Godless Murder Machine (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 2) Read online

  GODLESS MURDER MACHINE

  By

  Mike Leon

  Copyright 2015 by Mike Leon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover art by Yannick Bouchard

  Some additional illustrations by Rachel Lang

  PLEASE SEND ALL COMMENTS, QUESTIONS AND DEATH THREATS TO:

  [email protected]

  THE STORY SO FAR…

  In a time before time began, in a land where chaos ruled supreme and

  Fuck it. I don’t feel like writing a synopsis. Just send me an email and I’ll send you the first book.

  It’s not naked pictures of Megan Fox or anything, but it’s an okay book. I think the words are all spelled correctly. That’s good, right? So you can read it if you want. Or you could just read something by Larry Correia. That would have roughly the equivalent ratio of gun porn per page, but more werewolves.

  I really should hire somebody else to do my marketing.

  EXT. EGYPT – SHARM EL-SHEIKH - NIGHT

  To the infidels, the burqa is a prison, a dungeon where innocents are thrown and kept, never to see the light of day. To the people of faith, it is a cover, a sheath to protect those outside from the lure of the ‘awrah, the shameful parts within. To Fatimah, it is a shield.

  The burqa shields her from the others and their disgusted stares, from pointing children and laughing men. It hides her flesh and her hate. Under her shield, she is just another faceless woman.

  “How many will this make?” The question comes in Pashto from the cold barbarian of a man who accompanies her. Sayyid al-Dhafiri. His head is bald, but his chin supports a lengthy and coarse black beard with a few dyed red vertical stripes. His dull brown eyes are dim and listless, and Fatimah sometimes wonders if his unquestioning devotion to Allah has left no independent thoughts swirling behind them.

  “Seven,” she answers. The crowd continues through the streets around them, a river of flamboyant transgressors flowing through a dark wood of neon colored sin. The city of Sharm el-Sheikh is a blight upon the Egyptian land. They have flung modesty to the wind here and the women show their faces and bodies. Men poison themselves with alcohol. Even the women drink. The air is thick with their perfume stink and unashamed laughter.

  “Allah is merciful,” Sayyid says.

  “Most merciful,” Fatimah says, but her response is distant, aloof, and dead. Most would overlook this, but she knows Sayyid will notice. He can detect even the slightest hint of unbelief and never fails to confront it.

  “You have doubts?” he questions.

  Fatimah tilts her head low as she finds the words. She begins to answer, but a crowd of squealing kuffar women stumbles by, loudly and drunkenly singing of lewd acts. This is not their place. They belong half a world away or fueling the fires of Jahannam, not here in the land of believers, interrupting her conversation. She waits for them to pass.

  “Each time I pray for death,” Fatimah says. “And each time it does not come.”

  Sayyid nods grimly.

  “That is because Allah, may He be glorified and exalted, has a plan for you,” he says. “Soon the pain will end, but first you must truly submit to His will.”

  “I am truly devoted. What more could I possibly give to prove it? Ask any act. Ask any piece of me and I will cut it away in offering.”

  “I do not doubt you, but Allah, may He be glorified and exalted, does not reward offerings. He does not barter in exchange for your desires. He is not a merchant. He is a ruler.”

  “What must I do?” she asks.

  “You must only understand that you are insignificant. Your desires matter not. Only His plan matters. Serve Him. Serve His plan.”

  “I live to serve Him. If I die, it will be to serve Him.” Her answer is stiff, almost sullen, hardly the way it should be.

  “Do not despair, Fatimah,” he says. “I have already received word of our next great conquest. A great enemy of the caliphate has been found in the United States. You know him. The coward. The demon from the dark. The great pig of strife and suffering.”

  Even without any other detail, Fatimah knows who he means. For years she has burned with hate for this monster. In the mountains back home, they speak of him—of the devil with skin as black as night and a face like a skull. They tell tales of entire villages murdered quietly in the night, except the young girls, who were carried away to satiate some dark amusement. They still hang wards in the trees near those places to keep him away. They call him Djinn, Ghul, Gallu, Ifrit, and sometimes Shaytan, but Fatimah knows he is none of these things, and she has a much simpler name for him.

  “The Beast.”

  Her heart beats faster and her breathing becomes difficult to stay. This is far too fortunate to be a thing of chance. It can only be her destiny.

  “I will do this thing,” she exclaims without hearing another word. “Nothing would please me more.”

  “First, you will finish what you started here,” Sayyid says. “Then we will seek out our enemy and destroy him. This is the will of Allah, may He be glorified and exalted.”

  “Yes,” Fatimah says, nodding enthusiastically. “May He be glorified and exalted.”

  “Go now,” he says as he turns to depart.

  Fatimah is already making her way down the street, past rainbow colored lights that dangle from palm trees and windows that struggle to contain heavy bass beats. She doesn’t hear the blasphemous music though. She is too consumed with raw emotion—the only emotion that remains within her.

  She turns to her right and walks through the open doorway she saw the wretched kafir enter before her. She steps into a world of bright colors flashing in darkness and wiggling bodies grinding together with sweaty lust. Sparkling disco balls and fish shaped aluminum cutouts spin on strands of wire above her head. A muscle bound and tight-shirted man just inside the door yells at her over the ear-bleeding thumps from the speakers. Fatimah has no interest in what he has to say. She brushes past him and runs for the dance floor.

  The dancers gather in the middle of the club, on a waxed wooden floor surrounded by carpeted space with couches and translucent bars lit with neon colors shaped like fish. Near the edge of the mass of teeming bodies, Fatimah spies one of the drunken women from outside. She only has to push through one or two other people to reach the wicked non-believer. A man in a loose fitting white shirt snarls as she scrapes past him, knocking a green tinted glass from his hands to shatter on the floor. The woman only squints and looks at Fatimah through one glazed eye, as if teetering between laughter and total disregard, as Fatimah reveals the detonator and screams.

  “Allahu Akbar!” Fatimah shrieks.

  The ground-rattling bass thump of the speakers is lost like a gentle whisper amidst the deafening detonation thunderclap of forty pounds of ammonal. The pressure compresses her and the heat sears like fire on her skin. It feels like she’s been crammed into a baby coffin and set aflame atop a funeral pyre. Fragments rake her arms like razor rain. To open her eyes would be to lose them. To scream now is to breathe fire and steel.

  It ends in blackness, as it always does. A blindfold of acrid smoke fills the room, obscuring the broken bodies and leaking blood. The screeching ring left over from the blast makes all the crying and screaming sound miles away. The only sense left is touch, and the crowd uses it liberally to claw and crawl, scurryi
ng over the slow and the dead like a swarm of terrified rats.

  Fatimah emerges from the front doors into the street. Onlookers have already begun to gather. The stupid ones rush inside and the cowardly ones stand and watch. They don’t know her from any of the dozens stumbling from the smothering cloud, choking and clawing at their faces. She wishes she had another bomb for them, but all her explosives were spent.

  Outside, she is exposed. Her shield was shredded in the explosion, as was intended. The burqa was lined with sheets of glued-together ball bearings as shrapnel. The tattered remains of the blue fabric cling to her head and shoulders, where the force of the blast was not as intense. She counts her nine blood drenched fingers as she hurries away from the scene. The blood is likely her own, from the dozens of scrapes and cuts that crisscross her body, but no more digits were lost this time.

  They will say it is impossible to survive this thing she has lived through. They will say she left the bomb and triggered it from afar. They will say she was completely vaporized in the blast. They may say she does not exist at all. In a way, that is true. There is nothing left of her—at least not of the person she once was. Now there is only hate. It burns within her, building, expanding, threatening to explode like the suicide vests she has used to kill so many. Soon it will break free and engulf her. She will finally die destroying the person she hates most: the coward who left her this way.

  Fatimah will go to America and she will destroy the Beast. She will destroy Sid Hansen. It is the will of Allah.

  EXT. DRIVE-IN THEATER - NIGHT

  “It’s like an endless vacation,” Sid says. He relaxes back on the leather passenger seat and smiles. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  Lily Hoffman, the sultry owner of the purple Dodge Challenger they occupy, clearly disagrees. She sneers and cocks one of her dark eyebrows at him. Lily is a thin girl with raven black hair and paper white skin. She has lots of tattoos that Sid doesn’t quite understand. They aren’t for military units or anything like that, just drawings. The biggest one is a picture of an angel fighting a demon that takes up her entire left arm.

  “What about money?” she says.

  “YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM IT,” thunders a deep male voice ominously from the car’s stereo. Enormous white letters float in the darkness ahead of the windshield. Sid is not entirely sold on the drive-in movie experience. The car is boxed in on three sides, and it would be easy for attackers to come at them from any direction but the front without being sighted. Sitting here is practically asking for an ambush.

  “What about money?” Sid responds to the question with the same question.

  “You need it to pay for things,” Lily says over a collection of screams.

  “That’s why I work at GameStop.”

  “YOU CAN’T FIGHT IT,” the narrator says.

  “So you’re just going to work at GameStop forever? What if you want to marry some girl and have kids? Can you retire off of that?” Lily asks.

  “I don’t even understand what all those words mean,” Sid says.

  “Oh God! It’s in my brain!” squeals a man in the movie trailer.

  “I’m not surprised by that,” Lily says. “You don’t even have a 1st grade education. It’s amazing you can read.”

  “The old man taught us to read fast. We were beaten if we didn’t recognize words.”

  “YOU CAN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT IS,” the narrator says.

  “Oh my God, Jackie. We’re not safe!” cries an actress in the movie trailer. “It’s everywhere! And it’s like a thing! And it exists! Sort of. I think.”

  “That’s great,” Lily says “What about algebra?”

  “Who’s she?” Sid asks.

  “RAPE CULTURE,” the narrator announces.

  “Oh my God! It’s triggering me!” a woman screams over the bloody title card. “It’s triggering meeeeeeeeeee!”

  “What are the three branches of government?” Lily asks.

  “I know that,” Sid responds smugly. “The army, the navy, and the marines.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about. You don’t know anything but army stuff. It’s great if you’re being hunted by international super assassins, but it’s worth dick in the normal world.”

  “How does that make sense? I’ve been doing fine on my own in the normal world for two years even with super assassins hunting me.”

  “You haven’t been in the normal world. You’ve been living in broken down shacks in the woods, off the grid, eating rats.”

  “Yeah. And that was way harder than what I have to do now. This is easy. You know how many old soviet tanks almost ran me over this week?”

  Lily sighs. “None.”

  “That’s right. None. And I have air conditioning, submarine sandwiches and steak. Steak! And it’s cooked. You know people cook steak?”

  “Yeah. And it’s really gross that you didn’t.”

  “It’s good raw. The blood makes it saltier.”

  “Sid, normal people may not have to deal with bombs, or ninjas, or werewolves with gatling guns, but we have problems too. They’re not easier. Just different. And I don’t think your particular set of skills is useful for dealing with them.”

  “I think you’re underestimating me.”

  “I don’t think I am. You kill people. You’re super good at it. That’s what you should stick to doing.”

  “I don’t think so. I went to the library and used the Google there.” Lily snorts at his description. Sid continues. “Hardly anybody kills people. There are about a half a million murders in the world every year. So that means there are only half a million killers in the world every year, and that’s if none of them killed more than one of the dead people, which they definitely did, so it’s really even less than that. Less than one in twelve thousand people kills somebody every year.”

  “So?”

  “Not killing people must be better than killing people. It just makes sense. That’s what everybody does, and they wouldn’t do it that way if it didn’t work better. It works for ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-eight-eight percent of the population. Why can’t it work for me?”

  “I thought I covered that earlier… When did you become a statistics expert?”

  “Look, I’m not killing people anymore. That’s final. I’m just not. Why is the food singing?”

  On the drive-in screen, a foursome of animated anthropomorphic snack foods (chewing gum, popcorn, candy, and soda) jauntily saunters from right to left, singing about going to the lobby to get a treat.

  “It’s the lobby snipe. They used to use it to advertise the concession stand in the fifties,” Lily says. “The drive-in plays it for nostalgia.”

  “Huh.” Nostalgia is a strange idea. Sid doesn’t look back fondly on anything from his past. It was a non-stop storm of violence and destruction, and that doesn’t necessarily bother him, but he can’t single out anything he really liked about it either. There is nothing he longs to repeat or relive.

  “I actually think I want a Diet Coke,” Lily says. “Come on. Let’s go to the concession. You can get some eight dollar hot dogs and a ten dollar bag of popcorn.”

  “Why do I want those things?”

  “It’s all part of the experience, killer.”

  EXT. CRIME SCENE - NIGHT

  “Welcome to the show,” says a medium height man in black. His brass badge hangs from a chain over a shirt stuffed so full of body armor that he appears morbidly obese for his size. He shifts a walkie-talkie to his left hand to offer his right for shaking. “Lieutenant Beekman. This is my scene.”

  “Nick Papastathopoulos,” Nick says. He is a tall man with a pot belly that tests the limits of his black buttoned clerical shirt. The only place hair doesn’t seem to grow is the top of his head. He has bushy eyebrows and a thick black goatee.

  Beekman has the unnecessarily strong handshake of a man trying to prove he’s worth more than he is. Around him, lights flash blue and red from a dozen cars and two ambulances. There’s an armored
SWAT truck with a few men standing around it geared up like they’re about to retake Mosul for the umpteenth time since the Hussein regime. That’s the last thing anyone needs, especially here.

  “Padapolopolis?” Beekman says, trying to reproduce Nick’s last name.

  “Everybody just calls me Father Nick.”

  There are men with guns crouching in the bushes in front of the building. The entire block is sealed off with yellow crime scene tape, a silly little detail that impressed Nick on his way in. The police must keep absolutely immense rolls of the stuff in their cars. On the other side of the tape is a cross-section of people from the surrounding neighborhood, Hispanic in large part, but there are a few too many prosthetic legs for it to be just a typical slice of America.

  Nick sees a couple faces he recognizes. He nods solemnly in recognition. Combat vets have hope like anybody else, but they’re never overly optimistic people. They know the score here as well as he does, and it’s not a good one.

  “Thanks for coming down,” the Lieutenant says. “Dunham says he’ll only talk to you. You know him?”

  “Yeah. I volunteer with him down at the VA. Good guy, but he has to fight the monster pretty hard.”

  “The monster?”

  “PTSD. That’s what some of the vets call it. It’s worse than losing a leg. They can make you a new leg.”

  “Look, if you don’t want to go up there, nobody’s gonna hate you for it.”

  “I’m going.” Nick starts walking toward the building.

  “Whoa, hold up,” Beekman says, clapping a hand down on Nick’s shoulder to pull him back. “We need to get you a vest. Stephenson, get the reverend a vest!”

  “Priest,” Nick says.

  “Get the priest a vest,” Beekman corrects himself. “Didn’t your wife answer the phone earlier? I thought priests couldn’t get married?”