Monster Hunter Legion-eARC

  “I figured as much…” He finally turned around and ground his cigarette into an ashtray. “Either Heather’s team disappeared into the desert without a trace or Stricken was just yanking my chain, manipulating us for who knows what.” Earl sighed. “Well, to hell with Stricken. To hell with Myers. To hell with the bunch of them. They take and take and take some more…Hunters bleed, and sacrifice, and die, all for a world that doesn’t give a shit about us. They just assume we’ll step up because we always have. Maybe one day we just won’t bother.”

  I’d never heard him speak like that before. Earl Harbinger would never quit, never give up, the idea was inconceivable. My wife looked as concerned as I felt. “Earl, if there’s anything we can do…”

  “I’m just beat is all. We’ll talk about it some more in the morning. Good night, Z.”

  Chapter 11

  Julie awoke with a gasp. It immediately startled me wide awake. My hand landed on the long slide STI .45 resting on the nightstand. “What?” The alarm clock read 4:12 A.M. “What’s going on?” It took me a second of fumbling in the unfamiliar hotel room to get the lamp turned on.

  My wife was sitting up in bed, breathing fast, scanning the room nervously. Sweat was running down her neck. “Nightmare…I think.” She found her glasses, put them on, then stopped, puzzled. She placed one hand against the black lines on her neck, then snatched it back as if she’d burned herself. She looked at me, eyes wide with surprise. “Something’s wrong. Something’s here. I can feel it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s like an alarm is going off on my skin.” She sprang out of bed, whipped off her nightgown and began pulling armor out from under the bed.

  “Crap.” None of us understood how any of this metaphysical stuff worked, but we knew some of the Guardian’s abilities had been passed on to her. If those evil lines were saying something was wrong, she didn’t have to tell me twice. “Crap, crap, crap.” I rolled out of bed and started getting dressed. I always left my clothes where I could find them fast even in the dark. “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell.” No matter where we were, or what we were doing, Julie always kept a loaded rifle under the bed. This one was her Inside Gun, a heavily customized Springfield SOCOM with a short sixteen-inch barrel and a red dot sight. It was a stubby version of her regular rifles. She had it out and leaning against the nightstand before she’d even started putting her socks on. “I just feel like something really bad is here.”

  “And people keep calling me the psychic,” I said as I tied my boots. “Should we wake everyone up?”

  “Give it a second,” Julie said. “My neck’s stopped tingling. Maybe it’s nothing.”

  I kept gearing up, all the while hoping it was a false alarm. If Julie was wrong, maybe it had only been a bad dream caused by the celebratory bratwurst. Nothing would happen, we’d eventually go back to sleep, and laugh about it in the morning. Well, probably not laugh, since being marked by magic related to the foul Old Ones was never a laughing matter, but at least we would go back to sleep. Then I realized how freaking cold it was.

  “Feel that?” Julie asked, and I could see her breath come out as steam.

  “Yeah…” I read the numbers on the thermostat. The digital display said it was sixty-eight. Then it blinked and showed the time as 4:15, then it blinked again. Twenty-four degrees. “Holy moly.” There were a few times in my life when I’d experienced this kind of rapid, unnatural temperature drop. None of them had ever been indicators of upcoming good times. “We’ve got incoming.”

  “Incoming what, though?” Julie said. “Here, buckle me.” I helped her with her harness while she pulled out her phone and started typing. “I set up a company-wide alert earlier, just in case.” My iPhone was sitting on the table, and it began to vibrate as it received her message a few seconds later.

  “Clever. You’re cute when you’re paranoid.”

  “And freezing. Stupid magic warning thing should’ve told me to pack a sweater.”

  I was still buckling and checking mag pouches as we entered the empty hallway. Julie had just put her earpieces in. “Radio check. This is Julie, who’s with me?” I hadn’t gotten mine in yet, so I wasn’t sure who responded, but she gave me a thumbs-up. She had somebody. “Gather in the halls. If you know where other Hunters are sleeping, wake them up…Yes, Green, wake the foreigners too. No, I’m not yelling.” She rolled her eyes. “No. I don’t know what it is…What’s the temperature like on your floor? Okay.” Julie looked back at me. “Fifteenth floor is good. Seventeenth floor is comfy…Sixteenth floor is unnaturally cold. It’s here with us. Repeat, unknown entity seems to be on the sixteenth floor.”

  “Son of a gun,” I muttered as I pulled back the charging handle on Abomination and chambered a round of silver buckshot. “Figures.”

  “Okay, Hunters above and below. Stop the elevators and seal the stairwells. There are…five stairwells and two—no, three elevators. Don’t forget the freight one. We are not letting this thing get away.” She signaled for me to get my radio in, and while I did so she watched the hall. “Watch your shots. There are a lot of innocents here.”

  I got my earpieces in place, and all sound took on a slight bit of distortion from the electronic amplification. They weren’t crystal perfect, but I could hear my teammates and protect my hearing from gunfire at the same time. I touched Julie’s arm to demonstrate that I was good to go. She nodded. The door across from us opened and Trip came out, wearing the top half of his armor, but only a pair of basketball shorts and flip flops. “Late night?” I asked Trip. “Did you level up your paladin?”

  “Paladin? No. I was playing Warmachine. There’s no…Never mind…How the heck did you get dressed so fast? My gosh. Do you sleep in this stuff?”

  Our hotel deal had been mostly for rooms with two queen-sized beds, so Milo was Trip’s roommate. He came out a moment later, slapping a magazine into an M-4. His beard was particularly puffy and terrifying when it hadn’t been groomed yet. “What’ve we got?” He too, had only gotten part of his gear on.

  “Dude…You have flannel footy jammies?”

  Milo looked down. “Yeah, aren’t they nifty? Shawna got them for me for my birthday.”

  “Shhh.” Julie held one finger up to her lips. We fell silent. She pointed down the hall toward one of the other doors. I couldn’t tell what she was seeing. She keyed her microphone. “Something’s going on in 1613. Checking it out.”

  I leaned in close to my wife. “What is it?”

  “Look at the carpet.”

  I’d been studying the door. I hadn’t noticed the floor. The carpet around 1613 seemed darker. I took another step and the carpet squished damp underfoot. As I moved, the light glistened off of what appeared to be water running out from under the door.

  Milo had noticed it too. “Wet and cold monster stuff,” he whispered. “We’ll see who’s laughing at my warm footy pajamas soon enough.”

  “Wake up whoever’s next door and let’s get them out of there. This might be ugly,” Julie suggested. Milo took one side and Trip took the other, knocking loudly, as me and Julie slowly approached 1613. “Whose room is this?”

  I’d walked right past this after leaving Earl’s last night. This had been one of the party rooms. “One of Grimm Berlin’s, I think.” The stuff trickling out from under the door looked like normal water, nice and simple, like maybe the toilet had backed up. Nothing supernatural at all, except the carpet was already coated with a sheen of ice.

  Nate Shackleford had come around the opposite corner. Julie signaled for her brother to knock on the doors on that side. Jason Lacoco arrived a moment later. Great. Not my first choice of who I wanted at my back if something went down. There was some angry swearing in Spanish as Milo roused the first of the other occupants.

  There was a loud grinding noise from inside the 1613, like someone was dragging a piece of heavy furniture. All of the Hunters in the hallway tensed.

  Julie got back on the radio. “Earl, some
thing’s going down. We’re going in.”

  “Hold on. I’ll be there in a second,” Earl responded.

  There was a shriek of terror on the other side of the door. “Someone’s hurt. Going in now,” Julie shouted. I tried the doorknob. It was so cold I could feel it through my glove. Of course it was locked and needed a key card.

  “Somebody else go, then. Julie, stay put. It’s too dangerous.”

  “What?” Julie’s mouth fell open. “You…what?” I was as stunned as she was. Julie wasn’t exactly some delicate flower. She was always wherever it was the most dangerous. She’d been hunting monsters since she was a teenager. Earl had never coddled her before. My wife’s surprise turned to fury. “Sorry, Earl, you’re breaking up.”

  “Hold on! That’s an order.”

  “What’s his problem?” She let go of her mike and looked at me. “Kick it.”

  “Love to.” The lights would probably be off inside, so I turned on Abomination’s flashlight. Julie moved out of my way, covering me with the Springfield. I raised one size fifteen boot and let it fly. The hotel door was really solid, but I was big, excited, and the deadbolt ripped right through the jamb. The door flew open with a bang, with me and Abomination one step behind it.

  I skidded to a wet halt. Too surprised and confounded to move forward. “Fuck me…”

  The water wasn’t from an overflowing toilet or a busted pipe…It was from the river. The fifty-foot-wide, gray, frothy river that I was standing on the grassy bank of. I looked down. The tan hotel carpet simply terminated in a straight line and on the other side was dead winter grass. I looked up. There was ceiling, regular old, textured white ceiling…and then it, too, ended in a straight line, and past that there were stars. It was a wide-open night sky, and it sure as hell wasn’t in Las Vegas. To the side, there were no walls, there were trees. Inside room 1613 was a river and a forest, at least as big, if not bigger than the entire casino we were supposedly in.

  The hotel room wasn’t simply gone, it was like it had never been here, and I’d stepped through that doorway into a whole new world.

  Julie was right behind me. She collided with me. “What the—” I could hear Milo, Trip, and Nate behind us. They could all see it too. I hadn’t just lost my mind. “Back up. Back up!” Julie ordered. I was glad to get back on the carpet.

  “I just looked inside the room next door. There’s no giant forest in that one,” Milo said. The space which should have held that room was a copse of dense, gnarled, gray trees. “This is bad.”

  As bizarre as this was, I’d seen something similar a couple of times, extra-dimensional spaces grafted onto an earthly entrance. “Pocket dimension?”

  “They don’t normally appear out of nowhere,” Julie said.

  “Got a better explanation—” There was a scream to my right. The coat closet opened and the source of the scream nearly got ventilated by several very jumpy Hunters. A woman fell out amidst a clatter of clothes hangers and the ironing board. “Help! Help me! It got him!” She was hysterical.

  “Who’s she?” Julie asked, Springfield shouldered, ready to blast the stranger.

  I recognized the silly, skimpy, and now soaked and muddy Oktoberfest outfit. It was one of the dancers. “She’s from the party. Trip, grab her.”

  Trip took her by the arm and helped her up. She was hysterical. “It’s coming back. It’s coming back!”

  “What’s coming back?” Julie asked calmly.

  “It. Hugo called it Nachtmar before it…it got him! The metal with the worm in it, and the bones, and, and…” She pointed at the river and screamed incoherently.

  Something had appeared in the swirling, muddy water. At first it was just a dark spot, easily lost between the currents, but then it was heading our way, slowly, deliberately. A sharp point appeared. The incoherent screaming was getting on my nerves. “Get her out of here, Trip!” The point grew into a single black horn, then the water split around a wider shape made of decaying metal. It was moving along the riverbed, climbing out of the water, gradually coming right at us. “We’ve got company.”

  The others had crowded in around me in the narrow space between the coat closet and the bathroom. There was a clatter as guns were readied. “Hold your fire,” Julie ordered. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

  More of the head broke the surface, revealing a metal helmet, decorated with spikes and antlers and horns, but much larger than it needed to be to fit a human head. With each step it would bob into the water, then come back, and a little bit more would be revealed. There was a slit for the eyes, but only a cold blackness behind, there was a gash for a mouth, stained with rust. More spikes appeared as broad, razor-studded shoulders emerged. It was like a medieval suit of armor, only misshapen and twisted, broken, reformed, and then sharpened. Another step and its chest came out, the metal rent open, revealing white humanoid ribs, tangled with rotten fabric and frayed rope. Behind the ribs was a heaving, pulsing, translucent gray sack, like an unnatural organic engine.

  Waist-deep in the river, it lifted one gauntleted hand to display the jagged remains of a great sword. The other hand rose, holding the severed head of the German Hunter, Hugo. It showed the head to us, displaying it like a trophy.

  “I’d say we know now,” I shouted.

  “Fire!” Julie commanded.

  I put the holographic reticule of my EOTech on the monstrosity and let Abomination roar. The other Hunters did the same. The muzzle blast from so many guns in such close proximity was brutal. The armored monstrosity shuddered and wheezed as hundreds of projectiles slammed into it. Holes puckered in the metal. An antler snapped off. Bullets hit the gray organic mass inside, but rather than puncture through, they impacted, deformed the surface, but didn’t penetrate. A terrible shriek came from the monster. I kept pulling the trigger, hammering alternating rounds of silver buckshot and heavy slugs into my target until the firing pin landed on the empty chamber with a sharp click.

  It reeked of unburned powder and fear in the narrow space. As the guns fell silent and everyone scrambled to reload, the creature began walking slowly toward us again. Hugo’s head was discarded and swept away by the current. “The door’s a choke point. Fall back,” Julie said.

  The weight of the Hunters around me broke and moved away. “I got this,” I said as I broke open the new grenade launcher mounted under Abomination’s handguard. Milo hadn’t been able to come up with a steady supply of the Russian grenades, so I’d switched to an American-made M203. Normally, firing a grenade launcher at a target inside the same hotel room would be suicide, except this hotel room was now the size of a park, and the metal monstrosity was just far enough away that I could blast it and not be hit myself with shrapnel. I dropped a hefty 40mm shell in and slid the launcher shut.

  BLOOP. The grenade hit the creature square in the chest and detonated in a flash of smoke. The explosion knocked it back into the river with a ponderous splash.

  “Suck it!” Nate shook his fist. “How you like us now?”

  The thing thrashed and clawed its way out of the mud. Metal creaked as it stood back up. It had shrugged off a direct hit from a 40mm. As disturbing as that fact was, the other dozen or so horns, antlers, and points popping up in the water behind it was much worse. It had brought friends.

  “Fall back!” Julie shouted as she rocked another mag into her rifle.

  I lumbered out of the room, yanking open a grenade pouch on my armor. Trip and Milo had taken up positions on either side of the door, and after I passed by, they started shooting.

  Nobody in the hotel had slept through that. Hunters from all over the world were coming into the hall, trying to figure out what was going on. Lindemann pushed past the crowd, armed with nothing but a pistol and wearing one of the hotel bathrobes. “That’s Hugo’s room. What is going on?”

  “Unknown monsters,” Julie said. “Looks like a pocket dimension opened up inside.”

  “I must retrieve them—”

  I blocked his
way. “Hugo’s dead.”

  “No. It can’t be.” Lindemann was shocked. “You are certain?”

  I nodded. “It chopped his head off.”

  “I must see.” He swatted my arm away with surprising strength. He reached Milo, and when he saw what was inside, began swearing vehemently in German. It was hard to hear him between the gunshots. He turned to Julie. “It is the beasts from Stuttgart!”

  “What?”

  “We have fought these before. The Stuttgart Massacre, but this is impossible.”

  Earl Harbinger arrived. “I told you not to go in!” Earl snapped at my wife, but rather than continue on that futile path, he got right down to business. “What’ve we got?”

  Julie began to explain. When Trip and Milo ran their guns dry, Lacoco and Nate took their place. More Hunters were filing down the hall with heavier weapons. I have no idea how the big Pole had managed to get a PKM into the country, but I was glad to see a belt-fed. Word of what was happening had spread quickly. The rooms on either side were secured, the alien forest that had somehow invaded our hotel hadn’t spilled through the walls. Instead, a single, maybe five-hundred-square-foot, room was holding several acres of forest.

  Lacoco was firing a Remington 870 as fast as he could pump the action at the cumbersome monster. When he clicked empty, I grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him away before he even realized he’d run dry. He snarled at me but I shoved him aside. Personal beefs could wait. This was business. “Move your ass, Newbie!” I shouted as I took his spot. “Reload that gun!”

  Half a dozen silver slugs later I got my first indication that shooting these things wasn’t completely futile. The original monster had been practically chewed into scrap by our small-arms fire, and collapsed in a clanking and wheezing heap twenty feet from the door to our reality. The metal shell had been hammered so badly that it was simply not capable of further movement. “Good news! They can be stopped.”