KILL KILL KILL

by Mike Leon

  He peeks in through all the windows he can, checking for signs of an ambush. When he has circled around the mansion once and developed a quick floor plan in his head, he moves to a large, mostly glass, double door leading in from the swimming pool to the kitchen. The other entryway opened into a wide open living room which was overlooked by part of the second floor. Going in there would be stupid. He tries the door. It is unlocked.

  None of this adds up. There should be guards, remote sentries, something. But as the door creaks open into the house, Sid can only stare befuddled at the empty room ahead. He listens for the sounds of breathing, footsteps, or rustling clothes and he hears nothing. This is impossible. His hearing is perfect. He thinks he could hear the sound of a heartbeat in this quiet house, and still nothing. He steps inside.

  No one leaps out to ambush him. There is no unit of commandos. No alarm sirens sound. As he moves farther inside he still detects nothing. He stalks through the living room quickly and without a sound. He makes his way to the stairs. Stairs are difficult to traverse stealthily. Sid uses a technique that involves planting his feet against the edges where each step meets the wall and stabilizing with a free hand to spread out the distribution of his weight. A ninja taught his father this and his father taught him.

  He reaches the top of the stairs and readies his knife. He moves slower than he did downstairs because second floors are often creakier and he is closer to his target. He can’t risk any mistakes here. Tripping on some clutter or stepping on a loose floorboard will ruin everything.

  He passes two rooms on his way to the target. One is occupied by a single young woman. She sleeps with a shaggy mess of hair in her face and a fan blowing on her. This is foolish because the noise of the fan provides cover for intruders like him. Sid does not know what function she serves. The second room is larger and he spies the parents asleep in bed, both of them completely unprotected and their door left wide open. He continues to the next room and sees his target for the first time.

  The room is dimly lit by a small plug-in night light adorned with some kind of bear decoration. Stuffed animals clutter the floor and Sid must step over several. The eight-year-old enemy lies bundled under thick covers wrapped around him and over his head. Sid finds this ridiculous. The best way to sleep is on your back with a gun in your hand and your eyes open – and behind locked doors or hidden in a closet. His father taught him this. He almost laughs at the absurdity he sees in front of him. As if a woolen blanket with patchwork teddy bears on it will stop him or his seven inch blade. He flips the knife into a downward pointing position and prepares to strike his enemy. Then he stops.

  How can this be his enemy? This child has done nothing to harm him. The pathetic little shit can’t even defend himself. He lowers his knife. Sid has killed hundreds of men in his training. He and his brother used live prisoners for target practice since they were old enough to talk. Later, his father staked men to the ground behind the house and had the boys stab and hack at them with knives and swords and clubs. The first lesson of armed close combat, he said, is to feel these things. Nothing, no text, no training video, can prepare a person for the feeling of driving sharpened steel through human flesh. It is a sawing, grinding process that often comes to a jarring halt when the blade hits bone. For a long time, Sid felt a vile screech in his inner ears as he drove the knife deeper. This he learned to put aside by drawing on his inner anger. If he felt rage enough to tear into them with his teeth, then that nails-on-the-chalkboard feeling wasn’t there. But this one is different. This one is not some murdering bomber who curses and spits at him. He finds difficulty summoning the hate.

  This is the test. His father sent him here to this insecure rabbits’ nest to see not if he could, but if he would murder this baby.

  He cringes as the reality of his predicament sets in. For the first time in a long time, killing a person bothers him. This is harder than anything else the old man could have devised. Ninjas, commandos, battle tanks, even the chupacabra – he was ready for all those things, but this he came unprepared for.

  He stands over the bed locked in turmoil he doesn’t understand. This should mean nothing to him. He should stab this thing and be done with it. But he cannot bring himself to do it. Maybe that is the correct solution. Maybe his father wants him to leave.

  No. A warrior completes his mission. The old man told him that too many times. He clenches his teeth and prepares for that old hideous screeching feeling as he raises his knife. He growls like a vicious dog in his mind because that will numb the sensations in his hands. He will do this. He will follow his orders.

  He drives the blade ferociously, aiming to pierce lung and heart, because when he chooses to do a thing, he does it the right way. He turns the blade to slide between the ribs. A punctured lung will keep the target from screaming and a knife through the heart will ensure a quick death. What greets him is not the feeling of steel tearing through sinew and entrails, but a fluffy, soft puncturing that breaks the fall of his knife like a cushion. A second later, he realizes he has stabbed a collection of pillows. A decoy.

  The creak of hinges alerts him with only milliseconds to spare. Sid spins as the tiny child leaps from the closet behind him dressed in colorful pajamas and hoisting an UZI submachine gun that appears like a full sized rifle in his tiny hands.

  “Eat hot lead ya fucking cunt!” the murderous little tyke screams as he squeezes down the trigger and unleashes a stuttering blast of .45 caliber bullets at a rate of five hundred per minute. The gun kicks hard and he struggles to hang on like a champion bull rider.

  Sid has no gun and the smallest possible fraction of time to react. He should be dead, but the room is small, the moppet’s aim is poor, and Sid is very, very fast. He stomps one foot onto the twin mattress in front of him and plants it hard to leap back against the wall behind him and out of the way of a volley of bullets. With his other foot, he kicks off the wall and up over the little gunman’s line of fire to deliver a face-smashing flying kick that knocks little teeth scattering across the floor. He comes down on top of the midget with his enemy’s hand locked between his legs – the uzi still grasped in tiny fingers. Sid strips away the Uzi with one hand as he drives his knife through the throat of his target. The last of the empty .45 caliber casings tumbles to the ground as he withdraws his knife and bright red blood begins to pool on the carpet, so much of it that it does not sink into the fabric, but actually puddles on top of it. Only fourteen shots were fired.

  Sid checks for more threats. The parents he saw sleeping before have come running. The father wears a maroon bathrobe and points a drum-fed tommygun at Sid. The shotgun toting mother follows behind him in a nightshirt and fuzzy bunny slippers. Sid mows them both down with the UZI before they ever get a shot off.

  It takes him thirteen minutes to make his way through the woods back to the landing zone. He brings with him the severed head of the little target and he dumps it at his father’s feet on the floor of the chopper when he climbs up into the cabin one minute before the forty-five minute cutoff his father gave him.

  “I am surprised you came out of there,” his father says, showing genuine surprise for the first time Sid can recall. He yells over the roar of the helicopter blades in the chopper as it lifts off from the extraction zone. Sid stares blankly up at him from the floor. Another manila file folder plops down in his lap – the real file on his target, this one much thicker.

  “Little Timmy was one of the top hatchet men on the global market,” he continues. “The ploy was fucking old, but it never stops working. Little boy lost waits until he has your back and then whips out a hand cannon. He killed a UN official last week with a polonium dart gun hidden in a Tickle Me Elmo. Clever. Of course he was really thirty-five. He paid Columbian mercenaries to play his parents.”

  “So you passed the test. You were sloppy, but you passed,” the old man tells him.

  Sid nods. This is what he wanted, but something nags at him still. He must know.

 
“What made you pick this? Why this test?” Sid asks.

  “To make sure you’re always prepared for the unexpected.”

  “That was all?”

  The old man lowers one eyebrow and purses his lips slightly. He is taken aback just a little. He answers condescendingly, uncertain why Sid would even ask a question so stupid.

  “Yes. Why?” his father says.

  “No reason.”

  Sid knows it better not to say, and he never will.

  THE OTHER YELLOW MEAT

  “You ever hear of the Nanking massacre?” says that terrible man – the man with one ear. The words still bite into him from ten years past. He hears the voice, but he does not see yet. He has not entered the room yet. He does not want to. Not again.

  His father says nothing.

  “Well, turns out you Japs are some twisted fucks,” One-ear continues. “See, when you guys took Nanking, China in thirty-seven, the Jap army raped eighty-thousand women in six weeks. Eighty-thousand! True story.”

  “What is this?” he hears his father say. “Revenge for what the Japanese army did before I was born?”

  “Let me get to the good part,” One-ear says, dismissively. “See, when the Jap soldiers were done raping some poor peasant girl, they would take one of these and ram it up her cunt until she was dead. Terrible, terrible way to die.”

  Again. Nothing from his father.

  “I think you need a demonstration,” One-ear says.

  And then Yoshida enters the room. Then he sees.

  The room is empty of furniture. On the open floor, his father, Katsuhiro Tanaka, master of the Tanaka ninja clan, stands helpless. His hand rests on the hilt of his sword, as if it could do him any good…

  On a very large flat panel television mounted on the wall ahead of them, the terrible one-eared man violently stabs Yoshida’s family katana into Mitsuko’s crotch. His wife screams and flails her feet trying to kick the sword away. She tries fruitlessly to pull herself higher toward the ceiling she dangles from on metal shackles, away from the razor edge of the sword. More and more blood runs down the shining steel blade as her quaking body swallows it inch by agonizing inch. Yoshida turns away as the pointed end of the blade erupts from her gurgling mouth, an act which requires despicable precision on the part of the one-eared man. She continues to sputter and cough blood, somehow not quite dead yet, and the one-eared man leaves her like this as he turns back to face the camera and angrily reprimands the ninja.

  “You fucked with the wrong people this time, Tanaka,” the one-eared man growls into the camera.

  “I am unimpressed,” the ninja feigns coldly.

  “Fuck you, squinch eye,” the murderer responds cynically. “You look like you might shit yourself – You and your friend there.”

  Katsuhiro turns and sees Yoshida standing in the room beside him. Tears stream from his face. This is the first time he has ever startled his father. The old ninja hides it well, but he must be shaken to the core to have not noticed.

  “Father…”

  Katsuhiro stares back at Yoshida and maintains composure, but he says nothing.

  “Now that you know I mean business, let’s move on to round two,” says One-ear, as he moves off camera where the Tanaka men cannot see him. He continues to speak, nonetheless, shouting to register on the camera’s cheap microphone from some distance away. “See, I got a question I need answered, and I think you’re gonna answer it.”

  When he reappears in front of the camera, he is dragging a rusted, black, charcoal grill. It stands waist high on him and must have no wheels because Yoshida hears it grating against the floor.

  “It’s easy,” One-ear says. “Who were you working for when you broke into the vault?”

  “Coward!” Katsuhiro barks. “Face me!”

  “I ain’t Alexander Hamilton, ya fuck,” One-ear grimaces. “And I’m not retarded. I know about ninjas. I’m not within a hundred miles of that house. How do you like the setup, by the way? It’s called streaming video. Some kind of internet thing. Very high tech. Now answer the question.”

  Katsuhiro narrows his death glare. Yoshida cries like a baby now, curled in a heap on the floor beside him.

  “Fine,” One-ear responds. “Have it your way.”

  He reaches for the handle of the dome shaped grill lid and uncovers it, revealing the Tanaka baby resting on the blackened grating underneath. The baby begins to wail loudly at the sight of Mitusko’s dripping corpse hanging overhead.

  Yoshida stands. “Shintaro!” he shouts, as he grasps at his father’s leg and points wildly to the television screen.

  “I got a butane lighter and a taste for the other yellow meat,” One-ear says as he displays his grill lighter in front of the camera. “You gonna tell me what I want to know?”

  “Tell him!” Yoshida says.

  Katsuhiro remains stone faced. He refuses to give in. Yoshida curses his father’s cruel sense of honor.

  “When you return the child!” Katsuhiro offers.

  “No deal,” One-ear responds. “You have ten seconds. Tell me what I want to know and you get the baby back alive.”

  “Answer his question!” Yoshida screams, crying, thrashing at the old ninja’s leg.

  Katsuhiro holds steadfast.

  One-ear lights the grill. Smoke begins to drift upward from the charcoal. The baby cries harder. So does Yoshida.

  “We’re just warming up,” One-ear says. “How do you like yours done? I like mine well-done. I mean like shoe leather.”

  “Tell him! Tell him!” Yoshida cries.

  Yoshida stands and punches his father in the chest. “Don’t let him do this! Please!” He hits him again, but the old ninja doesn’t care. He isn’t there anymore. He is outside the experience. It is an old ninja trick that even Yoshida recognizes. Yoshida slaps him across the face. “Wake up!”

  In this moment, he hates his father more than anything in the world, except the man with one ear. He hopes his father dies. He hopes the awful smoking carcass of the baby will haunt him until he finally guts himself over his jisei.

  “No!” roars Katsuhiro Tanaka. He draws his sword and points it at the television screen. “You coward! You monster! I will hunt you until I have murdered everyone you hold dear and destroyed everything of value to you. Then I will kill you and when I am done I will go down to hell and kill your spirit there as well, so that not even the afterlife will grant you reprieve!”

  One-ear rolls his eyes. “I can see I’m not getting anywhere with this,” he says as he reaches off camera and picks up something heavy and oddly shaped with a trigger like a gun and wire antennas. It looks like a radio controlled car remote to Yoshida, but Katsuhiro recognizes it immediately – a remote detonator.

  “Sayonara, shitheads,” the spook says as he pulls back the trigger.

  The empty house around them erupts in an explosion too immense for them to feel. One-hundred pounds of C4 is enough to kill Death himself if he comes in too close. The acrid black plume of smoke reaches up toward the heavens, but doesn’t quite make it…

  …and the ninja awakens. Again, the ninja awakens. Ten years and the nightmare persists. No detail fades. Not the burning baby. Not the tortured dead face of his wife. Not the fury in his father’s eyes. They remain even clearer than the scars he still has from that terrible night, returning every time he rests his eyes. Sometimes he wonders if he died in that blast and was sent to this hell as punishment for the disrespect he showed them in life. That is his nightly hell.

  Then he wakes up and returns to his daily hell, one of beatings and bloodshed, running and climbing until he throws up from exhaustion, forcing himself far past the limits of normal men and well into the realm of the impossible.

  Two hells for one man. Two hells – and still nowhere near the level of suffering he will bring to the man who murdered his family.

  GRAVEYARD

  “Judy is looking for you,” Frank Overton says. The tall black operator stands at the lobby doors waiting
for Walter. He handles most of the day-to-day administrative duties at the company. “She says Lucy maxed out your VISA.”

  “Christ on a crutch!” Walter says. “That card has a fifty thousand dollar limit.”

  The building is an unmarked block of solid concrete with a few windows. It stands ten storeys tall somewhere in a remote part of Arizona, surrounded by miles of fence and warning signs. Trespassers will be shot. That’s not what the signs say, but it’s true.

  “That’s kids, man,” Frank says. “I paid for two weddings. Wish I had every penny back. Just make sure there’s an open bar.”

  An open bar was the only thing Walter insisted on when he handed his daughter the credit card. He has three girls, and Lucy is the oldest by almost ten years. He offered to pay for her wedding mostly out of guilt for not being around much, but partly to shit on his first wife.

  The lobby is an open area with a railed stairway leading up to an overlooking second floor. At the bottom of this stairway is a walk-through metal detector and a desk manned at all times by two guards dressed in rent-a-cop outfits. Walter waves them off as he and Frank walk through the metal detector.

  These men have only two jobs: to direct authorized visitors to the second floor, and hit the button if anyone unauthorized attempts to get past them. If they are killed, a dead man’s switch hits the button for them. The button floods the lobby with CR gas and sets off a building-wide alarm. Then operators in chem-war suits show up with heavy machine guns to see what the problem is. Pushing the button is a bad thing.

  “Status on the girl?” Walter says as he stomps up the stairs ahead of Frank.

  “Still catatonic,” Frank says. “Echo is all over that hospital. They have Shelly Baum in the room acting like the kid’s mom.”