The blood loss had slowed to the rate of a mildly drippy faucet. The half of Green’s face that wasn’t covered in blood was deathly pale. Trip opened his med pouch and pulled out a pressure bandage. He gently lifted the shredded remains of Green’s armor and revealed the terrible injury beneath.

Green moaned when the bandages touched him. “He sawed my foot off.” His voice was barely a whisper.

“We know.” Trip knelt next to him. “It’s okay, man. We got it. You’re going to be fine.”

“Where’s your partner?” I didn’t even know who Green had been patrolling with.

“Gone…Dead…Ragman got him.”

“Ragman?”

“Listen…” Green reached out and touched Trip’s arm. “He was my first monster. In San Diego. Serial killer. Sold his soul…Turned into that. I killed him years ago…” Green coughed hard. “Guess he wasn’t done with me yet.” He coughed again, wheezed, then passed out. I checked his pulse. It wasn’t good.

Another horror dredged from the back of someone’s mind and set free. Hugo’s last word had been Nachtmar. It was looking like nightmare was a good name for what we were up against.

When we got back to the conference center, we learned that the Nachtmar had struck in two places simultaneously this time. In addition to crippling Green and killing a Hunter from the Mexican company, by the name of Salazar, it had struck nearly simultaneously in another area. Pressfield, from Sticks of Fire out of Tampa, and Verne, one of the British liaisons from BSS, had responded to cries for help from one of the rooms. When they’d kicked in the door, Pressfield had been ripped to pieces by the demonic things that the anti-Hunting activists inside that room had mutated into.

The surviving Hunter fragged the room, then head-shot everything. He’d been so shell shocked that when he’d walked back into the main lobby where most of the trapped tourists had congregated, his wide-eyed and blood-soaked appearance had nearly caused a panic. That had only been three minutes before I’d run in, carrying Green and shouting for a medic.

Now the trapped tourists were ready to listen to us. Too bad we didn’t really know what to do yet.

Afterwards, Pressfield’s boss, Allen, was able to identify the creatures from the description as something similar to an oddity that Sticks of Fire had encountered and wiped out a year earlier.