My first inclination for most problems was to shoot them, but that would only get me killed here. Julie was right, I needed to hide. Crawling back to the big chunk of concrete, I found the partially crushed body. He had been squished into the soft dirt and was a real mess. We had no idea how smart these things were, and in any case, these probably weren’t the real thing anyway, rather figments of our imagination made real. I had no idea if this would work. Grimacing, I lifted the unmangled arm, and then lay down beneath, trying to squish myself as far into the soil as possible. Sorry, man. I tried to stay perfectly still. I was immediately coated in hot, sticky blood.

It was disgusting. It was infuriating. It was better than dying.

“They’re right on top of you,” Julie whispered in my earpiece, and then she too was silent, unsure if they would be able to hear even that much noise. I shut the radio off before anybody else made noise on this channel. Then I held my breath.

There was a narrow gap between the concrete and the dirt. Dozens of demonic limbs charged past, claws ripping up grass or elephantine feet smashing great circular tracks into the dirt. Bullets landed throughout the garden as the Hunters tried to hold them off.

Fall back. Get to a choke point. Come on, guys. Stay alive.

There were hundreds of demons. The first wave of black and orange bodies hit the breach only to be washed away by machine-gun fire. More arrived within seconds, clustered all around the hole, twitching and moving like bees on the surface of a hive. They were too occupied with the living to search the dead. Yet.

There had only been a handful of Hunters inside that area when the hotel had been hit. Not nearly enough to stop the tide of demons.

Milo must have left more of his explosives behind to slow them, because a few seconds later a final explosion rocked the breach, clearing the swarm off the wall and flinging demon bits in every direction.

By the time the gray smoke cleared, the fastest of the creatures had already swarmed in after the fleeing humans. The spine-flinging warriors continued inside after them.

But I wasn’t alone…Now the claws around my hiding place were moving more slowly, methodically. These feet were smaller. The workers had arrived. Like four-foot-tall, yellow, bipedal grasshoppers, their joints clicked and popped as they moved, and as I watched, horrified, they began pulling a body from the wreckage to systematically rip apart. Every direction I could peer through the gap, there were more twisted legs, dozens of them.