A shock of horror ran through his entire body. He dropped the flashlight, and the breath caught in his throat. He didn’t smell the vile air, or feel the inferno heat on his face; instead every atom of his being was focused on the thing that filled the doorway.

Octopus man, was the thought that jumped into his mind. The creature towered over him, all thrashing arms sticking from a bulbous head. He stared, his mind trying to assemble it into some sort of category of man or beast he recognized, and failing miserably. The thing was a massive amoeba-like creature made out of iridescent black slime. Multiple eyes floated over its surface, popping open to stare, before sinking back into the mass, and rising in another position.

Something wrapped around Bill’s neck, wrists and waist all at once and began to drag him outside. It was hot and greasy against his flesh, and hurt like a jellyfish sting. He tried to pull against it, began to struggle, but made zero impact on the monster. As he was dragged along the remains of his lawn toward one of the walls of the pit, he managed to look back in time to see more of the lumpen things wedge themselves in through his doorframe.

He heard Margaret scream, and he began to weep. Big Bill Anderson, her protector, her rock, was now useless. He wished he had a dog, and a big one, as he was pulled toward the wall of dirt.

*

“Yo, Frank, racked and ready.” Andy took one last look around as he teetered on the edge of the cavernous sinkhole. The grass behind him was littered with dead birds, which was why he specifically had been called in from his home base at Cedar Rapids.

Andrew Lincoln Bennet was an environmental geologist, and one of the best authorities on sinkholes in the state, if not the country. His job was to try and ascertain any connection between the land sink and the avian deaths. So far, he had no idea. The birds’ lungs (he had hastily dissected a few on a trestle set up beside their van) showed no sign of gas inhalation, and their eyes were clear, so no toxin deployment either. Still, he had breathing equipment slung on his back as he knew methane, sulfur dioxide, and even chlorine gas could belch up from the earth with little warning, as if the planet had ingested something disagreeable.

Andy nodded to his second-in-command, Frank Kelso. Frank was twenty years older and knew rocks like they were his family, but Andy had the modern expertise and had seen a lot in his thirty-five years. Frank was more than happy to defer to his young protégé, as he liked to call him.

“One away,” Frank, yelled, manning the winch, and gave him a thumbs-up.

Andy stepped back to quickly rappel down into the darkness. The sinkhole crater was more than two hundred feet across, and about twice that in depth – a biggie in anyone’s books. Andy knew of larger ones – Louisiana had one at Lake Peigneur that went down fifteen hundred feet – it was huge. But the current record was held by a monster in China in the Chongqing Municipality, that was a thousand feet across and two thousand deep – it could have swallowed a small village. As he rappeled down, kicking off the wall, he thanked his lucky stars this one wasn’t like that. The big ones could collapse, and a few hundred thousand tons of cascading rock and soil meant you just earned a free burial.