The first sound I heard over the ringing in my ears was the wind. It was screaming like a million people being tortured to death. It was alien, haunted, and it made my soul ache. It was the wind of a desolate place where no man should ever go. Beneath the scream of the wind were the screams of the people trapped here. Those were what brought me back to consciousness.
Then the pain in my skull hit and I added my scream to the rest. That woke me right up. Everything hurt. My ribs ached. My head felt like it had been split open.
It was wet. Water was running over me. I was lying in the mud. I forced my eyes open. Immediately the hurricane winds tried to rip them out of my head. The water was pouring from a broken fountain. I was in a flowerbed. Grunting in pain, I rolled over.
Above me, half the walkway of the conference center was gone, blown apart, flung down and spread around me. The other half was still attached, and I saw a Hunter dangling from the far edge being pulled back inside by another. There was a jagged hole in the conference center above and it looked like the building had puked its guts out. I could see that the people closest to the blast had been scattered. People inside were just beginning to get to their feet, and those that had been further away were dragging limp bodies away from the hole.
I had ridden a ten-foot section of the overhang into the gardens. Chunks of concrete with broken bits of rebar sticking out of them were all around me. There was broken glass everywhere. It was a miracle that I hadn’t been impaled or crushed to death. I wiped my stinging eyes. My glove came away red with blood. It was streaming from a deep cut on my forehead.
Everything hurt, but I couldn’t tell how badly I’d been injured. I got to my hands and knees, crawled a couple of feet, but was too dizzy, and face-planted into the mud. There was another person just ahead. I hadn’t been the only one caught in the collapse, but they hadn’t been as lucky. Half of their torso had been caught beneath the sliding debris and crushed. I was too disoriented to even tell who it was.
There was another roar, and this one wasn’t the wind. Gunfire erupted above as Hunters began firing into the alien hurricane. They were shooting out into the garden at something just ahead of me. Someone up there was shouting orders, struggling to be heard, trying to direct the innocent toward safety. Another flaming comet, smaller than the first, streaked across the gray sky and hit the building. The entire world shook under the explosive impact, and flaming bits rained down around me. The Hunters above me were driven back.
Raising my head, I could make out brightly colored shapes moving in the garden, some orange, some red, just quick flashes as the things maneuvered through the thrashing bushes. There was the briefest glimpse of an oddly shaped head and weird multiple eyes before the creature took cover. There was a terrifyingly familiar whistling noise as a cloud of projectiles was launched from the garden against the breach in the wall. Inside, humans cried out in agony as they struck.
I tried to stand, but a lightning bolt shot up the nerves of my leg and I went back down. Something was screwed up with my foot. There was movement to my side. Another survivor of the crash had staggered upright. It was a female Hunter that I’d seen, but never spoken to. She was shell-shocked, staring out into the mist, only her wide eyes visible through a mask of blood and dust. She turned to look up at where we’d just been standing. I shouted for her to take cover, but either she couldn’t hear me or no sound actually came out of my throat. I wasn’t sure. There was another whistling noise, a thud, and she lurched forward and fell.
Head swimming, face bleeding, I crawled through the wreckage. My hands landed on her warm body. There was a short spear sticking out of the dead woman’s back right between her shoulder blades. Without thinking, I wrenched it out with one gloved hand. I recognized the alien spine clenched in my fist right away, because I’d been killed with one just like it once.
It made sense, trapped here in the realm of nightmares, that this is what would be sent to end us. There were several survivors amongst the senior MHI staff here. If the Nachtmar had been looking for one consistent horror that many of us shared, these would be it.
It was the demons from Natchy Bottom. It was the creatures from the Christmas party.
We were all going to die.
My legs didn’t want to respond. The explosion and resulting fall had shaken me badly. I needed a minute to collect my bearings, but I didn’t have a minute. These things were too fast, too lethal. Once they got inside they’d rip us all to pieces, only since I was stuck outside with them, I’d be dead long before that.
I’d fought these things once before. They were horrific foot soldiers of the Old Ones. They came from an alien dimension, with many different shapes, sizes, and capabilities, some were small and fast, others were lumbering armored insect tanks, others could fling parts of their bodies as poisonous projectile weapons, and every one of them were tenacious and deadly. It was only the intervention of me using Lord Machado’s artifact that had saved our lives last time.
There was no way I could climb up the jagged face of the building and get back inside without being speared. Abomination was still slung to me, but I was too dizzy to walk, let alone fight effectively. I could see dozens of flashes of bright color through the mist. They were almost here.
“—hear me? Owen! Hide! Hide now!” It was Julie. My radio was still working. “They’re coming!”
She could see me. Julie was on the opposite roof, watching helplessly through a scope as her husband flailed around stupid and injured in the mud with a horde of interdimensional insect demons heading right at me.
Screw that. I didn’t want her to see me die.
My first inclination for most problems was to shoot them, but that would only get me killed here. Julie was right, I needed to hide. Crawling back to the big chunk of concrete, I found the partially crushed body. He had been squished into the soft dirt and was a real mess. We had no idea how smart these things were, and in any case, these probably weren’t the real thing anyway, rather figments of our imagination made real. I had no idea if this would work. Grimacing, I lifted the unmangled arm, and then lay down beneath, trying to squish myself as far into the soil as possible. Sorry, man. I tried to stay perfectly still. I was immediately coated in hot, sticky blood.
It was disgusting. It was infuriating. It was better than dying.
“They’re right on top of you,” Julie whispered in my earpiece, and then she too was silent, unsure if they would be able to hear even that much noise. I shut the radio off before anybody else made noise on this channel. Then I held my breath.
There was a narrow gap between the concrete and the dirt. Dozens of demonic limbs charged past, claws ripping up grass or elephantine feet smashing great circular tracks into the dirt. Bullets landed throughout the garden as the Hunters tried to hold them off.
Fall back. Get to a choke point. Come on, guys. Stay alive.
There were hundreds of demons. The first wave of black and orange bodies hit the breach only to be washed away by machine-gun fire. More arrived within seconds, clustered all around the hole, twitching and moving like bees on the surface of a hive. They were too occupied with the living to search the dead. Yet.
There had only been a handful of Hunters inside that area when the hotel had been hit. Not nearly enough to stop the tide of demons.
Milo must have left more of his explosives behind to slow them, because a few seconds later a final explosion rocked the breach, clearing the swarm off the wall and flinging demon bits in every direction.
By the time the gray smoke cleared, the fastest of the creatures had already swarmed in after the fleeing humans. The spine-flinging warriors continued inside after them.
But I wasn’t alone…Now the claws around my hiding place were moving more slowly, methodically. These feet were smaller. The workers had arrived. Like four-foot-tall, yellow, bipedal grasshoppers, their joints clicked and popped as they moved, and as I watched, horrified, they began pulling a body from the wreckage to systematically rip apart. Every direction I could peer through the gap, there were more twisted legs, dozens of them.
A grasshopper demon took hold of the limp arm resting on my back and began to tug. I was alone in the middle of them, but not helpless. I slowly moved one hand to Abomination’s grip. I’d take as many of them with me as possible.
Please let Julie escape. That’s all I ask.
There were demons everywhere.
So this is how I die…
“Not yet, Z. You don’t get off that easy.”
My radio was off, but I’d heard the familiar voice as clear as day.
It can’t be. He’s dead. Ray Shackleford killed him. I was fading in and out of reality. I was injured worse than I thought. Now I was hearing voices from my past.
But…Was that Copenhagen chewing tobacco that I was smelling?
“You’re not in the real world anymore, Z. You’ve all been shanghaied into a place between worlds. He’s killing you with things from your own pasts, things that are already dead and gone. Well, me and the other guys are sick of that shit, and here we can do something about it. This evil son of a bitch isn’t the only one that can cheat.”
A demonic claw wrapped around my boot and I was pulled from underneath the body parts and concrete. The worker demon grabbed the back of my armor and flipped me over. The creature loomed over me. Its pack of eyes flickered back and forth and then it clicked hungrily as it realized I was alive. It leaned over to slice my face off with one of its jagged mouths.
The demon’s face exploded, splattering me with hot bits. A figure stepped over me and kicked the headless corpse aside. The man knocked a second monster down with the stock of his rifle. Another monster ruptured in a shower of yellow bile. He worked a Marlin lever-action rifle and fired from the hip, disemboweling a third creature. He kept shooting and shooting and shooting, driving the demons back. Somehow the rifle never seemed to run out of ammo.
He was wearing MHI-issued body armor, bandoleers of individual rounds of .45-70, and on his arm was a patch featuring a walrus with a banjo.
It can’t be.
I’d never seen these demons show fear before, but this Hunter scared them. Screeching and chattering in their incomprehensible language, the horde retreated. “That’s right, you bugs!” he bellowed after them. “Run back to your master and tell him he’s not the only one with friends at this party.”
“But you’re dead,” I croaked.
“Duh.” Sam Haven turned around and grinned at me from beneath his gigantic mustache. “But screw death. I’ve got shit to get done. Come on.”
“Are you from my imagination?”