by B. C. James
“So, a Catholic Priest, a Muslim Cleric, and Don Knotts walk into a brothel,” he said quietly to himself. “No, that doesn’t work. What would Don Knotts be doing in a brothel? This may take a little work.”
While he added another layer of tape to his knuckles and seriously considered some life changes, he glanced up at the big screen television. The local pregame show was in progress. The cameraman, while doing a pan of the stadium, focused in on the Cardinal cheerleaders as they walked on to the field.
Thor looked with interest at what was on the screen and two things became abundantly clear. First of all, the cameraman’s Y chromosome was in good, working order. The second thing that he noticed was that these women were not the team’s normal cheer squad.
Thor had been a voluntary outcast from the world and company of gods for a very long time, so it took his memory a few moments to catch up with the images. He began to recognize some of the faces. These women were Valkyrie and there could only be one reason they were here.
“Bro, you have got to try one of these,” Baldr said as he burst into the loft.
Baldr’s long incarceration in the realm of the dead meant that he missed the culinary revolution that was spearheaded by Dolly Madison, Little Debbie, and Oscar Mayer. While many a stadium food vendor found themselves in Hel, their wieners stayed in the earthly realm. Today was the first time Baldr had experienced the simple joys of a ballpark hot dog.
Thor looked at his brother. The Valkyrie were here to drag him and his foot long, back to Hel.
“Hey, Baldr, it might be a good idea if you find a closet or something to hide in.”
“Oddly enough brother, the guy who sold me this also said something about me coming out of the closet…with his help. He also winked in a way I found disturbing and creepy. What am I missing about this whole closet discussion?”
“I’ll explain that to you later but right now there are bunch of Valkyrie here masquerading as cheerleaders. The only possible reason they would be hanging around in a stadium is to snatch you away and back to Hel.”
Baldr stopped chewing and looked like he was going to drop his hot dog.
When he first arrived in Hel, despite what he showed Thor, it wasn’t completely horrible. He was the most popular of the gods in a Hel where the Valkyrie acted as both the tour guides for the dead and the realm’s prison guards. It was sort of like living in a world where Orlando Bloom was incarcerated and all of his jailers were attractive, single women.
For a while he was used by the Valkyrie like a carbon-based love doll. This was not an arrangement he had any sort of problems with. In fact, with all things being equal, it was not a bad way to spend an eternity. This changed when a crabby shrew of a woman took over leadership of the Valkyrie. Baldr had never actually met her or learned her name, but that woman’s influence spread through them like a virus.
These ladies went from rolling in the hay with Baldr to sticking it under his fingernails. Except instead of hay they used long bamboo shoots brought from earth. Rumor had it that this new leader had an intense hatred for male gods. Seeing as he was the only one she had access to, this woman used her subordinates to inflict the full brunt of her fury upon him.
When the mood struck her, he would be mercilessly tortured by her proxies in ways that made Abu Ghraib look like a pillow fight. He never got to meet the architect of his misery, but he could sense her watching and enjoying the show.
On Asgard or on Earth, Baldr was more than a match for any of these women. Most of the abuse that he suffered happened in Hel though; it was their turf. Except for Hela herself, the Valkyrie were the most powerful beings in that realm. This left Baldr scarred with a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. He lived each moment with a deep aversion to Valkyrie. When given the choice between fight or flight in the face of this bevy of curvy thugs, he would choose flight every time.
While Thor had a sense of some of what Baldr went through in Hel, he was not privy to the full extent of his abuse at the hands of the Valkyrie. There was a myriad of reasons that Baldr kept these details to himself but it was mostly pride. He didn’t want to admit to his brother that he had his ass kicked on a regular basis by a bunch of girls.
Baldr did his best to regain his composure and gave a look of surprise, rather than fear. “Why should I hide, Thor? Between the two us, we are more than a match for a group of Valkyrie.”
Thor was considering some life changes but hadn’t made any firm decisions. He was more likely to start by getting to know the people he actually worked and interacted with on a daily basis or at least getting a puppy then he was to dive back into the mine field of Asgardian interpersonal politics.
Thor looked from side to side. “Nope, I don’t see anything in this room that says any of this is my problem. You’re on your own brother,” he said with a shrug.
Before Baldr could think of some sort of argument that ended with it being very much Thor’s problem, the door to the loft splintered and the Valkyrie burst into the room. In their miniskirts and halter tops, they looked more like they were dressed for the after party of a high school homecoming game than they were for a fight.
In contrast to the Playmate action wear they were decked out in, the faces of these women wore hard looks of malicious purpose. Baldr looked like a cornered wombat, searching for an avenue of escape from a pack of voracious dingoes. Thor just continued to wrap his wrists. He did manage to show enough interest in them to look over his shoulder and critique their outfits.
“I always liked the costumes the Rams cheerleaders wore best. Those aren’t bad though.” He said, stubbornly refusing to find them threatening.
Belle rushed toward Baldr but pointed to Thor and shouted in a cold measured tone, “Kill him!”
While the tone was controlled, there was still the hint of a quiver in her voice. Six Valkyrie broke away from Belle and attacked Thor. Belle went after Baldr alone. She ferociously tackled the God of Light. The force of the blow carried them through the bathroom door. Baldr’s flailing legs caught the edge of the door and slammed it shut.
The half dozen Valkyrie rushed Thor. He raised his hand like a traffic cop stopping a VW bug at an intersection. Oddly enough they halted.
“Slow your roll, ladies. If we are truly going to do this, I need to be prepared.” He didn’t know exactly why he was being dragged into this nor did he care. If being in the same room with Baldr was enough provocation for them to attack him, these misguided Valkyrie were about to learn some very painful lessons.
He reached into his duffle bag and retrieved his protective cup. He raised a finger to the women, indicating he would just be a minute, turned his back to them, and slid the cup down the front of his pants. The Valkyrie waited impatiently as Thor made the proper adjustments. He could hear some of their feet tapping behind him as he buckled up his football pants and turned around. Brittany, Belle’s second in command, rolled her eyes and blew a lock of stray blonde hair away from her eyes.
“Are you ready?” Brit asked in the most annoyed voice she could dredge up.
Thor knocked on the cup and smiled. “About as ready as I can be. Show me what you got!”
Four of the girls pulled out Tasers that would be the envy of most law enforcement professionals. The first thought that came to Thor’s mind was to wonder exactly where these girls were hiding this sort of weaponry. NFL Cheerleader outfits were easy on the eyes but left very little to the imagination.
Most girls would have problems hiding their lipstick in these costumes, let alone the sort of gear that would be issued to riot police.
The girls moved in a quick, coordinated attack. They fanned out in a semi-circle around the Thunder God, and the four with the Tasers all fired at once. The combined charge dropped Thor to his knees. For centuries, he ruled the skies and the storms. In all that time, he had never actually been hit with the lightning he so easily commanded. It had always filtered through the hammer he had become so known for, Mjolnir. What he was now going th
rough must be similar to being struck by lightning from the above.
This was not the fight Thor had imagined. In his mind, he easily repelled their physical attacks, put them back in their place, and maybe took them dancing after the game. If weapons were going to be involved, he assumed it would probably be blades. Knives and swords he understood. Thor was completely unprepared to deal with a half dozen cheerleaders with high-tech S.W.A.T. weaponry.
Thor’s muscles were locking, but his eyes worked just fine. He watched as Brittany and one of her cohorts produced another pair of odd looking guns from wherever they were hiding these objects in the tiny cheerleader outfits. The guns looked like something that would be used in paintball combat.
Thor had seen enough nature programs to recognize that the girls were pointing tranquilizer guns in his direction. These ladies were about to go all Croc Hunter on his ass, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He felt the first two darts hit him. After that he heard the girls celebrating another couple of successful bullseyes. He would have to take their word for it because at this point he could feel nothing. He wondered how much charge remained in the Tasers and if he would even be conscious when they ran out of juice.
With the Thunder God down and drugged the girls relented with the Tasers. Thor felt the stream of electricity going into his body shut off. He collapsed, panting on the ground. Whatever narcotic the darts were armed with was starting to pull the curtain down on his consciousness. It was times like these when he remembered that the word “god” was an overstatement of what he really was.
While he was powerful beyond the seemingly boundless imagines of Stan Lee or Chris Claremont, he still had some of the same weaknesses that plagued most carbon-based life forms. The nights when he had to be pulled off the floor after having his ass flattened by Johnny Walker or Old Grand-Dad were evidence of this. The only difference between him and the denizens of the city drunk tank is that what would take ounces to launch a normal human into Charlie Sheen territory would require over a gallon for Thor.
Considering how quickly his vision was starting to fog over he could only assume the girls had cranked the dart dosage up from caribou or mountain goat all the way to sperm whale levels.
“Is he still conscious?” Brittany asked.
One of the girls leaned over him to better see if he was foaming from the mouth yet. Thor grabbed her by the throat and flung her across the room like an unwanted Cabbage Patch doll. The rest of the Valkyrie quickly backed away and again fired their Tasers at him. Thor’s body locked up for the second time.
Between the tranquilizer darts and the electrocutions, allowing himself to black out was sounding like a better and better idea. It was at the moment that he was hit with something that wasn’t a drug filled dart or a Taser; he was struck with a revelation.
He was the God of Thunder and as such, commanding storms was part of his pedigree. This included lightning. There was very little difference between the stuff that the Tasers were torturing him with and the lightning bolts he once micromanaged with such glee. Ignoring the pain, Thor concentrated hard and focused on the electricity. He could feel it obeying…bending to his will. Before the Valkyrie knew what was going on, the electricity had changed direction and in one big burst, moved up the probes to those holding the Tasers. The quartet of Valkyries holding these weapons were fried into unconsciousness.
Brittany watched as Thor tried to get to his feet. She and Jamie, the only other Valkyrie left standing, were desperately looking for any additional darts to fire at Thor. After shooting enough doses of medetomidine and ketamine into him to send a small herd of angry bison into a Timothy Leary haze, neither of them could believe that he was capable of breathing, let alone movement.
While it was clear that he was far from unaffected by the drugs, there was a look in his eye that made it obvious to anyone with a survival instinct that Thor had taken all he was going to take from these women.
The girls had two choices in front of them. The first was to run away and face the wrath of Belle later. This was as scary as the idea of facing off against a pissed off Thunder God. The second was to take their chances with a drugged addled Thor in hand-to-hand combat. He could barely make it to his knees without one of his hands on the floor. So, they took their chances against him and did their best to finish him off by bludgeoning him with their dart guns.
Hitting Thor with a lightly built dart gun was about as useful as slapping a white rhino around with string cheese. Thor fed off his anger and annoyance. For a moment it helped him to overcome the effects of the drugs. In one smooth move he back-fisted both of the Valkyrie. Their limp bodies crashed through the draped windows of the luxury loft and fell to the stadium seats below.
Thor struggled to his feet, intent on seeing what had become of Baldr. The last time he saw his brother, he had tumbled into the bathroom with the leader of the Valkyrie, and the door had slammed shut.
Thor fell against the bathroom door with all his weight. He added as much force as his shocked muscles would allow. Cheap pine splintered under the assault. Once he was through and into the bathroom, he saw the woman on top of Baldr. She had his arms pinned under her knees and was doing her best to strangle him with her bare hands.
Even with the cocktail of drugs clouding his judgment, something here seemed both wrong and familiar. Were he thinking straight, he may have been able to put it together, but at that moment, he was seeing three of everything, and the only solutions intellectually available to him all involved hitting something.
The wrongness of the situation became even more wrong when the raven haired woman on top of Baldr fell over and started yelling, “Stop them, they’re gonna kill me!!!!”
Before Thor could even begin to try to process this odd turn of events he felt a cold steel snap around both his wrists. A large man in a dark suit with an earpiece was standing above him. Well, perhaps it was three large men in dark suits and earpieces, his eyes were still doing their best impression of compound vision.
“Sir,” the man, or men, said, “you are under arrest.”
At this point Thor just gave up and passed out. His unconscious body was dragged to one of the stadium’s basement holding cells.
Chapter 17
Thin rivers of blood flowed down Thor’s hands and collected in a shallow puddle just below his fingertips. The God of Thunder sat on a steel bench, slumped against a concrete wall. His brain was still shaking off the effects of the drugged darts that the Valkyrie had shot into him.
He gave an incoherent little smile as the feeling of the fluid trickling down his fingers tickled him a bit. Had he been fully conscious he would not have been concerned over his blood loss. As a God of Storms AND War, bleeding was just part of the job description. What would have concerned him was why he was bleeding.
While unconscious, he had strained against the handcuffs and chains that held him prisoner. The metal had bitten deeply into his skin. This is not unusual for many people who find themselves guests of the penal system. It is unusual if your pedigree has the words “God of Thunder” in it or your mailing address is somewhere in the realm of Asgard. Under normal circumstances, Thor would have just snapped the cuffs off like plastic toys. These were not normal circumstances. Regardless of what should have been happening, the restraints held.
As the fog in Thor’s mind began to recede, gradually putting him back in control of his faculties, the room around him began to take shape. The answer to the myriad of questions bouncing around in his brain was sitting on a folding chair at the other end of the small room; immaculately dressed in a smart woolen, pinstripe suit.
His couture was accentuated by a Rolex that, if fenced in the right places, could have fed North Korea for a year. The man’s ivory beard obscured a craggy face that betrayed a life that was both colorful and occasionally brutal. Where it not for the eye patch he would have looked like a more muscular version of the Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World.”
“Hi, Dad,” Thor said flatly.
Odin regarded him with his single eye. “I’ll bet you now wish you had taken the time to send a few Father’s Day cards over the years.”
Thor raised his head and took in the sight of Odin sitting there in his finery, sipping tea. “When did you become a chick? I liked you better when you were just a crotchety old man.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when something that felt not unlike a wrecking ball slammed into the side of his face. Odin smiled as he nodded to the person that Thor had failed to notice. The assailant was standing in shadows to his left.
“Thor, you remember your brother Tyr, don’t you?”
Thor spat a mouthful of blood on to the floor and smirked at Tyr. “I see you still punch like a preadolescent girl. Nice hand by the way.”
Tyr opened and closed his right fist and tugged at the black leather glove that covered it. “It’s a poor replacement for the one that Fenris bit off, but Father did his best when replacing it. I’m sure your face can appreciate some of the advantages that steel has over flesh. It is far less…forgiving.”
Odin’s wingtip bounced a little faster at the mention of Fenris.
“Yes,” Odin continued, “I had my engineers design a hand for Tyr that would replace the one that the wolf turned into a light snack. The new hand may not have the same sensitivity as skin, but it’s as hard as iron and can crush a diamond into powder.”
Thor looked at his brother. “That must really suck when you’re watching porn. If I remember correctly, you’re a righty.”
