I’d really like to say they took one look at our bite wounds before they all fled to high altitude ski resorts.
I’d like to say fear was still an important, insectoid reaction buried deep in their brainstems and not predominantly reliant on the faint buzz of a first-response text message: U Shld Worry, 4Rlz.
Tourists: a fungus that leeches life from the host but plays itself off as symbiotic. The Tilted Kilt drew all the single men within a two-mile radius, like ants to sugar - only the sugar’s dressed in ultra-short plaid skirts and unbuttoned Oxfords. Weekending couples held hands with Banana Republic bags under their arms. Girls from a volleyball squad, in town for a tournament, whispered about the waiters at the Paramount Cafe. On the Mall, families had brought their children out to enjoy the warm sun of one of Colorado’s 300 clear days a year. The uninfected had little warning of the Fifth Annual Denver Zombiecrawl. This is how I imagine we all must have looked from someone taking a helicopter tour of Denver that October Saturday afternoon: a dark line of ants shuffling up and down the 16th Street Mall, thousands of us infected by a contagion that spreads by contact, by sight, by word of mouth, and by film, by graphic novel, by survival guide and oral history: the Z-Virus. It’s easy to picture a forest floor covered in an army of infection-antlered ants as they mindlessly follow the bidding of their mycological masters. One fungus instructs the ant to bite down into whatever it’s standing on in order to remain stationery while the fungus matures. Some fungi create “infection pegs” that stick out like poisonous horns. They hijack an ant’s brain and use the body for spore dispersal. There are four species of fungus growing in the Brazilian rainforest that exhibit powers of mind control over ants. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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