by Leon, Mike
“Jamie, run,” Sid barks, but the transient is too quick. He snatches Jamie’s wrist and hauls them both through the open doors.
Sid bounds forward, reaching for Jamie’s flailing hands as they go out the doors. He gets nothing but slapping fingertips until he himself is out of the train, hanging onto the door frame with one hand and Jamie’s wrist with the other. At the bottom of the human chain they have formed, the transient dangles from Jamie’s right foot, screaming with wild elation as he weighs them down like a sack of cinder blocks dragging a loose-lipped mobster to a watery grave. “Die, charlatan! Die!” Only seconds down the line, the front of an oncoming train approaches like a wall of steel death to scrape them all from the side of the car.
Sid roars and strains to curl two adult people back into the train car. As the transient is lifted toward the doors, his demeanor shifts from a victory celebration to pure quivering rage. He underestimated the kill team’s strength. The creature vanishes and with its weight gone, Sid yanks Jamie back into the car just as the other train whooshes past them.
The transient is already waiting in the train car, having seemingly teleported himself behind them. Before Jamie can even regain proper footing on the floor, the ghost tackles them headlong out the doors. All three of them tumble out onto the wooden tracks. Sid rolls to a stop without any serious damage due to his armor, but Jamie takes a battering on the railroad ties. The kid has more than a few boogered up fingers and nasty abrasions.
The transient is not slowed.
“You don’t want to die quickly?” he screams, grabbing Jamie by the ears. “Then die slowly!” Sid barely manages to put himself between Jamie’s face and 600 volts of electric shock as the transient tries to force Jamie onto the third rail that supplies power to the trains. Sid pushes back and Jamie screams from being crushed between the two raging killers. Sid overpowers the transient, but the ghost kicks him right through Jamie and sends him reeling backwards to the edge of the ties. For a second, Sid teeters over a fifty foot fall into moving traffic on the street below. “Die! Die!” the transient screams, reaching again to force Jamie against the rail.
Sid goes over the edge of the railroad, snarling and cursing at the monster. He catches the end of a tie on the way down, and pulls himself back up to the tracks, but he’s too late to save Jamie from the transient.
Only the transient has halted in place.
“No. Not now!” the ghostly menace howls into the wind. “I need more time!” Jamie crawls down the tracks to get away from the screaming monstrosity as it shrieks even more frantically. “Only a few more seconds! No!”
Then the transient is gone.
Sid glances up and down the tracks. He looks over the edge to see if this is some kind of trick and the thing is about to come at him from somewhere else. Nothing. There’s nothing up here but him, Jamie, and the rustling of the Chicago wind.
“Where did it go?” Jamie says.
“I don’t know, but it didn’t look happy about it,” Sid says. “This is really fucking weird.”
EXT. BUCKINGHAM FOUNTAIN - NIGHT
“I’m never getting on the Green Line again,” Jamie screeches while holding out a broken finger for Mary Sue to wrap in a makeshift splint. They made their way a few blocks east after falling off the train in an effort to ditch any police attention. After that, Sid used a phone he lifted from a parked car to call Bruce to meet up at the nearest large landmark.
“There’s a reason the tourists don’t ride that shit,” Bruce says. The back of the utility van is packed with bright red cans and stinks of gasoline fumes.
“I don’t think the reason is floating ghost assassins,” Sid says. He is sitting on two of the gas cans for lack of room, packing ACP rounds into FNX magazines.
“Where do you think it went?” Bruce asks.
“Not a clue. He freaked out, screamed like he didn’t want to go, and then he just poofed out of existence.”
“He didn’t leave anything behind? No pieces?” Mary Sue asks.
“Oh yeah, he left a couple arms, and a spare rib, and he pulled out his teeth and handed them to me—what the hell kind of pieces would he leave?”
“In the stairs where you blew that smoke grenade he was coughing up blood like he was sick. Some of it got on the handrail.”
“Yeah? You think he’s got AIDS or something? Good.”
“Maybe, but that’s not it. See I went back to the stairs later, and the blood was gone.”
“Maybe it phased somewhere.”
“I don’t know, Sid. I’m not sure it was ever there to begin with.”
“You’re gonna have to explain this a lot better.”
“What if we’ve been thinking about this all wrong from the start? What if the reason he can do all these things that seem impossible, is that he’s not actually doing them?”
“Have you seen my face?” Jamie says, turning to display a deep black eye and lacerated forehead for Mary Sue to see more easily, not that she missed it before. The statement is rhetorical.
“I know. Sid, you compared him to a ghost when we first encountered him, and I dismissed that because I’m so stupid, but I think you were right.”
“An actual ghost?” Bruce says. “Like Casper? He’s a dead guy trapped in the world of the living?”
“No. I don’t think that. But some fringe scientists theorize that reported poltergeist activity is caused by the overactive latent psychic abilities of people in close proximity. What if the transient is something like that? He could be using psychic powers to appear here, but from somewhere else. I know it sounds stupid, and I’m probably wrong . . . Just forget it. I’m so stupid sometimes.”
“Hold up. That’s maybe not as crazy as you think. In the ’70s the company ran a whole bunch of experiments on that kinda shit. They’d hypnotize somebody and try to get ’em to astral project themselves into the Kremlin to spy on the Russians or find out what Castro had for breakfast or whatever.”
“Right. That’s called remote viewing, but it never worked. The government shut down the project in nineteen-ninety-five and all the documents were declassified. It’s generally regarded as junk science now.”
“Except you don’t keep funding a program you know is bullshit for twenty years. That don’t make sense.”
“Have you paid any attention to the way our government works at all?” Jamie says. “They still fund abstinence only education.”
“Yeah, well maybe I heard shit. I used to work for the CIA, you know. Maybe I heard that not all the files were declassified. Maybe I heard that the reason the project got canceled wasn’t ’cause it didn’t work, but because it worked too well. You ever think of that?”
“You heard that?”
“No. I’m just saying what if. You feel like a dipshit now?”
“No.”
“I’m still having some trouble with this,” Sid says. “You guys are saying the transient makes his ghost fly out of his body and run around on its own? And that’s somehow more believable than he’s just a guy who can walk through walls?”
“Not a ghost—a projection. He’s affecting events in a remote location, but no part of him is actually present at that location. The apparition you see is an illusion—a type of hallucination. It explains everything if it’s true. It’s why he leaves nothing behind, brings nothing with him, flies, teleports, moves through solid matter. He’s not actually doing those things. He just appears to be doing them. You can’t hit him because he’s not really there.”
“I hit him in the stairwell. I punched him right in his stupid face.”
“Oh.” Mary Sue’s head sinks, crestfallen. “I’m sorry. This whole idea was stupid. I’m so stupid. . .”
“I still think she’s on to something,” Player calls out in his weird computerized Stephen Hawking voice.
“Player?” Sid says. “How long have you been listening to this conversation?”
“I dialed him a while ago,” Bruce says.
“What the f
uck? Make noise or something.”
“If the transient is a remote viewer, ostensibly a super charged one, we don’t know the limits of that power. It does seem like he can’t go without appearing as some sort of manifestation or another, otherwise he would remain invisible and Jamie would already be dead. Right? Maybe his form is what he thinks he looks like, and he can’t unthink it.”
“Like a residual self-image,” Bruce says. “From The Matrix.”
“So he’s flying around believing he’s in this body that you see, and believing he’s picking up knives, and believing he’s pushing Izumi Saito out of a window. Whatever he believes is what happens. If he believes Sid is punching him in the face, then Sid is punching him in the face.”
“Like in The Matrix.”
“Yes, Bruce. Like in The Matrix. Something we’re talking about was actually related to The Matrix. Are you happy now?”
“Yeah.”
Sid is growing impatient with all this theorizing. It doesn’t seem to be getting them closer to the only thing he actually wants to know. “So if you guys are even anywhere close to right about all this, how do we kill him?” Sid says.
“His real body has to be somewhere,” Bruce reasons. “We find it and shoot him like anybody else.”
“Bruce, you just made me the happiest man on Earth.”
“Aight. So we make a milk run back to the warehouse, burn down the apocalypse computer, then we figure out where the transient’s real body is and we cap the bitch. Sound good?”
Mary Sue flinches as her cell phone buzzes and chirps a default ringtone. The noise is surprising, as she is only carrying a burner cell Bruce picked up from a grocery store. No one outside this van should have the number. She slides the burner from the waistband of her shorts and answers with a meek “Hello?”
Sid looks on with simmering disdain as she listens to what the other party has to say. He already knows what’s coming.
“It’s for you,” Mary says. Of course it is. This stupid shit always happens. Sid takes the phone as Mary tells him what he already guessed. “It’s Helen Anderson.”
“How did you get this number?” he grumbles into the microphone.
“It’s called a stingray, Sid,” replies a very annoyed and slightly southern sounding female voice. Helen Anderson is, since Sid last checked, the agent at the absolute top of Graveyard. “You should Google it.”
“Google yourself,” Sid says.
“Sounds like the quip clip is all out of bullets. Before you hang up, why don’t you take a look out the back of that van?”
Sid already knows what he’ll see, because he hears the rising cadence of war drums far off in the distance, so low that even he can barely make it out. He pops the back door anyway and takes a peek outside. He sees two black shapes growing in the northwest sky like giant insects over the big stone fountain. Choppers. More specifically, AH-64 Apache gunships—flying battle tanks equipped with a staggering array of missiles and guns, as well as an advanced targeting computer capable of directing all that explodey power at multiple targets with precision accuracy from miles away.
“I have two chain guns and one-hundred-fifty-two Hydra missiles locked on to your van,” Helen says.
“Those chain guns are beyond effective range.”
“I think we both know that’s beside the point.”
“What do you want?”
“I’ll have somebody there in two minutes to pick up you and your friends. Let’s have a chat.”
EXT. SIKORSKY CHOPPER - NIGHT
Mary Sue slouches timidly next to Bruce as he smokes his skinny little cigar. A Graveyard operator tried to tell him not to smoke in the helicopter, but Bruce told him to suck a donkey cock and lit it up anyway.
Sid is currently engaged in a staredown with Fleabag. The werewolf apparently acquired some fresh clothes since they last met, but he still has a few visible scrapes and bruises, and a single full-sized canine fang juts crookedly from his mouth even though he is in his human form.
“So is that like a werewolf fashion statement, or just a snaggletooth?” Sid says.
Fleabag refuses to break eye contact. He silently reaches up to his mouth, clutches the fang between two fingers and rips it out with its roots. He never blinks. The tooth drips blood for a second before he throws it from the open helicopter door.
“This is beyond toxic,” Jamie says. “This is nuclear masculinity. This is A-bomb level.”
“Whatever,” Sid grunts, continuing to glare into the werewolf’s eyes.
“Jiminy jillickers!” Bruce says, his cigar nearly falling from his mouth. “That’s a god-damned battleship!”
Sid still won’t look away from Fleabag, but he takes Bruce at his word. A minute later the chopper has set down on something and the rest of the passengers are hopping out of the cabin as the rotors spin down.
“The director’s waiting for you right there,” Fleabag says.
“I bet she is,” Sid snarls back. They are already the only ones left in the back of the Sea Hawk. “After you.”
“After you.”
Neither of them budges.
“These seats are real comfy,” Sid says.
“Sure are.”
“So do you have a regular dick? Or one of those red rocket things?”
“Why don’t you suck it and find out?”
“Man, you’re crazy, Fleabag,” says a nervous sounding Graveyard operator from the chopper skid.
“Crazy like a fox,” Fleabag replies, intensifying his glare at Sid.
“You say that too?” Sid says, unfettered. “How does that make sense? How is a fox crazy?”
“It’s just an expression. People use expressions.”
Helen Anderson stomps aboard the chopper, blocking the sight line between them with her body. “This is ridiculous,” she shouts. “You’re both acting like macho assholes. This isn’t Top Gun. Get off the chopper.”
Fleabag growls, hops from his seat, and jumps down from the chopper. Sid shifts his eyes after the werewolf, looking out onto the aft deck of an Arleigh Burke class destroyer where the others are already waiting surrounded by uniformed navy men and Graveyard operators.
“I always thought Top Gun was really gay,” Bruce says, standing just outside the chopper.
“What?!” Helen snaps back at him. “That’s crazy.”
“Nah, it’s pretty gay. I mean you got Tom Cruise, gay, playing beach volleyball with oiled up dudes, gay, singing showtunes in a bar, gay, going on and on about how he loves some other dude, gay. . .”
“Goose? Goose died!”
“Plus there’s this weird beta thing how Tom Cruise is all in love with an older woman who’s just slightly dykey.”
“Kelly McGillis is not dykey!”
“Kelly McGillis is a full-on lesbian!” Bruce yaps. He whips his attention to Jamie, and more than a few of the others follow. “Jamie, isn’t Kelly McGillis a lesbian?”
“How should I know?” Jamie shrieks angrily. “Why are you all looking at me?”
“You got the gaydar, don’t you? Or is that just regular gays?”
Helen rakes her long dusty blonde hair with frustration. “I can’t imagine why a real government agency ever had you on the payroll.”
“It’s a long story,” Bruce says.
Helen walks them from the helicopter pad under a towering overhead bay door and into a hangar behind the aft deckhouse. Sid guesses this is where they wheel the helicopter when they’re not using it. The whole group remains under escort by eight operators who all seem a little shaky, and Fleabag, who does not seem shaky. Graveyard operators don’t have uniforms per se, but they have guidelines. They always seem to wear black outfits, sometimes dark BDU’s that stand out from modern ACU’s which are always cam patterned and never black. Now they’re wearing black Propper polo shirts and whatever pants happened to be clean. This is how they dress when they’re trying to blend in with people in a populated area—minus all the subguns and tactical vests. Mos
t of them have dark sunglasses. One guy actually has on an ACH helmet over his polo shirt, which looks out of place and makes Sid wonder if he donned that thing just for this special occasion. Kill Team One is going to be here; better put on a helmet. Weird.
A Navy officer wearing a rainbow of colored patches that mean nothing to Sid waits just inside the hangar door with a nervous smile. “Welcome aboard the USS John Milius,” she says. “I’m Master Chief Wallace.”
“Master Chief?” Bruce says. “Like Halo?”
“No,” the Master Chief answers with a downtrodden frown. “It’s not like Halo. It’s never like Halo.”
“What kind of ship is this?” Mary Sue asks.
“The Milius is an Arleigh-Burke class guided missile destroyer.”
“She should be safe on the ship from whatever is trying to kill her,” Helen says, motioning to Jamie, clearly unaware of the internet blogger’s nuanced gender status.
“She’s not female,” Sid grumbles.
Helen appears surprised. “Oh. He’s trans? You’re trans? I’m sorry—I didn’t know.”
“No. I’m actually non-binary,” Jamie says.
“Oh. I see,” Helen says, visibly struggling with this information. “What is that?”
“It’s something else.” Sid shakes his head. “It’s like an in-between thing.”
“What? Well, does he . . . or she . . . have . . . you know . . . which way were you originally?”
“Neither.”
“You don’t want to go down this road,” Sid says. “I tried and I just got a headache. Whatever it is, it’s infuriating.”
“I can’t understand how my gender identity is A, infuriating, and B, any of your business.”
“It’s my business because I don’t know what words to call you to avoid an hour long metaphysical discussion.”
“I already told you. You say they. It’s they. That’s not so hard!”
“That doesn’t work! It sounds like I’m talking about a group of people.”