by Kane Gilmour
The collapse of the Eye had distracted him, when a wave of dire wolves had been headed his way. Stupid! The creature carrying him ran fast. Knight tried to grab at the creature’s face with a hand, but it batted his arm away with a swipe of claws. Knight could see the tears in the armor from the beast’s claws and knew if he wasn’t wearing it, he’d likely be dead already. Up close and over the monster’s shoulder like a burlap sack, all Knight could easily see was the creature’s broad back. The muscles rippled and tensed under the see-through skin. Knight tried to push back away from the dire wolf, but it suddenly turned at the end of the bridge and began sprinting back the way it had come. The force of the high-speed turn threw its balance off and allowed Knight a look around. The other dire wolves were already heading back toward the portal from which they had come. Knight reached for the low-slung holster on his left leg, pulling out his Glock, but again, the creature swept claws at him and the gun was knocked from his hand. He watched helplessly as the gun sailed over the edge of the bridge and into the river.
Next, Knight twisted his torso, lunging his head and knocking the dire wolf in the back of its head with his armored helmet. The creature loosened its grip for just a second. Enough for Knight to slide his right hand up to his sheathed knife on his chest. The dire wolf tightened its crushing grip again and Knight’s hand was trapped against his chest on the handle of the knife.
Bastard.
He struggled and peered around again to see that they were nearly at the portal, and many of the other dire wolves had retreated into it. He began frantically kicking his knee toward the dire wolf’s chest and once again, the creature loosened its grasp for just a second. But this time Knight was ready for the short respite. He ripped his arm outward, pulling the knife and driving it deeply into the back of the creature’s neck. He was surprised that the beast didn’t drop from the blow, so he tore the blade out and began stabbing at the creature’s back repeatedly, aiming for the heart-if it was where a human heart would be-and the back of the head and neck as much as he could.
The creature faltered and slowed. He could feel the descent in velocity as the dire wolf staggered. Then it began to fall forward, pulling Knight’s body with it. Knight pulled his legs up hoping to spring off the creature before the weight of it pinned him to the ground, but he was too late.
The dire wolf collapsed right through the wall of the glowing energy portal, and just as it hit the ground, the energy portal closed with a sucking sound and a strong gust of wind. The portal left a crater in its wake.
And a pair of feet.
The dire wolf’s.
There was no sign of Knight.
THIRTY-SIX
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
Asya screamed as she fell.
She had made her way to the lower level of the lab and stared up at the giant cage of metal that dominated the space before exploring the doors and tunnels that led off from the cavernous room. Many of the doors were locked, but she found old crumbling tunnels that burrowed into the earth, leading off each wall of the giant room. She had ventured into one just a few feet past the point where the lights from the main room offered any illumination.
She was about to turn back when she heard a tiny sound from deeper in the tunnel. It might have been a pebble scraping along the stone floor. Or maybe a small animal. It was impossible to tell. The tunnel, which was wide but low, was pitch dark. Asya felt along the brick walls with her hands and moved deeper into the space. She smelled dust and something wet, which surprised her, because thus far everything in the lab had been very dry.
It was when, for the second time, she was about to give up exploring and go back to look for a flashlight that she stepped forward into nothing and toppled over in the gloom. She screamed as she fell, the sounds of her voice echoing through the tunnel. She landed on something that was soft mixed with tiny sharp pokey spines. She felt the surface under her in the dark and the sensation on her fingertips was like spongy rubber with toothpicks sticking out of it. She touched one of the sharp things and applied a gentle pressure to its side. The thing snapped, just like a toothpick would. She ran her fingers over the break and felt the tiny barbs, but they were more jagged than the fibers from a snapped toothpick-more solid too.
“Bozhe moi. What is this?” She whispered in the dark, afraid suddenly of what else might be in this pit with her. She struggled to find footing on the squishy surface and instead walked on her knees with one hand on the mushy uneven ground for balance and the other reaching out in the dark for a wall. She felt the barbs poking her knees as she moved forward, but her splayed out fingertips soon grazed brick. She ran her hand over the bricks and they felt similar to the ones that formed the tunnel up above-smaller than normal bricks today. She ran her hand left and right along the wall looking for anything different than a flat wall surface. A door or a ladder. Or a light switch.
The smell in this new space was wetter than up in the tunnel, but the squishing surface that made up the ground was dry to the touch. She tried again to stand but quickly gave up. It was like standing on top of a ball pit. What she had thought was solid-if rubbery-ground was actually a pile of something. Several small somethings.
Stupid! Asya suddenly remembered that she had a small LED light in a survival kit that she wore on her waist in a tiny fanny pack. She had picked it up at the store in Olderdalen when Stanislav- no, Rook, she corrected herself-was buying his new coat. The kit would have some wooden matches as well, but the LED keychain light would be easier to find in the dark.
She unzipped the pouch and carefully slipped her fingers inside the scratchy nylon, so she didn’t disgorge the contents into the pile of mystery things on which she kneeled. Her fingers found the plastic casing of the tiny flashlight. She pulled it out. Before lighting it, she zipped the pouch again, and slipped a finger through the ring on the end of the light. She didn’t want to lose it.
Then she depressed the spring-loaded button, illuminating the small room around her with a garish blast of blue-tinged white light.
She wished she hadn’t.
Against her will, a second scream rose up in her. This one far longer and far more distressed than the yelp she had let out when she fell.
She was in a graveyard. She was on a graveyard. A grave mound. And it was heaped with the tiny corpses of small white creatures unlike any she had ever seen. There were hundreds-maybe thousands-of the little things, their rib bones poking though the desiccated chests of the small white puppy-like creatures. They had miniscule clear claws on each paw but strange small pinpricks of eyes on the sides of their heads. They were not puppies, nor wolves. She could see their musculature under their whitish skin. They were not any animal she had ever seen or heard of.
They were something else.
Something unnatural.
Hideous.
Asya’s breath caught in her chest. The mound of tiny bodies moved.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH
3 November, 1000 Hrs
Sara Fogg walked with Anna Beck into the large aircraft hanger that housed the last airborne vehicle belonging to Endgame. The Black Hawk sat on the concrete floor of the hangar and Black Six, the suave young spy, stood next to it in a black flight suit. Beck wore a black flight suit herself.
“You get to ride with the hunk, huh?” Fogg joked. “I bet Knight won’t like that.”
“He’ll get over it. Besides, Six can pilot a Black Hawk-I can’t. He’ll come with me to the Pease Air National Guard Base in Portsmouth where we’ll wait around to rendezvous with a Blackbird out of Hanscom Air Force Base and haul ass to Norway. Half the pilots are in Europe with Bishop and Knight and the other two are in New York with King and Deep Blue.”
“Would be nice to have Queen and Rook back. They’ll help keep our guys alive.” Fogg looked at Beck and patted her on the shoulder. The two women had become close over the last two weeks. “Be safe and kick ass.”
Beck winked. “You know it.”
Fogg watched as Beck strode across the hangar and lightly punched Black Six in the upper arm. “Let’s go, Secret Agent Man.”
Fogg turned as the two got into the Black Hawk and it rolled forward out of the massive hundred-foot-wide doorway. It then took to the sky and the computer controlled steel door slowly lowered into place from where it had been hidden in the ceiling of rock and concrete. Fogg had heard about a mishap with that door when the base was being set up and she always made it a point to not stand anywhere near it.
With the door completely shut, and the daylight gone from the hangar, it was a dimly lit and empty place. Fogg headed back to the corridor off the hangar that led to the offices and the main computer center, where she would no doubt find Aleman and Pierce still frantically trying to make sense of the strange creatures destroying the world.
Fogg had already made sense of it for herself. This was just how crazy the world had gotten. King and the rest of Chess Team were always in the thick of it. Genetically engineered soldiers, reani-mated monsters, custom tailored bio-weapons and viruses, anthropological missing-link creatures, golems, artificially intelligent super computers, assassins, corporate megalomaniacs, modern-day pirates, terrorists and even black holes. This was King’s world and she was a part of it. The world would go apeshit nutso and Chess Team would stop it. That’s what they did. And if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a world to worry about. Armed with that knowledge, she was able to remain as calm and tranquil as a Buddhist monk.
Most of the time.
Seeing King ejecting from that plane and smashing into a skyscraper had been a jolt. So had the dire wolf roar that brought back her claustrophobia.
It’s strange, she thought. Being in this base under a mountain doesn’t weird me out, but the thought of a tiny dirt tunnel so close to the surface that I could dig my way there with my fingers gives me the heebie-jeebies.
She had a rock-solid inner belief in King’s invincibility, and that got her through each new crazy thing that arose. But she also found herself wondering if maybe there would be a time soon when someone else could become ‘King.’ A time when she and Jack could take Fiona and go off to some isolated part of the world away from corporate madmen and bio-engineered super threats.
She knew enough about lab-created viruses from her work at the CDC to realize that it was only a matter of time before some super-plague wiped out a good swash of the world’s population. Going off to live like a survivalist in a cabin in British Columbia was looking more attractive to her all the time. Of course, the forest would play havoc with her sensory processing disorder, but maybe she could learn to live with that.
As she stepped into the computer room, she saw Lewis Aleman and George Pierce, who had both clearly found the time to throw on new clothes-Aleman still in jeans and a t-shirt, and Pierce with a black sweatshirt with a white King chessman icon on the left breast. Both men hunkered over Pierce’s computer terminal at the side of the room, Aleman having abandoned the ergonomic chair.
“What’s up?” she asked.
Aleman stood straighter and stretched his back, turning to her. “We’re tracking the portals and trying to find their origin.”
“Can you do that?” she asked.
“No,” Aleman smiled weakly. “But we can look at the surrounding environmental disturbances that the portals create and make some educated guesses.”
“Environmental disturbances?”
Pierce placed his hands on his lower back and stretched as Aleman had done, then slid his glasses further up his nose with the tip of one finger.
“The weather,” he said. “Each event creates local disturbances in the weather pattern because of the amount of electricity-even the ones that have appeared underwater or underground.”
“Oh that’s genius,” she walked over to the screen to see a map of the globe and colored circles representing the placement and appearance of known energy portals based on storm patterns detected by weather satellites. She’d seen similar maps on the news.
“Thanks,” Aleman said. He pointed at the screen. “So we’ve factored in the likely weather phenomenon when one of these things appears, and we’re tracking the size of them as they keep appearing. They keep getting bigger. So George had the idea to try to find smaller ones from before yesterday…”
Pierce broke in, “Right, and Lewis realized we could use existing satellite data to find smaller occurrences of the portals before yesterday when the first really big ones appeared in Asia.”
Aleman continued. “Right now the algorithm is searching out likely weather patterns and making a list of possible portals. But even if we can trace their origins, it doesn’t mean we’ll be able to figure out how to stop them. It’s just something to do. More data to gather. Hopefully it will all lead somewhere.”
As they watched the screen, Fogg noted the date in the upper-left corner of the screen going backward as fewer and fewer possible incidents appeared in different populated areas of the world. Eventually they got so small that she realized these events had gone unnoticed in large cities around the world. Only the portals of the last few days had been large enough to gain the world’s attention. The number of portals on the screen got smaller and smaller until only two remained-in Kathmandu, and in northern Norway. Fogg pointed to the one in Nepal.
“How large would that one be?” she wanted to know.
“About the size of a panel truck, probably.”
The next date, a week earlier, was of a portal about the same size, and it showed up in Norway again. It was now the last portal on the map. Then another on the previous day in Norway. Then another a few weeks earlier. These events were smaller than the one in Kathmandu. But she noticed they were all in the same town.
“Fenris Kystby. Hey, isn’t that the-”
“-the town where Rook is.” Aleman’s face was shocked. “He’s been at the source this whole time.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
Rook sat zip-tied to the metal chair and seethed. Fossen had led him to a small office off the main room with the giant metal apparatus. His pet dire wolf had followed at a distance, walking on all fours, curious and sniffing the air. Some of Fossen’s assistants were in the office-two men and a woman. They had secured Rook to the chair while Fossen kept his small pistol trained on him.
Rook didn’t recognize the people, but he knew the glazed look they had in their eyes. It was the same look the town’s villagers had that morning, when they attacked him at Peder’s farm. The assistants wore lab coats like Fossen and once they secured Rook to the chair, they left the room.
Rook scanned the space, but it mostly resembled a regular office. Desks and chairs-although the styles were pretty out of date-and a few far-newer laptop computers. The walls were white, and a large glass window looked out to the massive chamber with the metal octopus-like machinery. Fossen ignored Rook and consulted a laptop at one of the desks. Rook kept waiting for the man to start monologuing like a comic book villain, but the stoic Norwegian wasn’t inclined to oblige.
“You lied to me,” Rook tried.
“Actually, Stanislav,” Fossen looked up from the screen of his laptop and considered Rook. “If you carefully consider everything I told you, you will find that I did not lie to you at all. I told you to leave Fenris Kystby when we first met. I really didn’t know what Edmund Kiss had become, or that it was he that was destroying Peder’s livestock. I lost my son Jens to that monster.”
Rook didn’t think it a good idea to correct Fossen and inform him that he had killed Jens Fossen. It had been self-defense, but Rook didn’t think Fossen would care. A son is a son. Peder had helped him dispose of the body. He simply disappeared. It was only natural that Fossen assumed the creature Edmund Kiss had been responsible.
“I told you the truth about my research with the wolves. I admitted to you that I had known about Kiss’s lab, but that I had forgotten it even exist
ed-because it had been shut down years ago, when this larger installation was constructed. You asked me why Kiss’s lab was called Ragnarok. I told you I had no idea why. I really don’t. It was something the German Ahnenerbe group came up with. Kiss was a part of their research. Part of their group. I didn’t tell you about this installation because it wasn’t your business. But I never lied to you.”
Rook looked at the man in astonishment. “You just found it unnecessary to share information about this giant lab-which connects to the smaller lab upstairs. You didn’t bother mentioning that Kiss was your father. You didn’t mention anything about a Nazi experiment in World War II or that you had a pet marshmallow with teeth.” Rook motioned his head toward the dire wolf that sat quietly in the corner on its haunches. “Is that the Ulveria? The dire wolf, the local woman Anni was afraid of?”
“Yes, indeed. It is.” Fossen just looked at Rook with a blank expression. No questions and no more information forthcoming.
“You didn’t tell me about zombie people coming to kill me. And Kiss wanted you to seal something. He said he’d seen the dire wolf and it was terrible. Looking at it now I’d have to agree with him.”
“When could you have spoken to Kiss? He was beyond speech when we tracked him down and killed him. He was little more than a yeti.” Now Fossen was interested. His eyebrows raised high on his pale Nordic forehead as he waited for an answer.
“He had a note clutched in his hand. It was for you. Part of it was illegible. He still retained some of his human intelligence at the end, and he wrote the note for you. He urged you to seal something. What was it?”
Fossen turned his head to gaze out the huge pane of glass at the giant metal cage in the main room. He turned back to Rook, then looked down to his laptop screen again and typed a quick key sequence. The clacking noise of the keyboard was loud in the small room. With a flourish, Fossen hit the Enter key.