Kane Gilmour - Ragnarok

To King’s right stood Matt Carrack, wearing an arctic white version of the impact armor, with one of the matching white padded helmets. The five security soldiers armed in the white impact suits, carried rifles, heavy machine guns and even a few grenade launchers. Even Reggie, White Eight, their weapons expert, was suited up in one of the armored suits, but like King, without a helmet. Instead, he wore huge red and black ear muffs King had seen him use on the firing range back at Endgame headquarters.

They all opened fire and the sound was deafening in the echoing chamber.

Beck ran around the field of fire and up to the group. Her face showed that she understood what the absence of Knight and Bishop meant. Reggie supplied her with weapons and ammunition.

Reggie quickly supplied Queen, Rook and the woman with him, with a new MP5 and three extra magazines each. No words were exchanged. Just action. But even if they had tried to speak, the sound of ceaseless gunfire would have drowned out their voices.

Dire wolves continued to flow from the portal, but were met by a wall of projectiles that was impossible to pass through. And each new corpse slowed the advance of those just arriving. The floor was so cluttered with dead that King doubted the creatures could get up to speed, even without the bullets. The perfect bottleneck.

Rook staggered back against the wall, using it to prop himself up. He fired his newly acquired MP5 one handed, his other arm hanging limp at his shoulder.

Queen stayed close to the new arrivals, squatting to the floor and taking up a classic kneeling firing stance. The White security team members began to fan out to the sides, to catch any stray dire wolves that escaped the main fusillade of bullets blasting at the center front of the portal. One of the men was armed with a grenade launcher attachment under his FN-SCAR rifle and fired several shots inside the center of the portal.

The onslaught of dire wolves increased until the rate of fire wasn’t enough and more of them slipped past the bullets, several coming through the portal already airborne, as though flung from the other side. Their sleek muscular white bodies leapt and hopped to the sides of the fray. They got close enough to two of the White team members to attack. The first one leapt onto White Four, throwing him to the ground and tearing at the man’s armored suit. King knew it was Four by his size-short and stocky, the new White Four was a nice guy, but everyone had kept their distance. The last several White security team members had been killed in action when GenY, Richard Ridley’s former security force, attacked the New Hampshire base. King blasted the creature on top of Four with a concentrated burst and it fell to the side, but the man didn’t get up.

Another dire wolf ripped into the man with the grenade launcher, and the weapon skittered across the slick concrete, stopping near where the portal ate into the floor. The man pulled his sidearm and fired several shots, but the dire wolf hacked and clawed at him until one of his armored arms came loose with a pop. The creature flung the arm and it landed with a thump and a wet splat in front of Queen’s kneeling stance. She adjusted her aim and unloaded until the magazine went dry. The creature shook as she perforated its long body with 9 mm slugs. She reloaded and moved the sights of her weapon back to the oncoming wave of white muscled bodies, before the dead beast hit the floor.

The woman King didn’t know hung back, firing her weapon at any target that stood still long enough for her to see it. She’s a pretty good shot, whoever she is. Deep Blue and the others took positions around the room, a few lying down, a few standing and others kneeling like Queen.

One of the White security members set up a tripod, and Reggie loaded an M2 with its chain-fed. 50 caliber death. The gun overpowered the sound of all the other weapons in the room. The metallic booming of the M2 sent the oversized bullets across the room, ripping into the dire wolf hordes as they emerged.

Blood sprayed.

Limbs severed.

Rook ducked to the floor near the man dealing death with the big machine gun. He picked up a rifle from a pile near the man. It was an M-16-the standard US infantry rifle-but this one had the M203 grenade launcher attachment on the underside of its barrel. “Fuckin-A!”

Rook targeted a huge metal strut that supported the portal. It had a section that had lots of electrical cables and more than the normal amount of the metal receptor plates that ran up its length. The 40 mm grenade shot out of the launcher tube and arced through the room, smashing into the concrete base of the metal upright, just as Rook fired another grenade at a second upright.

The first metal arm sheared off completely and fell inward, swallowed by the glowing ball of light. The other strut’s base exploded into fragments and the strut fell backward. Each explosion dwarfed the M2’s din and filled the air with a ball of orange flame and a column of dark smoke. The detonations startled everyone and the shooting paused, as the metal support struts collapsed. Even the dire wolves paused and cocked their alien heads, looking upward at the damage.

“I told you I’d break that fucker.” Rook said. “I-”

The sphere of energy, no longer fully contained by the metal cage, bulged suddenly forward and upward, like a water balloon that had been squeezed hard on one side. When it hit the ceiling of the massive lab room, it ate right through, as though it had encountered nothing but more air. The front portion of the roof collapsed toward the team. Great chunks of stone and strips of steel crumbled from the ceiling, now open to the sky.

Rook watched the debris falling toward them. “Aww, shit.”

Somewhere

Knight brushed his arms, attempting to dust some of the midnight blue grime off his body after the long climb. Or is it orange? He and Bishop perceived this world differently, but maybe neither of them saw it right.

Bishop motioned to the suitcase nuke hanging from Knight’s back. “Where did you find it?” He was walking along the cliff’s edge toward the distant pinnacle of rock that they had agreed was their only logical destination. Knight walked alongside the big man, but away from the cliff’s edge. It had taken him hours to climb the thing and he had no desire to slip and fall off it.

“In a crater. There are craters all around. From the portals.”

“Yep. Seen ‘em.”

“Debris from Earth surrounds most of them, like a pie crust.” Knight said, pointing out to the multitude of craters they could see in the distance.

Bishop stopped walking and peered out at the collection of divots on the distant plain.

“Too far to tell,” Bishop said.

“Trust me; I’ve visited a few. I found the nuke beside one of them.”

“Seems like a lot of people had the same idea.” Bishop resumed walking along the cliff’s edge.

Knight stayed where he was and waited. Eventually, Bishop noticed Knight wasn’t walking with him and turned, a question about to form on his lips. But he saw Knight’s face, with one eyebrow raised that said Really? Think about it.

“Wait,” Bishop said, the idea formulating in his head. “That’s the nuke King and Deep Blue were supposed to place in New York?”

Knight nodded, and unslung the pack, reaching into a pocket on the exterior of the canvas sack.

“How do you know it’s theirs?” Bishop asked.

Knight produced a small iPhone from the pack and handed it to Bishop. It showed a picture of Fiona smiling on the wallpaper.

Bishop glanced at it and looked at Knight with a serious face. “Did you try this thing?”

Knight’s face lost all color. He looked down at the iPhone’s reception-no bars. Of course, there are no bars. I’m in another dimension. He realized he must have checked the reception on the thing a hundred times, even though he couldn’t remember actually doing it. Then he realized that the battery should have died ages ago, but it strangely showed two bars left on the power meter.