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They speak Russian in Moscow, did you know that?
Well, apparently the Diplomatic Security Service doesn’t, as that was my assignment straight out of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. Especially since my language and cultural specialties all revolved around the Middle East.
I had dutifully reported to General Schaefer and he had tried to get me to go active duty, but I had sadly turned him down. There are too many places and problems around the world that could need slayerly intervention and being stuck in one spot due to orders could cramp my response time. Also Faith was in school now, so it was my turn to take on apocoli until summer vacation. Giles had strong-armed tuition out of the Council, but she had also joined ROTC for the extra cash and training opportunities and the two of us were petitioning for access to Ranger School. General Dutch was still trying to figure out how to swing it without letting on to the higher ups about our capabilities. So in the meantime I had applied and was accepted to the DSS.
As I’ve said before, part of the DSS is the equivalent to the Secret Service’s protection detail. They guard ambassadors, embassies, and visiting foreign dignitaries. The other part does FBI like stuff like fugitive recovery, counterintelligence, and counterterrorism. The protection detail gets to guard parties and go to gorgeous banquets. The other sections, not so much.
Normally a new agent spends a year or two in the US being sent on temporary duty around the world as needed. Me? I was sent straight to the Moscow Counterterrorism Section.
Apparently when the Soviet Union shut down, there were a lot of high-ranking soldiers, politicians, bureaucrats, and spies that lost their jobs, paychecks, and opportunities for graft. They did NOT like this and did whatever they could to get some kind of power and cash flow back in their sweaty little palms.
The other thing that happened when the Soviet Union broke up was a lot of weapons and equipment was suddenly available if you knew who to talk to, namely one of the above soldiers, politicians, bureaucrats, and spies who were flailing around looking for cash.
The Soviet Union had the biggest military, in terms of relatively high-tech equipment at least, in the world. So it basically became the global mega-mall of violence if you had the cash and the contacts.
Then the Bratva (that’s the Russian word for “Brotherhood”) got involved. The Bratva is a pretty wide-ranging word that covers pretty much all Russian organized crime. The Bratva groups work a lot like the old Mafia groups in the US in 40s’, 50s’ and 60s’, only better armed and a lot more violent.
So you have gangsters with access to tanks, rockets, bombs, former special operations soldiers, and possibly nuclear weapons…Politicians that will block investigations, leak information, and do whatever’s necessary to keep themselves rich…And finally, terrorists looking to get the best explodey stuff money can buy.
So anyway, they wanted me here as an Arabic/Farsi linguist to translate wiretaps on potential buyers for ill-gotten goods. That’s right, my entire job was to sit in a room in a dumpy looking apartment block wearing itchy ugly headphones, and translate carry-out food orders.
My days were filled with dullness and takeout borscht orders not necessarily in that order. My partner in this tedium was an ex-FBI translator named Fisher who was pushing retirement and smelled like cheap aftershave. The pair of us swapped off twelve hour shifts and wished we were anywhere else.
The worst part was he pulled seniority and had me doing the 2000hrs - 0800hrs shift so I couldn’t hunt or shop or get any decent sleep! I ask you, is that fair? Here I am in a major European capitol and not even allowed to get my girly-girl instincts on. That is so not cool.
Anyway there I sat on a lumpy office chair, staring at the walls until someone started gabbing in my headphones. Then I got to start transcribing it as fast as possible. Oh what funnage! Important trivia…sensible people are asleep and not talking on the phone at three in the morning. In other words I never heard anything even remotely interesting. There were many days I wished I was back freezing on the top of a Tajiki mountain range or had said yes to General Schaefer.
Fisher and I were the remote intelligence gathering team. The action and ground investigation team were a bunch of chauvinist butt-heads seconded from the CIA. The only thing really redeemable about Fisher in fact, was that he thought they were just as much a bunch of idiots as I did. We had a small betting pool going on which one of them would screw up the operation first.
Maurice, the operations planner, was ex-DEA from the sounds of it and was proud of his “combat experience in Miami” and lorded it over Fisher and me. It was obvious that he hadn’t looked through either of our files as Fisher had been a SEAL during the Reagan ‘80s, and as for me, well…
Lawrence was a gadget guy. He was responsible for the bugging and wiretaps that Fisher and I listened to day in and day out. He and Maurice were always bickering about the proper placement of the gizmos.
And finally there was Jerome. He was the designated security and gave me the creeps. There was the buffoon act he always played and the grimy cheap suits he wore. He looked and acted like he got his jollies from hurting things for no real reason.
Lastly there was Marietta St. John. She was a career diplomat until a project of hers went bad so she ended up working for the DSS. Now she spent all her time kissing up to as many State Department bosses as she could, and yelling at Maurice to get results. We didn’t see her much because field ops would get in the way of her full schedule of official luncheons and dinners and that simply wouldn’t do!
So there I was, hating my career and my life, in the muggy hell of a Moscow summer. And then I said aloud the fateful phrase, “There’s no way this could get any worse…”
I gasped the moment that popped out, as I knew it was only a matter of time before trouble would find me. It had been a long and oh so boring night and we had just gotten word that the individuals we were watching were leaving town in a few days anyway. Apparently they really were wool dealers from Iraq.
It would take a few days to shut down the operation though and Fisher and I had to go through our stacks of transcripts to find something that proved that this whole thing hadn’t been a colossal waste of time and resources. Both of us agreed that we could start on that tomorrow and so we were walking together towards the Moscow Metro entrance. Now that the job was basically over, Fisher had loosened up and we were discussing Maurice’s shortcomings as a leader and as an operations chief as we boarded the escalator down into Park Poebedy station.
Just then my slayer instincts fired up. Something nasty was down in the station and by the time we reached the platform, 270 plus feet underground I could smell rotten and fresh blood in the air. I could tell Fisher had spotted it too by the way he unbuttoned his jacket.
Both of us were carrying our issue weapons and I had a couple of stakes and a knife just in case. I drew my pistol and slipped over to the turnstiles. Just on the other side was the body of a Moscow Transit policeman laying face down in a pool of his own blood. His pistol was beside his hand and the slide was locked back showing that it had been fired till it was empty. Fisher had moved up next to me and had drawn his own pistol. He looked up at me and I saw a change had come across his face. He didn’t look like an aging civil servant any more. He had hunter’s eyes…just like mine.
Fisher and I moved as quietly over the turnstiles as possible. Then the main lights flickered and died leaving us in pitch blackness except for the weak glows of the exit signs. I was fine and could see pretty well, but Fisher would literally be in the dark if we got jumped. I began pulling out my penlight when I heard a whispered “Don’t!”.
I doubletaked at the weird three lensed night vision goggles that Fisher had pulled out of his backpack and was strapping to his head.
“Cool, why wasn’t I issued a set?”
Fisher looked slightly startled, “You can see?”
“I eat a lot of carroty goodness. Saves on lightbulbs.”
He laughed slightly, “Something tells me you’re more than just a translator too.”
“Mayyyybe,” I slid off my jacket and rolled up my shirt sleeves, then quickly tied my hair back. Fisher had taken his jacket off too and was slipping a fancy looking watch-ish gadget onto his wrist.
I heard him muttering in the back of his throat for the Duty Officer to contact Grimsdottir ASAP.
“You have comms Fisher?”
He looked up at me. “No, not at this depth and with this much concrete and steel on top of us. How’d you know to ask?”
“I’m not an idiot even though I play one really well on occasion.”
“I can understand that…” he was about to say something else when a savage howl echoed through the tunnels.
“…That on the other hand…” he quickly finished pulling on a skintight dark gray bodysuit that seemed to suck up light and screwed a suppressor on his pistol.
I nodded and after reholstering my Sig, drew my knife.
“Tell me Fisher, have you ever heard of Jarrett Village?”
“Town in Somalia right? Rangers squashed a nasty warlord there I heard.”
“If we live through this, you’re going to hear more than you’ll want to know…”
He looked at my knife and the expression on my face, “Somehow I think you know what’s up there.”
“Actually not exactly, but the odds are pretty good I’ve run into something at least similar. Probably back when I was in High School. You’ve got the fancy vision, you wanna take point?”
He shrugged, “Why not, at least this beats transcribing intercepts.”
We worked our way through the darkened station. Once or twice hearing howls and groans that echoed off of the tile walls. There were also a fair amount of bodies laying around. This early in the morning though, traffic was light and the stations were due to close for their routine maintenance in about twenty minutes or so. The body count could easily have been a whole lot worse. In fact with the traffic the Moscow subway gets, triple and quadruple digit death tolls were very very of the possible.
“Jesus Summers, what happened to uh…it?” Fisher was pointing at a corpse that had torn into so many tiny pieces it was had to tell it had even been human. Also, not all the pieces were still there.
“I think something stopped for a snack, see how the internal organs and the brain are gone?” I pointed with my knife, “To a lot of…things, those are tastiest bits.”
“This is an animal attack? What happened, did a pack of leopards get loose down here?”
“Kinda sorta, only leopards probably wouldn’t kill for fun,” I pointed towards a stroller dripping blood, “They didn’t eat that body, just killed it. That means to me it’s open season with no bag limit.”
“I can work with that and call me Sam.”
“Hi Sam, you can call me Buffy.”
“Buffy?”
“Not one more word mister…”
We had entered from the long escalator at the end of the southern platform. By the time we got to the bridge in the middle that linked the two platforms over the tracks, the howling had gotten louder and a whole bunch more frequent.
Sam froze, then slowly eased back to me, “Ambush ahead. Thermal picked up a big heat source the other side of that pillar.”
“Yup. The other members of the pack are probably down on the tracks out of line of sight. Aim for the head or try to separate the spine. That’s the only way to slow these guys down without silver or fire. Decapitation does work if you can do it.”
“That sounds like we're fighting…”
“Oh yeah, were-somethings or other.”
I slipped down onto the tracks and squeezed myself as close as possible to the platform. Sam, if he was doing what we planned, was working his way from pillar to pillar. The only good thing about the weres being so with the extreme and gratuitous killage, was there was so much blood stink in the air our scents would be tough to pick up. The echoes in the mostly tile station would hide our true locations as well.
I was pretty sure they knew we were down here, but not exactly where down here.
Sam had taken my explanation of were-creatures really existing with a "Sure, why not?" sort of shrug, holstered his pistol, and drawn a large combat knife before slinking off into the darkness. Even without that fancy suit he was hard to spot and hear. With it, he was almost invisible in the shadows.
The plan was simple ambush them before they ambushed us. We were going to hit both sides of their picket line at once. I was worried about Sam getting taken down too quickly, but his suit looked to have something like Dragonscale built into it. He was a heck of a lot more resistant to clawey and bitey things than me at the moment. I sighed and moved out.a
They were all facing the bridge where they thought we'd have to cross to get to the other platform. so I moved till I was right behind the last one in the line.
There were six of them and they were really big, about seven to eight feet tall, and wolves by the look of it. The last time I had seen a werewolf that big was one that had moved down to Sunny-Hell from the colony up in Drago California.
I tried to remember what I knew about that kind of were, Seriously, there are so many different kinds of nasty things around it's hard to keep track sometimes. Stronger than the typical, heal fast from almost any wound, able to control the change, really stubborn. I think that was the basic list, and oh yeah, dumber than most. Think of them as a hairier biker gang.
In my awful Russian I yelled out something that I hoped was "Look it's Haley's Comet!" but with my luck was probably closer to "Your elephant is in the blender!"
Whatever I said they all turned to face me just as I leaped on my first target's back and separated his head from his body. As he dropped I flipped away from the onrushing furry horde and leapt onto the northbound platform.
I think I may have pissed them off slightly, as I was still holding their droog's head and was waving it at them like a pom pom to keep them angry. The level of ick in this job never ceases to amaze me.
The next thing that amazed me was Sam dropping from the shadowed ceiling like a murderous spider and looping a garrote around the last one in the conga line's neck. In a second he had it face down on the ground with his knees pressed into the small of the were's back, and was hauling up as hard as possible.
Weres are really really tough in general, and this kind even more in particular, but they are alive and do have to breath. That were was being choked to death by an expert and didn't stand a chance as long as Sam kept up the pressure. The really impressive thing was that Sam's entire drop and take-down with choking as a side was done completely silently. The others hadn't noticed a thing.
Right, next order of business is to do hit and run. I sped up and dived over the tracks to the north platform, sliding to a stop next to a cluster of bodies. Right before I hit, I threw the head as hard as I could into the floor to make sure it smashed the brain. You just can't take chances with regenerators.
I lay in the puddle of blood from their kills playing dead. I had made them stupidly angry, a specialty of mine I must admit, and they were weren't paying attention to their surroundings like they should have.
One of them even stepped over the couple I was laying next to.
Too bad so sad. I ran my knife blade up his left femoral artery around his junk and down his right femoral. I pulled my head out of the way in time as a large portion of his blood supply vented to the floor followed by his body as I had hamstrung him at the same time.
One of his buddies turned towards me, so I flung a stake into his left eye. It wouldn't stop him long, but any time I gained was quality play time. That done, I turned the guy I downed into a Pez dispenser and twisted off the skull, breaking the spine.
After I was finished with him I turned back to ol' one-eye. He had pulled the stake out and I could see that he was more than a little irritated with my reindeer games. Fine. I dodged his first swing and when he lunged to bite I stabbed him in the chest and leaving the knife in, reached up and double ear clapped him. His howl was pretty damn impressive, so I pulled my knife back out and spinning round kicked him in the throat. I felt his larynx pop, and his howl turned into a wolvy coughing fit.
Important biology tip when fighting things that have dentigrade (backwards knee-ish) legs. front kicks to the shins are very effective to drop them to the floor. Once he was down, I axe-kicked him across the top of the skull and felt it shatter.
The other three were coming after me now, so I turned and sprinted towards the bridge. When I got there I saw Sam was engaged with a really big honking wolf. He had his knife out and by the blood splashes on the fur I could see that he had been cutting it pretty badly. Unfortunately it was tough enough not to care at the moment of the cut and healed quickly enough so that the cuts weren't slowing him down.
I yelled out in Arabic, "Sam duck! I'm hitting him high!" and launched into a flying kick. Sam dropped to his knees and pushed against the big were's legs as the wolf spun to face my yell. In fact he turned just in time to get my boot in his face.
With Sam as the fulcrum I did my Archimedes impression and moved the were a good twenty feet. It wasn't the world, but it was pretty cool.
The other three were still chasing me though and as I had done some sudden stoppage, they were on top of me immediately. I lost track of Sam as I went into full defense. I was stronger than these guys and a whole lot faster, but there were three of them and they all had a heck of lot longer reach, nasty sharp claws and teeth, and healed very fast.
For members of a pack, they weren't really good with teamwork though. It was easy enough to guide their attacks into one another, as they all wanted the killing blow and would get in each other's way. The longer the fight went one the madder they got with me and with their buddies for blocking what should have been the final blow. I started slacking back on my strikes and showing all the signs of getting exhausted. That made them even madder when it was obvious that I was on the ropes and if it wasn't for the other's clumsiness I would be dead already.
I kept working the brawl until all three of them were absolutely furious with each other then guided one of their strikes into another's face.
All I had to do then was disengage from the dogfight as they proceeded to beat the crap out of each other. When two were down I stepped back in and dropped the exhausted winner before removing all three of their heads.
It was suddenly quiet except for a hissing popping sound by the tracks. I walked over and looked down. There was Sam standing next to the char-broiled corpse of the big one.
"Wow!"
"Third rail."
"So I take it you're not just a translator..." Sam was watching my back as I kicked open a janitor's closet and rinsed as much blood out of my hair and shirt as I could.
"I could say the same about you Agent Fisher. Tell you what, if we get out of this alive you can ask General Schaefer at SOCOM very nicely about me."
"You're one of Dutch's troops? That explains a lot. And what do you mean alive, are there more?"
"Probably. Take a look at the ones we took out, they should have shifted back to human by now. Do any of them look older than 20 or so?"
"Just the big one, Hard to tell B-B-Qed like he is though."
"I was afraid of that. This was a blooding hunt. The rest of the older males in their pack are somewhere close. They're the really dangerous ones."
"Wonderful. How do you know so much about werewolves anyway?"
"My best friend has been dating one since high school. He's a Pomeranian compared to these though."
"I had to ask. Now what?"
I had finished rinsing and felt a whole lot less icky. "Now," I answered, "We get to the surface without dying. They're probably watching the escalators and emergency stairs. Maybe go down the tunnel to the next station? That will limit the ways they can come after us."
"Sounds good...How fast can they run anyway?"
"A lot faster than me in a straight line and I can run fast enough to set world records. They have stability issues with corners and stopping though."
"This is going to be fun," he flipped his goggles down over his eyes and we took off down the track.
The two of us were running like heck down a dimly lit subway tunnel. The Alpha hadn't sent the rest of the pack after us right away, which probably meant he wasn't sure what was going on. That was good. The longer he was confused, the better off we were and the more time we had to flee.
Sam could run, that's for sure. He was an old guy, but as long as I kept my speed down he was able to stay with me. He was puffing pretty good and didn't sound happy. After we had gone about half a mile, I slowed down to a fast walk and he did as well.
"You okay Fisher?"
"Yeah, I thought I was in good shape, but damn you can run."
"Told you so. I'm still kind of new to Moscow. How far to the next station?"
"That would be Kiyevskaya, Summers. It's about three klicks from Park Pobedy where we started. We have about two klicks to go I'd guess."
I nodded and took a deep breath then held it. I needed to listen. There they were, the growls of a hunting pack behind us and closing fast. Sam saw the expression on my face and guessed what was up.
"Follow me Summers!" he moved to a plain metal door set in to the side of the tunnel, then reached into a side pocket of his pack and pulled out a set of lockpicks. In a few seconds he had the door open.
"That may not stop them Fisher."
"Should slow them down a little though," I had to agree with that.
We moved down an ancient flight of stairs and through a few more metal doors, locked and unlocked. There was a point where the two of us had to wade through some nasty water and sludge which I am sure would have ruined my boots forever, if the blood hadn't already. Once we got to the other end of the water channel, we went up a few flights of stairs and found ourselves in a deserted set of rooms.
I didn't hear the pack any more and was pretty sure we had lost them. I knew I was lost at least. Sam was poking through some papers on one of the desks.
"What is this place Sam?"
"Soviet Era fallout shelter and command post I think. It doesn't look like anybody's been down here since the 50's judging by some of these papers."
"Cool...right?"
"Weird actually. Normally you don't leave documents stamped 'Sekreti' in an abandoned bunker. Especially when they appear to be code pads."
"That doesn't seem normal no..."
"Not even for Soviet era conscripts."
My spider-sense started twitching, "Sam, we're not alone down here."
"Were-wolves?"
"I don't think so."
"Offense or Defense?"
Fisher looked thoughtful for a second then grinned, "Offense. Sometimes I just have to welcome strangers."
I grinned back, "Yeah, sometimes I'm terrible with the wait-age too."
We drew our weapons and headed to the only other door out of the room we were in. Now that we were closer it was easy to see the dents where something had pounded on it from the other side. The two heavy locking bars were still firmly clamped in place at least.
On a hunch I pulled out my penlight and shone it on the bars. In scratchy heavily faded brown ink, there were all sorts of marks and squiggles that a Watcher or a Willow could probably translate easily. All I could tell was that they were in Coptic script and I was pretty sure that 'apocalypse' was that squiggle in the center.
"Well whatever's written here is probably a sealing charm of some kind."
"Charm? You mean like magic?"
"Oh yeah. Werewolves, vampires, witches, demons...they're all real. Not all of them hate humanity of course, but enough do so that I'm always busy."
"So you're a demon hunter working for Dutch?"
"Nope. He tried to recruit me, but I said no thanks unh-unh. I like being a civilian. Uniforms are so not flattering."
"Ah...yeah," Fisher looked slightly dazed so I decided to take mercy on him and back down the ditz act.
"It's okay Fisher, most people are curled up in a fetal position by this point. You managed to kick two werewolves' butts without using silver and not get hurt. There are very few people that can do that."
"I'll take your word on that Summers. So it seems like you're the expert here. Through the door or head on out?"
"See these scrawls. They're fading and once they're gone whatever is inside can get outside. This will not be a good thing especially considering I'm not sure how we got here in the first place so I'm don't know if I can get back here later to make sure whatever it is stays sealed up."
"How bad is the whatever it is?"
"Well that brownish color usually means blood used as ink. Also I do recognize a word that means serious death and pain in the squiggles. I'd say, very bad with highs in the terrible range? This is potentially an end of the world type moment."
"Guess we have no choice then?"
"I don't. You can bail if you want to though. I'd wait a couple of hours so that the weres get bored and leave first. They have no patience. I mean even less than me."
"You're not getting rid of me that easily Summers, I'm coming with you."
"Suit yourself," I heaved down on the locking arm and with a pretty Frankenstein's lab style groan both bars snapped open. It still took a decent shove to push the door open and soon we were looking down a dark corridor with small blobs of light from ancient amber bulbs set into the ceiling.
"Still has power?" I was surprised.
"Soviet tactics were to overengineer everything, lighting systems included."
"Well, let's go meet the neighbors."
The corridor was short and ended with a door torn off its hinges. The room past it stank of old blood.
"Yuck!"
There floor was covered with decayed chunks of people and piles of military hardware. I scooped up a submachinegun and examined it. It was pitted with rust. Not too surprising considering how much water was in a body.
"Fisher, how old were those codes?"
"August 1952."
"This happened over fifty years ago then. Check out the bodies. See how all the pieces are pretty close together for a given dead guy?"
"Yeah?"
"That means they were killed and probably not eaten. All this tasty meat and no snackage..."
"What does that mean?"
"Not your standard demon, vampire, were-beast on a rampage...I don't know exactly what it means, but whatever it is, it does not play nice. You sure you don't want to bail?"
"Uh, no."
"Okay silly old guy."
"Hey!"
I grinned at him, "I understand, I couldn't leave this either."
"Let's find us a monster then Summers."
We had descended down two levels passing through a whole bunch of rooms and corridors well decorated with corpses. So far all the rooms had looked like parts of an underground command center. Barracks, offices, and that sort of stuff.
"Hold up!" Fisher hissed at me.
I stopped and turned to see him pointing at a heavy metal door, "What?"
"Armory. Door is still sealed."
"Can you open it?"
"Probably, give me a second," he pulled out his tools and got to work on the lock.
"You have got to show me how to do that. A friend taught me the basics, but you make it look so easy."
"Just have to have a little patience...and there!" the door swung open revealing a room full of mostly empty weapons racks and a few crates on the floor. Fisher kicked open one of the crates revealing a bunch of oily brown paper wrapped objects. He bent down and sniffed the paper.
"Thank god they used Ballistol."
"Ba-whatzit?"
"German made gun oil and corrosion preventative," he pulled a object out and unwrapped it revealing an AK-47, "Hell of lot better for us than cosmoline. Seeing as we don't have boiling water, ammonia, and the time to use either."
He rummaged through the crate and pulled out a couple handfuls of AK magazines, "Find us some ammo."
I started ripping crates open. The first one had more AKs the second..."Fisher, what's this?"
He came over and looked down at the large weapon, "DShK heavy machinegun. No tripod or cart though. Kind of useless for us. It would be like hauling a .50 cal."
I bent over and picked it up, "I can haul a .50 cal. Now give me some of those AK slings..."
With a bunch of slings, I had cobbled together a decent enough harness for the DsHK. Fisher had spent his time loading magazines for an AK.
The machine gun weighed close to 100 pounds loaded so I was basically double my body weight carrying it, but that weight would help soak up the recoil and not send me flying when I fired it. That first burst was going to be exciting though.
Now up-gunned, and with a bunch of grenades we had scavenged, we continued to move into the complex. Eventually we came to a checkpoint in front of a two foot thick steel blast door that had been battered open from the inside and then roughly closed. Letting the MG sag on its harness, I carefully pulled the door open as quietly as possible.
Inside was a tiny room wih another destroyed door on the other side.
"Looks like an airlock Summers."
"Bioweapon lab?"
"Maybe. Normally bacteria don't beat people to death though."
"Oh yeah. Really big bioweapon lab? Viruses that work out...a lot?"
"Is that possible in your world?"
"Corpses coming back to life to feast on the blood of the living and wear ugly clothes are part of my world. Giant musclebound viruses...not too much of a stretch."
"If I'm going to die by E.Coli beat down, it least it will make a hell of an autopsy report."
With that happy thought we eased through the second door.
There was a dramatic difference in the halls of this new section from the parts of the command center we had seen. Everything was swept and dusted like it had a regular cleaning crew go through it weekly. I also started hearing muttering voices around the next corner so I waved at Fisher to stop.
The voices were high pitched, scratchy, and speaking some odd dialect of Russian. I looked over questioningly at Fisher who shrugged and shook his head, then eased past me completely silently. When he got to the corner he pulled a snake-like thing out of his pack and poked it around the bend while holding the other end to his eye. After a few seconds, he put it away and slipped back to me.
We backed up further till we were well away before he said anything.
"Two of them, about your height. They were wearing old style Soviet Army Technical Services Rank. They're guarding a door."
"Any weapons?"
"All I saw were bayonets on their belts. No guns at all."
"Humans or humanish?"
"Not humans. Their faces looked odd."
"Want to see who they're working for?"
"How?"
"Well duh, going up and asking them for a start."
"Are you serious?"
"Sure. You stay hidden along with this," I patted the DsHK, "I'll go ask as the helpless damsel."
"Yeah, that could work. You going to be okay Summers?"
"If not, I have you to back me up."
"Not a whole lot of choices. Okay, let's do it."
We moved back up and I carefully set the machinegun on the floor, straightened my poor battered outfit and stepped round the corner.
"Um...Strasvychya! Gedye ya?" I figured saying hello and asking where I was would be a good start.
"Shto!!!" they seemed surprised to see me so I waved at them looking as innocent as possible, "Ya Amerikanisch. Vy govaroo Angliski yazik?"
They were weaselly little guys with a serious case of ugly stick bludgeoning. After I asked them if they spoke English they huddled up. Then one went through the door they were guarding, while the other drew his bayonet and tried to look fierce and dangerous. Confidentially, he didn't do a very good job of it. Heck, Wills could have done a better job.
A couple minutes later the door reopened and a blonde woman dressed in an immaculate uniform stepped out. The weaselly looking one that had obviously fetched her standing to one side.
Then the weaselly looking one spoke in english, "Her Magnificence the General Glorificus the Unimaginably Powerful thanks you for dinner. Please present your head to be feasted upon."
"Who?" I have to admit it's not the greatest response, but what can you really say to an intro like that?
The blonde answered, "Glorificus. You're a mortal; you should listen when your betters are introduced."
Her tone of voice worried me. She said that like I was just some kind of pond scum to be scraped off her boot.
"Sorry Glory, never heard of you. Are you a Soviet virus?"
"Her name is Glorificus, soon to be smear of blood and tissue upon the concrete. Obey her willingly and she will only devour your consciousness and sanity leaving you alive but blissfully mindless," her minions set a new bar for obsequiousness.
"Sorry wrinkles, I didn't know she was something more than a skank with a bad wave and poor fashion sense."
'Did you...did she just insult me? Jinx, did that slimy mortal just insult me?" Glory looked like she was getting a little upset.
"Oh most beautiful and untouchable harbinger of my potential torture and destruction, I do think that she may have slurred your appearance and sense of style. Two opinions that I, as one that wishes to continue breathing unimpaired for as long as possible, do not agree with of course."
"And who are you to insult a hellgod?"
Uh oh. Things that claim deific rank usually aren't, but something in the back of my mind made me think that Glory was the exception that proved the rule, "I'm Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. How'd you get stuck down here anyway?"
She sighed, "I'm in my home dimension, lounging in my favorite feeding ground. When the other two members of my triumvirate decide that I may have gone a little bit too far in devouring our worshippers. In mean it's not like they were important or anything right? Anyway they do some ritual and banish me to this dimension and I wind up getting caught in this thing that's all sparks and glowing and a bunch of stupid mortals are yelling at me. I eat them and then more mortals start attacking me so I eat them too. Finally a couple get away and manage to lock me into this place with only my servants to attend me and no decent meals anywhere. I put myself to sleep to wait for more food and my servants woke me when you arrived."
As she spoke my spider-sense was tingling stronger and stronger by the second. I knew I was out of my league.
"Sam! Run!" I yelled as I grabbed her closest minion and threw him into her face. There was a splat as she almost casually batted him away and embedded him into a wall before he even got near her 'do. I had taken two quick steps back and scooped up the DsHK from where it lay on the floor and triggered a burst into her face. The recoil sent me skidding backwards, but the sudden change in tactics surprised her and I managed to hit her between the eyes with at least a couple of rounds before she dodged around the corner faster than I could track her movements.
The next sound I heard was Fisher flipping grenade after grenade through the door where she had vanished. I heard the arming levers springing free so I ran. I had just made it around the next bend in the passage before the explosives went up. The walls and floor shook and I heard an aggravated scream, "Bitch! You ruined my outfit!"
I caught up to Fisher just as he rounded the next corner, "I said run! I just caught something in the face with a burst from this and it didn't even scratch her!"
"Oh fuck..."
We spent the next few minutes dodging and weaving through the corridors until we found ourselves in some weird looking lab complex. There was dust and a few messed up bodies lying around here which meant whatzerface probably didn't visit much. That was good, we needed to regroup.
"So what was it?" Fisher asked me when he had caught his breath.
"An indestructible commie valley girl...at least that's what she looked like."
"Another one?" he was looking at me.
"I'm not a communist or indestructible. Plus I was born in LA. This," I shook the DsHK, "annoyed her but I don't think it hurt her. We need something bigger."
"I'll see what I can find," he slipped off in that creepy silent way of his. I started poking through the papers and notes on the consoles at the edges of the room.
It was pretty big and had a large platform in the center surrounded by intricately carved columns. I recognized some of the carvings as a Sumerian summoning and binding ritual, only whoever wrote it was worse at spelling Sumerian than I was.
Half the notes and scrolls scattered around were magical texts and the half were wiring diagrams. The wiring diagrams I left alone, but the magical texts I could kind of puzzle out. Some were in English and some of the scrolls were in Classical Greek at least.
Fisher was back in about half an hour pushing a large dolley. He found me sitting in the middle of a huge pile of paper making notes on the floor.
"What'd you find Summers?"
"Nothing good so far. Can you translate this notebook? My reading of cursive cyrillic sucks."
He picked it up, "It's a diary, pretty torn up though. Last readable entry dated 10th of August 1952. 'Project underway. Utilizing Terwilliger resonation system to substitute for blood sacrifice and proper celestial synchronization. The Generalisimus', that's Stalin, 'the Generalisimus demands success or our families will suffer.' There's something written here called the 'Ogdru Jahad', whatever that is, 'may be called according to the documents gathered by Kroenen and von Krupt. Once it is called, our task is complete.' Where did you find this?"
"On that body. He was sitting in the nicest chair, so I thought he might have been in charge."
"So what are you taking notes on?"
"Trying to figure out what they summoned. It's a mess though. Even I know better than to try to play around with summonings. Especially when they built this one like an order from a Chinese restaurant. You know, Chant from column A...Sigils from column B...Not a good idea. Mixing spells always leads to the messy."
"So what were they trying to get...and what did they get?"
"An extradimensional source of great power I think, and they might have grabbed the wrong one. They might have also screwed up the binding sigils on those pillars. Either way, what they called wasn't under their control and just killed all of them. So what did you find?"
"About half a ton of TNT."
"That might slow her down..."
Terwilliger property HP Lovecraft
Ogdru Jahad, Kroenen, and von Krupt property Mike Mignola
We moved back through the dusty halls towards where we had run into that Glory chick. Fisher had rigged the TNT into a hundred and twenty five pound satchel charges with a chain of Soviet grenade fuses as detonators. Once the pin was pulled, it had about ten seconds before kablooie.
I had left the DsHK behind so I could haul the first two bombs to the deployment zone. This zone was in the exact opposite direction of the lab, so if it didn't kill her, she still wouldn't know where we were hiding. Even from the brief contact I'd had with her, she really didn't strike me as the sharpest deity ever to lay down divine wrath. More like a dumber version of Harmony.
Still, even the biggest idiot of a demon can lay down the smack. So it was probably a good plan to keep as much space between her and us as possible.
When we got to the choke point, Fisher packed the charges into lockers on the opposite sides of the hall. As he worked he explained how the tamping would channel the blast into one specific direction; amplifying its effects. When he was done we went back for the next two to set up about twenty feet further down the hall.
According to Sam, the way we were setting up the charges was called implosive lensing. When they went bang all their force would be aimed at a single point. Apparently this is one of the ways you can make a nuclear weapon go off. So anyway, all four blast waves would hit her at about the same time and would keep the other waves from moving past, so all that energy would be absorbed by the bulletproof blonde. This had a strong possibility of not ending well for her or us.
When he was done with the second set he set the trigger line along the wall and sprinkled it with dust to keep it from shining. Then it was simply a matter of me hauling the heaviest things I could find and stacking them next to the blast doors on the way to the focus point. Once I had them balanced to fall with a little push, I went to fetch the DsHK and act baity.
It took a little while to find one of her minions. The wrinkled little freak looked like he was searching for us, but it seemed as if he was just as mentally gifted as his boss so he was wandering aimlessly. I aimed and fired a short burst, The DsHk aimed low and to the left so I only took off his hand. I think he got off light.
With an abrupt scream he took off and followed. Eventually we got back to the cleaned up area. Now not exactly so clean due to grenade shrapnel and smoke as well as the blood leaking from my guide's hand. I fired off a long burst. In this kind of tightly enclosed space it sounded spectacular.
In just a few seconds Glory had popped around the corner.
"Hi my name is Buffy! I'm working my way though apotheosis and I was wondering if you would like to make a contribution. I understand killing a god can bring godhood?"
"You little bitch! You ruined my second best uniform! Death is far too good for you!"
"Strictly speaking, I just shot you in the face. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it helped, as you're still skanky. Sam was the one who blew you up and I have to say, he feels really bad about it. Especially since you're still like...alive?"
"I am going to rip the sanity from your so-called mind and feast on its tatters!"
"Ooo is that some kind of diet? Judging from your...curves I see that you really need to stick to it. Too many souls go straight to the hips I guess."
"Die!" with that she took off straight at me. I'm fast. Very very fast, both in straight line speed and reaction time. Glory moved like I was encased in glue. She was almost on top of me before I managed to squeeze the trigger and walk a continuous burst into her chest.
The heavy rounds sent her spinning and she crashed into the corridor wall at full speed with an amazingly impressive crash.
"You okay your goddessness?" I was backing down the hall keeping the barrel of the heavy machinegun trained on her as she pried herself out of the concrete crater she had made.
"You are sooooo dead!" she started her charge again and moved so fast she was almost invisible. I had figured she was an opponent with very few tactics though, so she ran right into the ankle height burst as I finished off the belt. This time she landed on her face and slid past me from her momentum. I jumped up and did a double knee drop on the back of her head, driving it a good foot or so into the floor, before rolling to my feet and running like hell.
The rest of the chase was Buffy runs to blast door and knocks barricade over before hauling ass further down the hall. Glory encounters blast door and spends enough time destroying barricade that Buffy can make it to the next blast door and its barricade, wash, rinse, repeat.
Finally she was at the entrance of the final section of hallway before the lockers. I was standing at the end looking winded. She started her run towards me and I took my foot off the deadman's switch on the floor. Immediately the lights went out and there was the dual sounds of me slipping through the final door and the crash as Glory tripped over the well camouflaged sandbags lying on the floor.
I dropped the barricade as Sam peeked through his scope that was slid under the door.
"Is she on target?" I asked.
"Oh yes...Miss Coyote, meet Acme products," he pulled the triggerline and there was a faint plink as the grenade pin popped free.
There is loud, there is loud, and then there is 500 pounds of TNT in an enclosed space. When my ears stopped ringing I coughed out a lungful of dust and and looked for Fisher. We had both dived away from the door and the barricade and curled up in the corners of the room in case the ceiling had decided to get all touchy-feely with the floor from the shockwave. I saw him shaking his head and coughing so I figured he was in pretty good shape.
The next step was to listen carefully for an angry goddess tearing a hole through a door. All quiet on the blasted front. I wasn't fooling myself believing she was dead, but I was fairly certain she was at least not at her full strength. I began clearing the barricade as quickly as possible then levered open the blast door.
The hallway was still clouded with dust. The lockers the charges had been packed into were simply gone. A huge crater, about ten foot deep and filled with part of the ceiling, twisted rebar and, I presumed, our target filled the corridor. Looking up I saw a matching gouge in the ceiling.
"Did I use enough dynamite Butch?" Fisher had finally made his way to the door.
"I hope so. If not, we are so toast," I replied. He coughed and nodded.
"Step 3?"
"Yup," I jumped into the crater and began searching the rubble. In about the exact center I found an unconscious goddess with small trickles of blood coming from her nose, ears, and eyes. I waved Fisher back and emptied an entire belt from the DsHK into her head from about two feet. At that range she actually bruised.
"Damn Summers! That was just cold."
"I'm not sure how fast she heals. She could be out for two minutes or two weeks and I'm betting on the former. At least she'll probably wake up with a headache now. Wire her up."
Fisher came over and duct taped a ten pound charge to each side of her head as I began cocooning her in scraps of rebar. One thing I've found is that it doesn't matter how strong you are, if you don't have any leverage, you're stuck.
"You sure this going to hold?"
"She's been down here for fifty years with almost no food. Even gods have to get their power from somewhere worshippers, blood sacrifice, whatever. I think if she's hurt enough she'll have to use her energy reserves to heal and when they're gone...well I think I can take her."
"Really?"
"She's a god capable of taking insane damage. Why would she bother learning how to fight? She's a lot like your typical vampire in a way."
"Huh? What?"
"Almost unkillable unless you know the trick. Specific diet, which if not met, really cramps their style. Incredibly strong and fast compared to their targets. Arrogant about their abilities to the point of unbelievably dumb.
Sure the weapons used on her have to be Big Gulp sized, but the philosophy of taking them down is the same. Play on their arrogance, make them mad to the point of truly stupid, blindside them with something they're not expecting."
"That makes sense..."
"I've been fighting things in a heavier weight class than me since I was fifteen. I've had to learn how to fight smart. That should do it," I picked up the now steel mummified god and threw her over my shoulder.
She didn't start coming around for a couple of hours and by that time we had gotten completely set up. I had completely wrapped her up with a length of steel cable that I had found in what looked like a machine shop and Fisher had welded it to the rebar. Then with a makeshift tripod she was suspended upside down over the platform in the main lab.
"You...." she hissed.
"Rise and shine sleepy head. We have a big day ahead of us."
"Once I get free..."
"...You'll suck my mind and tear my body to tiny scraps. Not really creative you know? Maybe you should come up with a better threat while you're just hanging around. Or maybe you should really ask what we're doing here."
She stopped spluttering and for the first time looked around her.
"This is where I was summoned."
"Yeah we kind of figured that out already. Fortunately, my blonde-ness only reaches my roots, not deeper. Now I'm no way a witch nor do I play one on TV, but I've seen and helped with more than a few summonings and de-summonings and lucky for us the guys that brought you here had a checklist," Sam raised a yellowed piece of paper in the air. "There's still enough power to run the Tir-thinger and we know the settings so we're going to try to send you home. If you stay perfectly still, you have a better chance of making it and not turned inside out or something yucky like that."
"Summers, power's almost at full!"
"Thanks! So anyway we're going to try to send you home. If it works, great. If not we'll simply use larger and larger amounts of explosives until we crush you like a bug. Remember, us mortals made a god bleed," I wiped some of the trickle from her ear onto my fingers and showed her the smear. Her eyes widened.
"That's not possible!"
"Ask an unkillable demon called the Judge about what I do to the impossible. Oh that's right, you can't...I killed him anyway," I stepped away from her and back to the scrolls and my notes. Like I told Glory I'm no witch, but the guys who brought her here were worse with rituals than I am. They had everything spelled out phonetically and in what order stuff was supposed to be read. Just like a cheat sheet for a final exam.
All I had to do was reverse some of the order and the tense of some of the chants. That plus the fact she wasn't supposed to be in this dimension at all, should snap her back to where she belonged.
"Okay Summers firing it up!" Fisher threw a seriously large switch and with Universal horror movie lightning, sparks started to fill the room. I started to read the ritual and could feel the power building up.
Contrary to the attitude I'd shown Glory, I'd never done this by myself before so I was still worried that I might screw it up. But initially it seemed to go pretty smooth. I finished the evocations to the lords of the gate and began substituting the phrases for 'replacement' of the great power, rather than the 'delivery'. Giles would have been so proud of my pronunciation. The ritual went on and on and I started to catch myself putting myself to sleep from the dullness. Finally I got to the crescendo and with a blast of lightning Glory vanished, chains and all.
"It worked?"
"You mean you didn't know if that would work? I thought you knew what you were doing!"
"Sorry Sam..." whatever apology I was going to make froze in my throat as a large number of Russian soldiers suddenly poured into the room.
Fisher looked at me and shrugged, "Guess they might have noticed the bang."
I wasn't sure who looked more surprised, them or me, so I shouted out the first thing that came to mind, "Pomogite mne! Ja presledovalsja zdes' terroristami!
The guy in charge looked at me strangely and said, "Chased by terrorists?" in decent english.
"Uh yeah...? Did I pronounce it wrong or something? Hey, are you guys here to rescue me?"
"Rescue you? From what? Who are you?"
"Anne Winters. I'm a tourist. I was taking the train back from a friends when these psychos started killing everybody on the platform. I ran into the tunnel and through the first door I could find and wound up here in the middle of some kind of war. These guys in old style uniforms and some other guys all in black. There was a huge explosion somewhere in that direction so I ran and hid in here with all these..." I gestured at the machines, "things? Then the noises stopped, but I had no idea where I was. Then you came down here to rescue me. Thank you!" I ran over and hugged him.
My psychological assault seemed to work. They didn't see Fisher fade into the shadows. I knew the stunning effect of my babbleburst would dissipate quickly so I fell to the floor and started to sob to confuse the situation more. While I was down I slipped my pistol, holster, and ID under the corpse I was next to. The leader whistled a couple of his guys forward to help me off the floor. They quickly frisked me, missing the knife in my boot, and finding nothing, zip-tied my hands in front of me.
The leader spoke up, "Sorry about that, but we must be cautious in this kind of situation. My men will escort you to the entrance where ther is a doctor."
I mutely nodded to him and docilely allowed myself to be led out of the room. Once we were clear of the lab, I snapped the zip tie and dropped them both as quietly as possible. In a minute Fisher appeared.
"Here's your gear," he handed me my weapon and ID, "I already took care of the guards they left behind. Let's go."
"Not yet, we have to destroy everything in that room. We still have a quarter ton of TNT in there, right?"
"Okay, I'll set the charge Summers, you get the guards clear. Can't afford to leave any dead Russian bodies on this job."
"Got it."
We snuck back into the lab where I started pulling the three unconscious guards well clear of Sam's planned mayhem. Then I closed and sealed all the blast doors in. Bending the locking bars insured we wouldn't be interrupted.
"Ready Sam?"
"Kind of..." he had stacked all our remaining explosive around the Tirwilliger machine and the pillars. He was now scooping up all the papers and adding them to a small bonfire of mystical scrolls and tomes, "...How far can you run in ten seconds or so?"
"I don't think I'm going to like this am I?"
"No triggerline. This needs to be a pull pin and run."
"Well, I just hope I can run far enough."
"I'd do it, but I know I probably wouldn't make it."
"No Sam, It's okay. I got this. You can start clearing our way past the guards at the entrance."
"You sure?"
"Yup," I made sure to pop the 'p' extra hard.
"On my way then."
I waited ten minutes then scooped up the DsHK and slung it on my back. I stretched out my legs and hips and cracked my neck. Lining up on the still open last blast door I pulled the pin and ran.
Before when the charges had gone off I was well clear of the direct pressure front. In addition the lensing effect had reduced the blast wave at its edges. This time the charge went off as I was in the middle of shutting the blast door to the lab. Stupid old Soviet fuses.
It ripped the door off its hinges, as I hadn't had a chance to throw the locking bar, and carried it and me sailing down the hall. Fortunately I unbalanced it slightly so it went into a slow spin and I landed with the door between me and the concrete floor. After sliding another twenty feet or so I was tumbled off and while shaking my head to clear it, checked for missing body parts. All of Buffy seemed to be present so it was time to start running again.
As my hearing started to return, I could pick up echoing shouts in Russian on the order of "What the fuck was that?" and its ilk. Occasionally I would pass an unconscious soldier so I knew I was following Fisher's route out. When I got to the entrance of the lab complex I saw him standing over a couple of bodies so I whistled to let him know I was behind him.
He spun, saw it was me and the pair of us took off into the Moscow underground labyrinth.
A couple hours later we came out of a storm drain about a block from the US Embassy. We were both filthy, exhausted, hungry, and alive. I just wanted to get back to my apartment and shower and sleep. I was waving goodbye to Sam when he stopped me and pointed at the weapon on my back.
"And what were you planning to do with this?"
I felt embarrassed as I had actually forgotten I was carrying it.
"Um, I don't think I can just dump it in a trash can."
"Give it to me, I can get it back to the States for you."
"Really?"
"I think you earned it, plus it suits you, brings out your eyes."
I handed him the DsHK and as he hefted it gave him a big hug, "Thanks Sam, I owe you."
"No you don't. This is the most interesting mission I've run in Moscow ever. If you ever decide you need a new job, I'm pretty sure my boss can find a place for you. Just send a message to me and I'll set up a meet."
"I told General Schaefer no..."
"Hey, I had to make the offer. Don't worry, I won't talk about this. I know a lady has to keep her secrets. Take care Buffy!" and with that he disappeared into the darkness.
A month later I was reassigned back to Headquarters in DC. When I got to my new apartment there was a large wooden crate in the center of the floor with a big red bow tied around it. Inside was the DsHK and a folder full of ATF waivers and machinegun tax stamps.
On the outside of the folder was a post-it with...
"You need better locks.
Sam"