Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories

by Joseph Nassise

  “They’re not dead. They’re living creatures, I think. Not flesh and blood, and not from around here. Some other . . . Jeez, I know how this sounds, but they come from another dimension or something. Mostly they just pass through our world, barely touching us. Maybe you hear a whisper from behind you, maybe catch a glimpse of something in a window, and that’s it, they’re gone. Somebody, somewhere along the line, figured out a way to trap them. And skin them.”

  He looked up at her. How did she know all this? Most people in his experience were more than happy to ignore all the crazy stuff. The monsters and the magic. Who wanted to live in a world full of zombies and werewolves, right? So much easier to pretend it was all myth and forget about it and let SEAL Team 666 handle it.

  In his experience people who knew, who lived in the world where the bad things roamed, had to be broken; so fucked up by what they’d experienced they could never go home again. So what was this woman’s story?

  She was still talking, and he knew he should listen. Much as he wanted to go back inside his own head.

  “Skin them,” he said. “Like raccoon pelts.”

  “Exactly like that,” Laura told him. “That thing on your wall—it’s a ghostskin. Maybe the first person to make one of those just thought it would be pretty. Shimmery and blue, right? Might make a nice cocktail dress. That probably didn’t work out so well for them. The skins are psychoreactive. That’s a fancy word for saying they can read your mind. That skin you were looking at, it’s not intelligent, it’s not self-aware. It is hungry. It feeds off your energy. It knows one trick to help it get its food, that’s all. But it’s a hell of a trick.”

  “Listen,” he said. “I know it isn’t real. I know it’s not—” Damn it. He would not say Jen’s name out loud, not here. “I know it was just showing me what I wanted to see. Saying what I wanted to hear. Okay? I know it’s just an illusion. So . . . thank you. Thank you for pulling me away from that thing. Job well done, yeah? You got me out of that room and clearly I needed help with that. I owe you.”

  She leaned back in the booth, her arms folded across her chest. He knew that posture. She was waiting him out. Eventually the food came. She picked at her fries.

  “I think I’m going to be okay, now,” he said. “I fell down, sure. But now I’m back on my feet. You can go home. I’ll be okay.”

  “It’s not real,” she said. Repeating his words.

  He looked down at his plate. He couldn’t imagine eating that greasy mess—he might as well have been served a plate of wood chips doused in kerosene. Probably would have smelled better.

  “Yeah. Exactly. Now I know that. I can shake it. So thanks. For telling me it’s not real.”

  “A heroin addict will tell you they can feel the drug in their veins, feel it climbing up their arm, even though there are no nerve endings inside your blood vessels.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jack said.

  “What that addict feels, is it real? Because they’ll do anything to get it again. It feels pretty damned real to them. You say you’re okay, Jack. You say I can go home. Because you know once I walk out that door, you can head right back to room nineteen. Back to that ghostskin.”

  He gave her a nasty look, then. Jack Walker had some pretty good nasty looks in him. She didn’t flinch.

  “You’re wondering how I knew that,” she said. “Can’t you guess? I’m addicted to ghostskin, too. Just like you.”

  “Addicted—” He shook his head furiously. “I’m not addicted. I haven’t even been here a week.”

  She laughed hoarsely. “Yeah. That’s a good one. Make no mistake about it. If that room was full of needles and heroin, it would be easier to walk away.” Seeing his doubt, she asked, “Are you going to tell me you don’t want to go back? Are you thinking right now you can just say no?”

  Instead of answering, he looked away.

  “When I walked into your room, it reacted to me. It started taking on the shape of my father.”

  “What? No, it looked like—”

  She shook her head. “It shows each person what they want to see. We could look at it at exactly the same time and see two different things. I miss my dad, a lot. I would give anything just to see him again. The ghostskin knows that. Like I said, just one trick, but a really good one.”

  “You’re not going to leave me alone, are you?” Jack asked.

  “No. I’m going to shove you into my car and drive you someplace safe and let you sleep this off. Then maybe we talk about how you get rid of me.”

  He shoved his plate away. He found his wallet in his pocket and pulled out a crisp hundred-dollar bill and slapped it on the table. He couldn’t look at the waitress on the way out. Couldn’t so much as thank her. He felt worthless, desperate, stupid. He glanced at his car in the parking lot. The keys were snug in his pocket. He could just drive away and get lost somewhere.

  Instead she pointed toward her own car, a little Japanese car like the one Jen had driven.

  Maybe, though.

  Maybe there was still a chance for him.

  Maybe.

  As he reached for the passenger door, he couldn’t help but look back at the motel. Looking was okay, right? If you didn’t look too long, maybe.

  For the very first time he actually saw the motel, its rundown decks, its rows of rooms. For the first time he noticed all the drawn curtains. Saw the faint blue flicker coming from every room.

  “Oh hell,” he said, letting his hand fall away from the car door.

  “Don’t. Just get in the car,” she told him.

  “No,” he said. “It’s in every room.” He glanced up at the motel’s sign. NO VACANCY. “Shit, there are other people in there. Other people like us . . . like me,” he added, the words sour in his mouth.

  “They’re not your problem,” Laura told him.

  Jack Walker didn’t operate that way. It was in his DNA to be heroic even if doing so could get him killed . . . even if being a hero was the last thing he needed to be doing. What had Commander Holmes called him that first day with Triple Six? Impetuous? Dangerous? Impulsive? All of those were still true, except he’d learned to rein them in. But that was before an asshole motel owner had created a prison for those in need, a place where the desperate became the damned, wasting away their lives talking to a ghostskin, pretending to be someone they couldn’t possibly be.

  No. If he was ever going to get past this, if he was going to look at himself in a mirror again, ever, there was something he needed to do first.

  She tried to grab his arm. She weighed probably half what he did.

  He shrugged her off and made a beeline for the motel’s office.

  “Jack!” she called after him.

  He heard, but he was on mission now, and he wasn’t going to stop until he was done. He was like a man on fire as he burst into the office, the bell above the door heralding his coming. No one was behind the counter, so he tried the door on the left, which he remembered had access to the back office. It was locked. He opened it with his size eleven shoe key, shattering the cheaply made doorframe. The room had a desk, a chair, and a file cabinet, but no person.

  He exited the room and kicked down the other door, which was to the manager’s apartment—nothing more than a glorified suite, with a living area and a bedroom, both of which were empty also. As he approached the closed door to the bathroom, he noticed that it had a hex sign painted on it. He had no idea what it meant, but knew that something important had to be inside.

  As he reached to open the door, Laura’s voice came from behind him. “I’d be careful opening that if I were you.”

  “What’s it going to do? Explode?” he snarled.

  “You see hex signs all over this part of the country. People paint them on their houses to keep their kids safe. For them, the signs are about as effective as nailing up a horseshoe. Just a quaint old custom.”

  “I’m guessing this one’s not so quaint.” It didn’t look like a lot of the hex signs he’d seen be
fore, actually. It wasn’t as colorful, or as complex. It looked like a pentagram made of bird wings.

  “If you actually know what you’re doing, there’s real magic you can put in those things. That one,” she said, gesturing at the door, “for instance, is the hex for a safe haven. It protects whoever is inside.”

  He turned to regard the hex once more. “Safe haven from whom?” he asked.

  “When you start messing with psychoreactive stuff like ghosts, it has a tendency to draw attention. Think of the ghostskins like a magnet. Bad things are drawn to bad things.”

  “So you think the owner is inside? Hiding from us?”

  She cocked her head. “Could be. But we need to be careful. Whoever it is has been using witchbilly magic. It can get dangerous.”

  “So I shouldn’t touch the door?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Okay, then.” He went to the side of the bed, cleared the surface of an end table with one sweep of an arm, and hefted it. He turned, took three running steps, and threw it at the door. The door shattered inward and the table immediately burst into flame.

  He heard Laura run out of the room, but he wasn’t about to leave.

  He grabbed the bed cover and threw it on top of the burning table. Covering his mouth with his left hand, he leaned into the bathroom.

  Empty.

  Where was the manager, the man who had given him the ghostskin?

  Laura came back inside lugging a fire extinguisher. Good thing she did, too. The last thing he needed on his conscience was a motel’s worth of burn victims as a result of a fire he’d caused.

  When she was done, she turned to him. “Don’t go throwing things at hexes. You never know if it might throw something back at you.”

  He understood, but could barely contain his frustration. He needed to do something. Anything. She seemed to notice.

  “It appears that we have three choices. We can either search for the guy who put the hexes in place and created the ghostskins or we can go into each and every room and try and bring the victims to safety.”

  After a beat he said, “I thought you said there were three choices.”

  “Or three, we do nothing and get the hell out of here. It’s actually the one I like best.”

  He suddenly felt exhausted. How long had he been in the thrall of the ghostskin, and what had it taken out of him? He could just leave—just pack up and get the hell out, go back to Coronado and do a mission, leaving all of this behind him. He could do it. He could absolutely turn his back on all the people enthralled by someone’s sick joke of a soul leech. But then the real voice of Jen asked him from a faraway memory—But at what cost to your soul?

  Who was he kidding? He could no more leave than he could give up. His eyes brightened a little as he set his jaw. “Let’s find this wizard and see if we can’t find an ‘off’ button for these damned ghostskins.”

  If he’d had his team with him, he’d have either requested overhead sat imagery or considered using a man-packable UAV to survey the area. But since he wasn’t with his team, he was forced to do it the old-fashioned way. The front of the motel and the parking lot were to the right of the manager’s office, so they peeled off left. He was in front, with Laura behind him. He could have sworn she rolled her eyes at him, but he couldn’t be sure.

  About halfway around the back, they saw a worn path leading into the thick Pennsylvania woods that abutted the back of the motel. The last of the daylight was failing, and the shadows under the trees were thick with darkness. Not the best time of day for recon, but they didn’t have much choice. He glanced back once at Laura, who gestured impatiently for him to proceed. He went into a slight crouch as he moved, ready to react to any signs of threat. The path wove through several trees and knee-high ferns. After about thirty feet, he spied a mark on a tree that had to be man-made. He crouched and searched the ground until he found a pressure plate in the middle of the path. What it might set off he didn’t know and unlike with the bathroom door, he didn’t want to know.

  He silently communicated his discovery, then pointed to the thick brush and made a walking sign with his fingers.

  Laura raised an eyebrow, but made no other comment.

  Walker left the trail and began paralleling it on the left. The going was much slower. Not only was the brush thick enough that he needed to push his way through, but he also had to be concerned for additional traps set to get those who left the trail, although he hoped the motel manager wasn’t that sophisticated.

  Tripping, sweating, and cursing as they pushed their way through the brush, they made it another fifty feet before they saw a worn wooden shack leaning lazily against the side of a hill. Hex signs had been drawn all over the sides and the door in various colors and patterns. Walker didn’t recognize them, but their totality made him itch, indicating that they indeed held a lot of magic.

  “You’re the Special Ops guy. What do we do now?” Laura said in his ear.

  “About now we’d generally send in Hoover.”

  “You’d send in a vacuum?”

  “Hoover’s our dog.”

  “Why’d you name your dog after a vacuum?”

  He stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. “It’s a long story,” he said. “We can either make our way through the hexes or we can wait to see who comes out.”

  “That is if anyone is in there,” she added.

  “There is that,” he agreed. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a piece on you?”

  “What, a gun?” she asked. “No.”

  “You came out here unarmed?”

  “Bullets can’t kill a ghost,” she explained. “Plus . . . I’m on probation.”

  He cursed silently to himself. He hadn’t brought any weapons to the motel, either. He’d been too worried he might do something irrevocable, so he’d left them behind.

  Great.

  They stood in the brush staring at the shack for about ten minutes, when Walker couldn’t take it any longer. He began to move forward.

  She grabbed the back of his collar. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I want to see the other side of the shack. Make sure there isn’t another way out.”

  “Be careful,” she whispered.

  Aren’t I always? he said to himself, knowing it to be a colossal delusion. Still, it was his delusion so he held fast to it. He checked the ground before each foot landed and made his way quickly across the path and into the dense vegetation on the other side. Sidestepping around a bush, he found himself face-to-face with a shimmering blue ghostskin, its flat misshapen surface even now changing into that of his dead fiancée.

  He squeezed shut his eyes and gritted his teeth as an impossible voice crackle-whispered, “Don’t leave me, Jack. It’s cold in Hell. I need you to keep me warm.”

  He spun back around the bush and fell to a knee. He tried desperately to clear his head. It sounded so much like her. What if she was in Hell? What if she was there because of something he’d caused her to do, like in the mission to Mexico where she’d been forced to commit murder to save him?

  No! Stop it! he told himself. This was exactly what it wanted . . . to get under his skin.

  He stood, determined to get beyond it. He kept his eyes open, but focused. He spun around the bush again and saw where the ghostskin was hanging from the tree like a profane sheet. He stepped past it, his eyes on the shack.

  Still, it spoke to him. “Jack. So cold. Jack. Don’t leave me.”

  He felt his eyes burn as he continued to step through the brush. When he made it another ten feet the feeling disappeared, and his tears evaporated. He took a deep, gasping breath and beheld a cave opening that had been previously blocked from view by their position on the other side of the path.

  Walker examined the perimeter for any sort of early-warning devices, but couldn’t see anything. Entering the shack was absolutely out of the question. But the cave, on the other hand . . . if that’s where the warlock was hanging his magic hat, t
hen that’s where Walker wanted to be.

  He found a path through the forest that would take him closest to the hillside. It took him fifteen minutes of stealthy walk-crawling to follow the path to where it ended, six feet from the hillside, and ten feet to the right of the opening. He checked again for any type of surveillance, but he couldn’t even detect any power lines, much less any electronic devices.

  Keeping low with his back to the hillside, he slid toward the opening, until his shoulder was about to edge into the open space. He stuck his head into the opening for a brief second, taking in everything, then returned to an upright position.

  The cave was deeper than he’d expected. From the muted rays of twilight, he was able to see a few tables near the entrance with some arcane instruments laid out upon them and the telltale blue glitter from ghostskins hanging farther back. A well-worn path ran through a stack of waist-high boxes nearest the entrance.

  If he could make it to the boxes, he could use them for concealment as he checked out the rest of the cave. With luck, he’d find the warlock before he’d need to traverse to where the ghostskins hung. He could almost hear them now, a chorus of false voices, begging and breaking his heart. The fact that he now dreaded to hear Jen’s voice made him angry. He grabbed on to that rage and used it as his weapon.

  He cautiously edged around the corner, trying to limit the amount of time he was backlit by the opening. He almost made it to the boxes before he heard a faint click, then the sound of a generator coming on inside the shack. Before he could even move, he was speared by a shaft of blinding light. It was as if someone had turned a spotlight on him, except this spotlight kept him from moving. He was completely frozen. Nothing moved at all. Not even his lungs. He panicked, but it did nothing to change his position. It was as if he was locked out of his own body. Without breath, his body would cease to function in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.

  Then he saw it. Coming out from a light embedded in the ceiling of the cave in front of him was a hex sign. Not a hex sign drawn on the ground or on a wall. Not one of substance. But one made of light, one projected upon him trapping him as surely as if it had been a physical restraint. A light as deadly as a bullet to the brain.