Oscar’s stalk eyes analyzed the desert canvas before us like an American Indian reading the terrain. The cephaloped hesitated, something clearly bothering it. Only after positioning himself between us did he lead us out, the sucker pads from his tentacles maintaining contact with our wrists as if the creature were our parent.

It took me only eight paces before I registered what Oscar must have felt—a static charge in the air that caused the hair on my arms to stand on end. The cephaloped’s fur danced like porcupine quills on his tentacles, Dharma’s long silky hair actually sparked—as did the darkening heavens, which flashed green lightning.

Fifty yards ahead, a funnel of tea-colored sand suddenly swirled up into the roiling sky—a miniature twister that dispersed within twenty seconds. Two more vertical columns of earth shot up to our left, sending us scurrying in the opposite direction as Mother Nature went haywire in a twister version of whack-a-mole—and we were the moles!

I heard a high-pitched blast that reminded me of a train’s whistle, and then Oscar was drawn upward into the air. Dharma let go, but I held on fast until the funnel wrenched him free, the twister launching the stunned cephaloped thirty-five feet above our heads before hurling him sideways.

We ran toward him, Dharma sprinting out ahead—the ground disappearing beneath my feet as I plummeted into gray darkness, falling five stories before the tunnel of sand curled and caught me, sending me tumbling into a horizontal burrow, where a stench attacked my senses, stinging my eyes like mustard gas.

Twenty feet away, unblinking crimson specks watched me in the semidarkness. As my watering eyes adjusted to the dim surroundings, I saw what appeared to be a pair of four-foot claws rise away from a tanklike body, the sharp appendages scraping sand from the eight to ten-foot-high ceiling.

People ate crabs; do giant crabs eat people?

I wasn’t about to wait around to find out.

Regaining my feet, I retreated back to the vertical shaft, burying myself in cold, wet sand as I futilely attempted to climb and claw and dig my way out of a shaft ABE annoyingly informed me to be fifty-six feet deep.

The car-size crustacean scuttled sideways as it sized me up, its perpetual gaze almost amused by my escape attempt.

A shrill blast of pan flute sent the monster backing away.

Oscar grabbed me in one of his tentacles and climbed up the shaft at a frenzied pace. Seconds later, the giant crab appeared behind us, its exoskeleton pale blue in the brightening light.

We broke free of the hole and ran toward Dharma, who was beckoning us fifty yards ahead.

But the holes functioned as sound amplifiers, and within seconds the beach was aswarm with dozens of giant crustaceans, the creatures coming toward us from all directions.