by Leon, Mike
They need white male sperm and Chinese ovum to mix with their circuits so they can make a race of half human, half Chinese, half robot hybrids that can survive in a vacuum.
“You think anyone will notice if I shoot the Jesus sign out?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t fuck with it. We don’t need the cops snooping around here. We got more NFA guns than John Woo up in this bitch and not a registration for one of them.”
Sid grunts. “I hate that thing.”
“The NFA?”
“The sign. It’s like living under a heat lamp.”
“Don’t cry to me. I told you to stay in the basement.”
“It’s not as defensible.”
Because the sasquatch peoples have a treaty with the vampires which they recently renewed, Bart. They’re working together now because they’re afraid of the return of the icons, which could destroy them both.
“That guy sounds like an idiot.” Sid laughs. “There’s no such thing as vampires.”
“Didn’t you kill a werewolf once?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“Nothing. What are you doing up here anyway? I thought you were banging whatshertits? Amber?”
“Sapphire.”
“Right. Sapphire. How come chicks are always Amber or Sapphire? What about all the other gemstones? How come you never meet a chick named Peridot or Tanzanite?”
Sid shrugs. “We fucked for three hours, but she got tired so I let her sleep. Then I had that weird dream again.”
“Shit. You gotta get this chick off your brain.”
“She’s not on my brain,” Sid growls back.
“Recurring nightmare where she swallows you with her pussy like a snake? That’s as on the brain as it gets, man. That’s some fucked up Freud shit there. It’s symbolic. See the pussy is this thing you gotta keep coming back to. She lures you in with it, and then . . .SNAP! It’s like a trap you can’t get out of. You’re stuck in that shit forever. Cause that’s what the pussy really is. Except I mean usually a bitch put a baby on you or get some alimony or some normal shit like that. This Lily chick is crazier than all that, and she got the ESP, so you’re double fucked.”
“Extra sensory perception?”
“Elusive snapping pussy. That’s the pussy you can’t never leave behind.”
“I’m gonna leave it behind.”
“You can’t. I’m telling you. No way. I know this shit. Her name was Jada Harris. Bitch set my car on fire and I still went back to her.”
“What if I find a girl with an even better ESP?”
“You never will. That’s the whole thing about the ESP. You never find another one that’s as good as that one.”
“That’s stupid, Bruce. There are billions of women in the world. The chances that I already found the best piece of ass out of all of them, on my first try-it’s impossible.”
“You’re missing what I’m saying. It’s not about the best. It’s about them being up here.” Bruce taps the side of his head. “It’s all in here is the problem. You can never let it go.”
I think we have time for one more caller. We’re on the line with Jamie. You’re on the air.
The idea Bruce presents is disconcerting, but not entirely unsupported by the evidence. Since the Red Scare incident, Sid has been with numerous women in a sexual capacity. Most them were prostitutes. All of them were beautiful. All of them fell short, if only slightly, of the bar set by Lily Hoffman.
Bart? I don’t have much time. I know they’re triangulating my position. I’m in a lot of trouble. I’m being hunted by Kill Team One.
“Hey they’re talking about you,” Bruce chuckles.
“Do they talk about me a lot?” Sid questions, slightly amused by this turn.
“Oh yeah. Conspiracy people have all kinds of theories about the NWO. Some of the stories from special ops guys who worked with your dad have kinda trickled down to these people. Most of them think you’re some kind of alien and you did 9/11, and those are actually the more realistic sounding theories. Bart did a whole show about it last year.”
I’ve been running for two days. I haven’t slept. Wherever I go, he finds me. I can tell when he’s watching. He’s, oh God, he’s horrible. His eyes are so black. They’re like animal eyes. There’s nothing in them.
“Maybe this clown really has met you before,” Bruce remarks in jest. Clearly Sid is not trying to kill this radio caller. Sid has been busy for a few months, mostly recovering from a broken jaw and banging lots of whores.
I need to make public what I know-I know your audience will listen. These people can’t get away with this. There are names. Scottie Fitch, Jaqclyn Davis, Karen Masters . . .
Should you be saying these full names on the air?
Yes, Bart! They killed them! They killed them all! Jennifer Marquits, Lydia James, Christina Jawadi, Brian Kemp, and now Izumi Saito. All those people were murdered by Kill Team One in the last six weeks! The police won’t do anything! They’re a part of it! We’re talking about the deep state here!
Do you have any idea what they want, Jamie? Do you know something the government doesn’t want out there?
No! I don’t know what they want! I don’t know what I did! I don’t have any state secrets! I’m not a spy! I’m not a researcher at Area 51! I’m a specialist in postmodern literature! Kinkos wouldn’t even hire me!
Suddenly, Sid experiences a jolt of awareness that ends whatever minimal entertainment he derived from the radio program. He cringes as he stares out into the dark, focusing on the rising and falling red blinkers of a distant radio tower. When he last spoke to Helen Anderson at Graveyard, she had used that same word: postmodern. She had used it with ominous undertones, and claimed the fate of the world was at stake. Sid ignored her for several reasons, the foremost being that Graveyard almost constantly, and dubiously, claims the fate of the world is at stake. It’s usually just a ploy to get people to serve their agenda.
Oh God! What is—They’re—He’s here! Die! Die, pig!
The broadcast cuts out. Sid and Bruce glance curiously to each other as they wait through seven seconds of just the faint whiny breathing of silent AM transmission.
“What the hell was that?” Sid says.
“It sounds like you got him.” Bruce wavers on other possibilities. “I dunno, man. This show gets a lot of crank calls. One time some guy called pretending to be Chris Redfield from Resident Evil. He had this whole bit prepared about the Umbrella Corporation.”
Okay, we’re sorry about that, folks. I had to cut out the last part of that call. Very strange. How much of that did you all hear? I’m not sure what got out. We’ll go to our wild card line with Bill. Bill, you’re on the line.
“It was probably a prank,” Bruce uneasily declares, as though he’s trying to convince himself more than anyone else.
Sid is not so set on the explanation. “He said something about postmodernism.”
“Like the future?”
“No,” Sid grunts. “It’s some kind of thing from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Graveyard thinks it has something to do with the end of the world.”
“Hold up.” The tone of Bruce’s voice rises with intrigue. “You think that call was real?”
“No.” Sid’s dismissal is too quick and forced to be authentic. He knows as soon as he says the words. He has never been a good liar. I think we should just forget this whole thing.”
“What? Graveyard, or maybe just some random guy, is out there murdering innocent people and letting everybody think it’s you and you’re just gonna let that go?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Your rep, homie. Your rep.”
“You just said they think I did 9/11.” Sid briefly compares these imaginings about him to the genuine article, and finds them not too terribly dissimilar. “And I kill people all the time. Whatever they’re saying about me is a drop in the bucket.”
“What about the end of the world though? What if it’s true?”
Sid waves off the
suggestion dismissively. “It never is. You really want to get wrapped up in some Graveyard problem and end up fighting the lizard king or a shadow monster or Cabal neo-soldiers or something like that?” Sid’s efforts over the last few months with the Player have been exceedingly smooth and transparent compared to any of the work he ever did involving Graveyard. It turned out that his initial distrust of the mysterious computer voice was largely baseless. The Player has only asked Sid to conduct some very simple operations, including the assassination of an active child murdering pedophile in Montana, the annihilation of a small ISIS splinter group in Florida, and the destruction of a Christian fundamentalist cult’s sarin gas stockpile. Sid thinks all of those activities were an objectively worthwhile use of his time and capabilities. Also, he got whore money.
“That is a good point actually.”
“See what I mean? With the Player it’s all easy mode. All I have to do is lay a smackdown on regular terrorists once in a while and I get money for whores and you get money for . . . whatever you people do with money—other stuff besides whores.”
“I still don’t get how you can’t wrap your head around money.”
“I understand it. I just don’t need it, except for whores.”
“What about food?”
“I kill it or steal it.”
“Clothes?”
“Steal them.”
“Cars? Guns?”
“Also steal them.”
“But you can’t steal whores.”
“You can. It’s just nasty.”
“You never try good old fashioned charm?”
Sid doesn’t dignify that question with a spoken response. He only frowns back at Bruce to signal that he thinks the suggestion is stupid. Women are ambiguous and fickle creatures. Attempting to woo them without cash has proven extremely inefficient, and produced wildly variable results.
“Alright. So this thing with the mysterious phone call to Bart Gong didn’t happen.”
“Didn’t happen. We don’t know anything about it.”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“You guys!” Mary Sue says, excitedly climbing through the roof access hatch to join them in the red glow of the city rooftop. “You’ll never believe this! Somebody just called in to Conspiratalk about you!”
“Fuck,” Sid snarls.
INT. FIREHOUSE - DAWN
Sid wonders if there is still a way to sabotage this clusterfuck of an operation before it gets off the ground. He sits on one of the swivel chairs near the equipment cage at the rear of the garage, his feet planted in a wide stance and his hands behind his head, holding it up as he grimaces at the florescent lights lining the ceiling.
“It was probably just a made up story,” he insists.
“I don’t think so,” Mary Sue sheepishly denies. She’s always sheepish, even when she’s shutting him down. Sid doesn’t like that about her. He has no patience for mealy mouthed pleasantries. “I checked the names the caller listed against a database of violent crimes committed in the last month and I got hits for all of them.”
“You can do that?”
“Sure,” Mary Sue giggles. She sounds like she’s six. “I hack the FBI and police all the time as a white hat consultant.”
“Tell him about the pattern.” The second voice comes from the conference phone on the desk next to Mary Sue’s mousepad. It belongs to the Player, the mysterious benefactor who directs and bankrolls Sid’s operations. He doesn’t know who the Player is, though he has some theories, and the entity only speaks to him via electronic devices, always with a disguised voice. For the last week, Player has been emulating Holly the supercomputer from a British television show called Red Dwarf. Sid tried to watch one episode of the show, but thought it was stupid and turned it off.
“What pattern?” Bruce says. Sid’s admonishing eyes dart over to the spy hunter, but it’s far too late to stop this conversation from going where it’s going to go.
“All of the victims were killed under eerily similar circumstances,” Mary says. “I mean, if you know what to look for. Otherwise they just look like accidents, and that was the conclusion of most of the investigations.”
“So somebody is bumping these people off and making it look accidental.” Sid shrugs. “It happens.”
“Well. . . It’s just that they didn’t make an effort to cover their tracks. I don’t know. I’m just a stupid girl.”
Player jumps in where Mary Sue has faltered. “What she’s saying is the murders appearing accidental is incidental,” Player says.
“You mean that they appear accidental is accidental?” Sid says.
“No. Incidental. As in they appear that way by an unintentional consequence of being done.”
“Huh?”
“Jennifer Marquits was found in her locked apartment. No sign of forced entry and the chain bolts on the door were all still fastened.”
“So the killer came in an open window. Left the same way.”
“On the twenty-second floor?”
Sid shrugs. “I would.”
“You’re sort of exceptional,” Mary Sue says.
“You hear that?” Sid smirks smugly at Bruce. “I’m exceptional.” Bruce snickers and wags his head, but they only receive a blank stare from Mary Sue.
“I don’t get it,” she says.
“Let’s stay on topic here,” the Player interrupts. “Scottie Fitch jumped through a plate glass window from his apartment. The police ruled it a suicide even though the apartment was a wreck like there had been a fight. Again, no signs of forced entry and the doors were bolted from the inside.”
“It’s another window,” Sid reasons. “Every time somebody falls out of a window that’s suddenly my problem?”
“Not all of them were windows. Christina Jawadi fell onto the tracks in front of a New York subway train. Jaqclyn Davis drove off a highway overpass. Karen Masters apparently hung herself from a drain pipe in her office’s parking garage-after getting a promotion at work and a marriage proposal from her multimillionaire venture capitalist boyfriend in the preceding twenty-four hours.” Player halts for a few seconds as though waiting for Sid to pick up some unspoken conclusion. “She said yes.”
“So this guy looked up a bunch of random accidents and suicides and made up a story. I still don’t see how any of this is related.”
The Player is not impeded. “Every one of the victims was an internet journalist.”
“Who isn’t?” Bruce snorts.
“This is serious. Davis wrote for Trigger. Jawadi was the culture editor for ProgVoice. Karen Masters wrote a number of think pieces for Futura under a pseudonym.”
“That one took some time to connect,” Mary says.
“Every one of these people wrote at least one article for a major site. The list is like a who’s who of fake news: UpFeed, The Rag, The Duffington Pole, Data Battles, Rubbernecker, the Daily Beast, Pixelmap. . .”
Bruce seems taken aback by the last mention. “The video game site with the guy who broke down crying during the Call of Honor review?”
“That’s the one.”
“He cried about a video game?” Sid laughs.
“Motherfucker got all weepy cause the guns looked too real. How you gonna review first person shooters if you’re afraid of guns?”
“The most recent victim wasn’t nearly so afraid of guns,” Player says. “Izumi Saito had two armed guards in her apartment at the time of the murder. Real mercenaries. They fired twenty seven rounds before someone stabbed them to death with a kitchen knife. Then the killer threw Saito through a window.”
“What’s with all the windows and trains and shit?” Bruce says. “Wouldn’t it be easier to cap a bitch?”
“To make them look like accidents?” Mary Sue suggests. “Cover up the murders?”
“Nah.” Bruce waves off the idea. “When you just did a slice and dice on the body guards ten feet away? That doesn’t cover shit.”
“What if the killer can’t carry weapons
with him? Assuming the kitchen knife came from Saito’s kitchen, all of the murders were committed with objects found at the scene or no weapons at all.”
“All of them were push-into-traffic kinda things.” Bruce nods. “Except the stabby one. It’s kinda weird.”
“We need to find the person who made that call. Jamie. He seems to know more about this.”
“We could go to the radio station—get their call logs. Run them through a crisscross directory and find the pay phone.”
“A crisscross directory?” Mary Sue shakes her head. A crisscross directory is a telephone book organized in order by number rather than name, which can then be used to track phone calls back to their point of origin. The term has become archaic with the advent of computer directories that can be searched by any piece of relevant information, cell phones that can place calls from anywhere, and the ensuing decline of printed hardcopy phone books.
“Something us old people used to use.” Bruce is much older than Sid or Mary Sue, though Sid does not know exactly how old. Sid only knows about crisscross directories because of his old man’s stubborn skiptracing lessons.
“Aw, come on!” Sid grumbles. “You’re on board with this now too?”
Bruce winces, clearly having some discomfort related to this admission. “It’s just it’s really interesting. And there’s the whole postmodern thing.”
“The postmodern thing?”
“Fuck,” Sid growls. Now that cat is out of the bag.
“Graveyard has some kinda interest in postmodernism,” Bruce explains. “Whatever that is.”
“What?!” the synthesized voice clips. “How do you know?”
Sid groans and rolls his eyes. “Helen Anderson asked me a bunch of questions about it the last time I saw her.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I’ve told you this before. I don’t want to get involved with those assholes again. When you get wrapped up with Graveyard, shit gets weird fast. You think you’re just doing some normal wetworks, then suddenly you’re in a flying sex dungeon fighting bengal tigers with a combat knife while a warlock shoots force lightning at you from a crystal skull.”