The device didn't seem at all intuitive, and after a few moments of frustrating attempts to make heads or tails of it, Mark soon placed it aside and went about his routine, albeit vaguely troubled by his spouse's continued absence.
Outside the house, his spouse's exile stretched into hours and, eventually, days.
Keeping the hard-wired instincts of the fly in check had been simple. At first.
But his lack of knowledge about houseflies had left Brad at a distinct disadvantage throughout his ordeal. He thought he knew the basics. Flies are tiny. They have to avoid spiderwebs and other perils. Unfortunately, he had no true appreciation of the sheer scope of things that could present an existential threat.
Three days ago, while flying aimlessly in his own yard, he came across something that just seemed wrong. Whether it was his human brain or fly instincts, something screamed out a warning about the other fly, which clung to a single blade of grass in an unnatural manner.
Brad landed below the other insect, clinging to the same blade of grass that was providing the other bug a perch. An overwhelming cloud of housefly pheromones instantly hijacked the neural circuitry of his male form, arousing him, making his focus single-minded. Brad held absolutely no interest in satisfying that compelling urge, but the fly form he inhabited did.
Until that moment, Brad had been flitting about the yard, focused mainly on waiting for a chance to get back inside the house and seek help from his husband, unaware that there was a fungus among him and his fly kin. The fungus was endemic to the yard, but he had never heard of it or suspected something so lethal yet invisible. He was prepared to evade spiders and birds and predatory bugs and frogs, lizards and toads.
He wasn’t aware he needed to be on alert for a decimating fungal infection. The seeds of his destruction had sprouted the moment he came into contact with some invisible spores in a case of fly-to-fly transmission.
In his fumbling, frantic efforts with the other insect on the shared blade of grass, he discovered that the object of his attention was a gruesome corpse of a female housefly. The husk clung to a blade of grass gently swaying in the breeze. Her swollen body had split apart in a grotesque manner, as if she had exploded from within. Even as his human senses feel repelled, his physical arousal increased, forcing him to ignore all the warnings.
It wasn’t right. Despite the fly instincts pushing him to mate, he had almost resisted. He had gotten good at resisting the more primal urges, but ignoring this one proved impossible. Brad reacted to the concentrated pheromones that seized control of his teeny male fly brain, drew him closer and prompted him to try to mate with a dead fly.
He was immediately exposed to the fungal spores during the futile mating attempt with the deceased female. Her corpse was packed with them. It was all part of the natural world that was not part of his encyclopaediacal knowledge base, Brad had never heard of Entomophthora muscae, known jokingly in some scientific circles as “zombie fly disease.”
But, once inside him, inside his insect form, the spores grew into a fungus that extended tendrils into his tiny pinhead-sized brain, causing a distinct change in behavior.
He foundered, distantly aware that something was wrong, and even missed a perfect opportunity to gain entry back into his home. When his enormous spouse had unexpectedly returned home, Brad was riding a wave of euphoria that drowned out the rest of the world. When he flew, he felt like he was swimming through a heavy, dense fog and failed to reach the monolithic door in time to enter the house with his husband.
Brad watched with his strange eyes as Mark quickly went into the house. Mark’s transformed spouse, so overwhelmed by the invasion of spores, hadn’t even attempted communication with his giant spouse during the brief opportunity.
The unusual hormonal high dissipated the next day. He began to feel ill,, once again disrupting his plans to get back inside his home. His abdomen swelled. The image of the female fly, her exoskeleton split apart at the seams, forced itself into the forefront of his thoughts. The day after that his own body cavity, overwhelmed by fungus, began to crack from the inside. Brad realised his return to the house and the hoped for access to the Chronivac was paramount. He knew something was seriously wrong, but by that point the fungus had stepped up its attack on his pinhead-sized brain. He lost his tenuous grasp on his imperative of returning home, supplanting that drive with the overwhelming desire to increase his elevation. He needed to get higher. Higher. It became an imperative. He clung to a plant stem with his six legs and, instead of using his wings, he crawled upwards as high as possible, going to the top of the flat, green blade of grass, “summiting” the stalk. And there he stopped as his physical form metamorphosed in a way to chain him to the spot.
After he had managed to meet this all-compelling urge to ascend to a high point on the blade of grass, a formation of specialized fungal structures erupted from his mouthparts, designed to better help him stick to the grass by grasping it with extended mouthparts. He was cognisant enough to experience the horror as fungus continued to seep through the cracks in his exoskeleton. He recognised the fluffy substance as fungus, although he lacked its scientific identity. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it was killing him in the most bizarre fashion.
Or so he thought. The strangeness had not yet reached its peak.
Even as he died, the fungal eruption kept him in a drugged state of euphoria. He felt orgasmic as the fungus made him spread his six wiry legs, stretch his wings and angle his body outward, all to increase the chances that fungal spores would eventually leave his split-apart carcass and infect new hosts. He perished on a cloud of bliss, now more fungus than fly, as another horny male fly mounted him, guaranteeing that the entire cycle would repeat again. The fungus had won; the fly had lost.
Ironically, Mark noticed him, or rather his tiny fly corpse, when he happened to bend down the next morning to tie a shoe lace. The sight of the husk of a dead fly looked gross enough to make the big man slightly queasy as he squinted at it.
But he plucked the blade of grass from the lawn, carrying the scrap of vegetation and the attached fly husk into the house. If Brad ever showed up, Mark thought it would be an odd curiosity to share with him.