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

Darayya, outskirts of Damascus, Syria

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.