And then it explodes. The bubble expands to envelop me, the coins, the entire sewer tunnel. The coins all pop at once, burning to useless ash in the skip of a heartbeat.
And just as quickly the bubble contracts again to its original size, but now I don’t have anything blocking the ghosts from finding me.
They pour down the manhole into the tunnel, a waterfall of grasping hands, screaming faces. They seethe and roil around each other, filling the tunnel, crawling along the walls, the ceiling. One single, writhing mass pouring toward me.
I have a sudden panicked idea. I stop cutting the cord, grab it in my hand. I focus my will, my panic and fear, primal energies I can tap into, amplify. Focus on the world of the living, breathable air, sun and stars, not this empty wasteland of the dead. I squeeze the glowing cord and throw myself to the living side, taking the cord with me.
The sewer tunnel solidifies around me, color and sound crashing in. The stink of shit, rotting garbage, and dead rats. New York.
The ghosts are nothing but shadows now, rushing headlong at me and passing harmlessly through. They wheel around grasping for a meal they’ll never get.
The glowing cord is still in my hand, bucking and twisting between my fingers. It extends a few inches above and below my hand and then fades into nothing. At the edges I can see a crackle of energy and one of the ghosts tries wedging its fingers through this gap between worlds.
Then the strands making it up snap like a ball of rubber bands and the entire thing collapses. Light bounces off the sewer walls, the brackish water. The gap I pulled it through seals up, closing hard on the ghost trying to get through. A wisp of ectoplasm dissipates like smoke in the air as part of his soul severs.
The ghosts are furious or moping. Running through me, surrounding me and glaring. That last spell did me in, drained my own reserves. I tap into the local pool and pull in more power.
“Beat it, you little bastards. You’re not getting me today.” I lash out at the ghosts with a spell, flinging them away like trash in a hurricane. In a moment I’m alone in the sewer tunnel.
Vertigo washes over me. I stumble through the tunnel until I get to the ladder leading to the street. Of course on this side the manhole cover’s still firmly in place. And it’s heavy as fuck. I heave myself out onto the street. Late-night traffic is light and I don’t have to dodge any cars.
The house is destroyed. Broken lumber, shattered glass. The entire structure has imploded, collapsing in on itself and bringing some of the adjoining brownstones with it.
I don’t feel my magic disappearing when I get to the doorstep. I pick my way through the debris searching for that sudden cutoff in the magic that will tell me the bubble is still there.
I don’t find it. I don’t find Deasmhumhain, either. She’s in her own world, trapped in limbo, or she took a runner. She’s dead, gone, or huddled powerless in an alley somewhere. Whatever it is I don’t have to worry about her anymore.
I slump against the torn-up wall of one of the brownstones, sewer water in my shoes, my pants soaked through with the effluvia of New York. Tasty.
Thank fuck that’s over.
I give Mags the last Word, and Mags speaks it. I open my eyes. I’m on the floor. On the ground, actually; the townhouse is . . . gone. Like it had never been there.
“Lem?”
I peer up at Mags. There’s still a fishhook in my head, a persistent tugging, weak and fading, but there. I can still feel her, Deasmhumhain, fading into the background, but clinging to me like a drowning woman, grabbing on to a piece of flotsam. She’s caught between universes, her portal to both closed. Carter drop-kicked her out of his, and I pinched the extrusion into mine closed, and she has only the thread of connection to me left. And she’s trying to pull herself through. Through me. She would split me open and step through my intestines.
I feel her give another tug, inching closer to me. It hurts. Her grip on me is weak, but she isn’t giving up. I’ve never felt such willpower. Such sheer will to survive.
“Mags,” I croak. “One more Word, okay? You got it in you?”
I can’t see him. My vision is white and blank. His voice is hoarse and heavy with exhaustion. Casting into another universe takes a lot out of a guy. “Sure, Lem.”
I give Mags one final Word: taka. To push, to abandon. He speaks it, and with a silent scream, I feel her torn from me, the hook ripped away. For one final second I feel her, and then she’s . . . gone.
My vision clears. I look around. We’re in an alley between buildings, broken bottles and trash, dog turds and one stray cat peering at us from a small fortress of old cardboard boxes. Mags is sprawled on the ground next to me, and we look at each other. He smiles shyly.
“I did good, huh?”
I nod. I realize I’ve just adopted Mags for life, but I’m okay with that. “You did, buddy.”
“What now, Lem?”
I take a deep, shuddering breath. I wonder what happened to Celine, Deasmhumhain’s urtuku, or disciple. Whether, after saving the world and almost certainly not getting any credit or reward for it, we have any responsibility toward a two-bit Trickster who is likely nothing without her Mistress.
Fuck it. “Now we go find Gabby,” I say. “And punch him in the nose.”
Weaponized Hell
LARRY CORREIA AND JONATHAN MABERRY
1
CAPTAIN JOE LEDGER
DEPARTMENT OF MILITARY SCIENCES
Iraqi Desert near Mosul
They say that in times of mortal peril your life flashes through your mind. Ideally, those memories are not accompanied by shrapnel or bullets.
For me it isn’t usually my childhood or images of my family or my ex-girlfriends. I don’t have flashes of chances taken and chances missed. None of that stuff. When my life is about to fall apart, what flashes through my head are the details of how in the wide blue fuck I got into this mess in the first place.
Case in point . . .
First, you have to know that the ideal combat mission starts with solid and very detailed intel, with time for training your team, for putting boots on the ground with all of the equipment you need, and to have local assets on hand to smooth the way. An ideal mission has close-range and long-range tactical support, and the cavalry is cocked and locked and ready to ride over the hill to save your ass if things go south.
Yeah, that would be nice.
So nice.
Never fucking going to happen, though. At least not for guys like me.
I run the Special Projects Office for the Department of Military Sciences. Sounds like a bunch of nerds sitting around dreaming up cool gizmos. It’s not. The name is boring and there’s some misdirection built into it. And, sure, we have geeks and nerds working for us, but they’re support. The truth is that the DMS is a covert rapid-response group. We run a couple of dozen small teams of first-chair shooters. We go after terrorists or criminal groups who are using bleeding-edge bioweapons. We are a zero red-tape outfit. If they’ve sent us in then the shit has already hit the fan.
The tricky thing is that this means we have to start running the moment we hear the first rumble of that avalanche. Prep time is what you can manage on the fly. Field support is usually a voice in the earbud I wear; real-time intel that the science and tactical teams are scrambling to acquire while we’re running headlong into the valley of the shadow.
I’m sure I mixed a couple of metaphors there, but I actually don’t give a cold shit.
I was in Iraq, in a twenty-year-old Humvee going bump-thumpity over a road that was pocked with wagon ruts and blast holes from IEDs. My driver, Rizgar, was a friendly, a Kurd with knife scars on his face. Four of his buddies were in the back. My own crew, Echo Team, was in a fast plane somewhere over the ocean. Too far away. Rizgar drove like his lifelong dream was to die in a fiery crash. My balls had climbed up inside my chest cavity and I’d found religion five separate times during near misses with boulders, craters, and the burned-out shell of an old Bradley. Rizgar had
to swerve to keep from hitting a goat and—still at high speed—leaned his head all the way out the window and yelled at the animal, who was now fading in the dust behind us.
“Kerim bimzha, heez!”
I understand enough Sorani to know that it was a vile thing to say, even to a goat.
I was yelling, too, trying to have a conversation with my boss, Mr. Church. He’d snatched me away from the mission he’d sent me over here to handle—taking down a black-marketer named Ohan who was selling recovered Soviet chemical weapons left over from the Afghan war in the eighties. Church said he’d catch up to me in motion. I was, in fact, in motion.
“What’s the damn op?” I demanded. “My guy in Baghdad said he could put me in a room with Ohan and—”
“We’ve been following a false lead,” said Mr. Church. “Ohan is not in Baghdad. We have reliable intel that he is in a village outside of Mosul.”
“It was reliable intel that said he was in Baghdad.”
“Nature of the game, captain,” said Church. “We have very high confidence in this sighting.”
“What’s the source of that intel? Our friends in the Agency? Another of those hotshot Delta gunslingers? Everybody’s seeing Ohan lately.”
“The identity of our source is classified.”
Even though Rizgar could hear my end of the conversation, the feed into my earbud was filtered through a 128-bit cyclical encryption system that God couldn’t hack.
“Declassify it,” I growled.
Church—being Church—ignored that request. He said, “Operatives on the ground have confirmed the presence of Ohan heading into the village. We believe he is going to meet an ISIL team to hand off a bio agent recovered from an excavated burial site.”
“Whoa, wait . . . repeat that? Someone’s using a burial site as a lab—?”
“No,” said Church. “Sketchy reports indicate that a biological weapon has been harvested from the burial site.”
“What kind of bioweapon? Are we talking mycotoxins or bacteria?”
Graves and tombs were famous for all kinds of dangerous spores, molds, fungi, and similar microscopic monsters. The whole curse of King Tut’s tomb was a prime example. Lord Carnarvon, the Englishman who backed Howard Carter’s expedition to find Tutankhamen, died of a mysterious illness after entering the tomb and being exposed to a fungus that had been dormant in the tombs for thousands of years and reactivated by fresh air. Other recently opened tombs in different parts of the world revealed pathogenic bacteria of the Staphylococcus and Pseudomonas genera, and the molds Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus. Very nasty stuff. Obtaining and weaponizing diseases so old that modern humans have no acquired immunity for them is a popular hobby for the world’s mad-fucking-scientists. Of which there are way too many.
“The nature of the threat is unknown at this time,” said Church. “I need you to make an assessment and to keep it out of the hands of the ISIL team operating in that area.”
I was still dressed for plainclothes infiltration of the Baghdad hotel where I was supposed to intercept Ohan. My cover was that of a South African mercenary acting as a go-between for a party wanting to buy some of Ohan’s nasty toys. I had my Sig Sauer and a Wilson rapid-release folding knife, but I was not in full combat rig. I was dressed in khaki trousers and one of those canvas shirt-jackets with lots of pockets. No helmet, no long-gun, no grenades. None of my favorite toys. And not nearly enough body armor. And, more to the point, no hazmat suit or even a Saratoga Hammer Suit. Nothing to protect me if this was an active biological agent, particularly an airborne one.
“Sure,” I said, “I’m on it.”
I hate my job.
Rizgar pointed to a small cluster of buildings visible through the heat shimmer a couple of miles up the road. Even from that distance we could see that things had already gone to shit. A fireball suddenly leapt up from amid a group of parked vehicles, lifting them, tossing them away with fists made of superheated gasses. Over the roar of the Humvee’s engine we could hear the rattle of gunfire.
2
SPECIAL AGENT FRANKS
UNITED STATES MONSTER CONTROL BUREAU
Iraqi Desert near Mosul
Special Agent Franks of the United States Monster Control Bureau was not known for his patience—especially when he had a mission to complete—but having random terrorist assholes flip his armored vehicle with an IED really put him in an even fouler mood than usual. His driver and interpreter, assigned to him from the Iraqi Army, had been killed on impact. From the noise of gunfire and bullets striking metal, the rest of the convoy was taking fire. Annoyed, Franks had crawled out of the upside-down flaming MRAP, in order to vent his frustrations on whoever had been stupid enough to ambush him.
Quickly assessing the situation, Franks realized it had been a really big bomb. It took quite a few buried artillery shells to toss an eighteen-ton vehicle on its roof. The explosion had flattened several of the houses at the front of the village. There was a blackened crater where the road had been. The enemy appeared to be a bunch of goons wearing ridiculous black pajamas, armed with AKs and looted M4s. It was an L-shaped ambush. They were firing from prepared positions in the village and from a ravine that ran parallel to the road. Their Iraqi drivers, rather than push through the ambush zone, had hit the brakes. Now they were taking heavy fire. It was another example of why Franks preferred never to work with locals, but he’d been overruled. His superiors didn’t like his idea of diplomacy.
Four hostiles, one armed with an RPG, had moved up on Franks’ vehicle to get a better angle on the rest of the stopped convoy. The hostiles hadn’t been expecting survivors, let alone a giant killing machine who was completely unfazed by the blast. Franks killed the first hostiles before they’d even realized he was there, another two before they could react, and the last one as he was trying to run away.
And Franks hadn’t used a weapon yet.
The rest of his convoy was made up of MCB personnel and their Iraqi Army escorts. It appeared that most of their vehicles were hit, though none as badly as his had been. Intel had said this area was under ISIS control, but they’d not been expecting resistance away from the dig site. As usual, their intel was wrong. He had to act fast or his strike team would be rendered combat ineffective, and they still had a mission to complete. His men would clear the ravine. His rifle had been crushed in the wreck, so Franks took the rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an AK-47 from the men he’d beaten to death and went into the village.
They’d set up a PK machine gun on the second floor of a mosque and were raking it over the convoy. There had been something in the briefing over the rules of engagement about not damaging religious buildings and blah, blah, blah, but Franks never bothered to read those things. So he blew up the mosque with the RPG. Then he went house-to-house, shooting every hostile he saw. Since Franks had reaction times that made most normal humans look like sloths, clearing out their firing positions was a piece of cake. He only had to gun down a dozen of them or so before the ambush broke and the remaining scumbags were running for their lives.
His radio had been broken in the crash, but from the noise, it sounded like his men had the road and ravine under control. Franks had seen a lot of casual barbarity in his life, but he knew ISIS were overachievers. Chasing them down was not his mission, but Franks really didn’t like them. Sure. He liked hardly anyone, but these assholes were special. So he picked up another weapon and went looking for trouble.
He found it.
The ISIS fighters regrouped in a small market. Their leader was rallying the troops, shouting in Arabic—one of the many Earthly languages Franks had never bothered to learn—so the motivational speech wouldn’t have been noteworthy except this human had the stink of demons all over him.
So their intel had gotten one thing right. The insurgents had made a pact with demons. Now this is more like it, Franks thought as he flipped the Kalashnikov’s selector to full auto and hosed down the market.
3
I made a pushing motion with my hand. Rizgar grinned and obliged by pushing the pedal all the way down to the floor. He steered with one hand and beat on the roof of the car with the other. The signal for his team to get ready.
We were driving straight into the heart of a full-blown battle, and it was going south on the good guys really damn fast. I could see a knot of men in American BDUs hunkered down behind a shattered convoy of bullet-pocked vehicles. They were taking heavy fire, but they were still in the game. Bloody bodies littered the ground around the vehicles, most with weapons still clutched in dead hands.
All around the convoy, crouched down behind cars, using broken stone walls for cover, stretched out on rooftops, and even kneeling in the street were fighters in the distinctive black of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. ISIS, ISIL, call them what you want. Sons of bitches who seemed to come out of nowhere and were cutting a bloody swath across the Middle East. Well-armed, well-provisioned, and dishearteningly well-trained. Maybe thirty of them alive and twice that number dead or wounded. This battle had clearly been raging for a while. The contractors in the convoy had fought like heroes, but there simply weren’t enough of them left to win this.
Rizgar, his four shooters, and Mama Ledger’s firstborn didn’t seem like a big enough crowd to make a difference. But let me tell you, shock and awe comes in all shapes and sizes.
Rizgar had picked the right angle for our approach. The contractors could see us but we wouldn’t be in their direct line of fire. The ISIL fighters had to turn to fight us on their quarter, which decreased the suppressing fire on the convoy. Distract and weaken. Rizgar slewed around to allow the maximum number of our guns to fire at once and we hit them real damn hard. Two of Rizgar’s men came out of the Humvee with RPGs on their shoulders. One targeted a building on the corner of the square, a spot where half a dozen of the black-clothed figures were grouped. They saw the grenade coming at them, they tried to move, but feet don’t move fast enough to dodge rocket-propelled explosives fired from fifty yards. The explosion killed four of them, tearing them to rags; and it turned the building into deadly debris. Every man inside the blast radius went down. Some dead, some dazed.
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 30