Ragnarok

FIFTY-EIGHT

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

4 November, 0130 Hrs

Asya immediately recognized that the security officers with the glazed over eyes were still breathing. She thought they were dead when she turned on the light. They were sitting in the dark!

Even now, after she had come into the room and turned on the light, the four beefy, muscular males in darks slacks, shined shoes, white shirts and gold badges on their chests, didn’t move. They sat or slumped in chairs, at desks arrayed around the room. Their eyes were glassy, and they either stared at the screens in front of them or looked off in strange directions around the room like mannequins.

Their uniforms identified them as a security team working for the lab. Asya held her breath. The men still hadn’t noticed her.

They must be under control from the light. Lost in bliss.

Arrayed around the room were twenty flat-screen monitors showing footage-live she guessed-from closed-circuit TV cameras around the facility. On the wall was a hard white plastic floor plan of the lab, with the legend Gleipnir Lab 1. Past the men, she saw a black metal cabinet the size of a closet at the back of the room.

A weapons locker.

She debated retreating from the room. Instead, she stayed motionless and continued her own glassy-eyed stare. What will they do? Will they ignore me?

Then as one, all four men stood abruptly, startling her. They all turned their heads her direction, glaring at her. Like a flock of birds. Like the villagers.

She froze in place, tensing her muscles, waiting. She knew they would come. She was suddenly glad Rook and Queen were not here. She wouldn’t have to hold back for fear of what they would think of her.

The bulky men lunged at her all at once.

The two furthest from her slammed into each other. Their frenzied attempt to get at her in the narrow space between desks was passionate, but uncoordinated. The other two men, one slimmer and the other heavyset, were closer, and they came straight at her. No finesse. No tactics. They just rushed.

Asya leapt straight up, her knee connecting with the underside of the fat man’s chin. His head ricocheted off her knee with an audible chock. The man fell over backward, slamming his head hard against the wall. Before she could land from the leap, the taller, thinner man was wrapping his arms around her midsection. She thrust her head back, hitting him in the nose, the cartilage snapping and a gush of crimson flooded out of his nostrils, saturating his white shirt and the back of her hair.

When his grip loosened, Asya swiveled in his arms, facing him. She pushed against the underside of his arms with her hands, and slid down out of his grasp. The man tried to reassert his grip, but she surprised him, by shooting back upward, where he’d held her the moment before. She rammed the flat of her hand into his already injured nose. Blood sprayed. The shattered cartilage drove into his brain, killing him instantly. The man’s body fell away from her as she was tackled from behind.

Asya turned as she fell to see one of the two remaining guards. They were both big men with Nordic good looks, short blonde hair and glistening gray eyes. Acne marred their otherwise clear skin, which she assumed to be the result of steroid use. She hit the floor by the doorway and rolled in a crouch to her feet.

The man closer to her took a step forward, lumbering and trancelike.

Asya darted through his parted legs near the floor, then spun and shot a fist into the man’s groin. He buckled at the blow, but quickly recovered to stand straight up again.

It’s like they can’t even feel the pain. As she heard the last man step toward her from behind, she realized that she would need to kill these men. There would be no other way to stop them. Her only other choice would be to run.

And Asya Machtcenko did not run.

She darted to the side of the man she had hit in the groin. He reached out for her slowly, like the creature in an old Frankenstein film-a large sweeping grab, unfocussed and wild. She got around him, but he had carried the sweeping hand around, and it hit her back, knocking her against the closed door.

She moved to her left just as the man drove his fist into the door, where she had been seconds before. A solid crunch filled the air. The man broke at least one knuckle. She slipped around the other side of him, and made a run at the second, slower security man still standing.

Just before she reached him, she stepped up into the air, planted her foot on his thigh and ran up the man’s stomach and chest. She pushed off his broad pectorals and her head and arms shot back toward the door and Frankenstein’s guard. Her body flew horizontal, with her back to the ground, for just a foot before her arms found the lumbering guard’s head and neck. She grasped his thick neck with both hands and as the man that had acted as her ladder came closer, she wrapped her shins on either side of his neck too.

Together, the three of them formed a human bridge, with each guard acting as the uprights, and Asya stretched from neck to neck as the surface of the bridge. With a sudden and violent shift of her hips, Asya rotated her entire body in a horizontal twist, like a human top that had just been launched at speed. The spinning movement broke the neck of each burly man, before all three of their bodies pitched to the floor. The report of the cervical vertebrae fracturing in stereo was tremendous, and she feared the creatures from the larger room would be coming to investigate.

Extricating herself from the dead men, she scrambled to her feet. She slipped to the door of the room and opened it just a sliver. Out the crack into the large room, none of the white beasts were making for the security room.

Good.

The first man she had hit-the overweight man-began to stir on the floor. Asya lifted her leg, as if she were about to perform a simple ballet move, but then sprang up in the air and landed on the prone fat man’s neck with the bone of her knee and upper shin. The man made a sickening gurgle and grunt when his neck broke, and his eyes bulged from their sockets with the ramming impact of Asya’s entire weight, dropped from a five-foot height.

She stood again and quickly checked the man whose head had smacked against the stone wall of the room. His skull was cracked. Congealing blood coated the edges of the wound. It looked a brighter red than she would have expected. Like a young girl’s nail polish, thick and glossy. He wouldn’t be rejoining the fight either.

Asya looked at the live video feeds on the monitors around the room. One showed a room full of people sleeping on beds laid out like in an orphanage. The lab scientists, she assumed. Another showed the glowing sphere in the main room and a few of the creatures sniffing the air around it. Another showed the empty office where she had collected Rook at gunpoint, earlier in the night.

She saw more empty storerooms and offices. She had yet to come across tunnels or corridors, though. Some of the cameras showed views of doors outside, leading into the lab. One of those doors was ajar in the snow. She didn’t see any rooms that looked like they might have rope or weapons, so she would check the cabinet at the back of the room next.

A monitor screen with rows of electrical switchboards caught her eye. The room was filled with thick electrical cables. Another screen showed the entrance to the tunnel where she had taken Rook to the pit. Then she realized something and checked all twenty screens again. Fossen, the man that ran the place, was not on any of the cameras. Neither was Queen. And neither was the entrance to the lab she had used with Rook and Queen. A lot of blind spots in the surveillance. Asya walked over to the plastic map and looked at the floor plan. The tunnel back to the abandoned part of the lab was not even on the schematic.

She stepped around one man’s extended leg, and made her way to the black cabinet. She opened it slowly and it creaked with a barely audible squeal. Inside were a few of the Walther pistols like the one she had used on Rook, and two AR-15 rifles with black canvas straps. A hook on the inside of the cabinet door held a small hand towel. It smelled of machine oil, but she used it to wipe blood off her face and out of her hair. On the floor of the cabinet was a navy blue nylon bag. She knelt and unzipped it to find a black braided nylon rope.

Perfect.

She took the bag and threw it over her shoulder and then put two of the pistols in the pockets of the ridiculous lab coat she wore. She thought of taking the rifles, too, but she didn’t think she could conceal them well enough under the coat and they wouldn’t fit in the bag. She left them and made for the door. On a small hook by the door was a 6-inch plastic-barreled flashlight. She pocketed it in one smooth move.

Back in the large main lab, she once again skirted the wall in a slow shuffle and made for the tunnel back to Rook, forcing the glazed look back into her eyes. She kept expecting the creatures to see through the ruse. But the beasts ignored her as she walked.

When she reached the tunnel entrance, she almost slipped on a small puddle of liquid. She grimaced. Urine, maybe? She sighed and continued into the tunnel, figuring the beasts had to piss somewhere. A few steps further in, and she was concealed in shadow. She breathed a sigh of relief that she had once more passed the notice of the bulky white monsters.

That relief flooded away as she was grabbed from behind in the dark. A powerful limb wrapped around her throat and squeezed. Hard. The kind of hard that left her little doubt about what was going to happen next. I’m going to die.