by Mike Leon
Outside, cars flip over in the parking lot as giant balls of fire erupt from the asphalt. He’s destroying their cars. He’s killing their backup. It’s almost as if Kill Team One is cutting off their escape. He wants them in here. He wants to make sure they don’t get away from him this time.
“Go! We have to go!” Kill Team One yells at her, reaching out from behind that big metal shield to throttle her shoulder. His words shake her back to reality. “There are too many of them!”
“Go! Take the girl,” he yells. His words are punctuated by the thudding of the P90 he fires over the top of the shield. “We must protect the girl!”
Shelly rises from the booth just as a lizard, taller than any man, scuttles over the seat back and on top of Sid. It has bright purple feathers forming a mowhawk-like spine on its head. Sid drives his KA-BAR knife through the monster’s brain and proceeds to use its body to shield himself as he exits the booth. He kills another seven lizards with his pistol before it runs dry.
Blood Drinker charges ahead of the rest of the host screaming and cursing.
“DIE HUMAN! DIE!”
The reptoid general extends a cavalry sabre at Sid and takes a swing, but he is not fast enough. Sid executes a riposte that takes the Nazi’s fingers off. The digits are sent flying across the floor and nearby counter top – one of them splashes into a deep fryer. The cavalry sabre falls to the floor along with them and Sid stabs Blood Drinker in the chest quickly and repeatedly, in a way that reminds Shelly of a prison shanking.
But then the man becomes a monster and the monster towers over Sid Hansen like a thing of terror. It whips its prehensile tail around to take Sid’s legs out from under him, but the boy jumps over it and stabs Blood Drinker in the face with that knife.
The monster roars. Even with no human signal left to express itself, Shelly can tell it is furious. It punches Sid with its giant gorilla arm and sends him flying from his feet. He takes his knife with him and a fountain of blood sprays from the open wound on the monster’s face. Sid lands on the tile between Shelly and the kill team and slides for a few feet along the waxed floor.
It is time to go.
Shelly snatches the Van Duyn girl from the floor, but the girl struggles free of her grip and gives her an annoyed glare. Clearly, she can run on her own.
The two of them bolt through the destroyed section of wall. On the other side, they are met by chaos. Fires burn in the lot outside. A rogue lizard man is surprised as Shelly appears from the dust and smoke. She guns him down, but more are already coming from the destruction around them, some from around the other side of the building, others from the destroyed vehicles in the lot.
Sid stumbles through the wreckage behind them.
“The leader can’t be killed with conventional weapons,” he says.
“Yeah, no shit,” Shelly barks. “Got a plan for these fuckers?”
“What do you mean?” he says as he kills several of them with his pistol.
Shelly runs for the rear of the building. She parked a small car two blocks over, through a deserted lot, on the other side of a boarded up old church. She had a feeling something like this might happen. Well, not quite exactly like this.
Behind her, Sid rushes headlong into a group of lizards with his knife. She does not have a good feeling about the outcome of that fight, but the kid seems to murder pretty much everything he looks at, in clear defiance of everything she was ever taught about close combat. Good luck to him.
At her side, the Van Duyn girl keeps pace. What is that girl’s name anyway? Someone told her back in the hospital. It starts with an M. Martha? Maria? Mandy? Fuck it. Who cares?
“Girl, stick with me. I’m going to get you out of here.”
They cut through the lot and past some cars parked on the adjacent street.
Then Blood Drinker is there. He appears in front of them from behind a parked car and he slams Shelly against the ground like a child flinging a doll. His hand is still gone and his face is badly mangled.
The girl screams – the only sound Shelly has ever heard her emit, and she turns to run.
“There you are, girl,” Blood Drinker growls as he moves to chase her. Shelly reaches out and grabs his ankle. He tries to break away, but she is stronger than she looks. She holds on.
“Stupid cunt!” Blood Drinker yells as he kicks at her side. He sheds his human appearance again, but the lizard is every bit as mangled and some more. It has both hands, but its face is caved in badly and chunks of scale and flesh are gone where the thing was shot many times at close range. One of its legs is terribly twisted and burned. The kill team must have done all that.
In this much larger guise, the monster easily shakes Shelly free and chases after the little girl. Shelly levels her gun and shoots him in the back three times, but this is hardly even a distraction as he chases after the child much faster than she can run.
He closes the gap in seconds and reaches out to grab a hold of the girl – to snuff out her life. Before that can happen, a battered green sedan bashes into the big monster in the middle of the street. His hulking mass crashes into the windshield of the vehicle. He rolls over the roof and onto the street behind the car as the vehicle screeches to a halt.
Then, as Blood Drinker pushes his broken body up from the blacktop, the car shifts into reverse and runs him over. There is a loud thump as he passes under the back tires, and then the front wheels stop on top of him before the driver steps on the gas and the tires grind that fucking beast into the street.
The driver’s side door opens on the other side of the car and a voice yells to the girl.
“Get in!”
It is Sid Hansen’s voice.
The son of a bitch did it. He killed all those lizards with nothing but his knife.
Oh. No he didn’t, Shelly realizes as she sees the horde of angry lizard men chasing after the car on foot.
Sid steps on the gas again and the car does some more damage to Blood Drinker’s shredded body before it peels out and barely escapes the dozens of angry monsters sprinting to catch it. One monster does leap onto the roof, but it is quickly shaken off as the car swerves through a turn and vanishes into the night.
Then they turn their attention to Shelly. She backs away as she takes a shot at the closest lizard. She turns to run, but more are already behind her.
A lizard man in a black trench coat grabs her. She punches him in the face and jams the muzzle of her gun up into his solar plexus. She pulls the trigger and sees the bullet erupt from the bastard’s neck. Blood spurts from the exit wound as the monster falls onto its back.
Two more lay their hands on her. She kills one, but the other takes her gun away. Then the rest of them are there grabbing at her. Then she sees Blood Drinker rising up from the asphalt like a cartoon animal that has to blow itself back up after being flattened in some accident. The sight of it is surreal. It is almost as funny as it is horrible.
She laughs, and it will be the last thing she ever laughs at. The monsters are already biting into her legs. They have her left arm and they’re eating her fingers. She can hear the sucking and smacking of their lips. Most of her blood is all over the ground. It hurts so much, but she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t scream.
They don’t have her right arm. No. That arm is under her. She uses it to thumb the pin from the grenade she was keeping in case things got interesting with Kill Team One. She can’t feel her left arm anymore. Maybe they’ve eaten it all. Maybe she’s just gone numb.
Three.
She can hear Blood Drinker over all of them. “FEAST ON HER FLESH!” he bellows.
Two.
It hurts so much.
One.
Now it won’t hurt anymore. It’ll never hurt again.
JIGOKU
Tanaka wakes in a river of flame. Then he closes his eyes again and he is on the cold dirt shores of Jigoku beneath a grey sky of lost souls. He is pursued by Gozu and Mezu. He runs from them and he is back in the blackness.
&nb
sp; The cold dirt is gone, replaced by weightless nothingness. The stars of the universe stretch out before him for infinity and they make him feel tiny and alone in the vastness of hollow darkness.
But then that feeling goes away and the stars and the nothingness all feel close to him like a blanket – a warm blanket of the universe.
“Hey Fuckhead,” an all too familiar voice calls.
Tanaka turns to see Ashley Marjorie floating toward him from Jupiter. The sight of him here is like a roach on a finely prepared sushi roll. His robot parts are no longer exposed. He appears as he did long ago, on the day he took Mitsuko away.
“I said I would drag you to Hell with me, monster,” he says. “It seems I have succeeded.”
“Shut up, retard,” Ashley rolls his eyes. “You’re not in Hell.”
“Where else would I meet with the likes of you?”
“God, you’re fucking stupid.”
“Come at me, monster. I will extinguish your afterlife.”
“Don’t you know we are all one here?”
Then the brutal killer is gone. He sinks away into the Milky Way like a drowning child vanishing into murky waters.
Tanaka then hears a voice from another life – a voice he has longed to hear again in person for over a decade.
“Tanaka-san?” chirps that voice.
“Mitsuko?” he gasps as he spins to look for his long dead wife.
But Mitsuko is not there. Instead, he sees something truly maddening. There before him stands a seven foot tall cartoon girl. She is flat like paper and has giant blue eyes that occupy a third of her humongous head. Little pink ribbons are tied in her black pigtails to match her pink dress.
Then the blanket of stars around him is gone and he is standing in a colorful cartoon landscape. Around him, the city is painted in vibrant blues and greys. The sky is bright cerulean and cloudless. On the horizon, he can see a cartoon robot, taller than any of the buildings, fighting some kind of goat-horned monster. The robot is clad in shining white armor and stabs at the beast using a blue energy spear.
“Its ki power is lowered now,” says the cartoon girl. “Use the precocious knife to penetrate its AP shield and initiate fourth gospel!”
Suddenly, the giant robot sheds its armor, which shakes the earth as it falls to the ground. Underneath is a two-hundred foot tall cartoon vision of Jesus Christ clad in white underwrappings and a crown of thorns. With a quickness only possible in animation, Jesus nails himself to a giant cross and screams.
“Jesusu haritsuke jutsu activate!”
Blue lasers emanate from his crown of thorns and begin to erode away the demon’s flesh. The monster cowers away briefly, but then it stands and advances unaffected.
“Its CLC regeneration is powering the mitochondrial essence conversion!” screams the cartoon girl next to Tanaka. “Reserve power to the transfer cells is depleted! Goodbye Tanaka-san!”
She explodes into rainbow colors as the sky turns blood red and the moon turns to a skull in the middle of the day.
“Do you understand any of this?” says a new voice – one he does not recognize.
Tanaka turns to his other side and finds himself staring into the toothy maw of a tyrannosaurus rex. The dinosaur sniffs at him. Upon its back rides a beautiful blond-haired cave woman, naked except for a tiny loincloth. She has a positively rockin’ pair of tits. An American M60 machine gun dangles from her right hand.
“It doesn’t make any sense at all,” the dinosaur says.
Tanaka takes a step back, startled.
“What’s wrong?” the dinosaur asks.
“I… I just thought she was talking to me,” Tanaka says, pointing at the naked woman with the machine gun.
“Her? No. She doesn’t talk much. They have a brain the size of a pea, you know.”
The dinosaur and the naked woman look to the horned monster as it bites Jesus’ head off with one snap of its jaws.
“And I thought the last extinction event was weird,” the dinosaur says. “Who writes this shit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither, dude. I’ll see you around. I got a date with a two-day-old diplodocus carcass.”
Then the T-Rex stomps off down the cartoon street and disappears behind some cartoon buildings.
Tanaka watches as the horned demon devours Jesus.
Then a supermassive black-booted foot stomps down from the sky and crushes the monster like a bug. The foot is the size of a city.
Tanaka looks up to see the creature it is attached to, but the figure is so tall that it narrows into an indiscernible black dot as it stretches into the sky. The legs are humanoid, but to identify a face is impossible.
Then its outstretched hand comes for him. Two black gloved fingers close in on him, filling up the entire street by themselves and leaving no place to run. Tanaka screams and plants his hands against them as they close on him. Somehow, he is strong enough to hold the fingers apart.
Then he is growing. The cartoon city shrinks around him, until it is beneath him, and the giant fingers take hold of his hand to raise him up, but he does not lift from the ground. He simply gets taller. Taller and taller he grows, until he is the size of the giant that is hoisting him.
It is Katsuhiro Tanaka.
“There you are,” the old ninja says.
Beneath them, the cartoon world is tiny and fades away into nothing. Soon they are back in the black of space again.
“Where am I, father? What is this place?”
“You are trapped between worlds,” Katsuhiro tells him. “This is the heart of paradox – a space where only those at one with themselves and the universe can travel. The greatest ninja masters have been here before you. It is a realm of truths that are lies and answers that lead to more questions.”
“Is this what it is like to be dead?”
“You are not dead. I told you that before.”
“The One-eared man told me that.”
“All things are one thing here.”
“Is he gone then? Is that metal monster destroyed?”
“Yes. He was decayed from existence.”
“I saw the shinigami come for him. The death god ate his soul.”
“No. The creature you saw was the mercenary called Entropy. He would have you believe he is none but walking death, but his motivations are those of a man and not anything more.”
“His death was… fleeting and did not…” Yoshida cannot think of the words. After a pause, he tries again. “Vengeance has not brought me satisfaction.”
“Vengeance is a tool you do not understand. It is a way of honor, not a thing of passion. It does not make one whole again. That is the belief of fools. To rebuild what you once had, you must look inward.”
“Is that why I am here?”
“You are here because your quest for blood led you to kill your own father.”
“Then mother was right. You did know.”
“I knew. I knew and I cared not. Often, appearances are more important than truths. I married your mother for appearances. Her romances did no harm to me. Why should I have spilled blood over such matters in a time when the very fate of all Japan was at stake? To indulge such petty jealousies is not the way. There is a bigger picture, Yoshida. I only hope that you are now big enough to see it.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“In the West, my old friend needs your help. Go there. Seek out the man called Kill Team One.”
“I have heard that name.”
“The peace you seek lies with him. A mighty champion of the dark world stands in your way. His sword technique is no match for yours, but his command of shijie is stronger than any known. Martial skill is unnecessary to a creature that persists in undeath even after being dealt most grievous wounds. Still, there is a path to victory over this demon.”
“And what if peace is not what I seek?”
“All warriors seek peace. Peace with themselves, peace with nature. It is why we fight.”
/> “No, father. I seek only death.”
“You seek what you think is your place, and you will find it.”
“What does that mean?”
“You must act quickly, for the situation is dire.”
“What are you saying?”
“Open your eyes.”
Then light burns through the curtain of stars, flooding into the universe, destroying it like a celluloid fire.
Tanaka is flat on his back, staring up at the bright sun. He feels burned and weak. Sweat soaks through his clothes. Towering above him is a man in a long grey duster and an American special forces beret. He turns his head to see a platoon of soldiers pointing rifles at him.
“Jesus, you’re keeping him in a storage locker?” says the man in the beret. “Lose the rifles. What do you think he’s gonna do?”
“This man single-handedly destroyed a large section of this fortification!” yells a man Yoshida does not see. Soon he appears next to the man in the beret. He wears the stars of an American military general.
“That’s rich. What did he do? Knock over some port-o-potties?” says the man in the beret.
“I don’t know who you people think you are, but Homeland is going to get a report of every detail of this little chaperone program and...”
“Stick a sock in it, dickhead.”
“I smell alcohol. Are you drunk?”
“Are you drunk?”
“What?”
“Ghoul, pick up Mr. Tanaka and put him in the helicopter.”
“You’re not taking that prisoner anywhere!”
“No? Okay then. We’ll just leave him here. Deadeye, what was that you were telling me before about the ninja that killed a hundred men just by looking at them?”
“Ninja magic,” speaks another voice Tanaka does not know. This man is far off and Tanaka is too weak to turn his head and see. “He made all their dicks fall off too.”
“Raise your weapons,” the General shouts at his soldiers. “He’s just saying that to scare you.”
