Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters Read Free Page A

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