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

by Mike Leon

  “Hi,” Lily says. “Do you have a phone here I could use? It’s an emergency.”

  “Do you need an ambulance?” the administrator says. “You don’t look okay, honey.”

  “No. I just need to use your phone.”

  “Well, all right.” The administrator pushes a boxy looking hardline telephone across the kiosk, turning it to face Lily. “Dial nine to get out.”

  Lily picks up the handset with her good hand and tucks it between her ear and shoulder as she dials. She hears the familiar ringing through the line.

  “Please just answer,” she whispers into the microphone.

  “Where are you?” Sid hisses over the phone. He sounds angry, but she doesn’t care. She’s never been so glad to hear his raspy death grunt voice.

  “I fucked up,” Lily says. “I’m at the Galleria, where the movie theater is. I need you. I—”

  And then she sees him.

  His combat boots impact the tile in slow motion, each footfall accompanied by pounding orchestral notes. His pale green duster trails behind the boots. His pasty yet muscular chest flashes between the lapels of the duster, exposing only the middle four letters of a big black word tattooed across it: Pego. His terrible grin stretches from ear to ear, exposing the teeth of a predator. The gun slung over his shoulder looks like it could level a city. His piercing blue gaze meets hers.

  She screams.

  “He’s here! He’s here!” she shrieks before she drops the phone.

  Victor rips the pin from a hand grenade with his teeth, throwing it, left handed, into the middle of the crowd around the fashion show.

  Lily has her back turned when she hears the blast, but she knows a dozen people just died. The machine gun drowns out everything else in the mall: the Muzak, her own frantic panting, and hundreds of terrified screams.

  INT. GALLERIA – DAY

  The glass doors leading into the mall are cluttered with advertisements and notices of mall hours and directives not to smoke or bring weapons, but all of them are outshone by the bright orange word Facists painted across the doors. It is spelled incorrectly, and lengthy orange fingers extend downward where the paint ran from overuse.

  Sid pushes his way through the doors and into a hellish nightmare. Further down the hall, a flimsy portable stage is surrounded by a carpet of bodies so thick that no full square of the aqua-gray tile can be seen beneath it. Ahead of him, a mall cop approaches. The man has buzzed hair and thick sporting glasses banded to his head. The radio on his white uniform shirt crackles with the shouting of emergency personnel over an ambiance of wailing death.

  “You can’t go this way, sir,” the mall cop says, before his face twists into surprised confusion at the sight of Sid’s assault rifle and other weapons. He is equipped with two handguns, a combat knife, and a ballistic vest with three M67 frag grenades latched to its MOLLE webbing.

  “The fuck I can’t,” Sid says.

  The mall cop reaches to tackle him, but before Sid can put a KA-BAR in his throat, the hapless security guard is knocked from his feet by a blur of force that is the ninja’s flying dragon kick. The ninja’s boot heel connects with the mall cop’s chin, sending the poor bastard head over feet, rolling like a tumbleweed down the hallway.

  “Mall cops.” Sid shakes his head.

  “We must move quickly,” Tanaka says.

  Sid nods.

  “You take the bottom floor,” Sid says as the two of them dash forward toward the dead and dying. “I’ll take the upstairs.”

  He hasn’t seen a bloodbath like this since Afghanistan, when Kill Team Three tried to take him out with a Vulcan cannon in a crowded cafe. He steps over most of the bodies, but has to walk on some. One squeals under his foot, a man with tattoos covering his arms. A torso in a black, flower patterned dress claws her way from the mass of corpses down the corridor, leaking a bloody trail from the jagged dangling mess where her lower half once was.

  A tall girl with diamond jewelry comes around the corner in front of him, carrying some very impractical shoes and wiping blood from her broken nose. She appears disoriented.

  “Which way to the escalator?” he barks at the girl.

  She points as she sniffles, then collapses in his wake. Sid charges onward.

  INT. GALLERIA – DAY

  The vicious growling of the pale horse fills the mall corridors. Lily hears him calling her out from in front of the store.

  “I saw you go in one of these stores, Lily,” Victor shouts. “Come on, Lily. Come out to play.”

  She sits on the floor inside a place called Sports-Collect-A-Mania, next to a large display of baseball player bobbleheads. The store is lit with obnoxious florescent lights and furnished with cream-colored metal shelving.

  The MacGuffin remains in her grip, which has turned to iron since she began running from death incarnate. She can’t be sure if that’s an extension of her newfound resolution to die before giving it up, or simply because her broken hand is so swollen it will no longer open.

  She ducked in here when she realized she was never going to outrun him while lugging the MacGuffin. She probably couldn’t outrun him without it either. So far, her hiding place has proven effective.

  “There’s a problem with your strategy here, darling,” Victor shouts.

  He fishes something from the backpack hanging from his left shoulder, and throws it into the adjacent store.

  Lily watches him through little space between two bobblehead boxes. She’s deep in the sports store, and he’s all the way out in the corridor, seemingly unable to determine which shop she entered. He’s too smart to go into any one looking for her and risk her slipping past him. Instead, he stands outside, waiting. She’s trapped.

  He throws another object into the Forever 21 across the hall.

  “Your problem is that the case is bombproof,” Victor says. “You are not.”

  Lily’s eyes widen as she realizes what he’s doing.

  “So,” Victor continues. “You can come out and give me the case, or I can blast all these stores to ribbons and drag it out of the splatter that used to be you.”

  A loud smack startles her, as something lands on the tile only a few feet away. It’s a bomb.

  “The choice is yours,” he says. “You have thirty seconds until I push the button.”

  She has to make a break for it.

  Lily shifts to her knees and toes. She peers out through the bobbleheads again. Victor remains in the same spot. He’s holding a detonator exactly like the one Sid used to blow up the Graveyard building.

  Lily searches the room for anything she could use to hurt him. If she’s going to die, she’s going to die fighting. What kind of weapon would be in a sports collectible store? A hunting knife, maybe? A golf club? No. She practically smacks herself when she sees it. She tiptoes over to the cash register a few feet away and plucks an aluminum baseball bat from a display stand behind the counter.

  Wielding the bat in her good hand and lugging the MacGuffin in the other, Lily sneaks as quietly as she can to the front of the store.

  She ducks behind a table covered in baseball cards sealed in plastic containers. She doesn’t see Victor anymore. He might have gone in one of the other stores. Now is her chance.

  Lily stands and dashes for the mall corridor. The nearest exit is only a few hundred feet to her—

  Smack! A fist bashes into her chest so hard that her legs come out from under her and she falls flat against her back. Her lungs shrink three sizes and she clutches her sternum.

  Victor snatches her up, setting her on her feet with all the effort of a child picking up a Barbie doll. Still wheezing and unable to breathe, Lily takes a desperate swing at him with the bat. He catches the bat and tears it from her grip with minimal effort. His boot heel crunches into her ribs and knocks her flying into a Pepsi® machine in the middle of the mall corridor.

  Then he’s up against her.

  “I like you,” he says. “Very feisty.”

  “Someone he
lp!” Lily screams.

  “Your mom is a real smooth ride,” Victor says, as his left hand invades Lily’s panties. “But I can’t wait to try the newer model.”

  “What did you do to her?” Lily cries.

  “Oh. Shush. Shush.” He puts his finger to her mouth. “I only made a few modifications.”

  “Please don’t hurt her anymore. If you let her go, I—I won’t fight,” she says. She feels the words coming out of her mouth, but she’s not really there. It’s just an involuntary thing her body is doing to keep her alive. She pets his crotch with her unbroken hand. “I can give it to you real good.”

  Victor unleashes a rabid cackle.

  “There’s nothing you can give me that I wouldn’t rather take.” He licks her face from chin to forehead. His breath stinks like hot road kill.

  Lily spits blood in his face.

  He grins.

  “Hey,” he says. “What’s that behind your ear?”

  Victor withdraws his left hand from her underwear and reaches behind her ear. Lily’s stomach drops. Her heart pounds. She’s certain the punchline to this stupid joke will be her bloody death.

  “It’s—” he whips his hand around in front of her nose. The object he grasps is a severed finger. It is wearing one of her mother’s rings.

  Lily starts to scream, but Victor forces the finger into her gaping mouth.

  “Eat it, cunt! Eat it, and a part of Mommy will be with you forever!”

  “Face me, demon!” calls someone Lily did not know was a part of the conversation.

  Victor turns his attention to the unknown challenger and Lily spits out her mother’s severed finger, gagging as it leaves her lips.

  Her white knight is a tall Asian man with flowing black hair and a sword hanging at his side. His eyes are wrapped in a long bandana, the ends of which dangle past his shoulders. A ninja? A blind fucking ninja? No. It’s some kind of hallucination . . .

  “The ninja!” Victor growls excitedly.

  Okay. It really is a ninja.

  Victor lowers Lily to the floor, turning back to her briefly. “You be a good girl and wait here,” he says, before spinning to face the ninja. Lily attempts to crawl away, but her body moves like a poorly orchestrated marionette. Her chest throbs and burns. Breathing is a struggle. Her hand, now a purple fixture permanently molded around the grip of the MacGuffin, sends shooting pains up her arm as she tries to push herself to her feet. She shrieks as it gives way and she falls against the floor.

  Behind her, Victor shoots at the ninja with a little machine gun. Lily watches as the ninja deflects the bullets like he’s in The Matrix or something. What the fuck?

  She tries again to stand, going to her knees first using her other hand. Moving from a prone position makes her core feel like it might snap. She looks back again.

  Victor charges the ninja, swinging the metal bat he took from her. The ninja whips his sword, taking the end off of the bat. Victor lunges, attempting to stab the ninja with the sharply shaven lip of the bat. The ninja twirls his blade, slicing the bat into perfect cylindrical sections, like a weenie thrown through a jet engine.

  “Holy fuck,” Lily says. The ninja might win this thing.

  She doesn’t want to stick around to find out. She forces herself up. Fortunately, her legs are relatively undamaged and able to support her once she stands. She limps forward as fast as she can press herself, moving for the closest way out of this nightmare.

  INT. GALLERIA – SECOND FLOOR – DAY

  The upper mall corridor overlooks the first floor all the way around. Sid hears the sound of a 9mm MAC-10 submachine gun up ahead and he knows he is going the right direction. He also knows he’s on the wrong floor.

  He runs along the corridor, looking over the railing down to the floor below. As he closes in on the sounds, he sees flashes of gunfire.

  The ninja, sword drawn, does battle with Sid’s brother. Beyond them, he sees Lily running away with the case. Sid hangs his M4 over the railing and squeezes off a few shots at Victor. His brother glances up and rolls his eyes.

  Victor pulls his foot-long kris knife, using it to catch the ninja’s sword midstroke. He pulls another identical knife and stabs at the ninja’s chest. Tanaka leaps away, avoiding the attack.

  Victor holds his knives outstretched, like a snake’s fangs, as he circles the ninja. Sid fires again at his brother, and again hits nothing but the mall floor.

  He needs to find a way down to the first floor, fast. It’s possible the two of them could beat his brother if they gang up on him. Alone, however, the ninja is fighting a losing battle. Sid can tell from here Victor isn’t even trying.

  He slaps another magazine into the feed on the M4, and is immediately distracted by someone yelling at him. He turns to see, not just one person, but a small crowd of mall patrons; a woman in a business suit, an older man with a Denver Broncos cap covering his white hair, a boy with green hair who must hold up his pants by the crotch as he runs, and a short chubby woman with skin-tight black pants and a white T-shirt. They are led by a huge man with a bushy caterpillar mustache and an unusually skinny mall cop.

  “Take out the gunman!” yells the huge man with the mustache as he lumbers across the corridor toward Sid. He is six foot nine, by Sid’s measurement—a measurement that is seldom wrong, and he has muscle packed on like a professional bodybuilder.

  “What the fuck?” Sid says, raising a bewildered eyebrow to this ragtag collection of misfits assailing him. These people picked the wrong fight. He has three seconds as they approach, more than enough time to double tap the whole group. He zeroes the rifle on the big man’s forehead, but then stops. It just seems . . . unnecessary.

  He shoulders the M4 as Mustache lunges for him. He grabs the huge man, one hand around his throat and the other crunching down on his testicles, and hurls him over the railing behind him. Mustache falls thirty feet down, slamming into the floor below. Blood splatters from his face into an explosive crimson pattern on the white marble.

  That may have been overkill—just a bit.

  The chubby woman turns heel and runs without further thought. Business suit woman takes a low cross in the guts that crumples her up like a paper wad. She falls to her knees and vomits up something thick and soupy. Saggy pants comes in with a flimsy haymaker. Sid tucks his chin and takes the punch with the rock-hard top of his head. He feels knuckles break against it with a satisfying crunch. Then he steps on the waistband of the punk’s pants and pushes them down around his ankles. He shoves the kid back at the business suit woman, as she’s still keeled over and throwing up on the floor. She ends up with her face in the kid’s fallen pants, vomiting into the crotch as he trips and goes down on top of her.

  Sid motions for the Broncos fan and the mall cop to come forward. The mall cop responds by pepper spraying him in the face. Sid doesn’t blink. Pepper spray is like a refreshing splash of cool spring water on a hot day. He wipes it from his face as the Broncos fan comes at him. Sid weaves under a punch and smears the spray into the old man’s eyes. Then he flips the old fogey with a simple o-goshi judo throw.

  Sid turns his attention to the mall cop. He glares at the lanky bastard and slowly crooks his head to the side. He studies the man. He takes in his shiny metal badge and his crisp white uniform. He sees his pathetic three-hair goatee and his quivering mouth. He looks in those glossy grey eyes and sees nothing but fear reflecting back.

  “Die!” Sid grunts. It is the first word that comes to mind—one he knows well. It was the second word he ever spoke (after “kill”).

  The mall cop loudly shits his pants, then sits down on the floor and begins to cry.

  INT. GALLERIA – FIRST FLOOR - DAY

  A shrill scream comes from a husky man as he falls from the floor above and smacks into the marble far behind the ninja. It is a curious thing, but ultimately irrelevant. The ninja doesn’t even glance back.

  Victor has fought this stupid ninja before. He has beaten this stupid ninja before. He will
beat this stupid ninja again. However, this time, only he will live to tell the tale.

  He spins his lead knife: his grip is tight, but not too tight. His enemy hesitates. Fear is on Victor’s side.

  Anticipation explodes into action. The ninja strikes first, leaping forward with an overhead swipe that Victor sidesteps and catches between his knives. Tanaka one-hands his sword as he parries Victor’s left knife with the other. Victor kicks the ninja and again they separate.

  This time, Victor takes the initiative. He strikes with both knives. Tanaka deflects one, but Victor changes direction and slices the ninja’s arm with the other. The ninja does not flinch. This is a true warrior. He brings his sword around in a swipe that nearly shears off Victor’s legs. Victor jumps the blade, of course, and knees Tanaka in the jaw. He drives both knives down at the sides of the man’s neck, but as they reach their target, they pierce nothing but a thick black smoke. Victor is blinded by the cloud wrapped around him.

  Before he can dive away, a sword comes at him through the black. He barely avoids it, the razor edge coming within a millimeter of his nose. He stabs into the smoke around him as he weaves under the outstretched blade and leaps from the cover of smoke.

  He tosses one knife aside as he hits the floor near the MAC-10 he dropped earlier; the ninja’s dark form is emerging from the cloud. Victor picks up the MAC-10 and squeezes the trigger. The blade becomes a flashing blur as it swats away the bullets. The solution to this problem is one Victor should’ve figured out much earlier.

  He lunges for the ninja with his wavy knife. He dodges the sword as he attacks, stabbing forward like mad, waiting for his chance. Finally the ninja meets his knife with the sword blade, but Victor muscles forward, forcing the ninja to push back, tying up the sword. Victor points the MAC-10 at the ninja’s chest and empties the rest of the magazine into his enemy’s guts. Blood sprays from a dozen wounds and splatters Victor’s chest.