The truth was more terrifying. He struggled to shinny his body backward, until the pole was between his thick calves, and then his knees. He clamped onto the pole with his powerful thighs driving his knees into the sides of the slick wood, feeling a rough splinter drive into the meat of his leg.
He would not scream from the pain. Not yet. He would need that scream soon. Very soon. If he waited too long, he would pass out again.
All at once he let go with his thighs and pulled down with his back muscles, his legs flipping forward. They snapped down and back and as his legs came through the halfway part of their arc, he screamed and tugged forward with his arms, while bucking with his back. At first the scream was a focusing of his power and rage, but as the iron nail was tugged through his hands, his scream turned into one of abject pain. His left hand—on top of the right—felt a brief second of resistance, before it snapped free of the spike and the arm started to flop out into space. The right followed closely behind it, and then both arms jolted to a stop as the chains around his wrists were fully extended.
His ankles wrapped around the pole below him, and he pushed up against it, his legs slipping on the wet wood. His hands still functioned, but burned with each movement.
But Ulrik did not care.
He pulled against his left wrist and reached up with his right hand. He grabbed the blood-slicked nail. The muscles of his forearm shook and vibrated, but his hand held on to the nail, and he pulled himself up slightly. He could feel the edges of the hole in his hand stretching under the strain.
Then he raised the left wrist and banged the metacarpal bone under his thumb against the tip of the nail until the joint broke, and his wrist collapsed, sliding cleanly out of the iron manacle.
Now partially freed, he released the pole with his ankles and let his body spin from the ruined hand grasping the nail. His vision clouded with a fugue of red hatred.
When his body faced the pole, he wrapped his powerful thighs around it and pulled himself up with the manacled hand, shinnying his legs up and taking the strain as soon as he was able.
With a final burst of strength, he hooked his arm under the pine board, and threw his body backward. The nail shrieked and squealed, and then the board, the nail and the chain all ripped loose, smacking him in the face before it fell away to hang from his wrist by the chain still attached to his right arm.
Pulling back in with his abs, his chest hugged the pole. He swung his right arm, flinging the chain, board and nail around the back of the pole. He tried to catch it with his left hand and missed on the first attempt.
Lightning flashed somewhere close, sizzling the sky and his retinas, before the roar of the Thunder God filled the sky. Ulrik screamed again in rage and black hate. He swung the chain again and the board slammed into the back of his left hand as he grasped for the metal links, filling him with a white hot light. His roar was lost in another peal of thunder.
He started laughing as he swung the chain a third time and filled his heart with the promises of pain he would inflict on the Vectors. This time, his mangled left hand caught the chain. He pulled the thing tight, tugging it hard and leaning backward. He slid his feet to the front of the pole and pushed against it. Then all in one move he released the vice grip his knees had on the wood.
Tugging on the chain and pushing against the front of the pole, he ran downward. In what seemed just a few steps, his ankle mashed into the squelching muddy ground. His left hand released the chain and his body fell to his right, collapsing in the soft muck.
He pushed himself up in the mud, and in the distance he saw Heinrich, good Heinrich, running toward him through the rain. As good as it felt to see a friendly face, he was filled with rage.
But he was still laughing.
And they were going to pay.
Every last one of them.
68
Val was being held with Agnes in a small room with a bed and a wooden dresser. Overhead was a single bare light bulb that filled the room with feeble illumination. Silk tapestries had been hastily hung from hooks on each of the walls, with the only bare spot being a foot-wide stretch from which protruded an opened fuse box. Springing from it was a jumble of black and red wires, portions of them stripped of insulation and twisted together.
The room smelled faintly of perfume and the salty scent of tears.
Val didn’t know where the flowery perfume had come from, but the tears were from Agnes, who had sat silently in the corner and sobbed after they had been forced to witness Ulrik’s execution.
The Vectors had brought the two of them into this room, threw them on the mattress, and then slammed and locked the door. There was nothing else in the space, and the concrete walls held no windows. Just outside the door, was a smaller room, where Val had been stripped of all her belongings save her tank-top and pants.
She had been surprised that the Vector men had left the two of them unmolested, but the room presented a wide variety of potential outcomes, and she had no desire to see any of them. If it came down to it, she would kill Agnes—and the whole human race—with her bare hands, snapping the girl’s neck, before she allowed the Dutch men (and possibly the women) to rape the girl. But she hoped it wouldn’t come down to that. Periodically over the last three hours, a Vector would unlock and open the door, checking on them. Then he would leave and lock the door again.
She knew her weapons were in the next room, stacked on a matching dresser to the empty one in this room. Every time the guard opened the door, she caught a glimpse of her folded leather jacket, and the long ax resting on top, the end of its leather-wrapped wooden handle tantalizing in its nearness.
Each time she heard the door lock begin to turn, Val poised for action, unsure whether it would be time to fight or die, but so far, their captors appeared to be interested only in keeping her and Agnes prisoner.
She had already decided she would make her move the next time the guard popped his head in the door, but before she had a chance to formulate a plan, the lock clunked.
The solid metal door opened a crack, as usual, and the Vector, a younger man of maybe twenty years, poked his head in. This time he glanced back into the outer room, and then slid inside, and closed the door behind him.
Val noticed two things immediately. The man had left his club outside in the outer room, and he had brought another, much smaller one, in his pants. Summoning up every ounce of acting talent she had, Val smiled sweetly at the man, and waved him over.
They had left her sterile gauze, which she had stuffed into the open, oozing hole in her shoulder, before using the bandages left to wrap the joint. It still hurt, though, and the rest of her body ached from the damage she had taken, but there was no way she couldn’t handle this young man.
The only question in her mind was how badly should she hurt him. When his left hand came out of his back pocket with a straight razor and his right hand reached for his zipper, she realized the answer to her dilemma.
She was going to hurt him a lot.
She smiled once more in her best ‘come hither’ look, pulling her legs back as if she were making room for the man on the bed. She positioned them under her. The man, with a slack-jawed look of complete lust, was clueless. He lowered the straight razor, thinking he wouldn’t need the weapon. Val lunged, leaping upward off the bed, the top of her head grazing the lone swinging light bulb. It moved in a pendulum arc across the small bedroom, and her knee cracked into the underside of the man’s chin. His arms flew out to the sides for balance, as Val landed on one foot and kicked out again, this time driving her foot into his chest like a piston. A loud crunch from his sternum echoed around the room.
The Vector’s body flew backward and his back connected with the exposed wiring from the fuse-box. He spasmed as power surged through him, dimming the overhead swinging bulb to a faint glow. Val had not heard any power generators, so she assumed the building had a reserve power supply from passive solar panels, like those she had seen on her journeys. She didn’t know if
the amount of electricity in such a system would be enough to kill the man, but she stepped over to the empty dresser, and tugged one of the wooden drawers free. She swung the empty drawer, shattering it against the man’s head. His body flew to the floor, where it twitched briefly. A thin curl of smoke rose off his back.
More smoke sizzled up off the fuse box, but the nearly dormant swinging lightbulb returned to its regular but low level of light. Val dropped the broken slats of the dresser drawer on top of the man’s head, and beckoned to Agnes, who had stopped crying. Instead her face wore an expression of awe.
“You have not seen anything yet,” she told the girl.
Agnes leapt up and Val tugged the door open.
The outer room was empty, as she suspected it would be. Val reached through the doorway and snagged her ax. It never left her hands as she quickly donned her jacket, and slipped her boots on.
Agnes slid her own shoes on, but none of their other camping equipment or bedrolls were in the room. There was nothing else for Agnes to collect.
Val strapped on her holsters, the knife and hand-ax. Even her goggles were on the dresser’s wooden surface, and she slid them on her forehead. Her shoulder wound had been aggravated during the scuffle, and had started bleeding again. She could feel the blood running down to her elbow.
She quickly pressed her fingertips to the wound, covering the digits in blood. She raised her fingers and planted them on her opposing cheeks, painting her face with the distinctive feather pattern that looked like dried blood.
Only this time, the blood was real.
She slid the goggles over her eyes, then pulled her sharp hand-ax.
“Do we have a plan?” Agnes asked.
Val nodded down at her waist. “Take my knife.”
The girl did as she was told, and held the knife up at the ready, a determined look on her face.
“The plan...is that we will kill every goat-fucking bastard between us and the sea.”
With that she flung open the outer door.
On the other side was a long rectangular room with a row of wooden tables covered with dishes and serving platters of food. Metal stein cups were everywhere. At the far end of the room was another door, to the outside.
And seated along the benches were twenty men and women in the midst of eating their meal, not one of them armed for battle. Not one spiked club to be found in the room. At the far end of the table was the raven-haired woman Val had seen with the Vectors’ leader, the man she assumed to be Borss. Val’s eyes locked with the woman’s. Then the woman dropped her plate and darted out the door at the room’s far end. Val was determined to get to her.
“We will start with these,” Val said through gritted teeth.
She lunged forward and up onto the table.
Then the carnage began.
69
Val sliced into three bodies before anyone at the table had a chance to move. Her ax sliced through the room in vertical chops, spraying arcs of blood up to the ceiling with each tug from a cleaved skull.
At the other end of the room, Vectors screamed and shoved their way through the door and out. Behind her, Agnes was using the knife’s pointed tip, jabbing two quick thrusts into the chest of any Vector still moving after Val had passed them.
Four more men and women fell at Val’s hands before the room had cleared of the living. She knew they would go straight for their weapons and then return—most likely in greater numbers.
“Let’s go,” she said, and Agnes followed her across the tabletops to the end of the long room.
Val sped up and leapt head first through the doorway, swinging her hand-ax to the side of the frame as she came through. The blade sank into the upper arm of a Vector who had been waiting with a raised club. The sharp tempered steel sliced most of the way through the arm—and all the way through the bone—before Val’s tumbling body was gone from the doorframe and rolling on the ground beyond it in a somersault. She came to her feet and whirled in a complete circle, taking in the screaming Vector, whose arm hung and flopped from a hinge of still-attached skin.
She stepped back and dispatched the nearly amputated foe.
The immediate area was clear, and as Agnes rushed out of the long dining room into the rain, Val saw there was no sign of the raven-haired woman. Agnes hurried up to Val, her eyes darting all around. Rain poured from the heavens, but the sky had lightened to an off white.
“Back to the warehouse,” Val said.
“What?” Agnes was shocked that Val would want to go back into that place, after what had happened just hours ago.
“We still need the machine part,” she said, and then took off running. They crossed a road, and a line of dull trees that grew up alongside it. On the other side was a large open space—once a parking lot or a loading lot, but now coated in a fine moss. Rotting shipping containers were stacked in piles, like miniature skyscrapers of the old world.
To their right was the white warehouse with the steel wheel they needed. Running from the river to their left were close to forty Vectors, now armed for battle.
“Hurry,” Val shouted, and she sprinted for the warehouse door.
She hadn’t understood the shouting of the Vectors when they had beaten Ulrik, but she understood that their leader was the man named Borss, and Anders had been working for him. The only advantage she had now was that she had never told Anders the number of the crate. The Vectors would not know which item she had been after. Heading back inside now was a calculated gamble, but there was no choice.
Val burst through the door, and Agnes, on her heels, tried to close it behind them.
“Leave it,” Val said, racing to the start of the R aisle. She was greeted by a grisly sight that took her breath away. She skidded to a stop, and Agnes crashed into her from behind. Then seeing what had brought Val up short, Agnes shouted out.
“Ulrik!”
The man looked like an animal that had been set loose from Helheim, the land of the dead. He was covered in blood from his crusted beard to his bare feet. His hands were wrapped in thick wads of cloth, but he still managed to hold his heavy ax, the shaft of it stretched across his body as he lumbered forward. The head of the ax was coated in so much blood it was dripping onto the concrete floor. He wore no shirt, but there were thick brown leather straps over his shoulders, the pack on his back weighted down by something heavy. Behind him, and sporting twin long knives like the black-faced swastika-adorned crazies from Germany, Heinrich was also covered in the gore of his victims.
Ulrik saw Val and Agnes, but the look of murder did not leave his eyes. “I have it. We should go. There will be more.”
Val pointed. “They come already. Back to the center of the aisle.”
Heinrich turned and started jogging back down the aisle. The warehouse was dim, but there was enough light from the skylights that they would see well enough to fight.
Ulrik held out his arm like a barrier gate, preventing Val from passing him. “You should take this thing and get her out of here, while we hold them off.”
“No,” Val said.
“You should—”
“No.” She said it louder, and she saw his eyes narrow. “We will live. All of us. That is the mission now.”
Ulrik lowered his arm, and as she moved past him, he said softly, “Yes, my Valkyrie.”
Agnes grinned at him as she went by, and then he turned and began a limping, hopping, lope of a run, back toward the center of the aisle.
A second later they heard a cry rise up as Vectors funneled into the building, again from both ends. The men and women came, yelling and hooting, swinging their spike-laden clubs, heedless of danger, rushing into the aisle. They came looking for revenge, or for battle or for blood.
But the four remaining fighters had a higher purpose. They would save the world, or they would die. But if they died, they were going to send as many Vectors as they could to hell before their end came. They took up positions a few feet apart, Heinrich next to Val with his lon
g knives. Behind them Ulrik stood in the middle of the aisle, and Agnes stood just behind him, her knife ready to jab at anyone that made it past the fighters.
There was no pause, no posturing. The Vectors just ran in to their deaths.
Val swung her hand-ax low and at her side, cleaving into the first man’s upper thigh as if she were a butcher cutting meat. With the handle of the long ax, she blocked his club’s blow overhead, then reversed the swing. She slammed the head of the ax out, slicing into the ear of another man who would have run between her and Heinrich. For his part, the German had stabbed one long knife through the throat of the third man in the vanguard, and jabbed left into the other ear of the man in the middle.
The first three bodies collapsed in a bloody heap at their feet, as the second wave came in, still screaming and swinging their clubs. Val stepped forward, and placed a foot on one of the bodies below her, climbing slightly higher. She refused to give the Vectors the high ground that the mound of bodies would soon form. She would soon be standing atop a mountain of dead—if the manic Dutchmen were foolish enough to keep coming. She only had to keep an eye on the shelving to ensure she was not flanked.
But then, like most battle plans, it fell apart shortly after the first bodies fell.
A Vector woman dropped off the top shelf high above them. Her feet pounded into Heinrich’s chest, taking them both down behind Val.
Ahead of her, three men dove forward at the same time, all leading with their rounded club tips, as if the weapons were spears.
The defensive line had been breached.
70
The crazy woman landing on top of him wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the damned spikes on her club. Heinrich had been surprised by the falling missile of a woman, but he had thrown himself backward, taking the hit and relying on his teammate for exactly what she provided.
As soon as he hit the ground, Agnes turned and jabbed her knife into the Vector woman’s back twice, sinking the blade to the hilt each time. With both lungs punctured—and probably her heart sliced as well—the Vector woman was out of the fight. Heinrich shoved the body hard, and by that point, as the weight of her rolled off of him, Agnes had already turned to finish off Ulrik’s new victims.
Viking Tomorrow Page 29
