by Mike Leon
“So when we find these fuckers we’re gonna ace them, right?” Akimbo asks over the sound of the rotors.
She doesn’t know what to tell him. The answer is no, but she wants it to be yes, and she knows he wants it to be yes as well. She contemplates lying to him, but she realizes that lie might get someone killed. If Akimbo’s team thinks they have kill orders then they will try to fulfill them when they do find their targets. She isn’t sure who would win that battle, Akimbo’s mercenaries or the boys, only that it would be a bloody mess either way. Of course, if she wanted the Hansens dead despite her orders, that would be the way to do it…
She opens her mouth to answer him, but a scream interrupts her from the front of the helicopter. It echoes through the headphones around her neck.
“Incoming!”
And then a terrible blast fills her ears. The chopper rocks from side to side. A volcanic burst of flame and burning steel erupts through the small door frame that opens into the pilot’s compartment and makes its way down the middle of the hold between all of the mercenaries lying against the sides of the hull. One man, still standing in the middle of the hold, is eviscerated by the flaming shrapnel. Shelly is looking at Akimbo as it happens, and she sees him look at the fiery death jet and then go out the side of the craft, but whether he is thrown from the chopper or leaps on purpose she cannot tell.
She can’t react before the chopper begins to spin out of control. Shelly grabs for anything she can and simply hopes whatever she gets is bolted down somehow. Someone bashes into her as they are flung through the chopper. It takes all of her concentration just to turn her head the way she wants in the midst of the chaos spiraling around her. She looks to see her hand grasping a strap of some kind. Then she catches a glimpse of the cockpit in flames, before someone is flung out of the chopper and annihilated by the spinning blade as it tilts downward. Somebody is screaming. She can’t tell who, but he keeps screaming the same thing. “We’re dead! We’re fucking dead, man! We’re dead!”
The impact is a jolt she won’t remember and the full minute after is simply blacked out. Shelly opens her eyes and is surprised by the amount of dust and dirt covering her. She is very annoyed that there is dust in her underwear, and that is the first thing that comes to mind, even before she wonders how terribly injured she is. Stupid, she thinks. She looks down at herself and verifies that nothing is missing, though her leg is pinned under a seat from the cockpit. It must have been thrown back somehow… No. She’s in the cockpit. How did she get in the cockpit?
The sound of gunshots interrupts her thinking. Someone is shooting at them. This can’t be good. She frees her foot and shimmies back to the rear of the chopper. Only then does she realize that the whole helicopter is on its side. She crawls over a dead mercenary, which she doesn’t recognize until she’s face to face with him. Then her eyes dart around looking for more, but there aren’t any, except for Daniels. Daniels is on his feet using the floor of the chopper as a wall to hide behind as he fires back at their attackers with a submachine gun.
“What the fuck just happened?” Shelly yells at him.
“RPG hit us! Hostiles on all sides! Armored transports. Where’s the captain?”
“He fell out!”
“Fuck!” Daniels says as he fires the subgun full auto over the edge of the chopper floor blind. “We need a radio! I don’t know how long we can hold them off!”
Shelly searches the ground for her grenade launcher. A weapon like that would be a godsend right now. In her hands it would be easy to take out the armored transports surrounding them. No such luck. She does find the radio, but it is shattered in a dozen pieces in the dirt underneath her.
“The radio is toast!” She says.
Then a fifty caliber rifle round punches through the chopper floor and cracks Daniels head open like an egg. The yoke spills out all over the ground right next to Shelly’s arm and some of it splatters on her.
She curses and pulls herself to her feet, only to be knocked back down again by two soldiers coming down into the chopper. They wear dark grey uniforms with Cyrillic lettering embroidered on the patches. Russian? No. Russians wouldn’t be here shooting at her chopper. Chechens. The American regulars were right. It was Chechen commandos. The lost convoys. The village massacres. All of it. There are no devils out here. Just a bunch of Eastern European assholes with a cause and a need for cash. The revelation is more than disappointing. It is heart-breaking. She was prepared for the Hansen brothers, even if they were pure evil. She had the resources to reason with them. She can’t do that now. The Chechens will kill her. No. They will rape her. Then they will kill her. Maybe she can at least take some of them with her.
The one closest to her is a large man with a boney face. He opens his mouth to say something in Chechen and she sees he has a mouthful of jagged, rotten teeth. She grabs hold of his face and brings him down with her. The mercenary screams and goes for a knife. Shelly snatches hold of it and uses a Krav Maga disarm to lever it from his hand and tosses it aside. His friend tries to pull her off from behind, but she won’t let go. She feels Rotten Teeth’s hands around her neck, choking her, but she has her thumbs in his eyes and she’s pushing with all her strength. Rotten Teeth screams as her thumbs dig into his eyeballs and up into what she thinks is brain. It feels like jello. J-E-L-L-O.
Then there are hands all over her, too many to count, and she’s being lifted up out of the chopper wreckage. They toss her to the ground outside and she looks up at the whole team. She counts at least twenty Chechens. There might be more. They have three technicals; pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted in the bed; the tanks of the third world. A couple of them lie dead in the dirt. Daniels must have hit them. The leader stands over her. He’s the one she thinks is the leader anyway.
He wears big sunglasses and puffs on a cigar like a knock-off Che Guevara. He even has the same long greasy hair. She can’t believe this guy. He kicks her as she tries to stand. Another one grabs her from behind. He reaches under her flak jacket and gropes the flesh of her left breast. He chuckles and says something to the leader. Shelly doesn’t speak any Chechen, but she knows what it means.
“This one should be good for fucking,” he says.
The leader looks back at his blinded man, blood and puss oozing from his eye sockets as three others carry him from the helicopter wreckage, and he nods with approval. All twenty of them will be having a turn with her. Some of them begin to argue, which she assumes is over who will go first. She looks around to see which ones are carrying sidearms. She might have a chance to grab a loose pistol and put a bullet through her brain before she has to live through this. Only the leader has one, and he stands back, seemingly uninterested in her.
When they finish arguing, four of them pin her to the ground. The largest man in the group mounts her and begins by kissing her breasts and licking her neck. Shelly refuses to scream. She won’t give them the satisfaction. She keeps her eyes on Che’s pistol and she becomes numb to everything else. She hears nothing around her. She sees nothing else. She wants that pistol. She wants to wrap her lips around that barrel and pull the trigger right now more than she has ever wanted anything. Funny how fast people’s priorities can change.
When it happens, she doesn’t even know at first. She feels the wet hot mess dripping down her cheek and she knows one of them has come on her face. She keeps looking at the pistol. Her tunnel vision is focused to the point that she can no longer see the pistol’s owner. The pistol becomes increasingly harder to track and then it settles on the ground much closer to her than it was before. She reaches out with her free hand to grab it. Not close enough. She crawls closer. Wait. How is she crawling? Why is her hand free? She breathes deep and turns her head up to take in her surroundings.
Chaos around her. Chechen mercenaries scream like frightened children. Most of them are wounded or dying. Some have truly horrific wounds. One man holds his entrails and cries. Another has two KA-BAR knives stuck in the sides of his neck. He
vomits blood like a waterfall. Others lie motionless already, lakes of crimson forming under their bodies. What she thought was semen on her face is actually a steaming mass of splattered gore. At first she has no idea who has done this. Did Akimbo survive the fall? No. He couldn’t have done this himself. Maybe more of her team that survived the crash? Then she sees.
He is like a shadow of solid black in the shape of a man. Black fatigue pants. Black tee shirt. Black camo paint covering all of his flesh – except his face. His face is painted like a bright white skull against the black. The teeth are painted on his top lip and long white vampire fangs extend down past the sides of his mouth. The Graveyard skull is his face. Demons from the dark with faces like skulls. Jesus. Now she understands.
Sid Hansen pulls both Kabar knives from the neck of the dead Chechen and then he throws one of them over Shelly to kill a man running away from the slaughter. The other he uses to gut another Chechen. He hisses like a snake in the man’s face. She turns to see Victor standing a few feet from her. She can tell them apart because Victor is bigger. Victor tears a man’s head off – with his bare hands.
“Jesus Christ,” she shrieks. Normally that would be strange because she’s Jewish, but now it doesn’t feel strange at all.
She tries to crawl away as she watches Victor stomp on some poor bastard’s chest and empty the entire magazine of a Scorpion into his teeth. It shatters them to bits, which are mostly blasted out the back of his neck. Victor reloads his gun as he looks around for more Chechens, sees none left alive, and proceeds to empty the magazine into the same man’s teeth again.
She starts to get up and run, but she runs into Sid Hansen face-first. It feels like slamming into a brick wall. How did he get behind her so fast? He tosses her down and looks her over. His eyes move over her body. They linger on her blond hair, which is a frizzy tangled mess hanging all over her back and shoulder by now.
“I don’t think she’s from around here,” Sid says.
Victor appears at his brother’s side to inspect their discovery.
There is something she’s supposed to tell them, but her mind is racing and she can’t remember what it is.
“This one should be good for fucking,” Victor Hansen says. She has one last thought before he cracks her in the head and everything goes black:
She was better off with the Chechens.
BORING EXPOSITION I
“Why can’t we get the Filekeeper out here?” Spears asks, looking up from a book that is thicker than any unabridged dictionary Walter has ever seen.
“The Filekeeper never leaves the sub-sub-basement,” Walter answers. He sits in a wooden rocking chair near a heavy oak desk stacked with more books. Walter wears his brown duster over a black sweater and blue jeans. He views Spears nose up, over the lenses of his cheap reading glasses.
“Never? I mean, I’ve never seen him out of the sub-sub-basement, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of leaving.” Spears wears a solid black ensemble including black jeans and a black knit sweater – all made complete by his black knit cap. Walter thinks he looks like what a child imagines when someone says stranger danger.
“I never seen Charlie Manson and Ronald McDonald in the same place at the same time. It don’t mean they’re the same person,” Operator Morgan chimes in. The short husky man sits on a desk with his arms crossed, a P90 slung over his shoulder. His outfit is almost on par with Spears, but Spears is tall and wiry, where Morgan is short and stubby. Somehow it just isn’t as comical.
All of them are dressed heavily because Van Duyn Manor has had no heat for months and the process of heating the behemoth mansion seems to be taking much longer than Walter expected. For the first day, he could see his breath in the air, but the temperature has increased in the two days since. It was never a warm place anyway. Maybe this is as warm as it ever gets, he wonders.
“Is that agreeing with me or arguing?” Spears furrows his bushy brow, uncertain.
“I don’t know,” Morgan answers after a great deal of scratching his sand colored soul patch. The two of them have been Walter’s own personal peanut gallery since they set up camp in the library of the mansion. The discussion seems to go in the same cycle by his observation. First, Spears complains for a bit that they are not cut out for this shit. The reason they are professional soldiers to begin with is that they flunked out of school. Morgan agrees wholeheartedly and they both complain about the cold. Then they talk sports. Next, Morgan talks about how he thinks the place is haunted. He says he hears strange scratching noises in the walls at night that, despite being in the same room almost all the time, the other two never hear for themselves. Then they talk sports. Then Spears says he’s hungry and the two of them discuss delivery options. Despite mentioning no less than three other possibilities (Indian, Chinese, and sandwiches), they always decide on pizza. Then they argue over which one of them will go down to the gate to meet the pizza guy, which always ends with Morgan changing his mind and scrounging through canned food in the pantry. When he comes back, he complains about how cold it is in the kitchen. They talk sports. Then both of them complain about the cold again. After a while, it all begins again with Spears pointing out that they are not very good at doing research.
“It’s still cold as balls in here,” Morgan says.
Even if Walter and his operators are not too savvy on the book learning, Eli Van Duyn most certainly was. The library of Van Duyn Manor is a vast and voluminous collection of novels, biographies, history texts and other far more ponderous tomes. That is why he brought Zap along, but the torture expert is not a social character and had lost himself somewhere else in the library within minutes of arrival. Walter went looking for him and found him up in some lost corner of the stacks looking over some very old and very dense manuscripts. He decided it best to leave Zap alone to his work. Afterwards, they didn’t see him at all. The library is just that big. Seven three-hundred square foot floors of densely packed books arranged according to Library of Congress Classification, a system Walter cannot grasp wholly no matter how hard he tries. He took the girls on visits to colleges that did not have libraries this big. Fiction fills two floors, and the rest is every type of non-fiction possible. It is hardly reasonable considering it was all for one man. The implication is disheartening to Walter. He always identified with Van Duyn’s modest tastes. He was a simple man, like him, he thought. Now that image is shattered. Eli Van Duyn spent in excess on his library the way Rothschild does on everything else. Van Duyn’s vice is now the reason they are stuck here.
Walter is certain now that Eli knew something about the lizards that got him killed, but finding out what that was has become a search for a needle in a haystack. It could be that his secret died with him. More likely even, is that the lizards took what damning evidence Van Duyn had here in the house. Victoria seemed to believe Eli had something real, something concrete, when he spoke to her. Surely the monster that killed him would have taken it. What other explanation could there be? Everything Walter sees here is just garbage – tabloid nonsense and hysterical babbling printed out from the websites of basement dwelling mama’s boys. Not one word of real proof. No shred of solid evidence. Something must be missing.
“I found something,” reports an icy droning voice.
Walter turns to see Zap slouching with his hand resting on a short telephone table.
“I found something on the lower level,” Zap says.
“What is it?” Walter asks.
“I’m not sure yet. You need to see.”
Walter looks to Spears quizzically and the Echo leader orders Morgan to come with them. Zap leads the way in no hurry. He never appears in a hurry. He leads them down a winding staircase three levels to the bottom of the library. There, the lighting is dim and the shelves are dull steel instead of the finished wood like in the higher levels. The books here are not novels or texts. Most are uniformly colored and hardly any display any form of cover illustrations. The number printed on each book’s binding b
egins with the letter M. These are books of sheet music.
Zap leads them left from the stairs to the far wall and then right halfway down the aisle along the wall. Then he stops.
“Something is amiss here,” Zap says, turning around to face them. “Look at this.”
He points to a single book, high on the top shelf. It is a whale of a volume that is printed in a landscape format which does not fit on the shelf entirely, and extends over the edge several inches. Its call number is M5394. Aside from that, it has no title or identifications on the binding.
“It’s a fake book,” Walter says. “It doesn’t even have a title.”
“If you pull on that thing will the shelf turn into a secret door like the mystery mansion?” Morgan blurts out.
“No. That would be crass,” Zap answers, hoisting up the book from the shelf and dropping it in Walter’s hands “None of the books in this section have titles. These are unknown musical compositions.”
Walter verifies that with a glance at the other nearby shelves. None of them are labeled, except with M numbers. He opens the book jacket to find it is filled will sheet music. He can’t tell what kind. Probably not Coltrane.
“So then what?”
Zap turns back to the shelf.
“That book was here,” he points at the top shelf again. “Next to M5398. If you look at the binding, you’ll see that the call number is M5394. It should go down here, to the left of M5395.”
Zap kneels down and points at the bottom shelf to his left.
“So what?” KillCrazy says. “It got misplaced.”
“No. Nothing here is misplaced. Seven floors of books and not one filing error except for this one. Van Duyn had a fetish for library science.”
Morgan chuckles like a twelve year old.
“He means an obsession. Not a sexual fetish,” Spears grins.
