by Mike Leon
In time, I became manageable and they began to teach me. Scientists are a strange lot. To this day, I still do not understand their need to prod and poke – push the envelope. If I found such a creature as myself, I would simply kill it and continue on my way, but they insisted on speaking to me, showing me words and maps. I could speak some from my days in Norilsk as a small child. They were able to teach me to read some words, but not many, and to this day I do not read Russian, nor do I read for enjoyment.
I spent two years in the prison before the KGB arrived in need of conscripts to fight the war in the east. The Soviet Union, if you did not already know, was never controlled by the group and the KGB acted in many of the same ways as Graveyard, but without such extreme need for secrecy.
They took everyone. The young, the old. It didn’t matter. They emptied that place and sent us all into the mountains to fight the Mujahedeen. In the conscript legions, every mission is a suicide mission. In the mountains they sent us ahead of the trained soldiers to lure out ambushes. Once the trap was sprung and the enemy positions revealed, the regulars would come down in their Hinds and missile everything to death – sometimes that included us. Then there were the trample jobs. The mine clearing operations. I’m sure you’ve read about that.
The rest of them were dead in weeks. More came from other prisons. There were uniforms, but they were often colored to draw attention to us – reverse camouflage. They wanted us as decoys to keep eyes off the real soldiers. They didn’t even give us rifles, because we couldn’t be trusted with them, and because they didn’t care. We usually had sticks to look like rifles, and failing that, we just went barehanded. A whole platoon of soldiers with no guns. You would think it suspect, but it always worked. The Mujahedeen never were that clever, and why would they be? They were not that much different from us.
I survived, of course. No one else lasted more than seventeen days, ever. But I remained. Suicide mission after suicide mission. My platoon blasted away before me. I remained among the pile of corpses every time.
I survived because I was more wolf than man. I was always alert. Always able to spot the enemy coming. Ahead of every move and quicker than every man. More than anything, I had my hate. I could turn it on like flipping a switch. I still can. I can hate you enough to kill you right now if I decide to.
I told you they didn’t give us guns. I didn’t need one. I killed with my hands, my teeth, and when I wanted weapons I took them from the dead. I learned to shoot guns in the midst of battle and I became exceedingly good at it – better than the regular army. I told you about the minefields. I walked through them with ease because I could smell the mines. They stunk like all metal tools of men and the others – they could have smelled it too, but like you they are not fully aware, not fully alert. Their senses are not open like mine and their minds are clouded with distractions. They do not feel the energy, like my ninja friends say.
Yes. I know real ninja. It was a ninja taught me to punch into a man’s chest and rip out his heart with my clenched fist. Mighty warriors and true killers all of them they are. If you survive the coming onslaught, maybe I will introduce you to some.
There were times the Russian regulars arrived to kill the holy warriors, only to find them already dead. I had killed them all. In time, they began sending me on real missions and offering me my choice of weapons. Though a choice of weapons meant little to me and that has not changed. Is it better to kill a man with a pistol or a rocket launcher? It does not matter. He is still dead. I took a knife at least because I knew it would work and a gun usually, but not always. I did not care. And with this attitude, I went out into the night and made a name for myself. They talked about the ghost that comes for men’s souls in the night. Ridiculous.
My duties expanded beyond Afghanistan. They began sending me all over the world. I was rarely shown intelligence reports so I didn’t know why I was doing the things I did and I often was not told where I was either. I was simply unhooded like a trained falcon and sent to kill.
In time, I became restless. The Russians gave me some privileges as long as I was out doing their dirty work, but the rest of the time I was cleaning floors and scrubbing toilets, confined to quarters while the officers went to see whores in town. So one night I killed them and left.
I spent a year trying to find mundane work in Norway. I taught myself to speak Norwegian like a native out of necessity. It took me several weeks of constant struggle and I am still proud of that over many of my flashier and more legendary achievements. Unfortunately, there is more to fitting in than speaking the language. You cannot, when punched by the town drunk in a bar, kill everyone in the bar. When a man yells at you for spilling coffee on his lap, you are not supposed to tear his face off and feed it to him. Also, war rape is reserved for war. These are just some of the things I learned before I grew frustrated and returned to soldiering – this time on my own as a mercenary.
I was freelance for two years and I made more money than I knew what to do with. Literally. I didn’t know what to do with money. I had no taste for expensive clothes or cars or boats. I didn’t understand investing or capital. I still do not. My lodgings were simple and I could not possibly spend all of it on whores, although I tried. That was where The Duke found me – in a whore house.
He was amazing. He was an old man by then. Died long ago of course. You never met him. He fought in the war. Fought the Nazis. That was the greatest generation. Fighting on the ground face to face in bunkers and trenches with guns and bayonets. Flying high in rickety pieces of steel that might fall out of the sky any minute from anti-aircraft fire or bad maintenance and dropping bombs by sight. The west doesn’t make soldiers like that anymore. They don’t even put bayonets on rifles anymore. They do all the killing from miles away now. It’s a shame.
He looked like an American cowboy. He was an American cowboy – the last of them perhaps. I remember that gun hanging around his waist just dangling. I thought it was some kind of joke. He walked in on me smoking a cigar after I had finished fucking this little Swedish girl. She looked like you, but shorter. Don’t look at me like that. It isn’t a come on. I don’t come on with that much subtlety. She wasn’t that good anyway.
After I decided it wasn’t a joke, I thought he wanted to kill me. You see many odd people with exotic methods at that level of the mercenary trade. There are French maids with hidden knives and blow gun snipers and such. A cowboy was not a big leap to make.
I was completely naked and lying on the bed still when he walked in. I had a gun hanging from the lamp shade next to me and a bowie knife under the pillow. I had a plan to kill him where he stood and a back-up if that failed. I had a plan to kill the girl too. I have a plan to kill you right now. I always have a plan to kill everyone in the room. Looking back, I know the Duke had a plan to kill me if necessary and at least a backup plan or two. He was the only man I ever met who was as prepared and alert as me.
He told me what he was there for, to ask me to join Graveyard, and I didn’t believe him. I made a move for the gun and he shot the gun to pieces right there before I could grab it. I had never seen anyone shoot like that. I wouldn’t again for twenty years. God, he was fast. That was enough to make me come along for the ride. That and the pay. Graveyard has always paid top dollar.
The Duke left just after I joined Kill Team One. It sounds funny now to say it and not mean me. Most of you probably don’t realize it was something else once. It was. The original team was all gone by then, old geezers, and they could not quite find adequate replacements. What is the expression? They just don’t make them like they used to. It was never more true than then. The ones I worked with were nothing compared to the original set that fought in the big one. Piece by piece they were blasted away or scared away around me and replaced over and over, until again, like with the Russians, only I remained.
It was in those years that I truly made the legend what it is today. I defeated the mad Doctor Mekanikal on his island of terror. I helped t
he Tanaka clan fight the Dark Shogun. I assassinated the master of the Hashashiyyin. I destroyed the AOL supercomputer before it could nuke California. I had many more adventures as well. Those were glorious times.
It was like that until the day the world changed. You remember that day. Everyone beyond a certain age remembers that day. I lost someone important in the Pentagon when the Mujahedeen crashed the plane into it. From that moment forward, I became dedicated to a new cause.
In a rage, I went to the desert to seek out the master of that worldwide cult of death, the Twelfth Imam, Mahdi to his followers, the Twelver sect. I drew him from his occultation by slaying hundreds of his kin, village after village, each with one left maimed but alive to pass the message on to the demi-god.
You have heard of him? Perhaps mentioned by the Iranian President on your Fox News Channel? He is real. His quickness is beyond human and he makes use of strange magic that cannot be explained by our science. Our most sophisticated laser guided bombs miss him by miles and our bullets blow away in the wind when we shoot at him. He knows when we are coming and he knows when we have left. It as if he truly is the presence of God here on Earth.
Undaunted, I met him in combat with guns and knives. For hours I battled him, unable to strike him down. I did make him bleed, and no other man has done that since, but in the end I could not defeat him. It was the Imam who left me with this limp.
Graveyard began their operations in the desert then with the Americans. Kill Team Three is there now. They are looking for him out in the caves and wastes, trying to learn his location from informants and kill him with bombs or guns. They will fail. I know what they refuse to believe – that their toys and tricks are useless. Mahdi can only be defeated by a true warrior with the will to look him in the face with hate as he dies.
When I could walk again, I built a cabin in the pine barrens of New Jersey, far from any prying eyes. There I lived alone with the boys. My boys. I taught them everything I know the same way I learned it – with the cold gaze of death on me. I taught them to hate as I hate and kill as I kill. I would not allow my boys to grow weak in a world of modern luxuries and entertainment. No. They lived with me as I lived with the wolves out there in Siberia, only with my knowledge and experience I could make them better. I could teach them to be the greatest warriors. I could make them strong enough to defeat even Mahdi. Only my old friend Walter knew what I was doing in the Pine Barrens, and he did not approve. But I did not care.
Now the boys are strong. They fight with knives like no man I have ever seen and they shoot at least as well as the Duke in his youth. They are fast and strong and I taught them what the ninja taught me about vanishing in the shadows. There is also something else – something special I cannot speak of. They are better than I ever was and I have sent them into the desert to finish what I could not. And now I realize I have made a terrible mistake.
I was too concerned with the obvious threat to notice the one lurking in the shadows. You have seen it. You have seen them.
Now we face an enemy which has infiltrated our highest ranks. Eli Van Duyn learned their secret and they killed him. Van Duyn’s girl saw something that night, and they will stop at nothing until she is dead too.
They attacked me soon after Van Duyn was killed. They tried to kill you twice and they led Kill Team Two into a trap. Their agents are everywhere.
If we are to win this war against these monsters, then I need my boys at my side. I need you to go into the desert and retrieve them for me.
THELIZARDSWALKAMONGUS.COM
The website name is simultaneously funny and spooky. It stares back at Walter from the array of monitors on the desk in front of him in Graveyard’s com room, as an analyst named Dodson takes him through the details. Most of them are well beyond the few hip tech terms Walter barely understands, like tweet and handle.
“We got in using an NSA backdoor in Apache which was, like, so easy,” Dodson says. Dodson is a well-manicured man; thin, smooth-skinned, flamboyantly, obnoxiously, flaming-hotter-than-the-sun gay. “We downloaded everything he had on his FTP in like two hours. He used the same password for his Gmail and Twitter, so we got into those too.”
“I thought they blew up Potts’ computers.”
“Oh honey, nothing is really on anybody’s computer anymore. It’s on the cloud.”
Walter doesn’t understand the cloud. He laments the days before all of this – the days when men actually had to break into buildings to steal paper documents. Now all that snooping is done from a swivel chair by sissies like Dodson. Dodson couldn’t even have had a security clearance in those days.
“So here are all the threads where he’s talking to Van Duyn,” Dodson says. “The conversation stops abruptly, surprise, when Van Duyn is killed.”
“Wait. Eli knew this guy?” Walter says.
“Well, I’m not sure he met him, like met him met him, but they talked on the internet a lot.”
“What did they talk about?”
“Oh, mostly the stuff that’s on Potts’ website. Or, was on Potts’ website. Somebody burned the servers after we got in and copied everything.”
“Burned them? I don’t know that. What does that mean?”
“They burned them, like physically burned them. Somebody poured gas on them and struck a match.”
“Where are these servers?”
“India.”
“That’s spooky.”
“Trust me. You haven’t even seen anything yet.”
“Alright, show me what you got.”
“Okay, well Potts is like this UFO NWO conspiracy website guru. He did an interview on Coast-to-Coast AM a few years ago. I have it on MP3 if you want to listen. Anywho, his whole thing is that there are basically lizard people and they look like us, and they’re hiding all over the world secretly controlling us. They’re in the government, like the president is a lizard person, and the congress are lizard people, and a bunch of celebrities he says are lizards. He says Selena Gomez is a lizard.”
“My daughter likes Selena Gomez.”
“When you’re ready come and get it, nah nah nah nah,” Dodson sings. “It’s so catchy. Who doesn’t like that?”
Walter doesn’t like it.
“You think any of this is true?” he asks.
“No,” Dodson says. “These people are all crazy. You should read some of the stuff that’s in the message board. They’re like freeze framing Fox News to try and get a screen grab of Sean Hannity shape shifting for a tenth of a second. There’s one guy that says he was married to a lizard woman for ten years.”
“I know how he feels.”
“Ha ha. He really means it though.”
“And Van Duyn went for all this crap?”
“Yeah. The emails are pretty serious. And then you get to the lawyer. See, Van Duyn dies, and the next day Potts gets an email from Leonard Berryman – Eli Van Duyn’s attorney. He says Van Duyn has died and he has instructions to deliver a parcel to Potts as part of the Van Duyn estate.”
Where’s Berryman now?”
“Nobody has seen him for weeks.”
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah. And then, days later, like way after Potts was already dead, this shows up in his inbox.”
Dodson double clicks on an email in a list of messages in front of them. A window opens showing a strange message with the subject line URGENT: You are in danger.
The message body reads:
Mr Potts,
You are in real danger. They are watching. Meet me at the same place we used to go. Supply the time.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Dodson says. “His obituary was printed the day before. All the UFO crazies were talking about it already.”
It makes sense to Walter. He doesn’t tell Dodson, but the message header tells him everything he needs to know. It was sent by Coltrane784. 784 is the street number of a place where Walter used to drink with a man who liked Coltrane. The message wasn’t really for Potts at all.
K
ill Team One is talking to him.
POINTY WHITE HATS AND
SWASTIKAS
“It’s like this, boys,” Ashley says. “Command wants the bloodbath brothers dead.”
He stands in the aft section of the Apocalypse at the top of the open ramp. Safari, Abo, the Knife Guy, Úlfhednar and John Q are all there. The kill team members sit along the benches lining the hull of the craft, except for Abo, who sits on the floor, and Úlfhednar, who has a fruit crate to sit on behind his laptop computer. This last bit has made the werewolf excited.
“In the morning we roll out on seek and destroy orders,” Ashley continues. “Our cover is this intel sheet saying the ninja that killed our last knife guy has been spotted at a hotel in Kandahar.”
“What about the last knife guy?” asks the knife guy.
“Nothing,” John reassures him dismissively. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Our actual mission objective is the termination of Sid Hansen and Victor Hansen.”
“With extreme prejudice?” asks John.
“Pointy white hats, swastikas, sowin’ the ground with salt and the whole lot it sounds like,” Safari interjects.
“That’s exactly right,” Ashley answers. “When we move, I want you, Abo, John, the knife guy and both targets with me. The werewolf is in the air. Knife guy, you lead them in the front of the hotel while Safari covers the outside with the fifties and I take the others around back. Once the knife guy is clear, I give the signal to the werewolf and we unload everything, including those Vulcans, on the building.”
Yes. Yes. This is what the werewolf wants. Death spitting artillery in his hands. Loud music in his ears. What shall he select for this particular outing? What will be the killing music?
“There won’t be a cockroach left alive in there,” John remarks.
“I hope so,” Ashley says. “Kill Team One’s boys remind me too much of their old man. I’m not taking any chances.”
