Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  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.

  ###

  Trinder stood in the wreckage on the ground floor of the art gallery and found himself strangely satisfied with this disastrous clusterfuck.

  Oh, he knew he was in a tight spot. Curses, gunshots, and various unidentifiable but God-awful bangs and loud noises sounded directly overhead. But this was hardly his fault. The higher-ups had not heeded his warnings, had they? The Bureau had not given him the resources he’d insisted were absolutely necessary to deal with a woman as dangerous as Colonel Varatchevsky. Assay Group had not authorized the Track Two assets within OSCAR that he had been demanding for two years. Echelon, as always, hadn’t even acknowledged his emails. And now, look at this mess.

  It wasn’t even a rhetorical mess. It was an actual goddamned real-world shambles. Dead civilians. First responders everywhere, none of them inclined to take orders from him. Media closing in like starving bottom feeders. Crazy talk on the secure comms. God only knew how many freelance shooters running around blowing their wads all over his area of operations. And…and…was that Agent Comeau out of his suit jacket and most assuredly not at his goddamned post?

  Trinder was about to begin the ritual humiliation of his underling for such a flagrant violation of operational procedure and dress code when a single piercing scream reached him through the tumult from the second floor. It was followed in short order by even more gunfire and the appearance of the FBI’s Special Agent Preston. Mr Preston had just returned from the second floor, whey-faced and incoherent, babbling nonsense and hogwash of an order to distract Supervising Agent Trinder from the important business of maintaining appropriate grooming standards amongst his underlings.

  Trinder filed Comeau away for later action, stomping through the debris and destruction on the ground floor, grabbing a shotgun from an FBI man who merely stared at him with the vacant intensity of someone lost in a hypnotic state. Trinder marched towards a large spiral staircase which would lead him upstairs to his quarry.

  Colonel Ekaterina Varatchevsky.

  “Yes, she was still up there,” Preston had mumbled. And that meant Trinder would prevail. No matter what the blowback, he would sail through it.

  ###

  Stepping around a screaming woman and the expensively suited man attending her near the top of the staircase, Donald Trinder emerged into Hell. As shambolic as the ground floor had been, with overturned displays and tables, this was worse. Like the aftermath of a frat house party on a devil-worshipping liberal arts campus. He immediately noted the untended corpses, the crawling and crying wounded, the smashed tables and ruined art. His quick professional gaze took in the number of shooters—twelve—and the figure of the hostile GRU agent, armed, with a long samurai sword.

  And Jabba the Hutt.

  That was his immediate and thus truest response. Colonel Varatchevsky had somehow smuggled into her bogus art gallery a giant tal
king blob of snot from a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away.

  The impression lasted only a moment before the scene resolved itself. The creature, which he would later learn was a Threshrend Superiorae of the Qwm Sect, was obviously wounded. Gravely so. The shooting had stopped. Perhaps because the Russian woman seemed to be in some sort of intimate face-off with the thing—if it could be said to have a face. Its head seemed mostly to consist of jaws that reminded Trinder of movie posters from his childhood. For the film of the same name.

  And eyes. Lots of eyes on stalks.

  Like a snail’s eyes, he thought, in a weirdly detached moment. Part of him wanted to bring the muzzle of the shotgun around and pump round after round into the monster. And that was the only word for it. Monster. A thing from the nightmares and terrors of childhood.

  But the impulse was mechanical. A mindless firing of muscle memory rather than an act of will. His will to do anything seemed to have deserted him. Instead, like the others, the tactical operators and bodyguards and Agent Nguyen, Supervising Agent Donald Trinder watched as the GRU agent performed some strangely ritualistic pantomime which seemed half duel and half dance. Some of them called to her to get out of the way, but their cries were flat and lacking in urgency.

  Varatchevsky had retrieved a long sword from somewhere. Some dead samurai’s weapon, Trinder assumed. She knew how to use a sword. He knew that. Her file had included quite detailed information about the Olympic program in which she had been placed after talent spotters identified her as a prospect for a medal. Gymnastics first, and later fencing.

  Trinder found himself pondering the details of Ekaterina Varatchevsky’s childhood, even though to do so was a form of neurosis. Madness, even. He couldn’t help himself. It was as though some external force compelled him to ignore the immediate danger and insanity and lose himself in contemplation of bureaucratic minutiae.

  He might have done just that. Standing there immobile for hours, lost in his thoughts which seemed to tumble one after the other down deeper and darker rabbit holes. Instead he was shaken from his reverie by another scream, this time not of terror but of defiance. A war shout. From Varatchevsky.

  She had moved quickly, with easy grace, as one might expect of somebody trained through their childhood years in the sporting disciplines chosen for her. The alien creature’s tongue shot out, a thick, ugly protuberance which looked like it was covered in thorns and barbed wire, and she dodged to one side before slicing clean through it. He shuddered in sympathy with the creature. Almost as if he felt a reflection of its pain and shock. The sensation, disturbing and even a little sick-making, passed quickly.

  Varatchevsky had closed with the animal and another blurring stroke took off the top of its head, severing that disgusting nest of eyestalks. The creature did shriek this time. A hideous scraping sound like a million fingernails on a giant blackboard. Trinder felt it in his meat. He saw the convulsion that shook his own flesh pass over the others. Everyone except the Russian who had somehow leaped high into the air to sink her long steel blade down deep into the skull of Jabba the Hutt.

  A stun grenade went off.

  Or a giant flash gun.

  Or a coronal mass ejection from the surface of the sun, traveling through space at relativistic velocities and slamming into that room at just that moment.

  Something like that, thought Trinder as he staggered and fell forward.

  ###

  Agent Nguyen lived clean. She did not drink, smoke, take drugs or indulge in deep-fried carbs or sweet, sweet bakery treats. She made sure to have her seven glasses of water every day, to lift weights three times a week and maintain a regimen of high intensity interval training. She ate her greens. She was young and fit and did not stay up late watching television.

  She recovered from the white-out a few seconds before anyone else, including the Russian spy, Varatchevsky. For the second time in less than five minutes, Shosanna Nguyen found herself climbing up off the floor, checking the load in her weapon and reorienting herself in a world that seemed to have tipped off its axis and gone spinning away into madness. Her fellow agents and operators were all down. The bodyguards too, although one of them was at least half conscious, like her.

  Varatchevsky, the reason they were all here, was slumped against the corpse of the Swamp Thing. That’s what Agent Nguyen’s febrile mind had settled on as a placeholder until she had further and better information. Colonel Varatchevsky, who was quickly coming around, had killed the Swamp Thing, and a flashbang had gone off or a light had exploded and in a few seconds the most dangerous woman in New York would surely gather her wits and be gone.

  Nguyen took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes tight, willing her balance and clarity to return.

  “Too bad the second most dangerous bitch in the Big Apple beat you to it,” the Clearance agent croaked at the dead monster, as she forced herself into action. She felt remarkably better for doing so.

  “Federal agents!” Nguyen shouted, pleased with how strong her voice sounded. A hell of a lot stronger than anybody else in that room right then, including Supervising Agent Trinder who was grunting and struggling for breath as he heaved himself to his feet. He’d faceplanted into a tray of food and his good suit was ruined.

  That more than anything gave Nguyen what she needed to take charge. She wouldn’t want to be on his bad side now.

  “Colonel Varatchevsky,” she shouted, “I will shoot. Step away from the…from the Swamp Thing,” she finished, still not knowing what to call the half-headless obscenity with a big-ass sword stuck in its cabbage. Varatchevsky, who seemed punch-drunk, staggered and toppled away, the sword going with her. But even as she stumbled, she too regained her balance. Nguyen could see it, and was a little freaked out by how fast the woman was recovering.

  She squeezed off a single warning shot from her weapon, putting it into the roof. The report sounded painfully loud in the quiet which had enveloped the room. It also got Varatchevsky’s attention. The Russian blinked twice and found her focus, the muzzle of Nguyen’s handgun. Just like that, she was back. Her shoulders lifted and then dropped as she sighed. A ghost of a smile played across her features.

  “Nice work, kid,” she said, and then in Russian, “А дело бывало—и коза волка съедала.”

  “What?” Nguyen said, careful not to get any closer to the woman, who still had the sword gripped loosely in her right hand. The blade was dark with blood. Or what she presumed was blood.

  Trinder appeared at her elbow, grinning and holding a shotgun on the Russian. “She said, ‘It’s happening,’ Agent Nguyen. ‘A goat is eating up a wolf.’ Or something like that. My colloquial Russian is rusty.”

  He swayed a little on his feet but his aim was rock solid. It never shifted from Varatchevsky’s center mass.

  “Good work,” he added and despite the weird banality of it, she thrilled to the compliment. She was not long with OSCAR but the ill temper of the senior supervising agent was legendary, and he had plenty to be ill of temper about this evening. Thankfully, not her.

  “This isn’t on me,” said Varatchevsky. Her smile as she indicated the corpse of the enormous and inexplicable Swamp Thing was unexpected and even disarming. Her accent held not a trace of its origins.

  Nguyen settled deeper into her shooter’s stance.

  “Drop the weapon,” she said flatly.

  More of the tactical ops guys were back on their feet, and they brought their weapons to bear too. A private gun, one of Varatchevsky’s mercenary hires for sure, looked from his employer to Trinder who didn’t even bother to show him ID.

  “Fancy some time in Egypt, son?” Trinder asked offhandedly. “The security service there, the Mabahith Amn ad-Dawla, they do a damn fine line in the sort of torture the courts just won’t let me enjoy here.”

  “Stupid judgey courts,” said Nguyen, getting into her sidekick role, but never taking her eyes or her aim off Varatchevsky.

  The bodyguard allowed himself
one plaintive look at the Russian but she smiled that strangely soothing smile again.

  “It’s okay, Tony. I paid in advance. Go on. You can have the rest of the night off. Oh and nice work,” she added, inclining her head toward the Swamp Thing.

  The security man let his gun fall as he backed away towards the spiral staircase. A few halting steps at first, and then he spun around and ran, taking the risers two or three at a time on the way down.

  “I believe Agent Nguyen instructed you to lay down your weapon, Colonel,” Trinder said, grinning as though he expected her to refuse. As though he wanted her to.

  But she shrugged and lay down the sword.

  “Step away from the pig sticker, now, if you would,” he said, before barking at one of the FBI guys. “You. Clear that weapon.”

  The man waited until Varatchevsky had moved back, her hands in the air. He shouldered his assault rifle and advanced on her with a pistol drawn. He was about to kick the sword aside when Trinder said, “Just pick it up.”

  He did.

  Then he screamed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was almost funny. The decoy had her cold. The little half-caste Asian Miss with the bad henna tattoo messing up her pretty face. The one Karin had made as soon as she’d laid eyes on her. She was the only one on her feet, the only one doing her job—and that included Colonel Ekaterina Varatchevsky of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Federation.

  Karin had blacked but she didn’t think it had lasted very long, a few seconds at most—but long enough. When she regained her senses the decoy had a gun on her and the other Americans were quickly coming to. More and more guns were pointing at her, although the Asian girl’s Glock 27 was probably enough on its own. She’d shown herself willing to pull that trigger when she’d pumped a couple of magazines into…

  Superiorae Pr’chutt un Theshrendum un Qwm.

  As soon as the name occurred to her in the strange unknown tongue, in a language she now spoke fluently, Karin’s thoughts fell back to her native language.