On the floor of the cave, Stevie lay winded. "I got—I got—I got the wind knocked out of me," he gasped at last.

Relieved laughter. Jason's face appeared alongside Jeremy's. "Looks like you were right, Stevie," he called down. "Looks like a cave or something."

Jeremy jostled the other boys, trying to get a better view. "What's down there, Stevie? Anything?"

Slowly Stevie got to his feet. He took a few unsteady steps. In the darkness something glis-tened, something round and smooth and roughly the size of a soccer ball. He picked it up and tilted it very carefully, so that the light struck it and it seemed to glow in his hands.

"Stevie?" Jeremy called again. "C'mon, what'd you find?"

"Human skull," breathed Stevie. "It's a human skulll"

Jason whooped. "Toss it up here, dude!"

Stevie shook his head. "No way, buttwipe.

I found it. It's mine." He stood, looking around in amazement. "Holy cow. Anyways, there's bones all over the place down here."

He took a few steps back toward the pool of sunlight. He looked down, and saw that he was standing in some kind of oil slick. When he tried pulling his foot up, the ground sucked at the sole of his sneaker.

"Shit," he murmured, clutching the skull to him. "What the—"

And then he saw that the oil was every-where, not just beneath his feet, but seeping up from cracks in the rock. And it was moving. Moving toward him. Black oil oozed up beneath his foot and wriggled down and into his sneaker. The skull fell from his hands and bounced across the stony floor as he tugged at his shorts and stared at the exposed skin of his leg.

Beneath the flesh something moved; a writhing thing as long as his finger. Only now there was more than one, there were dozens of them, all burrowing under his skin and moving upward. And there was something else, some-thing just as frightening: where the black oil passed, his limbs were left feeling numb and frozen. Paralyzed.

"Stevie?" Jeremy stared down into the darkness. "Hey, Stevie?"

Stevie grunted but did not look up at him. Jeremy watched, unsure whether this was some kind of joke. "Stevie, you better not—"

"Stevie?" the other boys chimed in. "You okay?"

Stevie was definitely not okay. As they stared, Stevie's head fell backward so that he seemed to stare straight up at them, and in the glaring desert light they could see his eyes first filling with darkness and then turning com-pletely, unnaturally black.

"Hey, man," whispered Jason. "Let's get outta here."

"Wait," said Jeremy. "We should help him—"

Jason and the other boy pulled him away. Jeremy went with them reluctantly, his foot-steps echoing loudly against the dusty ground.

Sirens wailed counterpoint to the rush of wind over the plain. In the housing development doors slammed as people began to file onto their front steps a few at a time. At the end of one driveway, a spare figure in jeans and dark T-shirt hugged her arms as she scanned the horizon, then began to walk down the street out of the development.

The fire engines were already there. Two men in full rescue mode jumped from the hook-and-ladder vehicle, disengaged a ladder, and hurried toward the hole left by the boys. Several other men followed them as the cap-tain pulled up in his car and hopped out, radio in hand.

"This is Captain Miles Cooles," he recited. "We've got a rescue situation in progress."

He stepped toward the hole. The three lead firemen had already slung the ladder down there, and one of them quickly stepped down it. His helmet gleamed in the sunlight, then winked from view as he reached the bottom and stepped away from the ladder.

"What you got down there, J.C.?" Cooles yelled after him. There was no response, and a moment later the second and third men fol-lowed the first into the darkness.

Outside, the sun beat mercilessly upon the growing circle of parents and children that had gathered.

Captain Cooles stood silently, his weathered face taut with concern as he stared at the sinkhole. After a moment he sent two more men down.

Cooles glanced up sharply. A low ominous whomp whomp echoed through the torrid air, as a helicopter mysteriously materialized from the glowing sunset. Around him more and more peo-ple were slowly appearing, parents and children all staring at the western horizon. Faster than seemed possible the helicopter approached the huddled group, banked sharply, and then hovered above them. People clapped their palms over their ears and shaded their eyes as clouds of dust rose and the unmarked copter landed gently on the parched earth.

What the hell? thought Cooles. The heli-copter's side door flew open, and five figures jumped out.

Swathed in white Hazardous Materials suits, their faces hidden behind heavy masks, they carried a gleaming metal lit-ter capped by a translucent plastic bubble, like an immense beetle carapace. They headed immediately for the hole. Cooles nodded and started after them, but before he had gone two paces another man debarked from the heli-copter, a tall gaunt figure in white oxford-cloth shirt, his tie flapping in the propellers' back-wash.

"Get those people back!" the man yelled, pointing to where the crowd was drifting curi-ously after the paramedics. A plastic tag round his neck identified him as Dr. Ben Bronschweig. "Get them out of here!"

Cooles nodded. He turned to the line of waiting firemen and shouted, "Move them all back! Now!"

Then, hurrying to catch up with Bronschweig, he said, "I sent my men down after the boy. The report is that his eyes went black. That's the last I heard—"

Bronschweig ignored him and made a bee-line for the sinkhole. Already the figures were clambering back up the ladder, bearing the limp body of the young boy on the bubble litter. At sight of this Bronschweig finally stopped, star-ing as the rescue crew bore it back toward the chopper. The crew followed, and as the gath-ered crowd watched in silence, the helicopter lifted back into the air, its blades sending bil-lows of red dustlike smoke across the plain. A minute later and it was only a black smudge against the ruddy sky.

"Is that my boy?" a woman's voice asked from the back of the crowd. "Is that my boy?"

Bronschweig walked toward the develop-ment, Captain Cooles close behind. In the near distance a line of unmarked heavy vehi-cles barreled along the highway, turning into the access road leading to the little rows of identical houses. Unmarked cargo vans and squat trucks were driven by blank-faced men in dark uniforms. At the front of this threatening caravan were two huge white tanker trucks, devoid of any logo or advertising, gleaming ominously in the dying sun. Bronschweig stopped, arms crossed on his chest, and watched them with a tense expression.

"What about my men?" Captain Coole's loomed angrily at the doctor's side, his face red. "I sent five men down there—"

Bronschweig turned and walked away with-out a word.

Cooles waved furiously back at the sink-hole. "Goddamnit, did you hear what I said? I sent—"

Seeming not to hear him, Bronschweig walked toward the approaching trucks. A few of them had parked in a line in the cul-de-sac.

Official-looking personnel were already pulling tents and tent poles, satellite dishes, banks of electric lights and monitoring equipment from them. The townspeople stared in bewilderment as the first of a myriad of refrigeration units were yanked from the backs of trucks and mus-cled toward the sinkhole.