The Yellow Hydrant

I wake up on a floor. It is a hard floor. The carpet is thin and brown and feels like sandpaper against my cheek. I open my eyes. My eyelids are sticky. They are glued shut with sleep and dried smoke. I rub them with the back of my hand. My hand is covered in a thick crust. It is a mix of dried mud from the riverbank and dried brown gravy from the Wellington building. It smells like old meat and burnt plastic.

I sit up. My body hurts. My knees ache. My back is stiff. I am still wearing my dumb suit. The collar is still too tight, but the button popped off at some point during the night. Now the shirt hangs open at my neck. It is ruined. My mom would be so mad.

My brain stops. The thought hits a wall.

My mom. My dad. The green face. The yellow dust.

My stomach turns over. It feels like I swallowed a cold, heavy rock. The rock sits right behind my belly button. It pulls my whole body down. I cannot think about them. If I think about them, I will start screaming. And if I start screaming, I do not think I will ever stop. So, I take the thought, I put it in a mental cardboard box, and I shove it deep into the back of my head. I tape the box shut.

I look around. I am in Konn's apartment. His family lives on the third floor. It is a small apartment. The walls are painted a dirty off-white color. There are posters of old bands on the wall. The edges of the posters are curling up. The TV is a big black square on a cheap wooden stand. It is turned off.

Konn is asleep on the couch. He is wearing his grey hoodie. The grease stain on his chest is now mixed with black soot and brown mud. He is snoring. It is a loud, wet sound. He sounds like a broken lawnmower trying to start in the rain. One of his muddy boots is hanging off the edge of the cushions. The mud has dried and crumbled onto the floor.

Harper is not asleep. She is sitting in a plastic chair by the window. She is staring outside. She still has her big black winter boots on. She is holding a piece of pink bubblegum in her hand. It is the gum she peeled off her nose last night. It is covered in dirt and little grey pieces of ash. She is just rolling it between her thumb and her finger. Roll. Roll. Roll.

"What time is it?" I ask. My voice sounds rough. It sounds like I swallowed a handful of sand.

Harper does not turn around. She just keeps looking out the window.

"Morning," she says.

"Is your phone working?" I ask.

"Dead," she says.

I reach into my suit pants. I pull out my phone. The screen is cracked. A giant spiderweb of broken glass covers the front. I press the button. Nothing happens. The battery is completely empty.

"Mine is dead too," I say.

I stand up. My legs feel wobbly. Like they are made of wet noodles. I walk over to the kitchen area. It is just a few feet away. The apartment is basically one big room. The kitchen floor is covered in cheap linoleum. It looks like fake wood. It is peeling at the corners. My dirty socks stick to it slightly when I walk.

I am hungry. I am so incredibly hungry. The hunger is a sharp pain in my ribs. It feels like a small animal is scratching the inside of my stomach. I open the fridge. It is an old white fridge. The handle is sticky. The motor hums loudly. It sounds like a giant angry bee.

I look inside. The light bulb is burned out. It is dark. There is not much food. Konn's mom works night shifts at the hospital. She does not grocery shop very often. There is a plastic jug of milk. It has a blue cap. I check the date. It expired four days ago. I put it back. There is a half-empty jar of pickles. The green juice looks cloudy. There is a single slice of American cheese wrapped in plastic.

"There is no food," I say.

Konn stops snoring. He snorts. He sits up quickly. He looks confused. He looks around the room wildly for a second. Then his shoulders drop. He remembers.

"There are Pop-Tarts in the cupboard," Konn says. He rubs his face. He smears a streak of black soot across his forehead. He looks like a tired raccoon.

I open the cupboard above the sink. The hinge squeaks. It is a sharp, annoying sound. There is a silver box of Pop-Tarts. Strawberry. The frosting has little colored sprinkles on it. I take the box down. I tear the silver foil open. I do not bother with the toaster. I just bite into the dry pastry. It is chalky. It tastes artificial. It tastes like cardboard and fake sugar. It is the best thing I have ever eaten.

I hand one to Konn. He takes it. He eats it in three giant bites. He chews with his mouth open. Crumbs fall onto his lap.

"Harper," I say. "Do you want one?"

I hold out the silver package. Harper finally turns around from the window. Her face is pale. There are dark purple bags under her eyes. She looks like she has not slept in a week. She looks at the Pop-Tart. She shakes her head.

"I am not hungry," she says.

"You have to eat," Konn says. He swallows hard. "We have to keep our energy up. This is a survival situation. Like in that video game. The one with the island."

"This is not a video game, Konn," Harper says quietly. "This is real life."

"I know it is real life," Konn says. He sounds defensive. "I am just saying. We need calories."

"Where is your mom?" I ask Konn.

Konn looks at the floor. He kicks a dried piece of mud with his boot. "She was at the hospital. Doing a double shift. I do not know if the hospital is safe. I do not know if she is there."

We are quiet for a minute. The only sound is the angry bee hum of the refrigerator. The silence is heavy. It presses against my ears. I hate it. I want the fire alarm from last night to come back. I want someone to yell. I want an adult to walk in through the door and tell us we are grounded for staying up all night. I want someone to tell us to wash our faces and do our homework.

But nobody walks through the door. The door stays closed.

"We should go outside," I say.

"Why?" Konn asks.

"Because we cannot just sit here," I say. "We have to see what is happening. We have to see if anyone is left."

"Maybe they contained it," Konn says. He sounds hopeful. "Maybe the fire department showed up. Maybe they sprayed the building with chemicals. Maybe the spores just burned up."

"I saw them floating in the wind," Harper says. Her voice is flat. "They were glowing. They went everywhere."

"We need to look," I say.

We do not pack anything. We do not have anything to pack. We just walk to the door. Konn grabs his keys from a little bowl on a table. The bowl is full of old receipts and pennies. The keys jingle. The sound is too loud in the quiet apartment.

We walk out into the hallway. The hallway smells like old cabbage and wet dog. It always smells like that. The carpet is dark green with weird yellow squares on it. The fluorescent lights overhead are flickering. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. They give off a sickly pale light.

We walk to the elevator. The metal doors are scratched. Someone carved a bad word into the metal with a key. Konn pushes the button. The button lights up orange. We wait. We wait for a long time. Nothing happens. The gears do not grind. The cables do not pull. The elevator is dead.

"Stairs," I say.

We walk to the stairwell. The door is heavy steel. I push it open. The air inside the stairwell is cold. It smells like concrete and dust. We walk down. Our boots hit the stairs. Thud. Thud. Thud. The sound echoes all the way down to the bottom. It sounds like a giant drum.

We reach the lobby. The lobby is empty. The mailboxes are shiny silver squares on the wall. Some of the little doors are hanging open. Junk mail is spilled on the floor. Fliers for pizza places and cheap car insurance.

We walk to the front door. It is a big glass door with a heavy metal handle. I push it. We step outside.

The sun hits my face. It is incredibly bright. It is a bright, clear spring morning. The sky is a giant dome of perfect blue. There are no clouds. Not a single one. It looks fake. It looks like a painting. The air is cold, but the sun is warm on my skin.

I look down the street.

It is empty.

It is completely, totally empty.

Usually, on a Tuesday morning, this street is loud. There are cars driving by. People are honking. The garbage truck is usually backing up, beeping loudly. Kids are walking to the bus stop. Dogs are barking at squirrels.

Today, there is nothing. No cars are moving. No people are walking. No dogs. No birds. Even the birds are gone. The trees are bare, just brown branches reaching up into the blue sky.

"This is weird," Konn says. He whispers. He does not know why he is whispering. Neither do I.

"Where is everyone?" Harper asks.

"Maybe they evacuated," I say. "Maybe the police came and told everyone to leave."

"Without us?" Konn asks. "They just left us sleeping in my apartment?"

"We did not hear sirens," Harper says. "If they evacuated the whole block, there would be sirens. Megaphones. Noise. There was no noise."

She is right. The night was quiet after the fire alarms faded in the distance.

We start walking. We walk down the middle of the street. It feels wrong. We are supposed to be on the sidewalk. Walking on the asphalt makes me feel like I am breaking a rule. The asphalt is wet. The snow melted a few days ago, and the street is covered in puddles. The puddles have oily rainbows floating on top of them. The oil swirls around. Blue, purple, green.

I look at the houses. They are normal houses. Brick houses with peeling paint on the window frames. Little patches of dead brown grass in the front yards. Garbage cans sitting at the end of the driveways. Everything looks perfectly normal. Except for the silence.

"Look at the hydrants," Harper says.

She points.

We are at the corner of Elm Street and Maple Drive. There is a fire hydrant on the corner. It is usually painted a bright, ugly yellow.

It is not yellow anymore.

It is green. But it is not just painted green. It is fuzzy.

We walk closer. The silence is so heavy I can hear my own breathing. I can hear the wet squish of Harper's boots in the mud. We stand in a circle around the fire hydrant.

The whole metal thing is covered in a thick layer of bright, neon green moss. It looks like a fuzzy tennis ball. The moss is thick. It looks like velvet. It looks soft.

"Do not touch it," I say quickly. Konn was already reaching his hand out. He stops.

"I was just going to poke it," Konn says.

"Do not poke it," I say. "Remember Mr. Henderson? His face exploded into a salad. This is the same stuff."

"It does not look like a mushroom," Konn says. He leans in closer. His nose is only a few inches away from the green fuzz. "It looks like a sweater. A really ugly, wet sweater."

I look closely at it. Konn is right. It does not look like the mushrooms from the gala. Those were big and chunky and looked like coral. This is flat. It coats the metal perfectly. It follows the shape of the bolts and the heavy chains. But as I stare at it, I notice something terrible.

It is moving.

It is not moving fast. It is not crawling. It is pulsing. Very, very slowly. The little fuzzy hairs on the moss expand, and then they shrink. Expand. Shrink. It looks like it is breathing.

"It is alive," Harper whispers.

Harper takes off her backpack. It is a heavy canvas bag. She unzips the front pocket. She pulls out a wooden ruler. It has faded marker stains on it. She holds the ruler out like a sword.

"What are you doing?" I ask.

"Testing it," she says.

She pokes the green moss with the end of the wooden ruler.

The moment the wood touches the green fuzz, there is a tiny sound. It sounds like a drop of water hitting a hot frying pan. Sizzle.

The tip of the wooden ruler turns black. Then it turns grey. Then it turns green. The neon green moss climbs up the wood. It moves incredibly fast. It eats the wood. It digests it in seconds.

Harper shrieks and drops the ruler on the wet concrete.

We all jump back.

The ruler hits the ground. Within three seconds, the entire piece of wood is swallowed by the bright green fuzz. It just looks like a green, fuzzy stick laying on the sidewalk. Then, the stick starts to melt. It collapses into a pile of green sludge. The sludge sinks into the cracks of the concrete.

"Okay," Konn says. His voice is shaking. "Okay. So we definitely do not touch the moss."

"It ate the wood," I say. My chest feels tight again. The air feels too thin. "It just ate it. Like acid."

"But it did not eat the metal," Harper says. She is rubbing her hand against her jacket, even though she did not touch the moss directly. "The fire hydrant is still there. It just covered the metal. It eats organic stuff. Wood. People."

I look down the street. Now that I know what to look for, I see it everywhere.

The street is infected.

Two houses down, the Miller family has a plastic lawn flamingo. It is usually bright pink plastic. Now, it is covered in thick, cotton-candy pink fuzz. The fuzz is pulsing in the sunlight.

Across the street, a silver car is parked in a driveway. The metal of the car is clean. But the rubber tires are covered in bright blue moss. The moss is eating the rubber. The car is sinking slowly as the tires dissolve into blue sludge.

"The wind," I say. "The wind blew the spores everywhere. They landed on everything in the neighborhood."

"This is really bad," Konn says. He runs his hands through his messy hair. He looks up at the blue sky. "This is really, really bad."

"We need to keep moving," Harper says. "We need to find an adult. A real adult. Not a cult adult. A police officer. Or the army. Someone has to be fixing this."

"Where do we go?" I ask.

"The school," Harper says. "It is a designated emergency shelter. I read it on a poster in the hallway once. If there is a tornado or a flood, everyone is supposed to go to the school gym. Maybe people are there."

It makes sense. The school is only four blocks away. It is a giant brick building. It is solid. It feels safe.

We start walking again. We walk right down the center line of the road. We stay far away from the sidewalks. We stay far away from the parked cars. We walk in a straight, tight line.

The neighborhood gets weirder the further we walk.

We pass a wooden telephone pole. It is completely covered in bright yellow moss. It looks like a giant, fuzzy banana sticking out of the ground. The wires at the top are sagging. The moss is eating the wood, making the pole weak. It groans in the light spring breeze.

We pass a recycling bin that blew over. Old newspapers are scattered across a driveway. The paper is being consumed by patches of orange and purple fuzz. The letters on the newspaper blur and vanish as the moss eats the ink.

We turn onto Oak Street. This is the main road that leads directly to the elementary school.

Suddenly, Konn stops. He holds out his arm and hits me in the chest.

"Stop," he says.

I stop. I look ahead.

There is a white truck parked diagonally across the road. It is a mail truck. It has the red and blue logo on the side. The driver's side door is wide open. The engine is not running.

We walk toward it slowly. Our boots scrape against the wet asphalt.

White envelopes and brown packages are scattered all over the street. It looks like someone threw them out of the truck in a panic. The envelopes are covered in little spots of green fuzz.

I look inside the open door of the truck.

The driver's seat is empty. But the steering wheel is entirely covered in thick, pulsing orange moss. The plastic dashboard has little pink mushrooms sprouting out of the air vents. They look like tiny pink umbrellas. A blue coffee cup sits in the cup holder. The coffee inside has turned into a solid block of fuzzy black mold.

On the floor of the truck, there is a blue hat. A mail carrier's hat.

It is not blue anymore. It is completely green.

"Where is the driver?" Harper asks. Her voice is barely a whisper.

"I do not know," I say. "Maybe he ran."

"Or maybe he melted," Konn says grimly.

We walk past the truck. We leave the scattered mail behind. The school is just one block away now. I can see the tall brick chimney. I can see the chain-link fence around the playground.

We reach the corner of Oak and Haskins. This is the busy intersection right in front of the school. There are four stop signs here.

And there is Mrs. Higgins.

Mrs. Higgins is the crossing guard. She is always here. Every morning. Rain, snow, or shine. She is a very old lady. She wears a bright neon yellow vest over a thick winter coat. She holds a giant red stop sign on a white metal pole. She always smiles at us. She always gives Konn a hard time for not tying his shoelaces.

She is standing exactly where she always stands. Right on the corner, at the edge of the crosswalk.

She is holding her stop sign up.

But she is not moving.

She is standing completely, perfectly still. Like a statue.

"Mrs. Higgins?" I say. I speak loudly, but my voice cracks.

She does not turn around. She is facing away from us, looking toward the school building.

We take a few steps closer. My stomach does that terrible flip again. The cold rock inside me gets heavier.

Her bright neon yellow vest is glowing in the bright morning sun. But it is not just the reflective fabric glowing.

Her entire right arm, the arm holding the metal pole, is covered in thick, vibrant orange moss. The moss climbs up her sleeve. It wraps around her shoulder. It crawls up her neck. The white metal pole of the stop sign is clean, but the red sign at the top has orange fuzz creeping over the white letters.

"Mrs. Higgins," Konn says. He sounds like a scared little kid. He does not sound thirteen anymore.

We step off the curb. We walk into the crosswalk. We walk around to look at her front.

She is still holding the sign up. Her hand is locked around the metal pole. Her knuckles are white, but the skin around them is tinted green.

The orange moss has taken over the entire right side of her body. It looks like a heavy, fuzzy orange blanket was thrown over half of her. The little fuzzy hairs on her coat are pulsing. Expand. Shrink. Breathe.

I look at her face.

I want to look away, but I cannot. My eyes are locked onto her.

The left side of her face is normal. Her eye is open. It is staring straight ahead at the empty school parking lot. Her skin is pale, deeply wrinkled, and frozen.

But the right side of her face is gone.

It is not bloody. It is not gory. It is just gone. Replaced. A massive, swelling lump of bright neon orange moss covers her right cheek, her right eye, and half of her mouth. Small, bright yellow mushrooms are sprouting out of her right ear. They look like weird, tiny sunflowers.

She is not breathing. Her chest is not moving.

But the moss is breathing. It pulses slowly on her skin.

"She is dead," Harper says flatly. She does not scream. She just states it like a math fact.

Suddenly, Mrs. Higgins's left eye twitches.

The eyeball rolls down. It looks directly at us.

Konn gasps and steps backward. He trips over his own muddy boot and falls hard onto the wet asphalt. His hands splash into an oily puddle.

The left side of her mouth—the side not covered in thick orange fuzz—twitches. It slowly pulls up into a crooked, terrifying smile. A dry, clicking sound comes from her throat. It sounds like two dry sticks rubbing together.

Mrs. Higgins slowly turned her head, and her face was just a solid block of fuzzy orange.