The Germans were an inexorable force—their tanks and motorcycles swarmed over fields and hills like mechanized ants, accompanied by hails of withering gunfire. Houses crumbled like broken matchboxes.

Whenever he closed his eyes to rest, he was quickly jarred awake by jumbled images of dead men, daggers shaped like winged human cobras, German snipers, and Eve Weathers whirling salaciously in sparkling underwear.

Hieroglyphs and dark painted figures covered the walls in patterns. Bestial, doe-eyed faces peered out above archways. Half-naked, animal-headed people. Some had wings. They knelt, crouched, played board games, raised their bare arms towards heaven.

His mind returned to a place and time he could never forget. That late afternoon lived on. It was an eternal day. Perhaps like some ancient Egyptian curse carved upon the walls of the hallowed tombs he plundered. That bloody, gold-dusted afternoon never faded. It stood like an immortal pillar in the shifting sands of his turbulent lifetime. It could not be undone. It could not be amended. That day changed his life forever.

One woman appeared everywhere. A barefoot, black-haired beauty in robes of white. She wore strange horned crowns—feathers of gold sprouted from her forehead. The walls told her story. She played board games with the animal-headed monsters, bowed to jackal-faced men and danced among winged serpents. Sunrays enveloped her figure. Her beady white eyes stared from all surfaces. No corner of the underground maze was free of her strange spell.

They were a corps of aggressive British soldiers living in the wastelands who spent all their time sabotaging enemy operations and hiding in oases.

Egypt was no longer the garden of desert gods—it was an empire of warring foreigners.

No more lip from you. Otherwise there might be a misunderstanding.” Kika eyed the door. She considered making an escape. “Oh…I forgot to mention something. It’s terribly stormy outside tonight,” said Mitch, with an ominously sweet smile. “It’s raining bullets.

Gory frontline memories from war in the Philippines returned to Mitch as he submerged himself in the brush. He sunk deep into the leaves and mud, and stayed there. He remembered scenes from the jungle. The tremors of falling bombs. The smell of smoke.