Ragnarok cta-4 Read online

  Los Angeles, CA

  2 November, 1800 Hrs

  Rush hour was still grinding away when a spherical chunk of the freeway evaporated in a ball of sizzling light and blistering beams of lightning that speared through random motorists and their pastel colored minivans and coupes. Traffic had stopped anyway, so hundreds of motorists simply abandoned their cars and ran away from the brilliant orb. Most of them eluded the lightning strikes, although a few were electrocuted as they ran. One man was hit by a glancing blow that sent him into the air across five cars, only to roll off the hood of a Ford Taurus and resume his sprint as if nothing had happened.

  Brian Daly sat transfixed as he watched it all happen through the windscreen of his tan Prius. He wondered briefly if he should also get out and run, as Lightning Man was doing, but then he saw the things streaking out of the ball of light. They were drawn to the fleeing people-hunting them. Daly noticed that the creatures ignored the motorists still in their cars, so he sat as still as he could, allowing only his eyes to move as he followed the carnage.

  The things were fast. Damn fast. And hard to see. They weren’t immaterial, like ghosts, but there was something strange about them. They were…indistinct, though that could also be from the fact that much of what he was seeing was in his periphery.

  They were strong, too. He saw several people attacked, their limbs or heads torn away with ease. The things moved on all fours like animals, but could also stand or run on their hind legs, erect, like humans. But these things were not human. Not even close. One of the creatures raised its head, but all Daly saw was its bulbous eyes, swiveling back and forth like a chameleon’s, before it ducked away, racing after anything that moved and ignoring anything that cowered.

  Daly sat transfixed and somehow remained eerily calm, as if he were watching a summer blockbuster, instead of the deaths of hundreds of rush-hour drivers. Then one of the creatures clambered atop the roof of a GMC Suburban to his left. He strained his eyes for a better view, but didn’t dare rotate his head. In his peripheral vision, he saw the thing lift its head to the sky like a wolf and howl.

  The sound was devastating-a soul-cutting, sonic assault, unlike anything Daly had ever heard. The sound shook the bones inside his skin. He lost control of his bowels. His bladder let go and the saliva in his mouth began to pour down over his lower lip as if he’d been in a dentist’s chair with a few gallons of Novocain pumped into his system. Terror took hold of him. His eyes went wide. His body shook uncontrollably.

  Later, after the creatures returned to the light, and the globe of lightning flickered out, leaving behind an enormous crater and thousands dead or dying, Brian Daly’s mind finally returned to some semblance of what it had been. But he would never be the same. He didn’t know what he had just seen, but he knew that local police forces would be helpless against it. Whatever those things had been, even the military would be hard-pressed to stop them. Still, he needed to tell someone what he had just seen. His brother Steven was an Army Ranger. Steve was just a captain, but he might be able to get the information to someone higher up. Daly pulled out his cell phone and called his brother as fast as his shaking fingers would allow.

  Philadelphia, PA

  2 November, 2100 Hrs

  Moments after the carnage in the other cities began, the Liberty Bell began to glow.

  Currently situated in the Liberty Bell Center, adjacent to the glass pavilion that had housed the bell from 1976 until 2003, the bell is the object of visitation by over a million tourists a year. But the facility closed to visitors at 5 p.m.. Only three security guards remained on hand when the inscription on the bell, Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof, began to luminesce. One of the three guards-the one furthest from the actual 2,080-pound copper-and-tin attraction-had just enough time to slap his hand on a large red emergency alarm before the surge of light engulfed him.

  Police responded quickly. They closed 6 ^th Street and set up barricades on Market and Chestnut, thinking people would be safe at that distance. They were wrong.

  Sergeant Gina Martinez stepped out of her cruiser at the barricade to an unholy sight. A giant dome of intense light throwing forked spears of lightning. Thunder boomed despite the clear sky full of stars above her head. She stepped up to the edge of the park, her mouth agape at the sight. The spectacle washed out the strobing colors from her cruiser’s light bar as well as from the forty others arrayed around her on the street and up on the sidewalk.

  What the hell is that? she wondered.

  “Clayton,” she called to a plainclothes detective who was near her. “What is this thing? Terrorist attack?”

  “Beats the hell outta me. We got an alarm on the bell. Thought it was a B amp;E or something. We’re trying to keep people out of the way of those lightnin’ bolts, but other than that, what the frig are we supposed to do? Fire Chief is on the way and the Mayor’s got the Guard coming, too. I guess we just wait and see.”

  Just then, a huge bolt of lightning struck close to their position and incinerated a tall maple tree.

  “Shit! That was close.” Gina ducked instinctively, but by the time she had crouched, the lightning was already done with the tree. Had it hit her…

  “I think it’s getting bigger.” Clayton sounded nervous.

  “That’s what she said,” Gina replied, her whispered voice on autopilot. She’d spent the previous night with her girlfriends. They sat around her apartment binging on nachos, drinking margaritas and watching The Office until every other sentence was “That’s what she said.”

  “I’m serious. Look. The top of the dome is above the roof and the edge is touching the credit union now.”

  “Damnit, you’re right.” Gina’s hand went instinctively to the handle of her holstered Glock, before she realized how useless her weapon would be against a glistening whitish-yellow dome of lightning. Still, she kept her hand on the grip. It prolonged her life.

  Four shapes bolted out of the center of the crackling energy. Gina saw them move. She dropped and rolled to the left just as one of them tore into Clayton, sending his legs in one direction and the rest of him in the other. All Gina saw was a smooth, white color and the movement of muscles, as if whatever she was seeing had no skin and was covered in skim milk.

  The other shapes tore into the rest of the cruisers. Blood sprayed away from every impacted police officer. Gina could barely track them, but she drew her weapon anyway and focused on one of the creatures. She might not have had a chance to stop it, but it paused suddenly and seemed to sniff the air. What she saw was terrifying. The beast’s eyes swiveled toward her and then it was in motion again, coming right for her. She couldn’t see it that well, but she remembered that eye and fired five times, where she thought it would be. The thing crashed to the asphalt right in front of her, pulling a scream from her lungs.

  A mistake.

  The other three creatures stopped and focused their swiveling eyes on her.

  What the hell are you? she had time to think.

  Then one of the creatures opened its mouth and roared. The sound was so loud it vibrated her body. Sheer terror took hold of her, and her thoughts simply shut down. The gun fell from her hand and she lost all control of her bodily functions as she collapsed on the corpse of the creature in front of her. Her body shook uncontrollably. When her body was pulled by the ankle, back toward the curved, pulsating wall of light, her fear-locked mind never noticed.

  TWO

  Fenris Kystby, Norway

  3 November, 0500 Hrs

  Stan Tremblay looked down at the blood leaking from the puncture wound in his upper arm and said, “Oh, it’s on now, you pecker-noodles!”

  His shoulder had only just started to heal from the trauma a few days earlier. He glanced up at the villagers surrounding him in a semicircle. Most of them were hanging back, but they wielded farm weapons, kitchen knives and even homemade torches. The man with the pitchfork, a villager he knew to be named Roald, was the closest.
He reached out his bleeding arm as quick as a snake strike and snatched the pitchfork away from the man. Roald stepped back slightly, in shock. Then the glazed look returned to his eyes. A look all the villagers had.

  A look of hate.

  Roald moved forward to attack again, this time barehanded after the loss of his pitchfork. Tremblay swung the shaft of the pitchfork around in a wide arc and clocked Roald in the side of the head. The man crumpled to the grassy field. The others paused. Just long enough for Tremblay to bring the wooden pitchfork handle across his knee and splinter it like a toothpick.

  “I’m done fuckin’ around with you people.”

  The look of hatred surged in the eyes of the villagers, and then they all rushed at him.

  Stan Tremblay was a pretty big guy. With his blue eyes, long blonde goatee and hulking size, he could have easily fit in as one of the local Norwegian mountain men. But his Russian accent was better than his Norwegian one, so when he had hiked into town looking for some peace and quiet, he had said he was a former Russian soldier. These people all knew him as Stanislav. None of them suspected that he was secretly a former Delta operator, one of five who made up Chess Team, a deep cover black ops group that faced threats to not only the United States, but to the whole world. When his last mission in Siberia had gone south, Tremblay, callsign: Rook, had felt he needed some time to get his head straight. After a journey aboard an Arctic fishing trawler, on his way from Russia to Norway, Rook had come ashore and just started walking. The land was desolate and windswept, and he figured if he couldn’t organize his thoughts in this remote place, then he wouldn’t be able to do it anywhere.

  Instead of solitude though, Rook had found himself helping the locals with a predator that was eating their livestock. He had discovered some of the town’s dirty laundry, but certainly not enough to warrant a mob showing up on the edge of the farm where Rook was staying. He knew some of these people. They had just been expressing their gratitude to him days earlier.

  As the first man, a stoic Norwegian named Baldur, got close, Rook swung out with his left hand-still clutching the business end of the snapped pitchfork. The outer rusted tine grazed the man’s cheek, but still he came on with a broad-bladed farm implement Rook had never seen before. Baldur made to swing with the heavy tool, and Rook stepped into the blow, smashing his forehead down on Baldur’s nose. A gout of blood sprayed through the air as the man recoiled. Rook hoped that because his size and gruff demeanor alone hadn’t been enough to make these people back off, maybe a few simple displays of violence would do the trick. He had started by talking to the crowd. But that hadn’t worked. All it had gotten him from the maddened villagers was a few puncture holes in an already injured shoulder. He glanced back at the farm behind him, where he had left his. 50 caliber Magnum Desert Eagle, concealed in the hay of the barn. He wished he had brought it now. Hopefully Peder, the old man that had been letting Rook sleep in his barn, would stay out of sight-or at least if he did come out, Rook hoped the man would have the sense to come out with the barrel of his well-kept shotgun leading the way.

  Two more men rushed Rook. He poked the blunt end of the wooden shaft into one man’s gut. A cough of air burst from the man’s throat as he dropped to his knees. Before Rook could swing the pointed half of his damaged weapon at the other man, he felt a hard smack on his shoulder blade. The second man had hit him with the flat of a shovel.

  A shovel? Seriously? These people were making him mad. He swung around in a full circle, bringing the wooden stick to the back of the man’s knees like an Escrima stick, then he helped the man’s descent to the sod by slamming the flat of the metal fork down on the falling man’s chest as he went.

  “So much for a few displays of violence.” Rook saw that the villagers assembled against him were not backing down, and all had murder in their hearts. Even the woman, Anni, and her two children were in the crowd, each wielding some kind of improvised weapon. The thin blonde woman had a kitchen knife and her kids were armed with screwdrivers. He was about to say something about how if they wouldn’t back down, he was going to have to bring his “A” game. But just then he heard a scream of anguish from behind him. Rook glanced back and saw the barn had just erupted into flames-with the horses still inside. He recognized the voice as Peder’s, and he saw two more of the villagers that had circled around him were tossing kerosene cans at the blaze.

  “Monkeyfu-” He was cut off by the blade of a pair of pruning shears slicing across his chest. A woman he didn’t know was about to take another swing at him, and a man was swiping a 2x4 at Rook’s head. He squatted low, allowing the swing to clear his head, and as he sprang back up to his feet, he let the woman have it with a left uppercut to the jaw, the wooden stick still clutched in his meaty hand. As her small body began to launch into the air, he kicked out with his left, booted foot, and caught the 2x4 man in the throat, just under his thick beard.

  Another man Rook had seen in the village swung the blade of an electric hedge trimmer at Rook’s left side. The damned thing wasn’t even running, but the glaze-eyed Nordic man swung it anyway, as if doing so would finally end all his woes.

  Rook took several steps backward. The people were getting too close. The fierce breeze in the early morning gloom would drive the flames on the barn harder. He had to ensure Peder and as many of the man’s horses as possible made it out of the flames in time. But the villagers were giving him no respite. It was as if the sight of the rising flames in the barn and Rook’s slight retreat had energized them. Where previously they were each taking pokes at Rook with their respective weapons, now they all simply ran at him.

  “Hot friggin’ pancakes, you morons won’t give up, will you?”

  And then the fight began. Rook started moving his feet and whirling his arms with the metal pitchfork fragment in one hand and the improvised Escrima stick in the other. Instead of waiting for the crowd to get to him, Rook headed into them and to the left. He smashed two men to the ground with his forearms, backhanded a woman with the stick on the follow-through of another strike and launched a kick at the midsection of a portly man in his fifties. Rook spun and struck with the weapons, taking down woman and man alike. When Anni’s kids made it to the forefront of the fray, he simply booted them away with low kicks, not putting his full strength into it at all. They flew away and their screwdrivers were lost in the short grass.

  Even as hard and fast as he fought though, Rook was getting tired. His fingers were getting numb in the cold morning air, and the size of the mob wasn’t diminishing rapidly enough. Some of the men he’d put down at the start of the fight were getting back into it. Then he heard a shotgun blast from behind him in the raging flames. He glanced back just in time to see the man that had become his friend in the last weeks, Peder, fall down onto the ground, a villager standing over him with a large stick, and the shotgun falling away to the side.

  Rook turned to sprint to Peder’s aid when he saw the man bring the stick down hard, end first, into Peder’s face.

  “No!” Rook started pumping his legs but something tripped him up, and he went sprawling to the ground. His mouth filled with dirt when he hit. Then something whacked his leg hard. He rolled away from the impact and spit the dirt out of his mouth. He pulled his legs up over his head into a backward somersault, landing crouched on his feet. He had dropped the metal pitchfork stick and now had only his two-foot length of splintered wood. As his body came to a stop from the roll, he spotted what had tripped him up. It was one of Anni’s kids. A little boy no taller than three feet, his long blonde hair tangled and streaming behind him, his short sharp breaths huffing, making him look like some feral jungle boy. He had the screwdriver clutched in his hand again and was driving it forward right at Rook’s face. Rook swatted at the hand that held the tool’s handle, knocking the thing from the boy’s grip, but the kid kept coming on. Rook balled his empty hand into a fist and conked the brat on the top of his head, this time sending the little beast into unconsciousness.

&nbs
p; Rook slowly stood, seeing perhaps twenty bodies on the ground, most of whom were writhing in agony, but a few of whom were still out after the damage he had inflicted. The problem was, there were thirty or so people still standing, and they were all coming straight at him like a tide of screaming soldiers in some sword-and-sandal epic. Rook took a deep breath. His face darted back to Peder and saw that the man’s body lay unmolested in the grass. His attackers were coming right at Rook.

  And one of them now held Peder’s shotgun.

  THREE

  Mount Kadam, Uganda

  3 November, 0600 Hrs

  Shin dae-jung, callsign: Knight, lay perfectly still in the long, yellowed grass, with the black combat boot-clad foot of a soldier standing on his hand.

  He was invisible in the long grass, with his ghillie suit covered in more of it, but if the soldier were to glance down, Knight might still be spotted. His trigger hand throbbed from the weight of the soldier’s foot, but he didn’t dare to flex it even slightly. Knight’s left hand was clenched firmly on the handle of his KA-BAR knife, still sheathed on his chest. If the soldier made him, or worse-tripped over the camouflaged experimental EXACTO sniper rifle on the ground in front of him-Knight would launch upward and thrust the blade of the Marine Corps knife deep into the Ugandan soldier’s chest. But right now, Knight’s cover was more important, so he remained still, barely breathing, in tiny increments.

  If it hadn’t been for the damn shooting, I would have heard this bastard before he was on me. The group of soldiers he had been watching fired their weapons in the dawn sky like idiots after a rousing speech from their leader.

  Knight had been deployed to Uganda to perform surveillance on a small offshoot guerilla faction. Led by Romeo Kigongo, the United Faithful Army was a militant and unruly branch of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA had recently come to the attention of the world for the atrocities they perpetrated on the weak and poor of rural Uganda, as well as for their incursions into neighboring African states using child soldiers as cannon fodder. The Ugandan military had been hopeless in tracking down the LRA, but eventually the world media began focusing on the group and its leader, Joseph Kony. When the world finally started clamoring for Kony’s head in 2012 (the United States and other nations had labeled him as a terrorist of special interest years earlier), many of Kony’s lieutenants-Romeo Kigongo included-simply formed their own splinter groups and returned to the life of pri-vacy their smaller fiefdoms had previously provided them. Kigongo’s group, the UFA, would probably have gone unnoticed for years if they hadn’t made an incursion into Tanzania to steal eight hundred million dollars worth of uncut diamonds. Now funded properly, they were taking the next step in the Interna-tional Bad Boy game. They were seeking a portable nuclear device.