Chapter 1

To make matters worse, the phone kept ringing. The man with the craggy face and the salt-and-pepper hair ignored it, but the ringing became unendurable. With a curse he tried to lift himself, felt his arm muscles turn to wet noodles, and his cheekbone smacked hard on the iron floor. As he lay helpless, the throbbing pain and the chirping of the phone melded into a song of agony.

He was dying, no doubt about that, but couldn’t he at least die in peace? He just had to find a way to get to that telephone and yank it out of the wall—only then could he settle down to suffocate in peace and quiet.

It took all his strength, but somehow he made his cold, trembling arms drag him to the control console and grab at the telephone.

“Who is it?”

“Thank God I found you!”

“How did you reach me? Zee phone has not worked from zee beginning.”

“How? Calling a hundred times a day for a week, that’s how! Five times I actually got a ring, and then the signal went out. Anyway, how’s it going?”

The gray-haired man collapsed, gasping, in the padded chair. “I am dying, that is how I am doing.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Cancer?”

“Asphyxiation.”

“Never heard of it. Is it, you know, painful?”

“It is not pleasant.”

“Well, how much time did they give you? I mean, do you think you’ll have time to finish helping me, you know…”

“Senator Herbie, my son was correct. You are a dweeb. Zee dweebiest. Right at this moment I am buried alive, maybe twenty meters under zee desert. If I could help anybody—”

“What do you mean, buried? How did this happen? What’s being done about it?”

“I don’t know what is being done about it I haven’t heard a word from the world above until you called.

I pray to zee heavens that your voice is not the last one I hear—”

“What about Jack? Isn’t he digging you out? I should go help him! Well, I would, except I have these burned feet, you understand. I’ll hire people, though. Lotsa Mexicans down there, right? Shouldn’t cost too much. What do you pay them, like two dollars a day? We’ll i get eight of them. Five, maybe. How long would it j take?”

Mercifully, the signal faded. The phone display said the batteries were depleted. Thank the heavens for small favors, he thought, and flopped onto the floor to expire in blessed silence.

But his peace didn’t last for long. Wouldn’t you know, if it wasn’t the phone it was the front door. Somebody was knocking insistently.

“Go away!” he shouted. No, he didn’t shout, because he couldn’t. Couldn’t even speak anymore. Had to have imagined shouting. Did that mean the knocking was his imagination, too? Now it was a grinding sound. Now it was a crackling hiss. A cutting torch? He passed out not caring.

The smell of canned air woke him, and there was a rubber mask attached to his face. He was breathing again, real oxygen, and he realized that the sound of a cutting torch had been an actual cutting torch.

He was still inside the Mighty Iron Mole, but now his son was with him. Just as improbable were the floating stars in primary colors, about the size of basketballs, that faded and flared with every flicker of his eyeballs.

Next time he regained consciousness the red, blue and purple stars were gone, and the green star had stabilized into a typical plastic glow stick around the neck of the phantom of his son.

“Hiya, Pops!” Jack Fast was grinning.

Jacob Fastbinder III tried to make his eyes work better. The details of the mole’s interior were crisp. He lifted one heavy arm and poked the teenager in the shoulder. Jack Fast felt real, too.

“Yep, it’s really me. I got here just in time, too. The atmospheric toxins were at lethal levels. You were almost a goner.”

“How?”

“I made an earth drill.”

Of course. The teenage boy simply built his own mechanical mole and used it to drill down into the earth and rescue his father. Why not? the old man thought. He was surely mad, and he poked at the figment of his imagination again.

“Ow!” The kid grabbed his abused nostril.

“Not real.”

“Am too.”

“Hallucination.”

“Take that!” Jack poked his father in the stomach hard, and Fastbinder bent double, hacking. When he stopped coughing he realized the oxygen mask was gone. Jack was holding it. The air in the Iron Mole smelled stale but breathable, and Fastbinder was standing on his own two feet.

“I don’t understand. How could you do it?”

“Come on and look.”

They stepped out of Fastbinder’s Iron Mole and into a tunnel. When Jack turned on his battery lantern, the tunnel sparkled as if it were a room of diamonds.

“Neat, huh?”

“Magnificent!” Fastbinder’s eyes fell on the device that created the tunnel, and he was astounded again.

The vehicle had three pairs of treads. It rode on two heavy-duty treads, while two steel supports each lifted another pair of smaller treads to the roof of the tunnel, not quite touching the fragile-looking crystalline walls. The treads were all welded against a gleaming stainless-steel compartment shaped like a stubby rocket. A tapered point extended toward Fastbinder, and when he peered through the treads at the other end he saw another tapered end.

“Cool, huh?” Jack asked. “No back, just two fronts, so if you get stuck you just reverse it. The extra treads extend automatically to grip the ceiling if the descent gets too steep, for one hundred percent traction. The thing can even ride on the extra treads if it gets flipped on its side.”

“But, Jack, how does it do zee drilling? And what is all this?” Fastbinder looked at the roof of spun crystal.

“That’s the coolest thing. Pops! The whole exterior surface is imbedded with proton discharge devices making really big honkin’ wads of static electricity. You should see this thing at work. Lightning everywhere! It makes, like, this air hammer that breaks it all down to particulate, dirt or sand or rock or whatever, and sends it flying around, and the particles at the perimeter of the proton discharge get melted in place, and the swirling crumbles stick to ’em and it builds a crystallized support structure. The crystal makes it strong enough, and the computer guides the protons to make tempered, noncrystalline filaments for more support—like rebar inside of concrete. See?”

Fastbinder was still woozy. He understood the concepts his son was throwing at him, and yet…

“You built this thing from nothing? How long have I been down here?”

Jack’s grin faded. “Six days, about. You should have taken more oxygen. You shouldn’t have even tried this in that old junker of yours.”

Fastbinder glanced at the hole where they had emerged from the Mighty Iron Mole. It was a classic, a one-of-a-kind marvel of engineering, built in 1938 by a demented inventor in Oregon. The inventor used it once, boring just eighteen feet into the rich black soil before the engine seized up. The inventor exited through the rear hatchway and was pulled out of his tunnel by rope. The tunnel collapsed as he and his assistants were discussing engine improvements.

The Mighty Iron Mole remained buried, and over the years its very existence came into doubt. Fastbinder, who was an avid collector of antique engineering oddities, heard the rumors, saw the sixty-year-old photos and paid the son of the inventor ten thousand dollars for excavation rights on the property, then paid another hundred thousand to purchase the MIM after he located it.

Fastbinder told the inventor’s son that the mole would be restored and put on display at the Fastbinder Museum of Mechanical Marvels.

“Not restored so’s it will work?” asked the son, now a retired plumber in Portland.

“Not quite,” Fastbinder said.

The inventor’s son considered the machine a death trap, but Fastbinder was in love with the Mighty Iron Mole long before he ever laid eyes on it. He’d intended to restore it fully—and he did. He even improved it. Still, it took blind desperation to convince him to actually use it.

The Iron Mole hadn’t exactly proven itself to be mighty. Now it looked almost as dead as when he’d first dug down to it in Oregon—a metal hulk, smothered in the earth. The entrance made by Jack was an ugly, burned gash in the aluminum-plated steel shell.

“I would like to put this old junker in zee museum, even if she did almost kill me,” Fastbinder lamented. “She is a special machine. Nothing was like her, ever.”

Jack looked gloomier. “Pops, the museum was trashed, and I mean totally. They took it to pieces. There wasn’t so much as a screw and a bolt still put together. Everything’s gone from the house, too.”

Fastbinder nodded. “I see.”

“These are some bad guys, Pops. Herbie was right. They’re freaks or something.”

“I know this. I met them, remember? I watched them on zee video when I was trying to make an escape. They used no weapons or tools. They did all the destruction with their hands.”

Jack nodded seriously. “That’s what Margo told the police.”

“Margo? She is okay?”

“She’s fine,” Jack assured him.

‘T would like to see the devastation for myself.” Fastbinder sighed. “Is it safe to return?”

“No. Uh-uh. The cops must’ve got word I was back in town. They started nosing around. We gotta surface somewhere else. Don’t worry, this baby’s nuclear. She’ll go for a thousand miles if you wanna. I’ve got oxygen for a week, and she’ll extract and replenish her air supply from any and all water we run into.”

“I am starving.”

“I have lunch meat inside JED. We’ll stop for supplies a few miles down the road.”

“JED?”

Jack looked sheepish. “Well, I been working all hours and didn’t have time to think of a better name, so I just called it Jack’s Earth Drill. JED for short. You think it’s a dorky name?”

Fastbinder shook his head. “Jack, I think JED is magnificent.”

Jack beamed.

Fastbinder crawled through the hatch into his son’s gleaming vehicle, never looking back at the old diesel earth drill that had been built by a lunatic in 1938.

For eighteen years Frank Socol operated the This Little Piggy Market and Gift Shop on America’s Historic Route 66. He bought the place because he loved the mother road and he wanted to be a part of it.

“But, Frank, it’s a convenience store,” his wife protested way back in the 1980s.

“It’s a market, a grocery, a community meeting place. This Little Piggy is a part of the history of Route 66.”

“I know you like Route 66 and all, but Frank, you are an ophthalmologist—you can’t give up your practice to run a 7-Eleven, even an antique 7-Eleven.”

“Lorraine, somebody has to save the This Little Piggy. We can’t allow another piece of Americana to just fade away.”

“Why not?” Lorraine asked.

In the end, Dr. Frank Socol had to choose between Lorraine and This Little Piggy. Lorraine now lived in Sioux City with an endocrinologist.

Frank kept This Little Piggy Market and Gift Shop on America’s Historic Route 66 in pristine and pseudo-vintage condition, including a screen door that slammed. He did add air-conditioning, and the valuable cool air buffeted out that screen door every time a tourist opened it, but every three-dollar bottle of pop they bought helped offset the A/C bill.

The tourists just kept on coming. The Japanese kept the cash flowing during lulls in American interest. There were also big influxes of Route 66 aficionados from Finland, of all places. Hell, the Finns would pay four dollars for a bottle of pop and never even complain—especially the stuff in brown glass bottles that claimed to be handcrafted, even though it came from a big plant in Albuquerque that produced the big soda brands.

Frank’s real profits came from water. “The rare water of the desert, hand-bottled at the hidden springs of the American Southwest.” That’s what the label said. Frank Socol composed it himself and had the labels printed in town, and bought the glass bottles—glass for the authentic look—by the truckload. He filled them in the back room between tour buses and motorcycle gangs.

That’s what he was doing—filling Mother Road Agua bottles—when he heard a rumbling noise like a really big truck thundering down the ancient, crumbling asphalt of Route 66. He turned off the faucet and noticed that the droplets in the sink were shivering.

Frank Socol walked out of his living quarters in back. From the narrow aisles of the ancient grocery store he could see the heat-shimmering mother road with nary a vehicle on it.

The rumbling became violent and Frank jogged onto the old plank porch, his body instantly engulfed in the desert heat.

It felt like the vibration came from behind This Little Piggy. That couldn’t be. There was nothing but empty desert for miles. In fact, there was nothing to the left or right of the market, either.

But when Frank went around the back, he did indeed find the source of the vibration.

The earth was bulging, growing, only a stone’s throw from the garbage bins. For a heart-stopping second Frank thought there was some sort of freak desert volcano coming to the surface. But who ever heard of a desert volcano?

Then he saw flashing blue electricity and the shape of a metal vehicle of some kind, and the air filled with whipping clouds of dust and sand. The sand engulfed him so fast he didn’t have time to close his mouth, and sand pushed into his lungs. Opposing gales of air squeezed him front and back, spinning him.

He retreated, but in the maelstrom he had to have staggered in the wrong direction. He found himself right up close to the machine that clawed out of the earth, and the crackling blue energy reached out for Frank Socol.

The vehicle crawled onto the level surface of the desert. The lightning vanished, allowing the clouds of sediment to settle like sifted flour. A light breeze carried the lingering dust away from Jack’s Earth Drill.

The hatch opened.

“Holy smokes! It’s hotter out here than at two thousand feet!”

Jack Fast slid out of the hatch feetfirst and stood blinking in the powdery sand, then saw he was not alone. “Hey, cool!”

Fastbinder emerged, merely happy to be alive and back on the surface of the earth again. He found his son examining the blackened, burned remains of a human being perched alongside JED.

Frank Socol was kneeling, his arms stretched out to either side, as if frozen in a state of worship. The static discharge of the earth drill had burned and blackened his flesh and bones halfway through his body.

The false idol to which he was praying was the gleaming, spotless earth drill.

“You like yours extracrispy, Pops?”

“No, thank you.” Fastbinder, to be honest, was nauseated by the remains—-and now he was worried about who else might be around.

“Don’t worry, it’s still early. Nobody for miles,” Jack explained. “Let’s go shopping!”

Fastbinder saw they had surfaced alongside Route 66. Miles to the east along this road were the abandoned remains of his own precious museum.

This place was also on a similar deserted stretch of Route 66, with the quiet mountains rising out of the dry earth a few miles behind it. It was old, but not a bad-looking retail establishment.

They emptied the antique, hand-built wooden shelves of This Little Piggy Market. They took over-priced foam coolers and filled them with everything from the refrigerated display cases.

“Told you, Pops,” Jack said as they each navigated a shopping cart through the desert weeds. “It’s too early for tourists.”

Fastbinder held up a small box of his favorite sugar-glazed popcorn snack. “Zees Screamink Yellow Zonkers would be a dollar and ninety-nine cents at zee zupermarket, but he was zelling it for six bucks U.S.”

“You talk like a real kraut when you get worked up, Pops,” Jack observed.

“I like zis place very much,” Fastbinder admitted. He typically restored antique machinery, but he could see that a lot of love and elbow grease had gone into restoring the market. The expensive furnishings in the living quarters, and the spotless new Land Rover parked in back, proved that This Little Piggy was quite profitable.

As Jack was tossing groceries in JED’s hatch, Fastbinder used the boy’s mobile phone to reach his lawyer in Cologne, Germany.

“Herr Fastbinder, I am so glad—”

“Shut up and listen. There is a property I want you to buy for me as soon as possible.” Fastbinder described the market.

“A grozery store?” his lawyer asked. “Eet duss goot bizeeness?”

“A tourist grocery store,” Fastbinder said. “And soon it will be zeetop tourist destination on zee famous American Route 66.”

Jack Fast was grinning. “Pretty savvy, Pops. Americans love this kinda bizarro unsolved-mystery stuff.”

“And zee Finns,” Fastbinder reminded as he ducked back into the earth drill. “Never underestimate zee buying power of zee Finnish tourists.”

Jack’s Earth Drill rolled into the tunnel and the flashing of lights didn’t appear again until it was a hundred feet down.

Nobody was there to witness its departure. Frank Socol, late owner of This Little Piggy Market and Gift Shop on America’s Historic Route 66, was too extracrispy to notice.