“Stop that!” he yelled pointlessly. The red-face guy was at the back now, shoving and elbowing hard, when what looked like a lasso made of licorice flung up out of the pit and wrapped around his neck. He screamed, the voice much higher than a man that size should have been able to manage, and then he was pulled onto his back, and dragged backward.

Ben stopped dead with his mouth open. The guy must have weighed an easy two hundred pounds, but he was yanked up and over the four-foot-high railing as if he were a child’s balloon.

People were running now. Screams of panic subsumed all of his warnings, and groups broke away into myriad dark chambers, not caring where they went as long as it was away from whatever was coming up out of the pit. Ben was frozen in indecision, his mind trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He started to back up, all the way to his perch, and then turned to look back down on the hellish scene.

Something dark that at first looked like a huge black cake covered the entire width of the bottomless pit. Once it reached the rim, it exploded into separate fragments – ten-foot-tall amoebic blobs of shiny blackness, covered in eyes and all thrashing limbs. The things took off after the fleeing people.

Ben’s eyes were so wide, they threatened to pop out of his skull, and he was transfixed as one charged toward him, rolling, scuttling, gliding on centipede legs one moment and a slimy slug foot the next.

He held up a hand, his mind now fully short-circuited. “Call the police,” he said softly as the thing loomed over him.

*

“I want it sealed off – the entire area.” General Decker paced as he spoke into the phone to Perry Logan, the base commander at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. Logan’s base was a big one – an army installation known for the 101st Airborne and 160th Special Operations.

Decker stopped to look back at the live feed from the satellite of the Mammoth Cave’s main entrance. There were the flashing lights of the local police blocking all the roads.

“And Perry, pull those local cops back; they have no idea what they’re up against.” He snorted softly. “For that matter, I don’t think any of us do.”

He listened some more to the local commander, and his eyes closed. Sealing the area off was a pipe dream – there were hundreds of miles of caves, and literally hundreds of entrances. They were still finding new ones all the time.

Decker exhaled. “Okay, Perry, let’s assign flamethrower units at all the major entrances – I’d like to try and at least contain them.”

He disconnected and then checked his watch. Major Abrams was due to touch down soon, and he had a chopper waiting for him and his team to bring them straight to the compound.

Decker now ran the entire US operations, called Project Underground. He had sent the President, safe for now in the sky on Air Force One, a recording of the interrogation of the thing that Ford had locked up in his deep containment cell and had been immediately given the green light on everything and everyone he wanted – unlimited resources.