KILL KILL KILL

by Mike Leon

  “You let me worry about the price tag, Mr. Highland,” Victoria says.

  “You heard the lady, Mr. Highland,” Walter says, emphasizing his name just like Victoria did. “We’ll worry about the price tag. You worry about what happens if your magic super suit doesn’t work right.”

  “Oh, it works. I assure you. The Aegis Mk 2 is the world’s first fully functional, neural impulse controlled, bullet resistant, powered exoskeleton. This system is five years beyond state of the art.”

  “Tell me about the bullet resistant part. That’s what I want to know.”

  “You’ll notice that the front of the exoskeleton is mostly covered in sheets of metal. Those are composed of a steel reinforced high density silicon carbide that will stop bullets all the way up to a .50 BMG.”

  “And a .50 BMG?”

  “That’s what the shield is for. The exoskeleton is equipped with a four inch thick chobham armor shield that can cover the entire forward vector. It’s tested to stop artillery rounds.”

  “What kind of artillery rounds?”

  “Well,” Highland fidgets. “We haven’t finished testing.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Look, it’s not going to stop an APFSDS or a Howitzer or something like that.”

  “What will it stop?”

  “It stopped 20mm shells with no problem in trials and it should provide some protection against a shoulder fired HEAT round.”

  “Some protection. That’s comforting.”

  “Um,” Highland stutters sheepishly. “What exactly, uh, does happen if my magic super suit doesn’t work right?”

  “That’s need to know,” Walter says. “And you don’t need to know.”

  “It’s online,” Tom calls out. He jumps back off the step stool and away from Ivan.

  The mechanical suit comes alive and Ivan steps away from the stool. He drags the tank armor shield along the ground, putting a gash in the concrete for the first few steps before he lifts it up. Aside from the horrible gnashing noise that makes, the thing is completely silent.

  “It doesn’t make a sound,” Walter says.

  “Oh no,” Highland smiles. “Aegis Mk 2 was designed to be totally silent.”

  “This is quite strange,” Ivan says. “I can lift this shield like nothing.”

  “Of course. That’s the whole point. All of your movements are mimicked and augmented by the hydraulics in the suit. It’s like you have super strength.”

  Van throws a right cross punch in the suit. He does it again.

  “It could be quicker,” he says. “But I can walk again. That is good enough. How much time will I have?”

  “When we take it off the chargers, you’ll have about four hours,” Tom says.

  “I won’t need that long,” Ivan says. “It will be done in twenty minutes. One way or the other. Is the bomb ready?”

  “The warhead is armed,” Tom says. He’s talking about the suitcase nuke they strapped to Van’s back, right next to the suit’s power supply, and wired to his heartbeat. It’s a contingency the old man came up with himself. This way, if he gets killed in there, the seven kiloton blast from his pack will still vaporize his lunatic kid and all of the launch systems in the Dead Hand hub. He’s fighting a nuclear dead man’s switch with another nuclear dead man’s switch.

  “There’s a kill switch attached to your belt,” Tom continues. He points at a small metal device with something akin to a grenade pin dangling from it. “If you disengage the pin, it disables the warhead. You understand that if you do that, it effectively aborts our contingency plan.”

  Ivan nods.

  “I am not afraid to die,” he replies sharply.

  “Nominal,” Tom says, his voice cracking. He rattles himself back to action after a few seconds of unease. “Now hold still.”

  The little nerd hoists a large futuristic looking rifle from a crate on the floor. It looks to Walter like something out of a comic book – too blocky to be a real gun. This must be the shoot around walls gun. Tom begins riveting it onto the right forearm of Van’s exoskeleton.

  “I just want to say one more time that this is a terrible idea,” Walter says. “We have Kill Team Two ready to go. The Russians have a thousand Spetznaz guys ready. We could hit the compound and take it like nothing.”

  “No,” Ivan says. “At the first sign of an assault, Victor will launch the rockets. The only way is if I take him by surprise. If I fail, the bomb will do the rest. There is no need for the rest of you to die with me.”

  He says it, and there isn’t a hint of fear in those coal black eyes. He’s fully prepared to flip death the finger with the fate of the developed world at stake. Either Van is insane or made of something greater than any man Walter has ever known. Walter thinks he knows which.

  Only hours ago, Walter was a broken man, numb with booze and wanting to die – but he didn’t really want to die. He wanted to escape. He wanted to get away from the never-ending cycle of violence, to forget the atrocities committed with his own hands. He wanted it so badly that he was willing to take a chance on whatever comes after death.

  Van doesn’t want to escape from anything. He never breaks. He doesn’t believe in any afterlife. He’s ready to go down there and fight and die just because that’s what men do. If Walter asked him why right now, he knows that’s what Van would say. Because that’s what men do. It is a rationale so simple that it appears to most like ignorance, but that could not be further from the truth. It requires an impossible inner strength to simply live and never question the meaning of life.

  Walter wishes he were that strong. He isn’t, and he never will be. The world doesn’t make men like that anymore. It hasn’t for a long time. Now they fight wars with laser guided bombs dropped on faceless specks below and missiles launched by a seaman fresh from high school mashing buttons on a Nintendo controller twenty miles off shore. Even most of the guys on the ground are shooting with superior weapons and training at enemies too far away to see. Those kids don’t know war. They don’t know what it means to look a man in the eyes and know that it’s him or you going home in a bag, and then make sure it’s him. The ones that do are different from the men Walter worked with in the old days. They don’t do it for a cause. They do it because they like it. Walter doesn’t know if there were always men like that, or if modern conditioning created them, but he knows they make him sick.

  There’s nobody going into the shit for God and country anymore, or even just for a better tomorrow. Those things gave way to moral relativism long ago. There is no more right and wrong, and the world never gets any better. It’s easier to accept that than keep fighting.

  “At least let Kill Team Two come with you,” Walter says.

  “No,” Ivan says. “They will only slow me down.”

  “I will go with you,” says the ninja. Walter practically forgot he was here. He winces with surprise as he looks at the sleek black form behind them.

  Van furrows his brow and purses his lips as he looks back at the ninja as well.

  “I go alone,” Van says.

  “He goes alone,” Walter repeats for Yoshida Tanaka. He throws up his arms in frustration. Arguing with Van is futile.

  “I see,” Yoshida replies icily.

  “I must go now,” Ivan says.

  Walter points at the hangar door and the Arsonist punches the red button that lifts it.

  “Good luck out there,” Walter says. “We’ll be in the air. You give a call and I’m down there in two minutes! Two minutes!”

  The old man nods back at him as he stomps out into the cold.

  Walter would do anything to help his old friend save the world from destruction, but as he watches Van walk out toward that plane, he can’t help but think maybe destruction is what the world deserves.

  DEAD HAND

  For Ivan, the cold is little more than an obnoxious old friend welcoming him home after a long absence. He ignores it much the same.

  He trudges through the snowy woods
for Dead Hand, as he did so many years ago on a mission to murder a man – a man who might have used the system much the way his insane son plans to now. History does repeat itself, though that is mostly a subjective thing. In the past, Ivan did not assault the compound wearing a steel suit of battery powered armor. Even now, the thing is blinking lights and warnings at him to remind him it is there.

  The helmet projects a heads up display like the one on many fighter jets. Ivan has never flown a fighter jet, nor had much interest in them. He does his killing with his hands. He has seen the mechanisms in them though, and this is quite similar. There is a compass, a small representation of the suit, a temperature gauge, and a targeting reticle – which appears to track the sights of the gun mounted on his right arm.

  He does not like this machine. It hinders his arms and is very conspicuous, but it is a necessity for two reasons. One, it allows him to walk without a cane. Two, if he stands a chance at beating Victor, he needs to be immune to bullets like Victor. He neglected to mention that last part to Walter or Victoria, and it is best they never learn of it.

  “Van,” Walter’s voice comes over the radio placed in his left ear. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” he answers.

  “Good. What’s your status?”

  “I can see the silo door now.”

  Ahead, he sees the bald spot between the grey trees where the hidden silo door opens to launch the rockets for Dead Hand. Decades ago, he used this door to gain entry to the facility. Now he will do the same again.

  Digging with the bottom of the shield into the frozen dirt, Ivan finds the hatch which allowed him access so long ago, still rusted and bent from the blowtorch he used to cut into it on that day. He reaches for the handle and tugs the hatch door upward, accidentally tearing it off the hinges with his unexpected new artificial strength. He shrugs and tosses the hatch aside.

  Peering down the hole, Ivan can see the signal rocket pointing up the middle of the silo, surrounded by three levels of black catwalks. Luckily, the hatch is large enough to allow him through, even with the heavy armor. This luck does not hold out for long.

  The system of gyros and actuators that power his movements also makes it easy to forget just how heavy the armor really is. He didn’t bother to ask that man Walter had at the airfield, but he knows the suit must weigh several tons. The shield alone may outweigh a small car. The ladder going down into the silo is iron, and begins to bend under the weight of the mechanized armor. Ivan lets go and drops the ten feet to the steel catwalk below, which creaks under his weight as well.

  He instinctively grabs hold of a railing as the catwalk begins to bend downward. A steel cable gives way and the railing snaps like a piece of floss suspending an elephant. So much for infiltrating the facility in complete silence, he thinks as he tumbles to the next level of catwalk. It smashes under the combined weight of the other falling catwalk and his massive suit. Ivan rolls away at some point in the fall and tumbles without the catwalks, trying to grab hold of something that might support him. He finds nothing of the sort and crashes into the concrete floor so hard that it cracks beneath him.

  He brings himself to his feet, no worse for wear, though a bit dizzy.

  Two men rush into the silo, having heard the commotion within. These are strangers – not any of the missing members of Kill Team Three, or that hooligan Niggerfucker. The first is a little man, dressed in rags and dirty in appearance. The other is equally haphazard.

  In his prime, he would have descended from the catwalks above them, like a spider upon its prey, as they remained completely unaware. But these are not those days. Instead, he barges forward and snatches both men in his hands before they have time to react. The suit makes the rest quite easy. The hydraulic pistons now powering his metal sheathed fingers crush one man’s neck until it is drawn so tight that his head simply topples away. The other one Ivan pushes against the hard bunker wall with the massive ballistic shield until his flesh and sinew billow over the edges. When he pulls away, the body is a mass of pink sludge plastered against the wall with the imprint of the shield in the middle like some wax seal of olden times. The man’s face appears intact in the rectangular imprint of the visor frame. He is not afraid to look them in the eyes as they die.

  “Two down,” he whispers into the helmet mic.

  “You’re starting to break up,” Walter says. He is not surprised. The bunker around him is probably four feet of solid concrete and there is a mountain on top of that.

  Ivan hunches under the small door from which the men came and into a maintenance tunnel. The network of these things connects the many hidden rocket silos utilized by the Dead Hand. There are thirty rockets, if Ivan remembers correctly. Time may have eroded his memory a bit. He does remember that the main bunker is to the left, and so left down the tunnel he goes.

  It is nearly a mile from the silo to the main bunker. Ivan meets one other group of sentries on his way and dispatches them simply by charging and smashing them before they have time to react.

  He meets another sentry near the doorway into the main bunker. This one is barely paying attention. He sits on the floor, leaning on the wall as if he could nod off any second. A two-way radio rests on the floor nearby. Ivan decides to test the arms in a different way. He lunges forward and throws a haymaker that connects with the guard’s nose. Punching flesh and bone with a piston driven metal arm is every bit as devastating as swinging an aluminum bat or lead pipe – and some. The guard is bashed into bloody oblivion with one punch, and Ivan finishes the convulsing body with a stomp to the head that does not stop until it meets the floor.

  Beyond the doorway is a short corridor which opens into the main bunker. Ivan expects to meet the most resistance there. The bunker forms a natural choke point where Victor is likely to have stationed fire teams to mow down anything coming down the main elevator. Even though he has come around another way, he has no way of knowing how many soldiers are waiting there for him.

  Ivan shrugs. They won’t be expecting a walking battle tank. He barrels through the door and charges down the hallway into the main corridor.

  As he turns into the corridor, he passes under the lip of an open blast door. The facility is filled with them, ready to drop at the push of a button. To his left are the elevators going up to the surface. To his right, he can see a door for the stairwell leading down to the reactor that powers the facility. Beyond that door is the control sphere for the system – a perfect sixty foot sphere of steel, buried underground and designed to withstand multiple nuclear blasts on the surface. Another blast door at the opening to the sphere is wide open and Ivan can make out some, but not all, of the control room. This place is just like he remembers it – except for three more demolished robot sentries and all of the mercenaries in his way.

  Twenty two of them. Ivan counts the heads like a super computer, before any have even registered that he is here. Most are still sitting down. A few of them lean on the back of the robots. One sits in the corner to his left, just outside the elevator doors, waiting with a radio in hand. Playing cards are spread out on the floor between some of the others. There is no sneaking through this anymore. The jig is up, and it is time for an all-out assault.

  He kills four with the arm-mounted rifle before they even start to shoot back. The gun is a boxy thing, not dissimilar in appearance to a P90, but larger and box fed. It is a creation of Exosquad, err, Exocom, whatever company built this mechanical suit. He has little use for brand names. In his hands, bullets kill, and that is all that matters.

  It is unusual in that the trigger for the gun is attached to the inside handle of the ballistic shield, meaning he has to aim with his right hand and pull the trigger on the left, but he adjusts to this rapidly and begins shooting them down that much faster. He half pays attention to the reticle on the heads up display. It is almost as accurate as he is.

  They fire back at him with G3s and UMPs, and mostly the ubiquitous AK-47, but the shield stops all those rounds flat. He do
esn’t even feel them hammering relentlessly against it. He only hears a multitude of little taps like rain on a tin roof. There is one larger gun though – much larger. It is the massive machine gun held by the werewolf at the end of the hall.

  When all of the others are dead, the werewolf still stands. The creature is even a bit taller than Ivan on this stilted suit. It holds a full sized heavy machine gun in its giant hands and holds down the trigger blasting Ivan’s shield with dozens of .50 bullets each second.

  He fires back and hits the wolf, as he had several times already in the course of mowing down the rest of the room, but the werewolf does not fall. Werewolves can only be killed with silver weapons. Ivan has no silver weapons, but the werewolf cannot hurt him unless it gets behind his shield. The outcome of this fight will be hinged on which gives out first, his ammo supply, or the werewolf’s threshold for pain. Ivan figures on the latter and presses forward.

  He approaches the beast slowly, firing more and more, pumping 5.56 rounds into it as fast as the gun will fire. The needle-like NATO bullets mostly burn through the monster and exit its back – a problem for Ivan as he would much rather fill the thing with lead that will stay put and keep it bleeding.

  He guessed right. When he is still ten feet away, the snarling monster leaps into the air and pounces on him, blazing the machine gun in his face. Ivan raises the shield. The werewolf attempts to bypass it by sticking the gun over the edge directly into Ivan’s face, but he is too quick for the creature. He snatches the muzzle of the Browning in his right hand and bends it with the piston driven might of the suit’s gauntlets.

  The fight is now quite one-sided. The werewolf attacks viciously, clawing at his chest and helmet, but Ivan ignores these swipes like the slaps of a child and drives his fist into the monster’s guts. After pulling a long string of entrails to the floor, he grasps the monster’s bottom jaw and tears it from that furry head. He continues dismantling the monster and throwing the parts until there is just a torso here, a leg over there, an arm dangling from one of the broken robots – scattered parts still thrashing and quivering. He will finish it later. He has no time now.