There was some head shaking and muttering.
“Will we avenge our fallen?” He got a chorus of yeahs and sures . “What? Are you not angry?”
Our response turned to shouts. “Damned right!”
“That’s better,” Kiratowa snapped, finally raising his voice. “When Harbinger calls for us, we will slaughter without hesitation every vile creature between us and our men! Then we will bring them back and plant the flag of mankind on the bloated corpse of the demon Asag!”
That got a bunch of motivated responses. I was starting to see why this guy’s company was so successful. He must have seen how the delay and the helplessness had been eating at us.
“For the Last Dragon!”
“For the Last Dragon!” Now I really wanted to kick some ass.
All of our radios popped. “This is Harbinger. Come in, portal team.”
“This is Kiratowa. We read you.”
“The gate is secured. The enemy has fallen back, but I can’t say for how long. We met heavy resistance and they might just be regrouping. You can go through now if you want, but I can’t promise we’ll still be holding it when you get back.”
We exchanged glances. The mood ranged from determined to excited. Nobody shirked. If anyone was scared, he didn’t show it.
Kiratowa spoke for all of us when he transmitted. “Portal team is on the way…Move out.”
We started running down the hall in a single-file line. It wasn’t a really fast run, because in addition to our armor and weapons, every one of us was carrying a heavy pack. We didn’t know how long we were going to be on the other side, and there would be no resupply, so if we wanted it, we had to carry it in ourselves. Face-planting was the last thing you wanted to do when you’re boogying down a steep slope carrying half your body weight.
The string of emergency lights guided our way. Hunters had been left to guard each intersection to make sure our main force didn’t get flanked. When they saw us approaching, they shouted encouragement. Everybody knew what this team was here to do. There was still gunfire coming from below, but it was more sporadic now. We didn’t enter the chamber so much as the hall got bigger and bigger, until our lights could no longer reach the ceiling, and you got hit with the realization that the space was vast. It was bigger than Management’s cave and DeSoya Caverns put together. It just kept on going for what seemed like forever. I couldn’t see the roof, but everything below us was built—grown?—out of that same gray material. The little bit of light the Hunters had brought into the darkness was reflected and bounced back, and it still left the details of most of the space a mystery.
Kiratowa signaled for us to slow down. We needed to get our bearings. There were glistening white bodies scattered everywhere. The Hunters who’d come ahead of us had gone through one hell of a fight.
“Harbinger, this is Kiratowa. We’ve reached the chamber, but need to get a bearing.”
“Yeah, it’s bigger than expected. Keep going straight on from the hall. And watch your step! There’s holes and plenty of gaps big enough to fall down. We threw down a strobe. Look for the blue blinking light.”
“There’s the beacon.” I knew exactly what kind of light they were using, and from how small it seemed from here, this space was even bigger than I’d first thought. There was room sufficient to land a 747 in here. Not fit…land.
Kiratowa was awestruck too. “I do not care for who built this, but it is very impressive. Now, double-time.” We began running again. The giant packs made us look like a bunch of lumbering gastropods, but I wasn’t even breathing hard yet and my muscles were fine. I was really glad I’d spent all those days running up and down Moose Mountain.
Though the floor was relatively flat, it wasn’t solid. Like Earl had warned, there were gaps. When I glanced over those edges, I could barely make out more openings below. They looked suspiciously like alcoves…doorways and windows maybe. Further down were what appeared to be suspended walkways and stairs to who knew where. The open spaces went on further than our lights would pierce, but I got the impression that there were whole ravines full of honeycombed structures below.
“We aren’t running across the floor of the cavern, we’re on their roof,” Gerecht said.
There were dead Asakku everywhere, riddled with bullets, blown apart by shrapnel, or burned to a crisp by flamethrowers. We couldn’t spare the time to examine the dead, but they seemed to come in all shapes and sizes, from dwarflike to seven feet tall. From what I saw, they were humanoid, mostly, but I saw some with two sets of arms and all manner of deformities. Some were naked, others clad in loincloths or scuzzy brown robes. The only thing they all had in common was the eerie, nearly translucent skin, which reminded me of the wrapper on a spring roll. We passed piles of leaking bodies. It was a little unnerving, how the solid floor seemed to be so readily absorbing the puddles of blood.
“That’s the portal team coming in. Hold your fire,” Earl said over the radio.
The blue strobe was on top of a raised dais. A bunch of Hunters had taken up defensive positions all around it, waiting for the next wave of attackers. We started climbing. The stairs were too small, and like everything else in this godforsaken place, constructed with just enough awkward angles to make you uncomfortable.
My boss was waiting for us at the top. Earl was splattered in blood, and he’d been firing his Thompson so much that I could smell the scorched wooden hand guard from ten feet away. Holly was with him, and she was looking a little harried. I knew from personal experience that when your assignment was to follow the indestructible Earl Harbinger into a fight, you became his gopher and ammo caddy. It was exciting, but not what I’d call fun.
“I’ve got a feeling the Children will be coming back in force. My gut’s telling me there’s a lot more of them down here and I don’t think we’ve got much time.”
“What do you wish for us to do?” Kiratowa asked.
“It’s your asses that are going to be hanging in the wind if they force us to retreat.”
“Then you had best come back stronger by the time we return, Harbinger. Point us toward the gate.”
“Damn, that’s what I like to hear.” Earl had a savage grin. “Come on. The big brains are checking it out.”
The portal was made out of a similar material to the rest of the city, only smooth and round, like a pipe. It must have once been a freestanding structure big enough to drive a car through, but it had collapsed during the bombing, so now it was more of a hole than a gate. When I got closer, I realized that the pipe material had melted through the floor. It hadn’t fallen over flat, but was instead lying at an odd angle, sloping downward. I couldn’t see what was inside the circle, since it was entirely covered in the same unnatural, heavy mist that had engulfed Las Vegas.
The hole was giving off a nasty vibe. It was cold, malevolent, and awake.
“I’ve seen some weird things, but I’ll admit that thing is creeping me the hell out,” Holly said as I stopped next to her.
She was right. Every instinct was screaming stay away. “Don’t worry. We got this.”
“You’d better.” She leaned in close and whispered. “I’ll be honest, I cried a little after you asked me to make sure your kid gets Abomination if you don’t come back. I don’t like it when people make me cry, Z.”
“I don’t believe that.” I forced myself to give her a confident smile. “Everybody knows Holly Newcastle is too tough to cry.”
“You ever make me do it again, I’ll kick your ass. Now go be heroic.”
Ben Cody was kneeling next to the gate, poking it with some sort of instrument that looked like an old-fashioned TV antenna. Paxton was a few feet away reading numbers off a tablet. She looked up as we approached. “Don’t touch the round part. It doesn’t look it, and it doesn’t radiate, but touching it is like touching a stove. You’ll leave skin. As for the inside…I’ll spare you the mystical mumbo jumbo, but basically, the other side of this reads a lot like what we recorded at the Last Drago
n.”
“I concur,” Cody said. “This is it.”
Good . Because we could be stepping into some sort of cosmic garbage disposal for all I knew. Now that would be one hell of a trick: get us to come all this way to voluntarily blend ourselves into mush. Only my instincts were telling me this was a door.
Elmo the Elf was along for the ride. “I also con- cur. I can feel it. This here is a hynlyfdraws .”
“I assume that’s fancy elf talk for nightmare hole,” Cody said.
“Yup. Through that fog’s a land of de-spair. This here is some right scary old-time witchcraft, likes of which I ain’t never seen before. It takes a mighty power to crack the world open.”
Cody stood up with a groan. He was way past retirement age. “Well, there you have it, Earl. As near as my instruments and hill folk Gandalf here can tell, this leads to the same place we saw before. That cyclops was telling the truth.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“We’re dealing with the mysteries of the universe here. We don’t get absolutes. Everything on the other side laughs at our laws of physics. However, I’m certain enough that if you hadn’t shot me down for being too old and broken down, I’d be going through with them.”
Earl nodded. That was as good as he was going to get. “All right. It’s your show now, Kiratowa.”
The Japanese Hunter didn’t mess around. He stepped carefully over the hot edge and began walking down into the unnatural mist. After Rothman’s warnings that I’d probably be on my own, I had to admit I breathed a sigh of relief when Kiratowa didn’t just bounce off the portal. He watched the unnatural fog curl around his legs, but when nothing horrible happened, Kiratowa resumed walking downward. “Let’s go.”
The rest of us followed.
“You boys hurry back. We’ll be waiting.”
“We will return as swiftly as possible, Harbinger.”
We were leaving a bad place to enter one that would probably be far worse. The mist crawled up my legs. It was thick, and squishy, like being bathed in evil Jell-O. I watched it rise up over my teammates, and then I could barely see my rifle in front of my face. The rest of my team was just dark shapes, walking cautiously onward, but then it got even harder to see. I could hear the others around me, the creak of ballistic nylon, the thrum of boots against stone, the nervous breathing. Then the feel of the ground beneath me changed. I was no longer walking on rock, but on soft dirt.
And then I stepped into a forest.
Confused, I looked around. This was completely different than last time. I was in a clearing, surrounded by pine trees. It was cloudy, but nothing like the fog-choked nightmare world in Vegas. There was plenty of light to see by. A chill rain was falling, and judging by the puddle I was standing in, had been for a while.
Glancing back, the unnatural fog bank was directly behind me, the oily surface still rippling from my passage.
I took a few nervous steps away from the fog. “Hello?” Nobody answered. The rest hadn’t made it through. I walked around the fog, which was easy, since it was only about ten feet across and holding way too still. “Gerecht? Kiratowa? Anybody?”
If this was the Nightmare Realm, then everything here would be conspiring to kill me. I scanned my surroundings for threats, but other than the rain, nothing moved. I readied Cazador anyway. The branches were soggy and drooping, great for hiding all sorts of nasty beasts.
I was getting something in my earpiece. It was weak and filled with static, but some signal must have been able to pass through the portal. The voice on the other side sounded like it might be Earl. He was saying something about the team. They’d walked across the portal, come out of the fog, and still been on Earth.
I transmitted back. “This is Pitt. I’m through. Can you read me?”
All I got back were a bunch of hisses, pops, and a few things that might be words. I tried a few more times in vain. Then I decided to try the main command channel. It probably wouldn’t work, but the Bride had a much stronger radio, so it was worth a shot. “This is Pitt. I’m on the other side of the portal. Can anybody hear me?”
When I got nothing from the main line, I flipped back to my squad’s channel. There was a lot of static, but I think Kiratowa was doing a head count, and he sounded furious that they’d gotten turned around.
Damn it. Professor Rothman had called it. The gate wasn’t for them. It was only for people like me.
“This is Pitt. I’m on the other side. Do you copy?”
I glanced around nervously. It looked just like the Pacific Northwest. There wasn’t anything particularly alien or terrifying about my surroundings. I looked back at the fog bank, hoping for some sign of movement, of some other Hunter making it through, but it just lay there, unnatural and thick, taunting me.
I could still turn back. A few steps and I’d be back on Earth. Nobody would blame me for giving up. I even thought about going back briefly… To check in, to reassess our plans now that we knew I was on my own, but I didn’t, because what if it wouldn’t let me back through a second time?
I had already given this a lot of thought.
“Harbinger, if you can hear me I’m going to proceed with the rescue mission on my own.”
The voice that answered over my radio was deep and creepy. “The Chosen who destroyed our king has returned. Heed our words, trespasser. We shall feast upon your fears until your mind breaks. When nothing remains of you but a gutted husk, we shall take your power, and use it to rain death upon your world.”
Good old Nightmare Realm. Well, at least that told me I was in the right place and hadn’t been magically whisked off to Seattle. “Listen up, alps. Your biggest badass couldn’t take me last time. You’ve got nothing. Come after me and I’ll destroy you.”
“You will suffer for your transgressions.”
The Nachtmar had been made incredibly deadly because of the Mark Thirteen project, able to take our worst fears out of our heads and shape them into reality, but regular alps only had a fraction of its power…hopefully. “Whatever. Stay off my radio, you little shits.”
The nightmare feeder didn’t respond. Frankly, I was more worried about other beings who had gotten stuck in this realm than some invisible soul-sucking parasites.
I waited in vain for someone else to make it through the fog. At one point I got the impression that another body had tried to make it through. The fog grew turbulent. It seemed to make the whole world buzz and left my ears ringing. I had a sneaky feeling that particular presence had been Earl Harbinger trying to force his way through. He was supposed to stay there and run things, but had probably decided in the heat of the moment that he’d make a bigger difference on the rescue than on the siege. But this wasn’t Earl’s destiny, so it wasn’t meant to be. I bet that really made him mad.
So it looked like I was it.
It was not the most impressive start, but it would have to do. But then something fell out of the fog and landed with a splash in a rain puddle. At first I thought it was a person, since it was big enough, but it was only another backpack. The living were being turned away, but apparently nothing was stopping gear from getting through. I went into the fog to get the pack, but then had to duck out of the way as another heavy bag seemed to fall out of the sky. It almost nailed me in the head. Now that would have been a really ignominious way to die. Brained by luggage, and nobody would ever know.
“This is Pitt, packages received,” I transmitted, just in case. “Thanks.”
I waited, but there weren’t any more presents. So I grabbed the bags and dragged them out of the mud. There was no way I could carry that much extra weight for long, but I could cache these. It never hurt to have some extra goodies stashed. I checked the bags. They were the same as mine: food, water, medical supplies, batteries, and other assorted useful stuff. Somebody had even given up their rifle so I could have a spare. Everybody on the rescue squad had standardized on weapons using the same magazines, so I had a ton of extra .308 loaded in Magpul PMAGs.
<
br /> Alert for threats the whole time, I found some good hiding places for the other packs. There was a fallen tree not too far from the portal. One bag got stashed beneath it. Then I followed a gully about two hundred yards to a rocky overhang and hid the second bag beneath it. As I was burying the bag beneath rotting leaves and pine needles, I realized that this might be an entirely pointless exercise. The place was supposed to be malleable by the whims of the strongest will present. The dirt on my hands, was it even real? Or did this forest exist only because somebody had wished it into existence, creating some small bit of order out of the swirling chaos? It felt like I was kneeling on a rock, something that to a human mind equaled permanence, but would any of this still be here when I got back?
If it was the strongest mind that shaped the land, what would happen when that mind was gone? Would it degenerate back to what it was before, or would it stay until a new mind came along to twist it into something else? And what would happen to things from the “real” world that were here when that happened?
It beat the hell out of me. The sooner I got out of here the better.
I went back and checked on the gate one last time. The fog was still floating there, being scary, mysterious, but also promising an escape. This was it. Last chance. Return to the relative safety of my friends, or venture into the unknown.
I set out alone into the Nightmare Realm.
CHAPTER 19
Dr. Rothman was probably right about the treacherous, perpetually shifting nature of this place, but in case he was wrong, I kept track of my path. I hoped all of that land nav training in Alaska would come in handy, except I was limited to matching terrain features and counting my steps. The needle on my compass spun wildly, probably since there was no magnetic poles here. If there was a sun, I couldn’t see it through the perpetual gloom.
Monster Hunter Siege (Monster Hunters International Book 6) Page 28
