Julie began to explain. When Trip and Milo ran their guns dry, Lacoco and Nate took their place. More Hunters were filing down the hall with heavier weapons. I have no idea how the big Pole had managed to get a PKM into the country, but I was glad to see a belt-fed. Word of what was happening had spread quickly. The rooms on either side were secured, the alien forest that had somehow invaded our hotel hadn’t spilled through the walls. Instead, a single, maybe five-hundred-square-foot, room was holding several acres of forest.

Lacoco was firing a Remington 870 as fast as he could pump the action at the cumbersome monster. When he clicked empty, I grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him away before he even realized he’d run dry. He snarled at me but I shoved him aside. Personal beefs could wait. This was business. “Move your ass, Newbie!” I shouted as I took his spot. “Reload that gun!”

Half a dozen silver slugs later I got my first indication that shooting these things wasn’t completely futile. The original monster had been practically chewed into scrap by our small-arms fire, and collapsed in a clanking and wheezing heap twenty feet from the door to our reality. The metal shell had been hammered so badly that it was simply not capable of further movement. “Good news! They can be stopped.”

“Bad news is that I see at least ten more coming,” Nate warned.

The gray, seemingly bulletproof tumor that had been stuck inside the chest cavity of the first creature slid out into the grass. The disgusting blob was alive, and squealed in an obnoxious high pitch as Nate hit it with several rounds of .308. The slug was the size of a calf, and it oozed and rolled itself back toward the river, leaving a steaming trail of blood and mucus behind.

“Oh, that is just nasty,” I growled as I launched another grenade into the approaching wall of iron. “The slugs in the torso are driving the suits. Next!” I shouted as I moved away.

The big man from Poland took my spot. He hadn’t even bothered to put on a shirt before coming to fight. The tattoo of linked ammo he had around one big bicep matched the belt hanging from the Russian machine gun at his side. His booming laugh made me think of a pirate captain. “I got out of bed with many beautiful women for this?” He fired from the hip, working the PKM side to side. Despite the lack of aiming or fire discipline, he wasn’t missing, and there was a continuous stream of clangs as bullets struck metal. The dude was good with a machine gun.

Earl was shouting orders. Lindemann interrupted him by tugging on one sleeve of his Minotaur-hide jacket. “Harbinger, listen to me. This is impossible. This cannot be happening.”