Ragnarok

FORTY-SEVEN

Exxon Building, New York, NY

King and Deep Blue burst out of the access door and onto the white-gray roof. Deep Blue had used his last MP5 round to blow out the lock on the heavy fire door.

King pulled a KA-BAR knife from a tactical nylon sheath on the side of his armor and let Deep Blue move to the lead. To the right was a large ten-foot tall wall of air conditioning fans. The older man ran left along the open rooftop, back toward the 6 ^th Ave. side of the building. King followed, turning with every few strides to see if the dire wolves chasing them had reached the roof access yet.

“Keasling says the dire wolves below the portal are retreating like army ants on the run,” Deep Blue called over his shoulder as he ran.

They were nearing the eastern portion of the raised level on the roof that held the top of the stairwell they had just existed, and the elevator shafts that ran down the central spine of the building. King looked back one last time before rounding the corner and saw two dire wolves explode out of the top of the stairwell, cornering like cartoon characters with legs pistoning in a blur of motion, but the body not yet responding.

“Not all of them are retreating!” King moved around the concrete corner of the building’s uppermost reaches, and slammed his body against the wall, laying flat against it. Deep Blue didn’t know he had stopped and was waiting with the knife poised to strike. He could hear Deep Blue contacting the helicopter pilot through the external speaker in the high tech helmet.

“The dire wolves are bugging out. We’re gonna need a rooftop pick up on West 50 ^th.”

King turned his attention completely to the concrete corner, tensing with the knife and bending at the knees, intending to spring up and add more thrust to the blow.

When the dire wolves came, they came fast. Too fast. The first dire wolf blitzed past the corner and a further thirty feet beyond, before adjusting its course. King was astonished-and a little disappointed-that the creature hadn’t overshot the corner of the raised structure by another twenty feet, which would have taken it sailing clear off the edge of the roof and down to 6 ^th Ave. Anticipating the arrival of the second beast, King lunged around the corner, with the knife leading, even before he caught sight of it. If he had waited, it too would have passed by.

As it was, he was about a yard ahead of it when he jumped out, but it was coming at ridiculous velocity and clearly wasn’t expecting any kind of resistance. The blade of the knife drove into the creature’s throat with force. The knife tore more than punctured, and the blade along with half the hilt and King’s hand, drove into the monster’s neck and head. He’d been aiming upward, and the blade quickly found its way to the center of the beast’s skull.

The dead creature, carried by momentum, tackled King to the roof.

They tumbled together, a mass of black and white bodies and limbs.

The world spun around King. He had no sense of where he was, only that he was rolling, far, with no way to stop.

While King careened across the roof, another three dire wolves emerged from the stairwell and headed for Deep Blue.

King withdrew his knife from the monster’s eye with a wet squelch. The motion flipped him free and he struck the concrete roof on his stomach, sliding on his body armor. The edge of the roof over 6 ^th was fast approaching. Slapping his hands down on the roof, King threw his body weight laterally, away from the dire wolf.

The dead dire wolf reached the end of the concrete roof and bumped up and over the six-inch high decorative wall before dropping down to the street. King scraped his knife blade across the concrete roof and spun his body just in time to plant his feet against the low wall and stop his slide toward doom.

One of the three dire wolves chasing Deep Blue let loose with the bone-shaking roar, and King once again discovered he possessed some kind of immunity to the auditory attack. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.

Deep Blue and the first dire wolf caromed across the roof, the dire wolf clawing at the man. Deep Blue stabbed back with a bayonet. The roof shook beneath them, knocking everyone down. They rolled and tumbled across the concrete as King struggled to give chase on the suddenly uneven surface of the roof.

“King! The roof is collapsing! Get over here!” King raced across the roof and noted the other two dire wolves bounding toward him in his periphery.

Deep Blue slashed at the dire wolf attacking him. It flailed and struggled.

King leapt atop the dire wolf and pinned the creature’s head down on the ground. Deep Blue sank the bayonet onto the creature’s eye.

“Go! Go!” Deep Blue struggled to his feet and lurched.

King nearly fell as the roof shifted beneath him again.

Oh my God. It’s the whole building!

Deep Blue ran for the edge of the building over West 50 ^th

Street. “The portals are gone! The building is collapsing! Black Three, deploy! I repeat, deploy! And get the fuck out of our way-” The man reached the end of the building and showed no signs of slowing down. King raced after his friend, mentor and the former President of the United States of America, as the man leapt right off the roof of a 52-story-tall Manhattan skyscraper.

The dire wolves were right behind King as he reached the end of the building and without a second thought, leapt off the building and into the air, 750 feet over the city street, as the skyscraper slid backward and away from his jump. The distance his leap took him out and away from the edge of the building appeared to be superhuman, but the building was collapsing-tumbling away beneath him, dumping tons of glass, steel and concrete on West 49 ^th and the troops waiting down below.

As he fell toward the asphalt far below him, King had time to note two things that were more terrible than falling to his death for over 700 feet.

The first was that about half way down the plunge, a black Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was hovering above the street, directly under Deep Blue and King, its rotor blades waiting to grind them like two scoops of ice cream in a blender.

The second thing was worse. The two dire wolves had followed him off the roof. They fell just above him, claws extended and reaching for his exposed face.