There was no shrapnel, and the shockwave alone usually wasn’t too bad unless you were close enough for it to damage your internal organs. That was all good to know academically, but like I said, bat to the face. So I lay there for a moment, blinking stupidly. Milo’s rifle was at my side, the brilliant beam of the flashlight still shining into the shaft as gray smoke came rolling out. Black gobbets of meat and heavy white teeth fell through the smoke to collect on the elevator’s roof.
“Z! Z! Are you okay?” Milo had taken hold of the drag straps on my armor was attempting to lift me, which was tough since I was twice his size.
“Fine.” My head was swimming. I was going to be hating life later. One of my electronic earpieces had shorted out. I smacked it a few times, but it was toast.
Milo took up his rifle, went through the smoke, and shined it up the shaft. There was an awful squeal and the cables shook as the creature climbed back up. Milo fired several rounds after it but then it was out of sight. “Hate those things!” Dizzy, I struggled to my feet. Milo caught my arm. “Grinders are gross.”
“A what?”
He mistook my ignorance for deafness. “Grinder!” he shouted in my ear. “They burrow under houses, creep up through the floor, and suck folks out of their beds. That’s why I refuse to sleep in basements. The name comes from that rotary mouth-hole thingy. It’s like death by a thousand Dremel tools. Grinds bones right into pulp.”
I didn’t even want to know which poor bastard was unlucky enough to have that nasty thing sucked out of their memory. I shook my aching head. That was twice today that I’d been too close to an improvised explosive device.
“Secure these elevators in case something else comes out,” Milo ordered a couple of Hunters that had coming toward the sound of the explosion.
“I’ve got to get to Julie.”
“That might be hard.” Milo picked up a backpack. It was filled with more bottles. “Elevators don’t work. You can take the stairs, but you should see something first. Things have gotten weird. Even by our standards.”
Our situation was so FUBAR that random rotary death monsters in the elevators were unremarkable, but Milo thought something else was weirder than that? This couldn’t possibly be good. “Status?”
“Our bus took a detour to crazy town. Come on. I’ll show you.”
* * *
My first clue that something was drastically different was that our radios were working again. Luckily the MCB was no longer jamming us. Excited chatter in several different languages picked up in my one working earpiece. There were monster sightings everywhere. Competent team leaders were getting everyone sorted onto different channels and vectoring Hunters against threats. At least the uninterrupted radio waves were a welcome change.
It wasn’t until Milo and I got to the windows of the conference center that I realized that having our radios back was actually a really bad sign. The reason the jamming wasn’t working anymore was because the jammers weren’t here anymore. Neither was the rest of the quarantine. Or the street. Or Las Vegas.
“What the hell is going on?” I stared out the windows and tried to wrap my brain around the scene. The manicured grounds of the complex stretched out for a few hundred yards and beyond that the ground just dropped off into nothing. There were crashing gray clouds that stretched above us and seemed to curve inward over the top of the connected hotel. The storm outside was brutal and unlike anything I’d ever seen, walls of seemingly solid fog were being driven about by fierce winds, but in different, conflicting directions. Every now and then the mist would swirl, revealing tunnels and cuts where we could see just a tiny bit further, but there was no city beyond.
The storm wasn’t dark at all. It had its own strange internal illumination. The odd light coming through the windows made everything look washed out, nearly black and white. The hotel creaked and shook as it was buffeted by the wind. The sound coming from the storm was dampened by our shelter, but it didn’t sound like any normal weather I’d heard before. It sounded displeased.
I didn’t know if the sudden wave of nausea I experienced right then was from the concussive force of Milo’s explosive or because of the sudden realization that we probably weren’t on Earth anymore. “Where are we?”
“I was kinda hoping you would know,” Milo answered. “You’ve at least been to other dimensions before.”
“Not this one.” The mysterious ghost had warned me about the blurring of the lines between worlds. Things had just got real blurry.
The conference center was shaped like a horseshoe. On the rounded bottom end of the horseshoe was the street, or where the street would’ve been if it still existed. I ran across the lobby area to get to the opposite bank of windows. The interior of the horseshoe was where the gardens and pools were. One leg of the shoe touched the casino and shops and the other ended at the hotel, the elevators of which Milo and I had just left.
From the windows on this side I could see into the manicured gardens one story below. The trees and bushes were shaking under the force of powerful gusts of wind. Hard rain was splattering the glass. Lightning flashed, and it turned the fog around it green. The color lingered far too long before it faded back to gray.
I could see the edge of the roof of the hotel where Julie was positioned, but couldn’t see anything moving up there. I tried the radio on my team’s regular channel. “Julie, come in. This is Owen. Can you hear me? Over.” I let go of the transmit button and waited. It was hard to tell from this angle, but the clouds couldn’t be too high above the hotel’s roof. It was like we’d been packed into a fluffy box of evil death clouds.
So not cool.
There was a sudden flash of purple lightning. It made the fog look like an angry bruise before the color gradually seeped away. “Come on. Pick up. Please pick up.”
All around us was chaos. A crowd of about forty guests and employees had come in here to be able to see out the windows. There was screaming, crying, arguing, shouting, fervent prayer, and general pandemonium. The room was lit by bobbing flashlights and the unearthly pale light from the windows. Tyler Nelson had gotten up on a table and was doing his best to be a calming influence on the mob. I didn’t think that psychology degree was much prep for something like this, but he was doing his best. A soothing voice might be helpful, but I’d seen some freaky shit in my life, and even I wasn’t feeling particularly soothable right now.
My radio beeped. “This is Julie. Go ahead.”
Oh, thank you. “Are you okay?”
“As much as I can be. You seeing this?” This time the lightning flashed Valentine’s-Day red.
“I am. I’m at the interior window. Main level of the conference center.” Waving one arm so she could pick me up through the sniper scope, I walked away from the others so I could hear. “I’m heading into the walkway over the garden.”
There was a few seconds of static. She had to wait for the weird fog streaks between us to move. “Got you . . . From up here I’ve got a good view out into the . . . whatever. Space? Beats me. I’ve never seen anything like this.” There was a lot of bad wind distortion from her end of the conversation.
“Me either. People down here are coming apart.”
“I’m trying real hard not to do that myself, dear.”
You and me both. “Does it look like we can walk out? Maybe make a run for it?”
“Don’t do that. There are things out there. I’ve just gotten glimpses. They’re gigantic, Owen. I don’t think there’s anywhere to walk to. It looks like we’re floating.”
“Say again, what?”
“Floating. Like an island. All I can see in every direction is this storm. We’re definitely not in Las Vegas anymore.”
Damn it . . . This was where demons dream. “I think the Nachtmar has dragged us into his world.”
Julie was quiet for a moment, surely thinking over the consequences of that awful idea. The radio was filled with wind. “Find Earl. We need to figure out how to kill this damned thing now.
”
Was that even possible? This was far worse than I’d imagined. The Nachtmar was unspeakably powerful. He hadn’t just blurred the lines, he’d ripped a chunk of our reality right out of the ground and sucked it to a whole different dimension, along with all of the poor bastards inside. What else was he capable of? Even if we could defeat him, was there any way home?
There were only a few others on the walkway, all Hunters, all of us staring stupidly out the floor-to-ceiling windows. One of them was muttering the same thing over and over, “No debemos estar aqui.” We’re not supposed to be here.
I put my hand out, and even through the glass and the glove, I could feel the energy humming on the other side. “Come inside. It’s not safe.” I let go of the transmit button and waited for her response. There was a crash back in the conference center behind me as one of the guests’ arguments turned violent. The big lady with the mobility scooter was beating a bellhop with her purse. Milo moved over to separate them. “Julie? Julie, are you there?”
“Incoming!” Julie ordered. “Get dow—”
A fiery comet fell into the gardens and hit like a bomb. The shockwave sent a circle of semi-solid mist hurtling outward. The windows of the walkway shattered. I barely got my arms up in front of my face as I was pelted with shards of glass. The alien fog crashed around me with the force of a tidal wave and I was knocked from my feet.
The mist was sickly cold. It clung to my face like wet spiderwebs. I couldn’t see through it.
The hotel shook under repeated explosive impacts. I couldn’t see what crashed against the building, but something vast struck a few feet away. The roar of cracking concrete drowned out the panicked screams. The floor bounced beneath me as if we were in a terrible earthquake. The shaking continued for several seconds, bouncing me along the walkway’s carpet. I groped blindly, trying to grab onto something solid, but then I realized I was sliding as the floor broke and tilted beneath me. There was a constant rattle and crash of falling debris. Bits and pieces of the building struck me as the floor tilted more violently. Then I was rolling crazily as the walkway tore from the conference center and collapsed around me.
I couldn’t see. I didn’t know which way was up. Then I was falling, part of a cascade of shattered glass.
My shoulder hit first. Then my face. There was another tearing roar that blotted out everything else, then another hit, spinning through the dust and fog, and then I slid and crashed my way to the ground. I was engulfed in choking dust, something else struck me in the head, and everything went black.
* * *
The first sound I heard over the ringing in my ears was the wind. It was screaming like a million people being tortured to death. It was alien, haunted, and it made my soul ache. It was the wind of a desolate place where no man should ever go. Beneath the scream of the wind were the screams of the people trapped here. Those were what brought me back to consciousness.
Then the pain in my skull hit and I added my scream to the rest. That woke me right up. Everything hurt. My ribs ached. My head felt like it had been split open.
It was wet. Water was running over me. I was lying in the mud. I forced my eyes open. Immediately the hurricane winds tried to rip them out of my head. The water was pouring from a broken fountain. I was in a flowerbed. Grunting in pain, I rolled over.
Above me, half the walkway of the conference center was gone, blown apart, flung down and spread around me. The other half was still attached, and I saw a Hunter dangling from the far edge being pulled back inside by another. There was a jagged hole in the conference center above and it looked like the building had puked its guts out. I could see that the people closest to the blast had been scattered. People inside were just beginning to get to their feet, and those that had been further away were dragging limp bodies away from the hole.
I had ridden a ten-foot section of the overhang into the gardens. Chunks of concrete with broken bits of rebar sticking out of them were all around me. There was broken glass everywhere. It was a miracle that I hadn’t been impaled or crushed to death. I wiped my stinging eyes. My glove came away red with blood. It was streaming from a deep cut on my forehead.
Everything hurt, but I couldn’t tell how badly I’d been injured. I got to my hands and knees, crawled a couple of feet, but was too dizzy, and face-planted into the mud. There was another person just ahead. I hadn’t been the only one caught in the collapse, but they hadn’t been as lucky. Half of their torso had been caught beneath the sliding debris and crushed. I was too disoriented to even tell who it was.
There was another roar, and this one wasn’t the wind. Gunfire erupted above as Hunters began firing into the alien hurricane. They were shooting out into the garden at something just ahead of me. Someone up there was shouting orders, struggling to be heard, trying to direct the innocent toward safety. Another flaming comet, smaller than the first, streaked across the gray sky and hit the building. The entire world shook under the explosive impact, and flaming bits rained down around me. The Hunters above me were driven back.
Raising my head, I could make out brightly colored shapes moving in the garden, some orange, some red, just quick flashes as the things maneuvered through the thrashing bushes. There was the briefest glimpse of an oddly shaped head and weird multiple eyes before the creature took cover. There was a terrifyingly familiar whistling noise as a cloud of projectiles was launched from the garden against the breach in the wall. Inside, humans cried out in agony as they struck.
I tried to stand, but a lightning bolt shot up the nerves of my leg and I went back down. Something was screwed up with my foot. There was movement to my side. Another survivor of the crash had staggered upright. It was a female Hunter that I’d seen, but never spoken to. She was shell-shocked, staring out into the mist, only her wide eyes visible through a mask of blood and dust. She turned to look up at where we’d just been standing. I shouted for her to take cover, but either she couldn’t hear me or no sound actually came out of my throat. I wasn’t sure. There was another whistling noise, a thud, and she lurched forward and fell.
Head swimming, face bleeding, I crawled through the wreckage. My hands landed on her warm body. There was a short spear sticking out of the dead woman’s back right between her shoulder blades. Without thinking, I wrenched it out with one gloved hand. I recognized the alien spine clenched in my fist right away, because I’d been killed with one just like it once.
It made sense, trapped here in the realm of nightmares, that this is what would be sent to end us. There were several survivors amongst the senior MHI staff here. If the Nachtmar had been looking for one consistent horror that many of us shared, this would be it.
It was the demons from Natchy Bottom. It was the creatures from the Christmas party.
We were all going to die.
My legs didn’t want to respond. The explosion and resulting fall had shaken me badly. I needed a minute to collect my bearings, but I didn’t have a minute. These things were too fast, too lethal. Once they got inside they’d rip us all to pieces, only since I was stuck outside with them, I’d be dead long before that.
I’d fought these things once before. They were horrific foot soldiers of the Old Ones. They came from an alien dimension, with many different shapes, sizes, and capabilities, some were small and fast, others were lumbering armored insect tanks, others could fling parts of their bodies as poisonous projectile weapons, and every one of them were tenacious and deadly. It was only the intervention of me using Lord Machado’s artifact that had saved our lives last time.
There was no way I could climb up the jagged face of the building and get back inside without being speared. Abomination was still slung to me, but I was too dizzy to walk, let alone fight effectively. I could see dozens of flashes of bright color through the mist. They were almost here.
“—hear me? Owen! Hide! Hide now!” It was Julie. My radio was still working. “They’re coming!”
She could see me. Julie was on the opposite roof, watching
helplessly through a scope as her husband flailed around stupid and injured in the mud with a horde of interdimensional insect demons heading right at me.
Screw that. I didn’t want her to see me die.
My first inclination for most problems was to shoot them, but that would only get me killed here. Julie was right, I needed to hide. Crawling back to the big chunk of concrete, I found the partially crushed body. He had been squished into the soft dirt and was a real mess. We had no idea how smart these things were, and in any case, these probably weren’t the real thing anyway, rather figments of our imagination made real. I had no idea if this would work. Grimacing, I lifted the unmangled arm, and then lay down beneath, trying to squish myself as far into the soil as possible. Sorry, man. I tried to stay perfectly still. I was immediately coated in hot, sticky blood.
It was disgusting. It was infuriating. It was better than dying.
“They’re right on top of you,” Julie whispered in my earpiece, and then she too was silent, unsure if they would be able to hear even that much noise. I shut the radio off before anybody else made noise on this channel. Then I held my breath.
There was a narrow gap between the concrete and the dirt. Dozens of demonic limbs charged past, claws ripping up grass or elephantine feet smashing great circular tracks into the dirt. Bullets landed throughout the garden as the Hunters tried to hold them off.
Fall back. Get to a choke point. Come on, guys. Stay alive.
There were hundreds of demons. The first wave of black and orange bodies hit the breach only to be washed away by machine-gun fire. More arrived within seconds, clustered all around the hole, twitching and moving like bees on the surface of a hive. They were too occupied with the living to search the dead. Yet.
There had only been a handful of Hunters inside that area when the hotel had been hit. Not nearly enough to stop the tide of demons.
Milo must have left more of his explosives behind to slow them, because a few seconds later a final explosion rocked the breach, clearing the swarm off the wall and flinging demon bits in every direction.