Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters (3 page)

“Fuck this,” said Madigan. “We have to get her out of there.”

She drew her weapon and ran for the door.

CHAPTER THREE

Unlike OSCAR, Colonel Karin Varatchevsky knew exactly how many armed security men and women were in the Warat Gallery that night; the correlation of forces, to borrow a phrase from the late and much lamented USSR. The guest list of 180 invitees was top heavy with serious money, not just pretenders with a million here, a million there. Martin Gnoji, if he survived the next few minutes, was predicted by the
Wall Street Journal
to be worth somewhere between eight and nine billion dollars by the end of the year. Less reputable sites made even more outlandish predictions. Nonetheless there were at least six men and two women in this crowd wealthier than him, and that sort of money didn’t go walking around without protection.

There were sixteen armed escorts in and around the gallery. Karen Warat had hired another five armed men and one female supervisor to secure the venue against everything from beggars and freeloaders, to protestors and even jihadi snatch squads. One of her guests, an Iranian exile, was a touch obsessed with the idea that ISIL planned to kidnap him right here in Manhattan. Of course, her security team had no idea they were, in effect, subcontracting for the Russian GRU, but they were seasoned professionals, all of them ex-military with multiple tours of the worst places in the world. They now worked for Final Solutions, a boutique agency, and she had earlier wondered whether they might provide a tripwire or a few minutes confusion should the FBI come blundering in. Not that she had expected the FBI to come blundering in. Making the Asian woman with the facial tattoo as a federal officer had come as a nasty surprise.

Just before the even nastier surprise which had jumped into her gallery through one of the large rear windows and was, even now, eating poor Fernando from
Monocle
magazine.

She recognized the flat, dense crack of a Czech Skorpion, fired twice on semi-auto, before the shooter flipped to fully automatic fire. When Karin saw him, she found the tattooed girl standing there too, by the Vietnamese fighting knives display. The man was one of the close protection detail the Uber douches—the share ride app guys—had brought with them. Their guy knew his stuff. He used a pistol shooter grip at first, but took the time to unfold the wire stock when he switched to full auto. The Skorpion was a fire hose for bullets. It would spray them everywhere without a strong stance and anchored base. The Clearance agent—Karin had decided she was almost certainly Clearance, and more of a decoy than anything—stood her ground while all around her panic erupted.

Good for you
, she thought.
Now get out of my way
.

OSCAR’s decoy was blocking her path to the nearest exit, and the…well, whatever that
monstr
was, squatted astride Karin’s other option: the rear fire escape. The two of them poured fire into the hideous creature, tearing raw, bleeding chunks from its hide.

It’s
tattooed
hide, she realized, making a connection between the ink on the Asian girl’s face and the swirling patterns of runes and abstract characters which appeared to have been etched all over the creature.

What was that monstrosity?

It had the vague shape of some enormous toad, but only suggested in outline. It seemed as large as a hippo. With gigantic hind legs, possibly for leaping, and forearms which seemed almost withered in contrast. Yet they were strong enough to hold the body of poor Fernando like a child holding a chocolate rabbit at Easter. Greedily. And like a child on a chocolate binge the creature seemed oblivious to all except its feast. It cared not for the screams and chaos around it. Nor even for the bullets chewing into its body.

Not until Uber’s shooter unloaded his clip on full auto.

The creature suddenly leaped forward, tossing aside Fernando’s corpse like a chewed-over chicken wing. Its tongue, or some grotesque limb it kept in its mouth, shot out and Karin had the impression of claws or a fist at the end of the tentacle smashing into the bodyguard’s skull.

His head blew apart, splashing blood and gray matter on the Clearance woman, who screamed but kept firing.

Unfortunately she was firing into the space where the creature had been, not where it was.

Karin saw her chance and went for it. She could not move as quickly as she might like in her heels, and did not dare take them off because of the sharp debris which now littered the floor. But she hurried as best as she could towards the rear of the building where she could make good her escape.

Two more security men arrived to add their fire to the ineffectual efforts of the girl, who had recovered enough to stumble away from the immediate danger. She had taken cover behind a display case and was trying to reload her tiny pistol with shaking hands. Karin, whose own composure had been sorely tested by the last few minutes, felt a flicker of sympathy for her, but not enough to spare her life if she got in the way. As the two hired guns, her own she was pleased to see, opened up with MAC-10s, she picked her way through broken glass and shattered exhibits. Food squished underfoot. Glass crunched.

At least the worst of the crowd crush had dissipated as the surviving guests fled the second floor. There were five bodies down that Karin could see. Two of them apparently killed by gunfire, rather than animal attack. If “animal” wasn’t too prosaic a term for this freak of nature. She hastened past an installation of Japanese lacquered armor, taking care to avoid straying into the line of fire. Now that her guys were on the job, however, bullets weren’t spraying around everywhere. The two Final Solutions operators worked the room in their own very particular way, tag teaming the beast. Never staying in one place long enough to let it choose which was the greater threat. One man pumped out three rounds while the other took cover near OSCAR’s girl. Then they swapped over, as the second shooter encouraged the Federal agent back to her feet and into the fight. They fired and moved. Fired and moved. Passing the assault back and forth between each other. OSCAR’s decoy, heartened by the support, set her features in a hard, thin-lipped mask and blazed away. Her fire control and tactical movement weren’t as good as the two men, but Karin acknowledged her spirit. The samurai whose armor and weapons she threaded through would have approved.

###

Her escape route was open and obvious, a quick turn around a ruined buffet table, past a stand on which rested a sword and
tantō
from the late Muromachi period, and out through the catering area. She might have made it too, if she hadn’t been wearing a pair of Christian Louboutin’s playfully spiked heels.

They were a favorite pair, and reasonably comfortable for high heels, but not at all suitable for this sort of thing. As yet more weapons opened up on the
monstr
—assault rifles now, carried by American tactical operators in black coveralls, helmets and body armor—the unnamed and horrible thing which had leaped into her gallery, eaten a perfectly lovely young man from an important magazine and ruined all of her best laid plans, suddenly leaped at her. It was not nearly as fast or agile as before and seemed to be carrying its great wounded bulk as a burden now. Dark and viscous liquids poured from its many wounds, the toxic fluids were foul smelling and even sizzling and steaming a little as they splattered and dripped everywhere.

A blob of the noxious ichor landed on the toe of her shoes and started to bubble and smoke. Less concerned about what she might tread on than the demonic stomach acid which was eating her Loubies, she kicked off first one shoe and then the other.

The abomination crashed down in a tangle of uncoordinated limbs and ruptured flesh, landing partly on the buffet table she had just maneuvered around. Shrimp cocktails and Maltese pastizzi exploded into the air. True to their national character, the Americans were still shooting, pouring torrents of fire into the creature, which was now dangerously close to her. Its grotesque eyes, a forest of them, moving like wave-tossed sea anemone, seemed to float around until they locked on her.

Its mouth, a terrifying maw into which she could imagine her whole body disappearing, opened wide and that bizarre barbed tentacle of a tongue quivered inside. Its teeth, she saw, as her bowels threatened to let go, were moving. Not because it was gnashing them in anticipation of another meal, but because they seemed to run on some sort of track in the creature’s mouth. Like a bandsaw made of shark’s teeth.

The volume of fire increased. Dozens of rounds smacked home, ripping raw wads of meat from the creature and spraying her with its thick, inky blood. She felt the liquid start to burn into her exposed flesh and the pain, high and searing, broke the trance she’d fallen into. A trance that had all but paralyzed her in body and mind as soon as the thing laid its many eyes on her.

She could not run, she knew that. To turn her back on this thing was to invite it to fall on her with that devouring mouth. She could not flee, but nor could she fight. She had no gun and even had she been foolish or desperate enough to attempt unarmed combat, she could tell from the way her skin blistered and burned that she was better off not coming to blows with this thing. Without thinking, without questioning the wisdom or folly of the act, she reached for the only weapon at hand.

###

The sword, a 1549 Nagayuki katana, was literally priceless. Unlike many of the exhibits this evening, it was not for sale. Not at any price—a non-negotiable condition of its display that some of her guests found difficult to accept. They were used to having their every whim and desire fulfilled. Karen had arranged its loan from the owner, a private collector from Scotland. The presence of the invaluable artifact had added to the cachet of the evening and helped to draw in some of the larger, more mainstream media outlets.

Now, it would save her life.

Karin’s hands closed around the grip and she withdrew the long steel from its scabbard. She was no kendo or kenjutsu master, but was familiar with most of the principal sword arts, and she had been an A-rated fencer before disappearing from the Russian Olympic program into an altogether more grueling, less public training regime for the GRU. The katana, named for a line of poetry by Yamanoue no Okura, felt as though it had been forged solely for her. It was beautifully balanced and in its perfect heft she felt a universe of possibilities.

So did the
monstr
.

Karin felt its attention turn to her and her alone. All of those terrible eyes fell upon her and she staggered a little as though struck physically. The creature, dreadfully wounded, perhaps mortally so, tried to leap at her, its jaws agape. She vaulted sideways, a move she had practiced thousands of times in the training hall, a move which her body performed without thought now. The ghastly tongue shot out, slower than before, and poorly directed. It reached into the space where she had been and shouting her
kiai
she brought the blade—
Ushi to yasashi to
—down diagonally right to left, a German longsword technique known as the
Zornhau
, or “wrathful strike”. The razor sharp steel passed through the creature’s tongue with ease, encountering only a brief moment of resistance. The
monstr
screeched in pain and outrage; she was certain she could hear it deep inside her head, not just in her ears.

The bodyguards, the tactical operators, and the tattooed girl from OSCAR had stopped shooting. She was too close to the thing, which was still thrashing about. Karin could hear them yelling at her to get out of the way, but she knew that she couldn’t turn her back. She had to finish it now or die. It made as if to leap at her again, but it was so weakened by gunshots and the grisly wound she had given it that it could only stumble forward into the range of her sword again. She whipped the gore-stained blade across and down, severing most of the ghastly eyestalks at their base. It shrieked, a piercing, almost psychic howl that turned her stomach, but not the point of her sword. That she drove deep into the creature’s head through the huge wound she had just opened there.

A stun grenade flashed somewhere nearby and she blanked out for a few seconds.

When she came to she was surprised to find herself on her feet.

She was not surprised to find a dozen Americans in black combat coveralls pointing their weapons at her.

CHAPTER FOUR

When the first confused reports of gunfire had reached his convoy as it rolled on Varatchevsky from 26 Federal Plaza, Supervising Agent Donald Trinder had felt his testicles crawl up into his body. They had quickly dropped again, when he remembered that his jewels were well shielded by the three memos he’d sent, warning that unless the op was run exactly as he said, a disastrous anal clusterfuck was inevitable. And here they were. With their anal cluster well and truly fucked.

Had he been granted the full Tac Ops squad, and armored cars and aerial assets he’d wanted, nay,
demanded
, they’d have put a bag on Varatchevsky without a moment’s difficulty. The streets would not be full of screaming millionaires and their witless minions. But they were, of course, and as the convoy accelerated, with increasingly confused reports arriving from Overwatch, Trinder had begun to scheme and intrigue at turning what seemed an unmitigated disaster into an unexpected fillip. The FBI would pay. The National Intelligence Assay Group would pay. Echelon would pay. And he, Supervising Agent Donald Trinder of the Office of Special Clearances and Records, would collect.

His surety faltered only slightly when the convoy pulled into the street outside the so-called Warat Gallery, and found the hysterical crowd running about like headless chickens while gunfire flashed and roared from the upper floor. His confidence returned with full force, however, when Overwatch confirmed the presence of the GRU spy on the premises.

Overwatch then tried to confirm the presence of some freaky bullshit that frankly made not a lick of sense at all to Supervising Agent Donald Trinder and he handed off his walkie-talkie to a convenient underling. He knew what he needed to know. Varatchevsky had not escaped. And his young protégé, Agent Nguyen had apparently got the critical shots in.