Kzine Issue 19

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  “Uh, thanks to all of you who made this possible.” I shielded my eyes, praying for a power failure. “I have a good, er, an excellent team.”

  The chant morphed into “He-ro, he-ro.”

  Tex Bremen, my chief engineer, grabbed the mic. “Any damsels out there who need saving?” More cheers. A gal from accounting feigned a swoon. “We have a present for you too, Harold,” he said. Two buxom women in medieval gowns presented me with an enormous steel sword. The chants resumed as I struggled to lift it, the two faux princesses pressed up against me for the obligatory PR shot.

  I promised myself that I would get to the gym more often as Tex borrowed the sword. Returning to my Scotch, single malt for the occasion, I watched him slow dance with both princesses and the sword simultaneously.

  A chill swept the nightclub as the door slammed open. A tall woman brushed past the bouncer. As she walked—no, flowed—in, every male head pivoted her way, and a few female heads as well. The first thing I noticed was the mane of flaxen hair, luminescent in the darkened room. Noticed, as in, I noticed a mushroom cloud over Kansas.

  After that first searing image, the next thoughts to intersect my consciousness were which department is she in? and tits. My jaw dropped, literally. Dr. Harold Regis, distinguished scientist and medal recipient, stood with his mouth agape like a thirteen-year-old boy on a beach in Rio.

  To my credit, I got my hyperventilation under control by the time she sashayed toward my barstool. “You must be the hero,” she said to the top of my downturned head.

  I responded by dropping the tumbler. It shattered. “Shit. I mean no. I mean yes.”

  “I’m Randi.” Her words were melodious with earthy undertones, flirtatious yet husky.

  To which I said nothing, still staring at the floor. Brain freeze. Tex, however, was happy to stand in for me. “Howdy darling, I’m randy too.” He got a snap kick to the groin and a dismissive flip of her mane. Owned.

  I nudged the broken glass under the bar with my left foot while I mustered the courage to speak. That this goddess in heels was interested in a skinny black researcher with Scotch dripping down his pants leg was incomprehensible. I was just trying to make it to the next second, so I squeaked, “Er.”

  “C’mon, let’s dance.” I mumbled something unintelligible and hobbled onto the dance floor, my hand quivering in hers, my big toe throbbing from a glass shard. Cut short on the bottom and low on the top, her crimson dress had a slit up the left side that nearly reached her armpit.

  “What do your friends call you?” She led, her arm circling my waist like a titanium clamp.

  “Er.” Same answer, still dumb. I focused on her tanned calves, slowly making my way north, “Dr. Regis.” Slight improvement. “Harold.” Damn, my foot hurt.

  “I’ll call you Hard.”

  That’s when I first looked into her eyes. Blue. Not cobalt or azure or even baby blue, her eyes were pure, monochromatic blue. “You have blue eyes,” I said. Clever dialog from a guy with an IQ of 193. Not.

  “Thank you, Hard.”

  I doubled down, using oratory skills honed by a year at Oxford. “Your hair is pretty. Um, pretty blond.”

  She laughed. “Your hair is pretty too. Pretty black. I like black.” With this she ran her fingers through my recently cropped hair, courtesy of the President’s own barber.

  I didn’t care if I like black was sincere or just repartee used to pick up an African American. She had a sense of humor, stunning looks and a mean snap kick. Then my eyes unlocked from hers. I froze, motionless, as if I had been turned to stone. For her face was plain ugly: haunted eye sockets, gaunt cheeks, a sharp nose and a battle-worn countenance. Good, she isn’t perfect, I thought, swaying to the music again.

  My next thought was of escape. The proverbial angel inside my head perked up and admonished me for being shallow. The little devil inside me, however, kept yelling coyote ugly and run. I awarded the point to the angel and called a cab.

  Fifteen minutes later we were both half naked in the elevator of the Holiday Inn. She slammed the hotel room door behind us with such force that the building shook. There was plenty of her to focus on besides her face, the queen bed groaning and swaying beneath us. Someone hammered on the wall next door, but neither angel nor devil cared. With a primal scream in some ancient tongue, she savagely mounted me. Perhaps I should have noticed the transformation in her body: skeletal features protruding through her flesh, eye sockets receding and hair turning iridescent white. The angel and the devil in my head swapped sides, but I wasn’t listening. Scrawny Harold Regis, Ph.D., was enjoying his own transformation too. Hooah.

  Five hours later, I wanted more but she had taken what she needed. I attempted conversation. “Who are you?” A Phi Beta Kappa caliber query.

  “My true name is Randgrid. I’m a valkyrie.”

  “Terrific. I’m a giant,” I replied, with a touch of wit and a feeble attempt to get the discussion back to my newfound macho prowess.

  “No, no, giants are much bigger. You’re an einherja,” she said, which deflated me, in more ways than one.

  “What in the dark realms of Hades is an einherja?”

  “Actually, Hades is on a different team. We don’t get along.” She snickered. “An einherja is a member of the Old Norse brotherhood of heroes. An eternal warrior. A berserker.”

  “Berserker? As in an armored dude with a halberd who charges into battle without thinking, trying to kill or maim as many orcs and goblins as he can before he gets mauled to death by the were-tiger?”

  “Close. Berserkers don’t care about armor and there are no such creatures as orcs. These days you guys have options: you can join the Army, the Marines or even DynCorp. I might be able to get you into the Finnish Sissi battalion. Very elite. Can you ski?”

  Orcs plus Marines plus skis equaled overload. I regrouped and reverted. “Who are you?”

  “A valkyrie.”

  “Like in mythology, with… wings?” I asked, beyond incredulous. Her bare shoulders were muscular, with flawless skin, but distinctly lacking in flight-enabling appendages.

  “Pretty much. Way back when, Odin had thirteen Valkyries—my ancestors—to summon fallen heroes to Valhalla. The heroes became the Einherjar, frolicking with golden-tressed maidens for all eternity, or at least until the next battle.”

  She slithered back into her crimson dress. Apparently, valkyries had no need for undergarments. “You do like golden-tressed maidens, don’t you Hard?”

  I was confused, very confused, my head bobbing up and down like one of those toys.

  “That was a long time ago. Nowadays we don’t have swan feathers.” She flapped her arms to demonstrate, one breast slipping free from her unfastened dress. I nodded mutely as she continued with a dissertation on how I was some sort of chosen; that my life would now be that of a true hero; and I had just fathered a baby girl, a new mini-valkyrie, in Randi’s semi-undead womb.

  “Baby?”

  “Aunt Guðrún was killed off Somalia—an oil tanker blew up; not clear if she was a pirate or security—and we must always be thirteen.”

  “Fathered?” Pretty sure that was a verb.

  “Yup. I chose you to father her replacement. A valkyrie is always sired by a hero. In return, the hero receives the gifts of the einherjar.”

  “How can you be sure I fathered a child just now? Are you on fertility drugs? And how do you know it will be a daughter?” Rapid-fire drivel.

  Randi laughed as she pulled on her Paciotti slingbacks. “Haven’t you been listening? I’m a valkyrie. I thought you scientist types were supposed to be smart. We only mate when we need to produce another valkyrie. Duh. Of course I’m pregnant and of course it’s a girl.”

  “Do I at least get a say in her name?” I asked, attempting to buy some time.

  “We tend to recycle the old names. I’m thinking Hlökk or Sigrún.”

  Retreat. “Will I see you again?” By now the angel and devil were both yelling at me to bail.

>   “Not this way, but I’ll be nearby whenever you’re at war. We’re linked, valkyrie and einherja, until death.” Her hand was on the doorknob. “Your death most likely.”

  “Oh, I reckoned I’d be immortal,” I said, with a cockiness I suddenly didn’t feel.

  A wry smile. “Hardly. Modern einherjar die. In battle. Think General Custer; he was Aunt Sváva’s.” She waved goodbye as she stepped out the door. “The Marines are a good choice—they’re all about storming ashore into relentless machine gun fire. Look for me when you’re in a tight spot; I still swing a mean war ax.”

  I dreamed that night of racing away from winged zombie harpies on a never-ending white beach strewn with mutilated bodies. I awoke to find the hotel room nightstand smashed into kindling, my left hand soaked in my own blood. I texted myself, Do not join Marines, before futilely attempting to go back to sleep.

  The next day I joined the pickup basketball game after work for the first time. I won’t be invited back: I broke the rim, the backboard and Tex’s jaw. Sunday morning I was escorted out of church for shouting “Death to the Philistines” during the sermon. That evening I drank tequila shots and picked a fight with three roughnecks behind a roadhouse. It was an unfair fight until one of them pulled a gun, but then dear Randi rode in on her Ducati in full leathers, wielding a double-bladed ax. She shouted as she roared off, “Consider the SEALs. Tough yet stealthy.”

  Sleep was impossible. After a five-hour run, I trolled the web until dawn, looking for evidence of my einherja brethren. It was safe to add John Wayne Gacy, Saigō Takamori and, ironically, Claus von Stauffenberg, to the list. My choices ranged from homicidal to power-drunk to suicidal. Great.

  On Monday I enlisted in the Army. Randi was right: if I was going to go berserk it would be better to do it for a cause. I wanted little Sigrún, or whatever her name would be, to be proud of her warrior father.

  * * *

  Our special ops team was hunkered down for the night on a fortified hilltop in eastern Afghanistan. Crazy Adams—her given name was Daisy, but that was a nonstarter for an explosives expert—had the watch. She woke me an hour before sunrise, tugging silently at my arm.

  I struggled to find my glasses and my automatic rifle. A dream of iced lattes and molecular transformation equations faded to black. “What?”

  She pointed. Crazy never talked, the result of one too many close calls with her work product. When I didn’t move fast enough she threw her shoulders back and her chest out, waved an imaginary ax over her head and mouthed a silent scream.

  Got it. Randi. Three years later, she still had a habit of showing up when a battle was nigh, sometimes to help, sometimes just to get in a few licks of her own with that ax. Dr. Harold Regis had been a world-class scientist; now Corporal Hard Regis was a world-class terrorist hunter, and I had my own semi-mythical death wish, a gift from that night. Hooah.

  I jumped to my feet and raced to the low berm we had built. An armored Humvee was making its way up from the valley floor, headlights on, radio blaring some Finnish pop ditty. It lumbered up to our guard post, reversed until it rammed into a tree, and then stopped.

  The window rolled down and Randi poked her head out. “Hang on,” she said, bopping to the music until the song ended. She killed the radio and squirmed out the window like a NASCAR driver, her figure still stunning, her face as gaunt as ever.

  “Hello, Randi,” I said.

  “Hiya, Hard.”

  “Hope those terrorists we’re tracking are sound sleepers,” Sean said, as he cleaned his sniper rifle, a one-eyed monster with a three-kilometer kill range. He had recruited me onto his team while I was in Fort Leavenworth. For fighting. I was always fighting now, a far cry from the skinny scientist perched on a lab stool.

  Randi reached into the backseat for her war ax and laid it lovingly on the Humvee’s roof. “Oh, Ahmmad isn’t sleeping.”

  Crazy cocked her head to the side, wordlessly asking the question for us as she tossed a grenade idly between her two hands. She had mousy brown hair, a boyish chest and a penchant for things that went boom. With no supernatural abilities whatsoever, not counting her smile.

  “He’s the number five terrorist on the CIA’s list,” answered Randi, who evidently spoke fluent Crazy. “Actually number four now—I got the number two guy on my way up.”

  There did appear to be blood on both the front fender and her ax.

  “And why is Ahmmad not sleeping?” Sean asked.

  “He’s been tracking Hard.” She was looking at me now. “Ahmmad once spent the night with Hjordis.”

  The cocked head question again.

  “My third cousin twice removed,” she added.

  “Oh shit,” in chorus, followed by the stomach-wrenching clang of Crazy’s grenade dropping onto a rock. My special forces buddies knew all about me and Randi: they had been forced to sit through Berserkers and Battlemaidens 101.

  Oh shit was right. I hadn’t lost a fight since that night with Randi, but I had yet to encounter another einherja.

  “What’s this dude Ahmmad like?” Sean asked. A part of me didn’t want to hear the answer, but I reached for the whetstone in my pocket just the same.

  “Half the size of a giant, with a face makes my dear cousin Hjordis look like a lipstick model.”

  “Where is he?” I asked, putting words to Crazy’s deliberate head rotations. I drew my claymore, a huge sword longer than I was tall, and stroked it with the whetstone. That pesky angel had long since flown the nest from my head. If someone needed killing, I was ready.

  “In a cave, over that ridge.”

  We collected our gear, applied lampblack and checked our weapons. As we formed up, Randi was sitting on the hood of the Humvee, the radio once again hammering out a forgettable tune from the hottest boy band north of the Arctic Circle.

  Crazy motioned for her to come with us. I mouthed, “Please.”

  “No,” Randi said.

  The claymore almost slipped from my grip. She was never one to pass on a good fight. Or a bad fight. “You don’t want slice off a limb or three?” I asked. “Maybe just an ear?”

  “Ei. Nope. Nyet.” No smile, but she didn’t seem concerned either.

  Which made me very concerned. It was bad enough to have to face a seven-foot-tall Arab stoked on supernatural testosterone, but to go into battle without my wingmate—wingless though she was—terrified the rational scientist within me. The einherja, however, was nonplussed and merely raised an eyebrow, Crazy style.

  “Hjordis is with him,” Randi said. “We can’t fight each other directly, duh.”

  I so needed to get a copy of the Rulebook for Semi-Mythical Creatures.

  “Don’t die in there, Hard. I can’t take you to Valhalla, those days are over,” Randi said, as she reclined on the hood, back arched provocatively like Miss December on a Humvees from Helheim pinup calendar. “Go on, fight, that’s what einherjar do.”

  We were half a klick up the trail when Crazy grabbed my arm, pulled me to a stop, and help up three fingers. She raced back down the hill.

  “Secret weapon?” Sean asked, as he sat on a log, cleaning the rifle again.

  “An exploding shovel,” I ventured, only half kidding.

  But when she returned three minutes later she had only a Sharpie. Under the evil eye of Sean she wrote Stay Safe on my left hand, kissed me quickly on the cheek, gave Sean a wild-eyed stare in return, and pulled out a packet of grayish-brown clay which she smeared on both sides of my claymore. Some sort of exploding grayish-brown clay no doubt. I would make my first swing count.

  The cave was easy to find. Hjordis was sitting in a soccer mom folding chair, feet on the corpse of one of our Afghan scouts. She had a beer bottle in hand, a pile of empties next to the corpse.

  “I can take her,” Sean said. We were only a kilometer away, max, but his CheyTac round would have only pissed her off. It took gold or nukes to kill a valkyrie. Randi had made it clear that gold weapons slash ammo were off limits, a form of
thirteen-way global truce that had existed since before recorded history. Crazy specialized in micro nukes, and she might even have one in her oversized knapsack, but that would pretty much start World War Three, not to mention get us killed too.

  “No,” I said before I realized Sean was laughing at me.

  Whether due to supernatural valkyrie hearing or dumb luck, Hjordis packed her chair and headed up the hill, but Sean’s infrared scope located two guards inside the cave mouth. Easy pickings—their corpses joined the poor scout’s.

  We made it ten meters deep into the cave before being ambushed by an entire squad of armed Taliban. Crazy’s satchel charge cleared that roadblock, but any possibility of surprise was gone. My turn. I put my head down and charged.

  Ahmmad was waiting for me, a machine gun cradled under one massive arm as if it was a baguette, a sword in the other hand. He wore a chainmail vest over khakis, a spiked helmet strapped tightly under his chin. “Die muthafucka,” he said.

  I dived for the ground under the barrage of fifty-caliber shells that hosed down the cave like it was on fire. A tight roll and I was on my feet—all part of the whole gift of the einherja package—the claymore held two-handed. I cleaved his machine gun in half with the first swing. The resulting explosion slammed Ahmmad against the nearest rock wall like he was a rag doll. Go Crazy.

  Which made zero difference, as one hundred and fifty kilos of muscle rebounded off the wall with a renewed fury, a second sword appearing from nowhere. He had the same package deal. For a supernaturally-charged monster of a man, he moved with speed and grace, landing four blows to every one of mine.

  A small explosion to my rear caught me by surprise and I flinched. I thought for a nano-second that perhaps Crazy had arranged a trap, but Ahmmad was chortling as he slashed downward with both swords simultaneously. I parried, but the first blade nicked the tendon in my right hand, causing my claymore to slip. As I ducked, the second sword sliced through my left arm, shattering bone and severing my lower arm above the elbow