Ragnarok

EIGHTEEN

Shanghai, China

Shin Dae-jung cowered against the low concrete wall. His eyes squeezed tightly shut. His whole body shook with fear. He couldn’t bear to open his eyes even a slice, because he knew with the certainty of a gambler on a winning streak that if he opened his eyes, his vision would fill with the sight of his grandmother having her innards eaten by one of his best friends.

Knight shook his head. His thoughts made no sense. Why is it so dark? It was daylight. We were in a fight…

When Chess Team had first gone up against the malevolent genetics company Manifold, run by the twisted egomaniac Richard Ridley, the company’s security team captured Bishop and their scientists experimented on him. He had become what the team termed a “Regen”-one of Ridley’s twisted regenerating soldiers. But there had been a heavy price attached to regenerative healing and near-immortality. The regeneration process slowly ate the soldier’s mind, filling it with aggression, until he was nothing more than a raging, hulking terror. Bishop had been well on his way to becoming such a mindless beast of anger, and Knight was the only one that had fought the big Iranian American when he was in his full-on Regen state. But Bishop had been cured, Ridley was gone and Manifold was no more. Questions formed in Knight’s terrorstruck thoughts. Why was he certain Bishop had reverted to his Regen form? How had his ailing grandmother arrived in Shanghai? And why was the Regen Bishop trying to eat her?

Knight cracked his tightly clamped eyelids and daylight burst through them like stabbing skewers. He squinted and blinked a few times until his eyes adjusted to the glare. His head felt heavy and his limbs didn’t want to move yet. He was curled in a ball on the concrete floor of the balcony on the Customs House clock tower. He groggily sat up. A chill ran up his back. His body was soaked through with sweat. What the hell?

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 spilling 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.