Ragnarok (27 page)

The light was incredibly bright, but the globe of electric fire felt appealing. It drew her closer. She stood directly in front of the pulsing light, all thoughts of her recent scare in the pit now gone from her mind. She just wanted to be near the light. It filled her with warmth, like the sun. Only this sun was for her. Her very own, personal star.

She smiled wide and exhaled a deep and contented sigh.

She didn’t notice, as five large white creatures that looked like grown versions of the dead babies, crawled out of the globe of brilliance and began to sniff the air around her.

FORTY-FIVE

Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH

LEWIS ALEMAN SAT alone in a side office off the main corridor in Central that ran to the tram station, which would lead to another part of the base that housed a submarine dock. He had left Fogg and Pierce in the main computer control room. He needed just five minutes to himself to process what he had learned, before he reported to Deep Blue. That his boss had not reported in yet regarding his rescue attempt for King did not bode well. It meant they were still up to their necks in battle or dead.

He would have to attempt to contact them regardless. Too much had happened. Knight and Bishop were off the grid. Queen and Rook were in the same town as the source portal—a portal that had appeared regularly over the last few months, and in precisely the same location.

Aleman realized that someone had to be regulating the phenomenon.
Not phenomenon
, he thought.
Attack.

The portals were appearing with increasing frequency around the globe and their strategy of dealing with the fallout caused by dire wolf attacks had led them nowhere. They needed to find whatever was causing the portals to appear and eliminate it. Before there wasn’t anything left of the planet. His quick research into the town of Fenris Kystby led exactly nowhere. There was no useful information about the place. It was a tiny town near the coast of northern Norway, well off the beaten track for tourists and natives alike. But the lack of any information on the Web was disturbing to Aleman. He could nearly always find
something
, about even the most obscure places in the world, even if it was just a farm report or a local carnival announcement. It was almost like any information about this place has been scoured away from the Web.

They knew the dire wolf was mentioned in Norse mythology. They had seen evidence that someone in Viking times had come across a dire wolf. They suspected repeated appearances of the portals in a town in Norway that no one had ever heard of. And Rook had called in earlier from the very same town and was facing mind-controlled people. Aleman didn’t know what it added up to, but he knew that the team was wasting its time in other locations.
Norway
is the source
.

He stood from his office chair and touched the ear of his communications headset, then he voice-dialed Deep Blue. He paced back and forth across the rich blue carpet between the glass-walled air-conditioned closet of routers and servers and the desk the room held. He heard the connection go live with a tiny audible click.

“Kind of busy now, Lew. There’s shooting and running…” Deep Blue sounded out of breath. Aleman would keep the information about Bishop and Knight to himself for the moment.

“It’s going down in Norway. Norway is the source.”

“Son of a—that’s where Rook is.” Deep Blue’s voice came between heaving breaths. Aleman couldn’t hear any external sounds because of the audio dampener in Deep Blue’s helmet, but he could imagine the running and shooting, just fine. He’d experienced it during his previous years as a Delta operator before an injury sidelined him.

“Actually, it’s the same
town
Rook said he was in. Queen’s tracking chip show’s she’s there with him. If they’re not together, they’re close. We need to get over there. Time is running out.”

“What’s the…projection?”

“Maybe two days if the portals keep appearing at the same rate and keep growing in size. The one in Norway seems to have stabilized in size and intensity. And there’s something else. When the Norway portal has opened in the past, it hasn’t stayed on for longer than a few minutes. But it’s on now and has probably been acti-vated for close to a half an hour.”

“We’re…on our…way. Ready everyone who can fire a weapon. The whole White team. How are Bishop and Knight doing?”

“Didn’t work out.” Aleman changed the subject quickly. “I’ll take care of everything on my end. Anything else?”

“Nothing. Out.”

Aleman consoled himself that now wasn’t the time to tell Deep Blue about Bishop and Knight. Deep Blue would be checking on everything from his satellite uplink on the face display of the helmet as soon as the battle subsided enough for him to do so. He would see the complete absence of the tracking chips both Bishop and Knight unknowingly carried, with his GPS program. The man would understand the ramifications of the missing signals. They were either dead or they were trapped on the other side of the portals. Possibly both.

FORTY-SIX

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

ROOK WAS DUMBFOUNDED. Fossen had just flicked a switch and teleported a sun into the neighboring room.

A sun!

“What the hell? Is that a…a dwarf star?” Rook turned back to Fossen, who wore a smug grin.

“No. Only a doorway.”

“A doorway to what?” Rook asked. “To where?” He struggled covertly against the plastic zip ties binding his wrists to the chair behind him. He didn’t think he would be able to break them, but he would try until he had no breath left.

“Another world.” Fossen nodded to the creature still crouching in the corner of the room. “The dire wolves are not a native species. Surely, you can see that, Stanislav.”

The man fell silent. Rook let the man do so for a while. He needed to get free from the damn chair. But then his curiosity got the better of him.

“But why, Fossen? Why open a ‘doorway’ to bring the dire wolves here? What does that get you? Is it connected to your work on the local wolf population? I don’t get it.”

The man didn’t reply.

Rook looked out the window to the glowing sphere in the next room and saw some of the puppet-like lab coats walking around the room, checking on the machinery.

“Why aren’t you being controlled like the others, Fossen? Or are you the one doing the controlling?”

The man leaned back in his office chair and it gave a groan from his weight. Rook looked at the man, and he appeared to be a part of the chair, as if it and he were old friends. He smiled. “The pheromones passing through the doorway help free the will of those who resist the will of my Lord.”

My Lord?
Rook thought.
Shit on a stick.
Religious nutjobs were always harder to handle because they were so unpredictable.

“I’ve heard it feels quite wonderful,” Fossen added. “And they’re happy to do whatever I, or my Lord, ask of them.

“I noticed that when half the town tried to kill me.”

He shrugged. “I asked you to leave more than once.”

“So why aren’t you all happy-tappy?”

“There are some of us here, those whose goals are aligned with the Lord’s, who remain unaffected. Sharp minds are required for an undertaking such as this. The pheromones only affect those who feel any degree of fear. We tested the compounds years ago, you see. But for Edmund Kiss, and your friend Peder—oh yes, he was a part of our group—we didn’t need to be controlled. We
wanted
to open the doorway. We
wanted
to see what was on the other side. And what we found?
Glorious
.

“As I said before, I didn’t lie to you. I just didn’t tell you everything. During World War II, the
Deutsches Ahnenerbe
was set up as a group with the sole purpose of investigating potential supernatural weapons. Hitler, as you probably know, was convinced that he would find some dark art or powered talisman that would help him win the war.”

“And the
Ahnenerbe
was willing to serve, right? Just doing their jobs like the jack-booted thugs at Auschwitz?” Rook looked dis-gusted.

Fossen surprised Rook by barking with laughter.

“No. Not at all. Hitler was a fool. He was good at getting people riled up, and he played that ‘master race’ card very well in public, but that wasn’t his true goal. He had a limited scope of vision. The man only wanted power and more power. Once removed from the main theater of war, the small group here abandoned the Third Reich and its bigoted agenda. They even abandoned the name
Ahnenerbe
. Now we simply call ourselves ‘The Group.’ Kiss and Peder and the others were interested in other worlds and supernatural creatures the likes of which Hitler could not have imagined. They remained here in Fenris Kystby, dedicated to one sole ideal. Over time, some, like Kiss, gained their own ideas about how things should be done and went their own way. Others, like Peder, dropped out shortly after the war. He never had the stomach for what we were doing, but he knew to keep his nose out of our business. I was born in the ’60s, when the project was well under way and the war was long over.”

Fossen stood and walked to the window, his back to where Rook sat tied to his chair. “You see, we kept people out of Fenris Kystby. No one knew what we were doing all these years. I did try to convince you to leave this town. We discovered the doorway and we figured out how the pheromones work. We even genetically tried to replicate the dire wolves, but all our attempts have been failures. We can’t get any subjects to survive infancy. Even tried crossing their DNA with our local wolves. I keep trying, but it’s more out of habit at this point, if I’m honest. Ultimately, we realized our true goal should be stabilizing and amplifying the doorway. It’s a naturally occurring phenomenon, like a small hangnail between dimensions. What you see out there is about twenty years’ worth of work to help that phenomenon become a permanent opening between worlds.”

Rook was sure one of the two zip ties was loosening as he flexed his thick wrists and pulled apart with his upper arms. It just wasn’t happening fast enough.

“So this is all about opening a portal for the dire wolves to come through? Why? Are they the mystery Lord you keep talking about?” He had to keep stalling the man, if he could.

Fossen leveled a serious glare at Rook.

Rook tried not to look away. He’d broken rule number one for dealing with religious kooks:
don’t insult their God.

“No, Stanislav, I wanted to
go there
. To live in Asgard and sit at the right hand of Lord Fenrir’s throne.”

Fenrir
, Rook thought. Fossen’s God had a name.

“I’m all that’s left of the true believers. The others out there are all dominated by the pheromones or by Fenrir’s will directly as She speaks to them. I see the look on your face, my friend. But I’ve already been though the doorway to the other side. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It is a stark place, but it is filled with bliss beyond comprehension.”

Rook thought it sounded like Fossen got a dose of Fenrir’s happy gas, too. Maybe not enough to make him loopy, but enough to make him see God, and want more.

Rook pulled hard at his restraints, but then stretched his neck, as if he were merely uncomfortable in the chair. He didn’t want Fossen to stop talking and start realizing his captive was nearly free.

“Have you ever wondered if Fenrir just wants to come here?”

Fossen smiled a strange distant smile, like he was remembering something amazing in his mind’s eye. “Oh, she wants to come here very badly. That’s why she needs me. To loosen the leash that keeps her from fully entering our world. She has been here before, several times over the ages. We’ve just mistaken the evidence of her passage.”

Fossen had actually piqued Rook’s interest. “How?”

“Impact craters,” Fossen said. “Some really are impact craters, to be sure, but many are simply the footprints of my Lord entering our reality, taking what she pleases, and returning to her world until the season returns.”

“Season?”

“The opening between our worlds occurs naturally, but the duration and scope cannot be predicted. Until now. Historically, many of the seasons with larger openings and longer durations coincide with mass extinctions.”

“Hold on,” Rook said with a laugh he couldn’t hold back. “You’re telling me these assholes are what killed the dinosaurs?”

Fossen shook his head. “They merely contributed to it.”

“Then why in the name of Ronald Reagan’s undescended right testicle would you help with something like that?” Rook’s patience ran out. “Oh right, Lord Fruitloop.”

Fossen seemed to absorb the comment with just a moment’s discomfort. “Because, with my help, the portal will remain open indefinitely. Our worlds will become one, and everyone will serve the Lord Fenrir.”

“Right, with you at
her
right hand.” Rook hadn’t missed that Fossen’s God was feminine.

“As promised.”

Rook was almost free of the plastic cuffs. “Listen buttercup, if there is one thing I’ve learned about megalomaniacs—human or otherwise—it’s that they’ll say, do and promise just about anything to achieve their goals. You’re being duped.”

“If you would only open your eyes and see—”

“You know they make big comic book conventions for people like you, right?” Rook said. “You’d fit right in. Pop on a pair of rubber Vulcan ears and you’d be all set. Maybe hook up with a Ferengi. I think they’re ugly as shit, but you seem to have low standards.”

Fossen grinned and shook his head. “Oh, Stanislav. I will miss your sense of humor.” The door to the room opened and Asya walked in calmly, holding another Walther pistol in her hand, trained on Rook.

Rook’s momentum toward his escape was derailed the moment he saw Asya. At first, he thought she was in on it with Fossen, but then he saw the wooden way she walked and the glazed look in her eyes.