"Once he takes everything, what'll happen to you?"
"Maybe then he'd just let me die…" he said wistfully.
This poor man's mind was being devoured, but the thing doing it was leaving the memories about this one particular Hunter for a reason. "Martin Hood did this to you, didn't he?"
He walked past me, through the crowd of distorted figures, and stopped, staring into the frozen eyes of young Mr. Hood. "Will you help me?"
"What can I do?" I asked.
"I'll show you these scraps, these things that Feeder's left to toy with me. In exchange, I want two things. I won't help you until you swear you'll help me."
"Name them." I expected for him to ask me to free him, to destroy this demon in his head, but not what came next.
"Kill me."
I was shocked. That's not why I was here. I couldn't do that. I started to respond, but choked. The frozen Hunters surrounded me, their faces scratched out of existence like a pencil drawing brutally scrubbed with an eraser until the paper tore. All happiness had been blotted from this man's existence, his body was nearly a lifeless husk…No. I understood the request.
I nodded. "And the second?"
He glared at the jolly, fat Hunter so long that I started to think I was another forgotten memory.
"Avenge me."
This was different than the other times that I had lived through others' memories. This time I didn't see through his eyes or feel with his senses, because those were long since muted and passed. Carlos no longer knew what it was like to experience such things.
Rather it was like I was a bystander as a partial scene unfolded in front of me. Details were few, sounds were painful and flat. The colors had bled into grays and shadows as even simple things like that had been stolen from him. What a horrible way to exist and this was all that he'd had since 1989. I was watching the welcoming of the new Hunter. Hood smiled and laughed as Carlos' team greeted him, slapped him on the shoulder, and shook his hand. The only two who had faces were my host and his future nemesis.
"He came highly recommended. A good friend of mine said that he was talented, that he would be an asset to our team," Carlos spoke to me, even as he shook phantom hands with Hood. "My friend was a man named Harbinger."
"I know him," I said.
Carlos shook his head. "I don't. I only remember what little bit is connected to these few things. That's all. But I hate him for bringing this monster into my life. Feeder let me keep my hate. It makes him warm."
Then we were in an unknown place, an intersection of two streets. A team of Hunters had taken up position around a few cars and were firing into a crowd of shambling zombies. There were hundreds of undead. It was a huge outbreak. Carlos and I walked between the flying bullets and the crowd of rotting undead. He gestured to where his mirror image was leaning over the hood of a car and blasting round after round of buckshot into the approaching mass. "Business was really good. I didn't realize at first that it was a little too good."
A zombie made it over the hood of the first car and Hood took it apart in a spray of machine-gun fire. "It had been kind of slow. We didn't really have much to do, and my team was getting the least business of any team in the country. Just bad luck I suppose. But then, within a few weeks of Hood's arrival, we were getting undead outbreaks constantly. Suddenly my team was raking in the dough. We were the stars of the company."
A zombie hit Memory Carlos from behind, taking him hard to the pavement. The nearby faceless Hunters were in no position to help and it looked like certain death. But the zombie froze, an inch from taking a bite out of Carlos' neck. It stayed there for a moment until Carlos could roll over, draw his.45 and put a round into the creature's brain. The splattered team leader caught a brief glance of Hood, hand extended, two fingers pointing at the frozen zombie. Hood went back to the action as if nothing had happened.
My host shook his head sadly. "That was my first clue, but in the excitement, I missed it. It went on. Every time we had nothing going on, more undead would pop up somewhere in our region. I was thinking that we had some hardcore necromancer living in the neighborhood, but he was always one step ahead of us. I was too stupid to realize that I saw him every day."
More scenes flashed by. Several months had passed since these Hunters had started working together. "By that time, I was a wealthy man, not that I can remember what I did with it. He's let me remember that I was like a damn superhero to the other Hunters, just to rub it in. Really, I was just a chump. Hood came across as a nice kid, a real joker, a bookworm, an intellectual, and a dork. Everybody loved him. It was a lie, an act. We didn't realize what he was fixated on." There was a vision of the two men, sitting on a bench on an ocean pier, drinking and telling stories, unwinding after a long day at work. "It turned out that Hood's parents were killed when he was just a boy. They were occultists, and had been messing around with the Old Ones back in England. He confided this to me one night. That's why he became a Hunter. He wanted to fight those things. He was obsessed with them."
"Why'd he tell you?"
My host laughed. "You'll see…"
Hood took a long draw from a cigarette before flicking the butt into the ocean. "See, boss, that's what got me thinking…" It was obvious that he'd had too much to drink. "There's a lot of information about the Elder Things floating around. Why not, and this is just a hypothetical, use their own weapons against them? Harnessing magic is no different than harnessing electricity."
Carlos openly scoffed. "That's insane."
"No. Hear me out, mate. You're a smart chap. It's like the war, the big one. My grandmother lived through the Battle of Britain and she told me what those V rockets sounded like when they flew over. Pure terror. Evil stuff, right? But as soon as the war was over, bam, the Allies grabbed up every German scientist they could, right? That's how we put a man on the moon."
Carlos took a long drink. "I suppose."
"This is the same thing. Just because knowledge originates from a bad use, doesn't make it bad. It's still knowledge. We owe it to ourselves to study the Old Ones, not just shun them. Think of what we could do." Hood grew somber. "Imagine if a group of us, people like me and you, who knew what was really out there, worked together and harnessed that power…We could banish death itself!"
"That's not how it works. Anything those things touch is tainted. Stay away from it, Marty." The Carlos of memory tossed his now-empty bottle out into the waves and stood to leave. "You're drunk and talking stupid. I'll call you a cab. Go home and get some rest, man."
"I thought maybe you would understand…" Hood muttered to himself as Carlos walked away.
Carlos continued his narration as the pier dissolved. "I figured it out eventually. Hood had found something in the archives back at headquarters. Some old book, picked up from who knows where." The next scene was in a room filled with many shelves, lined with row after row of books. At first I thought we'd come to a library, but then I realized that it was a small apartment, literally packed with books. The titles on the spines were all blurry and forgotten. Hood was sitting at a table, giant tome open before him, a single small bulb providing light enough to read by. The book must have been etched into Carlos' memory, because it was crystal clear. A massive, leather-bound thing, the pages ancient and covered in symbols and geometries that suggested madness in whoever inked it in blood millennia before.
"Hey, Marty. Nobody's been able to get a hold of you. I was getting worried so I had your landlord let me in. Are you okay?" Carlos called as he entered the room, only to jerk to a halt when he saw the open book. "Is that- What are you doing with that thing?"
"Learning…" Hood mumbled as if he was in a trance, not looking up as he traced his hands over the words. The crazed scribbling seemed to move. There was a drawing of the monstrous alien tree, branches like twitching cricket legs. A black smear had been rubbed onto the page above it, like a cloud rising from the tree.