Callsign: King II- Underworld

De Bord hadn’t been happy about it, but he’d nodded, and Pierce had moved ahead into a cavern almost as large as the burial chamber. What he saw there left him speechless. It was, he imagined, the archaeological equivalent of winning the lottery.

It was impossible to say what purpose the room served for the beasts. It might have been the equivalent of a treasure room or perhaps a museum; if they were as intelligent as the totem necklaces seemed to indicate, then it was not beyond the realm of possibility that they might recognize the value in other human artifacts. Or, they might simply have been great big pack rats feathering their nest with anything shiny that caught their eye. Ultimately, the creatures’ motivation didn’t matter nearly as much as the actual content they had collected.

The room was piled high with artifacts from every part of the globe. Pierce’s eye was drawn immediately to something familiar, a pile of bronze armaments—swords, spearheads, helmets—from the early Greek Classical period. But right next to those were gold figurines that looked Meso-American. There was no logic to the arrangement; the only common thread was that all the pieces were metal, specifically metals or alloys that were resistant to corrosion. Reddish and green lumps on the floor marked the resting places of objects of iron and copper that had not survived the passage of centuries…millennia, even.

Yet, it was not the temporal journey of these artifacts that interested Pierce, but rather their physical journey. How had artifacts from civilizations in every corner the globe come to rest here, in this cave in Arizona?

There might have been an explanation for the ancient coins—the banliang and the tetradrachm—worn by the creatures as amulets. Coins had a way traveling well beyond the borders of their country of origin, and there was plenty of evidence to suggest that ancient mariners had visited the Americas many centuries before Columbus. Coins brought by travelers might have found their way into the underworld. But Pierce had also been entertaining another possibility, and what he saw here seemed to reinforce that theory.

Then De Bord had hastened into the cavern. “They’re right behind me,” the soldier had shouted, gripping Pierce’s shoulder and propelling him forward. “And they’re pissed.”

And so they had run. Deeper, ever deeper into the Earth.

The creatures, when he happened to glimpse them in the distance, were not driven by the rabid fury that had possessed them during the attack on the camp, but they were nevertheless agitated by the intrusion. Their shrieks multiplied as the sound echoed down the long tunnels, like the cries of the damned rising up from Hell itself. What he could not comprehend, what he dared not even stop to think about, was why they had not already been caught. The creatures were fast, and on their home turf; by all rights, Pierce and De Bord should have been caught a dozen times over.

They’re toying with us, Pierce thought. Some kind of cat-and-mouse game.

Yet what alternative did they have but to scurry like mice?

“Left or right?” De Bord shouted.

Pierce glanced ahead and saw two diverging tunnels framed in the circle of the soldier’s flashlight. It was the first time they’d been confronted with such a choice, and now the enormity of the consequences of making the wrong decision seemed too terrible to contemplate. There were no obvious cues to suggest which path—if either—would lead to safety. Unlike the elaborate ruins he’d had occasion to explore, these passages were the work of nature, carved by flows of water and the vagaries of geology, without any thought for superstitious preferences. It was a coin-flip really.

“Left,” he said, barely able to get the words out. “Stay with the main passage.”

That it was the wrong choice became evident almost right away. Almost as soon as they passed the opening on the right, the creatures pursuing them let loose with a bone-jarring chorus of shrieks. Then, as if to answer them, a second cacophony erupted from the darkness directly ahead of them. They were caught between two groups of the creatures. De Bord skidded to a halt and raised his carbine, ready to make a desperate last stand.

Pierce glanced back. The monsters chasing them had not closed in, but hung back, cloaked in shadows.

“Back!” Pierce yelled. “We can make it to the other tunnel.”

De Bord nodded and with Pierce now leading the way, the two men sprinted back to the diverging tunnel. As soon as they entered it, the creatures lowered their cries, and began advancing again, pushing them forward relentlessly.

The tunnel was cramped, barely large enough for De Bord in his combat gear to make it through, and for a brief instant, Pierce thought maybe the constricting passage would hamper the pursuit. Somehow though, the creatures slipped confidently through the tight confines; both men could hear the scrape of hard knobby skin against stone and the low ululations of the monsters drawing closer all the time.