“We suspect the locusts’ behavior served a similar function to that of the ‘death grip’ of the ants’ mandibles, which the fungus utilizes to immobilize its host while it parasitizes it,” Thompson said. “Or at least that’s our working theory.”
“You’re telling me the fungus made them cram themselves into a tiny crack until there were enough dead bodies to raise the lid?” Randall said.
“That’s how it works, sir,” Waller said. “The spores attach to the exoskeleton, burrow through it using a combination of enzymes and mechanical force, and spread throughout the body in their yeast stage. They then infiltrate the insect’s brain and assume control of its motor functions.”
“A fungus can’t think.”
“It can in the sense that the ant — or, in this case, the locust — is able to. Its sole biological imperative is the perpetuation of its species, which means that it will do everything within its power to achieve its reproductive potential.”
Randall lifted one of the compressed carcasses from the rim. It looked like it had been stomped by a shoe. Several others came away with it, all of them tangled together by a snarl of stalks and some kind of white fuzz.
“What’s this furry stuff?”
“Hyphae. They’re thin filaments that spread throughout the host’s body while the fungus consumes it. They help maintain structural integrity and form a network not unlike our own circulatory or nervous systems.”
Randall remembered the holes in the exoskeletons of the locusts he found in the rabbit cages.
“So where are all of these growths on the ones that escaped?”
“Its rate of proliferation is staggering,” Thompson said through the speaker, which made his voice sound tinny.
Randall leaned right up against the window to get a better view of the rabbit on the dissection tray inside The Warren’s sealed lab. Its front and hind legs had been stretched out and pinned to the black wax. The flesh had been parted straight up its spine, the skin and fur retracted, and the naked musculature exposed. The spinous processes of its vertebrae were elongated by the stalk-like growths protruding from them. The base of its skull had been opened to reveal its brain and cranial nerve bundles.
He pressed the button and spoke into the microphone so his chief scientist could hear him.
“It looks like it’s already infiltrated the central nervous system.”
“We theorize that it entered the circulatory system via the superficial capillaries and crossed the blood-brain barrier in the same manner it breaks through the exoskeleton of an insect,” Thompson said. “There’s a minimal amount of hemorrhaging and midline shift, but the greatest hematological difference appears to be in the total volume of residual blood, which we estimate to be roughly half that of a living specimen.”
“There was no blood on the substrate.”
“Precisely.”
“The fungus is feeding on the blood?”
“More likely incorporating it into its biomass in much the same way other multicellular species of fungi grow from corpses and accelerate the process of decomposition.”
“Then how did they manage to infect the locusts in the first place?”
“Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is incredibly susceptible to infection from other fungi, which is why it doesn’t simply wipe out entire ant species wherever it goes. It’s nature’s way of keeping its reproduction in check. To protect the fungus-host ecosystem, it engages in what’s known as secondary metabolism, a process by which it produces the antibacterial agents necessary to stave off pathogens during the reproductive cycle. That’s why none of the other test batches survived. The antibodies they produced caused the wheat stem rust to produce deoxynivalenol in response to the threat, killing the unilateralis before it could assume command of the host’s motor functions. The locusts that had been bred for their aggressive response to predatory species added an element to the equation in the form of a foreign blood source, a threat against which all three species — fungal and host alike — were forced to work in tandem.”
Thompson used a pair forceps to lift off the crown in the rabbit’s skull, which peeled away from the brain with long strands reminiscent of worms. The fungus had already taken root and was in the process of growing through the cranium.
“It’s metabolizing the blood,” Randall said.
“That’s our working hypothesis,” Thompson said. “It’s consuming some component of the blood to produce the antibodies that allow it to circumvent the immune response and proliferate unchecked within the host’s body.”
“So what’s the end result?”
“Any speculation at this point would be premature.”
“I don’t want speculation, Doctor. I want answers.”
Randall glanced at the rabbit one last time before leaving the lab. He could have sworn there were even more filaments protruding from the muscles to either side of its spine than there’d been when he arrived.
“ARE YOU SURE this is what they want?” Corporal Lyle Benjamin asked. “Because there’s no going back from this. We’ve never decommissioned a well of this nature before, largely because such a thing has never existed until now. This is uncharted territory for us. This isn’t a well where we’ve extracted oil and water’s going to take its place. We’ve actively injected massive amounts of chemicals into porous rock where there wasn’t space for them to begin with.”
Randall looked up at the rigging of the derrick, which towered over them like a five-story spike driven into the earth. The chief engineer was right, of course, but he resented having his orders questioned. The instability was the whole reason they were decommissioning the 12,045-foot deep injection well, which had been commissioned for the disposal of waste chemicals from the weapons program and the commercial interests leasing space on the arsenal.
The original plan had been to allow the chemicals to precipitate in open-air, asphalt-lined holding basins the size of small lakes. Unfortunately, they’d contaminated the groundwater to such an extent that farmers dozens of miles away were losing entire harvests. The backup plan of sealing the waste in drums and dumping it into the ocean had proven too costly, necessitating the alternative of burying it so deep that it couldn’t infiltrate the groundwater through the bedrock. The flaw was that the high pressure required to force fluid into a space not designed to accommodate it had triggered a series of earthquakes, a regrettable outcome, to be sure, but nothing catastrophic. At least it wasn’t until the cause of the unprecedented seismic activity made the papers.
Honestly, Randall didn’t care one way or the other. Production was his concern, not disposal, and he had enough on his plate today that he didn’t have the time or the patience to hold the hand of an engineer who’d already received his orders from higher up the chain of command.
“Just get it done,” he said.
“It’s not as easy as plugging a hole. We have no idea how the concrete casings held up to the corrosive effects of the chemicals. We thought three concentric layers was overkill at the time, but we also thought the waste wouldn’t be able to eat through half an inch of asphalt. It’s possible that the pipe itself is the only thing holding the well together and once we remove it, the whole damn thing will collapse.”