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.