Free Cross of the Legion by Marshall S. Thomas Page B

racing.
    "Is she going to die?" Dragon asked.
    "Yes," Doctor Doom replied. "Definitely."
    "Yes," Priestess said. "I'm afraid so."
    "Stand back." We released the girl, and Dragon shot her in the head with a single round of xmin. She twitched once, and a shocked silence settled over us. We stood back. The fungus was consuming her utterly, completely covering her body. She didn't even look human any more. The fungus was thickening, building into an awful, pulpy mass, splattering as the rain hit it.
    "Scut," Dragon said. "All right, Pits, we take the school. I want everyone to be 100 percent alert!"
    "That's a ten!" I was almost in shock myself, backing away from that horrifying corpse. The damned thing was still growing, larger and larger. I moved on the school compound, 100 percent alert, my blood like ice, all sensors on max. The rain slowed to a miserable drizzle. The sky was a soupy mess.
    We assaulted the school in textbook form, blasting the doors open with vac, Trigger standing by with the manlink, Mams back there watching the perimeter, Kiss and Little Miss Miss floating somewhere off in the distance, guarding the sky. The school was a wreck but the structure was tough and most of the buildings were still standing.
    "Psycho, take a look," Tourist said. He peered around a corner, looking out at a walkway running between two buildings. Psycho moved up, and I covered them, straining to see it. A corpse—no, two corpses—fungus cases, both of them, swollen grotesquely, rotting in the drizzle. One of them was very small. It could have been a child.
    "Leave them alone," Psycho ordered. Then the largest corpse exploded violently with a dull plop, spraying fungus everywhere like shrapnel, filling the air with millions of tiny fragments of fungus, floating gently down to the gravel.
    "Deto!" Tourist exclaimed. His armor was covered with the stuff. "Get it off me!"
    "Stand by!" I raised my E and hit him with flame and a horrendous burst of burning gas exploded violently on his A-suit. When his armor began to glow red, I eased off on the trigger.
    "That'll do it," I said.
    "Thanks! Man, that was scary! What the hell did that?"
    "According to my tacmod, the Nova is in the basement," Dragon said from inside the nearest building, "and there's no life down there."
    "Do you think they're dead?" Psycho asked.
    "Don't know. Val, Dragon, sitrep."
    "Dragon, Valkyrie, all quiet out here."
    "All right, we're going down. Thinker, Flash, Sweats, on me. Psycho, secure our rear and don't let anything near the school."
    "Don't worry about your rear," Psycho said. And a little chill shot through my veins. I could see him in the Mound, one leg shot off, sitting with an E behind a pile of contac grenades. 'Don't worry about your rear,' he had said. We had almost lost him there.
    The signal led us into a basement corridor, completely blacked out. Our darklights activated and it was all bathed in cool green—a corridor littered with fungus-covered corpses, five of them. As I took it in, I realized it was a scene of considerable violence. The tile walls were smeared with blood and marred with scratches—fingernails, I realized. Two of the people had died in each other's arms, clutching each other for solace as the awful growth took hold.
    "Keep away from them," Dragon warned us.
    We stopped when we came to the sixth corpse. It was an O, just as dead as the humans. A giant, spidery frame, huge arms thrown out in front of it, all covered with rotting, pale white-green fungus.
    "Redhawk, you getting all this?" Dragon asked.
    "It's clear, Dragon. We're getting all your transmissions. Scut!"
    I kicked in a door and it was a storage room, full of supplies. The Nova was on the floor, still active.
    "That's probably them out there in the corridor," Dragon said, looking around the room.
    "Probably," I said. "I guess we just missed them." To have come all this way and to miss them, possibly by moments. What a shame. I thought briefly about Tara. She had