Godless Murder Machine (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 2)

by Mike Leon

  “Yeah. They had a contest to see who could make her scream loudest. I couldn’t stop them. I just walked away.”

  His words do nothing to convey the horrors suffered upon that girl by Victor and Kill Team Three. Graveyard’s lost third kill team was a gang of depraved marauders unfit for anything but raping and pillaging. Even the ones who were technically human were more worthy of being called monsters than most actual monsters. He walked away that night from a fight he couldn’t possibly win. Or did he?

  Victor and the werewolf were dead by Sid’s own hands. He killed Kill Team Two all by himself, and they were supposed to be better than the third team. He recalls every supposedly invincible enemy he has felled and as the body count rises so does his self-doubt.

  “You regret what happened?” the priest says.

  “No.” Sid lies. “Regret is a waste of time.”

  “We all have things we wish we could go back and change.”

  “Yeah? What do you wish you could change?”

  The priest shakes his head. “I… Uh… I had an older son. He got mixed up with some bad people. I don’t really like to talk about it.”

  “Mobsters?”

  “No.”

  “Terrorists?”

  “No. Drugs. He got mixed up with drugs. Okay? And I didn’t even notice until it was too late. And we lost him. And I always think if I wasn’t such a nice guy dad back then, maybe if I got on him about staying out late, or smoking cigarettes or keeping his grades up, then it wouldn’t have led to that.” The priest pauses and looks out the window for a lengthy interval, then continues. “The thing is, now I’m hard as heck on Stephen, and it’s all just going the same way.”

  “He’s doing drugs too?”

  “No. It’s the music he’s into.”

  “Music?” Sid raises an eyebrow at the bizarre revelation as he struggles to understand how that could have to do with anything. “That’s it?”

  “It’s disgusting. It’s the worst music I’ve ever heard. Everything about it is wrong and offensive and I don’t want it around.” A term Lily Hoffman used over last night’s dinner suddenly comes to mind. Sid didn’t quite comprehend its meaning until now.

  “That’s a first world problem,” Sid says. “Let me ask you something. How did you learn about sex?”

  “What?”

  “Sex. Fucking. You know. Did your dad tell you about it? You have a little conversation? I didn’t have that. I found out watching my brother rape a girl with three other guys. One of them was a cyborg. You understand how fucked up that is?”

  “A cyborg?”

  “It’s completely insane! For years I thought you have to stab chicks to get them to fuck. Then I found out that wasn’t true. Now I’m starting to think that might be true again.”

  “Wha—what?”

  “I don’t know, man. I just don’t know anymore.”

  “I assure you that stabbing women for sex is not the way.”

  “Yeah? Well, what do I do? I asked a bunch of girls in Target if they want to fuck today and all it did was make them angry.”

  “Did you say it just like that?”

  “Yeah! I couldn’t have been any clearer!”

  “If you talk to them like a malaka of course they get angry!”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I don’t condone sexual relations outside the confines of marriage.”

  “That’s what this guy I work with said. Then he pissed his pants and cried like a bitch just because the building exploded and I shot some guys to death with a PDW.”

  “That doesn’t in—what’s a? No. I.” Nick jumbles words together like a slipping rock climber scraping for a desperate hold on the mountain of conversation. He gets a grip. “The sex act is an extremely intimate and personal expression. It shouldn’t be squandered on strangers. It should be celebrated in a lasting union. Find a woman you care about. Spend time with her. Get to know her. Invest in her. The sex is just a part of that. It comes later.”

  “I tried that,” Sid grumbles. “It didn’t work either. I took her somewhere fancy. I told her her hair smells like angels. I got her the lobster. The lobster! And I got nothing back!”

  “She’s not a vending machine, Sid! She’s a person too. She has wants and needs that may be a little more complex than lobster and compliments.”

  “Yeah. She wants me to kill all these Russian guys who have sex in traffic.”

  “What?”

  “These Russian guys have sex in traffic. Liam Neeson made a movie about it. Now they beat up her friend and she wants me to kill them all.”

  “What?!?!?!? Who is this girl?”

  “She’s a stripper I met six months ago. She had sex with me so I’d kill her stepdad. Then she accidentally caused the Morston Massacre.”

  “The terrorist attack where all those people died?”

  “Yeah. So are you saying I should kill the Russians then?”

  “Sid,” Nick stares at him for a long pause in which he slowly shakes his head in ugly astonishment. “I can’t do this. You need Jesus. And not in the figurative way. I don’t mean you just need to find religion. You need the actual Jesus. He has to come down from Heaven. And I’ve never told anyone this before, and it scares me, but there might not be enough Jesus for you.”

  “See? And you’re worried about bad music?” Sid stops the car. He turns and looks out the passenger’s side window. “We’re here.”

  INT. WALK-IN FREEZER – ????

  Stephen awakens to the steamy feel of a sauna. His head aches and a frosty film covers his skin. It seems as though someone has turned off the freezer.

  “Hey,” he says. “Why’s it so hot in here?”

  “What?” Melissa rattles out of unconsciousness underneath him. Her teeth chatter. She must have fallen asleep and left a window open. “Wh-what?”

  “Is the power out? The freezer’s off. I’m burning up.”

  “Are you crazy? It’s so cold.”

  “You’re always cold. You’re just like your mother.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. What you just said. What is this? Where did this come from?” Melissa shimmies her hand up between their pressed together chests and swipes her index finger across his forehead. It comes away with a pasty coating of frost. Frosted tips. Frosted Flakes. Frosted Frost. Emma Frost. “It’s sweat. Oh my god. Your sweat is freezing. Why are you sweating?”

  “I need to take off some of these clothes.” He starts to pull away, but she grabs him.

  “No!”

  “Yeah. I’m gonna lay on the floor I think. Cool down.”

  “No, Stephen. Look at me.” She wraps her arms around him in an intense bear hug as he attempts to stand up from the blanket again. It’s just so hot in here and she’s not making any sense. “You’re illusionismal. Delusific. You have a space gaga to hibbity bibbity Makong Delta. Nobody knows but sasquatch and he ain’t telling.”

  “So hot.”

  “No! You’re staying right here!”

  “Right here?”

  “Right here.”

  “I’ll be. Right. Here.”

  INT. MESSY APARTMENT - DAY

  “What’s your favorite color?” Samir says into Mahmoud’s ear through his iPhone, a device he spent most of his savings on, as he wished to take a nice phone with him to paradise. Mahmoud, al-Kilij, and Muhammad remain in the messy apartment where the old Bosnian continues to interrogate the owner of the cell phone the Beast is using. They seem to be making some progress.

  “What’s your favorite color?” Mahmoud relays to al-Kilij, who then repeats the question with far more ferocity to their captive.

  “What’s your favorite color!?!!!?!?!” he screams at the man cowering on the carpet at his feet, while waving his curvy blade.

  “Purple!” the captive instantly shrieks back from his place cowering on the carpet. “It’s purple!”

  “Purple?” says the woman in the corner. “You told me it was blue! You tell all your bitches
a different color?”

  “Aw shit! It mighta been blue when I got that phone.”

  “What was the name of your first pet?” Mahmoud says.

  “What? Now I know that thing be trippin! I ain’t had no pets!”

  “He says no pets.” Mahmoud feeds the answer back to Samir.

  “That doesn’t help,” Samir says. “What do I put? None? Nothing?”

  “I would put nothing I guess.”

  “It won’t let me leave it blank.”

  “I mean I would type the word nothing.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s what I’m typing.”

  “Oh.”

  “Nothing worked.”

  “You’re in?”

  “No. It didn’t work. I’m trying N/A.”

  “But you said…”

  “I’m in!” Samir says.

  “Good,” al-Kilij snorts. “Now find the Beast.”

  “My momma was right!” shouts the woman. “She said not to marry you, Lamar! She said you was gonna get us both shot!”

  “Dammit, bitch!” the captive yells back. “She meant gettin’ shot by regular niggas, not some crazy Middle East niggas!”

  “I’m not from the Middle East.” al-Kilij says. He plucks his huge hockey stick sword up from the spot where it was embedded in the floor. “And I’m not going to shoot you.”

  He raises the sword over his head and then swings it down into the captive’s neck. Thick arterial gore sprays from the headless body and the woman manages half a scream before Muhammad’s knife severs her throat.

  EXT. COZY HOUSE - DAY

  Sid stands on a grey cement porch, up three steps from a tiny but perfectly kept lawn adorned by two beds of colorful flowers. An outcropping of the roof covers the porch and serves to suspend the bench swing next to him. A wooden post holding up the roof also supports a metal flagpole from which hangs an eight color rainbow flag.

  “What’s with the gay flag?” Nick says. The priest walks up the steps to join him on the porch.

  “A gay guy probably lives there,” the player says.

  “I don’t think Stephen knows any gays.”

  “You sure this is it?” Sid asks the big smartphone in his hand.

  “Yeah,” the Player answers. “He went in there an hour ago. He was holding hands with a man.”

  “He’s fifteen!” Nick says. “He can’t be gay.”

  “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt,” grumbles the Player.

  “I’m not in denial. He’s not gay.”

  “You say it like there’s something wrong with it.”

  “Well, in Orthodox tradition we believe it is sinful, but we all fall short of God’s ideal for us in our own way.”

  “Sounds like bigotry to me.”

  “I don’t have time for this,” Sid says. He slides the phone into his left pants pocket and draws the police Glock from his waistband. He spent all the ammunition in the brief tunnel fight earlier, but an empty gun isn’t always a useless gun.

  He kicks in the door and steps into the house with the gun at a low ready position. He enters an open living room with a high ceiling and a staircase along the wall to his left. The swinging door smacks into a tall wooden coat rack, and a collection of light jackets and umbrellas flop against the dark floor boards as it tips and falls. To his right, a flat panel TV flashes images of exploding cars and the smoking rubble of his GameStop store. The fat brown leather chaise sofa overlooking it is empty. The room is clear.

  “GameStop got exactly what they deserve,” says a woman on the TV with long dark hair, giant hoop earrings, a flannel shirt and gobs of makeup covering her face. “You can’t peddle murder and rape simulators all day every day and not expect this to happen eventually.”

  Sid hears the whiney creaking of bedsprings and muffled moans from upstairs even over the TV. He still needs to clear the bottom floor. He dashes through the living room and kicks open a door at the rear to peer into the next room: a small eat-in kitchen with a single counter and a small table surrounded by four chairs. He glances at the corners and leans over the counter to confirm this room is unoccupied as well. Then he backtracks through the living room.

  “What is that?” Nick whispers from the threshold of the open front door.

  “I have some ideas,” Sid says as he charges up the noisy stairway to the second floor.

  At the top of the steps is a narrow hallway flanked by brown slat walls and three open doors. A fourth door at the end of the hall is only cracked slightly. The rhythmic moaning stops and he can hear people talking inside.

  “What was that?” someone whispers.

  “What was what?” a voice replies.

  Sid isn’t interested in giving them any more time to discuss the issue. He goes right for the last door and shoulders his way through.

  There are two men on a hefty bed in front of him, fucking; boning; screwing; dancing the horizontal mambo—in animal costumes. The closest one is inside a fluffy white zebra costume complete with a life sized foam head including a tiny slot in the neck which serves as a visor. The one giving it to him from behind is a giraffe.

  “Ach!” shrieks the zebra.

  “Hands up!” Sid says. He shifts the pistol barrel back and forth between his targets. Neither moves an inch. “Which one of you is Stephen?”

  “What? Who are you?” the giraffe says.

  “Stephen!” Sid yells.

  “There’s no Stephen here.”

  Sid hears Nick stomping up the stairs behind him as he barks more demands at the men in front of him. “Take off the heads! Take ‘em off!” The giraffe keeps dropping his hands to his sides, behind the zebra. Sid doesn’t like that.

  “Hands in the air! Put ‘em up!” Sid yells.

  “What’s going on in here?” Nick says as he walks in from the hallway. As soon as he glimpses the men on the bed he slaps a hand over his eyes and turns away. “Aw, come on,” he groans. “Get a room.”

  “This is my room,” says the giraffe dryly.

  “Mr. Papastathopoulos?” the zebra says.

  “What?” Nick sounds surprised.

  “Get that fucking head off before I blow your fucking head off!” Sid yells before he realizes how strange that sounds. “You know what I mean!”

  The zebra slowly moves his raised hands to his ears, his zebra ears, and pulls off the giant foam head. Nick looks even more surprised when he sees what is underneath.

  “Blayne?!” Nick shrieks.

  “You can’t tell Stephen about this, Mr. Papastathopoulos! Please!” Blayne begs. “If anybody at school finds out...”

  “What the fuck is going on here?!” Sid bellows. “Which one of them is Stephen?”

  “Neither!” Nick says.

  “Sid,” yells the Player through the speakerphone in Sid’s pocket. “You have incoming. Get the kid and get out of there.”

  “Is Optimus Prime in your pants?” says the giraffe.

  “He’s not here!” Sid yells back.

  “He went into that house,” the Player says. “I’m positive!”

  “Oh no,” Nick says. “Player, what does Stephen look like?”

  “Uh,” the Player stalls in confusion. “He’s skinny, kinda pale, has gelled hair…”

  “You followed the wrong person from the rock concert!”

  “Fuck!” Sid growls. He lowers the pistol and spins. “We need to go. They’re coming.”

  “I don’t—what?” Blayne says. “You can’t tell anybody about this.”

  Nick lunges forward and snatches Blayne by the shoulders. “Blayne, listen to me carefully. Put on your helmet, head, whatever, and run. Both of you. You have to go now. These people that are coming, they’ll destroy this house with bombs and they’ll kill you.”

  “Is it Westboro?” says the giraffe.

  “I’m serious! Run! Go now!” Nick says as he releases the boy.

  Sid charges down the stairs with Nick following him. When he emerges on the front porch he scans the street for cars
headed his way and sees only a few slow moving vehicles that don’t seem interested in him. He dashes for the Uber car.

  “Player,” he says, tearing open the driver door. “ETA on the hostiles.”

  “One minute,” Player responds. “Give or take.”

  Nick sits down in the passenger’s seat as Sid punches the start button.

  “I need you to backtrack and find the actual Stephen,” he says as he stomps down the gas pedal and the car lurches forward.

  “Already on it. For the record, he’s uh… adopted, right?”

  “Yes!” Nick shouts. “From Africa! What other glaringly obvious details have you missed?”

  “You never thought to mention that your greasy Greek ass has a black adopted kid who likes death metal? And that’s my fault? What are the odds of that? They have to be astronomical!”

  The car comes up on an intersection as the light turns red. A little sedan slows to a stop in front of them, so Sid cuts the wheel and swerves around it into the intersection. A car coming from his left slams on its brakes and blows the horn at him. Another car, this one coming from his right, makes no noise at all but turns to follow him as he continues down the street. He recognizes it from when he dusted through their motorcade earlier, but the driver’s jihadi headband is also a dead giveaway.

  As the car flies along, he sees another one of them coming at him head-on, six blocks out, still the size of a thumb print on the windshield. Sid taps the brakes and slides through a turn to lose them briefly. The evasive action gets Nick’s attention.

  “You see them? Is that them?” Nick asks worriedly.

  “Yeah,” Sid says.

  “Oh, God.”

  “I have a plan this time.”

  Nick hops up on a knee to look out the back of the car as Sid builds speed and swerves into the oncoming lane to pass a Greyhound bus. More horns blare at them. Buildings flash past them at a breakneck pace.

  “Plan? What kind of plan?” says the Player. “I don’t know about a plan.”

  “Just keep talking,” Sid says. “I’ve got this.”

  The car’s automatic transmission flips into fourth gear as he blows through another intersection, picking up more tails in the form of a white utility van and a battered Chevy Blazer.