BILLY STEELE CHAPTER FIVE: MENACE OF THE MOLE PEOPLE

Many of the towns' people huddled inside the church preparing themselves for their condemnation, while a few screamed, "Why," to the silent skies.

Suddenly, the great, radioactive arrowhead became a giant hand that spread its humongous fingers around every structure in the town and pulled Young's Haven from the face of the Earth! The radiation cut a massive hole in the ground and then devoured the whole community as if Mother Earth was swallowing its young. Down, down, down, the entire town and all of its inhabitants became pulled from the surface to the underground, buried alive in one unforgiving grasp.

And none of the town's citizens would ever be heard from again....until....

Nearly forty years have passed since the religious community of Young's Haven vanished...

"It is time, Billy Steele," cackled the bewitching beauty Lucy Fur, "It is time for you to face the challenge of the first card from my Doom Deck." Lucy Fur, in her hellish saloon drew a card depicting a mole creature. A human being mutated into a disfigured freak by a generation of living underground and by the pollution from the radioactive fallout from the power of Billy's lost mine.

Lucy's "owl hoot" attired, grotesque minions from Hell joined her in her heinous guffaws, as she would play her velvet-skinned hand in her attempt to take control of the mine and destroy Billy Steele.

Meanwhile, miles away, in the mining exploitation town of Whiskey Flats, a wild and wooly community built on golden dreams, but where human life wasn't worth a plugged nickel---miners, cowboys, outlaws, cut-throats, and gamblers found temporary pleasure in bottles of red eye, marked cards and cat houses. One ill-fated night, a rampaging rumble shook the town to its very core. Gunmen toppled from their horses. All the bottles in the saloon vibrated wildly before smashing to bits as human lives shook apart under a merciless hand of judgment.

After an excruciating few minutes, the shaking stopped...but then a gaping hole opened in middle of Main Street. The terror stricken citizens, saw what only could come from a nightmare emerge from an underground cavern. Mole People, figures who once resembled human beings but became mutated into hideous creatures from years of living in the poisonous underground, climbed to the surface.

Scantily clad saloon girls screamed in horror upon seeing the approaching creatures. Drunken cowboys became scared sober as they drew their guns at the freaks. But before the first shot could be fired, tremendous worm creatures, tremors of terror, broke through the Earth from below. The monstrous worms devoured the gunmen whole and then in a flash, the entire town toppled into a gigantic hole created by the mutant mole people. With one last hellish roar, Whiskey Flats fell into the creature's cavern and clutches. The entire town and its dwellers then fell into a flaming lake of molten lava. All were burned alive, perhaps as punishment for their Earthly sins. And the sign reading, "Welcome To Whiskey Flats," caught fire on the surface, its citizens screamed for forgiveness below. But none would hear them!

When word of this disaster reached territory supervisor Slade, Paradise Valley's corrupt political leader, he smiled greedily and twirled his moustache malevolently. Slade long planned to rid the West of White Eagle, an Indian he feared as one who held a great, magical power over his Native American people. Slade had heard rumors of White Eagle's closeness to the Indian gods The Manitou and The Lightning Warrior, and "The Boss Tweed of the West" vowed to rid his authority of any challenger to his power. Slade wanted to possess the rich fields of the Native Americans' lands and reservations. Slade had long vowed to "Exterminate the red devils and step over their silent corpses" on his way to personal wealth and power.