You’ve been driving for hours and I wish you would stop. You clutch the steering wheel so hard, your knuckles pop white, your palms slick with sweat and desperation. Sunken, glassy, your eyes flick between the fuel gauge, the endless road, and the trembling land through which we pass. The fields pulse, magnificently multi-coloured, mantled by fungus heavy as jewel-toned snow.

Out in that seething world, spores seed and sprout in songbirds’ lungs. Throbbing scarlet mycelia bloom from the mouths of dogs and stopper rabbits’ throats. From buried town to buried town, iridescent gills flutter in silence where human voices have departed. Noise no longer matters to this world; it is singing a new song, one of quiet growth, a relentless slow conversation between the soil and the fungus, which threads itself implacably through it.

You mutter aloud sometimes, just for the sake of it. Nonsense, doggerel. It hurts to hear: your throat so parched, speech rusted, misshapen. I’m torn between treasuring your words and dreading them. There won’t be many more when the fuel runs out, when the car stops, when the fungal advance slides itself through the infinitesimal cracks around the windows.

What will starships see, gazing down at this new Earth? Imagine the continents traced in rainbow hues; imagine the smoke and smog lifting, the planet shaking out its new pelt as the last towers crumble to their graves.

You don’t like thinking about that. You say so, frequently. Two days ago you couldn’t make contact with your mother and yesterday your phone stopped working altogether. There wasn’t time to prepare, you explain aloud. You threw the seventy-two-hour kit in the trunk and drove without destination, without plan, without even a full tank of gas.

Before the radio gave out, futile speculation crackled in from the world’s last academics, its final experts. Did the fungus understand its own predation? How much self-awareness flickered under its smooth, slick caps? They couldn’t decide which was worse: impersonal consumption or conscious revolt against the former world. Neither option comforted you. With trembling fingers, you snapped the radio off.

When you tried to find the signal again, it was already gone.

Is this the last car, I wonder? How many others have sped northwards, westwards, onwards? How many are collapsing into the fungal embrace, even now?

Many. Many. Along the roadside lie corpses with fungus instead of bones, skulls and femurs and ribcages softening as their nutrients leach away. We pass an overturned bus, its sides split open, disgorging the dead. Fresh blooms pour like rivers through its seams. It’s still possible to discern individual features under the growth: noses, chins, cheekbones.

Your throat hitches, your hand rising to your mouth. After that, you fix your gaze to the road ahead. You don’t look elsewhere.

Night is falling, and the fuel is dropping lower.

You unspool curses like a litany. I’m entranced. They feed upon each other, relentless as the devastation outside, and they crescendo to an almighty, thunderous fuck. In that moment—your head thrown back, your eyes squeezed shut, you’ve never looked so beautiful.

An ominous clunk. The car isn’t meant to flee this far or this fast. You push onward, rolling your locked-up shoulders, when a deer leaps across the road, its antlers sheathed in fungus, a red ridge of growth spiking around its head like a crown. You swear again—less poetically—and jerk the wheel hard.

The car spins off the road. Gravel strikes the windshield, the wheels spinning frantically for purchase. With a horrific crunch, the car slams into a tree, the deploying airbag muffling your scream.

For a few minutes, I’m not certain you survived. Everything is perfectly still, fantastically quiet. The deer has vanished into the woods, though it’s probably already sunk to the ground, filaments knitting themselves through its blood vessels, questing into its marrow. Its last breath will smell like rot and rebirth.

So will yours, but you haven’t taken it yet. Groaning, you push yourself upright, try to restart the car. It whirs, clicks, and falls dead. More curses, more wailing, and I wonder that your throat doesn’t tear, I wonder that this is what you want the end to sound like. I wasn’t expecting this vitriol. You gnash your teeth and claw at the airbag, and I think you’d scrape the fungus from the planet with your fingernails, if you could.

Maybe in the beginning, you could have, but it’s too late now. The spores are in the air: invisibly riding winds and exhalations, inevitably drawn to quivering nostrils. With every landing, more mycelia; with every mycelium, more spores. It’s mathematical destiny, a planet’s next chapter written by the unforgiving hand of exponential growth.

None of this matters to you. You measure the space between the fungus’ leading edge and the car doors. Running might be possible. Waiting’s another—for a few minutes anyway.

I guess it depends how you want to spend them.

You’re sobbing now, and I wish you would stop. It isn’t sad, this rising tide of new life. It’s the spark to kindle a new flame, the floodwaters to wash away the old bones on which this world stood, and ready the soil for something more magnificent than you could ever know.

Your mouth falls open: red and moist as my brethren. From the moment the car doors closed me in with you, I’ve invisibly ridden your exhalations, quested to your marrow, seeded myself in the bottom of your lungs.

This part passes quickly. You won’t realize when it happens, though the grey jelly of your brain is pleasing to my roots. And when your last cries have fallen under the silence of our world, when we stretch over and under every inch of this planet’s soil, when the distant stars remark how we have caressed you all—

We will lift our song above this Earth and make even the galaxies beautiful.