#Justice

by Leon, Mike

  “You and I will never meet. Not physically. Not in the same time. I already know that for certain. I know many things. I know where you will run when you finally get that door open. I know I’ll kill Chan there. I’ve already been there. I’ve done it. You won’t stop me. Do you understand how I know these things?”

  “You can see the future.”

  “I’m from the future.”

  A bright flash illuminates the room, causing both Sid and the transient to glance at F4pl0rd, who is holding up a large Android cell phone to take a picture. “Sorry,” the hacker says. “I need pics or /pol/ is never going to believe this.”

  “I come from two decades after the fall, when the first Frankies appeared, an America ravaged by nuclear war and roving degeneracy. The country is a wasteland, a kingdom of corpses. There are pockets of survivors the death cult hasn’t found yet, but it won’t be long before Mahdi hunts them down.”

  “What do you know about the Imam?” Sid knows about that sonofabitch, and he wishes he didn’t. The old man thought the Imam was practically the devil in the flesh. Sid met the thing once, and it was the only fight he ever had in which he was indisputably outclassed. “You know how to kill him?”

  “The 12th Imam, Harbinger of the End Times, Mahdi, Lord of the Death Cult. Yes. I can look upon his face as he sits on his imperial throne. He put it on top of the Freedom Tower. A tasteless choice, but not surprising given his proclivities. He is neither the architect of this horror or the true threat. Do you know what separates men from beasts, kill team? Self awareness? Consciousness? Souls? Those are all interpretations of the same thing. Language. Abstraction.”

  “I hate abstraction.”

  “You would. You’re a notorious simpleton. If not, you might have stopped Wyatt when you had the chance. Instead, you let him strip away the only thing keeping our fragile society afloat. He reduced our language, and nearly all of the others, to nothing. He toppled Babel all over again while you chased your whores. As I told you when we first met, you stand for nothing. It disgusts me. But I’m here again to implore of you. Help me change the past.”

  “You’ve got it wrong,” Sid says. “Jamie isn’t Wyatt.”

  “You haven’t any inkling of the raw power that madman wields—the foresight. I can tell you he expected these events already. He planned for them. He is playing with you. The Wyatt I know cannot be named or killed. We only call him Wyatt because his true name cannot be known.”

  “That’s fucking crazy.”

  “No. He walks with your unwashed masses now, a secret king among the paupers. Those who see him do not remember his face if he does not wish it so. His weird magic is growing. Soon, no man will have the strength to harm him. I came back to kill him in this time, before he grows so strong.”

  “Seriously?” Sid remarks incredulously. He points at Jamie as the scrawny panicked waif rams the door in fruitless desperation—a flimsy door Sid could dash to splinters with a modest boot heel. “You really think that’s the world destroyer?”

  “We have the profiles generated by Comfort Eagle. Graveyard gave me Helen Anderson’s personal reports.”

  “Graveyard gave them to you?”

  “Well, future Graveyard.” The transient tilts his flame blurred head. “Who do you think sent me back here to stop all this madness?”

  “That’s how you know where to find Jamie. It’s not some fucking magic. You’ve just been reading Helen’s files this whole time.”

  “Of course. That’s how I knew only Chan survived my attempts, so Chan must have been Wyatt.”

  “Then why not just kill Chan? Why kill all of them?”

  “The bloggers? I had to kill them to narrow it down to Chan. I just told you.”

  “But you said you already knew who it was before you started, because you read the files.”

  “Yes. Because I killed the others.”

  “But you didn’t have to because you read the files.”

  “I don’t understand. From my perspective, it simply is as it is. It may be there are other versions of the timeline where each of them or all of them lived, but I have no memory of those. I have no way to know what I already changed, or if it is at all possible to change the way any of this happened. I only know I keep returning to an apocalypse, and that I must keep trying.”

  “Is that a grandfather paradox?” F4pl0rd says.

  “I don’t know what that is,” Sid grumbles. “Look man, you still have it wrong. There’s another player involved. The real Wyatt built that codification mainframe for BuzzWorthy incognito. They never even met the guy.”

  “If I am wrong we have lost nothing but a sad creature that pitied its own confused existence. So what? What is the life of one aberrant against the lives of billions? You would risk that for this single homophile?”

  “Some hero type would probably have a better answer to that question, but I’m just here for the whore money. That and after all this shit today I want to kill you just to prove I can.”

  “You are misguided,” the transient says, floating gently from his place in the wall. As his body passes through the smudged white paint, Sid realizes that the creature had not been hovering at his level of the building. The wispy burning shadows emitted from the ghostly body obfuscated its proportions when only parts of it were poking through the drywall. Now the transient’s upper half juts from the carpet in the open space of the room, his hips disappearing into the floor, but he remains eye-to-eye with the kill team. He’s huge. Just his torso is as tall as Sid. His legs are lost on some lower floor of the building.

  Jamie won’t stop screaming. F4pl0rd sits frozen in his chair, his cell phone remaining at the end of his outstretched arm, still as a statue.

  “Huh,” Sid remarks while glaring at the hulking apparition. “That’s different.”

  Sid springs into action. He snatches F4pl0rd’s phone, shoves Jamie aside, then bashes through the door with his shoulder. The flimsy wooden thing comes off its hinges and he actually smashes it flat against the opposite wall out in the hallway. He pulls Jamie through the doorway behind him and makes for the stairs as the door tips back to lean at an angle against the jamb it once fit in. They are already to F4pl0rd’s apartment door when he hears the hacker shouting after him.

  “Hey I need that phone! Pics or didn’t happen, man!” F4pl0rd says. “Pics or didn’t happen!” Sid stuffs the cell phone into a band attached to his armor’s MOLLE webbing and drags Jamie down the stairs faster than anyone other than him ever cares to move. Down two flights, he can hear the transient taunting him without an inkling of urgency.

  “Go ahead and run, Sid,” the monster says, his feet floating through the wall just above Sid’s head. “I know where you’re going. I know how this ends. I’ll lead you right to me!”

  True to his word, the transient does not seem to make much effort to follow as Sid and Jamie run the spiraling gauntlet of ninety degree turns down to the bottom floor and out onto the street in front of the building.

  Sid hauls Jamie along toward the utility van, parked at a meter a few blocks away. He finds a city parking attendant writing a ticket next to the van when he gets there. Sid punches the attendant in the face, knocking the man into an unconscious heap in the middle of the street.

  “I don’t have time for that!” Sid shouts as he tears open the van door and pushes Jamie over the driver’s seat to the other side of the van. Once behind the wheel, he fires up the engine and stomps on the gas to get them out of there.

  INT. THE VEIDT INSTITUTE - DAY

  “So our choices here are tranny or little kid, right?” Fleabag reasons with difficulty discernable from the way his nostrils flare wolfishly, although he remains mostly human in form. He stands next to the television, hovering menacingly over the good doctor, whom he placed rather firmly on the rec room sofa and ordered not to move. “If I have to have blood on my hands, I pick tranny.”

  “You’re not bumping off one of my patients,” Sartorius says. “I won’t let i
t happen.”

  “You couldn’t stop us anyway,” Fleabag snorts.

  “We’re not killing that kid,” Helen insists.

  “I don’t understand all the sudden compassion from you guys,” Bruce says. “I mean you’re Graveyard. Y’all are shady. You’re supposed to do the dirt nobody else can do.”

  “That was how Walter did things,” Helen says.

  “Graveyard’s been hiding bodies a lot longer than Walter was around.”

  “How would you know? The Duke had a very different outlook when he was in charge.” Helen’s cell phone rings. Hurriedly, she answers. “Yeah?” After a pause, she switches to speaker phone. “Sid?”

  “Yeah,” Sid Hansen says, over what sounds like a hard running engine. “I figured out how we can stop him, or at least slow him down.”

  “Sid, we know where he came from now. We have—”

  “Yeah I know. He’s from the future. He told me all about it. Look, I don’t have time to chat.” An intermission of squealing tires and muffled cursing indicates he is very serious about that claim. “He’s reading your reports. That’s how he knows where to find us. It was how he found us on the boat, all the places Jamie tried to hide—everywhere.”

  “What the fuck?” Bruce exclaims, having not quite processed this idea to its logical roots. “You write reports about this shi—yeah I guess you do. That makes sense actually.”

  “My files?” Helen cringes. “How would he have access to those?”

  “He’s an agent of Graveyard,” Sid says. “From the future.”

  “Great!” Bruce cheerily exclaims. “So delete that shit and he can never find any of the bloggers and all this just goes away. Problem solved.”

  But it isn’t that simple. It never is. “If he never comes back then none of this ever happens and I never have a reason to delete the files,” Helen says.

  “I’m sick of this shit! What the fuck is the point of time travel if you can’t change shit in the past to make the future different?”

  “There’s no time for this! Just shut up and listen!” Sid snarls through the phone, clipping the little speaker into fuzzy territory. “Don’t delete the files. Just lie in the ones you haven’t written yet!”

  “What the fuck?” Bruce exclaims, but Helen seems to understand where the kill team is going with this.

  “I think I get it. We can’t erase what already happened, but we can change what hasn’t happened.”

  “I want you to write a report. Say I lured him into Millennium Park and I found a way to kill him there.”

  “You got an idea how to kill him?”

  “Not the slightest, but if he thinks that’s where I stop him, he won’t go there. Right?”

  EXT. LAKE SHORE DRIVE - DAY

  Sid whips the utility van around a corner onto the freeway, barely clipping a small sedan and sending its panicked driver skidding off the road. Some people don’t know anything about combat driving.

  “Where are we going?” Jamie screams, looking back at him from the passenger’s side rear view mirror, in which the now massive transient emerges, howling like King Kong, from around the corner of a Gold Coast hi-rise in pursuit of the van.

  “The park!” Sid growls, wishing the van had a lot more torque and a manual transmission. “I don’t think he’ll go in there, because that’s where he knows I’ll kill him!”

  “But that’s a lie!”

  “The truth is a lie! Remember?!”

  “What about after that? Just stay in the park forever?!”

  “Long enough for Graveyard to bring in some nerve agents so we can spray him down. I still think VX might stop him.”

  “Chemical weapons?!”

  “Fuck yeah, chemical weapons! If I had Tsar Bomba I’d drop that on it too!”

  “Maybe I should shoot at it while you drive!”

  “That’s a terrible idea!”

  “Why?”

  “Because the back of the van is full of gasoline!” It is. All twenty gas canisters Bruce filled for their plan to burn the codification mainframe were left in the van when Graveyard came to pick them up in helicopters much earlier. Here they remain. Jamie looks into the back of the van to confirm Sid’s claim, as if he is wrong by some strange magic, then turns back to the road ahead and mouths a word of alarm as Sid swerves around a slow moving party bus. “Get off the road, ya fucks!”

  “This can’t possibly get any worse,” Jamie cries.

  Practically on cue, a Chicago Police cruiser turns onto the freeway right behind them, its sirens singing, lights flashing red and blue.

  “It’s the police! What do we do now?”

  The question sounds like one plus dolphin equals butter knife to Sid’s ears. They have a flying harbinger of death spewing black flame right on their ass and Jamie wants to know about the police? The police are fucking rodents. Sid could fight the entire CPD by himself. That’s a non-problem right now.

  In a blink, the transient is stationed on the dotted line ahead of the van. Sid yanks the steering wheel to avoid the monster as it lashes out with a taloned hand that slides through the passenger’s side of the vehicle. Sid reaches to his right and pulls Jamie viciously over to the driver’s seat to dodge the raking claws. Pushing the blogger back into place, he glances to the rear of the van and sees that the creature’s claws raked four gashes in the paneling near the back doors. It can cut through steel now. That is disconcerting.

  INT. THE VEIDT INSTITUTE - DAY

  Dave the analyst plops Helen’s laptop case down on the dining table in the rec room. Helen called out to the chopper and had him haul it in. She immediately goes to work unzipping the bag and unfolding the computer from inside.

  “What’s your Wi-Fi password?” Helen demands. Bruce has to smack Sartorius in the arm to make it clear she’s talking to him.

  “Uh-uh-oh,” the doctor shakes into alert from his daze of irrelevance. “It’s hamburgers.”

  “Hamburgers?” Bruce sneers. “That shit ain’t secure.”

  “It doesn’t need to be!” Sartorius says. “We have families in here!”

  “Okay, I’m in,” Helen calls out, ignoring the bickering. “What should I say?”

  “What he said to say. Sid went to Millennium Park. The transient followed him in there and Sid blew him up.”

  “Blew him up?” Helen asks, already typing headers onto her report.

  “I don’t know! Sid doesn’t know how to kill him!”

  “Just say that Kill Team One destroyed the transient by unknown means,” Fleabag suggests. “You don’t have to know how he did it. Maybe he never told you. It’s not like you guys are best friends or anything.”

  INSERT:

  In the afternoon, Kill Team One encountered the unknown aggressor again in the Millennium Park area of downtown Chicago.

  “That sounds like shit!” Bruce says, watching over Helen’s shoulder as she types.

  “I’m not Elmore Leonard, you fuck!” she shouts back. “I don’t do fiction!”

  “Say they ran into him somewhere else and got chased to the park. It sounded like he was in a car.”

  INSERT:

  On the following afternoon, while accompanying subject Chan, Kill Team One encountered the unknown aggressor at a location near downtown Chicago and attempted to evade. The unknown aggressor pursued Kill Team One into Millenium Park, where the kill team was able to kill the creature by unknown means. Kill Team One fled the scene and avoided capture. We were unable to discern his method of engagement he employed to effectively destroy the creature. Subject Chan returned to

  “I need a pronoun!” Helen says. “What pronoun do I use?”

  “This is a real shitty time for that!”

  INSERT:

  Subject Chan returned to his or her residence after debriefing and interrogation by myself, operators Overton and Dunn, as well as Codification Agents Remus, Byers, and Woznicki.

  “That’s it?” Bruce says. “That’s all you got to say?”

 
; “What else would I say?”

  “I don’t know, but we got to make it believable.”

  “It’s believable!” Helen barks back as she clicks the save button.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  EXT. LAKE SHORE DRIVE - DAY

  “Hold on!” Sid says, steering the van around the corner of Monroe and Columbus with a force that slams Jamie against the passenger’s side door. The tires screech and gasoline cans topple in the rear of the vehicle. One big red jug wobbles into the front of the van, between the seats, then rolls back as Sid slams down the gas pedal and takes the van up a flight of steps, ascending the grassy hill up into the Lurie Garden. The van bounces furiously up the steps, narrowly fitting between the cement safety wall beside the stairs and the railing that divides the stairway into two sections.

  The van hops from the concrete at the top of the steps and smacks down on the brick paved roadway leading deeper into the garden. A sandwich sign relaying lots of useful information about the Monarch Butterfly is obliterated under the van’s front bumper. Jamie screams.

  “It’s just a sign!” Sid yells, veering right to avoid a sprawling bed of foliage. A few small rogue trees stick up in the path ahead, which was laid out for pedestrians and not speeding vans attempting to avoid death ghosts.

  The transient appears again in their way, stationed between two short trees like a burning pyre of black flame in the vague shape of a man. Sid hits the breaks and jerks the wheel viciously. He swings the van around in a j-turn that takes out one of the trees. The transient is lost in the spin somewhere while Sid shifts to reverse. The monster phased through the van somewhere in that spin cycle though. Sid checks to see that Jamie remains intact, then sees the transient framed in the windshield as they reverse away at high speed. The monster shakes an angry fist at him.