Ragnarok (39 page)

Fenrir stepped further into the room, revealing two more legs and its hind quarters, a stubby lump of loose flesh stained with defecation. Nearly fifty liquid-filled sacks dangled from its body. Some of the creatures inside were waking up, twisting and clawing. With a gust of viscous liquid, one of the pouches ruptured, disgorging a fresh dire wolf onto the battlefield. The creature landed on all fours, shook the fluid away like a wet dog and sprang into action, joining the fray.

King twisted just in time to avoid yet another strike. The White soldier returned, launching himself at King. Up close, King could see a small Chess Piece insignia of a King on the man’s shoulder plating with a number 1 in the center. It was a quick homemade job, but King appreciated the sentiment anyway. White One again ran at King, all power and no finesse. King ducked a swinging punch and came up behind the man, his hand quickly sliding to White One’s neck and the helmet buckle restraints. He only got one before the man turned and kicked. King caught the kick in the stomach. It had been aimed at King’s unprotected chest, but he diverted the blow with his forearms, driving it down to the armor plating covering his lower body. The kick still had enough force to drive King backward, but not enough to knock him down.

Beck was still battling Matt Carrack—her opposite number with the callsign of White Zero—and their battle shifted closer to King’s. She was holding her own, but both combatants looked exhausted to King.

White One again rushed at King, who threw himself forward into the man’s chest. He wrapped an arm around White One’s middle and threw his other hand to the back of the neck, getting the second clasp. As they fell, King wrenched the helmet free, and still gripping it, swung his arm back at the man’s head, smashing the helmet against his head. The man fell and King worried that he might have hit the soldier too hard. He didn’t want to kill him—he was being controlled. King reached down and pulled off his armored glove. He reached for the man’s neck, checking for a pulse.

Before he could, a roar tore through the air, but it sounded nothing like Fenrir, or any of the dire wolves. It didn’t even sound organic.

Two glowing eyes emerged from the portal, followed by a white, boxy creature.

Not a creature
, King realized as the shape became clear.
A Humvee!

The battered vehicle, covered in white, gelatinous gore, skidded to a stop, flinging a dead dire wolf from its hood. Another dead dire wolf, this one missing it’s lower half, was jammed into the front wheel well. A coil of clear intestines slid down the driver’s side door. The thing looked like it had plowed through an army of the things.

The door flung open, sending the guts to the floor.

Bishop, still wearing his body armor, but no helmet, stood from the vehicle looking like a warrior from some other world. He looked down, saw a grenade launcher one of the White team had dropped and bent to pick it up.

Knight slid out behind him. “Punch line, Bishop. You can’t make an entrance like that and not have a punch line.” When his boots hit the rubble covered concrete floor, Knight didn’t miss a beat. He ran across the room in what appeared to be a loin cloth. His hair was back in a ponytail and whipped around him as he ran. He was covered in white dust. As he ran, he scooped up a discarded rifle.

Despite Knight and Bishop’s sudden arrival being a shock, King recovered quickly enough to notice a familiar shape strapped to Knight’s back.

It can’t be...

Fenrir looked down at the disturbance in time to see Bishop fire a 40 mm grenade right up at her belly, where a curtain of still-growing dire wolves hung in their liquid-filled sacks.

Before the first grenade had hit, Bishop fired another at her ass.

SIXTY-EIGHT

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

4 November, 0400 Hrs

THE EXPLOSION WAS tremendous. The shockwave sent Bishop flying backward into the portal, where he disappeared through the bulging, straining wall of brilliant light. Flames leapt up from Fenrir’s gut, but were quickly extinguished as several of the sacks burst, spilling their fluids and partially formed young to the floor. Fenrir let out an anguished roar that could have been fueled by pain or anger of the loss of her children. Its big body tensed and closed what looked like several large pores running along its flanks.

From one side of the giant room, away from the fight, a door opened and several bewildered people in lab coats with blonde hair ran out and raced for the small door that led outside the lab. Wind and snow still swept into the chamber from the ruined ceiling and the open hangar doors that Fenrir had been heading for, before Bishop’s grenade attack.

Knight ran to the metal stairwell with the FN-SCAR rifle he found and raced up the steps. Queen stood from where she had lain, rubbing her neck and squinting hard, as if she had a vicious headache. Carrack stopped fighting Beck, and looked around at the chaos around him. Beck recognized that Carrack was no longer under control. She moved away and toward the hangar door, looking for another weapon in the ruins. Deep Blue stood up from behind a long steel I-beam and looked wobbly on his feet.

King saw all of it happening around him. He threw another grenade at Fenrir’s front feet—his last—then ran to join Beck and look for another weapon.

Rook was standing, still favoring one shoulder, but he had opened fire on the creature with an MP5 dropped by one of the White team. He focused his fire on Fenrir’s flattened pug nose, and as the creature moved its head away, Rook followed it with the stream of bullets. The MP5 was equipped with a Beta C-Mag—the cartridge looked like two flat drums on either side of the weapon’s barrel. It held 100 rounds of ammunition, and Rook had found more of them at his feet in a black nylon bag next to Reggie’s impaled body. He kept the stream of fire sizzling through the air and then was joined by FN-SCAR fire from the stairs as Knight climbed, and by more MP5 fire, from Queen.

Bishop stepped out of the portal again, only this time, he backed into the room. After another step backward, he was fully into the room, backing toward Fenrir and firing his rifle into the portal, sweeping the barrel left and right.

Then they came.

Dire wolf after dire wolf poured out of the opening toward Bishop. The first wave of them crashed into him, sending him flying toward Fenrir, where his armored body slammed into Fenrir’s second left-side leg, just as it lifted from the floor and stepped forward. It was like getting hit by a bus. The impact launched him back into the room. He hit the floor hard and slid for a few feet before coming to a stop. He didn’t get up.

King saw twenty, then thirty, then forty of the creatures enter the room, some so eager that they climbed over each other. Fenrir had recovered from its wounds, or was simply ignoring the thirteen ruptured sacks hanging from its underside like popped balloons. It turned its slathering jaws toward the weapons that were barking at it, spitting bullets like vicious hornet stings. Carrack, Beck and Deep Blue had all added their weapons fire to the melee, but even added to Queen’s, Rook’s and Knight’s fire, they were not able to hold back the tide of oncoming dire wolves.

King looked up at Knight and the pack sitting next to him. He whistled to the man through his fingers and shouted, “Knight!”

Between shots, Knight glanced down. King pointed to the pack. Knight pushed it over the side without hesitation. King bent his knees and snatched the heavy bundle from the air, squatting to absorb the impact. He opened it up to confirm its contents.

The suitcase nuke.
His
suitcase nuke.

As the melee came closer, King did the only thing he could think of.

He turned and ran.

SIXTY-NINE

Aboard the Persephone, Fenris Kystby, Norway

4 November, 0415 Hrs

THE HUGE FLYING-WING aircraft settled gently in the snow, the thrusters of the engines blasting the white flakes in all directions, clearing a landing spot for itself.

Lewis Aleman sat in the computer room with the makeshift desk and chairs, frantically searching for more information about portals, alternate dimensions, Fenrir and dire wolves, as were Sara Fogg, George Pierce and Black Five back in New Hampshire. He could feed anything they found to Deep Blue over the earbud communicator in their leader’s ear.

“So, we’re thinking that this Fenrir thing might be secreting scent out of glands. The scent could carry pheromones, and that would explain the control over some of the team. Look for something that looks like a sphincter, or large pore. If you could…”

Deep Blue cut him off. “Timing, Lewis, timing. I think that problem is solved for now.” Aleman could hear tons of background noise on the line. He knew Deep Blue’s helmet was off, but at the moment, his anonymity wasn’t a concern. “We’re seeing increasing numbers of dire wolves, too, and we’re down several men. We need a way to stop these things and to kill the portal. We might have to go with your plan for the
Crescent
.”

“Working on it.”

“I know,” Deep Blue said. “But work faster.” He clicked off and Aleman’s earpiece went quiet.

Aleman shouted in surprise as the metal door to the room slammed open.

King stood in the doorway, dirty, bloody and missing the top portion of his armor. He was out of breath from his sprint through the snow drifts to the
Persephone
.

When he spoke, his voice sounded like a growl. “I need you to do exactly as I say.”

That’s when Aleman noticed the suitcase nuke clutched under King’s arm.

SEVENTY

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

4 November, 0430 Hrs

KNIGHT HAD A bird’s eye view of the entire conflict. He still didn’t feel like himself after his ordeal on the other side of the portal. His brain felt loose, his thoughts all erratic. He had a hard time remembering what had happened in all the time he was on the other side. But he and Bishop were able to agree that Knight must either have been on the other side for much longer—and they realized time worked differently on that side—or else his body had aged at an accelerated rate in the short span of time he was there. Either way, Knight was a few years older now.

Although strangely, Bishop wasn’t.

According to the big Iranian American, they had both been on the other side for about the same amount of time—Bishop having entered a portal on a rope like Tarzan just moments after Knight had been carried through the one on Westminster bridge. In the end they came to agree that time had worked differently for each of them, either because they had gone through different portals, or because Knight spent most of his time on the lower plane while Bishop entered the other world atop the cliff. Knight knew that time ran slower the further you got from Earth’s surface. You needed an atomic watch to see the difference, but the effect might be exaggerated in Fenrir’s dimension.

What Knight hadn’t told Bishop was that, when they met at the top of the cliff, Bishop had been covered in dried white dire wolf blood. It covered his armored chest and the side of his face. Bishop told him about his encounter with the dire wolf, that he’d hallucinated his worst fear—becoming a Regen once more, but Knight suspected the man had actually attacked, killed and eaten a dire wolf. Having personally survived Bishop as a Regen, it was a nightmare neither man wanted to think about, so Knight didn’t. He put the memory out of his mind with no intention of ever telling Bishop.

A burst of gunfire brought him back to the battle.

Knight focused on the chaos below him. Deep Blue fired on leaping dire wolves. Queen was back to her preferred method of up-close devastation with a wickedly curved blade, moving with a display of predatory violence that put the dire wolves to shame. Carrack, Beck and Rook were all near each other, unleashing a barrage of bullets at the giant creature’s sack-covered chest, which didn’t seem to hurt it as much as distract it.

In a perfect sniping position, he focused on the largest target, the behemoth. He considered the chest, but rupturing the hanging wombs wasn’t doing any real damage. Instead, he targeted the eyes, thinking if he couldn’t kill the gigantic animal, he could at least handicap it.

He lay on the metal catwalk and supported the FN-SCAR under the barrel and sighted one of the creature’s round eyes. The SCAR was a Belgian rifle with an effective range of about 1200 feet. He was less than a hundred feet from the beast. Of course, the monster was eighty feet tall; it would be an easy target from any distance.

He fired twice into the beast’s left eye and the creature roared, shaking the foundations of the underground lab. The metal catwalk rattled, shaking Knight to the point where he wondered if the whole catwalk system might come down.

The team continued their assault on Fenrir. It struck out wildly, unaware of where the bullet strike to its eye had originated. Its torso spun from side to side, swinging its arms and flailing the dangling sacks so hard that some burst open, dropping dire wolves sixty feet to their deaths. The giant snapped its tremendous jaws at the soldiers on the ground and pounded its feet, trying to crush them.

Knight waited until the creature turned again to snap toward Rook’s position. Rook ran out of the way and leapt over a pile of rock and sand, sliding down the other side. The beast’s head lunged at Rook, and then swung back to snarl at Anna Beck—Knight’s girlfriend—as she fired on the creature from behind, helping Bishop to his feet with her other hand. He was once again firing at the newly arriving dire wolves as they entered the fray through the portal.

The right eye stayed frustratingly out of Knight’s view, so he took a few more shots at the already damaged and closed-over left eye.

Then he heard a new kind of roar. This one was loud and higher pitched, more like a whine.