The Nightmare Game_Slayers Read online

  Keep it together, Chase whispered to the torturous hunger, someone alone. Someone vulnerable.

  She skirted the shadows, creeping past the bonfire and toward the convoy of undamaged vehicles.

  Most of the vehicles were empty, and those that weren’t held pairs or sometimes trios of Sleepers. Chase considered going after the occupants in one of those cars, but with her Willpower so low she wouldn’t be able to use any of her powers without going berserk. It was a risk she didn’t need to take as long as so many of the soul tokens were still up for grabs. She had time, she just had to play it cool until the right opportunity presented itself.

  At the very end of the line, a masked woman sat behind the wheel of a Porsche Cayenne. It wasn’t the vehicle Chase would have chosen for an escape on backwoods gravel roads, but she was a beggar here, not a chooser. She crept through the trees lining the road until she was even with the car. Chase waited, holding her breath and praying the woman hadn’t noticed her and there was no one else prowling around.

  Satisfied she was alone with her target, Chase darted forward and hooked her hand through the open window. Her bloody fingers clamped over the Sleeper’s mouth, and Chase tried to pinch the masked woman’s nose with her thumb and forefinger to shut off the Sleeper’s air supply before she could scream.

  But the mask made it impossible for Chase to tell what she was holding onto or to see the woman’s attack coming. The Sleeper didn’t scream. Instead, she bit down hard and got her teeth around Chase’s thumb.

  With a snarl, Chase pulled the woman's head through the car's window. The Sleeper responded by latching onto Chase’s wrist with both hands and grinding her teeth against the knuckle at the base of Chase’s thumb.

  A thought summoned the sickle into Chase’s right hand, and she swung it at the woman’s exposed throat. The tip of the blade bit into the far side of the Sleeper’s trachea, unleashing a foamy pink spray and a gurgling gasp. Chase levered the sickle’s handle forward, opening the woman’s throat in a burst of blood. The dying Sleeper jerked away from Chase, tearing her throat open even wider as she sagged behind the Cayenne’s wheel.

  As her victim’s white aura faded, Chase felt a surge of energy well up inside her. With a thought she channeled it into her Willpower, raising it from one to four, but dropping her Hunger from five to four. She also gained a single soul orb from Harvesting the Sleeper, but she scarcely noticed before disaster struck.

  The woman's hands slammed down on the Cayenne's horn, sounding a long, piercing blast through the night air.

  Chase flung the door open, cursing, and grabbed the dead Sleeper by the hair. She ripped the woman out of the car and slung her into the gravel. The corpse’s silk suit tore when her knees slammed into the gravel, and she skidded across the road, blood drooling from the ruins of her tattered throat.

  Chase leaped behind the wheel of the Porsche, not waiting to see how many Sleepers would answer the dying woman’s horn blast. She twisted the key in the ignition, threw the car into reverse, and spun the Cayenne's steering wheel. The car’s tires scrabbled for purchase on the country road, kicking up a thick cloud of dust and gravel that rolled under the Porsche and exploded from under its front bumper.

  The Sleepers were trying to organize a pursuit, but they were too scattered and disorganized. Those cars that had drivers who hadn’t headed into the hills to hunt down the Slayer were trapped by the empty vehicles in front of or behind them.

  Chase made a three-point turn to get the Porsche aimed away from the fire behind her, and glanced in the rearview. She grinned at the confusion behind her and pressed the pedal toward the floor.

  Chase drove into the night, blood on her lips and rage in her belly. It was time for Crucible to pay for its many sins.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Fool

  Chase parked the Cayenne in front of a darkened mobile home a quarter mile away from the rotating golden circle marking her next target. She drummed her fingers on the leather-wrapped steering wheel and took a few deep breaths to steady herself. She’d left one group of Sleepers in the dust, but knew she was likely headed straight into another pack of them. “Okay, Chase,” she whispered, “you can do this.”

  She left the keys in the ignition, hoping the expensive car would be its own best camouflage. The Sleepers trying to stop her all seemed to be reporting to the man who’d made her the offer at the truck stop, and they all drove the most expensive cars in town.

  The door closed with only the faintest of thumps, and Chase patted the Porsche’s warm hood as she stalked toward her destination. The luxury SUV had served her well, and she hoped it would be there when she returned. She was getting used to traveling in style.

  She also hoped the next Sacred Martyr wasn’t already mobbed by Slayers. As the number of Chosen decreased, competition for the remaining markers would heat up, and there’d be more surviving Slayers gathering under the golden ring to battle for the dwindling prizes.

  One on one, Chase was confident she could hold her own against almost any opponent. But when too many fighters entered a dustup, the situation became too unpredictable and prone to luck–both good and bad. It was one thing to defend herself against a single opponent. It was a whole other ballgame when there were a bunch of psychos all trying to stab holes in each other at the same time.

  Like everything Chase had seen of the town so far, this little strip of Crucible was in a state of advanced decay. The homes scattered along the sides of the road were all on wheels or blocks, their roofs sagging and their interiors hidden behind tattered Venetian blinds. Stray cats and dogs lounged lazily on the scrubby lawns, watching Chase from their chosen spots or squabbling over the gnawed carcasses of squirrels or rabbits who’d had the misfortune of wandering too close to a predator.

  Tree roots had grown through the gaps between the sidewalk squares, shoving the concrete slabs up at crooked angles around mounds of crumbling earth. The roads between the mangled sidewalks weren’t in better shape. The asphalt was pocked with crumbling holes, and weeds had burrowed up from the earth beneath to claw futilely at the night sky above.

  Chase didn’t know whether the evil of Crucible had manifested in the town’s decay, or whether it was a side effect of the soul-crushing poverty she’d seen everywhere since her arrival. The town was hanging onto life by a ragged thread. She couldn’t help but wonder if her coming her might what finally cut that thread.

  A thin strip of unruly trees separated the residential neighborhood Chase had parked in from her next target. Chase hunkered down in the skeletal cover and peered through the trees’ naked branches to assess the situation.

  The golden ring hung above a grocery store surrounded by an optimistically vast parking lot. A bizarre sign featuring an obese swine slicing carving slivers of ham from his own shoulder rose above the plain of cracked black asphalt and declared the store’s name: The Lucky Pig.

  Chase cursed at the chaotic jumble of luxury cars in front of the store. She had hoped the Sleepers couldn’t track the Chosen Victims as quickly as the Slayers, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Even if there were only one masked maniac in each car, there’d be at least a dozen inside.

  With the way her luck had been running, Chase imagined there’d be double that number. And that didn’t take into account any Slayers who’d beat her to the store or were on their way now.

  Great, Chase thought. This’ll be a party.

  She circled the parking lot, staying well away from the lampposts jutting crookedly from the fractured asphalt. The light they cast was dim and flickering, which Chase prayed hid her from her enemies already inside the store.

  Through the tall front windows, their surfaces stained with chalk paint drawings advertising specials on chicken necks and ham hocks, Chase saw suited figures milling about. The Sleepers didn’t appear organized, but there were so many of them they wouldn’t have to be to scour the store in short order. Chase wasn’t sure what would happen if the Sleepers killed one of the m
artyrs, and she didn’t want to find out.

  She hustled around the supermarket’s perimeter, looking for a way in that wouldn’t immediately expose her to the Sleepers. It would have been nice to use her Phantasm powers to simplify her approach, but Chase was leery about expending too much Willpower until she was sure she could replenish it. Going berserk inside the Lucky Pig would certainly increase her body count, but it wouldn’t help her survive the game.

  The wide rolling doors of the loading dock at the rear of the store were open, and a hazy fluorescent glow spilled through them. A heavy plastic strip curtain covered the entry and obscured the interior of the loading bay, but Chase didn't see any shadows moving beyond them. It looked like the best chance she had of getting into the grocery store undetected.

  “Okay, Chase,” she said, psyching herself up, “let's do this.”

  She sprinted across the parking lot, favoring speed over stealth because there was no cover to hide behind. Anyone looking out the loading dock doors would see her, so the less time Chase spent crossing the wide-open parking lot the better. She grabbed the lip of the loading dock platform and hauled herself up over its edge in one smooth motion. A flick of her wrist brought the sickle to Chase’s hand, and she used it to part the dangling strips of the plastic curtain.

  Screams from the Sleepers froze Chase the instant she stepped into the loading bay. She cocked her arm back to lash out with the sickle, but realized the nerve-shattering sounds were coming from deeper inside the Lucky Pig. The Sleepers hadn’t spotted her.

  Yet.

  Chase scuttled around pallets of canned and boxed foods wrapped in industrial-strength shrink wrap and ducked down behind the swinging door leading into the supermarket proper. Chase put her eye near the crack between the door and the wall and held her breath as she took stock of her position.

  Chase stared down an aisle of cleaning supplies that ran from just outside the door she was hiding behind to the midpoint of the store, where it was interrupted by another aisle running perpendicular to it.

  Another round of screams echoed through the grocery store, but Chase saw no one enter the aisle ahead of her. She kept low and slipped out from behind the loading dock door. Chase hunkered down against the wall for a moment, looking left and right to improve her picture of the building.

  The grocery store was laid out in a rough rectangle. Along the back wall to Chase's left were the dairy section, butcher shop, and freezer cases filled with seafood, packaged pizzas, and herd’s worth of shitty hamburger patties. From what Chase could see, that aisle crossed the entire back of the store, and similar open spaces on the left and right walls ran from the back to the back of the store, forming a rectangle with the registers.

  The middle of that rectangle was populated by long aisles stuffed with all the packaged food and household supplies a Midwestern town filled with lunatics could need, and those aisles were cut in half by another long walkway across the center of the store. Chase hated the long sightlines and lack cover. One wrong move would expose her position to anyone from the front or back of the store. If the Sleepers had guns, she’d be an easy target for anyone with even a little skill.

  She needed to find the martyr, take the token, and then get the fuck out of the store before all hell broke loose.

  Screams echoed through the supermarket, pounding against Chase's ears. Sounds reverberated from every direction and overlapped one another in a cacophony of bone-chilling shrieks. Chase tried to judge the locations of the Sleepers by their hunting screams, but it was impossible to tell direction or distance with so many competing voices. One of her enemies could be waiting in ambush around the corner of the aisle Chase was standing in, and she wouldn’t know until she’d stumbled into the trap.

  After reaching the far end of the cleaning supplies aisle, Chase took a quick peek to survey the situation. To her right, a long bloody drag mark covered the floor, as if a wounded body had been pulled toward the front of the supermarket.

  Not going that way, Chase thought.

  There were no enemies to her left, so Chase darted across the central aisle to take cover behind end cap of the aisle across from her position. She peered around the corner, only to jerk her head back when one of the Sleepers stepped out into the open not far from where Chase was hidden.

  Chase did her best to vanish behind the cardboard display of canned pumpkin pie filling and held her breath. Her back ached from the awkward stance she had to adopt to remain concealed by the sloping cardboard rack, but she couldn’t move without exposing herself to her enemies. Chase’s heavy boots were fantastic for protecting her feet, but they were worthless when it came to sneaking across the grocery store’s linoleum floor.

  The Sleeper screamed, so close to Chase it raised goosebumps on her arms. The shrieking lunatic would see Chase in one more step.

  The Slayer weighed her options. If the Sleeper turned around and walked away, Chase would be safe. But if the screamer found her, the rest of the store would know about it a second later.

  Chase couldn’t have that. The Sleeper had to die.

  She lunged forward and pivoted on her right foot to square her stance to her opponent. Chase swung the sickle in a looping sidearm attack and slammed the weapon into the Sleeper’s throat.

  Chase expected her target go down in a spray of blood. But the Sleeper had been moving when the attack hit her. It wasn’t the sickle’s curved blade that hit the Sleeper, but its handle.

  The blow had stunned the Sleeper, but the black-masked woman was far from out of the fight. She staggered and clutched her throat with her left hand, her screams choked to a whistling gargle by the damage to her throat. Unable to call out to her fellow maniacs, the Sleeper went on the attack and lashed out wildly with the hatchet in her right fist.

  Chase leaned away from the attack and the Sleeper’s sharpened blade whistled past her face and plowed into containers of condensed milk. The sugary, sticky fluid splattered everywhere, and cans tumbled off the shelves and rolled across the floor with an explosive racket.

  So much for the advantage of surprise, Chase thought. The falling cans would draw the Sleepers as sure as a screamed warning. Chase knew if she wanted to get to the martyr without being swarmed by dozens of masked freaks she had to finish this fight and get moving in record time.

  Chase caught the Sleeper’s next attack with the crook of her sickle. The curved blade hooked around the hatchet’s wooden handle, and Chase twisted it around and down into the Sleeper’s hand. The hungry sickle’s blade lopped off the first two fingers of the woman’s hand, scattering the index and middle fingers into the puddle of sugary milk spreading across the tile floor.

  The Sleeper dropped her ax and clutched her wounded hand. She tried to scream as the unholy pain of her injury set the nerves in her arm ablaze, but the only sound that escaped from her damaged throat was a choked wheeze.

  Before the woman could recover from the shock of her injury, Chase struck again. She clutched the sickle’s handle in both hands and leaned into a swing like a batter trying to knock a slow pitch out of the park.

  The tip of the sickle’s blade disappeared into the Sleeper’s head, just behind her temple, with the ugly squelch of a car’s tire rolling over a cantaloupe.

  A strangled clicking noise rattled out of the dying Sleeper’s throat in staccato bursts, and blood sprayed from her punctured skull. The viscous red mixed with the spilled milk to paint the floor in a red and white blur.

  The woman fell to her knees, and Chase planted a heavy boot on her chest. With a grunt, the Slayer shoved the dead body off her sickle. She spun the weapon once, flinging blood and clots of gray matter from the blood.

  Chase breathed deeply as the Sleeper’s aura faded and a flood of new power surged into her. For a moment, she considered harvesting the dead woman’s soul to recover her last remaining point of Willpower. It was tempting to gain another use of her powers, but Chase ignored her hunger. Her Fortitude was already recovered to full, and she c
ouldn’t justify lowering her Hunger for a single increase to her Willpower.

  Instead, she seized the woman’s soul orb and tucked away it into her talisman for future use.

  The fight had only taken a few seconds, but the Sleepers had heard the cans of condensed milk hitting the floor and were already closing in on Chase’s position. She was confident she could take on five or six of the Sleepers at the same time, but Chase also knew that fight would just bring more, and then there’d be another fight, and another, until the masked assholes finally wore her down. She couldn’t afford to get bogged down in pointless battles if she wanted to win the Nightmare Game and save what was left of her family from these psychos.

  Let’s get this over with, she thought and activated her Horrifying Apparition power.

  The familiar overhead view slashed across her thoughts, showing Chase the Sleepers scattered around the supermarket. Five of them converged on her location, one stood guard at the front of the store, and at least twenty more prowled through the aisles in search of prey.

  The golden glow of Sacred Martyr illuminated a young man crouching behind a freezer display filled with bags of breaded popcorn shrimp.

  Chase selected her target and her body burst apart and soared through the air. She was getting used to the power and enjoyed the rush of unnatural speed as her mind rocketed across the store to appear behind the martyr.

  The young man spun, to stare at Chase with his eyes bugging out of his skull. His mouth opened, but he was too terrified to make a sound. Chase grinned, and her pumpkin skull mask contorted, revealing a horrifying, pulpy visage to her victim. Blood leaked from the corners of the mouth carved into the mask’s tough shell, and the taste sent a shiver racing down Chase’s body.

  “Trick-or-treat,” Chase said, her voice deepened and twisted into a gravelly growl by the mask. She reared back and swung her sickle at the victim's throat in a killing stroke.