Monster Hunter Legion-eARC (50 page)

“Maybe.”

“I haven’t seen any of the nightmare creations use a gun yet.”

“Quiet, Z. You trying to give him ideas? It might be Mosh, or there were a few of the PT boys here too when everything went to hell.” Then there were several more shots, followed by a crash. “One way to find out.”

I cracked more glow sticks, gave Holly some, and since her gun had long since been emptied on newly minted vampires, handed over my compact .45. We found my brother at the opposite end of the storage area, only he wasn’t the one in need of rescuing.

The area was actually well lit, having taken on the guise of the mortuary in New Zealand where my brother had been tortured. The fog had curled inside the lightbulbs and was fueling them with a sick pale light. The nightmare creations had been cultists from the Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition. There were four of them, but their red robes had been riddled with bullet holes.

Mosh was standing in the middle of the area, over a fifth body. He swung around and pointed a pistol at us when he heard our footsteps. He was shaking so badly I was amazed that he didn’t just shoot. “Owen?”

“Yeah, man. It’s me.” I was flooded with relief. “It’s okay now.”

He’d been cut, beaten. His face was a mess of spreading bruises. His clothing was hanging in strips, and his flesh had been abraded beneath that. Blood was dripping down his arms and splattering into the fog. He held up the hand without the pistol and wiggled his fingers. “Kept them this time. They tried to take them again, but I wouldn’t let them.”

“What happened?”

“I…I don’t know. It was like before, only this time I knew what was going to happen.” He held up the nickel-plated Browning Hi-Power. “I stole this earlier off one of those PT guys. I don’t know how I got a hold of it now…But I got them. I got them all. Even her.” Mosh stepped aside, revealing the last corpse. “Remember her?” Intellectually, I knew it wasn’t the real Lucinda Hood, but it sure was a convincing facsimile. She was a rather attractive young woman with a hacksaw in one hand, but it had been twisted, wedged up under her chin and stuck clear through her throat, surely driven by desperate strength. Mosh giggled. “Bitch didn’t see that coming.”

My brother was seriously out of it. “I’m impressed. I didn’t know you had it in you. Now let’s get you out of here.”

“I should’ve did that the first time.” Mosh was going into shock. “But I’m not like you.”

I put my arm around his shoulder and steered him toward the exit. “Only in the good ways.”

I’d get these guys out, then I had to go back. I had to find Marcus and break the
Nachtmar
’s spell. There were hundreds of feds and rescue workers trapped in the foggy area, and if the
Nachtmar
was feeding on all of them, then there was no telling how strong it was going to become.

Lucinda Hood spoke. Mosh had nearly removed her head with the saw blade, but the
Nachtmar
didn’t need vocal cords or air to speak. “Wait, Chosen.”

“I already told you, no autographs!” Mosh turned around and shot Lucinda half a dozen times. The slide locked back empty, but he kept jerking on the trigger uselessly. “Fucking die already.”

I pushed the empty pistol aside. “Get him out of here, Holly.” She took my incoherently shouting brother by the arm and pulled him away gently. “What do you want, alp?”

The
Nachtmar
hissed. “I see now you are stronger than my last. Parlay with us, Chosen.”

“Sure. You go back to where you came from, leave us alone, and I don’t destroy you forever.”

“No. I am and always have been. The old realm can no longer satisfy my hunger. The mind worlds have all been explored. Their stories have been told. It is silent now. I would starve there. To go back is to end that which has always been. Ally with us.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Together we will shape this world in whatever fashion you see fit. You wish to halt the coming war? We can help you. We ask little in return. We will heed your stories. We will serve you. We will turn aside the invasion, for you will be the teller of this world, not a mere harvester of the flesh. You are stronger than the last. With our help, only that which you wish shall be.”

I scowled. The evidence all pointed to something big on the horizon, and the mysterious mark had been inscribed into this thing’s tomb in Dugway. “You know about the invasion that’s coming?”

“Yes…I am and always have been. We have seen his stories told before. His stories are beautiful. Even his silence is art. It was he who awoke us from our slumber. It was he who sent us forth to travel your mind worlds and tell your stories in flesh.”

“Why?”

“To test his foes.”

“Who is
he?
”

“He is that which ends all things. He will end you as well, if you do not accept our alliance. We will show you.”

The fog changed color, becoming a deep red the color of fresh blood. Lucinda and the fake cultists disappeared, to be replaced with brief flashing images, stacked on top of each other, going on forever and ever. I saw the world I knew in flames, cities collapsing into great tears in the earth. I saw everyone I’d ever known, and I saw each of them die horribly. Last of all, I saw Julie, only she’d been changed, every inch of her was covered in the marks of the Guardian. She had become nothing more than a desperate weapon, and had lost all of her humanity in the process. She alone survived, but at that point, it no longer mattered, because she was no longer
her
anymore.

The images stopped flashing. Above the chaos there was a single mastermind, plotting. He was watching me right now. The red faded and the false Lucinda reappeared before me.

“I’m sick of nightmares.”

“Those are not your nightmares, those are your future. We know this is not the story you wish told…Ally with us, Chosen.”

If I’d learned anything in this business, it was that you never made deals with the devil. “You know what I think of your offer?” I went over, slammed my boot down on Lucinda’s chest, grabbed the saw, and finished what Mosh had started. A few seconds later, the head went rolling away. “That’s what I think of your offer.”

When I finished sawing the teenage girl’s head off, I realized a mummy was politely waiting to speak with me.

It was as if he’d grown out of the fog. His flesh was desiccated, skin pulled tight and parchment thin over the bones. The eye sockets were empty black pits. The hair had long since fallen out, and the skin had split in places over the top of the skull, revealing white bone beneath. I recognized the cut of the uniform from when I’d met him before, only now it was ancient, frayed, and falling apart, bleached nearly colorless by decades of rotting away beneath the sands of a chemical weapons dump.

“Marcus?”

The mummy nodded. The lips had long since peeled back, revealing yellow teeth. The jaw moved, as if he were trying to speak, but no sound came out. The parts that could make sound had long since turned into jerky.

I’m remembering. That was my name once.

The fog was swirling around us, furious. The
Nachtmar
was gathering its energy, preparing to try another tactic, but it couldn’t stop what I was about to do. It had been a long time since I’d embraced the power granted to me by the Old Ones’ foul magic. Mordechai had understood what I could do. There was a reason he’d risked Mosh’s life to get me here. “I told you I’d help. I kept my promise. I know how to find the woman you’re looking for. Come with me. I need to show you something.” I held out my hand.

The handshake was like grasping iron bars wrapped in a thin leather glove, and a wave of unbearable cold rushed up my arm and threatened to seize my heart.

Chapter 25

“Where are we?”

The mummy had been replaced by the same young man that I had met earlier. His uniform had gone from dusty rags to a neat olive drab. His skin was normal instead of a dried-out husk, where before there had been splits in his scalp there was thick dark hair. This was how he saw himself, or, more likely, how the
Nachtmar
ensured he saw himself. The mummified corpse was all that really remained.

I knew that our bodies were still in Las Vegas. This place was real enough, but we weren’t. This was incredibly dangerous. As Mordechai had warned me long ago, when you leave a perfectly good body empty for long enough, something would come along and live in it.

“Where are we?” the ghost of Marcus Kitashima repeated.

“Look around. You tell me where we are.”

Much like how the mummy had been replaced by what looked like a normal human being, the fog-filled casino had been replaced by a wide-open desert of scrub brush. In the near distance were the shadows of mountains. It didn’t seem that different from the terrain I’d been in earlier in Dugway. After all, in terms of actual miles, we weren’t really that far away. Marcus had been buried not very far from his last earthly home.

“It seems…familiar. Why are we here?”

“Because I need you to understand that truth.”

It was freezing cold, but not from the strange energy-siphoning effect of the
Nachtmar
. This place really was that miserably cold in real life. The wind was howling. There was a dusting of snow on the sand. It was a barren, ugly place.

“Where have you taken me?” he asked, suspicious.

“You brought us here. This is what you’ve been looking for all along. I don’t know how to get here, but you’ve known all along, and he’s been leading you astray. The only thing I’ve done is help you get out from under the demon’s thumb. I’m like you.” I didn’t understand a fraction of what the Old Ones’ artifact had done to me, and I hated letting someone else tap into that strength. As I’d been told, everything from the other side came with a price, and I was going to have to pay for this somehow. “The
Nachtmar
isn’t strong enough to stop us both.”

He studied the horizon. It didn’t matter that it was dark. It wasn’t like his eyes were real anyway. He could see our surroundings just fine. “It does look familiar.” Marcus walked forward a few feet, squatted down, and poked at something in the sand. It was a chunk of an old bottle. Nearby were a few scraps of lumber rotting back into the ground. “But this…This can’t be…I know this place. There was a town here. Well, not really a town…They were only shacks, but…”

“They’re gone. They’ve been gone for a really long time. I tried to tell you before.”

Marcus went to his knees and laid his hands flat on the sand. “This
feels
like the place. I lived here. This isn’t another of his lies, is it?”

“I’m sorry. This is now. This is real.”

“This is where I left her. My wife…I promised her I’d come back.”

“But that was over sixty years ago. You’ve been asleep a long time.”

“It can’t be. That means…” he trailed off.

“Yeah.” It meant that everyone he’d ever know was probably dead, or so old that he wouldn’t be able to recognize them anyway. The world had passed him by. He was quiet for a long time as the terrible ramifications set in. “This isn’t your time anymore.”

“We’d only been married a year. She was going to have a baby.” The dead man’s voice cracked. “I promised her I’d come back when the war was over.”

“You have. Not making it in time isn’t your fault.”

The clock was ticking, but I needed the host to come to terms with reality.

Marcus stared at the ground, deflated. “They came here and asked for volunteers. Really? After throwing us out of the house I built with my own hands, after taking my father’s orchard away, and putting us out here in a shack that wasn’t even fit for pigs, where the wind blew right through the walls, and I was supposed to leave my wife in that damned shack, and they wanted me to go fight their war?” The ghost stood up and stared off into the distance. “But I did, because I was born in this country. It’s all I’d ever known. I felt like it was my responsibility…Did we win?”

“Yes, we did, because of guys like you. Now listen to me. I need you to do something—”

“No, you listen to me, stranger.” I could hear the anger creeping in.
 
“When those doctors interviewed me, said they had a special assignment, said I could help end the war faster, and then we could all go home…I believed them. Then they drilled a hole in my head and filled it in with evil. Every time it tried to take over more of me, I fought it off, but then they’d just drill another hole.” He curled his hands into fists. “They’ve got to pay for this.”

“
They
are all gone. They’re either long dead or about to be. The only people paying now are a bunch of innocents that had nothing to do with any of this. Your wife was pregnant? Well, so is mine. And she’s in danger
right now
. Some of those people dying out there might even be your grandkids for all you know.”

That thought took him by surprise, but this was a lot for a ghost to digest. “But how—”

“I need you to call off your monster. I need you to take him and go back to the dream world.”

“But I can’t. He’s become too strong. I was trying to keep him in check back when I first met you, but while we were asleep, it’s like he got stronger while I got weaker.”

“Then we’ve got no choice,” I said slowly. “I need you to die.”

Marcus stared at me, incredulous. “What?”

“You’re already dead. I just need you to accept it and move on. If you don’t, he’ll just keep on using you. You need to move somewhere beyond his grasp. You need to move on to the place where he can’t follow. Without your power, the
Nachtmar
will become weak, vulnerable. It’ll try to take someone else over…Probably me. But if it does, they can put me to sleep before it gets too strong, just like they did to you before.”

“That’s nuts. You don’t know what you’re asking for. The dreams. They never stop. They get worse and worse until you can’t tell what’s real. Don’t volunteer for that.”

“You volunteered for a tough job knowing damn well you might die, but you got stuck with something even worse. At least I know what I’m getting myself into. I need you to die. We all need you to die, Marcus.”

“I can’t…” he stammered.