Hellhole: An Anthology of Subterranean Terror

A PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS Michael McBride

“How did it happen?” Major Jack Randall asked.

“We’re still trying to figure that out,” Dr. James Thompson said.

The two men were diametric opposites. Where Randall was broad and muscular, Thompson was narrow and soft. They made for an unusual pairing as they strode down the corridor toward the laboratory known as The Warren. The soldiers guarding the door saluted and parted to make way for their commanding officer and chief civilian scientist.

“You’d better figure it out in a hurry.”

Chemsuits and gas masks hung from hooks on the wall beside the chemical showers. Randall watched the men inside the sealed lab through the reinforced glass while he donned his protective gear. He entered the outer chamber of the airlock and waited for Thompson to close the door behind them before opening the inner seal.

The entire wall to his right was covered with racks of wire cages. The rabbits housed here were designated for the nerve gas program, which had been established in response to the Army arriving in Germany with its mustard gas and lewisite only to find itself confronted with an arsenal of chemical weapons that made theirs look like novelty itching powders by comparison. The Nazi G-agents were lethal in minuscule concentrations and had the potential to wipe out armies with a single warhead and, worse, entire cities with a barrage of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Thus, the plants at the RMA had been transitioned to the production of sarin — the deadliest of the G-agents — and the race had commenced to stockpile as much as humanly possible in the shortest amount of time, which necessitated the installation of early detection mechanisms in case of accidental release, a job perfect for these rabbits.

Had any of them still been alive.

Randall opened one of the cage doors, grabbed the lifeless ball of fur, and lifted it from the litter. Its tongue protruded from between its long, hooked teeth. The glimmer of life had faded from its waxen eyes, but its body remained limp.

“This couldn’t have happened more than a few hours ago,” he said.

“3:56 AM, to be precise,” Thompson said. “The men were alerted by the screaming.”

“Screaming?”

“That’s how they described it. They were at the end of the hall. By the time they arrived, all of the rabbits were dead.”

Randall set the animal on the stainless steel examination tray behind him, then reached into the cage. The rubber gloves minimized the sensitivity of his fingers, forcing him to grab handfuls of the litter and sift it through his fingers until he found what he was told would be there. Even then he was surprised to find the locust carcasses.

“How did they get in here?” he asked.

“We believe through the ventilation ducts.”

“How in God’s name did they get out of their cage in the first place?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. It’s one of those things you’re just going to have to see for yourself.”

“Wasn’t someone supposed to be monitoring them?”

“According to the logs, he rounded right on schedule.”

Randall manipulated one of the dead insects into the palm of his glove. The African desert locust. Schistocerca gregaria. It looked like the grasshoppers in the surrounding plains, only larger and rust-colored, with a black face and red eyes. Its entire body was riddled with holes, as though someone had repeatedly punctured its carapace and abdomen with a pin.

He turned around to qualify his discovery with the doctor, only to find him studying the rabbit on the examination tray so closely that his face shield was within inches of it. Thompson sorted through the animal’s fur, revealing fresh pinprick lesions inflicted so close to its time of death that neither bleeding nor attempted healing had occurred.

“The locusts attacked them?” Randall said.

“That’s how it appears, although these look more like puncture wounds than bites.”

“But that shouldn’t have killed them.”

“You’re right, but, for the life of me, I can’t tell you what did.”

WHILE UNCLE SAM considered the chemical warfare program his priority, he invested heavily in the burgeoning field of biological weaponry. Four square miles of the arsenal had been devoted to growing grain infected with a plant pathogen called wheat stem rust. Puccinia graministritici, known as Agent TX, was more than a mere nuisance species. An infection not only decreased the yield of a crop by twenty percent, it increased the risk of contracting mycotoxicosis from ingestion, effectively wiping out entire harvests. This one anticrop agent had the potential to cripple even the mighty Soviet Union and starve its people, ending a theoretical third world war before the first shots were even fired.

Of course, this particular fungus had an added benefit with extraordinary military applications. It could be used to harvest deoxynivalenol, a toxin that could be used to both incapacitate and kill, depending upon the concentration.

Randall supervised both the plant responsible for its purification, storage, and shipment to Beale Air Force Base in California and the laboratory where they tested experimental methods of dispersal. TX couldn’t simply be loaded into a bomb and dropped into a field without serving as a declaration of war. There was an entire team devoted to stealthier means of release, chief among them the use of insects as vectors to spread the infection.

The Japanese had successfully tested the use of fleas to spread the plague, but their plan to disperse them by balloon was impractical. Even if the fleas managed to survive the plummet from high altitude, once they were free to roam the streets, the efficacy of the plan was under the direct control of so many mindless creatures. There was no doubt the plague would eventually take root, but as a weapon it lacked the immediacy necessary during times of war, which were won in the here and now, not some number of months into the unknown future. Plus, there was no means of containing the bacterium. Had the Japanese not surrendered when they did and Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night been set into motion, those infected during the planned assault on San Diego could have easily carried the disease right back across the Pacific with them on any of the Naval vessels stationed there. What they needed was both immediacy and containment, which was where Randall’s hand-selected team of scientists came in.

It wasn’t enough that a wheat stem rust infection would set into motion a series of events that would slowly lead to economic ruin and starvation, it needed to do so in a fast and predictable manner. The African desert locusts were the swarming variety, the kind that descended as a cloud upon a field and left nothing but inedible stalks in their wake. This particular species could be counted upon to lay siege to the targeted fields, but the problem quickly became one of containment. An aggressive swarm could follow the grain belt west and cut a swath across the Ukraine and Eastern Europe, leaving behind worthless acres infected with wheat rust to such an extent that nothing would grow there for years to come, but if their theory was correct, they’d finally found a solution.

Or at least they thought they had.

Randall stood in the center of the entomology lab, surrounded by six-foot-tall glass aquariums swarming with locusts. All except for one, anyway. The glass was cracked and the lid canted upward ever so slightly. It took him a moment to realize that the damage had been inflicted from the inside, where, unlike the other cages, wheat plants grew largely unmolested. The soil, however, was littered with small bones, feathers, and scavenged bird carcasses.

“What the hell happened here?”

“Show him what you showed me,” Thompson said.

Like all of the civilian scientists, Stephen Waller wore black-rimmed glasses, a white lab coat, and his ID badge clipped to his breast pocket. He was their resident entomologist, a field Randall suspected he’d chosen because of his physical resemblance. He was tall and slender and moved as though he possessed joints where others didn’t.

“If you’ll follow me, Sergeant,” he said, and led the way around the back of the aquarium to the ladder leaning against it. He gestured to it and Randall ascended until he was just above the level of the lid. It was immediately apparent what had happened.

Randall traced his fingertips across the raised edge of the lid. The bodies of hundreds of locusts were crammed into the seam, one on top of another, so many that they’d used the sheer mass of dead bodies to raise the lid high enough for the remainder to squeeze out.

“Extraordinary,” Randall whispered.

“More than that, sir. This level of coordination is beyond anything we’ve ever seen. Not even honeybees exhibit such extreme hive-mind behavior. These individuals willingly sacrificed themselves so that the others could escape. That’s higher-level thinking not traditionally associated with so-called lower orders of life.”

Cattail-like spines protruded from the carcasses. They were actually the stalks of a fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, an entomopathogenic species from Thailand that infected ants, causing them to climb a specific plant to a predesignated height, bite onto the underside of a leaf, and cling there until the fungus consumed its body and produced an explosion of spores from its fruiting bodies. The locusts had been suitable vectors for the wheat stem rust bacterium, but the unilateralis had only infected one of the twelve groups exposed to it — the one bred for aggressiveness toward avian predators, a flock of which could end their infestation before it began — and even then only a small number had survived to repopulate the swarm.

“We suspect the locusts’ behavior served a similar function to that of the ‘death grip’ of the ants’ mandibles, which the fungus utilizes to immobilize its host while it parasitizes it,” Thompson said. “Or at least that’s our working theory.”

“You’re telling me the fungus made them cram themselves into a tiny crack until there were enough dead bodies to raise the lid?” Randall said.

“That’s how it works, sir,” Waller said. “The spores attach to the exoskeleton, burrow through it using a combination of enzymes and mechanical force, and spread throughout the body in their yeast stage. They then infiltrate the insect’s brain and assume control of its motor functions.”

“A fungus can’t think.”

“It can in the sense that the ant — or, in this case, the locust — is able to. Its sole biological imperative is the perpetuation of its species, which means that it will do everything within its power to achieve its reproductive potential.”

Randall lifted one of the compressed carcasses from the rim. It looked like it had been stomped by a shoe. Several others came away with it, all of them tangled together by a snarl of stalks and some kind of white fuzz.

“What’s this furry stuff?”

“Hyphae. They’re thin filaments that spread throughout the host’s body while the fungus consumes it. They help maintain structural integrity and form a network not unlike our own circulatory or nervous systems.”

Randall remembered the holes in the exoskeletons of the locusts he found in the rabbit cages.

“So where are all of these growths on the ones that escaped?”

“Its rate of proliferation is staggering,” Thompson said through the speaker, which made his voice sound tinny.

Randall leaned right up against the window to get a better view of the rabbit on the dissection tray inside The Warren’s sealed lab. Its front and hind legs had been stretched out and pinned to the black wax. The flesh had been parted straight up its spine, the skin and fur retracted, and the naked musculature exposed. The spinous processes of its vertebrae were elongated by the stalk-like growths protruding from them. The base of its skull had been opened to reveal its brain and cranial nerve bundles.

He pressed the button and spoke into the microphone so his chief scientist could hear him.

“It looks like it’s already infiltrated the central nervous system.”

“We theorize that it entered the circulatory system via the superficial capillaries and crossed the blood-brain barrier in the same manner it breaks through the exoskeleton of an insect,” Thompson said. “There’s a minimal amount of hemorrhaging and midline shift, but the greatest hematological difference appears to be in the total volume of residual blood, which we estimate to be roughly half that of a living specimen.”

“There was no blood on the substrate.”

“Precisely.”

“The fungus is feeding on the blood?”

“More likely incorporating it into its biomass in much the same way other multicellular species of fungi grow from corpses and accelerate the process of decomposition.”

“Then how did they manage to infect the locusts in the first place?”

“Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is incredibly susceptible to infection from other fungi, which is why it doesn’t simply wipe out entire ant species wherever it goes. It’s nature’s way of keeping its reproduction in check. To protect the fungus-host ecosystem, it engages in what’s known as secondary metabolism, a process by which it produces the antibacterial agents necessary to stave off pathogens during the reproductive cycle. That’s why none of the other test batches survived. The antibodies they produced caused the wheat stem rust to produce deoxynivalenol in response to the threat, killing the unilateralis before it could assume command of the host’s motor functions. The locusts that had been bred for their aggressive response to predatory species added an element to the equation in the form of a foreign blood source, a threat against which all three species — fungal and host alike — were forced to work in tandem.”

Thompson used a pair forceps to lift off the crown in the rabbit’s skull, which peeled away from the brain with long strands reminiscent of worms. The fungus had already taken root and was in the process of growing through the cranium.

“It’s metabolizing the blood,” Randall said.

“That’s our working hypothesis,” Thompson said. “It’s consuming some component of the blood to produce the antibodies that allow it to circumvent the immune response and proliferate unchecked within the host’s body.”

“So what’s the end result?”

“Any speculation at this point would be premature.”

“I don’t want speculation, Doctor. I want answers.”

Randall glanced at the rabbit one last time before leaving the lab. He could have sworn there were even more filaments protruding from the muscles to either side of its spine than there’d been when he arrived.

“ARE YOU SURE this is what they want?” Corporal Lyle Benjamin asked. “Because there’s no going back from this. We’ve never decommissioned a well of this nature before, largely because such a thing has never existed until now. This is uncharted territory for us. This isn’t a well where we’ve extracted oil and water’s going to take its place. We’ve actively injected massive amounts of chemicals into porous rock where there wasn’t space for them to begin with.”

Randall looked up at the rigging of the derrick, which towered over them like a five-story spike driven into the earth. The chief engineer was right, of course, but he resented having his orders questioned. The instability was the whole reason they were decommissioning the 12,045-foot deep injection well, which had been commissioned for the disposal of waste chemicals from the weapons program and the commercial interests leasing space on the arsenal.

The original plan had been to allow the chemicals to precipitate in open-air, asphalt-lined holding basins the size of small lakes. Unfortunately, they’d contaminated the groundwater to such an extent that farmers dozens of miles away were losing entire harvests. The backup plan of sealing the waste in drums and dumping it into the ocean had proven too costly, necessitating the alternative of burying it so deep that it couldn’t infiltrate the groundwater through the bedrock. The flaw was that the high pressure required to force fluid into a space not designed to accommodate it had triggered a series of earthquakes, a regrettable outcome, to be sure, but nothing catastrophic. At least it wasn’t until the cause of the unprecedented seismic activity made the papers.

Honestly, Randall didn’t care one way or the other. Production was his concern, not disposal, and he had enough on his plate today that he didn’t have the time or the patience to hold the hand of an engineer who’d already received his orders from higher up the chain of command.

“Just get it done,” he said.

“It’s not as easy as plugging a hole. We have no idea how the concrete casings held up to the corrosive effects of the chemicals. We thought three concentric layers was overkill at the time, but we also thought the waste wouldn’t be able to eat through half an inch of asphalt. It’s possible that the pipe itself is the only thing holding the well together and once we remove it, the whole damn thing will collapse.”

“Then leave the pipe.”

“If we do, we risk the pressure building and creating a toxic geyser like Old Faithful.”

“Then take it out. What do you want me to say?”

“Here’s the thing,” Benjamin said. “The bottom seventy feet has no lining whatsoever. We’ve pumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals into permeable Precambrian metamorphic rock. Lord only knows what effects they had on it. There could very well be a cavity eroded under half the state and we’re about to destabilize the whole works.”

Randall heard his name shouted from a distance and turned to see Thompson running across the field toward him. The production plants were little more than silhouettes against the plains behind him. He’d never seen the scientist in the sunlight before, let alone moving at a pace anywhere close to a jog. Something must have happened in the lab. Something of a sensitive nature that couldn’t be broadcast across the open airwaves. Time to end this conversation.

“You have your orders, Corporal. Tear the damn thing down.”

Benjamin’s eyes narrowed and his jaw muscles bulged.

“Yes, sir.”

Randall turned his back on the engineer and struck off down the dirt road to meet Thompson. Benjamin immediately started barking orders behind him and the engines of demolition vehicles roared to life.

Thompson stopped a hundred yards away and had to double over to catch his breath. Randall closed the gap and pulled the scientist upright by the back of his lab coat.

“What is it, Doctor?” he asked.

“There are no words to describe it. You have to see it to believe it.”

RANA TRUDGES THROUGH the hip-deep weeds of one of the nation’s largest urban refuges toward the epicenter’s GPS coordinates. She’s surrounded by willow groves, marshes, and seemingly eternal stretches of grass, and yet she can still see the skyscrapers of downtown Denver from the corner of her eye. The air positively shivers with the roar of planes passing low overhead as they descend into DIA, mere miles to the east. It’s strange to think that this sanctuary filled with bison and ferrets, deer and bald eagles, had not so long ago been a toxic swamp unsuitable for habitation. She knew of its history, which was why she was unsurprised to learn that the coordinates corresponded to the location of the deep injection well that had been the source of the quakes that necessitated its closure in the first place.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the well had been properly sealed in the eighties and the process of remediation was moving along at an unprecedented rate. In fact, they were debating opening the final remaining closed area to the public a full year before the original Superfund timetable. A new swarm of earthquakes was more than a setback; it potentially compromised all of their hard work by creating fissures through which the chemicals trapped below the bedrock could seep into the groundwater. This wasn’t just another earthquake caused by the subterranean disposal of wastewater from fracking, like she dealt with on a daily basis, but a potentially disastrous contamination issue, which was why she and her team were forced to wear CBRN isolation suits matching those of their HAZMAT escort.

Sydney Partridge tromps through the field beside her. The cumbersome suit makes the young seismologist appear even smaller than she is. She carries the digital seismometer in one hand and its instrumentation in the other. Tim Telford had offered to help her, despite being overburdened by his own infrasound sensors, but she’d declined, largely because she knew how the geophysicist felt about her. The Hazardous Materials Response Team had its own equipment, which Rana would be more than happy if they never had any reason to use.

The grass gives way to bare earth, where absolutely nothing is able to grow. She’s still contemplating how bad it must have been if this is what progress looks like when she sees the jagged chunks of concrete standing from the earth.

“There it is,” she says.

Lightning-bolt crevices riddle the hardpan, none of them more than six inches deep. The hole at the center, however, is a heck of a lot deeper than that.

Rana climbs up onto an arched section of concrete that must have once been part of the containment shell and stares down into darkness that stretches seemingly to the planet’s core.

“I’M PICKING UP some strange seismic readings from down there,” Sydney says.

“What do you mean?” Rana asks, and crouches behind her so she can better see the monitor on her colleague’s laptop.

“That’s just it. They’re hard to qualify. The seismogram is incredibly sensitive and displays every little vibration. We’re talking air traffic and passing cars. In an area like this we’re dealing with an absurd amount of interference, but I can tell you that something down there is causing faint, irregular vibrations similar in amplitude to waves on the ocean.”

“You think there’s still fluid down there?”

“It’s possible, but that’s definitely not the source of the vibrations.”

“I’m picking up sound in the infrasonic range, too,” Tim says. “Nothing I’d attribute to tectonic activity, though. More like the resonance of air flowing into an enclosed space, a subtle increase in pressure like you feel in your ears when you change altitude.”

“The well must still be patent,” Rana says.

“That’s a safe assumption.”

One of the men from the HAZMAT response team scuffs across the dirt behind Rana. She glances back and reads the nameplate on his isolation suit: Stephens.

“We’re picking up high concentrations of volatile organic compounds,” he says. “I’m afraid you’re stuck with the suits for the duration. And I wouldn’t suggest lighting a match. There’s enough benzene in the ground to burn for weeks.”

He turns and heads back toward where his team is already cordoning off the area.

“How deep is that well?” she calls after him.

“A little over two miles, ma’am.”

Rana walks as close to the ragged hole as she dares. It’s nearly ten feet wide at the surface, but narrows to thirty inches somewhere below her in the darkness, provided they’re right in their assumption that the passage remains open. She kicks a rock over the nothingness and watches it plummet out of sight. It clatters from the walls several times before passing beyond the range of hearing. She stares into the ground for several more seconds before returning to the others.

“It just hit the ground,” Sydney says.

“You’re certain?”

The seismologist leans back and gestures toward her monitor, where the seismogram reveals a distinct, if small, uptick.

“I’ll be right back,” Rana says.

“Where are you going?” Tim asks.

“Back to the van. Turns out we’re going to need that drone after all.”

RANA WATCHES THE live feed from the drone as she pilots it downward into the earth. Its range is more than four miles, but it only operates for thirty minutes at a charge, which means she’s going to have to throw caution to the wind if she hopes to reach the bottom and have time to explore before starting the return trip to the surface. There are broken sections where the chute narrows to such an extent that she fears she’ll clip the rotors, and yet somehow she manages to guide it ever deeper.

The light mounted to the bottom barely limns rounded concrete walls in varying stages of decay. Most segments are cracked and severely eroded, while others are absent and offer glimpses of the underlying strata. All things considered, the well has held up miraculously considering its age and the nature of the chemicals consuming it, like stomach acid eating its way up an esophagus. The fumes make the darkness appear to shimmer at the most distant reaches of the beam’s range.

“How much farther?” she asks.

“You’re passing negative eleven thousand feet now,” Tim says. “You’ll reach the end of the reinforced sleeves in about eighty vertical feet.”

“Most of the concrete’s already gone. It’s amazing the entire well didn’t collapse years ago.”

“The sound of the drone’s rotors is affecting the seismic readings,” Sydney says. “I’ve lost our anomaly. Wait… there it is again.”

Rana watches the depths of the tunnel, where the downward-facing beam diffuses into the darkness. The residual concrete abruptly gives way to metamorphic rock so heavily eroded that there are shadows too deep for the light to penetrate.

“The drone’s too loud,” Tim says. “I’m no longer picking up any readings in the infrasound range.”

“There’s nothing natural about these vibrations,” Sydney says. “I can’t detect any rhythm or pattern. There has to be something down there causing them.”

“You mean like an animal?”

“Nothing could have survived falling two miles,” Rana says.

“A burrowing animal could have tunneled—”

“I hate to burst your bubble,” Stephens says, “but with the levels of contamination we’re detecting up here, I guarantee you there isn’t a living being on this planet that could survive down there for very long.”

The walls fall away to either side, revealing a massive cavern so large that the drone’s light shines upon nothing beyond open air. The original engineers had expected the chemicals to disperse into the porous rock, not completely degrade its physical structure and carve right through it.

“I’m telling you,” Sydney says, “there’s something down there.”

The bottom comes into view. It’s pitted like the surface of the moon and riddled with deep fissures caused by the recent quakes. Crystalline formations unlike any Rana’s seen before sparkle from their depths, a consequence of the reaction between chemicals used to make weapons of mass destruction and deep strata that had never been exposed to their like before. The results were positively breathtaking.

“They’re beautiful,” she whispers.

The drone’s light abruptly swings, blurring the image of the cavern floor and projecting a shadow reminiscent of a grove of skeletal trees onto the wall. The light abruptly darkens and the drone becomes unresponsive.

“What happened?” Tim asks.

“I don’t know,” Rana says. “I must have hit something.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Neither did I, but I’ve totally lost communication with the drone.”

“The vibrations are growing stronger by the second,” Sydney says. “And I’m detecting a pattern, almost like a drumroll.”

“Someone fire up the ground-penetrating radar,” Rana says. “We need to make sure we didn’t compromise the structural integrity of the well. If what we’re picking up is the sound of falling rock, this whole area could be about to collapse.”

“It’s not falling rock.” Sydney’s voice rises an octave and takes on a note of panic. “I’m telling you, there’s something down there.”

She turns her monitor so Rana can see it and heads toward the mouth of the well.

“What are you doing?”

“Watch the seismogram and you’ll see the difference.”

She crouches and shoves a large piece of concrete over the edge. It strikes the wall and rebounds into the chute.

“Give it about forty seconds to hit the ground and—”

The chunk of concrete fires upward from the hole and clatters onto the rubble.

Sydney doesn’t even have time to turn around before the shadows scurrying from the earth swarm over her.

“WHAT IN THE name of God happened here?” Randall asked. “I saw them with my own eyes. Hell, I even held one. There’s no doubt in my mind they were dead.”

The rabbits had all moved to the front of their cages and pressed their foreheads against the mesh, their fur sticking out at odd angles. Fungal growths protruded from the bases of their skulls and the lengths of their spines. A fuzz of hyphae covered their eyes, completely obscuring their vision, and yet Randall could feel the weight of their stares upon him.

“We theorize the fungi never actually killed the rabbits,” Thompson said, “but rather suppressed their vital functions to such an extent that they were able to override the immune response. They essentially created a state of deep hibernation, the physical characteristics of which match those of a moderate dose of deoxynivalenol.”

“You’re suggesting they can produce the toxin at will.”

“Fungi don’t have a ‘will’ any more than they have a brain to exert it, but it wouldn’t be untrue to imply that the two species—graministritici and unilateralis—have formed something of a mutualistic relationship by which the former produces the toxin in response to a threat to the latter, in this case the white blood cells of the host life form.”

“Surely there’s a way to manipulate that to work in our favor.”

“You mean as an incapacitant?”

“We could win a war without excessive loss of life.”

“Hoping for the fungi to pass from the locusts to the enemy is adding the very element of unpredictability we were seeking to avoid. Not to mention the fact that we know nothing about the physiological interactions of the fungal species inside the rabbit, let alone an infinitely more complex organism like man. This could be more than a mere fungal infection that their bodies can ultimately fight off; it could be actively killing them from the inside out. Or maybe any attempt to remove it will cause it to release a lethal dose of toxin.”

Thompson plucked one of the growths from the head of the nearest rabbit, which thrashed and hurled itself repeatedly against the wire mesh until its white fur darkened with blood.

“Their rate of growth is beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” he said, and turned it over and over in his gloved hand. “An hour ago those protuberances were barely longer than the fur. Now they’re close to three inches. Their life cycle hasn’t merely been accelerated; it’s been altered beyond our ability to form a predictive model. If it continues to metabolize the blood—”

“The rabbit will just make more.”

“That’s not the point. Fungi don’t grow indefinitely. Like I said, their sole purpose is to reproduce. Once they do, the host no longer serves a purpose. Biologically speaking, it will have outlived its usefulness. Like the ant that bites onto the leaf, the fungus will eventually consume it.”

“Which would effectively make it the most lethal weapon in our arsenal,” Randall said.

“But one outside of our control. You’ve seen what happened to these two simple species of fungus during the act of transmission from the locusts to the rabbits. There’s no way to predict how they will respond to the human body. We have much more complicated immune and nervous systems, but we’re no less susceptible to the effects of deoxynivalenol. I find it hard to believe the fungi could exert any influence over our actions like they do insects, but in sufficient quantity they could produce deadly levels of toxins.”

“Don’t you think that’s something we should look into?”

“Human testing? That’s not a road I’m prepared to go down.”

“What do you think it is we do here, Doctor? We’re don’t cure diseases. We dream up ways of killing as many people as possible and hope to God we don’t have to use them. But if — heaven forbid — we’re forced to do so, we need to know exactly what to expect, both for our men and our adversaries.”

“You see this tiny bulb here?” Thompson said, and held up the fungus for Randall to see. “This fruiting body holds thousands of microscopic spores that it will disperse in an explosive cloud. If they’re able to enter the body through superficial capillaries protected by several layers of skin, they’ll make short work of the bronchi in our lungs and the mucous membranes in our noses and mouths. We can’t control their dispersion like we can chemical weapons. They don’t have half-lives like radiological weapons. They can remain dormant for years. They can cross special barriers. We could inadvertently eradicate all life forms on the planet.”

The doctor was being melodramatic. Any one of the weapons at their disposal had the potential to wipe out all life on Earth. If they could eliminate the Communist threat without risking a single American life, then they at least needed to explore the possibility. Chances were this idea wouldn’t work, anyway. But if it did…

Randall imagined an invisible cloud of spores settling over Moscow.

“We need to try, Doctor.”

“No,” Thompson said. “What we need to do is proceed with the utmost caution. We could very well have created the means of our own extinction.”

THE SETTING SUN cast Randall’s shadow across the wavering grasses, through which a cool breeze rippled. It was strange not to see the massive derrick lording over the dark horizon, but, truth be told, he was happy to be rid of it. The earthquakes had been getting stronger with each passing year and it was only a matter of time before they ended up doing some serious damage. Granted, Denver wasn’t especially close to any major fault lines, but the fact that they’d been able to create seismic activity as though it were was more than a little troubling.

He’d ultimately relented and taken the engineer’s concerns to his commanding officer, who’d seen the benefits of maintaining the integrity of the well, if not the means of actively forcing pressurized fluid into it. None of them wanted the public relations nightmare of having thousands of gallons of chemicals erupt from the earth or the entire base collapsing into a toxic pit. The resolution had been to strip everything aboveground, from the generators and electric control house to the manifold and mast, and leave only a simple surface casing and blowout preventer, through which they could bleed the pressure. Eventually, they’d have to make a more permanent decision, but for now it bought them time to determine the best course of action.

Benjamin and his team were still out there, although they were about to lose the last of their light. Randall was just going to have to trust the Engineer Corps to work its magic because he already had more than he could handle on his own plate. With such a promising development in their biowarfare program, the brass cared about little else and expected another update once Thompson had a working theory regarding the fungal organism’s life cycle and the exact means by which it triggered what they were calling the “resurrection response,” a reaction they believed could be utilized on its own under the right circumstances to penetrate enemy lines inside corpses felled in battle.

Randall should have been more excited, he knew. Such unprecedented success would lead to rapid promotion and commendations galore, but the doctor’s trepidation had become contagious. His gut was a seething ball of nerves that he couldn’t calm, no matter how hard he tried.

He headed back inside. The fresh air hadn’t helped as much as he’d hoped it would. Thompson was still in his lab, trying to keep up with the rapidly proliferating fungi. The growths on the rabbits now looked more like the branches of trees than antlers and covered the entirety of their backs. The fruiting bodies were definitely more pronounced, too. If the chief scientist was right about their biological impetus, then it appeared as though it wouldn’t be long before they achieved it.

Thompson glanced up from his microscope and their eyes met through the glass. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

Randall pressed the button to activate the speaker so the scientist would be able to hear him.

“How are you holding up in there, Doc?”

Thompson shrugged as though the question were of no consequence.

“The fungi appear to have been made for each other,” he said. “It’s almost as though they fit together like pieces of a puzzle. I’ve only just discovered that their spores adhere to form an aggregate. The graministritici are a fraction of the size of the unilateralis, and cluster around it in much the same way metal filings cling to a magnet. Their bond is easily enough broken by adding water but doing so produces a trace amount of an acid I have yet to qualify, one I speculate functions to wipe out white blood cells. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s almost as though they’re metamorphosing into a single organism before my very eyes.”

“All the brass cares about is whether or not we can control it.”

Randall couldn’t shake the feeling that the rabbits were watching him. They were still pressed against the wire walls of their cages, their fungal protrusions poking out like porcupine quills.

“It’s too soon to tell,” Thompson said. “At this point I can’t even be sure what the final product of their union will be.”

“I need to throw them a bone. Give me something to work with.”

“Tell them—”

The rabbits screamed in unison, a shrill sound that caused the speaker to crackle. Thompson whirled to face the cages. The fruiting bodies exploded as one, releasing a mist of spores that expanded outward like glittering drapes blowing on the wind. They washed over the chief scientist and accumulated against the inside of the window like a dusting of pollen.

Randall cautiously approached and touched the glass. It was warm against his fingertips.

“You okay in there?”

The chief scientist turned around.

Randall staggered backward at the sight of him.

The lenses of Thompson’s mask had melted in amoeboid shapes and blood flowed freely from the skin around his eyes. He cried out and dropped to his knees.

A sharp crack preceded the formation of fissures that spider-webbed through the window.

Randall sprinted toward the emergency shutdown button. Slapped it. A klaxon blared. The overhead fixtures snapped off and the reserve lighting kicked on, casting a red glare over the entire facility. Airflow through the ductwork ceased. Electromagnetic doors closed and locked with thudding sounds he could hear echoing from the hallways as he donned his protective suit.

A fine mist of spores shivered from the ceiling vents.

He ducked under the chemical shower. Tugged the cord. Frigid water rained down upon him, drenching him inside his suit. He pulled on his mask and watched helplessly as the spores settled to the ground.

The window shattered and glass shards spread across the floor. The same combination of enzymes and mechanical force that had allowed the spores to penetrate the exoskeletons of the insects must have worked every bit as well on the glass and Thompson’s gas mask.

There was no sign of movement through the empty frame. Only rows of dead rabbits that stared back at him through hollow, skeletal sockets.

THE CHEMICAL SHOWER might have saved Randall’s life, but by the time he set off the fire alarm and triggered the building-wide sprinkler system, it was too late for the other scientists still in their labs. Spores had circulated through the air ducts and felled them in the midst of their work. Like Thompson, they demonstrated superficial lesions where the spores had worked through the skin and into the circulatory system. While he couldn’t detect any appreciable signs of life, he knew better than to take their deaths for granted. If they exhibited the same resurrection response as the rabbits and the fungi subsumed their physical forms, then he was dealing with more than mere infestation. As the chief scientist said, they were potentially dealing with the means of the extinction of their very species.

He knew exactly what his commanding officer would say when he called in what had happened, which was why he wasn’t about to do so. At least not yet. This was far beyond their ability to contain, let alone control. If a handful of locusts was enough to begin a cycle deadly enough to kill everyone inside the building, then he could only imagine what could be accomplished with four human beings whose bodies were currently in the early stages of fungal subsummation.

There was only one thing he could think to do, and it would likely derail his career. Maybe even more than that if anyone figured out he’d done so deliberately. As it was, he was taking a sizable risk removing the bodies from the facility, but he couldn’t allow the Army to get ahold of them.

He collected all four of the men and wrapped them individually in plastic tarps. The whole lot of rabbits fit into a fifth bundle, which he loaded into the back of a Jeep and drove out to where Benjamin’s team had been mere hours earlier. The well was sealed beneath a temporary iron hatch that was easily enough leveraged open to reveal a great black orifice from which chemical fumes rose with such intensity that they made his eyes burn.

Randall recognized the enormity of what he was about to do, but couldn’t afford to dwell on it for fear he might talk himself out of it. His plan was wrong on so many levels, and yet the consequences of doing the right thing could prove catastrophic. Thompson had recognized the dangers prior to his death and had planted the seeds of doubt in Randall, who believed in their mission to rid the world of the enemies of freedom and liberty, but not at the expense of all humanity.

The time had come to end this experiment once and for all.

He dragged the wrapped bodies from the Jeep and forced them through the orifice, which was barely wide enough to accommodate their shoulders. Used a metal post from the demolished mast to tamp them deeper, until he was certain they’d fallen into the depths, where the brass would never think to look for them, let alone be able to recover them.

By the time he returned to the main building, dawn was a pink stain on the horizon. With the interior drenched by the fire sprinklers, it was going to take more than a tank of petrol to do what needed to be done. Fortunately, there was a gas line in the lab and thousands of gallons of combustible precursor chemicals, more than enough to turn the entire facility into an inferno that would burn so hot and fast that there would be nothing left of it by the time the fire department arrived.

RANDALL FELT THE heat of the blaze on the back of his isolation suit as he walked down the dirt road toward the security gate. He hoped he’d made it look good enough that the powers that be would believe the bodies of the missing men had been incinerated inside. Maybe he should have just dropped a match into the well and blown the whole base to hell, but he still had faith in what they were trying to do, despite the fact that they’d created an abomination of nature in the process. At least he could count on the toxic chemicals two miles down to destroy the evidence of what they’d accomplished.

THE PAIN IS more than Rana can bear. She cries out and registers surprise at the sound of her voice echoing away from her into darkness so complete she can’t tell if her eyes are open or closed. She tastes blood on her lips, in her mouth. The intense pressure in her head is worse than any migraine she’s ever experienced and it feels as though someone’s sitting on her chest, making it difficult for her to breathe. Her arms and legs are sluggish and heavy. It has to be well over a hundred degrees. Her clothes are already soaked with sweat. She realizes where she is with a start and screams once more into the bowels of the earth.

A muffled moan from somewhere nearby. The acoustics make it impossible to pinpoint its origin.

She pushes herself to her hands and knees and crawls in what she hopes is the right direction, sweeping her palms across the uneven ground in front of her. Each inhalation brings with it chemical fumes that burn all the way down her trachea and into her lungs. The intense heat is worst near her left breast, where her suit must have torn during the attack, the memories of which come flooding back to her.

The creatures had come out of the ground with such speed that she hadn’t gotten a clear look at any of them. Mere silhouettes bristling with sharp, quill-like protrusions all over their bodies. She remembers Sydney turning around and sprinting toward her as the monsters washed over her. Hitting the ground on her chest and clawing at the packed dirt as she was dragged backward toward the hole. People shouting and running in every direction. Rana had barely managed two strides before she was struck from behind. Her mask cracked a heartbeat before her face slammed into the ground. Then, only darkness.

“Help me!” she screams, her voice reverberating into a space far vaster than the readings had led her to believe.

Silence.

She’s about to call out again when she realizes that the creatures that dragged her down here are likely still lurking somewhere nearby.

A faint scratching sound betrays the presence of something moving through the darkness.

Her right hand meets with a soft, somewhat rounded object. She pats it down until she recognizes it as a shoulder. The body is much larger than Sydney’s, meaning it belongs either to Tim or a member of the HAZMAT team. She works inward until she finds the helmet. The shield is broken, fully exposing the man’s face. She traces it with her gloved hands, but can’t feel the contours well enough to identify who it is.

Another scratch, closer this time.

The Tyvek fabric of his suit is torn. She reaches underneath it and feels his chest, but can’t tell if he’s still breathing. His button-down shirt is warm and wet with what she hopes is sweat. A quick search of the pockets of his jeans produces a wad of bills in a money clip and a set of keys with—

She nearly sobs out loud at the discovery of the mini flashlight on his keychain.

Once she turns it on, whatever’s down there with her will know exactly where she is, but if she’s to have any chance of getting out of here, she’s going to have to be able to see her surroundings.

There are tears streaming down her cheeks when she finally musters the courage to switch on the flashlight.

And immediately wishes she hadn’t.

Her screams reverberate seemingly all the way to the center of the Earth.

THE OLD MAN hobbles past the cordon, stands at the edge of the hole, and leans heavily on his cane. All of his life he’s feared this day would eventually come and has spent the intervening years preparing for it. The soldiers under his command have fought in some of the tightest quarters known to man, from the caves of Afghanistan to the apocalyptic cityscapes of Syria. They might not know what was waiting for them at the bottom of the well, but he had no doubt they knew how to kill it.

The blood on the hardpan is congealed into the dirt and there are obvious signs of a struggle near the lip, leaving little doubt as to what happened to the USGS survey team and the HAZMAT crew, whose vehicles still sit in the lot several miles away, a trek the old man had no desire to make at his advanced age. Fortunately, a colonel didn’t have to walk if he didn’t feel like it, so instead he rode in the expanded mobility tactical cargo truck, which had been specially equipped with a motorized winch and more than two miles of steel cable. His team was already unraveling it so they could attach their harnesses in sequence. They’d spent years preparing for this kind of penetration, if not the unknown that awaited them two miles down. Even the old man couldn’t predict what kind of changes might have occurred underground during the last five-plus decades.

He’d been watching the news closely since the first earthquake in the swarm, but it wasn’t until after the USGS failed to raise its chief seismologist on her transceiver that he was alerted through formal channels to the rapidly unraveling situation at the site of his greatest failure. While he’d never actually uttered the truth of what transpired here all those years ago, his commanding officers had recognized that something was amiss and kept him on a short leash throughout his career, which served him well since he couldn’t bring himself to leave the mess he’d made behind. If ever anything unusual was reported in the vicinity of that well, he’d be damned if he wouldn’t be in a position to handle it.

He looks at the pictures of the men and women who’d been dispatched to investigate the cause of the earthquakes one last time before passing the digital tablet along to the rest of his unit. He’d hoped to arrive to find the response teams in perfect health, despite the satellite imagery upon which he could clearly see there wasn’t anyone within two miles of the well. If anything has happened to them, their fates will weigh heavily upon his conscience.

“We’re burning daylight,” he says, and stares down into the darkness.

He thinks about all the things he could have done differently, knowing full well that if he had the opportunity to do it all over again, he wouldn’t change a thing. This was how events had always been destined to play out. It was why he’d persevered through the damage his tenure at the arsenal had done to his career and spent the balance of it working his way through the ranks until he was in position to command a team as loyal to him as they were to their country, a team that would follow his orders without hesitation. He’d survived two bouts with cancer, a triple bypass, and the Army’s best attempts to force him into retirement, all so he could be here at this precise moment in time.

Colonel Jack Randall raises his face to the sky and feels the heat of the sun on his face. He couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day to die.

RANA’S CRIES FADE into the unfathomable darkness beyond the range of the tiny light. It’s all she can do not to scream again as something moves through her peripheral vision. The walls and ceiling are positively covered with fungal growths reminiscent of briar patches, which can’t quite conceal the dark forms scurrying through them. One of the men from the HAZMAT team has been hauled up onto them. The sharp protrusions pass through his protective suit, summoning the rivulets of blood that trickle down the branches and eventually begin to drip to the ground with a soft plat… plat… plat.

She sees Sydney from the corner of her eye and rushes to help her. Kneels and rolls her onto her back. Her protective suit has been torn nearly all the way around and the clothes underneath are ripped. Her skin is bloody and raw and covered with pale white fuzz that almost appears to originate from within the wounds themselves. Worst of all are her eyes, which remain open and stare blankly into space. The vessels in her sclera have ruptured, turning the whites to red.

Rana stifles a sob.

Movement to her right. She whirls and shines her flashlight at a man in a suit matching hers. He tries to rise from the ground, only to collapse onto his chest again. Tries once more. When he looks into the light, she catches a glimpse of Tim’s face behind the reflection on his mask. His features are awash with blood. He makes a high-pitched keening sound and manages to crawl several feet closer before his arms give out.

“Oh, God,” she gasps, and runs to his aid.

The back of his suit is punctured in countless places. She struggles to roll him over. The inside of his mask is freckled with expiratory spatter, through which she can barely see his pallid features, contorted into an expression of sheer terror.

“Please—” he sputters. “Help… me.”

His eyes lock onto hers a split-second before the tiny veins burst and they flood with blood.

He screams and his face vanishes behind the expulsion of crimson that strikes his visor from the inside. His chest deflates and his body becomes still.

She shakes him.

“Tim?”

Shakes him hard enough to rattle his teeth, but his body remains limp.

Rana scuttles backward, swings the light in a wide arc. Sees another man from the HAZMAT team, sprawled on his side with his facemask shattered and blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.

The pain in her head intensifies and her stomach clenches. If the heat doesn’t kill her, the pressure at this depth eventually will. Assuming the chemical fumes didn’t finish her off first. Maybe if she closes her eyes and tries to reserve what little strength she has left, she’ll be able to last—

“Oh, no you don’t.”

Someone grabs her by the back of her suit and jerks her upright. She glances over her shoulder to see Stephens towering over her. While his suit appears largely intact, his left arm hangs at his side and he’s bleeding heavily from a laceration along his hairline.

“Get up,” he whispers. “Right now.”

He offers his hand and pulls her to her feet.

“The others—” she starts to say.

“Listen to me. There’s only one way out of here and we’d better find it before they come back.”

“Before who—?”

“Shh! Keep your voice down!”

She knows there’s no way in hell they’re climbing two miles straight up, but if even a small amount of fresh air—

The shadows shift ahead of them. Just beyond the farthest reaches of the flashlight beam.

“This way,” Stephens whispers.

“I saw something. Right over—”

Her words trail off as her light limns what looks like another bramble of fungal growth.

Until it moves.

RANDALL CLOSES HIS eyes as tightly as he can and tries to imagine himself somewhere else. Anywhere else. Unlike his men, he’s unaccustomed to being wedged into such tight confines. He thought he’d be better able to deal with the psychological effects of claustrophobia, from the crippling feeling of suffocation to the complete and utter inability to move.

He risks opening his eyes. Sees the eroded concrete passing mere inches in front of him, spotlighted by the narrow beam from the light mounted on his tactical helmet. And quickly closes them again. He concentrates on the sensation of descent, picturing himself inside an elevator, one moving much too slowly for his tastes, and cradles the specially designed, pneumatic-pressure powered assault rifle against his chest. While less powerful than its traditional counterparts and largely untested in battle, it still has enough force to punch a .45-caliber hole through a car door, should the need arise. More importantly, its discharge won’t ignite the combustible chemicals. Each of his men carries one, but only he carries the coup de gras, the incendiary grenade he wishes to God he’d used all those years ago.

“Passing the ten-thousand-foot mark,” Omega says through his in-helmet speaker. Each of his men has assumed a Greek letter based on position rather than rank, with Alpha serving as the tip of the spear and Omega manning the vehicle on the surface. “Not much farther now.”

Randall nods to himself. The airflow from the slender tank designed to attach to his thigh has done an amazing job of staving off the worst of the effects of the pressure change, although his forehead still throbs as though the vessels have swollen nearly to the point of aneurysm.

“I can see the opening underneath me,” Alpha says.

The point man is a good thirty feet below Randall and separated from him by three other men. Two more are harnessed above him, although he can’t tilt his head far enough back to see the boots hanging above the crown of his head.

“Slow descent by half,” Randall says.

“Slowing descent by half, sir,” Omega says.

“Tell me what you see, Alpha.”

“The chemicals have eroded through the rock, creating a vast cavernous space of indeterminate size.”

“Activate LiDAR.”

A faint reddish glow blossoms below Randall as a pulsed laser shoots out of the remote sensing device, which will create a three-dimensional digital elevation model of the cavern. It’s just bright enough to see through his closed eyelids.

The cable snags and Omega is forced to retract the line just far enough for the man who became stuck to work himself through the narrowing, before resuming once more.

“It’s roughly circular in shape,” Alpha says. “Just over a quarter mile in diameter with a domed roof approximately twenty feet high at its apex.”

Randall silently curses himself. The scientists had been wrong about the reaction of the chemical waste and metamorphic rock. They’d been wrong about so much…

“There are formations on the ceiling and floor reminiscent of helictites,” Alpha says. “Only they don’t appear to be speleothemic in origin.”

“What else could they be?” Beta asks.

“They appear to be biological.”

“Fungal,” Randall says.

A pause.

“What aren’t you telling us, Colonel?”

“Just keep your eyes open, Alpha.”

The sinking sensation slows, and then ceases altogether. A hint of slack ripples through the cable.

“I’m on the ground,” Alpha says. “It’s riddled with fissures, but feels stable enough. Just be careful where you—”

A sharp intake of breath and a gurgle of fluid.

The cable whips to the side, causing Randall to strike his head against the concrete chute. It jerks the other way and they all drop several feet.

“What’s going on down there?” Omega asks from the surface.

“We’re fish in a barrel inside this tube, Colonel,” Gamma says.

“Damn it,” Randall says. “Omega, release the brake.”

“Sir?”

“That’s an ord—” The line suddenly goes slack and they plummet into the depths. Randall presses outward with his upper arms to slow his momentum. Waits as long as he dares. “Reengage!”

He abruptly halts right after he passes through the ceiling of the cavern. His headlamp spins wildly as he twirls in his harness.

“Jesus Christ!” Beta shouts. “What the hell happened to—?”

The cable jerks again. The men below Randall disengage their harnesses and drop into the darkness, where twin beams of light lying on the ground highlight swatches of bare stone and rapidly expanding pools of blood.

Two more headlamps take up position between them. Gamma and Delta stand back-to-back, pivoting to examine their surroundings down the barrels of their rifles.

While all around them, the darkness begins to writhe.

THE CREATURE STEPS from the shadows into Rana’s light and she realizes that it’s at least partly human. It’s skeletal, as though little more than a being of desiccated skin mummified to a framework of bones. Its veins are like serpents trapped beneath translucent tissue, its muscles braided wires. Tatters of clothing remain, befouled by bodily functions and dissolution. Its ribcage stands apart from its breast and its head juts forward on a neck bowed like a vulture’s, a consequence of the long protuberances reminiscent of wires growing from its back.

“Jesus Christ,” Stephens whispers. “What the hell is that thing?”

The monstrosity lowers its head and cocks it from one side to the other in a predatory manner. Its lips have shrunken from its bared teeth, which have grown long from its receded gums, and its nose has collapsed to the triangular formation of cartilage and bone. The vessels in its forehead throb with the sluggish flow of blood. Where once there were eyes, the sockets are now lined with wispy, filamentous hyphae.

Rana stumbles backward.

It matches her retreat and snaps at the air. Its teeth make an awful clicking sound.

She detects movement in her peripheral vision, but can’t bring herself to tear her eyes from the creature advancing toward her on legs that tremble as though unaccustomed to movement.

Again, it strikes at her with its jaws. It’s all she can do to keep from screaming, especially when she hears the sound of snapping teeth to her right.

She turns to see Sydney approaching in halting movements, her face covered with a shimmering mask of blood. Her eyelids have peeled all the way back to accommodate the hyphae sprouting from her irises. She bares her teeth and snaps them.

“Run!” Rana yells.

“KEEP GOING, OMEGA,” Randall says, and their descent immediately recommences.

A shout echoes from the cavern below them.

It’s not one of his men.

The voice is undeniably female.

Dear God, the people who were attacked on the surface…

They were still alive down here.

Both of the lights below him swivel in the direction from which the sound originated, but reveal nothing beyond the crevice-riddled stone and several oddly shaped stones from which long fungal appendages grow.

“Any sign of Alpha or Beta?” he asks.

“No, sir,” Gamma replies.

“There’s an awful lot of blood down here,” Delta says.

“Focus on the mission,” Randall says.

“It would help if you told us what we were up against.”

Randall knows his man is right, but the truth of the matter is that he simply doesn’t know.

The moment his feet hit the ground, he disconnects from the cable and picks his way over the coils. If he trips, he’ll become more of a liability than he already is. His cane is bound to his left leg, effectively immobilizing it. In the process of unstrapping it, he loses his balance and feels himself falling, but Delta grabs him by the back of his suit and rights him. They can all clearly see that he’s not physically fit enough for the field op, but he has to know what’s down here. Not only is this his fault, it’s his responsibility to make sure that whatever managed to survive down here never reaches the surface.

He frees his cane and balances himself with one foot planted to either side of a deep fissure, at the bottom of which residual chemicals continue to eat through the earth.

“Gamma take point,” he says. “Epsilon. Zeta. Mark this location and watch our six. Delta, activate sonar. I want to know the second you ping anything else down here.”

Randall steps over one of the strange rocks. It’s knobby and covered with gray fuzz that almost looks like brittle, broken strands of hair from which the fungus proliferates in spikes. One of the tips brushes against his leg and a cloud of spores billows upward and swirls in his light, tiny golden sparkles like he remembers overtaking Dr. Thompson.

He shines his light down at the source, but it’s no longer there. It’s now several feet away and looking up at him from a skeletal face only vaguely resembling that of a rabbit, its fur sparse and its skin clinging to its skull. Its hooked teeth are long and yellow and its eyes have sunken into shadows.

“I’m picking up several distinct signals,” Delta says. “And they’re closing fast.”

The rabbit rises to its haunches, opens its mouth, and clicks its front teeth against the exposed bone where its lower gums had been.

“Where?” Randall asks.

“All around us.”

RANA SPRINTS THROUGH the darkness, the beam of the small light swinging in front of her, but hardly illuminating anything. She has to watch her feet to make sure she doesn’t trip on the fissures and nearly runs into a fungal growth hanging from the ceiling like a massive spiny stalactite. She’s within inches of it when it unfurls its arms from its chest and grabs the sleeve of her suit, knocking her off stride. She tumbles to the ground and the flashlight clatters away from her.

She rolls onto her back as the creature disengages itself from what almost looks like a briar-lined cocoon and drops down beside her feet. She kicks at the stone. Propels herself in reverse.

It scuttles after her in strange, disjointed movements, its head lowered and teeth snapping.

“Get up!” Stephens says, and drags her away from it.

Rana struggles to her feet and turns to run. Too late she sees the creature approaching from the opposite direction. It’s on top of Stephens before she can warn him, its clawed fingers gripping his suit while it tears at the seal around his neck with its teeth.

A popping sound, almost like the noise of a silenced pistol, and the air fills with what looks like motes of dust.

She shouts and strikes the creature repeatedly on the side of its head. Over and over. Until it disengages from Stephens. His mask is covered with the dust, which appears to be the only thing holding all of the cracks together. It disintegrates before her eyes and the creature seizes the opportunity to shove its face through the gap.

A spatter of blood strikes Rana’s mask, which begins to crack as the dust settles on it.

She brushes it off and dives for her flashlight, narrowly dodging the slashing arm of the creature from the cocoon, which joins its brethren in tearing Stephens’s suit to get at the man inside. His cries reverberate deep into the darkness, from the depths of which she detects a faint source of light.

“It came from somewhere over there,” Gamma says. “Approximately two o’clock.”

“Assume defensive formation,” Randall says. He peeks at the sonar monitor from the corner of his eye. Scattered dots ring the perimeter of the circular map and slowly converge upon the crosshairs at the center. “There are at least six of them. You get a clear shot, make it count.”

A part of him has always known the fungi survived down here, but never in his worst nightmares had he imagined that the rabbits had, too. The way the parasitic fungi had been able to slow the host’s metabolism to the point of mimicking death must have allowed them to enter a state of suspended animation, during which time they’d ceased all non-essential functions and absorbed their own physical forms to keep them alive. And if the rabbits could survive, then was it possible that—?

The faint aura of light in the distance coalesces into a single beam. A flashlight. He’s certain of it. Coming toward them. From the same direction as the scream.

RANA SPRINTS TOWARD the light, which grows brighter by the second. She trips and falls. Pushes herself up, only to fall again. She screams in frustration and has to slow her pace to combat the treacherous terrain.

They’re still behind her. She feels them gaining ground on her. Hears the clicking of their teeth.

An image of Sydney flashes before her eyes, the seismologist’s face wet with blood and her eyes… Dear God, her eyes… She’d been dead when Rana found her. And yet that couldn’t have been the case. But she’d been so certain…

A gray blur knifes through her swinging beam. Toward her feet. Before she can even look down, it strikes her foot and sends her sprawling. She goes down hard, the impact causing the cracks in her mask to expand even more and allowing the furnace-heat to seep through.

She feels whatever attacked her scurry up onto her back, its teeth tearing through her suit and burrowing into her—

Rana screams when its hooked teeth penetrate her skin. She reaches behind her. Grabs a handful of what feels like spongy weeds. Hurls it to the ground in front of her. Pushes herself upright. Her mind barely registers it as having once been a rabbit as she stomps on its skull until there’s nothing left of it.

The spines on the creature’s hunched back explode in a cloud that shimmers in her beam, just as she’d seen in the moments before Stephens’s death. They’re spores, she realizes, and they have the ability to break through what little is left of her face shield.

She ducks her head and runs, but the damage is already done. Her visor makes a cracking sound. She tears off the entire hood and casts it aside before the mask shatters and drops the spores into her suit. The chemical fumes flow like fire into her chest and smolder in her lungs.

The light is so close now that she can make out the silhouette of the man holding it. And beside him, two more figures, whose lights converge upon her. Along with the barrels of their rifles.

“They’re right behind me!” she screams.

“Get down!” Gamma shouts.

The woman throws herself to the ground a heartbeat before the entire unit opens fire. Only they aren’t all shooting at the same target. Randall detects movement all around them. He glimpses pale, skeletal creatures with wiry fungal growths protruding from their cadaverous forms as his men’s lights pass over them. Hears high-pitched screams, like air leaking from so many ruptured valves. The clicking of teeth.

“Get her to the cable!” he yells.

“They’re blocking our retreat!” Epsilon shouts.

“What’s going on down there?” Omega asks.

A naked figure darts from the darkness, tackles Zeta, and the two tumble across the eroded rock. It all happens in the blink of an eye, but even after so many years Randall recognizes the face of the man he found dead in his lab. The memories of wrapping him in a tarp and dumping him into the well haunt him. He turns his head until the beam mounted to his helmet shines straight into the monster’s emaciated face. Stephen Waller, the civilian scientist in charge of the locust-breeding project, stares back at him from the eerily sentient hollows of his missing eyes, his lipless mouth dripping with Zeta’s blood.

“I’m sorry,” Randall whispers.

A shot from somewhere to his left collapses the side of the entomologist’s head and hurls him outside the range of the light.

“There are too many of them!” Delta shouts.

A mutated rabbit clips Randall’s heel and he loses his already tenuous balance. The ground rushes to meet him. He lands with a snapping sound he hears as much as feels. One he knows means he won’t be getting back up again. His rifle clatters into a crevice beyond his reach.

Epsilon grips him around his chest, underneath his armpits, and attempts to drag him to his feet, but the fractured bones in his hip shift and produce pain beyond anything he’s ever imagined. He cries out in a voice filled with more anger than pain as Epsilon slings him over his shoulders.

“Put me down, goddammit!”

His subordinate ignores the order and blindly fires upon the creature blocking their way. The bullets impact squarely with the chest of a man in a HAZMAT suit, but barely serve to slow him down. His white teeth are a stark contrast to the blood flowing from his ruptured eyes. He bares them and gnashes at the air. Collides with Epsilon and sends Randall once more crashing to the ground.

Epsilon jams the barrel of his rifle underneath the man’s chin. A burst of compressed gas and the monster’s head jerks back. The contents of his skull splatter against the ceiling.

The woman scurries to Randall’s side. Her eyes are wide with terror and blood flows freely from lacerations on her cheek. He recognizes Dr. Rana Ratogue from the newscast that alerted him to location of the earthquakes and, later, from the intel provided by the Army when the USGS was unable to reach her.

“Clear a path!” she shouts at Epsilon. “I’ve got him.”

Epsilon bellows and charges into the darkness. Gamma rushes to catch up with him. Their lights converge on a skeletal man, whose deformed face quickly vanishes into an explosion of blood and bone.

“Someone answer me!” Omega says. “What in the name of God is going on down there?”

“Prepare for emergency extraction,” Randall says through teeth gritted in agony.

Rana grabs him by the wrist and drags him after them. Delta clasps his other arm and they cover the uneven ground at a much faster rate. Randall bites his lip to keep from crying out from the pain. It feels like his joint is made of shattered glass, which slices the muscles and tendons with even the slightest bump on the rocky earth.

Another man in a HAZMAT suit emerges from the darkness behind them. Delta fires repeatedly and drives him back into the darkness.

“There’s the cable!” Epsilon shouts through the speaker.

“Fire up that winch, Omega!” Gamma shouts. “We need to get out of here in a hurry!”

“They’re still coming!” Rana screams.

The creatures are little more than shadows passing through the darkness beyond the reach of their lights, but Randall can tell there are at least three of them, and they’re gaining ground in a hurry.

They abruptly stop and he turns to see Gamma holding the cable in one hand and his assault rifle in the other. The hole above him appears even smaller than before.

Randall grabs Rana by the sleeve and pulls her down to him. He unfastens his harness and slips it over his head.

“Take this,” he says. “It attaches to the cable that’ll take you back to the surface.”

“What about you?” she asks.

Randall smiles, but it’s not the kind meant for others.

“This is where the road ends for me.” He shoves the harness into her chest. “Now go!”

“Sir?” Delta says.

“Give me your weapon, soldier. I’ll make sure nothing follows you.”

“We can get medical attention topside—”

“These things have already proved they can climb up that chute. Someone needs to make sure they don’t do it again. Now get the hell out of here while you still can!”

Delta offers his weapon and salutes him.

Randall seats it against his shoulder and sights down the darkness.

RANA DONS THE harness and cinches it around her chest. One of the soldiers pushes her toward the cable dangling from the hole in the dome and clips her to it.

Sydney rushes into the light, her features contorted by what can only be described as rage. The old man with the broken hip shoots her squarely in the chest, lifting her from her feet. She lands on her back and sputters blood. Flips over and pushes herself to her hands and knees. Allows the fluid to drain from her mouth before starting to rise—

A second shot collapses her face inward, like a fist clenching.

Rana sobs and attempts to rush to her friend’s side, but the cable hauls her into the air. She can only watch as another soldier attaches himself to the cable below her and the old man and lone remaining able-bodied soldier fend off creatures stolen from her worst nightmares.

A malformed rabbit streaks across the ceiling toward her.

She barely recognizes the danger in time to swat it away, sending it plummeting to the ground. When she looks back up, she catches a glimpse of a humanoid monster scurrying across the earthen dome toward her.

“On the ceiling!” she shouts at the man below her.

He raises his rifle and fires a triple-burst into its spiny back. It loses its grip, but catches her arm as it falls.

Her shoulders and the back of her head meet with the sides of the orifice. The pressure threatens to snap her spine. She beats at the creature’s fingers until it lets go and she’s able to contort her upper body into the narrow chute.

“Get it off me!” the man below her shouts. The monster must have caught him on the way down, but there’s nothing she can do to help him. She can’t even lean her head far enough forward to see him.

“Don’t move!” Gamma shouts, and fires straight up between Epsilon’s thrashing feet.

Randall hears a steam-whistle scream, followed by the thump of the creature hitting the ground behind him. He can’t afford to turn around to make sure it’s dead, not if he has any hope of holding the monsters at bay. The moment they step into the light he’s already shooting, but he can tell they’re only testing him now. Learning from their mistakes. His best shots only serve to drive them back into the darkness and he has a finite number of bullets left. For all he knows, his next shot could very well be his last. He needs to give his men the largest possible head start and hope their suits protect them from what’s to come.

“Get out of here, Delta!” he shouts. “That’s an order!”

“Yes, sir,” Delta says, and Randall hears the clicking sound of the harness attaching to the cable. “Everyone will know what you did here.”

“I pray to God they don’t.”

Delta rises from the ground behind him and follows Gamma into the orifice.

A rabbit dashes across Randall’s useless leg. He resists taking the shot for fear of wasting the bullet.

“Better make this snappy, Omega,” he says. “I’m not going to be able to fend them off very much longer.”

A man in a HAZMAT suit appears in his peripheral vision and rushes straight at him. He pivots. Takes a fraction of a second to aim. Catches his attacker in the forehead. Knocks him backward, only to watch him rise to all fours. Everything above his right eyebrow is gone, and yet he still snaps his teeth.

Randall finishes him off with a shot between the eyes.

“How far up are they?” he asks.

“Nearing a hundred feet, sir,” Omega says. “The last of them should be entering the concrete casing.”

Randall turns and sights down a creature that’s now less than twenty feet away. It must have used the distraction to sneak within striking distance. He recognizes its face immediately, as, he’s certain, it recognizes his.

Dr. James Thompson creeps closer. The fungus grows from his forehead in a configuration reminiscent of a crown. Rather than white, the hyphae in his hollow sockets are a mold-like shade of blue.

“There are no words to express how sorry I am,” Randall says.

Thompson lowers his head, snaps his teeth, and breaks into a sprint.

Randall sights down the center of his old friend’s forehead and pulls the trigger, but the firing pin strikes an empty chamber.

Click.

Click-click-click.

“How far?” he asks Omega as Thompson closes in on him.

“A hundred and fifty feet, sir.”

“Give it everything you’ve got, Omega!”

Randall turns the empty rifle around and grabs it by the smoldering barrel. He grits his teeth and stares down the monster hurtling toward him. It lunges and he swings the weapon like a bat. Connects solidly with its head, but barely slows its momentum.

It lands on top of him and sends him skidding across the ground under its weight. He shoves its snapping jaws away from his neck as the fruiting bodies adorning its crown burst with an explosion of spores, so many he can hardly see through his mask.

“How far?”

A crack races diagonally across his face shield. The creature claws at it in an attempt to break it open.

“Two hundred feet, sir. I can only raise them so fast—”

“It’ll have to do.”

Randall unclips the incendiary grenade from his utility belt. Feels for the pin.

Another creature strikes him from the side, knocking it from his grasp. His mask shatters and shards rain onto his face. Talon-like fingertips sink into his cheeks. Through them. Pierce his gums and bone alike, making it impossible to open his mouth to cry out.

He frantically slides his palm across the ground until he finds the grenade. Slips his gloved finger through the pin.

Teeth sink into his biceps and he nearly drops it again.

The fingertips retract from his face, releasing his trapped scream.

He pulls the pin and drops the grenade as the scientist whose warning he failed to heed bites his face and tears—

A BLINDING LIGHT flashes below Rana. The earth lurches, then draws a deep breath, nearly wrenching her harness from its moorings.

She closes her eyes as a column of fire races straight up the shaft, propelling her toward the surface on a superheated current of air. Screams as the flames singe her hair and blister her cheeks. The cries of the men below her are deafening, even over the roar of the blaze.

Her head strikes one wall, then the other.

She tastes blood in her sinuses, feels it trickling down the back of her throat.

Sees darkness.

Then stars.

And, finally, nothing at all.

OMEGA RUSHES TOWARD the hole. Picks his way down the rubble-lined slope to the edge of the well, where the cable has eroded a furrow into the concrete and produces a buzzing sound as it channels even deeper. He grabs the first of them by the harness. Drags the limp body onto solid ground and unlatches it from the cable. It’s a woman. She’s severely burned, but he recognizes Dr. Rana Ratogue from the picture in his file.

Sirens wail in the distance, and beneath them, the thupping sound of the flight-for-life helicopter streaking across the sky.

Smoke billows from the plains to the west, where the ground has collapsed in upon itself, releasing the fire that spreads through the grasslands.

Omega drags Gamma from the hole next. Then Delta. Lines them up beside the seismologist. Their face shields are warped and black with soot, obscuring their features. He tears off their helmets to reveal faces covered with blood. Lowers his ear to Gamma’s lips and feels the subtle warmth of his breath. He’s still alive. As is Delta, whose eyes move beneath his closed lids.

Rana shows no signs of life, though. He can’t feel her breath against his ear, nor can he detect her carotid pulse in the side of her neck. The burns on her cheeks begin to crack and suppurate. He peels back her eyelids in hopes of eliciting a pupillary response, but the vessels burst and a skein of blood floods the sclera.

“Jesus,” he whispers.

RANA’S OTHER EYE opens and she bares her teeth. Sinks them into the soft flesh of the soldier’s neck. And drags him, kicking and screaming, down into the well.