Even with the colorful airborne flak, Deep Blue knew he wouldn’t have much time. King was near the shattered window and the dire wolves were between them, stopped where they had been and so still that he couldn’t even see an eyeball moving. He wasted no time in firing on the dire wolves with the MP5. He ran through the falling confetti as he fired. He aimed at three of the beasts and drilled two of them in the eye, hitting a third in the chest, before the first two managed to fall off the walls, where they had crouched sideways.
As Deep Blue got up to where King stood, he could see that King had regained his senses but was unarmed. A quick peek back toward the portal showed King’s weapon on the floor, just in front of the glowing wall. Two dire wolves stood hunched over by the walls further down the hall, between him and the rifle. It was a loss. But the other thing wasn’t on the floor at all.
“Jack, where’s the nuke?”
“Sorry, Boss. I chucked it into the portal when I was under its control, but I forgot to arm it. The portal is putting something in the air-”
“Yeah, I got that part. I-”
“They’re moving again.” King pointed down the hallway.
King was right. The confetti had mostly fluttered to the floor. Deep Blue leveled the second confetti cannon he had nabbed from the nearby party supply store and fired it high in the air. One of the two dire wolves ran headlong at them and King snatched the pistol from its holster on Deep Blue’s leg. He fired three shots at the creature and hit its head each time, but the beast kept barreling toward them down the hallway.
“Look out!” Deep Blue shoved King into a door marked Stairs that had no handle-just a metal hand plate for pushing. King slammed into the door and it opened wide, spilling him onto the landing. At the same time, Deep Blue gambled that with the confetti in the air, the charging dire wolf really couldn’t see but was just striking out where it had last seen them. When the beast was nearly on him, Deep Blue lunged to the side, against the hallway wall. The dire wolf ran right past him and out the shattered window, into open space.
Deep Blue looked out the window to see the animal fall. Ole! he thought. Then he leveled the MP5 at the remaining dire wolf. This one had been content to wait for the confetti to settle, but its eyes swiveled in anticipation of being free to move unobstructed through the soon-to-be-clear air. Deep Blue put a burst of bullets in its cranium. The skull erupted in a gout of ichor resembling warm mayonnaise. The perforated beast sank to the floor as King was getting to his feet.
“You back to your normal self?” Deep Blue looked King up and down.
“Completely. Fresh air from the broken window helped. Shit. More of them!” King opened fire down the hallway as more of the creatures crawled and ran out of the wall of yellow light. As Deep Blue looked, he realized they wouldn’t be able to hold off that many.
And he was out of confetti.
“The stairs,” he said.
King stopped firing and bolted into the stairwell.
Deep Blue followed at his heels. “They were all over the outside of the building too. Keasling’s men are having a hard time of it.”
King leaned over the railing and looked down the stairwell, but turned quickly back to Deep Blue, his face grim. “Too many. Up!”
Deep Blue sprinted up the stairs until he hit the landing. King was still at the bottom of the stairs and fired as soon as the door opened, cracking the skull of the first dire wolf through the door. The body’s momentum carried it forward and down the lower flight of stairs to the next landing.
Deep Blue covered the door from the upper landing as King raced up the industrial gray steps to meet him. Just as King reached the landing, another creature leapt through the door and Deep Blue blasted it with a carefully controlled burst.
They continued up flight after flight of stairs, carefully picking off any of the monsters that got too close. When King passed a foam fire extinguisher on the wall of the 45 ^th floor, he halted and nimbly unlatched the bright red tank from the wall. He then leaned over the railing and blasted the contents of the extinguisher down the space between the flights of stairs. It was a narrow space, but it was enough for the burst of white foam to spatter into the air and cascade down several floors. The extinguisher ran dry as the first dire wolf reached a landing below them, stopped and opened its jaws in a snarl that looked almost comical.
Deep Blue fired two shots at it before the MP5 ran dry.
King threw the empty fire extinguisher canister down the flight of stairs, knocking the animal back and off balance slightly. Then he pulled up the pistol he had taken from Deep Blue. He had only one round left and no more magazines, so he aimed carefully and then fired.
The creature’s head crumpled inward. The bullet liquefied the brains, exited the back of the skull and pulled the white slurry out with it, splattering white gore across the wall. His stomach turned at the sight. If only I could unsee some of this shit. He turned and raced up the next flight of stairs with Deep Blue. The much-older man had managed to reload the MP5 faster than King had ever seen anyone do.
“How many more magazines?” He asked.
“Last one. Run faster.”
As though in response, the horde of dire wolves on the steps below resumed their loud pursuit, closing the distance.
FORTY-THREE
Somewhere
Everything was a deep rich shade of midnight blue.
Everything.
The bleak cloudless sky, the rocky ground littered with small round stones, and the distant, jagged, impossibly tall cliffs. Chunks of London that had passed through the portal were scattered around the area: building rubble, a street sign, a dead bird and half of a car, its occupants missing. As Shin Dae-jung, callsign: Knight, looked around the alien landscape, his eyes kept struggling to comprehend the complete lack of variation in the color of things. It made looking at things hurt. He had taken refuge behind some boulders to deal with the overwhelming sensation of nausea he felt while his eyes tried to perceive and adjust to the monotone surroundings. He strained to focus on the cliffs and to differentiate them from the sky. He considered removing his armored helmet for fear of vomiting inside it, but didn’t think it wise. He focused on controlling his body and his stomach contents stayed down. He activated the night-vision optics built in to the helmet’s visor and the night changed to a dim day. The technology amplified available light, but there wasn’t much of it. Still, the shades of green in the night-vision view had a few more contrasts than the overwhelming palette of blue did.
The air tasted metallic, like dirty coins, but was breathable. He deactivated the audio dampener-it would help more at this stage if he could hear dire wolves approaching. The place was deathly still.
He didn’t hear anything.
No wind, no animals or insects. Just vast emptiness.
Aleman was right. This isn’t our world-or dimension-or whatever. Everything about the place is wrong, or my perception of it is.
The land was flat and rocky, except for the cliffs on the horizon. Knight stood and surveyed the sight. No sign of dire wolves on the open plain. He remembered they could really move when they were on a stretch of flat open ground, so he figured they had all just raced off to the horizon while his stomach was doing flip-flops. That or they went underground somewhere.
With no rifle, no pistol and now only the corpse of the dire wolf he had stabbed and his KA-BAR knife to keep him company, Knight kept scanning the plains for a sign of another portal. If he found one, he would rush for it and try to use it to get back to the world-his world.
He knelt down and examined the corpse that was missing its feet and legs below the shin. The wounds were cauterized completely. Knight poked one of the stumps with the tip of his knife to see how thick the scar tissue was. Eventually, with enough pressure, the knife slipped through the skin and a pearl of thick fluid oozed from the puncture. He looked over the rest of the creature up close. It had foggy transparent skin, like a jellyfish. It was muscular. The eyes were weird as hell. The mouth was full of clear sharp teeth ranging between one and two inches in length. The claws, like the teeth, were transparent and deadly. He picked up the creature’s limp arm and placed the sharp blade against the clear skin and made an incision that cut all the way to the bone. After wiping off the blade and sheathing it, he pulled open the wound and looked at the bone. Clear. Like glass. He could see the tube of gray marrow running down its core.