KILL KILL KILL

by Mike Leon

  “I don’t suppose you know the password too?” he asks.

  “Not a single damn digit,” she says. “It wouldn’t matter. It looks like a retinal scan, voice recognition and thumb print are required too.”

  “Knock it down,” Victor says.

  The Philistine orders the Bosnians to blast down the door and they set right to work. The team brought along a very large amount of C4 to destroy any structures that might impede them. It takes them five minutes to get the explosives in place. Judging from the thickness of the door and the security measures incorporated into it, they need to use more of the explosive than might ordinarily be used to breach an entrance. Because of that, Victor’s team has to stay a full hundred-fifty meters away in the snow. Once the blasting caps are set and the lines are run, they lie in wait for the Philistine to press the button.

  She does, and the whole structure vanishes, engulfed by a cloud of black smoke. The sound of the blast follows a second later. Some of the Bosnians cover their ears, but for Victor, the sound is the best part. The noise of anything blowing apart makes him feel alive.

  He rushes into the thick black mess with the Bosnians and the werewolf, all of them with muzzles leading the way, prepared to decimate any moving thing they might encounter with a plethora of different fully automatic weapons and a half dozen varieties of bullets. The werewolf is slouched over the same Browning M2 he brought to the hospital, apparently figuring it would be easy to carry since he would be in his huge battle form all of the time in this weather.

  The inside of the facility is dark and the choking cloud of dust makes it even harder to see. Victor listens for the sounds of shuffling footsteps to track his mercenaries in the darkness around him. He can make out a few blinking lights. The smell of burning metal is strong in the air still, and parts of the melted door lie cooling on the cracked concrete floor. Victor steps over them.

  The Bosnians are like swarming rodents in the dust, reaching and poking to find their way while bumping into each other. Victor leaves them behind and stomps straight to the end of the small antechamber they have entered. He immediately confirms the worst scenario possible. There is another door at the end of this room, just like the last – another boring, tedious, pointless fucking door.

  He expected this in truth. The Russians forgot this place long ago, but still he held out hope that there would be some guards, or a booby trap of some kind, perhaps other raiders arriving at the same time as them by a miracle of synchronicity. No. There is no fight to win here, just another inanimate slab of metal to blast through.

  They use a cutting torch on this one. A blast big enough to knock down the door inside the building might cause the entire structure to collapse. It would then take weeks and probably more manpower to clear the rubble and lift the tunnel enough to reach the next room. They will have to cut through this door with more precision. One of the Bosnians is tasked with operating the torch while the others wait. Victor sits down in a corner as the Philistine enters the antechamber for the first time. The woman is hardly one to rush to the frontline, even with her taste for a wide spectrum of cruelties.

  “How long until they cut through?” she asks.

  “An hour or two,” Victor says.

  “It’s a thick door. The USSR didn’t fuck around back in the day.”

  “Which day?”

  “The day. It’s an idiom. It just means a long time ago.”

  “Oh,” Victor shrugs. He is thoroughly unimpressed with all he has seen of the old Soviet Empire so far. “I must disagree. This facility is unguarded and hardly a challenge. I had hoped for more of a fight. Instead, I’ve seen security measures a simpleton with some power tools and explosives could walk through.”

  The Philistine’s black ski mask gives away nothing, but Victor knows she is hiding some detail. She was not sure of her safety when they blasted the door down. Otherwise she would not have stayed back.

  “Don’t give up hope just yet,” she says. Then she winks at him through the right side eye hole in that ski mask. “I’m a lot of things, baby. But a boring date isn’t one of them.”

  The answer is enigmatic. Kill Team Three circled this mountain once and Victor was watching himself for any sign of life. There was none. If there were sentries here, they surely would have encountered them by now. There could not possibly be a very large garrison. Military units larger than a squad or two require support structures – food, equipment, housing, transports, and here in the frozen wastes, a way to keep warm. These things are not easily concealed. Even if they were hidden away beneath the mountain there would be telltale signs: roads, or at least tracks where men patrolled and trucks brought in supplies, smoke or exhaust from their fires or furnaces, signs of waste from discarded food wrappings to fecal matter. Victor saw none of these things.

  “So if we turn this thing on, what’s gonna keep them from just turning it back off?” Niggerfucker asks.

  “They don’t know where the switch is.”

  “They got power in here. It’s got to be coming from somewhere.”

  “Nuclear batteries buried underneath the bunker. If the entire Russian power grid is knocked out, the Dead Hand still has power for twenty-five years, give or take.”

  Victor went over all these concerns with the Philistine before setting out on this plan of action. Niggerfucker just never listens. The construction of the Dead Hand is both ingenious and idiotic at the same time. Ingeniously stupid? It is a masterpiece in Victor’s view.

  Fail deadly. That’s what they call it – the opposite of fail-safe. The Dead Hand was designed to automatically launch all of the Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles at the United States in the event of a decapitating strike which would wipe out the Kremlin and prevent the Soviet leadership from ordering retaliatory strikes. It uses an array of sensors on the surface to monitor radioactivity and overpressure throughout the Russian motherland. If it detects a nuclear attack, the system sends a radio signal that triggers the ignition of dozens of relay rockets which spread out, broadcasting launch orders to thousands of ICBMs in silos throughout the country. The central brain of the system is buried in a subterranean bunker so deep beneath this mountain that it can withstand a nuclear attack. Once Kill Team Three has control of the bunker, no one will be able to take action against him without triggering a doomsday event. The trick now is just getting down there.

  It takes them another two hours to cut through the door, with three of the Bosnians passing the torch off in shifts. They start at the left corner along the top of the door and work their way down in a straight line to the floor, then again starting at the upper right corner. The door flops inward just before they make it all the way to the bottom, and two of the Bosnians shuffle to get out of the way to avoid being crushed under the thing as it falls. It smashes to the concrete with a loud clomp and leaves cracks jutting out from underneath it. A hairline fissure shoots like a lightning bolt across the room and stops at Niggerfucker’s feet.

  The Philistine orders the Bosnians through the door first. Victor is right behind them. The adjacent room is illuminated only by the flashlights of his mercenaries for a few fleeting seconds. Victor sees some colored lights blinking in the darkness; red, green, blue. Then the house lights flicker on and the room is awash with fluorescent brightness.

  There is a strange thing here. The room is an empty square, except for two pillars ahead of him, across an open space of twenty yards. On each of the pillars are sliding elevator doors and a control panel with only up and down buttons. This is not the strange thing. The strange thing is the seven foot tall robot in front of him.

  The figure is a boxy thing, partly rusted and mounted from the waist down on a set of black rubber treads cycling around a brass colored box with ribbons of cables running up the spindly waist. A shielded steel cable runs from the chassis of the treaded box to a system of sliding cables along the ceiling. From the waist up, it is a humanoid design with arms and a head, albeit one that is yelling at Victor’s tea
m in Russian.

  “Остановить,” it commands in a hollow, synthesized voice. “Пожалуйста отображения полномочия приступить.”

  It hasn’t a face so much as an array of infrared sensors where its face should be. It shows no expression. Just a cold blank slate of brass mounted on the shoulders of a suit of rolling armor. Victor has no idea what it is saying, but he can make some educated guesses from the way the robot’s two gatling gun appendages are pointed at him.

  “Остановить или вы будет прекращена,” the robot says.

  “It’s a fuckin robot,” Niggerfucker says.

  “У вас есть три секунды, чтобы подчиниться.”

  The gatling guns begin to spin up. The room is filled with the sound of the whirring motors that drive the rotation of the six barrel cannons.

  “I don’t think it’s a friendly robot, neither,” Niggerfucker adds.

  Victor has no interest in waiting to be shot at. He lifts his rifle and shoots the robot, right in its sensor face, five times. The thing flinches as the force of each shot stops against its metal head, but it is relatively undamaged. Maybe the Philistine was right. He can expect to have some fun after all.

  The opening salvo of minigun fire turns the three Bosnians flanking Victor to paste and removes most of Niggerfucker’s right side before he dodges into the last room.

  “Остановить где вы находитесь, злоумышленника,” the robot says.

  Victor charges the metal sentry, his AK-47 blasting full-auto into that metal chest. Shells whiz past his body as he moves, but he fears them not. Bullets cannot harm him. He missed his chance to demolish the last robot monstrosity he encountered, and he regrets that still. This one will have to do.

  Roaring like a beast, he leaps onto the figure’s frame, shouldering his rifle behind him and drawing his wavy kris knife from its place on along his leg. He wraps his arms around the robot’s head and covers its upper body in a crushing bear hug between those spinning cannons as they continue to spray death into the expendable men behind him.

  Victor stabs his knife into the robot’s back, but it bounces away from the heavy plate exoskeleton, leaving only a scratch. He stabs again, this time with a rage unparalleled by any man, aiming for a line where two plates meet along the spine of the machine. On this one he gets through. He twists the blade, but finds himself unable to do much but grate his hands against the handle of his knife. He could try to pry it open with the knife as a lever, but he knows the blade won’t hold against the thick armor. Instead, he pulls back on the handle, freeing the knife and planting it back in its sheath. He jabs the barrel of the rifle into the gap in the robot’s armor and begins to pull back with all his might, crowbarring the opening between the plates. The famously sturdy rifle holds, the barrel only buckling very slightly, and Victor pulls the trigger to unload the magazine into the robot’s hollow chest cavity.

  The robot begins to thrash wildly back and forth like a bucking bronco, viciously attempting to throw him to the ground, but Victor holds. When the magazine is empty, he pulls a hand grenade and rips the pin free with his teeth. He slams the grenade into the hole in the robot’s back and leaps clear of the bucking metal beast and rolls across the floor. The blast trumpets from inside the robot’s armor, shooting a jet of smoke and shrapnel from the opening behind it. A scattered pattern of metal shards is embedded in the opposite wall.

  The robot comes to a very sudden stop. The miniguns continue to spin, like they have a life of their own, but they no longer spew lead death.

  The Philistine walks into the room looking annoyed. She steps over a pile of guts that used to be one of the Bosnians. The area around the door is splattered with red and black ichor and flaking bits of cement dust from the dents the cannons left. She points at the spinning gatling barrels.

  “Those things are so fucking loud!” she shouts over the motors. “Someone shut them the fuck down!”

  The Bosnians swarm all over the inactive robot, pulling at it with a crowbar and another one cutting into it with the blow torch.

  Victor is already up from the floor.

  “You were right,” he says, smiling wide. “I did have some fun.”

  “I thought you would appreciate the surprise.”

  “If only there were more of them,” Victor says.

  “There could be.”

  “Fuck!” Niggerfucker shrieks. The big man leans against the wall near the door. “More of them things?”

  The Bosnians succeed in silencing the minigun motors. The room goes quiet and they no longer need to shout to be heard.

  “Coulda used a heads up on the last one,” Niggerfucker says.

  “What are they?” Victor asks. He knows the Philistine knows the answer.

  “I told you the facility was fully automated,” she answers, shrugging. “I meant it.”

  “That ain’t right. Ain’t no ruskie built that shit. Not in eighty-five, not now.”

  “Please,” the Philistine rolls her eyes, an action Victor can ascertain even through that black ski mask. “You regenerate like a worm. He’s immune to bullets. There’s an EDM DJ werewolf standing in the corner, and a robot is where you draw the line? The thing makes Johnny Five look like Roy Batty.”

  “We need to get to the computer core,” Victor says. He doesn’t care about this silliness. “I assume these elevators go down there?”

  “I think so.”

  Excellent. With some luck, there will be more gun toting machines in his way to make this even more interesting.

  Soon, he will have control of enough missiles to kill millions – and in screaming, burning, blasting clouds of destruction, millions he will kill.

  SNEAKERS

  “So what is your real name?” Monica says. Her eyes are as blue as the sky above her. A cool breeze blows through her dark hair. She’s sweaty and a little out of breath after the climb. The dirt at his back is cold.

  “I have none,” Ivan says. It is not entirely true. He must have had an earlier name, but he never learned what it was. He isn’t interested in finding out what it was either.

  “Nobody has no name. What did your parents call you?”

  “I never met them.”

  “What about the people who raised you?”

  “I lived amongst the wolves in the frozen wastes.”

  “Where did you get the name you have?”

  “I took it. I killed a man called Ivan Hansen. He was Russian and American, so I stole his identity to travel easily in both countries.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that that’s not who you really are?”

  “A name is not who you are. I have many names to many people. I am still here just the same.”

  She rolls over and looks at the clouds. The sky is populated with just enough of them to call this day clear still. Hazy shapes are hidden amongst them and one of Monica’s favorite things is to point out what they look like and see if he agrees.

  Today she does not immediately skip to that. She has a look that is more serious.

  “How many people have you killed?”

  “I have not kept count. Many thousands.”

  “Do you think you’ll ever stop?”

  “When I no longer have a reason. Probably I will be dead before then.”

  “But that’s what I don’t understand. You don’t have a reason. You never have. You don’t fight for a country. You don’t believe in God. I would say you do it for the money, but I know you, and money means less than shit to you.”

  “When I want something, I go take it.”

  “Exactly. You live like a pirate, Van. And I should hate you, but then you go do something like jumping into a grammar school to save a hundred kids from lunatics with a bomb and it makes me think twice.”

  “Those men were enemies to us all.”

  “You always say that, but I don’t understand what it means. Nobody
is an enemy to everyone.”

  “Some men are.”

  “How?”

  “When I was a boy in the cold, I survived without money or superstition. I struggled and became better simply because it was the thing to do to survive. All people should struggle to become better on their own, without made up gods or rulers to push them. When men try to hold us back from that, they are everyone’s enemy, and I kill them.”

  “That’s a better explanation than I thought you would come up with.”

  “You think I am a cave man.”

  “I do not!”

  She is silent for a moment. Then she shows him a mischievous stare.

  “You want to find a cave around here to drag me into by my hair?”

  He thinks about it. The idea is quite appealing, but he is comfortable lying here on the rocky summit.

  “Maybe in a bit,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  She snuggles against him.

  “That one looks like a gym shoe,” she says, pointing up at the sky.

  It could look like a gym shoe. Ivan would have said a combat boot. He doesn’t care. Today is too good a day for nitpicking.

  SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD II

  Walter pounds the pavement outside the Graveyard building harder than he has in quite some time. He’s running for the truck where Zap and Tom have been chopping up the cadaver hauled in from Denver.

  He reaches the trailer less than a minute since receiving the phone call that prompted him to run down three flights of stairs and through the security checkpoint in the lobby. He’s breathing harder than he would like, but he’s just too old for cardio.

  He whips the door open and sees Zap’s eyes dart to the rear of the trailer to see him. The dreary little man sits in a collapsible aluminum lawn chair bundled in layers of winter clothing. On a small rolling gurney in front of him sit some electronics and the strange conch like object he found in the reptoid’s brain. The inside of the trailer is lit with fluorescents and at least one massively bright incandescent spotlight. The carved up body of the monster is an even more eerie sight, the way the light plays on it here.