The Keeper's Wrath
The Broken Fingers of God
The bone bridge groaned like a dying animal as Luz and Cole fled the collapsing site. Behind them, the pulsating heart-mass screamed, its cry shaking the earth hard enough to crack the asphalt skin beneath their feet.
Luz barely felt Cole's claws digging into her arm as he dragged her toward the truck. Every instinct screamed to turn back—to reach into that withering mass and pull whatever was left of Mateo free—but the ground had other plans.
Black tendrils erupted from the cracks, lashing at their ankles like hungry eels. One wrapped around Luz's boot, yanking hard enough to dislocate her knee with a sickening pop.
Cole didn't hesitate.
He bit through the tendril with teeth that were suddenly too sharp.
The severed vine writhed between them, spraying a viscous fluid that burned through Luz's jeans like acid. She barely had time to process the pain before Cole hauled her into the rig's cab and punched the gas.
The tires screamed against the living road as they fishtailed onto a service ramp that hadn't existed moments before.
Luz clutched her dislocated knee. "What the hell are you?"
Cole's eyes reflected the rearview mirror—and the horror unfolding behind them.
The bone bridge wasn't just collapsing.
It was birthing something.
The First Betrayal
They didn't stop until the rig's engine overheated in the parking lot of an abandoned truck stop. The sign read "WELCOME TO NOWHERE" in bullet-riddled letters.
Cole dragged Luz inside, his claws retracting as he kicked open a storage room door. The space had been converted into a makeshift recording studio—walls papered with highway maps, a dozen cassette decks wired together, and at the center…
Rachel Mears' original recorder.
Still running.
Cole shoved Luz into a chair and gripped her knee. "This will hurt."
He yanked it back into place before she could protest. White-hot pain blinded her for three glorious seconds—long enough to miss him pressing PLAY on the recorder.
Rachel's voice filled the room:
"Final entry. Jake's gone. Not dead—transformed. The Big Man didn't want to eat him. It wanted a translator. Something to help it understand us. And now…"
A wet, rattling breath.
"Now it's learning how to love."
The recording cut to a new voice—Jake's—but layered with something vast and hungry:
"Cole. My first disciple. My keeper of the old roads. You will bring me hearts. You will—"
Cole smashed the recorder before it could finish.
Luz stared at the wreckage. "You work for it?"
Cole's smile showed too many teeth. "I worship it." He tapped the fresh blood dripping from Luz's knee. "And now, so will you."
The Baptism
Luz woke strapped to a metal chair, her mouth tasting like gasoline and copper. The storage room walls pulsed in the flickering fluorescent light, their surfaces breathing.
Cole stood over an ancient gasoline pump that shouldn't be indoors, its hose snaking toward her bare forearm. The nozzle had been replaced with a rusted IV needle.
"Jake was right about one thing," Cole murmured as he inserted the needle. "The roads are alive. But they're not the veins—"
Black sludge pumped into Luz's arm.
"—they're the nervous system. And we're the antibodies."
The vision hit like a freight train:
A continent-spanning organism buried deep beneath the tectonic plates
Interstates and highways as synaptic pathways firing signals to something vast and sleeping
Jake Carter standing at the center of the bone bridge, his body unraveling into black tendrils that conducted the workers like a grotesque orchestra
Luz screamed, but the sound was swallowed by the sludge now coursing through her veins.
Cole leaned close, his breath smelling of diesel and decay.
"Welcome to the congregation."
The Second Lighter
The transformation should have been instantaneous.
Should have been inescapable.
But Cole forgot about the Zippo.
Luz's fingers brushed it in her pocket as the sludge reached her heart. The flame that erupted wasn't the weak flicker from before—it roared blue and righteous, searing through the infection like a wildfire through dry grass.
Cole howled as the fire spread to him, his carefully constructed human disguise burning away to reveal:
Rib bones fused into a spinal column too long for any mammal
A chest cavity housing a cassette player spinning Jake's voice on endless loop
Black sludge weeping from hollow eye sockets
Luz broke the chair's arms as the fire purified her veins. She didn't stop to see if Cole was truly dead—just ran for the rig as the truck stop collapsed behind her.
The last thing she heard before the engine roared to life was the click of a tape deck powering on inside the ruins.
And Jake's voice, whispering:
"Luz… follow the red lights…"