Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories by Nassise Joseph

Author:Nassise, Joseph [Nassise, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

FOUR

Eventually, Jack pulled himself to his feet, cleaned his wounds as well as he could, then exited the bathroom.

The waitress didn’t seem particularly surprised when Jack came out of the restroom with blood streaming down his arm. She grabbed a towel and wrapped his hand for him, tying it in a knot. “Happens more often than you’d think,” she said.

No demand that he pay for the damage. No insistence that he leave right now and not come back. She took one look at an injured man and she tried to help.

He’d forgotten there were people in the world who weren’t trying to kill each other.

“Let’s get you some food. You too, Miss, you look like you could use a good meal. Burgers and fries okay? They’re frozen, just take me a second to defrost them and heat ’em up.”

The woman, this strange, short-haired woman who had dragged him away from Jen, nodded and then she led him over to a booth and sat him down. She never stopped staring at him.

“We call them ghosts but they’re not the spirits of the dead. Don’t think of dead people haunting the living because they have unfinished business, they’re not like that. I don’t know if that kind of ghost even exists, really.”

“They do,” he said, though he shouldn’t have. Maybe all these people trying to help him were making him soft. “They exist. And they’re bad enough.”

She didn’t seem surprised to hear it. “This is different. Don’t think lost souls. Think ectoplasm, maybe,” she said. Laura. Her name was Laura. That one fact had actually penetrated the swamp that his brain had become.

“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.

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