by Mike Leon
It did not take long for Victor to convince the werewolf to join his cause. He was angry at the boy, but anger can be put aside. The time spent since the end of Kill Team Three has been a terrible bore. Victor promises more of what the werewolf craves: shooting, killing, destruction, loud music. So far, he is living up to those promises.
The bodies are piling up after two minutes, and the flow of screaming innocents from the hospital exit is beginning to slow. It is time to go inside. The werewolf howls.
The inside of the building is exactly as he imagined, a maze of yellow painted dry-wall and windowless wooden doors. Down the hallway ahead of him, he sees the remaining metal frames of the automatic sliding doors that separate the next wing from this one. The glass lies in a mess of jagged pieces on the floor. What wing is this? The werewolf looks for a sign. He sees none. He cares not.
A screaming elderly man dashes from an open door in front of him and the werewolf stops shooting to snatch the man up, tear his head off with his teeth, and fling the head at the wall. The body is added to the carpet of them already lining the floor from wall to wall. The M2’s .50 BMG rounds have easily punched their way through the stampeding crowd, deep down the hallway to leave many dead that the werewolf could never even see through the masses.
The werewolf walks down the hallway, stomping on that corpse carpet without a care. His gun is ready to obliterate any living thing that appears to him. He reaches the double doors and they try to slide open automatically, but a body has fallen through the right side door and it wedges between the frame and the wall, allowing it only to two thirds of the way before sliding back to a closed position. This repeats until the werewolf smashes the door frame down with his furry brown fist.
Around the corner, he sees Victor clad in that puke green duster he always wears and some body armor. The boy is wearing a Halloween mask that resembles a grotesquely mangled human face, but not any particular horror movie monster or creature of folklore. A rubber eyeball dangles from one of the eye-sockets and the mask is splattered with blood which the color blind werewolf has trouble discerning from the intended features of the creation.
Victor is on the floor raping a nurse. The girl has freckles. She doesn’t look like an Egyptian. He has her blue scrub pants pulled down and her face pressed against the white linoleum floor. Leave it to Victor. That kid can’t go twenty four hours without putting his dick in something that doesn’t want it there. Victor looks up, slaps a plastic explosive charge on the wall beside him, and flashes two fingers at the werewolf. He says something too, but the werewolf can’t hear him over the death metal in his ears, and he can’t try to read lips through that mask. He doesn’t really care anyway. Then Victor commences with the rape again. The werewolf slaps his own explosive at this end of the hallway. Two minutes. In two minutes, Victor wants to be gone.
He stomps through the halls, machine gunning a few more stragglers over the next sixty seconds. One of them, a man wearing surgical scrubs, catches no less than fifteen rounds in the chest from only a few feet away. His whole body seems to disintegrate into a pink mist and his arms, legs, and head fall to the floor by themselves.
The werewolf makes his way back to the doors where he entered and leaves another explosive by the door as he leaves. He circles the building to find the black van they arrived in. The first police are beginning to arrive, but they are armed with pistols and clubs and there are but a few. The werewolf cuts them down with the M2 and only takes one bullet to the shoulder. It will heal in minutes.
He reaches the van at the same time as Niggerfucker. The werewolf does not like that man. He’s greasy and inarticulate. Niggerfucker opens the rear door to find the Philistine already waiting. The werewolf slides the M2 into the bed of the van before shifting forms. He would strain to carry it as a human.
The change is no longer painful as it once was. It does hurt, but not enough to bother him anymore. In his human form, Úlfhednar is scrawny and pale. His pants begin to fall down and he pulls the straps of some suspenders up over his shoulders to hold them in place. His giant headphones fall down around his neck and the sound of George Corpsegrinder Fisher’s voice gives way to the sounds of the world around him.
“You’ve been shot,” says the Philistine.
Úlfhednar shrugs. He has been shot many times before. He is not concerned with such trivial wounds anymore.
“Where’s Victor?” asks Niggerfucker.
“Right here,” calls Victor Hansen, walking toward them with the nurse from inside slung over his left shoulder and an AK-47 slung over the right. He sets the nurse down on the grass at his feet. She tries to run, but he holds her by her long hair – hair that is naturally orange and curly. Úlfhednar can see that now that his color vision has returned. This girl isn’t from around here at all.
“This is Beth, everyone,” Victor says. He peels off the Halloween mask and tosses it carelessly aside. “She’s here to help people she says. Help ragheads? But she’s not a raghead?”
“Please let me go,” Beth cries.
“We really need to get moving,” Killa yells anxiously from the driver’s seat of the van.
“Let me go!” the girl shouts.
“Okay,” Victor says, rolling his eyes. He lets go of her hair and she runs as fast as she can from his grasp. Niggerfucker raises a pistol to shoot her in the back, but Victor waives him off.
“Why let her go?” Niggerfucker asks.
“She’s not a rag,” Victor says. He digs in the left pocket of his duster for something, the detonator, and he raises it in his left hand.
“And besides,” Victor continues, clamping his finger down on the trigger of the detonator. Úlfhednar flinches, expecting the entire building to explode in front of them. Instead, he hears a sharp crack from the fleeing nurse. She stumbles, clutching her pelvis and tries to scream, but only an agonizing heave escapes her mouth with a spurt of blood.
“I put a blasting cap up her ass,” Victor says. He howls with laughter as he climbs into the back of the van. Úlfhednar nods at his creativity.
“Did we lose anyone?” the Philistine asks.
“Steve took a bullet when the first cops showed up,” Niggerfucker says.
“The knife throwing guy?” she says.
“Yeah. He’s dead.”
Victor laughs and slaps the werewolf on the back.
“Just like old times!” he says.
The Philistine pulls the trigger on the hospital as they’re speeding away and Úlfhednar watches the whole thing come down like a house of cards.
“I call that a mission success,” Victor says. “In and out in four minutes.”
“I admit I’m impressed,” the Philistine answers.
“Impressed enough to share some things with me?”
“What kinds of things?”
“Weapons of mass destruction, either conventional, chemical or biological.”
“What makes you think I have things like that?” She smiles slyly.
“I’m not sure you do. But you know where to get them, and how to make them work.”
“Maybe.”
Victor seems to settle for that answer. He doesn’t ask her again. He is right though. Úlfhednar knows the Philistine has knowledge of these things, and maybe even possesses a hidden cache of them somewhere.
Victor is silent for most of the ride back. He does make one unusual comment to the werewolf.
“Funny,” he says. “That girl wasn’t a raghead, but she was just as much fun to kill.”
CATACOMB
Walter can still hear the screams. Five hundred miles away, he can still hear the screams. He knows they are not real anymore. He tells himself that over and over again, but they won’t go away.
He’s sipping the last of a thermos of black coffee and letting his eyes wander over something very strange. It is a painting, roughly the size of a U-Haul truck, depicting an explosion of gaudy colours. A multitude of children dressed in ethnic costumes are crowded around an an
vil, on which a blond boy wearing lederhosen hammers a sword into a ploughshare. A Japanese boy holds the end of the sword for him. A Russian boy in a Mongol hat and an American boy dressed in a blue and yellow Cub Scout uniform bring more swords wrapped in Russian and American flags side by side. Below the children is stretched a tall cadaver, grey and still, its face covered in some kind of skull-like gas mask with eyes that are hollow and black. It clutches a Russian rifle, but wears the cap and coat of a Nazi soldier. Doves roost on top of the body and the red and orange stripes of a rainbow curl around it like a shroud, extending away to join the rest of a band of colors that arches over the children and off the edge of the painting.
“The Tanguma mural?” Victoria says, startling him. Walter turns as she hands him a cup of Starbucks coffee. She’s wearing her own clothes that she had some servants bring to her at the Graveyard building – a pair of blue jeggings over some Christian somebody heels, and a loose fitting purple so-and-so top. Walter can’t remember the designer names even though she mentioned them at least three times. Behind her, Jeppesen terminal is alive with hundreds of people hurrying to their destinations. Mothers drag children by the hand. Men in suits stride along the tile floor while taking business calls. Young people walk while thumbing smartphones, occasionally looking up from the screens to avoid running into benches or trash cans. None of them has the slightest inkling what is buried beneath this place. Well, there’s one guy who might, but he’s ranting and handing out pamphlets that people are promptly throwing away.
“This thing is weird,” Walter says. He has to put the screaming behind him. Has to block it out. He mustn’t let them know.
“It’s called the Children of the World Dream of Peace. My father had a hand in commissioning it,” she tells him. “There used to be another part where the rainbow continued into a picture of the soldier destroying a city and killing children. It was painted over because people complained.”
“Go figure,” Walter says, sarcastically. He can’t guess why someone would put something like that on display in public and not expect to cause a ruckus.
“It’s supposed to symbolize the children of all nations coming together to put an end to war and start a new era of peace and harmony.”
Walter looks back at the painting again. Rainbows. Smiling children. One of them is playing a guitar and singing. Two more hold hands. Walter is too cynical for this crap.
“I don’t buy it,” he says. “When I was a kid, I got in fights, played with toy guns, played army, played GI Joe, and Stony, remember Stony?”
Victoria shakes her head.
“Of course not. Before your time,” Walter says. “Point is, I never held hands with other kids or sang songs or did any of the shit in this picture. The children of the world don’t dream of peace, they dream of war. It’s why the world’s so fucked up, kid.”
“Always the old soldier, Walter,” Victoria says. “I think the mural is endearing.”
“It’s a free country. Let’s get moving.” Walter has on his brown trench coat over his slacks, but today he has a surprise stashed behind him. He brought along one of those Daewoo shotguns and slung it in a leather holster behind his back, down the length of the coat. He has a 1911 from the armory as well. He couldn’t look at the Sig anymore. He put it in a shoebox and gave it to Cody Lambert.
The secret elevator that takes them down to the catacombs is concealed in a maintenance hallway behind a door marked SECURITY and requires a special key for entry. Beyond that is a retinal scanner to board the elevator, as well as a voice recognition system. Only four living people can access this elevator. Walter is not one of them, so Victoria holds her eye open for the retinal scan. After the doors slide open, she speaks into a tiny microphone mounted on a skinny steel arm above the elevator’s control panel.
“We have a protractor,” she says. The little black monitor to the left of the microphone mounting flashes ACCESS GRANTED.
“What does that mean?” Walter asks.
“There really isn’t enough time to explain it,” Victoria says, rolling her eyes at him.
“We might be down here for days.”
“I stand by my original assertion.”
Walter doesn’t know what to make of that. He shrugs it off. The trip down the elevator is short and boring. They only have to descend a hundred feet or so to the hub that marks the center of the catacomb.
When the doors slide open again, Walter goes first. He is greeted by three submachine gun barrels in his face. Anton Reynolds’ guards are on the other end of those guns. The man came prepared. All of them are fully suited in body armor complete with tactical helmets sporting bullet proof visors. These guys won’t be losing any small arms fights down here.
Reynolds peers around the shoulder of one of the guards. Walter leans to see Reynolds lower half. Part of him has had this lingering, nagging feeling that maybe the reason Reynolds only showed his face in close-up on conference calls was that from the neck down he was some kind of slimy, green, tentacled monstrosity. That is not the case though, as Reynolds appears fully human down to his toes.
“Where’s the kill team, Walter?” Reynolds calls out.
“Which one?” Walter answers, grinning slyly at Reynolds. It makes the cocky bastard nervous.
“Not funny, dickhead. Not funny.” Reynolds checks behind him and then, oddly, the ceiling, although Walter would probably check the ceiling too if Kill Team One was out to get him.
“Nobody else came along for the ride?” Reynolds concludes aloud.
“Just me and Vicki,” Walter answers. “And this guy.”
He pulls open the front of his trench coat to reveal a tactical vest with dozens of little cylinders marked HIGH EXPLOSIVE strapped to the outside.
“A suicide vest,” Reynolds says.
“A dirty bomb,” Walter corrects. “Wired to a dead man’s switch. Any of your lackeys gets an itchy trigger finger and they’ll be hosing us all out of here in a century or so, when this facility isn’t irradiated anymore.”
“Real classy, you fucking prick.”
Eric Du Pont is standing back, away from the rest of them, and alone. He brought no team of body guards, no weapons, just a pair of knee length jeans shorts and a Hawaiian shirt that is unbuttoned to his tanned, diamond-hard abs. Walter never looked like that. Even when he was that age and lifting every day, he didn’t look like that. The kid is a specimen to be sure. He’s wearing flip flops. Real men don’t wear flip flops…
“Walter isn’t taking any chances,” Eric says. “Neither are you, from the looks of it.”
“What the fuck?!! It’s a talking Hollister mannequin!” Anton jokes. “Everybody run!”
“What’s Hollister?” Walter asks.
“It’s a trendy teenage apparel shop,” Victoria says. “I believe I own it.”
“You believe wrong,” Anton says. “Hollister is an Abercrombie brand. They’re publically traded, and we both have the majority shares.”
“Isn’t that nice,” Victoria says.
“But I have more of them than you,” he adds, quickly. “Just saying.”
Walter hears the elevator doors slide open behind them and he turns, expecting Elkan Rothschild. Instead, he is greeted by a husky black man with a tight afro and two Smith and Wesson M&Ps strapped across his chest over a smooth black dress shirt and a pair of bell bottom pants. He has a neatly trimmed beard.
“Akimbo,” Walter exclaims. Walter recognizes the mercenary from dozens of dossiers that have rolled across his desk over the years. Known for his unusual tendency to use two of everything at the same time, Akimbo is one of the best. “I thought you kept it to the Middle East.”
“For this kinda money I’ll go anywhere,” the big man answers. “Chernoybl, Zambia, Dayton, whatever.”
“Dayton? Dayton, Ohio?”
“Don’t even get me started. I’d rather fall out of a helicopter again.”
“That won’t be necessary here,” Rothschild says, stepping out fro
m behind Akimbo. Ever the refined gentleman, he wears a custom tailored suit. “Not even Mr. Stedman could get a whole helicopter down here.”
The chamber around them is not small, but it is solid concrete and only cramped, claustrophobic tunnels lead away from it to other parts of the underground complex. The thirty foot ceiling will make it easy for a giant reptoid to walk around comfortably in this room and Walter doesn’t like that, but there isn’t much to be done about it. He can use the tunnels as a choke point if necessary.
Elkan Rothschild and Akimbo step out into the middle of the room with the rest of them. Rothschild frowns at the sight of Sickle’s gun line, but he says nothing.
“So let’s get to it,” Eric calls out. “What’s Walter’s test?”
“Yeah, Walt,” Anton adds facetiously. “Let’s see what you got. I’ve been studying real hard. Is it written or is it oral? I hope the questions are multiple choice.”
Walter steps back to the elevator and leans against the doors. Here he can see all of them: Vicki, Anton, Anton’s mercenaries, Elkan, the Du Pont kid, and Akimbo. He eyes them, looking for anything that might tip their hand. Little details.
“None of that,” he says.
Reynolds gives him a dirty look. Elkan Rothschild speaks up.
“Let’s commence with it, then, Mr. Stedman,” he says. “What do you need? A blood sample? X-ray? What is it?”
Walter looks him up and back down starting at his disgustingly overpriced shoes and ending on them as well. He sees nothing that alarms him.
“This is it. This is the test,” Walter says.
“We just stand here?” Eric Du Pont asks.
“You don’t have to stand right here. You can go anywhere in the compound.”
“I don’t think I understand,” Eric says.
“Yes, Walter,” says Elkan. “I don’t quite follow either.”
“It’s easy to understand,” Anton interjects. “There’s no test. The whole thing is shit. Walter made up this scam to get us down here and now he wants us to wander around alone where he can pick us off one by one.”
