That’s when he caught a glimpse of the thing moving like a breeze through the snows, leaping between the trees and even up onto the sides of them before springing away, almost too quickly for Agnarsson’s eye to follow. Then it was gone in the shadows.
The first of his men to reach the trees was torn apart. Agnarsson didn’t see it happen, but the sounds of tearing flesh and muffled screams were fodder for the mind’s eye. Then the lower half of Magnus Trondheim’s red-haired legs flew through the air and tangled in the lower branches of one of the half-eaten trees. Other men had bolted at that sight, but Agnarsson had stood stock still, staring in wonder. He knew whatever the creature was, it wasn’t human.
The roar came again, but this time from inside the monastery.
There is more than one, Agnarsson realized.
The few men still rooted in place came unglued, and with shouts of horror, they ran without mind or any sense of where they were going. Only Agnarsson remained in place, not because he was brave, but because he was petrified. He kept a firm grip on his axe while warm piss trickled down his inner thigh.
His mind-spurred by lessons taught by a remorseless father, fought for control. It is too cursed fast to be a bear or a wolf.
The roar came again, dropping him to one knee.
The sound was closer, bouncing back at him from the trees and the falling snow all around him in the early morning gloom. A few of his men yet lived, but whimpered in terror. The vibration in Agnarsson’s eardrums was intense. His bones felt as if they rattled in his body. He couldn’t see the creature, but he knew it was near.
Then he heard the movement. Fast. Coming right for him. He whirled around and swung his double-bladed axe wide, hoping he might strike the beast out of sheer luck and force.
Instead, the world before him transformed into the sun.
Brightness assaulted Agnarsson’s sight-so intense and painful that it scorched his eyes even through his tightly shut eyelids. Thunder shouted and lightning crackled again, this time blasting out from all around him.
Guarding his eyes with his hands, he chanced a look and witnessed the giant ball of light collapse inward. Silence sucked the thunderous din away like a thirsty man slurping up the last of his mead, and Agnarsson was left alone in the dull light of early morning.
His men lay dead in the shallow snow all around him. Some of them, caught half within the sphere of light and half without, had been cut cleanly in half.
He looked down to see that his own body had been cleaved as well. His axe was gone and so was most of his axe arm below the shoulder. The wound had been closed with searing heat, the fire so hot he hadn’t even noticed he was injured. Now he looked down at his blackened stump in shock.
The creatures were gone. Nothing moved in the snow. The ball of lightning and fire was gone. Everyone around him was dead. But even more shocking was that the monastery itself, along with the ninety-odd raiders and scores of monks, had vanished. All that remained was a large bowl-shaped indentation in the ground.
He stumbled away from the site, looking back at the devastation. He did not know what it was that had attacked him, or where they had come from. But at the last moment, just before the blast, he had seen it. One of the creatures. He lacked the language to describe what he saw, but he would never forget it.
Agnarsson lost all of his men, his axe and his arm, but he had been spared his life for some unknown reason. And he did not understand why. But he would remember this night for the rest of his life. It would haunt him. His father had been wrong, there were things in the world that mortal men simply could not fight.
THE SOUND OF FEAR
ONE
Sao Paulo, Brazil
The Present, 2 November, 2200 Hrs
Sao Paulo was the largest city in Brazil and the largest in the southern hemisphere. It was also the sixth largest in the world in population. After today, it would be fourteenth.
The sky went bright with a loud crack and a crash of thunder. Lightning arced across the city, and a massive ball of glowing light appeared. It was yellow and swallowed several city blocks. The sphere crackled and pulsed as if it were made of pure energy. As it grew, the electrical phenomenon engulfed building after building. Security cameras around the city captured hazy, static-filled images of the creatures that eventually emerged. The first people to encounter them were torn apart. But even more people, still living, and screaming and gibbering, were dragged away into the spitting ball of fire.
After nearly twenty minutes, the globe of devastation sucked both sound and light out of the world before it winked out of existence. The crater left behind was immense. Buildings on the edge of the giant divot toppled inward, killing hundreds more still hiding in their apartments. Later, rescue workers would find that everything at the edge of the dome had been severed cleanly-buildings, roads, Metro tunnels and even human bodies, which littered the edge of the circumference of the effect. Over a million dead in just a few minutes.
Karachi, Pakistan
3 November, 0600 Hrs
As dawn bled light into the sky over the city, it brought thunder and lightning. But there were no clouds in the sky.
Karachi and its environs had grown from an estimated population of five million in 1980 to over twenty million-many of them refugees from successive wars in neighboring Afghanistan, first against the Russians, then against its own people and finally against the Americans. The city eventually took measures to purify the putrid and smog-coated air by planting more gardens and building more parks. Traffic was diverted onto high-speed overpasses. Still, the city continued to grow and grow, as refugees poured in.
The newest arrival appeared just as the noisy city was waking up. The ball of light hovered in the air, just a foot off the black asphalt, between the open doors of Jinnah International Airport and the McDonald’s restaurant that sat just opposite. Hundreds of crows complained at the interruption of their normal morning routine, scavenging food from nearby trash cans and along the edges of the road. They took flight, fleeing the intruding brilliance and cawing. The ball was no larger than three feet in diameter initially. But then it grew quickly and when it stopped, the fast-food franchise and a good portion of the airport were enveloped. Lightning crackled out of the center of the blinding sphere, blasting people and nearby structures.
The noise was deafening. As a repeated sound of thunder boomed, the cracks of bone-shaking sound pierced the morning air. Screams added to the din. Then something came out of the light, tearing into anything with flesh and rending it in seconds. The attacking thing moved too quickly to be seen in the dazzling light.
Then, with no warning, the piercing noise stopped, leaving only silence in its wake.
The light disappeared.
The sphere of devastation came and went in just ten minutes, but it took a scoop of the city with it. Cleaved buildings stood with their plumbing and electrical wires exposed; the ground was a perfectly smooth crater where previously asphalt, cars and pedestrians had been. It was as if a small sun had briefly made an appearance right on the surface of the Earth, clawing away all she held, until nothing remained. The tally of the number of dead or missing would take weeks, but in the end, it would be in the tens of thousands.
Seoul, South Korea
3 November, 1000 Hrs
The cable car that took visitors up to the top of Namsan Mountain, and the huge communications tower on top of the mountain, began to shake violently, before a blast of lightning severed the cable completely.