Callsign: King II- Underworld

Leilani turned her eyes back to the road ahead. It would have been easy enough to reply; the section of US Highway 60 through which she now drove was almost completely straight for at least another ten miles, and the only vehicle she could see was an eighteen-wheeler a good mile ahead of her—she’d probably catch up and pass him in the next few minutes. But the truth of the matter was that she didn’t want to reply to Becca’s inane message. Becca was a good friend, but oh so needy, and Leilani just didn’t want to deal with that right now.

Especially not right this instant, driving on the remote highway between her home in Globe and her job in Mesa. She hated the drive, hated living in Globe and hated the job, all of which meant she was in a foul mood to begin with, and not at all sympathetic to Becca’s grooming crisis.

The phone chirped again in her hand.



Shuoldi????



Leilani had lived her life—all 22 years of it—in the Arizona town some sixty miles from the edge of the Phoenix metro area. As a teenager, she had chafed at the limitations of the remote location; Phoenix, with its malls and marginally hipper scene, was just too far away. Getting her first car hadn’t helped much, because while the distance separating Globe from the city was relatively short, it required a sojourn through some of the most desolate terrain in the United States. Blisteringly hot asphalt, undulating mountains where lightning and even hail storms could descend at a moments notice, the possibility of overheating from using the air conditioner—and you couldn’t not use it—or a flat from one of the ubiquitous chunks of disintegrating truck tires scattered like land mines on the roadway, were just a few of the factors that gave the trip nightmare potential.

After finishing high school, she had enrolled at ASU, but living closer to the city, on campus, was about the only thing about college she had found appealing. So after just two semesters, she had dropped out and moved back home. The derailment of her plans for higher education had brought her face to face with the harsh realities of adult life; she had been unable to find work—at least the kind of work she was willing to do—in her hometown. After a few months, she had started looking in the city, even though it meant a daily commute through the wasteland. Her plan had been to get a job, and then with a few paychecks under her belt, find a place to live in Phoenix.

Six months later, she was still making the drive, four days a week, to her job at a sports bar in Mesa. Even though she lived frugally, at least by her own estimation, something always seemed to come up to drain away her savings before she could make the move.

Now, she wasn’t just sick of living in Globe. She was sick of the desert altogether.

Chirp.



Well??????



Leilani glanced down at the touch screen keyboard on the phone just long enough to tap out:



>>>Driving!!!



When her eyes met the road again, it was like looking at the end of the world.

So many things were happening at once, her brain couldn’t process all the incoming visual stimuli.

Directly ahead of her, the eighteen-wheeler was sideways, its white trailer stretching across both lanes, and relative to Leilani in her Altima, it was coming up fast. All around the trailer there was black smoke and dust, and pieces of debris were flying through the air from beyond it. There were flashes to the north, a veritable strobe of lightning, stabbing down out of a clear sky. And all along the roadside, there was movement: dark shapes that looked almost like people, swarming down from the hills.

She stomped her foot on the brake pedal, but as adrenaline slammed through her body, leaving her extremities strangely numb, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to stop in time. The semi’s trailer slowly rolled over directly in front of her as the Altima’s anti-lock brakes peeled away the car’s momentum…seventy-five to fifty in the space of a heartbeat…the underside of the trailer looming ahead of her like a monolith…fifty to thirty…

Damn you, Becca. I’m going to die because you couldn’t make up your own mind about a haircut.