Hunger

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 thatwas 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