Gone Series: Plague Part 35

He was going down a long, long slope. How far had he come? He couldn't say. He heard the rustle of the bugs coming behind him. In tight places they had to squeeze through, like ma.s.sive c.o.c.kroaches, flattening themselves to squeeze beneath low-hanging ledges, squirming onto their sides to edge past piers of solid rock.

They were following him. His army. Yes. He was certain of it. They would be his to command, his to use.

His army!

He could no longer breathe the air. But this was not his first time without oxygen. He still could see in vivid flashes the long, slow claw up through the mud of his grave.

No, Drake did not need air. Air was for the living, and Drake was something so much better than alive.

Unkillable.

Immortal.

The immortal soldier of the gaiaphage. His head swam with the joy of it.

Suddenly the floor ended and he pitched forward, face-first. He fell for several stretched seconds. He slammed into unyielding rock, bounced, rolled over, and laughed a soundless laugh.

He felt around with his hands and knew he was on a narrow ledge on one side of a deep vertical drop.

He stood up, put his toes on the edge, and looked down. Far below, a dim green light glowed, the only light in this pit of blackness. It might be a hundred feet, it might be a mile, it might be a hundred miles. There was no way to know.

He fell and fell, like Alice down the rabbit hole. It seemed to go on forever. Not seconds but minutes. An eternity.

WHUMPF!.

He hit with such force that it should have snapped his calves and thigh bones and burst his knees and jackhammered his spine and cracked his head open like an egg.

Instead, after lying crumpled for a moment, he unwound his twisted limbs and pushed himself back onto his feet.

The walls around him all glowed. With his eyes fully adjusted to the pitch black he could see fairly well now with nothing but the toxic radioactive glow.

Was he there? Was he at the end of the trip?

Come.

Farther still, down a sloping ramp. He realized that this was a different type of tunnel, no longer a man-made mining shaft but a natural cave deep, deep in the bowels of the stifling earth.

He entered a cavern that soared hundreds of feet above him. Green-tinged hanging stalact.i.tes met stumpy stalagmites. Like walking into the jaw of a gigantic shark.

Through the cavern and ever downward, following the faint trail of green. The creatures kept pace behind him. They had fallen after him, one by one, slowing their descent with their wings, spiraling down like helicopter seedpods.

An army! His army!

How far had he fallen? He could not know. How deep was he now? Miles.

Closer and closer.

And then, even as he felt his journey drawing to a close, his desperate goal coming close, Drake felt the familiar disturbance and swift onset of stumbling awkwardness that accompanied the transformation.

"No!" he moaned. "No, not now!"

But he had no power to stop the transformation.

It was not Drake but Brittney who finally came to the place where the gaiaphage lay. It was like living green sand. Billions of particles, each almost invisible to the eye, but together forming a single living thing, a hive.

The cavern was vast, impossibly huge. As if someone had sunk a sports stadium into the earth. The green, glowing ma.s.s of the gaiaphage covered stalact.i.tes and stalagmites, granite walls, and sandstone rock skysc.r.a.pers.

But beneath Brittney's feet the floor was strangely level and smooth. The gaiaphage had left an uncovered s.p.a.ce for her to see and to understand.

She knelt and pressed her hand against a clear patch of translucent, pearly gray beneath her. The searing pain a living person would have felt was only an interesting tingle to Brittney.

She knew what it was and where she was. This was the bottom of the FAYZ wall, the bottom of the giant bubble. She was ten miles down, at the lowest depths of the enclosed universe of the FAYZ.

She stood and looked left and right, in every direction, turning slowly to see. It was all resting on the barrier, she realized. The rock walls, the jutting stalagmites, all of it rested on the barrier itself.

And everywhere but in this one patch, the gaiaphage covered the barrier. It touched the barrier and did not feel pain.

Then, as Brittney looked down, she saw the color of the barrier change. The eternal blank grayness was crossed by fingers of dark green, the color of late summer leaves.

She understood: the gaiaphage could touch and alter the barrier itself.

She knew it was conscious. She knew it because she felt now the dread touch of that awful mind in hers. There could not be the slightest doubt.

Brittney fell to her knees.

She laced her fingers together and squeezed her eyes tight. But she could not block out the green glow. She could not stop herself seeing. She could not keep her mind safe from its terrible touch.

She felt her every thought opened, like so many files on a computer, each opened, observed, understood.

She was nothing. She saw that now. She was nothing.

Nothing.

She tried to call on her G.o.d. But her prayers would not form in her brain, would not whisper from her numb, trembling lips.

She saw it all clearly, the whole of it. A race of creatures who wors.h.i.+pped life. A virus designed to spread life wherever it reached. The planet first infected, then deliberately blown up so that seeds of life would spread throughout the universe in a billion meteors.

The endless, endless blackness of s.p.a.ce, of millennia during which one of those rocks spun along a path that might never reach an end.

It was caught in the gravity well of a small star.

And then of a small planet.

The shattering, fiery impact.

A death. A man obliterated.

And the absorption into that alien virus of something new and incredible: human DNA.

A new life-form. The unintended consequence of a n.o.ble plan.

No G.o.d in His Heaven had created the gaiaphage. And here, now, in the airless pit, no G.o.d could save her.

It was then in her despair that Brittney prayed, not as she always had, but to a new Lord. A savior who waited to be born, to break free.

Brittney bowed her head and prayed to the gaiaphage.

Tanner appeared to Brittney as she prayed.

Her dead brother was an angel. Not with wings and all of that, but she knew he was an angel. And now he appeared to her and spoke in a soft, soothing voice.

"Don't be afraid," Tanner said.

"Let me die," Brittney whispered.

"Who do you pray to?" Tanner asked.

"To you," she said. Because she had no doubt that Tanner was speaking for the gaiaphage.

"I cannot give you death," Tanner said. "You are two in one. Your immortality is his. And he is necessary to me."

"But who made me this way? Why? Why?"

Tanner laughed. "'Why' is a question for children."

"I am a child," Brittney said.

There was softly glowing magma dribbling from Tanner's cruel mouth. He bent down and touched her with fingers of ice.

"I must be born," Tanner said. "And then, at the ending of my beginning, you will die."

"I don't understand." With piteous eyes she looked up at the angel-turned-devil. "What do you need me to do?"

"Nemesis must be mine," Tanner said. "Nemesis must serve me and me alone. All who defend him and protect him must be destroyed. He must live to serve me."

"I ... I don't understand." She knelt with bowed head, unable to look at Tanner, knowing now that he had never been an angel, that he had never been G.o.d's servant, that he was nothing real at all, just the voice of the evil one.

"Nemesis," Tanner said, hissing the word. "We are two in one, like you and the whip hand. Two in one, waiting to be born. Only when he is alone, utterly alone, will he serve me. And then I will be burst from this coc.o.o.n."

"I don't know anyone called Nemesis," Brittney whispered.

She could feel her consciousness fading. Already her fingers were melting together to form the whip.

In the moments before she lost sight and sound, as she spiraled down into the blackness and Drake surged upward, Brittney's tortured mind saw the image of Nemesis.

She knew his name.

Peter Michael Ellison. Who everyone called Little Pete.

Pete.

HE FLOATED ABOVE the ground in the arms of a monster. His cheek lay against a stone shoulder. Rain no longer fell. Wild colors-green and yellow, brown and red, jagged edges of color sc.r.a.ped at him, wounding his ears.

The sister walked behind him. Her face was as stony as the monster's. Lips too red, eyes too blue, the sound of her breathing too loud.

At each step the monster's pebble skin rubbed against Pete's raw flesh, like sandpaper, like a thousand saw blades drawn slowly over tender scabs.

He wanted to scream, but if he screamed the loud colors would get louder.

He was no longer high atop the sheet of gla.s.s. He had fallen, fallen, down into the world of noise and blazing light. The Darkness was only a distant echo now. Now was now, utterly now and here and like needles under his skin, like knives in his ears. His eyes ached and throbbed.

He coughed and it was a cannon firing out of his chest, up through his throat, his mouth, burning him like blazing lava.

Why was he here? Why in a monster's arms? What was happening to him? After a long and peaceful escape he had been recaptured by the too-much world of furious activity and disjointed images.

His body, his body, that was all he could see or feel, the pain and the ache and the s.h.i.+vering that made him feel as if parts of him might come loose and fall, his body, forcing his attention away from the pristine gla.s.s cliff. Forcing him to feel every s.h.i.+ver, recoil at every cough, to feel, really feel, the sickness that was overwhelming his defenses.

Chapter Twenty-Eight.

5 HOURS, 1 MINUTE.

DRAKE DID NOT see Tanner.

The gaiaphage needed no angelic illusions to reach into Drake's fevered mind. Drake knew all he needed to know. The bugs, the creatures would serve him. He had his army.

And in his head he had a list of names. The freaks first. The normals next. All of them.

All but one, the gaiaphage told him. Kill until there is no one left to kill. But don't harm Nemesis.

Drake was filled with a pure joy he had never known. He felt a wild energy. All his life he had waited for this kind of moment. It was as if every single thing he had ever done-the beatings he had suffered, the much more numerous beatings he had delivered, the pleasure he had found in burning frogs and microwaving a puppy and drawing all those endless loving pictures of weapons, spears, knives, torture devices, all of it, all the hatreds, all the burning l.u.s.t, all the madness and rage, had come together to form this perfect, ultimate moment of crystalline joy.