by Mike Leon
And does nothing.
Yoshida stops. His tsunami of hate has become like a child’s splash in an inflatable baby pool. His eyes widen with fright as Ashley looks down at the fingers jabbing into his chest and continues to laugh. Then the kill team commander takes a swing at him so fast and so hard that the ninja is immediately certain his enemy is not human.
Yoshida leaps backward, barely avoiding Ashley’s fist, even with his superhuman ninja reflexes. Yards away, he draws his sword and prepares for a titanic struggle that he never expected from this undisciplined drunken slob.
“I learned a few tricks since the last time I saw you, kid,” Ashley says. “Since I pounded the snot out of you and made off with your woman and your baby.”
His eyes illuminate a cold blue shade as he stands upright, revealing that he is unaffected by the large amount of alcohol he just consumed. Yoshida stands his ground uneasily. Fear brings a word to his lips that he has not used since childhood.
“Bakemono,” he says. Monster.
“Don’t look surprised, ninja,” Ashley says. “You don’t get to run a Graveyard kill team for kissing ass or sucking dicks. You get there by crushing skulls. And I can crush skulls.”
Ashley picks up the brick that props the tavern door open. The door swings closed behind him and he holds the brick out in one hand for the ninja to see. His grip closes around it steadily like a machine until it cracks and shatters. He opens his hand and a fine stone powder falls from it.
Yoshida attacks. He must not give this monster time to prepare. His technique is perfect, but his sword is met by the sound of clanging steel. Ashley has blocked the blade with his arm. Yoshida attacks again and again, but each time his blade is deflected. Ashley lurches forward and snatches hold of the ninja, picking him up off the ground and flinging him across the street like a plaything.
“What are you?” Yoshida asks as he rolls to his feet.
“You should know, you oriental faggot,” Ashley responds. “It was your fault.”
Yoshida has no idea what he means. The last time he had any interaction with this man, he lost everyone he loved and Ashley got away with it.
“I put it to your woman – a couple of times actually. She had a tight little pussy before I rammed a sword up it,” Ashley says. The words sting at Yoshida’s heart. The image of Ashley raping his delicate little Mitsuko flashes through his mind and makes him feel sick. “Tight and wet and pouring with neuro-toxin. But you know all about that.”
“Liar!” Yoshida shouts at him.
His monstrous enemy searches his face for meaning. He takes a moment and grins.
“You really don’t know,” Ashley says, surprised. “Then I guess she pulled the wool over both our eyes. Your old lady was full of poison – some kind of ninja bullshit. I ended up rotting alive after I fucked her. Skin all turning black and falling off. Graveyard science guys said I had about a week before I was just bones. Fuck you for that. I had to make a deal with some real nasty people to keep breathing.”
Ashley reaches down and begins to pull at his hooded sweatshirt. He tugs it up and off and then throws it to the ground. Now Yoshida can see the bloody open wounds on his forearms where he blocked the ancient ninja sword. Between the bleeding gaps of flesh is not bone or sinew, but steel and circuitry. Actuators and pistons move instead of tendons and muscles.
“They made me into this.”
And then he charges. The cybernetic villain is like a freight train – an engine of destruction that cannot be stopped. He barrels through a volley of shuriken Yoshida throws at him as if they are paper wads and he keeps coming. Yoshida meets him with his sword, but it does nothing at all and Ashley simply smashes him aside. It is like being hit by a small car. Yoshida barely regains his feet after. Then steel fists hammer at him, each one a blur that would take his head off if he didn’t weave out of the way.
He tries to throw a smoke bomb to cover his escape, but the horrible metal man swats it from his hand. His fingers sear with pain. He winds up a stomp kick to push the enemy back, but Ashley grabs his ankle and easily snatches the ninja up off the ground with one hand. He swings Yoshida up in the air and repeatedly whips him against the ground like a sack of trash.
When Ashley lets go, the ninja is dazed. He hears the whirring of mechanical parts increasing in pitch and then he sees a fist coming down at him and he rolls out of the way. Ashley strikes the ground with such titanic might that the tavern shakes on its foundation behind him and his hand penetrates the ground and sticks. The cyborg struggles to pull his arm free.
Given the opportunity, Yoshida searches the ground for his missing sword and snatches it up. He steadies himself for a strike at Ashley’s exposed neck. He may be able to kill this monster yet.
He brings the sword down on Ashley and his strike is precise, but the cyborg barely notices the blade clanking against the base of his skull. He turns to look at the ninja with an expression of annoyance and then he grabs Yoshida with his free hand and throws him through the wall of a nearby house.
Yoshida finds himself in a pile of shredded boards and drywall. He tries to stand, but his shin folds like it is made of spaghetti. The cyborg snapped the bone with his robot death grip. Yoshida forces himself to his feet anyway. Even with all his ninja concentration, the leg still hurts badly. He hops on one foot. He doesn’t see Ashley and he hopes that the cyborg is still trapped in the street outside somewhere. He is badly outmatched by this killer abomination and it will take all his effort to escape. This is no longer about revenge. It is about survival.
An angry Afghan man yells at Yoshida while his wives squeal in horror. The ninja swats him out of the way and finds a door on the opposite side of the house from the one he came in. He wants to put the building between himself and Ashley.
Outside, he sees a man waiting in a rusted pickup truck smoking a cigarette. Yoshida opens the door, chops the man in the head, and drags him from the truck, before he gets in himself. He looks down at the pedals and realizes very quickly how difficult it will be to drive with only his left foot.
Before he has time to think it through, he hears a loud crash behind him and looks back to see Ashley smashing his way out of the house he just came from, the mangled corpse of the homeowner hanging from his hands.
Yoshida smashes down on the gas pedal with his left foot and the engine growls, but the truck does not move. It is manual transmission. This will be even more difficult. He smashes the clutch down with his sword scabbard as he shifts into first gear with his free hand. He steers the best he can while shifting gears with the same hand. Braking is an awkward impossibility for the moment. But there is no reason to slow down with the steel monster behind him.
The truck crashes through a cart of some kind and a wooden fence. The cyborg leaps to avoid the debris. Yoshida is too preoccupied with steering the vehicle to look back and see if the cyborg is gaining on him, and for a few moments he worries that Ashley will catch up.
When he finally appears clear of the city, he looks back and finds the cyborg losing ground as the vehicle accelerates beyond forty five. This will be good to know later. He mashes on the gas pedal harder and continues on. Soon Ashley is just a speck in the rear-view mirror. The ninja keeps going.
BLOOD DRINKER
Blood Drinker is angry. He sits in a steel reclining swivel chair at a small desk, leaning as far back as the chair goes, his meticulously polished black boots propped on top of the desk. His crisp Nazi uniform shirt is carefully folded over the shoulder of the chair, but he still wears the officer’s cap atop his head. He appears like a human male with receding dark hair and blue eyes, but this is a front for a more hideous form. His pointed teeth tear another bite away from a stick of jerky wrapped in orange tinted shrink wrap. This jerky is made from the flesh of human children, and each chomp, while tasty, is taken more for the catharsis than any other factor.
At the foot of his desk stands a tall man wearing a black trench coat and a bowler cap. Blood Drinker doesn’t even care to
guess what his name might be. He tears another piece of jerky away from the stick. The only thing keeping him from a murderous rampage right now is this jerky – and there is no end to it.
Around them is a whole warehouse full of the jerky. Cardboard boxes stack thirty feet high on huge steel shelves in every direction. The shelves are arranged in aisles for the half dozen fork lifts to navigate the warehouse. All day, every day, they ship the jerky around the globe. It is the best way to feed their scattered people, and far more civilized than the many lies men tell about them. They do not chase down children and rend them limb from limb for food, as in some human horror movie. No. His people are not thoughtless and uncaring. This meat is acquired from war-torn nations and third-world countries where it will not be missed. The animals are put down quickly and painlessly. If only humans were so kind.
“General Blood Drinker,” the nameless underling in front of him says. “The assassins you requested have arrived.”
“Good, good,” Blood Drinker says, shouting at a much higher volume than necessary. Klazomania is a rare side effect of the process they use to take human form. He pauses for a second to collect his composure. When he is not screaming, his voice is a deep grumble like some imagined demon might sound. “Are their methods sufficiently exotic?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?!!!” Blood Drinker bellows, his condition manifesting in a series of uncontrolled commands to violence. “Kill! Kill! Kill!”
“Yes, General.”
Blood Drinker doesn’t believe him. These assassins may require his personal inspection. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
“Take me to them!!!!” he says, standing up from the chair.
His servant leads the way through the warehouse. They have to press against a shelf at one point to squeeze past a forklift parked with a load of pickled hands on their way to the warehouse entrance.
Once leaving the actual storage facility, they enter a small waiting area where a receptionist sits at a cheap desk filing her finger nails. Blood Drinker has warned her about this before. The filing is not an issue, but clipping crosses the line. If he finds one, even one, nail clipping in this room, he will flay the skin from her bones while she still breathes.
In the waiting room, three strangers sit in the fake leather seating situated along the walls. They have not been allowed past the secretary, as it is imperative that no human be allowed to explore the building. Blood Drinker asks coldly that they stand for him. Only two of them do, and Blood Drinker ignores the insolence of the third, for now. He hopes that they are the solution to his problem – the problem Lord Sobek’s kill team failed to solve.
For weeks, the Hansen brothers have remained unaccounted. Ashley Marjorie believes them to be in the desert still, but his team has failed to hunt them down. Lord Sobek became aggravated with his incompetence, and so the task has fallen to Blood Drinker. Now Blood Drinker must waste his time with this menial job that was meant for a human animal. This is the reason for his anger.
The first is a woman. Already he is disappointed. Women are the weaker of the humans. Surely a male human would be better suited for this. How dare she waste his time? Strangely, she wears the black and white uniform of a French maid, although this uniform is far more revealing than the ones he remembers from the nineteenth century. It reveals her legs entirely and much of her chest is exposed. Her teats are pushed up and bulging from the top to increase her desirability to human males. Blood Drinker has no appreciation for this.
“Speak!!!” he shouts in her face.
She searches him awkwardly with her eyes for a second before she says anything.
“Mon is Laetitia,” she says, with a soft and seductive French accent.
“What do you do, Laetitia?!!”
“What do I do? Why, I do a little of zis. A little of zat,” she says, batting her eyes at him.
“Destruction!!!! Destruction!!!!!!” Blood Drinker says, turning to his trench coated lackey. “This one. What does she do?!”
“Uh, she lures men into her arms with sexual promises, disarms them and kills them with her hidden weapon,” says the lackey.
“An ancient trick played by any common whore,” Blood Drinker says. “What makes you so much better than any other?”
“I have laser gun hidden in my… petite fleur, chéri.”
“Delightful,” the General responds. He nods at the lackey with approval. Then he moves on to the next one.
The next of them is a burly man with long black hair. He towers over Blood Drinker like a skyscraper. He wears a black leather jacket with a plethora of chains and zippers and safety pins attached to it. A rugged shadow of stubble covers the bottom half of his face and sun glasses cover the other.
“And you?” Blood Drinker says.
“Niggerfucker,” says the huge man.
“What was that?!!” Blood Drinker leans in close, ready to execute this idiot for his brash disrespect.
“Niggerfucker. They call him Niggerfucker,” the lackey says, before anything else can happen.
“Why?”
“Cause Dead Nigger Fucker takes too long to say.”
“Oh,” Blood Drinker nods. “I like this one.”
He moves to the third.
The last of the assassins is the one that stays apart from the others. He remains seated with his face lowered and looking away from them. A black hood covers his head and hides his features, but he looks up slowly when Blood Drinker calls on him. The face is powder white, even in the lips. Its eyes are charcoal black and do not shine like the glossy flesh of an eyeball should. Blood Drinker can’t tell if there are even eyes in the sockets or if they are just empty and he’s staring into a darkened cranium. Blackened robes cover the figure’s frail looking body. This is the creature called Entropy.
“And you. What do you do?” Blood Drinker calls out.
“I am the void given shape,” answers the creature. Its voice is a shrill whisper that seems to echo even in the tiny waiting room. “I demand payment in pain, and this simple task of yours shall be completed.”
Blood Drinker is unimpressed. He cannot believe the insolence of this dog refusing to stand before him and then making demands.
Then, as if he can read Blood Drinker’s mind, the creature stands and moves across the room. Bare feet flash white from under the black robe as he walks and reaches for a flower in a vase on the secretary’s desk. He does not touch it. He does not need to. His mere presence seems to make the flower begin to wilt and then droop and then shed and finally dissolve away to nothing.
“That was a plastic flower,” the secretary says, wide eyed and morbidly astonished.
Blood Drinker looks to his trench coated lackey and smiles.
“Lord Sobek will be pleased!”
J-E-L-L-O
“They vanished into the mountains,” the decrepit old Afghan says. He is a tiny man, hunched over and toothless. He has more hair left in his ears than on his head. He speaks to Shelly through a translator, some young relative come to see that he is not among the dead, a tall and slender man with a well-trimmed beard and curly dark hair.
Shelly has the sinking feeling that her time is wasted on this one, just like on the others she has spoken to since Ghani. The days have been a blur of faces and interrogations – all for naught. Two weeks in the mountains and the story has not changed. They come in the night; charcoal black demons with faces like skulls. They kill all who lay eyes upon them. The details form like a maelstrom of horrors. Fire. Rape. Death. Then they are gone as fast as a storm. Demons from the dark, that first old woman had called them. Demons from the dark.
The American soldiers she interviews are not so quick to believe in devils. But they are still scared. They tell tales of commandos, maybe Chechen mercenaries, covered in black camo paint. There must be a dozen, maybe more. They strike only at civilian convoys during the day, but will hit anything at all after the sun goes down. There was even a SEAL team
gone missing one night, found in pieces the next day when the blackness had gone. Nobody sees them coming and no one is left to watch them go. Of course, statements like those are always exaggerations. Someone had to survive or there wouldn’t be a story. One such specimen Shelly found permanently confined to a wheelchair in an army hospital. The tale he told was much more like the version from the Afghani villagers. Demons from the dark.
Once, Shelly would have said that there were no such things as demons, only men. Now she knows the truth; that there are demons, but men can be worse. The first that come to mind are the men who cut her. Barbarians. But they are soon joined by others; human traffickers she had met in Mexico, warlords she dealt with in South Africa, that giant thing Walter Stedman had in his car at Van Duyn Manor, and the boys. The boys might be the worst of them.
This scene is the worst one yet. They burned every structure to the ground. Charred corpses littered the floor in many of them. On the roads, bodies lay blasted with heavy machine guns and even grenade launchers. At a large sheep farm on the edge of the village, it was impossible to tell human from ungulate amongst the scattered and bloody parts all over the ground.
The Hansen brothers are, without question, vicious psychopaths to the core – the kind of men who can survive only in a prison or a warzone. Every massacre makes her feel a little less like bringing the Hansens back to the world and a little more like dropping a bomb on them. Unfortunately, to do either she must first find them, and that has proven more difficult than originally intended. Why Kill Team One wants them so badly is beyond her reckoning, but she trusts the old man.
She takes one look back at the bloody mess, and that old man weeping on the shoulder of his young relative, before she boards the chopper to leave. Even Akimbo, usually cold and strong, is affected.
“I’ll remember this one,” he tells her on the chopper. “This is real nightmare fuel.”
Nightmare fuel. There is no better term for it. It is darkly funny, and she tries to laugh, because there is nothing else left to do but try and laugh. She does, and it drowns out the horror for a bit.
