What follows is a brief teaser from Sickness In Hell; my forthcoming splatterpunk novel. It's been years since I wrote the first drafts and it is finally taking form.
If Pillwaff and
her cronies had bothered to let the monitoring staff know what Henry
had been up to days before, they might have been a little more
vigilant- those mushrooms growing in the slurry-tainted swamp
separated from the intake stream by only a few yards of loose dirt
had finally made their way to fresher water- which didn't benefit
their growth, but didn't stop them either. Some of those spores had
gotten into the intake, and the decaying filter screens installed
long ago hadn't stopped them so much as they had provided the perfect
dirty, greasy substrate for them to take hold inside the water ducts
under the plant. The rusted, leaking pipes there weren't helping, and
the entire system was, unknown to anyone in the plant, ripe for
infestation by fungal colonies.
The situation
worsened over the next few minutes as well; the intake system quickly
began spawning hyphae and little, almost microscopic bits of mushroom
flesh were now circulating freely past the filter, as the happy
little fungus growths pushed their feeding receptacles to the other
side of the filtration sheets. With no way to monitor the filtered
water (for such technology did not exist in their aging plant) those
in the monitoring center could only ring Pillwaff hours later when
they finally bothered to check the indicator lights and tell her that
they should close things down for the afternoon and have someone
replace the filter system. Pillwaff wanted to go home and wear
bondage gear while watching dwarf porn anyways, to get herself all
greasy and sweaty, so she didn't give a shit and switched everything
off herself.
Down in the
shipping room annoying Sally had already been told to go home, but
decided to be anally retentive as always and commanded the last truck
to dock anyways and she'd load it herself. She didn't like unfinished
work- her raging obsessive compulsive disorder drove her mad and she
wouldn't be able to sleep if the hams weren't packed and shipped
before five o'clock sharp. It wasn't hard- years of doing the odd
lifting job herself when others weren't willing or present had left
her muscles bulging with veins- perhaps she was stronger physically
than any of the men in the plant.
She had no
idea the batch was tainted with mutated, slightly radioactive fungus-
it's not like the people in the monitoring center really communicated
with anyone else in the plant- Sally had just assumed that the
filters were clogged by a dead muskrat or some other unfortunate
animal had drowned and gotten sucked in, its corpse slowly dissolving
into sediment as it flattens against their water intake. She didn't
know shit about water systems anyways- who cares?
