by Mike Leon
“Walter, aside from Mr. Reynolds, the group believes you,” she assures him. “And Elkan has agreed to grant your request.”
Good, Walter thinks. He couldn’t think of any reason Elkan would turn him down, unless he just wanted to be difficult, but the alternative was an operation he didn’t want to undertake.
“It is no inconvenience at all, Mr. Stedman,” Elkan says. “The property is unoccupied anyway, but I must ask, what do you think you will find in Van Duyn Manor?”
Since the night of the murders, Van Duyn Manor has been cold and empty, a gothic monument to the horrors that occurred within its walls. Eli Van Duyn’s last will and testament bequeathed a substantial cash sum to his wife and to his ex-wives, but the rest of his estate, in its entirety, went to his young daughter. With the girl missing and presumed dead, ownership of all his worldly possessions passed instead to his close friend Elkan Rothschild.
“We still don’t know why Kill Team One murdered them all. I need to find out what Van Duyn knew. Best place to start is his library.”
It is just before noon as he leaves the castle. On his way out, he calls KillCrazy Spears and tells him to take Echo Team out to Van Duyn Manor, since they all know the place already. He tells them to set up there and wait on him.
He has rare personal business to attend to today.
He arrives at Lucy’s wedding only a few minutes late and enters the rear of the church still in his brown duster. As usual, he questions whether he believes in any of this shit anymore as he sets foot inside. As usual, he leans toward a yes answer and takes his hat off before searching for a seat.
There are no seats left, so he stands in the back, behind the last pew. He hopes no one notices him, but he knows Patty will be searching the room for him with her beady little eyes. Patty was Walter’s first wife, and Lucy’s mother. She is the only one he is really glad to be rid of. His second wife, Susan, he still misses sometimes, and he might still save things with Maddie, but Patty was a vicious and frigid bitch the whole time they were married. She got nothing in the divorce, because at the time Walter had nothing, and she remains bitter about it. She never remarried and she spent most of her time either doing or dealing prescription medications. She harassed Walter for a year leading up to the wedding, insisting that he be here to give Lucy away. She cared about it more than Lucy, who was more than accustomed to her father being absent from major moments in her life. At some point she will find him here and confront him about it. He searches side to side and sneaks a swig from the flask of scotch he keeps in his trench coat. Fuck that bitch. He paid for all of this.
Kevin looks pretty good in a tux. The kid is okay. All American Football star. Messed up his knee in college. The guy makes six figures designing theme basements in million dollar houses. Much better than the last boyfriend. What was his name? Rob. That’s right. Rob hit her once or twice, nothing too serious, but enough that she should have left him. She didn’t, so Walter had KillCrazy put a gun in his mouth and politely ask him to leave the city and never come back. He pissed his pants, and then agreed to their demands.
Her dress is… Walter doesn’t care. None of this matters. He loves his girls, but it is very hard to give a damn about white gowns and floral arrangements knowing the things he knows and seeing the things he sees. He works with a seven foot bullet proof retard that eats human flesh. Nobody in this room eats human flesh. Most of them would curl up and cry if they saw something like that.
And yet he does it all for this. This room is the reason why he sends assassins to kill men in their sleep, pays religious zealots to bomb embassies in other countries, subjects people to medieval torture with reckless abandon, and secrets away objects and technologies the common man can only dream of. He does it so this can go on – not just for him but for everyone. He does it so people can find a little bit of happiness, a little bit of light in the great big dark.
One day, they may not need him to do what he does anymore. One day, things may be better. This is what he tells himself.
He doesn’t speak to Lucy until after the ceremony, when she finds him at the bar in the reception hall. Maybe he didn’t care about the floral arrangements, but he made sure this thing had an open bar. Damn sure.
“Daddy,” Lucy says, poking him in the shoulder so that he nearly spills his drink. She looks great even up close. Her skin is smooth and her eyes are green. She looks like her mother did thirty years ago.
“Daddy, you missed the wedding,” she says.
“No I didn’t, pumpkin,” he answers, smiling. “I was in the back the whole time.”
She crinkles her nose at him.
“I didn’t see you there.”
“I was behind the tranny with the uh...”
“That’s Kevin’s uncle Jenny. Don’t be mean, Daddy.”
“Well I was there.”
“Okay. I believe you. Are you drunk already?”
“Not enough.”
She insists that he dance with her and he pretends to resist before he finally gives in and steps out on the floor with her. He knows some people are whispering about him being an absentee father and giving him looks like he shouldn’t even be here. But that doesn’t matter. Fuck them too. This is nice, and he doesn’t care what those strangers think.
He stays later than he planned, until Lucy and Kevin are gone, and then he walks off into the dark, having had a much nicer time than he figured, and having avoided Patty the entire night.
CORPSES AND
LUCKY CHARMS
“You’re a very hard man to find, Ashley Marjorie,” Shelly says. She wears a long, straight and shiny black wig to hide her real hair. She is somewhat certain no one from Kill Team Three has ever met her before, but she doesn’t like to take chances.
“Depends who’s lookin’ for me,” the Kill Team commander replies. He leans wearily over the bar in a tiny pub on the outskirts of Kabul. Even though the native Afghanis are forbidden to drink alcohol, the occupation gave rise to places like this springing up in cities where lots of foreign journalists, aid-workers, and contractors can be found. Hip travellers call them expat bars. Shelly doesn’t see the appeal.
Ashley’s eyes explore her body slowly, starting at her bare legs and moving up past her tiny shorts and tank top, then back down again. She can’t be sure if he’s looking for weapons or sex. He won’t find either.
Shelly notices the other eyes on her just then. In the corner, a very big black man wearing only some simple brown pants and a little pale man with long hair growing in patches. His face is bloodied, slashed and burned black in places. He looks like a walking corpse. The gravity of her situation weighs on her now, as she realizes that Kill Team Three will probably kill her in the span of a single curse word if they don’t like what she says next. She decides the curse word of choice will be cocksucker if it comes to that and then she proceeds to lie through her teeth.
“Name’s Veronica. Walter Stedman sent me. I’m looking for the Hansen brothers,” she says. She gets the words out coldly and without any tell on her face, but she feels her butt pucker so tightly it could crush an ice cube.
He looks at her more seriously now. His gaze tunnels through the mirror lenses of her sunglasses and she worries that he’ll figure it out somehow. He knows. He has to know. They’re going to kill her right here.
“Good luck, cutie pie,” he says. He smiles and turns back to the bar to finish off a brandy. The bartender already has another ready.
“Word is they’re with your unit,” she says, taking off the sunglasses and approaching the bar to sit down on the stool next to him.
“Those freaks aren’t with my unit. Not anymore. They went crazy. Turned on us. Shellshock or something. I don’t know.”
“Then I’m authorized to terminate them,” she says. This is another lie. Her orders are actually quite the opposite. She is to find the two of them, wherever they are hiding, and give them the passphrase told to her by Kill Team One: Eagle Necktie. Afterwards, they will kno
w what to do – or at least they should according to the old man.
Ashley bellows with laughter.
“Terminate the Hansen brothers?” he says. He turns to his cronies in the corner and parrots back to them. “This crazy bitch is gonna terminate the Hansen brothers.”
They all laugh at her.
“I assure you, I’m perfectly qualified for the job.”
“Lady, the Hansens murdered two of my best guys just because they felt like it and then they shot down my plane with a 240 bravo. You know what that takes? I did the homework. You need to lead by about six hundred feet. The best marine corps snipers can’t make that shot and Sid Hansen did it blind. Hit the goddamn pilot in the goddamn femoral artery from inside a building on the ground with a rifle. A fucking rifle. You can’t do that. Nobody can do that. I’m losing my mind just thinking about it.”
“When you find Sid Hansen you tell him I’m coming to peel his face off,” says the scarred little man in a thick Norwegian accent.
“He was on the plane,” Ashley says, motioning over his shoulder back at the Norwegian. “Unloaded eight thousand rounds from puff the magic dragon right on top of those dirty cum stains. You want know what that did? Fuck all. Nothing. Nadda. Cause the little fuckers can’t be killed with bullets. They have character shields.”
“Excuse me?” Shelly can’t make up her mind what he meant by that last bit.
“Character shields. You know. Like on TV shows, the main guy can be in a thousand gunfights, he never gets shot, because he’s the main guy and there’s no show without him.”
“And you think that Victor and Sid Hansen have… character shields?”
“No. I know they have them. How else would they live through that?”
“How did they…,” she starts to say, but then she stops herself. There’s no reason to ask. It is abundantly clear that thirty years of fighting secret wars has knocked a few screws loose in Ashley’s head. Instead, she skips to a more constructive topic.
“Where are they now?” she asks.
“Ask the locals,” Ashley tells her, snickering.
She leans in close to him and glares over the rims of her glasses. She’s being as intimidating as she can, but he doesn’t flinch.
“Look, asshole,” she says. “I don’t care if you take me seriously, but I’m on orders straight from Walter, so answer my fucking questions and whatever else happens is my problem, not yours.”
He puts down his drink and scowls at her. The rest of the kill team watches in silence.
After a moment, he speaks.
“Ghani. It’s a village eight miles south. Have some jarheads take you out there and look around. You’ll see.”
Shelly resolves to do just that. She stands up and walks away from the bar without saying anything else.
“You got spunk, kid,” Ashley Marjorie shouts at her back. “Come back anytime.”
She turns and winks at him before walking through the bar doors and into the street.
Akimbo meets her there. The husky black man smokes two cigarettes at the same time as he leans on the side of the building next to the door. He scratches his thick and perfectly trimmed beard before he takes hold of both cigarettes in one hand to open his mouth.
“He tell you anything?” Akimbo asks.
Akimbo is a contractor. Freelance. Shelly hired him because he’s the best there is in this part of the world, and she can’t trust anyone from Graveyard out here. Not on this one.
“The guy’s got a few screws loose. That’s for sure. He says to go to a village called Ghani?”
“Never heard of it,” Akimbo says. “Must be tiny.”
“Bust out the map, and if we need to we’ll call some Americans. Ashley said the marines know where it is.”
Two hours later, they’re on the ground in Ghani with Akimbo’s team. The mercenary has his pistols out and Shelly has her grenade launcher and they have five others behind them with machine guns and grenades and rifles and one chainsaw, but they don’t need any of it because Ghani is a ghost town.
When the chopper lifts off and flies away, it only makes the silence of the village even more disturbing.
“Where are the villagers?” Shelly asks. And then she steps in something that used to be part of a camel. The rest of it is splattered in blackened and rotting chunks. She gasps, and Akimbo laughs at her.
“Looks like an RPG did that,” he tells her, pointing at the camel carcass with one of his guns.
“Who would shoot a camel with an RPG?”
“Not the locals. RPGs cost a fortune and a camel is a serious asset to these people. You don’t just throw them both away.”
“Someone did.”
One of Akimbo’s team comments about the little ornaments, and that is when she first notices them. At first, there were so many they were invisible, like leaning on the wall of a skyscraper and not realizing it is a tiny part of something huge. But now she sees them: tiny little talismans, mostly hanging in the window and door frames. There must be hundreds – thousands even. They are circular and have Arabic inscriptions spiraling toward the center, where a large symbol is carved.
“Tawiz,” says Akimbo. “Muslim talismans for warding off evil spirits.”
“I don’t like this,” Shelly says.
Then – a thud from a small hut behind Akimbo. Shelly hears it as she is looking at him and he spins. Something moves between the cracks of a boarded up window. A shadow. The whole team turns their guns on the house. Akimbo orders them in harsh whispers. In seconds his men have the structure surrounded and he’s ready to kick in the front door with Shelly right behind him. She stops him.
“Wait!” she says, as she snaps open the six barreled revolving cylinder magazine of her grenade launcher. She picks one grenade out of its chamber and replaces it with another from her belt. Then she approaches the window and finds a place where there is a large enough gap in the boards for the grenade launcher muzzle to fit through. She smashes the glass and fires a single tear gas canister into the house. Then she ducks under the window and they wait.
It does not take long for the tear gas to fill the little house and take effect. A little old Afghani woman bursts through the front door into the waiting arms of Akimbo. She is dressed in black garb that covers her from head to toe and she claws at the veil that covers her face as she chokes on the fumes from the gas. Akimbo has to hit her to stop the screaming. His team clears the house in a few seconds.
He lays her out on the ground and she whimpers at them all in Pashto.
“What is she saying?” Shelly asks.
Akimbo calls one of his men to translate. A skinny man, balding, wearing ballistic glasses. His name is Daniels.
“She wants to go back in the house. She needs to hide.”
“Hide from what? Where did all the people go?”
Daniels asks her. She begins to ramble at him. Shelly thinks it is incoherent babble from the confused look on Daniels’ face and the way she just keeps going on, but then he turns to her and begins to interpret. What the old woman is saying is quite disconcerting.
“Demons from the dark. They come in the night with faces like skulls. They butcher the strongest men like lambs and carry young girls off screaming. No one who sees them lives. Here. The other villages. Everywhere. There is no escape. The end has come. Allah is punishing them for their wickedness.”
“That’s comforting,” Akimbo remarks.
“They come in the night,” Daniels interprets. “They will come and they will drag us all to hell.”
Ashley knew this. The bastard could have just told her instead of sending them all out to this fucking wasteland.
“That sound like our boys?” Akimbo asks her.
She looks back at the destroyed camel splattered into chunks all over the ground behind them, and the ruined houses all around. Boys. No. Not boys. The old woman has it right. Devils did this. And she is not so eager to deal with devils.
DUEL
By chance o
r twisted fate, it is high noon when Yoshida Tanaka confronts Ashley Marjorie coming out of the small tavern Shelly Baum left only an hour before, and then the rest of Ashley’s men shortly after. Tanaka has spent weeks watching for the perfect moment to strike, but Ashley never seems to leave the company of his twisted companions. Finally, the moment has come.
Standing in the deserted street in his black mask, the ninja waits to deliver the touch of death as Ashley stumbles drunkenly through the propped open front door.
The kill team commander sees the ninja’s feet before anything else. That stops him in his tracks and he scans slowly up the ninja’s black outfit and smiles. Yoshida stands there plain as day. He no longer cares who sees him.
“Kaatsooheero Taanacka,” he says, pronouncing the Japanese name like a typical westerner. “Took you long enough.”
Yoshida says nothing.
“I finally figured it out, you know,” Ashley continues. “It was Kill Team One. He hired you to breach the vault at the top of the Graveyard building.”
Yoshida doesn’t hear any of this nonsense. His rage deafens him. He uses it – focuses it. When it is let loose, it will mean a terrible end for this pathetic drunkard in front of him.
“I always figured. Backstabbing prick. I just couldn’t prove it. So really, this is all your fucking fault. You stole the damn things. You fuckin’ fuck.”
Yoshida takes off his mask. Ashley stops his drunken rant.
“Hey!” he says. “You’re the fuckin’ kid!” And he begins to laugh. His laugh is somewhere between a wheezing cough and a cackle and he leans slowly to his right until he is resting against the tavern door frame.
Yoshida lunges.
He focuses all of his energy, his rage, his hatred, and a little sadness into a single point and he lunges. The fingers of his right hand are four talons of raw destruction as he leaps forward to find Ashley Marjorie’s chest. His speed is beyond human. His eyes are dilated black. The death touch finds its mark.
