[LEATHERNECKS VS. MONSTERS: LOOSE ENDS]
EPISODE FIVE: 
The Vektor Institute and Vladivostok, January and February 1919, by Leatherneck1993

The second shell landed in the yard.

The windows along the hall came in all at once. The gallery jumped under Adams's boots, and the trench gun went off, and the Manchurian Special that should have gone into the middle of the white coat went into the console instead. The ashtray burst into white fire. Bakanov went down behind the engine and was gone among the brass.

Down on the floor, between the copper towers, the shimmer swelled.

It bellied out from the towers with the concussion, shuddered, and settled. It settled wider than it had been. The snow coming through the hole in the roof whipped into it and went up, faster, and a sound came out of it that Adams felt in the roots of his teeth.

Thorpe had both hands on the rail.

"The shells," she said. "Every shell opens it wider. That is what the guns are for, Gunny. He wants them to break it."
"The General's going to put the next one through the roof."
"Then the General must stop."
Adams turned. "Talbot. The wireless room. You saw where the wires came down off the mast. Chavez, go with him. Tell Dragonov we're alive. Tell him every shell opens the door. Tell him to come in with the bayonet."

Talbot was already moving, the camera banging on his hip. Chavez went after him with the automatic rifle.

Robed men were coming up the stair. Hunt and Sheehan were at the head of it with their bayonets, and the robed men did not stop, and Hunt and Sheehan did not either.
#

The wireless room was at the end of the long house under the mast, a cold room full of coils and a spark gap the size of a stove. Two robed operators sat at the bench. Chavez opened with his automatic rifle, he put a burst of Specials into the first and the light went up inside him. The second got halfway out of his chair before Chavez's second burst found him.

Talbot sat down at the key. The spark gap was live. He could hear the engine's stutter in it, the long-wave hum the box had been listening to since Seattle, and he keyed straight through it, plain English, slow, the way he had sent copy to the Picayune from Manila:

STOP FIRE STOP AMERICANS ALIVE STOP EVERY SHELL OPENS DOOR STOP COME IN WITH BAYONET STOP ADAMS

He sent it three times. The spark cracked blue across the gap and the mast sang it out over the mountains.
#

Johansson stood by the guns in the snow.

Four of them, laid on their sledges in a row at the head of the valley, with the gunners stripped to their shirts in the cold, and every gunner's breath going up in clouds in the light of the muzzle flashes. The third shell was going into the breech when the operator at the American set pulled off his headphones and stood up waving a paper.

Dragonov took it. He looked at it. He held it out at arm's length.

"English," he said. "It is in English."

Wang Che took it out of his hand. He read it aloud in Russian, and then in English for Johansson, and Johansson felt his chest go loose.

"Cease fire," he said. "They're alive."

Commissar Zhuk had come up behind the general with his ledger under his arm and his scarf wound up over his mouth. He said something in Russian, short.

"He says it is a trick," Wang Che said. "He says the Americans are dead. He says the machine is ready, and the General must fire."

Dragonov looked at Zhuk.

Johansson looked at Zhuk too. Thirty below. Every man on that hillside breathing out white. Zhuk had his scarf up, as he had in the prayer house and on the road and every hour since.

Wang Che stepped up to him and pulled the scarf down.

Zhuk's mouth was open. Nothing came out of it.

Dragonov shot him. His ledger book dropped from his hand, caught the wind and flew open the pages scattering everywhere in the snow, three columns on every one of them. Zhuk slumped, then leapt towards the general, hands turned to icy claws.  Johansson fired the anti-cryptozoic special rounds lit him up like the Fourth of July, his burnt husk dropped onto the snow, he did not get back up.

"Cease fire!" Dragonov roared. "Cease fire! We go in with the bayonet!" He swung on his own gunners. "Bring the music! And the Flame!"

They put the gramophone on a sledge.

Dragonov took the pencil out of the operator's hand and wrote the reply himself, in capitals, and gave it back, and the operator keyed it. Then he took out the Fabergé watch and opened it and looked at it, and showed it to Johansson.

Seven-oh-three.

"Green flare when the door is shut," Dragonov said. "Then everybody out. At eight o'clock I burn the house."

Wang Che was already pulling off his coat. Johansson stared at him.

"You're going in?"
"Fast is my best quality," Wang Che said, and went down the gorge with the first company at a run.
#
The guns stopped.

In the hall the robed men at the engine looked up, and Adams looked up, and for a moment there was nothing but the clatter of the brass. Then, far off and coming up the gorge, there was music. Horns, climbing. A drum underneath them.

"Strauss," Thorpe said.

The front doors of the long house came in. Partisans came through them with knapsack flamethrowers on their backs and the fire went down the corridors in long yellow tongues. Maxims came in on sledges, dragged by men in sheepskins. Bayonets. Grenades. Johansson came in at the point of it with the Thompson, firing in short bursts, and behind him came the gramophone on its sledge, still playing.

The things came out of their white to meet them. Two of them, three, horned and white and folding, out of the corridors and the ceilings, and the flamethrowers met them. They burned. They burned badly. The cold-men burned worse. A partisan lit his cigarette off a burning robed man and walked on.

In the corridor by the pens the partisans found the men in the wool caps, their own men, and lowered their rifles, and stood looking at them. Then they began to carry them out.

Adams went over the gallery rail.

He went down a card rack hand over hand with the cards tearing under his gloves and dropped the last ten feet to the floor. The robed men at the engine were turning toward the doors and the fire. Nobody stopped him.

The colonel's face was gray-blue and rimed, and his eyes were open.
"Gunny," he said.
"Sir."
Adams had the trench knife out. He cut the chest strap and the wrists and the ankles, and the colonel tried to stand and his feet would not hold him, and Adams caught him under the arms.

"Can't feel them," Quarterburn said.
"You'll feel 'em later. You won't like it."

Quarterburn reached past him to the console. The .38 lay beside the burned ashtray. He picked it up in his right hand. The hand shook.

Chavez came in at the side door with the automatic rifle and set himself in the corridor mouth, where the robed men would have to come through to reach the floor, and began to fire, short bursts, counting aloud.

"Eight. Seven."

Thorpe came down the stair. She went to the console where the card punch sat, a brass keyboard with a hopper of blank cards beside it, and she pulled a chain of punched cards out of the rack and laid it across her knees and read it, card by card, with her lips moving. Then she took a blank card and began to punch.

"What are you doing?" Adams said.
"Writing it backward," Thorpe said. "It computed the door open. It can compute it shut. Lady Lovelace explained how, in 1843, to a room full of men who were not listening."

Wang Che came through the side door past Chavez, out of breath, his pistol ready, with soot on his face. He stood at Thorpe's shoulder and watched her punch, and counted the holes on his fingers, and frowned.

"You have made one mistake," he said.
Thorpe did not look up. "I have not."
"No, you didn’t" Wang Che agreed. "I wanted to see if you were certain."
"Four," Chavez said, in the corridor. "Three."
Thorpe fed the end of her chain into the sprockets.
The engine bucked.

It did not want the new cards. The brass wheels stuttered and caught and stuttered, and the clatter broke up into something with no rhythm in it at all, and the copper towers began to sing. The shimmer between them heaved.

Something came through it.

A split toed foot. A foot the size of the bed of a Ford truck, webbed, white, with a black nail on each long toe, and it came down out of the shimmer onto the floor of the hall and stood there, and the stone cracked under it.

Every breath in the room froze.

Adams saw it happen. His own breath came out of his mouth and stopped in the air and fell, and broke on the floor, small and white, snow. Everyone's. Thorpe's, the colonel's, Wang Che's. It was snowing in the hall from the inside of their own mouths.

Through the hole in the roof two red lights looked down.
"One," Chavez said. Then: "That's all of them, Gunny."
There was a lever on the side of the console, brass, as long as a man's arm, with a red-painted handle. Thorpe had her hand on it.
"Reverse," she said. "Now. It has to be now."

She pulled. It did not move. The machine bucked again, more violently than before, a brass bolt cracked into Thorpe’s forehead dropping her to the floor.

Quarterburn leapt to catch her. Nearly tumbling to the ground of his own.  
Adams “Sir get her out. We got this.” moving in dragging Wang Che by the sleeve.
“Oh yes ‘We got’ this.”  Wang Che. Whispering “this requires strength Nathan, you should have volunteered the big Swede.”
Adams and Wang Che took the lever together, and pulled. The engine pulled back. The lever came an inch and went back an inch.
Out of the corner of his eye Adam’s saw Quarterburn lift the unconscious Thorpe and carry her towards the exit. He noted the Colonel’s hands were not shaking.  

They pulled.

The lever came over with a great grown, whether from the machine or Wang Che, Adams couldn’t tell.

#
The shimmer drew in.

It drew in from the edges toward the middle, slowly, and then less slowly, and the foot on the floor of the hall began to go back into it, dragging, the nails gouging the stone. The singing of the towers went up and up. The snow coming down through the roof stopped turning over. It fell straight. It fell down.

Something came out of the narrowing gate, the wrong way, falling.

It hit the floor of the hall in front of the towers and lay there. The body of a young man in a leather flying coat, frozen white, with a fair mustache, and his eyes open, and no helmet.

"I wondered what happened to the pilot," Talbot said, from the side door.

Bakanov came out from behind the engine.

He had lost the monocle. His white coat was black down one side from the burning ashtray. He did not look at any of them. He ran for the gate, small and quick in his felt boots, with his hands out in front of him, toward what was left of the shimmer between the towers.

Quarterburn, Thorpe now over his shoulder, pulled the .38 from his waistband.

"Not this time," he said.

He fired twice. Bakanov stumbled at the second shot and fell forward, into the gate, and the gate closed.

It closed on him at the waist.

The towers stopped singing. The engine ran down, the brass wheels turning slower, a tooth and then a tooth and then nothing. The light went out of the air between the towers. On the floor, in front of them, lay the bottom half of a small man in felt boots.

Nobody said anything for some time.

LaFontain was already at the foundation wall with his haversack. He went to the three places he had found with his ear, one, two, three, and set a charge at each, and named each one aloud as he set it.

"Sainte Barbe. Sainte Rita." He set the third. "Saint Jude. For lost causes. And one for Higgins, just to make sure."

The charges went off together. The engine came apart cold. Brass wheels came down off their spindles by the hundred and rolled across the floor of the hall in every direction and fell over, ringing, and the card racks came down out of the roof, and the cards came down after them, thousands of them, drifting, and settled on everything.

Adam’s took the flare pistol out of his coat, pointed it up through the hole in the roof, and fired. The flare went up green over the mountains.

#

Adams got his watch out. The Hamilton said seven fifty-three.
"Seven minutes," he said. "Seven minutes to get clear."

Then he heard himself say it. Remembering the General's watch. Seven minutes ahead of everybody.

"Out!" he yelled. "Everybody out! Now! Out!"

The first shell landed on the boiler house. Right on time, seven minutes early.

The wall at the end of the hall came in. Fire came through it. They went out the front through the smoke, the colonel between Adams and LaFontain with his arms over their shoulders and his feet dragging, and Thorpe, and Wang Che, and Johansson with the partisans, Hunt, Sheehan, Dunn, Chavez and Talbot with his camera. Into the yard.

There were new sledges in the yard.

A column of them had come up the south road opposite Dragonov’s men, while the hall burned, a dozen sledges robed cold-men on them, and in the first sledge a man stood with a fur collar up to his ears and a cigarette at his mouth. Prince Obolov. He had come to watch the end of the world. He held a pistol. The boiler house burned behind him. The Prince raised his pistol at the colonel.

The shot came down off the ridge. It took the Prince through the eye, and he went over the side of the sledge into the snow, and the cigarette went with him.

"Muldoon," Adams said. "God bless you, Cherry."

They ran. Down the gorge, past the frozen falls, with the shells coming in behind them on the station one after another, and the ground jumping. 

At the bottom of the gorge, where the side valley pinched shut, the Fords stood in the larch under their canvas. Muldoon and Smith came sliding down the slope to meet them.

A shell came down in the snow ten feet from Smith and buried itself and did not go off. Smith looked at it. LaFontain patted it on the way past.

"Dud," he said. "Lucky boy."

A shell went over and burst on the slope above them.

"Russians," Sheehan said. "No sense of occasion."

The Fords caught on the second try. They went down the frozen river with the radiators steaming vodka, and behind them the barrage walked down the gorge after them, the ice of the river bursting up in white columns in their wake, and up on the saddle the Vektor Institute went in sections. The long house. The boiler house. The empty pens. The mast stood a long while in the light of it.

The mast fell last.

#

Dragonov met them on the river in the gray of the morning, with his guns limbered and his sledges loaded and his men sitting in the snow. The men from the pens were in the last sledges under blankets, in their wool caps. Adams did not ask the General what he meant to do with them. The General did not offer.

Dragonov gave the colonel a bottle. He gave Wang Che a hug that lifted him off the ice.

"Until next time," he said, "Comrades."
"Next time you shoot seven minutes early," Adams said.
Dragonov roared, and coughed, and went back to his guns.

They came into Vladivostok on the seventh of February. The Glacier was alongside the Brooklyn in the ice lane, and her hold took a crate that night stenciled for the Pacific Branch at Alcatraz, and in the crate were the horns, and a lone punch card. 

Thorpe had cut the colonel's boots off him on the river and done what she could for his feet. He would lose two toes. He had decided not to mind.

In the Brooklyn's mail room Hunt handed the clerk a bundle of letters tied with string, addressed to a girl in Emporia, Kansas. The clerk took them without a word.

In the wardroom a yeoman brought the colonel an envelope from the War Department. It was dated the tenth of January, 1919. It had come by cable to the consulate two days before they landed and had been waiting for him ever since. 

War Department · Washington, D.C.
January 11, 1919

To: Lieutenant Colonel Alaric Quarterburn, USMC
By direction of the Secretary of War, and concurrence with both the Army and Navy, you will immediately desist from all inquiry, publication, discourse, or dissemination respecting cryptozoic creatures or phenomena, such matters being contrary to public interest and henceforth classified. The original manuscript, copies, personal copies, notes, field journals etc. are ordered to be turned over for storage and disposal, following chain-of-custody rules.

By Order of the Secretary of War,
H. C. Corbin
Brigadier General H. C. Corbin
Adjutant General, U.S. Army

Thorpe, fresh bandage across her brow, sat down across the table from him and gave him a folded note. Then she got up and went out on deck.

He read the note first.

Alaric. The war is over. When you are ready meet me in London. I have no intention of moving again for some time. I should consider it an honour if you joined me there. You are not to be maudlin. R.

He read the order second. Then he folded the order once and put it inside the note.

Adams had watched all of it from the door.  
Quarteerburn handed Adams the War Department telegram.
"Well, sir," he said. "Reckon it's truly over."
“I believe you reckon correctly, Gunny.”

Later, on deck, Adams stood at the rail and looked up. The clouds had opened over the harbor. The Big Dipper hung over the hills behind the city, bowl and handle, the way it hung over Tucker County.  

Nearly. There was a star in the handle he could not have sworn to. He blinked. It was gone. He looked at it a long time. Then he decided it was where it ought to be, and went in.

The snow came down over the harbor. It came down the right way, with nothing hidden behind.

END