The smoke is a great black smear rising up out over the jungle, and inside stirs impossibly vast complexes of fire. Orange and red dance between coiling, seething blackness with a demonic ferocity. Even in daylight, Howard can see this unnatural illumination, and even this far away he can feel the heat. Smell the ashes, the sickly-sweet of singed flesh.
His path is one of delirium. Stumbling across a gnarled and unwelcoming forest floor made cratered, uneven by huge sprawling tree roots a dozen meters in diameter. It’s like petrified waves encrusted in millions of years of growth: a riot of clovers and fungus and flowers strewn about in such unnerving, bright combinations that it makes his eyes hurt, especially when the breeze makes everything ripple and shift. Living stalactites taller than two men stacked atop each other array themselves randomly in the forest gloom, their smooth marbled surface making them seem like otherworldly headstones— until Howard passes them, and they suddenly sprout pairs of double-jointed, spidery legs and skitter off into the viridescent gloom.
This is Hell, he says to himself over and over in his degenerated mind, like a mantra, like a prayer. One foot shuffling in front of the other, both boots smeared by streaks of purplish-golden sap. Howard feels pinprick sharp legs wandering across him and nausea rises as he slaps himself haphazardly, turning and twisting to pry whatever has gotten to him away, panting with the effort, and then he’s falling. Tumbling down a massive root big enough to seem like an entire hillside, plunging down, down, down, thrown into a ravine so entirely cloaked in darkness that bioluminescent somethings glow faint blue all around him. The pain sings. Threatens to overwhelm him. He wonders if Rebecca lied to him, if the escape bunker is a falsehood. Wonders if—no—when, he’ll be eaten or smashed or obliterated out here in this place. Clammy wetness infiltrates his soaked, dirtied jumpsuit and one of his creepy-crawly assailants bites him, sharp white-hot pain blossoming in great waves down his spine. Howard can’t even scream as the paralyzing effect engulfs him.
Shards of memory come and go in glittering fragments. His childhood skulking in a Louisiana backyard, hunting for fascinating creatures to prod and poke and collect. Lovers and benders in college as he traversed exotic locales at the end of the world hunting for cures, for weapons forged not by human hands but by Nature herself. Perfect and undeniable. The Call, it’s proposition to be part of a project unlike anything else— a place unlike anywhere else, untouched by humanity, made in an evolutionary image that was endlessly beautiful. Endlessly savage. The hovercraft sailing over a huge, impossible vista dominated by trees a kilometer high and his first sightings of monsters that blurred biological lines nearly a billion years old. Rebecca’s touch, her scent, the sweet taste of her lips.
Something passes by above him unseen but heard as it’s too-many-legs almost whir, making an unnatural sound that seems to blend biology and machinery. A roar so loud that it shakes the dying man’s bones, so loud that the audio processing medium of a human being can only tolerate it as sensation, not sound. Howard recognizes this living Thunder. It makes his heart plummet, turns his mind into haywire sparks of unstoppable terror even as the poison is unraveling his very essence molecule by molecule.
If this is Hell, that is Satan. A living evil more real than any fictional demon, a walking catastrophe that embodies extinction and annihilation. It is natures ultimate end, the triumphant supremacy that laughs at pathetic atomic weapons or noxious chemical terrors born in darkened laboratories.
Howard embraces the pain. Pleads the poison to quicken to spare him that primordial visage. His last thoughts are tiny and fearful.
This place is Hell.
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