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

  Jeremy hurdles the counter, landing between Lily and the robber. The guy is mumbling something about his arm when Jeremy reaches down with one hand and hoists him to his feet, then slams him against the counter.

  “Who sent you?” Jeremy says. He asks the question the same way people ask what the soup of the day is, or what’s on the television. It’s unsettling.

  “My arm, man! You broke my arm!” the thug screams. The arm dangles from the elbow, held there only by soft flesh.

  Jeremy grabs the man’s dangling hand and plants his foot on the robber’s chest, forcing him back against the counter. He growls like an animal as he tugs backward with his upper body, tearing the arm free. Lily sees strings of tendon stretching and ripping and has to look away. The robber’s screams fill her ears. These are the worst sounds she’s ever heard from a human being.

  Jeremy smacks the robber in the head with the severed forearm. Blood erupts from the open end of the limb as it makes contact with the cowering robber.

  “Who sent you?” Jeremy shouts.

  “All right! All right!” the robber says. A fountain of crimson pours from his shredded stump and runs down the side of the counter. Some of it squirts onto Jeremy, but he doesn’t seem to care. “Some guy in Riker’s! Used to ride with Chino! Said he’d hook us up with fifty stacks if we did the girl and made it look like a robbery or some shit!”

  “Her?” Jeremy says.

  “Me!” Lily shrieks. “I knew it! Fucking Ted!” Ted is in Riker’s. Ted rides a motorcycle. Ted wants to kill her.

  Jeremy hits him again with the severed arm.

  The thug slumps against the counter, either blacked out from the pain or dead from blood loss; Lily can’t be sure which. It doesn’t matter. Jeremy shoots the robber in the face a second later, then twice in the chest.

  Then he turns his attention to her. She doesn’t know what to say; what to do. Words start to form, but they don’t mean anything. He stares at her with his coal-black gaze, the gun smoking in his hand. Then he comes toward her.

  Lily closes her eyes as he reaches for her. She squeaks, certain the next thing she’ll feel will be the icy touch of death.

  He reaches past her to grab a yellow stand-up sign propped against the wall behind her. He stands it in the middle of the ocean of blood on the floor surrounding the dead robber. WET FLOOR—PISO MOJADO. Lily can’t believe what she’s seeing.

  “This isn’t my problem,” he grumbles. He turns to leave.

  “Wait,” Lily says. “Where are you going? Who are you?”

  “Trust me,” he says, turning to look back at her with those nothing eyes. “The less you know, the better.”

  He walks out the front door into the dark night. She remains kneeling on the floor, frozen with fright as she hears the loud rumble of his ancient Chevy pulling out of the lot.

  It takes a long time for the police to get there. Someone called in about the car outside, its fender bent around a telephone pole near the street. Lily is still sitting on the floor when they find her. The first cop coaxes her outside and sits her on the back of his cruiser. Amy gets there as more cops wind yellow crime scene tape around the parking lot and Lily sits on the back of an ambulance. They give her a blanket. She doesn’t understand why. She isn’t cold. Amy sits down with her and immediately goes into hug overdrive.

  The cop talking to her is named Dillon. He’s a husky black man with glasses and a purple button-up shirt. He doesn’t have a tie. Most cops have ties. She keeps hanging on that. He keeps asking her the same questions. She answers them the same way, but the answers don’t make sense—not even to her.

  “So he sawed off the arm and hit him with it?” Dillon says.

  “No. There was no saw. He didn’t have anything.”

  “He just pulled the guy’s arm off?”

  “It wasn’t like he just plucked it off all Beowulf style. He had to tug on it—a lot. It was disgusting.”

  “Are you going to keep asking her the same questions all night?” Amy says.

  “We’re just doing our job,” Dillon says.

  Another investigator taps Dillon on the shoulder. The other guy has a manila folder that he keeps closed, but Lily recognizes it. It’s the W-4 and other papers Jeremy filled out when they hired him. Amy says something to Lily about making it home okay, but Lily doesn’t hear. She’s listening to the cops.

  “All of this is shit,” the other cop says. “Driver’s license and social belong to a Chinese kid two counties over. The address he used on the forms is the public library.”

  “Who is this guy?” Dillon says.

  INT. MAXIMUM SECURITY FACILITY – DAY

  The inside of this place is every bit as sterile and cold as Helen expected. She’s never been to a prison before. The main corridor is tiled in white with little grey specks. An inmate in an orange jumpsuit mops the floor ahead of them. None of the caged prisoners on either side of the corridor whistle or hoot at her. She might be a little insulted. Pantsuits must not get them going.

  The doctor is a short guy with a beer gut, gray beard, and thick-rimmed black glasses. McElroy is his name. Helen already doesn’t like him, but she can’t put a finger on exactly why. She follows him down the corridor with the commander.

  “He’s been asking to see you since he saw this morning’s paper,” McElroy tells the commander. “He wouldn’t stop screaming. I wanted to give him a sedative but I couldn’t find anyone willing to go in the cell with him.”

  “You give him newspapers?” the commander asks. He sounds stern, although his slight and perpetual tone of disappointment is just a little more pronounced. He’s a tall man, a bit taller than Helen, and she stands at six feet. He wears a brown trench coat that makes him look terribly unofficial, but he isn’t very interested in keeping up appearances.

  “I think it’s good to keep him stimulated,” McElroy says.

  “You shouldn’t let him have newspapers,” the commander says.

  “What’s he going to do?” McElroy sneers. “Papercut somebody to death?”

  “Just stop giving him newspapers.”

  “You know, Mister . . .” he pauses to have the name filled in for him, but that never happens. “I’m seriously considering filing a formal complaint with the Board of Corrections over the way this patient is treated.”

  “He’s a patient now?”

  “Yes. He’s my patient, and he’s obviously seriously mentally disturbed. Of course, I don’t know the extent of his history because every file I request that might say anything pertinent has everything except for the page numbers redacted. I have to assume your department has something to do with that?”

  “Yup.” The commander nods with a cocky grin.

  “And what department is that exactly?”

  “The NYDB.”

  “The NYDB?”

  “Yeah. None of Your Damn Business.”

  As they approach the end of the corridor, Helen sees a red door ahead. A guard steps forward and offers up a sign-in sheet on a wooden clipboard. The commander thumbs at the clipboard for her to sign.

  “Of course.” McElroy rolls his eyes. “And how exactly am I supposed to treat this patient with no access to his medical or criminal history?”

  Helen takes notice that there are no other names on the sign-in sheet.

  “You don’t,” the commander says. “Leave him in the box and forget about it.”

  The commander opens the door into a large open room. A dozen armed guards stand around the outskirts along the wall. Some of them are dressed in full riot gear and carry submachine guns. They look like they’re ready for a helicopter insertion into Iraq, not a shift in a correctional facility. What they’re guarding is even more bizarre.

  In the center of the room, encircled by a crudely spray-painted black line on the floor, is a fifteen-by-fifteen bulletproof glass cell. Inside is a pale, naked figure with a grizzly black beard and filthy hair hanging down past his shoulders. He punches the glass with a slow rhythm, agai
n and again, each punch smearing new wet blood on the stain that is already old and dried. As they get closer, Helen can read the fading word tattooed in lopsided clumsy script across his chest: Rapegod.

  There’s something familiar about him—something she can’t quite place. She knows that face somehow. She studies it through the thick black beard. She remembers: two years ago, she intercepted a photograph while working at NSA which she believed was connected to secret forces within the United States government. She was able to connect the man in the photo to an engagement inside Mecca with the Saudi National Guard, and a black box recording from a crashed Saudi airliner. As soon as she started making noise about it to the Special Operations Group, some jerks in a black van grabbed her and offered her a job working for the very same supposedly non-existent bastards she was investigating: Graveyard. She never identified the man in the photo.

  “Who is this guy?” Helen asks.

  “He’s the deadliest man alive,” the commander answers.

  “He always hits the exact same spot,” says the guard closest to them. “Been at it for over a year. I don’t think he can break it, but God help us if he does.”

  “How’re you doing, Sam?” the commander asks.

  “I’m as good as you can be doing this gig,” says the guard.

  “Who painted the circle around the cage?”

  “That’s the ten foot line. Dick Stehlin did that after an orderly lost some fingers. A few days later the subject killed him.”

  Helen looks to the box for any place the prisoner might be able to reach out or grab someone. There are only some tiny air holes, not big enough for a finger, and a slot for sliding in food. Then she notices there aren’t any other objects in the cell. There is no bed, no toilet—though there is a hole in the floor. She spies the newspapers mentioned by McElroy.

  “How’d he do that?” she asks.

  “He just looked at him and Dick dropped dead,” Sam tells them. “I mean, Dick was getting old, but if you see the tape . . . none of us look him in the eyes anymore. I don’t think you should, either.”

  The man inside the box stops hitting the glass and turns his glare toward the commander. Helen doesn’t like this. She doesn’t like this place. She doesn’t like this man they keep in a box. She doesn’t like his eyes. She doesn’t like the way that guard said the subject as if his name was some unknown or unspeakable thing. She doesn’t like the horrid grin stretching his face.

  “I’m not afraid of the bastard,” the commander says. Helen watches him step forward, right past the painted line on the floor, marching up to the bloody spot on the big glass box. She moves to follow.

  “Walter,” the prisoner says. “Your friend is pretty. I’m going to sodomize her.”

  He leans forward and licks the bloody glass. Helen decides it best to stay behind the ten foot line. She stops where she stands.

  “It’s been a long time, Victor,” Walter says.

  “You should try spending it in here.”

  “What do you want? I don’t have all day for your bullshit.”

  “I know where Sid is hiding.”

  “And how would you possibly know that?”

  “Easy.”

  “Prove it.”

  “If I told you, I wouldn’t have anything to bargain with, would I?”

  “And if you don’t give me a reason to believe you, then you don’t have anything to bargain with, do you?”

  Victor smiles. He peers over Walter’s shoulder and wiggles his tongue at Helen.

  “There are plans, contingencies the old man forced us to prepare for. Passphrases, locker combinations, smoke signals, safe houses, locations . . .”

  “He’s following one of those contingency plans,” Walter concludes.

  “I know which one now. I can show you right to him.” Victor smiles. His teeth are yellowing and filthy. “For a price.”

  “And that would be?”

  “The Lindemann device.”

  “The what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s in your vault. I know it is. An associate told me all about it before she met with an unfortunate accident.”

  “You gutted her,” Walter briskly counters. “I saw the body.”

  Victor shrugs. “Bring me the case. It’s just for my entertainment. It won’t hurt anyone.”

  “You’re a terrible negotiator, Victor,” Walter says.

  Walter turns his back on the cage and walks away. Victor punches the glass again.

  “You know you can’t find him without me!” he yells.

  Walter points to Helen. “I’m going to need copies of all the newspapers he’s seen in the last week.” That’s going to be her job.” Walter turns to McElroy. “You don’t give him access to anything else, right? TV? Internet? Yoga classes? A waterslide?”

  “I’ve had about enough of your remarks and . . .” McElroy starts to say.

  Walter catches McElroy by the necktie, shoving him against the wall.

  Behind them, Victor laughs as he wildly pounds on the cage. “You’re all gonna die! I’ll kill you all! I’m gonna open you up and shit in your guts!”

  “And what?” Walter barks into McElroy’s face. “You’ll report me?”

  Victor continues to curse at all of them. “I’ll stab you in the throat and fuck the hole!”

  “Think about this, McElroy. Understand this,” Walter says. “Every night, when you go to sleep, I get to decide whether you wake up in the morning.”

  Walter sets the doctor loose and the little man slinks away as Walter leaves the room. Helen glances at McElroy on the way out.

  “It’s true,” Helen says.

  INT. DEVIL’S HORSEMEN MOTORCYCLE CLUB - UPSTATE NEW YORK - DAY

  It is two in the afternoon by the time Gill Davies wakes up from last night’s bender, pays the hooker on his couch to leave, smokes a little crank to get going, throws his cut on, and makes it down to the clubhouse. The inside of the clubhouse is messier than usual. A couple tables are knocked over and whiskey bottles are all over the floor. Iron Maiden’s “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter” is blasting on the club’s old wood furniture speaker system. Sweet Tits is behind the bar pouring Wild Turkey for Duck Dick and Lawrence. Poochie has a fold-out map of the West Coast spread over the bar and he’s looking it over with Bald Sack, the acting president of the motorcycle club.

  “You get my text?” Bald Sack asks, scratching flakes of dead skin from his beard. His eyes are bloodshot and baggy, more so than usual.

  “Phone’s broke,” Gill says. Someone bet him he couldn’t bite through it last night. They lost that bet and Gill won five dollars.

  “Fingers and the prospect are dead,” Poochie says.

  “Holy Hell. Sack, you okay?” Gill asks.

  “I look okay to you?” Sack snaps back. He does not look okay to Gill at all. “They killed my boy, Gill. My boy.” The news is a shock. Fingers was a rough kid. He grew up in the club running drugs and guns, knocking over liquor stores, pimping, and dropping a few bodies along the way. He was no pussy, and everybody liked him.

  “What happened?”

  “They went out west looking for that harlot that locked Ted Smalls up, and somebody invoked violence from the depths of the collective unconscious on them,” Poochie says. Poochie has been saying some really weird shit since he went back to school and got that philosophy degree.

  “We gonna go get us some then?” Gill says.

  Poochie nods. “It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge. Friedrich Nietzche.”

  “Damn straight,” Bald Sack says. “Saddle up. All six of us are going. It’s a two day ride. We’re gonna find that little slut, and when we do we’re gonna do her up worse than that probie that ratted on Booger Lips.”

  “Let’s split the bitch open,” Gill says.

  EXT. SCHOOL YARD – DAY

  “So think about it,” Kayla says. She has to speak loudly to be h
eard amidst the chaos of all the cars jammed up on their way out of the school parking lot. High school kids tend to drive hand-me-downs and whatever used clunkers they could afford flipping burgers. It makes the three o’clock hour noisier than it needs to be.

  It’s nice out today and the girls sat at a picnic bench in front of the building. Lily’s iPhone hasn’t stopped jingling all day. She couldn’t make it ten feet through the hallways without kids she didn’t even know stopping her to ask about what happened. The story grew throughout the day. First she heard it was three guys; then five. Then they all had machine guns. In the most entertaining version, Jeremy punched through one of them, ripping out his heart and eating it.

  “About what?” Lily says. She tilts her head to eye Kayla incredulously over the rims of her sunglasses.

  “He just shows up out of nowhere,” Kayla says. “Fake name. Fake ID. Fake everything. He’s mysterious and aloof. Handsome and quiet. He exhibits supernatural strength.”

  “Don’t say it.” Lily stares across the table at Kayla through narrowed eyes.

  “He’s a vampire.” Kayla whispers the word while looking around to make sure no one else is listening.

  Lily hides her face in her hands.

  “He killed those men to protect you.” Kayla puts her hand to her chest. “What if he’s just like Edward?” she squeals.

  “You’re seriously retarded right now.” Lily lies down on the picnic bench and stares up at the blue sky.

  “Whatever,” Kayla says as she rips open a bag of crunchy cheese flavored Cheetos®. “He ripped off some dude’s arm. That’s, like, so hard.”

  “I know. I was there, remember?” She closes her eyes and she can see it again, as if it’s happening right in front of her. It’s horrific every time she pictures it, and yet she keeps doing it—viewing it over and over all day. “I’m probably gonna be messed up forever because I saw it.”

  “You were already messed up.” Kayla laughs.

  “Yeah, well, whatever.”

  “I think it’s the stuff you don’t know that makes it really fucking spooky.”