Tear the Lichen from Your Lungs

von Christina Carter

126 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Down here, fear isn't just an emotion. It's an invitation.Four kilometers beneath the permafrost lies Ob'yekt-84, a brutalist Soviet research outpost long buried beneath the Siberian crust. When industrial salvage engineer Maya Levitskaya leads a contracted retrieval crew into the depths to recover classified telemetry and seal an unstable borehole, the mission collapses before it begins. Automated station charges detonate above them, severing the hoist cables and crushing their only exit under thousands of tons of frozen granite.They quickly discover the terrifying truth behind their deployment: this was never a salvage mission. It was a one-way suicide insertion engineered by their corporate handlers to awaken an ancient biological anomaly.Deep within the fractured bedrock thrives the Calvaria-a pale-jade, crystalline pseudo-mycelium that defies terrestrial science. It does not feed on flesh, calories, or blood. It feeds exclusively on mammalian adrenaline and cortisol. Every thumping heartbeat, every panic-stricken breath, and every chemical surge of terror acts as an inescapable homing beacon for seeking fibrous tendrils that spear through pressurized suits and fuse with living nervous systems.As claustrophobia grips the surviving crew, the horrors multiply. Corporate-engineered rebreathers secretly flood their lungs with Soporific-7, an insidious neurotoxin that induces euphoric delusions and guides infected workers willingly into blooming death chambers. Through the rusted ventilation shafts echo the pleading voices of Soviet researchers who perished in 1984-calcified corpses whose windpipes are rigged to subterranean methane vents to construct a living, deceptive choir. Among those pleading voices is the one sound capable of shattering Maya's stoic reserve: her long-lost mother, speaking the private childhood lullaby from the night she vanished.With her team systematically culled by fungal mimicry and cold-blooded corporate betrayal, an automated thermal purge countdown begins, threatening to incinerate the facility into slag. Maya faces an impossible dilemma. She cannot outrun or overpower an organism that hunts the biological mechanics of human panic.To survive the encroaching root canopy and trigger the auxiliary hoist, Maya must strip away the very thing that makes her human. Armed with a field kit of high-grade beta-blockers, she must chemically flatline her own pulse, purging every trace of adrenaline to become completely invisible to the predatory hive mind before the countdown strikes zero.Tear the Lichen from Your Lungs is a suffocating, adrenaline-fueled descent into biomechanical dread and clinical survival horror. Merging the creeping body horror of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation with the icy paranoia of John Carpenter's The Thing, this masterclass in tension explores corporate expendability, unresolved trauma, and the terrifying price of keeping your heart still when every instinct screams to run.

• Themen: Belletristik Thriller / Spannung
• ISBN: 9798182789868
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 14.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Christina Carter