Ragnarok

TWENTY-FOUR

Manhattan Island, NY

3 November, 0630 Hrs

Major General Michael Keasling’s permanent scowl didn’t alter when he saw the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter settle in the middle of the cordoned-off city street, but he did breathe a sigh of relief as its rotor blades whipped dust and grit into the sky. The situation in New York hadn’t gotten out of hand yet, but he knew it would. He had 200 men out of Fort Dix, and another 200 on the way, but he knew they wouldn’t be sufficient for this mess. He also suspected the two men emerging from the helicopter might not make much difference against such an alien threat. Still, these two men were among the most capable soldiers he had ever known, and they were both his friends.

Keasling absently raised the fingers of one hand and stroked the smooth skin under his nose, where he had worn a mustache for most of the last twenty years. With the recent receipt of his second star, he’d made a few simple but profound changes in his life. No more coffee and more time in the gym for one-although with his short, stocky barrel shape, he’d been muscular enough. He wasn’t looking to become more intimidating but to increase his lifespan with cardiovascular exercises he hadn’t bothered with since long before he had become a General. His wife was long in the grave from the cancer, but his daughter had just had her first little blonde-haired son, Liam, and Keasling now wanted to live long enough to see the boy become a man. Funny how family changes everything, he thought.

The loss of the mustache wasn’t as physically life changing as the exercise, but he found his hand returning to the lack of it repeatedly, as if the loss of hair signified this new phase in his life as much as it reduced the appearance of his age by a decade. As the two men approached him on 6 ^th Avenue, and the helicopter took to the dawn sky behind them, Keasling thought about the chaos of the present situation and wondered, not for the first time since he had received his second star, if maybe it was time to stop. He knew he never would, though. The vicious cycle of thought further fueled his gruff demeanor as he stepped forward to greet his friends.

“King, you look like the fucking Michelin Man.”

Both of the recently arrived men were dressed in personal body armor suits that looked to Keasling like they were wearing sculpted pillows on their bodies. The General knew the suits were an extension of research carried out by the Pentagon and a Canadian man that started out making a suit impervious to grizzly bear attacks. Lewis Aleman’s genius had been further applied to the designs and the result was an incredibly lightweight, tactical battle-suit, which, while it would not stop a large-caliber bullet, would significantly reduce damage from impacts, falls and knife-or in this case, claw — attacks. Keasling’s people in the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had been involved in the Pentagon’s end of development on the suit, so he was aware of its capabilities. He understood the necessity of such body armor. Still, they looked like the Tempur-Pedic memory foam pillow he used during the few hours of sleep he got at night.

The suits had multiple sculpted angles that resembled the boxy radar-reflective surfaces of stealth aircraft, and the color scheme for the entirety of the suits was a grayish black, reinforcing the similarity. Both men wore full-face-mask helmets that kept their identities hidden as well, but Keasling knew each man by his gait.

“General,” Deep Blue said from behind his armored faceplate. “If King is the Michelin Man, what does that make me?”

“Very dignified and presidential, sir.”

“I was going to say my valet,” King started, “but dignified works too.”

“Show some respect, Delta Boy,” Keasling said, but he was smiling as he said it. King and his Chess Team cohorts were all former Delta, and they were used to a level of informality and a lack of ranks not approved of in other branches of the service. However, in just a few short years, Keasling had gone from being constantly irritated at the informality to having immense respect for Jack Sigler. The two men had become close friends.

He shook hands with both men, noting with approval how supple the gloves on the suits were. While still padded with a thin layer of the experimental armor material, the fingers would still be able to operate triggers and even keyboards if necessary.

“Sorry about the switch to the chopper, but Persephone would have trouble with how tight the buildings are in Midtown. Plus, no easy rooftops for VTOL nearby, like you had in Chicago. There’s crap all over the roofs here.” The general led the other men up 6 ^th, along the sidewalk.

“No problem. We came in low from Jersey and couldn’t see much. How bad is it here?” Deep Blue asked the general as they began walking up to West 49 ^th, where soldiers from Fort Dix stood and crouched behind sandbags, weapons trained down the street.

“Well, let’s just say that I’ve been wondering whether it’s too late to join the Peace Corps and get assigned to the ass-end of Botswana. I can tell you it was no damn fun getting all the civilians out of these buildings in this part of town. NYPD played a big part in that, but it would have been impossible later in the day.”

The men rounded the corner of a small concrete-bordered city-planning park with about ten trees, all still tenaciously clinging to their orange leaves before winter’s inevitable pull. Beyond it stood five abandoned hot dog carts with brightly colored umbrellas. Keasling’s stomach rumbled at the thought of wolfing down a few dogs with brown mustard and sauerkraut. They turned onto West 49 ^th Street and saw an empty road, cordoned off a few bocks west, down the narrow corridor of tall buildings before them. Steam gently seeped up from manhole sewer covers on the asphalt, and a discarded sheet of crumpled, dirty newspaper caught an errant breeze and wafted along the street, wrapping around the leg of a squat black fire hydrant with a silver top on the other side of the street.

“Where-?” King began, his voice thick through the built in voice modulator on his helmet.

“Up gentlemen, up.” Keasling said more forcefully than necessary. The situation was wearing on his nerves.

His armored companions slowly titled their heads up and took in the sight.

The Cobra Head streetlamps, stretched into their view, but otherwise, all they could see were two glass-walled skyscrapers reaching into the sky on either side of the road. The one on the right reached to 750 feet and the one on the left went almost as high, to 675 feet. But the building on their right had a glowing energy sphere embedded in it, close to the top. The globe of light stretched across the 100 foot gap between the buildings, over the street and just barely kissed the edge of the building on the left. The ball of light floated in the sky, with the right third of it clawing into the taller building. The globe was steady and solid, with none of the lightning effects Keasling had seen in video footage of the Chicago event.

“Gentlemen, the building on your right is the Exxon Building. The X part of the so-called ‘XYZ buildings’ of Rockefeller Center. The building on the left is McGraw Hill. The Y. Far as we can tell, the event does not actually touch the Y building, although it does look like it from where we are standing. The Exxon Building has 54 floors and floors 38 to 51 are inside the affected area. The elevators are just clear of the effect, though, so we can still get up top if we need to. I’ve got men in the Y building just opposite the curving wall of light, ready to fire if needed. No one in the X building though. If the creatures show up, I don’t want my boys too close.” Keasling turned to face Deep Blue and King in their armor. “They haven’t got pillow suits on.”

Deep Blue kept his head tilted upward, looking at the floating ball of light jammed between the two glass skyscrapers.

King lowered his head and looked at the General. “I think we’re going to need that helicopter to come back.”