by Mike Leon
Sid stands and watches as this impressive trick is used to take the corner off of the third and final shelf that stands between them. The metal end cap buckles and wilts like a decaying flower as his monstrous foe approaches. As welding and rivets disintegrate, steel shelving gives way and merchandise slides from the sagging shelves. Sid watches two heavy looking boxes containing vacuum cleaners slide down the ramping top shelf toward his foe and vaporize from end to end much like a stick of butter might if shot into a dwarf star. After the boxes are gone and the aisle ends in a brown rusted stump, the monster stands before him amidst a feint cloud of dust and a large collection of it at his feet. The floor under his feet remains undamaged. Sid takes note of this. It is an important detail.
“That’s a neat trick you have there,” Sid remarks calmly as he stares into the hollowed out sockets of darkness that are the enemy’s eyes.
“I have no tricks, child. I have nothing. For I am the death of this world and all that which lies beyond it. I am destruction. I am the reaper. I am Entropy.”
“Hey, buddy!” exclaims a male voice. Neither Entropy nor Sid turns to address the approaching Wal-Mart manager. “What the hell are you doing to my...” The chubby, middle aged manager trails off as he pokes his head around the edge of rusty shelving Entropy left in his path. He looks down the tunnel of destruction at the two of them. He quickly regains his composure and stomps toward them. “Is this some kinda protest? I’ve about had it with you people and the costumes and the signs. We’re not going union and you can’t just come in here and blow stuff up and expect to...”
Entropy’s hand juts out and catches the Wal-Mart manager by the throat. He hoists him off the ground like a frat boy picking up a Dixie cup. Then the guy just shrivels and decomposes. It’s over in a heartbeat, but the image of that guy’s face dissolving will stick in Sid’s memory as the purest image of what death looks like. It’s unfortunate, but he does nothing to stop it. He isn’t here to save strangers’ lives. This man should have been smarter anyway.
“You cannot run from the reaper boy,” says Entropy. “Now prepare yourself for the void!”
Sid says nothing. He glances around the store. There are people watching them. None of them are dumb enough to get close, but he sees some heads peeking over a skid of Pepsi twelve packs. He’s never had a Pepsi before. He needs to get on that. Come to think of it, he realizes he hasn’t ever had a soda before. Soda is notoriously unhealthy and so he was not ever provided with it as a boy and he was strongly discouraged from drinking it still. It is black in color and he suspects that means it tastes something like coffee. He did have some coffee once. It wasn’t very good.
He brings his gaze back to Entropy. He really needs to kill this guy. His mind comes alive with all of the possibilities. Sid knows hundreds of ways to kill people. They range from techniques as exotic as choking someone with a plastic straw to methods as straightforward as beating them with a lead pipe until their brain swells and stops working. Typically it is the more simple tactics that work best, but this is a special case. He can’t get close. He can’t shoot him. There are still other possibilities left. At least for now he can slow him down.
Sid whips his handgun from the holster and leaps backward. His back hits the waxed tile floor and he fires three shots at Entropy, but with a slight downward incline. The bullets gash a lot of wax and some tile out of the floor but they skip like he wants them to and roll toward their target, which is Entropy’s left foot. They tear through a well worn work boot and smash through bone. Entropy screams as blood gushes from his shoe. His destroyed foot crumples underneath him as he topples toward the floor.
“It hurts!” he cries. Tears stream from his eyes. Sid sneers briefly as he jumps to his feet and runs away. Tears are for the weak. A warrior has no tears.
Invincibility has made his enemy weak. Clearly no one has ever drawn blood from this beast, and now he reacts like an injured child.
Entropy pounds the tile floor with his balled up fists. He wails so loudly everyone in the massive building holds their hands to their ears. As he screams and thrashes, he violently destroys the floor beneath him with his incredible power. In a blink, there is a perfectly spherical crater beneath him and he falls to the bottom. Again, he disintegrates the ground, now soil rather than tiled flooring, and falls even deeper into the Earth. It quickly becomes evident why he does not extend whatever cosmic forces he commands all the way to the ground.
Sid makes his way back through store to the automotive department and hops over a service counter into the full service garage. As he charges through the repair shop, he grabs a half-full gasoline can from the concrete floor underneath a powerful pneumatic lift. He looks back to see Entropy standing in the way of the only exit, the service counter a melted heap at the bastard’s back.
“You are trapped now. Come and face me,” says Entropy as he approaches slowly.
Sid pulls the pin from his only flashbang grenade and releases the handle. He holds the grenade for a two-count as the dark monster staggers toward him. Then he pitches the grenade straight at Entropy’s face. The grenade bursts inches from the boundary of Entropy’s bizarre anti-matter aura, which Sid has already mapped perfectly. While bullets and shrapnel have no effect on Entropy, even his powerful shield doesn’t stop light. The blinding flare of the flashbang grenade right in front of him throws him terribly off balance.
Entropy reels and screams holding his eyes. “I’ll kill you!”
But Sid is already past him and out into the main Wal-Mart store. Dashing away from Entropy, he scans the walls of Wal-Mart for something. He does not see it here in the open store. It must be hidden away in some other room. Aside from a hallway leading to some bathrooms, and a small office, the only separate room he can recall during his survey of the store was the stock room, which he did not enter. He looks back and sees Entropy shaking off his temporary blindness. Sid runs for the stock room door on the other side of the building.
On his way through the main aisle, he passes a shelf packed with magazines. One has a picture of a very promiscuous looking woman covering herself with nothing but her hands. The word posted across the top reads MAXIM. What the fuck is that all about?
Before he enters the stock room, he glances back and sees Entropy, relentless in his pursuit, painting a trail of blood along the waxed floor with his mangled foot. Sid pounds another magazine into the carbine and bump fires the whole thing at the fucker before he smashes his way through the back room doors.
In the stock room, he immediately spots what he is looking for: a sign that says roof access posted next to a long yellow ladder leading up to the ceiling. He shoulders the rifle again and begins to scale the ladder. It is difficult with the gas can in hand, but his enemy is hobbled and he has time enough.
At the top, he finds a trap door which is padlocked and chained. He shoots through the padlock and smashes through the door. The roof of the Wal-Mart is a massive sprawling thing. It is broken up by air-conditioning units and dozens of skylights. The roof itself is made from some kind of thin gauge metal. It supports Sid, but just barely. He can hear Entropy at the bottom of the ladder screaming.
“You cannot run forever, boy!”
Sid tip toes out onto the flimsy metal, realizing he most likely didn’t even need to bring the gasoline for what he has planned. He uses it anyway.
As Entropy reaches the trap door he hoists himself up onto the roof. “You are trapped now, child! Come to me and become one with nothingness!”
Sid is sure the monster is enveloped in his strange shroud at this moment. It shields him harm and destroys everything that comes close to the horrible bastard. Not even the air around him can exist within. And that is why he cannot smell the lake of gasoline at his feet.
Sid tosses the empty gasoline can aside and draws his pistol. He fires a shot through the tin a few meters from where Entropy is standing. The impact against the metal sparks just enough to ignite the gasoline pooled all around the trap
door.
What happens next is akin to watching an animal with battery acid on its paw try to clean it off with its tongue. The fire cannot exist within Entropy’s shroud, but it does burn the bottoms of his feet. He tries to pat them out with his hands, but the gasoline adheres to his palms and then his hands are burning too. He screams. He panics. The fire spreads up his legs. There is only one thing left to do. He forces his decaying powers to their limit. This works. He stops burning and the flames beneath and around him immediately become nothing. So does the roof that supports him.
He falls through the ceiling of the Wal-Mart and into the back stock room. Sid hopes that the seventy feet down to the floor is enough to finish him off, and it might be, but Entropy goes right through the concrete, leaving a perfectly round tunnel behind him as he vanishes into the darkness of the earth. Sid wonders for only a second about the monster’s fate. The further he falls, the faster he falls. Will he smash into solid rock thousands of feet below? Will he burn in the Earth’s core? Will he reach the other side and rocket into space?
Fuck it. Who cares?
As he is leaving, only two police cars have arrived. He rolls a grenade under one of them to scatter the cops and make his escape.
He takes that Maxim magazine with him.
A PALE HORSE
Victor Hansen is silent and unmoving.
He couldn’t move if he wanted, because he’s chained to an upright metal gurney. His hands are encased in steel boots and the rest of him is wrapped in canvas straps. He’s surrounded on all sides by bulletproof glass and men with body armor and rifles.
He does not even bother to focus his vision, and so the world around him is a blur. He knows without seeing that the old man is out there looking in at him.
“Your brother is still missing,” he says through the collection of tiny sound holes drilled in the cage. “They cannot find any sign of him. It is strange.”
Victor doesn’t care.
They should have killed him. They should have blasted him, blown him up and burned the bits that remained. That would have been better.
Instead, they put him in here to rot.
Victor does not abandon his vacant stare. He tries to carry himself away from here; away from this moment; away from this place. He tries to go where he is stamping a boot print on the soft skull of a baby or putting a bullet between the eyes of some rag.
He can’t go there. He may never go there again.
“I realize now my mistake,” the old man says.
Victor doesn’t care what it is, but he’s going to hear about it no matter what.
“For a very long time, I thought our fight was with them – with the outsiders, things we can simply hate and destroy.”
Ivan shakes his head.
“I was wrong. Those things are not our true enemy. They are only a distraction.”
Victor isn’t listening. He’s thinking about how he wants to tear himself free of these restraints, smash his way from this glass tomb and rip the guards limb from limb. He could kill his way back to Siberia and launch those missiles, this time without leaving anyone time enough to stop him.
“They destroyed the Dead Hand,” his father says, almost as if he can read Victor’s mind. “Dismantled and the facility filled in with concrete.”
Any lingering hopes he had of bringing about a nuclear apocalypse are dashed by the old man’s words.
“I am going into the desert tomorrow to find Mahdi.”
The old man turns to walk away, but then he stops and says one more thing.
“You know, he could have been your greatest ally. You both wanted exactly the same thing.”
Fury boils to the brim. Victor screams. He rages so hard, he breaks some of the straps, but the chains hold him in.
The old man leaves him behind.
UCHIGAWA
Tanaka sits on the grass. He likes it here.
With his eyes closed, he can feel the energy of a dozen happenings around him. A bird plucks at a piece of twine caught under the leg of a park bench. A boy kisses a girl for the first time on the same park bench. A young man throws a boomerang, which does not return and instead smacks into an aluminum trash can. Under the trash can, field mice hide from the light of day. Only feet away from the mice, a group of young women practice yoga on mats in the green. They were talking about him earlier, the strange Asian man that sits still like a statue.
Tanaka has much that still concerns him. The monsters Walter Stedman has been warring against are routed, but almost certainly still remain in some small numbers. A wounded animal is the most dangerous animal, and that makes Tanaka worry. For now they can only wait and see what comes next.
He learned much of his father, and of himself in speaking to his father’s old friend. The man his father knew as Kill Team One deserves to be feared, but is not a monster. He simply has a unique worldview.
Still, Tanaka wonders what his father meant to tell him when he was between worlds. How is it that Ivan would bring him peace? Ivan knows nothing of peace…
“Hi.”
Tanaka’s concentration is dashed to bits by this disturbance. Deep in his meditations, he did not notice a young American woman approaching him. She has long brown hair, which turns to green and then to blond by the end. She is wearing a pink sports bra and skin tight black yoga pants.
“Yes?” he says.
“Hi,” she says, again. “Some of us were wondering if maybe you want to join us over there.”
“Join you?” he says.
“Oh. Wow. You’re like, really actually Japanese. That’s awesome. Yeah. For our Thursday night Yoga group. You want to come sit in with us?”
Tanaka doesn’t know anything about yoga. It’s a stupid exercise routine practiced by American women with too much time on their hands. This woman is annoying him and wasting his time.
“Why is it green?” he says, pointing at her hair.
“My hair. Yeah. I went swimming a couple weeks ago in my friend’s pool and then it turned green, and I just figured, you know, whatever.”
Tanaka nods silently. He forces her to fill the silence.
“I think I might just dye it all red. Bright red. Like Hayley Williams red.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“From Paramore? No?”
Tanaka shakes his head. He just wants this troublesome woman to go away.
“Oh. Well, um,” she twirls her hair nervously. “We’ll be over there if you want to come over.”
Tanaka nods again.
The girl with the green hair turns to walk away. What an aggravation. He has important matters to think over. He comes here to find peace, not to be interrupted by brash, ignorant girls.
As the girl with the badly dyed hair walks away, something catches Tanaka’s eye. She has a tattoo on the small of her back – a thing the Americans refer to as a tramp stamp. It is a pair of Kanji characters, trendy in the west, and yet a strange word to put on one’s backside.
Sometimes, Tanaka wishes the universe was more subtle with its messages.
He breathes a sigh and rises to go join the American women in their mundane silliness. Perhaps it is time to put away the sword for a bit and work on building some other facet of his being. Stupid as it may be.
He sits down next to the girl with the badly dyed hair as she is warming up, stretching her legs. She smiles at him.
“Your tattoo,” he says. “Why did you get that there?”
“I was… actually kinda drunk when I got that,” she says. “I tell people it means fire and life.”
“It doesn’t mean that.”
“Oh. Well, you would know I guess. What does it mean?”
“Uchigawa. Inward.”
LAST
The setting sun is a blaze of fiery orange as big as Walter has ever seen. Eventually it will vanish over the horizon and give way to darkness.
But then it will rise in the morning and the whole thing will start over again. Will it be a better tomor
row? Walter doesn’t know.
“Do you have a rank?” Kevin asks.
The kid sits on a piece of green plastic patio furniture with a Bud Light long neck in one hand and the sun to his back.
“Huh?” Walter asks. He wasn’t paying any mind to his son-in-law.
“You’re in the army, right? I always feel like I should call you Colonel or General or something.”
“Call me Mr. Stedman, son. Everybody calls me that.”
“Oh. Okay,” Kevin says. The patio returns to awkward silence as quickly as it was interrupted. Walter shifts his gaze to Heather and Katie playing tetherball in the yard. Heather just got accepted to Brown and she’s been ecstatic all weekend. Katie just got asked to her junior prom by a basketball player. She thinks Walter doesn’t know, but he knows. He’ll have words with the boy if he deems it necessary.
He left Ratzinger in charge of operations at Graveyard for the week while he came here to see the girls. The house Lucy and Kevin bought looks like the kind of place where they would shoot a porno movie. There’s a walk-out to a pool with outdoor speakers, a bar in the basement next to the home theater with stadium seats, glass glass glass, a hot tub, marble floors in a kitchen with an island stove top big enough to cook for the White House Correspondent’s dinner – it never ceases to amaze. The kid did a lot of it himself. No wonder people pay him the big bucks.
“So what do you do for the army?” Kevin asks. The kid won’t give up. He’s only actually met Walter one other time besides the wedding, and he hasn’t quite got it yet.
“I make bad guys dead,” Walter says. He tips his glass of scotch to Kevin before he turns it up and finishes the last of it.
