She left a small window at the top of her doorway, about three inches in height-just enough for her to see out and into the field of light the window of the building provided. She could see that the sleet had lessened and turned into a light gentle flow of large, two-inch snowflakes. She had never seen such large flakes-not even in the Arctic islands of Russia, several degrees north of where she was now in Fenris Kystby. The flakes fell, but they lessened in intensity. The beasts would be coming soon. She would have to work quickly. This last part was delicate. She used the end of her electrical wire to gently prod holes in the ceiling of her snow cell. One wouldn’t be enough. She made a dozen holes, enough to see the roofline above her drift.
The bunker was a natural rise. The roof would provide a natural vantage point. She suspected that at least one of the creatures would utilize both it and the light the window cast onto the snowy valley below the bunker. She saw movement through her roof holes, as one of the monsters moved past her line of sight to crouch on the edge of the roof and scan the valley below with its bizarre head cocked askew and the large reptilian eye rotating on the side of its head.
She could also see movement outside her door. At least two of them. A gust of wind howled across the hill, bringing a curtain of white sweeping along the ground with it, like nature’s broom, sweeping things clean.
The movement outside the door ceased. Queen checked through the peepholes in her roof. The squatting creature above her remained locked in place, its powerful chest and arms per-fectly still. They wouldn’t move until the gust of wind stopped blowing snow around.
Now.
Queen tensed on her bent legs and thrust up through the roof of her snow cave, launching her body onto the concrete roof of the bunker and rolling in one swift move. The big white monster turned its head, but it was too late. Queen leapt onto its back and threw her cord over its head, pulling tightly with both hands and leaning back like she was riding a mechanical bull at a Texas dive bar.
The beast stood and wobbled backward as it clutched at its throat and the thick insulated cord that was cutting off its air flow.
Needing to breathe is a bitch, ain’t it? she thought, and held on harder as the twitching, bucking creature began to flail uncontrollably around the roof of the small 10 foot square bunker.
There were two more creatures in the dooryard of the building, illuminated brightly by the window, but snow still fell, obscuring their sense of the world.
Queen pulled her knees up and rammed them against the monster’s spine, using her powerful leg muscles to add thrust to the pull of the wire across the throat.
The creature was out of air and out of time. It staggered closer to the front of the building, and tipped over the lip, head first, with Queen riding its back like a trick equestrian. They dropped toward one of the stationary beasts and at the last second, Queen abandoned her cord and leapt off the falling creature’s back. As it hit the snow, she struck the head of a second beast, digging her thumb straight into its large tennis-ball like eye. The sound it made was horrendous. Not the roar that had incapacitated her earlier, with fear and trauma hallucinations, but a screeching wail of pain and dismay. She wrapped her broken hand around the other side of the thing’s head as a white jelly-like substance juiced over the thumb of her attacking hand. This beast was going down too, and she rode it into the snow, then rolled.
As soon as she landed in the drift, she moved her head up to check on the location of the third white creature, and then she froze in place. A few feet away, it twisted its head, swiveling its eyes in alternating directions, trying to make sense of the white noise wreaking havoc with its strange senses.
She stood slowly.
Confidently.
Then the last beast let loose its dreadful roar. She was expecting it this time; she knew that one or all of them would try to use the roar. She didn’t know how it worked, but she knew it had been responsible for her flashbacks and hallucinations last time.
Even expecting it this time, it brought her down, trembling in fear. Tears filled her eyes.
Her body shook more violently from the fear than from the cold, but the hallucinations did not attack her mind.
She knew where she was and what was going on around her, but she was scared shitless.
Drawn to her emotional fallout, as though it could smell her fear, the beast swiveled its eyes in her direction. It opened its maw slowly, showing a mouthful of jagged pointy teeth, all sharp and long in the front. Her fear spiked again and she shrieked.
The beast stalked toward her.
The snow stopped.
She watched in horror as the last flakes floated to the ground.
The creature opened its mouth wide enough to engulf her head. The muscles beneath its clear cheeks coiled. The jaws looked powerful enough to pulverize her skull.
The only response she could manage was a scream, but it wasn’t simply a primal fear response. It was a name. And it lent her strength. “Rook!”
FIFTY
Midtown, New York, NY
“Black Three!” Deep Blue was shouting into his headset to the helicopter pilot. “The building’s coming down. So are we! Move before you slice us to ribbons!”
King flipped over face first to spread his arms and legs in a classic skydiving stance, as he and Deep Blue fell from the roof of the collapsing Exxon Building. Thankfully, the building tipped away from them, not quite yet to a forty-five degree angle. He watched the helicopter peeling away toward the Time-Life Building fire two rockets at the lower portion of the Exxon Building below him. The rockets sank into the concrete of the building a few hundred feet below him. Stretched out between the underside of the Black Hawk and the impact sites of the two rockets was a black net, reminding King of the nets he had seen at the circus when he was a kid. Only this time, one side of the net was held up by a helicopter, and he was the one falling into it-from the roof of a skyscraper. Also, he had two otherworldly vicious brutes about to fall on top of him and rake his eyes out.
The air squealed with the rending of concrete and steel as the upper twenty floors of the Exxon Building fell over. When it reached a forty-five degree angle, the center of the building sheared, and tore from the hollow space created by its central elevator shafts. Some of the building ripped away and dropped above the heads of the falling dire wolves.
The helicopter dipped, allowing some slack in the net. King heard the distinctive sound of repetitive gunfire. Black Four, the co-pilot, was firing a side-mounted machine gun at the dire wolves above King.
Deep Blue slammed into the net a second before King did. Both men quickly grabbed onto the netting, which was a thin, nylon and elastic substance coated in black threads. The net bounced under the weight of the bodies, but almost as soon as King hit the net, the helicopter rose up and pulled the net taught at a sharp angle, leading up and away from the crumbling Exxon Building.