Kane Gilmour - Ragnarok

But Rook had seen the dire wolf above him get shot. Someone was covering him. “Thanks for the catch, Deputy Dawg,” he said and leaned his head to the side. He heard the buzz of the bullet as it zipped past his ear and buried itself in the creature’s forehead. The talons slipped from his side.

Rook fell to the concrete, but the drop was manageable. He used the dead dire wolf below to soften his landing. The impact jarred him hard, but he turned the fall into a roll, converting the impact’s kinetic force into motion.

Queen saw Rook fall, but was too busy fighting the big one to help. It was cagey and knew to stay back from her slashing blade. She had no interest in continuing the standoff. “Black Zero! Crotch shot!”

She circled the big one again with the knife as Beck heard her request and fired at several nearby dire wolves, aiming at their groins. The third target’s crotch erupted with a spray of fluid, and the big dire wolf turned its head. That was all the distraction Queen needed. She leapt forward, slicing upward, and cut the thing from the middle of its huge sternum up to its throat. An arc of white blood sprayed outward from the beast, coating Queen in yet more fluid. The beast also defecated on the floor before it crumpled.

“That’s just wonderful,” Queen said, disgusted. Then she ran for the next living target.

Rook picked himself up off the floor, limping and holding his shoulder. He was injured.

“Rook!” Queen called to him. “Duck!”

Rook trusted Queen implicitly. He didn’t need to know why she’d told him to duck, only that she had. He dropped to the floor and rolled again, this time narrowly missing being shot as Black Six expertly targeted the dire wolf that had been coming up behind Rook. Its head and chest spasmed from the two shots, then it fell over backward. Rook got to his feet and approached Beck, who was firing on the last few beasts on the stairwell.

“Who are-Hopping crap on a pogo stick. You’re that Pawn that used to work for Ridley’s security goons, before joining our side in the fight against the Hydra.”

“Black Zero,” she said, handing him her Browning. “I’m with Endgame.”

Rook gladly took the weapon and aimed it at one of the last living wolves in the room. He squeezed the trigger twice, and the running creature-just getting up to its full speed in the confines of the lab-slumped over dead, its body skidding a few feet on the slick concrete.

“What’s Endgame?”

Beck killed the last dire wolf on the staircase, as it tried to leap upward on the exterior of the stairs. “Support crew for Chess Team.”

“We have a support crew? Nobody ever tells me these things.” Rook hung his head and held his shoulder with the Browning still in his hand. He grimaced.

Queen stepped over with Black Six. The man turned as he walked, checking all sides of the room, never lowering his weapon.

“Did you know we had a support crew?” Rook asked Queen.

“Nope. I’ve been running around Russia looking for you for the past few months. How would I know?”

Asya had run back down the stairs and leapt off the last few steps to the ground. She hurried over to where Rook stood and was about to ask him a question, but she stopped, her mouth hanging open. Then Black Six opened fire again and all heads turned toward the portal.

Dire wolves poured out of the pulsing energy portal. There were so many that they were actually climbing over each other to get out through the wall of light-a wall that stretched at its bottom to over twenty feet wide. Rook figured as many as fifty of them. They struggled and fought to push through the yellow brilliance, emerging to race across the slick concrete floor.

Black Six stopped taking single shots and began firing bursts. Beck opened fire as well.

Queen reached over to Black Six’s thigh and withdrew his Browning. She picked her shots and made them count. Body after body clogged the entrance of the portal.

Rook fired carefully, conserving the few shots of ammunition in the Browning.

Asya, unarmed now, raced behind everyone to the security room. Rook figured she was taking cover.

Even though the group had fired enough rounds of 9 mm ammunition to drop a herd of elephants, the creatures kept pouring into the room. They scampered over their dead, covering themselves in the blood of their fallen.

“This is not working,” Rook shouted. “We’re gonna get overrun here.”

Asya reappeared with two AR-15 assault rifles. She handed one to Rook and he handed her the Browning. He racked back the charging handle, and blasted another wave of the creatures. A puddle of white blood seeped out across the floor in front of the portal’s edge.

Black Six’s rifle stopped spitting its deadly hail of bullets and he shouted. “I’m out!”

Asya ran to him and gave him the second AR-15, then fired the last two rounds from the Browning, killing one of the dire wolves. Black Six opened up with the new weapon, dropping several more of the scrabbling creatures. When the weapon was empty, he retreated behind the rest of the group and out of sight. Rook kept firing until he was dry too.

“Too many,” Queen shouted. “Sons-a-bitches just keep coming!”

Dire wolf corpses littered the room now, and the pile at the entrance to the portal, a mound of arms and claws and bulging eyes, was at least four feet high. Seeing that the fight had nearly gone out of the group, the dire wolves slowed now as they stepped out of the light and into the cavernous room. Some squatted and sniffed the air. Others stepped forward slowly. More came through the glowing wall of energy. Rook watched as more and more came through and he lost track of the number.

They’re bleeding us dry, Queen thought, making us use all of our ammo. Fucking transdimensional rope-a-dope.

Rook turned to her. “We are going to need an escape plan before I run out of clean pairs of shorts today.”

Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway

4 November, 0300 Hrs

The enormous hangar doors disguised to look like shaded rock from the exterior split down the middle, revealing a chaotic battle that looked to King like Hell on Earth. Hidden motors concealed in the walls churned as the doors retracted on wheels set into a track in the floor of the huge space. A gust of wind blew a swirl of snow into the incredible scene before him.

The room was gigantic, and it held a sparkling energy portal one-hundred feet high. The glowing orb threw lightning and disgorged dire wolves as if they were jumping off a truck on the other side. A huge metal cage held the portal in place like an eight-digit hand holding a ball. In front of the sphere, a pile of dire wolf bodies impeded the newly arriving monsters like a barricade of sandbags. Beck’s MP5 spat bullets at the creatures. Queen stood off to the side, covered in white fluid, like liquid marshmallow, firing a handgun at any of the beasts that got close.

Rook and some woman King didn’t know ran toward him as he stepped into the gunsmoke clouding the air. Black Six was off to the side of the hangar doors, where he had operated the controls to let them in.

“Get down!” King leveled an FN-SCAR rifle and fired. Rook and the woman dove to the side, hitting the floor and rolling away. As the dire wolves clambered over the pile of dead, King’s shots riddled their bodies until they slipped down the front of the pile or added to the top of it. A river of white blood seeped from the carrion heap, sliding across the concrete floor as slow moving rivulets.

King wore the black and gray impact armor, but no helmet. He was armed to the teeth with rifles, handguns on both hips and a bandolier of grenades across his chest. Deep Blue stood to King’s left, wearing his battered black impact armor and his futuristic black helmet that made him look like he was ready to ride a motorcycle in a Japanese Shoei commercial. The man took up firing right alongside him.