by Mike Leon
“Fuck!” Walter screams.
“You are being a baby,” Ivan answers.
“You shot my fucking gun out of my hand!”
“I could have shot your brain out of your head.”
Walter grunts as he pulls on the piece of shrapnel sticking out of his right hand above the thumb. Blood trickles down his arm.
“I guess this is better then.”
“There’s more in your shoulder,” Ivan says. Walter turns his head to look down at his shoulder and sees more blood running down his shirt.
“Jesus, Van.”
“We cannot remain here. Blood Drinker may have followed me.”
“Who the fuck is Blood Drinker?”
“General Blood Drinker. He’s a Nazi fucking lizard,” Ivan says as he checks around the corner. He only needs to glance around the corner for a fraction of a second to paint the whole scene in his mind: a row of cars, a girl in six inch stiletto heels peeking from behind a purple BMW, the hubcap on the ground, a flattened tire. She must have been trying to change the tire in those shoes. His shot scared her. She may come looking to see what has happened. She may even call the police.
“You must be joking.”
“No! I promise you. This is nothing but the truth. He is real. They are real. I have fought them twice now. Once two decades ago and then again in that warehouse where they killed that man.”
“Why? Why kill Potts? The guy was a loon.”
“No. Van Duyn’s lawyer had a sealed copy of the photos for Potts and also me. He was followed. They ambushed us. Potts tried to run, but they grabbed him. Hung him from the ceiling and cut his legs off. They eat the legs, Walter. They like the legs best.”
“You tried to kill Reynolds, Van.”
“No. Blood Drinker took my cane from the warehouse and used it to kill Reynolds, only he didn’t know it wasn’t Reynolds.”
“Why Reynolds?”
“Listen to me. We don’t have much time. Tell them I am dead. You killed me here tonight. There is a convicted child molester at this address. Kill him and burn the body.”
Ivan slaps a scrap of paper into Walter’s hand.
“What the fuck?”
“His dental records are a perfect match, in case they check. They can’t check DNA, because no one has my DNA. I have this contingency in place for this very thing.”
“This is insane!”
“Walter, the future of humanity counts on you doing this thing for me. Go to Van Duyn’s library. The evidence is there, somewhere. The lizards never found the originals.”
“Evidence? What kind of evidence?”
“You will know it when you see it.”
Ivan awakes to the smell of flowers, no, perfume – a woman’s perfume. He sees himself reflected in deep blue eyes that are pieced together like a mosaic, each tiny tile a slightly different shade.
“What is your name?” he says, demanding more than asking.
“First, what’s yours?” the woman answers. “I have to make sure you don’t have brain damage.”
“They call me many names. Which one have you been told?” He pulls back and observes more of this woman who hovers over him. She has long dark hair tied in a bun behind her head, full lips, full breasts and a skinny waist. Most of her is covered by a white lab coat, to his disappointment, but he can still tell this is quite a woman. Everything a woman should be.
“If I told you, that would defeat the purpose,” she says.
Ivan glances around the room to confirm what he already knows. He is in a hospital bed. Which hospital he does not know. It does not matter. They are alone in here, and that does matter.
“I am only a ghost, and some men call me that,” he tells her.
“That’s funny. You mean that squad of commandos outside the door is here to guard something that doesn’t exist? Seems hard to believe.”
“Almost as hard to believe as the most beautiful woman in the world being in the same room as the most dangerous man in the world, but here we are.”
“Are all dangerous men such smooth talkers?”
“I don’t care much for talk.”
He snatches hold of her arm and she lets out a yelp as he yanks her onto the hospital bed with him. Her skinny little legs thrash in a narrow pencil skirt as he clamps one hand down on the small of her back and the other over her mouth.
“Relax,” he says. “Lie here for a minute. That is all. A minute and no more.”
She stops her thrashing and stares into his eyes. He releases his hand from her mouth and puts it on the back of her head.
“I don’t know you,” she says.
“I am a killer,” he tells her. “A wolf amongst the flock. What is there to know about an animal, besides that it is an animal?”
“My cat has a very charming personality compared to other cats.”
“It licks itself and chases string. Yes? It does what all cats do. It is a cat.”
“My cat is unusually cuddly.”
“That is not different. All animals do such things.”
He pulls her face to his. His nose is rubbing against her and her lips are moist against his.
“What is your name?” he demands again.
“Doctor Ellison,” she answers, coldly.
“Doctor? What parents name their child Doctor? You Americans do such strange things.”
“Doctor Monica Ellison. Monica.”
“Ah. Yes. Now that is a proper name for a perfect woman. Now, Monica, you may leave if you wish, and I will not stop you, but if you stay…”
He slowly slides his hand from the small of her back down to her butt and takes hold of it firmly. She gasps.
“If you stay, I will take you. I will take you like a woman deserves to be taken, over and over until you feel more alive than you ever have before. If you stay.”
There is a moment of hesitation before she answers.
“Well, that’s quite a line, Mr. Ghost, but I’ll be going now.”
“Shush. Stop lying to yourself. I can feel you and smell you. Your breath quivers and your heart races. You grow wet where a woman grows wet. Perfume and a lab coat cannot hide these things from me.”
Her eyes are wide with disbelief, anxiety, and a little bit of fear. A little bit of fear is never a bad thing.
“What if someone walks in?” she whispers.
“I will kill him where he stands.”
And then he has the feeling of Monica’s delicate body rubbing against him, her soft, wet tongue in his mouth, squirming against his own.
He’s kissing a different set of lips. They are plastic, cold and dead. Ivan opens his eyes and sees the drooping, bloodied face of Shelly Baum. Her burnt hair hangs to one side of her skull and her glazed, lifeless eyes stare straight at him.
“HA HA HA HA HA HA,” cackles Blood Drinker, as he pushes Shelly’s severed head against Ivan’s face. “Don’t you want to make out with the pretty lady?”
It doesn’t scare Ivan. He has seen too many corpses, touched too many corpses, been buried in too many corpses, to be afraid of them anymore.
But it does make him angry.
“I will kill you, Blood Drinker,” he says calmly. “I will find a way, and I will kill you.”
KILL TEAM THREE II
“How is it that your injuries regenerate?” Victor asks. He sits on top of a smoking heap of twisted metal that was a White Army APC. He sharpens his wavy knife against the jagged edge of steel flowering from the top of the APC where Niggerfucker pounded it using a bazooka stolen from a White Army trooper with the severed arm still attached.
On the ground beside him, Niggerfucker clamps his palms around the skull of a dying soldier. He squeezes them together, straining, veins bulging, until the skull gives way and crunches between his hands.
He wipes his mitts on the ground. Around them are the bloodied and broken remains of the ten men that came from the APC. The vehicle sits in the space between two buildings obstructing the view of anyone out in the street
. They are hidden from the eyes of the patrols here, though it will only be a few moments before the rest of the army follows the trail of bodies to find them. For hours, Victor and Niggerfucker have cut, stomped, burned and blasted their way through swaths of the pathetic bastards. He knows they have killed an entire company already, if not more.
“A hooker and craigslist,” the big leather clad freak says, as he pulls his hair back out of his face and tucks it behind him. He is a man of few words. Victor can appreciate that. Words are cheap.
“What’s craigslist?”
“You fuckin’ with me boy?”
“Not even in the least.”
“It’s a internet thing.”
“The internet makes you grow back your arms?”
“Nah.”
Niggerfucker sits down and lights a cigarette. He rests against the huge black tire of the APC.
“I was doin’ this thing in Atlanta one night, and I wanted me a whore, so I called one up offa’ the craigslist. It wasn’t my idea. It was this guy Roach Dust I ran with back then. Anyway, whore shows up ’bout two hours later with some rock she says is government shit. An’ we just figure it’s government shit and that’s always the best shit. Only we don’t know she stole it from some fuckin’ lab where they do experiments they ain’t even supposed to do. We all smoked that shit and don’t remember shit after. Roach Dust, he wakes up a day an a half later and his skin’s covered in shit that ain’t supposed to grow on skin; teeth, and eyes and little pieces of ear and tits growing out of his arms. Whore wasn’t so lucky. She melted. I think most of her insides leaked out her ass from lookin’ at what was left. I felt fine. ’Cept when Roach Dust went crazy and tried to off us both, I took a .00 buck in the chest and just watched it all grow back. Been that way since.”
“That’s a good story,” Victor says. “I’m not sure I believe it.”
“Whatever. I don’t give two shits. How come you’re immune to bullets?”
Victor sneers. In truth, he has no idea. It is peculiar how bullets always seem to miss him, even when he is standing still. The best he can figure is that the universe itself is on his side, driving him to complete his mission.
“I am far too great a warrior to be felled by bullets.”
“Yeah? That ain’t too likely a story either.”
Calling him a liar? Victor would normally kill a man for that kind of slight, but that seems futile in this case. It appears Niggerfucker cannot be killed, at least not by any means he knows yet…
“So,” Victor says “Are you going to keep killing rags with me forever, ’cause we have unfinished business.”
Niggerfucker tosses his cigarette aside.
“I don’t know too much no more,” he says.
Victor spins his knife in hand. He sees his own reflection covered in blood as if he bathed in the stuff. It is a good look for him he thinks. He smiles.
“Somebody offered me a whole shit ton of money, I mean a got-damn truckload of money, to off your skeezy ass,” Niggerfucker tells him. “Thing is, now that I get here, I’m not too sure I want to off a guy that kills camel fuckers as much as you do.”
And then Niggerfucker laughs a booming, obnoxious, smoke-filled emphysema laugh – the kind of laugh one might expect to hear on a fifteenth century pirate ship.
“HAR! HAR! HAR!”
It reminds Victor of the way Ashley used to laugh. That was in the days before the kill team commander tried to kill him – the good days.
In that moment, some bit of logic clicks together in Victor Hansen’s mind that probably should have come to him much earlier. He feels stupid over it for a very brief second, before he moves on to the next order of business.
“How much do you hate the ragheads, Niggerfucker?”
“Even more than the blacks. Rags did nine-eleven. I lost a brother in Iraq. Nobody hates rags more ’an me.”
“I do. I want to kill them. All of them. Every last stinking one of them. Do you understand? That’s why I’m here.”
“So what? You’re going to kill a billion people right there with those two hands? That ought to be rich.”
“No. I realize now that I can’t kill them all. I don’t have the firepower.”
“So then what’s your master plan now?”
Victor smiles. “Get a bigger gun.”
MASAMUNE
“It took them a month to fix the door your daddy knocked down,” says Walter Stedman, standing in front of the bulky steel door to the top floor vault in the Graveyard building.
Yoshida Tanaka watches as Walter takes the key he wears on a chain around his neck and inserts it into a small metal panel mounted on the tan brick wall of the hallway leading to the vault door. Tanaka has on some simple black pants and shirt that were given to him by Walter.
“Any idea how he did that?” Walter asks. He stops, hand still on the key, and looks back at Yoshida.
The younger Tanaka can only guess. Katsuhiro was a master of ninja secrets, some of them well outside the scope of reality for most rational minded people. Tanaka has one idea, but he does not care to discuss it with Walter.
“None. My father was capable of many incredible things.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t believe you. But fuck it. I’m over it,” Walter says, as he turns the key. A dull, spindly, metal microphone extends from the panel on the wall. Walter speaks his name into the microphone. Then a blue light shines over his face from a device inside the panel. A screen the size of a palm flashes ACCESS GRANTED.
The vault door swings open, making no sound at all.
Walter leads the way into the vault and Tanaka follows. The inside is a simple rectangular room, brightly lit with hanging bars of fluorescent white. The long walls to the sides are lined with file drawers, each displaying a number typed on a paper card. At the far end of the room is a collection of objects Tanaka guesses are simply too big to fit in the file drawers. He sees a set of European medieval armor, some swords propped in the left corner, a large clay pot as tall as a man’s knees, some unidentifiable modern machine with switches and unlit lights, a steel briefcase marked with a piece of masking tape that says “MacGuffin Device” in magic marker, a book the size of two cereal boxes stacked together that appears to be bound in human skin, and something that resembles a trite 50s science fiction movie ray gun. There are some other things Tanaka cannot place.
“Don’t fucking touch anything,” Walter warns. Yoshida has no desire to disobey. Some of these artifacts may be delicate – or dangerous.
Walter walks to the back of the room and opens locker number two-ninety-one. From inside, he pulls a brown cardboard tube the width of a wine bottle and five feet long. He grabs hold of a nearby rolling gurney that was left in the middle of the room and picks the cap from the top of the cardboard. Yoshida watches as he draws something from inside, long and skinny, wrapped in purple cloth. He sets the object on the gurney and begins unrolling the cloth.
Inside, is a Japanese sword sheathed in an elaborately etched koshirae. Yoshida cannot see the blade but the handle is wrapped in ray skin that appears very aged. Walter unsheathes the blade and Yoshida sees a cloud-like hamon he recognizes only from books and museums.
“Is that?”
“Yeah. It’s an original Masamoon,” Walter says, pronouncing the last syllable all wrong. “Van brought it back from Japan in the 80s. They say it’s priceless. I call that a load a shit though. Everything’s got a price, except maybe some men’s souls, at least as far as I’ve seen. Here.”
Walter passes the sword over to Tanaka. It feels perfect in his hands, even better than the sword he left behind when he battled the steel demon. That sword was a masterpiece as well, but this makes it look like a mere tool.
“It is an honor to view this spectacle of wonder.”
“Take it, kid,” Walter says as he slams the locker shut.
“What? This is a great work of art.”
“It’s a weapon – a weapon I don’t need – and it belongs in yo
ur hands, cutting up whatever the fuck is out there between you and the kill team. The armory in the basement should have throwing stars, rope, climbing gear, whatever the hell else you want.”
“When will we be departing?”
“You misunderstood me. I’m not going along on this one. I got something else to do. Besides, from what the kid says, he’s probably already dead.”
“No. The spirits would not send me on a fool’s errand.”
“I hope you’re right. When you have what you need, go to landing pad B behind the building. There’s a chopper waiting to take you wherever you want. Try the diner in Austin where Sid last saw him. You might find something.”
“Why are you doing all this? Why help me?”
Walter looks away from Tanaka for a moment, like he can’t quite face him over the thoughts in his head.
“I got my reasons,” he says. Yoshida would ask him for more, but he respects the man’s privacy, and they are interrupted by Walter’s secretary, a dour looking American woman, knocking on the wall outside the vault.
“Mr. Stedman,” she says. “There’s a very strange call for you on line four.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Walter yells out of the vault.
“I…” she stammers. “I don’t know. I thought it was a prank, but… I don’t think so anymore.”
Walter looks at the ninja and shrugs.
“I’ll take it down the hall,” he says.
Walter slaps Yoshida on the shoulder.
“Good luck out there,” Walter says.
Yoshida nods, and runs from the vault.
What the fuck is this? Some kind of joke?
Who is this really? Morgan?
A dialogue? What kind of dialogue?
Why do you sound like a dragon in an empty warehouse?
You eat our babies.
Yeah! You eat our god damned babies!
