as she lived by herself, save for the cats, and hadn’ t visited anyone in months, Sylvia felt that her risk as an infection vector was minimal.
She was walking during the day when she found the body, which was already unusual for her. But the markets that had popped up, where people traded goods or promises of work for fresh food from the countryside, only operated during daylight hours. During the day, one could see how quickly the face of Yrcalla had changed. Streets were entangled in meshes of fungus. Streetlights everywhere were bowed and broken, twisted out of shape from the sheer mass of fungal growth. Everywhere from Chicken Pox Prospects to Maigrettestrasse was deserted now, a whole chunk of the city given over to the voxsola. Derelict buildings consumed by glistening fungal webs, plants and dogs wrapped in a gossamer sugar coating of death.
Sylvia had never seen one of the cocoons before. At least that’ s what people had started calling them. They looked like cocoons, or perhaps the victims of a giant spider, wrapped up ready for digestion. Already there were rumours throughout the city that the abandoned pets and abandoned people consumed by the fungus were just a gestational state. What they gave birth to depended on who you talked to. Rumours of monsters, abominations from the Forbidden Zone, giant insects, beautiful angels made of light. Looking at the dead man, Sylvia found it hard to believe that any transformative process was going on here other than decay and decomposition. Wrapped up in tentacles of fungus, the man’ s face was hidden from view, only his limbs sticking out from the central gooey mass. His feet were bare; if he had ever had shoes they had been taken for the living by one who would soon wind up in a similar situation. Sylvia wondered who he had been. If he had been one of the many beggars and panhandlers
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