I stared at the pile of corpses. There was no hesitation when it came to zombies. In any other situation our training would’ve demanded that we wait long enough to be a hundred percent sure that they were actual undead monstrosities and not people dressed up in costume, but here in Hotel Hell, I was ready to shoot first and ask questions later.

“Anybody we know?” I asked, but they didn’t look like they’d been animated from any of the people I’d seen trapped here so far. That meant…I glanced at the others. Tanya was quaking, face pale, limbs quivering. Trip, having come to the same realization, was staring back at me. “These from my past or yours?”

“Either way it’s bad.” A chorus of undead moans filled the entire casino, dozens, maybe hundreds of them. “Keep going!”

The purple carpet near my feet ripped open and a rotting hand poked through, grasping wildly. Beneath the carpet was soft, crumbling black dirt. I flinched and jumped back. “Impossible,” I muttered as I smashed the hand beneath my size-fifteen boot and took off after my friends.

Tanya screamed as a hand broke through a nearby wall and reached for her. She backed into a slot machine, and another hand shattered the glass and grabbed a tangle of her hair. Suddenly, Edward was by her side, his sword humming through the air, and the hand went flying. It landed on a nearby blackjack table, still twitching as spasmodically as the maggots poking out of it.

“How the hell does that work?” I took a step around the broken slot machine. There wasn’t even room for a zombie to fit inside, but laws of physics be damned, there was still a zombie crawling out of it. The broken glass cut through its rubbery, bloodless skin. “I hate monsters that cheat.” I blew its head off.

“This way.” Trip was in the lead. Zombies were popping up all around us, clawing their way out of the floor as if it was made of soft cemetery dirt, crashing through the walls around us like they were old mausoleums instead of sheetrock and new wallpaper. Trip came running back, a mob of zombies blocking the direction we’d come from. “Not that way.”

We were completely surrounded. There were hundreds of them. Was there any limit to what the Nachtmar could create? I killed a zombie with each shot left in Abomination’s magazine, then dropped the shotgun to dangle from its sling and pulled my pistol. I lined up the sights and brain-shot the next zombie in line. Four more took its place. Even keeping our cool and dropping a zombie with each round, we’d be out of ammo and overwhelmed in no time. We needed an exit or at least a choke point.