by Mike Leon
On his way toward the exit, he stops. He hears something coming from a tiny closet off to the side of the room. He hears someone breathing.
He tears the closet door from its hinges and points his M4 inside at the face of Victoria Russell. He recognizes her from the picture Walter provided. She screams at first, but she settles quickly. Sid grabs her hand and yanks her to her feet outside the closet. She is wearing a rather elegant purple sun dress that stretches down to her feet.
“What do you want?” she demands.
“I’m here for you,” Sid answers coldly.
“Why? To ransom? Come now. I know you wouldn’t be here if you were a simple thief.”
“You don’t make any sense, lady,” he says as he places a thermite charge on the wall of the compartment, near the door where he came in.
“Who are you?”
“I’m uh… I’m Kill Team One. I guess…”
“Nonsense. I’ve met Kill Team One. He’s an older man.”
“No. That was the old Kill Team One.”
“Oh. No. You can’t be. You’re a child.”
“I’m almost sixteen.”
“You’re not even through high school!”
“What’s high school?”
“Well, you know. How do you not know?”
“I don’t have time for this.”
Sid unbuckles the small pack Deadeye wrapped around his left thigh. He presses it against Victoria’s chest so she will clutch it in her hands. She does.
“It’s not safe here,” he says. “Put this on.”
“Really?” she snarls back. “It was quite nice before you got here and started shooting up the place like the wild west.”
Sid grabs her arm and places it through the shoulder strap of the pack.
“Henry Krupp is a lizard monster. Walter Stedman sent me to get you off this plane.”
“Oh. Oh dear.”
Sid kneels down and snatches the bottom of Victoria’s dress. He tears the fabric around her legs like he’s unwinding a mummy. When he reaches her groin she slaps his hand away.
“That’s quite far enough, young man!” she says.
Sid shoves her against the hull as he ignites the thermite. It takes only seconds to burn its way through the thin sheeting and expose them to the cold air outside.
“Count to twenty and then pull this cord,” he says, placing the end of the parachute cord in her hand.
“What? What do you mean?”
Sid smacks her in the head.
“Count to twenty and then pull this cord!”
He picks her up off her feet with one hand and walks her over to the makeshift door he cut in the side of the plane.
“Start counting,” he tells her.
“But… I…”
Sid throws her through the hole and she vanishes into the wild blue yonder. Walter will find her later with the transponder they planted in the parachute pack.
Sid continues into the next room. The room is a lounge with two couches and two large televisions. At the other end is a door, and next to it, a staircase leading down to the deck below. The eyes of a bear skin rug look at him, as well as those of ten members of a tactical fire team. Sid takes in all of this with just a blink as he vanishes back behind the doorframe. One of the mercenaries pops off a few shots reflexively, but they miss. Sid tosses a flash grenade, one of only two grenades he brought along, into the room and waits to hear the bang signifying it has detonated. He counts. Hardened mercenaries will not be easily affected by such a simple distraction.
Bang.
He throws the other flash grenade into the room without looking. It sails into the room and over the heads of the mercenaries just as the other grenade pops. None of them sees it. Sid waits another three seconds. He yawns.
Bang. The grenade pops and Sid leans into the doorway and starts shooting. Seven of the ten mercenaries are still turned away from him – looking for the non-existent threat behind them. Sid kills them. He kills them all.
He makes his way through the room and over the bodies without incident. Beyond it, he finds the cockpit, where one more guard is positioned between the two pilots. Sid shoots the sentry through his left eye and a geyser of blood pours through the mutilated socket.
“Don’t shoot!” screams the pilot.
Sid approaches him without ever letting the man’s head out from between the sights of the M4. The co-pilot cries and soaks his pants.
Sid looks them over for any sign of concealed weapons. He sees none. Neither of them has tattoos, dog tags, hats, or any other items that would indicate military affiliation. These men are not soldiers.
“Keep flying the plane,” Sid tells them.
He backs out of the cockpit and returns to the lounge. He listens for anyone that might be waiting at the bottom of the stairs and then he hops down.
Sid finds himself in another small room, this one with a couch and several large bookcases filled with dusty old tomes bound in leather. He scans some of the bindings. Al Azif, Codex Sinaiticus, Voynich Manuscript, Unaussprechlichen Kulten – none of these things mean anything to Sid.
As he moves through the little library, he thinks he hears the faint sound of music from the room beyond. He moves closer to the door. Yes. He is certain. Someone is listening to music. Is it possible they did not hear the gunshots? He packs a new magazine in the M4 as he prepares to enter the next room.
He kicks the door down and it falls on a person, a woman, naked except for some neon striped knee socks. She is snorting a white powder from another woman’s bare back when the door comes down on her head. She shrieks in Sid’s sight picture. A tightly rolled hundred dollar bill has become lodged deep in her nose. Blood runs from the straw-like apparatus as she flops around on the carpet before him. The other girl scampers away toward a corner to cower and cover her naked body.
There in the very middle of the room sits Henry Krupp. He wears a pair of pin striped grey pants with no shirt. He is a hairless man, paper white and eerily tall and skinny. A platinum blond woman wearing a white lace butterfly thong sits in his lap. Curled on the floor next to them is a five hundred pound Bengal tiger. Another pokes its head around the corner of Krupp’s chair as Sid enters the room.
“Impossible!” Krupp shouts, startled by Sid’s presence in the room. He shoves the woman in his lap to the floor. “How did you make it past my guards?”
Sid does not care to answer. He snaps his rifle sights to Krupp’s face and takes the shot.
He misses.
He shoots again. One of the girls screams.
He misses.
“What the fuck?” Sid says.
He squeezes the trigger three more times and all of his shots whiz just past Krupp’s head and cut through the wall behind him.
“Valjean, Javert,” Krupp calls to his tigers. “Kill!”
Sid is unsure which tiger is which, but both of the hulking beasts come at him together. This happens just as the jostled prostitute on the floor stands and tries to pull the rolled up c-note from her nasal cavity. She succeeds just as the tiger on Sid’s left crashes into her on its way to him. The tiger’s claws dig into her shoulders and its jaws clamp down on her jugular as it takes her to the floor.
Sid spears the other tiger with the barrel of his M4, the muzzle sliding right between those teeth and down the tiger’s throat. Sid squeezes the trigger and empties the rest of his magazine into the tiger’s chest cavity. He drops the gun. He won’t have time to reload before the other tiger is on him. He unsheathes his KA-BAR and crouches into a fighting stance as the tiger hops away from its distraction.
The prostitute writhes and screams as blood spurts from her neck. She spins around flailing and spraying like an oscillating sprinkler watering a lawn with arterial blood. Krupp runs for another door on the opposite side of the room.
The tiger moves for Sid’s left side, but Sid shifts right and steps up onto a leather sofa just inside the room. He and the tiger circle each other until he moves
the whole length of the couch and steps back down to the floor. Now the tiger has the door to its back and its fallen partner beside.
The tiger lunges. Sid brings his knife up to impale the beast through the throat. He catches the right leg in his hand, but the left leg is free and those claws dig into his right forearm – his knife arm. The struggle becomes little more than an endurance test, but Sid has the upper hand. The more the tiger pushes forward, the farther into its body his knife blade tears. It still advances, being too brutishly stupid to understand it is killing itself, or maybe this is the effect of the nerve agent. Either way, the tiger halts its progress with its teeth brushing against Sid’s nose. His knife has sawed nearly a foot down into the animal’s chest.
He drops the tiger carcass to the floor and glances quickly at his arm. The claws left superficial puncture wounds near his elbow. His arm is coated in a thick layer of warm slippery blood, but he is certain most of it came from the tiger. Sid scans the room for threats.
On the floor in front of him, the girl who was sitting in Krupp’s lap kneels over the bleeding prostitute in the neon socks. Her white underwear is stained red with blood and the crimson liquid covers much of her nude flesh as well. She has her hands clamped tightly around the other girl’s neck in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding.
The naked girl they were using as a table remains in the corner, screaming uncontrollably.
Henry Krupp is out of sight, having already retreated to the next room.
Sid kicks open the door to the next chamber and finds himself in a room adorned by strange things in tall glass cases: a golden dagger with ruby studs, a silver chalice, ancient looking books. They each have little paper labels, but Sid cares little about these artifacts. They make poor cover from gunfire and mean little else to him.
A hand reaches from between two of the displays to grasp for Sid’s arm. He jumps back, out of reach. To his right is an iron cage no larger than a man and shaped like one as well. Inside, a young woman, nude except for a translucent negligee, reaches for Sid’s hand.
“Help me! You have to get me out of here!” she cries. Day old mascara runs down her cheeks. “He’s going to sacrifice me to Satan!”
“I hear the maiden’s call,” proclaims Krupp’s voice.
Ahead of Sid, the floor is raised and there is a sort of table sitting atop the higher section. It is an altar, a thing Sid has not seen before, as he has never set foot in a church. Krupp stands atop the altar, covered in a black cloth robe that stretches down to the floor. The robe’s drawstring dangles around his knees and his chest is exposed by the open front. A wide hood hangs down the back. Tucked under Krupp’s left arm is a bulky doorstopper of a book, leather bound and cracked, its pages brown with age. The front is emblazoned with a five pointed star that is half covered by his old and wrinkled arm. In Krupp’s right hand he holds something much smaller, something his fingers wrap around easily – a crystal skull.
“You are only half right, my dear. Sacrifice, yes, but not to Satan. Christian fairy tales interest me not. My pact is with older things – elder things; gods so old that an aeon is but a single breath to them!”
“You follow gods?” Sid asks. “Like the people in the desert?”
“So primitive, I know, but certain rituals in Mr. Crowley’s grimoire do allow me to extend my lifespan – provided that I bathe in the blood of the slaughtered lamb.”
Sid’s eyes dart around the room.
“I don’t see any lambs,” he says.
“It’s symbolic, of course,” Krupp sneers.
“He means the girls on the plane!” shrieks the caged woman.
“Oh…” Sid says. That makes sense now.
“Come now. Would you expect me to let them leave? Not after they’ve seen all this,” Krupp says, motioning to the plane around him.
Sid has had enough of this strange old man. He has a job to do. He raises his rifle and pops off a shot at Krupp’s head. He misses. Then he misses again. This can’t be right. He squeezes the trigger down and empties the rest of the magazine at Krupp’s chest. He should have just filled the fucker’s center mass with twenty-eight rounds, but every shot narrowly missed the man. Sid can see where most of them punched through the wall behind his target. This is embarrassing.
“I cannot be harmed by bullets, assassin,” Krupp taunts. “Surely you were told this before they sent you here to die.”
No one told Sid about that at all. Krupp can’t be shot? Sid wishes he couldn’t be shot. That would make everything he does so much easier. He drops his gun to the floor and draws his poisoned knife. Time to stab this motherfucker.
Sid leaps at Krupp with the knife extended. He comes down, aiming to impale the old man through the heart and kill him faster than the nerve agent can take effect. He turns the blade sideways mid thrust to slide smoothly between Krupp’s ribs. He is right on the mark, but he sails through Krupp’s body, as if the man is simply an apparition. Quickly, he turns around to see Krupp standing behind him.
“I command many magicks, assassin,” Krupp roars. “Two lifetimes I have spent collecting relics both holy and unholy, procuring tomes filled with dark knowledge, uncovering things that were sacred manifest on this Earth. Would you like to see my collection?”
Krupp raises the crystal skull in his right hand high above his head and cackles loudly as all of the glass display cases shatter behind him. The glass does not fall. Rather, it floats in the air, the pieces moving together to form a wall of jagged shards the width of the room. Krupp smiles and points at Sid with the crystal skull.
Sid leaps over the altar behind him as a thousand glass razors are launched through the room together, a flying phalanx of crystal death. Any normal man would be diced to ribbons, but Sid is behind the great oak table in time to save his skin. He sees the wall behind him stuck with sparkling broken glass, all except for the outline of the altar in front of him.
He stands and looks over the altar for Krupp. The old man remains where he was, unharmed and thoroughly entertained. Then the ruby studded dagger from the display case darts for his face. He catches the knife with his left hand, but whatever dark force compels it is strong and does not stop. He tightens his grip and wrestles back against a foe that is not there. He sheathes his own knife and grips the blade of the dagger with his right hand. Now, both hands struggle against the unwielded dagger and he is winning. Slowly, he is winning. He glances to Krupp and finds that the old man is covered in sweat, his face a mess of bulging veins and gnashing teeth. Sid pushes harder.
Krupp gasps and the dagger falls inanimate in Sid’s hands.
“You are young and strong, but brawn can only take you so far, assassin,” Krupp says between his panting. “Now DIE!”
As he shouts, there is a spark from the crystal skull that arcs out of his hand. A flash of blue lightning stretches out at Sid, but it is caught by the dagger still in his hand. He tries to hold, but the metal sizzles hotter and hotter until it is like a burning ember. He makes up his mind to discard it when his gloves catch fire. Sid throws the dagger at Krupp and the old man’s lightning stops as the dagger passes through him.
Sid’s burned hands hurt, but this is something he can ignore. He must ignore. He draws his KA-BAR from its sheath again and prepares for the next bolt of lightning. It strikes this knife like the last, but the KA-BAR’s grip is not metal like the last. The leather insulates his hand from the raw electrical energy conducted down the steel blade. It shocks him. It burns him. He roars like a madman. He can take it.
Sid advances. Krupp shrieks with terror and the lightning intensifies. It does not stop the kill team. Krupp emits a crushed, exhausted, fragmented whimper as the tip of the knife enters his throat. Sid thinks to put it in the rest of the way, but then he stops. He’s angry. He hates this man. He hates this place. He wants to watch him suffer.
And so he suffers. Blisters form on his skin. Foam runs from his mouth and Sid can hear his bones breaking from the intense and uncontrolled
muscle contractions. Henry Krupp dies pissing and shitting himself, when his spine finally gives way and his head turns completely backwards to stare up at Sid.
Then Sid saws the old creep’s head off and makes his way for the door with the severed head in hand.
“Please let me out!” cries the girl in the cage.
Sid stops. He picks up his M4 and snaps another magazine into the receiver. He pulls back the charging handle, blasts away the lock and then rips the cage door open, before he darts from the room.
In the next room, he finds the girl who was mangled by the tiger. Miraculously, she is still alive. The promiscuous woman wearing the white underwear remains with her hands clamped around that throat wound. Sid steps over them and goes up the stairs. He finds the third of Krupp’s partners huddled on the cockpit floor crying between the pilots.
Sid sprints through the rest of the plane and encounters no resistance. He leaps over the bodies of the slain. A few women scream at the sight of Krupp’s severed head dangling from Sid’s hand. He keeps moving.
When he reaches the hole he blasted in the fuselage to gain entry, he packs the head in the empty backpack and straps it around his shoulders before he climbs up onto the top of the plane.
Outside, he watches as the C-17 piloted by Walter’s men dips in for a visit. Sid can see Walter standing on the aft ramp only fifty feet above the cockpit of the Condor. The Graveyard commander tosses out a yellow line and Sid dashes for the front of the plane. He catches hold of the rope and the C-17 pulls up to get him the hell out of there.
He did good in there. He defeated a powerful enemy after a hard fight. For once, his mission was not a failure or a slaughter. It was a true challenge which he overcame – far more glorious than the massacres he took part in with Kill Team Three. Maybe the days of burning homes and mowing down children have passed him. He even left the women alive.
