Monster Hunter Vendetta

Chapter 13

It was a long, hushed drive to Appleton. Trip drove and I rode up front, with Holly and Satan's G-man in the back seat of the MHI Crown Vic. Since the last time I had gone anywhere with Franks I had actually shoved a. 45 in his ear, I could understand why he chose to sit directly behind me. The mood was unnaturally somber as Franks' presence had a stifling effect on our normal conversation. I bet he was just a blast at parties.

I had asked him at one point if he was going to contact his superiors or the rest of his protective detail to notify them of our destination. He had responded with a single raised eyebrow, which indicated to me a big negative on that idea. Because not only would he get ordered to turn around, he didn't like his current assignment any more than I did, and the sooner he could wrap this case up, the better. It was kind of frightening that I got that from a single eyebrow, and indicated to me that I was spending way too much quality time around Franks.

"Does anybody have the Nelsons in their address book?" I asked as we neared Camden. The good doctors probably deserved a warning about our visit. The last time I had been here to see a patient, gargoyles had destroyed half the place, smashed a few patients into mush, and given the husband of the Nelson team a heart attack.

Holly responded. "I do. I'll call them."

I had no idea that she even knew them, though it made sense. The Nelsons were former old-school MHI members, one psychologist and one psychiatrist, who specialized in helping the victims of monster violence. Of all of us, Holly Newcastle had experienced the most brutal and unforgiving introduction to the real world of any Hunter I knew, as a captive in a vampire feeding pit. Even after all this time, she had still never confided her whole story to even her closest friends.

I caught Trip glancing at the rearview mirror to sneak a look at Holly. He was probably thinking the exact same thing I was. Was she getting counseling or something? If so, good for her. This stuff was brutally hard on the brain and I would never fault anybody for wanting to talk to a professional about it, especially somebody that actually got it, like the Nelsons. "Have you been visiting Appleton?" Trip asked. Even Hunters had days off, and it wasn't like we didn't have personal lives that the rest of the team didn't know about.

"Yeah… that offend you?"

"No. Of course not." He quickly snapped his eyes back to the road to avoid Holly's ire. I chuckled to myself.

"What?" Holly asked me suspiciously with her phone against one ear.

"Nothing," I replied quickly. I was saved when somebody picked up on the other end. Apparently the Nelsons, whichever one she had reached at least, were early risers. She warned them that some Hunters were coming on business, but didn't want to give any specifics over the phone. She thanked them and hung up.

Twenty minutes later, we were there.

The front gate of Appleton was new, made up of freshly painted iron bars riding on smooth hydraulics. Julie had driven a van through the old one. Trip braked at the intercom, hit the button, and stated that we were MHI. A moment later we were heading down the lane. The sun was rising over the gothic spires of the asylum, a gray hulking shadow of carved stone and bleak walls. It looked really terrible considering the good work that went on inside. The Appleton Asylum was the home to many survivors of monster attacks, shunned and considered delusional by the rest of the medical community, but welcomed with open arms here. We parked in the nearly empty lot. It was early enough that the day shift employees hadn't yet arrived.

There were new doors installed at the entrance, and it was obvious, since the stonework didn't quite match, that repairs had been conducted here as well. Stupid gargoyles. Both of the Nelsons were waiting for us.

Lucius was portly, short, with wispy gray hair in a halo around his mostly bald head, and suspenders keeping his pants up over his belly. Joan was taller than her husband, thin, gangly, and brought to mind a stork or other long-legged bird. Both were in their sixties, and both were wearing absurdly thick glasses. I loved the Nelsons.

We piled out of the car. "Hello, everyone!" Lucius bellowed with a voice that belied his age. It was rare for Hunters to come visit and we were always greeted with some enthusiasm. Apparently, those of us who made it as Hunters tended to find this place, and its residents, kind of unnerving. There was a fine line between a survivor who became a Hunter and a survivor who lost their marbles. "Good morning!." He came down the stairs remarkably fast and intercepted me with a hearty handshake. "Well, Owen, my boy, it's been a long time," he said, which made me feel even guiltier for not visiting.

"Holly, it's wonderful to see you," Joan exclaimed excitedly as she virtually tackled Holly in a hug. "And this young man must be.. " She turned to Trip. "Jones. Let's see, James, no, John. It was something biblical."

Trip smiled and extended his hand. "They call me Trip, ma'am." She grabbed his hand and pumped vigorously.

The male Dr. Nelson let go of me and surged toward Trip. "Ah, yes. I've heard about you. Read your file, zombie attack survivor out of Florida. You were the school teacher who was forced to dispatch all his students with a sledgehammer!"

"Pickax," Trip corrected, slightly embarrassed.

"Marvelous! That must have been very distressing…" The Nelsons were looking him over excitedly, just sensing that he had to have all sorts of angst and trauma that they could write a paper on. They couldn't help themselves. They had done that to me the first time I had met them too. "Really, you need to sit down and have a chat with us… time permitting, of course." They simultaneously glanced over as the car door slammed. Franks had gotten out and was adjusting his clip-on tie. Lucius was flummoxed. "It can't be…"

"What's he doing here?" Joan demanded, pointing at the Fed. She raised her voice. "I want him off our property immediately!" Franks approached, scowling. She increased in volume and pitch. "Get him out of here before any patients see him."

"Doctors," Franks stated coldly, "I'm here on official business."

Both Nelsons were clearly agitated at his presence. "Your official business can kiss my old white ass, you simpering feculent, no good, hell-spawn fascist!" Lucius shouted. "You have no business here."

"I see you guys have met…" I said.

"You disgusting pig. You filthy murdering bastard!" Joan shook her fist in the air. "I'm calling security."

"Forget security. I'm getting my rifle," Lucius shouted, turning back into the asylum. "Jackbooted Nazi!"

"We gonna do this the hard way?" Franks asked.

I had no doubt that he wouldn't hesitate to pummel two senior citizens just for kicks. "Whoa!" I shouted loud enough to scare some birds out of a nearby tree. The Nelsons stopped yelling. "Everybody calm down. What's the problem?"

"He's the problem!" Joan shrieked.

"Yes, I caught that part. I already know he's an asshole, but specifically."

Lucius was enraged. "Half our patients wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for this man and the others like him. The MCB intimidates witnesses and survivors. They murder anybody who dares spill the beans about their little secret. Monster victims need love, and support, and therapy, so they can return to their lives. But the MCB takes survivors and punishes them instead."

Joan cut in. "The last thing these people need is for their own government to come along and tell them they're insane, that they imagined the whole thing, or if there's any forensic evidence, they cajole the victims into silence. Do you have any idea what kind of damage that does to people?"

"It's like locking up a rape victim because she might make the town look bad!" Lucius sputtered. "It's preposterous. It's absurd!"

"It's policy," Franks answered.

"That didn't work at Nuremburg and it won't work for you," Joan spat. "I may not know everything, Agent Franks, but one thing I do know for certain is that you're going to burn in hell."

Franks nodded, ever so slightly. "Been there. It's overrated."

"Enough," I said. "Lucius, Joan, please. I know this sucks, but we really need your help. I need to speak with somebody in your care. I'm stuck with Franks."

"It's really serious," Holly said apologetically. "We wouldn't ever had brought him if we had realized."

Joan shook her head. "I know you didn't realize what you were doing, because you're far smarter than that, Holly. I have patients inside, patients whose loved ones this man has actually murdered. I took an oath not to do any harm. I can't let him inside my facility." She was adamant.

This was getting nowhere, and I had to get to Carlos. "Franks, I need you to stay in the car."

"No."

I knew better than to waste my time arguing with him. Cutting down a redwood tree with my teeth would be more productive, and probably faster. "Doctor, please, we'll go fast. Your patients will never even know we're here."

"He's not coming in here without a warrant," Lucius stated.

"I don't need a warrant," Franks responded.

"Why you rotten-"

"Okay!" Holly jumped in. "How about this? While we're sitting out here making a scene, some of these patients you're worried about are going to come and see what's going on, and they're going to see this scumbag," she jerked her thumb at Franks, "and they're going to freak out. So how about we go someplace else, with no witnesses, and you bring out the one patient we need to speak to? Everybody's happy."

The Nelsons looked at each other, obviously not happy.

"It isn't to help the government," I said. "It's to help me, personally. A Hunter named Martin Hood has returned from the grave. He's already tried to kill my entire family and he will not stop until he gets me too."

That confused them. "Marty?" Lucius said. "Marty Hood? There's no way. He was one of the good ones. He was a great kid. You must be mistaken."

"Well, that's what we need to find out. This might be for nothing, but I have to know the truth. Please help me."

Joan sighed, exchanging glances with her husband. Lucius adjusted his mighty suspenders. They had been married for forty-plus years, and had reached that point where a lot of communication was unspoken. Lucius responded for them both. "Very well, Owen. We'll bring the patient outside. Whom do you need to speak to?"

"Carlos Alhambra."

Joan crossed her arms. "Then I'm afraid you're wasting your time. Carlos hasn't spoken to anyone in decades."

"He'll speak to me."

The spot that the Nelsons picked for our use was a gazebo on the far side of the lawn. None of the patients would be outside this early, and if any patients were at the windows, we would be far enough from the building that they wouldn't get a clear look at us. Franks would be just a random big dude in a bad suit, not the man who personally murdered their fellow survivors who couldn't keep their mouths shut.

A morning mist was rising from the Alabama River. Separating it from us was a wrought iron fence. Most of the patients at Appleton were here voluntarily, but there were a few who weren't, and there were others screwed up enough to decide that the river was a great place to take a header into. Tall trees, draped in Spanish moss, surrounded us. It was actually a very peaceful moment and I took the time to savor it, because what was coming next was probably going to suck.

"So, how have you been?" Lucius Nelson asked.

"Other than the whole death cult thing, pretty good actually." The two of us were sitting on a bench inside the gazebo. Franks was wandering through the trees, probably checking the perimeter. Holly was fifty feet away, throwing rocks over the fence into the river to watch them splash. Joan had left to retrieve Carlos, and Trip had gone with her. "You guys are coming to the wedding, right?"

"Yes, yes, of course. I've known Julie since she was a baby. We wouldn't miss it for the world. We're rather fond of her, you know. And I would probably be dead if it weren't for you."

That was embarrassing and I felt that it was mostly untrue. "I didn't do anything that any Hunter wouldn't have done."

"Exactly," he smiled, then gestured toward Holly. "And how has she been? We haven't seen her in months."

"Holly? Well, as far as I know, she's okay… I didn't know she was getting professional help. I know you probably can't talk about it, doctor-patient privilege, and all that, but if there's ever anything that I can do to help her, just let me know. She's my teammate and my friend, and finding out that she's still hurting, still needing help… is just terrible," I said truthfully. "Though after what she went through, who could blame her?" I added quickly, not wanting to offend the good doctor over the importance of his counseling.

He laughed. "Getting help? Son, she is the help."

"Huh?"

"That young lady is a volunteer on her days off. She comes in and helps out with the patients, visits, listens to them talk, plays Ping-Pong and checkers. She's especially good with the little children. She's wonderful, really brightens everyone's day, and we've been sad that she's been too busy lately, but such is the life of a Hunter. She understands these people, and they love her for it."

"Holly? Really?" That was a new one on me. It sure didn't fit the image that she tried to cultivate. I wondered why she never told us.

"Oh, here they come," Lucius pointed back toward the asylum. Joan was leading the way, and Trip was pushing someone in a wheelchair. "Now don't be disappointed when this doesn't work. If Carlos actually communicates I'll be absolutely shocked. He's been in a total stupor for decades."

"How bad is it?"

Lucius shook his head. "In layman's terms, he's checked out, toasted, brain turned off, a borderline vegetable. All he has done for years now is hum simple children's songs. Carlos was one of the smartest, bravest men I've ever known. I was proud to consider him a friend. And then one day, this happened. No medical explanation for it, no brain damage, no serious physical trauma, nothing."

"No idea what caused this?"

"No. He went on a mission, but only his body came back. I don't.. I…" He lifted his glasses and wiped under his eyes. "Sorry."

"I understand."

Trip pushed the wheelchair up the ramp and into the gazebo. Carlos was wearing a red bathrobe over a white gown. He was frail, with atrophied muscles, hands so thin that you could see bones through the papery skin, and hair that was buzzed short on his pale skull, probably for ease of maintenance by the staff. His head was lolling slowly from side to side as he stared at his lap. He was humming but I did not recognize the tune.

Doctor Joan took a cloth from the back of the chair and wiped the drool from his chin. His blank eyes gave no indication that he was aware of any of this. I got off the bench and squatted in front of the wheelchair.

"Hello, Carlos. My name's Owen Pitt. I'm a Hunter too. We need to talk." No response, obviously. "I need to talk to you about Martin Hood. I believe that he's the one who did this to you and I need your help."

"I don't think he can even hear you, dear," Joan suggested gently. "He's shown zero reaction to stimuli since he's been here. We've run every test you can think of."

I reached out my hand to touch his, but hesitated. I had talked about ripping the memories right out of his head, but now that I was in his presence, I didn't feel so confident in my rightness. It seemed awkward and invasive. This was a man, a fellow Hunter, and I had no clue what I was doing.

"You think this is a good idea?" Trip asked, sensing my hesitation.

"No, not really," I snapped. "You got a better idea?"

He shrugged. "Well, if you're going to do it, do it before Franks comes back." Trip was right. I didn't want the government to know that I had inherited any abilities from the artifact.

"Do what?" Doctor Joan asked, concerned for her patient.

"Owen can read minds," Trip said, then held his finger in front of his lips to indicate that it was a secret.

"Really?" Lucius was fascinated, probably sensing another paper.

"I don't know how it works. It isn't every time I touch somebody. It seems to be a combination of when they're thinking about a particularly strong memory while I'm also interested in that same memory. I think… I picked this up from the Old Ones somehow."

"Well, scientifically, that sounds like a crock of shit," Joan said.

"But we've seen some weird things," Lucius added. That was the beauty of working with former Hunters-very flexible minds. "Is it dangerous?"

"I have no idea."

"If they need to be remembering, how's that supposed to work with somebody who doesn't think about anything?" Joan asked sensibly.

I didn't really know that either. Maybe if I wanted that memory enough for both of us…

"Franks is coming back," Trip said.

Aw hell. I touched Carlos' skeletal hand.

Well, this is certainly different.

The world was vast, only there was no world. Just a void. An infinite space of nothingness. The void had no boundaries, no beginning, no end. There was no light, no dark, no color. Infinity stretched on forever.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Owen," I answered. "With MHI. Who are you?"

"I don't remember," the voice was male. "What are you doing here?"

"Where is here?"

"I don't remember that either…" the voice answered, confused. "But I'm not alone. It lives here too."

"Carlos, is that you?"

But then that first voice was gone. And something hideous took its place. This voice was different, screeching like bagpipes made out of rotten entrails and filled with broken glass. My mind rebelled against the unnatural force.

THIS IS MY SHELL. FIND YOUR OWN.

"What are you?" I challenged.

No answer.

Talk about weird, but I didn't have time for this. I needed to find information on Hood. Just having that thought seemed to cause the world to change. "I know that name," said the first voice. "I know Hood."

Now I could see; there was light, space, dimensions and gravity, as a blurry scene unfolded before me. A group of people, obviously Hunters, though their gear was outdated and their team patch was unfamiliar. There was no sound, but the scene was obviously one of welcome, as the group greeted a new member. The extraneous details of the scene were fuzzy gray blotches. The Hunters' faces were just… blank. Pasty blurs of flesh where their features should have been. Only one of the men was clearly visible, the new guy, and the scene focused in on him. He was an overweight young man, with a mop of curly hair, wearing a vest that barely fit over his stomach. His attitude was jovial as he smiled and laughed with the others. The scene slowed, the Hunters' movements became sluggish, until they quit moving entirely.

I had a physical form again. I walked between the frozen Hunters, a three-dimensional snapshot from time. Stopping in front of Hood, I studied him. I recognized him from Dorcas' memory. He had acne scars and looked nothing like the tough guy who had attacked me. In fact he didn't look like much at all, just a fat, goofy dude about my age.

"I remember this…" said the voice, and this time it came from directly behind me. I turned. One of the Hunters in the scene was speaking. Unlike the others, he still had details. His armor was olive drab, crisscrossed with leather bandoleers of shotgun shells. He was fit, strong, with a skinny beard and a thick head of dark hair just peppered with gray. Hispanic, probably about forty, he was a handsome man, but his eyes were sunken, haunted. I could only barely recognize him as the fragile person who I had met in the real world. "I remember this. It hasn't taken them all away."

"What hasn't taken them?"

"Feeder," he answered, as if that were obvious. "Are you here to help me?"

"Yes," I answered, not having any clue how I was supposed to do that. "Where is this Feeder?" Carlos held one finger up and placed it against his temple. I nodded.

"Don't worry. It'll come for us soon. Whenever I remember something, it comes and eats it. I have almost nothing left."

"It eats your memories?"

"More like it consumes, partially digests, and then pukes them back in pieces all over my brain. I've only saved a few. I've forced myself not to think about them, but I know they're there. When I remember something, it's gone forever. All the happy ones are gone." He held up his left hand, indicating a wedding ring. "I was married, I think, but I don't remember her. He destroyed those early, since they were the first ones I thought of when I was trapped. Once those were gone, then he took the regular ones. I couldn't fight him. He's too strong. He's always hungry."

I could only listen, horrified, wondering if my own were in danger while I was here.

Carlos stepped between the frozen bits of memory. His whole body was trembling. "I don't remember any of my life. I know what things are, and what words mean. I guess he can eat the meat, but not the bones. I don't remember ever experiencing anything. I know what food is, but I don't know how it tastes, you know what I mean? I've got almost nothing."

"How'd you save this one?"

"Oh, he let me keep the bad ones, the ones to taunt me, to laugh at my failure. Everything else I've ever experienced is all twisted and broken, but not these. I can relive the mistakes leading up to the end of my life whenever I want. In fact, that's the only thing that I can do. This thing living in my head is a malevolent motherfucker, that's for sure. If I could take any joy out of the ones he's left me, then I'm sure they'd be consumed along with all the rest."

"Once he takes everything, what'll happen to you?"

"Maybe then he'd just let me die…" he said wistfully.

This poor man's mind was being devoured, but the thing doing it was leaving the memories about this one particular Hunter for a reason. "Martin Hood did this to you, didn't he?"

He walked past me, through the crowd of distorted figures, and stopped, staring into the frozen eyes of young Mr. Hood. "Will you help me?"

"What can I do?" I asked.

"I'll show you these scraps, these things that Feeder's left to toy with me. In exchange, I want two things. I won't help you until you swear you'll help me."

"Name them." I expected for him to ask me to free him, to destroy this demon in his head, but not what came next.

"Kill me."

I was shocked. That's not why I was here. I couldn't do that. I started to respond, but choked. The frozen Hunters surrounded me, their faces scratched out of existence like a pencil drawing brutally scrubbed with an eraser until the paper tore. All happiness had been blotted from this man's existence, his body was nearly a lifeless husk

… No. I understood the request.

I nodded. "And the second?"

He glared at the jolly, fat Hunter so long that I started to think I was another forgotten memory.

"Avenge me."

This was different than the other times that I had lived through others' memories. This time I didn't see through his eyes or feel with his senses, because those were long since muted and passed. Carlos no longer knew what it was like to experience such things.

Rather it was like I was a bystander as a partial scene unfolded in front of me. Details were few, sounds were painful and flat. The colors had bled into grays and shadows as even simple things like that had been stolen from him. What a horrible way to exist and this was all that he'd had since 1989. I was watching the welcoming of the new Hunter. Hood smiled and laughed as Carlos' team greeted him, slapped him on the shoulder, and shook his hand. The only two who had faces were my host and his future nemesis.

"He came highly recommended. A good friend of mine said that he was talented, that he would be an asset to our team," Carlos spoke to me, even as he shook phantom hands with Hood. "My friend was a man named Harbinger."

"I know him," I said.

Carlos shook his head. "I don't. I only remember what little bit is connected to these few things. That's all. But I hate him for bringing this monster into my life. Feeder let me keep my hate. It makes him warm."

Then we were in an unknown place, an intersection of two streets. A team of Hunters had taken up position around a few cars and were firing into a crowd of shambling zombies. There were hundreds of undead. It was a huge outbreak. Carlos and I walked between the flying bullets and the crowd of rotting undead. He gestured to where his mirror image was leaning over the hood of a car and blasting round after round of buckshot into the approaching mass. "Business was really good. I didn't realize at first that it was a little too good."

A zombie made it over the hood of the first car and Hood took it apart in a spray of machine-gun fire. "It had been kind of slow. We didn't really have much to do, and my team was getting the least business of any team in the country. Just bad luck I suppose. But then, within a few weeks of Hood's arrival, we were getting undead outbreaks constantly. Suddenly my team was raking in the dough. We were the stars of the company."

A zombie hit Memory Carlos from behind, taking him hard to the pavement. The nearby faceless Hunters were in no position to help and it looked like certain death. But the zombie froze, an inch from taking a bite out of Carlos' neck. It stayed there for a moment until Carlos could roll over, draw his. 45 and put a round into the creature's brain. The splattered team leader caught a brief glance of Hood, hand extended, two fingers pointing at the frozen zombie. Hood went back to the action as if nothing had happened.

My host shook his head sadly. "That was my first clue, but in the excitement, I missed it. It went on. Every time we had nothing going on, more undead would pop up somewhere in our region. I was thinking that we had some hardcore necromancer living in the neighborhood, but he was always one step ahead of us. I was too stupid to realize that I saw him every day."

More scenes flashed by. Several months had passed since these Hunters had started working together. "By that time, I was a wealthy man, not that I can remember what I did with it. He's let me remember that I was like a damn superhero to the other Hunters, just to rub it in. Really, I was just a chump. Hood came across as a nice kid, a real joker, a bookworm, an intellectual, and a dork. Everybody loved him. It was a lie, an act. We didn't realize what he was fixated on." There was a vision of the two men, sitting on a bench on an ocean pier, drinking and telling stories, unwinding after a long day at work. "It turned out that Hood's parents were killed when he was just a boy. They were occultists, and had been messing around with the Old Ones back in England. He confided this to me one night. That's why he became a Hunter. He wanted to fight those things. He was obsessed with them."

"Why'd he tell you?"

My host laughed. "You'll see…"

Hood took a long draw from a cigarette before flicking the butt into the ocean. "See, boss, that's what got me thinking…" It was obvious that he'd had too much to drink. "There's a lot of information about the Elder Things floating around. Why not, and this is just a hypothetical, use their own weapons against them? Harnessing magic is no different than harnessing electricity."

Carlos openly scoffed. "That's insane."

"No. Hear me out, mate. You're a smart chap. It's like the war, the big one. My grandmother lived through the Battle of Britain and she told me what those V rockets sounded like when they flew over. Pure terror. Evil stuff, right? But as soon as the war was over, bam, the Allies grabbed up every German scientist they could, right? That's how we put a man on the moon."

Carlos took a long drink. "I suppose."

"This is the same thing. Just because knowledge originates from a bad use, doesn't make it bad. It's still knowledge. We owe it to ourselves to study the Old Ones, not just shun them. Think of what we could do." Hood grew somber. "Imagine if a group of us, people like me and you, who knew what was really out there, worked together and harnessed that power… We could banish death itself!"

"That's not how it works. Anything those things touch is tainted. Stay away from it, Marty." The Carlos of memory tossed his now-empty bottle out into the waves and stood to leave. "You're drunk and talking stupid. I'll call you a cab. Go home and get some rest, man."

"I thought maybe you would understand…" Hood muttered to himself as Carlos walked away.

Carlos continued his narration as the pier dissolved. "I figured it out eventually. Hood had found something in the archives back at headquarters. Some old book, picked up from who knows where." The next scene was in a room filled with many shelves, lined with row after row of books. At first I thought we'd come to a library, but then I realized that it was a small apartment, literally packed with books. The titles on the spines were all blurry and forgotten. Hood was sitting at a table, giant tome open before him, a single small bulb providing light enough to read by. The book must have been etched into Carlos' memory, because it was crystal clear. A massive, leather-bound thing, the pages ancient and covered in symbols and geometries that suggested madness in whoever inked it in blood millennia before.

"Hey, Marty. Nobody's been able to get ahold of you. I was getting worried so I had your landlord let me in. Are you okay?" Carlos called as he entered the room, only to jerk to a halt when he saw the open book. "Is that- What are you doing with that thing?"

"Learning…" Hood mumbled as if he was in a trance, not looking up as he traced his hands over the words. The crazed scribbling seemed to move. There was a drawing of the monstrous alien tree, branches like twitching cricket legs. A black smear had been rubbed onto the page above it, like a cloud rising from the tree.

"Damn it!" Carlos shouted as he shoved the book off the table and onto the floor. The pieces had finally clicked into place for him. The book landed with a thump, open to a page with a picture of a giant squid thing that I knew all too well. He reached across the table and grabbed Hood by the shirt and jerked him forward. "It's you! You're behind these outbreaks, aren't you? Answer me, you son of a bitch!"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Hood stammered. Then Carlos slugged him in the face, brutally hard. He grabbed the fat kid by his curly hair, yanked him out of his chair and shoved his face down against the open book. Blood dripped onto the pages.

"Liar!" Carlos shouted, enraged.

"All right, all right!" Hood cried. Carlos jerked him up and brutally shoved him back into one of the shelves. Books crashed to the floor. "Let go of me, please," he sobbed.

"It was you all along. I can't believe this!" Carlos released him and stepped away, hurt and disbelief obvious in his voice. "Why? Why'd you do it?"

"I had to! You don't understand what's at stake. We have to learn the mysteries or we're doomed."

"You're doomed all right. How many innocent people have died because of you? You know what the Feds are going to do when they discover you've been raising the dead? You're going to prison for the rest of your life."

Suddenly Hood went from simpering to in command. The change was shocking, like somebody had flipped a switch and another personality stepped forward. "Oh, that's where you're wrong, mate. You won't tell the Feds a word." Blood ran down his nose and dripped down the crease of his double chin but he didn't wipe it away. His eyes burned with the fervor of a true believer and for the first time I saw the man who would become the Shadow Lord. "Because you're going down with me if you do. I'll say that you ordered me to raise those zombies for the PUFF bounties."

"Oh, I am, huh?" Carlos responded as he pulled his pistol from inside his waistband. "We'll see about that."

"You won't shoot me," Hood stated flatly. "If I die, then I've left evidence for the authorities that not only did I create those undead, but that I did it on behalf of not just you, but all of MHI. The government will destroy you all for that. You love this company too much."

"Bastard!" The angry Hunter raised the gun and pushed it into Hood's cheek.

"Do it. I dare you," Hood snapped. "Kill your teammate. Murder your friend. Then explain that to the authorities. Explain that to the others while you try to convince them I wasn't making enough zombies to make you a millionaire."

Carlos hesitated, doubt creasing his features. "Damn!" he shoved the fat kid to the floor and stomped away, trapped. He paced back and forth for a moment. "You idiot. What've you done?"

"I'm fulfilling my destiny. I'm going to stop the Old Ones, once and for all." He finally paused to wipe his nose. "The bounties are funding my research. Animating the dead is letting me hone my skills. This is just the beginning of an epic work. You'll see."

Carlos shoved his pistol back into its holster before grabbing Hood by the neck and dragging him toward the door. "No. You're coming with me. We're going to see Harbinger. He'll know what to do."

We were back in the original void. Darkness in every direction.

"I didn't know what else to do. He was my responsibility and I failed. I turned to the one man who I knew would have the answers. We left that night, me, Hood, and that infernal book, and caught the first flight. I remember that he came along willingly, telling me the whole time about how he was right and how he would persuade Harbinger to see. I think he wanted me to dwell on his argument… When we arrived, there were a bunch of Hunters there, and unfortunately, it was the full moon. I had been too preoccupied to even realize that, so we weren't able to speak to him."

The night Hood died, I thought to myself.

"Exactly," he answered. There was a terrible, rending sonic wail. It came from the distant void. "Feeder's coming. I have to finish this."

We were standing on the edge of a circle of chaos. The little stone shack, the old slave quarters of the Shackleford family estate, was before us. Hunters were milling around. There was blood everywhere, stark red against the black and white of the rest of the world. Hood's dismembered body was at the entrance. A faceless Hunter was holding the body, trying in vain to help. I knew that the erased man was Myers. Other unknowns attended to a second injured person. A leg, severed at the knee, lay half chewed off to the side.

"He committed suicide."

"So I thought. Nobody but me knew about Hood's crimes. I felt terrible. I blamed myself for his death and the whole situation. I had failed."

I walked through the carnage. Hood was obviously dead, literally torn apart. There was now a struggle, a fight, between Myers and someone else who could only have been Ray Shackleford. The words were erased, but I knew that Myers wanted nothing more than to avenge his friend's death. "You never told the others."

"No. I didn't. I thought that Hood had killed himself out of guilt. Everyone loved him. What good would tarnishing his memory serve? Plus, I was afraid… somehow I could have done something different, somehow it was my fault. No, it was my secret to bear. No evidence ever arose after his death, so Hood must have been bluffing about that, so I just left it alone. I hid his stupid book."

"You didn't destroy it?"

"I couldn't. It wouldn't burn. I should have tried harder."

Suddenly, something rose over the Shackleford ancestral home, above the slave quarters, a shadow as big as the house, only shaped like an earwig. The sonic wail tripled in intensity as the shadow of pincers covered the full moon.

FOOD. The scream slammed through my skull.

"Holy shit!"

"Feeder's here," Carlos said nonchalantly. "Good. I won't miss this one anyway. Come on, I've got one more. Three years later."

A new place, a large older house in a pine forest, on the top of a hill. A team of Hunters were moving quickly through the darkened trees, weapons hot. They were sweaty, panting, a few of them had sustained injuries. This memory was the clearest of all. The others even had faces.

Carlos must be reading my mind. "Yeah, Feeder hasn't touched this one. This is the worst of all. I couldn't tell you who any of these people are, but it likes to let me watch them die, again and again."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't be. This is now the only memory I have left of my entire life. Well, there's actually one other. I can remember mi madre singing nursery songs to me when I was little. I think that's the oldest one I've got. For some reason, Feeder has left that one alone. I think he likes the music… Please, don't forget your promise."

"I won't."

"Good," he said. "Watch."

There were six of them. They were coming up on the house in three pairs, moving fast. They stopped in the trees just outside the yard. I focused in on their leader as he tried his radio, frustration was plain on Carlos' face. "We lost radio contact as soon as we arrived. Then we were cut off, surrounded, driven through the forest by undead. It wasn't until later that I realized we'd been herded to this place. He wanted it that way. He wanted us on our own at the end. He knew our methods, our procedures, he knew exactly what we'd do."

The Hunters hit the house. One pair on the back door, one on the front, the final held the perimeter. The teams cleared the Victorian-style house, finding it empty, boarded-up, furniture sitting under tarps, covered in dust. The first pair discovered the stairs to the basement.

"He lured us in. We were surrounded, no comms. The case was supposed to have been straightforward, basic monsters on the property, not that I can remember what they were supposed to be at this point, or where this even is, but we sure weren't prepared for what we found."

The basement was utterly normal, except for one concrete wall where the foundation had been chipped away to reveal a hole. The ancient tunnel wound down into the earth. The Hunters prepared to check it out.

"No escape, so I decided to try the tunnel. It might have led to a way out, or it might have led to whatever was controlling the monsters attacking us. I was such a fool. I let my ego cloud my judgment. I remember that I only made three big mistakes in my career. First was ever trusting Hood. Keeping his secret was number two. Going down that hole was my last."

Time passed as the Hunters went steadily downward, their unease growing at each step, noise of the undead trailing behind them a constant companion. They set ambushes, slowed their pursuers, but there were always more. At the end, the tunnel opened into a large, artificial room. Creatures-impossible creations of mismatched body parts from various animals, armor-plated monstrosities-rose up around them and cut through the Hunters with ease. They put up an amazing fight but were finally overrun. The memory was allowed to linger on the final suffering of each individual, chopped to bits at the ends of meat-cleaver arms or lacerated by serrated-steel teeth.

Carlos awoke a short while later, bound to a table with leather straps, someone calling his name. I recognized who was speaking immediately. The shadow man's appearance in the memory was the same as in the present. He hadn't even aged. This time he was wearing a white rubber butcher's apron, splattered with blood. He smiled broadly at Carlos.

"Hey, mate. How have you been?"

"Where are my men?"

"Recruited into my army." The necromancer paused to pull a sheet off of another operating table. Carlos screamed when he saw the bodies of two of his team in the process of being stitched back together into something else. The Hunter thrashed against his bonds in vain. "I'm improving on God's creation."

Carlos continued to struggle, insane at the sight of his friends. "I'll kill you! I'll kill you! You son of a bitch! I'll kill you!"

"Please… You didn't have the stomach to do it before and that's what brings us here today, I'm afraid. It pains me to do this, but I gave you an opportunity to see my side of things, only you wouldn't listen. You had to be self-righteous and stubborn. So now, the time has come for you to pay for your mistakes. But take comfort, your sacrifice will not have been in vain."

"Who are you?" Carlos demanded, still straining to free himself, wanting nothing more than to rip the man before him limb from limb with his bare hands.

"Come on, Carlos." The shadow man shook his head. "Do I really look that different now? The old body was so soft… It was a liability. When you forced my hand, I had to go with one of my contingency plans. The spell had already been prepared, but it was something that I had lacked the courage to implement on my own. There are many things that can go wrong when you swap bodies. Really, I should thank you. I found a way to trade up to something better, switch places if you will. I took this body from a poor addled nitwit, an easily manipulated man-child. I moved in and the poor sod got my old body. Lucky for him, he only had to put up with it for a few minutes before Earl ate him!"

"M-M-Marty?"

Hood pointed at his chest with both hands and smiled. "In the flesh! And the ladies love this body a lot more than the old one, I'll tell you that."

Painful realization hit. "But… but you're dead!"

"See?" Hood laughed. "I've conquered death, just like I told you I would, all those years ago. You shouldn't have mocked me… Nobody should have mocked me."

Carlos screamed. It was pure, primal hate. It went on for a long time as he struggled, futilely trying to break his bonds. Finally, rationality returned. "Marty, you worthless sack of shit, those were your friends." He jerked his head painfully toward the other table. "We were your family!"

Hood spread his arms wide. For the first time Carlos noticed the rotting things standing in neat rows behind his captor. The creatures had been spliced together, bones screwed to steel plates, bolts and wires crisscrossed, ivory, muscle, and iron conglomerated into a grotesque parody of life. "This is my family now."

Rage turned to fear. "You're insane!"

"That's a matter of perspective. I'm rather sure that I'm the only sane one here. See, things have changed. I was naive. I thought I could beat the Old Ones at their own game. But I realized the truth. They can't lose. So I cut a deal to benefit us all. And now you're going to help me help them."

Carlos' eyes flicked back and forth across the line of slavering monstrosities. "What do you want from me?"

Hood chuckled. "After I ‘died,'? " he made quote marks with his fingers, "you kept something of mine. I need my book back. It holds information that will allow me to open a portal to the other side."

"You can't do that!"

"Actually, you're correct. Very few people have the potential to unlock that kind of mystery. Sadly, I'm not one of them. I'm going to arrange for it to fall into the hands of someone who can. He's not even aware that he's helping me yet. He needs to be broken first, but I've already arranged for that."

Devious bastard… It all made sense. Hood was behind what had happened at the Christmas party. He was responsible for Susan's turning. He'd tricked Ray into opening that rift.

Hood leaned in close, stopping his face inches from his old leader. Carlos remembered it so clearly that he could smell Hood's aftershave. "So, where did you hide my book?" he whispered.

Carlos spit in his face. "I'll never tell you anything!"

The shadow man nodded slightly, not noticing the saliva in his eyes. "And I wouldn't have expected anything less from you. So once again, we'll do this the hard way."

"You going to torture me, pendejo?" Carlos demanded in typical MHI style defiance. "Bring it!"

"You wish. Torture would be easy. See, working for the Old Ones does grant you a few perks, a few abilities, if you will. They've sent some friends to… how should I say… live with me. Sure, I could torture you, knives, hot pokers, electric shocks, all that nonsense, but that would take time, and I don't have the stomach for such things." He gestured at the operating table full of mismatched body parts. "I'm a creator, not a destroyer. Rather, I'm going to send something to root around inside your brain and take what I need. So to answer your question, no torture. This is going to be much, much worse."

"What are you talking about?"

"Good-bye, Carlos. I learned so much from you, and really enjoyed our times together. You were one of my best friends. It really was a pleasure." His neck swelled as something crawled up from inside his torso. Hood opened his mouth. It was like staring down a deep well. Two tiny red eyes opened and blinked in the inky blackness. Miniscule pincers extended past Hood's lips. Carlos began to scream.

The tiny creature latched onto the Hunter's face, soft, black ooze crawling into his eyes, up his nose, down his throat. The screaming turned into choking and convulsing. I had to look away.

The scene went black. We were back in the void.

"It was a little thing at first. Like a headache. But it grew, and grew, and grew. The more it ate, the fatter it got. Everything I thought of, destroyed, torn apart. Just bits and pieces of me. It found what it was looking for, but it didn't stop there. No… it's just been taking ever since."

I had narrowly avoided the same fate in Mexico. I shuddered. The bagpipe howl arose as the mind demon approached.

"You better go now. Please, keep your promise. I'm begging you. Finish this."

Feeder surrounded us, a bloated, disgusting thing. Slobbering, chewing, tearing and flinging, as the last few visions of a mortal life were rendered into nothing.

"And this is the way the world ends…" my host said.

Back in the real world, I gasped and jerked my hand away from the wheelchair. Carlos' head was still rolling around weakly from side to side as a puddle of drool collected on his robe. He was humming softly.

"What happened?" Lucius Nelson demanded, concerned for his patient.

Glancing around, the doctors and Trip were still in the same spots in the gazebo as when I had left. Franks was approaching up the path at a brisk walk.

"How long was I gone?" I asked.

"You didn't go anywhere," Joan replied.

"Five seconds, tops," Trip answered quickly. "Did it work?"

"Yeah, kind of." I stood. "Doctors, we have to let Carlos die."

"What?" both of them responded simultaneously.

"Please, believe me. There's something terrible living inside his head. It's devouring him, piece by piece. He made me promise to kill him."

"Owen, that's ridiculous."

The wheelchair began to vibrate. I looked down. Carlos was going into some sort of seizure. It stopped. He was no longer humming. That too had been taken from him. His final memory was erased. The shaking ceased.

Joan knelt beside the chair and placed her fingers on Carlos' neck. "I think he's dead."

Suddenly the patient's head snapped up. His eyes opened, revealing blood red orbs. One thin hand locked around Joan's wrist with bone-crushing force. He jerked her to her knees.

My STI came out of the holster so fast that it practically materialized in my hand. I clicked the safety off as the front sight landed between those red eyes. "Let her go!"

"Noooo," the thing inhabiting Carlos' body hissed. Joan cried out as it squeezed her arm. "Feast is over… Need new shell to live in."

"What's going on?" Lucius cried out. "Carlos, let her go. We've been trying to help you."

"That ain't him, Doc. This thing is from the other side. Isn't that right, Feeder?"

The body wheezed. "Not true name. Name given by weak fleshling." The voice was raspy, not used to creating speech. "So hungry. Must feed." His other hand reached toward Joan's face, as if to caress it. Nostrils flared as it drank in her smell. "So many memories in this one… to feeeaaassst."

His wife in danger, Lucius Nelson's reaction was a split second faster than mine. Carlos' head jerked one way and then back as our bullets crossed an X through his skull. Joan fell. I stepped forward and booted the frail body in the chest, sending the wheelchair rolling back down the ramp and into the sunlight. The chair toppled over.

Even with the back of his skull missing, the animated body tried to rise, atrophied muscles driving forward, in search of another host. The movements were jerky, awkward, painful to watch. "Feeeaaassst.. "

Trip had drawn his Springfield XD. 45. Doctor Lucius stood at my side, stubby Colt Officer's model at the ready. The three of us looked at each other, knowing what had to be done, then we opened fire. Dozens of bullets tore through Carlos. A few seconds later, our slides were locked back empty, my ears were ringing, and the riddled body was absolutely still, blood pouring into the grass.

"What the hell!" Holly shouted as she ran toward the gazebo. She paused long enough to pull her STI Ranger and train it on the blood-soaked mess on the lawn like the rest of us. "Everybody okay?"

"We're fine," Joan answered calmly. "I think my wrist is broken though." The birdlike woman had pulled herself onto a bench. From somewhere she had produced a. 380 PPK and was holding it shakily in her left hand, her right resting awkwardly in her lap. She saw me looking at her. "Old-school MHI, kids. Shock is nature's anesthetic. Give me five minutes and I'll be crying like a baby."

I dropped my spent mag, slammed a new one in the gun, and dropped the slide. "See to your wife," I ordered Lucius. "Trip, Holly, on me." I approached Carlos' body slowly. The three of us covered him, pistols ready, but there was no movement.

The Hunter was dead, freed from his torment at last.

Agent Franks nonchalantly joined us a moment later. The big man studied the three of us, guns hovering over the ventilated corpse and his wheelchair. He shrugged, removed a candy from his pocket, unwrapped it, tossed it in his mouth, and threw the wrapper on the lawn. "Brutal… even by my standards," he said, chewing loudly as he walked away.

"What's that?" Trip asked, gesturing with his gun. "On the sidewalk?"

A tiny, black, glistening, earwig-slug thing was oozing away from the shattered skull. I moved so that my shadow wasn't protecting it. The tiny beast rolled over, revealing a pair of red eyes and a mouth with hooked teeth. It screeched in pain when the sunlight hit it.

I raised my size 15 boot. "Good-bye, Feeder." It smashed with a sickening wet pop. I ground it in. Black smoke hissed from the pavement.

First promise kept.???

"You know, you're no longer allowed to visit here, Owen," Lucius advised me. We were in the Appleton parking lot, getting ready to leave. "Every time you do, we lose patients. At this rate you'll put us out of business in no time."

"I'm really sorry…"

"I'm seriously thinking of having a restraining order drawn up," the doctor said with grave sternness. I suddenly felt like I was going to puke. He thumped me on the arm. "Ha. I'm just kidding, boy. Relax. It comes with the business."

Joan shook her head. "Forgive my husband. His idea of humor's a little skewed." Her sprained wrist had already been wrapped. She held it up. "But then again, I just took some Lortabs, so everything seems a little funny."

"Seriously, I wish we would have known about poor Carlos sooner. We kept him alive for all these years, when all we were doing was prolonging his suffering."

"You did the best you could," I responded. "There's no way you could have known."

"No medical textbook I know of has an entry for what crawled out of his head, I'm afraid," Lucius answered, "unless we write it ourselves. Maybe now you understand why when it comes to interviewing survivors, Joan and I can be a little…"

"Pushy?" I interjected.

"One way to look at it, I suppose," he chuckled. "Listen, I do want to help you. When Marty Hood first joined MHI, I did one of those pushy interviews. Here's the file. Maybe something in there will come in handy."

I took it from him. "Isn't this like privileged information?"

He smiled. "My Hippocratic Oath goes out the window when you sign up to help the Old Ones. I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire."

Holly joined us. "We're ready to go. We took the body down to the basement like you asked. None of the other patients saw us."

"Good, good…" Joan said. "Thank you, dear."

Lucius smiled sadly. "This place was built eighty years ago to house tuberculosis patients. We have an excellent crematorium. Morbid, yet so very effective. Necessary, given the things that poor man was exposed to. Don't worry, we'll say a few words over him."

"Thank you for your help," I told them sincerely.

"We're always here to help, and we only ask one thing…" Joan said. Agent Franks, apparently tired of our good-byes, began to honk the horn. She groaned. "Don't ever bring that man onto our property, ever again."

"Deal. I don't like him, don't trust him, and the sooner we're done with this, the sooner I can get rid of him."

"Hmm… Franks is obnoxious. How many people can you fit in that crematorium at one time?" Holly batted her eyes innocently. We all looked at her. "What?"

"Anything helpful?" Holly asked.

I handed the file across to the back seat so she could see it. "Well, Doctor Nelson figured Hood was driven, obsessed with success, and couldn't tolerate failure. As a boy, he was deeply traumatized by watching his parents' deaths, and was fixated on preventing that kind of thing from happening to others."

"Sounds like a pretty typical Hunter," Trip said.

"Yeah, I suppose." Fanatical and traumatized by something and doing their best to protect the world. "Hell, I bet he fit right in."

"Except for this part where Doc says that Hood had a genius-level intellect. No offense, but I'd say most of us don't set the bar that high," Holly pointed out.

Trip responded. "I went to college."

"I took an IQ test once. It said I'm all sorts of smartified," I joked.

"Okay, so Trip got through school by catching footballs and you beat up some nerds for a certificate. But according to this file, this Hood guy's brain is wired like Stephen Hawking… Like an evil Albert Einstein or something. This is one smart dude we're talking about, with real obsession problems, and now he's locked onto you."

"He's smart, but I'm no slouch," I said. Franks snorted. Man, I hate him.

"Just because nobody will play against you in Trivial Pursuit anymore doesn't mean you're a match for this guy, Z," Holly pointed out.

"That's just because Julie's always on his team, and she knows all the artsy questions," Trip muttered.

Holly continued. "What I'm getting at is that we've underestimated this guy. When we first learned about him, we thought we were just facing another bad guy, another monster. But this one's different. He's a former Hunter, so he already knows how we roll. He's patient enough to fake his death and plot craziness for decades. This man outwitted Earl Harbinger and all the Shacklefords, all while right under their noses the whole time. We already knew about the cult, but we've underestimated their leader. The idea of a spy inside MHI seemed stupid to me at first, but this Hood's some sort of chess master, and he's thinking ahead. This man will not stop and he'll pull out all the stops. We've got a lot bigger problem on our hands than we thought."

She was right. The car was quiet while I mulled that over.

"What do you think, Franks?" Holly asked. I was surprised that she would actually try to involve him.

Franks had to have realized by now that I had somehow read Carlos' mind, but he didn't indicate that he cared one way or the other. He was quiet for a long time, shaded eyes staring out the window. "I'm not paid to think."

"Helpful, ain't he?"

Franks turned forward. "But… I doubt you're ruthless enough to survive." He went back to the window.

We drove the rest of the way in silence.