Ragnarok (2 page)

That’s when he caught a glimpse of the thing moving like a breeze through the snows, leaping between the trees and even up onto the sides of them before springing away, almost too quickly for Agnarsson’s eye to follow. Then it was gone in the shadows.

The first of his men to reach the trees was torn apart. Agnarsson didn’t see it happen, but the sounds of tearing flesh and muffled screams were fodder for the mind’s eye. Then the lower half of Magnus Trondheim’s red-haired legs flew through the air and tangled in the lower branches of one of the half-eaten trees. Other men had bolted at that sight, but Agnarsson had stood stock still, staring in wonder. He knew whatever the creature was, it wasn’t human.

The roar came again, but this time from inside the monastery.

There is more than one
, Agnarsson realized.

The few men still rooted in place came unglued, and with shouts of horror, they ran without mind or any sense of where they were going. Only Agnarsson remained in place, not because he was brave, but because he was petrified. He kept a firm grip on his axe while warm piss trickled down his inner thigh.

His mind—spurred by lessons taught by a remorseless father, fought for control.
It is too cursed fast to be a bear or a wolf
.

The roar came again, dropping him to one knee.

The sound was closer, bouncing back at him from the trees and the falling snow all around him in the early morning gloom. A few of his men yet lived, but whimpered in terror. The vibration in Agnarsson’s eardrums was intense. His bones felt as if they rattled in his body. He couldn’t see the creature, but he knew it was near.

Then he heard the movement. Fast. Coming right for him. He whirled around and swung his double-bladed axe wide, hoping he might strike the beast out of sheer luck and force.

Instead, the world before him transformed into the sun.

Brightness assaulted Agnarsson’s sight—so intense and painful that it scorched his eyes even through his tightly shut eyelids. Thunder shouted and lightning crackled again, this time blasting out from all around him.

Guarding his eyes with his hands, he chanced a look and witnessed the giant ball of light collapse inward. Silence sucked the thunderous din away like a thirsty man slurping up the last of his mead, and Agnarsson was left alone in the dull light of early morning.

His men lay dead in the shallow snow all around him. Some of them, caught half within the sphere of light and half without, had been cut cleanly in half.

He looked down to see that his own body had been cleaved as well. His axe was gone and so was most of his axe arm below the shoulder. The wound had been closed with searing heat, the fire so hot he hadn’t even noticed he was injured. Now he looked down at his blackened stump in shock.

The creatures were gone. Nothing moved in the snow. The ball of lightning and fire was gone. Everyone around him was dead. But even more shocking was that the monastery itself, along with the ninety-odd raiders and scores of monks, had vanished. All that remained was a large bowl-shaped indentation in the ground.

He stumbled away from the site, looking back at the devastation. He did not know what it was that had attacked him, or where they had come from. But at the last moment, just before the blast, he had
seen
it. One of the creatures. He lacked the language to describe what he saw, but he would never forget it.

Agnarsson lost all of his men, his axe and his arm, but he had been spared his life for some unknown reason. And he did not understand
why
. But he would remember this night for the rest of his life. It would haunt him. His father had been wrong, there
were
things in the world that mortal men simply could not fight.

THE SOUND OF FEAR

ONE

São Paulo, Brazil

The Present, 2 November, 2200 Hrs

SÃO PAULO WAS the largest city in Brazil and the largest in the southern hemisphere. It was also the sixth largest in the world in population. After today, it would be fourteenth.

The sky went bright with a loud crack and a crash of thunder. Lightning arced across the city, and a massive ball of glowing light appeared. It was yellow and swallowed several city blocks. The sphere crackled and pulsed as if it were made of pure energy. As it grew, the electrical phenomenon engulfed building after building. Security cameras around the city captured hazy, static-filled images of the creatures that eventually emerged. The first people to encounter them were torn apart. But even more people, still living, and screaming and gibbering, were dragged away into the spitting ball of fire.

After nearly twenty minutes, the globe of devastation sucked both sound and light out of the world before it winked out of existence. The crater left behind was immense. Buildings on the edge of the giant divot toppled inward, killing hundreds more still hiding in their apartments. Later, rescue workers would find that everything at the edge of the dome had been severed cleanly—buildings, roads, Metro tunnels and even human bodies, which littered the edge of the circumference of the effect. Over a million dead in just a few minutes.

Karachi, Pakistan

3 November, 0600 Hrs

AS DAWN BLED light into the sky over the city, it brought thunder and lightning. But there were no clouds in the sky.

Karachi and its environs had grown from an estimated population of five million in 1980 to over twenty million—many of them refugees from successive wars in neighboring Afghanistan, first against the Russians, then against its own people and finally against the Americans. The city eventually took measures to purify the putrid and smog-coated air by planting more gardens and building more parks. Traffic was diverted onto high-speed overpasses. Still, the city continued to grow and grow, as refugees poured in.

The newest arrival appeared just as the noisy city was waking up. The ball of light hovered in the air, just a foot off the black asphalt, between the open doors of Jinnah International Airport and the McDonald’s restaurant that sat just opposite. Hundreds of crows complained at the interruption of their normal morning routine, scavenging food from nearby trash cans and along the edges of the road. They took flight, fleeing the intruding brilliance and cawing. The ball was no larger than three feet in diameter initially. But then it grew quickly and when it stopped, the fast-food franchise and a good portion of the airport were enveloped. Lightning crackled out of the center of the blinding sphere, blasting people and nearby structures.

The noise was deafening. As a repeated sound of thunder boomed, the cracks of bone-shaking sound pierced the morning air. Screams added to the din. Then something came out of the light, tearing into anything with flesh and rending it in seconds. The attacking thing moved too quickly to be seen in the dazzling light.

Then, with no warning, the piercing noise stopped, leaving only silence in its wake.

The light disappeared.

The sphere of devastation came and went in just ten minutes, but it took a scoop of the city with it. Cleaved buildings stood with their plumbing and electrical wires exposed; the ground was a perfectly smooth crater where previously asphalt, cars and pedestrians had been. It was as if a small sun had briefly made an appearance right on the surface of the Earth, clawing away all she held, until nothing remained. The tally of the number of dead or missing would take weeks, but in the end, it would be in the tens of thousands.

Seoul, South Korea

3 November, 1000 Hrs

THE CABLE CAR that took visitors up to the top of Namsan Mountain, and the huge communications tower on top of the mountain, began to shake violently, before a blast of lightning severed the cable completely.

Fifteen people sat inside the car that had nearly reached the top of its 1900-foot journey up a graduated height of 500 feet in altitude. The car plummeted 60 feet to the ground before they began to bounce and slide down the mountainside, leaving long grooves in the soil. Despite the impacts and jolts, all fifteen people survived the fall with nothing more than broken bones, multiple contusions and various cuts and scrapes.

They were the lucky ones.

As they plummeted down the mountain on one side, a sizzling globe of death appeared on the other side of the steel and concrete 777-foot tower at the summit of the mountain, chewing a hole in everything it touched. Spreading out in an arc of chaos and destruction, the unknown phenomenon scoured the northwest side of the mountain, erasing the Jung-gu and Seongdong-gu neighborhoods before imploding and leaving nothing more than a scar on the ground that stretched three miles in diameter.

Cairo, Egypt

3 November, 0300 Hrs

AT THREE IN the morning, even a behemoth like Cairo slumbers. The incessant honking of vehicle horns dies down for just a few hours. They would start again around 5 a.m., but the cacophony would be softer than usual.

The Egyptians, even in the middle of the night, were the first to mobilize military units against the phenomenon, their forces on a constant ready standby, after the recent events of Arab Spring.

The Egyptian Army managed to get an M6-2000 main battle tank on site in time to fire its M1A1 main turret conversion kit gun, with its 20 mm shells, at the pulsing, glowing target. However, as far as the Egyptians could see, the massive shells made little difference, disappearing into the energy without a trace.

Egyptian Air Force F-16 fighters arrived on scene just in time to fire a single AGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missile at the glowing sphere that stood hurtling lightning bolts where the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis hotel had been earlier that night. But just before the missile hit, the thundering roar and crackling light winked out, leaving an eerie silence in its wake. The remaining crater quickly began to fill with the waters of the River Nile. The missile plunged under the water and detonated at the bottom of the crater, sending up a sticky geyser of mud, water and sand. Cairo was about to get a new lake—right in the middle of the city.

Los Angeles, CA

2 November, 1800 Hrs

RUSH HOUR WAS still grinding away when a spherical chunk of the freeway evaporated in a ball of sizzling light and blistering beams of lightning that speared through random motorists and their pastel colored minivans and coupes. Traffic had stopped anyway, so hundreds of motorists simply abandoned their cars and ran away from the brilliant orb. Most of them eluded the lightning strikes, although a few were electrocuted as they ran. One man was hit by a glancing blow that sent him into the air across five cars, only to roll off the hood of a Ford Taurus and resume his sprint as if nothing had happened.

Brian Daly sat transfixed as he watched it all happen through the windscreen of his tan Prius. He wondered briefly if he should also get out and run, as Lightning Man was doing, but then he saw the things streaking out of the ball of light. They were drawn to the fleeing people—hunting them. Daly noticed that the creatures ignored the motorists still in their cars, so he sat as still as he could, allowing only his eyes to move as he followed the carnage.

The things were fast.
Damn fast
. And hard to see. They weren’t immaterial, like ghosts, but there was something strange about them. They were...indistinct, though that could also be from the fact that much of what he was seeing was in his periphery.

They were strong, too. He saw several people attacked, their limbs or heads torn away with ease. The things moved on all fours like animals, but could also stand or run on their hind legs, erect, like humans. But these things were not human. Not even close. One of the creatures raised its head, but all Daly saw was its bulbous eyes, swiveling back and forth like a chameleon’s, before it ducked away, racing after anything that moved and ignoring anything that cowered.

Daly sat transfixed and somehow remained eerily calm, as if he were watching a summer blockbuster, instead of the deaths of hundreds of rush-hour drivers. Then one of the creatures clambered atop the roof of a GMC Suburban to his left. He strained his eyes for a better view, but didn’t dare rotate his head. In his peripheral vision, he saw the thing lift its head to the sky like a wolf and howl.

The sound was devastating—a soul-cutting, sonic assault, unlike anything Daly had ever heard. The sound shook the bones inside his skin. He lost control of his bowels. His bladder let go and the saliva in his mouth began to pour down over his lower lip as if he’d been in a dentist’s chair with a few gallons of Novocain pumped into his system. Terror took hold of him. His eyes went wide. His body shook uncontrollably.

Later, after the creatures returned to the light, and the globe of lightning flickered out, leaving behind an enormous crater and thousands dead or dying, Brian Daly’s mind finally returned to some semblance of what it had been. But he would never be the same. He didn’t know what he had just seen, but he knew that local police forces would be helpless against it. Whatever those things had been, even the military would be hard-pressed to stop them. Still, he needed to tell someone what he had just seen. His brother Steven was an Army Ranger. Steve was just a captain, but he might be able to get the information to someone higher up. Daly pulled out his cell phone and called his brother as fast as his shaking fingers would allow.

Philadelphia, PA

2 November, 2100 Hrs

MOMENTS AFTER THE carnage in the other cities began, the Liberty Bell began to glow.

Currently situated in the Liberty Bell Center, adjacent to the glass pavilion that had housed the bell from 1976 until 2003, the bell is the object of visitation by over a million tourists a year. But the facility closed to visitors at 5 p.m.. Only three security guards remained on hand when the inscription on the bell,
Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof
, began to luminesce. One of the three guards—the one furthest from the actual 2,080-pound copper-and-tin attraction—had just enough time to slap his hand on a large red emergency alarm before the surge of light engulfed him.