Ragnarok (15 page)

Knight considered a moment, slurping liquid protein through a straw. “The good, please.”

“He’s got some full-body armor suits waiting for us at the next hotspot, which should help protect us in hand-to-hand against those things. They’re not bullet-proof, but he says they’re made of impact-resistant memory foam. Not too bulky. Should give us a nice edge, especially if they barrel into us, like that one that knocked me across the taxi.”

“Nice,” Knight removed his straw and gulped the rest of his shake. “Where
is
the next location?”

“London. Ready for the bad news?”

“Not really, but hit me.”

“Our original destination was Cape Town, South Africa, but there wasn’t just one energy dome there. There was a whole cluster of them. Cape Town is gone. The whole city. Gone.”

“Damn,” Knight stretched the word out. “Clusters?” His face looked ashen, as if he had seen not just one ghost, but an entire convention of them.

TWENTY-THREE

Fenris Kystby, Norway

ZELDA BAKER, CALLSIGN: Queen, was out of ammunition. She had one more magazine for the M9, but she knew she’d never have time to load it. The thing at the end of the narrow corridor moved like lightning, leaping from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. She had fired 15 times and missed every shot but the last. Now, the thing stopped, hanging upside down from the ceiling. It looked at her through one of its baseball-sized eyeballs on the outside of its blocky head.

Queen had been expecting something strange since Rook had told her about the mind-controlled villagers and the Nazi experiments that had gone on in these labs. But she wasn’t prepared for this. It looked at least eight feet tall, but it crouched and sprang more like a cat than anything humanoid. Its translucent skin covered coiled muscles and an almost transparent white substance that looked to her like blood. Its claws, teeth and even the skull appeared clear, allowing her a view of its brain, which looked like congealed cottage cheese.

Definitely didn’t evolve on this planet
, she thought.

Like the other members of Chess Team, Queen had faced unusual beasts before, but this one was odd. It had charged her at first, and she had fired all her bullets at the creature as it careened toward her. But then she hit it and it stopped.

Now it just looked at her.

She couldn’t tell if the creature was intelligent or not. Its oversized blocky head just remained fixed to the side. A lone bulbous eye locked on her face, the other looking in a different direction. Neither of them moved.

Maybe its vision is movement based?

She shifted her hand very slowly to the hilt of her KA-BAR knife—slow enough to not set off a motion detector. Her eyes never left the beast as her hand crept across her body.

The creature remained still.

Dust fell from the tunnel’s stone and brick ceiling, loosened by the recent bullet impacts and the holes punched by the creature’s claws. Loose streams of sandy soil poured down from cracks in the ceiling, too. Not so much that she thought the tunnel would collapse, but enough that the grit would get in her eyes if she moved.

Is that it?
she wondered.

She decided to wait the thing out, staying absolutely still until it did something. Her fingers grasped the non-slip handle of the 7 inch knife, ready to pull it from its sheath and go to work on the creature.

But it didn’t move. The creature waited, too. She watched it and noticed that the dust was settling and the streams of grit stopped falling.

The creature tilted its head to the side.

Queen still held the M9 in her left hand—useless weight.
Or is it?
Queen’s eyes went up to the ceiling again, and then she slowly moved her gun hand, but not as slowly as she had moved the knife hand. She wanted to see if the beast would notice the movement.

As soon as she moved her hand, the beast turned its head again. The round eyes locked onto the movement. Queen smiled. When she moved her hand, it had been backward, as if cocking her arm for a throw. She launched the empty M9 at the ceiling between her and the creature, where it waited on the ceiling. The creature began to move toward the flying weapon, but then the gun struck the weakened brick ceiling. A cloud of dust and dirt spurted from the ceiling before the pistol smashed to the floor, sending up another plume of dust.

Queen took two quick steps forward and to the side, but the creature’s eye didn’t swivel in her direction. It remained perfectly still as it had done before.

The dirty air confuses it.
Her eyes widened.
They use some kind of sonar, like a bat,
she guessed
. The eyes must not work as well as they appear to. Maybe low light blindness. So they compensate with sonar. But sonar is no good if the air is full of debris. Sensory overload.

She took two more steps forward, but this time moved closer to the center of the tunnel, and directly behind the stream of sand and dry dirt trickling from the ceiling. She took one more step right up to the dust, so the stream of dirt was coming right down in front of her face. The upside-down monster hung less than a yard from her position on the other side of the little falling soil.

Queen raised her knife.

The creature’s eye twitched in her direction.

The stream of soil slowed—her only cover, about to be gone. Queen abandoned caution and leapt forward, the wicked blade of the KA-BAR leading as she burst through the trickle of dust and plunged the knife into the creature’s eye.

The knife slid into the creature’s clear skull, up to the hilt, from the force of her thrust. She pushed until the beast’s body toppled over. She didn’t release her pressure on the knife until she felt the tip of the blade strike the stone floor.

She squatted next to the creature and wondered what it could be. She was about to remove the blade from the dead thing when a small skittering sound came from down the tunnel behind her. She withdrew the blade with agonizing slowness.
Have to make it like I’m not even moving.

A rock rolled across the floor and hit the wall of the tunnel with a loud clacking noise.

Queen drew in a breath.

The newcomer was less than ten feet behind her. The blade of the knife came free and Queen spun in a whirl, raising the knife for another killing stroke.

But that stroke never came. Instead came a noise. A roaring vibration like a hundred jet aircraft in her head.

Her arms turned to limp spaghetti.

The knife fell from her hand.

Her legs quivered and her teeth chattered.

Her eyes watered and a thick river of drool slipped from her mouth. She never saw the second beast. Its roar filled her world, and her eyes clamped shut trying to force out the terror, but as she fell to the ground, her whole body shaking like an epileptic in the throes of a seizure, she could utter only two words:

“Daddy, no!”

TWENTY-FOUR

Manhattan Island, NY

3 November, 0630 Hrs

MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL Keasling’s permanent scowl didn’t alter when he saw the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter settle in the middle of the cordoned-off city street, but he did breathe a sigh of relief as its rotor blades whipped dust and grit into the sky. The situation in New York hadn’t gotten out of hand yet, but he knew it would. He had 200 men out of Fort Dix, and another 200 on the way, but he knew they wouldn’t be sufficient for this mess. He also suspected the two men emerging from the helicopter might not make much difference against such an alien threat. Still, these two men were among the most capable soldiers he had ever known, and they were both his friends.

Keasling absently raised the fingers of one hand and stroked the smooth skin under his nose, where he had worn a mustache for most of the last twenty years. With the recent receipt of his second star, he’d made a few simple but profound changes in his life. No more coffee and more time in the gym for one—although with his short, stocky barrel shape, he’d been muscular enough. He wasn’t looking to become more intimidating but to increase his lifespan with cardiovascular exercises he hadn’t bothered with since long before he had become a General. His wife was long in the grave from the cancer, but his daughter had just had her first little blonde-haired son, Liam, and Keasling now wanted to live long enough to see the boy become a man.
Funny how family changes everything
, he thought.

The loss of the mustache wasn’t as physically life changing as the exercise, but he found his hand returning to the lack of it repeatedly, as if the loss of hair signified this new phase in his life as much as it reduced the appearance of his age by a decade. As the two men approached him on 6
^th
Avenue, and the helicopter took to the dawn sky behind them, Keasling thought about the chaos of the present situation and wondered, not for the first time since he had received his second star, if maybe it was time to stop. He knew he never would, though. The vicious cycle of thought further fueled his gruff demeanor as he stepped forward to greet his friends.

“King, you look like the fucking Michelin Man.”

Both of the recently arrived men were dressed in personal body armor suits that looked to Keasling like they were wearing sculpted pillows on their bodies. The General knew the suits were an extension of research carried out by the Pentagon and a Canadian man that started out making a suit impervious to grizzly bear attacks. Lewis Aleman’s genius had been further applied to the designs and the result was an incredibly lightweight, tactical battle-suit, which, while it would not stop a large-caliber bullet, would significantly reduce damage from impacts, falls and knife—or in this case,
claw
—attacks. Keasling’s people in the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had been involved in the Pentagon’s end of development on the suit, so he was aware of its capabilities. He understood the necessity of such body armor. Still, they looked like the Tempur-Pedic memory foam pillow he used during the few hours of sleep he got at night.

The suits had multiple sculpted angles that resembled the boxy radar-reflective surfaces of stealth aircraft, and the color scheme for the entirety of the suits was a grayish black, reinforcing the similarity. Both men wore full-face-mask helmets that kept their identities hidden as well, but Keasling knew each man by his gait.

“General,” Deep Blue said from behind his armored faceplate. “If King is the Michelin Man, what does that make me?”

“Very dignified and presidential, sir.”

“I was going to say
my valet
,” King started, “but
dignified
works too.”

“Show some respect, Delta Boy,” Keasling said, but he was smiling as he said it. King and his Chess Team cohorts were all former Delta, and they were used to a level of informality and a lack of ranks not approved of in other branches of the service. However, in just a few short years, Keasling had gone from being constantly irritated at the informality to having immense respect for Jack Sigler. The two men had become close friends.

He shook hands with both men, noting with approval how supple the gloves on the suits were. While still padded with a thin layer of the experimental armor material, the fingers would still be able to operate triggers and even keyboards if necessary.

“Sorry about the switch to the chopper, but
Persephone
would have trouble with how tight the buildings are in Midtown. Plus, no easy rooftops for VTOL nearby, like you had in Chicago. There’s crap all over the roofs here.” The general led the other men up 6
^th
, along the sidewalk.

“No problem. We came in low from Jersey and couldn’t see much. How bad is it here?” Deep Blue asked the general as they began walking up to West 49
^th
, where soldiers from Fort Dix stood and crouched behind sandbags, weapons trained down the street.

“Well, let’s just say that I’ve been wondering whether it’s too late to join the Peace Corps and get assigned to the ass-end of Botswana. I can tell you it was no damn fun getting all the civilians out of these buildings in this part of town. NYPD played a big part in that, but it would have been impossible later in the day.”

The men rounded the corner of a small concrete-bordered city-planning park with about ten trees, all still tenaciously clinging to their orange leaves before winter’s inevitable pull. Beyond it stood five abandoned hot dog carts with brightly colored umbrellas. Keasling’s stomach rumbled at the thought of wolfing down a few dogs with brown mustard and sauerkraut. They turned onto West 49
^th
Street and saw an empty road, cordoned off a few bocks west, down the narrow corridor of tall buildings before them. Steam gently seeped up from manhole sewer covers on the asphalt, and a discarded sheet of crumpled, dirty newspaper caught an errant breeze and wafted along the street, wrapping around the leg of a squat black fire hydrant with a silver top on the other side of the street.

“Where—?” King began, his voice thick through the built in voice modulator on his helmet.

“Up gentlemen, up.” Keasling said more forcefully than necessary. The situation was wearing on his nerves.

His armored companions slowly titled their heads up and took in the sight.

The Cobra Head streetlamps, stretched into their view, but otherwise, all they could see were two glass-walled skyscrapers reaching into the sky on either side of the road. The one on the right reached to 750 feet and the one on the left went almost as high, to 675 feet. But the building on their right had a glowing energy sphere embedded in it, close to the top. The globe of light stretched across the 100 foot gap between the buildings, over the street and just barely kissed the edge of the building on the left. The ball of light floated in the sky, with the right third of it clawing into the taller building. The globe was steady and solid, with none of the lightning effects Keasling had seen in video footage of the Chicago event.