Authors: Jeremy Robinson
Ragnarok (36 page)
“Nope. I’ve been running around Russia looking for you for the past few months. How would I know?”
Asya had run back down the stairs and leapt off the last few steps to the ground. She hurried over to where Rook stood and was about to ask him a question, but she stopped, her mouth hanging open. Then Black Six opened fire again and all heads turned toward the portal.
Dire wolves poured out of the pulsing energy portal. There were so many that they were actually climbing over each other to get out through the wall of light—a wall that stretched at its bottom to over twenty feet wide. Rook figured as many as fifty of them. They struggled and fought to push through the yellow brilliance, emerging to race across the slick concrete floor.
Black Six stopped taking single shots and began firing bursts. Beck opened fire as well.
Queen reached over to Black Six’s thigh and withdrew his Browning. She picked her shots and made them count. Body after body clogged the entrance of the portal.
Rook fired carefully, conserving the few shots of ammunition in the Browning.
Asya, unarmed now, raced behind everyone to the security room. Rook figured she was taking cover.
Even though the group had fired enough rounds of 9 mm ammunition to drop a herd of elephants, the creatures kept pouring into the room. They scampered over their dead, covering themselves in the blood of their fallen.
“This is not working,” Rook shouted. “We’re gonna get overrun here.”
Asya reappeared with two AR-15 assault rifles. She handed one to Rook and he handed her the Browning. He racked back the charging handle, and blasted another wave of the creatures. A puddle of white blood seeped out across the floor in front of the portal’s edge.
Black Six’s rifle stopped spitting its deadly hail of bullets and he shouted. “I’m out!”
Asya ran to him and gave him the second AR-15, then fired the last two rounds from the Browning, killing one of the dire wolves. Black Six opened up with the new weapon, dropping several more of the scrabbling creatures. When the weapon was empty, he retreated behind the rest of the group and out of sight. Rook kept firing until he was dry too.
“Too many,” Queen shouted. “Sons-a-bitches just keep coming!”
Dire wolf corpses littered the room now, and the pile at the entrance to the portal, a mound of arms and claws and bulging eyes, was at least four feet high. Seeing that the fight had nearly gone out of the group, the dire wolves slowed now as they stepped out of the light and into the cavernous room. Some squatted and sniffed the air. Others stepped forward slowly. More came through the glowing wall of energy. Rook watched as more and more came through and he lost track of the number.
They’re bleeding us dry
, Queen thought,
making us use all of our ammo. Fucking transdimensional rope-a-dope.
Rook turned to her. “We are going to need an escape plan before I run out of clean pairs of shorts today.”
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
4 November, 0300 Hrs
THE ENORMOUS HANGAR doors disguised to look like shaded rock from the exterior split down the middle, revealing a chaotic battle that looked to King like Hell on Earth. Hidden motors concealed in the walls churned as the doors retracted on wheels set into a track in the floor of the huge space. A gust of wind blew a swirl of snow into the incredible scene before him.
The room was gigantic, and it held a sparkling energy portal one-hundred feet high. The glowing orb threw lightning and disgorged dire wolves as if they were jumping off a truck on the other side. A huge metal cage held the portal in place like an eight-digit hand holding a ball. In front of the sphere, a pile of dire wolf bodies impeded the newly arriving monsters like a barricade of sandbags. Beck’s MP5 spat bullets at the creatures. Queen stood off to the side, covered in white fluid, like liquid marshmallow, firing a handgun at any of the beasts that got close.
Rook and some woman King didn’t know ran toward him as he stepped into the gunsmoke clouding the air. Black Six was off to the side of the hangar doors, where he had operated the controls to let them in.
“Get down!” King leveled an FN-SCAR rifle and fired. Rook and the woman dove to the side, hitting the floor and rolling away. As the dire wolves clambered over the pile of dead, King’s shots riddled their bodies until they slipped down the front of the pile or added to the top of it. A river of white blood seeped from the carrion heap, sliding across the concrete floor as slow moving rivulets.
King wore the black and gray impact armor, but no helmet. He was armed to the teeth with rifles, handguns on both hips and a bandolier of grenades across his chest. Deep Blue stood to King’s left, wearing his battered black impact armor and his futuristic black helmet that made him look like he was ready to ride a motorcycle in a Japanese Shoei commercial. The man took up firing right alongside him.
To King’s right stood Matt Carrack, wearing an arctic white version of the impact armor, with one of the matching white padded helmets. The five security soldiers armed in the white impact suits, carried rifles, heavy machine guns and even a few grenade launchers. Even Reggie, White Eight, their weapons expert, was suited up in one of the armored suits, but like King, without a helmet. Instead, he wore huge red and black ear muffs King had seen him use on the firing range back at Endgame headquarters.
They all opened fire and the sound was deafening in the echoing chamber.
Beck ran around the field of fire and up to the group. Her face showed that she understood what the absence of Knight and Bishop meant. Reggie supplied her with weapons and ammunition.
Reggie quickly supplied Queen, Rook and the woman with him, with a new MP5 and three extra magazines each. No words were exchanged. Just action. But even if they had tried to speak, the sound of ceaseless gunfire would have drowned out their voices.
Dire wolves continued to flow from the portal, but were met by a wall of projectiles that was impossible to pass through. And each new corpse slowed the advance of those just arriving. The floor was so cluttered with dead that King doubted the creatures could get up to speed, even without the bullets. The perfect bottleneck.
Rook staggered back against the wall, using it to prop himself up. He fired his newly acquired MP5 one handed, his other arm hanging limp at his shoulder.
Queen stayed close to the new arrivals, squatting to the floor and taking up a classic kneeling firing stance. The White security team members began to fan out to the sides, to catch any stray dire wolves that escaped the main fusillade of bullets blasting at the center front of the portal. One of the men was armed with a grenade launcher attachment under his FN-SCAR rifle and fired several shots inside the center of the portal.
The onslaught of dire wolves increased until the rate of fire wasn’t enough and more of them slipped past the bullets, several coming through the portal already airborne, as though flung from the other side. Their sleek muscular white bodies leapt and hopped to the sides of the fray. They got close enough to two of the White team members to attack. The first one leapt onto White Four, throwing him to the ground and tearing at the man’s armored suit. King knew it was Four by his size—short and stocky, the new White Four was a nice guy, but everyone had kept their distance. The last several White security team members had been killed in action when GenY, Richard Ridley’s former security force, attacked the New Hampshire base. King blasted the creature on top of Four with a concentrated burst and it fell to the side, but the man didn’t get up.
Another dire wolf ripped into the man with the grenade launcher, and the weapon skittered across the slick concrete, stopping near where the portal ate into the floor. The man pulled his sidearm and fired several shots, but the dire wolf hacked and clawed at him until one of his armored arms came loose with a pop. The creature flung the arm and it landed with a thump and a wet splat in front of Queen’s kneeling stance. She adjusted her aim and unloaded until the magazine went dry. The creature shook as she perforated its long body with 9 mm slugs. She reloaded and moved the sights of her weapon back to the oncoming wave of white muscled bodies, before the dead beast hit the floor.
The woman King didn’t know hung back, firing her weapon at any target that stood still long enough for her to see it.
She’s a pretty good shot, whoever she is.
Deep Blue and the others took positions around the room, a few lying down, a few standing and others kneeling like Queen.
One of the White security members set up a tripod, and Reggie loaded an M2 with its chain-fed .50 caliber death. The gun overpowered the sound of all the other weapons in the room. The metallic booming of the M2 sent the oversized bullets across the room, ripping into the dire wolf hordes as they emerged.
Blood sprayed.
Limbs severed.
ROOK DUCKED TO the floor near the man dealing death with the big machine gun. He picked up a rifle from a pile near the man. It was an M-16—the standard US infantry rifle—but this one had the M203 grenade launcher attachment on the underside of its barrel. “Fuckin-A!”
Rook targeted a huge metal strut that supported the portal. It had a section that had lots of electrical cables and more than the normal amount of the metal receptor plates that ran up its length. The 40 mm grenade shot out of the launcher tube and arced through the room, smashing into the concrete base of the metal upright, just as Rook fired another grenade at a second upright.
The first metal arm sheared off completely and fell inward, swallowed by the glowing ball of light. The other strut’s base exploded into fragments and the strut fell backward. Each explosion dwarfed the M2’s din and filled the air with a ball of orange flame and a column of dark smoke. The detonations startled everyone and the shooting paused, as the metal support struts collapsed. Even the dire wolves paused and cocked their alien heads, looking upward at the damage.
“I told you I’d break that fucker.” Rook said. “I—”
The sphere of energy, no longer fully contained by the metal cage, bulged suddenly forward and upward, like a water balloon that had been squeezed hard on one side. When it hit the ceiling of the massive lab room, it ate right through, as though it had encountered nothing but more air. The front portion of the roof collapsed toward the team. Great chunks of stone and strips of steel crumbled from the ceiling, now open to the sky.
Rook watched the debris falling toward them. “Aww, shit.”
Somewhere
KNIGHT BRUSHED HIS arms, attempting to dust some of the midnight blue grime off his body after the long climb.
Or is it orange?
He and Bishop perceived this world differently, but maybe neither of them saw it right.
Bishop motioned to the suitcase nuke hanging from Knight’s back. “Where did you find it?” He was walking along the cliff’s edge toward the distant pinnacle of rock that they had agreed was their only logical destination. Knight walked alongside the big man, but away from the cliff’s edge. It had taken him hours to climb the thing and he had no desire to slip and fall off it.
“In a crater. There are craters all around. From the portals.”
“Yep. Seen ‘em.”
“Debris from Earth surrounds most of them, like a pie crust.” Knight said, pointing out to the multitude of craters they could see in the distance.
Bishop stopped walking and peered out at the collection of divots on the distant plain.
“Too far to tell,” Bishop said.
“Trust me; I’ve visited a few. I found the nuke beside one of them.”
“Seems like a lot of people had the same idea.” Bishop resumed walking along the cliff’s edge.
Knight stayed where he was and waited. Eventually, Bishop noticed Knight wasn’t walking with him and turned, a question about to form on his lips. But he saw Knight’s face, with one eyebrow raised that said
Really? Think about it.
“Wait,” Bishop said, the idea formulating in his head. “That’s the nuke King and Deep Blue were supposed to place in New York?”
Knight nodded, and unslung the pack, reaching into a pocket on the exterior of the canvas sack.
“How do you know it’s theirs?” Bishop asked.
Knight produced a small iPhone from the pack and handed it to Bishop. It showed a picture of Fiona smiling on the wallpaper.
Bishop glanced at it and looked at Knight with a serious face. “Did you try this thing?”
Knight’s face lost all color. He looked down at the iPhone’s reception—no bars.
Of course, there are no bars. I’m in another dimension.
He realized he must have checked the reception on the thing a hundred times, even though he couldn’t remember actually doing it. Then he realized that the battery should have died ages ago, but it strangely showed two bars left on the power meter.
Knight took the device back and dropped it in the pack, shaking his head and continuing onward. “No reception.” Bishop followed him and said nothing.
They walked along the edge of the cliff for hours. Most of the time, they walked in silence. They saw no dire wolves, but after an hour, they found a crater at the top of the cliff. It was so close to the edge that they had to go around it. The circumference was only eighty feet—small compared to some of the portals they had seen, but it had a single piece of debris at its edge.
It was the front half of a police Ford Crown Victoria. The portal had sawed the vehicle in half just behind its light bar. The front windshield had been smashed in and the driver’s side door was wide open. Seeing nothing of value, they walked around the vehicle, and crater, and continued on their way.
The distant pinnacle of rock on the horizon grew larger as they trudged toward it, but it felt like an illusion to Knight,
like approaching the Rocky Mountains
—
they keep getting bigger, but they’re still so far away
. An hour after the Crown Vic, they saw another crater further away from the cliff edge to their right.