The Feeding Cave

(A story set in the Neoevolution Earth universe: The Collected Histories of Neoevolution Earth Series)

by E. S. Fein

Copyright © 2025

Background: This story is set in the universe of my Neoevolution Earth Series. The Hunter in this story appears in book 2 of the series (Winter’s Remains), but this scene takes place 36 years before the events of book 2. To read the series, click here: Neoevolution Earth!

Year: 2063

The steel door screamed open like a dying god. Its hinges protested in a metallic shriek that seemed to reverberate through the bones, echoing into the dark. Beyond the door was the breathless dark, a saturated nothingness that felt like it could drown light. And then, beyond the perfect darkness, a faint green phosphorescence made from walls of mushrooms pulsing with bioluminescence like veins of light mapping the birth canal of some ancient, buried beast. 

The guards didn’t speak at first. One simply raised his hand with the bureaucratic indifference of filing away a redundant document. The other kept his gaze down, solemn, as if he were leading livestock to slaughter. In their matte black armor, they seemed more like statues than men. The illusion only broke with the soft hiss of their breath, which was mechanical and impersonal behind their sealed masks. 

“For crimes against the Edicts of the Central District,” said the first guard, voice hard and rattling in the steel corridor leading back to the underground city of Downver, “you are hereby exiled.”

Thomas stepped forward with the halting dignity of a man who’d already died three or four times in his head. His grip on Eliza’s hand was steady, not strong. His knuckles were pale. His breath short. His eyes didn’t plead. They mourned, as though he’d already buried himself in pieces over the past few weeks.

“We were just trying to feed our son,” he said. “Don’t you have children?”

Eliza, pale and fraying, held tight to Liam. Eight years old, his eyes still large enough to reflect wonder instead of terror, Liam clutched a stuffed bear with a missing ear: a threadbare thing from the old world he called Mr. Bobo. The seams were loose and its fur patchy. Mr. Bobo had spent years absorbing tears, fever sweats, and whispered dreams. Now he seemed barely held together by memory and hope, like everything else in their lives.

The second guard moved without ceremony and shoved them—not violently, but definitively. A single motion to sever the family from the world behind them. Liam stumbled, his doll flying from his grip.

“Mercy is not ours to give,” the second guard said. He sounded almost regretful. Almost.

Thomas turned back, his face half-shadowed, jaw set. There was a flash in his eye, a fierceness that Eliza wasn’t used to. And yet, no matter how fierce, it would not change their doomed fate. Hope flared then collapsed into the hollow space where utter terror had already settled.

The first guard issued: “Death to John Downver, may his soul know only torment!” The phrase had become a Downver-wide custom, chanted now by guards, teachers, even children, since the uprising eight years ago that toppled John Downver’s last loyalists. After Downver’s death, faction wars had nearly torn the underground city apart until a group of former janitors from John Downver’s private estate seized control. Somehow, impossibly, they’d earned the trust of even the alley punks—the volatile, feral youth who roamed between districts without law or loyalty, and from whose ranks many of today’s fiercest leaders had emerged.

Finally, the second guard intoned the final ritual, which was even older than the first, concocted by John Downver himself in the earliest days of Downver roughly 13 years earlier: “May your bodies serve as the soil from which Downver grows to one day reclaim the surface of the Earth.”

The door slammed. Echoes rang like a bell tolling a private death knell that didn’t fade so much as stretch, dragging sorrow across the walls of the cave.

There was a sudden scream, not of horror, but of heartbreak.

“Mr. Bobo!” Liam cried. “His arm is stuck!” His small fingers scrambled at the seam of the door where the stuffed limb had been pinched, pulling and tugging with a desperation only children or dying men ever truly achieve. He jerked the toy with both hands until the fabric began to give way. The toy didn’t bleed, but the look on Liam’s face made it feel like it had.

Normally they would run to comfort their son, but Eliza and Thomas just stood there, the pale green glow painting their faces in soft, fungal hues. The air in the cave was humid, filled with earthy growth and rot. This place was alive. Anciently and hungrily alive. It breathed with a damp, microbial patience, as if it had been waiting for them all their lives.

“What do we do now?” Eliza whispered, the dark eating the sound of her voice. She couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead, but she still tried peering into the darkness, the bioluminescence outlining her cheekbones in alien green.

Thomas squinted ahead too, forcing strength into his voice. “We keep moving. There has to be a way to the surface.”

Eliza turned sharply. “The surface? Are you insane? You want to be eaten by a Hunter? Or worse, become one of those…things?” Her lip curled. “A Nomad?”

Her voice cracked at the edge of the word. Nomads weren’t talked about in Downver anymore, at least not loudly. Not unless you wanted nightmares.

“Better than dying in a cave, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” she asked, her voice so cold it froze the air between them. Thomas knew she wasn’t really angry, just afraid in a way that didn’t allow for softness.

“I got him!” Liam shouted triumphantly. He turned, beaming, Mr. Bobo dangling now with one limp arm missing at the shoulder. “He lost his arm, but I got him! Everything’s okay!”

The innocence in his voice cut through the tension like a torch in darkness. For a moment, the cave didn’t seem so deep.

Thomas looked at his son and then at his wife. His expression softened. He reached up and touched Eliza’s cheek, his fingers calloused and shaking.

“Downver is barely hanging on as it is,” he said. “We weren’t the first to get thrown down here. We won’t be the last. I don’t believe all those people just died. Some of them must’ve found a way. There’s gotta be a world out there. Communities. Survivors. People who figured it out. Downver’s the place that’s dying. But we—we’re going to make it. I promise. Okay, Liza?”

He believed it as he said it. Or needed to, even though he knew that hope was just a survival instinct wearing preferable clothes.

Eliza held his hand to her cheek just a moment longer than she had to. She closed her eyes, then looked again at Liam. “Okay, Thomas,” she said. “I trust you. Just get us out of here.”

Liam had wandered forward a few steps, transfixed by the softly glowing mushrooms. They loomed like green lanterns, casting eerie shadows.

“They’re beautiful,” he murmured. “I didn’t know greens could get so big. In Downver, they’re so teeny tiny.”

He reached out, and as his fingers brushed the soft, glowing surface, the mushroom pulsed brighter, reacting to his presence. 

Eliza crouched beside him. “At least there’s some light,” she whispered.

Thomas didn’t smile. He kept his back to the tunnel and nervously scanned the path ahead. “Stay close,” he said. “But I’m sure we’ll be fine,” he added carefully. 

They moved on, cautious and silent. The path narrowed at times, widened at others. The air grew denser. The green light was everywhere, but it didn’t warm. It only watched. Thomas considered that the silence wasn’t really just silence. It was also a withholding. A constriction. A barrier. 

The deeper they went, the more the mushrooms grew thicker stalks and broader caps, some as wide as Liam’s outstretched arms. The tunnel widened too, like lungs drawing breath, as if it wanted them to venture deeper.

Eventually they came to a bend where the ceiling arched high enough for them to stand without crouching. A single mushroom, twice Thomas’ height, stood at the bend like a sentinel. Its cap was speckled with silver. Drops of condensation trembled on its edges, catching the light like tears.

Then came a sudden whisper of movement. A brush. A rustle. A subtle drag across damp stone. 

Eliza froze. “Did you hear that?”

Thomas raised a hand for silence.

They waited.

“It’s probably just the way sound moves in here,” he said finally, though the words rang hollow.

“Are we going to be okay?” Liam asked again, his voice tinier now.

Thomas turned to him. “Of course we are, buddy. Just…just enjoy this. Before you know it, we’ll be in our new home. On the surface. Okay?”

Liam nodded. Eliza didn’t.

Then something really moved. Not a shadow, a thing that made shadows. It darted across the far wall, too fast for shape or size to be discerned.

Eliza sucked in a breath. “Something’s following us.”

Thomas stepped forward, putting himself between his family and the dark behind them. He picked up a jagged rock, slick and heavy. His grip trembled. He flexed his fingers as if testing whether he still had control over his own hands.

“Stay behind me.”

Another sound. A low rumble. No language, just resonance. Something deep. Hungry. It seemed to bloom from the walls themselves.

Eliza gripped Liam and pulled him close. “Who’s there?” she called into the dark.

Silence again. But it wasn’t silence.

It was breath. Just out of view. Waiting.

After moments that stretched for days, two yellow eyes appeared in the darkness high above them, followed by a Cheshire grin full of jagged yellow teeth.

Thomas’ voice split the air like snapped bone.

“Go, Liza! Run!” It came out sharp, almost too sharp, the edge of terror flaring into command.

Liam’s lip quivered, his small frame beginning to tremble with a fear too deep for words. “What is it, Daddy? What is it?” His voice cracked, high and raw, like a hinge forced open.

Eliza didn’t speak. She hoisted Liam into her arms. She no longer had any choice but to survive. Her panting began immediately with short, shallow bursts as she sprinted blindly down the mushroom-lit passage, Liam’s cries bouncing off the walls.

Thomas didn’t follow. Not yet. He stared into the cruel smile, into the shadows beyond the gentle phosphorescent blooms. The eyes and mouth closed, and then he saw it. More than a shape, more than a figure—a shift. The air bent. The space behind the mushrooms moved. Something impossibly large was exhaling the darkness.

Thomas’ throat caught as his body remembered what his mind refused to. He turned and ran.

A Hunter, he gasped inwardly despite knowing it was impossible. Why would a Hunter be in these caves and not hunting humans on the surface? 

He emerged into a vast chamber. The ceiling was gone, swallowed by height or shadow or both. The light of the mushrooms drew a bioluminescent trail across the ground like a sepulchral runway. Eliza was already far ahead, Liam still in her arms, his sobs tearing through the cavern.

“Daddy, wait!” Liam screamed. “Mommy, it’s Daddy! We have to wait for him!”

Eliza spun mid-run, wild-eyed. Her voice tore from her in a panic. “Hurry, Thomas! Hurry!” The muscles in her legs burned, but fear gave her lungs a second life.

“I’m coming!” Thomas shrieked, his control utterly gone. “Don’t stop! Just run, damnit! Just run!”

And then the voice came. Deep. Resonant. A voice that still plagued Thomas and everyone else old enough to remember in their nightmares and in their waking memories from before Downver. Memories of the new Nomadic world of Earth’ ls surface, a world of murderous plants, Nomads, Mutants, and worst of all, Hunters and Huntresses.

“Little lights, little lives,” the Hunter crooned. Its voice was bizarrely gentle, like a lullaby hummed by a corpse. “Wandering in my hive.”

It can speak well! Thomas gasped. He had only ever heard rumors of Hunters knowing language beyond the few simple words they usually used to communicate. 

Liam wailed, and Eliza nearly dropped him, her limbs jerking in panic. “It’s a Hunter!” she shrieked. “A Hunter! Oh god!” She screamed, not like a woman, not like a human, but like an animal caught in a steel trap, its muscles tearing against inevitability.

Thomas saw her turn the corner, and then something dropped between them. It landed with no sound. A figure, at least, a godless parody of one. Nine feet tall, humanoid in only the cruelest of technicalities. Its ears tapered to spear-like points and its nose was flattened and wet like a vampire bat’s. Its entire body was composed of raw scar tissue over lean muscle and patches of exposed flesh, blackened and pitted. The Hunter was a dilapidated ruin, stitched and regrown in misshapen ways that appeared to be barely holding together. But still its eyes glowed yellow. Still it smiled with a grin of razors.

From the shadows, the Hunter spoke.

“I not bad Hunter. I good Hunter.”

Thomas screamed like a little boy, like his own son, his entire mouth opening like a fresh wound. Feeling like a defenseless ape encountering a saber-tooth tiger, he instinctively threw the rock he was still clutching. It struck the Hunter’s head with a sharp wet crack.

The creature winced. Actually winced. Its hand went to the wound where blood, red like Thomas’, seeped from its temple.

“My skinsuit damaged,” it muttered, almost mournful. “My body damaged. I need flesh. Just a little. Just a little.”

Its voice was eerily childlike, pleading in a way that felt far more dangerous than if it had roared.

Thomas trembled. But Eliza and Liam had turned the corner. They were getting away.

“You give me flesh, little life?” the Hunter asked, taking a single heavy step forward. “Just little bit. Just…hand…or foot. You have another hand and foot. I just need one.”

Thomas backed away, slow and deliberate. His heart beat so fast he could feel it in his teeth. He checked over his shoulder. Eliza was for sure gone. Safe for now.

He looked up, far up, into the yellow eyes. “You…you want to eat one of my hands?”

“Yes, little life. Yes, that right.” The Hunter sounded elated, like a child promised a gift. “Just hand. Or foot. You can pick. I not picky. Maybe both ears?” Its smile didn’t widen; it deepened like the lines of a face stretching around something much older.

Thomas gave another furtive glance down the hall. He couldn’t help checking again, for he had to be sure. But there was no sign of them. He breathed in. Shakily. Deeply.

“I’m…I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Hunter. But…but I like my body the way it is. I…I don’t want…I don’t want to—why are you down here? Shouldn’t you…you…you be on the surface? Hunting?” Thomas stuttered as he trembled, doing his utmost to buy his wife and son as much time as possible. 

The Hunter smiled wider. Too wide. His lips pulled past what skin should allow.

“I stuck here,” he said. “I in pain. My skinsuit need flesh. Please. Just hand. Okay?”

It stepped closer. Thomas could now see how decayed its body was, with patches of living skin still clinging to ribs, shoulders, hips, but retreating in real time. Like mold on bread. The suit was dying, and the Hunter was dying in turn.

“Please,” Thomas begged. “Just leave my family alone. Let us live. There’ll be more prisoners. There’ll be more. Just let us go. You speak well. You can understand me. So that means you can reason too, right? Please, Hunter. Let us go to the surface,” Thomas pleaded like an ant to a boot overhead. 

The Hunter tilted his head, almost curiously.

“Surface! Surface!” it repeated in a sing-song way. “Yes. I want go surface too. But there no way back to surface. Not for me. So there no way for you. There only my cave. And my glowies. And the humans Downver give me to feed skinsuit and glowies. Downver harvest glowies. So, Downver want me eat you.”

Thomas’ breathing came faster now. The creature was inches away. He could smell it: blood and rot and something strangely sterile, like formaldehyde.

“Please don’t do this,” Thomas whispered pathetically.

The Hunter bent low. His head moved like an owl’s, like a marionette’s on loose string. One clawed hand reached out. It touched Thomas’ wrist. Cold. Dry.

Then it opened its mouth.

Thomas didn’t have time to scream. The maw widened like a snake’s, unhinging fully. Then it clamped down on his arm, all of it. The Hunter bit through Thomas’ bone as if it were rotted wood. And then it bit again, devouring Thomas’ entire right arm.

Thomas screamed, raw and primal, as blood sprayed in arcs, painting the mushrooms red. In response, the glow grew brighter where it landed, the mushrooms consuming his blood. 

“You took my whole arm!” Thomas shrieked. “You devil! Fuck you!”.

The mushrooms bulged. They pulsed. They glowed red with Thomas’ life. Meanwhile, the Hunter’s ruined skin began to seal, grotesquely weaving new dermis over exposed nerves.

“Flesh so good,” the Hunter murmured, licking gore from his lips. “I need. I sorry.”

Thomas fell to his knees and stared in dismay at the pink, gushing stump that had replaced his arm. “Oh god, no. Please no. This can’t be happening.”

The Hunter didn’t respond. Instead, it unhinged its mouth again, even wider this time, and it enveloped Thomas’s entire body head first. 

Inch-by-inch, the Hunter swallowed the man with inhuman patience. Writhing, screaming, Thomas was consumed like a beheaded fish down a gut-drenched drain.

###

Mother and son ran through dimming tunnels, their breaths ragged, the air thinner now, less wet. The mushrooms—once towering pillars of strange beauty—had begun to shrink and recede, as though retreating from something behind them. They leaned, sagged, and melted at the edges, like wax succumbing to flame. The soft green light flickered in places, broken, failing.

Liam stumbled slightly as he ran, his legs far too short to keep up with the adrenaline-fueled race for survival. His sobs had become hiccups, desperate little spasms in his throat. Mr. Bobo flopped wildly in his grip. 

“That was Daddy screaming,” Liam gasped, his voice breaking apart. “That was Daddy!”

Eliza didn’t slow. She couldn’t. Her legs were trembling beneath her like old matchsticks, her vision swimming, her heart pounding against the inside of her chest as if it too were trying to break free from the horrific cave of her own body. 

“Daddy is fine,” she said with practiced calm, doing her utmost to keep the tremble out of her voice as she swallowed panic like jagged glass. “Remember how much he screamed when he hit his finger with the hammer?”

Liam let out a tiny laugh that was more of a sharp, wet hiccup. He was still holding on, but just barely. His face was streaked with tears and grime, and his nose bubbled with mucus. 

“Will Daddy be okay?” he asked, smaller now, as if the question were trying to fold into itself and disappear.

Eliza didn’t answer. She couldn’t lie again, not without choking on it. Her tongue was too heavy. Her throat was too tight. Her silence was its own answer.

Ahead of them, a narrow split in the stone wall caught her eye. She realized it was a crevice just wide enough for a small woman and a child, just tall enough if they crouched. It would be tight, and it might not go anywhere. But it might go somewhere. That was enough. That had to be enough. 

She stopped, her breath heaving, and she set Liam down with trembling hands that didn’t feel like her own. Her fingers brushed his cheeks, clammy and streaked with cave dust.

“Daddy is fine,” she said again, this time softer. “I promise. But we need to hide, okay? I want you to go into that little crack in the wall. I’ll be right behind you.”

Liam hesitated, blinking hard. “But there might be spiders…”

She forced herself to smile. “Mr. Bobo is probably afraid of spiders. Especially with one arm. So you need to be brave for him. Okay?”

Liam clutched the doll tighter, his fingers twisting in the fur like he was holding on to the edge of the world. He nodded. Swallowed.

“Okay, Mommy.”

He ducked into the crevice, crawling on his tiny hands and knees through the narrow passage. Eliza followed, her shoulder scraping the rough rock wall, her knees sinking into grit and slime. The stone pressed into her back like ribs closing in around her.

Inside the crevice, there were no mushrooms. No light. Just stone and breath and fear. The air was so close she could feel Liam’s exhalations in front of her and the wet shuffle of his palms as he moved forward.

“Mr. Bobo,” Liam was whispering, almost chanting. “Don’t be afraid. You have to be brave. Mr. Bobo, be brave.”

Eliza didn’t speak. She only breathed. In. Out. In again. Measured, strained. For the sake of Liam, she forced herself not to scream in terror as if she were still a helpless little girl fending for herself on the surface against a mutated and god forsaken world. 

The passage bent and narrowed again. Then, abruptly, they spilled into a small, rounded chamber. At its center, a single mushroom glowed gently, pale green and quivering like it knew it didn’t belong.

Liam rushed in ahead, his eyes wide with hope until the realization dawned on him, slowly at first, then all at once.

“There’s no way out, Mommy!” he cried. “There’s no way out!”

Eliza caught up. Pulled him close. Held him.

“Shhhh,” she whispered, gently rocking him. “It’s okay, sweetie. We have to be quiet. Okay? We just have to be very, very quiet. Like Mr. Bobo.”

Liam’s chest rose and fell against hers. His sobs had dulled into trembles, each breath a flutter of broken wings.

Then, out of desperation, she stood and brought her boot down on the glowing mushroom to snuff out the light, faint as it was. It burst wetly beneath her heel, its light extinguishing into a dim ember, like a coal struggling not to die. The chamber plunged into almost-total darkness. Only a faint chemical green remained, enough to sense movement but not actually see any details.

Eliza knelt again and pulled Liam into her lap. His skin was ice cold and his hands were shaking. 

“Just hold Mommy,” she whispered. “And Mr. Bobo. Go inside your head now, baby. Everything is fine. Daddy is fine. You’re safe. We’re all fine.”

Liam clutched her like a pocket of oxygen at the bottom of the ocean. Their breathing and their heartbeats filled the room like macabre, orchestral drums. 

One second. Two. Five. Ten. Stillness.

And then—

Two yellow eyes opened in the dark. A smile followed. Glinting razors painted in shadow yet glowing faintly like molten steel.

Liam screamed. “Mommy! Mommy!” he shrieked, his voice raw and thin as if flaying itself against the walls. 

“Get away from us!” Eliza yelled, instinct overriding fear. “Just get away!”

The creature tilted its head, genuinely confused.

“Why you try kill my glowie?” it asked, voice low and disappointed, as if the mushroom’s death really did inflict the Hunter with pain.

It stepped forward. Towering, skeletal, monstrous. Portions of its skin hung from its frame like wet parchment—patchy, stretched, stitched—while other parts of him looked completely smooth. Blood slicked its mouth, glimmering under the faint glow of bioluminescence.

In its long fingers it held a human leg like a butcher might hold a tender cut. 

Eliza recoiled, knowing it must be her husband’s leg. She pressed Liam behind her. But the creature didn’t come closer right away. Instead, it walked slowly to the crushed mushroom and bent down. Carefully, almost reverently, it wrung Thomas’ leg like a wet rag.

Blood and sinew poured out.

The mushroom, near-dead just moments ago, swelled instantly. Its cap expanded, its stalk fattened. It glowed brighter than before, violently alive and ravenous for more blood. 

The Hunter smiled again and shoved the remainder of the leg into its mouth. 

Crunch. Chew. Swallow.

Eliza screamed. “Run, Liam! Back the way we came. Run!”

She charged the creature without a weapon and without a chance, desperation igniting in her chest like a flare. But the Hunter barely registered her. A single sweep of its gargantuan arm sent her flying. Her body hit the stone wall with a sickening crack, and she crumpled. Blood pooled from her mouth, thick and red and bubbling, her limbs twitching, her spine curved and wrong. 

She choked. Twitched. She stared at her son one last time before her eyes and panting became still. 

Liam stood frozen. His mouth hung open. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t cry. A dark stain spread down his pants as he dropped Mr. Bobo.

The Hunter watched Eliza die with a look of detached enjoyment. Then it looked down at Liam, its eyes softening.

“Oh no,” it said. “Oh no…I so sorry. I no want her or you die. Not yet. Not yet.”

It stepped forward. Its voice took on a pleading tone. “I want someone for talking. You very, very little life. Can you talk? You talk with me?”

Liam didn’t respond. He couldn’t. His throat had closed around itself. 

“I share your mother,” said the Hunter. “We eat together. And then we talk until it time for me eat you.”

Liam shook his head. His lips were wet with spit. His body no longer belonged to him. 

The Hunter crouched, folding its enormous legs under itself. The motion was smooth and insectile. 

“No feel bad, little life,” it said. “There no way out of cave. I try. There no way. You and parents always going die in here. So, no feel bad.”

Liam curled into himself, clutching Mr. Bobo again, rocking gently. His voice was gone. His thoughts were no more coherent than smoke.

“You eat mother’s legs,” the Hunter offered. “I like arm flesh better.”

Then, without ceremony, the Hunter reached down and tore Eliza’s arm from her body. The sound was wet and thick, a meaty rip. It lifted the arm to its lips and sucked a long strand of muscle from it like a noodle. Its teeth glistened, and its eyes were calm. Pleased. 

It turned to Liam and smiled as if it were just another person from Downver sitting down to enjoy their dinner. 

“I not bad Hunter,” it said. “I just hungry.”

It reached down again, snapped off the other arm, and began chewing. Blood painted its teeth, its chin, its chest.

Liam stared blankly. Nothing made sense. The world had broken, and there were no pieces left big enough to rebuild it. 

The Hunter finished chewing and licked the blood from its fingers, slow and methodical.

“Now, we talk,” it said. “Before my hunger take you too.”

It leaned in closer.

“My name Hunter541,” it said, lips still slick with Liam’s parents. “What yours?”

Liam just rocked, Mr. Bobo cradled in his lap like the final dying ember left in a frozen world.

The Hunter patiently waited for a response, all the while smiling at its new temporary friend.