by Nick Harrow
“You’ll be okay,” Gunnar croaked, his throat tight and sore. He turned in the seat to offer Bridget a sincere smile that would have been more convincing if he didn’t look like an extra in a zombie outbreak movie. “Just stay cool. I’ve got a friend who can take us in, at least for a little while. It’ll get us off the street until we figure out what happened.”
Bridget returned Gunnar’s smile with one of her own in the rearview mirror. Her eyes, one a vivid shade of blue bordering on violet, the other the color of fresh honey, seemed to dare him to look at her. Her hair, pulled up tight in a ponytail bound by a leather collar atop her head, was white down to her scalp, which was only slightly paler than her smooth, alabaster skin. The bodyguard admired the colorful sleeve of tattoos that covered Bridget’s left arm with a writhing serpent coiled around a phalanx of winged women soaring from her wrist to her shoulder. A thin line of knotwork ink was visible through the torn tank top stretched across her chest. The tattoo coiled down from the upper slope of her left breast and vanished under the tattered shirt.
There was something ethereal and alluring about the tall blonde. Gunnar lost himself in her challenging stare for a long moment, then shook himself and flopped back into his seat.
“Right on Paradise,” Gunnar said to Ray, struggling to keep his eyes open. “Then a left on Flamingo. Keep going to Spencer. Then another left. You can’t miss the place after that.”
Gunnar hoped like hell she’d remember the directions because he was fading fast. She’d always had a strong memory, but there was a lot of shit flying around today. If she forgot...
“I’m okay,” Ray said, as if reading his mind. “Seriously, don’t worry about me. Get some rest if you need it.”
Gunnar tried to hang on, tried to answer Ray, but the dark waters of unconsciousness had already closed over his head. Nightmare images from Caesar’s jerked and stuttered through his thoughts. Bloody men and women, their mouths twisted into rictus smiles, screaming tourists fleeing through explosions of chips and bills as they flipped over tables in their mad dash for safety...
The Vegas skyline shifted in his dream. Neon burned away and left behind guttering torches that leaked black smoke into the night sky. Sleek, modern lines became brutal, primitive structures. Shadows stalked the roofs between crenellations, their eyes sharp for predators and prey alike. Strangest of all, the scorching desert wind grew chill, snowflakes swirling on its frosty breath.
“The world is changing,” Gunnar’s father had said, his voice cracked and jagged after months of chemo. “The juggernaut’s coming, son. Watch for it. Don’t let it stomp you down.”
The words had made no sense to Gunnar at the time. He’d chalked them up to the toxic sludge and misfiring brain cells that had consumed his father, one bite at a time. Paranoia had always crept in around the edges, but toward the end it had dug its hooks in deep. The old man had cautioned Gunnar, time and again, to mind his own business, to help those closest to him and ignore the rest of the world. He’d always warned his son that there was no one outside his own family he could, or should, trust.
So when his dad had warned Gunnar of a changing world and bad things on the horizon, the bodyguard hadn’t paid much attention. Now, though, he felt different.
Something was coming. It was big and hungry, and it was sick of all the bullshit humanity had raised up from the dirt. It had a wolf’s snout and fangs as sharp as midwinter icicles. If it had its way, the monster would eat them all and shit out their bones. All of mankind’s cities would be gone, sandcastles washed away by a bitter tide.
Ray shook Gunnar awake. She leaned over, her hand on his forehead. “Jesus, babe, you’re on fire.”
“Yeah, you’re sexy, too,” Gunnar said, forcing a laugh that became a ragged cough. The car wasn’t moving. They’d made it to Mimi’s. “Let’s get inside.”
Gunnar pushed the door open, ripped off his seatbelt, and dragged his long legs out of the Accord’s cramped footwell. Burger wrappers and cardboard fry trays spilled out onto the concrete driveway and were promptly carried away by an unseasonably cool wind that howled through the streets like the monster Gunnar’s dad had warned him about. The sound chilled him more than the temperature.
“Look at this mess,” a woman called out from beneath the opening garage door at the front of the two-story house. “Pull that shit heap in here and get out of sight. Last thing I need is the neighbors wondering why the jolly green giant showed up on my doorstep looking like he’s caught himself a bad case of the clap.”
Gunnar looked up at the house, his vision blurred, as Ray pulled the car past him and into the oversized garage. The peaked roof sagged in the middle and rose on each end where a pair of crossed beams stabbed at the sky. The faint sound of a blowing horn reached his ears as he tried to get his bearings, and the ground rushed up to slap him in the face as the last of the strength leaked out of his legs.
Chapter 4
GUNNAR CAME TO SOMEWHERE inside Mimi’s place, one arm slung over Ray’s shoulder, the other hooked over the much taller Bridget’s. The women huffed and puffed under his weight, and he mumbled an apology and forced himself to take the weight off the ladies. His virus-ravaged voice sounded like a bullfrog caught in a tin can.
“Windows are all ballistic glass with one-way coating,” Mimi explained as they passed through a living room that was a time capsule from the seventies. Orange shag carpeting covered the floor and a sunken sectional surrounded the only modern piece in the room: an eighty-inch flat screen. Their guide rapped her knuckles on the door, then rested her hand on one of the heavy metal bars that barricaded it from the inside. “My current employer upgraded the place to withstand an assault. Until you all showed up, I thought they’d overreacted. Maybe not.”
“Sorry,” Gunnar sighed, and shuddered as another chill racked his frame. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come.”
Mimi muttered something that Gunnar couldn’t hear after that, though he was sure it was a string of curses directed at him. Mimi had semi-retired from the game a few years ago, and she didn’t like anyone, especially not refugees with trouble on their heels, showing up at her door. The last time the bodyguard had seen her, his former mentor had made it clear she did not want him darkening her doorstep unless he was walking the straight and narrow. “No offense, Gun,” she’d said as she shrugged into one of her too-tight tour shirts, “but I’ve gone through too much crawling out of that hole to let you drag me back into it.”
“I wouldn’t have let you in if there was another option,” Mimi said at last, blowing a strand of her curly red hair out of her eyes with an exasperated sigh. “Get your sorry asses into the elevator, and I’ll get you tucked in somewhere you can sleep off whatever the hell got into you. We’ll worry about what my bosses think tomorrow.”
Bridget entered a glass-walled box at the end of a short hallway. She leaned against the far wall, crossed her arms beneath her breasts, face turned to the floor. The white ponytail hung over her face like a veil, but it couldn’t hide the sounds of her sniffling or the coughs she tried to stifle. Ray went next, without bothering to hide her red eyes or running nose. They looked like hell, but Gunnar knew he must have been even worse from the way Mimi stared at him when she joined him in the elevator and pushed the down arrow button.
“We need some place secure,” Ray piped up, her voice as ragged as a career smoker’s. “A separate room for each of us, if you can.”
Mimi pulled the frayed collar of her ancient concert T-shirt up over her nose and gave her visitors the evil eye. “What did you bring here, Gun?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “People are going crazy. We needed a place to hole up, and you were the only one I could trust. We weren’t all sick when I called.”
“Motherfucker,” Mimi muttered. “If I catch Captain Trips or some other Stephen King plague, I will string you up by your balls.”
Gunnar wanted to tell Mimi she was welcome to fondle his balls whenever she liked, but he’d r
un out of gas again. His eyes drifted closed, and he leaned back against the wall.
Someone had painted a whimsical mineshaft scene on the other side of the elevator’s glass wall. The cartoon workers shifted as the car descended, their bulbous red noses and peaked hats giving way to icy blue skin and fanged maws. The troll-like creatures clawed at the stones with black nails and leered at the elevator’s occupants, tongues lolling between jagged teeth. Something about the image disturbed Gunnar. Maybe it was the haggard reflection of his own face in the glass.
“It’s a virus,” Ray said. “It moves fast. Things will be dicey tonight. We might get violent. Once that phase passes, though, we should be fine.”
Mimi muttered under her breath again and jabbed Gunnar in the ribs with a sharp elbow. The tattered Guns N’ Roses concert T-shirt she wore was several sizes too big, which was a change from the style Gunnar remembered. The tears in it revealed a small part of the collection of scars and tattoos that dotted Mimi’s lean torso. She looked better than Gunnar remembered, and even sick he couldn’t help but admire the sleek lines of her muscled arms and the swells of her thighs through her tight jeans. She caught him looking and tapped his nose with her knuckles. “I can’t believe you brought some psycho fucking plague here, Gun. You owe me big time when this is over.”
“More than you’ll ever know,” Gunnar admitted.
Mimi had saved him when YmirRe had chewed him up and spit him out. She’d scooped him up off the Strip and introduced him to people who, while definitely on the wrong side of the law, could put his prodigious size and particular skills to very good use. With her guidance, Gunnar had clawed his way up the criminal ladder to a very comfortable, very profitable job working for the Corso family.
And then his morals had reared their ugly head and fucked that gig right in the ear. Gunnar wondered how much of that mess had made its way to Mimi, and what she thought about him now.
The elevator dinged and its doors slid open. Mimi hustled out of the narrow box and guided the rest of them into a pastel subterranean wonderland. The only illumination came from pale purple and pink mood lighting scattered around the concrete perimeter walls to mimic the light of a spectacular sunset. Pastoral murals of forested mountains occupied the walls closest to the lift, and a swath of fake grass covered a wide section of the floor. Support columns disguised as fake trees jutted up from holes in the carpet, their thick branches spread across the low ceiling. A ranch-style home took up most of the space in the strangely decorated subterranean box. Gunnar peered through the kitchen window and couldn’t help but give Mimi a grin.
“You are now thirty feet below the surface,” Mimi said. “Nothing and nobody can get at you down here without coming through me first.”
“Who could afford to build a place like this and not use it?” Gunnar asked.
“The original house is older than you think,” Mimi explained. “It was built in 1978. No one’s lived here for a while, though. A couple of years ago, my employer snatched it up and went hog wild on the retrofitting.”
“That’s a lot of money,” the bodyguard said, then coughed. “Just who is writing your checks, Mimi?”
“Someone who might need a bunker in the event the bad guys go full gung ho,” Mimi said, pointedly raising her eyebrows at Gunnar.
A chill racked the bodyguard’s tall frame. He wasn’t sure if it was the virus doing a number on him, or the realization that Mimi was in bed with one of the spookshow government agencies they used to laugh about over drinks.
“Cozy,” he said.
“The good news is there are two bedrooms in that house, and another in the guest cabin around back. The even better news is that they’re not only cozy, they’re very secure.” Mimi wiggled her pierced eyebrows. “And I can lock them from the outside.”
Mimi guided Gunnar and the ladies into the home, through another seventies-style living room, and down a hallway with a door on either side. She opened the solitary door and gestured for Ray to step inside.
“I’ll lock all of you in,” Mimi said. “I’ll spend the night upstairs to make sure no boogeyman gets to you. These rooms don’t have their own bathrooms, though, so I hope you took care of that business before you got here. In the morning, I’ll unlock Gunnar’s door from the surface security panel, and we can have a chat over the closed-circuit TV. If you look all right, I’ll let you two ladies out.”
With her plan explained, Mimi opened another door, waited for Bridget to step inside, then pulled both doors closed and locked them with modern keypads set into the walls. She motioned for Gunnar to follow her, then went outside the ranch house, around back past a pool set into the concrete floor, and into a smaller cabin.
“You’re in luck,” she said. “This one’s got its own shitter. You can thank me for that later. If I don’t die from whatever plague you gave me.”
“Mimi,” Gunnar said, “you know I wouldn’t have come here if I had any other choice. It’s crazy out there.”
“We’ll talk about it in the morning, Gun.” Mimi sighed and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “You better hope to hell I like what you have to say. We had a deal, and you broke it.”
“I never meant—” Gunnar started.
“I know.” Mimi put her hand flat on Gunnar’s chest. “Give me some time to cool off. Maybe I won’t hate you. Get comfortable. Sounds like you’ve got a long night ahead of you.”
“Wake me up first,” he said. “In case Ray or Bridget needs my help.”
“Sure,” she said. “What if you’re the one who needs help?”
Gunnar shook his head and stifled a cough with his forearm. “I won’t.”
“You better not,” Mimi said. “Get some rest.”
The bodyguard watched his old friend go, her swaying hips bringing back memories of much happier times they’d spent partying their nights away. When the door closed and locked with a loud click, Gunnar dropped onto a king-size bed covered in downy blankets, stared up at a ceiling streaked with twilight hues from the mood lamps outside his prison, and passed out.
THE SMELL OF ROASTING meat and woodsmoke crawled up Gunnar’s nostrils and wormed their way into his thoughts, urging him to rise from the dead. The bodyguard ignored the smells. He didn’t want to get up, not even for a bite of whatever smelled so goddamned good. What Gunnar wanted was to lay right where he was, eyes closed, and wait for this horrible sickness to pass. He’d had the flu before, even caught a bad case of that swine shit that had gone around a few years back. That had left him feeling wrung out and more tired than he’d ever been in his life. This new crap, though, made his arms and legs feel like they were packed with broken glass, and breathing was worse than trying to suck air through a wet sheet of fiberglass.
“Get up if you don’t want to be on the menu,” an old man’s creaking voice said.
Gunnar opened one eye and saw a burly, ancient dude with a scraggly beard and ratty black patch over his right eye. The man’s remaining eyeball stared at the bodyguard from a few inches away. His breath puffed out of his open mouth in clouds of tobacco-scented condensation. Before Gunnar could say a word, the crusty dude stood up and extended a gnarled hand, the fingers knotted with angry red bulbs of arthritic knuckles. Gunnar took the offered help and was surprised at how strong the old man was.
The bodyguard was also surprised that his clothes were missing, and he was freezing his balls off.
“You’re a big one,” the old man said. He stooped with a groan to pluck a pointed hat off the stony ground. He plopped it on his head as he stood up, his remaining eye raking Gunnar from his naked feet up to his crown. “You as strong as you look?”
Gunnar certainly didn’t feel strong just then. The cold air had sapped even more of his strength, and it took more effort than he wanted to admit to keep from wobbling on his feet. But it was easier to breathe now, and the rhythm of his heart was no longer an unsteady gallop. He took another breath, cracked his neck, and shrugged. “I’m getting there.”
&n
bsp; That brought a wet chuckle from the ancient fart, who shook his head and spat on the ground. He gestured for Gunnar to follow him, then turned and walked down a rocky trail. They were high up on the side of a mountain, Gunnar realized with a start, their path flanked by scatterings of stubby pine trees and sparse tangles of wicked thorn bushes. The night sky was littered with more stars than the bodyguard had ever seen in his life, their silvery light rivaling even the enormous, shining face of the full moon. Grazing goats clung to the steep mountainside in the distance, their occasional bleats distorted into eerie warbles by echoes that bounced from one wall of the valley to the other, then back again.
“Where am I?” Gunnar asked his guide. For the first time, he noticed the old man was clad only in a dangling loincloth, sandals, a short fur cape knotted around his neck, and that ridiculous Gandalf hat jutting from the top of his head like a crooked lightning rod. “And can I get some clothes? It’s cold as a witch’s tit out here.”
“The utangard of your innangard,” the old man said, then chuckled. He produced a lit pipe from somewhere and took a long drag from the elongated stem. “I’ve never kept up much with all the religious mumbo jumbo that comes with this gig, so that’s probably a terrible way to explain it. Think of it as the wilder places of your mind. And you don’t need clothes. Your dangling dinger gives the völva something to look at.”
A trio of shadows flickered behind the old man, their swaying feminine forms visible for a moment, then gone as a cloud clawed its way across the moon’s face.
The trail rounded a cluster of spindly pines to overlook a deep valley dotted with the dancing lights of bonfires. Plumes of dark smoke rose up toward the mountain peak, carrying the delicious smells of sizzling fat and slow-smoked meat to Gunnar. His stomach growled, and he wanted to storm down the hill and grab a greedy share straight off the roasting spit. The urge was so powerful that he took a half-dozen running steps before the old man whistled at his back.
