She parked her quad in some leafy trees and then began pulling her blankets from her pack. Tonight they would sleep under the stars.
“Even Skjold will not find any game here,” Anders pointed out.
“This is true, but we will find plenty of fish. Perhaps you and Trond could try your luck at the broken bridge?” Val said, with good nature. She knew that no one was happy sleeping out, but there would be far more nights of this than the pampered evenings they had spent so far at the coastal villages.
They will need to get used to it. This is a good place to begin.
“Set up the camp,” she told Morten. “I am going for a swim.”
The rest began unpacking their needed items for the night, but Ulrik looked at her, before turning back to his task. He was the one she thought best suited for the journey. Level-headed. Calm. But if crossed, he was competent and efficient as a fighter. The hunter, the historian, the mechanic, and Trond all seemed happy to follow her lead, or in lieu of her order—Ulrik’s gentle suggestions. Morten and Oskar were the two she trusted least. Morten always had the look of a man who was up to something and hoping he wouldn’t be found out. Oskar was his lackey, and by association also seemed shifty. And despite Stig spending time with Erlend to learn about the ATVs whenever they stopped, lately the rotund man had been spending more time seated near Morten and Oskar at night.
If I will have problems, it will come from the three of them.
Her bath in the brisk harbor was uneventful, and she was able to sit on the small rocky beach in the last light of day, drying in the light and the breeze before dressing again in her black leather and weapons. She pulled her goggles back on again, too. She would take them off when it got darker and then stay in the shadows. She had learned long ago that the discoloration in her eyes made people uncomfortable, so she kept the goggles on around them. These moments of solitude were the only time she took them off.
As she approached the camp, moving through the trees, the sun set behind the rocky ridges of the coast, and the shadows deepened. She could hear a discussion going on as she got closer to the men.
“You saw what she did to Vebjørn,” Stig said.
“I did, and it was an impressive feat, but I am still not convinced she will be a good fighter in a full melee. And this journey will take us through who-knows-what kind of lands. Perhaps we will need to fight many men.”
Morten, she thought. Of course.
“You also saw her fight many men,” Ulrik said softly. “And she was very effective.”
“Yes, but she was lost in a berserker rage,” Morten persisted.
“Was she?” Ulrik asked.
“What do you mean?” Stig asked.
“Morten and I saw her fighting at the harbor. It looked out of control—a berserker rage, as you say. We all know what that means. We have felt it in the heat of battle,” Ulrik said.
“I have not fought in any battles, but I have heard the tales,” Nils interjected. “I know of what you speak.”
“She fought savagely,” Ulrik continued. “But with effortless grace. Each strike she dealt resulted in maximum damage to her opponent, and then she went on to the next. A minimum of movements, nothing wasted and everything gained. I have never seen a fighter like her. She did the same thing in the battle with the Bear of the North. Even when he had her down, her strikes were calculated. She never thrashed or flailed. So I ask you again, Morten the Hammer. Was it truly a rage? Or was she in complete control the whole time?”
Morten did not answer.
Instead, Stig did. “I see what you mean. I saw her at the harbor. At first what I saw was a crazy woman, but you are right. She rarely hit a single man more than once.”
“Precisely,” Ulrik said, again speaking in his calm, relaxed way, as if he had no real stake in the argument but was just thinking about it. But Val knew what he was doing. He was consolidating her power base in the group. “I don’t know about you, but I would rather follow a leader who can keep her head, even in a crazy fight like that one at the harbor—even a woman—than a man who would go completely insane and thrash his way through a battle, possibly losing limbs or life in the process, because his mind was too far gone.”
“Yes,” Stig said, having come around to Ulrik’s side of things. “She has made good decisions on the journey so far. Hiding the ATVs in the barns, stopping where we have. I think she will make a good leader for us. Even today, I thought we stopped too soon. I would have preferred to continue to a village. But once we unpacked, I realized just how tired I had become. Driving all day on those ATVs can suck the energy out of you. And the vibrations have made my legs numb. I think she made the right decision to stop here tonight.”
Val smiled in the dark.
Stig’s allegiance to Morten had been broken. Just like that. She noticed that Morten and Oskar had nothing further to say on the matter.
Six down, two to go, she thought.
Then she stepped out of the trees and into the camp, as if she had heard nothing. Anders and Trond returned a few minutes later with an immense six-foot long mackerel. It was the only fish they had caught, but they would all eat well that night.
9
When the snow began to fall, some of the men grumbled. They were stopped in a forest of thick conifer trees, to relieve themselves and shake the bone-rattling numbness of the all-terrain vehicles from their bones.
“It is summer,” Oskar said, wiping away flakes from his eyes with his skinny arm. “We should not see snow for many weeks yet.”
Nils spoke up. “You know that the weather can bring anything at any time. It was not always this way, though. Before the Utslettelse, the seasons were very regular. But the entire world shifted its position.”
“Either that,” Stig said, leaning against his ATV’s saddle, “or Skadi is a cruel and fickle bitch.”
Val didn’t put much faith in Skadi—the goddess of winter—having anything to do with it. She wondered briefly whether the statement from Stig, the perpetual complainer, was a dig at her, but she thought better of it. In the last few days, Stig had decided to side with Ulrik on any disagreement, and she had noted the heavy man was no longer sitting near Morten and Oskar when given the chance at night.
Unfortunately, Morten and Oskar had become bigger complainers than Stig, challenging her decisions at every opportunity.
It will soon be time for another lesson, she thought.
But for now, the turn in the weather concerned her. She knew the ATVs could move in light snow—Halvard had told her so, and Erlend had confirmed it. Erlend had discovered the vehicles the previous year, when an old man who had been caring for them died. It was not unusual for a piece of technology or some knowledge from the Old World to be cared for and handed down generation after generation. Halvard was proof of that with his book learning and knowledge of the sciences. But Erlend admitted that nine ATVs had been the find of a lifetime.
They were in bad shape when he had found them. The old man who had been keeping them in a barn had not tended to them for over a decade. It was Erlend who had converted the engines from running on Old World fuel and oil to running on propane. With Halvard’s guidance, they had worked a miracle.
As Val glanced at the hard gray sky and the snowflakes that were growing in size with every moment, she knew she might need another.
“Let us go,” she said. “We should get as far as we can before the storm forces us to stop.”
As they mounted up and started their engines, Ulrik raced up next to her and pulled hard on his brakes, his ATV already skidding in the light covering of snow on the ground. He spoke softly, so only she could hear him. “We are close to the border. Or perhaps we have already passed it. Are you certain you wish to travel into unknown lands with reduced visibility?”
Val recognized the question for what it meant. There had long been rumors of the horrors in Southern Sweden, and no one who had ever gone to investigate the truth of them had returned. Ulrik was not challenging he
r, but offering wisdom.
“I know,” she said. “But we’ll have to go through it sometime. The further south we get, the warmer it will become.”
He merely nodded, then took off and circled back to ensure the others were all ready to depart. He was good with the logistical aspects, and not for the first time, Val thanked the gods that she had him with her. The others would be far more difficult to manage, although Trond seemed to have taken a liking to her. Not in a mature way, but more the way a puppy will choose a favorite human to be near. She could think of worse situations than the massive man having her back.
They set off into the storm, the clouds blocking the sun and making the day nearly dark. As the snowfall intensified, Val and Trond led their convoy, but they could barely make out the road ahead of them.
Although she had never learned to read, Val consulted Nils every day on the map, asking the names of places and memorizing their letters and their locations. While the others had debated whether they were still in Norway or had entered Sweden, she knew they were already in the unknown lands. Nils knew it too, but he kept quiet, unless she was asking him questions.
Soon the blizzard grew so thick she could barely see past the extent of the quad bike’s headlights. “Turn off here.” She turned her bike off the rutted and bumpy road, deep into some close-growth trees, working her way down a natural path. As always, they went a short distance from the road so they couldn’t easily be seen, should anyone—or anything—take that easy path in the night. In this case, the snow, which had already accumulated a few inches on the ground, would soon cover their tracks.
Morten pulled his ATV up alongside hers as she drove deeper into the woods. “Is this wise?”
The same question, every night, she thought.
“Morten, I will not—”
CrackCrackCrackCrack.
The staccato crunching noise was louder than the engines of the ATVs, and she slowed to a stop, looking down into the snow, without finishing the sentence.
Morten stopped also, and jumped off his ATV, pulling his sword. “What is this?”
The others all pulled up, and seeing Morten armed, they jumped to the ready, pulling swords and axes from scabbards, sheaths and belt rings, where the weapons had been dormant for days now.
The snow in the forest was deeper than on the road. They had been heading further into the storm. But while it came to their ankles or mid shins here, it was not deep enough to cover what had been on the ground.
Jumbled across the ground, many sticking up at strange angles like the toppled buildings of Stavanger, was a sea of bones, poking through the snow. Val recognized the skulls of bears, and the leg bones of reindeer, which were both plentiful in this part of the world. She realized with a sick sinking in her gut that the rapid-fire popping noise had been when they had driven over the bones and into the—
Oh no, she thought. It is a nest.
Something had killed and eaten all the animals, upon whose bones they now stood. Something that had dragged the carcasses to this location in the forest, this small clearing, and consumed them.
The wind had been in their faces for much of the journey through the storm, and now, without warning, it died.
The snow was behind them, and in another minute, the clouds overhead lightened. Val glanced behind her and the wall of weather was nearly black as it receded into the distance.
“Vidar’s balls,” Morten said. “Look at how far it goes.”
Val turned again, and the sky ahead of them had cleared to a thin hazy mist above. But the ground was well lit, and she could see that the bones jutting from the recent snow stretched on ahead of them.
For miles. It wasn’t a small clearing. The land opened up to a treeless, sloping valley.
And it was completely covered in bones.
Now that the weather had cleared, Val could see that some of the discarded bones were human.
She was about to order everyone to get back on the ATVs and head back the way they had come, but it was too late.
The roar that came out of the storm behind them was deep and loud. It rumbled the ground they stood on. It was alive, and coming their way.
10
The ground rumbled from repeated impacts that shook up through Val’s legs. She leapt onto her ATV and shouted over the noise. “Scatter! Get the quads away from the path. Deeper into the bones.”
For once, Morten followed an order without debate. He leapt onto his green ATV and took off in a straight path through the bones to the left of the trail they had taken into the nest. Oskar was quickly behind him.
Val broke right, and Ulrik, Trond and Nils were with her. The others were already gone from sight. But Val didn’t look for them. Her attention was completely enveloped with the sight of the thing rushing out of the storm toward them. The smell hit her first, like a pulsating wave of death, and she realized when the creature roared again that it was the thing’s breath she was smelling.
To call it a bear was to call a puddle the sea. It was half the height of the trees—twenty feet tall at least. Its arms ended in paws that held far too many claws for them to even be effectively functional. Like a handful of loose straw all different lengths and angled in different directions. They would be useless for digging but perfect for eviscerating prey.
The creature moved on its hind legs only, which she had never seen before. Bears were known to stand, but never run on their hind legs. Unlike the deformed polar bear she had battled as a child, this creature was brown and black, and nothing like any bear should be. It had fin-like ridges protruding from under the fur on its back, almost like a whale fin. The rest of its body was covered in fur but rippled with mounds the size of human heads, like tumors pushing up under the skin.
But the monster’s head was its most terrifying feature. Its snout was distended, and the jaw hinged three ways—ahead and to each side, with three sets of jaws, as if it needed to eat on three sides of its head at once. One of its black dead eyes had been clawed out—by another creature or maybe by itself, but the wound was infected with oozing yellow pus. Deep long gashes trailed from the mangled eye socket up and over its head.
As it chased after her group, Val noticed the massive creature’s spine had picked up a few more protrusions. Arrows. Anders was in the trees somewhere, firing arrow after arrow into the creature’s hide, but the assault didn’t slow the monster’s frantic sprint into the bone nest.
It roared as it ran. The thunder of its hind legs striking the ground and crushing bones as it rushed after them, combined with the buzzing engines of the retreating ATVs and the continual cracking of the bones under the wheels of the quads, was a cacophony of sound that was almost as bad as the wretched smell of decay and putrescence that preceded the monster like an advanced invading force.
“The trees,” Ulrik yelled at her. She saw that he was right. He was arcing his ATV around and back toward the forest that had acted as a barrier between the road and the bone nest. The tall conifers would probably not stop the rampaging mega-bear, but they might slow it.
Trond must have already made it into the cover of the huge spruce and pine trees. Val couldn’t see him anywhere. Ulrik raced ahead of her, and was nearly to the treeline. She was fifty feet behind him. Her ATV skidded left and right as she tried to navigate the recently fallen snow and haphazard bones.
Only then did she realize that the jagged snapping bones had the potential to puncture one or all of her tires. She swore aloud and hoped the gods would prevent that from happening. The pursuing mega-bear was only a hundred feet behind her as she raced in an arc back toward the trees. The slightest delay and the creature would be upon her. The only question in her mind was whether it would eat her or simply crush her in its rush to get to the others.
The creature roared again, and this time she could feel the pressure wave of its breath blasting across her back and neck like a hot wind. Then she was in the trees, the ATV’s knobby tires gripping the smoother ground. The snow wasn’t as dee
p here, since the tree cover overhead was thicker. There was no clear path through the trees, but she threw her body left and right, weaving around the two-foot thick trunks.
Then trees snapped behind her, the sound like the wrenching of the world, with groans, creaks and explosions of wooden splinters. The trees wouldn’t slow the monster much.
She had lost sight of Ulrik, but kept moving straight, steering around whatever trees crossed her path. Her hope was to reach the road, where she could outrun the monster, and she figured that was where Trond and Ulrik had gone as well. But then she saw a sparkle of light on metal to her left, and when she glanced that way, she saw a parked ATV, missing its rider.
“Where the hell is—” she started, when she burst out of the thick tree cover into a small glade. A thick pine came tumbling over her head to crash in front of her in the middle of the clearing. She cranked the handlebars to the left, but the turn was too sharp, and her ride began to tumble. She sprang off it, but the velocity kept her body flying through the air and tumbling until she crashed into a thick cushion of pine needles. She thought the pine would break her fall completely, as the dark green boughs enveloped her, but then her hip and lower back slammed into a branch and a lance of pain shot through her spine up to her head.
She shouted out, and the rampaging monster bear suddenly stopped its chase. She stayed perfectly still, realizing the thing had just overshot her position, as she had plunged into the thick cocoon of needles.
But its hearing is excellent.
Val held her breath, not daring to move her body even a fraction of an inch. The horrific stench that spoke of countless dead animals for meals washed over her again. It has turned back this way.
Her lungs begged for air, but she refused them. She needed to move, but the movement she had in mind had nothing to do with her chest and everything to do with her arm. It was twisted behind her, and it would be useless there. She had no desire to die a horrible death at the triple jaws and multiple claws of the mutated bear. But if she was going to die that way, she would deliver the beast as much pain as she could. She slowly inched her right arm out from behind her back, pushing against the wall of green pine needles with her elbow.
Viking Tomorrow Page 5