Plague (Gone 4)

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.

“Don’t be afraid,” Tanner said.

“Let me die,” Brittney whispered.

“Who do you pray to?” Tanner asked.

“To you,” she said. Because she had no doubt that Tanner was speaking for the gaiaphage.

“I cannot give you death,” Tanner said. “You are two in one. Your immortality is his. And he is necessary to me.”

“But who made me this way? Why? Why?”

Tanner laughed. “‘Why’ is a question for children.”

“I am a child,” Brittney said.

There was softly glowing magma dribbling from Tanner’s cruel mouth. He bent down and touched her with fingers of ice.

“I must be born,” Tanner said. “And then, at the ending of my beginning, you will die.”

“I don’t understand.” With piteous eyes she looked up at the angel-turned-devil. “What do you need me to do?”

“Nemesis must be mine,” Tanner said. “Nemesis must serve me and me alone. All who defend him and protect him must be destroyed. He must live to serve me.”

“I . . . I don’t understand.” She knelt with bowed head, unable to look at Tanner, knowing now that he had never been an angel, that he had never been God’s servant, that he was nothing real at all, just the voice of the evil one.

“Nemesis,” Tanner said, hissing the word. “We are two in one, like you and the whip hand. Two in one, waiting to be born. Only when he is alone, utterly alone, will he serve me. And then I will be burst from this cocoon.”

“I don’t know anyone called Nemesis,” Brittney whispered.

She could feel her consciousness fading. Already her fingers were melting together to form the whip.

In the moments before she lost sight and sound, as she spiraled down into the blackness and Drake surged upward, Brittney’s tortured mind saw the image of Nemesis.