“How long is the bridge?” Morten asked Nils.
“Five miles,” he said, uncertainty clouding his face, as if he had realized that even one missing ten-foot section would keep them from crossing. “But then it gets worse.”
“Worse?” Val asked, her curiosity piqued. They had come to a halt on the road, and they were probably still a mile or two from the place where the road would become the entrance to the bridge. “How so?”
“It was a very strange design for a bridge. Meant to take vehicles like these, but also trains under the road, in a tunnel.”
“‘Trains.’ What are they?” Stig asked Morten.
“Like large rooms on wheels, which ran on the long metal rails you sometimes see in pairs,” Morten replied, and then he focused on what Nils was saying.
“Then after five miles, the bridge simply ends on a man-made island, and plunges straight down into the ground, like a passage to Hel’s domain.”
“It does what?” Ulrik said, his mouth hanging open in disbelief.
“The last three miles of the crossing is a tunnel under the water. It comes up on the other side, in Denmark,” Nils said. “I have read about this bridge, and seen pictures in an old book of Halvard’s. They could not make it a low bridge, because tall boats needed to pass under it. They could not make it a high bridge, because the towers on the other side would have been a problem for their flying metal birds in Copenhagen. A tunnel all the way would have cost too much time and resources.”
“So they made half of it a tunnel and half of it a bridge?” Ulrik asked, traces of awe and disgust in his voice.
Nils nodded. “It was a design triumph at the time...but now?” He shrugged. “There is no way to know if the bridge to the island will be solid, and there is no way to know if the tunnel from the island will be flooded.”
“Or filled with bear shit,” Stig moaned.
“If it is,” Val said, stepping off her ATV and signifying to the others that they would wait until dawn before challenging the bridge, “you will go first.”
As pale blue light filtered into the morning sky, long before the first ray of golden sunshine that would follow, they set off on the ATVs. They came to a broad concrete expanse, where the road widened out so they all could have ridden side by side and had room to spare. Val stopped the group to assess the area ahead of them. The road was in strangely good condition here, with hardly any grasses growing from it, and Val suspected that might have been due to the sea’s proximity.
Even to the right side of the road, the vegetation was small. Stunted trees and tufted grasses struggled in the sandy, rocky soil. Not enough food for the plants in the ground, so close to the salt water, Val thought.
The exposure concerned her. If there were hostile people or animals here, then the group had been spotted long ago. On the positive side, the smaller trees meant it would be impossible for something like the giant bear they had fought to be concealed and waiting for them. Still, she did not want to ride into a trap—or an animal lair.
In front of them, spread across the widened road, was a partially collapsed metal structure. It looked like a series of tiny linked rooms, with spaces to walk between. Or drive, Val thought. Then she understood the place’s function, just before Nils explained it to them.
“People would collect money here, before travelers could cross the bridge.”
A few of the tiny structures were little more than piles of debris, but the few still standing looked like they had been used to shelter more recent travelers. Some were missing their doors, and others their windows. One had wooden boards nailed over the gaping holes. All of them were covered in thin vegetation like the surrounding landscape. Small animals had made homes in the structures, too. She could see a few bird’s nests on the roofs of the little rooms.
To her left were sets of metal rails for the trains Nils had spoken of, and beyond the rails, an identical widened oncoming road where the metal shells of automobiles had been stacked up like a thirty-foot-tall wall. She had seen the vehicles in towns across the north, but had never seen a working one. Usually there was little left to them besides the rusted out metal shells. She had seen one with its comfortable chairs and glass windows still intact. But even those were usually missing the rubber on their wheels—or the wheels themselves. Val had seen people use them as shelters, or in one case as a tailor shop.
But the mountain of ancient vehicles on the other side, and the lack of any on her side made Val suspicious.
“Let us go and see this bridge,” Morten said.
“Yes,” Val said. “But not in the way you think.”
“What do you mean?” Nils asked her.
“I want to see the bridge, but not drive on it yet. We will take this road to the side—” She pointed, “—and we will drive around it. To the shore. I want a closer look before we try to cross.”
“You suspect a trap,” Ulrik said. It was not a question. It was approval.
They set off on the side road, which curved around the money-taking plaza, and onto a trail that led toward the coast. As they drove, Val’s eyes scanned for danger, but she found none. She could see ahead that this smaller road would turn and run right along a sea wall of boulders that stretched in both directions along the coast. The road ran under the bridge to the left. That was where she wanted to be.
When they reached the underside of the bridge, she stopped and dismounted from her quad. The sea wall was almost twice her height, and she scrambled to the top of the pile of rocks for a better view. Above her, the bridge’s rust-coated metal stretched out and curved into the sea. It rested on massive concrete supports interspersed along its length, each one taller than the last, until, at the center of the bridge, the height was two hundred feet above the water.
This close, Val could see that the structure looked deserted of animals and people. The sea was calm. The morning was warm.
Everything was perfect. Too damn perfect.
14
The group circled back around and slowly made their way onto the bridge. The road seemed to stretch forever before it reached the pylons at the structure’s halfway point. There were two passageways—the one on their side and another for returning traffic. They were separated in the middle by rusted spikes. Nils suggested they had once been a guardrail.
The outer sides of the bridge had guarding fences, many of which were still standing. A few tall, rusted-metal spires climbed up out of the central divide, but their purpose was unknown, even to Nils. What he had learned about the bridge—and the entire Old World—from books, could only take him so far.
Ulrik was not concerned about the metal spires, or the fractured metal guard rails. He was more concerned about the pieces of the road that were missing, the concrete and steel under them having given way. Holes covered the bridge’s surface, some larger than an ATV. He could steer around them for now, but worried there would be larger gaps, or that one would open up as he drove, dropping him down into the rail tunnel below the road, or a hundred feet further to the water. He peered into each hole as he passed. In some he had seen down to the train rails, and sometimes there was nothing under the road but the sea, far below, glittering like liquid diamonds in the sunlight. The only other detail Nils had known about this bridge was that the weather was often vicious. They had been lucky with the warm, clear sky. But how long will that luck hold? Ulrik wondered.
He led the way for the group with Val behind him. Trond, with his short, purple-dyed beard practically glowing in the morning sun, took up the rear. Ulrik took the path slowly. Nils had said it was five miles over the bridge, then that distance again on the man-made island and the tunnel. Val had told Ulrik to take his time.
“Safety is our main concern,” she had said. But then quieter, so the others couldn’t hear, she had told him, “But we need to be off this thing by nightfall, and you need to keep your eyes open. Be ready for anything.”
He was. His eyes scoured the gray road, the way ahead, the other side of
the bridge, the cerulean sea to either side, and the white pylons supporting the center of the bridge with cables.
It was the pylons that concerned him most.
The damn things were over six hundred feet tall. Had a lookout been perched atop one of them the previous day, they’d have easily spotted the ATVs. Plenty of time to set up an ambush.
As they got closer to the center of the bridge, the wind from the strait picked up. The day was still sunny and bright, but the air held a chill to it. The smell of the salt water filled his nostrils so completely he doubted he would have been able to smell roasting meat had it been laying in the road in front of him. He could see that the pylons, which he had thought were white in the brightness of the day, were really the sort of grayish white that old concrete gets. One of the pylons had snapped off near the top and hung from its many support cables. The rest of the cables appeared solid, but he was reluctant to move into the center of the bridge. He stopped the ATV, and waited for Nils to arrive with the others.
“Is it safe?” he asked, pointing to the dangling section of the pylon.
“Oh yes, it should be,” Nils said, his confidence brimming. He had clearly read something about the cables. “They were actually just for extra support, because of the trains. Normal bridges are slightly flexible and sway in the wind. It is expected. But with the trains passing in the tunnel under our feet, the bridge needed to be more rigid. So they supported the middle with those cables.”
“So it will not matter for us if they are broken?” Val asked.
“It should not. We weigh very little compared to the weights the bridge was designed to handle, and the concrete supports under the bridge are what keep it in the air.”
Ulrik was not fully convinced, but he started his vehicle again and rolled forward.
Just before they reached the first double set of pylons, the gaps in the road became extensive—as if someone had tried to destroy the bridge at some point in the past. None of them knew history the way Nils did, but they all understood that many wars had occurred in the past. Ulrik believed that this damage was intentional.
The road surface was missing entirely, and only the flat metal beams underneath showed, with deeply rusted metal plates over the beams. He stopped and explained his plan to Val, and she passed the information back. They would need to keep their wheels on the plates that rested atop the beams. If a wheel rode over an unsupported portion of metal plate, Ulrik suspected the ATV would tear through the tissue-thin rust.
It took thirty minutes moving at a snail’s pace to get the nine of them across the dangerous section. He was hungry when they were finally over it. He suggested they stop for food under the pylon’s eerie shadow. Nearby was a door that led into the structure. Inside was a small human sized box, which Nils explained was a powered lift to get people to the top. The power was long gone, and the amount of rust on the box suggested that even stepping into it would be a death sentence.
“The elevator goes down as well,” Nils pointed out.
Next to the defunct elevator was a metal ladder that stretched up into the darkness above their heads as far as they could see—even with the clever use of the headlamps on Ulrik’s ATV and a carefully held hand-mirror.
“We should climb to the top,” Morten suggested, eager as a small boy. “We could see the land we will be coming into, instead of going in blind.”
Val took one look at the ladder and shrugged her thin shoulders, her long blonde hair dancing. “It would take too long, and leave your arms sore from the climb. I would rather get off this monstrosity.” With that, she strode out of the room and back to her waiting ATV.
“What do you think, Ulrik the Fearless? Would you climb this tower to the sky?” Morten had begun asking Ulrik’s opinion on routine matters, as if the sting of taking orders from Val was lessened when Ulrik agreed with her.
Looking up into the darkness, Ulrik gave it some consideration. He had never named himself ‘Fearless.’ It was a childhood joke from his uncle, but it had stuck with the other villagers, and eventually it had become an expectation. He had become their most fearless fighter because they needed one. But he had worries and fears like any normal man.
“Seeing far ahead would be an advantage,” he began. Morten smiled and walked to the base of the ladder, already placing his hands on the rungs, as if the decision had been made. “But, should any trouble be approaching, you would be trapped up there, with no way down but to dive into the sea from the top.”
Morten removed his hands from the rungs and turned around. His face was pale at the idea of that dive.
“Even I am not that fearless,” Ulrik chuckled as he turned to follow Val outside.
They continued across the bridge as they had before, Ulrik in the lead, and Trond in the rear. The small flat island was visible in the distance.
His eyes shifting between the way ahead and the sea, Ulrik felt uncomfortable with the massive Pylons behind them. As he had told Morten, anyone on top of one of the massive spires would have an incredible tactical advantage. They could be watching them even now, signaling ahead.
He looked back over his shoulder to check for spies.
As soon as he craned his head around, he wished he hadn’t.
Between them and the receding pylons, the sea on either side of the bridge erupted with monsters. Long, wavering tentacles reached up out of the waters and clung to the cables jutting from the concrete towers.
15
Ulrik was in full disbelief as he watched tentacles reach up and wrap the pylons from both sides. The greenish blue limbs were covered in suction cups, like those of an octopus, but he had never heard of a creature so large.
Growing up in a fishing village, he knew about all the sea’s creatures. But this was something different. The tentacles streamed up through the surface of the road, ripping up chunks of concrete, rusted steel and asphalt. They hurled debris into the air, as the snapping, waving limbs rushed through the new openings like snakes squeezing through holes in a rock wall.
He suddenly understood that the holes in the road had not been caused so much by decay as by these reaching wands of flexible fish life. Then the water on the left of the bridge boiled and a shape rose up that was so huge, he had to turn his head to see from the rounded ridges of its eyes to the back of the rounded head. It was an octopus of a kind, but its head was a hundred and fifty feet across—and it had far more than eight arms.
Then the other side of the sea frothed and a second creature of equal size rose up, scaling the bridge’s central supports.
They were both the mottled yellow color of the sea floor, a sort of sulfurous shade with green-blue highlights over the eye ridges and in the deep, dark cracks that spider-webbed their massive heads.
The others were only just beginning to turn, to see what was causing the commotion in the sea. The creatures had moved so fast—like aquatic rabbits. And still, the two immense creatures, who were dwarfing the majesty of the bridge, could not account for all the waving tentacles bursting up from under the bridge.
Ulrik realized the truth in an instant. They have young. Many of them.
His mind sprinted through possible outcomes, but none of them were good. They had been lucky with the mutant bear. There was no way they would be able to face even one of these creatures.
“Get away! Fast as you can! Go!” Val had reached the same conclusion and was screaming at the men.
Ulrik was already past the place where the tentacles were crashing through the bridge deck, and he considered turning his quad around to help the others, but Val was racing right for him, moving as fast as the ATV would carry her.
“Go!” she screamed at him.
The others tore through the chaos of waving limbs, dodging and turning to keep their ATVs clear of the suckers and tentacles snaking through the support cables, reaching for them.
Anders ran his ATV straight at a thin tentacle snaking across the road. He threw his weight back at the last moment, pulling the f
ront wheels up as they hit the obstacle. The quad took to the sky, as Erlend had taught them to do. Skjold circled the chaos in the sky, always tailing his master.
Nils chased after Anders, and the front left wheel of his ATV dropped into a hole in the road, spilling him onto the ground. Stig raced up beside him, and grabbed the slim man by the back of his shirt, hauling him to his feet. “On the back,” he yelled. Nils straddled the twin silver propane tanks, and Stig raced off again. The others came zipping past as well.
All but Trond.
He was too far back. Between him and where Ulrik stood, there was now a forest of tentacles rising up from the road, many only reaching as high as a man, but many more reaching half as high as the pylons, while the two giant octopuses seemed to be fighting over the top of the bridge, their snaking tentacles vying for supremacy.
A thick barrier of horizontal tentacles prevented Trond from moving forward. Ulrik wanted to call to him to just leave the ATV behind. They would double up like Stig and Nils. But the man was too far away to hear him, and the water crashing down from the mighty animals was like a torrential downpour. The water brought the creature’s stench, filling his nose with the smell of rot and fish. There was no way for him to get to Trond, past the tentacles, but he considered it anyway.
Run back, Ulrik thought. Go back, big man. You cannot win this fight. These are too big.
Then as the warring giant octopuses intertwined across the surface of the bridge, Ulrik noticed that the big creatures’ movements were synchronized. As the one on the right advanced, the one on the left retreated.
Trond stood on the other side of the wall of reaching, grasping suckers, unsure of what to do. Slithering tentacles slipped behind him.
The huge creature on the left tugged its way up the pylon, bringing its huge eyes level with the roadway, as the monster on the right dipped down.
Viking Tomorrow Page 7
