by Mike Leon
Without any incident, he reaches his destination. It is bazaar day here at the camp, a strange tradition started by the American commanders several weeks ago. Every Friday, the Afghan merchants are allowed into the encampment to peddle wares to the soldiers. Each of the merchants has their belongings thoroughly searched for weapons and explosives upon entering the encampment. After the searches, they unfold tables and form booths and stalls over which they display the items they have for sale.
Most of the things the vendors offer seem useless to Sid; shiny baubles and colored carpets. Some things are useful; knives and swords, boots, and cooking utensils. Other things simply elude his classification. It is these strange things which occupy his thoughts most.
At one table, a soldier hovers over hundreds of colorful little rectangular boxes, flipping his fingers through them. There is a simple cardboard sign nearby with the words “DVD $10” scrawled in black marker. Sid plucks a box from the stacks and examines it. The front of the box says THE HANGOVER: PART III. It looks nothing like the videos his father showed him as a child, always marked CONFIDENTIAL or BURN AFTER VIEWING and containing images of executions or gun battles. The old man insisted they watch these things, especially in the years before the boys were big enough to hold a rifle properly. He puts the video back on the table. These things are not the reason he is here.
He is interested in the people selling these items. These are people like he has never seen before. None of them are warriors and he doubts any of them have even killed a man. Certainly none have taught their children like Kill Team One taught him. How then can they be expected to survive?
They do other strange things besides selling these useless trinkets. Twice each afternoon, all of the rags cease all other activities and fall to their knees. They place their heads against the ground in silence whilst their commander recites some sort of mantra. This goes on for seven to ten minutes each time, and seems to accomplish nothing of consequence. Each time Sid sees this, he is more confused than the last.
A boy nearly his age waves something at him from another table. It is a CD in a plastic case with a hand written label. His clothes are a collection of rags, most tan but some colored vibrantly, and his hair is a shade of reddish brown.
“Very good rap music,” says the boy. He smiles brightly at Sid. “Gangsta gangsta. Five dollar. Gangsta Gangsta.”
Sid walks away from the makeshift bazaar and on to what really interests him. Outside the six-foot HESCO barrier separating the encampment from open desert, the young children of the peddlers roam in the dust, talking and playing games amongst themselves near the rows of rusted old pick-up trucks parked there by their parents in the early morning. Many of them are involved in a game in which they kick a white and black ball along the ground while refusing to touch it with their hands. This is a very peculiar thing. He and his brother never played games like this as children. Where are the knives and rifles?
As he stands observing this strange phenomenon of kickball, his warrior’s eyes instinctively zero in on something none of the others have noticed. Far off from the others, half a mile by his judgment, a child runs screaming toward the rest of the group. Sid watches as a pack of snarling dogs emerge over the crest of the dune behind her – four of them, hungry and vicious.
He glances up at the nearest watch tower and sees two Americans engaged in idle chit chat, one laughing as the other gestures emphatically, the heavy machine gun next to them unmanned. As if it matters. The way the Americans shoot they would kill the child in trying to put down the dogs.
He ponders briefly if he should take any action at all. This screaming girl was unwise to wander so far from the others with no weapons of her own. He has no allegiance to her. Perhaps it is best to let the dogs tear her apart. She is a rag, after all.
The girl did nothing to threaten him, and he has no specific orders to kill her. It would hardly be an inconvenience to assist…
The other children begin to take notice when one of them points at the girl in the distance. They begin running for the encampment, some of them shrieking. By the time any of the adults react, it will likely be too late for the girl.
Sid rushes forward. In seconds, he reaches the girl. As the lead dog leaps to sink its teeth in, Sid stabs his knife through its throat and up into its brain. He swings the impaled dog around to bat another one away and then flicks it from the blade like a clump of garbage. The other two pounce for him at the same time, but they are no match. One gets the KA-BAR through its heart and the other Sid catches by the maw. He brutally twists its head completely backward, breaking both its jaw and its neck. This is not clean and painless, but a slow and gruesome process filled with the sounds of animal yelping and cracking bone and tearing ligaments.
When he is done, he looks to the last remaining dog as it crawls out from under its dead pack mate. The dog growls at Sid. Sid growls back. He bears his teeth and leans forward with his head down. The dog whimpers and runs off. From behind him, Sid can hear the boy at the video table shouting to him in Pashto, but he doesn’t understand any of it.
Sid only speaks two languages; English and Violence. Everybody speaks one of them.
Sid feels something tugging at his leg and turns expecting to see that one of the dogs is not quite dead yet and is gnawing on him. Instead, he finds himself looking into the bright blue eyes of the tiny girl as she clasps around his ankle. Tears and runoff from her nose drip down her face. She cries out something in Pashto over and over between sniffles.
“She says Allah sent you to save her,” says John Q, coming out from the encampment and chuckling at the scene in front of him.
“You speak their language?” Sid asks the master of disguise.
“You want to impersonate everybody you have to speak every language.”
The red-haired video vendor grabs hold of the girl and pries her off of Sid. He succeeds and then falls to his knees in the dirt at Sid’s feet. They both prattle on and Sid cannot understand any of it.
“Looks like you made some new friends, kid,” John Q says and then he bellows with laughter.
“What are they saying?”
“Mostly Praise be to Allah, Allah is great, the usual sand nigger shit,” John tells him. “The red-head says you can have all the videos you want.”
“Can you talk to them for me?” Sid requests.
“Yeah. I guess.”
Sid crouches down to meet the children face to face. By now the other vendors have gathered around to gawk and a small crowd has formed.
“Why do you pray?”
The boy answers.
“We pray to Allah and he shows us his mercy,” John says.
“Who is Allah?” he asks.
The boy answers.
“He says Allah is the one true God. Praise be his name.”
“Where is he?”
John interprets the question and the boy laughs briefly before he stifles himself.
“All place,” the boy says on his own, motioning around him.
“That’s impossible,” Sid says.
This time the little girl answers after John interprets.
“She says with God, all things are possible,” John tells him.
Sid stands. None of this makes sense. No one is everywhere. Clearly the children are mistaken. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand why his father and Graveyard want to kill these people so badly for believing in something imaginary. He doesn’t understand why these people want to believe so badly. He doesn’t understand the need to have a purpose or a creator. He doesn’t understand, and he probably never will, but he doesn’t need to. It is not his job to understand, only to kill. He nods at the children as he turns to walk away. One might even say he smiles slightly. The little girl smiles back at him.
Victor is waiting for him at the entrance to the encampment. He sneers at Sid as he walks on by. Sid doesn’t know how much he saw, but the look in his brother’s eyes makes him very uneasy.
ENCRYPTED CHA
T LOG 1
HOSPITAL
Shelly Baum enters the hospital lobby wearing tight blue skinny jeans and a big gray sweater that hides everything all the way past her butt. Her face is half hidden behind a hefty pair of dark sunglasses and her hair is up in a top knot so she looks like 1985 never ended. The idea is that no one from the hospital will recognize her like this, as the outfit is in stark contrast to the skimpy clothes she wore while she was last here.
She scans the lobby for familiar faces and spots a receptionist she spoke to several times on her last stay. She avoids the receptionist as she makes her way to the elevator. She notices on her way past the nearest stairwell that the door has been blocked off and covered with police tape. No surprise there, given the amount of explosives she tossed on those stairs.
The elevator doors open and reveal five strangers. Shelly gives them a once over; a nurse, a depressed looking couple in the corner, a teenage girl, and a Catholic priest. She steps on to the elevator and pushes the button for her floor.
Spears told her to stay home for a while and rest up. He said she was saying things that didn’t make sense. Spears can be an asshole sometimes, and this is one of them. She has no intention of following his orders.
After they let her out of the infirmary at the Graveyard building, Spears saw to it that she got on a plane back to her apartment in San Diego. Spears has never been there. If he had, he would know that apartment is basically an empty room with an air mattress and a rack of assault weapons hanging next to a TV. Shelly spent just over one hour there, packing some clothes, a few handguns, a duffle bag full of explosives, and a grenade launcher into the back of the rental car she picked up at the airport, and then driving back to where she had the gunfight with the spooky motherfuckers in the trench coats and bowler hats.
She’s determined to figure out who or what those bastards were, but she has exactly zero leads to move on. The only thing she can do is go back there and look at the place again. Maybe she’ll find something the local PD missed. Who knows? Maybe she’ll realize Spears was right and she hallucinated the whole thing.
The elevator doors slide open on the children’s ICU and Shelly steps out. There are few people on this part of this floor. It is night time and visiting hours are over, so the halls are mostly empty, with only the rare nurse happening through. Shelly quietly walks down the hallway past a monitoring station where a desk clerk is playing Candy Crush Saga on a cell phone.
When she nears the room where the Van Duyn girl stayed, she sees the hallway is again roped off with police tape. Shelly ducks under the tape and continues down the hall. Her job should be easy from here, because the hospital has closed off the whole area.
She starts in the room itself. There isn’t much to see except a patch of dried blood where she splattered that first fucker’s brains all over the floor. She didn’t hallucinate that. There’s more blood in the hallway from where the bowler hat guy shot those two people dead with the shotgun.
Shelly goes down the hall to the stairwell entrance where she shot at the bastards the most. The tile floors were decimated by the explosives she trailed behind her and there is at least one spot where she can see straight through to the obstetrics ward below. The intermittent sound of crying babies is the tip off. She hopes no chunks of ceiling collapsed on any infants during the fighting.
“Can I help you with something?”
Shelly looks over her shoulder to see a man in a white lab coat standing behind her. He has a plastic name tag pinned to his brown sweater that identifies him as Dr. Chochran.
“Oh,” Shelly says, feigning stupid. “I’m looking for the bathroom.”
“Past two lines of crime scene tape?” Chochran says.
“Is that what that was? Oh, jeez. Was there a murder or something?”
Chochran gives her the stink eye.
“You’re not supposed to be back here,” he says.
Shelly frowns.
“Neither are you.”
Chochran throws his head back and begins to gargle like he’s having a seizure, but he’s not having a seizure because he’s still standing. Shelly doesn’t like this at all. She starts to back away. Not a good plan to start a gun fight in here right now, with no backup and nobody to bail her out if the police show.
She turns and runs, but something trips her. She smacks into the floor and starts to crawl, but she can’t get away. Something is pulling her. It’s his tongue.
She looks down to see Chochran’s tongue wrapped around her ankle. The prehensile appendage extends out from his mouth at least ten feet, and as she kicks at it, it encircles her other ankle as well. The giant tongue draws her toward him as he drops down on his hands and knees. His jaw comes unhinged and his mouth grows into a gape that could swallow her whole.
Shelly reaches for the M9 and bowie knife stuffed in her sweater. She saws at the tongue with her knife. She severs the slimy red thing from its monstrous body, but that doesn’t stop it from moving on its own. It coils around the rest of her body like a snake, pinning her gun to her, gore spraying from the stump end.
Chochran pounces on top of her, but she drives the bowie knife into his guts. He yelps and leaps straight up to the ceiling, where he sticks like a fucking bug. His arms are bent backward so he can crabwalk on the ceiling looking down at her.
The monster scurries away like that, before she can empty the M9 into his chest. His movement reminds her of a roach darting away when someone flips a light on. The tongue lets go of her and slithers away with him.
Shelly doesn’t plan on letting him escape. She needs that thing dead to bring back to Graveyard and dump on Spears desk.
She dashes after him up the stairwell, but the creature is fast. It spirals up the bottom of the stairs, floor by floor ahead of her, until she can’t even hear it skittering along the plaster anymore. She follows anyway.
Up the first few flights she charges, but then she slows down with caution as she realizes the monster is lost to her and could be lying in ambush on the next floor. Carefully, she climbs the stairs ready to fire off the whole magazine from the pistol in the blink of an eye.
After a few minutes, she reaches the top floor and the monster is not to be seen. Chochran may have opened any of the doors on the way up and walked out into an open section of the hospital. There he would likely blend in with the various patrons and hospital staff, assuming he isn’t bleeding too profusely from his severed tongue and open chest wound.
Shelly goes back down the stairs. She combs over the rest of the stairwell, but finds nothing to prove the monster ever existed.
She spends almost an hour looking for anything she might be able to use, but there’s nothing. Defeated, she walks back to the hospital parking garage and her rental car for the long drive back to San Diego.
She checks the back seat, as always, opens the door, and sits down in the driver’s seat.
A hand clamps down over her mouth and pulls her against the headrest with all the crushing strength of an anaconda. Shelly tries to scream, but she can’t through the smothering grip of her unknown assailant.
Looking in the rearview mirror, she sees two eyes like a blackened void staring back at her.
Kill Team One loosens his grip just slightly.
“I can kill you faster than you can scream,” he says. “Do not scream.”
THE BIGGEST SECRET
Victoria Russell’s apartment in Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side is sterile and intentionally boring. Walter knows there is a name for this type of decorating, but he can’t recall it. All of the walls are white. The furniture is white or black. There are very few of the nicknacks he would expect in a woman’s apartment. The only colors he has seen so far are in the abstract paintings slung on the walls like a drunk hung them. There are dozens and many of them are crooked.
Having been let in by a servant and left in a parlor near the door, he finds himself staring at a painting of something that looks enough like a vagina for him to call it tha
t in his mind, but not quite enough to tell other people that’s what he sees. He tilts his head to the side to see if it looks like something else that way, but then it just looks like a sideways vagina. He tries to dismiss it.
“It’s a vagina, dear,” says Victoria as she enters the room wearing a robe made from purple silk. “You’re staring like you’ve never seen one.”
Walter turns and nods silently at her. He keeps his hands folded behind his back. He knows she knows firsthand that her comment is untrue. He makes a crooked smile that brings that up without saying anything about it.
“Belong to anyone in particular?” he asks.
“Yes.” Her response is cold and blunt. Walter waits for her to elaborate more as she reaches into a small refrigerated wine cabinet with a glass door. She does not.
Walter never did quite click with Victoria, even if they had slept together a decade ago, but she was by far the closest thing to a respectable human being the group had. If anyone is going to give him straight answers about Van Duyn, it would be her.
Victoria smiles back at him with the wine in her hand. “Would you like a drink?”
“No,” he answers. “I’m working.”
“It hasn’t stopped you before.”
She pops the quark from the unsealed bottle and sniffs at the opening. Then she pours some into a tall piece of stemware she took from a rack above the cooler.
“Back at Rothschild, you knew something you didn’t say. What was it?”
