Beaumont Texas, 3 weeks after the apocalypse.

"Come look at this." Anat sounds worried, but also excited. I know her well enough to know it isn't a good sign. I follow her pointing finger, and see a place where the sky ripples like heat waves or gas fumes. It reminds me of the ripples of light when Cas tries to become invisible. Or like the flicker of energy when the charged arrows hit their targets.

"I can feel it vibrating in my mind," she says. "There was a long gust of wind earlier, and it didn't move. It isn't anything real. Nothing of this world, anyway. It's something magic. And something powerful."

"So, you think we should investigate?"

"Fuck yes, we should investigate. If it's dangerous we don't want to just wait around. What if it is growing? I feel like it's getting stronger."

"What's this all about?" asks Rogers as he approaches from behind us.

"Wow, what's that?" Ellie noticed right away.

"What? Oh, that's weird," Johnson says.

"Shit, I can feel it. In my head." Ellie sounds queasy, and a glance in her direction confirms the intensity of her reaction. "I feel cruelty seeping from it. It's nothing like a predator, not in any sense we would recognize. If it is a predator, it feeds on suffering."

"It feels our minds on it, and wants us to come to it so it can hurt us." Anat’s voice is quiet but intense.

"So, we're not going then, right?" Ellie asks.

"We have to. We have to know what's going on, but we have to be careful."

"What could go wrong?" Johnson.

"Only, just fucking everything, I'm sure. Shit." Cas's voice is shrill and unhappy. But when is he ever happy?

"You think it's more zombies?" asks Johnson.

We gear up with our new armor and weapons. By now we've all figured out how to control our qi and sense our dantians through the microcosmic orbit meditations. And most importantly, we all have been able to dissolve the essence we've absorbed from the enemies we fought into our qi to supercharge it. Ellie and Anat have been working on how to share essence so those of us who play more supporting roles like Ellie can keep up with the rest of us. But haven't had a chance to teach the rest of us yet. Fortunately, none of us have moved forward so dramatically that there is any kind of imbalance developing.

We load a three day supply of water and canned food into the backpacks. We're as ready as we'll ever be. The hike to the anomaly, as we've come to call it, is relatively uneventful. Zombies are starting to fight in small packs now, but we are ready for them.

Rogers, Johnson, and I have found that when we focus our qi through our shields, it forms a field extending from the edges of the shield. When we form a shield-wall so the fields overlap, those fields reinforce each other becoming greater than the sum of their parts. Since my control of qi is greater, they put me in the center as we advance, with Rogers to my right and Johnson to my left. We've practiced advancing in a series of coordinated lunges to keep our shield wall together and are looking forward to putting our skills to the test.

We encounter a pack of four zombies, charging as we approach them. We lunge forward just as the first reaches our shield wall, and it practically bounces off. The other three collide and mill around as we begin to stab them with our short spears, with The back line has worked out a plan and drilled it a bit, now they execute. Since we hold our sheild in our left hands, our right sides are more vulnerable. So they focus their attacks on first the right-most opponent, then move across. Ellie jabs over the top of our shields and around our heads. Anat is able to pulse the sheath of flames around her spear at will, and I see it flare just before it stabs hissing into the zombies' flesh, each falling to the ground, writhing and screaming briefly in the wake of her attacks before lying still. I can feel that her killing blows draw most of the essence extracted by killing the creatures, but I'm sure she'll share, now that they've figured out how to do that.

Along the way we find a pawn shop, and search it. Among the items are a large collection of watches, many of which are the old-fashioned windup sort. We each take one, except Stefan who always wore one. The rest of us wind ours and sync our watches to his.

At last we get to the anomaly, which is sitting in the middle of a vacant lot surrounded by a small store, a house, an auto shop, and a thrift store. It looks like a triple-tall dust devil made of gas fumes, but denser, shimmering like oil on water. Floating in the center at waist height is a void of perfect blackness the size of an exercise ball that absorbs all light.

"It's a conduit between universes," Anat whispers. "To a universe of pain and cruelty."

"So, basically Cenobites," Johnson quips.

"I don't know."

Suddenly, something reminiscent of an insect leg protrudes from the void, followed a moment later by two more. A head pushes out, looking a bit like a hairless human face whose center has been pulled sharply forward from the upper jaw, turning the upper jaw and teeth into a long, lipless parrot-beak, matched by the lower jaw to create something like an insect mandible but turned vertically. Most of the nose is blended with the rest of that sloping, protruding triangular line, except by nostrils that flare and flex as the thing tests the wind. The eyes look vaguely human but bulge in sockets turned more outward than would be seen in any human, seeming to move independently as it scans its surroundings for a moment before focusing on us.

It pulls itself through the blackness and we can see that each leg ends in a huge, wickedly pointed raptor like claw. As the creature lowers its front legs to the ground and climbs the back part of its body out, and we can see that the creature's body is more humanoid than insectoid, with obvious bony hips that are narrower than the wide shoulders, and an engorged belly in between that seems to hold much of the creature's vital viscera in a fashion similar to the abdomen of an insect. The joints at the hips and shoulders are in pairs, with a total of eight legs on an otherwise mostly humanoid body. The claws flex as it stands, so that it rests its weight on a rather hoof-like bony spur projecting from the base of the outer curve of the claw, protecting the sharp point from wear. And I become aware of a dull ache in my joints like the flu. And a slight headache like I went too long without eating. Even the roots of my teeth feel wrong. And an old injury in my left shoulder I haven't thought of in years reminds me that it's there.

The creature scurries forward, to interpose itself between us and the center of the anomaly as another such creature crawls out, then skitters to the side as the newly arrived creature takes a position to the other side, before yet a third emerges and takes its place between the first two. The closer they get and the more of them there are, the more intense the aches become. It must be some kind of pain aura.

Then something like a tall man with a lithely muscular body climbs through the void. It looks lime kind of muscular elf or tall goblin, for it has ash-gray skin and is bald, with red reptilian eyes, and long pointed ears. It wears what seems to be armor made of what looks like thick black hide which covers every bit of it except for the top two-thirds of its head, above a curved line that goes up across the bridge of its nose and then down below its ears, but which is strangely supple and form-fitting. Lines of crimson runes in a style that looks halfway between Atlantean and Edenic runes from Earth trace sigils in seemingly random stripes across it, formations of obvious power, but without obvious pattern. A moment later, a kind of close-fitting cowl slides up and over its head, the middle-front forming a low widow's peak, almost a nasal. As it moves forward I feel the pain begin to seep into my joints, teeth, and skull intensify markedly, to the point I can barely move. Ellie mutters something, then begins chanting under her breath. The pain eases.

I plant my stance and press my shield forward, pushing my qi into the barrier. Is it my imagination, or does the pain ease fractionally? Rodgers on my right and Johnson on my left step forward, doing the same, and the pain ebbs a bit more. They push their qi into their shields and I feel their qi connect with mine, the shielding fields growing stronger and the pain is halved in intensity, though it is still there.

The spider-people form the front line, with the humanoid behind. He pulls out something like a chain whip tipped by an acutely pointed dart and begins whirling it. It crackles with electricity.

We push forward into their line. The spider thing in front of me swipes at my face with a vicious claw but I duck my head so the rim of my helm closes against the edge of my bevor with a dull clang. The claw glances off my helm as I peer out through rows of holes in the top edge of the bevor, but I still feel a moment of searing pain across my face as the thing’s power ripples though the mundane steel. What agony would we face if we were actually wounded?

The arachnoid monstrosity hooks its claws over the top of my shield. It tries to pull my shields down and bite over the top. I stab with my spear to keep the jaws of the creature attacking me at bay. Its body is all chitinous plates. I stab at its eyes. At the opening of its maw. It dodges. Weaves. My spear glances off again and again. It isn't just the armor. I feel it's power resisting my blows. I sense that my qi is barely strong enough to harm it at all, and against the armor I have little hope at all.

I glance at the others and see that Rodgers and Johnson are being similarly grappled. An arrow glances off the armored head of the humanoid spider to the right in a flicker of expended qi, and another does the same off its equally robust chest. Anat's spear glances off the creature's chest as well.

I vaguely hear Stefan yell "Neck" then it's my turn to dodge as the crackling chain dart of the demonic humanoid streaks toward me. Unfortunately, it is swinging downward and though it misses my head it strikes my armored shoulder. I feel a line of crackling fire shoot from shoulder to foot leaving my muscles spasming in such agony I can barely think. But I'm otherwise unharmed as my armor conducts the electrical discharge into the ground.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Another pair of arrows punch through the weaker chitin on the right-most spider-person's throat, and a burst of qi tears through chitin plates, sending blood and bits of meat and scale in all directions. A moment later, Anat capitalizes on the bleeding wound. He spear lances into its flesh with a scream, then a firey explosion half seversits neck as more bits of monster flesh rains down on us. The arachnoid collapses. They're more powerful than us but now it's seven to three, we have stronger weapons and armor, and their line is broken.

Rogers immediately capitalizes, pushing forward to double-team the spider in front of me. Against two spears it is forced onto the defensive, but I see Rogers grimace in pain. I feel it too, as bending the line of our shield-wall hems in the demonic spider thing I'm fighting but takes his shield out of alignment with the rest of the front line, reducing the protection for all of us. And he's even more exposed to the humanoid demon's aura. Still he stands firm as Anat takes advantage of the break in the line to rush forward. I glance at her and see a mixture of fatalistic determination and masochistic self-loathing on her face as she grimly assaults into the full force of the creature's pain aura. Stefan calls "Face!'" as Cas circles outward to line up a right-angle shot without risking Anat. Anat deflects the gray-skinned thing's chain, though her body jerks and some of the thing’s pain power must still have hurt her. A moment later two arrows slam into the eye opening of the creature's armor, and the explosion of qi staggers it.

A moment later Anat lunges forward, jabbing her spear into one of the creature's eyes. But the thing grasps the shaft of the hilt with one hand stopping her blow. It swings its chain dart in a fast circle over its head, as Anat drops her spear and draws her machete. She sharply lunges forward a step and the thing swings his chain dart at her. But her lunge was a fake and the crackling electrified chain whizzes in front of her face. Then she bursts back into motion, screaming fit to give a banshee pause as she lunges at it through the thing's pain aura, stabbing her wickedly pointed machete into the creature's face. Then she skips forward explosively to close the distance and rapidly slams half a dozen stabs into its face almost faster than the eye can follow. She falls to her knees as it collapses.

I should have been paying attention to my fight though, because just then, a hooked claw swipes at me over the top of my shield, catching me with my head up and my face exposed. My dodgeball instincts save me as I twist away, but not fast enough to avoid the claw entirely, and it slices into the side of my cheek. The creature's agonizing power lances into me and I feel like my head is about to explode. I roll away sobbing, holding my face. I'm dimly aware of Anat attacking the creature alongside Rodgers as the rest of the team quickly overwhelms it before killing the last of the spiders. Ellie is next to me, whispering some kind of mantra as she cradles my head.

The pain eases and I look up at her, feeling the edges of the opening through my cheek with my tongue. Ellie reaches out with her right hand, making a pinching motion that reminds me of Darth Vader force choking someone, but I feel the edges of the wound pressed closed. She holds her left palm over my face and I feel the loving power of the universe, the embrace of every sentient living thing flowing through her hand. For a moment, there is no pain, no fear. All of my anger, even the anger I'd held onto so long and buried so deep I'd forgotten about it is washed away. And I feel the flesh of my face knitting itself together. I know I'll have a scar, but at least I'll be whole. Tears of gratitude stream down my face, for her kindness, but more for the kindness of that universal love. Then it stops and I'm back to being bone tired, every joint, head, and even my teeth aching.

Rodgers holds out a hand, helping me up.

"You ok?" asks Anat.

"Yeah. Thanks. Fuck, I wouldn't want to get hit somewhere more vital by one of those things."

"And there's bound to be a lot more of them in there," says Johnson, stepping toward the anomaly and setting his stance.

"I don't like our chances," says Stefan.

"I don't either," replies Anat, "but we have to know what we are up against."

"Yeah, I can't argue with that."

"I'll go first," I say. Better action than thinking about what is coming. The worst part of war for me was always the waiting.

I climb through the blackness of the opening as fast as I can. Pain assaults my senses. Every part of my body aches. I'm afraid at first that there might be enemies nearby, but apparently the whole place feels like that here. Fuck. I hear distant screams, faint but so numerous that they blend together in a muted cacophony. I move up to make room for Rodgers and Johnson to enter, then we move forward to make room for the back line.

All around us is what looks like a catacomb or labyrinth made of stone. I feel earth qi, thick and heavy as if we're deep underground. We have entered a large room lit by braziers hanging from the ceiling and torches on the walls. Random torture devices are mounted here and there to the walls, sitting on the floor, or hanging from the ceiling between the braziers.

The opening in space we've just crawled out of looks just like the one on our world's side. It's off center with respect to the room, seeming to have opened as randomly as the phenomenon in our world. Could our presence here be as unexpected to the denizens of this realm as the beings we fought were to us?

The room is irregular in outline, like two odd-shaped rectangles smashed together, and the floor changes level in between. The lower level is partly flooded with dark liquid. Water? There are numerous arched corridors out of the room. Some taller, some wider, others smaller, and flooded tunnels on the lower level that could be a ridiculously spacious sewer, a contained river, or just part of the structure that became flooded. I see no clues to suggest where any of them might lead.

"There's no smell of smoke," Anat says. "I think the flames are some kind of magic lighting." Her eyes are on the torture gear though.

"It sure helps set the mood," says Stefan looking at the torture gear too. Everyone chuckles, releasing tension.

"Well, at least there's no welcoming committee."

"Maybe that was just the private they left on guard duty. Or someone who wandered by."

"I sense a difference in the energy from that direction." Anat points toward a tunnel that looks no different than any other. "I think it's an opening to another world. The energy is faint, but it's different than our world. And less malevolent than the atmosphere here."

"Let's see what we find." Stefan says. We move forward carefully, weapons at the ready. A dull ache like chronic pain hangs over us all. I try to channel the power of the universe, using the techniques that Ellie taught, and that helps hold it at bay.

After 5 minutes of walking we come to a fork. Anat's face is grim, and I see pain lining her face but she doesn't hesitate, pointing us to take the right-hand path. Another junction, this time a crossroads, and she directs us left. Then a T to the side and she points straight ahead.

After over an hour of walking we hear the screams ahead of us getting obviously louder. My pain level starts to climb again. We continue, eventually coming to a corner where it sounds like scores of people are suffering in agony just around it. After sharing worried glances all around, we move around the bend.

Ahead of us is room even bigger than the one we entered same gray stone walls and lighting with hanging braziers and magical torches on the walls. But this one is a scene that seems straight out of some outlandish hell, for the implements of torture here are anything but idle. The first thing we notice is a huge creature that has a lower body like a spider the size of a small car, with eight massive legs that could each have been torn from the rear haunches of a horse. Growing out of the front of it is a humanoid body from the hips up that if it was a person would be an enormous monster of a man, like the Mountain from Game of Thrones, if not bigger, and covered with plates of chitin. Belying the otherwise humanoid appearance of that torso, the creature has four arms, each a strange appendage ending with a three-digit hand with a single finger and two opposable thumbs, and the finger being tipped with a claw as long as a bowie knife. The thing's head looks almost human but has four eyes, the same red-reptilian eyes as the humanoid thing we fought. It has the same long ears, as well, but has spider-like mandibles growing from its cheeks that gnash together in front of its face.

There are half a dozen of the things we fought before, evidently its minions, dressed in the same hide-like armor with runic formations. There are a dozen smaller beings of a clearly related species whose heads would come up only to an average human's navel or perhaps the bottom of their ribs wearing what looks more like simple black, form-fitting leather in the same shapes, but without the runes. There are also half a dozen of the spider-things.

Around the rest of the room are at least a hundred stripped humanoid figures of various shapes and sizes, suffering in more ways than I could ever have imagined a being might be tortured. Some sit in cages that barely fit their bodies that hang from the ceiling, others in tall cages that force them to stay standing. And there are grates in the floor that hint at oubliettes, but those are the least of the horrors we see before us.

Others hang from their feet over the water, so they must struggle to keep their heads above the surface, or failing that to drown. But it seems death is impossible for these souls, as I watch a victim hanging spread to four corners in the air with their guts drawn out across the floor have the viscera packed back in and the wound close itself even as they still scream. Others are strung up by one ankle, wrists shackled together behind them with weights that draw their wrists down to twist their shoulders, and on their other ankle to pull it out both torturing and humiliating. Others have arms and legs locked folded, standing on knee and elbow tips upon small spiked platforms, while hooked chains impaled in their flesh threaten them with more terribles agonies if they fail to maintain their purchase.

Others are impaled through their bodies in various directions, or forced to support themselves over sharp spikes until fatigue take its toll and their bodies betray them to the piercing tools. Or they are stretched horizontally, while being bent back over sharply pointed bars under their waists. Or they are forced to sit upon acutely pointed pyramids that pierce and spread them horrifyingly.

How long we gape at the atrocities before us, I do not know. It was probably only seconds, but those seconds will surely be etched in my mind until my dying day. Then the great spider thing rounds toward us, hissing words in a language we need not know to understand. For the entire company in the room turns in our direction and begins to advance.

We all do the same calculation in our heads, that the more of the things we fought earlier were facing us, the greater the pain, and that the pain aura of the goblin thing was greater than the spiders. We all seem to anticipate that the combined pain aura of host before us would overwhelm us, fighting ability aside. We have no chance.

Some might have simply fled, but the two cops and I maintained good defensive order as we retreated, though we were not un-hasty in our escape. Fortunately the enemy did not rush us. Perhaps it was out of caution, as they faced well armed and armored aliens that were previously unknown to them. If they had, surely either we would have fallen paralyzed by pain or else have routed, and to flee has always been the surest way to die on a battlefield in the age of hand weapons. A samurai saying that one of my drill sergeants liked to quote was "he who fears death shall die, he who has no fear of death will live." There is much truth to it.

We make it to the gate between worlds, and hurriedly escape in the opposite order we entered in. Once outside we face a dilemma. Do we try to fight them here at this opening, or run away before they try to come through.

"What if that big demon alone has a pain aura strong enough to cripple us?" Stefan asks, cutting through our ambivalence. None of us has an answer for that. We run, dogged as much by feelings of cowardice in the face of the enemy as by fear of what might follow us through the anomaly.

We sit as a group in the warehouse, eating and rehydrating. Then after finishing we sit in silence.

"Well, I for one am intensely disappointed in myself!" Johnson exclaims, breaking the ice. "We get geared up in armor, then retreat from a bunch of demons and it didn't even occur to me to scream 'run away!' in a high-pitched panicky voice. What kind of failure of a Monty Python fan am I?"

We chuckle, then start discussing our options. First, we get into the easy business, agreeing on names so we can actually talk about what happened. We call the thing that appeared in the city a 'rift,' the smaller humanoids we call 'goblins' and the larger ones 'hobgoblins.' We call the small spiders-things are 'spider mobs,' while the big thing is a 'spider boss.' That out of the way, we get to the hard part. Figuring out what to do.

"There has to be a way to get strong faster," says Stefan, "and I think the energy we get from fighting zombies is the key."

"Meditation has been working for me so far," says Ellie.

"But how hard was it to hold the pain aura away, and how long did it take you to get good enough to be able to do that?" asks Rodgers.

"Not as hard as healing Jayce, but yeah, it took me a long time. I guess you don't think we have that long."

"I don't know," says Stefan. "But preparing for what you think the enemy will do instead of what they can do is a good way to get blindsided. Preparing for what you hope they do is a recipe for disaster."

"I've never wanted to kill the zombies," says Anat. "They are people. They might still be conscious on some level. But I don't see any reason to assume those demons are just going to leave us alone. We have to get stronger, and we have to do it fast. And hunting zombies seems to be the fastest way to do that."

None of us like it, but neither can we see a better way. Ellie in particular looks ill, but even she nods grimly.

"Along the way, we should go to my apartment and retrieve my books on runes and my notes. Maybe I can do some enchanting to give us a better chance."

"What about Houston?" asks Anat.

"What about it?" Rogers says.

"Haven't a lot of the Atlantean finds been by a university there?"

"Yeah, and a lot of those relics are enchanted. Some could be useful."

"So after we clear Beaumont we should go through Port Aurthur and then to Houston. At the very least, we'll find lots more zombies to hunt for their essence."