Kane Gilmour - Ragnarok

The beast paused and moved its head to the side, as if it were considering something. One of the white eyes swiveled, peering down at its fresh wound.

King watched, fascinated as the bundles of cable-like muscles under the thing’s translucent skin tensed and released, as the creature moved its head.

King opened up with the remaining 13 rounds in the magazine of his Glock.

The beast’s head erupted with spurts of white fluid, before its perforated corpse collapsed in a heap on the dusty concrete floor of the tunnel.

King stood and ejected the magazine, allowing it to clatter to the floor, the sound of it drowned out by the still echoing gunshots. He reached into another zippered pocket on his flight suit for the only spare magazine he had.

He just finished inserting the fresh rounds when Deep Blue’s voice returned.

“You alright? We heard the roar up here, although my sound dampeners in the helmet kicked in. Aleman says the fear response that the roar creates is pretty devastating.”

“Uh, the what?” King asked.

“Fear response. Did you experience a debilitating terror from the roar?” Deep Blue sounded perplexed in King’s earpiece.

“No. It was loud, but that was all. What are you talking about?”

“I’ll explain later. Come to the edge of the tunnel, we’re lowering a winch from the second Humvee.”

After King was winched up, Deep Blue led him to an exterior door on the side of the John Hancock Center, where he inserted a key and a door opened to reveal a private elevator. “One of the Secret Service evac routes from when I was the President.” Once inside the elevator, he used the same key to activate the lift. The men felt a tug at their stomachs as the fast-moving car raced for the roof, 100 stories above them. Deep Blue relayed the intel from Aleman about the fear response generated by the creature’s roar.

“Didn’t experience anything like that,” King said.

“Odd. Maybe you can’t hear certain frequencies, or have an odd ear structure. Whatever it is, be thankful for it. The National Guard topside were pissing themselves and screaming like little girls. Ale assures me I would have done the same if he hadn’t warned me to calibrate the audio pickups in this helmet to dampen any noises on that frequency.”

“We might all need helmets like that, then.”

The doors to the elevator opened and the men stepped out onto the roof of the building, its two massive antennas towering overhead. A huge fixed-wing, crescent-shaped craft idled on the roof.

“Looks kind of like the Crescent,” King said as they boarded the aircraft.

“Similar. The Persephone. The Pentagon is messing around with the design. Keasling is loaning it to us.”

They sat and strapped in, surrounded by a complicated computer array. Deep Blue removed his helmet and contacted Aleman, back in New Hampshire. The craft launched vertically and then King felt the thrust as it banked and accelerated.

“Aleman, catch us up,” Deep Blue began.

“Cape Town is gone,” came the sober response.

Deep Blue sighed. “How many dead?”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s gone. Completely.”

Shanghai, China

Knight staggered through the street, his body sore from the fall onto the creature on the ground floor of the Customs House building. The creature had remained inert after cushioning Knight’s fall from the chandelier. He didn’t know if it was dead or just unconscious, but he stuck his KA-BAR knife in its head five times to make sure it wouldn’t get up again either way.

Now outside the building and making his way between the abandoned cars in the road, Knight felt some of his normal cool persona returning, despite the fact that all he was armed with now was the knife. The creature’s roar had completely incapacitated him and he tried to analyze whether the noise had maybe triggered a dormant childhood terror, but that explanation didn’t feel right. He figured something in the beast’s vocalization had instigated a severe fight or flight response-except he was too paralyzed to fight and too full of hallucinatory fear to even consider taking flight.

There was no sign of the speeding white things along the road, but he had seen them go back into the glowing sphere, as if regrouping or afraid to be left behind, should this energy dome wink out like the others had. Knight squatted down low behind a garishly blue Ford and looked at the pulsing wall of light. The dome showed no signs that it was going anywhere anytime soon.

“Bishop? Where you at?” Knight tried his communicator again, but there was no response from his partner.

He moved from one car to the next, making his way toward the river. He wondered if the creatures could swim. They didn’t really look built for it-all sinew and claw. Still, when the creatures were upright, they looked like bipeds. If man can learn to swim, there’s no reason to think these things can’t. As Knight stepped onto the boardwalk adjacent to the water, a blur of movement in his peripheral vision made him pause.

Crap.

He could make out at least four more of the things tearing around the street. He looked for a pattern, but they moved chaot-ically, almost as if they couldn’t see him, or didn’t yet have a target. Knight glanced back to the water. Ten feet, and he could jump into the river. But will they follow me into the water? What if they swim better than a human?

“KNIGHT! INCOMING!” Bishop’s voice bellowed from the direction of the river.

That was all it took to get Knight in motion. Unfortunately, it was also the impetus the creatures needed to unite in pursuit of him.

He sprinted blindly for the river, moving in a straight line, whereas the beasts still needed to weave in and out of the abandoned car obstacle course.

Knight reached the river’s edge and saw the water level was a good ten or fifteen feet below the concrete lip of the boardwalk. But his speed carried him out over the water. A screeching noise filled the air, and Knight twisted in mid-dive to see the return of the Crescent.

The plane sped into the Bund historical district, firing rockets and cannon fire at the street, where Knight had been seconds before. He looked back to the water just before he hit and saw Bishop bobbing in the slow current on the other side of the river. He didn’t see the cars exploding and flipping in the air behind him as the Crescent turned the street, and the creatures skittering over it, into a swath of white, meaty slop.

A roar ripped through the air.

Knight’s mind registered what it was and what it was about to do to his body.

He tensed.

But nothing happened as his head submerged beneath the murky, polluted water. The liquid muted the fear-inducing scream, protecting Knight from its effects.

When Knight surfaced to take a lungful of air, snapping his head back to fling his shoulder-length black hair out of his face, he heard the powerful detonations on the road behind him, but no longer heard the roar of the white creatures. The Crescent pulled up and banked, coming in to hover over the pickup point at Bin Jiang Park, opposite the bend in the river.

Knight stroked over to where Bishop waited, a million questions on his mind, but Bishop had had plenty of time to think of the answers and preempted him.

“They can’t swim or maybe just don’t want to. They didn’t follow me into this muck.” Bishop pointed down at the thick stew of brown swirling waters. At least the current wasn’t particularly strong. “I heard the start of that roar of theirs before going underwater, and it was enough for me. Aleman got in touch. Says the sound causes some kind of physiological reaction. Adrenaline dump into the heart to the point of paralysis. Could even kill you, if you got scared enough.”