by Mike Leon
He snatches the cigarette out of her mouth. By now, the buzzing has become a thunderous war drum. He throws the cigarette down on the floor and stomps it out under his boot heel.
“Hey!” she says.
“They’re coming. Stay down and stay quiet, and you might live through this.”
He’s telling her a lie—a damned lie.
INT. SHATTERED HOUSE – NIGHT
Lily can see nothing but black. She can’t hear much either. The helicopter outside sounds unnervingly close. She feels around in the dark for Sid, for the table, for a way out; anything.
“Sid?” she yells. “Where are you? I can’t see!”
Crash! The sound of glass shattering makes her spin instinctively. It was here in the room with her, but she sees nothing. Someone else is here with her. She nearly screams, but she thinks it is best to stay quiet.
Then two loud cracks stab at her ears and a lightning flash illuminates the room. It doesn’t last long enough for her to make out anything. Darkness again. Her ears ring like she just walked out of a Cannibal Corpse concert. She can feel her heart pounding.
Smash! Crack! Crash! More feet stomping on the floor here in the room with her. Then more shots. She covers her ears. It’s so loud it hurts.
Someone slams into her and she screams. She’s sure this is it. This is the moment where she dies. She forces herself up from the floor and wipes her eyes. She’s all wet now.
A jet of flame erupts through the back window and sets fire to the ceiling. She can see now, and it’s a scene of unadulterated horror.
A soldier in black clothes grabs her shoulder. A foot-long knife juts from his throat and a dark red spray gushes into her face. She is already bathed in blood. It’s in her hair and her mouth. She can taste it now. She screams again.
Sid elbows the soldier in the face, knocking him to the floor. He pokes the muzzle of a machine gun into the guy’s chest with one hand and holds down the trigger. There’s so much blood. In his other hand, he’s holding the severed head of another commando. Lily can see some of the exposed spine sticking out from the stump of the neck.
“We have to get out of here,” Sid says. “These are Graveyard operators.”
“Who?” Lily yells. Her ears are still ringing.
The dead guys on the floor are dressed all in black army clothes with body armor and helmets. Some of them have patches on the shoulder with a big white Jolly Roger, only the skull has fangs like a vampire.
A second jet of flame blasts through another rear window into the kitchen, setting more of the ceiling ablaze.
“I’m having a barbecue!” someone shouts from behind the house. He has some kind of accent, maybe English.
Sid looks back at the window and growls.
“This looks a little undercooked!” Sid yells. “I’m sending it back!”
He hurls the severed head out the window.
A man in a long black coat appears in the window only a second later. His face is obscured behind a thick plastic breathing mask, like a firefighter would wear. He’s holding a big gun with a hose attached to a tank strapped to his back. It’s a fucking flamethrower.
“There you are, cocksucker!” he says.
Lily screams. Sid grabs her by the shoulder and shoves her face down into the floor as he flips the kitchen table over in front of them, shielding them both from an onslaught of flame. All around them, ammo cooks off and explodes. It sounds like popcorn.
“He’s going to kill us!” Lily screams.
“That asshole?” Sid says. “He’s a little bitch.”
Smash! Behind them, the front door bursts from its hinges and falls to the floor like a piece of timber. A behemoth figure steps through the threshold into the hallway. He must be nearly eight feet tall, with legs like tree trunks. He’s covered in black armor. His face is a screaming skull.
“Fresh meat!” he says.
“Now that asshole is a different story,” Sid says.
Sid levels the machine gun at the monster in the front door and rattles off an entire magazine into the thing. The behemoth doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow down. He produces a machete the size of a Viking broadsword from his back. He’s coming for them.
“We’re trapped!” Lily shrieks. More volcanic death blazes overhead.
“Stay with me!” Sid says. “We’re going that way.”
He motions to his left, but she has no idea what the fuck he means. There’s nothing there but an empty room. It’s a dead end. He continues to fire shots into the monster’s skull-face, one at a time. It has no effect.
“What way?” Lily yells.
Sid whips the gun around and launches a grenade at the wall. The explosion is deafening. In an instant, the room is filled with acrid black smoke. She’s blind again. She’s jerked off her feet by her arm and then she’s stumbling through the house, just trying to keep up as she’s pulled along.
EXT. SHATTERED HOUSE – NIGHT
Sid shoves Lily into the dirt outside and pulls a .45 automatic from his pants. He shoots that fire-spraying bastard in the fucking kneecaps and stomps forward to tear him limb from limb.
“Bollocks,” the fallen Arsonist manages to say, lifting his flamethrower to set Sid on fire. He’s far too slow. Sid snatches the end of the gun as the Arsonist squeezes down on the trigger, and a jet of flame spews into the air to engulf the helicopter hovering just above the house. The helicopter jerks to the right, then spins wildly out of control. The chopper veers deeper into the woods, the tail circling the rest of the vehicle, a fiery pinwheel of death, before it slams into the trees and explodes in a massive fireball.
The Arsonist screams as Sid feeds him the business end of the flamethrower.
“I hope you like it extra spicy,” Sid says. He pulls the trigger and incinerates the Arsonist’s face and insides. He never liked that guy.
Sid turns just in time to see a stone tomahawk spiraling toward his head. He catches it. The tomahawk’s owner approaches him from the trees. Tracker points at him as he raises another one of the crude weapons.
“I challenge you to the blood duel of the Crow people,” Tracker says. Sid has no idea what he’s talking about and he doesn’t give a fuck.
“Whatever,” Sid says. “I don’t have time for this.”
He fires off a bunch of .45s at Tracker and the Indian leaps behind a tree.
The Ghoul comes around the corner of the house, growling and gibbering about meat. Sid can’t fight them all this way. He snatches Lily’s hand, dragging her to her feet. He pulls her around the other side of the house while shooting at Tracker. After a few dozen yards she manages to kick her cumbersome shoes off and keep up with him on her own.
“Why do you always run from the skull guy?” Lily says.
“He’s bulletproof!” Sid shouts. “Bulletproof guys are a pain in the ass!”
When they turn the corner into the front yard, they see something Sid expected but still finds disappointing now that it’s for certain. The old pickup truck is a blazing inferno.
“Shit.” Sid looks farther down the dirt driveway to spot Lily’s purple Malibu in the dark, somehow unnoticed when the Arsonist set his car aflame.
“We’re taking your car,” he says.
“I left my keys in my purse!”
Sid smashes the driver’s side window. He dives through into the car and shoots out part of the steering column.
Lily runs around the vehicle and jumps in the passenger side, as he begins furiously rubbing bare wires together.
“You can hotwire a car?” she says.
“Easy,” he responds.
Sid doesn’t need to look up to know the Ghoul is coming. The cars are parked closer to the side of the house they came out on, and so the man simply turned and went the other way to intercept them.
“Uh, Sid,” Lily says nervously. “That guy is coming.”
“I know.”
Sid rubs the wires together again. Nothing. Again.
“He’s getting
closer,” Lily says.
That fucking monster never runs. He’s never in a hurry. “I know!”
From the corner of his eye, Sid can see the shape of the armored giant coming for them. That huge machete is out and raised in the air like the blade of a guillotine.
“Sid! Sid!” Lily screams.
The car starts as the machete cuts through the roof. It stops only millimeters from Lily’s nose. She screams again, curling lower in the seat.
Sid throws the car into reverse and the sound of screeching tires fills the air. The machete is ripped free of its steel trappings by the monster’s grip as the car lurches backward.
INT. LILY’S CAR – NIGHT
Lily feels the bridge of her nose to see if she’s bleeding—not that she could tell with the amount of gore already splattered all over her. She looks ahead and sees the car is moving dangerously fast on a gravel drive. She snaps her seatbelt on and braces herself against the dashboard.
“What the fuck was that?” she yells. “Who are those people? Why are they trying to kill you?”
“They’ll try to kill you too now,” Sid says. “You know too much.”
“What? I can’t hear anything!” Lily screams. “I think I have permanent tinnitus!”
“Pussy.” He shouts his next words. “I said, they’ll try to kill you too now! You know too much!”
“I don’t know anything!”
“You saw them. That’s already too much!”
“I was minding my own business and the next thing I know I’m being hunted by the Cobra Commander’s goons!”
“Yeah, you’re real innocent. You just had sex with me so I would kill a guy for you!”
“I didn’t think this would happen! Why the fuck would anybody think this would happen? Those guys were like a whole team of bad action movie clichés! The only thing missing was the guy who deflects bullets with a sword!”
Sid turns to her, alarmed.
“How do you know about him?”
“What?” Lily’s not sure he’s following the same conversation she is. “I don’t . . . I. What?” She sits back in her seat. Her heart races faster than the car; she thinks she’s hyperventilating. She breathes into her hands. He can’t possibly be implying that there is really a guy who can do that.
Something occurs to her—something maddening. Maybe Kayla was right.
“You really are a vampire!” she says.
“What?” he says.
“You’re super strong and you live alone in the woods. I’ve never seen you eat real food. You’re the undead—cursed to drink the blood of the living for all eternity. Oh, God.”
“Seriously?”
“Make me like you. Turn me. I’m ready for eternal undeath! Drink!”
For the first time, he laughs for real—not the fake chuckle she heard him force when he was trying to pass himself off as normal. This is a wild, ominous, predator cackle. This is really him.
“You’re being ridiculous,” he says. “There’s no such thing as vampires.”
He’s right. She did sound ridiculous. She sounded like a stupid little girl.
“Then how do you explain this?” Lily shouts. “How are you so good at killing people?”
“Lots of practice.”
EXT. SHATTERED HOUSE – NIGHT
Helen hangs onto a rail in the chopper as it hovers above the treetops. Ahead of her, Walter grabs a line and rappels down to the grass outside the smoking ruins of the old farmhouse. She looks back at Deadeye, the kill team’s world-class marksman, and his absurdly large rifle. She asked him about it once. It used to be a Barrett rifle, but he modified it into something else entirely. Everyone just calls it Betsy.
Deadeye winks at her and spits a mouthful of chaw into a coffee can.
“He’s pissed,” he says.
Helen sighs. She grabs the line and follows the commander down to the ground. The fire that destroyed the house has cooled to a smolder, and the only illumination is from the spotlight on the choppers.
She hits the ground next to a charred cadaver she’s pretty sure used to be Lonnie Pitts. She pokes the corpse with her foot. Pitts was a strange man, a sick man maybe, and she won’t miss him.
Tracker approaches them from the heavy tree cover surrounding the house. Walter shouts angrily over the helicopter blades.
“What the hell happened here?” Walter says.
“He went north in a car,” Tracker says. “He has a girl with him. The Ghoul chased them. All the others are dead.”
“You were supposed to wait for me to get here!” Walter rages. His forehead looks like it might burst.
“The Arsonist wouldn’t wait,” Tracker says, his stoic demeanor unfazed.
An operator hops off the chopper and runs toward them holding a handheld radio and headphones.
“God damn it, Lonnie!” Walter screams. “How many times did I tell you to keep it in your fucking pants?”
Walter draws a Sig 9 from a shoulder harness under his jacket and fires most of the magazine into the Arsonist’s burnt corpse. Helen leaps back and shields herself instinctively. “There! You fucking happy now, you son-of-a-bitch?”
Walter inhales deeply as he puts the gun away. Tracker never blinked the whole time. The operator with the field radio leans away in fear.
“Tracker,” Walter orders. “Get on the chopper with Deadeye and find the kid again. He couldn’t have gone far.” He turns his angry attention to the radio man without speaking any words.
The radio man holds out the handset and Walter snatches it away. He pushes the headphones against the left side of his face and answers with an angry “What!”
He pauses for a moment, listening with his hand pressed against his head. Helen watches as his face, red and enraged, turn pale white.
“What do you mean, he’s out?”
EXT. COLORADO – NIGHT
There are two kinds of people in this world: Victor Hansen, and weaklings that must be purged. Victor wants to throw every baby through a jet engine just to hear the sound it makes when it hits the turbines. He wants to put a bullet between the eyes of God. He wants to clog volcanos with bodies. He wants to piss a rain of acid from the top of the tallest building onto a crowd of virgins just to see their meat melt. He wants to collapse the sky itself just to pull survivors from the rubble, offer them a few seconds of false hope, then rip out their intestines and run.
He was made to kill-and he loves it.
For the first time in two years, Victor is free from that plastic fucking box the old man put him in. He feels soft now. He hadn’t killed anyone in so long he’d almost forgotten what it felt like. He doesn’t want that to ever happen again.
He grips the wheel of the Jeep he stole upon his exit from ADX. There were a few trucks outside he could’ve hotwired, but he passed on those and instead waited for an occupied vehicle so he could kill the driver. The Jeep’s driver was a middle-aged woman with graying hair. Victor crushed her skull under his heel before he took this ruggedly stylish Wrangler Sahara, with its legendary Jeep® brand capability. Now he’s in the wind.
They will undoubtedly track him, and the Jeep will make that easier, so he needs to change cars soon. He has plans. First, he needs to get to weapons. The easiest way is to make it to one of the old man’s storage lockers. Victor’s father was obsessed with contingencies and emergencies. He made the boys memorize hundreds of code words and meeting sites, and stashed heavy military hardware at a host of secret locations across the country. The closest is in Santa Fe. Hopefully, Victor’s idiot brother hasn’t already looted all the good stuff from that particular locker. Sid is likely still hanging out near the locker in Morston, which is several states away, but there’s no way to know if he came through Santa Fe already while Victor was imprisoned.
Assuming he can load up on machine guns and explosives at the Santa Fe locker, Victor’s next step is to hit Graveyard right in their dangling gonads when they’re not ready for it. They’ll expect him to keep running. Ne
ver do what they expect. Deception is key. Whatever the enemy thinks should be wrong, and whatever the enemy knows absolutely needs to be wrong.
At the Graveyard building, he’ll kill everyone, then blast his way into Walter’s vault on the top floor. That vault is filled with all kinds of nifty toys Walter and his predecessor picked up during their secret operations, but most importantly, the thing Victor wants most of all: the Lindemann device. The Lindemann device can change the world into exactly what Victor wants—a place where there is no more room for weakness. Where strength is all that matters, and Victor is the strongest.
Somewhere along the way, he’ll find the old man and kill him for what he did.
Before any of that, he will need another car, and the tiny red dots of taillights in the distance ahead signify a perfect opportunity to acquire one. Victor presses harder on the gas, accelerating through the mountain landscape to close in on the vehicle. It grows in his view from tiny specs into a large older-model diesel pickup equipped with a push bar and search lights mounted on a steel frame above the cab. Victor only slows the Jeep when it’s inches from the truck’s bumper. He honks the horn repeatedly, chuckling quietly to himself as he does so.
A hand emerges through the cab’s rear window, flipping Victor a middle finger over the truck bed. The truck veers left and crosses the center line. Victor laughs harder as he pounds on the gas, bringing the Jeep up next to the truck. A man in a down vest and cowboy hat rolls down the window to call Victor a faggot.
Victor stares coldly into the cowboy’s eyes and presses his lips together to give him an exaggerated kiss with only the cool Colorado air rushing between them. He never breaks eye contact. That agitates the cowboy further. Victor points at the man, performs the pantomime for sucking a dick, then points to the side of the road. He slows the Jeep and pulls over to the brim. The huge truck pulls to a stop fifty yards ahead of him.
The cowboy emerges from the passenger’s side of the vehicle, raving and waving his hands. Victor opens the door and steps from the Jeep, still stark naked from his imprisonment in the box. Two more men come from the truck.