by Alan Ryker
“If they’re down there, I can’t make them out from here. Oh wait…”
Light hit Pete’s face. His mind, which had wrapped him in sleep’s heavy tentacles, suddenly hurled him up and out into terrible consciousness. Beams of light pressed like knives through the darkness and his eyelids directly into his brain, sprouting new daggers of pain that sliced into every nerve ending.
“I think I see a face.”
“Just a face?”
Pete squinted, but could see only the lens of a flashlight blazing down at him from the end of a long, glistening tunnel. He raised his arm, thick clumps of dirt falling away as he shielded his eyes.
“Mr. Grish? Is that you?”
He hesitated. He didn’t know why, but he felt afraid to speak. He wished he hadn’t moved.
“Mr. Grish?”
“Yes.”
“Is your son down there? Are either of you hurt?”
Pete lifted his other arm from the heavy earth and put it over Junior, who moaned softly. He still slept. He was hurt, but he was healing, and needed more time.
Then Pete remembered that he’d come to find Junior, to take him to a hospital. Terror filled him at the thought of emerging, and he tried to shrink back into the earth. The light hurt, and the light was only the beginning of what awaited them up in the world above.
But no, Junior needed to get to a hospital.
“Hold on,” the man behind the flashlight said. “We’re coming down to get you.”
Electricity blasted his mind of uncertainty and launched him forward. The thick layer of mud that had seemed so impossibly heavy fell away as Pete clawed his way up the tunnel like an insect, teeth bared and his heavily muscled shoulders rolling in the tight tunnel.
His only thought—his lone purpose now—was to protect his den.
CHAPTER 25
It only got the one day of cloud cover before the golden eye of the sun once again began its fiery scrutiny, but it used the hours well. The radius of its exodus, with the burning landfill at the center, grew by miles and miles that day.
In some stretches of flat prairie, an individual could see from one brilliant horizon to the other, but they could sense each other even farther. They were the ever-sprouting limbs of the same body, scrabbling over sun-bleached plains and worming through desiccated soil.
The mind that controlled the body expanded as well. Each individual was a neuron in a nervous system that spread across pasture and field, gravel and asphalt, creek and barbed-wire fence. It had begun as a verminous intellect, cowering in instinctive fear. But the human mind gave it resourcefulness, willfulness, and a delight in the pain of others. Where there had once only been the will to survive, there was now the will to conquer. And to hurt.
But since its expulsion from the cradle, since the addition of humans as hosts, the most transformative change was the beginning of a clamorous self-awareness.
For now, it would spread out, and it would dig down. It would continue to cross golden fields of corn and wheat ripening in the hateful sun, and as it went, it would burrow in, creating festering pockets of hidden rot that would consume the American breadbasket from the inside out. But soon it would emerge, grown fat and strong on the fruits of humanity’s labors, an organism basking in its deadly perfection. Then, it would fulfill a new desire, one that made no sense to the older mind concerned only with survival. A new, barely understood desire was developing at the same rate as its self-awareness and its cruelty.
One day, it would have vengeance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Ryker is the product of a good, clean country upbringing. Though he now lives with his wife in the suburbs of Kansas City, the sun-bleached prairie still haunts his fiction. Learn more about his work at www.alanryker.com.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Discover other great eBooks at www.darkfuse.com.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
About the Author
About the Publisher