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

by Mike Leon

  “Fuck,” Sid says. He jumps up onto the bumper, then leaps for the edge of the trailer top. He pulls himself up to the top, where he can see clearly over the sound wall. He spots Victor on the other side, hauling the case through a grassy field and headed toward a large supermarket.

  Sid leaps over to the sound wall, dropping to the grass fifteen feet below. He follows his brother.

  EXT. GALLERIA PARKING LOT - DAY

  Helen awakes behind the steering wheel of the police cruiser. She sees two cars in front of her and reaches for the door. She sees two handles. She has to try twice to get the real one. She pushes her way out the door and the parking lot spins around her as she tries to stay upright. It stops after a moment and she is able to remove her hand from the roof of the cruiser and walk without bracing herself.

  The parking lot looks like a warzone. The police have arrived in force and are cordoning off the mall. She can see cops in tactical gear walking the perimeter with rifles.

  She walks around the back of the car and finds Lily sitting on the blacktop against the front wheel of the cruiser. Lily’s head rests back against the car and she gazes off to something millions of miles away in the sky.

  “Lily?” Helen says. “Where did they go? Where’s the case?”

  “You mean the MacGuffin?” the girl answers. “Doesn’t matter. It’s just a box.”

  Helen kneels down to her level.

  “Lily,” Helen says. She takes the girl’s head in her hands. “Look at me. Look at me. Where did Victor go?”

  “It doesn’t matter. As long as Sid kills the bad guy in an act of spectacular overkill and I remain inviolate to bestow him with sex as a reward then the tropes are satisfied.”

  “People are dying!” Helen shouts. She slaps Lily across her bloodshot eyes.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” Lily says. “Those aren’t even ancillary characters.” The ditsy little bitch has lost her god damned mind. “I don’t even think this is my story. It’s his.”

  INT. SUPERMARKET - DAY

  Sid enters the supermarket through the automatic sliding glass doors at the front of the building. He scans the store for Victor and sees nothing. In front of him is a woman who must weigh six hundred pounds, billowing over the seat of a motorized scooter. She looks at Sid and screams.

  He wonders why for a split second, before he remembers he’s covered in blood and holding a combat knife.

  “Shut up!” he barks. “Which way did he go?”

  “Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!” the scooterbeast continues to scream.

  A hand grenade sails over a shelving unit and lands at the scooterbeast’s feet, on the deck of the powered scooter. Sid runs and dives over a bunker displaying bananas.

  Boom! It rains scooter lady in the grocery store.

  Sid jumps from behind the banana display and runs down the main grocery aisle. He takes a corner around the shelving unit where the grenade originated and looks down the cereal aisle. He sees Victor running away from him. A woman pushing a shopping cart widens her eyes at Sid and steps back. A man in jogging clothes tries to get out of his way as Sid shifts direction and steps back into his way, then steps the other way and ends up in his path again. Sid goes through him with a flying kick. He surfs the limp jogger for a few feet on the slippery wax floor before he continues running.

  Sid reaches the end of the cereal aisle and sees Victor running through the meat department toward the deli. Victor leaps over the counter and disappears.

  Twack! Sid dodges a flying butcher knife which bites into the corner of the refrigeration unit next to his head. It penetrates the metal refrigerator door frame and sticks there. He keeps moving.

  Sid hops over the deli counter in pursuit of his brother and sees the flimsy plastic door at the rear of the deli flapping back his direction. He kicks his way through the door and enters the stockroom.

  The supermarket stockroom is a dingy place with dirty floors and yellow stained walls. The hallway Sid has entered is long and lined with shelving stacked to the thirty-foot ceiling. He checks both ways; to his left, there is nothing but vacant hallway. To his right, a forklift comes right for him.

  Sid narrowly avoids a forklift arm in the face, jumping up between the arms and planting his feet on the fork as the truck rolls on down the corridor. He draws his .45, reaching over the motor and steering wheel to touch the muzzle of the gun to Victor’s nose. He squeezes the trigger. His brother dodges left. He shoots again. His brother dodges right. Victor throws a switch on the panel in front of him and the fork begins to rocket up, elevating Sid high above the cab. He shoots at the steel forklift roof to no avail.

  Sid jumps down to the forklift roof, then to the floor behind the lift. He unloads the rest of the pistol magazine into the engine compartment and the truck grinds to a smoking halt.

  They are now in the supermarket’s loading dock, an open concrete room with four ramps leading down to huge sliding overhead doors. One of the doors is opened to the inside of a trailer filled with canned goods. A towering metal frame supporting six levels of wooden shelves packed with inventory skids nearly reaches the ceiling. In front of that sits a big green industrial cardboard baler.

  Victor hops from the broken forklift.

  “I was having fun with that,” he says. He leaves the suitcase in the cab.

  “I know,” Sid replies. He tosses the empty .45 aside.

  The knives are out again.

  “I love all this knife fighting,” Victor says. “Makes me feel like a kid again.”

  “It turns out that’s not normal at all,” Sid says.

  Sid stabs viciously at Victor. Victor dodges, bobs, weaves, parries. He counters and stabs Sid in the wounded arm. Sid jumps back. Blood splatters the concrete floor.

  “Normal is weak,” Victor says. He circles Sid, his knife pointed at him and dripping blood. “You’re weak.”

  Victor slashes at Sid. Sid ducks away, but Victor kicks him in the face. Sid falls backward against the bank of lockers along the wall.

  He only has a millisecond to react as he sees the wavy blade driving down at him. Sid rolls to his left and the kris knife stabs into the lockers. He attacks while Victor’s knife is entrapped by sheet metal.

  Victor catches Sid’s attack and diverts the KA-BAR. He traps Sid’s hand, driving the knife into the lockers beside his own. Sid rolls away as Victor stomps at him.

  Sid reaches to the workbench nearby and snatches up a framing hammer from a loose collection of tools. Victor picks up a claw hammer from the same workbench. In the span of a second they’ve transitioned from stabbing to bludgeoning. It’s not any less disturbing.

  “You can’t win this,” Victor says. “I’m better than you at everything.”

  The hammers clash between them, Sid swinging and Victor blocking his blow with the handle of his weapon. Victor turns the claw hammer and yanks back, ripping Sid’s hammer from his grip.

  “I’m better with knives. I’m better with hammers,” Victor says. He throws both hammers to the ground and puts up his fists. “I’m just better.”

  He throws a jab, which Sid counters into a Wing Chun trap. Victor escalates with a counter to the trap. Sid breaks free with a flying knee at Victor’s face, but Victor sidesteps and punches him in the balls. Sid crumples into a heap on the floor.

  “The flying knee?” Victor taunts. “Are you joking? Hi-ya! I saw that coming a week ago.”

  Sid picks himself up from the floor. His guts ache like somebody jack-hammered them. Still, he persists. In his mind, his options instantly branch into a tree of possibilities that seems ironclad. Start with a heavy stomp kick because it’s not a jab. Victor will be ready for a jab. If Victor sidesteps, throw elbows. If he traps, scoop kick. Anything else, clinch and throw. He already has contingencies for all of those possible responses too. From elbows: if Victor blocks, go to the Bukti Negara leg takedown. If he backs off, flying knees. From the scoop kick: if Victor doesn’t let go of his foot, transition to the BJJ triangle. If he lets
go, disengage.

  He launches himself forward with the raging stomp kick that initiates all of the options mapped out in his head. Victor sidesteps. Sid throws elbows. Victor blocks. Sid goes to the Bukti Negara takedown by snaking his shin behind Victor’s knee and pushing on the maniac’s chest. Victor turns his knee against Sid’s and slips under his arms to get behind him. He elbows Sid in the back of the head and then delivers a two-palmed karate strike to Sid’s spine that sends him sprawling back to the floor.

  “Let’s see,” Victor supposes aloud as Sid rolls over on the floor. His back feels like it might crack in half if he stands up. “You came at me with a stomp kick because you knew I would trap some ignorant jab. You never jab. And let me guess, if I backed off from the elbows you would have tried the flying knees again? You’re so predictable.”

  Sid grips a shelving unit nearby and uses it to climb back to his feet. He hobbles forward trying to formulate some kind of new plan—a desperation play that Victor won’t see coming. He’s too beaten for quick footwork. Maybe a multistage Wing Chun engagement would get him somewhere. He could go for his brother’s eyes. “I’m gonna kill you so har—”

  He doesn’t finish the sentence because Victor shoots across the space between them and slams the heel of his boot into Sid’s chest with the dreaded ansatsuken shadow kick, forbidden for centuries, and known only to a handful of masters. The world seems to turn sideways as Sid sails from his feet into a tall stack of boxes. He crunches into the boxes, denting them, and causing the now crooked stack to topple on top of him. That kick would have gone through him if he weren’t wearing body armor. He doesn’t know how many of his ribs are broken, but it is at least half. He spits blood onto some corrugated cardboard with a logo for Mondo Force® Energy Drink. Use the force to quench your thirst!

  “I never understood you,” Victor says. “I mean, you’re a weakling by my standards, but to the rest of them you’re walking death.”

  Sid isn’t listening. He’s too busy looking at the stupid drink logo and deriding himself in internal monologue. He never stood a chance. He made all the best moves. He made every decision for tactical advantage. But Victor is always three steps ahead of him. Now the last thing he’ll ever see is this stupid energy drink box.

  “You could’ve taken anything you wanted,” Victor says. “You could fill cities with the mounted skulls of your enemies while you have their squealing women as often as you like, but you have some stupid quality that keeps you from that. I don’t know what it is. You’d be better off without it.”

  Use the force to quench your thirst! Sid’s smeared blood covers most of the second clause. He props himself up on an elbow. His chest burns like a gasoline fire and he rolls over into a spilled pile of Marlboro cartons, Gold Pack, just like the ones Lily smokes for no good reason.

  Because sometimes you just have to do something that doesn’t make any sense.

  Victor plucks both of their knives from the lockers on the other side of the storage room. “You know, I think I’ll use your bones to decorate my armor.”

  Sid pulls an M67 frag grenade from his ballistic vest. He still has three of the little round explosives. He yanks the pin from the grenade and holds it up in front of him.

  “The old dead man’s switch routine?” Victor says. “Walter already tried that.” Sid throws the grenade across the loading dock. Victor lurches aside to avoid being struck by the flying ball of metal. “What the fuck?” Victor says, as the grenade skitters along the concrete behind him. Victor dashes for the nearest hard cover—the big green steel cardboard baler. “What are you doing? You’ll kill us both, you suicidal dipshit!”

  Sid doesn’t have a reason.

  He pulls the other two grenades and throws them haphazardly in random directions without even looking to see where they go as he rolls out of the pile of boxes and behind a skid of soup cans.

  For a few seconds, the loading dock is Armageddon. The first grenade pops, sending shrapnel into the walls and ceilings, shredding an old computer, stabbing at the storage lockers and cardboard baler. Sid doesn’t see what the others do. He only hears the blasts and sees the room rattle around him. A light fixture crashes from the ceiling, bursting with a shower of sparks on the floor right next to his head. Canned soup explodes in a salty shower all over Sid. A huge shelving unit collapses, sending thousands of pounds of boxed dinners, cereal and dog food avalanching down to the floor. Acrid smoke fills the already dim loading dock, making it harder to see and even harder to breathe.

  Sid checks to make sure his legs are still attached and he doesn’t have any new perforations. He struggles to his feet, waving smoke away as the florescent bulbs flicker on the high ceiling. Uncertain at first if he should stay and look for Victor, or just run while he can, his decision is assisted by the rabid cursing of his brother somewhere in the avalanche of ruined garbage.

  When Sid started throwing grenades like a blind idiot, Victor dove into the closest hard metal object for cover: the cardboard baler. It was the right move—a very tactical decision, but neither of them could have counted on the collapsing shelving unit, or the pallet of fifty-pound solar salt sacks that would rain down from above, stacking on top of the baler and pinning its sliding gate closed.

  Victor Hansen is trapped in the massive crushing machine.

  “Let me out of here, you fuck!” Victor shouts, punching the bright green grating in front of him. “You should be dead!”

  Sid stumbles around the baler looking for the control box as Victor curses at machine gun volume only inches from his face.

  “You’re gonna leave me in here?” Victor says. “Put me back in a cell, you pathetic cunt?”

  Sid finds the control box on the other side of the hulking machine, covered by a bent sack of salt that is leaking its dusty contents into the piled food items around them. He climbs on top of a mound of dog food bags and groans as he tosses the salt aside. His arms feel like wet noodles stuck with pins. The control panel has two buttons; a red one and a black one. Sid pushes the red one.

  The baler kicks into a cycle and the huge metal ram begins to press forward toward Victor.

  “You can’t smash me!” Victor screams. “I’m a god damned demon!”

  The ram comes closer, leaving less and less space inside the baler as it goes. Sid crawls down from the food avalanche and pulls his KA-BAR from the lockers.

  “I will haunt you from the depths of hell!” Victor rages. “I will come for your babies in the night! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

  Sid retrieves the suitcase from the driver’s seat in the forklift. He looks back as the baler crushes down on Victor. The curses turn to incoherent screams, then to the snap-crackle-pop of crunching bones.

  Sid turns and walks from the loading dock.

  INT. SUPERMARKET - DAY

  Sid steps out into the supermarket and finds himself staring down the barrels of ten assault rifles carried by a squad of commandos wearing ski masks.

  He sighs. It never ends.

  Then a dark figure emerges from behind a tall display of bold and zesty Doritos®. Sid recognizes him right away—the thick frame, mess of greasy, ratty hair, the long black and gray beard of a wild man. He leans on a teak cane, the head of which is a fanged skull. He glares at Sid through eyes as black as his own.

  “So it’s true,” Sid says. “You’re not dead.”

  “You have the case?” the old man asks. His voice is like gravel and his accent carries a hint of eastern Europe.

  “Right here,” Sid says, holding up the box for all to see.

  “Good,” the old man says. “Hand it over.”

  Sid sets the case down on the floor in front of him and a commando steps forward to claim it.

  “And Victor?” the old man asks.

  “He suffered a crushing defeat,” Sid replies. He winks.

  The commando delivers the case to the old man, who sets it on top of a cooler stocked with ice cold Pepsi® colas. Live bolder. Live louder—with
Pepsi®. He spins the tumblers to the correct combination and pops the lid open. He looks inside and nods approvingly.

  “Anybody ever gonna tell me what’s in that thing?” Sid says.

  The old man turns the case around to display its contents. To Sid, the machine inside looks like an incoherent mess of copper pipettes, crystals, and colored wires.

  “It’s called the Riftmaker. The Nazis constructed it to open a dimensional gateway through which their reptilian master race could return to this universe.”

  That doesn’t make any sense at all. “Why did Victor want it, then?”

  “Because it never worked. They tested it once and it ripped a gash in reality that thousands of nightmare things poured through from a hundred other universes. The Luftwaffe spent weeks carpet-bombing the island where they held the experiment.”

  “If Victor set that off on the mainland . . .”

  “Endless war with innumerable alien things across the globe.”

  “He would’ve loved it.”

  The old man closes the case and scrambles the tumblers. He sets it down beside his feet.

  “What made you run?” the old man says. “Why?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Sid says.

  “Try me.”

  Sid leans against a cooler next to the dock room door and picks up a pack of cold bacon. He presses it to his jaw. It feels good.

  “I was in Chicago on orders from Walter,” Sid says. “Blackout. Two adults and two children. Something about it messed me up. It wasn’t killing them. It was something else—the way they were. The things in their house. They were different than me. Everyone was different than me. I started wandering down the street. So I’m in downtown Chicago, seeing all these things I don’t understand, because they aren’t for killing, and I see the only thing that looks familiar to me: a poster of some guys with guns in front of a movie theater. And I realize I’ve never seen a movie before, so I want to find out what this is all about—find out what normal people do. And I go up to the ticket guy and he says I’m not allowed in because the movie was rated R.”