by Mike Leon
Copyright 2014, 2017 by Mike Leon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Author, except where permitted by law.
Cover art by J Caleb Clark
Edited by Rob Smales and Stacey Longo
PLEASE SEND ALL COMMENTS, QUESTIONS AND DEATH THREATS TO:
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THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED TO
ACCOMPANY THIS FEATURE
BY THE MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.
“Los Angeles,” the thundering voice of a faceless narrator bellows as the orange-hued city skyline rolls by. “The city of angels is about to meet the devil.”
A bald man, fifty-something, a patch over his left eye, stands on top of the Ritz Carlton overlooking the Staples Center. He wears epaulets on his shoulders and has a hook for a right hand.
“Good morning, Los Angeles.” He speaks English with an accent that is foreign, but cannot be placed. “My name is Ripper Cabrón. Remember it. Fear it.”
“He holds a city in his grasp,” warns the voiceover ominously.
“My men have hidden forty-six million gallons of VX nerve agent bombs throughout your city. At three o’clock today, I will detonate the devices unless the people of Los Angeles deliver Miss America to me. You have seven hours.”
“The police are powerless,” booms the narrator.
“He’s got us by the balls, Mr. Mayor,” says the chief of police in a meeting room with a dozen men in business suits.
“The citizens will do anything to survive,” rumbles the unseen baritone.
A man in a brown muscle shirt stands at the head of a crowd on the steps of city hall.
“The mayor is protecting some dumb bikini model, but what about the children?” he says. The crowd cheers. Some of them brandish makeshift weapons.
“The government has given up,” the narrator blares.
The mayor, tall, black, dragging his hands through short, cropped hair in the same meeting room as the chief of police, shakes his head. “We’re gonna have to give him the girl.”
“But there was one thing they didn’t count on,” the narrator reveals.
Boom! A car explodes! It flies into the air and falls back down into the middle of the L.A. freeway.
A man in a leather jacket and blue jeans steps out of a flaming building and shoots a mohawk-sporting goon with a pistol. He takes the hand of a beautiful woman wearing a sash that says Miss America. “Don’t worry, Miss America. You’re gonna be safe with me!”
“Who are you?” she cries, as he shoots two more villainous henchmen.
“I’m Jack Reacharound!” he says.
Ripper Cabrón screams in the face of an underling atop the Ritz Carlton.
“You’re telling me your whole squad couldn’t stop one man?” Spittle sprays from Ripper’s mouth. “One man?”
An army general speaks to the mayor at city hall.
“Jack Hardpecs Reacharound is the baddest bastard there is,” says the general. “He’s the only man ever thrown out of the army, the navy, and the marine corps just for bein’ too tough.”
“This summer,” says the narrator.
An M1A1 tank jumps over a low-flying helicopter with Reacharound behind the steering crossbar, while Miss America screams from the open gunner’s hatch.
“Get ready for action!” rumbles the narrator.
Reacharound swings on a rope from the top of a building, smashing through a plate glass window and onto a conference room table, sliding along the top, firing four Uzis, two with his hands and two with his bare feet, killing droves of armed soldiers along the way.
“Get ready for desire,” the narrator growls.
“I thought you could use a little incentive, Mr. Reacharound,” Miss America says. The two of them are alone in a public restroom and she wears only a light pink bra. She undoes the clasp between her shoulder blades, exposing her back, and just a little bit of side-boob. Reacharound winks.
“Get ready for a reach around!” roars the narrator.
“I’m getting too old for this!” yells Reacharound, freefalling from a smoking jetliner in the distance above him. He tears a parachute from the back of a terrorist falling beside him and tosses the man a plastic explosive in trade.
“Rex Octane is . . .” the narrator says.
“Reacharound,” says Miss America, as he holds her in his arms.
“Reacharound,” says the mayor, incredulously.
“Reachaarrrooouuunndd!” screams Ripper Cabrón as a building explodes behind him.
“. . . . Jack Reacharound!” the narrator exclaims.
And now our
Feature Presentation.
EXT. DARK FOREST – NIGHT
The hollow man stands alone. He melds with the dark. He becomes it. The silent shadows blanket a shell filled with so much screaming rage that it seems impossible anything could insulate it at all.
“Come out, Mister Gallardo,” calls a voice with an East Asian accent that would be almost unnoticeable except for the stretching of the honorific into a screeching meeesta. It comes from a man with spotty brown skin and black receding hair that leaves the top of his head mostly uncovered. Thick glasses reflect the beams of the flashlights each time they shine past him. “Come out or we kill the girl, Mister Gallardo.”
The girl he’s talking about is the twiggy five-foot tall child he hauls along in a tight bear hug: twelve-year-old Kat Way. She’s so rail-thin that even the relatively small East Asian man can carry her and keep a palm pressed over her mouth. Still, she has a lot of fight in her for her size. She viciously jerks her head left and right, managing to tear free of his grasp and shout a warning into the woods.
“Run, Mr. Gallardo! It’s a trap!” she shrieks.
Cute kid. Her parents call her Kitty. The hollow man is usually annoyed by children, but this one was nice to him, so he’s here now. It would be a shame if something happened to her.
Kitty’s father is some kind of computer big shot. He has an enormous mansion outside Redmond with two wings, chandeliers the size of minivans, and an Olympic-size swimming pool, which the hollow man was hired to attend in exchange for room and board—all off the books, of course.
Unfortunately, all of that money seems to have attracted the wrong kind of attention. Six masked men came in the middle of the night. The hollow man watched curiously as they crept past the pool house where he stays, cut through a back door into the house, and came back out carrying little Kitty. They left a note on a table demanding twenty million dollars for her safe return.
He usually tries his best to ignore these hassles, but Kitty was always friendly to the hollow man during the many hours she played in the pool and told him about things like cootie catchers and photo bombing (which he was surprised to learn does not involve actual explosives).
There are five men left now, crackling through the woods the way men accustomed to the city always do. They make no effort to conceal their footfalls or the crinkling of their heavy jackets, or the jingling of keys. They do whisper carefully when speaking to each other, but the hollow man hears them anyway.
“We can’t leave yet,” the boss says, struggling to contain Kitty’s flailing body. “If he has seen our faces we will all go down for this.”
“We should kill the girl now and leave the country,” says a slick-haired companion.
“No! We keep walking. He will follow and Chang will get behind him.”
Wrong. Chang is dead. His blood has already grown tacky on the hollow man’s killing hands. He inspects the men from all angles. They have shotguns and handguns, and some knives too. One carries a lead pipe. They are hardly any kind of mercenaries, and quite far from the type of monsters that pose a threat to him.
He takes one of them into the shadows with him.
There is no scream. No struggle. The mangled corpse even stops spurting blood before the others realize their compatriot is missing.
“Where did Lim go?” says the first hunter to notice their number has been reduced.
“I don’t know,” the boss answers.
“Lim!” another man shouts. “Where are you?”
“That idiot probably tripped and fell down the hill,” the boss says.
The hollow man drops the body on top of them. It falls from the tree tops and hits the soil at their feet with a low thud. Blood splatters the shoes of the other men and one man cries out before covering his mouth.
“He’s dead!” says the man with the lead pipe.
“I can see that,” the boss yells.
“His throat is cut to the bone!”
“More money for the rest of us,” the boss says. “Now we split the ransom four ways.”
“Three ways,” the hollow man says. His ghostly murmur carries through the trees and the kidnappers rapidly turn in a desperate attempt to locate the source of the sound. Even if they could pinpoint it, the hollow man isn’t there anymore.
Another is already gone, taken away into the darkness. His shotgun never discharged and now it is just a heavy useless thing in the hollow man’s fingers. He decides to play with them a little. He throws it back to the survivors. It clunks to the dirt and the boss picks it up while the slick-haired man falls to his knees.
“How is this happening?” the kneeler whimpers. “Where is he?”
The boss sets the girl on her feet and pulls a chrome plated Desert Eagle .50 from his jacket. It is one of the largest handguns in the world and looks incredibly awkward in the little man’s hand. He’s holding it all wrong. He has his wrist bent and his thumb on the backstrap and the middle pad of his index finger on the trigger. It looks like the dipshit has never fired a gun before, but none of that matters when he puts the muzzle up to Kitty’s head.
“You come out or I blow her brains out,” the boss yells into the surrounding woods.
“Please let me go!” Kitty screams. “I won’t tell anybody! Please!”
“Where are you, Gallardo?” the boss shouts over her squealing.
“Here!” the hollow man shouts.
The boss instinctively turns in the direction of the voice and blasts off a series of hand cannon shots that rattle the trees. With madness in his eyes he pulls the trigger again and again until the pistol’s magazine is empty and one of his own men is dead, his skull shattered by the very first stray shot.
Only two remain. The kneeling coward wails loudly as the boss turns, searching for the terror encircling him in the dark.
“It’s a monster! It can’t be real!” the slick-haired broken man wails.
“Shut up, you fool!” the boss barks.
The hollow man comes from the dark and takes hold of the boss. He jabs his fingers into the little bastard’s eyes. He takes the Desert Eagle and pistol whips it right through the boss’s teeth. The boss’s spine makes a sickening crack as the hollow man reorients his head to face backward. The boss looks better that way.
Kitty won’t stop screaming. She doesn’t run. She doesn’t fight. She just keeps shrieking at the sight of the ruined carcass as it slumps to the ground with its backward head, broken teeth, gouged eye sockets and emptied bowels. She really seems to be taking it hard considering the guy was just some asshole who would have murdered her.
“Hey,” the hollow man grunts. “Calm down.”
That doesn’t work at all. This is why he doesn’t like kids.
“What are you?” the last man chokes out through snot and drool. There are bits of leaves and dirt mixed in his gelled hair now. Hair gel is a thing the hollow man does not understand. Why bother with it at all? Why not just buzz the hair down so it doesn’t require such absurd maintenance?
The hollow man is not interested in this pathetic coward’s questions. He approaches the broken man soundlessly and takes hold of his arm. He forces the man’s head up and glares down into his terrified eyes with a hundred holocausts of hatred.
“Will there be more?” the hollow man demands. His voice is pure bass tone barbarism.
“More—more what?” the man cries. “Triads?”
“What the fuck is a Triad?”
“What? I don’t . . .”
The hollow man breaks two of his captive’s fingers. He repeats his question.
“Triads! Chinese gang!” the little coward screams.
“Will there be more?” the hollow man says.
“No! It was all Miao’s idea! Nobody else knows! Please don’t kill me!”
“Where do I find Miao?” the hollow man grumbles.
“That is Miao!”
He means the crumpled heap of broken bones and steaming feces on the ground beside them. Good. That means this is all cleaned up. The hollow man draws a weapon from its holster on his belt: a foot-long knife with a straight black blade and brown leather handle. He drives the knife into the base of his enemy’s skull. It makes a sharp crack and the man squeaks. Then the woods grow silent.
“Who are you?” Kitty asks between short frantic breaths.
He’s not Gallardo. Gallardo is just another dead man whose identity he uses. He can’t explain who he really is. He never explains that to anyone. It would just put them in danger.
“The less you know, the better off you are,” he says.
“What does that mean?”
“You know how to get home from here?”
Kitty looks out into the dark woods and shakes her head.
The hollow man points in the direction of the nearest road. She can’t possibly miss it unless she somehow turns completely around in the wrong direction. “You walk that way and don’t stop until you reach the street. Then wait for a car. Got it?”
Kitty nods.
“Good,” he says. “You’ll never see me again.”
INT. VIDEO TIME – DAY
Lily leans on the corner of the dilapidated checkout counter, chewing on a lock of her bottle-black hair next to a small, dust-covered TV/VCR combo unit showing a fuzzy copy of The Lion King.
The video store has four aisles of DVDs running parallel with its cavernous length. The checkout counter is a booth by the front doors with several candy displays taking up most of its surface area. They have all the usual suspects: Snow Caps, Twizzlers, Sour Patch Kids. There is a popcorn machine and a Pepsi® cooler stocked with delicious drinks.
“So what’s his name?” she asks quietly, masked by the noise of Nathan Lane belting out “Hakuna Matata,” so as to avoid being heard by the subject of her inquiry—a broad-shouldered and serious-looking boy in the far corner of the store. He has dark hair, a camouflage hoodie and some ratty blue jeans. He sits at a tiny circular table, at the end of a long row of DVD cases, filling out a job application with a half-length No. 2 pencil. He is roughly her age, maybe a little older; she can’t quite tell.
“Uh, Jerry . . . Jeff . . . Jeremy,” answers Amy. The store manager is a few years older than Lily. She’s blond and cheery and conservative—and there the differences end. In a different world, Lily thinks she could have been Amy—just like her, if it weren’t for what happened back home. It’s a curiosity she sometimes considers.
Lily returns to scrolling through Instagram on her iPhone like she has done for most of the day. There isn’t much else to do here. Video Time only has a handful of customers each week. It’s a poorly kept secret that the place only remains open as a front for the owner to launder money. It’s amazing to Lily that the authorities haven’t caught on yet. The place is a glaring anachronism. They have VH
S tapes for fuck’s sake. It might as well be a haberdashery, or a typewriter shop.
Lily feels a man’s ogling eyes on her and looks up from the phone in time to catch their job applicant staring. He does not immediately shift his gaze away from her when spotted. Instead, boldly looking her over before he returns to his job application.
“I think you should hire him,” Lily whispers to Amy.
“Did you talk to him?” Amy looks up from her early childhood education homework. “He seems kind of weird.”
“He has eyes like a caged animal. I bet he fucks like one.” Lily shoots through the lad with the sort of primal gaze a tiger gives to its next meal.
“Saying stuff like that makes people think you have daddy issues.”
“I do have daddy issues,” Lily says dryly.
“I don’t like him.” Amy grimaces and shakes her head, before poking it back in her homework.
“Come on, Amy,” Lily sighs. “This town is so boring. All the guys here are lame.”
“I’m not going to hire some creeper just because you think he’s hot.” This time, Amy doesn’t even look up from the textbook spread open on the counter in front of her.
“Please? Pretty please?” Lily flutters her eyelashes.
“No.”
“I’ll organize the porno tapes.”
Amy stops, eyebrows rising involuntarily. Lily knew the offer was too good for her to pass up without at least a second thought. The three big Rubbermaid bins of adult movies at Video Time have been in wild disarray as long as Lily can remember—primarily due to Amy’s irrational fear of touching any of the videos inside. This has led to an ongoing problem: the mouth-breathing ham beasts that actually still rent porn on tape have to ask for the bins at the counter, then spend an eternity digging through them while eyeballing the girls lecherously. It’s an awkward dance that could be prevented if they put the tapes in order and just printed out a list of what they have.
“Ew, gross,” Amy says, obviously feigning disinterest. “You’re only seventeen. I think it’s illegal for you to handle that stuff.”