KILL KILL KILL

by Mike Leon

  “Good morning, Walter,” Victoria says. “Mr. Kosygin, this is Walter Stedman.”

  “Yes,” replies the unknown man in a thick Russian accent. “I recognize him from photographs.”

  Walter has a few guesses why the Russians might have photographs of him. None of the reasons are good ones. The comment was obviously a dig at him for allowing himself to be photographed. Walter makes sure to smack the print screen key in front of him. Say cheese, motherfucker.

  “This is Yuri Kosygin,” Victoria says. “He’s the head of FMGFH.”

  Walter hears the acronym and he knows that whatever this is, it’s serious. FMGFH is the military contractor employed by the secret Russian syndicate that runs all of Eastern Europe. Walter doesn’t know much about the syndicate. Just like the people he works for, they remain cloaked behind many levels of secrecy. However, Walter knows the FMGFH. The company has occasionally clashed with Graveyard over opposing interests. It’s a shadowy army of butchers and madmen, just like the one he runs.

  “Mr. Kosygin, please show Walter what you showed us.”

  “As you wish,” Yuri says. “Mr. Stedman, three hours ago, the Kremlin received this video transmission by way of military communications satellite.”

  The picture of Yuri Kosygin’s face switches over to a frozen image of something Walter can’t make out. It looks like a boot on metal grating.

  “NORAD received the same transmission,” Victoria confirms.

  Yuri starts the video and the frame swiftly pans around from the foot to what appears to be the inside of a missile silo. Standing in front of a white and black checkered missile adorned with a rubber numbered keypad is none other than Victor Hansen. Walter nearly slaps himself for this one.

  “Hello gentlemen,” Victor says. “No doubt you know by now, I’ve taken Dead Hand. I now have control of over three thousand Russian nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

  “He’s full of shit,” Deadeye calls out. “No such thing as Dead Hand. It’s just something they made up for bad Discovery Channel specials.”

  Walter knows better. He’s been in this business too long. He’s seen enough death rays, holy relics, space lasers, and apocalypse plagues to know there was probably some ounce of truth to the tale of the legendary fail-deadly system. Still, if the Russians built what amounts to a doomsday device, they would have fifty infantry divisions and ten armored columns defending it. Victor Hansen doesn’t have the forces to fight through that, even if he is a damn super soldier. That makes his story doubtful.

  “In two days, I will launch missiles at Beijing, Shanghai, London, Tokyo, Mumbai and one hundred other cities around the globe. Nuclear retaliation by any country will trigger the Dead Hand system and launch the entire payload of Russian missiles at the United States. Billions will die. My demands are simple. The nations of the world must begin the extermination of all Islamic people by any means available. You have forty-eight hours to commence.”

  The video cuts to black.

  “Is he serious?” Deadeye says. The question is meant to be rhetorical. Victor is obviously delusional if he thinks that anyone would believe this, or meet his insane demands.

  “He could be,” Yuri says.

  “What do you mean he could be?” Walter asks. That doesn’t make any sense. He either grabbed the system or he didn’t. The Russians would know by now either way.

  “Comrade, you must understand. There was great chaos when the Empire fell…”

  “Oh my God,” Walter interrupts. He already knows where Yuri is going with this. “You lost it? You idiots built a doomsday device and you lost the remote?”

  “Did ja check the sofa cushions?” The Arsonist laughs.

  “We think it is located in Siberia,” Yuri says.

  “Siberia? That narrows it down,” Walter says. “Come on, guys. Let’s go have a look around Siberia.”

  “You do not need to be snippy with me, Mr. Stedman.”

  “I’m not being snippy,” Walter says. “Tom, how big is Siberia?”

  “Five point one million square miles,” Tom answers without even a second to think.

  “See? We can cover that in no time. We’ll meet back at IHOP when we’re done. Who’s for pancakes?”

  Yuri stares back at them unblinkingly through the monitor. The man is angry, but he is obviously not in a position to do anything about it.

  “How the fuck did you lose the God damned Dead Hand?”

  “Everybody in government thought somebody else in government knew where it was,” Yuri says. “But… nobody knew where it was at all.”

  “How are you supposed to find it then?”

  “That is why we came to you. There is one person alive who, we believe, knows the location of the facility.”

  “Who?”

  “Kill Team One.”

  “Since Kill Team One still drinks out of a sippy cup, I presume you mean the old Kill Team One.”

  Ivan nods.

  “He means me,” he confirms for everyone listening.

  Yuri Kosygin’s eyes widen with surprise.

  “He’s there with you?!” Kosygin says.

  “Yes,” Ivan answers. “And I know the location. KGB sent me there long ago on highly secret mission.”

  “Of course,” Walter says, rolling his eyes.

  “Everyone else who ever knew is dead now.”

  “Well that settles everything,” says Deadeye. “Write down some directions. Let’s drop a bunker buster on the joint and call it a day.”

  “It is not that simple,” Ivan says.

  “It never is,” Deadeye responds with a defeated tone.

  “The Dead Hand control hub is built into the side of a mountain and buried over two hundred feet underground. No conventional bomb will damage it.”

  “And a nuclear attack will trigger the system,” Walter finishes. The situation is almost too perfectly sinister to believe.

  “We feared that would be the case,” Yuri says.

  A solution comes to Walter rather quickly – too quickly to be worth anything, but he mentions it anyway.

  “Can’t you cut the connection to the warheads?” Walter asks.

  “No.” Yuri tells them. “Dead Hand uses radio transmission from overhead rockets to initiate launch. There is no hard line.”

  “Cut the radios out of the missiles.”

  “Do you know how many missiles we have? It would take years. We have less than two days.”

  “What about the power? We could cut the power to the facility.”

  “No. The facility supplies its own power.”

  “How the fuck does it do that?”

  “Nuclear,” Ivan answers before the Russian can. “Like a submarine. I have seen the reactor myself.”

  Technical Tom looks up from his Blackberry briefly and glances to Walter, prompting him for a go ahead to speak to the Russian. Walter shrugs away his permission. He can’t imagine what the guy could possibly say to make this any worse.

  “Mr. Kosygin,” Tom says. “A nuclear reactor and an array of rockets require considerable upkeep. It seems unlikely that the system would remain in operable condition after a long period of neglect.”

  “He’s got a point,” Walter says. “The thing has been rusting out there for two decades. It probably doesn’t even work anymore.”

  “The facility is kept operational by sophisticated automatons,” Yuri says.

  Ivan nods in confirmation.

  “Robots,” Walter says. “Great.”

  “Hang on. Hang on,” Reynolds calls out. “Am I the only one seeing the obvious solution here?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Give the man what he wants.”

  “What?”

  “Kill all the Arabs.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Victoria asks.

  “Why not? They’re causing the rest of the planet a bunch of grief anyway. Victor wants them dead. We want them dead. It’s a win win.”

  “Every governm
ent we control will be condemned internationally.”

  “Nah. He’s giving us the perfect excuse! We can put the damn video up on CNN if we want. It’ll take about ten minutes for the plebs to start lynching every brown person from here to checkpoint charlie. The Russians can take it from there.”

  “You’re talking about World War Three!” Victoria squawks.

  “Bullshit. The Chinese want the Arab oil even more than the rest of us. So we call up Chairman Mao and bring him in on the action. It’s us, the ruskies and the ching chongs united as one for the common good. Come on people now. Smile on your brother. All that stuff.”

  “I think he might be on to something here,” Walter says. It all sounds pretty clear to him. The writing is on the wall. Victor Hansen has the whole world by the balls right now. They should probably do what he says.

  “You are all fools,” Ivan interrupts. The talking heads all fall silent in the wake of his booming comment.

  “Excuse me?” Anton says.

  “You heard me,” Ivan says. “You fail to see this to the end.”

  “And what do you see, smart guy?”

  “You give him what he wants and then what? He goes free and retires to a beach somewhere? No. Not him. Not Victor. He is a warrior. He is a killer. He has a bloodlust like none I have seen. He will launch the missiles.”

  “Why would anybody do that? It doesn’t make sense. It’s the end of the world.”

  “To you, maybe. To him, it is different. It is the beginning of a new world – exactly the kind of world he wants to live in.”

  “No. That’s stupid.”

  Is it? Walter wonders. He never spent much time with Victor Hansen, but he knows what Van did to those kids out in the woods. He knows, and none of the others do.

  “I’ve never known Van to be wrong about a thing like that,” Walter says. “And he knows the kid better than any of us.”

  “Okay.” Anton says. “So if he’s right, we have around forty-five hours until everybody gets fucked. Well, not me. I have a fallout shelter. You know what I mean. But the selection of high class hookers is going to shrink like a pocket hose, and I don’t like that. So who here has some kind of idea to fix this problem?”

  Walter can only think of one way they might be able to avert disaster.

  “We need Kill Team One.”

  WORKIN FOR THE WEEKEND

  Sid walks from the theater in silence. Inglourious Basterds was not a screaming cacophony of death visions and mind shattering horrors committed to film. It was not two hours of sheer terror. It was hardly even a normal weekday afternoon.

  He had easily diverted the attention of the man standing guard inside the movie theater and sneaked down the hallway past him. He read the little signs posted on the ceiling to reach the movie on the poster and positioned himself in the rear corner of the room where the film was being projected. There were a hundred empty seats available, but it would be foolish to sit down and leave his back exposed in the dark like that. And so he stood with his back to the wall for one hundred fifty three minutes of film. When it was over, he shrugged and walked away. He expected something more.

  The streets are dark and devoid of life now. He sees no one walking the sidewalks. Even the ticket vendor is gone, his booth a black void with the lights turned out.

  He recalls the words of the ticket vendor. Too violent, he said. Too violent? What the fuck? The worst thing Sid saw in that theater was a man having a swastika carved in his forehead. Victor did things like that every day in the mountains just to pass time. Sid used to watch him and wonder what he got out of it.

  Too violent? It’s as if these people are so far removed from any sort of real unpleasantness, that even the most terrible scenes they can imagine are still quite tame by comparison.

  What must that be like? To live insulated from all the bloodshed he has witnessed and executed would be a strange thing indeed. He thinks it might make him weak. It makes all the others weak – and yet they still choose to live that way.

  Maybe he would not be able to do battle with superhumans and monsters if he were like them, but he also wouldn’t need to. The flipside of weakness suddenly feels very appealing.

  No more bullets flying at his face. No werewolves attacking him with assault cannons, or giant dragons attempting to eat him alive. No strange women would lure him with a soft touch and then try to kill him with a death laser. Never again would Walter scream at him for things he didn’t understand.

  Sid hates that man. Walter Stedman is a frail, cranky, drunken excuse for a soldier and he knew all along what Sid would only realize tonight over the bodies of children and their scattered toys – that he is the real monster. Walter never saw him as anything more than an attack dog to be used and abused however he saw fit.

  Fuck Walter. Fuck Graveyard. Fuck all of them. He’s never going back. He’s never going to do anything they tell him ever again.

  He scans up and down the street for a parked car and spots an older model brown Honda next to a parking meter ahead. This is a car he can hotwire quite easily using the skills his father taught him.

  Sid smashes the driver’s side window with a quick elbow to the center of the glass and opens the door. He tears the plastic cover from the steering column and begins. He finds two wires of the same color, the power supply wires. He strips them using his KA-BAR and twists the frayed ends together. Then he locates the battery wire and strips that as well. He strikes the frayed wire against the exposed copper of the power supply wires and a blue spark illuminates the inside of the car for a fraction of a second. The radio chirps as well. He strikes it again and the car comes to life.

  The radio blasts at him loudly.

  Everyone’s watchin’ to see what you will do. Everyone’s lookin’ at you.

  No more seek and destroy orders. No fights with gods given flesh. Sid will have none of that from here on out. From now on, he lives like normal people do. He’s going to stay in a house where he’ll sleep for more than an hour a night. He’ll read more about Batman, and watch television and drink sweet drinks. He might find a girl like the one on that huge poster – one that wants him to fuck her. That would be nice.

  He’s in such a hurry to leave that he doesn’t notice the living shadow slithering from an alleyway some blocks behind him.

  He shifts the car into drive and mashes his foot down on the gas pedal. The tires screech and the car lurches forward. The radio continues to blare.

  Everybody’s workin’ for the weekend. Everybody wants a new romance.

  WE INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST

  “Kill Team One didn’t show up for extraction,” Walter says. “Bravo checked the target site and found the place burned to the ground. He’s not answering his radio.”

  He wakes Ivan up from a brief nap he was taking in his briefing room chair.

  “You think he’s dead?” Victoria Russell asks. Her face is still blacked out, even though the Russians are no longer on the call with them. Most of the others are gone too, preparing equipment and information for a strike that may or may not be happening. Only Tom remains here with them, looking through technical readouts regarding old Soviet technology on a laptop nearby.

  “No,” Ivan says, shaking his head.

  “Then where is he?” Walter says.

  “I don’t know. It seems he has gone somewhere.”

  “Gone somewhere? Where would he go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I never should have trusted that stupid kid.”

  “So that’s it?” Reynolds says. “We’re out of options?”

  Nobody has an answer for him.

  “Well, fuck this. I’m going underground. I’ll see you chumps in a few days if this blows over. Deuces.”

  The image of Reynolds’ blacked out face cuts to a blank screen.

  “Bastard,” Victoria says.

  “There’s only one thing left to do,” Walter says. “We hit that bunker with everything. Full scale assault. I’m going in
with Kill Team Two and every operator we have left.”

  “He’ll see you coming a mile away.”

  “What you got?”

  “I will go alone.”

  “Yeah,” Walter laughs. “That’ll work.”

  “I can get into the facility undetected.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I have done it before.”

  “You can’t fight him,” Victoria says. “He has at least one accomplice. He could have a small army down there for all we know.”

  “Probably. I will need guns.”

  “You’re gonna need more than guns,” Walter says. “You look like Hell. You’ve been stabbed, sliced on, burned, beaten and practically in a coma for the last week. You can barely walk on your own.”

  “I can walk on my own.”

  “There’s no way. You’re not doing this.”

  “You will have to kill me.”

  “I’m not going to kill you.”

  “I would crush everyone in this building with my bare hands before you stop me.”

  “Mr. Stedman!” Tom says. “We’re getting an unusual call.”

  They quiet their argument momentarily.

  “What do you mean we’re getting a call? From who? Anton?”

  “No. Someone else.”

  “Nobody else can call us on this channel.”

  “Someone is.”

  “Answer it.”

  Tom clicks the mouse in his hand and the flat panel monitor on the desk in front of him is filled with an image out of a horror movie. There is a dimly lit room behind a head of fuzzy brown hair. The long locks surround a porcelain doll face with cheeks too rosy to be anything but painted plastic. Walter hasn’t seen the mask before, but he already knows…

  “The Philistine,” he says.

  He hasn’t seen the Philistine in many years – not since before she put the mask on. In those days she was Allison Lee, a genius freelance consultant who had worked on any number of government contracts, public, classified, and black book. Things have changed since then.