by Mike Leon
A loud alarm sounds throughout the entire structure, accompanied by flashing red lights mounted on the walls and ceiling. After the first horn, a Russian voice plays over the intercom.
“LAUNCH SEQUENCE ENGAGED. FIVE MINUTES UNTIL NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION OF CAPITALISM.”
“Nice chop job, dude,” calls the gruff voice of Niggerfucker as he ducks under the blast door from the control sphere. The big bastard steps into the corridor just as the blast door slams shut behind him. He is clad in black leather, just like the photograph Walter showed Ivan in the briefing, and he holds something Ivan does not like – a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle. “But I already pushed the button.”
This is exactly the situation Walter and the man from Exomart were discussing in the hangar, and it would be problematic if Ivan could not simply gun Niggerfucker down in the blink of an eye. He raises the rifle to put a bead on Niggerfucker’s forehead and squeezes the trigger.
Nothing. The gun does not fire. Instead, a bright red message flashes across the HUD in front of him. ALERT: PRIMARY WEAPON JAM DETECTED.
Niggerfucker raises the Gustav to his shoulder to aim.
Ivan has time enough to blink as he stares down the barrel of the tank killer, and in that time he realizes that the human species will now meet its end due to shoddy workmanship and his two sons.
“I’d say something clever before I pull the trigger,” Niggerfucker says, “but I ain’t never been good at sayin’ clever shit.”
Suddenly, the tubular end of the Gustav falls from the gun and clanks against the concrete floor.
A familiar form stands between Ivan and Niggerfucker. The sleek black figure is recognizable from where Ivan stands only by his flowing black hair and the sword already back in its sheath at his side.
“Tanaka,” Ivan says. “I told you not to come here.”
“A complicated man taught me that some things are bigger than your wishes or mine.”
With another lighting quick swipe of his blade, the ninja cuts off Niggerfucker’s head. The severed cranium falls beside the destroyed muzzle of the Carl Gustav. His body slumps slowly against the blast door and slides down, leaving a trail of crimson all the way to the concrete.
“From beyond the grave, your father saves the world.”
“I wasn’t talking about him,” says the ninja.
Ivan nods as Yoshida looks back at him.
“Van? Van?” Walter’s voice cuts in over Ivan’s radio. “You there? What’s your status?”
“Victor’s mercenaries have been terminated. We are outside the control room,” he says.
“Tom hacked into the com system down there. Guy’s better at this shit than that kid that made the Facebook. What do you mean we?”
“Tanaka is here with me. He may have saved us all.”
“Remind me to suck his tiny Jap dick when you get out of there. Right now, you need to secure that facility.”
Ivan looks to the blast door Niggerfucker closed upon entering the corridor. It is at least three feet thick, and designed to keep out men with cutting tools and artillery.
“It could take hours to get through this, even with explosives,” Ivan says.
The ninja hears and shoots Ivan a cocky glance before turning to focus on the door. He stands in silent concentration, his arms outstretched. He bends his elbows and draws his hands together at his chest. His fingers form a series of rapid motions the most dexterous L.A. gangster could not hope to mimic. They will not need explosives after all.
Tanaka unleashes the fury of nature on the door with a straight punch that generates a blast wave down the length of the corridor. Ivan feels it even through the armored exoskeleton. The force knocks the door free from its sliding track and flopping into the control room. The whole bunker rattles as it smashes down against the floor.
Ivan rushes forward to climb over the fallen door and into the control room with his shield down. He expects to be met with a hurricane of bullets and missiles and anything else Victor has to shoot at him.
Instead, he finds the control room deserted. Two swivel chairs sit empty before a colored control panel and a ten foot overhead CRT monitor displaying an old fashioned map of the globe made up of jagged green lines over a black background.
“There is no one here,” Tanaka says.
“It can’t be that simple,” Ivan tells him. “He saw this coming. He has another move.”
The alarm sounds again. Both of them hear it this time.
“FOUR MINUTES THIRTY SECONDS UNTIL LAUNCH.”
“I do not speak Russian,” Yoshida says, “but I think I know what that means.”
“He has started the launch sequence already.”
“Is there a way to stop it?” Tanaka asks.
Ivan shrugs. He hopes so.
“Van,” Walter says. “Tom thinks you can stop it if you shut down the reactor.”
The reactor is below them, buried in the deepest level of the facility.
“We have to go down,” he tells the ninja.
Tanaka nods. The two of them turn back to the corridor, only to be greeted by the peculiar sight of Niggerfucker’s headless body, standing on its own.
Skinny red vines grow from the gaping wound where his neck once was. They extend upward, twisting together to form sinews and flesh. By the time they see him, his head has grown almost completely anew.
“Fuckin’ faggots,” he says. “You shoulda killed the sand niggers like we asked.”
This is new. Ivan wasn’t told in the briefing that the big ugly American had any unusual abilities. Not many things can survive decapitation, even in Ivan’s vast killing experience. Zombies could usually keep snapping if the brain wasn’t destroyed. The werewolf is headless and still twitching. Blood Drinker kept going without a head. This is different though. Niggerfucker isn’t any of those things. They will have to find another way to finish this monster.
“We gonna dance, faggots? I’m ready to dance.”
“Go,” Tanaka says. “I will handle this abomination.”
NIGGERFUCKER
“Come on, motherfucker,” Niggerfucker says.
Tanaka watches as Ivan rushes the vile creature standing in the doorway and batters his man-sized shield against him. The shield swats Niggerfucker aside like a child. Though he tries to grapple with Ivan, the mechanical strength of the exoskeleton is a force no human can overpower, and Ivan leaves him crushed and maimed into a shape only human by the most horrifically vague definitions on his path through the door.
Niggerfucker stands, straightens his backward head, and looks to Tanaka.
“Fuckin’ faggot has a robot suit. Shits cheating. You. I got somethin’ for your ass.”
He reaches to his right, for a brown burlap sack resting on a rolling gurney just inside the door. From inside, he draws an M67 fragmentation grenade. He rips the pin from the grenade with his ugly yellow teeth and haphazardly tosses it at Tanaka’s feet.
Tanaka leaps over a heavy metal computer bank for cover. The loud pop of the grenade echoes throughout the spherical control room and opaque black smoke fills the air. Fortunately, the ninja sees with more than his eyes.
Tanaka hops back over the computer bank to find Niggerfucker leaning on the gurney, his body shredded by flying steel fragments, but not completely obliterated. He fumbles in the smoke to reach into the sack of grenades, but he lifts the sack upside down. No less than thirty hand grenades pour from the open bottom of the bag. The round green grenades scatter across the floor in all directions like a child’s marbles. Niggerfucker shrugs, then kicks at the concentration of grenades at his feet. Many of the balls clack against each other and are further scattered. One rolls behind the computer bank. Another goes to the far edge of the room. Some stop beneath the now broken swivel chairs at the main control panel. More come to rest against the edge of the fallen vault door.
“I call solids, cock nibbler,” Niggerfucker says. He snatches up a grenade from the floor and pulls the pin. Tanaka must act quickly.
First, he throws two poisoned shuriken into Niggerfucker’s eyes. The cretin stumbles backward and drops the grenade.
He dashes forward, drawing his sword as the grenade falls. Tanaka bats the explosive through the vault door and down the hallway. Then he takes off Niggerfucker’s arm with his blade.
Niggerfucker dives to the floor, covering a grenade with his body. He cannot be allowed to pull the pin. He may be somewhat stupid, but he is just clever enough to know what his advantages are. Tanaka, however, has had enough of these enemies who do not die when grievously wounded. It took the complete annihilation of Blood Drinker’s body and the incineration of all his parts to stop him. Tanaka will skip straight to such measures with this creature.
He drives his sword into Niggerfucker’s back and shouts.
“SEN SATSUJIN KAMISORI!!”
In the span of a second, he dices Niggerfucker into nothing but a pile of meat slices with the fury of a thousand sword strikes. A flood of red washes in all directions as though a blood filled water balloon has burst on the floor – all its liquid retaining shape for a nanosecond unconfined, before spilling out in all directions at once.
Tanaka watches the pile of flesh begin to mend as he dumps a flask of kerosene on it. He began carrying matches and fuel after his fight with the reptoid general. He empties the flask and strikes a match before his enemy has begun to move again. He drops it on the body and Niggerfucker is engulfed in flames.
Tanaka wastes no time exiting the control room. The fire may detonate the grenades here any second, and he must go downstairs to help the old man. He hopes it is not already too late.
“Hey zipperhead!” he hears before he has gone very far.
Tanaka turns to see Niggerfucker standing again, fully ablaze. Already an abomination, he is now a truly hellish specter as he drags himself toward the ninja shouting curses and screaming. His body is a oozing mess that looks less like a man and more like a partly melted wax figure. He lifts the stump of his severed arm, reaching out in pathetic desperation at Tanaka. In that moment, the ninja feels almost sorry for him. He is a pathetic creature – not much of a warrior, and possessing little intellect, his only real usefulness is his ability to die many times. That is no way for a man to exist, and yet he is cursed to do so by his only gift.
Then the arm grows into a slimy mass of tendrils that jut out at Tanaka over the span of twenty feet in a flash. Tanaka hacks away at the first few, but they keep coming, and his blade passes through them like water. The oily mess of tentacle slime wraps around his sword and yanks it from his hands.
“That ain’t never happened before,” Niggerfucker says. He draws the sword toward him as the long tendril stew retracts back toward his shoulder. “Hey. I don’t feel so good.”
He vomits up a thick stream of black muck that rolls down his chest and splatters on the floor, then hardens into a flesh substance so that the whole sloppy mess dangles from his mouth like a six foot long tongue.
“Wha tha fuck id you do to me? Ya’ fuckin’ ching chong.”
Tanaka has no idea except… The shurikens. Of course. They were dipped in blowfish toxin just like all the throwing blades he carries. Blowfish toxin is an infamous and potent neurotoxin. It could have all manner of unexpected effects on a mutated thing like this.
“WHAT YOU DO TA MEEEEEEEEE?” Niggerfucker screams. His shoulder grows into a bulbous mass, the bicep exploding out to the size of a beach ball. His left eye grows out on the end of a stalk of stringy sinews and he shits out a second, malformed head. The bones of his right foot tear free of their fleshy confines. His gut grows and grows. All of him grows. In only moments, he has become such a cyclopean mass that he can’t fit through the door to the corridor, though he struggles to slime his way toward Tanaka still. His face is a stretched out, agonized thing at the center of a billowing mass of pulsating flesh that pusses and heaves through the vault door like dough through a cookie press.
The grenades explode.
The hallway is showered in a spray of red gore that splatters Tanaka and leaves an outline in the shape of his shadow along the floor behind him.
He stands still for a moment, frozen with horror and disgust. His grandfather, a hibakusha, had once told him about the sights he saw when the bomb fell, of shadows burned into concrete and babies melted in their cribs. The old ninja wept in front of him then. Not until now has Tanaka ever dared to compare anything he has witnessed to that terror.
The piles of scattered giblets and lakes of blood remain unmoving and so does Tanaka. He stands frozen for a full minute, until the computerized alert rattles him back to reality.
“ONE MINUTE THIRTY SECONDS UNTIL NUCLEAR STRIKES FOR MOTHER RUSSIA.”
DEAD HAND II
Ivan hears the alert again as he descends to the bottom of the stairs.
“FOUR MINUTES, THIRTY SECONDS UNTIL NUCLEAR LAUNCH.”
He must not rush. Haste breeds mistakes. Mistakes cannot be made in the face of a cunning enemy. Certainly not this enemy.
“Mr. Hansen,” Tom’s voice radios to him. “In order to shut down the reactor you need to initiate the SCRAM sequence.”
“I do not know anything about these machines,” Ivan says. It is a lie. He knows these things are dangerous.
“We’re not all rocket scientists, Tom,” Walter says. “You’re gonna have to walk him through this.”
“Okay,” Tom cuts in. “There should be a big red button on the wall somewhere in there that says SCRAM. You need to find it and push it.”
“Then what?” Ivan says.
“That’s it,” Tom says.
“He doesn’t need to do anything else?”
“No. That’ll drop the control rods into the core and achieve negative reactivity. It shuts down the whole thing.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Walter says. “Why didn’t they push that at Chernobyl?”
“They did. It didn’t work.”
“That’s not what I wanted to hear.”
Ivan tunes them out as he reaches the bottom of the stairwell and the double doors leading into the reactor room. If there truly is one big red button that turns off everything, Victor will most surely be between he and it. He positions himself outside the doors and takes one deep breath before turning the corner.
The reactor core is a circular room with three floors of catwalks encircling a two story white, metal cylinder Ivan thinks looks like a giant oxygen tank. This is the reactor.
Victor is waiting for him exactly where he expected – in front of the big red button. The boy stands with a recoilless rifle in his hands. He’ll have to cover fifty meters distance to have the boy within arm’s reach. It may be doable. Only a madman would go on shooting a bazooka in a nuclear reactor room…
Victor fires a HEDP shell at Ivan without so much as a second glance. He taught his boys that chit chat is a waste of time.
In days gone by, he might have ducked out of the way, or even swatted the heavy projectile off course, sending it flying into something inconsequential like a wall or a conscript. Those times have long passed and now age and this bulky armor prevent him from performing such grand maneuvers. Ivan raises the shield and charges his target.
Charlie G slams into him like a jetliner at full throttle. The blast cracks the shield and the heat singes his skin even through the steel plates covering his body. His view is filled with smoke and the suit’s HUD images become garbled distortions. He continues forward. Bullets smack into him by the dozens – no, hundreds. Victor is shooting at him with at least two guns at the same time by the sound of the projectiles clapping against the armor. He can’t see through the smoke, but he still knows where he is. It takes more than some fire and loud noises to shake him. He hopes to grab hold of something he can hold onto, an arm, a leg – maybe the bastard’s scrawny little throat. If it was a lesser warrior he would snatch him up and crush his skull with ease, but his boy is too quick for that.
Ivan feels the sting of metal in his guts
and knows right away he’s been stabbed in the side through a slat between the plates near his hip. He has no time for pain. He uses the opportunity to punish his enemy. He whips around and grabs at the site of the intrusion. He feels fingers tapping against the steel gauntlets of his right hand, but he grasps nothing fleshy in his vice grip. Instead, he finds the knife in his side and draws it out, thrashing wildly with his arms as he plucks it away.
“You think this little nail file will stop me, boy?” he rumbles. At the same moment, he comes to the realization that his beard is on fire. He does not care. He bends the knife in half with one hand. After he tosses it to the ground, he rips the helmet from the top of the suit.
Victor is on him in a millisecond, thrashing him in the face with both fists and an then an elbow. He reaches for the boy, but Victor dashes away too quickly to catch.
He sees the boy again now, after what seemed like an eternity in blind darkness waiting for the deathblow. Victor holds no weapons and yet still stands with his fists up, prepared to fight his armored father. His pale green duster might conceal grenades or some other such tools that will allow him to cut the suit open, and so Ivan stands cautiously.
The exoskeleton is badly damaged, a detail he was unable to observe until now. Steam still rises from the armor and pieces are missing from the delicate back. The shield is a jagged heap of curled and twisted points still attached to his arm. He smothers the flames in his beard against his chest. His nose is broken and the blood runs down into the smoldering hairs.
“THREE MINUTES THIRTY SECONDS UNTIL NUCLEAR LAUNCH FOR CONTINUED HAPPY EXISTENCE OF THE WORKING PEOPLE.”
“I knew it was you,” Victor says. “Nobody else would have the stones to come down here and fight me.”
“You are correct.”
“Why? I’m getting rid of all the towel heads.”
Ivan coughs up a mouthful of blood and phlegm with a laugh.
“You do not fool me, boy. You won’t stop there. You have already taken this too far.”
