by Leon, Mike
“I think I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Jamie grumbles. “Is that an HK416 or an M27 IAR?” Jamie asks, pointing at the rifle on the floor beside the pizza box.
“Those are both HK416s. M27 is just the military designation for the variant with the sixteen-point-five inch barrel. This one is two inches shorter. Hold on—you know about guns?”
“Yeah. I was really infatuated with them in high school. It was a rebellion sort of thing.”
“You fought in a rebellion?”
“No--like a teenage rebellion. You know.”
“No. I don’t know.”
“You never argued with your parents?”
“You don’t argue with the old man, so much as get your ass kicked by the old man.”
“At least you had a dad. Mine bailed early. I can’t blame him though. My mom is a fucking headcase.”
“My dad made me fight grown men in a cage, to the death, in increasing numbers until I could kill ten at a time barehanded.”
“My mom wanted me to be a girl so bad she made me wear pink dresses until I was twelve. We had a mandatory Barbie hour every day with both tea and crumpets. She cried and threatened to hang herself when I told her I wasn’t doing that anymore.”
“What the hell is a crumpet?”
“It’s a miniature pancake. That’s all it is. They should just call them small pancakes.”
“The old man only fed us raw meat, water, rice, and mixed vegetables.”
“Mom gave me a bottle until I was six. She made me sit in a car seat until I was fourteen.”
“I had to drift a Honda Accord down a spiral parking garage ramp with an angry wolverine chained to the steering wheel when I was nine. The old man called it defensive driving training.”
“Mom once called nine-one-one because there were, quote, too many Mexicans on the grill line at Panda Express. They actually sent a car. She was off her meds and freaking out. The police didn’t know what to tell her. It was so embarrassing. That was the first time I ran away. I stayed at my friend Pat’s house and we shot his grandpa’s MG42 all weekend. I never wore that pink dress again.”
“A machine gun moment. I’ve had a few of those.”
“I could probably use a few more,” Jamie sighs. “So how is that gun different from an M4 or an AR-15?”
“It’s short-stroke gas piston operated.” Sid points at the HK416. “There’s a piston above the barrel that the gases blow back on discharge. The piston strikes the bolt carrier and forces it back.”
“Is that better?”
“Yeah. Direct impingement blows fouling back into the bolt carrier assembly and makes jamming more common with the standard AR-15.”
“You really know your machine guns.”
“It’s not a machine gun. It’s a select fire rifle.”
Mary Sue screams.
“You’re way too excited about this,” Sid says.
“Behind you!” Mary Sue shrieks. Sid is on his feet in a millisecond.
The transient treads toward them through the open warehouse. The silver smelted KA-BAR machetes are like infantry sabers in the grey creature’s molting hands. Rotting and naked yet again; its skin appears even more ragged than before. His hair hangs in stiff white strands that point like arrows at the floor. “This place,” he says, dragging the machetes along behind him. The tips screech on the cracked cement. “This is it. The engine of so much emptiness.”
“We’re going to burn it,” Sid says, hopping up from the floor. “But you have to leave Jamie alone. This was all a setup. Jamie doesn’t even know how the machine works.”
“You can’t believe a word that changeling utters. Every sentence is a perfect lie and a perfect truth.”
“That really doesn’t correspond with what I’ve seen.” Sid sneers. He can hardly imagine Jamie as some sort of evil mastermind—a little kooky for sure, but in no way dangerous.
“It corresponds with deceit and destruction. The machine is only an instrument. It’s the musician that must die!” Without another second’s hesitation, the transient raises both weapons over his cadaverous head and then swings them down like guillotine blades at Jamie. Sid rips the nearby terminal’s monitor from its place, trailing cables and flailing an optical mouse along with it, to intercept the huge knives. The blades sink deep into the LCD display which hisses and crackles. Sid twists the computer peripheral to loosen the transient’s grip, then grasps one of the machete handles to wrench it free.
Jamie backs into the corner near the tussled PC terminal at first, then dashes for the door while Sid is tangled with the ghostly creature. Mary Sue throws a small PC speaker through the transient’s head to absolutely no effect. The monster pries free the machete it managed to hold on to, then turns and follows Jamie out the door. Sid takes a swing at it and his weapon glides through the creature’s back like air as it runs from him. That at least confirms it does not have a silver allergy—though the odds of that were already quite long.
“It doesn’t fucking stop,” Sid says as he chases the transient through the door. The monster gains on Jamie, but Sid catches up just as quickly. When the transient raises his weapon to strike again, Sid steps through the intangible creature and deflects the machete with his own. The angle could not be any more awkward, or the situation more ludicrous. The transient takes another swing, which Sid parries to his right—both of their rights since they occupy the same space. This is officially the weirdest sword fight of all time.
The transient halts suddenly and nearly jams Sid in the guts with the butt of the machete as he isn’t able to stop that fast. Sid leans left and narrowly avoids the blade as he rolls forward on the blacktop lot outside the warehouse. He regains his feet just in time to block the transient’s machete again.
“Your interference is beginning to upset me, Kill Team,” the transient snarls.
“You want to be upset? Look in a mirror, cocksucker.”
“I thought yo-” Whatever the transient was trying to say gets interrupted when Mary Sue blows an air horn in the center of his skull.
Bwoooooo! The transient recoils and slaps his hands over his ears as he dives to escape the shrill squealing of the horn. “Gaah!” he croaks, his machete clacking against the blacktop. “What is that horrible thing?”
“I knew it!” Mary Sue says.
The transient lashes out and rips the air horn from her hands. He crushes it between his palms and it bursts into a frosty explosion of compressed air.
Sid scoops up the fallen machete and slides both weapons back into their sheaths on his back. There seems to be no use in swiping at the transient with them. He finds the particulars of this enemy especially frustrating. Sid has never been so strictly on the defensive before. He usually subscribes to the theory of good offense being the best defense, shooting foes dead before they have any ability to act against him, but that doesn’t apply here at all. He can distract this thing, maybe annoy it, but he can’t hurt it at all. He can only try to prevent it from doing any damage. It’s the worst feeling in the world: not being able to kill someone.
Sid turns to see Jamie sprinting full bore down the street with a good lead on all of them. That kid really can move. The transient floats off in pursuit. Again, Sid follows.
The creature moves at a brisk pace when it levitates, but not anything the kill team can’t keep up with. Jamie turns off the sidewalk down a narrow alleyway one block from the warehouse, which is a bad move. The transient cuts the corner into the alley by phasing through it, its chief advantage in any foot race. Sid loses sight of the ghostly being for a few seconds as he catches up to the alleyway and also takes the corner. When he regains sight of the other two, Jamie is still running like mad, but the transient has stopped to pick up a brick from the ground beside a heavy steel dumpster. He winds up and launches the brick at Jamie’s head from meters away, but Sid bats it out of the air as it leaves the creature’s hand. The brick cracks against the alley wall. The transient growls with frustration as
he bats at Sid’s head with a clenched fist. Sid raises a gauntlet and catches the creature’s comparatively feeble punch—for the first time actually contacting the transient in any way resembling normal physical interaction. It is not stronger or faster than any normal human, at least not according to its punching ability. The only unusual note is that the monster does not appear to damage his hand throwing a full force haymaker into a gauntlet made from metal and carbide plates. Sid knocked a werewolf’s teeth out with that gauntlet. This scrawny creep should have just broken at least some of the bones in his hand, but he seems fine.
Then, in the microsecond the transient’s fist is frozen only inches from his face, Sid notices a peculiar pattern. It is faded and blurry and difficult to make out against the background of grey flesh, but it is definitely there. The transient has a single line of words and numbers tattooed on the underside of his wrist, too small to read or notice from even a few meters away: Aqua 6 1 6 Green.
“Is that your model number?” Sid says, provoking a very morbid glare in return.
The monster sails away in an instant, continuing its single-minded pursuit of Jamie.
Mary Sue catches up to them again just as Sid takes off down the alley. “I don’t think he gets tired,” she yells.
“Neither do I,” Sid snarls back.
“I mean really though. He can even fly. Jamie can only keep running so long.”
She does have a point. Sid can sprint for miles, but Jamie will be out of steam soon, and it’s Jamie the thing is after. This isn’t quite the foot race it appears to be. It’s more like running from a slow car.
“You have to find a way to hurt him or he’s going to kill Jamie!” Ahead of them, Jamie comes to the end of the alley and turns out of sight. The transient slips into the brickwork beside him to pursue through the nearest building. Sid and Mary Sue increase pace to make up for the monster’s ability to shortcut.
“I might know a way, but somebody won’t make me VX!”
“You can’t use nerve agents in the city!” Mary Sue shrieks. “That’s horrible!”
“You’re being a total bitch about this!”
“I am not a b-word! You’re so mean!”
As they come around the corner and regain sight of Jamie, Sid sees that the journalist may have already discovered a way to solve their dilemma—at least for the short term. Jamie has crossed through an empty street and is trundling up a set of tan-painted metal steps to the elevated ‘L’ train platform above. The free floating stairs are covered by a ribbed tin roof and enclosed with glass.
Sid charges out into the street as the transient wisps over the trunk of a rusted out hooptie parallel parked near the stairway to the train platform. The creature watches Jamie ascend the steps and begins its own gravity defying elevation from the pavement. Sid makes it to the bottom of the stairway in time to see Jamie struggling up the steps in an apparent effort not to pass out from exhaustion. Jamie’s cardio fitness is crap.
There is a turn-around landing in the staircase two thirds of the way to the top, and as Jamie reaches it the ghoulish head of the transient phases through the metal flooring ahead. Sid charges up the steps full speed to intercept the monster, but Jamie is too gassed to focus on anything but making it up the steps. Jamie practically runs face-first into the transient without even an attempt to stop. The transient gives one vicious push that shoves Jamie backward down the steps. Luckily, Sid is there to stop the blogger from tumbling all the way down to the bottom and ending up with a broken neck.
“Your presence is quite frustrating Kill Team,” the transient grumbles as he punches the window beside him. The glass ripples loudly, but doesn’t break. It’s probably safety glass. Sid could break it, especially with these nifty dread gauntlets, but the transient failing to do so further cements Sid’s speculation that the ghost cannot match his strength. “Haven’t you ever dreamed a dream so real and good that waking up felt like a nightmare?”
Sid steadies Jamie on the steps with him and pulls a grenade from the MOLLE strap across his chest. Mary Sue stops at the bottom of the steps behind them, watching apprehensively as Sid yanks the pin.
“All you wanted after was to go back to sleep, back to the dream, but the dream was gone. . .” The transient coughs a throaty hack and reels momentarily. Blood from his mouth spatters the handrail he clutches to support himself. “Don’t you understand that this world is my dream? I do this for us all, so that the morning will never come.”
“Cock-a-doodle-doo, asshole,” Sid says. He throws the grenade up the steps. The little olive canister clanks down on the landing at the transient’s feet and he watches with a visible sense of confused fascination as it rolls through his ankle and taps against the glass behind him. It stops with stenciled white lettering face-up reading M18 SMOKE GREEN. That only seems to increase the transient’s bewildered state.
“What are you doing?” he says, as the grenade pops and begins pouring forest green smoke into the air. The enclosed stairway fills in seconds.
“I can’t see!” Mary Sue shrieks.
Sid drags Jamie forward up the stairs through smoke so thick he can’t see past the end of his own nose. They reach the landing, where Sid knows they are actually standing in the transient, and he pushes Jamie up the next short flight of stairs.
“It’s clever in a way, I suppose,” the transient rasps. “But you’ve only blinded us both.” Sid stomps on the floor as Jamie vanishes up the stairs into the inky green mist. A hand almost instantly clamps down on his armored shoulder. “There you are!”
“Wrong!” Sid shouts as he turns and punches the transient in the mouth. “Whoever told you about me missed some important details.” Sid bobs aside of a withered fist aimed right at his chin. “See, the old man taught me to fight. Ninjas taught the old man to fight. Ninjas don’t need eyes to see.” Sid takes another swing at the transient and feels his gauntlet bash into something meaty, but the next punch after that goes through nothing but air. Curiously, the billowing smoke seems undisturbed by the transient’s movements through it.
“You’re an obstinate buffoon if you think this path is anything but the wrong one.” If Sid hit any normal human that hard with his armored hands they wouldn’t be crawling, much less speaking coherent sentences. Punching the transient does nothing. He decides to back off and see to it that Jamie makes it onto the train.
Sid bolts up the stairs and emerges from the green cloud onto the platform flanking the ‘L’ train tracks at whatever station this is—he didn’t bother to check. Jamie is already jumping the turnstile ahead of him and rushing for the open doors of the awaiting train car. Nearby, the transient rises through the platform floor searching both directions for his target. He quickly zeroes on the only frantically fleeing human shape, and both he and Sid give chase.
Jamie steps onto the train car just as Sid leaps over the turnstile. The doors slide closed before he can make it aboard, and a gasping petrified Jamie watches as the transient approaches. The damn thing isn’t leaving the station nearly fast enough. Sid whips a machete from his back and jams the point of the blade into the crack between the car doors, drawing unwanted attention from the half dozen bystanders inside the train.
“That guy has a sword!” somebody shouts, but collective attention of the other passengers is quickly stolen by the floating naked cadaver that fizzles through the side of the car.
Sid twists the machete handle to try and pry the doors open as the train begins moving. He gains a certain curiosity about who’s running this train, and why they’re just going about business as usual even though an armored ninja guy is stabbing through the doors and a ghostly apparition just floated aboard, but on second thought the reaction doesn’t seem entirely unjustified. Why not hit the button for get-the-hell-out-of-here?
Sid has no success getting the door open before the train is moving too fast and a passing support beam on the platform threatens to snap his machete from the train, so he pulls the big knife loose and circles th
e beam. As the train car accelerates on the tracks and passes him, Sid leaps onto the rung-like connectors between it and the next car. He sheathes the machete and draws an FNX, which he uses to blast through the nearest window. Squeezing through the broken glass around the window is relatively easy with a layer of Kydex protecting him.
Sid tumbles onto one of the blue-on-white aisle facing seats inside the car and rises next to a sign citing safe procedures in case of emergency. One of the items on the list reads: Move to another car if your immediate safety is threatened. All of the passengers seem to be following that directive. A small stampede of frightened faces nearly tramples Sid to get away from the death spectre standing at the other end of the car. Sid elbows a large Hispanic man who seems too incompetent to move around him, then has to climb over someone in a wheelchair at the end of the rush, but he manages to clear the wall of bodies as they all pour into the next car, leaving him alone with Jamie, the transient, and a crusty old man who looks around the inside of the car, shakes his head, and returns to sleep on a tattered travel pillow.
“You’re getting on my nerves, Sid,” the transient says, snatching the handle of an empty baby stroller someone left in the aisle of the car. “You can’t fight me.” He whips the stroller angrily against the row of seating beside him. “You can’t hurt me. You can’t hold me back. I never get tired. You can never do anything but run, and you can’t run forever, so why prolong the inevitable?”
“Whore money,” Sid says. This actually seems to throw the transient off.
“Whore money?” the ghastly thing spits in disbelief, brown blood dripping from his lips.
“Yeah. It’s money for whores. It’s about all money is really good for.”
“I wish I could have as cavalier an attitude. Where I come from, those trivialities are long expired. You have no idea what you have.” The transient reaches up to the ceiling between the nearest set of sliding doors, into a darkened well the width of a coffee mug which contains some kind of small handle. “Well, no matter. I’ll set it right soon.” He pulls the handle and the doors slide open, admitting the cold night wind and rumbling rail sounds to the interior of the car. The second and third stories of buildings roll by in the darkness. “Time to go for a dive.”