I tried to get to my feet, failed, and he caught me under the arm and jerked me upright. I slapped his hand away and stepped back.
“Who are you? How do you know about Church? How do you know about demons, for Christ’s sake? And, just in general, what the fuck?”
“The fuck,” said Franks, “is that ISIS has gone old-school.”
“Meaning what?”
He pointed into the desert. “The answers are out there. If you want in, you need to come with me now.”
“No, first I get answers.” I stepped away from him and tapped my earbud to get the channel for the tactical operations center. “Cowboy to Deacon.”
“Go for Deacon,” said Church.
“Two words,” I said. “Franks and demons.”
He said, “Ah.”
He gave it to me in bullet points, but they hit like real bullets. Agent Franks. Monster Control Bureau. A group that responded to supernatural threats in the same way that the Department of Military Sciences responds to terrorists with high-tech science weapons.
Real.
All real.
If there was a note of apology in Church’s voice for not having read me in on this earlier, I sure couldn’t hear it. As I listened, Franks stood apart, checking his weapons and trying to look as casual as a towering freak of a monster killer could look.
“Franks is in the family,” said Church. “You can trust him. He’s one of us.”
“One of us? Is he even human?”
Church paused. “At this point, captain, would that even matter?”
10
SPECIAL AGENT FRANKS
“How do you know Mr. Church?” asked Ledger.
“We’ve met,” Franks said. “He offered me a cookie.”
“Yeah. He does love his vanilla wafers. We have a pool going that there’s some kind of code in that whole cookie thing. What he eats, how he eats them, what he offers to other people.”
“You’re overthinking it.”
“Pretty good chance,” said Ledger. “Equal chance we’re not. He’s a spooky bastard.”
They walked. The sun was an open furnace.
“Most soldiers, even SpecOps, would have died,” Franks told him.
Ledger cut him a look, but only shook his head.
“You fight okay.” By Franks’ standards, that was a huge compliment.
“I intend to go home and cry into my pillow,” said Ledger. “Maybe wear sweats and eat a whole thing of Ben and Jerry’s. Or get drunk. Drunk is a real contender for how I intend to process this shit.”
11
CAPTAIN JOE LEDGER
I’m a big, tough manly man, but there are times I just want to go and hide. Like when I’m in the middle of the Iraqi desert, having just waded through a brutal firefight and some Frankenstein-looking cocksucker tells me that demons are real and we have to go chase one of them.
It doesn’t help one little bit for me to remind myself that no one drafted me. I signed on for this stuff. Well . . . maybe not this stuff, but a good soldier doesn’t get to choose his wars.
But, really, man . . . demons?
There is not enough bourbon in all of Kentucky to make that fit into my head.
Franks asked, “Have you heard of Alghul?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s a monster from Arabian folklore.”
“They’re more than that.”
I glanced over my shoulder in the direction we’d come. “Oh,” I said. “Shit.”
“One Thousand and One Nights has some truths. Alghul exist. They’re mostly female demons who haunt graveyards, digging up fresh corpses to feed on. They lure men to remote spots and attack them. Like mermaids.” He cut me a look. “Yes. Mermaids are real. They love human flesh.”
“Jesus. Disney got that wrong.”
“Alghul are ferocious, but rare. Most were imprisoned. Until now.”
“So . . . ISIL is doing what? Recruiting desert demons?”
“Of course.” He said it so matter-of-factly that it jolted me. I studied his brutish face, looking for some trace of humor or even irony. Nothing. He was as frank as his name.
“Okay, okay, so they are recruiting desert demons. How, though? If these Alghul are so vicious that they were imprisoned, why don’t they chomp on the ISIL dickheads? I’m sure they’re every bit as tasty.”
“I don’t do cultural evaluations,” he stated. “Dark magic probably.”
“And they can shape-shift? When I saw the first one she was an ordinary girl. Sixteen, seventeen, maybe. Then suddenly she wasn’t a girl.”
He nodded. “They prefer to use virgins as hosts. Demons enjoy corrupting the pure.”
There had been a lot in the papers about ISIL fighters kidnapping women, forcing them into marriages with their people, or consigning them to rape camps. As insane as it was, I could see the ugly shape of it. ISIL was fierce but it wasn’t massive. It did not really have a home country. It couldn’t put a million-man army in the field to oppose the growing coalition of international forces. Even though many of ISIL’s leaders were former Saddam officers and the equipment they used was stolen advanced tech, they were still comparatively small. They could fight a guerrilla war but there was no way they could achieve a decisive win or hope to hold their territories for very long. They needed a wild card. I was dealing with some of this stateside with ISIL teams stealing technologies like portable EMPs and drone tech. This was new, and if it was something they could repeat over and over again, then this was a game changer.
12
SPECIAL AGENT FRANKS
The sun beat down on their heads, and then the rocks beneath them radiated the heat back upward. They were traveling cross-country to avoid being spotted. It was a brutally hot day and he was sweating profusely beneath his armor. Franks didn’t mind. Discomfort was one of those mortal concepts he had never really grasped. Compared with the endless void of Hell, a little mortal suffering was a small price to pay to have a body.
Captain Ledger was human and must have been dying in the agonizing heat, but he didn’t seem like a complainer. They’d set a tough pace across rugged terrain, as fast as Franks was willing to risk without further aggravating the bullet hole in his leg, but Ledger had kept up. In fact, he seemed to enjoy the challenge.
So Ledger could fight extremely well, hadn’t been scared of an Alghul, and was tough. It was too bad he was with a different agency, because Franks found himself thinking that he could use a man like this . . . But unfortunately, it turned out Ledger was also a smart-ass.
“So, Franks,” said Ledger, “my people tell me you saved the world once.”
“I heard the same thing about you.”
Ledger shrugged. “Hasn’t everybody?”
“No,” Franks stated flatly.
But Ledger was undeterred. “That sea monster off the California coast with the nuclear sub. That was one of yours, wasn’t it?”
“Classified.” Franks had been working with tough guy secret agents of the US government since Benjamin Franklin had performed his first exorcism, so Franks was used to the inevitable dick measuring to see if an agent’s rep was legit. “How’d you like the Red Order?”
“No comment.”
“Thought so.”
They made it less than half a kilometer before Ledger tried to make conversation again. What was it with mortals and their need to break perfectly good silences?
He was a little out of breath from the climb, but he kept pace. Ledger tapped his earbud. “I’m getting a lot of nice backstory on you, Franks. Here’s a fun fact. My intel guy says that people who work with you have a tendency to die horribly.”
Franks snorted. If Ledger wanted to talk, they might as well talk about the mission. They would be there by sundown. “We’re only a few clicks from the target. The ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.”
“I heard ISIL bulldozed it. I guess that’s the sort of thing psychopaths do.” Ledger snorted, seemingly disgusted by the thought. “They’re destroying pricel
ess historical relics because they think it’s an insult to their skewed view of their religion. The word ‘fucktard’ comes to mind.” He paused. “Though, I suppose something out there raised a flag, otherwise my boss wouldn’t have sent me here.”
Franks thought that Ledger was probably talking about intel pinged by the DMS’s fancy secret super computer, Mind-Reader. The DMS used it to predict problems by looking for patterns in the massive information streams gathered by the various covert intelligence networks. Franks wasn’t sure how well that actually worked for them, but it had brought Ledger here, so maybe there was something to it.
“MCB got a tip. Terrorists found the lost Prison of Shalmaneser. It was built in 1240 A.D. to house the king’s enemies.” Franks snorted. The mortal ones had turned to dust a long time ago. It was the immortal ones he was worried about.
“Which is why you’re here, I suppose. Church tells me he intercepted communications from an ISIL tactician who’d cut a deal with someone at Nimrud for a new super weapon. You know, man, we gunslingers in the post-9/11 federal agencies are supposed to share information about stuff like this.”
Franks just grunted. He’d never been good at sharing.
“Let me guess,” Ledger persisted, “this lost prison holds more of those Alghul. How many are we talking about?”
Fourteen thousand corpses of the desolate plains, an unholy army that was legend among all the jealous Fallen, until King Shalmaneser had found a way to cast them from their physical bodies and entomb them in the Earth, but Franks couldn’t tell Ledger that or how he knew about it, because there was classified, and then there was classified.
“A lot,” said Franks.
“So much fun hanging out with Chatty Cathy,” Ledger sighed.
13
CAPTAIN JOE LEDGER
We reached the ancient Prison of Shalmaneser just as the sun began sliding toward the western horizon. Long fingers of darkness seemed to reach out toward us from the shattered rock walls, broken trees, and parked vehicles. Our approach was cautious and circumspect. I reached Bug at the TOC and asked for whatever an eye-in-the-sky could tell us.
“Read forty heat signatures, Cowboy,” he said, using my combat call sign. “Thirty-four are steady, six are variable. One minute they’re normal, then they shift from low-temp to really hot. Not sure how to read that. Maybe they’re underground and thermals can’t get a solid lock.”
I told Franks and he shook his head. “As the Alghul takes over, they burn hotter. The variations in thermal signature mean that the demons haven’t fully taken hold. Human spirits are hard to destroy. Even assholes like these.”
I had the impression that an explanation that long caused him actual physical pain. Getting trapped in an elevator for six hours with this guy would be a hoot.
We made maximum use of ground cover and came in on a line the satellites said was as close to a dead zone as we’d get. Franks never seemed to tire as we crawled over rocks and through dry washes and up sandy slopes. I felt like I was melting.
There was a small camp built inside the remnants of a medieval building that had collapsed centuries ago. The ISIL vehicles were hidden under desert camo tarps, but we saw a half dozen empty slots where the vehicles from the fight in town had been parked. We hunkered down to study the layout while Bug fed me what intel he could grab from the satellite.
“How many sites are there like this?” I asked, nodding to the Assyrian ruins.
“Too many.” Franks grimaced, or maybe it was a smile. Really hard to tell with a face like his. “Most stay lost.”
“So why haven’t we heard about the Alghul until now?”
“We have. MCB find stray Alghul, we put them down. They’re here. Somebody hears a woman calling at night. Goes to look . . . The bodies are torn apart. Blame it on war. Nobody looks at a corpse over here and thinks ‘demon.’”
“Um,” I said, but I had nowhere to go with that.
“A few days ago a girl taken captive by ISIS returned to her village as a monster and slaughtered everyone. MCB found out. Intel says this is the source.”
“We shut this place down, and we shut down the threat?”
Franks shrugged.
“And here we are,” I said. The shadows were lengthening and the heat of the day was already beginning to shift. Once the sun was down it would get very cold very fast. “So, what’s the plan? Soft infil? Gather some data and call in an airstrike?”
“No. Explosives only kill the body. We need to kill the demons.”
“Shit. Let me guess, only silver does the trick.”
“It varies, demon to demon,” he said. “With the Alghul, it is silver or the hands of a true warrior.”
“Isn’t that just peachy. What if there are a lot of them?”
Franks shrugged again.
“Okay,” I said, “there are forty hostiles in there and my team is hours out. We’re two guys. So again I say, what’s the plan?”
Frank handed me a Glock and two spare magazines. I still had the silver-coated Ka-Bar. Franks had taken enough firepower from his convoy to launch a frontal assault on the gates of Hell. He pointed to a pair of guards walking sentry outside of the opening to the ruins.
“Kill everything. How much more plan do you need?”
14
SPECIAL AGENT FRANKS
Franks gave Ledger a few minutes to get into position before he started walking right up to the front of the dig site. The site was a haphazard maze of crumbling ancient buildings, twisted rock, modern prefabs, and heavy equipment. It was crawling with insurgents and absolutely reeked of demon stink. He didn’t know how many humans had already been possessed by Alghul, but it looked like they’d practically formed a line to wait their turn to go down into the prison. The tactician was smart, only letting one volunteer descend into the depths at a time, because possession wasn’t pretty, and it might make the others lose their nerve.
Idiots.
Construction spotlights kept most of the area well lit, but there were plenty of shadows for Ledger to work in. Franks had thought about taking out the generator first, since he could see in the dark, but so could the Alghul.
There was a Toyota pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in back blocking the road. The man on the gun saw the darkened shape of Franks approaching, pointed, and began shouting something. Franks shouldered the SCAR, put the ACOG scope’s glowing green triangle on the man’s chest, and launched a .308 round through his heart. The guard spun around and toppled from the bed of the truck. Franks kept walking.
The sudden noise had gotten everyone’s attention. Another man had been sleeping in the cab of the truck, and he bolted upright, glancing around, confused, until Franks’ second bullet went through the driver’s window and blew his brains all over the passenger’s side. A man in black pajamas and white sneakers ran around the truck. He had just enough time to fire a wild burst from his AK before Franks shot him once in the chest. He tumbled forward, skidding to a stop on his face.
There was movement all over the front of the camp now. Excellent. If they were all paying attention to him, then Ledger could get a shot at the ISIS tactician before he could create any more Alghul. Just in case Ledger needed more time, Franks slung his rifle, hopped into the back of the pickup, worked the charging handle on the big 12.7mm DShK machine gun, and turned it on the camp. Franks was really good at being distracting.
15
CAPTAIN JOE LEDGER
There are times you have to nut up and say “fuck it.”
So I nutted up and said fuck it.
16
SPECIAL AGENT FRANKS
THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.
The massive bullets tore right through the sheet metal of the prefab buildings. Lights shattered. Men died. Orange muzzle flashes rippled across the camp as they returned fire. Franks methodically swiveled the heavy machine gun toward each one and mashed the trigger, ripping apart bodies and cover. An insurgent ran from the ruins with an RPG over one shoulde
r and took a knee. Franks tore him in half and the rocket streaked off into the darkness.
As the last of the belt of heavy rounds cycled through the gun, Franks heard a new sound over the pounding. The screams were unnatural, like a sandstorm processed through tearing human vocal cords. Alghuls incoming, Franks thought as he saw the twisted figures loping across the camp on all fours toward him. About damned time.
17
CAPTAIN JOE LEDGER
I moved in, low and fast, running with small, quick steps to keep my aim level, firing the borrowed Glock in a two-handed grip. The ISIL tactician ducked backward, grabbed the shoulder of one of his guards and hurled him at me. Part shield, part weapon.
I put two center mass and dodged around him to get to the tactician, but there were more of the fighters. So many more.
They screamed at me in half a dozen dialects and began firing their AK-47s, filling the tomb with thunder. But they were panicking, too. In surprise attacks panic is the sword and shield of the attacker and it bares the breast and throat of the attacked. The swarm of bullets burned the air around me. I did not panic. I closed on them and fired, taking them in turn, shifting to interpose one in front of the other, making them pay for their fear that made them miss when I did not.
I could hear carnage and destruction behind me. Franks was a goddamn tank. I think he scared me more than what we were fighting. If he was an example of the MCB operators, then what the fuck else could they put in the field? I mean, I’m top of my game for what I am—a black ops gunslinger, but I’m flesh and blood. I couldn’t shake off the kinds of damage he was wading through. Even so, I heard him grunt, saw out of the corner of my eye as some of the enemy fire hit him hard enough to tear chunks away, to slow his advance. Could he die?
Probably.
I damn well could.
And so could the fighters in this tomb.
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 32
