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.”
“Bad news is that I see at least ten more coming,” Nate warned.
The gray, seemingly bulletproof tumor that had been stuck inside the chest cavity of the first creature slid out into the grass. The disgusting blob was alive, and squealed in an obnoxious high pitch as Nate hit it with several rounds of .308. The slug was the size of a calf, and it oozed and rolled itself back toward the river, leaving a steaming trail of blood and mucus behind.
“Oh, that is just nasty,” I growled as I launched another grenade into the approaching wall of iron. “The slugs in the torso are driving the suits. Next!” I shouted as I moved away.
The big man from Poland took my spot. He hadn’t even bothered to put on a shirt before coming to fight. The tattoo of linked ammo he had around one big bicep matched the belt hanging from the Russian machine gun at his side. His booming laugh made me think of a pirate captain. “I got out of bed with many beautiful women for this?” He fired from the hip, working the PKM side to side. Despite the lack of aiming or fire discipline, he wasn’t missing, and there was a continuous stream of clangs as bullets struck metal. The dude was good with a machine gun.
Earl was shouting orders. Lindemann interrupted him by tugging on one sleeve of his Minotaur-hide jacket. “Harbinger, listen to me. This is impossible. This cannot be happening.”
“Get a hold of yourself, Klaus, your boy is dead—” The German leader hadn’t struck me as the type to go into denial, especially at a time like this.
“I mean that this is an impossibility. This is some sort of magic trick. I know these beasts. We destroyed them years ago. They only come from one very specific place in my country. They cannot simply appear here.”
“Well, they have.”
“So it appears.” Lindemann didn’t sound convinced. “Something is here.”
“Assuming these are your old pals, how do we kill them?”
“The suits are mecha-magical constructs. The creatures that live inside them are the intelligence and source of power. They are vulnerable to heat. They can only survive in cold and moist environments.”
“They aren’t going to like Vegas much,” I said.
“Anybody got a flamethrower?” Earl shouted. The call was repeated, but sadly, even Hunters aren’t prone to drag along anything that heavy, awkward, and potentially lethal on vacation. Plus, checking a flamethrower onto a commercial airliner is a pain in the ass. “Damn it. Find me some incendiaries. Make some Molotovs. Z, hold that doorway no matter what!”
The better-armed Hunters had formed a line to take a turn. Despite the language barrier, everybody had caught on pretty quick that we did not want whatever everyone else was shooting at in 1613 to get out. “Got it.” A quick glance confirmed that the monsters were getting closer, but they were having to funnel toward us, and as the armor-piercing rounds took them down, they were being forced to clamber over the fallen. We were chewing them to bits.
But there were still more coming out of the river . . .
“Here! These should help.” Esmeralda Paxton squeezed past the line of Hunters with an armful of liquor bottles and a set of curtains over one shoulder. She flipped open her knife and began slashing strips from the curtains. She handed me a bottle and a rag.
“Will this stuff burn?” I smelled it. What was that, ninety proof? “Gah, never mind.” I stuffed the strip of curtain into the neck of the bottle and swished it around until it was soaked. I didn’t smoke, but anybody who might need to set something or someone on fire should always carry a lighter. Before I could get mine out of my armor one of the Europeans reached over, flipped open a turbo lighter, and ignited the rag. “Thanks.” And to think that I’d complained about all those annoying smokers earlier.
I hurled the Molotov through the doorway. It shattered against one of the fallen monsters and ignited its carapace. The creatures around it shrieked and pulled away. The alcohol burned far too quickly and the monsters were back on the move. “More!” I turned back to find that the Hunters without rifles or shotguns had formed an assembly line, cutting, stuffing, and lighting. A flaming bottle was waiting for me. Another two shooters cycled through as I took the second Molotov and chucked it at a different creature. It only burned for a few seconds of painful wailing. The dampness of the invading forest and less-than-ideal incendiaries was thwarting us. Two enterprising Australians had wrapped their curtains around lamps to make bundles and poured whiskey all over them. I got out of the way as they lit them and tossed the blossoming fireballs into 1613. The slugs made a chorus of painful shrieks.
We were the very model of efficient monster killing.
“Coming through! Make a hole! Bomb coming through.” Lee and Cooper were shoving their way down the hall, one dragging something big, the other pushing. The crowd parted and it was revealed to be the housekeeping cart.
Earl looked up, recognized his former Explosive Ordnance Disposal tech and his former Marine demolitions specialist, and smiled. “This should be interesting. Clear a path!”
Seeing who was involved, I was suddenly very nervous. The two of them stopped a few feet away. From the look of the cart, they had raided the janitor’s closet for cleaning supplies. Lee began pouring a big jug of a clear liquid into the trash can. Cooper dumped in a five-gallon bucket of something red. Lee began to stir it with a mop handle. The two explosives experts seemed positively giddy. That was a bad sign. “Somebody order fire?”
“Everybody except the next shooters fall back!” Earl shouted.
Milo came over, read the label on one of the empty bottles, and nodded approvingly. “Ooh, good idea. Hey, did you guys notice all this laundry soap?”
“Brilliant!” Lee exclaimed as he snatched up a box.
“Fall way back!” Earl clarified.
“Don’t worry. This should mostly just stick and burn rather than explode.” He sounded very excited, and if Milo was excited, then we should probably evacuate the city. “Mostly.”
If this was going to be it, I wanted to be where it was most dangerous, so I cut in line to be the last shooter. Lacoco took the other side. The nearest creature was only ten feet away, and as it took another halting, clanking step, I realized that the carpet in front of me was receding, almost as if the dead grass was consuming and replacing our reality. The bathroom was gone. There was a tree where the coat closet had been. Their world was growing. “Hurry it up!”
The housekeeping cart rolled on squeaky wheels until it was between me and Lacoco. Everybody else retreated. Cooper reached into his cargo pants and came out with a white phosphorus grenade. “My only one. This is our initiator.” My team was the only one that had arrived directly off a mission, and with the corresponding armament. The rest were supposed to be on vacation. How much deadly crap had Cooper stuck in his luggage? “You’ll probably want to chuck this thing as far as you can.” He really emphasized the word far. “Ready?”
I looked at Lacoco. “Yeah.” He put his shotgun down and took hold of one side of the cart.
The nearest monster was lifting a gigantic spiked mace over its antlered head. It would be on us in seconds. I grabbed the other side. The cart came off the ground easily enough. “Far as we can. Gotcha.”
“Everybody take cover!” Earl warned.
Coo
per yanked the pin on the hand grenade. The spoon popped off and he dropped it into the garbage can of chemical sludge with a plop. “Do it.”
We hadn’t exactly rehearsed this. There was no one, two, three, or an organized heave, ho, or any of that jazz. The fuse on a hand grenade is measured in a few short, very angry seconds. Lacoco and I both roared and flung the housekeeping cart as hard as we could. It sailed past the nearest monster, the lifeless helmet turning to watch it pass by, but then that was all I saw as Cooper reached out, grabbed the door, and yanked it shut.
“Get down!” Diving as far as I could, I hit the soggy carpet and covered my head.
FOOOOOOM!
The entire world shook, and the explosion was so loud that my hearing protection shut itself off for several seconds. The lights went out.
Somebody was coughing. Then I realized it was me. It was raining dust. Powerful flashlight beams appeared from both ends of the hall. Then something cold and wet was running under me. I rolled over and was glad to see that a pipe had busted in the ceiling and water was squirting into the hall, rather than it being the invader’s river water. The door to 1613 had been blown out and smashed through the opposite wall. Two feet of wall on either side of the door had been turned into splinters, and drywall chunks and the soggy carpet had been peeled back and shredded.
I wasn’t the only one coughing. The hallway was filled with a noxious smoke. I couldn’t see into 1613 at all. A shape leapt through the smoke and ran into the blast area. “Clear!” Earl called out from inside the room.
“Clear as in they’re all dead?” I shouted back.
“Clear as in they’re gone. Status?”
“Good,” I answered as I extricated myself out from under a few feet of building materials.
“I’m okay.” Lacoco came out of the smoke covered in dust and a trickle of red rolling down one cheek. He reached down for where he’d left his shotgun, but that whole section of wall was gone. He looked around and swore.
I shouldered Abomination, which was still faithfully tethered to my armor. “You’ll want to put a sling on that. Losing guns gets expensive.”
“Go to hell,” Lacoco told me.
Cooper walked up, proudly surveying the damage. Lee joined him a second later, laughing his ass off. They high-fived each other. The fire alarm was an annoying beep beep beep. Thank goodness the sprinklers didn’t go off, because that would have extra sucked. Hunters appeared through the haze, converging back on 1613. Earl walked out of the chaos, waving his hand in front of his face. “It’s over,” he assured everyone.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Julie reached my side and began running her hands around my head and neck. It wasn’t out of tenderness, though. She was looking for injuries. Being right next to an explosion was always a bitch, and bleeding to death while you were in shock was always a possibility. Someone else was inspecting Lacoco. “I’m okay,” I assured her.
“Uh-huh . . .” Now she was checking my arms for blood. “Keep talking. How’s your head?”
“I told you I’m fine.”
“What’s the anniversary date of the first time we met?” she asked.
That was a terrible question to check for traumatic brain injury. “Uh . . .” I sucked with dates. “It’s on the calendar?”
“Hah, gotcha,” she grinned. “Owen’s good.”
“What happened to mostly fire, Milo?” Earl asked.
Milo peeked his head around the corner of the next room. “That was way more explodey than I expected. What brand laundry soap was that? Oh . . . wait a second . . . I was thinking of something else. Never mind.”
The smoke cleared out quickly because there was a strong breeze. And when we could see again, the source of the breeze was fairly obvious. The pocket dimension, if that was what it had been, was gone. Room 1613 was back, but it was toast. The Cooper-Lee-Anderson insta-bomb had removed the windows, most of the back wall, and the balcony from 1613. The lights of the strip were bright through the gaping hole in the side of the hotel. The walls were shredded and blackened, the ceiling hung in tattered strips. The furniture was mangled.
Ten Hunters in various states of dress and preparedness swept into the room and secured it. There were no signs of the monsters, of the river or the forest, and especially no sign of Hugo. I walked to the edge of the remodeled outer wall and looked down. The balcony had landed in the pool. It was a good thing nobody had been swimming this early in the morning. There were a lot of flashing lights in the parking lot below as police cars and fire trucks arrived.
Trip joined me. He whistled at the destruction. “Between the buffet and this, I’m thinking we’re not getting invited back next year.”
CHAPTER 12
“Other than the water that leaked out, there’s no evidence it was ever here. A whole forest comes out of nowhere and takes over. Monsters that shouldn’t exist kill a Hunter and then disappear into thin air . . . I’ve never heard of anything quite like that before.” Julie told the assembled decision-makers.
I was sitting on the burned remains of the hotel bed. Ten minutes ago it would have been in a magical river. “You’re a master of understatement.”
Lindemann was in the center of the room, picking through the debris. “There is no sign of Hugo. Damn it.” He kicked the remains of a chair. “What is going on here?”
No one had a good answer for that.
The room was packed with lead Hunters from various countries. Many of our own experienced MHI staff were out running interference. We knew how to deal with American law enforcement much better than anyone else. The fact that there was an MCB contingent already in town was sure to complicate matters. They would probably be here shortly.
“We’re missing a few Hunters, but those that are gone were seen leaving the party, some alone, some with new friends. None of the other companies seem to be missing anyone. So it seems that everyone is accounted for except Hugo,” Julie explained. “Surrounding rooms weren’t affected, just this one. But how and why? The only witness said Hugo called it Nachtmar.”
“It means nightmare. That word will do as well as any other,” Lindemann said. He tossed a chunk of broken wood into a puddle. “Fitting.”
“You knew what these things were, Klaus?”
“They were the cause of the Stuttgart Massacre . . .” Most of the European Hunters began nodding and one of them crossed himself. “Grimm Berlin lost nearly half of our men.”
I was unfamiliar with the event. Julie leaned over and whispered to me. “It’s their equivalent to the Christmas party. Bad op.”
Lindemann seemed haunted as he continued to poke through the debris. “The monsters had been created in a necromantic ritual several hundred years ago, designed to be immortal soldiers for Emperor Maximilian by a mad alchemist named Schreiber. Only a few were activated in that time, but the denizens that were grown to give them life proved to be far too bloodthirsty, and the rest were hidden away and buried, hopefully to never be used.”
“I remember hearing that Maximilian’s iron army was one of the mystical things the Third Reich was searching for.” Earl should know. He’d been there, and had probably gotten that information firsthand, but since only a handful of us knew who he really was, that went unsaid.
“Which they never found, thankfully. It wasn’t until ten years ago, when a new canal was being dug in the city and their chamber was accidentally flooded. The water released them from their slumber. The Bundeswehr asked for our expertise in the cleanup. Only the beasts escaped the tunnels and entered a neighborhood. It was . . . horrific . . . We destroyed them all, wiped them out completely, but in the process Hugo and I were all that survived from our team.”
“That’s why you said these things were impossible.”
“The artistry of those creations is like a signature. Those were Herr Schreiber’s work. There is no way that such a particular design could be recreated so accurately, so far away, and in such different circumstances. The alchemical methods were lost hundre
ds of years ago. It would be like us discovering a Wendigo in Italy or a mermaid in Mongolia. These were special, one of a kind, regional monsters. No, something else is afoot here.”
“We should interview the woman Hugo was with,” Pierre Darne suggested. He was a young man, but struck me as a competent leader, maybe a little nervous, but trying to hide it, sort of like Nate in that respect. He kept his manner professional, though I did notice that he wouldn’t make eye contact with Earl Harbinger. Pierre even looked a bit like his deceased father, tall, thin, handsome, and with an aristocratic sort of air. “Perhaps she saw how it began?”
“She was pretty freaked out, though.” I glanced at Trip. He was far more compassionate than most of us. If anybody could handle a shell-shocked stripper it was Trip. Holly was one of the Hunters that had gone out for the night and hadn’t returned yet, but I could only imagine that she’d just slap the hysterical girl a couple of times and tell her to get a hold of herself. “You got this?”
“I’ve got it,” my friend answered before walking out.
“So this is why government man pays ten million American dollars for a simple spider,” the big Pole said. “I think maybe this case is not so simple after all.”
Earl was nodding in agreement. “It has to be connected. That stupid critter didn’t kill all those people today and disappear an entire Unicorn strike team.”
“Unicorn?” several of the Hunters asked at the same time.
“Special Task Force Unicorn . . .” Earl answered. “Stricken’s bunch. Shit. Forget I said that name. You don’t want to go around repeating it. Real low-profile bunch. They’re the ones that do the things you don’t ask about. They make MCB look like Boy Scouts.”
“How do you know this?” asked a muscular Greek Hunter who had come to the battle wearing nothing but his underwear.