I was going to die. At least, that’s what the floating screen told me.
The prognosis for your long-term survival is vanishingly slim, the message read in bold, blocky letters. The words were scrawled across a semitransparent yellow window, which looked like one of those eight-bit Nintendo Game notifications from the late eighties. I suggest you come to terms with this reality and prepare yourself accordingly. If you happen to be a person of religious conviction, now would be an appropriate time to make amends with your preferred deity.
My eyes skipped frantically from word to word as I reread the prompt for the third time.
What in the absolute fuck is going on here?
A cold sweat broke out across my skin, and I momentarily pulled my gaze away from the prompt and looked down at the ground. The ghostly yellow screen remained frozen in the air.
I was in a wide hallway with short gray carpet—the kind they use in hotels and office buildings—and walls covered from floor to ceiling in stained yellow wallpaper, peeling in places and covered with water spots in others.
Directly behind me was a dead-end hallway with a blazing red exit sign, but no door.
Ahead was an open, empty conference room with high ceilings that could’ve belonged inside any of a thousand run-down hotels across America. The walls were plastered with more of the nondescript yellow wallpaper, and white columns rose to a drab white-tiled ceiling dotted with recessed fluorescent lights. Those lights flickered sporadically, casting pools of sterile illumination and oceans of darkness across the carpeted floor in turns.
There was no furniture in the room beyond.
No end tables or cheap wing-backed chairs.
No reception desk or receiving area.
Just an enormous, abandoned cavern of gray carpet and wallpaper, which reminded me of a yawning mouth. Hallways branched off from the vacant conference room, snaking out of view.
This couldn’t be real. It didn’t make sense. None of this made any sense.
For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where I was, how I’d gotten here, or what in the name of sweet baby Jesus was happening to me.
Maybe I was going crazy.
Or maybe I’d died, and this was my own, personal version of hell.
That was the most plausible option, all things considered.
The last thing I remembered was from the night before.
I’d been at the bachelor party to end all bachelor parties with the rest of the guys from the general contracting crew. Joseph, Joe-Dan—not to be confused with Joseph—Zack, Jake, George, Dave, Jesse, Cameron, Chad, and Niko, of course, since he was the lucky groom.
There’d been a stripper dressed as a clown for reasons I couldn’t quite recall. Although my well-known hatred of clowns probably had something to do with it. Also, fireworks. Well, maybe not fireworks per se, so much as sticks of Tannerite and a wee-little bit of dynamite, which our buddy Jake had procured from a demo site in Dayton.
I was pretty sure cow tipping had been involved at one point.
I vividly recalled cannonballing off my buddy Zack’s roof into an oversized kiddie pool filled with an unholy amalgamation of Natty Ice, Bud Lite, Corona, and whatever else the rest of the crew had lying around. Pretty sure Dave had dumped two or three boxes of Franzia red wine into the unspeakable alcohol concoction.
That probably explained why it felt like I’d slept in a churning cement mixer filled with boulders and broken beer bottles. Leaping into kiddie pools full of booze was a young man’s game, and I wasn’t as young as I used to be. Not old exactly, but even at thirty-six, I found I didn’t bounce back quite the way I had at twenty-six. The copious alcohol consumption also explained the raging hangover and the dull ache radiating through my skull and pulsing steadily behind my eye sockets.
But none of that gave me any insight, whatsoever, into where I was, how I’d gotten here, or what in heaven above was happening. There was just a blank hole, big enough to drive an Abrams tank through, between the party and waking up in this barren stretch of industrial hallway.
One minute I was laughing with Jake and Zack, telling old war stories about our time in the sandbox together, and the next I was peeling my ass off the gray carpet with the glare of harsh fluorescents stabbing into my eyeballs like an ice pick.
Guttural, inhuman roars and the sharp clang of steel clashing against steel drifted from a corridor just out of sight. This place might’ve appeared barren, but it wasn’t empty.
Something was in here with me.
Something dangerous.
Which probably accounted for the ominous warning, tattooed on the air itself.
The sounds of battle were getting progressively closer by the second. Feeling the cold edge of panic creep into my chest, I turned my gaze back to the yellow screen and reread the message once more, this time from the beginning.
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Warning! Temporal Boundary Displacement Breach!
As Standing Chair of the Variant Research Division, it is my responsibility to inform you that due to an unstable temporal anomaly—and circumstances outside of VRD control—you have accidentally experienced a Temporal Displacement Event (TDE), sometimes referred to as “Noclipping.”
Fortunately, you survived the event and have NOT been integrated into the Progenitor Engine or reduced to “Meat Slurry” by the Influx Processing and Randomization System.
Unfortunately, the prognosis for your long-term survival is vanishingly slim. I suggest you come to terms with this reality and prepare yourself accordingly. If you happen to be a person of religious conviction, now would be an appropriate time to make amends with your preferred deity.
— The Researcher
Yeah… None of that was even remotely helpful.
I’d never heard of the Variant Research Division, and I couldn’t even begin to wrap my mind around what a temporal displacement event was. To me, the whole message was just a bunch of bullshit that sounded more or less like corporate speak for “go fuck yourself.”
I squinted, examining the box itself a little more closely.
I’d been so panicked and shocked by the message that I’d failed to notice there was a tiny “X” in the top right corner of the notification. I let my gaze linger on it for a beat, and when I mentally “clicked” the button, the window blinked away. Gone in an instant as though it had never been there at all.
A thunderous boom rattled the floor, sending fine dust motes spinning and dancing overhead. A moment later I heard an odd mewling noise followed in short order by the dull thump of footsteps and the whoomph of an explosion. Rolling tongues of flame blazed into view from a connecting corridor before quickly dissipating.
Every instinct screamed at me to turn tail and haul ass in the opposition direction, but there was nowhere for me to go. I was trapped in a hallway with no exit and the only way out was through the conference room ahead. I idly considered trying to climb up through the ceiling panels, but instantly knew that wasn’t an option. They were twelve feet up, easy. Even in my prime I couldn’t have made that leap.
I turned back toward the conference room just in time to see two figures barrel into view from a hallway off to the left.
The first was human.
The second was… not.
In a blaze of furious movement, a lanky man in a duster bolted forward and lashed out with a ridiculously oversized sword, slamming the weapon into what could only be called a monster. There was no other description that fit.
Though writhing crimson ball of nightmare fuel came close.
The sword blow batted the horror diagonally across the cavernous space like a baseline drive, and it collided with one of the square columns on the far side of the room. The impact violently shook the floor and cracked the pillar in two. More plaster particles swirled in the harsh blue-white light.
The attack would’ve snapped me in two, but it hardly seemed to phase the creature. It pulled itself from the ground with ease.
Although the monster was eighty feet away, I finally got my first good look at the thing. Problem was, even with it standing in clear view, my brain couldn’t quite comprehend what exactly I was seeing. It was a bit like looking at one of those MC Escher paintings where the perspective is all wrong and none of the lines come together the way they ought to. And the longer I stared, trying to puzzle it out, the more it hurt my eyes.
The eldritch horror was eight feet tall and vaguely man-shaped—though it wasn’t human even in the most liberal sense of the word.
An extra pair of arms jutted out from its muscled torso, and its whole body was bloody red and sinewy as if the creature had been crudely flayed alive. Its lower half was a mess of segmented legs protruding out from a writhing centipede body. A cruel obsidian mask covered its face and crown of jagged black spikes hung suspended above its head. A cloak of thrashing scarlet tentacles trailed down its back, reaching all the way to the carpet.
Those tentacles were covered in oozing sores and glaring eyes.
Embedded in the center of the monster’s bloody chest cavity was a gleaming multifaceted gem with golden numbers engraved on its various faces. Encircling the glittering stone, were six glowing green sigils that looked like they’d been cribbed from the Necronomicon.
In one hand, the monster held a curved khopesh crafted from yellowed bone, and in the other it wielded a whip made entirely of teeth and spinal vertebrae. Those weapons radiated a dark, almost malevolent aura that left me both nauseous and scared shitless.
I looked down, evaluating what I had to defend myself with.
I was in trouble. A lot of trouble.
Turned out, drunk me had made some interesting fashion choices the night before. Choices that I was deeply, deeply regretting right now.
Slung around my shoulders and trailing down to my thighs was a knock-off red-and-gold, baroque Versace bathrobe. It was a hideous assault on taste and sensibility, and it actively made me despair for the future of humanity. I had never hated something so profoundly, or so quickly. Where it had come from or why on god’s green Earth I was wearing it were mysteries that beggared the imagination.
I had on a wife-beater beneath the robe and a pair of cut-off jean shorts—better known in trailer parks the world over as Daisy Dukes or jorts—that were so short and so tight they looked like faded blue denim spray-painted onto my nutsack. Instead of tennis shoes or flip-flops, Drunk Me had opted for my clunky work boots, which were missing the laces.
Then, to complete the look, I’d apparently decided to don my tool belt, which connected to a pair of leather suspenders. Although I didn’t have a mirror, I knew exactly how I must’ve looked. Like a strung-out hobo who’d managed to raid both a Home Depot and an upscale department store during a city-wide blackout. Of all the terrible life choices I’d made last night, however, grabbing my work belt had been the best of the lot.
I reached down and slid free my 19 oz rip claw hammer.
The shaft was hickory, the head worn from years of hard use. Its familiar weight was a comfort in my clammy hand, even though I doubted it would do much good against the walking nightmare. Certainly not as much good as a Glock with a full mag.
Not that a Glock would serve me much better.
Even though I’d spent eight years in the Marine Corps and done a couple pumps overseas to combat zones scattered across the Middle East, I’d served as a Motor-T driver. I’d spent most of my time behind the wheel of a troop carrier, pounding Rip Its and chain-smoking cigarettes, not kicking in doors or raiding insurgent stash houses.
And that was the better part of ten years and thirty pounds ago. Other than the occasional hunting trip with the boys, I hadn’t picked up a firearm in ages.
Besides, even if I were an expert shot and in peak physical condition, a handful of 9 mil rounds weren’t gonna do much against that thing. Hell, I was pretty sure a .50 cal and an anti-tank Javelin missile wouldn’t do much against that thing. If it wanted me dead, I wouldn’t last more than a handful of seconds before it gutted me like a trout.
My hand tightened around the handle anyway.
Fuck it. If I was going to die, at least I’d go down swinging.
But maybe it wouldn’t come to that. The big ol’ scary son of a bitch didn’t seem to be interested in me.
Not yet, anyway.
Its attention was entirely fixed on the lone figure swaggering through the conference room like an old west gunslinger getting ready for a showdown at high noon.