Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters (7 page)

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.

They were not. The lead story was some oil rig fire in the Gulf of Mexico and, true to form, the little foxes were somehow blaming it on eco-warriors or terrorists or Greenpeace. All the same in their minds, she supposed. It would be amusing to watch them share the blame for the disaster between the foolish Greens and Mullah Obama, but she thought it best that she scan the other news channels first. She tried all the network news bulletins first, then the cable and affiliate shows.

None of them reported what had happened at the gallery. Not as it had happened at any rate. Some ran with an FBI statement about a raid on a Mafia gathering. She snorted milk through her nose at that. That was such a ridiculous cover story it immediately reassured her that she was not mad. She had not hallucinated the whole thing. It would surely break open in the next few hours.

She frowned though, wondering why it had not broken already. A mere oil rig fire was not enough to push the arrival of monsters in New York off the front page or out of the trending topics on Twitter. There had been so many smart phones at the event last night, and bloggers and…

She remembered Jon Maberry having trouble with his phone. And somebody else complaining about the Wi-Fi which should not have been problematic, given the advanced systems she had installed to siphon data off the devices of everyone who entered the gallery. But of course the Americans had learned hard lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan. They routinely smothered cell reception during operations. Trinder would surely have done no less last night. He would want to control the imagery and message. Her own phone had worked. She had received the warning about the raid via MMS. But her BlackBerry was in no way a standard unit and it was entirely possible the
pindosi
had allowed her phone to function just so they could monitor any communications with her controllers.

She flicked off the television, knowing she would get nothing from it for many hours, if not days. She had at least sated her appetite. For the first time she felt full. Not to bursting, or even uncomfortably full, but the eggs and bread appeared to have topped off her furnace.

She did not care to think what would happen if she ran out of food. She could not disobey orders and leave the safe house. She could not order in delivery. Best not to think about such things right now, she decided. There were ample supplies of freeze-dried rations to see her through until the arrival of the ex-fil team. She would not starve. But she might go mad.

###

The hours of waiting until the ex-fil team arrived she spent meditating. Not on her childhood or Sergei with his deep green eyes, but on the events of the previous night. And on the entity she knew as Pr’chutt un Threshrendum un Qwm. Pr’chutt was in her thoughts now, her memories. Not as a separate entity, but as much a part of who she was as those thoughts and feelings and memories which she had always carried with her, and which made her who she was. Who she had always been.

There seemed no sense in avoiding it. If she was insane her fate was sealed. She would not be extracted. She would be disposed of.

But she was not mad. She knew that. This was no nightmare or hallucination. The situation was inexplicable, irrational, but that did not preclude questioning it rationally. Such an interrogation might lead to an acceptable explanation.

Karin settled herself into an armchair and closed her eyes, slowed her breathing. However, she could not find her quiet center. Something was caught at the edge of her thoughts, pulling on her attention. After a minute she frowned, stood up and fetched the sword. She felt more at ease immediately. She took her seat, laid the long blade in its lacquered scabbard across her lap. It was real. Not a memory. She could touch it and, unlike the Threshrend, she knew something about it.

She drew out the steel with a soft hiss.

“Hello my friend,” Karin said. “I cannot help but feel you are trying to tell me something. What is it?” she asked rhetorically. And then less rhetorically, “What do we know about you?”

She listed for herself all of the attributes of this weapon which her gallery had borrowed for the exhibition. Not that she imagined herself returning it any time soon. Or ever.

“You were forged by Nagayuki Saku sometime in February 1549.”

As she spoke, her voice which had been light and even somewhat fanciful, grew less so, becoming not deeper but somehow surer with each word, as though she intoned the rites of a ceremony. Goose flesh rose on her arms and she shivered once, but continued to talk. Unselfconsciously addressing the sword now. As though it were a person in the room with her.

“You were originally offered by Master Nagayuki to the Kibitsu Shrine in Hiroshima prefecture and there you lay in state, worshipped for a very long time, even through the tempest of the late Muromachi and Sengoku periods.”

Karin sat up a little straighter. The goose flesh along her arms subsided, but the katana seemed to hum on some barely perceptible frequency as she spoke.

“Your long repose came to an end sometime in 1591 when a band of
rōnin
attacked and desecrated the village in which the Kibitsu Shrine lay. For ten years you fulfilled the true destiny for which Master Nagayuki had created you. You passed through the hands of many warriors, some of them worthy of you, some not. You were named by one of the journeymen samurai who wielded you for a line in the poem by Yamanoue no Okura.”

She spoke the words like a prayer.

“I feel the life

is sorrowful and unbearable

Though

I cannot flee away

since I am not a bird.”

Karin held the sword up before her, not feeling at all ridiculous about talking to a 500-year-old piece of metal.

“This is who you are. This is what you are. Sorrowful and unbearable.”

The katana did hum then, as though in pleasure. Karin felt it, a warm buzz that spread from her hands where she gripped the ancient weapon, up her forearms and into her shoulders, spreading out through her body like the warmth of a long hug from a favorite grandparent.

When she put the sword down again, she was crying.

She knew what
Ushi to yasashi to
was.

She knew what she had become.

###

Ex-fil arrived mid-afternoon, only two of the team came up to the apartment, the other three stayed with their vehicles and did their best to secure a perimeter. As far as they would ever know Colonel Ekaterina Varatchevsky was in a good physical and mental state, having evaded the American security apparatchiki.