by Mike Leon
“It’s not every day you have a gun fight with the specter of death himself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She doesn’t know?” Spears says to Morgan, who shrugs in response.
“Honey, while you were sleeping, the shit hit the fan big time.”
“Big time,” Morgan interjects.
“It was Kill Team One. He killed the Van Duyns. He’s gone rogue. He took the girl after your shootout and dropped completely off the grid.”
“Vanished like the fucking Loch Ness monster,” Morgan adds.
“It was him in the stairwell,” Shelly says. “I thought he looked familiar. I saw him last year when he came to see Walter about something.”
“He shows up later at this fucking huge fortress house in the Ozarks. Walter has Alpha Team guarding the house – all ten of them, with enough firepower to shatter an armored cavalry division. KTO gets into the house anyway. A firefight starts and he just WRECKS everything that moves. I saw the place. It was, uh… It was bad.”
“Rambo would cry and piss himself.”
“Anyway, we found the client, Anton Reynolds, nailed to the ceiling with a wooden cane, only it’s not really Reynolds. It’s his double; a look-alike. You know, like Saddam Hussein or some shit. The real Reynolds was in hiding the whole time. Apparently this guy is a major player of some kind. I don’t know. Nobody knows where he is now. Graveyard is on high alert. Walter issued a seek and destroy order on Kill Team One. He’s out there with Kill Team Two and Charlie Team chasing him down.”
“Who were the trench coat guys?” Shelly asks.
“Who?”
“The guys who shot me.”
“Kill Team One shot you.”
“No. What?”
“You said Kill Team One shot you.”
“No. He was there, but what about the guys in black trench coats. They were trying to kill the girl.”
Spears gives Morgan a confounded glance.
“We only missed Kill Team One by a minute or so. We didn’t see anybody else.”
“What about the bodies?”
“There were no bodies there. It was just you.”
“They were there, these weird guys in trench coats and bowler hats. They all looked the same. I killed at least three. I saw the first one in the girl’s room. He had a needle with poison. He was gonna kill her, but I got the jump on him. His head spun backwards.”
“You broke his neck?”
“No. His head spun around backwards to look at me. Like an owl or something.”
“Shelly, they’ve been giving you a lot of medication.”
“Get the security tapes from the building.”
Spears gives Morgan a look of grim realization, then turns back to Shelly.
“Shelly,” he says. “The tapes are toast. He burned the whole video bank. The guard on camera duty too. Burned him alive.”
“I know what I saw. This was real.”
“I think you’ve been through a lot.”
“It doesn’t add up, Spears. What would Kill Team One want with that girl? If he wanted her dead why didn’t he just kill her there?”
“I don’t know...”
“I think he was trying to protect her.”
“Why would he save the girl and then go kill the shit out of a bunch of our people?”
“I want to talk to Walter Stedman.”
“He’s gone with Kill Team Two. And I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.”
“Why not?”
“You’re kinda sounding like one of these people that says spooky black helicopter guys are after them.”
“Spears, we are the spooky black helicopter guys,” she says cynically. “We even have the helicopters.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I never really made that connection,” Morgan says.
Shelly has worked with Spears for two years now. They have been through gunfights together, and he doesn’t believe her.
“I think you need to stay here and rest up,” Spears says. “Chill out. Take a few days to get better. Echo will need their Bombshell back.”
“Fine,” she agrees, begrudgingly.
But staying here and resting is the last thing she plans to do.
KILL TEAM TWO
The Ghoul bashes through the rusted steel door with the strength of a wrecking ball. The flashbangs fly in over his shoulders and explode a tenth of a second before the other six charge in, covered behind the unstoppable moving giant with guns to their flanks. The vast inky blackness of the warehouse is assaulted by the light of Walter’s hefty flashlight and the little bit of daylight that comes in through the broken door behind them. Swinging chains are silhouetted by the moving beam of brightness and the steel hooks dangling from the ends of them create giant claw shadows that pendulum back and forth along the aluminium wall. This is the stuff of nightmares.
“What the fuck is this place?” grumbles Jackson ‘Deadeye’ Kimble, emphasizing the word fuck immensely in his thick southern drawl. His cigarette nearly falls out of his mouth. The sharpshooter is a husky man with a thick blond moustache that turns downward at the corners of his mouth and moves down his chin. His hair is covered by a maroon Texas A&M ball cap turned backwards.
“He was here. I have his scent,” says Tracker. He is a tall, red-skinned and chiseled masterpiece of warrior might. Long, straight, black hair parted down the center of his head bounces as he sniffs the air. A collection of stone tomahawks adorn his leather belt on either side of a big bold buckle that displays the fanged skull logo of Graveyard.
“Fresh meat!” says the Ghoul, his gravel voice a muffled echo in that latex skull mask. He points his humongous cleaver ahead to a swinging shadow that Walter thinks is probably a body. The Ghoul only gets that excited when he smells blood.
The Arsonist stands at Walter’s shoulder in his heavy fire coat. He unleashes a torrent from his flamethrower that sets fire to a patch of concrete to the right of them, the fire further lighting the room, but also adding to the terror of the shifting shadows on the walls. The way the Arsonist slings fire always makes Walter uneasy. He just likes it too much.
“I’m scared. Will one of you boys hold me?” Vixen says. Her skin tight black leather cat suit makes her a woman-shaped shadow behind him. Her voice is high pitched and child-like – filled with innocence. Walter knows better. Innocence is a lie, and in this case it is a big fat lie. Vixen follows the comment with a crazy laugh that can only come from a killer.
Zap follows them all with his big black bag. He is silent and cold. His expression remains a complete blank. It only changes when he’s working on somebody with the things in that bag. The rest of them are freaks, but this one is worse somehow. Every time Walter lies to his daughters about his job, or drinks himself to sleep, or sits alone in the dark trying to convince himself that all of it is for a greater good, he’s thinking about the things Zap does. Every time.
This is Kill Team Two.
The team moves in the direction of the Ghoul’s pointed cleaver. A closer inspection leads to the conclusion Walter had already supposed. There is a body suspended from one of the dozens of chains that hang from fifteen foot tall industrial cranes placed throughout the darkened warehouse. It is a man, mid-thirties, brown hair and pale skin. A blackened steel hook jutting out from his sternum connects him to the lengthy chain. His legs are gone. Flies buzz around the corpse. It has been here for days, maybe a week. Walter doesn’t recognize him.
“Hello there,” Zap says, leaning in to look the corpse in the eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Something tells me he’s not real chatty,” Walter says.
“I can make anyone talk,” Zap answers, rooting a black leather wallet from the body’s pants pocket. He tosses it to Vixen, the only other one of them with a free hand, and he continues looking over the body.
Vixen holds the wallet up near Walter’s flashlight and flips through it. It contains a picture of a chubby girl, a MUF
ON Membership card, two dollars and eighty one cents American, and an Indiana driver’s license for Darryl Potts. She remarks about the height listed on the license.
“He’s not five ten anymore.”
“Cute,” Walter says, holstering his pistol.
“What is this thing anyway?” she asks, pointing at the crane.
“It’s a crane for lifting up ’eavy engines when you work on ’em,” the Arsonist answers. “Me dad used to have ’em in his machine shop.”
Deadeye shuffles something around with his boot in the darkness.
“Is that shell casings?” he says.
Walter shines the flashlight on the floor and the shiny twinkle of hundreds of tiny copper cylinders verifies Deadeye’s guess.
“Damn,” Walter says. “Somebody had a hell of a firefight in here.”
“He was here three, maybe four days ago,” the Tracker tells him. “There was a gunfight, and blood, over there and there,” Tracker points to spots on the floor. Walter shines his flashlight to expose more crimson puddled on the floor – too much to come from one person.
“Zap, I want all that blood checked against the FBI database,” Walter says.
“They bleached it all,” Tracker says. He snorts. “Even you can smell that.”
The Indian is right. He can.
“Fuck. What about Kill Team One? Where did he go?”
“He’s gone. He’s just gone.”
Walter has never seen the Tracker this stumped, but he isn’t surprised. The whole world has been upside down since this thing started. He takes a moment to consider the possibilities. One thing is certain: This was a cluster fuck. Bits of it he can piece together. Kill Team One doesn’t start fights he can’t win. That means somebody tried to ambush him here. It all went to shit. Van had to pull out fast. So did the other guys, but they took their dead with them.
“They used a chainsaw to take his legs,” Zap says, still examining the cadaver on the hook. He shows absolutely no emotion whatsoever, his voice a dry monotone.
“Take them where?” Vixen asks, looking disgusted.
“Same place they took the bottom of the last guy,” Deadeye answers.
“Meat!” The Ghoul rumbles.
“This just keeps getting more fucked up.”
“Potts might be the key to this mess,” Walter says, looking back at the body.
In an hour, the whole team is in front of the address listed on Potts’ driver’s license. It is a tiny aluminum trailer with no flowers or decorations on the outside, except for a small satellite dish mounted over the only door. From the looks of things, Darryl Potts was not living the dream.
As always, the Ghoul is the first to go in, and he smashes the door down like it is made of paper. Walter and the Tracker move in behind him while the others cover them from the outside. Walter never worries when Deadeye has his back. That hick could hit a dime at two miles with a big enough gun, and today he has a big enough gun. Unfortunately, some threats are not stopped by bullets.
The Ghoul has barely poked his head inside the trailer when the Tracker shouts “Bomb!”
Walter doesn’t need to hear it again. The Tracker is already bolting away from the trailer ahead of him, but Walter is an old man and can’t run like he used to. The Ghoul turns ponderously as the two of them run away.
As always, Walter doesn’t actually see the explosion. He feels it take him off his feet, but his eyes are closed and his hands are covering his head. It feels like he’s in an industrial size laundry dryer for a few seconds. When he stands, he’s dizzy. He feels around to make sure all of his limbs are still attached, including his head, which sounds stupid to anyone who hasn’t lived to see men walking around for minutes after a blast with no idea their arm is missing or their jaw is no longer attached. Fortunately Walter is still all there.
He looks back at the smoking heap of aluminum that used to be Darryl Potts’ residence. The Ghoul is on fire. This is not the first time the Ghoul has been on fire. In an ironic change of roles, the Arsonist rushes to put him out with a fire extinguisher from their van. In front of him Vixen screams as she pulls a piece of shrapnel from her calf. Tracker helps him to his feet and he realizes he was never actually standing at all, but still on the ground. The world finally ends its spin dry cycle and he gives the Indian a thumb up.
It was a setup. Somebody wanted that body found. Somebody knew they would come here next and somebody tried to blow them up. It could have been Kill Team One, but Walter knows bombs are not Van Hansen’s style.
Now Walter is angry. No. He’s usually angry. Now he’s tired and angry. There’s another player in this game; one nobody told him about. He’s sick of this shit, and he plans to get some answers.
CRY HAVOC
“A ninja?” Ashley Marjorie parrots back at Victor. “That ain’t good.”
He sets his cigar down on the brown vinyl top of the fold-up card table in front of him. Specs of black ash dust the table where he sets it and scatter in the gentle wind. He has forgone his normal sweat clothes for a brown and grey track suit and he sits in a collapsible wooden and fabric chair at the bottom of the rear ramp leading up into the Apocalypse. Several large columns of US Army rangers do calisthenics behind him. To his left, seated at the table in a metal folding chair, is an Army Colonel who looks on somewhat skeptically at the conversation.
“I soundly defeated him,” Victor says cockishly. Sid lets Victor do as much of the talking as possible in these situations. To take any chance of making his brother feel inferior is always a mistake.
“You killed him?”
“No. I broke his sword and he vanished in a cloud of smoke.”
“That some kind of joke?”
“He’s telling the truth,” Sid speaks up sheepishly from over Victor’s shoulder. He is still wearing the same clothes from the fight and blood smears his pants legs from picking over the knife guy’s splattered cadaver.
“He was looking for a man with one ear,” Victor says.
“One ear?”
“Are you running child soldiers?” says the Colonel to Ashley. “The State Department might have something to say about that.”
“The State Department can suck my dick,” Ashley informs him as he picks up his cigar from the table and takes a puff. He waves Victor and Sid off with his free hand. “Carry on boys.”
The two of them walk off together toward the building where Kill Team Three has been staying. It is a bright day and warm. Sid could use a shower.
The barracks, or what they call their barracks, is an aluminum temporary structure with no windows. There is only one large room and a stack of bunk beds against one of the walls. A fold-up table in the center of the room hosts a perpetual card game which players join and leave constantly as long as the team is not deployed. Safari, Abo and John Q have already beaten them back here and are restarting the game or picking up the one the left before they had to go burn a village. Sid does not understand card games. He had no time for such things as a child and still has no appreciation of them. The only others he has not seen join the game are his brother, who disappears to his own unknown devices for long periods of time, and the werewolf, who rarely leaves the Apocalypse and mixes industrial dance music on a laptop whenever he is not sleeping. He played some of it for Sid once. Sid didn’t understand it.
“Hey, there’s the ninja slayers!” John Q says laughingly as he sees Victor pull back the tan cloth they keep draped over the only door.
“Why are you all so obsessed about ninjas?” Safari says as he lights an ivory pipe with a shiny zippo lighter. He wears a drab pair of slacks and suspenders but no shirt and sits opposite Abo, who says nothing. Sid has still never heard the giant speak.
“They flip out and kill people,” John Q responds, chuckling to himself. No one else laughs. “Nobody? Seriously? Do you even know what the internet is?”
Abo shakes his head at both of them.
“Abo don’t believe in ninjas,” Safari says, speaking for t
he dark-skinned giant. “Can’t say I think much different. It sounds like a crock of shit.”
“You don’t know that,” John answers, suddenly becoming more serious. “Asia’s a mystery. You ever notice Graveyard runs no ops in Japan? And we have standing orders never ever to cross the Chinese border. It’s like a brick wall. You don’t know what’s going on in there. Nobody does.”
“Little straw hat chinks is growing rice and making with cheap electronics for lazy Americans. That’s what’s on in China. There’s no ninjas there.”
“It was real,” Victor tells them smugly. He scrapes a tiny black plastic sharpener along the razor edge of his wavy kris knife. The sharpener is a black rectangle with two slits marked coarse and fine. Victor runs his knife through the fine side and it emits a grating sound that is really very quiet, but still grinds away at the nerves of everyone present. Sid has a sharpener just like this in his pocket, but he couldn’t use his to elicit this much fear in a group of such grizzly men. “He was looking for a man with one ear.”
“Who do we know with one ear?” Safari says, more of a skeptical dismissal of the issue than an actual question.
“No one that I can think of,” John answers. “Well there’s that guy in the mess.”
“No, he has an ear,” Safari interrupts. “That’s just shrapnel cuts on his head.”
“I don’t know. I think his ear’s pretty much gone.”
They continue arguing, but Sid slips away unnoticed. He has no interest in this, and something more engaging awaits. He takes to the showers in another building nearby, never leaving his rifle more than ten feet away, even as he rinses off, and actually holding his KA-BAR knife the whole time. His father taught him this.
Afterward, he puts on another black shirt and some fatigue pants and straps his knife to his belt. He traverses the length of the encampment, passing more barracks, a communications tent, helicopters and more soldiers he doesn’t know. He does catch awkward glances from some of them. He is younger than even the youngest American troops operating out of this place. Now that the sun has cooked away his formerly pasty complexion, they sometimes mistake him for an Afghani child set loose on the base, and there have been one or two minor incidents. One MP stopped him and interrogated him with a series of bizarre questions to confirm his identity; What did Beyonce and Jay-Z name their baby? Can you name a TV show Miley Cyrus was on? How many points did Gretzky score in the Lakers game last night? Sid reacted to all of this with a jaw shattering flying knee strike to the MP’s chin. Afterward, Ashley told him to please tell anyone with questions that he is quote, with the scary guys and fuck off, end quote.