chunk: Val and Earl return to town and borrow horses. They come upon Wallace and his wife's buried station wagon near their trailer, but the couple is missing. As they press on, something suddenly erupts out of the ground, revealing the snake-like creature to be one of multiple tentacled "tongues" employed by an enormous burrowing worm-like creature, later named a "Graboid". Thrown from their horses, the two men run for their lives. The chase ends when the eyeless creature violently rams itself into the concrete wall of an aqueduct and dies from the impact. Rhonda LeBeck, a graduate student conducting seismology tests in the area, stumbles onto the scene; she deduces from previous soundings that there are three other Graboids in the area. Rhonda, Val, and Earl become trapped overnight atop a cluster of boulders near one of the creatures, and they eventually escape by pole vaulting from boulder to boulder to reach Rhonda's truck.