by Mike Leon
“A ninja maybe?” Walter says with uncertainty. “The Imam for sure. That freak show, Entropy, is death incarnate, but this doesn’t fit his M.O. at all.”
“Kill Team One.”
Walter should have seen this coming. Anton has had some kind of beef with Kill Team One for years. Walter still doesn’t know why. The way Anton is, it could be over a game of checkers that didn’t go the way he wanted.
“Kill Team One works for us,” Walter says.
“Are you sure about that?” Anton says. “Does anybody even know what he’s been doing for the past how many years?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“A pretty good idea doesn’t sound good enough to me. Last I heard, he was hiding in the pine barrens, teaching his kids to be barbarians, writing on the walls with his own shit for all we know.”
“Language,” Elkan says.
“He didn’t do this,” Walter says. But he isn’t really sure. The old man is undoubtedly capable of making the mess they had to clean up the other night.
“How do we know he didn’t crack all the way up and decide to kill us all?” Anton says.
“Because I know him.”
“Oh. Okay. That’s good. You know him. That means there’s no way he’s gone psychotic.”
“Enough, Anton,” Elkan says. “You’re being crass. I’m sure Walter isn’t ruling out any possibilities yet.”
Damn straight he’s not.
“What of the girl, Walter?” Elkan asks. “Where is she now?”
“Echo Team took her to the local hospital ER. When she’s well enough to move, we’ll take her to someplace more secure.”
“You had better,” Elkan says. “That girl is now the head of the Van Duyn family.”
PAGING DOCTOR
KILLCRAZY
Shelly Baum brushes her blond hair in front of a mirror. Her long and smooth golden locks shine just like the girl on the Pantene Pro-V commercial. Shelly probably could have been that girl, she thinks, as she pushes her hair back over her shoulders and sighs. It’s the only thing that still makes her feel like one of the girls. The IDF made her cut it, and she always hated that about them, but Graveyard doesn’t really care. The first thing she did when she signed up was let it grow all the way down to her butt. That was too long though, and she settled on chopping it off half way. It looks good. It looks damn good. If it weren’t for all the scars then she could be... She stops herself. It isn’t the scars people can see that made her what she is.
A clicking noise in the adjoining room snaps her back to awareness.
To avoid attention, and possibly a clash with the local PD, Shelly has been posing as the girl’s mother under a fake name. She initially objected because she’s only twenty-nine, but Spears was quick to point out that lots of floozies get knocked up in high school – the kind of floozies that let their kids wander out in the snow while they’re out doing cocaine and couch dances. She agreed, and she dressed the part. Selling a lie is often in the details.
She grabs her hefty handbag from the floor behind her and hoists it onto her shoulder. She slips one hand into the bag to clutch the handle of a MAC-10 she stuffed inside. Shelly isn’t crazy about subguns. She’s much more at home with her grenade launcher, but bringing it into the hospital seemed like insanity for a lot of reasons. She could fit a vast array of smaller weapons into her handbag and just look like any other bimbo with a big purse. For that reason she often got stuck with jobs like this one.
She leans to her left, using the doorway into the next room as cover. By leaning this way, she can slowly scan the room and place any enemies before they can draw a line of sight to her. This is an old trick gunfighters use. As she tips sideways the objects in the next room gradually come into her line of sight. Window. Curtain. Pulse machine thingy. Hospital bed. Then she sees something she doesn’t like.
In the hospital room, standing at the foot of the bed, is a man wearing a black trench coat and a bowler hat. He leans over the Van Duyn girl with his back to Shelly. He is silent as he reaches into his coat pocket and draws a tiny plastic syringe along with a glass pharmaceutical bottle. He holds them up to the light as he sticks the syringe into the bottle. Whatever this is, it doesn’t look good.
Shelly steps out of the bathroom aiming her subgun at his back through her purse.
“Sign says no visitors, asshole,” she barks. “What’s your story?”
He doesn’t turn. He says nothing. Instead, his head spins around one-hundred-eighty degrees – completely backward. He stares at her blankly like an animal.
“What the fu-,” she starts to say, but she’s seen enough already. She squeezes down the trigger of the MAC-10 and annihilates the motherfucker in the face with bullets. He falls backwards against the bed and then rolls forward down to the floor where the gaping hole that used to be his nose empties a gallon of runny red mess all over the waxed tile floor.
She tears a police style walkie talkie from the handbag and barks into the microphone while mashing down the talk button.
“Spears! This is Shelly. Code red! I need extraction!”
Shelly wants the girl out of here now. The whole hospital had to have heard her subgun and it won’t be long before nurses, doctors and (most importantly) security guards come storming into the room. The girl remains in the same catatonic state as they found her out in that blizzard. The freezing storm took its toll on the child and the doctors had to amputate three of her left fingers, though they managed to bring her temperature up and had since downgraded her status from critical. Shelly doesn’t like children, but she still feels bad for this one.
Shelly snatches hold of the little girl by the arm and lifts her from the bed, throwing her over her shoulder and hanging onto the radio with her left hand. The kid wears nothing but a green hospital gown which leaves her bare butt exposed to everyone in front of Shelly, but she doesn’t have time to worry about covering her up. She pulls the MAC-10 from the handbag as she kicks the swinging hospital door open and charges out into the hallway.
She is greeted by the sight of a nurse in her fifties, with curly brown hair and scrubs; and a black security guard wearing a blue uniform from some kind of private firm. He has a gun on his belt. Shelly’s eyes move to it while his brain is still chewing to explain the sudden emergence of a tall and topless sexpot carrying a preteen and pointing a full-auto death spewer at his brain pan.
“Reach motherfucker! Reach!” She screams. “Let me see those hands!”
The security guard’s eyes widen with fear. This guy has obviously never had the muzzle of an automatic weapon at the end of his nose. He puts his hands up. Shelly glances over her shoulder lightning quick to check her rear. She backs away from the guard in a hurry. He isn’t planning to be a hero. She’s been in this business long enough to know.
She backs off down the hall and just as she’s about to take a corner and lose sight of the guard and nurse, she sees them – the enemy. Two men in trench coats and bowler hats enter the hospital corridor through a set of double doors far at the end of the hallway, behind the security guard. These men are dressed in nearly identical fashion and match the one in the girl’s room too. They are too far for her to make out their faces or expressions, but she knows what they want from the sawed-off shotgun one of them holds to his hip. He takes a shot and hundreds of tiny lead pellets flood the hallway accompanied by an echoing blast. A piece of buckshot buries itself in Shelly’s shoulder as she escapes around the corner. She doesn’t have to look back to know that the nurse and that security guard are dead. The sound of another shot confirms that a second later. Whoever these guys are, they play dirty.
“Spears!” She yells into the radio. “Where are you?”
There is no response.
Her shoulder stings, but she doesn’t have time to worry about a pellet. Fuck that. She’s to the stairwell door already when she sees the bowler hats come around the corner. She was hoping to lose them in the hallway, but they’re fast. They�
�re fast and she’s slow, weighed down by this pesky brat. She needs to do something to slow them down.
She drops the subgun in her purse and pulls a hand grenade at the same time. She tosses it blindly behind her. Another blast of buckshot bombards the door as she charges into the stairwell. The stairwell is a big one and there is a good length of flat floor space between the door and the actual stairs.
She hears the blast from the grenade out in the hallway as she reaches for the real diversion – a stick of C4 plastic explosive. Shelly loves the stuff. Shelly loves anything that explodes really. She likes bombs because they’re so impersonal. There’s no other weapon that allows her to kill without being anywhere nearby. Some would call her cowardly for that, but it’s just too easy.
She drops the explosive charge to the stairs going down and then fires on the door with the MAC-10 to keep the bowler hat men at bay. She empties the whole magazine into the door as she backs up the stairs. When she reaches the landing where the stairs switch directions, she reloads and waits silently for a moment. She needs them to see her going up. She can’t have them see the bomb and turn back.
She sees a black bowler hat in the tiny porthole window on the stairwell door and she takes a single shot. Then another. She wants them to think she will fight them here. That will serve her purpose.
She fires two quick bursts at the door as she sticks another explosive to the stairs leading up. She’s planted her bombs in such a way that the enemy can’t see them until he’s between them both. This is a trick she’s used before. She takes one more shot and then scrambles up the stairs.
When she’s made it up two flights, she leans over the railing next to her to see if she can spot them coming up behind her. She can’t. She doesn’t expect to. She detonates the bombs anyway. The stairs rattle and the noise of the blast is deafening. It does not bother her, although she does wish she had her hands free to cover her ears.
Her ears are still ringing when she reaches the next floor and sees the door opening from the corridor. Black trench coats and bowler hats. They’re everywhere. She doesn’t count before she opens fire. The subgun is a wicked killing machine and it cuts them down like blades of grass, but one gets a shot off. Shelly doesn’t feel it at all. She’s too busy finishing off the last of the trench coat assailants. There are three bodies when she’s done.
Then the pain shoots up her left side like a jackhammer pounding her in the chest. She can’t carry the girl anymore. She’s about to collapse. Shelly drops the girl on the stairs and flops down next to her. She looks down and sees blood gushing from her side. It looks bad.
There are three floors left to the roof. She can’t carry the little bint up all of them. She crawls up to the next landing and grabs the kid by her hair. She drags the girl up to the landing with her. She pulls another Mac-10 from her purse and sets it down on the floor next to her. She mashes down the talk key on the walkie talkie.
“I’m hit!” she yells. “Stairwell. Fifth floor. Multiple targets.”
The Van Duyn girl remains motionless. She hasn’t been hit, but she’s still unconscious or catatonic, Shelly isn’t sure which. She tries slapping the girl awake. She smacks her face and tells her to run, but it does no good.
The sound of someone yelling in the hallway makes her drop the radio and pick up the other subgun. She trains her guns down the stairs and to the door. One of the men she killed lies in the doorway, holding it open like a big doorstop. She can hear shuffling outside. More of them. They’re coming.
She sees the muzzle of a shotgun come through the door and she opens fire. She’s firing two guns. Bullets hail down on the door like a vicious storm. She’s shooting blind. She needs something to cut through the door and hit these assholes. She holds the triggers down until the guns run dry and the stairwell is silent. Out of rage and hate she tries to pull the triggers again but they don’t budge. She knew they wouldn’t, but she couldn’t stop herself.
She has nothing left in her purse now except for a single grenade and an immense can of pepper spray. She pulls the grenade and waits.
Nothing.
She hears the sound of a door swinging open somewhere, floors above her. They’re coming down after her. She can’t hold this spot from two directions at once. She only has one thing left to do. The dead man’s switch. She plucks the pin from the grenade and squeezes down on the spring loaded handle. She waits.
She can hear them coming for her. The rustling of their long coats gives them away. It is loud – far too loud. It fills her ears and threatens to deafen her. She’s losing it. She can’t keep her eyes open anymore.
Then something happens. Gunshots. Just above her. A trench coated body falls down the center of the stairwell from floors above to wrap around the center railing in front of her. Blood drools from his mouth. His hands dangle.
“Spears?” she yells up into the stairwell.
But it is not Spears. The man who leans over the railing above to look down on her is someone she has seen, but she can’t quite place him. He’s old and haggard. He has a thick dark beard with grey stripes in it.
“They shot me, Spears. They’re in the door. By the door. With the thing. Grenade.”
She realizes she’s not making any sense just before she blacks out.
OZARKS
It has happened again.
Walter thought Eli Van Duyn’s murder might be an isolated incident. Perhaps he had upset an East Asian cabal or had invoked the wrath of some exotic assassin. People like that are out there. He thought maybe that was the whole story – that no other attacks would follow and eventually they would find the guy who did it, fill him with machine gun rounds, and get on with life.
Not after today.
Hours ago, someone assaulted the hospital where the Van Duyn’s girl was sleeping. They killed several members of the hospital staff and engaged in an extended gun battle with Shelly Baum which demolished a good chunk of the hospital and put Shelly in critical condition. They took the Van Duyn girl.
Now Walter is standing in the large living room of Anton Reynolds’ compound in the Ozarks. It was started in the early 2000s, after 9/11 made Reynolds paranoid about the possibility of economic collapse. He built a damn castle out here, complete with a crenellated parapet and a moat, to ride out the years of lawlessness that might follow.
Walter stares up at the impaled corpse of Anton Reynolds pinned to the ceiling. The man’s limbs dangle beneath him and drips of blood still trickle to the floor from the end of the object run through his guts. It is a teak cane topped with a fanged skull that had to be custom carved because all of the ones at the store had animal heads that were not appropriate. Walter knows this because, many years ago, he gave this very cane to Ivan Hansen.
Walter is one of the few people who know Kill Team One’s real name – or what passes for one. They used to drink and smoke sometimes, always alone at the same lounge bar. He liked scotch and the jazz – particularly Coltrane. He didn’t talk much, and when he did, it was always about his work or something impersonal – news, politics, history. Walter didn’t know where he came from or if he had a family somewhere – or a woman. There was probably a woman. Nobody likes Coltrane unless there was a woman.
That all changed around the same time Reynolds built this place.
“At least there’s a weapon this time,” says Frank Overton. A dozen other operators stand watch just within sight.
There are more bodies all around them and scattered all over the castle grounds. Walter had assigned Alpha Team to guard Reynolds after Van Duyn, and the man had beefed up his own private security as well. Now, all of them are dead. Some of them appear to have been shot, others knifed and a few blown to scattered bits. It is difficult to go from room to room without tripping on a cadaver.
“What do you make of this?” Frank asks. “It looks like a Graveyard patch.”
“Totenkopf, sir,” says Sergeant Holman. Holman is a little man with buzzed blond hair and wire rim glasses.
“A death’s head. It’s actually a very common military symbol going all the way back to the Hussars of Frederick the Great.”
“Do they all have vampire fangs?”
“They don’t,” Walter says, before Holman has a chance to respond. “The Duke added those in the fifties because he thought they made it more frightening.”
He cringes before he tells them the next bit.
“The cane belongs to Kill Team One.”
“Shit,” Frank says. “You think Kill Team One did this?”
“It looks like it. Frank, call up all the security teams and let them know we’re on high alert.”
Walter’s cell phone rings. He pulls it from his belt holster and looks at the number display on the outside before flipping it open. It is a number he doesn’t recognize. He walks away from the others as he answers.
“Hello?”
“So, a little birdy told me that my multimillion dollar fortified mansion has been redecorated with carcasses and bullet holes.”
The sound of Anton Reynolds’ voice is a shock to Walter.
“Who is this?”
“You don’t recognize my voice? I’m real fucking insulted.”
“I just saw you in there. You’re dead.”
“Well that answers my next question, which would be what the fuck happened to my decoy and the small army of mercenaries I paid to guard him?”
“Dead. They’re all dead.”
“That’s real shitty news, Walt. Would you believe people laugh at me for being so paranoid all the time? Good thing I don’t listen to them. Good thing I don’t listen to you when you say you’re totally confident in your operators.”
“I’m still confident,” Walter says. He is.
“I don’t know why. From where I stand, it looks like you have two massive fuck-ups, one dead employer, a bunch more bodies, and you still don’t have a fucking clue who you’re fighting.”
“That’s not true anymore.”