Red Scare (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 3)

by Mike Leon

  Then they start to move and the zombie conclusion seems premature. The walking dead usually don’t coordinate ambushes. These did. The walking dead almost always look dead. These don’t.

  The crowd rushes at him, half of them like charging Zulus and the remainder hobbling on replaced knees and orthopedic shoes. More pour in from the aisles between slot machine banks, more than he cares to count. Sid takes aim at the closest first. The two CZ pistols roar in his hands as he blasts 9mm bullets into the foreheads of the oncoming swarm. He puts down five of them in an instant, and the fact that they go down at all is a welcome indicator that they can at least be killed. He continues to pick off the fast ones with surgical precision and a machine gun’s rate of fire, alternating left and right, acquiring each target as the slide recoils on the other gun, and squeezing the trigger as the next cartridge chambers. It is a feat an elite marksman would call superhuman and impossible. The kill team proves one of those adjectives incorrect.

  Still, it is not enough. Even at the limit of his capabilities, mowing down ten assailants per second, there are simply so many that he can only impede their progress and not halt it completely. The guns run dry with the slides extended.

  Sid ejects the empty mags, tucks the CZ pistols under his arms, pulls two new mags from his hoodie pocket, and packs them into the pistols. He returns to his grisly shooting gallery. Four more seconds. Thirty-eight more bullets. Thirty-eight more bodies. They show no sign of surrender.

  He draws the KA-BAR and keeps moving for the exit, but the zombies are all around. They’re flooding from side doors and hallways. A dozen fresh attackers flood in through a doorway designated HIGH LIMIT by the shiny metallic letters affixed to the wall above. The only way out of this mess is over a high pile of corpses.

  Sid kicks his way into the first enemy and is immediately met with unexpected resistance. The enemy, a stocky black man wearing a sideways beret and tweed jacket, sidesteps the stomp kick and throws a jab at Sid’s chin which would connect if not for the kill team’s reflexes. Sid raises the KA-BAR, the blade pointing from the bottom of his clenched fist, and stabs it at his enemy’s skull. The man in tweed catches the knife with a quickness and skill impressive by any standard, though Sid’s mighty attack is so forceful it simply powers through and the KA-BAR still makes it through the cranium. The enemy falls dead, but this is a worrisome development. These zombie people can fight.

  An elderly woman comes swinging an aluminum cane at Sid with greater expertise than he saw from any of the terrorists he killed last week. Her attack angles and transitions are those of an Eskrima master, though she only takes two swings before he catches the cane and drives the KA-BAR through her aorta. She falls instantly, proving headshots unnecessary.

  “Hey!” screams a woman wearing a paisley vest standing at a green felt-covered gaming table nearby. “What the hell is going on here?” One of the pseudo-zombies cracks her in the skull with a Samuel Adams bottle, spraying beer all over the floor. Apparently not everyone here is in on the plan.

  Sid tries to stab a white haired octogenarian and ends up in a three stage Wing Chun hand trapping session which comes to a stabtastically bloody conclusion just as a fur-coated fat woman swings her purse at him like a heavy flail. He dodges and the bulky Michael Kors bag slams against a carpeted support column, dumping an excess of twenty pounds of loose change onto the floor. Sid introduces her to the pointy end of his knife.

  Two tiny Asian men, each only a bit taller than Sid’s belt buckle, scream in unison as they leap at him from opposite directions, each executing a masterful flying dragon kick with intention to crush him between their outstretched heels. “Heeeeee-YA!” Sid snatches one man by the ankle and swings him into the other with a forceful thud that includes the unmistakable crackle of splintering skull. He retains the limp little Asian man to club two svelte Icelandic girls off their Ugg boots and into a living blob of lard carried by a scooter. The slow ones are catching up to him.

  “How many of you fuckers do I have to kill before you get the point?!!” Sid growls as he jabs the KA-BAR through a chubby fellow’s left eyeglass lens, through the eye socket, and into the brain stem.

  “The death of one man is a tragedy,” says a greying old geezer plodding forward on a four legged metal walker. “The death of millions is a statistic.” Sid adds him to the statistic with a knife through the carotid.

  There is nowhere left to go. The horde has circled him completely now, choking off all exits and leaving no option but to fight. They move shoulder-to-shoulder, a closing sphincter of angry bodies. Sid yanks the M67 from his pants pocket and tosses it over several rows of heads, but a hand darts upward from the crowd and snatches it, pulls it into the group, and several bodies fall on it. The blast comes a second later, and only kills two or three at best. They killed themselves to minimize the casualties. Zombies don’t behave like that.

  Sid lashes out with the KA-BAR, cutting a throat. A hand grasps at his wrist, but he twists out of their grip and stabs at the body it belongs to. It is just a teeming mass of bodies now with no room to maneuver, no room to move, no room to breathe. He stabs into the wall of flesh over and over. Stab. Kill. STAB. KILL. Bodies fall at his feet. Blood spouts from dozens of the dying, spraying him, covering him until he is a red-oiled engine of sharpened steel death encased in a shrinking compartment of cadavers.

  Eyes in his face. He can’t tell if they are alive or dead. He stabs. He cuts. The floor is higher now, carpeted in layers of bone and meat. Thoughts become singular imperatives. Stab. Chop. Murder. Kill. He buries the KA-BAR in a fat body that keeps coming even as it bleeds buckets of arterial blood. Hands, or teeth, or just a vacuum of sucking flesh, grab the knife and it is lost. Sid kills one of them with a three-inch-punch to the chest and sinks his fingers into the eyeballs of another. Squeeze. Pull. He is unravelling intestines from somewhere. He cannot move through the blanket of wriggling, clutching, struggling bodies piling over him.

  INT. BACK TO THE FRAMING DEVICE - DAY

  Igor Volchenko blinks quietly, clears his throat, inhales as if he is about to say something, perhaps something profound, holds for a few seconds, then gives up on whatever it was.

  Sid is still stuck on the metal rack in the strange dungeon of the Obshchiy Syndicate. This is where the freak army brought him after the casino. They move together like a tidal wave of conjoined flesh when they need to. Traveling to this place was an hour of being buried in stinking skin and sticky blood with hardly any way to breathe. He thinks they were on a truck, or at least a vehicle of some kind, but even that isn’t definite. Sid could be anywhere within an hour of Los Angeles by now.

  The freaks are still here, staring at him without focus, standing motionless and entranced. Those unable to walk without assistance were left behind, but the crowd still bears no sign of uniformity in their appearance. There are men and women, young and old, but mostly old. There are no children, which is a curious fact. They have expensive clothes, ratty rags, filthy mugs and carefully exfoliated faces all mixed together.

  Volchenko shakes his head. “I am very confused.” he says.

  “What is there to be confused about? You killed Lily Hoffman,” Sid grumbles for the second time. “So I fucked up your entire operation. And I’m not finished with you yet.”

  “I don’t think we did that though.” Volchenko scratches his chin and winces from his attempt at recollection. “Velour, do you know anything about this girl?”

  Danny Velour shrugs flippantly. “I don’t think so. I only made two tapes in the last three days and those chicks were South American. Engine?”

  The giant in the leather mask shakes his head quietly.

  “Someone get Fedosov,” Volchenko says. “Where is he?”

  “Upstairs, I think,” Velour answers. Without a second of hesitation, one of the zombified weirdos darts up the cellar steps.

  “We did not know who you were until he told us a few hours ago,” Volchenko says, pointing to the leader of the swa
rm. “How would we find your friend and make all of these arrangements?”

  “Boss,” Moldovich says. “If he killed Sergei, then why did you have me kill Eddie Seong?”

  “Because I thought Eddie Seong killed Sergei for his brother!”

  Sid snarls at Volchenko. “You fuckers can try, but you’re not talking your way out this.”

  “We are not trying to. You are chained to steel frame. Why would I lie to you now?”

  “Because you’re afraid of what I’m gonna do to you.”

  Velour lets out a half measure of a laugh. “Ha! Your story doesn’t even make sense, kid,” he says. “Why would Volchenko kill some slut instead of just taking you out? And why video tape it and send it to you?”

  “Why not use girl for leverage to get to you?” Volchenko says. “That is what I would have done.”

  “Exactly! This thing has more plot holes than Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. And they really said butt stuff? Nobody talks that way—maybe teenagers—nobody with the cojones to stab a little girl in the guts like that though.”

  “I never say butt stuff.” Volchenko shakes his head assuredly.

  “Yeah. I mean, you try to be more sly than that when making threats of sexual violence against a kidnapped love interest. You allude to it. Let their imagination do the work. Say something about the carpet matching the drapes, like J.T. Walsh in Breakdown. That’s a great line. Or you go generic and just say you’re making her comfortable, wink wink. We’re going to have a fun time, air quotes.”

  “She’s a real smooth ride,” Yuri Moldovich chimes in. “Is thing I say.”

  “That’s a little ham-handed. You don’t really need to say anything at all necessarily. You could just strip her down to a little bikini like Princess Leia. People get the idea.”

  Yuri’s face springs into a ghastly flush. “You think they raped Princess Leia?”

  “Oh yeah. For sure. Jabba’s palace ran an all-night bounty hunter buffet on dat ass.”

  “I’m going to peel his face off and feed it to him,” Sid says.

  “You got the wrong guys, suka blyad!” Volchenko shouts. “You killed all of my people! Destroyed much of my fucking business! And why? Because you got played like suka! You know this word suka? Is bitch! Got played like bitch! Somebody played you!”

  “Fuck you, Volchenko,” Sid shouts. “If you didn’t kill Lily, then who did?”

  DEAD TEENAGER MOVIE

  “Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is ninety minutes of teenagers being strangled, stabbed, impaled, chopped up, and mutilated. That’s all this movie is, is just mindless bloody violence. And just think of the message this film offers to its teenage audience: The world is a totally evil place, this movie says. It’ll kill ya. It doesn’t matter what your dreams and hopes and ambitions are. It doesn’t matter if you have a new boyfriend or a new girlfriend, or you’ve got plans for the future. You can forget all those plans, because you’re gonna wind up dead. There is literally nothing else in this movie, and the sickest thing is, this isn’t the final chapter. That’s just an advertising gimmick. The ending clearly sets up a sequel, and what I wanna know is: I wonder if they’re gonna be heartless and cynical enough to make a sequel, because why not? They’ve already taken the bucket to the cesspool four times for this sludge. I think the people that made this movie ought to be ashamed of themselves, and that’s what I think, Gene.” - Roger Ebert

  INT. VIDEO TIME BASEMENT - DAY

  Lily sits slumped over in a cold folding chair which has rusted along the feet from the occasional basement flood. Her chest is covered only by a white dress shirt which is buttoned haphazardly. She can feel her thick black eye shadow smeared down her cheeks.

  “Let me go,” she cries out to the hulking shadow that hovers between the tripod mounted video camera and a blinding hot light.

  “GREETINGS,” speaks the shadow. “As you can see, we have your woman.”

  The shadow moves toward her and gains definition. He’s a huge man, broad shouldered and pot-bellied. His face is hidden behind a black balaclava. He steps behind her quickly, before she has much time to study him. Then she feels the cold steel of a butcher knife against the soft flesh of her throat. Lily shudders as a chill runs down her spine.

  “You have insulted us, stupid Amerikos, and so we are to make her suffer for glory of the motherland,” her captor says. A gloved hand moves to her left breast, skimming it lightly in a circle, then patting quickly and with an open fist, as though attempting to smother a small fire with bare skin. “If I am not too clear, we make our way with your woman many times... AND THIS MEAN ALL OF THE WEIRD BUTT STUFF.”

  “What?” Lily says. “Really, Dave? Butt stuff?”

  “Yeah…” Big Dave answers. The knife falls away from Lily’s neck as Big Dave joylessly removes the black knit mask that covered his head. Underneath is a doughy face with a few days stubble surrounding a horseshoe moustache. “I don’t know. I just don’t feel right about saying this stuff. You know? I’m not a professional actor, you know?”

  He’s right. Big Dave isn’t qualified to do much, other than check ID cards next to the turnstile at the Black Omen’s entrance. But he’s an imposing guy, and Lily is working with whatever she can get. She enlisted him before she rounded up her camera equipment with Kayla and came out to the strip mall basement under the old video store. She still has a key from when she worked there, and the poorly lit concrete room looks like a dungeon.

  “Just say the line,” Lily says. “The line is ‘Her backdoor tight like nursery school girl.’”

  “I’m not saying that.” Dave shakes his head. “I’m not talking about your back end.”

  “We work in a strip club, Dave. You see my b-hole every time somebody gives me a fiver. It’s not a big deal.”

  “It is to me. I don’t say stuff like that.”

  “He won’t say the lines,” Kayla says, leaning from behind the video camera. “Can we just give up on this? It’s a terrible idea.”

  “It was your idea!” Lily says.

  “No it wasn’t! I said I don’t think Sid would notice if you were dead!”

  “And I said maybe we need to find out!”

  “What if you’re right? What if he goes completely apeshit and kills a hundred people?”

  “That won’t happen, because right after he sees the video, I’m going to jump out and go Ah-ha! And catch him all mopey.”

  “Mopey? The guy who just told you to kill your baby?”

  “God, Right to Life. It’s my body.”

  “I don’t think he knows about abortions, Lily,” Kayla says. “He meant kill it kill it. Like with a hammer or something.”

  Dave issues a startled glance at Lily. “You’re pregnant?!” he says.

  “No.” Lily rolls her eyes. “I just told some guy I was. Don’t worry about it. Let’s get back on track here.”

  “I’m not saying the butt sex line,” Dave says as he pulls the mask back over his face.

  “Look, if we’re going to sell this, the implication of sexual violence needs to be real. It’s how these things work. You don’t just pop the disposable woman. You do something really diabolical to her and then stuff her in a fridge.”

  “I’m not saying it.”

  “Fine!” Lily groans. “Take it from ‘Now your woman will die.’”

  He does, and he does well, despite his terrible moose-and-squirrel Russian imitation. After Lily chokes out an agonizing screen death with the help of a stage knife, an old shirt, and some fake blood, she changes into some blue jeans and an off-the-shoulder Megadeth shirt. She edits the video on Kayla’s laptop. The girls copy the video file to a blank DVD, which Lily places in a brown envelope on which she scrawls KILL TEAM ONE in blood from a pin prick. She seals the envelope and puts it in Kayla’s hands.

  “I have to pack all the gear back into my car,” Lily says. “Can you take that to my house and leave it on the front porch?”

  “I’m not doing that,” Kayla declares. “I
don’t want anything else to do with this.”

  “But you’re my bestie! And besties do things for each other...like drop off weird black mail DVDs, and conveniently position you in the cramped back seat of my Challenger for a triple feature with Steve at the drive-in next week.”

  Kayla sighs as she picks up the envelope. “I need a better bestie.”

  “I love you bunches,” Lily says as Kayla trundles up the basement steps with the envelope and Big Dave. She hears Kayla’s car pulling out of the parking lot as she disassembles the hot light stand and packs it into its case. After that, she packs up the camera, which is significantly heavier in its hard shell case and carries it up the steps to the parking lot behind the old video store. She stuffs the camera into the passenger’s seat of her purple Dodge Challenger, because she doesn’t think it will fit in the car’s small trunk.

  Taking a quick breather afterwards, Lily notices the navy Honda Fit which has been parked behind the video store since she and Kayla arrived. Neither of them recognized the tiny car, and a big blue ☪☮e✡is✝ bumper sticker amidst a blanket of other new-age slogans confirmed that the car did not belong to Marty, the owner of the tiny strip mall, who is known to frequently opine that the United States should just send them all back to Africa.

  Lily leans down to the windshield and looks inside the little car. She sees a jumbled mess of fast food receipts and patchouli oil bottles cluttering the floor. A small wooden Native American dreamcatcher dangles from the rear view mirror and the driver’s seat has been pushed all the way back. Apparently a really tall hippie left his car here. Lily shrugs. Whatever.

  A goliath black shadow blocks out the sun like a passing cloud. Lily turns and meets a wall of Kevlar with holes that expose charred hamburger flesh. Giant outstretched gorilla hands close around her neck like a noose and a monster drools slimy mucus from a gaping maw as it bellows “MEAT!”

  The Ghoul is an eight-foot-tall, flesh eating, bulletproof armored, super strength endowed humanoid monster. Lily has met this beastly thing before, when she stuck a power drill through its eyeball and Sid blew it up along with her last car. It was dead! She was sure it was dead! This is impossible!