“She dwells in my world now. She fights me, as you do. She will not give in to her fear like most, but she will break. I will—”

I slammed Abomination’s butt stock against the corpse’s skull hard enough to crack it wide open. “Zip it.” The doctor’s body spilled into the fog and the Nachtmar was silent. “Holly! Hang on. I’m coming.” It was difficult to tell with only the light of a few glow sticks, but this seemed like the storage room they’d hid in before. The door had been badly damaged and there was a big shelf lying on its side. I recognized the leering costumes. I took another step forward and my feet sunk into the floor. I didn’t need to see it to know that it had turned to soft dirt. The lines of reality were blurring hard in here. “Holly!”

There was a depression in the floor. The fog was toppling into it, telling me that it was a rather big hole. “Z?” Holly called from inside. Her voice reeked of desperation. “I need help. Get a rope.”

It could have been a trap, but I didn’t have time to think through the consequences. “Is that really you?”

“No. I’m the Easter Bunny. Rope, now, asshole!” That certainly sounded like the real Holly, but then something else snarled at the bottom of the hole. I tossed the glow stick down. It fell about a dozen feet, cutting through the gray, until it hit the ground between two figures. One was Holly, covered in mud and holding something gray and pointy in her hands, using it to ward off the second figure. The other person was in far worse shape, ragged, tattered, so absolutely filthy that I could barely even recognize it as a human being, and couldn’t even tell what sex it was. “A little help would be nice, Z!”

The batteries on my holographic sight had died along with everything else, but it was an easy enough shot. The silver buckshot hit in a loose wad, blowing a hole through its jaw, neck, and shoulder. The body hit the far wall of the pit, but kept on snarling.

“Hold on,” Holly snapped. I took my finger off the trigger. She used the distraction to lunge forward and plunged her weapon into the creature’s chest just above the sternum. Holly levered it up, then drove it down with a sick, wet crack, right through its heart. She put her foot on its stomach and shoved it away, where it rolled to a stop.

“Good shot,” I said.