KILL KILL KILL

by Mike Leon

  “There is an entire country of Indians. Kill Team Three had orders never to cross into it.”

  “He means American Indians, and he’s an idiot.”

  “What are American Indians?” Victor asks. He’s never heard of such a thing. Of course, he hasn’t spent much time in America. He was never out of the Pine Barrens until he left for the desert, and only left there for a few short runs into North Korea.

  “That’s what I’m talking about right there,” Niggerfucker laughs.

  “You really don’t know? Of course you don’t,” the Philistine rolls her eyes. “I’m sure Kill Team One never made you open a history book.”

  “History is as futile as masturbation, and I indulge in neither.”

  “I saw you jerk it on some girl’s face in the Gaza Strip last week!” Niggerfucker points at him accusingly from the floor, half sitting up to see his reaction.

  “Your point?”

  “I guess I don’t have none…” the mutant biker says before flopping flat against the floor again.

  “Americans aren’t from America,” the Philistine explains. “They killed the people who used to live there, almost all of them, hundreds of years ago.”

  “How did they do it?”

  “There was no trick to it. No secret weapon. The settlers from Europe had guns and walled forts. They spread diseases that killed off large numbers of the natives. They brought them alcohol…”

  “Alcohol?” Alcohol? Niggerfucker is drinking alcohol. Kill Team Three often drank copious amounts of alcohol. Using that as some type of a weapon seems unlikely. Though it did seem to disorient them.

  “Yes. It’s a very long and complicated issue.”

  “Ain’t that complicated. They used to be all over the country. Now they ain’t.”

  “And again, they couldn’t kill all of them. It simply isn’t possible. If you want a weapon that we can use, within our resources, which will have the maximum possible effect, a super plague is that weapon.”

  “Tell me more about the nuclear weapons, like Niggerfucker said.”

  “Nuke them all? No way. That’s ridiculous.”

  “How would we take control of the Soviet missile stockpile?”

  “You can’t! There are multiple failsafes, launch codes, security codes, and the entire Russian army standing between you and all three thousand some missiles,” she says. She laughs. “I mean I guess you could engage the Dead Hand, but that would just launch all the missiles at the United States. It wouldn’t do us any good.”

  “The Dead Hand?”

  “Heh heh. Supposedly the Ruskies built a dead man’s switch to automatically launch all their nukes at the U.S. in case we nuked ’em first,” Niggerfucker says. “It’s an old cold war legend. Ain’t no such thing.”

  “No. It’s real. I know where they keep the activation switch,” the Philistine says.

  “Ain’t no way. Nobody would build somethin’ that stupid.”

  “You can’t even fathom how stupid it is, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t help us any.”

  “Maybe it does.” Victor has the answer now. There’s no weapon he can use to finish them all. No. That would require a concentrated effort from a vast army. He doesn’t have an army, but there may be a way to commandeer one – maybe even several. The Russians, the French, the Americans – they all carry out a war against the Islamists in secret.

  “Huh? Come again?” she says.

  “It seems as if half the world wants exactly the same thing we do, but they’re somehow afraid to do what must be done. Why?”

  “Global repercussions. Genocide is an international war crime. You can’t just start murdering people with the whole world watching.”

  “What if we gave them an excuse?”

  “What kind of excuse?” the Philistine crooks her head. He thinks she is smiling, but it is hard to tell through that little slit.

  “Where is the Dead Hand control system?”

  “Maybe I don’t feel like telling you,” she says.

  “Maybe I don’t care,” Victor growls, standing up from his chair. He grabs a handful of her hair. “Maybe I’ll lean you over that countertop and fuck your asshole raw.”

  “Nothing you can do will make me talk,” she says. Victor pulls her up from the chair and forces her over the nearby counter. She bangs against it as he forces her face down onto the Formica.

  “I’ll give you one last chance, cunt,” he whispers in the Philistine’s ear.

  “I’ll never tell. Do your worst, you fucking pig.”

  He does his very worst.

  JOE BIDEN

  The Graveyard building is as deserted as Sid has ever seen. Most of the operators went with Walter on some unknown mission. They left him behind. Sid doesn’t care. All he ever does is fuck up anyway. He fucked up with Shelly and his father. He fucked up killing Krupp on the plane. He fucked up letting that woman get to him in Dubai. He just fucks up. He’s a fuck up.

  For four days now, he has been cleaning guns in the building armory, mostly M4 carbines. Graveyard has at least a thousand of the ubiquitous, skinny, black, short-barreled, long guns. They have them with collapsible stocks, solid stocks, rails, no rails, heat shields, double heat shields, free floating hand guards, heavy barrels, light barrels, step down cut barrels, flash suppressors in no less than four varieties, flip-up optics, no optics, iron sights forward and rear, Swiss cheese bolt carriers, normal bolt carriers, shell deflectors, vertical fore grips, angled fore grips, and at least ten different types of rear grips.

  Disengage the takedown pin. Remove bolt carrier and charging handle from the upper receiver. Disassemble the bolt assembly. Place the bolt assembly components in solution. Remove the main spring from the buffer tube and wipe down. Run wire brush down the barrel from breech to muzzle. Run a patch down the barrel from breech to muzzle. Reassemble bolt assembly and lubricate the components. Then place them back in the bolt carrier. Oil the trigger grouping. Oil the charging handle. Replace bolt carrier and charging handle in the upper receiver. Fold the gun closed and engage the takedown pin. Pick up another gun. Repeat.

  Four days of this. He has cleaned rifles, pistols, shotguns, every kind of gun down here. It will be days more before he has finished. No operators have come in here, not since several teams took the heavy machine guns they needed for some unspoken mission the day Sid began cleaning. Only the Van Duyn girl has been down to see him. With the building mostly empty, she is able to roam with impunity after ditching the guard outside her door. This man must be a very poor soldier. That, or she has made some sort of arrangement with him. In any case, the girl appears here almost daily to watch him clean guns. She writes questions in her notepad that he attempts to answer, though none of them seem to relate to the cleaning or maintenance of firearms. He wishes they did. He can answer those questions. The things she asks him about are strange. She wants to know what kind of music he likes, and if he watches television programs, and how he feels about people. Sid told her he doesn’t listen to music. He told her about a video he watched instructing on the operation of an M120 mortar, but she said that wasn’t what she meant. The more intangible questions he cannot even attempt to answer. Usually, she gets frustrated and leaves after an hour or so. Then it is back to this monumentally boring task.

  It isn’t the monotony that bothers him. Sid cleaned guns every day in the Pine Barrens, and he has had to repeat much more strenuous tasks at even greater lengths on many occasions. When he was three, his father made him throw a hatchet into a target the size of a tennis ball painted on the side of a tree at fifty yards. He was not allowed to stop until he hit it ten times in a row. It took him five days without sleep.

  What bothers him about this is the humiliation. The fuck up factor. He’s cleaning the guns because he’s a fuck up. He’ll probably fuck this up too. He can’t do anything right.

  Sid hears someone coming and looks up to the double doors. The only work bench in the armory was faced away from the entrance, but
he turned it around for this express purpose. He never spends any extended length of time with his back to the door. His father taught him that.

  The door slowly creaks open, as someone struggles to push their way through. Sid already knows who this is, just from the sound of squeaking wheels and a whirring motor that came from the hallway. It is the man November Team brought back yesterday. He didn’t see any of this, but he heard. He heard them pushing him past the armory doors on a stretcher when the helicopter landed behind the building. It was a twin engine chopper, not one of the usual Hueys that Graveyard maintains. He heard Ratzinger hollering in the hallway. He heard seven sets of boots and four wheels all rolling together. He didn’t bother to get up and take a look then.

  “Hello,” says the man in the doorway. He is dressed in a shiny red robe that Sid thinks could be used to conceal weapons. His right leg is encased in a thick white cast and elevated on a rest attached to his stainless steel wheelchair. His left hand levers a little joystick forward to push the powered chair through the doors. There is a bandage on the bridge of his nose, which appears recently set, and his eyes have black bags under them.

  Sid looks back at this strange man in silence.

  “I hope you don’t mind me joining you,” the man says. “I simply had to meet the already infamous super soldier myself.”

  “Who are you?” Sid asks, dryly. He sets down the M4 he was cleaning and hammers down the takedown pin.

  “I see my reputation still does not precede me quite everywhere,” the man remarks, as he wheels toward the bench. “My name is Elkan Rothschild. I own this company.”

  “Walter Stedman is in command here.”

  “Walter merely manages this place for my partners and I. You don’t know how this works?”

  Sid shakes his head no.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Elkan says. “It’s all very droll, really. What are you doing down here?”

  “I’m cleaning the guns,” Sid says.

  “Which ones?”

  “All of them.”

  “Oh my,” Elkan exclaims as he looks up at the rest of the room. The Graveyard armory is a room with three long rows of shelves containing all the standard and exotic weapons fare the fire teams might need on assignment stacked all the way up to the twenty five foot ceiling. In addition to the usual rifles and submachine guns, there are grenade launchers, anti-tank weapons, shoulder fired missiles, assorted explosives, and heavy machine guns mounted on tripods. It is a huge room, filled with huge guns.

  “That’s quite a tall order for one boy,” Elkan says.

  Sid sets down another M4, closes it up, and punches the takedown pin. He cleaned it while they were talking.

  “Walter ordered me to clean all the guns.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He’s angry because I completed a mission he ordered.”

  “That hardly makes sense.”

  “I don’t understand it either.”

  “I see,” Elkan says, resting his head on his hand, propped on the arm of the wheelchair. “What was the mission?”

  Sid does not respond. This man has no need to know these things. He continues cleaning an M4, sliding a wire brush down the barrel on a T rod.

  “Do you like working for Walter?” Elkan asks.

  Sid knows the answer to that question. Walter Stedman is a hot headed and irrational man. He can’t even make up his mind whether he wants a target dead or not dead. Sid does not like taking orders from him. But that doesn’t matter. He is not to question orders.

  “I imagine you know quite a bit about guns,” Elkan says, watching Sid strip down another carbine.

  “Yes.”

  “I assume you must be a martial arts expert.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which ones?”

  “All of them.”

  “That hardly seems possible.”

  Sid raises a precarious eyebrow at this man who doubts him.

  “Why are you asking me these questions?” Sid asks. “Who are you?”

  Elkan spins his wheelchair around and begins to come around the workbench. Sid follows him with his eyes and eventually has to turn on his seat to keep Elkan in front of him.

  “I told you,” he says. “I own this place. But more than that, I am a ruler, a modern king, a puppet master pulling the strings, as some would have it.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, mister,” Sid says.

  Elkan rolls his black encircled eyes.

  “I am the supreme commander, the highest ranking general.”

  “Where’s your army?”

  “This is my army,” Elkan says motioning around him. By now, he has made his way around the bench to Sid’s other side, and the sundry arsenal of Graveyard’s many weapons surrounds him. “Do you understand now? All of this belongs to me.”

  Sid nods. Now he understands. Graveyard belongs to Elkan Rothschild. It is a strange notion though. This battered man with a shrill voice does not seem like much of a warrior.

  “Good. Good,” Elkan says. “Now, I want you to tell me everything. Your whole story about all of this.”

  “Story about what?”

  “All of this; working here for Walter, and before. What happened when you got back from the desert? How did you get here?”

  “I drove here.”

  “And then?”

  Sid shrugs.

  “I beat up the guards at the front door. Can I ask you something?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is killing people wrong?”

  Elkan chuckles.

  “That is a strange question.”

  “That’s what everybody says. Can’t somebody just say yes or no?”

  “Yes. The answer is yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well,” Elkan smirks, “No. Not really.”

  Sid buries his face back in his work, disappointed.

  Elkan Rothschild sighs.

  “Do you want to know the real answer?”

  Sid looks back up at the battered man and nods enthusiastically.

  “The truth is,” Elkan tells him, “the question is what people call a catch twenty-two. That’s a sort of game where you lose just by playing, so the only way to win is to cheat.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It means killing people is wrong, unless you can kill people.” What Elkan just said is total nonsense.

  “That’s even worse.”

  “Every government, every religion, every monarch since the dawn of time has killed. Everyone with power kills, but they tell you not to. Power equates killing. Killing equates power. That’s why they, and by they I mean we, don’t want you to do it.”

  “I don’t get it. I don’t know those things.”

  “Let me try to put it in terms you can understand. Let’s say I have an army, and I tell you my army will kill anyone who kills a person.”

  “Then they would all have to kill themselves for killing that person…”

  “No. They don’t do that. They don’t follow their own rule.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then you meet a man who says he is going to kill you, unless you kill him first. Remember, my army is there watching you. How would you survive?”

  “I would kill the army and the man.”

  “I think you’ve just answered your own question better than I ever could.”

  Sid hears footsteps from the hallway, too light to be operators with gear, or even full grown adults. It’s the Van Duyn girl, come to visit him again.

  “Sid, I’m going to be very straightforward. I’d like you to come work for me.”

  “I don’t think Walter would allow that.”

  “Pishposh. Walter allows what I tell him to allow.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “It’s what I need you to do. No one else could possibly accomplish this mission.”

  Sid hears the door open behind him and the Van Duyn girl walks into the room. He can
hear the crinkling of her little spiral bound notepad.

  “I’m busy right now,” he says, glancing back at her. The girl frowns, annoyed.

  Elkan smiles politely at the girl, and she looks him over curiously.

  “Hello there,” he says. “What’s your name?”

  And with the sound of his voice, everything in the room changes. Sid hears the slap of the girl’s little notepad against the cold concrete floor, and the click clack of her pen next to it.

  He looks back again to see her standing still, her knees knocking together. The crotch of her blue jeans grows darker with an expanding urine stain. The girl’s face is a pale white mask of terror. For the first time ever, he hears her say something, even if it is just a whisper.

  “The bad man,” she says.

  Sid turns back to Elkan, only Elkan is not there. Instead, he finds himself looking up at twenty five feet of prehistoric terror.

  He doesn’t get even a tenth of a second to look at the whole creature before all he can see is teeth – foot long teeth, closing in on him.

  THE NIGHT

  THE BAD MAN CAME

  “I don’t understand how you’re having trouble with this,” says Eli Van Duyn. “This changes everything we know about everything!”

  “Eli,” his friend says, in a calming voice. “They could have easily been faked.”

  The other man is hunched over the big oak desk in Van Duyn’s first floor study. From under the desk, Megan can see his legs, only a foot from her face. She tries to mask her breathing or they might hear.

  “No. These are real. I’m sure of it.”

  “You can do quite a bit with Photoshop these days.”

  “I’ve had two experts look at them independently.”

  “Oh. Which two?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Just look at them.”

  “I admit they’re very convincing, but really…It sounds like something from a bad seventies television movie, which was followed by another movie, then adapted into a series, then another series.”

  “I get it. It sounds crazy and stupid, but it’s real. For the fifteenth time, it’s real.

  “Who took these photographs anyway?"

  “I don’t know. It could only have been one of them. We didn’t have cameras during the crusades.”