Mjolnir

by B. C. James

  Sif gaped at the creature. “This is obscene. It’s a crime against both God and nature.”

  Surt just looked at it with detached interest. “That doesn’t look a thing like me.”

  “I know,” Odin said, “your DNA didn’t mix well with Thor’s. Considering we only had ten minutes to work with your sperm before we had to get this mix into that sarcophagus and start cooking, I don’t think we did half-bad. We will do better when we get to the 2.0 version of this project. We have plenty of left over DNA. If you like, Surt, you and Loki can start worrying about that today. Anyway, the only reason we rushed this one into production was to acquire one very special item.” Odin looked straight at Sif. “Give me the hammer! If you do, I will let you live.”

  “Oh, you can have the hammer.” Sif’s eyes burned with anger as she said this, and nobody had any doubt what her true intent was.

  “Katheryn,” Sif whispered, “are you ready?”

  “Locked and loaded.” Katheryn replied.

  Sif led the Valkyrie on a charge against Odin and his creature. The spear, Gungnir, along with a shield appeared in Odin’s hands, and he raised them in a defensive posture.

  Sif had run out in front of the Valkyrie. She had always believed in leading from the front. About ten yards before they reached the Allfather and his abortion of a clone, Katheryn raised her hand, and she skidded to a stop on the Nevada sands. All the Valkyrie followed her in this action. Sif heard them put on the brakes and turned her head to see what was wrong.

  She saw Katheryn grinning back at her. At that moment, she knew she had been betrayed. Before she could turn back to Odin, she felt a massive fist slam into the side of her head. Sif had never been hit so hard in all her life. White flashes appeared before her eyes as she dropped the hammer and crumpled to the ground.

  Sif was on her back as her hand clawed at the ground, trying to find Mjölnir. She heard footsteps in the sand and felt the weight of a man on her arm as Odin stepped on her wrist. She saw him just shaking his head at her in an almost disappointed manner, making “tsk tsk tsk” sound. Sif spat at him as he raised Gungnir high and brought the point of the spear down through her heart.

  He winked at Katheryn. “All yours! And thanks for taking care of Simmons for me. The whole evening would have been lost if that traitor was allowed to live and we never got the box back.”

  “My pleasure.” She neither bowed nor nodded to the Allfather and she could tell that he was a little bothered by that. It didn’t matter, he was no longer important to her. She turned to the rest of the Valkyrie. They raised their weapons and beat them across their scabbards and shields in salute to their new leader.

  “Okay girls, now that Sif is gone, who gets the pleasure of escorting her soul to the underworld?” Nobody volunteered. “Okay, who has the lowest amount of seniority?” Almost every one of them giggled and pointed at her. “Oh, that’s right. Okay, who has the next lowest amount of seniority? They all pointed at a smaller, dark haired girl named Beth. She rolled her eyes and went off to complete the unpleasant task.

  As Beth was leaving, Katheryn called after her. “When you’re done, meet us at the usual spot, the first several rounds are on me!”

  Chapter 38

  The Valkyrie had left the field and headed off to celebrate the rise of a new leader. Odin pulled Gungnir out of Sif’s body and produced a handkerchief from the top pocket of his coat. He wiped the blood from the shaft of the spear, looked to his monstrous creation and spoke.

  “Go get it,” Odin said as he pointed to the hammer of Thor. Mjölnir lay in the sand where Sif had dropped it. The Thor/Surt clone took a few massive strides and picked up the hammer. It looked like a child’s toy in his hand. Odin made the mental note that when he used the leftover DNA to create the next generation of this thing, he would have to do something about its aesthetics and size. The 2.0 version would need to be approximately the same build as Thor and much more pleasing to the eye then this ten-foot escapee from Where the Wild Things Are.

  The creature stood pigeon-toed in front of the Allfather and showed Odin the hammer like a baby showing its dad something interesting it had found in its diaper. Odin simply added the word “smarter” to the growing list of things needed for the next version.

  “Come with me. We have to go kill my son.” Odin motioned for his cloned creation to follow him and the creature obediently ambled along behind him.

  Baldr was still reeling from Sif being killed by Odin. She was gone now, and Thor was still blind and useless on the ground. That last one was Baldr’s fault, but it didn’t change the fact that he no longer had any friends in the area. He had gambled and lost. Casting his lot with Sif seemed like such a good bet on the surface.

  Back when she was still pretending to be a Valkyrie, Baldr had recognized her for the goddess she truly was. It wasn’t difficult. Even back in the old days of Asgard, people joked that he paid more attention to Sif than Thor ever did. It was probably true, too. He always did have a little crush on her. As it turned out, Sif not only had the power to keep the Valkyrie off his back, but she wanted to gain Mjölnir for the sole purpose of treating most of the Asgardian pantheon like they were in a Scorsese film.

  Baldr had nothing against Thor, and didn’t really aspire to see his brother dead, but the broken and apathetic Thor that Baldr met after escaping from Hel was only interested in hurting quarterbacks and drinking heavily. Not that he thought there was anything wrong with either of these things, but for his long-term security Baldr needed the hammer-wielding God of Storms and Tempests, not the God of Fantasy Football.

  Sif’s revenge-fueled ambitions knew no bounds. Due to her ignorance of Odin’s deception, she had targeted her own ex-husband for assassination. This was something Baldr was only grudgingly on board with, but if she could have taken out Odin, Surt, Loki, and maybe Loki’s kids, he would have been home free.

  If things had worked out, he would have also moved up in the power rankings. With the exception of a hammer-wielding Sif, Baldr recognized that he might have been the most powerful of the remaining gods. If he were being honest, the idea of having the rest of the Aesir call him Allfather did not exactly turn him off.

  This was a pipe dream, though. As he stared out across the Nevada sands, he saw a number of very powerful beings. He wasn’t on good terms with any of them. Surt reflexively hated all Asgardians in the same way that lions seem to hate hyenas. Odin, his father, was once his biggest fan, but had abandoned him in Hel. Now, the old man was simply obsessed with end time prophecies and how he would survive them. It would seem that to Odin, everyone around him was now an expendable human shield. Hela was presumably still furious about his escape and Loki was the one who engineered the death that originally sent Baldr to Hel. It was pretty clear that he was on his own for now.

  Baldr bent the light around himself and fundamentally disappeared from sight. As he was skulking away, trying to be careful about footprints, he caught a glimpse of Thor from the corner of his eye. He was on his knees and still rubbing the place where his eyes once were. It would seem that he had not given up on the idea of massaging his vision back into existence. Walking toward him was Odin and his obscene clone. They were one hammer strike away from ending Thor’s life.

  Baldr saw poor Idun’s body on the ground, close to Thor. In the sand next to her body was her purse. When Loki ripped her throat out, she tried desperately to get into her purse. Baldr would have bet his extra kidney that she had some apples in there. Why else would she end her life trying to open a purse? Is it possible that she didn’t want to face the afterlife without checking her makeup first or popping a Tic-Tac? It was more likely that she was trying to get to something that could save her life.

  Baldr started to walk away but then turned and looked back again at Thor. He raised his hand and shot a beam of solid light at the purse. It made an explosive impact just under where the bag was resting and catapulted it into the air. The purse hit Thor square in the chest.

 
Thor flinched backwards, initially thinking this was some sort of attack. He couldn’t see what hit him, but he felt the soft leather of the purse through the rips in his shirt. Once he put his hands around it, he realized that the object was probably not a danger to him.

  He felt around and quickly identified it as a woman’s handbag. He didn’t know why somebody would chuck a purse at him, but his present situation had disintegrated to the point where it didn’t matter why it was there or if the bag matched his shoes. He put aside any fashion concern and opened it.

  He felt around in the purse and found objects that he recognized such as lipstick, sticks of gum, single serving sugar packs, lots of slips of paper, and a sealed plastic baggy. None of the other objects seemed like they would be much help to him, so he took out the baggy and opened it.

  The sweet smell of sliced apples reached his nose. He had a moment of disbelief as he thought that this can’t be for real, but he ate the apple slices as fast as he could. Almost immediately, there was an itching in his eye sockets that he dared not scratch. The blackness of his vision became lighter shades grey.

  While his destroyed eyes were quickly healing, his ears worked just fine, and he could hear two people approaching. Sand was great at muffling sound. The fact that he could hear them at all suggested they were large people. One of them sounded absolutely enormous.

  He stood up and backed away from the sound as his vision began to clear. His grey vision was starting to become colorful blurs. His ears had not lied to him; two big blurs were truly headed his way.

  “Smash him!” a voice said.

  Thor recognized this as the voice of his father. He watched the massive blur raise something above its head. Thor wasn’t about to wait to see what it brought down, so he dodged to the right and hoped he was going in a good direction. Something whistled through the air where he had previously been standing.

  His vision was returning quickly, and he could now clearly see his father standing with something that looked like a special effect from one of the Lord of the Rings films.

  “What the hell is that thing?” Thor’s statement was more an exclamation of surprise than a question directly to Odin.

  “Well, in the strictest, most technical sense son, it’s you.” Odin looked at the creature again, more embarrassed by what could only be interpreted as bad craftsmanship. “Yes, I know, it looks terrible. We will get around to fixing that, but I suspect you won’t be around when we perfect the cloning process.”

  Thor looked at him in disbelief. “You cloned me? You friggin’ cloned me? At what point in your life did you go from bad father to Dr. Evil?”

  “Oh, come on now, son! Cloning you only made sense. I think we can both admit that you’re a bit of a disappointment. While the Ragnarok prophecy makes it very clear that “Thor” is present in the last battle, there is no reason YOU have to be that Thor. Thanks to modern technology all I needed was some of your DNA and an empty ovum and I could grow my own Thor. Actually, with all the engineers and cutting edge machinery at my disposal, I really didn’t even need the ovum.”

  “Wait a second, you want to kill me and then replace me with a clone so that the prophecy is not only fulfilled, but you get to fulfill it with a version of me that you whipped up with a chemistry set?” Thor used the questions as a stall tactic to allow his eyesight to come back completely. However, he was also genuinely curious, and appalled, about what Odin was saying.

  “That sounds about right. It’s a two-dimensional assessment from a tenth rate intellect, but fundamentally correct.” The Allfather could barely keep the tone of smug satisfaction out of his voice.

  “Hold on, hold on,” Thor said shaking his head, “If you can replace me with this thing…”

  “Oh, I won’t be replacing you with this one. This is just a prototype.”

  “Okay, I got that, but if you can replace me with a version of this thing…then what about you? The prophecy says Fenris kills you in the end.” Realization hit Thor like a bolt. “You’re going to clone yourself aren’t you? You’re going to kill me, clone yourself, clone me, and after you bring all this to a head, go off to sit in a safe little bunker while everyone destroys each other. Your clone gets killed, but in the end you’re still around. The prophecy is fulfilled, and you live to tell about it.”

  Odin touched his nose to indicate that Thor had hit the nail on the proverbial head. “We all know that everyone dies at Ragnarok. The bits about survivors in a beautiful new world was something tacked on by historians and writers to give humanity some hope that they would live on into a shining paradise, but that was never part of it. The new world that will awaken after the destruction of Ragnarok will be a world where I am the unquestioned, unchallenged God and there are no ungrateful children or rival factions constantly nipping at my heels.”

  Thor had to admit, using scientifically created stunt doubles to get around his own, prophesied death was inspired. He was impressed, not to the point of actually congratulating the old man, but he was impressed, nonetheless.

  Odin snapped his fingers and the creature took another swing at Thor with Mjölnir. The attack was much faster this time. The clone was only minutes old, and like a baby deer, it needed a little time to get past the awkwardness of transitioning from the “womb” to the world.

  “When this night is over, and you’re dead, I will make the next clone exclusively of your DNA. I don’t think I will mix it with Surt’s again. While it’s only been a few minutes, I am not as happy with the results as I thought I would be.” Odin was casually twirling Gungnir as he said this. He wasn’t really speaking to Thor in particular; it was more like the Old God was thinking aloud.

  Thor seized upon the part where his father said that the creature was made with his and Surt’s DNA. It was clear that the creature was becoming stronger and faster as the minutes ticked on, but what Odin said gave Thor an idea. He stopped dodging and just stood there.

  The creature had become used to him hopping around but seemed confused when he stopped and simply held his ground. The clone howled at him in an attempt to get him to move, but Thor just stood motionless. Odin’s creation became enraged that the game had changed. He was apparently enjoying the whack-a-mole like contest.

  The creature wailed in fury, raised the hammer, and brought it down hard on Thor’s head. Immediately the clone disappeared into the sand like a nail that had been driven into a piece of wood with one blow. The hammer dropped to Thor’s feet.

  “The problem, old man, was you took your little science experiment one step too far. You created a creature that you thought could use Mjölnir because it was part me. The second you tried to crank up the power levels by adding Surt’s DNA as well, you created something that may have had enough of me in it to lift the hammer, but Mjölnir would never recognize it as its master.”

  “My engineers had considered that,” Odin said as he stopped twirling Gungnir. He changed to a two-handed grip and pointed it at Thor. “When we crunched the numbers, it turned out it was a 60/40 gamble in our favor, so we played the odds. Live and learn.”

  Thor picked up Mjölnir. A warm feeling came over his entire body. He remembered when he had discarded the hammer in a moment of extreme grief…a moment that had lasted years and years. Now it felt as if he had just lifted the missing part of his soul off the ground. Holding it in his hand, he felt the gentle interplay of energy between him and the hammer, and it made him feel whole. Between grief and denial of what he was, he had been living as a two-dimensional shadow for many years; now dimension and color had returned to his life.

  He looked back over to his father who now suddenly looked more apprehensive. He didn’t seem at all comfortable with the idea of doing his own dirty work, especially against an opponent who wasn’t chained or otherwise handicapped.

  Thor looked Odin straight in the eyes, smiled and raised Mjölnir to the night sky. Lightning forked down striking the hammer. The electricity flowed through Thor and back into the ground. Red hair
stuck straight up from the hole that the clone had disappeared into. A muffled, savage roar came from the sand, and the ground beneath the feet of both Thor and Odin exploded, sending them flying in different directions.

  Surt had watched the goings on from his boulder by the sacrificial table. He had not heard much of the words that passed between Thor and Odin, but he was looking forward to watching them kill each other. The reappearance of the Thor/Surt clone, however, had changed his mind about hanging around.

  “Okay kids, time to go!” Surt said. His words were lost on Loki and Fenris who were not in any condition to respond.

  Hela pointed to the left over zombies. “Are we taking them too?”

  Surt grinned an evil little grin. “No, I think it would be more fun to leave them here. The people of today seem obsessed with the idea of a zombie apocalypse, so let’s give them one.”

  Surt watched as the enraged clone howled and screamed while pulling itself out of the sand. He then looked at his flaming sword. “This ought to make things more interesting.” Surt threw the sword in the direction of the clone. It landed at the creature’s feet.

  The clone picked up the sword, and smiled a gap toothed and crooked smile as it giggled in baritone. He slashed at Thor with the weapon. The Thunder God leapt out of the way. The flaming blade struck the ground and cleaved a drainage ditch-sized scar into the desert floor. Thor raised the hammer and took to the air. This was a fight that he figured was best fought out of reach of Odin’s little science experiment.

  The clouds gathered above Thor and he sent hurricane force winds against the clone. This effort lifted the monster off the ground. Lightning bolt after lightning bolt fried the creation as Thor maneuvered him into a funnel cloud.