#Justice

by Leon, Mike

  “Sid,” Bruce leans in to speak some truth. “I’m currently having a conversation with a mysterious robot voice, a guy who is impervious to bullets for absolutely no reason anyone can explain, and a pink haired sixteen-year-old rocket scientist neurosurgeon who just hacked the FBI from an iMac. From where I stand, shit got weird a while ago.”

  “Okay, then you guys go tackle this thing then. I’ll be here with the hookers and the Netflix app. Knock yourselves out.”

  “I’ll cut off your hooker money,” Player says.

  “Shut your mouth,” Sid responds almost involuntarily. He actually surprises himself. The Player knew exactly where to hit him and make it count. Without hooker money, Sid will have to spend inordinate amounts of time enticing women into sex with him, if that’s even possible. He could steal cash, of course, but cash is hard to steal in large enough quantities to afford acceptable hookers. Fine escorts like Sapphire don’t come cheap. He would likely have to settle for street walkers. He has seen the local street walkers . . .

  “Fine,” Sid caves after a moment’s consideration. “Pack up the van. I’ll go wake up Sapphire.”

  EXT. THE HIGH DESERT - NIGHT

  The studio where the Conspiratalk signal originates is surprisingly low key. Some might argue it is less than that. Shoebox-sized may even be an adequate description. Sid had expected a colossal space-age building with many floors and tiers of workers all supporting the gargantuan nationally syndicated media entity, but now he looks up from the front passenger’s window of the van and finds that he has to look back down because he overshot the tiny building’s rooftop. Building may actually be the incorrect nomenclature. Shack or hovel seem more appropriate words to describe the square brick structure with white drapery tightly packed into its old store front window. The window indicates it must have been a small shop once, in decades past, and that was repurposed on the cheap. A heavy black iron gate bars the front entrance next to the window. Above it, a neon sign glows red in the darkness, notifying everyone within sight that the show is On Air.

  “When you said he has ten million listeners a week I figured the place would be bigger,” Sid says. They have made certain that is not the case. They circled the building twice, counting the exits and looking for escape routes, which are both plentiful and scarce depending on perspective. The building sits by itself on a desert road with the nearest landmark being a small group of trailers a quarter mile away. So while there are technically limitless directions to run, there are exactly none that provide a covered escape—the only kind of escape that matters.

  Though Bart Gong’s voice is somewhat sporadic, his guest has been prattling on for no less than the last thirty seconds without stopping for air. His name is Tom Danielewski and he has written a book about a secret underground base in Dulce New Mexico which he believes is ninety levels deep and houses contingents of reptilian humanoids who are working with the United States Air Force toward some unknown sinister goal. Gong finally breaks in with a “that’s interesting,” as if simply to signify his presence in the room for anyone who might have forgotten what they were listening to.

  “Alright,” Sid says, racking the slide of a suppressed FNX-45 and reaching for the door handle.

  “Hold up, man,” Bruce cautions. “Let’s at least wait for him to go to commercial. You want the whole country to hear us busting in there?”

  “Fine.” Sid holsters his FNX under his shoulder and rests against the door as they wait for Bart to cut into his guest’s ceaseless nonsense and announce a break for sponsors.

  The reptilians come from a planet called Alpha Draconis in the Draconis system. They are the ultimate puppet masters over mankind, and they’re trying to build a society where they sit at the top of these sort of monarch over all of us and humanity is-it’s enslaved-mentally within the matrix, to fight wars for them and project the negative energies back to their moon base for harvesting. These creatures aren’t physically feeding on human beings. They’re feeding on our negative energy. They subsist on feelings of fear and hate which they absorb psychically.

  “False,” Sid declares.

  Mary Sue leans in from the back of the van. “Which part?” she timidly asks.

  “All of it. The reptilians don’t control the Order. The Order hates them. They don’t feed on negative energy. They literally eat people. They’re not from another planet. They’re from the fourth dimension.”

  “You’ve seen lizard people?”

  It’s time for us to go to a commercial. Stay tuned and when we come back, more with Danielewski on Dulce Base.

  “Let’s do this,” Sid grunts as he pushes through the van door and stomps toward the radio studio’s gated entrance. The others are unprepared to keep up with him. They’re still in the van as he blasts through the gate lock with the FNX’s entire magazine and rips the gate open to get at the door beyond it. He stomp kicks the door, causing the latch and bolt to skip from their strike plate and swing into the cramped space beyond.

  Inside the radio studio, a small beer-gutted man with a thick horseshoe mustache and his head enveloped by a hefty looking pair of headphones sits alone behind a three-sectioned desk packed with computer monitors and many microphones. The workspace takes up most of the room, leaving only a tight walking space between it and the wall all the way around, so Sid goes over the desk, tramping on cables and keyboards, kicking at least one arm-mounted condenser mic out of his way on the path to Gong.

  The radio show host is too bewildered to do anything but pitch back in his seat as Sid points the FNX at his nose and barks “I want your call records.”

  “Take whatever you want,” Gong says. The boxy FNX suppressor bobs along to follow his nose as he speaks. “This is just an entertainment program. We don’t want any trouble.”

  Gong’s tone is too flat to be genuine, and Sid reads his rigid eyes as a sure sign the man is trying not to look at something. He plants a foot on Gong’s chest and kicks him away from the desk. Gong barrels over his chair backward and Sid feels under the lip of the desk to find a sawed-off shotgun, double barreled. It was affixed there with a strip of leather riveted to one of the desk’s aluminum crossbars. The radio host was stalling for a chance to reach for the gun. Commendable. Sid might have done the same, but he would have been better at selling it.

  “Nice,” Sid says as he breaks open the shotgun and lets the shells fall to the floor in front of Gong. “Not a sound plan though. You’ve got a gate that will keep out the average crackhead, which means anybody coming through that door will be well equipped, maybe a tactical team or something. So a one-off weapon like this will be worth fuck all, especially if they have body armor. You might want to look into a subgun. An uzi maybe. I prefer a P90 for stuff like this because the 5.7 has a little better armor piercing capability.”

  “Who are you?” Gong says.

  “I’m Kill Team One,” Sid informs him matter-of-factly. “The real one.”

  “I don’t know anything,” Gong says in a panicked whisper. “This is just an entertainment program.”

  “Duh.” Sid rolls his eyes. “You guys are wrong about all this stuff. And that Danielewski guy is a clown. Where can I see the call logs?”

  Bruce enters the studio with Mary Sue, the two of them just now catching up, and he seems terribly unhappy with what he sees. “Aw come on, man! You can’t just smack Bart Gong around! We don’t got to wreck the place!”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Sid counters. “Oh hi, Mr. Gong, I can’t tell you who I am, but I really need your call logs. I can’t say why either. Kay, bye.”

  “Who are you people?” Bart Gong remains on the floor. His headset dangles at the end of its line over the edge of the desk at Sid’s back. It ended up there when it was ripped from Gong’s head after Sid kicked him end over end. Tom Danielewski’s confused questions coming through as unintelligibly low-volume bits of static from the swinging cans.

  “Mr. Gong,” Bruce says. “I’m a huge fan. I’ve been listenin
g for years. Really sorry about all this.”

  Mary Sue purses her lips, uncertain what to make of Bruce’s display, then sets to work at one of the studio’s workstations.

  “I don’t want any trouble,” Bart Gong says, now braced against the bottom of the rear studio wall. “You can be Kill Team One. You can be whoever you want. Take whatever you want.”

  “Is there anybody else in here?” Sid asks, looking around the room, and through a glass partition over Gong’s head into the only other room in the building, a small booth containing a chair and sound mixing board.

  “No. Nobody else. Just take what you want and leave.”

  Sid looks to Bruce incredulously.

  “He’s telling the truth,” Bruce says. “Bart produces the show all by himself. He doesn’t even have a call screener.”

  “I have the number,” Mary Sue says as she begins scrolling through whatever electronic directory she has loaded on her cell phone. “It looks like the call came from a payphone in Chicago.”

  “Chicago, Illinois?” Sid asks.

  “No, the other Chicago,” Bruce heckles.

  Sid has been to Chicago. He spent some time there during his last days working for Graveyard. He does not like that city, though his reasons are not at all concrete and might even be downright nebulous. “I hate Chicago.”

  “You hate everything.”

  Bart Gong has apparently come back to a crescendo in the waveform that is his nerve, and he eyes Sid with tenacity he seemed incapable of in the cowering moments between reaching for a shotgun and begging on the floor. “If you’re really Kill Team One, tell me why you were at the Morston Mall Massacre.”

  “Easy. To stop a psychopath from stealing a dimension ripping doomsday weapon. I killed him. Also, the terrorists that blew up the city a few months later were trying to kill me. They work for the 12th Imam. He’s real. And I shot all those people at Wendigo Joe’s casino, but they were possessed by a communist nanovirus that controlled their minds so I kinda had to.”

  “You can’t tell him all this stuff!” Mary Sue squawks.

  “Why not? Nobody will believe him. I’ll throw in some garbage too. Vampires are real. 9/11 was an inside job. A woman can do anything a man can do. That big school shooting last year was a hoax. Which one of those things is true? Trick question. They’re all false. Or are they?”

  “I can do anything a man can do,” Mary Sue says.

  “Yeah? Can you slap a mob boss’s daughter in the face with your dick?”

  Mary Sue frowns. “That’s gross.”

  “I’m real sorry, Mr. Gong,” Bruce says. “He was raised by a guy who was raised by wolves.”

  “Yeah. Did you know I’m actually Kill Team One Two? There was another one before me. That’s exclusive.” He finds a nearby microphone and speaks directly into it. “You heard it here first!”

  “That mic is off,” Bart manages, seemingly now too bewildered to do more than lie on the floor very still, shifting his eyes between the others like a man encased in a statue.

  “Shit.” Sid shrugs. “Well whatever. We got what we need. Interview’s over. Hashtag rapid dominance. Tweet that out on your twit box. And come see me in actual real ultraviolence, opening this Friday. It’s gonna be the biggest movie of the year.”

  “How much TV have you been watching?” Bruce asks as Sid saunters past him for the door. Mary Sue jumps up from her seat and comes with them.

  “A lot.”

  INT. UTILITY VAN - DAY

  It took the Player only about fifteen minutes to look back at the location of the payphone attached to that number at the time stamp of the call to the Conspiratalk show and then follow the caller to his current whereabouts. During the call, Jamie, if that is his real name, was interrupted by heavily armed agents of some unknown and unofficial entity. He was taken to a building on the outskirts of Chicago by three men wearing body armor and toting XM8 rifles. The rifles were the first sure evidence that something serious is going on with this Jamie guy. Those guns are oddities. Gang bangers definitely wouldn’t have them. XM8s were designed as military prototypes in the 1990s but never adopted by the United States army. As such, they were never very widely disseminated, and other newer rifles greatly surpassed them in proliferation.

  One of those newer rifles is Sid’s current go-to for shootouts, assassinations, and all his other favorite forms of anti-social behavior: the HK416. He and Bruce recently picked up a case of them from Bruce’s contacts in the Devil’s Undertakers motorcycle gang. The German manufactured Heckler and Koch HK416 platform is a gas-operated battle rifle based on the ArmaLite AR-15 design and equipped with a short-stroke piston to reduce malfunctions more common to the direct impingement system utilized by standard AR-15 variants. Sid attached vertical foregrips and red dot optics to all of the rifles.

  “How many are there?” Sid says.

  “I’ve counted at least eight moving in and out of the house in the last twenty four hours,” Player informs him. “Unfortunately, they’ve been in the city too long to trace back a point of origin on the video.” The Player refers to the 800 trillion megapixel spy satellite which he uses to record everything that happens in the continental United States—but only for the last seven days. Video recorded at such ludicrous resolution requires equally ludicrous amounts of storage media. The week of footage Player normally keeps purportedly fills a jumbo jet hangar, though Sid has never seen it himself.

  “If they have hardware like that, they’re not amateurs.”

  “There were no guns used in any of the previous murders,” Mary Sue says.

  “I noticed.”

  “Why do you think they kidnapped the caller this time, but killed all the others?"

  “It’s not the killer that grabbed him,” Bruce says. He’s stating the conclusion he and Sid already reached. “There’s somebody else in the game.”

  “You know there’s still time to abort this mess,” Sid suggests. “We could be back at the firehouse in a couple hours. Get some Chinese takeout? Maybe check out a movie? I’ve been meaning to watch Universal Soldier. That’s a good one, right?”

  Player shuts him down with two words. “Sid. No.”

  “Fuck,” Sid grumbles. It was a long shot, but he figured he would try. He really needs to learn to talk to girls. Then Player won’t have anything to hang over him anymore. “I hate all of you.”

  “Come on, man,” Bruce coaxes. “This thing should be some easy shit. Probably turn out to be nothing. We’re talking about journalists here. They probably got a story some fat cat wants to kill and that’s all it is. Shit happens all the time.”

  “Either way, I’m trying out the dread suit.” Sid’s words cause Mary Sue’s face to light up with enthusiasm, then frustration.

  “It’s called the Panoply of Freedom,” she insists.

  “That’s a stupid name. Dread suit.” This has been an ongoing argument for the last three weeks, since Mary Sue started measuring him for the custom battle armor that Sid is currently pulling from a crate at the rear of the van.

  After the fight with Red Ghoul at the Brunswick family farm did not go smoothly, Player suggested Sid equip himself with better protective gear besides the occasional flak vest. The reasoning was not difficult to work through considering his history. Enemies of all kinds have fired approximately a billion bullets at Sid Hansen in his lifetime. None of them has ever hit him. In the meantime, he has been beaten, blown up, stabbed, sliced, shadow kicked, twisted, bitten and trampled. All of this prompted the Player’s assertion that maybe protection from bullets isn’t really what Sid needs.

  The dread suit is a form-fitting set of shirt, pants, boots, helmet, and gloves, all made from stitched-together Kevlar with Kydex plates covering all the vital non-moving areas. The plates are padded with a layer of foam and vaguely imply the form of a muscle bound human male-but only if shining a 5000-watt spotlight on the damn thing. Mary Sue sprayed the whole suit with some kind of cutting-edge ultra-matte black enamel wh
ich absorbs 99.8% of visible light. Sid tried the suit on twice for fitting, and both times found his appearance in a mirror unsettling. He looks like a shadow. With the helmet off, he looks kind of like a disembodied head floating over a silhouette. His body has no definition and appears two-dimensional under all but the brightest direct light. Mary Sue explained that the lack of definition would make it harder for attackers to see the joints in the armor and aim for them.

  “I still think it should be bulletproof,” he says, removing his well-worn blue jeans while staring boldly at Mary Sue. She exaggeratedly averts her gaze. Sid grins.

  “It would be too heavy if it was bullet resistant,” Mary Sue says, now shielding her eyes with a cupped hand. “Besides, you’re impervious to bullets anyway.”

  “That’s not true. I’m just good at utilizing cover.”

  “Well, bullets never hit you either way, so we decided to focus on close-up threats. You should be pretty well protected from any blunt force trauma, slashing weapons, concussive blasts—it’s really a lot more like a suit of medieval armor than modern body armor.”

  “So it’s already obsolete? Great.”

  They didn’t completely ignore his input for the suit design though. There are two features which Sid won out on. One is the skull-faced silicon carbide helmet. If you’re going to have a helmet, it might as well be scary. That’s self-explanatory. The other feature is the gloves, more accurately gauntlets, which are plated to a ridiculously intricate degree. His fingers are braced with titanium rods and each individual phalanx has its own carbide shield. This is because hands are more important, and more delicate, than most people ever think about. Also, Sid has always wanted to punch somebody in the face with a metal glove.