She pulls her arm back—and slams it forward, hammering the blocked exit. She doesn’t crack through. She doesn’t so much as dent it. But there is a response. It comes in the form of a squelching sound. The floor shifts beneath their feet. The ceiling surges and then flops down nearly to their heads. The walls tighten. This is not a slow and steady change. It’s a sloppy, baggy compression, like they’re trapped in an irritated intestine that is committed to digesting them. Fluids ooze. Spores darken the air. They’re choking and they’re blinded and they’re fighting the damp weight of the hallway closing around them.

Jack gets shoved one way, then another. He calls out for Mia and Nora, but they’re separated from him, and he feels like he’s tangled up in a thousand sopping blankets. The weight pushes him down and he feels something pressing against his chest—the hard corner of the flask. He manages to rip it out of his pocket. Unscrew it. Splash some whiskey out.

Maybe he’s just imagining it, but after one dribble, the fungus seems to loosen its grip. When he shakes the flask out more fully, there is a kind of squeal and it pulls away entirely.

He finds himself on his knees, slathered in some sort of mucus. When he looks up, he sees Nora and Mia clutching each other in a ball and, beyond them, the open end of the hallway.

“Go,” he says, and they scramble upright and stumble forward through the gap.

On the other side they rest for a moment, and he holds up the flask. “I remembered. In the lab. How it shrunk away when I emptied that bottle of Beam.”

“Thank you,” Nora says, and he says, “Don’t you mean Cheers?”

“Your jokes are rarely funny, but especially not right now.”

They continue on through the maze of corridors and finally find the source of the infection on a lower level—in a windowless medical ward. Here, Albus Crotter hangs from the wall. Puttied there. All the hyphae seem to spring out of his center, rippling outward fibrously. Like something waxen, his body melts in and out of the fungus, sunken in places and bulging in others. His jaw hangs open crookedly, his mouth overlong, a gaping cavity ridged with black and yellow teeth. Out of it pours a constant stream of spores, dirtying the air. His eyes dribble black oily tears that streak down the wall in rivulets.