by Kane Gilmour
With no rifle, no pistol and now only the corpse of the dire wolf he had stabbed and his KA-BAR knife to keep him company, Knight kept scanning the plains for a sign of another portal. If he found one, he would rush for it and try to use it to get back to the world-his world.
He knelt down and examined the corpse that was missing its feet and legs below the shin. The wounds were cauterized completely. Knight poked one of the stumps with the tip of his knife to see how thick the scar tissue was. Eventually, with enough pressure, the knife slipped through the skin and a pearl of thick fluid oozed from the puncture. He looked over the rest of the creature up close. It had foggy transparent skin, like a jellyfish. It was muscular. The eyes were weird as hell. The mouth was full of clear sharp teeth ranging between one and two inches in length. The claws, like the teeth, were transparent and deadly. He picked up the creature’s limp arm and placed the sharp blade against the clear skin and made an incision that cut all the way to the bone. After wiping off the blade and sheathing it, he pulled open the wound and looked at the bone. Clear. Like glass. He could see the tube of gray marrow running down its core.
He looked up at the bleak sky. Something about this world made the creatures evolve this way. He remembered what Black Five said about how alternate dimensions could be similar, but also incredibly different. Was it the atmosphere? The sun? Or simply a completely different set of physical laws? With no way to find out, and no new insights on how to kill the creatures, beyond putting a bullet in them, Knight put the arm down and stood. One more unsolved mystery.
The variant shades of night-vision green showed no life signs and no portals. He prepared his stomach and then deactivated the night vision and looked out through the normal visor view for a sign of a portal. The view was less unsettling now that he knew to expect the constant shade of midnight. Still, nothing that looked like a portal, a structure or a living creature. He reactivated the night vision and turned to face the distant cliffs. They were the only aberration in what seemed to be otherwise endless rocky plains.
Cliffs it is, then.
With the knife in hand, he began walking. He took only a handful of steps before he became convinced that someone-or something-was watching him. He looked around, but still saw nothing but the plains. He kept walking toward the cliffs, switching the night vision on and off occasionally, just to be sure that one spectrum of light wasn’t preventing him from seeing something that the other might reveal. Nothing.
So he walked. The feeling that something was following him-or just observing him-remained. As a sniper, he knew that feeling. The feeling of having a long barrel targeting your every move, ready to send death with a few pounds of pressure on a sliver of metal. He was on the other end of that feeling, but recognized it in his targets when, as though warned by some sixth sense, they turned and looked directly at him. He was usually too far away to actually be seen, but if anyone ever did see him, they died with the image.
When he came to a small pile of waist-high boulders, he dove behind them and rolled to a stop on the other side. In the dive, he turned his head and looked back behind him. Old submarine commanders called an abrupt change of direction ‘clearing the baffles.’ The idea was to change course unexpectedly, allowing you to see a stealthy pursuer. But like with his other attempts to spot any pursuit, which he was convinced of now, he saw nothing.
Dejected, Knight resumed his trek to the cliffs. They were further than he had thought. He felt like he had walked for at least an hour, but the cliffs appeared no closer. He felt ravenously hungry and reached into a canvas pouch on the outside of the armored suit, withdrawing a high-energy protein bar. He squatted on his haunches, turning as he did so, clearing the baffles again, but as usual, he saw only the rocky field around him. He took off the helmet and ate the protein bar, trying not to fully taste its chalky flavor. The suit had a built in Camelbak water reservoir. He removed the plastic tube from its holster on his left shoulder and bit down on the valve, sucking the warm water into his body to flush the debris of the protein bar down. He took another gulp and then put the tube away. He didn’t know how long the water would last him, but he figured it would be better to conserve it.
He put the helmet back on and activated night vision again, then resumed his walk. He checked the Suunto watch on his wrist, but found it had been damaged in the fight with the dire wolf on the bridge. The face was cracked, and a piece of the plastic bezel stuck out at a weird angle. He considered just ditching the thing, but then realized he’d be making a trail on the rocky ground. He stopped and squatted again, but this time, it was to pick up one of the many flat round stones on the ground. It looked like a flat skipping stone you would find near a river. He dropped it into a zippered pocket and resumed the march to the cliffs.
Eventually, he got tired and had to stop. The cliffs were still a distance off. He sat and removed the helmet. There was no cover anywhere, so he just sat in the middle of the rocky plain and took in the rich hues of navy blue that covered everything like a blanket of night. It felt like night to him too. He and Bishop had been on the go for how long? He looked at his watch again. Still broken. The bezel fragment had snapped off at some point. He rubbed his hand over his smooth face. He had never been able to grow a beard-with his Korean ancestry, his abilities to grow body hair were pretty limited. So a five o’clock shadow wouldn’t be arriving any time in the next decade to help him determine the passage of time. Ultimately, he realized it didn’t matter. However much time passed, he would get out of here as soon as he could. He would keep heading for the cliffs and he would do whatever it took.
Exhaustion began to take its toll on his body, and even though he sat cross-legged on the uncomfortable rocky ground, his head kept nodding. Eventually, he lay down on his side, his sleep-deprived mind rationalizing why it would be perfectly safe to do so, and how he would remain vigilant, nonetheless. He was a sniper after all. He was trained to stay awake in combat situations for days on end. He would be fine. There was nothing moving on the plain.
Then his mind cajoled him to allow himself just a few minutes of eyes-closed rest.
I won’t go to sleep deeply. Just a few minutes, that’s all.
And then he slept. Deeply.
For years.
FORTY-FOUR
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
Asya closed her mouth, clamping off the scream before it was truly done. She swung the tiny LED light around the space. It was little more than a brick pit, really, just twenty feet in diameter and roughly circular. She played the light around the chamber and hoped for a door or a ladder, but the walls were uninterrupted.
And the whole pit was filled with heaps of the dead and desiccated corpses. Like little white stuffed animals in one of those crane-and-claw, coin-operated vending machine games. But there was no metal claw above her-instead, something moved beneath the heap of tiny bodies.
The mound shifted slowly.
Little bodies tumbled.
The corpses were almost cute, except for the rib bones poking out of the chests. The eyes were hardly pronounced but sat on the outside of the face, like halved grapes. The creatures had white skin that she could see through to the muscles and meat below it.
She began to breathe quickly, willing herself to overcome the fear paralyzing her. The thing under the mound moved again, in a zig-zagging motion. The floor of tiny dead performed a wave like the people at a sporting event.
It moves like a snake, she thought.
And then her paralysis broke. She lunged, clawing and scrabbling across the heaped dead, heading for the brick wall. As she moved her hands through the pile, crawling to the wall, the glow from her LED flashlight flared wildly in the space, throwing fast moving shadows around the pit.
She needed to get out. This place was wrong and horrible. Unnatural. Evil, the word came to her panicked mind unbidden. Evil.
She flailed through the bodies and reached the brick unmo-lested, but her mind, completely unhinged by fea
r, couldn’t comprehend that the slithering thing under the bodies had yet to grasp her ankle. She dug her fingers into the mortar between the bricks and found it was crumbly under her touch. She pulled herself up and placed her toes into the wide spaces between the bricks. She raced up the thirty-foot wall with balance a rock climber would have admired. She kept the LED light between her teeth, placed her toes and fingers into the cracks and didn’t look back.
When she reached the top, she threw herself over the lip, and onto the rough stone floor of the tunnel. She could see a blazing bright light at the end of the tunnel, back in the large laboratory. It was far brighter than the spotlights affixed to the ceiling, and she clung to the idea that bright light was her salvation from the atrocities in the pit.
Asya struggled to her feet and ran headlong toward the light. She abandoned all thoughts of stealth hoping to find Rook and Queen. But when she exited the mouth of the tunnel into the room though, another strange sight greeted her. The giant hand of metal-she recalled the gleaming chrome claw in the game with the stuffed animals, only this one was absurdly large and upside down, resting on the floor with its open claws stretching almost two hundred feet up to the ceiling-held something in its clutches now. A blazing sun, easily over a hundred feet in diameter, hovered between the metal struts of the claw. Small arcs of lightning shot out of the ball of crackling energy, but the lightning curved unnaturally backward, striking the large metal plates on the claw’s upright legs, harmlessly dissipating.
The light was incredibly bright, but the globe of electric fire felt appealing. It drew her closer. She stood directly in front of the pulsing light, all thoughts of her recent scare in the pit now gone from her mind. She just wanted to be near the light. It filled her with warmth, like the sun. Only this sun was for her. Her very own, personal star.
She smiled wide and exhaled a deep and contented sigh.
She didn’t notice, as five large white creatures that looked like grown versions of the dead babies, crawled out of the globe of brilliance and began to sniff the air around her.
FORTY-FIVE
Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH
Lewis Aleman sat alone in a side office off the main corridor in Central that ran to the tram station, which would lead to another part of the base that housed a submarine dock. He had left Fogg and Pierce in the main computer control room. He needed just five minutes to himself to process what he had learned, before he reported to Deep Blue. That his boss had not reported in yet regarding his rescue attempt for King did not bode well. It meant they were still up to their necks in battle or dead.
He would have to attempt to contact them regardless. Too much had happened. Knight and Bishop were off the grid. Queen and Rook were in the same town as the source portal-a portal that had appeared regularly over the last few months, and in precisely the same location.
Aleman realized that someone had to be regulating the phenomenon. Not phenomenon, he thought. Attack.
The portals were appearing with increasing frequency around the globe and their strategy of dealing with the fallout caused by dire wolf attacks had led them nowhere. They needed to find whatever was causing the portals to appear and eliminate it. Before there wasn’t anything left of the planet. His quick research into the town of Fenris Kystby led exactly nowhere. There was no useful information about the place. It was a tiny town near the coast of northern Norway, well off the beaten track for tourists and natives alike. But the lack of any information on the Web was disturbing to Aleman. He could nearly always find something, about even the most obscure places in the world, even if it was just a farm report or a local carnival announcement. It was almost like any information about this place has been scoured away from the Web.
They knew the dire wolf was mentioned in Norse mythology. They had seen evidence that someone in Viking times had come across a dire wolf. They suspected repeated appearances of the portals in a town in Norway that no one had ever heard of. And Rook had called in earlier from the very same town and was facing mind-controlled people. Aleman didn’t know what it added up to, but he knew that the team was wasting its time in other locations. Norway is the source.
He stood from his office chair and touched the ear of his communications headset, then he voice-dialed Deep Blue. He paced back and forth across the rich blue carpet between the glass-walled air-conditioned closet of routers and servers and the desk the room held. He heard the connection go live with a tiny audible click.
“Kind of busy now, Lew. There’s shooting and running…” Deep Blue sounded out of breath. Aleman would keep the information about Bishop and Knight to himself for the moment.
“It’s going down in Norway. Norway is the source.”
“Son of a-that’s where Rook is.” Deep Blue’s voice came between heaving breaths. Aleman couldn’t hear any external sounds because of the audio dampener in Deep Blue’s helmet, but he could imagine the running and shooting, just fine. He’d experienced it during his previous years as a Delta operator before an injury sidelined him.
“Actually, it’s the same town Rook said he was in. Queen’s tracking chip show’s she’s there with him. If they’re not together, they’re close. We need to get over there. Time is running out.”
“What’s the…projection?”
“Maybe two days if the portals keep appearing at the same rate and keep growing in size. The one in Norway seems to have stabilized in size and intensity. And there’s something else. When the Norway portal has opened in the past, it hasn’t stayed on for longer than a few minutes. But it’s on now and has probably been acti-vated for close to a half an hour.”
“We’re…on our…way. Ready everyone who can fire a weapon. The whole White team. How are Bishop and Knight doing?”
“Didn’t work out.” Aleman changed the subject quickly. “I’ll take care of everything on my end. Anything else?”
“Nothing. Out.”
Aleman consoled himself that now wasn’t the time to tell Deep Blue about Bishop and Knight. Deep Blue would be checking on everything from his satellite uplink on the face display of the helmet as soon as the battle subsided enough for him to do so. He would see the complete absence of the tracking chips both Bishop and Knight unknowingly carried, with his GPS program. The man would understand the ramifications of the missing signals. They were either dead or they were trapped on the other side of the portals. Possibly both.
FORTY-SIX
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
Rook was dumbfounded. Fossen had just flicked a switch and teleported a sun into the neighboring room.
A sun!
“What the hell? Is that a…a dwarf star?” Rook turned back to Fossen, who wore a smug grin.
“No. Only a doorway.”
“A doorway to what?” Rook asked. “To where?” He struggled covertly against the plastic zip ties binding his wrists to the chair behind him. He didn’t think he would be able to break them, but he would try until he had no breath left.
“Another world.” Fossen nodded to the creature still crouching in the corner of the room. “The dire wolves are not a native species. Surely, you can see that, Stanislav.”
The man fell silent. Rook let the man do so for a while. He needed to get free from the damn chair. But then his curiosity got the better of him.
“But why, Fossen? Why open a ‘doorway’ to bring the dire wolves here? What does that get you? Is it connected to your work on the local wolf population? I don’t get it.”
The man didn’t reply.
Rook looked out the window to the glowing sphere in the next room and saw some of the puppet-like lab coats walking around the room, checking on the machinery.
“Why aren’t you being controlled like the others, Fossen? Or are you the one doing the controlling?”
The man leaned back in his office chair and it gave a groan from his weight. Rook looked at the man, and he appeared to be a part of the chair, as if it and he were old friends. He smiled. “The
pheromones passing through the doorway help free the will of those who resist the will of my Lord.”
My Lord? Rook thought. Shit on a stick. Religious nutjobs were always harder to handle because they were so unpredictable.
“I’ve heard it feels quite wonderful,” Fossen added. “And they’re happy to do whatever I, or my Lord, ask of them.
“I noticed that when half the town tried to kill me.”
He shrugged. “I asked you to leave more than once.”
“So why aren’t you all happy-tappy?”
“There are some of us here, those whose goals are aligned with the Lord’s, who remain unaffected. Sharp minds are required for an undertaking such as this. The pheromones only affect those who feel any degree of fear. We tested the compounds years ago, you see. But for Edmund Kiss, and your friend Peder-oh yes, he was a part of our group-we didn’t need to be controlled. We wanted to open the doorway. We wanted to see what was on the other side. And what we found? Glorious.
“As I said before, I didn’t lie to you. I just didn’t tell you everything. During World War II, the Deutsches Ahnenerbe was set up as a group with the sole purpose of investigating potential supernatural weapons. Hitler, as you probably know, was convinced that he would find some dark art or powered talisman that would help him win the war.”
“And the Ahnenerbe was willing to serve, right? Just doing their jobs like the jack-booted thugs at Auschwitz?” Rook looked dis-gusted.
Fossen surprised Rook by barking with laughter.
“No. Not at all. Hitler was a fool. He was good at getting people riled up, and he played that ‘master race’ card very well in public, but that wasn’t his true goal. He had a limited scope of vision. The man only wanted power and more power. Once removed from the main theater of war, the small group here abandoned the Third Reich and its bigoted agenda. They even abandoned the name Ahnenerbe. Now we simply call ourselves ‘The Group.’ Kiss and Peder and the others were interested in other worlds and supernatural creatures the likes of which Hitler could not have imagined. They remained here in Fenris Kystby, dedicated to one sole ideal. Over time, some, like Kiss, gained their own ideas about how things should be done and went their own way. Others, like Peder, dropped out shortly after the war. He never had the stomach for what we were doing, but he knew to keep his nose out of our business. I was born in the ’60s, when the project was well under way and the war was long over.”