CHAPTER NINE
Vladimir left an hour later with Yuri. The ex-fil commander looked worried, his underling nonplussed. Yuri had not yet been informed of the new correlation of forces. His turn would come. Vlad’s deputy, Josef, a tall, dark-eyed Ukrainian, had been brought into the impromptu briefing and he remained with Leonid and Nikita who were, at that moment, ordering the occupants of the gym downstairs to get the hell out of their little clubhouse.
Karin could hear the objections, mostly framed as guttural profanities, but she noted that objecting was not the same as refusing. The gym was empty within five minutes. She had been able to hear all this not because anybody had raised their voices but because she’d discovered a disturbing ability to tune into nearby conversations as though turning the dial on an old-fashioned radio. She noted the development, but filed it away for future reference. They had other, more pressing issues to investigate first.
“Nobody touches the sword,” she said as Josef and Oksana left the room with her.
The Ukrainian gave the enchanted weapon a worried look. He had accepted its bizarre, possibly supernatural status even more readily than Karin. He had also crossed himself twice in the manner of the Orthodox faith, when she had demonstrated the skin-cutting phenomenon again. The fear that burned off him in waves was almost as great as the religious awe she sensed behind it.
“Do not worry, Colonel,” he said. “I shall lock the room.”
She was back to being “colonel”, not “bitch”.
“I’m not concerned about anybody stealing it,” Karin said flatly.
“I understand that.”
They filed down the narrow staircase, returning to the main floor of the gym. Leonid pulled down the steel rolling door. It moved reluctantly, with a grating rumble implying it was rarely if ever closed. Karin’s eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness quickly. Fluorescent lights flickered on overhead and she winced in discomfort, but then adjusted to that too.
Josef went into a close huddle with his men as Oksana took a digital recorder from her medical bag and a large phone from her purse. A Samsung.
Karin was back in her sweats. She ignored the incredulity in the voices of the two ex-fil team members Josef was trying to brief. Their turn, too, would come. Indeed it was here.
“Jumprope first?” she asked, and Oksana nodded. “Three minutes, as fast as you can.”
The rope broke after only two. She was jumping so quickly, the cheap plastic cord began to heat up and smoke after a minute and a half. It broke with a crack and the two pieces flew apart. One of them whipped her in the shin.
Oksana, who had recorded the whole thing on her phone camera, moved in to take Karin’s pulse and blood pressure. The ex-fil team stared gape-mouthed at her. To them it must have seemed as though she were in a video running at five or six times its normal speed. She tossed the ruined jumprope to one side. She was not even sweating. Oksana’s face was pale and her breathing shallow as she took Karin’s measurements.
“Heart rate fifty beats per minute,” she said. “Blood pressure one-ten over seventy.”
“Normal then?”
“Better than normal. Kettle bells next.”
“Of course.”
The miracle gym equipment of the last few years was an old Russian favorite and Karin was familiar with many routines from her early days in the gymnasium, and later training with GRU. She still used the bells at her local gym in Manhattan. They were an excellent conditioning aid.
“Best stand back,” she warned.
Oksana moved well away from her subject and, even though they were already halfway across the gym, Josef and the other ex-fils took a couple of precautionary steps back too.
Karin searched out the biggest pair of kettle bells available and found them over near the weights benches. A pair of fifty pound behemoths. She checked that she had enough space around her for the routine, lifted both weights as though they were hollow plastic facsimiles, and worked her way into a Girevoy sequence, a fluid procession of swings, squats, deadlifts and presses that she gradually accelerated to fashion a blurred and impenetrable steel cage around herself. She slowed down and stopped after three minutes.
Her muscles had warmed but were not fatigued. She was, however, beginning to feel peckish.
“I will need protein bars,” she told Josef. “All of them.”
Josef ordered his men to fetch as many boxes as they could find in the office. They returned with an armful each. Probably stolen from a warehouse or a truck, Karin thought. She waited while Oksana took her vitals again, then stripped the wrappers from half-a-dozen Lean Body Gold bars. The ex-fils now regarded her with awe. There was something like a spark of worshipful revelation in Josef’s eyes.
“Normal,” Oksana announced. “Which is pretty fucking abnormal, if you ask me.”
Karin could not help but smile. The doctor was recovering her equilibrium. Running these “standard” tests, was undoubtedly helping with that. She could lose herself in familiar routine, even if the results were anything but familiar or routine.
“Lift some weights now!” Nikita cried out with unalloyed enthusiasm. He was the youngest of the team and seemed more excited than anything else. “I’ll bet you could top Kashirina’s max.”
“Pah! Kashirina?” Josef said soberly. “She could beat Lovchev. I am certain of it. Try, Colonel. Show us what you can lift.”
Josef, as it happened, was correct.
###
They were done with her physical examination in less than an hour. Karin and Oksana returned to the small apartment while Nikita was dispatched to fetch sustenance. He hurried away like a small boy eager to please his parents and returned with four bags of hot food from two nearby restaurants, a Balkan seafood diner and a Baltic carvery.
Karin was glad of the meal. She had burned a lot of energy for the doctor’s exams, but also she could feel her body burning even more as it underwent some fundamental change. She was fit before all this happened. She had not been raised in a fashion that would allow her to sink into sloth and flabbiness just because she was not competing any more. And of course, she was always competing, in a fashion.
She competed with men like Donald Trinder. Or women such as Monroe of Echelon. She competed with the NSA, the CIA, the British, the French, whoever might stand in defiance of the Rodina’s rightful place in the world, whoever would work against the interests and destiny of her country. She may have spent many long years in America, establishing herself and her operations, but she had not become soft like an American. She still trained with the discipline of her early years in Volgograd, and her later instruction in the many facilities of the Main Intelligence Directorate.
She was fit for purpose, and her purpose was war.
But she had never been this fit.
She could feel her very sinews burning and hardening, like good iron smelted into stronger, purer steel. She was conscious of her senses growing ever more acute, ever more powerful. And she was all too aware of other, newer senses which were also developing within her, and becoming more powerful. This last she thought of as her Rasputin-like ability. A faculty for sensing the thoughts and feelings of others as materially as you might hear their voice, or smell their sweat or cologne.
She did not know what these things would cost her in the end, but for now she did know enough about the unusual demands on her body that she was of a mind to keep it fueled. She could feel her metabolism running at white heat; burning, always burning.
The others shared her meal in the bedsit, but restrained themselves out of deference to her needs and because, in the case of Josef and Leonid, they felt themselves in the presence of something profound and awesome, something potentially divine. Nikita talked a mile a minute, and Josef slapped the back of his hand as he reached for a second piragi, a bacon roll done in the Latvian style.
“That is for the colonel,” he warned, sounding as though he was shooing a beggar from the kitchen door of his boyar.
“
Have the bacon roll, Nikita,” Karin said. “You are still a growing boy.”
“In his pants maybe,” said Oksana, and bright red blush crawled up the young man’s face as the older ones laughed just a bit too loudly. Hysteria lurked somewhere in the back of that laughter.
Nikita took the roll.
The gym rats had been allowed to return downstairs, and the sound of weight plates crashing into each other and gloves pounding the heavy bags shook the tiny room. Leonid and Nikita left to patrol the neighborhood while Josef maintained the reverent distance which had quickly become his default posture towards Colonel Ekaterina Varatchevsky.
“Will you need more food like this?” he asked as she plowed through a large plastic bowl of fish stew. “In this volume, I mean? We should be prepared if that is so.”
“I do not know,” Karin answered honestly. “I was hoping the doctor might tell me.”
Oksana shook her head.
“You say you have been eating like this since you killed the monstr? It could be that the transformation you are undergoing will eventually be complete and then perhaps your metabolism will return to normal, or something approaching a new normal for you. But I cannot say. This has no precedent.”
“This thing you killed,” Josef said.
“The Threshrend daemon.”
He crossed himself in the old Eastern Orthodox fashion, two fingers, right to left. Karin could feel his acid reflux. She had to concentrate to dial it back, allowing her to continue eating.
“Yes, this daemon. It is like…” his face contorted and she felt his difficulty and embarrassment as a tightness in her own chest. “It is like a werewolf or a vampire,” he asked, as though such things were as real as Tokarev pistols and kettle bells. And of course, they were, she now knew. “Will it…. Will you…?”
“No,” she smiled kindly, sending him her reassurance as a parent might soothe a child who has woken with a nightmare. The effect was instant and observable. The tension ran out of his body as though a string had been cut. “No,” she continued. “I am not turning into a Threshrend. Or wampyre, or wulfin.”
She frowned. She had spoken in the Olde Tongue. The language of Pr’chutt un Threshrendum.
“A vampire or a werewolf, you mean?” Oksana asked. She too was frowning. “I cannot check for blood contaminants here, but perhaps we should. Perhaps there is a reasonable explanation after all. The Americans experimenting with biological weapons? Something gone awry that—”
“It was nothing of the sort,” Karin said gently. “It was a monstr. From a world of monstrs. A world I have up here now.” She touched two fingers lightly to her temple. “I need to get home, my friends. I must talk to our superiors, make them aware of this threat.”
She dabbed at her mouth with a clean napkin.
“I hope Vladimir returns soon.”
But Vladimir did not return until the following day and by then the world was only too aware of the threat it faced.
CHAPTER TEN
Karin finished most of the food Nikita had brought and Josef sent him out for more late in the afternoon. This time he returned with a selection of Bangladeshi curries and Vietnamese stir fries.
“I did not think they had food in Bangladesh,” he joked. “So I had to see.”
This time, her appetite was sated halfway through, and the others were able to eat their fill in company with her. Josef paid the gym manager for the protein bars she had eaten earlier and gave him money to get more.
“Immediately.”
The man did not argue and a dozen boxes of the tasteless energy slabs now sat in the corner of her crowded room in case of emergencies.
Karin had stowed the enchanted katana in the corner behind her single bed, where nobody might brush against it by accident. She had taken to shortening the sword’s name. To her it was now simply “Sorrow”, and the blade seemed pleased with this. No, the blade was pleased with this, she knew. It was not a lifeless artifact. It had a soul. The soul of a fallen champion. Karin could feel this presence as a constant sub-aural hum coming from the long steel, as though it were a great tuning fork she had used to strike the universe.
The crashing and clanking of weight plates continued late into the night under her bedroom, but for a second night running she found herself so tired after eating that she fell asleep halfway through a conversation with Josef and Oksana. She slept heavily until woken by Nikita in the early hours of the morning.
###
“Colonel Varatchevsky. You must come now.”
She came awake not entirely oriented to the world. It took a second for her to recall her surroundings and the circumstances which had led her to them.
“Come on, Colonel. You need to see this. There are monstrs. More of them.”
Her head was thick with deep, dreamless sleep. The sleep of redemption, but even through that she felt Nikita’s excitement as an electric buzz under her skin. It was not entirely pleasant and she closed off the connection with an effort of will.
The room was empty, the mess from dinner cleared away. Oksana was gone. A bare, low watt bulb shone in the corridor outside. She still wore the same clothes as yesterday, the gray sweatpants and NYU hoodie. Somebody had taken off the trainers she had been wearing but they were placed neatly by the cot and she quickly pulled them on her feet. To what end, she thought dully. Her feet did not need protecting.
She felt the pull of her enchanted, ensouled katana as she left the small room, but she did not take it with her. The gym goons downstairs would inevitably want to examine it and it would be inconvenient to explain so many magically severed limbs to any survivors and onlookers. This was a good decision, as it transpired. The gym was crowded with hugely muscled criminals, all of them gathered around a television set hung from the ceiling.
Karin supposed they would normally have watched MMA fights on this. Or pornography. Now a great number of them, many more than she remembered from her arrival yesterday afternoon, stood gaping at a news program. Josef stood with them, saying nothing. Leonid was nowhere to be seen. Doubtless he was spooking around the local streets, looking for any sign that the American authorities had found them.
It took her a few moments to understand that the television news had nothing to do with her adventure at the gallery. It concerned an entirely different incident. The CNN dateline said “New Orleans”. She had never been to the city, and what little she knew of it was not on screen. Helicopters hovered over some inner city neighborhood, not the few blocks of the old town familiar to outsiders and tourists. Bourbon Street, that was the name, she thought.
This was not Bourbon Street.
The ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen described it as Central City, New Orleans. A misnomer for sure. That was no CBD in the news imagery. It looked like any depressingly squalid inner-city slum occupied by the enormous underclass of this grotesquely unfair country. They could have been watching an episode of COPS, save for the bands of Hunn battling marines on waste ground near an old Pizza Hut.
She recognized the clan markings and battle order of the Hunn immediately.
And their leashed Fangr.
She recognized Lieutenants Grymm.
She looked upon the Horde.
“Hooy na ny!” she said.
No fucking way!
“What are they, Colonel. Are these the Threshrend?” Josef said in her ear, his voice urgent. All around them young and not so young Russian mobsters cheered every time they saw an American go down under the edged metal of the Horde.
Fucking idiots, she thought, in her American voice. Karen Warat’s voice.
“No,” she told Josef quietly. “They are much worse than any Threshrend. Although I would not doubt there are Threshrendum with them. Sliveen scouts too. Perhaps even Gnarrl.”
Her voice was flat, empty of emotion. This was much worse than she had allowed herself to imagine. She gripped Josef by the upper arm but let go immediately when he yelped in pain.
“Sorry. But I
must study this. I will need another television. Or a computer or tablet with an internet connection. I don’t think we can kick these assholes outside again. It will cause trouble.”
“Agreed,” said Josef, rubbing at his tricep. His face looked washed out in the light of the television. “Give me one minute.”
He disappeared into the crowd while Karin watched the live news feed. The commentators were confused. They hesitated again and again, trying to describe precisely what they were seeing.
Monstrs.
A few of the men around her noticed her presence and elbowed each other. They had not been here when ex-fil brought her in. To them she was just a pretty woman within grabbing distance. She hardened her shell, the emotional wall all women learn to build in the face of unwanted male attention. She hardened it with such speed and strength that a small invisible blast wave seemed to travel out from where she stood. Most of the men suddenly struggled to get away from her, to be anywhere but near this off-putting bitch. One of them, the one who had elbowed his friend with a leering smile, doubled over and vomited, spraying the legs of the men around him. Karin moved away as a small fracas followed. It did not escalate. The on-screen violence proved more compelling.
Josef returned with one of the men she did recall seeing this afternoon. A brute of a fellow, stupidly large with steroids and weight training. He would be slow and not especially agile, she thought. Easily defeated in combat, even without the change which was upon her.
He was not of a mind to fight however. He had an iPad he handed over to her. Fully charged.
“I have entered the wi-fi code,” he said.
She took the tablet from him and said thank you.
“I will return it in the morning.”
“Don’t worry.” He shrugged. “Is not mine.”
###
She retired to her bedsit with Josef. Nikita stayed downstairs to watch the battle with the crowd. They were growing very rowdy as beer and bottles of vodka passed from hand to hand. Some of them, she could hear, the smarter ones probably, were cheering for the Americans now. This occasioned some discord among the audience but Karin could sense the mood of the men downstairs shifting as they saw more and more of what was really happening in New Orleans.
Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters Page 7
