by Mike Leon
“Do you not know about Operation Paperclip? That was when the OSS imported Nazi scientists after World War Two. You can look it up later, but suffice it to say the Nazis with the bloodworms ended up working for the CIA after the war. So they were Nazis. Is that a good enough explanation why?”
“I guess.”
“So the Ghoul is a big Nazi zombie?” Sid asks.
“No,” Player answers. “Zombies are dead. The Ghoul is still alive. He’s just held together by parasitic bloodworms.”
“Sounds yummy.”
“The worms are pretty remarkable. Previously undocumented and presently non-recurring Annelids which live in mammalian tissue, both consuming dead cells and secreting a sort of undifferentiated cellular slurry which defied classification by specialists, but promotes unparalleled cellular renewal.”
“In English?”
“I think I understand,” Mary Sue says. “It means if you cut him, the worms sew him back up.”
“It goes way beyond that, Mary. They fix anything that happens to him. He can regrow limbs, probably his entire head, the worms will even knit his brain back together.”
“Wait a minute,” Mary says. “Doesn’t that mean the CIA and Graveyard have been sitting on the cure to cancer, the cure to everything, since World War Two?”
“Yes, but it has certain drawbacks, like the unrelenting and irresistible urge to consume human flesh. The worms need a constant supply of dead flesh to subsist, and they have a way of getting what they want. Then there’s the skin. The worms die when exposed to the open air, so they do a pretty shoddy job of replacing the outermost portions of the epidermis. That’s why his skin is basically one giant lumpy scar all over his entire body. They’re also making him crazy. See, they can repair his brain, but not whatever was stored in it. So his wiring up there is a mess. It’s like an old rotary hard drive that hasn’t been defragged after a billion rewrites.”
Sid snorts. “You’re saying the older he gets, the more ugly and retarded he gets,” he says.
“That’s one way to put it. When the program imploded in the seventies under scrutiny from Congress, the CIA handed off some assets to Graveyard to make them disappear. Your dad found the Ghoul and decided they could train him to be a walking battering ram, and back then he wasn’t so bad. He still had some conversational skills according to Van. Fifty years of being shot, stabbed and bludgeoned in the head changed that though. Now it’s doubtful he knows what year it is, or where he is, or even who he is. There’s just the hunger for meat, and as long as he keeps eating it, he will never die.”
“So let’s make sure he never eats again,” Sid says. “What do I need?”
“No small arms will punch through his RHA.”
“He’s WEARING rolled homogeneous armor?”
“Well, the plates are technically ceramic, but they have up to twenty-two millimeters RHA equivalency.”
“No wonder rifle rounds don’t even make him flinch.”
“Not in the chest or his facemask. Aim for the joints with something big though and you’ll get through, as if that makes much difference. He regenerates quite rapidly. Bullets sting him at best. And as you already discovered, the usual regenerating monster tricks don’t apply. You set him on fire and he still came back from that. The key to killing the Ghoul is to kill the worms, which isn’t actually all that difficult if you can get to them.”
“They die in the open air. So I just have to blow him up.”
“Completely. You have to blast him into bloody chunks. A direct hit from a high explosive anti-tank weapon would probably do the trick.”
“But we don’t have anything like that.”
“We don’t?” Bruce says, laughing.
INT. LGC MANAGEMENT PROPERTIES - DUNGEON - DAY
“Everybody on the ground! FBI!” agents in heavily padded black tactical gear bark and shout in stern meaty voices as they fan out through the gaping hole left by the bulldozer in the side of the basement. Dmitry’s ears still ring from the flashbang grenade they tossed inside before they swarmed the place, and he cups his hands over them as a big purple amoeba blob fills most of his vision. He should have known better than to stare directly at that thing when it blew up, but it landed snugly against a middle aged woman in a soiled sunflower pattern dress, and there was something unusual enough about that spectacle that he kept looking on with the paralysis of indecision. Should he bat the grenade away? No? Too late? But maybe not? Maybe just shout a warning? And then it blew.
“I’m an agent!” Dmitry shouts as he flattens his hands against the back of his head and remains seated and frozen on the basement floor.
Somewhere, one of the SWAT guys is yelling “Interlace your fingers! Interlace your fingers!” and that and the ringing are the only things Dmitry can hear. The purple blob fades to flickering orange. The woman in the sunflower dress is on fire. It isn’t a blazing inferno. It is hardly a kitchen fire, but she is screaming hysterically anyway. Two linebacker sized tactical goons tackle her. Someone smacks Dmitry in the shoulder.
“Chad! Chad, what the Hell happened here?!” It is Max Wintergreen, clad in a blue FBI windbreaker and black tactical vest.
“Max? I don’t even know where to start.”
“Where’s Volchenko?” Max asks. Dmitry points at the pile of tattered limbs on the basement floor and Max cringes as he steps closer to examine the remains. “How did this happen?”
“They tore him apart,” Dmitry shrugs.
“They? Who? The Russians?”
“No. These people.” Dmitry points around the room at the ragtag mob of geriatrics and simpletons. The crowd around him is as puzzling as the mysterious man who appeared to assist Volchenko in finding the bogeyman who killed most of their men. None of them seem to remember how they got here or anything that happened in the last few hours before Dmitry woke up on the floor, but the copious amounts of blood smeared on so many of them seemed to indicate they had a part in Volchenko’s demise. Dmitry spent the last hour attempting to calm them and keep them all here while he waited for Wintergreen’s tactical team to storm the place.
“Moldovich? The snuff people? Anybody?” Max says.
“Velour is over there.” Dmitry points at the bloody body slumped at the bottom of the stairs. “They killed him too.”
“What the fuck, Chad?! You mean to tell me we got bupkis here?”
Wintergreen’s shoulder mounted radio crackles and a voice on it informs him that they found a few people wandering along the road from the house. Some of the crowd left despite Dmitry’s insistences that they stay to talk to the FBI.
“Look, man. I’ve seen some really fucked up shit in the last forty-eight hours.” He scans the sea of distraught faces one more time, some of them sobbing, others wounded, others outwardly angry. “Does anybody have a joint? Anybody?”
EXT. U-STORE IT LOCKER - DAY
Sid steps out of Bruce’s car and looks back at the smirking mercenary while making the best skeptical glare he can muster with his puffy broken face and wired jaw. The bright orange segmented overhead door of the locker where he used to keep his black van filled with machine guns, grenades, and other ordnance is just ahead of him. “That’s my weapons storage locker.”
“Yup,” Bruce says.
“My weapons were all in my van. Jihadists blew up my van. There are no weapons in my weapons storage locker.”
“Correct. That is your empty storage locker.” Bruce points at the orange door directly across the pavement, opposite Sid’s locker. “THAT is my storage locker.” He takes a ring of keys from his pocket and jingles them cockishly as he heads for the door. Sid and Mary Sue follow. Bruce undoes the padlock on the door and gives the handle a good yank. The door slides up to reveal a room full of weapons.
“We been stockpiling stuff for a couple months,” Bruce says. “Stuff we thought you might need if we convinced you to work with us.”
There are two sealed five foot gun safes near the door, which Bruce sets about o
pening as soon as they enter. The rest of the room is packed with rifles and other larger long guns mounted on the walls, some decoratively. Sid recognizes a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, FIM-92 Stinger, an SA-24 Grinch, an old-fashioned collapsible M-72 LAW, and the classic RPG-7. There is also a wooden pallet stacked four feet high with cases of Magnum condoms.
“That is so gross,” Mary Sue says, cringing at the condoms.
“Ask me how fast I go through the whole pallet,” Bruce says. “Go ahead. Ask.”
“No. I don’t want to know.”
Sid goes straight to the anti-tank weapons.
“There’s a TOW missile in the shed outside if you don’t think any of that stuff is big enough,” Bruce says.
“Stop,” Sid says. “My dick can only get so hard.” He picks up the RPG-7 and checks the hammer and bore for dirt and proper lubrication. The Soviet manufactured Ручной Противотанковый Гранатомёт (Manual Anti-tank Grenade), commonly referred to by the English language backronym Rocket Propelled Grenade, is the most prolific man portable anti-armor weapon in the world. It consists of a 40mm steel tube which is ninety-five centimeters long and partially encased in a wooden stock which acts as insulation to protect the user from burns. It takes a football shaped warhead with an extended cylinder that is loaded directly into the muzzle, and has an effective range of two hundred meters. It is not the biggest big gun in Bruce’s collection, but it is the only one that is reloadable. “How many warheads do you have for this RPG?”
“Got six of those thermobaric anti-personnel rounds.” Bruce works the combo lock on the second of the safes.
“That’s optimal for soft targets, but you need to turn him into gibs,” Mary says. “You want a single stage high explosive for this.”
“She’s right,” Sid says. “We need a classic big kaboom.”
Bruce grins. “We got those too. And we got something else that might come in handy.” Bruce pulls open the safe door and reaches inside. He pulls out something that has a revolver handle, but just keeps coming out of the safe long after any normal sized revolver would have been through the door. He hands the giant nickel plated pistol to Sid and the weight of it in his hands is comparable to most rifles. “Smith and Wesson 460 XVR with a ten and half inch barrel. The premier bear and elephant hunting pistol.”
Mary Sue groans. “You actually bought that thing?”
“I got five of them.”
EXT. BRUNSWICK RANCH - DAY
It is noon when Sid Hansen arrives at the Brunswick ranch. He has a ballistic vest striped with MOLLE webbing, two S&W Model 460 XVR grizzly bear killing revolvers loaded with 360-grain .460 caliber cartridges, two M67 fragmentation grenades, a KM2000 Bundeswehr knife, a Bluetooth headset, a badly broken jaw, three broken ribs, and a possibly cracked orbital socket pending X-ray examination. He has seen better days.
Behind him, Mary Sue pokes out of the Cadillac’s sunroof, her pink hair a sparkling contrast to the overcast weather. She sets the RPG-7 down on the roof next to her with a hollow clunk.
“Hey!” Bruce shouts from inside the car. “Don’t scratch the paint!”
“Sorry,” Mary says.
“You know how to use that thing?” Sid says.
“Oui oui. I used to practice with GIGN. Do you really think you can lure the Ghoul out here?”
“Yeah. I could probably put a pork chop on a fishing line and get him out here with that.” Sid shakes his head. “The Ghoul would be an unstoppable super menace if he weren’t so stupid.”
Sid walks around the front of the car and up the long dirt driveway toward the house as Mary Sue covers him. He glances at the demolished sport utility vehicle in the driveway ahead, then goes for a closer look at the body crushed against the barred front window. It was a young woman, but now it is a twisted and ugly thing, cold and dead for hours. There is no question the monster was here. But is he still here?
“You see anything, Player?” Sid says.
“Nada,” Player responds in his headset. “There’s a lot of cloud cover. What do you want to do?”
“Let’s see who’s home.” Sid rings the doorbell. He waits. He hears the slight rustle of footsteps on the other side. The door cracks open and he’s looking at a scrawny man with a swollen face and patterned oxford shirt which looks very much like the ones Sid saw in Banana Republic. He is holding a revolver.
“What the hell?” the little man says. “I’ve been waiting for hours!”
EXT. BRUNSWICK RANCH - DAY
Red scrapes his way through the cracked open trunk of the Cadillac, which he had to hold perfectly still and not quite closed for over two hours to avoid placing himself in a very compromising position. He slithers down the back bumper to the dirt below and then pulls the trunk gently closed.
He skids on his back from bumper and quietly eyes the pink haired child from behind. She cannot hear him. Red was the stealthiest, craftiest, most invisible warrior on his side of the Cold War once. The skills he honed then remain, even long after his body was destroyed. He could try to kill her, and in better shape he might, but his lack of weapons and this single sickly body leave him at a great disadvantage. If he were greater in number, and not risking so much, he would certainly kill her, but not now. It is a futile effort.
He turns and rises onto his knees, crawling from the vehicle on all fours, at an angle where he will remain in the blind spot from the car’s mirrors. He makes his way to a nearby shrubbery for some cover. Red now has a plan to get the kill team—both of the kill teams...
INT. BRUNSWICK RANCH - DAY
Sid steps through the front door into the farmhouse den at the behest of the scrawny man with the gun, an absolutely squeaky clean Colt Python. To his left is a large leather sofa which is lopsided in relation to the wall, the way furniture only ever is if it has been pushed around during a struggle. A messy haired young woman occupies the far corner of the sofa wearing baggy sweat clothes and thick eyeglasses.
“Who is it, Trevor?” she says. She looks up just long enough for Sid to regard her tear stricken face, then back down at her knees to continue crying.
There is a bloody body lying next to a pool table at the rear of the room and the house smells like charred flesh.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” says Trevor. “Are you new?”
“What happened to him?” Sid says, pointing at the body on the floor, which he notes his perforated by bullet wounds consistent with the size and shape of a .357 cartridge. He has made a number of holes that size himself. The girl starts to cry louder.
“The killer shot him.” Sid peeks through the kitchen door and the smell of burned skin and hair intensifies. “I managed to wrestle the gun away from him though.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead. I threw him in the metal shredder outside.”
“Where are the others?”
“No one else made it. Just me. And Karen, of course. She was very drunk, so I put her in the back room where she would be safe. That was before it all started. The poor girl. She’s very upset.”
“Not Gavin! Why?!” she shrieks. “Why?!” Trevor sits down on the couch and puts his arm around the girl, patting her affectionately on the shoulder.
“How come you didn’t call the cops?” Sid asks.
“Father said to wait for you.”
“What happened to Lily Hoffman?”
“That goth girl? Killed with the rest. What do you know about her?”
“I don’t have time for this,” Sid says. “What the fuck is going on here, shit monkey?”
“I just told you.”
“Yeah, except there are more holes in your story than, well, that guy.” Sid points at the corpse on the floor. “Like even if the Ghoul used guns, I’m pretty sure his fingers wouldn’t fit in the trigger guard of that Colt, which looks like it just came out of a display case, and you should have called the cops hours ago.”
“I didn’t have a signal.”
“You j
ust said you called somebody else.”
“You’re not Father’s man, are you?” Trevor’s grip tightens around the revolver. The movement is subtle, but to Sid Hansen’s hyper experienced eyes the slight flexing of finger muscles might as well show up in bright neon.
“If you point that fucking gun at me, I will drag you into that kitchen and pour whatever I find under the sink down your throat until you stop moving.”
Trevor doesn’t listen. They never listen. His hand starts to rise and Sid darts across the room. The Bundeswehr knife is out in a flash. Trevor’s hand comes off with the revolver and clunks against the floorboards. He screams like a bitch as he stares at his blood spurting stump. Sid sheathes the knife and grabs the stupid fucker by his good wrist.
“Come on,” Sid says as he drags Trevor across the den, howling and kicking at the floor, his blood shooting from his severed wrist in great gouts. “We’re gonna see what kind of drain cleaner they have, motherfucker.”
Karen screams frantically. “Who are you?! Why are you doing this?!”
Sid smacks his way through the door into the kitchen. Trevor tries to spread his legs too wide to fit through the doorframe, but this is futile. Sid kicks him in the guts a few times, not because he needs to, but because he derives some sadistic satisfaction from watching the dipshit squeal harder. When he turns to drag Trevor the rest of the way to the sink, someone is standing in the kitchen. This someone is filthy with black grease and has a crusty mole on his cheek.
“You underestimated us,” he says. “It will be your undoing.”
“Who the hell—Oh, fuck,” Sid says. “It’s you again. How did you get here?”
“Maybe we were brought by your invisible hand, capitalist dog.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying half the time.”
“Where is Ivan? Tell us and we will spare you a slow death.”
“Fat chance, fuckwad.” Sid quick draws the right hand 460 and fires off a shot that sounds like a twelve gauge shotgun blast despite coming from a pistol. The 460 kicks like a mule in his hand and the interloper’s head completely disappears in a puff of pink mist and grey chunks. It looks like an exploding melon. “You’re not even bullet proof.”