Ragnarok

TWENTY-ONE

Chicago, IL

King leapt out of the Humvee as it hurtled into the suddenly dark abyss, and landed on the scoured-clean side of the crater. With nothing to grab onto, he slid down the steep grade. He could see in the dim light where different pipes or cables had been before the dome had appeared, but the entire surface of the crater wall was now as smooth as glass, the lightning ball having melted soil, asphalt, concrete, metal and everything else into a smooth paste before rapidly cooling and solidifying.

He slid face down, picking up speed as he went. His hands scrabbled for purchase, trying to find a nook or hole to grab, to stop his descent. Behind him, the abandoned Humvee smashed into the center of the hole with a loud crump but no huge explosion. The twisting, shrieking sound of impacting metal was horrible enough and he was glad he had bailed, even though his body slamming into the crater had hurt plenty.

He wasn’t really worried about sliding to the bottom of the crater. He was worried about what had happened to the creature. Did Whitey make it back into the dome before it blinked out?

He looked below him as he slid down into the dark, but couldn’t see anything in the dim light. He strained to hear the beast in the dark below him, but the noise of sirens from rescue vehicles up on the panicked streets drowned out any chance he might have had to detect movement. Moreover, there was the whispering hiss of his uniform gliding on the silky-smooth crater wall throwing up a white noise barrier.

Then, instead of coming to the bottom of the crater, he felt himself lurch downward, falling through the open air. What the hell? But before he had time to finish the thought, he hit solid ground again unexpectedly, the force driving the air from him lungs in a loud cough. He was no longer moving.

He was laying down on a lumpy horizontal surface. He reached under his back with his hand and felt wood spaced out by concrete. Railroad ties. But there’s no subway anywhere near here. King slowly moved to a sitting position and toggled his communications gear.

“Blue, you out there?”

“King! You’re okay?”

“Bruised and battered. I’m in some kind of underground railroad tunnel that shouldn’t be here. Plus I’m going to have trouble getting back to the surface. The sides of the crater are smooth.”

“There were a number of mining projects after the turn of the century, King. Over 110 miles of tunnels and caverns are now under the greater Chicago area. You must have found one of them. What about the hostile you were after?”

“No sign of it. I’m going to give pursuit.”

“Understood. Just be careful. I’ll be down for you once we wrap of the last of them up here. Two of them didn’t make it back to the sphere before it closed down.” King heard the audible click of Deep Blue signing off. He stayed still in the dark of the tunnel, waiting for his ears to adjust to the ambient noise of the tunnel, before he proceeded deeper inside. There was always the chance the creature missed the tunnel and slid to the bottom of the crater, but King didn’t think so. The small hairs on the back of his neck raised; he could tell the beast was in the tunnel with him.

It was colder up on the city streets, with the November wind blowing hard. In the tunnel, the air was dry and mild. The dark was inky black. King knew he would have to use a flashlight. He removed a small tactical light and laser sight from one zippered pocket on his flight suit and attached it to the barrel of his Glock 23, which the Air Force had issued him before his ill-fated F-16 flight. It took some work to get the thing attached in the dark, but he managed it.

With the lights off, he slowly stood and moved to his right. Leading with his hand outstretched, he searched for the wall of the tunnel. It took him only a few steps before his fingertips brushed the edge of the smooth rock wall. His ears strained at the silence, hoping to detect some small sound of movement, but all was dead quiet. King laid his body against the wall and took a slow breath, then flicked on the flashlight and targeting laser.

The tiny LED light and red laser beam illuminated the ten-foot wide concrete tunnel as if the sun had just been turned on. Ten feet deeper into the tunnel and hanging upside down from the ceiling by its claws, its back was to King. He was in its blind spot.

He stood stock still, moving the targeting laser to the back of the creature’s head.

Almost. Almost…

King took a slow deep breath and released it, preparing to take the shot, when the bulbous white orb on the side of the creature’s upside-down head swiveled back to look directly at King. He fired the Glock, but the beast was already on the ground, flipping and landing couched on all four limbs, like a cat.

Then it roared.

A huge, echoing, hideously loud roar that vibrated in King’s chest like the thumping bass of a high-end car stereo. He squinted in momentary pain from the volume of the roar, but then fired another shot and dropped to a crouch of his own.

The creature lurched to the side, a gout of thick white blood spraying from its shoulder. King could smell the fluid, and it didn’t smell coppery like human blood. More like spoiled fish. And metal and plastic.

The beast paused and moved its head to the side, as if it were considering something. One of the white eyes swiveled, peering down at its fresh wound.

King watched, fascinated as the bundles of cable-like muscles under the thing’s translucent skin tensed and released, as the creature moved its head.

King opened up with the remaining 13 rounds in the magazine of his Glock.

The beast’s head erupted with spurts of white fluid, before its perforated corpse collapsed in a heap on the dusty concrete floor of the tunnel.

King stood and ejected the magazine, allowing it to clatter to the floor, the sound of it drowned out by the still echoing gunshots. He reached into another zippered pocket on his flight suit for the only spare magazine he had.

He just finished inserting the fresh rounds when Deep Blue’s voice returned.

“You alright? We heard the roar up here, although my sound dampeners in the helmet kicked in. Aleman says the fear response that the roar creates is pretty devastating.”

“Uh, the what?” King asked.

“Fear response. Did you experience a debilitating terror from the roar?” Deep Blue sounded perplexed in King’s earpiece.

“No. It was loud, but that was all. What are you talking about?”

“I’ll explain later. Come to the edge of the tunnel, we’re lowering a winch from the second Humvee.”

After King was winched up, Deep Blue led him to an exterior door on the side of the John Hancock Center, where he inserted a key and a door opened to reveal a private elevator. “One of the Secret Service evac routes from when I was the President.” Once inside the elevator, he used the same key to activate the lift. The men felt a tug at their stomachs as the fast-moving car raced for the roof, 100 stories above them. Deep Blue relayed the intel from Aleman about the fear response generated by the creature’s roar.

“Didn’t experience anything like that,” King said.

“Odd. Maybe you can’t hear certain frequencies, or have an odd ear structure. Whatever it is, be thankful for it. The National Guard topside were pissing themselves and screaming like little girls. Ale assures me I would have done the same if he hadn’t warned me to calibrate the audio pickups in this helmet to dampen any noises on that frequency.”

“We might all need helmets like that, then.”

The doors to the elevator opened and the men stepped out onto the roof of the building, its two massive antennas towering overhead. A huge fixed-wing, crescent-shaped craft idled on the roof.

“Looks kind of like the Crescent,” King said as they boarded the aircraft.

“Similar. The Persephone. The Pentagon is messing around with the design. Keasling is loaning it to us.”

They sat and strapped in, surrounded by a complicated computer array. Deep Blue removed his helmet and contacted Aleman, back in New Hampshire. The craft launched vertically and then King felt the thrust as it banked and accelerated.

“Aleman, catch us up,” Deep Blue began.

“Cape Town is gone,” came the sober response.

Deep Blue sighed. “How many dead?”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s gone. Completely.”