Gray Spoiled Earth: Agent Purple

A journal entry from the travels of J. This one marked as.

“Agent Purple”

I came across an overturned military truck today. It wasn’t really of much concern, nor would I have given it a second thought, if the whole thing was completely devoid of the Mold. Upon closer investigation, it wasn’t hard to figure out why. The back of the truck was filled with various opened and spilled barrels of a thick purple sludge which had gotten all over the truck and surrounding area. Agent Purple.

In the Vietnam War, American developed a chemical weapon known as Agent Orange. It was an herbicide, and a nasty one at that. It destroyed the foliage that was hiding the enemy, and to destroy their source of food by spraying it on crop fields. The effects were visible, and deadly, not just to the plants but to the people who sprayed it and were sprayed. There was actually something called Agent Purple, but most people didn’t know that when the new one was deployed.

I don’t know who exactly created the new one. No one I’ve come across has any idea really, even some of the higher up military I’ve come across from the time. It appeared in several stages, and with various levels of efficiency. The first use was at the Panama Canal, in a sort of field test/desperate action. It was effective, but rainfall washed away the stuff and the moss just grew right back.

The next use was some time later. When we created The Scorch. They fine tuned the stuff, but maybe a bit too much. They made it too strong, and when they sprayed it across half a continent, it killed everything the mold could feed off of. Contaminated the water. It was a success…and now we have a desert that stretches from the southern part of Mexico to the Panama. Nothing will grow there again for centuries, maybe permanently. Not even the usual desert foliage and fauna. There is a disturbing purple shimmer to everything, shifting with the wind.

The final iteration is what I’m seeing now on the military truck. You’d need to put it into a proper spreader to reduce the consistency, but the stuff is now sticky. Powerful, but not as strong as it used to be. You spray Agent Purple in an area, and it’ll kill the Mold and everything else there is. Kind of like a foam, it’ll clear the area and if cleaned properly, the area could be used again for plant life in a year or two.

Obviously, that didn’t work out, and the side effects were…nasty. Even short-term exposure had a variety of health concerns. There were supposedly plans for future iterations. Something that just targeted the Mold, or one that was safe for humans to be around. It never came to be.

Supposedly there are entire cities out there that tried to use the stuff to keep the Mold away. Pristine cities, not a spot of the Mold on them…with piles of bodies stretched as far as the eye could see. It’s not a place you go to unless you’re very desperate. Walking into purple stained streets and buildings.

Most of what remains is stored in barrels. You come across them a lot, these barren patches of earth, and know to stay away.