Hunger (41 page)

“You get the next fish I catch,” Quinn said.

“Not if I’m buried alive,” Duck argued.

“Fried. Fried up so tender and flavorful.”

“You can’t buy me with food,” Duck huffed. “I…I want a swimming pool, too.”

7
MINUTES

THE MINE SHAFT
was collapsed.

Lana stood facing a wall of debris. And for a fleeting moment, she felt hope that this, at last, spelled the end of the monster that had enslaved her.

But from that wall, the battered, blunted end of the fuel rod protruded.

The billions of crystals that were all the body the gaiaphage had swarmed over the spilled uranium pellets.

Lana felt the gaiaphage’s anticipation, its rush of bliss. The fear of destruction drained from the creature. And for a while, Lana’s mind was almost her own as the gaiaphage reveled in its dark joy.

It was no blessing recovering her senses. Lana knew now beyond any doubt that it had been she who had pulled the trigger and shot Edilio. She who had failed to blow up the cave. She who had allowed this to happen.

Too weak.

A fool, easily manipulated into delivering herself into the
service of the monster. Too weak to resist it.

And as it grew stronger, as its fear ebbed, it would reach into her mind again and use her power to build the body that would emerge from this lair. Burying the creature would not stop it. It would create the body that could tunnel its way out, the cunningly designed monster-within-monster nesting doll that could never be killed.

She was the key now. Lana knew that. The tunnel had been shut with a tremendous crash that would seal the gaiaphage in unless she gave it the key to escape.

Only her own death could stop it.

Her will was too weak. Her only hope was delay. The uranium, surely it would kill her. Surely it would destroy her if she did nothing to heal herself.

But would it happen quickly enough?

And would the gaiaphage know what was happening to her and force her to save herself? Did the creature understand that its food was her death?

Duck stood on the hillside. He was a hundred feet or so above the mine shaft. They had made a guess, hoping that this would position him above what Caine said was a wide subterranean chamber.

All guesswork, of course. If Duck didn’t eventually fall into an open chamber, he would have to do it again. And again.

Quinn was all but carrying Sam, holding him up with his arms as Sam endured wave after wave of pain.

“The morphine is wearing off,” Sam said. “Hurry.”

Caine stood ready. Brianna had run off to fetch rope. But
when she returned she had fallen to her knees and vomited violently, heaving up nothing.

“Have to do this now,” Sam said. He was panting. Holding on by his fingernails.

“Do it, Duck,” Quinn urged.

They were all waiting for him. Looking to him. So many lives on the line, and they were looking to him. To Duck Zhang.

“Oh, man. It better be really good fish,” Duck said.

And then he was falling through the ground. Falling and falling, and waving his arms as he went, tunneling through rock as if it were no thicker than pudding.

Falling and flailing, falling and flailing. Knowing he would be able to float back up and out into the air, but not 100 percent sure. Mostly. Not totally sure. Maybe this time—

Duck slipped suddenly as he fell through the ceiling of the mine shaft. He stopped his fall only after sinking two feet into the mine shaft’s floor.

Duck breathed a sigh of relief. He was not in a wide, open chamber, just in a narrow mine shaft. A miracle he’d hit it.

He wondered if there were bats in here. Well, judging by the scared looks of all the others up above, there was something much worse down here. So maybe bats wouldn’t be a bad thing. Maybe bats would be a good sign.

“Okay!” he yelled up.

No answer.

“Okay! I’m down!” he shouted as loud as he could.

A rope uncoiled and dropped.

Caine was first. He landed gently, using his own
power to cushion the drop.

“Dark down here,” Caine said. He yelled up the shaft. “Okay, brother: jump.”

Light shone blindingly bright down the shaft Duck had made. Like eerie sunlight coming through a chink in a shutter.

Caine raised his hands and Sam dropped slowly down the shaft.

Sam seemed to be holding a ball of brilliant light in his hands. Only not holding it, really, Duck realized when his eyes had adjusted. The light just glowed from Sam’s palms.

“I know this place,” Caine said. “We’re just a few dozen feet from the cavern.”

“Duck, we may need you,” Sam said.

“But I was just going to—”

Sam’s legs buckled, and Duck grabbed him just before he hit the ground.

“I’ll stay,” Duck heard himself say.

What? You’ll what? he demanded silently.

Come on, Duck, he told himself. You can’t just run away.

Sure, I can! Duck’s other voice protested.

But just the same, he supported Sam’s weight as they walked deeper into the cave.

Don’t you want to be a hero? Duck mocked himself.

I guess I kind of do, he answered.

“Keep the light on,” Caine said.

Sam could keep the light burning. That he could do. Could do that. Light.

His heart was a rusty, dying engine, hammering like it would fly apart. His body was scalded iron, hot, stiff, impossible to move.

The pain…

It was at him now, a roaring tiger that ripped him with every step, tore at his mind, shredded his self-control. He couldn’t live with it. Too terrible.

“Come on, Sam,” Duck said in his ear.

“Aahhhh!” Sam cried out.

“So much for sneaking up on it,” Caine said.

It knows we’re here, Sam thought. No sneaking. No tricking. It knew. Sam could feel it. Like cold fingers prodding his mind, poking, looking for an opening.

This is hell, Sam thought. This is hell.

Keep the light on, Sam told himself, whatever else, keep the light on.

There was a skittering sound as Caine’s feet kicked some loose pebbles that on closer examination were identical, short, cylinders of dark metal.

“The fuel pellets,” Caine said dully. “Well. I hope Lana does radiation poisoning. Otherwise we are all dead.”

“What?” Duck asked.

“That’s uranium scattered all around. The way it was explained to me, it’s blowing billions of tiny holes in our bodies.”

“
What?”

“Come on, Goose,” Caine said. “You’re doing great.”

“Duck,” Duck corrected.

“Can you feel the Darkness, Goose?” Caine asked in an awed whisper.

“Yeah,” Duck said. His voice wavered. Like a little kid about to cry. “It feels bad.”

“Very bad,” Caine agreed. “It’s been in my head for a long time, Goose. Once it’s there, it never goes away.”

“What do you mean?” Duck asked.

“It’s touching your mind right now, isn’t it? Leaving its mark. Finding a way in. Once it gets in, you can never shut it out.”

“We have to get out of here,” Duck said.

“You can go, Goose,” Caine said. “I can drag Sam along.”

Sam heard it all from far away. A conversation between distant ghosts. Shadows in his mind. But he knew Duck could not leave.

“No,” Sam rasped. “We need Duck.”

“Do we?” Caine asked.

“The one weapon it doesn’t know we have,” Sam said.

“Weapon?” Duck echoed.

“It opens up just ahead,” Caine said. “The cavern.”

“What is it? What’s it look like?” Duck asked.

Caine didn’t answer.

Sam rode through a spasm of pain. It seemed to come in waves, each worse than the one before. Surfing the pain, he thought. But in the trough between waves, he sometimes had a few seconds of clarity.

He opened his eyes. He turned up the light.

As Caine had said, they were emerging into a space that
was no longer a mine shaft but a vast cavern.

But no natural geological event had created this vast, silent hole beneath the ground. No stalactites hung from the arched roof. No stalagmites grew from the floor.

Instead, the stone walls seemed to have been melted and then solidified. There was still a faint smell of burning, though no smoke and no heat except what radiated from the fuel rod behind them in the shaft.

“Figured out where we are yet, Sam?” Caine asked.

Sam groaned.

“Yeah, kind of have other things on your mind right now, huh? You know about the meteor that hit the power plant all those years back, right, Sam? Sure. You’re a townie.”

Sam rode the next wave. He didn’t want to scream. Didn’t want to scream.

“Meteor plows right through the power plant, right into the ground. Like our boy Goose, here: so heavy, moving so fast, it’s like shooting an arrow into butter. Tears a massive hole. Stops here, what’s left of it.”

They had advanced fifty feet into the cathedral space of the cavern.

Sam nodded, not capable at that particular moment of speech. He tried to lift his hands, but their weight was too great.

Caine took his wrists and lifted up his hands, a motion that caused Sam to roar in agony.

But the light shone brighter.

And there, revealed, the thing being born. It was more lump than any definite shape. A seething hive of rushing,
twisting, greenish crystals.

But as they watched, the surfaces facing their way took on a perfect, mirrored surface.

“Looks like he’s ready for you, Sam,” Caine said.

Then, a different voice. Eerie and awful.

“I am the gaiaphage,” Lana said.

The transformation had begun when the gaiaphage touched the first of the scattered uranium pellets. Lana felt the surge of power, like grabbing an electrical wire, like grabbing every electrical wire in the world.

She had cried out in the shared ecstasy of that moment.

Food!

The gaiaphage’s terrible hunger was gone. In its place a rush of power. Rage unleashed.

Now! Now it would become!

The billions of crystals that formed the gaiaphage’s shapeless, random form began to rush like ants. Rivulets became streams, streams became rushing rivers. What had been little more than scum on the surface of rocks formed into mounds and peaks. Here and there, sharp points. Here flat and there peaked, here pliable and there stiff.

Crystals folded in endless dimensions, layers within layers. Even at this wild speed it would take days to finish, but already the barest outlines were beginning to reveal themselves.

The gaiaphage that had been spread through a thousand feet of the subterranean cavern now condensed, came together, like stars drawn into a black hole.

Lana could feel it all, as though her own nerves were part of the gaiaphage. And maybe they were, she thought. Maybe there was no longer a line between them. Maybe she was part of it now.

It was all around her. In her ears and nose, in her mouth and hair. Swarming insects covering every square inch of her.

And yet, she had begun to feel a sickness inside her. A feeling that was her own and not the monster’s.

What fed the gaiaphage was blasting her apart, cell by cell.

She had to hide it. Couldn’t let it see. She had to die to stop it, had to die of the radiation that churned her stomach.

Around her the crystals were hardening, forming a thick shield. And the surface of that shield began to shine, like steel. No, like a mirror.

A tremor of fear shook the gaiaphage.

Lana opened her eyes and saw the reason. Three dark shapes. Frail, afraid, but standing before the gaiaphage.

Too late, Caine. Your power will not shatter the gaiaphage.

Too late, Sam, she thought. Your burning light will not work.

The third…who was that? She felt the question in her own mind take on terrible urgency in the gaiaphage.

The gaiaphage held her like a fly in amber. It revealed her now to the gasps of the humans.

“I am the gaiaphage,” Lana’s mouth said.

Caine stared in horror. Lana’s face floated, suspended within a seething mass of what might have been mirrored insects.

“Sam! More light!”

Sam had slipped. He was on his knees. Glowing hands down on the stone floor as he moaned.

Duck was staring, awestruck, at the glittering, shifting monstrosity with the face of a girl in torment.

Caine could not see the extent of the creature, but it felt huge, like it might go on forever.

He reached his hands over his shoulders. Reached back behind him. The bent fuel rod slid from the jumble of rock and debris.

Caine threw his hands forward with all his might. The fuel rod smashed into the monstrous glittering mass. It bounced off and clattered to the ground, spilling more pellets.

Nothing. No effect. Like hitting the gaiaphage with a Q-tip.

“Sam? If you’ve got anything left, now is the time,” Caine cried.

“No,” Sam whispered. “It’s ready for me. Duck.”

“What about him?”

“Duck…,” Sam said, and fell, facedown. He did not move.

“You got something besides falling into the ground?” Caine shrilled at Duck. “You got some nuclear bomb in your pocket?”

Duck did not answer.

“Sam?” Caine cried, and now the gaiaphage was moving,
shifting its weight, undulating toward Caine, with Lana’s weeping, twisted face, her mouth speaking but Caine unable to hear from the sound of blood rushing in his ears, knowing it was over, knowing…

The gaiaphage poured liquid fire into Caine’s brain, overwhelming every sense, crushing consciousness with pain.

You defy me?

Caine rocked back, barely kept his feet.

“Throw me!” Duck cried.

I am the gaiaphage!

“Throw me, throw me!” a voice kept shouting.

“What?” Caine cried.

“Hard as you can!”

The gaiaphage thought nothing of the soft, human body that flew toward him.

Up into the air the human flew. Toward the roof of the cavern.

Down he came.

The gaiaphage would never even feel the slight weight as it…

…hit with the force of a mountain dropped from the edge of space.

Duck hit the gaiaphage and drilled straight through its crystalline mass.

And straight through the cave floor beneath it.

Into the vortex, like grains of sand in an hourglass, fell the gaiaphage.