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

by Mike Leon

  “It was unlocked,” Gavin says. “But I think we left it that way.”

  “It’s a fucking glass door!” Lily says, waving at the kitchen’s rear wall, which is just the glass door flanked on either side by windows looking out on the back deck.

  “That’s not going to keep him out, is it?” Gavin says.

  “No!” Lily says. “I don’t even think the front door will keep him out. This prissy shit isn’t even going to slow him down.”

  “We just have to hope he doesn’t walk up to the deck and find the door then. Where’s the phone?” Gavin turns to Jenny for the last question and she sniffles as she points to a cream colored plastic telephone on a composite countertop next to a coffee maker. It has a rotary dial.

  Gavin puts his finger in the rotary dial but then freezes in befuddlement. “Does anybody know how to use this thing?”

  Adler and Carter look at the phone like something discovered among the wreckage of an alien craft. Jenny shrugs and says “I don’t know. Only my dad uses it. He says cell phones are stupid.”

  “Stand back,” Lily says. “I think I saw Kolchak the Night Stalker use one of these once.” Gavin backs away from the rotary phone and Lily sticks her finger in the little wheel on the face of it. She hem-haws briefly before putting her finger in a different hole.

  “Get away from the fricking phone!” someone shouts. Lily turns back to the door leading into the den and sees Trevor just inside the kitchen. His nose is twisted into a zig zag and both eyes are swollen with blue rings around them. But Lily’s attention is quickly drawn from Trevor’s bruised and broken face and toward the nickel plated revolver gripped between the sick bastard’s hands. The barrel is pointed directly at her. “Nobody is calling the police!” he yells.

  “Whoa! Bro,” Adler raises his hands. “Where’d you get a gun?”

  “It hardly matters!” Trevor growls, waving the barrel of the gun in manic furor. The gun is pointed at Adler when it stops moving, and Trevor’s next words are separated by needlessly long pauses for unnecessary emphasis. “No one! Is! Calling! The! Fricking! Cops!” He sounds like a talentless prepubescent child attempting to sing in a death metal band.

  “It’s cool, brah. It’s cool.” Adler backs away.

  “You!” Trevor waves the gun at Lily. “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, pick up that phone and throw it over here!”

  Lily picks up the phone and pulls it to the limit of its cord, which is only a few feet from the counter. “Sure thing, Dr. Huxtable,” she says as she yanks the plug from the wall.

  “Shut up!” Trevor barks as he swipes the phone from her hand.

  “Could you not provoke the rapist with the gun pointed at us?” Gavin says.

  “I’m hardly a rapist, you obnoxious brute! You are!”

  “Hold up,” Lily says. “Lemme check Wikipedia, because I’m not sure that’s how that works.”

  “Because you’re just another inferior beast like all the rest. Your female mind is driven solely by the base instinct to attract a brutish alpha male degenerate and bequeath him with the pleasures of love and sex with no regard for gentlemen of superior intelligence.”

  Lily chuckles. For her, what he said is weirdly accurate. “I know, right?”

  “It’s not funny!” Trevor screams with ragged rage. “I am a magnificent gentleman! I read Shakespeare! I can quote Milton! I can tell Chianti from Bordeaux with just a sniff! I reached level sixty in World of Warcraft, an impressive accomplishment! And yet you reject me! You cruel beasts ignore my suffering, ignore my greatness, and give it all to these degenerates! You are the sick ones! You are vicious animals who delight in my suffering! And when I am finally driven to the pathetic indignity of intercourse with a lower female, you call me a criminal?!”

  “I can’t believe I liked you,” Jenny says.

  “He’s worse than that thing out there,” Lily says. “At least it doesn’t know any better.”

  “All of you,” Trevor says, flicking the revolver muzzle at the far end of the room. “Against the wall.” Everyone does as he says, though Gavin attempts to reason with the psychopath as he backs away. Trevor sets the telephone down on the kitchen counter between him and the rest of them.

  “Trevor, what you did to Karen is not our major problem right now,” Gavin says. “There’s a… person outside, Trevor. He killed Summer. He wants to kill us all—”

  Bam! A shot rings out through the kitchen as Trevor blasts the old rotary telephone to bits. Lily yelps and jerks back against the glass and wooden paneling near the door to the deck.

  “Nice story, but I’m not interested in having my name dragged through the mud over this extortion. I’ve already called Father. He’ll fix everything. You plebeians will walk away with a ransom I’m sure.”

  “How come you have a signal?” Lily says.

  “I have Verizon,” Trevor sneers.

  “Nobody else here has Verizon?”

  Lily gets a lot of shrugs and shaking heads in response.

  “That sounds about right,” she grumbles.

  “You might as well all sit down. We’re going to wait here until Father’s associate arrives.”

  “Look, Trev,” Lily says. “If we don’t call the police now, nobody will be left alive when your man gets here. You included.”

  “Is that some kind of threat? Who are you anyway? And how come you’re not wearing any pants?”

  Lily starts to answer, but is interrupted by the spectacular explosion of the glass doorway at the rear of the kitchen. Jenny wails as the monster’s gargantuan armored boot crunches scattered shards just inside the room. It stoops to fit through the twisted wooden frame that remains of the door, all the time snarling and calling out its usual catchphrase. “Meat! Meat!”

  Trevor’s face contorts into wild disbelief as he sees the Ghoul for himself. All of the others run from the broken door and the lumbering killer monster as it enters the kitchen.

  “What is that?” he nervously rambles. “Who is—stay back.” He points the gun at the others as they scramble toward him and away from the Ghoul. “Nobody come any closer!”

  “Shoot it!” Lily screams, stuck in the middle of the kitchen between two maniacs.

  “You!” Trevor yells at the Ghoul as it marches into the kitchen. “Stop there! Or I’ll shoot!”

  The others react in a range of panicked disarray. Jenny will not stop screaming, frozen in terror with her back against the refrigerator. Gavin picks up a small fire extinguisher from beside the microwave and swings it at the Ghoul. The monster takes the red canister right in the teeth without so much as a blink and pounds Gavin down to the floor with a hammering fist. Carter pulls a wet butcher knife from the sink and Adler bolts around the monster and makes his way out the broken back door.

  “I said stay back!” Trevor screams with strained and illusory rage, because nothing he can say means anything in this room anymore. The revolver goes off in his hand as he shouts, maybe intentionally, maybe by accident. The bullet strikes the Ghoul in his armored shoulder and does not elicit so much as a flinch from the creature. Trevor pales in reaction and pushes his way through the door at his back.

  Lily takes Gavin’s hand as Carter stabs the butcher knife against the monster’s armored chest. The knife point halts only a centimeter into the burned Kevlar and Carter’s hand, his grip not tight enough, slips down the blade.

  “Flesh for my hunger!” the Ghoul says as it picks Carter up with one hand and swings him into a set of cabinets over the dish washer. Jenny continues to scream uselessly. The Ghoul slams Carter against an island countertop, then through a rack of dishes. Ceramic shards clatter along the floor with silverware and metal pots.

  “Come on!” Lily shouts to Gavin as he peels himself up from the floor. She draws him toward the back door, but he stops to pull Jenny away from the refrigerator. Jenny keeps screaming and slobbering even as Gavin pulls her out onto the back deck. She doesn’t even seem to know where she is anymore.

  Lily loo
ks back through the broken door as she steps out onto the deck and she sees the Ghoul stuffing Carter’s body into the open oven. “Cooked meat!” he bellows. Then she’s sprinting from the house as fast as she has ever run before.

  INT. THE BARN - NIGHT

  Gavin makes it into the Brunswick family barn ahead of Lily and Jenny. His first thought is to go for some kind of weapon, something they can use to fight the horrific killer terrorizing them. He goes for the farm tools on the wall to his left and picks a heavy scythe down from the rusty nails it sits perched on.

  “What are you doing?” Lily chirps as she enters the barn behind him, breathing heavily from her run. Jenny sobs uncontrollably as she makes it into the barn hot on Lily’s heels.

  “I don’t want to die!” Jenny says. “I never got to do anything!”

  “Maybe I can stab it with this!” Gavin says.

  “You can’t stab it with anything!” Lily says. “I’ve seen it stabbed in the brain, set on fire, shot, blown up, electrocuted. None of that worked.”

  “Well we have to do something!” Gavin says.

  “We can get the fuck out of here!” shouts Adler from the back of the barn. He got there before any of them, and he is already making progress on a plan that is the polar opposite of what Gavin intended. He hoists a heavy red gasoline canister up from the dirt floor near the two mud-splattered ATVs they were all playing with earlier. “Help me gas up these quads!”

  “I’m not leaving Karen behind!” Gavin says.

  “Fuck Karen!” Jenny shrieks. “She’s gone! I don’t want to die!”

  “Bro, I know it’s fucked up,” Adler says, pouring gasoline into the ATV’s tank. “But I don’t think she’s wrong. We got to go.”

  “Not without Karen,” Gavin says. “It’s my fault she got that wasted, and my fault what happened to her. I’m not ditching her here.”

  “Bro, she’s in the house. The monster is in the house. Now, I’m about to get as far away from that thing as I can get without a SpaceX ticket.”

  “You’re being a coward, Adler. That’s just a man in a suit back there!”

  “Fuck that! You saw what it did to your car! That thing’s some kind of Frankenstein or an alien or some shit! You heard what Lydia said. The government built it in a lab!”

  “I just want to go!” Jenny says. “I’m so scared, you guys! I’m so scared!”

  “Shut up, Jenny!” Gavin says. “You’re in shock and you’re not making any sense.”

  “Bro, you’re the one not making sense,” Adler says.

  “You guys,” Lily says.

  “Yeah, Adler. Just let our friends die! Yeah, that’s great.”

  “You guys, I know what to do,” Lily says. Gavin tunes in, hoping to hear a better solution than anything he or Adler have come up with. He ends up being disappointed. “Have you guys ever seen John Carpenter’s Vampires?”

  Adler throws his arms up in exasperation. “Great. She’s lost her mind too.”

  “No?” Lily says, looking around at the other three for positive affirmations that never come. Gavin has not seen John Carpenter’s Vampires, nor can he see any logical conclusion to what the loopy little goth girl is saying. “What the fuck? It’s great. Anyway, James Woods harpoons vampires with a crossbow, and then Daniel Baldwin uses a Jeep winch to haul them out into the sunlight and turn them into crispy critters.”

  “Thank you for that, Lily. I don’t see how it helps.”

  “We can do it too! We have everything we need here. Those ATVs can haul the Ghoul, and I see at least two hundred feet of lasso rope hanging around this place.”

  “That’s all true, except for the part where vampires are not real and it isn’t even daytime.”

  “Duh. That’s why we pull him into that metal shredder.”

  EXT. BRUNSWICK RANCH - NIGHT

  Lily stands alone in the dark. A cool breeze blows between her bare legs and rustles the grass beneath her boots. The rear of the Brunswick ranch is wide open, and for that Lily is glad. At least she’ll see the monster coming for her out here.

  She glances back at the barn and tries to picture the others waiting inside for her to draw the monster into their trap, Gavin with the lasso they fished through the metal shredder, Adler with his finger on the ATV’s ignition switch, and Jenny just quietly not pissing herself. Lily hopes they’re ready. She shakes her head free of worry and walks toward the house.

  “Hey!” she shouts at the Brunswick ranch, with its warm yellow windows. It is the only source of light here, and it projects shadows out into the grassy field around her like spiky black fingers, some of them moving in the wind. “Hey! Where is everybody?! I’m all alone out here just waiting to get chopped up and eaten!”

  She checks over her shoulders just in case. The Ghoul is surprisingly sneaky sometimes for such a big dopey creature, but she sees nothing moving even as she squints and scans all along the trees far beyond the barn. Looking back to the house, it remains silent and still.

  “Yup! I’m out here with this juicy top round!” Lily spanks her ass the way only a good stripper can. The sharp slap echoes against the house, surprising even her. “I’m totally helpless!”

  The monster’s behemoth shadow falls across the yard as it steps out from the kitchen onto the wooden deck above her.

  “Oh no! It’s a flesh eating monster!” Lily squeals in a campy pitch. She even fans herself with her hand. “What ever shall I do?”

  The Ghoul’s feet stomp down on the deck planks as it turns to its right and he heads slowly down the short flight of stairs to the ground, taking the steps two at a time. The monster never ever runs. Even in a desperate chase, Lily has never seen it lumber forward with more than a determined walk, and she is counting on that to hold true as law now. Even when it only walks, its strides are so long that it hardly needs to run, and she would never escape from the beast if it ever decided to increase its pace to a brisk jog.

  When the Ghoul reaches the bottom of the steps, Lily turns and runs for the barn, screaming all the way. “Please somebody help! That monster is going to eat me!” Lily Hoffman will never win an Oscar. She sprints across the lawn, widening the gap between her and the armored behemoth as he stomps pressingly but not quickly in her direction. Lily makes it through the big open barn door and dashes for the table in the corner with its assorted compressed air tanks and other tools. She picks up a slender metal cylinder which is a foot long and has a rubber coated hand lever, not unlike a bicycle brake lever, attached at one end. It is a captive bolt gun, used to kill cattle, likely useless against the monster, but Lily hopes never to get close enough to find out. She turns a small red valve atop a CO2 tank which is cabled to her unusual weapon and turns to face the Ghoul.

  “Come on, hamburger face!” she shouts at the monster approaching through the yard. “I’m gonna fuck you up!” The monster only continues plodding forward into the threshold of the barn door, where he is fully illuminated by the yellow bulb over his head. Lily picks up the CO2 tank in her other hand, lowers her stance, and points the bolt gun at him in a terrible imitation of Anton Chigurh. “I got here the same way the coin did, asshole!”

  To her left, Lily can see Adler waiting and sweating on the ATV behind the massive metal shredder. Jenny cowers against the side of the machine, low to the ground, her hand over her mouth as though screaming is an involuntary response that requires some kind of blockage. Across the barn, Gavin slides from behind the barn door as the Ghoul plods past him. He has the stiff looped rope they pulled down from the wall in his hands. Lily makes as much noise as she can to keep the Ghoul’s focus.

  “Hey, razorface! Eat my ass!” she screams. She wishes she had a chainsaw or something louder, though the Ghoul makes her job easier by adding its own snarls and stock phrases to the noise.

  “Fresh meat for my hunger!” the monster calls out as he marches toward her. “I hunger!”

  Gavin spreads the lasso loop to the Ghoul’s shoulder width as he creeps behind the colossa
l killer. Lily loses sight of him as he closes in, obscured by the creature’s towering form. She waits to see the rope around it before she does anything but scream more insults. When she sees the brown braided strands encircling the creature, she shouts for Adler. “Do it! Come on! Do it now!”

  The ATV sputters to life as Gavin runs with the rope in his hands. It slips the monster’s shoulders, but closes around his neck like a noose as he turns and swipes at Gavin’s back. “Meat!” Adler powers forward, taking the four-wheeled vehicle around the corner of the metal shredder and through the barn, zipping past the monster and out the big barn door into the grass with the line and Gavin trailing behind him. He screams like a girl as he goes, but can hardly be heard over the ATV engine. The Ghoul’s head is whipped back as the rope draws taut and the creature is flung backwards toward the metal shredder behind him. Adler nearly goes over the steering column as the ATV slows, suddenly dragging the full weight of the armored monster. Lily drops the cattle gun and raises her hand to the big red start button that powers on the shredder. She waits. If she hits the power too early, the shredder will cut the line and the monster will go free. She needs him all the way inside the giant mechanical pulverizing apparatus before she starts it.

  The Ghoul slides on his back as he grasps at the rope around his neck with his hammy armored hands. He thuds against the wall of the huge shredder and then the ATV halts. The wheels spin with no traction as Adler gives it more gas, trying to reel the monster up the side of the shredder without much visible progress. The Ghoul looks to Lily, only a few feet away as he struggles against the four wheeler’s horsepower, then turns to the tightened rope which extends from the bottom of the shredder to the frame of the ATV. He lets go of the rope around his neck and grabs the other line.

  Lily gasps. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she mutters as she watches the Ghoul tug at the rope, winding the slack around his forearm. He is playing tug-of-war with the ATV. He is winning.