Callsign: King II- Underworld

Nina didn’t expect to make such a discovery tonight.

She closed the door on the Toyota, extinguishing the only source of artificial light, and she was plunged into the near total darkness of the desert night. After a few moments however, her eyes adjusted and she saw a wondrous landscape, painted in the faint silver of starlight. The craggy peaks of the Superstition Mountains stood in stark relief against the velvety night sky. There was a tiny LED squeeze light on her key-chain, and a much larger MagLite under the seat of the Land Cruiser, but she resisted the impulse to light her way by such means. She was, after all, trying to sneak into an area that had been designated by the authorities as an exclusion zone.

In the last twenty-four hours, the nationwide paranormal community had been set on fire by the strange reports coming out of Arizona. After filtering through the paranoid tangents and discarding probably erroneous exaggerations, Nina had been able to piece together the facts—if they could be called facts—that had triggered the current conflagration.

According to the most reliable sources, an unknown bipedal creature had caused the multi-vehicle accident that had temporarily shut down a section of Highway 60. On the national scene, it was being called ‘Bigfoot’ or ‘sasquatch,’ a term derived from the Salish word for ‘wild man,’ which originally had applied only to the legendary ape-like creature that roamed the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Stories of a similar creature were to be found in almost every part of the world, from the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, of the Himalayas, to the Skunk Ape of the Florida Everglades, and Arizona was no exception. According to locals, at least the few of them attuned to the chatter, the accident had been caused by the Mogollon Monster.

Nina had followed the Internet discussion forum threads back to the earliest posts, which contained links to a video that had evidently been removed. Later threads angrily decried the removal as censorship, but several of them focused on what had been on the video: a fierce hominid, or possibly a primate, attacking a young woman in a car, immediately following the highway accident.

Nina had grown up with stories of the Mogollon Monster. It was reputed to be a hominid, ranging from six to eight feet in height, covered almost entirely in long dark hair. Some people who claimed to have encountered it reported a strong smell, similar to the odor of a skunk, and said that the generally shy creature produced whistling and shrieking noises. The only remotely violent behavior associated with the creature was a tendency to throw rocks at campers from a distance. The idea that such a reportedly peaceful creature would attack a car seemed as unlikely as…well, as unlikely as its existence in the first place.

Cryptozoology had always represented a troubling sub-class of paranormal research for Nina. It was ostensibly nothing more than a search for new animal species, and as such, firmly rooted in the principles of science. Cryptozoology didn’t require you to weigh in on heavy philosophical subjects about what happened after death, or whether the possible existence of extraterrestrials was at odds with religious beliefs. There were even a few examples of cryptids—mostly animals thought to be long extinct—that had been verified.

But science cut both ways. For an animal species to avoid extinction, it had to play a functional role in its ecosystem—it had to eat to survive, and that kind of biological impact produced tell-tale evidence. Even more importantly, animal species required a minimum population size to avoid the negative effects of inbreeding. The existence of the ubiquitous lake monster, for example, seemed very unlikely because for the species to remain extant, there would have to be, at a minimum, a dozen or more breeding pairs at any given time. Decades of searching had not revealed a shred of evidence to verify the existence of a single monster swimming in the depths of Loch Ness, much less the remains of the thousands that must have lived and died over the course of several millennia. Such details however rarely seemed to bother the true believers.