by Mike Leon
Then it truly begins. She comes at him with a flurry of palm strikes that he deflects with his hands. He grasps her left arm in a wing chun hand trap, but she reverses that and he transitions to a second stage trap – a technique that most modern martial arts experts agree only happens in the movies. She reverses that and Sid moves to yet a third stage trap, which she escapes by running up the wall behind her and back-flipping over him. This girl knows her shit.
She kicks him in the face before he can react at all. She’s very fast, but her kick feels like a slap in the face with a rolled up newspaper compared to the way Victor and his father hit. She comes at him with more of those – a snap, a hook, another hook, and then a round kick. He traps her foot on the last of those and sweeps her up off her feet, swinging her against the wall like a sack of potatoes. She takes the wall in the face twice before she twirls out of his hands and leaps away to the bed. She picks up her bra with her foot and pulls the steel underwire from the fabric. Its sharpened edge faces him as he pulls the hidden butcher knife from his cargo pants. It is a mistake if she thinks she can beat him in a knife fight.
Or maybe not. The bitch is good. She slashes at him with the underwire and he deflects that, but then she surprises him with the second underwire. He catches her wrist as that one comes down at him. She executes a riposte with the wire against his knife and moves to stab his other hand. He is forced to let go of her hand and she catches his knife between both of her blades and breaks it. He is left with a jagged stump of a kitchen knife. Oh well. It was no KA-BAR to start with.
She comes at him again and slices a gash in his shirt. Then he catches a foot in his face again. He tastes blood this time. That is when he makes up his mind to wreck this stupid girl. He drops his broken knife and advances on her with his bare hands. She stabs at him with both blades, but he catches her by the wrists and picks her up off her feet. She kicks at him wildly in the shins, the abs, the balls. He ignores it. No more of this Kung Fu bullshit. He simply overpowers her. He presses her against the wall so she cannot move. He clamps his hands down on her wrists like metal vices. She groans as the bones begin to fracture. He can’t have her screaming, so he uses the only weapon he has left and moves to bite her throat.
“No! Please don’t!” she squeaks. “Don’t kill me!”
He sinks his teeth in. He tastes blood as he breaks flesh. She tries to scream, but his jaws are already crushing her trachea. All she can do is hiss and spew up more blood. Sid turns and spits a heaping mouthful of gore onto the carpet as he flings her onto the bed.
She lands face down. One wrist is bent at a sharp angle that surprises Sid. The other is merely slightly fractured. A pool of crimson death pours out onto the covers from her torn and broken throat. Her body twitches and her broken hands clumsily feel for her jugular – as if she could somehow patch the hole through which all of her precious life is spilling. Her eyes search frantically for a miracle that is not there as she realizes she has only seconds left until it all ends. Sid has seen it all before, and it doesn’t interest him. He’s drawn to something else.
He’s looking at her ass. That perfect, tight, round ass seems to fill his view as she’s bent over the bed in front of him. He sees her silky shaved vulva, and even though she’s dying – no – dead, he still wants to fuck it. He wants to fuck her. He needs to fuck her. He can’t stop himself. He can’t take any more of this. It’s long past time to whip out the throbbing hard boner he’s had all night and jab it in this wet cunt. Even if she’s dead, she’s only been dead for a minute, he rationalizes. It’ll be like she’s still alive – as long as he’s quick about it. He has to do it. His heart is pounding harder than it was when they were fighting. He begins to undo his belt buckle as she grows completely still.
Then Grenadine’s body finally ceases all function. Her bowels loosen and a thick brown clump of slimy stool runs from her anus, across her female parts, and onto the bed. Sid cringes as the sight returns him to his senses. He can’t believe what he was thinking. The smell is awful.
He sits down on the floor. Then he falls on his back and lies there, looking up at the light fixture on the ceiling. It burns his eyes like staring into the sun, but he doesn’t care. Who was this girl? Why did she try to kill him? He didn’t want to kill her. She was nice to him for a while. She was pretty. What the fuck? Why does that matter?
He lies there for a long time – so long that the disgusting smell of her waste fades from his senses. He nods off for just a blink. He almost can’t force himself to his feet again, but he does.
He wraps Grenadine’s battered, bloody, shitty corpse in the sheets from the bed and stuffs it in an air conditioning vent at shin level next to the dresser. It will be at least a day before they find it.
He searches the room and tears apart her luggage. Inside a bulky leather suitcase, he finds a hidden compartment with a dozen small pistols and knives, as well as some shape charges and blasting caps. He takes the suitcase back to his room with him.
Inside, he finds Shelly still sleeping soundly in bed. He took a small .380 automatic from Grenadine’s suitcase, and he clutches it in his hand as he lies down on the floor. The gun makes him feel a little better, but he has never been so confused.
A LIST OF NAMES
“It’s really quite incredible,” Zap says.
“Can you tell me again? Maybe in regular English please?” Walter grumbles, squinting because the light over the operating table hurts his eyes. The morgue in the Graveyard basement smells bad and is brightly lit, and he is hungover. None of these conditions complement each other very well. They are alone, except for a third man Walter has not met before. The dead reptoid is spread open on the slab in front of them. Colored guts spill from its open chest cavity between folds of green scales. Talons hang over the edge of the slab, but the thing is surprisingly human looking right now.
“That’s how they transform so quickly. They never really transform at all.”
“So their human form is like a hallucination.”
“No. It’s more complicated than that. What you see is there, but something else is also there too.”
“Like a hallucination.”
“No. A hallucination is something you imagine. This is a real object you simply cannot perceive. It’s like a tesseract.”
“What’s a tesseract?”
“It’s a convex regular polychoron,” says the man standing over the slab next to Zap, the man Walter does not know. He is short with dark brown hair which is full and combed and parted along the left side of his head. He wears thin wire-rim glasses and has a short beard that is trimmed neatly. The rest of him is covered in a white lab coat. He looks to be thirty or so.
“What the fuck did he just say?” Walter asks.
“Four dimensional analogues to three dimensional polyhedrons. It is to a polyhedron what a polyhedron is to a polygon.”
“Who is this guy?” Walter asks Zap.
“This is Tom from R and D. Tom is very technical,” Zap answers.
“Yeah. No shit. Do you understand what he’s saying?”
“A little. Think about it this way. A cube has six sides. All of them are squares. If you can only see one of them, then the cube looks like a square. You don’t know it’s a cube until you turn it around and see that it has more sides.”
“Okay… I follow.”
“Well, a tesseract is a cube until you turn it around and then it’s something else.”
“What is it?”
“Something we can’t fully comprehend. The reptoids can, because they’re four-dimensional creatures.”
“Doubtful,” Tom interrupts. “Theoretically, a true four dimensional entity must exist as a space-time worm with awareness of all its temporal parts. It is extremely unlikely that such an entity would have any need or means to interact with creatures in three dimensional space.”
“Theoretically…” Zap says.
“The alternative is extremely unlikely,” Tom says. “How often do you
converse with infinitesimal points?”
“Every time I see my first wife,” Walter says.
Zap and Technical Tom both stop at his joke. As if not certain what he meant. They each disregard him after a few seconds and continue their discussion. Tough crowd.
“Then what else could they be?” Zap asks.
“I posit they are three-dimensional creatures that developed some very primitive comprehension of four-dimensional space-time.” Technical Tom’s answer is a bit more than Walter cared to deal with right now.
“I never thought I would miss killing people,” Walter says. “Remember people? Walk on two legs, shoot guns at you when they’re mad, don’t turn into twenty foot lizard monsters? Remember those?”
“These things aren’t that much different from us,” Zap insists.
“They spin around and they’re monsters on the other side. That’s different enough.”
“The next cell is a monster,” Tom interjects.
“Whatever, man.”
“But they’re not nearly as complex as we first suspected,” Zap says. “They eat, sleep, and breathe the same air we do. They bleed red blood and their internal organs are just as fragile.”
“Except for the one that took two mags from a subgun and a chainsaw through the guts like it was a brisk morning warm up.”
“Yes. That. We’re confident that type of ability is somewhat rare,” Zap says. “Perhaps the effect of some technology. All of the other creatures were killed with standard munitions.”
“Rocket launchers, elephant guns, flame throwers – all the normal stuff you use every day.”
“Of the seventeen specimens we examined, fourteen were killed with small arms fire and two died from severe burns,” Tom says. “Only one required more drastic means of termination.”
“Damn right. We hit it with a tank killer. Tell me about that one. Why was it bigger than the others?”
“There is actually more than just a size variation,” Tom says. “We’ve classified at least three distinct subtypes amongst the reptilian creatures. There are some that take on a vaguely theropod appearance, not unlike a velociraptor, but with elongated arms.”
“Blood Drinker.”
“Yes. Others are distinctly more humanoid. They lack the snout typical of dinosaurians, and particularly in the lower leg structures, where the tarsometatarsus appears more like a mammalian tarsal cluster, the resemblance is quite striking.”
“Other ones are somewhere between the two,” Zap adds. “Bipedal with long necks, almost upright.”
“Get back to the big ones.”
“It isn’t that simple. All of the subtypes show evidence of developmental plasticity,” Tom says, losing Walter again.
“Translation?”
“They’re like crocodiles,” Zap says. “They never stop growing and their size is directly related to how much they eat.”
“Not comforting at all. And they can look human no matter what size they are?” Walter asks.
“Yes,” Zap says.
“That’s some shit your pants information right there.”
“But…”
“This better be good news.”
“It is. We’re certain,” Zap stops to correct himself. “Almost certain that they can’t look like anyone. They have set human forms that remain the same.”
“So once we’ve identified someone as a lizard, they can’t just impersonate someone else and blend back in,” Walter says.
“Right,” Zap says. “And there’s more. Something we found in the warehouse. You’ll want to see this.”
Walter can’t imagine what more he would want to see of that place. He already sees it every time he closes his eyes.
“The volume being handled there was… surprising,” Zap tells him. “Somewhere south of a thousand units a day.”
He means babies. Children. They cut the throats of a thousand children a day. Sliced them up. Ground them up. Made them into steaks. They put the eyes in jars. Pickled the smaller hands and feet. They made a lot of them into jerky. Fucking jerky. They made babies into jerky.
The ones Graveyard rescued from the crates in the front dock were maybe a day’s order of meat to these things. It was anyone’s guess where they came from. Zap tried to survey them before Delta hauled them away. They spoke a dozen different languages if they spoke at all. One spoke a language Deadeye recognized as Somali, but none of them understood. Another told them he was sold for weapons in Sudan. Sold by his parents or someone else? Walter will never know.
“They were processing enough meat annually to account for all the active missing persons in the United States twice over again, which, on an international scope, is still not easily marginalized,” Tom says.
“That one factory was killing about as many children as you possibly could, in the world, before people start to notice,” Zap interprets.
“I’m not hearing the good part of this,” Walter says.
“It means we know that was the only factory.”
“Yes,” Tom says. “And assuming they subsist entirely on human meat we can estimate their number between ten thousand and twenty thousand. That’s assuming less than one in twenty displays signs of gigantism and their metabolism is between human for the low estimate and a komodo dragon for the high estimate.”
“That’s hardly much of an army.”
“And the margin of error is well within one order,” Tom says.
“What does that mean?” Walter asks.
“Don’t worry about that,” Zap says. “It’s just math.”
“It’s still a lot when we don’t know where they are and can’t see them right in front of us,” Walter says.
“We know how to find them,” Zap says.
“How? You designed a detector? Do they show up on infrared? Thermal?”
“We just look at their shipping records.”
“Oh.”
“We have them here. We have all their records. It doesn’t take us down to the individual level, but we at least see where regular shipments of human meat have been delivered. We’ve been running cross references of the addresses since yesterday. Some of the results are surprising.”
“Three estates belonging to U.S. Congressmen, one governor’s mansion, Graceland, Buckingham Palace, the list goes on,” Tom says.
Something absurd occurs to Walter as he reaches for a big yellow legal pad sitting on a nearby counter. He has to ask.
“Selena Gomez’s house?” he asks, as he jots down the names of the five remaining group members on the legal pad.
Zap looks at him strangely.
“Uh, not that we’re aware,” Zap answers.
Damn. Walter had a hundred dollars riding on that. This is still good news. He slides the scratch pad across the table to Zap.
“I want all of these names checked against what you have. I want to know about shipments that went to these people or any properties they own, even through another party. You’re probably going to be dealing with multiple levels of subsidiaries, mergers, and parent corporations here so be thorough.”
Zap looks at the list. His stony expression remains as he nods to Walter.
“If anyone on that list is connected to this thing, I want to know about it yesterday,” Walter says.
IN RAGE STRIKES WIDE
Yoshida Tanaka’s things are in order. All his money has been left to his childhood friend, Jin Ishikawa, though the man was quite surprised to see Tanaka on his doorstep after a decade long absence. Ishikawa is now a vending machine repair man in Tokyo. Not surprising, as Jin only ever wanted to be a rock star – despite lacking any sort of musical skill or talent. Even if he could never be a rock star, at least now he can afford to live like one.
He left the Tanaka clan in the hands of Kazuya Murakama, his father’s mighty retainer. Murakama is a great ninja, and more level headed than Yoshida could ever wish to be. He will make a wise and formidable Jounin.
Yoshida himself now walks through the dark of the A
fghan night, dragging a sack behind him filled with explosive charges. On his back is his sword. He no longer makes an effort to conceal his face and his long black hair blows in the wind behind him. His destination: the American army fortification where he knows Ashley Marjorie resides.
His motive is no longer simple vengeance. Now he seeks redemption as well. The explosives in his sack are wired to a dead man’s switch he had attached to the vest he wears under his shirt. The second his heart stops, blasting caps will detonate all seventy kilograms of C4 in that bag. Even if he cannot best his enemy, he can at least drag the steel abomination to Hell with him. This is what he deserves. It is the penance he must pay for his crime.
Yoshida Tanaka killed his own father – not the man he sought to avenge. No. He killed his real father. In his paranoid rampage he was blinded to the simple truth before him. It came out later, when he went through Tetsuo’s things. The old ninja had loved his mother and for years they carried out a secret tryst unbeknownst to Katsuhiro Tanaka. The terrible stress of their secret, kept right under the nose of the deadliest ninja in all the world, eventually drove his mother to suicide. In the years to come, Tetsuo never strayed far from his secret son, and when the boy chose to travel to a faraway land and leave the life of the shinobi behind, Tetsuo commanded the most skilled kunoichi at his disposal to watch over him in secret. However, even the plans of master jounin can be unraveled by unforeseen chaos.
Mitsuko became enamored with her charge. By the time Tetsuo learned of her infatuation, it was already too late for him to put a stop to it. Tetsuo did not send the one-eared assassin that murdered his family. That was a delusion – a sick delusion. Fate sent that monster to him. Nothing more.
Now his hands are filthy with the blood of the most honorable man he ever knew. Tetsuo Tanaka would rather die than break a promise he made to the woman he loved. The man he thought was his father would not have done that. Katsuhiro died keeping the secrets of some murderous accomplice, but he would have executed his wife in a heartbeat if he discovered her infidelity. Debts owed to blackguards and war criminals were worth more to that man than his family.
