by Mike Leon
Tetsuo gives him a curious look.
“You said yourself that he never knew,” Yoshida says. “Why?”
Tetsuo looks away from him. It seems that he cannot meet his gaze.
“I cannot say. It would bring dishonour.”
“I see,” Yoshida says. He understands too perfectly.
“You do?” Tetsuo says, fear on his face like a mask.
“Yes,” Yoshida answers. “My father always said you were jealous of him. He recognized your treachery, even if I did not.”
“What?”
“The truth is that you planned to steal the Tanaka clan from him. You planned to stab him in the back and have me killed in my sleep and then all of this would be yours. Tell me, Tetsuo, how many assassins did you have waiting here in the keep for you to give the command and kill my father?”
“No. That is not true!”
“Why should I believe you? You have lied to me my whole life.”
“I gave my word never to tell…”
“My father gave his word once and it cost his life and two others. Is your word worth that much?”
Then something awful comes across his mind – something so horrendous he immediately wishes he never made the connection.
“You did it,” Yoshida says, narrowing his eyes at his uncle. “You hired the One-eared man to kill us all.”
“Yoshida, listen to yourself. You cannot believe this delusion.”
“Is it? It worked. You sit at the head of the Tanaka ninja clan this moment. The only witness to your crime died on your order and you would have had her take her killer with her.”
“No. That is not true!”
“But it is. There you sit, Jounin of the Tanaka clan, ninja master, traitor, murderer…”
“One of those is a proper title, child. I am master of the Tanaka clan! As head of the clan I command you not to speak any more of this nonsense!”
“You command me to bury the truth so none may see your vile ways exposed.”
“Enough!”
“Enough of you, uncle! I challenge you!”
Tetsuo turns to stone before him. No. Not entirely. There is a vague hint of fear from the old man, but he hides it well – almost as well as his brother.
“If you must,” Tetsuo says coldly.
“I must. I will see my family avenged in one week’s time.”
BORING EXPOSITION II
They didn’t come here at all. Not during the war. Not during the Neolithic era. No. They were here before us. They were here before anything else.
Here there be dragons, Walter thinks. Ancient mapmakers used the phrase to label distant uncharted lands. Did they know? Some of them must have…
The creatures were here at least as long as the dinosaurs. Christ. They WERE the dinosaurs. Just like men came from the monkeys, these things came from giant sawtoothed beasts that roamed prehistoric Earth – except it isn’t technically prehistoric anymore. At least it isn’t for them. Not with what Walter has in this box.
Spears sits fixated on it. He has looked at it for hours. Every twenty or thirty minutes he comes up with another reason to dismiss it, as if anything but outright denial will shatter the world around him. Walter understands. When he accepted it, he had that terrible agoraphobic feeling, like gravity had suddenly been reversed and he needed to grab hold of the ground or fall out into the stars. In his years with Graveyard he has seen some strange things; a compound filled with Nazi zombies, a plot to use airline contrails for mind control, even two or three self-proclaimed costumed supervillains. None of those things turned the whole mystery of life upside down. This thing does.
It is a full color photograph of an armored knight mounted on horseback in front of a walled city. His steel plate armor gleams in the sunlight. His hand rests on the golden pommel of a sheathed longsword. He is the image of chivalry – all except his face, which is a hideous crocodile maw of spear-like teeth.
The city in the background is Antioch. Zap identified it by comparing it to depictions from the era; a task that was necessary because nothing remains now where Antioch stood but for a few collapsing ruins. Yet the city is in pristine condition in the photo, undamaged by the wars, earthquakes and time that caused it to crumble.
“I still think it’s a guy in a suit,” Spears mutters.
Zap raises his head from the stack of notes he is presently working through to respond.
“Then how do you explain the horse?” he says.
“It’s just a horse. My sister has a horse,” Spears says.
“It’s a destrier. Those horses haven’t existed since the high middle ages.”
“Then how do you know what it is?”
“I’m very intelligent.”
“Maybe it’s photoshop.”
Walter tunes them out. The argument has already played out a dozen times now. Zap always wins. He is right about the picture. He’s right about ALL of the pictures, Walter thinks, as he glances at the big brown cardboard box resting on the desk next to him. It is a simple brown parcel with UPS shipping labels. It has no return address. No way to identify the sender. There are more pictures; dozens of them. Many are from World War II and the earliest appear to come from late antiquity – which Morgan only understands as the part after Jesus but before castles.
Flipping through the box is a visceral and terrifying lesson in world history. Only the one picture shows the eldritch true face of the creature. The others are eerie for different reasons. Some are just too old to have been taken with any human camera, like the photos from the Inquisition or the old Aztec empire. Others are outright sinister in nature. One set documents human sacrifice among the Aztecs – a priest dressed as a feathered serpent tearing the still beating heart from a young girl. Another shows Heinrich Himmler himself, wine glass in hand, toasting a Nazi general field marshal who shows a wide, needle-toothed grin. Zap cannot identify the general – peculiar because all the Nazi field marshals are known and well-represented in photos. A scribbling in Van Duyn’s handwriting on the outside frame of the image reads: blood drinker?
Blood Drinker. Van had said that name behind the Black Omen. He said Blood Drinker killed Darryl Potts… Walter studies that man’s features. His receding hairline, dark as jet, those pointed teeth, his piercing grey eyes.
The notes are the true goldmine, not the pictures. In addition to the drawers of manila folders containing collected Nazi documents and the shelves of ancient books, some predating the printing press, Van Duyn kept yellow legal pads and spiral bound notebooks filled with his musings on the evidence he collected. He filled several journals as well, which Walter continues working through backwards. Those give the most coherent narrative.
The creatures Eli called Reptoids are something much more than human. They are able to comprehend existence in ways which men cannot. They are stronger and faster and they have powers that defy explanation. Their technology is more advanced. And yet their numbers are small, so they must hide in the shadows while they manipulate our civilization to their own ends.
They once existed in much greater numbers, but some unspeakable cataclysm destroyed their vast empire. Few words were given to describe it in any of the texts Walter saw. When brought to his attention, Zap said that one of the German texts made reference to the race of lizards being banished from this realm when Ultima Thule was visited by der Wanderer. There were other references to Thule as an island or a lost city belonging to the creatures, but there was no mention of a wanderer anywhere else. More curious was the use of a definite article, Zap had mused.
Most of the hard evidence concerns the war and the Nazis. A key piece is the statement of Rudolf von Sebottendorf of the Thule Society, a German occult group which funded the Nazis in their earliest days. Van Duyn had sent Alpha Team to retrieve the journal from a Turkish military installation. Inside its pages, von Sebottendorf explained exactly how a small club for believers of magic spells and witchcraft eventually came to bankroll the Third Reich – it didn’t. The
Thule Society was nothing but a ragtag collection of new age stooges before von Sebottendorf came along with big ideas and big money – both of which he had gained from a nameless stranger he met while walking the streets of Munich drunk in the dark of night. Soon after, the club established the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. The rest of the story appears in every high school history book. What those books do not include is how von Sebottendorf learned that his mysterious benefactor was not a German like him, not an Aryan either, not even human. Panicking, he attempted to sabotage the plans of the reptilians by leaking information to the Bavarian government that would lead to the executions of the Thule Society’s leadership in 1919. By then, it was already too late. The creatures had reached an understanding with Adolf Hitler, and the occultist group was no longer useful to them. Von Sebottendorf fled to Turkey, where he was regarded as a fool and a madman.
In later years, the Nazis would attempt to reverse the effects of the accident that erased the creatures from this world. Using Reptoid technology cobbled together by their best scientists, the Germans built a device intended to open a doorway into some other dimension. As Zap had explained it, they were trying to bridge the gap between three-dimensional and four-dimensional space because they theorized the missing Reptoids had somehow been trapped in a four dimensional continuum. The machine, codenamed Riftmaker, was constructed by a Dr. Friedrich Lindemann and tested at a secret facility near Lechfeld. The results were disastrous. The riftmaker opened not a simple door to the next dimension, but ripped a gaping chasm through unfathomable layers of spacetime. It took the SS a week to exterminate the horde of monstrosities that flooded in from a hundred other possible realities. Afterwards, Lindemann fled to the United States with the riftmaker, where the OSS sheltered him under the assumed name Ronald McGuffin. McGuffin was killed in Chicago a few years after the war, but all of his notes survived and were collected by Eli. The riftmaker itself was confiscated by the Duke and, Walter was surprised to learn, is still in his vault at the top of the Graveyard building. Apparently, not even the dirty lizards want the damned thing anymore.
Since the war, the Reptoids of Thule have laid low. There have been no grandiose attempts to conquer the world by force. Whatever plans they sow are subtle now and far more insidious. Some say they already have the United States, and Britain, though not even Eli had evidence of that. Others link them to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, saying that the creatures simply discarded one set of fascist toadies for another and are presently gearing up to do it all over again. Eli believed that, but had nothing to prove it. No. He had something even better – the smoking gun that finally got him killed.
They are the most recent photos in the UPS box: pictures taken, not decades, but months ago. Walter flips through them again. A crowd of children herded into a cold empty room in some vast building and hung upside down from meat hooks. A little black girl screaming as a man in a brown apron pulls her along the processing line by her hair. A brown skinned boy with his throat cut ear to ear. That same girl dead – they’re flaying her. A headless infant hanging from another chain. There are more, but Walter skips to the one he continues to dwell over. The last photo is an external shot of the building. At the bottom, in unknown handwriting, is an address.
Van Duyn sat on the photos for at least a week, uncertain where to begin dismantling the reptilian agenda. He showed no one, though he made one set of copies which were sealed and given to his lawyer with explicit instructions for what to do with them should anything happen to him. The lawyer was to personally deliver the envelope to Darryl Potts and Kill Team One. That didn’t work out so well.
The contents of this box bring up more questions than answers in many ways. Who sent the pictures to Van Duyn? How long had they been manipulating the course of human history? What destroyed their great civilization? Walter could ponder these things for days, weeks maybe, and probably end up like Van Duyn and Potts did. No. Indecision is what killed those men. Walter has no interest in that. Walter is a man of action.
“Spears,” he says, jarring the Echo leader out of his argument with Zap. “Have the rest of Echo meet us in the lobby. We’re pulling out.”
“Affirmative,” KillCrazy replies.
“Then call in to HQ. Have them saddle up the choppers and call in the teams,” Walter says as he gathers up the photos and stuffs them back in the UPS box.
“Okay. Which ones?”
“All of them.”
Walter puts on the brown duster he had draped over his chair and picks up the box. The others follow.
“We hitting the slaughterhouse?” Morgan asks on the stairs up to the library.
“We’re going to mow down every last one of those motherfuckers,” Walter smiles.
But Walter doesn’t have to mount up a dozen choppers full of professional killers and fly to the address on that photograph to find the reptoids. The monsters are already waiting for him in the giant foyer of Van Duyn Manor.
MONOLOGUES
“Hello, Mr. Stedman,” says the man in the Nazi uniform. His voice sounds like a garbage disposal. His piercing eyes focus on Walter without ever shifting to any of the others. The eyes are memorable, but it is the teeth that define him – those terrible, pointed, needle teeth.
He stands, smiling wide, blocking the huge doorway that leads out into the yard in front of the manor. Flanking his sides are two men wearing grey trench coats topped with wide rimmed fedoras. These men seem lost in time somehow, as if they took a wrong turn in the roaring twenties and found themselves a century in the future.
“Hey, that’s the guy from the picture,” Morgan says, surprised.
Spears says nothing and lights them all up with a P90. They don’t call him KillCrazy for nothing. The gun rattles off five-sevens as Spears jerks it from side to side. Morgan joins in and the two of them perforate the fuckers in seconds.
Only Blood Drinker remains. The ice cold Nazi bastard oozes blood from a dozen holes in his chest, but he seems hardly phased. He looks to his left and right, at the corpses that were his guards, and shrugs.
“Useless chaff,” Blood Drinker speaks.
KillCrazy reloads the P90 and levels it at Blood Drinker’s chest. The Nazi pulls a Luger pistol from his belt and points it back at Spears as Morgan loads his gun.
Walter dislikes the odds. The monster wouldn’t be so calm if they had a chance at killing him. He hasn’t time to shout anything before the guns begin blazing.
Spears is first to the trigger. He pumps a dozen rounds into Blood Drinker’s chest before the Nazi shoots him in the guts with the Luger. Neither of them seems to notice as they continue to blast each other full of holes. When the guns run dry, Spears has been shot in the left thigh, the hip, the chest several times and in the throat. Blood Drinker is worse off. He looks a lot like Bill Travers did when they found him. A bowling-ball-sized gap occupies his chest and blood runs from his mouth. One eye has been put out and his nose is a splintered wreck of red gore.
Blood Drinker keeps coming. He pulls a Hitler Youth knife from a sheath on his leg and rams it into Spears’ guts. KillCrazy still refuses to die and crams the muzzle of a pistol into the Nazi’s face and pulls the trigger, blasting chunks away from Blood Drinker’s skull. Blood Drinker twists the blade and Spears unloads more bullets into his head as the two of them spew blood in each other’s faces.
When it is all over, Spears is dead and Blood Drinker is a pink and red mess of tattered flesh from the shoulders up. Walter has his Sig 9 trained on the freak’s forehead, and he doesn’t even remember reaching for the gun. He knows it won’t do him any good.
“Put that away, Walter,” Blood Drinker tells him. Blood drools from his shattered mouth every time he opens it. A few broken tooth fragments fall to the floor and clatter on the tile. “You cannot hurt me, and you have nowhere to run. We have killed all of your men.”
And then Blood Drinker is not a man anymore. In a blink, he has gone from a shredded mess of a walking cadaver to a green-scaled
monster that stands four feet taller than Walter. The frame of the monster is like that of a gorilla in ways. It has relatively tiny legs to support it, but its shoulders are broad and its arms thick and muscular. A lengthy prehensile tail extends from its spine and swings behind it, hovering above the ground. His maw is a thing of terror, extending almost a full foot from his cold black reptilian eyes. Teeth like daggers interlock between his jaws.
“Fuck me,” Morgan says as the three of them look upon the massive horror. Zap remains unshaken. He stands like a statue.
“Yes. Fuck you,” Blood Drinker rumbles. “Fuck you all.”
The lizard’s hulking, taloned hand jets out and snatches the box of photos from Walter’s grip.
“It appears Mr. Van Duyn was very busy,” he says, as he rifles through the contents of the box. “Do you know we spent hours looking for these after we killed him? Then more after your people abandoned this place.”
Walter’s eyes move for the door. Blood Drinker notices.
“There is no use running,” he bellows. “My warriors have this place completely surrounded. Now, I must know, where is the girl?”
“The girl?” Walter says, playing dumb. He shows a defiant and smug smirk. “What girl?”
“Do not play games with me, insect,” Blood Drinker roars.
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Walter insists. He remains cool even as the reptile stares him down. This is a first for him, nose to nose with an outright monster, but Walter has seen his share of strange and fearsome things. After a few Nazi zombies and mystical ninjas, a giant lizard man doesn’t quite terrify like it should.
“Destruction!” Blood Drinker bellows, as he spins. His tail whips around and smacks Walter’s legs out from under him. Walter throws out his hands to catch himself on the tile floor.
“Do you know where all of this came from, Walter?” the monster asks. “Do you know where all of your civilization comes from?”
“Africa?” Walter chuckles.
“Insolence!” Blood Drinker roars back, spinning around to breathe on Walter’s face through those dagger teeth. “We built it! We gave it to you!”
