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.

As the propellers of the S-2 tilt-engine airplane spun down, Kate’s boots crunched onto the parched earth of the ranch outside of Tijuana. With her one good eye, she surveyed the old mansion. It a large residence, probably built by one of the land-owning tyrants who once ruled the area. Now it was dilapidated, with all its glamour and elegance bleached and cracked away long ago. Now it was like the land around it: forgotten, broken down, and dried out.

Clem and Reggie hopped out of the side door of the S-2 and joined Kate in surveying the area.

“I wonder if this guy will lend me these grounds for a remake of El Latigo Negro: The Masked Avenger,” Reggie said as he looked around. “We’d have to do something about that big barn, though. Too modern.”

He tilted his head to indicate the bright red barn next to where they had landed. It was clearly a new structure, freshly painted, larger than the mansion itself, and with large sliding doors that were shut and locked. It might have housed a hundred head of cattle, but the lands surrounding it were too barren to support livestock.

The back door of the mansion creaked open and a dark skinned man in a white lab coat stepped onto the broad front porch, a look of bewilderment on his face as he watched the guests who had literally dropped out of the sky. He wore bulky vinyl gloves, and in each hand he carried bloody slabs of beef.

“Doctor Montgomery Scott, I presume?” Kate called to him.

“Yes. Can I help you?” he asked in a voice that was uncertain but not unfriendly. His gaze shifted from them to their airplane, and then he asked, “Are you with the Prometheans?”

Reggie and Clem exchanged questioning glances, but Kate didn’t let herself slow down at the thought of not knowing what he meant. “Doctor Scott,” she said. “I’m afraid I bring some bad news. We recently apprehended a Nazi spy who had four names on a list. Three of those names belong to scientists who have disappeared in the last week. The third name belonged to Professor Scrumtumbler, who went missing two days ago.”

“Scrumtumbler is a good friend of mine,” Dr. Scott said. “Now, let me guess—mine is the fourth name on the list. You came to tell me that they are coming for me next.”

Kate nodded. “You don’t seem terribly surprised.”

“I’m disappointed but not surprised,” Dr. Scott said, shifting one of the bloody stakes to his other hand. “Would you care to join me? I was just heading to the barn to feed my chickens.”

Clem lifted the brim of his black hat and looked at the steaks in the doctor’s hands. “You feed your chicken raw meat?”

“Oh, yes. My chickens are the reason the Nazis are interested in my research. Come have a look for yourself.”

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 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.  

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