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“Hey! Hey, Pastor, is that you?”

He turned, his flashlight beam flickering over the face of a young man hurrying toward him. Jarret Moore, one of his Bible study students. He lowered the beam.

“Hi, Jarret. Do you know what’s going on?”

“Earthquake! Feels like a really strong one, too. Maybe a 7.0?” The clean-cut young athlete reached him. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“I was in the SUB with some friends. They headed back to the dorms, but I thought I’d better come out here to make sure everything was okay.”

Lindgren smiled. Jarret was like so many other enthusiastically religious young men and women he’d tutored over the years; meticulous to a fault, but a good boy at his core. A little more life experience would temper and refine his faith.

“I was just trying to decide whether I should stay here or head out to where all the noise is,” Lindgren admitted.

“You should stay here,” Jarret said at once. “People are—”

Abruptly, with a rumble like thunder, the earth leaped and rippled beneath their feet. Both Jarret and Lindgren lost their balance and fell. The flashlight rolled out of the pastor’s hand, its beam flickering and then regaining strength.

The thunderous roar continued with a loud cracking, crashing sound. Lindgren turned his head, searching for its source.

Across the parking lot, the library’s brick walls were collapsing.

The ground bucked beneath them as though something were pushing it up from below. Another great mass of bricks tumbled off the library wall, revealing steel reinforcing girders that trembled like straws. More bricks collapsed, and windows cracked and shattered.

Then the rippling beneath the earth stopped.

Lindgren scrambled to his feet, snatching up his flashlight as he ran toward the library. This close to finals—

Cries arose from the rubble.

He lost track of time as he and Jarret and the students and staff who hadn’t been trapped under the collapsing walls dug through piles of brick and shelving. One of the library staff members parked all of the information services carts in a line along the buckled sidewalk and turned on their headlights. They would provide illumination until their solar-powered batteries lost their charges.

Thank heavens, Lindgren thought as he worked, that most of the students were earthquake-wise enough to have taken refuge under the reading tables and study desks. So far everyone was alive, although several would need medical treatment.

“The emergency lines are all busy,” reported one of the library administrators, closing her phone. She sounded grim. “And campus security isn’t answering, either.”

“Pastor!” Jarret shouted from the sidewalk. “Come here, quick!”

Lindgren climbed over the skittering piles of bricks and joined the three students who stood in a huddle: Jarret, a girl he recognized from services, and a young man he didn’t know.

“Go on, Ally, tell him,” Jarret urged.

“It’s a monster,” she said, through chattering teeth. She wasn’t dressed for the cold, and from the way she leaned on her friend, Lindgren guessed she was injured. “Peter and I saw it come out of the ground, this giant snakelike thing, and it smashed a whole bunch of people right outside Gilbert Hall.”

Sickened, Lindgren shrugged off his wool coat and draped it around her shoulders.

“Take her to the chapel,” he directed Jarret. They had turned the nave into a makeshift hospital for the injured students they’d dug out from the rubble. The chapel’s tiny emergency cabinet was already running out of bandages and antiseptic.

“But, what about—”

“Go on. She’s freezing to death.”

“You don’t believe me,” Ally said, shivering, “because nobody ever believes when they’re told about monsters, but it’s true, you can ask Peter.”

“I will.” Lindgren touched her shoulder. “You go inside with Jarret and get warm, and say a prayer for us all.”

She nodded. Jarret took her arm and helped her away.

“It
is
true,” said the young man she’d called Peter. He wasn’t dressed much better than the girl, and his feet were bare and covered with dirt. “I know it sounds crazy, but it looked like a giant snake, and it came out of the ground, turned, and then went back in again, on top of a bunch of RAs and people.” His face was white. “I think they’re dead.”

“Could it have been a loose pipe, or a burst of steam?” Lindgren asked, searching for some other explanation. “The earthquake has probably broken a number of underground pipes.”

“No. It was scaly, and it had teeth. It was alive, not a piece of metal.”

Lindgren breathed a prayer and nodded, putting a hand on the young man’s back. “All right. I’ll go take a look. Go inside, get warmed up, and see if you can borrow some shoes and a coat from one of the injured students. We need as many able-bodied searchers out here as we can get.”

“Do you want me to show you?”

“You were in Gilbert Hall? I know the way. Go on.” Lindgren gently pushed him forward, and Peter nodded.

The pastor shivered, his suit jacket little defense against the cold and his fear. He walked over to the administrator with the phone.

“There’s some trouble at Gilbert Hall,” he said. “I’m going to take a look.”

“I’ll keep trying to raise someone on the phone,” she said, nodding. “Be careful, Pastor.”

“You, too.” He flicked on his flashlight and began walking across Campus Park, praying that the two young students had been mistaken.

Then he heard gunshots from north campus, and he changed course, breaking into a run.

XV

Clancy was being tugged forward, out of his warm bed, and he protested, but his mouth was full of dirt. He coughed and choked as he was dragged out into the open air.

He rolled on his back. The earth was shaking and trembling, and stars swam overhead as he tried to focus.

“You’re alive?” A calm voice with a note of surprise. “Ah, yes, I see.”

Clancy blinked, feeling dirt fall off his face, and clenched his hand as someone tried to tug the evidence bag out of it. Alarmed, he pushed himself up to one elbow. His wrist ached where it had been grabbed.

“What—” he coughed and spat. The white-haired provost—Penemue, that was his name—raised an elegant eyebrow. Clancy wiped his face with his arm, still holding the bag that he’d grabbed from the technician moments before the man had been engulfed in a wave of dirt. “What the hell was
that
?”

An earthquake, of course. But not just an earthquake, not with those huge white things bursting out of the earth and sending dirt washing over them all. Jesus, had he really seen them?

He rolled to his knees and looked around. The whole north campus looked like a battlefield that had been saturation-bombed. Even the generator-run spotlights had fallen over, their bright beams criss-crossing the ground in a haphazard manner.

Huge pits and craters marred the earth, and heavy equipment was half-buried in giant ripples of dirt and shattered stone. He saw an arm without a shoulder attached to it, and somebody’s shoe, and a body that wasn’t moving.

Jackson was sitting next to him, groaning and holding his leg. Shattered bone jutted through the flesh and his pants leg.

Clancy licked his lips and tasted dirt.

“You pulled me out.” He looked up at the provost. “Thanks. Did you call an ambulance?”

Penemue regarded him with a thoughtful expression. “Not yet.”

He seemed none the worse for wear. Dirt didn’t cover his fine wool coat and expensive suit the way it covered Clancy, and his bright white hair wasn’t even ruffled. Clancy shook his head. Some folks were born lucky.

He pulled himself to his feet, feeling strained muscles protest.

“Jackson? How you doing?”

Jackson looked up, his face white with shock and his eyes glassy.

“Think it’s broken,” he whispered, thinly.

“Hang in there. I’ll get us some help.”

“We’re the only survivors.” Penemue smoothed the front of his coat. “You were buried, but your head was left exposed.” He gestured to the large pile of upturned dirt from which Clancy had been drawn. Clancy shuddered.

“Did you see those giant snakes?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God. I’m not crazy.” He looked around. Where was the forensics team? Buried underground? He felt a trace of panic. “You got any idea what they were?”

Penemue was silent. Clancy wasn’t surprised. He didn’t have any good guesses, either. Everyone dead. Jesus! He looked down at the bag in his hand, then carefully folded it around the clay medallion and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

Whatever it was, it was the only piece of evidence left from the investigation.

“First thing we do is call an ambulance, and then report to the station,” he declared. Freaks of nature, aliens from outer space, or genetically engineered escapees from one of the local biochem labs—whatever those snakes were, they had to be reported.

Maybe if both Jackson and Penemue supported his story, he wouldn’t be laughed out of the office.

“Emergency services may be too busy to respond. The entire city seems to be in a state of emergency,” Penemue observed.

Clancy took another look. The provost was right. The generator-powered lights had fooled him, but beyond them, everything was dark. And the ground was still shaking, although not as badly as before. He rubbed his wrist, then reached inside his jacket and touched the holster under his arm. He hadn’t lost his gun. That was something.

“There’s a radio in my car. You stay here and keep an eye on Jackson. Don’t let him move.”

“Wait.” Penemue lifted a hand. “Give me the seal before you go.”

“The what?” Clancy stared at the man a moment before registering his meaning. “You mean, the medal thing?”

“It’s a seal of summoning.”

“Summoning
what
?” He was suddenly afraid he already knew the answer.

“The beings in between.”

He swallowed. If he hadn’t seen those snake-things himself, he’d say Penemue was crazy. Even now, part of him was hoping this would all turn out to be a nightmare or some kind of hallucination.

“You think this is some kind of Satanic cult thing? Summoning demons?”

“Satan doesn’t mean a thing to those creatures.”

“So it’s, uh, paganism or something?” At one of the annual sensitivity and diversity training sessions, he’d had to learn the difference between pagans and Satanists.

“The seal is part of it, Detective. If you give it to me, I may be able to learn more.”

Penemue could be telling the truth. He was some kind of professor, after all. But he could be the head cultist, too, for all Clancy knew.

“Tell you what,” he countered. “Come down to the station with me, and we’ll see about letting you inspect the evidence under secure conditions. Forensics, remember—wouldn’t want your fingerprints confusing the jury later.”

“This won’t ever go to trial.”

“That decision’s out of my hands.” He was definitely getting a bad feeling about the provost. Assuming the white-haired man even
was
the provost—suddenly Clancy wasn’t sure about that, either. He hadn’t asked for identification, and what the hell was a provost, anyway? “Look, you can come with me or not; it’s up to you. But people are dead—” he stopped, reminded of his missing colleagues. The panic and grief that he’d held at bay threatened to rise, and he thrust it down, swallowing hard. “—and Jackson needs medical treatment
now
. I’ve got to get help.”