by Kane Gilmour
This early in the morning in the sleepy town, Rook was thankful there were no gawking bystanders. Asya nodded her curt Russian nod, and then stalked into the general store, keeping Queen in view with squinted eyes until she passed the threshold into the shop. Queen eyed the woman like prey until she disappeared through the doorway. Then she rounded her glare onto Rook.
“Not a fucking word from you for weeks-we didn’t even know if you were alive-and then you turn up in backwater reindeer country playing pattycakes with that little tramp?” she was shouting. She advanced on him and smacked him across the face, but it lacked power or even emphasis.
He looked her in the eyes and said nothing. She tried to hold his gaze for a moment, but then turned away.
“Things in Siberia were rough, Zel. I needed some time to get my head together.” Rook paused for a moment, then continued. “I’m sorry, I-”
“Knight lost men, too, Rook, but he didn’t run away and put his head in the sand.”
“Put my-” Rook’s face turned a few shades more red.
At that moment, Asya walked out, saw Rook’s face and turned right back around.
Rook rolled his neck, popping vertebrae. “They were slaughtered, Queen. Didn’t stand a fucking chance, and I couldn’t do a damn thing to help.”
“And now you know how I’ve felt since you disappeared,” Queen said.
While their mutual affection had been growing slowly for some time, this was the closest they’d ever been to honest about it. “Which is why I stayed away. If I came back I might have checked out. Those men that died, on any other day, they could have been you. Not sure I could have lived with that.” He waved his hand out toward the store. “Every time she landed a punch, I felt like throwing up.” He paused, suddenly out of words to say and wondering if he should take the next verbal step. But that scared him more than anything he’d faced before. “Zel…”
“Stop calling me that.”
“What?”
“My mother called me Zel. It means something.” Queen leveled her eyes on his. “You haven’t earned it yet.”
Asya returned a second time, carrying a box of band-aids and a small first aid kit that she tossed to Queen. The spell was broken as Queen caught the kit in the air with hardly a glance in its direction.
“So what the hell are you still doing here, Rook?” Queen’s countenance was all business now, any sign of affection disappeared the second Asya returned. For her part, Asya looked just as serious, but Rook was pleased to note that at least some of the tension between the two had dissipated.
“There’s a village north of here. Fenris Kystby. A former Nazi laboratory, strange wolves and now the entire populace of villagers, who only yesterday were thanking me, attacked me this morning like a scene from Night of the Friggin’ Dead. Something definitely wacky is going on in that town. And a friend of mine is dead because of it. I’m going back there, and I’m going to figure out what’s going on. You two can stay here and try to kill each other again, or you can come with me.” Rook climbed into the driver’s seat of the much-abused Volvo. Without a word-and without any haggling over shotgun-Asya slipped into the back seat while Queen took the passenger seat. Both women closed their respective doors at the same time and fastened their seatbelts.
“Alright, that’s what I’m talking about,” Rook said. Then from the backseat, Asya smacked her hand across the back of his head.
“Do not get cocky, Stanislav,” she told him. Queen snickered.
“God help me if you two become friends.”
FOURTEEN
Shanghai, China
Knight burst past the rusted, flaking roof access door to the balcony that ran around the clock tower, and raced to the edge of the tan concrete wall. Far below him and down the street, the energy ball still pulsed. He could feel its electrical hum in his teeth like he was standing too close to high tension power lines. Things were racing out of the globe of light and streaking down the abandoned street. About fifty feet closer to the clock tower, Knight saw that Bishop had taken cover behind an abandoned pale green taxi cab, and had set up his XM312-B across the hood of the vehicle. The big man was firing furiously at the speeding blurs as they shot from the crackling sphere, many of them clearly hit and knocked into the nearby river from the impact of the. 50 caliber rounds.
But just as many of the things were getting past Bishop.
Knight quickly laid his EXACTO sniper rifle along the edge of the wall in front of him and targeted a space behind Bishop’s position. Knight pulled his eye from the scope and looked for the speeding blurs. One was looping back around and heading for Bishop’s back.
Damn, they’re fast.
Knight barely had time to guess at the thing’s speed before he fired the weapon at the empty space behind Bishop’s head, hoping he could hit the racing blur before it struck his friend from behind.
The bullet blasted from the muzzle of the rifle. A cloud of white burst from the far side of the creature’s head. The dead thing’s momentum carried it forward and it slammed into Bishop from behind, before rolling to the front of the cab, obscuring it from Knight’s view.
Bishop was knocked off his feet and simply rolled in one smooth move across the hood of the cab. He swung the barrel of the weapon back and fired at his previous position, blasting another creature and sending it smashing through the plate glass window of a cell phone shop. Broken plastic display phones skittered out of the shop across the pavement with clicking and clacking sounds, but again, Knight was denied a chance to actually see whatever it was Bishop was shooting at.
He began picking blurs and firing about ten to twenty yards in front of each, hoping to hit something. Every third shot or so, he needed to protect Bishop’s six from another speeding blur, but for half of those, Bishop himself swung around in a full 360? arc, firing with his machine gun. Knight couldn’t see if he was hitting the things, but he could tell, as they ducked and weaved before retreating, that Bishop wasn’t killing many of them, if he was hitting them at all.
Knight saw some the things tearing back toward the globe of crackling light. Then the movement was gone.
He looked for a new target and didn’t see anything moving down on the street. Knight finally had a chance to look for his fallen targets and was surprised to see so few. Damn, I missed more than I thought. He could see only three, and he knew there was a fourth in front of the cab.
“You seeing these things, Knight?” Bishop’s voice sounded loud in Knight’s earpiece as he shouted.
Knight looked through the scope of his rifle at one of the fallen bodies. He had hit it. It was missing a good portion of its muscular chest, but otherwise, the corpse provided him a pretty good idea of what they were up against. The beast was at least seven feet tall, and milky white. Long, powerful limbs were claw tipped, yet the creature was vaguely humanoid in appearance. The head was a bit blockish with a domed forehead through which he could see a white, spongy mass.
I can see through its skin, Knight realized and then wondered, is that its skull? Or its brain? He glanced over the rest of the body and saw bundles of long, sinewy muscles twitching beneath the translucent skin.
The creature struck him as somewhat feline, especially the way it moved, but it was really unlike anything native to Earth. The most obtrusive feature was its eyes, which were huge orbs on the outside of the sides of its face. Like a chameleon, Knight thought, separately mobile and stereoscopic-able to look in multiple directions at once.
“I’m seeing the fallen ones. Having a hard time tracking the moving ones,” Knight replied, still eyeing one of the corpses.
“Yeah, I hear you. I’m-oh shit, here they come again.”
Knight pulled back from the scope and saw several more shapes blitzing from the ball of light down the street. Bishop opened up fire on them again, strafing across the street. Knight began taking targets as they came for Bishop, one after the next. The creatures were falling this time-he’d figured out the effective range ahead
of their paths to fire now-but too many of them were getting past Bishop’s arc of fire, leaving Knight to pick them off. One bumped against Bishop, throwing his aim off, his stream of. 50 caliber bullets passing harmlessly into the air. Knight could see more of the creatures advancing on Bishop. He fired again, taking down another creature and toggled his microphone, “Bishop, time to bug out man.”
Bishop dropped to the ground just as one of the creatures was about to hit him. Instead, it leapt over him and its momentum kept it going down the street. Knight let that one pass, even though he knew it would loop back on Bishop from behind. He focused on the next wave coming out of the glowing sphere.
Then an idea came to him. As he tracked another streaking form moving close to a line of abandoned vehicles, Knight chose a car three car-lengths in front of the speeding creature and unleashed the devastation of his sniper rifle on the fuel tank of a black Audi. The tank ruptured, sending fuel onto the ground, and Knight quickly fired a second round at the pavement, the spark of its impact igniting the fuel and the speeding creature. The explosion of the remaining fuel in the car made a deep bass thump and the car flipped over backward.
Bishop was on the move, leaping over the hoods of vehicles, then firing in a sweep, and then leaping again. Knight repeated the move, rupturing fuel tanks two more times before the creatures swept over to the boardwalk beside the river, well away from the cars.
“OK, tangos are intelligent, too, Bishop.”
Suddenly the staccato explosions of Bishop’s weapon stopped. Knight pulled his eye away from the scope and glanced up. He saw Bishop drop the big weapon, run up the hood of a Buick, and leap into the air toward the next abandoned car on the road, throwing a grenade behind him from the apex of his leap. Bishop landed on the roof of the bright red Ford in front of him, crunching in the thin metal, as the creature trailing him reached the Buick and the grenade as it landed. Knight targeted another creature chasing Bishop just as the explosion from the grenade sent up a huge cloud of smoke and debris, obscuring his shot.
“Damn.”
Bishop made for the river’s edge, as he had said he would do. Knight adjusted his stance, leaning further out over the parapet. He targeted the last creature chasing Bishop and fired. Then he pulled back from the scope to see yet another wave of speeding lines making waves in the air like heat haze, down on the street. Then one of the creatures mounted the roof of the cab Bishop had previously used for cover and turned its head up to the sky and howled.
The sound was hideous.
The noise was deafening and terrible, a deep bass rumble like a horn filled with every terror in the world. It vibrated through Knight’s body, rattling his bones. He dropped the sniper rifle and it fell to the next lower section of the tower. Goose bumps broke out across every part of his skin, sweat beaded and dripped as though he were clutched by fever, and a terror-filled scream that would shame him forever had anyone heard it ripped from his lungs.
Shin Dae-jung had never been so scared in his life.
FIFTEEN
Chicago, IL
3 November, 0100 Hrs
Well, this is embarrassing.
King thought he was going to die. Clutching the pants of a dead man with one hand, and the eject lever between the dead pilot’s knees in the other, King held on for dear life as the rockets on the underside of the ejection seat slammed him out of the crashing plane and across the sky laterally at close to 100 mph. He had just enough time to see that the thrust from the rockets on the seat were going to slam him, the pilot and the seat into the side of a building with darkened glass windows and five vertical stripes of dark tan concrete. Even in the brightly lit night scene, and at a point of view from which he had never seen it, he recognized it as the Park Hyatt building.
Then his next thought as the chair blasted across the sky was to try to crawl lower down the pilot’s legs toward the blasting rockets-so he wouldn’t end up between his impromptu getaway vehicle and the oncoming wall of stone and glass.
His brain didn’t have time to complete the next thought.
I hope I don’t get roasted The rockets died. The chute section in the headrest exploded outward with a pop, slamming into King’s shins and flipping him over the footrest of the seat toward where the rockets were propelling the craft just a second before. His body arced out and away from the seat and he lost his hold on the ejection lever. He clung for all he was worth to the dead pilot’s flight suit and twisted hard, scrambling in mid air to get his other hand back on the pilot before the impact.
When it came, it rattled him, but the impact was far less than he had expected. Two men, one chair. The normal propulsion of the seat might have pitched them through the glass and out the other side of the building, but because of the weight, the propellant had quit and their velocity had died down before the crash. The window around them shattered into tiny safety glass crumbles that rained down to the street. The chair lodged itself just inside the building, but King was dangling from the pilot’s ankles and swinging from the bottom of the chair, on the outside of the building, with the wind tearing into him and lightning strikes from the several-story glowing orb below him crashing into the surrounding structure.
Well. This isn’t too bad. If I can just…
King felt the chair shift and start to slide, and then it was in freefall-above King. He didn’t have time to wonder whether the parachute, which had already deployed but had yet to have time or airflow to inflate, would open in the plummet to the Water Tower park several hundred feet below him. He knew it wasn’t far to the ground and it would be a close thing. He scrambled up the pilot’s legs, now trying to get on top of the pilot before the seat separated from the pilot’s corpse.
Tom Duncan stood on the street craning his head up. He stared up at the spectacle of King’s amazing ejection and wondered if it would somehow be possible for the man to survive. He had approached the edge of the glowing, lightning-spitting ball, to see if he could gain some readings from it for Aleman, when King’s F-16 had come ripping into the sky overhead. Lightning struck the plane and then it faltered. Duncan could see it would crash. A second or so after praying that King would eject, he zoomed in with the camera lens on his helmet’s heads-up display to see King making his way into the pilot’s seat.
Then everything had gone crazy. Lightning began shooting from the glowing orb even more than it had been, striking the buildings all around the Water Tower park. The canopy on the jet burst off, and King, riding on the pilot’s ejection seat with the pilot, was fired sideways through the air and straight at the side of a building. Duncan’s heart was climbing up his throat like a mountaineer moving up a chimney of rock as he watched in fear for his friend.
Then a more immediate concern. The broken, crashing 20-million dollar jet was spinning and falling right for Duncan’s position. With the crackling dome wall of energy that now reached close to 80 feet high directly behind him, Duncan could only move ahead along Michigan Avenue or dodge to the side in either direction, but the plane was spinning erratically as it came down out of the sky at him and he wasn’t sure which way to move. Time slowed as he heard shrieks from the nearby onlookers, where the military and police had set up a cordon down by the Walgreen’s store on Chicago Avenue.
The plane was almost on him and Duncan simply threw himself forward onto the rough asphalt of Michigan Ave., scraping the palms of his hands. The falling plane, its engine completely shut down, flew over his head soundlessly. The lack of noise was eerie. The crowd down the street quieted.
Duncan rolled over and sat up to look back up Michigan at the energy sphere. There was no sign of the plane or its wreckage. Duncan tapped at the keys on his wristpad and a display from a CCTV camera mounted on the John Hancock Center’s roof, looking down on the street on the other side of the energy ball, appeared on his helmet’s display. No sign of the jet on the other side.
The energy dome had simply swallowed the crashing plane. Then Duncan remembered King.
He
scrambled to his feet and looked back up to the top of the Park Hyatt and there was King, dangling from the bottom of the ejection seat, which had lodged into what his faceplate told him was the 67 ^th floor of the building. Hold on, King, I’m on my way, Duncan thought. He was about to start running diagonally across the park to the building, when the chair, its dead pilot and King, all shifted, lurched and fell.
Oh no.
Duncan watched, spellbound as the chair separated and King scrabbled up the dead man’s body as the parachute inflated and slowed their descent. Thank God.
Then the strong winds ripping between the skyscrapers, made stronger by the atmospheric disturbance caused by the pulsing dome, slammed into King and the pilot, blasting their parachute north across the Water Tower park and directly toward the sphere of light. They were still a few hundred feet high when the roaring wind shifted and their parachute moved sideways, with King furiously working the toggle straps.
They plummeted faster, King and the dead man, just ten feet in front of the wall of electric light, and Duncan held his breath. King was 100 feet off the ground, but still too far to let go of the dead pilot and leap to safety. Lightning blasted from the sphere again, barely missing the parachute.
Duncan was sure King would make it now. Fifty feet off the ground.
The wind gusted again, hard. Duncan was almost blown off his feet. The dome was playing havoc with the atmosphere around it, like an electrical storm.
King was blown into the wall of the energy dome. He and the dead pilot swung in toward it at a 45-degree angle away from the parachute. As their bodies hit the wall of energy, they disappeared inside it, until only the lines of the parachute and the black canopy could be seen. King went into the dome at probably 30 feet off the ground. Duncan couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Then the wind shifted again and the parachute gusted back and away from the dome, yanking King and the pilot back out of it and over the park until they slammed onto the ground just to the side of the concrete fountain in the park’s middle. Duncan sprinted over to the crashed men.