Monster Hunter Legion-eARC (31 page)

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 against 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.

Trip was standing over the dead man in the tie, his tomahawk dangling at his side, dripping dark blood. “That was Jim,” he said softly. “Friend of mine. Taught shop. Last time he was the one that broke in. He was the one that got the kids that I couldn’t save. I put those kids in there. I told them to barricade the doors and stay put. I went to get help. I told them to pray. I told them to have faith and everything would be okay. I told them to
trust
me, but I failed them. I was too slow, too weak…I wasn’t ready then. I didn’t know what I was doing then. I wasn’t prepared. Not this time…Never again.”

I looked to the classroom. The screaming had stopped. It was quiet except for the buzz of the old lights. “What happens now?”

“I don’t know. Last time I got this far they were already dead.” Trip put his tomahawk away and stuck a fresh mag into his subgun. “Let’s find out.”

Stepping over corpses, we reached the classroom. The door was nearly destroyed. One sharp kick sent it flying inward.

As promised, he’d given us our exit. The four of us stepped out onto the empty gambling floor of the Last Dragon casino. The door we’d just come through led to nothing but an empty janitorial closet.

Chapter 17

Earl Harbinger wasn’t even there for me to brief when we got back to the conference center. He was off taking care of another crisis called in by Mitch. Apparently, there was a kraken in the pool.

Cody, Paxton, and the other smart Hunters had come back from the nightclub without incident. They’d walked right through the area where we’d been initially attacked by zombies, and there hadn’t even been a sign that anything had happened there at all. I gave them the rundown of what we’d seen, then had to repeat myself to Klaus Lindemann, who had been made the second-in-command of our operation. I hadn’t been around for that part. It struck me as a cagey move by Earl, though, since Grimm Berlin was respected by many of the companies that didn’t particularly care for us, and even the companies that didn’t like either of us would have a difficult time not listening to the combined experience of those two men.

Nobody I briefed had a clue what the significance of topaz could be, but it immediately sent Lee on a research kick. We had monsters that had violent adverse reactions to silver, and more rarely from other substances like holy water, white oak jade, or salt, so why not topaz? Milo took a raiding party down to the gift shops to find some. There was bound to be some jewelry we could use. It would be nice to have another weapon to use against this thing.

Of course, that was all assuming that the kid I’d talked to was even real and not some sort of trick of the
Nachtmar
’s. For all I knew the damn thing thought topaz was delicious and was using us to forage for snacks. I didn’t know what to believe, and since I’d just strolled through a hallway that had been filled with Florida, believing
anything
here was one hell of a risky assumption.

Lindemann told me that he’d put together one group of Hunters, hotel employees, and a few surprisingly useful volunteers from among the tourists to explore possible avenues of escape should time run out. There are always sewer systems and steam tunnels under a building of this size, and if we were lucky not all of them would be blocked by the MCB. None of us were real hot on the idea of dying in this quarantine. So far there hadn’t been any luck.

All of the spare equipment available had been gathered in the conference center. One of the Russian Hunters had been trapped outside the quarantine, and his gear had several loaded eight-round Saiga magazines in it, so I borrowed those to resupply Abomination. It was lunch time, and Milo’s raiders had brought back a literal ton of food. The conference center had facilities for everything, and the employees had gone to work preparing food. It kept their minds occupied and everyone else’s bellies full. After picking up a couple of plates, I found Trip sitting on the carpet outside the main conference room with a thousand-yard stare, so I gave him a turkey sandwich and a Coke and sat down next to him.

“I’ve got no appetite,” he said after a minute of staring at his food. “Go figure.”

“Reliving the worst moments of your life will do that to you. Eat. Come on. You’ll feel better…I know you want to.” Trip finally relented, unwrapped the sandwich, and took a bite. He chewed listlessly, still staring off into space. I let him drink some Coke before bothering him more. He needed the sugar. “How’re you doing?”

“Better than expected.” Trip watched his hands for a bit. They were still trembling, but much less than before.

“Want to talk about it?”

“No.” But when I didn’t go away, Trip sighed and gave in. “Really, I’m fine. That was just a shock to the system. After Florida, once I found out that there was such a thing as Hunters, for the very first time I knew what God wanted me to do with my life. I’d found my purpose. There was real evil in the world, but it was okay, because there were good guys that could fight it. Knowing that’s what got me by the first time. God had a plan for me.”

Trip was a lot more religious than I was. I could only nod and agree. “Sounds reasonable.”

“This
Nachtmar
wanted to scare me, wanted to break me, maybe? I don’t know. Assuming it even thinks like we do at all. But if that was what it was going for…Big mistake on his part.” Trip took a long drink of the Coke. “What just happened only reaffirmed my faith that I’m doing the right thing. When I was a normal guy, a whole bunch of innocents died because I didn’t have the skills that I do now. We plowed through more zombies in five minutes than I had in two hours back then. How many times have we saved the day, Z? How many innocent people are alive because we did our job?”

Trip was a true believer. It was going to take a lot more than revisiting his past to shake him. “We’ve saved bunches.”

“We’re the good guys. We’re the heroes.”

“Damn good-looking ones, too. I knew you’d be okay.”

“Eternal optimists.” Trip chuckled. “But I’ve been thinking. If this
Nachtmar
could do that with what I had in my head…My experiences are nothing compared to what some of these Hunters have been exposed to. What’s going to happen when it gets to someone like you? I mean, come on, you’ve been to hell.”

“It wasn’t really hell. It was more of an infinite dimension of eternal suffering populated by awful beings beyond comprehension. Totally different.”

“Uh-huh…”

I tried to laugh it off. “Motherfucker can’t handle what’s in my brain.”

Trip often chided me for swearing too much, but at least I could make him laugh. “I’m just glad Holly isn’t here. I mean, sure, she’d be valuable, kick butt, take names, and all that, but you know…I’m glad that no matter what she’ll be okay.”

I understood exactly what he meant. Holly was one of us. We’d stood back-to-back surrounded by the forces of really pissed-off evil many times, kicked the crap out of it, and managed to walk away, but it was nice to know that no matter how bad things turned out in here, at least one of us would live on. I held out my soda and we clinked Coke cans. “Amen to that. Reminds me of something, though…” I got up with a grunt. “I need to talk with my wife.”

“Want company?”

This was going to be weird enough by myself. “Naw, it’s cool. Finish your lunch.”

I probably should have taken some backup. Going anywhere alone was stupid. Everyone else was occupied working on something, and I was distracted by the idea of finally being able to talk to Julie about what Earl had told me earlier. It was a sloppy call, but I justified it to myself that it would only take a minute. I got to the elevators, tagged the button, and only had to wait a second for the last one on the left to
ding
and slide open.