She dashed down the narrow hallway to the point where it opened into the mosaic pattern on the floor and walls. Here she slowed, carefully stepping around the pressure plates hidden among the ancient tiles. As she reached the far side, a bullet impacting next to her shoulder made her flinch. The two Nazis were rounding the corner, weapons aimed right at her.

The foot soldier rushed ahead heedlessly. The squad leader yelled and grabbed at him to hold him back, but it was too late: he blundered right down the center of the hall and onto a pressure plate. A cloud of short spears burst from the wall next to him. With a quick series of sickening thuds and a spurt of blood, he was pinned to the far wall, the rifle dropping from his limp hands.

The squad leader took his time, hopping from one safe square to the next. In between each hop, he fired one round at her. She ducked around the corner, out of the tomb and into the catacombs.

“Sie sindein dummkopf!” she shouted back down the hall, waving the skull so that he could see it one last time. “You didn’t really think I’d let you keep it, did you?”

She stepped back and triggered the stone slab to rumble closed, sealing the passage closed behind her. Then she held the skull up so that she could inspect it in the glow of her flashlight.

Suddenly, a gloved hand seized her wrist. She looked up to see Commandant von Wartenburg glaring down at her.

“You didn’t really think I would let you keep it, did you?” he said with a voice as cold as death.

Maia twisted the shotgun to the side and then slid her hand up the double barrels. The squad leader grimaced and attempted to yank the gun free, but a quick flip of her fingers released the breach, allowing the barrels to swing open. Before the unfired shells could hit the floor, she let go of the rifle and sprang away and out towards the bridge across the magma pool, stuffing the skull into her satchel as she went.

As soon as she placed one boot onto the bridge, a long crack raced down the center of the stone. Just as the bridge crumbled into the bubbling rock beneath her, she leapt away and managed to seize the top of a broken pillar nearby.

A bullet slammed into the side of her temporary refuge, followed by another. She glanced over her shoulder to see the Nazis in the opening of the altar room. Their rifles were too long to do them much good inside the little room, but out in the open she would be a sitting duck.

She flung herself at the next column, slamming hard into it and then dropping a few terrifying inches before her fingers seized a notch in the carven stone. She scrambled around to the far side an instant before feeling two more rifle rounds smash into the opposite side.

Chunks of the ceiling rained down on all sides and the column began to tilt as its base melted in the magma pool. The squad leader cursed at his men to follow her, and as soon as she heard the sounds of their scrambling out of the collapsing structure she jumped to the next pillar, scrambled up, and made one last leap to the solid stone floor of the passage that led out to safety.

She looked back to see the squad leader and the first soldier fling themselves onto the nearby columns, but the second soldier went a different direction. He jumped for the remnants of the bridge, but it disintegrated beneath his boot the moment he landed. He didn’t even have time to scream before he plunged into the boiling rock, disappearing in a radiant crimson splash.

“I should have warned you that lava is bad for your health!” she taunted.

The squad leader clung to his column with one hand while he went for his pistol with the other, but Maia was around the corner before he could draw it.

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.

“And now, frau,” said the lazy-eyed Nazi squad leader. “You will die.”

“Before you pull those triggers,” Maia said, backing up against the altar of the ebony skull. “There’s something you should know. Something about this artifact that your commandant wants so badly.”

The two Nazi soldiers looked up from their rifles to the squad leader. The squad leader made an impatient gesture with his shotgun. Her shotgun—he had impounded it from her when she had first entered their camp. The thought still made her flush with anger.

“The thing you need to know about this skull is,” she reached behind her and placed her fingers around its cool, hard sides. “It’s booby-trapped.”

She lifted it suddenly, feeling the tiny hair that was tied to its base pull tight and then snap. For the first time in her life, she prayed that the trap would still work, that the tripwire mechanism hadn’t aged too badly.

Then the ground lurched underneath their feet, and she smiled. This ancient culture—the Atlanteans—they built their devices to last forever.

The two foot soldiers stumbled against the quaking walls of the small altar room, their rifles momentarily forgotten in their hands. However, the squad leader was not distracted for as long. Even as chunks of the ceiling began to fall all around them, he leveled the shotgun at her.

Maia feigned a throw of the skull, thrusting her hands towards him but without carrying the priceless artifact along for the ride. Her gambit worked: the squad leader, perhaps acting on pure reflex or perhaps too terrified to allow his commandant’s prize to shatter, brought his arms up in an attempted catch.

The ruse bought her enough time to slam her shoulder into his sternum, but her weight wasn’t enough to knock him down. Skull tucked under one arm, she grabbed her shotgun and gave it a twist, hoping to wrench it free of his grasp. She got it pointed past her, but could not loosen his grip any further.

They vied over the weapon as the ground beneath them shook and the walls around them crumbled. The other two soldiers had regained their footing, but their rifles were too long to be wielded easily inside the cramped confines of the tiny room. Maia managed to spin them around so that she was closer to the door and the squad leader was between her and the soldiers.

If she let go to flee, the squad leader would blast her in the back before she could take a step out the door. If she stayed there, the other soldiers would take her down with their rifles. Through the opening, she heard a snapping and a popping sound, followed by a wet crash. The bridge that offered the only safe passage over the magma pool was collapsing. She would lose her chance of escape if she didn’t act fast.

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.

The air was still roasting inside the gigantic skull-shaped monolith although only a slight red glow found its way in from the magma pool. Yet it was enough to see what Maia had come for: a life-sized, black skull artifact on a pedestal.

It was a woman’s skull, that much was evident from the graceful curve of the brow and the sleek line of the jaw. It might once have been a human skull because was detailed and organic in a way she had never seen replicated by an artisan. Or, it might also have been a very convincing sculpture, because it was black and shining, and looked like it had been formed from volcanic glass rather than living bone. Either way, Maia expected it would fetch a fortune on the open market. Museums would start bidding wars to get it. She flexed her fingers as if she were already polishing her treasure.

Begrudgingly, the Nazis entered the enclosure, their boots thumping irreverently on the floor. She gave them a quick glance, then stooped down to get a closer look at the skull. If the builders of this ancient tomb had gone to the trouble of creating traps in the hallway beyond and then coming up with some ingenious machine to pump molten rock through the room, they would surely have been counting on a rush of greed to ensnare future a tomb raiders. No need for haste, she thought. If she grabbed it now, she might set off a ceiling collapse or triggering a rolling bolder.

“Oh my beautiful and magnificent queen,” Maia said, flexing her fingers again. “You wouldn’t hurt me, would you? You and I have too much in common.” She knelt down before the pedestal, partially to show her respect for the god-queen, who seemed to be one of the few historical figures whom Maia could respect. More than that, though, she knelt down to get a look at the underside of the skull to inspect the pedestal for wires or pressure plates.

That was when she heard the click of a shotgun breach. She knew then that the lazy-eyed squad leader was aiming her own weapon at her back.

“You have found that which my commandant seeks,” said the squad leader. “To show my gratitude, I will allow you a moment to speak your final prayers.”

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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.

She didn’t go far into the narrow, dusty hallway before halting. The squad leader protested, but she hunkered down and inspected the floor by the red light. She could just make out the mismatched lines of the floor-stones.

Pressure plates, she thought. The ancient builders lined the floor like the ribs of a skeleton, and one misstep would trigger something unpleasant. A trap door? Crushing walls? Poison darts? She saw no need to find out.

“Step only where I step,” she said, and led them along a circuitous route down the hall. They traced her path with great precision and never bothered to ask why. Nazis, she decided, had plenty of practice playing “follow the leader.”

The passage opened up into a bowl-shaped room that burned with the force of hatred itself. Beneath the edge of the threshold, the floor dropped away into a bubbling pit of magma. Maia kicked a few pebbles from the passage into the molten rock below, where they hissed and disappeared beneath the surface. So that’s where the red glow comes from, she thought. It was also the source of the putrid air.

As intimidating as it may have been, the churning magma seemed upstaged by the central feature of the room: a gargantuan skull in the center of the room that seemed to rise up out of the lake of fire like the face of terror itself. This was the image of the god-queen, and it had been hewed from some monolithic black slab of rock large enough to allow a grown man to walk upright between her gaping jaws. Her skeletal face had been stylistically rendered, with a snarl evident in the bony cheeks and a furrowed brow, and cascades of blazing red magma spilling from its crown backwards like flowing sheets of hair. A long, curving tongue projected from her mouth to form a bridge, beckoning them to enter.

Maia felt a surge of awe for this monument, and something more—a kind of kinship with the woman who fought so savagely to keep what had belonged to her people. She inhaled deeply, allowing the heated air to blaze into her lungs and warm her from within. She felt energized, purified, ready to lay claim to the lost treasure. Above all, she felt alive.

She stepped onto the tongue-shaped bridge, heedless of the seething red pool below here.

“Halt!” the squad leader called from behind her. “There may be danger!”

She had forgotten about her guards, and now she turned to see them huddled at the threshold, acting as fearfully as cattle in a thunderstorm. They wrinkled their noses at the room’s scent and held out their palms to block the heat and the glare from their faces.

“Danger,” she said, rolling the word around on her tongue. In every language she had studied, she enjoyed the sound of that particular word. “We wouldn’t want a little danger to hold us back, now would we?”

With that, she proceeded into the dark maw of the god-queen’s skull.

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.

The Nazi guards followed her closely, and the deeper she went the more they huddled together. She might have used her control of the only light-source to bully them, forcing them to keep up with her and go where she pleased. She might even have managed to ditch them in these forking tunnels, but she was too distracted by what the walls were telling her to play games. Ultimately, she stopped in front of a large mural, the Nazis clustered behind her like shadows thrown back by her flashlight.

Pressing her nose close to the wall as she examined it, Maia brushed brown dust out of the crevices and cleared the ancient cobwebs to reveal the full design. The lines of script revolved in great sweeping circles along the wall, contracting towards the center where  the image of the god-queen, her face a leering skull amid viciously flailing hair, glared out prominently. Maia caressed the central image with her finger tips, leaning in close and squinting as she looked deep into the black pits of the eyes.

“You took us here to find primitive gibberish on a wall?” the lazy-eyed squad leader asked. “I am certain this is not what the commandant is seeking. We have plenty of gibberish on the walls closer to the command post.”

“This isn’t a wall,” Maia said. “It’s a door.”

Without looking at him, she slid her index and middle fingers into the empty eye-sockets of the queen’s skeletal face. As she did, the wall shuddered and cast off a thousand years of dust before slowly rumbling backwards.

A blast of sulfurous air rolled out from the newly revealed passage. Only a moment later, a blood-red light filled the passage, as if the gust of air from the opening door had caused the combustion of a bonfire somewhere ahead.

This passage had been sealed for uncounted years, but it had been brought back to life by their presence. The thought thrilled Maia.

The three Nazi guards were not so bold.

“Why is there red light?” the squad leader asked. “No one could be in there, lighting fires for us. The tomb has been sealed too long—no one could possibly be living down here…could they?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” she said, striding forward into the eerie light.

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.

Maia inched through the shaded alleys and vine-clogged buildings, studying the architecture and intricate wall carvings as she went.  The professors would no doubt go mad for the broken down buildings and the dirty old pottery shards buried in the sod, but Maia didn’t care about that. The Nazis might be insufferable bastards as far as she was concerned, but at least they understood that history is only as valuable as what people are willing to pay for it. If history—and life—had taught Maia one lesson, it was that cultures rise and cultures fall, but if you don’t take what you need from the world, the world will take it from you.

Before much longer, she found what she was looking for in the form of a stepped pyramid that resembled a Mesopotamian ziggurat. She led her guards up the stairs of this forgotten temple, then down the internal stone passage, deep into the basement, deeper into the sub-basement, and deeper still into the curling catacombs beneath the city.

The Nazis had confiscated her knife and pistol, and the lazy-eyed squad leader brazenly carried her shotgun strapped to his back, yet they had not taken her flashlight, which she now used to illuminate the hieroglyphs that danced and swayed among the shadows cast upon the smoothly-carven walls all around them. It was as eerie as it was exhilarating to think that no human eyes had read those strange figures or trespassed through these halls in thousands of years.

It took her hours of labor in those dark rooms, but Maia finally determined that the carvings were partially bas relief murals and partially an ancient script. Combined, they formed a sliver of history of this great city. With a few years of scrutiny, Maia might have been able to decipher the whole text, but it looked to her like it mostly consisted of the same apocalyptic garbage that had been scrawled by a thousand different dying cultures. According this particular mythology, there was a war among the gods which ended with the elder race abandoning the earth for various celestial destinations. This city was supposedly one of the last holdouts, were the ruling class refused to migrate to their newly appointed home. Their pharaoh-like god-queen held out against the wishes of her counterparts in other city-states, evidently battling them with the aid of some mystical emblem. Ultimately, she was overthrown and her cursed emblem was sealed away beneath this city. Maia tipped her hat in admiration as she read of the woman who fought against time and death itself. In the end, the god-queen failed, but her efforts were valiant.

Whatever kernel of historical truth these carvings might have held, Maia gleaned one very important fact from that wall: something of great value was buried down there, and she now had a pretty good notion of how to get 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.

Although they had slaves working continuously, the Nazis had managed to push back the vines and weeds from only one quadrant of the city, and the jungle still gripped the rest in its tight green and brown tendrils. When Maia walked the edge of the perimeter, she discovered a young slave boy diligently hacking away at the vines with a stone adze. He paused to look up at her, mouth wide in surprise at seeing this khaki-clad foreigner with long black hair flowing out from beneath her brown hat. She looked back at the boy and saw that he was about the same age she had been when the BIA had removed her from her family and sent her off to the boarding school. At least this little slave had been allowed to keep his long hair and his tribal dress—evidently the Nazis, unlike her supposedly benevolent teachers, weren’t in the self-righteous business of civilizing the savages.

Maia fished out a tin of corned-beef hash, pried off the lid, and held it out for the boy.

“It is forbidden to feed the slaves out of turn,” barked the squad leader, a man with a lazy eye. This man also carried Maia’s impounded shotgun strapped across his back as if to flaunt his culture’s institutionalization of robbery.

She briefly considered slugging him in the gut, but she knew she couldn’t get away with it as long as the other two goons were standing by with their machineguns. Instead, she fixed him with a defiant glare and continued to carry the food to the frightened slave boy.

The lazy-eyed squad leader drew his pistol and pointed it at her, daring her to take one last step.

“Verboten!” barked the squad leader, thumbing back the hammer of his pistol.

Maia paused with the can of food halfway held towards the slave boy. “Think about what happens if you don’t shoot me,” she said in smooth German.

“There will be no repercussions for killing you,” the squad leader announced flatly.

Maia shook her head. “No, think about what happens if you don’t kill me. I’m going to find that treasure your commandant wants so badly, and you’ll be the one who brings it back to him. What will he give you? Double cigarette rations? A pay bonus? Perhaps even a promotion? If you shoot me now, all you get is a little target practice.”

The squad leader held the pistol steady for a long moment. He showed no reaction other than a slight twitch in his cheek. Finally, he eased his pistol’s hammer back into place and lowered his weapon—just like she knew he would.

Greed motivates everyone, Maia thought. Nazis are no different from the rest of us.

She shoved the opened can of food into the slave-boys hands and marched towards the line of vines and ferns. Beyond that line, the city was dark and overgrown, not yet touched by the Nazi efforts at so-called reclamation.

“Verboten!” The squad leader pointed the gun at her again.

“I thought we just went through this,” Maia said, and pressed forward without slowing her stride.

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.

The Nazi stooges followed Maia around the city like machinegun-toting ducklings. They seemed fooled by her outward confidence, but in truth she didn’t know where she was going or even what she was looking for—all she knew was that they were willing to kill her if she didn’t find it.

Gradually, careful investigation revealed that the city must have housed numerous cultures that rose and fell over the course of millennia. The structures showed a progression of different building techniques ranging from straw huts to grandiose domes and pyramids. Everything was crumbling and weather-damaged, save only the oldest buildings, those constructed by the original founders of this city. These were thousands of years old, and yet it seemed that if the dust and vines were cleared away, they would shine as brightly as the day they were constructed.

That made it easy to guess where to begin: whatever the Nazis were looking for, it must have been built by the same hands that constructed these great, enduring monuments.

Maia moved from building to building, piecing together the stories and the hints left behind on the intricately carved walls of the most ancient structures. The city clearly revolved around the great pylon in the center, but the pylon was not the only point of interest. She was ready to bet that what she sought would be marked by the largest, most ornate structure. After all, nobody throws their jewels down a sewer. That meant all Maia had to do was look for the highest, grandest structure that the Nazis hadn’t already crawled all over.

After making a show of pondering several meaningless ancient wall etchings, Maia marched purposefully to the edge of the reclaimed area, ready to gamble her life that she would find what she needed within the tangled vines and darken buildings beyond.

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.

“Our operation is systematic and thorough,” the Nazi lieutenant said, just a bit defensively. “It is only a matter of time before we find what we seek. We have no need for you.”

Maia leaned back in her chair, the picture of nonchalance. “I’ve excavated more tombs than the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, and I’m only half as corrupt. So here’s the deal: you give me free access—are you writing this down?—you give me free access to the under-city and I find the trinket you want. Oh, but I get to keep everything else I can carry out of there.”

The lieutenant rubbed his big chin while studying her expression. Perhaps he was searching for signs of doubt or deceit, or maybe he was just wondering how to get out of this interrogation with his pride intact.

“Commandant von Wartenburg,” he said in a low, serious tone. “He will not like this offer.”

“Not your problem,” Maia tapped the report form with her finger. “Your job is to pass along my offer. Here, let me see the report to make sure you’ve spelled everything correctly.”

The lieutenant snatched the paper away and finished it where she couldn’t see it. Rather petulant, she thought, but at least he finished the paperwork.

Evidently, some ambient effect of this region interfered with radio communication, so the Nazis had assembled a small pool of message-runner slaves who had been deemed too infirm for heavy labor. The lieutenant waved over one of them, a white-bearded man, who accepted the report timidly and limped to a platform connected to the zeppelin by long ropes. The wobbling platform was then winched up into the zeppelin’s belly fifty feet overhead. It was a painfully slow process, and the whole while the frightened old man clung like a frightened gecko to the shaking ropes.

The minutes dragged on while Maia waited for Commandant von Wartenburg to come to a decision. From the hushed tones with which the soldiers spoke of him, Maia was beginning to realize that the Commandant struck as much fear into his own soldiers as he did in his slaves. That was bad news: it meant he would drive a hard bargain.  The truth was, finding whatever specific trinket the Nazis were after would be like finding a needle in a dank, dark underground labyrinth. All she wanted was a free pass to snoop around under the city and pocket some long-buried gold, but maybe it wasn’t worth it. She had asked for a hundred percent of her findings, but if the commandant offered her anything less than forty, she would have to walk away.

A scream broke the still air and Maia turned in time to witness a man fall from the zeppelin. With a sickening thud, the figure smashed into the ground and lay still, and only then did Maia recognize the white-bearded slave.

Maia was the first person at the old man’s side, but his broken body was beyond saving. A moment later, the lantern-jawed lieutenant shoved her to the side, then fished a piece of paper out of the dead man’s satchel.

“What is it?” she asked breathlessly. “What happened?”

“It appears the commandant has given you his answer,” the lieutenant said, handing her the paper.

Maia saw that it was the same official report they had sent up to the zeppelin. A box at the bottom of the page bore the commandant’s orders, written in pristine handwriting:

SHE WILL FIND THE ITEM OR SHE WILL BE SHOT.

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