#Justice

by Leon, Mike

  “That must be one of the more moderate articles,” Jamie says.

  “I’m really sorry, but it looks like everybody wants to kill you,” Mary Sue whimpers. “This doesn’t help at all.”

  “Wait. Do you think that’s who’s doing this? Are white nationalists really that tied into the deep state? They’re moving past doxxing, trolling, and DDOS attacks to-to this?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Sid finally belts out. “Let’s go all the way back to the beginning. Who are you?”

  Jamie takes a moment of nervous contemplation to rewind and answer Sid’s simple question. “I’m Jamie Chan.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m an internet blogger. I work for BuzzWorthy.”

  “And that is?”

  “It’s an internet content aggregator and news site. We publish editorials, videos and listicles.”

  “Clickbait,” Bruce says.

  “Yeah, okay. Clickbait,” Jamie begrudgingly agrees. “Every platform has its faults.”

  “What does that mean?” Sid has never heard this term before.

  Bruce answers before Jamie can. “It’s stupid lies on the internet that’s just supposed to get you to click on it. You see a little headline says they got naked pictures of Ariana Grande but when you click on it you find out it’s just sideboob.”

  “You?” Sid says. “You’re responsible for sideboob?”

  “No! We do not do sideboob!” Jamie argues.

  “What is sideboob?” Mary Sue asks.

  “Boob shot in profile. Usually from a 4 o’clock angle,” Bruce explains. “Not a nipple to be seen.”

  Mary Sue reddens with shame. “Oh my.”

  Sid leers at Jamie with boiling disdain. “You disgust me,” he says.

  “We don’t do that! That’s Ogler, or Celeb Jihad. Those sites are total trash.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “We cover a lot of progressive issues, nostalgia, hipster fads, sexism. You ever heard of manhaling? I created that.”

  “What the hell is manhaling?”

  “It’s when a woman is on a bus or the subway and there’s a man on the bus too, and he’s breathing. It’s oppressive because that’s air that a woman could have breathed.”

  “That’s retarded.”

  “It got two hundred thousand shares in a day,” Jamie beams. “You still think that’s retarded?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t actually believe that manhaling shit?” Bruce asks. “Do you?”

  “Of course not. Nobody actually believes it. That’s how outrage porn works.”

  “Outrage porn?”

  “An article that’s solely written to piss off some segment of the readers. Manhaling is classic outrage porn. Nobody ever really believed in it in the first place, but the article pissed off a bunch of cis male conservatives and they shared it with other cis male conservatives so they could all go flame the site, and the site cashed a fat check from all the cis male conservative traffic at the end of the day.”

  “Let’s get back to the murdering,” Sid says. He catches the micro expression of fear in Jamie’s eyes and realizes his phrasing implied something he didn’t intend, but he just goes on ignoring that. “Why does somebody want to kill you?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “I call bullshit,” Bruce says. “They always know why. You don’t go around being a good little sheep and then the man targets you all out the blue. That don’t happen.”

  “But that’s exactly what’s happening! All my friends are dead! How do you explain that?”

  “The cops say most of those were accidents or suicides.”

  “The fuck they were! I’ve seen him! He appeared in my kitchen two nights ago—just walked right through the wall and swung a frying pan at me! There he was! Kill Team One!”

  “Why do you think he’s Kill Team One?”

  “That’s what Bubbles called him. Scott Fitch-we called her Bubbles. She was transitioning. Bubbles was into all that New World Order conspiracy stuff. She was the first to suspect what was happening after two of the others died. She said that’s what they do when you’ve become a threat to them. They send Kill Team One and he makes you go away.”

  Sid laughs at the notion. Even when he did do stuff like that, he hardly had time to erase every little bird the powers-that-be deemed an annoyance.

  “I figured it was just her coping mechanism. You know? Some people just need to see a reason for everything. They say she jumped off her building, but I know the truth. Not Bubbles. She was a rock. She was in street fights with fascists during Occupy. She just finished collecting funds for reassignment. It didn’t make sense.”

  “Did you go to the police?” Mary Sue asks.

  “Do you know what happens when an intersectional person walks into a police station and tells them a secret organization inside the government is assassinating members of the LGBTQ community and allies? It’s an understatement to say they don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Bruce says. “So I understand.”

  “Bruce, that’s mean!” Mary Sue says.

  “What? This bitch is trifling. If the NWO had a plan to exterminate all the gay commies in the media they’d have offed Rachel Maddow years ago. And we know Kill Team One ain’t doing this shit ’cause he’s right here!”

  “What?” Jamie chokes, looking frantically around the van, as if the murderous spectre somehow appeared on the floor beside them in response to Bruce’s assertion. “Where? Where?”

  “He’s Kill Team One,” Mary Sue says. “The real one.”

  “What?!”

  “There’s definitely something going on,” Sid says, directing his attention to Bruce and ignoring Jamie’s flushed reaction to this revelation. “You saw Graveyard operators here with your own eyes.”

  “Probably here for the same reason we are. They heard a good story and came to check it out. We know Jamie’s story ain’t true or they’d have killed them when they snatched them up.”

  “What did they want from you, Jamie?” Sid asks.

  “Those creepy guys in the house?” Jamie specifies. “They said they were trying to protect me from, uh, from you.”

  “Great,” Bruce proclaims with vicious sarcasm. “So if they didn’t think you were the mysterious fake homo assassin before, they definitely do now.”

  “So we just started a conflict with Graveyard because of some bad make-believe. That’s spectacular.”

  “Yeah. And now those motherfuckers are gonna come at us with-shit I don’t know—they already got a motherfuckin’ werewolf. I don’t know what you escalate to after that, but I don’t want to find out!”

  “Excuse me. . .” Jamie says.

  “We should probably try to contact them. Maybe we can draw down.”

  “Excuse me. . .” Jamie repeats.

  “You didn’t kill any of those operators, did you?”

  “Nah. I just gave Fleabag a headache, but he’ll be fine in a few days.”

  “That should help. Maybe Player has some kind of number we can use to reach out.”

  “Excuse me. . .”

  “We can find them on the sat feed if all else fails.”

  Jamie explodes into red-faced rage. “How do you dickheads explain the evil ghost killer following me?!”

  Sid shrugs. “Figment of your imagination.”

  “Publicity stunt for your website,” Bruce suggests as he chomps off more hot dog.

  A dark shape fades through the side of the van, taking up residence in the unoccupied passenger’s seat right next to Bruce. The thing is a shadow of a man, grey and ragged like a corpse, but still moving like it is alive. It is covered in rotting greenish grey skin that crackles like a broken salt flat. The creature’s atrophied face sags like a zombie’s. Its eye sockets are impossibly hollow like some ancient skull, but nothing resides inside except darkness beyond darkness.

  “What the fuck?” Bruce exclaims through a bi
g bite of hot dog.

  “There you are!” the phantom speaks. Its booming voice echoes into the back of the van. Flakes fall from its cheeks as the crackled skin stretches to permit the movement of its mouth. “I’ll end this nightmare now.”

  Lots of things happen over the course of the next second. Bruce rolls out the driver door. Mary Sue screams. Jamie screams louder. All of the screaming is drowned out by the rapid succession of thunderclaps from the muzzle of Sid’s FNX pistol, which he slings from the holster and begins blasting into the empty black holes the weird shadow creature has in place of eyes. At this distance bullets are just a formality; the pressurized gas and burning powder ejected from the muzzle is enough to spall vitreous and scramble brains without any help from lead projectiles. All of that goes through the spectre’s head. It just doesn’t do any damage on the way through. Sid pops off the entire magazine into that rotten grey face and then leans to get a look at the fresh baseball-sized hole the bullets left in the passenger’s side dashboard as he thumbs the mag release.

  “Bruce Freeman, Agent of Shield,” hisses the ghoulish entity as it scans the repertoire of guns and knives spread through the back of the van. “You’re a liar and a coward.” As he finishes this proclamation Sid puts a KA-BAR blade through his throat. It’s like shadow-boxing. There’s nothing of substance there to stab. Sid turns the blade with the ease of a well-oiled doorknob to no effect. He looks back at Jamie and Mary Sue with a wild-eyed look of surprise.

  “Run!” Sid bellows. The command is unneeded. Both of them are already on their way out the back doors. The spectre lunges to reach for his fleeing target. Sid moves to push him back toward the front of the van, but the creature jumps right through him into the back of the van. It pauses briefly to make a snarling face back at Sid as it reaches for the small rack of handguns inside the van’s gun locker. Sid looks on, wholly dumbfounded, as it plucks an HK USP from the rack and bounds from the back of the van to the blacktop behind it. This is very disconcerting.

  Twenty meters down the street, flanked by Mary Sue, Jamie flees in a senseless panic, running against the flow of traffic along the right-hand lane of Michigan Ave. There are no moving vehicles in that particular lane since it is used for parallel parking, but oncoming cars do breeze past them on just the other side of the dotted white line to their right. Smarter prey would have run a different direction, using the van’s body to block the ghost assassin’s line of sight to them, but that also would have put less total distance between them, and when running from a creature that passes through obstacles like they aren’t there, total distance is all that matters. It occurs to Sid that Jamie’s blind stupidity may be the only reason Jamie is the last of the bloggers still alive. The others tried to hide. Jamie just bolted.

  “Die, monster!” the ghost-killer shouts as it takes aim at Jamie’s back with both hands on the big HK pistol. “For the salvation of us all!”

  Jamie is gibbering like a lunatic, but Mary Sue has the presence of mind to look back and see the gun pointed at them. “Get down!” she shrieks, shoving into Jamie with her shoulder. They both go sprawling to the next lane of the street just as a compact car zips past them.

  Bam! Bam! The shadow man opens fire, hitting a parked car farther down the right-hand lane, and then sending another bullet skidding along the blacktop toward Water Tower Place. The ghost-assassin is a terrible shot.

  The real Kill Team One is not. Sid raises his FNX and takes aim at the assailant’s back. He can’t see the HK from where he stands, but he doesn’t have to. He squeezes the trigger once, twice, three times, and renders the HK inoperable by shooting through the shadow creature into the pistol’s hammer. The ghost-assassin spends a frustrated second investigating the jammed and shredded gun before tossing it aside. He whips around to curse at Sid.

  “Nihilism is your cause, Sid Hansen. Revelry at the cost of woe. Suffering is your wake. How many will drown in it? Families? Cities? Nations?” He turns his coal-black orbs away again to focus on his fleeing target. “Not if I can help it.” Then the dark creature gently rises up into the air, lifted by some invisible force, and floats away from the van toward its prey.

  Bruce peeks around the corner of the van into the rear doors. “You know that guy?” he asks. Sid shakes his head in the negative before pulling his scary skull helmet down over his face. Somehow, this whole scenario just got weirder. From the gun box he snatches an M4 carbine with attached M203 grenade launcher and leaps into the street.

  “Get the van out of here,” Sid barks back at Bruce as he charges after the floating ghost. Mary Sue pulls Jamie out of the path of a honking car and they run for the sidewalk in front of a Banana Republic store with the monster in hot pursuit. Sid sifts through ideas of how he might kill the damned thing. He has an extensive knowledge base of unusual creatures mostly due to the old man’s insistence that he pass an aptly titled Killing Things Test before going on any real world operations as a youth. This is why Sid knows how to kill werewolves, trolls, redcaps, and even totally ridiculous fictional monsters like vampires. The old man intentionally included a lot of made-up beasties in the training as insurance against outlandish possibilities. Even with all of that knowledge at his disposal, Sid has only vague notions about the ethereal entity he is chasing. It seems to be some kind of ghost, and the old man didn’t cover ghosts.

  EXT. THE MAGNIFICENT MILE - DAY

  Mary Sue Jadefire Sakura Ravencaller never expected to see something like this in her lifetime—not even working with the notorious Kill Team One on whatever strange and unlikely adventures he might have. Lifeforms that can phase through walls are impossible. Sure, there are forces and objects that can move through solid matter; radio waves, gamma rays, tachyons. A living creature simply cannot for a whole bunch of reasons. Because science. But there it is happening right in front of her—so to speak. It’s actually behind her.

  Mary yanks Jamie Chan by the arm in a mad dash to the sidewalk nearest them, so they can at least be safe from moving cars. The creature floats toward them, hovering gracefully a meter over the pavement at an unhurried pace. The slow speed at which it levitates is perhaps more unnerving than the fact that it can levitate at all. It is in no rush, as though it is completely confident it will catch them soon enough, regardless of the fact that they are gaining distance from it.

  “I should expect better from you, Miss Ravencaller,” rumbles the ghostly shade as he passes through a parked sedan on the brim of Michigan Avenue. His shins vanish into the car’s roof below him as if he were standing knee-deep in some thin liquid. “You are hardly so shallow—” Whatever else he says is cut off by the resounding explosion of the car into a ball of fire that Mary Sue quickly deduces to be the work of Sid and a grenade launcher. The blast is staggering, and the shock wave pushes Jamie to the ground ahead of her.

  Mary glances back as she pulls Jamie up from the pavement again. She can’t see the apparition in the cloud of burning car parts between them and the kill team, but she has seen enough already to know the creature wasn’t stopped by some simple ordnance.

  “We have to lose it somehow,” Mary Sue says.

  “I tried! It always finds me!” Jamie huffs back. Mary Sue is not convinced by this line of reasoning. She saw the thing’s face when it climbed into the van with them. It conveyed just the slightest hint of surprise and even proclaimed there you are. It was not the expression of some infallible heat-seeking juggernaut. It was more like some kind of confused transient. That may be the best word for it, because whatever it—he—is, he isn’t from around here.

  She hangs on to Jamie’s hand, tugging the panting journalist along as they run past scores of gawkers stopping to ogle the flaming heap of car in their trail. No one pays the pink haired teen and her companion any attention. Most people don’t make the connection because they weren’t watching the whole debacle unfold from the beginning—and that’s fine. They make it to the crosswalk on Chicago Avenue and Mary looks almost involuntarily to verify the traffi
c light is still red and it is safe to cross, as if that would halt them anyway. She then glances back to see the transient emerging from the column of smoke in front of Banana Republic with the black shadow of the kill team behind him.

  Mary picks up the pace as they cross the street, making it to a mostly grassy block that contains only one small structure: a limestone castle with four crenelated corner towers and one much taller and much more intricately decorated central tower. This is the historic Old Chicago Water Tower.

  Automatic rifle fire rings out and people on the street begin to scream. Mary cringes as a series of high powered bullets zip over her shoulder and chip away at the limestone ahead of her. Sid already blew up someone’s car, and now he’s shooting the historic Chicago Water Tower with an assault rifle, all to hurt a being that has already proven itself impervious to physical damage. She doesn’t know which monster she’s more afraid of right now.

  SID’S POV DOWN RIFLE SIGHT:

  Sid has concerns about over-penetration because he’s firing a high caliber automatic rifle at an incorporeal target in a crowded city. Fortunately, nothing but that ugly stone building happened to be beyond the monster. That worked out.

  BACK TO SCENE

  Mary Sue hustles past the old water tower looking for somewhere she can turn off of Michigan or otherwise lose the transient. So far they’ve passed no obvious escape route, just a lot of boutique stores that would turn into a dead end if the transient pursues them inside.

  “You know the city better than I!” Mary Sue shouts, prompting a strange glance from Jamie. “Where can we find a large public building with lots of exits? A convention center, shopping complex, tourist attraction?” Mary asks.

  Jamie is almost breathing too hard to answer. “Heh, uh, heh. . .” Jamie points across the street. “In there!” And then Jamie takes off running through traffic in a mad dash. Mary Sue has no choice but to follow as cars squeak to a stop. An angry man behind the wheel of a BMW holds down his horn as she passes in front of his grill.