Ragnarok

FORTY-FOUR

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

Asya closed her mouth, clamping off the scream before it was truly done. She swung the tiny LED light around the space. It was little more than a brick pit, really, just twenty feet in diameter and roughly circular. She played the light around the chamber and hoped for a door or a ladder, but the walls were uninterrupted.

And the whole pit was filled with heaps of the dead and desiccated corpses. Like little white stuffed animals in one of those crane-and-claw, coin-operated vending machine games. But there was no metal claw above her-instead, something moved beneath the heap of tiny bodies.

The mound shifted slowly.

Little bodies tumbled.

The corpses were almost cute, except for the rib bones poking out of the chests. The eyes were hardly pronounced but sat on the outside of the face, like halved grapes. The creatures had white skin that she could see through to the muscles and meat below it.

She began to breathe quickly, willing herself to overcome the fear paralyzing her. The thing under the mound moved again, in a zig-zagging motion. The floor of tiny dead performed a wave like the people at a sporting event.

It moves like a snake, she thought.

And then her paralysis broke. She lunged, clawing and scrabbling across the heaped dead, heading for the brick wall. As she moved her hands through the pile, crawling to the wall, the glow from her LED flashlight flared wildly in the space, throwing fast moving shadows around the pit.

She needed to get out. This place was wrong and horrible. Unnatural. Evil, the word came to her panicked mind unbidden. Evil.

She flailed through the bodies and reached the brick unmo-lested, but her mind, completely unhinged by fear, couldn’t comprehend that the slithering thing under the bodies had yet to grasp her ankle. She dug her fingers into the mortar between the bricks and found it was crumbly under her touch. She pulled herself up and placed her toes into the wide spaces between the bricks. She raced up the thirty-foot wall with balance a rock climber would have admired. She kept the LED light between her teeth, placed her toes and fingers into the cracks and didn’t look back.

When she reached the top, she threw herself over the lip, and onto the rough stone floor of the tunnel. She could see a blazing bright light at the end of the tunnel, back in the large laboratory. It was far brighter than the spotlights affixed to the ceiling, and she clung to the idea that bright light was her salvation from the atrocities in the pit.

Asya struggled to her feet and ran headlong toward the light. She abandoned all thoughts of stealth hoping to find Rook and Queen. But when she exited the mouth of the tunnel into the room though, another strange sight greeted her. The giant hand of metal-she recalled the gleaming chrome claw in the game with the stuffed animals, only this one was absurdly large and upside down, resting on the floor with its open claws stretching almost two hundred feet up to the ceiling-held something in its clutches now. A blazing sun, easily over a hundred feet in diameter, hovered between the metal struts of the claw. Small arcs of lightning shot out of the ball of crackling energy, but the lightning curved unnaturally backward, striking the large metal plates on the claw’s upright legs, harmlessly dissipating.

The light was incredibly bright, but the globe of electric fire felt appealing. It drew her closer. She stood directly in front of the pulsing light, all thoughts of her recent scare in the pit now gone from her mind. She just wanted to be near the light. It filled her with warmth, like the sun. Only this sun was for her. Her very own, personal star.

She smiled wide and exhaled a deep and contented sigh.

She didn’t notice, as five large white creatures that looked like grown versions of the dead babies, crawled out of the globe of brilliance and began to sniff the air around her.