“Either way it’s bad.” A chorus of undead moans filled the entire casino, dozens, maybe hundreds of them. “Keep going!”
The purple carpet near my feet ripped open and a rotting hand poked through, grasping wildly. Beneath the carpet was soft, crumbling black dirt. I flinched and jumped back. “Impossible,” I muttered as I smashed the hand beneath my size-fifteen boot and took off after my friends.
Tanya screamed as a hand broke through a nearby wall and reached for her. She backed into a slot machine, and another hand shattered the glass and grabbed a tangle of her hair. Suddenly, Edward was by her side, his sword humming through the air, and the hand went flying. It landed on a nearby blackjack table, still twitching as spasmodically as the maggots poking out of it.
“How the hell does that work?” I took a step around the broken slot machine. There wasn’t even room for a zombie to fit inside, but laws of physics be damned, there was still a zombie crawling out of it. The broken glass cut through its rubbery, bloodless skin. “I hate monsters that cheat.” I blew its head off.
“This way.” Trip was in the lead. Zombies were popping up all around us, clawing their way out of the floor as if it was made of soft cemetery dirt, crashing through the walls around us like they were old mausoleums instead of sheetrock and new wallpaper. Trip came running back, a mob of zombies blocking the direction we’d come from. “Not that way.”
We were completely surrounded. There were hundreds of them. Was there any limit to what the Nachtmar could create? I killed a zombie with each shot left in Abomination’s magazine, then dropped the shotgun to dangle from its sling and pulled my pistol. I lined up the sights and brain-shot the next zombie in line. Four more took its place. Even keeping our cool and dropping a zombie with each round, we’d be out of ammo and overwhelmed in no time. We needed an exit or at least a choke point.
“Over here,” Tanya said. There was a set of double doors nearby that I hadn’t seen earlier. Tanya ran to the doors and yanked them open. “They’re unlocked.” She looked in. “And zombie-free!”
Anything was a better option than getting eaten. “Get in there then.” An arrow hit a nearby zombie in the chest. The thing rocked, but then kept walking, oblivious to the shaft sticking out from between its ribs. “Quit dinking around and move!”
Trip walked backward toward the doors, firing methodical, single, aimed shots the whole time. Edward was on the other side, and in a flash of movement, zip zip zip, three zombies fell to the floor, their heads rolling away. I emptied my pistol magazine on the way over to them. There was quite the pile of corpses all around us by the time I got there.
The four of us got through the doors, and they swung shut behind us. Edward found something on the ground, picked it up, and shoved it through the twin handles to form a makeshift crossbar.
We were in a long, straight, industrial-gray hallway. There were rows of green lockers on each side and multiple wooden doors with small glass windows inset in them. The fluorescent lights above us were flickering and humming.
I braced my shoulder against the door, reloaded Abomination, and got ready for the inevitable zombie onslaught. “We’ll hold them until help comes. If they break through the door, the hall’s narrow enough to funnel them down. Let’s stack these sons a bitches, Trip.” He didn’t answer. Trip was busy staring down the hallway. I looked past him, but couldn’t see anything worth fixating on. The hall terminated at a bulletin board. That wasn’t nearly as interesting as an onslaught of flesh-eating zombies. “Trip?” I snapped my fingers. “Trip!”
My friend spoke very slowly. “This is bad…Really, really bad.”
Shit. It was unlike Trip to lose it. “Ed, help me.” The orc put one boot against the base of the door, sheathed one sword, then took the other one up in both hands, ready to thrust it through the intersection of the two doors to surprise-kill a zombie. With Captain Slice ’n’ Dice by my side, any zombie hands that broke through were going to get lopped off real quick. We just had to hold until Harbinger hit them from the other side.
But there was no crash, no press of undead corpses stacking up against the door. It was quiet…Had the zombies been too stupid to follow us? That was possible depending on the type and strain, and those had been slow shamblers, the stupidest type I knew of. Or had the Nachtmar’s magical effect worn off? If I opened the door, would they be gone and the casino turned back to normal, or would they be there waiting? I got up, realizing as I did so, it was no longer cold. In fact, it was hot. A deep, thick, muggy heat that made me feel like I was back in Alabama. The sudden temperature change made my skin tingle painfully.
“Heh…” Trip laughed absently. “This is really bad.”
I looked back to the door. Still no zombies. But then I realized what Edward had used to jam the door handles closed. It was a pickax, and the metal tips were coated with congealing blood and tufts of hair. “Trip, where are we?”
“This is where I found out monsters are real…We’re in Florida.” Trip said. “Lord help us, this is my high school.”
John Jermaine Jones, or Mr. J, as he was commonly called back then, had been a teacher at a small-town high school in rural Florida when the zombie outbreak had occurred. Some local teens had antagonized a witch doctor, with gruesome results. The outbreak had been a small one by historical standards, but still bad enough to warrant a Level Three containment by the Monster Control Bureau. Luckily for them, the events had occurred only a few days before a hurricane, which provided a handy scapegoat to explain the number of dead and missing in the media. There had only been a handful of firsthand eyewitness survivors, and all except one had been rather easily intimidated into silence, but that one had been recruited by a private Hunting company and had signed all of the applicable NDAs, so by Monster Control Bureau standards, the Leonard, Florida, outbreak had been handled flawlessly.
Those facts were all irrelevant to Mr. J, who had spent the evening hitting his students in the head with a pickax.
Trip stumbled and crashed into one of the puke-green lockers. He was beginning to hyperventilate. I ran over and caught him before he could slide to the floor. “This isn’t real! Trip, he’s messing with your head. We’re not really here.” Probably.
“I can’t do this again.” Trip grabbed onto my arm so hard that it hurt. “Not this. I had to kill them, Z. I had to kill them all. I tried to save them, but there were too many. I had to leave some of the kids behind.”
“That was a long time ago. You did the best you could. We’re going to walk out of here. This is all an illusion.”
Tanya rapped her knuckles on the wall. “Nope. It’s real. We’re just not in our world. We’re in between.”
“In between what?” I demanded.
“People are used to only being in one world. Hunters get used to seeing into others sometimes. Elves can see into some of the others a little. There’s lots of other worlds bunching up against ours. That’s where lots of monsters come from, you know, but this…This is part of some other world squished into ours. It’s all twisted up so I don’t recognize which one it is. I wish I could call Momma. She’d know.”
“Night-mare-land,” Edward rumbled, still watching the door. “Bad place.”
Choosing between a casino full of zombies on Earth or wandering further into nightmare-land was an easy call. “Whatever it is, we’re getting the hell out of here.” I dragged Trip back to his feet. “Listen to me, man. I need you to focus. Now is not the time to lose your shit.”
“I’m okay,” he said wiping his eyes with the back of his glove. “Wasn’t expecting this is all. Let’s get out of here.” There was steel in his voice as Trip lifted his gun. “Put your game face on.”
“That’s more like it. Ed, get ready.” I pointed Abomination at the doorway.
Our orc yanked out the pickax and let it clatter to the floor. He kicked the door open and…
“Oh, come on…” Slowly lowering Abomination, I gawked at the scene. There was a sidewalk, some bushes
, then the clearly marked handicapped parking area, and behind that were some tall street lamps being circled by clouds of reflective nighttime bugs, and beyond that was an empty street, then the bleachers for a football field, and on the other side of that was a dense, dark, swampy forest, clicking and buzzing with insect life. The door slowly swung back inside, then out, then in, then stopped, blocking the scene entirely. “Trip?”
It took him a moment to get his voice back. “That’s what it looked like. I ran into the first zombies where they had been digging up a busted water pipe outside. That’s how I got the pickax in real life.”
I sighed. “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Edward muttered something, and Tanya gave him a friendly cuff. “Of course, Las Vegas is in Nevada,” Tanya said. “That’s from The Wizard of Oz. Didn’t your momma let you watch any TV while you were growin’ up? Orcs…”
“What do we do?” I asked her.
“Why are you asking me?” Tanya was terrified.
“You’re the wizard!” I gestured at the doors that most certainly did not lead back into the casino. “That’s a magic issue. Fix it!”
A low growling sound came from inside one of the nearby lockers. All of us jumped. Something thumped against the sheet metal. Then it thumped again, harder. Something was trying to get out. I put the EOTech on the center of the locker. Trip was saying something under his breath, repeating the same thing over and over, and I realized he was praying. “What is it?”
“Her name was Amy. She was on the softball team, sophomore, good kid. Bright future.” Trip’s whole body was shaking. “She was the only survivor outside. I came in here to call for help, but I could hear more of them ahead. This locker was open, so I told her to get inside. I closed the door and told her to stay real quiet…I didn’t know what else to do. I thought they wouldn’t be able to get to her.”
The locker rocked. The metal frame was bending around the latch. The zombie inside couldn’t get enough range of motion to break itself free.
“Don’t cry. Don’t cry. I’ll get help. Just stay quiet and they won’t know you’re here…” Trip whispered.
“She had already been bitten, hadn’t she?”
“I didn’t know what to do back then, Z. I did the best I could.”
Edward stepped forward, lifted his sword about head high, and drove it cleanly through the sheet metal. He wrenched it around then pulled out the blade, now coated in fresh blood. The moaning stopped. The locker was still.
There was a sudden bang as a door further inside the school was opened. Someone screamed.
“This is how it happened…Exactly how it happened,” Trip said. “This is exactly how it happened. They all died last time.” The screaming continued. It sounded like a young woman, high-pitched and terrified.
“Focus, Trip. Listen to me, man.” I grabbed him by the shoulder. “Don’t let him mess with your head. It’s not real.”
“What if it is? We don’t know who else is in here.” Desperate, he knocked my hand away. There was more crashing as furniture was knocked over, followed by the groans of the hungry dead. Then there was a chorus of screams. “I can save them this time.” Trip took off in a sprint.
I should’ve seen that coming. “Damn it, Trip!” I shouted after my friend. “Stop!” I couldn’t have tackled him if I wanted to. Trip was way faster than I was. “Hell. Come on,” I told the other two.
Trip was running full tilt, and he’d been a college football running back. The dude could move. He got to the next intersection, hung a left, and disappeared. I got there a few seconds after him. There were bloody handprints on the walls. Trip had already rounded the next corner when I stepped in a puddle of blood, slipped, and landed on my hands and knees. Ed moved to help me, but I waved him on. “Catch Trip.” Tanya and Edward did as I ordered and kept running.
I got up and started after them, but as I reached the next corner, the fluorescents died. I was completely engulfed in darkness. I reached out to touch the wall that had just been there, but my hand fell through nothing. I took another step to where I was positive the wall would be, but it was only open air.
The world around me had vanished. “Oh, crap.”
Everything was just gone. It was empty and dark and vast, and my muscles threatened to lock up in fear. I had to fight down the sudden urge to panic. I blundered forward, sightless. No. Don’t leave me here.
Then there was a tiny flicker of light ahead, the fluorescent lights of the high school. I struggled toward it.
The figure of a man stepped into my path. “Wait, please.” I squinted to see who it was, and with a shock, recognized the young man that I’d seen briefly at the wrecked gas station. He was in the same olive-drab utility clothing, free of any identifier. My initial reaction was to shoot him, but the look on his face was one of concern rather than menace. “Don’t leave yet. I pulsed you here so we can talk without him hearing us. It’s getting worse out there, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
The young man rubbed his face with his hands, the motion of a man who was desperately trying to wake up. “I don’t remember.”
“You’d better start remembering, sport. Are you the one behind this? Are you the Nightmare?”
“No. I’m trying to hold him back. I used to remember how to control him, but I’ve been asleep. They put me to sleep. I’m still trying to wake up. Everything’s so confusing. I don’t know anymore.”
What the hell is going on here? “What do you remember?”
“Needles…They stuck so many needles in me. Hundreds and hundreds of needles. They gave me drugs. They shut down my brain. They thought it would stay inside me that way. The doctors thought it would sleep forever, but it dreamed the whole time. Such terrible dreams…” The young man shuddered, and that seemed to rouse him from his haze. “I’ve got to find her. Help me find her, mister. I have to know she’s safe. In the dreams, he showed me over and over what he would do to her. That’s how he woke me up. I’ve got to get to her before he does. Help me find her, then I can put him back to sleep. I can’t rest until I know she’s safe.”
He’d mentioned finding someone last time. “Who?”
It was as if he didn’t hear me. “He wants you to die here. You’ve crossed into his world. I’ll try to make a door for you and your pals to go back through. I won’t be able to do that for too many more times now that he’s awake. He gets stronger, then he rests and comes back again. The stronger he gets, the more the worlds will blur together. I’ll make you a door home, but promise you’ll help me first.”
What choice did I have? “Okay. I promise.” The darkness parted just a bit more. The place I’d just been standing was ahead, shimmering as if it were under water. I took a step toward it, fearful that what felt like solid ground beneath my feet would disappear at any moment, then another step, and another. The light grew closer. “This woman I’m supposed to find, what’s her name?” Then I realized that the light was fading, and soon I would be left in the darkness, trapped. There was no time. “Shit.” I ran for it. As I moved past the young man, it was like being struck by an arctic wind, the cold was so piercing.
One freezing hand reached for me but it passed through my arm as if there was nothing there. The cold threatened to overpower me. “I remember something important. Topaz! Look at topaz!” he begged.
And then I was back in the light.
Turning around, there was nothing but the blood-smeared high school. The empty black was gone.
Another bloodcurdling scream brought me back to reality.
It was as if no time had passed at all, and I caught up to Tanya and Edward in a few seconds. Just ahead, Trip rounded one last corner and skidded to a stop.
I caught up. There was a mob of zombies waiting for us. Their clothing was ripped, red with fresh blood, there was a janitor, teachers and parents, but most of them were just normal kids. They were all focused on trying to get into a classroom, smashing themselves over and over agains
t the splintering door. There were interior windows; those were cracked, held together only by the wire mesh inside, but the zombies were slowly pushing their way in. The screams were coming from inside the classroom. The zombies had heard the squeak of Trip’s boots and their heads snapped around automatically, dead, glassy eyes fixated on him.
“This time I’ve got a gun,” Trip said. The zombies started toward us. “And I know how to use it.” Then he went to town. The first zombie caught a .45 right in the eye. The next two were going down before the brains of the first one had even splattered against the floor. The impact of the bullets made more noise than the firing of the suppressed KRISS. Brass tinkled across the floor.
A zombie lurched at us from a nearby closet. I blasted it square in the face. A dead cheerleader came from the other side, but Edward hurled a knife and stuck her head to a bulletin board. By MHI standards, slow zombies were easy money. Trip just kept on shooting real bullets into the imaginary zombies as they lurched and jerked their way toward us.
Trip’s gun was empty. There was still one left tottering toward him. I pointed Abomination. “I’ve got this,” he spat with uncharacteristic rage. Trip dropped his subgun and pulled the tomahawk from his belt. The zombie was wearing a white shirt and a tie. “Hey, Jim.” The zombie kept walking obliviously toward his destruction. Trip took two steps forward and swung, planting the little ax into Jim’s forehead. “You don’t get them this time.” Trip wrenched the tomahawk out, taking a huge chunk of scalp with it, then chopped Jim again, then one last time as the nearly headless corpse went down. Trip was panting. “Never again.”
In less than twenty seconds there were more than twenty dead zombies littering the hall. Edward went over and jerked his knife out of the wall and the zombie’s head. It dropped like a rock. Ed wiped his knife off on the cheerleader’s skirt before resheathing it. Tanya went to the side and barfed in a trash can.