“Polite?” VanZant reached inside the remains of his shirt and pulled out a thin piece of metal he had sharpened into a shiv. “You’re lucky Pitt showed up when he did, Riochedare, because I was saving this for you in particular.”
I didn’t know if my partner in crime had ever made it over the walls or not. I raised my voice and shouted. “Lococo! Are you here?”
“Jason’s not here, Z,” VanZant said sadly. “The six of us, we’re it.”
VanZant thought I meant as a prisoner, not a rescuer. I’d catch him up later. Lococo must not have been able to scale up the side of the island after all. But we’d planned for that too, so he’d be falling back to our staging point on the hill. “Okay. Get out of here. I’m right behind you.”
“Thanks. We owe you.”
“Damned right you do.” As the last of the Hunters left, I kept my rifle on Riochedare. The Fey watched us go. They were unreadable beneath those helmets, but they had to be fuming. “Listen up, chuckleheads. I can kill you with this thing further than you can see. If you follow us, I will drop you.”
“Go then, human. We will not trouble you, but make haste. For when my lord returns, he will be outraged at this slight. You have made a grave mistake, for nothing escapes a Wild Hunt.”
There was nothing else for me to say. I kept my rifle on the Fey as I retreated through the doorway, just waiting for the youngsters to try something. I walked backwards all the way to the stairs, rifle shouldered, continually moving the muzzle from the door to the top of the wall, but no helmets appeared.
The other survivors were slogging through the mud toward my hill. VanZant and I hurried down the stairs after them. He was having a hell of a time just walking. VanZant was a martial artist and an athlete, seeing him in this state just pissed me off.
But he was beaming anyway. “Sorry. Not a lot of room to stretch the old leg muscles when you’re suspended in what’s basically a birdcage.”
“No-bullshit assessment time: can your guys survive the journey back to where you were captured?”
VanZant must have seen how grim I looked. “Why? Oh hell. You’re it, aren’t you? Okay, don’t worry about us. If it means getting out of here, we can do anything. They may look weak, but they are mighty. Their spirits are high, and in this place, that’s what matters most.”
“Good.”
“Besides, we’d all rather die fighting than rot away in a birdcage.”
“How long are the Hunts usually gone for?”
“It’s hard to tell time here, but I imagine you’ve gathered that by now…They’re usually out of the fort for what feels like two, three days tops.”
That meant we only had a couple days’ head start. We needed to run until we collapsed.
CHAPTER 23
Lococo wasn’t at the agreed-upon rally point. There was no sign of my friend. It was like he’d been swallowed up by the swamp.
By the time I got to our hilltop hide, the Hunters had found my pack and were using my knives to cut holes in Fey blankets to make ponchos. Luckily they all still had shoes, because trying to cross this terrain barefoot would be a death sentence. We’d be moving out in a minute. Hopefully, Lococo was on his way back. I just prayed that some swamp predator hadn’t picked him off after we had separated.
They were hurrying. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much determination expended over such a simple task. These men were dead set on getting away. But when they saw me climbing up the hill, they dropped what they were doing and rushed over.
I got handshakes, pats on the back, even tearful hugs. I didn’t know what to say to a bunch of dudes with lice-encrusted beards weeping on me. “It’s okay.” I represented the most hope they’d had in months. I knew each of them, but mostly through stories told to me by their friends and teammates in Alaska, or by their trinkets I’d collected in a Ziploc bag. It was hard to believe they were here in the flesh. “Everything is going to be okay.”
Now we just had to get away.
“Listen up. There’s not much time. I’m Owen Pitt, with MHI. Bad news. I’m the only one who was able to come through to get you.” There was some obvious disappointment at that. Couldn’t say I blamed them. “Good news. There is a portal back to Earth, and there are Hunters waiting on the other side for us. Only it’s a long ways off. If we want to make it home, we need to get there before the Wild Hunt catches us. So we’re going to have to haul ass.”
“How will we keep from getting lost?” someone asked. “Last time the terrain kept changing around us. We couldn’t find anything.”
I held up my glove. “On this pinky I’ve got a magic ring from an undead Roman—I shit you not—and it’s supposed to point the way home. If I get killed, take the ring and keep going. It’s really on there so you’ll probably have to cut my finger off. I won’t be offended. Any questions?” I was sure there were plenty of questions, like how the hell were we going to pull this off? but nobody wasted time asking the obvious. “No? Good.”
“What’re we waiting for?” one of the men exclaimed. “We get out of this shithole, the first round’s on me!” It wasn’t that funny, but everybody had a laugh. Hunters were an obnoxiously optimistic bunch, and we’d just pulled off an interdimensional jailbreak, so an ultramarathon across nightmare land running from killer Fey was no biggie.
I glanced around the swamp. There was still no sign of Lococo. “Somebody else was supposed to meet us here.”
“Who?” VanZant asked, perplexed.
“Jason Lococo.”
All of the smiles died.
“What’s wrong with you guys?”
“I’m sorry to tell you, but Jason’s dead,” VanZant explained.
That didn’t make any sense. “No. He was just here. He was supposed to sneak in the back to free you guys. He was the first one of you I found.”
VanZant exchanged a confused glance with the other survivors. “I don’t know what to tell you, Z. Lococo died fighting the Wild Hunt.”
Now wasn’t the time for jokes, but it was obvious they weren’t pulling my leg. “You’re wrong. He survived somehow. I was just talking to him.”
One of the Hunters was shaking his head. “No mistake, friend. He saved all of our lives, but got wounded on the way out. I tried to stop the bleeding, but couldn’t do anything for him without any proper medical supplies. He bled out.”
“We buried him on the mountain,” said another. “We dug a shallow grave with our bare hands. It was all we could do, at least spared him the indignity of the skinnies eating his body.”
This made no sense. I couldn’t even process what they were telling me.
“Are you okay, Z?” VanZant asked.
He’d been in a dungeon for months, and here he was asking me if I was okay? But I wasn’t okay. I took a deep breath. “It’s just that we walked all the way here together. He showed me where to find you.”
The Hunters exchanged nervous glances. Now they were worried this place had already driven their rescuer insane.
Had it?
Poly had seen one of the lights go out. That must have been him. Had Lococo been a ghost all along? Had all that been in my imagination? Only he had saved me from certain death and hauled me up a cliff. The missing fingernail and aches and pains told me I hadn’t imagined that. There was no time to make sense of this now. I could ponder on it when the Wild Hunt wasn’t on our trail.
“Whoever I saw, it doesn’t matter. We’ve got to move.”
* * *
It was far faster leaving the swamp than going in. There was a big difference between searching for something without getting spotted, as opposed to getting the hell out as quick as you can. Since I was the only one who’d been living off of real food instead of nightmare fuel, I was in the best shape by far, so I got in front and blazed a trail. Surprisingly, I didn’t have to stop and wait for the single-file line of Hunters to catch up very often.
The Ring of Bassus seemed to be working. Whenever I paid attention to it, I could feel ju
st a bit of heat and pressure. When I went in the indicated direction, it was like it was guiding me toward trails and clearings that I didn’t even realize where there until I was right on top of them. I had to have faith. The Roman had said that it would guide me back to what I loved most.
Julie, here I come.
The little frog people, swampy lights, and mysterious howlers all avoided us, which was lucky for them, because anything that got between this bunch and home would have gotten promptly beaten or stabbed to death. I’d passed out my spare knives, but we only had the one firearm between all of us.
Which was another head scratcher. Had I loaned my sidearm to a ghost? How the hell did that work? The idea of ghosts hanging around me wasn’t odd. Only it was exceedingly rare for a ghost to physically manifest, and those instances had been brief. Sam had joined in the fight in Vegas, and Mordechai had once been so angry at a particular vampire that I’d been able to use his cane as a stake, but that kind of thing was odd and brief.
This was different. I’d hung out with Lococo for what had to have been close to two weeks, and he had given me zero indication of being dead. Did he even know he was dead? I had run into that kind of denial before. Had the Nightmare Realm brought Lococo back as some kind of cursed revenant? Our foggy death march didn’t give me much time to dwell on it. We were moving quickly, so I needed to concentrate on my surroundings. A sprained ankle now meant doom.
We walked and walked, and whenever the terrain allowed it, ran. When we got to the point that men started falling down constantly, we stopped to rest. Before we could sleep, we had to tend to the split blisters and sloughed-off patches of constantly wet skin.
It was in those brief moments when we stopped that I understood why these men had all started looking to VanZant as their leader, because he checked on each one, making conversation the whole time, trying to check their state of mind and lift their spirits. It was obvious he cared more about their well-being than his own. At this point, their shoes were held together with rags, and it is a humble leader who personally checks the soles of his men’s feet.
When VanZant limped over to me last, I asked if everyone was going to be okay. My biggest concern was illness, especially since we’d spent the day covered in rancid mud, but he assured me that in all their time here, none of the survivors had ever gotten sick or shown any sign of infection. They figured if you succumbed to disease, the Nightmare Realm could no longer feed on your suffering, so nobody got off that easy.
That “night” I passed out my most important possessions—my extra pairs of Danner socks. For the lucky survivors, it was like Christmas. Unable to make a fire, we huddled together for warmth. Surprisingly, my nightmares were almost hopeful. It’s amazing what you can get used to. A few hours later, we dragged our exhausted carcasses up and started running again.
The moist clingy fog was slowly replaced with rain, and the trees went from twisted Fey nightmares back to regular old pine trees. I never thought I’d be so happy to see the miserable pseudo-Pacific Northwest again. We had reached the border faster than expected. Either the ring was leading me on a more direct route than Lococo had, or maybe our hope was actually transforming the landscape in our favor.
I kept checking the sky and listening for thunder. The threat of the Wild Hunt was gnawing at my mind. We were making good time, but if they caught us, we were toast. At one point, VanZant saw me watching the clouds and warned me that they might not come from above at all. Last time they had been on the ground so that their hounds could follow the scent.
It was like a never-ending endurance race. After an unknown amount of time spent in painful exertion, VanZant came up to me, drenched and exhausted, and told me that if we didn’t stop to sleep again soon, we were going to start losing people. None of them had complained to me. I may have been their rescuer, but after what they’d been through together, I was an outsider. They weren’t going to tell me if they were about to drop. But VanZant they would confide in, trusting that he’d know when to call it. I had never been this tired before; I couldn’t even begin to imagine how they were feeling.
We found a small cave that was out of the rain and crashed. There were even enough dry sticks inside to start a fire. That small mercy filled my heart with joy. As we huddled around the flames, sharing body heat, I could hear their stomachs growling. Mine was too, but not as bad yet. Before they started passing out, I realized that I had something belonging to each of them. So I got out the Ziploc and passed it around.
A Hunter began to cry when he found the photo of his wife.
I vowed that I was going to get these poor bastards home, no matter what.
There were several unclaimed items left in the bag. We’d never known which of the missing had been among the survivors Poly could sense, versus those who had died and we’d just never recovered their bodies. Seeing those forgotten bits made me sad. The small good luck charm from Kiratowa’s man was still in there, so he was dead after all. Kiratowa was going to be pissed that his streak was actually over.
On first watch, I passed the time staring off into the rain, listening to the snores, too exhausted to think. My eyes burned with the effort of keeping them open.
When VanZant took over for me at the mouth of the cave, he whispered so as to not disturb the others. “I’ve got the rest of this, Pitt. Get a few hours for yourself.”
I just nodded, but I didn’t move. I figured I’d probably just close my eyes and pass out right there. When every muscle was this sore, it didn’t really matter what position you put them in. Something was still going to hurt.
VanZant looked back at the sleeping Hunters. Half his face was covered in shadow, the other half in firelight. He was wearing his old dog tags that I had brought from Earth, because at least those were a tangible connection to memories of a place other than here.
“You know, Z, I did the best I could to keep us together, to keep them all focused and fighting. You give up here, you’re gone…Your soul rots. This place sucks you dry and leaves a husk. We ran into a few of those…the lost, wandering. They’re like these lonely, crazy wraiths. I just have to tell you. I was close to giving up. I don’t think I could have lasted much longer. As soon as I had the chance I was going to shiv a Fey. I had no delusions of escaping, but I hoped they’d get angry enough to execute me for it.”
“Sounds reasonable.” Getting killed by a monster was a far better way to go than giving up and turning into one. If you’re going to die, might as well be defiant about it.
“I’m trying to say thanks. Better to die fighting than wither away captive. Even if we don’t make it, this way is better.”
“Naw. You’ve kept them alive this long, John, it’s just a little further. If the Wild Hunt finds us, you’ve got to take them the rest of the way. These guys love you. You’re the only one who can keep them moving and I’m the only one in condition to buy much time. So if that situation arises, let’s not waste time having a debate over it.”
VanZant obviously didn’t like where I was going with that line of thought. “Nobody else is getting sacrificed. You’ve already done enough finding us.”
“Sorry, John, but I’m really not the one who found you.”
“Get some sleep, Z.”
I closed my eyes. “Tell me where you buried him.”
“You’re going to laugh, because this sounds far-fetched, but it’s true. I don’t know how one wound up here, but we buried Jason’s body next to an old school bus.”
I was asleep in seconds.
* * *
A horn echoed through the mountains.
The Wild Hunt was closing in.
That haunting sound turned my blood to ice water. Every one of us had frozen in place and was staring back in the direction we’d come from. All I could see was endless trees, concealing our doom. We had been moving single file along a ridgeline, drawn this direction by the now constant warmth of the ring. There was a river below us, and somewhere past it was the gateway home.
> Not now. We’re so close.
“They’ve caught our scent. This is what happened last time!” one of the Hunters cried. “There’s no getting away!”
“Might as well die here. I can’t walk anymore.”
These men were hard as nails, but you can only push someone so far beyond exhaustion before they start to give up. Several of them were leaving bloody footprints, so it wasn’t like we could hide. We’d been moving nonstop for what felt like several days. I could see it in their eyes. When that horn blew, it signaled the end. It had sucked their will to live.
Not all of them however. “Shut up,” VanZant ordered. “None of that talk. We’re not giving up.” Ari Rothman had started to sit down, but VanZant grabbed him by the arm and pulled him up. “Stand your ass up.” VanZant shoved him along. “After everything we’ve been through, you can’t stop now. Move, Hunter!”
But they were dejected, beaten. The portal was probably still miles away.
“This is it…” someone whispered.
“Not yet,” I muttered as I started walking back down the line of bearded, quivering, near-skeletal survivors. They were all out of breath, obviously in pain, and I’d be damned if I let them go down like this. I stopped by their leader, who was too annoyed to be scared. “John, how far do you think that horn was?”
“A few miles at most. At the speed they ride, unless they stop for a leisurely lunch, they’ll catch up to us before we can cross that river.”
“Not if I make them pay for every inch.” I chamber-checked Cazador. My rifle was loaded and ready. Good. It should have been, but when you spend this much time in a delirious haze you shouldn’t take anything for granted. “Remember that talk we had the other night?”
“I remember.”
“Good.” No need to waste time arguing then. I bit my glove and pulled it off. Getting the Ring of Bassus off my pinky was a lot easier than expected. I’d shed a lot of weight recently. “Here, take this.”
VanZant knew exactly what I was doing, but it hadn’t sunk in for the sleep-deprived, starved others. They were all looking back nervously, waiting for the Wild Hunt to appear and ride us down, but their leader knew what was happening. VanZant just gave me a grim nod as he slipped the ring on one of his fingers. Having been through a lot together, that one look said everything that needed to be said.
Monster Hunter Siege (Monster Hunters International Book 6) Page 35