"A little more to the left!"

"What?"

"Left!" Lovelace shouted again, this time louder and waving her arms to the left. Specifically her left. "Go left!"

Lucas shifted his feet along the shingles of the roof of the pub, their exact destinations obscured by snow. He kept his shoes flat against the tiles, nudging the snow away from their path so as to not put anything he could slip on between the roof and his soles. With him he dragged a long metal pole, to which Professor Lovelace had tacked on an entire engineering textbook's worth of electronic devices, from the trio of dishes mounted about a metre above his head - pointed at where the storm wall that had suddenly cut them off from the outside world curved inwards to form a rough dome with the blackened clouds overhead - to the series of little plastic boxes with small LCD screens on each of them that were clamped on down the length of the pole in a spiraling order, to...the wires. Oh god, the wires. Lucas had once gotten used to the professor's messy ways, the very essence of which he had been immersed in for the good part of the two years he spent under her, working on a tool that outside of emergencies, he barely used and never sold the designs of. Her nature seemed to have not changed in the slightest, evidenced by the absolute mess of wiring that joined everything on the pole together; some segments of it wrapped multiple times around the shaft to use up length, and others were simply too long for what they were stringing together, and the simply curved out then back in from the pole. There was only one consistency, and that was the lower the components got from the dishes, the more messy it became as Lovelace's patience and ability to organise progressively disintegrated. Near the bottom, the resulting abominable mass of wires and cable ties, coloured like rainbow vomit, was held to the pole one more time before it slithered down the slant of the roof and off its edge, to where Lovelace had plugged it into a small tablet.

"Modular" my ass, Lucas thought, reaching down to grab the trail of cables and throw it out, allowing the part that went off the edge to skip over a couple of shingles as he moved it to the right. His right. "Got anything!?" He called back down after bracing the pole on the roof.

"Still nothing! There's a lot of interference!"

He glanced at the storm wall in the distance, and then at the roof's edge. "Yeah no shit!"

"I need to upgrade!" The cable going in her direction went slack.

"Alright," he muttered, beginning to pull the rest of the mass up from below and bundle it up. Then he rotated the pole onto its side, facing the dishes up, turned himself and slowly inched back down towards the ladder. It was a solid three minutes of trying not to lose his footing, and another one and a half of handing the entire pole to the bald man who was holding the ladder for him before he could finally climb down himself. "Thanks, Marcello."

"I'll move this inside," Marcello said, adjusting his glasses before carefully pivoting the device through the back door.

"Aite." Lucas stood in the backyard, among the grills that were now under their tarps after he'd ordered the staff home, and looked up.

The dark, swirling clouds seemed to groan at him, and for a moment it felt like he was back on Theremis again, looking up from the lower levels of the pit city as the mining industry wound down for the day, belching black smoke into the circular patch of sky above. They'd found something horrible down there, in the old tunnels under the city. Lucas didn't trust it, not one bit.

A familiar voice rang through the trees, and he looked back down to see Raya, covered in flecks of snow, out of the trees, turning to look behind her before shouting at him again. At that distance, he could barely hear it, but the way her lips were moving, he knew exactly what it was she was trying to tell him.

Hide!

Lucas stared at her for a moment, before the tops of the trees further in the valley suddenly moved as something massive began to push past them. He watched as Raya dove headfirst into a pile of snow and wiggled her way in until only the white tip of her tail remained, just camouflaged. He turned and ran inside, shitting and locking the back door before bursting out behind the counter. "We need to hide!"

Wyland, Lovelace and Marcello, gathered around the transmission device, looked up at him in confusion.

"I mean it! Something huge is coming this way! Turn off all generators!"

While the three of them scattered, Lucas reached under the counter and pulled open a metal hatch, through which he reached and felt some switches. He ran his fingers over to the last two and flicked them both. Around the building, there was the sound of metal against metal, as steel shutters rolled out of the space in the ceiling and planted themselves over the windows, while their counterparts rose up from either side of the doors leading outside and clamped tightly onto them.

He himself grabbed the short shotgun from under the counter and dove under one of the tables, sliding to a rest alongside a pitch-black cat with wide, unblinking yellow eyes, which he grabbed and hugged tightly. From where he was, he could see that Lovelace had emerged from the doorway down to the basement, where the generators were, before the entire bar and the stairwell behind her went dark, plunging them all into blackness.

For a long couple of minutes, all Lucas could hear was his own breathing, heavy against Gorgon nuzzled to his chest, and the sound of something far larger than himself shifting around on the grounds outside. The chain-link fence behind their property rattled violently as it was suddenly uprooted, and slowly, what little light that filtered in through the gaps in the metal barricade of the kitchen window became eclipsed by the bulk of the thing outside.

"Psst!"

Lucas turned to see Lovelace under another table, pointing at the cat in his arms, and waving towards herself. He shook his head, and turned back to hear the big thing outside shifting, moving towards the side of the building with guest rooms.

Oh shit. He'd completely forgotten that after having gotten the old man blackout drunk, he had had Marcello move both him and the sleeping woman into different rooms until their situation was resolved. If they woke up, or made any kind of noise now...

The beast stalking them moved again, and to his relief, it went around another corner, now obscuring light past one of the front windows, to his partial relief. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lovelace still trying to attract Gorgon, but he ignored her, his grip tightening on the stock of his weapon.

Something large and blue punched right through the steel barricade, producing a noise that made Lucas grind his teeth in discomfort. The limb retracted, taking the metal shielding off its hinges as it did so, and light poured in from the broken window, hitting the tops of the tables. On instinct Lucas took aim at the aperture, only to have his loosened grip permit Gorgon to hop out of his arms and dash across the illuminated space, a blur of black before he was in Lovelace's arms instead. He knew what she wanted to do and he knew it was a terrible idea, but at this point, maybe it was the only chance they had. Whatever was outside was intelligent, he had no doubt, and it was checking for them. One nervously twitchy trigger finger, one accidental blast from Gorgon, and they were all done for.

It felt like an hour had passed before the thing leaned back out of the window, disappearing from view and stomping away from the Foxhole.

As soon as he heard it push into the trees that surrounded their place again, he slowly crawled out from under the table, and crunched over the broken glass to peek out the destroyed window. To the west, he saw trees moving in the distance, heading further away. He gave the broken metal shutters and the huge, pointed prints in the snow on the ground a concerned look, before jogging around the building to the back.

He and Raya spotted each other before he was even halfway past the backyard, and they ran to meet each other at the top of the incline, crashing into each other in a tight squeeze. He ran his hands through her hair and over her ears, which were soaked from the snow melting to her body heat. "Are you alright?" he whispered.

"Yeah," she breathed into his shoulder. "It didn't see me."

"We have to get inside. Where's everyone else? Where's Barrett?"

She looked up at him, her eyes almost as wide as Gorgon's. "Hicks and Alleane are dead. It killed them at the lake, and..." She swallowed hard. "Barrett ran into a vanishing cave."

"What?"

"I don't know if or when he'll come back."

He stared off into the forest. "What the hell do we do?"

She gave him a peck on the cheek, her expression turning to determination and wariness as she followed his gaze. "Easy," she said. "We kill the fucker ourselves."