by Leon, Mike
“Oh yeah. Mega nerds. The nerdiest nerds. I don’t think a one of them has ever gotten laid before. Anyway, these nerds pointed all their nerd computers at the internet and found a bunch of stuff they say doesn’t add up. There are anomalies in the culture that could only have been caused by some artificial means other than them. They also say there’s a strong pattern in the language at the origin of the anomalies.”
“Huh?”
“The agents think there’s a person, one person, somewhere out there in the country, causing all the anomalies.”
“Wyatt.”
“Yes. If the agents are right, Wyatt or whoever he is, is single handedly changing or undoing any programming he wants to. He’s working against them, and it looks like he’s winning, which is supposed to be impossible.”
“You think Jamie might be Wyatt? Is that what you’re getting at here?”
“Sid, the codifiers created a profile along with a list of likely suspects—the watch list. Jamie is the only one left alive.”
“Except that Jamie says somebody else built that machine and Bruce thinks that was all just a setup. That sounds more like your evil mastermind.”
“The transient is the key to this now. We need to find out why he thinks Jamie is so dangerous. What’s his evidence? Either he’s wrong, or he knows better than we do and he’s trying to kill Jamie and prevent the apocalypse.”
“Sounds like fifty-fifty odds on the end of the world.” Sid shrugs. “Good luck with that. You don’t need me.”
“You heard Lily! She said only you can stop Wyatt!”
“You can’t believe anything Lily says. You don’t know her. She’s a lying skankbox.”
“It’s a message from the fucking future!”
“Well if you want to test all this shit, it’s not hard. Call down to Fleabag and tell him to shoot Chan in the brain stem right now. If Chan is Wyatt then it won’t work. The bullets will bounce off or something.”
“She said only you can stop Wyatt. It’s not the same thing as killing him. It could be that if someone else kills Wyatt instead of you, that’s what causes the apocalypse.”
“I don’t think that’s what she meant.”
“I don’t know. She’s your girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend. And how do I know you didn’t call her up and record this thing just to get me to come work for you?”
“That would be awfully elaborate. Don’t you think?”
“I think you want me back that bad.”
“Oh please. Your ego is unbearable. I have companies of commandos and a whole other team that can do what you do.”
“Yeah? What’s that kill team called? What number are they?” Graveyard never re-numbered the kill teams even after Sid vanished. He has found that interesting for some time, and it seems like a good item to rub in Helen’s face.
“For your information, we don’t call them kill teams anymore. They’re Guardians.”
Sid almost felt rebuffed until he heard the new name. Now he has to laugh. “That’s a stupid name for a death squad.”
“They’re not a death squad.”
“Right. They fly in on a helicopter and kill people on your orders. I totally see your point now. That in no way resembles a death squad.”
“We just don’t call it that, Sid.”
“I’m not Sid anymore. Now they call me Loverboy. I woo the ladies with my charms and romance and stuff.”
“You know, this is interesting. Wyatt is apparently a postmodernist, which is all about the end of universal objective truths. You’re supposed to kill Wyatt, and you’re the most objective person I’ve ever met. You’re practically like an animal.”
“Don’t try to fight it, Helen. Now that I’m Loverboy you find me irresistible.”
“I would rather let a dog hump me.”
“Woof.”
“Are you gonna help us or not?”
INT. USS JOHN MILIUS - MESS - NIGHT
The ship’s messdeck—which is a lunchroom—is a blue tile floored space containing fifteen tables, a row of drink dispensers, a small salad bar, some mounted televisions, and a hardwired phone tucked neatly away in the back corner. Everything is bolted to the floor—which is called a deck. Bruce sinks into a hard metal seat and pops the top from a can of Grape Crush he acquired from a vending machine in the hallway—only they’re not called hallways. They’re called p-ways, because everything on a ship has to have a weird fucking name that doesn’t make sense. The Master Chief seems to love pointing these things out. She does it politely, like a helpful tour guide, but Bruce still thinks it’s dumb. He was glad when she went off to her office or somewhere and left them alone.
Across the thick blue tablecloth, Fleabag peels the wrapper from the last of a stack of beef sticks he obtained from the vending machines as well. He does so blindly as he’s staring over his shoulder at Mary Sue and Jamie while they (meaning both of them) investigate a cappuccino machine near the entryway. Bruce can’t decide if that’s called a door or a hatch. There’s no way it’s just a door. It’s probably not a hatch either. They probably call it a walkhole or something equally goofy.
“So what’s going on with pinky over there?” The werewolf picks up all ten unwrapped sticks of jerky in a bundle and bites through them, chewing and bearing his teeth the way Bruce would expect a carnivorous dinosaur to eat. The mess is hardly crowded, but there are a few sailors occupying the other tables, and Fleabag clearly isn’t the only one paying attention to the voluptuous female figure in the sea of seamen. Guys were rubbernecking at her all the way from the weatherdeck, although she remained completely oblivious, as always. “What’s her . . . situation?”
“She’s sixteen,” Bruce answers.
“That is a situation.” Fleabag stretches his mouth into a wry expression. “I think I can wait.”
“Never mind what’s going on with her. What’s going on with you?” Bruce says. “You turn into a werewolf. That’s some shit. How’s that happen?”
“Either you get bit by a werewolf or your parents are werewolves.” Fleabag chomps more beef jerky.
“No shit?”
The werewolf notices a sailor two tables over staring at him as he chews the jerky, probably because it is a bit of a spectacle. “What are you looking at, Popeye?” The sailor quickly buries his eyes in his own plate of food. “That’s what I thought.”
“So I’m guessing you eat a ton of meat,” Bruce says.
“Around ten pounds a day. It costs a fucking fortune.”
A sudden quiet and a lot of swiveling heads causes Bruce to turn his attention back toward the rear of the mess, where a crusty grey hand has erupted from the bulkhead in the middle of a painted crest displaying the ship’s name and motto: With extreme prejudice! The hand is followed by a horrific face, empty-eyed and rotten, but far worse than before. The left quarter of the transient’s face is now completely open to the inside of his cranium, which is stuffed with darkness that seeps out into the air like a black flame.
“There you are!” the monster says again, pointing halfway across the mess to where Jamie Chan is dumping sugar packets into a cup of coffee.
“That’s him!” Bruce shouts, pointing back at the transient. “How the fuck he find us on a motherfucking boat?!”
Fleabag is already growing in size, both because he is standing from his seat, and because he is shifting into a snarling man-wolf. Jamie screams and drops the coffee on the deck of the mess deck before bolting for the door. Nine tenths of the sailors follow. One guy pulls a gun. A few others seem to be fixed in place by their buckling sanity. A culinary specialist behind the salad bar looks on like he’s watching Katie Morgan wrestle six midgets naked. The sailor currently utilizing the mess’s satellite phone shakes his head and shouts into the mouthpiece.
“Baby, there’s a werewolf and a ghost in the messdecks!”
The werewolf hits his head on the low ceiling and has to duck down to stomp toward the wall phasing menace. The guy with the pistol shoots
Fleabag in the side twice before realizing he’s being retarded and also running for the door. Fleabag doesn’t seem to notice the bullet wounds as he pounces on the transient, but he just goes right through the ghostly creature and slams into the bulkhead behind it.
The transient floats through the mess, listing from side-to-side, and shouting after Jamie. “You can run no longer! My killing intent is uncaged, unfiltered, pure!” Fleabag rakes his hefty talons through the transient’s back twice, but is ignored. The transient floats out of the mess through the door with the werewolf biting and clawing at him all the way. Left alone with a stunned Mary Sue and very entertained cook, Bruce gets up from his seat.
“What do we do?” Mary Sue says. Bruce throws his hands up in the air as he walks after the werewolf and the phantom. There doesn’t seem to be much reason to hurry, as he can do nothing useful even if he catches up to them. Mary Sue dashes too enthusiastically past him after the monsters.
The culinary specialist shakes his head. “White people. . .”
“Type shit,” Bruce mutters back, on his way from the mess.
An alarm klaxon sounds throughout the ship as Bruce creeps down the narrow corridor.
“Security alert, security alert! Away the security alert team! Away the back-up alert force! All hands not involved in security alert stand fast! There is a. . .” the speaker stalls momentarily. “There is a problem.” Bruce doesn’t know what else to call it either.
Down the p-way, the werewolf scrapes onward, filling up the narrow space more than a little bit like a sci-fi movie blob. He’s just way too big to move around the inside of this ship. He has to go through a door on all fours, and even then barely squeezes through. Bruce can’t see past the moving wall of fur to see what the transient is doing. Mary Sue trails only a few feet behind Fleabag, unable to move beyond him.
From behind Bruce, someone shouts a husky warning. “Out of the way!” It comes from a sailor wearing a body armor vest over his uniform and carrying an old-school M16A1 rifle with the full buttstock. Bruce can’t figure where he came from. The ship is a labyrinth of narrow twists and turns all packed with pipes and cables and ladders. Navigating it is like trying to trace a single strand of spaghetti through a bowl. Another sailor appears behind the first and raises his rifle as soon as he sees the monster ahead.
Bruce starts to tell him to stop, but then realizes nothing he can say in less than ten minutes will help anyone here, so he just throws himself against the deck and screams at Mary Sue. She plasters herself against the nearest bulkhead and the sailors start shooting. The automatic rifles make an ungodly amount of racket in the enclosed p-way, and the only real damage they manage to do is to Bruce’s eardrums. Being shot by dozens of rifle rounds just makes the werewolf angry.
“You guys are shooting at the wrong monster!” Bruce shouts from the floor. “Hold your fucking fire!”
“Stay down!” A sailor screams back, ramming another magazine into the M16 in his hands. Down the p-way, the werewolf pushes himself toward the ceiling and Jamie Chan dives between his spread ankles, apparently having reversed direction somewhere ahead.
“Hold your fire!” Bruce shouts. Mary Sue pushes herself up from the deck and chases Jamie back toward them.
“Shut up!” the sailors shout, even though they refrain from firing down the p-way just as Bruce insisted. Jamie hoofs it past Bruce as he stands back up from the deck. The transient floats right through the werewolf, looking even angrier than ever before. Bruce throws himself down again as the sailors open fire on the transient.
Bullets zip through the transient with no effect, but rip into the werewolf behind it, shredding muscle and furry flesh. Another fang cracks from the monster’s snout and clatters to the deck with bloody drool as it struggles forward through the tiny p-way.
The transient stops and reaches for one of the sailors’ guns, but the man yanks it violently away.
“Give me that!” he bellows, inky black fog rising from his mouth the way warm breath is visible in the cold, only whatever is leaking from him is totally impenetrable. He reaches for the other sailor’s weapon. “Feel my void!” he roars, blackness streaming from his gaping mouth and hollow eyes in a cone of vile dark that projects right through the sailors like they’re made of tissue paper.
Both men scream wildly. One of them begins crying and firing his gun at the ceiling. The other deep throats the muzzle of his M16 with immediacy so furious that it disturbs Bruce more than the visage of both monsters, and probably more than anything else he has ever seen before. Bruce is convinced that guy absolutely could not wait to blow his own brains out. It was like a suicide race and he had to be the winner, and nothing else in the world mattered more.
“What the fuck?” Bruce mutters. “I didn’t know he could do that. Did you know he could do that?” he asks of Mary Sue, on the floor a few feet away, a little closer to ground zero of whatever that was that the monster did. She has a glassy-eyed gaze that Bruce has never seen from her before.
“I saw people hurting puppies,” she says. “Why were they hurting puppies?” Bruce grabs Mary Sue’s nearest wrist and pulls her toward him as soon as it becomes apparent that the girl ain’t right. They need to get the hell away from that thing—whatever it is. Fuck this. Fuck saving Jamie Chan.
The transient already has scooped up the dead man’s rifle and is firing after Jamie down the p-way in the opposite direction. Bullets skitter and ricochet loudly down the corridor as Bruce pulls Mary Sue into the moving wall of bloody meat that is the werewolf. Fleabag shrinks back to a human shape so they can pass. Bleeding from a dozen gunshot wounds, he tugs the suspenders that hold up his oversized pants and follows along behind them.
“It’s like it’s not even there,” Fleabag says. “I couldn’t touch it!”
“That’s what we told you before!” Bruce barks back, looking down the p-way ahead, unable to see anything that looks like an end to it. There are some cramped stairs just ahead and to his right, so he takes them. There isn’t a great reason. He just has an irrational feeling that he needs to put walls between him and whatever just happened. A floor will do just as well.
He takes one last look back down the p-way behind him and sees the remaining sailor mercilessly beating his forehead bloody against the deck, squealing like a pig, and repeating “I don’t want my eyes! I don’t want my eyes!”
Helen Anderson is at the top of the steps to offer Bruce a hand. She is quickly joined by several more armed sailors. “Bruce! Did you see where it went?”
“Fuck it!” Bruce says, walking Mary Sue up to the next deck. “This ship don’t have enough guns to put that thing down.”
“Those poor puppies,” Mary Sue whimpers. “He isn’t from now. We think he’s from now, but he’s not.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Helen says.
“I think she saw into the motherfucker’s deadlights or some shit. I don’t know. She didn’t get it as bad as the security guards.”
“That’s him!” shouts a sailor coming toward them with even more armed guards. “That guy turned into the monster!”
Three sailors from the security response team slam an annoyed Fleabag to the deck and pile on top of him despite Helen’s loud protestations. “He’s with me! Stop that! Where’s Captain Willard?”
INT. USS JOHN MILIUS - BERTHING - NIGHT
Sid stalks the aft p-ways of the main deck like a jungle cat, only he’s a jungle cat with a submachine gun. He borrowed the MP5 from Helen’s operators after he begrudgingly agreed to help them. He had to agree. It was the only way off this stupid boat. Incidentally, it does seem like the rest of them are in over their heads without him in this whole postmodern apocalypse situation. He half cares about that—sort of. He told Helen to get a boat ready for him and left her at the front of the Milius as soon as he heard the alarms. Hopefully these sailors will be able to get that shit together in decent time so he doesn’t have to stall.
It doesn’t take him long to get an idea whe
re the transient went. He only has to go the opposite direction of all the running sailors whose reactions range from terrified hysteria to mildly skeptical caution. Shuffling around them in the tight space proves incredibly obnoxious. When one sailor gets in Sid’s face for going the wrong way, the kill team gives him a one-way ticket to Concussionville with an elbow to the jaw.
“I don’t have time for this,” Sid grumbles.
He gets a glimpse of the blackened creature another dozen meters down the p-way. The thing looks like it went through a meatgrinder since the last time he saw it. Half its head is an empty hole now. It is armed with an M16A1 rifle, the older variety that fires full auto and has a full-size barrel and stock. It’s weird to see the transient walking around with a gun rather than floating, but it makes sense. He needs some kind of weapon to do his job. The creature doesn’t see Sid, nor does Sid make his presence known before it vanishes around another corner.
“Where are you hiding, hedonist?” the transient’s voice echoes over the buzz of the ship’s machinery. “There are barbarians at the gate and you can’t wait to lower the drawbridge!”
When Sid comes around the corner, he sees the transient’s horrid form hovering between sets of racks—flat bunk beds made from sheets of aluminum and stacked three high. They might more accurately be described as slots or cubbies to common soft Americans unfamiliar with the cramped conditions on a warship. Compared to the comforts the first world knows, these might as well be morgue drawers, but Sid can appreciate the austerity of it all.
The racks have short blue privacy curtains, but only two are pulled closed out of the nine bunks visible. The transient points his gun at one of the curtains and balances the weapon in one hand as he reaches for the blue fabric with the other.
“Are you . . . in here?” he rips back the curtain to reveal an empty rack. He excitedly blasts the M16 into the padding at his fingertips. The rifle jumps wildly in his right hand until he releases the trigger looking astonished. The wide-eyed monster gives pause then, as if he’s never fired a fully automatic weapon before. Process of elimination puts Jamie hiding in the other curtained off rack, behind the transient, and Sid is out of ideas for extracting the journalist safely from that situation.