CHAPTER 1
One Week Later
I was carrying a bucket full of severed limbs and human organs to the incinerator. Say what you will about Agent Franks, but whenever he visited MHI, it was never boring.
It had been a busy night. The Body Shack was trashed. As I dumped the contents of the bucket into the fire, Gretchen the Orc was still collecting bloody towels and surgical implements, while Milo sprayed down the floor with a hose. Red blood mingled with the glowing blue of the legendary Elixir of Life, and it all went swirling down the drain.
“This is why we need to hire another janitor,” Milo said.
This was where we’d put Franks back together. The real mess was where Earl Harbinger and Agent Franks had decided to reenact Frankenstein versus the Wolfman. In my house. It had been an epic battle, which I had abruptly cut short by driving a truck through the wall and running over them both. My wife—the lovely Julie Shackleford—had gone back to examine the extensive damage those two had inflicted on her beloved ancestral family mansion. I’m glad she had left while Gretchen and Milo were trying to save Franks, because after all the work she’d personally put into restoring that old place by hand, she might have shot Franks in his big smug face when he woke up. She wasn’t particularly happy with Earl either.
Using a secret recipe found in Franks’ possession, Trip Jones had cooked up a vat full of the Elixir of Life, which Gretchen had then used to bring Franks back to life. Right after we had gotten Franks put back together with spare parts, a mysterious stranger had arrived, but Earl said that he was from a secret order of Catholic warrior monks, and they were all right. Then our uninvited guest had borrowed a demon tracking relic we had just had lying around, and gone off to do whatever it was mystical holy warriors do.
Like I said, Franks? Never dull.
Not that regular Monster Hunters were slouches. I was still on crutches from fighting a nightmare dragon in Las Vegas. It had been one hell of a month.
“You said Franks wanted to trade information for our old broken demon tracker thingy,” Milo looked up from spraying down the stainless steel operating table and saw me reading. “So what did you get? He used up all my best cadavers so I hope it’s good.”
Now that we were done saving Franks and he’d gone on his merry way, we could get to the important stuff. I slammed the door on the incinerator and pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket. There was an address written on it in Franks’ oddly small handwriting.
“He said this was for a multidimensional research facility that worked with the MCB.”
“Multi, like they research other dimensions, or multi like it exists simultaneously in other planes of existence?”
That was a fair question. In this business it really could go either way. “Well, the address is in Albuquerque, so I’m assuming study. You know how sensitive MCB gets about portals.”
“For once I can’t blame the Feds for being jumpy.” Milo was our resident mad scientist, but even he didn’t like messing with black magic. “So what are we supposed to do? Take a tour?”
“Supposedly they can tell us what happened to the Hunters we left behind at the Last Dragon.”
“Whoa…” MHI had two Hunters missing in action. Between the other companies there were a dozen more whose bodies had never been found. “Good trade.”
“We’ll see. Franks is a dick, but he’s honest about it. If he says there’s a way, there’s a way. I’m going to go find out what’s at this address.” I started hobbling for the door. I had one forearm casted and one foot in a big plastic booty, but I’d left my crutch leaning in the corner. Gretchen made a grumbling noise beneath her mask. She had been giving me vile tasting Orcish healing potions for the last week so the bones would knit faster, but she’d warned me to take it easy. I had a hunch that was going to be a challenge. “Yeah, I know, Doc. Working on it.”
Gretchen just clucked disapprovingly and went back to picking up entrails.
* * *
A little while ago I’d had to make a tough call. Abandon some good men to certain death in order to dust off to try and get a monster to chase us, or stick around to evacuate them and possibly get everyone killed. It hadn’t been an easy decision, but it had been the right one. I’d sacrificed a few to try and save many. Luckily the gamble had paid off, and hundreds of us had made it back alive.
But it haunted me.
Everyone assumed VanZant and Lococo were dead. The Hunters assembled at the first annual International Conference of Monster Hunting Professionals had been some of the toughest, hardest, most experienced monster killing bad asses ever assembled, yet when the Last Dragon casino got sucked into the nightmare realm, many of us had bought it, and the rest had barely escaped with our lives. We’d only been stuck there for a few hours. How in the world could a handful of Hunters survive a land of shifting nightmare fog that made your worst nightmares come to life, for nearly two weeks?
Even if by some miracle they were still alive, they were beyond our reach. Creating portals to the other side was the sort of thing done by necromancers and insane wannabe wizards. It never ended well. So even if they’d survived somehow, we couldn’t help them. And that was almost worse.
But logic didn’t matter. These were my people, so I had to know.
Originally I was just going to look the address up myself, but you don’t make it very long as a Monster Hunter without a healthy amount of paranoia. The most wanted fugitive in the world had given this to me. And he was being pursued by Stricken, who was some kind of super spy with a stable full of monster assassins, who’d already screwed my company over multiple times, with the full weight and authority of the US government behind him. The last thing I wanted to do was draw Stricken’s malevolent gaze again. I think he only spared my life in Las Vegas on a lark.
My computer knowledge extended to Excel spreadsheets and that was about it, but hidden in the basement of the MHI compound’s main building was our IT Department. Since it consisted of a single internet troll, it could hardly be called a department, but when he wasn’t distracted being a completely awful contrarian douchebag to random strangers on Facebook, Melvin actually did pretty good work.
This section was off-limits to newbies and anyone else who might flip out if they knew we employed an eight foot tall monster to keep our network running. I used my crutch to bang on the door. It was almost four in the morning, but as far as I could tell, Melvin didn’t actually sleep. Sleep would cut into his Call of Duty time.
“Hey, troll! I need you to do something.”
“Go away!” Melvin shouted through the door. I could hear explosions and gunfire. “Melvin is on epic kill streak! Epic!”
After Trip had cut a deal with this thing, we’d learned pretty fast that you couldn’t interact with a troll like a regular employee. There was no reasoning with internet trolls. You had to establish dominance. I pounded on the door again. “Listen, you PUFF applicable pile of garden hoses, get off your lazy ass.”
“Bite me, accounting department. Talk to Melvin’s supervisor.”
“Fine. I’ll go get Holly.”
Originally we’d tried using Trip as Melvin’s supervisor, since he’d been the one to give Melvin a job offer—under duress—but Trip was just too damned nice. Now Holly on the other hand, she scared the crap out of Melvin. The video game was suddenly silent. Two seconds later the door creaked open. The hideous green monster loomed over me. His snaggly teeth were coated in so much old sugar that they’d begun growing moss. His eyes were blinking and twitchy, fueled by dozens of Red Bulls.
“How may Melvin serve you today, Mr. Monster Hunter?” He shuffled aside so I could enter.
“Research.”
When we had first hired Melvin, our network was one box under Dorcas’s desk, and this had been a storage room. Now the place was filled with server racks and blinking lights. His desk was an old door on top of a stack of cinderblocks, but there were six monitors on top of it. We’d spent a lot of money on hardware for him, but when he wasn’t being useless he could actually be kind of handy. It all worked out financially because we didn’t actually pay Melvin in anything other than snack foods and bandwidth.
“It smells like troll in here.”
“Odor of excellence,” he wheezed. “Should bottle and sell as Axe body spray. Make millions.”
“Focus, Melvin. I’ve got an address. I want to know everything about it. What’s there, who owns it, who works there, what they’re doing, and every possible way to get in.”
“Is your Google broke, scrub? This insults Melvin’s leet skillz.”
“The hard part is you have to do it without raising any red flags. Nobody can know we’re interested in this.”
“Who you worried spying? NSA? CIA?”
“Special Task Force Unicorn.”
“Oh…” The troll let out a long hissing noise. I think that indicated fear. Good. “Melvin no like Unicorn.”
“Nobody likes them, for good reasons.” Stricken had kidnapped Earl’s girlfriend, used us all as pawns in Las Vegas, and if what Franks was telling us tonight was accurate, even had Agent Myers killed. I still didn’t know how I felt about that. “So don’t get caught.”
* * *
A couple of hours later I went upstairs armed with fresh intel. The sun wasn’t up yet, but there were a handful of Hunters hanging out around Dorcas’s desk. Somebody had brewed a pot of coffee. They were all too excited talking about the events of the night and the potential ramifications to go back to bed. Trip and Holly were there. So was my brother.
“Hey, man. Where you been? I thought you’d gone back to help Julie. Your place is trashed.” Mosh offered me a cup of a coffee, but distracted, I brushed past and went to the memorial wall instead.
Every Hunter who had ever been killed or gone missing in action since the founding of MHI had a spot on this wall. There had been a lot of silver plaques when I’d started, and we had added too damned many since.
“What are you doing, Z?” Holly asked.
The shiniest, newest plaques were from Las Vegas. We were so used to losing people that we were obnoxiously efficient about getting these made quickly. I found the two I was looking for. John VanZant. Jason Lococo. Everybody gave me a curious look as I pulled those off the wall.
“Not yet.”
And then I limped off. I had a flight to catch.
* * *
An hour later I was at the Montgomery Regional Airport, sitting on a bench, waiting. I had hired a private jet, and was waiting for the pilot to arrive. MHI owned its own cargo plane, but since this might be a wild goose chase, I didn’t feel comfortable taking advantage of company assets. I was doing this on my own dime. What Melvin had turned up made me suspicious that either Franks had been yanking my chain, or this was some sort of clever secret squirrel cover up. It just didn’t seem like the sort of place they’d hide some weirdo paranormal research facility. Regardless, I’d grabbed a Go Bag, sent Julie a text that I needed to take a quick trip, and then driven straight to Montgomery’s little airport.
While I was killing time, I checked my emails. There was another one from Mom about Dad. It wasn’t good. I put my phone away. It was all second hand bad medical reports. I couldn’t look at that now. Damn, I was tired.
“Bad news?”
Surprised, I looked up to see Julie standing there, glasses perched on the end of her nose, big green duffel bag over one shoulder, cleaned up from earlier—though she’d missed a spot and had some dried blood under one ear—yet still gorgeous as usual. Her long dark hair was tied up haphazardly for once, so I could see the black line on her neck. That meant she must have been really weary, because she usually tried to hide the Guardian’s mark.
I blinked stupidly. “What’re you doing here?”
“Taking a trip apparently.” My wife gave me a tired smile. “I got your text.” She dropped her bag on the floor, and then flopped down in the seat next to me. “Cryptic.”
The waiting room was nearly deserted at this hour. Nobody was close enough to eavesdrop. “I figured if Stricken suspected public enemy number one was going to try and make contact with us, all our communications are being monitored.”
“More than likely. From the look on your face though, whatever you were reading’s not good. Your dad?”
“Yeah. He’s not doing any better.” His condition had been degrading steadily ever since he’d spoken to me and Mosh. His borrowed time was up, his purpose fulfilled. At least that awful, shitty, part of his prophecy had proven to be true. “I don’t know what to do.”
Julie put her hand on mine. “I’m so sorry.”
I changed the subject. “What are you doing here?”
“If I sat around any longer looking at what’s left of our place, I was going to lose it, so I might as well do something useful. I was finally getting the old house looking half decent. Damn Earl.”
“Where is he, anyway?”
“I think he’s tailing Franks to see if he can find Heather.”
That was ballsy, but sounded about right for Earl. “We should go help.”
“I asked. Earl very specifically said we’re not supposed to. He made a deal, MHI sits this one out.”
“You say so.” I hoped our boss knew what he was doing.
“Trying to avenge the love of his life, I can forgive him jumping the gun and wrecking the house, but Earl’s paying for the repairs. All the repairs. Frank’s blood is everywhere. I’m hiring contractors for that mess. So in the meantime, I’m going with you.”
“But you’re—”
“A couple months pregnant, not a fragile porcelain doll. I come from a long line of hardy southern gunslinger moms who squeezed out babies and then got right back to work, so don’t try and coddle me. You’re the one that’s supposed to be taking it easy, not me.”
“Okay.” We’d had this discussion before. I had finally gotten her to agree to avoid active monster hunting for the safety of our kid. “This shouldn’t be anything dangerous.”
“Honestly, I think I should at least be able to provide sniper fire until I can’t buckle my armor anymore.”
“You promised,” I reminded her. And of course, minutes after I’d finally gotten her to make that promise, we’d had Frankenstein versus the Wolfman in our living room.
“I’m kidding. Look, I’m still coming to terms with the idea. Being a mom doesn’t seem real yet. I wasn’t exactly expecting this. Having a family? With all of the weirdness in our lives?”
She was mostly worried about the Guardian’s curse. We still didn’t have a clue what that was doing to her, let alone our baby. “Your folks were Monster Hunters and you turned out great.”
“Just as long as the two of us don’t end up like my parents.”
“That’s not going to happen.” At minimum my Chosen thing and her Guardian thing meant we couldn’t be turned into vampires, but I was pretty sure she was speaking in general. There are plenty of ways to go out badly that didn’t involve becoming one of the undead.
Julie changed the subject. Between me not wanting to dwell on my dad and her not wanting to worry about impending parenthood, pretty soon we would be talking about the weather. “Melvin told me what you’re looking for. I just hope you aren’t getting your hopes up.”
“Realistically, I know they’re gone. But Lococo had a daughter. It would be nice to tell her I know for sure what happened to her dad.”
“I’ve known VanZant for years. He’s one of our best. We owe it to them. But these people actually knowing anything useful is a long shot. This trip will probably end up as begging academics or arguing with government employees. Negotiation is my job. You on the other hand, have a spotty track record for diplomacy.”
She handled all of MHI’s contracts and could charm or schmooze just about anybody. I was good with spreadsheets. “That’s a diplomatic way of putting it.”
“Exactly.” She laid her head on my shoulder and snuggled up against me. “I didn’t get a lick of sleep because of stupid Franks. Wake me up when it’s time to waddle to the plane.”
“Whatever. You don’t even look pregnant yet. But I bet in a couple months you’ll have the sexiest waddle ever.”
“Damned right I will.”
I was glad she was here.
* * *
Julie rang the doorbell.
The way Franks had made it sound I’d been expecting something fancy. Like a brutalist concrete building that could serve as a bunker, or something high-tech with lots of black glass and swoopy architecture, that sort of thing. Multidimensional Research sounded impressive.
I hadn’t been expecting a house in a middle class suburb of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It wasn’t even that big of a house. According to Melvin it was twenty-five hundred square feet of brick, stucco, and lame. It was owned by a real estate company that was more than likely a shell corporation for the MCB, and had been for a few years. There was zero indication that there was a secret tunnel network beneath it hiding anything interesting, like a supercollider, or a star gate, or something. This was the kind of street that had minivans parked on it. Instead of lawns everybody had sand, gravel, or cactus. Across the street and two houses down a little girl was peddling Girl Scout cookies.
“It’s not exactly Cheyenne Mountain.” Julie stated as she rang the doorbell again.
“I don’t know. Check out cookie girl.”
“She’s adorable.”
“Too adorable. She’s eyeballing us. I bet she’s an undercover MCB sharpshooter.”
“The pigtails are a dead giveaway,” she agreed, sarcastically.
“You’ve got to admit that’s a pretty high-speed, low-drag haircut.”
“I rocked that look when I was that age.” Julie gave up on the bell, and gave the door a firm knock. It wasn’t even a metal security door or anything. Just regular soft wood. If I didn’t have one foot in a plastic booty I could have kicked it open in one try.
We had an MHI team in New Mexico already. Julie had rightfully pointed out that there was no reason we couldn’t have asked them to do this and saved us a trip. Of course, she’d said that, but she hadn’t tried to talk me out of it either. I think we both needed to feel like we were doing something proactive.
The blinds in the nearest window shook as somebody peeked through at us. They quickly snapped shut.
“I hope this isn’t Agent Franks’ idea of a joke, and something horrible lives here,” Julie muttered.
“If we’re about to get eaten, I’m glad my last act of defiance was getting Mosh to tattoo our smiley face logo on him.”
There was the sound of locks being undone, and then the door creaked open. It was dark inside. All I could make out was part of a face and one eye. There was a security chain latched on the inside, but that was a laughable safety feature to a three hundred pounder like me. The door must have been even thinner than I thought, because he had heard what I’d said. “You know Agent Franks?”
“We’re passingly familiar,” Julie said, not wanting to commit to having just seen the thing with the quarter billion dollar PUFF bounty on his head. “Is this—”
“He’s not here, is he?” The guy inside sounded young, but breathy, like he was chunky and needed an inhaler. He tried craning his head around to see past me through the crack. “Agent Franks scares me. I don’t want any trouble.”
“You’ve not been watching the news lately, have you? Franks is indisposed. Listen, sir, we were told you might be able to help us with something.”
He stopped his futile scanning for Franks long enough to take a good look at my wife. “Hang on…Are you Julie Shackleford?”
“I am.”
“The Julie Shackleford?”
As opposed to all the other Julie Shacklefords? “That’s me.”
“No way!” He quickly closed the door, there was a rattle as he undid the chain, and then he flung the door wide open. “I’m a huge fan!”
I about fell off the porch. He had one eye. Not like one eye, missing the other, sort of thing, but one great big eye right in the middle of his lumpy misshapen face.
“You’re a cyclops,” Julie stated calmly.
But despite being a fearsome monster of myth and legend, he was just kind of standing there, grinning stupidly. The cyclops was a big fellow, portly, but only about as tall as I was. In a typical illustration they’d be wearing a fur loin cloth and carrying a tree for a club. This one was wearing a fuzzy blue bathrobe, sweat pants, and bright green Crocs.
“And your biggest fan! Oh man, I can’t believe this!” He actually clapped his hands together with glee. “Yay!”
Across the street, cookie girl had caught up with us. She’d rightly figured I had the look of a mark who would purchase my body weight in Samoas if given the opportunity. When she saw the cyclops she screamed, dropped her Thin Mints, and ran for her life.
“Whoops! I’m not supposed to be seen by the neighbors without my disguise. I could lose my exemption.” The cyclops had great big buck teeth. “Oh well. Come in. Come in!”
Julie and I exchanged glances. Cyclops were supposed to be these rare, badass giants, carrying off heroes to dark caves to be devoured. He was just so goofy looking that I hadn’t even been tempted to reach for my gun. I had no idea how long ago it had been since a cyclops had caused trouble, nor did I know the last time a Hunter had collected PUFF on one. Decades? The scholarly types had figured them for extinct.
Julie shrugged. What the hell? Why not? She entered the home. I sighed, then followed.
Other than the large number of comic book posters stuck on the walls, the interior of his house was utterly normal. He had a scraggly beard, but it only seemed to be growing out of his neck. Judging by the orange dust all over him, and the bag on the couch, he’d been eating Cheetos. The TV was paused on some anime.
Once we were inside he closed the door and locked it behind him.
“This is such an honor. I’m Poly, Welcome to Albuquerque.”
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Pauly.”
“No, Poly. It’s short for Polyphemus. Sorry. I’m totally geeking out. Julie Shackleford is in my house.”
“I’ve never met a cyclops before,” Julie said with the utmost politeness.
“Aren’t you supposed to be gigantic?” I asked, but Julie immediately gave me a look like don’t mess this up. Don’t blame me. I was just wondering if maybe we’d found a midget cyclops.
“Us being giants is a hateful inaccurate stereotype that exists because the ancient Greeks were racist. And super short. It’s all relative.” He turned back to Julie. I swear the cyclops was going full on fan boy. He was damned near giddy. “I’ve never met anyone from MHI before, let alone a legend. Do you know Milo Anderson? Oh my gosh…You totally know Milo Anderson!” He looked me over with his huge gelatinous eyeball. “And you’re Owen Pitt.”
“That’s me.”
He shrugged. “That’s cool I guess.”
Ouch.
“If you don’t mind me asking, how do you know about us, Poly?”
“Remote viewing and MCB reports mostly but you’re way prettier in person.” The cyclops gulped. He began to blush. “I’m sorry. That probably sounded rude.”
“That’s fine,” Julie said quickly. I was about to interject no, it isn’t, but she continued. “Remote viewing, you do that for the MCB?”
“Mostly. I like when they ask me to look at stuff you were involved in. It’s better than Netflix.” You’re the best.”
Julie nodded. That was awkward. “Thanks.”
“They captured me, but Agent Myers got me a provisional PUFF exemption because I can see some things humans can’t. They pay me to look at pictures and tell them stuff. It’s a sweet deal. It sure beats living in a cave and stealing goats. And I get to help the heroes!” He sounded really proud as he began to lumber down the hallway. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
One side of the hall was filled with movie posters. The other side was action figures, still in the packaging. I’d have to introduce this guy to Trip. They’d get along great. Probably start a weekly game night.
“What do you mean by help the heroes?” Julie asked.
“Agent Myers and his guys. They’re super nice. Well, except for Franks. Obviously. He’s kind of a dick. I was locked up in this prison with all sorts of awful monsters and these other guys were doing experiments on my brain. They weren’t nice at all. Even threatened to pluck my eye out. Can you believe it? But after that big rift in Alabama a couple years ago, Agent Myers thought I could help, so he snuck me out of the prison in the middle of the night. I’ve been here ever since.”
“Why did he do that?”
“Because us cyclops can see things humans can’t. That’s why there aren’t many of us left. Once humans figured that out they started stealing us. Most of us aren’t helpful and nice like me, so humans just suck their eyeball out to make into drugs to give other humans to try and get our powers. It never works good. When they try to see far away human eyes are too wimpy and start squirting blood.”
“Gross.” And here I’d always thought all those supposed Cold War remote viewing conspiracy theories were nonsense. We stopped, closed door on one side, bathroom on the other. The sink was covered in tubes of acne cream. “What kind of things can you see?”
“Like they’ll tell me there’s a rift, and I can see into the other side a little. Or something will happen, and they’ll take pictures of it from a satellite, and then Agent Myers will have me look at the pictures and tell them all the things they can’t see. Like spirits and ghosts, or what the people in the picture were saying at the time.”
“You can see conversations. In the past?”
“Sometimes. He gets super happy when I do that. Agent Myers or one of his friends check in on me once in a while, but I’m not allowed to talk to anybody else from the government. Agent Myers said I could get in a lot of trouble if I do that.”
This all sounded like it wasn’t the government hiding him, but he was being hidden from the government. Had Myers stolen Poly from STFU? Judging by our humble surroundings, I had a sneaky feeling this was one of Myers’ off the books operations. The poor cyclops didn’t even know that his benefactor was dead.
“Are you allowed to leave?” I asked.
“Nope.” Poly pulled up one leg of his sweat pants to display an ankle monitor. “I can go in the back yard or as far as the mail box, but only if I wear my disguise. No outside world past the mail box for me…But I can talk to you guys, right? I mean, you’re Julie Friggin’ Shackleford, for Zeus’ sake!”
“Absolutely,” Julie agreed, and she was so nice she probably felt guilty for taking advantage of Myers’ captive cyclops nerd.
Poly opened the door. There was a drawing table in the middle of the room. Every wall was covered in maps, from floor to ceiling, most of them the regular, printed folding kind, but then there were others that appeared to have been drawn by hand. Those maps were almost childlike in their simplicity, with cartoon terrain features, and place names with rough letters that looked drawn rather than written.
“Sorry. I don’t draw good.” Poly held up his fingers and wiggled them. They looked like fat sausages. “I can’t see everything that comes through the holes in the world, but I see some, and when I see them early enough, that makes Myers really happy. Humans think two eyes is good, but your eyes suck. Depth perception isn’t all that. Two eyes, but only one world. Cyclops have one eye, but we can see two worlds at the same time. It’s flipped. You can only see what’s in front of you. It gets blurry but us cyclops can see things far away, through walls, on the other side of the world, even sometimes, through time if we look hard enough.” Poly turned to me and grinned. His front teeth were way too big, like a beaver. “I can tell you know what seeing through time is like, huh, Owen Pitt?”
“Yeah, a little.”
Julie took out her phone and started taking pictures of the maps. Poly didn’t seem to mind. I spotted a map of Las Vegas on top of the nearest pile and walked over to it. A circle had been drawn around the Last Dragon.
“Agent Myers asked me to focus extra hard there, to make sure nothing else bad was sneaking through.”
Next to it was one of the hand drawn maps. “Last Dragon” had been scribbled on that page next to a big black X. It took me a moment to realize that map wasn’t of any place on Earth. The terrain features were meaningless scribbles. The place names were gibberish. “Julie, check this out.”
“That’s when it went into the bad place where nightmares come from,” Poly said. “It’s one of the between worlds. You’ve both been there, so you know. I don’t like looking there at all. It is sad and scary and everything that lives there is mean and hungry. You were lucky to get away.”
This was what we’d come for. “Not all of us got out. We left some friends behind. Can you tell what happened to them?”
The cyclops nodded vigorously. It made his double chins jiggle. “Some got stuck but some died. That left seven.”
“Seven are still alive?” Julie gave me an incredulous look.
“They sure are, Julie Shackleford. The door is closed, so I can’t see clear no more. But human lives glow. Embers Agent Myers called them. Humans in a bad place are sparks in the dark. So I know seven good guys remain.”
I believed him. It was like a punch to the gut. There were survivors. But we couldn’t help them. That was almost worse. “Can you see how they’re doing? Did they find a place to hide? Are they safe?”
“Sorry.” The cyclops shrugged his meaty shoulders. “It’s like windows. Open I can see fine. When the blinds are closed I can see the light coming through, but I can’t see what they’re doing. Next time they open up I’ll be able to see probably.”
Julie was staring at the map of the nightmare realm. “What the hell do we do now?”
Myers had sprung this cyclops to keep an eye on rifts. It was worth a shot. “Next time they open…Poly, do you know any other ways into the Nightmare Realm?”
He shook his head in the negative. That made the jelly of his great big eye slosh. It made me a little nauseous to look at. “I can’t watch the whole world at once. That would be silly. I can only see places when I look at them hard, and Agent Myers calls and tells me where to look. I guess there’s tiny ones all the time, where the little nightmare thingies pop out, but nothing you could squeeze a human through. Though come to think of it there’s…No. Never mind.”
“What is it, Poly?” Julie gently coaxed.
“There’s one place that opens every year when the stars line up right, but it is too scary, even for Julie Shackleford and MHI. If you go there you would all die. And that would be super sad.”
I started to say something, but Julie shook her head. Right. Diplomacy. I was too impatient and pushy, but I wasn’t too proud to admit it. I had a sneaky feeling that if I was the one interrogating Poly we wouldn’t have even made it this far.
“It’s fine, Poly. We’ll be careful.”
“I don’t have many friends. All the other cyclops have gone away. Agent Myers is my friend but he’s so busy he doesn’t visit much. You could be my friend, Julie Shackleford. But if you go there, you’ll die, and we can’t be friends if you’re dead.”
He was wrong there. I had a bunch of friends who were dead.
“Just because you tell us about it doesn’t mean we’ll do anything dangerous with that knowledge. We just want to understand.” Julie was very patient. She was going to be a great mom. “It’s very important to us. Please?”
“Okay.” Poly was clearly agitated. “Come on. I’ll show you Agent Myers’ Big Secret Project.” He wandered from the office back into the hall. “He said if I did a good enough job watching for this one special bad guy he’d put me in a cosplay disguise and take me to DragonCon. I want to be in the parade.”
The other bedroom was set up similar to the first, only even more cluttered if that was possible. One entire wall was taken up by a big map of the world. Maybe it was because there were a bunch of push pins stuck all over it that it reminded me of the map we had started putting together in a casino hotel room, based upon odd cases and rumors from the world’s monster hunters, all involving an unknown underground menace.
Julie realized the same thing. “It’s like Earl’s mobilization map for all the underground anomalies…All the ones we know about are flagged on here. Only there’s a lot more locations on this one than on ours.”
“Things come crawling out of the dirt. They’ve been getting busier. Every week Agent Myers calls and gives me a new place to watch and I tell him if I saw anything. There are so many now I can’t hardly keep up looking at them. Agent Myers tries not to act scared when he visits, but I can tell he’s afraid.”
It was color coded. The yellow pins seemed to correspond with the various sinkholes and tunnels that had opened up, leaving out of the way rural villages entirely depopulated. There was a yellow pin in the ocean where the Chinese navy had blown up an underwater city. There was a black pin at DeSoya Caverns and another one in New Zealand where we’d fought the Arbmunep. There were also green and white pins all over, and one big red thumbtack near the top.
“Green is for Fey. They’re weird and tricky. Black is for Old Ones. They hurt my eye. Agent Myers says for me never to look at their side because I’ll go crazy. White is for stuff Agent Myers wasn’t sure about.”
“Yellow?”
“Agent Myers doesn’t know much about them, just that’s the same symbol shows up. Wherever it is, I can’t see around it very good. They belong to a very bad thing that got woke up when time got broken.”
“Crap.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Julie told me. “If you hadn’t used the artifact, then Lord Machado would have won and we’d all be doomed anyway.”
“Still…”
“The different color pins don’t like each other,” Poly said. “They fight the good guys, but they fight each other too.”
I knew our fate was intertwined with the various warring cosmic factions, I’d just never seen it so laid out and color coded for my convenience before. “What makes these places special?”
“These are where worlds rub against each other and the borders get fuzzy. Sometimes monsters come through there.”
“There’s that many?” Julie was a little taken back. “I mean, we know it happens, but still…That’s insane.”
There were a cluster of different color pins stuck in Natchy Bottom. That I could believe.
“Humans call them places of power,” Poly offered helpfully. “Black magic is stronger there.”
“We’re passingly familiar with the concept,” I muttered. “What about this big red guy?”
“That’s the one that made Agent Myers the most scared. I’m supposed to look at it every single day to see if stuff is happening there. Sometimes there are things on top. But I think the scary part is what’s beneath.”
“What’s beneath there, Poly?” Julie asked as she took a picture of the big map.
“The end of the world I think.” Water began pouring out of his big squishy eye. I realized Poly had started crying. He sniffed. “A city of monsters. A very bad thing lives there, maybe the baddest thing of all, come to ruin everything. Agent Myers thinks the bad thing is there for now, but if he leaves I’m supposed to call right away. He’s the one that’s been making the yellow pins show up, to test the good guys, so he can learn how to beat the heroes. Agent Myers is very afraid of him, and he’s the bravest human I know.”
Julie touched him gently on the shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.” That seemed to calm him down. “What can you tell us about the bad thing?”
“Not much. He’s hard to look at. It’s like he’s in more than one place at a time, and more than one time in one place. Though I think he’s mostly stayed there since he woke up. But he has lots of almost as bad things working for him, and they come and go all over the place, spying or making trouble.”
Either the cyclops really was a childlike innocent, or he was the best actor ever, but if Myers had taken the risk of stealing and hiding him from Unicorn, that meant his remote viewing thing was legit.
“This scary place that opens to the nightmare world, it’s there, isn’t it?”
Hesitant, Poly lifted one sausage finger to point, but then paused. “Promise you won’t go there?”
“I won’t lie to you. I can’t make that promise, Poly,” Julie said. “But we’ll do our best, and we’ll try to be safe. Heroes have to do dangerous things sometimes to help others. That’s what makes us the good guys.”
“I knew you would be as brave as Agent Myers.” And then, sure enough, Poly the Cyclops pointed at the big red pin. “It’s in the City of Monsters.”
It was way up north, on a large island off the coast of Russia. I read the name. “Son of a bitch.” My hands closed into fists. My lips twisted into an unconscious snarl. My reaction must have startled Poly, because he took a nervous step back.
“What’s wrong, Owen?”
“That’s where they killed my dad.”
* * *
Something big happened while Julie and I were on our way to the airport. I’d not checked the news recently, but I could tell by the way all of the other travelers had gathered around the TV screens in a hushed silence that it was bad news, unfolding live.
I limped to the back of the crowd, not close enough to hear the announcer, but I could read the scroll along the bottom of the screen. India. Death toll unknown, but it was in the hundreds.
“What happened?” I asked the nearest waiting passenger.
“They think a chemical plant caught fire,” she said. “The poison gas burned a whole town. That’s so sad.”
The video showed terrified crowds of people running for their lives. Fires raged out of control in the background as buildings collapsed.
“It’s probably just an accident,” Julie whispered.
“I hope so.” Which was a terrible thing to say, but there it was. When you worked in this business it was really easy to get paranoid that every single tragedy you saw on the news was just a cover story to explain away the existence of monsters. In reality plenty of regular, normal bad things happened every day. We could have gotten hit by a truck on the way here. Or our plane could crash on takeoff, and that was just rotten luck. No monsters necessary. And sometimes towns just catch on fire and rapidly burn to the ground without the forces of evil holding the match.
But then the live camera angle changed, away from the refugees and toward a nearby hillside, where a giant symbol had been freshly burned into the stone. The camera only lingered on it for a moment. Most people wouldn’t recognize it as anything other than random char. We knew it was a calling card.
Julie sighed. “Damn it. Not again.”
Somebody at CNN must have been read in, because the live feed was cut. They switched to the studio, where they began introducing a chemical expert, who I was certain would be paid off by the MCB to regurgitate whatever the Indian government’s official cover story for the incident was.
I was seeing red. How many more people had to die because I’d woken this thing up?
“Are you okay?” Julie tried to take my hand, but it had unconsciously clenched into a fist.
“I won’t be until we stop this son of a bitch.”