 Durham firefighters just got a pay increase with the city's approved budget. With their bulging red eyes and their alien-like mating sound, periodical cicadas can seem scary and weird enough, but some of them really are sex-crazed zombies on speed, hijacked by a supersized fungus. West Virginia University mycology professor Matt Kaysen, his nine-year-old son Oliver, and graduate student Angie Macias are tracking the nasty fungus called Massospora cicadina.