Book of the Dead

Chapter 1

Big Bill Anderson sat in his favorite chair — red faux leather, soft, deep, and comfortably shaped by decades of sitting into a perfect reverse image of his ample butt. His chinos were pulled up a little high, and his blue checked lumber shirt was a tad tight across the gut, but at his age, he’d earned the right to get a little out of shape.

He turned the page of his paper, looking down the ads for pet adoption, scanning the older dogs: Labradors, terriers, schnauzers. Most had pictures beside them, and insanely happy, beseeching, or frightened faces stared back at him, all wanting new homes, just one more game of fetch with an attentive new owner, or to be far away from the guy who used beat the shit out of them.

He stopped at one, a shepherd, five years old, big guy with the tip of one ear missing, eyes that were clear and sharp with whip-smart intelligence — Rusty.

“I wish, boy.”

Bill had desperately wanted another dog ever since Bella had died ten years earlier. He felt that now he was retired, and had his days on his hands, he might be able to swing the old girl toward it one more time. He tore the page out and let it rest on the small side table beside a new cup of steaming tea.

The vacuum cleaner started in the other room, and he knew that Margaret would be pushing the infernal machine in under his feet any moment. He grimaced, imagining the rush of warm, stinking exhaust air, the roar of a jet engine, and her light smile revealing her perverse delight in either loud cleaning devices or another opportunity to simply bug him.

He leaned forward to look at the picture once again. “Maybe later, Rusty.” Bill let his eyes slide to the small table. A huge roach was edging across its smooth top. He rolled up the paper, and whacked it. “Ha.”

A vibration beneath his feet tickled his soles. He forgot the roach and frowned in the direction of the vacuum-cleaner noise. “What the hell setting has that woman got it on?”

Another vibration and he noticed the surface of his tea shimmy. He reached for the cup just as there came a thump from below. The vacuum went off, followed by silence for several seconds.

“Bill?” Margaret called from the other room, apprehension in the word.

“Wasn’t me, honey.” Bill sat still, silent, waiting. There was another thump, then another, the latest from overhead. “What the hell?”

A deeper thump, again from below, sounding like someone was shifting heavy furniture in their basement. An antique plate on the mantelpiece tilted forward and fell to the rug.

“Margie?” Bill slowly rose to his feet as his wife entered the room, her forehead creased, her hands wringing a cleaning cloth.

“Bill, are you…?”

Bill shook his head, turning it slowly, concentrating on listening, his arms out from his sides slightly, as though to help with his balance.

Several more thumps came from above, and Margaret squeaked and hunched her shoulders. Bill looked to the window. Outside, there seemed nothing unusual — the garden and, beyond that, the Wilsons’ house, with the lemon tree just covered in green bulbs not yet ripe enough to pick overhanging the fence in between.

More thumps, and, as Bill watched, something black struck the lawn, and then another. Bill squinted — birds.

“Hey, birds are —”

Bill never finished that thought: another thump cracked the plaster in the walls, and the house actually seemed to drop a few inches.

“Whoa.” Bill noticed Margaret’s face was white, and her wringing hands continued to move up to her breasts, as though she was praying. She was shaking her head; her eyes were watering.

He smiled at her. “Stay there. We’ll be fine.”

There came a blast of thick heat, and then the house simply… fell. Bill felt himself become weightless, as if gravity had been suspended. Outside the windows went black at the same time as the power shut down. The only light was thrown down from above, and outside he could still see movement, but rapid, as though walls were shooting upwards past the windows.

There was a crash. Margaret screamed, and Bill was smashed to the floor. His wife of thirty-five years began to sob, and that hurt him more than anything else. He got to his knees, staying there for several seconds as he checked his numerous aches and bruises. He was relieved to find that nothing was broken — at sixty-five, bones were like kindling.

“Oh god.” He gagged, and put a hand over his mouth and nose, as a God-awful stench filled the house. His brow ran with perspiration from the heat.

“Margie, you okay, girl?” He stayed on his knees and crawled toward her.

His wife lay on her side, moaning. He bet it was her hip; she’d had a replacement half a dozen years back, and still complained of it.

Bill went to an upturned table among the debris of furniture, broken pottery, papers, sheets of plaster, and something else — dozens more of the scurrying roaches.

“What the hell?” He bet it was an earthquake, and a big one by the feel of it. He scrambled around in the murky light, just the ghost of a glow coming in through the windows. He pulled a drawer and emptied it, rummaging until he found a small flashlight, and flicked it on.

Margaret was sitting up, holding her stomach. There was blood on her face.

“You okay?” he whispered, not knowing why quietness was important.

She nodded. “What happened?”

“I don’t know yet.” Bill used the table to push himself to his feet and walked to the window. He was right — there looked to be walls built all around them. He frowned as he followed them upward, and placing his face close to the glass he saw that the walls loomed hundreds of feet over the house. At the very top, there was sky… and maybe a lemon tree.

“Holy…” These weren’t walls that had sprung up; instead the house had fallen down into some sort of pit.

He still had his cheek pressed to the glass when something rushed past. “Christ on a cross!” He pulled back as though electric shocked. The shadow had been huge: twice as big as a man.

“Bill, is there a fire?” Margaret had managed to get to one knee.

“You just stay there a moment, old girl. I got to check on something.” Bill licked his lips and ran a forearm up over his head. It was blistering hot, and though he couldn’t smell smoke, he could smell something that refused to be identified — sulfur, methane, and fishy like. He remembered being at a beach when he was a kid, and there was a shark carcass high and dry on the sand, all bloated up in the hot sun — it was that sort of smell.

He turned his small light beam to the floor, checking the rubble, and then picked his way through it to the front door. The frame was warped, and deep cracks run up past the lintel, and across the ceiling. The house was warped. Forget about repairs; this is a knock-down job, he thought. Hannity’s Insurance would have a fit.

He grasped the handle, and immediately jerked his hand away — it was damned hot. He gritted his teeth. “Man up,” he whispered, and grabbed it again. The brass knob was hot, but not searingly so. He turned and tugged, and the door moved a quarter inch and them jammed tight. Plaster dust rained down onto his head and neck. Bill grunted and tugged again, and this time the door flew inwards.

A shock of horror ran through his entire body. He dropped the flashlight, and the breath caught in his throat. He didn’t smell the vile air, or feel the inferno heat on his face; instead every atom of his being was focused on the thing that filled the doorway.

Octopus man, was the thought that jumped into his mind. The creature towered over him, all thrashing arms sticking from a bulbous head. He stared, his mind trying to assemble it into some sort of category of man or beast he recognized, and failing miserably. The thing was a massive amoeba-like creature made out of iridescent black slime. Multiple eyes floated over its surface, popping open to stare, before sinking back into the mass, and rising in another position.

Something wrapped around Bill’s neck, wrists and waist all at once and began to drag him outside. It was hot and greasy against his flesh, and hurt like a jellyfish sting. He tried to pull against it, began to struggle, but made zero impact on the monster. As he was dragged along the remains of his lawn toward one of the walls of the pit, he managed to look back in time to see more of the lumpen things wedge themselves in through his doorframe.

He heard Margaret scream, and he began to weep. Big Bill Anderson, her protector, her rock, was now useless. He wished he had a dog, and a big one, as he was pulled toward the wall of dirt.

“Yo, Frank, racked and ready.” Andy took one last look around as he teetered on the edge of the cavernous sinkhole. The grass behind him was littered with dead birds, which was why he specifically had been called in from his home base at Cedar Rapids.

Andrew Lincoln Bennet was an environmental geologist, and one of the best authorities on sinkholes in the state, if not the country. His job was to try and ascertain any connection between the land sink and the avian deaths. So far, he had no idea. The birds’ lungs (he had hastily dissected a few on a trestle set up beside their van) showed no sign of gas inhalation, and their eyes were clear, so no toxin deployment either. Still, he had breathing equipment slung on his back as he knew methane, sulfur dioxide, and even chlorine gas could belch up from the earth with little warning, as if the planet had ingested something disagreeable.

Andy nodded to his second-in-command, Frank Kelso. Frank was twenty years older and knew rocks like they were his family, but Andy had the modern expertise and had seen a lot in his thirty-five years. Frank was more than happy to defer to his young protégé, as he liked to call him.

“One away,” Frank, yelled, manning the winch, and gave him a thumbs-up.

Andy stepped back to quickly rappel down into the darkness. The sinkhole crater was more than two hundred feet across, and about twice that in depth — a biggie in anyone’s books. Andy knew of larger ones — Louisiana had one at Lake Peigneur that went down fifteen hundred feet — it was huge. But the current record was held by a monster in China in the Chongqing Municipality, that was a thousand feet across and two thousand deep — it could have swallowed a small village. As he rappeled down, kicking off the wall, he thanked his lucky stars this one wasn’t like that. The big ones could collapse, and a few hundred thousand tons of cascading rock and soil meant you just earned a free burial.

“How we lookin, hotshot?” Frank’s voice squawked from his belt mic. Andy could imagine his buddy up top, standing a good fifty feet back from the edge in case the walls started to slide. He’d be fifty again in front of everyone else, keeping the police rescue, residents and general public well back until he, and others, had fully examined the site. The entire block would remain evacuated and sealed off until their work was done.

He touched down. “I’m okay; just hit bottom, pop.”

He heard Frank whistle. Andy unsnapped the harness hook and grabbed a secondary flashlight dangling from his belt; he flicked it on, adding the beam to his helmet lamp’s halogen, and looked around.

Andy’s number-one priority was to locate Bill and Margaret Anderson, and his hopes rose. The house was virtually intact, sitting in the center of several feet of green lawn, now littered with carcasses of dead birds.

“Bill Anderson! Bill and Margaret Anderson, can you hear me?” He waited as his words bounced around the huge pit. After a few minutes, there was still silence. Light from above gave the scene a nighttime atmosphere. He looked closer at the house: aside from some cracking in the external structure and the front door hanging off its frame, he might have expected to see Bill and Margaret sitting on the porch as if nothing was wrong.

“Structure’s pretty good; I’m going in.” As he approached he winced at the smell. Weird, he thought. Wonder if they’ve got a septic tank. He quickly checked the anemometer on his belt — the air quality was still good. Just leaking shit, he hoped.

Andy adjusted his helmet, sweat now streaming from his pores. As well as the smell, the heat was near unbearable, which was also weird, as he should be feeling lower temperatures at a few hundred feet. He knew there was no volcanic or geothermal activity in the area, and there hadn’t been for close to a million years.

“Bill Anderson?”

Andy leaned forward to wave his light across the doorway and windows. He guessed if they were in there, they’d be damned confused and frightened. And if Bill had a gun, Andy was liable to catch a gutful of double ought if he went barging in.

He approached carefully, his feet crunching on something. He looked down to see hundreds of roaches moving about. “Nice.” At the doorframe he rested his hand on the broken wood, and then snapped it back, revolted. Even though he wore gloves for the descent, he recoiled from the thick, viscous material that coated the rough leather. He shone his light on it — glistening, milky with darker streaks. He brought it close to his face.

“Aw, fuck.” He ripped it away. It had to be the source of the smell enveloping the area. It was like fish, sulfur and crushed snails all in a jellied paste. He shone his light around at the walls, wondering where it had come from. In his decade and a half in geology, he had never come across anything like it occurring naturally above or below the ground. He brought his light back to the frame.

“Bill, I’m coming in, if that’s okay.” He shone his light inside. “If you can hear me, just make a sign… anything.”

Andy counted off the few seconds — nothing but silence. He swallowed noisily, and then moved inside, avoiding the fallen furniture and going quickly from room to room. The smell was worse in the small building, and he held his breath as he searched. In a few minutes he had examined the house in detail, and stood again on the porch.

“Nothing, Frank; are we sure they were home?” He looked up to the sky, hundreds of feet overhead; suddenly wishing he was up there.

“Yep,” Frank said. “Neighbor said he saw them only an hour before, and he’s sure they didn’t leave. Have you looked everywhere — the perimeter?”

“I’ll do a final sweep now.” Andy stepped off the porch. The lawn was littered with dead birds down here too, but incongruously, it otherwise seemed almost untouched by the drop into the pit — as if it had been lowered gently. Flowers in their beds still stood upright, their blooms straining towards sunlight they would never feel again. There was a wheelbarrow, with gloves laid over one handle, and a flagstone pathway ran for two dozen feet to abruptly stop at a wall of dirt and rock.

Andy circled the house. He had about twenty feet of space between himself and the walls of the sinkhole. They looked solid and not saturated, as he would have expected.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” he whispered.

He knew sinkholes occur because groundwater erodes away porous limestone creating a karst feature below the surface shell. Eventually the ground just collapses into the void that’s been created, and might have been there hiding for days, months or even years. But water is the key ingredient, and down here it was dry… and hot.

“Talk to me, Andy.” Frank’s voice sounded tight.

“It doesn’t make sense — it’s bone dry down here.” Andy continued to pan his light.

“Maybe drained away. That pocket could be years old, and by now we have a total percolation effect. Water’s long gone — it happens,” Frank said.

“Yeah, but in limestone, and not in bedrock like this. This just feels… different.” Andy walked to one of the walls and frowned — there was something on it, or pressed into it — a symbol or shape. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small camera, taking a few images, and then turning to snap off some more pictures of the structure and size of the cavity.

He tucked the camera away and then reached out to touch the dark soil where the shape was indented. It was soft and spongy, like Styrofoam packing. He knew the earth was capable of some amazing feats — it could sink, rise up in columns or waves, it could spin like a whirlpool, and become as hard as rock or soft like quicksand. But this was something outside of his experience. Besides, as he’d said to Frank, down this far, it would have to be mostly bedrock, not soil.

Andy pulled a small plastic bottle out of a pocket and scraped some of the spongy soil into it. He capped it and had begun to turn away when he stopped, and then spun back, frowning. He lifted his flashlight, holding it up and centered while reaching into yet another of his numerous pockets. He carefully drew forth a flat folding knife that he expertly opened out one handed while keeping his eyes on the wall.

Andy used the blade to dig in gently, carefully, edging out the spongy soil, and letting it plop wetly at his feet. He used the tip of his blade to snag the object and drew it out: it was a sleeve — blue checked wool, thick, like you get in those hunting or lumber shirts. He tugged it free and held it up on the blade tip. Despite the dirt covering the material, it was clearly fairly new.

“How the hell did you get in there?” he whispered, and then looked briefly to the surface — not a chance that this thing had been buried by sedimentary processes. Anything down here would be tens of thousands of years old, at least. He flapped the dirt free and looked at it again; even from a foot from his face, he could smell the stink — the same fishy, sulfurous odor that was in the slime.

It was a sleeve with a shiny button still on the cuff end, shredded at the other. He moved his light a little closer — the ragged end was damp. It was hard to tell what it was in the whitening glare of the flashlight, but the fluid glistened, and he knew what he hoped it wasn’t — blood.

“Jesus, Bill, what happened down here?”

He quickly checked his pockets. Damn, no sample bags. He cursed his poor preparation and ended up wadding the material up and tucking it in a spare pocket. He dug a little more into the soil without finding anything, and then turned away looking again towards the sunken house. It was tomb quiet, and a prickle lifted the hair on his neck.

“Ah, Frank…” Andy cleared his throat. “Frank, there’s nothing here.” He lifted his light again. The slime glistened back at him from the door. “If the Andersons were ever here, they’re gone now.”

“Probably never down there. They’ll sure get a shock when they get home this evening.” Frank didn’t sound convincing.

Andy felt the sleeve wadded up in his pocket. “Sure… sure they will.” He took one last look around, moving his light slowly over the property. Smears of the glistening slime reflected the beam back at him. The dark or confined spaces never worried him. Being a geologist meant caving, tight tunnels, basically a lot of underground work, but this down here… He felt the hairs on his neck rise, and stay risen like the hackles of a dog. This is a hundred percent pure weird, he thought.

Andy snorted softly. “Only in America.”

“What was that?” Frank asked.

“Nothing.” Andy reconnected himself to the drop line. “Grabbing some samples and coming up.”

Chapter 2

Viktor smoked the pungent cigarette slowly. He managed to tune out the sound of his five young children and screaming wife, Alina, as he read the morning paper. It’d be another long day driving the bus from the airport to the city and back. It was a twelve-hour shift now; it had been eleven hours only two years back, but the manager had cut staff with the remaining drivers working longer, or risking being cut themselves. The biggest joke on the drivers was that though the hours increased, the pay stayed the same. Big, big joke, he thought and blew more thick smoke into the tiny apartment.

His wife’s voice went up a few decibels and he raised his eyes over the paper to look at her — he smiled and winked — still beautiful after five children. Alina had managed to turn her face beet-red from screaming at the young ones. Only Maria, their oldest at seven, ever listened to her. Alina straightened, blew hair from her forehead and grinned and shrugged.

He nodded in return. He’d work a hundred hours a week if it meant keeping food on this woman’s table. She made it all worthwhile. He looked up at the stained walls and the roaches moving along the peeling picture rails. She deserves better, he thought glumly.

He sipped at a metallic-tasting coffee and winced — extra flavor thanks to the old copper pipes, he knew. He lowered the cup just as the table jumped.

“What is — ?” The table jumped again. Alina stopped moving, and the house quieted as the children ceased their mad dashing about. They all stood in silence. Alina and the five little ones turned big eyes towards him.

Something struck the window, making Viktor jump and little Rakael squeal. Viktor looked to the pane as another wet thump sounded against the glass — it was a bird, momentarily stuck on the sill, its beak shattered and bloody, its eyes round and mad. It fell away, leaving a streak of blood as it plummeted towards the earth.

Viktor started to rise to his feet. Earthquake? he wondered. Kirov had minor tremors all the time, but these buildings, most twice as old as his babushka, were little more than cheap, crumbling brick and powdery mortar — a good breeze, and they’d collapse like a deck of cards.

He felt a juddering vibration beneath his feet, and then a waft of hot, stinking air. Birds started to crash into the building as though being fired from a cannon. That’s it, no more waiting, he thought. Better to be safe in the street, than crushed to muck in an old building.

“We go quick. Out, out.” Alina took control, snatching up the two youngest and yelling instructions. Maria grabbed Rakael, and he took his eldest son by the hand. They went down the old steps two at a time, their feet squashing roaches on every riser, as the building started to grind. On the way down, doors opened and old gray heads poked out, but then were pulled back in as though on a leash.

“Get out!” Viktor yelled to them, but no one followed or even acknowledged him. In this building, like many others, neighbors rarely talked, and all were strangers to each other.

Viktor kicked open the downstairs doors and rushed into the freezing street, not stopping until they were on the opposite sidewalk. He checked his brood were all with him, and put an arm around Alina. Only then did he look back.

The building shimmied, rose a couple of feet, and then, staggeringly, dropped into the ground as though on a fast elevator. It didn’t fall and then stop, crumble, or even collapse. It simply went down, and kept going down.

Viktor could hear the crushing grind of earth and brick as the three-story edifice disappeared into a massive black void. There was silence for a minute or two. Then the screams came.

Chapter 3

Matt Kearns pushed long hair back off his face, and then ran across Massachusetts Avenue towards the Qdoba Mexican Grill. He kept a hand over his leather satchel on one shoulder and pushed open the small door, inhaling the scent of chilli, spices, and roasting meat.

“O-ooh, yeah.”

His interview with the board in at the Harvard Lamont Library had gone well — very well — and he expected an offer to come through within the week. After all, he was still one of the top paleolinguists in the world, had an understanding of more ancient languages than anyone else in the USA, and was witty and charming — Why shouldn’t they love me? he thought, and grinned, as he was shown to a table.

He snatched a copy of that day’s newspaper from the rack and slid into the booth. If he got the job, he’d start teaching a basic languages class at the Resource Center. Low down the ladder, but he’d be home, and that was all that mattered. Besides, he was sure he could climb back to full tenure quickly.

He waved to a pretty waitress and she nodded in return, and then made a beeline toward him. He looked around — the diner was near empty, save for a few foreign students, a large family eating without talking or even making eye contact with each other, and a solitary coffee drinker.

Matt lifted the satchel over his head, leaning it on the seat beside him as the waitress stopped.

“Welcome to Qdoba Mexican Grill. My name is Andrea. We have specials today that—”

“I know.” Matt smiled. “It’s all good, Andrea.” He smiled, sweeping his hair back again. She nodded, and her eyes lingered just a few seconds longer than was necessary, before flicking away.

He smiled. Still got it, he thought, as he looked down the menu quickly, already knowing what he wanted: chicken quesadilla — one enormous corn tortilla filled with spicy chicken, bell peppers and melted cheese, then folded in half and lightly toasted — heaven on a plate. He used to have them once a week when he worked here three years earlier… and he planned on resuming the same delightful habit now he had returned.

“Andrea, I’ll have the prince of tortillas — quesadilla de pollo, por favor.” He grinned and winked. Andrea giggled as she wrote and then headed to the kitchen.

Matt dropped the small laminated sheet, picked up the newspaper, and flicked through the headlines while he waited — financial crisis in France worsening; the Middle East still beating itself back to the Stone Age; and another picture of the President grinning and swinging a golf club. He sighed and continued flicking through, only glancing at the stories, until — Unexplained bird deaths accompany sinkholes. “Huh?” Matt frowned and read quickly.

“Now that is interesting”, he whispered.

Matt didn’t know that much about geology, but he did know that sinkholes had been around forever and occurred when too much groundwater dissolved away the subsurface layers. The ground just fell into a void. They were common in places like Florida with a lot of rain and lots of limestone rock below the soil surface. But they were near unheard of in places like Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, which were way up in the mountains.

And what’s with the birds? he wondered. Intrigued now, he swiveled and reached for his satchel, taking out a slim computer and opening it on the table. In a few moments he had powered it up and found the restaurant’s wifi and was entering the headline. He selected one of the most detailed results and quickly read down the page.

Hmm, ‘and the Earth shall fall’, Matt thought, remembering a scrap from some unknown ancient Arabic prophecy. The pretty waitress appeared beside him, balancing a huge plate on the tips of the fingers of one hand.

“The prince of tortillas… for a prince.” Color rose in her cheeks at the blatant flirting, and she slid the plate in front of him.

The quesadilla looked magnificent. Matt looked up at her and flashed his most charming smile. “Beautiful… and the quesadilla looks pretty good too.”

The waitresses face went a shade redder and she scampered away, looking back over her shoulder when she got to the kitchen door. Matt looked back down at the food, his mouth watering.

As he ate, he used one hand to find more results for recent sinkholes and was near overwhelmed with the hits — too many to count, and all over the world. Some had pictures — massive dark craters, in some cases hundreds of feet deep. There were a few from the Iowa hole — shots of a lonely house down deep in the darkness, and then a picture of the wall and the symbol. He leaned forward.

“Hello there, what are you?”

Matt knew hundreds of languages, and spoke most. He had studied dialects living and dead all his life, and he knew a communication symbol when he saw one. This picked at his deep memory, but still wouldn’t surface. He shook his head, and then read on. The final details almost obscured the geological impact — people were missing — dropped down into the holes and not recovered.

“Wow,” Matt said, whistling softly and then inserting another mouthful of quesadilla. What’s with that? he wondered. Can’t be recovered, as the sinkholes are still active, or something else? Hmm, those damned holes must be deep, he concluded.

And the earth really shall fall, he thought, frowning as he read on. The final pages of the paper surprised him — in the missing-pets section, there used to be maybe a single column of furry faces staring out. Instead there were endless appeals for Bitsy the black and white cat, Big Jim the Rottweiler or Sam the retriever — dozens and dozens, all gone missing.

Times sure have changed, he thought and tore out the sinkhole article and the images from the paper. Matt jumped as his phone buzzed in his pocket, and seeing the unknown number he contemplated letting it go to message. He shrugged — he wasn’t exactly pressed for time, so he stuck it to his ear.

“Hello?”

He listened for a few seconds and nodded. “I’ve been known to do consulting, but my rates are — ” His eyebrows shot up. “Wow, I mean, sure, I think I can make that. A day’s work sounds interesting and coincidently I was just reading about — Yes, I understand.” He hung up and snorted. Government loves spending other people’s money. Still, a day’s consultancy at those rates with all expenses paid would take care of his rent for the next week. Why not? he wondered and looked again at the strange symbol, straining to remember its implication — nothing came.

After a few seconds he had to look away. He took a bite of his quesadilla even though for some reason he felt a bit queasy.

Deputy Will Kramer walked the girl up her front steps, and then checked her house from top to bottom before she would let him leave. Her face was pale, which made the dark rings under her eyes all the more prominent.

After twenty minutes, he left her standing in the hallway, every light blazing in the house. He placed one of his police cards on the hall table, tapping it and asking her to call him if she remembered anything, or had any concerns. She never moved a muscle.

Kramer whistled air through compressed lips. She’d gone out for a date with her boyfriend, and something had scared them — a monster, she had called it. Now her boyfriend was missing, and she looked about a hair’s breadth away from running screaming down the street and all the way out of town.

He stood at the open door, and touched his hat. She still didn’t move, just stood with her shoulders slumped and hair forward over her face.

“Alison, I’ll call if we find out anything, okay?” There was the slightest hint of a nod. Kramer exhaled and shut the door.

Doesn’t look like any breakup I ever seen, he thought as he jumped back in his cruiser and eased away from the curb. He headed straight over to the missing man’s house. Mr Marc Rice lived right on Knob Hill Park at the end of Alpine Lane — ten minutes away.

Kramer slowed as he turned into the street. It was coming up to three in the morning, and it was tomb silent. He wound down the window as he pulled over exactly where Alison had told them she had seen her boyfriend for the last time, earlier in the evening. He switched off his car, and listened to the engine tick as it cooled — there was nothing else — no sound, no motion.

His eye caught movement and his neck wrenched as he swung around quickly. Several large fat cockroaches were heading single file along the gutter toward the park. They moved quick and with purpose. In a moment, they had entered the grassed area and vanished into the dark void.

“Good riddance,” he whispered.

Looking to the sidewalk, he saw that it still glistened from the spillage mentioned in the report. He grimaced as several cockroaches stopped at its edge, seemed to taste it, and then headed at top speed into the park. He pushed open the door, stepped out and stretched his back.

Kramer wrinkled his nose; the air stank of a strange fishy odor. “Phew, garbage day.”

He pulled his long black flashlight free and held it up in his fist. He then touched the button on the mic attached to his shoulder. “Sal, going to check out the park at Knob Hill. Over.”

“Okay, Will: stay in contact and take care,” the voice said in among the crush of electronic noise.

“You got it. Kramer out.” He swung the flashlight around. There was nothing but the foul odor. Stepping up onto the pavement, he saw that the black spillage marks had mostly dried, but still left a silvery snail trail that shone stickily in his beam.

“Nice.” He walked slowly toward the park, unconsciously placing his steps to avoid crushing leaves, roaches, or making any noise. He didn’t know why, but he had the urge to be as silent as humanly possible. He came to the park edge and its fringe of trees. For the most part the park was empty save for scrubby bushes and a huge rocky outcrop that gave the area its name. Normally this time of year it was dry and smelled of dust, and not much else.

Knob Hill Park wasn’t exactly a showpiece, like some of the national park areas closer to Bald Mountain that had willows, alders, cottonwoods, and sedges with Idaho fescue and bluebunch wheatgrass growing underneath. This was more an open space favored by dirt bike riders on weekends, much to the chagrin of the peace-loving residents nearby.

Kramer exhaled through pressed lips and shook his head. He doubted it would even be used for that any more, now that a huge sinkhole had opened up in its center. He walked out a few dozen feet, breathing through his mouth to avoid the sulfurous odors wafting over the dry ground. He panned his light slowly over the landscape.

“Jesus Christ.” He started, and felt his neck and scalp tingle from the shock. Someone was there. Still as a post, but around fifty feet further in, standing there in the dark. Kramer couldn’t tell if the guy was facing him or not. However, he looked big, bigger then him, and damned bulky. Marc Rice had been a little dude, according to his girl.

“That you, Clem?” Kramer squinted. “Trying to give me a heart attack here?” Big Clem Johnson was an ex-wrestler, six-eight easy, but this guy seemed even bigger.

Kramer reached down to unclip his gun while keeping the beam of his light on the figure. He advanced a half dozen feet. “Sir, you need a hand?” He waited, but the figure didn’t flinch.

He swore softly, and angled his head to touch the mic button on his shoulder. “Got someone in Knob Hill Park. Not responding to instructions.” He went to take another step, but felt his primitive core rebel. “Ah, Sal, are there any cars in the area you could send?”

“Will, is there a problem?” Her voice contained a hint of concern.

Kramer smiled. “No, no, just like to have some backup. This guy is no lightweight and isn’t talking.” He let go of the microphone, and stood a little straighter. Kramer, at six-two, was a fair-sized man, and broad across the shoulders. But he guessed he fell about a foot shy of this guy and was outweighed by a hundred pounds.

“Sir.” He drew his gun. In the entire time he had been in the force, he had only drawn it once, when a car chase dropped a load of out-of-town gang-bangers on their doorstep a few years back. Even then, he hadn’t needed to fire it.

He stopped his approach, and started to crab to the side, trying to see under what he assumed was a hood or shawl up over the guy’s head. He tried again with the light, but couldn’t see to pick out any definition — inside the hood, it just looked empty — and wet.

“Sir, you need to answer me. Sir.” Kramer swallowed, feeling the pulse of his heart in his chest and neck. He had advanced to within ten feet of the figure, and up closer he seemed even bigger than ever… Or is this guy actually getting bigger? he wondered. One thing was for sure, this was no resident.

Kramer resorted to breathing through his mouth as the smell up close was revolting, and he wondered whether the guy had shit himself. He took another step, but felt his stomach roil, from nerves. His feet were begging to challenge his commands, as if his body recognized danger that his brain was too dumb to notice.

Where the fuck is that backup? He ground his teeth.

Maybe a warning shot, he thought. He looked back briefly at the houses through the line of trees. Better not: he’d panic them. He turned back and saw that the thing had shifted, only slightly, but the bulkiness had… rearranged. Then an eye opened inside the hood — he was close enough to see in the beam of a park safety light that it was an amazing grey-blue. It blinked once, and then another opened beside it. Then, to Kramer’s horror, another eye opened — an inch above the first two.

“What the fuck?” Kramer lifted his gun in one hand like he’d been trained — gun up, and resting on the lower wrist of the flashlight hand with the light turned toward the target. He strained, working hard to stop the shaking in his limbs as more and more orbs popped open on the thing, and just as quickly bubbled back into the body. The slimy black was no cape or hood or suit: it was the thing. What freaked him the most was that he knew all the eyes saw him, looked at him, sized him up, and stared with interest. Soon other pustules and protuberances bulged and formed, and Kramer’s nerves gave out. He dragged one foot back a half step.

It was if that stumble was the trigger for the thing to explode into movement. It went from a roughly man-shaped column of blackness to a ragged tentacled monstrosity in a second — and in even less time it was a wave of goo enveloping him.

Kramer felt the thing cover his entire body, and every dot of his exposed skin felt compressed, hot and greasy, and then the pain came — it was like being bathed in battery acid. He still held his gun and fired and fired, over and over, the bullets punching holes in the dark flesh, but the holes quickly closed over. It made no difference to its hold on him.

In the last seconds of his consciousness, he felt himself lifted and something warm and wet worm its way into his mouth and force itself down his throat and into his stomach. He would have vomited if he could.

Alison’s monster, he thought as he felt himself being carried, and he knew exactly where — the sinkhole.

Chapter 4

Alfarouq skipped down the early-morning street. Dust puffed up as his battered shoes touched what remained of the sidewalk — broken roof tiles, decrepit cardboard boxes, smashed windows and miles of rubble littered the bloodstained concrete. The only real traffic was the occasional beat-up truck, and perhaps a cruising military vehicle on the lookout for snipers, insurgents or other slow-moving targets. Violence was now so common and enduring that ten-year-old ‘Fookie’ remembered little else.

Darayya City was one of the oldest in Syria, and home to over seventy-five thousand people. It was said it was where Paul the Apostle had his conversion to Christianity — on the road to Damascus, as the saying went. Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Druzes, all gone now: chased out. Fookie shrugged. Everyone would be gone soon, and then who would be left to fight? He thought about it, and then made up his mind — maybe a good thing.

Fookie picked up a metal rod and banged it on the ground, making a hollow clang that reverberated down the street, fading away to silence… almost. A single fat roach marched out from under a broken box, and he banged the steel rod down again, crushing it in half. “I’m boss here,” he said to its remains.

Lifting his head, he could just hear the faint sound of a radio playing somewhere, and he headed toward it, hoping some of his friends had woken and were gathering for another idle day on the streets.

He kicked at a soda bottle, sending it spinning down the road, and watched as it whirled to a stop. Something crashed into the ground beside it in a dark and wet explosion. Fookie frowned and took a few steps closer. Another thing struck the littered street further away, breaking glass, and sending a small billow of dust into the air. Then came another and another. One of the things flapped once, weakly, and then lay still. A blackbird, then, he guessed.

He approached one of the smashed birds and lifted his rod, ready to poke at it, but paused mid-reach as the street rumbled beneath him. Fookie looked up and saw a few windows open and heads stick out; scowling faces stared down at him, as though somehow he was the cause of the deep vibrations.

Fookie looked above their heads, then higher — the brightening sky was filled with circling birds — not all the same — some huge crows, some starlings, pigeons and tiny fast-moving sparrows that darted in among the tornado of feathers and fury. They took turns peeling off, and then dive-bombing the ground, committing suicide in some sort of strange attack on the Earth.

Another vibration, shallow this time, as though something was getting nearer. Fookie looked around, confused, and not a little frightened now. The ground jumped up and down, and mortar and tiles fell from roofs to explode on the already debris-littered street. As if a signal had been given, the remaining birds all started to dive at the ground, striking hard, dying instantly. They were silent missiles of flesh and feather; their fury was unbounded.

Fookie placed his hands up over his head and ran for a tattered awning as the birds continued to explode in red wetness around him.

“Crazy,” he screamed once under cover. He pointed his rod at the small bodies beginning to pile up in the street. “Crazy.”

He could hear alarms going off, and shouts of confusion and also of terror. Fookie thought it might be a good idea to retreat home for a while and looked up to check for more birds. The sky seemed empty so he ran hard — just as the ground gave a mighty heave. Right then, from out of every doorway, window, drain, and crack in the pavement, roaches streamed in long lines, falling over each other, excited, skittering and scattering, moving faster than anything Fookie had ever seen.

He screamed, but his voice was drowned out as a huge crack ran down the center of the road, unzipping to reveal blackness that was like a river of night opening at his feet. The roaches piled into it like lemmings on their suicide dive. A vile gas belched upward and then a jet of hot air that made the young boy gag as he ran. He held his nose, crying now. Fookie ran harder, in a wide-legged style, looking like a ragged sailor trying to keep his balance on the heaving deck of a ship at sea. He leaped over the crack that was widening from an inch to many feet in a blink. The ground on the other side fell a foot, then immediately rose about a dozen feet. Fookie tripped and fell forward onto his face. He lifted his head and looked back over his shoulder. The buildings, the street, the piles of dead birds, hung there momentarily, before dropping… and dropping and dropping. A deafening roar filled the air as though some giant beast was in its death throes.

Dust rose in sheets as the buildings slid downward. As Fookie stared, he had the impression of terrified faces pressed against windows that had been three stories in the air, but were sinking now into a void that continued to grow. There was a howling, perhaps of stone and steel being crushed, or was it the sound of a thousand voices collectively shrieking their horror?

Fookie’s nerve broke and he also screamed again, backing away crablike, as the ground continued to grind beneath him. He squeezed his eyes tight and covered his ears for many minutes until the ground stopped shaking. When he finally peeped from just one eye, there were settling clouds of dust, and a monstrous pit, bigger even than the Aarjess Soccer Stadium.

The entire block, Fookie’s block, had been swallowed.

Hussein ben Albadi, former Doctor of Anthropology at the University of Damascus, felt the pull of vertigo as he stood at the edge of the enormous crater or pit or whatever it was that had opened up in the earth. Even standing right at its edge, and seeing the massive emptiness before him, he found it hard to believe.

Thousands of people had been evacuated from the surrounding suburbs, but still there were hundreds of figures lining the rim: people who, like him, had come to gaze into the crater’s depths. Government forces, rebels, fanatics had all suspended hostilities to stand shoulder to shoulder with disbelieving neighbors.

Albadi crouched, as he didn’t trust his shaking legs so close to something that overwhelmed his senses. Looking down, where the light still allowed details to be seen, there was a cross section of the surface world, as if someone had sliced a child’s birthday cake, and the layers of icing, sponge and cream were all laid bare. Except here, it wasn’t sugar and sweets on display, but half basements with furniture stacked against walls, an underground car park with a single car left hanging precariously at the edge of nothingness, the other vehicles having been swallowed by the monstrous pit, and broken pipes, the water pouring from their severed ends turning to mist long before it disappeared into the darkness. Further down, and just before everything disappeared in darkness, he saw what was below human intrusion into the thin outer skin of our world. The soil here became bedrock. Whatever had occurred had pulled down buildings, streets, soil, and even hundreds of feet of solid stone.

Albadi couldn’t even guess at how far it went down but, like a few others at the edge, he had a small pair of field glasses that he used to peer into the depths. Once or twice he thought he saw movement but quickly discounted it as a trick of the near non-existent light against the dark and darker shadows.

A few hundred feet along, someone lit and dropped a red smoking flare into the depths. Some pulled back momentarily, fearful the dot of heat and light would ignite flammable gasses, but eventually curiosity won out, and they crept back to watch it drop lower and lower, until it became a flaring spark that finally landed, creating a small pool of hellish red light on the sunken architecture about a thousand feet below them.

Albadi exhaled and felt slightly dizzy. He perspired profusely, and didn’t feel well at all. Apart from the feeling of empathetic shock at the knowledge that hundreds of people were either dead or trapped down in the depths of the crater, there was something else — a feeling of unease and foreboding that made his gut roil. When he had read about the people going missing, and the holes opening up, he had been dreading this. Could it be true? he wondered.

He and a few other academics had taken it upon themselves to preserve the great literary history, the precious works in the ancient Damascan library, from terrorists and looters. Albadi and the other men and women had worked with a mix of speed and care as they packed up the ancient books, manuscripts and scrolls. However, there had been one discovery that had frozen him. Wrapped in an oilcloth, hidden from sight between two religious texts, it was just a copy of an earlier work, but still, from the first page, it had taken his breath away. Fanciful blasphemy, he had thought from the scraps he had been able to read.

But now? Albadi, still crouching, turned and threw up onto the ground. After a moment, he wiped his mouth with a sleeve and got to his feet, pushing quickly back through the crowd. The more distance he put between himself and the pit, the better he felt. It was strange: he didn’t see the crater as a geological oddity, but instead some evidence of infection, a canker on the face of the Earth from which an evil and pustulant scourge would soon burst forth.

The Book said this would happen. He needed to be home. The Book also said there was worse to come.

Chapter 5

General Henry Decker looked at the image on the wall screen, hands on his hips. Beside him, Major Joshua Abrams walked forward, holding up an arm and sweeping it across the picture.

“Two thousand feet wide, give or take. And goes straight down about a thousand. No survivors.” He turned to Decker. “This is in Syria. It’s bone dry, and only suffers sinkholes rarely in its lowland marsh areas.” He shook his head. “No reason for it, sir.”

“Just like in Iowa, and in Kansas, Montana, Utah, and…” Decker’s forehead creased. “Just how many other places now?”

“Five hundred confirmed significant sites… just in the USA. Over four thousand worldwide, and they’re getting bigger and deeper, as we can see from this monster.”

“Jesus Christ, this is not normal,” Decker said.

“Far from it, sir. Right across the States we suffer from sinkholes, but the things that make this series of events very abnormal are the size and depths, and the absence of ground water. In fact most of these are opening up in geologically very old and dry areas.”

Decker frowned. “Theories?”

Abrams shook his head. “Plenty, but none that make sense.” He brought up another image, this one of the Iowa hole, and also a shot of Andy Bennet. “This guy, a geologist, was first into the Iowa hole. He took several samples from the base. Seems to know what he’s doing. Results are yet to be confirmed, but the material recovered at the bottom of the pit was biological… primordial biological.”

“What the hell does that mean? Primordial as in some ancient animal? This isn’t getting any clearer, Josh.” Decker’s jaws worked.

Abrams exhaled and shrugged. “Yes and no. More like basic tissue matter, with a simple cell structure — protoplasmic almost.”

Abrams picked up a small remote and changed the screen image again. Next was a report, heavily redacted. “There’s more. Mr Bennet also wrote a report that is now in our hands.” The next image cleared away the blackout stripes over the words. “In it, he says the earth walls at the bottom of the sinkhole were spongy, but not as in damp. More like the soil was resolidifying, as though it had been made soft, not by water, but by some other means, and it was that which caused the house to drop.”

“I’m not liking the sound of this.” Decker stared evenly at the image. “We’re testing vibration weapons that can soften entire surface structures. Maybe someone else is trying out something similar on us.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so.” Abrams turned the page. “And this is where it gets weird. Bennet also recovered something from down in the pit — from within the wall actually — this sleeve.” He shrugged. “Unremarkable by itself, but it was in the wall, looked dragged in, as Bennet put it. We sequestered the sample and had our own labs analyze it — weird on top of weird. We did a DNA test with some epithelials on the material against one of Bill Anderson’s surviving relatives — we got an immediate hit and confirmed the shirt definitely belonged to our missing man.”

Abrams sat on the table’s edge, pulling at his lip for a moment. “We found something else on that sleeve, some fluid: not blood as Mr Bennet first wrote in his report, but something else — once again biological.”

Abrams reached over to enlarge the image of the ragged end of the sleeve. He sat staring for a few seconds.

The general leaned forward. “Well, go on.”

“Saliva… or something like saliva.” Abrams said slowly.

“Something like saliva, huh?” Decker groaned. “Major, can you please get to it? Was it saliva or not, and what the hell dribbled it onto the arm of our missing Mr Anderson — did they have a dog?”

“No.” Abrams exhaled, knowing his superior officer was already getting fed up with the unexplained phenomena — so was he, for that matter. “Okay, let me lay out what we got back from the labs — the substance is like saliva in that contains sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium chloride, bicarbonate, phosphate, and trace amounts of iodine, plus a truckload of amino acid chains all in a solution of mucopolysaccharides and glyco-pseudo proteins — mucus — exactly as in saliva.”

Decker folded his arms, his face hardening. Abrams continued, picking up the pace. “But the lab boys are stumped as the proteins don’t make sense. They’re biological, but biological straight out of a nightmare — could be mammal, could be reptile, could even be jellyfish with all the mismatch of DNA strands they’ve identified so far… And some don’t match anything in the global genetic libraries.”

“So we have no idea what left these weird traces behind?” Decker asked.

“Maybe we do. VELA picked up movement in a few of its last scans.” Abrams changed the image on the screen again. The new picture showed the massive Syrian sinkhole viewed from about ten thousand feet. He clicked through the images as the satellite drilled down further, and further, until the screen darkened as the VELA magnification dived into the heart of the pit.

“It’s what made us have another look.”

“Survivors?” Decker eyebrows were raised.

“That’s what we thought until we got the IT guys to clean up the images.” Abrams moved through a number of pictures, and the grainy darkness became sharper, more focused.

“Holy shit, what is that? A deformed bear?” Decker craned forward.

There were now three images, side by side, taken over a few seconds. In the first, something large and dark moved towards a human body. In the next, the thing was seen to be dragging the corpse by one leg toward the pit wall. In the final frame, it had vanished — seemingly into the dirt.

Abrams shook his head, eyes fixed on the screen. “We have no idea what that was. But according to the Syrians, who have now ventured into the sinkhole, there were no survivors. However, we have heard via informal channels that this isn’t the entire story: they assumed there were no survivors, because they didn’t find anyone down there — living or dead.”

“Jesus.” Decker exhaled. “So whatever that was, it wasn’t the only one.”

“No, we don’t think so,” Abrams said. “Not if we estimate how quickly the hundreds of bodies were removed.”

“Removed? To where?”

Abrams shrugged.

Decker turned back to the screen. “Well, whatever it was, it was below ground — thank god for that. We can at least contain it.”

Abrams shook his head. “Maybe, maybe not. We are starting to find traces of this substance above ground — in Arizona, Utah, Iowa, Idaho, Texas: the list goes on.” He looked up. “Something else…”

“Jesus Christ, there’s something else?”

“Pets, dogs, cats, local wildlife — they started to go missing just after these phenomena started. We thought that the animals, being sensitive, might have just hightailed it.” He exhaled. “But now people are also vanishing.” He called up more images. “And there are these… clues, hopefully.”

Decker leaned in to examine the images on the screen. “Is that… a language? Have we translated it?”

“We don’t know what it is. Our own experts say it could be a language, but none they know of — or at least none they know of existing today, or even in the recent past. But we haven’t yet consulted a few of the experts on ancient languages and symbolism.”

“Then do it. Someone is trying to tell us something — we need to know what it is.” Decker rubbed two gnarled hands through his hair. “Jesus Christ, Josh, I feel I know less now than when you started talking. We need to be on the front foot here — skip to what we’re doing about it.”

Abrams nodded. “The events, so far, seem random, unpredictable; so for the time, we should stick with what clues we have, and pursue them. The geologist, Bennet, reported the sleeve was in the wall, and that the walls were solidifying, like they had been soft. Maybe that’s how this thing occurred. The major activity is below ground; Bennet wanted to excavate.” He shrugged. “Maybe we should let him.”

“Yes.” Decker stared for a moment. “I need answers, and so far I feel we’re in the eye of a shit storm without an umbrella.” He half turned. “Have you got the media nailed down? Don’t need Joe Public banging on our door until we know what we’re dealing with.”

“We’ve got a lid on it for now, sir.” Abrams from his notes. “The majors from the television networks, radio and newspapers are all onboard. Also, the internet carriers — we needed to wave the National Security Act at them, but they’ll play ball. A few local news jockeys may try and run a story, but we’ve got counter-information ready to go.” Abrams half smiled. “For now, we own the data flow.”

Decker grunted. “Good man. Make it happen, Joshua.”

Abrams gathered his folders. “Already in motion, sir. I’ve dispatched one of my best people with a team of engineers down to Iowa. They’re going to pick up a languages expert on the way, rendezvous with Bennet and commence a subsurface excavation.” He turned to the screen, and the shredded blue-checked sleeve. “If there’s anything down there, we’ll find it.”

“Holy shit.” Matt eased the rental to the curb.

He pulled the scrap of paper from the dash and read the address again — this was it all right, but where he was expecting to see the hole in the ground where Bill and Margie Anderson’s house used to be, there was a huge inflated dome covering the entire site. Barriers were set up and two military men stood casually at the entrance.

He was due to meet up with some army guy, but had decided to swing by to look at the site first. He pushed open his door and stepped out. Down the road an SUV pulled in, and behind the wheel a big, older guy in a cap glared at him.

Matt nodded — the guy just kept glaring.

“Sheesh, welcome to Pleasantville.” Matt smiled and walked toward the barriers. He noticed the front flap of the dome billowing slightly and knew that meant negative air — a decontamination entrance. This was a big deal; something must have turned up in the sinkhole. He felt a prickle of apprehension on his neck.

Matt pushed aside one of the wooden barriers and flashed his friendliest smile at the closest guard. “Hi there.”

The man did little more than square his stance, but remained at ease. “Good morning, sir.”

Matt nodded. “I’m Matt Kearns, Professor Matt Kearns. I’m expected, well, not really, but I was sort of invited…”

“Sir, do you have an appointment?” The guy looked bored, but his eyes were stone chips in a granite-hard face.

“Yes and no; sort of. I was invited down, but not yet. Do you think I can speak to…?”

Suddenly, the entrance flap was thrown back and another soldier appeared — a woman. She looked briefly down at a clipboard, smiled and then stuck out a hand. “Professor Matthew Kearns; I’m glad you could make it.”

The two huge guards stepped aside like double doors being thrown open. Matt’s hand automatically came up to meet hers. “No problem. But I didn’t know I needed an appointment or that you were even here. What’s going on, and why are you guys, I mean the military, involved?”

“I’m so sorry, we’ve been trying to get hold of you, through your office, your home, text messages.” She shrugged.

Matt reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone — three new messages waiting for him. He read quickly, and then sighed. “Captain Kovitz? You’re the military guy?”

She nodded. “That’s me. But you can call me Tania. We’ve kinda been waiting for you. I work for the military’s Federal Archeology Division.”

Matt had never heard of a Federal Archeology Division, but he had always wondered how it was the army managed to turn up so quickly to Civil War sites to begin excavation. These guys obviously worked fast.

She smiled as he looked at her properly. The more he stared the more he liked what he saw — clear blue eyes and blond hair pulled back tight, with a spray of freckles across her nose. Even though she only seemed to be in her early thirties, about his age, she had lines around her mouth and eyes, signifying years of outdoor work.

“So, is there something of archeological value here?” He pointed to the dome. “And that looks like a contamination shroud.”

She continued smiling, not bothering to look over her shoulder. “It’s just to give us some space and privacy as we work. Remember, we haven’t yet found Mr and Mrs Anderson. If we do discover them, best not to have a news chopper broadcast it before we’ve had a chance to inform relatives.”

Sounds reasonable, he thought. “Or worry the neighbors, I guess. Makes sense.”

“Come on in.” She turned and nodded briefly to the two guards who came to attention as she passed.

She pushed the flap aside and held it open for him. Matt felt the rush of warm air bathe his face. There was the smell of something unfamiliar that nevertheless picked at his memory.

Inside, the plastic dome cast a white glow over everything. Matt saw that the sides of the enormous hole had been reinforced with ribs of some type of synthetic material, and a cage elevator stood open and waiting at its edge. On the far side, a small crane was anchored to the ground, and it was silently lowering more equipment to the sinkhole’s floor.

A young man, also roughly about his own age, leaned against a railing with arms folded. His eyes flicked to Matt, but then went directly to Tania. The guy didn’t look military.

“Matt, I’d like you to meet — ”

“Howdy.” He came forward and stuck out his hand. “Andy Bennet, geology, nice to meet you. You’re another archeologist, huh?”

Matt shook the hand. It was rough and callused, and he was sure his felt the exact opposite. “Nice to meet you too, Andy. I’m Matt Kearns, and I just work with old languages. Nothing as glamorous as archeology, I’m afraid.” Matt went to lean out over the railing, and saw that floodlights illuminated the depths. Several people wandered about around the sunken house in bulky suits.

“Don’t sell yourself short, Professor. You’re probably the best in your field — both of you are. It’s why you’re here,” Tania said joining him at the railing.

Matt whistled softly. “Wow, how long have all you guys been here?”

“About twelve hours; we got here last night.” She looked out over the space, pride on her features.

“And you archeologists always wear HAZMATs?” He turned and raised an eyebrow.

Tania shrugged. “Sure, if some brilliant young geologist by the name of Andrew Bennet has said there was a strange substance in the hole that might turn out to be toxic.” She briefly nodded to Andy, and then tilted her head. “I’ve already been down there, and look…” she patted her chest “…still hale and hearty. But military rule number one: better to be safe than sorry, right?”

There was a commotion behind them, and Tania turned momentarily to see one of the guards stick his head past the front flap. “Captain, his partner?”

“It’s okay, lieutenant, let him pass.” She turned to Andy. “Oops.”

Frank bustled in, looking red-faced and pissed off. “Goddamn army assho—” He saw Tania and his lips clamped shut. He smiled and half bowed. “Ma’am.” He turned to glare at Andy, then Matt, and then looked out over the work going on. “Holy shit… sorry.”

Tania introduced herself, but Frank couldn’t take his eyes off the work in the sinkhole. He took off his cap and wiped his brow. “Looks like someone’s been busy.”

“Federal Archeology Division,” Andy said, and jerked a thumb at Matt. “And a languages guy.”

Matt went to stick his hand out.

“Bullshit.” Frank waved the hand away. “Pardon my French, Captain. But I’ve been on sites where you guys have turned up, and at most you get some pencil-neck with a mobile ground-penetrating radar and a clipboard, and that’s about it.”

Tania held up her board and shrugged. “That makes me the pencil-neck, I guess.” She motioned to the work going on. “Gentlemen, we can cross a river, a deep gorge or burrow through a mountain if circumstances demand it… and we think they demand it here.” She turned back to Andy. “Mr Bennet, your report brought us here, that, and the hundreds of these holes opening up right across the country.” She stared down into the pit. “We’re looking for answers, and I think you are too. You said in your report you wanted to excavate.” She pointed to a rack of suits. “Put those on, gentlemen, and then let’s go excavate.”

Matt leant against the cage wall in the elevator and let his eyes wander over to the other occupants, which wasn’t easy to do with the HAZMAT suit’s hood over his head. Andy Bennet was pretty intense, but seemed professional. He noticed that the geologist rarely took his eyes from Tania, and guessed he was smitten.

He admired the guy’s fortitude. Matt had a problem with caves, though perhaps once, a long time ago, he could have descended by himself. But not any more. Andy’s partner, Frank, looked ready to explode, and that wasn’t just the from the ill-fitting suit. Matt grinned, and looked across to see Tania, ice cool and smiling back at him. He nodded in return.

Matt doubted that the glyphic writing Andy had discovered in the sinkhole had anything to do with the land drop, but as he had been only a few hours away, it was worth having him come and look them over. If they were anything like the image he had seen in the newspaper, he doubted he’d be able to help. But he was interested, and he still he got paid whether he could help or not — money for old rope, as his father used to say.

He noticed that Andy held tight to the railing in the five-man cage and listened to Tania deliver a continuous stream of information as they slowly descended. She explained the different machines, people involved, and what their overall expectations were based on his report. At one point she had Andy point out to them where exactly he had found his samples, her voice piped to all their suits via a two-way radio.

Matt pulled at his visor. Tania had explained that for now they would need to use what was termed a Level-A suit — the highest grade of protection against vapors, gases, mists, and particles. Even though it was warm outside, and he was encased in a single piece whole-body garment of thick, impermeable material, the suit contained a personal canister of breathable air that was ice-cool against his skin. Fresh air and air conditioning: bearable, he thought as he adjusted the hood again. Apart from this stupid visor. He held it in place for a second or two.

Matt had to swivel most of his upper body to look at the military woman. The full-face piece — a large curved sheet of clear material — was difficult to get used to, and allowed zero peripheral vision.

On the other side of Tania, Frank gripped the bar, hard. The older man’s large and overweight frame pushed at his suit front, and even behind the faceplate he was visibly flushed.

Matt nudged Andy, and motioned towards his colleague.

Andy turned and peered at Frank. “Okay there, big guy?”

Frank flashed him a look, and then nodded jerkily. He added a small salute.

The cage eased to a stop and Tania pushed open the gate. “Gentlemen.” They stepped out, and Tania shut the gate. “Follow me.”

She took the lead and they walked single file. The amount of light and activity created a show-room environment that made everything seem garish and movie-set-like. Still, Matt was thankful for the extra light as it mostly dispelled the sensation of foreboding he had experienced travelling down.

The four of them skirted other people in similar suits who were working in teams, either collecting the dead birds, scraping samples from door frames and window sills, or waving what looked like Geiger counters at different sections of the newly fortified walls.

“What killed the birds?” Andy asked.

Tania looked from the geologist to the men dragging the bags of feathered corpses. “The birds killed the birds — did it themselves. Just flew into the ground.” She stopped beside a stack of shovels and picks ranging from full ditch-digging size right down to gem-collector picks.

Andy picked up one of the tiny hammers and turned. “Where do we start?”

Mat snorted, liking the guy.

“Very funny.” Tania took it from him. “I didn’t know geologists had such sophisticated senses of humor.” She smiled and dropped the tiny tool back onto the pile. “And we can start wherever you say — you get to show us where you found the sleeve, and we’ll commence there. Further to your report, we’d also like your advice and commentary on what the consistency of the soil looks like as we excavate — any changes or anomalies.”

She swiveled to Matt. “And Professor Kearns here can give us his insights into the symbols.”

“So it was a language?” Andy asked, eyebrows raised behind the Perspex.

Matt shrugged. “Might be nothing more than a formation anomaly. Once I’ve seen the site, and also any evidence of other communication, I’ll be able to judge whether it was human in origin or not.”

“Excellent,” Tania said. “Are we good?”

Frank and Matt nodded, and Andy bowed, and held out an arm. “This way.”

Tania waved over a couple of men and motioned for them to bring the digging equipment. Andy approached a section of wall and leaned in close. “Here.”

Matt stepped up beside him.

“This is where the shirt sleeve was… and the carving or whatever it was.” He waved his arm over a wall now pocked with digging marks.

Matt reached out and touched it. It was quite solid. “You said it was soft?”

Andy reached out and stuck a finger in. “It was softer than this.” He turned and looked over their shoulders. “Can we…?”

Tania spun. “Turn that light over here.”

One of the halogen stands was swung around and they were lit up like stage actors. Andy backed up a step.

“Notice something strange, Frank?”

The older man folded his arms. “Yup; most of the surrounding strata down this far is Cambrian-age bedrock, some shale, and a little limestone for good measure. Most that is, except that section right there.” Frank pointed with a thumb to the ten-foot-wide area Andy had just been examining up close.

“Bingo. It’s hardening up now, but still not rock.” He held a hand out to Matt. “Stand back, Prof; real men at work.” He grabbed a medium-sized shovel and gently stuck it into the wall. He pushed and then levered free a bucket-sized clod, and used the shovel end to gently mash the soil flat. “Still soft, and not even rock fragments; it’s like there was a tunnel here that was filled in.” He looked back to the wall. “But nothing I know of could do it that completely without leaving a trace of the excavation work.” He turned to Tania. “Could you guys? The military, I mean.”

Her mouth turned down and she slowly shook her head. “We’ve got equipment and techniques that are powerful, fast, and adaptive, but not pretty. There’d be traces of any work done by a team like ours.”

“That’s what I thought.” Andy turned back to the wall. “Frank, give me a hand — let’s see where this rabbit hole leads.”

Matt watched as together the two men gently shoveled dirt from the section. Tania had her soldiers clear away the debris, piling it further along the cave. The piles grew as the hole became deeper; and after about fifteen minutes, the pair had dug about five feet into the wall. The going had been fairly easy due to the softness, but still, working in the thick suits must be hot and fatiguing.

Andy stopped. Frank was already leaning on his shovel, slightly bent over.

“Hot.” He wiped at his forehead, and then growled at not being able to reach the damp skin behind the faceplate. Matt could see that Frank’s face was once again very red and streaming with perspiration.

Tania obviously saw the same. “Shift change.” She pointed to the two young soldiers. “Jackson, Morris, take over, and easy as you go.” She turned to Andy but spoke to her men. “Mr Bennet here will supervise.”

Andy handed over his shovel, and the two men set to deepening the tunnel.

After a further twenty minutes, the lights behind them had to be re-angled to illuminate the hole’s depth. They had dug in close to twenty feet, the soldiers having made much better headway than the geologists.

Jackson dug in hard, and a slab of earth fell away. He called over his shoulder. “Got something.” He stepped aside.

Morris did the same, and Tania ordered them out so she, Frank, Andy and Matt could crowd in.

“Like what I saw before.” Andy traced the glyph with his hand.

Matt held up his flashlight, following the indentations over the whorls, dots and lines. “Well, it’s definitely not a fluke of geology.”

Andy blew air from his lips. “I could have told you that, genius.”

Matt shook his head. “It’s probably a picture language, or a talisman, but like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

“It looks a little like Sumerian,” Tania said as she crowded in close to him.

Matt hmm-hmmd as he reached out to touch the symbol. The pain was instantaneous and acute. There was a roar in his ears like that of a train approaching in the subway, and immediately he felt his gorge rise to the back of his throat, burning it with the acid from his belly.

He stepped back and coughed. As if a switch had been thrown, the pain, noise and other sensations vanished.

“Hey, you okay?” Tania grabbed at him, and stared hard into his visor.

“Whoa.” He shook his head. “Weird.” He blinked. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Must have…” He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He smiled at her and squeezed her arm. “Yeah, I’m okay.” He held up his hand and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together; the dirt was mushy between his fingers. “Sumerian, sure, it’s certainly old enough. I mean Sumerian or Egyptian got interesting around five thousand years ago, beating out Minoan and Chinese by like a thousand years. But there were languages long before that; it’s just that they didn’t survive in a written form.”

“Can you read it?” Andy asked.

Matt shook his head. “From one symbol? No way.”

“Hey, I’m glad we brought you.” Andy grinned.

Matt flipped him the bird, it not quite working in the suit’s bulky gloves. He turned. “Can you get a shot?”

“On it.” Tania lifted a small camera, and it flashed several times.

“There’s something else in here.” Andy nudged Matt aside, and lifted his flashlight. He tugged at something in the dirt, teasing it free. “Another shred of material.” He looked around and scoffed. “This far in? That’s freaking impossible.” He handed it to the military woman.

Tania lifted it up in the light. “More shirt.” She looked up. “We DNA-tested the previous sample you found — we confirmed it was definitely on Mr Anderson at some point.”

Frank snorted. “Well it isn’t now, and it didn’t get down here via sedimentation, percolation or even via some sort of drain — way too deep. That leaves it getting in there after the land fell into the sinkhole.”

“And that doesn’t make sense either.” Andy said. “But it’s in there, so let’s follow it.” He lifted his shovel. “The trail of cookie crumbs says: go this way.”

“Wait.” Matt held up his hand with Andy’s shovel poised over the symbol. He would have loved to take an imprint, but he knew it wasn’t possible in the time they had. “Ah, forget it.”

Andy dug in again. Both Frank and Andy excavated for another ten minutes, stopping now and then to pull more fragments free: more scraps of clothing; a woman’s shoe, split open; a wristwatch, still working; and what could have been a large clump of hair.

The soil now had the consistency of an underdone chocolate cake — soft, moist, but slimy moist. For the last few minutes the men had been scooping it away rather than digging, and the going had been easier.

“Jesus Christ.” Frank staggered back as a huge clod fell away and the glare of the light revealed the object. In the harsh illumination, the back of a human head came as a shock. There was thin gray hair, the tips of ears and just the hint of a blue checked collar showing.

“Holy shit; he’s stuck in there, goddamn it.” Frank coughed wetly in his suit.

Matt grimaced as he looked at the grisly thing.

Andy placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Hold it together, Frank. You don’t want to puke in that suit or you’ll be swimming in it until we leave.”

Captain Tania Kovitz stepped in close to the head. “Mr Bill Anderson, I presume. So there you are.” She held up her light, moving it to different angles, illuminating the gray-haired scalp.

Matt could see that inside her mask her eyes showed no fear, but were instead puzzled and curious. She looked briefly back and around at the tunnel they were in.

“We’re a good thirty feet in here,” she said.

While they had been digging, the soldiers had been installing support struts of the same strong synthetic material that lined the huge pit outside, more of them in close to where they were now, as the soil looked like it was liquefying once again.

She reached up with one gloved hand and touched the hair. She shook her head. “How the hell would this guy get blasted so far in?”

Andy just shook his head, apparently not able to speak. He looked baffled, and Frank’s pallor indicated he was indeed fighting against his lunch making a reappearance. Tania reached for the knife at her waist, and gently started to clear the soil away from one side of the head, bringing her face in real close. After a minute she slowed.

“What the hell…?” She dug a little on the other side of the embedded head, wiped and then sheathed her knife. She reached up again and took hold of Bill Anderson’s head, and tugged. There was a wet plop, and then the skull, or what was left of it, came free in her hand. Frank got even closer to losing it, retching loudly.

“Oh god.” Andy coughed and held a forearm uselessly up to the faceplate of his suit.

Matt grimaced at the thing she held. The skull wasn’t a skull at all: instead it was nothing more than a cranial cup, as the front half, the half with the facial features, along with the skull’s contents, was gone.

Tania stood looking down at it, her face hidden in the suit’s hood. “I don’t understand.” She held the flashlight up, illuminating the grisly cup — inside it was coated in black slime. “Did he get blown apart?” She looked from Matt to Andy.

Frank cleared his throat and took a few steps closer. He edged around Tania and to the wall. He placed a hand on the dirt where the skull came from. “So soft; strange. Maybe before, when the sinkhole started to fall, it was almost totally liquid, and Bill sort of… sank or floated in there. When it solidified, the geo-pressure tore him apart.” He shrugged. “We’re a long way down.”

Tania nodded slowly and looked back down at the remains of Bill Anderson in her hands. “I better bag this.” She walked past Andy and Matt, carefully carrying the skull fragment. Andy looked up at Frank, who nodded, and motioned for the two young men to follow her, before turning back to the wall. The two soldiers who were with them continued to remove debris, following them out with another couple of wheelbarrows full of soft soil.

Andy caught up to Tania and Matt. “That can happen.”

“Huh?” She looked bewildered.

“The soil… it can get liquid soft. If it was like liquid, he might have…”

“Really?” Matt waved an arm at the pit floor. “Look around, Andy.”

The geologist didn’t bother. “I know, I know, why isn’t everything else coated, or destroyed? Why is it only Bill and Margaret that have been…” he exhaled and shrugged “…I don’t know. Extracted?”

“He’s right,” Tania said. “Extracted, drawn in… and then pulled apart.” She called for a sample bag, and dropped the fragment in. Her face was creased with frustration. “Still doesn’t work for me, Mr Bennet. I was sent here for answers, and so far, I’ve got nothing.”

“Back to Mr Bennet now, is it? Hey, don’t get angry with me.” Andy straightened his visor. “Look, I agree there’s still a lot that doesn’t make sense, but at least we know what happened to the Andersons now.”

“No, we don’t. We know where bits of them ended up, and that’s about it,” she fired back.

“Okay, okay.” He held up his hands and straightened. “Tania, Captain Kovitz, I’m not sure we should go on. Getting dangerous in there. The soil is way too soft, and no matter how much we secure it, there’s a growing chance it’ll collapse on us.”

She turned, and after a few seconds nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll get this sample back to the lab.” She shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry, Andy. But my boss isn’t going to be happy. I’m not exactly bringing him back any real answers.” She raised an eyebrow at Matt. “None of us are.”

Matt shrugged. “I agree, we’ve done all we can today, we should…” There came a grunt from Frank, and Matt saw Andy quickly look over his shoulder to the excavated hole, from which the older guy hadn’t yet emerged.

“Frank, come on out, buddy, we’re done for the day. Let’s get out of here,” Andy called, even though the microphone in his suit would have carried the voice directly to his friend’s ear.

Andy turned back to Tania and smiled. “Friends?”

She smiled and nodded.

“Buy you a drink later? We can toss around some ideas.” He flashed her a winning smile.

Matt groaned and was delighted to see Tania shake her head. “Rain check — got to get back.”

More of Frank’s grunts came over the radio, followed by the sound of his suit material rumpling violently.

“What the…?” Andy frowned. “Frank?” He took a step toward the hole. “He can’t hear me.”

Tania grabbed his arm. “You’re talking directly into a two-way radio — he can’t not hear you.”

They heard more grunting and then what sounded like a sob. “Shit.” Andy raced to the hole, disappearing inside fast.

“Wait!” Tania yelled after him. “Soldiers, at arms.”

Matt followed Andy, as Tania waited for Jackson and Miller.

In a few seconds Matt caught up to Andy and slid to a halt. The man just stood there, as if in a daze. Matt came up beside him and saw his face was pale, and his mouth slack.

“What is it? What did you see?” Matt looked around. “Where…?”

The end of the tunnel was empty — Frank was gone. The section of wall where the remains of Bill Anderson had been found looked… disturbed, and glistened as if coated in oil or slime.

“It… took him.” Andy’s words were barely audible.

“Huh? What did?” Matt shook the geologist.

Andy suddenly put a hand to his head, over the microphone at his ear. He moaned. Matt knew why; they could all hear Frank’s voice, not words, but strangulated grunts, struggling and more of the god-awful sobbing.

“Oh god, he’s in there… in there.” Andy lifted a shovel and started furiously digging. “Get him out, get him out.”

“Stop!” Matt yelled.

Almost immediately the soil above them collapsed.

Andy Bennet sat in a corner of a bustling meeting room with his head in his hands, still not understanding what had happened to his long-time friend and colleague. One minute the big man was right there, and the next he had been in the wall. He sat back. In the freakin wall… but still alive, and sounding like he was being dragged away. How can that even happen?

It can’t, it’s impossible, he thought. And impossible is what everyone kept saying. But he’d been there, he’d seen it, the thing that grabbed Frank, held him tight, and then pulled him struggling into the dirt. It couldn’t have been real. He must have been in shock, delusional, that was it.

Andy crushed his eyes shut as Frank’s struggling, frightened voice continued to torment him. He remembered the fragment of skull belonging to Bill Anderson, and his friend’s screams took on a horrifying dimension. He tried to blank them out.

He sat back, feeling nauseated. In the cave-in, they’d lost Jackson, and Matt Kearns and Miller had needed to pull both him and Captain Tania Kovitz to safety. The official report was that both men, Jackson and Frank, had been lost in the collapse — much easer to understand — much easier to believe.

He groaned, not wanting to be here any more, and envied the professor. Matt Kearns had left, and he was here to try and clarify his geological findings, no matter how inexplicable they were.

Andy looked around the room: it was stuffed with military types. Tania had invited him to this meeting just twenty-four hours after losing his friend. He felt like shit, but he guessed that if there were answers to be had, he couldn’t possibly say no. Besides, he liked Tania… liked her a lot.

After he was introduced around the room, he had shaken plenty of hands, sat down, and took the offered coffee. No one sat with him, no one talked to him, and he was pretty much ignored. That suited him fine.

Andy studied the crowd as he sipped his coffee. Henry Decker, the general, was top dog. He was large, square and, though the years had turned slabs of muscle to padding, he still looked formidable and sharp.

Just along from him was Major Joshua Abrams in animated conversation with Captain Tania Kovitz. The tall man turned to stare back for a moment, before nodding and then continuing his briefing or argument with his officer.

He watched Tania for a while — she was like a magnificent jewel among granite cliffs. Looking at her calmed him. Her brow furrowed as she spoke; she was obviously not happy with something the tall officer was saying.

General Decker clapped his hands once. “Major.”

Abrams crossed to an open computer on the long table. Andy dragged his chair over to it and began to tap at the keyboard. The far wall lit up behind them, and the room quieted. There was a map of North America, covered in red spots — continental measles, Andy thought. He quickly recognized that many of the dots corresponded to sinkholes he was familiar with. The first thing that struck him was the number — hundreds — and a lot of hundreds at that. The second thing that struck him was that the sizes of the red dots varied.

“Too damned many,” Decker said his jaw jutting. He turned to Abrams. “Do you have a time plot?”

Abrams tapped at the keys again. The screen went blank, and then a clean map of the USA was displayed. Another tap and dozens of small red dots appeared.

“One month ago,” he said, and then pressed another key. The map became more crowded with dots that were twice as big.

“This is two weeks ago.” Once more Abrams changed the graphic. This time they came back to the final screen; the dots were twice as big again. “And now we see where we are today.”

“Exponential growth,” Tania said. “As time progresses, the sinkholes increase in size and in depth.” She stepped a little closer to the screen. “And as Mr Bennet has informed us, the ground, the subsurface, the entire geology of the areas varies little between most of these sites.”

“You know, when we test drill a new geology, we use a small-bore drill — call it a string,” Andy said. “Once we’re happy with it, we use bigger drill kits. Thing is, we start small until we know what we’re dealing with or we get better at it. That’s what this thing looks like to me — the first ones were trials.” Everyone turned to him. “And whatever is doing them is getting better at it.”

The silence stretched.

“Whatever is doing them.” General Decker paced toward him. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? What the hell is doing them?” He folded his arms, scanning the room. “Anyone?” He waited. He lifted his hands. “Well, come on, people: thoughts, ideas, theories, anything? You’re supposed to be my best and brightest. That’s why you’re all here, goddamnit.”

“Anyone know what an ant lion is?” Andy looked around the room at the blank faces. “It’s a little critter, a bug, with massive jaws, that creates a pit in the soil, and lies at the bottom of it. What makes its trap unique is that the ant lion softens the soil so that any ants unfortunate enough to fall into the pit can’t climb back out. They get grabbed by those massive jaws, and are pulled below the ground, where they’re torn apart and eaten alive.” Andy sat back feeling drained as he worked at trying to shut out his friend’s screams — pulled apart and eaten alive. He knew he’d never really be able to shut them out.

Decker stared at him. Andy stared back. “Bugs.” Decker looked from Abrams to Tania. “Well, Captain, is that what you’re telling me you think it is? Bugs?”

“No sir,” Tania said. “We’re still analyzing the samples we found, but we’re not ready to suggest any basis for the sinkholes or the other anomalies just yet.” She shot Andy a warning glance.

Andy shook his head. “I didn’t say it was bugs, I’m just saying that something weird is going on down there, and something did pull my friend into the hole — right into the freaking rock and soil, damnit.” Andy was on his feet leaning on his knuckles and trying hard to rein in his frustration.

“The birds.” He looked up. “Birds… Are there dead birds at all the sites? Suiciding?”

“Yes.” Abrams said. “All of them… And that’s another mystery. We’re actually using the birds as an indicator now. The ground seismic sensors are useless at predicting these things. There’s no initial disturbance, and even during an occurrence, there is little vibration. But hours before an event, the birds gather overhead, and then just minutes prior to the land dropping, they simply fall out of the sky.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but no, they don’t fall… They dive bomb the site,” Tania said quickly. “As Mr Bennet said — they suicide.” Tania moved to the computer. “And that’s not all.” She called up another image of birds circling an area over water, and then in the next image, they were seen flying straight into it. “These are not sea birds, and they are drowning themselves. We’ve sent down divers and mini-subs where this happened, and we saw evidence of seafloor drop. It’s happening on both land and at sea, and, once again, no vibration.” She turned to Andy. “They couldn’t possibly see it, but they knew.”

The seconds stretched, and everyone in the room continued to stare at the image of the birds. Decker broke the silence. “How? How do they know?”

Andy cleared his throat. “Well, they have senses we don’t. Birds can detect a magnetic field, that’s how they migrate long distances even when there are no landmarks.”

“Is this something you’ve come across before?” Decker asked.

“In my fieldwork, I’ve come across highly magnetized soil deposits… and they can certainly throw off sensitive equipment. If it was more powerful, then it might just be creating some sort of magnetic field disturbance that affects the birds.”

Decker nodded. “Go on.”

“Well—”

“I’m not sure,” Tania cut in. “Look at the ocean shot again.”

All eyes turned to the screen. Tania flicked between surface and underwater shots.

After a few moments, Decker shook his head. “I don’t see anything else.”

“That’s right. I don’t either — where are the sharks and rays? These creatures have a highly developed sense of magnetic determination as well. If some sort of magnetic anomaly is strong enough to get the birds’ attention from the sky, then it should be an irresistible force for cartilaginous creatures below the surface.”

Decker grunted. “Yep.” He inhaled and exhaled slowly through his nose. “So, maybe not magnetic, and here we are, back at square one.”

“Maybe not,” Abrams said. “Captain, take us back to the time line, second to last.”

“Yes sir.” Tania called back up the second-to-last dot image of the country.

“Thank you, excuse me.” He took over, shrinking the image slightly and then calling up a page that had been scanned in. It too was a map of the North America, and red dots had been hand-drawn on it.

“We’ve been fielding a lot of calls from the concerned public, and theories that ranged from alien crop circles, mole-men, and death cults, to, well, you name it and we’ve been sent it. To date, the cover story for all the phenomena — the bird migrations, bad smells, and the sinkholes, is that they are all related to weather pattern changes due to climate change. It’s holding so far, but for how long is anybody’s guess.”

Tania motioned to the screen. “But then this came in. Notice where they positioned their red dots… and then.” He called up the final dot position of the country. Every dot hand-drawn on the map corresponded to an actual sinkhole location.

“As I said, this was sent before they occurred.” He leaned back and folded his arms. “Last week it meant nothing — this week, it is the most compelling lead we’ve seen.” He looked across to the general. “Someone has reached out to us… from Syria.”

“Jesus Christ. Is it a friendly, or are they doing this as a warning?” Decker ran a hand up through his hair.

“They’re a friendly, we think. Doctor Hussein ben Albadi — an academic — he checks out. He says the sinkholes are all part of some ancient prophecy. He also sent this…”

Abrams called up an image of a symbol. He paired it with the ones Tania had taken in the Iowa sinkhole: they were almost identical.

“Yep, we got a pattern emerging here,” Decker said.

Abrams nodded. “Albadi says he’s got further proof and an explanation about what’s happening now… and what’s about to happen.”

The general turned slowly. “And exactly what is about to happen?”

Abrams smiled flatly. “The end of the world, of course.” He then spoke softly. “Seems that to fully understand the prophecy, it needs to be read in its original language. Also there’re some vital components that need to be obtained; he can’t get to them, but he thinks we can.”

“This might be the break we’re looking for.” Decker looked back at the screen. “You’re my science officer, Joshua; get a team together, whatever you need, whatever it takes, make it happen. We are about one more sinkhole away from a damned national, no international panic.”

Matt Kearns walked quickly down Cambridge Street, turned at Fifth, and then again into Thorndike. His apartment was a top floor of a weatherboard building — it had seen better days, but the street was leafy, he could walk to work, and it was well within his budget. Once he knew for sure he had a position at Harvard, he could decide then whether he would kick it up a level.

Besides, he thought, since his relationship with Megan had gone down the tubes he didn’t need to feather a nest for someone else’s tastes anymore. Spartan was good, in fact: just a TV, bed and refrigerator was fine as far as was he was concerned.

He opened the downstairs door, waved to Mrs Styles who always seemed to be lurking just inside, and climbed the dozen stairs up to his apartment. Inside he looked around. Spartan is good, but lonely, he thought glumly, missing Megan. Matt suddenly remembered the waitress from a few days back, and her smile. We’ll have to do something about that — best cure for heartache, he thought, cheering himself.

He dropped his satchel, went to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer, twisting the top off, and then sinking into a battered brown leather armchair. He sipped, enjoying the coolness of the leather against his back after the warm afternoon walk. He had nothing on so could relax and decide later whether to go out for a few drinks or order in and then coach-potato it for the evening.

He drifted back to the job in Iowa, and how the cave had collapsed, killing the soldier. They’d nearly all been killed — they’d got lucky. But he knew sooner or later his own luck would run out. He shivered despite the warmth — the sound of the old geologist somehow trapped in the dirt wall still haunted him. He’d experienced some weird things in his time, and this ranked right up there.

Captain Tania Kovitz had invited him to a debrief with her superiors, but he had declined. The money had been good, but he was glad it had been a short job. He gulped a mouthful of beer, groaning as his phone trilled. He pulled it from his pocket, and glanced down — the caller’s number was unknown. His finger hovered over the cancel button for a second or two, but then, bored, he lifted it to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Matthew Kearns?” The voice was rich, deep and cultured.

“Yes. Who’s speaking?” Matt asked, sipping again and waiting for the sales pitch.

“Edward Mercer.”

Matt sat forward, almost spraying beer across his room. Edward Mercer was the president of Harvard. Before he could even think about it, Matt was on his feet and smiling. He probably should even be saluting. “President Mercer, sir.”

This has got to be good news, he thought, his heart starting to race. During his interviews he had meet with several of the senior faculty members and the executive team, but not the president. The man wouldn’t call just to give him the kiss off — he’d leave that to one of the plebs. He went to sip his beer again, but instead put it down and walked to the window.

“What can I do for you, sir?” Joyful expectation welled up in his chest. He wiped his hand on his trousers.

“Matthew, do you know what Harvard requires?”

“Sure.” An easy one, thought Matt. “Veritas, or better said in the original and full Harvard motto: veritas, christo et ecclesiae — the Truth for Christ and the Church. Harvard requires the truth above all.” He smiled. Nailed it — next question?

“Yes, that’s the motto. But that is not the major requirement of a modern university the size of Harvard. That is not the lifeblood that nourishes it, and us.”

Oh-oh, he thought. Trick question: bummer. Matt sat down and reached for his beer. He tried again. “Good teaching staff?”

“Matthew, also correct, but sitting above them all is the most important substance to a modern teaching entity.” He paused. “Money, Matthew; it’s money. With it, we flourish, without it, we shrivel and die.”

“Money, of course. I was going to say that, but, you know.” Matt rolled his eyes and sipped.

“I knew you were,” Mercer said. “Last federal budget, the government allocated eighty billion dollars to health research and development. We need to ensure that a large portion of that funding heads toward our own department’s work right here. The more we get, the better it is for our… students. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes sir, I do. It’s vitally important for our students.” And for a late-model AMG Mercedes pulled up in the faculty parking bay, he thought and toasted the air.

“And as Harvard educators, we should do everything in our power to keep that lifeblood flowing, right?” Mercer said smoothly.

“Couldn’t agree more, sir.”

“Good, very good, because you can help. There is one reality, I’m afraid; the fact is, there is not really an opening at Harvard right now.”

Matt’s stomach sank.

Mercer went on. “And I’m sorry to be commercially brutal, but it seems you need us more than we need you right now. You’re a talented individual, but there are plenty of those who would kill for a professorship at Harvard.” He let that thought hang.

“Hm-hmm.” Matt sipped again, feeling his opportunity slipping away. He’d try really hard not to burn any bridges by telling Edward Mercer what he thought of him, and the lucre-green lifeblood running through his withered old veins.

“Matthew, people who succeed in life take chances, seize opportunities and make things happen themselves,” Mercer said with building enthusiasm.

Matt waited.

The Harvard president continued. “And an opportunity has arisen. One that if seized could put you in the box seat for a full tenure, with all privileges and seniority restored. Straight back into the high-ranking fold, as it were. How does that sound?”

“Sounds like you’ve got my attention, President Mercer.”

“I knew you’d be interested. Your file said you were a go-getter,” Mercer said, the words clearly delivered through a smile. “There’s a little fieldwork that needs to be done. Basic translation stuff, simple as that — Middle Eastern languages, ancient Greek, Latin, various other vocabularies and dialects… right up your expertise alley, I would say.”

Matt shrugged. “Sounds straightforward; where’s the fieldwork site?”

“Syria,” Mercer said quickly.

“Syria?” Matt frowned. “Uh, bit of a war zone, right now isn’t it?”

“Won’t be a problem. It’s away from all the major cities and the fighting — more out in the leafy suburbs. Matthew, this is urgent and important… especially for you. There’s a plane leaving for Aleppo tomorrow morning. You’ll be met by Captain Tania Kovitz, an archeologist, and will be introduced to the rest of the small team. You’ll also have a military escort, so you’ll be as safe as can be.”

“Tania Kovitz? I know her.” Matt sighed, feeling a knot starting in his stomach. “How long is it for?”

“In and out; probably only a few days.”

Matt nodded. “And I’m guessing, seeing as this fieldwork will allow Harvard to improve its portion of the R&D budget allocation, that it must be a government job… military.”

“Professor Kearns, Matthew.” Matt could hear the confidence in the president’s voice — the man obviously knew he was now hooked, and that it was time to reel him in. “All of that is way above my pay grade. There are people who are much better informed than me, just waiting to answer any and all questions you may have.”

“On the plane,” Matt said.

“Yes, on the plane.” Mercer sounded like he had gotten to his feet. “Well, seems you’re a man in demand; they requested you personally. Apparently you’re on their books.”

Matt slumped in his leather chair. He groaned. “I’m on the books,” he repeated softly. “Sir, I’m not…”

“Please call me Edward.”

“Edward, I’m not sure I want to get involved in any more government projects right now.”

“Nonsense — a few days, a week at most, and then next thing you know, you’ll be guiding young minds through the intricacies and beauty of ancient languages. Just as you were famed for doing in these halls of Harvard. You’ll make a fine addition, and I personally can’t wait to have you back in the fold… with us.”

“If I help?” Matt said, weakly.

“If you help, yes, Matthew. It’s a small thing and you can consider it part of the interview process,” Mercer said, hurrying him now.

“No jungles or caves, right?” Matt held his breath.

“Not that I know of, Matthew. Straight translation work — in and out in little more than a day or so, I expect,” Mercer added, sounding bored now.

Matt sighed and closed his eyes. He drained his beer. “Okay, what are the flight details?”

Chapter 6

The dark blue car eased to a stop and the door pushed open. Matt swiveled his legs out of the passenger side and dropped his bag on the ground, whistling as he looked up at the massive aircraft on the runway.

Beside him the driver leaned forward on the wheel and followed his gaze.

“Yep, she’s a big baby — C17 Globemaster III. That beautiful girl can lift well over half a million pounds of payload at a cruise speed of just under Mach 1.”

“Wow.” Matt turned. “Just how many of us will be onboard?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

The driver grinned. “Well, that there is one of our strategic airlift transports and can take one hundred and thirty fully kitted out troops.” His grin widened. “Or six VIPs, you being one of them.” He winked and then gave a small salute as Matt stepped out and closed the door.

The driver called, “Enjoy your holiday, sir.” He spun the wheel and the dark sedan accelerated away.

“Holiday, huh?” Matt picked up his pack, and headed toward the huge aircraft. The ramp was down at the rear, but the interior was nothing but a black hole at this distance. When he was still a hundred feet away, a figure half appeared at a tiny side door, spotted him, and came down the metal foldout steps quickly. She jogged to him, smiling, hand stuck out from twenty feet away.

“We meet again.” He grabbed her hand and shook it. “Hey, it wasn’t you that had anything to do with me being here, was it?”

She smiled wholesomely and disarmed him immediately. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for academics with charm and boyish good looks. Come on.” She turned and headed back to the plane.

“So, Syria, huh?” he asked, looking up and up at the enormous aircraft.

She nodded. “Now you’re here, we’ll do introductions, and then a formal briefing when we’re under way.”

“I’m the last?” Matt’s feet clanged on the incongruously flimsy metal steps.

“Yep, last but not least.” Tania stopped just inside, and held out an arm directed past the cockpit to the rear of the plane.

Hollow, was Matt’s first impression. Inside the metal skin of the aircraft, the slightly oval shape was enormous at nearly seventy feet in length, about twelve high and eighteen wide. But it was nearly empty. There were just six chairs — two by two in three rows, each fixed to the middle of the craft. There was a small bench-type structure in front of each — a small island for work and rest in a gigantic echo chamber.

A tall man stood at the front: mid forties, looking fit and only slightly army. However, either side of him there were two sharp-eyed military guys who looked tough enough to break boards with their hands and heads. Matt recognized the type — Special Forces. He also recognized the geologist Andy Bennet from the sinkhole at Iowa, and waved.

The tall man raised his hand. “Now, I can say: Good morning, everyone.” He smiled broadly. “Firstly, I’d like to welcome Professor Matthew Kearns and welcome back Chief Geologist Andrew Bennet, and thank both of them for joining us at such short notice. Matt, Andy, my name is Major Joshua Abrams. I am the chief science officer for US STRATCOM, and I’ll be the mission leader on this little trip.”

Andy stuck up his hand, but Abrams shook his head. “Later. You’ve both met Captain Tania Kovitz, our senior archeologist. And these two big guys either side of me here are lieutenants Lester Hartogg and Rick Berry. They will be our support officers.”

On face value, both of the huge men simply looked bored, but their eyes were alert. It’s always the eyes, Matt thought. They were the giveaway of a killer. Berry’s were dark and pitiless. Hartogg’s were ice blue, set in a ruddy face with red hair and stubble — he would have made a good Viking. The men’s flat-eyed stares spoke of the more brutal aspects of combat — receiving and, undoubtedly, delivering.

Matt exhaled slowly. If they needed soldiers of this caliber, then Mercer’s “straight translation work — in and out in a day” talk might not have been the whole truth.

“That’s all we need to do for now. The distance to Aleppo in Syria is five thousand four hundred and seventy miles, and should take us just on fourteen hours. I’m sure that’ll give us plenty of time to get to know each other real good. After we take off and then have leveled out, there will be a formal briefing. Until then…” Abrams gave them a small informal salute before looking over their heads to the cockpit. Matt spun in time to see the pilots close the cabin door. Almost immediately, there was an electronic whine and the huge metal tongue of a rear ramp began to lift. At the same time, the smooth sound of the Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines came to life.

Matt turned back and saw Tania Kovitz looking at him, so he smiled and nodded. She returned the gesture. Maybe the trip might not be so bad after all, he thought. Next he leaned forward and saluted Andy. The geologist gave him a lopsided grin: he seemed to have recovered from being near buried alive. It was the first time he’d gotten a good look at the guy, what with them having spent most of their last encounter in HAZMAT suits. Andy looked only slightly older than he was, and had short sandy hair and a tan line that stopped halfway up his forehead — Matt had seen them before on guys that wore hardhats in the field.

They took their seats, Abrams and Hartogg in the front row, then Tania and Berry, followed by him and Andy in the rear two. Matt gritted his teeth as the huge machine rumbled down the runway and lifted into the air. It seemed no time at all before his ears had popped and Abrams was unbuckling and getting to his feet.

The major stood, his expression more formal, in one hand a slim electronic tablet. Now that they were sealed in and on their way to about twenty-eight thousand feet, he knew there was no backing out. He held his arms out wide.

“Our mission is one of many. In a way we are an exploratory team investigating the sinkhole occurrences happening across the world. To date, there have been a thousand significant earth-drop events across the United States, and globally the number is twenty times that… that we know of. We now know there are holes opening up below the ocean, so at greater depths, beyond our scopes, there could be many, many more.”

“Thousands?” Matt frowned.

Andy nodded. “Yep, and earth-drop is probably a better description than sinkhole for what’s going on. A sinkhole usually implies subsurface water — none of these have had that cause. Instead, the earth simply drops away without any discernible geological influence. It’s weird.”

Abrams smiled grimly. “Andy is right.” He paced. “He was also the first geologist on site in Iowa for what we’re calling the genesis event. Although there could have been smaller ones earlier, this was the first one where we managed to obtain samples — all of which still defy explanation. Bottom line is, we’re stumped as to what’s causing these events, as is almost everyone else.”

“Almost?” Matt asked.

“Almost.” Abrams nodded, giving him a grim smile. “And that brings us to our mission. Seems we have someone in Aleppo, Syria, who believes he knows what it is we’re dealing with. He anticipated the recent earth-drop events — every single one of them — and so proved he is the real deal. We know because… well, let’s just say he sent us a calling card.”

“Come on, Major, no need to be coy. I’m here now, locked in with the rest of you.” Matt held out his hands. “What exactly was this calling card?”

Abrams half smiled, and then nodded. “Okay.” He lifted the tablet, and flicked his hand across the screen several times, looked at the image he’d called up, and then handed it to Matt.

It showed a map of North America, crisscrossed with something that looked like veins running over the countryside. The veins intersected at certain points, some small, some large. Red dots of different sizes were at the intersection points.

“That is the calling card.” Abrams’s face had became serious. “The sinkholes identified… before they occurred.”

Matt snorted softly. “Ley lines.”

“What?” Abrams frowned.

Andy slapped his leg. “Of course, ley lines; I thought I recognized them. We come across references to these all the time in unexplained geological phenomena. They’re a joke.” His grin fell away at the look on Matt’s face. “Aren’t they?”

“What’s a ley line?” Abrams asked.

“A metaphysical reference,” Matt said. “There was an English archaeologist named Alfred Watkins, who in 1921 identified a sort of connection between alignments of ancient monuments and megaliths, natural ridge-tops and water-fords. They are also supposed to have been influenced by the sun, moon and other astral bodies.”

Matt looked down at the image again. “Watkins’s work was influenced by an even earlier paper by William Henry Black given to the British Archaeological Association in 1870. Black speculated that there were spiritual geometrical lines which covered the entire world.”

“Spiritual?” Abrams shook his head. “What we’re dealing with is definitely not spiritual.”

“I agree.” Matt shrugged and handed back the tablet. “But that’s what the lines represent.” He looked at his colleagues, and his brow creased. “Okay, I understand why Andy is here, and Captain Kovitz, and also Berry and Hartogg, but why am I here? It can’t be just because you need some Syrian translated. There are thousands of American Syrian speakers, some of them already in the military, so I’m assuming it must be something a little more complex.”

Abrams paced for a moment, as if thinking through his answer. “Our contact has alluded to a document, a manuscript or a book or something written in different ancient Arabic scripts. We don’t know what it is at this point in time, and he wouldn’t tell us.”

“Arabic?” Matt shook his head. “Are you sure? ‘Arabic’ includes numerous dialects and type-forms across a huge territory, stretching across the Middle East and down through much of Africa.” He pushed his hair back. “In Syria, I think we’re more likely to be looking at Syriac. That’s a Middle Aramaic language, written in the Syriac alphabet. It was spoken for centuries, but it wasn’t a literary language until around the fourth century.”

Abrams opened his arms. “You see; you’re already of value.”

“No, no, no. I know when someone’s blowing smoke. Any first-year languages student could have told you that. One more time: why am I here, Major?”

Abrams grunted. “Professor Kearns, I could not begin to form a satisfactory explanation for you at this point. You’ve seen the symbols we have been encountering in the sinkholes — Doctor Albadi has similar glyphic representations. He also said there would be critical translation work, and we needed to bring someone expert in numerous Middle Eastern dialects… and some older languages.” He held up a hand. “I don’t know which yet, but our new friend said some of the languages would be… challenging. He also said that our specialist needs to have an open mind. I’m loath to embark on speculation without something a little more concrete.”

He looked from Matt to Andy. “So, in a nutshell: we are going to meet Hussein ben Albadi, a doctor of anthropology formerly of the University of Damascus. He now resides in a small town on the outskirts of Aleppo. He has some compelling information for us — and I believe he has something worth seeing and listening to. Something that is critical to our survival.” He took a breath. “We need to hear it first hand — all of us.”

Chapter 7

Yellow dust and broken brick, peeling paint and miles of ochre roadway: these were the impressions Matt got as they sped away from the airport. The battered minivan continued past the city center, heading west, fast.

Their plane had immediately dusted off, not even waiting for a refuel — armed men in jeeps had chased it down the runway. It would take on more fuel in Israel, and then continue home. The airport was too unstable for it to stay, and the team knew that getting back stateside would mean they’d need to travel by another route. The expedition’s return plan now was for them to make it across Turkish border — A few days, my ass, Matt thought. Lucky he didn’t have any houseplants.

Matt leaned forward to the driver and spoke in rapid Syrian; he grunted, nodded and then spoke out of the side of his mouth, keeping his eyes on the partly obliterated road and the groups of sullen-looking men patrolling the streets.

“Shou-Kran.” Matt wedged himself back in between Andy and the SEAL Rick Berry, who took up most of the seat, and, like Hartogg in front, never took his eyes off the streetscape.

“Bashnatrah,” Matt said, and half turned to Abrams and Tania seated behind him.

“That’s right: Bashnatrah,” Abrams said, also keeping a close watch on the passing street.

“It lies on an ancient merchant caravan route between Aleppo and the Mediterranean. Mostly cultivated farming land, and one of the few towns as yet untouched by the civil war. It’s where we’ll find the summer place of our contact.”

“Doctor Hussein ben Albadi,” Matt said.

“Ah… he is honorable, good man,” the driver said over his shoulder.

“An honorable man.” Abrams nodded. “Good.”

Once past the city perimeter, the driver became a little more relaxed — there was less debris, fewer bands of watchful soldiers or rebels — but still the SEALS kept their weapons ready.

“Slow down,” Hartogg said.

The driver turned and frowned at him, but shrugged and then eased back a little. Andy looked out at the near empty landscape, seeing nothing. “Expecting trouble?” he asked.

“Always,” Berry said from next to Matt.

“IEDs,” Abrams said from behind them.

“Great,” Matt whispered. Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, were one of the deadliest creations of modern Middle Eastern warfare. They’d started as little more than buried mines, but as those taking defensive measures became better able to deal with the simple explosives, then so too did the bomb builders adapt. The IEDs became more sophisticated, making use of professional concealment techniques, armor-piercing shells, remote or automatic detonations and pressure or motion detection. The big ones could easily take out an armored troop carrier. Matt gripped the seat back. To a flimsy minivan, they’d spell total obliteration.

“Not Syrian.” The driver slowed even more. He turned, his face furious. “No Syrian would make this type of war.”

Abrams leaned forward to look past Matt and Berry through the windscreen. “That’s the problem — a lot of militias now, crime gangs, and foreign fighters who hate everything and everyone.”

“Al-Qaida, ISIL,” the driver said. “Cut off heads.”

Andy snorted. “Did I thank you for inviting me yet?”

Tania leaned forward to pat Matt and Andy’s shoulders. “Don’t worry boys, stay close and I’ll protect you.”

In another hour they began to see more green and less yellow, and soon they pulled into a large property. Stout metal gates swung open, and, after the ochers of the trip, the magnificent green oasis was a welcome sight. As the van coughed to a halt on crunching gravel, a small, round man appeared on the front porch and raised his hands.

“Welcome, welcome.”

“Hold.” Berry and Hartogg were first to alight, taking up positions each side of the van, their eyes moving over everything.

After a few minutes, Hartogg nodded to Abrams — the major stepped out. “Doctor ben Albadi?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, I am ben Albadi. Call me Hussein, please. Welcome.” He came down the few steps, and shook hands, clasped shoulders and grabbed elbows as introductions were made.

Matt heard the van start up its engine, and he turned to see the driver mouth “Good luck” in Syrian before accelerating hard toward the gate.

“Hey!” Matt took a step but the van picked up even more speed, turning hard on the gravel.

“Sonofabitch.” Tania started to chase it, but Albadi yelled after her.

“Forget him, miss; he was brave enough just to bring you here.”

Abrams watched the cloud of dust as it disappeared, growling low under his breath. “Great.”

“Someone tell me we have a Plan B to get home.” Andy looked from Abrams to Tania.

Matt shook his head. “I thought he was Plan B.”

“Work first, worry later.” Abrams turned away. “Doctor, show us what you’ve got.”

Albadi nodded and led them inside; the temperature immediately dropped ten degrees.

Matt wiped his brow, relieved to be out of the heat, and looked around at the sprawling single-level house in disbelief — it was packed from floor to ceiling with books, papers and overflowing boxes. The air smelled of mold, ancient paper and drying leather.

Albadi led them further inside to a room a little less cluttered and with a single large wooden table. He called for refreshments. Hartogg and Berry conferred with Abrams for a few seconds and then both disappeared. Albadi frowned as they left the room, and looked to the major.

Abrams shrugged. “Forgive the intrusion and rudeness, Doctor, but security is critical. You understand.”

Albadi seemed to think about it for a second or two and then waved it away. “Of course, of course; these are the times we live in… and why you are here.”

Matt walked to a shelf laid out with books. “This is some collection, Doctor.” He turned one huge book towards him, its leather cover heavily carved and also inscribed with gold gilt and other still-vibrant colors. His eyebrows shot up. “Holy wow. This is a copy of the Tarikh Dimashiq. And a very good one.”

Albadi grinned and came closer. “You know this book, Professor Kearns?”

“Oh yeah.” Matt nodded. “The first ever history of Damascus, written by Ibn Asakir in 1170. I’ve read a later copy, or volume one, anyway… though nothing like this one.”

Albadi glowed. “Yes, yes. The Tarikh Dimashiq is in seventy-two volumes and is one of most important books about the Islamic history of Syria. Asakir tried to collect everything about our city, its important people, and even their conversations. It is also one of the biggest collections of ancient Arabic poems gathered in one book.”

“Beautiful.” Matt ran his fingers lightly over the cover. “It’s been around for nearly nine hundred years. Magnificent copy.”

Albadi shrugged. “Magnificent, yes; a copy, no. This is the original Tarikh Dimashiq.”

Matt’s mouth fell open. “Then it’s priceless.” He pulled his hands back. “What is it doing here?”

Albadi opened his arms and turned slowly, taking in the stacks of books, papers and material around the room. “The Kitab al-zuhd and Kitab al-fada’il, written in 840, the al-Jam bayn al-gharibayn of 1010, the Gharib al-hadith by Ibn Qutaybah al-Dinawari of 889 — they’re all here.” He walked along a row of books, trailing his fingers lightly across the top of some as though they were jewels. “Remember Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan? After their formal governments were toppled, one of the first acts of barbarism was the looting or destruction of the contents of the museums and libraries.” He shook his head. “It is said some of the theft was carried out to order.”

“Collectors with shopping lists.” Tania Kovitz spat the words. “Bastards.”

Albadi frowned at the harshness of her words, but then nodded. “And none have yet been found. Syrian treasures, which had taken centuries to find and amass, vanished within hours of the uprising.”

He looked up at the group, his smile weak. “Syria is an unstable place right now. The Az-Zahiriyah Library of Damascus is our oldest, established in 1277. It has books and manuscripts dating back to the first millennium — over twenty-two thousand of them.” He held up a fist. “I will not see its treasures whisked away to end up in a rich man’s private collection or destroyed in some sort of stone-age religious purification.” He waved an arm and sighed. “Here, I can keep them safe, until things… settle down.”

The tea and coffee arrived and they gathered around a low table. Tania was straining to keep herself under control as a servant poured the drinks. She declined some dates and honeyed pistachio, and then couldn’t hold back any more. “Doctor Albadi, you found something among your ancient books and manuscripts? Something that gives you some clue as to what is going on with the birds, the disappearances, the earth-drops and their growing size?”

“And the vermin that precede them… the roaches.” Albadi held up a hand. He waited until the servant had finished his task and left the room. He shrugged apologetically. “We must be watchful. Not everyone will be happy with what we will do and say here.” He sat back and interlocked fingers on his stomach.

“Roaches?” Matt asked.

“There were roaches in the Iowa drop,” Andy said. “Didn’t think anything of it then… should I have?”

“Have you seen anything else in the depths of these pits?” Albadi tried to seem indifferent, but his eyes were alert as he watched them.

“I thought I…” Andy grimaced. “Maybe. I don’t know what I saw.”

Matt saw how keenly Major Abrams watched the young geologist. There was something hidden there. Albadi also seemed to notice the major’s focus.

“Major Abrams, perhaps you have seen something too?”

Abrams looked away and slowly shook his head. “We registered some anomalies, but we’re still analyzing the data. Nothing conclusive enough to share at this point.”

“Anomalies? Yes, anomalies is a term for them. But perhaps abominations is a better one.” Albadi’s fingers were still clasped over his stomach. “I believe what we are dealing with is something beyond ancient, beyond mankind, beyond the beasts, and perhaps even beyond the primordial ooze we all crawled from.” He looked at Matt. “But perhaps we have sensed it. Maybe the gifted have sensed it more keenly than the rest. And other creatures with even greater senses than our own — surely they have.”

“Like the birds,” Tania said. “And now you’re saying the roaches do too.”

Albadi shrugged. “The roach is probably one of the most ancient creatures living on our world. They were here before even the great saurians, and have been on this planet for three hundred and fifty millions years longer than humankind. The world was young then, raw, and they have seen things that we could not imagine. They have seen what has come before, and perhaps they can see what is to come again. I think maybe they share an infinity with, um…” He sat back, seeming to search for the right words.

“With what?” Veins stood out on Tania’s throat. “What do you know about what’s going on? You predicted the earth-drops, their time, and even where they were going to occur. We’re in a race, doctor, and we don’t have time to talk about roach philosophy. Tell us what you know, please.”

“I know but a little.” Albadi stared for a second or two and then sighed heavily as he got to his feet. He searched a shelf, pulled free a roll of tattered paper, and laid it on the table, unrolling it flat. It was the crisscrossed map of North America.

“The ley lines,” Matt said.

Albadi turned to Matt, toasting him with his small ornate cup. “You have an extensive knowledge, Professor.” He left the map on the table, looking at each of them. “I have seen one of the sinkholes. I have read scraps of a manuscript that was beyond fantastical.” He stared hard at them. “I believe we have all seen things that defy explanation. Little pieces of the same puzzle. We see a hint here and there — a glimpse, a scrap, or a fragment.” He held up his hands. “It seems we all know a little, but none of us knows all.” He put his cup down carefully. “Have any of you heard of the Andhgajanyāyah?”

Matt said, “The parable of the blind men and the elephant; we probably all have.”

Albadi nodded. “There are many different versions, but the message is primarily the same. It is an old parable dating back to Jainism, the obscure fifth-century BC Indian religion. In essence, it is the tale of a group of six blind men in a deep forest who come upon an elephant for the very first time. They wanted to determine what it looked like, so each approached the beast, feeling different parts of the elephant’s body. The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; another, the tail and says it is like rope. The trunk is like a tree branch, the ear is a fan, and the belly is a wall, says three more. The final blind man feels the tusk, and announces it is a pipe of stone.

“None of them could agree on what the huge creature was actually like. It was just then that a sighted man walks by and sees the entire elephant all at once, and tells them. They are shocked, but then realize that the lesson is that while one’s subjective experience is true, it may not be the totality of truth.”

Matt nodded. “In another version, the men also learn for the first time that they are blind.”

“And have perhaps never really seen anything as it truly is,” Albadi finished. “And that, my friends, is perhaps what we are like here. Each of us has information about what we are experiencing, but none of us knows exactly what it is we are actually dealing with… and even if we did, would not see things as they truly are.”

“Because none of us has seen the entire picture… including you,” Major Abrams said. “So, has anyone seen the entire picture, Doctor?”

Albadi bobbed his head from side to side. “Yes, I believe there have been a few. But only one recorded what he had seen.” He turned with his lips pursed to look at Matt, and he nodded, perhaps coming to a decision.

“What do you know of the Al Azif?”

“The Book… the Book?” Matt’s mouth dropped open. “Seriously?”

Albadi nodded solemnly.

“The Al Azif, AKA The Necronomicon, AKA The Book of the Dead?” Matt shook his head. “Yeah, I know a lot. It’s a fictional — what? Grimoire? — created by H.P. Lovecraft. It doesn’t exist. It was first mentioned around 1924 in a short story called ‘The Hound’. The author of the Al Azif was supposedly a man named Abdul Alhazred, known as the Mad Arab.”

“Yes, the famous English writer, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He had a copy, and found out very early that the Beast and its army would return. He was another who had seen… all of the elephant. He tried to warn us the only way he knew how — through his literary works. For all his brilliance, and his prodigious writings, he died penniless and in great pain.” He looked up at Matt. “He was ruined financially, mentally and finally, physically. It seemed powerful forces tired of his expositions.”

Albadi waved his arm around taking in the stacks of ancient tomes. “As for the Book; where better place for clues to be found than in one of the world’s most ancient libraries?” He chortled. “The Mad Arab — some would say we’re all mad, yes? I assure you, Professor, he, like the book, was, real. Alhazred was a poet from Sanaá, in Yemen, who lived during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, around 700 AD. He roamed the Middle East, visiting the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of the great southern deserts of Arabia — the Roba El Khaliyeh, the vast empty space of the ancients. He also transversed the ad-Dahna or Crimson Desert of the Saudi Arabians, which is held to be protected by evil spirits and monsters of death.”

Albadi crossed to a small, heavy wooden door set into the wall. He unlocked it, and from the space behind brought forth something wrapped in an oilcloth. He set it on the table before them. He placed one hand on it, fingers steepled.

“In his last years of his life, Alhazred lived in Damascus, and in 738, he wrote a book of pure horror and mad prophecy in Syriac, Arabic, and multiple other languages, some that could not be read. He called it the Al Azif.”

“And you have it?” Tania’s eyes burned.

“No.” Albadi smiled, and turned from her, back towards Matt. “In 950, the Book was translated into Ancient Greek and called The Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas, a scholar from Constantinople. This version was later outlawed, and then burned in 1050 by Patriarch Michael. However, not before it was translated from Greek into Latin by Olaus Wormius in 1228. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX banned all editions of the work, calling it ‘a blasphemous script of ultimate evil’.”

“Now that’s a book review you won’t see on Amazon,” Andy said, grinning.

“But the book did survive.” Albadi turned his back on the geologist. “A Greek edition was found in Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century, and supposedly translated into English. But this edition has never been seen, other than as fakes turning up for sale, even today on the internet.”

Albadi sipped at his coffee again and then smiled. “Time is the enemy of history, my friends: sometimes it erases it. By 1050, when the Greek version of the Al Azif was created, the original version had already long disappeared.” He shrugged. “And with all translations, the new versions lost much along the way — much of the meaning, much of the power, and also anything written in the strange languages that refused to be translated by the best scholars of antiquity.” He turned back. “The original has never been found, and even a location for it remained a mystery.”

“The language refused to be translated?” Matt asked. “What does that mean? Was it not an Arabic or Syriac dialect or form?”

Albadi shook his head. “I do not know: other than a symbol here and there, I have never really seen it, and no one else living has either. But they became known as the forbidden passages, and it is said they were not in any human language. It is perhaps nothing but the scribbling of a madman, or…” he looked levelly into Matt’s eyes “…Enochian, true Enochian.”

“Enochian?” Matt snorted softly. “I must see it.”

Tania said, “Oh, please. That’s bullshit.”

Abrams stepped closer, glaring at Tania. “I think we need to know everything; then we can decide what’s bullshit. I agree with the Doctor; these are all pieces of the puzzle, and we need to hear them all.”

“Enochian.” Matt rubbed his chin. “Well, no one is even sure if it’s real. It’s supposed to be the language of the angels as recorded in the private journals of the Englishman John Dee in the 1500s.”

“Matt.” Tania shook her head. “Historians and linguists have studied the Enochian symbol strings, and not one of them can decide if it’s a real language or something just made up by Dee as a joke.”

“They can’t decide… but they never ruled it out.” Matt shrugged. “Over the years, I’ve seen enough to know that some legends are real. It sort of fits; according to the story, Dee’s journal was actually a transcript of an earlier work… much, much earlier — maybe it was drawn from the translated Al Azif. Enochian is also called Celestial Speech, taught to Adam by God himself.”

“Language taught to the first man, by God.” Albadi nodded. “But now the question is, which God, hmm, Professor Kearns?” He rubbed his hands together as if washing them of any traces of the Book. “And whether it is Enochian or the fevered scribbling of a madman is yet to be seen.” He grinned. “But ‘The earth shall fall’ is a fairly accurate prediction for a madman to make, yes, Professor?”

“‘And the earth shall fall’,” Matt repeated, startled. The phrase had occurred to him as soon as he read about the sinkholes. “I know that quote. From an old Arabic saying, or so I always thought.”

Albadi smiled broadened. “The words of the Al Azif are everywhere, we just don’t realize it.” He looked from Matt to Abrams. “And now to another piece of the elephant, hmm?”

Major Abrams scowled impatiently, and Tania folded her arms tightly across her chest.

“The Al Azif — I do not have the original, but I believe I have located fragments of the first ever copy made. A copy in native Syriac and Arabic, and far more descriptive than the one the American author, Mr Lovecraft, possessed.”

“And you’ve read it?” Tania asked.

“Yes, and I think it is mostly safe to read. But a copy is nothing like the original. According to notes in the text, the simple act of even reading the original work is dangerous. The author, Alhazred, vanished without a trace. Some said he met with a terrible end. The man claimed in his tome to have discovered the secrets of a race far older than mankind, and far older than life as we know it on this planet. He had found the path to the Old One, Cthulhu, and their servants, the loathsome Shoggoths — and I believe it was one of these creatures that took him.”

“Cthulhu, the Old One,” Tania said, folding her arms, her brow now deeply furrowed.

Albadi nodded. “In the Al Azif, Alhazred talks of a time when our world was nothing but a boiling vision of Hell, with a black sky above, devoid of any light or hope — there was no moon, no light, no life. These great beasts brought all the hate and lust of a newborn universe with them, creating more of their kind, budding off pieces of themselves to raise as slaves and soldiers, and perhaps just to be more beasts for them to torture, maim and kill.”

“There’s nothing in the fossil record to confirm that at all, Doctor,” Andy said.

“I know, and there wouldn’t be.” Albadi drew in a deep breath. “These leviathans knew dark magic, and knew how to defeat death itself. They are not dead, my friends.” He stared into the distance. “The Old Ones, the First Ones, the Elder beings — bad dreams, or things of mad fantasy, we thought. But perhaps that’s what they, and others, wanted us to believe.”

Tania threw her hands up and turned to Abrams. “Boss, come on — dark magic now? This is turning from bullshit to ludicrous bullshit.”

“It certainly is,” Abrams said. “But so is what’s happening around the world.” His expression hardened. “Do you need to wait outside, Captain?”

Tania’s face blazed momentarily. “No, sir.” She snorted. “But…”

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Matt half smiled at Tania. “Be patient; Dr Albadi is risking a lot by even talking to us.”

Albadi tilted his head. “Who said that, Professor Kearns. Was it a Persian philosopher?”

“Not quite.” Matt grinned. “Sherlock Holmes… another great philosopher.”

Albadi chortled. “Very good.” He moved his hand to hover over the cloth cover. “And you are correct: there are mortal risks, and not just for me. I have found there are real cults of Cthulhu, whose members do not consider themselves bound by any of the rules of the human race. We must be on guard.” He sucked in a breath and pulled the oilcloth back, displaying a moldering pile of pages.

“Written in 800 BC, less than a hundred years after the original — its value is in its proximity in time to that first manuscript. The more you follow the book back in time, the more of its core meaning is revealed.” He hesitated for a moment, and then quickly lifted the leather cover. There came a knock on the door, and one of his servants entered. Albadi quickly flipped the cloth back over the book, and shooed the man away. “Shukran idrukni, idrukni.”

The man’s eyes darted around, taking in the cloth-covered mound and each of the Americans, before he nodded and backed out. Only then did Albadi relax. He turned to the group and shrugged. “I am overly cautious, perhaps.”

Once again his hands fussed as he flipped pages. “In Syria, we are also experiencing the sinkhole phenomenon. But within the fog of war, who cares if a few thousand people fall into a pit, when tens of thousands are being slaughtered in the streets above, hmm?” He peered up at Abrams and Tania. “But these events are what started my search for answers among the ancient books, and what led me to the Al Azif.”

He placed one stubby finger on a particular page. Matt drew near, looking down over his shoulder.

“The sinkholes are the first doorways to the surface for the Shoggoth. The birds are the spirits of the Earth, the enemy of Cthulhu, and are becoming enraged in the sky; the carnivores, the roaches, the vile lice upon the sleepers beneath us… It is all in here. Before they rise, the earth shall fall.” He tapped the book. “The sinkholes are only the start. The Shoggoth will come through first, as well as the other vermin of the dark deep. And they will be in the shadows, moving upon the surface now, as the few morsels that have been brought down will not long satisfy the appetite of the leviathan below us. Those disgusting servants of the Old One; they exist to eat and round up the food for their master.”

Albadi leaned forward and started to read. “From the darkest core, they will rise. From beneath the rock, below the soft earth and slime, they will come. The Great Old One and its army. It sleeps, powerful, all knowing, and patient beyond time itself. Cthulhu shall rule again.” He pushed the book away, looking pale. “It is my theory, based on the prophecy in the Al Azif, and the signs we have seen, that the Great Old One Cthulhu is once again awakening, and we don’t have much time. Its army of Shoggoth is already here.”

Abrams stared hard at the Syrian but spoke almost casually. “You keep mentioning these things, Shoggoths. What exactly are they? Does it say what they are… supposed to look like?”

Matt looked at Abrams. The major’s eyes held a hint of unease, and the realization struck — the man knew something.

Albadi hesitated for a moment, and then began turning more pages. “The Shoggoth — yes — their very name means Inhabitant of the kingdom of darkness. In the Book they are described as shapeless things — creatures made from nothing but black putrid slime, with multiple eyes that float freely over their surface. They can form limbs, mouths, and eyes whenever and wherever they will. They are much bigger and more powerful than a human.” He looked up. “These will be the army, the shock troops of Cthulhu.”

Abrams’s face drained of color, and he turned away.

“Soon, the leviathan from the deep earth will come.” Albadi sat back. “And then the time of humankind will be over.”

Silence stretched as Abrams paced.

Matt noticed Tania smirked, and she shook her head when he caught her eye.

“I need to know more about this… thing, that is supposedly on its way.” Abrams stopped pacing.

“Cthulhu,” Matt added, now less surprised that the major didn’t challenge what they had just heard.

Abrams nodded. “I want to know more about its strengths, and its… weaknesses.”

“Weaknesses?” Albadi snorted his derision. “A flea could ask how to stop an elephant.”

“Ever seen what the toxic bite of a Chimaeropsyllidae flea can do to an elephant?” Tania said folding her arms.

Albadi’s lips compressed. “These beings are not like mortal creatures, Captain Kovitz.” He carefully turned a page in the ancient manuscript.

She held up her hands. “Well, tell us about them.” She looked down at the page and frowned. “That’s the Caduceus — it’s Greek.”

Albadi stared down at the image of two intertwined winged snakes. “No Captain, it’s not the Caduceus. That was one of its interpretations after it was adopted by the ancient Greeks. The wand of Hermes, with power over life and death.” He traced the image with one finger. “But the symbol is far older. It was found on Mesopotamian cylinder seals that were over six thousand years old. It was thought to represent the earliest form of the Underworld gods.”

Matt came and stood between Tania and Albadi. “It’s also appeared in Babylonian script, representing the balanced struggle between life and death.”

“Balance,” Albadi said. “Yes, but the balance between two of the greatest Old Ones, brothers, locked in an eternal embrace — Cthulhu, of the dark, and Xastur, the light.”

“Xastur? So there’s two now… and one is good?” Tania asked, with her lip curling.

Albadi seemed unfazed. “Not good as we understand it. We are dust compared to them, and our values and lives mean nothing.”

“And now they’re both coming awake?” Tania asked.

“I don’t know,” Albadi said softly.

“But this shows two beings intertwined or fighting. How come then only one, Cthulhu, is rising?”

“Again, I don’t know, Captain Kovitz. These are ancient beings of immense power. From what I can decipher in the Al Azif, they are currently imprisoned.” He grimaced. “No, that’s not right; they are currently sleeping beneath the sea, beneath the Earth, and in some versions in other dimensions altogether. When they first ruled it was for billions of years, and it was even before the primordial ooze. But something happened, some sort of great cataclysm that made the world unsuitable.

“A few, like Cthulhu, chose to await a more suitable environment — just as some animals hibernate during a time of cold, so also did the Great Old Ones lie dormant. Many perished, simply vanishing over the intervening billions of years. But the true Old Ones, the most powerful of them, slept on. But not eternally. Cthulhu was but waiting, and it had set itself an alarm clock. Not a device, but an event — it would await powerful cosmic forces aligning again, so it could be woken, and then be released to revel once more across the world and cosmos.”

Tania frowned. “Cosmic forces aligning? Like what does that mean?”

Matt said, “The sun or moon being in a certain place?”

“Something like that, but a lot more powerful.” Andy, who had been standing quietly at their rear, came forward. “What about all the planets aligning? That’s about to occur soon.”

“The convergence.” Albadi nodded. “I think this is true. Alhazred called it heaven’s light — all the planets in alignment would have been very bright in the sky. It is a very rare event.” He rose to his feet. “The last such alignment was in 738 AD, the year that Alhazred finished writing the Al Azif. And the next is due… in just a few days’ time.”

Matt raised an eyebrow at Andy. “How did you know about that?”

Andy waved away the question. “Most modern geologists do. There are seismometers left on the moon by Apollo astronauts that record moonquakes, right? So, they occur most often during perigee, that’s when the Earth and moon are closest together — once every month. It focuses a lot of gravitational energy on the geology. Ha! And I didn’t even go to Harvard.” Andy continued, “The Earth’s gravity can trigger quakes on the moon. But being eighty-two times smaller than us, the moon’s way too weak to trigger any earthquakes back here, though it is of course still enough of a force to pull at our tides. Now, what if all nine planets were brought into alignment; something that happens, once every thirteen hundred years or so? There would have to be a geological effect — there’d be no avoiding it.”

“Yes, yes, but more than geological,” Albadi said. “It is a very powerful gravitational force, no question. But when all the planets focus on us at the same time, what other cosmic forces would also be focused on us, pulling and tearing at us?” His face became grim. “They would draw out the old impurities, like pus from a boil.”

“So, this alignment is some kind of cosmic alarm clock,” Tania said.

“And it’s getting ready to ring,” Matt responded.

Abrams ran both his hands up through his short-cropped hair, exhaling. “Doctor, you said they’d been here before. But they’re not here now, and we are… so where are they?” He dropped his hands heavily to the table. “And what happened in those times they were here?”

“A sensible question, Major.” Albadi turned back to the pile of yellowing paper, and began flipping through more pages. “There are no times included here, but there are the ancient Syrian words for thousands and millions. I made some notes and then correlated these to what we know of the Earth’s history. What I found was astounding.”

He drew aside several pages of hand-written notes. “According to Alhazred, there have been five appearances of the Old Ones in Earth’s past. These events occurred after they supposedly went into their cosmic slumber, when they were in effect awoken. The periods correspond exactly to the four mass extinction events punctuating Earth’s history.”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Matt said softly.

Albadi turned one of his note pages. “The first great mass extinction event took place when our world was in its infancy, some 434 million years ago, during the Ordovician period. According to the fossil record, sixty percent of all life forms of both terrestrial and marine life worldwide were exterminated. Then again, some 360 million years ago in the Late Devonian period, was the scene for the second mass extinction event.” He turned a page. “It goes on… The end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago, shows that up to ninety percent of life was extinguished.” He looked up. “Ninety percent.” He sighed and went on. “Finally, and most recently, 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs disappeared — all of them.”

“Jesus Christ.” Andy leaned back against a table, upsetting some books. “But how the hell did we send them back?”

Albadi expression was miserable. “We didn’t; how could we have? Even when the Old Ones were most recently here, we were barely tiny animals scurrying between the toes of the giants. No, they, it, went back to its slumbers of its own accord.” He shrugged. “Perhaps the food ran out.”

Matt snorted. “They ate everything. There was nothing left — they scoured the planet of meat.”

“And we’re up next,” Tania said softly.

“He’s damn well gonna find us a bit hard to swallow.” Abrams got to his feet, but paused before turning away. “Wait a minute… why didn’t they come through in 738? The planets were aligned, these things were obviously beginning to come through, given what we think happened to Alhazred. So why aren’t they already here? Why didn’t they scour the planet of meat then?”

“Yes, yes, another sensible question.” Albadi pointed at the major’s chest. “In fact, Major Abrams, that is the most important question now facing mankind. This is why you must find the original Al Azif. It alone must have the answers we seek. It is my belief that Alhazred somehow found a way to stop them.” His brow creased. “No, that is not right. I do not believe that they could ever be stopped. But maybe he found a way to slow or delay them. Make them continue their slumber until the next alignment.”

“Push the problem out to be dealt with by the poor saps of the future — us,” Andy said.

“And we need to do the same to the next guys,” Tania said as she came over to look down at the ancient book. “So, Doctor, here’s the next million-dollar question — the Book — where the hell is it?”

Albadi smiled. “I believe it is hidden right here, in the Middle East. Where it has always been.”

Chapter 8

Charles Sheldon Drummond, one of the wealthiest men on the West Coast, lay face down in the chapel. His lips moved in fervent prayer, his eyes were screwed shut and his hands spread, his mouth was cotton dry and his chest and ribs screamed in agony from the hard stone beneath him. He had been there for hours, and he would stay for hours more.

“Sir.”

His prayers stopped.

“Sir.”

His teeth ground and he opened his eyes. No one was allowed to disturb him here — no one. He looked up at the altar, seeing the large eye embedded in the center of the writhing mass of limbs — the image of the Old One, its likeness known for as long as humans could daub images onto cave walls.

“How dare you, Kroen?” Drummond started to rise.

“The Book, sir,” the big bodyguard responded.

Drummond froze, waiting.

“Father says there are non-believers searching for it.”

Drummond’s eyes went wide, and he twisted, looking up at Kroen, knowing immediately what the huge man was referring to. Thoughts of retribution fell away like dry autumn leaves. “The Father said that?”

“Yes sir, and we have a location,” Kroen said.

Drummond turned back to the eye. “Oh Great One, your return will be the mightiest event we worthless humans have ever witnessed.” He got to his feet. “Where, when?” His dark robes trailed as he headed for the doors. On the way, he snatched up a bottle of Swiss mountain water, drank deeply, and then tossed it over his shoulder to the bodyguard.

Kroen caught it smoothly. “I do not know. The Father calls for you.”

Drummond spun, his eyes blazing. “When…?”

“Now,” the guard said.

Drummond felt the color drain from his face. “Of course…” he gulped. “Of course.”

“And now we must ask ourselves; where in the Middle East?” Albadi held a finger in the air, waving it, as he talked. “Abdul Alhazred travelled far during his… creative phase, and said he found the ruins of Babylon, the fallen cities of Ibu, and also crossed the haunted deserts of ad-Dahna to the forbidden caves. I believe it is in one of those long-forgotten sites that he got his inspiration for the Book… where he spoke of communing with the Old Ones.”

“Great,” Tania said sharply. “If it’s in a cave, we just go and damn well get it, and then get the hell out of here.”

Albadi turned to her, and opened his arms. “I didn’t say the Book was in the cave. In fact, even if you did find the cave that Alhazred used, it might be of no use to you, now. What I said was, the cave was where Alhazred received his inspiration. No, Captain, the Al Azif was secreted somewhere else, and I believe it is quite close — hidden — in a library.”

Matt looked up. “A library… your library, in Damascus?”

“No, no,” Albadi scoffed. “This copy refers to the Great Library of the Macedonian. Even though the Az-Zahiriyah Library of Damascus was created nearly eight hundred years ago, the library we seek was already ancient long before that. It was the greatest library our world has ever known, and at one time had collected together all the world’s knowledge, and its secrets.” Albadi smiled. “That Macedonian was Alexander.”

“The Bibliotheca Alexandrina; the Library of Alexandria in Egypt,” Matt said. “But it was destroyed nearly two thousand years ago by Julius Caesar.”

“A tragedy on an unbelievable scale,” Albadi said, his eyes downcast. “The most famous example of cultural vandalism in our history.” He looked up. “But not by Caesar, Professor Kearns. It is true that a fire raged through the library at the time of Caesar, but the works were spared. The real cultural vandal was Pope Theophilus in 391 AD, who regarded some of the works as being heretical and decreed they be destroyed.”

“Great; a dead end,” Tania said, pacing away from them. “I gotta use the head; back soon.”

“A dead end?” Albadi asked, brows raised at the departing woman. “The original library was an oasis of wisdom, and Alexandria became the center of the world for scientific and intellectual learning. It was also said to be the repository of many mystical wonders. Things that defied explanation for even the finest minds of their time.”

“I don’t know how that helps us, Doctor.” Abrams looked briefly at his watch.

Albadi smiled. “It helps because the copy of the Al Azif I have infers that the original work is held within the great Bibliotheca… on the island of the Pharoes.”

Abrams just stared, deadpan.

“Its impossible.” Matt frowned. “The Al Azif was written in 738 AD, and the library was supposed to have been destroyed centuries before that.”

Albadi said, “Exactly, and perhaps why it escaped destruction and remains hidden. I think that the library was moved again. To the scholars at the time, the works would have been more valuable than gold. They would have had an almost religious value. The scholars would have died before they let the entire library be destroyed again. Somewhere in Egypt, on this island of the Pharaohs, the great library still exists.”

“Then the library it is.” Abrams turned to Matt and then Tania, who had just pushed back into the room and was drying her hands on her pants. “Do either of you guys know the location of this island of the Pharaohs?” he asked.

Tania folded her arms. “Never heard of it.”

Matt’s brows were still creased. “I know a lot about the ancient Middle East, but I’ve also never heard of any reference to an island of the Pharaohs. Still, it sounds vaguely familiar. Dr Albadi, can I see the references to this library?”

Albadi nodded, and turned some pages, coming to one and running his finger down the archaic script. “Here.”

Matt nodded as he read, and after a minute he paused. “Ha, of course.” He began to smile. “Doctor, you were right and wrong at the same time. Yes, it’s still in Alexandria, which makes sense. But it’s not the island of the Pharaohs, but it’s actually the Island of Pharos.”

Albadi smacked his forehead. “Of course, the inflection on the noun.” He bowed. “Your skill is truly impressive, Professor Kearns.”

“Pharos?” Andy came and looked over Matt’s shoulder. “Does that help us?”

“Pharos, why not?” Tania grinned. “It makes sense to move it to, and perhaps hide it in, the greatest structure of the ancient world… perhaps even as great as the pyramids themselves. It’s where the Ptolemaic built the Lighthouse of Alexandria.” Seeing their more or less blank faces, she went on. “Look, back then, most dwellings were single story, and very few were ever over fifty feet tall, so imagine a structure of stone standing nearly four hundred feet high, fully encased in pure white marble. At its top, a giant golden statue of Poseidon, and between his legs, a large bonfire was kept burning at night with a huge polished mirror to guide the ships into the harbor.”

She sighed. “But, I’m afraid, it’s something else that was destroyed. Though it did endure longer than the Library of Alexandria. It survived over a thousand years of earthquakes.”

Albadi bowed again. “You too amaze me, Miss Kovitz.”

“Captain,” she said, and he bowed an apology she waved away. “It’s gone now, of course. It was a fort for a while in the fourteenth century — those earthquakes had eroded it quite a bit.”

Matt took over. “The island, Pharos, is just a barren rock now with a lot of debris below the water — there’s nothing there at all.” He folded his arms and paced. “I’ve been there, seen it. It’s empty, picked clean — little more than an interesting destination for diving enthusiasts.”

“And the reason it’s empty is what’s left is all below the water.” Tania grabbed him as he went to pace by. “Think about it, Matt; what if what we seek is not on the island, but somewhere below it… or inside it?”

“But what’s below the water is mostly rubble,” Matt said. “And the place is crawling with tourists. It’s not exactly hidden in the center of the Amazonian jungle.”

“If I may, Professor.” Albadi gave another small bow as he interrupted. “Maybe they just don’t know where to look… or maybe, if there is an entrance, there are only certain times that it becomes apparent.”

Andy clicked his fingers. “Like at certain times of the day… when the sun is just at the right angle. There’s this huge rock in Australia that looks like it can change shape and colors, depending on time of day. Also some crystalline deposits can reflect light, like halogens, but only for a few minutes a day, and only during certain times of the year.”

Matt spun and pointed at him. “Bingo.” He grinned. “That’s it. And now imagine the effect if the moon was amplified by the celestial convergence.” He clapped once. “It might only be open at night, during the three days of the full moon.”

“Night dive, anyone?” Andy said.

“We’ve got to get there, pronto,” Matt said to Abrams.

“Agreed. We need to find that book.” Abrams exhaled. “Doctor, we can’t use the airport in Syria, and looks like our ride hightailed it. We also can’t get a chopper in, with all the militants on the ground with stinger missiles. Our fallback is to cross into Turkey; can you take us?”

Albadi shook his head. “No.”

Abrams’s eyes became sharp. “Well sir, can you arrange for us to be taken there, as our driver took off like his ass was on fire the moment we stepped out of his van?”

Again Albadi shook his head. “No, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, for fu—” Abrams ground his teeth, his face turning red. He spun away from the Syrian, and then leaned close to Matt. “Talk to him before I shoot him.”

Matt turned to the Doctor, but Albadi must have already anticipated him, and waved him away.

“Major Abrams, it is nothing to do with my cowardice, or bravery, or even trying to extort your money.” He waved an arm around in his library. “I have all the riches for a dozen lifetimes. But whether you know it or not, we are in a war zone. Above us, in the air, you have government planes with orders to shoot down anything that isn’t personally authorized by the President. On the ground, you have too many militias and factions to count or try and negotiate with. In every second house is an informer. Major, you cannot go by road, you cannot fly, you cannot travel by any standard route and chance being seen by the population. You must cross the desert.” Albadi stood beside an old map, gently running fingertips over the images of skulls and djinn… and the warnings. “And even then, it is not a good place now.”

He turned, his head tilted. “I cannot take you, and I cannot give you a driver or arrange one — it would be suicide for him… and most likely for me and my family.” He shrugged. “Already I risk my head just by having you here. I cannot take the chance of being seen to help Westerners.” Once again he waved his arm around at the piles of ancient manuscripts. “If any one of the more aggressive anti-Western militias finds out, they’ll burn everything, behead me, and then search for my relatives. Then they will come for you.” His eyebrows sagged on his forehead. “Everything would be lost. Truly, I am sorry.”

“It’s okay, Doctor Albadi. We’ll find a way across,” Matt said. “I know this was a huge risk to you and we greatly appreciate it. Your assistance has been immeasurable.” He turned to Abrams and raised his eyebrows, before slowly turning back to their host.

“Ah, Dr Albadi, is there anything we can do for you? As a simple gift of thanks for everything you have risked for us?”

Albadi stared for a moment, and then his head bobbed. “Well, yes; my daughter Sabeen is studying economics at Princeton University. She worries about me and wants to come home. She must not. If you could just… keep her there, at least until the country here stabilizes.”

Abrams nodded.

“Of course. She will be safe. You have our word,” Matt said.

“Good.” Albadi closed his eyes and swallowed. “Professor Kearns. I do have an SUV you can take; it is rigged for desert driving, so will suit your requirements. I can give you supplies, and I can also give you directions. But the rest must be up to you.”

“Thank you,” Matt said.

Tania grunted, and looked from Albadi to the map once again. “Dr Albadi, is there anything else you can tell us about the Book, or Abdul Alhazred, or the library? Anything and everything is important now.”

The doctor seemed to think a moment more, and then turned back to the table and the ancient tome’s pages. He leaned over it, sighing. “Much of Alhazred’s work was crazed, nonsensical — it is why he was called the Mad Arab. For many centuries, scholars who read the copies assumed it was all mad scribbling — now, current events mean we know better. Most of his essays, writings and poems have turned out to be truly prophetic. The man was given over to bouts of dark poetry, and perhaps…” He started to turn pages quickly, and then stopped and looked up at Matt.

“If you find the original Al Azif, it will be you who translates it, yes?”

Matt nodded. “When we find it.”

“Then you must steel yourself. As I mentioned, the act of reading the original work is dangerous. It was said to drive men to suicide, make them sick, and even invite the attention of the Old One in their dreams. There is only one way to prepare — read here, and start to absorb the words.” Albadi kept one finger on a page. “Alhazred gives us a clue as to what to expect in your journey. Read it, Professor.”

Matt looked down at the mix of ancient languages. He started to translate. “Hmm, it’s incomplete, but he talks of an underworld… and structures.” He read on. “A city guarded by massive gates, and…” He felt the bloom of pain begin in the center of his brain. He shook his head. He soon felt he had been kicked by a horse, but from the inside. It slid down into his gut like a bomb.

Matt slammed a hand over his mouth and swung around frantically. Albadi anticipated him and lifted a wooden waste bin. Matt grabbed it and vomited explosively into it.

Tania rushed to him, putting an arm over his shoulders. “Jesus, Matt, you okay?”

Matt nodded, feeling embarrassed, but slightly better as soon as he moved away from the book’s pages. He wiped his mouth.

“A city?” Tania said, rubbing Matt’s back. “Is that what Alhazred found, and what we’re looking for?” She let him go, and looked at Albadi with one eyebrow up.

“Perhaps,” Albadi said. “Alhazred says that what you seek is buried deep behind mighty barriers big enough to hold back an army. It is the same as I deciphered. He says it is a city created millions of years before human beings even stood upright.”

Matt breathed deeply, shutting his watery eyes for a moment. “Many of these ancient prophetic works were allegorical. It might not mean a physical city at all. Given Alhazred’s mental state, perhaps he meant something like a mental construct — the walls of his mind and all that.”

“Or nothing but hallucinations from a mix of hashish and a wild imagination,” Tania added.

“We could hope that. But it might mean exactly what it says,” Albadi said softly. “Only in the original Al Azif will you find the answer.”

“Gates so huge they could hold back an army,” Andy said softly. He looked to Matt. “Hold them back… from our armies going down, or something else coming up?”

Matt nodded. “You know, the planets have been used for both chronological and religious reasons for thousands of years. After all, archeoastronomers are still studying Stonehenge for its possible connections with planetary alignment.”

“The trigger,” Andy said. “The alarm clock event again.”

“Yes.” Matt looked from Tania to Abrams. “Given what we are experiencing, I think we should take everything seriously, and be prepared for it.”

“Agreed,” Abrams said.

Tania nodded, but still looked reluctant. “What about the monsters and djinn in the forbidden deserts?” she asked, sardonically.

Albadi snorted. “I wouldn’t worry so much about djinn as bands of Al-Qaida fighters roaming the outskirts of the cities. You have more to fear from falling into their hands.” His lips compressed momentarily and his eyes moved to Tania. “They torture and behead foreigners, and would take great delight in capturing an American — especially a female American.”

“They can fucking try,” Tania spat.

Abrams growled. “No one is going to be getting captured… Soldiers!”

Berry and Hartogg came back into the room, their eyes wolf like in their intensity.

Matt was glad they were there… and on his side.

“Berry, Hartogg, load em up, we’re moving out in fifteen.” Abrams dismissed them, and with a brief “HUA!” the men spun and then disappeared out the front.

Abrams approached the small doctor, his hand out. “I appreciate everything you have done. Thank you; I hope we see you again.”

Albadi took his hand and shook it. “I hope so too. Good luck, and I pray you are not too late.” The doctor held onto the major’s hand. “There is one more thing. I also pray this is all the raving of a lunatic, but I fear it is not. And if it is not, then the servants of the Old One also exist and will be already here.”

“The Shoggoth?” Matt said.

Matt noticed Albadi’s eyes were fearful, and he wondered what else the man knew that he wasn’t telling them.

“The army behind the gate,” Andy said folding his arms and turning away.

“And you think they are here now?” Matt asked.

Albadi nodded. “These things were the slaves and servants of the Old Ones. They built the giant cities, gathered food for them, fed them, cared for them… and protected them.”

Abrams exhaled forcefully. “Can they be killed?”

Albadi shrugged. “Are they even alive as we understand it?”

Andy spun back to them. “Well, that’s just great.” He went to turn away again and then stopped dead. “Hey, you said they fed the Old Ones. You mean they’ll feed them us?”

Albadi’s face was blank. “They feed them meat. And in this age, man is the most abundant food source. So yes, Mr Bennet, they will feed them us.”

Andy groaned. “Frank, my partner, was grabbed by something under the earth… in the Iowa earth-drop.” He shook his head, eyes downcast. “From what I understand, all the holes, once the land drops, anyone unfortunate enough to be inside the drop area is never seen again — they vanish.” He winced and rubbed his forehead. “Oh God, I feel sick.”

Matt narrowed his eyes. “Looks like food gathering has already commenced.”

Tania came over and placed a hand on Andy’s shoulder. “We need to make sure this stops, now.”

Abrams lifted his voice. “First thing we need to do is stop spooking ourselves.” He looked at his watch. “We’ve got a long way to go, and all over potentially hostile terrain.” He looked Andy and Matt in the eyes. “As civilians I can’t order you to come with us. But, I think we’ll need you — both of you.”

Matt turned to look at the mountains of old books. Staying made sense, and he could spend his time exploring ancient works that he might never get to see again. A feeling of comfort spread through him as he looked over the piles of ancient books. Staying made a lot of sense. Going with Abrams made no sense at all. He’d seen what happened when people got involved in these insane military-type missions — they died, and damned horribly.

Abrams must have noticed Matt’s wandering focus. “I think untold numbers of lives will depend on us. What I’ve seen, and now what I’ve heard, leads me to believe that a lot is at stake… perhaps everything we hold dear.” He stared hard. “We… need… you.”

Matt sighed. “Okay.” He met Abrams’s eyes. “Okay, I’m in.”

Andy nodded as well, anger in his eyes. “Let’s fucking do this.”

Chapter 9

Jessica pushed the pram along Coronation Street, and inhaled deeply. The crepe myrtles were in flower and their vanilla scent filled her nose with perfume and her soul with happiness. She stopped briefly under one, letting her eyes travel from its base to its tips — she always loved the trees’ magnificent streaked bark and bunches of small, tight flowers on the end of the branches.

This was her dream job — being a live-in nanny for a prominent surgeon and his wife. Trips abroad, good pay, and Jeremy, an angel to care for. She breathed in the scent of the flowers again and peered through their bouquets to the River Avon, still a little muddy from some recent rain. It was a good-sized watercourse, broad, deep, and with small ferries punting along its rippling surface.

The pram wheels squeaked, but other than that, it was still library-quiet that early in the morning. There was a single jogger and the odd cruising taxicab, but the rest of the up-market street was hers. Looking across the road, the compact two-story houses were jammed in tight together — not a lot of land, but an expensive price tag for a view over the water. The block she lived in on Coronation was one of the biggest, at about two thousand square feet, and bordered Camden Road, Osborne and Allington. But the block more like a village, really, she thought, just as a curtain of cloud pulled back to let in golden shafts of morning light.

The first vibration tickled the soles of Jessica’s feet, and she looked back over her shoulder expecting to see some large lorry approaching — there was nothing.

The next sound was different, and ugly. The wet thump was from a fat, gray pigeon as it dive-bombed into the grass of a front yard in an explosion of feathers and gore.

Ew, she thought, pursing her lips. She thanked her lucky stars that Jeremy hadn’t seen the unfortunate bird’s accident, but then shrieked as another bird struck the ground, then another and another. Soon starlings as well as pigeons were raining down and battering the houses, lawns, and the pavement. She grimaced at the sight, as the birds weren’t just falling from the sky, but actually flying into the ground as if they couldn’t see it, or were determined to strike it as hard as they could — it seemed as though they made war on the Earth.

Jessica felt frozen with indecision. There was no cover for hundreds of yards, and the tree she sheltered under was hardly thick enough to act as an umbrella against the feathered onslaught. She reached forward to pull the small canvas canopy over Jeremy, who was now sitting up, his mouth open in a single-toothed grin of delight as he watched the brown and gray birds fly into the grass and cement around them.

Jessica felt the vibrations again, the pavement shimmying under her feet, but this time there came a small jump as if everything raised and fell an inch. Car alarms started all over the city, and, looking along Coronation Street, it seemed that the vibrations, the jumping, and the birds ended at Camden, as if there were a fence of calmness just a few hundred yards further on.

Go, go, go, she thought as purpose finally jolted her into action. She sucked in a deep breath and began to run, the pram out in front, rolling over the bodies of birds and the dark cracks opening in the pavement. When she was within a hundred feet of the street corner, the ground lifted again, higher and higher, rising up as if there were a huge bubble of gas underneath them.

She started to weep. Her muscles burned and her breath became hot and tortured. She gagged as a foul gas belched up from below. She knew what was coming; she had heard the whispered rumours, seen the stories that usually vanished as quickly as they appeared. No one had believed: no one really cared. They’d all just continued with their lives — part of her mind took a moment to look at that unbelievable fact in something like wonder, or disgust, or both.

Whatever bubble had blown up below them suddenly burst. They were on a slope now, running down a hill of broken concrete and torn grass with just a few dozen feet to go to safety. Then the land started to fall.

Jessica knew she would never make it, but there was one thing she knew she had to do — nannies were more than just nursemaids, they were carers, playmates, best friends, and bodyguards, prepared to do anything for their charges. Jessica launched herself, pushing out her arms, flinging the pram forward, its large rubber wheels spinning as it raced down the slope, travelling at about twenty miles per hour toward the stable ground so close.

She fell flat on her stomach, but raised her head, her eyes wet as the ground beneath her dropped. Her last vision as she fell into the pit was of the pram slowing to a stop on the stable ground: safe.

Chapter 10

“Kroen, just… wait here… and leave the engine running.” Charles Drummond wanted to be away quickly, as he knew he’d be uncomfortable. The street, the building, and the Father, all made him feel small and uneasy. He’d been given much, and promised so much more; still the Order was unsettling even for a high-level acolyte like himself.

He looked again at the doors, steeling himself. The Order of the Old Ones was an ancient sect that reached back to the days of Babylon and even beyond. Its sole purpose was the worship of Cthulhu and its minions, with the goal of easing the great gates of R’lyeh open so they might have rule over the Earth once again. In return, people like Drummond were made wealthy beyond the dreams of Croesus, and were promised they would be made kings over humankind for a thousand years. They would also be spared while the other creatures of flesh and blood were… consumed.

Drummond stood in the empty back street before the black double doors. There wasn’t another person in sight, nor a bird perched on an eave, nor a rat, nor a single bug scurrying about. There seemed nothing living in the entire street.

Drummond pressed the bell button. There was no sound, and the huge black doors stayed closed and silent. Time stretched, but he knew to wait. After another few moments the door swung inward, and a tall shaven-headed man nodded, but said nothing. He was one of the priests of the order and was dressed in a rough cassock, made of something coarse that looked like it had been woven from long hair. Drummond grimaced, imagining what it must feel like against the man’s skin.

He followed the priest in silence; no words were necessary, as he knew where he was to go. It wouldn’t matter if he did feel the need to talk; he had tried to strike up a conversation once before, and it was if he and his questions didn’t exist. The priests were courteous, helpful, but silent as mutes, and were both the household staff and bodyguards of the Father — nothing more, nothing less.

Drummond continued weaving along dark corridors that sloped ever downward, with the only light a single candle placed here and there in damp stone alcoves. He guessed the candles were for his benefit, as the priests didn’t seem to mind the dark at all. Drummond watched the man’s back for a while — he seemed to glide in his cassock, as though he didn’t take steps but instead moved on some sort of conveyance that had no normal up-and-down motion of walking. Maybe he was on wheels. He would have laughed at the thought, expect he knew that his nervousness would have made it come out like some sort of insane cackle.

After another fifteen minutes of heading down ancient moss-covered steps, and along smooth stone pathways, Drummond estimated they were a good half-dozen floors below ground. It was warmer here, as though the heating had been cranked up to about eighty degrees. He pulled a silken handkerchief from his breast pocket to dab at his brow and top lip.

Eventually the priest stopped before a large archway, at another dark, sealed door. He turned and nodded to Drummond, and then stood back into a coffin-shaped alcove. Drummond knew what was expected — he was to go in alone. He swallowed, and licked dry lips. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat, and knocked once before pushing open the thick door.

The first thing that always assailed his senses was the smell — fishy, but not the scent of fresh-caught fish, but more the odor of something left to putrefy on a dead shoreline. There was also the heat, and the pervasive darkness broken only by the light of a double candle on the altar stone at the far end of the large room.

Drummond stood still, feeling perspiration run down his sides. There were other impenetrably dark alcoves at various places, and he knew they led on to further passageways. He had no idea how large the building was, or how far it descended into the Earth, but guessed whatever the size from the outside, its depths led down too many levels for him to calculate. Frankly, he thought, I’m as deep as I ever want to go.

A gust of even more fishy air: he felt the hair rise on his neck. He knew what was required of him and walked slowly to the altar, keeping his gaze averted, then got to his knees, clasping his hands in front of him. He looked up, straight ahead, feeling his heart rate increase.

“Father.”

A huge figure grew out of the darkness, seeming to rise up from behind the altar stone. The Father was over seven feet tall, wearing a cowl pulled up to conceal a large head, and a dark cassock over a lumpy misshapen frame. Like the priest on the way down, the Father seemed to glide rather than walk, and was always face-on, never turning his back, as though there was only ever one side to the being.

“Charles.” The voice was ocean deep and guttural. It had a bubbling quality as if the man had fluid in the back of his throat and was struggling to form words around a sluggish tongue.

“Yes, my Father. You called and your servant came.”

The voice bubbled for a moment, before words formed. “The Al-Azif, the hidden Necronomicon, will be found. It is, as we suspected all along, in the land of the Egyptian kings.” The Father paused as if to catch his breath or rest a strange tongue in a strange mouth. “Charles, there is a man, a Hussein ben Albadi, in Syria, who has access to the first copy made — it is quite detailed. He is talking to the Americans now, sharing what he knows. They are already there.”

Drummond looked up. “Do you want me to intercept them?” He knew if he could recover the Book, his reward would be substantial.

“Not yet.” There was wet wheezing for a few seconds. “Go to Syria first. But let the Americans recover it. Then take it from them.”

Drummond bowed. “It shall be as you wish.”

The Father glided closer, his arm reached forward. Something that felt like soft, cold fingers caressed Drummond’s chin, tilting his face upward. “The last seals will be broken; the Necronomicon will show us how. You will speak the words, Charles.” The hand caressed his face. “Bring it to us, and you shall be rewarded like no other human on this world. You will be the king of the kings. The Old One will rise, and we must all be ready.”

Drummond’s eyes were glassy in his pleasure, but as the Father continued to lean over him, he needed to hold his breath from the stench. The tall being shifted, and Drummond caught a glimpse of the structure within the dark folds of the cowl. He felt his testicles shrivel. Things moved in there where the face should have been, coiling over each other, writhing and twisting softly, like some many-legged sea creature moving in excited agitation.

The head leaned back, and the image disappeared in the folds of the heavy material. “Charles, they must never learn to read the book. Even those who see its fragments must be… silenced. Nothing must stop our work. Nothing must stop the final seals being broken. Nothing.” The hand moved to clasp his shoulder — it was viscid soft, at first. He felt the cold through his jacket, but then also felt pressure, and then pain. “They must not learn.”

“I… understand.” Drummond knew his voice sounded a little high, as the fingers began to dig into his flesh. He crushed his eyes shut, and the pressure on his shoulder eased and then vanished. He looked up in time to see that the figure had retreated behind the altar, and then, as if by magic, it simply shrank or dropped from sight.

He fell forward and threw up, his stomach continuing to roil within him. After another few moments, he got to his feet and backed to the door. As soon as he got there, it was pulled open by the bald priest, who motioned for him to immediately follow him back along the way he had come.

Back in his car, he used both hands to wipe his handkerchief up and down over his face. He had already discarded his jacket, as the smell of the handprint made his stomach turn over again.

Kroen sat silently, waiting for his command.

“Get our Syrian people on the line. Prepare the fast jet, and a team; I’ll take charge.” He smiled, his eyes burning with excitement. “We can’t beat them to it now, but who cares? We will let them find it, and bring it to us.” He confidence was returning. “I want that fucking book, Kroen.”

“Yes sir,” the big man said, staring straight ahead.

Drummond smiled thinly. “And I want to find out what else this Dr Hussein ben Albadi really knows.”

Chapter 11

They’d left the road hours back, and the tough four-wheel-drive vehicle was now bounding over a dry, rock-hard clay pan, throwing up clouds of yellow dust. Abrams scowled as he looked back through the rear windshield. “We’re sending up a plume a mile high.”

Hartogg spun the wheel. “Nothing we can do about it, sir. Place hasn’t seen rain for weeks — dry as the dust in a mummy’s jockstrap.”

Abrams snorted and then tried to make room between the two SEALs. He turned to the other passengers. “Everyone all right back there?”

The major looked at each of them briefly before his eyes travelled once again to the rear window. Matt knew he wasn’t checking their own dust plume again; he was looking for other plumes — pursuit.

Matt sat at the window to the right in the rear seat, and Tania had demanded the one on the left for security. Andy got the middle as he had scrambled to be next to her.

“Are we there yet?” the geologist asked over the sound of the engine.

Abrams smiled patiently. “About a hundred miles, but definitely not as the crow flies — so maybe a day’s driving — longer if we need to do some avoidance maneuvering.”

“How will we know when we’re in Turkey?” Andy continued to watch the landscape go by.

“People will be speaking Turkish… and hopefully won’t be trying to cut your head off.” Tania nudged him when he rolled his eyes. “Just pulling your leg, Bennet. As there’s no border, and just miles of empty land, we’ll have to rely on our GPS to tell us.”

Andy nodded and slid down into his seat. “You seemed to know a lot about this lighthouse and island. What exactly are we looking for?”

Tania leaned back. “The Lighthouse debris is mostly underwater now, and the Island of Pharos has thousands of archeological pieces scattered over the surrounding sea floor — columns, statues and sphinxes have been lying there for ages.” She turned to him. “I’m looking forward to what we can find there.”

Rick Berry had his head down looking into his GPS, and then pointed flat handed to the north-west. “We need to veer five degrees to avoid a small town coming up.”

Matt knew that running into possible spies was not an option for them. Though he could speak most Middle Eastern languages fluently, the group looked about as Syrian as the Bee Gees. If they ran into rebels, they wouldn’t get away without a firefight.

Hartogg eased the wheel over a notch, and slowed as they hit some heavily stoned ground. Abrams looked back for a moment, grunted and then slid lower into his seat as well, and then pushed his cap down over his eyes. The dust cloud was worse, and, as they barreled along, the thick tires kicked up a huge rooster tail of debris.

Matt sipped from his canteen and looked past Tania and out her window. It was easy for the eyes to become tired, looking out over the crumbling yellowed ground, and the occasional pale spiky leaves of stunted trees.

Though they were heading into an area of higher elevation, it was still hot and dry with the outside temperature around ninety and the humidity at a moisture-sapping fifteen percent. This was not the sort of land you took to by foot. Without lots of water, you could end up dehydrated and delirious within twenty-four hours. He bet that the two SEALS, Abrams, and probably even Tania might be physically equipped for the terrain, but city slickers like him and Andy would be in a world of hurt. He was…

Their vehicle was kicked up into the air, to spin in slow motion. Matt felt his stomach lurch as light and dark swirled in and out of each other. The truck struck the ground on its roof, and his head and neck compressed. Everything went black.

Matt opened his eyes as he was being dragged backward, his boots furrowing the hard ground. He looked up to see the SEAL, Hartogg, smiling down at him; the big man winked.

“Nice to see you back in the land of the living, Professor.”

“Wha…?” Matt’s vision swam and the SEAL’s white grin in a dust-and-soot-covered face stood out like a Cheshire cat’s.

“Bit of a lump in the road, is all. All good now.” Hartogg continued to grin and drag him.

Matt craned his neck; Tania was sitting up, hunched over and holding her head. Andy was beside her, sipping from a canteen; his face was streaked red.

Matt went to sit forward. “I’m okay.”

Hartogg pulled him up next to Andy and Tania. He then let go, and kneeled to push up one of Matt’s eyelids and look into his eye. After a second he nodded and slapped him on the shoulder. “Good man; you profs are tougher than I remember from when I went to school.”

“You went to school?” Andy grinned at him.

Hartogg grinned back, gave him the finger, then got back to his feet and jogged to the upturned SUV. Matt sat forward, feeling his head swim momentarily.

“What just happened?” He watched as the SEAL joined Berry and Abrams in stripping the destroyed vehicle. Smoke billowed and the scorched ground indicated there had been a fire at some time. The three men worked quickly, crawling in and over the machine like ants over roadkill, and that’s exactly what it was.

Tania groaned. “Oh God.” She rubbed her head through her hair. She looked around quickly. “Give me a shove here, Bennet.”

Andy pushed Tania forward and she got to her feet, standing with her hands on her hips but head down as she sucked in huge gulps of air. She looked across to Matt. “What happened? A fucking mine, Claymore, IED, take your pick — that happened. You okay?”

Matt nodded, and felt his neck creak.

“Good.” She smiled down at him.

“I’m okay too, thanks for asking.” Andy toasted her with his canteen.

“I could already see you were,” she said, stretching her back.

Berry trudged back to them, unloaded some gear. “Boss says five minutes and we bug out, Captain.”

“Got it.” Tania sipped again and watched as the big man returned to the truck. In a few more minutes they had everything of value that was still working, and the SEALs and Abrams joined the wounded.

The major lifted field glasses to his eyes. “We need to move. Was an IED, a good one; usually means there’ll be insurgents close by. They’ll want to see what it was that trigged their trap. We need to be a long way from here by then.”

Andy looked around. “Where to? Do we head back?”

Abrams shook his head. “Nope, we’re closer to the border than home. Might as well continue. Our sat-comms are toast so as far as HQ is concerned we’ve gone dark. We can only send a local squirt to some friendly stations and hope we can pick up support — might be useful if we run into trouble.” He continued to scan the horizon. “So, we go forward.”

Andy snorted. “Did you say run into trouble? You mean, this is not trouble?”

Abrams continued to look out at the dry landscape. “You’re alive, aren’t you?” He turned back to the group and grinned. “But that was the good news. So, now the bad news — we do not have transport, we are in extremely hostile territory and will need to move quickly, carrying as much as is humanly possible. There will be no backup, no international communications and no more supplies until we complete our mission. That is the priority, those are our orders.”

Tania dusted herself down. “The only way is forward.” She turned to Matt and Andy and smiled. “Just think of it as a very long walk on the beach.”

Matt scoffed and looked out over the arid, gritty land. “Yeah, and then normally the payoff is a cool dip in the surf.”

“Not this time, Point Break.” She held out her hand, and Matt grasped it and hauled himself to his feet. He felt a little woozy, and although his head cleared quickly, he was left with a splitting headache. He used one hand to press on his temples.

“How’s the head?” She stepped in closer to him, looking deep into his face. “No concussion I can see, but you look a little pale. You need to sit down again?”

“No.” Matt felt a dab of stickiness at one of his temples — blood. “Headache, but I’m okay.” He winced.

“Got just the thing.” She reached into her pack, jiggled something and then held up her open hand — there were two small white tablets on her dirty palm.

“Excedrin — that’s it?” Matt raised an eyebrow.

She grinned. “Kearns, out here, even if you lose a freakin leg, that’s it. Look around, Professor; we’re not in Kansas any more.”

Matt shook his head. “It’s okay, I’ll survive.”

“Tough guy, huh?” She closed her hand over the pills and smiled. “I like it.”

“My back is sore.” Andy got to his feet, knocking dust from his hair.

She snorted. “You’re a geologist, Bennet — an outdoor man who works with rock.” She jerked a thumb at Matt. “I’m sure the toughest thing the professor has had to put up with is a fight over the last bagel in the staff room.”

“Hey I…” Matt clamped his mouth shut, cutting off his protest. He’d battled krakens beneath the Antarctic ice sheets, been stalked by giant beasts up in the Black Mountains, and he’d travelled to the Amazon to trek through a hidden prehistoric jungle. He looked at Tania grinning at him, and he shrugged. At the moment he was getting special treatment because she thought him a bookworm — Why rock the boat? he thought, and grinned sheepishly. “You know me too well already, Captain.”

The SEALs talked quickly and softly, with Abrams pointing in a few different directions, and then to small devices — probably GPS and ground radar, Matt assumed.

After a moment, Abrams nodded and turned. “Okay, people, let’s move it out. I want to do twenty miles before we rack. Berry, take point, Hartogg, secure the rear — no stragglers, folks.” He waved them on. “Take us out, Lieutenant.” Berry jogged a few hundred feet out in front, and then continued at a fast walk. His neck was craned forward, and Matt imagined his eyes would be darting over everything that could possibly conceal a sniper, explosive, or attacker. Given the hostile territory, Matt didn’t envy these guys for a second.

In another few hours, the sun had started to dip, but the heat was no less intense. The only saving grace was that it was a dry heat, though even so, lips became chapped and skin chafed. Water was now at a premium, so rationing at short sips only was in force. Matt knew what could happen during dehydration — disorientation, hallucinations, headaches, and muscle fatigue, and then, in extreme cases, death.

They would walk long into the night’s darkness, and rest for a few hours before sunup. Then hopefully, they’d only have another twenty-five or so miles until the border, maybe arriving by mid morning. Matt wasn’t sure what this meant, when they got there — friendly faces, an outpost? He was too fatigued to ask.

A few hours later, the light had gone and Berry came back in. Matt overheard his words as he spoke softly with Abrams.

“Got a dry creek bed — only a slight depression, but gives us some shelter. Flat land outside, low opportunity for concealment on the perimeter — good as we’re going to get.”

Abrams nodded. “Okay; we’ll rest here.” He suddenly felt for his comms and looked at the small screen. He grunted in satisfaction.

“Good news, we got a return ping. There’s a Mossad agent in the vicinity: Bluestar. Looks like we might have a friendly face out there about to join us.” He turned to the group and pointed to the dry creek bed. “Let’s get some rest. I’ll take first watch for an hour, then Berry, and then Hartogg. No fires, no lights, no wandering off, limited conversation — sound will carry for miles over a flat surface.” He looked hard at Matt and Andy.

“Got it,” Matt said.

Later, he and Andy sat together, eating dried beef and sipping warm water. Matt felt bone tired, and Andy’s eyes had dark circles showing under a layer of dust.

“Been in the desert before?” Matt whispered.

Andy nodded slowly. “Yep, Chihuahuan, Sonoran, Mojave, lots of them. But never in the Middle East — first time.” He took another bite of his beef, chewing slowly. “You?”

Matt nodded. “Yeah. The Middle East is the real genesis of civilization, and the birthplace of formal language. Most of my work is done on campus, but I’ve been known to get my hands dirty.”

Andy grinned. “Thought so. You never struck me as the sort to wrestle with other academics over that stale donut.”

Matt smiled. “No, but as Captain Kovitz is extending me her personal protection…”

“Forget it; she has eyes for only me.” Andy laughed. He nodded to Tania. “She’s quite a looker… for a soldier, I mean.”

Matt looked over his shoulder to where Tania was checking her kit. “Only you, huh? Good luck with that.” She looked up and gave them a thumbs-up. Matt retuned the gesture and then turned back to Andy. “Sure, she’s attractive, but I wouldn’t tell her that; army chicks are usually pretty tough.”

Andy’s mouth turned down. “Still not sure I like them on the front line.”

Matt snorted. “You haven’t met some of the military women I have.” He remembered the fearsome Special Forces soldier, Casey Franks, all tattoos, scars and bunched muscle. And there were others he knew even more formidable.

“Yeah, well, maybe there’s one in a thousand,” Andy scoffed. “But Tania’s a nice girl — too nice to be doing this.” He laid himself back down.

“Archeology or army? Ah, forget it.” Matt also lay down, resting his head on his pack.

Andy said, “Do you really think there is a book that’s going to tell us what’s going on with these earth-drop occurrences?”

Matt shrugged. “A week ago I would have called bullshit. But with the holes, the birds, roaches, and seeing the pages that Albadi had, predicting the events we are experiencing, well, then, yeah, I think there’s a good chance we’ll find something.”

“Good.” Andy cleared his throat. “Because when I was at the bottom of the Iowa sinkhole, I saw something. Freaked me out. First time I ever felt like that in my life.”

Matt stared up at the sky. There were a billion stars sprayed across the velvet darkness — pinpricks of light showing through a black blanket. Directly overhead, lighter and bigger than the rest, was a line of six dots. Matt knew there’d be two more behind the Earth — it was the solar system’s convergence, and would complete within a few days.

“Yep, we’ll find something,” he hoped aloud, and closed his eyes and prayed for sleep.

Abrams, first on watch, had draped a camouflage net over his head to break up his profile. He had a long, bulky set of field glasses to his eyes and moved them over the landscape — nothing showed. He flicked them over to light enhancement and then up to thermal — a few rocks still glowed pink, as the day’s heat slowly left them, but for the most part, there was nothing — not a bat, rodent, lizard, or even bug he could detect. Unnatural, he thought, as a desert night was a hive of activity for nocturnal hunters. The heat of the day forced most creatures below ground, but at night, it was showtime… Unnatural, he thought again.

He was about to move back to light enhance when a lump grew in the sand a few hundred feet out. He frowned and focused in on it — the thing was big, and moved slowly, only raising the sand by a few inches. Where it lumped the dry surface there was a red glow, as if there was intense heat being generated. He blinked to clear his vision. The small sand wave travelled for hundreds of feet. He wished the geologist was with him to ask, as he doubted it was anything artificial. As Abrams followed it with his eyes, it began to sink lower and lower, until it vanished.

“What the fuck was that?” he whispered. Must be related to the sinkholes, he guessed. He made a mental note to ask Andy Bennet when he woke. He exhaled, feeling unsettled. He’d feel better after they got to their destination, and at least had some cover at their backs. He put the glasses to his eyes again, and scanned the now cold and motionless desert.

Matt felt the toe in his ribs and looked up to see Captain Tania Kovitz standing over him. “Rise and shine, Sleeping Ugly.”

He blinked; it was still dark. He felt grittiness in his eyes, and a mouth that was sticky dry. “Christ, I feel like shit. Sorry.” He sat forward, his head thumping.

Tania kneeled. “How’s the head?”

“Not worse.” He rubbed his face. “Just dehydrated. I’ll be fine when we’re under way.”

She punched his arm. “Good man.”

Matt grinned back. “Yes I am. You should see me at my best.”

“Careful, I might take you up on that.” She raised an eyebrow.

Matt toasted her with his canteen and then sipped. He would have liked to swill and spit, but the water was too precious, so he swallowed it down, grit, stickiness and all. He got to his feet and saw that Andy was already up, talking to Abrams. Berry and Hartogg were nowhere to be seen.

Tania had a small pair of field glasses to her eyes and spoke out of the side of her mouth. “Get some food into you, as we’re heading out soon. We’re going to try and put in another ten miles before the sun comes up.” She lowered the glasses. “We don’t have enough water for a full daylight trek; this’ll save us a few pints.”

Matt nodded. “I’ll be ready.”

Andy joined them and Matt snorted. “Hey, you look as bad as I feel.” He motioned to Abrams. “Everything okay with the major?”

“Yeah sure,” Andy said. “He said he might have seen something strange out in the desert last night; like a lump or something moving under the sand. Wanted my advice.”

“That sounds weird; what did you tell him?” Matt tucked his canteen away.

Andy shrugged. “Could be a lot of things. The earth can create a wave effect through seismic activity, stress vibrations, liquefaction — plenty of causes.” He looked around and then grunted softly. “But I doubt any of those are in effect around here. The Middle East is geologically very old and stable. But then again, so were Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Utah, and a hundred other places where the land dropped.” He grunted softly. “Nothing is making sense any more. Don’t think I was much help to him.”

Abrams turned to them and held up a hand.

Tania nodded in return. “Let’s go, boys.” She waved them on.

Charles Drummond walked around the man nailed to the top of the wooden table. He hummed softly as he removed objects from his pockets to lay them gently next to the prone figure. At one side of the large room, the man’s servants were perched on wooden stools, hands tied behind their backs, and a noose around each of their necks — there were six of them, but three already dangled, their faces blue, eyes popping and tongues bulging like fat slugs between their lips.

Kroen stood with several men almost as huge as he was, with automatic weapons held loosely at their sides. More men were spread throughout the house — Drummond’s small army had been assembled.

“So, so, so, Doctor Hussein ben Albadi, formerly of Damascus University, well-respected academic, and a man who is moderately wealthy… and now a traitor, and a thief to boot!” Drummond motioned to all the books stacked around the room. “And a very good one, by the look of this treasure trove.”

Albadi mumbled through his gag.

Drummond leaned over him. “What’s that, too tight?” He laughed. “That’s the least of your troubles, my dear.” He walked to a shelf and drew out a book. He flipped it open. “Wow, this looks old… and expensive.” He looked up. “Is it rare?”

Albadi’s face was red and he mumbled more frantically.

Drummond opened the book, and ripped out a page. He snorted. “Oh what the hell.” He ripped out page after page, getting faster and faster. Many of the ancient leaves crumbled in his hand. At last the spine split and the book fell to pieces. “Oops, bet I get a late fee for that.”

He dropped the remains and wiped his hands together. “So, dear Doctor, let’s get down to business. We know that you have assisted six Americans — four of them military, and two specialist civilians. We also know you sent them out into the desert, after showing them fragments of the first existing copy of the Al Azif. A very valuable copy, given it has clues regarding the whereabouts of the original. But you already knew of its value and its secrets, didn’t you? That’s why you burned it up.”

Drummond sighed. “What makes a man who has given his entire career over to books consciously destroy something of such rarity and value?” He grinned down at the doctor. “Oh, I can’t tell you how irritating I found that. Irritating, but of no matter.” He reached out to stroke Albadi’s head. “Because we now have you, and all the wonderful secrets locked away in your brain.”

Drummond patted Albadi’s balding head, grinned and then reached under the plastic apron he wore to take another item from his pocket, which he placed with the others. He looked along the neat arrangement of scalpels, calipers, pincers, and bone saws and nodded approvingly. They were all gleamingly new and terrifyingly sharp. All would saw, open and slice though flesh like butter.

Drummond ran his hand along the line of reflective steel. Albadi whimpered and stared up at the ceiling, tear streaks marking his cheeks and temples. He was stripped to his underwear, with large nails pounded into the palms of his hands, his elbows and ankles, pinning him to the wood.

Drummond lifted a single instrument, a scalpel, and held it delicately like a conductor would a baton. “Beautiful.” He spoke softly, catching sight of his own reflection in the polished steel. “Where did you send them?”

Albadi whimpered, and then mumbled. Drummond snickered and reached across to pull down his gag. “I’m sorry, you were saying?”

“You fool. You have no idea what you’re doing. I know you don’t want the Book; you want to find the gates. Do you know what will happen if the Old One rises? Do you?”

Drummond turned. “Why yes.” He held his arms wide. “I’ll be king… and you and your kind will be nothing more than grist to the mill, so to speak.” He looked at his wristwatch and his lips compressed. “This is taking too long.” He turned to look over his shoulder at Kroen, and nodded once.

The huge bodyguard kicked another of the stools away, and Albadi crushed his eyes shut, as if that would also drown out the strangulated gurgling as another life was extinguished.

Drummond smirked. “Two left. Soon we will run out of servants, then it will be your turn.”

Albadi kept his eyes closed and Drummond leaned over him. “It’s not very pleasant, watching a man die like that, and knowing that it’s all because of you. But, Doctor, you really are missing something that is truly beautiful.” He tapped the man’s face with the scalpel. “I could make you watch, you know. A little incision here, and here, and then peel away the upper lids on both your eyes — no hiding then, hmm?”

Drummond sighed. “Doctor, or at least doctor of literature, I know the human body so well. I know how to caress it to heavenly pleasure, or take it to Hell when I expose nerve clusters and then play them like a harp.” His smirk deepened. “But the music yours plays will not be to your liking: of that, I can assure you.”

“Kroen.” Drummond held up two fingers, and the last two stools were kicked away. He waited until the sounds died away to only the creaks of stretching rope fibers. He sighed. “I have done this dozens of times, to stronger men and women than you. They all talk, they always talk.” He grinned. “Just to be clear: you are already dead. Your future is known and it is me who will have the pleasure of taking you forward on that journey. But the way I take you is up to you — swift and painless, like you are just getting tired and so cross over into a gentle sleep from which you never wake.” His eyebrows went up slightly. “Or screaming for hours on end as I reduce you to a thousand slices of bloody flesh and shrieking nerve ends.”

Drummond waited a moment longer, and then held up both hands, surgeon-like, with one holding the scalpel.

Albadi whimpered, and then nodded. Drummond leaned over him. “I have a secret to tell you.” He snickered. “I don’t really care about the Book’s copy, and I know exactly where your visitors are going… I only want to make sure you tell no one else about it.” He kissed the blade and smirked. “Doctor, I think we both know that I was always going to torture you.” He placed the blade on Albadi’s thigh, just over the femoral nerve, and then drew it down.

On the Lebanese-Syrian border, an Israeli agent of the elite Metsada Division stopped her roadside interrogation as she received the coded security squirt from the Americans. Her lips compressed in a tight line: she knew well the territory the Americans were in — there were Al Qaida, ISIS, the United Islamist Front, Party of a Thousand Martyrs, and a dozen other armed brigades crawling all over the area. With luck they might make it — but there was precious little of that left in Syria any more.

The man underneath the agent’s boot wriggled and spat words up from split and bloody lips. The agent ignored him, and looked out to the east — the sun would soon rise, and the Americans would be exposed — not much time.

Concentration lapsed for only a moment, but it was enough — the man jerked upward, a combat knife appearing in his hand, the blade coming fast at the Metsada agent’s groin. In a swift motion her foot on his neck was withdrawn, and then swung around to stamp down on the wrist holding the knife. Her slim black dagger flashed down once, deep into the man’s orbital socket — he shuddered, and then lay still.

The agent wiped blood from the knife and hand, exposing a small blue star in the meat between thumb and forefinger. The blade was then expertly tucked back into a sleeve, and then she stepped away from the body and rolled it into a ditch.

The agent climbed aboard a long skeletal-looking motorbike. The LEPERD was an Israeli design for fast solo incursions — electric motor with plenty of torque delivered via a lightweight but muscular power plant. Its heavy-duty spring suspension system, adjustable rear shocks, and knobbed tire tread meant it was built for overland desert terrain.

The agent kicked up the guard, pulled goggles down over her eyes, wrapped a keffiyeh headdress around her nose and mouth, and throttled forward, accelerating quickly to seventy miles per hour over the dry flat landscape. It immediately became clear why the motorbike was Metsada’s solo vehicle of choice in the Middle East — it was near silent, the electric motor giving off only a faint whine as it blistered over the predawn desert landscape.

Fifty miles — be there in an hour, thought Adira Senesh, whose name meant mighty in Hebrew. She concentrated on the still dark desert as she drove without lights. Her eyes were as black as pools of oil and they were narrowed in her concentration. She knew she owed the Americans nothing, but there was one man she would never forget, one who had stolen her heart, and who perhaps again one day… She shook her head and gritted her teeth. But not this day, she thought. This day she would do her job, and, as a top Metsada agent, sometimes that job was dealing death.

The sun was up and Abrams and the small group had long since left the creek bed. The land was flat save for dry scrub and ochre boulders in an ochre landscape, for miles upon miles upon miles. He thanked his lucky stars that the GPS unit had survived the crash — without electronics he bet even his SEALs would be hard pressed to navigate by just the huge sun.

Berry was out at point, a hundred feet ahead, hunched, and occasionally lifting field glasses to his eyes. Thermal and night-vision were of course now useless. Abrams looked briefly over his shoulder — the geologist and language professor were strolling along as if looking for a picnic spot in Central Park. Behind them was Captain Tania Kovitz with only a sidearm, but she was as vigilant as ever. Deeper back at rear point was Hartogg, adopting the same crouching movement as Berry — Abrams was glad to have both of them, but now wished for another dozen. There was something about the land here that made him feel uneasy… and he hated to admit it, but he was still a little rattled by that weird lumping in the desert he had seen the night before.

Out front, Berry raised a hand, and then lowered it slowly, palm down. Abrams felt a tingle run through his system — the SEAL had spotted something. Those guys could pick up things regular soldiers like him could never hope to. Abrams half turned; Tania and Hartogg were already lowering themselves to the ground, but Matt and Andy were just squinting back at him.

“Get on the goddamned ground,” Tania hissed. Matt and Andy immediately dropped.

Berry scurried to a craggy outcrop, and was down on one knee. He had his rifle to his eye and was using the scope to scan the flat plains out to the northwest.

Abrams spoke softly into his field mic. “Talk to me, Berry.”

“Movement; two o’clock — staying low now, dug in tight, but they’re there.” The man was cool as ice.

“Shit,” Abrams whispered. They could win a skirmish against a few militants, but couldn’t afford to get pinned down. When reinforcements came, they wouldn’t be his own. And if there were more than a few dug in; they were in trouble right here, right now.

Abrams clicked on his mic again. “Kovitz, bring the civs in close. Hartogg, secure the rear.”

Matt, Andy, Tania belly-crawled to Abrams, and Hartogg stayed a few dozen feet back to turn and focus on the landscape behind them.

“Clear,” was all the SEAL said.

Thank God. We aren’t ringed yet, Abrams thought with relief. They had grenades; once Berry confirmed how many and where, they could turn them to dust.

“Let’s see what we’ve got. Berry, give me a count.” He tried to project cool, but was anything but. He felt as if he had a lit stick of old-style dynamite in his hand, and the wick had just disappeared into the end. Nothing had happened, yet, which meant explosion imminent or nothing at all — either eventuality was possible.

Abrams swallowed; it hurt, his mouth dust-dry. He felt the rising sun begin to sting the back of his neck. Taking too damn long, he thought.

“Incoming!” Berry roared the word, and got down low as the RPG fizzed out of the desert, directly at him, and then over him, travelling at about six hundred feet per second.

“Shit!” Abrams hugged his head. It was never like in the movies, where the rocket seemed to travel slowly — in real life once they kicked from the pipe, they were moving almost as fast as a bullet.

The rocket-propelled grenade exploded in the desert, just a hundred feet past the SEAL. They all felt the heat and percussive blast wave: the plume was close enough to punish eardrums and sear skin.

Berry was immediately up, putting rounds back at the launch position. Return fire spat from dozens of concealed positions at two o’clock, just as he had said.

Another rocket sailed out and past them. They couldn’t shoot these things for shit… And thank God for that, Abrams thought. But they obviously had more weapons than sense, and time was on their side. Eventually they’d hit the bull’s eye.

A couple of insurgents broke from the earth and sprinted toward Abrams’s position. Berry raised himself up and fired two rounds, both hit dead center and both men were blown backward. Immediately hundreds of rounds were launched toward Berry and their group.

From behind, Hartogg spoke laconically into Abrams’s ear. “Got another nest, one out at four o’clock and the other making all the noise at two o’clock — reckon there’s about half a dozen shooters in each, not counting those two try-hards that Berry just sent to Hell.”

“Got it.” Abrams held up his field glasses, and Hartogg spoke again.

“I also reckon there’ll be more coming soon. Can’t stay here, boss. Just say the word.”

“Yup.” Abrams exhaled. He knew what the man was asking — an assault — take them head-on now, before they got a lucky shot in, or their numbers grew. Berry and Hartogg would get close, and perhaps take them down. They both had M67 fragmentation grenades, but unlike the sniper’s nests, theirs weren’t rocket propelled — they could throw them a hundred feet, but closer was better for kill-confirm.

Abrams grimaced, momentary indecision making the gears of his mind spin uselessly. Just then Berry kneeled up and fired again, short bursts to conserve ammunition. This time, total firepower was concentrated on him, and another rocket fizzed out from behind a small outcrop of low rock.

“Incoming.” Berry threw himself down.

Abrams also hugged the dirt, and watched as his worst fear was realized — Berry ceased to exist — his position was vaporized by a direct strike.

Abrams pounded the dirt with his fist. “Fu-uuuck.” His seconds of indecision had meant a good man’s death.

Bullets came at them like swarms of bees, and another rocket exploded a few feet out from Hartogg. There would be more rockets now, and if they tried to flee, they wouldn’t get a dozen feet.

Abrams ground his teeth. Trying to wait them out was not an option — nightfall would spell their death, as then they’d also have to deal with the belly-crawlers coming at them over the dark sand.

He looked back over his shoulder. Four sets of eyes looked to him, waiting for his next instruction — he had nothing.

Can’t stay here, Hartogg had said. Take em head-on, now or never. He felt down for his grenades. This is gonna hurt, he thought, as he steeled himself for the suicidal assault.

He looked up briefly to check the sniper’s position, and saw momentarily a rooster tail of sand and debris shooting up about half a mile out. It stopped, and he blinked, trying to determine what it had been. Maybe more reinforcements for their attackers, he thought with dismay. Abrams had surprise on his side for only a few more minutes.

He opened his mic. “Hartogg, going in, on my word — looping assault, I’ll come in from the right flank, you the left on the four o’clock nest. Kovitz, prepare to give us cover from your position. Okay, people, let’s blow them back to hell.”

“HUA,” Hartogg returned aggressively, sounding eager to avenge his SEAL buddy.

Abrams sucked in a huge breath, and looked down at the ground for a second. He said a silent prayer, and then counted down.

“Three, two, one… go.”

He burst from his position, sprinting out in a loop, zigzagging as he came. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the huge form of Hartogg doing the same, the man moving at a speed beyond his own to take on the southern nest.

The hundred yards seemed to take forever, but as he approached his target, there were no rockets or gunfire. When Abrams was within thirty feet of their enemies’ position, he saw someone dressed in dark fatigues, guns strapped down on his groin in a V-shape for fast draw, and a slim black blade in each hand.

The figure — not a big guy, but wiry as heck, and faster than any human Abrams had ever seen in action — danced, spun, and kicked, slashing and stabbing at the snipers who one after the other fell around him. The desert fighters leaped at the lone figure, or raised guns, but the soldier was too quick for all of them, and soon they had all been cut down like wheat.

Abrams slowed to a stop, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Hartogg joined him, his gun still at the ready.

“Boss, southern nest is dead — all six.” He motioned to the dead snipers before them. “And now, so is this one. Who the fuck is this one-man hurricane?” He still had his gun up.

“Don’t know yet, but I’m done with taking chances.” Abrams held his pistol in a two-handed grip. “Soldier, lower your weapons.”

The black covered figure was barely breathing hard. Dark eyes were the only feature showing in the keffiyeh headdress.

“Put… your weapons… on… the ground.” Abrams spoke through his teeth.

The twin pools of dark stared for a moment, assessing Abrams and Hartogg, and then the guy leaned forward to wipe his bloody blades on the clothing of one of the dead.

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Abrams felt his patience burning away.

“Boss, maybe he doesn’t speak English,” Hartogg added.

Abrams shouted, “This is your last warning: put your hands in the air, or I will be forced to disarm you.” He felt Hartogg glance at him from the corner of his eyes. He didn’t want to shoot — just wanted the asshole to comply. What’s his problem? he wondered. “Drop… the…”

The lone figure spun the blades and then slipped them back into hidden sheaths. He then held his hands out, palms open.

“Don’t move.” Abrams advanced, followed by Hartogg from a slightly different angle. Abrams could still see little other than a pair of velvet-dark eyes. The assassin raised his arms, and stayed stock still, legs slightly apart. His eyes never left him for a second.

Abrams came in close and reached out to pull the head-covering away.

“Boss.” Hartogg’s voice carried a warning — too late.

The figure exploded into action, grabbing Abrams’s wrist and gun, spinning him around, finger and thumb on each side of his windpipe, and using his body as a shield from Hartogg. One minute Abrams had felt in control, and then next he was disarmed, and now a hostage.

The SEAL screamed instructions, gun up, but obviously knew that he didn’t have a shot.

Abrams cursed. Idiot, amateur! he thought. He’d just witnessed this person take out two snipers’ nests by himself as easily as if he were ordering a burger and beer. And a minute later he was underestimating the guy.

“Be still.”

The voice in Abrams’s ear was muffled, but not deep. He calmed himself and they stood for a few seconds, Abrams held as a shield, and Hartogg neutralized. In another moment, the assassin loosened his grip on Abrams’s throat, and let his gun slip back into his hand. Abrams was pushed away, but the point was clearly made — I could have killed you, but I let you live.

Hartogg had his gun up, rock steady. “Got a shot — say the word, Boss.”

Abrams waved him down, breathing in gulps from a pinched neck.

The figure started to unwrap the covering over his head, ignoring them both now. The eyes stayed fixed on Abrams.

“What…?” Hartogg’s mouth fell open.

Long dark hair fell loose around a face that could have been beautiful but for an edge of brutality that urged caution, not trust. She wasn’t smiling, though there was no anger in her countenance. She was calm and totally relaxed.

For a woman she was tall, Abrams guessed about five ten at least. She looked around and then her eyes came back to him.

“Not a good time or place for a stroll,” she said without a trace of mirth.

Abrams blinked. “No, no indeed, and we should be driving but ran into a little unexpected IED trouble.”

“Here IED is not unexpected, but always expected — a child’s mistake.” Her eyes were hard.

Hartogg snorted, and the woman looked at him, and then to Berry’s smoldering remains. “You make mistakes out here and people die, hmm?”

“Fuck you.” The veins in Hartogg’s neck bulged.

“At ease.” Abrams cleared his throat, feeling like they, he, had been admonished enough. “Major Joshua Abrams; you mind if I ask who I might be addressing?”

“Joshua?” Her brows went up. “That is an old Hebrew name. It means the salvation of Jehovah. A good, strong name.” She nodded. “Captain Adira Senesh; I got your callout.”

“Israeli army?” Abrams asked.

Senesh ignored the question and instead looked around at the landscape, the sky and then back to Abrams. “Major, you are a long way from home… and not in a good place. What are you doing here?”

Abrams half smiled. The woman didn’t answer his question directly, but the obvious evasion was answer enough: she was a Mossad agent — Kidon or Metsada, he bet — and, by the way she took down all of the insurgents, a damned good one.

“What we’re doing here is classified,” said Tania Kovitz, joining them, followed by Andy and Matt, still several dozen feet back.

Adira looked Tania up and down. “You have about an hour before a squad of terrorists arrive. Good luck.” She began to walk away.

“Adira.” Matt jogged closer.

She spun at his voice, squinting. Like a door swinging open to briefly show warm light, her face softened momentarily, before it swung shut once again. She shook her head. “Professor Matthew Kearns… we live in interesting times.” She suddenly looked around, her eyes wide. “Is he here?”

“No, no, he isn’t,” Matt said, knowing immediately who she was looking for — Alex Hunter.

Her expression dropped. “Of course not. If he were here, those sniper nests would have been obliterated long ago.” She sighed.

Abrams brow creased. “You two know each other?”

Matt grinned. “Yeah, kinda… we met on a mountaintop… in the Appalachians. She gets around.” He stepped closer to the Metsada woman, and turned to Abrams. “And we need her if we’re going to get out of here alive.”

Captain Tania Kovitz kept staring at Adira, but Hartogg lowered his rifle, and nodded to the woman — wary, but more at ease now. Abrams knew the SEAL recognized a fellow Spec Forces warrior… and he agreed with Kearns that she was one they needed.

Abrams grunted. “I agree.” Tania started to object, but he just took his voice up a level. “Adira —”

“Captain Senesh,” Adira said.

“Captain, we need your help. We lost our truck and need to get to the Turkish border.”

“Why?” She stared evenly.

“Because —” Matt began.

“Professor Kearns.” Abrams’s voice carried a warning.

“She can help.” Matt turned back to Adira. “We need to get to Alexandria, in Egypt, and Turkey is the closest friendly place.”

“Where were you hoping to cross, exactly?”

“Reyhanlı, Hatay Province,” Abrams responded.

She nodded. “I know it — on the border — stupid choice. Your information is out of date — it’s now a bombsite. They distrust everyone, and you would be arrested on suspicion of being a spy. This is the Middle East, Major. Nowhere is safe for Americans.”

“Or Israelis,” Abrams pointed out.

She snorted. “But we are used to it, and here, we expect nothing but treachery. Keep in mind that for every single supporter you encounter, there will be a hundred more killers or informants who would sell you out in a second.”

Abrams breathed evenly for a moment, and tried hard to keep his frustration in check. “Well, do you have a better suggestion?”

“Of course. For a start, you must stay away from populated areas. Get to Samandag. It’s in the same province but is less populated and still mostly untouched by the war. It’s also on the coast,” Adira said evenly.

“Then what?” Abrams asked.

“Then, if we’re still all friends, I can have someone meet us. Get you to Israel.”

“We don’t want to get to Israel. We need to get to Egypt, and fast.”

“Oh yes, Alexandria. And you think the Turkish military is going to help you get there? The Turks and Egyptians don’t even talk any more. And you think they will do more than simply detain you, as diplomatic communiqué go back and forth between your countries for weeks.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I think you do not have passports, or a cover story, or even a lot of money to buy safe passage.”

Abrams folded his arms.

Her head tilted. “Did I mention how popular Americans are out here?” She relented. “Major, we can provide you with cover, documentation and everything else you need.” She shrugged. “One step back, two steps forward. Think smart, Major, the door is closing.”

Abrams bristled, and he knew he was grinding his teeth. The damned woman had him over a barrel.

Matt Kearns came and stood in front of him, his back to the woman. “Major, that’ll work. We can trust her.” He shrugged. “There’s no one else to trust.”

Abrams looked past Matt to Adira. “And what’s the price?”

She smiled. “No price, Major. All I need to know is what I’m getting into. What is so important in Alexandria that you would come all the way to Syria, and then cross the desert to find it?”

“You don’t need to know that, and it’s not relevant to you. Besides, I’m not sure at this stage that we should be teaming up with Mossad. However, guide us to Samandag, and then we can see if our plans need updating.”

Adira grinned. “Ah, the warrior who won’t take advice.”

Matt tilted his head. “Sounds like someone else I know.”

Her eyes flicked to Matt. “You are using up all of your lives too quickly, Matthew Kearns. Sooner or later there won’t be someone to save you, and you’ll find your head will become separated from your body.”

“Probably true.” He smiled sadly. “Adira, this is important. We think it might give us answers to the sinkholes and disappearances.”

“Kearns!” Abrams’s voice was sharp, but Matt held up a hand and continued.

“We know they’re also happening in Israel. The Major might even put in a good word for you with the right people in the States.”

She stared for a few moments, and then grunted softly. “Then perhaps we do have a shared goal. This is what I was sent into the desert to ascertain — whether the sinkholes had a military cause… and, if they did, to eradicate it.”

Suddenly, from behind them, Hartogg roared a warning. Adira dived and rolled, and Abrams and the others followed quickly.

Abrams lifted his head. “What have you got, soldier?”

Hartogg was like a statue, gun up and pointed out at the desert. “Movement in sniper nest one.”

“Impossible,” Adira said and got up on one knee, a handgun pointed at the place where she had demolished the six fighters earlier. “They are dead.”

Abrams waited another few seconds, licking dry lips. “Hartogg, low and easy, come in from your right flank. Captain Senesh and I will —”

Before he could finish, Adira was up and sprinting in a zigzag to the nest. She leaped in.

Andy nudged Matt. “Bit of a risk taker, huh?”

“Goddamnit.” Abrams got to his feet, sprinting. Hartogg came in fast from the right.

They arrived at the same time, with Matt, Andy and Tania in fast behind them. They stood looking down into the small depression. Adira walked around the next, kicking over some scraps of clothing, weapons, ammunition, and a dusty pair of field glasses.

“Nothing.” She looked hard at the SEAL.

“What did you see, Hartogg?” Abrams said, frowning.

“Corner-eye movement.” He shrugged. “Bit like… a lump, or something. Thought it was…” He stopped, and then shook his head. “Where are they, then?”

Abrams looked back at where Adira stood holstering her gun. There were no bodies. He slowly turned to scan the landscape.

Hartogg jogged to the second sniper nest, and called back to the group. “Empty as well — all gone.”

Abrams lifted his field glasses. “Someone’s out there — must have snuck in and recovered the bodies from right under our noses.”

Adira shook her head, also turning slowly to look out at the desert. “I do not think this. There were a dozen bodies. If there were enough men to carry that many away, there were enough to ambush us. They would leave the bodies and try and kill us.”

“Well, they didn’t just walk away,” Abrams said quietly.

Adira kicked at a pile of clothing. A football-sized creature scuttled free, its claw-like legs moving quickly.

“Shitza.” She pointed her gun at it.

“What the fuck is that?” Andy said, his face twisted in horror.

The thing was like a giant slater bug with armor-plated segments and way too many legs. It stopped its bid for freedom and instead seemed to stick to the ground. It started to sink into it, shuddering and twisting, and just before it disappeared into the soil, an eye opened on its back — not a chitinous bulb, or multi-faceted lens, but instead a brown eye, a human eye, with pupil and white around it.

In another second, there was just a lump in the soil. Adira used her boot to kick at the small mound — the thing had already sunk below the top layer.

“Was that… was that some sort of gross scarab? They’re carnivorous, aren’t they?” Andy said, his voice high.

“Yes and no.” Matt came down into the small depression and kneeled by the hole Adira had just made. He picked up a discarded blade and started to dig into the soil: it struck nothing solid, but when he pulled the blade back it was coated in black goo. He sniffed it and then flicked it off. “They’re flesh eaters, but the biggest can only grow to about five inches, I think; that thing was a foot long and had about ten legs. It looked like some sort of deformed aberration. I’ve never seen anything like that before.” Matt turned, his mind leaping back to the Syrian doctor and his unsettling texts. “Perhaps no one has seen it before. Remember Albadi’s quote? ‘The other vermin of the dark deep would rise, the lice upon’ or something.”

“Oh great,” Andy groaned. “Do you think these guys were pulled under?” He turned to Tania. “Remember how Frank was pulled into the earth?”

Tania looked from Andy to Abrams. “We should probably move out, sir.”

“Yeah, we should.” Abrams took one last look around. “Captain Senesh, lead on.”

“You.” Adira pointed to Andy, and then out to the desert. “Bring my bike.”

“Huh?” Andy guffawed. “Can I ride it?”

“No. If anyone could ride it, I would. All of us cannot ride, and I do not wish to leave it for the desert. So we need to push it.” She shrugged. “It’s light, and you look strong.”

The geologist went to complain, but Abrams cut him off. “Do it, Andy. All hands in now.”

Andy groaned, but went and lifted the long machine from the sand.

After about an hour’s steady walking, Tania sidled up to Matt, her expression set. “I don’t trust her. She’ll throw us over in a second.”

Matt smiled. “As we’ve done to her in the past. Believe me, she has no reason to trust us either. But, it seems we have shared goals, so…” He shrugged.

Matt saw that Tania’s gaze narrowed as she stared at the athletic form of the Israeli woman. Is there a flash of green appearing in those eyes? he wondered. Perhaps it was just a natural rivalry between members of different forces. Hartogg might have relaxed, but he had volunteered for rear point, where he could keep Captain Senesh in sight even while surveying their surroundings.

Matt nodded at Adira’s back. “She knows what she’s doing, and we need her.”

Tania snorted. “Yeah, well, she needs us too. Everyone does.” She turned to look into Matt’s face. “I think I’m a little more objective than you, and my advice is, just don’t get too close to her. I think you’d regret it.” She dropped back, leaving Matt to trudge on alone.

The pace was hard, Adira’s long legs never once slowing. She never seemed to fatigue. As well, the sun had reached its peak, so the heat began to hammer down on them. Adira had covered over her head again, leaving just a slit in the cloth for her eyes. Andy pushed the bike, and his shirt was completely wet — to his credit he hadn’t complained for a second. Matt felt for the geologist, and decided he’d give the man a break soon. Before he did, he jogged up to walk beside Adira. “You look well… Are you?” he asked, glancing at her.

She turned her covered face to him. “I’m alive.” Her black eyes stared for a few seconds. “And back where I belong.”

“Ah, back where you belong; here.” He waved an arm out at the desolate landscape. He looked back into her eyes. “I kinda missed you.”

“I would have killed you, Matt… if you’d got in my way. That’s what I do. You think I belong in America? I think some people might not be too happy if I turned up there.” She looked away. “Did Alex Hunter survive?”

“Yeah, he survived, and he’s back in the fold now,” Matt said. “I worked on a job with him recently in Crete.”

“So, that was him?” She laughed softly for a moment, before becoming serious again. “Does he ever… ask about me?”

Matt stared forward for a moment, not sure how to answer.

“Ack, forget I asked. Stupid question.” Her voice had a bitter edge.

Matt trudged on beside her for another few minutes before looking around at the landscape. “Must get lonely out here with nothing to do but save us poor dumb Americans.”

“It’s becoming a habit.” She pulled the material away from her face and reached down for a canteen on her hip. She took a sip, then replaced it. “My search for the source of the sinkholes was proving fruitless. They’re happening now all over the world — but you know this.”

Matt nodded. “The land is sinking globally and anyone who goes down into one of the pits never comes back up… or is found. We’re also seeing people disappear who are simply in proximity to the pits.”

She nodded. “Our scientists have tracked anomalies on the surface — strange things that came out of the holes. They usually return, but when we follow them in, we find nothing. It’s solid rock down there. And even the deepest caves only descend a mile.” She grunted. “We have both seen strange things in our lives, Professor. I fear we are about to see them again.”

From behind them Andy cleared his throat, then pushed the bike up between them.

Adira grinned. “You like my bike?”

“I love it, and it only started getting really heavy about five miles back.” He jiggled his eyebrows at Matt. “Still love to have a ride.” He waited, but Adira didn’t respond.

Matt looked over his shoulder at Tania and she flicked him a worried look. He turned back to Andy. “My turn, buddy.” He grabbed the handlebars.

Andy straightened his back and stretched. “Thanks.” He walked beside Adira. “I couldn’t help overhearing you mention about things disappearing into the pits. I lost my friend in Iowa, and I think something was in the soil… something big.”

“Did you see it?” Adira asked.

“Yes, no… sort of. The cave collapsed on us,” Andy said. “Looks like we’re all coming at this from different angles.”

“Blind men and the elephant again,” Matt added.

“Except one of the blind men is now a mysterious and beautiful Israeli agent.” He turned and winked at Matt.

Matt groaned and slowed down, letting Andy weave his magic. He watched as he flashed her toothy grins and delivered a non-stop monologue. Eventually she stopped and leaned in close to him. Her expression was rock-hard as she spoke directly into his face.

Andy nodded, and Adira increased her pace, leaving him behind.

Matt caught up. “Trouble in paradise, Romeo?”

“My heart is broken.” Andy snorted softly, his mouth turning down. “She said I was a little boy, and compared to the men she has loved, I am a bug.”

Matt laughed out loud. “Hey, out here, I think that’s a compliment. She likes you; keep at it, buddy.”

“Nah.” He looked over his shoulder at Tania and perked up. He looked back at Adira’s tall athletic form. “Did you see the way she took apart those terrorists? She’s awesome.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen her in action before. The woman is a human weapon.” He motioned to her back with his head. “Hey, I know, why don’t you bring up that thing about women not being tough enough for the front line again?”

Andy groaned. “I think I’m gonna skip it.”

Matt pushed the bike over a large piece of stone. “Good call; we don’t want to have to carry you as well.”

They walked and rested, walked and rested through the heat of the day and well into the cool night. The borders in the region were porous and endlessly disputed, and Syria had become Turkey many miles back. Adira only called a halt around two am, when they were ten miles from the water. In the distance the black ocean showed a line of lights right on the coast.

“Samandag; we rest here. No fires.”

The group stood on the hilltop, looking out over the coastal plain and the water. A moon was setting, creating a huge silver path over the dark waves.

Matt felt tired from his scalp right down to his blistered toes. “Will there be a boat? It’s still about six hundred miles to Israel, and about another two hundred onto Egypt, plus we need to pass by the rest of Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon — not going to be an easy ride.”

She nodded. “Then best not go by boat, hmm?” She looked at each of the bedraggled group. “And I certainly do not think you are ready to walk into Egypt just yet.”

“We’re not staying in Israel,” Tania said quickly.

“Okay, we avoid Israel.” She smiled at Tania, but there was no warmth in the expression. “You see, I can compromise. I hope you can too.” Her smiled dropped. “Captain Kovitz, Lieutenant Hartogg, scout the area and report back. Mr. Bennet, bury my bike.”

Tania glared and looked to Abrams who exhaled, but then nodded to his subordinates. Hartogg took off, and Tania muttered and headed off with Andy and the bike in the opposite direction.

Adira walked off a dozen feet and spoke into a small comms device, and after a few minutes she came back over the Abrams.

“They’re on their way. I’ve also asked that they relay your whereabouts to your superiors.” She smiled flatly. “Don’t want them sending another team out to blunder about in the desert, do we?”

She walked to a slight rise in the sandy soil, reached into a pocket and pulled out a fist-sized rod. She telescoped it to about a foot and then jammed it into the earth. A small green light started to blink on the top.

“Beacon?” Abrams said.

She nodded. “As I said, they’re already en route. They just need to know where to rendezvous with us.”

“So where are we going?” Matt asked.

She turned. “We should be in Cyprus within two hours.”

“Cyprus?” Abrams recoiled. “What the hell are we going to Cyprus for…? And I thought we needed to pick up our documentation?”

“Exactly.” She stood with her hands on her hips. “We have an office in Cyprus. They will take care of us. It also means we can depart via normal airlines — just a few tourists on a Middle Eastern diving holiday, travelling from Cyprus to Alexandria — sound good?”

Matt snorted and nodded, but Abrams wasn’t mollified. “What do you mean, ‘we’? Who exactly is this ‘we’?”

She stepped in closer to Abrams. “Time for you to compromise, Major. You are not safe yet, you have not secured what you seek yet, and you are certainly not at home. You’ll need support and protection. Without me you’d be picked up in about fifteen minutes.”

“Goddamnit, Captain, why do I get the feeling I’m losing control of this situation?”

Adira’s smile never faltered. “You’re not. I’m making sure you remain in control, Major. Trust me.”

Abrams held her gaze, and then threw his hands up.

Tania Kovitz came back in from scouting the area. She glared at Adira, but then faced Abrams. “Clear, sir.”

Hartogg and Andy followed and nodded to Adira. Hartogg seemed to be enjoying the interchange between the two tough women. Abrams just sighed.

Adira nodded. “Good. Everyone bury everything we don’t need.”

Andy held up the few remaining items he had been carrying. “And what exactly will we need?”

“Truthfully, just yourself. Everything else twelve inches below ground… now,” Adira said as she checked a small box.

In another five minutes, she waved an arm. “Get down — clear a space. We need to get back about fifty feet from the pulser.” She walked away from the green-lit tube and crouched. The others did the same.

Matt waited; there was silence now, and the moon was sinking lower toward the water. He was conscious of the people close to him in the dark, but other than a fingernail-sized dot of green fifty feet away, there was just the hint of light from the low moon.

At first it sounded like a breeze was coming up from the sea, and then in another few seconds he heard Hartogg laugh softly.

“Nice,” the SEAL said.

An odd sharp-angled shape appeared; it was impossible to make out its exact form in the darkness, as it was black against a dark night. It came in near silently, and Matt marveled at how quiet the huge machine was. Turning side on, it looked to be about sixty-five feet long.

“So quiet,” Matt whispered.

Hartogg nodded. “You bet: it’s one of the best hunter-killers on the military market.” Matt could see his white teeth in the dark as he grinned. “You’re looking at a UH-60 Stealth — it was that baby that crept into Bin Laden’s backyard. The reason it’s so quiet is it’s got extra chopper blades, and a lower rotor speed. Added to that there’s no external rivets, and an infrared suppression finish in nano paint — this bad boy is invisible and silent as the devil.” He grinned again. “Like I said, it’s the best of the best… and that’s because it’s one of ours — we sold it to em.”

They squinted through the sand kicked up as the huge machine touched down like a giant dark insect. A soft red glow came on inside the cabin, and a figure waved them on.

Adira ran first, snatching up the pulser. In another thirty seconds they were moving at about a hundred and eighty miles per hour toward Cyprus.

Chapter 12

“Sunfa bitch.” Harry Wilcox’s hands slipped down the slick plunger as he worked it again in the basement sink. After pushing and pulling it some more he lifted it away and in return received a gurgle and a blerk, and then a few measly bubbles popped and slid back into the metal drain.

Phew. He turned away to drag in a breath — whatever was goddamn stuck in there was now stinkin to high heaven.

“Is it clear ye-eeet?” The voice from upstairs carried notes of high impatience.

Harry leaned back. “Nearly, baby; I think I just about got it that time.” He ground his teeth and lifted the plunger again, bringing it down over the drain once more. Their basement was the storage cellar, workshop and laundry room, and, as he and Summer had three kids all under the age of three, diapers were piling up — fast.

He sighed. When they had little Melody-Blue, their oldest, they’d promised each other they’d do their bit for planet Earth and never use those disposable ones that clog up the landfill — but then came Little Miss Mountain-Dew followed by Daisy-Sunshine, and whaddaya know, those little suckers shit right around the fucking clock.

Harry pumped again and again — if he couldn’t unblock the drain, that meant no washing machine, which then meant washing by hand outside, and as Summer was still breastfeeding little Daisy-Sunshine, he’d for sure be the sap standing out there with fifty pounds of brown-streaked Modern Cloth Diapers.

He stopped to wipe his brow, and then frowned. “Ah, getouttahere.” A huge cockroach scuttled across the concrete floor. Harry stamped on it, but immediately another took its place, racing madly towards the center drain grate. He lunged and managed to catch its rear half with his boot tread.

“Yech.” Even with its abdomen flattened to a yellow and brown paste, the front half still tried to scuttle away.

He looked around for more moving targets. The basement room was a good size, about fifty feet square on a concrete slab with a drain in the center. It had a sink, dryer and washer, and storage for dry goods, plus his workbench, and a million other things that had come down there to be sealed away in boxes and forgotten.

Harry sucked in a huge breath, jammed the plunger over the sink’s drain and started his dance once more — up down up down, and then rip it free, hopefully dragging loose whatever was in there — gurgle, splurk, pop — nothing.

Just then, he felt a small vibration through the soles of his feet, and the drain in the center of the room also popped and gurgled. A splash of inky fluid spattered the floor around its chrome rim.

“So-ooo, that’s where you’re hiding?” Harry lifted the plunger, spun it in his large fingers and walked toward the center of the room, keeping his eyes fixed on the drain-hole lest it disappear like some rabbit he had his sights set on. On his way he grabbed the already open bottle of Drain-Away, and then got down on his knees beside the tiny round grate.

“Bottoms up.” He upended the bottle, letting the blue liquid run thickly in, smiling and holding his breath.

The bottle emptied, and he sat back on his haunches. “Let’s see you chew on that.” He grabbed the plunger, but would give the caustic concoction a minute or two to work its magic.

“Now Harry? Is it clear no-ooow?” The voice was getting shriller by the second, and he gritted his teeth.

He lifted his head. “Soon, angel pie. What do you think I’m doin down here; playin with myself?” he added under his breath.

There was a squelching sound from in the hole, and Harry peered in. Seeing nothing, he placed the rubber cap of the plunger over the drain. “It’s go time.” He pumped it up and down several times, his face going red and his grin widening as a thick mucousy sound started to rise and fall in time with his jerking ministrations.

Using his bodyweight, he leaned down hard for one last plunge, and then ripped it away. To his shock, a gush of glistening blackness rose in a column, splattering his shirt, face and one of his arms. He dropped the plunger and grabbed for a rag to rub at his eyes.

He barely heard the liquid sound in the room, or if he did, he wouldn’t have cared. The burning gunk stung his skin and one of his eyes — mercifully it hadn’t got in both, but still the shock and pain were unbearable.

Harry went to get to his feet but couldn’t. He realized that something had him by the arm, and he took his hands away from his red raw face and opened his one good eye. He recoiled in horror — the silver drain cap had popped free and a thick black pipe of goo extended from it and was wrapped around his forearm.

Gaa! He yanked, but it stretched. He tried to throw himself backward, but the thing was incredibly strong. Harry whimpered. The slimy touch on his arm started to burn even more ferociously than the fluid on his face. And this had the added horror of being something that seemed alive, and was now tugging at him.

The ground vibrated again under his feet, and he became aware of Summer’s yelling voice once again.

“You better have that cleared soon, Harry, or there’s gonna be tro-ooub-bbble.”

“Summ—” was all he could yell, before something slimy that tasted like shit, oil and Drain-Away jammed itself in past his lips and worked its way down his throat.

Summer sat on the couch frowning at the television. Everything the young English chef baked or cooked slid easily from pans, golden and perfectly made. He turned to the screen and gave her the benefit of his usual open-mouthed grin. His tongue looked slightly too big for his mouth.

“Lovely jubbly,” he yelled as he held up the plate.

“Yeah, well, you try doin that with my old pans.” She wrinkled her nose; the clothes basket was full to overflowing with dirty nappies. Either they went in the washer or in the tub outside, and as she had just gotten the little ones off to sleep, and was on her downtime break, she knew who would be scrubbing shit, and real soon.

“Ha-aarry, are you…?”

The basement door burst open, and Harry lurched out. She sat forward — his face was beet-red, and one of his eyes looked funny — all milky-white sort of. “Harry?”

Harry opened his mouth but nothing came out. Instead he worked his jaws as if he were either trying to say something or pry loose a bone he had managed to lodge in his gums.

Her brows came together. “Are you stoned? Is that what you been doin down there?”

He lurched closer and now Summer could see that around his mouth it glistened blackly like he had been drinking engine oil. She tried to think what was stored down there that he could have been getting into.

He hadn’t said a word, or even looked at her. She started to feel the hair on her head and neck rise.

“Is it… fixed?” She got to her feet and stepped up on the couch.

Harry remained standing in the center of the room, arms slightly out from his sides, and turning slowly as if trying to find something.

“Harry, you’re scaring me. Stop it!” She put a foot up on the back of the couch.

He slowly turned toward her, and the good eye in his head suddenly went full black, as if the pupil had totally grown over all the white. He opened his mouth wide, then wider. She heard his jaws cracking. Summer was expecting the man to scream, but instead, several feet of black ribbons extended from his mouth.

Summer’s throat hurt, and she realized she was screaming, and couldn’t stop. She grabbed up a pillow and held it in front of herself, getting ready to vault over the back of the couch and sprint to the door.

Suddenly Harry just… exploded. The black ribbons came from every part of his body, growing hugely to become tendrils, pipes, and trunks of black flesh that all ended in thrashing tentacles. His eyes doubled, tripled and kept on multiplying, and then slid all over his grotesquely inflating body.

Harry, the man, her husband, just broke apart as if he were a shell casing being shed by the disgusting giant creature that now stood before her, filling the room with its bulk and its stink.

Summer’s nerve broke. She forgot about her kids. She forgot everything. She glanced over her shoulder to the door, and then leaped. She had been a sprinter at high school and used to be as fast as the wind.

The thing that used to be Harry was even faster — she never made it.

Chapter 13

A light blinked twice on the hill.

It was still before dawn when they were dropped off on an empty stretch of coast on the southeastern side of the Cypriot island. The chopper immediately sped out over the dark water and was gone before they had left the sand.

Matt sniffed the warm air — salt, dry grass, and the beach shack smells of seaweed and old driftwood.

A tall figure appeared. “Bluestar.”

“Lonewolf,” was Adira’s quiet reply. Confirmation received, the man turned and led them to a dark SUV waiting just back from the coastal dunes.

Their driver was introduced as Baruk. Matt noticed he spoke to Adira deferentially, and seemed a little in awe of her.

Beside the driver, Adira shared the front seat with Abrams, which meant he, the enormous Hartogg, Andy and Tania were crowded into the rear. Matt could barely breathe. Thankfully, they arrived at their destination within thirty minutes — a bungalow on the outskirts of the small town. The house looked like any normal bungalow, and surprised Matt with its Spartan look and low external security… until he realized that was probably exactly the image Mossad or whoever wanted projected.

They were met on the porch by a young woman, who held the door open as they entered. She ushered them through to a side room, where the carpet was rolled back to reveal an open trapdoor and dark stairs leading down.

Adira went in first, followed by Abrams and then the rest. The young woman, Marta, remained up top, shutting the trapdoor as Hartogg came in last.

Once inside, Matt saw that it was more than a basement — there was effectively another house underneath the one above. In one large room, several cots were readied for them, with clothing laid out on each. As they moved along a hallway, Matt saw a computer room with photographic equipment, an armory and even washing and cooking facilities.

Baruk conferred quietly with Adira, who nodded and then motioned to the shower room. “Fast showers for all. Once done, we can take photographs, and prepare the travel documentation.”

Hartogg started to strip off, and Andy wasn’t far behind him.

“A shower sounds perfect right about now.” The young geologist shucked off clothes that billowed yellow dust as it hit the ground at his feet. It was only then that Matt realized how decrepit they must all look… not to mention a few of them still had crusts of blood on their heads and faces from the explosion.

In half an hour they sat around eating tomato omelets Marta had made, and sipping coffee. Matt still felt tired, but human again. Like a production line, Marta and Baruk had taken their photos, cropped them and expertly inserted them into well-traveled American passports. They decided to stick with US identities, as Adira knew that, other than maybe Matt, none of them would be able to pull off any other nationality, and they hadn’t had time to absorb an entire foreign back-story should they be interrogated.

Adira and the two agents sat at a computer screen, building up their travel history. Adira came back and joined them, and handed each a packet of documentation containing plane tickets, dive passes, and printouts of entry tokens for windsurfing, diving, water skiing, and other holiday enjoyments.

“Congratulations, you all just spent time at the Pervolia Club Resort, one of the nicest on Cyprus.”

Matt checked his watch — it was still only ten in the morning, and already he was exhausted. He looked at the information and shook his head in admiration. It was perfect, and he had no doubt that many of the intelligence agencies in the world did the same thing. It made him wonder just who anyone really was any more — that man on a bus, the woman in a restaurant — a real person, or some sleeper agent gathering information or on a secret mission? Welcome to the world of espionage, he thought.

Adira sat down at the table and spread out some airline tickets.

“Twenty hundred hours tonight — ten pm — we fly out late in two groups on ALY airlines. It’s a short flight of only two hundred and ninety miles, and we will be there in forty-five minutes.” She pointed to the information packs. “We will need to clear customs and immigration, which should be our only real challenge. Read the information prepared for you, study it and remember it.”

“Who goes with who?” Abrams asked, sorting through his data.

“Team one will be myself, you, Major, Professor Kearns and Captain Kovitz — we are two couples on holiday. Team two will be Hartogg, Andy and Baruk — you are all salespeople who have won a dive holiday, congratulations.”

“Sweet.” Andy turned to grin, but Hartogg ignored him, and Baruk kept his eyes on Adira.

Abrams looked at the Israeli agent opposite him. “So we’ve picked up another Mossad body?”

Adira nodded. “Baruk is one of our local operatives, and he knows the region extremely well. Once we are in Egypt, we will make contract with one of our local cells to obtain any equipment we need.” She looked into Abrams’s eyes. “Unless you believe you can secure the necessary equipment and logistics yourselves.” She raised an eyebrow.

Tania Kovitz scoffed. “We can organize resources if we need to. In fact —”

“Ha.” Adira waved her off. “In fact, your intelligence capacity in the Middle East is near non-existent. We know most of your offices in the region were exposed by the traitor who worked in the NSA, and are now all identified on the internet.” She shrugged, and then stared hard at the American captain. “Let’s not kid each other here, Captain Kovitz — there is no time, I have neither patience nor any interest in playing games. We’re here to offer help — but only once.”

Tania gritted her teeth, her face growing dark. Matt could tell she was going to explode, but thankfully Abrams intervened.

“We’re all on the same side, and we have the same goal here. Of course your assistance is welcome.” He got up from the table, still holding his coffee mug. “Now if no one else has anything else to add, or objections, I suggest we get some sack time before the flight.”

“Works for me.” Matt said, leaning back. His weariness dragged at his bones, and started to blur his vision. Everyone around the table looked the same.

Abrams motioned to Adira. “One more thing; I need to check in — now.” His expression told her there would no argument.

“Sir,” Abrams said, looking over his shoulder. He was in a closed room, but would bet every word he said was being listened to.

“About time, Major.” General Decker’s voice sounded relieved. “Thought we’d lost you. What happened?”

Abrams smiled, imagining the tough stocky general in his office. He bet he’d already had another team ready to go.

“We met with Dr Albadi in Syria, and got a good lead on a source of information that might be the key to the earth-drops and disappearances.” It was easy to keep his briefing short seeing as he didn’t want to divulge too much. “But our ride home took a hit from an IED. Had to hike it across the desert. Luckily we found a friendly… of sorts. Captain Adira Senesh, Israeli army — pretty sure she’s Mossad.”

Abrams heard keys being struck as the general typed the name into the database.

“Jesus Christ, Joshua. This woman is on the extremely dangerous list. She not just Mossad, she’s Metsada. She even had a head-on with some HAWCs last year. If she’s tough enough to mess with those guys, you better watch yourself.”

Abrams exhaled. “Well, we need to get to Egypt, and she can get us there. As for trusting her, not a chance.” He smiled, knowing he wasn’t giving up anything the Metsada agent probably didn’t already know.

There was silence, and he knew Decker was probably looking over her file. He whistled softly, but before he could add anything Abrams cut him off.

“Sir, this line is not secure.” He changed the subject. “Have there been any new developments I need to be aware of?”

There was silence for a few second. “More earth-drops, more people disappearing, on larger and larger scales. We’re getting information breakouts now. Had to happen. But we have a new threat. There are… things, creatures of sorts, coming up from out of the holes, and even out of the freaking drains. Monstrous things we believe are directly responsible for the earlier animal abductions and the more recent disappearances.”

“Yes, happening here too.” Abrams remembered the bodies that vanished in the desert.

“God,” Decker said. “But we also think we now know what’s happening to some of them — the people. Some of them are being… absorbed, for want of a better term… instead of just eaten.”

Abrams grimaced. He didn’t like hearing the tension in the older warrior’s voice.

It sounded like Decker got to his feet. “In fact, I’ve got an appointment in about an hour where we expect to determine how we can deal with these things.”

“How are you able to do that?” Abrams asked.

Decker grunted. “Because we captured one.”

Adira talked quietly upstairs with Baruk and Marta until her comms device pinged. She recognized the call signature and walked quickly to a front room, looking out over a small garden. She answered it.

“Boker tov, Captain.” The deep wheezing voice was both formidable and familiar.

“Shalom, General. We were right, they are here looking for the Al Azif, and now they are taking me right to it.”

“Good, good work, Addy. I knew it was right to send you. Do they have a firm lead?” he asked.

“Yes, Uncle,” she said, confidently.

He laughed, sounding more like air brakes than anything human — he was wheezing more than usual. She could imagine the small, grizzle-haired man almost lost in his favorite red leather chair. But appearances would be deceptive — there was no frailty or weakness in the old warrior. General Meir Shavit was the head of Metsada, the Special Operations Division of the Mossad, and had served his country for over fifty years in both military theatres and dedicated intelligence services.

From his headquarters in Tel Aviv, he oversaw a staff of around two thousand. Though the Mossad was classed a civilian bureaucratic security operation, it was one of the most structured and professional intelligence services in the world; and also one of the deadliest. General Shavit’s Metsada was Israel’s well of poison, and Adira the sharpest dagger he dipped in it.

She smiled; glad now that their relationship was as strong as ever. “We will be in Alexandria tonight. They believe the Book is secreted somewhere on or around the island of Pharos.”

“Pharos? Hmm, interesting. I will have a two-man team waiting for you. But be warned, Addy, you are not the only ones seeking the Book. The man the Americans met, this Dr Hussein ben Albadi, has been killed, along with all of his staff. The remains displayed signs of extreme surgical torture. Addy, they have someone on their trail, someone ruthless.”

Adira ground her teeth. “If they step in front of me, they will fall.” Her face was grim as she spoke.

“I know, my dear. Show them no quarter.” He wheezed for a moment and Adira waited, her concentration intense. “Addy, we must have the Al Azif. We must know what it contains. If there is a solution or cure for the falling earth, then Israel must be cured first. Strength, honor, and good luck, Captain Senesh.”

She straightened. “I will not fail you, Uncle.”

“I know you won’t.”

The line disconnected and Adira sat down, her tired eyes on the garden, but her mind spinning with plans. Her eyes gradually closed, and soon the plans continued in her dreams.

Chapter 14

General Decker stood with hands clasped behind his back and stared through the two-inch-thick military grade Perspex into the twenty-by-twenty foot reinforced cubicle. His hands were damp, and he wished some of that moisture were in his mouth.

Looking at the thing inside made him feel physically ill. He saw what it looked like now, but he had seen the footage of what it had looked like when it was captured — it made him want to vomit.

“And that… that, thing, is Harry Wilcox?” He couldn’t help his mouth turning down in disgust. The man in the room looked wet, but stickily wet, as if he had been rolling in engine lubricant. He stood staring straight ahead. Decker knew that it was looking at them.

Eric Ford, lead scientist in their bio-weapons division narrowed his eyes. “Yes and no. Well, no, not any more.” He turned to Decker and shrugged. “I mean, sure it looks like him, but now, who knows what it is? The fact is, the life form can imitate anything it comes into contact with.”

Decker swung toward Ford — the man’s face was grim, and contained none of the usual spark he would normally have exhibited for a discovery such as this. Ford saw it like Decker did — not a source of wonder, but a threat to life… all life.

He scratched his chin. “And the other family members? My files said there was a wife, Summer… and they had three children.”

Ford shrugged. “All dead — consumed, we think, by good ole Harry in there.”

“Consumed? He ate them? All of them?” Decker grunted, remembering the footage of the capture — at first the thing had been much bigger than it was now. “So, it’s shape shifted, re-morphed back into some sort of hiding camouflage?”

“Yes, so it can move among us… its prey, I assume. But I doubt it would hold up to any sort of close scrutiny — it doesn’t speak, or at least it hasn’t with us. It’s primitive, but we think it has a base intelligence. It’s very clearly an ambush predator.”

“What is it? Is there anything even remotely like it? I need something to work with.” Decker’s frustration started to override his nausea.

“What it is? We have no idea,” Ford said. “Its physical composition is more akin to some sort of amoeba, but it’s so primitive, it predates anything we’ve ever seen. Any trace of a close relative probably never survived in the evolutionary geological record — how could it? It doesn’t seem to have bones.” He sighed. “And as for where it’s from, we can only assume it came from deep underground. There was a sinkhole that had opened up below the house. Traces in the basement drain indicate it came from there.”

“Jesus Christ, Eric. What’s it doing in there? It hasn’t moved since I’ve been down here.”

“Hasn’t moved a muscle for hours. It’s waiting for stimuli — let me show you.” Ford pressed an intercom button. “Martin, send in a sample.” He folded his arms. “This is what it’s waiting for… and all it wants for now.”

A door slid open in the rear of the cubicle, and a goat was quickly pushed in. Its ears flickered, and its nose twitched as it caught the scent of something strange. It took a few steps along the side of the room and then froze. Its nose worked some more.

“Keep your eyes on Harry,” Ford said softly.

While Decker watched he saw Harry’s expressionless face start to palpitate. One of his unblinking eyes started to slide — not the pupil, but the entire organ — across his face, to now be situated on his temple. It stared unblinking at the goat. Another eye formed and popped open, this one on Harry’s cheek, before the head started to slowly turn.

The goat’s legs started to tremble, and its head dropped. It bleated constantly as it backed into the farthest corner of the room.

In the next second, Harry opened his mouth, wide, then wider than was humanly possible. From that dark hole, an explosion of black tendrils shot at the goat. The animal screamed in a voice that was too human for Decker’s liking.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, narrowing his eyes as if to try and shield himself from the horror.

The goat was dragged toward Harry, who started to grossly inflate into a mass of writhing and squirming blackness as the Shoggoth finally revealed itself. Perhaps it couldn’t maintain the pretense while it was focused on capturing its food, or needed to be in its primary shape to feed at all. Regardless, the thing now resembled a giant thrashing blob of putrid black flesh, with tentacles that were a mix of tendrils and muscular trunks. Some thrashed in the air, others pounded down on the ground, like elephantine legs. All the time, new organs formed and unformed over its bloated body — ears, eyes, mouths, not all human, and not all even from creatures the watching soldiers recognized.

A giant orifice formed on its side, and opened stickily. The goat was dragged across the cell and then stuffed inside. The hole closed over it. The animal’s shape could just be made out inside the Shoggoth’s form, and its screams were still loud over the speakers. Ford quickly reached out to shut off the sound just as the screaming turned into a wet crunching.

“Shit.” Decker couldn’t drag his eyes away from the horror. “Can it get out?”

Ford’s mouth turned down and he shook his head. “The room is a level-9 containment cell — reinforced, blast-proof walls, ceiling and floor, and nonporous to even liquids and gases. Harry isn’t going anywhere.” He folded his arms. “We need more time to study it. This thing is the true primitive, but we know it has some level of intelligence.”

“Intelligence?” Decker sucked in a deep breath, and blew it out hard, as if to expel the vision. He turned to the scientist, talking through clenched teeth. “I don’t care if it’s fucking Einstein; you just find me a way to kill them.”