by Mike Leon
The analyst Walter looms over is named Roger, but everyone calls him Archie because he looks like the comics character. Curly red hair, goofy smile—he even always wears a sweater. It’s uncanny.
“We got him on camera hotwiring a jeep outside ADX,” Archie says. “Local PD found it flipped over in a creek bed ten miles south.”
“He switched cars,” Helen says.
“He’s coming here,” Walter says.
“Why would he come here?”
“It’s just how he is. He’s not going to go hide in a shed in the woods or get an assumed name and a job at Safeway. He’s going to start killing on a very large scale, and he’ll start here for two reasons: one, he hates us, and two, we have something he wants.”
“What is it, Walter? The box he asked you for?”
Walter ignores her question. Instead, he fires off another at Archie. “Where are Deadeye and the Indian?”
“There’s still nothing from the chopper,” Archie says.
“They’re all dead,” speaks an icy cool voice from behind them.
Yoshida Tanaka waits quietly in the comm room door frame. He is almost like a shadow, clad entirely in sleek black formfitting attire. His silky black hair hangs down the back of his neck. He carries an ancient-looking Japanese sword at his side, which Helen has never seen him without. She wonders at times if he sleeps with the thing.
“How do you know?” Walter asks.
“You set them against not a man, but a demon,” the ninja says. “I knew before it happened.”
“You don’t know, Tanaka,” Helen says. “You’re in the dark on this just like we are.”
“Perhaps you should come visit me in the dark some time,” the ninja says. Helen can’t decide if it’s a come-on or a threat.
“I need all hands on deck for this one,” Walter says. “You gonna stick around for the action?”
“What choice do I have?” the ninja says. “We all face doom if he is not stopped.”
“What kind of doom?” Helen says.
“The worst kind,” Walter says. He smacks the analyst in the shoulder. “Archie, I want a chopper on the roof ready for dust off until I say otherwise.”
“Will do,” Archie says.
“I need you to come with me,” Walter says to Helen.
INT. LILY’S CAR – DAWN
“It looks like a Thai whorehouse in here,” Sid says. He’s poking at one of the pink fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview mirror. The matching playboy bunny seat covers and floor mats don’t help.
“Fuck you! I got shot!” Lily shouts. She’s driving, and her hands are wrapped around a pink and purple leopard print steering wheel cover to further prove his point.
“It’s not that big a deal,” Sid says. He slides a brass blasting cap into a block of C4, and then follows the wire with his fingers from there to the next cap. He inserts that cap into another block and continues. He’s been at this for some time.
“No? How many times have you been shot?”
“Not at all.”
“What?” Her demeanor suddenly shifts from infuriated to bewildered.
“I’ve never been shot.”
“You don’t think that’s weird?”
“Why would I?”
“People shoot at you all the time, right? Like, how many hundreds of times?”
“Tens of thousands. Probably millions.”
“And nobody ever hit you at all? Not once?”
“No. Not really.”
“So, what, are you like Captain Kirk, and everybody else is a red shirt?”
“I don’t remember all the shirt colors . . . what are you talking about?”
“Hold up. Have you actually been in a Thai whorehouse?”
Sid says nothing. He’s been a lot of places, but he’s never been to Thailand. He only knows about it from a magazine article about sex tourism there. He picked it up in a Walmart while stealing provisions for the shack he lives in.
“Oh God,” Lily says. “Of course you have. You’ve probably fucked every hooker on both sides of the Pacific. You probably gave me some rare Indonesian super VD. Now I have to go get checked. If I die from AIDS, I’m gonna punch you.”
He hasn’t fucked anyone except Lily. The closest he ever got was watching his brother. Victor had a way with women—a way of torturing and mutilating them until their bodies gave out. For a long time Sid thought that was what sex looked like. He was stupid then.
“And where the hell are we going?” Lily says.
Sid finishes with the current strand of C4 bricks and drops it into a backpack. He tosses that pack in the back seat with the others.
“We’re going to the Graveyard headquarters building in northern Arizona,” Sid says.
“But those are the guys trying to kill us.”
“Right.”
“So shouldn’t we be running away from them?”
“That’s exactly what they’ll expect.”
“So instead of running, you’re going to go fight, like, a hundred guys with machine guns, just you and the element of surprise?”
“Don’t worry. I have a plan.”
INT. GRAVEYARD VAULT – DAWN
The ninth floor of the Graveyard building is so quiet Helen could hear a roach’s footsteps on the tile. There is no one on the entire floor except Walter, two elevator guards, and herself. She follows him down the hall toward the vault, a thing of near mythical status and the focal point of the few dozen people worldwide who really know anything.
“I’ve never brought you up here before,” Walter says. “Have I?”
“No.” Helen studies the walls and floor, as if expecting to see something magical in them, but they’re just walls.
“What have you heard?”
“I don’t know, sir. Lots of stories.” She’s just trying to stay cool. The way people talk about this place, the Holy Grail might be locked away up here.
“You heard the one about the alien bodies?” Walter asks.
“Yes,” Helen answers apprehensively, waiting for him to shatter her world into pieces with a forbidden truth that she and thousands of others have sought for their entire lives.
Walter forces a chuckle.
“That one’s horse shit,” he says, invoking nothing but disappointment from her. “So is Walt Disney’s frozen head. It might be somewhere, but not here. What about the water-powered car? You heard that?”
“Yeah. Horse shit?”
He gives her a smirk of lofty swagger.
The vault door is eight feet around and hinged. It sits at the end of a short hallway off the main corridor. There is a panel on the wall with a camera, a microphone, and a key slot. As far as Helen knows, Walter has the only key in the world that will open this vault door. He wears it on a chain around his neck. She watches as he draws the key from under his shirt and sticks it in the lock.
He speaks his name into the microphone and then faces up at the camera. The door vault slowly begins to open.
“There’s stuff in here that nobody ever needs to see,” he says. “Some of it could put the whole world at risk. Some of it we just aren’t ready for yet.”
The inside of the vault is lined with safety deposit boxes; bigger objects sit on the floor or on pedestals. Walter walks into the vault ahead of her.
“Don’t touch anything,” he says.
Helen follows him and begins eyeballing some of the things that aren’t locked up. There’s a steel spear propped in the corner that looks about as old as civilization from the rust all along it. Near that is a suit of medieval armor on a stand.
“This is what Victor wants,” Walter says. He lifts a large stainless steel briefcase which was propped in the corner and drops it on top of a rolling gurney in the center of the room. Helen turns her attention to the box and looks it over. There are no distinguishing features, other than the three-digit combination locks on either side of the carrying handle.
“What is it?” Helen asks.
“Just an
apocalypse in a box,” Walter answers.
“Okay then.”
“From here until I say so, this is the football. We need to make sure Victor doesn’t get the football. At all costs—all costs—Victor doesn’t get the football.”
“Got it,” Helen confidently responds.
“Say it,” Walter demands. “Victor doesn’t get the football.”
“Victor doesn’t get the football.”
“Good. Now come with me. And bring that thing with you.”
Walter walks from the vault. He stops after a second and looks back. Helen is hesitant to follow.
“Come on,” he says.
“Wouldn’t it be safer in the vault?” she asks.
“Not if we’re all dead. Then he’ll have all the time he needs to knock that door down.”
INT. LILY’S CAR – DAY
Lily stares over the steering column, out into the bright desert. Sid gathers the bags he packed from the back seat, dragging them out into the dust in a big pile. She doesn’t like this. She doesn’t like it at all.
“Stay here,” he says. “And don’t fall asleep.”
“You’re leaving me out here alone?” Lily says.
“Yeah. What?”
“I’ve seen way too many horror movies not to be creeped out by this middle of nowhere Route 66 desert shit. I know what happens out here.”
“What happens?” He leans into the door frame, looking at her inquisitively.
Dozens of images of screaming final girls fight for the main screen in Lily’s head. So does the thought that she wouldn’t be the final girl. She would be the slutty friend: the girl who shows her tits ten minutes into the movie and then gets killed first.
“Scary things,” she whimpers.
“I promise you,” Sid says. “I’m the scariest thing out here.”
“Fine. But—”
He’s gone.
“Sid?” she calls out. Nothing. He’s just gone. He left her here. The passenger door still hangs wide open.
“Great. This is creepy.”
She crawls across the passenger seat and looks out into the desert through the open door. She sees nothing but brown soil and a few cacti in the distance.
She reaches for the door handle, pulling the door closed quietly, then sits back down in the driver’s seat. She sighs.
She imagines the mutants from The Hills Have Eyes are watching her right now. No matter how hard she tries on her own, the idea won’t go away.
Finally she resorts to her iPhone. She flips through the selection of music she keeps stored there, looking for something suitably cheery, and digs for the Beats headphones she knows are under the seat somewhere.
EXT. THE DESERT – DAY
Sid creeps along the desert terrain. He carries with him the half dozen sacks he filled with C4 explosive charges in the car.
He scans the brown dust ahead for anything strange. He’s looking for a particular spot he hasn’t seen in many years, not since his father first brought him and Victor here for training on this particular contingency plan. That was eight years ago, when he was ten, but he has a perfect memory which was beaten into him by his father’s constant and violent insistence that every detail is important in matters of warfare.
His memory does not fail him. He finds the general area he’s looking for and stomps on the ground until he hears a hollow clanking beneath his feet.
He reaches down to brush the dirt away, uncovering a trap door that has likely been hidden since his last visit as a child.
He reaches for the wire handle and hoists the door open to expose the darkness beyond. It’s go time. He drops the bags first. Then he jumps down into the black.
When the Graveyard building was constructed, decades ago, the old man saw to it that the entire structure could be demolished by taking out a few key support beams in the building’s lower levels. He also made sure there were certain discreet ways in and out of the building. Only Sid knows these things now that his brother and the old man are gone.
In the months before he absconded from Graveyard, the company was fighting a particularly nasty war against enemies of the New World Order whom Sid hopes he’ll never see again—literal monsters. Those horrific things lured the old man and both boys into an ambush at a diner in Texas that only Sid managed to escape. After Sid made it back to Graveyard alone, Walter made him the new Kill Team One and sent him out on a seemingly endless run of revenge killings. It was practically a genocide—a revengenocide. It was a mission Sid ultimately found tedious and a little bit distasteful. It didn’t help that Walter constantly belittled him throughout the operation. After a few weeks, he dropped off the grid and never looked back—not until now.
INT. GRAVEYARD HEADQUARTERS – DAY
Helen waits on the second floor balcony of the Graveyard building’s lobby. The balcony overlooks the front doors and their metal detectors, flanked by guards who permit entry into the rest of the building. Behind her are the elevators leading to the upper floors. At her sides are the tactical operators of Bravo team, crouching behind sandbags beneath the balcony railing. Walter insisted on the sandbags. She questioned him, but he just made another comment implying she didn’t know what she was dealing with when it came to Victor.
She has three teams of ten operators here. One with her and the other two dug in at the front door. Walter has two more teams upstairs on floor ten. Another three teams are patrolling the building, sweeping for any signs of a breach.
She expected this to be a big joke to most of them, but it isn’t that way. Some of the newer guys are dicking around, but the older operators are quiet. They were here the last time. They know, and their solemn demeanor worries her.
Chris Coch, the guy next to her, is one of the quiet ones.
“Hey, Anderson,” says Hudson Pulasando, the marksman for Bravo Team. “Don’t worry. Me and my squad of ultimate badasses will protect you.”
“That’s sweet of you, Hudson,” she replies. “I still won’t touch your shrimp dick.”
A few of the operators laugh.
“Don’t inflate his ego,” says Coch. “Hudson’s dick makes a brine shrimp look like a horse cock.”
Walter’s voice comes in over Helen’s radio. “Anything down there?”
Helen looks over the railing through the lobby’s great glass front and sweeps over the desert landscape outside. She does this as more of a formality than anything else. She expects to see nothing. Her expectations are correct.
“Not a peep,” Helen says.
As if guided by a greater power, one solely invested in situational irony, the building rattles from the detonation of an explosive charge.
“Then what the fuck was that?” Walter yells over the radio.
“I don’t know,” Helen says.
“All teams, report!” Walter commands.
Helen listens as they each check in from locations all over the building.
“Delta, we’re on six. Nothing up here.”
“Guard station,” the next one calls. It’s one of the operators stationed at the front gate on the outskirts of the perimeter. “All clear out here. Was that in the building?”
“I need answers, people,” Walter calls.
“Command, November,” radios a voice Helen doesn’t know. “We’re on sub level two. Lot of smoke down here. We think it came from the shower room.”
“Who is this, Ratzinger?” Walter says.
“Uh, negative,” calls the November operator. “This is Camisaroja. Ratzinger’s on vacation.”
The building alarm sounds. This is the first time Helen has heard it go off since she started work here. It’s a pulsing industrial honk like she would expect from a battle ship or a nuclear plant. The loud honking is underscored by a woman’s droning voice repeating the same message back-to-back.
Warning. Security breach reported in sector fourteen.
“What the fuck is that?” Walter’s voice crackles over the radio.
“Command, guard
station,” radios the front gate operator. He’s breathing heavily and shouting. “You got incoming! Ran right through the fence!—ks like a school— incoming.”
Helen mashes down the talk button to ask him to repeat the last part, but then she sees it. It’s coming for them, bouncing on the dirt on its way to the building. It’s a school bus—a big yellow school bus.
“Bring it down!” she screams into the radio.
What follows is a storm of bullets that would kill a hundred men and leave nothing but torn scraps of flesh and cloth, unidentifiable as anything except ruined human meat. The outside teams hit that bus with 240s and M16s and even a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle.
It keeps coming.
“Take it down! Take it down!” Helen yells into the radio.
The fire teams continue to pour machine gun rounds into the front of the bus, but it roars toward them still. Helen knows that to be impossible. No one could survive that. Unless . . .
Now she sees. The bus crosses into the blacktop parking lot outside the building and sideswipes some parked cars. Above the battered and smoking engine compartment, the bullet-riddled windshield is an empty void. No one is driving the bus at all.
The fire teams keep shooting. She’s sure the engine is destroyed, but that doesn’t matter. It’s already too close. It’s already speeding too fast. It never intended to stop again.
“Oh no,” Helen says, watching the bus impact the front of the building. She dives behind the sandbags as an explosion of flame and steel and broken glass engulfs the lobby. The blast is so loud it feels like her ears aren’t covered, even though she knows her palms are pressed tightly against them.
The building stops quaking and Helen looks up over the sandbags, seeing very little through the thick black smoke filling the lobby. The operators on the balcony with her are filthy but okay, except for Roy Hemp, rolling around on the floor grunting with glass shards in his eye. Chris Coch moves to try and help him.
