by Greg Sisco
"It’s not necessary,” he repeated Tyr’s words with a mocking tone to his voice. “We don’t have to.”
Loki grabbed a young woman from the crowd and ripped the bandanna off his face. As she tried to pull away from him, he grabbed hold of her head and jerked it back, sinking his teeth into her neck.
He drank greedily of the young girl’s blood in front of a crowd of petrified viewers, each standing in his own trance of a terrorized awe. While he would have liked to drink more from the delicious young beauty, he discarded her in the name of showmanship and took a deep breath, projecting his chest forward and making eye contact with as many members of his audience as he could. Then he released an inhuman growl that shook the floor and ceiling, cracked eardrums, and sent humans recoiling into corners. He flashed his elongated canines to anyone who dared to look at him as he roared the shrieking roar of a damned creature with the image to prove it if the sound should leave any skeptic unconvinced.
As the passengers scrambled and cried vainly for help, Loki turned his gaze to Tyr who was still holding the delicate Eva to his chest.
"Guess what, Tyr! Now it’s necessary! Now they’ve all gotta die!”
The passengers were all dead. Loki was right. To let one walk away was to jeopardize their entire way of life. None of them could be allowed to leave this train with a memory of what had happened because none of them were worth the risk.
But surely a six-year-old girl was a different story. If the little girl survived, she would be taken away by other humans and when she was asked what happened on the train, she wouldn’t know. She wouldn’t understand. And if she did tell them, ‘There were vampires. They were sucking people’s blood and hissing and roaring,’ the humans would say, ‘Poor young child. She’s seen such horror, and she has such an imagination.’ They would tell her, ‘Of course there were vampires. What did the vampires look like? Did they tell you their names?’ But they would never believe her. And as she came to mature she would begin to doubt it herself and she would eventually dismiss it as a trick of the brain. She was young at the time. Her mind played tricks on her. Blah, blah, blah. Humans were easy this way.
Mostly it was Tyr’s pride that told him all this, but it was true. While he kept the girl at the forefront of his mind as he took action, the true base of his impulse was for saving face. He wanted Loki to know they were living under the rule of Loki and Tyr, not just Loki. For once he wanted to stand up to Loki and prove he had a voice. He was lashing out against his Brother for the sake of lashing out, for the sake of taking a stance, and mostly because he wanted recognition, a little bit of clout.
But he liked the little girl, too. He didn’t want her to die a sucker’s death in this train. That was no lie.
As for the rest of the passengers, they were zombies. The walking dead. They had to be put down before they escaped the train and infected others with their knowledge. Thor fired his Uzi blindly into the crowd of spectators. While only two of them were killed, a few others were hit as they screamed and ducked away.
The crowd broke. It was every man for himself. People ran for cover, pushing past friends and loved ones, stepping on the dying bodies of brothers and sisters as they ran for the doors.
Monica had been hit in the head by one of Loki’s bullets. She was dead on the floor. Richard grabbed Tyr and forced him back into a wall, his forearm against the vampire’s neck. Tyr pulled up his shotgun and shot Eva’s father in the face in front of her. His body dropped to the ground with all the others.
Most of the crowd was dead or mortally injured in seconds. Five or six people had escaped past Loki and back into the train, likely hoping to escape through doors and windows in the dining car.
As one of them made a run from the baggage car, he pulled a bowie knife from his side and drove it into Thor’s heart.
Thor gasped in pain and grabbed the man’s shirt, pulling him back face to face and putting his hand on his neck. The man stared into Thor’s eyes, wide-eyed in terror. Thor grasped the bowie knife with his free hand and tugged it out of his ribs, taking a moment to look down at it. There was a silent moment between them as a thousand thoughts were exchanged, and then Thor drove the knife into the base of the man’s neck.
He shrieked, grabbing at Thor as he fell to his knees, trying with all his will not to die.
"Yeah!” shouted Thor. “It’s fuckin’ annoying!”
Loki chuckled. Thor looked up at him. A silent glance passed between them and it was decided Loki was to stay here with Tyr and Eva while Thor hunted the passengers heading into the rest of the train.
He hooted for a moment and fired his Uzi into the air, then he ran out toward the rest of the passengers, bellowing in an obnoxious singing voice, “Early in the mornin’ we round up the dogies. We mark ‘em and brand ‘em and bob off their tails.”
In the luggage car, a wounded man had climbed up on one hand and knee and unlatched the back of the train. He pulled open the hatch and the door flung open, letting a gust of wind fill the car and blow the hair on Loki, Tyr, and little Eva.
Loki shot the man in the head and his corpse dropped out of the train and rolled to a resting place on the tracks behind them.
"The hell was the point in all this, Loki?” Tyr asked. Eva was sobbing loudly in his arms now and clutching to his chest. At this point he didn’t blame her. “This was supposed to be a fun evening. You had to go and get competitive?”
Loki grunted, turning his gaze down to his AK.
Thor was singing as he ran through the sleeping cars, firing wildly at everything around him. “Round up the horses, load up the chuck wagon, then throw the little dogies out on the long trail!”
As he sang this, he would have liked to have tossed somebody through a window for the irony in the lyrics, but he was not near enough to any windows to make it practical. He settled instead for shooting a teenage boy in the spine.
"Just shoot her, Tyr,” Loki all but begged. “We can all go hunt the rest of them together. Maybe we can let some of them escape into the desert for a bit. You know, make it fun for everybody.”
Tyr raised his gun and pointed it at Loki.
Loki drew the AK to shoot Eva but Tyr fired before he could, opening up a gaping wound on his hand and sending the AK spinning onto the floor.
Loki reared up and ran at Tyr, locking the shotgun sideways between himself and Eva.
Thor was chasing the last two living passengers down, still singing, “Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies. It’s your misfortune and none o’ my own!” He fired a few shot’s into a young woman’s head as he sang this, leaving her handsome boyfriend as the only remaining survivor of the unfolding massacre.
The boyfriend had been pulling open an emergency exit at this point. When the shots were fired, he ran at Thor shouting. The two fought for the Uzi and spun in circles until the man punched Thor and forced his weight into him, knocking him backward onto the floor. As he hit the ground, Thor used his momentum to force the young man over his head and into the wall behind him, not noticing he was actually throwing him through the open emergency exit.
"Pain in the ass,” Thor mumbled under his breath. He jumped out of the train, tucking and rolling, to make sure the young man had died.
Back in the storage car, Loki had grabbed hold of the trigger on Tyr’s gun and aimed it up at little Eva’s face. Tyr forced Loki back with his foot, sending him sprawling back to the other side of the car. As he fell back, he kept a tight hold of the shotgun and managed to pry it from Tyr’s hands. He trained the gun on Tyr as soon as he landed.
Tyr turned to face toward the open end of the car and away from Loki, using his own body to shield little Eva from the shotgun. Led pellets ripped into his back, tearing open his clothing and spraying his blood in a cloud of mist.
He dropped to his knees in pain at the edge of the car and looked down at the tracks. Behind him, Loki was readying a second shot, but out there the little girl had a chance—at least, she did if she was as strong as he hoped she w
as. And if she wasn’t, well, maybe she didn’t deserve to live anyway.
Tyr leaned forward and rolled out onto the tracks, holding Eva as tightly as he could without killing her. There was a moment of profound silence when their bodies were in the air. A grown man clutching a little girl, wrapping his arms around her to keep her safe. The two of them floating through the air embracing one another. A connection of security and an unspoken love.
And then there was pain. Wood and steel, bolts ripping into flesh, hard edged objects pounding into Tyr’s flesh and bones. He tried his best to keep himself on the receiving end of all of the pounding and cutting. I can take it. My body will heal. Don’t let the little girl get hurt. She will grow up to be something wonderful. Just help her through this one situation.
When they stopped rolling, Thor was standing over them with his Uzi in his hand.
"Come on, Brown,” Tyr begged. “Don’t let Loki force your hand. She won’t remember. Just trust me.”
Thor had killed the last passenger. His job was done. He hadn’t left the train to kill little Eva. That had been Loki’s job. Still, he wondered what the right decision was.
"Why?” Thor asked Tyr. “Why does she matter?”
"She’s strong,” Tyr answered. “She’ll grow up to be the kind of woman you long for but never find. We’re just... letting the little fish go so we can catch the big one later. When she’s a little older I want her to be mine.”
Thor laughed and put his hand out to Tyr. Tyr took it and Thor pulled him to his feet. He set Eva on the ground next to him and hugged Thor, always one to understand. He leaned down next to Eva.
"Eva. I need you to listen to me.”
She was crying and didn’t acknowledge him.
"Eva, I know you’re rattled, but I really need you to listen. Are you listening?”
She didn’t speak, but she nodded.
"Okay, Eva,” Tyr said. “You have to run. Run for those rocks over there. Just hide there. Someone will help you. It might take a long time. But someone will come. I promise. Do you understand?”
"Yes,” said Eva.
"Good girl. Now go.”
With that, Eva ran for cover behind the rocks in the distance. She was well out of sight by the time Loki had jumped out of the train, recovered from his roll, and run down the tracks to catch up to them.
"Where is she, Tyr?” he screamed.
"Gone,” Tyr told him. “I’m going to drain her in a few more years. When it’s worth it.”
Loki struck him, sending him flying back onto the tracks. Thor just stood and watched, letting them work out their conflict without interference as usual.
"Where the fuck is she!?”
"Do whatever you want, Loki. She’s gone. You can’t have her.”
Loki was furious. He tried to fire the shotgun into Tyr’s face out of frustration, but he was out of shells and spent a few seconds beating him with it instead. He would have persisted in finding the girl, either by scouting the area or by beating Tyr further, but morning was only a few hours away and having leapt from the train, they still had a few miles to walk before they would be safe from the daylight.
Loki didn’t speak to Tyr until they were back at the loft, at which point he tossed him into the tables and pounded on him until Tyr left the group for good. Little Eva had poisoned their brotherhood and The Great Train Robbery of 1986 had not been as great as all the hype.
That night, an anonymous call was placed to the police department stating a little girl needed help eight miles outside of Reno along the Amtrak railroad track. There had been some sort of massacre on one of the trains during which the engineer had been shot. The train had traveled at full speed into the station, colliding with another train and killing two-dozen people on top of at least seventeen murdered passengers. Somehow a little girl had escaped the train, perhaps at the will of sympathetic thieves. She suffered mild delirium and told fantastic stories of monsters attacking the passengers.
By the time a few years had passed, Eva didn’t dwell on it anymore. She had present problems and the monsters who killed her parents had never shown up in her life again. Maybe she’d just been scared. A girl her age was not meant to witness such brutality. Maybe her young mind hadn’t been able to take it. It didn’t matter. Her parents were dead and some things would never be answered. By the time she was diagnosed with cancer, The Amtrak Massacre wasn’t something she ever thought of anymore.
But true to his word, Tyr had tracked the girl down thirteen years later to kill her. At least, he had planned to. He was mistaken to have thought his desire to protect her was something that would wear off in time.
Sitting across from Eva in the living room, Loki had it all figured out.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When Tyr opened the door and came into his living room, Eva was sitting down and watching the television. As he entered, she jumped up excitedly and said, “Hey, baby. Where have you been?”
“Well, I went to pick you up, and you weren’t there and I got tied up… uh…”
Tyr’s eyes moved to the kitchen as he noticed not only that the light was on, but he could see the shadow of another person moving about within.
Eva was hugging him now. As she kissed him on the cheek, he said in a terrified voice, “Who else is here?”
"What?” asked Eva. There was suddenly a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
As the shadow drew nearer to the doorway and the figure approached, Tyr realized he already knew the answer. He wanted it to be Thor, or the Butcher, or the police, even Ofeigr himself to whom he could attempt to explain his actions and rectify his mistakes. But he knew the shadow in the kitchen, and it wasn’t the shadow of any of those people.
He grabbed tightly to Eva, ready to protect her from whatever was to come.
"Hello brother,” Loki said cheerily when he stepped into the room. “You didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend.”
Tyr lit a cigarette and Loki lit a cigar. They had excused themselves from Eva stating they had catching up to do, and they were now on top of the empty building Loki’s business partners had spent the last few months erecting. Thor had arrived to meet them as well, putting the three of them in the same place for the first time in over a decade.
“I can’t believe it’s taken you this long to track me down,” Tyr said.
Loki sneered. “Track you down? I never gave a shit about tracking you down. I know you. You’ve got to run off and do your own thing now and then. I respect that.”
Tyr shook his head in gentle disbelief. What about the impaling? Did he respect that too? And what about Eva? When was the fury coming?
"She’s almost my type,” Loki mused. “’Cept for the fuckin’ cancer, you know? Takes away that healthy girl glow. You know the way healthy girls glow? Chicks with cancer look more like a muted fart.”
Thor laughed quietly at Loki’s insensitivity. Tyr didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t about to start a fight with Loki over a few course words about his girlfriend. If talking shit about her was Loki’s way of allowing Tyr to be his own person while still feeling like he was asserting his dominance, Tyr was ready to accept that.
"She didn’t really look like that when I met her,” he said. “I’ve kind of watched it happen.”
Loki couldn’t hold back anymore. He grabbed Tyr and put him in a brotherly chokehold, smiling as he did it. Tyr was ready to fight back, thinking the two were finally about to settle their score, before he recognized it as a playful gesture of affection and discovered maybe there was no score to settle after all.
While Loki held him in a headlock, Thor punched him a few times in the spirit of horsing around with a sibling. Without even a minor confrontation, the three of them were instantly Brothers again, as though there had never been an ounce of bad blood between them.
"My crazy bastard brother,” Loki said struggling to breathe through his laughter. “He keeps her around and watches her suffer for months.”
Tyr
forced a laugh.
"You always were the shittier gambler, Tyr,” Loki was still laughing his ass off, bellowing that car horn as loud as ever. “Back on that train you were about ready to kill me over her, talkin’ about how fuckin’ perfect she was going to be when she grew up and she’s not even gonna fuckin’ grow up at all! She looks like a fuckin’ crack whore!”
"Calm down, man. Calm down,” said Thor.
"It’s all right,” Tyr told him. “Don’t worry.”
"When are you going to kill her?” Loki asked, suddenly very serious.
"Soon,” said Tyr, a little surprised at how true the statement sounded when it came out of him. “Probably tonight.”
"Couldn’t be a bad idea; she’s not getting any hotter,” Loki said, laughing at his own words again. Then there was a long pause before he stopped laughing and said, “So I can only assume based on the circumstances that you’re just as skeptical of The Augury as I am.”
This was the exact kind of talk Tyr didn’t want to hear from Loki. He didn’t want to answer this truthfully, to say he thought that The Augury was only a system to keep fools like Loki in check. But he couldn’t very well say he believed every word and expect Loki to go along with him.
"I believe there is an Ofeigr,” he said, “and I believe he understands what is foolhardy and what is acceptable given the state of the world at the time. And I think we can make our own choices as long as we’re not prostituting our culture.”
Loki took a long drag off his cigar.
"So if I said I didn’t believe a word of it and I thought prostituting our culture would turn us into kings, you would disagree with me?”
Tyr sighed. It was nice to know Loki wasn’t going to kill him, but it would have been too much to expect him not to be Loki.
"Take it easy, Tyr. You’re such a pussy,” said Thor.
"No,” said Loki, “I actually happen to agree with most of what you just said. I don’t know about an Ofeigr, but The Chosen… I think they’re out there.”
