KILL KILL KILL

by Mike Leon

  “Walter didn’t ask you down here,” Victoria says. “I did. And the test is quite simple. You see, Walter’s men have discovered that the reptoids begin to break down in a matter of days if they don’t eat man meat.”

  “So does Kim Kardashian,” says Reynolds. “Get to the point.”

  “I believe that is the point, Mr. Reynolds,” Elkan tells him. “They intend to keep us down here until one of us starts to disintegrate.”

  “Or tries to eat the rest of us,” Walter finishes.

  “There are other ways out of here…” Anton starts, but Walter cuts him off.

  “Yeah. There’s a blast door that opens into a decoy storm runoff about a quarter mile south. Ma Deuce is there in triplicate with twenty guys so excited about pulling the trigger their dicks are hard.”

  “There is also a freight elevator on the other side of the complex that leads to the surface,” Vicki says.

  “The Ghoul is there now waiting for anyone who might try to sneak away to grab some munchies.”

  One of Anton’s bodyguards leans and whispers something to his employer. Walter can’t hear him well enough to make out his words, but he has a good enough idea what is being discussed.

  “You’re welcome to try,” Walter says. “He’s a walking cannibal battle tank with meat cleavers the size of surf boards and body armor two inches thick. He doesn’t sleep, and he’ll laugh at those subguns while he cuts you apart – all three of you. But go ahead.”

  Anton’s guard stops talking, lowers his brow, and scrunches his lips. Walter knows that look. It’s the look that says the guy can’t do shit, but is waiting for his chance to try.

  Akimbo shrugs. “I don’t believe any of this hocus pocus shit anyway,” he says.

  “We’ll starve down here,” Eric exclaims.

  “No,” Victoria answers. “I’ve taken care to stock the kitchen with rice and assorted vegetables. No meat products, for obvious reasons.”

  “Well, Victoria,” Elkan says, smiling wide. “It may be worth it if I can try reptoid burgers at the end of this inquisition.”

  AMERICAN WOMAN

  “You don’t fuckin’ move,” Niggerfucker growls through a lit cigarette. “It’s like workin’ on a damn statue.”

  “Pain is an illusion,” Victor says. “Only fools are shaken by it.”

  “You’re crazy, kid.”

  Niggerfucker holds a stainless steel, two-coil tattoo liner to Victor’s bare chest as Victor sits at the card table in the bottom floor back room of the Philistine’s building. The chair still smells like blood. It must have run down into the cracks between the metal so that bits were left behind when Chuck cleaned it. It doesn’t matter. Victor likes the smell. The machine emits an obnoxious buzzing sound, but Victor puts that aside. This will be well worth the annoyance.

  “How come you don’t have any ink?” asks Killa, his question directed at Niggerfucker. The little man displays a pulsating naked woman drawn on his bulging right bicep as he flexes it – as if that was necessary. Victor hasn’t seen him wear anything but identical white tank tops since he got here, often flexing his arms and pectorals to show off.

  “I used to,” Niggerfucker says. “I used to be all tatted up. Thing is, it don’t grow back with the rest of me. After I got shot to shit enough times, I weren’t tatted up no more.”

  “That’s because the synthetic bloodworms infesting your body aren’t able to reproduce inorganic matter,” the Philistine says. She crosses her khaki legs and her black knee boots slap together behind Victor. She seems much more sophisticated since their first meeting, in which she walked the building in a grimy bathrobe after Victor saw her being fucked by a fat dog of a man. She still hasn’t shown her face, though she has changed masks more than once. This one is a plaster-white porcelain creation that fits the contours of her face and reveals more than the black veil she wore days ago. Strands of her brown hair dangle over it. Her blue eyes shine through thin slits and they are far from dead. Victor would fuck her in that mask – if he didn’t have to maintain this alliance with her.

  “Bloodworms?”

  “Tiny little parasites that knit his wounds and rebuild any parts of him that are missing.”

  “I’d like to get some of those bloodworms,” Victor says.

  “Fat chance,” she responds. “That stupid whore stole the only sample and then Easy Rider and his hobo friend smoked all of it.”

  “Down to the last roach,” Niggerfucker says.

  “Just make more of them,” Victor suggests.

  “I didn’t make the ones we had,” the Philistine says. “They were… of unknown origin.”

  “A shame,” Victor says. “What about other things?”

  “What kind of other things?”

  “Things that might be of use to me.”

  “For what?”

  “You know what.”

  The last several days have been a repeat of the same conversation. Victor has gone out to kill quietly at night, stalking the alleys and rooftops for any brown throat he can cut and any brown pussy he can fuck, while asking the Philistine to provide him the details of any technologies that could be used, at least in theory, to accomplish his mission. Thus far, she has been reluctant to answer his questions.

  “I just don’t see what’s in it for me if I answer your questions,” the Philistine says.

  “You get to see all the dirty Muslims dead. Don’t you want that? After what they did to your face?”

  “Yes, but I really just don’t feel like telling you anything,” she says, throwing her head back and brushing her hair behind it with her left hand. Her body is covered by a flimsy spaghetti strap top and her skin is smooth. As she lowers her hand from her head, she rubs it against her chest.

  Niggerfucker has stopped drawing on Victor’s chest. The needle has not moved in seconds. He is simply gazing curiously at the Philistine. Victor cannot fathom why. He flicks Niggerfucker in the shoulder, and the abomination rattles his head, as if shaking out of a trance. He begins drawing again.

  The Philistine stands and leans over Niggerfucker’s shoulder to look at the tattoo on Victor’s chest. It is near enough to completion now that she can read the whole word. She sneers.

  “Ha,” she scoffs. “How very crass.”

  Victor feels the bloodlust rising. He forces himself to put it aside. He remembers what Niggerfucker told him. He needs these people. He needs an army. He can’t raise an army if he kills everyone he meets.

  The Philistine turns her back on him, as if she hasn’t a worry in the world, and she walks from the room. Victor hears those high heeled boots clacking up the stairs.

  “The hell was that?” Niggerfucker says, after they hear the faint slam of her bedroom door from two floors above.

  “She’s taunting me,” Victor says. “I don’t like it, and I don’t plan to let her continue.”

  “I ain’t, uh…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Victor does not care for these word games. Men speak to the point or they do not speak at all.

  “I will reach my limit with her if she continues this stupid behavior.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

  “You’re the one who told me I must not kill anyone here.”

  “That’s not what I,” Niggerfucker stops drawing again and turns back to Killa. “Killa, you saw that right?”

  “No secret the lady’s got strange taste,” Killa says, looking up from a small mirror piled with cocaine that he is carefully separating into lines.

  “What’s that mean?” Victor asks them. “What are you babbling about?”

  “I think she’s coming on to you,” Niggerfucker says.

  “She’s not on me. She walked away.”

  “Nah, Dude. She wants to fuck.”

  The idea is so foreign to Victor that it takes him a few seconds to process what Niggerfucker is telling him. He’s never heard of such a thing. All of the women he fucks scream for
him to stop the whole time. Just last night he had to stuff a shopkeeper’s daughter’s underwear down her throat to stop her shrieks from alerting the police. She choked to death as he was finishing inside her. Last night was a good night.

  “She mocked my tattoo,” Victor says.

  “Yeah she did. Almost like she was askin’ for it.”

  “She was asking for it,” Killa nods as he snorts up a line from the mirror.

  “She was teasing you. She wants to piss you off. Why else would any chick laugh in your face at your tattoo that says that?” Niggerfucker points at Victor’s nearly finished tattoo. Victor considers the absurdity of what the two mercenaries are telling him.

  They could be right. Then again, they’re both idiots, fit for little more than curb stomping ragheads on command. Still, if they are wrong, that means he is wasting his time here. He’d rather find out now than waste any more time.

  Victor pushes Niggerfucker away.

  “It’s not finished yet,” Niggerfucker says.

  “There will be time for that later,” Victor tells him as he stands up from the chair. He is wearing just a pair of camouflage pants and some black combat boots he took from a dead soldier. He wastes no time stomping up the stairs to the Philistine’s bedroom. He notices the green glow of the werewolf’s monitor from an open room on his way up to the top floor. Undoubtedly, the creature is in there wearing those bulky headphones and won’t hear whatever noise he makes. When he reaches Philistine’s door, he finds it shut in his face.

  He stomp kicks the door and it splinters into a hundred wooden shards that topple onto the floor at the foot of her stacked twin mattresses.

  The Philistine stands next to the bed, her pants and boots removed and flung haphazardly on the floor next to her. She glares at him, angrily.

  “I’m not dressed, you idiot,” she says.

  Her body is a svelte sliver of tan flesh covered by that spaghetti strap top and nothing else. She’s shaved smooth like silk and Victor’s eyes travel down to her bare vulva and back up to meet hers.

  “I’m gonna fuck you raw,” he says.

  “Please. I’m old enough to be your mother, little boy. Now run along.”

  Victor leaps over the foot of the bed, drawing his wavy knife in a flash. Before she can take another breath, he has her pressed up against the wall with the tip of that knife needling at her throat. He slips his open hand between her breasts and tears away her bra and top. She’s naked except for that alabaster mask over her unknown face.

  Victor gathers up a handful of her hair and forces her head into his chest. Her nose smears in the bloody, unfinished tattoo there.

  “What does it say?” Victor asks, except he’s not really asking, he’s demanding.

  “Fuck you,” she says.

  “What. Does. It. Say?” he repeats, forcing her face back into the tattoo hard, smothering her against it. When he pulls her away, the white mask is stained with streaks of blood.

  “Rapegod. It says rapegod,” she says. This is the correct answer. This is the bloody word emblazoned black on his chest by Niggerfucker.

  “And what am I?” he says.

  “You’re an asshole.”

  Victor smacks her head against the wall.

  “What am I?”

  “Rapegod. You’re the Rapegod.”

  “Good,” he responds. “Now I’m going to give you a choice. I can stuff this knife in your cunt, or I can stuff my dick in it. Which would you prefer?”

  “Your dick,” she whimpers. He can’t tell if she’s crying behind that mask, but he thinks she is.

  Victor slaps her again.

  “Your dick, what?”

  “Your dick, Rapegod.”

  “That’s better.”

  “Please, whatever you do, just don’t hit me with the riding crop.”

  This gives Victor pause. What a strange thing to say. He hadn’t even paid attention to the riding crop. There it is, propped in the corner opposite the door, a long rod wrapped in leather. It is the same one he saw the fat man using to spank her upon their first meeting.

  “Shut up!” he says. “I tell you when to speak.”

  He forces her down onto the mattress. He jabs the knife into the wall next to the bed and wraps his right hand around her neck. With the fingers of his left, he reaches between her thighs to spread the lips of her pussy open. She’s dripping wet. He’s never seen that happen before.

  As he unfurls his cock from his pants, she pleads quietly.

  “Please don’t do this. Just let me go. Just let me...”

  She gasps as he forces it in to her. The inside of her pussy feels like jelly. He can hardly feel anything she’s so wet. He doesn’t much like it.

  “You’re too loose, whore.”

  No sooner does he say it, and the walls of her vagina close in a massaging wave along the shaft of his cock. It feels better than the blood of a hundred Arabs on his hands.

  “Is that better, Rapegod?”

  “Barely,” he says. He punches her in the left tit to remind her he’s in charge.

  “Please don’t come inside me, Rapegod. Please.”

  Victor doesn’t listen to that at all. He fucks her hard for five whole minutes and finishes deep inside. When he’s done with that, he slaps her tits bloody with that riding crop and then he watches her finish herself off with her fingers.

  The Philistine is a real crazy lady.

  CATACOMB II

  Walter wakes up to the sound of screaming. He has woken up to the sound of screaming every morning for the past three days. It never really goes away. It can only be muffled, and only when he is wholly focused on some task directly in front of him. This screaming is muffled.

  And that makes it different somehow. Something is not quite right about it this time. He opens his eyes to a cavernous empty room. His feet fill the foreground of his view like the players in some sidewalk sock puppet theatre. His back is propped against the elevator doors just as he sat against it lasts night, and for the last three nights, lying against the doors so that he would be awakened if anyone attempted to leave through them. He sits up and leans forward. The screaming is muffled. The screaming is real.

  Walter jumps to his feet. This isn’t the sound that has followed him from Graveyard. This is different. Someone is screaming inside this very complex. Gunshots. He hears gunshots. Walter runs for the middle of the three corridors leading away from the main chamber. The tunnel reminds him of the cramped decks of a battleship; grey and colorlessly functional. Pipes and cables along the ceiling with no attempt made to conceal them. White fluorescent lights in strips only a few feet above his head. There is no sound but the screaming that grows louder as he runs.

  He whips out the USAS-12 almost as an afterthought, and continues down the tunnel until he reaches a junction in the hallways. He could continue on, or he could take a left. He will do neither, because the screaming is coming from just around the corner.

  Walter slams up against the wall to peek around the corner and open up with that beast of a shotgun. A normal shotgun kicks like a mule, and this shotgun has a twenty round drum, ergo twenty mules. He’s too old for this.

  He doesn’t get a chance to shoot it. As he turns the corner, Elkan Rothschild barrels into him. Hurled down the hallway screaming like a school girl, Elkan smacks into Walter’s gun and rips it from his hands on his way to the wall. He bashes against the concrete, and Walter is afraid the man may be dead. He turns and looks back down the hall to see a monster looking back at him. The thing fills the corridor with its body. It must be thirteen feet tall, but it cannot stand upright in here so it crawls on all fours. Mostly, Walter can just see the head with its stiletto teeth and those front talons. The lights along the ceiling have been shattered and the monster’s eyes are like glowing red rubies in the dim hallway.

  Walter draws his colt and begins emptying the magazine into the thing’s face just as a knee jerk reaction. With his other hand, he reaches for his fallen shotgun, b
ut feels only the cold floor behind him. He glances back and sees the stock of his gun sticking out from under Elkan’s form. He lunges and wraps his hand around the stock. He drags it out from under Elkan and swings the gun around to fire, but he sees only the pointed prehensile tail of the monster disappearing around the next corner down the hall.

  “Fuck!” He grunts as he gives chase. Walter comes around the corner and finds nothing. There is not a sign that it was ever there, except for drips of blood along the floor. Those still could have come from Elkan, or Akimbo. Where is Akimbo?

  Walter hears something rustling overhead and he jumps back with his gun aimed high. Akimbo drops from the bundle of utility cables that run along the ceiling. He smacks against the floor at Walter’s feet, landing on his back. Both guns are drawn and the slide is locked back on one. Akimbo’s right arm is badly burned and blisters have already formed in a straight line a few inches wide across the underside of his forearm.

  “That thing is real!” Akimbo shouts.

  “I know it’s real!” Walter yells back. “What are you… hiding in the access shaft?”

  “I put thirty rounds in that thing and it kept coming! Fuck yeah, I was hiding in the access shaft!”

  “Well Elkan is back there and I think he might be dead!”

  “I ain’t no Kevin Costner, motherfucker! I’m a mercenary!”

  Someone smacks Walter on the shoulder. He lurches around, drawing his pistol reflexively, and finds Victoria standing beside him. She’s still wearing the clothes she had on three days ago. All of them are. None of the others knew there would be an extended stay, and Victoria thought it would look bad if she alone came prepared.

  “Get that thing out of my face!” she squeaks.

  Walter puts his pistol away and runs back down the hallway to Elkan Rothschild. The others follow.

  The man lies in a crumpled heap against the wall. Walter turns him over and he coughs in Walter’s face. His eyes are bruised and his nose is a zig zag of broken bone.

  “My leg!” Elkan says.

  Walter looks down to Elkan’s leg and cringes. It is badly broken below the knee. Blood soaks through Elkan’s pants leg and the bone is bent well beyond a ninety degree angle. He will need medical attention.