With no time to open another circle, Fort hit the ground hard and let out an enormous groan of pain. He lay there for a moment, unable to move, all the air knocked out of his lungs. The last few minutes had been a haze of terror and adrenaline, and now that he was safe, if broken, he let the horror of what he’d just gone through wash over him, and he shivered.

The shivering only made his body hurt worse.

When he could finally breathe and convince his poor body to move once more, he crawled to the edge, where an elaborately worked metal railing had been built to keep someone or something from falling over it. That was interesting, as there was no way the monsters below could have made anything like that. So who else was down here, then?

He pulled himself up by the fence and glared down at the creatures below, now all roaring in annoyance.

“I hope I woke you all up,” he said, giving them a death stare. “And I hope you don’t get back to sleep any time soon!”

One of the creatures slammed a hand into the wall below him, and Fort had to catch himself on the fence to keep from tumbling back into the cavern. Realizing he was pushing his already terrible luck, Fort quickly backed away and tried to figure out where he was now.

Red circles of light with the intensity and color of exit signs lit the ledge, and Fort realized for the first time that the ledge’s opening looked like it’d been purposely dug to be too small for the creatures’ arms to reach into. With their massive claws, he figured the monsters could still dig a larger opening, but they hadn’t bothered for some reason.

In fact, it was odd that they would all stay put in that cavern. Granted, it was pretty huge, but there were a lot of them crammed in there, and they didn’t seem like the most peaceful of monsters, at least not in his experience.

Maybe the Old Ones controlled them here, too, just as they did when sending them against Washington, D.C., and the old Oppenheimer School?

The Old Ones, or something else.

The red lights and fence on the ledge certainly suggested some kind of being watched over the monsters. Fort slowly crept toward the nearest wall, trying to ignore the shooting pains in his legs and torso. The wall looked like it led to a tunnel with more of the red lights, which seemed to be the only way out.

Without any other choice, Fort entered the tunnel, pushing himself up against the wall as much as possible to keep hidden. The red lights barely illuminated the tunnel, so if whoever watched over the creatures had eyesight like his, they’d never see him.