Nora reaches for her pistol, but it turns out there’s no need. The hand of the professor goes limp soon after it closes around Jack’s throat. She might hear a word—“Help”—clotted with phlegm, but if not, she can certainly see the plea in the man’s eyes.

Jack rips away the fungal coat, tossing the meaty layers aside until the body is moistly unpeeled. Gordon is unresponsive when they shake him. Jack yells, “Robert! Robert, can you hear me?” and then asks her if they should call 911 and risk exposing others or do chest compressions and try to resuscitate him themselves.

“Hold on.” She leans her face close to Professor Gordon’s, and the plastic fogs with a faint breath. “He’s still alive.”

He needs a doctor, but first they need to destroy whatever is growing here before it spreads.

She can see the panic in Jack’s eyes—the professional calculations he’s making, the cost of the lab, the cost of his career—and she worries he’ll choose his own future over the future of others. But then Professor Gordon lets out a bubbling gasp, and life wins. Jack nods and says, “Get Gordon out of here.”

“What are you going to do?”

“There’s a bottle of whiskey in the far cupboard.”

“Hardly seems like a good time for a toast.”

“I’m going to burn this shit down.”

She grabs Professor Gordon beneath the arms and tries to drag him to the hall, but he’s limp and heavy and hard to move.

Jack rushes to a cabinet half covered with fungus, scrapes the lip of it away, yanks open the door, and reaches to the back of the shelf. He pulls out a handle of Jim Beam and yells, “Bottoms up!” He takes one small hit, then shakes it out through the room. Some of the fungi noticeably shrink against the splatter. A few of the cauliflowers explode their storms of black spores.

There is a Bunsen burner sitting on a counter like a candlestick waiting for its flame. He splashes a stream toward it, tosses the bottle aside, cranks the gas, and sparks the ignition. Tongues of flame spread greedily. He doesn’t linger. He hurries toward Nora to help with Professor Gordon.

They leave the room, and as they close the door behind them, amid the fire’s spitting sizzle, Nora thinks she hears a wail of pain.

The fire alarm goes off as they leave the building, and the fire trucks pass them in a blaze of whirling light on their way to the hospital. They drop Professor Gordon off outside the emergency room, where Nora flashes her badge and tells the nurse the man was exposed to a toxic contaminant in a lab and needs to be treated in isolation with antifungals.