After jumping off the bus, Tasìa stood on the side of a desolate country road. The same road she had walked through rural burgs to get to her own house a few days before.

She calculated in her head the distance to the downtown of Villa Morrón, Tasìa cursed under her breath.

Eight miles she would have to walk to score some LSD.

Tasìa recalled her conversation with Missi, amazingly enough as it seemed so long ago, but in reality, it occurred less than a week before.

"How are you feeling," Missi asked.

"Nothing different, except I have a feeling the chemo is weakening my inoculation. I see the incubus in my dreams. I also see the black-eyed ones asking to be let in. And the snake in the tree hissing telling me what it could do for me."

As for her mental health, Tasìa had known for a few months now it was slowly deteriorating. Now that she was on the run, there was no chance of legally receiving a new inoculation to stem the damage the chemo treatment had done to her.

Self-medication was the only answer she had available to her. Though the inoculation was a combination of compounds, lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, was the principal catalyst in the pharmaceutical cocktail. It stymied the continuous assault of the nanospores upon the mind.

Tasìa walked a little further down the road and she stopped. The stitches in her gut made it uncomfortable to travel any distance more than the shuffle it took her to get from room to room around her house.

Tasìa had a first-rate medical station there, but she likely caught an infection due to having to do her own stitch work without any assistance.

Did she regret her action back on the bus that got her where she stood now?

No, of course not. Tasìa now realized something about the ex-cop's attempt to assault her. He was softening her up for an interrogation.

It is what cops did in the Quadra so there was no alternative course of action where she could have stayed quiet as he felt her up and he moved on.

That is how those animals operate.

Her father's words came back to her.

There is never a negotiation for just a little giving-in here for a little break there. Any loss of control over what happens to you is a loss of all control over what happens to you.

Still, she had something going for her, Tasìa knew this region north of Villa Marròn very well. There was a deer trail that ran adjacent to the main highway before it swerved deeper into the woods to cross a bike path.

The bike path, itself, was a shortcut into the city.

Sirens blared from a mile up the road, Tasìa slid into the woods and she began to run along the deer trail towards the bike path.

With the jagged terrain of fallen limbs, long flat rocks, and black soil, the pain on her abdomen surged.

She could endure it. One tough little bitch, Green-eyed Elise once complimented her. Tasìa was more concerned about the condition of the stitches than the pain she felt.

She had stolen the medical equipment from the mansion of a cosmetic surgeon. The filament she chose was delicate and fine-grained to prevent any noticeable scarring.

Tasìa paused behind a grove of trees and she crouched down as the volume of the siren wailing reached an apex.

An EMS Firebird hugged the curve of the road just a few dozen yards away from her. The converted sports car was a sexy little red number.

Man, would I love to steal that fine bitch if the opportunity presented itself.

The front retained the characteristics of a sports car, the backend expanded to haul a patient and an attendant.

It was a good sign that so far only the medical services had been alerted. In the confusion on the bus, the injury was still being treated as an accident.

Tasha giggled at a notion that crossed her mind, perhaps they mistook the injury for a zipper malfunction.

When the Firebird wagon passed the grove on by, Tasìa began to haul ass.

A mile out from the bike trail, Tasìa noticed an odd odor in the air. It smelled putrid and sour, like the esters from a compost of rotting bananas.

She slowed down and caught her breath. Backing up a little bit, she aligned her shoulders against the trunk of a large tree.

Tasìa had smelled this odor before.

Ascospores.

In the first several days of the invasion, giant sacks of the floating spore colonies would burst yellow dust over the cities and countryside. Before the inoculations, panic and mass psychosis would have ensued.

They were still a source of fear given other oddities often followed the wake of their path of destruction.

Tasìa felt a chill in the air. Then she was in the cast of a shadow. Above her, one large ascospore, easily ten yards across its diameter, hovered in a tumbling fashion. It was followed by several smaller ones.

The crashing sounds of branches breaking surrounded her. Tasìa turned around so she could grip the tree if she needed to climb it.

Several small deer rushed past her as they merged together on the trail. They moved swiftly, and they were quickly out of view.

What were they running from?

Tasìa was now feeling to be one hundred percent the city girl who in her youth was easily spooked by even the woods of a well-groomed park.

How she felt dragged along unwillingly when her father took her hunting, Tasìa recalled, vividly.

In her previous identity, she had spent hundreds of hours hiking these very woods, but now they felt alien to her.

Chin up, and don't lose your shit, Tasìa.

She told herself.

No sound followed from whence the deers had merged. She took a peek.

Nothing but somber woodland. The ascospores seemed to merely dangle harmlessly in the sky.

With clenched fist, Tasìa committed to steel her resolve. She would not allow herself to be panicked, no matter what crossed her path.

Continuing down the deer path, she soon came upon familiar grounds once more when Tasìa recognized a thicket of hazel limbs.

The very ones that gave Tasìa her alias years ago when she first explored Villa Marròn. She had even dyed her hair to match it.

Beneath the thicket of brush, mushrooms lined up so dense they could have been mistaken for the strata of a pinkish clay sediment.

She began to have an uneasy feeling. Tasìa pulled out her favorite gun, a Kel-Tec P-32 Custom. She had the grip restocked in a polished mesh made of snake bone for sigil related purposes.

As she stepped deeper into the mushroom laden path, a small ascospore began to twirl around her head.

A liquid film oozed from its surface. She was relieved at the sight of this. Though you would not want to get the liquid on you, it was easier to defend against then if this ascospore was in its dry phase.

She gripped her gun tight in both hands. This scenario had the feeling of a trap.

To see how it would react, Tasìa dropped on her knees. It pulled back, hovered in place as if it was uncertain how to respond.

Tasìa took advantage of the easy placement that the target gave her. She shot it twice.

It spun like a top before plunging on to the ground.

A ratatat sound, like the high-pitched howl of a rabid squirrel, shrieked from above her. The giant spore shook in place.

Did she just piss the big mothership-like fungus off?

It began to spin in its place hovering above her, gaining more and more momentum with each rotation.

Tasìa ran like hell. She knew the angry fungus that followed was only a few dozen yards away by the constant howl that stirred at her back.

Wind buffed up against her shoulders, sudden and abrupt. She ducked flat in a spread against the black soil and dead leaves of the ground.

The ascospore slammed into the trunk of a thick tree. A twirl of yellow gas started to fall in all directions and spread far out into the path and shrubbery around her.

Shivers of goosebumps crawled up along the length of her skin. In most situations, she felt confident she could manage, but in Tasìa's gut, she felt ill-prepared to deal with these pestilent things attempting to trap her.

She grabbed a face mask from her fanny pack and she slid it on before she stood back up.

Many yards up the path, a high-pitched scream grew in intensity before it broke out into a loud trembling cry.

Tasìa's stomach quivered until she was forced to jerk the mask back off and vomit. She knew that sound intimately. Until her dying day, she would associate it with the worst shot she had ever taken.

She once took a shot she thought dead center to kill a deer with a hunting rifle, but she merely grazed the beast.

The torturous cry was unmistakable.

She remembered her own tears. Her father mussing her hair as he comforted her.

Sincerity in all of your actions, my child, is your only assured path to further yourself righteously.

Her father had told her. So odd that his words endeared for so long.

She continued up the path. Something, wiry and long, rustled in the shrubs ahead of her. Tasìa expected to see a gore-ladened slaughter of the pack of deer by this time.

There was no blood where the struggle was taking place. Upon inspection of the aberrant thing in front of her, she could not make heads or tails of it.

That same something jumped out of the shrubs. It pulled at a deer that, in turn, kicked back at it with the leg that remained free.

Where it had touched the deer, gray boils protruded out of the beast's skin.

Tasìa pointed her gun at the aberration. It appeared to be of a fungus composed of an oily and leathery bark.

She took aim at the center of its mass before emptying the magazine of its rounds into its body.

It shattered like wood bursting at the wedge of a vicious ax, revealing red rope-like tendons beneath. The aberration writhed and coiled on the ground for several seconds before it lay dead still.

Tasìa reloaded her pistol as she walked up to the deer. Its scream now merely a moaning noise suspired only when it breathed out.

There was another noise so faint Tasia could barely hear it. It was distinctive and grotesque, nonetheless. The gray boils on the deer's body now numbered in the hundreds.

They made a searing noise, as if the acids forming inside them were ready to boil over.

"I'm sorry, dear lady," Tasìa told the deer before she ended its misery with a single bullet to the head.

As she walked farther up, more strata of mushrooms occurred along the pathway. The pinkish and white hews were beautiful though she was in no mood to relish the sight of them.

Tasìa hoped they were not even more harbingers of evil design.

Most of the residents of the Quadra believed the Cull Spores were some mad spook's idea of the future advancement of warfare.

In the years since, no one was certain of the veracity of those stories. With the Salvage discouraging wild speculation, no one of note would take credit for the rumors either.

Tasìa now understood why these notions were preoccupying her mind; the mushroom strata was indeed a deliberate design.

It curved into a second path up a hill. On both sides of the new path, the dense strata formed intricate latticework, baroque and artful.

She decided to follow the path to see what was on the top of the hill.

A gazebo of dense mushroom and ivy thickets formed around a fairy mound, like one would find in the Celtic lands of Europe.

There was something that spoiled the beautiful scenery around her. An unmistakable scent. The oily, sweet musk of death.

It came upon a breeze down the pathway from the fairy mound above her.

Tasìa reached the summit; as she began to kneel she saw what caused the stench. In the center of the mound was a dead fairy baby.

Dry little butterfly wings, little lambsy hooves, two spiraling ram horns upon its head. Its mouth agape in a sad eternal frown.

Tasìa stared in disbelief. She had to tell herself.

You are not a dream at all. You are real. You seem so real.

She noticed an epitaph beneath its feet written in Latin

Te semper amabo, mi dulcissime sole.

Mommy will love you forever, my Sweetest Sunshine.

Tasìa bent down on her knees, closed her eyes and she prayed for its soul.

What a unfair world we inhabit, Tasìa thought.

A Biblical verse came to Tasìa's mind.

I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will rob you of your children. Pestilence and blood shall pass through you, and I will bring the sword upon you. I am the Lord; I have spoken.

She wept uncontrollably. She had thought herself incapable of the emotions that now wailed out of her, given how emotionally spent the ordeals she endured the past week caused her to be.

As quick to change as a jackal's leer, the smell of death dissipated.

Tasìa shut her eyes more tightly. If she opened them what she had seen would no longer be there. That she feared.

It was just as fearful to her as what she just witnessed. It meant she was going insane.

She had to score the LSD before she spoke to León, tomorrow.

She had to do it for her Aunt Tatiana. She turned her head, got up and ran.