Ragnarok (19 page)

“These things don’t smell too good either.”

Deep Blue ignored this latest quip, but King felt certain the man was cocooned in his own foam stench. The putrid smell wafted over King, threatening to ruin his focus.

“Remember you are not to engage any dire wolves if you can avoid it. I’ll cover you as best I can.” Deep Blue was back to business.

“I’m sure you’ll be better at it than I would be. That targeting software in your helmet is kind of like cheating,” King said, as the elevator reached the 40
^th
 floor and both men felt their stomachs lurch at the abrupt stop.

“Wasn’t time to get you one,” Deep Blue said.

“Yeah, but Christmas isn’t far off,” King quipped, and then as if throwing a switch, he shut off his sense of humor and readied himself to kill anything that wasn’t human. If someone’s pet chihuahua jumped out, it was toast.

Both men raised their MP5 submachine guns and stepped to either side of the doors as they slowly opened. King smiled briefly inside his suit. Deep Blue might have been out of action in the field for years—since he had been a Ranger and subsequently served in politics—but the man was still sharp, and he and King had very quickly learned each other’s moves. They had gained an almost precognitive awareness of each other in battle—something that often took many battles for other soldiers to gain.

King moved into the lushly carpeted hallway and crouched. Water rose from the rug, surrounding his foot. Everything was saturated. “Looks like the sprinkler system went off.” He eyed the sprinkler head poking out of the ceiling above him. A single drip of water maintained a tenuous grasp. It fell and smacked against his facemask. “Let’s hope there isn’t a fire. I don’t think there’s any water left in the system.”

Deep Blue took up a position right behind King. About forty feet down the wood paneled hallway, the glowing yellow curve of the portal’s wall emerged from the wood and seared into walls, floor and ceiling, completely blocking the corridor.

The total lack of sound was eerie. King had gotten up close to one of the portals before—
hell, I’ve even been though one
—but the last time, according to Aleman’s theory, the portal was still ‘flickering’ into our world. This one was stable.

No fluctuations.

No lightning.

No sound. Though King couldn’t be sure if that was just because his helmet made him deaf to the outside world. It was a tactical disadvantage, but in this case, with dire wolf roars that could incapacitate a Chess Team member with crippling fear, Deep Blue had insisted. King had pointed out his previous immunity to the roar in Chicago, but Deep Blue wouldn’t be moved. Their communications between each other were voice activated as well, so unless Deep Blue or Lewis Aleman spoke in his ear, all King could hear was his own breathing. It reminded him of HALO jumping, which might have been somewhat calming if not for the nuke in his backpack.

King advanced down the hall, staying to the left, Deep Blue covered the right. The plan was simple: a few feet away from the portal wall, he would unsling the backpack, arm the heavy device it held, remove the safety remote control and pocket it, then hurl the thing through the glowing yellow wall. Keasling had a second failsafe that could shut off the device if the backpack passed harmlessly in and out of the portal and plummeted to the ground forty stories below them. The General and his men would be watching for anything to come out of the bottom of the orb. The team wouldn’t take any chances with destroying New York. The city had seen enough hell already.

King squatted a few feet from the portal and pulled the strap of his MP5 over his helmet, freeing his hands. He slid the backpack off his shoulders and then slowly stood, facing the wall of light. Then he dropped the pack on the carpet and froze.

DEEP BLUE WATCHED King’s motions ahead of him as if in a trance. King was getting ready to deploy the bomb and then just stopped for some reason. The man hadn’t moved in a minute. At first Deep Blue thought King had heard or sensed something. But their helmets had sound dampeners and King hadn’t moved at all.

Something was wrong.

“King? What’s going on?”

Nothing. No reply.

Deep Blue took a cautious step backward, away from where King stood facing the portal. He pulled his arm up and tapped quickly on his wrist-keypad that he’d attached to this battle suit from his last. He tested the ambient audio. Had a dire wolf roared? He thought he would have felt it vibrating in his chest, even if he couldn’t hear it because of the audio dampeners. The faceplate display in his helmet told him no such sounds were present.

“King? Are you okay?”

Still no reply.

Deep Blue activated another scanner on his wrist and waited an impatient twenty seconds, until a display came up on his faceplate indicating a foreign substance in the oxygen content of the air. Not a huge amount, but whatever it was, it was an unrecognizable chemical substance. Could be something to worry about, or it could just be the electrified atmosphere from the portal and the stench of the cleaning chemicals used in the hallway. He couldn’t be sure.

But one of the small features Aleman had built into Deep Blue’s new tactical helmet was an air-scrubbing filter. King’s armored helmet didn’t have one.
Must be something in the air.
He wouldn’t know more until he approached King. But the stiff way the man stood worried Deep Blue.

He stepped forward and reached his hand out to King’s shoulder.

A blur erupted from the wall of light, moving around King’s static form, slamming into Deep Blue’s chest. Something flung him halfway back down the corridor where he hit a wall and crashed to the floor. He was surprised that the suit took the brunt of the impacts—both when he was hit and when he landed in a heap against the wall.

The optic displays in his helmet’s faceplate were going nuts.

Dire wolves
.

He lifted his MP5 and prepared to stand, but one of the fast-moving creatures swept him up and threw him over its shoulder. Its claws raked across his back, but the armor deflected the blow. With his rifle arm pinned under him, the beast streaked headlong toward the other end of the corridor with him as its captive—away from King’s still-frozen form. Three more dire wolves clustered around King, but they weren’t attacking his inert body for some reason. Deep Blue fumbled with his free hand, searching for the knife on his left leg. He had just wrapped his fingers around the blade’s handle when he and the dire wolf hit the floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the carpeted hallway.

Deep Blue’s armored back smacked the glass and he barely felt the window shatter. He couldn’t hear it, either. But he could see the dire wolf’s mouth opened wide in a roar, as his body separated from it and they both began to fall through the shower of glittering glass particles toward the pavement forty stories below.

THE SOUND OF LOSS

THIRTY

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

3 November, 1300 Hrs

ROOK CLUNG TO the thick black rubber insulation around one of the heavy cables that ran up the curved I-beam of the metal monstrosity. He managed to snag the cable with the fingers of one hand, and now swung precariously above the concrete floor over a hundred feet below him. He reached up with his other hand and grabbed a purchase on the side of the arcing metal upright, then swung his legs in and wrapped them around the beam like a man clinging to the slick trunk of a coconut palm tree.

Once firmly attached to the curved surface, and in no danger of falling, Rook looked back up at the catwalk from which he had fallen. The metal bar was painted a deep Nordic blue. Balancing on the railing like Batman crouched on a Gotham gargoyle, was a creature, partially silhouetted by a huge Klieg light on the ceiling behind it.

Great. At least I know who to blame for knocking me over the railing.

Although vaguely humanoid, its limbs were longer than a human’s and had muscles that dwarfed Bishop’s. Rook could see the individual bundles of its musculature just below the soft white, slightly see-through skin of the thing. Its hands and feet were larger than a human’s were, and each digit had a clear two-inch claw on it, like a shard of glass. The head was domed with large orb eyes on either side of its brain, which he could see through its transparent skin and skull. Its mouth was wide, like some kind of psychotic Cheshire Cat, and when it opened its mouth, Rook saw plenty of see-through sharp incisor teeth for tearing and ripping prey. He couldn’t decide if the thing was snarling or smiling at him.

“Slap my ass and call me Susan! Finally, something I can kill. Just you wait, Milkshake. When I get down from here I’m going to introduce your ugly head to your rectum.” Rook began to scramble down the curved metal, using the twining black electrical cables as handholds. He was nearly to the first panel-like metal plate below him when a distant roar sounded from far off in the bowels of the facility.

Terror seized Rook.

His eyes grew large and his body broke out in a sweat. His heart was thumping in his chest. He started hyperventilating, pulling in huge gulps of the dry air. Instead of climbing further down the metal leg of the cage toward the floor far below him, Rook gripped the cables tighter. His hands clutched the cables so tightly that blood ceased to flow through them. His knuckles turned a pasty white color. He was afraid to stay in place and he was afraid to move.

Suddenly, as quickly as the fear had beset him, Rook felt it begin to fade. His heart rate began to slow and he looked around the cavernous space in shock and wonder. He blinked a few times. Besides the creature on the railing, no one (and nothing) was in sight. He had no idea why he had temporarily been so scared of the distant howling sound. It was almost like a wolf’s howl at the moonlight, but stronger.

Not a wolf.

He felt less and less afraid with each passing moment. The creature remained on the railing above him, unmoving. His breathing under control again, Rook resumed his descent down the curved metal beam. The number of metal plates, protuberances and twisting cables made climbing easy. When he reached the half-way point, he glanced back up at the white creature on the catwalk.

It hadn’t moved.

He continued to climb toward the safety of the floor, seventy feet down. When he was no more than fifty feet off the ground, he glanced up again. What he saw almost made him fall.

“Sweet fuck-a-doodle-doo!” The creature’s face was inches from his own. Somehow the creature had leapt to the strut and descended over a hundred feet in the few seconds since Rook had last looked up at it. And it had come down the strut headfirst and in complete silence!

Rook’s heart jackhammered. He gripped his handhold tighter with his left hand, preparing to release his right. He wasn’t sure how much damage he could do with one bare hand, while hanging fifty feet off the ground, but he was ready to give it a go. He pulled his arm back to fire a punch at the beast’s snout, but a voice held his shoulder in check.

“I wouldn’t do that, Stanislav. The dire wolf will not hurt you unless I tell it to. Or unless you attack it.”

Rook kept his fist cocked back, but craned his neck around to the floor, where Eirek Fossen stood wearing a white lab coat. He was over six feet tall with short dark hair and brown eyes and a wide face. Broad and imposing, the man also held a small black pistol. Rook couldn’t be sure from his height above Fossen, but it might have been a Walther PP, the precursor to the famous pistol used by Ian Fleming’s infamous spy. This was the man Rook had allied himself with to fight the monster Edmund Kiss had become. Fossen raised his arm, aiming the weapon at Rook.

The alliance was most definitely over.

“I should have let Kiss eat your face off.”

“I could say the same, Stanislav. Now come down, and do so slowly.”

THIRTY-ONE

Exxon Building, New York, NY

JACK SIGLER, THE man known as
King
in the field, felt fine.

Not fine. Fantastic.

He wondered if he had ever felt better. The light from the portal glowed and beautifully. He breathed in deeply and relished the taste of the air. He knew it would be even better if he took the helmet off.

He unfastened the clasps at his neck and lifted it up off his head. He didn’t carefully place the helmet on the ground—he just let it fall from his fingers. The helmet thumped with a dull sound when it hit the carpeted hallway floor, but King paid it no mind, because now he could hear the portal as well as see it.

And it sang to him.

He smiled broadly.
This must be what it’s like for Fiona when she hears the mother tongue
. His foster daughter was unique in her ability to see and hear the protolanguage of the world in paintings and sculptures, in music and in nature. She had used that ability to help Chess Team and save mankind on more than one occasion. But such important thoughts couldn’t find a hold on the slippery surface of King’s mind, lost in ecstasy as it was. Instead, he let thoughts of the team and the world fall away, like small bits of paper caught in a breeze.

It’s so beautiful
.

King inhaled the air deeply, smelling lush fragrance and clean mountain air all in one breath. That he stood in a sterile air-conditioned corridor in a modern building seemed a faraway notion, and because it ran counter to how good the air smelled and tasted, he let that idea go too. It fluttered away just as his worries had. In Chicago the light had been bright, glaring and full of electric danger. Now it shimmered with a luster he felt soothing and exciting all at the same time. He felt calm and in control for the first time in his life. He felt both purpose and the complete lack for a need of purpose. He just was.