She held the trigger down as snow fell into the expansive room. She saw King helping Deep Blue remove his cracked black helmet. Beck was helping Asya up.
She lingered on Asya. The woman looked incredibly familiar, but Queen couldn’t put her finger on why. The way she fought. The way she moved. The look in her eyes, or her eyes themselves. The two women moved over to Deep Blue and King, and the idea that had been scratching at the back of Queen’s head since she had met the Russian woman burst into her frontal consciousness.
Son of a bitch. I know who you are, lady.
She didn’t see Rook anywhere, until she heard him, and his voice distracted her from her new revelation about Asya. He stood across the room, covered in dusty grime.
“Like it hasn’t been a bad enough day,” Rook shouted. “I had to drop the friggin’ ceiling on everyone. Goddamned, buck-toothed, white marshmallow lookin’ cocksuckers!” He sprayed bullets from the M-16, mowing down the stationary dire wolves, dropping three of them before his rifle ran out of ammunition. “Bastards!” He dropped the M-16, and charged toward the remaining six dire wolves that stood still.
“Rook,” King called out.
Rook ignored him, pounding forward. He drew a Browning pistol he must have picked up during the fight. He walked right up to the first dire wolf, placed the weapon up to the creature’s head at a distance of no more than two inches, and fired. The far side of the dire wolf’s white head exploded outward. Rook headed for the next creature. It turned toward him as he got close, but he still shot it from point-blank distance, before it had time to react.
“Rook!” King called out again. Rook ignored the call as he walked up to another dire wolf and executed it. The creature’s body jolted from the shot and flopped onto a pile of dirt. “Rook!”
Then King called out again, and Queen and Deep Blue lent their voices to the call.
“ROOK!”
Rook angrily turned to face the team by the open hangar doors across the wreckage-strewn floor. “For the love of-What? What do you want?”
Deep Blue, King, Queen, Asya, the woman Rook knew as a ‘Pawn’ from a previous mission-now called Black Zero-and three of the soldiers in the white armor all stood still. Only some of them had their mouths hanging open, but each and every one of them was looking at Rook.
No, Rook thought. Not at me.
Above me.
Rook spun around. A ten-foot tall mound of white goo, like a massive clump of melted Gozer the Gozerian Stay Puft marshmallow, stood in front of the portal. When a stiff breeze carried away the smoke, he saw it wasn’t goo at all.
It was loose skin.
On a foot.
The size of an SUV.
The ridges at the base of the mound were not ridges, but toes. Three thick digits, each the size of a man, coiled and twitched, as though in anticipation.
Rook stepped backward, looking up, up and further up as he moved.
The ten-foot-tall foot connected to a powerful leg that went another twenty feet up before bending at a knee, and disappearing into the light.
Rook stumbled backward over some rubble and went down on his ass.
Above the backward-bending leg, a gigantic chest appeared. Ten-foot-tall cloudy-skinned sacks dangled from the torso like pendulous breasts. Two. Then four. Then six. They kept coming. Inside each were dire wolves in different stages of growth, floating in mottled white and red fluid.
The room shook as the monster took a step forward, bringing a second leg through the portal. The sacks swayed back and forth, the fluid inside them gurgling. Then the head came through.
In many ways, it resembled the smaller dire wolves. The rounded snout held a flat nose just above a wide, curving mouth full of shovel-sized, transparent teeth. Its round chameleon eyes, each the diameter of a hula-hoop, twitched back and forth, taking in the entire room as they swiveled independently of each other. But the skin, while transparent, hung in loose folds that warbled and swayed. And while quasi transparent, it also glistened, like it was covered in millions of tiny scales.
The giant’s brain, which was visible beneath the clear skin and skull, was the size of a VW Bug, but it looked better formed than the sponge-like dire wolf brains. And it moved, pulsing inside the head, like a heart.
As the top of the torso slid out of the portal, a pair of shorter arms emerged. They were connected to the body below the head, but set back. The fifteen-foot-long limbs resembled Popeye’s arms, thin at the top, but with muscular forearms. A three-fingered hand tipped each arm.
When a third leg stepped into view, Rook had seen enough and for the first time in his life, he tried to speak and found himself speechless.
SIXTY-SIX
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
4 November, 0330 Hrs
King watched as a fourth massive foot stepped out of the portal, this one crushing a dead dire wolf under foot. He’d seen a lot-the Hydra reborn, living stone giants, man-eating praying mantises-but this…this put them all to shame. At eighty feet tall, it was by far their largest adversary, but it was also just plain nasty.
Rook scrambled backward on the floor over the rubble with his hands and feet, shoving to gain some distance from the titanic creature. “Thing is fugly!” He turned and climbed to his feet, racing across the room to the others.
Deep Blue, King, Carrack, and the remaining three White team soldiers all heard Lewis Aleman’s voice over their earpieces. He was seated back on the Persephone, outside the lab. “I’ve lost visual contact. Not sure what’s going on inside. Be advised. I’ve done linguistic analysis on the name you saw above the hangar doors outside the place. Gleipnir. It was a mystical cord used to capture Fenrir, a giant wolf in Norse mythology. Not sure how much that helps, but watch out for giant wolves I guess.”
Deep Blue touch activated his microphone and the others heard his reply, “Nice to know, Lew. Better late than never, I guess. See what else you can find on Fenrir. Like how to kill it.”
“Seriously? Is now the best time for-oh shit. Really?”
“Well, it’s not a wolf,” King said. “But it’s off its leash for sure.”
“Somebody please shoot it,” Rook said.
King opened fire on the creature with an MP5. The bullets ripped a line into the creature’s chest. It raised its head, below which hung a white, fleshy waddle.
It tilted the head back.
The waddle expanded.
And it howled.
The sound shook the facility’s walls. Ceiling fragments rained down, crashing into Beck and the Russian woman. The floor shook like a 7.7 earthquake, knocking people off their feet. Some of the team fell to their knees in abject terror. Those who had yet to deal with the roar of the dire wolves were unprepared for the effect.
King remained unaffected, as he had been the last time, with the roars of the dire wolves in Chicago and New York. Queen had mastered battling the effect with her rage, so Fenrir’s roar only made her feel weak. The men in the white armor-Carrack, White One, White Three and White Five-were shielded by the audio dampeners in their helmets. They each opened fire on the gargantuan creature. Deep Blue wasn’t wearing his helmet and he fell to the floor in a fetal position. The roar affected Rook, too. He fell to a sitting position, curled into a ball on the floor and rocked back and forth.
King fired again at the creature, this time aiming up near the ceiling of the huge room, at the giant beast’s head. The White team kept shooting and Queen fired at the narrowest parts of the creature’s leg in a concentrated burst, sending globs of fish-like meat spinning off in an arc from the limb. The wounds looked large until King looked at them in context. They were like scrapes to the giant. Barely noticeable, if at all.