by B. C. James
“Now!” She yelled.
A laser blast came from behind a toppled RV and caught Nidhogg in the lower area where his tail met his torso. Baldr had considered the biology of most creatures and figured this might be a vulnerable point. It wouldn’t kill him, but he may react like churlish cocktail waitress being unexpectedly goosed by a drunken customer.
Nidhogg reared up and then went violently forward as he roared his displeasure. As his head hit the silver tank, Freya leapt out of the way and sprinted to a safe distance. A second laser blast hit the tank right above the dragon’s head. A large fissure opened in the container, spilling thousands of gallons of liquid nitrogen on both dragon and rider. There were a few seconds of panicked thrashing as the chemical waterfall poured over them, and then Nidhogg slumped down, his flash frozen, the rigid jockey falling from his back.
Freya, Baldr, and Brock all carefully moved to towards Nidhogg. He wasn’t moving, and all indications were that he was down for the count. His pale skin had turned a shade of blue under the intense cold of the chemical bath. His rider’s face was contorted with horror. In her right hand, she still clutched a phone.
“Ya think it’s dead?” Brock asked while examining the carnage.
“I doubt it.” Baldr was wary, but fairly certain they were out of immediate danger. “The cold probably put him into a sort of hibernation. That was brilliant Freya. Where did you get that idea?”
“I watch a lot of the Discovery Channel. I learned that reptiles don’t do very well in the cold.”
Freya continued to stare at the phone in the rider’s hand. When the torrent of liquid nitrogen began to hit her, Brittany had instinctively raised her hand with the phone in it above her head to prevent it from being damaged. She didn’t succeed. The black screen and hopelessly cracked glass made it clear that it was beyond useless. Even without a working phone to confirm her suspicions, Freya was bright enough to put two and two together and come up with four.
“Hey Baldr,” she waved him over, “do you recognize this woman?”
Baldr took a long look at the frozen face. “Yeah, I know her. Her name is Brittany. She is the number two Valkyrie. It makes sense they would send somebody so far up the ranks after us, because I doubt they have given up on trying to drag me back to Hel.”
Freya thought about this for a moment. “She and Nidhogg sure weren’t acting like they were after you.” She thought back to how the Valkyrie appeared to thumb a text into her phone once she believed that Freya was isolated and cornered.
“Not everything is about you, sweetheart.” Baldr said in a way that was somehow both endearing and petulant.
“That may be true, but one thing is clear…” Freya stepped on the Valkyrie’s wrist, and pointing to the phone. “She was probably tracking the phone in your pocket with that one.”
Baldr rolled his eyes, took the iPhone out of his pocket, and dropped kicked it across the highway. “Happy?”
“Not yet.” Freya said. She kicked the Valkyrie’s frozen head and watched it come apart in a combination of icy chunks and thousands of tiny shards. “Okay, now I’m happy.”
While they had been talking, Brock was busy looking for a good vehicle. He found a black Chevy Avalanche whose owner seemed to be lying on the highway next to the truck; incinerated from the waist down.
It took Brock less than two minutes to hotwire the vehicle and load Thor into the rear passenger seat. His honking got Freya and Baldr’s attention as they continued to examine the scene.
“I don’t think there is anything more we can learn here.” Baldr motioned toward the truck.
Freya could hear a new wave of sirens coming in their direction. She nodded and headed toward the Avalanche. After a brief debate over who should get the front passenger seat versus sitting in back with Thor, it was determined that Freya’s previous call of shotgun was still in play and she slid in next to Brock. Baldr took his place in the back seat. He patted Thor on the head, “Happy to see us big guy?”
They drove off to find the Goddess Idun and her healing apples.
Chapter 27
Dennis Syrdon had given up muttering under his breath and was now openly swearing as he tried to escape from a Chinese finger trap. By the time Holly Ann came into his office he had his foot in the air, pressed against the trap that bound his fingers hopelessly together. His potpourri of profanities was like a verbal sampler plate of curse words from across the European continent. Holly Ann recognized most of those that originated from the happy side of the Berlin Wall. She also recognized that trying to leg press his forefingers had disaster written all over it.
“Sir, all you are about to accomplish is dislocating your fingers.” She was never quite sure whether or not to roll her eyes, chuckle, or smile daintily in the face of his buffoonery. Whether he knew it or not, his antics were actually quite endearing. This fact made her feel guilty about even suspecting that he could be capable of doing anything horrible. She still couldn’t get the vision of him putting some pencils in the eye sockets of a lacquered skull—real or not—out of her head or reconcile his hints that his new desk toy was the earthly remains of the girl he had taken out the evening before. He was just the type to use this prop and some very specific language to deliberately give her a serious case of the willies.
She was concerned, but never followed up on these concerns by calling the police or checking any of a dozen available resources for any recent missing persons. In the end Holly Ann was paid an outrageous amount of money and the price of being wrong may be the unemployment line. There was also the fact that she was truly fond of Dennis. In her heart of hearts, she didn’t want to believe he had it in him to be guilty of anything more serious than some rather creative forms of tax evasion. So, she went out of her way to avoid bumping into any facts that might contradict the idealized vision of him that was in her head. The sick feeling in her stomach that erupted every time she saw that skull sitting on his desk would eventually go away. At least that was what she kept telling herself.
“You’re right!” Dennis said as he considered how a couple of dislocated digits would affect the rest of his day. “I have a gun in my top, left drawer. Would you be a lamb and shoot this thing off my fingers?”
“Sir, I don’t see how shooting a finger off is somehow better than dislocating them?”
“And that’s why I get the big desk and the ‘World’s Greatest Boss’ coffee mug, and you have that lightweight one from IKEA and a cup with mouse ears on it. You do still have the one I brought you back from Disney, right?”
“Of course, I do,” Holly Ann said. “It sits next to that ant farm you bought me when you thought my productivity was falling off and I needed some inspiration.”
“Excellllllllllllllent…owwwwwww!” Dennis tried to steeple his fingers in an evil “Mr. Burns” manner, but all he managed to do was nearly sprain his trapped digits.
Holly Ann just sighed and rolled her eyes, something she had mastered over the years. She knelt down in front of him, gently grasped his fingers, and pushed them toward each other, freeing him from the deceptive little trap.
“You see, it gets tighter when you try to pull your fingers free. You have to do the opposite of what common sense tells you to get out of this trap.” While she was doing her best to explain the complexities of a child’s toy to one of the most brilliant and accomplished business executives in the country, she could feel him sniffing her hair.
“Hmmmm…hey, sweetcheeks, are you washing your hair with ‘Body on Tap?’ If so that’s a pretty daring choice. I like it!”
“Um, no, I haven’t seen that in stores since I was kid.”
“Now that’s a shame. Turning beer into a shampoo was simply inspired! A world without a beer shampoo may not be a world worth living in, somebody ought to do something about that.” Dennis shook out his right hand and put the index finger that had been snared by the finger trap in his mouth. He extended his left finger in front of Holly Ann and put on the sort of pleading
look that made it clear that he wanted her to kiss his imaginarily injured extremity.
Holly Ann had originally come in to tell him that there was a call on hold for him. As usual, when she walked into his office, she had gotten sidetracked. Dennis with his finger in his mouth created a rare moment of silence that allowed her to actually deal with the business that brought her there in the first place.
She gently pushed his finger aside. “Mr. Syrdon, there is a call on your private line. A Mr. Grimnir says he is returning your call.”
“Well, if it’s my private line, why are you answering it?”
“Remember sir, after the incident with the senator’s wife, the paternity test, and that flaming bag on his porch, you stopped answering your own phone.”
“Oh yeah, that was a hell of night, wasn’t it! Did I ever pay you back for the bail?”
“No sir, it always seemed to slip your mind.”
Dennis just smiled mischievously. “Well, it could be that I enjoy being in your debt. Remind me about this again a couple weeks before the profit-sharing checks get cut.” He winked at her and flashed a smile. “Now get out of here, I have a call to take. And would it kill you to do one of those Project Runway sashays out of here as you leave. I mean, baby, watching your backfield in motion is always a treat, but c’mon, when the audience is screaming for more, you just can’t leave them hanging. It’s called showmanship, sweetheart!”
Holly Ann started to walk away. She stopped after a couple of steps, turned around, lifted his left hand, and kissed his allegedly gravely injured finger. She then grabbed a book from Dennis’s desk, covered her posterior with it, and walked out from the room. Even though her back was to him, she was trying hard to suppress a smile. Somehow he made her feel both objectified and flattered at the same time. Holly Ann also found him endlessly entertaining. It was moments like this that she again felt guilty about suspecting him of anything nefarious.
Loki took a wad of gum out of his mouth and slammed to the underside of his desk before he picked up the phone. He leaned back in his chair, put his feet up and put the receiver to his ear.
“Odiiiiin…bubala...how are they hangin’! By the way, great pseudonym! Grimmmmnirrrr!” Dennis repeated this in a ghostly, Vincent Price-esque voice.
Somehow, Odin closing his remaining eye and shaking his head was almost audible over the phone. “Loki, the deception was necessary in case your line had any unauthorized ears listening in. What would they think if they knew who was calling you?”
“Hey Odin, nobody loves you more than I do babe, but even if the innocuous ‘they’ knew it was you who was calling, ‘they’ wouldn’t know who was calling. More people believe in the deity of Captain Crunch than they do the Allfather Odin.”
“I’ll concede that point, but ‘Odin’ also runs the biggest defense contracting firm in the world. It may raise a few eyebrows when a guy whose company makes nuclear weapons is calling a guy whose company makes…well…whatever you guys make over there.”
“We make dreams, babe…we make dreams! I still love the Grimnir name. Last time I checked it means ‘Hooded One.’ Sooooo…I guess you’re telling me that you never bought into the circumcision fad?”
Odin was starting to get a headache. “I’m just returning your call Loki. Considering the fact that each of our goals is to see the other dead, you’re lucky I am extending you this much courtesy.”
“Hey, Mr. Hooded one, just because I’m going to kill you doesn’t mean I don’t love you. The whole feeding you to Fenris thing is just business babe, nothing personal. We’re all just mad about you over here!”
The headache was moving from behind Odin’s eyes to his temples. Even back in the old days when they were blood brothers, conversations with Loki often had this effect on him. “I’m a busy man Loki, what do you want?”
“Well, let me get straight to the big, red headed point on this. It’s about your son, Thor, and that slutty little goddess who has barnacled herself to him. One of your operations to capture them is interfering with one of my operations. We have the same goal, I suggest we smoke the temporary peace pipe, split the spoils, and then we get back to the business of trying to kill each other without any outside interference.”
Odin turned this over in his mind a few times. “So, you are proposing we adhere to the time-honored tradition of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’?”
As Odin said this, Loki tried to speak and laugh at the same time. It came out more as a nasal snort than a laugh. “Are you kidding, Odin! Let’s not fool ourselves here, sweetheart. The enemy of MY enemy is MY bitch. It will just be easier for both of us to get what we need from them if we aren’t always looking over our collective shoulders.”
“So, Loki, why should I work with you? What do you have to offer that I would need?”
All sense of mirth exited Loki’s voice. “You’re a blind old man, and I don’t mean the fact that you only have one eye. You can’t track them anymore with Nidhogg and some bubble-headed Valkyrie. I am completely aware that whatever ill-conceived attack you called down upon them failed and failed miserably. But you’re in luck, I happen to know exactly where they are going. So, do we have deal?”
Odin knew he had to be careful; deals with Loki were like making a wish on a monkey paw. The wish rarely turned out the way the wisher thought it would.
Odin and Loki did their best to work out a deal without either tipping the hand of their larger strategy. Once Freya and Thor were captured, it was agreed that Odin would get Freya first, but only for a few hours. He assured Loki that was all the time he needed and that she would be turned over to him alive and in reasonably good health for whatever it was Loki wanted her for. Odin made a point of not guaranteeing that she would be mentally or emotionally intact when he was done with her. Loki didn’t seem to care one way or the other what her emotional state would be when he got his hands on her.
They agreed that Thor had failed as both a son and a god so he would be put on ice for the foreseeable future. They were both ambiguous about whether being on ice meant imprisoned or dead, but neither Odin nor Loki seemed to have a problem with either scenario. It was just one of the open contract items they both agreed to resolve later.
When the subject of Baldr came up, the agreement was a quick one. He would be handed over to the Valkyrie who, once a period of extended torture was concluded, would presumably play a spirited game of tetherball with his corpse.
A contract was created and emailed between the two gods, revisions were made, and both electronically signed it. Loki insisted that they seal the pact by once again becoming blood brothers. Odin refused without explanation.
In reality, he didn’t want Loki anywhere near a source of his DNA. Loki was clever and had a deep well of resources. Considering some of the things that Odin himself was doing with Thor’s blood, he shuddered to think what Loki would do with his. In the end they sealed the whole thing by becoming Facebook friends, and vowed the truce would hold until one god unfriended the other.
Chapter 28
As they left the carnage of Glendale behind them, the mood in the Avalanche began to lift a bit. Brock made a few jokes about whether Arizona immigration policy extended to busty reapers of the dead. If it was a crime to jump the border fence and work off the books as a dishwasher in Phoenix, then a Valkyrie flying up from the underworld on a dragon and killing a bunch of people had to break all sorts of state regulations.
Freya scanned the skies as best she could and wondered aloud if Sheriff Joe Arpaio made his famous pink inmate uniforms in dragon size and how many he had on hand. This was a not so subtle hint that Nidhogg was not the only dragon that existed in all the nine worlds. There was always a chance that another Valkyrie could pop up, riding something from Nidhogg’s angry, fire breathing gene pool. This was less likely now that the iPhone they were tracking Baldr with was no longer with them, but it wasn’t impossible.
The way that phone was just left lying in Thor’s cell screamed trap
. Baldr would have to be brought up to speed on how modern technology could be used against them if he was going to avoid another such blunder in the future.
Baldr joined in the hilarity by making a few Weekend at Bernie’s jokes at Thor’s expense. Neither Freya nor Brock laughed. There was just an uncomfortable silence as they both just turned to look at him.
“What? Too soon?” He asked while looking into their disapproving faces?
“Geez you’re an asshole,” Brock said. He then looked at Freya, “Has he always been like this?”
“Believe it or not,” Baldr said, ignoring the probability that the question was rhetorical, “I was once the most beloved of all the gods.” He put his arm around Thor’s neck. “Remember those days, big guy? Hell, I was even more popular than this comatose bastard.”
He leaned Thor back against the rear, passenger door. “Albeit, since I was killed, I enjoy a whole different perspective on life and death than you do junior. And believe me, I am much more in tune with what Mr. Thunder God over here is going through than either of you.”
“What do you mean by that?” Freya interrupted, “he’s not dead yet.”
“No, but he may be soon.” Baldr said in response. “It’s more than just death though. Thor was on top of the world until I stumbled back into his life. Okay, he was a bit of a drunk and didn’t have much of a sense of humor, but he was rich, famous, and loved by just about everyone. And look at him now—comatose, hanging between life and death, and drooling on himself.” Baldr wiped Thor’s chin with the sleeve of his jacket. “When he…if…he comes around, I can guarantee you he will not be thankful for the world that he will awaken to. He will be a homeless, penniless, and hunted pauper. That is a long way from where he was just twenty-four hours ago.”
He put his lips to Thor’s ear, but whispered loud enough for Brock and Freya to easily hear what he was saying. “At least the world hasn’t forgotten about you, oh mighty Thunder God. The only thing worse than being hunted, is being anonymous. No matter what happens here, the name Thor will still be remembered.”
