Viking Tomorrow

by Jeremy Robinson

  He waited a beat and then followed at a much more leisurely pace, the other thirty-eight men on bikes queuing up to follow him, cranking their throttles and wasting gas, their engines filling the mountain stillness with echoing thunder.

  Ruck slid his hawg through the section of the pink wall with a small roof over it. The remains of a mangled guard fence lay on the far side. The way ahead was rocky and lined with trees, but it would be easy riding. He’d just have to take it slower than the turns on the alpine roads. Beyond the jagged metal frame, he could see Klein well up the path, racing into danger with delusions of glory.

  With a little luck, he’ll get himself killed by their archer.

  The path became steep, and the way was littered with larger rocks. Ruck realized he would have to spend more time focusing on the ground than on the possible threat ahead. He slowed his hawg, allowed five of his Hangers to catch up, and sent them on ahead with a wave of his hand. He then rejoined the flow of bikers scrabbling up the trail. If the flat-bikers left traps, he was happy to let these men find them.

  Traps or not, the flat-bikers would eventually tire of running. They would stand. They looked like the type. Then Ruck would throw them Klein—if he lasted that long—and a few more Hangers, before sweeping in. He would finish off the flat-bikers, take the woman, and capture the strange four-wheeled hawgs.

  He didn’t give two squirts whether Kinsker wanted the travelers pushed instead of killed. Ruck would have the smooth woman, and with the Hangers’s support, high on their victory and the capture of the four-wheelers, he would ride into Kinsker’s small ambush and challenge the man’s authority. Even if Ruck lost a few men in the mountains, he knew he would still outnumber Kinsker’s group, with Faust and fifty men sent off to attack the Floaters. Plus he would have whatever prize the flat-bikers possessed. Ruck didn’t know what it was—Kinsker hadn’t told them—but he was clever enough to recognize that Kinsker wanted it for a reason. And the man had known the flat-bikers were coming. Someone on the other side of the mountains had tipped him off. Ruck would need to learn who that was. The last thing he would need was another challenger.

  After Kinsker was dead and Ruck was the new Keystone, his group would meet up with Faust. If they had succeeded in their attack of the Floating City, Ruck would take the credit. If they were losing, he’d call them off and live to fight another day.

  But first, we need to catch these flat-bikers.

  The trail began to hug tight curves around the sides of mountains, and the view stretched for miles. Short green pine trees coated the low hills away to the south. Ruck snuck a momentary glance at the view’s majesty, but quickly imagined himself plummeting off the side, man and bone-machine bouncing down rock strewn hills. Chased by the vision of his own road-rash gore, he turned his attention back to the ground, ensuring that the black rubber tires of his hawg stayed straight and in the middle of the four-foot-wide path.

  A tunnel loomed ahead. The gray stones of the man-made archway matched the color of the mountain it cut through, the blocks machined and sloped outward in an inviting gesture.

  Across the top of the tunnel were strange letters Ruck couldn’t read:

  MCMXVII

  EX ARDVIS PERPETVVM NOMEN

  There were other letters below that, but he was in the mouth of the tunnel before he had a chance to glance at them. The ground was clear, but the path turned hard to the right, and plunged into darkness. The headlamp on his hawg was broken, and he hadn’t gotten a spare bulb yet. They were hard to come by, but he hadn’t experienced any hardship from it yet—the Hangers nearly always rode as a group, and during the day. He had always had light to see by. But the tunnel was too narrow to ride side-by-side with another. He would have to slow and let the man behind him catch up, so he could see from his headlamp.

  Ruck’s lead on the next man was short. He didn’t need to wait long. But sitting in the dark, he began doubting his plan. He had no idea where the tunnel went. Maybe it wasn’t even a tunnel. Maybe the road just went deep into the mountain, a snake hole twisting deeper and deeper into the Earth.

  Where are the flat-bikers leading us?

  Just then the Hanger behind him approached, and he could see again, the black walls of the tunnel illuminated in the distance. Ruck rolled forward, moving slower than he had before, and finding more courage after his momentary doubt in the dark.

  Soon he could see daylight at the end of the tunnel. He realized it was just that—a tunnel. It had only been about fifty feet long. Not some mouth leading into hell itself. As he burst out into broad daylight, his rear wheel fishtailing on the loose gravel path, he determined to catch up to Ziegel.

  He could see the man in the distance, riding up the steeper trail. He would tell Ziegel to take it a bit slower. He wouldn’t explain why, but if they passed through any more long tunnels, he would use the man as a light source. And if necessary, he would use Ziegel as a shield against the archer, too.

  After a sharp hairpin turn, they approached another yawning tunnel. It would make the perfect place for an ambush, and he wondered if he could catch the flat-bikers in one of these tunnels.

  Then Ruck’s grip on his throttle loosened as he wondered if that was their plan.

  44

  The words echoed through Val’s head: Lasting renown won through tribulation. It was the translation of the slogan on the first tunnel, or so Nils had told her. She hoped it would be a fitting epitaph for her group if this plan did not succeed.

  As she blasted out of the fourth tunnel along the trail, the path became a straightaway for the next hundred feet before it angled to the right. She sped up, despite the loose rocky ground, her thick tires spitting rocks behind her. The path widened and she let Ulrik and Heinrich move ahead of her. Their ATVs made short work of the steep grade. After two more tunnels and a series of switchbacks, Val let Morten and Oskar move ahead as well.

  Just outside the mouth of the sixth tunnel, she bade Anders to wait with her. Down the hillside they could see countless pines amid rocky crags, and far below was the series of switchbacks they had just driven up. Val stepped off her ATV, walked to the side of the path and picked up a large rock, just smaller than her head.

  Far below, they could see a progression of the Hangers. The line of grisly men moved slowly on the loose rocky path, but there were dozens of them, and Val knew that if they were still giving chase when they returned to clear roads, the men would catch up. So she decided to rattle them a bit.

  “Can you hit them from here?” she asked Anders.

  The archer considered the request for a moment. “Too many trees. Probably not.”

  Val looked at the rock in her hand, spun around in a full circle, and pitched the missile in a high arc. It sailed out into the void. “Maybe we will get lucky. This should at least give them a fright.”

  Ruck happened to glance up the mountain, and the simple act saved his life. He saw a small gray shape arc down from the trail above, and beyond that he could see the smooth woman in her odd eyewear. She stood on the trail looking down with another of her flat-bikers.

  Before Ruck could shout a warning through his laced mouth, the descending object crashed into a slight outcropping and bounced straight at Ziegel’s unsuspecting cranium. The rock was close to the size of his head—minus the hair—and it tore the man’s skull from his shoulders. A cloud of crimson detonated around the man like the seeds of a disturbed dandelion.

  The velocity of the impact carried the rock, and the human head, well out into the void where they plunged downward. The momentum also tugged on the man’s neck and the wrenching motion pulled his body sideways. It toppled clean off the bike, flipping through the air, before a leg caught in a tree, and the corpse came to rest at a twisted angle.

  Ziegel’s hawg bounced along as though it still had a rider, until it struck a rock and toppled over in the middle of the path.

  Ruck was equal parts horrified and amazed. Either the woman was the luckiest shot on Earth, or she wa
s the most skilled warrior he had ever seen. Either way, he knew what could stop her. He reached into his skin jacket, and pulled out his most prized possession.

  There were not many handguns left in the world, and fewer bullets. But the top five members of the Hangers all had Glocks. They were antiques, and the men meticulously cared for them. They practiced firing the weapons once a year, especially after finding a new haul of bullets. Ruck was the best shot of the five of them. But he had only three bullets left. It had been a long time since they had come across ammunition of any kind—never mind the 9mm that the Glocks used.

  Three bullets.

  But he had just decided to use one on the smooth woman.

  Frag her, he thought.

  He already had a wife. He didn’t need another.

  Val spun as something sliced into her upper arm. Then a loud, echoing crack rang out across the mountains, as she twisted and slumped across her ATV. Anders was crouched by her side in heartbeat.

  “Are you okay?”

  Val turned and looked at her arm. The bullet had ripped through the leather jacket and sliced through her skin, but it had missed bone, and had not carved deep enough to damage muscle. Just a scratch, but it burned like a bastard. And the same damn arm the Long Knife stabbed. It has only just healed. “They will be coming. Move.”

  Anders rushed back to his ATV and they were off, buzzing up the trail to the next tunnel. Just before the ninth, the others were waiting for them, and Nils was off his quad. It was parked just inside the mouth of the tunnel. Nils was standing on it, stuffing one of his bombs into a crevice near the ceiling. He gave the detonator’s timer dial a twist with a clicking noise and then slowly pushed it into the soft, claylike substance. Then he dropped down onto the saddle of his ATV and sped off into the tunnel’s gloom. The others quickly followed, Heinrich glancing nervously up at the bomb as he passed under it. Val and Anders, last in line, did the same.

  Ruck had quickly taken the saddle bags off his hawg and abandoned it for Ziegel’s. Although the bone cage on the side was scratched and cracked from its fall, the hawg’s headlamp worked, and at the moment, that mattered far more. He had left his hawg on its kick in the grass, to the side of the path. He took off up the hill. When he noticed Ziegel’s hawg had more juice than his, he had smiled at his good fortune.

  He didn’t know he had hit the smooth woman with his shot until he saw blood splatter on the gray rocks, just outside the mouth of the sixth tunnel.

  I actually hit her! Massive smooth!

  And now, at the upper level of the switchback, he was thoroughly delighted to see that he’d exacted some blood for blood. But the smooth woman’s corpse was nowhere in sight. And the blood spatter wasn’t enough to suggest his shot had killed her.

  It won’t matter. The next two bullets will do the trick, he thought with a grim smile. Throwing caution to the wind, he sped up, passing the Hangers ahead of him until he was just behind Klein.

  And then he took the lead.

  The passage from daylight to darkness repeated until it was like a blur. The stunning greenery around them and the fresh, crisp mountain air went unnoticed as Val struggled to keep up with the others on the shifting terrain. Occasionally there would be a huge rock embedded in the middle of the trail, and she would have to swerve, her rear wheel gripping the path’s edge.

  Behind her, the maniac leading the Hangers, the man with the gun, closed in. He had put the weapon away, but it wouldn’t be long before he could stop and shoot her in the back. He was no more than twenty feet back when thunder rumbled across the valley, and the ground beneath her ATV shook. Pebbles bounced across the path.

  The bomb, she thought.

  It was much too soon. Nils had said he was setting it for close to half an hour, but it had been less than five minutes.

  Then as soon as the explosion’s pressure wave passed, a second impact struck. The Hangers’ leader had sped up next to her and smashed his bike into her ATV, driving it toward the trail’s edge and certain death.

  45

  Val removed her right hand from the throttle and snapped it out, hooking it around the back of the Hanger’s neck. He tried to pull away from the ledge and from her grasp, leaning his bike to the right. But her grip was like iron, and he towed her and her ATV with him.

  She released his neck and her quad fell back behind him. Then she cranked the throttle again, ramming the front of her ATV onto the unprotected rear wheel of his bike. As her rear wheels tipped up off the trail from the impact, his rear tire squealed in protest, and the air filled with the scent of burning rubber.

  The Hanger was thrown forward from the collision, and his forehead banged on the sideview mirror attached to the high handlebars. He swerved right toward the wall, and then left toward the drop off. Val took the opportunity to zip past him on the inside of the trail. She wanted to lift her left foot and give the crazy bike-rider a swift kick, sending him clean off the ledge, but she needed her weight on the footboards to steer the ATV properly, and the path was too narrow. In her zeal to send her foe to his demise, she might follow him into the abyss. So she focused on retaking the lead and pouring on the speed, getting ahead of the Hanger before he fully recovered.

  It didn’t take him long.

  As she swept into the next tunnel, a loud crack filled the air and something pinged off the tunnel wall with a burst of sparks. At first she thought Nils had set another explosive, because of the report’s volume. But then she realized the Hanger had pulled his gun and fired another of the small metal projectiles—Nils called them bullets—at her. Thankfully, he had missed.

  The tunnel felt darker than the others she’d been through, and she realized that the light shining from her ATV was uneven, illuminating the left of the cavernous tube more than the right. One of the lights at the front must have broken when I rammed him. The tunnel rose up at a steep grade, the ceiling just above her head.

  She leaned forward and ducked low beneath the ceiling. The motion saved her life as another bullet whizzed just over her head, ripping through the leather pack attached to the front of the ATV, just above the headlamps. The reverberating report felt like a thousand claps of thunder. Her ears rang louder than her ATV’s constant buzzing and the deep growl of the Hanger’s two-wheeler.

  She forgot about the ringing when she saw the tunnel’s end ahead, someone standing in the path. It was their pre-determined signal, and she sped up in anticipation of what she knew would come, keeping her head low, behind the front satchel.

  Fifty feet from the end of the tunnel, Anders was hollering for her to stay low. She couldn’t hear him, but his waving hand was clear enough. Get down, which was easy to obey since she was already as low as she could get. Anders let three arrows fly down the tunnel. Then he turned and hopped back onto his ATV and tore up the trail.

  Val didn’t see or feel the deadly bolts clear her head, but she knew they had or she would have either felt the agony of having been hit, or she would be dead. She raced out of the low tunnel and raised her body into a normal riding position. But she didn’t slow or turn around to check on the Hanger.

  There was no time.

  She knew what would come next.

  The next tunnel would be a long one, and she needed to get to it and through it as fast as possible. Anders slipped into the tunnel’s mouth. She was close to the black entryway when she started to hear the whining buzz of her own motor again. As the ringing faded, she heard the throaty burble of the Hanger’s engine, too.

  He was still behind her.

  Val cranked the ATV as fast as it would go, launching into the dark tunnel. She knew the tunnel would be straight, so she would be in no danger of crashing at such high speeds. Nil’s plan had been to set the explosives at the end of the longest, straightest tunnel they could find.

  She passed through a hundred and fifty feet of darkness before she could detect the faint glow of dim daylight at the end. Anders was already out the other end, beyond her field of view. She lean
ed down again, not because of low clearance but to reduce her air resistance and squeeze out every last bit of speed out of the sturdy vehicle.

  As soon as she approached the end of the tunnel, she slammed on the brakes. The tires locked up and the ATV skidded out of the tunnel and into the open on a wide section of the path. Nils had chosen well. The ATV turned sideways and slid to a stop. She hopped off the vehicle and ran back for the mouth of the tunnel.

  Anders, positioned on the slope to one side of the trail, nocked an arrow. Nils, whose two-seater ATV was further up the trail, hopped on to her quad and steered it back in the right direction before powering up the path with it and coming to a slow stop ahead of his own vehicle.

  Val scooped something off the ground at the side of the tunnel entrance, then stood in the path, listening to the Hanger coming on and waiting for the light of his headlamp to turn the front of her black leather jacket orange.

  Then all of a sudden the man’s shape was visible in the light shining into the tunnel’s mouth. He had been driving without the headlamp, and was nearly on top of her.

  46

  Ruck was furious, and he saw the world through a haze of red. He’d forgotten that he had fired his three shots until he tried for the fourth. He slid the Glock back into the holster inside his denim jacket and gripped the handlebar until his knuckles started shaking.

  He was thirty feet from the end of the tunnel, running without his headlight. The smooth woman stood defiantly in his path. And while he couldn’t shoot her, he could damn well run her down. He might take them both off the edge of a cliff, but he felt it would be worth it.