by Mike Leon
It is as if God screamed fuck you and the heavens opened up to rain bullets and blood. The ceiling simply disintegrates as two-hundred 20mm shells punch through it every second. Time slows to a crawl for Sid as he realizes what is happening. He turns his head and roars as he dives for worthless cover under a café table that will dissolve like a sugar cube in this torrential pour of death. He looks out at the crowd around him as they fall to pieces. A Mujahedeen with his pistol outstretched, the barrel pointed straight at Sid’s face, is unable to pull the trigger because a shell has already severed his arm at the elbow far too quickly for him to have noticed yet. He will never notice because another shell is about to take his head off. A small boy snaps in half at the small of his back. The top part begins to fall freely as he continues to scream. A woman in a burqa has become a crimson soaked throw rug, so riddled with bone shattering lead fragments that she no longer has any human form. Those who survive the first three seconds of gunfire are greeted by a shower of broken glass and metal fragments that used to be the atrium ceiling, now falling like a thousand thousand razors. The table does provide some protection from that, but it is soon obliterated by the Vulcan. Sid sees a steel beam falling his direction and rolls away as it smashes down on the destroyed café table. He lands on the mangled partial cadaver of a clean shaven man in a shredded suit. The limbs are all gone but the horrified face stares up at him, through him, past him, screaming a silent indictment at the sky.
Sid turns over and does the only thing that makes any sense at all to him right now. He shoots at the sky. The plane is thousands of feet above them. It moves so quickly that he needs to lead by hundreds of feet to hit it. He can’t see it. The building is falling on top of him. A dozen bullets miss him by centimeters in each tenth of a second and this would be insanity even if all of those other things were not happening.
But Sid is more than a good shot. He is a living weapon. He is born to kill. His senses are sharper than any man. He can hear the plane. He can hear the shots. He can follow them back to the source. He closes his eyes.
The 240 is a good gun, and for Sid it is more than a weapon. It is an extension of his being. It is an extension of his rage. He squeezes the trigger and roars. “DIE! DIE! DIE!” But he can’t even hear himself over the cacophony around him. He doesn’t let go until the gun cycles through the whole belt of ammo.
If he hit the plane, he has no idea. But the Vulcan stops.
Sid jerks to his feet and looks himself over. Through some miraculous chance, he is completely unharmed. Blood smears his face and stains his clothes. The hotel lobby looks like a mass grave in the middle of some third world genocide. The chipped and battered tile floor is covered in a carpet of mangled bodies and pulverized debris. A coating of grey dust voids the scene of all vibrancy. He thinks nothing could possibly live in this heap of horror, but then he is proven wrong.
Victor stands in the exact same spot. He never moved. And why would he? Nothing here could possibly have sheltered him from the Vulcan. He is covered with dust and broken glass. He pulls a jagged shard from his shoulder and tosses it to the floor without ever displaying anything but his signature twisted glee. Blood runs down his arm from the cut as he raises his machete to point at their enemy.
Yes. The Arab cleric still stands. More disturbing still is that he remains seemingly untouched by the death storm that destroyed everything around them. His armor still shines and his robes are bright white like nothing ever happened. He draws his scimitar from its sheath and exposes the blade for the first time. It is dark like jet, but with a slight green tint. It curves slightly and ends in not one, but two points, giving it the appearance of a serpent’s forked tongue.
“By Zulfiqar, sword of evil’s bane, you meet your doom, infidel!” the cleric screams. Sid has a terrible feeling about this...
And it begins. Victor slashes at the Imam with a broad and powerful overhand strike and the blades clash between them, the Imam catching Victor’s machete between the prongs of his forked tongue tip. The machete slides between them, grinding steel on steel until it is finally free and continues downward to its target. But the Imam is too quick and his armored frame is no longer there for it to strike. So Victor slashes again. This time, the Imam is already behind him before he completes the motion. Victor barely dodges the attack.
Then Sid leaps into the fray. This is the only thing left to do against this enemy who shrugs away bullets like a phantom. Sid’s knives point downward from his raised hands as he flies through the air growling. Maybe now Victor won’t call him a runt anymore.
He slashes with furious hatred at the Imam. By now he recognizes who this is. Every vicious stab of the toxic coated combat knives is a sentence to agonizing death, but his blades meet nothing. The Imam moves like a river and attacking him is like stabbing water. Sid can barely track his movements and he swears he can see a colored trail following the bearded Muslim.
Both of them, slashing like madmen, are just barely keeping the Imam busy. Then he does something unbelievable. He breathes fire. Like a god damned magic fucking dragon, he breathes fire. It erupts from his mouth with a furious and roaring exhalation and projects toward Sid. He leaps away, but the searing heat singes the hair off his left arm. He turns back to see the Imam turning the jet of flame toward Victor, but the older brother ducks under it and stabs up into the Imam’s chest with the tip of his machete. The strike is met by the enemy’s shining white armor – armor that does not give way.
Sid jumps back into the fight hoping to get a knife between the plates of that armor from behind. He thinks if he can just stab the motherfucker in the spine that will put an end to this. He is quickly reminded of just how impossible it is to actually hit this bastard. One of his knives ends up in a wall across the room and the other he barely hangs on to as the Imam smacks the blades with his immense strength and legendary sword.
Sid pulls his .45 and empties a magazine into the back of the Imam’s head while Victor blocks and parries attacks he can hardly keep up with. The bullets do nothing and the Imam kicks Victor to the floor with a mighty foot. He slides his sword back into its sheath and faces Sid with calm serenity.
“You are strong,” the fire breathing monstrosity tells them. “But Allah’s will is stronger than all things.”
Then he holds out his hand and takes Sid’s knife away. He doesn’t grab for it or move even. The knife just rips free of Sid’s grip and sails across the room, into the Imam’s fingers. The Imam looks it over, spinning it curiously. Neither of the boys wants to see what he does with it next. Sid almost turns and runs, but then he thinks it better to keep his eyes on the knife in case he has to move quickly. What the Imam does finally do is perhaps more unsettling than any simple attack he might have envisioned.
He holds the knife up to his face and licks the length of the blade, cutting into his tongue along the way. When he reaches the tip, blood drips from his lips and he discards the knife to the floor like a piece of trash. Sid can’t peel his eyes away. This is impossible. He smeared that blade himself with Revenant TXX, a synthetic nerve agent twelve times more powerful than Novichok-7 and ninety-six times more powerful than VX. This can’t be happening. He stands for another few seconds, waiting to see if the effects were just delayed somehow, but they never come. No seizures. No massive hemorrhaging. No boils. Nothing.
Then the Imam is there. He covers the distance between them faster than Sid can track him. He snatches Sid’s arm and bashes him in the chest with a fist that hits like a carnival mallet. Sid crumples. An imploded skyscraper couldn’t topple so hard. He’s sure his ribs are broken. Maybe his arm too. It feels like he’s on fire.
Victor takes a shot at the Imam with a .40 cal, but the Imam spins to face him and the bullet turns around mid-flight. It makes a complete loop back the way it came and embeds itself in Victor’s shoulder. He snarls like a cornered and wounded animal.
“Allah is great,” the holy warrior says. “Blessed be hi…”
He is int
errupted by the giant-sized, radio controlled boomerang that shatters through the wall, spinning at two hundred miles per hour. The boomerang makes it almost to him before he leaps over it, and it continues for Victor and Sid, who both duck under it. The weapon exits the building through the opposite wall and vanishes.
Kill Team Three enters the building through the broken glass café front led by Ashley. The werewolf is noticeably absent. Abo catches his boomerang just outside the building as they continue inside. When Ashley sees the three of them, the Hansen brothers and the Twelfth Imam, he stops in his tracks.
“Holy shit,” he says. “It’s the fuckin’ Imam.”
There is a second that lasts an hour, while everyone in the room tries to decide what to do next. Ashley finally shatters the silence.
“Kill ’em all!” he screams at the top of his lungs as he opens fire with a 240 across the room. All of them open fire. Machine guns blaze. Bullets pierce the walls like paper.
Sid needs to run. He wants to run, but everything hurts. His chest feels like it is completely shattered and his arm is already beginning to swell. He doesn’t know if he can stand on his own. Bullets whiz past him as he throws himself over a marble countertop, flopping like a bar room drunk and grunting like one too. He can’t see Victor. He can’t see the Imam. He doesn’t care. He needs to get out of this place now. Then that massive boomerang comes crashing through the counter top and buzzes his head so close he loses a few hairs. Marble and stone comes down on top of him; every chunk like a punch in the body from a crowd rioting against him. He tries to crawl away, but a lot of it is on top of him. He pushes it off. He can’t stand. He sees two of everything. Fire. Screaming.
You can get the rest of KILL KILL KILL all in one nifty volume for about half the price of a Subway sandwich.
And don’t forget the bestselling spin-off series, The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One. No one called it a bestselling series before I wrote this, but if you buy it because I called it that, and other people do too, won’t it then be a bestselling series? Then doesn’t calling it a bestselling series make it a bestselling series? Is there even such a thing as a bestselling series? Bestselling where? In the world? In my house? And best in what way? Quantity sold? Page count? Number of obscene words?