dry.
It was when, for the second time, she was about to give up exploring and go back to look for a flashlight that she stepped forward into nothing and toppled over in the gloom. She screamed as she fell, the sounds of her voice echoing through the tunnel. She landed on something that was soft mixed with tiny sharp pokey spines. She felt the surface under her in the dark and the sensation on her fingertips was like spongy rubber with toothpicks sticking out of it. She touched one of the sharp things and applied a gentle pressure to its side. The thing snapped, just like a toothpick would. She ran her fingers over the break and felt the tiny barbs, but they were more jagged than the fibers from a snapped toothpick-more solid too.
“Bozhe moi. What is this?” She whispered in the dark, afraid suddenly of what else might be in this pit with her. She struggled to find footing on the squishy surface and instead walked on her knees with one hand on the mushy uneven ground for balance and the other reaching out in the dark for a wall. She felt the barbs poking her knees as she moved forward, but her splayed out fingertips soon grazed brick. She ran her hand over the bricks and they felt similar to the ones that formed the tunnel up above-smaller than normal bricks today. She ran her hand left and right along the wall looking for anything different than a flat wall surface. A door or a ladder. Or a light switch.
The smell in this new space was wetter than up in the tunnel, but the squishing surface that made up the ground was dry to the touch. She tried again to stand but quickly gave up. It was like standing on top of a ball pit. What she had thought was solid-if rubbery-ground was actually a pile of something. Several small somethings.
Stupid! Asya suddenly remembered that she had a small LED light in a survival kit that she wore on her waist in a tiny fanny pack. She had picked it up at the store in Olderdalen when Stanislav- no, Rook, she corrected herself-was buying his new coat. The kit would have some wooden matches as well, but the LED keychain light would be easier to find in the dark.
She unzipped the pouch and carefully slipped her fingers inside the scratchy nylon, so she didn’t disgorge the contents into the pile of mystery things on which she kneeled. Her fingers found the plastic casing of the tiny flashlight. She pulled it out. Before lighting it, she zipped the pouch again, and slipped a finger through the ring on the end of the light. She didn’t want to lose it.
Then she depressed the spring-loaded button, illuminating the small room around her with a garish blast of blue-tinged white light.
She wished she hadn’t.
Against her will, a second scream rose up in her. This one far longer and far more distressed than the yelp she had let out when she fell.
She was in a graveyard. She was on a graveyard. A grave mound. And it was heaped with the tiny corpses of small white creatures unlike any she had ever seen. There were hundreds-maybe thousands-of the little things, their rib bones poking though the desiccated chests of the small white puppy-like creatures. They had miniscule clear claws on each paw but strange small pinpricks of eyes on the sides of their heads. They were not puppies, nor wolves. She could see their musculature under their whitish skin. They were not any animal she had ever seen or heard of.
They were something else.
Something unnatural.
Hideous.
Asya’s breath caught in her chest. The mound of tiny bodies moved.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH
3 November, 1000 Hrs
Sara Fogg walked with Anna Beck into the large aircraft hanger that housed the last airborne vehicle belonging to Endgame. The Black Hawk sat on the concrete floor of the hangar and Black Six, the suave young spy, stood next to it in a black flight suit. Beck wore a black flight suit herself.
“You get to ride with the hunk, huh?” Fogg joked. “I bet Knight won’t like that.”
“He’ll get over it. Besides, Six can pilot a Black Hawk-I can’t. He’ll come with me to the Pease Air National Guard Base in Portsmouth where we’ll wait around to rendezvous with a Blackbird out of Hanscom Air Force Base and haul ass to Norway. Half the pilots are in Europe with Bishop and Knight and the other two are in New York with King and Deep Blue.”
“Would be nice to have Queen and Rook back. They’ll help keep our guys alive.” Fogg looked at Beck and patted her on the shoulder. The two women had become close over the last two weeks. “Be safe and kick ass.”
Beck winked. “You know it.”
Fogg watched as Beck strode across the hangar and lightly punched Black Six in the upper arm. “Let’s go, Secret Agent Man.”
Fogg turned as the two got into the Black Hawk and it rolled forward out of the massive hundred-foot-wide doorway. It then took to the sky and the computer controlled steel door slowly lowered into place from where it had been hidden in the ceiling of rock and concrete. Fogg had heard about a mishap with that door when the base was being set up and she always made it a point to not stand anywhere near it.
With the door completely shut, and the daylight gone from the hangar, it was a dimly lit and empty place. Fogg headed back to the corridor off the hangar that led to the offices and the main computer center, where she would no doubt find Aleman and Pierce still frantically trying to make sense of the strange creatures destroying the world.
Fogg had already made sense of it for herself. This was just how crazy the world had gotten. King and the rest of Chess Team were always in the thick of it. Genetically engineered soldiers, reani-mated monsters, custom tailored bio-weapons and viruses, anthropological missing-link creatures, golems, artificially intelligent super computers, assassins, corporate megalomaniacs, modern-day pirates, terrorists and even black holes. This was King’s world and she was a part of it. The world would go apeshit nutso and Chess Team would stop it. That’s what they did. And if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a world to worry about. Armed with that knowledge, she was able to remain as calm and tranquil as a Buddhist monk.
Most of the time.
Seeing King ejecting from that plane and smashing into a skyscraper had been a jolt. So had the dire wolf roar that brought back her claustrophobia.
It’s strange, she thought. Being in this base under a mountain doesn’t weird me out, but the thought of a tiny dirt tunnel so close to the surface that I could dig my way there with my fingers gives me the heebie-jeebies.
She had a rock-solid inner belief in King’s invincibility, and that got her through each new crazy thing that arose. But she also found herself wondering if maybe there would be a time soon when someone else could become ‘King.’ A time when she and Jack could take Fiona and go off to some isolated part of the world away from corporate madmen and bio-engineered super threats.
She knew enough about lab-created viruses from her work at the CDC to realize that it was only a matter of time before some super-plague wiped out a good swash of the world’s population. Going off to live like a survivalist in a cabin in British Columbia was looking more attractive to her all the time. Of course, the forest would play havoc with her sensory processing disorder, but maybe she could learn to live with that.
As she stepped into the computer room, she saw Lewis Aleman and George Pierce, who had both clearly found the time to throw on new clothes-Aleman still in jeans and a t-shirt, and Pierce with a black sweatshirt with a white King chessman icon on the left breast. Both men hunkered over Pierce’s computer terminal at the side of the room, Aleman having abandoned the ergonomic chair.
“What’s up?” she asked.
Aleman stood straighter and stretched his back, turning to her. “We’re tracking the portals and trying to find their origin.”
“Can you do that?” she asked.
“No,” Aleman smiled weakly. “But we can look at the surrounding environmental disturbances that the portals
