The group quickly climbed aboard the Nazi truck and drove away as quickly as possible from the temple. Malcolm found that controlling the tracked vehicle was a little more challenging than driving a regular truck, a task made even more challenging by the pitch black night and dangerous glacial ice. Archie rode shotgun, peering into the darkness, and amazingly managed to see things before the headlights even really hit them, though how he did this was a mystery to Malcolm.

In the back, Iris, Penelope, and Eleanor kept watch for pursuit. Penelope, still dealing with the dissociation from being a brain in a jar for most of the day, found comfort in the return of her giant wrench. She busied herself with using the Salamander to heat up the back of the truck so that the three of them didn’t freeze in the subzero cold. Iris dealt with a growing hangover as the truck bounced and bobbed through the undulating snow and ice. She spent most of her time watching Penelope, concerned that the young woman had just underwent a great deal of trauma.

Eleanor caught sight of a light far behind the truck, and alerted Malcolm and Archie to it. They poured on the speed, but the heavy truck and rough, uneven terrain kept the vehicle from moving too quickly. Behind them, the lights resolved into three headlamps, three of the four Nazi snow-motorcycles, gaining on the truck.

As they approached the Northern Col and the steep descent ahead, Penelope turned the Salamander on the ice and snow behind them, melting patches and turning them into ice. As the truck went over the edge of the col, she was able to combine both the ice sheet and her Web Caster to create a trap for the pursuing Nazis. Two of the troopers avoided the trap, but the third was caught directly, thrown off his snowmobile, and began rolling down the col, gathering snow and ice and becoming a giant snowball.

As Malcolm struggled to keep the truck straight, Archie fired a few rounds at the Nazis. He missed, but that prompted them to fire back. One of the Nazis fired a burst from his machine gun, hitting the three women in the back of the truck. The shot was random and wild, and the three only took superficial flesh wounds. The other Nazi was more precise, firing for the treads on the truck. His shots hit, but they were not enough to stop the huge truck from continuing downward.

As Iris, Eleanor, and Penelope prepared to return fire, the two Nazis lost control of their vehicles. They had pushed their speed too high and couldn’t maintain the course, skidding sideways first and then flipping over the handlebars of their snowmobiles as they crashed into embankments of solid ice. The team cheered as the truck continued on while the Nazis were left trapped on the steep col. As the truck reached the foot of the glacier, they watched as the giant snowball, still containing the third Nazi rider, rolled to the side and fell down into a crevasse.

The team stopped to fuel up the truck, ensuring they would be able to reach the Cygnus. As they headed toward the plane, they saw activity nearby, and surmised that the Nazis must have left guards in waiting for them. Archie decided to stealthily approach the plane, certain that his magnificent night vision would give him an advantage. He was decidedly not stealthy at all, and as he got close to the plane, he turned to wave at the others to indicate he had made it, only to see Victoria Niesennkraft and her two cronies standing right behind him.

Flabbergasted, Archie tried to say hello to his former classmate. Victoria, however, turned to the Nazi Lieutenant that had taken the heart from Archie at the Aztec temple and commanded him, “Hol den Schädel.” As Archie watched in confusion and amazement, the Nazi officer’s body began to contort and bulge, his uniform splitting at the seams, his face elongating, and hair sprouting over his flesh. In a handful of heartbeats, the man that had been standing there was replaced by a ravenous beast that could only be…

…a werewolf!