Ragnarok

SIXTY-FIVE

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

4 November, 0315 Hrs

Queen dove to the side as wreckage rained down around her. She rolled on the floor and came up in a firing stance, ready to fight, but found herself in a cloud of choking dust and grit. It would have been the perfect time to take down all the dire wolves. She figured they were all frozen, stock still, waiting for the airborne particulates to clear, so they could see their prey.

But Queen couldn’t see them either. All the shooting had stopped as the giant slabs of masonry fell with explosive force, shattering on the floor. She scanned the area around her and found Black Six lying face down, his torso and upper legs pinned under a slab of the massive roof. She lay down on the floor, put her feet against the stone and prepared to pull the man out by his legs. She pulled and he came free easily. When she looked down, she saw that she had freed only the man’s legs, from the upper thigh down. The rest of him was crushed under the rock slab.

Man down, she thought, but there wasn’t anything she could do.

She dropped his legs, growled, stood and looked for something on which to vent her anger.

Sand and grit scratched her eyes. She pawed at it with a filthy, muck-coated hand. As the cloud began to clear, she could see the snowy sky above through the fractured, opened roof. The portal, which was not quite a sphere anymore, stretched up through the roof. Gunfire erupted again as those still living found targets in the murky air.

A shift in the dusty air alerted her to the presence of a dire wolf. She turned and found it right behind her, frozen in its macabre statue-like stance. Like a street-performing human statue. She swept the curve-bladed Kurkri from the sheath on her hip, slicing the stationary creature’s head off in one vicious swipe. The body strangely stayed erect on its feet as the head rolled to a stop next to gray rubble. The headless corpse disturbed her, so she kicked it in the chest and the carcass toppled over.

She could see the man that wore the earmuffs over by the now inactive M2. A six-foot tall spire of steel I-beam had killed him, impaling him through his chest. Falling wreckage had bent the M2’s barrel like a paper clip. Two of the white-armored troopers were hunkered down behind another pile of stones, firing at the dire wolves as they slowly emerged from the gloom, although most still stood motionless, waiting for the air to clear. Queen raised her MP5 and loosed a barrage of bullets toward every creature-statue she could see.

She held the trigger down as snow fell into the expansive room. She saw King helping Deep Blue remove his cracked black helmet. Beck was helping Asya up.

She lingered on Asya. The woman looked incredibly familiar, but Queen couldn’t put her finger on why. The way she fought. The way she moved. The look in her eyes, or her eyes themselves. The two women moved over to Deep Blue and King, and the idea that had been scratching at the back of Queen’s head since she had met the Russian woman burst into her frontal consciousness.

Son of a bitch. I know who you are, lady.

She didn’t see Rook anywhere, until she heard him, and his voice distracted her from her new revelation about Asya. He stood across the room, covered in dusty grime.

“Like it hasn’t been a bad enough day,” Rook shouted. “I had to drop the friggin’ ceiling on everyone. Goddamned, buck-toothed, white marshmallow lookin’ cocksuckers!” He sprayed bullets from the M-16, mowing down the stationary dire wolves, dropping three of them before his rifle ran out of ammunition. “Bastards!” He dropped the M-16, and charged toward the remaining six dire wolves that stood still.

“Rook,” King called out.

Rook ignored him, pounding forward. He drew a Browning pistol he must have picked up during the fight. He walked right up to the first dire wolf, placed the weapon up to the creature’s head at a distance of no more than two inches, and fired. The far side of the dire wolf’s white head exploded outward. Rook headed for the next creature. It turned toward him as he got close, but he still shot it from point-blank distance, before it had time to react.

“Rook!” King called out again. Rook ignored the call as he walked up to another dire wolf and executed it. The creature’s body jolted from the shot and flopped onto a pile of dirt. “Rook!”

Then King called out again, and Queen and Deep Blue lent their voices to the call.

“ROOK!”

Rook angrily turned to face the team by the open hangar doors across the wreckage-strewn floor. “For the love of-What? What do you want?”

Deep Blue, King, Queen, Asya, the woman Rook knew as a ‘Pawn’ from a previous mission-now called Black Zero-and three of the soldiers in the white armor all stood still. Only some of them had their mouths hanging open, but each and every one of them was looking at Rook.

No, Rook thought. Not at me.

Above me.

Rook spun around. A ten-foot tall mound of white goo, like a massive clump of melted Gozer the Gozerian Stay Puft marshmallow, stood in front of the portal. When a stiff breeze carried away the smoke, he saw it wasn’t goo at all.

It was loose skin.

On a foot.

The size of an SUV.

The ridges at the base of the mound were not ridges, but toes. Three thick digits, each the size of a man, coiled and twitched, as though in anticipation.

Rook stepped backward, looking up, up and further up as he moved.

The ten-foot-tall foot connected to a powerful leg that went another twenty feet up before bending at a knee, and disappearing into the light.

Rook stumbled backward over some rubble and went down on his ass.

Above the backward-bending leg, a gigantic chest appeared. Ten-foot-tall cloudy-skinned sacks dangled from the torso like pendulous breasts. Two. Then four. Then six. They kept coming. Inside each were dire wolves in different stages of growth, floating in mottled white and red fluid.

The room shook as the monster took a step forward, bringing a second leg through the portal. The sacks swayed back and forth, the fluid inside them gurgling. Then the head came through.

In many ways, it resembled the smaller dire wolves. The rounded snout held a flat nose just above a wide, curving mouth full of shovel-sized, transparent teeth. Its round chameleon eyes, each the diameter of a hula-hoop, twitched back and forth, taking in the entire room as they swiveled independently of each other. But the skin, while transparent, hung in loose folds that warbled and swayed. And while quasi transparent, it also glistened, like it was covered in millions of tiny scales.

The giant’s brain, which was visible beneath the clear skin and skull, was the size of a VW Bug, but it looked better formed than the sponge-like dire wolf brains. And it moved, pulsing inside the head, like a heart.

As the top of the torso slid out of the portal, a pair of shorter arms emerged. They were connected to the body below the head, but set back. The fifteen-foot-long limbs resembled Popeye’s arms, thin at the top, but with muscular forearms. A three-fingered hand tipped each arm.

When a third leg stepped into view, Rook had seen enough and for the first time in his life, he tried to speak and found himself speechless.