King looked up to see Rook wrestling with the White team member. He raced over to help, but the White soldier that had shot at him was now plowing toward him. He dodged to the side, running up a small hill of rubble, then spun around and jump-kicked at the man’s head. Although the soldier wore the armored helmet, King hoped the kick would at least knock the man unconscious. But the soldier ducked the kick.
As King flew over the man, he saw Beck was up and duking it out against Matt Carrack. And the Russian still fought one of the other White security men. She leapt nimbly and gracefully, while her opponent bull-rushed her.
King landed on his feet, glancing at the woman. She looked incredibly familiar to him. He couldn’t understand exactly why. He had never met her.
The woman slipped up the soldier’s back, wrapping her legs around his upper chest, then her hands quickly found the buckles on his helmet and pulled it off. King saw that it was White Five, a quiet man with blonde hair and an always serious face. Five threw himself over backward with the hope of crushing her with his weight. She unwrapped her legs from his chest, and cartwheeled away from the impact of his body. She arrested her spin, reversed and leapt. A second after White Five hit the floor, her hand chopped at his neck. Then she was up and away.
The neck strike was the same he’d used on Queen.
He tried to remember where he’d learned the move, but couldn’t.
King heard Rook growling behind him and turned to see his friend hefting a massive slab of concrete and dropping it on the armored chest of his opponent. The armored man struggled but didn’t have the leverage or the abdominal muscles to get up from under the slab. Then Rook sat down heavily on top of the slab, adding his 200 pounds of muscle.
King almost laughed.
Then he heard a scream. He looked behind him. Fenrir had stepped further into the room, and as King turned, a giant three-fingered hand swept across the floor, scooping up one of the still-helmeted White security soldiers and flinging him against the wall of the room-over sixty feet up. Then the man’s armored body plunged to the floor, crashing hard again. King hoped the body armor could withstand such blows.
Fenrir stepped further into the room, revealing two more legs and its hind quarters, a stubby lump of loose flesh stained with defecation. Nearly fifty liquid-filled sacks dangled from its body. Some of the creatures inside were waking up, twisting and clawing. With a gust of viscous liquid, one of the pouches ruptured, disgorging a fresh dire wolf onto the battlefield. The creature landed on all fours, shook the fluid away like a wet dog and sprang into action, joining the fray.
King twisted just in time to avoid yet another strike. The White soldier returned, launching himself at King. Up close, King could see a small Chess Piece insignia of a King on the man’s shoulder plating with a number 1 in the center. It was a quick homemade job, but King appreciated the sentiment anyway. White One again ran at King, all power and no finesse. King ducked a swinging punch and came up behind the man, his hand quickly sliding to White One’s neck and the helmet buckle restraints. He only got one before the man turned and kicked. King caught the kick in the stomach. It had been aimed at King’s unprotected chest, but he diverted the blow with his forearms, driving it down to the armor plating covering his lower body. The kick still had enough force to drive King backward, but not enough to knock him down.
Beck was still battling Matt Carrack-her opposite number with the callsign of White Zero-and their battle shifted closer to King’s. She was holding her own, but both combatants looked exhausted to King.
White One again rushed at King, who threw himself forward into the man’s chest. He wrapped an arm around White One’s middle and threw his other hand to the back of the neck, getting the second clasp. As they fell, King wrenched the helmet free, and still gripping it, swung his arm back at the man’s head, smashing the helmet against his head. The man fell and King worried that he might have hit the soldier too hard. He didn’t want to kill him-he was being controlled. King reached down and pulled off his armored glove. He reached for the man’s neck, checking for a pulse.
Before he could, a roar tore through the air, but it sounded nothing like Fenrir, or any of the dire wolves. It didn’t even sound organic.
Two glowing eyes emerged from the portal, followed by a white, boxy creature.
Not a creature, King realized as the shape became clear. A Humvee!
The battered vehicle, covered in white, gelatinous gore, skidded to a stop, flinging a dead dire wolf from its hood. Another dead dire wolf, this one missing it’s lower half, was jammed into the front wheel well. A coil of clear intestines slid down the driver’s side door. The thing looked like it had plowed through an army of the things.
The door flung open, sending the guts to the floor.
Bishop, still wearing his body armor, but no helmet, stood from the vehicle looking like a warrior from some other world. He looked down, saw a grenade launcher one of the White team had dropped and bent to pick it up.
Knight slid out behind him. “Punch line, Bishop. You can’t make an entrance like that and not have a punch line.” When his boots hit the rubble covered concrete floor, Knight didn’t miss a beat. He ran across the room in what appeared to be a loin cloth. His hair was back in a ponytail and whipped around him as he ran. He was covered in white dust. As he ran, he scooped up a discarded rifle.
Despite Knight and Bishop’s sudden arrival being a shock, King recovered quickly enough to notice a familiar shape strapped to Knight’s back.
It can’t be…
Fenrir looked down at the disturbance in time to see Bishop fire a 40 mm grenade right up at her belly, where a curtain of still-growing dire wolves hung in their liquid-filled sacks.
Before the first grenade had hit, Bishop fired another at her ass.
SIXTY-EIGHT
Gleipnir Facility, Fenris Kystby, Norway
4 November, 0400 Hrs
The explosion was tremendous. The shockwave sent Bishop flying backward into the portal, where he disappeared through the bulging, straining wall of brilliant light. Flames leapt up from Fenrir’s gut, but were quickly extinguished as several of the sacks burst, spilling their fluids and partially formed young to the floor. Fenrir let out an anguished roar that could have been fueled by pain or anger of the loss of her children. Its big body tensed and closed what looked like several large pores running along its flanks.
From one side of the giant room, away from the fight, a door opened and several bewildered people in lab coats with blonde hair ran out and raced for the small door that led outside the lab. Wind and snow still swept into the chamber from the ruined ceiling and the open hangar doors that Fenrir had been heading for, before Bishop’s grenade attack.
Knight ran to the metal stairwell with the FN-SCAR rifle he found and raced up the steps. Queen stood from where she had lain, rubbing her neck and squinting hard, as if she had a vicious headache. Carrack stopped fighting Beck, and looked around at the chaos around him. Beck recognized that Carrack was no longer under control. She moved away and toward the hangar door, looking for another weapon in the ruins. Deep Blue stood up from behind a long steel I-beam and looked wobbly on his feet.
King saw all of it happening around him. He threw another grenade at Fenrir’s front feet-his last-then ran to join Beck and look for another weapon.
Rook was standing, still favoring one shoulder, but he had opened fire on the creature with an MP5 dropped by one of the White team. He focused his fire on Fenrir’s flattened pug nose, and as the creature moved its head away, Rook followed it with the stream of bullets. The MP5 was equipped with a Beta C-Mag-the cartridge looked like two flat drums on either side of the weapon’s barrel. It held 100 rounds of ammunition, and Rook had found more of them at his feet in a black nylon bag next to Reggie’s impaled body. He kept the stream of fire sizzling through the air and then was joined by FN-SCAR fire from the stairs as Knight climbed, and by more MP5 fire, from Queen.