by Mike Leon
The Zero commander pulls down the black knit mask over his mouth to curse at the other man. This sentiment Walter has seen from every angle over the years. When Lucy was a baby, nothing terrified him more than the thought of not making it home. Those feelings were long behind him. Now he looks down from the top, and he already knows the end of the story just from the look in Jourgensen’s eyes. The Zero commander will finish out his contract and move home, probably open up a business – a pawn shop or a gun store or maybe one of those little boutique shops where men play with tiny painted plastic soldiers. Those are the things soldiers do when they can’t be soldiers anymore.
“Fuck you, Hanneman,” Carl says to his man, and turns to Walter to speak before his words are drowned out by the loud reverberation of gunfire somewhere else in the building. He leans in closer and starts again as the shooting continues. “We killed four back that way. That hall leads to the rear exit we breached, and a little side office the size of a closet. It’s clear.”
“Good. We’ll take both teams that way,” Walter says, pointing down the corridor to his right. Jourgensen nods. Apparently the hostiles Zero encountered did not change shape, he thinks if they had then the team would seem more unsettled.
“Let’s rock,” Jourgensen says as he pulls his mask back up to cover his mouth.
The Ghoul leads the way. With the Arsonist behind him, the monster is like a moving wall of fire-breathing death. They do run into a terrified looking man, who exits a small door into the corridor in front of them. The Arsonist burns him and he skitters up a wall to crawl on the ceiling before falling to the floor and dying on his back at the Ghoul’s feet. Zero clears the little room he came from. Other than that, the trip down the dank corridor is uneventful.
The hall leads into the storage area. The storage room must take up the majority of the building. The ceilings are twenty feet high, and thirty rows of steel shelving reaching almost that height are arranged in aisles just wide enough to fit a forklift. Simple bulbs provide the dim lighting. Here is where the terror begins. They don’t make it ten feet before they pass a shelf of pickled baby hands in jars. Some of the Delta operators argue that they might be from monkeys, but then Hanneman points out a severed head floating in another jar. It didn’t come from a monkey.
The fire teams were briefed on this. Walter explained they would be encountering some very unusual things here, and he specifically stressed that the enemies used this facility to butcher human children, but he was deliberately vague about the nature of the hostiles to anyone outside of Kill Team Two. He didn’t want most of his force to think he was losing his marbles. He was certain to make sure they were adequately equipped, and that was the important part. When a few team commanders questioned why they were hauling .700 Nitro Express double rifles and AT4 launchers on a warehouse raid, Walter told them it was in case they ran into Godzilla. He made sure to say it in a way that rode the line between joking and serious. That would keep them on their toes.
The Arsonist’s flamethrower alerts Walter to more enemies as the masked firebug torches them through a section of shelving. The real beauty of such a weapon is that cover and obstacles do not impede its destructive gush of flame. It was designed to take advantage of that simple fact: Everything burns. Everything.
Of course that can be a problem when precision is required, as evidenced by the flailing and screaming dead firing subguns at enemies they can’t see because their eyes are melting – that and the flaming shelves in front of them. A zero operator douses the flames with a fire extinguisher, and two Delta guys run around the corner to the other side of the shelves to finish off the wailing corpses with good old fashioned bullets.
“I think we caught ’em with their pants down,” Deadeye says.
“My specialty,” Vixen says, raising an eyebrow of smug seduction.
Then something happens that wipes that smug look from her face.
Ahead of them, nearly on the other side of the hulking warehouse, a steel shelf topples. It seems at first to be tipping into the aisle on its own, but then Walter realizes that is his own sense of rational denial blinding him to the truth – truth so strange that he has to force his eyes to see it for what it is, even when it is right in front of him. A giant monster is pushing the shelf over.
Walter had been joking about Godzilla in the briefings, but this makes him regret those comments. The thing at the other end of the warehouse is truly gargantuan. The monster’s head nearly reaches the top shelf. Blood Drinker had been small by comparison. This one is pale brown in color and appears very dry, where Blood Drinker had been bright green with a shimmer of wetness.
The monster comes around the corner into the center of the aisle and faces them all down. It towers so high that he can see it plainly over the Ghoul’s shoulder without even stretching.
“Bring it down!” he shouts. He gives the command and is instantly answered by a chorus of heavy guns that drowns out all but the sound of his own thoughts. The giant monster takes it all in the chest and face. Five-five-sixers burn through it and leave little pinholes, but the bigger rounds, the .700 express rounds from the double rifle, those bore tunnels through the thing the width of a fist. Chunks of crimson pulp fall to the floor accompanied by pouring blood that looks like a red waterfall coming from so high.
Still, it keeps coming.
For a few seconds Walter worries that the big ones are simply invincible. He should have known after he saw Blood Drinker shrug off all that damage the Ghoul did with the chainsaw. Those double rifles were designed to stop charging elephants for fuck’s sake. What else can they do? Drop daisy cutters on the damn things?
Then he feels the shockwave of the AT4 next to him and the monster’s jaw comes off its hinges. Most of its throat is blasted out the back of its head as well. After that it takes a nose dive into the concrete and lands with an outstretched claw at the Ghoul’s feet.
Quiet.
“Fuckin’ hell,” he hears a Zero team operator whisper. He doesn’t know which one.
Walter looks at the monster carcass, which is nearly as tall as him even on its belly. It still twitches a bit. He looks back at Deadeye as the sniper tosses aside the smoking AT4 launcher. He thinks it best not to take any chances.
“Wreck it,” he commands.
The Arsonist is all too happy to comply.
“Roast lizard, coming right up,” the firebug says as he sets fire to the monster. Then they leave the fucking thing to burn as they move deeper into the building.
They meet November in the middle of a room filled with dead children swinging on meat hooks. The floor is wet with blood and someone left a black hose running, its brass nozzle on the floor near Walter’s feet, continuing to wash red water down a drain at the center of the room.
“Jesus Christ,” Jourgensen says, stretching out his hand to turn the face of a young boy, throat cut and skin white like copy paper, his blood drained and mostly on the floor. Walter can’t see the Zero leader’s skin through all that flak, but he guesses it is nearly the same shade.
November leader, Lieutenant Ratzinger, lowers his M4 carbine as he steps onto the killing floor from the opposite door. His team watches their rear as he takes off his helmet and runs a hand through his shaggy brown hair. Walter comes over to greet him in the middle of the ocean of blood.
“We killed ten… things back there,” Ratzinger says, nearly hyperventilating. It’s odd that men can live through a hundred firefights and still be shaken by some things.
“Should see what we got in the stock room, mate,” the Arsonist says, sticking out his tongue like Gene Simmons. Apparently other men live through a hundred firefights and laugh it up in a room full of dead babies. “We’re ’aving a barbecue!”
Walter hates that man. He hates him so much.
“There’s a fucking killing line,” Ratzinger says. “They unload them back there and hang them and just keep sliding them down to this room.”
Ratzinger closes his eyes. He looks lik
e he might puke.
“Is everything clear?” Walter asks him. This is all he needs to know.
The November leader nods. Then he props his hands on his knees and throws up.
Walter calls out on his radio. “Are we clear?”
He hears six different men answer back to him. Then a call comes through from one of them.
“Commander, this is Morgan. Oskar’s got something you should see over here,” he hears.
“Copy,” Walter responds. He finds it unlikely they could possibly show him anything that surprises him at this point.
He asks some more questions to pinpoint where Oskar team is holed up exactly, but they’re having a tough time giving him directions over the radio. Ratzinger stops throwing up just long enough to point back through the door he came from and tell Walter to hang left at the end of the hall. He must have seen what they’re talking about.
Walter walks off down the hallway with Kill Team Two behind him. When they find Oskar, they are fully on the other side of the building from where they first entered. On this side there is another dock, much like the one they infiltrated, but this one is filled with aluminum shipping containers.
Morgan is waiting next to them with the Oskar leader, whose name Walter can’t remember for anything. Thompson? Jackson? Fuck it. He’s getting too old for this.
“I heard it just keeps getting worse the farther in you go,” Morgan says, motioning whence Walter came.
“Yeah. It does,” Walter tells him. “What you got for me up here?”
Morgan grabs a handle on the end of the nearest container and swings the door open. An orchestra of crying and sniffling fills the air. The container is full of live children.
“What are we gonna do with these?” Morgan asks.
Walter scans the sea of tiny faces staring back at him from the darkness of the container. There must be fifty of them crammed inside. If all these containers are full, then there must be a couple hundred kids here. This could quickly spiral into a serious mess. These children need food, and medical attention, and someone to hold their hands and tell them everything will be okay. He has no one here to do these things. Graveyard is not a daycare.
Normally, they would wait until evac and then call the local police. The kids would end up with child protective services. Problem solved. Unfortunately, they need to take apart every inch of this building, and that means days, maybe weeks with the size of this place. He considers the possibilities.
They will need to bring in some trucks and haul the kids somewhere else. Then they can call the police to that location. He will need his people to drive the trucks. The last thing they need is nosey truckers in the equation fucking things up. So they just need trucks… This is a big hassle.
His radio crackles to life with an even bigger one.
“Uh, Command, we have a problem coming in from the southwest.” The voice belongs to one of the chopper pilots hovering above the building and carries the dry boredom Walter believes must be a prerequisite for completing flight school.
“What is it?” he calls back.
“Uh, we got three Apache attack copters coming in low about, uh, two miles out.”
This is very bad news.
“Americans?” Deadeye asks.
“Has to be,” Walter answers. “Nobody else flies choppers like that in US airspace.”
He walks to the nearest open garage door and peeks out at the southwest sky. He can see the choppers coming like big black flies in the distance. This warehouse is in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. The nearest military installation is one hundred miles out. This is no field exercise and those aren’t transport choppers. Walter can do the math. Somebody sent them here to kill Graveyard.
“What do we have that can take those choppers out?”
“We’re gonna fire on Americans?”
“Just answer the question, Deadeye.”
The sniper winces like he might sneeze. That’s the face he makes when he’s thinking. It doesn’t happen that often. They pay him to shoot things, not think about them.
“Delta has a stinger, and I could nail a pilot with that fifty cal,” he says, pointing to a rifle held by one of the Oskar team operators. “We got a bunch of those AT4 launchers if they get close enough.”
Bad. Bad. Bad. All bad news. A stinger can take out one of those choppers. The fifty cal is a long shot, both literally and figuratively. The AT4 launchers are just shit. The choppers would have to get stupidly close for those to do anything, and even then, those are unguided surface-to-surface missiles designed to kill slow-moving tanks at close range – not attack copters buzzing by at fifty or a hundred knots.
Equipped with 30mm chain guns, Hellfire and Hydra missiles, Apache helicopters are amongst the baddest motherfuckers in the sky. Those three choppers probably have one hundred fifty of those missiles between them – missiles that will punch through this shitty aluminum building and turn men into paste. They carry cutting-edge targeting acquisitions systems that can engage multiple armored targets from nearly a mile away with infrared and thermal vision. They can see through the fucking walls. He can’t run. He can’t hide. All that’s left to do is shoot first and pray.
He radios Delta to ready that stinger, and Deadeye positions himself with that fifty cal in the doorway.
“I got the one in the middle,” the sniper says, as he turns the knob on the rifle’s enormous scope to adjust for the range. The rest of them take cover behind the least flimsy obstacles they can find and prepare to shoot back with carbines and tank-killers should the opportunity present itself.
“Target lock,” he hears on the radio. Delta has a bead on a copter.
Walter considers one last time that this might only be a fluke. Maybe the choppers just happened to be flying over for some completely unrelated training run...
No. No way.
He raises the radio to his mouth. The apaches are closer now. He can hear the blades pounding like war drums.
“Engage.”
This is going to suck.
THE DRYING POLE
Yoshida Tanaka waits in the rock garden, perched on a stone pillar with his eyes closed in meditation. Soon, the fight will begin. The lesser ninja have arrived slowly in the last hour, finding places within the garden to observe the coming melee. It is not common that the leadership of the clan comes into question – a question answered by a duel to the death.
Tanaka wears a simple black karate gi and has his hair pulled back into a single tail that dangles down his back. His sword rests on his left hip, to be drawn by his right hand as fast as the killing thought that requires it.
His uncle is already a few minutes late. Yoshida could be insulted, but he remains calm. Tardiness could be a ploy. Such tactics are not unheard of. The great swordsman Myamoto Musashi famously defeated Sasaki Kojiro at Funajima Island using such trickery. The legendary duelist stalled for hours, arriving late in the day, soiled and smelly. He did not even think to bring a sword, and instead carved a wooden one from a boat’s oar as he crossed the Kanmon Straits to the island. Kojiro, enraged by these many disrespects, charged Musashi, who had the sun at his back and easily killed the man with his wooden sword, before leaping back in his boat to let the changing tide carry him away from Kojiro’s angry supporters. It is a story well known to swordsmen, and Yoshida will not play into the same trap.
Instead, he sits with his legs folded and his hands resting on his knees. Calm. Silent. Serene. It is said that, in a state of pure meditation, the greatest masters of the shadow arts were able to feel the presence of every pebble in the garden. Yoshida tries, but he cannot. Even now, the anger burns deep within him. His meditation is impure. At best he can feel the wind whispering over the garden wall – a thing anyone might hear if they listened. Tetsuo’s chosen ground is a strange place for a duel, he thinks. It is odd to even set foot in the rock garden when not tending to it. Zen gardens are meant to be overlooked from a tower or even higher landscape, not to stroll in.
Tetsuo arrives flanked by his two retainers, Kazuya Murakama and Shuya Domoto. Formidable ninjas in their own right, Murakama is known for his skill with an unusual chain weapon called a kusari, and Domoto is said to be the greatest living master of the sai. Yoshida does not turn to acknowledge his entry into the garden, but he can feel the disturbance of energies in the room. Nearby ninjas bow to his uncle upon his entrance, but all remain silent. Ninjas are not easily excited into rabble. Most speak only when necessary.
He remains silent and facing away. His uncle’s retainers remain at the garden door as Tetsuo approaches him. He still does not turn.
“Yoshida,” he hears Tetsuo’s voice behind him. “Do not do this.”
He does not respond. He maintains his elevated focus.
“Yoshida,” Tetsuo says again. “Look at me.”
He opens his eyes, but he does not turn for the simple sake of non-compliance. From his spot on top of the pillar he can see over the stone wall around the garden and out into the lush green fields on the other side. The setting sun lowers. When he turns, it will be behind him.
He turns.
His uncle is clean shaven and dressed in the finest red silks – a fitting colour to disguise the blood on his hands. His sword is also strapped at his left hip, Yoshida notices. He kneels on the ground before Yoshida, like a servant, and he begs.
“Please. I beg of you one last time. Do not insist upon this bloodshed. Please believe that I harbored no murderous intent toward your father. Call an end to this duel.”
It is a heartfelt sounding plea, and yet it is a deception. The way of the ninja is the way of misdirection. If Tetsuo convinces him to put his weapon down, then he can cut his throat at any future moment he pleases. Yoshida Tanaka will tolerate this treacherous dog no longer. He draws his sword and points it at Tetsuo.
“Stand up, uncle,” he says. “You are not that committed to a peaceful resolution, or you would not have brought your sword. Now stand and fight me, traitor.”
