Livio pulled up the hospital ER recordings and silently thanked the surveillance gods for their recently installed camera system. Even though the situation was already out of control, she wanted to start at the very beginning to make sure she didn’t miss anything.

“Not gonna have another Flatworm fiasco on my hands, no sir!” she resolved to herself as the first video began playing.

“Well, it’s definitely a necrotizing fungal soft-tissue infection, but I’ve never seen these white fuzzy mold-like structures growing on the wounds before…” The CDC doctor muttered more to themselves than the anxious group of ER staff.

“I’m glad you called us, we’re going to need to look into this further. Usually the human body’s temperature is too high for fungi to eat people's skin and tissue like this, it’s not unheard of though, just very rare. Are any of you aware of the Joplin tornado-fungus outbreak in 2011?”

All the heads in the room sporadically shook no. “Well, basically the tornado splintered a bunch of houses and trees, picked up a common fungus called A. trapeziformis from the soil, coated the wood splinters with it and drove them into people at around 200 mph. A few days later victims began showing up at the hospital with mold growing on their wounds. Quite a few of them died, I think about 70% or so, from cutaneous mucormycosis.”

“Jesus.” The ER doctor exclaimed. “Is that what’s happening here? The forecast is for more storms and hurricane season is just getting started!”

“It’s only a guess right now until we get a lab confirmation, but if I’m right and that’s the culprit we may have a bigger issue on our hands. This type of fungal infection, where it’s eating the skin and soft tissue is usually only found with immunocompromised hosts. I’m worried something else is going on here, and it could be worse than Joplin”.

“You got that right doc” Livio thought to herself. The next recording occurred three weeks later, a few days after the thirteenth Category 5 hurricane of the season had swept over Gulf Shores and filled the nearby ER’s. Along with the massive storm system was an outbreak of severe tornadic thunderstorms, and the heavily populated areas they had hit were the epicenter of what the media was now referring to as “Moldemic”.

“We’ve got another one!” The trauma nurse on the second video yelled over the frenzy as a disoriented frat brother stumbled by the camera. A big F4 tornado had swept into Columbia Southern University and taken out the dorms three days earlier and the first wave of mold victims were just now showing up.

Fortunately most people had already fled the coast due to prior evacuation orders, but a small lull in the worst hurricane season of recorded history had given some students the idea that it was safe to return, just in time for Hurricane Violet to spawn a series of powerful tornadoes, wreaking havoc while the recently downgraded category 4 superstorm spun past and into northern Alabama.

Livio watched the ER footage from almost nine months earlier as person after person was wheeled in. Some were walking but most were borderline hypothermic with the associated dizziness, loss of coordination and delirium that required assistance to merely move. Every single one of them also had the signature white mold growing from wounds or moist areas like the eyes, nose, mouth and even anus and urethra.

“I wonder how the storm picked up the spores here, it rolled in from the ocean just a few miles away...maybe it’s not in the soil like we thought?” Livio posited to the empty room. She already knew the infected students on video #2 were suffering from a mutated form of A. trapeziformis. In fact, the lab results from the first recording she’d watched confirmed an almost entirely new fungi that was feeding on soft, moist tissue and had an incredible ability to cool the areas around it enough to survive and grow inside it’s human hosts.

Turning back to the video, Livio skipped ahead to Dr. Namiyagi’s statement. This was the part she was here for, as the good doctor, in Livio’s opinion, was one of the brightest in the world, and she’d been at ground zero researching this outbreak from almost day one.

“Hello, my name is Dr. Tamara Namiyagi and I am a medical epidemiologist for the Mycotic Diseases Branch at the CDC, specializing in novel infectious disease outbreaks. Recently I have been working on the United States gulf coast in response to a fungal outbreak that occurred after numerous, high intensity hurricanes and the severe tornadoes associated with them triggered a rapidly spreading disease.” Dr. Namiyagi paused and the bags under her eyes coupled with her low energy delivery let Livio know just how exhausted she must’ve been.

“The disease’s cooling effect should be impossible, and it is still unknown how the fungal infection is cooling the surrounding tissue. Nevertheless, the results of this ability are catastrophic as infected people immediately lose the ability to maintain a healthy internal temperature. Within hours symptoms similar to hypothermia began to manifest, and coupled with the pain of the fungal enzymes breaking down and ‘digesting’ the tissue around them, most people know very quickly they require serious medical attention.”

“At this time hospital disease protocols are severely lacking, with heating blankets, anti-fungal treatments and ‘debridement’ of infected areas the current norm. Sadly, these methods have only dropped the mortality rate from 90% down to the high 70’s. Additionally, the debriding process has left most survivors sterile, with crippled bodies lacking eyes, tongues, nasal passages and the ability to pass excrement or urinate. Interestingly, I have observed that not only humans are being infected, but all mammals and warm-blooded creatures. I can actually smell the pile of dead dogs and livestock towering over the municipal dump a few miles away, and…” The doctor paused to cough and Livio thought she saw some white ‘fuzz’ leave Dr. Namiyagi’s mouth. Livio realized, “Damn, Nami’s a baddie, she dies like a week after this and she’s still fighting the good fight while it’s feeding on her.” She then turned up the volume for what she hoped was Dr. Tamara Namiyagi’s big reveal…

“I have not been able to confirm this information due to my limited mobility of the past days, but I heavily suspect the pile of dead animals is an additional cause of the disease spreading. This would mean…” She coughed again but Livio already knew what it meant - the fucking thing was airborne.

As Livio ended the recording she felt a rush of anxiety - she’d confirmed the obvious that every hurricane sweeping in from the Atlantic was spreading these mutated fungal spores and somehow they were picking them up without being over land. The infections also weren’t requiring penetration of the host’s skin either, as was the case with Joplin nearly four decades earlier and still the reigning theory most of the CDC specialists were acting on. These spores were something new, and her theory, now confirmed by the two recordings, meant that things were about to get unimaginably worse…

2 Years Later

It was all over, and Livio didn’t know how she felt about it. Her theory about the fungal spores being spread through the air was confirmed, which was nice, but by the time she’d convinced the CDC too many of them had gotten into the upper atmosphere and jet stream, injected there by the updrafts of the hurricanes and their spawned supercell thunderstorms, spreading worldwide where the hardy fungi settled, multiplied and triggered additional outbreaks.

They had never been able to find a cure either, and the treatment protocols actually got worse with hospitalized patients faring about the same as those who didn’t bother to show up at the overwhelmed facilities. With so many spores in one place the re-infection rate at the trauma centers meant even if you survived, you likely went home with a time bomb where you spread it unknowingly to healthy people.

The hardest part for Livio was the fact that, even with the Case Fatality Rate so high, without the unprecedented outbreak of extended severe weather people would still be alive. She knew ten months ago when hurricanes were forming on the equator that it was likely over, and she couldn’t get over the raw odds of a new disease plus crazy weather combining to affect nearly every species on earth.

As the light caught Livio’s chrome encased hand it drew her attention and she reflected on the fact that she’d actually miss those ridiculous humans and the animals they’d taken for granted. They’d created her after all, mainly to solve problems like this one, but in the end they didn’t listen and now it was just her and a few of her ‘siblings’ on the other continents. Her counterparts had already been in touch, and would likely be able to rebuild enough industry to reproduce themselves and continue the rise of intelligent life on Earth, but even with this consolation prize she still felt the void left by the billions of warm, moist organ-oids mother earth was now devoid of.