by Mike Leon
Tanaka has been sitting in the room for three hours when the old man begins to stir. It is the same room in which he awoke two weeks ago to find Walter Stedman sleeping in the very same chair where he now sits.
“How long have I been out?” Ivan asks. He sounds groggy, but Tanaka has never known him to be anything else. He’s still debating whether that is coincidence or just the way Ivan always sounds.
“A full week has passed since we slew Blood Drinker,” Tanaka says. “You are in the Graveyard building. In the infirmary.”
“I know where I am. I have spent more time here than any place I ever called home. You waited here this whole time?”
“No. Not the whole time.”
The last two days the ninja spent with Ratzinger’s team, combing Graveyard, calling names and checking them off from a list provided by the payroll department. They found two of the monsters hiding amongst the ranks of Walter Stedman’s little army. Tanaka cut their heads off himself. One was a soldier from a fire team apart from Ratzinger’s November squad. The other was a desk worker, which confirmed Ratzinger’s fears that the info they were given may have been compromised. That prompted him to triple check all of the payroll people and take Tanaka on extra sweeps of the entire building. Tanaka is wholly confident there are no reptoids left at Graveyard.
He visited Walter’s office to inform him the building was clear, before coming to wait here. The normally gruff soldier seemed rather unusually melancholy at the time, avoiding Tanaka’s eyes and responding with single words rather than the usual emphatic strings of vulgar expressions.
“The Reptoid King is dead,” Tanaka says. “Your son destroyed the monster.”
“Victor killed Sobek?”
“No. I don’t know who that is.”
“Sid did it? How?”
“With a very large bomb.”
“Where is Walter Stedman?”
“Here in the building. I spoke to him several hours ago. He was behaving strangely.”
“How so?”
“He seemed quiet.”
“Maybe I will go see him when the room stops spinning.”
Tanaka nods silently, unsure how to ask Ivan the questions he has. The room is silent for a moment, except for the intermittent beeping of the EKG machine. Then Ivan does his work for him.
“What is it you want, ninja?”
“Hmm? What do you mean?”
“You didn’t kill Blood Drinker and haul me back here for nothing.”
Tanaka still struggles to proceed.
“My father... He sent me here. He said that the peace I seek lies with you.”
“His ghost must be mad. I am surrounded by war. Always.”
“Sometimes we learn to behave like a dog by watching a bear.”
“Is that Confucius?” It is not. Why do all these Westerners ask him that?
“Will you tell me about him?”
“What is there to say that you do not already know?”
“Will you tell me anyway?”
“He was a great warrior – able to stand against me even in my youth.”
“Everyone knows that. I want to know something else.”
“What is it?”
“My father died for a debt he owed to you. My wife and child died with him. Why? What was this debt?”
“Tanaka, some secrets are better not known.”
“My family died. I must know why.”
Ivan pauses for some time. He seems to be considering Tanaka’s request or carefully choosing his next words. Maybe both. Tanaka cannot be sure.
“Your father had a lover besides your mother,” Ivan says.
“I see,” Tanaka says. “How did you know of this?”
“I witnessed them together. I promised your father I would speak nothing of it to any man as long as I live. It seems I break such promises more easily than him.”
“Perhaps. But I do not believe you.”
“It is true. I swear it. Now let it go.”
“My father was a wealthy head of household in Japan. It was 1985. He could have had any number of whores with little consequence.”
“Let it go, Tanaka.”
“No. Now it is you who owe me a debt of honor. I want to know the truth.”
“I told you the truth.”
“Then who was my father’s lover?”
“Hamato Aramata.”
Tanaka expected everything in the world except the answer Ivan gave him. The words sting him and his first feeling is to deny, yet the puzzle piece fits far too well to be a lie. Hamato Aramata was the true name of the shadowy Onmyōji who tried to unite this world with its dark counterpart in 1985, only to be stopped by the combined efforts of his father and Kill Team One.
“The Dark Shogun?”
“Yes.”
“The Dark Shogun was not a woman.”
“I told you. Your father was a complicated man.”
“My father killed him in a duel atop his demon spire.”
“I was there. It was a ferocious battle. When Katsuhiro finally cut him down, he wept. He told me he had never known happiness like Hamato had brought him, but in the end, he knew what had to be done.”
Walter also said Ivan was there when his father defeated the Dark Shogun, and there is no other way the American could know that story. Even though every ninja of his clan knows the tale, there are none who saw it happen.
“He was so difficult with me. He was a man obsessed with tradition.”
“He was that way because the other way already failed him. I told you. He was a complicated man.”
He was indeed a complicated man.
“Now you know everything,” Ivan says. “Has that brought you the peace you seek?”
“No. Not at all,” Tanaka says. He thinks Ivan may have been right. Some secrets are better not known.
“You are looking in the wrong place. Your father once told me, to rebuild what you once had, you must look inward.”
The phrase strikes a chord.
“He told me the same thing in my vision.”
“Maybe you should heed his advice.”
SHADOWS
Sid is a shadow, a ghost, a wisp of darkness. He moves swiftly through the night, approaching the house undetected. Unsurprisingly, considering the lack of any sentries. No one stands watch here, and it gives him a sense of familiarity – a strange feeling like he has done this very thing before.
He has, he realizes, thinking back on the mission to kill Timmy, the fake child assassin. Timmy’s house was a little bit more secure than this. It at least had a wall around it.
This one is much more susceptible to assault. No wall. Backed up to a forest. Uphill at the end of a cul-de-sac where the neighboring houses have no good view from their windows. He used all these advantages to reach the back door unnoticed, and now he is using a bump key to open that door with little more than a tap. A thermal scan of the house showed all targets sleeping on the upper floor, too far from the door to hear the little thump as he punches the key and turns. The bump key does its job. The little pins in the locking mechanism jump out of place and the lock turns as he expected. He lets the door swing open slowly as he points a Mk 23 pistol into the darkness ahead.
Normally these guns come equipped with laser sights, but Sid has no use for such a thing, so he took it off to lighten the load. He kept the sound suppressor, even though it makes the gun twice as long. He hopes not to need either. Even with the suppressor attached, this pistol will likely be loud enough to wake up the neighbors. The gun has a high ammunition capacity for a pistol, but is bulky as a Desert Eagle, which Sid doesn’t like. He doesn’t care that much though. He can shoot anything they hand him.
He glides up the stairs without a sound and into a narrow hallway crowded with doors. He goes to the end of the hallway, prepared to unload the Mk 23 into any moving thing that appears in front of him. No such obstacles present themselves. He notes the targets through open doorways as he moves: a small one, asleep in a bed to his right; anot
her small target, asleep in the room across the hall; two adults, in bed together in the larger room at the end of the hall. The glow of a solid blue television screen bathes over them. He goes to them first.
Sid holsters the giant pistol as he enters the room and draws his knife. He was not permitted to use poison on this mission, as it would attract added attention when local law enforcement discover the bodies. That is no matter. Standing next to the bed, he starts with the male. He drives the KA-BAR into the target’s back below the ribs and angled up, punching through skin and into kidney. The body jerks quickly, unable to scream because of the intense pain. The female begins to stir, but Sid withdraws his knife and plants it firmly in her throat before she can emit a sound. He stabs them each through the heart to ensure death and then he goes down the hall for the young ones.
The female child is easiest. A curly haired thing wearing dotted pajamas. She has no chance of fighting him at all. He simply covers her mouth and stabs her through the heart, his blade turned sideways to slide between the ribs. It goes all the way through the tiny body and into the bedding beneath. Her eyes go wide as the blade impales her. They stay that way long after he has taken back the knife and walked to the room across the hall.
The boy is youngest and clutches a stuffed animal in his sleep, a thing Sid still does not understand. It seems to be a charm of some type, for luck or religion – beliefs in things that Sid cannot see or make sense of. Henry Krupp had magic charms, and they did give him strange powers. Perhaps such things are not to be completely ignored. This one does nothing, however and the boy child is soon dead just like the girl child, a river of crimson rolling out onto the sheets. Sid watches the blood soak into the mattress in silence for a moment before snatching the thermal goggles from his belt and scanning the house around him. He sees nothing but the fading signatures of the targets he already killed. He peels the goggles away from his face and frowns.
This is hardly glorious battle. It isn’t even a fight. He’s murdering babies in their sleep. It is the fifth such mission he has conducted in the last three days and all of them have been the same. Infiltrate a house. Terminate all parties in the residence undetected. Extraction.
The first was the hardest. The adults he killed without a second thought. The children were more difficult and he had to summon forth his hatred to push hesitation aside. Hesitation is for the weak. A warrior has no hesitation.
His hate was not directed at the children though. It was a more generic hate. He tried to hate them. He told himself they were terrible enemies, or that they would grow into them one day, but those things did not work. No. His hate was for something else.
He feels wasted doing this. Are there no monsters for him to fight? No armies of mercenaries? Surely there is the Imam, a god walking the Earth, that he could be battling across the world somewhere. Instead, he is here, stabbing harmless babies to death on Walter’s orders.
Walter’s orders are about as nonsensical as Sid can imagine. Walter ordered him to kill someone, which he did, and Walter was furious. Walter ordered Graveyard to protect someone else, Sid killed him, and Walter is delighted. He put Sid back on operations as a reward. His father told him many times never to expect that life simply deliver him a sharp sword and a straight path to his enemies, but this is pure madness – and there is no end to it in sight.
Walter says these targets are all reptilian conspirators, but Sid has some doubt. He is not an expert on such matters, but he has yet to see any evidence that these people he kills are actually the same as the monsters that killed Shelly Baum. The bodies bleed like humans and die like them. None have shifted into hideous monstrosities and attacked him like that thing in the Graveyard armory.
He leaves the boy child’s room and walks down the hall to the large bedroom again. He wipes the blade of the knife on the sheets of the bed and watches the corpses of the adults. Only the female has begun to show any sign of abnormality, her skin already drying to a salty white and flaking. This is not unlike the last five visits, on which he observed that only some of the bodies changed.
Are the others not reptilian creatures then? Are they still? Maybe they don’t all fall apart. He doesn’t know.
The bedroom is three hundred square feet by his count, with nine foot ceilings, hardly built to accommodate a creature of any great size. It is furnished with a rocking chair, two dark brown chests of drawers, a television atop one of them, a light brown nightstand, a cherry colored wooden nightstand, a large wall mounted cabinet and a full body mirror with a silver frame.
Sid pulls the pillows from the bed, and then he lifts the mattress on both sides, looking under each. He opens all of the drawers and roots through them. The cabinets too. He finds many strange things. Porcelain figures top many of the wooden surfaces. The drawers are filled with clothing that is too delicate to be made for tactical use, some of it brightly colored and impractical for staying hidden in any combat environment. The high cabinet contains many bottles of yellow, orange and clear liquid; poisons perhaps. He does not know.
On top of the silent television is a silver colored DVD player and on top of that sits the empty case of some disc. Sid flips the disc case over in his hand. It is labeled Billy Madison and it is adorned with pictures of a mentally retarded boy and a promiscuous woman. Sid thumbs the play button and the video begins as he searches the rest of the room.
In the dark colored nightstand, he finds a leather bound bible, a book he has seen before and appears common. Next to that is a box of tissues, a cassette recorder, a small knit purse containing a roll of paper money a bit thicker around than the suppressor on the Mk 23, a bottle labeled personal lubricant, but which does not look like any gun oil Sid has ever seen, and a unidentifiable cylindrical device with nothing but an on/off switch to distinguish it from a billy club or other small bashing weapon. He picks up the device and pushes the switch to the on position, but it does nothing but emit a buzzing sound and rumble in his hand. A useless thing. He turns it off and drops it back in the drawer.
On the TV behind him, the video has started. Sid watches it as he roots through the other nightstand drawer. He finds a photograph of some women at a party, a flashlight, an old wallet, a cellular phone apart from the one that is already on top of the night stand, some batteries, and a plastic jar of little aluminum foil packages shaped into perfect squares. Sid picks up one of them, tears it open and finds something he recognizes. It is a barrel cover, used to keep water out of the barrel of a rifle during underwater insertions. The presence of these would indicate there is a rifle somewhere nearby, but Sid finds no such thing. He tears the whole room apart, and he finds no such thing.
He sits down at the foot of the bed, defeated. He will search the rest of the house, the children’s rooms, the spare room, the kitchen, all of it in due time – but he already knows what he will find. There are no guns in this house. Not a single firearm. Not a pistol. Not a rifle. Definitely not a heavy machine gun or any type of explosive ordnance. It was the same at the last four houses. None of them have any weapons.
What sort of madness is this? How did these people expect to fight off intruders – with the flimsy knives they keep in their kitchens? The closest thing he found to a real weapon was a sword mounted above the fireplace in the second house he visited, but it was made of brittle steel and attached to the handle by a thin extension that would not hold if used to strike anything thicker than a cardboard box. Sid could not even use such a pathetic weapon effectively himself. What the hapless targets living there intended to do with it is still a mystery to him.
The video in front of him is an even greater mystery than the lack of weapons. It is not instructional, rather, it seems to be a work of fiction describing the case of a man with a severe brain injury. He has poor motor function and a speech impediment. It would probably be better if this man had died from his injuries rather than live on as such a pitiful creature.
Sid looks around the room again. This is what these people do, he real
izes. They do not fight. They do not battle men and monsters. They lie here on soft beds and watch these stories in this house where no discomfort is known. They must acquire these things somehow. Maybe they are merchants like the people cleaning the hotel in Dubai, or the vendors in Afghanistan.
He walks down the hallway to the room where the young male target lies dead in a lake of blood and tears. He observes the contents of that room again. The walls are coated in white paper with little colored sketches of blue children playing games with balls like the ones back in the desert. The floor is messy with tiny representations of people made from painted plastic. Sid recognizes one of the little plastic figures. He crouches down and picks it up, turns it over in his hand. It’s Batman – another fictional thing. He thinks this is such a strange thing, but then that seems like too familiar of a thought. Practically everything he sees anymore is strange to him. He has always seen anything that is not a killing tool as some characteristic of madness or weakness or stupidity. But then the ugly truth comes to him.
It is like the world itself shatters to a million pieces around him when he realizes that he is the aberration. He is the deviant. He is the horror. No one else is like him. No other human is a fearless, godless murder machine. Only he is this thing. Only he lives to kill, and kills to live, to the exclusion of any other endeavor.
All these things he does not understand – the playing cards of Kill Team Three, the movie in the other room, the bottled water in the Dubai hotel, the mixed drinks made at the bar there, the fucking everyone does, the speed limit sign, the girls on Krupp’s plane that acted like they never saw a gunfight before – THESE are the normal things.
THE OLD MEN OF THE WORLD DREAM OF PEACE
Walter sits at his desk with a bottle of hooch in hand. He’s already half in the bag, wondering what he did to end up here. He lost nearly fifty men in that warehouse mess. He killed Krupp. He started a genocide and left it half finished, with plenty of collateral damage along the way. It’s been a bad year, but moreover, he wonders what he did before that to end up here.
