BWhen you're a POW it's important to keep track of the time, but it was only like a week before something I dreaded more than an Afghan general with a fetish for branding irons reared its ugly head.

It opened the barred iron door and walked - no, more like glided - toward me, in a hooded black coat that rustled softly across the packed sand of my prison.

My first thought was maybe I was just seeing things, like my mind was in a fog from days of eating nothing but stale rice, and the dull pain of cuts and bruises that still echoed throughout my body.

The guy stopped in front of me. It was a pretty tense moment let me tell you, mainly because I kept expecting him to kick me, or spit on me, or I don't know, randomly pull a tire iron out of his pocket like a fucking Looney Tune and start hitting me like a pinata with it. But that time, the hits didn't come.

Instead he leaned forward to offer me a hand, and that was when I got a good look at his face.

On it there was no skin; only hollow bone and two black holes looking down at me where eyes should have been.

At that point I knew I wasn't hallucinating.

"Grim," was all I could say.

It was surreal, though. That was the first I'd seen of him outside of my nightmares since the night we tried to bring Milkshakes back from the dead, and at a Taliban POW camp in the middle of Afghanistan no less.

He flexed his skeletal hand like he wanted me to hurry, but I glanced at my comrade lying next to me, still unconscious from a particularly vicious breakfast beating. I only joke about it now to lessen the blow of what happened next.

Sargeant Sellars was his name, and he let out a light gasp when Grim touched him on the neck.

It happened so fast, and there was nothing I could do. All it took was that one touch to make the pain go away. After all we'd endured; talking to each other about all the beer we'd drink and the chicks we'd bang once we made it back to the other side...it didn't matter. Sellars was snuffed out.

"You fucking...bastard!"

I grabbed Grim's leg, but I didn't have any strength left in me to do anything.

He must have sensed this, because then he grabbed me by the neck, and with just that one hand managed to lift me off the ground. Pretty strong for someone without an ounce of muscle weight, sure, but at least I'd been spared whatever voodoo magic bullshit he used on Sellars.

My head was spinning as he dragged me outside. We were on a hill overlooking an encampment nestled in the grassy basin below us. I saw that the soldiers that had been guarding the shack I was being held in were both dead, so I instinctively checked one for guns and ammo.

I turned with a loaded AK-47 in hand, raring to give Grim what I've been meaning to for a long time, but saw that he had already made it to the bottom of the hill.

Right now I can still picture him, standing there in the kind of sun that makes the air ripple, with those empty eyeholes fixed on me as his cloak blew in the hot desert wind.

I had to go after him. For Mandy, Nergal, Sellars, and everyone else that's been 'touched' by the bastard, I thought that I had to be the one to kill death.

...

The Taliban encampment lay in ruin. Its soldiers were cut down in a variety of different methods from what Billy could tell, as he limped through the streets after Grim.

The smell of skin seared until it turned black and started to peel filled the air, as he walked limbs and other loose body parts that were sliced off through the bone, resting in puddles of blood that soaked into the streets of sand and rock and turned them red.

He jumped back when a body fell out of an upstairs window, splitting in half horizontally as it fell in a cascade of gore, and blood that sprayed unto his face and bare chest.

"What the hell happened?"

Billy had seen his fair share of battlefields, but this was unlike any he'd ever seen before. This was the scene of a slaughter.

Armored vehicles and even tanks were toppled over like toys, blocking off some roads, and the carcusses of grounded helicopters were jutting out of the earth.

As Billy went on, the collapsed walls of stone buildings also littered his way. He climbed over a tall mound of debris, looked down, and there he saw a squad of Taliban soldiers armed with assault rifles on the other side. There were more of them than Billy could count on one hand.

Cruel laughter tore through the air.

Four tentacles flew out of the mound of rubble. They grabbed a soldier each, flailed them around in the air, then pulled their writhing forms into the mound.

"Men are so filthy!"

A giant silver arachnid came into view. Its steely gray carapace deflected the soldiers' bullets, as the woman strapped into the transparent arc of its back screamed ceaselessly.

"All men must die!"

It sliced the soldiers to bits with its rapidly moving bladed appendages just by walking through them.

...

Billy paused to take another gulp of beer, as he gave Mandy some time to take it all in. It was close to midnight when Irwin dropped them off back at the apartment, but neither of them wanted to sleep. They tried to avoid talking about anything Grim related, but Billy couldn't tell her about his time in Afghanistan without bringing up the unexpected encounter.

"He's been gathering forces," Mandy said, her head resting against his chest. "But for what?"

"Whatever it is, he wants us to be alive to see it."

"Actually...I've been thinking that maybe...he doesn't have a choice."

She touched her bottom lip to show she was thinking deeply about it.

"We're the ones that summoned him, so only we can send him back."

"How do we accomplish that?"

"We need to draw the same sigil we used to summon him, and perform a banishing ritual. But, he has to be inside of the sigil for it to work."

"Is there any other way, you know, that maybe won't get us killed?"

She frowned, turning her head slightly. "I don't know for sure, but...the bond can be broken if...either of us die."

Billy looked at her sharply. This was all news to him, and whether it was the guts they instilled in him at the army, his guilt, or the beer talking, he made a vow to himself in that dirty apartment that he would protect Mandy at all costs. They would put a stop to Grim, and this time, he wouldn't let his partner die.