Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories

by Joseph Nassise

  Franks and I had proved that.

  Then in one of those moments of combat improbability that offer proof that the gods of war are perverse sons of bitches, a heavy-caliber round hit the side of my gun. The force tore the gun from my hand and nearly took my trigger finger with it.

  The tactician had two burly guards with him and they were all eight feet from me. Their guns were swinging toward me.

  I had no time at all, and I gave them none. Eight feet is a long step and a jump. I leapt into the air, slapping the barrel of the closest AK aside a microsecond before he fired, and at the same time I hooked the shooter around the back of the neck, shoving him sideways. He crashed into the second shooter and I landed on the balls of my feet, pivoted, snapped out a low flatfooted kick to the second man’s knee. The joint splintered audibly and it tore a shriek from him. I gave him a double-tap with my elbow, one very fast and very light hit to the eye socket to knock his head backward and a second, much harder shot to the Adam’s apple. He fell, gagging and trying to drag air in through a throatful of junk.

  The first shooter tried to slam me across the face with his rifle, but he wasn’t set for it. I slapped the swing high and ducked low, chop-punching him in the groin, then rising fast and hitting him in the throat, too, this time with the stiffened Y formed by index finger and thumb.

  That left the tactician facing me.

  He did something cute. He pulled a knife.

  So, what the hell, I pulled mine.

  He was pretty good. Fast, strong, knew some moves.

  Pretty good is great if you’re fighting in a back alley or in the dojo using rubber knives. Not when you’re fighting for your life.

  He tried to drive the point of his knife into my chest, maybe hoping to end it right there. I clubbed the knife down and away with a fist and used the Ka-Bar to draw a bright red line beneath his chin. I whirled away to avoid the spray of blood.

  18

  SPECIAL AGENT FRANKS

  Franks crashed through the camp, keeping up a steady stream of fire on the charging Alghuls. The contorted bodies were nearly as fast as he was, and it was taking several solid hits to put them down.

  Beneath their tearing uniforms, their skin quickly dried and cracked apart, and unholy yellow light poured through the gaps. Bones twisted into points and ripped through their fingertips. As the possessed around them shed their humanity, the mortal ISIS fighters lost their nerve and fled into the desert. Not all of them made it, as overcome with bloodlust the Alghul fell on them, tearing them limb-from-limb, and painting the stone walls with blood. Franks would have shot the survivors in the back as they ran away, but he couldn’t spare the ammunition.

  There was a ripping noise as an Alghul tore through a canvas tent to get at him. When it appeared, the yellow glow leaking through its tearing visage reminded him of a candle inside a jack-o’-lantern. But when he knocked it down and then stomped its chest flat with one big combat boot what came squirting out wasn’t very pumpkin-like at all.

  “Franks! Over here!” He turned to see Ledger standing in a doorway to an ancient stone building. He no longer had Franks’ Glock and instead held a Russian Stechkin automatic pistol he’d picked up from one of the dead ISIS fighters. Behind him, stairs led down into the darkness. Ledger glanced up as a shadow crossed him. An Alghul was spider-climbing up the rock above him. Ledger calmly raised his Stechkin and fired several rounds through its face. “I found the prison,” he said as the Alghul landed next to him with a sick thud.

  And the rest of the Alghul must have realized it too, because they’d quit tearing the terrorists’ guts out and shoving them into their mouths long enough to all focus on the American intruders. There were at least a dozen of them left, and they all ran shrieking toward the doorway.

  “Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast.” Ledger grimaced as an Alghul swiped at his eyes with its claws. He shot the creature repeatedly as it stumbled away. Then Ledger darted forward and punctuated the attack with a deep slash from the silver Ka-Bar. The demon shrieked and crumpled to the stone floor.

  Franks shoulder-checked another Alghul into the ground and then dumped the rest of his rifle’s magazine into its body, sending up gouts of blood and sand. “Don’t let anything past this point,” he told Ledger as he shoved by him.

  “I sure hope Church was wrong about your allies tending to die horribly,” Ledger muttered as he got ready to hold off a horde of demons on his own.

  “Not really,” Franks said as he went down the stairs.

  “That’s not helping,” Ledger shouted as he kept shooting.

  19

  CAPTAIN JOE LEDGER

  I swapped out a spent magazine for a fresh one just as a wave of Alghuls rushed at me.

  The Modern Man inside my head more or less screamed and passed out. The Cop backpedaled because this wasn’t his kind of fight.

  But the Killer . . . ?

  Well, hell, I think he was waiting for the right moment to take the wheel and drive us all to crazy town.

  And I liked it. They rushed at me. And I . . . fuck it. I rushed at them.

  I let the gun barrel lead the way but I chased the bullets into the crowd. The heavy rounds punched holes in foreheads and burst eyeballs and painted the walls with dark gore. If we’d been in a wider space they could have circled me and cut me apart. This was a narrow stairwell and it worked for the kind of close-range fighting I do best. When the slide locked back I simply rammed the barrel into the screaming mouth of one of the Alghuls and then slashed her across the throat. As she twisted down to the ground I reached past and quick-stabbed the next one in the right eye and then the left. One-two shallow thrusts with the sharpened clip of the Ka-Bar. The demon staggered back, clawing at its face with black talons, and I knee-kicked it into the others, jamming and crowding them even more. I grabbed a fistful of hair and drove the knife into the socket of a throat, gave the blade a quarter turn and ripped it free.

  The dead and dying monsters toppled against the others, pressing them backward, transforming their savage attack into a clumsy rout. I jumped onto them, riding the falling, tumbling, bone-snapping avalanche down the stairs. Claws tore at me, the stone walls and the stone steps pummeled me, teeth snapped at me, but I rode a magic carpet of destruction down to the bottom. This was my moment and although they were demons from some twisted corner of hell, I was the red king and the knife was my scepter.

  Then something massive crashed past me, striking the last of the demons like a runaway truck.

  Franks.

  He was splashed with blood and there was a wild light in his eyes that was no more human than the monsters we fought. He smashed them with fists the size of gallon pails; he stomped on them. I saw him tear an arm from its socket in exactly the same way the first Alghul had done back at the village.

  It was all red madness.

  I was the only one down there who was human.

  If you could call the Killer human. He was like a demon howling inside my head, and through my mouth and with my voice.

  But I was wrong.

  I wasn’t the only human down there.

  I saw a man standing at the rear of the chamber.

  He was dressed in strange clothes, all of gold and jewels and leather, like someone who had stepped from a history book. In a flash of insight I realized that he was probably dressed as a shaman or sorcerer from the courts of King Shalmaneser, emulating everything down to his garb so that there was no chance of getting his horrible ritual wrong.

  He was the one responsible for all this death. He was the one who had taken all of these innocent girls and turned them into monsters. He had participated in a kind of spiritual rape by opening them to the demons who destroyed their souls while stealing their flesh. The depth of this crime—this sin—was bottomless. If he lived, if he escaped, then all of this destruction, all of this pain, was for nothing. He would start it up again somewhere else. He would ruin more lives, and by doing it hand ISIL a weapon more dangerous t
han any nuke.

  Behind the sorcerer was a doorway in the living rock of the cavern. It was open and beyond it I could see flames. Maybe there was a bonfire in there, but I don’t think so.

  I think I was looking straight into the mouth of Hell itself.

  One after another of the Alghul came running from the flames to join the fight.

  “Franks!” I screamed, pointing.

  The brute had three Alghuls tearing at him and he bled from at least fifty deep cuts, but he turned, saw me, saw where I was pointing. Saw the sorcerer.

  I saw him stiffen. I saw the moment when he understood what we were seeing.

  Franks reached up and ripped one of the Alghul from him and used her body as a club to beat the other two into shattered ruin. Then he lowered his head, balled his fists, and charged toward the sorcerer.

  Leaving the other ten Alghuls to swarm at me.

  But I kicked myself backward and stepped on something that turned under my foot. It was one of Franks’ guns. A mate to the Glock he’d given me. I snatched it up, vaulted the rail, and dropped fifteen feet to the floor. My knees buckled under the impact, but I tucked and rolled as best I could. The Alghul shrieked like crows and swarmed down the steps toward me. The sorcerer pointed at me with a ceremonial dagger and at Franks with a scepter.

  “Kill them!”

  The demons closed around me like a fist.

  I raised the pistol and took the shot.

  One bullet.

  There was only one round left and the slide locked back.

  The sorcerer stared at me. All the Alghul froze. The world and the moment froze.

  The sorcerer had three eyes. Two brown ones and a new black one between them. Two of the Alghul stood behind him, their faces splashed with blood that was redder than theirs.

  We all lived inside that frozen moment for what seemed like an hour. Or a century.

  And then the sorcerer fell.

  20

  SPECIAL AGENT FRANKS

  It really pissed him off when stupid mortals fucked around with things beyond their comprehension. This idiot had probably pieced the spell together out of some forbidden tome. He’d gotten the costume right but the actual magic words written in blood on the walls were the equivalent quality of crayon scribbles. The workmanship was so shoddy they were lucky he hadn’t sucked northern Iraq into another dimension with this half-assed summoning spell.

  Ledger drilling a hole through the summoner’s brain had stopped the ritual. No more would cross over. However, they were still up to their eyeballs in Alghul, but since the path was still open, Franks had a solution to that little problem.

  This next part wasn’t in any of the MCB’s manuals.

  Franks walked to the shimmering portal, and placed his hands against the edges. His gloves immediately burst into flames. Even though they were all around them, the humans couldn’t sense the disembodied, but Franks could. He saw that the Alghul’s spirits were still tethered to this prison. In this place of power he could apply the might of his will against theirs.

  Your invitation has been revoked, Franks declared in the Old Tongue. A hot desert wind ripped through the ruins, sand blasting the bloody marks from the ancient walls. The demons shrieked as the void ripped them from their newfound flesh and sent them hurtling back into the darkness.

  And then he shut the door.

  The flaming portal disappeared in a flash. Every possessed body instantly collapsed into a limp, wet heap.

  Well, that worked better than he’d expected.

  Ledger was panting, covered in blood, and surrounded by corpses. He looked to Franks, incredulous. “What the fuck just happened, Franks?”

  “Mission accomplished.”

  21

  CAPTAIN JOE LEDGER

  I want to say that it was an easy wrap. I want to say that Franks did his magic mumbo jumbo and the world became all shiny and new and cartoon animals frolicked around us.

  I’d love to say that. Just once.

  The truth was that there were still some possessed ISIL foot soldiers out there.

  Franks and I are alive right now because we earned it.

  I’m telling you this now as I sit on an equipment box in Camp Baharia in Fallujah. There are a lot of US military around me. Echo Team finally arrived, so I have my own people there. In that place, with that much muscle around me I should feel secure, should be able to take a deep breath.

  But I think it’s finally hit me.

  There are demons. Real demons.

  There are monsters. Real monsters.

  We stopped a threat unlike anything I’d ever imagined could be real in this world. The gateway to Hell, or to wherever those demons came from, is closed, thanks to a monster that stands alongside ordinary humans like me.

  That doorway is sealed, but when I asked Franks if that meant that demons could no longer come into our world, he did something that I didn’t think he could do.

  He laughed.

  And, brother, it was not the kind of laugh you ever want to hear.

  No, it was not.

  So I sit here, waiting for my ride out of this place, for my ride home. The night is heavy and vast. I used to think the shadows were nothing more than lightless air, that nothing lived in them, that nothing could.

  Now I know different.

  Holy god, now I know different.

  RELATED WORKS

  Remember: these characters and the worlds they’re from have plenty more stories to tell, so make sure you check out their series and authors to learn even more!

  Character (Series) Author

  Ava (Hellhound Chronicles) Caitlin Kittredge

  Sabina Kane (Sabina Kane) Jaye Wells

  Verity Price (Incryptid) Seanan McGuire

  Elena Michaels (Women of the Otherworld) Kelley Armstrong

  Cadmus Damiola (Glass Town) Steven Savile

  Daniel Faust (Daniel Faust) Craig Schaeffer

  Cade Williams (The Templar Chronicles) Joseph Nassise

  Joe Hark (Pitchfork County) Sam Witt

  Angel Crawford (White Trash Zombie) Diana Rowland

  Kitty Norville (Kitty Norville) Carrie Vaughn

  Jack Walker (Seal Team 666) Weston Ochse

  Laura Caxton (Laura Caxton) David Wellington

  Dahlia Lynley-Chivers (Southern Vampire Mysteries) Charlaine Harris

  Peter Octavian (The Shadow Saga) Christopher Golden

  Joanne Walker (The Walker Papers) C. E. Murphy

  Harper Blaine (Greywalker) Kat Richardson

  Lem Vonnegan and Pitr Mags (Ustari Cycle) Jeff Somers

  Eric Carter (Eric Carter) Stephen Blackmoore

  Agent Franks (Monster Hunters International) Larry Correia

  Joe Ledger (Joe Ledger) Jonathan Maberry

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Kelley Armstrong is the author of the Cainsville modern gothic series and the Age of Legends young adult fantasy trilogy. Past works include the Otherworld urban fantasy series, the Darkest Powers and the Darkness Rising teen paranormal trilogies, and the Nadia Stafford crime trilogy. Armstrong lives in Ontario with her family.

  Stephen Blackmoore is the author of the noir urban fantasy novels Mythbreaker, City of the Lost, Dead Things, Broken Souls, and the upcoming Hungry Ghosts. He has written tie-in fiction for the role-playing game Spirit of the Century, the video game Wasteland 2, and the television series Heroes Reborn. His short stories can be found online and in the anthologies Deadly Treats and Uncage Me. He cohosts the bimonthly crime fiction reading series Noir At The Bar L.A. He can be found online at www.stephenblackmoore.com and on Twitter at @sblackmoore.

  Larry Correia is the New York Times bestselling author of the Monster Hunter International series, the Grimnoir Chronicles trilogy, the Dead Six military thrillers, and the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior epic fantasy series. A former accountant and firearms instructor, Larry lives in northern Utah with his patient wife and children.

  Christopher Golden is the New York Times number-one b
estselling author of such novels as Snowblind, Dead Ringers, Tin Men, and Of Saints and Shadows, among many others. A lifelong fan of the “team-up,” Golden frequently collaborates with other writers on books, comics, and scripts. His collaborations with Mike Mignola have led to two cult favorite comic book series, Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies The New Dead, Seize the Night, The Monster’s Corner, and Dark Duets, among others, and has also written and cowritten comic books, video games, screenplays, and a network television pilot. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.

  Charlaine Harris is a true daughter of the South. She was born in Mississippi and has lived in Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas. After years of dabbling with poetry and plays and essays, her career as a novelist began when her husband told her to stay home and write. Her first book, Sweet and Deadly, appeared in 1981. When Charlaine’s career as a mystery writer began to falter, she decided to write a cross-genre book that would appeal to fans of mystery, science fiction, romance, and suspense. She could not have anticipated the huge surge of reader interest in the adventures of a barmaid in Louisiana, or the fact that Alan Ball would come knocking at her door. Charlaine is a voracious reader. She has one husband, three children, two grandchilden, and three rescue dogs. She leads a busy life.

  Caitlin Kittredge is the author of sixteen books for adults and teens, including Black Dog and the award-winning Iron Codex trilogy. She created and wrote the comic Coffin Hill for Vertigo and writes the upcoming series Throwaways for Image Comics. Ava and Leo’s story continues in Grim Tidings, Book Two of the Hellhound Chronicles. Find Caitlin on Twitter at @caitkitt.

  Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling novelist, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He writes the Joe Ledger thrillers, the Rot & Ruin series, the Nightsiders series, the Dead of Night series, as well as stand-alone novels in multiple genres. His comic book works include Captain America, Bad Blood, Rot & Ruin, V-Wars, and others. He is the editor of many anthologies, including The X-Files, Scary Out There, Out of Tune, and V-Wars. His books Extinction Machine and V-Wars are in development for TV, and Rot & Ruin is in development as a series of feature films. A board game version of V-Wars will be released in 2016. He is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse, and the cofounder of the Liars Club. Prior to becoming a full-time novelist, Jonathan spent twenty-five years as a magazine feature writer, martial arts instructor, and playwright. He was a featured expert on the History Channel documentary Zombies: A Living History and a regular expert on the TV series True Monsters. Jonathan lives in Del Mar, California, with his wife, Sara Jo. Visit him at www.jonathanmaberry.com.