The next morning, Carter was dead. He’d suffocated in his sleep.
Wilson left him where he lay and by evening the fungus had consumed him completely. The bright orange stain on the sidewalk far below had long disappeared.
Every morning and night Wilson checked himself for the fungus, but he remained uninfected. Kimberley had been right, it seemed. He was immune. Not that it really seemed to matter any more.
A week or so after Carter’s death he was sitting on the roof one late afternoon, drinking a bottle of wine he’d found, and staring vacantly out over the fungus-covered vista, when he heard a loud rumbling sound. He looked and saw the Post Office Tower starting to topple over. It fell toward Tottenham Court Road in slow motion, and when it hit the ground, after smashing through the brittle shells of the smaller buildings beneath it, the impact made the Euston Tower shake.
Wilson guessed that the fungus had finally eaten through the concrete base of the Post Office structure. He was glad it had collapsed. Every time he looked at it he remembered what its bulbous summit had contained. the horrors of Jane’s laboratory. his son’s eyes staring out of that cabinet.
For some reason he interpreted the destruction of the tower as an even more positive sign than the RAF jet’s appearance.
All of a sudden he knew for certain that the battle would be won and the fungus would be destroyed.
He drank the rest of the wine and flung the bottle high into the air.