by Mike Leon
Helen peers down below but barely recognizes anything. The lobby floor is covered in debris. The front doors are simply gone, the front of the building nothing but a gaping hole. Scattered sandbags litter the room. Bodies and pieces of bodies stick out from the gaps in debris.
Then she sees him and almost screams.
Victor saunters into the lobby through the destroyed building front. He wears a pale green duster that brushes the destruction beneath his feet, and he carries an M240B slung over his shoulder. Gone is the rugged beard that obscured his face before. He looks down and sees a soldier with a broken leg, attempting to crawl away from the rubble.
“It looks like there’s been some kind of accident here,” he says. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
The injured commando turns up to face Victor. Helen can’t identify him from here. He’s too covered in blood and dirt. Unable to speak, he coughs up something unintelligible.
Victor shoots him in the face with the 240 Bravo. The automatic fire of the machine gun destroys the soldier’s skull, leaving nothing but a puddle of black and red muck attached to his shoulders.
“Take him out!” Helen shouts. She lifts the MP5 at her side and squeezes the trigger to fill Victor with as much of the magazine as she can. The others do the same.
He stands without even blinking, as hundreds of bullets whiz past his frame. A few nick his jacket. None hit him. None of them at all.
It’s simply not possible. None of this is possible.
Victor looks up at the balcony with a wide grin.
“Didn’t they tell you I’m impervious to bullets?” he says.
From a shoulder holster under his jacket, Victor pulls a pistol nearly the length of his forearm. Even from up on the balcony, Helen recognizes the Desert Eagle, a gun so big most professionals consider it nothing more than a novelty. Victor fires three shots, one-handed. Three of Helen’s fire team fall dead.
“It looks like you are not,” Victor says.
Helen drops behind the sandbag barrier and looks around at her remaining team. Coch is still trying to help Hemp.
“This ain’t happening, man,” Hudson says. Then he takes a bullet in the back of the head from over the sandbags. Wet and salty gore splatters Helen’s face.
INT. GRAVEYARD BUILDING – SUB-SUB-BASEMENT – DAY
Plaster falls from the bathroom ceiling onto Sid’s shoulders. With his left hand, he forces a commando’s head into a toilet. With his right, he drives a KA-BAR knife into the commando’s skull. The point of the blade pops out through an eyeball.
Sid turns on another commando outside the tiny bathroom stall—a thin blond man in a red polo shirt under a flak jacket. He’s trying to call for help.
“Command, November! He’s in the—”
Sid jams the KA-BAR into the commando’s guts. He twists the blade. The operator hurls up a pint of shimmering red blood, which drools down his chin onto his shirt.
Clank. Sid hears the unmistakable noise of a rifle being dropped to the floor behind him. He turns.
Another commando holds his hands in the air, almost touching the low ceiling of the little locker room. He steps back, only to bump into the row of urinals behind him. He’s shaggy for a commando, and a little short. He has dark skin and patches of short facial hair not nearly thick enough to be called a beard.
“I’m out,” the shaggy commando says. “Dude, I’m out. They don’t pay me enough for this shit.”
Sid nods at the man, considering the words. He sounds genuinely terrified.
“You want me to hit you or something, to make it look good?” Sid asks.
“No. Fuck it,” the commando says. “I’m done with this shit. I’ll get a job at GameStop.”
“Good luck. They always tell me they’re not hiring.”
“My brother-in-law is a district manager.”
“Really? You think you could get me a job there?”
“Are you for real?”
“Yeah. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is just to get a stupid day job when the only thing on your resume is . . . you know . . .”
Sid pulls his knife from the chest of the dead commando pinned to the wall behind him. It comes out with a spurt of blood.
“I’ll, uh, see what I can do,” says the shaggy commando as he backs his way from the bathroom.
“What’s your name?”
“Bruce . . .” says the commando, shuffling down the hall.
Sid shrugs. He’ll have to check in with Bruce at a later date.
INT. GRAVEYARD BUILDING – TENTH FLOOR - DAY
Helen falls out of the elevator as the doors slide open. She twists, diving for the opposite corridor wall, reaching for the only thing that might help slow him down—a grenade.
She fumbles with the grenade in her shaking hands, but eventually gets two fingers through the ring connected to the pin and gives a tug to jerk it free. She throws the grenade into the elevator before the doors close again. Then she’s on her feet, running down the hallway toward the swarm of black-body-armored operators ahead of her. Walter Stedman is in the middle of the pack, holding a USAS-12 at the ready.
“I take it that means he got past the lobby,” Walter says. His voice is full of dry cynicism and his face is grim.
“They’re all dead!” Helen screams. “They’re all dead!”
“Fuck.”
“What?” one of the contractors says.
“She joking?” another one says. It’s Sheffield, the Alpha Team commander.
Behind her, the elevator doors are blasted half open by the grenade she tossed. The sound of the car screeching down to the first floor and imploding against the cement bottom of the elevator shaft follows.
“She’s not joking,” Walter says.
“We have to blow the stairwell,” Helen says. “It’s the only way to stop him.”
“We have superior numbers in a tunnel fight,” Sheffield says. “He’s not getting through here alive.”
“He’s impervious to bullets!” she shrieks.
“What?” Sheffield says. “Did you get hit in the head?”
“I know what I saw! They emptied all their mags at him and he just stood there!” She’s leaving out the part where she ran like a scared little bitch. She watched him kill them all, some with a knife, and then she ran. She can still see him grinning at her through the elevator doors as they closed. He was in no hurry to catch her, and that worries her the most. “We have to try to blow him up.”
“You’re delirious. Somebody knock her out before she demos the whole building.”
“Hold off on that, son,” Walter says. “I believe her.”
“You want to blow up the building?” Sheffield says, his voice filled with uncertain confusion.
“I think he’s impervious to bullets.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Anything’s possible, son. And Helen Anderson doesn’t tell whoppers.”
“Then what are we supposed to do? Mount up a fucking cavalry charge?”
“I have an idea,” calls a voice behind them. Helen can’t see him through the densely packed fire team, but she knows that voice and she almost screams.
Victor is already there.
“You can all die,” he says.
INT. GRAVEYARD BUILDING – SUB-SUB-BASEMENT - DAY
Sid steps out of the bathroom, dropping a satchel of C4 against the wall across the hallway. He memorized the floor plan of the sub-sub-basement as part of his training. He knows a major support beam runs through here. He’s got five more packs to deliver, and then he can get the fuck out through that tunnel he bombed in the level below.
He is more than a little curious about the noise from above. It sounds like the Battle of Okinawa up there. The combination of sustained small arms fire and explosive detonations makes it almost impossible to hear the shadowy assailant approaching his back . . .
Sid whips around and levels his pistol at the threat: a tall Asian man with flowing black hair and
a skin-tight suit with a Japanese sword sheathed at his hip. It’s the fucking ninja.
“You?” the ninja says, as if he expected someone else. Sid has met this ninja once before, long ago, and only briefly. He seems to have made an impression.
“I hate ninjas,” Sid says. He really does. He hates their inexplicable and contradictory codes of honor, and their dirty illusions, and their disappearing into puffs of smoke, and their weird language with four million different letters that all look like someone had a seizure with a paint brush. Ninjas are just so complicated. They’re everything he is not.
“I shall vanquish you, demon!” the ninja says.
With only twenty yards between them, Sid pops off a shot at the ninja’s nose. He spent the extra tenth of a second to aim. He can shoot the wings off a termite at this distance without even looking down the iron sights, but he also likes to be sure.
The ninja draws his sword from the sheath and smacks the bullet out of the air in one fluid motion. It slams into the end of the hallway, far beyond the dark figure that was its target.
“Bullets do no good,” Sid says, rolling his eyes. “Shocking.”
Sid sighs and brings the M4 up from his back as he holsters the pistol. He does this without ever losing a bead on the ninja’s face. Immediately, he squeezes the trigger of the assault rifle, opening fire on the ninja with 5.56 rifle rounds in full-auto rock-and-roll mode. Sid controls the gun in a way most people assume is a thing of fantasy, placing each shot almost exactly where the last one hit, all thirty of them—in eight seconds.
The ninja’s sword becomes a silver blur, flashing brightly as it twirls. He bats each and every round out of the air. They skitter across the walls and floor as they continue down the hall to slam into the concrete where the corridor turns. Even Sid is impressed.
“Wow,” Sid says. “You are really good at that.” It’s an understatement. This guy might be quicker than him.
“Bullets are like flies to be swatted by those truly in touch with their inner power,” the ninja says.
Sid launches a grenade at his face. That’s insanity at this range, indoors, with a low ceiling, but nobody lives forever. He doesn’t anticipate the ninja letting the grenade blow them both up anyway.
He anticipated correctly. The blade cuts the grenade in half. The halves fall to the floor behind the man’s boots without detonating. Thick black powder spills from the broken casing and hangs in the air, slowly settling to the floor around the ninja.
Sid opens the under-slung M203 grenade launcher below the fore rail of his rifle and dumps out the empty casing from the grenade he just fired. He packs another into the barrel and slides it back to the closed position.
The ninja throws a ton of sharp things at him. Kunai, shuriken, needles: ninja shit. He hates ninja shit. Sid ducks under a kunai and sidesteps a bunch of shuriken, deflecting one with the rifle. All of them are tipped with ninja poison for sure. That’s another thing he hates about ninjas: they put fucking blowfish toxin on everything they touch.
When the projectiles stop coming, he stands and stares. “You done?”
No answer.
He launches the next grenade at the ninja’s stupid fucking face. The blade cuts this one in half, just like the last, but this time something is different. This grenade doesn’t simply come apart and tumble to the floor. No. This one bursts in a spray of amber colored liquid that splatters the ninja’s face and chest.
“What the—” the ninja starts, but it turns to a choking sputter as he begins clawing at his face.
“Tear gas, retard,” Sid says. “That’s what you get for flashing all that chop suey shit at me.”
Sid drops his rifle magazine on the floor and packs the next one into the receiver. He works the charging handle and raises the rifle to his shoulder, but the ninja explodes into a puff of black smoke before Sid can squeeze the trigger.
He stands for a moment, searching the smoke for any signs of his target before concluding the ninja is really gone.
He shakes his head as he picks up the rest of the satchel charges. “Where do they find these guys?”
The sound of an explosion on one of the levels far above continues into a screeching cacophony that races down to meet him. Thirty yards ahead, beyond where the ninja stood, the elevator doors explode out into the hallway. An eruption of soot fills the entire corridor.
Now he has to know what they’re doing up there.
INT. GRAVEYARD BUILDING – TENTH FLOOR - DAY
Helen watches Victor down the barrel of a gun. She’s lying on the floor surrounded by cadavers, again. Victor cut down both fire teams with a machine gun while all of them shot back hundreds of times—only to miss hundreds of times, like something out of a bad nightmare.
There’s so much blood on the floor Helen smears a trail through it as she tries to scoot up behind him. She doesn’t know how she survived the onslaught of bullets killing everyone around her, but she did, and now she has his back.
Victor holds Walter Stedman up against a wall at the end of the hallway. The Graveyard commander is already riddled with bullets, and he spits blood all over Victor’s face.
“Too easy, Walter,” Victor says. “I told you I’d kill you all.”
“I’m not dead yet, you fucking abortion,” Walter says.
Victor cackles madly in Walter’s face.
Helen inches ever closer. She’s trying not to breathe. During all the shooting, Walter dropped the case on the floor. It rests now only a few feet from Victor’s heels, in a lake of blood a quarter inch deep. Helen makes her way for the case, not for the kill. She already learned that shooting at him is futile and fighting him hand-to-hand results in a closed casket funeral for anyone who tries. She’s certainly not going to try. Walter had to waive her close quarters combat requirements to hire her on at the company.
She can’t kill him, but she can grab that case and run.
“I’m not even going to kill you, Walter,” Victor says. “I’m going to leave you here so you can watch me turn all of this into a predator’s paradise. No more sympathy. No more charity. No more weakness. A world where none but the strong survive, and the strong thrive. The killers will thrive.”
Helen leans forward. She can almost reach the case. Just a little farther.
“It’s suicide,” Walter says. “You’ll murder the world.”
Victor shrugs. “Nobody lives forever.”
She wraps her fingers around the briefcase handle and lifts. As she pulls it up off the floor, it emits a slimy pop from the suction of the blood pool enveloping it. Uh oh.
Victor turns.
“I knew you were there,” he says. He lurches forward so fast she doesn’t see him coming. She feels the boot in her chest before anything else and she’s face up on the floor. Her chest is on fire. It’s a struggle to draw breath.
“I was saving you for later,” Victor says. “I want to eat your pretty skin while you watch.”
INT. GRAVEYARD BUILDING – TENTH FLOOR – DAY
Sid pokes his head around the stairwell doorway and sees the last thing he ever expected to find here or anywhere else—a dead man, his brother, Victor Hansen.
Victor is dressed in a signature pale green duster just like Sid remembers, and that’s half the reason he recognizes him from behind. The other half is the squealing woman he’s choking against the wall—practically an accessory for his brother.
They’re surrounded by dead Graveyard operators. This was a real battle. Actually . . . no. This was just Victor. Sid can tell by the excessive mutilation of the bodies.
Walter Stedman is here too. Fuck that guy. Things did not end well between them, and there’s no question in Sid’s mind that Stedman is the one who gave Kill Team Two the order to hunt him down.
“I guess if you can’t keep your panties on,” Victor says, “we might as well get started now.”
“I’m not gonna let you have the box,” the woman says. On the floor behind them sits a hefty metal briefcase
smeared with blood.
“Walter forgot to tell you something else about me. Besides being impervious to bullets.”
Victor draws a foot-long knife from his belt. The blade is wavy like a serpent—another signature of his. He slides the blade between her thighs and presses the tip against her crotch.
“I take whatever box I want,” Victor says.
She screams.
Sid shrugs and steps back into the stairwell. Not his problem. Time to—what did that space pirate guy say in the movie Lily showed him? Blow this thing and go home?
“When you scream like that it makes me so hard,” Victor says. “Do it again.”
Nothing. She refuses to scream. A mistake. With Victor, you give him what he wants or it gets so much worse.
“I like a challenge,” Victor says. “Let’s see if you scream when I cut your tits off.”
Sid stops on his way down the stairs. He has seen this all before, across the ocean in a gallery of horrors, years ago. He did nothing then. There was nothing he could do then, just like there is nothing he can do now. It would be a willful tactical error for him to intervene—a huge mistake. There’s just something he can’t place about this that brings his rage to the forefront.
Even without any new screams in the air, he can hear the memories of hundreds from the past. He can see their faces. The worst is the first one—the one Victor took apart in front of him. She was barely grown. It shouldn’t bother him. It’s stupid. It’s just more bodies on top of the pile. The old man trained him never to look back. An animal never looks back and neither should you, the old man would say.
Keep going, he tells himself. Keep going. You’re going to blow this place up in a few minutes anyway. Everyone up here will be dead. Just walk away. It’s what that Han Solo guy would do. Right? Right?
He turns back up the stairs and walks out into the hallway. He can’t explain why. It’s easily the stupidest thing he’s ever done. He’s just so angry he can’t stop himself.