Dark thoughts filled the mind of the alien captain. He ground his mastication plates, seething in frustration as his ship sped over the warm sea the humans called Mediterranean. Ahead lay the African continent and the mystery he was tasked with investigating.

 

Ridiculous.

 

He was a seasoned fleet captain, a veteran of five planetary campaigns, and had more than earned his right to lead his platoon of exterminators into battle. Into battle. Being assigned this reconnaissance mission was an insult. He was a fighter, not a scientist, and the real fighting was to the north and across the ocean to the west. He cared little about an anomalous energy reading beneath the desert.

 

As land reappeared on the horizon, his gunship’s sensors lit up—incoming enemy aircraft. Good. Although the humans’ military technology was inferior, he would nonetheless enjoy swatting down whatever resistance they could offer.

 

* * *

 

Dark thoughts filled the mind of the undead pharaoh. Four thousand years of smoldering anger burst into searing flames of rage as light finally breached his tomb. Four thousand years! Although shut away from the world, he could still sense its turning that whole time, the coming and going of the seasons, the passing of the eons. And all the while, he’d suffered.

 

As the light slowly awakened his putrefied flesh, the pharaoh’s mind was already racing, sorting through the myriad vengeful fantasies that had sustained him through his interminable solitude. That his betrayers were long gone hardly mattered. His wrath only needed a target—any target.

 

The thunderous hammering, which had briefly subsided, returned, and the sunlit crack overhead widened. A haze of dust filled his burial chamber, the fine silicate particles twinkling through the light like fireflies over the Nile.

 

Just as the pharaoh rose to a sitting position, testing his strength for the first time in millennia, a massive chunk of sandstone broke free from the ceiling above. With unexpected ease, he swatted it aside. So, his powers had not atrophied during the curse of waking death, but swelled. Like a lake built by a trickle of water, his magic had filled a reservoir of potential that felt depthless.

 

Woe to his enemies.

 

* * *

 

Dark thoughts filled the mind of the Egyptian soldier. Although there was no denying the horrors on the daily news broadcasts, seeing the invaders firsthand was shocking. Surely, these were the end times.

 

The swiftness with which the single alien vessel had brushed aside their defenses left no room for hope. That they seemed intent on wiping out the entire human race left no choice but to fight on. If death was inevitable, then he would face it defending his nation and its people. And its antiquities?

 

Why a previously undiscovered tomb—for that’s clearly what it was—would be of interest to the aliens, he couldn’t imagine. Not that it mattered. He wouldn’t spend his last moments entertaining idle curiosity. Instead, he thought of his wife and children and the soldiers who marched bravely beside him.

 

Only twenty meters away, the lone alien who’d disembarked their hovering ship hammered down into the sandstone with armored fists. He was ten feet tall and hidden within a suit of strange metallic fabric that shimmered iridescent beneath the African sun.

 

The soldier slowly raised his rifle, hating how it quaked in his hands. He took dead aim, slowly compressed the trigger . . .

 

And then froze.

 

A new impossibility materialized before him—a desiccated corpse rising forth from the freshly opened fissure in the earth. The thing fell immediately upon the alien, bearing it to the ground, twisted fingers at its throat. A stomach-turning crunch rent the air as the armor, and whatever neck lay hidden beneath it, collapsed within the corpse’s grip.

 

The aliens’ ship pivoted in the air, orienting itself in their direction, and then opened fire. The spears of green light, which had wreaked devastation on so many northern cities, seemed to dissipate in the air, never reaching the mummy’s now outstretched fingers. And when those fingers curled into a fist a moment later, the ship imploded like a burst balloon and fell smoldering from the sky.

 

Impelled by fear and awe, the soldier and his comrades fell to their knees in near-perfect unison. When the undead thing turned to them, it paused, tilting its gruesome head, seeming to consider their prostrate forms. Then it laughed.