Callsign: King II- Underworld

Run!

She scrabbled for a purchase on the blisteringly hot tar macadam and pulled herself the rest of the way out of the car. She was on her feet an instant later and immediately started moving.

She didn’t get far.

Another demon appeared from behind the rear of the Altima, blocking her escape. The thing rose to full height, towering over her, all matted black hair, carious yellow teeth and bloody red eyes. She pivoted, trying to get around it, ducking under the sweep of its massive arms, but before she could move, she felt the ground slip away. Another pair of arms seized her from behind and closed tight in a crushing embrace.

There was just enough air in her lungs for a scream.





2122 UTC (2:22 pm Local)



Arizona Department of Public Safety officer Matt Becker felt a moment of dread as he stopped his police cruiser and stepped out of its air-conditioned environs into the desert heat. He’d seen plenty of carnage on the road in his six years with DPS, and it never got any easier. According to the 911 call, this one was probably going to be pretty bad, but it was what he was paid to do.

Traffic coming from Phoenix was already piling up on 60. From what he could tell, the wreck was at least twenty minutes old, but no one from the long queue of idling vehicles had ventured out to play Good Samaritan. That was probably for the best, but Becker thought it a little strange; usually there was always someone eager to offer their services or at the very least, gawk at the twisted bodies. Today however, the onlookers seemed to want to keep a healthy distance; there was a gap of almost half-a-mile between the first stopped car—presumably the person who had placed the emergency call—and the edge of the wreck.

Becker left the cruiser with its MARS lights flashing a constant warning, and jogged toward the chaotic sculpture of fiberglass and metal. It was difficult to tell how many vehicles were actually involved. There were three eighteen-wheelers, all of them either jack-knifed or on their side, but pieces of passenger cars and SUVs poked out from beneath them. Becker counted at least six different smaller vehicles. Yet, it was only as he was completing his hasty assessment of the wreck that he realized something was profoundly wrong.

There wasn’t a soul in sight.

It was extremely rare to find a rollover accident where passengers weren’t ejected on impact. Seat belts weren’t always a sure way to prevent being thrown when a car traveling close to eighty miles an hour suddenly started tumbling, and statistically, there were always a few dumb schmucks who couldn’t be bothered to “click it.” This time however, there were no scattered bodies. Nor were there any walking wounded, milling about the site in a state of shock.

Shaking his head, Becker approached the nearest vehicle—the rear end of a silver Ford Taurus, was poking out from under the tanker-trailer of a big rig—and stuck his head in through the sprung left rear door. Through the almost overpowering smell of evaporating gasoline and diesel, he caught the metallic odor of blood. Red-black streaks and clumps of gory tissue painted the interior, but there were no bodies.

Becker felt a chill creep down his back in defiance of the Sonoran Desert heat. He moved over to the nearby semi and peered in through the spider-webbed windshield.

No one there.

“What the—?”

Becker’s disbelief gave way to trepidation as he moved into the heart of the pile-up, but there was not a single person, living or dead, in the entire tableau. Only blood, sometimes in copious amounts, splattering the interiors of the wrecks and drying to black spots on the asphalt, offered any sort of proof that the occupants of the vehicles had not been simply whisked away, raptured off to heaven or beamed up onto an orbiting alien starship.

No, Becker thought. People died here. And then someone took them.

He kept searching, but his initial eagerness had given way to funereal dread. On the far edge of the pile-up, he found one last vehicle, a dark blue Nissan Altima that had slammed into the underside of an overturned shipping container, which stretched across the road like a gate. He glanced up the highway and saw that, here too, a surreal buffer zone existed between the wreck and the line of traffic from the east.

Becker circled the Altima, knowing full well that there would be no body, but then something caught his eye and he stuck his head in through the opening where the driver’s side window had been.

Lying on the floor, covered in tiny particles of broken glass, was a smartphone.

He picked it up and swiped a gloved thumb across the display to wake the device. The screen immediately lit up and showed a live-action image of the interior of the car; the video-camera function was actively recording.