Ragnarok (26 page)

King leaned over the railing and looked down the stairwell, but turned quickly back to Deep Blue, his face grim. “Too many. Up!”

Deep Blue sprinted up the stairs until he hit the landing. King was still at the bottom of the stairs and fired as soon as the door opened, cracking the skull of the first dire wolf through the door. The body’s momentum carried it forward and down the lower flight of stairs to the next landing.

Deep Blue covered the door from the upper landing as King raced up the industrial gray steps to meet him. Just as King reached the landing, another creature leapt through the door and Deep Blue blasted it with a carefully controlled burst.

They continued up flight after flight of stairs, carefully picking off any of the monsters that got too close. When King passed a foam fire extinguisher on the wall of the 45
^th
floor, he halted and nimbly unlatched the bright red tank from the wall. He then leaned over the railing and blasted the contents of the extinguisher down the space between the flights of stairs. It was a narrow space, but it was enough for the burst of white foam to spatter into the air and cascade down several floors. The extinguisher ran dry as the first dire wolf reached a landing below them, stopped and opened its jaws in a snarl that looked almost comical.

Deep Blue fired two shots at it before the MP5 ran dry.

King threw the empty fire extinguisher canister down the flight of stairs, knocking the animal back and off balance slightly. Then he pulled up the pistol he had taken from Deep Blue. He had only one round left and no more magazines, so he aimed carefully and then fired.

The creature’s head crumpled inward. The bullet liquefied the brains, exited the back of the skull and pulled the white slurry out with it, splattering white gore across the wall. His stomach turned at the sight
. If only I could unsee some of this shit.
He turned and raced up the next flight of stairs with Deep Blue. The much-older man had managed to reload the MP5 faster than King had ever seen anyone do.

“How many more magazines?” He asked.

“Last one. Run faster.”

As though in response, the horde of dire wolves on the steps below resumed their loud pursuit, closing the distance.

FORTY-THREE

Somewhere

EVERYTHING WAS A deep rich shade of midnight blue.

Everything
.

The bleak cloudless sky, the rocky ground littered with small round stones, and the distant, jagged, impossibly tall cliffs. Chunks of London that had passed through the portal were scattered around the area: building rubble, a street sign, a dead bird and half of a car, its occupants missing. As Shin Dae-jung, callsign: Knight, looked around the alien landscape, his eyes kept struggling to comprehend the complete lack of variation in the color of things. It made looking at things hurt. He had taken refuge behind some boulders to deal with the overwhelming sensation of nausea he felt while his eyes tried to perceive and adjust to the monotone surroundings. He strained to focus on the cliffs and to differentiate them from the sky. He considered removing his armored helmet for fear of vomiting inside it, but didn’t think it wise. He focused on controlling his body and his stomach contents stayed down. He activated the night-vision optics built in to the helmet’s visor and the night changed to a dim day. The technology amplified available light, but there wasn’t much of it. Still, the shades of green in the night-vision view had a few more contrasts than the overwhelming palette of blue did.

The air tasted metallic, like dirty coins, but was breathable. He deactivated the audio dampener—it would help more at this stage if he could hear dire wolves approaching. The place was deathly still.

He didn’t hear anything.

No wind, no animals or insects. Just vast emptiness.

Aleman was right. This isn’t our world—or dimension—or whatever. Everything about the place is wrong, or my perception of it is.

The land was flat and rocky, except for the cliffs on the horizon. Knight stood and surveyed the sight. No sign of dire wolves on the open plain. He remembered they could really move when they were on a stretch of flat open ground, so he figured they had all just raced off to the horizon while his stomach was doing flip-flops.
That or they went underground somewhere.

With no rifle, no pistol and now only the corpse of the dire wolf he had stabbed and his KA-BAR knife to keep him company, Knight kept scanning the plains for a sign of another portal. If he found one, he would rush for it and try to use it to get back to the world—his world.

He knelt down and examined the corpse that was missing its feet and legs below the shin. The wounds were cauterized completely. Knight poked one of the stumps with the tip of his knife to see how thick the scar tissue was. Eventually, with enough pressure, the knife slipped through the skin and a pearl of thick fluid oozed from the puncture. He looked over the rest of the creature up close. It had foggy transparent skin, like a jellyfish. It was muscular. The eyes were weird as hell. The mouth was full of clear sharp teeth ranging between one and two inches in length. The claws, like the teeth, were transparent and deadly. He picked up the creature’s limp arm and placed the sharp blade against the clear skin and made an incision that cut all the way to the bone. After wiping off the blade and sheathing it, he pulled open the wound and looked at the bone. Clear. Like glass. He could see the tube of gray marrow running down its core.

He looked up at the bleak sky. Something about this world made the creatures evolve this way. He remembered what Black Five said about how alternate dimensions could be similar, but also incredibly different. Was it the atmosphere? The sun? Or simply a completely different set of physical laws? With no way to find out, and no new insights on how to kill the creatures, beyond putting a bullet in them, Knight put the arm down and stood.
One more unsolved mystery.

The variant shades of night-vision green showed no life signs and no portals. He prepared his stomach and then deactivated the night vision and looked out through the normal visor view for a sign of a portal. The view was less unsettling now that he knew to expect the constant shade of midnight. Still, nothing that looked like a portal, a structure or a living creature. He reactivated the night vision and turned to face the distant cliffs. They were the only aberration in what seemed to be otherwise endless rocky plains.

Cliffs it is, then.

With the knife in hand, he began walking. He took only a handful of steps before he became convinced that someone—or something—was watching him. He looked around, but still saw nothing but the plains. He kept walking toward the cliffs, switching the night vision on and off occasionally, just to be sure that one spectrum of light wasn’t preventing him from seeing something that the other might reveal. Nothing.

So he walked. The feeling that something was following him—or just observing him—remained. As a sniper, he knew that feeling. The feeling of having a long barrel targeting your every move, ready to send death with a few pounds of pressure on a sliver of metal. He was on the other end of that feeling, but recognized it in his targets when, as though warned by some sixth sense, they turned and looked directly at him. He was usually too far away to actually be seen, but if anyone ever did see him, they died with the image.

When he came to a small pile of waist-high boulders, he dove behind them and rolled to a stop on the other side. In the dive, he turned his head and looked back behind him. Old submarine commanders called an abrupt change of direction ‘clearing the baffles.’ The idea was to change course unexpectedly, allowing you to see a stealthy pursuer. But like with his other attempts to spot any pursuit, which he was convinced of now, he saw nothing.

Dejected, Knight resumed his trek to the cliffs. They were further than he had thought. He felt like he had walked for at least an hour, but the cliffs appeared no closer. He felt ravenously hungry and reached into a canvas pouch on the outside of the armored suit, withdrawing a high-energy protein bar. He squatted on his haunches, turning as he did so, clearing the baffles again, but as usual, he saw only the rocky field around him. He took off the helmet and ate the protein bar, trying not to fully taste its chalky flavor. The suit had a built in Camelbak water reservoir. He removed the plastic tube from its holster on his left shoulder and bit down on the valve, sucking the warm water into his body to flush the debris of the protein bar down. He took another gulp and then put the tube away. He didn’t know how long the water would last him, but he figured it would be better to conserve it.

He put the helmet back on and activated night vision again, then resumed his walk. He checked the Suunto watch on his wrist, but found it had been damaged in the fight with the dire wolf on the bridge. The face was cracked, and a piece of the plastic bezel stuck out at a weird angle. He considered just ditching the thing, but then realized he’d be making a trail on the rocky ground. He stopped and squatted again, but this time, it was to pick up one of the many flat round stones on the ground. It looked like a flat skipping stone you would find near a river. He dropped it into a zippered pocket and resumed the march to the cliffs.

Eventually, he got tired and had to stop. The cliffs were still a distance off. He sat and removed the helmet. There was no cover anywhere, so he just sat in the middle of the rocky plain and took in the rich hues of navy blue that covered everything like a blanket of night. It felt like night to him too. He and Bishop had been on the go for how long? He looked at his watch again. Still broken. The bezel fragment had snapped off at some point. He rubbed his hand over his smooth face. He had never been able to grow a beard—with his Korean ancestry, his abilities to grow body hair were pretty limited. So a five o’clock shadow wouldn’t be arriving any time in the next decade to help him determine the passage of time. Ultimately, he realized it didn’t matter. However much time passed, he would get out of here as soon as he could. He would keep heading for the cliffs and he would do whatever it took.

Exhaustion began to take its toll on his body, and even though he sat cross-legged on the uncomfortable rocky ground, his head kept nodding. Eventually, he lay down on his side, his sleep-deprived mind rationalizing why it would be perfectly safe to do so, and how he would remain vigilant, nonetheless. He was a sniper after all. He was trained to stay awake in combat situations for days on end. He would be fine. There was nothing moving on the plain.

Then his mind cajoled him to allow himself just a few minutes of eyes-closed rest.

I won’t go to sleep deeply. Just a few minutes, that’s all.

And then he slept. Deeply.

For years.

FORTY-FOUR

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

ASYA CLOSED HER mouth, clamping off the scream before it was truly done. She swung the tiny LED light around the space. It was little more than a brick pit, really, just twenty feet in diameter and roughly circular. She played the light around the chamber and hoped for a door or a ladder, but the walls were uninterrupted.

And the whole pit was filled with heaps of the dead and desiccated corpses. Like little white stuffed animals in one of those crane-and-claw, coin-operated vending machine games. But there was no metal claw above her—instead, something moved beneath the heap of tiny bodies.

The mound shifted slowly.

Little bodies tumbled.

The corpses were almost cute, except for the rib bones poking out of the chests. The eyes were hardly pronounced but sat on the outside of the face, like halved grapes. The creatures had white skin that she could see through to the muscles and meat below it.

She began to breathe quickly, willing herself to overcome the fear paralyzing her. The thing under the mound moved again, in a zig-zagging motion. The floor of tiny dead performed a wave like the people at a sporting event.

It moves like a snake
, she thought.

And then her paralysis broke. She lunged, clawing and scrabbling across the heaped dead, heading for the brick wall. As she moved her hands through the pile, crawling to the wall, the glow from her LED flashlight flared wildly in the space, throwing fast moving shadows around the pit.

She needed to get out. This place was wrong and horrible. Unnatural.
Evil
, the word came to her panicked mind unbidden.
Evil
.

She flailed through the bodies and reached the brick unmo-lested, but her mind, completely unhinged by fear, couldn’t comprehend that the slithering thing under the bodies had yet to grasp her ankle. She dug her fingers into the mortar between the bricks and found it was crumbly under her touch. She pulled herself up and placed her toes into the wide spaces between the bricks. She raced up the thirty-foot wall with balance a rock climber would have admired. She kept the LED light between her teeth, placed her toes and fingers into the cracks and didn’t look back.

When she reached the top, she threw herself over the lip, and onto the rough stone floor of the tunnel. She could see a blazing bright light at the end of the tunnel, back in the large laboratory. It was far brighter than the spotlights affixed to the ceiling, and she clung to the idea that bright light was her salvation from the atrocities in the pit.

Asya struggled to her feet and ran headlong toward the light. She abandoned all thoughts of stealth hoping to find Rook and Queen. But when she exited the mouth of the tunnel into the room though, another strange sight greeted her. The giant hand of metal—she recalled the gleaming chrome claw in the game with the stuffed animals, only this one was absurdly large and upside down, resting on the floor with its open claws stretching almost two hundred feet up to the ceiling—held something in its clutches now. A blazing sun, easily over a hundred feet in diameter, hovered between the metal struts of the claw. Small arcs of lightning shot out of the ball of crackling energy, but the lightning curved unnaturally backward, striking the large metal plates on the claw’s upright legs, harmlessly dissipating.