“Our bus took a detour to crazy town. Come on. I’ll show you.”

My first clue that something was drastically different was that our radios were working again. Luckily the MCB was no longer jamming us. Excited chatter in several different languages picked up in my one working earpiece. There were monster sightings everywhere. Competent team leaders were getting everyone sorted onto different channels and vectoring Hunters against threats. At least the uninterrupted radio waves were a welcome change.

It wasn’t until Milo and I got to the windows of the conference center that I realized that having our radios back was actually a really bad sign. The reason the jamming wasn’t working anymore was because the jammers weren’t here anymore. Neither was the rest of the quarantine. Or the street. Or Las Vegas.

“What the hell is going on?” I stared out the windows and tried to wrap my brain around the scene. The manicured grounds of the complex stretched out for a few hundred yards and beyond that the ground just dropped off into nothing. There were crashing gray clouds that stretched above us and seemed to curve inward over the top of the connected hotel. The storm outside was brutal and unlike anything I’d ever seen, walls of seemingly solid fog were being driven about by fierce winds, but in different, conflicting directions. Every now and then the mist would swirl, revealing tunnels and cuts where we could see just a tiny bit further, but there was no city beyond.

The storm wasn’t dark at all. It had its own strange internal illumination. The odd light coming through the windows made everything look washed out, nearly black and white. The hotel creaked and shook as it was buffeted by the wind. The sound coming from the storm was dampened by our shelter, but it didn’t sound like any normal weather I’d heard before. It sounded displeased.

I didn’t know if the sudden wave of nausea I experienced right then was from the concussive force of Milo’s explosive or because of the sudden realization that we probably weren’t on Earth anymore. “Where are we?”

“I was kinda hoping you would know,” Milo answered. “You’ve at least been to other dimensions before.”

“Not this one.” The mysterious ghost had warned me about the blurring of the lines between worlds. Things had just got real blurry.

The conference center was shaped like a horseshoe. On the rounded bottom end of the horseshoe was the street, or where the street would’ve been if it still existed. I ran across the lobby area to get to the opposite bank of windows. The interior of the horseshoe was where the gardens and pools were. One leg of the shoe touched the casino and shops and the other ended at the hotel, the elevators of which Milo and I had just left.