Sechin Tower

“What did you do?” Celeste demanded of Thelonius.

Thelonius’s lips pulled back into a guilty smile and he made a very human shrug.

He never had time to explain, because the Nazis had found them. A pair of them kicked the door open and rushed for them, murder in their eyes. Thelonius was able to bring up his blunderbuss in time to parry the first soldier’s knife, and then they were locked in deadly struggle as they vied for the flintlock rifle held between them.

The other soldier seized Celeste by the wrist and the lapel of her grey uniform. He bore down on her, pressing her into the microphone system that von Wartenburg had used to address his troops below. Her spine pressed against the switch, activating the loudspeakers outside the ship, so that her voice was picked up and amplified a hundredfold.

Her scream crashed down onto the city like a tidal wave, rolling over the slaves and the soldiers alike, filling every corner of the city and piercing the depths of each dilapidated building. It washed over the walls and out into the jungle where it shook seed-pods from trees and flung clouds of winged reptiles into the skies. A herd of ten-ton triceratopses and a flock of lumbering, placid stegosaurs looked up in sudden panic, ready to run but unsure of which direction to flee.

The scream was cut short, and all the jungle seemed to enter a state of trembling paralysis. Then, from far out in the wilderness, Celeste’s scream was answered by a thunderous roar.

The Rugged Explorer

Jack held the Amazon at arm’s length, paralyzed with the realization that she was, in fact, a woman.

She, however, felt no such hesitation about Jack’s gender. She grasped his wrist, pulled her throat away from his fingers, and then wrenched his arm down and outward, causing him to stumble forward.

He managed to keep his feet under him, but when he stood back up she was already behind him, one arm locking in place around his neck, squeezing his throat shut.

He tried to shake free, but she pulled him back and off balance so that he could only stagger after her. He pried at her arms, but her hold was too tight.

His vision narrowed and the world seemed to flush with red before it began to fade to black. His feet trembled, and he felt a quaking in his chest as his lungs struggled for oxygen.

The Nazi spectators, safely protected by the tall arena wall, roared in sadistic joy.

The trembling grew in Jack’s body. An odd thought struggled up through the growing blackness to capture his attention: it wasn’t him that was shaking. It was the arena.

With a deafening roar and a shrill whine, a spray of rocks burst from the ground at the base of the arena wall. Suddenly, the Nazis weren’t cheering any more: they were shouting in panic as something massive and ripped its way up through the earth at their feet. It pulverized an entire quadrant of the arena wall and then settled there, a massive, noisy shadow veiled by a cloud of dust and sand.

The Amazon released her grip and Jack’s vision cleared as blood rushed back to his brain. She must have been thinking the same thing he was: now that the wall was broken, they could get up into the stands. Once again, the Nazis were their mutual foe—provided they could get past whatever had burrowed up from the ground.

The dirty cloud settled down to reveal the source of the destruction: the gigantic, shining tube of Professor Scrumtumbler’s drilling machine, its nose-cone still spinning in the air.

The hatch flipped open on the back and Scrumtumbler, his hair as unkempt as ever and his lab coat even filthier than usual, popped out into the open.

“Scrumtumbler ex machina!” he shouted, raising both fists into the air as if he had just won a prize fight.

Einstein had forgotten his name, and Elsa had never bothered to remember it either. So, too, would the rest of the world forget Scrumtumbler if he died in this subterranean pit, consumed by a writhing swarm of blind grubs.

“Science be my light and my flame,” he muttered, thinking that these would be his last words.

But the words sparked something within him. He looked first to the hollowed-out, rubbery husk of the grub he had stomped. Then he looked to flaking iron in the walls of the pit, and finally to the stream of sulfuric acid pouring down from above.

“Eureka!” Scrumtumbler declared.

In the excitement of his epiphany, he shook his stun rifle and something clicked inside it, causing the electric arc to flare brightly against the darkness.

In the brilliance of his invention, Scrumtumbler dashed forward and stomped on several more of the carnivorous grubs. This work was as exhausting as it was filthy, but it was important that he gut a few more before the bulk of them swarmed him. One managed to grasp his calf in its powerful jaws, forcing a shriek out of the scientist, but he knocked it loose from his leg, and then slammed his heel into its back.

By the time he slew eight of the vile crawlers he left panting, exhausted, and covered in sticky gore. Three of them had split down the middle and were thus useless to him, but the bodies of the others held firm. Working quickly, he dragged the carcasses away to the wall of the pit, as far as he could get from the opening eggs. In another few minutes, he calculated, the rest of the eggs would hatch and he would have nowhere to run.

Using the butt of his broken stun rifle, he scraped at the wall of the pit, quickly creating a large pile of iron filings. Another grub found him as he worked, taking him by surprise as it seized the tail of his lab coat. He was able to dispatch it and add it to his collection.

When he looked back he saw an undulating blanket of the disgusting creatures spreading out from the egg sack towards him. He knew he didn’t have much time left.