Ragnarok

SIXTY-FOUR

Somewhere

Knight brushed his arms, attempting to dust some of the midnight blue grime off his body after the long climb. Or is it orange? He and Bishop perceived this world differently, but maybe neither of them saw it right.

Bishop motioned to the suitcase nuke hanging from Knight’s back. “Where did you find it?” He was walking along the cliff’s edge toward the distant pinnacle of rock that they had agreed was their only logical destination. Knight walked alongside the big man, but away from the cliff’s edge. It had taken him hours to climb the thing and he had no desire to slip and fall off it.

“In a crater. There are craters all around. From the portals.”

“Yep. Seen ‘em.”

“Debris from Earth surrounds most of them, like a pie crust.” Knight said, pointing out to the multitude of craters they could see in the distance.

Bishop stopped walking and peered out at the collection of divots on the distant plain.

“Too far to tell,” Bishop said.

“Trust me; I’ve visited a few. I found the nuke beside one of them.”

“Seems like a lot of people had the same idea.” Bishop resumed walking along the cliff’s edge.

Knight stayed where he was and waited. Eventually, Bishop noticed Knight wasn’t walking with him and turned, a question about to form on his lips. But he saw Knight’s face, with one eyebrow raised that said Really? Think about it.

“Wait,” Bishop said, the idea formulating in his head. “That’s the nuke King and Deep Blue were supposed to place in New York?”

Knight nodded, and unslung the pack, reaching into a pocket on the exterior of the canvas sack.

“How do you know it’s theirs?” Bishop asked.

Knight produced a small iPhone from the pack and handed it to Bishop. It showed a picture of Fiona smiling on the wallpaper.

Bishop glanced at it and looked at Knight with a serious face. “Did you try this thing?”

Knight’s face lost all color. He looked down at the iPhone’s reception-no bars. Of course, there are no bars. I’m in another dimension. He realized he must have checked the reception on the thing a hundred times, even though he couldn’t remember actually doing it. Then he realized that the battery should have died ages ago, but it strangely showed two bars left on the power meter.

Knight took the device back and dropped it in the pack, shaking his head and continuing onward. “No reception.” Bishop followed him and said nothing.

They walked along the edge of the cliff for hours. Most of the time, they walked in silence. They saw no dire wolves, but after an hour, they found a crater at the top of the cliff. It was so close to the edge that they had to go around it. The circumference was only eighty feet-small compared to some of the portals they had seen, but it had a single piece of debris at its edge.

It was the front half of a police Ford Crown Victoria. The portal had sawed the vehicle in half just behind its light bar. The front windshield had been smashed in and the driver’s side door was wide open. Seeing nothing of value, they walked around the vehicle, and crater, and continued on their way.

The distant pinnacle of rock on the horizon grew larger as they trudged toward it, but it felt like an illusion to Knight, like approaching the Rocky Mountains — they keep getting bigger, but they’re still so far away. An hour after the Crown Vic, they saw another crater further away from the cliff edge to their right.

“This one must be immense,” Bishop commented.

Knight could only tell that it looked like an enormous junkyard that stretched for miles. Ragged corners of buildings were interspersed with vehicles and wreckage of every kind.

“I’m thinking we check around for a functioning set of wheels. Looks like a long way to that rock tower.” Knight changed course and made for the crater’s edge.

“Survivors?” Bishop asked.

“I’ve never seen any,” Knight told him. “Seen a lot of wreckage, but never bodies.”

They approached the edge of the debris and saw that this particular crater stretched for a few miles. It was deep and filled with rubble that had tumbled in from the outer edge. Several smaller satellite craters pocked the ground around it.

They walked the circumference of the wide circle, looking at the destruction. They saw buildings and whole slabs of highways, but nothing really recognizable or worthwhile.

When they came to the second satellite crater, Knight stopped in his tracks. Right at the edge of the small hole were two things-a Humvee with a flat tire and an open, empty box.

As Bishop pulled up next to Knight, he could see that the box was a medical organ supply cooler. It was empty. The Humvee was an ambulance variant. The front hood and front doors of the vehicle were the same as any other of the multipurpose military-utility vehicles. The back bumper at the crater’s edge had been cleaved in half by the portal when it closed. The vehicle had what looked like an olive drab camper top sporting a big red cross painted on a white square.

As Bishop walked up to the vehicle, Knight went around the back of it and returned with a spare tire that had just missed being cut in half by the portal.

“Hold on, Knight. Let’s check if it runs before we bother.” Bishop slipped into the driver’s seat and started the ignition. The engine purred to life and Bishop smiled. He killed the engine, got out and helped Knight replace the tire.

As they were finishing with the tire and stowing the jack in the back of the vehicle, Bishop pointed to an insignia on the vehicle with two red bars and a blue bar, with a yellow pattern that looked like a hockey trophy.

“What country is that?” Bishop asked.

“Mongolia,” Knight said. “I’m driving.”

Knight put the pedal to the floor, peeling the vehicle around until they faced the tower in the distance. He eased up on the gas, but kept them moving quickly.

“So where are all the people we saw being abducted?” Bishop asked, from the passenger seat, where he held one of the two MP5s at the ready.

“Got a theory, but it isn’t pleasant.” Knight had been able to take the vehicle up to 40 mph on the uneven surface of the ground without rattling them both to death.

Bishop looked at him, waiting.

“The dire wolves. Think about how fast they are. Know how many calories speed like that would burn?”

“I’m not sure,” Bishop said. “If they needed to eat that much, what do they eat when the portals aren’t open? I haven’t seen anything else living here.”

“Maybe the portals open to dimensions other than ours?” Knight offered. “Or maybe they hibernate.”

“Mmm,” Bishop said. “But they probably do eventually eat what they take, human or animal, and they’ve been doing it for quite some time, so the real question is, where are all the bones?

Two hours later, they found the bones.

As they sped across the plain, the tower resolved and they could see that it was not a natural geological feature.

It was a tower of bones.

A twenty-foot high, mile-long wall led away from the tower toward the upper plain before it abruptly stopped, as if whoever or whatever constructed it just lost interest. But the tower was immense, rising several hundred feet high-a massive monolith of death. As they neared, Knight suggested they kill the engine and proceed on foot.

After a ten-minute jog, they stopped at the wall’s edge. It was constructed haphazardly from a mix of white human bones, and larger, clear bones which Knight assumed had come from dire wolves. Some of the longer specimens stuck out from the tower as far as a foot. They saw femurs and skulls, ribs and spinal columns. Nothing was excluded. Even the small bones of a hand were visible. Some kind of mortar that looked like concrete filled the spaces between the bones. A layer of orange dust-blue to Knight, orange to Bishop-coated everything.

Bishop grasped one the large dire wolf long bones sticking out of the structure and tested it for strength. The bone was solid. He put his weight on it, and it held him. He turned to Knight.

“Up or around?”

Knight looked up to where the tower met the twenty-foot high wall. “Up, I guess.” He tested his weight on bones that stuck out of the giant monument and quickly climbed for the spot where the wall and tower converged. Bishop followed. Twice, when Bishop put his weight on a human bone, it cracked with a dull crunching noise, leaving behind a splintered stump, which he was still able to use as a foothold.

When Knight reached the top, and peered over the wall, he turned to look back at Bishop. His face was filled with tension. Bishop reached the top a moment later and saw what had disturbed Knight.

The plains continued on the other side and ran for miles to the horizon. But the span was filled with a vast army of dire wolves. Their white see-through skin added contrast to the landscape, almost glowing. Closer to the structure of the tower and the wall, there were hundreds of small bone walls, with cells built into them like in an underground crypt. Each cell contained one or more human bodies. Some were stuffed in with their limbs folded over in grotesque ways. Others were stored in pieces, with some cells filled with only one kind of body parts-all feet or all heads.

Thousands of people.

Not one of them living.

And the bodies didn’t seem to be decaying. Bishop noticed an absolute lack of insects like flies that would normally be buzzing and swarming around such a charnel house. Nor, could he smell the dead.

They’re being stored, he thought. It’s like a giant pantry full of human corpses.

Near the end of the bone wall that ran a mile away from the tower, a one-hundred-foot tall portal stretched into the sky. The army of dire wolves stood a half mile away from the tower, and equally far from the portal. They weren’t lined up in rows and columns like a human army might be, but it was clear to Bishop that they were ready to begin their fight.

Not far from the portal, a wide tunnel burrowed down into the soil-eighty feet wide and just as tall. A yawning cavity in the ground.

“That portal isn’t flickering.” Bishop said.

Knight looked at the scene and shook his head. “What’s that Elmer Fudd says?”

“I’m hunting wabbits,” Bishop said, enunciating the words, but not doing a full on impression.

“The other one.”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Bishop said.

“That’s the one,” Knight said. “What are they all waiting for?”

Bishop put his hand on Knight’s head and turned him toward the cave in front of the portal. “They’re waiting for that.”

A massive form rose from the depths.

Knight had been trying to deal with the horror of this place through joking, but all trace humor fled his body as fast as the blood from his face.

“Let’s move,” Bishop said.

“Move where?”

Bishop motioned to the Humvee. “Let’s take a ride. See if we can’t lead the charge.”

“I don’t know if I love or hate the way you think,” Knight said, starting to climb down. “No, wait. I hate it. I definitely hate it.”