by Mike Leon
“KILL HER NOW!” the Scare screams as the idiots charge forward, streaming to the site of the breach in the wall. Mary Sue pokes the tip of her thumb into the power switch on her mysterious toy. Sid expects it to explode or shoot lasers or turn into a swarm of flying robots, or maybe a force field, but it does none of those things. It does nothing at all.
The scare and all his idiots collapse. They go sprawling to the floor, mostly in heaps, with bodies piled on top of bodies, foaming and spasming like lab rats dying from some infection. Hands flailing, eyes rolling, tongues hanging, they all writhe about the floor as a single gibbering mass.
“Motherfucker,” exclaims a familiar voice. “What the fuck is this place all about?” It’s Bruce. The ex-CIA GameStop manager jumps down from the driver’s side of the truck still wearing his nametag lanyard from the video game sales chain. He knocks on one of the dog cages and the petrified woman inside shrieks something at him in Slovene.
“Bruce?” Sid says. “What are you doing here?”
“Bailing your ass out of this mess.” Bruce dashes forward, lumbering over a mound of rattling bodies. He unholsters an HK MK23 with attached suppressor and laser aiming module. It’s a pistol which is roughly the size of a pet elephant, and almost as practical.
“How did you find me?”
“No time to explain.” Bruce raises the MK23 and fires off a .45 slug through the chain holding Sid’s right hand to the framing device.
“The eye in the sky sent us,” Mary Sue says.
“There was plenty of time to explain that,” Sid grumbles.
“I guess so. You got any other important questions?”
“Yeah,” Sid says. There are lots of unexplained items that seem pertinent right now. How long has Bruce been working for the Player? Who is he really? What does the Player want? What was that machine Mary used to knock out all the idiots? But all of that will have to wait. “What’s your situation?” Sid cocks an eyebrow at Mary.
Mary sneers at him as Bruce shoots through the next chain. “I know your type, Sid Hansen. Look at the poor disfigured girl and how ugly she is. She must be lonely and desperate and easy. Well, not me.”
“Huh? You’re smoking hot. You’re the hottest chick I’ve ever seen.”
“Don’t patronize me. I’m not stupid. I’ll never sleep with a miscreant like you, no matter how revolting I look.”
“Am I missing something here?” Sid says.
“Her eye.” Bruce sighs as he shoots through the last of the chains. Sid looks at Mary more closely. He sees nothing remarkable (besides how incredibly cute she is OMG). He leans closer and squints. Then he sees it. There is a hairline scar which runs from her left eyebrow, straight down across her eye and ends on the highpoint of her cheekbone. He can barely see it even with his ridiculous eagle eyes, and most people would require a magnifying glass to find the imperfection.
“Don’t look at it,” Mary says, turning away in shame. “I’m hideous. It’s why I’ve never… been with a man.”
“Really?” Sid grins like a dog with a new tennis ball. It hurts like Hell, but he doesn’t show it. “So you’re a...uh…”
“She’s all kinda things,” Bruce interjects as Mary plants her fingers on Sid’s jaw line and prods at the bones. “She’s a neurosurgeon, a rocket scientist, and a Judo champion.”
“I bet I can show you a few things on the Judo mat,” Sid says.
“I’m really not very good,” Mary answers meekly.
“She won an Olympic gold medal.”
Mary shrugs. “I had to do something between my internships at the White House and NBC.”
“What the shit, kill team?” Bruce says. “We busted in here on a crap shoot that that jammer would work and saved your ass from a level ninety-nine elite raid boss situation, and the only thing you’re interested in is still pussy.”
“I had that whole thing under control,” Sid grunts.
“The fuck you did! You were getting your face punched in.”
“What does that box do anyway? It just knocked them all out...”
“It’s a mobile phone jammer,” Mary says. “We express ordered a case of them from China after that cell phone IED disaster last week. The nanites communicate over the same bandwidths as common cellular devices. Jam their signal and you lock them up. They use the same CDMA channel access they borrowed from the Russians. It hasn’t changed since the cold war.”
“Huh?” Sid grunts.
“The Red Scare is a sentient airborne nanotech contagion that used to be a Cuban communist revolutionary,” Mary explains. “He spreads vectors everywhere he goes. Anyone that comes in contact could be infected—assimilated in a way. They become part of his hive mind, like an extension of him.”
“He was the old Kill Team One’s enemy numero uno during the Cold War. Your dad killed his original body decades ago, but the Scare just keeps on ticking. Got a beef now he won’t never forget. He’s like a goddamned commie Energizer bunny. Mind control super flu.”
“Why didn’t he just mind control us all?” Sid says.
“He has limits,” Bruce says. “He can only control people with real low intelligence, like the bottom ten percent of the population or something. He calls them his useful idiots, like Lenin.”
“I don’t think Lenin said that,” Mary mutters.
“But he had a small army up there...” Sid questions. “That was a lot more than ten percent of the people in that casino.”
Bruce waves his hands in angry emphasis. “You met him in a building full of people too dumb to stop giving all their money to boxes with flashing lights on them!”
“Is that what those video games do?”
“Motherfucker… I don’t know about you. I just don’t know.”
“I was afraid he would control me,” Mary says. “I’m so stupid sometimes.” She looks down at the floor in self-pity.
“And you!” Bruce yells at Mary. “You’re a goddamned super genius dime piece! Quit havin’ a goddamned pity party all the time!”
“So now what?” Sid asks.
“Now we got to do something about the Ghoul.”
“The Ghoul?!” Sid says. “What about the Ghoul?”
EXT. LGC MANAGEMENT PROPERTIES – DAY
Survival is an easy thing for Red Scare. It requires only one useful idiot; one exploited worker; one person who will believe in utopia without question. As long as one remains, the dream lives on, and so does the Scare.
Now the dream lives on in some waif he left along the periphery, as he often does. One must remain away from the fighting—a chairman, a visionary, one whose survival is paramount for the greater good.
This one’s name is unknown to Red, and he does not care. He seldom learns their names. He knew the old one that lived with Gloria was Esteban, and he knows the body he presented to Volchenko was Maksimov Antonovich. That one he picked from a telephone directory just for the overtly Russian name. Those are dead to him now, as are the rest that came from the casino. That pink haired bitch working with Kill Team One cut off all of them.
Now the chairman remains outside, and with this body alone, Red must find some way to retain a chance at victory. He must stay clear of the murder ranch and the cell jammer there. He has seen that trick before, and he is never amused when it is employed against him. Judging from the size of the portable jammer that girl was carrying, Red should be safe if he stays more than a hundred yards from the main building.
He reaches the gate at the edge of the ranch property and peers through the iron bars up the long drive to see if anyone is coming down. The coast appears clear, so he creeps along the wall toward a black vehicle that appears out of place, one parked on the brim of the road, not near the gate where someone would innocently leave their car to go inside, but much farther down where it is more discreet.
Red is about to break the driver’s side window when he sees that the passenger door is unlocked. He goes around to the other side and climbs in. On the floor in front of
the passenger’s seat, he spies another of those obnoxious cell jammers. He disengages the lithium ion battery pack from the bottom of the device and throws it over the wall into the ranch grounds. He sets the jammer back down where he found it and starts feeling under the dashboard for the trunk release.
INT. LGC MANAGEMENT PROPERTIES - DAY
Sid looks over the now slumbering mass of bodies at his feet in the basement of the bizarre mafia murder dungeon. “So you’re telling me Lily is not dead, and neither is the Ghoul?” he says.
“Correct,” Mary answers, as she turns over the badly beaten Dmitry Fedosov and wipes a handful of gore away from his nose. “And this guy works for the FBI.” Fedosov groans and spits out a tooth.
“I know that,” Sid grumbles. “How long have you known about all this?”
“Player figured it out about the time you kidnapped Volchenko’s daughter,” Bruce says.
“Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
“Cause you’re the only teenager on the planet doesn’t have a fucking cell phone!” Bruce barks. “We’ve been over half of California trying to catch up to your dumb rapid dominance establishing ass!”
“I don’t understand this. They killed her. They videotaped it and sent it to me.”
“That’s the piece we were missing,” Mary says. “We never saw the video.”
“You’re talking about the package Lily’s chubby friend left on her doorstep, right?” Bruce says.
“Kayla? Why would Kayla want me to think Lily was dead? Could she be compromised somehow?”
“A spook?” Bruce shrugs. “Wouldn’t surprise me. Could even be a shapeshifter if they’re trying to get at you. You bring out all the freaky shit.”
“We’re not going to know until we find Lily Hoffman,” Sid says. “Come on. Let’s do this.” He hauls off over the piled concrete rubble all along the floor near the tractor and heads through the gaping hole to the outside.
“Don’t forget the jammer,” Bruce says to Mary Sue.
“I’m afraid he could regain control of the whole crowd as soon as we carry it away,” Mary replies. “Don’t worry. I have another one in the car.”
INT. LGC MANAGEMENT PROPERTIES - DUNGEON - DAY
Fedosov awakens in a sweaty pile of other humans and he rubs blood away from his eyes. His mouth hurts like hell and he wiggles his tongue around to find that a front tooth is missing. He looks around the damp basement and the carpet of bodies surrounding him as he wipes his hands on someone’s nearby shirt. The place is weirdly quiet now. The only other waking thing is one girl in one of the dog cages.
Dmitry crawls over limp limbs and unconscious faces until he reaches a clear area of floor, then makes his way to the caged woman.
“What happened?” he asks, hooking his fingers through the little bars of the cage. “Where did they all go?”
It is of no use asking. The woman in the cage only whimpers in some Slavic sounding dialect Dmitry does not recognize. He checks the cage to see if he can at least let her out, but it is padlocked and requires a key. He makes a slow circle around the dungeon and finds nothing except Volchenko’s disembodied head on a pile of severed and torn extremities. Engine’s bullet riddled body is not far from a pile of guts that used to be Yuri Moldovich. The bratva had Dmitry’s cell phone when he last saw it, and now it could be anywhere in this shit show, likely under a pile of bodies. Dmitry makes his way up stairs to look for a landline phone.
In the ranch kitchen, Dmitry does not find a telephone, but he does find a large key ring which is flush with dozens of the jingling little instruments. He picks it up from a countertop next to the refrigerator and the keys rattle loudly through the silent house. Like an answer to the rattling keys, something rustles beyond a white wooden door a few feet away. Dmitry watches in quiet suspense as the door eases open to reveal the terrified face of Danny Velour. The snuff director stands squashed awkwardly against the shelving in a small pantry, one flip-flop on the floor and the other in a box of potatoes.
“Fedosov,” Velour whispers. “Thank God it’s you. What happened down there? Are they gone?”
“I don’t know,” Dmitry answers in a hollow tone he has never used before—that he didn’t even know he had.
“We have to get out of here, man!” Velour lifts his foot from the potato box and inches forward from the pantry door. “Do you have your car keys?”
“I’m not sure.” Dmitry feels like he can see through Velour, not into his inner workings, but in a flyover sense, as though the man is simply not occupying the space in front of him anymore and can be crossed through without any regard. This is true of every part except his eyes, which Dmitry avoids.
“Look, man. I don’t care if you’re FBI and all that shit. I don’t care about the money. Whatever. I’ll give you everything on Volchenko, the others, anything you want. I just want out. I can’t go to prison.”
Velour is still talking when Dmitry picks up a paring knife from the drain board next to the kitchen sink and sticks it right through the knot of the bastard’s cotton bathrobe belt. The knife doesn’t stick Velour very deeply, but he gets the point. Dmitry pulls it free and stabs Velour again as the pornographer begins to scream and slap at the blade. Dmitry shoulders him back into the pantry, where Velour is crunched between Dmitry and the edges of shelves stacked with dried food. Dmitry’s knife punctures his guts like the perforating needle of a sewing machine running stitches down a sweatshop garment with an approaching deadline.
“No! No! I’ll do anything!” Velour wails like a frightened child as his blood and tears spill across the stored food. His offered bargains are met with silence from Dmitry as he continues the stabbing. “Anything. Anything.”
Dmitry tires surprisingly quickly and leans against the refrigerator for a brief respite, not expecting Velour to do anything but die. To his surprise, Velour stumbles from the pantry clutching his swiss cheese belly. His shredded bathrobe refuses to stay closed now and his naked trunk is exposed. The blood gushes from his guts and drips from his little knot of a dick. He turns and hobbles slowly toward the basement door. Dmitry takes in a heavy breath and goes in for another round, stabbing Velour in the back. Velour hardly seems to notice anymore as he just continues to inch away, making feeble pleas. Dmitry quickly loses count of how many times he stabs Velour in the back. The filmmaker reaches the basement steps mumbling something about his mother. Dmitry gives him a solid kick in the back and the filmmaker tumbles loudly down the steps, flipping end over end until he comes to rest on the concrete floor below.
He follows Velour down there and again is surprised that the evil fuck is not dead. Velour croaks some kind of blood belch at him. “Aw God. My mom will see the tapes. Not my mom. Not… My mom is a nice lady...”
But then he goes quiet and still, and Dmitry is glad it is over because he doesn’t know if he has the nerve or the strength to cut that man anymore. He drops the knife on the steps and sits down beside it.
INT. BRUCE’S BRAND NEW CADILLAC CTS-V - DAY
“Just—could you not bleed on the carpet is all I’m saying,” Bruce says over the shoulder of his seat as he drives his sleek new Cadillac CTS-V along the freeway. He has only one hand on the wheel even as he changes lanes and passes other cars at a brisk but not breakneck pace. “If it gets on the leather it wipes off. No big. But the carpet stains, man.” In the back seat, Sid tries to hold still while Mary Sue wires together his teeth, using a sparkling clean titanium surgical forceps.
“I’m sorry about the blood on the seats,” Mary Sue says. “If only I was a better doctor…”
“It’s just that I’ve only had it for three days. I don’t want to mess it up right away, you know?”
The robotic voice of the Player comes from the car’s speakers via a Bluetooth connection to Bruce’s cell phone. “With what I’m paying you, you can afford to get the car detailed, Bruce.”
“I don’t understand cool cars,” Sid grumbles through his clenched teeth, avoiding any
sounds that would necessitate closing his lips. “Why do you nor’al people have to have cool cars?”
“You wouldn’t get it because you blow up every car you touch,” Bruce snaps back.
“Not every car.”
“That argument is over, man. Ship has sailed.”
“Whatever.”
“Could you not talk as much please?” Mary says.
“How long is this gonna take?”
“Oh, not long. But these Ernst ligatures won’t hold, so I’ll need to redo this with a proper arch bar later.”
“Yeah. Awesome,” Sid dryly remarks. His head feels like someone ran over it with a compact car. He readily changes the subject. “Player, tell me about the Ghoul.”
“The Ghoul. Where do we start? He wasn’t always like that, but he was never really okay either. The Ghoul started out as George Vidal, AKA The Anchorage Animal. He strangled and ate as many as thirty prostitutes before he was caught. The BOP loaned him to the CIA just before they gave up control of all the Alaskan prisons. This was in fifty nine when MK Ultra was in full swing, if that tells you anything.”
“Hold up. Nineteen fifty nine? How old is he?”
“He was fifty three then. The Ghoul doesn’t really get older. You might call him a golem or a construct. I call him a complete and total abomination—every possible ethical misstep in the name of scientific progress all wrapped up in one walking biological battle tank. See, Vidal isn’t all Vidal anymore. They Frankensteined him together with parts from other...um...participants in the program.”
“Why would anyone do that?” Mary Sue interjects.
“They were experimenting with samples of rare Japanese bloodworms, thought to be mythical until Nazi scientists were gifted some by members of Unit 731 during the war.”
“You lost me,” Bruce says.
“Yeah. And, um, WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THAT?” Mary shouts.