Monster Hunter International

"This is Delta," replied Myers. "Investigate. Proceed with caution. Over."

Harbinger scowled and his nostrils flared as he sniffed the air. Our leader looked uneasy as he studied the surrounding swamp. He looked to Skippy and Edward. The orcs studied the air. Skippy shook his head in the negative. Harbinger got on the radio.

"Belay that order, Alpha team. Do not make contact."

"MHI, get off my radio net," Myers snapped.

"What color are the lights in those shacks?" Harbinger asked. "I bet they're green."

"Uh… This is Alpha. The lights are green. I repeat green. Over."

"Fall back, Alpha. Fall back unless you want to get the marrow sucked out of your bones."

"This is Delta. Alpha, ignore that order and check out those structures. Over."

"Myers, you dumb ass. Pull your men back or you're going to lose a whole team. And then we're going to have to waste a day messing with the things on that island, and they don't have anything to do with what we're after. Alpha team, listen up. If you step foot on that island, you're dead men. By the time we get over there, they'll have skinned you and eaten your eyeballs right out of your heads." He let go of the mike, and then thought better of it. "Over," he added.

"What are they, Earl?" Julie asked with some concern. He just held up a hand and waited for Myers' response. A minute passed.

"This is Alpha. What should we do, sir? Over."

Finally Myers responded. "Fall back, Alpha. Ignore the structures for now. Mark them on your GPS for future investigation. Over."

"It's your funeral," Harbinger said into the radio.

"What are they?" Trip asked nervously.

"Humboldt Folk," he explained. Most of the Hunters looked at each other in confusion. Only the senior Hunters nodded in understanding. "They just want to be left alone is all. Alpha team is lucky they didn't set foot on that island. The Folk don't let trespassers leave. Ever."

"No, Earl. You forget something. We're real lucky our team isn't the one that happened across it," Julie corrected him. "They wouldn't leave their circle to attack Alpha. They're all male. For us they might have made an exception."

"What do you mean?" Trip asked quietly.

"The Folk tend to run real short on fertile females," Julie answered. She quickly checked her weapons. "Holly, if you get attacked by some strange-looking people with a green glow about them… save your last bullet for yourself." She was not joking.

"What are they?" Holly asked. She held her.308 Vepr and scanned the surrounding trees.

"What were they is a better question," Harbinger responded, "and that's a story that I'm going to save for when we're standing in a warm sunshiny place. Come on, team, we're wasting daylight."

Somewhere in the distance strange animals cried.

Chapter 22

Hours passed as we trudged deeper into the heart of the evil swamp, yet we had not gone very far. The going was slow in Natchy Bottom. It was afternoon, and the rain had not let up. The water level had risen, and walkable land was becoming scarcer. All too often we were forced to wade through the murk, unseen things grasping at our boots, mud sucking us down. At this point we were all so coated in filth that it was becoming difficult to tell who was who.

The shorter Hunters had it particularly bad, often having to wade through water that came up over their chests, and being forced to hold their weapons above their heads. At one point Lee slipped and disappeared beneath the water, and did not come up immediately. Sam dived under and retrieved him, bringing the other Hunter up sputtering and choking. Lee swore that the roots had not wanted to let him go.

I noticed that the mood of the group had become darker and more somber. The further we went into Natchy Bottom, the more it seemed to suck at a person's happiness and will to live. It really was a bad place. I could feel that something was watching us. Unknown insects crawled or slithered inside my clothing.

"Stop," Harbinger ordered. The team complied, weapons at the ready. "This is it."

I looked around. It looked just like every other patch of gray-and-black muck and mutant trees that I had been looking at all morning. I would certainly hate to get lost in here.

"Yes. Everybody stay quiet. No sudden moves. Don't point your weapons at the Wendigo." He got on the radio. "Franks. Call a halt. This is the place. I'm going to make contact."

"This is Delta. I want my men there with you. Over." Myers' voice was distorted, and hard to hear through the static.

"Alpha, Bravo, set up a perimeter. Charlie with me. Hold up, MHI. Over," Franks stated over the radio.

"All right. My favorite person in the whole world," I muttered. "My good buddy Agent Franks gets to hang out with us." My tongue unconsciously probed the gaps in my gums from where he had smashed out my teeth.

"He ain't so bad for a bureaucratic killing machine," Trip said.

"I heard he once burned a bus load of nuns 'cause he thought there was a zombie on board," Sam added.

"No, those were orphans," Milo corrected.

"He's actually kind of cute in a psychopathic way," Holly said.

"Eww," I responded. "That's sick."

"Hey, some girls go for that side-of-beef thug look." She winked at Julie. I could tell our sharpshooter's cheeks turned red beneath the coating of grime. Personally, besides the muscles, I did not think that I looked like Franks at all. I was, after all, much better looking. Well, in my opinion at least.

"I said quiet," Harbinger admonished. The team settled down. Charlie team materialized out of the mist a few minutes later, moving like ghosts. Franks looked like Swamp Thing, coated in mud and moss. He made a few rapid hand signals and his team disappeared into the trees.

"Okay," he grunted as he knelt in the mud amongst my team.

"Y'all sit tight. I'm going over there." Harbinger pointed out a small clump of land, almost tall enough to be dry. "I'll be right back. Franks, you'd best keep your men under control."

"Don't worry," the quiet man stated. Harbinger nodded and moved quickly away, sloshing through the mud, stepping on roots and semisolid land whenever possible.

"How's your stomach?" Franks asked as he studied the terrain.

"Sore. How're your nuts?" I whispered back.

"Fine." He shifted his gun in his big hands. "I killed the last guy who tried to kick me like that."

"Hey, asshole, if we're comparing notes, I think you've hit me a lot more times than I've hit you."

"Will you two shut up?" Julie hissed.

Harbinger had reached the island. He hung his tommy gun in the branches of a tree, set down his revolver and grenades, and finally stabbed his bowie knife into the trunk, leaving it there vibrating slightly. He left his weapons behind and walked slowly up the mud hill. At the summit he sat down cross-legged, back toward us, and waited.

"Probably a stupid question at this point…" Trip whispered. "But what's a Wendigo exactly?"

"A shaman who was cursed for committing an unforgivable act, usually something cannibalistic. Doomed to walk the Earth forever, guardians of the land and its original inhabitants," Julie answered softly. "It's a horrible fate."

The swamp grew still. The rain stopped. The constant croaking and chittering of amphibians and insects abruptly died. The tiny bit of light that we had been getting through the canopy went away, leaving us in near darkness. A shiver ran down my spine. It felt almost sterile and impossibly lifeless.

An eerie illumination slowly rose from the other side of the hill, highlighting Harbinger as he sat perfectly still. Something moved in the unnatural light. Something huge. Impossibly tall, but startlingly lean. All we could see was a silhouette of billowing skins, ten feet tall, with antlers like a deer rising from the center of its elongated head. An alien figure out of nightmares. It was not of this world.

The thing stopped before Harbinger. Our team leader did not move. I realized I was holding my breath.

The antlered being was motionless. Its long limbs folded tight against its body, giving us no clue as to its unnatural structure. I could not see the Wendigo's facial features, and for that I was thankful. If they were conversing we could not tell. Other shapes moved on the island, giant hulking things, bristling with hair and mud, just outside of the circle of pale light. A horrible smell drifted across the water. I gagged involuntarily.

After a few minutes of silence the Wendigo turned and drifted off of the island. The hairy beasts ambled away, disappearing into the swamp. The gray light died. The rain began to pelt us again. Gradually the light returned to its natural levels and frogs began to croak. The swamp returned to normal, or at least as normal as a place like Natchy Bottom could be.

"That was the Wendigo," Julie told us. "The other things were skunk-apes. Swamp Sasquatches. It protects them, keeps them away from our world. They are why I didn't want your people"-she nodded at Franks-"to just come in here and blow the whole place up."

"Just big monkeys," the Fed grunted.

Julie started to reply, but then bit her tongue. Arguing with Franks would be like beating your head against a block of granite.

"Uh-oh," I said, "that don't look good." Once the mysterious being had gone, Harbinger leapt to his feet and slid down the hill, grabbed his weapons, and came leaping across the water, splashing toward us as fast as he could.

"It's a trap!" he shouted in our direction.

"Alpha, Bravo. Go hot," Franks ordered.

Harbinger skidded into us, breathing heavy. He looked like he had seen a ghost. I suppose in a way he had.

"The Cursed One ain't here. The vampires ain't here. But they summoned something else. Something is waiting for us. It was a trick." He turned to Franks. "We need immediate extraction and air cover."

The silent Fed did not argue. "Delta, this is Charlie. We need immediate evac. Over."

Nothing.

Franks repeated his request. Still no response. A regular man would have looked concerned at being stuck near the crossroads of all badness, in the middle of an ambush set by creatures of unspeakable evil. He shrugged, apparently unperturbed.

"The signal isn't getting out," Julie said. "How could it be a trap? My dad told us…" She trailed off. "Oh no."

"He told us what Susan wanted him to," Harbinger snapped. He kicked a tree stump. "Damn it! I should have thought of that. We have to get out of here."

"Alpha, Bravo. Come in," Franks said. "Nothing." He stood up and pointed at some of his men. He made several rapid hand signals and pumped his fist in the air. They nodded, leapt to their feet, and sloshed in the direction of the other teams. "We fall back to the extraction zone."

"Can you call in air cover with flares?" Sam asked.

"Already done," he answered as something boomed from the direction of Charlie team. A few seconds later, red flares erupted high above us and slowly drifted toward the thick canopy of trees.

"I just hope they see them in the bad visibility," Milo said, looking up at the rain and the roiling clouds.

From the distance came a sound like the blowing of a horn, a deep rumbling that we all felt in the pits of our stomachs. The low note continued for several seconds and then trailed off. Another horn blew to our south, and then another to the east.

"Earl, what did they summon?" I asked. All I knew was that if they had been brought here by Lord Machado, they were not going to be friendly.

"I don't know." His face was streaked with mud and his eyes narrowed dangerously. "But the Wendigo said to get out. He said it's beyond his power. So it's bad. Real bad. I told him to get his people out of here. So if you see something that ain't human, shoot it."

More horns sounded. Now they were all around us. Several rang out between us and the way that we had come from. "Sounds like they're not going to let us retreat." Julie snapped her M14 to her shoulder and scanned through the scope. The MHI staff began to fan out, weapons at the ready, looking for defensive positions.

Deprived of his radio, Franks started to bellow orders to his men. "Dig in. Claymores. Hit them when they come for us. At my signal push through to the south." That was our end of the diamond. "Your men up to being the tip of the spear?" he asked Harbinger.

"Of course," our team leader answered with far more confidence than I felt. Ed's swords flashed silver in the low light as he pulled them smoothly from their sheaths. The blades were short and thick and wickedly sharp. He cracked his neck and vertebrae. The rest of us were armed with a variety of firearms, plus each person was packing along some form of heavier ordnance: RPGs, grenade launchers, and Milo had some sort of homemade lightweight flamethrower. It hummed ominously when he switched it on, heavily pressurized with napalm.

"Find cover," Harbinger ordered. "We don't know what they are, so hit them with everything." The squad complied. To our left, Charlie team dug down. To our right was Alpha. Bravo was behind us. Franks moved amongst his men, giving orders. Pointing out problems. Assigning areas of responsibility. Offering reassurance while the rumble of unnatural horns sounded in the distance. He may have been a violent bloodthirsty scumbag, but he was a good leader.

"Get lower, Trip," Harbinger suggested as he paced amongst us. "Holly, you have a clear area behind you, so you can use the RPG if we need it. Lee, don't hug right against that tree, it limits your mobility. Step back a bit and you still have cover." We had a great leader as well. "Looking good, Hunters. It ain't gonna be nothing we can't handle."

"I hate the part when you don't know what the bad guys are," Sam said quietly as he pressed his bulk behind a mound of tree roots. The low rumbling horns stopped. The rain slapped against the water.

"Harb Anger," Skippy grunted. The orc swiveled his head from side to side as he sniffed the air. "They come."

"What are they, Skip?" Julie asked.

"Not know," he answered. "Smell… smells not from… here."

The ten of us were spread out over a forty-foot area, holding low behind trees, roots, logs and mud. Each of us was scanning the swamp for threats. The rain and mist made it difficult to see very far. My area of responsibility was a confused mass of light and shadows, vines and trees, moss and mud. Nothing moved. The swamp was quiet except for the noises of small animals and the occasional bubble of mysterious organic gasses creeping to the surface.

Gunfire and explosions erupted to the north. Bravo team had made contact. Some of the Newbies jumped at the sounds and began to turn.

"Hold!" Harbinger shouted. "Watch your area! That's their problem. Deal with yours!"

I forced myself back into position as the supersonic cracks of rifle bullets and the duller whumps of high explosive filled the air. Bravo team was unleashing hell upon something. After several seconds the initial salvo died down until there was only a sporadic firing of weapons. Then nothing.

Franks' deep voice drifted through the trees, shouting orders and commands to his men.

"Bah. Whatever they are, they ain't so tough," Sam said as he spit into the water.

Harbinger held up his hand for quiet. He closed his eyes and listened intently, almost as if he was meditating. Suddenly he stiffened and swore quietly.

There was a whistling noise from the direction of Bravo. Then another, and another, until the swamp echoed with dozens of the strange sounds, and then the damp thuds of hundreds of separate impacts. Wails of pain and human agony followed.

"What was that?" Lee blurted, a hint of terror in his voice.

He did not get an answer. Harbinger snapped his tommy gun into position and squeezed off a long controlled burst into a patch of black water. The.45 slugs tore into the muck and geysered upwards. The surface exploded under the impacts as something sprang upward through the mist.

I got a brief glimpse of the first creature before it was torn to pieces in the storm of hot lead and silver, orange fluids spraying into the surrounding foliage. It was about the size of a man, only hunched and misshapen. Insectile in its joints and extra limbs, the creature seemed all unnatural angles and claws, with two sets of interlocked jaws, and dozens of red eyes set into a blunted skull of a face. It ruptured open as the bullets pierced its carapace, almost as if its internal contents had been under great pressure. The torn thing thrashed about, falling backwards into the muck, finally lying still.

It was only because of my hearing protection, and its electronic amplification of sound, that I was able to hear Julie talking to herself. She sounded terrified and shaken. Julie Shackleford did not scare easily.

"Not them. Not again."

"What was that thing?" Holly shouted. None of the experienced Hunters answered. I lifted my cheek from my stock, looking over at the others. Milo blinked slowly, as if in disbelief. Sam stared silently into the distance. Julie had begun to shake uncontrollably. Harbinger changed magazines, looking down at his weapon instead of us. In the background more screams and random gunfire erupted from Bravo. Finally Harbinger pulled the bolt back, regarded it solemnly, and finally answered us.

"It's the things from the Christmas party."

"God help us," Milo said.

"This time we're armed, though," Sam answered. "It was hand-to-hand then, now we got guns."

"So do they," Harbinger replied sadly. "So do they."

"Incoming!" Julie shouted as she fired into the swamp. Orange-and-red shapes appeared from the murk or came charging out of the fog. Once again I heard the whistling noise, only this time it was closer, much closer. Something impacted the mud inches from my face, spraying my goggles. It appeared to be a long bone spine, dripping in dense orange fluid. I aimed at the source, a hunched insectoid demon thing, and stroked the trigger, blasting a slug through its thorax. More spines flew into our position, thudding into our cover like a volley of medieval arrows. The creature I shot stumbled, righted itself, hunkered down, pointed its crest in our direction, and launched another spine, cracking it deep through the bark of the tree I was hiding behind. I hit the creature with two more rapid shots, bursting some sort of internal fluid sack, and sent it back into the mud.

Spines landed all around me, each one impacting like a spear. The demons bobbed and crawled through the trees, closing the distance for their primitive weapons. They appeared to have no concept of fear, charging straight into our position, bodies exploding and breaking, limbs tearing off and being left behind, alien eyes pushing onward.

"Milo! Light 'em!" Harbinger ordered. Milo dropped his rifle onto its sling and scooped up the flamethrower. He fired a ten-second burst through the swamp, igniting the creatures, engulfing them in flames, sending them crackling back into the water. Some of the creatures reappeared, still burning, the water not being able to extinguish the lethal chemical mixture. They thrashed about, launching spines randomly until they expired.

Then it was still. There were no more moving orange shapes, only exploded and burned husks, charred and opened like over microwaved hot dogs. In the distance horns sounded as the demons regrouped, preparing to attack again.

"Everybody okay?" Harbinger shouted. One by one we shouted back in the affirmative. Somehow our team had gotten through the skirmish uninjured. Judging by the cries coming from Bravo's position, they had not been as lucky.

"They ain't so tough," Sam bellowed angrily as he shoved more massive shells into his.45-70.

"Sorry, Cowboy. Those were just scouts," Harbinger answered. "They were just probing us."

"How do you know?" I asked. "You don't even know what these things are."

"I can just tell. The ones we fought in '95 were just workers or drones. Mindless things with just claws and teeth. These things are the soldiers. They're gonna come again. That was just a test."

Explosions rocked from the direction of Alpha team as their position was attacked. We waited in anxious silence as the battle raged on without us. Sure enough, after a few minutes of fighting, Charlie team was attacked in turn. A stray bullet pulped a tree branch above my head. Other bullets whipped around us, sounding like angry bees.

"Watch your field of fire, you derelicts!" Sam shouted uselessly.

"MHI! I'm coming in," Franks shouted as he splashed toward us. He pushed his way to Harbinger's position and squatted in the mud.

"How's it going?" our leader asked.

"Two dead. Two wounded. One critical," the stoic man answered. He did not bother to ask about us. "We need to push out. Head for extraction."

"Negative. They can breathe under water. We could walk right into an ambush. If they get in close, those spear chuckers are gonna own us," Harbinger stated flatly. "We need to hold here."

"They are feeling us out for a rush."

"You saw how fast they move. We can't ditch them through the swamp, and with no cover, they're gonna tear us up."

"We have to fire and maneuver," Franks insisted.

"Listen, we're not fighting people. This ain't the army," Harbinger insisted. "We move out and we're dead."

"We're moving with or without you," Franks said. "Two minutes. We'll send up flares." The federal agent swiveled and moved away. "You can stay if you want."

Harbinger watched him go. "Shit."

"Earl? What do you wanna do?" Sam asked.

"We ain't got much choice. Without them, we get flanked and we're dead. We have to stick together." He changed the tone of his voice so that we could all hear. "Okay, team. When we see the flares, we move back the way we came. Lay down fire on anything that looks suspicious." He tried to rally us. "We can do this. We are the best. We've beaten these orange bastards before. I'm on point, then Skippy and Ed. We have the best senses. If we fire on a position, follow suit, it means we saw something." He switched magazines. "I'm loading tracers. I'll mark it, you kill it. Everybody get ready."

Flares rose into the rain-drenched sky. A cold weight shifted in my gut. The swamp before us was vast with shadowed hiding places.

"Move out!" Harbinger ordered.

We set out toward safety, moving as fast as possible in the unforgiving terrain. Mud sucked at us, clung to us, increased our weight and tried to drag us down. The muscles in my calves burned at the exertion of double-timing it through the syrupy surface. To our sides and slightly behind us, the Feds moved through the trees. Even with their impressive physicality and despite their intense training, they could move no faster. The rain increased in intensity, hammering us, bouncing from the water below until it seemed as if it was raining from two directions.

It was still bone-numbingly cold, but we were all overheated and labored with the exertion of trying to move quickly through the muck. I did not take the time to brush the mammoth mosquitoes from my face. They were not the only things after our blood.

We crossed through the steaming carcasses of the destroyed demons. A closer look showed that the internal workings of the creatures were totally different than anything from this world. Their insides appeared to be a complicated series of bags and tubes, all orange, yellow or bright red. I stepped quickly over one creature, its two mouths open in a final death snarl, rows of jagged teeth and extra tongues hanging out haphazardly, a dozen dead eyes open and collecting rain.

I could feel a dark presence in the air. Not just the alien, skin-crawling sensation inherent in the haunted swamp, but rather an oppressive heaviness that seemed to further burden us. I recognized it.

The Cursed One was watching us.

His physical body was not here, of that I was certain, for surely I would have known it. But, rather, he watched us from afar. Somehow his presence was here amongst us, watching the trap which he had set encircling his enemies. Son of a bitch was enjoying this.

The evil signature of the accursed ancient artifact was on this endeavor. I did not know what the demon things were, but I knew that they had been ripped from their home world and brought here through its power. The artifact was the key.

We had made it less than three hundred yards before we made contact again.

Harbinger moved quickly, faster than the rest of us, somehow able to find traction where none of those following could. He froze in place, snapped his archaic subgun to his shoulder and fired a burst of tracers into the water below a fallen tree, splashing up gouts of water. Before the rest of us could react, he had aimed at another spot and fired more bright streaks into it.

The line of Hunters erupted. I lifted Abomination, aiming at the first spot. The hidden demon leapt upwards, intersecting with my buckshot, tearing its body asunder and taking its life. Other creatures rose beside and behind it, and I struck them down as well, Abomination merely a flawless extension of my killing will.

Then all hell broke loose.

Orange shapes tore through the pounding rain, scurrying at us from every direction. Insectoid horrors were coming out of the gnarled tree branches, erupting from the mud, launching their deadly missiles at us, trying to close the distance to use their claws and dripping teeth. Our advance stopped, the federal agents bearing down around us into the streaming horde of orange and red. The scene was utter chaos.

I emptied my shotgun, learning quickly to aim for the point where the creatures' heads intersected with their hardened bodies. It was a weak point, and beneath was some sort of fluid bag that would burst like a water balloon, putting the demons down hard. I dropped the spent magazine and instantly slammed a new one home. A spine whistled through the air, missing my face by inches. A Fed stumbled in the muck beside me, firing his FN into a charging monster. The.223 bullets punctured the body, but did not drop the creature.

"Aim for the neck!" I shouted as I chambered another round. He aimed higher and the creature exploded in a shower of gore. The body splashed into the water only a dozen feet away.

"Thanks!" the nameless man shouted. He raised his gun to engage another target, but stopped, looking down curiously at the alien spine embedded through the armor of his chest. "Shit!" he shouted before another spine nailed him squarely in the face, killing him instantly.

I caught the falling body and knelt behind him. It would be a lie to say that I did so to help, but rather it was an instinctive need to find cover as more spines sailed toward us. The limp form fell against me, heavy with sodden murk and spilling blood. I found the demon hunched down, launching spines at us. I aimed over the dead agent's shoulder and fired at the creature until it was dead. More creatures took its place, swarming over the fresh carcass and charging toward me. I fired my grenade, striking a tree and tearing three of the creatures asunder in the blast of hot shrapnel.

More spines struck the agent's twitching body. Abomination clicked dry. I dropped it onto its sling and grabbed the Fed's unfamiliar bullpup carbine. I raised it one-handed and sprayed the rest of the magazine in the direction of the creatures, the empty cases flying out the front of the weapon. When it was empty, I dropped it, sprang to my feet, and ran, searching desperately for cover, reloading my shotgun as I went.

Julie was kneeling behind a log. I dived over the top and splashed face down in the mud next to her. I came up choking and spitting out the fetid taste. I rolled over and joined her. With each supersonic crack of her rifle, another demon went down. She hunched behind the log. "Reload!" she shouted as she searched for a fresh magazine. Spines impacted into our cover with wet thuds. I went over the top, spotted the demon hurling bits of itself toward us and swiftly killed it. More and more of them were pouring through the gray trees, a garish swarm of Mardi Gras color.

The tableau disappeared in a wall of brilliant flame as Milo ignited the swamp. "Clear out! Keep going!" he yelled at us as he put down a blanket of destruction. I knew that his portable weapon only had so much fuel, and demons were already closing from other directions, flashes of bright color betraying their positions all through the swamp.

Something shifted behind Milo. A single point opened in the rainy air, almost as if a giant hand had pulled back an invisible zipper. The sky on the other side was a dusty red, and flames licked the air when the alien atmosphere touched our own. A single demon dropped through the rift and splashed down. The opening snapped closed, leaving only pale sky. The creature raised a multi-jointed limb over its head.

"Milo!" Julie screamed as she fired at the creature. The bubble under its lower jaw exploded, sending it sprawling, but too late as its claws came down. Milo Anderson grimaced in pain as the sharpened bones pierced and shredded his arm. He went to his knees in a shower of crimson droplets.

Julie and I leapt to our feet, struggling forward. I grabbed Milo and hoisted him up. He kept the flames spraying into the swamp, beating back our foes. The intense heat washed over me and scalded my eyes. I could see flashes all across the terrain as other portals opened briefly and more creatures dropped into our world.

We were in a running battle against an endless foe, and there was only one possible outcome.

I pulled the bleeding and shaking Hunter across the water. The flamethrower sputtered and died. Julie was by my side, firing at the onrushing horde. She reached to her webbing, pulled a grenade and tossed it into the trees. The resulting blast shook me to my teeth. I made my way toward the rest of my team as fast as I could.

"Duck!" Harbinger shouted as I approached. I did so without thought, pushing Milo and myself down. He fired over our heads, cutting down the creature that had gated in beside us. The heavy husk fell on my back, a pointed, superheated, squishy weight. Pushing myself up, I kicked the segmented body aside.

Other types of demons were appearing now, smaller, swifter things, without any sort of distance weapon. They moved effortlessly across the terrain, faster than a human athlete could on dry ground. I watched as one leapt onto the back of a Fed, tearing at the man with its bone claws. Instantly, three other creatures were on him, pulling and biting. He disappeared in a shower of blood and limbs. A third kind of creature appeared, heavier, with plate-like bones covering its vulnerable joints. These beasts lumbered slowly through the swamp, pausing to spit balls of green material from their upper mouths. A ball impacted at the feet of another Fed, exploding in a shower of horrible acid. He dropped his weapon and clawed at his Kevlar-covered legs, screaming in pain as it burned through to his bones.

They were everywhere.

We struggled toward a patch of higher ground. It was only a clump of mud, but it was the most defensive position we had. Milo began to shake horribly, as if he were having a seizure. "Poison," he said through gritted teeth. "Drop me."

"No, you can make it!" I shouted.

"O-O-wen. D-d-drop me," he ordered. His beard was running red with the blood coming from his mouth and staining his teeth. The powerful poison was tearing him apart. I did as I was instructed. Milo fell against a tree, and slid to the ground, pulling up his rifle. "Tell Shawna I l-l-love her," he gasped.

Julie tried to turn back for him, holding out a hand, pleading for her friend. I grabbed her by the arm and continued toward the high ground. There was nothing that we could do. Milo raised his carbine one-handed and fired, keeping the monsters at bay so we could escape. His AR emptied, he tossed it aside, shakily drawing his 1911. We kept moving as the shots echoed behind us. Several fast-moving demons descended upon the red-bearded man, and the last I heard was a thunderous chain of explosions as he detonated the grenades on his vest.

"Bastards!" Julie screamed as she stroked a demon to the ground with the stock of her rifle. I put my boot on its carapace and forced it down, as she put a finishing shot into the struggling thing's throat. We were both sprayed with yellow bile.

I passed Albert Lee's dismembered body, killing the distracted monster that was tearing at his flesh with a single shot to its pulpy brainstem. I loaded a fresh grenade and launched it into the horde following us. It killed four of them and barely made a dent.

I saw Skippy disappear under a pile of the creatures. His brother Edward jumped in to save him, blades singing through the raindrops. I had never seen any living being move with such fluid grace and deadly speed. Claws and heads were severed away in a remarkable dance of destruction, spraying orange fluids high into the air. Edward screamed an unearthly battle cry as he hacked through the beasts, spinning, ducking, always swinging and killing. The severed limbs and twitching corpses began to pile up.

Finally a spine appeared in Edward's back, and then another in his thigh. The orc began to falter. I fired a magazine into the fray, killing a demon with each shot, but it was too little, too late. Edward kicked a monster off of Skippy's body, and stood over his brother protectively. Shouting at the onrushing creatures, he slashed at them until finally he was washed away in a tide of crimson bodies.

The brothers died with great honor.

We reached the high ground. Our Alamo. Our Thermopylae. A twenty-foot pile of mud and sticks. There were only a handful of humans left. I could actually hear Lord Machado's laughter.

But the damned die hard.

CRACK. BOOM!A pile of the thick-set armored demons exploded as Holly's RPG struck amongst them, throwing heavy limbs and bone plates high into the sky. "Take that, you miserable sons a bitches!" she shouted as she tossed the spent launcher aside and pulled a grenade from her vest. She pulled the pin and hurled it into the swamp. At this point the enemy was so thick that we did not need to aim. It erupted in a shower of sparks and fragments.

A nearby Fed was pulled from his desperate hiding place in the crack of a tree trunk. He was dragged screaming into the horde, and violently pulled apart. He spasmodically jerked the trigger of his rifle. The stray bullet struck Holly Newcastle in the forehead, yawed and tumbled violently through her brain tissue, and exited at the base of her skull. She fell to the ground in an instant lifeless heap.

I crawled up onto the mud, shooting the closest demons, blasting a fast mover as it leapt toward us. Julie was still by my side as she struggled to her feet and tossed another frag. I instinctively shot an incoming acid bomb out of the air as if it were a clay pigeon. The remains showered down amongst the creatures. Julie began to pull and toss grenades from my webbing as I kept shooting.

As I reloaded, I saw Trip curled up near the summit. Torn and bloodied from dozens of claw marks, he jerked violently as the poison in his body finally stopped his great heart. I screamed in vain, flipped my shotgun to full-auto and sprayed the onrushing horde. Out of 12-gauge shells, I dropped Abomination and pulled my STI.

Sam Haven stood at the top of the hill, roaring like a berserker, a Fed rifle in each hand, pointing in opposite directions and firing downward into the throng. He was surrounded by a cloud of spent brass and a stream of profanity so creative and vile that it was destined to travel up to the heavens and pervert whole other worlds. The brave cowboy was silenced in the flash of an acid grenade.

Harbinger appeared out of nowhere. He flung his empty tommy gun aside, hard enough to shatter the head of an armored demon. "Julie!" His eyes flashed yellow. Multiple spines had been driven deep into his back and sides. "Julie!" He drew his revolver, dropped six monsters in less than a second, and reloaded another moon clip in a blur of motion. He fought his way toward us, batting aside a leaping demon with a bare fist. "I'm sorry!" he shouted as he reached us, a veritable wall of monsters at his heels.

"Don't worry about it, Earl," she answered with a slight smile as she tossed our last grenade into the alien horde. "I always figured it would be something like this."

Harbinger only nodded. He dodged under a swinging talon, grabbed the demon by its lower jaw and wrenched its head until the twin spinal columns snapped. Hurling the dead thing back into the crowd, he roared for more.

Franks pulled himself up to the top. Blood was streaming down his lacerated face, and his armor was smoking and burning with acid. A spine pierced his bicep. With no display of emotion he grabbed the shard and wrenched it free in a splash of red. The injured arm hung limply at his side. He drew his Glock and nodded at me. "Die with dignity," he stated simply. Behind him the last of his men looked around in panicked bewilderment, put his pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Franks cringed as his last charge died. "Not like that." The dark Fed fired into the masses, dropping onrushing demons with unflinching accuracy.

There were only the four of us left.

Lord Machado laughed. His physical body was hundreds of miles away, but his spirit, his presence, his consciousness was there with us. He laughed in triumph. He gloated. His pride swelled at the defeat of his greatest enemies.

We drew back to back at the top of the little mud hill, stepping over the lifeless bodies of our friends. Franks' slide locked back on his Glock. He calmly dropped the magazine, placed it in the crook of his lifeless arm to hold it, grabbed another mag, inserted it, snapped the slide closed, and went back to shooting. A launched spine struck him in the wrist, traveled up his arm, and exploded out his elbow, opening his forearm like a gutted fish. The gun dropped from his deadened hand.

"Oh well," he said, both arms hanging limp, drizzling blood, at his sides. With no hesitation he charged downward into the horde, kicking a monster back with his heavy boot, then shattered another's mandibles with his forehead. He kicked another in its package of eyes, but a lashing claw opened up his inner thigh and femoral artery. He fell on his back and was dragged under the orange horde.

I emptied the STI into the demon wall, sending a beast back to hell with each shot. But for every one that I dispatched, another flaming hole would open in the sky, dropping another creature into the back of the throng.

I am sorry, Boy. This is end.

I speed-reloaded and continued shooting. I felt Julie by my side. She was also down to just her handgun. Time was running out. Acid exploded nearby, and scalding droplets scorched us. I heard an inhuman scream of rage from behind me as Harbinger ripped into the demons with his bare hands, crushing their alien bones, and flinging their husks back into the mass.

"I love you, Julie," I shouted as my slide locked back empty and I went for another mag.

"I love you, Owen," she answered.

Too bad I was about to die.

A demon hunched down directly before us, a subcutaneous membrane opening on its back, spines aligning to launch at Julie's chest. I stepped in front of her.

The alien spear pierced through my armor just above my sternum, shearing through the top of my heart and piercing out the muscles of my back. Incomprehensible pain slammed me, heat and pressure beyond all imagining. I fell to my knees, and rocked backwards in the mud.

I looked upwards at Julie as my life blood flooded out of me and onto the ground. Rain poured down into my unblinking eyes.

Chapter 23

My body lay lifeless on the ground, legs bent, arms spread wide, an alien spear protruding from my chest, and a puddle of blood spreading under gravity's power.

I stood above myself. Above the battlefield. Demon horde rampaging against the final two Hunters. My spirit moved between the sluggish raindrops. Time had slowed down, and I watched as the last few seconds of the battle stretched into eternity. Julie was only a few heartbeats from certain death. Earl Harbinger stood at her back, torn asunder with wounds, bristling with spines like a mutant porcupine, bleeding from countless injuries, but still fighting beyond any human capability.

Mordechai Byreika stood by my side. I could feel the Old Man's sorrow.

I am sorry, Boy. You fought much hard. Braver Hunters the world never has seen.

What now?

Is over. Battle is lost. Tomorrow Cursed One destroy world.

Above the battlefield was the presence of Lord Machado. I could see it now. A sprawling evil blackness, roiling in the clouds. His laughter continued.

No.

Is not possible, Boy. You are not stuck. Move on you can. Not like me.

No.

The Cursed One was visible to me now. Of course, I was not bound by the limitations of my human sight. The gash that he had torn into the world was visible. The tear that went to the other place, the rift to the other world. The world that served as a temporary repository for the minions of the Old Ones. The ancient artifact of evil stood above all. It was the key. It was the bridge.

No.

The power was not ready. It was not time yet. Lord Machado would not be able to unlock the full power of the artifact until tomorrow at the zenith of the full moon. The demon army standing below was just a partial example of what the artifact could do.

You can go on. There is good place waiting for you. Move on, Boy. Is over.

No.

I watched in slow motion as Earl Harbinger tore the head from one of the demons. In the view that I had now, I could see the demon's contorted spirit disappear from that animated physical body, denied access from this plane of existence. At that exact moment, a rift appeared to the other world, and the same spirit dropped through, cloaked again in a new physical body.

The Cursed One could only control a limited number of spirits.

His powers were still limited.

No.

I headed directly toward the evil blackness, passing into the realm of the dark one. I aimed my spirit at the artifact. The artifact was the key. The artifact was the key to control the power of time and space.

Boy! Wait. Do not face Cursed One like this. You will become stuck like me!

No.

Lord Machado regarded me idly. I could see the link back to his physical body. His slime-coated form knelt in a dark cavern, surrounded by his sleeping vampire minions and a fresh host of undead servants.

YOU HAVE FAILED, HUNTER.

No.

THIS WORLD IS MINE NOW.

I willed myself to approach the artifact. With the veil removed from my eyes I could see the true evil of the ancient thing. It dwarfed Lord Machado. It dwarfed us all. Its power was incredible. Incredible and dark and old and unspeakably evil. I could see the legions of dark forces waiting to move hungrily into this world should its power be unleashed. Black glistening octopus things, bigger than skyscrapers. Ancient triangular crustaceans the size of freighters, floating weightless through the void. Pale saucer eyes searching for a fresh world to plunder and intelligent souls to enslave.

No.

And I looked upon the glory of the legions of goodness and light that stood ready to do battle against them. A vast host of the noble and great ones. I could have given up and moved on and joined them. They urged me silently onward.

YOU HAVE THE STRONGEST MORTAL SPIRIT I HAVE EVER BEHELD.

I ignored him. I continued toward the artifact. I had to reach it.

YOU SHALL BE A FINE SLAVE.

No.

TOMORROW I SHALL RAISE MY QUEEN. YOU WILL BE HER SERVANT.

My consciousness strained against the evil barrier, pushing onwards toward the horrid power. Far below my surviving friends battled onward. More spines and claws pierced Harbinger, but still he fought on, rolling and splashing down into the ranks of the evil minions, smashing them, tearing them with his teeth and claws, more holes opening in the sky as the spirits of the alien warriors were recycled. Julie stood alone, blade in one hand, alien spine wielded as a club in the other. They fought on.

I reached the artifact. It glowed before me like a black sun, epic and deadly. Finally Lord Machado realized what I was doing.

YOU ARE MAD. YOU CANNOT CONTROL THE POWER OF THE OLD ONES. ONLY I MAY DO SO. YOU WILL BE UTTERLY DESTROYED.

I knew that he spoke the truth. He was not just talking about losing my life, but losing what I really was. The artifact was that powerful. Below me, my love fell to the claws of the alien army.

No.

I touched the artifact. Stretching across a thousand billion years of space and reality, time, matter, imagination, power. I put my will against the meager hold the Cursed One had upon it.

NO.

He rose to battle me, but he had been unprepared for a challenge. I focused my will upon the dark object as it assaulted my mind and my sanity, bombarding me with strange images and alien memories of a thousand dead worlds. I wrested it from the tentacles of the Cursed One.

The tenuous link across the rift was severed. The tunnel from the world of the Old Ones to an obscure swamp in Mississippi was destroyed. The alien army disappeared in a flash of light and fire.

NO!

The Cursed One screamed at me. We drew face to face for the first time, or as much as was possible since neither one of us currently had a face. His power surged against me, forcing me away, striving to ensnare my spirit and destroy me forever.

The carnage of the epic battle was strewn below. The remains of dead Hunters were spread across the fetid swamp. The dark spirits of the blighted region wandered amongst the bodies, celebrating the victory. My brave friends had been scattered and killed, the life ripped from their bodies. Only the changed Harbinger remained alive, and only barely, and even he would succumb to the lethal poisons shortly.

Trip, Holly, Milo, Sam, Lee, Skippy, Edward, even Franks and his men.

And Julie.

Her body lay still, and from my vantage I could see that her time was up.

I wished that I could turn back time.

Yes.

Lord Machado screamed in rage. Wrath crackled across the universe as his will was subverted.

NOOOOOOO…

The power of the Old Ones was tapped. Ancient wells of evil were utilized, and for the first time in eons, the true power of their ancient artifact was unleashed. Incomprehensible energies were set free, battering the foundations of time and space, subverting natural order, and crackling across the universe.

For five minutes, linear time was broken.

My spirit was reunited violently with my body and the breath of life filled my lungs. I gasped in pain and confusion. The horrible cleaving pain in my chest was gone. I choked, and the sour swamp gas smell of Natchy Bottom was in my mouth. I watched as concentric rings of water moved backward upon the surface, formed globules of water, and reversed themselves against gravity and rose into the air. As time stabilized, the raindrops froze, and then fell like normal.

I was lying in the mud, shotgun readied before me. The others were spread out over the same patch of ground that we had been defending five minutes before.

"Aarrrgghhh!" Sam shouted, continuing the noise that he had been making when the acid bomb had killed him. Holly aimed at the spot of ground that the first alien had jumped from and wildly emptied her rifle into the water, splashing mud, wood bits and water, but no monster. She dropped the rifle and grabbed her forehead, finding no hole. She then probed under the back of her helmet looking for the exit wound.

Harbinger stood up and looked around in confusion. Gradually the others did the same thing until the whole group was standing, bewildered and confused. Except for me, of course. I lay in the mud and wept, my cheek pressed into the stock of my weapon.

In the distance some of the Feds panicked and detonated their claymore mines against the empty swamp. Shouts of confusion echoed through the trees.

The Hunters checked themselves for extra holes, and found none. Milo walked a few feet away, set the flamethrower down, and then fell to his knees and folded his arms to pray silently. Trip did the same, crying while he did so. Skippy and Edward removed their hoods, revealing their tusked faces to everyone. They both took small, dried-lizard necklaces from inside their clothing and began to bat them with their foreheads and gesture toward the sky.

Julie flopped down next to me. She grabbed the drag strap on the back of my armor and tugged hard. I pushed myself up. She grabbed my face in her hands and kissed me passionately. I responded. She tasted like swamp mud, but it was still great. It was good to be alive.

"I would be mighty appreciative if somebody could tell me what in the hell just happened?" Sam said.

"I died," Lee stated quietly. "I got bit in the neck." He pulled his glove off and ran one hand over his throat. "I left my body."

"Me too," Holly added. "I don't know what got me."

"Fed shot you in the head," I answered.

"Stupid bastard," she said coldly.

"It was an accident. He was getting eaten."

"Still…"

"All of us died." I slowly stood up, searching for the words to explain what I had seen, what I had done. "I… When I got killed…" I stabbed my thumb to my chest. "I saw the Cursed One. I fought him for control of the artifact. I made a wish…"

"You did this?" Julie asked, stunned. She ran one hand down my filthy face. "How?"

"I just don't know." I was way out of my league on this one.

Harbinger had not said anything yet. He slowly sat down on a stump and scowled, deep in thought.

"You seriously made a wish? Like Aladdin and the magic lamp or whatever? And brought us back from the dead? And made all of those things go away?" Sam said.

"I guess."

"Bullshit," he spat, "just ain't no way."

"He didn't bring us back from the dead," Milo said, still kneeling, his back toward us. "We never died."

"I don't know about you, Milo, but I got my damned brains blown out," Holly said.

Milo stood and faced us. "Not what I mean. Yes, we died, but that was erased. That has not happened yet. It would be happening shortly, but it got reversed. Turned back to right now. What we just went through never happened."

"Sure it did," Sam said. "It just happened."

"When?" Milo held up his watch.

"Uh… in the future?"

"Right. So it has not happened."

Sam thought about it for a moment, head cocked sideways as he stroked his walrus mustache. "Screw it. I need a drink."

Franks drifted into our area, his crack federal agents following slowly behind him. They were not moving swiftly now. Rather, they looked as shell-shocked and confused as we did. None of them even reacted at the sight of the unmasked orcs. Compared to what they had just gone through, what were a couple of tusk-faced humanoids?

"Hey, guys," Milo said cheerfully. "Let me guess, you all got killed by orange monster insect demon things too?"

"Yep," Franks answered.

"Oh good, at least we're all on the same page."

The dark Fed just held up his thick arms, looking down at where they had been pierced and shredded by whistling spines. He made a fist and cracked his knuckles, then slowly lowered them.

Harbinger finally spoke. "See, Franks, I told you we should have stayed put."

Franks shrugged. He keyed his radio. No longer disrupted by the unnatural rift in the area, we made immediate radio contact. Myers' voice sounded shaken.

"What's going on out there?" the radio shrieked.

Franks scowled as his straightforward brain tried to figure out how to explain our situation. Harbinger keyed his mike and interrupted.

"It was a trap. Ray Shackleford set us up. We were ambushed by a horde of trans-dimensional demons. We all got killed. Then time ran backwards. We all woke up alive. And the monsters are gone. Request immediate evac…" He let that hang for a moment. "Over."

"Uh, yeah," Franks concurred.

"Air evac is on the way. What caused the time effect?"

Harbinger looked at me through squinted eyes, but did not betray my secret to the Feds. "Unknown. Suspect it was caused by the Cursed One's artifact. We went back in time approximately five minutes."

"I know," Myers responded. "It wasn't just you. We felt it too. It was 2:39, and then it was 2:34."

"How widespread was the effect?"

"Hold on…" The radio went dead.

Forty quiet Hunters stood packed together in the pounding rain, taking no small amount of comfort from the nearness of other real people. The emotions displayed ran the gamut from confused, to terrified, to shaken, to ecstatic, but mostly to blank thousand-yard stares while our human brains tried to process the impossible. And we were Monster Hunters, either governmental or private, and every one of us was no stranger to the weird or the unexplainable. Shivering from the cold, I put my arm over Julie's shoulder and pulled her close. Slow minutes ticked by. We all waited for Myers' response.

"Sorry… I was told to turn on the news."

"How widespread was the effect?" Harbinger asked again.

The radio crackled.

"Um… Reports are coming in now… the whole world."

"Say again?"

"Earth. Every person on Earth felt it."

We stood in the Monster Control Bureau's giant tent command center, dripping from our showers, stinging from the leech removal process, and aching from the bevy of antibiotic shots given to us to combat the rancid waters of Natchy Bottom. The flat-screen televisions had been changed from satellite imagery to several different cable news channels.

"-continue to drift in. We can now confirm that India, Australia, Bangladesh and Finland also experienced the phenomenon and-"

"Large scale rioting has broken out in Los Angeles, New York, and in several other cities in the continental-"

"Yes, Diane, the President will be addressing us live from Air Force One in a matter of minutes-"

"-the Prime Minister's office has issued a statement for all to remain calm until-"

"-repent sinners! The hour of judgment is at hand! I'm sorry I cheated on my wife, I'm adulterous slime. It's all April the weather girl's fault. Evil slut. Wait… you can't take me off the air… damn you, Harry! Repent, you heathen bastard! It's the end of the world! The end I say-"

Some of the media people were holding it together better than others. The same could be said for us.

"Maybe it wasn't caused by this artifact," Myers contended.

"Yeah, and maybe I'm Elvis," Harbinger shouted back.

"It could have been a coincidence," the senior agent pleaded.

"Sure, a rift in time just happens to occur as we're fighting the minions of something that we were warned was going to try to control time? Give me a break, Myers."

"I'm the one that has to talk to the President, damn it. I need to give him more than conjecture. I need proof! This is the biggest thing that has ever happened."

"Hell, I'll talk to the Prez," Sam added helpfully. "He's a Texan. He'll understand."

Harbinger ignored his teammate. "Myers, there hasn't been an attack of trans-dimensional forces since '95. That's a rare enough occurrence as it is. It has to be connected."

"There was the Vanni Fucci incident in Dothan a while back," Julie offered.

"Isolated case," Harbinger said.

"I know that, and you know that. But I need to explain this all to people who don't know a damn thing about monsters. They were already prepared to go all the way to 'final option' to stop Lord Machado; what are they going to do now? Preemptively nuke the whole state into a sheet of glass?"

"That'll alienate the Southern vote for sure," Milo said.

I started to speak. I could tell them exactly what had happened. Julie kicked me in the shin. She shook her head in the negative.

The news continued to babble:

"-UN General Secretary has just called for a unilateral ban on time travel-"

"-I'm telling you, Ken, space aliens are behind this. I talked about it in my book, The Coming Gray Invasion, this is just phase one of their colonization-"

"-does not appear to be as much widespread panic on the other side of the world, since many people appeared to have slept through the disturbance-"

"-just in, there are reports of… this can't be right… vampire attacks in Alabama and Georgia? Vampires? Uh… eyewitnesses are reporting that the dead are walking? What is this shit?" The screen went blank, and then to a static display that said they were experiencing technical difficulties.

Myers smashed the screen with his boot. Sparks flew from the sides of the TV. "Enough! Get out of here! Go take care of your local outbreaks! Just get out of my headquarters!" he shrieked at us. His phone rang. "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."His face blanched. Looking like a deer in the headlights, standing in the path of a truck with no brakes, he slowly answered it and listened, his eyes rolling back into his head. "Yes. I will hold for the President…" He covered the mouthpiece. "Lieutenant, get these civilians out of here!"

The National Guard soldiers herded us out of the tent. We stopped outside. The rain had thankfully stopped, leaving us with a pale overcast sky. Harbinger sighed in relief and pulled out a cigarette. He offered one to the soldiers, who gladly took him up on the offer.

"So, Mr. Harbinger, is it…? Is this really the end of the world? Demons and all that?" one of them asked.

"Not if we can help it," he answered as he walked away, Monster Hunters trailing behind. Our group headed for the parked chopper. Skippy and Edward were busy "liberating" fuel and prepping for takeoff. Our mud-soaked gear was already stowed, and we were ready to go. Harbinger stopped before the hulking chopper, taking a long drag from his cancer stick. "Mount up, crew. Let's get out of here. It's been a strange day."

"We got company." Holly nodded back toward the command tent. Agent Franks was following us, as stoic and impassive as ever. He trudged through the damp grass, hard eyes fixed on our group. He had been busy caring for his men, and had not yet had a chance to change out of his mud-drenched, and surely leech-and-tick-infested armor. He stopped, hands awkwardly at his side.

We waited while the emotionless soldier found the words.

"Thanks."

He snapped a hard salute, ramrod straight, and parade-ground perfect. Harbinger, Sam and Lee instinctively returned the gesture. The rest of us stood there stupidly. Franks made eye contact with each of us, squinty and cold, held his arm rigid for a long moment, and then let it fall. He spun on his boot heel and stalked back toward the tent.

"So does that mean we're friends now?" I asked.

"Hell if I know," Julie answered. "At least he didn't slap you around again."

The others moved for the chopper. Harbinger grabbed me. "Not so fast. Me and you need to talk for a second." He gestured over his shoulder and we walked away from the others. I saw Julie watching after me, looking concerned, and then she was gone into the vehicle's interior. Skippy fired up the turbines, and the powerful engines began to whine.

"What's going on?"

"I really don't know."

"You don't need to keep secrets from me. We're a team."

"You should talk."

He shrugged. "No big deal. I have some issues, sure, but I don't have the ability to twist the laws of physics like you seem to do. Care to explain?"

"Damn it. I told you what I know, Earl." I flushed with anger. "If I knew how to put an end to this, I would tell you. If I knew how to kill that slimy son of a bitch, I would do it."

"Can you find him?"

"I haven't been able to so far. The Old Man doesn't seem to be able to tell me."

"What about when you saw the vision? The road sign? When he got here?"

"The one that almost killed me? You want me to try that again?" I asked incredulously. Not that I had not already thought of it myself. It was a desperate ploy, but we were running low on time.

"If we can't find him, then we're all dead tomorrow anyway. You saw those things. Imagine them crawling over the whole world. Billions of them. Hundreds of billions of them. Orange shells as far as your eye can see, and squid things that look like blimps floating overhead. And that will just be the first wave. Then the big things will come."

"You've seen them too?" I asked in surprise.

"Yes, I have. I might not have magic powers or whatever the hell it is you've got going on up there." He poked me in the forehead. I was too stunned to react. "But I've been on the other side. I've seen that place."

"In '95. You went into the rift to pull out Julie's dad…"

He nodded slowly, the memories of the red-skied alien world eternally burned into the dark corners of his mind. I had at least one person who understood what was at stake.

"They're coming, Earl. I don't even know if the Cursed One realizes it or can see it. I don't know if he knows what's waiting for him to use that box, that thing… I'm scared," I admitted.

"I am too. And at this point, I'll be honest, I didn't think there was much out there that could scare me anymore." Harbinger was not lying or trying to appear tougher than he was. He was telling the truth. He had moved past the concept of fear, operating instead upon animal cunning and self-preservation instincts. Until now.

"We have to stop him," I stated. "I'll do whatever it takes."

"Find the Place. Find out where he's hiding. I don't care if you have to beat it out of that ghost. Get me a name, a town, something, anything. And we'll teach this clown not to mess with MHI."

"I will." I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I knew that the responsibility fell on my shoulders, on me alone, and perhaps on an old Jewish Hunter who had been dead for half a century.

"Let's get out of here then." He started toward the chopper. "I would wish you sweet dreams, but honestly, I hope you have horrible ones. I hope you see this evil thing and get his address, 'cause I'm personally gonna kick his ass."

I sat by Julie for the chopper ride back to the compound.

"How are you doing?" I struggled to communicate over the internal engine noises.

"Not real good." She patted my hand. "Just when I thought that maybe my dad wasn't as evil as I thought, he sets us up. He sent us all to die. He covered for that evil bitch." She spat. "I believed him."

"Well, he's gone now," I assured her. I suppose that we should not have been so surprised at his treachery. He had been willing to risk everything to bring his beloved back. Of course he would be willing to merely lie for her.

"At least we know he's dead. The Feds must have cut his head off and burned the body by now."

"Most likely."

"One down. One to go," she said angrily.

I tried to change the subject from her death vendetta against her parents. Almost any subject was lighter than that. "So, can we technically consider today a first date?"

"I guess. Next time, how about we do dinner and a movie?" She laughed as the tension broke.

"Ha. What girl wouldn't want to crawl through a haunted swamp, get killed, and travel through time? That's one heck of a date."

"You must have dated some strange women."

"Actually I haven't dated very many women at all. I haven't had much luck."

"Why?"

"They usually think I'm weird." That much was true. Slightly strange, kind of big awkward, and ugly-I was no charmer.

"Me too."

"You think I'm weird?" I shouted over the noise.

"No, I mean that people have always thought that about me. You know, crazy girl, always talking about monsters. Spends all her time shooting, building bombs, or practicing how to chop things up. Hangs out with a bunch of crazy people. Paranoid, delusional, lives in a compound, that kind of thing. It takes a real toll on relationships."

"See, I think that sounds perfect."

"You would." She leaned against me.

Across the troop compartment, Holly made gagging motions. Julie and I both flipped her the bird. She winked at us and went back to harassing Trip.

"Sorry to interrupt you lovebirds," Harbinger said over the radio, "but we've got business. Julie, see what other teams you can contact and find out their status. Owen has something he needs to do too."

"I need to get some sleep," I told her.

"I know, it's been a tough day."

"That's not what I mean. I need to make contact with the Old Man. I need to find the Cursed One. Tomorrow night is it."

"Are you going to try to see through his eyes again?"

"I don't know," I answered. "I've got to do something."

She looked out the window and sighed, shuddering slightly.

"Be careful."

"I will."

"Come back to me. I can't lose anybody else."

"I promise."

"Boy! Much has happened," the Old Man exclaimed. "What have you done?"

"I turned on the artifact, I guess," I answered.

"Is as I feared. This is terrible. Much terrible." He shuffled toward me, hobbling on his cane.

"Hey, we're all still alive. It sure beats the alternative."

"No," he answered. "Not better at all. Not for you."

"Hey, I'm the one that had a spine sticking out my aorta."

"Better to be dead than be cursed tool of the ancient evil."

"I'm nobody's tool," I said angrily. I was getting really tired of everybody treating me as if I was stupid. "I did the best that I could."

"No, Boy. Now is much worse than before." His bony hand grabbed me by the arm. "Come, hurry. One last memory to show."

I stopped him, pulling away. "No, Mordechai. I don't have time to screw around. Just give me a straight answer for once. Where is he, and how do I kill him?"

"You not are ready for such things." He looked at me, his hard eyes drooped in sadness. "Boy, to do such a thing would make you dead for sure. Not just dead. But maybe worse. Much worse. Cursed like he is even."

"But I'm not evil," I said defensively.

"No. Surprised I have been by you being so good." He lifted his cane and thumped me in the chest. "Good, but sometimes stupid. Brave, but proud. Too proud for own good. If not more careful, pride will kill you and blow up world. Think you can solve problems, but no patience to learn. Want to rush. Do things now." He puffed himself up and did a very poor imitation of me. "I am Boy. Now, now, now. Hurry, hurry. I can do everything. No need to learn first!"

"You would need about two more of you to do a good impersonation of me, you old midget," I told him. "Plus I don't sound like that at all."

"Bah. You are good boy. But no longer can you worry about what you are. You are Monster Hunter. Your father, he made you warrior. Do not-how you say?-pretend to be something else. No time for doubt. No time for 'normal' " He spat the word.

"You know about that?"

"I live in your head. What? I not pay attention? Now I ask one thing. Just one. Do this for me. I promise before time run out I show you new vision. At that time, what do have to lose? Your brain probably pop, serve you right. But world is destroyed right after anyway."

"Fair enough. What do you need?"

He thumped me over the head with his cane. Hard. "Shut up your big mouth and pay attention!" he snapped. "Last memories while Cursed One was still just man." He put his hands on my head. "We leave quick before he makes change. To be in his head at time, surely you die."

I rubbed the bump on my head. I just did not get much respect around here.

"Let's do this," I said.

Lord Machado's memories.

Were of dirt. Brown dirt.

I woke up. Face down in the mud. Lying crumpled in my armor at the base of the mighty pyramid. I must have tumbled the entire way. The rain had stopped, and the jungle sun burned down upon me. I staggered up, heaving against the weight of my plate. Crusted blood coated my body, and wept from my many wounds.

My artifact.

I crawled up the stairs, pulling myself forward on my hands and knees, so very weak, and the pyramid was so very tall. I pulled, gasped and kicked, raggedly crawling my way ever higher.

I blacked out repeatedly, only to find that I had climbed higher without knowing it. My skin burned in the sun and my delirium and thirst increased. I began to crawl past bodies, past the torn remains of my soldiers who had so bravely fought the stone guardians. I cursed them for their betrayal. I cursed Captain Thrall.

Finally at the top, I kicked away the giant feasting buzzards. My ax was embedded through the back of the captain's now-empty suit of mail. His body was gone.

The artifact was gone.

I screamed at the sky. Cursing everything, swearing vengeance upon all, I tore my blade free, shaking it overhead. I vowed to regain that which was mine.

The body of the priestess Koriniha was face down in a puddle. The carrion birds had pulled her open and eaten freely. Her fine robes were crusted with dried red, stained with her spilled organs. The buzzards reluctantly hopped away as I approached.

She was the key.

I had to bring her back.

We were two weeks from the city, a hard trek through dark jungle paths. I could not carry her weight all that way, especially alone, wounded, and without provisions. I knelt beside her, and with my ax, carefully stripped the flesh from her bones, breaking joints as necessary to reduce her to her component parts. When I was done, I bundled the broken skeleton into a soldier's cloak, and tied it tight with a belt. I slung it over my back and stumbled down the pyramid, in the direction of the city. Surely one of the remaining dark priests would know what to do. If I could bring back my concubine, she could reunite me with the artifact. Nothing was going to stop me.

Days passed.

Delirium increased.

I ate bugs and small animals raw, crawling, dragging myself ever onward. Fever rushed through my body. Eating away at me. Burning me. Killing me. I did not sleep. I pushed onward, through the darkness, strange beings and spirits watching me along the jungle paths, urging me onward toward my destiny. I did not abandon my armor, nor my ax. They were symbols of my authority, and I would not give my enemies the satisfaction of abandoning part of my birthright to rust in the never-ending rain of the hated jungle.

My first sign of the city was the towers of black smoke and the clouds of milling vultures.

It was a city of the dead.

A month had now passed since my expedition had left. The bodies of the people were mostly in their homes, on their sleeping mats, pustules open on their decaying forms, taken by a fever.

I walked down the empty streets. The brilliant songbirds had starved in their cages. The only movement I saw was the carrion animals inside the doors and openings as if they were the new owners. In a way they were. Stray dogs, brought here by my men, prowled the streets, fattened by the vast stores of available meat.

Fires had caught, and now burned out of control, with no one left to fight the blaze. The air was thick with smoke and ash. I did not know if any of the people of the city had survived, but if they had, then they had fled this cursed place.

I made my way to the temple. The priestess had taken me deep beneath it, far down into the bowels of the earth, where strange things lived, and the very walls were alive. She had shown me the ancient obelisk and its prophecy. Surely there I would find my answers.

Infection had set into my wounds, dripping green pus and leaving a trail upon the paved road. My body stank like the corpses in the surrounding buildings. I was aflame with fever, yet shivered because I was so starkly cold. I could not remember my trek to the temple, nor the long deep descent to the ancient unnatural cavern. I do not know how much time passed on my journey down the endless stairs and tunnels.

I found myself in the cavern, reduced to crawling like some pathetic forest beast. The damp bones of Koriniha rattled on my back. I pulled my ax along, dragging a trail through the soft living floor. Now, so close to death, I pushed myself along by will power alone. I had no torch, so I moved through the dark. Strange things skittered over my body, or slithered over my hands. I crawled, hopelessly lost, pushing onwards toward where I felt the obelisk to be. The air rushed and changed direction overhead, as if the cavern itself was breathing. It stank of rotting fish, but I could barely smell it over the stench of decay coming from my own flesh.

At last my quest ended.

The black obelisk was there-still impossibly thin, and disappearing into the darkness above. The ancient writings of the prophecy gave off a faint light of their own. My swollen fingers struggled to uncinch the remains of the priestess from my body, and after much effort I was able to spill her bones upon the patch of floor where I had taken her to consummate our pact.

"Old Ones. I have come," I croaked through my parched throat, barely able to produce any sound. "I demand you return your Priestess Koriniha to life."

Nothing happened.

I lay gasping and heaving on the floor. I forced myself upwards, knees buckling, I fell against the obelisk, barely holding on.

"Old Ones. I am he whom you prophesied." The writing was there before me, glowing, providing scant illumination. It was still in Latin. I read the words again. Surely it was I.

"I have done what you asked. I have fulfilled my part," I demanded. "Give her back to me. Give me my power."

The giant breathing continued, each exhalation brought a greater stink of rotten ocean. Nothing responded. I grew angry. I found the strength to push myself away from the obelisk, standing shakily on my own feet. I pulled my ax into my hands.

"It is mine! Give me my power!"

The breathing continued.

"Damn you then." I found the strength to lift my ax. I swung it into the narrow obelisk. Obsidian chips flew as I struck. "Damn you!" I struck again, finding strength in my fury. Lines of the prophecy winked out of existence. "I do not need you!" Bits of the obelisk embedded themselves in my skin as I hammered it. "I am the one!" The narrow thing cracked and shifted from the roof. More lines disappeared. "The power is mine!" A final blow turned the center into powder. "I curse you, Old Ones!" I spit on their prophecy.

The obelisk toppled, the lower part shattered, and the top hung suspended for a long moment before detaching from the unseen ceiling of the cavern and falling, exploding like glass on impact. I was left alone in the dark, gasping, heaving. Dying.

We must go now, Boy. Hurry.

The cavern shifted. I had drawn the attention of the Old Ones. Shapes dropped down around me, somehow visible as darker than the shadows.

Come. Must leave his mind.

What's happening?

He has-how you say?-pissed them off.

Ten thousand glowing eyes opened on the cavern walls as the giant tentacles encircled me, suckers piercing and ripping into my rotten flesh, lifting me upwards through the cavern, into the gaping gelatinous maw of an Old One. I screamed, but acid filled my mouth and poured down my throat, burning, tearing.

Darkness…

Pain…

I was once again myself. Owen Z. Pitt.

Thank goodness.

The memory was fading away as the Old Man pulled me back toward light and sanity.

I saw Lord Machado as he was cruelly twisted into the Cursed One. His human form was stripped away, replaced with the foul organic materials of the ancient alien trespassers. His mind was probed and tortured, shattered and pulped against incomprehensible forces, pushed beyond the breaking point of any mortal being. The torment lasted for a hundred years.

Finally satisfied at the punishment, or perhaps growing bored and tiring of it, the Old One dropped the pulsing mass of black tissue back to the floor where it landed with a wet splattering.

Somehow his spirit survived the unspeakable torture, driven by hate, anger and lust for power. Those things were his anchor, keeping him from being absorbed completely into the ancient beast. The inky mass slithered away into the darkness, husbanding its strength.

Planning for its return.

The Polish village was silent. I shuffled through the snow, making my way through the rubble of homes and businesses, looking for the church, what I knew now to be the chosen Place of Power from the winter of 1944. My feet were bare, but the jagged stone, shell casings, and broken glass did not harm me.

"Mordechai!" I shouted. "We need to talk!"

I found the church. The steps were barren. I hurried up them and through the entrance.

"Byreika!" I bellowed, cupping my hands over my mouth. The Old Man was nowhere to be seen. I kicked over a damaged pew. I did not have time for this. "Where are you?"

"Greetings," called a voice. I turned to see a man, a stranger, approaching down the aisle. He was short, dressed in an archaic steel breastplate and plumed, rounded helmet. A yellow and brown family crest was emblazoned upon his chest. His goatee was black and grease-slicked down to a point. His eyes were small and dark, set deep into a face tanned like leather. He glared at me from under bushy eyebrows. "Your friend will be along shortly." One arm hung at his side, lazily holding the handle of his battle-ax, the blade dragging a furrow through the ash and snow on the church floor.

I realized he was speaking archaic Portuguese. The language of Lord Machado's memories.

Not good.

"Lord Machado," I said over the lump in my throat.

"We have never been properly introduced. You have plundered through my memories. My precious things. You have delved into my power and tried to take that which is mine. You have ruined my plans and stolen the glory of the ancients, an honor which is rightfully mine. And yet, I do not even know who you are." He stopped, only a few feet away. The artificial construct of the Old Man's world shifted violently as the Cursed One intruded. The fabric of the surrounding town rippled as if it were fluid. "Who are you?" he hissed.

I somehow found the courage to respond. "I'm the man that's going to kill you once and for all."

Snapping his head back, he laughed-the same evil laugh from the memories. "How naïve. I cannot die. I am eternal. Far greater things than you have tried to take my life. I refuse to die."

"We'll see about that."

He raised the ax slowly, taking it in both hands, balancing it, feeling the weight. He inspected the blade, carefully running one thumb over the edge.

"I've killed thousands of men. I could kill your body now as you sleep. I could take your spirit and chain it to the artifact like your guide. Do not be insolent with me," he threatened. "It would bring me much joy to rip the heart from your chest."

"Try it."

He did not move, merely stood, cradling his ax, smiling slightly, as if my bravado amused him.

"Are you going to sit there, or are we going to do this?" I asked, preparing to fight. How did you battle an immortal being in your own dreams? I was about to find out.

"Nay," he answered. "For in this place you are safe. I am but a shadow, a message, a warning. I am here but as a friend. I come to offer you a pact of peace and cooperation."

"Fuck off."

"My young friend, you have much to learn." He planted the ax head solidly into the floor and leaned upon the shaft. "Tomorrow I will rule. That much is already determined. Those who stand with me will be greatly rewarded. Whatever you so desire, power, riches… You wish to have the vampire's daughter. I can see to it that the two of you shall live together for eternity… in return for your allegiance. It is within my power to give you whatsoever you wish. I will need captains for my army, great men such as yourself. Think of the glory."

"Real tempting," I answered. "But how about I just find you and shove that stupid ax up your ass?"

"Those who stand against me will be crushed. I shall kill you for eons. I will wear your skin as my cloak, I will grind your bones into powder, I will drink your blood, and I shall chain your soul to the artifact forever. A token trophy of my victory." As he spoke he began to change, features becoming blurry and darkening, as if he was cloaked in smoke. He grew, widened, black-glistening tissue protruding through the seams of his clothing and creases of armor. The ax thumped to the floor, no longer fitting in the fleshless hands. "I shall take every one that you have ever loved. I shall turn them to me, or I shall swallow their souls. I shall make them suffer as you do, and they shall know, as their flesh burns and their skin is peeled away, that it was you who caused this suffering. That it was you, through your foolishness, which caused them such pain. And they will curse your name through eternity."

The Cursed One's voice changed, as if the sound was traveling through water. The flesh of his face sloughed away, leaving a skull, and then black tendrils sprang from under his helmet and out of his mouth, coating his face in a withering mask. "I shall take your family, your father, your mother and your children who are not yet born. They shall feel my wrath and know of my eternal rage. I shall take this woman you love, the vampire's daughter, and I shall inflict savagery upon her such that your pathetic mind cannot comprehend. Once she is broken I shall give her to her mother, and she too shall join my legions."

The transformation was complete, and the true form of Lord Machado towered above me, bones cloaked in a slime-coated mass of moving tentacles: pure black hatred made manifest into a physical presence. The armor remained, only now dented and rusted, bracketed in filth and ooze. The mass slapped wetly against the wooden floor, black fluids dripping through to eat away at the ground below. The helmet dipped down, burning eyes gleaming in my face.

"Choose now. Choose your fate. Serve me or serve eternal pain."

Incomprehensible fear grasped claws around my heart. I knelt down before the billowing wall of evil. The Cursed One began to laugh, echoing through the shattered church, secure in his power and greatness.

"I choose neither."

The pulsating mass that was the Cursed One's head tilted slightly, betraying the still-human reaction of disbelief. My hand closed upon the polished handle of the ancient ax as I heaved myself upwards. I swung the massive blade into the black flesh, slicing through the flailing darkness.

The Cursed One roared and struck.

Chapter 24

Light.

Confusion.

Pressure on my chest. Hands restraining me, holding me down.

I lashed out, knuckles colliding with something soft. Strong fingers landed on my throat. I reached upwards, grabbed the person and flung them aside. Something struck me, grabbed me, lifted me through the air and slammed me painfully into a rock-hard surface.

"Wake up, damn it!" Harbinger shouted into my ear.

I gasped. I was alive.

And being crushed painfully into a cinderblock wall. Harbinger held me up by the straps of my armor, feet dangling several inches from the ground. He shook me violently, took one hand away and slapped me silly.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Cut that out."

"Okay. He's back." Harbinger released me and I dropped to the ground. The much smaller man had flung me around as if I weighed nothing. "Sam. You okay?"

Sam Haven stood to one side, rubbing the side of his head. A slight trickle of blood leaked out of his nose and strained through his enormous mustache. "Kid's got a punch all right. Like getting kicked by a horse."

"Sorry," I said.

"Jeez, I was only trying to help. You were flopping around like a fish," the big cowboy said.

I looked around in bewilderment. We were by the hangar, back at the compound. The Hind sat nearby, blades still slowly turning. The team stood around me, looking concerned. I felt nauseous and weak. I slid down the wall and sat. Julie squatted down beside me.

"You were having a seizure again. You started as we came in for a landing." She pressed her fingers to my neck and took my pulse. She glanced at her watch. "Your heart rate is crazy."

"The Cursed One was in my dreams," I gasped.

"Did you get us a location?" Harbinger asked.

I shook my head sadly. "Sorry."

"Shit," he sputtered. "Nothing?"

"He made me a job offer," I added. "Great benefits package. Eternal life, that kind of thing. All I've got to do is help him conquer the world. Or he's going to boil my soul for eternity or something." I did not say what he had said about Julie. I was going to make the slimy son of a bitch pay for that.

"Okay, let's get inside," Harbinger said. I tried to wobble back to my feet. Julie gave me a hand up, and Trip silently put my arm over his shoulder and helped me to walk. Holly picked up my shotgun. "I've summoned every team back to the compound for the night. Pitt, you're going to need to debrief all of us. Maybe somewhere in there is a clue that we need to track him down."

"Aren't the others taking care of local infestations?" Holly asked.

"It's suicide to hunt vampires in the dark. I've got a few team leads who're brave enough to try though, so I ordered them back. So now we regroup, check our gear, and tomorrow we head out again. We have one day left to find the Place."

"I can try again, Earl," I said shakily. "I can do it. Byreika promised he would show me before time runs out."

"You looked like you were going to die back there," Trip said, with concern in his voice. "You sure you want to do that again?"

"You got a better idea?"

He thought about it. "Nope… The Lord helps those who help themselves."

"I wish he would send a miracle our way then, 'cause we sure could use one," I said.

"Maybe he has," Trip suggested. "Maybe you're our miracle."

"If that's the case, we're screwed," Holly said. "No offense."

"None taken. Hell, I agree."

"No, serious. Think about it," he told the group as we approached the main building. I never thought that I could be so glad to see the ugly old fortress, but I was. With the sun setting in the distance, the compound looked almost heavenly. "You talk with ghosts. You see visions. You even managed to turn back the clock. Explain that if it isn't a miracle."

"Trust me on this. If you had seen the evil crustacean monsters that this artifact comes from, then you wouldn't be talking about the backwards-in-time experience as if it was a good thing." I shuddered when I thought about their giant saucer eyes floating through space. "You had best put your faith in something other than me."

"I don't know, man. I think you've got a job to do. I think when that werewolf killed you, you got sent back with a mission, and Byreika is your guide."

"Whatever, dude."

"Actually, there might be something to that," Harbinger said. "I'll have to ask Milo, since he's our religious expert, and see if anything like that has happened before. But right now I've got him and Skippy putting the guns and rocket pods back on the Hind."

"What about the Feds?" Julie asked. "They specifically told us not to arm it."

"Screw 'em. World's probably going to end tomorrow anyway. What are they going to do? Prosecute us? It's the least I can do for Skip. The guy has been itching to blow something up for a long time."

Several different vehicles were parked in front of the building. Mostly they were plain Suburbans or large passenger vans. We were not the first team to return. The reception desk was empty. There was a brief note from Dorcas saying that she had gone, in her words, up to Forestdale with some of the kids "to do some killin' " and that there were some pudding cups in the fridge. The chocolate ones were hers, and she promised painful death upon anyone who ate them.

The other Hunters were gathered in the cafeteria. I had never seen most of them before. They were an interesting crew. Most of the heavy suits of armor had been ditched as soon as was possible, and the Hunters were trying to get in the small bit of relaxation that they could. A few had not taken theirs off yet, mostly the ones who had been lucky enough not to be splattered with undead juices during the day's activity. In addition to the infamous horned happy face there were several other team logos present. Some were cartoonish: a fire-breathing warthog, Scud the Disposable Assassin, Samurai Jack, and one that appeared to be a cross between a shark and an octopus. Others logos were more serious: a skull with vampire teeth and a knife through it, a highly stylized dragon, crossed Kalashnikovs, and a version of Munch's "The Scream." All of the patches were black and olive drab green.

Some Hunters were eating, scarfing down whatever calories were available. A large group were clustered around the TV watching the news as more reports trickled in about the worldwide panic caused by the missing five minutes, but the majority of the Hunters were cleaning their guns or sharpening edged weapons. Someone had plugged in a CD player and was playing classic rock.

"Earl!" a ponytailed man in a Harley Davidson tank top shouted. "Hey, everybody! Harbinger's here!" The Hunters dropped what they were doing, jumped up and crowded around us, many of them asking questions.

"Calm down," Harbinger boomed. "As soon as everybody's here, we'll have a full debriefing. Status? Who're we missing?"

The biker-looking fellow started to tick off names on his fingers. Apparently he at least knew everybody. "Nobody called in any casualties today. Most of these vamps never knew what hit them. We stacked up piles of the bastards. Boone is here, but his guys volunteered to be perimeter security for now. VanZant, Paxton, and Mayorga's teams called in and are on the way. Eddings just crawled out of some mine, said he didn't get the message to pull out before dark. So they should be last ones in."

"Didn't get the message, my butt," Julie said angrily. "You don't stay in a vampire hole after dark."

"Crazy bastard," Sam said with admiration.

"Where's my… the Boss?" Harbinger asked.

"Called about fifteen minutes ago. Him and the Newbies kicked some serious ass up in Forestdale. They're coming. The Boss sounded really happy on the phone."

"No surprise. He hasn't got to kill anything in years. Thanks, Phillips." Harbinger slapped the man on the back. He raised his voice so that all of the assembled Hunters could hear. "You scumbags best not have eaten everything. I'm starved."

"Fred's making up some dinner-he used to be a chef you know-but right now there's pudding cups in the fridge," said one, as he spooned Dorcas' precious chocolate into his mouth.

"You poor condemned fool," muttered Sam under his breath. For that Hunter's sake, I hoped that Dorcas had had a chance to use up her daily quotient of violence against vampires.

"Whoa there, chief. We're dying here," the man named Phillips interjected. "Rumor has it that you had something to do with that five minutes. What was up with that?"

"Where'd you hear that?"

"It was all over the Feds' encrypted channels. Something about a demon massacre in Natchy Bottom," a female Hunter said. I loved the fact that breaking into the government's secure communications did not cause anyone to bat an eye.

"Yeah, man, that was some freaky shit," said a short man. "Whole world is going crazy out there."

Most of the others nodded in agreement. In the background the news video was showing huge crowds of demonstrators gathered in front of the White House. The scrolling information across the bottom warned of the condition-red terror warning, and the declaration of martial law across the Southeastern U.S.

"Well, I'll address that. But I'm going to wait until everybody's here. I'm tired and I ain't telling that story more than once." He pulled out a cigarette. Three other Hunters whipped out lighters. Every person in the room respected or admired Harbinger far too much to argue. "Somebody scare me up something hot and made out of cow. And that's an order." He leaned in, lit the end of the cigarette from one of the proffered lighters and inhaled greedily. "It's been a hell of a day."

I agreed fully with that sentiment. Harbinger's team dispersed, greeting and conversing with old friends. I dropped my bag of gear on the floor and went to scrounge up something to eat. I was starving, exhausted, sore, aching, and missing a considerable amount of blood from the leeches and thumbnail-sized ticks. However, I was still a gentleman.

"Julie, can I get you something from the kitchen?"

"Hang on. I'll come with you." She set her equipment next to mine, and hurriedly made her way through the double doors. I followed, stomach rumbling, already salivating at the smell of something being fried. I stumbled zombielike in the direction of precious food. But Julie grabbed my hand, led me off to the side, waved quickly at the few Hunters cooking and scrounging, and pulled me through a small side door into the hallway.

"What's up?" I asked, glancing back longingly toward the kitchen. At my size and level of physical activity, I had to eat 4,500 calories a day to keep from getting cranky. She led me quickly up the stairs to the top level. I had not been up here much. I followed stupidly.

"We died today."

"Yeah, I've done that a couple of times. It don't get any easier."

She stopped, glanced down the hall to make sure we were alone. Satisfied, she turned and looked me in the eyes. "It really makes you think. Coming that close. Doesn't it?"

"I suppose," I answered, slightly embarrassed.

"You saved us. I don't know how you did, but you're something special. I can't explain it."

"You're the special one. I've known that since I first met you," I told her sincerely.

"I had the same reaction. I just couldn't explain it at the time."

"Really?" That took me by surprise.

"Yes. Really. Look, I know this is sudden, but what you said back there… in the swamp… right before you… you stepped in front of me…" I thought of the alien spear that I took for her piercing my heart. "Did you mean that?"

"I… uh… well…" I stammered, afraid to answer truthfully.

She responded quickly. "Because if you didn't, I totally understand. It was a really intense moment… and I don't want to move too fast… or anything like that. And there has just been so much going on… with my family… and…" She did not mention the missing Grant, but the look of guilt was obvious on her face. "It's just happened so fast, and I wasn't expecting anything like this. There has been something about you, ever since we met. And then when Grant abandoned you on the freighter… We fought about that. I couldn't believe he did that to you. And then he disappeared, and I know how I feel about you, and I should feel guilty because he's probably dead or worse, and so much has happened, but you're here, and I just don't know-"

I cut her off. "I meant it." I screwed up all of my courage. Compared to this moment, vampires, werewolves, undead, gargoyles, demons, giant sky squids-they were nothing. I would rather face legions of monsters than have her reject what I was about to say.

I held both of her hands as gently as a brute like me could manage. Her expression was unreadable. "I love you," I stated simply.

She did not respond immediately. I felt a nervous weight form in my stomach, threatening to drag me through the floor. I swallowed involuntarily as all of the moisture left my mouth. Finally she smiled, a little smile at first, and then gradually it spread into a wide grin.

"Me too."

"Really?" The weight lifted. Lightning crashed. The heavens opened and choirs of angels sang.

"Yes. Now quit squeezing my hands, you're gonna break them."

I hurriedly let go. "Sorry."

"No problem." She leaned in close and we kissed. Her lips were warm and soft. She broke away and nodded her head toward one of the doors off to the side. "That's the room that I use when I work late and end up sleeping at the compound." Julie sounded slightly short of breath. "I figure that we have a little while before the other teams get here and anybody notices we're gone."

Dinner could wait.

I had not thought that anyone had seen us slip quietly back into the cafeteria. I had been as stealthy and nonchalant as was possible. Julie had winked at me one last time and moved off to coordinate with the other teams and take care of business. The room had almost filled with Hunters, and only one team was still missing, but was due at any moment. My gear had been pushed to the side. I picked up my bag, spotted my friends sitting at a table in the back of the room, and made my way over. The cafeteria had taken on an almost party atmosphere as Hunters who had not seen each other in months or years were reunited.

"Hey, dude. What you been doing?" Trip said, sliding over so I could have room to sit.

"Uh… nothing."

"Whatever," Holly said as she pushed a plate of now lukewarm pasta toward me. "We saved you some food… Stud." She winked evilly. "Best eat. Keep your strength up." Very few things slipped past Holly Newcastle.

"Thanks," I mumbled and immediately began to eat. The meal was delicious. "Wow, they sure did use a ton of garlic."

"The guy that cooked it, Fred, said that it might help when we fight vampires tomorrow," Trip explained. "Maybe they won't want to bite us if we stink like garlic."

Holly snorted. "That's just an old wives' tale. Vamps aren't scared of garlic."

"Hey, up until yesterday night we thought them turning into fog was just a myth too," I answered. "So until then, load me up, baby."

The final team arrived with a flourish. They were beleaguered and their armor was still splashed with undead fluids. Their logo was Smoking Elvis. Their leader waved to the crowd.

"Sorry we're late, but we killed twenty bloodsuckers. Let's get this party started." Shouts of "Showoff!" and "About time!" rose from the Hunters. But it was all in good fun.

"Will somebody hose these guys off? Damn, Eddings, your crew smells like vampire shit!" Sam bellowed.

"Love you too, Sam," he shouted back.

Harbinger cleared his throat. "Get your guys cleaned up, and grab some grub. We need to have a meeting." At that, the newcomers immediately complied. The rest of the room went back to its heated conversations and raucous laughter. Holly watched them go. After a moment's hesitation, she sprang to her feet and ran after them, grabbing the team lead by the arm.

"Excuse me?" she asked as he turned around. I was close enough to hear the exchange over the noise of the room. "Are you the team out of Las Vegas?"

"At your service." Eddings bowed slightly. "I don't think we've met, miss?"

"Newcastle, Holly Newcastle. Yes. Yes, we have met." She surprised all of us by embracing the filth-coated Hunter, hugging him tight, and holding him there. He looked bewildered. Finally she let go of him. He studied her curiously for a minute.

"Ahh… I remember now. Wow. Good to see you. You look a lot better. You've gained a bunch of weight," he said that as a compliment. "You must have put on thirty pounds."

"Thanks," she answered proudly. I looked at Trip and shrugged. That was not something I was under the impression you could say to Holly, or any woman for that matter, without getting shot.

"Earl told me he was going to try and recruit you. I'm glad to see you took him up on it. How do you like Monster Hunting?"

"Honestly, I hated it at first, but I felt like it was something I just had to do. Face my fears, you know…"

"Yeah. I understand that, after what you went through."

"Now, though?" Holly laughed. "I love it."

"I told Earl you would be perfect… Look, I've got to clean up before he skins me for being late."

She hugged him again. This time I could tell she was crying. I did a double-take at that. I was not aware that Holly was capable of producing tears. He whispered something in her ear, and patted her gently on the back. Eddings finally broke away and hurried after his men. Holly wiped her eyes and returned to our table.

"What was that about?" I asked.

"Uh… nothing." She mimicked me perfectly. "Now shut up and eat your spaghetti." She sighed and watched them leave, gradually returned to her food and ignored the rest of us.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm glad that you're all here. We have a bit of a situation on our hands."

That was an understatement.

Harbinger paced back and forth at the front of the cafeteria. The conference room was too small to fit the assembled humans and orcs, so the large maps of the South had been brought downstairs and leaned against the wall. Many of the red tacks had been replaced with yellow tacks, but there were many new red ones dotting the map. It looked like Alabama had the measles.

Every single member of MHI was present. The ones that I knew were a small minority. Julie sat by her grandfather and a young man who must have been her little brother. Boone's guys had come in from the perimeter and were standing toward the back. Mead had waved happily at me when he had entered. The orcs stood by themselves, slightly separated from the rest of us, packed tightly together, hooded heads kept down, shoulders slumped, not used to being surrounded by so many humans.

"The team leads were sent a brief synopsis as to where we stood a few days ago. But we have had some new developments. At 2:39 today, time backed up for five minutes. This was felt by every single person on Earth."

From the brief snitches of news that I had caught, billions were caught up in hysteria over the event. Some were in a panic, others in a religious fervor, and some were in denial. Thousands of babies had been born twice. Hundreds of people had died of natural causes twice.

"Yes. Those five minutes were in fact related to this case, and it goes to show how serious this one is. This is it, folks, this is the big one. Our real enemy is one General Joao Silva de Machado. We like to call him the Cursed One. He's five hundred years old, and in case you're wondering how you'll recognize him, he's the one that's a blob of black slime wearing conquistador armor. He's armed with some sort of ancient artifact that will be activated at the zenith of the full moon tomorrow night, giving us"-Harbinger glanced down at his watch-"approximately twenty-two hours. This artifact was the cause of the… glitch. And that was just a sample of the freak show to come. When this thing really goes off, it's the end of the world."

"What do you mean by 'end of the world'?" a Hunter asked.

"Literally. End of the world as in kiss your ass good-bye." The crowd murmured. MHI had faced some strange things before, but never anything like this. "The artifact must be used at a specific Place of Power, but we don't know where that Place is."

"Like the Christmas party in '95?" the man named Eddings asked.

"Correct," Harbinger stated. "Speaking of that, the Cursed One has killed Ray Shackleford." He stopped, counted on his fingers, and then added for clarity, "The fourth."

The Hunters erupted in confusion.

"Settle down. It gets worse. They tracked him down looking for information. They got him because Susan Shackleford, who is now a Master vampire, knew right where to find him."

If the news of Ray's death had upset the Hunters, the idea of his wife being a vampire stunned them into silence. You could have heard a shell casing hit the floor across that cafeteria. I glanced over at the Shacklefords. The Boss was as stoic as ever, arthritic hands steepled in front of his emotionless face. Nathan Shackleford resembled his sister and mother, but had the hulking build of his father. He was a handsome young man, but at the moment he looked tired and forlorn. Julie put her arm over her brother's shoulders as he hung his head down and stared at the linoleum.

"Yes, people. One of our own is one of the seven. Every trick we know, she knows. She helped make them up. Apparently she 'persuaded' Ray to lie to us. Ray told us where to go, and we went there blindly, in order to intercept the Cursed One." Earl paused to light a cigarette. I noticed his hand was shaking slightly as the flame of his Zippo wavered. He noticed the tremor as well, and snapped the lighter violently shut.

"Working alongside the Monster Control Bureau agents,"-most of the Hunters and all of the orcs started to grumble-"we went deep into the swamp, right into an ambush. It was the creatures from the Christmas party." Harbinger waited for the shouts and swearing to die down. Probably half of the people in the room had been survivors of that night. "The ones we fought at the rift were just drones. These were soldiers. My team and all of the Feds were killed, but when the artifact was activated, we started right before the ambush, only the creatures had been sent away."

"You can't die, Earl!" someone shouted. "That's impossible!"

"Nothing can kill Earl Harbinger!"

"Quiet down," Harbinger ordered. "Y'all know that isn't true."

"But-"

"Shut up!" the director roared. The Hunters instantly complied. "It's possible, because it happened today." He waited a moment before continuing. I did not know what had caused that outburst. Harbinger was a legend amongst the Hunters, but as I had seen back in the swamp, even he had his physical limits. "The artifact was the key. It summoned the creatures. It has power over time and who knows what else. It's a little stone box about the size of a deck of cards. And you'll know it when you see it because it holds a world of hurt, and we're probably going to have to pry it out of the claws of something really bad.

"On this case we have already lost two good Hunters. Jerry Roberts is dead, and Grant Jefferson is missing-either dead, turned or being held captive to be used as a sacrifice tomorrow night. If he's still alive, we're his only hope. So now we're going to listen to a story. It ain't over yet, we still have us a secret weapon… Owen."

The room was still. I gulped. "Yeah?"

"Tell us all your story. Don't leave anything out. Hurry up."

I stood awkwardly and walked to the front of the room.

"He's only a Newb," somebody said. "How does he know what to do?"

Harbinger held up his hand. "Listen up. This is Owen Pitt. His team calls him Z. He killed a werewolf with his bare hands. In the last week he has saved the lives of my team members on multiple occasions. He's killed vampires, wights, gargoyles and demons. He went head to head against Jean Darné. He alone has seen the Cursed One. And for those of you still doubting, he has fought Agent Franks. Twice. And even managed to kick him in the balls once."

"I would rather fight the demons!" someone shouted.

"Me too," I answered.

"Hunters-treat this man like you would treat any member of my team. Some of the things which you are about to hear are going to sound weird, but I personally believe them, so take that for what it is worth. Some of the things which you are going to be told can never leave this room. If this story was to get back to the Monster Control Bureau, then there is no telling what they would do to him. And know this, if anyone here ever speaks to the Feds about what Owen has seen, I will find out. You can know that of a surety, and I swear upon all that I hold holy, I will track you down to the ends of the world, reach down your throat, and pull your spine out your mouth." Nobody in the room said anything. They knew that he was deadly serious. My secrets were safe with this crew. "Owen, tell us everything."

I stood before the room of brave souls. Men and women who in the eyes of some were no better than mercenaries, but whom I knew to be heroes. I was one of them, and I was proud to have their respect, but humbled at the same time.

I shared my story. I told them about the Old Man, from the first encounter with him after my near death at the claws of Mr. Huffman. I told of the dreams. I spoke of Lord Machado and his failed expedition. I tried to convey his greed, his insane ambitions, his hate, and the inhuman desire that kept him alive when any other mortal man would have just been broken and consumed. I spoke of the Old Ones, slime-coated evil from beyond time, and I spoke of their prophecy and of their search for the unwitting fool with the power to unlock the gate and let them in. I warned of the Tattooed Man, the ancient captain, cursed to protect an artifact of unyielding darkness, and his solemn promise to take my life.

Haltingly, I told the Hunters about our deaths in Natchy Bottom. About my battle against the Cursed One's incorporeal self, and my blind luck in triggering the power of the artifact, surprising him, and temporarily wresting it from his control. Finally I spoke of his offer, my loyalty in exchange for a place in his kingdom, and I spoke for the first time about his threats against the others, especially Julie. I searched her out, making eye contact. She nodded slightly, understanding my fear, but her will was like iron, and she was not afraid of his curse.

Nathan Shackleford interrupted my speech. "This Machado asshole is going down!" The young man rose to his feet, fire in his eyes, fully prepared to defend his family from any further attacks. "I'll stake the son of a bitch myself!"

"Shut up, Nate," the senior Shackleford calmly ordered. "And watch your language around the womenfolk. That ain't polite."

"Sorry, Grandpa." He sat back down. Julie smiled in sisterly pride.

"Thank you, Mr. Pitt," the Boss said. "Is that all?"

"I'm afraid so, sir." I spread my hands in apology. The Hunters began to speak amongst themselves, team leads turning around and telling their troops to quiet down. "I'm sorry."

"No need for an apology, son. You've done your best." He pointed his hook at me. "That is all that any man can do."

"Yes, sir."

Harbinger stood back up. I started to return to my seat. "Stay right there, Owen. This is question-and-answer time. We have about five hundred years of collective monster-killing experience in this room, and I want to take advantage of it. We may be able to cobble together a couple semi-functioning brain cells out of this crew and figure out this puzzle."

Questions came from the crowd as the assembled Hunters picked my brain looking for a clue, something that we had missed. Something-anything-that could point us in the direction of the bad guys, and allow us to exercise our gifts for violence. Monster Hunters by nature tended to be a direct and straightforward bunch, similar to human claymore mines with big signs that warned front toward enemy. I uncomfortably tried to answer the questions as best as I could, but it was hard to recall every little thing from the heavily fragmented dreams. I could feel myself growing light-headed. It had been a long day.

Harbinger summed up our scant information. He stood in front of the map, back to the crowd. "So we know he's in Alabama, or at least he was a couple of days ago. Owen saw him underground, but we don't know if he's in a cave, a mine, or even a basement."

"The Elf Queen said that she saw him near water," Milo added.

"Now if we lived in the desert that might help," Sam said sardonically.

I leaned against the wall. I was not feeling very good. It was probably the stress. I closed my eyes. The pulse in my head was pounding, my heartbeat was elevating. My lungs constricted. I felt like I was going to be sick.

"Owen saw the Tattooed Man with Montgomery in the background. He's going to be looking for the Cursed One as well." Harbinger waved his hand over the area representing central Alabama. "But by now he could be anywhere… Owen, was he coming or going? And could you tell what direction? Owen?"

I could not answer. My mouth had suddenly dried up, leaving me unable to speak. My legs had gone numb, and I slid down the wall, flopping to the floor. My vision was fading.

"Owen!" Julie shouted.

"Aw hell." Harbinger hurried to my side. Squatting down, he grabbed my head. "Hey! Stay with me. That's an order." He shook me. "Owen!" Behind him I could see the blurry forms of the other Hunters rising to their feet in alarm.

I tried to apologize, but I was fast slipping into unconsciousness. I felt Julie's hands on my neck as she took my weakening pulse.

Chapter 25

"Sorry. Is best can do," the Old Man whispered.

"Where are we?" I looked around, but our surroundings were pitch-black and revealed nothing. I could feel his presence standing beside me.

"Shhh." His frail hand landed on my shoulder. "You want him to hear us?"

"Okay." Since I was not actually here, I could not really understand how whispering was supposed to help anything. "I think I'm dying."

"No, you be fine. Unless mess up I do. Then get dead for sure."

"That's supposed to make me feel better?" It was discomforting to be in the darkness. There was an absence of sensation not limited to just vision. I could not hear anything other than my companion. There were no scents, not even the feeling of the air on my skin. I missed the battle-damaged village. In comparison to the sensory deprivation, the shelled-out bunch of rubble might as well have been a plush resort.

"Where are we?"

"Same as before, town was just last thing I see, so is what have to show in your head. Takes effort to make like real. And Cursed One found it. So now we sneak in for look. I promise to show Cursed One's place. Other way not work now. Cursed One has shielded his mind. Blocked his memory. We try this way. I think might work perhaps… maybe."

"Mordechai, I swear that if you screw up and kill me, I'm going to be pissed. If I end up a ghost, I'm gonna be kicking your ghost ass for eternity."

"Ooh. Tough talk for alive person. Haunting is much hard work. Kids today not work hard enough to do such things. Now be ready. Is much danger… I try to show. Then we go away before catches us he does. He knows about me now. He is ready to stop me. Ready to fight you."

"What happens if he catches us?"

"You get stuck like me."

"And what if he catches you?"

The Old Man did not answer. I felt his hand tighten on my shoulder.

"What happens if the Cursed One catches you?"

"Not know. But must try." There was a slight trembling in his raspy voice.

"What are you going to do?"

"Like first time I show. You leave body. Go quick so nothing comes and lives in you. We take look. We get out. Hard to explain. If something bad happens, you go. Go away fast. Go back to self. Just wake up. Should be safe when wake."

"We don't need to get so close. Can't we just float overhead or something? That's all I need. No need to get all up in his face, or tentacles, or whatever."

"Not work like that again. Shielded. No. We go right in. Take you right to artifact I can. Then out. Out fast. No try to fight. Without body, you not have chance this time."

"I did okay last time," I lied. Even though I could not see him, I knew that he was shaking his head disapprovingly. Luckily he did not whack me with his cane.

"No, Boy. Not like that. You still not understand what you have done." He sighed. "Here, take these things." I felt something bump against my arm. I fumbled around in the dark until I found his waiting hand. He placed several small objects into my palm and then squeezed my fingers shut. "Maybe you can use."

"What are they?"

"I promised more toys to you. I keep promise. If we not die in next few minutes, still very strong vampires to face you have. Sorry I not can give more, is best can do."

"Thanks." I put the little objects away. "I don't know how they work, but they do a number on vampires." I remembered the look of shock on Susan Shackleford's undead face after she had burst into flames. I would be glad to have more of the little killer toys.

"I not know really, but think maybe have idea. Long time ago, before I got calling, like you got short straw… before I hunt monsters. I was-how you say?-craftsman. I build… I build things with hands." He sighed again, sounding very sad. "I think now, the memory I have left, is all I have. I make things again. I know are rough, but has been long time for me. I send you back with them. I send back to real world with these things I create. Back you go to the world, with these little bits of me. Bits of who I was. Maybe even who I am still now."

"I don't know if I understand."

"Holy things when used by faithful person is much powerful. Why? Not because of little metal star or little wooden cross. No, because of belief. Belief that good beats evil, because of strength that is inside people. For me, not believe-know. These little things, they are all I have left to give."

"Thank you," I said, and I meant it. The toys were physical manifestations of the Old Man, created from his memory and translated into the real world through unknown means. The little objects were like bottled faith.

"Boy… glad I have been to be stuck in your head last little while. Gives me hope for future… if world not get destroyed of course. Then short future that would be. You are good boy. Proud. Stubborn. Sometimes stupid. But always try to be good. Heart means to be good. Makes me glad that other one chosen is good man. No matter what happens. Promise… promise you finish this. Even if I not there to help."

"Of course. But don't talk like that. You aren't going anywhere."

"Bah… is much danger in this thing. Promise me."

"I promise I'll finish this."

"Good. Now remember things you have seen. Remember things I have show you. Is up to you, many things which I not could tell, I have show you. Remember them, and all will be fine." He patted me on the shoulder.

A grim feeling of dread hovered around us. I tried to steel myself in preparation for our raid. The odds were not in our favor.

"It's been an honor," I stated solemnly.

"Me too, Boy. Me too… Now let us go and look. Make no sound. Try not to think so loud. As you say, let's do this thing."

A sensation of sudden movement. An abrupt stop.

Dark. Cool. Damp. Musty.

I could sense the spirit that was the Old Man near at hand. There were other things in the dark as well. Not quite living, but refusing to be dead. The presence of the ancient and powerful vampires was thick in the cavern, as well as the oily taint of the Cursed One.

There was no light, but since I was not seeing through eyes, it did not matter. We were in a cave. A mammoth opening in the earth. Pillars of rock stretched from floor and ceiling, most of the stalactites and stalagmites far longer than I was tall. Banks of harsh artificial lights had been smashed and kicked over, leaving only shadow and broken glass.

I could feel the seven Masters. Not all were in the cave itself, but rather they were hunting or feeding in the night above. A few remained on guard, hanging suspended, invisible in the tangled rock overhead. The sense of their power was overwhelming. Susan Shackleford was there. Far younger than the others, but in my current state I could perceive just how dangerous she was-strong beyond all expectations for a vampire so young. The others were older, and some had even been alive when my ancestors were living in mud huts or paddling canoes across the oceans.

For a moment I was able to glimpse into their twisted minds. Their leader, Lord Machado's lieutenant, was the one known as Jaeger. He was also young. Not even undead for six decades, hated and feared by the others, he led them through his unnatural strength, granted not in the traditional manner of the vampire, but rather by the power of the ancient artifact-a tortured gift placed upon him at the moment of his human death, bound to the artifact, and sealed into the service of the Cursed One.

There were humans present as well. Several were being kept in a hole, too steep and slick to crawl out of. They were snacks. Grant Jefferson had been bound and tossed in a corner. Judging from his appearance he had been savagely beaten, but he was still alive. The Cursed One had his sacrifice.

The vampire leader, Jaeger, knelt at the rear of the chamber, a fearsome thing of awe-inspiring strength, now relegated to a mundane chore. He held an ancient conquistador's helmet and polished it, his narrow hands moving like a belt sander. The breastplate and ax that I had gotten to know so well sat on a cloth before him. He was a squire, preparing the colors of his knight before the final tournament. The feathered plume had long since turned to dust.

Something moved at the rear of the great chamber. A tear appeared in the solid rock and light seeped through the crack. It was similar to the rifts that the demons had used in Natchy Bottom, a hidden passage carved through space to someplace else, unnaturally grafted onto the walls of this cave long ago. I could see and understand the portal clearly in my disembodied state. The rift gradually widened as a glistening shape pushed its way through and slapped wetly onto the floor. The temperature dropped from chilly to freezing in seconds. The helpless humans whimpered in fear.

Lord Machado had returned.

I had a brief glimpse into the portal as it disappeared back into the rock. Dark sky flickered in the distance. It was the Place of Power.

The vampire bowed his head and presented the helmet to the waiting master. The withering mass reached down and plucked the antique from his servant's hands. The tentacles gently lifted the steel pot and set it on the skull-shaped protuberance, a crown upon a blighted brow.

The thing that was Lord Machado towered above the tall vampire. Still vaguely man-shaped, twisted and hardened bones formed the supports for the black pulsating tissues. Several tentacles dangled from where the arms would have been, and legs had been replaced with a veritable platform of withering limbs. Every inch of black flesh moved like a bucket of worms.

The creature paused. Then slowly rotated toward us.

I tried to shrink back, an impossible feat in my current condition. The helmet cocked to the side as the burning eyes zoomed in on us. I heard the Old Man's thoughts.

Run.

I willed my spirit away from the Cursed One, back through the huge cavern. Jaeger screamed and leapt at us, his movement too fast to discern. It felt as if a wall of evil slammed into me, pinning me down, capturing me and holding me. I fought against it, but I was not strong enough. Lord Machado oozed across the stone, compressing his body between narrow paths, tentacles reaching forward, driving his will like a spear.

I could not flee. I could not escape. Master vampires detached themselves from the ceiling and dropped around me. The Cursed One was closing. As hard as I pushed, I could not break away from the will of the evil thing. I could feel him pulling me toward him, sinking hooks into me and reeling me in.

I was doomed.

Flee, Boy!

The spirit of Mordechai Byreika did not pull away. Instead he hurled himself against the onrushing vampires. An explosion of blue sparks lighted the cavern as his presence collided with Jaeger, smashing the vampire backwards across the cave in a brilliant display that blinded all of the undead. The vampire struck a stalactite with a resounding crack.

Take that, Nazi bastard! Payback is bitch!

The will of the Cursed One bore down upon Mordechai. The Old Man faced his adversary in a futile but noble gesture. For a brief instant the ghost became visible, holding his cane in his arthritic hands like a weapon, narrow shoulders hunched, eyes hard and jaws clenched. He swung at the onrushing blackness.

And was swept away.

Mordechai! No!

The will of the Cursed One was temporarily diverted. The snares that held me snapped. I remembered the Old Man's admonition. Every instinct told me to fight, but I fled. A sense of pain engulfed me, but it was not mine. It was Mordechai's. It filled the cavern, drowning out all other sensations.

I saw his death.

The Polish winter. 1944. The rubble of the shelled-out town. The burned and blackened church. The Old Man tied to the altar. The incorporeal presence of the Cursed One hovering nearby, hungrily waiting, but already knowing that his calculations had been in error. Jaeger, then merely a human in the black uniform of the SS, holding a gleaming blade high. Bitten by a vampire far earlier in his forgotten youth, the curse of the undead waited in his veins for his suicide and inevitable return.

Sounds of gunfire coming from the village. Multitudes of German soldiers cut down by the immortal Thrall.

The artifact, black energy swirling, sitting by the Old Man's head. He did not fight, for he knew this battle was over. The blade flashed down, cutting sluggishly through Mordechai's narrow chest. Blood splattering over the church, over the ancient Place of Power.

The heart held high, pumping blood down the Nazi's arm. The ritual failed. The time had not been right. The black energy of the artifact dying. The light in the Old Man's eyes dying at the same time.

The sacrifice bound to the artifact. Mordechai's spirit was chained and enslaved to the ancient box, decades passing, as he was trapped, helplessly bound to this world.

Until he found me.

He screamed as he experienced the pain of death all over again.

I knew I had to wake up. I fought my way forward, pushing away from the Cursed One, like a swimmer with lungs burning for air struggling toward the sky. There was a large tunnel out of the great cave. It was round corrugated metal. It was angled toward the surface.

Behind me the ghostly scream was cut short. The Cursed One returned his attention toward my fleeing spirit, searching, grasping. Energy slung past me like cracking whips. I knew that if I could reach the surface, if I could reach the air, I could return to my body and wake up.

It was close-the surface. I raced onward.

Then suddenly a silent conquistador stood in my path. Blocking my way.

No. Mordechai's sacrifice would not be in vain. I pushed forward.

The conquistador did not move.

It wore a silly cartoon grin. It had a big, stuffed, fake head.

What in the hell?

I broke through, the Cursed One raging below. My spirit soared into the night sky and tore across the horizon at impossible speeds. I was free.

"Owen!" Julie shouted in my ear. "Are you with us?"

"Ack," I coughed, choking off my shout of freedom. "I'm back," I gasped.

"Are you okay?" All of the Monster Hunters were clustered around me.

"Mordechai is dead."

"We know. He died in 1944," Julie explained soothingly as she ran her hand over my face. "You're going to be okay now."

I struggled to form words. "No… Just now. He's gone. He gave himself up to save me from Lord Machado." I lay still. I could feel my heart hammering in my chest. It had to be at least a hundred and fifty beats a minute. I could feel sweat pouring out of my body, and every inch of me tingled in pins and needles discomfort. My hands were clenched into shaking fists. I forced them to open.

Several small wooden toys fell from my hands onto the floor.

Holy shit.

Harbinger was still squatting at my side. "What did you see?"

"Grant's alive. He's the sacrifice." Several of the Hunters began to murmur. It was one thing to have one of our own killed in action. It was another thing entirely to have one of our own in the hands of the bad guys.

"Where are they?" Harbinger pounded his fist into his palm. "Where?"

"A big cave."

"Where?"

"I don't know."

Harbinger gestured at some of the others. "I want to know every cave in the South. Now! What else?"

"It was huge. Lots of rock formations. Kind of pretty. Real tall. Taller than this building. The interior had to be at least a hundred yards wide." It was hard to guess scale when you were not in your physical body for reference. "You had to take a big metal tunnel to get into it."

"Big caves!" Harbinger shouted. "What else?"

"Uh…" I thought back to the final thing that I had seen. "There was a conquistador. At first I thought it was something to do with Lord Machado, but it wasn't. It was stuffed. Like one of those big fake heads people wear at amusement parks."

"What the hell?" Harbinger said. "Get me caves with conquistadors."

"Friendly Fernando?" Milo interrupted.

"Who the fuck is Friendly Fernando?" Harbinger snapped.

"Oh my…" Milo said, "Earl, some of us went there last year. Friendly Fernando is like the mascot. It's a tourist place. Biggest cave in the state. I can't believe you haven't been there, since you're from here and all. They even have a little theme park with some rides, and a water balloon tower, and a maze, kids love it, and a gift shop, and…"

Earl stood and grabbed the red-bearded Hunter by the shoulders. "Focus, man!"

Instead Julie answered, almost as if a light bulb had gone off over her head. "DeSoya Caverns. Lord Machado is in DeSoya Caverns."

We broke to prepare for our assault. Teams formed up. Weapons were readied. Intelligence was gathered.

"DeSoya Caverns Park is in Childersburg. Near Sylacauga. About seventy-five miles from here up the 231." Julie pointed at the map. The team leads were gathered while the rest of the Hunters were busy preparing for the mission.

Harbinger looked at his watch. "If we leave in three hours, we can arrive about the time the sun comes up. Gives everybody a chance to catch a little sleep, and some of our teams have been up for twenty-four hard hours straight. Tired Hunters make stupid decisions. And the last thing I want to do is land on this place when the Masters are awake and prowling."

"Can we just drop a bomb on it? Bury those bastards?" Boone asked.

"I don't think so," I answered. "The Cursed One was in something else. There's a hidden rift to somewhere else in the back of the cave. The cave itself isn't the Place of Power. It's just the entrance. If we blow the cave, we're probably doing him a favor, and he's going to be sitting fat and happy wherever that rift goes to."

"It could be a pocket dimension," Julie explained. "There have been cases of them in monster hunting history. Basically a bubble outside of the regular world, but attached to a fixed point. So if it is a pocket dimension, even if we smash the cavern, it won't touch the dimension, other than to bury the entrance."

"Then we go in after him," Harbinger ordered. "What do we know about this place? What makes it so special?"

Julie started to list off factoids. "Twelve stories tall. Football field wide inside. Lots of onyx and marble. First major cavern discovered in this country. During the Civil War, the Confederacy used it to mine saltpeter for gunpowder. During prohibition it was a speakeasy called the Bucket of Blood."

"So I'm guessing we won't be the first people to put some bullet holes in it," Eddings said.

"Nope. Plenty of people have been plugged in that cave. Before the Europeans showed up it was an Indian burial ground for at least two thousand years."

"So now we have a theme park and tourist attraction on top of it. Makes perfect sense," Mayorga pointed out. "The-two-thousand-year-old holy site explains why this is the target."

"I'm telling you, it's just the gateway," I insisted. "The Place is on the other side of the gate."

"Can you find the hidden gate and open it?" Harbinger asked pointedly.

"I don't know."

"Well, if you can't, plan B is to blow the whole place to hell."

"Do we have the munitions to do something like that?" a Hunter named Cody asked. "I know we have evil genius Milo and whatnot, but even he can only do so much."

"Actually, I was thinking that if we don't stop the CO before the moon is up, we call the Feds. They'll just nuke the place."

"Good plan. Just give us time to get out from under the mushroom cloud first," Cody said. He was a big grizzled man. Other than the Boss and Dorcas, he was probably the oldest Hunter present. He turned to me, expressing some curiosity. "Hey, kid, is your dad Auhangamea Pitt?"

"Yeah," I answered, surprised. "You know him?"

"One of the baddest Green Berets to ever walk the face of the earth. He kept me alive when I was just a scared kid stuck on a firebase in the middle of nowhere. You look like him. Big and ugly."

"Thanks."

"And from what I've heard tonight, you take after him too. So when we get in there, I've got no doubt you're going to get that rift or gate or whatever open. Right?"

"I'll try," I answered, not knowing if I could live up to my father's legend.

"Trying isn't going to cut it. Because if we have to fight our way through seven Masters, I can guarantee we won't all live through it. And if some of us get killed, only to get in there and not be able to open the gate, then that is just stupid. I say we just blow the whole thing and bury them," Mayorga said, "Calculated risk."

"No," Julie snapped, "you're forgetting Grant. He's captive. We have to get him out of there."

"I don't want to lose my whole team for one person," he retorted. "I vote we blow the cavern from a distance."

"Come on, May, nobody lives forever." Eddings grinned crazily.

"This ain't a democracy," Harbinger said. "I decide…" Mayorga looked at him sullenly. Harbinger turned back to me. "Owen, for the last time. Can you open this rift?"

I thought back to the vision. I was still shaking from it. Finding the spot would be easy. I did not see how it was opened, but somehow I felt that I could. But if I was wrong, a whole bunch of Hunters might die in vain. I answered carefully, "Yes. I can do it."

"Okay, we go in," Harbinger decided. "Julie, gather all the intel you can on this place."

"Speaking of which," a female team lead, who's name tag read Paxton, interjected, "this place had to have come up on the Feds' radar for potential sites. They've got to have guards stationed there."

"I know folks in the National Guard here," Boone said. "I'll make some calls and find out what's stationed there."

"We can assume they're dead or turned. Probably at least bitten, and enthralled so they can still check in on the radio. We'll just have to assess when we come to it."

"Should we contact the Feds first? I know they're a bunch of dicks, but we're talking about the fate of the world here," VanZant asked.

The Boss spoke up for the first time. "No. We hit it at dawn. If we fail, then we call them. I would really prefer to see this handled without an atomic bomb used on my home state." He poked a hole in the map with his hook.

"If we pull this off we are going to be rich," Hurley said.

"Or dead," Mayorga muttered.

"Tell your teams what's up. Grab some rest. We hit DeSoya Caverns at dawn," Harbinger ordered. The team leaders quickly dispersed, excited or nervous at the thought of another mission. Julie gave me a little smile before picking up her laptop and leaving. Harbinger looked at me. Steel blue eyes unblinking. "Well, this is it."

"I guess so."

"Sorry about your friend."

"You would have liked him, Earl. He was a good man." I thought of Mordechai throwing himself at the Cursed One to give me a chance to escape. I remembered my promise to finish this business. I intended to keep it.

"Well, what're you waiting for?" Harbinger asked as he removed a cigarette from the pack in his pocket.

"Huh?"

He flicked his Zippo and ignited the flame, taking his time in responding. "Brief your team."

"But…"

He took a long drag. "I've got three Newbies that seem to think you're their leader. Trip, Holly and Albert would follow you anywhere. Whether you know it or not, you're a leader. That's good enough for me. Consider this a promotion."

"But… I'm no leader."

"Yes, you are. I know none of you have a damn clue, so I still want y'all attached with my team. But they answer to you, and they stick with you. No matter what. Do what I tell you and you should be fine." He held out his hand. I shook it. He almost broke my fingers. "Don't screw up."

"I won't let you down, Earl."

He only nodded. Gave my hand one final bone-crushing squeeze, and then moved on, leaving me alone in front of the map. Alone, except for my doubts and uncertainty. I hurried to find my team.

Milo Anderson crashed into me. He excitedly pushed a loaded five-round Saiga magazine into my hand. He had an insane gleam in his eye, as he seemingly did whenever he had the opportunity to harness whole new forms of destruction.

"Think this is going to work?" I asked.

"Not a bad idea. They were oversize, so I had to trim them a smidgen. Hope that don't mess up the mojo. Lucky for you I had the reloading bench already set up for 12 gauge," he answered as he tugged absently on his beard. "If this works, it should be awesome. If not?" He shrugged.

"If not, at least my death should be relatively spectacular."

"That's the spirit." Milo grinned. "Lightweight projectiles. Low powder charge. This is short range only, like conversational-distance short range. Accuracy is going to suck. Penetration is going to be negligible. Probably won't have enough pressure to cycle Abomination's action. So plan on going manual."

"Can do. Thanks Milo."

"Good luck, Owen. I've got to go grab some spears and my garlic wreath. Catch you on the flip side." The strange Hunter ran to take care of his team's supplies.

I contemplated the magazine. I sure hoped this worked.

The convoy of mismatched vehicles tore northward at dangerous speeds, dawn fast approaching. I sat in the passenger seat of one of the MHI Suburbans. My armor was still damp and cold from Natchy Bottom. You can't just drop twenty pounds of Kevlar and Cordura into the drier. I had my shotgun clenched between my knees. Over a dozen magazines of assorted 12-gauge ammunition and 40mm grenades rode in pouches on my chest and sides. I was wearing both of the STI.45s that Julie had given me, along with several magazines of silver bullets. My ganga ram was strapped across my chest, and several sharpened white-oak stakes rode in a pouch on my back. I had smoke, frag and incendiary hand grenades. And just for luck, on my ankle I was wearing the little.357 which I had used against Mr. Huffman.

I had used our last few hours to get some much-needed sleep. I had not dreamt, and I felt a chill loneliness. I was certain now: The Old Man was gone.

The wipers beat rhythmically. The rain was increasing, running almost like rivers down the road. The wind was howling and the big vehicle rocked as strong gusts hit us. Being the only one of us who had lived through any hurricanes, Trip assured us that this storm was not far behind in intensity. The sheets of falling water were so thick that I could barely see the taillights of the vehicle ahead of us.

The storm had come out of nowhere. It had the mark of the Cursed One on it. I worried about Julie, buckled into the Hind with the rest of her team. Surely Skippy would get them through.

The Newbie team had been crammed into the overloaded Suburban for the trip. Holly had taken to calling us the rainbow coalition team, since we had one white female, and males of the Black, Asian, and Other categories. All we needed was a lesbian and a guy in a wheelchair and we were ready to salve even the biggest liberal's angst. The others were sharing the second row of seats, and the driver was a talkative little Hunter named Gus, out of Hurley's team in Miami.

"Yeah, you guys should have seen it. Little town outside of Pensacola. Vampires nested all over the city works building. We're ready to go in and hit them fast and hard. We get stopped by the mayor for-guess what? You guys ain't gonna believe it…"

"What, Gus?" Lee asked in exasperation, not wanting to egg him on, but seeing no other way out. Gus had talked nearly nonstop since leaving the compound. Everybody dealt with the stress of an upcoming mission in their own strange ways, I supposed.

"She was a big Anne Rice fan. She wanted to 'reason' with them. She just thought that they were misunderstood. She wanted to open a 'dialogue.' " He took his hands from the wheel long enough to make quote motions with his fingers. I started to instinctively reach for the wheel as we began to hydroplane.

"I hate that sensitive romantic vampire bullshit," Holly said.

"Yeah, exactly. You wouldn't believe how hard killing undead got after those damn books came out. Every love-starved housewife out there started thinking of them as tragic homoerotic Fabio-looking things. Morons. Well, anyway, so the mayor goes and gets eaten and Hurley says to us-"

The radio cut him off.

"This is Harbinger. We've got to land the chopper. Storm is getting too bad to fly-even for Skip. We're putting down before Sylacauga." The radio went out.

"So, anyway, Hurley says to us-" Gus was cut off again.

"Pick us up. Clearing at the end of the road right before town. Skip will stay with the Hind. Hopefully the weather will clear enough that he can take off and provide some air support later."

I saw brake lights ahead. Gus swore and slowed down.

"What's the problem?" Holly asked.

"Shh," Trip hissed. He rolled down his window, letting rain in.

"What are you doing?" Holly asked.

"Hear that?" he asked.

"No," I answered. But it was no secret I had the worst hearing of the bunch.

"What is that?" Lee asked nervously.

"Tornado sirens."

"What's that mean?"

"It means we have a tornado warning. Weather is weird for them so it probably isn't just a warning on conditions. Means some have been seen in the area."

"How will we know if one is nearby?" Lee asked.

"It'll sound like a million freight trains. You'll know," Trip warned.

I noted with some concern that the clouds had turned green, a sick deadly color.

Other noises could be heard over the rain, thumping against the roof of the Suburban. Small round things were smacking wetly against the window.

"Now, that's different," Gus said as the wipers knocked away the blood and meat on the windshield.

"Dude, roll the window up!" I shouted.

"Oh, gross!" Trip exclaimed as something hit him.

It was raining frogs. Thousands of tiny amphibians were striking us, bouncing off of the hood or road. Some were falling faster than others, hitting hard enough to explode in little red puffs.

"Isn't this from like the Ten Commandments? Let's get out of here before the plague of locusts show up," Lee suggested nervously.

"Well, actually, it's not an unknown phenomenon to have it rain frogs," I said. "Tornadoes or water spouts can pick them up and drop them someplace else. Fish too."

"Not the time for trivia, Z," Holly said.

I bit my tongue. My attempt at explaining the phenomenon was rather lame. We all knew what this meant. This was the day. One of the frogs examined me through the glass before the wiper batted it aside, leaving only a red smear.

MHI assembled in the parking lot of a small grocery store. We were only a few miles from the caverns, and Harbinger did not want us to hit the site until the sun was fully up. Not that I thought it would do much good; the clouds and rain were thick enough that it might as well have been night.

"How much light can a vampire stand?" I asked.

"Very little can cause them pain. A direct hit and they catch on fire. And maybe we'll get lucky and get a little sunshine," Julie answered.

"At least it quit raining frogs," Sam grunted.

A large contingent of us had assembled under the store awning, making last-minute preparations, asking questions, or just stretching our legs before the final fight. Some extremely curious locals had ventured out of their homes, trying to figure out what the large group of paramilitary-looking folks were doing in their small town. Considering the things that had happened over the last few days, we were not that weird in the grand scheme of things, but we still must have been a sight.

Sam nudged me and pointed across the lot. A local teenager in a yellow rain slicker approached one of our parked vehicles, a three-quarter-ton pickup hooked to a gooseneck horse trailer. It belonged to our orc contingent. Overcome by curiosity, the kid peered over the side door, only to stumble backwards and fall into a mud puddle when something large slammed into the sheet metal and growled.

"Hey, kid! It ain't polite to poke your nose in other folks' business. You trying to lose a hand?" Sam shouted.

"What was that? Who are you guys?" the kid shouted, suddenly afraid.

"It's your momma. And we're the circus. Now scram!" Sam let his duster jacket open to reveal his armor and.45-70.

The kid pulled himself up and ran back toward his home, probably trying to figure out what exactly it was that he had seen in that horse trailer.

"Sam! Quit scaring the children."

"Sorry, Julie," Sam said as he grinned at me from under his mustache.

"Boone? You got anything about who's on guard?" Harbinger demanded.

"This one was high priority. Word is at least a squad of actual Feds on the cavern. Local guardsmen blocking the road. They've been checking in on a regular basis, so they're still alive," he answered. "We've got authority to deal with local infestations, so the soldiers should let us through. The Feds, on the other hand…"

"If they are on site, figure that they've been turned," Julie said.

"You mean I might get to stake a Fed?" Sam asked with far too much eagerness. "Oh, that would be fricking awesome."

"Easy there, big fella. Only if they're dead," Harbinger warned. "This is it, folks. Any questions?"

The group was silent. Our radio channel was open so the Hunters still sitting in the running vehicles could hear. No one asked anything.

"Fine then." Harbinger cleared his throat before continuing. "Whatever happens, I want y'all to know that I'm proud. Most of you know how long I've been doing this, and you know I won't lie. This is the finest group of Hunters MHI has ever assembled. I mean that. You know what to do. You're the best of the best. I would take this crew against the gates of hell themselves if God would give us the contract. With these teams we could collect PUFF on the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It's an honor to have led you into battle, the greatest honor I've ever had. Like the memorial wall says, Sic transit gloria mundi. We're mortals, but the deeds we do are the stuff of legend, and your courage will live forever. Know that, and be sure. You're the modern versions of Beowulf, of St. George, of Odysseus. You're Van Helsing with firepower. You're Jack and the Beanstalk with automatic weapons. We're walking in the valley of the shadow of death, but we shall fear no evil! Because evil is about to get a stake put through its black heart because we are the baddest mother-fuckers to ever set foot in the valley!" he finished in a roar.

A cheer rose from the Hunters. I pumped my fist into the air and shouted. All of the horns were honked. The wargs in the trailer began to howl. I was surprised that nobody started shooting into the air. That was probably just because they wanted to save ammunition.

Harbinger paused, looking out into the rain. A malicious grin split his face. He finally continued. "Good hunting. Move out."

Chapter 26

The lead Suburban braked before the National Guard checkpoint. An old M113 armored personnel carrier, basically a bulletproof box on treads, blocked the road. The soldiers had been driven under cover, sitting in their vehicles trying to stay out of the horrible rain, lashing wind, and scattered frog showers. They regarded us warily as our convoy approached. One of the soldiers manned the big.50 mounted on the armored personnel carrier and swiveled it in our general direction.

Boone and Harbinger exited the lead vehicle and approached the soldiers, hands held wide, indicating that they were no danger. After the events of the last few days, the soldiers weren't going to take any chances. I noted that having the APC parked in the center of the road was kind of redundant, since the storm had blown several large trees down, forming a very effective roadblock right behind their position. Some smart NCO had some of his men spread out into the trees.

"Poor guys. Stuck out in this weather. What are they supposed to do if a tornado hits? Hide under that tank?" Trip asked.

"It's their job. They're doing what they have to do," Lee said. I felt his hands pull on the back of my seat as he tried to get a better view. "I hope they let us through."

The radio crackled, "Pitt. Come up here. Just you."

"Roger that," I answered. "Be right back, guys." I pulled my black raincoat tight and stepped out of the warm vehicle into the screaming rain. The coat was bulky and long enough that it hid Abomination. I wasn't about to go anywhere this close to the Cursed One without my gun. I struggled to hold my hood down as the wind tried to tear it away. Branches tumbled across the road. It was raining sideways. I splashed down the road, past several other vans and SUVs, Hunters inside looking out at me from their relative comfort. I reached the roadblock.

Boone was speaking with one of the Guard. They appeared to be arguing. "What's going on?" I shouted to be heard over the wind.

"Boone's trying to bluster his way through. He just barely got out of the Guard himself and these are his people. They still won't let us through without permission from the Feds stationed at the cavern itself, and they ain't responding on the radio."

"Figure they're dead?"

"Something like that," he answered. "Do you sense anything?"

"I'm not psychic, Earl."

"Do me a favor and try," he ordered. "You have a connection with this thing. We need to exploit every advantage. It's worth a shot."

I pulled my hood low, trying to block the rain. I closed my eyes. Balancing in the road as the wind rocked me, coat billowing, I listened. Cold moisture leaked around the openings of my protection and down my armor. How was I supposed to sense them? I concentrated, remembering how I felt at those times when I had viewed Lord Machado's memories.

Then I felt it. A growing presence. Darkness. Age. Power. Masters. I could feel the alien thoughts-the confidence in their strength and their combined ability to crush any number of humans. I could hear their voices, their communications, almost as if they were shouting;

Fools. You have slept so long. You do not know the power of the Hunters' modern weapons. Return and protect our Lord.

We fear no human, Jaeger. I have seen their puny "cannon."

We shall crush them and feast. Calm thyself, young one.

I was one of them. Y'all don't know what you're getting into. Things have changed since your day, you old bastards.

Silence. I have no time for your cowardice. Hide in your cave, female, for we walk in the daytime. Now is our time to reign.

Fine. Underestimate them and see what happens.

As Trip was so fond of pointing out, pride comes before the fall. Most of the vampires ignored the admonitions of Jaeger and Susan warning them of the dire power of our modern weapons. These Masters had slept through the last few centuries, and they held no fear of man. They were coming up the road, heading right toward us, no subtlety, not even rushing, taking their time and savoring their assured victory. We only had a few minutes.

I opened my eyes and the sensation vanished. Heck, maybe I was psychic.

"Earl, we've got company coming." I pointed down the road. "I think it's the Masters. At least a few of them. But they don't understand what they're up against. They're old and cocky."

"Okay. Better to fight them in the open than underground… Suckers." He looked plaintively at the sky, but there was no sunlight to be seen. Harbinger approached Boone and tapped him on the shoulder. I drew closer so I could listen. The soldier on the.50 tracked me. "Excuse me!" Harbinger butted in. "Gentlemen, we're about to be attacked."

"My name isn't 'Gentlemen,' it's Lieutenant McNab. And you need to back this convoy the hell up and turn around. This here is a secure area, and no civilians are allowed on this site. Move back or I'll order my men to open fire."

"Lieutenant McNab, sir, we have authorization from the Federal Government to access this area. There's an undead outbreak inside the cavern complex. It's imperative that we get in there," Boone said.

"Undead? Like Dawn of the Dead, booga-booga zombies?" The lieutenant laughed. He was very young, and could not have been doing this for very long. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Back this convoy up now or I'm authorizing the use of force." The nearby soldiers looked around nervously. An older soldier in a camouflage rain poncho stepped behind the lieutenant.

"How much time?" Harbinger hissed at me.

"Maybe a minute or two," I responded.

He shook his head slightly, and cracked his knuckles under the sleeves of his raincoat. "We're gonna have to fall back and let the vampires slaughter these poor saps."

"Excuse me, sir?" the other soldier said. He tapped the lieutenant on the shoulder.

"Yes, Sergeant?" the young man responded.

"I know this man." He nodded at Boone. "This is Sergeant Jay Boone. Nineteenth Special Forces. I worked with him in Afghanistan. He's one of us."

"How's it hanging, Gregorius?" Boone asked.

"Pretty good. Did you get a medal for Kandahar?"

"Yep, and a purple heart, and my medical discharge. Now I'm back to monster hunting."

"Sergeant, what is this nonsense?" shouted the lieutenant.

"Sir, if this man says that we are about to come under attack, I believe him. We'd best let these folks through to do their job."

"I'm under orders, damn it!" he shouted. "Nobody goes through here unless the FBI says so, and they aren't responding!"

"They ain't responding because they're dead," Harbinger answered. "Boone, Pitt, let's fall back while these guys get killed. Good luck, Sergeant. Have your men save their last bullets for themselves."

"Wait," said Gregorius, "Boone, you said undead. Like that thing we found buried in Bagram? The one that ate Chris?"

"No, sorry dude. Way worse. Master vampires. That thing we found was just a pussy ghoul."

"Dang. Hold on." He chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, deep in thought, before turning toward his men. "Defend against the park, enemy is incoming. Prepare to fire on my command." The soldiers complied instantly to their seasoned NCO. Harbinger immediately clicked our radio twice. Doors opened and Hunters spread out, many sloshing across into the trees. Sunroofs were rolled back and belt-fed machine guns or MK19 grenade launchers were lifted into their mounting brackets. The armed Suburbans rolled forward, and pulled off to the sides, forming a front.

"What are you doing? There's no such thing as vampires."

"Shut up and grab your rifle, sir. If we live you can put me in for a court-martial. Boone, what should we do?"

"What do you have?"

"Two squads, the track here, and a 60 on one of the Humvees. But these guys are admin pogues. I'm lucky they gave us live ammo."

Harbinger stepped in. "Hold this center position. Control their fields of fire. We've got a lot more hardware than you. And with these things there ain't no shame in running, so retreat if you need to."

"Sergeant, I order you to arrest these men! That is a direct order. Oh my…" He stopped speaking when he saw the door of the trailer drop and the first of the wargs jump free. The giant wolves, as big as horses, limbs squat and heavy with muscle, snarling and nipping at each other, really were an impressive sight. The black-masked orcs quickly found their mounts, slung themselves bareback onto the creatures and readied themselves for battle. "Oh my." He started to draw his pistol, but I placed my hand firmly on his.

"Those are on our side. The bad guys are coming from the other direction." I pointed.

"Oh my," he said again as the pack of wolves and riders wheeled about and headed for the treeline, ready to flank into the enemy. The lieutenant looked like he was about to vomit.

"And that's what we alcoholics like to call a moment of clarity," Boone quipped.

I noted that the orcs had taken the time to put white handprints on their masks and helmets. It was a nice touch. They must have loved the Lord of the Rings movies too.

"Edward, this is Harbinger. Hold your wargs in reserve. You're our cavalry."

"Unter… stand… Harb Anger."

The road stretched ahead almost three hundred yards before disappearing over the top of a lush hill. The Hunters had spread into the forest on both sides. Strange that Harbinger had spoke of a valley of death, and now we found ourselves in one. I turned and found my team waiting, loaded down with heavy weapons, looking to me for guidance. I looked to Harbinger, he nodded to one side, and I went. The others followed. He continued to bark orders into the radio, giving each team lead an area of responsibility, and most notably telling VanZant's team to, "Dig in the big guns."

We set up in a small ditch off of the road, with a good view of the approach and a small amount of cover. Once again I was waist-deep in water, this time from the flash floods. Just once I would like to hunt monsters someplace dry, but as a good rule of thumb, if you could get lower, you do it. Lee threw down the tripod, and Trip dropped the FN MAG machine gun onto it. I was pleased to see that they did it exactly how Sam had taught us, quickly and surely opening the feed cover and sliding in the belt of silver.308. Lee hunkered down behind the big weapon. Holly handed me an RPG. The heavy tube was reassuring in my hands. Everyone dug down into the ditch, prepared to fight. Nervous but competent. Scared but professional. We were ready to put some smack down. Not bad for an accountant, a librarian, a schoolteacher, and a stripper. Not bad at all.

"Ready, guys?" I asked.

"We got a choice?" Lee asked over the stock of the Belgian machine gun.

"Not really."

The rain ceased. The wind died. The clouds turned an even brighter green. It was eerily still and the energy could be felt in the humid sky. Many Hunters glanced hopefully upward. Unfortunately there was no sunlight. The ancient evil approached.

"They're here," I said, my voice echoing in the now silent valley.

Four figures appeared over the hill, walking purposefully down the road. They had to know that we were there, but they did not care. They were Masters.

Two clicks came over the radio-the signal to get ready. Harbinger would wait for them to close into the most efficient kill box before unleashing our fury.

The four vampires continued to approach. They looked like regular people, out for a nice bit of exercise. Three males and a female. They were dressed in normal attire, nothing fancy, nothing archaic, just regular everyday clothing. Most likely taken off of some of their recent victims. They were graceful and beautiful even from here, but they could not hide what they were from me. I could almost taste the evil.

I wasn't the only one. "Man… I would give my left nut for some sunshine right about now," Trip whispered.

"It isn't like you're using it for anything anyway," Holly retorted.

"Will you shut up?"

"The Cursed One isn't going to let it happen." I glanced up at the unnaturally moving clouds. This was his storm. "The sun won't shine until he's finished."

"We get in that cave, I'm going to put a grenade where the sun don't shine on him," Lee promised.

Banter was good. It kept the mind off of the palpable terror that was at two hundred yards and closing. I raised the RPG, sat it on my shoulder, pushed off the button safety, and checked that the hammer was back. I had not shot one of these before, but the sighting arrangement was very straightforward. I centered the vampires in the aperture marked 200.

The radio crackled: One click, two clicks, three clicks.

Fire.

The Hunters opened up. Hundreds of bullets struck first, followed almost instantly by rockets and grenades, and only a few seconds later by the massive explosions generated by our 81mm mortar team's nine-pound shells. Weapons ignited all across the valley. I squeezed the trigger of the RPG. It was a simple tube that directed a rocket-propelled chunk of high explosive. The concussion was amazing. If this hadn't been so deadly serious it might possibly have been the coolest thing I had ever gotten to shoot. I found that I was smiling as the area around the vampires disappeared into a cloud of smoke and dust, with gouts of flames leaping into the air and chunks of dirt and asphalt raining down for hundreds of feet.

It was beautiful.

The ancient ones had underestimated their human foes. They were unprepared for the power of our modern weapons. Pound after pound of high explosive ignited in their midst. Multiple belt-fed MK19 launchers dropped a stream of grenades onto their heads. Walls of shrapnel tore them asunder and their bones and flesh were charred by phosphorus, thermite, napalm and towering pillars of flame.

"Yee haw!" Trip shouted, watching the clouds of smoke rise, and the almost slow-motion falling of debris. It had been a spectacular display of firepower.

Harbinger came over the radio. "They ain't done until you cut off their heads. Watch out. VanZant, keep that mortar on them. Pile it on!"

I tossed the empty tube down. Behind us the mortars continued to thump. I could not see anything moving besides the smoke. "Trip, Holly, grab some more rockets. Go."

"Movement. Vamp on the right," the radio said. Gunfire and rockets flew from the treeline on that side. A burning figure emerged into view, only to disappear again as the dirt around it exploded upwards into a volcano of flame. The shells continued to pepper the area, each one flattening a massive space. There wasn't going to be anything bigger than a microbe that was going to survive the punishment we were putting into that area.

"How much damage can these things take?" Lee asked.

"Beats me," I replied. I saw something emerge from the front. "Vamp in the center. On the road." Lee let loose with a burst of.308, stitching a path of impacts and tracers up the road and into the jerking creature. The flaming vampire ran toward us at impossible speeds, seemingly twisting between the bullets, then disappearing as an RPG landed in its path. The smoking body landed a moment later, crashing down to the pavement, and instantly popped back up out of the crater. They healed too fast.

The vampire was engulfed in a thunderous explosion as something roared from the center. The blast from the Spig recoilless rifle shook us all. It made me glad that I had taken the time to help Julie haul it up from her basement. The smoke cleared long enough to see that the vampire was gone. Holly jumped back into the ditch with arms full of rockets. She thumped me in the shoulder and pointed upwards.

I tracked in on the movement. The torn remains of the vampire were just reaching the apex of their arc, and began descending rapidly toward the earth. The biggest piece of the creature splattered onto the road not fifty feet from our position. The supernatural was no match for the laws of physics and some well-directed artillery.

"Yes!" I shouted. They were killable.

I choked off my triumphant shout when I realized that it was still moving. The head, one claw, and the torso was trying to pull itself toward us, twitching and splurting fluids from its burned flesh. If it regenerated enough to regain its faculties, it would be able to shape-shift and live to fight another day.

"No way, man!" Lee shouted as he directed a stream of tracers into the body. The heavier rounds from the National Guard Browning.50 began to pepper the carcass as well, kicking up gouts of dirt and vampires bits.

"Edward. Go! All teams hold fire along the front," Harbinger ordered. He was still standing by the National Guard, and he personally made sure that they ceased fire.

A dark shape exploded from the trees, leaping in huge bounds across the burning grass and rain-swollen ditches, claws tearing up plumes of mud and vegetation. Edward hugged low to the mane of the mighty warg as it moved with predatory speed toward the downed Master. Edward drew a sword from his back as he leaned low, hanging barely above the ground as they approached their target. The orc's arm flew upward, like a scythe ready to harvest wheat. It swung down, pushed not just by the power of the orc, but by the speed of the seven-hundred-pound beast driving him forward.

Edward's masterful aim was true. The ancient blade sang through the air. It met little resistance from the charred and ashen flesh, and it crashed against the hardened vertebra with a clang that every Hunter could hear. Did he make it through?

The warg passed by, screeching to a mud-soaked halt, before spinning around, red tongue rolling like a giant dog, tearing at the earth and charging back at the vampire. Edward sheathed his sword, hung low, and dragged his fingers through the grass. He swung up, returning to the back of his stead, a trophy held triumphantly above his head.

It was a blackened skull.

Lightning crossed the sky from every direction. Thunder crashed. A gust of wind tore through us, pushing to the north. The skies protested as the ancient vampire's spirit was finally forced from this world. The Hunters began to cheer. The warg bounced back into the trees, Edward still holding the vampire's severed head extended for all to see. The mortars began to fire and drop more explosives into the valley. Only I could hear the mental screams from the other Masters.

Fools. I warned you of the humans' modern weapons. Flee. Protect our Lord.

The burning. It will not stop burning.

No time… to heal… too much damage… so weak… need blood.

They have destroyed Gurgo. Sythak is dying. I shall avenge them.

See, I told you so. Assholes.

My lord, use the artifact. Place me into their midst so that I may tear the life from their hearts. Their weapons require distance to work against us.

IT SHALL BE DONE.

"Oh, shit!" I exclaimed, turning from the battlefield, looking over my shoulder back the way that we had come. I keyed the radio. "Earl, vampires are going to gate in close, too close for bombs."

"Where?"

I concentrated, but the moment was past. The voices were gone. I narrowed my eyes on a point to the side of our parked convoy of vehicles. For some reason it drew my attention. It was almost as if I could see the invisible energy forming, swirling in preparation.

"Behind us, thirty yards off the road. South side!" I shouted as I surged out of the ditch, sprinting toward the spot as fast as I could. Abomination slammed back and forth against my chest. My boots were sodden with water and seemed to weigh hundreds of pounds. My breath came in gasps as I closed the distance. I was never a good sprinter. If the vampires could appear in our midst, we were as good as dead. They moved far too quickly to be stopped with the weapons that we could use at close range.

There was a crackling noise as the rift opened. A red line appeared out of thin air, and then spread wide. I reached under my raincoat and pulled one of the sharpened white-oak stakes from my load bearing gear. I held it low at my side as I ran forward. It was going to be close and ugly.

The creature appeared through the rift, stepping lightly onto the grass. Blood-colored eyes blinked, adjusting to what was, for it, brilliant light. It had already shed its human appearance, ready for battle, looking like a twisted, gray, hulking bat-thing, all fangs, muscles and claws. It saw me.

Too late to do it any good. I jerked the stake upwards, bellowing, my weight and momentum carrying me forward. Crashing into the vampire was like hitting a brick wall. I pushed the stake with all of my might, coming under the rib cage and stabbing into the pulsing black heart. The vampire shrieked so painfully loud that my hearing protection momentarily shorted out. It grasped my hand, trying to pull out the stake. Its jaws opened wide enough to fit my head inside the maw. I continued to push the sharpened wood deeper into the creature's black heart.

A stake through the heart would kill any living thing. It would instantly paralyze any regular vampire. On a Master, it seemed to merely weaken it. At its normal strength, the creature would have been able to break me in half, now it was almost as if I were fighting someone only twice as strong as a normal person.

The creature swatted me across the chest. I flew back, airborne for what seemed an impossible time, landing hard on the hood of one of the SUVs, shattering the windshield, and sliding down until I fell on my hands and knees onto the pavement. The vampire struggled to pull the stake free. Trip and Lee barreled into the creature, hacking wildly at it with their blades, trying desperately to take its head off. The monster shoved them away, but not before Trip fiercely planted his tomahawk into the base of its skull.

With a wrenching squeal, the stake was torn free. The creature roared in triumph, but only for a moment. Its eyes widened as the grill of a Suburban smashed into it at thirty miles an hour. The tires bumped as Holly gunned it over the fallen vampire, crushing it beneath. She slammed it into park, with the thing still trapped, opened the door and hopped out.

"Keys were in it!" she shouted as she turned and pulled a grenade from her armor. "Run!" She pulled the pin, the spoon popped off with a clang, and she tossed it into the front seat of the vehicle. I pushed myself up and ran for my life, trying to get as far away as I could before the five-second fuse went off. If that vehicle had been as loaded down with munitions as ours had been, this wasn't going to be pretty. The vampire bench-pressed the SUV off of itself and rolled the vehicle onto its side. It stood, broken bones quickly knitting, looking for prey.

I dove behind one of the vans and tried to get as low to the ground as possible. The initial detonation of the grenade was relatively mild. The pressurized napalm tank it ignited was not. The crate of 81mm mortar rounds that went off next was downright amazing. The van I was using as a shield rocked up onto two wheels and every window shattered under the pressure.

Once the thunder had died, I slowly lifted my head. I peered around the edge of my scorched cover. The Suburban was reduced to a burning pile of distorted scrap lying sideways in a freshly dug crater. A chunk of metal landed in the grass a few feet away. I realized that it was a door. A burning tire rolled past.

"Wow" was the most articulate thing that I could think of to say.

"Think we got it?" Holly shouted from under the warg trailer.

"I hope so." I lifted the rifle and approached the wreckage. "Trip! Lee! You guys okay?" In the distance the mortars continued to fire.

"Pitt! Status?" Harbinger's voice sounded in my ear.

"I think we got the vampire. I can't find two of my guys."

"This is Mayorga. One of them has broken through. It's in the trees on the left. Putagot Abe."

"This is Cody. Got one on the right too."

"Earl," I said into the radio. I kept my gun up, pointed toward the burning vehicle. "There's only one left in the valley. And it's badly hurt. It can't regenerate until it gets blood." Holly extricated herself from under the trailer, and I tossed her rifle back.

"How do you know?" he asked. "Shit, never mind. VanZant, stop the barrage. Edward, clean up in the center. Phillips, roll right. Paxton, reinforce left. Now they're up close, but we've hurt them, so they're gonna be weaker and slower. We can take them. Pitt, my team is coming your way."

I did not respond. I scanned the surroundings. No sign of the vampire. No sign of Lee or Trip either. "Hey guys? Anybody hear me?" I shouted.

"I'm okay," answered Lee. He approached from the other side of the wreckage. His armor was smoking. He struggled with the FN MAG in his hands. It was almost as big as he was, and the exposed belt of ammo hung to the ground. "That was one big-ass fireball."

"Have you seen Trip?" He shook his head in the negative.

"Oh no…" Holly trailed off. "I killed him."

"You don't know that!" I shouted. "Trip! Can you hear me!"

Nothing.

"Look." Lee gestured with the machine gun barrel. I turned quickly, hoping to see my friend. Instead I saw that the flickering rift into the cavern was still open. It floated a few feet above the ground, a door out of nothing, but I could clearly see that there was something on the other side. I lifted Abomination warily, clicked on the flashlight and shined it into the shimmering gap. The powerful light pierced the darkness and illuminated a rock wall.

"Grant!" I exclaimed. Grant Jefferson was lying bound and gagged on the cavern floor, seemingly only forty feet away. "Earl! Earl! We found Grant. We've got a back door into the cavern!"

"On the way," he responded.

"We better hurry before it closes," Lee said.

"How do we know it isn't a trap?" Holly asked. "What if it closes while we're halfway through?"

"I don't know." Wild gunfire crackled through the forest as the other Hunters battled the two Masters. "We've got to try." I reached into a pocket and pulled out a handful of glow sticks. "I'm going in. I'll try to grab him and bring him out. Cover me." I cracked the sticks, shook them, and tossed them through the rift. They landed and scattered across the cavern floor, providing a soft green glow. I couldn't see anything else moving.

"Good luck," Holly said, "you big brave idiot."

I ran toward the rift, no use screwing around. I closed my eyes right before I hit it, only to open them to find myself barreling into the cavern. I had not felt a thing. I gulped in the moist cave air. I turned around, and the rift was still there, only now it showed the valley and the ominous green storm clouds overhead. My remaining teammates were waiting for me.

"Hurry up!" Holly shouted.

That was good advice. I swung my shotgun around, letting the light shine on the damp walls and the slick stalagmites. I did not see any threats. I shined the light on Grant. He moaned softly when the brilliant light hit him.

"Come on, buddy, let's get out of here." I knelt at his side and pulled the gag away.

"Pitt?" he gasped. I heard something shuffle in the darkness. I spun the light around. Wights. Lots of them.

"Yeah. Time to boogie." I grabbed him by the straps of his armor and, with a grunt, hoisted him over my shoulder. I sprinted for the rift, ignoring the two hundred pounds of extra weight. The wights began to scramble over the rocks toward me. One stepped into my path, only to be nearly decapitated by a burst of Lee's machine-gun fire. Apparently bullets went through the rift just fine. I passed the falling creature and jumped through the portal.

I was back outside.

And the wights were right behind. Lee ripped off the rest of the belt into the portal. Holly stood at his side, blasting any undead that came too close.

"We could use a hand, chief!" Lee said as he dropped the huge gun, pulled his pistol and fired at an approaching wight.

I roughly tossed Grant on the ground, tugged a pair of grenades off of my webbing, pulled the pins and chucked them through the portal. "Off to the side!" The others responded, moving out of the path of the shrapnel. They exploded at the feet of the wights, blasting them into bits of pulsing tissue. A cloud of gravel fell from the cavern ceiling.

"Owen!" Julie called. Her team and several other Hunters were approaching quickly. "I don't believe it. You found Grant!"

Harbinger nodded in approval. "Sam, Milo, cover that rift."

"My pleasure," Milo answered, pushing past Lee, and shooting a rising wight through the spine with his AR10 carbine. "Wow, cool magic portal thingy!"

I drew my knife and cut the cords binding Grant's wrists. His eyes looked wild and frightened. "It's okay, dude. We got you. You're safe."

"Die!" Grant screamed. He grabbed me by the throat, trying to crush my windpipe. I grabbed his hands and tried to pry them away.

"Grant! What are you doing?" Julie cried. "Stop that!"

"Acckkkkk…" I said, trying in vain to get some oxygen.

"Die, interloper!" Grant shouted, crazed eyes bulging, spraying spittle into my face. Either he knew that I had moved in on Julie or he was insane. Either way, it totally hurt.

"He's enthralled," Holly said simply. "Susan must have bitten him."

Julie stood over him, calmly raised the butt of her M14 and cracked him sharply alongside his head. He was out like a light. "Grant, honey… I think we need to start seeing other people."

I rubbed my throat. "Damn, that hurt." On the bright side, it was strangely satisfying to not only rescue my competition, but have the woman we were competing for give him a concussion.

"Is he going to be okay?" Lee asked.

"The enthrallment will wear off pretty quick. But when he eventually dies, no matter how long it takes, he's going to have to get his head cut off, or he's going to come back as one of them. The undead curse is in his blood now," Holly explained. She knelt and pulled Grant's armor open at the neck. There was a ghastly wound on the top of his chest, now caked in dried blood.

"That sucks."

"Yeah, pretty much. But you get used to it," she answered.

"The rift is holding," Harbinger said. "Let's go get the CO." The gunfire continued in the distance. "Now that the vampires have closed the range, we've got a hell of a fight on our hands. Maybe if we kill him, this cloud cover will disperse."

"Roast them bastards good." Sam spat, noticed something moving in the cavern, aimed his rifle and fired. "Let's get some." He levered another mammoth shell into the action.

"Okay, I'm on point. You guys stick behind me…" He paused, his nose twitching. Harbinger began to spin, but the Master vampire rising behind him was too fast. It grabbed him by the straps of his armor and hurled him through the air at an insane velocity. Harbinger struck one of the SUVs, crumpling the frame around him as if it had been in a high-speed collision and shoving the massive vehicle several feet across the road.

Nobody could have lived through that.

"Earl!" Julie cried as the Hunters opened fire.

It was the Master from the rift, the one that Holly had blown up. It was fully healed now, and no longer encumbered by a stake in the heart. Bullets struck to no effect. It lofted something in one gray claw, and launched it toward us in a blinding flash. Lee's leg exploded in a shower of blood as Trip's tomahawk head pierced his thigh. He screamed as he toppled to the ground.

The Master moved too quickly to track, dodging and weaving toward us as silver bullets dug divots into its muscled flesh. It swooped onto Gus. One claw stabbed out and impaled the Hunter through the throat, unleashing a spray of arterial blood. The vampire held him there as it licked its lips. I aimed around Gus's twitching form and shot the vampire in the mouth. The slug exploded out the back of the creature's skull. The wound closed instantly. Enraged, the vampire pulled its bloody talon free, leaving Gus staggering, gagging and choking, hands at his throat, trying to stop the bleeding. The Master lashed out with one arm, and I instinctively dodged aside as Gus's head flew past.

The vampire had moved ten feet before the headless body had even begun to fall. It charged the next Hunter in line. Sam was struck in the arm, and the sound of bones snapping could be heard across the valley. The big cowboy roared in pain, somehow dodged under another swing and fell to the ground. He worked the action of his lever-gun with one hand, letting the weight of the barrel carry the weapon down, and then flicking the action closed with his wrist. Sam extended the muzzle and launched a silver bullet up through the vampire's head. It did not even slow the thing down.

I fired as fast as I could, putting shell after shell of silver buckshot into the thing to no avail. It kicked at Sam as he rolled away, claws tearing a hole in the pavement. Milo stabbed his now-empty rifle forward like a spear. The vampire tore it from his hands and batted him backwards through the rift into the waiting wights. Milo disappeared with a cry of panic.

I grasped for the special magazine that Milo had given me and slammed it home, dropped the bolt, and looked up in time to see the Master bearing down on me, blood-red eyes filled with rage. I pulled the trigger.

The vampire stopped, confused. Pain was an unfamiliar sensation for the ancient creature. It looked down at the hole in its chest, then opened its jaws and screamed. It tore at itself, trying to somehow pull the burning agony from out of its insides. Thrashing, screaming, falling to its knees, claws tearing into the ground. Blue flames erupted from the hole, spilling through the vampire's ribs, igniting internal gasses, spitting and crackling. The vampire let out an unearthly wail as it tried to tear open its own belly.

"Take that!" I shouted as I pulled the trigger again. Nothing. Of course. Milo had warned me that the specialty rounds would lack the power to cycle the action.

When I had woken up after Mordechai's death, I had been able to get a good look at his little carvings for the first time. They were simple little tops, or dreidels as he called them. Traditional little Jewish toys, each side carved with a Hebrew letter that I had no idea how to read. They were rather small. And fortunately for us, with a little judicious carving, Milo was able to cram them into a 12-gauge shell.

I cleared the malfunction, and chambered another round. I put the glowing holographic site on the vampire. "Mordechai says hi!" It was a stupid thing to say, but I'm not really eloquent at times like this.

Blue flame flashed on the vampire's head as the toy splintered across its skull. The vampire screamed again, rolling across the ground, driving its head into the mud, trying to put out the flames.

The toys seemed to hurt them, but they weren't strong enough to kill them, and I only had three left. Gradually the blue flames died, and the shaking vampire stood, snarling at me, baring its teeth. The distended mouth struggled to form English words. "You shall pay for that, mortal," it hissed as smoking tissues sealed together.

"Vampire!" someone roared. "Pick on somebody your own size!" The vampire turned, looking for the challenger. Harbinger slowly pulled himself from the wreckage of the SUV, blood streaming from dozens of cuts. He gingerly reached over his back and yanked out a blood-stained chunk of steel, which he then casually tossed to the ground with a clatter. "If you think you're tough enough." He stretched, and bones audibly cracked back into place. "Well, come on then, you stupid thing." He unfastened the armor from his torso and arms and took it off. In the flickering light of the burning Suburban, many holes and injuries could be seen on his wiry body. They gradually puckered closed. "Come on, vampire! I'm giving you a challenge!"

The vampire stopped. Flexing its long limbs. "Loup-Garou," it hissed. "Yesss. I accept your challenge. Your kind are nothing to the vampire."

Harbinger looked past the creature, locking eyes with me. It was the look of a desperate man. "Go! Kill the Cursed One!"

Harbinger began to change, throwing his head back as if he were in great pain, and then twisting it from side to side. He fell to his knees, hands scraping along the pavement. Bones twisted, flowed, and re-formed. His spine pushed up and out along the top of his back. Skin stretched and ripped as pale hair exploded from every pore.

The others did not wait to watch the transformation. Instead they sprang into action. Sam jumped into the rift after Milo. Holly threw a tourniquet around Lee's leg, and Julie ordered the other Hunters to drag Lee and Grant to safety. I stood transfixed like an idiot.

The transformation continued as the vampire waited, patiently readying itself for a great battle. Harbinger opened his mouth and razor-sharp teeth thrust out of his extending jaw. His pants ripped as his knees reversed direction. Claws exploded through the ends of his boots and he kicked the useless things away. When his eyes opened, they were a predatory gold. He fixated on the vampire, and howled, the sound echoing for miles. Harbinger surged to his feet, clawed arms thrown wide, the last vestiges of humanity disappearing to be replaced with pure animal power. The howl continued, growing in intensity and bristling rage.

If Mr. Huffman had been a normal werewolf, Harbinger had to be some sort of mutant super werewolf. I could sense the power, every ounce of his human form turned into a perfect killing machine. Coiled strength, steel masquerading as muscle. I slowly reached up and felt the scar on my face. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.

Harbinger launched himself forward, leaping into the air. The Master did so as well. The two titans collided in midair with a crash like thunder, nearly twenty feet above the ground. They plummeted to earth in a spray of mud, claws and fangs flying, impossibly fast, shadows spinning and lashing out, backlit by the fire. Red blood and black ichor sprayed as they tore into each other's flesh. It was a contest of wills, immortal speed and primal strength.

"Owen!" Julie shouted. "We've got to move!" The others had already jumped through the rift. A moaning Lee was being fireman-carried back toward the National Guard. I hurried after her, turning one last time to watch the magnificent battle: Harbinger suspended in air, tearing down at the vampire, and the Master driving its claws upwards into its foe. It was an astounding display. Julie grabbed me by my armor and pulled me through the rift.

DeSoya Caverns were quiet. The last of the wights were twitching on the ground-shot, chopped or pulverized into non-dangerous pieces. Sam extended his good arm and hauled Milo to his feet. Holly was splattered with Lee's blood, and there was far too much of it.

The rift closed behind us. I swore and jumped aside, just barely missing being caught as it scissored shut. I did not want to dwell on what would have happened if part of me had still been on the other side.

"Well, we're committed now," Sam grunted, holding his broken arm tenderly.

"Earl's a werewolf?" I blurted.

"Well, yeah, I'll explain later. What's our status?" Julie ordered, settling subconsciously into command mode. She scanned her flashlight across the vast interior chamber, illuminating the huge area beyond the pale glow of the light sticks. The stone glimmered wetly.

"Heck if I know," Milo wheezed.

"Lee was hurt pretty bad. I tried to stop the bleeding, but he's going to need a real doctor real fast," Holly said. "Poor Gus. His head just came off…"

"I know… but we can't do anything for either of them now. Holly, are you okay?"

"Fine. I'm fine."

"Sam, how's that arm?"

"Done broke it," he said. "Stupid vampire. I ain't broke a bone since I gave up bull-riding."

"Can you fight?"

He snorted. "I got a spare." His forearm dangled in such a crooked direction that it made me slightly ill just looking at it. Sam had to have been in horrible pain, but he ignored it.

"Let's sling it up at least so it isn't banging on things. Milo?"

"Sore, but otherwise all right. Lost my carbine though," he answered as he wiped the blood from a cut on his shaved head.

Sam tossed over his.45-70. "Not gonna do me much good with one arm anyhow. Careful, that there's a man's gun. Got recoil that'll put hair on your chest. I still got my pistol."

"Owen?"

"Good to go," I answered. I saw from the still-twitching remains that the wights had once been federal agents. I picked up an FN SCAR off of the floor and checked the chamber. The government guys got all the cool new gear. It was loaded. Full mag in the gun, 20 rounds of their composite silver.308 on tap. The mounted flashlight worked as well. I kept the Fed gun in hand and let Abomination hang. I only had a few of Mordechai's magic shells left and I wasn't about to waste them on a wight. If we were to run into one of the Masters, I wanted to have some of the good stuff available.

"Where's Grant?" Milo asked as he quickly shoved extra shells into Sam's gun.

"Still on top with the others," Julie said. "Probably safer up there… unless Earl eats him… Where's Trip?"

"We lost track of him when we had that big explosion," I answered. I hoped that he was still alive, but I was starting to have my doubts.

"I think I killed him." Holly spoke quietly.

"It isn't your fault," I snapped. "You did what you had to do, otherwise that thing would have done to all of us what it did to Gus."

"I just wish that I hadn't been so mean to him… He was such a sweet guy," she muttered. "Damn it. He deserved better."

"No time for that." When the chips were down, Julie was all business. "We need to hurry. Owen, which way to this secret portal?"

I glanced around, getting my bearings. Everything looks different when you have eyeballs. "That way." I gestured. "I'll take point," I said as I started between the rock formations.

She hesitated, probably thinking about having somebody else do it. Being the tip of the spear was the most dangerous position. "Just don't get killed," Julie admonished. "I would miss your charming personality."

"Why thanks," I replied.

"Plus we need you to open the door."

I went forward, stabbing the light ahead and also occasionally upwards, looking for any suspended vampires. There were millions of spots in the cavern where danger could lurk. Visions of Gus's tottering headless corpse flashed unbidden into my mind. I stepped over the smashed remains of a historical display and kicked the severed guide ropes out of the way. The five of us moved quickly but cautiously. Every pass of the flashlight illuminated new formations, age-old deposits, twisted clumps of rock and sediment. Every strange shape that revealed itself caused me to jump. The walls shone as our lights struck smooth surfaces.

There was something ahead, a darker shadow on the already dark floor. I held up my fist, the signal to freeze. The rustling of armor let me know that the others had responded. I gestured ahead with my flashlight. There was a hole in the ground, a pit. It was a natural formation, and the guide ropes that had surrounded it to keep the tourists from falling in had been torn and tossed aside. I leaned forward, letting the Surefire illuminate the gash in the rock. I was struck with a sense of foreboding.

"Oh no…" I gagged as the smell of torn open bodies hit my nostrils. "Oh no."

Julie drew alongside and shined her flashlight into the hole. She grimaced. "Vampire pen." A look of disgust crossed her face as she stared into the pile of corpses. "Poor things."