Then she caught sight of something flapping in the air next to the fist that held her wrist. It was his flight control device.

Another elbow slammed into her helmet, but as it did, her left hand was already in motion. She dropped her own flight control, letting it dangle by the short cord wound through her jacket while she reached over to seize his. She cranked the throttle to maximum.

He shot away from her in a bright red flash, flailing for his flight control as he went. It would only take a moment for him to recover, but she was quicker: one burst from her pack put her on the same trajectory. She stretched her arm out in front of her, peered down the sights of her pistol, and pulled the trigger as quickly as she could.

Two, three, four shots. Even with two good eyes, it would take a miracle to hit his fuel tank.

Seven, eight, nine shots. She was about to give it up as hopeless when the rocket-truppen exploded, an instant bonfire against a black backdrop.

Kate was battered and bruised, and she had one bullet left. The buzzing in her helmet was a constant now: her fuel tank was nearly dry. When it was empty, she would fall like a rock. And there was still one more fighter plane.

She aimed herself directly towards him, stretching her pistol out in front to aim as carefully as she could. Her red hair licked at the edges of her helmet’s visor. Somehow it had come loose and now it streamed out behind her, a flaming red trail to match that from the rocket pack.

The Messerschmitt pilot saw her coming. He might have had her right in his sights, but he didn’t fire. He bobbed its wings three times—the aviator’s signal for surrender—and wheeled back towards his base.

A minute later, Kate’s rocket pack sputtered on the last drops of its fuel as she passed through the side door of the S-1. Clem and Dr. Scott exploded into applause as she set down in the cabin. Even Reggie took his hands off the stick long enough to clap.

“How did you do it?” Dr. Scott gasped. “How did you drive off an entire squadron?”

Kate whipped off the helmet, allowing her red hair to cascade down over her shoulders.

“Let’s just put it this way,” she said. “They just got aced by Kate Boone: Daredevil Pilot!”

The first rocket-truppen shot in on a tail of fire, matching speeds with the S-1 airplane so that he could touch down on its back. Spikes in his boots and gloves dug into the airplane’s hull so that he could scamper across the fuselage like an insect. His head darted side to side, his thin limbs wobbled but carried him forward swiftly. He wore all black, but his mask’s round, bulging lenses and proboscis-like gas filter glinted in the night.

Kate threw open the side hatch and launched herself out and then straight up, spinning as she rose to face the unwelcomed boarder. She stalled her rocket pack at just the right instant so that she hovered in front of him, an angel in silver and brown reflected in his lenses.

He unclasped his cloves and went for his submachine gun; she already had hers out. The blast caught him square in the chest, swatting him away from the plane with such force that his spiked boots remained behind, lodged in place by their own spikes.

The recoil pushed Kate back and away from the S-1. She allowed gravity to cradle her for a moment before flattening out and slamming the throttle all the way open. Instantly, the force of the acceleration pressed against every inch of her skin. It squeezed her lungs and compacted her stomach into a tiny ball. The bitter wind pierced her jacket, and the air whistled against her helmet so loudly that she could hardly hear herself scream in delight.

Flight. True flight. Power, speed, freedom—this was her first test of the rocket pack, and she was now soaring higher than an eagle and faster than a hurricane.

Two lances of tracer fire probed the night around her, bringing her back to the problem at hand. She performed a tight roll and glanced back to see the two other rocket-truppen on her tail, guns blazing. It was time to see how her rocket pack compared to theirs.

“Take the stick,” Kate said to Reggie as she unstrapped herself.

“Wait… what?” Reggie sputtered. “I don’t know how to fly—”

“All you have to do is hold her steady. I’ll go take care of the rocket-truppen.”

“The what now?”

“The rocket-truppen. Rocket troopers. Our dear Professor Scrumtumbler accidentally designed the Nazis some rocket packs.”

The plane pitched forward as Kate swung herself out of the pilot’s seat. Reggie lunged for the stick. He clutched it with quaking hands, causing the plane to lurch and sway in its flight.

Good, Kate decided. That’ll make us harder to hit. Also, it’ll remind the boys to appreciate my expertise.

Gripping the railings to keep herself upright, she moved to a cargo locker just to the rear of the cockpit. From here, she could see Clem and Dr. Scott buckled tightly into the passenger seats, their eyes clenched shut, their faces fully green with air-sickness.

Kate opened the closet and unstrapped a footlocker from the bottom shelf. First, she removed her Tommy gun, snapped in a fresh ammo drum, and put her spare cartridge into the pocket of her flight jacket. Then she reached for the next object in the footlocker, a gleaming silver backpack consisting of a pair of thick engines strapped to short maneuvering wings.

“What are you doing?” Reggie yelled back from the cockpit. “You’re going to die and I’m not even going to get any good footage of it!”

“Scrutumbler designed their rocket packs,” she said. “But he designed mine even better.”

Kate jerked at the controls, throwing the S-1 into a barrel role to escape the Messerschmidt fire peppering its hull. There were two fighters on their tail and something else much bigger bearing down on them fast. She couldn’t outrun them and the S-1 was unarmed.

“What’re you going to do?” Reggie was strapped into the copilot’s chair and clung to the armrests with white-knuckled fists.

“Just watch,” Kate winked at him with her one good eye and then threw the lever that tilted their engines vertically.

The entire plane shuddered sickeningly and the metal hull screeched like a seasick condor. Their momentum continued to drag them forward, but now their engines wrenched them vertically into the air. As the change in velocity crushed them down into their seats, but Kate was gratified to see twin phosphorescent streaks of tracer fire ripping through the night below them, followed swiftly by the speeding fighter passing through the space they had occupied a moment earlier.

Kate guffawed. “Oh, how I wish I could see the look on that pilot’s face.”

She eased the plane right onto the tail of the fighter. Maybe five yards away, maybe three—it was hard to tell with only one eye. The fighter’s propwash created fierce turbulence, but at this distance the second fighter couldn’t gun for them without the risk of shooting down his partner.

Kate had the advantage of maneuverability, but the Messerschmitts were much faster, and she judged that her mid-flight vertical dodge was a one-time trick: try it again and she would shear the wings right off the S-1.

Then a flash of lighting from the cloud below illuminated something worse. It was a large airplane of a design she didn’t recognize. The fuselage was folded into the body in a way that made the whole thing look like a single wing studded with a series of sleek gun-turrets. Its four monstrous engines chewed through the air with a startling velocity, but Kate estimated that it was not nearly as maneuverable as the Messerchmidtts. In fact, this new plane looked like it must be a bomber, which meant she could fly circles around it. What good was a bomber in chasing down a fugitive aircraft?

The answer came a moment later when the flying wing’s bomb bay doors were opened and three small shapes dropped from its belly. An instant later, each shape flashed to life and became a red streak in the night. They swirled around each other like a swarm of angry hornets on their way to the S-1.

Another flash of lightning gave her a glimpse of what they were. They were men—individual men, each with a blazing rocket pack strapped to their backs.

If Kate had brought her stein into the room, she would have dropped it onto the floor.

“The Thule Society?” she exclaimed, anger and disbelief fighting for control of her tone. “You’re telling me that Professor Scrumtumbler worked for the damned, dirty Nazis?”

Professor Reinhardt smiled sadly again, and the wrinkles around his eyes made him look more grandfatherly than ever. “Hitler’s government can be very persuasive. Your professor became involved with them before any outsider could have seen how corrupt the regime truly was. Once he went in deep enough, he recognized the evil. As did I. As will, I believe, all of the German people. Someday.”

Kate studied him with her one good eye. She felt unbalanced now, just like the time her stabilizer froze during a barnstorming exhibition. Professor Reinhardt was muddying everything up—it was supposed to be black-and-white. It was supposed to be good-versus-evil. Life was so much simpler when viewed through a single eye, because everything was neat and flat. Depth made everything much more confusing.

“You’re trying to justify an evil cause,” she said, more to convince herself than to convince him.

Reinhardt shrugged. “Perhaps. But I believe that the German people will suffer greatly for our mistakes. In the mean time, some of us are working to fight that evil. Your Scrumtumbler was one of those men. He stole information from them, information about the Hollow Earth. That is why he designed his drilling machine—he wanted to beat the Nazis in a race to inner-space.”

“I only care about one thing: how to get him back safely. So he can keep building me airplanes, of course.”

“Of course. Which is why I have given Dr. Scott information on Castle Vevelsburg. It is a Thule stronghold only a few hundred kilometers west of here. They have been researching a means to open a passage to the Hollow Earth.”

“Why should we trust you? How do we know we aren’t just walking into a trap?”

“I can offer no proof to satisfy your mind until your heart is ready to accept it. You may choose trust, or you may choose fear. But I have one other thing to offer. A gift—something entrusted to me by Professor Scrumtumbler.”

He bent down to unclasp the latches of the large suitcase. Then he gestured to indicate she should have the honor of opening it.

“What is it?”

“This is what the professor designed for the Nazis. But he gave them an inferior model and then, later, he burned the blueprints. This is the only existing advanced prototype.”

“And why are you giving it to me?”

“Perhaps I am hoping that you will realize that a Nazi and a German are not the same thing.”

She squinted at him for another moment before turning her attention to the box. When she opened it, the light glinted off the contents. She gasped and all prejudices fell away from her mind.

“Is this…” She had to clear her throat before she could finish her sentence. “Is this as fast as I think it is?”

“Captain Boone,” Dr. Scott said to her as he emerged from Reinhardt’s library. “He wants to see you now, Captain Boone.”

Kate grimaced and studied the doctor’s innocent face. She guessed that it probably hadn’t occurred to him that their host may have already alerted his superiors. Even as they walked down the hallway, a platoon of Nazis might be encircling the quaint little house.

Nodding, Kate made her way into the library. Like the rest of the house, the library was trim and tidy, with wood paneling and tasteful alpine-rustic furnishings. Three of the walls were lined with bookshelves. The fourth wall contained a painting of a snow-capped mountain and an ornate clock, the kind powered by a web of miniscule gears and hidden springs to make a wooden bird pop out and sing while miniature wooden skiers spin around the base. The sight of that clock made her want to strap Reinhardt into her co-pilot seat and do barrel rolls until he screamed.

Professor Reinhardt sat directly below the clock, a large, scuffed leather suitcase at his feet. He smiled at her in a way that made his white eyebrows rise up on his tall forehead.

“I have a gift for you,” he said.

“Does that gift involve turning us over to your Thule buddies or your Nazi masters?”

He shook his head sadly. “Please do not assume that all Germans are Nazis. Our people suffer greatly under Hitler’s rule, and if we ever go to war…” he seemed unable to speak the unspeakable.

“I’m not here to talk politics,” Kate said. “Someone swiped my professor. I aim to find out who, and I aim to get him back.”

“I can help you with both of those things,” he leaned back and fumbled in his pocket for an wooden pipe and a pouch of tobacco. He glanced up at her and seemed to change his mind. “Professor Scrumtumbler was a good friend of mine. A most unreliable man, but nonetheless a good friend and a valuable professional associate.”

“You’re a scientist too?” she asked. “Did you know him through that Prometheus Club?”

“I? No, frauline, I am not a member of the Order of Prometheus. I am an archeologist by training, which is not the type of science practiced by the Order. No, I knew Scrumtumbler during his association with a different organization, one that throws a broader net across the academic disciplines. I knew Scrumtumbler when he belonged to the Thule Society.”

Kate leaned over the small kitchen table and anxiously tapped her holster. She didn’t trust the man called Erich Reinhardt and she didn’t enjoy being a guest in his home. The others might have been taken in by his little-old-man demeanor, but all she saw was a German, and the last Germans she met had been firing fifty caliber shells in her direction.

It was Dr. Scott who had insisted that they come here. After refueling in Rio, she had flown them for a day and a night across over the Atlantic. (This one’s for you, Ms. Earhart, Kate thought as she caught sight of Africa on the horizon.) They touched down in Egypt and then turned north, crossing into Austrian airspace by night. Throughout the flight, Dr. Scott had assured them that Reinhardt was trustworthy because he, like Professor Scrumtumbler, was a member of the Order of Prometheus. But he was also a member of the Thule Society, and Kate wasn’t ready to trust anyone who had willingly joined that fuehrer-hailing pack of academics and thugs.

Reggie and Clem were currently reclined on the old man’s couches, happily snoring away their supper of bratwurst and home-brewed hefeweizen. They didn’t seem to think that Reinhardt’s nationality was an important detail, which blinded them to the possibility that if this little old man could be a double agent working against the Thules, he could just as easily be a triple agent working for them.

Kate sniffed her portion of the dessert strudel. She had eaten dinner, but only after seeing her host take a bite of each item. Reinhardt had retired with Dr. Scott immediately after serving the strudel, so she had not witnessed him sample it. For all she knew, it was laced with knock-out poison, and that’s why Reggie and Clem were sleeping so soundly right now. Then again, a long flight and a large meal would put anyone to sleep, so maybe it was on the level.

She leaned in and sniffed the dessert. It smelled sweet and delicious and she was tempted to take a bite. Just to test it. Just to see if the strawberry jam was as scrumptious as it seemed. But then she reminded herself that this was the confection of her enemy.

It might as well be sauerkraut, she thought as she pushed the plate away from her.

This is an ongoing story about a lost world of hungry dinosaurs, sinister villains, and non-stop action. If you’re new to Hollow Earth Expedition, I suggest starting at the beginning.

Kate Boone dove to the floor as the bullets tore holes in the door and shattered the windows above her. Reggie kicked the door closed and then crouched down, carefully balancing his breakfast plate in his hands.

The men by the truck opened up with another burst of machinegun fire that almost cut the door in half. Wood splinters and glass shards rained down on them—and onto Reggie’s plate of food.

“Those guys aren’t kidding around this time!” he said, staring in horror at the mound of scrambled eggs now made inedible by the debris.

Dr. Scott stepped in from the kitchen, the mop still in his hands and a horrified look on his face. Kate sprang to her feet and ushered the doctor back the way he came.

“My research!” Dr. Scott yelled, pushing past her on his way to the stairs.

Reggie blocked the way with his husky frame “Sorry, doc. We gotta get out of this house before we end up looking like Swiss cheese.”

“Everybody out to the plane!” Kate ordered.

“Where’d Clem go?” Reggie asked. Nobody had an answer.

Kate dashed out the back door and over the open ground. The gunmen noticed her as she rounded the corner of the barn, and a hail of bullets kicked up the dust just behind her feet.

The airplane was parked behind the barn, but now the gunmen were watching that side of the house. Reggie knew he would never make it across the fifty yards of open, sun-blistered ground.

“Cover us!” Reggie called to Kate.

Kate must have heard him, because she popped back around the corner of the barn, taking aim with her one good eye.

By the truck, one of the two men scrambled to undo the ties to the cargo cover while the other fired the last three bullets from his sub-machinegun and then fluidly ejected the magazine. Kate’s Mauser pistol used rifle-grade ammunition, which gave her the advantage at this range. Her first shot kicked up a dust cloud at the man’s foot as he readied his new magazine and sprayed bullets in her direction. His shots fanned out uselessly; her next two shots found his chest and knocked him to the ground. The second man seized another gun from the truck bed, but Kate’s fire drove him under cover.

Reggie ran for it, hauling Dr. Scott behind him by the sleeve of his white lab coat.

Then the thing in the cargo bed knocked the canvas off itself with a huge steel hand. When Reggie saw what it was, he stumbled and fell to the dry ground.

It was all metal, pistons, and rivets, and it might have been mistaken for an armored car except that it walked upright on two stumpy legs that kicked up clouds of dust with each heavy step. Its blocky torso was armor-plated and adorned with a Swastika-and-dagger motif, and where it might have had a head it bore only a flat hatch a series of view-slits. Its arms were steel and iron girders bound by complicated joints that hissed and hummed as they moved. One of those arms ended in a crude fist, and the other bore a multi-barrel machinegun.

The huge gun swiveled to point directly at Reggie, its barrels spinning to life.

“Unbelievable,” Reggie coughed. “Where’s my camera when I need it?”

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 is an ongoing story about a lost world of hungry dinosaurs, sinister villains, and non-stop action. If you’re new to Hollow Earth Expedition, I suggest starting at the beginning.

Reggie Sparks scooped Dr. Scott’s special scrambled eggs into his mouth. Strangely, the others didn’t seem quite so eager to try the neon-orange eggs produced by mutant, carnivorous chickens.

Reggie watched Clem and Kate Boone daintily push their food around on their plates without actually eating any. (Evidently, Reggie noted, Kate Boone was not such a daredevil when it came to her food.) They hadn’t eaten any of the fried “chicken” at dinner the night before, either.

It just means more for me, Reggie thought as he speared another link of chicken sausage from the serving plate. It did, after all, taste like chicken.

“So let me get this straight,” he said through his mouthful of food. “You scientists have a secret society?”

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Dr. Scott said, dabbing the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “It’s not secret so much as it is…esoteric. Think of us as a professional organization. Invitation only. We call ourselves the Order of Prometheus. Professor Scrumtumbler was a member—”

“Is a member,” Kate cut in. “We’re going to find him and bring him home safely.”

“Yeah, anyway,” Reggie pressed on. “What you’re saying, Dr. Scott, is that this is why the Nazis are after you. They’ve been kidnapping or bumping off the other scientists and your name was next on the roster with the Order of—whatchamacallit—of the Phoenix?”

“Order of Prometheus,” Dr. Scott corrected. “These events are being driven by an organization within the Nazi party, a very influential group that calls itself the Thule Society. They’ve dedicated themselves to giving Hitler a monopoly on both technological and occult knowledge.”

“I gotta tell you,” Reggie waved the half-eaten sausage at the end of his fork. “This would make a dynamite screenplay. Any other secret societies out there we should know about?”

Before Dr. Scott could answer, Clem reached out with the hand bearing the eye-in-triangle tattoo and knocked over the carafe of orange juice. Everyone beat a hasty retreat from the table before the rivers of juice found their laps. Only Reggie managed to rescue his plate so that he could keep eating.

While Dr. Scott went to retrieve a mop from the kitchen, Kate scooped her food back into the serving dishes.

“We need to decide what to do next,” she said. “We slowed them down in Nevada, but it’s only a matter of time before these Thule creeps catch up to us.”

“But Dr. Scott doesn’t want to leave his research,” Reggie said. “He said so last night—hey, is that a car coming up the road?”

Popping the last of his sausage into his mouth, Reggie moved to the front room and peered out the window. He saw a large cargo truck pull around in the lawn so its bumper faced the house. Two men in grey business suits hustled out of the cab to work at the straps holding the canvas cover onto something large and lumpy in the truck’s cargo area.

“Looks like the Thule goons found us,” Reggie said, spitting a few flakes of sausage as he spoke. “What do you want to bet we don’t want to find out what they’ve got in the back of that truck?”

Kate strode past him and flung open the door. As soon as she did, machinegun fire ripped into the house.

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 is an ongoing story about a lost world of hungry dinosaurs, sinister villains, and non-stop action. If you are new to Hollow Earth Expedition, I suggest starting at the beginning of the story.

Inside the barn, Dr. Scott dangled a slab of bloody meat through the thick bars of a livestock pen. Within the cage were several creatures that resembled chickens in the way a shark resembles a guppy. These so-called chickens were four feet tall with heavy-set beaks that had elongated into spike-toothed maws. Their legs were muscular and built for running, and their tails stretched back to counterbalance their heavy fore-bodies. Their skin was layered with yellow-brown scales except for the few irregular patches of brown feathers that dotted their backs, tails, and vestigial wings.

Reggie Sparks took one look at them and rushed back to the plane to assemble his camera equipment, leaving Kate and Clem to speak with the doctor.

Dr. Scott dangled a strip of steak through the bars. The monsters inside slammed against the cage and slashed at each other savagely to get at the meat.

“These can’t be chickens,” Kate said. “What did you do to them?”

“An animal’s entire evolutionary history is contained within every cell of its body,” Dr. Scott said. “All I did was prompt them to display different traits of their ancestors.”

“I wouldn’t have thought that chickens had such monstrous ancestors.”

“You might be surprised,” the doctor tossed in another hunk of meat and watched his creations tear into it. “It is very probably that the chicken is the closest living relative of the tyrannosaurus rex. It’s a little sad, when you think about it.”

“Pardon me,” said Clem. “But why on earth would you want to create a race of monster chicken?”

“Why?” he exclaimed as though simultaneously offended by the question and delighted at the opportunity to answer. “The reason is simple: a larger chicken means more meat. I’m going to feed the world. The future is bright! You’ll see—the twentieth century will bring great prosperity and lasting peace for all humankind.”

“I guess you don’t listen to the radio much,” Kate said.

Dr. Scott dumped the last of the meat through the bars and peeled off his gloves. “I don’t get radio reception out here. I’m afraid my communication with the outside world is limited to my telegraph line.”

Clem’s eyes widened just slightly at the mention of the telegraph. If he had been playing poker, he would have given himself away, but neither the pilot nor the scientist seemed to have noticed.

“Sir. Ma’am,” Clem said. “’Scuze me, if you don’t mind. I need to go freshen up.”

He left the two of them and passed Reggie, who was hustling his cinema equipment into the barn. That left Clem alone to enter the mansion, find the study, and locate the brass telegraph set on a side table. He dialed through to London, and began tapping out his message with the hand marked by the eye-and-triangle tattoo.

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