The sky was nothing but thick storm clouds. The cold rain never let up. I was still dressed for the Arctic Circle, so it wasn’t too bad, but the moisture was beginning to leech in everywhere. I’d nearly gone hypothermic yesterday, so I really couldn’t afford to get chilled again.
I kept walking, but I didn’t know toward what. It wasn’t like I had clear directions, beyond believe extra hard. I hoped that by keeping the mission at the front of my mind, I could make this awful place show me the way, even if I had to beat it into submission. Laboring under all this gear, downhill would have been easier, but I went up, in the hopes that I could find a good vantage point and maybe spot something. And because up was the direction I went, I told myself it was right, and if it wasn’t, too damned bad. I was going to make it right. Because screw you, Nightmare Realm, you’re not the boss of me.
And shortly after making that decision, I stumbled across a game trail going in the direction I was headed anyway. Was this the answer to my prayers? Or was this the Nightmare Realm screwing with my head and leading me toward disaster? Either way, it beat crashing through the brush, so I took the trail. And then I got to thinking maybe the trail wasn’t anything mystical at all. We knew all sorts of weird creatures from various worlds got stuck here just like we had, so what had cut this trail, and how hungry was it?
Head up, gun out. One foot in front of the other. Find our guys. Go home.
The dirt was soft, but I didn’t see any tracks. I couldn’t help but leave boot prints myself. Maybe I would get lucky and one of our survivors would stumble across my obviously-from-Earth tread pattern and investigate. On the downside, whatever predators lived here would have no problem following me.
My watch stopped. I guess you can’t tell time in a place that doesn’t believe in time. My watch also had an altimeter, but it alternately told me that I was either five thousand feet below sea level or a mile high. That digital display of nonsense was all sorts of helpful.
Hiking through dense forest while waiting for something to ambush you is nerve-wracking. A normal march, you can put your head down, lose yourself in the labor, and plod on forever, but for this I had to stay alert. The rain would mask the noise of anything sneaking up on me, so I kept my head on a swivel, constantly scanning.
Being switched on for hours is tiring.
I had been training hard, but between the clinging mud, slick rocks, moist chill, and stupid pack, I was starting to feel the burn. It was tempting to lighten the load, but I didn’t know what I would need. Our guys had survived here for months, so there had to be something to subsist off of. Since I was drenched, the water part was obvious, but there had to be food too.
The trees occasionally thinned out enough that I could see a little further, but in every direction were other thickly wooded slopes. It seemed like I was in a mountain valley, but the tops always remained hidden in the clouds. I felt like I was tantalizingly close to seeing something. Once in a while I got a good look down, and I was pretty certain that I could still find the portal if I needed to. At least the realm hadn’t screwed me over yet.
It was endless green below and gray above. It never got dark. The light remained diffuse through the clouds. The rain kept up. Sometimes it would get heavier, then it would die off to a drizzle, but then it would turn back up.
Why the hell did I decide up was the right direction?
After what my sore feet and back suggested was a whole day of marching, it still looked exactly like Earth. If I got to the top of this endless friggin’ mountain and I saw Portland on the other side, I was going to be ticked off, because nothing would be more annoying than fighting your way through the City of Monsters to get teleported to Portland.
I spotted a cave and decided to take a rest. It was more of a depression beneath some rocks than a proper cave, barely deep enough to fit me and my pack, but it was nice to get out of the stupid rain for the minute. At first the lack of continual thumping noise against my helmet made me feel like I’d gone deaf. I thought about making a fire, but everything here was too moist to burn, and I wasn’t going to waste any of my C4. That stuff burned like crazy. I didn’t know how much time had passed, but I was burning a lot of calories and was starving. I broke out a freeze-dried meal pack and took stock of my situation.
We had been expecting something to try and murder the rescue squad as soon as we came through, so we’d been prepared for a fight and kitted up accordingly. Armor is nice when something’s actively trying to murder you, but the rest of the time it is heavy and miserably hot. Since it had been me on my lonesome the whole time, and it looked like I was going to be in this for a long haul, I could probably ditch some gear. If I considered this little cave a third cache, I could even convince myself that I wasn’t just being a wuss.
I ditched my helmet. I had a skullcap that would keep my head warm, and it weighed a lot less. Trip had given me the big cool-guy Suunto watch for my birthday, but since it was now useless, it could go too. When I got back I’d lie and tell him I’d lost it in a dramatic manner. It was more exciting that way. I hated leaving my armor because with my luck, ten minutes later something would come along and stab, shoot, or bite me…But pounds are pounds. I’d be able to move faster this way. Anything that I could eat stayed in the pack. Anything that shot, stabbed, exploded, or made fire, I kept too.
As I went through my pack, I came across the Ziploc bag of oddball items I’d collected while traveling around prepping for this mission. It was a weird mix. I had old dog tags, a class ring, a cigarette lighter, a nice ink pen, a crumpled photograph of someone’s wife and kids, and other assorted odds and ends. I had gotten ahold of a personal effect for every single missing Hunter that I could. These were all things that had been important to them, something that they’d held close and carried with them at times. I didn’t know if having these knickknacks would make a lick of difference when it came to finding them, but it couldn’t hurt. I opened the bag and shook it over my hand, and the first thing that fell out was a glass eye.
It was one of Lococo’s spares. It had been in the compound’s barracks, where he’d been rooming while going through Newbie training. It’s tough to get a closer personal object than one you actually carried in your eye socket. I wasn’t good at the magic or mysticism stuff, but I concentrated on that glass ball, hoping that it would show me the way.
Earl swore to me that Lococo was a good man. He had come from a shoddy company, but risen to the occasion, and saved a lot of lives in Copper Lake. He was an ex-con, and had served time for manslaughter, but Earl had seen a lot of potential in him. Lococo had a bright future with MHI. He’d been invited to the Last Dragon because of how far ahead of the other Newbies he’d been. The experienced Hunters teaching his class had thought it would be a good learning experience.
And then I’d abandoned him on a roof, surrounded by monsters.
I rolled the eye across my clammy palm. “If you’re still alive, Jason, hang on. I’m on the way.” It had landed iris up, so it was like it was staring at me accusingly. Talking to myself was weird enough, but I still felt like I needed to explain. “I’m sorry I screwed up your life. You getting stuck here. That’s on me. I can’t ever make up for what I’ve done to you, what I’ve taken from you, but I’m going to bring you back so you can see your daughter again. I’m going to find you and bring you home.”
The eye kept staring at me, but I didn’t get any big insight on what to do next. I just felt guilty for giving him the glass eye to begin with, and stupid for talking to it now. I made a fist. It was a cold lump in the middle. “I promise.”
I put the eye back in the bag, sealed it, and stuck it in my pack. That bag would never be dead weight. That bag was why I was here. I rubbed my hands together for friction and blew on them for warmth. It was time to get back on the trail.
* * *
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered as I reached the top of the mountain and looked out over the weirdest damned thing I’d ever seen.
<
br /> It took me several seconds—maybe minutes, who could tell anymore?—of uncomprehending staring before my poor mortal brain began to process what my eyes were seeing.
Below me was the evergreen forest I’d been marching through forever. Beyond that, however, was a land of patches, stitched together with protean fog. In the distance was a desert. Beyond that was a jungle made of orange vines. I turned. There was a land of snow next to a land made of fire. To the right was an ocean, to the left, a never-ending waterfall where the ocean fell off the world. All of them lumped together, discordant, right on top of each other, borders crossing and blurring in that chaotic angry fog we had seen before.
The place we’d entered through Las Vegas had been a borderland. The actual Nightmare Realm was like a patchwork quilt of never-ending weirdness. All of these things, they were copies of somewhere else, somewhere real sucked out of a traveler’s memories. The fakes were all crammed in together, competing for precious reality, shaped by thousands of minds, some of which were obviously insane.
Then I realized the horizon curved up. I craned my head back. The world kept going and going, more petty kingdoms climbing as far as the eye could see. This world could never be represented on a map, because we were inside the globe. The clouds I’d been climbing toward weren’t clouds at all, just another border, with competing territories intruding from above.
I needed to sit down.
At first I thought I was delusional. I’d hiked through miles of clouds to get this far, and maybe this was oxygen deprivation, or somebody had put a hallucinogenic mushroom in my meal packet or something, because this? This was some psychedelic, weird-ass, mind-blowing, acid trip experience, and I’d seen the Dread Overlord in person.
Holy shit. There are sky islands.
Smaller chunks of disintegrating worlds had broken off and were floating like icebergs, colliding with other realities. I had to put my hands on my knees, bow my head, and take a bunch of deep breaths. I focused on the ground beneath my feet. It still looked like Oregon. I could focus on the ground. Ground was okay. Ground was understandable.
When I thought I was ready, I looked up again, saw the skylands, said screw it, and looked back down at my boots again. I really wanted to puke. This was kind of overwhelming.
Those Hunters could be anywhere. I know I was supposed to bring us together by the power of my will, but come on…how could I exert my will over that? This was insane. I don’t give up easy, but right at that moment, looking at just how ridiculously vast this place was, I wanted nothing more than to admit defeat and walk back to the portal.
On the bright side, it had stopped raining.
It turned out that when I was alone for a while, I talked to myself a lot. “Okay. I can do this. I’m feeling a little in over my head is all. Mordechai, Bubba, Sam, if any of you dead guys can hear me, I could really use some guidance right about now. You got away with helping in Vegas because you said the rules were fuzzy. This here is a whole new level of fuzzy, so if you’re listening—”
A twig cracked.
I spun around, Cazador flying to my shoulder. Something had moved in the trees behind me. I hadn’t imagined it. That was the direction I’d come from. It was the first sound I’d heard from something other than myself or the rain in a long time.
I’d been asking my ghosts for help, but ghosts didn’t step on branches. My pulse was pounding, but I wasn’t afraid of whatever had made the sound. The elevated heartbeat was a natural side effect from seeing the world broken into puzzle pieces and dumped into a chaotic pile. I was actually thankful for something to take my mind off the weirdness.
Keeping the rifle at the ready, I walked slowly to the side. There was no cover for me to use. I’d walked out into the open of a rocky clearing to get a better view and had let myself get distracted. That had been stupid. Less than fifty yards away, some low-hanging branches swayed as something brushed against them. I saw a flash of white, startling after all the hours of brown and green, and then it was gone.
It wasn’t one of my people, and it had seen me. I had nothing to gain by getting into a fight. I needed to get the hell out of here. Having no idea which way to go, I picked a direction and started walking away.
Something slammed into my pack. I slipped on the damp rocks and fell on my side. The noise of the gunshot registered as the sound continued to echo off the mountainside.
There was only a split second of shocked disbelief as I hit the ground. Who’s shooting at me? But then I was trying to figure out where it had come from. There was black powder smoke rising from the leaves near where I’d seen the movement. A stark white figure rose from the brush, a long pole in its arms. Its head seemed too big for its body as it leaned forward to see if it had killed me.
Lying on my side, I lined up Cazador’s side sights on its center of mass, flipped the safety off, and pulled the trigger. WHUMP. The .308 bullet hit it square.
By the time it dropped, I was up and running. It’s amazing how light a big pack is when the adrenaline hits. I ran toward the threat. There might be more of them in there, but that was the closest cover, and being behind trees was better than being in the open when they had guns.
The thing was on its back, arms thrown wide, a red hole in the center of its white chest. Dead.
Oh, hell. It was an Asakku.
I’d not been able to get a good look at the ones in the under city, but this was obviously the same species. This one was short, maybe four and a half feet tall, and skeletally thin. I could see vague dark outlines of its internal organs through its weird stretchy skin. The eyes were solid black and way too big for its face, like they were designed to soak up every bit of light available in a place where there was none. Its teeth were bared in a final death grimace. That hadn’t lasted long since I’d blown a hole through its heart, but those teeth were jagged, crooked, and stained yellow. It had one too few fingers, and the digits that it did have were too long, and ended in thick dirty nails which were more like claws. It was wearing nothing but rags and a rough leather strap with some pouches around its waist.
The nearest comparison I could make for the Asakku’s appearance was what they used in sci-fi movies for gray aliens. Imagine one of those, but a caveman version…on meth.
This wasn’t some memory plucked out of my mind and given form by an alp. I’d never fought these before. Some of the Asag’s soldiers had found a way through the portal. There could be more. I took a knee next to a tree and listened. The forest was quiet again. My gunshot was suppressed, but the creature’s hadn’t been. That sound would have carried a long way. If there were more of these here, then they would have heard it.
But thinking about that gunshot, monsters didn’t use guns very often. That was bad news. Its weapon had landed a few feet away. I moved over to inspect it and got another surprise. It was a flintlock. My pack had been shot with friggin’ musket. Only then I realized this was no antique. The proportions of the stock were all wrong. The design was one I’d never seen before, and I’m a huge gun nut. Heck, even the aesthetic was wrong. Look at old firearms in a museum, and no matter how odd, or how much of an evolutionary dead end the design may have been, they still looked like they’d been built by humans for humans.
The Asakku hadn’t scavenged this gun. They had built it.
I went back to the body and pulled one of the pouches off its belt. The leather was soft and made out of some mystery animal, but I recognized the contents. Black powder. And in another, lead balls, approximately seventy caliber. Old-school, heavy and slow, like a Brown Bess, which meant it would probably hit like a freight train.
This was bad, very bad. The Asakku the lead teams had fought through in the under city had been armed with tooth and claw, not guns. The Petrov Report hadn’t mentioned guns either. If there was some monster gunsmith down there now cranking even this low-level technology out, that changed the equation dramatically. I remembered the confusing mess of the City of Monsters, with all of those unknown tunnels
like an ant’s nest below us…If they could make black powder, they could make bombs.
My growing dread was interrupted by another sound. It was a shout, a deep, reverberating bellow that echoed through the forest. That call was answered, repeated several times, and magnified when it was answered by a set of lungs that were nearby. So that was what the Asakku sounded like. I ducked down and waited, but they’d gone silent again. Probably waiting for an answering cry from the one I’d killed. When no answer came, they’d be on the hunt. I didn’t know if they were a patrol from the city, or if they were settled here, or what. All I did know was that it sounded like there were a lot of them, they’d heard the gunshot, and they were on the way to investigate.
I picked the direction opposite the calls and started running.
Could they track me? The ground was so soft it was almost impossible not to leave prints, but I tried to steer for where there was an undercoat of leaves and needles instead of bare dirt. But could they track by smell? I had no idea. How good was their hearing? I was a big guy and nobody had ever accused me of being stealthy. I’d taped down everything that might rattle and make noise, but I was noisy just by existing. The Asakku had small vestigial ears, but they’d have to be deaf to not hear me crashing through the branches.
After running for a bit, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw white shapes drawing near where I’d left the corpse. Movement attracts the eye. There was a fallen tree to the side, so I got behind it and hunkered down. I waited several seconds, hoping that none of them had been looking in this direction. There were no shouts when they reached the body, but they could be communicating by hand signals.
I needed to be able to see what they were doing, so I shrugged out of my pack in order to low-crawl around the side of the log without it sticking over the top. Mud leaked into everything that was unzipped as I slid around the rotting bark. There was a spot where I could hide beneath a pine bough and still see out. I had only managed to put about three hundred yards between us, but there were a lot of trees in the way. Since they lived underground, maybe I’d be lucky and they’d have terrible vision.
Monster Hunter Siege (Monster Hunters International Book 6) Page 29