Earl had ordered us to meet back in his room. A cartoony world map had been bought from the hotel gift shop and affixed to the wall. Pushpins were stuck into various locations as more Hunters reported in. Over the last hour we’d gone through a fifty-pack of pushpins, and there were still more stories coming in.

“How could we have not heard?” Julie asked in amazement. “This is staggering.”

“It isn’t like we all hang out together, and you think our government-mandated secrecy is bad, we’re nothing compared to some of these places.” Earl read a message off of his phone, shook his head sadly, and stuck another pin into a comically distorted Mongolia. “More tunnels…Of course we’ve heard of some of these, but we always thought of them as random monster attacks, outbreaks, craziness…But this…” He stepped away, as if he was trying to see the whole picture.

The three of us studied the map. I couldn’t put my finger on what was troubling me. “Rates have been up before. When I first got hired we were at an all-time high.”

“Sure, but that was stateside, and mostly because of the private Hunting ban. It was individuals, monsters here and there, the natural growth of a predatory population that had lost the best thing that kept it in check. These, on the other hand…” Julie stroked her neck thoughtfully. “These are oddball events with bigger repercussions, and all over the last few years. MHI alone has faced two since then that if they’d gotten out—”

“Three,” Earl corrected. “Copper Lake was another tip-of-the-iceberg type event. If I hadn’t shut that down quick, it could’ve turned a lot worse. Ours were all connected, though. Machado was being used by the Old Ones, then Hood was working for the same Old One, and his daughter was somehow involved in Copper Lake.”

“But that was after we killed their god, Earl! That’s hard for a religion to bounce back from.”

“Christianity seemed to do all right,” he said.

“That’s because it didn’t stick…So, three events related tangentially to the minions of a specific Old One, but he, it…whatever, is toast. So do we think something like him is pulling these strings? These new events, they’re like ours, little things that could spiral out of control in no time.”

“A few,” I answered. “But there are so many where we don’t know what happened. People missing, or some type of creature shows up and then disappears, and most of them with an underground connection.”