. The path to his cabin had become a stream. Trees were still falling beyond the fence. A branch as thick as a man’s thigh had landed across the generator shed and driven a splintered end through the roof. He could have made it back. He had made it through worse. But the lightning had started, and a man who walked half a mile through a forest full of leaning snags in a lightning storm was a fool with an unfinished will.
Willow stood at his shoulder. She had taken a towel from somewhere and wrapped it around her neck, and her teeth were chattering.
“You can stay,” she said. It sounded like something she had been working up to saying for some time. “Obviously. Until it passes.”
“I’ll stay.”
“I can make tea. There’s still the camp stove.”
“Fine.”
It was the longest civil exchange they’d had in a month.
The dry room, once they had cleared a place to sit, was a tight, close little cave of a space, lit by a single battery lantern turned down to a low yellow glow. The shelves ran floor to ceiling, crammed with boxed reagents and labeled crates. A camp stove hissed in one corner, with a dented kettle atop it. Beyond the steel door the storm hammered, muffled now, a continual dull drumming that seemed to come from the earth itself. The two of them sat across from each other on overturned crates, knees almost touching, steam rising from their tin cups.
For a time neither of them spoke. The kettle ticked. Willow held her cup in both hands and watched the surface of the tea. Noah watched the door.
“You never asked me what I was working on,” she said at last.
“I know what you’re working on.”
“You know I’m working on something. That’s different.” She lifted her eyes. “Two years, Noah. I think I’ve earned an actual question.”
He considered refusing. The impulse was there, solid and familiar, the instinct to close the door. But the storm was in the walls, and he was tired, and she had held the ladder.
“All right,” he said. “What’s the point of all this?”
She told him.
She did not tell it like a lecture. She told it slowly, with long pauses, rubbing the rim of her cup with her thumb, and she began not with the science but with the beginning, because she seemed to think he needed it, and perhaps he did. He had lived the end of the old world in a single forest, in a single winter, and he had never really understood the rest.
It had started, she said, in the timber camps. Seven years ago this autumn. A fungus that had lived quietly in the soil for ten thousand years found a way across the barrier between species, and then across the barrier between warm blood and cold ground. The first cases were loggers, and elk, and the dogs of the loggers, and by the time anyone in Olympia had thought to ask what it was, there were whole valleys silent. The spores traveled on wind and rain. They settled in lungs. They grew, over a matter of hours, through the nerves, and what rose from the bed afterward walked and bit and breathed out clouds of yellow dust that carried the infection to the next living thing.
“Cordyceps mutans,” she said. “That’s what we named it. Though it wasn’t one fungus by the end. It was dozens of strains, all evolving, all trying different tricks. The ones you see in the dead forest now are the survivors. The nastiest. The ones that learned to spread.”
“And the animals,” Noah said. “The ones that don’t turn.”
“Fish. Mostly.” She nodded. “That’s the thing about the spores. They need air and a certain level of humidity. Water drowns them. They can’t germinate, can’t take root in anything that lives in it. Salmon, trout, shellfish, even the river otters seem to resist. It’s why the coast and the rivers are the only places anyone’s still eating decently.”
Noah thought of the trout on the cairn, and the heavy blocky handwriting, and said nothing.