Ragnarok (14 page)

“Blue, you out there?”

“King! You’re okay?”

“Bruised and battered. I’m in some kind of underground railroad tunnel that shouldn’t be here. Plus I’m going to have trouble getting back to the surface. The sides of the crater are smooth.”

“There were a number of mining projects after the turn of the century, King. Over 110 miles of tunnels and caverns are now under the greater Chicago area. You must have found one of them. What about the hostile you were after?”

“No sign of it. I’m going to give pursuit.”

“Understood. Just be careful. I’ll be down for you once we wrap of the last of them up here. Two of them didn’t make it back to the sphere before it closed down.” King heard the audible click of Deep Blue signing off. He stayed still in the dark of the tunnel, waiting for his ears to adjust to the ambient noise of the tunnel, before he proceeded deeper inside. There was always the chance the creature missed the tunnel and slid to the bottom of the crater, but King didn’t think so. The small hairs on the back of his neck raised; he could tell the beast was in the tunnel with him.

It was colder up on the city streets, with the November wind blowing hard. In the tunnel, the air was dry and mild. The dark was inky black. King knew he would have to use a flashlight. He removed a small tactical light and laser sight from one zippered pocket on his flight suit and attached it to the barrel of his Glock 23, which the Air Force had issued him before his ill-fated F-16 flight. It took some work to get the thing attached in the dark, but he managed it.

With the lights off, he slowly stood and moved to his right. Leading with his hand outstretched, he searched for the wall of the tunnel. It took him only a few steps before his fingertips brushed the edge of the smooth rock wall. His ears strained at the silence, hoping to detect some small sound of movement, but all was dead quiet. King laid his body against the wall and took a slow breath, then flicked on the flashlight and targeting laser.

The tiny LED light and red laser beam illuminated the ten-foot wide concrete tunnel as if the sun had just been turned on. Ten feet deeper into the tunnel and hanging upside down from the ceiling by its claws, its back was to King. He was in its blind spot.

He stood stock still, moving the targeting laser to the back of the creature’s head.

Almost. Almost…

King took a slow deep breath and released it, preparing to take the shot, when the bulbous white orb on the side of the creature’s upside-down head swiveled back to look directly at King. He fired the Glock, but the beast was already on the ground, flipping and landing couched on all four limbs, like a cat.

Then it roared.

A huge, echoing, hideously loud roar that vibrated in King’s chest like the thumping bass of a high-end car stereo. He squinted in momentary pain from the volume of the roar, but then fired another shot and dropped to a crouch of his own.

The creature lurched to the side, a gout of thick white blood spraying from its shoulder. King could smell the fluid, and it didn’t smell coppery like human blood. More like spoiled fish. And metal and plastic.

The beast paused and moved its head to the side, as if it were considering something. One of the white eyes swiveled, peering down at its fresh wound.

King watched, fascinated as the bundles of cable-like muscles under the thing’s translucent skin tensed and released, as the creature moved its head.

King opened up with the remaining 13 rounds in the magazine of his Glock.

The beast’s head erupted with spurts of white fluid, before its perforated corpse collapsed in a heap on the dusty concrete floor of the tunnel.

King stood and ejected the magazine, allowing it to clatter to the floor, the sound of it drowned out by the still echoing gunshots. He reached into another zippered pocket on his flight suit for the only spare magazine he had.

He just finished inserting the fresh rounds when Deep Blue’s voice returned.

“You alright? We heard the roar up here, although my sound dampeners in the helmet kicked in. Aleman says the fear response that the roar creates is pretty devastating.”

“Uh, the what?” King asked.

“Fear response. Did you experience a debilitating terror from the roar?” Deep Blue sounded perplexed in King’s earpiece.

“No. It was loud, but that was all. What are you talking about?”

“I’ll explain later. Come to the edge of the tunnel, we’re lowering a winch from the second Humvee.”

After King was winched up, Deep Blue led him to an exterior door on the side of the John Hancock Center, where he inserted a key and a door opened to reveal a private elevator. “One of the Secret Service evac routes from when I was the President.” Once inside the elevator, he used the same key to activate the lift. The men felt a tug at their stomachs as the fast-moving car raced for the roof, 100 stories above them. Deep Blue relayed the intel from Aleman about the fear response generated by the creature’s roar.

“Didn’t experience anything like that,” King said.

“Odd. Maybe you can’t hear certain frequencies, or have an odd ear structure. Whatever it is, be thankful for it. The National Guard topside were pissing themselves and screaming like little girls. Ale assures me I would have done the same if he hadn’t warned me to calibrate the audio pickups in this helmet to dampen any noises on that frequency.”

“We might all need helmets like that, then.”

The doors to the elevator opened and the men stepped out onto the roof of the building, its two massive antennas towering overhead. A huge fixed-wing, crescent-shaped craft idled on the roof.

“Looks kind of like the
Crescent
,” King said as they boarded the aircraft.

“Similar. The
Persephone
. The Pentagon is messing around with the design. Keasling is loaning it to us.”

They sat and strapped in, surrounded by a complicated computer array. Deep Blue removed his helmet and contacted Aleman, back in New Hampshire. The craft launched vertically and then King felt the thrust as it banked and accelerated.

“Aleman, catch us up,” Deep Blue began.

“Cape Town is gone,” came the sober response.

Deep Blue sighed. “How many dead?”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s gone. Completely.”

TWENTY-TWO

Shanghai, China

KNIGHT STAGGERED THROUGH the street, his body sore from the fall onto the creature on the ground floor of the Customs House building. The creature had remained inert after cushioning Knight’s fall from the chandelier. He didn’t know if it was dead or just unconscious, but he stuck his KA-BAR knife in its head five times to make sure it wouldn’t get up again either way.

Now outside the building and making his way between the abandoned cars in the road, Knight felt some of his normal cool persona returning, despite the fact that all he was armed with now was the knife. The creature’s roar had completely incapacitated him and he tried to analyze whether the noise had maybe triggered a dormant childhood terror, but that explanation didn’t feel right. He figured something in the beast’s vocalization had instigated a severe fight or flight response—except he was too paralyzed to fight and too full of hallucinatory fear to even consider taking flight.

There was no sign of the speeding white things along the road, but he had seen them go back into the glowing sphere, as if regrouping or afraid to be left behind, should this energy dome wink out like the others had. Knight squatted down low behind a garishly blue Ford and looked at the pulsing wall of light. The dome showed no signs that it was going anywhere anytime soon.

“Bishop? Where you at?” Knight tried his communicator again, but there was no response from his partner.

He moved from one car to the next, making his way toward the river. He wondered if the creatures could swim. They didn’t really look built for it—all sinew and claw. Still, when the creatures were upright, they looked like bipeds.
If man can learn to swim, there’s no reason to think these things can’t
. As Knight stepped onto the boardwalk adjacent to the water, a blur of movement in his peripheral vision made him pause.

Crap
.

He could make out at least four more of the things tearing around the street. He looked for a pattern, but they moved chaot-ically, almost as if they couldn’t see him, or didn’t yet have a target. Knight glanced back to the water. Ten feet, and he could jump into the river.
But will they follow me into the water? What if they swim better than a human?

“KNIGHT! INCOMING!” Bishop’s voice bellowed from the direction of the river.

That was all it took to get Knight in motion. Unfortunately, it was also the impetus the creatures needed to unite in pursuit of him.

He sprinted blindly for the river, moving in a straight line, whereas the beasts still needed to weave in and out of the abandoned car obstacle course.

Knight reached the river’s edge and saw the water level was a good ten or fifteen feet below the concrete lip of the boardwalk. But his speed carried him out over the water. A screeching noise filled the air, and Knight twisted in mid-dive to see the return of the
Crescent
.

The plane sped into the Bund historical district, firing rockets and cannon fire at the street, where Knight had been seconds before. He looked back to the water just before he hit and saw Bishop bobbing in the slow current on the other side of the river. He didn’t see the cars exploding and flipping in the air behind him as the
Crescent
turned the street, and the creatures skittering over it, into a swath of white, meaty slop.

A roar ripped through the air.

Knight’s mind registered what it was and what it was about to do to his body.

He tensed.

But nothing happened as his head submerged beneath the murky, polluted water. The liquid muted the fear-inducing scream, protecting Knight from its effects.

When Knight surfaced to take a lungful of air, snapping his head back to fling his shoulder-length black hair out of his face, he heard the powerful detonations on the road behind him, but no longer heard the roar of the white creatures. The
Crescent
pulled up and banked, coming in to hover over the pickup point at Bin Jiang Park, opposite the bend in the river.

Knight stroked over to where Bishop waited, a million questions on his mind, but Bishop had had plenty of time to think of the answers and preempted him.

“They can’t swim or maybe just don’t want to. They didn’t follow me into this muck.” Bishop pointed down at the thick stew of brown swirling waters. At least the current wasn’t particularly strong. “I heard the start of that roar of theirs before going underwater, and it was enough for me. Aleman got in touch. Says the sound causes some kind of physiological reaction. Adrenaline dump into the heart to the point of paralysis. Could even kill you, if you got scared enough.”

“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?”