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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 Brittney’s feet the floor was strangely level and smooth. The gaiaphage had left an uncovered space for her to see and to understand.
She knelt and pressed her hand against a clear patch of translucent, pearly gray beneath her. The searing pain a living person would have felt was only an interesting tingle to Brittney.
She knew what it was and where she was. This was the bottom of the FAYZ wall, the bottom of the giant bubble. She was ten miles down, at the lowest depths of the enclosed universe of the FAYZ.
She stood and looked left and right, in every direction, turning slowly to see. It was all resting on the barrier, she realized. The rock walls, the jutting stalagmites, all of it rested on the barrier itself.
And everywhere but in this one patch, the gaiaphage covered the barrier. It touched the barrier and did not feel pain.
Then, as Brittney looked down, she saw the color of the barrier change. The eternal blank grayness was crossed by fingers of dark green, the color of late summer leaves.
She understood: the gaiaphage could touch and alter the barrier itself.
She knew it was conscious. She knew it because she felt now the dread touch of that awful mind in hers. There could not be the slightest doubt.
Brittney fell to her knees.
She laced her fingers together and squeezed her eyes tight. But she could not block out the green glow. She could not stop herself seeing. She could not keep her mind safe from its terrible touch.
She felt her every thought opened, like so many files on a computer, each opened, observed, understood.
She was nothing. She saw that now. She was nothing.
Nothing.
She tried to call on her God. But her prayers would not form in her brain, would not whisper from her numb, trembling lips.
