This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story.

From the driver’s seat of the Model T, Kate watched the quiet the bungalow of the Oasis Springs hotel. The place looked innocent enough, isolated back here in the rear lot of the sleepy little street. Just to be safe, she fed a stripper clip into her Mauser c96, clicked the bolt into place, and secured the pistol in the shoulder strap inside her flight jacket.

“All you gotta do,” Reggie said from the back seat as he wrestled with his camera to get it pointed out the car’s window. “Just knock on the door and tell whoever’s in there that you have some information about the professor’s drilling machine. Be subtle. They’ll spill the beans if they think you’re on their side.”

“You really think that will work?” she asked skeptically. “Especially with your camera pointed right at him?”

“Trust me,” Reggie said, aiming the camera at the door of the bungalow. “Perhaps you’ve seen the gripping Great War thriller ‘There’s a Spy Among Us?’ I directed that. So, yeah, I think it’s safe to say I know a thing or two about international intrigue.”

Reggie pulled a black sheet over himself and adjusted it so that only the lens of the camera protruded from beneath. Now, instead of looking like a man with a forty pound cinema camera, he looked like an enormous mound of black, ominous laundry.

Clem, who sat in the front passenger seat, twisted around to look at the director. “Pardon me,” Clem said. “Why do we need to film this? I don’t reckon this camera is a good idea.”

Reggie pulled back the sheet to look Clem in the eye. “The professor hired me to document the story of his experiment,” he said. “I plan on following through because I, sir, have my integrity. More importantly, there might be someone in the military willing to pay for evidence relating to these spies.”

Clem shook his head and looked over to Kate for a second opinion.

“Did Amelia Earhart shy away from the press?” she said as she opened the door and stepped out.

“Remember what we talked about,” Reggie’s muffled voice came from beneath the sheet. “Play it subtle. Subtle!”

“I got it,” she said, and crossed the small lot to stand at the bungalow’s door. She raised her hand to knock but paused and looked back over her shoulder.

Reggie flipped the sheet off his head just long enough to mouth, “subtle!”

Nodding, Kate knocked on the door and waited for one tense moment until a shadow crossed the peephole.

“Who are you?” said an accented voice from within.

She slammed her boot into the door. With a splintering crack and a bone-jarring thump, the latch ripped out of the threshold and the door flew open into the person on the other side, knocking him to the threadbare carpet within.

Before the man could catch his breath, Kate pinned his chest and whipped out her pistol.

“What did you do with my favorite professor?” she demanded, pressing the Mauser’s barrel into the man’s forehead. “Speak quick, or I might stop being so subtle.”

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!
Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story.

By the time Jack heard the shot, he had circled to the far side of the volcano and ascended the slope of loose shale to a small ledge. From his perch, he had studied the green landscape that extended out in every direction until it curved upwards at the horizon and disappeared into the misty clouds. Intricate river systems carved through the forests, while to the south—or what he guessed was south—a great lake or small ocean inlet sparkled blindingly under the noon-day sun. What drew his eye, however, were the ruins of an ancient city only a few miles away.

Peering through his binoculars, Jack had been able to see the stone buildings, wide roads, and tall outer walls of the city. All of it was crumbling and much had been lost to the jungle, but small groups of people labored throughout the city to fight back the jungle’s growth and rebuild the walls of the buildings. These people came in two basic types: the one in the shackles and the ones with the whips.

Those in shackles were men, women, and even children. Their skins had the rich, dark hues of people who lived in the open, and their clothing was simple, consisting of animal skins or thin fabric weaves. They stooped in the streets to clear away vines or strained in the hot sun to repair the roofs of the dilapidated buildings. Many of them heaved against heavy carts to drag mounds of rubble from somewhere deeper in the city out to the perimeter walls, where they formed long chain-gangs to pile the rubble into the gaps created by time and erosion.

The whip-wielding masters of this slave army were European, but Jack was too far away to recognize any insignia on their gray uniforms. They carried modern firearms—rifles, mostly, but Jack spotted a few submachine guns swinging from shoulder straps. It made Jack’s teeth clench. The year was 1936, for crying out loud—this kind of colonial abuse belonged to the last century. So who were these men?

Jack soon had his answer. Through his binoculars, he followed the roads inward, to the center of the city, where a tall obelisk rose up into the misty sky. From where he was perched, the tip of the obelisk was obscured by the branches of a nearby tree, but when he moved just a bit to his right he could see that a gargantuan zeppelin hung in the air above the city, tethered to that obelisk. And he could see that the side of the zeppelin was emblazoned with a white circle containing a black swastika.

“Nazis,” Jack growled to himself. Saying the word made him want to spit, just to clear out his mouth.

But that was the moment he heard the distant boom, and he knew it was a gunshot from the direction of the drilling machine. The Nazis would have to wait—Jack’s crew was in trouble.

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story.

Maia leapt from the deck a split second before the dinosaurs collided into the drilling machine. She cleared the head-plate of the largest of the triceratopses and touched down on its spine, spreading her arms and legs wide to hold on. With a triumphant whoop, she righted herself on the animal’s back and waved her fedora in the air like a cowboy at a rodeo.

Then she saw that the others hadn’t been as lucky. When the triceratopses had smashed into the broad side of the drilling machine, they had rocked it into the air, and Maia’s three companions had spilled over the far side and tumbled to the ground. They managed to struggle back to their feet only in time to face down one of the enraged dinosaurs as it rounded the corner and pawed the ground in preparation for another charge. The two professors pressed themselves against the machine’s wheel wells, but Celeste tore off through the open field and the three bull triceratopses launched themselves after her. The actress pumped her arms like a trained athlete and she drove herself towards the tree line, but her terror-fueled sprint would not be fast enough to escape the massive animals barreling down on her.

As Maia clung to the back of the lead triceratops bull, the wind stung her eyes and whipped her hair across her cheek. She had witnessed a stampede once before, and she understood what it was like to be in the path of violent, threshing hooves. She had been a child then, watching the approaching tide of four dozen head of cattle that a rancher had been illegally driving through the Kiowa reservation. The other children had cowered on the far wall, but Maia hadn’t seen the point—their schoolhouse building was so rickety and dilapidated that the jostling of the passing cows would surely knock it down onto their heads no matter where they stood. She watched through the glassless window as her school teacher, a prune-faced old priest, stepped out the door and fired a pistol into the air. The cattle didn’t slow down, but they veered off towards the sunset and disappeared into their own dust storm. Maia had always remembered that moment, because it was the instant she realized that the old man used fear to control the cattle in the same way he controlled the “little red savages” whom the United States Government had entrusted to him.

As the triceratops’s horn sliced the air mere inches behind the back of the fleeing Celeste, Maia un-slung her shotgun and fired into the air. The boom echoed through the jungle and birds exploded from the trees. The triceratops heaved underneath her as it turned in its charge, bewildered by the noise. It must have triggered some primal instinct meant to protect the dinosaurs from volcanoes and lightning, because the huge beasts wheeled and surged away across the field, Maia’s own mount thundering to catch up to its herd.

She looked over her shoulder to see the actress sprint into the dark forest. With Jack gone on his scouting expedition and the professors huddled up by the drilling machine, it meant the expedition was now completely scattered throughout this strange wilderness. Still, if Maia jumped off during the stampede, she would be broken into pieces by heavy saurian feet. That was okay—there was no point getting off the ride until the fun was over.

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

I’m pleased to officially announce my new novel, Mad Science Institute!

What’s Mad Science Institute about?

Sophia “Soap” Lazarcheck is a girl genius with a knack for making robots—and for making robots explode. After her talents earn her admission into a secretive university institute, she is swiftly drawn into a conspiracy more than a century in the making. Meanwhile and without her knowledge, her cousin Dean wages a two-fisted war of vengeance against a villainous genius and his unwashed minions.  Separately, the cousins must pit themselves against murderous thugs, experimental weaponry, lizard monsters, and a nefarious doomsday device. When their paths finally meet up, they will need to risk everything to prevent a mysterious technology from bringing civilization to a sudden and very messy end.

When, where, and what’s next:

This novel will be available in ebook and paperback on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other major retailers in December. Between now and then, I’ll post Mad Science Institute news, images, and excepts so you can keep up to date on all the pulse-pounding action. I’m super excited about this, and I’m confidant that if you like the Hollow Earth Expedition serial stories, you’re going to love Mad Science Institute.

Is it December yet? Is it December yet? Is it December yet?…

This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story.

Maia Parker slipped her fedora over her black hair and slung her shotgun onto her shoulder. “Well, I’m not staying inside this tin-can just because some chauvinist thinks I can’t take care of myself,” she announced as she scampered up the ladder and out into the bright sunlight.

Out on the steel deck of the drilling machine, she surveyed the thick rainforest that stretched in every direction and the clearing which surrounded them. Throughout the clearing, enormous, three horned animals casually grazed on the grass or scratched at the dirt in search of roots and tubers.

“Triceratops,” Professor Scrumtumbler said as he joined Maia in observing the animals. “Soon they will be known as Tri-Horned Scrumtumble-saurs. Much more catchy name, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

One of the enormous beasts looked up at them and snorted. The blast of air from its nostrils smelled like garden compost.

“They look friendly enough,” Maia said. “Bet you a sawbuck I can ride one.”

Scrumtumbler shook his head and mumbled something about being trampled to death, but Maia figured it was just because he knew he would lose the bet. If he wouldn’t go for it, maybe she could sucker one of the other crewmembers into the wager. And if none of them took her up on it, she would just have to find some other excuse to ride one.

The others soon emerged from the hatch, even Celeste, the blonde-haired actress who had been an unintentional stow-away. In the bright noon-day sunlight, Celeste’s red, sequined dress sparkled so brightly that Maia had to put her hand to her brow to block the reflected brilliance.

“Something seems to be spooking the beasts,” Professor Limefellow observed, pointing down to the nearest triceratops. It was shaking its enormous gray head-plate and bucking its horns threateningly into the air. Two more of the massive beasts joined in with the threatening display, their bellows mixing the sounds of elephant trumpets and lion roars. Behind them, the other members of the herd responded to the commotion by forming a tight, defensive circle around their young.

“They seemed so nice before,” Celeste said. “What’s gettin’ them all riled up like that?”

Maia studied the three bulls squaring off against the drilling machine. In the bright sunlight, their head plates seemed dappled with red pinpoints of light. As they stabbed at the air with their horns, they squinted and blinked against the flashing glare of something in the direction of the drilling machine.

“Your dress,” Maia said to Celeste, pointing to the actress’s red, sequined outfit. “You’re like a walking red cape at a bull fight.”

Before Maia could shove Celeste down the hatch, the three triceratopses roared once more and charged in. They ran together, flank to flank, rushing forward like a thirty ton tsunami of prehistoric muscle and bone.

The ground shook with the thunder of dinosaur feet. Celeste gasped. Scrumtumbler and Limefellow both tried to get down the hatch and into the drilling machine, but they collided with each other and neither of them made it inside.

Maia crouched down and timed her jump for the instant before the beasts slammed into the steel hull.

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story.

From a belt pouch, Jack drew his compass and studied it in dismay. He twisted it side to side, tapped the glass, and then rubbed his cleft chin in contemplation. No matter what he did, the needle swung erratically, pointing in no particular direction for more than a few seconds. Still, there was more than one way to orient oneself in the wild. When the sun inched down from its noon-time spot, he would be able to use the hands of his watch to find north. Yet when he glanced at his watch he saw that it, too, was malfunctioning. Winding it didn’t help: the second hand kept twitching without making any progress and the hour hands remained frozen in place. He would simply need to get a feel for the land by direct observation.

Jack hopped down on the far side of the drilling machine to keep the steel hull between himself and the three-horned behemoths as he trotted towards the black, jagged rocks of the volcano’s slopes. As he went, he held his rifle at the ready and scanned the tree line—with herbivores as big as those beasts grazing around the drilling machine, this region might contain even larger predators.

He didn’t need to travel far before he found confirmation of the danger he had feared. Twenty yards before reaching the rocky slope of the mountain, he came across a wide swath of trampled grass. Hunkering down, he ran his fingers over the broken stalks to reveal dozens of sets of fresh prints.

Boot prints.

His crew was not alone in the primeval wilderness.

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story.

Jack Steele raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sunlight pouring through the porthole. After twenty-four hours tunneling through bedrock, daylight was a shocking wake-up call to the crew.

In the seat next to Jack, Professor Scrumtumbler lowered his goggles over his eyes so that he could look out into the blindingly bright landscape. “We’re here!” the wild-haired scientist declared. “We’ve made it into the Hollow Earth!”

“Nonsense,” said Professor Limefellow from the next seat. “If we were in a subterranean cave, there would be no sunlight, of course.”

“Not according to my theory,” Scrumtumbler said huffily.

Jack put an end to the professors’ bickering by working the bolt of his Remington .30-06. “You eggheads and dames stay here,” he said. “I’ll go find out where we are.”

Popping the hatch, Jack lifted himself onto the steel deck of the drilling machine and saw that they had emerged at the foot of a mountain surrounded by a vast rainforest. Loud birdcalls rang through the trees, warm air carried the scents of springtime growth, and a herd of enormous animals grazed in the clearing not far from the drilling machine. The whole region must have rested at a very low elevation, because the horizon curved upwards in all directions until it faded into the white, misty clouds that evenly coated the sky. Strangely, this cloud cover did nothing to dampen the light from the bright sun that hung directly overhead, as if it were hung on the near side of a swirling white backdrop.

Professor Scrumtumbler had said that his underground caverns might contain an ecosystem and even its own phosphorescent lighting source, but this place was obviously no dank cave filled with bats and bugs. Jack decided that the machine must have drilled through the crust at an oblique angle to emerge somewhere else on the Earth’s surface. Based on the looks of the verdant rainforest around him, he guessed they were in the Amazon jungle somewhere. Judging from the size of the animals grazing nearby, he revised his guess to somewhere in Africa. Then he got a better look at those animals and decided he had no idea where he was.

The herd consisted of about a dozen squat, gray creatures that he might have mistaken for rhinoceroses, except that they were closer in size to elephants. And the rhino-horn on their nose was accompanied by two longer, thicker horns that drove straight forward from a broad, bony head-plate. They seemed harmless enough as they uprooted the grass and ground it in their parrot-beak mouths, but it still made Jack nervous to see that their grazing was taking the heard closer to the machine. One of them even meandered right up to the side of the drilling machine, looked at Jack with a yellow eye that had a black, vertical slit of a pupil.

Once, Jack had seen an Australian platypus and decided it was the most unlikely hodge-podge of spare parts that existed outside a fairly tale. Now, he was forced to revise his opinion, because these three-horned monstrosities looked like it belonged to a different world. Whatever it was, the professors could quibble about its classification later: for now, Jack had a job to do.

Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes of this story delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine!

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story.  

Kate Boone swooped in low and then yanked back on the stick to drive the nose of the S-2 almost straight up into the air. At the precise moment the experimental airplane stalled, she pulled the lever and the four engines—one on each wing and two on the tail—rotated perpendicular to the earth, allowing her to settle the experimental airplane into a smooth vertical landing.

She flung open the cockpit door and strode out onto the desert, brushing sand off her brown flight jacket and shaking it from her red hair. Squinting her one good eye, she saw two figures standing twenty feet away at the base of the drilling machine’s empty launch struts. One was a round-cheeked, sly-eyed man cradling a movie camera in his lap. The other wore a black hat and held a Colt revolver. As she had landed, Kate thought that he had been pointing the revolver at the other man, but her arrival had interrupted whatever might have been about to happen. Or maybe she had misunderstood what she saw—sometimes the missing eye made it hard to discern details like that.

“Who are you?” said the man with the camera.

“I’m the test pilot,” Kate said as she strode towards them. “I fly all the professor’s contraptions. I was supposed to pilot the drilling machine today.”

The man with the gun politely touched the rim of his black hat. When he did, Kate saw a triangle-and-eye tattoo on his hand.

“What’s with the patch?” The man asked with a drawl. “I reckon it ain’t easy to fly with only one eye.”

“I’ll fly circles around you, cowboy,” she said. Then she nodded at his gun and asked “You expecting trouble?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Come look at this—we got us a saboteur.”

Reggie, the movie director, and Clem, the engineer, introduced themselves as they walked to the far side of the launch struts where they found the body of a man in a charcoal grey suit.

Kate searched through the dead man’s pockets. “No identification, but he has these.” She said, handing a small packet of papers to Reggie.

“What is this writing?” the director asked. “German? It looks like German. And the last page has a Swastika on it. Who was this guy, a Nazi spy?”

“Let’s go find out,” Kate said, dangling a key ring she had found in the spy’s pocket. It contained a hotel key, stamped with the words OASIS SPRINGS HOTEL. LAS VEGAS, NEVADA.

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

New episodes of this story will be added every Tuesday and Friday. Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine.   

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com  

This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story.  

Scrumtumbler pressed the throttle forward and locked the treads into position. The rest of the crew swung back and forth in their Farris-wheel style seats that always kept their feet pointed down regardless of the drilling machine’s orientation.

Celeste pressed her face to the porthole and watched as the line of dirt rose up to block out the sun. “We’re going to die!” she moaned. “I’m not even supposed to be here!”

“Take it easy, doll-face, I’ll take care of this,” said Jack Steele, the crew’s wilderness guide. He was a tall man, his body lean and iron-hard, and somehow his gritted teeth made the cleft in his chin even deeper. He wore khaki from head to foot, adorned only with a leather belt and a shoulder harness for his Colt automatic.

Jack unbuckled his seat’s chest strap and leapt down into the piloting compartment next to Scrumtumbler. “Turn this thing around, Doc,” he demanded. “I got a bone to pick with your engineer back there.”

“It doesn’t turn,” Scrumtumbler said, indicating a spiraling, sinking motion with his index finger. “The best it can do is angle a little as it goes.”

“Then put it into reverse,” Limefellow called from his seat above.

Scrumtumbler scooted his goggles up onto his forehead and looked up into the passenger area. “It doesn’t have a reverse. The hole fills in behind us as we go, and, in case you hadn’t noticed, the drill is only on the front end.”

“Design flaw,” Limefellow announced contentedly as he made a mark in his notebook.

Maia Parker, the crew’s translator, cleared her throat and adjusted a lapis lazuli choker that she wore around her neck. Like Jack, she wore a khaki safari suit, but her dark hair, dark eyes, and high cheekbones spoke of a Native American ancestry. “I don’t see the problem,” she said. “This just means we’re a couple of hours ahead of schedule. I was getting bored waiting around up there, anyway.”

“You broads just stay out of this,” Jack said.

“Don’t call me a broad,” she said silkily, her fingers drumming on the pistol holster at her side.

“We’re all going to die, aren’t we?” Celeste said with quiet resignation.

Scrumtumbler snorted. “There’s no danger here. The only way we could die would be if we steer into a magma flow and boil to death. Or if we surface in a lake and drown. Or if we lose power and become trapped inside the bedrock.”

“Trapped?” Celeste shuddered. “You mean we could end up starving to death inside this bucket of bolts?”

“Nonsense!” Scrumtumbler waved dismissively. “We’d suffocate long before we ran out of food.”

“May I ask,” Limefellow interrupted. “Why on Earth did you enlist a wilderness guide and a translator to explore a cave?”

“I had my reasons,” Scrumtumbler muttered, rubbing the back of his head and further mussing his unruly white hair. “I have a theory…a hunch.”

“…bases his theories on hunches…” Limefellow said to himself as he added another note to his book. Then he leaned forward in his seat and spoke to Maia, who sat below him. “Incidentally, my dear, I am a professor of linguistics, which means we will no longer be needing your translation services”

“As long as I get paid,” Maia said with a roll of her eyes.

“Everyone, everyone!” Jack’s voice boomed through the cabin. “Maybe we’re lacking a few members of the crew and maybe we have a few guests we didn’t expect, but we’re all going to make it back safely. I personally guarantee it.”

There was a moment of contemplative silence.

“Yep,” Celeste finally said. “We’re going to die.”

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com

This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story. 

New episodes of this story will be added every Tuesday and Friday (and maybe more often if the mood takes me). Don’t miss any of the pulse pounding action! Get all the episodes delivered to your inbox each month by subscribing to my free ezine.

Reggie Sparks threw open the door of the outhouse and had to hold onto his fedora to keep it from blowing off in the sandstorm kicked up by the drilling machine’s departure. As he watched, the gargantuan machine chewed its way into the ground, its steel hull slowly rotating in place as it disappeared into the mound of rubble kicked up in its wake.

“Hey, you crumbs!” he held his pants up with one fist while he shook the other at the titanic molehill where once the drilling machine had been. “Come back! You forgot me! Oh—my camera!”

Reggie hurriedly buckled his belt and then rushed to the side of his fallen Mitchell Model NC 35mm cinema camera where it lay in the scrub brush, its tripod toppled by the vibrations of the drilling machine’s passing.

A man in a black hat and a checkered shirt stepped out of the dust cloud near the launch struts. Reggie recognized the man as Clem, one of the assistant engineers.

“I didn’t know you were still here,” Clem drawled slowly.

“I was in an executive meeting,” Reggie jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the outhouse. “Would you look at this? Lens is broken. These things cost a fortune. Not only that, but I’m out the chance to get a shot of the drilling gizmo doing its thing. Stock footage sales would have kept me in butter and eggs for a month of Tuesdays, you know. This whole gig was nothing but a trip for biscuits.”

As the rumbling of the drilling machine receded, the buzz of airplane engines passed by overhead, but otherwise the desert was silent. Reggie frisked his pockets until he found a small set of screwdrivers, which he then used to unscrew the brass ring that secured the camera’s main lens.

Clem circled around to stand behind him, casting a long shadow over the director. Slowly and silently he drew a long black Colt .45 from the holster at his hip.

Reggie rubbed the stubble on his chin appraisingly as he held up the cracked lens to peer through it at the empty desert in front of him. “The Professor owes me a new lens,” he grumbled. “That, and I can’t believe they went and left me behind.”

“They went,” Clem said, extending his pistol to the back of Reggie’s head. “And they left no witnesses behind.”

Hollow Earth Expedition was created by Jeff Combos and is property of Exile Game Studio. For more Hollow Earth Expedition action, check out ExileGames.com