by Paul A. Rice
However, the control tower he was currently looking at didn’t seem like it was going to be doing any broadcasting at all, not now and not ever. It was trashed beyond repair, of that he had no doubt.
Speaking of doubts – Ken began to seriously doubt whether there was actually anybody here, well...not except for those thieving bastards down by his Toyota. ‘And who the hell were they?’ He let his eyes scan; there was no sign of the men, and no sign of anyone else. He’d been walking around this joint for hours now, the early morning sun was on the first rung of the ladder and there was mayhem and destruction on every one of his horizons, lots of mayhem, but not a soul in sight. Ken sniffed deeply, the air reeked of burning. He knelt and watched for a while, letting his thoughts address the strange situation.
He remembered some film he’d seen years ago. It had been called ‘The Omega Man’ or something like that. The scenario had been very similar to the one he found himself suffering in the present, total chaos all around...end of the world type stuff...and then all the crazy people started attacking the good guy. In the end the hero had simply shot the shit out of them. Actually, when he thought about it, Ken figured there hadn’t been a whole lot more to the movie...just loads of people getting their heads blown off. He shuddered at the thought. ‘Yeah, that was the film, that and one of those zombie movies…’ He grinned dryly to himself, whispering: ‘That’s where I am – in a Goddamned zombie movie, any second now the freaks are gonna come around the corner and line me up for breakfast!’ His soft laughter bounced off one of the wrecked shipping containers next to him, it sounded tinny and hollow, pretty much how Ken felt.
He stopped laughing and looked around again: he had the distinct impression that he was being watched, but after giving himself a mental shake, Ken persuaded himself that perhaps it was only those old movies playing in his head. Standing in the early morning warmth, he hitched up his trousers and then began to walk again. It wasn’t long before he reached the main thoroughfare of the base. On his right, about four hundred yards up the wide dirt road, was the State Department building he’d seen from a distance earlier on. It appeared to be intact and yes, there were still some antennas on the roof. He decided that he would check it out later, but first he wanted to go and find his office – maybe Mike had taken cover up there.
Ken took the first left, crossed the road and then weaved between the remains of a prefabricated building, which up and until recently had been the camp’s gymnasium. It now had only one of its flimsy, rolled-steel walls left standing, and even that was sagging precariously over to the right. All the other walls plus the roof were long gone. In fact, it looked like the roof of the gym that lay sliced through the wall of a church that had stood next door. The roof looked like a giant Frisbee as it sat impaled in the charred remains of the wooden building. And, just like every other thing in this place, they were both showing the awful signs of having been on the wrong end of an oversized flamethrower.
Bizarrely enough, some of the equipment still remained sitting neatly upon the floor of the roofless gymnasium. Ken saw a sign taped to its flopping wall. Even though the plastic was curled at the edges, he was still able to make out the words. Their listed instructions gave orders to an absent parade…
‘No loud music.
Bring your own towel.
Warm up before you train.
Please treat this equipment carefully.
Have a nice day!’
That sign annoyed him, he hated meaningless signs anyway, and this whole missing-people scenario was really starting to get on his nerves. The sight of those words simply fetched home his helplessness. ‘Yeah, marvellous, I’ll have a fucking great day!’ Ken spat the words out. He definitely didn’t want to be here right now. ‘This is turning into a nightmare…’ he mumbled, turning away with the frustration flaring in his chest.
He caught sight of something, a flash of colour, from the corner of his eye. Standing upright, he gazed at where the colour had come from. On the inner wall of the church, he saw the scrawled letters: ‘MJW – SD HOUSE’ They were written in the brightest of green paint, and underneath the words was a symbol. It looked similar to the spearhead thing that he’d dreamt of. It looked like some kind of Roman spearhead.
Ken felt as though he recognised it, now that was weird, how he knew was beyond him, but he did, he knew. The one thing that definitely knew was what those letters stood for: ‘MJW’ – Mike’s initials: Michael James Wyppen. He also knew that ‘SD HOUSE’ meant the State Department building. It’s what the building had been known as by all those who lived on the base, it was either that or ‘The Funny House’ depending on who you were talking to, and was where all the spooks hung out.
So, unless Ken’s eyes were deceiving him, Mikey boy was in the SD House with a can of green paint and some stolen piece of Roman weaponry. ‘Nice one, Mikey, that’s the way to go, you light-fingered, Aussie bugger!’ Ken said it out loud deliberately – just in case Mike was able to hear him. The sound of his own voice began to make him feel a whole lot better, just knowing that Mike was alive lifted his spirits. Ken didn’t even entertain the thought of Mike not being alive. They would be reunited within the next hour and that was that. No question.
He grinned and made a move towards the SD House. ‘That guy had better be alive, or I’m gonna kill him,’ he whispered, ‘and he’d best have the kettle on, too – I’m bloody gagging for a brew!’
The others would have laughed at his naivety...
5
The Others
One of the others had been doing his own scheming for several years now; in fact, his tale had started a long time before Ken had ever even thought about coming to Afghanistan and getting caught up in the nightmare he was currently battling through. The man’s actions were the reason all of this had occurred in the first place. Dwayne ‘Red’ Tolder, was busily setting himself up on Kandahar airfield. He’d been sent there by the men upstairs – the men in grey suits, most of whose names he never knew. He didn’t care about their names, they paid him well and Red happily did whatever it was he wanted to do. Most of his deeds were highly illegal, very bloody, and committed with the full approval of those nameless people who lived ‘upstairs’.
Red was a loose cannon, but his aim was good and he’d cleaned up a lot of bad shit the department’s dealings invariably left lying around. They used him, and he let them. They saw him as a cleaner, but they’d underestimated him. Red saw himself as an opportunist. After all, it had been his ability to take advantage of things, brutally dispensing with all that came between him and his goals that had landed him here in the first place.
He was highly trained in all aspects of espionage and its counter. He shot like a marksman, fought like the devil, and was a whole heap smarter than anyone at all gave him credit for. That was good, and he had learned to enjoy good things, mainly because his early life had been filled with bad things, bad things like his father.
Unbeknownst to this awfully wicked lump of a man, he had inherited a rather large portion of evil from his aforementioned father. The Demon had taken root in his soul and deposited a fine smattering of Darkness therein. It helped him, wickedness breeds wickedness. That’s why he, the Demon, had chosen Red as a host for some of his black particles. He liked Red and he liked his name, too.
Currently, Red was in the process of obtaining possession of something rather special – a simply wonderful device. A fantastically powerful machine, one that would change his future for the better, and if he didn’t get his way, then the device would be used to make everyone else’s future, very unstable – terminally so. Red was a man with a plan, a man on a mission, so to speak. Indeed.
***
The other schemer, a planner of some esteem – the Master Planner – was a man named George. He was very old, very wise, and he came from a place where time, space, and the meaning of life, the meaning of everything, had a completely different meaning to anything Red had ever, or would ever, comprehend.
George’s raison d'être, his awful, contradictory commonality with Red, lay within a two-pronged quest. Firstly, he existed to fight evil. Whereas the red-haired giant lived by the sword and obeyed his dark master’s inner commands without second thoughts, in contrast, the old man’s mission – the very weave upon which George’s entire family history was based, aeons of yesterdays – lay in the fighting of evil. Red was filled with evil and George existed to extinguish any and all particles of the Darkness.
Secondly, he fetched life to the universe. He and his kind spent a lot of time in scattering the seeds of creation amongst the heavens, and time in George’s world was a completely different thing to the passing of a clock’s hands in Ken’s world. However, George’s people were not only the bringers of life; they were also destroyers of Darkness. They were the hunters of evil. And they knew their game.
But the one fatal flaw, which they possessed in abundance, lay in their ability not to be able to identify the utter evil that mankind was quite capable of unleashing without any help from the Darkness whatsoever. Its presence merely thickened the soup. Luckily, George and his kind were learning, and learning fast. They would use any and all means at their disposal; they would stop at nothing in their quest, even if it meant hiring some outside help – hiring in a specialist.
That would be just fine. Cue: Kenneth Rob-in-son.
Just as Ken had no idea of the horrors awaiting him in George’s plan, the old man was similarly unaware of how he and his kind would be dragged into the murky cess-pit of Ken’s world – a little blue planet called Earth. George was about to learn that just because you always had the best intentions, it didn’t always mean you achieved the best results.
He never had a clue. And nor did Ken.
And Mike, oh yes – Michael James Wyppen? Well, he was currently indisposed. Half his guts were hanging out and he would have encountered some considerable difficulty in attempting to walk into the kitchen. No spine, you see? That wouldn’t be such a good start, especially when he was supposed to be in the process of putting the kettle on for his best friend, and Ken was going to be in need of something when he finally arrived. He was also going to be half-mad.
Oh, and the red-haired bastard – what about him? Well, let’s just say that Dwayne Tolder simply didn’t give a flying fuck, not about anything or anyone.
6
The Funny House
Nothing to laugh about…
Ken arrived in front of the Funny House about thirty minutes after he’d left the gym. He had approached like the night, moving softly across the shattered remains of the camp. Slipping and sliding from one darkened corner to the next. His was the skill of a master sniper in his element. Eventually he found himself hidden beneath a smouldering wooden door. It provided excellent cover over the small ditch into which he had crawled. Burnt masonry and blackened rubble surrounded him. Lying in the shadows, he had another one of those reality-check moments, when the gravity and weirdness of his situation came back and gave his mind a good pinch. Little voice spoke up again. ‘What’s going on? I just wanna run, it doesn’t matter which way!’ The thought echoed through his mind. ‘Just run, and make it fast!’
As he waited in the smokey coldness of the little hole, whilst quietly thinking about taking his mind’s advice, Ken’s eyes caught sight of the entranceway to the SD building. He was amazed to see the front door to the building had been left wide open. The place was usually like a maximum-security prison, a person had no chance of even getting into the car park, never mind simply waltzing through the front door. Then he saw the men.
There were four of them. No, make that six...
Six men armed with AK-47s, gathered in the entranceway of the Funny House, casually standing in the sun and discussing something. Totally unaware of the ice-green eyes fixed upon them. With lots of pointing, their leader, the one doing most of the pointing, proceeded to break the men down into groups of two, sending one pair away immediately. With weapons slung across their backs, the two men began a slow and disinterested meander around the perimeter of the old building. The remaining four went inside, rattling the door shut behind them.
Ken waited, he watched, and he planned. After a long time, he finally established their routine: every hour the men would swap duties – two old ones in, two new ones out. They never went anywhere except around the outside walls of the Funny House. He was almost certain that there were only six men, and periodically all of them would be inside at the same time, probably for a meal break. The next time they left their posts to go and eat, Ken made his move.
No need for any ghostly approach methods this time, as soon as he saw the door closing, Ken scrambled out of his hole and ran like the devil across the dirt track separating him from the front door. He carried a sturdy length of two-by-four hardwood, which he’d prised loose from the smouldering door overhead; it was about three feet long and fitted his hand perfectly.
He arrived at the door like a leopard on the final leg of its stalk, sprung with coiled aggression and adrenaline. He knew which way the door opened and he knew which way the men coming out would usually go, that knowledge led him to take cover behind the low blast-wall about twenty yards away. He crouched behind the wall and waited, barely breathing. His plan was a simple one: he was simply going to beat the crap out of the first people to come past, grab their weapons and then make a plan for the second phase. It was sketchy plan at best, mostly relying on luck. But, sometimes sketchy plans come to fruition, sometimes things work out just fine. Ken got lucky.
He heard the door opening and then clatter shut again. He crouched lower as the sound of footsteps approached, they stopped and he heard the noise of a zip being undone. Fluid started spraying into the dust about two feet away from him, on the right. Ken leapt to his feet. There was only one man and he was turned away, urinating into the dust without a care in the world.
Ken broke the solid piece of wood across the back of the man’s head. The meaty ‘thwocking’ noise which accompanied the impact of his deadly blow, sounded as loud as a bass drum in the silent heat; the impact sent the snapped end of the wooden club spinning away. The target of his perfectly-aimed ferocity collapsed where he had been standing, viciously striking the concrete lip of the blast wall with his forehead on the way down. The bass drummer pushed out another beat. Ken pounced on the unconscious man and using the two-foot-long stump of his club, he struck him again, hard, on the back of the neck just below the skull. There was a cracking noise, and it wasn’t wooden. The man’s legs went into spasm. Ken dragged him behind the wall and proceeded to relieve the body of its weapons, casting his eyes furtively between the task at hand and the door.
Two minutes later, and armed with a fully loaded Kalashnikov – a copy, but of a very high quality – two spare magazines and two grenades, Ken was standing outside the entranceway of the Funny House and ready for the execution of phase two. Listening carefully, he recognised the sounds of a meal being taken, the clanking of tin plates and the odd rattle of cutlery giving rise to his assumption. He heard muffled voices and the sound of a chair scraping its legs on a stone floor. Bending down, Ken looked through the empty keyhole – the five men were seated around a table about twenty feet in front of the door. ‘Perfect…’ he thought.
He reached into his pocket and, with some relief, removed one of the grenades. Ken had never been that keen on having high-explosives next to his balls, but needs must. He leant the rifle against the wall and stepped forwards. In one smooth movement, using his left hand, he pulled the pin and opened the door. Then using his right hand in an underarm lob, he threw the grenade into the room. It bounced once and rolled directly under the table. Ken slammed the door shut and grabbed the AK. There was a shout, followed by the sound of a chair falling over, and then a loud blast. The door shuddered in its frame.
He entered the building like a maniac on speed, booting the door open and quickly darting through, ducking into cover behind some wooden crates on the left. A pall of black
smoke rose above the place where the men had been seated, no sign of the table, blown to smithereens. Three of the men were on the floor; the other two were staggering away. He killed them where they stood – two shots each to the centre of the body. They went down silently. He turned to the others and pumped two rounds into each of them. Blood flew. Ken squatted, eyes flickering around the smokey room. One of the corpses farted, stomach gasses escaping its lifeless bowel muscles.
He grinned sickly, thinking: ‘Nothing ever changes, does it?’
Satisfied that the threat was gone, he decided to check the rest of the building and rose to his feet to begin a slow and methodical check of each and every room in the place. It would have been slow and methodical, if only somebody hadn’t tried to kill him. In fact, there were two of them, two more, dark-skinned Afghans. ‘No, not Afghans – these guys are bigger, darker,’ he thought.
Whatever the case, the men were heavily armed. And they were pissed off. Ken had no trouble in figuring that one out. The high velocity bullet, ripping through the wall two inches above his head gave him a head start.
He hit the deck, rolled to his left and came up firing. He’d seen them and that was their first big mistake. They should have waited, or have been better shots. The men were exiting the third room on Ken’s right. His well-placed snap-shots blasted the wall next to the front man’s face. The man stumbled backwards into his friend, his clumsy shock-reaction causing both men to trip up. Their flailing retreat sent them both stumbling back into the small room.
Ken heard them hitting the ground by the door.
Big mistake number two: plasterboard provides absolutely no protection against hurtling lead and copper. Ken steadied his aim, before proceeding to fire ten rounds in a concentric pattern on and around the area of the wall just behind the door. There is nothing quite like the sound of thudding bullets striking human flesh – it can even be discerned over the booming of a Kalashnikov’s roar within a large, echoing room. Ken heard the thuds – thwacking, meaty clumps of noise. A man screamed. He dodged to one side, dropped into a kneeling position and waited with his rifle held in the aim, eyes scanning the men’s position.
