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

and she was back in her shooter’s stance, her Glock 27 held in both hands. She squeezed the trigger repeatedly, but carefully, taking time to drop the sight back on target after the recoil of every shot.
    The S&W Hydra-Shok rounds punched into the center mass of the creature, gouging fist-sized plugs of meat from its hide, but it seemed too far gone in bloody gluttony to care.
    Beside her the Skorpion fell quiet as the bodyguard swapped out mags. She kept up a steady rate of fire.
    “Thanks,” he said evenly. It was as though she’d held a door open for him or offered him a match for a light. He had to be a private shooter, one of the close protectors they’d been briefed to expect with so many of the one percent in attendance.
    More like the one tenth of one percent, Nguyen thought, taking in the bodyguard with her peripheral senses. Killers like this didn’t come cheap. He pushed home a fresh clip and shouldered the weapon again, squeezing off short bursts which raked away even more flesh from the thing, exposing bone work and even glistening innards in one or two places.
    At last the creature reacted, throwing aside the remains of its meal and leaping out of the torrent of fire.
    This time Agent Nguyen did scream.
    It hadn’t jumped away from the gunfire.
    It was coming at them.
    ###
    “Holy shit, Dee! Did you see that?”
    Comeau crouched at the window, his weapon out, but useless at this distance.
    Madigan called back from the next room, “It looked like… Shit. Rudy. I don’t know what it looked like.”
    His desire to check the video was so great he had to leave the room. Trinder would fucking skin him if they missed something because he was rewinding the camcorder to confirm that he wasn’t mad, that he’d just seen a monster.
    And he had, he was sure of that. It wasn’t a trick or a publicity stunt or some sort of internet prank. He’d seen plenty of those, laughed at them like everyone else. He really liked the Spiderdog one on YouTube. But whatever he’d seen in that gallery was no bullshit prank. He hadn’t even caught just a glimpse of the thing.
    No. Special Agent Rudy Comeau had himself a good long look at some honest-to-God comicbook nightmare come to life. He turned and ran from the room, back to Madigan.
    “Did you fucking see that? Tell me I’m not crazy, Dee. You saw that, right?”
    She was standing at the window, her mouth agape, shaking her head.
    “You must have seen it! How could you fucking miss it?”
    His voice sounded shrill and needy, but Madigan wasn’t denying what he’d seen. She was struggling to believe her own eyes.
    Comeau followed her gaze and found the new kid, Nguyen, standing her ground next to some man mountain, the source of the automatic gunfire he’d heard a moment ago. They poured it on. The hired gun sent one burst after another into the body of the creature which was…
    “Oh. Damn.”
    It was eating somebody.
    The bullets weren’t bouncing off it. They were hitting home and hitting hard. He didn’t know what the bodyguard was packing but Nguyen would have carried a standard load of .40 cal Hydra-Shoks for her piece. He could see the impacts as rounds slammed into the monster, digging bloody plugs out of its carcass, but it was just so damned big it seemed content to wear the damage while it fed.
    And then it wasn’t.
    “Whoa!”
    Comeau stepped back involuntarily as the creature leaped forward. It moved with startling speed for something so big. A long dark blur whipped out of its mouth.
    “Oh god,” Madigan breathed.
    The tongue or tentacle, or whatever the hell it was, reached out at least six feet and punched into the face of the shooter standing next to Nguyen. His head blew apart like a heavy, rotten piece of fruit dropped from a great height.
    “Fuck this,” said Madigan. “We have to get her out of there.”
    She drew her weapon and ran for the door.

CHAPTER THREE
    Unlike OSCAR, Colonel Karin Varatchevsky knew exactly how many armed