Godless Murder Machine (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 2)
Page 7
A hand darts toward the sky near the back of the group. It is difficult not to notice, though Sayyid continues in forced ignorance. Fatimah looks toward Stromwell next to her, and the businessman shrugs cluelessly.
الحمدُ لِله مُعِز الإسلام بنصرِه ومُذِل الشِرك بِقهره ومُصرف الأمور بِأمره ومُستدرِج الكافرين بِمكرِه الذي قَدر الأيام دولا بعدلِه وجَعَل العاقِبة للمُتقين بِفضلِه، والصَلاةُ والسلامُ على مَن أعلا الله منار الإسلام بِسيفه.
“Um, um, excuse me,” interrupts the man with his hand raised. He is a white, young and sickly creature with a bright red beard. He sits meekly on the ground amidst the majority of the others.
Sayyid stops his speech and stares blankly at the interrupting subordinate. He does not appreciate interruptions. Fatimah tenses in preparation for his inevitable bad reaction. “What?”
“Yeah, um, it’s just that a bunch of us don’t speak Arabic. So we can’t really understand…”
“What?!” Sayyid barks. “Who doesn’t speak Arabic?”
Nearly two thirds of the hands in the junkyard go up.
“What?” Sayyid looks horrified.
“We’re not all from the Middle East,” says the red bearded man. “I’m from Portland. A bunch of these guys are from Bosnia and Albania. Tom over there is from Orlando.”
“Represent,” says a slim black man with wire rimmed glasses.
“Stromwell,” Sayyid angrily turns to the money man. He whispers angrily. “I asked you for army to make jihad, not rainbow coalition. What is this?”
“We recruited only English speakers so they could avoid unwanted attention,” Stromwell says.
“Where do you find English speaking jihadis?”
“I self-radicalized on the internet,” says red beard. “It’s what everybody’s doing now.”
“Really?” Sayyid says.
“Oh yeah. I know a bunch of guys at Berkeley who are starting up a cell, but I’m not really a ground floor type. Not my thing. I need a more structured environment.”
“Oh yes? We can provide structured environment right here.” Sayyid reaches out toward Fatimah and draws his fingers in, motioning for her to hand him something. She knows exactly what he wants. She reaches under her shield and pulls the Glock 18 she has strapped to her leg. She tosses it to him casually, like a toy ball.
Sayyid presses the magazine release and the box magazine falls from the pistol grip. He slips it into his pants pocket as he walks through the crowd to the little red bearded man. He turns the gun backwards and holds it out to red beard, grip first.
“Take this,” Sayyid says. The little man timidly pinches his fingers around the pistol and takes it in his hands. “Now put it in your mouth. Pull the trigger.”
“Um… Is it loaded?” red beard says.
Sayyid shrugs. “Who am I to know? Maybe Fatimah keeps one in the chamber. Maybe she does not. Maybe you live. Maybe you die. This is not for us to decide. It is the will of Allah, may He be glorified and exalted.”
“I don’t understand.” Red beard turns the gun in his hands, looking at it instead of Sayyid. If he were to look up, he would see the unshakeable zeal in the leader’s eyes.
“Of course not. It is not for you to understand. It is only for you to believe.”
“I don’t see the point,” the man laughs nervously.
“Give me the gun then. I will show you, my friend.”
Red beard grins sheepishly as he finally makes eye contact with Sayyid and places the gun back in his hand. Sayyid inserts the magazine back into the Glock and racks the slide roughly. Nothing ejects from the gun.
“For Allah is full of grace for those who believe,” Sayyid snorts and smiles. He puts the muzzle of the Glock to the top of red beard’s head and pulls the trigger. BAM! The shot punches straight down through the little man’s skull, killing him. Sayyid stands over the twitching body and looks to the men encircling him. “There is no room for unbelievers here! Are there any others among you?”
Nobody says yes to that.
“Good. Now. To business. I do not like these lengthy meetings.” Sayyid walks back to the car where Fatimah is sitting and picks up a thick paper folder. From it, he draws an eight by ten print of their target. “We are here to kill this man. Pass these around.” He dumps the folder in the crowd of soldiers and the men begin plucking copies of the photo from it and passing it on. “Take a long look. This is the greatest infidel there is, the deadliest of our enemies: the Beast!”
“The beast…” rustle some members of the crowd like a quiet echo of Sayyid’s words.
“They whisper stories of him. They say he is quicker than any man. They say bullets cannot harm him. They say he is a shadow that kills. I say, even if these things are true, even a shadow fears God.”
“Glory be to Allah!” shouts a man from the rear of the crowd. Sayyid nods in approval.
“We will destroy him using the very tactics employed by his arrogant western allies: an overwhelming display of power. This is not a hit. This is not a shooting. This is total annihilation. We will be using the fleet of vehicles constructed here and equipped with only the strongest explosives to run him down and blast him straight to Hell! We will be watching him from the air, using the very same underhanded tricks of the kuffar against them! No man can fight this! There is no escape! There is only death! Tonight, we destroy the Beast!”
EXT. LILY’S HOUSE - NIGHT
Lily hurries to climb out of Sid’s creepy rape van before he can come around to the other side and open the door for her. She doesn’t think he will, but she wants to be sure. Watching him pretend to be gentlemanly is a painfully uncomfortable experience.
She jumps down to the sidewalk as he reaches her and she slams the door.
“Are you in a hurry?” he says.
“No. What for?” she says.
“I don’t know. You got out of the van really fast.”
“I just don’t like your creepy van.” That part is true. For all his action anti-hero raditude, he sure has terrible taste in cars. “We should have taken the Challenger.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Style,” Lily says as she heads up the front walk to her house. He tags along behind her.
“I told you, I don’t care about that.”
“You should.”
“So what now?” he asks.
“I don’t know…” Lily seductively answers. She really doesn’t. She knows what she wants to happen. She wants him to grab her and slam her against the front door, hike up the absurdly slutty little black dress she wore for him and fuck her senseless before he drives into town and machine guns a building full of mafia guys. Then she wants him to come back for round two with the blood still on his hands. “What now?”
“Do you want me to come in?”
“Maybe...” She smiles at him as she stands on the porch with her back to the door. “Are you gonna fix my Soviet situation?”
“No.”
She shrugs. “I suddenly feel really tired. And I’m so stuffed. So much lobster.” She grabs the doorknob and pushes the door open behind her.
“So… does that mean you…”
“And I got my period.” She leans forward and gives him a peck on the cheek. “I had a nice time.” She steps back into the house. “Kay thanks bye.” Then she shuts the door in his face.
She goes to the nearest window and peeks through the blinds to watch him slowly walk back to his van and drive away.
“Lily?” Jeanette calls from the living room. Lily walks down the hallway and finds her mother curled up on the couch like she has been every night since the mall massacre. “You’re home early.”
“I need a cigarette,” Lily says.
EXT. SCRAPYARD - NIGHT
Fareed fast walks through the scrapyard on his way to speak to Yusef as the computer expert walks back to h
is van. Yusef is a rotund man, short and slow, so the slender and long legged Fareed has little difficulty catching up to him. He is about to open his mouth when someone interrupts him.
“Fareed! Fareed!” The voice belongs to Mahmoud, a scrawny youth of a jihadi with a hairless face and crooked teeth. He practically jumps up and down like a child whose parents just bought him a pony. “Look what I got!”
Yusef laughs as the boy holds the end of his AK-47 rifle up in a way which displays his new toy and almost slices open Fareed’s nose in the same gesture. His excitement is over the bayonet attached under the muzzle of the gun.
“When I find the infidel I’m gonna stab him right in the guts with this!” Mahmoud says. The boy is much younger than them, and would be better suited kicking a football than waging jihad. Both Yusef and Fareed have often wondered aloud how he ended up here.
“I didn’t think anybody still used those things,” Yusef says, stopping for Fareed to catch up.
“I do! I’m gonna be just like al-Kilij, but they’re gonna call me al-Bayonet, because of how I kill infidels with a bayonet!”
“Alright, my friend,” Fareed says. “Are you ready to make war on the enemies of Allah, may He be glorified and exalted?”
“Allahu Akbar!” Mahmoud whoops as he dashes away from them, brandishing his rifle in the air. “Death to the infidels!”
Fareed looks around to verify no one else is nearby, then he snatches the shoulder of Yusef’s shirt.
“We can’t do this!” Fareed says.
“Oh, fuck,” Yusef exclaims. “Thank Allah we’re on the same page. Can you believe that guy? Yesterday he was going to kill me because I had porn in my van. I had to burn it all.”
“Who has porno mags? Don’t you have internet connection?”
“I have that too. I really like porn. I may have a problem. But back to the point. He’s fucking crazy, man!” Yusef says. “You see the way he shot Connor in the head?”
“I was right next to him! I think this is brain on my shirt! Look at this! This won’t come out!”
“He was just here to piss off his parents, but still, he wasn’t bad guy.”
“He told me he was here to check his privilege. I don’t know what that means.”
“Yeah, he was a bit different. Fuck it, man. We have to get the fuck out of here. We can take a van and go. If we leave now we can be in Lake Tahoe by morning.”
“What’s in Lake Tahoe?”
“Everything. Gambling. Women. Booze. And it’s cold there.”
“You only needed to say that last part. Twenty five years in Saudi Arabian desert, man. I just want to go somewhere my balls don’t stick to my leg.”
INT. THE ABYSS - NIGHT
Nick flashes the driver’s license in his open wallet at the morbidly obese bouncer standing guard at the door to The Abyss. This is only at the bouncer’s absurd insistence. Nick is old enough to be that bouncer’s dad. He can tell by the look in the guy’s eyes that his obstinance is born from spite. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to wear a clerical collar to a heavy metal club.
The Abyss barely meets the requirements for being called a club at all. It is closer to meeting the definition of a vacant property. There are windows at the front which Nick recalls were used to display vacuum cleaners back when this was a sweeper shop. Now they display only a collection of mildly offensive doodles in black magic marker and a whiteboard sign which reads: Tonight: Thunderchild 3000. The club has no bar, and probably no liquor license, despite the kids obviously passing Corona bottles in the crowd ahead of him. There is no furniture. No place to sit down. There isn’t even a stage. There is only a vast splotchy carpet from wall to wall and it is collecting more stains before Nick’s very eyes. At least the name of the place is appropriate.
The noise made by the band, which Nick struggles to label as music, is absolutely inexorable. It is so vicious and dense that it seems to have a physical body here in the room. It is a bastard wall of sound that could not inhabit Phil Spector’s worst acid fueled nightmare. Nick can’t understand any of the words. It sounds something like HAMBURGERS HAMBURGERS HAMBURGERS.
Nick couldn’t sleep a wink, mainly because he slept most of the day away already. He noticed Stephen and his car were both missing when he got out of bed to heat up some milk and maybe have a cookie. It took him less than a second to figure out where the boy went. He borrowed Maria’s car without waking her up and headed here to round up his wayward son.
He sweeps his eyes across the crowd slowly, searching for Stephen in the sea of faces adorned with rings and bars and other metal scraps. His search is assisted by the almost exclusively Caucasian interest in death metal. The only two black faces in the crowd each stick out like sore thumbs. He zeroes in on the first. Not Stephen. He shifts to the second. Bingo.
Stephen doesn’t appear to see him. He slouches against a doorframe to the left of the band and under a glowing green regulation exit sign. He is near the front of the room, and that is a problem, because it puts the entire crowd between him and Nick.
There are roughly a thousand of them packed in like sardines, screaming and jostling. The crowd is far in excess of any safety standards imaginable for this small space. Their indifference is evidenced by a defaced sign which reads: Maximum occupancy not to exceed EAT COCK. Pushing through that seems dangerous at best, but there does not seem to be a better option.
Nick turns sideways to make himself slimmer and starts cutting his way through the crowd, slowly inserting himself between concert goers. The band stops playing very suddenly, which Nick suspects signals the end of a song, or they may just have a problem with their equipment. There is no way to tell.
“This next song…” the singer grunts. “...is about how you’re all a bunch of consumer whores. It’s about America, and it’s called Godless Murder Machine.” The blast beat begins again as soon as he finishes his sentence.
BINGE ALL DAY ON NETFLIX
THEN YOU PURGE YOUR E-WASTE
APPLE FILLS YOUR EMPTY SOUL
AND WORKERS ARE DEBASED
SUPERSIZE YOUR LUNCH TODAY
AND SPEND YOUR CHECK ON BEATS BY DRE
BOMBINGS ARE A WORLD AWAY
THE TRUTH MUST NOT BE FACED
The lyrics Nick can decipher are exactly the kind of shallow tripe that a high school kid would hear and find deeply profound.
INT. THE ABYSS – NIGHT
The new Thunderchild 3000 song is like really deep and philosophical and stuff. Metal is a thinking man’s music, and that’s why so many people don’t get it.
FREE WITHOUT A CONTRACT
FREE WITHOUT A CONTRACT
FREE WITH TWO YEAR CONTRACT
FREE WITH LIFETIME CONTRACT
ORDER UP SOME DOMINOS
ORDER UP A DRONE STRIKE
ORDER UP A MASSACRE
YOU’RE LIVING IN THE FOURTH REICH
“Hey!”
The sense of someone yelling Stephen’s direction is more a feeling to him than an actual sound among the thrashing E strings of the band. It is like a small splash in the crushing currents at the bottom of some deep sea trench. He turns toward the source.
“Hey dude!” yells Blayne. “Hey!”
“What?!” Stephen shouts back.
The response is something else Stephen can’t understand. He asks Blayne to repeat it and Blayne points into the crowd as he yells again. Stephen only needs to follow Blayne’s finger to decipher the unknown words.
“Is that your dad?”
Stephen makes visual contact with his glaringly serious father as the priest pushes his way through the moshing crowd. He does not look happy to be here.
“Run!” Stephen yells. He turns and pushes through the exit at his back in a shrieking panic. Blayne stands for a startled moment, then dashes to catch up.
“He looks pissed, dude!” Blayne states the obvious.
“Yeah, no shit.” Stephen is hardly twenty feet into the paved alleyway behind The Abyss and he’s alread
y huffing for air. He plays guitar instead of sports for a good reason. “We have to get to the car!” He hopes the crowd in the venue will provide enough of an obstacle to give them the head start necessary to get in the car and go. He hopes the car is still there…
“Stephen!” his father calls from outside the club. Stephen looks back and sees the tall priest running after them from the rear exit. “Stop!”
Stephen doesn’t stop. He turns a corner and follows the alley past a group of trash cans and under an enormous rod-iron fire escape. A rat dashes across his path, but he’s too pumped up on adrenaline to be slowed. He and Blayne sprint onward out into the open street and come out on the sidewalk near the orange Chevy Volt parallel parked on the side of the road. Stephen digs into his pocket for the keys and mashes the unlock button on the tiny plastic remote.
The boys dive into the car and Stephen pushes the power button. He sees his father running out of the alleyway toward them as the onscreen display slowly illuminates and the little battery indicator fills up with bars to indicate that the car is ready to drive.
“Come on! Come on! Faster!” Stephen yells at the display as his father dashes toward them. He jabs at the automatic lock button and pulls back on the stick to shift into reverse. The car rolls backward without any noise as his father yells through the windows.
“Stop the car right now!” Nick yells, knocking on the windows. “You’re gonna end up in jail if you don’t stop this nonsense right now, mister!”
Stephen shifts into drive and turns the wheel to the left. He pushes down on the accelerator and the car lurches forward, lightly scraping the corner of the small sedan that was parked in front of it as they drive away. Nick bolts after the car, but he can’t keep up, and they lose him after only fifty yards