Plague

from joy, not fear.
    He felt the mind of the Darkness touching his. Felt that powerful will. It wanted him. And he was sure now what the Darkness would ask of him, and what weapons it would give him.
    The mine shaft was clear but still a dangerous place. The supporting timbers had not been replaced and now the stone roof was jagged, hanging precariously in some places, while in others it had been hollowed out into dark cathedral domes by the collapse.
    “I’m coming,” Drake whispered. But why whisper? “I’m coming!” he yelled.
    He left the last of the light behind. Total darkness now. He felt his way forward, step by step, hand and whip hand outstretched. He scraped against jutting rocks, stubbed his toes dozens of times. The air smelled stale. It was hotter than it should have been in the shaft, warmer than the outside. He was sweating in the pitch black, gasping for scarce oxygen.
    “I’m coming!” he shouted again, but his voice now was metallic and flat and did not carry any distance. He tripped and fell to his knees. When he stood up, he banged his head.
    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 massive cockroaches, 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 stalactites 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 mass of the gaiaphage covered stalactites and stalagmites, granite walls, and sandstone rock skyscrapers.
    But beneath