by Mike Leon
“Run!” he says.
“Whatthe?”
Before the soldier can react, an enormous green hand comes up the stairwell and over the railing behind them. Sid dodges its taloned grasp, but it snatches the operator. Then the grenade detonates, the sound echoing up the stairs into a sustained ringing. The blast must be a jolt to the monster below, because its humongous hand jerks upward, bashing the operator against the ceiling and crushing his skull. Sid plucks the pin from the operator’s remaining grenade and runs through the lobby doors as the body is dragged below. He hears the second explosion as the doors swing shut behind him and the Van Duyn girl.
The lobby is already alive with men in black body armor. Four stand blocking Sid’s way. Above them is the balcony, and the sound of footsteps alerts him to the presence of at least ten more. He inspects their weapons. Another sub gun, three carbines, an assortment of tear gas. No. This will not do.
“You’re going to need bigger guns!” he shouts.
“What?” says one of the operators, a clean shaven man with his helmet straps unbuckled. “What the hell is going on down there?”
“Fall back!” Sid yells as he passes them by, dragging the Van Duyn girl along by her mangled hand. “Get away from the doors!”
Sid takes a carbine from one of the soldiers as he passes. He takes it so swiftly that the man is left standing unmoved, as if the weapon was still in his hands. The soldier is still looking down at his empty hands in confusion when the stairwell doors swing open and the beast erupts from them.
It bats the four operators aside with a single backhanded slap that crosses half the room.
“I’m going to pick your bones clean, boy!” Sobek screams.
Sid turns and fires three rounds of 5.56 into the monster’s left eye as he back peddles; then three more into the right. The monster raises a hand to cover its eyes, blinded yet again.
“Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice…”
The monster’s tail whips across the lobby with incredible force, hurdling at Sid like a forty foot mace. He flattens against the ground and feels the steel scales breeze over him. The tail smashes into the walk-through metal detector near the front entrance and dashes the machine to pieces. One of the security guards is hit as well and sent sailing into a support beam where he meets his grizzly end.
The guards on the balcony open fire on Lord Sobek, but Sid knows this will do nothing. They will need anti-tank weapons to destroy the creature. There are weapons in the armoury which would likely wound it, but he will have to get past the monster to get them. There are two ways back to the basement, the door at the monster’s feet and the elevator on the balcony, which means sprinting up the stairs right under the beast’s nose. Still yet, destroying it altogether might require something larger than Graveyard has on hand. Fucking grenades barely slowed it down…
Sobek reaches up onto the balcony and snatches one of the security guards. He crushes the man in his giant hand and flings him aside. The broken, oozing mass that splatters on the floor next to Sid barely resembles a man anymore. Another guard shrieks, flying high across the room after Sobek tosses him over his shoulder. The monster is tearing through the security team quickly, but this may be the distraction Sid needs.
He looks back once to see the Van Duyn girl cowering behind a steel support beam. He can’t take her along. He will have to do this quickly if he is to leave her here.
He sprints for the door. He is headed straight for the monster’s feet – probably the last place in the room anyone should want to be. The underbelly of the thing is devoid of genitals, a disappointment, as Sid could shoot at them if they were there. One massive foot lifts from the floor and stomps back down as the creature claws at someone up above. Sid leaps to avoid being crushed and rolls along the tile floor. He reaches the stairwell doors unnoticed.
As he reaches for the handle, the doors swing wildly open. More operators file into the room in front of him – men from the November fire team. These men have bigger guns – elephant guns, grenade launchers, AT4s, and heavy machine guns. Sid hugs the tile and November shoots at the monster with all of these things.
It’s a motherfucking heavy metal show cranked up to eleven. There is quite a bit of BOOM amongst the RATTATTAT and at least one KABLAM as the giant beast is hammered with a dozen guns designed to kill battle tanks. Sid looks on as scales and blood rain down on the lobby floor like gruesome confetti. Two men plant an M2 browning on the floor next to him and begin a sustained barrage of .50 rounds that tear chunks of meat from the creature’s hide. He sees a HEAT round from an AT4 blast a hole through the thing’s midsection big enough for a child to walk through. Another such blast breaks the monster’s right leg in two at the knee. It topples and the floor quakes from the impact. Sid feels it shaking beneath him.
“Is that the best you can do?!!!” the monster screams.
Then one of the operators fires an 84mm HEDP round from an M3 Carl Gustav that blows off the monster’s bottom jaw at the hinge, and that is the end of it saying anything else. Soon after, it collapses.
November stops shooting.
“God damn, Lieutenant,” says one of Ratzinger’s men. “The Goose fuckin’ wrecks these things.”
Lieutenant Ratzinger offers Sid a hand up from the floor, but the boy bounces to his feet without any help.
“You retrieved those guns very quickly,” Sid says.
“We knew as soon as we heard the roar,” Ratzinger reports solemnly. “That’s not a sound you forget.”
“We’re going to need more.”
He barely speaks the words and two more operators appear pushing a wheelbarrow filled with 84mm rounds for the Gustavs, explosive charges, and two more AT4s through the double doors from the stairwell behind them.
“We got plenty more,” Ratzinger says. “We brought Charlie G and the whole gang. Where is Elkan Rothschild? I need to make sure he’s secure.”
“Nevermind that. We have to destroy all of it before it regenerates,” Sid says.
“Before it what?”
Sid can already see the creature’s gaping open wounds rebuilding themselves. Strings of muscle extend beyond the frayed ends where they once terminated into bloody soup. Sinew bubbles and grows. When the creature has regrown, it will most certainly try to escape.
Sid scans Ratzinger for something he needs, something which will ensure this monster’s destruction. He spots it on the man’s belt, clipped in a leather holster beneath the waist of his body armor.
Sid reaches out, snatches Ratzinger’s cell phone from his belt and hurls it across the room, straight into one of the monster’s open wounds.
“What the fuck?!” Ratzinger says. “That’s not a grenade!”
The monster stands, its destroyed leg almost regrown in full already, the rest of it a cross-section of bone and flesh, dripping blood and stringing entrails as it moves.
“Fire at will!” Ratzinger screams as the monster stumbles away from them, toward the glass front of the building.
The next command he yells is drowned out by the creaking of steel beams and cracking of glass as the giant beast barrels through the front of the Graveyard building and into the desert sun. It turns the corner of the building almost immediately and they’ve lost sight of it then.
“Where the fuck is it going?” Ratzinger says.
“It’s running. It knows it can’t beat us with these guns.”
Ratzinger lifts a radio to his face.
“This is November. Fire up the choppers. I want to be in the air in two minutes!”
The little speaker strains to relay the screaming response from the helipad.
“HOLY GOD!! OH GOD! It’s a fuck...”
They all watch as a flaming heap of crumpled helicopter sails past the glass entryway and crashes into a small sport sedan in the parking lot in front of the building. The resulting explosion sends a fireball a hundred feet in the air.
“It’s taking out the choppers!” Ratzinger says.
“It took out the choppers,” Sid corrects. “It doesn’t want us to follow it.”
“We have jeeps.”
“A monster that size probably runs forty mile an hour,” an operator chimes in. “It’s already long gone.”
The reptoid king is smart. It knows it can’t beat them here, not with all the heavy guns. What it can do is eliminate their mobility and run. Sid anticipated these things as soon as he saw November pounding it with all that artillery. He may not be an intellectual heavyweight, but he is a master of all things tactical in nature. The monster almost certainly underestimates his ability. For that reason, he believes he is still a step ahead.
“My father taught me never carry a cell phone,” Sid says. “They can always find you if you have a cell phone.”
CATACOMB III
“You have to kill them, Walter. You have to kill them all if you want the world to live.”
That’s what Jourgensen keeps telling him. The dumb son of a bitch won’t go away. He’s disgusting to look at, with his face all blown off, but he won’t leave. The dead operator stands there in the hallway, on the other side of the short rice bag wall placed here by Walter and Akimbo for their little siege. Walter lies on his side, his head resting on a rice bag. He’s trying to ignore Jourgensen, to look past him, through him, to his real target.
Walter looks down the hallway at the closed door to room 24A. Reynolds holed up in those quarters days ago, and none of the others have seen him since. Their only exchanges have been with the bodyguards at the door. After the incident at the elevator, they came here to knock on Reynolds door and check on him. The bodyguards answered and the situation quickly escalated to violence. After a few verbal exchanges, someone fired a shot at Walter through the door, which prompted Akimbo to go full-on head banger’s ball with double .45’s pointed down the hallway. Walter ducked around a corner as the bodyguards returned fire. After that, the two of them alternated hauling rice bags in from a supply depot in the next wing of the facility until they had a decent sized barricade in the hallway.
“I have an idea,” Jourgensen says. “What if you’re the lizard, Walter? You ever think of that?”
“No.”
“You talkin’ to me?” Akimbo says. The mercenary is resting along the wall opposite Walter. “I think I nodded off there.”
“It’s not crazy, Walter,” Jourgensen says. “What if I told you the lizards planted you here as a sleeper agent?”
“Yeah,” Walter answers, doing his best to ignore the apparition. He’s lying of course. “I wonder if you hit any of them when you unloaded the pistols through the door.”
“I doubt it.”
“Think about it,” Jourgensen prattles on. “What kind of proof is there that there really is a Walter Stedman? You have, what, three daughters and some ex-wives? When was the last time you saw any of them? Has anyone else ever met them? Maybe that’s all made up.”
“We’re eventually going to have to make another move on the door,” Walter says.
Jourgensen continues to ramble.
“You have no hobbies, no interests, no friends and no family. You don’t do anything except run Graveyard and chase after lizard monsters. If this were a movie or a novel or something, I’d say you were a pretty one-dimensional character.”
Walter tells himself the dead man is talking nonsense to fuck with his head. It’s not possible. But then, when was the last time he saw any of the people he remembers? His girls? The ol’ lady – the current one anyway.
He saw them at Lucy’s wedding. That wasn’t that long ago. He went right after the meeting with the inner circle, before the mess at Van Duyn Manor – the second mess. Or was it the first? He can’t recall.
He just waltzed into that wedding and back out again, like it was a dream. Maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe he fell asleep in the chopper and all of it happened in his head.
“Sure. You go right ahead,” Akimbo says. “I watch horror movies. I know what happens to the black man in these situations.”
“A black guy is whining about how the black guy always dies first? That’s not cliché dialogue at all,” Jourgensen remarks. “How do you know this guy isn’t just a figment of your imagination? Just like your girls.”
Is it insane that he’s listening to this right now? A figment of his imagination is telling him that someone is a figment of his imagination.
“We should blow it down,” Akimbo says.
“I didn’t bring any explosives, except the ones wired to me.”
“He’s like a walking caricature of Samuel L. Jackson, but bisexual. I think you made him up. You’ve seen too many Tarantino movies, Walter. This shit is getting to you – it got to you long ago really.”
“That’s just great. You know, I have an idea,” Akimbo says. “Why don’t you just call your personal army down here and light these motherfuckers up?”
“Shoot him in the brain, Walter. See what happens. Will he just vanish away like the imagined character he is, or will you have to hide the body? Nah. You’ll just have one of your lackeys hide it, if anyone even cares at all. It’s just another body. There are plenty of bodies in this business.”
What if Jourgensen is right? Maybe he should try it. It’s not like anything would happen. He could make up any story he wants about what happened down here. Victoria and Eric aren’t here to see. They locked those two in separate rooms yesterday. For their own safety…
“How long are you gonna keep this up?” Jourgensen says. “Quit stalling. You know what to do. Pull out your pistol and give him a lead facial just like that kid back at HQ.”
“Walter? You okay?” Akimbo asks.
Walter doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to talk to anybody if he’s just going to shoot them. Is that it? He’s going to shoot him? What if that’s what the lizards want him to do? That could have been their plan all along. Maybe they’re manipulating him from in that room somehow. Reynolds is making him see things that aren’t there. He could have been doing it since Krupp, maybe since before all of this. Now he’s trying to convince him to kill Akimbo so he can escape the facility.
But maybe he knew Walter would see that coming. Maybe he wants Akimbo alive. Maybe Akimbo is the lizard.
Maybe all of them are lizards…
“Walter, dude. You’re looking at me real funny, man.”
From the Office of the State Department
Document 324518
Subject – Classified
00:02 What were those coords again MC?
00:05 That would be victor foxtrot five-two-oh-nine-three-five
00:08 Roger there’s nothing out here but dirt MC.
00:10 Uh stand by Ascalon
00:11 Blackout12, this is MC, confirm coordinates.
00:12 Victor foxtrot five-two-one-one-four-three. Target is moving northbound.
00:13 You have sparkle?
00:14 No sparkle.
00:16 Copy on the sparkle MC.
00:17 You have VID?
00:18 Uh, negative MC. We have coords from a cell phone ping.
00:19 Ascalon we need a PID of target before you deploy.
00:19 Blackout12 what are we looking for?
00:20 You’ll know it when you see it.
00:21 You copy MC?
00:22 MC copy. Blackout12 what exactly does that mean?
00:24 I promise you’ll know it when you see it.
00:32 Blackout this is MC actual. We’re gonna need a real PID.
00:36 Trust me on this one MC. You really don’t.
00:37 Blackout if you can’t provide PID-
00:38 Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!
00:39 Ascalon repeat.
00:39 Holy shit! I saw it. It’s alive. It’s huge. It’s I don’t know what the fuck I don’t.
00:40 What the fuck is that?
00:40 It’s fuckin’ it’s fuckin Godzilla some shit.
00:41 That’s our target.
00:42 Ascalon this is MC actual. You are clear
to deploy payload.
00:43 Ten seconds.
00:43 Roger. We need a BDA.
00:52 Splash.
00:53 Holy fuck. Direct hit.
00:54 Roger Ascalon. You got that BDA?
00:55 Stand by. There’s a lot of dust.
CATACOMB IV
“Do it, Walter,” says the flesh shredded apparition of Carl Jourgensen. “Do it.”
Walter Stedman lies with his head down behind the rice bag barricade in tunnel C-21 of the DIA catacombs. Next to him, Akimbo looks on apprehensively.
“What the hell, man? You gonna answer me?” the mercenary says. “You okay? I seen that thousand yard stare before, and there ain’t nothin’ good about it.”
Akimbo is the lizard. He might just be one of many. They’re probably all lizards. Every one of the fuckers in this dungeon with him. Vicki, Eric, Reynolds – they’re all in here laughing at him. The whole thing was her idea. She was in on it with them all along. They’re going to kill him down here and eat his legs like that poor nerd that made that website.
The nasty Korean automatic shotgun is on the floor beside him, but going for that thing right here next to the man is a losing proposition. This is a job to be done with a pistol. Walter can draw on Akimbo, but Akimbo is quick. The merc didn’t make a name for himself by losing gun fights. Walter is wasting time. He shouldn’t be thinking about this. The longer he waits, the more suspicious Akimbo will be. It will be mere seconds before the lizard bastard knows what’s coming.
