I figure the Billhooks run dog fights so they have a lot of dead pit-fighting dogs. Now meat is a luxury good. Butchers don’t waste meat. So they got these dead dogs and meat locker warehouses and they got this leech Micella who’s fascinated with rot and decay and is cultivating some cordiceps kinda fungus, cultures it in these black iron trapezoidal coal-scuttle buckets like and when Coran’s thugs bring in the next wagonload of dead dog she hoists them up on hooks and lowers their faces into the fungal growth medium and lets it grow up into their faces and spine. They keep about a dozen of these things in cold storage, twitching. You know, like a dog thats dreaming of running something down.

And when the Billhooks need to really fuck someone up, they cut a couple of these dog things down and pull their heads out and their faces are all like a tapered block of fungal mass, shaped like the inside of the bucket and their somehow jaws open sideways now.

As they warm up to room temp they get more and more frantically, viciously kinetic. They make this horrible growling gurgling roar like a lion drowning in its own infected phlegm. Eventually, they’ll just go into seizures, but they can rip a lot of people apart before they do.

Killing them is hard because they are already dead.

Don’t shoot them in the head.

That’s how you get spores.