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.
FORTY-FIVE
0 MINUTES
KIND OF LIKE the first time, Duck thought.
At the pool that day. Like that. Falling and the water rushing down with him.
Only this water was more like sand. A billion tiny crystals all sucked down the drain that Duck had made in the earth.
He could see nothing as he fell. The crystals filled his eyes and ears and mouth.
He couldn’t breathe, and this panicked him and he fell even faster, trying to outrun the monster that fell with him.
No air.
Mind swirling, crazy, not even afraid now, just…
Memories flashed like a jerky video. That day when he fell off a pony at his fifth birthday party.
That time he ate the whole pie…
His mom. So pretty. Her face…
Dad…
The pool…
He stopped falling. Something had stopped him at last.
Too late, he thought.
Can’t fall through to China, Duck thought.
Well, Duck thought, I guess I did want to be a hero.
And then Duck stopped thinking anything at all.
FORTY-SIX
CAINE STOOD IN darkness.
Sam’s light was gone.
There was a soft, slurry sound. Like rushing water but without water’s music.
Caine stood in darkness as the sound died slowly away.
And now, silence as well as darkness.
Diana. He would never save her now. He might survive, but for the first time in his life, Caine knew that his life, without Diana, would be unbearable.
She had teased him. Abused him. Lied to him. Manipulated him. Betrayed him. Laughed at him.
But she had stuck by him. Even when he had threatened her.
Could what they had really be described as love? He’d blurted it, that word. But were either of them capable of that particular emotion?
Maybe.
But no longer. Not now. Up above, up on the surface, she was dead or close to it. Her blood seeping into the ground.
“Diana,” he whispered.
“Am I still alive?”
At first Caine thought it might be her voice. Impossible.
“Light,” Caine said. “I need light.”
There was no light. For what seemed like an eternity, no light. The voice did not speak again.
Caine sat in the dark, too beaten to move. His brother curled in a ball. Dead, or wishing he was. And Diana…
Quinn fought panic as he descended the irregular shaft Duck had cut. The rope felt thin in his hands. The walls of the vertical shaft scraped his back and sides as he descended. Rocks kept falling on his head.
Quinn knew he was not brave. But there was no one left. Something was wrong with Brianna. She was doubled up on the ground, clutching her stomach and crying.
Quinn didn’t know what was happening down below. But he knew that if Sam and Caine didn’t bring Lana back up out of there, there would be too many deaths for Quinn to even think about.
Had to do this.
Had to.
He reached the bottom of the shaft and felt his legs swing freely. He lost his grip and fell the final few feet.
He landed hard, but without breaking anything.
“Sam?” Quinn whispered, a sound that died within inches of his mouth.
He fumbled for the flashlight in his pocket. He snapped the light on. His eyes had adjusted to the dark. The light seemed blinding. He blinked. He aimed the beam ahead.
There, not a hundred feet away, a human figure in silhouette. Moving.
“Caine?”
Caine turned slowly. His face was stark and white. His eyes rimmed red.
Caine rose slowly, like an arthritic old man.
Quinn rushed to him and shone his light around, sweeping the area. He saw Sam facedown.
And there, standing with her arms at her side, stood Lana.
“Lana,” Quinn said.
“Am I alive?” Lana asked.
“You’re alive, Lana,” Quinn said. “You’re free of it.”
A dark shadow passed over Lana’s face. Her mouth twisted downward. She turned and began to walk away.
Quinn put his arm on her shoulder. “Don’t leave us, Healer. We need you.”
Lana stopped.
“I…,” she began.
“Lana,” Quinn said. “We need you.”
“I killed Edilio,” she said.
“Not yet you didn’t,” Quinn said.
Mary Terrafino woke to the taste and smell of fish.
Instantly she twisted her face away. The smell was disgusting.
She looked around wildly. To her amazement she was tied up. Tied to an easy chair in her day care office.
“What am I doing here?” she demanded, bewildered.
“You’re having dinner,” her little brother said.
“Stop it! I’m not hungry. Stop it!”
John held the spoon in front of her. His cherubic face was dark with anger. “You said you wouldn’t leave m
e.”
“What are you talking about?” Mary demanded.
“You said you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t leave me alone,” John said. “But you tried, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re babbling about.” She noticed Astrid then, leaning against a filing cabinet. Astrid looked like she’d been dragged through the middle of a dog fight. Little Pete was sitting cross-legged, rocking back and forth. He was chanting, “Good-bye, Nestor. Good-bye, Nestor.”
“Mary, you have an eating disorder,” Astrid said. “The secret is out. So cut the crap.”
“Eat,” John ordered, and shoved a spoonful of food in her mouth. None too gently.
“Swallow,” John ordered.
“Let me—”
“Shut up, Mary,” John snapped.
Diana first. Caine would allow no other choice.
Then Edilio, who was so close to death that Lana thought he must have had his hand on the gate of Heaven.
Dekka. Horribly hurt. But not dead.
Brianna, with her hair falling out in clumps.
Last, Sam.
Quinn had hauled him up on the rope, helped greatly by Caine.
Lana sat in the dirt as the sun came up.
Quinn brought her water. “Are you okay?” he asked her.
She could say the words he wanted to hear, but Lana knew she could not make him believe. “No,” Lana said.
Quinn sat next to her. “Caine and Diana, they took off. Sam is sleeping. Dekka…I don’t think she’s over it yet.”
“I can’t cure a person of memories,” Lana said dully.
“No,” Quinn agreed. “I guess if you could, you’d cure yourself.”
He put his arm around her shoulders, and she started crying then. It felt like she could never stop. But it didn’t feel bad, either. And Quinn did not leave her. Far off there was the sound of a car’s engine.
Quinn said, “Hey, Brianna zipped back to town. Brought Astrid and someone else.”
Lana didn’t care. Lana didn’t think she would ever care about anything again.
But then, there was the sound of a car door opening and closing. And suddenly, Patrick was there, his cold, wet nose thrust insistently against her neck.
Lana put her arms around him, hugged him close, and cried into his fur.
FORTY-SEVEN