The demon’s face exploded, splattering me with hot bits. A figure stepped over me and kicked the headless corpse aside. The man knocked a second monster down with the stock of his rifle. Another monster ruptured in a shower of yellow bile. He worked a Marlin lever-action rifle and fired from the hip, disemboweling a third creature. He kept shooting and shooting and shooting, driving the demons back. Somehow the rifle never seemed to run out of ammo.

He was wearing MHI-issued body armor, bandoleers of individual rounds of .45-70, and on his arm was a patch featuring a walrus with a banjo.

It can’t be.

I’d never seen these demons show fear before, but this Hunter scared them. Screeching and chattering in their incomprehensible language, the horde retreated. “That’s right, you bugs!” he bellowed after them. “Run back to your master and tell him he’s not the only one with friends at this party.”

“But you’re dead,” I croaked.

“Duh.” Sam Haven turned around and grinned at me from beneath his gigantic mustache. “But screw death. I’ve got shit to get done. Come on.”

“Are you from my imagination?”

“No. That’s stupid.” Sam snorted, reached down, grabbed my armored collar, and hoisted me as if I weighed nothing. “Can you walk?”

It hurt like a son of a bitch. I’d wrenched one leg on the way down. My ankle felt like it had been sprained, same one the stupid rag monster had torn up earlier. I wasn’t going to win any races, but there wasn’t time to whine about it. “Yeah.”

He pulled me along, through the ruined gardens, through the evil swirling fog, and away from the breached wall. “You’ve got no idea how much it sucks being in the spirit world watching my people get their asses kicked in the world of the living and not being able to do anything about it. We can’t see everything, but we can watch those that we’re close to a little. We’re still in this fight, we just haven’t been allowed to participate yet.”

The red haze in my head had cleared a bit, enough to know that I wasn’t imagining this. I’d been rescued by a dead Monster Hunter. And judging from the gunfire in the gardens, he’d brought friends. “We?”

“See for yourself.”

I was still blinking away someone else’s blood so it was hard to see clearly, but there were several men waiting ahead of us. Some were dressed in modern MHI armor, but a few were wearing armor that seemed more old-fashioned, and a few were even in the archaic high-necked leather suits that I’d seen Bubba Shackleford in. They seemed somehow blurry. The strong winds didn’t so much as muss their hair. I could have swore that it was Chuck Mead that gave me a small nod as we passed, but Chuck had died at DeSoya Caverns.