#Justice

by Leon, Mike

  “When we get there,” Bruce says. “I’m gonna go in first. Knock on the door, see if I can settle things the civil way.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Sid says.

  “Neither is you crashing in there and mowing everybody down. We don’t know who these people are. They might be on our side.”

  “I think you’re crazy.”

  “Crazy like a fox.”

  “What?” Sid challenges the last statement. “What does that mean? Are you agreeing with me?”

  “No. I’m saying I’m crazy like a fox. That’s an expression.”

  “I’ve never heard that. You’re full of shit.”

  “Nah. Mary Sue, isn’t that a thing? Crazy like a fox.”

  “Yes, I think so,” Mary Sue says. “You’re crazy, but you’re crazy in a good way.”

  “No one says that,” Sid argues. “You two are making this up.”

  “People say that shit, man,” Bruce insists.

  “Well you’re gonna get killed in there.”

  “I think you’re underestimating my smooth talking skills.”

  INT. RENTAL PROPERTY - DAY

  Bruce Freeman is currently zip tied to a chair. It’s a nice chair, not padded or anything, just finished wood, but nice looking. He has been tied to much more rickety chairs before. A gaggle of men surround him, hovering with contempt and flak jackets. Some of them have guns. One of them is demanding answers.

  Bruce really overestimated his smooth talking skills.

  The house is a two-story on the South Side—too clean to be abandoned, but too devoid of furniture and trappings to be lived in. The whole place is empty except for a few sleeping bags and chairs. Bruce’s guess is these guys are squatting here, or rented the joint short term with cash and no names. Both are accepted practices in the spy biz.

  “Who are you?” says the leader of the group, blasting a mag light in Bruce’s eyes from only inches away. He’s a husky character, with a well-trimmed beard and beady little eyes under an animated unibrow. As big as he is, his pants are clearly a few sizes too big for him, and kept up by a set of drab suspenders that blend in with the rest of his tactical gear. It’s an odd detail. These mercenary types don’t generally wear baggy clothes. Stuff like that is a life threatening hazard in a firefight.

  “It’s like four PM,” Bruce says, in no way intimidated by the light in his eyes in the already brightly lit room. “What’s with the mag light?”

  “I ask the questions here!”

  “Yeah. Everybody says that when they got you tied to a chair. It’s a cliché, man. You gotta have a give and take, you know? Any kind of conversation has to go both ways.”

  “This isn’t a conversation.” The commando team leader sounds like he’s probably from the Midwest, definitely American—not an import mercenary. “It’s an interrogation.”

  “Man, I don’t want to get into semantics. I’m gonna level with you. I’m here with this major badass motherfucker. . .”

  “Kill Team One?” The interrogator snaps at the mention without letting Bruce finish. Apparently these guys are already acquainted. “What does the kill team want with Chan?”

  “Chan? Look, right now, Kill Team One is right outside, and if you guys don’t get real cool in the next minute, he’s gonna bust in here and kill everybody. All y’all motherfuckers. I’m trying to prevent that from happening. I’m a peace broker. I’m a ambassador right now.”

  One of the other bag men speaks up. “Shut up,” he yells in Bruce’s face, his breath smelling strongly of salami and onions, then whips his attention back to the leader. “This guy’s yanking your dick, Fleabag.”

  “That is a really weird nickname,” Bruce remarks. It is. It’s the kind of nickname that has to have spawned from a great story. Maybe he got fleas from an ex-girlfriend, or he sleeps in a doghouse because his wife snores. Whatever it is, it lends credence to the theory that these guys are real spooks and not just some mob goons. Real operators tend to have the kind of nicknames cruel kids put upon each other in middle school. It’s never Nighthawk, or Eagle Talon. It’s always stuff like Gooch or Pedobear. “And I’m totally serious here. You guys are possibly just seconds away from a whirling vortex of death and destruction. I mean some biblical shit. Weeping and gnashing teeth type shit.”

  “If you’re telling the truth, then why didn’t he just come in here himself?” says salami breath.

  As if to answer his question, a wall on the far side of the room explodes into chalky white dust and chunks of drywall, causing Bruce and most of the goons to avert their eyes. Sid steps through the gaping hole onto the ugly orange carpet of the wide open living room. He looks like a spectre of death, a man-shaped shadow with a glaring grey skull and scary black rifle. The guns and grenades and the straps securing them to his body have the definition that the rest of him does not, causing them to appear like 3-dimensional objects attached to a 2-dimensional form. Sid points the rifle at Bruce’s captors and all of the men go leaping for cover, some of them into an adjoining room and others over an island counter behind Bruce’s chair.

  “Shit, motherfucker,” Bruce says. “How many breaching charges did you use?”

  “Four,” Sid shrugs. “We have more.”

  Someone holds a Glock 17 around the corner from the adjoining room and squeezes off two blind suppressing shots before Sid zeros on his location. The kill team fires only once and nails the hostile shooter through the wall.

  “Shit!” somebody shouts. “Fleabag is down!”

  “Fucker’s the real deal! Abort! Abort!”

  Bruce watches with a look of incredulity as men barrel back over the kitchen counter and into the next room. One guy leaps through a window to get away, doubtlessly cutting himself in the rain of broken glass that showers his body. Bruce leans back in the chair to get a better view into the adjoining room just in time to see two commandos crash into each other on their way through a door frame in their panicked haste to escape the house.

  “Come on, cocksuckers! Nobody wants to party?” Sid shouts after them. After he receives no answer, and all of the men have cleared the house, Sid lets his rifle hang from its strap. He whips a KA-BAR knife from a sheath on his chest to cut Bruce free from the half dozen zip ties the commandos used to strap him to the chair. “That was even easier than I figured it would be.”

  “We didn’t get Chan-the guy from the phone call,” Bruce says, rubbing one of his wrists after Sid freed it from the overly tight plastic ties.

  “There’s somebody upstairs,” Sid says. “I heard him stomping around.”

  “How do you hear anything after those breach charges?” Bruce complains, definitely still experiencing ringing in his ears from when Sid blasted the wall down. He does hear something though. He hears the shuffling of another person in the room, prompting him to look over his shoulder and spot the bloody carcass of Fleabag being flopped by someone onto the hardwood kitchen floor nearby. Then he realizes there is no one else there to move the body. Then he realizes the body is moving on its own.

  Fleabag props his torso up on one elbow and glares up at them. Blood gushes from the bullet hole in the side of his head as he growls angrily. His beard seems heavier now—there’s actually a lot more hair on his face. His teeth sprout into gargantuan fangs.

  “What the fuck, man?!” Bruce screams like a school girl. “What the fuck?!”

  “We didn’t happen to pack silver bullets in the van, did we?” Sid asks, as the hulking man-wolf rises from the floor on its tree trunk legs, stooping to avoid hitting its head on the ceiling. He has to already know the answer.

  “No,” Bruce says. The kill team groans loudly.

  “Find Chan. I’ll fight the werewolf.”

  INT. RENTAL PROPERTY - DAY

  Fleabag, the werewolf, is a massive beast with bulging muscles and claws long as steak knives. It’s a man shaped thing, except for its legs, which have an extra joint like a dog’s hind legs, and its head, which is very much a sno
uted wolf-head. Its ears are also unusually tall and pointed, almost bat-like, a detail which sticks out as peculiar to Sid, but very well may be common among werewolves. He has only seen one other before and can’t be sure that one wasn’t the exception.

  Before the monster can do anything at all, Sid does the only thing that makes sense. He lights it the fuck up.

  There’s something oddly comforting about firing a fully automatic weapon. Suppressive fire is so called because it suppresses enemy maneuvers and return fire, but Sid feels like it suppresses more than that. It suppresses problems—especially at a range so short that all of the bullets are going directly into said problem. The M4 thunders in Sid’s hands as the bolt carrier pumps and the extractor whips a steady stream of shell casings from the right side of the rifle onto the hard wood.

  A half dozen 200-grain bullets slam into the monster’s teeth as it bucks wildly to avoid the gunfire. The monster’s fangs break like fallen china and tumble onto the countertop beside it. A few rounds end up in the walls, but most of the magazine gets buried in the werewolf’s sinewy chest before it bounds off the kitchen counter and leaps at Sid with its arms outstretched in a massive belly flopping tackle. Sid drops the rifle and rolls toward the sailing monster, slipping beneath its clawed feet and drawing his KA-BAR as he hops up from the floor.

  It’s a good knife, but it isn’t going to do a whole lot of good. Werewolves regenerate very quickly and are virtually impossible to kill with conventional weapons. Their particular brand of regeneration does not work to repair wounds caused by silver objects, which affect them just like normal weapons affect normal creatures. Sid killed the last werewolf he encountered by fashioning a shiv from a broken toothbrush and dipping it in molten silver before stabbing the thing in the eye. Unfortunately, none of those implements appear to be available here.

  Sid weaves under wicked swiping talons and stabs the monster in the guts twice, then uppercuts it in the jaw. To his surprise, the werewolf reels away from the impact of his punch, then backs off and glares at him cautiously. For a fraction of a second, Sid is as confused as the monster. It’s the gauntlets. He always wanted to punch a guy in the face with metal gloves, but their utility for fighting even bigger things never even crossed his mind until now. Sid fakes a left jab and the werewolf actually flinches.

  “Ha! You flinched!” he shouts.

  The werewolf snorts and forces out a heavily distorted “Fuck you.”

  “I enjoy doggie style,” Sid says. The monster immediately turns tail and runs, tearing off down a hallway deeper into the house and leaving Sid standing in the kitchen gloating to himself. He just won a boxing match with a werewolf. He shouts after the monster as he heads down the hallway to seek it out. “Maybe if you have a sister or something. . .”

  That is when Sid hears the unmistakable and all too familiar sound of an M134 minigun’s rotary barrels spinning up. He throws himself to the floor just as a flickering beam of hot lead chops through the wall beside him like an invisible chainsaw. That gun expels bullets so fast and with such velocity that the werewolf firing it in this flimsy wooden house is akin to swinging around an 800 foot long lightsaber. A curtain of strafing gunfire extends over Sid’s head and he experiences a microsecond of deja vu. This is actually not the first time a werewolf has tried to kill him with a rotary gun.

  Sid slides his knife back into its sheath and draws his FNX-45s as he crawls along the hallway. The dread suit has plated and padded elbows, which is great for rolling and worming across twenty feet of drywall pebbles and wood splinters that used to be walls. The minigun is very quickly tearing the house apart.

  Reaching the door to the room from which the god-slaughtering storm of 7.62x51mm bullet-death is coming, Sid stops and waits without showing himself. If he just runs in there, the werewolf will turn the bullet hose on him. That’s the last thing he needs. Despite Mary Sue and Lily Hoffman’s absurd ideas, bullets do not just go around him. He tries to formulate a better plan.

  A minigun like that eats ammunition faster than most people can comprehend. Even a gunship generally only carries enough ammo for ten to twenty seconds of continuous fire. Unless the werewolf has a shipping crate of cartridges in there, the gun is going to run dry in a few seconds. The problem is that the house might collapse before that happens.

  INT. RENTAL PROPERTY - UPSTAIRS - DAY

  Upstairs in the rental property, Bruce creeps along a carpeted hallway, covering his ears with his hands to try and muffle some of the earth-shaking belch of what he can only guess is some kind of electrically powered machine gun. It sounds more like a roar than the rhythmic blasting that normally comes to mind when thinking of a machine gun, and this particular roar would belong to something much larger than any North American land animal.

  Bruce lost his gun somewhere downstairs. The assholes who grabbed him at the front door took it when they searched him, and he didn’t have time to go searching for it when Sid cut him loose and began a boxing match with a five-hundred pound wolfman. Now Bruce is just hoping he can find their boy Jamie and get out of here without running into some commando badass or getting perforated by an artillery piece.

  He stops creeping and starts running, because attempting to muffle his footfalls suddenly seems pointless when the noise level from just down the stairs well exceeds that of a Cannibal Corpse concert. He peeks in two open doorways to completely empty rooms on his way to a closed door at the end of the hall. He tries the knob and realizes it is already moving, something made imperceptible until he touched it, due to the vibrations and noise from below. The knob won’t turn, but it is definitely jiggling. That’s really strange to Bruce until he notices the little protruding latch set in the middle of the knob and the screws on either side affixing the knob to the door. All of those parts should be on the other side of the door. The commando goons must have taken the knob apart and reversed it to lock from the outside. It’s a cute idea, but it wouldn’t be any way to keep Bruce prisoner, and Sid would find it downright laughable. The door is flimsy hollow pressboard. They would just go through it.

  Bruce undoes the latch and the door flies backward, yanked open with terrified ferocity. Someone slams into him a fraction of a second later, but rebounds back to the carpeted floor of the bedroom beyond. He looks down into the frightened eyes of the person who was locked inside.

  INT. RENTAL PROPERTY - DOWNSTAIRS - DAY

  Pinned down on the carpet by relentless gunfire, Sid Hansen looks up at the uneven trails off bullet holes carved in the hallway wall above him and comes up with an idea that seems like it should have been a total no-brainer. He rises to his knees, takes a quick glance through one of the holes, just long enough to make out the huge werewolf on the others side, its drooling jaws hanging open as it blasts away with the minigun in wide sweeping swaths. Sid drives the muzzle of his FNX into another bullet hole, the threaded barrel making a neat peg to fit the ragged opening in the drywall. He then fires a single shot into a black cylindrical housing attached to the minigun’s body. This is the disconnector, the mechanism which frees each fresh cartridge in the belt from its metal linking and feeds it to the whirling set of chambers beyond, to be fired down one of the six rotating barrels. With the disconnector broken, the spinning barrels grind to a halt. The gun’s motor whirrs loudly as it strains to push through the knot of linked ammo now jammed up in the system.

  The werewolf looks to his belt of ammunition, his yellow wolf eyes following it down to the big ammo can beside him, a black box about the size of the average duffel bag, and which Sid knows to have a capacity of 1000 rounds. The werewolf looks back up at the gun. He could not have heard Sid’s shot over all the noise, but now he sees the cracked housing where a .45 ACP round wrecked his gun and he howls with rage.

  Sid bounds into the doorway and blasts the werewolf with the full fury of both FNX pistols. The werewolf hurls the forty pound minigun at Sid, but aims poorly in its frustration and hits the wall beside him. The gun impacts so hard it actually
sinks into the drywall. Sid doesn’t have time to marvel at that as he dodges a flurry of talon swipes from the monster. Its claws are four inches long, making it a wonder the thing could even operate that gun without them getting in the way.

  The werewolf snaps at his neck, and Sid bobs and back peddles to avoid its terrifying jaws. He whips it across the teeth with a pistol, then jams his KA-BAR into its chin, pinning the monster’s bottom jaw to the top. The werewolf reels dizzily, then leans against a nearby wall. The wall, already badly shredded by automatic weapons fire, collapses under the monster’s substantial weight. The werewolf falls through, ending up back in the room adjoining the kitchen—the same room where the fight started.

  “Come on, man,” Sid says. “You’re getting wrecked here.” He steps through the massive jagged opening in the drywall to gloat over the fallen monster as it rips the KA-BAR from its chin. “What do you think is gonna happen?”

  The massive beast lashes at Sid’s ankle with a hand like a bear trap, but Sid hops away to avoid the flailing hand. The werewolf is up then, surprisingly quickly. It rushes him down, snarling and barking as Sid blasts away with both pistols. The monster compresses its legs to pounce, which Sid ducks to avoid, but the werewolf never leaves the ground. Instead, it grabs him by the arms. That werewolf learns quickly.

  The monster is incredibly strong. It is twice Sid’s size, and Sid is by no means small. Sid isn’t going to beat this thing in a wrestling match. He empties both pistols into its eyes, then smashes his boot toe into its chin and snakes both arms over the werewolf’s hands to break the monster’s grip at the thumbs. He leaps back as the beast howls in pain.

  Sid reloads his guns. He’s exploring alternatives for finishing this fight off. He could light the werewolf on fire somehow. Werewolves hate fire. It won’t kill them, but they heal from burns slowly. If he had a bigger cutting weapon he could hack off its head. That does the trick with werewolves too, but the big bastard isn’t going to sit still while he saws its head off with a combat knife.