Time Spike: Chapter Twenty

    The men who had been so eager to join Hernando de Soto on his expedition into the interior of the New World were now desperate to go back to Spain. The gold and silver they’d sought were nowhere to be found in this land of demons. The plantations, worked by slaves taken from native villages, were nothing more than a dream either. There weren’t enough of them. They’d found hardly any more than the Tula slaves they’d brought with them, before the great river disappeared and the dragon’s sulfur breath began rising from cracks and fissures in the ground.

    So many Spaniards had died—so many Spaniards, and so many of their horses. Most of the pigs were gone too. Not from dying but from running way.

    The only creatures doing well were the dogs. They had not lost one dog.