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
