The earth kicked Ben's feet and sent him flying into the air with his next running step.

As he toppled through the jump, the ground below cringed away from him. A dip in a wave. It came back up just in time to slap his body from shoulder to hip as he landed face down.

From somewhere ahead there was the sound of tearing wood. From behind, an enormous whump of impact, almost too deep to really be called sound. Against Ben's face, the dirt thrummed with echoes of an earthquake.

A moment later, in the middle of what felt like a pool of silence, the thing that had fallen cried.

The noise it made wasn't angry or bestial. It was a note sung in harmony by a thousand mouths, a beautiful voice backed by horns, a whalesong chorus of struck-glass leviathans.

Ben rolled over onto his back to look up at the thing, and his mind started gibbering.

For some reason he thought of his last visit to a planetarium. The feeling of leaning back, looking up at vast designs being illuminated on a huge dome. But he wasn't looking at a projection. It was an object, an artifact, a creature.

His closest frame of reference was deep sea creatures. He thought of basket stars, the grasping, curling-fronded starfish. He thought of spreading mold and fungal networks. He thought of a glass of milk, dropped and smashed, and splattered out in a disk of irregular geometry.

At the center of rings of branching ferns there was an animal structure, a six sided kite that sat at its heart, the source of six tree-trunk octopus limbs that moved with intention. Each tentacle ended in a pair of taloned fingers, and each finger had a mouth.

As he lay dumbfounded, the thing reared up. Two of its limbs lifted up high into the sky, fingers extended. Richard Nixon holding peace V's. Then it brought its talons down on the hovering Lirral craft.

The alien ship lit up in blue light. Hidden forcefields flashed visible with a sound like a struck bell. The ship didn't move, just enduring the attack.

The leviathan thing twisted like it was going to whip the ship with a tail, but on its symmetrical reverse two more limbs were ready to lash out. The ground quaked under its delicate movements.

Ben's mouth was coppery with the taste of adrenaline. His limbs were weak. He didn't know what to do. He wasn't a worm before a bird, he was krill between the teeth of a whale.

He rolled back onto his face and rose to his hands and knees. The ground was still humming with the memories of the thing's impact. His limbs were shot through with vertigo, his muscles had become viscous solids, too instantly-tired and jelly-weak to get him to his feet.

He crawled towards the bridge, bruising palms and knees and somehow twisting his ankles into uncomfortable angles.

Hayden appeared at his side, crouching to put one arm around his shoulder and another hand under his armpit, giving him upward pressure.

The ground seemed to fall away again, but this time it was just him rising to his feet.

He staggered forward, half supported by Hayden.

Monroe was a little way ahead of him, kneeling on the grass, arms limp beside him, face blank as he stared up at the thing that had fallen.

Ben waved his leg out as he passed, aiming to try and kick Monroe's shoulder to snap him out of it. He swung too high and the tip of his shoe clipped his chin instead.

Monroe turned to look at him, still space-eyed, then climbed unsteadily to his feet.

They ran for the bridge. The impact of the entity had sent shockwaves through the ground and damaged everything, the bridge, the visitor center. Cracks in the parking lot.

The Lirral at the bridge didn't even look at them as they passed. It was frozen, staring at the giant behind them. Paralyzed by fear? Silently communicating with someone else?

The bridge, already damaged, croaked under their feet as they hustled across it. The impact quake from the giant thing landing had broken something underneath it and made it unsound.

Thirty feet below, the estuary promised a hard landing into cold water, but that wasn't even a consideration for Ben. He'd jump into that water if it would let him get away from the monster behind them.

He ignored the whining wood, stepping over visible cracks. As he found his stride he separated from Hayden and picked up his pace.

The sounds coming from behind them evolved as they ran. High pitched shrieks joined the ringing of the Lirral ship's shields, and long whistles that ended with snapping guitar strings. He didn't turn to look. He wasn't ready to see that thing again.

They made it across the bridge into the parking lot on the other side. The highway onramp was visible through the trees a few hundred yards away, but Ben didn't want to go there. He didn't want to be up high. He didn't want to be out in the open. His instincts told him to find a hole and hide in it, to dig a hole, with his bare hands, to fill it in above him until he was a part of the landscape, invisible and undiscoverable.

Dawn broke away, heading for where the only two cars were parked side by side in the parking lot. She checked the doors, both were locked, then looked around and ran to rejoin them.

Ben kept running, passing her, leaving her behind. Waiting for the others was no more an option than a rock waiting for the other rocks in a landslide. Ben was governed by purely mechanical forces. He was matter flowing downhill, a cloud of vapor pushed on a weather-front of high emotional pressure.

His bracelet had turned itself off. His first warning of the approaching teardrops was seeing them emerging from the trees on the far side of the clearing around the parking lot.

Gangly, ungainly, there were about twenty of them picking their way through the trees.

Ben hadn't seen any this far out of the city on their hike along the highway, but there must have been some. Now they were all drawn to the sound of the battle between the Lirral and the colossus.

Ben finally stopped running. He almost tripped over his feet as the opposed survival instincts run and freeze fought for dominance, but he did stop running.

"Stop," Ben shouted to the others.

His voice was lost beneath the din of the energy-vs-flesh contest behind him, but the others couldn't miss the crowd of dusty-black teardrop shapes, dancing and bobbing their way forward, like a crowd of fifty-somethings shyly gyrating towards the dance floor at an ABBA tribute band performance.

Monroe caught up and ran past him, screaming and waving his long-handled sword.

He spun around like a top, swinging the purple blade at the teardrops. By chance, the blade hit one of them.

The plane of purple light cut through the dusty skin of the teardrop without slowing, and the thing came apart like a rubber boot full of water. Its top half flew off, bending and collapsing. A translucent fluid scattered out into the air, but evaporated almost instantly in the light, turning to nothing. The thing's lower half froze stock still, falling out of its unstable position with its legs up in the air like a dead spider.

The closest five of the others heard Monroe's war cry and turned on him instead of continuing towards the alien battle.

"Oh shit," he said, reeling back from the part of the crowd he could see.

He accidentally backed into the other part of it, two of the teardrops reacting to the contact by stabbing out with taloned legs, hitting Monroe with wet slapping sounds as the tips buried themselves in his hip and thigh.

"Oh shit! Shit!"

He tried to pull away, was caught on the legs, tried to push them off, his hands slid frictionlessly across them.

He swung his sword around and caught one of the ones holding him, making a cut that bled evaporating fluid, but the teardrop didn't seem to notice or care about it.

The rest of the group clustered around him, obscuring him in a screen of bobbing bodies.

Without otherwise moving, Ben reached down and touched the yellow bean on his bracelet.

Lines sprang up over the world.

He could see Monroe again. A chalk-white outline of a human figure, with a silver-traced sword and shield, struggling beneath a mess of overlapping purple ovals.

It looked like Monroe was trying to swing his sword around, and Ben could see the tip occasionally poking out through the side of a teardrop, but the things were pressing against him, and he was struggling to get the angles he needed. He looked like someone trying to mop the floor in a packed elevator.

Hayden appeared at Ben's side, breathless.

"He alive in there?" she asked.

"Yeah."

Hayden let out a long breath and stepped forward.

She advanced on the closest teardrop, the spear she'd bought held overarm with the pole going up over her shoulder.

As she got into range she swept the tip down in a hacking motion, cutting at the closest alien.

Its skin split, and interstitial fluid gouted out then burned off in the air.

Ben remembered his walkie-talkies. He pulled two out, flipped them on, and mashed the call button on one as he tossed the other over the heads of the creatures clustering on Monroe.

The child-safe walkie-talkie flew in a screaming arc, and this close, the teardrops did pay attention.

As it flew over them, a few spindly arms lanced out, missing it, and then as one the cluster abandoned Monroe to chase the louder device.

It bounced in the grass about twenty feet off, and all of the aliens who'd stopped to focus on Monroe were now stabbing at it, getting in each other's way as dozens of spiked legs tangled in the narrow space around it.

Monroe was still standing, one arm hanging weakly at his side, the other holding a spot on his thigh. He was crying, snot dripping off his chin. He wasn't bleeding anywhere, even in places Ben had definitely seen him get stabbed.

Ben started jogging towards him, finding the jelly of his legs still had solid bones in them after all.

When he reached him, he checked Monroe over for obvious wounds. There were places where he looked like he'd been impaled on baseball bats, deep depressions that his clothes followed inside his body.

When Ben pulled at Monroe's shirt to check the skin, he found that the same depression was there in the body, a three-inch wide sinkhole into flesh where a teardrop limb had penetrated, deforming the meat of his body like they'd been pencils rammed into play-doh.

Monroe was a mess, but there was no blood on any of the depressions, and he didn't show any pain when Ben grabbed at one.

"Are you good to run?" Ben asked, getting close and whispering at Monroe's ear.

Monroe seemed to nod. Ben touched him on the shoulder then started sneaking past the teardrop stab party. He caught sight of Monroe, Dawn, and Hayden picking their way along behind and beside him.

As Ben was coming level with the screaming walkie-talkie, a teardrop managed to spear it directly, then quickly ate it. The loud electronic tone didn't stop, even when the device was inside the alien.

The others started lancing it over and over, while the beeping teardrop defended itself. It was just like when one ate his cellphone in the office. They were still drawn to sound, attacking each other. Maybe eventually they'd all eat each other.

Ben let go of the beeper button on his handset, and the tone stopped, but the popping skewer fight continued, self-sustaining by this point.

They all continued past it, staying clear of the tree-line as they jogged back up the curving road in the direction of the highway.

Behind them, the colossus had finished killing the Lirral craft. Ben couldn't look, but he could work it out from the lack of guitar-string weapons, while the sounds of wet trumpet grunts continued.

As they reached the highway a figure appeared on the road, waving, beckoning them over. He looked like an older guy with a beer gut and a trucker cap, a flannel shirt unbuttoned to show a Mickey Mouse t-shirt.

Ben stopped, his heart in his throat. He told himself another human was less dangerous than the monsters behind him.

It was Dawn who moved towards him first, never stopping her run, just changing direction.

Ben followed after her, with the others.

"You make it out of the visitor center?" Dawn asked, coming to a stop out of breath in front of him.

The man nodded. "We gotta get out of here. I've got a car a little way off, the engine looks good but I need help getting her out of a ditch."

"We can't drive," Hayden said. "Those bug things hunt by sound."

The older man gave a helpless expression, and repeated "The engine looks good."

"How about we head up the Brunswick bypass," Dawn suggested. "We could get to Augusta airport without getting deep into another city.

"You want to go to another alien shelter?" Ben asked. "That didn't work out just now."

"Give us a better idea," Dawn said.

"Find an abandoned farmhouse to sleep in. Make new plans tomorrow," Ben said.

Dawn looked at him, then at Hayden.

"That is a better idea," Hayden said.

The older man looked at the colossus towering somewhere behind Ben, then said, "We gotta get out of here."

"Show us the car," Dawn said.

The man turned around and headed off, and the rest followed him.