She soon heard his heavy boots hammering on the tarmac.
“Hey lady? You okay? You need help?” he asked.
“Rape,” she said in a breaking voice. Not feeling guilty about it. Nor about what she did next. It was all necessary.
As the good Samaritan leaned over her, Karin raised her arms to him, like a child reaching for its parent, needing to be lifted up. He knelt over her and she smelled cigarettes on his breath, and bourbon and cola—and then underneath them, peanuts, fried potato skins, a breath mint, coffee and pizza. She realized with a start that she could parse out each particular odor. Something else to ignore as her hands shot out like a striking cobra, taking a cross grip on the collar of the man’s riding jacket and scissoring the neck closed. The rider squawked and struggled, but he was the child now. She could tell he had a wiry strength and there seemed very little body fat on him beneath the riding leathers, but she had no more trouble controlling him than she would a small boy. She choked him out in less than ten seconds. It was not just years of training and the application of good technique. She was strong. Much stronger than him. Much stronger than she had ever been, even during the most extreme periods of her earlier training.
A truck drove past but did not slow.
Nobody emerged from the bar.
The courier stopped resisting and slumped down on her. She dragged the unconscious man into the darkness of the alleyway and stripped him. The boots were a size too big for her, but she put them on anyway, stopping for a moment to examine her feet. Another mystery. They were uncut. Indeed they were flawless, as though she had recently enjoyed an expensive pedicure. Karin’s mouth was dry and her heart beat quickly as she changed. This was nothing. Just another data point to consider when she had time, and right now she did not. She still had to make good her exit from this part of the city.
The motorcycle leathers fitted her well enough, a little long in the pants, a little roomy across the shoulder, but not so much that anyone would notice. She collected her sword and fashioned a crude sling from strips of her ruined dress. The weapon sat comfortably on her back under the slightly oversized jacket, only the grip and guard poking up through the collar. It would have to do. She could not conceive of leaving the sword behind. She was unsure why not but it seemed important to have it with her.
Karin left the man without a backward glance, near-naked and stretched out in the street. She walked across the road to the big Yamaha he had been about to start. She looked nothing like the art gallery owner OSCAR was chasing. The key was still in the bike’s ignition.
###
Karin rode to the address she’d been sent, safely cloaked in the leathers of the motorcycle courier, her face and long blonde hair hidden inside his helmet. There were a noticeable number of police cars speeding through the city’s road network, all of them with sirens blaring and lights flashing. Karin rode conservatively, never drawing attention to herself. The safe house was an apartment on the second floor of a three-story walk-up on West 75th, just off Amsterdam. She did not know the arrangements for the property—which front company owned it, to what uses the other floors were put if any—and she had no need to know. The coded message on her BlackBerry had directed her to this place and she trusted in her superiors and their organization. Were any place in Manhattan able to be called safe for her right now, this old brownstone was it.
She parked the bike in among a pod of other motorcycles outside an Italian restaurant across the street. The smell of cooking meat, of garlic and oil, made her dizzy. Resisting the bizarre urge to march into another restaurant kitchen and start laying around her with violence until someone fed her, she memorized the tag on the motorcycle instead. Field controllers would see to the disposal before morning, probably using some criminal gang as a cut out. Carrying her Thai food as though home from a dull day at the office, Karin walked up the front steps and used a key code embedded in the text message to gain entry. Another key code gave her access to the second floor apartment. It was unoccupied; the whole building was.
She shut the door behind her, shrugged off the jacket and unslung the katana. She leaned the sword up against the entry hall table and was about to turn on the lights when she realized that she didn’t really need them. There was enough light from the street lamps outside to see what she was doing.
And then she knew that there wasn’t. The curtains were drawn. Thick, heavy drapes that blocked out most of the street lights’ illumination. She was able to see in what must be near complete dark as though dusk was only then falling.
This of all things brought her undone.
Karin swayed and collapsed against the wall, sliding down and landing on her butt. Her head swirled with images of the night and she felt as though she might throw up, except she had nothing to disgorge. The smell of the cooling Thai food made her stomach growl and, in spite of the nausea, she reached for it, peeling off the lids and scooping out the noodles and meat and rice with her filthy hands. They were sticky with gore but she did not care. She was starving and now that the prospect of eating was before her, she could not stop herself. She finished the stolen meal and slowly climbed to her feet looking for the kitchen, refusing to think about anything else.
It was down the hall, past two bedrooms and a spacious lounge area. Karin instinctively searched for a light switch, and winced at the painful discomfort when the LEDs came on. It was like staring into the sun. She was about to turn them off again but her eyes adjusted quickly. She blinked away a few tears and opened the refrigerator, a large double door unit. It was abundantly stocked with meat, fruit and vegetables. The salad items were fresh enough that she knew a caretaker must have been in during the last twenty-four hours. The lettuce leaves were crisp. Use-by dates on the milk cartons were a fortnight from expiring. There were also freeze-dried rations in the cupboards but she took all the fresh protein—a half leg of ham, a plate of rare and thinly sliced roast beef, and a packet of Canadian salmon—ignoring everything else.
This time she washed her hands before eating, using a squirt of dishwashing liquid at the sink. The Thai food had sated only a little of the terrible hunger she had been feeling, a quite horrifying hunger in fact. She grimaced at the sticky organic coating on her fingers and hands and wondered, as it came off under the running faucet, why it had not burned her skin like it had her shoes.
But her skin had burned, hadn’t it? The blood of that creature—the Threshrend—had sizzled and smoked on her skin at the very first touch. She recalled the burning sensation with a shudder. That shit would have stripped the flesh from her bones, given time. But it hadn’t. It had stopped hurting when…
When she had slain Pr’chutt un Theshrendum un Qwm.
Karin Varatchevsky closed her eyes. Not ready to deal with…with what?
She wasn’t even ready to contemplate that either. Carrying the ham bone by the thin end of the hock she searched out the bathroom and turned on the shower. She would eat while she cleaned herself. And then she would ponder the mysteries and horrors of the evening.
###
The shower helped. It helped so much that she ran a bath, collected the rest of her second—or was it her third?—dinner, and ate a long slow supper in the steaming hot water. There was a bottle of Stolichnaya in the freezer and she took that into the bathroom as well, pouring herself a stiff shot and throwing it back to wash down a mouthful of smoked salmon. It helped too, and on the basis that more of a good thing could only be better, she repeated the dose. After three double shots of thick, sub zero vodka she stopped, not because she was getting drunk, but because she was not.
It could not be that she had eaten so much. No amount of food could soak up the alcohol she had just slammed down. But she had only a slight buzz on, that was all. Her hunger pangs having abated for the first time in hours, she slowed her ravenous consumption of protein and waited for the drink to take effect. To take the edge off. Perhaps then she could examine the events of the night without cutting herself.
&nbs
p; But the slight buzz faded quickly.
Karin frowned. She was a good Russian, and a good drinker with it, or because of it, if you like. She could take a belt, but she also knew the fine calibrations of her capacity to drink, and she should be getting drunk by now. Not actually drunk, just getting there. She narrowed her eyes, holding the bottle of Stoli out in front of her in the bath. It had not been watered down. It was as pure and as potent as ever, but it seemed to have no effect on her other than maybe helping to ease her hunger, which was ridiculous. She took a swig right from the neck this time, not bothering to pour a measure into the crystal glass she had been using. The vodka had warmed a little in the steamy bathroom, but it was still beautifully chilled and frost-burned her throat as it went down.
She slugged the equivalent of three or four shots and waited. Again. A slight buzz then nothing. It was like drinking sugar water—without the sugar rush. The taste had not changed and she almost up-ended the whole bottle down her throat, but stopped herself at the last moment. That would be madness. Even a Russian could not take such a drink. It would kill her. She put the bottle aside, ate the last of the salmon and refused to think about anything. It was important to let her body and her mind decompress. They had both been under enormous and crushing stresses this evening.
She meditated, focusing by recalling in exact detail the fencing routine she had been practicing when the three representatives of the Russian Olympic Committee had come calling on her small, rundown training hall in Volgograd.
She had taken up fencing as an escape from the grueling demands of gymnastics training, and because Sergei, the rather good-looking brother of her friend Miryam, had promised to show her some moves. He was a regional champion and had the most divine green eyes.
Sergei had borrowed, or stolen, a few ping-pong balls. Probably stolen. Karin remembered him tying a length of string around one of the tiny plastic balls before hanging it from the ceiling. Standing with her fencing foil in hand, she waited for the ball, now level with her sternum, to become motionless. With a deep breath she exhaled and lunged. Her right foot glided forward as her left leg thrust her body forward. Gravity lowered her center of mass until the right sole slapped the concrete floor. And Sergei was there, pressed up against her, his arms around her arms, his hips brushing hers.
“Like this,” he said.
Forearm and foil extended in attack until the tip tapped the ping-pong ball, pushing it in a perfect arc, straight out. Karin recovered and lunged again, catching the ball just as it centered itself.
Lunge, extend, attack, tap ball, repeat. Lunge, extend, attack, tap ball, repeat.
“Form first,” Sergei said, his breath warm in her ear, causing blood to rush to her neck and face. “With good form, speed will follow.”
Recall like this, deep-diving into her memory, worked surprisingly well to block out more recent and traumatic events, until Karin grasped just how much detail she was able to recall. It was as though, lying in that bath in New York, she could fold time and step through into the training hall itself. She could smell the liniment and old sweat, feel the pinch of the slightly too tight training slippers on her growing feet. The foil in her hand, the heat from the naked bulbs hanging low overhead—they were all as real to her as the water in which she lay, and the wet handtowel she’d placed over her eyes. Ekaterina Varatchevsky seemed not just to recall her distant past, but to relive it, in situ. Sergei’s breath on her neck. His stiffening cock pressing into her thigh. The way she wiggled back into him. God! Were she to leave the hall she could walk all the way home, knock on the door of her parents’ apartment and find them still alive and…
She sat up quickly, swearing.
“Eto mnye do huya!”
But she did give a fuck. She had to. Something strange and terrible was happening in the world. And to her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
There was a Sig Sauer pistol and three spare mags in the main bedroom, secured in a small safe with five thousand dollars. The safe used the same key code as the apartment. She left the money in the vault, but placed the gun and reloads on the small nightstand next to the bed. Karin was exhausted but found she could not sleep until she had retrieved the sword from the entry hall. That was weird, but no weirder, she smiled bleakly, than anything else this evening.
She knew she would have to confront the reality of what had happened. Not just…the Threshrend. She forced herself to say the name of the beast. But also the fact of her discovery and near capture by the Americans. Two extreme situations, one of which she was well trained to face. The other…she shook her head as it hit the pillow.
It was too much, but at least she was not alone in having witnessed the impossible. More than a hundred people had seen…
Pr’chutt un Threshrendum
…smash its way into her gallery and eat a number of New York’s elite inhabitants. There would be images of the thing all over the internet by now. All over the world. Other people could worry about that. She would worry about getting away from Agent Trinder.
She fell into a deep and dreamless sleep with her hand wrapped in an almost childlike fashion around the pommel of the sword known as Ushi to yasashi to.
###
The buzzing of her phone woke her shortly before dawn. Karin rubbed the sleep from her eyes. There was a moment of disorientation, which lasted for one heartbeat, almost two. She did not recognize her surroundings and for that fleeting instant was not sure why, and then it all came rushing back. The gallery, Gnoji, OSCAR and—she paused here and took a breath.
And the Threshrend. Which she had slain.
She swore. It was all real.
The BlackBerry buzzed again. Another MMS. A photograph; this one showed three Etruscan coins, one stamped with the image of a temple, another with a lion, the third showed a swordsman. An offer of five thousand Euro was attached. Decoding the imagery, she was to stay in the safe house. She would exfiltrate in three days. The extraction team coming for her was Europe-based, five strong. They were authorized to use deadly force. She was not to allow herself to be captured.
Throwing back the sheets, she climbed out of bed with a resolve that had been entirely missing during her flight from the gallery. It was time to face realities, however perverse.
The reality of her flight was all around her. She was in this safe house because the Americans had uncovered her operation and now she must flee or die. Her controllers were quite explicit about that. She was not Anna Chapman. The stakes involved in allowing her to fall into enemy hands were much greater. But that was not the reality she was currently resolved to face. Five colleagues were already en route from the continent to deal with that. They had probably arrived in Manhattan while she slept. They would see to her disappearance, one way or another.
No, the reality she must face was more extreme.
The Threshrend Superiorae of the Qwm Sect had made passage from the UnderRealms, breaking through the capstone and manifesting in the Above—in her art gallery, or in the alleyway out the back of it at least. No, it had not materialized in the gallery, she recalled, but had gained entry by the more conventional method of jumping in through an upper floor window. Then it had eaten some people. Poor Fernando. The Americans had arrived like the cavalry of their most fevered culture dreams, in what even Karin acknowledged was an instance of near perfect timing. They had also, she must admit, come close to killing the Threshrend, but not close enough. That had fallen to her.
She had killed the daemon Pr’chutt un Threshrendum un Qwm—she could hear the name spoken in her mind, as if by another voice—and in doing so she had been changed. She did not know how she had been altered, but she had the evidence of her escape to vouch for the irreducible truth of it. She had done the unthinkable. She had healed when healing was not possible. She had known the thoughts, or perhaps the feelings, of the men and women around her, had felt them as corporeal facts. She was stronger and faster, but she was also weaker. She would have collapsed with hunger had she not
eaten enough for a troop of hungry men. She might have died from hunger had she not gorged herself so.
And the vodka.
What the fuck was wrong with that? She had downed three-quarters of a bottle on her own and yet she felt as though she had taken nothing stronger than white tea the night before. Indeed, if she felt anything, it was hunger. Again.
Karin did not wait this time. She picked up the sword, which was becoming as compulsive a habit as picking up a purse or phone when leaving the house, and hastened through to the kitchen. Most of the meat had gone the night before. A few scraps remained on the ham bone, and she quickly cut them off and tossed them in a bowl with half-a-dozen eggs. Then she added another six eggs and poured in a packet of grated cheese and a cup of milk, whipping up a crude omelette that she cooked in a deep-sided skillet on the gas stove.
Her stomach was rumbling dangerously as she spooned the meal straight from the frying pan into her mouth. It took another omelette, this one made with chorizo and tomato, before she felt she could leave the kitchen. Nonetheless she took the remaining carton of milk, a block of hard cheese and a loaf of slightly stale wholemeal bread with her into the lounge room. The bread was low GI and would hopefully take some time for her super-heated metabolism to digest. She understood both instinctively and logically that the hunger had to be related to an elevated metabolism. Her body could not have performed such feats last night without expending stupendous amounts of energy.
Satisfied that she had done enough to face the impossible for one morning, she turned on the big wide-screen television. She could not leave the apartment until the ex-fil team arrived so she searched out Fox News for light entertainment. It was so much funnier than the comedy channel. After laying out her second breakfast, Karin briefly eased the heavy curtains aside to peek down onto the street. The motorcycle she had stolen had been taken again. Reassured that Field Control had taken care of that loose end, she settled in to enjoy the racist buffoonery of the idiot fascists on Fox and Friends. They must surely be squealing like stuck pigs about her escape.
Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters Page 5