Thelonius tried to keep his hands steady on his blunderbuss as he stared down the Nazis. Humans, he realized, looked a bit more like chimpanzees than he would have cared to admit, which would make shooting them in cold blood feel too much like murder. He prayed that these primitive savages would have the sense to recognize his superior weapon and back down.

No such luck.

They chattered rapidly at him in their strange, fricative-laden language and then one of them suddenly lunged at Thelonius’s throat with his knife. Now it wasn’t a question of murder, it was a question of self defense, and his finger seemed ready to pull the trigger of its own accord.

With a boom and a cloud of grey smoke, a pattern of tiny black holes opened up across the soldier’s chest and the wall behind him. The other soldier, evidently unaware that Thelonius’s weapon held only one charge, turned and ran down the hall, shouting for his peers.

“You shot a gun inside a zeppelin?” The female hollered at him. “What kind of crazy monkey are you?”

“I am no monkey, madam, I am a chimpanzee,” Thelonius decided to be forgiving because the poor thing was no doubt frightened by the loud bang and flash of his highly advanced weapon. Still, manners must be considered. “A thank-you might be in order, as I just saved you from your enemies. My name is Thelonius, and you, if I may be so bold, are named Celeste?”

The female’s eyes widened in amazement.

“Professor Limefellow informed me of your name,” he explained in hopes that she wouldn’t be too in awe of his more highly evolved mind. Humans, he had observed, were notoriously superstitious creatures and he didn’t want any of them to start worshipping him as some kind of god.

Boot-falls and angry voices echoed down the hallway.

“We gotta scram,” Celeste said as she grabbed his wrist and pulled him into a run. In his opinion, this was a most impertinent and un-ladylike action, but it seemed best to follow her nonetheless.

Their aimless dash took them into the ship’s mess hall, where they took cover behind a row of ovens. Their pursuers sounded like they were everywhere behind them, but Thelonius needed a moment to catch his breath. Celeste seemed none the worse for their short sprint, by which Thelonius surmised that her long human legs were better adapted for running than his. Perhaps human beings were not inferior to chimp-kind in every way.

“What was your plan, monkey man?” Celeste whispered to him.

“Your kind more closely resembles monkeys than mine,” Thelonius bridled. “To answer your question: I gained access to this vessel by climbing the tether. Unless you can climb down a few hundred feet of swaying rope, we will need to find another route.”

Thelonius the chimp-man, quite bored of Professor Limefellow’s investigations of the ruins, scampered up the tether connecting the zeppelin to the central pylon. He had waited long enough to investigate this strange machine that hovered overhead like a dark storm cloud: it appeared as large as a hill, and yet it floated in the air as easily as a sprig of wood floated on a pond.

How could this be? He wondered. The chimpanzees of the surface world must be wise indeed to create such a vehicle for their human servants.

Thelonius slipped in through the anchor hatch and soon found his way into the cabins. The insides, he discovered, were ringed with tight passages and narrow doorways, the intersections of which were marked with the bent-cross insignia that he recognized as the symbol of the Na-Tzee tribe. Seeing it reminded him to be cautious, for Limefellow had warned that they were a brutal tribe.

It took Thelonius little time to work out the mechanism for operating the door latches, and he peeked into several rooms to inspect the soldiers’ living quarters. He found little of interest. The decorations were limited to little more than pictures of a thin, arrogant-looking human with a square mustache that sat on his upper lip like a small box. After marveling at the lifelike quality of the artwork—what ape-man could paint with such precision?—Thelonius realized that this must be the Na-Tzee leader. Picking up one of the flat glass picture cases, he wondered why they would enshrine a human being in this way rather than the ape-men who must certainly be in charge of their society. (Human beings govern themselves? Preposterous.) With closer inspection, Thelonius decided that he could see a certain chimpanzee-esque quality in this leader’s features. Possibly, he was some kind of vile half-breed. Thelonius set the picture down with a shudder of disgust.

Suddenly, a piercing shriek sounded over the ambient wind against the zeppelin’s hull. Thelonius un-slung his blunderbuss and crept out into the hall. Another shriek and a series of very angry words uttered in a female voice drew him forward through the tight hallways. The chimp-man moved cautiously and quietly, but he found he needn’t: only a skeleton crew remained aboard, evidently assuming that their elevation would protect them from all boarders. Foolish humans and their two-dimensional thinking.

Thelonius quickly tracked the sound through the hallways to the opposite end of the ship, where the Spartan bedrooms were replaced with Spartan storage closets. Two gray-suited men were attempting to push a human female into one of these closets. The female resisted furiously. In the struggle, one of them knocked her cap from her head and a cascade of golden hair rained down around her shoulders.

“Unhand that female!” Thelonius shouted boldly, raising his rifle to his shoulder. He considered giving them a warning shot to scare them off, but it would take too long to reload. Better a quiet threat than a loud bluff, he decided.

The two soldiers were startled at his voice. They turned to him in amazement, the female all but forgotten. Then there was a flash of steel, and each had a knife in hand.

“Aaaa.. aaw…” Celeste managed to squeak despite von Wartenburg’s mystical command. Dumb galoot, she thought as she glared at him. You grow up with as many brothers and sisters as I did and ain’t nobody gonna stifle your voice.

“I have only one further question for you,” he said sternly. “Have any of your companions mentioned an ancient artifact, or have they spoken of a culture that once called itself Atlantis? You may speak now.”

She was certain he threw in the last sentence to cover for his spell’s inability to bind her voice.  “Aaaa… awright, buster,” she demanded as her words came flooding back to her. “Nobody shuts me up like that. What’d you do to me?”

“You will answer my question now.”

“Wrong, buster, you’re gonna answer my question. You can order me to shut my yap, but you can’t force me to talk. See what I mean? So you tell me how you do that voodoo you do and then maybe I’ll stop being too mad to sing like a canary.”

Von Wartenburg, as expressionless as ever, used a key to open his gun case. He selected a luger, loaded it, and turned back towards her. The pistol wasn’t pointed at her, but it wasn’t quite pointed away from her, either.

“I compelled you by means of the Atlantean language,” he said. “Every creature on this planet is neurologically evolved to understand and respond to that language. Perhaps even a simpleton such as you can see what that implies about the power of these ancient ones. Now, before I demonstrate the full might of these words, you will tell me if you ever overheard your betters speak of the Atlanteans.”

“You got a politeness problem, you know that?” Celeste shook her head. “But, in answer to your question: nope, I don’t think so. That is, Professor Scrumtumbler kept talking about his theory that some people from the olden-days built something he called the Hollow Earth. But he was expecting to find a big cave, I think. Not this place.”

Von Wartenburg’s eyes narrowed. “How did he know of the existence of the Hollow Earth?”

Celeste shrugged. “He theorized it, I guess. You know: he just made it up.”

Von Wartenburg snorted and slid his luger into his belt pouch. “Guard,” he called. “Take this one to the brig. I have business to attend to below.”

Although this military zeppelin was much larger than the luxury airship she once took from Hollywood to New York, Celeste was beginning to discover that it lacked all of the amenities of its civilian counterpart. The interior hallways were lit by naked bulbs instead of elegant electrical lamps. The deck was bare metal instead of plush carpet. The chairs were hard and rigid instead of soft and cushioned. The worst thing, aside from the pervading smell of oil and iron, was the color scheme, which couldn’t even be called a color scheme because everything was gray. The walls were battleship gray, the floors were gunmetal gray, and the uniforms were storm-cloud gray. The only thing that wasn’t gray was the commandant, who wore all black from his leather hat down to his polished boots.

“Why are you here?” von Wartenburg demanded. He spoke in English, his words showing almost no accent and even less emotion.

“I’m here because your goons grabbed me in the jungle and, listen, none of this is our fault. It was those monsters out in the jungle that killed your men when all we wanted was—”

“Silence,” von Wartenburg barked.

“But it wasn’t our fault! That bigger monster that came after me didn’t like my screaming. Also, there was a bear. Did I mention the bear?”

“SILENCE.” This time von Wartenburg spoke in that strange language of his, the one that he had used on Celeste in the cargo bay to force her to drop her knife. Just like before, she understood it perfectly even though she had never heard the word until that moment. Also like before, she was powerless to resist the command. She tried to protest, but when she opened her mouth she could not make even a squeak.

“I had hoped that your physical beauty indicated superior breeding,” von Wartenburg said with all the emotion of a doctor discussing birth defect statistics. “But now I see that you lack the intelligence of a common sow.”

While she worked her jaw in mute frustration, he pushed back from the desk and strode to the window, a small porthole that overlooked the ancient city below. Grabbing a desktop microphone, he spoke commands that were echoed across the jungle through the zeppelin’s PA system. When he was satisfied that his soldiers below were carrying out his orders, he set down the microphone and strode to a decorative glass case containing a selection of German-made pistols.

Celeste strained against the invisible strings that seemed to bind her larynx. “Aa…,” she managed. “Aaaa…”

It was hardly louder than the squeak of a mouse, but it made von Wartenburg’s eyes widen a fraction of an inch. With such an impassive face, he might have made a great poker player, but Celeste had studied human expression for too many years to miss the clue. It told her that von Wartenburg was surprised she was able to get out any sound at all. Although she had uttered nothing more than a syllable, it proved that she could resist his sorcery and defy his will.

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.

Two strapping young soldiers awaited her inside the zeppelin cargo bay. One was a squat, dark-haired fellow who hauled in the cargo platform upon which she rode. The other soldier, a fresh-faced lad with a distinct reddish tinge to his close-cropped hair, graciously offered a hand as if he were asking for a dance at a royal ball.

Now this is more like it, Celeste thought. Down below, none of the Nazis had offered her anything other than harsh glares. Perhaps these young men were more courteous due to better parenting. Or, she mused, perhaps they were less bullying simply because they lacked the machineguns. The only weapons she saw here were the military daggers strapped to their hips—Celeste knew from her stint as Kidnap Victim #3 in Reggie Spark’s disastrous flop Charge of the Lighter-Than-Air Brigade that firearms aboard a zeppelin would be safely stowed in a locked armory. The thought was comforting.

Celeste gratefully accepted the red-haired soldier’s help down onto the relatively stable deck plate. Evidently, this didn’t please the dark-haired zeppelin-steward, who scowled at his partner while offering Celeste a cigarette.

“Thank you, but I don’t smoke,” she said, looking at the limp cigarette in his outstretched hand. It was slightly bent and looked like it might have been caught out during a rainstorm.

She had hoped the courteousness of her refusal would be understood across the language barrier, but the soldier’s scowl only deepened. Too late, she realized that cigarettes would certainly be rationed among the soldiers and probably prized more highly than a week’s pay.

The red-haired soldier beamed triumphantly and then produced a small, paper-wrapped parcel. The moment he unwrapped it, a heavenly aroma of sugar, buttery richness suffused the air.

“Chocolate…” Celeste whispered, her soul momentarily transported by the mere fragrance of it.

With a wink, the soldier unsheathed his knife to cut off a small chunk. When he handed it to Celeste, her mouth watered and her stomach growled, and she realized that she hadn’t eaten in hours, or maybe a day (who could tell in this land of eternal daylight?). Even so, she dared take no more than a mouse-nibble for fear that it would not last. She rolled the tiny bite around with her tongue, coating every inch of her mouth, and closed her eyes so that she might fold her entire being around the taste.

When she opened her eyes, she saw that the red-headed soldier was smiling proudly but the other soldier was glaring with undisguised rage. When they turned to lead her out of the hold, the second soldier jostled the first, knocking him off course with his shoulder. It might have been an accident, but the red-headed soldier knew better, and he retaliated with a more blatant shove.

Without another word, the two were suddenly locked in a standing wrestling match, each trying to drive the other into the metal bulkhead.

Celeste wanted to pry them apart and scold them for fighting over her. Then she remembered that they were Nazis.

“Oh, please, don’t fight over little ol’ me,” she said with absolutely no conviction. Then she bit off another nugget of chocolate and settled in to watch the show.

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 shove from the lantern-jawed lieutenant almost made Celeste fall to the ground. It was hard enough walking in her new, oversized boots without Nazi bullies pushing her around. They were not forgiving about what had happened out in the jungle, even though she kept telling them it wasn’t her fault: the one soldier had been stabbed by a spear before she even got to the scene, and the other had been eaten by a dinosaur. Yet nothing she said made a difference: the Nazis just weren’t interested in being open-minded.

At least they had offered her one kindness: a change of clothing. When she had arrived in the command post, the lieutenant had shoved a bundled-up gray uniform into her arms and pointed to a bush which was to serve as her dressing room. The uniform proved to be too tight in the hips and the chest and too baggy everywhere else, but it was better than her red dress, which had been torn, muddied, and chewed-on to the point of near-indecency. Celeste had also been glad to find that the uniform had been carefully stripped of all badges, insignias, and swastikas. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t give her a mirror to examine herself in the outfit, so all she could do was tie her hair back with a strip of her tattered red dress and hope for the best. Under these circumstances, “Stunning” or “beautiful” were certainly out of the question, but maybe she could hope for “tomboy-cute.” Then she remembered how the soldiers in camp had greeted her with hungry stares, and she buttoned the uniform shirt up to the very top.

They wouldn’t tell her where they took Jack or what they were planning to do with him, but she gathered that she was being sent up to the zeppelin to see someone named Commandant von Wartenburg. For some reason, all the soldiers spoke that name in a hushed whisper, and it made her feel like she had been typecast yet again in the role of damsel in distress.

With the zeppelin floating high above the city, the only way up or down was a small metal platform rigged up to a winch by fifty foot cables. At gunpoint, she climbed on and gripped the ropes until her knuckles turned white. As it ascended, the platform swung sickeningly back and forth in the slightest breeze, which made her grip the ropes even tighter, until the whiteness spread from her knuckles all the way out to her wrists.

At first she closed her eyes, but that made the sea-sickness worse, so she kept them fixed on the looming black blimp above her. It was a huge vehicle, built rugged for military use. From the scaffolding encircling its rounded sides protruded several propeller engines, now silent. A thick chain anchored the tip of its pointy nose to the peak of a tall, ornately carved obelisk projecting up from the city. A compact biplane hung from the underside of the zeppelin like a baby bat clinging to its mother’s belly. The zeppelin’s carriage was flat, angular, and black with visible rivets and small windows that could be quickly shuttered with armored flaps. This section contained all the equipment and troop quarters and yet made up only a small proportion of the overall vehicle.

As Celeste was pulled into the cargo bay, she felt as though she were being swallowed by a gargantuan beast—a feeling which had become distressingly familiar.

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