The two on his left—the knife gripper and the other—lunged first. Ulrik swept his ax up in a lunge of his own, releasing its handle and allowing the heavy ax head to sail through the air, its long handle chasing the pointed tip. The projectile hit the knife gripper so hard that the metal collapsed his chest inward. His already dead body spun, the long handle of the weapon striking hard across the throat of the man next to him.
Two opponents down in less than two seconds.
Ulrik was not watching the impact, though. It was a diversionary tactic against the other two, and it had worked. While they watched Ulrik’s ax fly, he charged, shield held high. He brought the edge of the giant wooden disc down on top of one man’s head. The now dead man fell and tangled in Ulrik’s legs, sending him toppling into the other man. It was enough to knock the man to the ground, but the last Long Knife was not injured by the fall. Ulrik rolled as he went down, his grip loosening on the shield, and he came back up atop the man. His arms pumped like he was running, his fists, forearms and elbows pounding his opponent.
The man tried to crawl away, but Ulrik was on top of him, beating the bald head until it no longer resembled a head.
As Ulrik rolled off the man and pulled his shield to him, he heard a battle cry: “For Midgard!”
He looked back across the field and saw Stig had somehow survived the projectiles that had ripped through his chest. Blood poured from the corner of his mouth as he grabbed two of the Long Knives and slammed their skulls together, crushing them with his powerful arms. Stig was not as large as Trond had been, and much of his weight was fat rather than muscle, but he was still larger than their newfound enemies running across this battlefield. He used that size and power to his advantage, barreling into the next two men, and knocking them down. After the impact, a two-foot-long knife was stuck in Stig’s chest, four inches deep, but the man just knocked it aside with his forearm, sluicing the blade out. If he felt the sharp edge of the thing in the flesh of his arm, he gave no indication.
The large man took three more running steps at an opponent, when one of Anders’s arrows buried itself in the Long Knife’s eye socket. Stig barely noticed. The man was dead, so he was no longer worthy of receiving the big Viking’s pent up rage. Stig continued on toward the men piled atop Val.
He only made it halfway there before the cumulative effect of his multiple injuries and his illness caused him to crash to the ground, just as Ulrik was running past him for Val.
Behind him, Morten and Oskar whirled in their devastating back-to-back ballet of death, assailants dropping all around them.
Anders was reduced to plucking his already expended arrows from the heads of his previous victims before firing them across the field to drop the newcomers. But the battle was nearly over, and only stragglers were still running onto the field.
“Das ist es!” “Sheißen!”
‘That is it!’ ‘Shoot!’
Nils heard the shouts and knew what they meant. He had been waiting for any sign that this might be coming. He thrust his shield out, smashing it into the face of the man he had been fighting. Then he dropped his ax from his left hand and grabbed the horn on his waist, pulling it to his lips as he leaned back from the return attack. The man’s long knife clanged into his shield just as the mechanical chattering thunder boomed over the field.
Nils blew his horn, the sound echoing over the clearing even louder than the machine gun. As he expelled the last of the air in his lungs, he dropped into a squat, the wooden shield over his head. The man he had been fighting was instantly perforated by the machine gun fusillade, and several rounds ruptured the top edge of Nils’s shield as he held it up above his head. Then the dead Long Knife collapsed on Nils’s shield, his body becoming additional protection for the Viking, as they both crunched into the ground. Nils lay under the wooden shield and the Long Knife’s body.
He was pinned, but could see Anders on the ground, peering through the foot high grass. The horn blast had saved at least one of them.
Then, fainter than the first time, Nils heard the machine gunner speaking again. “Das war die letzte Kette.”
‘That was the last chain.’
Last chain? Nils wondered. Then he understood, blowing his horn again with two quick bursts. The last belt of ammunition for the weapon. The morons had only ten or twenty bullets left. They should have waited until they had us all lined up.
Nils couldn’t climb free from the weight of the man on top of him, but he saw Anders take the message of the double horn blast, standing to his feet and running off to rejoin the battle.
Nils tried to squirm his body forward, gaining just half an inch with each struggling thrust of his legs and hips.
He closed his eyes with each jolt, but when he opened them, he could see a Long Knife running across the field for him, only one knife in hand.
Nils struggled faster, grunting with the effort of trying to dislodge the dead weight of a man that outweighed him by nearly double. His progress was minimal. He was stuck.
The Long Knife stopped right above him.
Nils looked up to see the man’s vicious smile, as the two-foot blade began its plunge downward.
29
Nils never wanted to be a fighter. As a child, he had been small and slight, but intelligent. Despite academic pursuits not being highly sought after in this new world, after the Utslettelse, he had persisted in his interests, and Halvard had approached his parents, convincing them to let him train in the old ways of science.
As it had turned out, Nils had not been terribly good at science, but he had instantly been attracted to the texts in Halvard’s library. The man had deemed the books ‘dry histories.’ Dry to you, maybe, Nils had thought. He had been fascinated with the Old World and all of its lost knowledge.
Now as the lumpy black iron blade plunged down at his head, Nils, for the first time in his life, wished that he had worked harder to strengthen his body. He had really wanted to see Italy.
At the last second, instinct guided him, even with his eyes shut. He yanked his head to the side. The shckkk sound of a knife slicing into something, came from just left of his ear. When he opened his eyes, he saw the knife had stabbed into nothing more than soil and grass.
He tilted his head up in time to see the man dropping down over him, an arrow protruding from the middle of his forehead. But the arrow and the man’s face disappeared as he fell forward, his dead weight slamming down on top of the corpse already pinning Nils. The extra weight took Nils’s breath when it squeezed him, and he thought he would now suffocate.
Then the pressure lifted, as the newest corpse was tossed aside, rolling into the grass in front of Nils’s pinned head. Then the first body was dragged away. Strangely, his savior had not been Anders. A man was running away from him, toward the nearby battle. But Nils did not recognize the man. His legs were covered in forest camouflage patterned trousers, with large stuffed pockets on the sides of the legs. He wore black leather boots, and a black T-shirt, covered with a fur vest. A two foot long wooden club dangled from his hand. The weapon had bands of black iron around the tip. Each band sported several two-inch-long, metal spikes. Most dripping blood. Below the iron bands, some of the metal spikes jutted right out of the wood. A long metal spike rose from the end of the weapon.
Nils sat up with his shield and watched the stranger sprint across the field. He had short blond hair that had been cut in patchy bits, most likely by himself. As he came across a Long Knife, he dodged and evaded the blades, his spiked club bashing into head after head.
The stranger leapt over Anders, who was tussling with a Long Knife on the ground—each man unarmed. He kept running, past Stig’s fallen body, and past where Ulrik fought three men in a frantic, thrashing struggle. Nils had no doubt the men would fall before Ulrik’s fury. His long blond hair, soaked from mist and sweat, Ulrik punched, kicked and clubbed the three unarmed men. His shield was as much a weapon as a defensive tool. Nils decided to learn all he could about using a shi
eld—if they survived this bloody battlefield.
Nils staggered to his feet as Morten and Oskar stabbed the last of their opponents. They saw him looking and Oskar rushed over, while Morten limped, his leg dripping blood.
“Where is Erlend?” Oskar demanded.
“I do not know,” Nils said. He pointed. “Who is that?”
The men turned to look at the stranger, who was just reaching the pile of bodies, under which was their leader.
He leaned down and pulled bodies away, flinging them with immense strength. They saw him drop his club and hold his hands out flat in front of him, then speak. A second passed, and he reached down to gently pull Val up off the ground.
Nils was shocked that she had taken his hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. Her left arm was bleeding, but she seemed otherwise unhurt. The stranger bent to collect his club, and kept his eyes scanning the trees at the edge of the field, while Val turned her back to the man and collected her weapons from the ground.
Closer to them, Ulrik drove his fist into the face of the last living Long Knife. The opponent tumbled backward like a folding blanket, landing on the ground on the top of his head, his neck shattering with an audible set of cracks similar to the machine gun.
Nils turned back to Morten. “Do you need help to walk?”
“I will be okay.”
The three of them approached Anders as he climbed to his feet. He looked a little dazed, but otherwise unhurt. Nils bent down to pick up one of the long knives, his own weapons temporarily lost. They joined Ulrik, who collected his ax, and then they all approached the stranger with caution.
Val saw them coming and shouted. “Find the weapon. This is not over if they can kill us from a distance.”
Ulrik ran toward the edge of the forest, and after Morten said “Go,” Oskar followed him. Anders went with him. Nils stayed with Morten, and he and the Laplander limped up to Val and the stranger.
“Who is this?” Morten asked.
Val and the stranger both turned to him. The man’s short, badly cut hair was unusual when the rest of them all had longer hair. But his eyes still looked Nordic, even if his cheekbones betrayed him as different from them. His clothes would have done that anyway.
“I am Heinrich,” he said in their tongue, though it was heavily accented.
Before he could say more, Val interrupted. “He was the one who left us the food. Where is Erlend?”
The men all shrugged. They might not fully trust Heinrich, but he had proven himself to not be an enemy.
Ulrik, Oskar and Anders came jogging back from the trees. “They have gone,” Ulrik called. “The weapon is broken.” He explained the look of the thing, with a piece sticking awkwardly up in the air, and the links of the ammunition belt on the ground with the spent shells. He had never seen a machine gun before, but a quick look at the device in the small foxhole surrounded by sandbags had been enough for him to puzzle out how it had worked.
As they searched the field for Erlend, they first came to Stig’s body, and Ulrik briefly recounted how the man had conquered his illness and his machine gun injuries to perform one last heroic, rage-fueled berserker attack. “He died well.”
Morten sat in the field suddenly, grabbing his leg, before he leaned back in the grass.
“I will stay with him,” Nils said. “Find Erlend.”
Nils sat on the ground and pushed the body of a Long Knife aside. He had no wish to sit near the dead. When he did, though, the moved body uncovered what had been beneath it. Another, smaller body, pierced and punctured in seven different places—among them the eye socket and the throat.
“Never mind. I have found him.”
30
Three of their number had died, and they were not over the mountains yet. Not halfway through with their journey. They still needed to get the genetic material and then retrace their steps back to the North. Val shivered at the thought of facing the Blue Men and the mutated octopus a second time.
Although they had lost Stig and Erlend, they had gained Ull—Heinrich, she reminded herself. The man had helped them cremate Stig and Erlend, and had revealed that he had been wandering alone in Germany when he had spotted them. He had been tailing them since shortly after their encounter with the Blue Men in Denmark.
“How were you able to find food, when we were not?” Anders had asked the German man.
“I was riding a bicycle,” he admitted. “The noise of your engines was scaring the game away.”
Val had further questioned the man to her satisfaction, and his eagerness to assist in the aftermath of the battle, as well as his timely aid during the clash, counted for much. The Vikings kept a close eye on him for the first few days, but the German was congenial and always helpful and upbeat.
Because they had not crossed many miles each day, due to the difficult terrain, Heinrich had been able to keep up with them, performing long days of pedaling on a two-wheeled bicycle with no motor. Anders, Morten and Oskar all admitted they had seen bicycles in the North, although they had never ridden on one. Val had seen one as well, but she had not joined the conversation.
When their fallen friends had been dealt with, their ashes spread on the breeze, and their spirits taken to Valhalla, Heinrich had taken Erlend’s ATV, and with a few short lessons, he was competent at maneuvering the vehicle.
They had continued south, explaining to Heinrich that they had a mission on the other side of the mountains, and that they were honor-bound to finish it. With nowhere else to go, and no one else in the world, Heinrich had offered to accompany them the full way, and Val had accepted.
Now they rolled into a town with crumpled concrete walls, toppled orange tile roofs, the charred, singed remains of countless buildings and one unique architectural oddity. In fact, they would have passed the town by, for fear of yet another ambush, had it not been for that one strange feature.
While all the surrounding buildings were little more than rubble reclaimed by vegetation, one structure stood. “Ulm Church,” Heinrich told them, Nils translating from German, since the man’s ability with the northern tongue was limited. “It was the tallest church tower in the world once. I don’t know if it still is.” It climbed five hundred and thirty feet into the sky, like a charred, petrified fire giant from Muspelheim—the Land of Fire.
The darkened stone spire had been visible from the outskirts of town, and with everything else abandoned, it looked like a good place to spend the night—if it was likewise empty.
Unlike in Copenhagen, the roads were barely cleared, and in two cases they had to carefully crawl the ATVs up and over hills of uneven concrete and dirt.
Ulrik brought up the rear of their convoy, keeping his eyes on the surrounding scenery and on Heinrich. He had not said anything, but Val had understood the man did not trust the German.
The gothic towers loomed above the plaza where they parked the ATVs. It was mostly clear of the rubble, and it was obvious that since the city had fallen, the church, the only standing structure, had housed the dregs of humanity on occasion. The soaring arched doorways had been barricaded with stone and wire, but vines had long since grown over them. The coils of wire had rusted down to just a few bits still sticking up at random angles. The doors to the sides of the main entrance had been barricaded from top to bottom with rounded river stones. The tall stained glass windows were bricked up from the inside. Everything below a height of thirty feet was stained darker than the rest, a thin veneer of carbon from fires having scorched the outside of the structure.
A few of the spires on the sides of the massive structure had snapped off, and Val suspected they, like the charring, were the results of successive battles. But the main tower looked undamaged. The tower would have made a fantastic defensive position against hordes of Long Knives or Blue Men. Anything short of the double-headed octopus could have been repelled by just a few people barricaded inside. She wondered if they would find anyone alive inside. Or if not, how many dead would they find?
&nb
sp; Val and the men checked the perimeter on foot, scrabbling over the detritus of city and war, until they had once again returned to Morten, who had waited with the ATVs in front. When they were sure the church was deserted, Val pointed at the door.
“Let us see if we can get it open—without destroying it.” She didn’t say that they might need to have a working door to defend themselves, once inside the church. It was understood. Even Heinrich nodded.
After clearing away the stones and crumbling wire, and hacking at the overgrown vines with their blades, Ulrik approached the solid slabs of scarred and dented wood that served as the doors to the old building. As he reached the door, he saw it was already open a crack. He touched his hand to it and the thing swung inward, the hinges creaking loudly.
There goes the element of surprise, he thought, but then he remembered the ATVs. He had grown used to the incessant buzzing of the seven engines, but for anyone that was hiding within, the noise would have announced the Vikings’ arrival long before they had parked out front.
The interior was surprisingly bright. Light streamed in from clerestory windows set one hundred feet above the nave, near the roof. Everything lower had been boarded, bricked or covered with welded metal and concrete. Sunlight was unable to sneak through the blockades covering the windows that were once filled with stained glass, and which soared up the sides of the building.
There wasn’t a single wooden church pew inside the nave. Instead, the interior had been filled with branches. The wooden limbs looked like the nest of a gigantic bird, or the fuel for an oversized bonfire that was never set to flame. The wood filled the space’s center and was stacked twenty feet high.
“Interesting,” Ulrik said. “We could make a campfire tonight.”
Val pushed past him into the entrance hall’s interior. “I think not. We could see the building for miles. A fire will be visible just as far.”
Viking Tomorrow Page 13