Chapter 8 The Name Of God

Vex didn't know how long he'd knelt inside the stone circle. His mind had detached, drifting in and out of consciousness. Time passed like a fever dream, memories bleeding together, Bella's last smile, the nurse's face blooming with eyes, the pit of bodies.

Now it was quiet.

Too quiet.

The roots beneath him no longer pulsed. They listened.

Something had changed.

He stood slowly. His body ached with fresh lesions, skin splitting along his arms where vines tried to escape. He pressed his jacket against the worst of it and staggered out of the clearing.

At the edge of the woods, someone waited.

A woman in a black coat, hood low, standing by a motorcycle. Long hair. Eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. Her voice was low, wary.

"I thought you were dead."

Vex blinked. "Lana?"

Lana Wu. Former MI5. Now freelance investigator for biohazard black sites. He hadn't seen her in five years, not since Istanbul.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

"Same as you. Following the roots."

She handed him a USB drive and lit a cigarette with hands that didn't shake. "There's a vault under Black Vale High School. Wasn't always a school. Built over something older. You've seen the circle. The next bloom is tied to the lunar root. That's in three days."

He felt sick. "What's in the vault?"

She exhaled smoke.

"The name."

THE FIRST BLOOM

They broke in that night. Black Vale High had been abandoned since the first outbreak. Rusted lockers. Flooded classrooms. Mold growing in the shape of flowers along the gym walls.

The vault lay beneath the boiler room, steel doors reinforced with concrete and old-world glyphs. Lana used a frequency jammer to disable the smart lock.

They descended into the dark.

The stairs went on forever.

At the bottom: a chamber walled in obsidian tiles, covered in ancient text, some Sumerian, some Latin, some unknown.

And in the centre, encased in a cylinder of crystal and ivy, was a body.

Human-shaped. Seven feet tall. Female. Skin like polished bark. Face smooth and eyeless. No mouth. Just rows of slits across the jawline.

Vex's head throbbed as he looked at it.

"She's not dead," Lana whispered. "They planted her here to grow."

The roots above their heads began to shift. A hum rose from the floor, low and throbbing.

A heartbeat.

The crystal cracked.

"Back up!" Lana shouted, drawing her gun.

It was too late.

The body opened.

Not with a scream, but a sound like a forest groaning after a long drought. From her chest cavity, thousands of vine-hairs extended, grasping the air, tasting it.

Then it spoke.

Not aloud. Inside their minds.

"I AM SHU'KALITH. MOTHER OF BONE. YOU ARE INSIDE ME."

THE ESCAPE

Vex fired into the heart of the bloom. His bullets passed through, it didn't bleed. It absorbed. Fed.

Lana threw a thermite grenade at the base of the roots and pulled him up the stairs.

The entire chamber began to collapse. From the ceiling, red ivy poured like blood, spilling through cracks, blooming against the heat.

They barely made it out of the vault as it imploded.

Outside, the town was no longer asleep.

From every home, figures emerged, people infected, transformed. Their bodies twisted, bark-armored, moving in sync.

The Red Bloom had begun.

And Shu'kalith had a body now.

The infection wasn't a virus.

It was a summoning.

A resurrection.

A god reborn through the sacrifice of a town.

And it had only just opened its eyes.