Kill Kill Kill (Part 1)

by Mike Leon

  

  KILL TEAM ONE

   

  What makes a man a killer? I mean a killer. A real killer. It isn’t special training or secret weapons. It isn’t a badge or a uniform patch or a scary tattoo. It isn’t a killer instinct. All of that is bullshit. I know what makes a man a killer. It is simply hate.

  Men tell stories about me and where I come from. Some of them say I’m a demon from hell or the angel of death. Some say I am part robot or that I descended from Vlad the Impaler or that I was genetically engineered to be a superhuman killing machine. All of that is bullshit too. I am just a man with a lot of hate.

  I was born in Norilsk sometime in the fifties. I can’t be sure what year. Things were… difficult then. Do you know Norilsk? No. No one does in this part of the world. Americans can tell you the result of every Super Bowl, but they don’t know what goes on outside. It is okay. People are ignorant everywhere in the world. They’re just ignorant about different things. I promise, there they don’t know anything about you either.

  Norilsk was a labor camp once. A gulag, as they say in my native Russian. It is in the northernmost reaches of Siberia, as far north as humans dare to settle on this Earth. My father worked in the mines there, although I don’t know his name or what he did to end up there. My earliest memories are of him beating my mother, which he did often. He died in the mines when I was a small boy. My mother starved and my older sister was eaten. Not by animals.

  I escaped into the wilds. That was certain death. The temperature is often twenty below. Birds fall from the sky frozen dead and shatter like glass when they hit the ground. In the winter, the sun does not come up for weeks on end. The air is choked with smog from the smelting ore and there is no escape from the acid snows that killed all of the trees long ago.

  I nestled in the barren forests with a litter of wolf pups for warmth and when the she-wolf returned it let me be. There I remained, following the wolves for food. In time, I became like them. I spent at least a decade out there I think. I think. It is hard to tell when the nights can last months and there are no modern devices to keep time.

  What? You don’t believe me? That is perfectly fine. Believe one of the stories the operators tell then. But you have come here to join a fight against monsters from a world outside this one, so you should probably try to have a more open mind.

  You can learn much with the wolves that you cannot learn from men. Wolves are like people but not quite. They have more base concerns. They are concerned always with food and safety. Men ignore these things in favor of distractions and imaginings. More than anything the wolves can kill better than men. The wolves have to kill just to eat. Men need to hate to kill. I had to learn to hate just to eat.

  I was a young man by the time civilization found me. Oil drillers came across me out there and thought they could make money selling a boy raised by wolves to the circuses. Their plan did not execute well. I killed three of them when I woke up at the drilling station with a tranquilizer dart in my arm. Tore their throats out. Tore their wrists open. Ate some of the pieces. They knocked me out again.

  I woke up in a prison, or an insane asylum. They were much the same in that part of the world and in those days. There it was test after test, day after day, and more of the same violence. They did not understand me anymore than the zookeeper understands a wolf. It was weeks before I did not lunge at the glass and months before I did not lunge at them when they came to feed me.

  In time, I became manageable and they began to teach me. Scientists are a strange lot. To this day, I still do not understand their need to prod and poke – push the envelope. If I found such a creature as myself, I would simply kill it and continue on my way, but they insisted on speaking to me, showing me words and maps. I could speak some from my days in Norilsk as a small child. They were able to teach me to read some words, but not many, and to this day I do not read Russian, nor do I read for enjoyment.

  I spent two years in the prison before the KGB arrived in need of conscripts to fight the war in the east. The Soviet Union, if you did not already know, was never controlled by the group and the KGB acted in many of the same ways as Graveyard, but without such extreme need for secrecy.

  They took everyone. The young, the old. It didn’t matter. They emptied that place and sent us all into the mountains to fight the Mujahedeen. In the conscript legions, every mission is a suicide mission. In the mountains they sent us ahead of the trained soldiers to lure out ambushes. Once the trap was sprung and the enemy positions revealed, the regulars would come down in their Hinds and missile everything to death – sometimes that included us. Then there were the trample jobs. The mine clearing operations. I’m sure you’ve read about that.

  The rest of them were dead in weeks. More came from other prisons. There were uniforms, but they were often colored to draw attention to us – reverse camouflage. They wanted us as decoys to keep eyes off the real soldiers. They didn’t even give us rifles, because we couldn’t be trusted with them, and because they didn’t care. We usually had sticks to look like rifles, and failing that, we just went barehanded. A whole platoon of soldiers with no guns. You would think it suspect, but it always worked. The Mujahedeen never were that clever, and why would they be? They were not that much different from us.

  I survived, of course. No one else lasted more than seventeen days, ever. But I remained. Suicide mission after suicide mission. My platoon blasted away before me. I remained among the pile of corpses every time.

  I survived because I was more wolf than man. I was always alert. Always able to spot the enemy coming. Ahead of every move and quicker than every man. More than anything, I had my hate. I could turn it on like flipping a switch. I still can. I can hate you enough to kill you right now if I decide to.

  I told you they didn’t give us guns. I didn’t need one. I killed with my hands, my teeth, and when I wanted weapons I took them from the dead. I learned to shoot guns in the midst of battle and I became exceedingly good at it – better than the regular army. I told you about the minefields. I walked through them with ease because I could smell the mines. They stunk like all metal tools of men and the others – they could have smelled it too, but like you they are not fully aware, not fully alert. Their senses are not open like mine and their minds are clouded with distractions. They do not feel the energy, like my ninja friends say.

  Yes. I know real ninja. It was a ninja taught me to punch into a man’s chest and rip out his heart with my clenched fist. Mighty warriors and true killers all of them they are. If you survive the coming onslaught, maybe I will introduce you to some.

  There were times the Russian regulars arrived to kill the holy warriors, only to find them already dead. I had killed them all. In time, they began sending me on real missions and offering me my choice of weapons. Though a choice of weapons meant little to me and that has not changed. Is it better to kill a man with a pistol or a rocket launcher? It does not matter. He is still dead. I took a knife at least because I knew it would work and a gun usually, but not always. I did not care. And with this attitude, I went out into the night and made a name for myself. They talked about the ghost that comes for men’s souls in the night. Ridiculous.

  My duties expanded beyond Afghanistan. They began sending me all over the world. I was rarely shown intelligence reports so I didn’t know why I was doing the things I did and I often was not told where I was either. I was simply unhooded like a trained falcon and sent to kill.

  In time, I became restless. The Russians gave me some privileges as long as I was out doing their dirty work, but the rest of the time I was cleaning floors and scrubbing toilets, confined to quarters while the officers went to see whores in town. So one night I killed them and left.

  I spent a year trying to find mundane work in Norway. I taught myself to speak Norwegian like a native out of necessity. It took me several weeks of constant struggle and I am still proud of that over many of my flashier and more legendary achievements. Unfortunately, there is more to fi
tting in than speaking the language. You cannot, when punched by the town drunk in a bar, kill everyone in the bar. When a man yells at you for spilling coffee on his lap, you are not supposed to tear his face off and feed it to him. Also, war rape is reserved for war. These are just some of the things I learned before I grew frustrated and returned to soldiering – this time on my own as a mercenary.

  I was freelance for two years and I made more money than I knew what to do with. Literally. I didn’t know what to do with money. I had no taste for expensive clothes or cars or boats. I didn’t understand investing or capital. I still do not. My lodgings were simple and I could not possibly spend all of it on whores, although I tried. That was where The Duke found me – in a whore house.

  He was amazing. He was an old man by then. Died long ago of course. You never met him. He fought in the war. Fought the Nazis. That was the greatest generation. Fighting on the ground face to face in bunkers and trenches with guns and bayonets. Flying high in rickety pieces of steel that might fall out of the sky any minute from anti-aircraft fire or bad maintenance and dropping bombs by sight. The west doesn’t make soldiers like that anymore. They don’t even put bayonets on rifles anymore. They do all the killing from miles away now. It’s a shame.

  He looked like an American cowboy. He was an American cowboy – the last of them perhaps. I remember that gun hanging around his waist just dangling. I thought it was some kind of joke. He walked in on me smoking a cigar after I had finished fucking this little Swedish girl. She looked like you, but shorter. Don’t look at me like that. It isn’t a come on. I don’t come on with that much subtlety. She wasn’t that good anyway.

  After I decided it wasn’t a joke, I thought he wanted to kill me. You see many odd people with exotic methods at that level of the mercenary trade. There are French maids with hidden knives and blow gun snipers and such. A cowboy was not a big leap to make.

  I was completely naked and lying on the bed still when he walked in. I had a gun hanging from the lamp shade next to me and a bowie knife under the pillow. I had a plan to kill him where he stood and a back-up if that failed. I had a plan to kill the girl too. I have a plan to kill you right now. I always have a plan to kill everyone in the room. Looking back, I know the Duke had a plan to kill me if necessary and at least a backup plan or two. He was the only man I ever met who was as prepared and alert as me.

  He told me what he was there for, to ask me to join Graveyard, and I didn’t believe him. I made a move for the gun and he shot the gun to pieces right there before I could grab it. I had never seen anyone shoot like that. I wouldn’t again for twenty years. God, he was fast. That was enough to make me come along for the ride. That and the pay. Graveyard has always paid top dollar.

  The Duke left just after I joined Kill Team One. It sounds funny now to say it and not mean me. Most of you probably don’t realize it was something else once. It was. The original team was all gone by then, old geezers, and they could not quite find adequate replacements. What is the expression? They just don’t make them like they used to. It was never more true than then. The ones I worked with were nothing compared to the original set that fought in the big one. Piece by piece they were blasted away or scared away around me and replaced over and over, until again, like with the Russians, only I remained.

  It was in those years that I truly made the legend what it is today. I defeated the mad Doctor Mekanikal on his island of terror. I helped the Tanaka clan fight the Dark Shogun. I assassinated the master of the Hashashiyyin. I destroyed the AOL supercomputer before it could nuke California. I had many more adventures as well. Those were glorious times.

  It was like that until the day the world changed. You remember that day. Everyone beyond a certain age remembers that day. I lost someone important in the Pentagon when the Mujahedeen crashed the plane into it. From that moment forward, I became dedicated to a new cause.

  In a rage, I went to the desert to seek out the master of that worldwide cult of death, the Twelfth Imam, Mahdi to his followers, the Twelver sect. I drew him from his occultation by slaying hundreds of his kin, village after village, each with one left maimed but alive to pass the message on to the demi-god.

  You have heard of him? Perhaps mentioned by the Iranian President on your Fox News Channel? He is real. His quickness is beyond human and he makes use of strange magic that cannot be explained by our science. Our most sophisticated laser guided bombs miss him by miles and our bullets blow away in the wind when we shoot at him. He knows when we are coming and he knows when we have left. It as if he truly is the presence of God here on Earth.

  Undaunted, I met him in combat with guns and knives. For hours I battled him, unable to strike him down. I did make him bleed, and no other man has done that since, but in the end I could not defeat him. It was the Imam who left me with this limp.

  Graveyard began their operations in the desert then with the Americans. Kill Team Three is there now. They are looking for him out in the caves and wastes, trying to learn his location from informants and kill him with bombs or guns. They will fail. I know what they refuse to believe – that their toys and tricks are useless. Mahdi can only be defeated by a true warrior with the will to look him in the face with hate as he dies.

  When I could walk again, I built a cabin in the pine barrens of New Jersey, far from any prying eyes. There I lived alone with the boys. My boys. I taught them everything I know the same way I learned it – with the cold gaze of death on me. I taught them to hate as I hate and kill as I kill. I would not allow my boys to grow weak in a world of modern luxuries and entertainment. No. They lived with me as I lived with the wolves out there in Siberia, only with my knowledge and experience I could make them better. I could teach them to be the greatest warriors. I could make them strong enough to defeat even Mahdi. Only my old friend Walter knew what I was doing in the Pine Barrens, and he did not approve. But I did not care.

  Now the boys are strong. They fight with knives like no man I have ever seen and they shoot at least as well as the Duke in his youth. They are fast and strong and I taught them what the ninja taught me about vanishing in the shadows. There is also something else – something special I cannot speak of. They are better than I ever was and I have sent them into the desert to finish what I could not. And now I realize I have made a terrible mistake.

  I was too concerned with the obvious threat to notice the one lurking in the shadows. You have seen it. You have seen them.

  Now we face an enemy which has infiltrated our highest ranks. Eli Van Duyn learned their secret and they killed him. Van Duyn’s girl saw something that night, and they will stop at nothing until she is dead too.

  They attacked me soon after Van Duyn was killed. They tried to kill you twice and they led Kill Team Two into a trap. Their agents are everywhere.

  If we are to win this war against these monsters, then I need my boys at my side. I need you to go into the desert and retrieve them for me.

    

  THELIZARDSWALKAMONGUS.COM

   

  The website name is simultaneously funny and spooky. It stares back at Walter from the array of monitors on the desk in front of him in Graveyard’s com room, as an analyst named Dodson takes him through the details. Most of them are well beyond the few hip tech terms Walter barely understands, like tweet and handle.

  “We got in using an NSA backdoor in Apache which was, like, so easy,” Dodson says. Dodson is a well-manicured man; thin, smooth-skinned, flamboyantly, obnoxiously, flaming-hotter-than-the-sun gay. “We downloaded everything he had on his FTP in like two hours. He used the same password for his Gmail and Twitter, so we got into those too.”

  “I thought they blew up Potts’ computers.”

  “Oh honey, nothing is really on anybody’s computer anymore. It’s on the cloud.”

  Walter doesn’t understand the cloud. He laments the days before all of this – the days when men actually had to break into buildings to steal paper documents. Now all that snooping is d
one from a swivel chair by sissies like Dodson. Dodson couldn’t even have had a security clearance in those days.

  “So here are all the threads where he’s talking to Van Duyn,” Dodson says. “The conversation stops abruptly, surprise, when Van Duyn is killed.”

  “Wait. Eli knew this guy?” Walter says.

  “Well, I’m not sure he met him, like met him met him, but they talked on the internet a lot.”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “Oh, mostly the stuff that’s on Potts’ website. Or, was on Potts’ website. Somebody burned the servers after we got in and copied everything.”

  “Burned them? I don’t know that. What does that mean?”

  “They burned them, like physically burned them. Somebody poured gas on them and struck a match.”

  “Where are these servers?”

  “India.”

  “That’s spooky.”

  “Trust me. You haven’t even seen anything yet.”

  “Alright, show me what you got.”

  “Okay, well Potts is like this UFO NWO conspiracy website guru. He did an interview on Coast-to-Coast AM a few years ago. I have it on MP3 if you want to listen. Anywho, his whole thing is that there are basically lizard people and they look like us, and they’re hiding all over the world secretly controlling us. They’re in the government, like the president is a lizard person, and the congress are lizard people, and a bunch of celebrities he says are lizards. He says Selena Gomez is a lizard.”

  “My daughter likes Selena Gomez.”

  “When you’re ready come and get it, nah nah nah nah,” Dodson sings. “It’s so catchy. Who doesn’t like that?”

  Walter doesn’t like it.

  “You think any of this is true?” he asks.

  “No,” Dodson says. “These people are all crazy. You should read some of the stuff that’s in the message board. They’re like freeze framing Fox News to try and get a screen grab of Sean Hannity shape shifting for a tenth of a second. There’s one guy that says he was married to a lizard woman for ten years.”

  “I know how he feels.”

  “Ha ha. He really means it though.”

  “And Van Duyn went for all this crap?”

  “Yeah. The emails are pretty serious. And then you get to the lawyer. See, Van Duyn dies, and the next day Potts gets an email from Leonard Berryman – Eli Van Duyn’s attorney. He says Van Duyn has died and he has instructions to deliver a parcel to Potts as part of the Van Duyn estate.”

  Where’s Berryman now?”

  “Nobody has seen him for weeks.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “Yeah. And then, days later, like way after Potts was already dead, this shows up in his inbox.”

  Dodson double clicks on an email in a list of messages in front of them. A window opens showing a strange message with the subject line URGENT: You are in danger.

  The message body reads:

   

  Mr Potts,

   

  You are in real danger. They are watching. Meet me at the same place we used to go. Supply the time. 

   

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Dodson says. “His obituary was printed the day before. All the UFO crazies were talking about it already.”

  It makes sense to Walter. He doesn’t tell Dodson, but the message header tells him everything he needs to know. It was sent by Coltrane784. 784 is the street number of a place where Walter used to drink with a man who liked Coltrane. The message wasn’t really for Potts at all.

  Kill Team One is talking to him.

    

  POINTY WHITE HATS AND

  SWASTIKAS

   

  “It’s like this, boys,” Ashley says. “Command wants the bloodbath brothers dead.”

  He stands in the aft section of the Apocalypse at the top of the open ramp. Safari, Abo, the Knife Guy, Úlfhednar and John Q are all there. The kill team members sit along the benches lining the hull of the craft, except for Abo, who sits on the floor, and Úlfhednar, who has a fruit crate to sit on behind his laptop computer. This last bit has made the werewolf excited.

  “In the morning we roll out on seek and destroy orders,” Ashley continues. “Our cover is this intel sheet saying the ninja that killed our last knife guy has been spotted at a hotel in Kandahar.”

  “What about the last knife guy?” asks the knife guy.

  “Nothing,” John reassures him dismissively. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Our actual mission objective is the termination of Sid Hansen and Victor Hansen.”

  “With extreme prejudice?” asks John.

  “Pointy white hats, swastikas, sowin’ the ground with salt and the whole lot it sounds like,” Safari interjects.

  “That’s exactly right,” Ashley answers. “When we move, I want you, Abo, John, the knife guy and both targets with me. The werewolf is in the air. Knife guy, you lead them in the front of the hotel while Safari covers the outside with the fifties and I take the others around back. Once the knife guy is clear, I give the signal to the werewolf and we unload everything, including those Vulcans, on the building.”

  Yes. Yes. This is what the werewolf wants. Death spitting artillery in his hands. Loud music in his ears. What shall he select for this particular outing? What will be the killing music?

  “There won’t be a cockroach left alive in there,” John remarks.

  “I hope so,” Ashley says. “Kill Team One’s boys remind me too much of their old man. I’m not taking any chances.”

  Will it be house or techno? Perhaps something more classical. Pachelbel’s Canon or Air on the G String may provide an interesting counterpoint to the murdering chaos, but they are already so overused in pop culture. He has several times used Helter Skelter during a machine gun attack, and he considers it briefly but then decides against it. No. He wants to do something more modern. Then he has an idea.

  “Hey, werewolf,” someone interrupts his thinking. It is John Q. “You okay there? You look totally zoned out.”

  “He looks like he might be wankin’ it behind that laptop,” Safari says. Squinting through a monocled eye at Úlfhednar.

  Abo nods his head and smiles. Giant white teeth are a strange and funny contrast against the naked blackness of his form. He makes a jerking motion with his hand.

  “I am… quite excited for this mission,” the werewolf answers in his thick Norwegian accent.

  “Guy’s so creepy,” John whispers to Safari next to him. Of course, the werewolf hears. But the werewolf says nothing. The rest of Kill Team Three has not his appreciation for art.

  The werewolf is only thinking about tomorrow’s bloodshed. He has thought of something so perfect. Something he has always wanted to do. He will use Wake Up, from Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled album. He will listen to that song. Yes. He will listen through it without so much as wiggling a toe. He will listen until the song grows quiet, like a whisper, and then… and then…just as Zack de le Rocha screams that he heard a shot and Tom Morello unleashes the alternate picking beast all over his six-string, the werewolf too will unleash the beast. It will be his greatest act – his masterpiece. He will be like a living music video.

  The timing must be uncanny to do this correctly. He must research the travel time for all of them. He will need to know the precise moment in the song that he wants to start shooting, but that is easy. There must be no delays. If all goes well, he will squeeze those triggers just as Ashley gives the order. If it does not go well, then he will be squeezing the triggers early or even a bit late. It does not matter. Sometimes sacrifices must be made for such brilliance.

  It begins at dawn.

    

  DEATH OR REVELATION

  IN BACK OF

  THE BLACK OMEN

   

  Walter is in the last place he ever saw Van Hansen – a blues bar where they used to drink scotch and tell old war stories. Only they don’t play the blues here anymore…

  Th
e girl on the small rear stage bends over on all fours and spreads her business wide open for Walter to see, her clear plastic heels pointing at him like accusing fingers. He doesn’t want the DJ to call attention to him so he sets a five on the stage before he returns to his scotch. The Black Omen, he wonders, what kind of name is that for a strip club anyway?

  When he looks up again, he sees him. Ivan. Kill Team One. Death incarnate. The old man is already seated at a table across the bar. He has a drink in his hand, and he’s glaring Walter’s direction with those soulless black eyes. Walter glares right back at him and takes a sip of scotch. He knew it would happen like this. The old man has a tendency to materialize out of thin air. No one ever sees him coming. One minute you’re alone and the next he’s there as if he simply grew out of some shadowy corner in the room. He motions to the back door and Walter nods. This is it.

  Ivan makes the first move. He stands and makes his way for the door. He passes Walter’s table on the way out but he looks straight ahead, keeping Walter just in the edge of focus. Walter stays at the table to finish his scotch. The whole time, he’s reminding himself how stupid this is. That guy waiting out there for him is a killing machine. No. Not just a killing machine. He deals with killing machines every day. That man is a death god, and Walter is scared.

  He mashes the send button on his cell phone, to shoot off a pre-typed text message to each of his girls that just says “Love you – Dad.”

  He reminds himself that everybody has to go sometime. Maybe this is it. Fuck it. Better this than cancer. Under the table, he stuffs his pistol in the waist of his pants. Then he downs the last sip of scotch and stands up. It’s time to man up and head out there.

  Outside, Ivan stands with his back to the door gazing out into the blackened field behind the club. Smoke drifts upward from his face. Walter doesn’t like this at all. He expected things to be more tense. This could be some kind of trick. He won’t be taking any chances, and he’s not going to lose the initiative while he has it. He draws his gun and points it at the Kill Team’s back.

  “Put that away, Walter,” the old man says calmly. He doesn’t turn around.

  “Not a chance,” Walter says. He keeps his gun trained on Van Hansen’s back. “I may be younger than you but I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  “I can take that gun from you and kill you ten times before your body hits the ground.”

  “I don’t believe that. Not anymore. You’re old, Kill Team. You’re falling apart and you got a bum leg.”

  “I think you would be surprised.”

  “Why did you kill Reynolds?”

  “That was not me. It was Blood Drinker. How much do you know?”

  “I’m asking the questions here! What the fuck happened to Darryl Potts?”

  “They got to Van Duyn’s lawyer. They were monitoring Potts’ lines. They were waiting for us. It got bad.”

  “Why? What did he have?”

  “He had proof, Walter. I saw it.”

  And then something clangs to the ground around the corner. It sounds like a trash can lid, or it might be a waitress dropping a steel pan. It doesn’t matter. The nanosecond Walter isn’t completely focused on Kill Team One, the old man pulls a Sig 9 and now they’re staring down each other’s barrels.

  “Who followed you here?” Ivan shouts.

  “Drop it!” Walter screams.

  “You drop it!” Kill Team One shouts back.

  “I don’t want to kill you, Van!”

  “Did you bring them with you, Walter? Whose side are you on?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Then there is a single gunshot.

    

  COLD VENGEANCE IS THE WARM BLOOD OF MY

  ENEMY ON MY HANDS

   

  Yoshida Tanaka waits in the darkness outside the American army base. He has come in the shadows to visit these men of Bochi where they sleep and where they least expect him. Quickly he vaults over the wall and into the barracks area, his hand resting on his sword hilt, his arm coiled like the cobra, ready to strike. On the other side there are more lights, but there are more objects, more buildings, more trucks, more shadows…

  He slides through them like a brisk wind looking for the first sign of the skull and bones, but he sees none. He needs better cover if he is to walk among them in the open where he can inspect this place more easily.

  A sentry. His name is Horrowitz. The ninja creeps up behind him while he is pissing behind a barracks. Usually he would use his sword, but this time he needs it to be clean. He pricks Horrowitz with the edge of a shuriken coated in blowfish toxin and the sentry is dead before he ever knows what hit him.

  Tanaka stuffs the body under a parked hummer and walks out into plain sight dressed as Private Horrowitz, complete with M4 carbine. The gun feels strange in his hands. Foreign. Alien. Surprisingly heavy. He never uses these things and he is irked by its weight in comparison to the tools he usually carries.

  Out in the open, he passes poorly for an actual American soldier, and he worries that anyone asking him any questions will immediately see through the ruse because of his accent. He speaks Engrish berry good, but not like a Horrowitz. He knows Horrowitz is probably a Jewish name, but he doesn’t know if Jews sound like other Americans or different somehow. In any case, he has a back-up plan: Kill the witnesses and smoke bomb away.

  He gets through thirty minutes of patrolling by keeping his head down and nodding at anybody who looks his way. He’s beginning to feel frustrated when he sees what he has been looking for: a fanged skull and bones.

  It is a tattoo, simple black with no fill, on the bicep of a skinny little man wearing tight leather pants and gothic make-up. He runs his hand through a flowing length of black hair as he walks excitedly from a small building. Yoshida peers in a window to see if there are more of them where he came from, but he sees only an empty room with bunk beds and a card table, all unoccupied. He follows the little man.

  The little gothic man makes one stop at a larger building which Yoshida realizes is an armory or depot. He goes in and comes out a few minutes later driving a forklift that carries a crate the size of a small car. Yoshida picks up his pace to follow the forklift.

  He’s sure the little man can’t hear him, but he runs into another problem when the forklift passes another sentry. This one is a tall black American dressed in a regular army uniform like the one Yoshida has. The sentry looks him over and Yoshida nods and smiles.

  “Sup,” he says, channeling every rapper he ever saw on American TV while he was in college. It comes out harshly, which works in his favor he thinks, and the sentry keeps on walking. He continues after the forklift.

  After some time, he realizes the forklift is headed for a small airstrip where a large military plane awaits. Airmen check the underside of the plane and the little gothic man drives the forklift up to the side of the fuselage and sets the crate down on the ground. He jumps out and motions to a mechanic, who then takes control of the forklift.

  Yoshida leans into a door frame as he watches the dark man walk away from the forklift toward another man, this one wearing camouflage army pants and a hooded sweatshirt with the hood up. Yoshida can’t see his face.

  He can’t hear what they are saying over the noise from the plane, but he tries to read the lips of the little man from his hiding place in the doorframe. He concentrates on that pale, skinny face, but then something happens to break his concentration.

  A helicopter passes hardly a hundred feet overhead and slows to hover over the airstrip. The man in the hooded sweatshirt turns up to look at the chopper and he pulls his hood down. The ninja’s stomach nearly erupts from his throat. It is the man with one ear.

  He looks exactly like Yoshida remembers him from that day ten years ago – except he has both ears. This is an odd development, but the ninja hasn’t the faculties to ponder why. The little gothic man walks away to board the plane and leaves the man with two ears standing alone on the airstrip. Though th
ere are soldiers on the airstrip, the ninja knows he can strike from behind and end this before any of them ever notice him – especially in this guise. He will have to act quickly, even though he wishes the opposite. Luckily, he has just the technique for such a situation.

  The secret ninja death touch is not a thing of fiction. The Tanaka clan has passed it down for centuries. It is, in reality, a technique of limited application considering the decades of meditation required to learn it. The death touch only does what a sword or poisoned kunai will do much faster and without any of the training. Still, with proper focus, one can master the art of killing a man with a finger. One can even specialize it – make it a swift death or one that goes on for weeks of bleeding, searing, bone splintering pain. Yoshida’s death touch is not of the swift variety.

  Then something happens that has not happened in nearly a decade. Someone sneaks up on the ninja.

  “Hey man,” calls someone behind him.

  Yoshida turns to see the tall black sentry he passed earlier, apparently returned to inspect him further.

  “Hey man, what’s your name?” he says through his gritted teeth, which Yoshida can now see are wired together, probably because of some sort of jaw injury.

  “Uh, Horrowitz,” the ninja answers. He stutters. All he can think is that he’s losing his chance to strike at the two-eared man.

  “You sure?” the sentry asks him. “I don’t know too many Chinese Horrowitzes.”

  Yoshida turns back to the airstrip for a second to see a jeep pulling up next to the two eared man, driven by a huge black man in brown shorts holding some sort of giant metal weapon. The man who murdered his family is escaping.

  “Half Japanese. My mother’s side,” Yoshida lies, calmly.

  “Yeah. Where you from?”

  His mind is on fire with hate. All he can think is the man who murdered his family is escaping.

  “New York City.”

  “What part?”

  The man who murdered his family is escaping and he will murder more, torture more, slaughter more.

  “Brooklyn.”

  “That don’t sound like a Brooklyn accent.”

  “It is.”

  The man who murdered his family is escaping and he will murder more, torture more, slaughter more. He will rape more wives and burn more babies.

  “Yeah? How many rings did Jordan get when he played for Knicks?”

  Yoshida glares back at the sentry.

  He will rape more wives and burn more babies.

  “Fuck you, man.”

  The sentry chuckles.

  “Good answer,” the man says. “I’m a Heat fan, myself. And fuck the motherfucker that talks shit about them.”

  Yoshida can’t stand this anymore. He lunges upward and delivers a flying knee strike to the sentry’s chin, shattering his jaw again and knocking the man sprawling to the dirt. He turns back to the airstrip just in time to see the two eared man grin and make a mocking salute to some other soldiers as the jeep pulls away.

  He will rape more wives and burn more babies.

  The ninja clenches his fist around the rifle in his hands so hard that the steel bends.

    

  DEATHSTORM

   

  Sid jumps off a jeep in Kandahar City at fourteen-hundred hours. He’s geared to fight World War Three by himself, which means he has three grenades, two KA-BAR knives coated in neuro-toxin, a .45 USP sidearm and a 240 Bravo machine gun. Victor is at his side and carrying a six-barreled 40mm MGL, two pistols loaded with .40 depleted uranium bullets, a machete, and a small black plastic collapsible shovel commonly known as an entrenchment tool or e tool. Both of them wear black t-shirts and body armor with black fatigue pants. The knife guy, Safari, Abo and Ashley dismount a second jeep behind them.

  They stand facing a somewhat modern building compared to what Sid has seen during the rest of his tour here. There is a large glass foyer through which he can see people drinking coffee and talking. These are not the towel headed hill people he is used to, but refined, well dressed, clean people. The rest of the building is tan stone of some kind and it goes up three floors with darkened windows spaced evenly.

  “I’ve never killed anyone with an e tool before,” Victor says, licking his teeth. “I plan on fixing that today.”

  Sid can’t understand why Victor would think that. The ninja is unfathomably dangerous. They will probably barely kill him with the whole team shooting machine guns and grenades. The idea of Victor stopping him with an e tool is just absurd. But then his brother did fight the ninja with just a knife last time they met. If that didn’t expose his increasingly irrational bloodthirst then what happened in the barracks a few nights ago did. Sid tries to put it out of his mind. He didn’t go back in the barracks that night. He doesn’t know what happened to the girl. He doesn’t want to know. He can’t think about that. He has a job to do.

  Personally, Sid is scared. No. He’s not scared. His father would beat him for being scared. Fear is for the weak. A warrior has no fear.

  But he is anxious. He is anxious because he’s walking in to face a true warrior and he is now convinced that the men behind him are, at best, unstable and, at worst, terribly psychotic.

  “Don’t get cocky in there,” Ashley says. “Katsuhiro Tanaka is a real god damned ninja straight from the land of the rising sun. This ain’t no Chinese knock off.”

  “Issat a real thing? A fake ninja?” Safari asks as he sets up a Browning M2 on the back of the second jeep next to a belt fed grenade launcher and the laser designator they will need if they have to call in an air strike.

  “A fake ninja is as real as any real ninja, only fake,” Ashley answers as he puts out his cigar on the side of the jeep and saves the remaining stub in his shirt pocket. “Move in two teams. Sid, Victor and, um...”

  “Bruce,” says the knife thrower.

  “Knife Guy,” Ashley continues. “The three of you go in the front and start clearing out brown people. You see yellow and you smoke that shit so hard it makes Hiroshima look like a firecracker in a Pepsi can. Safari, stay here with the big guns. The rest of you come with me around back. Let’s light this motherfucker up.”

  Victor spares no time storming the front of the building. Sid and the knife guy follow behind him. He doesn’t use the door. No. Victor thinks doors are for the weak. He launches a grenade at the plate glass and the front of the building disintegrates into a pile of shattered shards and screaming people.

  Victor’s combat boots crunch on broken glass as he steps over the knee high metal window frame and into a little café in the hotel lobby.

  “The ninja! Where is the ninja?!” he screams at the small collection of terrified and disoriented hotel patrons. He kicks one man in the guts as he attempts to crawl away through the mess of glass shards leaving a snail trail of bloody streaks behind him.

  “I don’t think they have any idea,” Sid says as he steps into the café.

  Victor gives his brother an annoyed glance and then screams “Get out!” at the café patrons as he fires a pistol into the ceiling. “Come on, runt. Let’s flush out some game!”

  Sid follows Victor further into the building. The knife guy looks almost as scared as the people in the café, but he goes with them. They make it out of the café and into the hotel lobby and then they see something way too strange to continue without further investigation.

  Everyone in the lobby is screaming and running from the men with huge guns that just blew up the coffee shop. Men trip over each other scrambling for the front door. Women scoop up babies. A child cries for his missing parents. Someone is being trampled in the front doorway by a hundred shrieking escapees. All of this chaos is going on around them and yet one person sits completely unaffected.

  He rests on top of the desk of the hotel concierge, his legs folded and his hands resting in his lap. He is a big man, covered in a white robe. His face is obscured behind a jet black beard which dangles down his chest all the way to his waist and lo
ng black hair that hangs past his thick brows. His eyes are closed and he seems entirely undisturbed by the commotion. This is because his god has told him to be here today. His god will protect him.

  “What the fuck is this?” Victor says, when he notices the praying Muslim.

  Sid had already noticed, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to think.

  “Hey, sand nigger, say hello to seventy-two virgins for me!” Victor growls as he draws and raises his pistol again with one hand, the other holding the MGL over his shoulder. He squeezes the trigger and he and Sid both hear the familiar bang they’ve heard millions of times before. The pistol recoils only a tiny fraction in Victor’s perfect grip, as it has millions of times before. There is a flash and a smell of cordite, as there has been millions of times before. Only this time, nothing happens. The bearded man does not die. A spray of blood does not gush from his head. His brains do not leak out all over the floor. Nothing like that happens.

  At first, it seems Victor missed, which is ridiculous. He’s only thirty feet away. He can hit a lemon at five times that distance one-handed with that very gun. He shoots again. Again nothing happens. It is as if his bullets just vanish. He pulls the trigger again. And again. He empties the entire magazine into the bearded Arab’s face. This accomplishes nothing.

  The knife guy turns heel and runs like a little bitch. He does not make it ten feet through the screaming crowd before a man wearing a turban stabs him to death with a large combat knife.

  “My followers number greater than legion,” says the bearded, unshootable man. He speaks perfect English with a slight British accent, like someone who went through elocution classes. “Together we will bring death to you who forsake Allah.”

  And then Sid sees them. More turbans all throughout the crowd. Sure. Some of them might be people who just decided to wear a turban today, but maybe they’re with this asshole too. Maybe this is a trap.

  “We have a problem,” Sid says to his brother.

  “Take care of it, runt,” Victor answers, having noticed the small army surrounding them as well.

  The bearded leader of the Mujahedeen stands for the first time and he is quite tall – even more so on top of the desk. His posture is like an angry parent leaning over to scold a rotten child. He throws back his robes to reveal a suit of glimmering medieval plate armor and the hilt of a sheathed scimitar sword. His command is simple. “Kill the infidels!”

  Sid turns to open fire on the crowd, the whole crowd, with the 240. He doesn’t have time to be picky about targets. Allah will have to sort them out.

  Victor does exactly what Sid would expect from him. He drops his grenade launcher on the floor, whips out that big machete he brought, and points it at the bearded giant.

  And then something none of them expected...