Danger Zone

Extract From : Blood Sun

Darkness devoured him.

Eyes wide with terror, he saw only the gaping void, heard his desperate breathing hammering through his skull as the rasping one-eyed monster pursued him. Beneath his feet, death's slippery tongue glinted dully into the belly of the beast.

A faint signal beat through his mind, a rhythmic note that was his own voice. Don't fail. Don't fail. Don't fail. To do what? His thoughts were in tatters. He tried to scan the memory banks embedded in his brain. Terror gushed chemicals through his body. He couldn't remember! Legs and arms pumped him deeper into the tunnel as crackling sparks of cruel laughter gained on him. The monster's beam of light could not see him yet, his dark clothing morphing him into the nothingness. A grinding, pulsating sound of metal on metal. Arms flailing, his coordination began to fail. Always so strong, always so capable, and fit and young. Young. Yes, he was. He remembered that. And voices from the past - echoing in his head. Never give up. Keep going. You're one of the fittest boys here, Danny. Danny! That was his name. He was too young to die. He knew this as surely as he knew that the blackness suffocating him was now the beginning of the end. Blood began to seep from his eyes, nose and ears. Like the tears of a clown, it dripped down his cheeks.

He fell forward, and in those two seconds it took before he hit the ground lightning flashed behind his eyes and a rippling wave of enormous power reached up to him from the blackness, pulling him to his death. His muscles loosened; the coarse brown envelope he had been clutching fell from his fingers. His body jerked convulsively as the power surged through him.

The approaching London Underground train's impetus created a vacuum that sucked air out of the tube-like tunnel. Rubbish scattered. Old crisp packets and a brown envelope addressed to Max Gordon at Dartmoor High School tumbled and fluttered their way to the platform.

The train shuddered over the unseen body now lying to one side of the electrified line, but the boy felt no pain or fear. He had already sunk into the vortex of death.

The brain worm had finally eaten its way through his skull.

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