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to listen in on their conversation.

  “What are they saying?” asked Ty, impatient.

  “Hold a sec,” said Roderick, “it takes a few moments for my software to translate. Okay. ‘That’s everybody. The fuse is lit. Let’s go.’ That’s all they said.”

  The two trolls stared back at their massive ship with dozens of masts and its glossy silvery sails, then stepped toward the light-warping portal.

  Before we could fire on them, they disappeared into the swirling mists of the tunnel. We all stood up from behind our cover just as the galleon blew.

  The shockwave knocked us all to the ground like a giant had sneezed on us, and the boom made my ears ring. Debris rained down – flaming shards of wood and glowing hot metal chunks. We all crouched face-down in the sand and covered our heads until the deadly shower stopped.

  “They’ve all gone – they’ve escaped through the portal!” yelled Marley, standing up and looking after them.

  “And it’s starting to shrink!” said Ty. “We gotta move. Move! Move! Move!”

  My legs were running toward the portal before my mind could ponder the decision. The six of us raced across the sandy ground, jumping over burning hunks of the trolls’ ship, watching the portal shrink from about twenty yards across to fifteen, to ten, to five.

  “Go!” cried Tipton.

  “It’s New York!” yelled Marley as she dove through the opening, laser rifle and quantum whip in hand.

  “Medford!” cried Ty, stumbling through.

  “Oh my gosh!” hollered Turner. “It’s L.A.!”

  I stepped in last, Salt Lake City before my eyes, and tripped. I found myself on my belly, looking backwards as the portal closed, the mysterious island on which I’d spent who-knows how long becoming a speck in the center of my vision, then disappearing. I found myself in complete darkness. It was cold. The air smelled stale. I heard echoes of my squad – couldn’t make out the words.

  Then I felt extreme pressure on my whole body and passed out.

  When I came to, Marley was standing over me, my vision blurry at first.

  “We made it,” she said.

  “Made it . . . where?” I asked, sitting up and looking around. I was in a green canvas tent, lying in a cot. Light crept in through the flap, and the sound of war raged in the distance. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire?”

  “Sort of,” said Marley. “The trolls have brought their war here – back to the real world. It’s 2015, and they’ve been here for two years. The portal caused some kind of time displacement, and when we came through, the trolls had already begun their attack – and they’re making good headway. We’re just outside of Washington D.C. in a medical camp. The front lines are about a half mile north of here near the Beltway.”

  “What now?”

  “The U.S. government has asked us – our Bermuda Triangle squad - to consult the Pentagon,” said Tipton, stepping into my view from the left. “They want Roderick to work with them on developing more weapons like his, and you and I to work with them on strategy. We’ve been fighting these demons for ages now. We know how they think, understand their guerilla tactics and know how to find them when they slip into stealth mode.”

  “Welcome home,” said Roderick, parting the flaps and stepping into the tent. “Ready to rock ‘n’ roll, mate?”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. For some silly reason I’d expected to wake up to the sound of my children playing, the smell of my wife’s cooking, and the sensation of my own bed under my back – as if it had all been a bad, really weird dream.

  Instead I was back in our war zone, only the battle had moved from a non-existent island in the strangest place on earth, to our nation’s capital.

  “How are we supposed to do this?” I asked. “There are thousands of trolls, and just six of us,” I said.

  “The military’s trying to replicate my technology,” said Roderick, “but they don’t have time for the reverse engineering involved. Since we are fully trained with it, and we have the knowledge of the trolls’ tactics, they want us to pair off and head up three battalions.”

  Tipton continued as I sat up and took a paper cup of water from Marley’s hand. A gust of wind parted the tent flap and brought with it the smell of burning rubber and death. “The trolls are holed up at the Pentagon. Turner and Ty are to lead five hundred men from the north side, you and Marley are taking a similar force in from the west, and Roderick and I will attack from the south east. We’ll converge on the trolls and use Rod’s equipment with backup from the conventional troops.”

  “How are the trolls managing to put up such a fight?” I asked. “Our military should be able to wipe them out in a heartbeat – without our help.”

  “Apparently,” said Roderick, “the trolls are magical in this realm. Their powers didn’t work on the island, but when they entered our world, they started taking out entire regiments of U.S. troops with their magic. Soldiers were bursting into flames, dissolving into jelly, or just plain disappearing, only to report in from hundreds of miles away, bewildered.”

  I swiveled my body, swinging my feet around to sit on the edge of the cot, and stretched my back with my feet on the plywood floor of the tent. “What about an air strike?”

  “They’ve used their magic to erect some kind of an invisible, impervious shield over the Pentagon,” said Tipton.

  “But Rod’s weapons can penetrate it at the ground level,” added Marley. “The laser rifles are effective at close range.”

  “But it takes a lot of energy,” said Roderick. “We’ll have to use the lasers to get past the force field, then take the Pentagon with nothing but flash bombs, the sonic bazooka, and the quantum whips.”

  I stood up, a little stiff, a little dizzy, and a lot achy. Marley handed me a shirt and I pulled it on. “Why am I here – why didn’t I end up in Salt Lake?”

  “Dunno, mate. We all wound up here. Maybe the trolls did something to the portal,” said Roderick.

  “Well,” I said, slipping into my boots, “let’s get this done. Where are Ty and Turner?”

  “They’re already headed to the north side. Our assault commences in fifteen minutes,” said Tipton.

  “How long was I out, anyway?” I asked Marley as we stepped out of the tent.

  “Don’t you remember?” asked Marley. “You were the last one to emerge from the vortex. You were delirious at first, then after a couple hours you fell into a coma. You’ve been under observation in that makeshift hospital for three days.”

  The sunlight was bright in my face and I brought a hand up to shield my eyes. Before us lay the green fields of Arlington National Cemetery. The little white headstones, previously aligned into row after perfect row, now lay scattered and broken, like an angry child had kicked over a set of dominoes. Hundreds of deep footprints in the grass led away toward the Pentagon.

  “They came through here on their way in,” said Marley.

  Plumes of smoke still wafted up to the gray sky from a number of small buildings in the distance.

  We met up with our five hundred troops and started toward the edge of the force field that covered the Pentagon. The entire troll army was now inside, no doubt trying to figure out how to take control of our national defense systems.

  Several troll sentries maintained guard by the entrances, firing their supercharged arrows at us. The blazing shafts passed right through the force field from their side, striking a few of our men and burning holes right through their body armor. But any attempt to fire back simply glanced off the protective shell around the massive building and ricocheted away.

  “Hold your fire!” I yelled into my shoulder-mounted comm unit. A fully-armored Humvee pulled up in front of us to provide cover. We crouched behind it. I nodded to Marley, and we lifted our laser rifles, then fired our beams, converging on the base of the shield. The air seemed to glow, sparks flew, and a high-pitched whistle accompanied the dazzling light that emanated from our weapons. Purple and green smoke billowed out
of what looked like a blow-torch seam as we cut a door-shaped notch out of the troll defense. The smell of ozone filled the air, its bitter taste on my tongue.

  With a crunching, grinding squeak the invisible “door” we’d cut fell inward, flattening a parked car on the other side of the magical wall. The edge of the hole glowed and sparkled, making clear the gateway that led inside.

  Our men poured in, firing on the troll guards with malice, just as a radio signal came in from our other two teams, indicating they had also gained access.

  We coordinated our efforts to systematically take out the troll brigades one by one, working our way inward toward the five acre central plaza where the troll leader was believed to be holed up.

  Our laser rifles’ energy supplies spent, we relied heavily on the quantum whips to cut our way through the remaining couple of hundred trolls as we worked to reach their leader.

  The whips were about ten feet long and only a few white-hot nanometers in diameter, and used some kind of subatomic energy to slice through any material with a simple flick of the wrist. Back on the island, we’d spent weeks under the tutelage of Roderick to perfect our striking action, so that we could fell trolls without accidentally dismembering ourselves.

  Marley and I were each armed with two – one in each hand – and we spun and flailed our way through the mass of trolls, dropping them like a scythe cutting through wheat before they could hit us with their magic.

  Finally, all the trolls lay