A disillusioned priest with a military past must protect civilization from an infectious strain of crude oil that threatens to transform the citizens of Lakewood Alaska, infiltrate the pipeline, and take over the planet.

SYNOPSIS:

An oil drilling operation outside the town of Lakewood Alaska conducts an EM reflection survey to look for oil, but instead detects a continuous low frequency wave, that when played back as an audio file, sounds like a (distorted) multitude of human screams.

When this recording is enhanced the clarified screams are isolated and played back as individual sounds, several of them turn out to match voice-print samples in the company security system's voice-recognition program. They all belong to deceased former employees.

One of whom is the late wife of CARTER PARIS the town's increasingly agnostic and inebriated church minister. A man with a Military past both traumatic and mysterious; he was off the grid, on a black-op demolishing oil wells in the second Iraq War, when his wife and unborn child passed away.

Carter's old high school sweetheart, Cynthia, the Geologist for the Lexicon oil company who conducted the survey and distilled the screams from it, calls him to her office in town to ask what he as a man of God, makes of these recorded subterranean screams, and to reveal that the survey further yielded a massive super-deposit at great depth, one that has been feeding the smaller deposits throughout the region, and is now yielding an unusually toxic strain of crude oil, in which her lab found DNA among other things, DNA that includes the genetic markers for every known life form, and even more unknowns.

But as a despondent, disillusioned priest who is busy drinking his communion wine and rolling joints with pages torn pages from the bible as he goes about the Lord's work, Carter's reaction to this is incredulous and dismissive. So he departs to continue with his fractured exercises in ministry and outreach.

Meanwhile, this infectious strain of crude begins to surface all over town, spreading in meandering fingers and streams to infect the populace, transforming them into raging, berserkers with black veins and increasingly inhuman appearance. They prove to be increasingly fast, strong, and well-nigh indestructible as they attack, infect and multiply

We learn that this strain of oil, and indeed the planet itself is a living organism, trying to rid itself of the environmental plague that is the human species. It wants to reach the pipeline, its link to the world at large, where it can hybridize with all crude oil everywhere. It's objectives are to manipulate, mutate, and eliminate humanity anywhere it finds it. Carter and Cynthia, along with lifelong friend and town Sherrif Eli, are the first and last hope of survival that civilization has.

But its attacks manifest in stages, each more disturbing and deadly than the last, it erupts from the earth, it controls and transforms people to do its bidding, and shape-shifts into monstrous forms derived from the prehistoric matter of which it is composed. it even rains from the sky as our heroes are now pursued by a Mercenary unit, hired to eliminate all witnesses to this anomaly, and retrieve a genetic sample, for the cloning of this inexhaustible energy source for Cynthia's employer.

(A.A.) LAKE OF FIRE