Kane Gilmour - Ragnarok

Deep Blue watched King’s motions ahead of him as if in a trance. King was getting ready to deploy the bomb and then just stopped for some reason. The man hadn’t moved in a minute. At first Deep Blue thought King had heard or sensed something. But their helmets had sound dampeners and King hadn’t moved at all.

Something was wrong.

“King? What’s going on?”

Nothing. No reply.

Deep Blue took a cautious step backward, away from where King stood facing the portal. He pulled his arm up and tapped quickly on his wrist-keypad that he’d attached to this battle suit from his last. He tested the ambient audio. Had a dire wolf roared? He thought he would have felt it vibrating in his chest, even if he couldn’t hear it because of the audio dampeners. The faceplate display in his helmet told him no such sounds were present.

“King? Are you okay?”

Still no reply.

Deep Blue activated another scanner on his wrist and waited an impatient twenty seconds, until a display came up on his faceplate indicating a foreign substance in the oxygen content of the air. Not a huge amount, but whatever it was, it was an unrecognizable chemical substance. Could be something to worry about, or it could just be the electrified atmosphere from the portal and the stench of the cleaning chemicals used in the hallway. He couldn’t be sure.

But one of the small features Aleman had built into Deep Blue’s new tactical helmet was an air-scrubbing filter. King’s armored helmet didn’t have one. Must be something in the air. He wouldn’t know more until he approached King. But the stiff way the man stood worried Deep Blue.

He stepped forward and reached his hand out to King’s shoulder.

A blur erupted from the wall of light, moving around King’s static form, slamming into Deep Blue’s chest. Something flung him halfway back down the corridor where he hit a wall and crashed to the floor. He was surprised that the suit took the brunt of the impacts-both when he was hit and when he landed in a heap against the wall.

The optic displays in his helmet’s faceplate were going nuts.

Dire wolves.

He lifted his MP5 and prepared to stand, but one of the fast-moving creatures swept him up and threw him over its shoulder. Its claws raked across his back, but the armor deflected the blow. With his rifle arm pinned under him, the beast streaked headlong toward the other end of the corridor with him as its captive-away from King’s still-frozen form. Three more dire wolves clustered around King, but they weren’t attacking his inert body for some reason. Deep Blue fumbled with his free hand, searching for the knife on his left leg. He had just wrapped his fingers around the blade’s handle when he and the dire wolf hit the floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the carpeted hallway.

Deep Blue’s armored back smacked the glass and he barely felt the window shatter. He couldn’t hear it, either. But he could see the dire wolf’s mouth opened wide in a roar, as his body separated from it and they both began to fall through the shower of glittering glass particles toward the pavement forty stories below.

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

3 November, 1300 Hrs

Rook clung to the thick black rubber insulation around one of the heavy cables that ran up the curved I-beam of the metal monstrosity. He managed to snag the cable with the fingers of one hand, and now swung precariously above the concrete floor over a hundred feet below him. He reached up with his other hand and grabbed a purchase on the side of the arcing metal upright, then swung his legs in and wrapped them around the beam like a man clinging to the slick trunk of a coconut palm tree.

Once firmly attached to the curved surface, and in no danger of falling, Rook looked back up at the catwalk from which he had fallen. The metal bar was painted a deep Nordic blue. Balancing on the railing like Batman crouched on a Gotham gargoyle, was a creature, partially silhouetted by a huge Klieg light on the ceiling behind it.

Great. At least I know who to blame for knocking me over the railing.

Although vaguely humanoid, its limbs were longer than a human’s and had muscles that dwarfed Bishop’s. Rook could see the individual bundles of its musculature just below the soft white, slightly see-through skin of the thing. Its hands and feet were larger than a human’s were, and each digit had a clear two-inch claw on it, like a shard of glass. The head was domed with large orb eyes on either side of its brain, which he could see through its transparent skin and skull. Its mouth was wide, like some kind of psychotic Cheshire Cat, and when it opened its mouth, Rook saw plenty of see-through sharp incisor teeth for tearing and ripping prey. He couldn’t decide if the thing was snarling or smiling at him.

“Slap my ass and call me Susan! Finally, something I can kill. Just you wait, Milkshake. When I get down from here I’m going to introduce your ugly head to your rectum.” Rook began to scramble down the curved metal, using the twining black electrical cables as handholds. He was nearly to the first panel-like metal plate below him when a distant roar sounded from far off in the bowels of the facility.

Terror seized Rook.

His eyes grew large and his body broke out in a sweat. His heart was thumping in his chest. He started hyperventilating, pulling in huge gulps of the dry air. Instead of climbing further down the metal leg of the cage toward the floor far below him, Rook gripped the cables tighter. His hands clutched the cables so tightly that blood ceased to flow through them. His knuckles turned a pasty white color. He was afraid to stay in place and he was afraid to move.

Suddenly, as quickly as the fear had beset him, Rook felt it begin to fade. His heart rate began to slow and he looked around the cavernous space in shock and wonder. He blinked a few times. Besides the creature on the railing, no one (and nothing) was in sight. He had no idea why he had temporarily been so scared of the distant howling sound. It was almost like a wolf’s howl at the moonlight, but stronger.

Not a wolf.

He felt less and less afraid with each passing moment. The creature remained on the railing above him, unmoving. His breathing under control again, Rook resumed his descent down the curved metal beam. The number of metal plates, protuberances and twisting cables made climbing easy. When he reached the half-way point, he glanced back up at the white creature on the catwalk.

It hadn’t moved.

He continued to climb toward the safety of the floor, seventy feet down. When he was no more than fifty feet off the ground, he glanced up again. What he saw almost made him fall.

“Sweet fuck-a-doodle-doo!” The creature’s face was inches from his own. Somehow the creature had leapt to the strut and descended over a hundred feet in the few seconds since Rook had last looked up at it. And it had come down the strut headfirst and in complete silence!

Rook’s heart jackhammered. He gripped his handhold tighter with his left hand, preparing to release his right. He wasn’t sure how much damage he could do with one bare hand, while hanging fifty feet off the ground, but he was ready to give it a go. He pulled his arm back to fire a punch at the beast’s snout, but a voice held his shoulder in check.

“I wouldn’t do that, Stanislav. The dire wolf will not hurt you unless I tell it to. Or unless you attack it.”

Rook kept his fist cocked back, but craned his neck around to the floor, where Eirek Fossen stood wearing a white lab coat. He was over six feet tall with short dark hair and brown eyes and a wide face. Broad and imposing, the man also held a small black pistol. Rook couldn’t be sure from his height above Fossen, but it might have been a Walther PP, the precursor to the famous pistol used by Ian Fleming’s infamous spy. This was the man Rook had allied himself with to fight the monster Edmund Kiss had become. Fossen raised his arm, aiming the weapon at Rook.