She stared for a moment, and then nodded, her face softening. “I’m sorry; I had no right to bring you down here, Professor. This is not a job for a civilian.” She smiled sadly. “But it is what I do. This is what defines my life.” She pointed to the archway. “Go back to the car and wait with Andy. I will scout a little more down here, and then I’ll come back up and meet you.”

She stepped closer to him, and Matt could see how her eyes burned with an intensity that he only ever saw in the eyes of elite soldiers on the eve of a mission. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Thank you.” She went to turn away, but Matt reached out and grabbed her.

“Wait, wait.” He felt almost a physical pain as his conscience wrestled with his innate sense of self-preservation. “Forget it, I’ll come with you.”

She held a hand up. “No, you are right. You should not be here, and this is bigger than we expected. You need to go up and outside, and then call in Major Joshua Abrams and his team. Tell them what we have found. Tell them to come, and…to be ready.”

She turned and vanished behind the altar without once looking back. Matt shifted his weight from foot to foot. In the end he looked down once more at the piece of face.

The empty staring eye socket decided for him. “I’m outta here.”

Chapter 24

General Decker looked again at the updated satellite images of the Mammoth Park topology, now from only about three thousand feet. From this height, that part of Kentucky was usually emerald green. He exhaled, shaking his head.

“Goddamnit.”

The entire area over the national park was a bilious smudge of black. Not just the dry ashen cast of forest-fire remnants, but a case of some sort of slimy malignant fungus that had caused everything to rot.

Much as he hoped it would all just go away, or get better by itself, the evidence was now impossible to ignore. He reached forward and toggled some keys. The satellite images shifted to another spectrum: stratigraphic sonar representations.

“Cthulhu; it’s real.” He blew air through his lips. There it was, the deeper smudge now taking on a definite shape – there was a huge central body, like some sort of coiled parasitic worm, except this horror had enormous branching arms reaching out beneath the skin of the planet.

“And when you break through…” He turned away from the screen and looked out at the parade ground, knowing what he needed to do. “…God help us all.”

*

Matt retraced his steps, keeping his flashlight usage to a minimum, and cursing softly as he occasionally bumped into a wall or protrusion he hadn’t remembered. He felt like a cowardly creep for letting Adira go on by herself. Of course he knew very well he wasn’t equipped to offer her anything other than company, and frankly calling in backup was the most logical and sensible thing to do. “I’m doing the right thing,” he whispered. “No, I’m a cowardly creep.”