by Mike Leon
He rests on top of the desk of the hotel concierge, his legs folded and his hands resting in his lap. He is a big man, covered in a white robe. His face is obscured behind a jet black beard which dangles down his chest all the way to his waist and long black hair that hangs past his thick brows. His eyes are closed and he seems entirely undisturbed by the commotion. This is because his god has told him to be here today. His god will protect him.
“What the fuck is this?” Victor says, when he notices the praying Muslim.
Sid had already noticed, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to think.
“Hey, sand nigger, say hello to seventy-two virgins for me!” Victor growls as he draws and raises his pistol again with one hand, the other holding the MGL over his shoulder. He squeezes the trigger and he and Sid both hear the familiar bang they’ve heard millions of times before. The pistol recoils only a tiny fraction in Victor’s perfect grip, as it has millions of times before. There is a flash and a smell of cordite, as there has been millions of times before. Only this time, nothing happens. The bearded man does not die. A spray of blood does not gush from his head. His brains do not leak out all over the floor. Nothing like that happens.
At first, it seems Victor missed, which is ridiculous. He’s only thirty feet away. He can hit a lemon at five times that distance one-handed with that very gun. He shoots again. Again nothing happens. It is as if his bullets just vanish. He pulls the trigger again. And again. He empties the entire magazine into the bearded Arab’s face. This accomplishes nothing.
The knife guy turns heel and runs like a little bitch. He does not make it ten feet through the screaming crowd before a man wearing a turban stabs him to death with a large combat knife.
“My followers number greater than legion,” says the bearded, unshootable man. He speaks perfect English with a slight British accent, like someone who went through elocution classes. “Together we will bring death to you who forsake Allah.”
And then Sid sees them. More turbans all throughout the crowd. Sure. Some of them might be people who just decided to wear a turban today, but maybe they’re with this asshole too. Maybe this is a trap.
“We have a problem,” Sid says to his brother.
“Take care of it, runt,” Victor answers, having noticed the small army surrounding them as well.
The bearded leader of the Mujahedeen stands for the first time and he is quite tall – even more so on top of the desk. His posture is like an angry parent leaning over to scold a rotten child. He throws back his robes to reveal a suit of glimmering medieval plate armor and the hilt of a sheathed scimitar sword. His command is simple. “Kill the infidels!”
Sid turns to open fire on the crowd, the whole crowd, with the 240. He doesn’t have time to be picky about targets. Allah will have to sort them out.
Victor does exactly what Sid would expect from him. He drops his grenade launcher on the floor, whips out that big machete he brought, and points it at the bearded giant.
And then something none of them expected...
It is as if God screamed fuck you and the heavens opened up to rain bullets and blood. The ceiling simply disintegrates as two-hundred 20mm shells punch through it every second. Time slows to a crawl for Sid as he realizes what is happening. He turns his head and roars as he dives for worthless cover under a café table that will dissolve like a sugar cube in this torrential pour of death. He looks out at the crowd around him as they fall to pieces. A Mujahedeen with his pistol outstretched, the barrel pointed straight at Sid’s face, is unable to pull the trigger because a shell has already severed his arm at the elbow far too quickly for him to have noticed yet. He will never notice because another shell is about to take his head off. A small boy snaps in half at the small of his back. The top part begins to fall freely as he continues to scream. A woman in a burqa has become a crimson soaked throw rug, so riddled with bone shattering lead fragments that she no longer has any human form. Those who survive the first three seconds of gunfire are greeted by a shower of broken glass and metal fragments that used to be the atrium ceiling, now falling like a thousand thousand razors. The table does provide some protection from that, but it is soon obliterated by the Vulcan. Sid sees a steel beam falling his direction and rolls away as it smashes down on the destroyed café table. He lands on the mangled partial cadaver of a clean shaven man in a shredded suit. The limbs are all gone but the horrified face stares up at him, through him, past him, screaming a silent indictment at the sky.
Sid turns over and does the only thing that makes any sense at all to him right now. He shoots at the sky. The plane is thousands of feet above them. It moves so quickly that he needs to lead by hundreds of feet to hit it. He can’t see it. The building is falling on top of him. A dozen bullets miss him by centimeters in each tenth of a second and this would be insanity even if all of those other things were not happening.
But Sid is more than a good shot. He is a living weapon. He is born to kill. His senses are sharper than any man. He can hear the plane. He can hear the shots. He can follow them back to the source. He closes his eyes.
The 240 is a good gun, and for Sid it is more than a weapon. It is an extension of his being. It is an extension of his rage. He squeezes the trigger and roars. “DIE! DIE! DIE!” But he can’t even hear himself over the cacophony around him. He doesn’t let go until the gun cycles through the whole belt of ammo.
If he hit the plane, he has no idea. But the Vulcan stops.
Sid jerks to his feet and looks himself over. Through some miraculous chance, he is completely unharmed. Blood smears his face and stains his clothes. The hotel lobby looks like a mass grave in the middle of some third world genocide. The chipped and battered tile floor is covered in a carpet of mangled bodies and pulverized debris. A coating of grey dust voids the scene of all vibrancy. He thinks nothing could possibly live in this heap of horror, but then he is proven wrong.
Victor stands in the exact same spot. He never moved. And why would he? Nothing here could possibly have sheltered him from the Vulcan. He is covered with dust and broken glass. He pulls a jagged shard from his shoulder and tosses it to the floor without ever displaying anything but his signature twisted glee. Blood runs down his arm from the cut as he raises his machete to point at their enemy.
Yes. The Arab cleric still stands. More disturbing still is that he remains seemingly untouched by the death storm that destroyed everything around them. His armor still shines and his robes are bright white like nothing ever happened. He draws his scimitar from its sheath and exposes the blade for the first time. It is dark like jet, but with a slight green tint. It curves slightly and ends in not one, but two points, giving it the appearance of a serpent’s forked tongue.
“By Zulfiqar, sword of evil’s bane, you meet your doom, infidel!” the cleric screams. Sid has a terrible feeling about this...
And it begins. Victor slashes at the Imam with a broad and powerful overhand strike and the blades clash between them, the Imam catching Victor’s machete between the prongs of his forked tongue tip. The machete slides between them, grinding steel on steel until it is finally free and continues downward to its target. But the Imam is too quick and his armored frame is no longer there for it to strike. So Victor slashes again. This time, the Imam is already behind him before he completes the motion. Victor barely dodges the attack.
Then Sid leaps into the fray. This is the only thing left to do against this enemy who shrugs away bullets like a phantom. Sid’s knives point downward from his raised hands as he flies through the air growling. Maybe now Victor won’t call him a runt anymore.
He slashes with furious hatred at the Imam. By now he recognizes who this is. Every vicious stab of the toxic coated combat knives is a sentence to agonizing death, but his blades meet nothing. The Imam moves like a river and attacking him is like stabbing water. Sid can barely track his movements and he swears he can see a colored trail following the bearded Muslim.
Both of them, slashing
like madmen, are just barely keeping the Imam busy. Then he does something unbelievable. He breathes fire. Like a god damned magic fucking dragon, he breathes fire. It erupts from his mouth with a furious and roaring exhalation and projects toward Sid. He leaps away, but the searing heat singes the hair off his left arm. He turns back to see the Imam turning the jet of flame toward Victor, but the older brother ducks under it and stabs up into the Imam’s chest with the tip of his machete. The strike is met by the enemy’s shining white armor – armor that does not give way.
Sid jumps back into the fight hoping to get a knife between the plates of that armor from behind. He thinks if he can just stab the motherfucker in the spine that will put an end to this. He is quickly reminded of just how impossible it is to actually hit this bastard. One of his knives ends up in a wall across the room and the other he barely hangs on to as the Imam smacks the blades with his immense strength and legendary sword.
Sid pulls his .45 and empties a magazine into the back of the Imam’s head while Victor blocks and parries attacks he can hardly keep up with. The bullets do nothing and the Imam kicks Victor to the floor with a mighty foot. He slides his sword back into its sheath and faces Sid with calm serenity.
“You are strong,” the fire breathing monstrosity tells them. “But Allah’s will is stronger than all things.”
Then he holds out his hand and takes Sid’s knife away. He doesn’t grab for it or move even. The knife just rips free of Sid’s grip and sails across the room, into the Imam’s fingers. The Imam looks it over, spinning it curiously. Neither of the boys wants to see what he does with it next. Sid almost turns and runs, but then he thinks it better to keep his eyes on the knife in case he has to move quickly. What the Imam does finally do is perhaps more unsettling than any simple attack he might have envisioned.
He holds the knife up to his face and licks the length of the blade, cutting into his tongue along the way. When he reaches the tip, blood drips from his lips and he discards the knife to the floor like a piece of trash. Sid can’t peel his eyes away. This is impossible. He smeared that blade himself with Revenant TXX, a synthetic nerve agent twelve times more powerful than Novichok-7 and ninety-six times more powerful than VX. This can’t be happening. He stands for another few seconds, waiting to see if the effects were just delayed somehow, but they never come. No seizures. No massive hemorrhaging. No boils. Nothing.
Then the Imam is there. He covers the distance between them faster than Sid can track him. He snatches Sid’s arm and bashes him in the chest with a fist that hits like a carnival mallet. Sid crumples. An imploded skyscraper couldn’t topple so hard. He’s sure his ribs are broken. Maybe his arm too. It feels like he’s on fire.
Victor takes a shot at the Imam with a .40 cal, but the Imam spins to face him and the bullet turns around mid-flight. It makes a complete loop back the way it came and embeds itself in Victor’s shoulder. He snarls like a cornered and wounded animal.
“Allah is great,” the holy warrior says. “Blessed be hi…”
He is interrupted by the giant-sized, radio controlled boomerang that shatters through the wall, spinning at two hundred miles per hour. The boomerang makes it almost to him before he leaps over it, and it continues for Victor and Sid, who both duck under it. The weapon exits the building through the opposite wall and vanishes.
Kill Team Three enters the building through the broken glass café front led by Ashley. The werewolf is noticeably absent. Abo catches his boomerang just outside the building as they continue inside. When Ashley sees the three of them, the Hansen brothers and the Twelfth Imam, he stops in his tracks.
“Holy shit,” he says. “It’s the fuckin’ Imam.”
There is a second that lasts an hour, while everyone in the room tries to decide what to do next. Ashley finally shatters the silence.
“Kill ’em all!” he screams at the top of his lungs as he opens fire with a 240 across the room. All of them open fire. Machine guns blaze. Bullets pierce the walls like paper.
Sid needs to run. He wants to run, but everything hurts. His chest feels like it is completely shattered and his arm is already beginning to swell. He doesn’t know if he can stand on his own. Bullets whiz past him as he throws himself over a marble countertop, flopping like a bar room drunk and grunting like one too. He can’t see Victor. He can’t see the Imam. He doesn’t care. He needs to get out of this place now. Then that massive boomerang comes crashing through the counter top and buzzes his head so close he loses a few hairs. Marble and stone comes down on top of him; every chunk like a punch in the body from a crowd rioting against him. He tries to crawl away, but a lot of it is on top of him. He pushes it off. He can’t stand. He sees two of everything. Fire. Screaming.
KILL TEAM ONE IS DEAD
“Kill Team One is dead,” Walter says. “I shot him myself.”
“Bullshit!” Reynolds says, so forcefully that the small television monitor containing his image actually visibly rattles atop the conference table. Reynolds hairline is receding and his shiny forehead seems to take up an inordinate amount of the screen.
On the monitor next to him is Henry Krupp, pale and bony as ever. More interesting than the man himself is the backdrop behind him. Walter is amazed at how close it comes to the joking caricature he had always conjured for the man. Candles. Stone block walls. There is even a gargoyle.
On the third and final monitor, Eric Du Pont appears very bored. The bottoms of his sneakers fill the left half of the screen, as he has his feet up on the desk in front of the camera wherever he is.
Victoria and Elkan are there in the room with him.
“You have the remains,” Walter tells him.
“We have a charred carcass that YOUR people say maybe used to be Kill Team One,” Anton sneers. “We can’t do DNA because nobody has his DNA for comparison. We can’t see him because he’s a piece of toast. So we have nothing to go on but your word, and why is that again?”
“Because I burned it,” Walter answers. “I called the Ghoul out there and we dragged it into the woods and burned it.”
“Why would you do that?” Reynolds prods.
“It was a global security threat,” Walter responds. “We’re talking about Kill Team One here. A guy like that you make absolutely sure he’s dead. Scorched earth zero tolerance. Shoot him up, cut him up and incinerate the pieces. Every lunatic this side of the international dateline would want that body. I don’t want another Glasgow situation here.”
“Glasgow situation?” Eric Du Pont speaks up for the first time during the inquiry. He never has valid input. He just asks questions about things he’s too young to know about.
“Some lunatic in Glasgow used Aliester Crowley’s grimoire to revive some IRA hero to try and take a train station in Belfast.”
“But Glasgow is in Scotland,” Eric says, curiously.
“It’s a long story. Let me skip ahead. Fifty people die in a train derailment, then Kill Team Two blows the zombie to pieces with fully automatic weapons. The End.”
“Ridiculous bullshit,” Anton scoffs.
“Hardly,” Krupp interjects. “Crowley’s magick is not to be taken lightly. And we did have Bin Laden dumped in the ocean for similar reasons…”
“Alright,” Anton says. “Bad hair metal icons aside, I want to see the god damned body.”
“I’m telling you, we destroyed it,” Walter tells him.
“Or you made up the whole thing. It’s awfully convenient that the only other person who saw him dead is a mute retard. Isn’t it?”
“The Ghoul isn’t mute. He just only talks about meat.”
“He says about five stock phrases. He’s like one of those fucking dolls with the pull string.”
“Enough,” Elkan Rothschild speaks up. He sits across the table wearing a suit made from something that has eaten at Walter’s curiosity since he sat down here. It is grey and smooth, not normal cloth. It must be some sort of marine mammal. An otter or a manatee maybe. Whichever one is more endange
red, Walter reasons. That would fit Rothschild’s taste. “I see no reason to make accusations and begin a shouting match. Mr. Stedman has served us very well for two decades. If he says Kill Team One is dead, that is enough for me.”
“He’s a fucking liar!” Anton Reynolds shouts. “The two of them are in league together! I vote we put Ashley Marjorie in charge and send him after Kill Team One!”
“What reason would I have to lie? You people sign my paychecks,” Walter reasons. “And you know you can’t trust Marjorie to operate in populated areas. The guy thinks genocide is a pastime.”
“Mr. Stedman is correct,” Krupp says. “Ashley is a loose cannon.”
That was grossly understated. Walter had to stop Ashley from using a dirty bomb in Rockefeller Center once because he thought someone in the building might be feeding information to the Chinese. It turned out an office worker was just calling a phone sex line that was routed to Beijing. Ashley still killed the guy, because the enemy is the enemy. How many times had Walter heard him say that? At least a hundred.
“Ivan Hansen is still out there!” Anton shouts at the rest of them.
From there, the meeting dissolves into bickering and Walter is asked to wait outside. He finds himself in the large corridor of Rothschild’s castle, sitting on a bench and contemplating walking out on all of them until Victoria emerges from inside with Elkan. Walter gets a closer look at Rothschild’s suit and resolves to ask him about it.
“What is that material?” Walter says, motioning up and down at Elkan’s clothes.
Rothschild smiles. “This? Oh, it’s monk seal. I had one killed to make it and another one just to throw in a dumpster.”
“Really, Elkan,” Victoria says, rolling her eyes. “You are too shameless in your consumption.”
They make no more attempts at small talk, as Victoria skips straight into business.
