by Kane Gilmour
Not a wolf.
He felt less and less afraid with each passing moment. The creature remained on the railing above him, unmoving. His breathing under control again, Rook resumed his descent down the curved metal beam. The number of metal plates, protuberances and twisting cables made climbing easy. When he reached the half-way point, he glanced back up at the white creature on the catwalk.
It hadn’t moved.
He continued to climb toward the safety of the floor, seventy feet down. When he was no more than fifty feet off the ground, he glanced up again. What he saw almost made him fall.
“Sweet fuck-a-doodle-doo!” The creature’s face was inches from his own. Somehow the creature had leapt to the strut and descended over a hundred feet in the few seconds since Rook had last looked up at it. And it had come down the strut headfirst and in complete silence!
Rook’s heart jackhammered. He gripped his handhold tighter with his left hand, preparing to release his right. He wasn’t sure how much damage he could do with one bare hand, while hanging fifty feet off the ground, but he was ready to give it a go. He pulled his arm back to fire a punch at the beast’s snout, but a voice held his shoulder in check.
“I wouldn’t do that, Stanislav. The dire wolf will not hurt you unless I tell it to. Or unless you attack it.”
Rook kept his fist cocked back, but craned his neck around to the floor, where Eirek Fossen stood wearing a white lab coat. He was over six feet tall with short dark hair and brown eyes and a wide face. Broad and imposing, the man also held a small black pistol. Rook couldn’t be sure from his height above Fossen, but it might have been a Walther PP, the precursor to the famous pistol used by Ian Fleming’s infamous spy. This was the man Rook had allied himself with to fight the monster Edmund Kiss had become. Fossen raised his arm, aiming the weapon at Rook.
The alliance was most definitely over.
“I should have let Kiss eat your face off.”
“I could say the same, Stanislav. Now come down, and do so slowly.”
THIRTY-ONE
Exxon Building, New York, NY
Jack Sigler, the man known as King in the field, felt fine.
Not fine. Fantastic.
He wondered if he had ever felt better. The light from the portal glowed and beautifully. He breathed in deeply and relished the taste of the air. He knew it would be even better if he took the helmet off.
He unfastened the clasps at his neck and lifted it up off his head. He didn’t carefully place the helmet on the ground-he just let it fall from his fingers. The helmet thumped with a dull sound when it hit the carpeted hallway floor, but King paid it no mind, because now he could hear the portal as well as see it.
And it sang to him.
He smiled broadly. This must be what it’s like for Fiona when she hears the mother tongue. His foster daughter was unique in her ability to see and hear the protolanguage of the world in paintings and sculptures, in music and in nature. She had used that ability to help Chess Team and save mankind on more than one occasion. But such important thoughts couldn’t find a hold on the slippery surface of King’s mind, lost in ecstasy as it was. Instead, he let thoughts of the team and the world fall away, like small bits of paper caught in a breeze.
It’s so beautiful.
King inhaled the air deeply, smelling lush fragrance and clean mountain air all in one breath. That he stood in a sterile air-conditioned corridor in a modern building seemed a faraway notion, and because it ran counter to how good the air smelled and tasted, he let that idea go too. It fluttered away just as his worries had. In Chicago the light had been bright, glaring and full of electric danger. Now it shimmered with a luster he felt soothing and exciting all at the same time. He felt calm and in control for the first time in his life. He felt both purpose and the complete lack for a need of purpose. He just was.
King smiled again at the strange wall of light in front of his face.
He glanced around him and saw three of the dire wolves moving slowly around his body, looking both at him and down the corridor behind him. He didn’t really care what they were looking at. They didn’t frighten him at all, and he felt no animosity toward the creatures. He reached out his hand to touch the skin of one and found he couldn’t feel it because of his glove. He pulled his hand back and removed the glove with the other hand, then reached back out to stroke the dire wolf’s chest with his naked fingers.
They are so soft! The creature had a very fine downy hair on its body, almost invisible to the human eye, like the fuzz on a ripe peach. Like the feeling of a high-end stuffed animal.
King ran his hand over the dire wolf’s chest and the creature simply stood there allowing it. The eye facing King warbled in the orb on the side of its head, regarding him carefully. King wasn’t frightened of the creature at all now. Instead, he felt affection akin to love for the beast.
But somewhere small at the back of his mind was a tiny voice screaming that this whole situation was wrong. King ignored the voice and moved forward, placing his cheek against the dire wolf’s shoulder. He rubbed the soft down against his face.
“You’re nice,” he spoke aloud and the dreamy quality of his voice made him giggle.
The dire wolf moved away from him and another came closer, sniffing at him. He liked this new one even better. Friendly. Fiona would like him.
But this second thought of Fiona gave power to the insistent, niggling voice at the back of his brain.
No. She wouldn’t. No! This is wrong.
“Go away,” he told the voice, and it died a quiet death in his subconscious. The dire wolf didn’t move away from him.
He knows I’m not talking to him. Or is it an it? I didn’t see any naughty bits.
King assessed the beast again, but came away from the glance only feeling better, if that was possible. His thought of determining its gender, if any, was swept away, as if a glorious breeze had just rushed by him, carrying scents of his favorite foods, the sea after a storm and gentle winds from an almost artificially green Alpine valley he had once visited in Switzerland.
This place is so good. I should bring Sara here. He grinned a huge grin.
No. The quiet voice returned. You have to keep them safe.
His grin faltered as images of cities being devoured by globes of devastating lightning-hurling energy filled his mind. But the pretty King tightly squeezed his eyes shut, blocking out the glistening wall of the portal in front of him. No longer looking at the soft, friendly dire wolves. The images were still in his head though. The horror of people killed and cities scooped out of the ground by a cosmic event unlike anything before it.
You have to keep them safe.
Thoughts of his girlfriend, adopted daughter, team members and friends like George Pierce filled his mind. His memories of them made resisting the euphoria that much easier. There was a nuclear weapon in a satchel at his ankles, and he remembered what he was supposed to do with it. But it was hard, so very hard. Fighting against that warm happy place, where he had been for days-or had it just been moments-was the hardest fight of his life.
He sensed his resistance slipping. He wouldn’t last much longer. He yearned to go back to the bright light and the wonderful smells of autumn in Vermont, skiing in Europe, the beach in Florida… Florida. He remembered Disney and the Russian helicopter.
In one sudden, lunging movement, he reached down and grabbed the satchel with the nuclear weapon. He spun in a fast circle and flung the backpack into the wall of bright light before him. It disappeared as it hit the edge of the portal. He could only hope that it had gone in far enough.
Then as the warm happy feelings began to engulf him again, filling up all the empty places in his soul with a pulsing joy, the likes of which he had never even imagined existed, it happened.
That tiny voice that had brought him back to sanity for one brief moment spoke again. A doubt. A whimper. Little more than a squeak.
You didn’t arm the device.
King didn’t car
e.
The warm glory of God Himself wrapped him in a loving embrace.
THIRTY-TWO
London, England
The two dire wolves, glistening wet from the rain, slammed into Bishop’s body, knocking him to the river-facing end of the capsule. His body smashed into the glass and metal of the end of the passenger car, but with the impact-absorbing armor, it felt like little more than a light shove. He lost his hold on the XM312-B and the machine gun flipped out the shattered window, toppling away. A second weapon lost in 24 hours. Bishop swore silently.
The dire wolves stopped halfway inside the capsule. One now squatted on the center of the wooden bench and the other on the floor to its left. They waited, and Bishop wondered why. He stayed on the floor of the capsule, unmoving, watching them.
Great big eyes, but you can’t see too good, can you?
He realized they couldn’t see in the rain and had waited for it to abate before moving again. But it wasn’t raining inside the capsule. Bishop strained to hear and then realized he couldn’t hear anything but his own breathing. The armor. Maybe they detect body heat too. Maybe they only track movement. Then inspiration struck.
Bishop couldn’t hear any external sound and his body was cushioned from impact by the armor. Slowly, he moved his hand up to his chest. The MP5s were still strapped to him. Attached to the strap of one of the rifles was an M84 stun grenade, more commonly known as a flash-bang. It didn’t contain shrapnel, but instead emitted a non-lethal burst of magnesium-based flaring light and an incapacitating bang of sound. But with the sound dampener in his helmet and the impact-absorbing armor, all Bishop would have to do to avoid the effects of the grenade was close his eyes tightly. He slipped his finger into the circular pull ring and then struggled a second to get another finger into the secondary, triangular pull ring. He didn’t bother depressing the safety lever. His movements were minimal, but still the dire wolf on the bench moved its head slightly at the motion.
Crap. He’s seen it.
Bishop lunged to his feet, dropping the grenade on the floor of the cabin. The dire wolf on the bench turned its attention fully in his direction, but it lunged laterally, grabbing the metal railings again as it had done when it entered the capsule. The other dire wolf swiveled its eyes and lowered its head to examine the grenade as it skittered to a stop in front of the creature.
Bishop crushed his eyes shut and lunged forward toward to dire wolf on the wall. The shockwave impact from the grenade hit his armored body just before he slammed into the creature on the wall. The creature bounced off his moving body like a superball bouncing off a wall. The dire wolf was moving away from Bishop as he opened his eyes, in time to see the beast sliding out the open doors of the capsule and falling away. He looked back to see the second dire wolf stirring on the floor, where the grenade had temporarily done exactly what it was designed to-it had stunned the creature. Bishop didn’t wait to see how long it took the dire wolf to recover. He sprinted for the open door and leapt out into the air.
The Crescent hadn’t moved from its position above Bishop’s capsule on the top of the wheel, so the rappelling line still hung from the underside of the huge curve-winged transport plane. But it was further away than Bishop had thought. He stretched his fingers out as far as he could. His body shot out into open space. Just when he thought he would miss the rope entirely, the back of his fingers brushed the line. He scrabbled at it and snagged it. As he moved through the air and before the rope absorbed his weight, he quickly wound the rope around his left arm once. Momentum swung him out and away from the wheel. The line wasn’t long enough for him to slide to the ground, so his only option was to swing back to the frame of the Eye.
He twisted on the rope as he began to swing back. Keeping the rope wrapped around his left arm, he reached out at the apex of his swing and caught hold of the nearest tie rod. Hooking his knee around the rod, he moved his hand back to the rope and began to climb. Knight must have noticed what was going on, because Bishop looked up to the capsule he had just escaped in time to see the second dire wolf’s head explode, coating the doors on the end of the capsule with a milky fluid.
He climbed hand over hand, rewrapping the rope around his left arm each time for an added measure of security. He slid his leg up the tie rod until he got to a crawlspace formed by a triangular tunnel of bars and struts that ran under the capsules-or above them at the bottom of the wheel. Knight picked off a few more dire wolves from around Bishop while the big man focused on his climbing. He could see the creatures pitching off the rails to either side of him, falling to the ground and river below. As Bishop worked his way down the tunnel of bars, heading for a capsule two away from the first one he’d entered, he could see three people still trapped inside. He also noticed that Knight’s firing had stopped.
“Bishop, you read?” Knight calm voice spoke softly in his earpiece.
“What’s going on?” He asked.
“They’re bugging out. But there are a lot more over on the bridge by Big Ben. You okay on your own for a minute?”
Bishop glanced back the way he had come through the jungle gym of connected white bars. Upriver, he could see Westminster bridge was overrun by dire wolves and a portal had formed on the Victoria Embankment, close to, but not yet touching Big Ben, the famed British landmark clock tower at the end of the Palace of Westminster-one of the city’s major seats of governing.
“Go. I’m going to help the people still trapped in the other capsules.” Bishop resumed his scramble through the bars.
“We’ll be right back. Try to hurry. If the portal goes, the center of that wheel goes too. You’ll look pretty silly rolling to Southend.” The Crescent suddenly peeled away from the top of the London Eye, heading for the middle of the green-painted Westminster Bridge.
Bishop continued down past the remains of his original capsule and the next, on to the one after that. Inside were three young girls that looked to be no more than sixteen or seventeen, each dressed in fashionable pink and white fleece jackets. They probably dressed like each other intentionally, Bishop thought. He remembered when he was younger, the girls would have been mocked mercilessly by their peers for showing up at high school or elsewhere looking like ‘Twinkies’-identical and two to a package. What was considered cool had apparently changed.
When Bishop looked up from under the capsule, he saw that each of the girls had smeared eye make-up. They had been crying. Also, it was a long way up to the capsule from the bottom of the triangular passage. He would have to shimmy nearly twenty feet up one of the diagonal uprights to get to the girls.
He looked down briefly to the hundreds of feet of air and steel below him before the river, then looked back at the portal. The last of the remaining dire wolves were high-tailing it back inside.
Running out of time.
He took one more glance, this time further afield toward the bridge, where the Crescent lowered and Knight delivered pain from above. Bishop began to slide, climb, shimmy and shrug his way up the slick metal pole. The angle helped the climb considerably, and before he realized it, he reached his hand up for more pole only to find the upper rim of the wheel. The girls had watched his ascent awestruck, and now that he was close enough to almost reach out and touch, they started screaming for his help.
“Relax. I’m going to get you out!”
Then the unthinkable happened.
The portal disappeared. He could see its absence from his limited peripheral vision in the helmet. He turned his head to look and just as his side vision had suggested, there was a massive gaping space where the hundred-foot diameter globe of energy had been. In the distance across the city, other globes were still present, but his had gone, taking everything it had touched. A quarter of the outer rim of the wheel was now missing, along with the capsules that would have been there. The tie rods that reached from that portion of the wheel down to the hub were gone too. The hub itself and the two gigantic white cantilevered supports that held the entire wheel aloft wer
e also gone. Bishop was holding onto a crescent-shaped incomplete wheel of steel and now-dangling tie rods and cables that were held in the air by…nothing.
With several people still trapped in capsules below him on the unaffected side of the wheel, the girls still trapped in the one above him and Bishop still holding on to the structure near the top, the London Eye began to fall over into the river.
THIRTY-THREE
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
The woman with the callsign Queen disappeared. In her place was a fourteen-year-old girl with the unlikely name of Zelda. Her mother was dead. Her father was a drunk and beat her nightly. Sometimes with a leather belt. She was terrified of spiders and mice. She couldn’t stand heights. Enclosed spaces would make her break down into a puddle of tremors. Lightning terrified her and made her scream. She dreamed every night that she was being devoured by wild animals. She was still alive and breathing as lions and cougars pulled her intestines from her abdomen. When she woke from her sleep, the nightmares just got worse in the light of day.
Her world was a living state of terror. If only she could find a way out of it. But she knew drugs were not the way. She had been on drugs when her son died and they hadn’t helped.
Wait, that’s not right. I didn’t have a child at fourteen.
She struggled to make sense of the fear and the logical incongruity that crept into her mind. I crushed the spider. I’m not afraid of spiders any more. She knew she shouldn’t think that way. He would be back and he would be angry. He would beat her again and again, and maybe this time he would go too far. I don’t fear anything. Major-General Trung tried to break me in Vietnam, but I beat him too. I am the hunter now.
“Quiet,” she whispered. “He’ll hear!”
I base jump.
“He’s in the hallway, right now.”
