Rated R (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 1)

by Mike Leon

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The blood and guts is gross and whatever, but it’s spooky because we don’t have any idea why. That’s what I keep thinking about. Why was he here? Where does he come from? Where did he go? Think about it. There’s this guy out there who’s obviously not just a guy. He could be anywhere, and he’s pretending to be one of us for some reason we don’t know. How spooky is that?”

  “You’re right,” Lily says. She thought about it plenty, but she isn’t any closer to an answer. The best she can figure, he was like Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence. He was a hitman for the mob and things got ugly, so he went into hiding. That story doesn’t make sense, but it’s the best she can do. “It’s a little spooky.”

  “I still think he sounds hot,” Kayla says. “Edward drives a way nicer car, but we can talk about it.”

  The comment spurs Lily to think of something she hadn’t before. She picks up her Invader Zim backpack from the picnic table and walks away.

  “Lily?” Kayla shouts after her. “Don’t go. I’m sorry.”

  She looks back at her friend.

  “It’s cool, Kayla. I have to go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Okay?” Kayla shrugs.

  Lily leaves school in her Malibu and takes a detour past the mall to be sure. She sees what she’s looking for. It sits parked at the corner of the movie theater lot: a rusted brown Chevy pickup truck.

  INT. GRAVEYARD - DAY

  It takes Helen less than an hour to retrieve the newspapers Walter wants and then she’s on her way to meet him back at the building. The gate men wave her on as she flashes her security pass at them, and she drives up the only road there is beyond the ten foot fence surrounding the company compound.

  The desert sun burns brightly outside, but it is cool in the Hummer H2, with the air conditioning on high. She’s halfway up to the building when her phone rings, interrupting the Glenn Beck radio program. The touch screen display on the stereo says Matt is calling. She takes it on the Bluetooth.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Helen says.

  “Guess what I got you,” her husband says excitedly over the car’s speakers.

  “Mmmmmm,” she hums. “I don’t know. A vacation?”

  “I’ll give you a hint. It’s a first edition.”

  “Sense and Sensibility?” Helen guesses. She collects rare books as a hobby and she’s been looking for a first run of that one for years.

  “Nope. Not that one.”

  “I don’t know. What is it?”

  “You’ll have to wait and see when you get home,” Matt says.

  “About that,” Helen says. She bites her lip. “We have this thing at work. I probably won’t be home for a couple of days.”

  “What kind of thing?” Matt asks. He sounds disappointed, but not angry. Yet.

  “I can’t really talk about it.” This argument has been going in circles since she took this job. It isn’t going to get any better today.

  “Can you talk about anything you do?”

  “No.” Helen sighs.

  “So that’s not really a surprise.”

  “You’re the one who said you could use some space.”

  “Not this much. I haven’t seen you in a week, babe. Before that, you were gone for five days. You’re hardly ever home.”

  “Yeah. And you never went away with the navy.”

  “No. Never,” he says. His words wobble with false zeal. It’s a damn lie. Matt left her alone at their house in Maryland for months at a time when he was deployed with the SEALs.

  “Really? You’re gonna stick to that?”

  “I just don’t understand. When I got out of the Navy we were talking about settling down, starting a family, and then you suddenly want us to up and move to the other side of the country and you never talk to me about anything. What happened? What are we doing?”

  “Look,” Helen says. “I’ll take some time off after this project. We can go to the cabin.”

  “Fine. We’ll talk about this later.”

  Helen pulls up in front of the building.

  “All right. I have to go.”

  She hangs up and steps out of the Hummer. Matt might not believe a lot of what Helen does even if she told him. Most people think her job is a myth, and the people who don’t are usually crazy.

  Helen is the number two at Graveyard, the private military wing of the shadowy group that actually controls the world—well, at least the western half of it. Any time a farmer reports seeing black helicopters in the vicinity of mysterious cattle mutilations—that’s Graveyard. When creepy guys wearing sunglasses at night show up to tell somebody what they didn’t see—that’s Graveyard. The people who actually shot down United 93, The AT&T longlines mind control project, JFK, gangstalking—all Graveyard. Slenderman—accidental, but Graveyard. MKUltra—that was the CIA . . . but Graveyard helped at little.

  The company’s building stands ahead of her, ten stories tall, in the desolation of the Arizona desert. The glass front appears shining black in the sun. Helen has wondered since she first saw the place just why so much of the building is constructed from glass. It doesn’t lend itself well to combat or secrecy—two major interests of the company.

  She enters the lobby and finds the usual two security guards manning the metal detector in front of the stairs leading to the overlooking balcony. She walks across the tile floor, briefcase in hand, and smiles at the guards. They’re clad in black fatigues, riot helmets, and heavy ballistic vests bearing the company’s ominous logo: a human skull with vampire fangs over crossed bones. It includes no numbers, names, slogans, or departmental or regimental markings. It is not very complex, and might even be called generic amongst military patches. Walter once told Helen that was the intention. It’s a scary picture just for the sake of being a scary picture—and easily confused with a lot of other military markings.

  The stairs take her up to the balcony where the two elevators going to the other floors can be accessed. She boards one and pushes the button for floor ten.

  Walter is waiting for her in his office.

  “That was quick,” he says.

  “It wasn’t hard. I went to the newspaper’s offices. I probably could’ve gone to Barnes & Noble.”

  She drops the stack of newspapers on his desk. Walter keeps this room like something out of the 1960s. He has a plastic globe on a wooden stand, a rotary phone, and a green desk lamp that Don Draper would call passé.

  “I’ve seen him before,” Helen says. “In a picture I saw at the NSA. I think you know the one.”

  “I know the one,” Walter says.

  “Who is he?”

  Walter opens up the first paper and begins leafing through, though scanning for what Helen can’t say.

  “We don’t actually know what he is,” Walter says. “We only know that the old man is responsible.”

  “The old man? You mean Ivan Hansen? Kill Team One?” Helen never met the legendary assassin in person, but she knows all the stories. No person or unit ever racked up a higher kill count. He was a one-man wrecking crew, able to compete with whole squads of soldiers. He became Kill Team One by himself after he was the only member to return alive from so many missions that the old Graveyard commander stopped assigning him teammates. He didn’t need them anyway. Ivan Hansen was practically a mythological demigod to the mercenaries of Graveyard, and to a number of raving conspiracy theorists that had managed to obtain not-quite-redacted-enough documents. He was eventually crippled in a secret operation, and retired. His current whereabouts are unknown. “You’re telling me Ivan Hansen made him somehow?”

  “Yeah. After Van’s injury, he got pretty loopy for a while. Started talking about preparing for the future. Before I knew it, he had these kids out in a shack in the woods. I don’t know how, but I don’t think they’re entirely human. We don’t know what he did—if they’re genetically manipulated or mystically empowered. I’d visit them and I would see things . . . toddlers stab
bing men to death, shooting at live targets. We provided him with detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan for a time. He would put them in a cage with the prisoners and say ‘kill.’ Early on the victims would be tied down. Later he stopped tying them down. Then he started adding more men. You ever seen a ten-year-old get in a cage with a dozen grown men and rip them all to pieces? That’s a rhetorical question. I know you haven’t.”

  “You mean it worked?”

  “Too well. Victor Hansen is the most brutal killer the world has ever seen. His proficiency in combat is superhuman. He slaughters infantry platoons by himself. If you believe the guards outside that box, he kills men by looking at them. He knows nothing but violence. He believes in it like it’s his god. He murders the way most of us breathe, and left to his own devices, he would kill every man, woman, and child on this planet. Van himself put Victor in the box. If he ever gets out, he’s never going back in.”

  “Then why don’t we just pump a canister of VX into that stupid box and call it a day?”

  “It’s complicated. Graveyard has enemies that we may not be able to fight alone, enemies he hates as much as we do. For that, we need him alive.”

  “What about the other one? If we find him, and recruit him, we don’t need Victor anymore. Right?”

  “You already see where I’m going with this. Sid Hansen was always more stable—snarky, and a little dense, with no respect for authority, but more stable.”

  “So how are the newspapers going to lead us to him? That’s what I don’t get.”

  “Van Hansen is an obsessive prepper. Impossible to catch off guard. For contingency plans he stored caches of weapons all over the country. Now, I don’t know the locations, but Victor definitely does. And I’m guessing he saw something in one of these papers, something unusual, something that happened close to one of those locations.”

  When he finds what he’s looking for, it’s a curiosity more than anything else, tucked away on the sixth page of yesterday morning’s front section: a dubious report of a video store clerk supposedly tearing off a man’s arm during a robbery attempt.

  “Get Kill Team Two,” Walter says.

  EXT. MOVIE THEATER – DAY

  Lily arrives at the mall after picking up a few things from home: a blue spaghetti strap top, a grey pleated miniskirt, stiletto heels. She’s bringing her A-game today, and these are just some of her tools.

  She parks outside the Cineregency Cineplex, right next to the brown Chevy pickup truck she recognized on her pass through after school. She’s sure it’s the same one. There aren’t many trucks that rusty still on the road.

  She opens her purse and pulls out two things: a roll of masking tape and her iPhone. More tools. She uses her teeth to cut the tape. It only takes a minute for the rest. She keeps moving.

  As she walks up the cement steps to the Cineplex, she passes a man in a tracksuit smoking on a bench. He nearly breaks his neck ogling her. She doesn’t need to look back to see if he’s looking up her skirt from the bottom of the steps. She already knows. They’re like sheep.

  She enters the lobby and stops to contemplate where to look first. Krohike’s manager saw the apparition in a projection room, which is on the second level. She’ll need to be sneaky to get up there. That, or she could flirt with one of the ushers a little and see where it gets her. If Krohike is here, she can probably get him to take her upstairs and show her around. Then she would have to ditch him somehow.

  It all turns out to be irrelevant. The hollow man is here. He’s right in front of her, walking past the concession for the front doors. He looks just like he did the night before—same ratty jeans, same camo hoodie. It even still has some specks of dried blood on it.

  “I knew it!” she calls out. She extends her arm to finger him accusingly. “I knew it!”

  He stops briefly, wide-eyed like a little boy caught flipping through dirty magazines.

  “You smell like popcorn,” Lily says.

  “I don’t know you,” the hollow man says, striding on. “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “Just like Krohike,” she says. He smells like popcorn because of the movie theater.

  “Who’s Krohike?” he says, slowing for a moment to give her a confused look.

  “Some guy I know.” She shakes her head dismissively. “Whatever. Point is, you’re busted!”

  “I don’t know you.”

  He passes her and continues for the door. She follows.

  “You were, like, researching your cover or something in here, weren’t you? To, like, play a better video store clerk?”

  “What?”

  “You’re like Patrick Bateman. There is no real you—only an entity, something illusory. You simply are not there.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” he says in a bemused tone that surprises her. “I’m leaving now. Go away.”

  He pushes through the Cineplex doors and begins walking down the stairs to the parking lot. Lily is right behind him.

  “I’m coming with you,” she says.

  “No you’re not.”

  “Try and stop me,” she defiantly says.

  The hollow man stops and turns in the blink of an eye. Lily squeaks as he snatches her wrist in his right hand. His grip feels unbreakable, like her arm is caught between two boulders.

  “I don’t have to try,” he says, glaring at her with dark intensity.

  “Let go of me,” Lily says. “I’ll scream rape.”

  “You won’t live long enough to scream anything.” His crushing grasp tightens. Her hand goes numb.

  She narrows her eyes at him. She won’t back down. No. She’s staring into a black abyss and it’s looking back at her, but she won’t back down.

  “There a problem here?” calls the man in the tracksuit behind them.

  “Is there?” Lily whispers to the hollow man.

  The death grip on her wrist suddenly goes slack. She feels needles in her fingers and wiggles her hand to shake it off.

  She winks back at the man in the track suit. “No problem.”

  As she turns back, she sees her quarry climbing into the rusted-out pickup. She runs for her car. He’s already screeching out of the mall lot as she starts her engine. She tries to follow him, but he drives like Bullitt. He swerves past the cars ahead of them, weaves through oncoming traffic, and drifts around a corner.

  And then he’s gone.

  EXT. VIDEO TIME – DUSK

  Crime scene tape blows wildly beneath the hurricane winds of a military chopper. Solid black with no markings, the roaring machine sets down in the video store parking lot.

  Lonnie is first on the ground. He sees the world through the plastic of his oxygen mask. The blue glowing pilot light of his flamethrower points the way ahead as the others follow him. They call him the Arsonist for all of the obvious reasons. He likes to burn things. He wants to burn Sid Hansen tonight.

  The Ghoul is easily two feet taller than any of them, a behemoth thing, clad entirely in black body armor that makes Lonnie’s own heavy flame-retardant jump suit seem like a pair of swim trunks. Most men couldn’t lift that armor—much less wear it all day. The machete the Ghoul brandishes in his left glove is spiked and serrated in a way that is far more aesthetic than practical. It looks like a horror movie weapon.

  “Fresh meat!” the monster bellows. Lonnie has never heard the Ghoul say anything but that and a few other stock phrases, including “Flesh for my hunger,” “I hunger,” and some slight variations along those lines. He’s like one of those talking dolls, except he says really fucked up shit when you pull his string.

  The Indian Tracker is exactly what he sounds like. He used to be more practical, but lately he’s taken to wearing a feathered headdress and smoking cigars everywhere. It’s weird, but it doesn’t keep him from doing his job.

  Tracker kneels outside the video store and sniffs the air. Lonnie can barely wait to pick up the trail. He doesn’t like the son-of-a-bitch they’re tracking. They have a history. Sid Han
sen kicked the crap out of him a few years ago, when the kid walked right through Graveyard’s security, breathing tear gas like it was a flowery summer scent and demanding to talk to Walter as if clearances were all just a joke. He kicked Lonnie in the testicles so hard that one of them ruptured. For weeks, it hurt so bad to move that he thought he would never walk again.

  “Well?” Lonnie asks in his thick cockney accent. “How is it, then?”

  Tracker places a hand on the ground. He smells his hand.

  “Fresh meat,” the Ghoul repeats.

  “We know,” Lonnie says.

  “Blood,” Tracker says. “Lots of blood. Two trails end here. Many lead away. Two with blood on them.”

  “Which one is it, chief?” Lonnie says. “I want the bloody tosser.”

  “One wore perfume,” Tracker says.

  He sniffs one more time and scowls.

  “Hot Topic perfume,” he says.

  “We follow the other then,” Lonnie says. He turns back to the chopper, yelling at the soldiers waiting inside. “Gear up for airborne assault and maintain visual contact.”

  “Command said not to engage,” Tracker says.

  “Command can sod off,” Lonnie tells him. “I owe the fucking twat, an’ I’m gonna burn ’im alive.”

  EXT. SHATTERED HOUSE – DUSK

  Lily parks the Malibu in front of a house so decrepit she can’t believe it still stands. It’s surrounded by overgrown weeds, making it hard to see through the dense tree cover. She never would have found the place if not for the pickup parked in the dirt driveway.

  She steps out of the car, taking off her sunglasses. She tosses them on the passenger seat next to a laptop computer.

  “Fuck.”

  She looks up at the rotting old frame ahead of her. The windows are boarded up. The roof is collapsing. It could be worse, she tells herself.

  She steps up to the pickup and reaches into the bed. She tears her iPhone free and peels several large strips of masking tape from it.

  She approaches the front door, all the way watching the ground for muddy spots that her heels might sink into. She’s relieved when she gets to the cement front porch and hasn’t lost her shoes. The door has an empty hole in place of a knob. She can bend down and see right into the house. Above the hole in the door is a hinged metal bar with an open padlock dangling from it. So he padlocks his house. That’s . . . interesting.