The Nightmare Game_Slayers Read online

  The Nightmare Game: Slayers

  Sam Witt

  Pitchfork Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE NIGHTMARE GAME: SLAYERS

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Pitchfork Press

  Copyright © 2017 by Sam Witt

  This e-book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  First Edition: October, 2017

  I always dedicate my books to my wife and daughters, but this one, especially is for my wife, Kim.

  Without her support and honesty, none of these books ever get out into the world for you to enjoy.

  Also, she didn’t murder me when I was in a berserker frenzy trying to finish this book at all costs. This is a rare trait in any partner.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Shit the Author Says

  Awesome Free Stuff

  Other Books by S R Witt

  Get Your Fill of Gamist Fiction

  Even More Gamelit Groups!

  Chapter One

  Rules of The Nightmare Game: The Three Laws

  The First Law

  Three is the number of our world, and all things are bound to it thrice. Body, mind, and spirit, we are creatures of the triumvirate and we must adhere to its will.

  The Second Law

  All of the world’s people can be separated into three tribes.

  The Sleepers, who are the least of us, for our souls nourish the spirits and lay the foundations for all else. But Sleepers are also of the Adversary, as our slumbering minds are ripe for infestation by the lower powers.

  The Sacred Martyrs, who are the chosen of the Red God. Their holy blood is the sacrifice that strengthens us all and preserves our world from the horrors of the Adversary.

  The Slayers, who are fearsome warriors that rise up at the appointed time to claim the essences of their victims and free the spirits of the Chosen. They preserve our world through their sacrifice, and safeguard us through their baptism of blood.

  The Third Law

  The Nightmare Game is the apotheosis of our people. It is the sacred ritual that shields us from the darkness, and we all must bathe in its blood. Though we may travel far and wide across this earth, at the end of the third cycle of seven, the scions of the families must return and accept their roles and places in the tribes. This is our way, and the way of our forebears. We obey these laws that life continues, and the sun will shine upon the Church of the Red Dawn in these last days of our diseased and dying world.

  —Alexander Shibley, 1743, from The Great Game of the Gods

  Chapter Two

  Welcome to Crucible

  Chase Harrow opened the murder manual and read from the neatly typed, but completely insane words filling its pages for the thousandth time since it had appeared in their mailbox.

  “The mask will shield you from harm,” she read to her brother, shouting over the music blasting from the speakers in their white panel van’s dash as they rolled down a rural Missouri road. The ancient Dodge Caravan struggled to climb the steep hills of the Midwestern back country, but it was the only link to their former lives and the siblings couldn’t bear to part with it.

  “Your weapon, its deadly edge bound to your very soul, will give you the strength to defeat your enemies. And your victims shall provide you with the orbs of their soul essence to fill your talisman and grow your power. These three shall nourish and sustain your body, mind, and spirit, and in this way will the triumvirate of the Church of the Red Dawn be sustained in its struggle against our enemies.”

  She smacked the flimsy book against her knees. She drummed her short, burgundy-polished nails against the book’s cover. “This is the most fucked up role-playing game I have ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty.”

  Paxton, a few years older than his sister and more concerned with the fate of their missing parents than the bizarre game manual that had started them on this strange journey, shrugged and eased the old white van around the decaying highway’s steep curves. “How can you even read that? The font is all messed up, and the ink is so blurry I can only make out every third word. There aren’t even any pictures, just a bunch of those weird diagrams. I get a headache just thinking about it.”

  Chase shrugged and examined the manual again. She turned it over in her hands, hoping it would reveal some clue she hadn’t uncovered the other hundred times she’d looked at the thing.

  The book’s dingy card stock cover was creased from years of heavy use and stained by an interlocking series of three brown circles. The beat up book looked as if someone had used it as a coaster for their Coke cans or coffee mugs a few times over the years. The white card stock was stained yellow from nicotine, and the interior pages were brittle and still carried the perfumed ghosts of cigarettes and stale beer. Every page was filled with a single neat column of text that stretched from one narrow margin to the next. A few pages contained hand-drawn diagrams of crude concentric circles crisscrossed by faded pencil lines that connected smaller circles in rough triangles.

  There was no front or back matter, no copyright page or publisher’s mark. The back cover was a plain white sheet pocked with tiny burn holes.

  She turned the book back to the front cover and ran her fingers over the black letters that had been copied over and over, until their surfaces were worn and velvety.

  “Slayer, Sleepers, and Martyrs: Rules of the Nightmare Game.”

  Paxton glanced at the slim book in his sister’s hands. “It’s probably just some sick asshole’s way to get our hopes up and send us off on a wild goose chase. Probably saw the news story on the Internet and decided to get his kicks by sending us that stupid book.”

  Chase frowned at her brother’s words but kept her thoughts to herself. If the book was some kind of sick hoax, then someone had gone to an awful lot of trouble to make it look authentic.

  Chase opened the manual’s cover again and traced her finger along the faded gray pencil lines written in sloppy block letters along the top edge on the inside of the co
ver. Property of Jack Harrow, 1996.

  This book had belonged to her missing father. Other than the knife clipped inside the front pocket of her jeans, this strange collection of old yellowed paper was the only physical connection Chase had left of him.

  “I don’t know, Pax.” Chase leaned back, leaving the manual resting on her lap. “Why would someone go to all this trouble just to drag us to the middle of nowhere, USA. What kind of dickhead…”

  Chase almost choked on the words. Unshed tears burned at the corners of her eyes, and a lump in her chest ached like a block of ice caught in her lung. The past month of her life had passed in a blur of depression punctuated with the spikes of rage that had haunted her life as long as she could remember.

  Usually, she could control the anger. She acknowledged it, absorbed it, and then let it pass without acting on her darker impulses. But since her parents had gone missing, her emotions were pushing their way closer and closer to the surface.

  She took a deep breath, stared out the window, and tried not to remember what had happened to her parents. Which, of course, was impossible. As soon as her thoughts were no longer occupied, they drifted back to the nightmare that had wrecked her life and set her on the long and winding road to a small town that didn’t exist as far as most of the world was concerned.

  On a sunny Thursday on the border between September and October, her father had left home for his boring office job and never returned. The police found his car parked in his usual space at the company’s garage, but no one had seen Jack come in for work that day. Somewhere between the parking lot and his third-floor desk, Jack Harrow had vanished.

  His wife, Eva, had disappeared around the same time. She’d left Chase at home to keep an eye on Paxton while she stepped out to get a cup of coffee from the Starbucks a few miles down the road. She’d ordered her usual Venti Hazelnut Mocha, no whip, from the drive-through and then vanished off the face of the earth somewhere between the speaker and the window.

  Her car, an old green Subaru Outback that had refused to die despite its ridiculously high mileage, had never reappeared.

  Poof, just like that, Chase and Paxton were orphans.

  For the first few days after their parents went missing, Chase and Paxton were surrounded by the police. Uniformed officers stood guard outside their apartment on the off chance this was some weird revenge plot related to her parents’ somewhat dodgy past. Detectives showed up on their doorstep to tell them how the investigation was going and ask questions they hoped would shed some light on the case. For days, it seemed like the Dallas Police Department had nothing better to do than check up on Chase and her brother while hunting for their parents.

  After the first week, the detectives stopped coming around. At the ten day mark, the policeman guarding the door was replaced by a patrol car that swung through their parking lot a few times each day to make sure there were no strangers lurking around and no suspicious vehicles parked in the complex’s lot.

  The detectives’ in-person status reports became phone calls, and then text messages, and then silence.

  Chase wanted to be angry with the police for their dwindling attention to her parents’ disappearance, but she couldn’t hang onto her rage. The police had done their best, but there’d been no sign of her parents in a month. They were out of leads, and unless an informant called in, they had nothing to investigate.

  There were no phone calls from anonymous or mysterious numbers to Chase’s or Paxton’s cell phones. No local business or private security companies had come forward with blurry sightings of her mom or dad on closed-circuit cameras outside a bank or convenience store. Their credit union insisted no one had cleared out what little remained in their account, and no one was using their credit cards.

  Whatever had happened to Jack and Eva Harrow was a complete mystery with no solution in sight.

  And then, a month later, the manual had arrived in a manila envelope with no postmark and only one line of a return address.

  Crucible, MO.

  The Internet was useless when it came to finding the little town. Google didn’t turn up a single mention of the place, and its maps weren’t any better. Finally, after days of fruitless phone calls, Paxton found an old man in Missouri’s Department of Tourism who vaguely remembered the little town.

  “Haven’t heard that name in years,” he’d mused. “My father mentioned it once at dinner. He was a long haul truck driver and had passed through there on his way to Arkansas with a load of mattresses. It used to be out on route CC, not far from Taum Sauk Mountain. Funny how that came back like that. Be sure to gas up if you head out that way because there’s not much in the way of civilization there.”

  Three days later, Paxton and Chase had pooled the last of their money from their bank accounts, took the emergency Visa they were never, ever supposed to use, and loaded their few belongings into the back of their family’s white van.

  Fortunately, the bug out bags their parents had insisted they pack had been waiting for the siblings under the lowest shelf in the pantry. Their parents had been strongly in favor of those preparations.

  “You never know when you’ll need to get moving in a hurry,” their father always warned them. “We don’t want to get caught with our pants down after what happened in Austin.”

  The weight of Chase’s knife seemed to increase tenfold at the memory. She’d been a little kid when she’d killed three men in Austin. What bothered her the most wasn’t the deaths of the intruders, but the fact that they weren’t necessary. If she’d been better prepared to run, she never would have had to fight. But she hadn’t packed her bug out bag. Hadn’t prepared to leave her toys and stuffed animals behind. She’d killed those men not to protect her life, but to protect the trappings of that life.

  That had been the hardest part about her parents’ disappearance. She knew, somehow, that the incident in Austin had something to do with their disappearance thirteen years later. She didn’t know how, but there had to be some connection.

  But Chase had kept mum about that dark night when she’d committed her first murder in self-defense. She hadn’t told the police, and the secret ate her up inside.

  What if that’s why the police can’t find mom and dad, she’d wondered to herself in the deep, dark, quiet hours of the nights since her parents had vanished. She’d come so close to telling the detectives about those men. About the way they’d come to the Harrow house on the outskirts of Austin in the dead of night with guns and knives. About why Chase, just five years old, had known how to handle a knife and where to stab a man to make sure he went down and stayed down.

  If she’d told the police they might have been able to go back over the old evidence in that case and find something new to use. Maybe they’d have found out who those men were, and track their associates, their families, someone who might have wanted revenge for their deaths.

  But the police might also have started asking questions about what kind of woman the murderous little girl would grow up to be. Chase knew they’d start looking at her differently, start thinking of ways to pry her away from her brother and lock her up.

  “There’s a cop back there,” Paxton said, dragging Chase out of her daydream. “He’s been on our tail for the past ten minutes.”

  Chase sat up straight and glanced at the GPS cradled in its plastic mount on the van’s dash. “We’re right at the speed limit. What the hell does he want?”

  Paxton narrowed his eyes at her. “Before you ask, no, I didn’t do anything stupid. He pulled out of the driveway right after we crossed the county line. Been glued to us ever since.”

  Chase adjusted her position in the van’s passenger seat so she could see the rearview mirror outside her window. She tried to pretend she was looking out the window at some wildlife. A deer, maybe. Some cardinals. A squirrel or six.

  Just look natural, Chase reminded herself. You’re not breaking any laws.

  Yet.

  Her glance showed Chase a beat-up Crown Vi
ctoria police cruiser rolling along about twenty yards behind the van. Bug-guts were smeared across the cruiser’s windshield like the dried snot on a toddler’s lip, making it impossible to see the driver. The Vic’s brown paint had faded to a pale tan across its wide hood. The rectangular headlights crouched on either side of a cracked grill like a pair of cataract-sheathed shark’s eyes. Dents and scratches marred its bumper, like old scars on an angry dog’s muzzle.

  Something about the worn-out car bothered Chase, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Her fingertips brushed the Civilian’s handle where it rested in her left pocket.

  “Just keep driving,” Chase told her brother, fighting the urge to provoke the police officer. Paxton wasn’t breaking any laws, so this guy was probably just looking to relieve the boredom of his day by fucking with them. The rage that had defined most of Chase’s life slithered up from the dark cave at the back of her head, but she shoved it away. “Stay steady, don’t give the officer a reason to pull us over.”

  The cop, Chase couldn’t tell if it was a sheriff or constable, or maybe just a townie on his way back from grabbing coffee at a diner the next village over, because the cruiser’s markings were worn down to nothing from a combination of age and sun damage. Whatever he was, he stayed about 10 yards off their tail and followed the white van like he was in no big hurry to hassle them. Maybe he wasn’t. It wasn’t like the stretch of the highway had a lot of places for them to turn off, after all.