Kane Gilmour - Ragnarok

“I can believe it,” Knight said, lowering his eyes.

“You caught the full blast,” Bishop said. It wasn’t a question. “I called in the airstrike. Deep Blue wants us to regroup and gear-up. Starting with getting you a new headset.” Bishop swam over and pulled Knight’s earpiece away from his head. Knight flinched from the move. Bishop looked at Knight without a word. He hadn’t missed the flinch.

Bishop held up Knight’s earpiece, and Knight could see that the plastic frame was damaged and a small wire was hanging out of it. He hadn’t even noticed.

“We need some kind of headsets that’ll protect us from that roar.” Bishop watched Knight, his generally implacable features filled with concern for his friend.

Knight held his gaze for a moment, then looked away, still treading water. “Let’s just say it was pretty fucking terrible, and leave it at that.”

“Yeah,” Bishop turned and stroked overhand for the shoreline. Knight followed him.

Bishop crawled onto a concrete boat launch and stood slowly, looking back across the river at the energy dome. Before his eyes, the dome closed in on itself, disappearing in seconds, until only a glowing dot was left at the center of its radius, like an old cathode-ray TV set, moving down into a tiny dot of light before turning off completely. Or was it just a trick of the eye? An imprint left on my retina?

He reached down to help Knight out of the water. The little Korean man was usually so slick and self-assured. Not only was he a stellar sniper, but as a wealthy, well-dressed ladies’ man, his personality was the most confident on the team. But the sound of that roar had really rattled him.

Bishop felt more than a little rattled himself, but more so over how damn hard it had been to shoot the creatures. It was one thing to know that you could drop them with a. 50 caliber round. But shooting something that moved in a blur? He shook his head. Wasn’t easy. He could hit them by firing in the path of their trajectory, but it was sloppy, wasted a lot of ammunition and he still missed the damn things more frequently than he hit them. Plus, the bastards hit like a freight train. He absently rubbed his right shoulder, which he had torqued when he rolled across the pavement after one of the creatures slammed into him.

“Nice timing,” he told Knight, and nodded with his head across the river, where the energy dome had been.

Knight looked across the river and sighed. “Think the thing is sentient?”

Bishop looked aghast. “The dome? No. Let’s hope not. The creatures are enough to deal with.”

They boarded the Crescent and took their seats, the vehicle launching them into the sky. Once they were at cruising altitude, Knight headed to the small galley on the ship, intending to fill up on protein. Bishop got in touch with Aleman and passed on their mission status, as well as his own personal observations about the dome.

When Knight came back, handing him a chocolate protein shake, Bishop gladly took it and leaned back in his chair, not looking at the little man. “Ale gave me good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

Knight considered a moment, slurping liquid protein through a straw. “The good, please.”

“He’s got some full-body armor suits waiting for us at the next hotspot, which should help protect us in hand-to-hand against those things. They’re not bullet-proof, but he says they’re made of impact-resistant memory foam. Not too bulky. Should give us a nice edge, especially if they barrel into us, like that one that knocked me across the taxi.”

“Nice,” Knight removed his straw and gulped the rest of his shake. “Where is the next location?”

“London. Ready for the bad news?”

“Not really, but hit me.”

“Our original destination was Cape Town, South Africa, but there wasn’t just one energy dome there. There was a whole cluster of them. Cape Town is gone. The whole city. Gone.”

“Damn,” Knight stretched the word out. “Clusters?” His face looked ashen, as if he had seen not just one ghost, but an entire convention of them.

Fenris Kystby, Norway

Zelda Baker, callsign: Queen, was out of ammunition. She had one more magazine for the M9, but she knew she’d never have time to load it. The thing at the end of the narrow corridor moved like lightning, leaping from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. She had fired 15 times and missed every shot but the last. Now, the thing stopped, hanging upside down from the ceiling. It looked at her through one of its baseball-sized eyeballs on the outside of its blocky head.

Queen had been expecting something strange since Rook had told her about the mind-controlled villagers and the Nazi experiments that had gone on in these labs. But she wasn’t prepared for this. It looked at least eight feet tall, but it crouched and sprang more like a cat than anything humanoid. Its translucent skin covered coiled muscles and an almost transparent white substance that looked to her like blood. Its claws, teeth and even the skull appeared clear, allowing her a view of its brain, which looked like congealed cottage cheese.

Definitely didn’t evolve on this planet, she thought.

Like the other members of Chess Team, Queen had faced unusual beasts before, but this one was odd. It had charged her at first, and she had fired all her bullets at the creature as it careened toward her. But then she hit it and it stopped.

Now it just looked at her.

She couldn’t tell if the creature was intelligent or not. Its oversized blocky head just remained fixed to the side. A lone bulbous eye locked on her face, the other looking in a different direction. Neither of them moved.

Maybe its vision is movement based?

She shifted her hand very slowly to the hilt of her KA-BAR knife-slow enough to not set off a motion detector. Her eyes never left the beast as her hand crept across her body.

The creature remained still.

Dust fell from the tunnel’s stone and brick ceiling, loosened by the recent bullet impacts and the holes punched by the creature’s claws. Loose streams of sandy soil poured down from cracks in the ceiling, too. Not so much that she thought the tunnel would collapse, but enough that the grit would get in her eyes if she moved.

Is that it? she wondered.

She decided to wait the thing out, staying absolutely still until it did something. Her fingers grasped the non-slip handle of the 7 inch knife, ready to pull it from its sheath and go to work on the creature.

But it didn’t move. The creature waited, too. She watched it and noticed that the dust was settling and the streams of grit stopped falling.

The creature tilted its head to the side.

Queen still held the M9 in her left hand-useless weight. Or is it? Queen’s eyes went up to the ceiling again, and then she slowly moved her gun hand, but not as slowly as she had moved the knife hand. She wanted to see if the beast would notice the movement.

As soon as she moved her hand, the beast turned its head again. The round eyes locked onto the movement. Queen smiled. When she moved her hand, it had been backward, as if cocking her arm for a throw. She launched the empty M9 at the ceiling between her and the creature, where it waited on the ceiling. The creature began to move toward the flying weapon, but then the gun struck the weakened brick ceiling. A cloud of dust and dirt spurted from the ceiling before the pistol smashed to the floor, sending up another plume of dust.

Queen took two quick steps forward and to the side, but the creature’s eye didn’t swivel in her direction. It remained perfectly still as it had done before.

The dirty air confuses it. Her eyes widened. They use some kind of sonar, like a bat, she guessed. The eyes must not work as well as they appear to. Maybe low light blindness. So they compensate with sonar. But sonar is no good if the air is full of debris. Sensory overload.