Author's Note: This story was born long before the current COVID-19 crisis. It was created in a brainstorming session with my late father in mid-2018. However, given the current situation, it came to mind as something people might enjoy. To all those suffering, I give my sympathies and good wishes. Here is a little story to take the edge of the current situation.
This account is for the benefit of those who may read it after my upcoming and state-sanctioned death. I think they'll find it... Maybe not amusing. Shocking, perhaps?
"Come on!"
I let myself be led from the van without protest. I was in my scrubs and mask, and when the cleaning gear was forced into my newly-liberated hands, I looked for all the world like a zero-hour cleaner. The guard, gruff as always, shoved me through the door of the evacuated hotel.
"It's on the roof. Deal with it."
Not quite monosyllabic, but certainly curt. It was a long trek up the stairway, up to the roof where my task was waiting for me. The building had been evacuated about an hour before, shortly after a patrol drone had spotted the thing on the roof. After that, the drone had remained while people were rushed and given preventative treatment, assessing how long there was. Then I was called for. Or rather, I was picked out from a large selection of society's unwanted. Better than the needle, I suppose.
It took ten minutes to reach the roof, up the main stairway then via a service entrance onto the roof. It wasn't hard to find my assigned clean-up. There it was, sitting in a slightly curled-up position just hidden by the concrete balustrade. It had been human, and was still to a degree. But the string-like fungus has completely covered their form, and from the pores round the joints came the first edges of immature fruiting bodies bearing the germs of a billion billion spores.
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