Trip put his phone away. “I figured you’d be used to that by now.”
“She likes to remind me. What do we have to work with?”
“About half the companies have thrown in with us. The other half are off doing their own thing. Some of them were staying at other hotels, so we’ve got about three-quarters of the conference attendees here. Of the half that are with us, half of those actually like us, and the other half know that since we’ve got more locals we have the most ammo. Milo and some of the Australians are putting together an equipment inventory. Those guys over there . . .” Trip nodded toward another group that had come up with a map of the hotel, “are dividing everyone up into two-man teams and figuring out how to patrol this whole place.”
“Assuming the phenomenon happens again . . .”
“We get on it fast. You want to let it spread out and get really big before we find it next time? Didn’t think so. That group over there is collecting all the brainiacs. They’re trying to figure out what’s happening and how to stop it.” There were a dozen Hunters in that group, including Lee, Paxton, and Cody from MHI. Cody was actually writing equations on a dry-erase board. Julie hadn’t been kidding about him. “Another group is acting as go-betweens with the non-Hunter guests. Turns out one of our guys, Tyler Nelson from the New York team, knows all about the psychology. He said he would get them calmed down. He helped talk down Hugo’s girl too.”
“Nelson? Any relation to the Doctors Nelson?”
“Their grandson,” Trip said. “Small world, huh? Following in the family footsteps, got a degree, practiced, then got bored. Now if I ever have kids I’m going to encourage them to do something safe.”
“Look how well accounting worked for me . . .”
“Hey, do what you need to do fast, because we’re going on patrol in ten minutes. We’re going to clear this place, room by room. Shoot. I just realized without radios that is going to get a lot more complicated.”
“Don’t worry.” I patted Abomination. “We’ve got other ways of making noise.”
I hit the smart group first. Not wanting to interrupt, I hung back and listened. The debate was rather heated and they were trying to decide if it had been a pocket dimension, a portal, or a something I’d never heard of involving a whole bunch of PhDs’ names stuck together. Back in school, I had test scores high enough to get a MENSA invite, but this stuff was way over my head. Cody saw me and gestured for me to approach. He pointed a dry-erase marker at my heart. “You. Earl said Franks mentioned Decision Week?”
“He did, to someone I think was from STFU. Then the major at Dugway talked like the containment unit was left over from it.”
Cody turned his dry-erase marker on a bald Israeli. “See? I told you this had Decision Week stink all over it.” The burly, bushy-haired Vietnam vet turned back to his dry-erase board and began writing more numbers and symbols. “So, the question now is, whose work are we dealing with? Weiskopf? Silverman? He loved summoning things from Planck space. God help us if it was Hampson and his neurobiological demon bondings. Yuck.” Cody shuddered.
I sure hated to interrupt all that calculus. “Is this like what they did during Decision Week?”
Cody laughed. “Decision Week wasn’t the project. It was the end result. The name comes from the week that everything in Los Alamos went batshit insane and the high command decided that atomic weapons were less dangerous. They pushed the boundaries of science until they blurred into magic and then into something beyond that. It was madness.”
“But does any of this sound familiar?”
“Z . . .” Cody put the cap back on his marker and turned around to face me. “They tried everything out there. It is so damn top secret that even though I’ve worked on the DOE contract for the last twenty years, I don’t know a tenth of what laws of the universe they violated.”
“I’ve been a scientist most of my life. I believe in the pursuit of knowledge above all,” said an unfamiliar man with a proper British accent. I realized that he was one of the academics from the ICMHP curriculum. At least some of the non-Hunter guests weren’t totally useless. “But what they did there? Bugger that. I’d rather go back to rubbing two sticks together to make fire.”
“They poked God in the eye,” said the Israeli. He made a two-fingered poking motion, like unto the Three Stooges. “Poink. He was not amused.”
“Desperation makes you stupid,” Cody said. “They’d been working for a while before Decision Week happened. Nobody knows what set it off. Several of the experiments went horribly wrong all at the same time. Reality was ripped to shreds. Men mutated. Turned into insects, incorporeal wraiths, you name it. Some were found with their bodies partially fused into solid objects. Portals were opened to who knows how many dimensions. Ancient gods were communed with, Aztec to Zulu and everything in between. Brilliant men were driven mad. A Nobel Prize winner grew an extra eye in his forehead. Some minds switched bodies. They had this one janitor, his tongue grew its own mouth, complete with tiny little shark teeth, and then started communicating . . . in Latin. A better question, Z, is what didn’t happen at Los Alamos.”
Lee was taking rapid notes. “Tongues with teeth? That’s awesome.”
“Not for the fellow whose tongue began talking to him, I’d imagine,” Paxton said. Even in her armor she still reminded me of a Cub Scout den mother. Even the werecat on her team patch was cute.
Cody continued, “Our problem now is deciding which, if any, of those harebrained experiments we’re dealing with here. All of the experiments were potentially war-ending weapons, but some turned out to be far more dangerous than others. None of the possibilities are good, and this quarantine indicates that the government has decided this is one of the bad ones, but obviously not the worst.”
“How can you tell?”
Cody shrugged. “They haven’t bombed us yet.”
I was sorry I asked. Before I could say anything else, someone bumped my elbow and moved into the brainiac circle. It was Edward. I was shocked to see that Tanya, Princess of the Elves, was right behind him. Surprisingly enough, Edward was standing right next to an elf, and nobody was getting stabbed. From what I understood of those two groups’ history, that was really good. I looked around to make sure Skippy wasn’t here too, because seeing those two together would cause him to lose his mind. Luckily, no Skip. Edward, as usual, was entirely covered, wearing mirrored shades and a ski mask. As a Newbie, Tanya hadn’t been issued armor yet, and was wearing a too-tight tank top and jean shorts. Apparently she was pretty confident she was going to pass training, since she’d gotten the MHI logo tattooed on her ankle. With her hair hiding her pointy ears she could at least pass for a human being, but she really didn’t look like she fit in with this crowd.
Even though he’d already gotten my attention, Ed bumped my arm again. It was odd to see the orc so willingly enter a room full of humans. “What’s up, Ed?” I looked at the non-MHI Hunters. “This is Edward, my administrative assistant.”
“Tell them, Ed,” Tanya said. She put her hands on his shoulders and shoved him toward the table. Still no stabbing. I was impressed. Edward grunted at Tanya to quit bugging him, then reached into his black coat and pulled out a cloth. He set it down on the table and gently unrolled it for all of us to see. The smart Hunters leaned in.
It was a fuzzy little lump of pointy flesh. “That’s from the spider?” Lee asked, instinctively moving back from the table. I remembered Ed chopping the end of the limb off and his cryptic words about it not being real. The orc pointed at the thing, as if to say, see?
“What? I don’t get it?” Cody said.
“Ed says it’s fake. It ain’t real and stuff,” Tanya explained.
Curious, Lee overcame his dislike of giant spiders and came back over to squint at the piece of leg. “Hmmm . . . You know, there is something weird. I’m no biologist . . .” Albert Lee knew more about giant spiders than the rest of us, since they had been his initial exposure to the world of monsters, had kill
ed a bunch of his friends, and nearly cost him his life. “The hair is wrong. This is like fur. The ones I’ve killed had bristles. And the bottom is wrong. This is like a spike. The other ones had a sort of pad.”
Ed shook his head in the negative and grunted angrily. A knife materialized in his hand. I knew from experience he usually had a dozen of those stashed. He pointed the tip at the leg and made a poking motion. I tried to see what he was getting at. There was a bunch of sand that I hadn’t noticed in the cloth before, but other than that, it looked like the end of a spider leg, only it was about the size of a hot dog. Then Ed took the knife and began mashing the leg violently with the flat of the blade.
It crumbled into sand.
“What the hell? Can I see that?” Cody took the knife from Edward and scooped up some of the dirt. Half of the sample still looked like the leg, black, hairy, and distinct, but at the edge of where Ed had smashed it, it simply turned into brown sand. “I’ll be damned.”
“The magic on it has worn off. He showed it to me first,” Tanya explained proudly.
“Fake . . . Moosh,” Ed explained. He looked around at the humans, seemingly embarrassed to have said anything. By Edward’s standards of communication that had been a doctoral dissertation.
“Good work, Ed,” I told him.
The brainiacs were intrigued by this new development. “Z, is this what the soil in that area looked like?” Paxton asked.
It was hard to tell. It all looked like sand to me, and much of it had been covered in snow. “Pretty close, I guess.”
The smart Hunters began to jabber excitedly. Cody gave Edward his knife back. “Ah ha! Matter organization at the origination site! That narrows down the possibilities.” He uncapped his marker and went back to his board. “If the pocket dimension—”
“It ain’t no pocket dimension,” Tanya cut in, putting her hands on her hips. “Duh.”
“What do you mean?”
“They gotta have a focal point to anchor on Earth. They can’t just pop up. It takes days to stick one on. And I looked all over that blown-up room, and there ain’t no focal point nowhere.”
“How do you know?” asked the Englishman, eyeing her suspiciously.
Tanya was trailer-park elf royalty and proud. She snorted, indignant to be questioned by commoners. “I don’t need fancy schooling to know about magic.” She went up to the board and snatched Cody’s marker away. “Now this is what it looks like when you connect an eskarthi-dor, which is the right name for it. Y’all have been saying it wrong.” She drew some quick symbols. “See? That’s what the anchor looks like. That thing that popped up before wasn’t no eskarthi-dor, but I can probably figure up what it was fast enough.” She looked at Cody’s equation, shook her head disapprovingly and rubbed out a number with her thumb and replaced it with a triangle. “People just don’t understand magic right. Wish I could call momma. She’d know what this was, no problem. Ed, be a love and fetch me a Mountain Dew. I need to do some figuring.”
Ed looked at me, shrugged, and then wandered off to find her a Mountain Dew.
“Diet, Ed!” Tanya shouted, not looking away from the board. “Gotta watch my figure.”
Cody tilted his head to the side and studied the interloper as she continued writing strange Elvish symbols. “And you must be Tanya.”
“Yup. The one and only greatest wizard that’s ever lived.”
“I believe that,” Cody muttered to me, then raised his voice. “Well, you do know some magic, which means you know more than the rest of us. Welcome to the smart team, Tanya . . . Now give me my marker back. You have to earn your own dry-erase marker.”
CHAPTER 13
Trip and I went on patrol. We were one of ten different teams out looking for early signs of trouble. Most of those had a casino employee or two with them to keep them from getting lost in the confusing place. Earl had directed the two of us to the camera room to try to coordinate some more help.
It had been an hour since the quarantine had started, but the Feds still hadn’t tried to communicate with us. Phones, radio, and internet were all down. Cable TV still worked, and as we passed a big screen above one of the bars, I spotted the front of the Last Dragon. “Hey, that’s about us.”
The man being interviewed was a tough guy in a suit with a short haircut, which pretty much screamed MCB. “You know, that guy looks like he’s in really good shape for a CDC spokesman.” Trip found the remote on top of the bar and turned the volume up.
“There’s no need for alarm. Everything is safe and contained. One of the guests at the casino showed symptoms of a very rare type of African hemorrhagic fever.”
“Is that like Ebola?” asked the nervous reporter.
The agent looked right at the camera. “Yes. Exactly like Ebola. Which is why we suggest that everyone stays well back from the containment area. It is very contagious.”
“Is there any danger of it spreading?”
The MCB agent gave a fake laugh. “Oh, no. Everything is perfectly safe and there is no danger at all to the city of Las Vegas. The people inside may be inconvenienced, but our doctors are testing them now. Once we are certain that no one else is infected then they will be released. The whole procedure should only take a few days at most.”
“Great. We’ve officially got Ebola.” If the hundreds of innocent people trapped in here hadn’t been freaked out before, they would be now. I looked over at Trip. “How much you want to bet somebody at the MCB is getting screamed at for forgetting to shut the cable off into here before that aired?”
The TV turned to static. “Jinx. Way to go, Z.”
“Sorry.”
We continued walking through the oddly lit neon wonderland of beeping and clicking slot machines. It felt odd being so empty of people, but the entire casino floor area had been closed off. There had been some argument about what to do with everyone stuck here. Some of the casino staff had wanted to try to stick to business as usual, but Earl had been rather persuasive that that was an incredibly stupid idea. Since word had arrived from their management that they were to cooperate with us, they had acquiesced.
Some of the Hunters had thought it was best to keep everyone in their rooms, while others had thought it was best to try to put everyone into a few big areas so they could be watched. Both methods had their pros and cons, and depending on what we were dealing with, either one could potentially be the best or worst possible thing to do. If we were dealing with something like a fast-spreading mutating plague or undead outbreak, then keeping people separate behind locked doors and controlling choke points made a lot of sense. In a situation like that, sticking everyone in one place could potentially create a zombie army in a matter of minutes. On the other hand, keeping them in small groups made them virtually impossible to defend, and would be terrible if the phenomenon could simply pop up wherever it felt like, which is what had apparently happened in Hugo’s room. It wouldn’t do any good to be isolated behind a locked door if the thing he had called Nachtmar could simply float up through your carpet and chop you to pieces.
The decision was a moot one anyway, since very few of the bystanders that had been trapped here were inclined to listen to us, and the place was a huge maze of interlocking rooms and confusing corridors, so if somebody wanted to wander off it wasn’t like we could really stop them. It’s a free country. Most of the trapped non-Hunters and employees were clustered in the common areas, some whining, others nervous, though nobody had panicked yet. The Ebola announcement would probably change that, and it would more than likely really suck for Nelson and Hunters that had volunteered to herd sheep.
Meanwhile, the Hunters had thrown politeness out the window and were all openly armed, and many of them didn’t speak a lick of English. Not to mention that this was Nevada, and the SHOT Show was in town, so many of the stuck gamblers were probably concealing guns too. I was all in favor of people packing heat, but we didn’t want anyone to get jumpy and decide that my side were the bad guys here, so MHI was encour
aging the other Hunters to be polite.
Hotel security had still been consulting their manuals to see if there was an official policy about what to do in a situation like this by the time we had a small private army wandering their halls looking for monsters. So security had shut down the gambling areas and locked up the money. Now they were mostly protecting the vault and trying to keep their trapped tourists calm. They’d been told to defer to Earl’s judgment, a wise choice. The only services trying to conduct business as usual were a strategic few of the restaurants, open for breakfast, because people full of bacon are less likely to riot.
Not too bad of a reaction considering we had only been quarantined for an hour. It had been one heck of a crazy day and the sun wasn’t even up yet.
“I think this is it,” Trip pointed at a door that was nearly invisible under the strange lighting. There was a swipe pad for a key card. He tugged on the door, found it locked, then knocked and waited.
A few seconds later it was opened for us by a middle-aged, overweight man in a wrinkled gray suit, who blocked the way and regarded us suspiciously. He was wearing a big gold name tag that read MITCH. “Who’re you?”
“We’re from MHI,” Trip said.
“Let’s see some ID,” he demanded.
Trip looked down at his body armor. “Seriously?”
“These particular circumstances aren’t exactly in the handbook, okay? Gimme a second . . . Fine. Management warned me you were coming. This is on them if you do anything stupid. All right. I’m the night-shift surveillance room supervisor. This way.”
We entered a very normal corridor that could have come out of any office building in America. “How’d they tell you we were coming? I thought the phones were down.”
“There’s an internal switchboard and operator. We can still call from room to room, but we can’t call out,” Mitch explained. That was good to know. I’d have to make sure to alert Earl and spread the word. “I saw you coming. I see everything here. Management said I was supposed to fully cooperate with you.” He took note of Abomination and Trip’s KRISS submachine gun. “Rules say no unauthorized weapons in the control room. That’s in the handbook.”