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

Page 20

by Mike Leon


  The old man nods slowly. After a moment he prods Sid for more.

  “And?” “And?” Sid says. “What do you mean? That doesn’t click for you at all? I actually murdered thousands of people before I was old enough to see fictional murder. I found out I spent my entire childhood doing the thing that nobody’s supposed to do! Ever! That wouldn’t mess with your head just a little bit?”

  “No,” the old man says. He’s telling the truth. Sid knows he is. The old man has a heart of the blackest black.

  “Fuck,” Sid says. He tosses the bacon package back in the refrigeration bunker. “Well, let’s do this. Are these all the goons you brought?”

  “Sid,” the old man says. “I have ten soldiers with automatic rifles. You have a knife.”

  “All right. I’ll even the odds.” Sid drops his knife. “That better?”

  The old man motions to one of his commandos. The masked soldier nods and removes his ski mask. As he lowers his hand, Sid sees something he does not at first understand. He doesn’t immediately recognize the person behind the mask—and yet he does.

  It’s him. That is to say, the person under the mask is also him. He is another Sid Hansen. This other one is younger and lacks the multitude of scars on his arms, but is otherwise identical.

  “You have an army of me?” Sid shouts. “What the fuck?”

  The old man nods. “You’re no longer a threat to us.”

  “No shit,” Sid says. “Now I’m just a threat to . . . myself. Fuck. This is the biggest mind fuck. You are, hands down, the world’s worst dad.”

  “We don’t need you anymore,” the old man says. “I can see to it that you aren’t bothered.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Not bullshit.”

  “I don’t have to stay off the grid anymore?”

  “Get out of here, Sid. Just stay out of trouble.”

  “Done,” Sid says. He sheaths his knife and limps past the army of clones. “This is fucking great. I’m getting a place with central air.”

  EXT. GALLERIA PARKING LOT - DAY

  Lily sits on the end of an ambulance. The Galleria parking lot is teeming with EMTs and police. There are more flashing lights than solid ones. Lily watches as some of them wheel a bloodied figure out on a stretcher. She can’t tell if it is a man or a woman, but she searches intently for movement. She doesn’t look away until she sees a finger twitch—or so she thinks.

  People wander the lot shouting the names of the missing. A man in a brown coat stops, in shock, near the cruiser and calls out to Lily.

  “Katie?” he says.

  Lily looks him in the eyes and he moves on, realizing she is not the person he’s looking for.

  “Victor’s dead,” Sid says. He appears like a ghost, as he so often does. Lily wants to rush up and throw her arms around him, but she’s too broken to move.

  He reaches down for Lily’s hand. He plucks her up off the ground and she leans against the car.

  “These people are all dead because of me,” she says.

  “Victor killed them,” Sid says. “And he would’ve killed a lot more if you didn’t help stop him.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “And you never will,” he says. “Come with me.”

  Sid drags her forward and she limps alongside him. Her legs are not as fatigued anymore, but the rest of her is still a mess. She needs him to lean on.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I saw something over here,” Sid says.

  He leads her deeper into the lot, through a half dozen rows of cars, until they come to the back of a tall black van—a van like the one in the storage unit where the helicopter shot at them.

  Sid pulls open the door.

  In the back of the van, bound with duct tape and gagged with a rope, is Lily’s mother. She’s clad only in her underwear and bleeding from the frayed ends of two fingerless knuckles. She lifts her head and Lily dives into the van, despite her injuries. She wraps her arms around her mother and the Hoffman women cry together.

  SUPER: THREE MONTHS LATER

  INT. CABIN – DAY

  The Fountainhead was the favorite book of a younger Helen—a simpler Helen. It’s still a good book, probably even a great book, but she finds more fault with it as she gets older. The end seems less and less believable each time through. She’s not so certain anymore Roark could win that trial with just an inspiring speech. And Dominique bounces around from husband to husband like the leading lady on one of those terrible teen soap operas. She marries the first guy because she hates him—rationale that is questionable at best. Then the husband essentially sells her to her next husband as part of a business contract. It made more sense when Helen was fifteen. Still, the first edition Matt found for her is very impressive. The pages don’t stink like smoke, and the binding is pristine. A book like this sells at auction for the cost of a brand new sports car. Matt found it in a thrift shop for a dollar.

  She puts the book down and kicks her cowboy boots up on the coffee table in front of the davenport. The forest stretches as far as she can see, beyond the bay window. The cabin is one of the larger ones in the area, and used to be a hunting lodge in the eighties, before Matt’s parents bought it. Country line dancing is in order for tonight at Bobby Lee’s Old Time Saloon in town. She’s already started drinking. By the time they make it to the bar, she’ll have a good buzz. She’ll get tipsy there. Then they’ll come back to the cabin and try again to make a baby. That’s the plan anyway. There’s nothing to stop them now that her career in shadow politics is over.

  The aftermath was ugly.

  Officially, the massacre at the Galleria was carried out by a solitary Islamic radical who killed himself when confronted by police. The FBI gave him a name, a face, and even produced a body. Where they came up with that character, Helen has no idea. She wasn’t involved. It wouldn’t have been hard, though. They could’ve pulled any detainee from a dozen different places around the world, stuck a Glock in his mouth, and made up any story they wanted. Most people believe it. Some people don’t. There are already websites springing up to discuss the paranoid theories. So far, none of the ones Helen has seen are close to what really happened.

  Marines touched down at the Graveyard building from Yuma not long after she and Tanaka left. They worked to pull survivors out of the rubble and secure any dangerous ordnance found in the wreckage. The vault, found largely undamaged near the top of the ruin, was transported to another site held by Graveyard’s parent corporation. Helen doesn’t know where that is.

  Walter Stedman was buried at Arlington National Cemetery and given a twenty-one gun salute. Helen was there with Lieutenant Ratzinger and Frank Overton, two guys she realized were probably too accustomed to funerals. She was uneasy when she saw Matt talking to them there, and fitting in a little too well.

  They never found any sign of Yoshida Tanaka. Whether that means he made it out of the Galleria or was incinerated in the exploding shopping mall is anyone’s guess. She had asked Sid what he thought after the fact, and he just shrugged and said, “Fucking ninjas.”

  The sound of the front door slamming in the other room lifts her heavy eyelids, and she rises from the couch. Matt enters, sweating from his evening jog. Her husband is a beefy specimen, broad shouldered and big armed. He’s built like a tank. Bar creeps never hassle her when they go out together. It’s half the reason she married him.

  “Hey babe,” Matt says, holding up a big manila shipping envelope. “This was on the porch when I got back.”

  “What is it?” Helen says, standing to meet him at the kitchen counter.

  “I don’t know. It just has your name written on it.”

  As she steps up to the counter, Matt’s eyes scan down her skin-tight jeans and the plaid shirt she tied off above her belly. He smiles, dropping the envelope on the counter.

  “Damn, cowgirl,” he says. “Maybe we can just stay in tonight.” He puts his hands on her hips.

  “You smell like an ol
d gym bag,” she says. “Go take a shower.”

  “Look into my eyes,” Matt says, in his Bela Lugosi voice, pressing his fingers to his temples and gazing at her eerily. This is an old joke of his, but it seems so much darker since she saw Tanaka do the real thing and make it work.

  “Whatever,” she laughs, shoving him away. “We’re going line dancing, and you’re gonna like it.”

  “Do I have to wear a cowboy hat?” Matt says as he walks from the room.

  “Yes,” Helen shouts after him.

  She picks up the envelope from the counter and turns it over. Her name is written across the front in thick black marker, and it’s sealed in multiple wrappings of clear packing tape. The envelope bulges in the center. Something rectangular is inside. It didn’t go through the mail, Helen realizes as she pulls a kitchen knife from a drawer beside her. Someone must’ve left it on the porch for her. There is a very short list of people who even know about this place, and fewer would know she is here now.

  She cuts the packing tape along one edge and turns it sideways to pour the contents onto the counter. Two things fall out. One is a cheap cellphone with a small display and a simple nine-number keypad—perfect for someone to use briefly, then throw away because they don’t want to be traced. The other thing is a plain white business card that slides out and falls flat on the counter facedown. She flips it over and sighs.

  There is nothing printed on the card but a fanged skull and crossbones—the Graveyard emblem.

  INT. GAMESTOP - DAY

  Sid wears a lanyard around his neck with a plastic name tag that says Dutch. It’s an assumed identity, one he stole from someone who won’t be missed.

  Working at Gamestop is pretty simple. Sid has to show up on time and wear his name tag. Sometimes he has to file video games in alphabetical order. People hand him money. Then he hands them video games. Then they leave. They don’t pay him much, but nobody shoots at him and there are no werewolf attacks or killer prostitutes trying to seduce him, either.

  There was one incident where he eviscerated a shoplifter and Bruce had to explain how that was not permitted—a concept that eludes him still, but he is still learning to blend in.

  “You know,” Bruce says, from his place on the counter, a video game controller in his hands. “It’s amazing to me how bad you are at this.”

  He’s talking about Call of Honor: Modern Battlefield, a thing Sid will never understand in any capacity. The idea that people would create a digital simulation of warfare is not that strange to him: war games have been part of his life as long as he can remember, and everywhere he goes it appears that people dedicate copious amounts of their time to enacting fantasy violence. The part that annoys him is that they get it so wrong.

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Sid says. “This is nothing like the real thing.”

  “I can see that. You’re oh and twenty-two. That guy is tea bagging you.”

  “The concept of hard cover is completely wrong in this. They don’t get it at all. Drywall doesn’t stop 5.56. I shoot through it all the time. I shot a guy through a floor a few months back with a 9mm just on the sound of his footsteps. Why can’t I do that? And I can only shoot the direction I’m looking? And my aim is terrible. And this stupid controller thing doesn’t feel anything like shooting a rifle. I have no grappling ability at all. Why can’t I tackle that guy and take his gun away?”

  “It’s not Star Trek,” Bruce laughs. “This isn’t the holodeck.”

  “I don’t know what that is, but this game is dumb.”

  “You coming back to my place tonight? We’re grilling out.”

  “I can’t. I have some business to take care of.”

  INT. THE BLACK OMEN – NIGHT

  “Remember to tip the ladies if you sit up front,” rumbles Max, the DJ. His words tend to blend together in long chains of subwoofer bass tones that no one can understand. “Now everybody put your hands together. Coming up on the middle stage it’s . . . Chastity.”

  He fades up the music she picked: Slayer’s “Psychopathy Red.” It matches her Slayer string bikini; solid black with anarchy symbols over her cans and the band’s logo across her butt.

  Lily starts off running up to the stage past a few tables of regulars. Those guys always sit in the back and she can name most of them: Sweatpants Steve, Cross-eye Larry, Reggie—just Reggie, Normal Kevin. The girls call him that because he’s inexplicably normal for a strip club regular. Lily thinks that actually makes him the weirdest one of them all. He’s probably a serial killer.

  She skips up the stairs to the stage and leaps onto the pole. She starts off climbing right to the top and grabbing hold of the wheel attached to the ceiling above. She goes round a few times on that before she wraps her legs around the pole and takes it for a spin.

  Prude bitches talk about pole dancing like it’s easy. It’s not. Lily works at it every day, and she’s good. She’s very good.

  Despite that, the boys don’t pay to see gymnastics. She suspends herself upside down, her legs wrapped around the pole, and dive-bombs the stage floor. Her nose stops a few inches from the floor and then she gives them what they pay for.

  She scans the upside-down faces along the tip rail below her: three frat boys and a young married couple. The frat boys are all entranced by her tits. The married couple seems less interested. That’s disappointing. Married couples buy lap dances. Frat boys don’t. She needs to escalate this situation.

  She drops down to the stage with the beginning of her second song: VHS or BETA’s “Night on Fire.” She crawls to Mr. Married Couple on all fours, aims her heels at him and drops her bikini bottom to her knees. She rolls over to her back, putting her legs in the air to kick the panties away and show him everything. He’s interested now. The missus leans over and whispers in his ear.

  The frat boys don’t like losing her attention. The middle one stands a neatly folded five dollar bill on the stage. Lily crawls over. She lies down in front of them and begins doing something that is illegal in a strip club in this state. They like it. So do the marrieds. The wife puts a ten dollar bill on the edge of the stage, face up.

  Lily tumbles over their way. She looks back at the frat boys and shrugs. She gives the couple the same show she was giving the boys. The husband is enthralled. The wife strokes his leg. He’s pretty jacked, and she’s a pretty thing. Lily likes where this might be headed.

  The frat boys put ten dollars on the stage. Lily glances their direction and Mr. Married has already put down another ten in front of her. She shrugs at the frat boys. One of them brandishes a crinkled twenty dollar bill in the air and smacks it down on the stage, smiling.

  Thump! The stage rattles and Lily turns, startled, to her left. Beside her sits a red and white plastic Igloo cooler. Behind it, Sid sits down in one of the chairs next to the stage.

  Big Dave, the bouncer, is already at Sid’s side.

  “The stage ain’t for your beer, chief!” Dave yells. “Time to take your cooler and get out!”

  Sid doesn’t even acknowledge the bouncer’s presence.

  “It’s okay, Dave,” Lily says. “He’s with me.”

  Dave gives her a look of uncertainty before he backs off.

  Lily’s song ends and she collects her tips and her bikini from the floor before she hops down next to Sid. She picks up the cooler and smirks at him as Max announces the next dancer.

  “Is this what I think it is?” she asks.

  “You told me it doesn’t matter what’s in the box,” he says.

  “This time it does,” she says.

  He doesn’t answer her question.

  “Come on.” She takes him by the hand. He bounces up from his seat and follows her as she guides him through the club, wearing nothing but her heels.

  “Where are we going?” he asks.

  “You’ll see.” She retrieves her clutch from behind the bar on the way. She walks Sid over to Chuck, the other bouncer, sitting in a steel folding chair outside a glass
block entryway with wavy neon lights above. A sign over his head reads VIP Lounge.

  “I need an hour, Chuck,” Lily says. She counts out three hundred dollars for him, which he places in a till in his lap.

  “All yours, boss,” he says.

  “And Chuck,” Lily says. She puts a twenty dollar bill in his hand. “I heard about the problems with the camera in there.”

  “Yeah,” he nods. “It’s gonna take at least an hour to fix it.”

  “Damn,” she says.

  The VIP room is lit entirely with black lights. Lily sets the Igloo cooler down on the only table, in front of the black leather sectional taking up the far corner from the door.

  She positions herself between the cooler and the camera mounted in the corner of the room, opposite the sectional, just in case Chuck forgot to turn it off. Sid places his arms around her.

  “Hey!” she objects. “No touching the ladies!”

  She shoves him down on the sectional. “Sit on your hands.”

  He follows directions. She sees him snickering at her too.

  She looks back at the cooler and hesitates opening it. Maybe she should just take his word. Maybe that’s enough.

  Then she realizes it is not. She doesn’t just need to know. She wants to see. She thirsts for it.

  She pulls the handle atop the cooler, rotating the lid down to expose the contents. She should cry or scream, and she might have before, but not now. Something in her has changed.

  She smiles.

  Lily closes the cooler and struts over to the sectional. She sits down on Sid’s lap and puts her hands on his shoulders.

  “You did good, killer,” she whispers.

 

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