Callsign: King II- Underworld

Nina tore her eyes from the dead creature and let herself be led away from the collapsed tent and toward an area where several Humvees had been parked in an orderly row…‘had’ being the operative word. All but two of them had been overturned, ripped apart or otherwise demolished.

As if sensing that her ability to think rationally was severely impaired, Nina’s savior guided her to the passenger side of one of the surviving vehicles and opened the door for her. Like an automaton, she climbed in and then just sat there, staring through the windshield at the surreal landscape beyond. Just beyond the carnage, not too many miles in the distance, spears of lightning kept stabbing down out of the sky. A few seconds later, King got in on the opposite side and started the engine.

“Better buckle up,” he said, even as he shifted the truck into gear.

The Humvee lurched forward and picked up speed, swerving around only the largest obstacles that lay along the path to escape. Nina resisted the impulse to curl up on the seat with her hands over her eyes, and instead tried to lend whatever help she could to the effort by keeping an eye out for threats emerging from her side.

In a few seconds, the Humvee reached the edge of the camp and rolled like a juggernaut over the already crushed concertina wire barrier. The transition from mayhem to relative calm was striking. The shrieks of the creatures and the sounds of sporadic gunfire were drowned out by the throaty roar of the Humvee’s diesel engine and the crunch of rocks beneath its heavy-duty tires. They might simply have been on a drive through the desert, if not for the eerie glimmering fog and the near constant flashes of lightning. The ride however, didn’t last long. To Nina’s dismay, when they had gone only a few hundred yards from the military camp, King cut a tight U-turn, and pulled the truck to a stop facing back the way they had come.

“What are you doing?” she said, her voice strident, on the verge of hysteria.

In the silver glow, she could see the grim determination in his eyes. “I left a friend back there.”

“How are you going to help him? Those things are all over the place.”

“Yeah? Well, those things are part of the reason I’m here in the first place, so it’ll be like killing two birds with one stone.” Then, inexplicably, he smiled and patted her on the arm. “I’m not going to let a little thing like an army of crazed Bigfoots stand in my way.”

“Mogollon Monsters,” she corrected, unthinkingly.

That stopped him. “Muggy…what?”

“Bigfoot is from the Northwest. Here in Arizona, our legendary cryptid is called the ‘Mogollon Monster.’” She spelled the word, which didn’t look at all like the way it was pronounced: muggy-un. “There are obvious similarities, which have led a lot of people in the crypto-community to believe that they’re the same…” She trailed off, realizing even as she spoke how ridiculous she sounded. None of it was academic anymore. All her knowledge about the Mogollon Monster was based on a patchwork of native legends and unverifiable anecdotes; all of that had just gone out the window.

King’s earlier urgency now seemed more subdued. “Well that explains a lot. You’re a monster hunter, right? That’s what you were doing out here in the desert?”

“I’m…no.” Nina struggled to find an explanation that didn’t make her out to be a kook. She flashed back to Magnuson’s accusation. “I’m a journalist and I do write about…folklore. But I wasn’t looking for the monster; I didn’t think there was such a thing.”

A tight smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “I wish you had been right about that.”

Pieces clicked together in Nina’s head. “Hang on. You said you were here because of them, too. What did you mean by that?”

King stared at her for a moment then his eyes drifted to something behind her. “That storm isn’t moving. The lightning keeps coming down in the same place.”

“Don’t change the—” She dropped her protest as the impulse to turn and look proved overpowering. Sure enough, the constant flashes of electricity and falling ball lightning appeared to be striking in the same area. Stranger still, barely visible against the strobing flashes, the night sky was unobscured by storm clouds.

Then, as if the purpose of the storm had merely been nature’s way of getting their attention, the frequency of the flashes began to diminish, and about a minute later, the lightning ceased altogether. As the last report of thunder echoed away into the darkness, Nina saw that the silvery mist was also dissipating rapidly. A few moments later, a blanket of darkness and quiet settled over them.