“There it is,” Ulrik said, grinning at Val while pulling his ax out of the holster on his back.
The others looked around for the source of the noise, but Val stepped from her ATV and pulled her long ax and her hand ax. “They are coming.”
“Who?” Morten said, drawing a sword.
Then several ululating cries echoed around the park as thin naked men with long greasy hair, their bodies and faces covered in blue paint, came rushing from every one of the doors and windows of the buildings scattered around the park. Any space, no matter how small, belched the human-shaped blue blurs. There were hundreds of them, but they were all unarmed.
Stig and Oskar looked to Val for silent advice.
“We fight,” she said.
Escape was not a possibility anyway. The onrushing wave of human limbs would hit them in seconds, and they didn’t know the way out of the strange park yet.
Bodies crashed into them like a suicidal wave. The Vikings arrayed themselves in front of their vehicles. Even Erlend and Nils, armed with axes, hacked at the swarming bodies that came in wave after wave, like the crashing of the sea. The Blue Men seemed not to have any agenda or fighting skills. They just rushed at the Northmen, their lemming bodies thin and emaciated.
Stig and Morten were soon weaponless, their blades having been knocked from their hands by the crush of incoming bodies. The men resorted to punching and headbutting, dropping frail bodies with a single strike. Ulrik swung his ax wide in front of them, the blade slicing or grazing three men with each mighty sweep.
Anders plugged a dozen of the frantic runners with arrows, and then started tearing into the running men with his hands. Nearby, Skjold swooped in and razed men with its talons, before taking off back into the sky. Nils and Erlend worked together, first side-by-side, and then back-to-back, each man with a sharpened blade in each hand and spinning in a dance of death, dropping foe after foe with the slightest cut.
Val soon realized the Blue Men would fall with the slightest strike or cut—they were not used to fighting, and that meant that their only advantage was numbers. As the bodies began to pile in front of the Northmen like a seawall, Val raced atop the bodies and leapt out away from the arced ATVs, and deeper into the fray.
Her arms were a blur as she cut, dodged and stabbed anything blue in her sight. Writhing bodies spilled out around her, bleeding blue.
The onrushing wave of blue humans had lessened, but they were still coming.
Val turned and ran back to the safety of her group, who were dropping the most recent arrivals. “We need to get out of here. There are too many. Soon we will be too tired to raise our arms.”
She expected opposition from Morten, but he was too busy swinging his long sword and cleaving away more of the scrawny attackers.
“Stig,” Ulrik called. “Go with Nils and Erlend behind us toward the trees. Try to find a way out. Then get back here and start the quads.”
The men ran off as ordered, and Val closed ranks with Anders, Morten, Oskar and Ulrik, the five of them forming a wall in front of the vehicles. Without needing to be told, they each recognized the need to keep the flailing blue maniacs from the quads. The Vikings were already short a vehicle, and if they lost more in the battle, they would need to flee the horde on foot.
Val thought that might have been their opponents’ plan. Wear the Northmen down with wave after wave of human onslaught, and then seize the vehicles when they were too exhausted to fight anymore.
The Blue Men around them fell in a moaning, wailing pile. Still the slightest injury caused them to drop to the ground in the ever-expanding sea of blood and blue-painted limbs.
There was a brief reprieve as Ulrik cleaved the head off the last attacker. But they could hear the strange gargling calls, as more Blue Men rushed across the park, making for their position. Stig returned from the trees behind them, leapt atop his ATV, turned and raced back into the woods, just as Nils and Erlend ran out of the trees.
“A way out?” Morten asked.
“No,” Nils heaved. “There is a fence, like at the front. But it is old. Stig will try to knock it down.”
Erlend ran to an ATV and jumped atop it, kickstarting the vehicle to life. Nils did the same. Then they each ran to yet another vehicle and repeated the motions.
“Ulrik, stay with me.” Val said. “The rest of you go. Get the fence open.”
Morten ran past Ulrik, slowing to offer the man his long sword. Ulrik accepted it without a word. They all understood the situation. If he and Val couldn’t hold back the Blue Men, none of them would get out alive. He held the sword in one hand and his ax in the other. Val stepped up next to the broad-chested man, and they waited for the running, screaming swarm to reach their position.
The others took off with their vehicles, leaving Ulrik’s and Val’s standing and ready, already turned toward the distant fence.
“I will come back for you when the way is clear,” Morten promised.
Val was dubious, but then the next wave of Blue Men arrived. She and Ulrik aimed for the legs, dropping man after man into the heap of bodies. The pile was now to Val’s chest, and she realized that if the Blues kept coming at them, she would have to retreat partially, or they would be scaling the wall and leaping onto her from above.
Ulrik holstered his ax, and swung at the full extension of his arm with Morten’s blade, increasing the killing distance to nearly seven feet.
“Back up!” Val called.
They both stepped back toward their waiting ATVs. Four blue bodies scrambled and toppled over the low wall of carnage, the men slipping in the blood as they came down the other side. One of them slid down and cracked the back of his own skull on the ground. He stopped moving immediately. Another got close enough for Val to swipe at his neck with the ax, and an arc of blood sprayed laterally away from the man before his face planted into the stone in front of her feet.
“Back again,” she said, and she and Ulrik took two steps again, this time until the backs of their legs reached the parked vehicles. “Ulrik. Get on your quad and go.”
Three more men climbed the human blockade and slid down the other side.
“Are you sure?”
Val swung her long ax, cleaving through two more necks before she sank the smaller hand ax into the third’s face. As her body completed the turn and she came back to face him, the entire front of her body was coated in blood. “Go!”
Just then, Morten came roaring out of the trees on his ATV, and he arced in front of them both, extending his arm and clothes-lining two more men in the necks, before he needed his hand for the throttle again. “The way is clear,” he shouted. Then he took off into the woods again.
Val wasted no time, hopping on her quad. She and Ulrik followed Morten into the trees, and the crazed Blue Men chased after them on foot. Val had to steer between thick tree trunks, and she feared the leading Blue Man would catch up with her, but the strange, thin men moved like they were drugged, smashing headlong into trees and falling down as if they had been stabbed.
On the other side of the thin belt of forest, Val found a section of gate on the ground. Morten raced over it with his ATV, then tore off down a road following the others.
Val glanced over her shoulder to see the Blues still giving chase as the ATVs outran them.
The rest of the crazy city awaited.
19
The journey continued day after day, the eight Vikings crawling across the endless landscape on their motorized steeds. They had made it out of Copenhagen without further incident, although the roads had been similarly orchestrated and blockaded until they had found their way to an open field and out of the maze.
The rest of the trip across the island of Sealand was uneventful, until Nils spotted a bent and mangled road sign for Odense—a town they skirted. He then told Val that they had somehow crossed off the island and onto the next without moving across the body of water once known as The Great Belt.
Much discussion followed, and the cons
ensus—and Val agreed—was that the strait had either been emptied by decades of geologic upheaval caused by the great annihilation, or perhaps mankind had changed the landscape. Proceeding south, they circumvented larger towns unless they needed to forage for more propane again. Once the southern region of Denmark turned into a never-ending progression of fields with tall grasses and shallow marshland, they left the road for good. It had been too crowded with abandoned cars and road blocks. Still, they had seen no more people—blue or otherwise.
Now the landscape was filled with grasses as high as the handlebars on the ATVs, and their progress was slow. The day was warm, and Val was tired. The frigid winter loomed, encroaching with each passing day, and she felt some pressure to continue. But she also had come to recognize when the others needed down time.
Val raised her arm at the head of the convoy, and they all slowed to a stop. “Let us take a rest here.”
They stopped single file because, to the sides of them, the grasses were a few feet shorter, indicating they were on one of the many raised dikes in the area. The land below the grasses to either side of the dike was marshy peat bog. The Vikings had been stuck in shallow bogs on many occasions. They knew to stick to the high ground now.
“It is about time. I thought we would never stop,” Erlend said, stretching his sore limbs. He and Nils had begun taking turns driving their shared ATV, with the other riding on a cobbled-together saddle secured over the twin propane tanks. The passenger faced backward, offering their convoy a rear lookout. Today Erlend had been manning the rear-facing seat. “If I had known I’d be riding on the back of one of these, I would have made it a lot more comfortable.”
“You could not make it better now?” Nils asked, eager for the answer. He knew he would be riding in the jump seat as soon as they began again, and already his ass ached at the thought.
“Not without more tools and materials. Perhaps when we reach the next town we can put something together.”
“There is probably nothing more to see today,” Val announced, ending the discussion. “More miles of farming land and bogs. We should camp here for the night. Take the afternoon to rest.”
The news was greeted with great applause and hooting. They had rarely taken any breaks. The last time had been after clearing Copenhagen, when they had performed a small ceremony to remember fallen Trond.
“With that excellent news, I will venture into this bog and anoint it with my urine,” Morten announced with great cheer. The others laughed, Val included.
Ulrik spread a large blanket over the tall grass behind the parked vehicles, and Val sank onto it next to him, while the others unpacked. She was grateful to take a break, herself, and laid back on the blanket. She looked up at the clear blue sky turned purple by her ever-present red tinted goggles. Her mind wandered, back to her early days after marauders had killed her parents. After the polar bear. Then through the hardships she had faced on her own as a child on the islands of Åland, and later as a young woman on the Swedish mainland, before she had traveled to Stavanger. Her life had been filled with battle and strife, so when the chance presented itself, she soaked in the quiet moments.
“What sort of name is Val?” Ulrik asked her, startling her out of her reverie. The sudden attempt at casual conversation caught her off guard. He was not normally one to chat. “Is it a usual name for the women of Åland?”
Val laughed. “No. Not a normal name for a woman. It is short for Valkyrie.”
Ulrik grunted in amazement. “Fitting. How did you learn to fight?”
Val smiled. She knew Ulrik was politely trying to press for details on her past. It wasn’t unheard of for a woman to be a fighter in the north. Shield-maidens joined great battles, but more often in a support role to the larger fighters like Trond. Ulrik had rarely encountered anyone like her: a full time fighter. A traveler. A mercenary. Someone willing to fight for pay or food. Those roles were nearly always filled by men.
“Mostly by watching others,” she said, looking at Ulrik. “I understood that I would not always be stronger than my foes. I needed to be faster, and more agile.”
She knew the answer was vague, but it would suffice for now.
Before he could respond, Morten began yelling from the nearby bog.
He was calling for help, and the others rushed into the marsh, water splashing up above the tall grasses, splattering them with mud. They pushed through the tall weeds to a clearing with shorter grasses and spongy peat under foot. “Come quickly,” Morten called, the initial panic in his voice subsiding.
All around him, across the glade, were bodies frozen in time. They were completely black, their skin and clothing alike. Many of them appeared to be clawing their way out of the earth and frozen in place. Some were on the ground in various poses. Others had degenerated to little more than skeletons before turning black and rock-like.
Val nudged the toe of one of her black leather boots against the upraised hand of one of the strange bodies. It did not give. It was as hard as stone.
“What are they?” Anders asked, his bow at the ready, despite the lack of threat from the statues.
No one could answer him. The Vikings wandered the field, examining the petrified dead. Val thought at first that the bodies might have been some macabre sculptures, like the lions at the Tivoli park in Copenhagen, but these were too life-like. The veins of the arms and even the creases of the skin were visible on the surfaces of the blackened bodies. Val bent down to the one nearest to her, and saw fingerprints on the figure’s thumb. No, these are the dead. Somehow turned to stone.
“It must be the water in the bogs,” Nils hypothesized.
“Should we get out?” Oskar asked, panic rising.
Val patted him on the shoulder. “It would have taken years for them to turn to stone like this.”
They spent the next few minutes looking at the various corpses. Many appeared to have been executed. Ropes hung around their necks, petrified as much as the skin below them.
One particularly gruesome body was still submerged from the torso down, his legs extending up in the air, as if he had dived into the bog, his head stuck in the mud below the water—or he had been forcibly held down.
Morten walked across the field of the dead back to Val. “Perhaps we could find a different campsite for the night?”
“For once we agree,” she said. It was habit for her to think that way, but the truth was that her estimation of the man had risen several steps since the battle with the Blue Men. According to his word, he had come back for her and Ulrik, and since that day he had been less abrasive, and often quite helpful.
The group returned to the dike and continued south, well away from the morbid field of bodies, before making their camp. Their planned day of rest had been taken away. Their dreams that night were filled with the hauntings of the aquatic creature at the Øresund Strait, the manic Blue Men and the ghosts of the murdered dead from the field that day.
The next day they made their way into an abandoned village with a sign by its road proclaiming ‘Handewitt.’ Nils informed them, based on the other writing on the sign, that at some point during the day they had crossed into a region known as Germany.
They came across no other people—alive or dead—that day. But Val keenly felt some sort of presence watching them. Maybe hunting them.
20
Borss detested the Blue Men. Dealing with them and their freakish cult made him feel like he needed to bathe. In acid. But he had known they would have been his best option for waylaying the Northerners on their journey into the mainland. His mainland. That the Blues had sent him a Holy Messenger meant they had failed.
“Their feeble dog comes now,” Zeilly said. She was a dark haired witch woman, capable of using herbs and roots in unusual ways. She could cure all manner of ailments, and her cooking skills were legendary. But so was her wrath. Most of Borss’s men were terrified of her, and with good reason. She was always by his side, advising and counselling. And more often than not,
mocking others for his private enjoyment. She stood next to his chair as the Blue Men’s pathetic vassal scurried forward in his white, open chested robe, displaying his deeply tinted blue skin.
“Honorable Kaiser Borss,” the blue priest began, “I bring you tidings and well wishes from the Holy Monastery of the Sea and Sky. Our Bishop bids me—”
“You fucking lost them, didn’t you?” Borss asked, sounding bored. “They got past your holy tidal wave of morons. Yes?”
“I—uh. I—” The Blue Man was clearly at a loss, and he looked around Borss’s throne room, as if for help.
The space was little more than the first floor of a former office building, its walls and ceiling still intact. While many structures in Bremen still stood, few of them were dry when it rained. But Borss had conquered the place—and the town. Just like he had conquered most of the continent—through coercion, guile and force. Unbearable, overwhelming force.
“Our esteemed Holy Bishop desires to…” the priest began again, attempting to restore some semblance of civility to the conversation.
“Desires to?” Borss interrupted again.
The witch woman snickered at his side.
“Holy Bishop Adelard…wishes to…convey…” the Blue Man sputtered.
Borss had heard enough.
In a lightning fast blur of shining, polished armor, he sprang from his throne and covered the ten paces between him and the indigo clergyman. His huge fist, clad in a spiked metal gauntlet that matched his chestplate, wrapped around the squirming man’s throat. Borss squeezed down hard. The feeble messenger’s eyes grew abnormally large in his otherwise blue face. Behind him, Zeilly purred with something like sexual satisfaction at the sight of the brutal murder. A loud crunch filled the air as the cartilage in the Blue Man’s neck gave way. The priest’s head flopped against his shoulder, and Borss opened his hand.
Viking Tomorrow (The Berserker Saga Book 1) Page 9
