Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  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 mi
ss 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.

  “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 cove
ralls, 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.