Ragnarok (9 page)

Queen dropped Asya’s leg and stepped away from the impact. She was whirling back to ensure her opponent was finished when Asya sprang up from the ground, the top of her head catching Queen under the jaw, and knocking the latter’s head back until she lost her balance and slammed into the same car Rook had hit earlier. Before she could recover, and while her body was rebounding off the car, Asya landed a fierce left to the middle of Queen’s face, her nose very audibly breaking, and blood spattering across her porcelain face.

Instead of slowing her down, the injury seemed to reinvigorate the former Delta woman. Queen dropped low and lunged forward with both fists, driving the air from Asya in a loud belch-like burst, as the fists made contact with Asya’s middle. Queen followed through with a forearm to the side of Asya’s face, driving the smaller woman down onto the ground.

Asya’s left leg hooked behind Queen’s, and she was falling to the ground as well. All semblance of art and craft seemed to go out of the fight now, and the two were just feral. Attempting to kill the opponent was the only motivation.

Queen clambered onto Asya and pummeled her in the face repeatedly. The smaller woman squirmed and twisted, and as Rook watched, her legs somehow scissored up around Queen’s left arm and her neck. The tiny, slim legs locked behind Queen’s blowing blonde hair, choking the larger woman.

Rook’s anger grew. He knew Queen could handle herself in a fight with just about anyone except maybe God, but seeing her being hurt set his teeth to grinding. Not that he blamed Asya. He didn’t really want to see her hurt, either. But when he tried to shout out again, he discovered he’d barely caught enough breath to whisper.

Queen spared one hand to attempt to loosen the chokehold on her throat, but continued raining blows down with her other fist. On the next punch, Asya swiped blindly with her left arm and pushed Queen’s pistoning arm to the side, where the fist made contact with the ground instead of Asya’s blood-soaked face. Queen let out a howl of rage, and Asya torqued her hips and legs, driving Queen’s weight to the side and off of her. As Queen’s side hit the snow-covered ground, both women heard an ear-piercingly loud whistle. The sound was shrill and booming at the same time. It was immediately followed by a ferociously loud and growling voice.

“Knock it…the fuck off…now!”

Rook reached down, grabbed both women by the back of their shirts and pulled them violently apart. Neither one resisted. The two bodies deflated and crumpled as both women began to feel their injuries from the fight. Then they slowly began to get to their feet, with Rook standing between them and holding his hands up to each like a traffic cop.

“Not another punch.” Rook tried to appear menacing, but after the beating he had taken at the farm, he wasn’t in much shape to do anything if the women were determined to ignore him and tried again to kill each other.

Queen coughed once and spat out a mouthful of blood. Her nose was gushing crimson as well. Rook glanced to Asya and saw that Queen’s raining punches had split the Russian woman’s lip, and small cuts above both her brows were leaking blood into her eyes, which she simply swiped at with annoyance. He was grateful to notice that both women were breathing heavily and probably neither was in any shape to have another go.

“Normally I’d pay big money to see a fight like that, but we have more important things to deal with today. Asya, Queen is one of my people. She’s here to help.” He turned to Queen and motioned to Asya. “Queen, this is Asya. Long story short, she was held hostage, I freed her, she came back to ask for my help in something, but saved my life instead. She’s on my side.”

“
Your
side?” Queen looked ready to slug him again.

“Against the—forget it.” Rook looked to Asya and nodded toward the store. “Why don’t you go see if they have any bandages, and give us a chance to catch up.”

This early in the morning in the sleepy town, Rook was thankful there were no gawking bystanders. Asya nodded her curt Russian nod, and then stalked into the general store, keeping Queen in view with squinted eyes until she passed the threshold into the shop. Queen eyed the woman like prey until she disappeared through the doorway. Then she rounded her glare onto Rook.

“Not a fucking word from you for weeks—we didn’t even know if you were alive—and then you turn up in backwater reindeer country playing pattycakes with that little tramp?” she was shouting. She advanced on him and smacked him across the face, but it lacked power or even emphasis.

He looked her in the eyes and said nothing. She tried to hold his gaze for a moment, but then turned away.

“Things in Siberia were rough, Zel. I needed some time to get my head together.” Rook paused for a moment, then continued. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Knight lost men, too, Rook, but he didn’t run away and put his head in the sand.”

“Put my—” Rook’s face turned a few shades more red.

At that moment, Asya walked out, saw Rook’s face and turned right back around.

Rook rolled his neck, popping vertebrae. “They were slaughtered, Queen. Didn’t stand a fucking chance, and I couldn’t do a damn thing to help.”

“And now you know how I’ve felt since you disappeared,” Queen said.

While their mutual affection had been growing slowly for some time, this was the closest they’d ever been to honest about it. “Which is why I stayed away. If I came back I might have checked out. Those men that died, on any other day, they could have been you. Not sure I could have lived with that.” He waved his hand out toward the store. “Every time she landed a punch, I felt like throwing up.” He paused, suddenly out of words to say and wondering if he should take the next verbal step. But that scared him more than anything he’d faced before. “Zel...”

“Stop calling me that.”

“What?”

“My mother called me Zel. It means something.” Queen leveled her eyes on his. “You haven’t earned it yet.”

Asya returned a second time, carrying a box of band-aids and a small first aid kit that she tossed to Queen. The spell was broken as Queen caught the kit in the air with hardly a glance in its direction.

“So what the hell are you still doing here, Rook?” Queen’s countenance was all business now, any sign of affection disappeared the second Asya returned. For her part, Asya looked just as serious, but Rook was pleased to note that at least some of the tension between the two had dissipated.

“There’s a village north of here. Fenris Kystby. A former Nazi laboratory, strange wolves and now the entire populace of villagers, who only yesterday were thanking me, attacked me this morning like a scene from Night of the Friggin’ Dead. Something definitely wacky is going on in that town. And a friend of mine is dead because of it. I’m going back there, and I’m going to figure out what’s going on. You two can stay here and try to kill each other again, or you can come with me.” Rook climbed into the driver’s seat of the much-abused Volvo. Without a word—and without any haggling over shotgun—Asya slipped into the back seat while Queen took the passenger seat. Both women closed their respective doors at the same time and fastened their seatbelts.

“Alright, that’s what I’m talking about,” Rook said. Then from the backseat, Asya smacked her hand across the back of his head.

“Do not get cocky, Stanislav,” she told him. Queen snickered.

“God help me if you two become friends.”

FOURTEEN

Shanghai, China

KNIGHT BURST PAST the rusted, flaking roof access door to the balcony that ran around the clock tower, and raced to the edge of the tan concrete wall. Far below him and down the street, the energy ball still pulsed. He could feel its electrical hum in his teeth like he was standing too close to high tension power lines. Things were racing out of the globe of light and streaking down the abandoned street. About fifty feet closer to the clock tower, Knight saw that Bishop had taken cover behind an abandoned pale green taxi cab, and had set up his XM312-B across the hood of the vehicle. The big man was firing furiously at the speeding blurs as they shot from the crackling sphere, many of them clearly hit and knocked into the nearby river from the impact of the .50 caliber rounds.

But just as many of the things were getting past Bishop.

Knight quickly laid his EXACTO sniper rifle along the edge of the wall in front of him and targeted a space behind Bishop’s position. Knight pulled his eye from the scope and looked for the speeding blurs. One was looping back around and heading for Bishop’s back.

Damn, they’re fast.

Knight barely had time to guess at the thing’s speed before he fired the weapon at the empty space behind Bishop’s head, hoping he could hit the racing blur before it struck his friend from behind.

The bullet blasted from the muzzle of the rifle. A cloud of white burst from the far side of the creature’s head. The dead thing’s momentum carried it forward and it slammed into Bishop from behind, before rolling to the front of the cab, obscuring it from Knight’s view.

Bishop was knocked off his feet and simply rolled in one smooth move across the hood of the cab. He swung the barrel of the weapon back and fired at his previous position, blasting another creature and sending it smashing through the plate glass window of a cell phone shop. Broken plastic display phones skittered out of the shop across the pavement with clicking and clacking sounds, but again, Knight was denied a chance to actually see whatever it was Bishop was shooting at.

He began picking blurs and firing about ten to twenty yards in front of each, hoping to hit something. Every third shot or so, he needed to protect Bishop’s six from another speeding blur, but for half of those, Bishop himself swung around in a full 360º arc, firing with his machine gun. Knight couldn’t see if he was hitting the things, but he could tell, as they ducked and weaved before retreating, that Bishop wasn’t killing many of them, if he was hitting them at all.

Knight saw some the things tearing back toward the globe of crackling light. Then the movement was gone.

He looked for a new target and didn’t see anything moving down on the street. Knight finally had a chance to look for his fallen targets and was surprised to see so few.
Damn, I missed more than I thought.
He could see only three, and he knew there was a fourth in front of the cab.

“You seeing these things, Knight?” Bishop’s voice sounded loud in Knight’s earpiece as he shouted.

Knight looked through the scope of his rifle at one of the fallen bodies. He had hit it. It was missing a good portion of its muscular chest, but otherwise, the corpse provided him a pretty good idea of what they were up against. The beast was at least seven feet tall, and milky white. Long, powerful limbs were claw tipped, yet the creature was vaguely humanoid in appearance. The head was a bit blockish with a domed forehead through which he could see a white, spongy mass.

I can see through its skin,
Knight realized and then wondered,
is that its skull? Or its brain
? He glanced over the rest of the body and saw bundles of long, sinewy muscles twitching beneath the translucent skin.

The creature struck him as somewhat feline, especially the way it moved, but it was really unlike anything native to Earth. The most obtrusive feature was its eyes, which were huge orbs on the outside of the sides of its face.
Like a chameleon
, Knight thought, separately mobile and stereoscopic—able to look in multiple directions at once.

“I’m seeing the fallen ones. Having a hard time tracking the moving ones,” Knight replied, still eyeing one of the corpses.

“Yeah, I hear you. I’m—oh shit, here they come again.”

Knight pulled back from the scope and saw several more shapes blitzing from the ball of light down the street. Bishop opened up fire on them again, strafing across the street. Knight began taking targets as they came for Bishop, one after the next. The creatures were falling this time—he’d figured out the effective range ahead of their paths to fire now—but too many of them were getting past Bishop’s arc of fire, leaving Knight to pick them off. One bumped against Bishop, throwing his aim off, his stream of .50 caliber bullets passing harmlessly into the air. Knight could see more of the creatures advancing on Bishop. He fired again, taking down another creature and toggled his microphone, “Bishop, time to bug out man.”

Bishop dropped to the ground just as one of the creatures was about to hit him. Instead, it leapt over him and its momentum kept it going down the street. Knight let that one pass, even though he knew it would loop back on Bishop from behind. He focused on the next wave coming out of the glowing sphere.

Then an idea came to him. As he tracked another streaking form moving close to a line of abandoned vehicles, Knight chose a car three car-lengths in front of the speeding creature and unleashed the devastation of his sniper rifle on the fuel tank of a black Audi. The tank ruptured, sending fuel onto the ground, and Knight quickly fired a second round at the pavement, the spark of its impact igniting the fuel and the speeding creature. The explosion of the remaining fuel in the car made a deep bass thump and the car flipped over backward.

Bishop was on the move, leaping over the hoods of vehicles, then firing in a sweep, and then leaping again. Knight repeated the move, rupturing fuel tanks two more times before the creatures swept over to the boardwalk beside the river, well away from the cars.

“OK, tangos are intelligent, too, Bishop.”

Suddenly the staccato explosions of Bishop’s weapon stopped. Knight pulled his eye away from the scope and glanced up. He saw Bishop drop the big weapon, run up the hood of a Buick, and leap into the air toward the next abandoned car on the road, throwing a grenade behind him from the apex of his leap. Bishop landed on the roof of the bright red Ford in front of him, crunching in the thin metal, as the creature trailing him reached the Buick and the grenade as it landed. Knight targeted another creature chasing Bishop just as the explosion from the grenade sent up a huge cloud of smoke and debris, obscuring his shot.