Godless Murder Machine (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 2), Page 3

  “I asked her if she wanted to pre-order and she said no,” Sid says.

  “That’s cause you got no game. I spit mad game like you don’t even know.”

  “You spit on her?”

  “No. It’s an expression. You have to build value into the product and create a sense of urgency. In their mind, you need to make every game the hottest thing ever, limited edition, if they don’t give you five dollars now they’ll never get one and their baby will get dysentery.”

  “But we always have plenty of the new games when they come in.”

  “Of course we do. None of that shit is actually true. We just want to make sales.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we have numbers to hit.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the district manager says so. I don’t know, man. This job is chicken shit. You know that. It just would be cool if we hit our goals this month, instead of just not disemboweling any customers in the store.”

  Sid looks to the spot where he eviscerated a shoplifter a few months ago. He spent several days going back over it with different carpet cleaners, but a slight discoloration remains. Afterwards, Bruce told him he would be out of a job if he ever kills anybody in the store again, a demand that would seem like a fantasy request to anyone unfamiliar with their backgrounds.

  They met in the basement bathroom of a paramilitary building shortly before Sid demolished it with explosives. Bruce was working as a contractor there and saw Sid kill a ten-man commando team with nothing but a KA-BAR knife, prompting Bruce to drop his rifle and swear he would just get a job at GameStop instead. Sid used him as a reference, and here they are.

  “This disc looks like somebody dragged it from the back of a roller coaster,” Bruce says. “If anybody wants Ride to Hell: Retribution, try to sell them this one first.”

  Sid nods at Bruce as the store phone, a husky black cordless handset placed on the counter between the two computers, rings. He swipes it up before it even completes the first ring.

  “Thank you for calling GameStop, where you can pre-order Maximilian Dood’s Pro Streamer 2. This is Dutch. How can I help you?”

  “Hi,” says the demure and crackling voice on the other end of the phone line. “I’m looking for a particular video game. It’s super rare. You might not have it.”

  “What’s it called?” Sid plants his fingers on the keyboard in front of him to search the store’s inventory by computer.

  “Uh, it’s really hard to spell. Let me spell it for you.”

  “Okay. Go.”

  “Um, B-A-T-T-L-E-T-O-A...”

  “We don’t have it.”

  “TROLLED!” The sound on the phone shifts to uproarious cackling. “Ha ha! Do a barrel roll!” Then the receiver clicks into silence.

  Sid puts the phone back down on the counter.

  “Was that the fucking Battletoads kids again?” Bruce says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Motherfuckers don’t quit. I might get somebody from the company to trace that shit back one of these days.”

  “GameStop traces phone calls?”

  “No. The company company. The CIA, man.”

  Bruce rarely makes it a full ten minutes without mentioning that he used to work for the CIA. Though it is still unclear exactly what he did there.

  “How was your date with whatshername?” Bruce says. “The stripper?”

  Sid grunts.

  “That bad?” Bruce infers.

  “She wanted to fuck, then she didn’t want to fuck.”

  “She gave you blue balls?”

  “There’s a name for that?”

  “Yeah. Fuck yeah! It’s the worst! Feels like a motherfucker hit you in the kidneys with a cinder block.”

  “It didn’t go away until this morning! Why do they do that?”

  “Women are crazy, man. They all want a fucking romance.”

  “Romance?”

  “Yeah. Like you buy her flowers and say nice things to her. Like tell her how she’s special and her hair smells like angels, and take her to one of those expensive restaurants where the waiter stands over your table and listens to your conversation. When I was in the CIA we got half our intel waiting tables in those places. I worked with this one old guy, swore up and down the Eastern Bloc went down just on account of Soviet hotshots chasing pussy.”

  “I need to hear more about this romance thing.”

  INT. NICK’S HOUSE - DAY

  Nick jolts awake at the relentless sound of double bass drums and shrieking electric guitar. He rolls from his bed and flops to the carpet wrapped in a prison of grey sheets. The noise assaults him through the walls and ceiling as the bright afternoon sun assaults him through the windows.

  “What the—?” he says, untangling himself from the wrappings and reaching for the plaid bathrobe he keeps on the coat rack next to his bed. He pushes through the bedroom door.

  The horrible racket only increases in volume as he makes his way down the hall toward its source: the slightly warped wooden door to the staircase leading up to the finished attic of the cozy cape cod he lives in. Nick pulls open the door and is bombarded by unimpeded musical heresy.

  BLOOD CURSE FIXED UPON THE WRETCHED

  BURN THE MARK ON TO THE TESTED

  He stomps up the old steps with his hands clamped over his ears and finds a three piece band under the angled ceilings of the upstairs room. There’s a death grunt screaming vocalist with stringy brown hair and tattoos snarling incomprehensibly into a microphone. Nick doesn’t recognize him. The bass player Nick knows. It’s Stephen’s friend Blayne Willis, a lanky kid with gelled hair and unusually clear skin. He lives down the street. Stephen pounds on the drums.

  FEED THE CHRISTIANS TO THE LIONS!

  RAPE THEIR WOMEN! KILL THE CHILDREN!

  DRAIN THEIR BLOOD TO FILL THE CAULDRON!

  MAKE THEM SCREAM FOR SATAAAAA-AAAAAAAAAAN!

  “HEY!” Nick yells. The singer (growler?) is the first to notice him. He turns and taps Blayne on the shoulder and the boy quits plucking at the bass. Stephen keeps beating away for a moment, unaware as Nick yells. “What is this?”

  The singer waves at Stephen to get his attention. “Hey. Hey, dude!” The drums stop and Stephen turns his attention upward to Nick. He’s short and skinny, not much for sports. He has a neatly trimmed flat top, Buddy Holly glasses, and a dark African skin tone that makes it impossible to hide the fact that he is adopted. He is fifteen.

  “I thought you were working, dad,” Stephen says.

  “Hey, Mr. Papastathopoulos.” Blayne waves.

  “What is this?” Nick asks again.

  “This is Black Church,” Stephen says. “Remember? I told you I joined Black Church?”

  “I thought you joined a black church.”

  “No. Black Church is a black metal band.”

  “What? Two thirds of your band is white.”

  “It doesn’t mean African American people are in the band, dad. It means the metal is black.”

  “It’s black like a black comedy.”

  “No, it’s black like a dark comedy. Black comedy means it has Snoop Dogg in it.”

  “Whatever it is, stop it. I’m trying to sleep. I was up all night talking to the police.”

  “Did you see that guy get his head blown off, dad?”

  “What?”

  “Was it totally metal?”

  “Metal? That’s not an adjective.”

  “Yeah it is. It means like wicked sick. Like naked girls chained up smelling the glove and biting off bat heads and burning churches and being Norwegian. All that stuff is metal.”

  “Stephen, I didn’t raise you to think stuff like that is cool. Violence is not cool. A man is dead and—what is that?”

  The thing that caught Nick’s attention is sitting on top of a buzzing Marshall half stack in the corner of the attic. It is the sleeve of a record album, something Nick hasn’t seen since he donated his old records to Goodwill a decade ago, and the cover is a grey
and red cavalcade of obscenities: a woman, crucified to a stone sarcophagus and cut from neck to anus, with innards being eaten out of her splayed vagina by an emaciated cadaver.

  “That’s Cannibal Corpse’s 1992 album, Tomb of the Mutilated on vinyl,” Stephen says. “Way retro.”

  “I don’t want that in my house,” Nick says, shaking his head in disgust.

  “It’s not that bad, dad.”

  “It’s filth. Get rid of it.”

  “You’re really being kind of gay right now.”

  “What did you say to me?”

  “I said you’re being kind of gay.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. Apologize right now.”

  “No. You’re being a complete dick.”

  “Go to your room!” Nick says, realizing too late the absurdity of the command.

  “I’m in my room,” Stephen says.

  “Yeah, well stay in it! And don’t come out until tomorrow!” Nick turns to the two teenage boys watching the argument in quiet discomfort. “And your friends can leave!”

  The pasty singer darts from the attic without pause, eagerly escaping the awkward situation. Blayne shrugs quietly and slings his bass guitar over his shoulder to carry it down the stairs.

  “This is bullshit!” Stephen says. “I have tickets to a show tonight!”

  “So?”

  “They were thirty dollars!”

  “You should have thought of that before!” He picks up the Cannibal Corpse record and stomps out of the room, slamming Stephen’s door behind him.

  INT. THE BLACK OMEN – DAY

  The Black Omen appears like a vision of the future, though less the future of today and more the future of the nineteen seventies. Lily watches the bar from her perch on a pole in the hallway leading into the main room from the front door. The cramped little hallway serves as a barrier between live nude girls and the outside world, though it is unclear which of those needs protection from the other.

  She’s naked except for the fluorescent blue hand prints stamped over her crotch, cheeks, and tits and the cheap plastic platform heels she spray painted for this routine. Under the club’s signature UV lighting she looks like a disembodied bunch of ghostly glowing lady parts. It’s neat, but the real gimmick is the row of fluorescent markers lining the riser at her feet. For five dollars she stops dancing long enough for patrons to sign their name. For ten she lets them leave a little doodle. For twenty they can leave a big doodle, and so on and so on. On busy nights she makes a thousand dollars doing this. Easy. It’s mostly just from simple autographs. Nobody has tried to reproduce an Albrecht Durer woodcut across her midsection yet, but she’s not ruling anything out.

  Unfortunately, this is not a busy night. This is a Wednesday afternoon, and the only thing written on her is the phrase DENNIS WAZ HERE on her inner thigh. She never saw Dennis before, and will probably never see him again. He was drunk by noon and she could see his hard-on through his sweat pants, but she gouged him for fifteen bucks on his way out, and that makes him okay.

  A rush of cool air signifies the opening of the front door and Lily turns to see her friend entering. Kayla Peterson is a big lady. The brown haired goth girl enters the hallway sipping the last of a 64 ounce slushie with a big blue Food Stop logo stamped on the cup.

  “Oh my god, Lily,” Kayla says. “Put some clothes on.”

  Lily rights herself from an extended frodo and shoots down the request with an incredulous glare.

  “Do you know what goes on in strip clubs?” she asks.

  “Of course I do,” Kayla retorts. “I saw Flashdance.”

  “You have no idea,” Lily says.

  “Who’s Dennis?” Kayla asks.

  Lily throws up her hands in indifference. She gathers up her markers and Kayla follows her down the hall and to the turnstile that blocks off the bar. Big Dave, looking barely awake in his folding chair next to the contraption, doesn’t bother harassing Kayla about paying a cover.

  Kayla’s eyes widen like a horrified house cat as she glances at the main stage, where a beautiful blond goddess spreads her labia wide for the viewing of three fat hillbillies.

  “Wow,” Kayla says. “That’s really, uh, explicit.”

  “That’s Molly,” Lily says. “She makes more money than anybody. And she’s really smart. She has a degree in art history.”

  “I thought it would be different.”

  “How?” Lily says. She jumps up on a stool at the bar. Kayla sits down next to her.

  “I don’t know. Louder? I thought people would be like cheering or something. And she’s not even dancing...”

  It is an observation that expresses more naiveté than insight. Men do not come to strip clubs to cheer for anyone, or to witness impressive feats of acrobatics. They come to see exactly what Molly is showing them, and they usually look at it quietly.

  “Hey Jessica,” Lily calls for the bartender’s attention. Jessica, a tall toothpick of a cowgirl with shimmering brown curls and a ten gallon hat, is only a few years older than Lily. She pours drinks at the Omen, but her clothes don’t come off. “Can I have a bottle of water?” She nudges Kayla. “You want anything?”

  “I could really go for a Mountain Dew right now,” Kayla says.

  “We have a full bar here, wink wink, nobody’s carding. And you want Mountain Dew?”

  “Hell yeah. It tastes like the sweet nectar of the gods.”

  “It tastes like every guy I ever dated who said he was a cage fighter, but wasn’t a cage fighter.”

  “I used to date the inventor of Mountain Dew,” says Jessica as she fills a glass from the bar sprayer and sets it down in front of them.

  “Really?” Kayla blurts with sudden interest. Lily has heard this story before and is less interested. “What happened?”

  “Jerk dumped me as soon as I paid for him to get his GED.” Jessica walks away to answer the ringing bar phone.

  “That doesn’t…” Kayla scrunches her nose as she tries to construct a mental model in which the thing Jessica just said is actually possible.

  “Yeah,” Lily mutters. “Nobody has the heart to tell her.”

  “It’s for you,” Jessica says, darting back into the conversation with the bar’s cordless phone in her outstretched hand.

  “For me? Who is it?” Lily says. Jessica shrugs as Lily takes the phone. She is met by the familiar growl of the kill team.

  “I want to take you somewhere nice,” Sid says.

  “What? What are you talking about?” Lily laughs.

  “Like a fancy restaurant. What’s the fanciest restaurant around here?”

  “I don’t fucking know.” Lily rolls her eyes. She has never been particularly interested in snooty restaurants. She repeats the question to Jessica and Kayla.

  “The McDonalds on Dunaghy Street has a fireplace,” Jessica suggests.

  “My dad always takes new girlfriends to La Mouche Espagnole,” Kayla says. That sounds perfectly French enough.

  “La Mouche Espagnole,” Lily relays back to Sid.

  “Good. I’m taking you there tonight.”

  “Okay.” Lily snickers. “I get off at five and- Hey, you can’t wear combat boots and camo pants in there.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s just not okay.”

  “What should I wear?”

  “Like a polo shirt and slacks I guess, or a suit, or... I don’t know. Try to… I…” It’s frustrating because she knows his vocabulary doesn’t include any words for different types of clothes. She needs to just show him a picture. Something simple and direct. “Just Google Jason Statham and wear what you see him wearing. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Done.”

  Lily shakes her head as she hands the phone back to Jessica, who walks away and begins pouring drinks for two older businessmen across the bar.

  “I don’t know if I can deal with this. He wants to take me to an expensive restaurant, and last night at the drive-in he got all lame and cuddly with me.”

 
“That sounds awful!” Kayla sarcastically snarls. “Do you want to press charges?”

  “It’s so boring. All the boys at school did that shit. The corsage pinning, hand holding, sweet nothings…”

  “He whispered sweet nothings?”

  “No. Thank you, Jesus. I don’t even think he knows what those are.”

  “I think it sounds romantic.”

  “I don’t want romantic,” Lily says. “He’s a merciless killer super soldier. I want the merciless killer super soldier sex. I want to get thrown around and pounded hard on top of a pile of M19s with semi-automatic high caliber grenade launchers, and watch him walk away without asking or caring if it was good for me.”

  “Wow. Are you sure John Milius isn’t your real dad?”

  “Milius wouldn’t have been caught dead at Lilith Fair.”

  “Isn’t Sid done with all that stuff though?”

  “Fuck. He’s so done with it. He’s working at GameStop now. He loves it. How lame is that?”

  “At least nobody is trying to kill him anymore. That’s pretty cool, right?”

  EXT. SCRAPYARD - DAY

  Light floods the trailer as the rear door slides up and over Fatimah with the grating screech of unoiled metal. Sayyid stands tall next to her. He is a powerhouse of a man. Rugged, scowling, always angry. He is her guide here, both her lantern and her paddle in a dark sea of infidels and sin. He brought her across the ocean. He brought her through Mexico. Now he has successfully transported her to the heart of the Great Satan—The United States of America.

  “You see?” The words come from a Mexican man they know as Juan Sanchez, a name Sayyid told her is likely false. He is a coyote, a people smuggler, and one with a reputation for doing his job quite well. Now he stands in the dirt before them at the opening of the semi-trailer he used to transport Fatimah and Sayyid across the border and three states. “Like I tell you. Safe and sound. Now the rest of the money.”

  He’s talking to a tall and gangly old white man wearing a spotless business suit and shiny black sunglasses, the kind of man Fatimah has seen by the hundreds in the UAE showing off colorful American sports cars and perpetually accompanied by sinful women who proudly wear their shame in place of clothes. He can only be Stromwell, their benefactor, the man they have come to meet.