Beginning his slow descent, the first thing he saw upon entering the cave was a curtain of glowing silk strands that hung from the backs of long, segmented, armored bugs pressed flat against the stone all around him. He noted with horror that some were longer than he was tall, and all had mandibles that looked like they could take a finger in a single bite. The gash was not wide, either; any serious swaying in one direction or another would see him entangled with their silk. And, if these were anything like the glowworms of Australia, then the droplets he saw clinging to the strands were not dew, but poison.

  He contemplated briefly firing on a few of the bugs, but they weren't reacting to him in any way, and if there was to be a defense response, then he didn't favor himself while surrounded on all sides as he was. Instead, he opted to leave the patient predators alone for now. Holding his breath, Moose delicately – very delicately – lowered himself the miserable twenty feet it took to get clear of the worst of the strands.

  "God damn it," he said, getting his first real look at the cavern, "it's gorgeous."

  It was like something from an old adventure movie. Mist came wafting up from the swampy forest below, lit irregularly by holes in the ceiling, the glowworms, thousands of bright red blinking fireflies, and some of the trees and shrubs themselves, which emitted a golden light from beneath their branches. The place was massive and overfull of life, sloping from where he knew the formal entrance was into what appeared to be an underwater lake on the far other side. Moose was less than a quarter of the way to the lake, which was very lucky; he wasn't sure his rope would have reached the bottom had he entered at the lake-end, and the swamp seemed denser the further you went. Below him was a thatch of oaks and maple trees, their seeds presumably having entered here through the hole he was now dangling from, and the last of the stepped terraces that made up the start of the cavern.

  The further down he went, the luckier he realized he'd gotten with his choice of entrance. It was not the trees and shrubs that were glowing gold, but the beehives built on them. Fortunately, the oak under him had been spared – though that did make him a little concerned as well. The red fireflies seemed to cluster around it more than they did most of the other trees, and definitely more than they did near the beehives. Maybe they competed with the bees in some way.

  Once he was at the top of the oak, he was relieved to see that other than their size, about the length of his palm, and color, the bugs seemed as harmless as their surface cousins. They did seem to like flying directly at him, but they either bounced off and trundled away in a different direction, or landed for a few seconds before taking off again. He did his best to ignore them, reminding himself again of the glowworms ringing his rope above.

  As he descended through the branches to land on the muddy soil at the base, he confirmed that the fireflies competed with the bees for space, at the least. They had laid their bright red eggs underneath the boughs of the oak. The curious, nature-loving child in him wanted to collect a few of the eggs to bring back to the surface, maybe to send to Penn State, but he was ill-equipped to do so. He'd come prepared for a fight, not science.

  That brought to mind an important question: What exactly was he here to do? Before he'd seen what it looked like down here, the plan had been simple. He would kill as many monsters as possible while trying to find any evidence of Salem Cooper's passing. But what the hell was he supposed to do about all this? There was an entire ecosystem down here, and worse, it was a swamp broken up by labyrinths of stalagmites and full-on thickets of mangrove-like trees – it could take weeks, if not months, to explore this fully.

  Moose carefully unclipped from the rope and started in the direction of the entrance to the cave. There was little chance the boy had made it into the swamp, little chance even that he'd made it past the crack that had taken Welly and Decker, his birding dogs. It made more sense to work in reverse.

  He sniffed the air – smoke and burning rubber. Looking down, he saw that the bottom of his boot was smoking; there seemed to be a slimy fuel clinging to it, burning with the same bright red color as the fireflies.

  "Shit."

  Moose wiped the sticky flame off on a rock, watching as the substance continued to burn for a good while. Thankfully, his shoes were hardy and new, as armored as the rest of his gear. As long as he avoided whatever had set them alight, they would be fine.

  He had a bad feeling about what that something was, though. Taking one of the fireflies that had landed on his chest between his thumb and forefinger, he flicked the thing hard at the same rock. His eyes went wide. The moment it splattered against the stone and the sac of glowing fluid on its abdomen was exposed to the air, it burst into flame, leaving a fiery trail as it ran down the side of the rock.

  "They're…they're full of napalm," he said with a strangled voice, calmly observing the thousands of the bugs gently bobbing through the air around him. They'd seemed cute just seconds ago.

  Napalm!? Fucking napalm? Really?

  He took a deep breath and started slowly walking away from the oak. Panicking in this situation would only get him killed. At least this had clarified his mission for today.

  Moose was here to assess dangers – recon, essentially. He would get as much information as he could, and then he would get the fuck out of here.

  The former ranger got no further than fifteen feet before encountering yet another quandary. In order to get to the entrance of the cavern, he had to traverse the stepped terraces, which were full of water and life. Lotus flowers and other water lilies obscured much of what lay beneath the surface, but he could see tons of little fishes swimming underneath the pads. There were stones throughout the pools that he could step on, but they seemed…suspicious. He couldn't put a finger on why, but they were oddly uncanny in a way, like they'd been planted there deliberately.

  Nothing to it but to do it. Moose reached his foot forward and tapped the closest stone. It felt firm and stable, but still, he couldn't shake the feeling of wrongness.

  His boot couldn't give him the tactile feedback he needed. Leaning down, he patted the stone with his gloved hand – still normal, still off somehow. He felt around its sides, his thumb breaching the surface of the mostly still pool, small ripples scaring away a few of the smaller fish.

  The instant that happened, the very second he had disturbed the peace of the fish, the stone he'd been touching surged up, holding aloft two massive pinchers in defense of its chosen home, and snapped one down on the center of his hand.

  "Agh, shit!"

  Moose retracted his arm, but the thing clung on, the crushing force of its pinchers putting the relatively thin armor on his gloves to the test. He caught its other pincher with his left hand before it could likewise latch on, slammed the crab to the ground, and placed his boot on top of its shell for leverage. The thing felt more like a stone than ever. Stomping on it did nothing, and trying to pull himself free was like testing his strength against a table vice.

  Quickly opting for another strategy, he moved his boot to the crab's free pincher, pinning it to the ground, and drew his pistol, a reliable nine-millimeter loaded with sub-sonic rounds this time so as to not deafen himself again. The first bullet dented – dented – the body of the crab, ricocheting off with a dull metallic clang. He directed the next bullet at the joint just below the pincher crushing his hand.

  That did the trick, severing the pincher cleanly. Moose kicked the crab away, sending it just eight feet away, where it landed with an enormous splash in the next terrace up – a terrible, terrible mistake, he realized.

  From the small pool he'd first disturbed had emerged eight or nine of the stone/metallic crab monsters, all of which were currently scurrying at him, claws forward. From the larger pool behind them came dozens of the things, the largest as wide as his torso. That number included the one he'd shot twice, its shell notably dented from the point-blank shot.

  He took one look at that, turned around, and sprinted towards the oak, practically throwing himself up the first branch he could see without red eggs on the underside. The tide of crabs was fast behind him; once they finished gathering around the base of the tree, he would have to jump over them and make his way past them and the terraced pools. Moose was willing to bet he'd be fine as long as he didn't disturb the water or the tiny fish again. Hopefully, there would be a way out from this enormous cavern to the surface there, or else he'd have to stall until he had the space and time to loop back around and clip into the rope.

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  The first crab reached the tree, paused, turned around, picked up the nearest crab, and lifted it above its head. Another crab swiftly climbed up the other two before it was locked into a rigid position by the one beneath. A fourth struggled for a moment to climb up before two others came from behind to give it a boost.

  "Oh, what the fuck, man."

  Of course, the crabs could work together down here. Why wouldn't they? Everything in this goddamn cave existed solely to torment him.

  Still not panicking, he made his way as quickly as he could to a bough nearest to the rope. There was no time to properly loop the rope through his belay device and the various safety measures, but Moose could do a hundred-thirty-foot rope climb up thin nylon while being pursued by intelligent monstrous crabs – surely.

  Any small hope he had of juking the crabs was immediately lost the moment he was dangling from the rope. The tide turned as one to pursue, using a similar strategy to chase him up the rope. The first crab grabbed the rope with one claw and then picked up the crab at its side, lifting it up so that it could grab the rope and lift it in turn.

  "Fuck you, God."

  He raced up as fast as he could, muscles burning with effort, but the things were, somehow, just slightly faster. Moose had a lead to begin with, meaning that they caught up some fifty feet up. One immediately latched onto his boot, but these were not like his gloves; they'd been specifically made for fighting the various mutated sharks that littered the waters of Japan's coasts. The claw cut through the rubber and cloth shell but was halted by the steel wire mesh underneath.

  Moose instinctively tried to kick it off him or to at least knock the tower of crabs it was on top of down, only to realize his error when the rope began to retract upwards on its own. Sparing a glance up, he saw that in the commotion, it had tangled itself with the strands of silk hanging from the back of a giant glowworm. The man-sized bug was now pulling its silk into its body slowly as it began to stir from its slumber. If that thing took its mandibles to the threads of the rope, then he was about to go crashing down fifty or sixty feet through an oak tree filled with sacks of living napalm.

  Biceps burning, he hung from one hand, drew the nine-millimeter once more, and made the greatest shots of his life. He fired once up, striking the thin and thankfully relatively unprotected body of the glowworm. It had mostly finished pulling in its silk, so when it died, both it and the rope dropped. As it fell, the few inches of silk stuck to the rope caused the whole thing to jerk as the glowworm's body momentarily caught there before ripping free. Then, while the corpse of the bug was still falling and the rope was now swinging wildly, he fired again at the crab on his boot. The second bullet struck the crab at the seam of where the top and bottom of its shell parted for its eyes and mouth, killing it instantly at the same time as the glowworm was splattering against the branches of the oak.

  Moose held on with his thighs as the rope swung into contact with another dozen silken, poisonous strands. The singular positive was that the crabs were more impacted than he was, the chaotic movements pushing their tiny brains past the limit. He had to imagine they'd evolved the ability to climb in response to tunnel wolves pilfering their underwater gardens, not to chase men up ropes. They froze, clinging to each other and the rope as best they could, unable to react to what was happening.

  That gave him an idea. It was awful, but it was the only one he had. Holstering the pistol once more, he took advantage of the crabs' confusion to continue sprinting up the rope, something that was made easier by the fact that multiple glowworms were now slowly pulling it up. Their gooey poison was dripping down sporadically, occasionally landing on his head, rendering whatever it touched completely numb. But thankfully, there was still plenty of Regenerative Agent still in his blood – he had to trust that he'd be fine. There was no room in this situation to also worry about the poison.

  Nothing to it but to do it. He could feel the toxin working its way through his scalp and into his bloodstream, but all he could do was push himself harder in response. The crabs were making minimal progress, at least, freezing each time they moved a little further up – perfect.

  Above him, the slow pull of the rope stopped as the silk strands of multiple glowworms became tangled up with each other. The silk didn't stick to itself, but the wild swinging of the rope had looped the strands together. The bugs seemed to realize this at a staggered pace, awakening from their complete stillness to crane their segmented bodies down to examine what had occurred.

  The first bug to realize that it was competing with its neighbors for a meal reacted mercilessly. Before the others could react, it turned and cleanly severed the head of the one next to it, yanking it off the stalactite with a quick jerk. It didn't fall, however - too many of its strands were still entangled with the rope. Instead, it simply dangled like a weight from it over his head.

  Christ, okay, if he was going to pull this off, it would have to be now. Moose reached down with one arm, grabbed a hold of the rope beneath his feet, and started to swing it deliberately. Above him, two glowworms locked their jaws and started to wrestle one another, trying to drag the other off from its perch. Below, the crabs came to a complete stop, simply holding on.

  They were heavy, but he had adrenaline and momentum on his side. The seconds felt like hours as each swing got closer and closer to bringing the section of the rope with the crabs to the curtain of silk ringing his exit. Finally, with one great heave, he did it, whipping the rope up over his head and into the glowworm threads in the immediate vicinity of the hole. As one, they began to pull their silk up almost exactly as one of the two above him put a mandible through the other's brain. It joined its brethren in dangling over him, rendering the climb up now fully impossible.

  He'd counted on that, though, and was already shuffling over, one hand at a time, toward the other side of the rope. There, the crabs had ceased their pursuit and were battling instead with the poisonous silk they'd been captured by, as well as the creatures lassoing them in. The fight seemed equally matched. When a crab could orient itself properly and get an idea of what to actually attack, it would more or less instantly kill the glowworm on top of it. But that was a rare occurrence; most were simply trying to attack the strands and seeing their pincers get glued together for the effort. One of the glowworms was already gnawing at the eyes of a still-wriggling crab.

  In the chaos, Moose was able to get fairly close to the hole, the rope now anchored at a number of points around it by various glowworms. Luckily, none had taken to attacking the rope itself. The one that had killed its neighbors seemed to have sussed out the nylon wasn't good eating and was mindlessly cannibalizing the corpses dangling from it instead.

  Unfortunately, this was the part of his plan where he now had to swing off the rope to dyno onto one of the loose stones around the exit or else fall a hundred-plus feet to his death – not something he would have considered himself capable of prior to now. But there was no room for doubt; he had to believe in himself, or he was as good as dead.

  Like sent from heaven on high, as soon as he had the thought, another rope came through the hole, this one thick and old, hempen and potentially hand woven as unbelievable as that seemed. He was grabbing it before his brain could finish recognizing that it was real.

  "Heave!" came a thunderous and deep voice from above. It was like a dark mirror of Walton Ennis' – the same baritone and the rich timbre, but somehow cold and imperious where the radio man's was warm and welcoming.

  Four pale, gaunt Laponte men hauled him to safety. They wore tool belts and were covered in dirt and wood dust, clearly having just finished a hard day of labor.

  They rolled him onto his back and let a happy Sheila greet him. He pushed her away before she lapped up any of the poison covering his face.

  Charles Laponte leaned over him, a half-smile on his face; more joy there than he'd ever seen the man wear before. "The Lord is not finished with you yet, Finneas Blyde."

  One of his younger sons added, "There are stairs down, moron."