by Mike Leon
“Is he still back there?” Stephen yells at Blayne, who hugs the back of the passenger seat to search the street behind them.
“No,” Blayne says. “I think you lost him.”
“What the hell, dude? What am I gonna do? I think I dented the car.”
“It might not be that bad,” Blayne says. He rolls down the power window.
“Really?” Stephen worriedly questions as Blayne leans out the window to look at the side of the car.
“Okay. It’s bad. It’s all down the side.”
“Oh my God. They’re gonna kill me.”
“I told you this was a bad idea.”
“I can’t go home.”
“What?!”
“I can’t. I just have to stay on the run.”
“That’s going to make things so much worse.”
“You don’t understand them, Blayne. My dad is like one of those witch hunt guys, the prurients.”
“The puritans.”
“He’s a puritan! He’ll probably send me to military school or something. What was I thinking?”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking right now. You need to calm down and use your head.”
“No. No. I need to find someplace to crash. I can’t believe he found me! How did he find me?!”
INT. SID’S APARTMENT - NIGHT
Sid enters the window of his crumbling apartment. He pulls a wad of paper bills from the pocket of his tracksuit and throws it on the pile with the rest of his money in the corner. The pile, mostly change and singles, reaches his knees at its highest point.
He strips away the tracksuit and stands clothed only in his growing anger. He can’t shake the events of the day from his mind. The buzzing is no longer a sound. It’s a feeling. It vibrates inside him like a pressure cooker struggling to contain an explosive load. I’m the customer and I’m always right! He should have gutted that bitch. The lobster. THE LOBSTER! And he should have put that slut over the table and fucked her filthy slit raw. But that’s not normal. Normal people don’t do those things. Got to be normal.
Sid looks around his normal apartment. His normal mountain of guns sits spread out on the countertop in his half kitchen. It contains three normal M4 carbines, a normal Barrett M82, a normal Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, twenty normal M67 fragmentation grenades, a normal MP5, four normal HK pistols, five normal Glock pistols, two hundred normal rounds of .50 BMG, two thousand normal rounds of 5.56, half that many normal 9mm, and a few dozen normal HE rounds for the goose.
He has no bed, no furniture. He keeps a boxy old TV with long bunny ears in the corner and most of his clothes in a stack on the floor.
Sid lies down beside the stack of clothes in a pointless attempt at sleep.
He spends an hour trying to drill holes in the ceiling with nothing but his glaring eyes. Failing that, he takes the next clean pair of camo pants from the stack next to the gun pile, snatches a collared black shirt from the same pile, and heads for the window. He climbs down the fire escape, drops to the empty gravel lot below, and wanders through it to the tree line at the rear of the property. He slips into the darkness of the woods. The anger within him has grown to the brink of containment and he has become a predator searching for a surplus kill.
INT. SCRAPYARD - OFFICE - NIGHT
“What do you mean, he’s gone?” Sayyid roars. He punches the cheap sheet metal desk next to him, the only fixture apart from a set of file drawers in the scrapyard’s tiny office front.
“No one can find him.” The answer comes from al-Kilij, a Bosnian jihadist known for his many exploits in Europe, and Sayyid’s new top man. He has a long grey beard that hangs almost to his belly. Protruding from a sheath slung over his right shoulder is the grip of a bent sword, the kilij, which they say he personally used to sever the heads of a hundred Serbian prisoners during the war in his home country.
“Could something have happened to him?” Fatimah asks. Al-Kilij responds with a look of cluelessness. “We must find out what happened to him.”
“There is no time.” Sayyid says.
“He may have been a traitor, or someone else…”
“All the more reason to move quickly, before our enemies can act.”
“But we need Yusef for the operation. Or someone like him.”
“He plays games on a computer. Anyone can do this. He is easily replaced.” This is a gross inaccuracy. Fatimah read Yusef’s profile.
“He was a world class computer hacker wanted for cybercrimes in ten countries.”
“You defy me, girl?”
“No.” Fatimah dares not defy him. Not for fear of him, but for fear of a greater power.
“Good.” Sayyid walks to the screen door that separates the office from the outside and pushes the flimsy thing open and leans out into the scrapyard.
“Who here knows how to use a computer?” Sayyid poses the question loudly and openly to all the men moving and hovering around the cars and trucks in the yard. Unquestionably, none are as qualified as the man they had, even if he was a pervert. He asks again after he does not get a response in good time. “Anybody here that is good with computer?”
One of the jihadis waves at them. He’s a chubby man with pocked skin and thick glasses. “I’m an information systems major,” he says.
“Good enough,” Sayyid grunts back. “What’s your name?”
“Samir.”
“Good. Someone take Samir to the computer van. And make sure to keep that van far away from the fighting. Now we ride! We will destroy the infidel where he sleeps!”
INT. OLD APARTMENT BUILDING - NIGHT
“I don’t like this,” Blayne says, climbing the creaking green steps up into stifling humidity.
“It comes with the territory,” Stephen says. “All real musicians live in sketchy pads.”
The run-down three floor walk-up they’re ascending feels like an oven, and Stephen saw a dead cockroach at the base of the steps when they entered the building. The decades old wallpaper is peeling at every vertex and even in the middle of some surfaces. This does not look like a nice place to live.
Blayne sighs. “I just mean you don’t even know Glenn that well.”
“I see him at shows all the time.” Shows are the only place Stephen has ever seen Glenn Tilley. Glenn is in his twenties and has toured with a number of national acts, usually as a roadie, but sometimes filling in on guitar. He’s isn’t a big shot, but he has lots of stories about big shots, and people like to hear those stories, so people like Glenn. “Besides, who else do we know with their own place where I can crash?”
“Nobody, but shouldn’t you just go back to your parents? I don’t think they’re gonna throw you in jail or anything.”
“Don’t be gay, dude. It’s fly or die now. If I want to keep a shred of artistic integrity I can’t go back to those bible thumpers.”
The stairwell ends at a lopsided wooden door with chipped white paint and an old round brass knob with layers of different weathered colors rubbed away by years of use. Muffled sour notes from an electric guitar buzz through the door. Stephen lights up the iPhone to double check the apartment number Glenn texted him.
“This is it.” Stephen says. He knocks on the door somewhat gingerly and waits for a response. He hears heavy footsteps approach, then the knob turns and the door swings open.
“What’s up?” says Glenn. He’s a short guy with scruffy black mutton chops and bulging biceps. A bandanna restricts his greasy hair. “You get kicked out?”
“Uh, well, not exactly, but close enough,” Stephen says.
“Whatever, man. I don’t really care who stays here, as long as you’re not a narc.”
He steps back from the doorway and waves Stephen and Blayne inside. The boys walk into a small hallway with peeling wallpaper and tile patterned laminate floors that curl up in places and rarely meet flush with the walls. In one spot it actually runs up the wall a few inches, as if whoever installed the flooring was simply too lazy to cut the extra bit dow
n to size. The apartment smells like old food and cigarettes.
To their right, the hallway opens into a little room where a tall spindly man with long hair and an assortment of Satanic tattoos covering his shirtless body picks at the guitar they heard through the door. He’s older than them, old enough to be Glenn’s father even, and appears oddly familiar.
“You can sleep on that,” Glenn says, pointing to a fold-out couch with holes chewed in the foam padding and an empty space where one of the three cushions should be.
“Is that Gash?” Stephen asks as his memory clicks into place. “From Christ Child Abortion?” The guitar player in the little den isn’t just any old schmuck from around town. He’s one of the most infamous black metal shred guitarists in the world.
“Yeah,” Glenn says. He drops his cigarette lighter onto a windowsill nearby. The vinyl blinds above it are caked with grey fuzz. “He’s staying here while the heat dies down from that nightclub fire.”
“‘Ere we go then. Let’s all ‘ave a butcher’s a’ the guitar player,” Gash grumbles in a thick London accent as he mutes his strings. His guitar is a black Jackson V with a bumper sticker pasted under the bridge which reads: Fuck stickers. “That one, the black one, he looks like a narc. The other one looks like a poofter, but that one he’s a narc alright.”
“He’s fifteen,” Glenn says. “You think they hire them out of middle school now?”
“Might could. The iron minger’s not beneaf it.” Gash cuts across the low E and A to produce a thunderingly distorted drop D power chord as he glares at Stephen. “How ‘bout it? Thatcher send you ‘ere?”
“What year do you think it is?” Blayne says.
“Two thousand five. Innit, ya barmy tosser?”
It is not 2005, and Stephen cannot even begin to wrap his head around what was said after that.
“Dude, this isn’t 21 Jump Street. Get off his case,” Glenn says.
“Fine.” Gash cringes even a bit harder than his normal permanent cringe. “But I’ll be a dead man before I’m doin’ the porridge at her majesty’s pleasure.”
“I’m a big fan of your band,” Stephen says.
“That’s why I split up ‘at codswallop. Too many fans. Fuckin’ poofters turn everything into a fad. Worshipping Satan in’t even crazy enough to be exclusive no more, innit?”
“Christ Child Abortion broke up?”
“Dude,” Glenn says. “People were buying their albums. Not cool.”
“It’s not?”
“Fuck no,” Gash growls. He unstraps his guitar and props it in the corner of the room. “The whole point o’ black metal is telling everyday blokes to fuck off. Ya’ can’t do that when you’re sellin’ ‘em records, can you?”
“I guess not…”
“So what are you doing now?” Blayne asks, eyeing Gash inquisitively.
“Well, I thought what’s even crazier than writin’ songs about Satan? And the answer came a’ me in a bad trip, well not bad, but complicated. ‘Ang on.” Gash picks up something from the arm of the couch and raises it to his face. It’s a syringe without a needle. He holds his right eye lids open and kicks his head back.
“What’s he?” Stephen mouths just before he sees Gash jab the syringe into his eyeball. Blayne squeaks and slaps a hand over his mouth as they watch the old rocker thumb the plunger down. “What is that?”
“Acid,” Glenn says. “He takes it straight to the eyeballs.”
“Anyway,” Gash tosses the syringe aside and blinks rapidly. “I said what’s crazier than Satan? And the answer. Japanese Satan.”
“Huh?” Blayne says.
“Use your noggin. The most fucked rubbish in the world comes from Japan. Panty vending machines. Bukakke. Killin’ dolphins. Eatin’ live fish. Tenticle pornos. And then I thought, we got it all wrong. Satan ain’t a English bloke at all. He’s a bloody chinaman.”
“I have to go,” Blayne says. He abruptly turns from the room and heads for the door. Stephen walks after him.
“How are you getting home?” Stephen calls after him.
“I’ll find a way.” Blayne shrugs. “I’ll get a cab or something.” He pulls open the apartment door and heads out into the stairwell, pulling it shut behind him.
“Good riddance,” Gash says. “Tape your bunger shut with that one around. You got meff on ya?”
“I have what on me?” Stephen says, now alone in the apartment with just Glenn and Gash. The place feels so much more alien without his friend. “Do I smell funny?”
“Meff, ya cheeky git.” Gash slows his words down as though he’s speaking to an uncooperative toddler. “Crystal meffamphetamine. Do you have any?”
“No. I don’t really do stuff like that...”
“Gah. Bollocks!” Gash snarls. “I’d bugger a bulldog for a tweak right now.”
EXT. SID’S APARTMENT - NIGHT
“We are approaching the door,” a whisper comes across the radio from one of the men Sayyid sent inside Sid Hansen’s apartment building. He does not expect them to kill or even fight the legendary super killer within. For that, they have three vans filled with explosives parked at the base of the building. He only needs the men to confirm his enemy is inside before he pulls the trigger.
He occupies the passenger seat of the enormous monster truck they constructed for command of this mission. The vehicle is eleven feet tall on its sixty-six inch tires and surrounded with steel plates crudely welded to the outside of the body. It has slots in the rear compartment for up to six men to fire heavy guns, and a plated door in the ceiling for the operation of the mortar system mounted in the truck bed. It does not look pretty, but form is not a thing which concerns Sayyid.
In his lap sits an iPad which displays the live feed from the satellite as relayed by the comm van which is parked miles away. In his hand is a cell phone containing the list of license plates and phone numbers for vehicles in the fleet, numbers which he committed to memory along with the drivers of those cars. When he calls a number, that car explodes. It could not be more simple.
Around him, the fleet waits in silent apprehension. The scores of vehicles he commands have gathered around him in the street nearly a hundred yards away from the building, watching, listening for the first hint of violence.
“We are about to breach,” the whisper comes over the radio. Sayyid places his thumb over the number for one of the vans parked below the building. On contact, his plan is to blow the vans and topple the structure. God willing, everything inside will die. Regardless, they will fire machine guns and mortar shells at the rubble until there is no hope of even a single cockroach’s survival.
“Oh, uh, oops,” the radio crackles. The voice belongs to Samir. “Yeah, uh, he’s not in there.”
“What do you mean?” Sayyid responds into his own radio. He looks to the puzzled face of his driver as they wait for an answer. His attention is drawn to the bright flash from the windows ahead of them.
BAM! A loud crack carries through the night air, reaching the truck seconds after the flash. The blast inside the building would appear to contradict the information Samir has just given him. Sayyid yells back into the radio.
“Report! Report!”
“Oh no. It’s bad,” the man inside cries out on the radio. “Ishak and Fadil are dead. So much blood! He’s hamburgers! Hamburgers!”
“You have contact?” Sayyid prepares to push the button that will send them all to their marriage in heaven as the infidel burns.
“No no. MRUD. Lots of them.” He coughs loudly into the radio. Mina Rasprskavajućeg Usmerenog Dejstva: a type of directional mine used in Bosnia. Though Sayyid already knows these were probably the much more prolific American devices of similar design: claymore mines. “He booby trapped the door.”
“Ooooooohhhh,” Samir says with drawn out realization. “That explains him going in and out through the window.”
“He went out the window?!!!” Sayyid shouts. “How long ago?!!”
“Uh, about an hour ago.”
“You fucking fool! How did you miss that?!!”
“I just started using this thing!”
“It is common sense! You rewind and at least make sure he’s in the building!”
“That’s what I just did!”
“I meant before this! You had one job! One job!”
“I’m sorry Sayyid. It will not happen again.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re looking at him from space! Where is he?!”
“He went in the woods. I...I can’t see him anymore. It’s dark in there. He’s under the trees.”
EXT. DENSE FOREST - NIGHT
Sid skulks through the shadows, silently stalking his prey. He cannot be heard by human ears, but that is no challenge. To go unheard by superhuman ears is the true test. He fails it.
He shifts his footing a few millimeters and his prey turns its head toward the large growth of bushes he crouches in. It sniffs the air with its snout. Teeth make their first threatening appearance with a low growl. No sense hiding anymore.
Sid leaps from the bushes and charges. He expects to make contact with a furry mass of snapping jaws and barking rage. He is surprised when the wolf turns and runs. It yelps briefly as it goes, dashing off into the trees.
“What the fuck?” Sid whispers as he takes off in pursuit. He reaches top speed quickly and moves through the foliage and around tree trunks faster than any normal man, but the wolf is even faster. It’s like trying to chase down a car. He sprints flat out through the brush for only three minutes before he loses sight of the beast and gives up.
He punches the nearest tree, a tall skinny thing with smooth bark and very few branches. If he weren’t so angry, he wouldn’t have blown his approach. He would have caught that wolf before it knew he was there. He would have beaten it to death with his bare hands. He hits the tree again.
