Ragnarok cta-4

by Kane Gilmour

  In thirty seconds, he was down on the top of one of the abandoned capsules that sat parked hundreds of feet above the river. Most of the passengers were below him now, so Bishop took the opportunity to fire wildly, taking out dire wolf after dire wolf, sometimes with only a grazing shot, but enough of an impact to send the target tumbling.

  The rain wasn’t helping either. Bishop lay down on his stomach on top of an abandoned capsule to cut the wind and rain against his body. He hadn’t detached from the rope yet, and decided not to. Instead, he crawled forward to the end of the egg-shaped passenger compartment’s roof and began to slide over its end toward a precipitous fall. With one hand on the rope, he allowed some slack to spool out. He grabbed the lip with his other hand and swung down and into the empty carriage, dropping to the floor. The rain spatting on the faceplate of his helmet and the wind pushing his armored body let up immediately. The view was fantastic, and Bishop knew that on a clear day you could see almost 25 miles. Today the visibility was not that good, but he could still see several more of the glowing portals that had opened in various parts of the city.

  The center of the capsule had a white roof, but the ends of the egg shape were all windows. The end he’d come through had a set of double doors that retracted to the sides like in an elevator. A designer wooden bench filled the center of the space. Bishop knew from a previous visit in calmer times that the egg-shaped air-conditioned capsule rotated as the wheel moved, but at such a minimal speed that passengers barely felt the rotation. In fact, it moved so slowly that the huge Ferris wheel never stopped turning-tourists simply stepped into and out of the slow moving capsules at ground level. One complete revolution of the wheel took about a half an hour. But now the wheel wasn’t turning at all. Bishop guessed the operators must have hit an emergency stop before fleeing from the spectacle of the besieged Ferris wheel.

  He was glad the wheel wasn’t moving, because it made aiming at the dire wolves easier. He lay down on the floor of the capsule, sliding his body next to the bench, with the barrel of his XM312-B pointing at one of the lower side windows under a pane with a huge British Airways logo in red and blue. His view was down the arc of the wheel to the next two lower capsules. He fired once, blasting the window out. Then he started obliterating any dire wolf in his field of fire. It was so easy that he started to wonder why the dire wolves kept pouring down that direction, as if they couldn’t see where he was in his capsule. As if they were afraid of the height themselves. He watched the limber creatures swing and slide their clawed grips along the white metal struts to the next lower capsule, and he realized there was something wrong with the dire wolves. These were not the same creatures he had faced in Shanghai a few hours earlier. Those beasts had moved with a surety and speed he had never seen before.

  Bishop stopped firing for a moment and rolled to look up through the clear ceiling of his capsule, back toward the portal where even more dire wolves were emerging. There were far more of them in this attack than in Shanghai, but they were moving much slower. Pausing to tilt their heads, as if looking for something or smelling the air. Sometimes darting their heads from side to side, like a startled dog, when it hears a far off noise. His observations were interrupted when one of the creature’s heads exploded into white mist as Knight continued his barrage from the still hovering Crescent.

  Bishop detached his rappelling line and turned to fire on the dire wolves that made their way past his shattered window, heading toward the passengers below. He fired a few volleys and then two things happened.

  The first was that the rain intensified to a full-on deluge. His visibility reduced significantly.

  The second thing was completely bizarre. The dire wolves-all of them, as if receiving a cue telepathically-simply stopped moving. Wherever they were on the Eye, on top of one of the capsules below Bishop’s vantage point, on the white metal frame or just emerging from the portal, they just…stopped. Frozen where they stood.

  “What the hell?” Knight’s voice sounded in Bishop’s headset inside the helmet and it startled him. He had become so used to hearing only his own breathing inside the helmet, that any external sound was freakishly loud by comparison.

  “No idea, man. It’s like they’re afraid of something.” Bishop replied, and then he began mowing down any stationary targets he could sight through the curtain of rain. Knight’s fire from above resumed and soon they drastically reduced the number of dire wolves on top of the wheel.

  Bishop stopped firing when he ran out of targets lower than his side of the capsule. He stood and clambered over the bench to the other side of the capsule. He knew there were thirty-two capsules-one for each borough of London-from his previous visit as a tourist. He glanced out past the twin BA logo on this side, and he could see only two capsules above him, before the wall of the portal engulfed the frame of the wheel. Those two capsules were completely empty. The doors to one were open. The capsule furthest from him still had its doors shut, but the dire wolves had smashed in windows on top and the inside of the capsule was painted in a dark red hue.

  Bishop shuddered.

  Those people had been first. That explained why the others had panicked and jumped to their deaths. More dire wolves squatted on the frame above Bishop’s capsule, unmoving. He counted thirty of them.

  Make that twenty-nine. Bishop smiled as Knight continued to obliterate the stationary targets.

  The rain let up as he watched for a few seconds. Something nagged at the back of Bishop’s mind as he watched the frozen beasts succumb one by one to the devastating fire from Knight’s Barrett. Then, again as if controlled by one mind, they all twitched and moved their heads. Several of them stood from their crouches, and the rest swiveled and tilted their heads, their strange tennis-ball-sized eyes roaming.

  Oh shit. Bishop shattered the glass on this side of the capsule and began firing the big. 50 caliber rounds at the dire wolves again, still laying down a line of slaughter, but he wounded more than he killed.

  The remaining creatures rushed his capsule as another wave of forty or so muscular, gleaming white beasts lunged out of the portal and onto the white steel trusses. Many of them climbed onto the roof above Bishop.

  This was a fight he could not win.

  Bishop heard a noise at the end of his capsule and turned to see two huge, eight-foot tall dire wolves. The first had dropped into the open doors, just as Bishop had done. The second had climbed into the compartment on the upright metal hinges of the open door on the right and grabbed the safety rail, squatting laterally on the wall of the capsule’s glass as if gravity didn’t affect it.

  There was no time to pull the barrel of the XM312-B out of the shattered window on the side of the capsule to aim at these two, ten feet away from him on the capsule’s end. Then the thought that had been tickling his subconscious came through to the front of his mind like a Japanese bullet train.

  “Knight! It’s the rain! They can’t see in the rain!”

  The dire wolves, each outweighing Bishop by a few hundred pounds of muscle and menace, charged.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Midtown, New York, NY

  3 November, 0830 Hrs

  King was sweating profusely inside the body armor and helmet. Although the suit contained a state-of-the-art liquid cooling system, it wasn’t as comfortable as it could have been. Each time he took a step and the armor between his legs rubbed, he was reminded of the corduroy trousers his mother had gotten him at Goodwill when he was ten. He hated those things. With the sound dampener technology in the helmet activated, he couldn’t hear the noise of the armor rubbing, but he could feel the vibrations on his skin.

  He knew he wasn’t sweating because he was hot, though. No, he was certain the cause of his dampened skin was the small suitcase nuclear device he wore on his back.

  “How you doing, King? I’m sweating like a pig in this thing,” Deep Blue’s robust voice came through King’s helmet microphone as they rode the elevator to the 40 ^th floor of the Exxon Building
.

  “Thank God, I thought it was just me.” King looked at their reflections in the shiny brass elevator doors.

  Deep Blue grunted a laugh. Still, King could tell the humor was forced. Neither one of them liked the current plan, but it was all they had.

  “These things don’t smell too good either.”

  Deep Blue ignored this latest quip, but King felt certain the man was cocooned in his own foam stench. The putrid smell wafted over King, threatening to ruin his focus.

  “Remember you are not to engage any dire wolves if you can avoid it. I’ll cover you as best I can.” Deep Blue was back to business.

  “I’m sure you’ll be better at it than I would be. That targeting software in your helmet is kind of like cheating,” King said, as the elevator reached the 40 ^th floor and both men felt their stomachs lurch at the abrupt stop.

  “Wasn’t time to get you one,” Deep Blue said.

  “Yeah, but Christmas isn’t far off,” King quipped, and then as if throwing a switch, he shut off his sense of humor and readied himself to kill anything that wasn’t human. If someone’s pet chihuahua jumped out, it was toast.

  Both men raised their MP5 submachine guns and stepped to either side of the doors as they slowly opened. King smiled briefly inside his suit. Deep Blue might have been out of action in the field for years-since he had been a Ranger and subsequently served in politics-but the man was still sharp, and he and King had very quickly learned each other’s moves. They had gained an almost precognitive awareness of each other in battle-something that often took many battles for other soldiers to gain.

  King moved into the lushly carpeted hallway and crouched. Water rose from the rug, surrounding his foot. Everything was saturated. “Looks like the sprinkler system went off.” He eyed the sprinkler head poking out of the ceiling above him. A single drip of water maintained a tenuous grasp. It fell and smacked against his facemask. “Let’s hope there isn’t a fire. I don’t think there’s any water left in the system.”

  Deep Blue took up a position right behind King. About forty feet down the wood paneled hallway, the glowing yellow curve of the portal’s wall emerged from the wood and seared into walls, floor and ceiling, completely blocking the corridor.

  The total lack of sound was eerie. King had gotten up close to one of the portals before- hell, I’ve even been though one — but the last time, according to Aleman’s theory, the portal was still ‘flickering’ into our world. This one was stable.

  No fluctuations.

  No lightning.

  No sound. Though King couldn’t be sure if that was just because his helmet made him deaf to the outside world. It was a tactical disadvantage, but in this case, with dire wolf roars that could incapacitate a Chess Team member with crippling fear, Deep Blue had insisted. King had pointed out his previous immunity to the roar in Chicago, but Deep Blue wouldn’t be moved. Their communications between each other were voice activated as well, so unless Deep Blue or Lewis Aleman spoke in his ear, all King could hear was his own breathing. It reminded him of HALO jumping, which might have been somewhat calming if not for the nuke in his backpack.

  King advanced down the hall, staying to the left, Deep Blue covered the right. The plan was simple: a few feet away from the portal wall, he would unsling the backpack, arm the heavy device it held, remove the safety remote control and pocket it, then hurl the thing through the glowing yellow wall. Keasling had a second failsafe that could shut off the device if the backpack passed harmlessly in and out of the portal and plummeted to the ground forty stories below them. The General and his men would be watching for anything to come out of the bottom of the orb. The team wouldn’t take any chances with destroying New York. The city had seen enough hell already.

  King squatted a few feet from the portal and pulled the strap of his MP5 over his helmet, freeing his hands. He slid the backpack off his shoulders and then slowly stood, facing the wall of light. Then he dropped the pack on the carpet and froze.

  Deep Blue watched King’s motions ahead of him as if in a trance. King was getting ready to deploy the bomb and then just stopped for some reason. The man hadn’t moved in a minute. At first Deep Blue thought King had heard or sensed something. But their helmets had sound dampeners and King hadn’t moved at all.

  Something was wrong.

  “King? What’s going on?”

  Nothing. No reply.

  Deep Blue took a cautious step backward, away from where King stood facing the portal. He pulled his arm up and tapped quickly on his wrist-keypad that he’d attached to this battle suit from his last. He tested the ambient audio. Had a dire wolf roared? He thought he would have felt it vibrating in his chest, even if he couldn’t hear it because of the audio dampeners. The faceplate display in his helmet told him no such sounds were present.

  “King? Are you okay?”

  Still no reply.

  Deep Blue activated another scanner on his wrist and waited an impatient twenty seconds, until a display came up on his faceplate indicating a foreign substance in the oxygen content of the air. Not a huge amount, but whatever it was, it was an unrecognizable chemical substance. Could be something to worry about, or it could just be the electrified atmosphere from the portal and the stench of the cleaning chemicals used in the hallway. He couldn’t be sure.

  But one of the small features Aleman had built into Deep Blue’s new tactical helmet was an air-scrubbing filter. King’s armored helmet didn’t have one. Must be something in the air. He wouldn’t know more until he approached King. But the stiff way the man stood worried Deep Blue.

  He stepped forward and reached his hand out to King’s shoulder.

  A blur erupted from the wall of light, moving around King’s static form, slamming into Deep Blue’s chest. Something flung him halfway back down the corridor where he hit a wall and crashed to the floor. He was surprised that the suit took the brunt of the impacts-both when he was hit and when he landed in a heap against the wall.

  The optic displays in his helmet’s faceplate were going nuts.

  Dire wolves.

  He lifted his MP5 and prepared to stand, but one of the fast-moving creatures swept him up and threw him over its shoulder. Its claws raked across his back, but the armor deflected the blow. With his rifle arm pinned under him, the beast streaked headlong toward the other end of the corridor with him as its captive-away from King’s still-frozen form. Three more dire wolves clustered around King, but they weren’t attacking his inert body for some reason. Deep Blue fumbled with his free hand, searching for the knife on his left leg. He had just wrapped his fingers around the blade’s handle when he and the dire wolf hit the floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the carpeted hallway.

  Deep Blue’s armored back smacked the glass and he barely felt the window shatter. He couldn’t hear it, either. But he could see the dire wolf’s mouth opened wide in a roar, as his body separated from it and they both began to fall through the shower of glittering glass particles toward the pavement forty stories below.

  THE SOUND OF LOSS

  THIRTY

  Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

  3 November, 1300 Hrs

  Rook clung to the thick black rubber insulation around one of the heavy cables that ran up the curved I-beam of the metal monstrosity. He managed to snag the cable with the fingers of one hand, and now swung precariously above the concrete floor over a hundred feet below him. He reached up with his other hand and grabbed a purchase on the side of the arcing metal upright, then swung his legs in and wrapped them around the beam like a man clinging to the slick trunk of a coconut palm tree.

  Once firmly attached to the curved surface, and in no danger of falling, Rook looked back up at the catwalk from which he had fallen. The metal bar was painted a deep Nordic blue. Balancing on the railing like Batman crouched on a Gotham gargoyle, was a creature, partially silhouetted by a huge Klieg light on the ceiling behind it.

  Great. At least I know who to blame for knocking me
over the railing.

  Although vaguely humanoid, its limbs were longer than a human’s and had muscles that dwarfed Bishop’s. Rook could see the individual bundles of its musculature just below the soft white, slightly see-through skin of the thing. Its hands and feet were larger than a human’s were, and each digit had a clear two-inch claw on it, like a shard of glass. The head was domed with large orb eyes on either side of its brain, which he could see through its transparent skin and skull. Its mouth was wide, like some kind of psychotic Cheshire Cat, and when it opened its mouth, Rook saw plenty of see-through sharp incisor teeth for tearing and ripping prey. He couldn’t decide if the thing was snarling or smiling at him.

  “Slap my ass and call me Susan! Finally, something I can kill. Just you wait, Milkshake. When I get down from here I’m going to introduce your ugly head to your rectum.” Rook began to scramble down the curved metal, using the twining black electrical cables as handholds. He was nearly to the first panel-like metal plate below him when a distant roar sounded from far off in the bowels of the facility.

  Terror seized Rook.

  His eyes grew large and his body broke out in a sweat. His heart was thumping in his chest. He started hyperventilating, pulling in huge gulps of the dry air. Instead of climbing further down the metal leg of the cage toward the floor far below him, Rook gripped the cables tighter. His hands clutched the cables so tightly that blood ceased to flow through them. His knuckles turned a pasty white color. He was afraid to stay in place and he was afraid to move.

  Suddenly, as quickly as the fear had beset him, Rook felt it begin to fade. His heart rate began to slow and he looked around the cavernous space in shock and wonder. He blinked a few times. Besides the creature on the railing, no one (and nothing) was in sight. He had no idea why he had temporarily been so scared of the distant howling sound. It was almost like a wolf’s howl at the moonlight, but stronger.