KILL KILL KILL

by Mike Leon

  The monster turns his back to them once again.

  “Long ago, this world was ours – when your kind were nothing but mindless apes! We are the dragons of lore, fools! When you were swinging in trees and flinging your shit, we roamed the Earth! When you were hiding in caves and killing each other with stone tools, we were mastering the seas with fleets of ships! When you built your first walled cities, ours were a thousand years old already! Where do you think your human tales of Atlantis, and Mu, lost Lemuria come from? Our Empire was a paradise where your kind was but livestock to feast upon. We ruled this world, insect!”

  “You must have done a real good job of it,” Walter says as he stands up and dusts himself off. “Cause now you have to hide from us like a little bitch.”

  “Silence!” Blood Drinker commands as he slaps Walter away with just a nudge of his hand. Those thick gorilla arms are like wrecking balls. Walter stumbles backwards into Morgan and the operator props him up.

  “You have not the slightest inkling what terrible ruinous powers brought low our race, for it was the will of gods to us and we are gods to you. And yet, even the will of gods could not crush us completely. We remained in ancient Thule, our last secret city, where we would lay the plans to rebuild our great empire. From there we enslaved your ancestors with our divine right of kings. Kings! HA! They were nothing but pawns in our game and still they control you.”

  “I think you need to crack a history book there, chief,” Walter says. “There hasn’t been a king in charge of shit since George Washington beat the…” he trails off and his defiant smile turns to a look of concern.

  Blood Drinker cackles like no human can without the aid of some electronic device. His laugh is like that of a chorus line – many voices laughing together rather than just one.

  “Yes. Now you understand,” he says, calmly, for the first time since they met here and maybe ever. “The people you work for, Walter. We gave them what they have. Do you know what it is? Did they share that secret with you, or are you just their faithful dog?”

  The silence answers the question for him.

  “Of course. They told you nothing,” he says and he laughs that inhuman laugh again. “HA HA HA HA HA HA! I will tell you, dog. Alchemy. We gave them the secret of alchemy. The Rothschilds, the Russells, the Krupps – the others too, they did not always carry those names, but they have always carried the secret of their line.”

  “What the fuck is he talking about?” Morgan asks.

  “Just nevermind it,” Walter says. That makes Blood Drinker laugh more.

  “Yes. You understand now. They hold the power to turn filth into gold and with it they hold your entire race by the balls! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

  Blood Drinker’s cackling could shake loose a landslide, but Walter can’t hear it. He’s too involved in his own thoughts. The monster makes too much sense to be lying. It explains so many of the questions he has asked over the decades. If the group can make gold, then they can choose to collapse or inflate the whole world’s economy as they see fit. Their own wealth is infinite, which is why they always stay in power. As long as they tell no one how they do it, then they will remain at the top of the pyramid forever, dictating to presidents and prime ministers and CEOs any way they wish. It is the ultimate example of monetary force majeur. Do as we say or we buy you to death.

  Of course, the lizards would be doing the same. Unless…

  “You forgot how to do it, didn’t you?” Walter’s smirk returns.

  “We did not forget,” Blood Drinker responds snidely, as if forgetting is somehow beneath him. “After the fall of Thule, many ancient technologies were lost.”

  “So you forgot?” Walter goads him.

  “We do NOT FORGET! We do not share your feeble human mental capacity. Even now our technologies are far more advanced than your greatest developments! Our weapons make your most powerful warhead appear like a child’s firecracker! You have already seen that your primitive guns cannot harm us!”

  “I don’t know,” Walter says, motioning over his shoulder to the dead lackeys Blood Drinker brought with him. “They didn’t get back up. That means whatever fancy toys you fuckers got, there ain’t enough to go around.”

  “I tire of this. Lord Sobek demands the girl. Now where is she?”

  “Lord Sobek?” Morgan whispers, confused. Walter shakes his head and shrugs.

  “Hail Lord Sobek! Rightful Emperor of Earth and King of the Reptoids of Thule.”

  Then the Ghoul crashes through the front door with all the grace of a drunk being thrown into the street from a rowdy pub. He towers over the reptilian corpses on the floor, brandishing a chainsaw that looks big enough to saw down a great redwood. His head rotates left and right to make a scan of the room’s occupants.

  “Fresh meat!” he roars, not shocking anyone but Blood Drinker. He pulls the ripcord on the chainsaw and it rumbles to a start.

  Blood Drinker suddenly has two short swords in his hands, each one a bastard sword by human standards, though where they came from is a complete mystery.

  “Took you long enough,” Walter complains as he leaps away from Blood Drinker and the armored giant stomps toward the monstrous reptile.

  They meet like charging rams in the middle of the foyer. Blood Drinker’s swords stick in the heavy bombproof plating that covers Ghoul’s shoulders on either side of his head. The Ghoul rams the chainsaw through Blood Drinker’s guts and the spinning saw blade buzzes out through the reptile’s spine.

  Blood Drinker lets go of the swords and grabs ahold of the Ghoul’s mask as he screams and claws at it.

  “Die human! Die!” he shouts.

  “MEAT!!! MEAT!!!!” the Ghoul shouts back into the monster’s teeth.

  Blood Drinker pulls the monster’s Kevlar and latex skull mask free to expose the ruined mass of hamburger flesh underneath. The Ghoul has no hair and his face is mostly melted. His teeth are broken and rotting. Lacerations crosshatch every inch of flesh – the leavings of a thousand knife wounds, explosive detonations, napalm burnings. Walter is reminded why they make him wear the mask.

  The Ghoul is giant for a man, but he is still dwarfed by Blood Drinker. The lizard stoops down and chomps on the Ghoul’s skull, his huge jaws just barely big enough to close around the entire thing. The Ghoul screams and the chainsaw roars as it saws through more of Blood Drinker’s guts.

  When they separate, the Ghoul is bleeding from the giant bite marks that perforate his head like a crown and Blood Drinker’s intestines are pouring out through the gaping hole in his side, the chainsaw still hanging from his belly.

  “Pitiful humans! When will you learn your weapons cannot harm me?” Blood Drinker says, as he pulls the chainsaw free and snaps it in two, discarding the pieces on the tile. In seconds, his spilled guts are sucked up into his body again and the leaking mess rent by the saw has already knit itself to make him whole again.

  The rest of Kill Team Two enters through the doors. Deadeye shoots the huge lizard repeatedly with a rifle, but each wound seems to close up before the next one is opened.

  Blood Drinker appears only mildly annoyed by the appearance of the kill team. He turns to look at Walter one last time. Then there is a flash of fire and the demon is gone, leaving nothing but an acrid puff of smoke and the smell of brimstone.

  “What the fuck?” Morgan says, after a moment of quiet from all of them.

  “That was too easy,” Deadeye says.

  “I don’t think you killed it,” Walter tells him. “What about the others?”

  “We killed six more hiding in the woods outside,” Deadeye says. “They don’t show up on thermals, I guess cause they’re cold, but Tracker found ’em pretty easy with that nose of his.”

  “Echo team?”

  Deadeye shakes his head grimly.

  Walter picks up the Ghoul’s mask from the spot where Blood Drinker vanished and hands it to the beast. It is hard to approach him without being smacked in the head by the swords still jutting
from his shoulders. Blood runs from where the blades pierce the Kevlar.

  “Looks like we’re gonna need to patch you up again, big guy,” Walter says.

  “Meat?”

  “Yeah. Zap will feed you whatever you want when we get back. You did good.”

  “These are very interesting,” Zap says, already across the room crouching over the dead trench coat men.

  “Uh. What the fuck?” Morgan says again.

  Walter goes over to inspect the cadavers at Zap’s feet. Both are riddled with bullets, but there is something else as well. Where they once appeared human, now their flesh has begun to slough off, peeling in patches to reveal scaly green skin underneath.

  “The human skin sheds from the dead ones. This must be why they take their dead with them,” Zap says.

  Zap reaches down to peel away the human face from the reptilian to the left of the door. What Walter sees underneath is much more humanoid in appearance than the giant thing that Blood Drinker shifted into.

  “The varied size and appearance of the creatures may suggest multiple subspecies. It could explain why our guns killed these two, but not the larger one.”

  “You mean there are different breeds, like dogs, and some of them are immune to bullets?”

  “Maybe. It could be a technological implementation as well. I want to cut these things up and see what’s inside.”

  “Good idea,” Walter answers, turning back to Morgan. “Morgan, pick up these bodies and haul them back to the truck.”

  “What the fuck?” the operator responds. His gaze is glassy and unfocused. Walter recognizes shellshock all too well. Morgan doesn’t come from a kill team like Zap or Ghoul. The regular operators rarely see anything that would be classed as strange or supernatural. Morgan never has.

  He snaps his fingers at the end of Morgan’s nose.

  “We don’t have time for this, soldier,” he says, gruffly. “We’re dealing with some nightmare science fiction bullshit. It happens now and then. You’re not in the minor leagues anymore. Now pull your shit together.”

  Morgan does as he says and he and Zap haul one of the cadavers outside, each of them grabbing one end. The Ghoul picks up the other and slings it over his shoulder like a rag doll.

  Walter makes sure to collect the photos, which scattered on the floor when Blood Drinker drew his swords. Then he follows the rest of them out. There is little time.

  KILLDOZER

  “You cannot drive a killdozer into an international airport and steal a 747,” Shelly says, for the third time.

  “Why not?” Sid asks, again. For a vicious, man-eating super soldier he has an annoying naiveté. The conversation has been circling back to this for hours, if it can be called a conversation at all. Kill Team One’s progeny has all the social skills of a technical support touch tone menu.

  “Because it’s suicide. Kabul Airport is swarming with military. NATO is all over the place. The AAF has a base there. They’ll shoot you to pieces before you make it to the fence. Do you even know how to fly a plane?”

  “Victor does.”

  Shelly sits on the hood of the killdozer, a sixty ton Caterpillar bulldozer modified with concrete and steel plates, parked in the large cave entrance. The vehicle was stolen by the Hansen brothers from a construction site and altered with scrap metal stolen from a dozen other sites they raided while hiding in the cave system.

  She knocks on the makeshift composite armor and it feels like rock rather than steel. They did a good job building this thing. Nothing short of an artillery shell could possibly get through it. In a civilian environment, a machine like this would be unstoppable, and indeed has been before, once in Colorado and twice back in Israel. The IDF actually used armored bulldozers to raze buildings in hostile territory, albeit theirs were not as crude as this. Shelly drove one through a section of housing in the West Bank once. The problem here is that Kabul Airport is not a civilian environment. There would be no shortage of artillery there to smash this dozer, and that is the part Sid refuses to understand.

  “We surveyed the site three times,” he argues. “One of us can take out all of the anti-armor with a rifle.”

  “There’s no way you can do that! And it isn’t necessary besides! I have passports for both of you!”

  “I don’t understand this passport. What kind of weapon is that?”

  “It’s a piece of paper that says you can leave the country. We’ve been over this already.”

  “A piece of paper that makes the sentries let me pass.”

  “Yes.”

  He eyes her suspiciously. Then he turns his gaze to the cave wall, then back again, now with a harsher look.

  “I don’t believe you,” he concludes.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Shelly sighs.

  “If there were papers like that, we would use them to go past men’s guards and assassinate them in their sleep.”

  “There aren’t papers like that.”

  “Exactly.”

  Sid lurches from his seat on the cave floor, suddenly alert.

  “What?” Shelly asks. Drawing the bulky desert eagle she kept in her pants since Victor tried to rape her.

  “Someone’s coming,” Sid whispers. He listens for a bit longer. “It’s Victor.”

  “How do you know that?” she says without thinking. He answers but she doesn’t hear him as she loses herself in nagging fear. Victor might be worse than anything else that might find them…

  Before she has any more time to think, Victor Hansen’s tall dark frame is silhouetted in the cave entrance against the light from outside. He is just a black figure fifty feet away.

  “We have to get out of here,” he says.

  Next to Shelly, Sid lowers a pistol and barks back to his brother.

  “Why?”

  “Because Kill Team Three knows where we are and Ashley is a fucking robot.”

  “A robot?” Shelly asks.

  “You heard me. A bullet-proof robot with super strength. I hit him with that giant boomerang and it just slowed him down.”

  “Abo?”

  “Dead, and I fucked up that faggot werewolf with a knife, but the robot is still coming.”

  “You have C4 and MGLs back in the cave,” Shelly gets out before he cuts her off.

  “I don’t think you get it, cunt. We need a MOAB to kill this thing. We don’t have a MOAB. It’s time to leave.”

  “I won’t argue with that. I have papers for both of you.”

  “You know about these passport things?” Sid asks his brother.

  “You have passports?” Victor exclaims, angrily. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  Shelly decides it best not to comment.

  “Can we leave now?” she says.

  SLAUGHTERHOUSE

  They hit the ground and they’re a swarm of black. Operators in Level V body armor rush to the front door. Operators fast rope onto the roof and begin cutting through it with thermate. Operators smash smoke grenades through windows.

  Walter is with Kill Team Two, behind the ten-man Delta Team, moving in through the building’s back dock. He is armed with his Sig 9 and a radio. They pass through one of three tall green aluminium overhead doors and into the dirty cement dock area.

  On his way down here he thought they were too late. The building looked deserted, empty – cleared out like every other place these things were sighted. He thought they would find nothing. These damned lizards are more elusive than Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster. They must have emptied out the building, spraying bleach on DNA evidence and hauling kidnapped children away to some other location, or maybe they weren’t here at all. Maybe those pictures were taken years ago and the monsters had long moved on to another butcher shop.

  Someone shouts “Contact!” over the radio and all of those worries subside. The sound of heavy machine gun fire buries them deeper. There are monsters here.

  They are greeted by gunfire there in the room seconds later. The muzzle of a gun flashes at them from a doorway.
Delta and Kill Team Two spread out for cover. Walter leaps behind a stack of cardboard boxes piled taller than him on a wooden skid. Delta returns fire, but it is the Arsonist with his flamethrower who decimates any hope the defenders had of mounting a resistance. The stream of napalm death fills that doorway as he approaches with Deadeye and men from Delta. They pound the door with full auto fire until the Arsonist lets up, then they toss a concussion grenade through the doorway. Walter covers his ears as the grenade takes a good section of the brick around the doorframe with it and the Ghoul charges in to chop at anything on the other side that might have survived. Nothing has.

  They all converge on the doorway, and some of them poke their heads around to see, but no one sets foot on the other side but the Ghoul. Walter has a look and sees the body of a half lizard horror on the damp cement of the darkened corridor beyond the dock. The corridor extends both ways and they have no idea what lies at the end in either direction. There wasn’t time to get blueprints before this strike.

  “Scaly,” Vixen says as she leans around the corner and spots the lizard body.

  This is a conundrum. They could be walking into a cross fire, and even if not, he will need to split his forces to go both directions. Instead, he will leave a few men here to hold the doorway.

  Walter is about to designate someone to that task when Zero team comes up the hall from the left to meet them at the doorway. The eight of them could not have arrived at a better time. Carl Jourgensen, the zero commander, is up front, though he is not immediately recognizable under the ridiculous mass of body armor and bulky ballistic helmet he chose to wear today. It is uncharacteristic for any of them to wear that much gear.

  “Glad to see you sorry bastards,” Walter says. “That you under there, Carl?”

  A few of the Zero operators chuckle. One of them, Matt Hanneman, a sandy-haired man with half a week’s beard explains.

  “The Lieutenant’s old lady popped out a kid yesterday,” he says. “She’s got him wrapped up like Kenny McCormick.”