by Mike Leon
Will it be house or techno? Perhaps something more classical. Pachelbel’s Canon or Air on the G String may provide an interesting counterpoint to the murdering chaos, but they are already so overused in pop culture. He has several times used Helter Skelter during a machine gun attack, and he considers it briefly but then decides against it. No. He wants to do something more modern. Then he has an idea.
“Hey, werewolf,” someone interrupts his thinking. It is John Q. “You okay there? You look totally zoned out.”
“He looks like he might be wankin’ it behind that laptop,” Safari says. Squinting through a monocled eye at Úlfhednar.
Abo nods his head and smiles. Giant white teeth are a strange and funny contrast against the naked blackness of his form. He makes a jerking motion with his hand.
“I am… quite excited for this mission,” the werewolf answers in his thick Norwegian accent.
“Guy’s so creepy,” John whispers to Safari next to him. Of course, the werewolf hears. But the werewolf says nothing. The rest of Kill Team Three has not his appreciation for art.
The werewolf is only thinking about tomorrow’s bloodshed. He has thought of something so perfect. Something he has always wanted to do. He will use Wake Up, from Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled album. He will listen to that song. Yes. He will listen through it without so much as wiggling a toe. He will listen until the song grows quiet, like a whisper, and then… and then…just as Zack de le Rocha screams “I think I heard a shot!” and Tom Morello unleashes the alternate picking beast all over his six-string, the werewolf too will unleash the beast. It will be his greatest act – his masterpiece. He will be like a living music video.
The timing must be uncanny to do this correctly. He must research the travel time for all of them. He will need to know the precise moment in the song that he wants to start shooting, but that is easy. There must be no delays. If all goes well, he will squeeze those triggers just as Ashley gives the order. If it does not go well, then he will be squeezing the triggers early or even a bit late. It does not matter. Sometimes sacrifices must be made for such brilliance.
It begins at dawn.
DEATH OR REVELATION
IN BACK OF
THE BLACK OMEN
Walter is in the last place he ever saw Van Hansen – a blues bar where they used to drink scotch and tell old war stories. Only they don’t play the blues here anymore…
The girl on the small rear stage bends over on all fours and spreads her business wide open for Walter to see, her clear plastic heels pointing at him like accusing fingers. He doesn’t want the DJ to call attention to him so he sets a five on the stage before he returns to his scotch. The Black Omen, he wonders, what kind of name is that for a strip club anyway?
When he looks up again, he sees him. Ivan. Kill Team One. Death incarnate. The old man is already seated at a table across the bar. He has a drink in his hand, and he’s glaring Walter’s direction with those soulless black eyes. Walter glares right back at him and takes a sip of scotch. He knew it would happen like this. The old man has a tendency to materialize out of thin air. No one ever sees him coming. One minute you’re alone and the next he’s there as if he simply grew out of some shadowy corner in the room. He motions to the back door and Walter nods. This is it.
Ivan makes the first move. He stands and makes his way for the door. He passes Walter’s table on the way out but he looks straight ahead, keeping Walter just in the edge of focus. Walter stays at the table to finish his scotch. The whole time, he’s reminding himself how stupid this is. That guy waiting out there for him is a killing machine. No. Not just a killing machine. He deals with killing machines every day. That man is a death god, and Walter is scared.
He mashes the send button on his cell phone, to shoot off a pre-typed text message to each of his girls that just says “Love you – Dad.”
He reminds himself that everybody has to go sometime. Maybe this is it. Fuck it. Better this than cancer. Under the table, he stuffs his pistol in the waist of his pants. Then he downs the last sip of scotch and stands up. It’s time to man up and head out there.
Outside, Ivan stands with his back to the door gazing out into the blackened field behind the club. Smoke drifts upward from his face. Walter doesn’t like this at all. He expected things to be more tense. This could be some kind of trick. He won’t be taking any chances, and he’s not going to lose the initiative while he has it. He draws his gun and points it at the Kill Team’s back.
“Put that away, Walter,” the old man says calmly. He doesn’t turn around.
“Not a chance,” Walter says. He keeps his gun trained on Van Hansen’s back. “I may be younger than you but I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“I can take that gun from you and kill you ten times before your body hits the ground.”
“I don’t believe that. Not anymore. You’re old, Kill Team. You’re falling apart and you got a bum leg.”
“I think you would be surprised.”
“Why did you kill Reynolds?”
“That was not me. It was Blood Drinker. How much do you know?”
“I’m asking the questions here! What the fuck happened to Darryl Potts?”
“They got to Van Duyn’s lawyer. They were monitoring Potts’ lines. They were waiting for us. It got bad.”
“Why? What did he have?”
“He had proof, Walter. I saw it.”
And then something clangs to the ground around the corner. It sounds like a trash can lid, or it might be a waitress dropping a steel pan. It doesn’t matter. The nanosecond Walter isn’t completely focused on Kill Team One, the old man pulls a Sig 9 and now they’re staring down each other’s barrels.
“Who followed you here?” Ivan shouts.
“Drop it!” Walter screams.
“You drop it!” Kill Team One shouts back.
“I don’t want to kill you, Van!”
“Did you bring them with you, Walter? Whose side are you on?”
“What are you talking about?”
Then there is a single gunshot.
COLD VENGEANCE IS THE WARM BLOOD OF MY
ENEMY ON MY HANDS
Yoshida Tanaka waits in the darkness outside the American army base. He has come in the shadows to visit these men of Bochi where they sleep and where they least expect him. Quickly he vaults over the wall and into the barracks area, his hand resting on his sword hilt, his arm coiled like the cobra, ready to strike. On the other side there are more lights, but there are more objects, more buildings, more trucks, more shadows…
He slides through them like a brisk wind looking for the first sign of the skull and bones, but he sees none. He needs better cover if he is to walk among them in the open where he can inspect this place more easily.
A sentry. His name is Horrowitz. The ninja creeps up behind him while he is pissing behind a barracks. Usually he would use his sword, but this time he needs it to be clean. He pricks Horrowitz with the edge of a shuriken coated in blowfish toxin and the sentry is dead before he ever knows what hit him.
Tanaka stuffs the body under a parked hummer and walks out into plain sight dressed as Private Horrowitz, complete with M4 carbine. The gun feels strange in his hands. Foreign. Alien. Surprisingly heavy. He never uses these things and he is irked by its weight in comparison to the tools he usually carries.
Out in the open, he passes poorly for an actual American soldier, and he worries that anyone asking him any questions will immediately see through the ruse because of his accent. He speaks Engrish berry good, but not like a Horrowitz. He knows Horrowitz is probably a Jewish name, but he doesn’t know if Jews sound like other Americans or different somehow. In any case, he has a back-up plan: Kill the witnesses and smoke bomb away.
He gets through thirty minutes of patrolling by keeping his head down and nodding at anybody who looks his way. He’s beginning to feel frustrated when he sees what he has been looking for: a fanged skull and bones.
It is a tattoo,
simple black with no fill, on the bicep of a skinny little man wearing tight leather pants and gothic make-up. He runs his hand through a flowing length of black hair as he walks excitedly from a small building. Yoshida peers in a window to see if there are more of them where he came from, but he sees only an empty room with bunk beds and a card table, all unoccupied. He follows the little man.
The little gothic man makes one stop at a larger building which Yoshida realizes is an armory or depot. He goes in and comes out a few minutes later driving a forklift that carries a crate the size of a small car. Yoshida picks up his pace to follow the forklift.
He’s sure the little man can’t hear him, but he runs into another problem when the forklift passes another sentry. This one is a tall black American dressed in a regular army uniform like the one Yoshida has. The sentry looks him over and Yoshida nods and smiles.
“Sup,” he says, channeling every rapper he ever saw on American TV while he was in college. It comes out harshly, which works in his favor he thinks, and the sentry keeps on walking. He continues after the forklift.
After some time, he realizes the forklift is headed for a small airstrip where a large military plane awaits. Airmen check the underside of the plane and the little gothic man drives the forklift up to the side of the fuselage and sets the crate down on the ground. He jumps out and motions to a mechanic, who then takes control of the forklift.
Yoshida leans into a door frame as he watches the dark man walk away from the forklift toward another man, this one wearing camouflage army pants and a hooded sweatshirt with the hood up. Yoshida can’t see his face.
He can’t hear what they are saying over the noise from the plane, but he tries to read the lips of the little man from his hiding place in the doorframe. He concentrates on that pale, skinny face, but then something happens to break his concentration.
A helicopter passes hardly a hundred feet overhead and slows to hover over the airstrip. The man in the hooded sweatshirt turns up to look at the chopper and he pulls his hood down. The ninja’s stomach nearly erupts from his throat. It is the man with one ear.
He looks exactly like Yoshida remembers him from that day ten years ago – except he has both ears. This is an odd development, but the ninja hasn’t the faculties to ponder why. The little gothic man walks away to board the plane and leaves the man with two ears standing alone on the airstrip. Though there are soldiers on the airstrip, the ninja knows he can strike from behind and end this before any of them ever notice him – especially in this guise. He will have to act quickly, even though he wishes the opposite. Luckily, he has just the technique for such a situation.
The secret ninja death touch is not a thing of fiction. The Tanaka clan has passed it down for centuries. It is, in reality, a technique of limited application considering the decades of meditation required to learn it. The death touch only does what a sword or poisoned kunai will do much faster and without any of the training. Still, with proper focus, one can master the art of killing a man with a finger. One can even specialize it – make it a swift death or one that goes on for weeks of bleeding, searing, bone splintering pain. Yoshida’s death touch is not of the swift variety.
Then something happens that has not happened in nearly a decade. Someone sneaks up on the ninja.
“Hey man,” calls someone behind him.
Yoshida turns to see the tall black sentry he passed earlier, apparently returned to inspect him further.
“Hey man, what’s your name?” he says through his gritted teeth, which Yoshida can now see are wired together, probably because of some sort of jaw injury.
“Uh, Horrowitz,” the ninja answers. He stutters. All he can think is that he’s losing his chance to strike at the two-eared man.
“You sure?” the sentry asks him. “I don’t know too many Chinese Horrowitzes.”
Yoshida turns back to the airstrip for a second to see a jeep pulling up next to the two eared man, driven by a huge black man in brown shorts holding some sort of giant metal weapon. The man who murdered his family is escaping.
“Half Japanese. My mother’s side,” Yoshida lies, calmly.
“Yeah. Where you from?”
His mind is on fire with hate. All he can think is the man who murdered his family is escaping.
“New York City.”
“What part?”
The man who murdered his family is escaping and he will murder more, torture more, slaughter more.
“Brooklyn.”
“That don’t sound like a Brooklyn accent.”
“It is.”
The man who murdered his family is escaping and he will murder more, torture more, slaughter more. He will rape more wives and burn more babies.
“Yeah? How many rings did Jordan get when he played for Knicks?”
Yoshida glares back at the sentry.
He will rape more wives and burn more babies.
“Fuck you, man.”
The sentry chuckles.
“Good answer,” the man says. “I’m a Heat fan, myself. And fuck the motherfucker that talks shit about them.”
Yoshida can’t stand this anymore. He lunges upward and delivers a flying knee strike to the sentry’s chin, shattering his jaw again and knocking the man sprawling to the dirt. He turns back to the airstrip just in time to see the two eared man grin and make a mocking salute to some other soldiers as the jeep pulls away.
He will rape more wives and burn more babies.
The ninja clenches his fist around the rifle in his hands so hard that the steel bends.
DEATHSTORM
Sid jumps off a jeep in Kandahar City at fourteen-hundred hours. He’s geared to fight World War Three by himself, which means he has three grenades, two KA-BAR knives coated in neuro-toxin, a .45 USP sidearm and a 240 Bravo machine gun. Victor is at his side and carrying a six-barreled 40mm MGL, two pistols loaded with .40 depleted uranium bullets, a machete, and a small black plastic collapsible shovel commonly known as an entrenchment tool or e tool. Both of them wear black t-shirts and body armor with black fatigue pants. The knife guy, Safari, Abo and Ashley dismount a second jeep behind them.
They stand facing a somewhat modern building compared to what Sid has seen during the rest of his tour here. There is a large glass foyer through which he can see people drinking coffee and talking. These are not the towel headed hill people he is used to, but refined, well dressed, clean people. The rest of the building is tan stone of some kind and it goes up three floors with darkened windows spaced evenly.
“I’ve never killed anyone with an e tool before,” Victor says, licking his teeth. “I plan on fixing that today.”
Sid can’t understand why Victor would think that. The ninja is unfathomably dangerous. They will probably barely kill him with the whole team shooting machine guns and grenades. The idea of Victor stopping him with an e tool is just absurd. But then his brother did fight the ninja with just a knife last time they met. If that didn’t expose his increasingly irrational bloodthirst then what happened in the barracks a few nights ago did. Sid tries to put it out of his mind. He didn’t go back in the barracks that night. He doesn’t know what happened to the girl. He doesn’t want to know. He can’t think about that. He has a job to do.
Personally, Sid is scared. No. He’s not scared. His father would beat him for being scared. Fear is for the weak. A warrior has no fear.
But he is anxious. He is anxious because he’s walking in to face a true warrior and he is now convinced that the men behind him are, at best, unstable and, at worst, terribly psychotic.
“Don’t get cocky in there,” Ashley says. “Katsuhiro Tanaka is a real god damned ninja straight from the land of the rising sun. This ain’t no Chinese knock off.”
“Issat a real thing? A fake ninja?” Safari asks as he sets up a Browning M2 on the back of the second jeep next to a belt fed grenade launcher and the laser designator they will need if they have to call in an air strike.
“A fake ninja is as real as any
real ninja, only fake,” Ashley answers as he puts out his cigar on the side of the jeep and saves the remaining stub in his shirt pocket. “Move in two teams. Sid, Victor and, um...”
“Bruce,” says the knife thrower.
“Knife Guy,” Ashley continues. “The three of you go in the front and start clearing out brown people. You see yellow and you smoke that shit so hard it makes Hiroshima look like a firecracker in a Pepsi can. Safari, stay here with the big guns. The rest of you come with me around back. Let’s light this motherfucker up.”
Victor spares no time storming the front of the building. Sid and the knife guy follow behind him. He doesn’t use the door. No. Victor thinks doors are for the weak. He launches a grenade at the plate glass and the front of the building disintegrates into a pile of shattered shards and screaming people.
Victor’s combat boots crunch on broken glass as he steps over the knee high metal window frame and into a little café in the hotel lobby.
“The ninja! Where is the ninja?!” he screams at the small collection of terrified and disoriented hotel patrons. He kicks one man in the guts as he attempts to crawl away through the mess of glass shards leaving a snail trail of bloody streaks behind him.
“I don’t think they have any idea,” Sid says as he steps into the café.
Victor gives his brother an annoyed glance and then screams “Get out!” at the café patrons as he fires a pistol into the ceiling. “Come on, runt. Let’s flush out some game!”
Sid follows Victor further into the building. The knife guy looks almost as scared as the people in the café, but he goes with them. They make it out of the café and into the hotel lobby and then they see something way too strange to continue without further investigation.
Everyone in the lobby is screaming and running from the men with huge guns that just blew up the coffee shop. Men trip over each other scrambling for the front door. Women scoop up babies. A child cries for his missing parents. Someone is being trampled in the front doorway by a hundred shrieking escapees. All of this chaos is going on around them and yet one person sits completely unaffected.
