by Kane Gilmour
Fossen stood and walked to the window, his back to where Rook sat tied to his chair. “You see, we kept people out of Fenris Kystby. No one knew what we were doing all these years. I did try to convince you to leave this town. We discovered the doorway and we figured out how the pheromones work. We even genetically tried to replicate the dire wolves, but all our attempts have been failures. We can’t get any subjects to survive infancy. Even tried crossing their DNA with our local wolves. I keep trying, but it’s more out of habit at this point, if I’m honest. Ultimately, we realized our true goal should be stabilizing and amplifying the doorway. It’s a naturally occurring phenomenon, like a small hangnail between dimensions. What you see out there is about twenty years’ worth of work to help that phenomenon become a permanent opening between worlds.”
Rook was sure one of the two zip ties was loosening as he flexed his thick wrists and pulled apart with his upper arms. It just wasn’t happening fast enough.
“So this is all about opening a portal for the dire wolves to come through? Why? Are they the mystery Lord you keep talking about?” He had to keep stalling the man, if he could.
Fossen leveled a serious glare at Rook.
Rook tried not to look away. He’d broken rule number one for dealing with religious kooks: don’t insult their God.
“No, Stanislav, I wanted to go there. To live in Asgard and sit at the right hand of Lord Fenrir’s throne.”
Fenrir, Rook thought. Fossen’s God had a name.
“I’m all that’s left of the true believers. The others out there are all dominated by the pheromones or by Fenrir’s will directly as She speaks to them. I see the look on your face, my friend. But I’ve already been though the doorway to the other side. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It is a stark place, but it is filled with bliss beyond comprehension.”
Rook thought it sounded like Fossen got a dose of Fenrir’s happy gas, too. Maybe not enough to make him loopy, but enough to make him see God, and want more.
Rook pulled hard at his restraints, but then stretched his neck, as if he were merely uncomfortable in the chair. He didn’t want Fossen to stop talking and start realizing his captive was nearly free.
“Have you ever wondered if Fenrir just wants to come here?”
Fossen smiled a strange distant smile, like he was remembering something amazing in his mind’s eye. “Oh, she wants to come here very badly. That’s why she needs me. To loosen the leash that keeps her from fully entering our world. She has been here before, several times over the ages. We’ve just mistaken the evidence of her passage.”
Fossen had actually piqued Rook’s interest. “How?”
“Impact craters,” Fossen said. “Some really are impact craters, to be sure, but many are simply the footprints of my Lord entering our reality, taking what she pleases, and returning to her world until the season returns.”
“Season?”
“The opening between our worlds occurs naturally, but the duration and scope cannot be predicted. Until now. Historically, many of the seasons with larger openings and longer durations coincide with mass extinctions.”
“Hold on,” Rook said with a laugh he couldn’t hold back. “You’re telling me these assholes are what killed the dinosaurs?”
Fossen shook his head. “They merely contributed to it.”
“Then why in the name of Ronald Reagan’s undescended right testicle would you help with something like that?” Rook’s patience ran out. “Oh right, Lord Fruitloop.”
Fossen seemed to absorb the comment with just a moment’s discomfort. “Because, with my help, the portal will remain open indefinitely. Our worlds will become one, and everyone will serve the Lord Fenrir.”
“Right, with you at her right hand.” Rook hadn’t missed that Fossen’s God was feminine.
“As promised.”
Rook was almost free of the plastic cuffs. “Listen buttercup, if there is one thing I’ve learned about megalomaniacs-human or otherwise-it’s that they’ll say, do and promise just about anything to achieve their goals. You’re being duped.”
“If you would only open your eyes and see-”
“You know they make big comic book conventions for people like you, right?” Rook said. “You’d fit right in. Pop on a pair of rubber Vulcan ears and you’d be all set. Maybe hook up with a Ferengi. I think they’re ugly as shit, but you seem to have low standards.”
Fossen grinned and shook his head. “Oh, Stanislav. I will miss your sense of humor.” The door to the room opened and Asya walked in calmly, holding another Walther pistol in her hand, trained on Rook.
Rook’s momentum toward his escape was derailed the moment he saw Asya. At first, he thought she was in on it with Fossen, but then he saw the wooden way she walked and the glazed look in her eyes.
Fossen went back to his laptop. “Take him.”
Asya stepped behind Rook and cut the plastic zip tie with a small knife she produced with her free hand. She shoved him hard in the spine with the gun and said simply “Go.”
He left the room and entered the main chamber with the glowing sphere- a doorway, he thought-and Asya motioned him toward a tunnel on the left. He hoped for a second that this was all some ploy on her part to rescue him. Maybe she was just pretending to be under the spell of the pheromones. As they left the light from the main chamber and pressed on into the darkness of the tunnel, he tried whispering to her, but she made no response other than to poke him repeatedly in the spine with the Walther.
He planned to attack her on the next poke, but she spoke to him instead.
“Stop here.” Her speech was labored. Like she was trying to force her speech past her lips. “Hold…out your hand.”
He raised his hand in the darkness. She placed something small and plastic into his hand. He closed his fingers around it. “Hold on to it…and do not…drop it.”
“Why? What is it-?”
Before he could finish he felt a powerful kick in his lower back. To deliver that much force, she must have taken a step back and lunged at him with a flying sidekick. His body sprawled forward but there was nowhere to land. He fell in darkness until he hit something bouncy like a rubber ball, but with little pinpricks all over it. Then he heard something shriek in the darkness.
FORTY-SEVEN
Exxon Building, New York, NY
King and Deep Blue burst out of the access door and onto the white-gray roof. Deep Blue had used his last MP5 round to blow out the lock on the heavy fire door.
King pulled a KA-BAR knife from a tactical nylon sheath on the side of his armor and let Deep Blue move to the lead. To the right was a large ten-foot tall wall of air conditioning fans. The older man ran left along the open rooftop, back toward the 6 ^th Ave. side of the building. King followed, turning with every few strides to see if the dire wolves chasing them had reached the roof access yet.
“Keasling says the dire wolves below the portal are retreating like army ants on the run,” Deep Blue called over his shoulder as he ran.
They were nearing the eastern portion of the raised level on the roof that held the top of the stairwell they had just existed, and the elevator shafts that ran down the central spine of the building. King looked back one last time before rounding the corner and saw two dire wolves explode out of the top of the stairwell, cornering like cartoon characters with legs pistoning in a blur of motion, but the body not yet responding.
“Not all of them are retreating!” King moved around the concrete corner of the building’s uppermost reaches, and slammed his body against the wall, laying flat against it. Deep Blue didn’t know he had stopped and was waiting with the knife poised to strike. He could hear Deep Blue contacting the helicopter pilot through the external speaker in the high tech helmet.
“The dire wolves are bugging out. We’re gonna need a rooftop pick up on West 50 ^th.”
King turned his attention completely to the concrete corner, tensing with the knife and bending at the knees, intending to spring up and ad
d more thrust to the blow.
When the dire wolves came, they came fast. Too fast. The first dire wolf blitzed past the corner and a further thirty feet beyond, before adjusting its course. King was astonished-and a little disappointed-that the creature hadn’t overshot the corner of the raised structure by another twenty feet, which would have taken it sailing clear off the edge of the roof and down to 6 ^th Ave. Anticipating the arrival of the second beast, King lunged around the corner, with the knife leading, even before he caught sight of it. If he had waited, it too would have passed by.
As it was, he was about a yard ahead of it when he jumped out, but it was coming at ridiculous velocity and clearly wasn’t expecting any kind of resistance. The blade of the knife drove into the creature’s throat with force. The knife tore more than punctured, and the blade along with half the hilt and King’s hand, drove into the monster’s neck and head. He’d been aiming upward, and the blade quickly found its way to the center of the beast’s skull.
The dead creature, carried by momentum, tackled King to the roof.
They tumbled together, a mass of black and white bodies and limbs.
The world spun around King. He had no sense of where he was, only that he was rolling, far, with no way to stop.
While King careened across the roof, another three dire wolves emerged from the stairwell and headed for Deep Blue.
King withdrew his knife from the monster’s eye with a wet squelch. The motion flipped him free and he struck the concrete roof on his stomach, sliding on his body armor. The edge of the roof over 6 ^th was fast approaching. Slapping his hands down on the roof, King threw his body weight laterally, away from the dire wolf.
The dead dire wolf reached the end of the concrete roof and bumped up and over the six-inch high decorative wall before dropping down to the street. King scraped his knife blade across the concrete roof and spun his body just in time to plant his feet against the low wall and stop his slide toward doom.
One of the three dire wolves chasing Deep Blue let loose with the bone-shaking roar, and King once again discovered he possessed some kind of immunity to the auditory attack. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.
Deep Blue and the first dire wolf caromed across the roof, the dire wolf clawing at the man. Deep Blue stabbed back with a bayonet. The roof shook beneath them, knocking everyone down. They rolled and tumbled across the concrete as King struggled to give chase on the suddenly uneven surface of the roof.
“King! The roof is collapsing! Get over here!” King raced across the roof and noted the other two dire wolves bounding toward him in his periphery.
Deep Blue slashed at the dire wolf attacking him. It flailed and struggled.
King leapt atop the dire wolf and pinned the creature’s head down on the ground. Deep Blue sank the bayonet onto the creature’s eye.
“Go! Go!” Deep Blue struggled to his feet and lurched.
King nearly fell as the roof shifted beneath him again.
Oh my God. It’s the whole building!
Deep Blue ran for the edge of the building over West 50 ^th
Street. “The portals are gone! The building is collapsing! Black Three, deploy! I repeat, deploy! And get the fuck out of our way-” The man reached the end of the building and showed no signs of slowing down. King raced after his friend, mentor and the former President of the United States of America, as the man leapt right off the roof of a 52-story-tall Manhattan skyscraper.
The dire wolves were right behind King as he reached the end of the building and without a second thought, leapt off the building and into the air, 750 feet over the city street, as the skyscraper slid backward and away from his jump. The distance his leap took him out and away from the edge of the building appeared to be superhuman, but the building was collapsing-tumbling away beneath him, dumping tons of glass, steel and concrete on West 49 ^th and the troops waiting down below.
As he fell toward the asphalt far below him, King had time to note two things that were more terrible than falling to his death for over 700 feet.
The first was that about half way down the plunge, a black Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was hovering above the street, directly under Deep Blue and King, its rotor blades waiting to grind them like two scoops of ice cream in a blender.
The second thing was worse. The two dire wolves had followed him off the roof. They fell just above him, claws extended and reaching for his exposed face.
FORTY-EIGHT
Somewhere
Bishop struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. Everything around him appeared to be a salmon shade of orangey pink. The sky was so pallid it made him nauseous to look at it. The ground was covered in chunks and oblong protruding mounds of rocky grit. As far as he could see, the landscape was uniform. Lumps and bumps, but no mountains and no trees. No water and nothing moving.
He was on his hands and knees, disgorging the contents of his stomach onto the peculiar pasty colored soil, when he heard movement behind him. He still had two MP5s strapped to his body, but he couldn’t access them quickly from his position on the ground.
He scooped up a handful of the strange grit on the ground in his left hand, as if he was struggling to stay on his hand and knees. The truth was that after vomiting, his body felt far better adjusted to the strange sights. He was almost back to normal. He just hadn’t gotten up yet. He pulled a knee up, as if in agony, but actually hoped to spring up to his feet. Then he slowly dragged his right hand under his body, as if he was holding his stomach in agony. Instead, he pulled the handle of his SOG SEAL knife from its sheath on his massive armored chest. He had formerly relied on a KA-BAR, like the rest of the team, but since Deep Blue had formed Endgame and taken over the old Manifold base as a headquarters in New Hampshire, Bishop had started field-testing lots of different equipment for fun. Deep Blue obtained what he felt was the best of the best for the team, and the base had racks of armaments from which to choose. Bishop had found the 12-inch knife with the 7-inch blade and instantly fell in love. On a smaller man, the size of the knife might have made it unwieldy. But Bishop was a mountain of a man.
The noise scuffed again, just behind him.
Bishop sprang up, whirling in a 180 degree circle. It wouldn’t be the first time he shocked an opponent with how quickly a man of his size could move.
His hand came whistling around, spraying the soil at the eyes of the dire wolf, which stood just taller than Bishop did. His second hand followed through on the spin and sliced out with the SOG blade. The edge raked across the beast’s chest, and the creature let loose with its natural defense mechanism-the devastating aural attack that made the thick bones in Bishop’s body vibrate as if they were about to explode.
Under normal circumstances, the roar would paralyze an opponent. Fear would course through their bodies at the fight-or-flight reflex the roar triggers. But Bishop had just the one major fear. It dwarfed everything else and was a fear he lived with every day. When Chess Team had first gone up against Richard Ridley’s Manifold Genetics company, they had captured Bishop and experimented on him at the genetic level. Bishop had been transformed into a ‘Regen.’ He had developed amazing regenerative abilities, healing from minor wounds in seconds and could even grow back severed limbs like a salamander. But those amazing abilities had come with a heavy price. Each time his body regenerated, his mind lost a shred of his humanity until he became nothing more than a raging monster. He had battled the condition with meditation and eventually with a crystal from the Neanderthal city of Meru in Vietnam, which had negated the rage effects he felt with a combination of vibrations and ionization. He didn’t buy into things like crystals and UFOs, but the one from Meru worked, and that had been clear to everyone.
Ultimately, his genetic structure had been fixed, removing the regenerative abilities, and with them the likelihood that he would transform into a raving maniac again. But the fear never left him. The nightmares came nearly every night. He put on a good facade for the team, but insid
e he lived with the constant worry that he would one day lose control and start killing every living person around him. He lived with the fear that he would eat their bloodied corpses like a deranged African lion, pulling and tearing at the flesh in long strips and unrecognizable chunks.
The dire wolf in front of him wasn’t finished howling when the fight-or-flight reflex in Bishop manifested. But for Bishop with his fear of losing all control, the reflex simply made him hallucinate that he had. He lunged forward before the dire wolf had closed its mouth and before it could move. Bishop grabbed the beast around the back of its head and sank his teeth into the creature’s throat, ripping and tearing at the white translucent skin. Fluid filled Bishop’s mouth as he continued to bite and tear at tendons pulled as tight as piano wires. His powerful meaty hands clutched the back of the dire wolf’s head, so it couldn’t escape.
The creature backpedaled, and fell over in shock, dead before it could hit the rocky salmon soil. Bishop rode the falling creature to the ground, but even the impact couldn’t dislodge him.
He didn’t stop eating for a long time.
FORTY-NINE
Outside, Fenris Kystby, Norway
3 November, 2330 Hrs
Queen moved away from the trap door, back in the direction she had traveled underground in the tunnels and the labs. The snow drifted to above her knee in places. She found it hard to believe this much snow had fallen in just a few hours. The landscape was completely different from how it had been when Rook led her and Asya down to the secret hatch.