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“Freeze!” Mr. Caraway repeated. “Put your hands up. All of you! That includes you, Rosalyne!”

I threw my hands into the air. I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t understand what Mr. Caraway was doing here. I wasn’t aware that he was allowed, legally or occupationally, to carry a firearm.

“Where’s Andrea Medea?” Mr. Caraway demanded. “Professor Medea. Where is she?”

“We don’t know,” Valerie replied.

“Don’t play games with me, Valerie James,” Mr. Caraway growled. “You’re all under suspicion of fomenting a new Cult of the Electromagnetic Man on campus under the guise of the university film club. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

“What a preposterous accusation, Detective Caraway,” Valerie laughed. “Do you even hear yourself? Who would believe you if you said that out loud?”

“Where is Andrea Medea?”

“Where is anyone in this world?” Valerie asked. “Where are you? Where am I? What space do we have to cross to meet each other in the middle? Professor Medea could be anywhere, even in front of you, and yet you would never see her. Physical distance means nothing so long as deskny controls us.”

“Quit your bullshit. Tell me now or I’ll–”

“She’s right behind you.”

A sudden gasp escaped Mr. Caraway’s blank canvas of a head. He stumbled forward, his shoulders shivering and his limp knees dropping onto concrete. His eight chamber revolver hit the ground. His fingers twitched and his arms curled around and towards his back.

A shadow rose from behind Mr. Caraway. Like everyone save for the girl with the black eye, it was faceless, with only the egg white oblong coat to tell me that the rising silhouette was indeed Professor Medea.

But unlike everyone else, her clothes had been stained by an aggressive, festering mold. It clung onto the fabrics, melting through it like acid until it reached her skin, where it merged with her tanned epidermis to form blotched webbed patterns not unlike loose reptilian scales.

The black mold crawled, writhed up her neck and onto her head where they found perfect vacancies where the artifacts of her face used to be. The black mold gave her peppered freckles. Two splotches, dripping like wet mascara, served as her eyes.

And then there was her mouth.

Her lips stretched like butterfly wings on a mutated Rorschach, its maw a mosaic of stitched, incongruent grooves and glossy strings. And when they opened, the strings snapped back and released a legion of spores, mycotic specks of black mold that breathed down Mr. Caraway’s back even as he doubled over and revealed a wooden handle plunged into his back.

“Andrea?” Mr. Caraway whispered. “What have they done to you?”

“I’m sorry, William,” Professor Medea cried. “I had to do it. I did it for him.”

A heavy fluid soiled the bottom of Mr. Caraway’s dark brown coat. It seeped through the leather and dripped, pooling beneath the clouds, too grayscaled by shadows to recognize what it truly was. Valerie looked over Mr. Caraway and pushed against the wooden handle. The old man moaned loudly. She nodded to one of the girls behind her.

“He’ll live. Bandage him up,” Valerie said. “Let’s get going.”

“Where are you taking us?” I shouted.

“Where everyone else is going. To the Bergerac of course,” Valerie replied, “where Apocalypse Anew will finally begin.”

“And you’ll just think I’ll just follow you there?”

Professor Medea twisted her fungal face. In an instant she towered over me as the first of her kind, a new kind of human, a sapient fungal breed that rotted her mind to the core.

“You have to come,” she said. “You have to come with us, Rosalyne. Do it for me, Rosalyne.”

I felt a separate hand placed on my shoulder.

“Please,” said the girl with the black eye. “You should come with us.”

“I don’t have to go with you at all,” I snapped, “and neither do you. Get away from me Professor Medea, and the rest of you too! Just let the both of us go! What’s the point of all this?”

“What’s the point?” Valerie repeated. “You know the point more than anything, Destiny.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“If you don’t come with us, something might happen to the old man over there,” Valerie gestured to Mr. Caraway, who lay prone as two of the film club members wrapped muddy towels around his lower back in the shape of tourniquets. “If you care at all about what happens to him. You’ll come with us.”

I knew Valerie’s threat was real. I could hear grimacing groans. Mr. Caraway had been exposed to a lethal dose of black mold. He needed immediate medical attention.

“If I go, then you have to let Mr. Caraway free.”

“No,” Valerie shook her head. “He goes too. He’ll survive if you do what we say.”

“Hurry it up then,” I growled. “He doesn’t have much time.”

“You were the one slowing us down,” Valerie smiled.

The film club members pulled Mr. Caraway to his feet. His face drooped over his shoulders and his groaning turned to hoarse, pained rasps. We descended the staircase after Valerie with the girl with the black eye and Professor Medea bringing up the rear.

“You tricked me,” I said.

“It was the only way to bring you here,” the girl with the black eye replied. “I don’t think I could’ve done this alone.”

“I don’t understand. Why do you have to do this at all?”

"You won’t understand until I’ve played my part, but my suffering has to have meaning, have purpose,” she replied. “All this time with Valerie over the years has to have meant something. If it means I can save you, someone who has stood up for me, then it will have meant something in the end.”

“They’re speaking nonsense,” I hissed. “She calls both of us Destiny. You’re playing into their make believe while they poison us just like they poisoned the professor. It’s all just a game to them! We can just go, run away from all of this. It doesn’t even have to exist!”

“You can’t run away. You have to face the truth. Surely you can’t believe what you just said after you yourself saved the world once. Why else would you have predicted the end of the world if you didn’t feel a crisis was coming? It’s here. A final confrontation with the world, the World, is coming, and we’re going to save it together.”

Once we descended to the top floor of the library, the film club, Mr. Caraway, and I were no longer alone.

A host of students, most from the philosophy class, spiraled down the steps of the library. As Valerie passed, they nodded amongst themselves and rose, their eyes fixed to their phones as they glazed over the mildew ridden compositions of Apocalypse Anew.

Whether homegrown from Professor Medea’s body or birthed from their digital devices, black mold bloomed before the ensuing crowd. It dripped off the perforated gold aluminum screens, leaked out of the ventilation shafts, and melted into the windows like condensation.

The procession continued outside.

Thick nimbus clouds settled over the valley and blotted out the sun. A chilly breeze swept through the grounds, placating the summer heat.

Meanwhile, spores poured into the air like pollutants from a burning foundry. The clouds absorbed them whole. Their gray bodies retched as all of the mold flooded in and they became fat and encumbered. Their bodies blackened with yellow discolored spots. One by one, like an infection, the mold multiplied and leapt from host to host, darkening the skies until one might mistake it for a night with sickly dim stars.

Then, they began to vomit.

The crowd shifted right at the dirt road leading north towards the Bergerac Building, while a downpour began to fall. The summer trees withered. Even the soil became the hospice for the ensuing mycological catastrophe that, as I had always feared, stemmed not from the indifference of the treatment of the halls at the Bergerac, but from the indifference of all of us, of us human beings to suffering, from my own self-afflicted blindness.

As we filed into the Bergerac Building behind Valerie and her ilk, who continued to drag Mr. Caraway down the halls, where the black mold cheered from the sidelines like ravenous spectators at the Colosseum, I saw the clouds above part ways.

Behind them, I saw it again, that growth of mold that colluded into the shape of a colossal eye large enough now to replace the sun. Its eyelashes were shaped by furred, vinelike appendages that wriggled like the hairs in my intestines. It opened and its pure white pupils dawned upon the Bergerac, for the moment when we would be judged for its hand had finally arrived.

And that’s when I saw the blood dripping from the Mr. Caraway’s soaked leather coat and the half-drawn bandages that didn’t do a thing. I saw that the black eye was just a bruise and not an aurora of gemstone colors. I saw the faces of terrified students. I saw the knife in Mr. Caraway back and behind me, the twisted smile of Professor Medea, who holstered the old man’s revolver and fastened cleavers and serrated blades along her belt.

I watched us march up the stairs, past Room 1999-7 to the second floor, to the film club room. The aluminum sheets had returned and reskinned the walls and chalkboard with metallia, but the windows had been blown wide open, giving the black mold eye in the sky a front row seat to what was about to come next.

Television sets, along with radios atop them, circled the students now boxed in inside the film club. On each of the screens flashed the movement of black mold writhing across petri dishes. Their electromagnetic waves bounced off the metal barriers and found escape only through open windows.

“Now,” Professor Medea smiled, “In the name of the Electromagnetic Man, let’s see who deserves to return to the sky. Jump! All of you!”

The students screamed and huddled together. It didn’t matter if one tried to make a break for it. A film club member stood guard at both of the exits, holding a butterfly or a Swiss Army knife to ward off escapees.

“If no one has the courage to be first, we’ll simply choose one of you!” Professor Medea laughed. “Oh, Electromagnetic Man. Look at me now! See how I judge the unworthy for you, my love!”

The remaining film club members set Mr. Caraway down by a teacher’s podium and pulled out a student at random. They pinned her to the chair at the center of the mosaic of TVs just like I, just like the girl with the bruised eye had been. They strapped her, kicking and shrieking, to the chair, clamping the clothespins over her head so that she could see nothing but black mold.

I took a step forward, but the tip of a frozen paring knife touched the back of my neck.

“Don’t you dare move,” Professor Medea snarled.

“Not yet,” whispered the girl with the bruised eye.

We waited as Apocalypse Anew supposedly played, but I could see nothing but the movement of black mold. Then the student tried to shout for help, the film club unveiled a soggy rag.

Finally, when the screen faded to a dim white, Professor Medea approached the student. She ripped out the cloth and leaned in with her knife poised over the student’s forehead.

“What did you hear? Did you hear the electromagnetic waves? Tell me, do you know what your purpose now is in life?”

“I don’t know!” the student sobbed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I don’t know what he was talking about!”

“Then face the trial of deskny!”

Professor Medea pulled then pushed the student out the window with a quickness that confirmed that this was not her first time. I felt my knees churn. I saw in the whites of the pupil in the great eye beyond, the face of the one I knew who never let injustice go.

I saw the face of my brother.

The Electromagnetic Man.