“Don’t you want to be a hero?” Quinn asked.
“No,” Duck said honestly.
“Yeah, me neither,” Quinn admitted. “But, Edilio, he’s a
hero. He’s the real thing. And, Sam . . . well, I don’t have to
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tell you what Sam has done for all of us.” Quinn took Duck’s
arm and said, “We need you, Duck. Only you. Only you can
do this.”
“Dude, I mean, I want to help, but . . .”
“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.”
FORTY-FOUR
7 MINUTES
T H E M I N E S H A F T 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
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5
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
566 M I C H A E L
G R A N T
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
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
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7
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.
568 M I C H A E L
G R A N T
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.
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9
“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
570 M I C H A E L
G R A N T
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,
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57
1
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.
572 M I C H A E L
G R A N T
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.
•
•
•
H U N G E R
573
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,
574 M I C H A E L
G R A N T
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
K I N D O F L I K E 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.