Ragnarok (37 page)

“This one must be immense,” Bishop commented.

Knight could only tell that it looked like an enormous junkyard that stretched for miles. Ragged corners of buildings were interspersed with vehicles and wreckage of every kind.

“I’m thinking we check around for a functioning set of wheels. Looks like a long way to that rock tower.” Knight changed course and made for the crater’s edge.

“Survivors?” Bishop asked.

“I’ve never seen any,” Knight told him. “Seen a lot of wreckage, but never bodies.”

They approached the edge of the debris and saw that this particular crater stretched for a few miles. It was deep and filled with rubble that had tumbled in from the outer edge. Several smaller satellite craters pocked the ground around it.

They walked the circumference of the wide circle, looking at the destruction. They saw buildings and whole slabs of highways, but nothing really recognizable or worthwhile.

When they came to the second satellite crater, Knight stopped in his tracks. Right at the edge of the small hole were two things—a Humvee with a flat tire and an open, empty box.

As Bishop pulled up next to Knight, he could see that the box was a medical organ supply cooler. It was empty. The Humvee was an ambulance variant. The front hood and front doors of the vehicle were the same as any other of the multipurpose military-utility vehicles. The back bumper at the crater’s edge had been cleaved in half by the portal when it closed. The vehicle had what looked like an olive drab camper top sporting a big red cross painted on a white square.

As Bishop walked up to the vehicle, Knight went around the back of it and returned with a spare tire that had just missed being cut in half by the portal.

“Hold on, Knight. Let’s check if it runs before we bother.” Bishop slipped into the driver’s seat and started the ignition. The engine purred to life and Bishop smiled. He killed the engine, got out and helped Knight replace the tire.

As they were finishing with the tire and stowing the jack in the back of the vehicle, Bishop pointed to an insignia on the vehicle with two red bars and a blue bar, with a yellow pattern that looked like a hockey trophy.

“What country is that?” Bishop asked.

“Mongolia,” Knight said. “I’m driving.”

Knight put the pedal to the floor, peeling the vehicle around until they faced the tower in the distance. He eased up on the gas, but kept them moving quickly.

“So where are all the people we saw being abducted?” Bishop asked, from the passenger seat, where he held one of the two MP5s at the ready.

“Got a theory, but it isn’t pleasant.” Knight had been able to take the vehicle up to 40 mph on the uneven surface of the ground without rattling them both to death.

Bishop looked at him, waiting.

“The dire wolves. Think about how fast they are. Know how many calories speed like that would burn?”

“I’m not sure,” Bishop said. “If they needed to eat that much, what do they eat when the portals aren’t open? I haven’t seen anything else living here.”

“Maybe the portals open to dimensions other than ours?” Knight offered. “Or maybe they hibernate.”

“Mmm,” Bishop said. “But they probably do eventually eat what they take, human or animal, and they’ve been doing it for quite some time, so the real question is, where are all the bones?

TWO HOURS LATER, they found the bones.

As they sped across the plain, the tower resolved and they could see that it was not a natural geological feature.

It was a tower of bones.

A twenty-foot high, mile-long wall led away from the tower toward the upper plain before it abruptly stopped, as if whoever or whatever constructed it just lost interest. But the tower was immense, rising several hundred feet high—a massive monolith of death. As they neared, Knight suggested they kill the engine and proceed on foot.

After a ten-minute jog, they stopped at the wall’s edge. It was constructed haphazardly from a mix of white human bones, and larger, clear bones which Knight assumed had come from dire wolves. Some of the longer specimens stuck out from the tower as far as a foot. They saw femurs and skulls, ribs and spinal columns. Nothing was excluded. Even the small bones of a hand were visible. Some kind of mortar that looked like concrete filled the spaces between the bones. A layer of orange dust—blue to Knight, orange to Bishop—coated everything.

Bishop grasped one the large dire wolf long bones sticking out of the structure and tested it for strength. The bone was solid. He put his weight on it, and it held him. He turned to Knight.

“Up or around?”

Knight looked up to where the tower met the twenty-foot high wall. “Up, I guess.” He tested his weight on bones that stuck out of the giant monument and quickly climbed for the spot where the wall and tower converged. Bishop followed. Twice, when Bishop put his weight on a human bone, it cracked with a dull crunching noise, leaving behind a splintered stump, which he was still able to use as a foothold.

When Knight reached the top, and peered over the wall, he turned to look back at Bishop. His face was filled with tension. Bishop reached the top a moment later and saw what had disturbed Knight.

The plains continued on the other side and ran for miles to the horizon. But the span was filled with a vast army of dire wolves. Their white see-through skin added contrast to the landscape, almost glowing. Closer to the structure of the tower and the wall, there were hundreds of small bone walls, with cells built into them like in an underground crypt. Each cell contained one or more human bodies. Some were stuffed in with their limbs folded over in grotesque ways. Others were stored in pieces, with some cells filled with only one kind of body parts—all feet or all heads.

Thousands of people.

Not one of them living.

And the bodies didn’t seem to be decaying. Bishop noticed an absolute lack of insects like flies that would normally be buzzing and swarming around such a charnel house. Nor, could he smell the dead.

They’re being stored,
he thought.
It’s like a giant pantry full of human corpses.

Near the end of the bone wall that ran a mile away from the tower, a one-hundred-foot tall portal stretched into the sky. The army of dire wolves stood a half mile away from the tower, and equally far from the portal. They weren’t lined up in rows and columns like a human army might be, but it was clear to Bishop that they were ready to begin their fight.

Not far from the portal, a wide tunnel burrowed down into the soil—eighty feet wide and just as tall. A yawning cavity in the ground.

“That portal isn’t flickering.” Bishop said.

Knight looked at the scene and shook his head. “What’s that Elmer Fudd says?”

“I’m hunting wabbits,” Bishop said, enunciating the words, but not doing a full on impression.

“The other one.”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Bishop said.

“That’s the one,” Knight said. “What are they all waiting for?”

Bishop put his hand on Knight’s head and turned him toward the cave in front of the portal. “They’re waiting for that.”

A massive form rose from the depths.

Knight had been trying to deal with the horror of this place through joking, but all trace humor fled his body as fast as the blood from his face.

“Let’s move,” Bishop said.

“Move where?”

Bishop motioned to the Humvee. “Let’s take a ride. See if we can’t lead the charge.”

“I don’t know if I love or hate the way you think,” Knight said, starting to climb down. “No, wait. I hate it. I definitely hate it.”

SIXTY-FIVE

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

4 November, 0315 Hrs

QUEEN DOVE TO the side as wreckage rained down around her. She rolled on the floor and came up in a firing stance, ready to fight, but found herself in a cloud of choking dust and grit. It would have been the perfect time to take down all the dire wolves. She figured they were all frozen, stock still, waiting for the airborne particulates to clear, so they could see their prey.

But Queen couldn’t see them either. All the shooting had stopped as the giant slabs of masonry fell with explosive force, shattering on the floor. She scanned the area around her and found Black Six lying face down, his torso and upper legs pinned under a slab of the massive roof. She lay down on the floor, put her feet against the stone and prepared to pull the man out by his legs. She pulled and he came free easily. When she looked down, she saw that she had freed only the man’s legs, from the upper thigh down. The rest of him was crushed under the rock slab.

Man down
, she thought, but there wasn’t anything she could do.

She dropped his legs, growled, stood and looked for something on which to vent her anger.

Sand and grit scratched her eyes. She pawed at it with a filthy, muck-coated hand. As the cloud began to clear, she could see the snowy sky above through the fractured, opened roof. The portal, which was not quite a sphere anymore, stretched up through the roof. Gunfire erupted again as those still living found targets in the murky air.

A shift in the dusty air alerted her to the presence of a dire wolf. She turned and found it right behind her, frozen in its macabre statue-like stance.
Like a street-performing human statue.
She swept the curve-bladed Kurkri from the sheath on her hip, slicing the stationary creature’s head off in one vicious swipe. The body strangely stayed erect on its feet as the head rolled to a stop next to gray rubble. The headless corpse disturbed her, so she kicked it in the chest and the carcass toppled over.

She could see the man that wore the earmuffs over by the now inactive M2. A six-foot tall spire of steel I-beam had killed him, impaling him through his chest. Falling wreckage had bent the M2’s barrel like a paper clip. Two of the white-armored troopers were hunkered down behind another pile of stones, firing at the dire wolves as they slowly emerged from the gloom, although most still stood motionless, waiting for the air to clear. Queen raised her MP5 and loosed a barrage of bullets toward every creature-statue she could see.

She held the trigger down as snow fell into the expansive room. She saw King helping Deep Blue remove his cracked black helmet. Beck was helping Asya up.

She lingered on Asya. The woman looked incredibly familiar, but Queen couldn’t put her finger on why. The way she fought. The way she moved. The look in her eyes, or her eyes themselves. The two women moved over to Deep Blue and King, and the idea that had been scratching at the back of Queen’s head since she had met the Russian woman burst into her frontal consciousness.

Son of a bitch. I know who you are, lady.

She didn’t see Rook anywhere, until she heard him, and his voice distracted her from her new revelation about Asya. He stood across the room, covered in dusty grime.

“Like it hasn’t been a bad enough day,” Rook shouted. “I had to drop the friggin’ ceiling on everyone. Goddamned, buck-toothed, white marshmallow lookin’ cocksuckers!” He sprayed bullets from the M-16, mowing down the stationary dire wolves, dropping three of them before his rifle ran out of ammunition. “Bastards!” He dropped the M-16, and charged toward the remaining six dire wolves that stood still.

“Rook,” King called out.

Rook ignored him, pounding forward. He drew a Browning pistol he must have picked up during the fight. He walked right up to the first dire wolf, placed the weapon up to the creature’s head at a distance of no more than two inches, and fired. The far side of the dire wolf’s white head exploded outward. Rook headed for the next creature. It turned toward him as he got close, but he still shot it from point-blank distance, before it had time to react.

“Rook!” King called out again. Rook ignored the call as he walked up to another dire wolf and executed it. The creature’s body jolted from the shot and flopped onto a pile of dirt. “Rook!”

Then King called out again, and Queen and Deep Blue lent their voices to the call.

“ROOK!”

ROOK ANGRILY TURNED to face the team by the open hangar doors across the wreckage-strewn floor. “For the love of—What? What do you want?”

Deep Blue, King, Queen, Asya, the woman Rook knew as a ‘Pawn’ from a previous mission—now called Black Zero—and three of the soldiers in the white armor all stood still. Only some of them had their mouths hanging open, but each and every one of them was looking at Rook.

No
, Rook thought.
Not at me.

Above me.

Rook spun around. A ten-foot tall mound of white goo, like a massive clump of melted Gozer the Gozerian Stay Puft marshmallow, stood in front of the portal. When a stiff breeze carried away the smoke, he saw it wasn’t goo at all.

It was loose skin.

On a foot.

The size of an SUV.

The ridges at the base of the mound were not ridges, but toes. Three thick digits, each the size of a man, coiled and twitched, as though in anticipation.

Rook stepped backward, looking up, up and further up as he moved.

The ten-foot-tall foot connected to a powerful leg that went another twenty feet up before bending at a knee, and disappearing into the light.

Rook stumbled backward over some rubble and went down on his ass.

Above the backward-bending leg, a gigantic chest appeared. Ten-foot-tall cloudy-skinned sacks dangled from the torso like pendulous breasts. Two. Then four. Then six. They kept coming. Inside each were dire wolves in different stages of growth, floating in mottled white and red fluid.

The room shook as the monster took a step forward, bringing a second leg through the portal. The sacks swayed back and forth, the fluid inside them gurgling. Then the head came through.

In many ways, it resembled the smaller dire wolves. The rounded snout held a flat nose just above a wide, curving mouth full of shovel-sized, transparent teeth. Its round chameleon eyes, each the diameter of a hula-hoop, twitched back and forth, taking in the entire room as they swiveled independently of each other. But the skin, while transparent, hung in loose folds that warbled and swayed. And while quasi transparent, it also glistened, like it was covered in millions of tiny scales.