Ragnarok

TWENTY-THREE

Fenris Kystby, Norway

Zelda Baker, callsign: Queen, was out of ammunition. She had one more magazine for the M9, but she knew she’d never have time to load it. The thing at the end of the narrow corridor moved like lightning, leaping from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. She had fired 15 times and missed every shot but the last. Now, the thing stopped, hanging upside down from the ceiling. It looked at her through one of its baseball-sized eyeballs on the outside of its blocky head.

Queen had been expecting something strange since Rook had told her about the mind-controlled villagers and the Nazi experiments that had gone on in these labs. But she wasn’t prepared for this. It looked at least eight feet tall, but it crouched and sprang more like a cat than anything humanoid. Its translucent skin covered coiled muscles and an almost transparent white substance that looked to her like blood. Its claws, teeth and even the skull appeared clear, allowing her a view of its brain, which looked like congealed cottage cheese.

Definitely didn’t evolve on this planet, she thought.

Like the other members of Chess Team, Queen had faced unusual beasts before, but this one was odd. It had charged her at first, and she had fired all her bullets at the creature as it careened toward her. But then she hit it and it stopped.

Now it just looked at her.

She couldn’t tell if the creature was intelligent or not. Its oversized blocky head just remained fixed to the side. A lone bulbous eye locked on her face, the other looking in a different direction. Neither of them moved.

Maybe its vision is movement based?

She shifted her hand very slowly to the hilt of her KA-BAR knife-slow enough to not set off a motion detector. Her eyes never left the beast as her hand crept across her body.

The creature remained still.

Dust fell from the tunnel’s stone and brick ceiling, loosened by the recent bullet impacts and the holes punched by the creature’s claws. Loose streams of sandy soil poured down from cracks in the ceiling, too. Not so much that she thought the tunnel would collapse, but enough that the grit would get in her eyes if she moved.

Is that it? she wondered.

She decided to wait the thing out, staying absolutely still until it did something. Her fingers grasped the non-slip handle of the 7 inch knife, ready to pull it from its sheath and go to work on the creature.

But it didn’t move. The creature waited, too. She watched it and noticed that the dust was settling and the streams of grit stopped falling.

The creature tilted its head to the side.

Queen still held the M9 in her left hand-useless weight. Or is it? Queen’s eyes went up to the ceiling again, and then she slowly moved her gun hand, but not as slowly as she had moved the knife hand. She wanted to see if the beast would notice the movement.

As soon as she moved her hand, the beast turned its head again. The round eyes locked onto the movement. Queen smiled. When she moved her hand, it had been backward, as if cocking her arm for a throw. She launched the empty M9 at the ceiling between her and the creature, where it waited on the ceiling. The creature began to move toward the flying weapon, but then the gun struck the weakened brick ceiling. A cloud of dust and dirt spurted from the ceiling before the pistol smashed to the floor, sending up another plume of dust.

Queen took two quick steps forward and to the side, but the creature’s eye didn’t swivel in her direction. It remained perfectly still as it had done before.

The dirty air confuses it. Her eyes widened. They use some kind of sonar, like a bat, she guessed. The eyes must not work as well as they appear to. Maybe low light blindness. So they compensate with sonar. But sonar is no good if the air is full of debris. Sensory overload.

She took two more steps forward, but this time moved closer to the center of the tunnel, and directly behind the stream of sand and dry dirt trickling from the ceiling. She took one more step right up to the dust, so the stream of dirt was coming right down in front of her face. The upside-down monster hung less than a yard from her position on the other side of the little falling soil.

Queen raised her knife.

The creature’s eye twitched in her direction.

The stream of soil slowed-her only cover, about to be gone. Queen abandoned caution and leapt forward, the wicked blade of the KA-BAR leading as she burst through the trickle of dust and plunged the knife into the creature’s eye.

The knife slid into the creature’s clear skull, up to the hilt, from the force of her thrust. She pushed until the beast’s body toppled over. She didn’t release her pressure on the knife until she felt the tip of the blade strike the stone floor.

She squatted next to the creature and wondered what it could be. She was about to remove the blade from the dead thing when a small skittering sound came from down the tunnel behind her. She withdrew the blade with agonizing slowness. Have to make it like I’m not even moving.

A rock rolled across the floor and hit the wall of the tunnel with a loud clacking noise.

Queen drew in a breath.

The newcomer was less than ten feet behind her. The blade of the knife came free and Queen spun in a whirl, raising the knife for another killing stroke.

But that stroke never came. Instead came a noise. A roaring vibration like a hundred jet aircraft in her head.

Her arms turned to limp spaghetti.

The knife fell from her hand.

Her legs quivered and her teeth chattered.

Her eyes watered and a thick river of drool slipped from her mouth. She never saw the second beast. Its roar filled her world, and her eyes clamped shut trying to force out the terror, but as she fell to the ground, her whole body shaking like an epileptic in the throes of a seizure, she could utter only two words:

“Daddy, no!”