KILL KILL KILL

by Mike Leon

  Victor grins wider than Ivan has ever seen before.

  “Okay,” he says. “You got me. But why not let me?”

  “Why not let you kill everyone?”

  “Not everyone will die. The lucky ones will survive. It’s only all of this that goes away,” Victor motions to the machines around them. “The machines, the governments, the systems. All of that will fall away and leave us alone to be what we are – the strong.”

  “This is why I always liked your brother better.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Ivan shrugs. Truthfully, he has no idea where Sid has gone. Probably dead. Victor will take his uncertain answer as a bluff most effective – one that gives away no detail and no motive.

  “In here somewhere waiting to get the jump on me I’m sure,” Victor says. “I’ll kill him in a blink.”

  “Perhaps,” Ivan says.

  “He couldn’t even get it up to fuck that cunt you sent to round us up. He’s a fucking bitch.”

  “You hurt that girl?” Ivan asks, furrowing his brow with concern. “She was my friend.”

  “I fucked her little asshole until she cried, and then I slapped her face with my bloody dick.”

  The old man shakes his head in disgust.

  “All this time, Victor, I thought I was fighting monsters. I wasn’t. I was making them. You are the monster. You...”

  Victor lunges forward, drawing a pistol from his jacket.

  He taught the boys chit chat is a waste of time – except when using it to confuse your enemy. Victor may be younger and quicker, but the old man is a master of deception. Unlike those other things, deception is a tool that only grows sharper with age.

  Victor has made a mistake coming close to him again. The boy expects to catch him off guard, but he is a fool if he thinks Ivan is upset by mention of some infantile atrocity. He played Victor like a child, and now he will spank him like one. He grabs the boy’s arm and clamps down on it. Victor pops one wide shot off before the gauntlet fingers smash down on his wrist, snapping through bone like teeth through a supermarket candy bar.

  “Aggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Victor Hansen screams. Fucking baby.

  Ivan moves to grab Victor’s other arm, but finds himself unable to do so. The suit has suddenly become shockingly heavy. He tries to move the arm again, but finds any motion is impossible. The armor is frozen in the pose he adopted when he grabbed Victor’s gun.

  Victor continues to scream as Ivan turns his head and discovers the root of his problem. The single shot that Victor managed to squeeze off did not fly wide at all. In fact, it struck the small cable that connects the suit to him. The needle-like end still juts from the base of his skull and rubs against the frayed end of the wire connection it once completed. Without that wire, he is effectively solid as a statue.

  His position is problematic, as Victor still has a free hand, and his undamaged pistol now rests with his limp hand inside the helmet collar of the suit, the muzzle of the black Berretta M9 pointing at Ivan’s right shoulder. Ivan looks up from the pistol and meets Victor’s eyes. In this moment, he knows that Victor knows.

  He scrambles to reach the gun the only way he can – with his teeth. Victor reaches into the helmet collar with his other hand at the same time. The two of them struggle for the weapon, with Victor getting his fingers around the grip before Ivan is able to bite down on his palm. He bites down to the bone, careful not to chomp through, because that would free Victor’s hand. Victor fires a shot inside the helmet collar, but the 9mm bullet bounces from the back of the collar and rattles to the floor somewhere. Victor squeezes the trigger three more times. Bullets bounce harmlessly into the room and hot brass falls down into the suit. One casing lands on Ivan’s neck and sizzles into his flesh, but he does not care.

  “I’ll kill you! I’LL KILL YOU!!” Victor screams. He tries to rips his hand free from Ivan’s teeth, but the old man’s bite is locked down harder than an alligator. He kicks wildly and uselessly at the frozen armor.

  Ivan tries to say something fucking wicked hard, but what comes out is “OU CANK KIWU DEH ANDEL A GEF.”

  “What?” Victor says, finally stopping his barrage of kicks.

  “AH SED OU CANK KIWU DEH ANDEL A GEF.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “FUH OU GHOU.”

  Victor plants both feet on the armor and gives a tremendous roar as he pulls away from Ivan’s teeth. Meat from his hand is stripped clean off the flesh and he loses grip on the pistol but he succeeds in freeing his hand. Ivan spits a mouthful of bloodied flesh as he snatches the gun in his teeth and flings it to the floor behind him. Victor won’t be picking it up unless he wants to tear his other arm off.

  Victor punches him in the face.

  “Die! Die!” he screams.

  “Go ahead and kill me!” Ivan says.

  Victor punches him more and more.

  “I’m wired to a dead man’s switch.”

  “You lie,” Victor says.

  “No. Six kiloton. Strapped to my back. You can kill me, but I take you with me.”

  Victor glares at him and he can tell the stupid brat knows he is telling the truth. He gives up punching and starts prying at the metal fingers around his broken arm.

  Ivan watches him through a filter of red that is the blood dripping into his eyes. He studies the face of rage in front of him. It is a face that resembles his, but not as much as it resembles another – one Ivan has not seen in many years…

  They’re still standing there like that two minutes later when Yoshida Tanaka finds them. The ninja enters the room cautiously, more cautiously than Ivan would like, considering the ticking timer on Armageddon.

  “ONE MINUTE UNTIL NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION OF ENEMIES OF THE WORKING PEOPLE.”

  “The reactor!!” Ivan shouts.

  Tanaka looks at the huge reactor core beyond them.

  “How do I turn it off?” Tanaka asks.

  “The SCRAM button. Over there,” Ivan says, motioning with his head.

  The ninja punches the button and the entire facility goes black. After a few seconds, the emergency lights kick on. The bunker must have auxiliary power stored in batteries or a generator somewhere.

  Victor never gives up prying at that gauntlet. He keeps going long after the fingers on his good hand are worn down to the bone, and that’s how Walter Stedman finds them – trapped there together and covered in running blood with the ninja silently observing.

  He enters the room with Kill Team Two fully assembled and a dozen commandos from FMGFH. The commandos are geared in white snow camouflage and Ushankas.Yuri Kosygin is with them.

  “Jesus,” Walter says at the sight of Victor still trying to tear himself free of Ivan’s mechanical death grip. The boy glances back at them at growls like a dog. “Somebody shoot that piece of shit.”

  “No!” Ivan shouts. His command rattles the room.

  Deadeye freezes, finger halfway into the trigger pull on a Benelli shotgun. One guy from the FMGFH jumps like a frightened child.

  “What the fuck, Van?” Walter says. “Why not?”

  “He has information we need.”

  Victor stops tearing at his own flesh just long enough to flash Ivan a look of surprise.

  Walter’s face acrobatically converts into the most intense look of bewilderment Ivan has ever seen. The Graveyard commander raises the his Colt pistol. He points it at Victor’s head.

  “What could he possibly have?” Walter says. “You tell me right now, and it better be good, or I’m putting a hollow point in his fucking brain pan right this God damned second.”

  “He knows how to stop the Imam,” Ivan says.

  It is a bold-faced lie.

  Walter shifts his eyes to Victor, then back again. He frowns, and lowers his gun.

  “Chain him up...”

  “He’ll pick the chains,” Ivan interrupts.

  “Then shackle him, chain him, put him in a fucking steel yoke, and hog tie him to a spit,” Walter says. “I
s that good enough?”

  Ivan nods. Maybe.

  “And somebody find a way to cut the old man out of that God forsaken thing.”

  “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you all!” Victor screams. “I’ll kill your children and gun-fuck your wives! DIE! DIE! DIE!!!!!!”

  He doesn’t stop – not even after they’ve put him in a steel box to airlift back to Alaska.

  BIG BOX RETAIL

  Sid approaches the aluminum and glass entryway of this strange place and is surprised when the doors slide open before him. The only other place he encountered automatic doors was the airport in Kabul.

  He came here on the advice of a civilian making some repairs to the roadway. Sid stopped and asked where he could find ammunition, and the man, wearing an orange vest which would make him a glowing target in a firefight, told him to come to this place.

  He halts for a moment, uncertain if he should proceed. There could be some kind of danger on the other side. He watches as a group of terribly fat people walk around him and through the door ahead. One of them looks back at him in a peculiar way, as if surprised by Sid’s sudden stoppage. He is not fitting in with the normal people. He is drawing attention.

  He moves forward cautiously and travels into a small antechamber windowed on all sides. The windows are plastered with signs displaying pictures of entirely random and indiscernible objects next to numbers and dollar signs. He follows the fat people through another set of doors and into the most terrifying place he has ever seen before.

  It is a depot the likes of which he has never seen. Far larger than the supply depots kept by the Americans in the desert, and dwarfing anything maintained by Graveyard, this place is truly immense. Rows and rows of metal shelving extend as far as he can see, all of them stocked heavily with packages of every shape, color and size. Surely, the owners of this depot are supplying an army for a coming invasion.

  “Welcome to Wal-Mart,” says a frail elderly man standing on the white tile floor in front of him. Sid eyes him with caution.

  “What is this place?” he asks.

  “Well, you’re off Interstate 90,” the old man says. “Where you trying to go?”

  “I know where I am,” Sid says. “What is this place? What army are you supplying?”

  The old man looks perplexed.

  “You’re in, uh, Wal-Mart,” he says. “We have some support our troops ribbons by the customer service desk over there.”

  The old man points toward a large counter near the corner of the structure, but Sid has no interest in ribbons. Clearly, this old man is mentally unsound. Sid passes him to explore the depot on his own. With some luck, he might even find a decent rifle.

  He finds himself oddly transfixed by the goings on at the checkout lanes. Even now, in the middle of the night, a half dozen people wait in line at the checkouts with carts full of items they wish to purchase. He’s staring at this for at least twenty seconds before reality is entirely clear to him. This place is a market. It’s like the markets in Kandahar or the bazaar set up by the Americans in the desert. This is where civilians come to buy goods and services.

  The reality is both comforting and disturbing at the same time. He isn’t likely to run into any soldiers here, but the sea of outlandish objects before him is overwhelming. Will he need to know all of these things if he wants to fit in amongst the ranks of normal people?

  He spots a sign dangling from the ceiling on chains that lists several categories of items with arrows pointing to where they are found, but nothing on the list resembles weapons or munitions, so he begins systematically stalking the aisles of the store from one corner to the next, checking for any sign of guns, knives, or explosives.

  As he wanders through the store, he looks up and down at the gargantuan caches of items stacked upon the shelves. He recognizes many things; hardware, children’s toys, cleaning supplies, video equipment. Still, there are many things which mystify.

  In one area, he finds what appear to be shirts for dogs. He can’t fathom any idea why a dog would wear a shirt. Maybe it is some kind of body armor. That would make sense. Dogs are often used in pursuits of dangerous enemies. They may need some protection from bullets. He pokes a fluffy pink dog shirt. It doesn’t feel like Kevlar. No ceramic plating. The label attached to it says nothing about an armor level. It looks almost as if it exists simply to decorate a dog. Sid knows better. There must be some other unforeseen reason for this thing. He moves on.

  In another aisle, he finds a collection of small knives made from silver. He knows without a doubt that these are for killing werewolves, but the blades are quite dull and would hardly pierce the hide of such a creature.

  He maps much of the building as he goes, skimming past enormous collections of women’s clothing, books, a stock room, and an automotive department with a full service repair center including hydraulic lifts and stacks of new tires.

  He grazes through the sections of the store for twenty minutes before he finds the guns. There is a collection of several dozen rifles and shotguns mounted on a rack behind a counter manned by a tall sentry with a shaggy head of hair and a hanging gut. As he approaches, he notices the stench of cigarette smoke.

  “Anything I can help you with?” the sentry says.

  “I need guns,” Sid tells him.

  “Um, okay,” the sentry says. The man looks down his nose at Sid. “What kind of guns?”

  “M4, or AR-15, with a fire selector, free floating rail and top rail, holographic optics, collapsible stock, and M203 grenade launcher.”

  “You’ve seen too many movies, kid,” the sentry says.

  “I’ve only seen one movie.”

  The Wal-Mart clerk pauses, unable to extrapolate anything from that. Then he moves on.

  “We don’t have anything like that. This is Illinois, not The Hurt Locker.”

  “What do you have?”

  “We got a Bushmaster E2S, couple DPMS guns, some CMMG.”

  Sid has studied those guns in pictures, but never actually fired one. They are low quality variants of the rifle he requested. It will require some maintenance and alterations to be reliably used for anything extreme. The gas key and castle nut will need to be staked, optics added, he would prefer to replace the rail. Why does no one ever have the gun he asks for? It’s not an exotic weapon by any standard. Even the lowest ranking soldiers at the American encampment in the desert were issued with such equipment.

  He remembers the words of his father. A warrior is not his equipment.

  “I want the Bushmaster, twenty thirty-round box magazines, and a thousand rounds of full metal jacketed 5.56.”

  “Hold your horses there, Newtown. Let’s see your FOID.”

  “My what?”

  “Firearm Owners Identification Card. I need to see your FOID and then there’s a twenty four hour waiting period after the background check. You don’t look twenty one...”

  Sid punches the beer gut sentry in the face and the man goes down like a sack of wet sheets. He doesn’t understand what it is with these people and their age limits on everything. Identification papers. Waiting periods? He doesn’t have time for that. He leaps over the counter and begins rooting through the guns and magazines.

  He finds a large stack of 5.56 ammo boxes and then locates a cardboard box filled with cheap thirty-round box magazines. He ducks behind the counter and begins cranking cartridges into them from the boxes. In ten minutes time, he has packed fifteen magazines full and tossed them into a nylon pack he found beside the counter.

  He fingers through the rifle rack for a decent carbine and finds nothing better than the fat sentry told him was available. He grabs the Bushmaster, smacks a magazine into it, bashes it again when the low quality magazine doesn’t catch the first time, and then slings the rifle over his shoulder and heads for the exit.

  He is making his way along the center drive aisle when his enemy steps around a corner in front of him. Entropy appears as the truest aspect of the reaper, with his pale white count
enance glowing in the artificial lighting of the store and his black cloak flailing far behind him. He moves like a ballet dancer, graceful, but slow. He is never in a hurry. His head cocks back as if he’s experiencing an orgasm as he comes toward Sid with his hands low and his chest puffed out ahead of him.

  Sid pushes his borderline superhuman reflexes to their full capacity as he leaps back and brings the rifle over his shoulder. He actually sneers briefly as he takes aim at this ridiculous grim reaper wannabe and pulls the trigger. His gun kicks once. His aim is perfect and his hands are steady, even as they flash like a hummingbird’s wings to the casual observer. He is not surprised however when this strange fairy of a man stands his ground without a flinch. Sid fires again, straight between his enemy’s eyes. Nothing.

  A fat woman pushing a shopping cart screams “He’s got a gun!” and runs for her life.

  This civilian rifle has no fire selector and no full-auto setting, only a safety. Sid has to force the gun into a pseudo-automatic fire mode by holding his trigger finger still after a trigger pull and using the elasticity of his shoulder forcing back on the gun’s recoil to fire off more shots. He levels the gun at his enemy’s chest and burns through the rest of the magazine in seconds.

  “No weapon forged against me shall prevail, child,” says the unknown and somewhat inhuman creature.

  Sid sighs. Too many of the enemies he encounters are impervious to bullets. He wishes that, just once, one of these guys would bleed and die when he pulls the trigger. Sid takes a corner to vanish from the assassin’s view. He needs to fall back and keep the engagement at a distance until he figures out this guy’s gimmick. It isn’t body armor. The bullets didn’t hit him. He isn’t ethereal. The bullets didn’t impact anything behind him either. He didn’t regenerate. It’s like the shots just vanished mid-flight. This is something he hasn’t seen before.

  The groaning sound of twisting steel causes Sid to turn back. What he sees is a little bit more unnerving than disappearing bullets. His enemy has pursued him through the shelving that separated them. That is to say he actually walked through what was left of the shelves (aisles thirty-one and thirty-two containing kitchen wares and lawn furniture respectively). It’s as if the steel in his path rusted and decayed away to nothing, shriveling out of the way and leaving a six or eight foot gap for him to walk through. The remaining bisected ends of the aisle are rusted at the joints where they once continued into each other.