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  Ragnarok

  ( Chess Team Adventure - 4 )

  Kane Gilmour

  Jeremy Robinson

  Kane Gilmour, Jeremy Robinson

  Ragnarok

  “The fetters will burst, and the wolf run free;

  Much do I know, and more can see

  Of the fate of the gods, the mighty in fight.”

  — The Poetic Edda

  “Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.”

  — Aristotle

  “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge.”

  — Rod Serling

  PROLOGUE

  Fenris Kystby, Norway

  The Past

  The deep, resonating beat of drums rolled through the early morning fog like the thunderous footfalls of a frost giant. In response to the sound, an alarm bell rang in the distance-tiny and pitiful. Hrolf Agnarsson knew the monastery’s monks would be rising from their slumbers and arming themselves, but he wasn’t concerned. He’d led many raids before, and the battle was often won before the ships even made landfall. If the drums didn’t do it, the fiery torches lighting the dragonhead prows sent most of the God-fearing men running.

  The drums reached a fevered pace as the ships cut through the fog. Agnarsson’s beard, clumpy with debris from a hastily eaten breakfast, twitched as the man grinned. The monk’s heartbeats would keep pace with the drums. By the time his raiding party reached the monastery, the men who remained would be exhausted from fear and from holding weapons in sweaty hands.

  There were times when he longed for a true fight, but he wasn’t ready to be sent to the halls of Asgard quite yet. Not when there was plundering to be done. Live like a King on Earth, his father taught him, and be greeted by Odin as a son.

  He looked up at the gray walls of the monastery. His smile widened when he saw several men fleeing from the gates. The Irish never put up much of a fight, he thought.

  Irish monks, persecuted refugees from their own island homeland, had decided to settle and build a small structure that had later blossomed into the gray, rock-walled monastery. Other Vikings had led raids on the Irish on their island, but Agnarsson had suggested he and his men come up and pillage the Irishmen right here at home. Monks always had good food and drink, as well as skins and books and other things that raiders could sell in the southern markets. Women would have made the raid even better, but Agnarsson had rarely found women in a monastery.

  The drums beat on, and for the first time, Agnarsson let his pulse quicken.

  The ship scraped over the smooth stones of the shore. The rumble beneath his feet acted like a trigger. “Hoooaaarrhhggg!” he shouted, thrusting his axe high into the air. The thirty men behind him abandoned their oars, stood and drew their weapons, joining in the war cry. Then, as one, they vacated the boat with him, jumping into the frigid knee-deep water with little thought or care.

  When the two neighboring longships unloaded, each carrying thirty more men, Agnarsson actually heard screams rise up from within the monastery. If they weren’t afraid before, Agnarsson thought, they are pissing themselves now.

  The knowledge quickened his pace.

  Rocky shoreline gave way to soft earth. His two-hundred-fifty-pound body left indentations with every step. Halfway to the monastery, he shed his skins and let them fall to the ground behind him. The furs had already begun to overheat his body, and in a moment, they would only be in the way. And his body-muscular and coated with the dried blood of previous kills-would set his foes’ legs to shaking.

  Agnarsson rounded the first of the outbuildings and came to a stop. There, standing before him, was something he’d never encountered before. Ten monks, armed with swords, stood waiting. He admired their bravery. Ten Irish monks against ninety Viking raiders. A ridiculous thing. Yet here they stood.

  He looked into their eyes and saw their fear. Brave, but not fools, Agnarsson thought. They know death has come for them.

  Ninety men stopped behind him, facing down the ten.

  And still, they stood their ground.

  This will not do, Agnarsson thought. He took pride in his ability to instill fear in men. That these men stood against that fear was an insult. He searched their eyes, seeing only terror. Then why…

  Then he saw it. One of the men held his sword like he knew how to use it. He might even be dangerous.

  They stand because of him.

  Agnarsson laughed and lowered his axe. He looked back at his men and they laughed, too. They all knew the joke and the punch line. It was time to share it with the monks.

  With a speed that belied his size, Agnarsson turned forward again and with a twitch of his arm, threw his axe. The heavy blade spun in oblong circles as it sailed through the air. It came to rest with a wet smack and buried deep in the rib cage of the brave man. Ribs split. Lungs burst. The man’s heart severed in two, freeing him from this world and the remaining monks from their duty.

  Swords struck the earth one by one as the nine remaining monks fled. They’d only made it five steps before the raiding party sprang into action. Waves of men surged past Agnarsson. He watched the glory unfold. Flames rose, along with screams. Monks fled, and died. Blood soaked into the earth.

  With the casual gait of a man who knew that life couldn’t get any better, Agnarsson strode up to the monk who held the axe in his chest. He put his booted foot upon the man’s chest and pushed. The ribs flexed and cracked, loosening their grip on the axe blade. With a slurp, the weapon came free. The weight of the weapon in his hands and the sight of blood dripping from it brought a fresh smile to his face.

  It grew wider still when he saw a monk fleeing toward him. The man had five raiders on his heels. And they would have overtaken the man if they hadn’t seen Agnarsson waiting, axe rising up. Taking careful aim, Agnarsson wondered if he could cleave the man in two. His muscles flexed. His grip tightened. He swung.

  And missed.

  As the axe split the air, a brilliant flash of light, made brighter by the white snow underfoot, forced his eyes shut. Blinded, he didn’t see the monk fall to the ground. The axe sailed through air and nothing more. The momentum of the missed blow nearly flung him to the ground, but he regained his balance and avoided the humiliation.

  He opened his eyes to more bright light. Lightning arced through the sky above him, crackling with the sharpness of breaking trees. Then he realized that the sound, in fact, was snapping tree trunks. He turned around toward the source of the light and found its brightness now missing, along with a portion of earth and the trees within it. Odin had reached down from Asgard and scooped away part of the world.

  As the monk behind him started praying to his “one true God,” Agnarsson turned toward the man. “It is a sign,” he said. “Odin takes from the earth as he desires. Just as he would have us do.” He raised the axe, but the monk was spared once again.

  An ear-splitting roar rolled over the monastery like a tangible spirit.

  The sound reverberated off the stone walls of the buildings his men had set alight. He could feel the sound in his heart, thrumming and humming. Hardened Viking raiders fell to their knees, some of them screaming in terror. The few remaining monks passed out or pissed their robes. Every man around him screamed as if his soul was being yanked out and flung down to Neifelheim.

  Agnarsson had known his men all his life. They feared nothing. No God and no man. But now they were weeping and blubbering like babes. Some of the men-his men-started to flee into the woods. So complete was their panic that not one
of them realized they were running toward the sound’s source, rather than away.

  That’s when he caught a glimpse of the thing moving like a breeze through the snows, leaping between the trees and even up onto the sides of them before springing away, almost too quickly for Agnarsson’s eye to follow. Then it was gone in the shadows.

  The first of his men to reach the trees was torn apart. Agnarsson didn’t see it happen, but the sounds of tearing flesh and muffled screams were fodder for the mind’s eye. Then the lower half of Magnus Trondheim’s red-haired legs flew through the air and tangled in the lower branches of one of the half-eaten trees. Other men had bolted at that sight, but Agnarsson had stood stock still, staring in wonder. He knew whatever the creature was, it wasn’t human.

  The roar came again, but this time from inside the monastery.

  There is more than one, Agnarsson realized.

  The few men still rooted in place came unglued, and with shouts of horror, they ran without mind or any sense of where they were going. Only Agnarsson remained in place, not because he was brave, but because he was petrified. He kept a firm grip on his axe while warm piss trickled down his inner thigh.

  His mind-spurred by lessons taught by a remorseless father, fought for control. It is too cursed fast to be a bear or a wolf.

  The roar came again, dropping him to one knee.

  The sound was closer, bouncing back at him from the trees and the falling snow all around him in the early morning gloom. A few of his men yet lived, but whimpered in terror. The vibration in Agnarsson’s eardrums was intense. His bones felt as if they rattled in his body. He couldn’t see the creature, but he knew it was near.

  Then he heard the movement. Fast. Coming right for him. He whirled around and swung his double-bladed axe wide, hoping he might strike the beast out of sheer luck and force.

  Instead, the world before him transformed into the sun.

  Brightness assaulted Agnarsson’s sight-so intense and painful that it scorched his eyes even through his tightly shut eyelids. Thunder shouted and lightning crackled again, this time blasting out from all around him.

  Guarding his eyes with his hands, he chanced a look and witnessed the giant ball of light collapse inward. Silence sucked the thunderous din away like a thirsty man slurping up the last of his mead, and Agnarsson was left alone in the dull light of early morning.

  His men lay dead in the shallow snow all around him. Some of them, caught half within the sphere of light and half without, had been cut cleanly in half.

  He looked down to see that his own body had been cleaved as well. His axe was gone and so was most of his axe arm below the shoulder. The wound had been closed with searing heat, the fire so hot he hadn’t even noticed he was injured. Now he looked down at his blackened stump in shock.

  The creatures were gone. Nothing moved in the snow. The ball of lightning and fire was gone. Everyone around him was dead. But even more shocking was that the monastery itself, along with the ninety-odd raiders and scores of monks, had vanished. All that remained was a large bowl-shaped indentation in the ground.

  He stumbled away from the site, looking back at the devastation. He did not know what it was that had attacked him, or where they had come from. But at the last moment, just before the blast, he had seen it. One of the creatures. He lacked the language to describe what he saw, but he would never forget it.

  Agnarsson lost all of his men, his axe and his arm, but he had been spared his life for some unknown reason. And he did not understand why. But he would remember this night for the rest of his life. It would haunt him. His father had been wrong, there were things in the world that mortal men simply could not fight.

  THE SOUND OF FEAR

  ONE

  Sao Paulo, Brazil

  The Present, 2 November, 2200 Hrs

  Sao Paulo was the largest city in Brazil and the largest in the southern hemisphere. It was also the sixth largest in the world in population. After today, it would be fourteenth.

  The sky went bright with a loud crack and a crash of thunder. Lightning arced across the city, and a massive ball of glowing light appeared. It was yellow and swallowed several city blocks. The sphere crackled and pulsed as if it were made of pure energy. As it grew, the electrical phenomenon engulfed building after building. Security cameras around the city captured hazy, static-filled images of the creatures that eventually emerged. The first people to encounter them were torn apart. But even more people, still living, and screaming and gibbering, were dragged away into the spitting ball of fire.

  After nearly twenty minutes, the globe of devastation sucked both sound and light out of the world before it winked out of existence. The crater left behind was immense. Buildings on the edge of the giant divot toppled inward, killing hundreds more still hiding in their apartments. Later, rescue workers would find that everything at the edge of the dome had been severed cleanly-buildings, roads, Metro tunnels and even human bodies, which littered the edge of the circumference of the effect. Over a million dead in just a few minutes.

  Karachi, Pakistan

  3 November, 0600 Hrs

  As dawn bled light into the sky over the city, it brought thunder and lightning. But there were no clouds in the sky.

  Karachi and its environs had grown from an estimated population of five million in 1980 to over twenty million-many of them refugees from successive wars in neighboring Afghanistan, first against the Russians, then against its own people and finally against the Americans. The city eventually took measures to purify the putrid and smog-coated air by planting more gardens and building more parks. Traffic was diverted onto high-speed overpasses. Still, the city continued to grow and grow, as refugees poured in.

  The newest arrival appeared just as the noisy city was waking up. The ball of light hovered in the air, just a foot off the black asphalt, between the open doors of Jinnah International Airport and the McDonald’s restaurant that sat just opposite. Hundreds of crows complained at the interruption of their normal morning routine, scavenging food from nearby trash cans and along the edges of the road. They took flight, fleeing the intruding brilliance and cawing. The ball was no larger than three feet in diameter initially. But then it grew quickly and when it stopped, the fast-food franchise and a good portion of the airport were enveloped. Lightning crackled out of the center of the blinding sphere, blasting people and nearby structures.

  The noise was deafening. As a repeated sound of thunder boomed, the cracks of bone-shaking sound pierced the morning air. Screams added to the din. Then something came out of the light, tearing into anything with flesh and rending it in seconds. The attacking thing moved too quickly to be seen in the dazzling light.

  Then, with no warning, the piercing noise stopped, leaving only silence in its wake.

  The light disappeared.

  The sphere of devastation came and went in just ten minutes, but it took a scoop of the city with it. Cleaved buildings stood with their plumbing and electrical wires exposed; the ground was a perfectly smooth crater where previously asphalt, cars and pedestrians had been. It was as if a small sun had briefly made an appearance right on the surface of the Earth, clawing away all she held, until nothing remained. The tally of the number of dead or missing would take weeks, but in the end, it would be in the tens of thousands.

  Seoul, South Korea

  3 November, 1000 Hrs

  The cable car that took visitors up to the top of Namsan Mountain, and the huge communications tower on top of the mountain, began to shake violently, before a blast of lightning severed the cable completely.

  Fifteen people sat inside the car that had nearly reached the top of its 1900-foot journey up a graduated height of 500 feet in altitude. The car plummeted 60 feet to the ground before they began to bounce and slide down the mountainside, leaving long grooves in the soil. Despite the impacts and jolts, all fifteen people survived the fall with nothing more than broken bones, multiple contusions and various cuts and scrapes.

  They we
re the lucky ones.

  As they plummeted down the mountain on one side, a sizzling globe of death appeared on the other side of the steel and concrete 777-foot tower at the summit of the mountain, chewing a hole in everything it touched. Spreading out in an arc of chaos and destruction, the unknown phenomenon scoured the northwest side of the mountain, erasing the Jung-gu and Seongdong-gu neighborhoods before imploding and leaving nothing more than a scar on the ground that stretched three miles in diameter.

  Cairo, Egypt

  3 November, 0300 Hrs

  At three in the morning, even a behemoth like Cairo slumbers. The incessant honking of vehicle horns dies down for just a few hours. They would start again around 5 a.m., but the cacophony would be softer than usual.

  The Egyptians, even in the middle of the night, were the first to mobilize military units against the phenomenon, their forces on a constant ready standby, after the recent events of Arab Spring.

  The Egyptian Army managed to get an M6-2000 main battle tank on site in time to fire its M1A1 main turret conversion kit gun, with its 20 mm shells, at the pulsing, glowing target. However, as far as the Egyptians could see, the massive shells made little difference, disappearing into the energy without a trace.

  Egyptian Air Force F-16 fighters arrived on scene just in time to fire a single AGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missile at the glowing sphere that stood hurtling lightning bolts where the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis hotel had been earlier that night. But just before the missile hit, the thundering roar and crackling light winked out, leaving an eerie silence in its wake. The remaining crater quickly began to fill with the waters of the River Nile. The missile plunged under the water and detonated at the bottom of the crater, sending up a sticky geyser of mud, water and sand. Cairo was about to get a new lake-right in the middle of the city.