by Mike Leon
“I see the police!” Melissa says.
“That’s not the police,” Sid says, snatching up the rifle from the console.
“There are so many numbers!” Nick says, still fumbling with the iPhone in his blistering fingers.
“Good,” Sid says, watching the banshee’s police car rapidly close on them in the rear view. “Start calling!”
“I can’t!” Nick says. “I can’t kill all those people.”
Sid’s first thought is to gouge the priest’s eyeballs out in anger, but he’s preoccupied by the growing push bar on the police car behind them.
WHAM! The police car rams the back of the Volt, thrusting the little car forward and jostling everyone inside. Fatimah bares her broken teeth in an inaudible attack howl through the glass. Subgun rounds punch through the rear window as Sid jinks the car from side to side.
“Eh, you know what?” Nick says. “Fuck ‘em.”
He starts dialing.
EXT. HARRAH’S LAKE TAHOE - DAY
“I tell you, Yusef,” Fareed says. “I never really believed about the seventy two virgins anyway.”
The tall Arab is clad in blue jeans and an Alice in Chains tee shirt which still bears the sales tag of the Wal-Mart where it was purchased. Large sunglasses hide his eyes and his headband has been discarded in favor of a Sacramento Kings cap. He lights a cigarette with a flip-open Zippo lighter.
“Oh, me neither,” Yusef says, rolling his eyes. He fingers an epic stack of hundred dollar bills as the two of them strut through the parking lot of Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, the gigantic hotel and casino looming behind them. “Is just so much pressure, you know?”
“Exactly!” Fareed says. “My grandfather was suicide bomber. My father was suicide bomber. My older brother—suicide bomber. I tell my family I think I want to be doctor or lawyer, is like I told them I am homosexual. My mother, she cries. She say ‘Oh Fareed, why you do this to me?’ and I feel bad so I end up here.”
“Here is not so bad, my friend.”
“No. It is not. What are the Iranians thinking? Always with the death to America. Death to America. What is that about? We come to America and we are counting stacks like Young Thug!”
“You got to have a system. Nobody in there has system.”
“Let’s go get some hookers.”
KA-BOOM! The van ahead of them becomes a skyward fireball that showers dozens of surrounding cars with ember rain.
“Oh shit, man.”
EXT. VACANT HIGHWAY - DAY
“Nothing’s happening!” Nick yells into Sid’s ear. He pokes at the iPhone screen with the relatively clean knuckles of his burned and bloody hands.
“Just call them all!” Sid shouts back. “Keep going!” In the rearview, the outskirts of town loom over the column of ratty cars surging toward him with their cargo of death. The view ahead is a wide open span of brown wasteland and paved highway.
Sid puts his finger down on the little switch to his left and watches the automatic window slide down next to him as the police car pulls along beside him. He props the AK on the edge of the window and empties the rest of the magazine into the pursuit vehicle’s engine compartment. Steam rises from the hood of the car, but it continues to gain on him.
“That thing isn’t slowing down,” Sid says.
“Allahu Akbar!” the bearded Islamist screams from the open passenger window of the police car as he aims his submachine gun at Sid.
Sid jerks the wheel to the left and slams into the side of the police car, impaling the Islamist’s head on the bayonet attached to the AK. The submachine gun clatters down the side of the car and vanishes into the street behind them. Sid leaves the AK in the bastard’s head as he pulls away from the Charger.
“I just scored a drive-by bayonet kill!” he says, smacking Nick in the shoulder excitedly. The priest continues to dial numbers.
“Is that good?” Melissa questions through jittery trepidation.
“I’ve never done that before!” Sid says. “Nobody’s ever done that before!”
The Charger bashes into the side of the Volt with the dangling AK smacking up against the window frame and the dead body suspending it flopping up and down in the cabin. Fatimah screams from behind it.
“Today, you breathe your last, Beast!” she howls, hefting a Smith and Wesson Model 500 up from her lap. The world’s largest handgun is like a bazooka in her tiny hand. She blasts away at the front of the Volt. The dashboard lights up like the Vegas strip. Maintenance Required. Check engine.
“I’m gonna cut your head off and stuff it up your cunt!” Sid screams through the window as he bashes the Volt up against the side of the Charger. It’s like a field mouse trying to push a brick.
“A pointless threat! The one true God will not allow me to die!” She snaps open the revolver’s cylinder and five empty shells fall on the corpse next to her.
“Even better!”
A motorcycle zooms up along the right side of the Volt. Its rider points a pistol at the front tire, but Sid jerks the car to the right, smacking the bike and sending it rocketing into a fire hydrant at high speed. The bike and the rider become one tumbling mass of bent metal and crunching bones.
“How far are you?” Sid yells to Nick. The pack of cars behind them is closing.
“I called four numbers! Nothing happened!” They could have belonged to cars that were already detonated, or that simply aren’t present here.
“Only four?!”
“It’s this stupid touch screen! I have to look at it, and I never know if I pushed the button the right way!”
“The license plates! Call one of the plates behind us!”
“You’re trailing a lot of smoke, Sid,” the Player yells.
“I know!” he roars back. “Just shut up about it!”
Sid hears a loud thump from his left and realizes they’ve shot one of the rear tires out. He pushes the gas pedal to the floor as he feels the drag on the car increase. Sparks and shreds of rubber explode out into the street. The pack grows closer. The lead cars are hardly ten meters out and gaining. The other rear tire explodes as Fatimah cackles.
“DIE! DIE!” she howls, firing more bullets into the hood of the Volt from that behemoth revolver. “DIE!”
Then it happens.
It all blows up. The cars, the street, even the sky, all seem to catch fire in a cluster of explosions that sound off like the world’s loudest bubblewrap being throttled. The priest must have dialed the right car, probably one near the middle of the pack, but even Sid can’t tell through the hurricane of flame and rolling steel. It’s a chain reaction, and it’s exactly what he hoped for—only much closer than he would have preferred.
The Charger grinds against the side of the Volt. Fatimah’s manic laughing screeches uncontrolled as the blast engulfs both vehicles. Sid cuts the wheel furiously to avoid losing control, but the back end of the car is already off the ground and the front end is trying to eat dirt. The Volt trips on the front tires and the whole car rolls over the Charger’s hood. Airbags deploy. Glass bursts and scatters. The front tires rotate unopposed in the air.
The Volt lands upright with a creaking and angry thud against the pavement. Sid glances around the inside of the car to see if any of the passengers are dead. The Player clamors over the phone.
“Hello? Is anybody dead? If you’re dead, say something.”
Nick shakes his head. Both of them turn to the back seat.
“My face hurts,” Melissa says. A glass shard is stuck through the flesh above her left eyebrow, like a terribly ragged surface-to-surface piercing. More glass is embedded in her shoulder and a collection of broken bits rests in her cleavage.
“Stephen?” Nick says.
“Not any worse than before,” the boy answers. “I don’t think.”
Sid hears the growl of the Charger engine outside and snaps his attention to the source of the noise. She’s out there, ahead of them. Revving the engine.
“Get out!” Sid says.
“What?” Nick yelps.
“We’re doing this. Get out. Take the kid.”
Nick throws open the passenger door without hesitation. Melissa fidgets in her seat, one eye drawn tightly closed, poking at the glass shard above it. Nick rips her door open and yanks her from the car.
“Help me,” he shouts to her as he pulls Stephen from the back of the Volt.
“What? What are we?” she mumbles.
Sid revs the engine. It sounds like a moped.
Through the thinning dust outside he can distinguish the shape of the Charger. The big car roars at him like a jungle cat. The boy barely clears the cab when Sid shifts to drive. The Volt skitters forward as the Charger fishtails madly, its shredded rear tires blubbering for a grip on the street. They get what they want. The Charger catapults forward, running directly at Sid’s cracked windshield like a huge missile. He can see Fatimah loudly calling for his death as they rocket toward each other on a collision course that will turn both cars into steaming steel wads.
Sid pops the door handle and leaps from the Volt only a few feet from the Charger’s black push bar. He rolls along the street with the pavement tearing at his elbows and shoulders. The Charger chomps the Volt down to the driver’s seat in an impact so fierce that the open door blows off its hinges and slides along the road with a high pitched screech. Fatimah goes through the windshield spitting blood and vitriol.
The mangled girl sails over the Volt, scraping its roof as she passes. She smacks into the road over a hundred feet behind the little car and lies motionless. Sid rises from the ground as the twisted heap of scraps begins to burn between them. He picks up the disconnected door on his way back to the wreck. It isn’t over.
He pries the AK and its bayonet from the head of the Charger passenger, now mangled beyond recognition, as he watches Fatimah struggle up from the ground. Her arms vibrate with fatigue. Her knees knock. The artwork his brother left across her face has been destroyed. The letters S and L abruptly end in a mass of road rash. Besides some worn and stained cotton panties, her only article of clothing is the explosive laden vest surrounding her body. She shambles toward him like the walking dead. She clenches her fingers around the clacker wired to her martyr maker as Sid detaches the bayonet from the rifle.
“No—” she trails off. “Nowhere. To hide. Won’t stop. Death to the infidel!”
Sid rushes toward her, dragging the door alongside him and carrying the big steel knife between his gritted teeth. He eyes her hand, the only thing that matters, as he gains on her. She begins to cackle furiously as she holds out the detonator to taunt him.
“Death to the infidel! Death to the infidel! HA HA HA HA HA HA!”
She clamps her thumb down on the button. Sid leaps for her, raising the disembodied Volt door in front of himself like some mythic dragon slayer, as fiery doom consumes them both. Heat rushes against him. It’s like trying to push a pickup truck through a blast furnace for a tenth of a second before he’s knocked on his back.
The air is thick with filth. The ground seems to quiver like the surface of the sea. The kill team remains.
He stands, smoldering in the midst of an acrid black cloud that blocks out the sun. Hair burns. His clothes burn. Nails protrude from one elbow and the tips of his boots, but the Volt door looks like a studded Plinko pegboard.
Fatimah cries out through the smoke ahead of him. Sid reaches out and grabs for her. He rings the fingers of one hand all the way around her delicate little neck and hauls her out into the clear air.
“No! Nooooo!” she screams, flailing her limbs against the pavement in the way of a child throwing a tantrum. “It is the will of Allah!”
Sid pulls the knife from his gritted jaws and holds the tip to her flat and scarred chest.
“It is the will of Allah!” she shrieks again.
Sid drives the knife into the soft flesh of her belly. Her eyelids spread wide as the sky when the point pokes her spine.
“It is the will of Allah,” she says, coughing up a pint of deep red blood. “It is the will of Allah.”
He pulls the knife and stabs her again, turning it up and twisting the blade. She heaves more blood.
“It is the will of Allah!”
“Shut up and die!” Sid stabs her six more times with a vicious quickness of which he alone is capable. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
“It is the will of Allah!” she says, blood squirting from her open wounds and leaking from her mouth. She lifts her hands and grips his shoulders, a seemingly impossible feat for her torn and broken body.
“Then I’ll kill him too!” Sid says. “Whatever I have to do to make you stay dead.”
“It is the will of Allah,” she says.
“Tell him to come out here! Let’s do this!” He stabs her again and again until her belly is one huge weeping wound now. Her entrails dangle from it, dripping blood and bile and whatever remnants were left in her stomach.
“It is His will!” She heaves sticky bubbles of red slime, having nothing left in her to spew.
“He’s not coming, bitch,” Sid says. He stabs the knife into her chest to puncture her lungs and heart. “Who’s godless now?”
Fatimah’s ruined face contorts with great difficulty. Her mouth curves downward and her remaining eyebrow lowers in a visage of pure rage.
“It—I—” she croaks. “I… hate… you.”
Then she goes limp with the stillness of death.
After everything that happened, it’s too risky to leave her this way. There can be no assumptions. Sid presses the edge of the knife to her throat and begins to saw through the trachea, jugular, and spine. It is cleaner than usual, as most of her blood is already in the street. He casts away her lifeless head and starts on the rest of her body, not satisfied until it is completely dismembered.
EXT. VACANT HIGHWAY - DAY
Even from afar, Nick cannot watch the kill team complete his gruesome task. He has half a mind to go put a stop to it, but the other half is in complete disagreement, and he knows he couldn’t compel Sid to do anything anyway. An army might not be able to do that.
Instead, he focuses on the little cell phone in his hand. He continues to work his way down the list, dialing the phone numbers one by one as he kneels over his injured son.
“Dad,” Stephen groans for his attention.
“Yeah?” Nick says.
“I don’t want to be in a black metal band anymore.”
Nick laughs. “It’s not a big deal, Steve. It’s just music. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”
“I know, dad.” Stephen chokes. “I just lost my taste for it.”
The rumble of an approaching engine kicks Nick into a sudden panic. His head twitches around to view the oncoming vehicle with growing horror.
His fears fade as the purple Challenger slows to a stop and the door opens. A girl steps out on black platform boots with heels so high she might as well be wearing stilts. She brushes back long black hair to uncover deep blue eyes encircled with thick black makeup like a raccoon mask. Her skin is pasty white like a cadaver and she has more tattoos than a girl her age should ever have already accumulated.
“Whoa,” she says surveying the destruction in the middle of the road.
“Excuse me,” Nick says, waving at her. “Uh, Miss. Is there any way you could take us to a hospital?”
“Oh hey,” Lily says. “You’re that priest guy!”
“Oh,” Nick says. “It’s you.”
“You know her, dad?” Stephen asks.
Before he can even attempt an answer, Sid stomps past them, covered in blood and the stench of death. He advances on the little goth girl without any change in his bloodthirsty demeanor.
“How did you find us?” he growls.
She sneers and rolls her eyes. “I followed the explosions and dead bodies.”
“I learned something today,” Sid says. He pushes her against the car, handling her like an object with no semblance of personhood. “Killing people. Much bet
ter than not killing people.”
“Yeah?” Lily says, as he begins to suck on her neck. “You gonna kill some Russians for me?”
“I’m gonna kill every one of those Russians.” Sid turns her around and slams her face down against the hood of the car. He forces his fingers into the waistband of her tiny denim shorts and tugs them down around her thighs. “And I’m gonna come down your whore throat when I’m done.”
“Oh yeah,” Lily squeaks. “I want to suck it down.” She yelps as he violently penetrates her from behind, his hands keeping her clamped down against the car. “Fuck me! Fuck me!”
She moans loudly. Her eyes roll back in her head and she takes on the appearance of something that should be covered in a sheet and given last rites.
“Are we just going to watch this?” Stephen says.
“It’s like a trainwreck. I can’t look away,” Melissa says, ogling the scene in front of them with unblinking eyes.
Nick can only shake his head. He has spent a lifetime studying and classifying good people, bad people, morals, laws, commandments, right and wrong. What he’s looking at now doesn’t fit neatly into any of those boxes. He doesn’t know what this is.
“Guys?” Stephen says. “Really. I’m pretty sure I need an ambulance.”
ASDF
INT. COMM VAN - DUSK
Samir Atli looks on in terrified disgust as the Beast fucks a filthy infidel woman over a car like a goat or some other farm animal. Such perversions are common among the westerners.
The army of holy warriors and the fleet of vehicles they piloted lies in ruins. None but two technicals and one motorcycle remain, with only a handful of wounded men to make use of them. Sayyid is dead. Fatimah has been dismembered. But the Beast has forgotten something very important. They still have the uplink to the spy satellite. With it, they can watch him with the eyes of God. They will rebuild. They will not relent. The infidel can run, but he cannot….
KLACK! KLACK! KLACK! A strange noise echoes through the interior of the van and Samir turns to see the driver slump over the steering wheel. A man, a black man with a patchy beard and puffy hair, leans around the passenger seat pointing a hefty pistol with an extended black tube jutting from its muzzle. The little red dot from the gun’s LAM illuminates Samir’s chest. Samir has already seen him once today, only he was just a tiny shape on the monitor then.
