Clang. Clang. Clang. Screeeeech.
It was getting closer. There were new sounds, small tings of impact, and the raspy scrape as something pushed against the walls of the shaft. A fat blob of cold water struck my head and rolled down my cheek. Instinct made me look up. Something blacker than the darkness of the shaft moved, glistening, above.
Its shape was so alien, so baffling, so unfathomable, that for a split second I could do nothing but gawk and try to comprehend. It reminded me of pulling weeds and looking at the hairy roots beneath, partially obscured in wet dirt, only these millions of roots and tufts were wiggling. It filled the entire shaft and was gradually descending, now only two floors above. In the middle of the mass was a single, awful, circular mouth, filled with row after row of blunt white teeth, stretching up inside like a tunnel until it disappeared into the thing’s interior.
I slammed my body against the kukri. The door opened a few inches. I tossed my knife through, got my hands on both sides and shoved as hard as I possibly could. The doors slid open and I clambered through. It was dark here too. Rolling across the floor, I crashed into a set of legs. Thankfully, they were attached to a living human being. “It’s coming!” I shouted.
A flashlight beam stabbed me in the eyes. “Z?” Milo Anderson asked. “What’s coming?”
“Damn if I know,” I gasped. Milo set his AR-10 against the wall and used his free hand to help me up. As my light came around, it illuminated a plastic bottle in Milo’s hand. It was filled with gray powder. I pointed. “Explosive?”
“Yeah. Cooper made Tannerite. Why—”
I snatched it from him. Tannerite is the common name for a simple explosive made from a mixture of ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder. For the ammonium nitrate he’d probably stolen fertilizer from the grounds crew. The aluminum powder, I had no idea. But it would go boom, and a one-liter soda bottle was a decent sized boom, and best of all, it could be set off with the energy of a high-velocity rifle round. Abomination’s buckshot was too slow, but a .308 would do nicely. I picked up Milo’s rifle and thumbed on the flashlight. “Gonna borrow this.
I stuck the muzzle of his rifle into the shaft, risked a peek, and saw the dangling wet root monster still gradually oozing its way down. Milo stuck his head around the corner and exclaimed, “Grinder!”
“Friend of yours?”
“No.” Milo reached out, took the bottle back, and hurled it at the monster. The explosive struck the roots, but before gravity could bounce it back, half a dozen of the tendrils lashed out with blinding speed and encircled the bottle. It automatically slithered the bottle toward its mouth hole. The rows of teeth inside began to rotate hungrily against each other. The sound was like nails on chalkboard on triple speed. Milo pulled back and stuck his fingers in his ears. “Blast it!”
The AR-10 had an Aimpoint sight on it. The shot was easy. The angle was not. I fired once and the bullet slammed into the earthy mass right next to the bottle with a splash of black mud. The second round hit the Tannerite square.
The explosive wasn’t very big, but in the enclosed space it was brutal. There was a terrible blast that struck me as I fell. It was like getting smacked in the face with a bat.
There was no shrapnel, and the shockwave alone usually wasn’t too bad unless you were close enough for it to damage your internal organs. That was all good to know academically, but like I said, bat to the face. So I lay there for a moment, blinking stupidly. Milo’s rifle was at my side, the brilliant beam of the flashlight still shining into the shaft as gray smoke came rolling out. Black gobbets of meat and heavy white teeth fell through the smoke to collect on the elevator’s roof.
“Z! Z! Are you okay?” Milo had taken hold of the drag straps on my armor was attempting to lift me, which was tough since I was twice his size.
“Fine.” My head was swimming. I was going to be hating life later. One of my electronic earpieces had shorted out. I smacked it a few times, but it was toast.
Milo took up his rifle, went through the smoke, and shined it up the shaft. There was an awful squeal and the cables shook as the creature climbed back up. Milo fired several rounds after it but then it was out of sight. “Hate those things!” Dizzy, I struggled to my feet. Milo caught my arm. “Grinders are gross.”
“A what?”
He mistook my ignorance for deafness. “Grinder!” he shouted in my ear. “They burrow under houses, creep up through the floor, and suck folks out of their beds. That’s why I refuse to sleep in basements. The name comes from that rotary mouth-hole thingy. It’s like death by a thousand Dremel tools. Grinds bones right into pulp.”
I didn’t even want to know which poor bastard was unlucky enough to have that nasty thing sucked out of their memory. I shook my aching head. That was twice today that I’d been too close to an improvised explosive device.
“Secure these elevators in case something else comes out,” Milo ordered a couple of Hunters that had coming toward the sound of the explosion.
“I’ve got to get to Julie.”
“That might be hard.” Milo picked up a backpack. It was filled with more bottles. “Elevators don’t work. You can take the stairs, but you should see something first. Things have gotten weird. Even by our standards.”
Our situation was so FUBAR that random rotary death monsters in the elevators were unremarkable, but Milo thought something else was weirder than that? This couldn’t possibly be good. “Status?”
“Our bus took a detour to crazy town. Come on. I’ll show you.”
My first clue that something was drastically different was that our radios were working again. Luckily the MCB was no longer jamming us. Excited chatter in several different languages picked up in my one working earpiece. There were monster sightings everywhere. Competent team leaders were getting everyone sorted onto different channels and vectoring Hunters against threats. At least the uninterrupted radio waves were a welcome change.
It wasn’t until Milo and I got to the windows of the conference center that I realized that having our radios back was actually a really bad sign. The reason the jamming wasn’t working anymore was because the jammers weren’t here anymore. Neither was the rest of the quarantine. Or the street. Or Las Vegas.
“What the hell is going on?” I stared out the windows and tried to wrap my brain around the scene. The manicured grounds of the complex stretched out for a few hundred yards and beyond that the ground just dropped off into nothing. There were crashing gray clouds that stretched above us and seemed to curve inward over the top of the connected hotel. The storm outside was brutal and unlike anything I’d ever seen, walls of seemingly solid fog were being driven about by fierce winds, but in different, conflicting directions. Every now and then the mist would swirl, revealing tunnels and cuts where we could see just a tiny bit further, but there was no city beyond.
The storm wasn’t dark at all. It had its own strange internal illumination. The odd light coming through the windows made everything look washed out, nearly black and white. The hotel creaked and shook as it was buffeted by the wind. The sound coming from the storm was dampened by our shelter, but it didn’t sound like any normal weather I’d heard before. It sounded displeased.
I didn’t know if the sudden wave of nausea I experienced right then was from the concussive force of Milo’s explosive or because of the sudden realization that we probably weren’t on Earth anymore. “Where are we?”
“I was kinda hoping you would know,” Milo answered. “You’ve at least been to other dimensions before.”
“Not this one.” The mysterious ghost had warned me about the blurring of the lines between worlds. Things had just got real blurry.
The conference center was shaped like a horseshoe. On the rounded bottom end of the horseshoe was the street, or where the street would’ve been if it still existed. I ran across the lobby area to get to the opposite bank of windows. The interior of the horseshoe was where the gardens and pools were. One leg of the shoe touched the casino and shops and the other ended at the hotel, the elevators of which Milo and I had just left.
From the windows on this side I could see into the manicured gardens one story below. The trees and bushes were shaking under the force of powerful gusts of wind. Hard rain was splattering the glass. Lightning flashed, and it turned the fog around it green. The color lingered far too long before it faded back to gray.
I could see the edge of the roof of the hotel where Julie was positioned, but couldn’t see anything moving up there. I tried the radio on my team’s regular channel. “Julie, come in. This is Owen. Can you hear me? Over.” I let go of the transmit button and waited. It was hard to tell from this angle, but the clouds couldn’t be too high above the hotel’s roof. It was like we’d been packed into a fluffy box of evil death clouds.
So not cool.
There was a sudden flash of purple lightning. It made the fog look like an angry bruise before the color gradually seeped away. “Come on. Pick up. Please pick up.”
All around us was chaos. A crowd of about forty guests and employees had come in here to be able to see out the windows. There was screaming, crying, arguing, shouting, fervent prayer, and general pandemonium. The room was lit by bobbing flashlights and the unearthly pale light from the windows. Tyler Nelson had gotten up on a table and was doing his best to be a calming influence on the mob. I didn’t think that psychology degree was much prep for something like this, but he was doing his best. A soothing voice might be helpful, but I’d seen some freaky shit in my life, and even I wasn’t feeling particularly soothable right now.
My radio beeped. “This is Julie. Go ahead.”
Oh, thank you. “Are you okay?”
“As much as I can be. You seeing this?” This time the lightning flashed Valentine’s-Day red.
“I am. I’m at the interior window. Main level of the conference center.” Waving one arm so she could pick me up through the sniper scope, I walked away from the others so I could hear. “I’m heading into the walkway over the garden.”
There was a few seconds of static. She had to wait for the weird fog streaks between us to move. “Got you…From up here I’ve got a good view out into the…whatever. Space? Beats me. I’ve never seen anything like this.” There was a lot of bad wind distortion from her end of the conversation.
“Me either. People down here are coming apart.”
“I’m trying real hard not to do that myself, dear.”
You and me both. “Does it look like we can walk out? Maybe make a run for it?”
“Don’t do that. There are things out there. I’ve just gotten glimpses. They’re gigantic, Owen. I don’t think there’s anywhere to walk to. It looks like we’re floating.”
“Say again, what?”
“Floating. Like an island. All I can see in every direction is this storm. We’re definitely not in Las Vegas anymore.”
Damn it…This was where demons dream. “I think the Nachtmar has dragged us into his world.”
Julie was quiet for a moment, surely thinking over the consequences of that awful idea. The radio was filled with wind. “Find Earl. We need to figure out how to kill this damned thing now.”
Was that even possible? This was far worse than I’d imagined. The Nachtmar was unspeakably powerful. He hadn’t just blurred the lines, he’d ripped a chunk of our reality right out of the ground and sucked it to a whole different dimension, along with all of the poor bastards inside. What else was he capable of? Even if we could defeat him, was there any way home?
There were only a few others on the walkway, all Hunters, all of us staring stupidly out the floor-to-ceiling windows. One of them was muttering the same thing over and over, “No debemos estar aqui.” We’re not supposed to be here.
I put my hand out, and even through the glass and the glove, I could feel the energy humming on the other side. “Come inside. It’s not safe.” I let go of the transmit button and waited for her response. There was a crash back in the conference center behind me as one of the guests’ arguments turned violent. The big lady with the mobility scooter was beating a bellhop with her purse. Milo moved over to separate them. “Julie? Julie, are you there?”
“Incoming!” Julie ordered. “Get dow—”
A fiery comet fell into the gardens and hit like a bomb. The shockwave sent a circle of semi-solid mist hurtling outward. The windows of the walkway shattered. I barely got my arms up in front of my face as I was pelted with shards of glass. The alien fog crashed around me with the force of a tidal wave and I was knocked from my feet.
The mist was sickly cold. It clung to my face like wet spiderwebs. I couldn’t see through it.
The hotel shook under repeated explosive impacts. I couldn’t see what crashed against the building, but something vast struck a few feet away. The roar of cracking concrete drowned out the panicked screams. The floor bounced beneath me as if we were in a terrible earthquake. The shaking continued for several seconds, bouncing me along the walkway’s carpet. I groped blindly, trying to grab onto something solid, but then I realized I was sliding as the floor broke and tilted beneath me. There was a constant rattle and crash of falling debris. Bits and pieces of the building struck me as the floor tilted more violently. Then I was rolling crazily as the walkway tore from the conference center and collapsed around me.
I couldn’t see. I didn’t know which way was up. Then I was falling, part of a cascade of shattered glass.
My shoulder hit first. Then my face. There was another tearing roar that blotted out everything else, then another hit, spinning through the dust and fog, and then I slid and crashed my way to the ground. I was engulfed in choking dust, something else struck me in the head, and everything went black.