Kane Gilmour - Ragnarok

A monitor screen with rows of electrical switchboards caught her eye. The room was filled with thick electrical cables. Another screen showed the entrance to the tunnel where she had taken Rook to the pit. Then she realized something and checked all twenty screens again. Fossen, the man that ran the place, was not on any of the cameras. Neither was Queen. And neither was the entrance to the lab she had used with Rook and Queen. A lot of blind spots in the surveillance. Asya walked over to the plastic map and looked at the floor plan. The tunnel back to the abandoned part of the lab was not even on the schematic.

She stepped around one man’s extended leg, and made her way to the black cabinet. She opened it slowly and it creaked with a barely audible squeal. Inside were a few of the Walther pistols like the one she had used on Rook, and two AR-15 rifles with black canvas straps. A hook on the inside of the cabinet door held a small hand towel. It smelled of machine oil, but she used it to wipe blood off her face and out of her hair. On the floor of the cabinet was a navy blue nylon bag. She knelt and unzipped it to find a black braided nylon rope.

Perfect.

She took the bag and threw it over her shoulder and then put two of the pistols in the pockets of the ridiculous lab coat she wore. She thought of taking the rifles, too, but she didn’t think she could conceal them well enough under the coat and they wouldn’t fit in the bag. She left them and made for the door. On a small hook by the door was a 6-inch plastic-barreled flashlight. She pocketed it in one smooth move.

Back in the large main lab, she once again skirted the wall in a slow shuffle and made for the tunnel back to Rook, forcing the glazed look back into her eyes. She kept expecting the creatures to see through the ruse. But the beasts ignored her as she walked.

When she reached the tunnel entrance, she almost slipped on a small puddle of liquid. She grimaced. Urine, maybe? She sighed and continued into the tunnel, figuring the beasts had to piss somewhere. A few steps further in, and she was concealed in shadow. She breathed a sigh of relief that she had once more passed the notice of the bulky white monsters.

That relief flooded away as she was grabbed from behind in the dark. A powerful limb wrapped around her throat and squeezed. Hard. The kind of hard that left her little doubt about what was going to happen next. I’m going to die.

Outside the Gleipnir Facility, Norway

4 November, 0130 Hrs

Anna Beck tugged hard on the toggle of her parachute with one hand and pulled her 9 mm Browning from her leg holster with the other. She fired several shots at the dire wolves on the fringe of the melee, not wanting to risk hitting Queen by firing too close to the center. In another two seconds, her feet hit the ground. She quickly released the harness of the parachute, but the dire wolves were ignoring her and still rushing for Queen.

As she freed herself from the harness and rolled in the snow to take up a firing stance on her knee, she saw Queen viciously head butt a dire wolf under its chin, sending its head back in a whipping arc, and a spray of white liquid squirting from its snout. Before its head hit the ground, Beck put a bullet in it. She fired twice more before she heard automatic fire from behind her.

She twisted in the foot-deep snow to see Black Six firing short bursts with an MP5 submachine gun. The muzzle flash lit up the snowy white expanse of the field between the hills in splashes of orange. They had muzzle suppressors for the MP5s back in New Hampshire, but no one thought this mission would involve stealth. They were here to do some damage. She watched him drop four dire wolves, their bodies contorting in agony after the bullet impacts, and then dying far more abruptly than a human would.

She fired her Browning a few more times, dropping dire wolves with headshots. She heard Queen growl like a feral animal and saw her knock one of the dire wolves away from her with an uppercut.

“Good God,” Black Six said, his voice a mixture of fear and awe. “Look at her.”

“Now you know why she’s in the field and I guard an underground bunker,” Beck replied.

Beck raced over to the center of the fight. She fired the last few shots from her weapon at point-blank range as the dire wolves still attempted to dog-pile Queen, ignoring Beck completely.

Beck recognized the situation. Even if she didn’t know why, she would take advantage of it. She fired until her magazine was empty, then holstered the weapon and drew her knife-a wide, curved blade, Gurkha Kurkri Plus manufactured by Cold Steel. More machete than knife with its swept 12-inch blade, Beck hacked at the first few dire wolves she could get to and then stabbed two more in the backs of their necks. She couldn’t believe that the creatures were ignoring her until she got closer to Queen and smelled the woman.

“Oh dear God,” she shouted. “What the hell is that funk?”

“I know,” Queen growled while striking a dire wolf in the throat with her knuckles and then stabbing a thumb into its eye. She was coated in sticky white fluid and bleeding from several places as well. “I know! I caught one in the crotch and it sprayed me with its fuckin’ goo like a skunk!” Beck could hardly hear the woman over the bursts of MP5 fire from Black Six, as the man kept the remaining oncoming horde of dire wolves further away from the skirmish.

Then Beck had an idea. She sheathed the Kurkri, inserted a fresh magazine into her Browning and started firing at the approaching dire wolves, aiming for their nether regions. Gouts of white fluid burst and pulsed from the wounds as the beasts went down to the snow, and she soon saw some of the other dire wolves going to the injured ones, instead of after Queen.

She ran over to Black Six’s position, where he stood knee deep in snow, and she took up firing next to him. “Aim for the balls.”

“They don’t have balls!”

“Well there’s something there. Some kind scent sack.”

Black Six calmly adjusted his aim and mowed down the next wave of the creatures, firing at waist level. A few of the creatures’ genital areas burst when the 9 mm rounds ruptured the milky white skin at the groin. White liquid sprayed.

Black Six groaned. “Fuckin’ nasty.”

The next wave of dire wolves, about seven of the beasts, stopped at the row of freshly dead and began clawing into the corpses. Black Six and Beck exchanged a look. “I got this,” he said.

Beck raced back to Queen to help her dispatch the last two creatures, but she needn’t have bothered. Despite the multiple wounds on Queen’s body and the muck that coated her, the woman still moved with quick grace and powerful strikes, taking down one more beast with an eye jab and then the last by leaping up onto its chest and twisting the creature’s powerful neck until a loud crack rang out. Beck counted twenty-two bodies piled on the ground by Queen’s feet, and several more around the main fight, that she had shot after ditching the parachute.

Queen looked at her, breathing hard, covered in a mix of red and white gore, the bright red skull on her forehead glaring through the muck.

Beck couldn’t hide the shiver that ran up her spine. She’d heard stories about Queen’s hand-to-hand combat skills, but never imagined that she-or anyone else aside from some mythological God of war-could be capable of such carnage. It was horrifying, yet in these circumstances, a thing of beauty.

Queen stood bent over with her hands on her knees, breathing hard. Beck walked up to her slowly. She stopped a few feet away. The stink was horrendous. “You gonna be okay?” Queen nodded. Beck took a step back scrunching her nose. “Ugh. Maybe roll around in the snow for a few minutes or something.”