KILL KILL KILL

by Mike Leon

  Yoshida does not wish to think about this anymore. He does not wish to go on consumed with hate and lust for blood. He does not wish to live with these hellish memories. It is time to end the whole terrible story.

  He can see the gate of the American base now ahead of him. A gap in the six-foot stacks of gabions wide enough to fit a truck through is what they call the front door. No doubt the sentries there are watching him with their night vision goggles and thermal imaging equipment from their towers above the wall. They likely have guns trained on him now with laser sights invisible to the naked eye, ready to shoot him down in a hail of bullets as soon as he comes too close. He does not care about these things, partly because he does not feel threatened by them, and partly because he no longer desires to live anyway.

  He is a hundred yards away from the gate when he feels the first shot coming. He feels it before he hears it or sees it, because he is finally at peace with himself. He has cast away the hate that once consumed him. Now he is one with nature. He feels the air and the clouds. He feels every grain of sand beneath his feet as he passes over.

  The motion is fluid and seamless. Like the flick of a hummingbird’s wing, his sword swats the speeding bullet away. The ding of the metal sounds out before the crack of the shot reaches his ears.

  The guards light him up with searchlights. The light is blinding, but he no longer needs his eyes to see. They shoot at him again. Again, he swats the bullet from the air like a pesky fly. He continues his approach. Yoshida Tanaka has attained what only legends achieved before him. As more bullets come his way from eleven different rifles, he bats them away with ease and never stops moving. This is the power of a true ninja master.

  He yells the name of his enemy to the gate.

  “Ashley! Come out and fight me!”

  By now, the soldiers in the towers have stopped shooting. He can hear some of them discussing explosives. There is little he can do if they choose to launch rockets or grenades at him except run away, but he will not be running away. Not today. Today he finishes this.

  He is greeted by two American soldiers at the gate. They shout and point rifles at him. One of them fires a shot when he does not stop. Even at a distance of ten feet, Yoshida slaps the rifle round away with no difficulty. He calmly demands his adversary.

  “I am here for Ashley Marjorie,” he says. “He must come out and face me.”

  “Hands on your head!” screams the soldier who did not shoot at him. He has a salt and pepper stubble covering a hefty chin beneath his big flak helmet. “Put ’em up! Put ’em up!”

  Then someone puts a hand on his shoulder. It is Ashley Marjorie. He wears dirt stained blue jeans and the same baggy blue hoodie that he always wears.

  “Lower your weapon, son,” he says. “I’ll handle this.”

  The soldier turns and he is nose to nose with the kill team commander. He is afraid. Yoshida can sense his fear. These men know there is an abomination in their midst, but they are powerless to stop it.

  The gatekeepers do as he says. The man with the big chin cowers away quickly. The other, the one who shot at him, is more hesitant to leave.

  “He – He stopped a bullet,” the soldier stutters.

  “Horseshit, kid,” Ashley says. “You just saw some swamp gas. Go back inside the wall.”

  The soldier obeys, and then Yoshida and Ashley are left alone outside in the glow of the spotlights with the eyes of those in the towers on them.

  “You came back for some more of this old bucket of bolts?” Ashley says.

  “I came back to drag you to hell,” Yoshida answers.

  “That so? Whatcha got there? A bomb? You gonna blow me up? Nice plan, squinch. Get on with it.”

  Yoshida has no reason to continue listening to this man’s insults. He makes his move. He flings a group of four shuriken at Ashley’s eyes. If there is any part of this metal man that his weapons might pierce, it is the eyes.

  One of his little bladed stars finds its mark. The others scratch at the flesh of Ashley’s face to reveal slivers of the gleaming cybernetic skull beneath. The cyborg tears at the shuriken embedded in his right eye and howls. Flinging the star to the dirt with blood streaming down his face, he spits at Yoshida.

  “Nice shot, nip,” he says. “Now I’m gonna fuck you up.”

  Ashley reveals a foot-long serrated bowie knife from the big pocket on the front of his hoodie and charges. The cyborg barrels forward like a nine thousand ton freight train. It seems no power on Earth is quick enough to escape his wrath – and yet the ninja does. Yoshida Tanaka becomes a blur to the soldiers looking on in their towers.

  He leaps into the air, a single shaped charge, a brick of dense steel, open on one side and packed with a clay-like explosive, in his hand. Narrowly avoiding the cyborg’s vice-like death grasp as he flips over its head, he plants the plastic explosive between Ashley’s shoulder blades. He sets down far beyond the reach of the human skinned metal monster, and now Ashley stands between him and his bag of explosives.

  Quickly, Ashley reaches to his back and snatches the explosive in his hand, throwing it higher in the air than any normal human possibly could. The bomb reaches the end of its three second fuse and it explodes high in the sky like a Taikai firework.

  “Shaped charges,” Ashley says. “I thought you ninjas didn’t use modern weapons. Not a bad idea I guess.” Not a bad idea, indeed. Linear shaped charges are designed to direct the force of a blast in a specific direction to penetrate extremely dense materials like tank armor, fortified bunker walls and vault doors. Certainly they can punch through the bionic endoskeleton that keeps Ashley moving.

  Ashley raises a pistol and shoots at Yoshida, but the ninja turns the projectiles with his blade. Then, summoning the power of his ninja magic, he slices the air from meters away, far out of Ashley’s reach. His attack extends like a lash – a shockwave slicing through the air far beyond the reach of his actual blade. Kamaitachi. The razor wind dices Ashley’s pistol down the middle and splits open the skin of his fingers. His shirt is sliced in half from neck to crotch and another rift opens in the flesh of his forehead to reveal more of his bloodied metal brow.

  Ashley holds his hand in front of his face, examining the damage to his fingers. The skin is shredded, but the metal frame beneath is undamaged. He wiggles his fingers. Then he tugs away with his other hand, flaying the skin from the middle knuckles on down, to leave the flesh as a hideous fingerless glove for the robotic skeleton underneath.

  A strategy forms for Tanaka. If this thing has a metal skeleton, then he has a reference for its weakest spots. He did gouge the cyborg’s eye. That proves it is not completely invincible.

  Tanaka leaps forward and swings his sword to strike low in the midsection. He is swift and precise with his cut. His blade shears through flesh and guts, but not too deep, as he is careful not to hit the abomination’s hardened spine. Gore sprays from Ashley’s back as Yoshida’s sword erupts with an explosion of sparks. Broken servo-mechanisms jut from the open wound. Blood spurts from inside and runs down loose hanging wires to dribble off their frayed ends.

  The ninja shifts to strike again from the other direction. This time, the cyborg catches his sword in its fingerless palm. Metal meets metal with a dense clank. Yoshida feels the grinding of steel. Ashley takes a swipe at him, but the ninja is long gone before his grasping talons come near. Yoshida is much faster since they last met.

  Yoshida stands now by the bag of explosives he left on the ground upon his first approach. He snatches another shaped charge from the bag and sets the three second fuse. He throws another group of shuriken for the cyborg’s face and Ashley must raise his hand to shield his remaining eye. Then, with one second remaining, Yoshida hurls the explosive brick at Ashley’s chest. It detonates. The force of the blast knocks the cyborg flying onto his back as Yoshida ducks down and shields himself.

  He wastes no time. He must take this chance to ensure the destruction of his enemy. Tanaka grabs the sack of explosives and
swings it as he stands. He goes round once, twice, and then lets go. The bag hurdles toward the fallen cybernetic man and comes to a rest on his chest. As Tanaka runs like the wind, away from the explosives, he draws a kunai from his things and stabs it into his clothing. He does not have to feel for his target. In one quick jab he has cut the line that monitors his heart. Now the stopping of the monitor may in turn stop his heart, rather than the other way around. How ironic, he thinks, as the world explodes behind him.

  When the ninja gains his feet again, he has no way to know if minutes or hours have passed. He is intact, though battered. He surveys the damage, and it is of a truly grand scale.

  The bomb destroyed most of the gabion wall that forms the front gate. A watch tower lies cracked and broken on the ground. Fire consumes it. Flames have spread for nearly an acre, beginning at the crater left by the blast. The size of it surprises him – at least ten feet around and two feet deep. Thick black smoke billows upward from the flames at the center. Yoshida is certain nothing could have survived that.

  But he is wrong.

  There in the midst of that charred crater encircled in flames, the machine pushes itself to its feet. All of its human flesh is gone, shredded and burned. Only some tatters of its pants still cling to its metal legs. The robot is not entirely like a human skeleton, but the resemblance is there. Its metal limbs are slender and its joints whirr and hiss as hundreds of tiny motors and servomechanisms rotate and swing. The face is like a skull – a skull now on fire. Flames cover much of the thing, but it does not seem affected.

  “Get ready for the good stuff, jap,” it says. The voice emitted from behind those moving metal jaws still sounds like Ashley. “I don’t have all that extra skin slowin’ me down no more.”

  Then the robot’s torso buzzes to life with moving parts. Twisting, spinning, turning – the pieces are like a hive of bees moving about. When they have finished, they have formed a six-barreled minigun that elevates into position, mounted on the robot’s left shoulder.

  The gun barrels begin to spin and Yoshida dashes to his right. Bullets whiz past his back, and the robot turns to compensate. Yoshida spins on his heel and deflects two shots with his sword. These shells are much heavier than anything fired at him before. They should shatter the steel of his blade, but because Yoshida has the power of a ninja master, his sword will hold. He throws a smoke bomb and vanishes from his enemy’s sight.

  Then he is behind the machine. He brings his blade down on that minigun with the titanic might of an earthquake. For the first time, his sword does cut into the metal but only a few inches – just enough to damage the gun.

  The robot does not stop. He turns his head and opens his steel mouth wide. Something extends from between its pearly white teeth. It is pointed and shiny. Yoshida darts away as he realizes what it is. Ashley launches a missile from his mouth.

  Tanaka does something he never could have dreamed a year ago. He ducks under the missile and reaches up to grab its stabilizing tail fins. Flaming jet burns his hand, even through his glove, but he does not care. He must not care. He turns the missile around, toward the robot, in a fraction of a second.

  The tiny warhead zooms for its original master and meets its mark on the android’s chest. The explosion feels immense from this close distance. Tanaka is sent flying from his feet as if swept away by a tsunami.

  The ninja lies sprawled on the ground. His chest burns like an oil fire. His left hand feels like a billion needles are stabbing it. He clutches his chest with his right hand and finds shrapnel and blood. He lifts his head to search for the robot. The evil metal thing is already there to pick him up off the ground.

  The robot snatches him up with one hand. Its frame is barely damaged but for blackened stains on the surface.

  “Something finally fuckin’ goes right!” Ashley says. “What should I pluck off first? Your arms or your legs?”

  Yoshida goes for a kunai with his good hand. The robot makes no effort to stop him as he stabs it again and again into that blackened metal skull. His arm feels like rubber and his strikes are like a child’s.

  “You don’t stop. When are you gonna get it? Your weapons are useless. YOU are useless. You’re just meat. The people that made me, they’re way ahead of the rest of you clowns. I’m indestructible, baby.”

  His laugh is a mechanical diphone droning, like Stephen Hawking’s computer trying to imitate a mad scientist’s insane cackle.

  Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

  Tanaka stabs the kunai into Ashley’s eye. Even that does nothing.

  “You know something? Fucking your wife got me a VD that rotted my god damned skin off. Filthy cunt. But it was the best thing ever happened to me. Cause now I’m gonna live forever.”

  Tanaka has one last hope. He drops the kunai and reaches for it now – a single brick of explosive left hidden in the waist of his pants.

  “Bitch was a hell of a ride too. The look on her face when I crammed my dick in her backdoor was comedy gold. I thought her eyeballs were gonna pop right out of her head. She made the same look when I stuck that sword in her! Remember?”

  Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

  Tanaka activates the fuse and punches the explosive into Ashley’s flapping jaws. The killer android sputters, as if choking on it. Good. Tanaka closes his eyes and waits for the last two seconds to tick away.

  Mitsuko. I will be with you soon.

  Ashley turns his head away and the shaped charge erupts out into a jet of shrapnel and flame from his mouth – a deafening explosive burp like a cast iron cannon in the dark.

  “You get an A for effort, squinch,” the cyborg says.

  He drops Tanaka to the ground.

  “Now I’m gonna pull your guts out and feed ’em to you.”

  Tanaka lies staring up at the stars. He has nothing else. He is battered and broken. His weapons are spent. He does not know where his sword is. There is no hope and nothing on this Earth that can destroy the metal beast. He waits for it to be over.

  “Problem with you japs is you just don’t know when you’ve lost. You lost when we dropped the God damned bomb on you. That was one hundred percent American ingenuity right there, and we shoulda flown up north and dropped another one right in the middle of Moscow. Too bad we didn’t. But things are different now. Team America has me, and when I’m done making these rag heads my bitch, I’m gonna come for all you chinks in ching chong land. Own our debt? Own my fist in your ass! Then I’m gonna take care of the dirty Mexicans that keep stealing our jobs. You know why?”

  Tanaka does not answer. He can see death now – a creature visible only to those leaving this mortal coil. It hovers over him with nothing eyes and blackened robes.

  Ashley kicks him.

  “You know why? Because America is number one!”

  Death speaks.

  “ASHLEY MARJORIE?” it says.

  Tanaka shakes his head. This cannot be right. He is hallucinating because of his injuries.

  The robot turns and looks upon the visage of the reaper.

  “You?” Ashley says. His voice tinted with surprise.

  “DO NOT DELAY ME, ROBOT! THE CHILDREN OF KILL TEAM ONE. WHERE ARE THEY?”

  “You look like a faggot,” Ashley says as he clenches his metal fingers into a fist and punches death in the face. His fist never connects. Instead, it seems to melt away into nothingness as it comes closer to the death god’s person. Tiny specks of rust flake away in the wind.

  The robot draws away. His right arm ends in a rusted brown stump at the elbow. Death reaches out and his left arm is soon to follow.

  “WHERE ARE THEY?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “DO NOT LIE TO ME!”

  And then Ashley’s robot legs begin to disintegrate away like dust in the wind. The android falls to the ground, a body and head.

  “Go fuck yourself!” Ashley hollers.

  “YOU HAVE OUTLIVED YOUR USEFULNESS. PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THE VOID.”

  There is a metallic shriek, like a
cross between a scream and the sound of an old dial-up modem making its connection. The rest of the robot rusts away into nothing.

  Then death slips away into shadows, leaving no sign he was ever there.

  Tanaka does not try to stand. He knows he cannot. For a second, he starts to wonder what just happened, but he realizes quickly that is an error.

  He remains there, face up in the dirt until the darkness comes for him.

  AMERICANUS

  “The shipments go to a corporation called Historia Americanus,” Zap says. “They sell hardback encyclopedias.”

  “People still buy those?” Walter asks.

  “No. No one buys those.”

  The stone-faced operative stands over Walter’s desk. The slender man is clad in simple grey business casual attire and a black leather jacket. Lately, he has been a constant fixture in Walter’s life. He is quiet, frightening, unmoved and yet ever-present. He is like a gargoyle, Walter thinks. No. A grotesque. Gargoyles have a water spout. A grotesque is just a statue.

  Next to Zap is his somewhat livelier new friend Tom from R&D, a man Walter has come to refer to simply as Technical Tom. Tom seems engrossed in his smartphone, but Walter knows the man is processing every word of this conversation with more diligence than anyone else he knows. That man is so smart that his divided attention is worth more than most men’s undivided attention.

  “Of course. It’s a front,” Walter grunts. He pours thirty-year-old single malt scotch into a glass with ice. Across the pond they would call him a pussy for not drinking it straight, but fuck ’em. He sets the glass down on his desk next to the disassembled M&P he was cleaning before these two showed up with the news. He picks up the barrel and holds it to his nose as he looks for deposits.

  “We looked at the company’s website,” Tom says. “Very basic HTML scripts circa nineteen-ninety-eight. Their marketing primarily targets doomsday preparation enthusiasts.”