He launched an arrow, and Val felt a hand shove her injured shoulder hard. White sparks of light shot across her vision as pain engulfed her, and she was forced downward, as a fast moving bulk leapt over her. As her vision cleared, she saw Morten, howling like an infuriated animal, as he flew over her head, his long sword stretched out in front of him.
Then the arrow plunged into Morten’s eye and snapped his head around so hard that she heard his neck crack.
Even though he was dead, Morten was not out of the fight yet. He hadn’t been leading with his four-foot long shining steel blade. He had thrown it. Like a spear. Before his body began its descent toward the floor, the long blade followed its path and stayed true, plunging deep into Anders’s chest, just under the man’s heart, and sinking all the way until the metal cross-guard thumped into his ribs. Anders was lifted off the ground and carried backward by the weight and force of the large sword’s impact. He slammed into a shelf, where the blade punched into a crate and held him in place.
Morten’s body crumpled to the ground, his head at a grotesque angle, and the arrow jutting from his eye socket making it appear as if he was looking upward and urging others to follow the line of the arrow shaft, seeing what he saw in death.
I know what you found, my friend, Val thought. Redemption.
Val stood and lifted her gaze from her dead Viking companion. Anders was still standing, leaning against the shelf.
Footsteps pounded toward her in the gloom, beyond the light of the sparking flare and Anders. No escape. She glanced behind her and saw six Vector men, all armed with spiked clubs. Oskar and Morten were down. No sign of Ulrik or Agnes, but she had to assume they were down, as well. And Heinrich...
“You wanted to know why,” Anders said over a mush of blood that dribbled from the corners of his mouth. He slurred like a drunk. “I will tell you why. Because the bounty kept growing. Enough to let me live out my days well fed, far from the squalor of my youth, and in the company of women eager to please, or given no choice. I have traveled this part of the world before. And when the Vectors learned what you were after, they made a generous offer. All I had to do was keep them informed of our group’s whereabouts. I will be as rich as a King, and you will be mine...on a leash.” He spat a thick wad of blood to the floor, then pulled a knife from his belt. He took a step forward, tugging the sword out of the crate behind him.
He raised the knife, took another step forward...
...and then he ceased to be, in a glorious rupture of red liquid.
A shattering boom filled the warehouse as a metal crate dropped onto the man’s head, mashing its heavy cargo of metal parts onto him. The crate compressed Anders’s body, crushing his head down to his feet, crunching bone and squishing muscles. There was nothing left of him other than a pasty smear that stretched seven feet in all directions. The explosion of blood and meat covered Val in a fine coating.
The men running out of the dark beyond the crate skidded to halt, as did the six behind her.
Val’s eyes slid upward to the top of the big metal shelving unit, where Ulrik, his bare chest covered in several puncture wounds dripping blood, stood heaving. He had used those massive muscles to shove one of the several hundred pound crates, and let it drop on Anders.
He looked down at the spattered human remains and shouted, “Did we come here to talk or did we come here to fight, you bowl of shit?”
Even in the face of the carnage and their overwhelming loss, Val barked out a laugh at Ulrik’s comment. But the laughter left her soul when more of the Vectors—some of them flat-chested women—came down the aisle into the light. They all carried the spiked clubs, and one of them dragged a passed-out Agnes along by her ponytail.
Behind Val, more of the Vectors moved in. She glanced back up to Ulrik, and saw that men were closing on him from each side of the top shelf.
The man next to Agnes had a thin series of white scars on his left cheek, as if he had repeatedly cut himself shaving. He set his club on the concrete floor, next to the spitting and hissing flare, then pulled a knife from a sheath on his back and pointed the shining silver tip at Agnes’s throat.
“Overgave,” he said.
He spoke in Dutch—or some variant of it—but the root of the word was similar enough to her own Northern dialect, where it would be Overgivelse. Even if it hadn’t, she would have recognized the meaning based on the posture and the threat.
Surrender.
66
Dawn limped into the world one lingering step at a time. The overcast sky threatened more rain, the scent of ozone in the air suggesting the sky might follow through on its threat.
The clouded skies cast the dockyards in a gray gloom that helped conceal Heinrich, but the Vectors would be more alert after the incursion into their territory. He had held back to the shadows all night, keeping tabs on where the men—and women—took Ulrik, Agnes and Val. There was no sign of the cousins, and Heinrich believed that both men were dead.
On the plus side, there was also no sign of Anders or his bird, so Heinrich thought there was still a possibility the bowman might return.
Needing a better place to hide while still being able to view the entire Vector camp, and watch for an opportunity to steal their prisoners, Heinrich climbed a rusty ladder on the exterior of a massive, cylindrical fuel tank. It was the first in a row of five. Seventy-five feet in diameter, and over a hundred feet tall, the tank’s roof provided the perfect overwatch from which he could see across a wide open field of mud, and over to the warehouse and the surrounding buildings. Beyond those lay the river. Behind him, was more industrial dockland, and another slice of the river, revealing that the spit of land they were on was actually an island of sorts.
He belly-crawled around the entire circumference of the tank, slowly popping his head up at the edges and getting the lay of the land. Then he moved back to his initial vantage point and watched for the Vectors to emerge.
Val had given him special instructions.
She had been concerned about an ambush, and he was to hide himself away, waiting for the moment to lend assistance, if something went wrong.
And something had. Horribly.
Heinrich had first retreated to the abandoned shack they had used earlier in the day, but then he had thought better of the decision and had found a different building from which he could view the front of the warehouse. For the first few minutes of his special mission, he had worried that he had been sidelined for being the least skilled of them. He even briefly wondered if his position with the group was not as solid as he had assumed, and that Val was hoping to leave him behind in Rotterdam.
But he’d only had a few more minutes to ponder the question before large groups of Vectors descended on the warehouse door and piled inside. It had happened so quickly that he hadn’t had time to respond. But then he had remembered Val’s instruction. Hide. Wait for the moment. That moment had not been the right one.
So he had remained hidden, and eventually the Vectors had come out, pushing Val and Ulrik, both bleeding and surrounded by men and women with weapons. Behind them, more Vectors tugged young Agnes by her hair. When Morten and Oskar did not come out, the story of what had happened was easy to piece together.
They had known. They had waited. They had rushed into the building from both ends and pinned the Vikings down.
When a small group of Vectors broke away and rushed into the shack where the Vikings had hidden earlier in the day, Heinrich knew they were aware of the group’s numbers. They had lost track of one.
Him.
The next morning on his new perch, high up on the fuel tank and waiting for movement, he knew Val had made the right choice. He had no idea how he would rescue them, but if the opportunity came, he would take it and succeed, or die trying.
When his stomach grumbled from hunger, Heinrich guessed the sun had been up for a few hours, even diminished as it was behind the screen of loaded clouds.
The door to a low-slung building on the edg
e of the great field below him snapped open. Five men—or maybe there were women in there too—strode out into the center of the large field carrying shovels. They spent a few minutes digging a deep, but small-diameter hole in the mud, until they hit much drier dirt underneath it. Heinrich guessed the hole to be five feet deep. Then the group walked off the field, taking their shovels with them.
What is this? he wondered. Too small to be a grave.
He would not have to wait long. Vectors began walking onto the field, lingering. They were waiting for something. Heinrich counted thirty-two. He noted that none of them had breasts, although he was certain that some of them were woman. He wondered if they were all naturally flat-chested or if the women had their breasts removed for some reason. He watched for a sign of their prisoners, and as the minutes spun out, he worried that maybe the Vectors had gathered for an execution.
Then another group of five came out, pushing Val and Ulrik ahead of them with spiked clubs. Agnes was not there. Another three Vectors came into the field as well, and the largest of them carried a conical horn. His body was armored in gleaming silver plate, and covered in deadly spikes. A dark-haired woman in thick furs walked beside him.
The big man shouted into the horn, and it amplified his voice. He spoke in a Dutch accent, but Heinrich could still make out the meaning of most of the words, because they were similar to the German he spoke.
“Vectors! Brothers and sisters! Gather and observe. Record.” The man was a bit bulkier than the others—broader and barrel-chested—but his clothing gave no indication of his status.
“My brothers and sisters, long have we sought our prize. The foreigners have tried to keep it from us, killing our allies and murdering our fellow Vectors!” The man’s voice, even amplified as it was through the bullhorn, was drowned out as the gathered thirty-nine Vectors shouted outraged boos and hisses.
The man with the bullhorn raised it high, and the voices of the crowd settled. “But now we have them, and soon we will use the young one to gain massive riches. But first we must deal with their warriors, who murdered our friend.”
Again the outraged voices of the crowd rose in volume, and several people with thicker accents than the bullhorn-man shouted out. Heinrich could not make out more than a word, but he understood the calls were indignant cries for justice.
A man standing next to Ulrik swung his spiked club at the back of the Viking’s legs. The man twisted the handle at the last second, so none of the spikes impaled his prisoner, but the strike was hard enough to take Ulrik’s legs out from under him, and his large frame crashed backward into the mud.
The crowd cheered and laughed.
Ulrik appeared uninjured, but stayed on his back until another two Vectors came up on him from behind and started to yank him up. Back on his feet, he lashed out with a backhand fist, pummeling one of the two in the face before three others rushed in, driving the un-spiked tips of their clubs into Ulrik’s stomach. As he dropped to his knees in the squelching mud, another man came running in and kicked Ulrik in the gut, flipping his body to land once more on his back.
For a split second, Heinrich had thought the resistance would lead to the perfect opportunity to lend his assistance, and while his adrenaline had spiked, he had been prepared to rush to the fuel tank ladder. But Ulrik was down in seconds, and Val, stripped of her leather jacket and missing her goggles, stood nearby, scowling, the blood-red hawk-wing pattern on her face smeared.
Heinrich felt helpless, as he wondered again and again, What can I do?
Then the armored bullhorn man shouted, “These people from the North. They came into our lands, with no tribute. Without asking permission! They hacked and killed their way across the land, all the while trying to deprive you of your hard earned wealth.”
The crowd’s frenzied screams and hoots rose to a crescendo.
“And now, my loyal friend Anders, is dead.”
The crowd went silent, and Heinrich nearly swallowed his tongue.
Anders?
Before Heinrich could even allow the idea of Anders’s betrayal to filter through his confused mind, the armored-man took a running step and kicked the side of Ulrik’s head. As the boot connected, Heinrich could hear the thud all the way up on his fuel tank, and he cringed.
“And this dog-fucker killed him! Crushed him so badly that we don’t even have a body to bury! What should we do with him, I ask you all?”
The crowd erupted with screams and competing shouts. Eventually, the noise coalesced into a slowly building chant that got louder and louder.
A group of Vectors left the field and came back a minute later lugging a thirty-foot long wooden pole, like the many Heinrich had seen along the edges of roads in older towns. He finally made out the words of the thickly accented chanting.
Pin him up.
Pin him up.
Pin him up.
67
Ulrik’s body ached. His stomach hurt, and his ribs were either bruised or cracked. The tingling in his arms told him they were asleep, as he had been, but a dull pain radiated from his hands to his shoulders.
The side of his face felt swollen and tight. And his jaw ached. His left eye was swollen shut, and he kept his right closed to make anyone watching think he was still unconscious. He gently probed the inside of his mouth and felt all his teeth still in place, but one molar nudged a bit under the pressure from the tip of his tongue.
Raindrops pelted the right side of his body. I’m outside, he thought. The ticking of the rain filled his ears, and he strained to hear anything else. When he was convinced he might be alone, he slowly cracked his right eyelid.
It was either dusk or the storm clouds had darkened the sky to a dull slate gray. He hung up high over a grassy field that was turning to mud in the downpour.
He looked up and the memories flooded back.
The chanting.
The beating.
The clanging of the big metal hammers.
The thick iron spike.
His wrists were chained to either side of a foot-long pine board, and a thick black iron nail, a foot long, had been pounded through his hands, and the board, attaching them both to the dark brown wooden pole from which he was suspended.
They have crucified me.
Ulrik’s hands had been laid one atop the other, and the nail—an inch wide, unfinished iron spike—had been forced through his hands between the middle and third metacarpal bones, forcing them apart and pushing the fingers apart so his hands resembled the horns of an ox.
Blood dripped down from the holes, but it had started to crust and coagulate, despite the rain. His fingers had turned white from blood loss. The only reason his weight hadn’t torn his hands through the spike was because his body was being supported by the manacles around his wrists—not the holes in his hands.
He considered wiggling his fingers, and then thought better of it. It would hurt if he could do it at all, and it would do exactly nothing for him.
He looked down and saw his bare feet dangling below him. As far as he could see, he was only attached to the pole by his hands and his wrists. The distance between his wrists was just enough to keep the weight of his body from suffocating him to death, although he was already finding it hard to breathe.
He didn’t have long before whatever strength he had would leech away into his toes and flood out into the rain.
The field below him was empty. With storm clouds blocking the sky, he had no idea how long he had been nailed to the pole. It couldn’t have been too long, or he would have suffocated for sure. His body felt battered, but still strong. He didn’t know much about crucifixion, but he imagined weakness would come soon enough.
He struggled to open his left eye, and its lid cracked just slightly, allowing a thin sliver of muted sight. It would be enough. He craned his head around left and right, ensuring that the field below him was in fact completely vacant, and that no guards were posted in the nearby buildings. He was high enough to see the warehouse where the V
ikings had been defeated, and the distant river beyond it. The building where they had been detained looked deserted now.
The rain intensified. He could no longer see the river past the curtains of cascading water. He could feel the water sliding between his aching wrists and the iron manacles around them, lubricating him to no avail. The cuffs were thick, and he didn’t think he would be able to get his wrists out of them, even if he could get his hands free from the nail.
He could see only one way to do it, and it was going to hurt more than he could imagine. He needed to psyche himself up for it, and filled his mind with thoughts of failure; at protecting Agnes, in allowing Val to be captured, at the betrayal of Anders, and at the deaths of Morten and Oskar—the latter of whom he had been marched past when the Vectors took their prisoners out of the warehouse. His fury mounted when he thought about how he had failed not just his people, but the whole human race. Even the Vectors would die out if he and Val did not get Agnes to Halvard and his gene science.
Then his thoughts replayed what they had done to him. How they had beaten him like a dog, and how they had pierced his hands and left him to die.
But he had not died.
And they were fools.
Every last one of them.
He heaved with his massive stomach muscles, pulling his thick thighs and knees upward, and then lowered them. It was agony, but the pain was nothing compared to what it would be, and if he could not perform this first stage, he would not have the strength for too many tries.
He sucked in a deep breath and swung his legs up again, pulling hard with his arms and sending screaming tendrils of pain rushing down his shoulders to his heart. His abdominal muscles contorted in on themselves, and his chin mashed to his chest as his legs swept up over his head and over the wooden plank holding him prisoner.
He thought his neck would break, but then his ankles wrapped around the upper part of the pole, and took some of the weight off his bent arms. If anyone saw him now, they would think he was trying to eat his hands off or maybe hump the pole.
Viking Tomorrow Page 28