After a quick search of the area failed to turn up any sign at all of Melvin, Buck and Chris headed back to town, planning to use Josiah’s phone to call the police. Phones were few and far between in Perfection due to the cost involved in getting the phone company to run a line away from the mains, and most of the inhabitants of the geographically-isolated valley relied instead on CB radios for communication - even cell phones were useless in the dead area created by the encircling mountains.

Josiah’s phone wasn’t working; neither was Mary’s. And Dr. Jackson wasn’t answering on the CB.

A lot of half-panicked yelling into the radio did get one result, however; Ezra’s small Jeep pulled up in front of the store in a spray of gravel not five minutes after the call went out. He ‘just happened to have’ several guns and extra ammunition in the vehicle with him and volunteered to drive out to the doctor’s himself while Chris and Buck made a run into Bixby for the sheriff. Mary and Billy agreed to stay at the store with Josiah until the authorities arrived at the insistence of all four men and then the truck and the Jeep zoomed off on their urgent missions, their drivers all hoping for the best.

Hope was not fulfilled. Buck and Chris found the only road out of Perfection completely blocked by a rockslide and the truck that had belonged to the telephone repair men abandoned nearby; further searching turned up a few…pieces that indicated the line repair had been in progress when the killer had happened by the site. Chris had almost bust a blood vessel when Buck, backing up too close to the slide, had hung up on something and stalled out the truck. After a lot of swearing and seriously abusing the transmission the truck popped loose and they were back on the road, Buck protesting that he hadn’t been hung up and Chris insisting that they had to be careful because he didn’t need to spend the night out there in the middle of nowhere with a killer on the loose. And that brought up another thought. "Oh damn, that college kid…"

"Shit, I hope we’re not too late…" Buck stepped on the gas and the truck barreled down the highway in the general direction of the last spot they’d seen the little red truck. They finally spotted it parked in the shade of some rocks a few miles from where it had been before and, a few hundred yards away, two people with their attention fixed on something on the ground. "Woo-oo! Look at that pretty long hair," he exclaimed happily. "And long legs, nice ass - just my type. Who do you think the other one is?"

"Hopefully not the killer." Chris leaned forward and squinted through the dirty windshield; a startled expression appeared on his face, then the beginnings of a wicked smile…which he quickly concealed. "Sure that one’s your type, Buck?"

His friend grinned. "Hell, looks like she fits all my requirements - if she’s got big blue eyes I may just have to marry her!"

Their approach had been noticed, and the two individuals moved away from the piece of equipment they’d been fussing over to wait for the vehicle to reach them. Buck’s face fell as they pulled up, and Chris laughed. "Can’t wait to hear you tell him that - just look at those big blue eyes."

The two young men approached the truck once it stopped, the shorter, dark-haired one coming right up to Buck’s open window. "Hey, you must be Buck and Chris! Martin told us all about you guys. I’m JD and this is Vin, we’re here for the summer."

Martin had been the previous grad student and both men had fond memories of him. Buck grinned in spite of himself. "Geology, right?"

"Seismology," Chris corrected. He got straight to business. "You boys haven’t seen anyone else out here, have you? Or anything unusual?"

"Should we have?" The long-haired student - Vin - was immediately concerned. "You’re the first people we’ve seen since we got here."

"We have been getting some kind of strange readings, though," JD added. "Looked like someone was doing some blasting or something, is that what you’re talking about?"

"Blasting? Ain’t nobody doing any blasting out here, kid," Buck said dismissively. "No, we’ve got some kind of killer on the loose, took out the phone repair guys and another guy we know - and his son is missin’ now too. Phones are out and the road’s blocked, Perfection’s on its own."

Vin whistled. "Damn, that ain’t good." He looked around, frowning at the red truck not quite out of sight by the rocks. "You guys mind stickin’ around a few minutes? We’ll gather up this equipment and then follow you back into town."

His eyes met Larabee’s and an instant of silent communication passed between them; Chris suddenly felt like he’d known Vin for years, and he realized that the younger man was worried because he couldn’t see the truck but didn’t want to further alarm his fellow student by saying so. "Sure, no problem," he answered. "Matter of fact, why don’t we give you a hand with that stuff."

Buck didn’t want to leave their truck unattended either, so he stayed with JD to help get the equipment packed up for transport while Vin and Chris - the older man with one of Ezra’s high-powered rifles at the ready - took over the job of going to get the other vehicle. It was while he was squatted down beside the grad student that Buck noticed something dangling from the truck’s rear axle. "Well I’ll be damned, I was hung up!" he swore, standing up and going over to investigate; curious, JD trailed along behind him. "I can’t imagine what it could be, though, shouldn’t have been nothin’ out there but rocks and sagebrush…"

Dropping to one knee to peer under the truckbed, already reaching for the unidentified attachment, he suddenly started back with a cry of alarm and nearly toppled JD in the process. The younger man quickly moved in to look for himself.

It was…remains; a flat, eyeless head had its jaws locked around the truck’s rear axle in a literal deathgrip with a vaguely eel-like body trailing across the ground behind it and terminating in a mess of ripped leathery skin and raw orange flesh. It gave off an odor reminiscent of rotting meat and compost that made his eyes water. "Hey Buck, could you hand me that little shovel?" he asked, never taking his eyes off the creature. "I want to pry it off of there so we can take a look at it."

"Are you sure we should mess with it?" Buck countered, but obligingly handed over the little camp shovel. "I mean, this thing stalled out the truck! What if it’s…"

"Don’t worry; it’s dead," JD reassured him. He used the narrow blade of the shovel to pry the dead jaws off the metal and then dragged the creature out from under the truck. Pulling a pocketknife out of his back pocket, he carefully stuck the blade through what looked like the creature’s nostrils and lifted its head for a better look. "Nope, no eyes; it must be totally subterranean. That would mean it ‘sees’ by sensing heat, maybe vibration…"

"I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that out here, what is it?"

"No idea - I’ve never heard of anything like it either," was JD’s reply. He put the head back down and pulled his knife back out, grimacing as clear mucous clung to the blade. "Do you have some gloves? We should probably take this back to town with us for further study, but I’m not sure we should have contact with it until we know for sure none of the substances on it are toxic."

Buck sorted through that for a minute and then frowned at the younger man. "Why can’t you just say, ‘Don’t touch it, it might be poisonous’?" he complained, and went back to the front of the truck to get the gloves. The red pickup pulled up as he was putting them on and he yelled at Chris, "Pard, the next time I say I’m not hung up you for damn sure better listen!"

Chris gave him a puzzled look and then frowned, looking around at the equipment still strung around the site. "What’ve you two been up to? You were supposed to have all this stuff packed up and ready to load…" He walked around the back of the truck to see what JD was doing and froze as he took in the thing spread out on the ground. "What the hell is that?"

"That is what stalled out the truck," Buck informed him with a very self-satisfied expression. "Looks like it was tryin’ to take a bite out of the back axle, the kid here pried it off with a shovel."

Vin had hurried back to see as well; with a low whistle he squatted down beside JD and sniffed. "Meat-eater," he observed, wrinkling his nose. "But…" He pulled his own work gloves out of his back pocket and tugged them on. "JD, lay out a piece of that tarp in the back of your truck, let’s get this where we can see it better." JD did as he asked and with Buck’s help Vin soon had all four feet of the creature spread out in the back of the red truck and was poking at the ripped end with a stick. Then he moved up to the head and lifted it, looking inside the mouth...and paled. "Oh shit."

"Can’t be too much to shit about, it’s dead," Buck began.

"No, it ain’t," was the unhappy reply. Ignoring the three shocked looks being leveled at him, Vin began to roll the corpse up in the tarp, tucking in the ends so the sticky orange ichor that leaked from it wouldn’t get on the truck bed. "JD, get the rest of our gear, we’ve all got to get out of here right now."

Reacting to the urgency in his friend’s tone, JD rushed back to the scattered equipment and began to hurriedly pack it up; Buck reacted too, taking a moment to start his truck before going to help gather things up. Chris scowled and looked around; everything looked quiet. "Vin…"

"Ain’t got no throat," the younger man said, coiling the full tarp and sliding it into a corner of the bed, wedging it in so it wouldn’t roll around. He looked up then, his blue eyes wide with worry. "This part we’ve got, it ain’t a whole animal - just a little piece like an arm or maybe a tongue. It smells like a meat-eater but that little mouth don’t have no way to swallow anything, just a row of sharp little hook-teeth to grab into things with."

"Things to eat," Chris added unnecessarily. "So if that’s just a little piece…"

"The whole thing’s probably as big as a truck," Vin finished for him, jumping down out of the truck bed and pulling off his gloves. "It stalled out your truck?"

Chris nodded. "Had to put it in third gear to get loose, must be one strong son of a bitch." He stepped out of the way so that JD could put an armload of equipment in the back of the truck. The sight of rolls of paper with lines on it stirred his memory. "Hey, didn’t you boys say you were getting some sort of weird readings out here?"

"Yeah, we’ve been picking up microtremors," JD told him. He picked up some of the paper and traced a line on it with his finger. "See right here, that was one from this morning, and then over here…" He scowled suddenly and grabbed another piece, traced another line. "These were all at around the same time, just in different spots. If this is actually a reading of one of those things moving…then there are three of them, not just one." A small plume of dust puffing up from the valley floor just a small distance away caught his attention. "And I’m guessing they’re under the ground…"

As if on cue, the earth under their feet trembled and suddenly the running truck with its noisy engine lurched forward as the ground under its front tires caved in. Buck started to go check it out, muttering something about sinkholes and old mines, but Chris caught his arm. "It must have heard the truck," he said.

"Felt it," JD corrected. "No eyes, it felt the vibration and homed in on it." A muffled roaring from under the ground made them all jump and the blue truck lurched forward again. JD thought fast. "My truck runs quiet, if we can all get in and take off fast enough we should be able to outrun it."

"I’ve got the keys," Vin told him. "But we’ll all have to jump in at once, as soon as all that weight hits the shocks that thing’s gonna know something’s up - Little Red’s just runnin’ off a V-6, if that thing gets a hold of him we’re all gonna be spendin’ the night on top of a rock and hopin’ it can’t climb."

"Shit, for all we know it can fly," Buck said, swallowing hard. "Hate to rush everyone, but I know my engine and she’s about to die."

"On three, everyone jump in the truck," Chris ordered. "One…two…THREE!"

Three men jumped into the pickup bed while the fourth leaped into the driver’s seat, slamming the door just ahead of a seeking tentacle which instead slid harmlessly down the smooth surface, leaving a trail of mucous behind it. The little red truck leaped forward like it had been fired from a gun and bounced across the uneven ground while the men in the back hung on for dear life and watched with growing relief as the small dust plumes that were chasing them fell further and further behind. Finally Chris rapped on the rear window. "I think we lost him, Vin! You can slow down now!" The truck slowed slightly and then angled off toward the highway, and Chris sat back against the cab with a sigh. "That was too damn close."

Buck nodded, but he still looked worried. "I just hope monster number 3 isn’t out at Doc’s place - after what we just saw, I bet it could suck that little Jeep right out from under Ezra."

"Yep." Chris tipped back his head and shut his eyes. "I’m not gonna borrow trouble, though; let’s just hope he’s already back in town."