by Mike Leon
He thinks, in his drunken state, that it was his attitude toward school as a child. Walter never paid attention in school. In elementary school he was a troublemaker, always shooting spit wads in class instead of doing his work. Later in high school, he started getting into his old man’s booze.
Walter takes another swill of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 straight from the handle. Old habits die hard.
“You know what you should do,” Jourgensen says. The bloody specter has followed him since he spoke to Adams in that trailer. “You should give a blow job to that Colt after all the damage you caused.”
It all landed him in the army. He couldn’t get into college because of his grades. He didn’t want to work at the family business, a hat shop, both because millinery is the most God awful boring work, and because he resented his old man for being a drunk. So the army it was for him.
Walter takes another drink to that.
“Go ahead, Walter,” Jourgensen says. “Blame all the babies you killed on your primary school education. It’s okay. It’s not your fault. It was the system that failed you.”
Being a soldier was the first thing Walter was ever good at, so he stuck with it. He stuck with it all the way into SFOD-D. That was a bad decision. He should have just rotated out and found a regular job driving a bus or something. He always thought woodworking looked interesting. He should have done that. Instead, he met Patty in an army bar – another bad decision – and he stayed in the Special Forces until Graveyard offered him more money for what sounded almost like a vacation after two deployments and an ugly divorce.
“He’s the thing,” Jourgensen continues. “Everything you do is a disaster. Three failed marriages? Two kids who probably couldn’t pick you out of a line up, and one that barely considers you a correspondent. You’re turning sixty in a couple years. It’s only going downhill from here.”
Walter pulls his 1911 from the holster and sets it down on the desk. He looks at it for a moment as it sits atop a desk calendar with half the dates crossed out in red Xs. The barrel points at a dumb bauble Lucy gave him when she was a little kid. It’s a coffee mug that says WORLD’S GREATEST DAD. What a crock of shit that is. He wonders sometimes if it was meant as a sarcastic joke. Was Lucy old enough to understand something like that when she picked it out? Probably. She got her sense of humor from him.
“If you just end it all now, at least you won’t shoot any more kids in the head.”
Walter picks up the gun. He killed a lot of people with his old gun before Van destroyed it. This gun only put holes in scaly things and one little boy that didn’t deserve it. Walter turns the gun around and stares down the barrel. The steel muzzle against his face feels warm because it has been so close to him for so long.
“There we go. Now do it. Pull the trigger, you son of a bitch.”
He hears footsteps in the hallway and sets the gun back down on the desk quickly. He snatches up the booze again and prepares to look just drunk, rather than drunk and depressed.
“You’re awake!” Walter says, upon the sight of Ivan Hansen limping into his office. The legendary warrior stands in the doorway, wearing only some loose fitting black sweat pants. His upper body is a mass of wounds and scar tissue from burns, cuts, bullet wounds and explosive fragments. Multiple white bandages adhere to his flesh. His long peppery beard is soaked with sweat and his black hair hangs in damp locks in his face.
“I was awakened not long ago,” Ivan says. His raspy voice is even more rugged than usual. Walter can feel Van’s eyes moving up and down him, across the desk, around the room, assessing everything he sees into a perfect reconstruction of the last hour.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“Nah,” Walter says. He looks into the old man’s empty black eyes and tries his best to make it sound good, but Van has a way of seeing through people.
“Is that so?”
“I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“I killed a kid, Van. I shot a baby in the head.”
Van Hansen shrugs. Of course he does, Walter thinks. To him, it’s like saying he took the trash out or washed the car.
“Does that mean anything to you?” Walter says.
“Why did you do it?”
“We were trying to get answers from Novak. We thought – I thought it was a reptilian. Then Adams said it wasn’t.”
“Adams? You believe him?”
“I think so.”
“He lies. They all lie. What did you see?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t look. I couldn’t look.”
“These monsters are skillful manipulators. They cannot be trusted.”
“I don’t want to live like this anymore,” Walter shrieks. “Look at me! I’m a shell of a man! And for what? I’m working on ex-wife number three. My kids barely talk to me. I have more dead friends than living. Now I’m a God damn baby killer, and for what? I used to say it was alright because I was making the world a better place, but that’s bullshit. I made that up so I could sleep at night, and now that’s not even working anymore. All we do is ruin things. We ruin people’s lives. We kill people, and blow everything up, and leave a trail of widows and orphans wherever we go and it never stops. It’s never a better place. There’s no better tomorrow. It never fucking stops. So yeah. I’m ready to give a blowjob to a forty-five, because maybe that will make it...”
Ivan smacks Walter in the face. It stings like a bitch. He knows the old man was holding back. Walter doesn’t stop.
“I killed that kid! Shot him execution style!” Walter cries out. “I burned those people for no reason!”
Ivan smacks him again. He hobbles around the desk and grabs Walter by the collar. Walter fills the air with manic laughter.
“And then I sent Kill Team One to kill the rest! I didn’t have to do it! But I did…”
Walter feels warm tears rolling down his face. Walter Stedman is crying. He hasn’t cried in thirty years and now he’s sobbing like a girl.
Van picks up Walter from his seat and slams him against the wall behind him. He hits him again. Then again. Walter can taste blood.
“Listen to me,” Ivan says. His face is pressed up against Walter’s nose. Walter thinks he must have blown his brains out and this is what the reaper’s breath smells like. “You never look back. Never. Never look back. What is done is done and there is nothing more to say of it. You do not look back because you can never know what would have been.”
“What would have been is those kids would still be alive.”
“NO!” Ivan roars. The office rattles. “Do you think the wolf stops to feel sadness for the caribou cub? Never. The wolf does not know what would have been. The wolf only knows what is. Those people are dead, but you are alive. That is what is. If you want to end it then go ahead, but I will not look back.”
Ivan drops him and Walter falls back drunkenly against the wall. He slides down to the floor and sits there.
He watches as Ivan turns and hobbles away toward the door, true to his word, not looking back. Walter is convinced he would make it all the way out of here and down the hall, not even returning to look if he heard the gunshot.
He never gets to find out for sure, because Deadeye shows up in the doorway before the old man can leave. He sticks his head into the room and knocks on the wall outside, a pointless feign of actual politeness.
“We got a problem,” Deadeye says. He spots Walter on the floor and Ivan limping away and pauses with awkward uncertainty.
“What’s the problem?” Walter says, as he stands up from the floor. He grabs a tissue from a Kleenex box on the desk and wipes his bottom lip, which he’s sure is bleeding without looking.
“There’s a call from NORAD,” Deadeye answers. “Some shit is hitting the fan real hard. They want to talk to you.”
RATED R
Sid doesn’t know for sure what this place is called. He could ask someone, but that would give away his presence here. He could get b
ack to where he came from. He’s certain of that. He could retrace his steps to the house of bodies he left. He can find the chopper in time for evac. And so he isn’t lost. He just doesn’t know what this place is called.
He’s wandering in search of something he may never find – something he can’t name for sure. After the killings, after the last house, he walked away on his own. The choppers would be at the evac site soon, but fuck the choppers. He’ll go back when he wants to go back, and there’s nothing they can do to stop him.
He’s tired of people ordering him around. He’s tired of stabbing sleeping babies. He’s tired of men and monsters attempting to kill him. He’s tired of being berated for things he does not understand or care about. He’s just tired, and he’s going to do whatever the fuck he wants right now. He’ll go back when he’s ready.
The streets of the city are paved with black asphalt as far as he can see, which is not far because so many buildings surround him. This place is like Dubai, but it appears older – at least older than the part he saw. He was there only briefly, and spent nearly all that time in the hotel.
He still has the Mk 23 strapped to a holster on his thigh as he walks down the street. There are people here. Some look at him with fear in their eyes, others laugh when they see him pass. Already he knows they can pick him out. There is something different about him, and they can tell.
It might be his gun. He remembers how much Shelly hassled him about not taking any guns into the airport. Guns will draw attention, she told him. That is likely the same here.
He looks up at a sign that makes no sense at all. It says Chase in brightly glowing blue letters. There are a hundred glowing signs within sight in a dozen different colors. None of them mean much to him. Chase what? He looks around, but no one is running. He peers inside the darkened storefront window beneath the sign, but sees nothing save some desks, a counter with papers on it, a taller counter with little wooden signs that have people’s names written on them. There is also a vault door in the rear corner of this building. Maybe they keep weapons in there. They must keep them somewhere. He hasn’t seen anyone with so much as a sidearm in this whole city thus far.
He meanders past a window sign that is nothing but a ten foot tall photograph of a blonde girl wearing only a yellow bra. The sign says SUMMER’S SEXIEST PUSH-UPS. Sid knows all about push-ups, but he doesn’t understand this. Apparently, the girl’s name is Victoria. It’s not the same Victoria he rescued from Krupp’s plane. This Victoria is more shapely and has eyes that sparkle like an ocean. He would like to fuck her. He hasn’t thought about that since Grenadine and the way she died, but this woman makes all that horror go away. He wonders if he can find her inside, and if she would let him fuck her without a fight. He would rather not hurt her, but if he had to...
He is still ogling the sign when a tall black man passes him on the sidewalk. His pants hang so low that the waist band is around his knees and he must hold them up with one hand. He wears a cap with an insignia Sid does not recognize. He smiles and reveals a gleaming set of gold teeth.
“Yeah, you like that?”
Sid glares quietly back at the passerby, prompting a more serious look from him. Then the man continues walking away.
Deciding it best to keep moving and avoid any trouble that man could bring back with him, Sid moves into a darkened alley next to the building. He discards some of his extraneous gear. He hides the Mk 23 down the front of his pants, along with its holster. The suppressor makes the gun too large to conceal this way, and so he unscrews it and puts it in a cargo pocket on his pants leg. His knife he straps around his shin and pulls a pants leg over it.
He follows that alley until it opens back onto another street. He crosses the street and moves through another alley, then another, and another. Within a few minutes, he is two miles from the spot where he saw the man on the sidewalk, most of that traversed in darkness.
He emerges from the last of the shadows under a white marquee sign surrounded in bright light bulbs. He turns up to read the sign on the marquee, black plastic letters that read ONLY GOD FORGIVES, THE WAY WAY BACK, TARANTINO TUESDAY. To his left is a set of wooden doors and next to that is a black bunker or box with windows on the three outward facing sides. On the other side of the glass, Sid can see a man sitting in a folding chair reading a book. He has greying hair and thin wire rimmed glasses. He is portly and unfit looking. He pays no attention to his surroundings, even in such an exposed position. He most likely doesn’t even see Sid only ten feet away.
On the wall behind him, Sid notices colorful posters mounted in series, three on that wall and another two on the other wall past the windowed box. The posters are framed with tiny white bulbs that illuminate them.
These are movies – works of fiction. This must be a place where such things are displayed. This could be an interesting thing to see. In the houses he entered, works of fiction were common on video discs and posters and books. Batman was a work of fiction and that was… entertaining for a time.
Sid walks into the movie theater and scans the room around him. The lobby is alive with the hum of machines and ventilation. It is strangely cold inside. To his left is a counter with a glass case containing snack foods wrapped in colorful packages. The American soldiers and Graveyard operators sometimes ate things like this, though the old man had insisted they were unhealthy and should be avoided. There is a much bigger case containing bags of bright yellow popcorn, identified by a sign and picture above. Ahead of him stands a boy in a maroon jacket standing guard at the mouth of a long hallway leading deeper into the building. This boy is scrawny and has not so much a beard, but a number of single hairs haphazardly growing from his chin. He begins to walk past the man, into the hallway where it appears they show the movies. The man with the fuzzy face speaks up in a squeaky voice.
“Uh. Ticket please,” he says.
Sid stops and eyes him intrusively, searching for weapons. Unless this sentry has some hidden killing tools, or secret and powerful fighting abilities, then he stands no chance at all. Sid could snap him in half.
“What do you mean?”
“You need your ticket,” the scrawny boy squeaks back.
Sid looks to the ticket taker’s hands, which quiver slightly. He reaches the proper conclusion after five seconds of analysis. This place operates like the airport Shelly took them through on their return trip from the desert. They require paper tickets which permit access to restricted areas. It is a peculiar system, especially considering the complete lack of security forces here. He could overpower this boy and continue down the hallway, but he decides it better to play by the rules. He doesn’t wish to draw any attention.
He walks back outside through the set of windowed doors.
Sid approaches the man in the box. The man notices him and noses up from the book in his hands. He speaks through a thick window with holes cut in a formation that appears like a telephone speaker.
“Yeah?” he says.
Sid points at one of the posters on the wall to his right. It depicts a group of men who look startlingly like Graveyard operators, except for the presence of a seventy-year-old MG42 light machine gun in the hands of the trooper on the right. The gun is too old for any modern soldier to be issued, but that doesn’t rule out smaller, poorer forces that may have scavenged the weapons out of necessity. Behind the soldiers in the poster are several women, and the upper body of another man is visible as well. He wears a hat just like the one Blood Drinker wore.
Beneath them are the words INGLOURIOUS BASTARDS.
“I want to see that,” he says, without giving any thought to the decision.
“I.D.” the man in the box replies flatly.
Sid stares back at him entirely clueless.
“I need to see your I.D.” the man behind the glass repeats.
“What is that?”
“Identification. Driver’s license. State I.D., whatever you got.”
Sid doesn’t have anything like that. Graveyard o
perators carry no identifying records on operations, and his father insisted they never carry any papers of the sort. Real warriors do not need these things, he would say.
“I don’t have an I.D.” Sid says.
“This movie’s rated R. No one under seventeen admitted without parent or guardian.”
Sid furrows his brow. He is not seventeen and his father is not here. He has not met any man that could be his guardian – whatever that means.
“You seventeen, kid?” the man says. “You don’t look seventeen.”
“I’m sixteen.”
“You’re not old enough to see that movie. It’s too violent. Maybe you should see somethin’ else.”
He’s not old enough to see this? How could that possibly be true? Sid ponders the question briefly, and he concludes that whatever is depicted in this movie must be nothing less than the most outrageous anathema invented by any mind of man or animal. The flood of violent imagery that fills his mind in that second is enough to drive any normal man screaming and crying into throes of broken, hopeless dementia. And this movie is worse than that?
He must see for himself.
ALL YOUR BASE ARE
BELONG TO US
Walter is in the war room on the top floor of the Graveyard building. With him are Deadeye, Technical Tom, Zap, and The Arsonist. They’ve set up an encrypted voice chat with Vicky and Anton, whose faces are blacked out to avoid recognition, presumably from several other blacked out faces and one other unknown man in the call. His face is clearly visible, but Walter does not recognize him. He is an older gentleman with a white beard and a suit. Walter figures him for a commie when he notices a little hammer and anvil pin on the left lapel of the suit.
Walter gulps down black coffee in an effort to sober himself from his interrupted bender. Ivan leans back in a chair across the table, having showered and cleaned himself up just a bit. He sits at an angle with the camera to his back and over his shoulder just behind him, so that he does not appear in the frame. Only Walter and the others in the room can see his face. The old man’s eyes tell him nothing at all. Is he angry at Walter for what happened? Sad? Does he really just not care at all? Walter thinks the latter. The old man would kill his own mother if he thought it needed to be done. He wouldn’t even blink.
