by Mike Leon
“I saw him stop bullets with his sword…” someone else chimes in.
“Shut up, corporal!”
“Okay. Well, you guys enjoy your ninja master,” the man in the beret says. He turns and begins to walk away. “We’ll just be off now. If he starts doing his dim mak death touch jutsu or some crazy thing, just give me a call. I’ll only be a twenty-six hour flight away.”
“Fine. Take the ninja!” the General grunts.
“Yup. Sounds about right. Ghoul, pick up Mr. Tanaka and put him in the helicopter.”
ALL Y’ALL IS A
POLICE ASS MUTHAFUCKA
Officer Feldman stands a full foot taller than Sid, hovering menacingly over him. His eyes are masked behind dark sunglasses. He wears a black shirt with grey dress pants, and shoes so polished they look like mirrors. His name is on a reflective metal tag over his left front shirt pocket. Sid looks at it, wondering if this man is some sort of soldier.
“You have any idea how fast you were going, son?” the officer shouts.
“The vehicle’s maximum speed,” Sid says.
Cars fly by them on the busy freeway. They are so close he can feel the wind from each as it passes. He could throw this annoying man into the next one if he wanted, but he will see what the man wants.
“The vehicle’s maximum speed??! A hundred and thirty miles per hour is what I clocked you at. What is wrong with you, boy? You could have killed somebody!”
“I can always kill somebody,” Sid says, looking puzzled.
“You smartin’ me? Where’s your registration anyway? You even have a license?”
“No.”
“Turn around, son. We’re going downtown.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
He punches Feldman in the face so fast that the actual strike is lost between the frames of the police cruiser’s dashboard camera. This will circulate at the police station and then eventually on Youtube. They will say he can kill a man just by looking at him.
Officer Feldman will spend six months in the hospital with nearly every bone in his face broken.
Sid sits back in the car and turns the ignition. Beside him, the Van Duyn girl remains in the passenger seat.
“I didn’t kill him,” Sid says. “I still don’t understand why he was following us and flashing all those lights.”
The girl only shows him a funny look. Sid stomps down on the gas pedal and peels out.
“Do you?” he asks.
She nods.
“Well what was it?”
She reaches for a worn spiral bound notepad and broken number two pencil she scrounged from the car’s center console and glove box some hours ago. The girl, he has found, is far better equipped than he to understand and navigate this strange place that is America.
Sid has, of course, been to this country before. He lived here all his life, but he stayed within the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. He slept in a simple cabin with his father and brother. He cooked and ate what he could kill. He learned to kill with guns. He learned to kill with knives. He learned to kill with his hands. There was no time for anything else. The woods stretched as far as he could see in every direction and he never stopped to ponder what was beyond them. That was the America he knew.
This America is different. This is a land of flashing lights, neon signs, roads, and cars, loud noises, places that serve food, and houses that do other things Sid cannot begin to guess. An hour ago, he passed a picture of a naked woman twenty feet tall. There are so many distractions here… And still his mind remains focused on something he wishes he could forget: Blood Drinker.
This thing, this man who became a monster before his eyes, led a swarm of them, giant and scaly things with fangs and claws. There were too many for him to fight alone, and even with his father there, they could not hope to defeat the monsters. If only Victor had been there too. If only he had recognized the imposter before it was too late. All the signs were there. Victor slept in that room in Dubai. He slept. That wasn’t right. His brother should have been out killing someone. He didn’t even try to hurt Shelly. And he ran from Kill Team Three in the desert. He even told them to run. No. Victor would never do that. He might make a tactical withdrawal briefly, but Victor Hansen does not flee from enemies he could be killing. How did Sid not recognize this? He failed them all.
Sid led them into a trap. He disappointed his father just like a thousand times before. That is all he has ever been – a disappointment. Now, the old man is probably dead. Shelly is certainly dead, and it is his fault. He will never be half the warrior his father was.
The girl holds up the notepad for him to see. Scrawled on the front page, in light grey cursive script, it reads: YOU ARE SPEEDING.
Sid nods. “Yes. I’m driving very fast.”
She rolls her eyes. Then she notices something and points out the window while slapping his shoulder.
“What?” he says.
She’s pointing at a sign that reads: Speed Limit 55
“That’s not a problem. I’m driving much faster.”
She writes on the pad again: SUPPOSED TO GO SLOWER. DUMBASS.
“That’s a terrible idea. Driving slower makes us more susceptible to weapons fire.”
She only gives him that same worried look she gave him before. Then she crosses her arms and rests her head against the window.
Sid wishes he could go even faster.
DEICIDE IS PAINLESS
There is something about murdering unarmed people that Victor Hansen loves even more than killing the ones that try to fight back. Try is the operative word because none do much better than that. He can’t quite exactly say what about it he likes so much better. Killing enemy combatants is good too, just more frantic and hurried. When he kills defenseless people, he gets to take his time and savor each second. There is an artistry that goes into choosing the precise moment to finish them. He prefers to draw it out as long as possible. Sometimes he lets them run for a great distance before he puts a bullet in the back of their head. Other times, he cuts some vital artery and lets them bleed out slowly. He tends to save those types of lingering deaths for the meekest victims. The ones that make him angry, he annihilates in spectacular fashion – by unloading automatic weapons or artillery into them, or just bashing them into burger.
This is going through his mind as he throws the severed head of a man in his mid-thirties to a screaming woman huddled in the corner of her tiny household kitchen. The room is a mess with signs of struggle – chairs knocked over, pans scattered across the floor, the headless body of her husband bent and twisted against a counter top. Victor broke the man’s arms into a zig zag of splintered bone fragments and cut his head off with his kris knife.
He looks the woman over and decides she is too fat for fucking. He can afford to be choosy in the city. Women are plentiful here, and generally more attractive than what he saw in Afghanistan. Not this one though. He towers over her as she screams in the face of the severed head, not quite dead yet. Its mouth still gibbers and the eyes still form expressions. She tosses it aside in horror.
Victor grabs the cloth of her shirt and stands her up against the wall. He grins. Then he smashes his forehead into her face like some brutal animal. Again. Again. He grunts loudly each time and it makes him feel more alive than he ever has before. When her face is mostly smashed up into the back of her skull, he stops. Two Saudi police officers enter the house behind him, stepping over the door that is already broken down. Victor whips a Desert Eagle from his pale green duster and slings the gun around to his back. He shoots them each in the throat. It is time to leave.
He has spent the last four days doing this. He moves from house to house as silently as possible, often wiping out three or four entire families before anyone makes enough noise to draw the attention of the police. He has thus far resisted the urge to stay and fight them. The city is already swarming with military and they won’t be far behind the peace officers. The army would bring troops en masse and much bigger g
uns. He could take thirty or forty, but any more than that and he would be in a bad situation. Tanks would be a bad situation – a terrible situation… Best keep moving. Stay ahead of them.
He steps out into the night and glances over his surroundings. He tries not to look toward the center of the city. Looking that way makes him angry. The lack of devastation there taunts him like the worst unfinished business. Exactly ninety-seven hours ago, Victor crashed a jetliner into Mecca, and although he killed hundreds of the camel fucking ragheads, he did not destroy that stupid little house they all pray to. He failed to kill their God.
He’s already a hundred yards away when the police backup pulls up in front of the house. Victor chuckles as he turns the corner of another small house and loses sight of them. He tries to imagine their faces as they walk in on the mess he left them. A dozen maimed bodies lying still in the dead of night. Comedy gold.
He is greeted around the corner by the dark form of a husky man, taller than him and thicker too. He has long brown hair pulled back into a pony tail that hangs down the back of a black leather jacket studded with spikes and colorful tin pins showing little logos and pictures Victor does not know. His blue jeans are torn and the exposed knees are too white to belong to any native of this desert hellhole. Coiled around the stranger’s right arm is a steel chain. The links look thick enough to pull a truck, and a few feet of them dangle below the stranger’s hand where they terminate into a sharpened hook. In his left hand is an MP5 submachine gun.
“Victor Hansen,” calls the stranger. This could be entertaining.
“Yes,” Victor answers, smiling.
“They call me Niggerfucker. Time to die, queer.”
Victor shoots Niggerfucker in the face twice as if it does not even deserve a passing mention. Indeed, it would not deserve mention, if not for the reaction of the big leather bound assassin. Niggerfucker does not die. He does not even fall. He goes cross-eye for a moment. He grunts. He heaves. Then a bullet seems to be pushed back out of his flesh like bloodied lead excrement from the asshole that is his gunshot wound. The other soon follows.
Victor laughs.
“That’s a cute trick,” he says, pointing at Niggerfucker’s submachine gun. “Your turn.”
The raging bastard levels the gun and squeezes down the trigger. The MP5 rattles in his hand, shockingly steady for a fully automatic weapon fired with one hand, though not even near the kind of control Victor would exhibit himself.
Niggerfucker does not hit him. Not even once. This comes as a shock to neither of them.
“Looks like I get to do ya with the chain then,” Niggerfucker says.
He lurches forward and hurls that great steel chain at Victor’s chest. The hook jets toward him like a rocket, but he is more than quick enough to avoid it. The hook buzzes his shoulder and continues into the street behind him. Niggerfucker jerks it back, but Victor sees that coming too and ducks under the sickle shaped instrument as it makes its return trip past him. Victor snatches hold of the hook and leaps forward, reeled in by his enemy’s strength. He produces his kris knife as he sails forward and it is far too late for Niggerfucker to get out of the way.
Victor’s knife plunges into Niggerfucker’s chest through that leather jacket. Victor plants his feet on his enemy’s chest and plucks the knife free as he bounds away. Niggerfucker swipes at him, but catches nothing. Blood gushes from the stab wound in his chest.
The blood stops pouring quickly and Victor can only guess the gaping wound under that jacket has sealed itself. Niggerfucker flips Victor his middle finger. Then he brings the chain around in a wide arc letting out slack. He swings it round and round and the chain extends just a bit more with each pass. Victor steps back to avoid the growing radius of steel death that is whirring past his face every tenth of a second. The wall is at his back and he’s running out of ground quickly.
Victor makes his move.
He dives under the spinning chain and rolls to Niggerfucker’s feet. He points his humongous hand cannon up and squeezes the trigger three times to fill the fucker’s balls with .50 Action Express. He doesn’t expect it to score a kill, but it should definitely slow him down. It does.
“Fuckin’ FAGGOT!” Niggerfucker howls as he grabs his bleeding crotch. Victor chuckles, perhaps prematurely, as Niggerfucker’s hook comes crashing down at his face. That bastard is quick with that thing – unnaturally quick. Victor rolls to the side to avoid the hook, but it is coming at him again as he hops up from the ground. He leaps and it zips beneath his feet. Niggerfucker jerks the chain back, but Victor catches it in his hands as he plants his feet back on the ground.
“I’ve had enough of this thing,” Victor says. He wraps the chain once around his wrist and pulls the slack tight. The tug of war lasts only briefly. Victor is stronger than Niggerfucker and hauls him in slowly. He is prepared to stab this sorry sack of shit as many times as it takes to make him permanently dead.
“HAGHAGAHAHARA!” screams someone – or at least that’s what Victor hears. All of these Arab languages just sound like a sinus infection to him. Victor rolls his eyes. He was hoping to finish this without interruption.
Both of them stop where they are and turn toward the source of the shouting. In the street beside them, stands a squad of ten men dressed in coffee stain pattern desert camouflage uniforms and holding G36C rifles. These guys are White Army – the division of the Saudi military tasked with protecting Mecca. Victor has been avoiding them for days. The leader coughs out some more phlegmy-sounding commands Victor doesn’t understand.
Niggerfucker raises his MP5 and wastes the guy. The rest of the squad responds by shooting him to shreds. Nine fully automatic rifles all simultaneously emptying their magazines into him from thirty feet away makes a serious mess of him. One of his arms comes off completely and falls to the ground still clutching the subgun. Half his face comes off. His chest splits open like a clam. Ribs jut out like bloodied broken daggers from his flesh. Niggerfucker does not fall.
All of them look on in horror as he begins to grow back. Even the arm sprouts anew from the bloodied stump of his shoulder. First there is a stalk of sorts, covered in mucus and shimmering slime that extends from his body. Flesh grows from it like a mold, oozing and pulsating. Wormy red twigs form into fingers. It has become an arm, though one still less than human, in a matter of seconds.
The bloodied, slimy mess of a man-thing turns to Victor as he picks up his gun.
“After I face fuck every one of these shit hand, slurpee sellin’, diaper hat wearin’ dune coons, then you and I got some shit to settle,” he says.
Victor can’t stop laughing as they start in on the White Army.
THE BUTTON
Walter wakes up exactly where he passed out, in the little green upholstered chair in the corner of the infirmary room where the ninja rests. He fell asleep here hours ago, when it was still dark out. Now the room has an orange glow cast by the setting sun through the only window. That is not the only thing that has changed since he closed his eyes. The ninja stands over Walter, holding a small butter knife to his nose.
“Where is this place?” the long-haired Asian man demands. He is naked except for the bandages that wrap his arms and chest.
Walter grimaces. He has to piss like a race horse. He was drinking vodka last night because he ran out of scotch. He rolls his eyes downward without moving his head. The handle still rests in his lap.
“Where am I?” the ninja repeats.
“You’re on the fourth floor of the Graveyard building in Arizona.”
“Arizona? I’m in America?”
“Yeah. I gotta piss. You mind if I go do that?”
“You are the master of that steel demon!”
“About that. He was some kind of robot?”
“A cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton.”
“Is it true you japs are into robots? You know, sexually?”
“Why have you brought me here?”
“I can ans
wer your questions, well, most of them. But first could you put down the knife and let me take a leak?”
The ninja glares at him suspiciously.
“If I wanted you dead I would have killed you already. Look around. We didn’t even strap you down to anything.”
The ninja raises one eyebrow. He does glance around the room briefly. Then he lowers the knife and steps away.
Walter stands and walks hurriedly to the tiny adjoining bathroom. He isn’t entirely sure he will make it in time.
“I’m cutting it close,” he says as he swings the flimsy door open and unbuckles his belt. He drops his trousers as he reaches the toilet. He groans loudly.
“You are a strange man,” the ninja says. “What is your name?”
“Walter Stedman,” Walter shouts from the bathroom over the sound of splashing urine. “I assumed you knew that.”
“No.”
“What was your beef with Ashley?”
“My beef?”
“You know. Your dispute. The reason you were fighting.”
“He murdered my wife and child.”
“That’s a good reason.”
“It is… not a reason to do the things I did.”
“I got three girls, Tanaka. If anybody did anything to them I’d send the most twisted people I could to have a go with him before I fed the motherfucker his own guts.”
“You know my name? How?”
“Your daddy was the greatest ninja who ever lived. He killed the Dark Shogun in single combat. Cut off his head and saved Japan and the United States. Nineteen-eighty-eight. Of course, only a handful of people know that,” Walter says as he steps out of the bathroom. “I only read the file on it, but Kill Team One was there.”
The ninja turns up at Walter in surprise.
“Kill Team One? You know him?”
“Yeah.”
“I must find him.”
Walter chuckles.
“Nobody finds Kill Team One, Tanaka. He finds you.”
