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 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.
She saw it all clearly, the whole of it. A race of creatures who worshipped life. A virus designed to spread life wherever it reached. The planet first infected, then deliberately blown up so that seeds of life would spread throughout the universe in a billion meteors.
The endless, endless blackness of space, of millennia during which one of those rocks spun along a path that might never reach an end.
It was caught in the gravity well of a small star.
And then of a small planet.
The shattering, fiery impact.
A death. A man obliterated.
And the absorption into that alien virus of something new and incredible: human DNA.
A new life-form. The unintended consequence of a noble plan.
No God in His Heaven had created the gaiaphage. And here, now, in the airless pit, no God could save her.
It was then in her despair that Brittney prayed, not as she always had, but to a new Lord. A savior who waited to be born, to break free.
Brittney bowed her head and prayed to the gaiaphage.
Tanner appeared to Brittney as she prayed.
Her dead brother was an angel. Not with wings and all of that, but she knew he was an angel. And now he appeared to her and spoke in a soft, soothing voice.