Chapter 24
I ran through the darkened hall. My brother’s memories had been clear. I had a good general idea of what part of the building he had last been in. My biggest hindrances to finding him were the typical, stupidly confusing layout of most casinos, the fact that the power was out so I had to navigate by flashlight, my leg was fragged, and the fact that I didn’t know if they’d still be in the same place. Mosh and Holly might already dead.
They’re alive. Edward’s alive too. He’s too fast to die. Not like that.
I had heard the dragon’s roar and felt the vibrations of their battle for quite some time. He’d slowed it. Maybe even stopped it, because nothing had come after me. Yet.
I’d found the right part of the building, the offices of the evacuated casino. I recognized the frosted glass of the cubicle area where Mosh and Holly had kidnapped Dr. Blish. Nightmare fog covered six inches of the floor. It was freezing cold. My leg hurt so bad that it had moved into a whole new territory of pain. So I had put the pain in a drawer in my brain and shut it. Something was torn in there, I knew it, but I could still move relatively quickly and I could still put weight on it, so screw it. Lee would be in a leg brace for the rest of his life because of me, and I’d never once heard him complain about it.
That was just one of the many people whose lives were screwed up because of me. The list was a long one. Lee’s leg had been ruined, but how many Hunters had died that day at DeSoya Caverns because I hadn’t been strong enough to take out Lord Machado faster? I was here searching for my brother, his talent had been extinguished, his soul had been cut up along with his fingers, and that had been my fault too. I was never good enough. I never had been, and never would be. Edward was probably dead now too, just bones stuck in the dragon’s teeth.
The fog was crawling up the walls.
The Hunters that had been holding out at the Last Dragon were surely dead. There was no way the Nachtmar let that hotel back into this world if they were still alive. They were either dead, or worse, locked up in the dream world to be endlessly tortured, while the Nachtmar wrung every last bit of terror he could out of their minds.
They’re fine.
No. They’re not. They’re all dead. Lacoco and VanZant were dead too. A couple of minutes after I learned that I’d been just as awful a force in Jason’s life as everyone else I’d ever known, I’d abandoned him to die, ripped to bits by a flock of gargoyles.
I didn’t have a choice. If I didn’t reach the Nachtmar, everyone would have died. If the Hind had been crippled—
No. I could have gone back. I could have reached him. I could have gotten those other Hunters onto the helicopter. I was a hypocrite. I had tried to drown Grant Jefferson for abandoning me to monsters once, but I had done the exact same thing, only worse, because I’d done it to several Hunters. I hadn’t left to fight the Nachtmar. I had fled out of cowardice.
That’s not right. I’m forgetting something.
As I looked back over my life, all I could see was a long parade of failures. Even my successes were only postponing the inevitable. I’d defeated the Old Ones’ invasion. So what? They’d be back. Their victory was inevitable. All I’d done was use my finger to plug one hole of a leaking dam, only the whole thing was cracking and falling apart, and when it collapsed it would wash away the whole world. What was the point?
I found myself on the carpet, but I couldn’t remember falling down. The nightmare fog covered me completely, drifting over my face in a comforting cocoon. The cold was relaxing. I should just stay here for a while. Pushing on would only make things worse, cause more trouble, ruin more lives. It could be somebody else’s problem for once, somebody else’s responsibility. What was the point? It was like my father had always said, I wasn’t tough enough, I wasn’t smart enough, I didn’t try hard enough. Hell, I was supposed to end his life too, and the last thing I’d ever see in his dying eyes as the cancer consumed his brain was disappointment. The cycle never ended. They’d be better off without me.
Get up. Get up and fight. That’s the Nachtmar talking.
But I didn’t know which thoughts were my own. They were conflicting, colliding. Everything had gone dark. My flashlight had died, batteries leeched by the unnatural cold.
That helped me focus. It was trying to do the same thing to me.
Pushing myself up, the fog tried to drag me back down with chains made of self-pity. Images of sadness and failure filled my mind. “I’m stronger than you!” I roared. It was horrible, this terrible weight, but I managed to get back up. The fog wasn’t just around me, it was in me. Was this a glimpse into the sort of manipulations the human host had been enduring all this time? Lies, distortions, and half-truths…regardless of who you were, you would break eventually. The fog had taken on the consistency of foam and was clinging to my face. I had to physically grab bits of the stuff and hurl it away. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
I could have sworn that something moved in darkness of the corner of my eye. There was the rustle of dry leaves and a whisper. “You are good.”
“You’re not, you wretched piece of shit. Where’s my brother?”
The Nachtmar didn’t respond. Batteries dead, I blundered forward in the dark. The cold was making me stupid. It took a second for me to remember that Hunters always had a backup for everything. Two is one, one is none. There were glow sticks in a pouch on my armor, so I drew them out, cracked them, and shook them until I had a small comforting green glow to light my way. I tripped over a body on the floor. It might have been one of the Paranormal Tactical men or maybe somebody from STFU, but I couldn’t tell because his face had been dissolved.
“Mosh! Holly! Can you hear me?” They were here. Somewhere…But I had a sinking feeling that here and here were two different things. The Nachtmar was distorting reality. They were so close that I could feel them, but I felt like we were slipping in and out of the real world. The fog’s power was growing. The Nachtmar was feeding on everyone who was trapped in the mist. The nightmare realm was spreading. Good thing they’d evacuated. I couldn’t even imagine what this thing would be like if it could entrap an entire city. “Mosh!”
I got no answer.
But maybe that was because I was calling the wrong name…
The host had once been a normal man, corrupted. Heather Kerkonen had given me a pair of dog tags torn off the body buried in Dugway. My hands were shaking so badly from the cold it was hard to draw them free from my pocket. I held them up to the glow stick and squinted to see.
Kitashima, Marcus
I knew what all the info was for because of my dad’s tags. There was a service number, blood type A. The religion was an X, which if I recalled for that time period, meant something other than Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish. The name of the next of kin was Mary Kitashima. A wife? A mother? Was that who he had been demanding I find? The address section for the next of kin contact seemed to be only partially complete, Topaz WRC.
Look at Topaz.
That had been the host’s words. It had been a place. In his confusion, with his will being sapped and his mind being manipulated, the host had been searching for his home. WRC? It sounded vaguely familiar…Dr. Blish had told Mosh that all of the subjects had been volunteers that could blend in with the target populations. WRC…War Relocation Center.
I’d learned about this. My dad had made me learn about this. He’d wanted me to understand the fine line between men’s reason and fear, and just how quickly that line could be crossed. During World War Two the Japanese on the west coast had been rounded up, rights stripped, homes and property confiscated, and then they’d been imprisoned in several different godforsaken camps in the middle of nowhere. Over a hundred thousand people, just like that…Dad’s goal had been to instill a healthy mistrust for authority in his kids. That was one lesson that had stuck.
Topaz had been the name of one of those concentration camps.
“Marcus Kitashima! Come out and face me.” The fog recoiled away from me. It had been a long time since the Nachtmar had allowed that name spoken out loud in the presence of its host. “I kept my word. I know how to find her. I know how to find Mary. I know you can hear me. You need to push your way through the fog. Don’t let the Nachtmar stand in your way. Don’t let him stop you.”
The fog pulsed with an unnatural light. Something rose to my left, forming out of the floor in a vortex. It took on the shape of man, and for a brief moment, my hope surged…Only a hideous, shrieking ghoul surged forth, snapping ragged jaws and clawing bone fingers for my throat.
I calmly raised Abomination and blew its head off. The entire figure exploded into congealed mist globules. “Don’t let the nightmare cloud your mind, Marcus. Come toward the sound of my voice. I’m here to help you.” Other monsters formed in the fog, and I killed them, one after the other, not even thinking. Not even taking the time to assess them further than it took to see that they weren’t who I was looking for. I kept talking the whole time. Calm. Rational. Killing. “The Nachtmar is controlling you. He’s using you. He doesn’t want you to have the truth.”
Werewolf on the right. Two rounds of buckshot dissipated it back into nothing. The darkness was lying, spewing blasphemy and horror. Demons came out of the ceiling. I killed them. Whipping tentacles came out of the walls and exploded one after the other. I reloaded without thought and dropped a charging wight. It was an endless parade of beasts. It was so dark that I could only react at the last instant. It was pure instinct. Movement on both sides. I switched Abomination to my off hand and drew my pistol in the other. I drove my arms out and killed both of them before they could even fully form. “Come on!”
Moving forward, I found another real body, this time one in a wheelchair. It was Dr. Blish. Dead. Only there wasn’t a mark on him. His face was frozen in a final, rigid scream, killed by his own fear.
The fog crawled into his open mouth. The corpse turned his dead face toward me. The lips didn’t move, but he spoke with the Nachtmar’s voice. “I will not let him go. I will not go back to the silent lands.”
“You won’t have a choice. He’s stronger than you are.”
There was a scream to my side. I raised Abomination, but that had been a human scream, and despite the Nachtmar’s trickery, I knew this one was real. “Holly?”
“She dwells in my world now. She fights me, as you do. She will not give in to her fear like most, but she will break. I will—”
I slammed Abomination’s butt stock against the corpse’s skull hard enough to crack it wide open. “Zip it.” The doctor’s body spilled into the fog and the Nachtmar was silent. “Holly! Hang on. I’m coming.” It was difficult to tell with only the light of a few glow sticks, but this seemed like the storage room they’d hid in before. The door had been badly damaged and there was a big shelf lying on its side. I recognized the leering costumes. I took another step forward and my feet sunk into the floor. I didn’t need to see it to know that it had turned to soft dirt. The lines of reality were blurring hard in here. “Holly!”