“Help me.”

Matt turned to Tania. Was that her? he wondered. Though he had been looking at Andy, he hadn’t noticed her speak. Her lips were slightly parted, but she could have been catatonic for all the expression she was giving him.

“Andy, where’s Lieutenant Hartogg?” He took a few more steps.

Matt felt a hand ease down on his shoulder, and he nearly leaped off the walkway. “Shit.” He spun. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” He turned back, shrugging Abrams’s hand off.

Matt went to step closer, when Abrams grabbed him. “Don’t…fucking…move.” The major’s hand was like a vice. “Professor, we need to back up, now.”

“Huh?” Matt couldn’t understand why Abrams wouldn’t want to ask them where his SEAL was. He half turned. “But…” He saw the look on the major’s face – determination, dread, and worst of all, fear. Abrams’s eyes were wide and fixed on Andy.

Matt’s head spun back, and he moved the beam of his light over the pair.

“Oh shit.” He saw now what Abrams already knew. The pair weren’t just intertwined in some sort of lover’s embrace, but instead seemed to have melted together. Where their ribs, thighs and arms touched or overlapped, the flesh had merged, as if the skin, muscle and bone had melted together like some sort of protoplasmic wax.

“Oh.” Matt took a single step back just as an explosion of thrashing black tendrils shot from the figure of the geologist – not just from him, but burst from his face down to his bellybutton. He opened like a clamshell to disgorge a countless number of the whipping appendages.

Matt was covered instantly, and Abrams fell back, holding up an arm that was quickly enveloped in the greasy ropes that had also now shot from Tania.

Matt cried out as his skin burned. The touch of the revolting mass was like a combination of venomous sting and scalding hot-oil burn. He could see through the mess that Andy just stood there, arms by his side, face and gut split wide as more and more of the waving arms unloaded. He was a bottomless pit of the stuff.

“Shoggoth!” Abrams screamed.

The tendrils thickened, and then Matt started to feel them begin to work their way into his skin. Beside him, Abrams was almost totally enfolded, and his grunts and strains told him that the major wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

More coils wrapped around Matt’s neck, and he held tight to one and noticed a bulge form on the limb. The lump then popped open and Matt was horrified to see it was an eye. The bulb swiveled toward him, regarding him with the pitiless stare of a predator.

Jus then, there came a staccato burst of gunfire and the Tania half simply exploded in a geyser of black jelly. There came more gunfire, and Andy, who had been as immobile as a storefront mannequin, started to shiver and dance as holes appeared all over his naked body.