Callsign: King II- Underworld

He scrambled out of concealment, taking in the room like a game board, with the towering Mogollon Monsters arrayed like enemy pieces, blocking his path to the objective. He didn’t see Sokoloff, and entertained a fleeting hope that the beasts had already taken care of that little problem. Taking a deep breath, he hurled a chair at one of the creatures, hoping to distract it more than anything else, and then launched himself in a low sprint for the exit.

A sweeping arm grazed him, knocking him off course, but he rebounded off the doorframe and scrambled into the darkened foyer. The door to the outside had been completely torn away, and beyond it, the world strobed between night and day as lightning—or rather charged plasma from the atmosphere—flashed like the cameras of a dozen crazed paparazzi on the red carpet. The frequency of the flashes was increasing, with several flashes per second, and the constant roar of thunder resonated through King’s torso like the mother of all woofers.

He burst out into the open, slowing only long enough to take in the carnage. The soldiers hadn’t been completely annihilated, but the few remaining survivors were clustered around a Humvee to his right, fiercely repelling more than a dozen monsters. Their battle was drawing more creatures in like the gravity well of a black hole. The area to his right was eerily deserted, with wrecked and abandoned Humvees jutting up out of the waist high mist. King swerved in that direction and resumed running, staying close to the exterior of the building.

As he rounded the corner, he was exposed to the full fury of the artificial lightning storm.

The air was alive with heat and electricity. He could feel the static crawling on his skin as he raced along the side of the building, toward the precipice overlooking the abandoned pit mine. The mist hid the exact location of the drop, but as he neared the place where the silvery fog seemed to cascade out into nothingness, he cautiously tested the ground before each step, getting as close as he dared.

There, at the edge of the vast manmade crater, he got his first look at the Bluelight device.

The actual structure was unremarkable. It didn’t look much different than an oil rig or an industrial manufacturing facility. At its center, perhaps half a mile away, and several hundred feet below on the floor of the pit, was an upright column, similar to the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant, surrounded by catwalks and miles of wires and tubing. King assumed that the column was heart of Bluelight, the proton gun that was currently firing a steady stream of subatomic particles into the sky, but if the discharge was accompanied by any sort of visible effect, it was impossible to see against the arc-welder bright flashes of lightning. The plasma bursts were being gathered by three metal towers that looked like radio transmitter aerials, each taller than the proton emitter, positioned as points of a triangle around the center.

As he gazed out across the pit, King’s hopes of somehow reaching the Bluelight device and shutting it down manually evaporated. Even if he somehow found a way down to the floor of the mine—a journey that would almost certainly take longer than the few minutes remaining until the world caught fire—the energies being pulled down from the sky would incinerate him long before he reached it. It was all he could do to endure the blisteringly hot fury of the storm here, at the edge of the pit.

But then he glimpsed something that wasn’t quite so far away. Directly below, at the base of the sheer wall, was another familiar looking structure, one that could be found in any American city: an electrical transformer station.

Bluelight pulled massive amounts of raw energy from the sky, but for its own operation, it needed a steady, measured flow of electricity. Copeland and Mayfield had talked about how the device would be used to charge storage batteries; the transformer was a critical step in that process.

Destroy the transformer, and Bluelight goes dark, King thought.

The transformer was almost as unreachable as Bluelight itself, but as he shaded his eyes with one hand, peering down the side of the pit, King saw the solution and felt a fleeting instant of hope.

But as he turned around to carry out his desperate plan, something slammed into the side of his head and sent him sprawling toward the precipice.





37.


Pierce stared up at the beast, searching for some trace of the humanity he had glimpsed during his sojourn into the underworld, but it simply wasn’t there. The creature’s eyes might have been the color of fresh blood, but the real thing was dripping from its bared teeth and oozing from dozens of wounds on its body to splatter onto the floor.

Then he glimpsed something familiar. Dangling from a string around the monster’s neck was a dark, discolored coin with the distinctive likeness of the goddess Athena. The tetradrachm. This was the same creature that had attacked the motorist. The coin it wore as a totem was the very thing that had drawn him into this nightmare.