Ragnarok (22 page)

He had no idea why none of them chose to turn right out of the portal and head deeper into the city, toward the parks. It was like they were a flock of birds, or a shoal of fish, moving always in the same direction. He lined up one last shot with the Barrett’s Leupold scope, and squeezed the trigger. A bloom of fluid erupted from the front of the fast moving dire wolf’s chest.

Knight pulled his eye away from the scope and watched as the dire wolf fell forward on its chest and face, its legs grotesquely in the air behind it. It slid forward for another dozen feet, its intense momentum carrying it onward, before it rammed into another dire wolf corpse that lay on the bridge.

More dire wolves emerged from the portal up by the clock tower, but he had cleared them from the bridge for the moment. He took the opportunity the brief lull provided to stand up and abandon the Barrett. He headed deeper into the
Crescent
, running to an armory closet. Normally, Bishop was the one that used heavy machine guns. For one thing, he was the only team member strong enough to lug one around all day. Although Knight was smaller, he could still lift the 127-pound gun Browning M2 with its tripod, but he wouldn’t be able to carry it far. He brought the weapon over to the door and set it down.

“Black One, can you set down? I’m gonna hop out with a Browning.” Knight spoke to the pilot and before the man replied, the VTOL engines slowed and the ship began to lower the last hundred feet to the bridge.

“If you’re sure, Knight. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be on the ground with those assholes.” One of the things Knight had come to like about Black One was that the man was always congenial and upfront with his thoughts, but he complied with requests almost before they were issued. His copilot, Black Two, was usually taciturn to the point of sullen. Knight tried to remember when he had last heard the man speak. He couldn’t.

“I’ll be fine.” The
Crescent
gently set down on the surface of the bridge and Knight hopped out of the open door, pulling the giant Browning with him. He set it down in the middle of the bridge on its tripod, just behind an effective barrier of dire wolf corpses. Then he went back to the open doorway and pulled out a couple of boxes of belt-fed .50 caliber ammunition.

“Pull back to a safe distance. I’ll call when I need you.” The
Crescent
pulled up and moved away toward St. Thomas’s Hospital on the south side of the bridge.

Knight set one of the boxes of ammunition next to the Browning and loaded a belt. The weapon had an effective range of around 2000 yards, so he’d be able to hit the dire wolves pretty far down the bridge. He was only about 500 feet from the portal, so he would have to be careful not to strafe the buildings on either side of the road as the monsters ran at him. He felt certain that while Britain would be grateful for US assistance in putting down the dire wolf incursion, they might look less fondly on him turning Big Ben into a Swiss cheese building full of eight-inch holes.

Knight opened fire on the end of the bridge with the huge gun, simply rotating it on its tripod to mow down an entire line of dire wolves that were heading his way. The gun’s violent recoil shook his arms as he fired an arc of .50 caliber death back across the bridge again, ripping through a second wave of dire wolves. All that remained were the creatures still emerging from the portal. He waited for them to make the left turn and come at him.

Just like birds. Or bats. Bishop said they couldn’t see well in the rain. Maybe they do have some flocking instinct and don’t know what to do when the leader is confused. Or dead.

The thought of Bishop, and the knowledge that he had a second or two before he needed to fire again, made him look to his right along the river, toward the London Eye. He looked at the exact moment that the wheel crashed down vertically on its lower rim. A quarter of the wheel was gone. The tie rods flailed in the middle like a broken bicycle wheel. The entire wheel was off the support—because the top third of the cantilevered struts were just missing. Vanished. Like the portal.

Oh shit
. Bishop was still on the top of the wheel. Knight could just barely see him clinging to the top, as the remaining structure toppled slowly forward into the river, mashing the small pier that ran parallel to the river’s shore, where the wheel had sat. The steel buckled and flopped as it came crashing into the river, and Knight followed Bishop with his eye, the man riding the falling pile of metal like a bucking bronco, until the splash from the impact with the water sent up such a plume of murky brown water that the tiny figure was obscured.

Knight was about to call out to Bishop over the microphone in his helmet when he felt something slam into him. He wasn’t hurt at all—the armor absorbed the impact perfectly, but he was startled to find himself several feet in the air, being carried over the shoulder of a dire wolf. The Browning was already far behind them.

The collapse of the Eye had distracted him, when a wave of dire wolves had been headed his way.
Stupid!
The creature carrying him ran fast. Knight tried to grab at the creature’s face with a hand, but it batted his arm away with a swipe of claws. Knight could see the tears in the armor from the beast’s claws and knew if he wasn’t wearing it, he’d likely be dead already. Up close and over the monster’s shoulder like a burlap sack, all Knight could easily see was the creature’s broad back. The muscles rippled and tensed under the see-through skin. Knight tried to push back away from the dire wolf, but it suddenly turned at the end of the bridge and began sprinting back the way it had come. The force of the high-speed turn threw its balance off and allowed Knight a look around. The other dire wolves were already heading back toward the portal from which they had come. Knight reached for the low-slung holster on his left leg, pulling out his Glock, but again, the creature swept claws at him and the gun was knocked from his hand. He watched helplessly as the gun sailed over the edge of the bridge and into the river.

Next, Knight twisted his torso, lunging his head and knocking the dire wolf in the back of its head with his armored helmet. The creature loosened its grip for just a second. Enough for Knight to slide his right hand up to his sheathed knife on his chest. The dire wolf tightened its crushing grip again and Knight’s hand was trapped against his chest on the handle of the knife.

Bastard
.

He struggled and peered around again to see that they were nearly at the portal, and many of the other dire wolves had retreated into it. He began frantically kicking his knee toward the dire wolf’s chest and once again, the creature loosened its grasp for just a second. But this time Knight was ready for the short respite. He ripped his arm outward, pulling the knife and driving it deeply into the back of the creature’s neck. He was surprised that the beast didn’t drop from the blow, so he tore the blade out and began stabbing at the creature’s back repeatedly, aiming for the heart—if it was where a human heart would be—and the back of the head and neck as much as he could.

The creature faltered and slowed. He could feel the descent in velocity as the dire wolf staggered. Then it began to fall forward, pulling Knight’s body with it. Knight pulled his legs up hoping to spring off the creature before the weight of it pinned him to the ground, but he was too late.

The dire wolf collapsed right through the wall of the glowing energy portal, and just as it hit the ground, the energy portal closed with a sucking sound and a strong gust of wind. The portal left a crater in its wake.

And a pair of feet.

The dire wolf’s.

There was no sign of Knight.

THIRTY-SIX

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

ASYA SCREAMED AS she fell.

She had made her way to the lower level of the lab and stared up at the giant cage of metal that dominated the space before exploring the doors and tunnels that led off from the cavernous room. Many of the doors were locked, but she found old crumbling tunnels that burrowed into the earth, leading off each wall of the giant room. She had ventured into one just a few feet past the point where the lights from the main room offered any illumination.

She was about to turn back when she heard a tiny sound from deeper in the tunnel. It might have been a pebble scraping along the stone floor. Or maybe a small animal. It was impossible to tell. The tunnel, which was wide but low, was pitch dark. Asya felt along the brick walls with her hands and moved deeper into the space. She smelled dust and something wet, which surprised her, because thus far everything in the lab had been very dry.

It was when, for the second time, she was about to give up exploring and go back to look for a flashlight that she stepped forward into nothing and toppled over in the gloom. She screamed as she fell, the sounds of her voice echoing through the tunnel. She landed on something that was soft mixed with tiny sharp pokey spines. She felt the surface under her in the dark and the sensation on her fingertips was like spongy rubber with toothpicks sticking out of it. She touched one of the sharp things and applied a gentle pressure to its side. The thing snapped, just like a toothpick would. She ran her fingers over the break and felt the tiny barbs, but they were more jagged than the fibers from a snapped toothpick—more solid too.

“Bozhe moi. What is this?” She whispered in the dark, afraid suddenly of what else might be in this pit with her. She struggled to find footing on the squishy surface and instead walked on her knees with one hand on the mushy uneven ground for balance and the other reaching out in the dark for a wall. She felt the barbs poking her knees as she moved forward, but her splayed out fingertips soon grazed brick. She ran her hand over the bricks and they felt similar to the ones that formed the tunnel up above—smaller than normal bricks today. She ran her hand left and right along the wall looking for anything different than a flat wall surface. A door or a ladder.
Or a light switch
.

The smell in this new space was wetter than up in the tunnel, but the squishing surface that made up the ground was dry to the touch. She tried again to stand but quickly gave up. It was like standing on top of a ball pit. What she had thought was solid—if rubbery—ground was actually a pile of something. Several small somethings.

Stupid!
Asya suddenly remembered that she had a small LED light in a survival kit that she wore on her waist in a tiny fanny pack. She had picked it up at the store in Olderdalen when Stanislav—
no, Rook
, she corrected herself—was buying his new coat. The kit would have some wooden matches as well, but the LED keychain light would be easier to find in the dark.

She unzipped the pouch and carefully slipped her fingers inside the scratchy nylon, so she didn’t disgorge the contents into the pile of mystery things on which she kneeled. Her fingers found the plastic casing of the tiny flashlight. She pulled it out. Before lighting it, she zipped the pouch again, and slipped a finger through the ring on the end of the light. She didn’t want to lose it.

Then she depressed the spring-loaded button, illuminating the small room around her with a garish blast of blue-tinged white light.

She wished she hadn’t.

Against her will, a second scream rose up in her. This one far longer and far more distressed than the yelp she had let out when she fell.

She was in a graveyard. She was
on
a graveyard. A grave
mound
. And it was heaped with the tiny corpses of small white creatures unlike any she had ever seen. There were hundreds—maybe thousands—of the little things, their rib bones poking though the desiccated chests of the small white puppy-like creatures. They had miniscule clear claws on each paw but strange small pinpricks of eyes on the sides of their heads. They were not puppies, nor wolves. She could see their musculature under their whitish skin. They were not any animal she had ever seen or heard of.

They were something else.

Something unnatural.

Hideous.

Asya’s breath caught in her chest. The mound of tiny bodies moved.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH

3 November, 1000 Hrs

SARA FOGG WALKED with Anna Beck into the large aircraft hanger that housed the last airborne vehicle belonging to Endgame. The Black Hawk sat on the concrete floor of the hangar and Black Six, the suave young spy, stood next to it in a black flight suit. Beck wore a black flight suit herself.

“You get to ride with the hunk, huh?” Fogg joked. “I bet Knight won’t like that.”

“He’ll get over it. Besides, Six can pilot a Black Hawk—I can’t. He’ll come with me to the Pease Air National Guard Base in Portsmouth where we’ll wait around to rendezvous with a Blackbird out of Hanscom Air Force Base and haul ass to Norway. Half the pilots are in Europe with Bishop and Knight and the other two are in New York with King and Deep Blue.”

“Would be nice to have Queen and Rook back. They’ll help keep our guys alive.” Fogg looked at Beck and patted her on the shoulder. The two women had become close over the last two weeks. “Be safe and kick ass.”

Beck winked. “You know it.”

Fogg watched as Beck strode across the hangar and lightly punched Black Six in the upper arm. “Let’s go, Secret Agent Man.”

Fogg turned as the two got into the Black Hawk and it rolled forward out of the massive hundred-foot-wide doorway. It then took to the sky and the computer controlled steel door slowly lowered into place from where it had been hidden in the ceiling of rock and concrete. Fogg had heard about a mishap with that door when the base was being set up and she always made it a point to not stand anywhere near it.

With the door completely shut, and the daylight gone from the hangar, it was a dimly lit and empty place. Fogg headed back to the corridor off the hangar that led to the offices and the main computer center, where she would no doubt find Aleman and Pierce still frantically trying to make sense of the strange creatures destroying the world.