dinosaurs?”
Fossen shook his head. “They merely contributed to it.”
“Then why in the name of Ronald Reagan’s undescended right testicle would you help with something like that?” Rook’s patience ran out. “Oh right, Lord Fruitloop.”
Fossen seemed to absorb the comment with just a moment’s discomfort. “Because, with my help, the portal will remain open indefinitely. Our worlds will become one, and everyone will serve the Lord Fenrir.”
“Right, with you at her right hand.” Rook hadn’t missed that Fossen’s God was feminine.
“As promised.”
Rook was almost free of the plastic cuffs. “Listen buttercup, if there is one thing I’ve learned about megalomaniacs-human or otherwise-it’s that they’ll say, do and promise just about anything to achieve their goals. You’re being duped.”
“If you would only open your eyes and see-”
“You know they make big comic book conventions for people like you, right?” Rook said. “You’d fit right in. Pop on a pair of rubber Vulcan ears and you’d be all set. Maybe hook up with a Ferengi. I think they’re ugly as shit, but you seem to have low standards.”
Fossen grinned and shook his head. “Oh, Stanislav. I will miss your sense of humor.” The door to the room opened and Asya walked in calmly, holding another Walther pistol in her hand, trained on Rook.
Rook’s momentum toward his escape was derailed the moment he saw Asya. At first, he thought she was in on it with Fossen, but then he saw the wooden way she walked and the glazed look in her eyes.
Fossen went back to his laptop. “Take him.”
Asya stepped behind Rook and cut the plastic zip tie with a small knife she produced with her free hand. She shoved him hard in the spine with the gun and said simply “Go.”
He left the room and entered the main chamber with the glowing sphere- a doorway, he thought-and Asya motioned him toward a tunnel on the left. He hoped for a second that this was all some ploy on her part to rescue him. Maybe she was just pretending to be under the spell of the pheromones. As they left the light from the main chamber and pressed on into the darkness of the tunnel, he tried whispering to her, but she made no response other than to poke him repeatedly in the spine with the Walther.
He planned to attack her on the next poke, but she spoke to him instead.
“Stop here.” Her speech was labored. Like she was trying to force her speech past her lips. “Hold…out your hand.”
He raised his hand in the darkness. She placed something small and plastic into his hand. He closed his fingers around it. “Hold on to it…and do not…drop it.”
“Why? What is it-?”
Before he could finish he felt a powerful kick in his lower back. To deliver that much force, she must have taken a step back and lunged at him with a flying sidekick. His body sprawled forward but there was nowhere to land. He fell in darkness until he hit something bouncy like a rubber ball, but with little pinpricks all over it. Then he heard something shriek in the darkness.
FORTY-SEVEN
Exxon Building, New York, NY
King and Deep Blue burst out of the access door and onto the white-gray roof. Deep Blue had used his last MP5 round to blow out the lock on the heavy fire door.
King pulled a KA-BAR knife from a tactical nylon sheath on the side of his armor and let Deep Blue move to the lead. To the right was a large ten-foot tall wall of air conditioning fans. The older man ran left along the open rooftop, back toward the 6 ^th Ave. side of the building. King followed, turning with every few strides to see if the dire wolves chasing them had reached the roof access yet.
“Keasling says the dire wolves below the portal are retreating like army ants on the run,” Deep Blue called over his shoulder as he ran.
They were nearing the eastern portion of the raised level on the roof that held the top of the stairwell they had just existed, and the elevator shafts that ran down the central spine of the building. King looked back one last time before rounding the corner and saw two dire wolves explode out of the top of the stairwell, cornering like cartoon characters with legs pistoning in a blur of motion, but the body not yet responding.
“Not all of them are retreating!” King moved around the concrete corner of the building’s uppermost reaches, and slammed his body against the wall, laying flat against it. Deep Blue didn’t know he had stopped and was waiting with the knife poised to strike. He could hear Deep Blue contacting the helicopter pilot through the external speaker in the high tech helmet.
“The dire wolves are bugging out. We’re gonna need a rooftop pick up on West 50 ^th.”
King turned his attention completely to the concrete corner, tensing with the knife and bending at the knees, intending to spring up and add more thrust to the blow.
When the dire wolves came, they came fast. Too fast. The first dire wolf blitzed past the corner and a further thirty feet beyond, before adjusting its course. King was astonished-and a little disappointed-that the creature hadn’t overshot the corner of the raised structure by another twenty feet, which would have taken it sailing clear off the edge of the roof and down to 6 ^th Ave. Anticipating the arrival of the second beast, King lunged around the corner, with the knife leading, even before he caught sight of it. If he had waited, it too would have passed by.
As it was, he was about a yard ahead of it when he jumped out, but it was coming at ridiculous velocity and clearly wasn’t expecting any kind of resistance. The blade of the knife drove into the creature’s throat with force. The knife tore more than punctured, and the blade along with half the hilt and King’s hand, drove into the monster’s neck and head. He’d been aiming upward, and the blade quickly found its way to the center of the beast’s skull.
The dead creature, carried by momentum, tackled King to the roof.
They tumbled together, a mass of black and white bodies and limbs.
The world spun around King. He had no sense of where he was, only that he was rolling, far, with no way to stop.
While King careened across the roof, another three dire wolves emerged from the stairwell and headed for Deep Blue.
King withdrew his knife from the monster’s eye with a wet squelch. The motion flipped him free and he struck the concrete roof on his stomach, sliding on his body armor. The edge of the roof over 6 ^th was fast approaching. Slapping his hands down on the roof, King threw his body weight laterally, away from the dire wolf.
The dead dire wolf reached the end of the concrete roof and bumped up and over the six-inch high decorative wall before dropping down to the street. King scraped his knife blade across the concrete roof and spun his body just in time to plant his feet against the low wall and stop his slide toward doom.
One of the three dire wolves chasing Deep Blue let loose with the bone-shaking roar, and King once again discovered he possessed some kind of immunity to the auditory attack. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.
Deep Blue and the first dire wolf caromed across the roof, the dire wolf clawing at the man. Deep Blue stabbed back with a bayonet. The roof shook beneath them, knocking everyone down. They rolled and tumbled across the concrete as King struggled to give chase on the suddenly uneven surface of the roof.
“King! The roof is collapsing! Get over here!” King raced across the roof and noted the other two dire wolves bounding toward him in his periphery.
Deep Blue slashed at the dire wolf attacking him. It flailed and struggled.
King leapt atop the dire wolf and pinned the creature’s head down on the ground. Deep Blue sank the bayonet onto the creature’s eye.
“Go! Go!” Deep Blue struggled to his feet and lurched.
King nearly fell as the roof shifted beneath him again.
Oh my God. It’s the whole building!
Deep Blue ran for the edge of the building over West 50 ^th
