BILLY STEELE CHAPTER FIVE: MENACE OF THE MOLE PEOPLE

It was like hideous hands reaching from beyond the grave to pull their victim down to be buried alive, or swirling quicksand drowning its victims, that the stockade and pioneer town became sucked into the Earth itself.

Billy began to shed some tears as he witnessed his home and unit fall prey to the mutant extremists.

In his heart of hearts, Billy vowed to escape his metal bonds and find a way to stop this destruction. Suddenly, the alarm in Agar's throne room began its shrilly sound. The lights flashed on and off frantically, and a repulsive odor filled the room.

The radiation from Billy's lost mine, the source that caused the mole people' s disfigurement and provided them with their all mighty power, once again began its rampage. The radiation, again taking the shape of a giant, black arrowhead, spread through the fantastic underground kingdom it created, and began to take the very lives it conceived.

The mutant mole guards quickly dropped to their knees as their weapons fell from their claws. Agar, coughing hysterically, leaped from the throne over his guards' corpses, and tried to restrain his escaping prisoners: Billy and his friends and family. Cassidy, struggling against the virus gripping her, used her remaining strength to kick the extremist leader in his mid section. And Agar fell to the floor; the radiation's black arrowhead shape pierced his heart in retribution. Now poisoned by the radioactive fumes, Agar dropped his good book as he breathed his last.

"I'll lead you to the surface," Cassidy yelled to Billy, Holt's Rangers and White Eagle as she grabbed Billy's hand in hers.

"Do you know where they are keeping our weapons," Billy asked the girl. "We can't leave without them!"

"We got to go before we are all killed by the earthquake," Cassidy argued. "I know of a passage way to a safe chamber above. It's how I escaped. I'll lead you out of danger, even if it costs me my life."

"If we don't get our weapons back, then the whole West will be destroyed," Billy pleaded. "Once we are all safe on the surface, we can help you and the other sick kids. But we need our weapons first. Please, take us to the storeroom."

White Eagle then told Billy, Cassidy and the Rangers to stand close to him. Uttering words of his culture's magic, the Indian wizard created a cocoon like shield that was impervious to the radiation's gaseous poison. Billy, his friends and family breathed safely under White Eagle's protective magic.

Cassidy looked deeply into Billy's trusting eyes and then led Billy, Col Tim, Big Boy, Jubilee and White Eagle down a darkened path towards where their weapons were stored. As they quickly made their way while under White eagle's cocoon, they had to step over the corpses and skeletons of the mole people who fell to the radiation's wrath.

Soon, they came upon the locked chamber where Billy's black-arrowhead, Thunderhawk, ceremonial-mask, buffalo-skin, and Cassidy's sword was surrounded by force rays. Big Boy heroically tried to reach between the energy bars to grab Holt's Rangers' sabers and pistols. But he was knocked from his feet by the mere spark of the bars' bolts and was left shaken. As Billy and his friends tried to figure out a way to retrieve their prized weapons, they suddenly heard the rampaging ramifications of an underground earthquake.

The same radiation that built this subterranean palace and was causing the surface world to fall now rampaged like an angry toddler during a temper tantrum and that chain reaction caused the tremendous cave in. Massive boulders fell from above to crush anything in their path.