Seed of Evil by Greig Beck (smart books to read TXT) 📗

were just feral creatures like Benji’s friend James, but once they made it to the mine, many began to complete their transformation.

And the others? He wondered whether the other people who had disappeared were changed or snatched and brought down here? He just hoped they weren’t killed immediately, giving him a chance to save Benji and Karen.

From out of the darkness, something flew at him and struck his chest and stuck there. It immediately tried to burrow its sharp, pointed head into him, and he grabbed at it, immediately spiking his hands on all the thorns and sharp edges jutting from its hard body.

Thorny wings flapped on the thing and he threw it hard onto the ground and stamped a large boot on it, making it break like a crustacean’s shell and spilling its mushy, fibrous contents to the floor.

Was that a bird once? he wondered.

There was more flapping and then another came at him, flying awkwardly as it tried to keep its ungainly size and shape in the air. Mitch took no chances this time and quickly lifted the gun, fired once, and blew the thing out of the air. It landed in a brittle heap to the mine floor and lay still.

“It’s a damn madhouse,” he whispered, his chest now pumping hard.

He ran on, gathering speed, and after another 20 minutes, he stopped to drag in lungfuls of putrid air and just listen. There was the sound of water up ahead, and after a moment thinking through the pros and cons of making any noise, he decided.

“Karen?” his voice boomed and then echoed away from him. He was about to call again when a tiny scream came back—it was her—and Mitch launched himself forward, sprinting now.

After another few hundred feet, the rotting, fishy smell took on a more distinct odor. He’d smelled it before—the eggy odor of methane gas.

Mitch slowed as the tunnel became wetter and even more thickly malodorous. The walls were moving now almost in peristaltic waves like the inside of a gut. He felt like he was being swallowed alive and soon to be digested.

The tunnel had ended, and he moved through raw tumbled rock, obviously where the miners had accidentally broken through into the water cavern all those decades ago. He had to breathe shallowly, as the gas was starting to make his head and vision swim.

Mitch eased through a crack in the rock face and crawled out into a large cavern that, due to its size, seemed to have no end. Where he emerged, he found he was up high and looking down on a dark lake of bubbling liquid. The methane gas was percolating up from below to pop in little explosions of green vapor from its surface.

He stood with his mouth hanging open, astounded and probably dealing with shock as he stared—hundreds of feet out from the shoreline was some sort of island and on it was a single massive tree-like thing. And it moved. Because it was alive.

“Adotte Sakima,” Mitch softly said the name of the first people’s powerful god.

“It’s real,” he whispered.

As he stared, he saw that the roots of the monstrosity constantly shifted, snaking about and curling over objects that it snatched up and fed into itself. Hanging from its withered branches were pendulous bulbs like hideous fruits that writhed and jiggled and threatened to birth hideous things.

The primitive core of his mind rebelled at the horror and screamed for him to turn and flee, but his military training forced him to stand firm and face it down. He had been in hair-raising situations before, but those times it was human monsters he had to deal with, and now it was something from an ancient time of dark nightmare.

But above it all, he knew Karen and Benji were down there somewhere, and he would never leave without them.

“I’ll never lose anyone again,” he said to strengthen his own resolve.

Mitch felt light-headed from the methane-laden air but still slid down the slope, holding his light up. The powerful beam only just reached to the island, but he saw there were bodies floating in the disgusting water, some face down, but others being dragged out toward the waiting tree—no, not bodies…people, as some of them still feebly struggled. It was these poor souls that the roots delicately picked from the water and stuffed into one of many red-lined orifices on the mighty trunk.

“Ah shit,” Mitch whispered. This was the thing the Paleo Indians had tried to warn them about all those millennia ago. Those carvings and painted images in caves were of this tree god, the Adotte Sakima, that lived below them all.

Mitch wondered whether it was some freak of nature, a mutation, or even if it originated from this world at all. And how many thousands of years ago had the waters first surged to the surface and its seeds infected people or grew inside them then turning them into some sort of quasi-plant beings to do the bidding of a living, sentient tree? The rest of the people were captured and herded down here to be nothing more than living plant food.

“Karen!” he yelled again.

“Mitch!”

His head swung to the voice and he saw her then. A group of the petrified-looking beings dragged several people toward the water. Karen was there, clinging to a smaller body, which lifted his spirits a fraction to know it was undoubtedly Benji—she had found her son and done what she set out to do.

He reached for his gun but realized he could never fire it in here now as he might ignite the methane gas. So instead, he began to run toward them, now not having any plan at all.

As he did, the branches of the tree stopped their sinuous movement as though the massive growth finally became aware of him.

In seconds more, from the fetid lake, from the walls, and lifting from the rotten earth, strange figures began to rise up. If they had once been people, they were nothing like that