The MCB agents fled. I didn’t need to be a government employee to know that this was going to cause some really serious repercussions for Franks, who wasn’t human and only existed because the MCB allowed him to. “Will you be in trouble?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered simply. Franks went over to the bag and unzipped it. He rummaged around inside, pulled out a battle-ax and tossed it to me, heedless of whether I was ready to catch something heavy and razor-sharp or not. “Familiar?”

I managed to snag it by the handle and kept both my thumbs. Lighter than it looked, it still had a bright orange inventory sticker on it. The wooden handle was worn smooth and strangely comfortable in my grip. The metal seemed warm to the touch. I knew this blade. I didn’t just know it from using it myself, but I knew it from another man’s unholy memories. “Holy shit.” It was thousands of years old, and if it was in fact magic, it was only because of the sheer number of lives it had taken had given it a sort of life of its own. “This is Lord Machado’s ax.”

“I’ll need it back,” Franks said. He removed a Roman gladius from the bag and tested the weight by tossing it back and forth between his hands. It looked way too small on him.

“You got any more magic swords in there?” Mosh asked hopefully. Franks pulled out a bone-handled dagger. It was about the size of a glorified steak knife. Mosh took it reluctantly. “Seriously?”

Holly had relieved the stunned guard in the entrance of his G-36K carbine. She laughed at Mosh’s little knife. “I’d be embarrassed to let anyone see me with that.”

“Shut up,” Mosh said as he read the inventory sticker. “This one’s called the Black Heart of Suffering. That sounds evil. Is it evil?”

“Way evil,” Franks said.

“Sweet.”

The ground quaked beneath our feet.

“It’s coming.”

The brief glimpse into the nightmare world had rendered most of the quarantine line what Franks would refer to as combat ineffective. The sane had run. That left a handful of MCB that were in the know, about a dozen members of Paranormal Tactical, and a tiny group of cops and soldiers who were getting a real fast tutorial on the fact that monsters existed and one was about to come eat us.

“How do you think this is gonna go down?” Mosh asked me nervously.