"Come on, let's go back to the van," I said, my voice hollow.

I turned around and saw two glowing red eyes above, piercing through the rain. Something was perched on the nearest telephone pole.

Its body was total darkness, as if it was made out of wisping shadows that were tugged and pulled at by the wind and rain. It looked like a huge owl, its wings spread out wide at its sides, though from what I could see it didn't have a beak or any other features save for its huge glowing eyes.

Was this the thing we had seen flying above us earlier? The red eyes, shadow-like form and wings seemed to suggest so.

The four of us stared at it, and it stared back.

We couldn't move, and neither did it.

The red glow from its huge saucer-like eyes dimmed a bit, it folded up its wings, spread them out again and took off into the air. We watched the red glow fade into the distance as it leisurely glided away. I took a glance back to everyone; they were all staring off into empty space.

"...Come on..." I muttered.

We all ran back to the van. I put my hands up to my head, "What are we going to do... Those things, they have to be digging all around the city, right? Maybe even through the city. That light goes on beyond the horizon. At the speed they're going... it can't be taking them too long to dig. And who the hell knows how many of them there are... by now I wouldn't be surprised if they had this whole area surrounded... What should we do? What... what can we do?"

Doubt and uncertainty filled the air. We all knew the only answer. If we wanted to make it to the bunker, if we wanted a chance of certain survival...

"We'll have to go through Crestland." Jared said, though you could tell in his voice that he really did not want to say it. The hysteric woman on the radio's warning played back in my mind. Crestland is lost. "If we want to get to the manor, that is. We must be about almost halfway past the city by now. Assuming those worms didn't dig all through the city and around it, we can just go along until we reach their starting point. I'm just going off on a limb, but they were coming from the city, so maybe they're only going West? If they surrounded everything..." he brought his hand up to his head and let out a sad laugh, "Well, I guess it won't really matter where we go then, will it? It will probably only be a matter of time before we're done in, unless we can find more people and group up. That's seeming less likely with every passing minute though."

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I was covered in goosebumps.

I always had a bad feeling about Crestland since we started heading this way. Something deep inside me was warning me to stay as far away from it as possible, some sort of instinct maybe. The woman's radio message had only added fuel to the fire, had transformed it into an absolute inferno of paranoia and dread.

I stared at the glowing light from the crevasse, imagining the dozens of corpse filled worms squirming and writhing through the earth.

Would we even be able to make it into the city?

"Well..." Sarah said, "It's night now. How about we find a place to rest, like we were going to before... that incident. Then we can think about what to do." She took a deep breath, "Those worms... that must have been what was making the earthquake when I was leaving the city..."

I brought my shaking hands to the wheel and took a long breath.

Was there another way? I couldn't think of any... we could go all the way back but that would take us twice the time, and if the worms had dug all the way around then we would have gone all that way for nothing... shit...

For now, just worry about finding a place to rest for the night. Then we can think more tomorrow. Yeah...

I drove us back from the crevasse for about five minutes until we came across an intact house with a basement.

We parked the van, took our bags with us and walked inside.

The ground floor looked like it had been looted. The houses around here weren't very spacious, everything including the beds were all in one room. The cupboards and everything had been flung open and emptied. After inspecting the ground floor, we went into the basement. It wasn't very big, but there was enough room for the two mattresses and couch. There were a few boxes in the basement, which we searched through. The only useful thing was an electric torch, which we placed in the centre of the room to light it. We brought the mattresses and couch downstairs and barricaded the basement door with the three wooden chairs we found. It just felt much more secure to be in the basement.

We unpacked the bags that still remained with us to keep stock of our supplies:

We had enough food for... not very long. If we each ate once a day, we had enough for about two days after today. But I didn't know if we could survive on that much food, everything that was happening really wore on us. We needed nutrients. We ended up deciding it was best to go looking for food the next day.

We had a flashlight, with a few spare batteries.

Jared, Aaron and I each had a blanket.

We all had raincoats, which we wore most of the time anyway.

We had a portable radio, which I turned on and had Aaron look through the stations.

For weapons, all we had now was a knife for each of us.

We had to find a gun. But nobody had guns, nobody other than police officers or the military, so finding one would be pure luck.