Ragnarok

FOURTEEN

Shanghai, China

Knight burst past the rusted, flaking roof access door to the balcony that ran around the clock tower, and raced to the edge of the tan concrete wall. Far below him and down the street, the energy ball still pulsed. He could feel its electrical hum in his teeth like he was standing too close to high tension power lines. Things were racing out of the globe of light and streaking down the abandoned street. About fifty feet closer to the clock tower, Knight saw that Bishop had taken cover behind an abandoned pale green taxi cab, and had set up his XM312-B across the hood of the vehicle. The big man was firing furiously at the speeding blurs as they shot from the crackling sphere, many of them clearly hit and knocked into the nearby river from the impact of the. 50 caliber rounds.

But just as many of the things were getting past Bishop.

Knight quickly laid his EXACTO sniper rifle along the edge of the wall in front of him and targeted a space behind Bishop’s position. Knight pulled his eye from the scope and looked for the speeding blurs. One was looping back around and heading for Bishop’s back.

Damn, they’re fast.

Knight barely had time to guess at the thing’s speed before he fired the weapon at the empty space behind Bishop’s head, hoping he could hit the racing blur before it struck his friend from behind.

The bullet blasted from the muzzle of the rifle. A cloud of white burst from the far side of the creature’s head. The dead thing’s momentum carried it forward and it slammed into Bishop from behind, before rolling to the front of the cab, obscuring it from Knight’s view.

Bishop was knocked off his feet and simply rolled in one smooth move across the hood of the cab. He swung the barrel of the weapon back and fired at his previous position, blasting another creature and sending it smashing through the plate glass window of a cell phone shop. Broken plastic display phones skittered out of the shop across the pavement with clicking and clacking sounds, but again, Knight was denied a chance to actually see whatever it was Bishop was shooting at.

He began picking blurs and firing about ten to twenty yards in front of each, hoping to hit something. Every third shot or so, he needed to protect Bishop’s six from another speeding blur, but for half of those, Bishop himself swung around in a full 360? arc, firing with his machine gun. Knight couldn’t see if he was hitting the things, but he could tell, as they ducked and weaved before retreating, that Bishop wasn’t killing many of them, if he was hitting them at all.

Knight saw some the things tearing back toward the globe of crackling light. Then the movement was gone.

He looked for a new target and didn’t see anything moving down on the street. Knight finally had a chance to look for his fallen targets and was surprised to see so few. Damn, I missed more than I thought. He could see only three, and he knew there was a fourth in front of the cab.

“You seeing these things, Knight?” Bishop’s voice sounded loud in Knight’s earpiece as he shouted.

Knight looked through the scope of his rifle at one of the fallen bodies. He had hit it. It was missing a good portion of its muscular chest, but otherwise, the corpse provided him a pretty good idea of what they were up against. The beast was at least seven feet tall, and milky white. Long, powerful limbs were claw tipped, yet the creature was vaguely humanoid in appearance. The head was a bit blockish with a domed forehead through which he could see a white, spongy mass.

I can see through its skin, Knight realized and then wondered, is that its skull? Or its brain? He glanced over the rest of the body and saw bundles of long, sinewy muscles twitching beneath the translucent skin.

The creature struck him as somewhat feline, especially the way it moved, but it was really unlike anything native to Earth. The most obtrusive feature was its eyes, which were huge orbs on the outside of the sides of its face. Like a chameleon, Knight thought, separately mobile and stereoscopic-able to look in multiple directions at once.

“I’m seeing the fallen ones. Having a hard time tracking the moving ones,” Knight replied, still eyeing one of the corpses.

“Yeah, I hear you. I’m-oh shit, here they come again.”

Knight pulled back from the scope and saw several more shapes blitzing from the ball of light down the street. Bishop opened up fire on them again, strafing across the street. Knight began taking targets as they came for Bishop, one after the next. The creatures were falling this time-he’d figured out the effective range ahead of their paths to fire now-but too many of them were getting past Bishop’s arc of fire, leaving Knight to pick them off. One bumped against Bishop, throwing his aim off, his stream of. 50 caliber bullets passing harmlessly into the air. Knight could see more of the creatures advancing on Bishop. He fired again, taking down another creature and toggled his microphone, “Bishop, time to bug out man.”

Bishop dropped to the ground just as one of the creatures was about to hit him. Instead, it leapt over him and its momentum kept it going down the street. Knight let that one pass, even though he knew it would loop back on Bishop from behind. He focused on the next wave coming out of the glowing sphere.

Then an idea came to him. As he tracked another streaking form moving close to a line of abandoned vehicles, Knight chose a car three car-lengths in front of the speeding creature and unleashed the devastation of his sniper rifle on the fuel tank of a black Audi. The tank ruptured, sending fuel onto the ground, and Knight quickly fired a second round at the pavement, the spark of its impact igniting the fuel and the speeding creature. The explosion of the remaining fuel in the car made a deep bass thump and the car flipped over backward.

Bishop was on the move, leaping over the hoods of vehicles, then firing in a sweep, and then leaping again. Knight repeated the move, rupturing fuel tanks two more times before the creatures swept over to the boardwalk beside the river, well away from the cars.

“OK, tangos are intelligent, too, Bishop.”

Suddenly the staccato explosions of Bishop’s weapon stopped. Knight pulled his eye away from the scope and glanced up. He saw Bishop drop the big weapon, run up the hood of a Buick, and leap into the air toward the next abandoned car on the road, throwing a grenade behind him from the apex of his leap. Bishop landed on the roof of the bright red Ford in front of him, crunching in the thin metal, as the creature trailing him reached the Buick and the grenade as it landed. Knight targeted another creature chasing Bishop just as the explosion from the grenade sent up a huge cloud of smoke and debris, obscuring his shot.

“Damn.”

Bishop made for the river’s edge, as he had said he would do. Knight adjusted his stance, leaning further out over the parapet. He targeted the last creature chasing Bishop and fired. Then he pulled back from the scope to see yet another wave of speeding lines making waves in the air like heat haze, down on the street. Then one of the creatures mounted the roof of the cab Bishop had previously used for cover and turned its head up to the sky and howled.

The sound was hideous.

The noise was deafening and terrible, a deep bass rumble like a horn filled with every terror in the world. It vibrated through Knight’s body, rattling his bones. He dropped the sniper rifle and it fell to the next lower section of the tower. Goose bumps broke out across every part of his skin, sweat beaded and dripped as though he were clutched by fever, and a terror-filled scream that would shame him forever had anyone heard it ripped from his lungs.

Shin Dae-jung had never been so scared in his life.