It looks like Pete's gone for good, so you start pondering the situation. You don't know exactly how much time passed in between the moment when Pete went to retrieve his treasure, and when you arrived at the spot... but maybe it wasn't very long. Maybe, while he was waiting in this dust bowl for you to arrive, all Pete had time for was hiding the treasure in the immediate vicinity... in the sand!

Aside from the marks of your struggle with the old pirate-bum, there's no obvious pits or piles in the sand that suggest something is buried there. Digging around could take days, though Pete probably didn't have time to bury his booty very deep. If only you had something to poke around quickly... Your eyes fall on Pete's old cutlass. That smelly old bastard doesn't need it anymore now, anyway. You take it, kneel in the sand and raise the old weapon over your head. "Thought you were going to kill me with this, eh?" you say, sneering at the corpse. You stab into the sand before you... and a great big, screaming hiss explodes from beneath you.

You fall back, startled. The cutlass is wrenched from your hand by something it's gotten caught in beneath the sand. A cloud of dust is kicked up between your legs, and you're suddenly staring into the face of a horrid, slimy, eyeless snake. It snarls at you, and with good reason, because Pete's cutlass has been driven straight through its head, dripping orange goo on your pants. You give out a great big girlie shriek in response, but the snake-creature dives into the ground again. Just before you can sigh in relief, you feel a tremendous tremor ripple through the ground.

A giant Graboid thrusts itself through the surface of the dust bowl, opens its sluggish beak and latches on to you with half a dozen more snake-like appendages. You are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the giant maw. You can only hope to offend his taste buds with the amazing load you just made in your pants, because other than that, it's curtains for you.

WHERE'S MICHAEL GROSS WHEN YOU NEED HIM? START OVER!