He looked up at the bleak sky. Something about this world made the creatures evolve this way. He remembered what Black Five said about how alternate dimensions could be similar, but also incredibly different. Was it the atmosphere? The sun? Or simply a completely different set of physical laws? With no way to find out, and no new insights on how to kill the creatures, beyond putting a bullet in them, Knight put the arm down and stood. One more unsolved mystery.
The variant shades of night-vision green showed no life signs and no portals. He prepared his stomach and then deactivated the night vision and looked out through the normal visor view for a sign of a portal. The view was less unsettling now that he knew to expect the constant shade of midnight. Still, nothing that looked like a portal, a structure or a living creature. He reactivated the night vision and turned to face the distant cliffs. They were the only aberration in what seemed to be otherwise endless rocky plains.
Cliffs it is, then.
With the knife in hand, he began walking. He took only a handful of steps before he became convinced that someone-or something-was watching him. He looked around, but still saw nothing but the plains. He kept walking toward the cliffs, switching the night vision on and off occasionally, just to be sure that one spectrum of light wasn’t preventing him from seeing something that the other might reveal. Nothing.
So he walked. The feeling that something was following him-or just observing him-remained. As a sniper, he knew that feeling. The feeling of having a long barrel targeting your every move, ready to send death with a few pounds of pressure on a sliver of metal. He was on the other end of that feeling, but recognized it in his targets when, as though warned by some sixth sense, they turned and looked directly at him. He was usually too far away to actually be seen, but if anyone ever did see him, they died with the image.
When he came to a small pile of waist-high boulders, he dove behind them and rolled to a stop on the other side. In the dive, he turned his head and looked back behind him. Old submarine commanders called an abrupt change of direction ‘clearing the baffles.’ The idea was to change course unexpectedly, allowing you to see a stealthy pursuer. But like with his other attempts to spot any pursuit, which he was convinced of now, he saw nothing.
Dejected, Knight resumed his trek to the cliffs. They were further than he had thought. He felt like he had walked for at least an hour, but the cliffs appeared no closer. He felt ravenously hungry and reached into a canvas pouch on the outside of the armored suit, withdrawing a high-energy protein bar. He squatted on his haunches, turning as he did so, clearing the baffles again, but as usual, he saw only the rocky field around him. He took off the helmet and ate the protein bar, trying not to fully taste its chalky flavor. The suit had a built in Camelbak water reservoir. He removed the plastic tube from its holster on his left shoulder and bit down on the valve, sucking the warm water into his body to flush the debris of the protein bar down. He took another gulp and then put the tube away. He didn’t know how long the water would last him, but he figured it would be better to conserve it.
He put the helmet back on and activated night vision again, then resumed his walk. He checked the Suunto watch on his wrist, but found it had been damaged in the fight with the dire wolf on the bridge. The face was cracked, and a piece of the plastic bezel stuck out at a weird angle. He considered just ditching the thing, but then realized he’d be making a trail on the rocky ground. He stopped and squatted again, but this time, it was to pick up one of the many flat round stones on the ground. It looked like a flat skipping stone you would find near a river. He dropped it into a zippered pocket and resumed the march to the cliffs.
Eventually, he got tired and had to stop. The cliffs were still a distance off. He sat and removed the helmet. There was no cover anywhere, so he just sat in the middle of the rocky plain and took in the rich hues of navy blue that covered everything like a blanket of night. It felt like night to him too. He and Bishop had been on the go for how long? He looked at his watch again. Still broken. The bezel fragment had snapped off at some point. He rubbed his hand over his smooth face. He had never been able to grow a beard-with his Korean ancestry, his abilities to grow body hair were pretty limited. So a five o’clock shadow wouldn’t be arriving any time in the next decade to help him determine the passage of time. Ultimately, he realized it didn’t matter. However much time passed, he would get out of here as soon as he could. He would keep heading for the cliffs and he would do whatever it took.
Exhaustion began to take its toll on his body, and even though he sat cross-legged on the uncomfortable rocky ground, his head kept nodding. Eventually, he lay down on his side, his sleep-deprived mind rationalizing why it would be perfectly safe to do so, and how he would remain vigilant, nonetheless. He was a sniper after all. He was trained to stay awake in combat situations for days on end. He would be fine. There was nothing moving on the plain.
Then his mind cajoled him to allow himself just a few minutes of eyes-closed rest.
I won’t go to sleep deeply. Just a few minutes, that’s all.
And then he slept. Deeply.
For years.
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.