Rated R (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 1)

by Mike Leon

  “You picked the wrong truck’a hillbillies to fuck with, ya fuckin—” the cowboy stops as he beholds Victor’s startling nudity. He looks back at his friends and laughs. “What the fuck? We got some kind’a freaky faggot here.”

  The truck’s driver laughs with him. “They got all kinds a letters now, Jim-Bob,” he says. “L-G-B-T-B-B-Q. I think this one’s an F, for faggot.”

  Victor laughs as he casually meets the cowboy halfway between the cars.

  The old man taught him and his brother every martial art known to man, and some others—others that are forbidden, thought lost, or impossible. Victor Hansen is a master of karate, judo, jiujitsu, kung fu, krav maga, savate, aikido, muay thai, pencak silat, escrima, sinanju, and a host of others—even the forbidden ansatsuken of myths and legends.

  Victor howls with rage as he drives his fist into the cowboy’s chest, crunching through bone and sinew. The cowboy’s eyes nearly bulge from his head as Victor’s fist breaks through his ribcage. Victor tears the weakling’s still-beating heart from his chest and shows it to him. The man tries to scream, but nothing comes out before he collapses.

  The driver of the truck pulls a gun, a CZ P09 Duty chambered for 9mm with standard magazine capacity of twenty. He aims the gun right at Victor’s eyes with notable stability. This man is an accomplished shooter. Still, it will do him no good.

  Victor Hansen cannot be harmed by bullets.

  It took Victor a long time to figure out why, because the old man never told them. The old man didn’t tell them a lot of things, and undoubtedly there are still secrets to be uncovered, but the bullet question is one he has answered. For years he thought he was simply quite good at dodging them. That eventually became statistically impossible to a ridiculous degree. Then, for some time, he believed a higher power was intervening. He learned the far more mundane truth from a researcher familiar with classified government research projects. The old man equipped his boys with extraterrestrial deflector shields taken from the dead bodies (and some survivors) at a crash site in the forties. Less than ten of the devices are believed to be in human hands, and all of the other known ones are utilized by the inner circle of the New World Order to prevent sniper assassinations.

  The driver fires the entire magazine at Victor as the super killer calmly approaches, takes the gun, bashes the man’s face in with the butt of it, and circles the truck for the other passenger.

  He thinks he’ll get creative with that one.

  EXT. U-STORE IT – NIGHT

  The car stops in front of an outdoor storage unit, one big orange garage door in a row of other big orange garage doors. Sid cuts the engine and jumps out of the car. Lily exits the car on the other side. She hasn’t stopped asking him questions since the house.

  “So these Graveyard people,” she says. “Who are they?”

  “They’re a private military company that works for the New World Order,” Sid says. To Lily, it sounds like a story a hobo would yell from a street corner.

  “There’s no New World Order,” she says. “Guys in tin foil hats made that up.”

  “No. They’re real. I’ve met them.”

  He kneels to check a padlock hanging in front of his shins, affixed to the storage unit door.

  “So Graveyard is like some kind of top secret army death squad?” Lily asks.

  “No,” Sid says. “It’s more than one squad. There are hundreds of them. They’re not part of the United States government. They’re a private military company. They’re contractors—you know, mercenaries. The Order pays them to do their dirty work. The company is run by a guy named Walter Stedman. He’s a complete dick. Those guys at the house were Kill Team Two, his second best team.”

  A feeling of dread fills Lily’s guts.

  “If that was his second best team . . .” she says. “What about the best team?”

  “You’re looking at him.”

  “You were on Kill Team One?”

  “I am Kill Team One.”

  He searches his pants pockets for something, growing increasingly aggravated as he digs deeper with no result.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Lily says. “You’re one guy.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he says. “The designation makes it confusing.”

  “And you’re, like, seventeen.”

  “Eighteen,” Sid says, as he pulls something tiny from his pocket, wrapped in white cloth. He unravels the cloth, revealing a key to the storage unit.

  “How? Are you like genetically engineered? Or a cyborg?”

  “No. I’m just a guy.”

  “Then how do you do the stuff you do?”

  “My dad was the last Kill Team One. He trained us.”

  “Us?”

  “Look, you really don’t need to know.”

  “Yeah. Exposition is lame.”

  He turns the key to release the padlock, which he tosses to the ground at his feet. He slides the garage door open and reveals a big black van parked inside.

  “All you need to know is I’m the ultimate super soldier,” he says. “I used to work for these guys. I ran away. They’ve been hunting me ever since.”

  “This is totally rad.”

  “It’s not rad. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  “What? But you’re, like, super kill-guy! Every guy on the planet wants to be you!”

  “That’s because they watch those stupid movies you like. They think it’s all casinos and gorgeous women. It’s not! It fucking sucks!”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been doing this since I could walk. It’s constant. You never get a break. Somebody’s always trying to kill you. Buildings blow up. The car chases never end. This shit tonight was nothing. Exploding helicopters? That’s a Monday at the office. Last year I killed a werewolf with a toothbrush. A fucking werewolf! A mythological creature and I was just like, eh, marginally impressed. And the gimmicky minions come out of the woodwork like you wouldn’t believe. Let’s see . . . there was a guy with rock skin one time. That was fun. Oh. Here’s one: a French assassin tried to kill me with a laser gun hidden in her vagina. I really think that messed me up for life, by the way. Who does that?”

  “That’s gross.” It’s all she can say. The questions conjured by that last image all overwhelm her at once.

  “Yeah. No shit. And I’m tired of it. I want to be like you people! I just want to sit down, eat a submarine sandwich, watch some Netflix and not worry if somebody is going to throw a thermal detonator through my fucking window.”

  “The action hero just wants to be a regular guy.”

  “Yes!” Sid pulls open the back door of the van and exposes a pile of guns and bombs even more exhaustive than the one he had in his house. “Now, let’s go kill all these fuckers so I can be on my way.”

  INT. HELICOPTER – NIGHT

  Deadeye crouches in the helicopter with his supermassive rifle at his shoulder. Tracker led them here to the middle of a forest in total butt-fuck nowhere and he says this is where they need to be. Deadeye doesn’t see shit, but he trusts the man. Tracker has never been wrong before.

  “There,” Tracker says, pointing through the open chopper door into the night. Miles of trees stretch out between them and the nearest lights of civilization.

  Deadeye searches the trees for signs of movement and sees nothing—just leaves and darkness.

  “Pilot,” Deadeye says. “Get the searchlight on the trees down here.”

  “No!” Tracker interrupts. “Not in the trees. There.” He points again into the distance ahead. That’s when Deadeye realizes he’s not directing them to the woods. What he’s pointing to is much farther away. The Indian’s eyes are just that good.

  Deadeye raises Betsy and peers through the scope. The tiny blur of lights in the distance comes alive. There’s a gas station, a storage park, a cheap motel, and a White Castle drive-thru.

  “Where, Tracker?” Deadeye says. The question is absurd. He has a 5000x magnification lens and the Indian still ha
s to tell him where to look? “Where is he?”

  “The storage park,” Tracker says.

  “You sure?” Deadeye asks, backtracking to the storage park and scanning the rows of orange-painted overhead doors from an angle.

  “His scent is like the bear rife with the blood of a fresh kill.”

  “Whatever you say, chief.” Deadeye laughs.

  He sees a purple Malibu parked in front of one of the doors. It’s five clicks away. Nobody has ever made a kill shot with a rifle at that range. Most marksmen would call it impossible.

  “We need to get closer,” Deadeye says.

  “He’ll hear the chopper,” Tracker says. He waves his hand for them to stop.

  Deadeye looks away from the scope for a moment. He spits his chew into his coffee can and looks off into the tiny blur of lights again with his naked eyes. He shakes his head, snickering to himself as he puts his earplugs in.

  It’s time to make history.

  INT. STORAGE UNIT – NIGHT

  Lily crouches in the back of the van inside the storage garage. She’s holding a canister she identifies as a grenade, but she couldn’t say much more about it. Guns and bombs aren’t really her thing. Sid rustles through the carpet of munitions at her feet. He’s like organizing his guns or something. She has no idea.

  “So what is this thing?” Lily asks.

  “It’s a flashbang grenade,” Sid says, glancing at the thing in her hand.

  “What does it do?”

  “It makes a flash and a bang.”

  “Hence the name . . .” she nods. It makes sense.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what do you do with it?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says, sounding slightly annoyed.

  “Fine, jerk.” Lily puts the grenade down and plops on the van bumper at his back.

  Sid picks up a big black gun and sticks a bullet clip thing in it. Lily thinks she should probably read a book about guns or something if she’s going to hang around this guy.

  “Listen,” he says. “I need you to stay here while I ditch your car. It might throw them off a little.”

  “You’re not going to blow it up or anything?” It might not matter anyway after what the Ghoul did to the roof. It doesn’t take much to total a cheap used car.

  “No,” he sighs. “I’m not going to blow it up or anything.”

  “Is this safe? What if they show up here?”

  “If they show up here, they’ll kill you. Hope they don’t show up here. I’ll be back in four and a half minutes.”

  He turns and walks toward her car, big gun slung over his shoulder. Four and a half minutes? How could he possibly be that precise?

  “’Kay,” Lily says. She doesn’t like this at all.

  Sid steps across the molding line that divides the storage unit from the blacktop parking outside. His foot doesn’t make it down on the pavement before he’s in the air. Something skids across the concrete at his feet. A rock? Did he drop something? Lily isn’t sure.

  “Shit,” Sid grunts. He drops the gun on the ground behind him.

  “What?” Lily says. “What is it?”

  He’s already in the back of the van with her, digging through piles of equipment. Something like a firecracker sounds in the distance.

  “What is it?” she says. “What’s wrong?”

  Clank! The sharp noise of puncturing metal startles her. She looks up and spots a hole in the side of the van the size of a baseball. She turns and sees another hole behind her, on the opposite side of the van, only inches from her head.

  “What did that?” Lily says.

  She hears that distant crack again, but by now she understands.

  “Sniper,” Sid says. “In a chopper five clicks southeast. He’s so far the bullets get here before we hear them.”

  Sid tosses a grenade over his shoulder out into the parking lot. It hisses and emits thick black smoke from under her car. He throws a few more behind it.

  “What are you gonna do?” she says.

  Sid reaches under the seat behind her and pulls out something long and cylindrical, olive colored . . .

  “Is that a rocket launcher?” Lily squeaks.

  Clank! The entire van shakes. Lily squeals. She checks to make sure none of her is missing.

  “I need cover fire,” he says. He snatches up another big black gun from the floor and presses it into her arms.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” she says.

  “Just stick it around the corner and pull the trigger.”

  “And?”

  “That’s it. It’s not rocket science. You go bang bang. I run out there with a MANPADS and helicopter goes boom. I’ve done this a bunch of times.”

  “But . . . but . . .”

  The garage is quickly filling with smoke.

  “I can’t see anything!” Lily says. He’s already gone by the time she gets the words out—vanished in the blanket of black smoke that fills the van and all her surroundings. Lily coughs. She can barely breathe.

  She stumbles out of the van, dragging the gun Sid handed her. She needs to get out of the smoke. Wait. No. That’s a bad idea. The smoke is keeping the guy with the huge gun from seeing her. But it feels like her lungs are on fire.

  She drops to the ground, remembering what they taught her in kindergarten about fire safety. It sort of works—a little bit.

  Okay, it doesn’t really work. It still feels like she’s breathing out of a Pontiac Judge’s tailpipe. She forces herself to stay. If she leaves, she’ll probably catch a bullet through the head. She’s smarter than that.

  Lily feels for the doorframe and determines that she’s in the corner. She’ll do what Sid said. She has to trust him. He knows what he’s doing, and it’s the only way she might get out of this now.

  The gun is still in her hands somehow. She dragged it with her without thinking. She pokes it around the corner with one hand, barely able to hold it up straight. The muzzle wobbles crazily.

  “Okay, Lily,” she says. “You can do this. Girl power.”

  She turns away from the gun and closes her eyes as she pulls the trigger. The gun rattles in her hands. She tries to hang on, but it jumps and kicks and she can’t keep it steady.

  Suddenly, she feels a sharp pain and drops the gun. She rolls onto her back and screams. Her blood is on the floor.

  INT. HELICOPTER – NIGHT

  “Did you get him?” Tracker says, holding his hands over his ears.

  Deadeye scans slowly through the gray for signs of life.

  “I think so,” he answers.

  They won’t know if he hit his target until the smoke clears. If he did, then it’s a world record—another one. Too bad he can’t tell anybody about it.

  “There!” Tracker points.

  “What?!”

  Tracker points into the woods now, somewhere below them. Deadeye raises his enormous rifle again to zoom in on the darkness below. He searches for any sign of movement at all.

  “Where is he? Where?”

  Before Tracker can answer, something flashes down below, an ignition that illuminates a section of trees outside the view of his scope. Deadeye pans left to the source and sees something horrible. It blazes toward him blindingly and he has to look away.

  “Oh, shit,” Deadeye says.

  That’s all he has time to say before the helicopter explodes in a white-hot eruption of flame.

  INT. STORAGE UNIT – NIGHT

  Sid throws down the Stinger SAM on the way back to the storage unit. He enters the garage waving his hands as the smoke thins. This wasn’t much of a challenge in his realm. He’s shot down moving aircraft with a rifle before. Using the stinger, with its heat-seeking laser targeting system, was practically a joke by comparison—and with a stationary target, too. Any child could do it.

  As the smoke clears, Sid sees Lily lying on the floor curled into a fetal position. She’s still breathing. Her right arm bleeds from a gash along the outside of her right shoul
der. He pokes her with his foot.

  “I got shot!” she shrieks.

  “Show me,” Sid says.

  She points to the gash on her arm. Her finger wobbles as she points. She’s quaking with fear.

  “That?” Sid says. “That doesn’t even count.”

  “What? A fucking bullet went through my arm!”

  “Are you kidding? That was a fucking cannon. It would’ve taken your whole arm off if it hit you.”

  “Then what the hell did this, asshole?”

  “I think maybe just the superheated air around the bullet breezed by your arm.”

  “Fuck you, superheated air. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s barely a flesh wound. We don’t have time for this shit.”

  He goes around to the front of the van to check for something he hopes he won’t find. Luck is not on his side: he finds a gaping hole in the side of the van and leans over to look through. He can see the floor on the other side. It goes straight through the engine block.

  “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  “We have to take your car.” Sid scoops up a handful of munitions and carries them out to Lily’s Malibu.

  “My car? Where?” she squeaks, getting up off the floor to follow him.

  “You’re driving,” he says.

  He pulls open the back door of the Malibu and dumps an armload of guns in the back seat.

  INT. COMM ROOM – DAWN

  The comm room at the Graveyard building is a mess. It’s large, with six rows of desks all manned by nerdy guys hunched over a bunch of iMacs. The walls are alive with flat-screen monitors displaying maps and live feeds of cable news networks. This place has always reminded Helen of her old job at the NSA, except their computer labs were bigger. She sticks close to Walter in the sea of nerds.

  “Where is he?” Walter says. His voice is gruffer than usual. Helen slept a bit in the chopper on the way back, but she knows Walter didn’t. His eyes have grown uncharacteristically wild and bleary since last night.