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.