Fists of Iron_An Urban Fantasy Novel

by J. A. Cipriano

  Tyrone’s neckless head swiveled like a turret from my smirk to Molly’s judgmental gaze before settling on Gabriela’s determined face. “All right. I can tell when I’m beat. I’m in, as long as we don’t cause any harm around here. I’ve got my own duty, right?”

  4

  The thing about treachery is it’s awfully easy to pull off when everybody trusts you, and everyone trusted Gabriela. Being a selfless healer who had spent countless hours giving of herself to everyone around her paid big dividends in the trust department. It certainly allowed everything to go smooth as silk until we slipped out of the building.

  It also helped that Tyrone, as head of security, ensured no one saw us do it.

  I glanced into the rear views of Mom’s blindingly pink mini-van as we sped away from the Pendleton Building’s parking garage. “So we’re out of there and on our merry way.” I glanced at Gabriela beside me. “So where exactly is that merry way going?”

  She adjusted the courier bag around her shoulder, no doubt filled with her trusty tablet full of spells and assorted mystical juju. “We’re essentially flying blind right now, so we need to get information. We need to consult the Pythia.”

  “Oi, why is it ye bookworms always want to go Classical with yer prophecy?” Molly complained as she sharpened a wicked-looking trench knife from one of the backseats. “I’d say we’d be better off speakin’ to the filidh at a pub I know.”

  Tyrone, stuffed like a pig in a poke beside Molly, snorted. “You’re both nuts. Prophecy is the most imprecise form of divination. You wanna find somebody, there’s lots of better ways.” He clamped a meaty hand on the back of my seat. “Frank, I know a guy who specializes in technomagical surveillance. Real pro. He can help.”

  “Dinnae be puttin’ thoughts into me boyo’s head like that! There’s ain’t a thing wrong with prophecy now, but we can’t be wastin’ time goin’ all the way to Greece fer answers, aye?”

  Gabriela's brow knit in annoyance. “We don’t have to go to Greece to see the Oracle. Well, not precisely, but that’s not the point. We can’t, no offense intended, rely on a likely drunk and certainly unknown druid in a bar with something as important as my son’s life!”

  “As if your choice is any better, Doctor,” Tyrone proclaimed as he rolled his eyes. “Huffing fumes is as crazy as drinking whiskey when it comes to wizardry. Scientifically proven surveillance is the way to go!”

  Now I knew how Mom felt every time she took Bobby and me out to eat when we were kids. It was starting to get as loud, annoying, and petty. The worst part of it was it looked like I, Frank Butcher, Captain Irresponsible himself, was going to have to be the responsible adult.

  I was at my limit after the second round of back-and-forth, so I cut that shit off before the third could get rolling. “Christ, kids, pipe down before I start acting like my mom, something none of you want to see, trust me!” With a sidelong glance toward the back, I added, “Fact of the matter is I don’t know any of these people from Adam’s housecat and this would’ve been a lot easier if you guys had let me talk to Abner about this!”

  “I know that you trust him now, Frank,” Gabby said, “but I find it hard to forgive so many backstabbings. We honestly don’t know if he’s still working for his creator or not.”

  I shook my head as I glanced back to the road. My eyes kept snapping to the rear-view mirror. Paranoia, maybe, or maybe the hairs on the back of my neck were rising up for a reason. There was only empty road behind us as I replied, “Either way, it’d be getting us on the right track faster than this runaround.”

  “Assuming he told the truth, aye?” Molly chimed in. No one seemed willing to give our big clay friend so much as an inch. They had their reasons, sure, but they also hadn’t fought across an insane hellscape with Big Red as their only salvation. Let’s just say it’d gone a long way to making me trust him. “And assumin’ he didn’t tell old Johnny boy about our little transgression. If there’s one thing them Peacekeepers hate, it’s breakin’ their orders.”

  Tyrone made a little wheeze as if he was about to say something, but he cut it off abruptly. I could see in the rear view he had craned his nonexistent neck to try to look out the back window. Guess I wasn’t the only paranoid one, a realization which prompted me to focus on the van’s side mirror.

  “One of you ladies figure out which way we’re going and fast, because we’ve got company.” Maybe it was preemptive of me to say that. I mean it wasn’t like a caravan of new black SUVs was following us. Perhaps the small convoy of rusty, peeling cars and station-wagons was merely a coincidence, an impromptu gathering of P.O.S. junkers on their way to the wreckers. Yeah, and I’m the Queen of England.

  Say anything else about how petty everyone might have been acting beforehand, but once things got serious, everyone put their game face on. Bluto snatched up the duffel bag we had filled with a small selection of long guns from the Ender’s armory. Molly wormed over the backseat and slipped into the cargo area, producing a long, metal wand, more snap baton than wizardly instrument, from somewhere. As for the doc, she began weaving her fingers, beginning to stitch together a spell from the tapestry of magic all around us.

  “Head for downtown,” she said, eyes staring off out the windscreen. “The El Cortez. Trust me, Frank, it’s the best place to go.” Why she wanted us to go a historic landmark of a hotel now was beyond me. Before I could reply, she started murmuring an incantation in Latin, one I hadn’t heard her use before.

  As if our followers realized we had seen them, the fleet of clunkers let out a collective roar of high-revving engines and surged forward. I couldn’t see who was behind the wheels of the cars, but something made la Corazon thump in my chest. I’d been in this deep-dive into the world of magic for long enough to know to trust the ancient rock in my chest, so I opened my mind and my senses to the Aztec artifact.

  My foot caressed the accelerator as a golden filter dropped over my vision, revealing the hidden threads of magical energy to me. I’ll never do the sight of it justice, the weave of multi-colored strings that threaded through everything, living or not, and wove all of reality together. Even in moments like this one, when shit was going wrong and I could feel crosshairs on my back, that brilliant Technicolor sight always put my mind at ease.

  Well, every moment except this one. You know how they say that ignorance is bliss? This was a case where that was truth. Most of what I saw was the calming glow of threads and strings, but there were glaring holes in the tapestry. When I saw holes, I mean holes. Empty, black, cancerous sores in the fabric of magic itself. They stood out in stark relief from the vibrant, lively colors of everything else.

  Most importantly, these blights were all over the cars behind us and the people, if they were actual people, inside. Every rusted spot or hole in the paint was matched by black emptiness in the metaphysical plane. What wasn’t nothingness was woven together by bloody red patches of dark magic. I could practically smell the brimstone from here.

  I had only seen this kind of thing in the chaotic, primordial ooze of the prison dimension Abner and I had saved John from. It had been a realm overwhelmed by the Great Old Ones, shit that would make most people’s hair turn white at first sight.

  While I was being overwhelmed by the sight of pure evil coming up on our rear end, things were moving at a lightning pace around me. As Tyrone pulled out a well-oiled automatic shotgun (an AA-12 with a drum magazine, quite a beauty in my eyes) out of the bag, the closest rust bucket lurched within a car’s length, close enough for the things dwelling inside the twisted steel to strike.

  Oily tendrils launched out of the cracks, dents, and rust across the station wagon. The tentacles slapped against the pretty pink finish of the van, sending multiple ringing echoes through the interior. There was no idea what kind of damage they had done, but at least they seemed to slip away as my foot instinctively shoved the accelerator down to the floor.

  “We’re totally fucked if you guys can’t figure something out and fast
,” I growled, trying to focus on the reality in front of us instead of the Great Oldsmobile Ones behind us. There was at least a half-dozen of the creeping chaos-mobiles, and it wouldn’t take that many to bear us down. That was likely just the start of our troubles. “I’ll try to juke them for as long as I can.”

  “What the fuck are those things?” Tyrone yelled to no one in particular, but he didn’t freeze up like most people would have. Instead, he threw the side door open and leaned his bulky frame out, showing off some amazing balance for a man of his size.

  As he leveled the shotgun toward the nearest demonic car, Molly began to wave her wand, “It’s only some horrors from beyond the stars, boyo!”

  Tyrone replied by pulling the trigger, unleashing a thunderstorm of booming echoes as the AA-12 spit a hail of slugs downrange. The barrage tore into the car’s body, ripping away shards of metal and rust along with globs of ever-shifting ichor. The next few shots shattered the windshield and turned whatever was driving into red-and-black mist.

  The lead car lurched and skidded as it lost control. A barrage of shotgun slugs will do that. That bit of misfortune was guided into a full-on disaster by Molly. She finished a twirl of her strange instrument, adding a few whispered Gaelic words, and the chaos-mobile went from a skid to a highly-improbable death roll, the kind of car wreck that gives an action movie fan the shivers.

  Gabriela’s chants grew in strength as her fingers wove into ever more complex motions while I threw the minivan into my best defensive driving I could force the land yacht into. See, cool wrecks look great on the movie screen, but the monster car had been close enough for debris and globs of chaos goo to get slung our way. I certainly didn’t want any of that clinging to us.

  Shrapnel clanged across the van and left a nice crack in the back window as Tyrone ducked back inside. “That won’t discourage them, if they even fucking noticed. Probably a batch of cultists; there’s always people crazy enough to worship soul-eating monstrosities.”

  As if on cue, the rest of the mongrel horde sped around the wreckage of their pack leader, slowed for mere seconds by the tumbling wreckage. They sure looked like shit, but they had literal demons under the hood. Unfortunately, Mom’s mini-van had been purchased for its grocery capacity and its overall pinkness, not for its performance. Even pushing it as fast as I could, we were already being overrun again.

  “I really hope what you’re whipping up is a good one, Gabby,” I said through gritted teeth. “We’re going to need it.”

  She answered by redoubling the speed of her weaving fingers and whispered words. I didn’t have to look through the heart’s eyes to feel the building magic. I could trust she knew what she was doing. We only had to buy her the time to do it.

  As I took a hard right to orient us toward the El Cortez, two more of the demonic pack lurched up, no longer making any pretense of the unnatural monstrosities hiding inside. Protoplasmic tentacles flailed and reached out as they approached on both sides, looking a like a pair of rusty octopi on wheels ready to feed.

  Molly lithely flipped back over the seat, returning to her original position, while Tyrone unloaded another burst from his shotgun. By all rights, the big guy should have emptied that drum twice over by now but, well, you know, magic.

  This time, though, the slugs weren’t nearly as effective. It wasn’t like he missed. Tyrone, for all the shit I had given him, was a damned fine shot, and he wasn’t going for finesse here. No, he’d been going for the main body of the thing. Maybe crawling globs of evil were smarter than they looked because the now-shifting-colored slime condensed and covered over the side of the car like a big, bubbling block of ballistic gel. The goop ate up those slugs like a fat guy sucking down free appetizers.

  A barrage of tendrils lanced out at us, the ends narrowing into sharp tips. It sounded like a sideways hailstorm, only unlike a hailstorm, the tentacles punctured the thin metal of the sides and shattered the safety glass before gripping the inside of the car and pulling us toward the gibbering mass.

  I turned the wheel sharply away from the thing, wheels squealing on the pavement, but we were losing this deadly game of tug-of-war. Metal creaked and groaned under the stress, and the pink-mobile’s shocks complained as the whole cab rocked back and forth.

  Needless to say, I was cursing up a storm as I fought with the wheel. Gabriela’s incantation took on a fever pitch as the car on Tyrone’s side moved in for a sideswipe, a classic pincer move. We were totally fucked, but I at least wasn’t going to give up just yet.

  No one else was either, thankfully. Tyrone grabbed hold of the Jesus handle above the door, steadying himself as he bellowed out something in a guttural tongue. Etchings I hadn’t noticed along the AA’s barrel came to life, filling with glowing, liquid gold, right before the entire weapon recoiled and spat out a basketball-sized glob of white-hot lava.

  There’s something to be said for the cleansing power of fire and molten rock. The sticky ball splattered over the ever-changing ooze, burning white-hot across the monster car’s body. While some parts of the goo were thick enough to absorb the lava without burning entirely away, other parts melted down to the corroded metal underneath. The demonic car turned away like a scolded dog, and I swear the thing burbled and whimpered as it retreated.

  On the other side of our car, as the side door buckled and tore off its mountings, Molly ran the wand down the edge of her knife, cooing to the blade like it was sharing a bed with her (something that has a surprising chance of being true). As the tip of the wand finished its path down the blade, she turned and slashed rabidly through the air, each quick cut punctuated by a sharp war cry.

  The wind snapped to attention, her motions matched by sudden bursts of concentrated, cyclonic winds. The air quite literally cut through the tentacles piercing the pink hide of the van one by one. As the last one cut free, our noble chariot lurched forward, the engine whining with effort.

  It took all of my focus and most of my luck to keep us under control. Mini-vans aren’t meant for high-speed chases, and we didn’t exactly train to drive them in Army basic either. Still, I held it together, but it might have been a short-lived thing. I didn’t have to look back to realize the cry of alarm from the backseat was due to the death car coming at our rear.

  Car wasn’t the right word though. This was the big dog, the mean machine, the literal Mack truck of these infected monstrosities. The radiator grill of the thing’s cab had become the maw of a beast, the broken metal grill now twisting and dripping with the ever-shifting goo I was becoming way too accustomed to seeing.

  The hammering of the auto-shotgun mixed with Gaelic incantations, but both were overwhelmed by the belching and burbling of the possessed truck. I was about to spin the steering wheel, divert down a back alley I hoped would be too small for the thing, when Gabriela finally let out one surprisingly loud shout in Latin.

  “No, don’t turn!” she shouted as a nuclear green glow in the dark light coalesced in her hands. “Remember the Taurus?”

  I did indeed remember Gabriela’s magic Ford. More specifically, I remembered the enchanted turbo mode it had. I also remembered Gabby had told me at the start of all this that magic, if you hadn’t prepared it ahead of time, could take a long time to weave together. I imagine that a combat medic doesn’t often need a car turbo-booster at the ready.

  “Got it,” I cried back and kept the wheel ramrod straight. She reached forward with her glowing hands, about to caress the dash when the back end, from the rear hatch to almost the back axles, crunched flat in the jaw of the Great Mack Truck Monster’s slavering, indigo jaws.

  5

  As soon as Monster Truck embedded into our van and slammed on its brakes, we were stopped on a dime. Thank God our frame somehow stayed intact or we would have ripped apart like cheap cardboard. Thank God as well for seatbelts too, even though they hurt like a bitch as they strained to keep me in my seat. Gabriela was buckled in too, letting out a sharp gasp as she was hung against the straps. I don’t k
now how hard it was for her to keep that spell ready, but she did it, her hands still glowing neon green.

  The others weren’t so lucky. Tyrone, shaped like a barrel, bounced off the back of my seat as if Donkey Kong himself had thrown it, rattling me even more. At least he was well-padded, rebounding mostly unharmed even as the air was blown out of him and he landed flat on his gut.

  Molly’s quick reflexes let her go limp (or maybe it was the double-shot of whiskey she downed before we left) just before she flew off her feet. She somehow managed to bounce off the roof at an angle that almost threw her out of the now-missing side door. Her knife went flying out of the van, but she kept a grim hold on her baton-wand as she hung there, an arm and half her body out of the side of the van.

  Gabriela and I exchanged pained glances. There was no need for words, not after all we’d been through. She couldn’t unleash her spell or the van would rip apart from the strain of pulling free, and I knew she couldn’t weave another while she had that ready. We both nodded in unison as we unbuckled our belts.

  We worked so perfectly together I almost wanted to cry there and then because it certainly looked like we’d never be together, not as lovers or (dare I say it) husband and wife. I belayed that shit as I clambered through the tight space between the two front seats while Gabriela hopped into the driver's seat. Now that I wasn’t strapped in, there was something I had been itching to try on these death mobiles since I first took a horrifying glance at them.

  As Tyrone struggled to catch his breath, hands searching for his gun, and Molly pulled herself up by the door frame and spat up blood from her split lip, I faced down the looming truck with its entire front end now forged from pure liquid corruption. The thing was only kept in shape by some kind of natural viscosity, like a Jell-O mold of infinite chaotic destruction. Its radiator jaws were still clamped hard on the back end as it sprouted another cluster of dripping pseudopods.