THIRTY-TWO

London, England

The two dire wolves, glistening wet from the rain, slammed into Bishop’s body, knocking him to the river-facing end of the capsule. His body smashed into the glass and metal of the end of the passenger car, but with the impact-absorbing armor, it felt like little more than a light shove. He lost his hold on the XM312-B and the machine gun flipped out the shattered window, toppling away. A second weapon lost in 24 hours. Bishop swore silently.

The dire wolves stopped halfway inside the capsule. One now squatted on the center of the wooden bench and the other on the floor to its left. They waited, and Bishop wondered why. He stayed on the floor of the capsule, unmoving, watching them.

Great big eyes, but you can’t see too good, can you?

He realized they couldn’t see in the rain and had waited for it to abate before moving again. But it wasn’t raining inside the capsule. Bishop strained to hear and then realized he couldn’t hear anything but his own breathing. The armor. Maybe they detect body heat too. Maybe they only track movement. Then inspiration struck.

Bishop couldn’t hear any external sound and his body was cushioned from impact by the armor. Slowly, he moved his hand up to his chest. The MP5s were still strapped to him. Attached to the strap of one of the rifles was an M84 stun grenade, more commonly known as a flash-bang. It didn’t contain shrapnel, but instead emitted a non-lethal burst of magnesium-based flaring light and an incapacitating bang of sound. But with the sound dampener in his helmet and the impact-absorbing armor, all Bishop would have to do to avoid the effects of the grenade was close his eyes tightly. He slipped his finger into the circular pull ring and then struggled a second to get another finger into the secondary, triangular pull ring. He didn’t bother depressing the safety lever. His movements were minimal, but still the dire wolf on the bench moved its head slightly at the motion.

Crap. He’s seen it.

Bishop lunged to his feet, dropping the grenade on the floor of the cabin. The dire wolf on the bench turned its attention fully in his direction, but it lunged laterally, grabbing the metal railings again as it had done when it entered the capsule. The other dire wolf swiveled its eyes and lowered its head to examine the grenade as it skittered to a stop in front of the creature.

Bishop crushed his eyes shut and lunged forward toward to dire wolf on the wall. The shockwave impact from the grenade hit his armored body just before he slammed into the creature on the wall. The creature bounced off his moving body like a superball bouncing off a wall. The dire wolf was moving away from Bishop as he opened his eyes, in time to see the beast sliding out the open doors of the capsule and falling away. He looked back to see the second dire wolf stirring on the floor, where the grenade had temporarily done exactly what it was designed to-it had stunned the creature. Bishop didn’t wait to see how long it took the dire wolf to recover. He sprinted for the open door and leapt out into the air.

The Crescent hadn’t moved from its position above Bishop’s capsule on the top of the wheel, so the rappelling line still hung from the underside of the huge curve-winged transport plane. But it was further away than Bishop had thought. He stretched his fingers out as far as he could. His body shot out into open space. Just when he thought he would miss the rope entirely, the back of his fingers brushed the line. He scrabbled at it and snagged it. As he moved through the air and before the rope absorbed his weight, he quickly wound the rope around his left arm once. Momentum swung him out and away from the wheel. The line wasn’t long enough for him to slide to the ground, so his only option was to swing back to the frame of the Eye.

He twisted on the rope as he began to swing back. Keeping the rope wrapped around his left arm, he reached out at the apex of his swing and caught hold of the nearest tie rod. Hooking his knee around the rod, he moved his hand back to the rope and began to climb. Knight must have noticed what was going on, because Bishop looked up to the capsule he had just escaped in time to see the second dire wolf’s head explode, coating the doors on the end of the capsule with a milky fluid.

He climbed hand over hand, rewrapping the rope around his left arm each time for an added measure of security. He slid his leg up the tie rod until he got to a crawlspace formed by a triangular tunnel of bars and struts that ran under the capsules-or above them at the bottom of the wheel. Knight picked off a few more dire wolves from around Bishop while the big man focused on his climbing. He could see the creatures pitching off the rails to either side of him, falling to the ground and river below. As Bishop worked his way down the tunnel of bars, heading for a capsule two away from the first one he’d entered, he could see three people still trapped inside. He also noticed that Knight’s firing had stopped.

“Bishop, you read?” Knight calm voice spoke softly in his earpiece.

“What’s going on?” He asked.

“They’re bugging out. But there are a lot more over on the bridge by Big Ben. You okay on your own for a minute?”

Bishop glanced back the way he had come through the jungle gym of connected white bars. Upriver, he could see Westminster bridge was overrun by dire wolves and a portal had formed on the Victoria Embankment, close to, but not yet touching Big Ben, the famed British landmark clock tower at the end of the Palace of Westminster-one of the city’s major seats of governing.

“Go. I’m going to help the people still trapped in the other capsules.” Bishop resumed his scramble through the bars.

“We’ll be right back. Try to hurry. If the portal goes, the center of that wheel goes too. You’ll look pretty silly rolling to Southend.” The Crescent suddenly peeled away from the top of the London Eye, heading for the middle of the green-painted Westminster Bridge.

Bishop continued down past the remains of his original capsule and the next, on to the one after that. Inside were three young girls that looked to be no more than sixteen or seventeen, each dressed in fashionable pink and white fleece jackets. They probably dressed like each other intentionally, Bishop thought. He remembered when he was younger, the girls would have been mocked mercilessly by their peers for showing up at high school or elsewhere looking like ‘Twinkies’-identical and two to a package. What was considered cool had apparently changed.

When Bishop looked up from under the capsule, he saw that each of the girls had smeared eye make-up. They had been crying. Also, it was a long way up to the capsule from the bottom of the triangular passage. He would have to shimmy nearly twenty feet up one of the diagonal uprights to get to the girls.

He looked down briefly to the hundreds of feet of air and steel below him before the river, then looked back at the portal. The last of the remaining dire wolves were high-tailing it back inside.

Running out of time.

He took one more glance, this time further afield toward the bridge, where the Crescent lowered and Knight delivered pain from above. Bishop began to slide, climb, shimmy and shrug his way up the slick metal pole. The angle helped the climb considerably, and before he realized it, he reached his hand up for more pole only to find the upper rim of the wheel. The girls had watched his ascent awestruck, and now that he was close enough to almost reach out and touch, they started screaming for his help.

“Relax. I’m going to get you out!”

Then the unthinkable happened.

The portal disappeared. He could see its absence from his limited peripheral vision in the helmet. He turned his head to look and just as his side vision had suggested, there was a massive gaping space where the hundred-foot diameter globe of energy had been. In the distance across the city, other globes were still present, but his had gone, taking everything it had touched. A quarter of the outer rim of the wheel was now missing, along with the capsules that would have been there. The tie rods that reached from that portion of the wheel down to the hub were gone too. The hub itself and the two gigantic white cantilevered supports that held the entire wheel aloft were also gone. Bishop was holding onto a crescent-shaped incomplete wheel of steel and now-dangling tie rods and cables that were held in the air by…nothing.

With several people still trapped in capsules below him on the unaffected side of the wheel, the girls still trapped in the one above him and Bishop still holding on to the structure near the top, the London Eye began to fall over into the river.

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