BILLY STEELE CHAPTER FIVE: MENACE OF THE MOLE PEOPLE

The kid ranger quickly looked for a way to escape. Suddenly, he was shocked by the energy field surrounding his prison's bars.

"It's no use," Cassidy sadly said, "Agar and his followers are determined to kill me and rule the upper world."

"But why? Who are you? Who are they and what do they want," Billy questioned the hazel-eyed beauty.

Cassidy confessed to an anxious Billy. "I don't remember my parents, but I know my looks made me different from the others here. You are the closet one I ever saw that looks like me."

Cassidy further explained how she was ostracized for not resembling her race of the half human mutated mole people. Billy found it hard to understand, for he saw beauty in Cassidy and ugliness in the mole creatures, while this grotesque civilization perceived the exact opposite view.

To Billy, Cassidy's beauty was only marred by her missing arm-it appeared that it was eaten away somehow. Billy at first thought these mole mutants might have tried to cannibalize the girl, but the loss of her arm was caused by something more horrifying.

Cassidy's arm was eaten away by the radiation from a hideous, unknown power. The same radiation that pulled the town of Young's Haven from the Earth a generation ago and it was the same radiation coming from the power source locked in Billy Steele's lost mine! But neither Billy nor Cassidy knew of the horror Billy's legacy has wrought.

As Billy and Cassidy hugged each other for comfort, the girl confessed how she trained herself to use her sword as a substitute, steel arm. For the crime of having a child like Cassidy, her parents were imprisoned and later enslaved by the mole people and eventually, were never seen again. Cassidy's beauty labeled her a freak to these mole people and rather than eradicate her, they enslaved her like a beast of burden. They wanted to use the radiation's rays to turn Cassidy from a human beauty to a hideous mole girl. But the plucky girl chose to remain herself, albeit a prisoner rather than succumb to their inhuman demands. Tired and hurt at being abused and targeted the freak, Cassidy escaped the mole people's hideous kingdom through a secret passageway she found to warn the surface world of the mole creature's plan for conquest.

Cassidy opened her heart to Billy as they cuddled closer in the face of danger. "Who is this Agar," Billy asked, "And who are these creatures he leads?"

Cassidy explained the legend of the mole people. After the giant, radioactive hand had swallowed up Young's Haven and pulled it beneath the Earth, the town and its inhabitants had become bathed in the radiation from the power hidden in what would later become known as the Knox mine-Billy's legacy. Over the years, the radiation's power and years of living deep underground transformed the human townspeople into the mutated mole creatures. But what was even more fantastic, the radiation empowered them with the knowledge, tools and materials to construct a fantastic underground kingdom beyond imagination.

"But why do they want to take over the surface," Billy asked. Before Cassidy could continue, the cell door was unlocked and more ray gun toting mole people escorted them out.

"Agar wants you," a grotesque guard told his pre teen prisoners.

Billy and Cassidy were chained tightly as they made their way to Agar's throne room. Suddenly they heard roars of anguish coming from cages where the giant worms, the tremors of terror were kept. Sadistically, their mole guard shoved the helpless boy and girl close to the monster's cage.