“Mosh! Holly! Can you hear me?” They were here. Somewhere…But I had a sinking feeling that here and here were two different things. The Nachtmar was distorting reality. They were so close that I could feel them, but I felt like we were slipping in and out of the real world. The fog’s power was growing. The Nachtmar was feeding on everyone who was trapped in the mist. The nightmare realm was spreading. Good thing they’d evacuated. I couldn’t even imagine what this thing would be like if it could entrap an entire city. “Mosh!”

I got no answer.

But maybe that was because I was calling the wrong name…

The host had once been a normal man, corrupted. Heather Kerkonen had given me a pair of dog tags torn off the body buried in Dugway. My hands were shaking so badly from the cold it was hard to draw them free from my pocket. I held them up to the glow stick and squinted to see.

Kitashima, Marcus

I knew what all the info was for because of my dad’s tags. There was a service number, blood type A. The religion was an X, which if I recalled for that time period, meant something other than Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish. The name of the next of kin was Mary Kitashima. A wife? A mother? Was that who he had been demanding I find? The address section for the next of kin contact seemed to be only partially complete, Topaz WRC.

Look at Topaz.

That had been the host’s words. It had been a place. In his confusion, with his will being sapped and his mind being manipulated, the host had been searching for his home. WRC? It sounded vaguely familiar…Dr. Blish had told Mosh that all of the subjects had been volunteers that could blend in with the target populations. WRC…War Relocation Center.

I’d learned about this. My dad had made me learn about this. He’d wanted me to understand the fine line between men’s reason and fear, and just how quickly that line could be crossed. During World War Two the Japanese on the west coast had been rounded up, rights stripped, homes and property confiscated, and then they’d been imprisoned in several different godforsaken camps in the middle of nowhere. Over a hundred thousand people, just like that…Dad’s goal had been to instill a healthy mistrust for authority in his kids. That was one lesson that had stuck.

Topaz had been the name of one of those concentration camps.