FORTY-FOUR
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
Asya closed her mouth, clamping off the scream before it was truly done. She swung the tiny LED light around the space. It was little more than a brick pit, really, just twenty feet in diameter and roughly circular. She played the light around the chamber and hoped for a door or a ladder, but the walls were uninterrupted.
And the whole pit was filled with heaps of the dead and desiccated corpses. Like little white stuffed animals in one of those crane-and-claw, coin-operated vending machine games. But there was no metal claw above her- instead, something moved beneath the heap of tiny bodies.
The mound shifted slowly.
Little bodies tumbled.
The corpses were almost cute, except for the rib bones poking out of the chests. The eyes were hardly pronounced but sat on the outside of the face, like halved grapes. The creatures had white skin that she could see through to the muscles and meat below it.
She began to breathe quickly, willing herself to overcome the fear paralyzing her. The thing under the mound moved again, in a zig-zagging motion. The floor of tiny dead performed a wave like the people at a sporting event.
It moves like a snake, she thought.
And then her paralysis broke. She lunged, clawing and scrabbling across the heaped dead, heading for the brick wall. As she moved her hands through the pile, crawling to the wall, the glow from her LED flashlight flared wildly in the space, throwing fast moving shadows around the pit.
She needed to get out. This place was wrong and horrible. Unnatural. Evil, the word came to her panicked mind unbidden. Evil.
She flailed through the bodies and reached the brick unmo-lested, but her mind, completely unhinged by fear, couldn’t comprehend that the slithering thing under the bodies had yet to grasp her ankle. She dug her fingers into the mortar between the bricks and found it was crumbly under her touch. She pulled herself up and placed her toes into the wide spaces between the bricks. She raced up the thirty-foot wall with balance a rock climber would have admired. She kept the LED light between her teeth, placed her toes and fingers into the cracks and didn’t look back.
When she reached the top, she threw herself over the lip, and onto the rough stone floor of the tunnel. She could see a blazing bright light at the end of the tunnel, back in the large laboratory. It was far brighter than the spotlights affixed to the ceiling, and she clung to the idea that bright light was her salvation from the atrocities in the pit.
Asya struggled to her feet and ran headlong toward the light. She abandoned all thoughts of stealth hoping to find Rook and Queen. But when she exited the mouth of the tunnel into the room though, another strange sight greeted her. The giant hand of metal-she recalled the gleaming chrome claw in the game with the stuffed animals, only this one was absurdly large and upside down, resting on the floor with its open claws stretching almost two hundred feet up to the ceiling-held something in its clutches now. A blazing sun, easily over a hundred feet in diameter, hovered between the metal struts of the claw. Small arcs of lightning shot out of the ball of crackling energy, but the lightning curved unnaturally backward, striking the large metal plates on the claw’s upright legs, harmlessly dissipating.
The light was incredibly bright, but the globe of electric fire felt appealing. It drew her closer. She stood directly in front of the pulsing light, all thoughts of her recent scare in the pit now gone from her mind. She just wanted to be near the light. It filled her with warmth, like the sun. Only this sun was for her. Her very own, personal star.
She smiled wide and exhaled a deep and contented sigh.
She didn’t notice, as five large white creatures that looked like grown versions of the dead babies, crawled out of the globe of brilliance and began to sniff the air around her.
FORTY-FIVE
Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH
Lewis Aleman sat alone in a side office off the main corridor in Central that ran to the tram station, which would lead to another part of the base that housed a submarine dock. He had left Fogg and Pierce in the main computer control room. He needed just five minutes to himself to process what he had learned, before he reported to Deep Blue. That his boss had not reported in yet regarding his rescue attempt for King did not bode well. It meant they were still up to their necks in battle or dead.
He would have to attempt to contact them regardless. Too much had happened. Knight and Bishop were off the grid. Queen and Rook were in the same town as the source portal-a portal that had appeared regularly over the last few months, and in precisely the same location.
Aleman realized that someone had to be regulating the phenomenon. Not phenomenon, he thought. Attack.
The portals were appearing with increasing frequency around the globe and their strategy of dealing with the fallout caused by dire wolf attacks had led them nowhere. They needed to find whatever was causing the portals to appear and eliminate it. Before there wasn’t anything left of the planet. His quick research into the town of Fenris Kystby led exactly nowhere. There was no useful information about the place. It was a tiny town near the coast of northern Norway, well off the beaten track for tourists and natives alike. But the lack of any information on the Web was disturbing to Aleman. He could nearly always find something, about even the most obscure places in the world, even if it was just a farm report or a local carnival announcement. It was almost like any information about this place has been scoured away from the Web.
They knew the dire wolf was mentioned in Norse mythology. They had seen evidence that someone in Viking times had come across a dire wolf. They suspected repeated appearances of the portals in a town in Norway that no one had ever heard of. And Rook had called in earlier from the very same town and was facing mind-controlled people. Aleman didn’t know what it added up to, but he knew that the team was wasting its time in other locations. Norway is the source.
He stood from his office chair and touched the ear of his communications headset, then he voice-dialed Deep Blue. He paced back and forth across the rich blue carpet between the glass-walled air-conditioned closet of routers and servers and the desk the room held. He heard the connection go live with a tiny audible click.
“Kind of busy now, Lew. There’s shooting and running…” Deep Blue sounded out of breath. Aleman would keep the information about Bishop and Knight to himself for the moment.
“It’s going down in Norway. Norway is the source.”
“Son of a-that’s where Rook is.” Deep Blue’s voice came between heaving breaths. Aleman couldn’t hear any external sounds because of the audio dampener in Deep Blue’s helmet, but he could imagine the running and shooting, just fine. He’d experienced it during his previous years as a Delta operator before an injury sidelined him.
“Actually, it’s the same town Rook said he was in. Queen’s tracking chip show’s she’s there with him. If they’re not together, they’re close. We need to get over there. Time is running out.”
“What’s the…projection?”
“Maybe two days if the portals keep appearing at the same rate and keep growing in size. The one in Norway seems to have stabilized in size and intensity. And there’s something else. When the Norway portal has opened in the past, it hasn’t stayed on for longer than a few minutes. But it’s on now and has probably been acti-vated for close to a half an hour.”
“We’re…on our…way. Ready everyone who can fire a weapon. The whole White team. How are Bishop and Knight doing?”
“Didn’t work out.” Aleman changed the subject quickly. “I’ll take care of everything on my end. Anything else?”
