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  When he recovered and came at me with a second, soccer-style kick, I leaped up and landed behind him before he’d even completed his follow-through. His head swung back and forth a few times as he tried to figure out where I’d gone.

  I tapped him on the shoulder to help him out. “Back here, sir.”

  He spun around.

  “Stand still, kid.”

  “Not a wise strategy, sir.”

  He came at me with both hands, trying to throttle me.

  I ducked down into a squat so fast that I swirled up a dust cloud like the Tasmanian Devil.

  The SEAL nearly shattered his fingers when his hands locked in the space my neck had occupied a split second earlier.

  “I’m gonna rip your heart out of your chest and show it to you while it’s still beating, boy!”

  Okay, I may have been the teenager in this fight, but the twentysomething SEAL could definitely win a medal for Most Immature. He was driven by sheer rage and kept flailing at me even as I zipped and zoomed out of reach.

  “Fight me, kid!”

  “I am!”

  Hey, there’s no rule that says you must always beat your opponent with brute force. Sometimes you can just wait him out and wear him down. Call it my siege strategy—a prolonged and persistent effort that weakens the enemy to the point of ultimate surrender. Yes, I could’ve transformed myself into a brick wall and let Mr. Machismo land one punch that would’ve shattered every spindly bone in his fist, but, like I said, we needed every soldier and sailor we could muster to go up against Abbadon.

  The Navy SEAL was as tough as he looked. He kept coming at me. For a full hour.

  Most of the other soldiers got bored with our zero-contact pas de deux. I saw Dana yawn. Joe went back into the kitchen for a second helping of bacon, sausage, and ham, taking a couple of Black Ops guys with him.

  Finally, after an hour and sixteen minutes (I’m guessing a world record for a boxing match with zero points scored), the Navy SEAL—drenched in sweat and gasping for breath—collapsed in a crumpled heap on the ground.

  “Emma?” I called out. She was, once again, geared up to be our company medic.

  She rushed over to the fallen SEAL with a canteen full of Orange Elephant, the much more potent (and pungent) Alpar Nokian version of Red Bull. Two sips and you’re totally revitalized.

  One sip is all it takes if you’re human.

  “Outstanding, Daniel,” the Navy SEAL conceded when the Orange Elephant kicked in and he remembered how his legs worked. “I’m impressed. The name’s Lieutenant Russell,” he said, thrusting out his right hand. “You lead. I’ll follow. Heck, kid—I’d follow you into hell itself.”

  “Good,” I said, grasping his hand firmly in mine. “Because that’s exactly where we’re going.”

  Chapter 62

  A FLEET OF helicopters landed in the nearby pasture.

  “Where’d those come from?” asked Agent Judge.

  “Just something I whipped up so the strike force can hop over to West Virginia,” I explained.

  “Excellent. Where are the pilots?”

  “We don’t need them. I just need to imagine where you’re going and the airships will fly you there.”

  The troops ducked under the rotor wash and carried their gear into the waiting choppers.

  “You got us the birds?” Lieutenant Russell asked as he gathered up all the gear he had shed to fight me.

  “Roger that,” I said. “I figure a true leader needs to do more than duck punches.”

  He nodded. “See you in hell, sir,” he said as he dashed off to hop into a chopper.

  “Grab a helicopter, sir,” I said to Agent Judge.

  “I’ll fly with you.”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid you can’t.”

  “Come again?”

  “I’m going to teleport. I need to get there first to set up a landing beacon outside the cave entrance.”

  “Daniel?”

  “Sir?”

  “You wait for us. Don’t you dare try to take on Number 2 by yourself.”

  “I won’t, sir. A team leader is nothing without his team.”

  He shot me a salute. “See you in West Virginia.”

  While he raced off to a waiting whirlybird, I focused on the coordinates my internal GPS memory had locked in on when I logged the death of Number 33 (Attila) on The List. Traveling back to West Virginia, I wondered if the state should change the slogan on their license plates from ALMOST HEAVEN to JUST OUTSIDE HELL.

  Chapter 63

  WHEN I ARRIVED at my destination, my father was already there, waiting for me.

  “Impressive technique, Daniel.”

  I thought he was commenting on my increasing skill at teleportation. “Thanks. Fortunately, I remember this place very vividly. It helped me fully grok the location.”

  Hey, it’s hard to forget the place where you turned yourself into yak stew so you could work your way through an alien’s slimy intestines. Trust me, a trip like that is sort of like going to Disney World—you remember it for a long, long time.

  “I meant how you dealt with that SEAL, son. You met his anger with restraint.”

  “Thanks. I guess meeting Xanthos has mellowed me.”

  My father smiled. “ ‘Do not give sway to the negative way.’ Good advice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Giving you a little extra advice is why I’m here, son. I’ll be joining you from time to time on this mission, but strictly in an advisory capacity.”

  “Outstanding. I’ll take all the advice you’ve got to give.”

  We moved closer to the mouth of the abandoned coal mine.

  “I figured this would be as good a place as any to start searching for Mel and Abbadon,” I said. “I think it leads to what Number 2 calls the underworld.”

  “It does,” said my father. “But be on guard as you descend into Number 2’s domain, son. You are about to enter a realm few have ever journeyed into. Fewer still have come back to talk about it.”

  My father vanished and I set up a homing beacon to guide in the fleet of helicopters.

  As the landing skids slid across the windswept weeds of an open field and the heavily armed troops jostled out of the choppers, I materialized my four friends.

  “So, Daniel, is this where you took out Attila?” Willy asked, surveying the scene.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey,” said Joe. “The grease stain on that tree over there—is that him?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Gross, Daniel,” said Emma.

  Joe kept going. “And what about that oily splotch on that rock, and that chunky stuff dangling off that shrub, and that bony bit stuck in the mud?”

  “Okay,” said Dana, “that’s just disgusting, Joe.”

  “I know! This guy Attila was all over the place. This must be what they mean when they say you’re spreading yourself too thin.”

  Agent Judge came jogging over to join us, followed by his 150-member strike force, all of them outfitted with serious alien weaponry clattering and clanking against their backs. My father wasn’t there to greet his old friend, Agent Judge. In his role as special advisor to the team leader, he would be visible to and advising only me.

  “So this is the place?” said Agent Judge, gazing down into the dark tunnel.

  “Yes, sir. It was the initial rally point for Abbadon and his minions, right before they launched their attack on D.C. This mineshaft leads down to a cavernous chamber. That room could very well be an entrance to his underworld empire.”

  Agent Judge nodded and mumbled, “ ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ ”

  He was quoting Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, an epic poem widely considered to be the preeminent work of Italian literature, about a previous descent into the devil’s lair—what Dante called “The Inferno.” That “abandon all hope” quote? According to Dante, it’s the inscription right outside the front door to hell, which, if my hunch was right, was where we wer
e currently standing.

  “Lock and load,” I shouted to the troops. They racked rounds into their weapons and charged up their whining blasters. I raised my hand and chopped it dead ahead at the entrance to the coal mine. It was time to begin our slow march into hell.

  After about twenty yards, the sharply raked angle of the downward slope cut off all the daylight that had been streaming in through the squat entryway. We were plunged into total blackness. I blinked hard and switched my ocular nerves to their night-vision mode.

  I could make out faint green blobs maybe another twenty yards in front of us. I closed my eyes so I could switch back to regular vision and shouted, “Light up your headlamps.”

  I didn’t want my team stumbling around in the dark. I also didn’t want to go blind when they all switched on the light gear strapped to their helmets.

  When I opened my eyes again, I saw 150 shafts of tungsten light shooting through the misty gloom.

  I also saw bats.

  Thousands and thousands of bats. Startled from their roosts by the light beams, they flooded up the mineshaft.

  “Take them out!” shouted Willy.

  But before the strike force could squeeze off a single round, the bat swarm washed over us like a leaf-choked stream rushing down a sewer drain during a downpour.

  “Hold your fire!” I shouted. We were completely swallowed up by a dense cloud of squealing, flying rodents. I could feel their fuzzy bodies and rubbery wings brushing across my face, arms, neck, legs—every inch of my body. Claws became tangled in my hair. This was no place for weapon fire. If we started blasting the bats, we’d be simultaneously blasting one another.

  The swarm of flying rodents became so thick there was barely room to breathe. We were more than surrounded. We were engulfed.

  And then things got even nastier.

  The thousands upon thousands of bats transformed into Abbadon’s full-bodied alien henchbeasts.

  And, believe it or not, they looked (and smelled) even nastier than they had as buck-toothed vampire bats.

  Chapter 64

  WE WERE OUTNUMBERED a thousand to one—no, more like five thousand to one.

  “Hold your fire!” I shouted again.

  Our targets were still too close. Yes, Agent Judge’s handpicked team was full of brave warriors and skilled marksmen. However, very few of them had ever actually dealt with the kind of alien firepower they were currently carrying. A blaster gut-shot to the alien creep standing directly in front of you would bore straight through the creature’s cockroach-crusty shell, shoot out his backside, and take out one of the mine’s support beams, bringing down an avalanche that would bury us alive.

  This is why blasters, when sold by legitimate dealers, come with warning labels: NOT RECOMMENDED FOR INDOOR USE.

  All we could do was wait for Abbadon’s slobbering lackeys to make the first move. And when they did, it wasn’t the move I had been expecting.

  They lined up in rows like a high school marching band, did an about-face, and started tromping down the subterranean passageway—away from us.

  Were they retreating without firing a single shot? Then I noticed that none of the freakazoids were even carrying weapons. It was like they were a drill team without the toy wooden rifles.

  And the weirdness kept getting weirder.

  The massed legion of alien thugs, who moved like the synchronized marching machines North Korea likes to put on parade, pivoted their heads in unison and began chanting over their shoulders at us.

  “Follow us. He waits below. Follow us. He waits below.”

  My new friend, Lieutenant Russell the SEAL, pushed his way to the front of our jumbled pack.

  “It’s a trap, Daniel,” he said. “They want to lure you down there so they can ambush you.”

  “Maybe. But it’s not an ambush if we’re not surprised. I’m going down after them. The rest of you can stay here if you want, but I need to push on.”

  I started marching down the mineshaft, following Abbadon’s followers.

  Agent Judge, my friends, and the strike force?

  They were maybe one or two steps behind me.

  Chapter 65

  WHEN WE REACHED the cavernous room where (ages ago, it now seemed) I had witnessed Abbadon’s pep rally, I realized that this sweltering underground cathedral with its stalactite-studded ceiling was only the entryway into a vast and hidden labyrinth of passages.

  My father, unseen by the other members of our force, including my four best friends, walked at my side as I followed the dark legions and descended farther and farther into the lower depths. Our conversation was telepathic. Nobody heard our thoughts except us.

  Lots of legends about this place, he said. Dante wrote of being lost in a dark wood, assailed by beasts he could not evade, unable to find the straight path out, falling into a deep place.

  I swiped away the sweat dribbling down my forehead. The deeper we journeyed toward the center of the Earth, the hotter it got.

  You’re feeling the effects of the “furnace of fire” the Bible speaks of, my father continued. There is a reason hell is described as a burning wind, a fiery oven, and a lake of fire. The underworld is closer to Earth’s mantle, a dense, hot layer of semisolid rock. It’ll keep getting hotter the deeper we burrow.

  I had a feeling a lot of our strike force would be peeling off their tactical armor before we reached our final destination, wherever that might be.

  Ancient civilizations knew of Abbadon’s kingdom. For the Greeks, his home was known as Hades, an abyss used as a dungeon of torment and suffering.

  When my father said that, I thought again of Mel.

  Being held prisoner.

  In Abbadon’s dungeon.

  And when I thought about her, I knew I had to keep pressing on, no matter how high the devil jacked up his thermostat.

  When you encounter Abbadon—and you will, Daniel—trust none of what you hear, and less of what you see. Satan knows how to manipulate and deceive. There is only one way to defeat an adversary this cunning and shrewd….

  Don’t let him tempt me away from who I truly am, I mentally muttered.

  Exactly.

  Hours passed. We slogged on through the pressure cooker of heat and humidity, winding through a maze of narrow tunnels.

  Our strike force was slowing down. The horde of aliens up ahead was not. According to Joe’s radar sweeps, the distance between our two armies had grown to two, maybe three miles.

  I’m growing weary, I heard my father say telepathically.

  I never think of my dad as old, but right then he sounded ancient. Feeble.

  Suddenly the cramped passageway we were shuffling through opened up, and we moved into an alpine valley beneath towering, snowcapped mountains—all of it eerily illuminated by glowing patches embedded in the earth, forty thousand feet above our heads.

  “Incredible,” said Dana. “It’s like we’re outdoors, underground.”

  “Only the sky is pitch black,” said Willy. “And it looks like there’s a couple hundred moons.”

  “Because that isn’t the sky, and those aren’t moons,” said Emma. “Those are phosphorescent mineral deposits. We’re looking up, at the Earth’s crust.”

  “According to my readings, we’re nine miles underground,” Joe said, consulting his super-intelligent smartphone, which was loaded up with apps they don’t sell in any store on Earth.

  I used my 128:1 zoom vision to track Abbadon’s black-hooded throngs.

  “They’re heading up into the mountains,” I reported.

  Then, son, said my father, you better head up into the mountains, too.

  Chapter 66

  JOE DID SOME reflected laser readings and simple triangulation geometry and confirmed what I already suspected: Number 2’s minions were leading us up a mountain taller than Everest, the highest peak on the face of the Earth.

  “The ascent, however,” said Willy, “is more similar to K2, the second-highest summit.”

  That w
as not good news. K2 is a much more difficult and dangerous climb than Everest, with hanging glaciers clinging to the ridges near the summit and a narrow mountain gulley filled with ice and snow that rises at an eighty-degree angle. For every four people who reach K2’s summit, one dies trying.

  “We don’t have time to acclimate to the altitude,” Dana said, adding another problem to our growing pile.

  I turned to Agent Judge. “It’d be suicide to march the entire strike force up the face of that mountain.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “That my friends and I go forward with two dozen of your top mountain climbers.”

  “We’ve got some airborne guys from the Tenth Mountain Division. And some of the Special Ops guys did time up in the Hindu Kush range of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

  “Excellent. They’re with us. You lead the others out of here. Backtrack the way we came in.”

  Agent Judge shook his head. “I’m not turning back, Daniel. Mel is my daughter.”

  “Yes, sir. But she’s already lost her mother, and I refuse to allow this mountain to turn her into an orphan. With all due respect, sir, there is no way you can make the climb. And if you tried? We’re all tied together on the safety line. You slip and fall to your death, you’re taking people with you.”

  “I’m coming,” said Lieutenant Russell. “We’re trained to survive in extreme environments. Plus, I’m particularly good in low-oxygen situations. I can hold my breath underwater for three full minutes.”

  I grinned. I had to admire the guy’s guts.

  The thirty of us moving forward started our ascent up the craggy face of the mountain in the frigid air. Wispy clouds shrouded us in total darkness, taking visibility down to zero. Of course, I don’t need to “see” to see, so I led the way. I had materialized crampons (spiked climbing shoes), carabiners, and climbing ropes—not to mention helmets, gloves, goggles, and tons of North Face thermal wear. We had left all the alien weapons with Agent Judge and the guys heading home.