Ragnarok cta-4

by Kane Gilmour

  Knight stood and swayed. Things went out of focus and he thought he would fall, but then reality reasserted itself and the world around him slammed into focus again. He looked over the wall. He had dropped the EXACTO rifle. The glowing, pulsing sphere was still crackling down the street and throwing sharp, jagged bolts of lightning to strike the street, the buildings and the river. Debris or water pluming up with each strike.

  The river! Bishop!

  “Bishop! Can you hear me?”

  Static was the only reply. He looked over the parapet wall again, expecting to see Bishop’s body on the ground with the few creatures they had managed to kill. But there were no bodies. Either the beasts had managed to get back up, or the surviving ones had pulled away the corpses of the dead.

  Then a blur caught Knight’s eye. One last creature streaked out of the glowing energy dome and headed to the base of the clock tower where Knight watched from above. The thing stopped its hectic race across the pavement just shy of the base of the building and slowly craned its head sideways, so its chameleon-like eye was looking up the tower, directly at Knight. This can’t be good.

  Knight was about to consider alternate means of escaping the Customs House building, but the creature didn’t enter the lobby. It continued to stare up at Knight for another few seconds. Knight didn’t know how its vision functioned. Maybe if he didn’t move at all, the thing wouldn’t spot him. The creature squatted low and lunged toward the stone base of the building. The leap carried it twenty feet into the air before its claws extended and the beast snagged the side of the building. It hung on in a crouch, its bizarre head still tilted like a dog listening to a faraway sound, its eye still glaring up the building at Knight. Then it began a galumping, leaping climb, straight up the side of the building toward Knight’s position.

  “Ah, shit.” Knight bolted away from the low wall and quickly glanced around. At the speed the creature was climbing the building, it would be here in seconds. Without the EXACTO, he had only his KA-BAR knife and a grenade on him. “Bishop, if you’re out there, I could use some help! I’m bugging out of my hide.” He was still filled with the panic from earlier, although visions of his grandmother had faded and he no longer had the feeling Bishop had reverted to his Regen state. Where had that come from anyway? Wait…the roar. It started with the howl that one creature made.

  There was no other escape beside the rusted access door from the stairs he had used to reach the balcony. Knight raced to the door and at the last second, pulled the grenade from his belt pouch. A standard-issue M67 fragmentation grenade, Knight didn’t know how effective it might be on the beast, but it was all he had. He removed the safety clip, then positioned himself at the top of the stairs, inside the stairwell, holding the door ajar, with one outstretched hand. Using his thumb to remove the pin, Knight held the spoon on the side of the grenade for a second longer, his watchful eyes never leaving the edge of the wall where he expected to see the creature at any time.

  But instead of one clawed hand reaching over the edge of the parapet, the beast leapt straight up into the air, clearing the edge of the wall by a good several feet, before landing on the top of it in a crouch. Knight could just see the clear claws extending from the tips of its white toes dig firmly into the concrete just below the lip of the wall.

  Knight let the spoon fly and gently rolled the grenade out, before letting the door swing shut. He leapt over the side railing on the stairs, and dropped eight feet to the middle of the next flight of stairs in a crouch. In one fluid movement, he leapt forward headfirst and reached his hands out side to side to grab the railings on either side of the stairs. With about a third of the flight of steps remaining, he swung his legs up to his chest and pivoted on his arms. Then he lunged down the rest of the flight of stairs feet first, releasing his grip on the rails and flying down to land on the painted blue concrete landing in another crouch. He took two steps and lunged down the next flight of stairs, repeating the maneuver, pinioning on his arms over the side rails halfway down the flight and landing on the next landing. As he crouched on that landing, he heard the rusted door above him creak open and then the grenade detonated, slamming the door shut with a booming sound that echoed down the staircase. Still, the fire door muted the explosion considerably.

  Knight wasted no time wondering if the grenade had done its job. He vaulted down the next few flights of stair and then out onto the lower balcony level, searching for the rifle. He quickly found the glass door leading out to the balcony, but he could see before he went through it that the rifle was damaged-the long barrel bent at an unusual angle. He left it and raced back to the stairs.

  As he reached them, he heard the fire door at the top of the stairwell slam open. He glanced over the railing and down the space between the flights of stairs. The ground floor had a large room at the foot of the stairs, beyond the blue domed ceiling of the main hall. Above the base of the stairs hung a chandelier that was suspended by a cable running up the center of the stairwell to the 5 ^th floor, where it was secured to the steps by a horizontal bar of concrete that was no doubt reinforced with rebar.

  Knight repeated his entire-flight-of-steps lunging technique for the next few flights, listening nervously as he did, to the scrambling, scrabbling noises of translucent claws scraping across painted blue concrete from above. The lower flights of stairs were covered in a rich carpet, but in typical communist Chinese architectural style, after the good impression of the first few floors, the remaining floors were a utilitarian concrete.

  When Knight reached the cross-struts for the chandelier on the 5 ^th floor, he was running out of time. He could hear the lumbering beast hurtling down each flight nearly as fast as Knight, though he couldn’t yet glimpse the creature when he looked up. Knight ran down a few steps lower than the cross-struts, so he could see the underside where the electric cable and the metal support cable attached. He didn’t know if the cable would support him, but at that second, he checked nervously again up the stairs and finally saw the thing. It was injured certainly. Its movements were awkward, where before it had been all grace and power and speed. It was bleeding white fluid in places too, and it dragged one of its arms-or were they front paws-as if the limb was completely limp and nonfunctional. The creature stopped and regarded him with one of its swiveling orb eyes, then opened its maw of glassy sharp teeth in what Knight thought could only be a snarl.

  Knight brought his gaze back to the cables as the beast began to move again. No time to consider, he leapt out into the open space and grabbed the cables. They easily held his weight, and he swung precariously in space for a moment. The beast rounded the landing above him and was almost to the position from which he had jumped, when Knight wrapped his legs around the cables and hooked one forearm around them, then let go with his other hand and snatched a hold of his wrist. He began to descend the cables, with the sleeve of his BDU jacket on his left arm taking the brunt of the friction. He knew he could outrun the beast with gravity, but he had no idea how he would break his fall before he hit the chandelier below him, which was racing up toward his crotch.

  He heard the beast frantically flinging itself down flight after flight of stairs trying to catch him. Knight tried pulling the wrist of his left arm closer to him in an attempt to brake his fall, but the tension of the crook of his elbow had no effect. He could feel the heat from the friction building up against his arm, even through the garment.

  Ah no, this is going to hurt.

  Knight slammed his feet into the chandelier on the end of the cables and the jolt ripped the cables loose from their mooring up at the 5 ^th floor of the building. To Knight it felt like a slight hiccup in the rate of his descent, and then he was sailing toward the marble floor twenty-five feet below. The long cables chased him toward the floor.

  He tumbled backward, the loose cable no longer keeping him upright. As he fell through the open space of the great room that served as a proper lobby after the decorative front hall, he noticed the creature come spil
ling off the carpet of the main staircase and scrabbling across the slippery marble floor. It slid and slipped, then came to a stop beneath him. The creature tilted its head-staring up-just in time to see a 300-pound crystal chandelier, followed by a 150-pound Knight with an extended middle finger and 60 feet of whipping steel and electrical cables all about to smash it into paste.

  NINETEEN

  Fenris Kystby, Norway

  Rook opened the double doors below the window just a crack, making sure they were still covered by soil on the outside, as they had been on his last visit to the lab. He didn’t need to open the doors far. He could see a wall of light brown dirt. A small spray of dust and dirt tinkled down to the floor. He shoved the doors closed again.

  “Must be another entrance,” Queen said. She hadn’t holstered the M9, and Rook could tell the place was spooking her, even though she would never admit it. “Wouldn’t be the first covert lab in history to have a secret entrance hidden in plain sight.”

  Rook stiffened and drew a sharp breath. “Holy-you’re right.” Rook raced out of the room and back into the offices.

  “Not sure why that’s a surprise,” Queen said as she gave chase.

  Asya followed her back into the offices, where Rook was approaching the door to the empty biohazard room. He turned slightly as he opened the door, to look back at them. “Only two rooms in this place with nothing in them-the closet off the first room we entered and this one. But the door frame to the closet was narrower. No way you could get a sofa in there. But this room? Must be a secret door somewhere.”

  Rook stepped into the room and the others came in behind him. Queen’s halogen headlamp illuminated the space as if it were daytime. “I never even stepped into the room the last time. Because it was empty.” He smiled at Queen.

  “Just like me a minute ago. Even though you told me it was empty, I looked, but I didn’t go in.”

  “Sure. Why would you?” Rook walked back past her and Asya to the wall near the door and felt around the doorframe they had all just come through.

  “You are searching for secret switch or something like that?” Asya asked.

  “Yup.”

  Queen kept the lamp on the doorframe as Rook worked his fingers along the top of it slowly, feeling for any irregularity.

  Asya turned and walked to the far wall of the room. She tilted her head slightly, and scrunched up her eyes, looking at the floor. “Queen? Light please.”

  Queen swiveled her head and brought the gun up in Asya’s direction. The Russian woman squatted and pointed to the floor, just in front of the edge of the far wall. Queen stepped closer. The light revealed a curving arc where the grimy floor had been disturbed. It looked to Queen like the scrape marks on the floor in front of a revolving door at a fancy hotel.

  She stepped up to the wall and pressed gently on it. Asya stood and stepped back as the entire wall began to spin on a well-greased central post, hidden from view.

  “Nazis,” Queen said, as she pushed past the slowly twisting door, with her M9 leading the way.

  “I hate ’em.” Rook said.

  Asya looked confused for a moment before recognition filled her eyes and she smiled broadly. “Last Crusade. Great movie.” She then did a horrible impersonation of Sean Connery. “I shuddenly remembered my Charlemagne, Junior.” She slipped into the passage behind Queen, and Rook brought up the rear, shaking his head.

  They moved through another passage like the tunnel that led them to the lab, only this one was made from small crumbling bricks and it was far wider-not wide enough to drive a vehicle through, but well wide enough to carry the bloody sofa through. Rook could almost hear the smile on Queen’s face as she taunted Asya in a whisper. “They let you watch Indy in Mother Russia?”

  “Oh yes. The blonde bitch plummets to her death in the end,” Asya returned. Queen whipped her head back to look at Asya, her long blonde hair swinging over her shoulder as she did so. She smiled wide, showing her teeth, and turned back to illuminate the front of the tunnel again, chuckling as she did so.

  “I like her, Rook. Let’s keep her.”

  The passage continued for what Rook took to be at least a mile. At the end, they found a double set of steel doors set into a rock foundation, similar to the door at the end of the first tunnel. This set of doors also had a name stenciled above it:

  Gleipnir.

  “I don’t know this one,” Queen said.

  “Beats me,” Rook said, “but Ale will know what it means. Ready?”

  Queen nodded. Rook took hold of the handles on the doors and pulled them open.

  They moved silently. Rook made a mental note that someone must have regularly maintained the doors for them to make so little noise when moving. Perhaps Fossen hadn’t told him nearly enough about what the Nazis were doing in this lab, or what he was doing with his modern wolf research.

  What they encountered on the other side of the doors was so immense, it stopped them in their tracks.

  They emerged on a wide metal catwalk that ran around the top edges of a cavernous space filled by a large metal structure. Eight curved struts, each rising from a concrete block in the center of the massive room, stretched up some two hundred feet, forming a sphere of metal columns that came together just beneath the ceiling twelve feet above their heads.

  Rook glanced down through the catwalk’s metal mesh floor. That’s a long way down.

  It looked to Rook as if the thing was missing a giant marble that would sit perfectly in its embrace. Wires and cables snaked along the length of each strut, connected to metal plates, like solar panels, spaced along the inner edges of the struts. The structure reminded Rook of an oversized version of the Faraday cage he’d seen at Boston’s Museum of Science, which directed the flow of lightning.

  “Like a cage of giant fingers. But what does it do?” Asya whispered.

  “Or what does it hold,” Queen replied.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Rook said. “I’m probably gonna wind up breaking the fucker into tiny pieces, so don’t get attached to it. These people killed Peder and nearly killed me. If that thing isn’t designed to create free clean energy for the world, I’m busting it.”

  There were computer stations and electronics arrays at panels and desks around the base of the giant room. Along one wall was an enormous hangar-style metal door that could retract into the walls on either side. Doors lined the walls along the catwalk, on the top level where they stood, but also on several levels below, all of which wrapped around the outside of the giant room. Staircases connected each flight to the next. A vertical maze. Massive Klieg lights lit the entire scene from their housings in the ceiling of the cavern.

  “Only thing missing is people,” Queen mused aloud.

  “They were all too busy kicking my ass this morning.” Rook spotted a large door further along the same wall from where they had emerged. “One mystery at a time. I wanna know where Kiss and the sofa went.”

  “I’m going to take a closer look at that…thing,” Queen headed for the stairs down.

  Asya paused for a moment. “I will check other doors on this floor.”

  “Suit yourselves.” Rook moved to the wide doors and opened them. They opened into an average-sized storage room with gray metal filing cabinets, cardboard boxes and the mysterious missing sofa. Fossen, or someone else, had cleaned the sofa’s old fabric. There was no sign of Edmund Kiss’s bloody remains. Rook looked around the rest of the room before rifling through the file cabinets. The cabinets and boxes were full of moldy documents that had clearly been around since before the ’40s. The smell reminded Rook of his grandmother’s house in New Hampshire, shortly before she died, when her legendary cleaning skills had diminished.

  He couldn’t make much sense of the documents. They were scientific and technical reports. He came across the word Ragnarok a few times and only once across the word Gleipnir. But the descriptions of the former only confirmed what he knew already-that Edmund Kiss and other Nazis had begun experimenting wi
th wolf genes around the ’40s and the man had eventually gone missing. For Gleipnir, all he could find were facilities reports. Janitorial supply bills and large food bills, but Rook figured in the older days, in this distant, remote part of Norway, travel to a large supermarket wasn’t likely. They would have had to purchase all their necessary supplies well before the winter, and store everything here in the lab somewhere.

  The technical reports discussed things that his meager Ger- man skills were never designed to decipher. Gene sequences, astrophysics, quantum mechanics and medical topics. After fifteen minutes of scanning documents, Rook had even less of an idea of what kind of research was going on in the facility than he had when he’d entered it.

  He was about to give up and check out another room when he came across a manila folder that had diagrams of the gigantic octopus-like metal structure in the main room. He paused and squatted down near the floor to look at the pictures more carefully. They showed the massive device with an enormous sphere of crackling energy suspended in its center. In the diagram, lightning bolts shot out of the sphere into the corners of the room.

  “Huh, maybe it is supposed to provide energy.” Although Rook doubted the motives of the device’s builders were to provide that energy for free.

  Then two things happened at the same time. Rook heard the report of Queen’s M9. Not just one shot. A lot of shots. And Asya was screaming.

  Rook leapt to his feet and dropped the folder with its diagrams on the floor as he raced to the door, heading for the catwalk. But when he reached the catwalk, something large and white slammed into him from the side. His feet were knocked out from under him and his lower spine slammed into the guardrail around the edge of the huge machinery-filled chamber. Rook pinioned his arms, desperately trying to claw his way back to balance, but the velocity of the impact sent his upper torso flipping backward over the rail, and he was falling down through the giant room to the floor, hundreds of feet below him.