Monster Hunter Legion-eARC (49 page)

They’re fine.

No. They’re not. They’re all dead. Lacoco and VanZant were dead too. A couple of minutes after I learned that I’d been just as awful a force in Jason’s life as everyone else I’d ever known, I’d abandoned him to die, ripped to bits by a flock of gargoyles.

I didn’t have a choice. If I didn’t reach the
Nachtmar
, everyone would have died. If the Hind had been crippled—

No. I could have gone back. I could have reached him. I could have gotten those other Hunters onto the helicopter. I was a hypocrite. I had tried to drown Grant Jefferson for abandoning me to monsters once, but I had done the exact same thing, only worse, because I’d done it to several Hunters. I hadn’t left to fight the
Nachtmar
. I had fled out of cowardice.

That’s not right. I’m forgetting something.

As I looked back over my life, all I could see was a long parade of failures. Even my successes were only postponing the inevitable. I’d defeated the Old Ones’ invasion. So what? They’d be back. Their victory was inevitable. All I’d done was use my finger to plug one hole of a leaking dam, only the whole thing was cracking and falling apart, and when it collapsed it would wash away the whole world. What was the point?

I found myself on the carpet, but I couldn’t remember falling down. The nightmare fog covered me completely, drifting over my face in a comforting cocoon. The cold was relaxing. I should just stay here for a while. Pushing on would only make things worse, cause more trouble, ruin more lives. It could be somebody else’s problem for once, somebody else’s responsibility. What was the point? It was like my father had always said, I wasn’t tough enough, I wasn’t smart enough, I didn’t try hard enough. Hell, I was supposed to end his life too, and the last thing I’d ever see in his dying eyes as the cancer consumed his brain was disappointment. The cycle never ended. They’d be better off without me.

Get up. Get up and fight. That’s the
Nachtmar
talking.

But I didn’t know which thoughts were my own. They were conflicting, colliding. Everything had gone dark. My flashlight had died, batteries leeched by the unnatural cold.

That helped me focus. It was trying to do the same thing to me.

Pushing myself up, the fog tried to drag me back down with chains made of self-pity. Images of sadness and failure filled my mind. “I’m stronger than you!” I roared. It was horrible, this terrible weight, but I managed to get back up. The fog wasn’t just around me, it was in me. Was this a glimpse into the sort of manipulations the human host had been enduring all this time? Lies, distortions, and half-truths…regardless of who you were, you would break eventually. The fog had taken on the consistency of foam and was clinging to my face. I had to physically grab bits of the stuff and hurl it away. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

I could have sworn that something moved in darkness of the corner of my eye. There was the rustle of dry leaves and a whisper. “You are good.”

“You’re not, you wretched piece of shit. Where’s my brother?”

The
Nachtmar
didn’t respond. Batteries dead, I blundered forward in the dark. The cold was making me stupid. It took a second for me to remember that Hunters always had a backup for everything.
Two is one, one is none.
There were glow sticks in a pouch on my armor, so I drew them out, cracked them, and shook them until I had a small comforting green glow to light my way. I tripped over a body on the floor. It might have been one of the Paranormal Tactical men or maybe somebody from STFU, but I couldn’t tell because his face had been dissolved.

“Mosh! Holly! Can you hear me?” They were here. Somewhere…But I had a sinking feeling that here and
here
were two different things. The
Nachtmar
was distorting reality. They were so close that I could feel them, but I felt like we were slipping in and out of the real world. The fog’s power was growing. The
Nachtmar
was feeding on everyone who was trapped in the mist. The nightmare realm was spreading. Good thing they’d evacuated. I couldn’t even imagine what this thing would be like if it could entrap an entire city. “Mosh!”

I got no answer.

But maybe that was because I was calling the wrong name…

The host had once been a normal man, corrupted. Heather Kerkonen had given me a pair of dog tags torn off the body buried in Dugway. My hands were shaking so badly from the cold it was hard to draw them free from my pocket. I held them up to the glow stick and squinted to see.

Kitashima, Marcus

I knew what all the info was for because of my dad’s tags. There was a service number, blood type
A
. The religion was an
X
, which if I recalled for that time period, meant something other than Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish. The name of the next of kin was
Mary Kitashima.
A wife? A mother? Was that who he had been demanding I find? The address section for the next of kin contact seemed to be only partially complete,
Topaz WRC.

Look at Topaz.

That had been the host’s words. It had been a place. In his confusion, with his will being sapped and his mind being manipulated, the host had been searching for his home.
WRC?
It sounded vaguely familiar…Dr. Blish had told Mosh that all of the subjects had been volunteers that could blend in with the target populations. WRC…War Relocation Center.

I’d learned about this. My dad had
made
me learn about this. He’d wanted me to understand the fine line between men’s reason and fear, and just how quickly that line could be crossed. During World War Two the Japanese on the west coast had been rounded up, rights stripped, homes and property confiscated, and then they’d been imprisoned in several different godforsaken camps in the middle of nowhere. Over a hundred thousand people, just like that…Dad’s goal had been to instill a healthy mistrust for authority in his kids. That was one lesson that had stuck.

Topaz had been the name of one of those concentration camps.

“Marcus Kitashima! Come out and face me.” The fog recoiled away from me. It had been a long time since the
Nachtmar
had allowed that name spoken out loud in the presence of its host. “I kept my word. I know how to find
her.
I know how to find Mary. I know you can hear me. You need to push your way through the fog. Don’t let the
Nachtmar
stand in your way. Don’t let him stop you.”

The fog pulsed with an unnatural light. Something rose to my left, forming out of the floor in a vortex. It took on the shape of man, and for a brief moment, my hope surged…Only a hideous, shrieking ghoul surged forth, snapping ragged jaws and clawing bone fingers for my throat.

I calmly raised Abomination and blew its head off. The entire figure exploded into congealed mist globules. “Don’t let the nightmare cloud your mind, Marcus. Come toward the sound of my voice. I’m here to help you.” Other monsters formed in the fog, and I killed them, one after the other, not even thinking. Not even taking the time to assess them further than it took to see that they weren’t who I was looking for. I kept talking the whole time. Calm. Rational. Killing. “The
Nachtmar
is controlling you. He’s using you. He doesn’t want you to have the truth.”

Werewolf on the right. Two rounds of buckshot dissipated it back into nothing. The darkness was lying, spewing blasphemy and horror. Demons came out of the ceiling. I killed them. Whipping tentacles came out of the walls and exploded one after the other. I reloaded without thought and dropped a charging wight. It was an endless parade of beasts. It was so dark that I could only react at the last instant. It was pure instinct. Movement on both sides. I switched Abomination to my off hand and drew my pistol in the other. I drove my arms out and killed both of them before they could even fully form. “Come on!”

Moving forward, I found another real body, this time one in a wheelchair. It was Dr. Blish. Dead. Only there wasn’t a mark on him. His face was frozen in a final, rigid scream, killed by his own fear.

The fog crawled into his open mouth. The corpse turned his dead face toward me. The lips didn’t move, but he spoke with the
Nachtmar
’s voice. “I will not let him go. I will not go back to the silent lands.”

“You won’t have a choice. He’s stronger than you are.”

There was a scream to my side. I raised Abomination, but that had been a human scream, and despite the
Nachtmar
’s trickery, I knew this one was real. “Holly?”

“She dwells in my world now. She fights me, as you do. She will not give in to her fear like most, but she will break. I will—”

I slammed Abomination’s butt stock against the corpse’s skull hard enough to crack it wide open. “Zip it.” The doctor’s body spilled into the fog and the
Nachtmar
was silent. “Holly! Hang on. I’m coming.” It was difficult to tell with only the light of a few glow sticks, but this seemed like the storage room they’d hid in before. The door had been badly damaged and there was a big shelf lying on its side. I recognized the leering costumes. I took another step forward and my feet sunk into the floor. I didn’t need to see it to know that it had turned to soft dirt. The lines of reality were blurring hard in here. “Holly!”

There was a depression in the floor. The fog was toppling into it, telling me that it was a rather big hole. “Z?” Holly called from inside. Her voice reeked of desperation. “I need help. Get a rope.”

It could have been a trap, but I didn’t have time to think through the consequences. “Is that really you?”

“No. I’m the Easter Bunny. Rope, now, asshole!” That certainly sounded like the real Holly, but then something else snarled at the bottom of the hole. I tossed the glow stick down. It fell about a dozen feet, cutting through the gray, until it hit the ground between two figures. One was Holly, covered in mud and holding something gray and pointy in her hands, using it to ward off the second figure. The other person was in far worse shape, ragged, tattered, so absolutely filthy that I could barely even recognize it as a human being, and couldn’t even tell what sex it was. “A little help would be nice, Z!”

The batteries on my holographic sight had died along with everything else, but it was an easy enough shot. The silver buckshot hit in a loose wad, blowing a hole through its jaw, neck, and shoulder. The body hit the far wall of the pit, but kept on snarling.

“Hold on,” Holly snapped. I took my finger off the trigger. She used the distraction to lunge forward and plunged her weapon into the creature’s chest just above the sternum. Holly levered it up, then drove it down with a sick, wet crack, right through its heart. She put her foot on its stomach and shoved it away, where it rolled to a stop.

“Good shot,” I said.

“Rope, Z,” Holly demanded, and then I realized why she was in such a hurry. The one with a now perforated heart hadn’t been her only problem. The glow stick hadn’t landed on
ground.
The floor was an uneven layer of dead bodies. The entire floor was
squirming.
It was a vampire feeding pit, and the newly minted undead were waking up. Holly had to brace herself against the wall as the man she was standing on tried to rise, knocking her off balance. She stomped ineffectually on his head. “Hurry.”

I didn’t have actual rope, but I always kept a small roll of paracord. It was nearly as useful as duct tape. I wrapped one end around my hand a few times, then tossed the remainder at her. “Catch.” She found the roll and held on for dear life. I pulled hard and dragged her up. Her weight made the narrow cord slice into my flesh and cut off the circulation to my fingers, but there hadn’t been time to secure it any better. Holly got her shoes on the side and tried to kick her way up the mud wall. Hands came out of the fog, grasping listlessly for her.

Holly latched on for dear life as she cleared the edge. I let go of the cord, grabbed her by the wrists and dragged her to safety, cutting a path through the fog. Her fake FBI windbreaker had been shredded. Holly lay there gasping for breath. “I thought I was toast.”

Holly had survived one of these in real life; of course the monster would use that against her. “The
Nachtmar
is getting into your head—”

“Yeah, yeah. I figured that out. He probably thought he could ruin me with this.” She took a deep breath. “He’ll need to try harder. The real one was worse. The problem there wasn’t when our dead occasionally woke up before the vampires could drag them out and chop them up. It was the starvation and the monotony.” Holly snorted. “He went for flash and missed the whole point.”

I couldn’t even imagine. “Good thing you had a stake.”

Holly shook her head. “I wish. I ran out of ammo and had to improvise. That was a jagged broken femur…Just like old times…”

“Can you move?”

She must have seen how I was standing, favoring one leg. “Probably faster than you.”

“Where’s Mosh?”

“I don’t know. Once things got weird, we were separated…Wait, you guys are back?” A smile split her filthy face. Despite everything else, Holly was actually an optimist. “We did it. Awesome.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Long story. Come on.” Dragging Holly out of the hole must have messed with the
Nachtmar
’s plans. The fog seemed more erratic, more desperate. I helped her up. “We’ve got to find somebody named Marcus Kitashima.”

“Marcus…I think we met. Dr. Blish said that name. Undead, dark, and creepy, plunged the world into a psychotic nightmare? Yeah, he took that doctor you told me to find. I heard him die screaming. At least I hoped he died, because it sure did sound awful otherwise.”

“That’d be our guy.”

“Marcus…Project Thirteen…
Mark
Thirteen’s a nickname? Son of a bitch.” Holly was excited. “So we kill this Mark dude, we fix everything?”

“Actually, I’m here to save him.”

Holly sighed. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Really, Z? Did you at least bring help?”

“Ed, but he’s upstairs fighting a dragon.” There was a sudden
bang
from the opposite end of the storage room. That had been a gunshot. “Mosh?” I asked.