HOSPITAL
Shelly Baum enters the hospital lobby wearing tight blue skinny jeans and a big gray sweater that hides everything all the way past her butt. Her face is half hidden behind a hefty pair of dark sunglasses and her hair is up in a top knot so she looks like 1985 never ended. The idea is that no one from the hospital will recognize her like this, as the outfit is in stark contrast to the skimpy clothes she wore while she was last here.
She scans the lobby for familiar faces and spots a receptionist she spoke to several times on her last stay. She avoids the receptionist as she makes her way to the elevator. She notices on her way past the nearest stairwell that the door has been blocked off and covered with police tape. No surprise there, given the amount of explosives she tossed on those stairs.
The elevator doors open and reveal five strangers. Shelly gives them a once over; a nurse, a depressed looking couple in the corner, a teenage girl, and a Catholic priest. She steps on to the elevator and pushes the button for her floor.
Spears told her to stay home for a while and rest up. He said she was saying things that didn’t make sense. Spears can be an asshole sometimes, and this is one of them. She has no intention of following his orders.
After they let her out of the infirmary at the Graveyard building, Spears saw to it that she got on a plane back to her apartment in San Diego. Spears has never been there. If he had, he would know that apartment is basically an empty room with an air mattress and a rack of assault weapons hanging next to a TV. Shelly spent just over one hour there, packing some clothes, a few handguns, a duffle bag full of explosives, and a grenade launcher into the back of the rental car she picked up at the airport, and then driving back to where she had the gunfight with the spooky motherfuckers in the trench coats and bowler hats.
She’s determined to figure out who or what those bastards were, but she has exactly zero leads to move on. The only thing she can do is go back there and look at the place again. Maybe she’ll find something the local PD missed. Who knows? Maybe she’ll realize Spears was right and she hallucinated the whole thing.
The elevator doors slide open on the children’s ICU and Shelly steps out. There are few people on this part of this floor. It is night time and visiting hours are over, so the halls are mostly empty, with only the rare nurse happening through. Shelly quietly walks down the hallway past a monitoring station where a desk clerk is playing Candy Crush Saga on a cell phone.
When she nears the room where the Van Duyn girl stayed, she sees the hallway is again roped off with police tape. Shelly ducks under the tape and continues down the hall. Her job should be easy from here, because the hospital has closed off the whole area.
She starts in the room itself. There isn’t much to see except a patch of dried blood where she splattered that first fucker’s brains all over the floor. She didn’t hallucinate that. There’s more blood in the hallway from where the bowler hat guy shot those two people dead with the shotgun.
Shelly goes down the hall to the stairwell entrance where she shot at the bastards the most. The tile floors were decimated by the explosives she trailed behind her and there is at least one spot where she can see straight through to the obstetrics ward below. The intermittent sound of crying babies is the tip off. She hopes no chunks of ceiling collapsed on any infants during the fighting.
“Can I help you with something?”
Shelly looks over her shoulder to see a man in a white lab coat standing behind her. He has a plastic name tag pinned to his brown sweater that identifies him as Dr. Chochran.
“Oh,” Shelly says, feigning stupid. “I’m looking for the bathroom.”
“Past two lines of crime scene tape?” Chochran says.
“Is that what that was? Oh, jeez. Was there a murder or something?”
Chochran gives her the stink eye.
“You’re not supposed to be back here,” he says.
Shelly frowns.
“Neither are you.”
Chochran throws his head back and begins to gargle like he’s having a seizure, but he’s not having a seizure because he’s still standing. Shelly doesn’t like this at all. She starts to back away. Not a good plan to start a gun fight in here right now, with no backup and nobody to bail her out if the police show.
She turns and runs, but something trips her. She smacks into the floor and starts to crawl, but she can’t get away. Something is pulling her. It’s his tongue.
She looks down to see Chochran’s tongue wrapped around her ankle. The prehensile appendage extends out from his mouth at least ten feet, and as she kicks at it, it encircles her other ankle as well. The giant tongue draws her toward him as he drops down on his hands and knees. His jaw comes unhinged and his mouth grows into a gape that could swallow her whole.
Shelly reaches for the M9 and bowie knife stuffed in her sweater. She saws at the tongue with her knife. She severs the slimy red thing from its monstrous body, but that doesn’t stop it from moving on its own. It coils around the rest of her body like a snake, pinning her gun to her, gore spraying from the stump end.
Chochran pounces on top of her, but she drives the bowie knife into his guts. He yelps and leaps straight up to the ceiling, where he sticks like a fucking bug. His arms are bent backward so he can crabwalk on the ceiling looking down at her.
The monster scurries away like that, before she can empty the M9 into his chest. His movement reminds her of a roach darting away when someone flips a light on. The tongue lets go of her and slithers away with him.
Shelly doesn’t plan on letting him escape. She needs that thing dead to bring back to Graveyard and dump on Spears desk.
She dashes after him up the stairwell, but the creature is fast. It spirals up the bottom of the stairs, floor by floor ahead of her, until she can’t even hear it skittering along the plaster anymore. She follows anyway.
Up the first few flights she charges, but then she slows down with caution as she realizes the monster is lost to her and could be lying in ambush on the next floor. Carefully, she climbs the stairs ready to fire off the whole magazine from the pistol in the blink of an eye.
After a few minutes, she reaches the top floor and the monster is not to be seen. Chochran may have opened any of the doors on the way up and walked out into an open section of the hospital. There he would likely blend in with the various patrons and hospital staff, assuming he isn’t bleeding too profusely from his severed tongue and open chest wound.
Shelly goes back down the stairs. She combs over the rest of the stairwell, but finds nothing to prove the monster ever existed.
She spends almost an hour looking for anything she might be able to use, but there’s nothing. Defeated, she walks back to the hospital parking garage and her rental car for the long drive back to San Diego.
She checks the back seat, as always, opens the door, and sits down in the driver’s seat.
A hand clamps down over her mouth and pulls her against the headrest with all the crushing strength of an anaconda. Shelly tries to scream, but she can’t through the smothering grip of her unknown assailant.
Looking in the rearview mirror, she sees two eyes like a blackened void staring back at her.
Kill Team One loosens his grip just slightly.
“I can kill you faster than you can scream,” he says. “Do not scream.”
THE BIGGEST SECRET
Victoria Russell’s apartment in Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side is sterile and intentionally boring. Walter knows there is a name for this type of decorating, but he can’t recall it. All of the walls are white. The furniture is white or black. There are very few of the nicknacks he would expect in a woman’s apartment. The only colors he has seen so far are in the abstract paintings slung on the walls like a drunk hung them. There are dozens and many of them are crooked.
Having been let in by a servant and left in a parlor near the door, he finds himself staring at a painting
of something that looks enough like a vagina for him to call it that in his mind, but not quite enough to tell other people that’s what he sees. He tilts his head to the side to see if it looks like something else that way, but then it just looks like a sideways vagina. He tries to dismiss it.
“It’s a vagina, dear,” says Victoria as she enters the room wearing a robe made from purple silk. “You’re staring like you’ve never seen one.”
Walter turns and nods silently at her. He keeps his hands folded behind his back. He knows she knows firsthand that her comment is untrue. He makes a crooked smile that brings that up without saying anything about it.
“Belong to anyone in particular?” he asks.
“Yes.” Her response is cold and blunt. Walter waits for her to elaborate more as she reaches into a small refrigerated wine cabinet with a glass door. She does not.
Walter never did quite click with Victoria, even if they had slept together a decade ago, but she was by far the closest thing to a respectable human being the group had. If anyone is going to give him straight answers about Van Duyn, it would be her.
Victoria smiles back at him with the wine in her hand. “Would you like a drink?”
“No,” he answers. “I’m working.”
“It hasn’t stopped you before.”
She pops the quark from the unsealed bottle and sniffs at the opening. Then she pours some into a tall piece of stemware she took from a rack above the cooler.
“Back at Rothschild, you knew something you didn’t say. What was it?”
“You don’t waste any time.”
“I’m done wasting time on this one. Good people are dead. Somebody tried to blow me up this afternoon. And I got a feeling this isn’t the end of it. There’s somebody else in this game, and I think the group knows more than they’re letting on.”
“What makes you think I’ll tell you?”
“Survival. If you want me to do my job and keep you alive then you’ll give me what I need to do my job the right way. That and I think you don’t agree with them anyway.”
Victoria grins just slightly and that lets him know he’s right. She sits down with her drink.
“What if I tell you and you don’t believe me?” Victoria says as she swirls the dark red wine in front of her.
“I’ve seen a real live ninja vanish in a puff of smoke, an eight-year-old kill a Spetznatz team with a spork, and the pieces my daddy brought home from the Roswell crash. I believe what I see right in front of me, if that makes any sense to you.”
Victoria smiles. “You saw Van Duyn right in front of you. What do you believe about that?”
“I liked Star Trek when I was a kid. Spock used to say once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains has to be the truth.”
“It’s from Sherlock Holmes,” Victoria interrupts, unintentionally reminding Walter that she has a doctorate in English Literature.
“Huh,” Walter stops, puzzled. “Sorry. I went to a fox hole instead of college.”
Victoria smiles and makes a feint exhale of a laugh that makes Walter think she likes him, but that she pities him at the same time. Walter grows more serious.
“I think something ate Eli Van Duyn’s legs and his wife’s head. Maybe the killer, the bad man, fed them to something. I don’t know. The real question is: why? I think you know why.”
She takes an uncharacteristically large swig and finishes the glass. “No,” she says. “Not really.”
“But you know more than I do, and that’s enough to freak you the fuck out. What is it, Victoria?”
“Van Duyn spent the last few weeks before he was killed trying to convince us that something very strange was conspiring against us,” she stops and sighs. “Specifically, reptilian humanoids from another dimension.”
A tall man in his early twenties walks into the parlor wearing nothing but a leopard print thong. His frosted tip hair is gelled and spiked into a faux hawk. His bulging six-pack is shiny and hairless like the rest of his body. He raises an eyebrow to her last comment. Walter notices him but Victoria has her back turned.
“One of your toys got out of the box,” Walter says quietly.
Victoria turns to see the modelesque youth.
“Charles! Go back in the bedroom. I have business,” she belts out angrily. The boy follows directions.
“Now what was that you were saying?” Walter reminds her.
“Walter, do you know nearly every culture in the world has depictions of dragons in its mythology? Many include serpents in their creation myths. In Indian legend, the Naga passed down knowledge to their human followers. It was a serpent that convinced Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, Walter. There are ancient Sumerian texts which refer to people from the sky who brought them the divine right of kings. What do you think of that?”
“I think you really did your research for this conversation.”
“My concentration was in folklore, not a fox hole. That and recent events have inspired me to brush up a bit. Van Duyn believed that the creatures came here during the late Neolithic era for uncertain purposes. They used early humans as slaves and may have interbred with them. They eat human flesh and drink blood, a conclusion you seem to have drawn on your own as well, and they can be quite large.”
“Then where did they go?”
“It’s hard to say. Certain Sumerian texts say they were banished to Irkalla – Sumerian hell. Some of the more thick-headed interpretations state they hid underground in subterranean cities. Van Duyn thought they were trapped in an alternate reality. One of the problems with ancient texts is that the writers had very limited comprehension of what they were seeing and we are working through that filter. I’m certain you’re familiar with Clarke’s laws.”
“Not at all.”
“Really, Walter, you should read more often.”
“I read current events.”
She furrows her brow and frowns at him. “There are rumors, urban legends, if you will, that Hitler was secretly in league with the reptilians. Some say he managed to bring some of the creatures back to Earth. Eli was particularly interested in these stories; so much so that he occasionally sent Graveyard operators to collect old Nazi documents by means which were sometimes less than civilized. On our last weekly video conference he mentioned some files he had just obtained which were particularly exciting. Two days later he was dead.”
Walter winces as he thinks. He puts his hand to his face. He does not like the implications of this information.
“You would think a fifteen foot lizard man with a mouth like a killer whale would be easier to find.”
“Oh no, Walter. That’s the worst part of it all. You see, the reptilians are shapeshifters. They can take human form.”
Walter winces with disbelief.
“I don’t buy it,” he says.
“I know it sounds crazy, Walter,” she says, rolling her eyes. That’s why I didn’t tell you before.”
“Somebody probably killed Van Duyn to cover up something, but it wasn’t a reptilian humanoid shapeshifter vampire conspiracy.”
“I’m not saying that, but…” she pauses. “It might have had something to do with why someone killed him. Could you at least keep an open mind?”
Walter considers it for a moment.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he says.
IT’S AWWWWRIGHT!
Sid snaps awake long before anyone else in the room. He sleeps lightly and with a pistol in his hand, just like his father taught him. The pistol levels almost on its own at the source of the commotion. He doesn’t even have to think about it. Around him, other members of Kill Team Three begin to rouse. Abo is up quickly, but Safari is slow and John Q keeps sleeping. Ashley is nowhere to be seen. Sid lowers his pistol a second later when he sees what woke him.
Victor, standing in the doorway to the barracks with that wavy kris knife in his left hand, has a hold of something – a person. She is wearing a dark brown k
urti that covers her down to her feet. Her dark hair is a mess in her face from Victor dragging her by it. The room is still dark and Sid can’t be sure. He stands up from the bottom bunk and looks closer. It’s the girl he saved from the dogs.
“Wakey, wakey,” Victor says, dragging the girl over to the card table in the middle of the room.
The girl starts to scream, but he bashes her through the table, knocking it over and scattering playing cards across the floor. He has the knife point at her eye before she can figure out where she is.
“You want a lobotomy, cunt?” He growls. The girl silences herself.
“The hell are you on about?” Safari asks, groggily, from the top bunk next to Sid.
“I caught this little whore in the supply shed trying to steal water bottles.”
“Pesky little waif,” Safari chuckles.
But Victor is wearing body armor and that green duster he likes. He has two guns strapped to his legs and, obviously, his knife. He didn’t put on all that gear just to go to the bathroom. Sid knows right away that he’s lying. He went over the wire and found that girl.
“I think we can have a little fun with her,” Victor says. “Get some, get some.”
He starts by pinning the girl to the floor under his knee. He smacks her face a few times and then clamps his hand down over her mouth as he slides that kris knife into the neckline of her kurti and slices down the length of her clothes like he’s unzipping a jacket.
The sight of her naked body is startling to Sid. She fights to cover herself with a forearm and her crotch with a hand, but her attempts are futile. She is not like the naked children that run in the road sometimes. She has thin fuzz where children do not and little knobby breasts.
Victor bites down on his knife like a high seas pirate as he reaches to explore the unshaven fur between her legs. Sid can tell she doesn’t like it, but it is not like Victor is cutting her or breaking her bones. He’s just touching her. He’s even being gentle about it. Sid doesn’t understand why the girl is so upset.
Then Victor starts to undo his own pants. Sid almost interrupts to ask him why, but then decides better. Abo comes down from his bunk and sits on the floor next to where Sid is standing and simply spectates. The giant black man nudges Sid on the shoulder and nods, smiling with approval.
When Sid turns back from Abo’s face, he sees Victor has his dick out. The girl’s muffled screams intensify. She lets her breasts go exposed, no longer a priority, as she reaches with both hands to shield her genitals. Victor slaps at her defenses briefly. Then he rolls his eyes and punches her hard under the sternum. She stops screaming. She stops doing much of anything except gasping for air. Her shield is down and he begins to stab into her.
That first stab is the worst. Though she cannot scream, the dreadful look on her face, with her mouth hanging and her eyes wide, shakes Sid to understanding that something terrible is happening here even if he doesn’t comprehend it. He steps closer.
“I don’t think she likes this,” he says to Victor, who ignores him. He repeats himself. “I don’t think she likes this.”
Victor halts the fucking for just a second and swivels his head toward his brother. His expression is one of pure glee. This is exactly where he wanted this to end up.
“What are you gonna do about it?” Victor says through the knife in his teeth.
Sid does not have an answer. He turns to the others. Abo and Safari stare back at him waiting anxiously to see how he responds. John Q is still sleeping. The guy could sleep through an artillery shelling. He looks back at Victor. He can’t fight Victor. He has before, and it always ends the same way. He has knife scars all over his body to prove that. He could keep him busy for a while maybe, while the girl escapes. No. Not worth the risk. The others might jump in and subdue her. Victor might just beat him that quickly and chase her down. Worse yet, Victor might just kill him. His brother is prone to fits of rage.
Sid backs down. Victor chuckles. He keeps looking at Sid as he takes the knife from his teeth and presses the point into the girl’s pelvis. Blood runs from her flesh as he begins to carve his name into her waist near her hip. He is remarkably precise considering all of her squirming and thrashing – and that he never takes his eyes off his brother the entire time.
Sid feels more compelled than ever to stop this somehow. He can’t do it by himself. The only other person who might help him is Ashley. Ashley might stop this. It’s his job to keep his soldiers in line. He has to make Victor quit. Sid dashes from the barracks, leaving the rest of the kill team laughing at him.
The night wind blows cool against his skin as he tucks his pistol into the waistband of his boxer shorts, the only clothing he has on. The gun flops loosely in the pants waist. He has to tug at it several times to keep it from falling all the way through and down his leg to the ground.
He thinks he can find Ashley in a trailer behind the com shed. If the kill team commander isn’t with the rest of the team, he’s usually in that trailer. Sid hauls it as fast as he can. He runs into an MP on the way, who remarks about his underwear and tries to get in his way. Sid takes him out with the flying knee and it doesn’t even slow down. He keeps moving.
When he reaches the small aluminum trailer he sees that the small port windows are lit up. The flimsy screen door to the trailer is propped open. He dashes through without thinking about what he might be interrupting.
Inside, Ashley sits at a desk with a laptop computer. He is wearing a gray hoodie and sweat pants. Ashley quickly shuts off the computer monitor.
“Victor is...” Sid belts out before he realizes he doesn’t know the word. He starts over. “Victor is torturing a little girl in there.”
“What?” Ashley says, looking very bothered.
“He went over the wire and kidnapped a little girl. He’s torturing her for fun.”
Ashley furrows his brow and stands up. “We’ll just have to see about that.”
Ashley marches back to the barracks at a steady clip, like a man walking to a fight. Sid feels like he’s just tagging along, awkwardly uncertain whether he should run ahead or lag behind, or keep the exact same pace.
When they reach the barracks, Ashley pounds open the front door and everything stops. Victor is in the same spot, raping the girl, only now he is holding the kris blade underneath one of her breasts and threatening to saw it off. He halts when he sees Ashley.
“What the hell is going on in here?” the commander barks.
Neither Victor, Abo or Safari have an answer, only a puzzled look. Sid stands at Ashley’s side ready to fight in case Victor flies into a rage against them.
The seconds tick by. Even the girl is almost silent, except for a few whimpers.
“I’m raping the shit out of this sand-nigger,” Victor finally says.
Ashley nods slightly. He reaches into the big front pocket of his hoodie and pulls something out. He tosses it down on the floor near Victor. It’s a hundred dollar bill.
“Ben Franklin says I can make her scream the loudest,” Ashley says.
Victor cackles loudly. “You’re on. You’re all on.”
Sid steps back toward the door. Ashley spins to face him. He bends down a bit to meet Sid face to face.
“Son,” he starts. “A long time ago I used to work for the CIA. I had two kids and the most wonderful wife in the world. Then I found out she was a Soviet spy. You know what I did? I murdered the bitch and sent her head to her KGB handler in a box with a nail bomb. Killed him. I roasted the rest of her on a spit. I made the kids eat the meat and I told them ‘this is what communism tastes like.’ You know why?”
Sid shakes his head. He doesn’t know the answer.
“Because the enemy is the enemy. Ain’t nothin’ more.”
Ashley smiles at Sid, pats him on the shoulder and turns around to face the rest of Kill Team Three.
“Alright boys,” he elates. “Let’s get to it.”
Sid takes one last look at his brother. Victor smiles back at him. Th
e girl reaches out for help, but there is nothing else he can do. He can’t fight the whole kill team. He feels defeated. He feels disgusted.
He does the only thing he can do. He walks away.
Encrypted Chat Log 2