He scooped up a handful of the strange grit on the ground in his left hand, as if he was struggling to stay on his hand and knees. The truth was that after vomiting, his body felt far better adjusted to the strange sights. He was almost back to normal. He just hadn’t gotten up yet. He pulled a knee up, as if in agony, but actually hoped to spring up to his feet. Then he slowly dragged his right hand under his body, as if he was holding his stomach in agony. Instead, he pulled the handle of his SOG SEAL knife from its sheath on his massive armored chest. He had formerly relied on a KA-BAR, like the rest of the team, but since Deep Blue had formed Endgame and taken over the old Manifold base as a headquarters in New Hampshire, Bishop had started field-testing lots of different equipment for fun. Deep Blue obtained what he felt was the best of the best for the team, and the base had racks of armaments from which to choose. Bishop had found the 12-inch knife with the 7-inch blade and instantly fell in love. On a smaller man, the size of the knife might have made it unwieldy. But Bishop was a mountain of a man.
The noise scuffed again, just behind him.
Bishop sprang up, whirling in a 180 degree circle. It wouldn’t be the first time he shocked an opponent with how quickly a man of his size could move.
His hand came whistling around, spraying the soil at the eyes of the dire wolf, which stood just taller than Bishop did. His second hand followed through on the spin and sliced out with the SOG blade. The edge raked across the beast’s chest, and the creature let loose with its natural defense mechanism-the devastating aural attack that made the thick bones in Bishop’s body vibrate as if they were about to explode.
Under normal circumstances, the roar would paralyze an opponent. Fear would course through their bodies at the fight-or-flight reflex the roar triggers. But Bishop had just the one major fear. It dwarfed everything else and was a fear he lived with every day. When Chess Team had first gone up against Richard Ridley’s Manifold Genetics company, they had captured Bishop and experimented on him at the genetic level. Bishop had been transformed into a ‘Regen.’ He had developed amazing regenerative abilities, healing from minor wounds in seconds and could even grow back severed limbs like a salamander. But those amazing abilities had come with a heavy price. Each time his body regenerated, his mind lost a shred of his humanity until he became nothing more than a raging monster. He had battled the condition with meditation and eventually with a crystal from the Neanderthal city of Meru in Vietnam, which had negated the rage effects he felt with a combination of vibrations and ionization. He didn’t buy into things like crystals and UFOs, but the one from Meru worked, and that had been clear to everyone.
Ultimately, his genetic structure had been fixed, removing the regenerative abilities, and with them the likelihood that he would transform into a raving maniac again. But the fear never left him. The nightmares came nearly every night. He put on a good facade for the team, but inside he lived with the constant worry that he would one day lose control and start killing every living person around him. He lived with the fear that he would eat their bloodied corpses like a deranged African lion, pulling and tearing at the flesh in long strips and unrecognizable chunks.
The dire wolf in front of him wasn’t finished howling when the fight-or-flight reflex in Bishop manifested. But for Bishop with his fear of losing all control, the reflex simply made him hallucinate that he had. He lunged forward before the dire wolf had closed its mouth and before it could move. Bishop grabbed the beast around the back of its head and sank his teeth into the creature’s throat, ripping and tearing at the white translucent skin. Fluid filled Bishop’s mouth as he continued to bite and tear at tendons pulled as tight as piano wires. His powerful meaty hands clutched the back of the dire wolf’s head, so it couldn’t escape.
The creature backpedaled, and fell over in shock, dead before it could hit the rocky salmon soil. Bishop rode the falling creature to the ground, but even the impact couldn’t dislodge him.
He didn’t stop eating for a long time.
FORTY-NINE
Outside, Fenris Kystby, Norway
3 November, 2330 Hrs
Queen moved away from the trap door, back in the direction she had traveled underground in the tunnels and the labs. The snow drifted to above her knee in places. She found it hard to believe this much snow had fallen in just a few hours. The landscape was completely different from how it had been when Rook led her and Asya down to the secret hatch.
She moved steadily through the snow, heading toward what she expected would be a much more obvious entrance back into the facility. The room with the giant metal cage had huge hangar-style doors. She knew they must open to the outdoors somewhere. The land was hilly with small rises and valleys, but she moved at a rapid pace, despite the snow. She kept looking back, waiting for the white-skinned creatures to appear. They would blend perfectly into the snowy landscape-natural camouflage. But she knew they couldn’t see properly with any kind of obstacles in the air. The sleet would play havoc with their perceptions. They might even still be back at the hatch.
She couldn’t waste time. She needed to get closer to the hangar doors-wherever they were-and then find a place to make a stand. If the snow and sleet stopped, those things would be after her.
Queen crested a small rise, and ahead she could see a rectangular hill in the snow, which looked to be about four or five feet taller than the rest of the hill. Like a bunker, she thought.
She moved toward the shape, at times in snow almost up to her hips. As she got closer, she could see that her original thought about a bunker wasn’t far off. The structure was a gray concrete, although it was difficult to see it clearly, as she approached it. Snow coated its flat roof. Small ice crystals clung to the vertical sides of the building. Its most notable feature from a distance was the small window set into the side of one wall. Light poured out of the tiny window like blasting rays of the sun.
When she reached the wall, she could see decorative swastikas carved into the cement. The bunker had the look of a WWII-era German structure. Each symbol was perfectly centered above a feature of the building-one above the small window, which was too small to climb through and not much larger than her face, and the other above a long-since-rusted metal door. The symbols had faded with time and weather, and upon closer inspection, it looked like someone had made a concerted effort to chip them away. The small bunker-like building sat atop a hill, exposing Queen to harsh winds. The top of the building’s roof, just a few feet above the snow, was mostly clear of piled snow, blown away by the wind.
She inched close to the window, but couldn’t make out anything more than the blisteringly bright light that streamed out, making the rest of the un-illuminated area around the bunker darker by comparison. She swept away the snow covering the door and discovered it was covered by earth as well. The upper hinge was on the outside of the door. There would be no way to get the thing open. It reminded her of the double doors in one of the abandoned labs that Rook had shown her. That room had a small window that was covered over almost entirely by soil and snow, too. She hadn’t seen that window on her way to this hill. She assumed it would be completely covered by snow now.
The snow was letting up. Her hand began to throb and swell. Her gloves were long gone, so she reached into a pocket of her jacket and pulled out the fleece headband she had worn earlier to hide her brand. Her ears were cold too, but they would have to wait. She needed her hand. She used her teeth and ripped the fleece along its seam, and then wrapped her broken hand with it, using it like a bandage.
With the additional warmth and support from the fleece, she then wrapped the wire around her hand again, to use it as a garrote, when the time came. Then she looked again at the way the window cast light onto the snow and had an idea. She moved to the side of the window and began to scoop snow away from the bottom of the huge drift against the side wall. Soon she had to get on her hands and knees to move the snow out of the makeshift cave she was creating. The hole would be just large enough for her to squat in, and the top would come just a few inches under the top of the snow drift. The snow packed nicely, and she could tell that the roof wouldn’t collapse in-at least not until she needed it to. Once she could fit inside the small shelter, she started scooping more snow, but this pile she placed at the entrance, sealing herself in. By the time she was nearly done, Queen was soaked with sweat. She hoped the white beasts didn’t have a good enough sense of smell that they could detect her even through the natural sensory countermeasure provided by the falling snow.