Red Scare (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 3) Read online

  He takes the phone and glances at the phone number on the screen, which displays UNKNOWN to the surprise of absolutely no one. Sid holds the device to his ear. “Yeah?” he says.

  “I didn’t realize you were such a basic bitch,” speaks a mysterious electronically altered voice from the iPhone. It sounds different from the last time they talked. This voice is robotic and hollow instead of mechanical and empty. In any case, it belongs to the Player, an unknown party who has been watching Sid with an ultra-high resolution spy satellite since at least some time last week, and assisted him in dispatching an army of Islamic yahoos a few days ago. “Is that pumpkin spice you have there?”

  “It’s good, whatever it is,” Sid grunts, looking up at the gargantuan skylight in the mall corridor ceiling above. He gets up from the table and walks away from the girls, in search of some more discreet corner for this conversation.

  “Do you want to try on some Ugg boots while you’re there? They’re having a sale at DSW.”

  “What do you want?” he says.

  “I see Graveyard had a chat with you,” the Player says.

  “I told them to fuck off.”

  “That’s good. You don’t need to be working for them.”

  “No? I need to be working for you, right?”

  “Not for me. With me. We’ve talked about this.”

  “We’ve talked about it five times now. And every time I tell you the same thing. You’re a mysterious robot voice that harasses me by telephone. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want.”

  “I want to make things better.”

  “When you say vague shit like that, it sounds like you have a secret agenda.”

  “I don’t have a secret agenda. I did some bad things, Sid—in a sort of past life. I regret them now, but I see a chance to set that right, and I need your help to do it.”

  “I’m not your personal army.”

  “You need me as much as I need you.”

  “I only need you to stop calling me.”

  “You have no direction, Sid, no idea what you’re doing, or where you’re going, and no plans for the future.”

  “My plan is to bang a lot of hot slutty girls.”

  “You inherited your father’s virility but none of his charm.”

  Sid laughs loudly. “You must have some wires crossed. You mean my dad? Stonyface McGrimdark? Speaks only in growls? Once broke my nose for using the word ‘feelings?’ If you really met him you’d know the old man never touched a woman he wasn’t stabbing to death.”

  “Please. Van never saw a hooker he didn’t leave bow legged. He got the clap so many times it turned into applause.”

  “Van?” The name is a curious bump in the conversation, as hardly anyone called the old man Van. Walter Stedman was the only person Sid can think of who did that.

  “Despite what you may think, you will have eyes on you forever because of who and what you are. There will always be daggers in the dark, and you will always leave a trail of death and destruction wherever you go, until they finally get you. They would have already without my help.”

  “Those ragheads last week were candy-asses. Whatever.”

  “Yeah? Maybe the next gang of assassins aren’t such candy-asses. Maybe they decide to just drop a bunker buster on you. What then? And what about your girlfriend?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “How long until she catches a stray bullet? Or worse?”

  “Casualties happen.”

  “You’re so full of it. You know, I know what you did for Fatimah back in the desert, and Helen, and Jeanette Hoffman—and that Russian stripper at the Black Omen. You’re not quite the monster you think you are.”

  “I don’t need you. And I don’t need this. Conversation over.” Sid disconnects the call.

  EXT. HAPPY HARMONY DREAM SPA - DAY

  The Happy Harmony Dream Spa is in a small strip mall between a tattoo parlor that is open by appointment only, and a travel agency which may or may not be defunct according to varying persons. The spa’s entryway is a wooden double door painted with a hideous matte gold that is beginning to fade and chip. A torn paper sign on the left door instructs the usage of only the right door in bold handwritten letters. The large storefront window beside it is blocked by thick wooden blinds and a sticker on the window says WE MAKE BEST RELAX 4 U. Even Vlad understood what goes on here the very first time they visited.

  Dmitry enters the spa and gets half the standard greeting from Denise, the woman who runs the show for them.

  “Welcome Happy Harmony Dream Spa,” she starts in a high pitched Chinese accent. “We make best—oh. Mr. Fedosov.” She shifts out of the accent as soon as she recognizes him. Denise is from the East, but not that far East. She was born in Indiana. “What brings you in today?”

  Vlad steps through the door behind Dmitry and brushes his head against one of the Chinese paper lamps suspended from the ceiling of the little waiting area they’re standing in. It might be more proper to call it a foyer now, considering the type of establishment this is, but the floorplan still screams dentist’s office, or maybe it was a veterinarian.

  “I need to talk to Nina.”

  “She came back early last night,” Denise says with prying eyes. “Did she piss off Sergei?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What the shit, how?”

  “Just get Nina.”

  Denise nods and leaves through the back door. She returns a few minutes later with a groggy looking floozy wearing a t-shirt and some underwear. Denise has her by the wrist and jostles her through the door angrily. “Just fucking talk to him,” Denise says.

  “No! Please!” Nina shrieks. “I didn’t see anything! I swear!”

  “Whoa! Whoa!” Dmitry says. “Relax. We just want to talk.”

  “I don’t know anything!”

  “Damn it, Nina!” Denise slaps Nina across the face with a resounding clap. The girl tumbles sideways onto a little pink cotton love seat. “You tell them what they want to know or you won’t get another God damn fix for the rest of your life!”

  “Good! I don’t want that stuff no more anyway, cunt!”

  Denise winds up to hit her again, but Dmitry snatches her wrist before she can let it fly. “We just need to ask a few questions without a scene.” He releases Denise’s hand. “It might be best if she comes with us.”

  Denise gets the idea. “Whatever. Just don’t bring the dumb cunt back here.”

  “Done,” Dmitry says. He snaps his fingers and points at the door. Vlad yanks Nina off the loveseat by her ankles.

  “No! Noooo!” Nina screams as she claws at the little gaps between the cheap vinyl tiles on the floor, trying to catch some kind of hold that isn’t there and never will be. Vlad throws her over his shoulder and hauls her out the front door ahead of Dmitry toward the standing Audi A3 out front.

  Denise only shakes her head. “Stupid girl.”

  Vlad shoves Nina in the back of the car. Dmitry goes in after her. He puts his arm around her to keep her from going anywhere. She doesn’t stop bawling until they’re well on their way down the road.

  “Please don’t kill me,” Nina sniffles.

  “Why would I do that?” Dmitry says.

  “Because I saw too much.”

  “I don’t know what you saw.”

  “I got kids, Mr. Fedosov. Two little girls. They live with their grandma. What’s gonna happen to them?”

  Dmitry unwraps his arm from her and waits for a moment to test her. The child proof locks are engaged, so she’s not going anywhere anyway. “Do you want a cigarette?” he asks.

  “No.” Nina shakes her head apprehensively. She has a fragile, glassy look in her eyes. “I’m trying to quit.” She crosses her arms defensively, and her little biceps spasm unnaturally. Dmitry notices the tremors.

  “The horse too?” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “When did you stop?”

  “Last night after—” She stops
herself from saying anymore. “Last night.”

  “What happened?”

  “I thought I was dead. I almost died with a dick in my mouth. My girls almost had a mommy who died with a dick in her mouth. I just keep thinking about that. Please let me see them again. I need to get clean and see them again.”

  “I won’t hurt you, Nina. I just want to know what you saw.”

  “I told you. Nothing. Honest. I’ll never talk to nobody.”

  “Well, that’s a problem, because I need you to talk to me.”

  “You’re going to kill me anyway, aren’t you?” She sniffles through pouty lips at him. “Where are we going?”

  “That’s up to you. Denise doesn’t want you anymore, so we could go down to West L.A. and I’ll drop you off there, and you can jab on the corner until you O.D. behind a dumpster. That’s option one.”

  “Uh-uh. I’ll kick it myself. Cold turkey.”

  “You think so? I wouldn’t bet on it. You almost died with a dick in your mouth last night. Said so yourself. You’re already trembling after, what? Twelve hours without the skag? It will only get worse. I bet if I offered you a G right now you would let me smear a Cleveland steamer all over your tits.”

  “I wouldn’t…”

  “No? I can have a G in my hands in a minute.” Dmitry shouts to the front of the car. “Hey, Vlad! Take us over to Tony the Tiger’s place. I need a few bricks of that China white.”

  “No…” Nina averts her eyes to her bare thighs. “Don’t make me do that. I.. I’d do other stuff.”

  “Option two is you tell me what you saw last night and I drop you off at rehab. On me.”

  “What?”

  “You heard it.”

  “You’ll just kill me.”

  “If that’s true, you’re already dead. So you might as well take the only chance you have.”

  Nina returns her gaze to him, studies him for a beat, then finally opens her mouth.

  “I, um, I was coming down. And I had a lot of booze, cause Sergei wouldn’t give me a fix all night. So he says he’ll give me a deuce if I—you know. So then this guy kicks in the door. I never seen him before. I think he had a sword.”

  “He was alone?”

  “I think. It mighta been the booze a little, but he was like Chuck Norris. He killed everybody. And he threw the sword at Sergei. There was so much blood. It went everywhere. It went in my mouth.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Like a guy, I guess. He was kinda big. He had on a black hoodie and those grey and white splotchy pants, like army guys or whatever. I didn’t see his face too good. He had big sunglasses on. And lots of guns and those bullet belt things, you know, like on his chest.”

  “He had bandoliers of ammo?”

  “Are you really taking me to rehab?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “He wanted my rate.”

  “Rate?”

  “Yeah. Like for my pussy.”

  “He talked to you?”

  “He said he had a beef with Sergei. And he didn’t have to kill me as long as I didn’t know too much. Then he set the computers on fire and he left.”

  “Was he Korean?”

  “He didn’t look Chinese or nothing. He was white.”

  “What else about him?”

  “That’s everything I remember. If I knew who he was I would say.”

  “It’s a very crazy story you’re asking me to believe.”

  “It’s what happened.” Nina looks away from him again. She turns to the window and the passing buildings, passing cars, but with no focus on any of them. “You’re going to kill me now. Aren’t you?”

  “And get blood all over my nice interior?” Dmitry jokes. She still won’t look at him. She’s lost in the city, maybe lost in her own past.

  “Can you do something nice for my kids at least? Like send ‘em some flowers or something?”

  “I think we can arrange that.”

  Dmitry can tell she doesn’t believe him until an hour later, when some orderly and a nice lady named Mrs. Walsh are walking her away at the clinic.

  Nina turns back to Dmitry one last time as she’s walking down the hall with beads of sweat on her forehead and some donated scrubs covering her legs. “Thank you, Mr. Fedosov,” she says.

  INT. GALLERIA - HOT TOPIC - DAY

  Hot Topic is the desert in the middle of an oasis. In a place where every person is smiling, every picture is sex, every flat surface is coated in promises of happiness, every tone within earshot is a bubblegum nicety, and every word spoken is an offer of something more, Hot Topic is a monolithic reminder of cold industrial death.

  “Band tees are buy one get one fifty percent off,” says a tall man with rings of plastic in his earlobes wide enough for Sid to thread with a .50 BMG. “And all the Star Wars merch is over there.”

  The monolithic reminder of cold industrial death is made from cardboard.

  “I think I want to gauge my ears,” Kayla says.

  Lily’s friend is a stubby flat-bottomed thing with a shrill voice and excess fat billowing over in too many places. Nothing she does to her ears will fix these problems. Sid waits through fifteen seconds of discussion with a Hot Topic employee about gauge sizes before he walks away.

  He stops at a shelf stocked with compact discs and begins flipping through them to look at the grotesque images printed on their covers. He never had any interest in music before, but last week, as he was chopping the head off of an Islamic cleric by way of sustained gunfire, he heard something described as thrash metal for the first time, and it was awesome. He moves his fingers across the tops of the CDs, working through the shelf and noting the artwork and lettering of those which seem to speak to his values. Anthrax, Blood Tsunami, Cannibal Corpse, Hatebreed, Megadeth, Slayer, Warbringer—these are ideas and concepts he understands and appreciates.

  “CDs? I thought I was the only one who still buys those.” The voice belongs to a short young woman with a shapely figure packed into some grey jeans and a black t-shirt so tightly that it appears vacuum sealed. Her forearms are clad in black and white striped cloth arm warmers. She brushes long and salty platinum hair from her face to reveal a timid smile as she stuffs a stack of folded t-shirts into a bin along the wall.

  “I’m just looking,” Sid says as he shifts his gaze up and down her body. A laminated nametag, not unlike the one he wore at GameStop, denotes her as Vesper.

  “Yeah,” Vesper says, taking notice of his wandering eyes. Her hoarse whisper of a voice gives way to a brief fit of squawking nervous laughter. “You’re funny.”

  “Yeah? I guess.” Sid doesn’t know exactly what she means, but he’ll go along with it. She’s hot, and she’s not running away from him. Of course, that drastically increases the odds she’s some sort of assassin sent to kill him.

  “So what do you like to listen to?” she says.

  “I don’t actually listen to anything.”

  “Oh. That’s deep. The sound of silence. I get it. You know, I think it’s really brave that you’re showing your arms like that.” Vesper waves her fingers past the dozens of red scars on the outside of his arm.

  Sid lowers his brow, focusing on this strange girl and her all-too-encroaching comments. “What do you know about that?”

  “Plenty.” She swivels to see who is looking, then pulls back the cloth covering one of her arms to reveal a scattered collection of thin straight cuts. “I wish I was as strong as you.”

  Holy shit! This chick is dead sexy AND she knife fights!

  “What’s your name, Mr. Strong?” she asks.

  Sid questions whether to give her his real name or one of his various aliases. “Sid,” he says.

  “Ooh. That’s a cute name. Like Sid Vicious.” She punctuates that with a quick and high pitched tee hee.

  “You’re very attractive,” Sid says. He learned something from Father Nick Papastathopoulos recently: Only a malaka outright asks girls if they want to fuck. Women
appreciate much more subtle suggestions. “For no particular reason at all, you should know that I’m very skilled at sex.”

  Vesper releases her yacking dolphin laugh again. “For no particular reason?”

  “None at all.” But that’s a lie. There is totally a reason: Sid wants to bone her. He just can’t tell her that. If she figures it out, she’ll probably run, so he’s staying discreet for now. “I also have a big dick.”

  “Oh yeah?” Vesper leans close to him. “I have someplace you can put it.” She places a ball of wadded up cloth wrapped with plastic in his hand. It’s a pair of black boxer briefs with a yellow Batman emblem emblazoned on the crotch.

  “Oh,” he says, crinkling the underwear in his hand. “You mean this. This is the place. Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” she snickers. “But I bet I can find two more. Three if you’re good.” And then she lets rip that obnoxious cackle again.

  “Hey there,” Lily butts in around Sid’s shoulder. “Who’s your new friend?”

  “Is this your girlfriend?” Vesper says as both girls’ eyes meet in a moment of quiet animosity.

  Sid and Lily offer conflicting answers simultaneously.

  Lily giggles. “Excuse us for a second,” she says. She takes Sid’s wrist and yanks at his arm. He follows her from Hot Topic, back into the bubblegum pop of the mall corridor. “What was that? Who was that slut?”

  “You think she’s a slut? This just keeps getting better.” Sid looks back into the store at Vesper. The wispy little girl smiles uneasily at him from the rear of the store. Lily pulls him away from the storefront, out of Vesper’s view. This puts them directly in front of a place called Berean Christian Books.

  “Well, who is she?”

  “Vesper. She’s the Hot Topic girl. She works there, and I think she wants to have sex with me.”

  “She looks like a crack whore. I bet she has full blown AIDS.”