KILL KILL KILL

by Mike Leon

  “Kill him, Walter!” Jourgensen screams. “What are you waiting for?”

  A thunderously loud crash jars Walter’s attention away from Akimbo. It sounds like an Olympic boxer pounding the heavy bag from here, but Walter knows right away the sound is being muffled by distance and several walls.

  “What the fuck is that?” Akimbo says. His question is followed by a repeat of the smashing sound. “It sounds like it’s coming from block B.”

  Walter doesn’t waste any time thinking. He snatches up the USAS-12 from the floor and runs for block B. He already knows what to expect. Block B is where they locked Victoria and Eric after the attack on Rothschild.

  Walter navigates the labyrinth of tunnels like a rat in some laboratory experiment, and he wonders for a moment if that’s all he is – a rat in their twisted game. He may be walking right into a trap. Akimbo behind him, Eric and Victoria ahead, Reynolds missing altogether. They could all be waiting to gun him down around the next corner.

  The muffled thumping becomes a loud banging as Walter gets closer to block B. From the sound of it, this can only be one thing. The monster that attacked Rothschild has come for one of the others, maybe both of them. He looks down at the fire selector on the shotgun as he runs. He already knows what he will see, but it never hurts to double check. He has every intention to completely fill this bastard with lead on sight and nothing less than full-auto is good enough for that job.

  Walter reaches tunnel B-14 and finds something that surprises him. He turns the corner into the hallway, finger on the trigger, expecting to see a giant scaly monster bashing its way into quarters 37B and 39B. The hallway is clear. Nothing.

  Then the sound echoes through the corridor once again. Ahead and to his right, Walter can see the door to 39B rattling from a thunderous beating. The bashing is coming from inside 39B.

  Before Walter can take another step, a raging green arm smashes through the steel door and scrapes at the floor in the hallway between the rooms. Then it retracts into the room for a moment before the monster pounds against the door one more time and the whole thing comes crashing down.

  This is the same beast that attacked them two nights ago. Walter can tell from the bullet wounds still scabbed over along its skull. Akimbo did hit it after all. The monster wails in a voice that is far from human.

  “Lord Sobek!! MASTER!!!” It howls as it stampedes down the hallway straight for Walter and Akimbo, as if it doesn’t even notice the two men in its way.

  Walter gets a bead on it and squeezes down the trigger.

  The auto shotty kicks in his hands like a bucking bronco as lead death blasts from its barrel and spent shells eject over his shoulder. Round after round, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of pellets tear at the monster’s scaly green face and neck. The shotgun has spent the entire twenty round barrel in a matter of seconds. The monster is a mass of hamburger from the shoulders up.

  It keeps coming.

  “Move!” Walter shouts as he dives to avoid the reptile battering ram rumbling toward him through the compact hallway. Akimbo fires his guns at the monster as he leaps out of the way. It darts past the two of them, driven full speed toward some other unknown objective. As it passes, it corkscrews up the wall and onto the ceiling to run away from them.

  “It can walk on the fucking ceiling!” Akimbo screams as he reloads both pistols.

  “Follow it,” Walter barks. He’s already stomping off in the monster’s path. He jabs at the magazine release and the empty drum falls from the shotgun to skitter across the floor. He has one other, which he slaps into the receiver to do more damage to the thing when he finds it.

  The monster is not hard to find. The howling does not stop, and it reverberates through the empty corridors, overpowering the screams that filled Walter’s head for these last days. They give chase through all of the block B living quarters and down the centermost tunnel heading south. And though they cannot hope to catch up to the thing, Walter knows where it is going.

  This tunnel leads to block D, where there is a blast door that leads into a decoy storm runoff used to bring heavy equipment and large loads into the complex. That same blast door is where Walter stationed twenty men with very large guns.

  He hears those guns now.

  It is hard to mistake the sound of an M2 Browning for anything else, especially in this giant echo chamber, and especially when there are three of them. Other guns join the chorus, smaller guns, and at least one grenade. Never before has that sound been so welcomed.

  “Sounds like we’re missing the party,” Akimbo says. Walter shrugs off the comment.

  It takes them almost ten minutes to traverse the length of tunnel the monster must have cleared in only two. By the time they reach the blast door, the shooting has long since halted and silence awaits. Walter approaches the last corner cautiously, afraid of what he might find. He stops short of revealing himself to anything left standing at the blast door and he knocks on the wall beside him.

  “It’s Walter,” he says waving his hand around the corner.

  He waits for a response. In his worst nightmares, there will be none. There will be none and he will walk into a pile of bodies clogging the blast door.

  “You can come out, sir,” a voice calls to him.

  Walter turns the corner and sees a collection of his operators. The concrete chamber surrounding the blast door is a relief from the claustrophobic spaces that comprise the rest of the complex. The blast door itself is wide open and Walter can see the bottom of the door raised almost to the ceiling. The thing must have a fifteen foot clearance.

  The monster is little more than a broken carcass, shot to bloody pieces by heavy weapons and the men of fire teams Omega and Sigma.

  A single rubber flip flop on the floor only helps to confirm Walter’s suspicions, that the creature was Eric Du Pont. It was he they locked in 39B two days ago. Du Pont went in and this monster came out. They know now that Akimbo’s bullet test was worthless.

  “It opened the blast door and tried to come through,” says a short greasy operator with a thick black beard and bushy eyebrows. His skin is brown and pock marked. Walter thinks the man’s name is Karas, but it might be Kassis. “We let him have it with the big guns. You see how that worked out.”

  “Where the fuck was he trying to go in such a hurry?” Akimbo asks, looking down at a mess of chum and scales splattered on the floor near his boot.

  “Beats me,” says Karas. “He was making a fuck ton of noise on his way.”

  BARBECUE

  Sid leaps from the chopper as it touches down. The ground is scorched beneath his feet. He can feel the warmth through the soles of his boots and the cuffs of his pants. It is hot here, even for Arizona. Thick brown dust still clouds the air. For miles there is nothing but dirt and cacti to see, that and the mess they’ve made in this spot. The flamethrower in his hands leads the way.

  Ratzinger had to call in a chopper from off site to pick them up, and by then the thing was long gone, but they were able to track it using the signal from the cell phone Sid hurled into its massive open wound.

  Tracking a cell phone is exceedingly simple in the modern age. Positions can be calculated to within a few meters by measuring the time it takes to bounce a signal from the nearest towers. Better still, are the coordinates provided by the phone’s own GPS – a capability required on all American cell devices by the FCC.

  It was more difficult to call in the airstrike. No one at Graveyard, save Walter Stedman himself, has the authority to request support from the military. With Walter locked in a basement in Colorado with the rest of the Graveyard operators, Ratzinger had to place a call from Walter’s office phone while doing his best impression of the old fart. Judy tried to stop them at the front desk, but Sid only glared at her as they walked past and that put an end to any resistance from her.

  Fifty eight minutes later, a Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit dropped a two-thousand pound thermobaric bomb on the creature’s head. Thermobaric bom
bs, or fuel-air bombs, contain a large amount of fuel, rather than the explosives contained in conventional warheads. The ignition of thousands of pounds of ethylene oxide in the air causes a crushing pressure front that expands from the point of impact. Anything not instantly cremated by the nearly six thousand degree inferno will be pulverized by the blast wave and then doubly crushed by the vacuum that occurs when the flames burn out and the pressure drops. Pressures like this destroy battle tanks and liquefy the organs of men where they stand. Such weapons are nasty business.

  The others are searching the dust behind him, but Sid finds his quarry like a homing missile. He knows not to look in the center of the blast. There will be nothing in the center of the blast. Any matter that once was there would be incinerated or thrown to the outskirts before being sucked back in. No. Sid treks outward and finds exactly what he expects to see – a ring of bits.

  It surrounds the crater where the bomb struck, an almost perfect circle fifty yards across. Pieces of all shapes and sizes, torn, blasted and shredded apart – they must burn every last bit to make sure the monster does not come back from some tiny scrap.

  “We have to burn all the pieces now, to make sure,” Sid says. He already saw the monster come back once. He won’t let that happen again. All of it must be destroyed. The best way is fire.

  “You don’t have to tell me twice,” says Ratzinger from behind him. He raises his voice to bark at the operators climbing down from the chopper and scattering throughout the blast site. “Alright people, I want every god damned giblet toasted extra crispy!”

  Sid has already started. The flamethrower spreads a blanket of flaming napalm over the smoking remains of the creature. He makes his way along the circle, burning more and more as he goes. Ratzinger trails behind, burning the same bits again after Sid has already set them aflame.

  “Over here, there’s more!” Someone shouts. A group of soldiers rushes to cook a chunk of meat which has stuck to the side of a cactus. They set fire to the whole plant.

  Sid has burned his way along twenty yards of scattered guts and tatters of scaly flesh when he first spots the humongous skull of the beast ahead. He skips a swath of remains and moves for that now. It lies face up, severed from the rest of its parts and badly damaged. Much of the bone is exposed and the face of the thing gone, but that maw of terrible teeth is still intact. A trail of red slime and juice seeps out into the desert sand from the gaping hole where it was once attached to a body. Sid could crawl through that hole it is so big.

  “Bagh,” the monster head drools, trying to speak. Even in a thousand thousand parts, it is not fully dead.

  “Fuck,” Ratzinger says. “That’ll make your hair stand on end.”

  Sid has no reply. The monster doesn’t scare him. Nothing scares him now. He’s sure of it. Not monsters. Not men. Not death itself.

  It isn’t because he’s so brave. It’s because he’s seen too much madness to care anymore.

  “I guess not,” Ratzinger says.

  He points the flamethrower at the giant head.

  “Bastards,” is the last word ever uttered by Sobek, King of the Reptoids of Thule.

  NOBODY LIKES COLTRANE

  There is nothing quite like the love of a good woman. A good woman. Do you know how you tell a good woman, Tanaka? No? It is in the way she fucks.

  You think, this dirty old man is talking nonsense, and you roll your eyes. But I am not. Let me tell you.

  Some women, they let you fuck them. Dead fish. Boring. Quiet. Those women do not want to fuck. They want something else from you. Attention. Security. A baby maybe. If they are whores then money. Those are bad whores – the ones like dead fish. Walk away and don’t pay them. If her pimp comes to fight you spit on him and stab his balls. That is what I do.

  Some women, they fuck you. They pull you aside and tell you they want it. They pull down your pants and suck your dick when it is least convenient. In the middle of a war even. They get on top. They scream and moan and make a good show – but you always wonder if that is all it is. A show. Maybe she just wants something else like the dead fish girl, but she is a good actor. Even a whore, especially a whore, if she is a good one, will make you wonder these things up until you hand over her money.

  With a good woman you never wonder. She wants it.

  Did you have a good woman, Tanaka? Of course you did. You would not have battled through such horrors over the loss of a simple whore.

  You and I are the same.

  I lost a good woman in a building, Tanaka. Ragheads Tanaka. Never forget.

  Do you like Coltrane Tanaka? No? You don’t know? We should listen to Coltrane sometime you and I. Walter Stedman says nobody likes Coltrane unless there was a woman. He is right. Never tell him he is right.

  I shot Walter Stedman behind a strip club. Don’t worry. He is alright. I shot his gun.

  Do you know what it takes to turn small boys into killers? Trick question. A knife or a gun is all. Anyone can be a killer.

  I made them expert killers. That is much more harder. More harder.

  What? Don’t be ridiculous. I make perfect sense the things I say.

  Walter sent me targets for the boys. Cardboard? Clay? No. People. The best kind of target. He had them shipped to me instead of Gitmo. You know what I did? I put them in a big cage and told the boys to shoot at them. You learn best from moving targets.

  I tie them down I say kill. The boy he takes whatever I give him and he kills. Sometimes I give him knife. Sometimes spoon. Straw. Rock. Piece of string. I say kill. He kills. Over and over. Every day. You have to learn where. You cut. You stab. You choke. You have to learn where.

  Then I put the boy in the cage with them. I say kill. He kills. Then I put him in the cage with two of them. Then three. Then four. So and so. Finally twelve. Then I throw a knife in the cage. That makes it harder or easier. Depends who catches the knife.

  The boys they take many beatings, but they learn. Now they kill twelve men easy.

  We kill four thousand that way. The boys bury them in the Pine Barrens. Burn them. Bury them. You say four thousand dead. I say one good woman.

  WINNING

  Walter steps off the Graveyard chopper grinning like the fighter pilots he used to have lunch with in his Special Forces days. What is it with fighter pilots that they always have those hefty white smiles and their chests puffed out like the alpha primate? It must be the job. It must be the feeling of jetting through the air way past the speed of sound, knowing that when you set foot back on land you can fuck any single lady in the bar with minimal alcoholic intervention. Fuck ’em. None of them ever brought down zilla face to face.

  He turns up to the second chopper, still in the air, the bulky frame of the monster itself dangling from a tow cable and covered in a black tarp they retrieved from the airfield.

  “Bring it down slow!” Walter yells. The words sound strange coming out of his mouth. He is so accustomed to screaming for everything to be done right now, yesterday, faster than a scalded dog, faster than a redneck can change a tire, and a whole volume of other similar remarks.

  Air gusts from the chopper blades as the machine lowers to the helipad. A group of operators on the ground reach to steady the swinging monster. Walter sees it resting on the pavement and then he turns to walk away with the second chopper still hovering above.

  The helipads behind Graveyard are a mess. Twisted hunks of broken helicopter lay heaped on the ground, some obviously pushed off to the side with haste when the field maintenance teams were radioed ahead. There are bodies plastered into the dirt too, mangled beyond recognition some of them, others just looking to the sky with endless stillness. Worth it? Walter ponders the question. Maybe. They got the bastards on the run now.

  Lieutenant Ratzinger is waiting closer to the building with Sid Hansen and a few members of November team. None of them are geared up for an assault completely, except for Sid Hansen. Kid probably takes a carbine in the shitter. The rest of them are half dressed in tact
ical gear. Ratzinger himself is wearing a blue polo shirt with fatigue pants and some black knee pads – the left one with a big white Graveyard skull spray stenciled on the hard plastic. That’s a new development. It looks neat, but Walter isn’t crazy about having too many identifying marks on his people.

  “I want a full report!” Walter barks on his approach.

  “It was Rothschild, sir!” Ratzinger yells over the chopper blades. “It was the biggest one I’ve seen.”

  Walter doesn’t take that lightly. Ratzinger was there in the slaughterhouse. He saw the carcass of that thing they needed tank killers to bring down. If he says it was big, it was big. He still wants to see it for himself. And he wants the eggheads to go over every inch of it with a fine toothed comb.

  “Where is it now?” Walter asks.

  “We killed it, sir.”

  “I know that! Where are the parts?”

  So far, he’s only hearing things he already knew. Operators there at the building phoned to Walter hours ago to explain the situation back at Graveyard. Only minutes before that, members of his fire teams had destroyed a creature of their own beneath the Denver airport.

  The monsters had almost won. All it took was a slight of hand to focus Walter and the others away from Elkan Rothschild. The son of a bitch was always a step ahead of him. From misdirecting him to kill Krupp, to placing all the suspicion on Anton Reynolds in the catacombs, Rothschild had every detail covered. Walter and Akimbo were ready to call in Kill Team Two and murder Reynolds and his men down there. Even if they had figured out Du Pont was a reptoid, Rothschild would have made out scot-free and they would be back at square one – if they were lucky. If they weren’t so lucky, they would have all died down there, leaving only Rothschild to pick up the pieces…

  But it didn’t happen that way. Now, Reynolds is on an armed transport back to his mansion fortress in the Ozarks and Du Pont is the dripping whale-sized carcass under the tarp behind him. They are winning this thing.