Ragnarok

FORTY-EIGHT

Somewhere

Bishop struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. Everything around him appeared to be a salmon shade of orangey pink. The sky was so pallid it made him nauseous to look at it. The ground was covered in chunks and oblong protruding mounds of rocky grit. As far as he could see, the landscape was uniform. Lumps and bumps, but no mountains and no trees. No water and nothing moving.

He was on his hands and knees, disgorging the contents of his stomach onto the peculiar pasty colored soil, when he heard movement behind him. He still had two MP5s strapped to his body, but he couldn’t access them quickly from his position on the ground.

He scooped up a handful of the strange grit on the ground in his left hand, as if he was struggling to stay on his hand and knees. The truth was that after vomiting, his body felt far better adjusted to the strange sights. He was almost back to normal. He just hadn’t gotten up yet. He pulled a knee up, as if in agony, but actually hoped to spring up to his feet. Then he slowly dragged his right hand under his body, as if he was holding his stomach in agony. Instead, he pulled the handle of his SOG SEAL knife from its sheath on his massive armored chest. He had formerly relied on a KA-BAR, like the rest of the team, but since Deep Blue had formed Endgame and taken over the old Manifold base as a headquarters in New Hampshire, Bishop had started field-testing lots of different equipment for fun. Deep Blue obtained what he felt was the best of the best for the team, and the base had racks of armaments from which to choose. Bishop had found the 12-inch knife with the 7-inch blade and instantly fell in love. On a smaller man, the size of the knife might have made it unwieldy. But Bishop was a mountain of a man.

The noise scuffed again, just behind him.

Bishop sprang up, whirling in a 180 degree circle. It wouldn’t be the first time he shocked an opponent with how quickly a man of his size could move.

His hand came whistling around, spraying the soil at the eyes of the dire wolf, which stood just taller than Bishop did. His second hand followed through on the spin and sliced out with the SOG blade. The edge raked across the beast’s chest, and the creature let loose with its natural defense mechanism-the devastating aural attack that made the thick bones in Bishop’s body vibrate as if they were about to explode.

Under normal circumstances, the roar would paralyze an opponent. Fear would course through their bodies at the fight-or-flight reflex the roar triggers. But Bishop had just the one major fear. It dwarfed everything else and was a fear he lived with every day. When Chess Team had first gone up against Richard Ridley’s Manifold Genetics company, they had captured Bishop and experimented on him at the genetic level. Bishop had been transformed into a ‘Regen.’ He had developed amazing regenerative abilities, healing from minor wounds in seconds and could even grow back severed limbs like a salamander. But those amazing abilities had come with a heavy price. Each time his body regenerated, his mind lost a shred of his humanity until he became nothing more than a raging monster. He had battled the condition with meditation and eventually with a crystal from the Neanderthal city of Meru in Vietnam, which had negated the rage effects he felt with a combination of vibrations and ionization. He didn’t buy into things like crystals and UFOs, but the one from Meru worked, and that had been clear to everyone.

Ultimately, his genetic structure had been fixed, removing the regenerative abilities, and with them the likelihood that he would transform into a raving maniac again. But the fear never left him. The nightmares came nearly every night. He put on a good facade for the team, but inside he lived with the constant worry that he would one day lose control and start killing every living person around him. He lived with the fear that he would eat their bloodied corpses like a deranged African lion, pulling and tearing at the flesh in long strips and unrecognizable chunks.

The dire wolf in front of him wasn’t finished howling when the fight-or-flight reflex in Bishop manifested. But for Bishop with his fear of losing all control, the reflex simply made him hallucinate that he had. He lunged forward before the dire wolf had closed its mouth and before it could move. Bishop grabbed the beast around the back of its head and sank his teeth into the creature’s throat, ripping and tearing at the white translucent skin. Fluid filled Bishop’s mouth as he continued to bite and tear at tendons pulled as tight as piano wires. His powerful meaty hands clutched the back of the dire wolf’s head, so it couldn’t escape.

The creature backpedaled, and fell over in shock, dead before it could hit the rocky salmon soil. Bishop rode the falling creature to the ground, but even the impact couldn’t dislodge him.

He didn’t stop eating for a long time.