Mjolnir

by B. C. James

  “Of course, I’m concerned! I’m worried sick, believe me! If I took off my shirt you would see that the stress of the situation is giving me a rash the size of Texas”. He loosened his tie and peered down the front of his shirt, “Well, maybe not a rash, looks more like razor burn…but I’m damned concerned. Something ought to be done about this.”

  “About your razor burn or Mrs. Douglas’s missing daughter?” she asked with more than a little sarcasm in her voice.

  “Hmmm…let’s start with the razor burn. That is a problem I know we have some control over. After that, we will see what we can do about solving this problem with the missing girl. Hey, it will be simple. You round up Fred and Velma, I’ll grab Shaggy and Scooby, then we can all pile into the Mystery Machine, interfere with the police investigation, and have this crisis solved by the time lunch rolls around.”

  There wasn’t even the hint of smile on his face as he spoke, but sarcasm dripped from his tone. He was taking the long way around in telling her there was nothing they could do.

  “But, sir…this is the third one this month…and…”

  “Holly Ann, we have over ten million distributors in the U.S. alone and another twenty-three million in China. That number is constantly growing. Between here, Asia, South America, Europe, and the Middle East, we have enough people in the organization to qualify our company as a medium-sized country. Hell, we should have a seat in the U.N. with all our members. Statistically speaking, having a person go missing every now and then is completely normal when an organization is dealing with this sort of population. I’m surprised that we don’t get daily reports of more of our people wandering off into the sunset and never being heard from again.”

  Holly Ann fidgeted a little as he gave this lecture. She had to admit he had a point, but it didn’t make her feel any better. A number of calls were still on hold and she thought it best to go back to work without saying anything else on the topic.

  Dennis, for all his bluster and logic about the situation, still felt like he had somehow lost the argument. He hated when Holly Ann got quiet on him.

  “Tell ya what, kiddo, if you can get me a picture of the girl, her name, a description of what she was wearing, and anything else that you believe would be helpful, I’ll show it while I’m doing that guest spot on the Cain Adomnain Club tomorrow. The show reaches a truckload of do-gooders every day. Maybe that will help find her.”

  This got a little smile from his assistant. She was pretty sure that he really was a good person at heart and wouldn’t just let this go without doing something. “Will do, sir. At least we’re trying something, Right?”

  Now that this little state of affairs seemed to be settled to her liking, he went into his office to prepare for his spot on the Cain Adomnain Club. Dennis loved being on that show. Using a Bible verse as a dog whistle for his distributors had the unexpected side effect of endearing him to the Christian media. These people seemed to support any person or cause as long as they used the words “Praise the Lord” every once in a while. The audience and supporters of the Christian Telecast Network and its show The Cain Adomnain Club didn’t even bat an eye when their leader and prophet, Patrick Bobson, came out in 1991 and insisted that God had told him that George Bush would defeat Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. When January of ‘92 rolled around and the Clinton era had begun, nobody even bothered to question Bobson about his moment of false prophecy or what that said about his relationship with God. Many Christians don’t seem overly committed to researching and learning about the very thing they have devoted their lives to. This made them easy to fool. A large percentage of them were the religious equivalent of a “C” student who didn’t want to do the optional reading. In other words, the perfect people to cultivate for new distributors.

  Syrdon tilted his chair back, put his feet up on the large oak desk in front of him, and began to doze lightly. Every now and then he would chuckle between snores. This was how he spent the remainder of the workday. Anticipation always seemed to make him sleep a little better.

  Chapter 5

  Thor began to regain consciousness. The first thing he was aware of was that he had an epic headache. This was not unusual for him after a night of binge drinking and hiding self-pity behind mindless bluster. He never believed that it was fair of the cosmos to curse him with the same sort of hangover that lesser beings were forced to suffer through. His alleged godhood had managed to get him through “The Great Plague,” eons of natural climate change, and several unprotected evenings with Courtney Love and Maria Brink, not to mention a weekend holiday in Chernobyl. He had survived everything that the most belligerent mosquitoes could throw at him and whatever pandemic de jour that the New York Times editorial staff could come up with as a way to panic its sheep-like reader base. Despite all this, alcohol made his head hurt every time. For Thor, it was Jack Daniels and not death that was truly the great equalizer.

  Besides his aching head, the other thing that Thor was aware of was that he was not alone in the room. Most of the previous evening was a blur and he was not yet completely coherent. He remembered being at the bar. He remembered being drunk. He remembered imparting some personal philosophy on the nature of gods to patrons who were too drunk themselves to come up with a graceful way to excuse themselves and find more entertaining company elsewhere. He also remembered being abducted and spirited away from the pub. Had he been thinking in a sober and rational manner, he would recognize he was lying on a comfortable bed. People who want to do you harm don’t generally kidnap you and then let you sleep off the evening’s revelries on a Sleep Number mattress.

  Of course, Thor was not entirely sober or rational at that moment. The combination of a hangover and the fact that he never quite got the hang of waking before noon took him right down to his default settings. In Thor’s particular case, most of his personal default settings involved a lot of hitting. He instinctively reached for his famed war hammer, Mjölnir, so he could dispense some god-like justice in a fitting manner. His hand closed not around his signature weapon, but a soft pillow. His hammer was not there. He should have remembered that.

  Okay, so there was no hammer. If his only option was to dispense godly justice with something from Bed, Bath, and Beyond, so be it. He feigned unconsciousness until he felt that the stranger in the room with him was near. The attack was sudden and savage. Usually, when a guy Thor’s size moves with anything that resembles quickness, the cliché statement is “he moves pretty fast…for a big guy.” In Thor’s case he wasn’t moving “pretty fast…for a big guy,” he was moving pretty fast for a bolt of lightning. He spun from lying on his stomach to a full fighting stance in less time than it took the average nerve ending to recognize that it’d been exposed to fire. During this transition, he swung the pillow with what could only be called lethal force, words that have probably never been applied to a pillow before, and made contact with the unknown person in the room. The figure was lifted off the ground and awkwardly flung across the bedchamber leaving a shower of goose feathers from the disintegrated pillow in his wake.

  The limp form went crashing through the bathroom door, which was about fifteen feet to the left of the bed. He skidded across the black tile floor until a large Jacuzzi brutally put a stop to his momentum.

  Thor surveyed his surroundings. There was nobody else in the room to hit. It also occurred to him that the room he was standing in was his own bedroom. Why would somebody go to all the trouble of kidnapping him just to take him home? His late wife, Sif, used to pull him out of taverns and take him home to bed, but that was less about her concern for him and more about the fact that he had a bad habit of sticking his sword in other extramarital sheaths during extended drinking sessions. He always claimed that it was an accident, and that it just sort of fell in there, but this explanation didn’t keep her from sobering him up with lethally cold water and repeated blows with cast iron cookware. He smiled at the memory and rubbed his head in the place where a pan typically impacted his skull. Dam
n, he missed her. He could reminisce about the finer moments of his marriage later though; he still needed to see if the intruder was alive enough to do anything more than bleed all over his bathroom floor.

  Thor looked at the sculpture that hung over his bed. It was a piece of art that involved a lot of bladed weapons. In this case, it was a weathered Norse shield with an impressive array of Germanic and Scandinavian swords crossing behind it. The blades fanned out at the top of the shield like a deadly, steel, peacock tail. The sword going vertically through the center space was a two-handed Flamberge. He pulled the art from the wall and took the Flamberge from its place of prominence within the shield.

  The Flamberge was the Shaquille O’Neal of swords. It was big, heavy, and slow. The blade itself was nearly four feet long, and that didn’t include either the enormous handle or the second grip that was just above the hilt. It was about as heavy as a medium-sized poodle and was originally designed to break through medieval armor. In the hands of most men, this ancient can-opener would be awkward and unwieldy. In the hands of Thor, the heavy weapon was manipulated as if it was an extension of his arm.

  For eons he had become used to carrying his famous, sometimes infamous, war hammer. It just felt wrong when he held any other weapon, almost like he was cheating or somehow being unfaithful.

  However, Thor didn’t really need a weapon. Unless somebody was hiding a nuclear device in their boxers, most people were no threat to the Thunder God. He brought along the weapon for the effect it would have on the intruder. While Thor loved a good beating, as long as he was on the right side of it, it would look bad in the press if he beat someone to death in his home, even if that someone was trespassing. No matter what, it would look like an uneven fight and the criminal trespasser would turn into a sympathetic case. This was just the sort of thing that could hurt his endorsement deals. It would just be easier if the burglar saw a huge man coming at him with a sword and surrendered without a fight.

  Thor walked past the shattered door and saw a man sitting on the floor, next to a dented Jacuzzi, rubbing his head.

  “You never change Mighty Thor…and I don’t mean that as a compliment.”

  Thor wasn’t an easy man to catch off guard. The last thing that took him by surprise was wiped out in the last ice age along with the mammoths. But seeing his half-brother, Baldr, sitting on his bathroom tile and nursing a potential concussion was more than most Mondays had to offer.

  Baldr rubbed his head and moved his neck from side to side to see if anything below his brain stem had become dangerously dislodged. As he buried his hand in long, chestnut hair, checking his skull for cracks, Thor noted that his younger brother was one fringed leather jacket away from looking like a nineteen eighty-six version of Jon Bon Jovi nursing a post groupie and vodka hangover.

  Baldr was a big deal in the old days. He was the God of Beauty and Light. Once upon a time, that made him the most beloved of all the Asgard’s deities. He was a rock star to the people of the Dark Ages, a medieval Elvis without the Quaaludes. He was far from the most powerful deity on the block, but Baldr definitely had the hearts of all the gods, people, and…well…just about every carbon-based life form on the planet.

  This changed when Loki engineered Baldr’s murder. At one time, everything in Heaven and on Earth had sworn an oath never to do Baldr any harm. Everything, that was, except for one tiny holly bush. Loki discovered that this shrub had not made any promises concerning Baldr’s safety. Putting this knowledge to its most malevolent use, Loki, the God of Lies, had covertly made a spear from the wood of this disloyal bush. He then tricked one of Baldr’s own brothers into stabbing him with it. That was how the most beloved of all the gods died. Human society had always had a collective tendency towards “out of sight, out of mind.” After Baldr disappeared to the depths of Hel, people sort of forgot about him. Outside of a small contingent of Renaissance Faire patrons and Society for Creative Anachronism members, his legacy faded into obscurity.

  People who went to Hel tended to stay in Hel. That was how the mistress of that realm, Hela, liked it. The probability of Baldr showing up in an earthly bathroom was roughly about the same odds as finding Andy Kaufman working at a Taco Bell drive-thru in Kankakee, Illinois. But here he was.

  Thor did his best to hide his surprise. This would have been more convincing if his mouth wasn’t hanging open like he was waiting for someone to toss a grape in it.

  He turned the gap-mouthed expression into a sort of annoyed sneer and hoped that covered up his shock.

  “You know, the face your making has a certain ‘Jethro Clampett’ quality to it,” Baldr said still rubbing his noggin, “It suits you.”

  “The ghost of my brother returns from the dead to break my bathroom and insult my intelligence…oh joy,” Thor dryly quipped as he put the sword down. “Of course, I’ve survived through the millennia while you were killed by a piece of landscaping. So, who’s the smart one now?”

  Thor smiled and offered his half-brother a hand to help him up. Baldr waved off the gesture by giving the Thunder God a proper English, two-fingered salute and got to his feet unaided by his snarky sibling.

  “Thor, the cockroaches have been around longer than either of us. If longevity is your measuring stick for intelligence, feel free join your six-legged contemporaries at the MENSA potluck dinners.”

  “Well, now that we have the pleasantries out of the way…”

  “You wound me Thor; one would think that you weren’t delighted to see me.”

  Thor wasn’t exactly “delighted” to see Baldr. But this wasn’t really Baldr’s fault. In truth Thor had not really felt anything that resembled true happiness since the death of his wife, Sif. But he was pleased to see his half-brother despite the fact that there were several eons of competitiveness and an underlying stream of resentment because their father, Odin, had always liked Baldr best.

  Baldr was the God of Light and in his father’s eyes was both the smart one AND the pretty one. By contrast, Odin treated Thor like something he only cared about when a he needed to move some furniture.

  This was a recipe for brotherly resentment, but that all fell away when Baldr died. It was his brother and Thor mourned him along with the rest of the planet. And therein lay the current problem: Baldr fell squarely into the category of “the dearly departed.” His last known address was somewhere in Hel. Very few had ever attempted to escape Hela’s realm and the success rate made lottery odds look promising by comparison. Seeing as the proprietor of the underworld didn’t take kindly to runaways, and had a scorched earth approach when it came to retrieving escapees, Baldr’s arrival probably meant nothing but trouble. Thor wasn’t sure he wanted to be standing near the patch of earth that would inevitably be ground zero for a good scorching.

  Part of him wanted to hear Baldr’s tale of life in the underworld and what could only be described as a near impossible escape from the place of the dead. An almost equal part of him wanted to brain Baldr with the nearest lamp, dump him in the neighbor’s recycling bin, and then head back to bed in blissful ignorance.

  While there could be a healthy debate about whether or not Thor was a kind being, he was generally fair. He felt that the least he could do was hear his half-brother out.

  Thor thought for a moment. “Okay, so here you are, in my home, after escaping from a place that nobody ever escapes from without some horrifying consequences. In the past several hours you have kidnapped me from a bar…”

  “Liberated! I think that’s the word you’re looking for. I liberated from the bar.” Baldr said, raising a finger to interrupt his brother. He believed it was important to make it clear that he had rescued Thor from the clutches of his captor, Jack Daniels.

  “And for that liberation you got your ass kicked ass with a pillow. You also dented my Jacuzzi. So, I am not sure ‘delighted’ is the best word for our current situation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you escaped, but the question is how much trouble followed you out of Hel? The best I can of
fer you right now is a drink and some company while I decide whether I should let you stay or put you out with the morning trash.”

  “Fair enough, Thor.”

  “Now that we have settled that, I’m going back to bed. Don’t wake me till Judge Judy is over.”

  Baldr looked at Thor blankly. “What’s a Judge Judy?”

  Thor just walked away chuckling and shaking his head.

  Chapter 6

  Thor was not on very good terms with mornings. He was a creature of the night. The main reason for this was the availability of taverns…to be more specific, the availability of HIS type of taverns.

  At these saloons, a punch in the face was sort of like the word, “Aloha.” It could mean, “hello,” “goodbye,” be a request for directions to the nearest emergency room, or an invitation to a box social. The bars at the top of his list also featured waitresses who should come with a government warning tattooed on their lower back. These type of places generally opened after dark and took a “don’t ask don’t tell” approach to serving alcohol past the legal hours.

  Dealing with the arrival of his new guest and the inconvenience of another morning became a moot point after Baldr strode into his room and pulled the curtain from a westward facing window. The scene that greeted Thor’s waking eyes included the setting sun; morning was long past. He had managed to sleep through the entire day. This was not extremely unusual for Thor. He rather enjoyed starting his day when the sun was disappearing behind the horizon. It wasn’t long before he was cleaned up, dressed, and in his GTO heading for one of his favorite watering holes.

  Baldr seemed to be enjoying the ride. There was a pretty good chance that classic American muscle cars were in short supply in the underworld. The open air of the convertible seemed to agree with him.