by Mike Leon
“Get back, motherfucker!” Akimbo shouts.
Walter turns to see Akimbo with both guns drawn on Eric Du Pont, who has come down the hallway.
“Put your guns down!” Victoria shouts.
“No, Vicki He’s right,” Walter says. The sheer terror of the situation suddenly becomes known to him – they still don’t know who it is. Walter saw the monster attack Elkan, but that only rules out Elkan. None of the others were present. Even Akimbo fell out of the ceiling moments after the thing was gone.
“I just spoke to Eric a few minutes ago!” she says. “He couldn’t have been here at the same time!”
“Then why’s he bleeding?” Akimbo says, his eyes locked on Eric Du Pont. The kid seems more annoyed by the gun pointed at him than actually upset. Blood trickles from his hands and drips down to the floor.
“I cut myself on a green bean tin,” he says.
“Bullshit! I shot you thirty times while you were a fucking dinosaur!”
Walter tries to settle the dispute the only logical way. He taps Elkan on the ground. The aristocrat is struggling to keep his eyes open.
“Elkan, Elkan!” Walter shouts. “Did you see who it was?”
“No. It just… It just came at me.”
“God damn it!” Walter barks. He reaches for his cell phone. He flips it open to call for backup.
“I don’t get reception in my house and you got five bars this far underground?” Akimbo says. “Fuck AT&T!”
The real reason Walter gets reception is that the facility has its own signal repeaters wired to a transmitter on the surface. Anyone could use a cell phone down here. He needs to have those installed in the basement of the Graveyard building.
Eric Du Pont takes a step forward.
“Don’t you fucking move!” Akimbo shouts.
“You can’t shoot me,” Eric says. “I’m bullet proof.”
“The hell you are,” Akimbo says. He squeezes both triggers and fires two shots right at Eric’s eyes, but they bury themselves harmlessly in the wall at the end of the hallway.
“What the fuck is this shit?”
“He has a shield that protects him from bullets,” Victoria says. “We all do.”
“I don’t!” Akimbo says. He yells back to Elkan. “I feel like you left a lot of important details out of the job description!”
Walter shouts into his phone.
“I need emergency medical personnel to the terminal elevator now!”
He hears Ratzinger on the line.
“Copy. Team deployed. ETA three minutes.”
“We need to move him!” Walter shouts at Akimbo.
“I’m not taking my guns off lizard boy over there,” Akimbo says.
“I didn’t do it!” Eric shouts back.
“I’ll help,” Victoria says, ignoring the other two. “But you have to get his legs. I can’t look at them.”
“Fine,” Walter says, as he leans to pick Elkan up. He runs his hands around Elkan’s thighs and lifts his lower half as Victoria picks him up from the shoulders.
“He’s heavy,” she says.
“Fuck you,” Elkan rasps. That’s a good sign, Walter thinks.
“Just move!” Walter shouts. They begin to move, and Akimbo backs up behind them, never taking his sights off Eric Du Pont. They leave the kid behind in the corridors.
Victoria makes it a hundred feet to the main chamber before she starts to lose her grip, and Akimbo catches Elkan to take over. The two men haul Elkan to the elevator and set him down outside the doors. Walter punches the button.
“I’m going up with him,” Walter says. “I’ll be back down in two minutes!”
“I’m going with you,” Akimbo says. “That’s my money train right there.”
“No one leaves. NO ONE! You even think about leaving and the Graveyard teams up there blast you to doggie chow.”
“You ain’t leaving me down here with that thing!”
“Take this!” Walter says, shoving the Daewoo shotgun into Akimbo’s hands.
“What’s this gonna do?”
“You hit the reptoid, right? That means it’s not shielded from bullets.”
Akimbo looks down at the shotgun, considering Walter’s supposition. “Wish I had two of them.”
“It’s my fault,” Victoria says. “This was a terrible idea. We should have never come here.”
“Don’t pussy out now,” he tells her, and he thinks he sounds so strange saying this thing; telling her to keep it together when he’s hearing things that aren’t there. He’s losing his god damned mind.
The elevator doors slide open and Walter drags Elkan inside by himself.
“Two minutes!” Walter shouts back at the others through the doors. He isn’t sure why he says that. They know he’ll be back as fast as possible. Why would they think anything else? What? Would he stop and have tea with the operators upstairs? He could have said something more inspirational to Victoria at least. No. There wasn’t time. What he said was as good a thing as any, he decides as the doors slide closed.
The ride up takes only seconds, but it feels like much longer. He slaps Elkan Rothschild to keep him awake.
When the doors slide open, Walter faces another line of automatic weapon barrels pointed at him. He’s tired of that happening. Everywhere he goes, someone is pointing a gun at him.
There are five operators in tactical gear and two medical personnel with a collapsible stretcher – both of them doctors. Victoria arranged for them to be on site with full surgical kits and blood in all the necessary types. One of the operators is Ratzinger. The others Walter doesn’t recognize. They’ve brought in a lot of new people since the slaughterhouse.
The elevator is down a short hallway, so they don’t have the entire terminal staring at them. That’s their one saving grace.
The older doctor looks at Elkan’s leg. He’s a middle aged man, balding on the top of his head, which is what Walter is looking at, and a little over weight.
“This is a bad break,” the doctor says.
“No shit,” Walter calls out.
“Mr. Rothschild, can you hear me?” the balding doctor calls out while shining a tiny flashlight into his eye.
“Get that light out of my eye,” Rothschild says.
“He’s not in shock,” the younger, skinnier doctor says. “This leg is gonna need surgery.”
Walter grabs Ratzinger by the shoulder and pulls him into the elevator. He barks commands into the operator’s face.
“I want you to get him back to Graveyard,” he says.
“Arizona’s a long...”
“You’re in a fucking airport! You put him on a jet and you fly him the fuck out there right now, and all fucking five of you go with him and these two nice doctors, and you shoot the ever-loving shit out of any swinging dick that swings your direction just a little too far.”
Ratzinger nods.
“Was I clear enough?” Walter says.
Ratzinger nods again.
The doctors already have Rothschild on the stretcher when he lifts his hand to beckon Walter closer. Walter leans in next to him.
“You get me that lizard steak, Walter Stedman, or you’re fired,” he says, and he smiles as they wheel him away.
Did he mean that? Or was he just delirious? Walter has only a second to wonder before the doors slide closed again and he’s alone in the elevator. Looking down, he notices for the first time how much blood is on the floor. It trails in the door and then back out again in a U shaped pattern.
“You know what you should do,” he hears someone say.
Walter raises his head, startled, and takes a step back. Next to him there in the elevator is Carl Jourgensen, all wrapped up in the body armor he died in. His face is shot half off from a heavy machine gun round or two, and a piece of steel rebar is stuck through his chest. His left eye is gone and the hollow socket reminds Walter of that thing on the painting upstairs.
“You should kill them all,” Jourgensen says. “You sho
uld whip out that Colt and put it up to Vicki’s forehead and pew pew pew. Right through her brain. Then the Du Pont faggot. Then Reynolds. And if you get out alive you can finish off that fucker with the broken leg.”
“I’m not listening to you,” Walter says.
“It’ll fix everything. End the whole reptoid problem. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“I’m not listening to you!”
“Listening to whom?” Victoria asks.
Walter turns and sees the doors have opened again at the bottom of the elevator. Victoria and Eric are there staring at him. Akimbo is behind them with the shotgun on their backs.
“No one,” he answers. “Has anybody seen Reynolds.”
Akimbo shakes his head.
“Little bitch holed up in a living quarters about fifty meters down that left side tunnel,” he says. “Been in there for days with those guards outside the door.”
“Great,” Walter says. That doesn’t help their situation.
“I been thinking about what you said before.”
“About what I said?”
“Yeah, about how the monster can be shot. You know, I shot at Calvin Klein over there and couldn’t hit him, but what about…”
Akimbo slings a single pistol from its holster on his chest and fires a shot at Victoria Russell.
For a second, Walter isn’t sure if Akimbo’s shot missed its mark. He waits for Vicki to say something, or turn into a thirteen foot monster and attack them, or just die – who knows?
“I’m fine,” she says. “Degenerate.”
“I’m not bullet proof,” Walter says. “Before you try that again.”
“I saw you chasing after it,” Akimbo says. “That means Reynolds is the monster.”
“Or maybe you missed when you shot at it before,” Vicki says.
“Nah. I know I hit it.”
“Maybe it’s you. Walter, did you ever see Akimbo and the reptoid in the same place at the same time?”
Walter didn’t. But he doesn’t like where this is headed either. Maybe he should do what Jourgensen told him. He could kill Akimbo with the Colt, then overpower Eric and Victoria by himself. Strangle them both or bludgeon them with the shotgun. Anton’s men would be tricky. He could hold the elevator and bring Kill Team Two down here to slaughter them all. He hears Valerie Novak screaming. She’s on fire. Her flesh is melting and she’s screaming. Wait, wasn’t Valerie already dead by the time the Arsonist set her on fire? It must be the children. The children are screaming.
“Walter?”
“No,” Walter answers. “I never saw them together.”
“Too bad. The only way we can prove it isn’t you is if we cut off part of you and it doesn’t cast off its skin,” Vicki says. She cocks her head and asks Akimbo “What tiny appendages do you have that you rarely use for anything?”
“Bitch, I swing both ways and I still wouldn’t swing anywhere near your flat ass,” he answers. “I could have killed you ten times over again when Walter was up the elevator.”
“It doesn’t make sense, Vicki,” Eric says. “Why would he even be here if he was one of those things? He could have just stayed home.”
If he kills them all, it might make the world a better place. No more shadow government. No puppet masters pulling the strings. Freedom. True freedom. He hears the children screaming. If he kills them all, will it stop? Will it finally stop?
WEAPONS OF MASS
DESTRUCTION
“The problem with Revenant is that it was never designed as an airborne toxin,” the Philistine says.
“So we put it in the water,” Victor says.
He’s sitting in a metal folding chair at the card table in the kitchen of the Philistine’s building. He’s loading 9mm bullets into box magazines at a speed which he considers medium pace, but with which normal human beings could not hope to keep up. His tattoo, finished and filled in by Niggerfucker, is healing nicely across his chest, except for some scarring where he rubbed the Philistine’s face mask across it. He wears only some boxer shorts, which are not his. He stole them from Tim, who won’t be needing them anymore.
“No. You can’t. Revenant is too easily diluted. You would need an oil tanker full and the water would turn bright yellow. Besides, who’s going to drink it after they see what happens? You need something more subtle.”
“Subtle is no fun.”
“But it works. The Russians have been hiding sterility agents in UNICEF vaccinations since the seventies. It stopped the Nigerian conquest of North Africa.”
“I never heard nothin’ about no Nigerians taking over Africa,” Niggerfucker asks. The big man sits on the floor, covered in dirty black leather, also loading 9mm magazines, but at a much slower pace. He has only finished a dozen or so since the beginning of the conversation.
“See?” she answers. The Philistine’s mask is a brown leather creation today, with laces holding together three separate pieces that cover her face, and a barred slit over her mouth. She wears some sweat pants and a black sports bra she’s kept on since Victor tore her tits up with that riding crop. She told him they hurt too much when they move. He told her to quit whining or he would beat her even more. She whined more. He beat her more. This is how things have been between them for the last day and a half.
“I say we fuckin’ nuke em anyway,” Niggerfucker says.
“Yes. That’s original,” the Philistine snorts. “Who helped you formulate that flawless plan? Cletus the slack jawed yokel?”
“Why won’t it work?” Victor asks.
“You’re talking about exterminating a widespread subset of the world population, across multiple cities, multiple countries, multiple continents, AND interspersed with other non-targeted subsets. In short, there’s no place to nuke.”
“The middle east,” Niggerfucker says.
“Yes. And if you somehow took control of the entire Soviet missile cache, you could probably destroy all the major cities, and turn much of the desert there to glass. Then you would still have to deal with all the Muslims in the rest of Asia, America, Europe… They’re everywhere. If it was a viable option, the Russians would have done it thirty years ago.”
“Well fuck then,” Niggerfucker says, flopping over onto the floor, where he continues to load magazines, now holding them high above his head with his arms straight up in the air.
“How would you do it?” Victor says.
“Acheri,” she says.
“Gazoo-tight,” Niggerfucker responds, inappropriately and incorrectly.
“It’s not a sneeze, moron. It’s a programmable virus being developed in a secret French laboratory.”
“Programmable how?” Victor asks.
“Theoretically, you can set it to attach only to specific DNA sequences so it affects only people with those sequences in their genetic makeup. Everyone else it just spreads through. You want to wipe out everyone with brown eyes, or blond hair, you set it that way and it only spreads to those people. It has a mortality rate of one hundred percent and spreads more easily than the common cold. Within days, you have a worldwide super plague that kills everyone you want to kill.”
“That’s pretty wicked,” Niggerfucker says. The dirty bastard is sitting up now, taking a drink of whiskey which he obtained yesterday when he and Victor murdered an elderly man and his four children in their home. It was glorious. “I never woulda given that much credit to the Frenchies.”
“We aren’t the only ones with a distaste for camel humpers. There are far right members of the French government who think runaway Islamic immigration is a threat to the country. In theory, they could use the virus to purify the population.”
“They made it to do exactly what we want,” Victor says. This is a fortunate coincidence.
“Exactly.”
“How do you set it?”
“You have to culture it on a synthesized repeating sample of the DNA sequence you want to target. I can do it with equipment in their lab.”
“No. I mean
who do you set it for?”
“That’s the tricky part. You would have to spread it across multiple vectors. You find common traits amongst people from different Islamic regions. Culture different versions of the virus to affect each of those groups.”
“This sounds less promising.”
“It’s not perfect. You’re going to miss certain segments of the population that are too genetically close to the rest of us. Islam isn’t a race, it’s a religion, so anyone could be one of them, even people just like you.”
“I assure you none of them are anything like me,” Victor says.
“That’s for sure,” Niggerfucker says.
“How does it kill them?” Victor asks. His targets dying of a sickness is not preferable to crushing their skulls with his own hands, but perhaps the sickness is a particularly gruesome affliction, one that ends in massive hemorrhaging or disfiguring mutations. Perhaps it contorts victims through torturous convulsions the way Revenant does.
“Fever. It only takes a few days,” she says. Victor’s heart drops like a stone. This is a terrible disappointment.
“I don’t like it. It’s boring.”
“What do you mean, it’s boring?”
“I want to hear their screams and feel their blood on my hands. This plague is a bore.”
“You can’t really kill every single one of them. It’s not realistic at all.”
“Has no man done a thing like this before?”
“No man has. Hitler probably came closest.”
“How did he do it?”
“A monumental effort. He used his armies to herd Jews into camps where they were gassed or starved to death. He still didn’t kill all of them. Maybe if he won the war he would have. It doesn’t matter. We don’t have millions of troops at our disposal.”
“You want to talk about extermination, take a look at the Indians,” Niggerfucker says, flat on his back again, the handle of whiskey uncapped in his hand.
“What about them?” Victor asks.
“The Indians, man. Columbus killed all of ’em.”
“That’s terribly inaccurate,” the Philistine says.
