Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters (2 page)

It was a prearranged signal that her cover had been blown and she was ordered to exfiltrate the city as quickly as possible. The unusually high price of the artifact told her that American security officials were already en route. The consignment number was an encoded address; a safe house.

Colonel Ekaterina Varatchevsky maintained her poise and stayed in character as she scoped the crowd, seeking out those facial tattoos, and scanning for any support the spy catcher might have. It was possible, even likely, that her pursuers had put the woman into the scene because she was so conspicuous. She would draw the eye away from other, better camouflaged operators. Karin smiled a passing hello at the judge she had defamed to Gnoji a few minutes earlier. If the tattooed and slightly inept agent was a decoy, that spoke to an adversary with more finesse than the FBI. It might mean she had come to the attention of Clearance or even Echelon.

She veered off the path she had been taking, headed for her office in which a small go-bag waited inside the safe. If the Office of Special Clearances and Records (OSCAR) had her in the crosshairs she would not have time to collect even a basic escape kit. She would simply have to move quickly and pray to evade the initial sweep. At least she could be thankful she had almost certainly not come to the attention of Echelon. She knew of a whole FSB network liquidated seven years ago by just one of their operators, a woman who had disappeared nine cell members without ever appearing on the threat detectors herself.

Karin was sweating now—but only lightly, the thinnest sheen making her forehead shine under the gallery’s LEDs, and most of her guests were red-faced and mopping at their brows already. It was a warm night and the old building’s A/C struggled with the body heat of the crowd. She weaved around a stand displaying a nearly complete set of armor from an officer of the Eastern Han Dynasty, but found her way blocked by a knot of revelers who were so deeply engrossed in discussing
House of Cards
that they did not even notice her.

They did notice the first scream, however. Everyone did.

CHAPTER TWO

Special Agent Rudy Comeau had filled a quarter of the Big Gulp soda cup and he was still pissing up a storm while his partner kept an eye on the old, two-story warehouse across the street. The facade was fashionably weathered, but the interior had been fitted out to high spec when the Warat Gallery took over the space.

“What’s happening now?” he asked, loudly, to cover the terrible noise of epic urination. Stakeouts were hard for a man with a weak bladder. All the Comeau men were cursed with weak bladders. And that monster cup of soda hadn’t helped. “Any sign of the target?” Rudy called out.

“Clocked her twice through the windows on the second floor, workin’ the room,” said his partner, Special Agent Dee Madigan. “She’s really good, Rudy. I don’t know whether she takes her cover super serious, or whether she actually needs a second gig because the GRU pays like shit…”

She paused and reached up to thumb the button on her headset.

“Overwatch Three,” she confirmed. “Another four entrants, two Caucasian female, one Asian female, one African-American female. I make that 147 civilians. Over .”

Comeau rejoined her at the window.

“Did you wash your hands?” she asked.

He held up a moist towelette from KFC. He always carried a couple with him. Special Agent Comeau might be comfortable pissing into a paper bucket when the need arose, as it did with inconvenient regularity in this job, but he was quite fussy about his personal cleanliness.

“I dunno how you eat that stuff,” said Madigan, taking her eyes off the gallery across the street for a moment.

“I only buy the wraps,” Comeau retorted, a touch defensively.

They were perched a few floors above the event which their boss was intending to raid and ruin in a couple of minutes. Double-height windows afforded them a good view of at least a third of the gallery’s floor space. Just as importantly, the added elevation—they were on the fourth floor—gave them good tactical coverage of the whole block.

“Fucking Trinder,” said Comeau. “We could have grabbed this babushka this afternoon when she was setting up. Or when it’s all done. He just wants the media.”

Madigan did not disagree.

“They’re four minutes out,” she said.
“What the hell is that?”

Comeau glanced where she was pointing, just in time to see an unmistakable surge pass through the crowd in that part of the gallery.

“What the—”

Gunshots cut off whatever he might have been about to add. Screaming and cries of alarm and distress reached them, muted by distance and glass and the low rumble of the city.

Madigan was already reacting.

“Overwatch Actual, this is Overwatch Three, come in. Overwatch Actual, this is…”

Comeau moved quickly towards the door, leaving her behind to report in, and to seek new orders. He wasn’t running towards the sound of the guns, just down to the next office, also vacant, which they had taken over as a second observation point. It afforded a slightly better angle on the main gallery floor, but didn’t have aircon or comfy antique office chairs to sit in. He could hear Overwatch Two downstairs and a little further along the corridor. Or rather he could hear the hammering of somebody’s shoes along the bare wooden boards of the corridor. Had to be Two.

The door to the empty office stood wide open. A small video camera rested on a tripod, angled down across the street, its red “Record” light glowing steadily. He hurried to the window, resisting the natural urge to stop and rewind the video, to see if the cam had captured anything. Comeau gave the recorder a good two feet of clearance. It’d be his ass if he knocked it over at this point.

Instead he tried to use this slightly better vantage point to see if he could pick out what was happening.

Nada.

In the few seconds he’d taken to move to this office, whatever was happening had spun even further out of control. The pressure wave he’d seen surge through the party had broken up, and with it the coherence of the crowd. People now ran in every direction. He heard more gunfire and screams.

OSCAR had two agents in there. Both armed. The mission brief identified only two GRU operators: Varatchevsky and another woman, name unknown. They were not expected to be armed, although it was assumed they would have access to a weapons cache somewhere within the building.

Even so, a couple of sidearms blazing wild on semi-auto would not account for the volume of fire he could hear across the street. One of the giant floor-to-ceiling windows exploded, sending a storm of glass down towards the street and amplifying the jackhammer sound of gunfire. Somebody was rocking on full auto down there.

###

Shosanna Nguyen’s gun was in her hand before she knew she’d reached for it; before she knew what she was shooting at. Not the target, that was for damn sure. Warat was gone. Disappeared into the chaos of the milling crowd. Special Agent Nguyen, now feeling less special than ever, dropped into a shooter’s crouch, only to be knocked off her feet by some hysterical clothes store dummy come to life. The woman hit Nguyen with a bony elbow as she ran past. It would have been a textbook strike if she’d meant it, but the crazy
biatch
was out of her mind.

Everybody was out of their minds. A pleasant, civilized evening had unraveled in blood and derangement. Nguyen struggled back to her feet lest she be trampled. She had to pull herself up off the floor, virtually climbing the display case she’d been standing next to. It had been showing off a couple of old fighting knives or something. One of them was gone, but she didn’t think this was a robbery.

Didn’t even think it was Trinder’s raid gone wrong. He was still a few minutes away. No, this was…

Her mind froze when she saw exactly what
it
was.

Rational thoughts were impossible. The processes of reason were jammed up like rusted gear levers.

She stood and stared in the widening gyre of confused violence.

The…thing…

She searched for a name and found nothing. It was a thing. A squat, ugly horrific beast of a thing. Reason failed her. Intellect fled. She was left with simple nightmare imagery, understood in the most childlike ways. The enormous hunched body of the thing vaguely recalled the shape of a toad. The eyes, there were so many of them, they swam on the end of long, fleshy stalks. And the mouth.

“Oh god….”

The mouth was a giant maw, ringed not just with shark’s teeth but…

The teeth were moving in there, like the teeth of a chainsaw, and instead of a tongue to catch giant flies, the creature lashed out at all around it with some sort of grotesque inner mandible, itself alive with even more fangs and thorns. The thing had tiny arms, reminding her stupidly of the dinosaur models her brother had once liked to build. The leathery little arms seemed withered and useless attached to such an enormous mass of heavy, bloated flesh, but the creature still put them to use. In one set of wicked fore-claws it clutched the limp body of a young man, his torso fearfully torn open. Nguyen shuddered and began to shy away from the awful sight.

She gasped when the creature lifted the twitching form to its mouth and bit down. It was like feeding a human being into a giant wood chipper. Blood and offal exploded across the hardwood floors of the Warat Gallery, painting artworks and furnishings.

Conflicting urges warred within Nguyen. She wanted to run, to scream like everyone around her. She wanted to collapse and fold herself into a ball and close her eyes until it was all over. Instead she simply stood, not moving. Unable to save herself or anyone else. The creature tore its meal apart, while keeping an eye on her. Just one eye, out of so many, but she could feel it looking into her.

Not at her.
Into
her.

Seeing what was there.
Knowing
…

The stuttering roar of a machine gun going off next to her head broke the spell. A giant black man in a blue suit had unfolded the wire stock of a Skorpion and braced the snubby little weapon against his expensively tailored shoulder. Framed by his immense bulk, the Czech machine pistol looked like a toy, but the bark was loud and fierce. Her fugue state broken, Agent Nguyen uttered one tiny cry of surprise but then her training kicked in and she was back in her shooter’s stance, her Glock 27 held in both hands. She squeezed the trigger repeatedly, but carefully, taking time to drop the sight back on target after the recoil of every shot.

The S&W Hydra-Shok rounds punched into the center mass of the creature, gouging fist-sized plugs of meat from its hide, but it seemed too far gone in bloody gluttony to care.

Beside her the Skorpion fell quiet as the bodyguard swapped out mags. She kept up a steady rate of fire.

“Thanks,” he said evenly. It was as though she’d held a door open for him or offered him a match for a light. He had to be a private shooter, one of the close protectors they’d been briefed to expect with so many of the one percent in attendance.

More like the one tenth of one percent, Nguyen thought, taking in the bodyguard with her peripheral senses. Killers like this didn’t come cheap. He pushed home a fresh clip and shouldered the weapon again, squeezing off short bursts which raked away even more flesh from the thing, exposing bone work and even glistening innards in one or two places.

At last the creature reacted, throwing aside the remains of its meal and leaping out of the torrent of fire.

This time Agent Nguyen did scream.

It hadn’t jumped away from the gunfire.

It was coming at them.

###

“Holy shit, Dee! Did you see that?”

Comeau crouched at the window, his weapon out, but useless at this distance.

Madigan called back from the next room, “It looked like… Shit. Rudy. I don’t know what it looked like.”

His desire to check the video was so great he had to leave the room. Trinder would fucking skin him if they missed something because he was rewinding the camcorder to confirm that he wasn’t mad, that he’d just seen a monster.

And he had, he was sure of that. It wasn’t a trick or a publicity stunt or some sort of internet prank. He’d seen plenty of those, laughed at them like everyone else. He really liked the Spiderdog one on YouTube. But whatever he’d seen in that gallery was no bullshit prank. He hadn’t even caught just a glimpse of the thing.

No. Special Agent Rudy Comeau had himself a good long look at some honest-to-God comicbook nightmare come to life. He turned and ran from the room, back to Madigan.

“Did you fucking see that? Tell me I’m not crazy, Dee. You saw that, right?”

She was standing at the window, her mouth agape, shaking her head.

“You must have seen it! How could you fucking miss it?”

His voice sounded shrill and needy, but Madigan wasn’t denying what he’d seen. She was struggling to believe her own eyes.

Comeau followed her gaze and found the new kid, Nguyen, standing her ground next to some man mountain, the source of the automatic gunfire he’d heard a moment ago. They poured it on. The hired gun sent one burst after another into the body of the creature which was…

“Oh. Damn.”

It was eating somebody.

The bullets weren’t bouncing off it. They were hitting home and hitting hard. He didn’t know what the bodyguard was packing but Nguyen would have carried a standard load of .40 cal Hydra-Shoks for her piece. He could see the impacts as rounds slammed into the monster, digging bloody plugs out of its carcass, but it was just so damned big it seemed content to wear the damage while it fed.

And then it wasn’t.

“Whoa!”

Comeau stepped back involuntarily as the creature leaped forward. It moved with startling speed for something so big. A long dark blur whipped out of its mouth.

“Oh god,” Madigan breathed.

The tongue or tentacle, or whatever the hell it was, reached out at least six feet and punched into the face of the shooter standing next to Nguyen. His head blew apart like a heavy, rotten piece of fruit dropped from a great height.