by B. C. James
The three women looked down at the unconscious forms of two men while the third blubbered on his knees, bleeding out and incoherently begging them not to kill him.
Brittany wiped the blood off her gladius. Her victim was clutching his stump as he watched her do this. She could feel his eyes upon her. She grinned at him as she licked the last of his blood from her blade.
“What should we do with them, m’lady?” She asked, returning her weapon to its sheath.
Belle looked at her for a moment, considering the question. Brittany hated when her boss stared at her. It forced a sort of eye contact which with anyone else would be easy. In this case it was hard to look into Belle’s eyes and not find yourself staring only at the one that was milky white.
They were obviously both aware of this disfigurement. Belle wore a black strip of face paint across her eyes and vertical stripes from ear to ear. If asked, she would say the makeup broke up the lines and contours of her face and offered a further layer of anonymity. What she wouldn’t say is that she did it to distract from her ravaged eye. Of the two explanations the latter was the truth.
Makeup or no, staring seemed to be rude. Deep down Brit wished her boss would just wear an eyepatch like any self-respecting pirate. That would make it so much easier to focus on the remaining blue eye.
“Take them out to the alley, Brittany. Blood Eagle all three. That should adequately punish them for daring to lay hands on me.”
“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but wouldn’t slitting their throats be quicker and quieter than nailing them, spread-eagle, to the wall, cutting their backs open, and pulling their lungs out?”
“Brit, someday you will learn that the message we convey is what is important here, not the convenience.”
The young woman bowed and then she and her partner dragged Ratchet and his friends through the Ratskeller’s rear exit. As if a signal had been passed telepathically to the rest of the gang waiting outside, a fourth girl came in with a hammer and some wrought iron nails in her hand. She made her way through the bar and followed the other two out to the back alley.
Soon the air was filled by anguished shrieks of pain from the wannabe rapists. The men continued to scream and plead even while the nails were being driven through their extremities. Their voices rose into the upper registers as deep incisions were made in their backs. The sound coaxed a pleasant, and disturbingly charming, smile of satisfaction from Belle.
She listened with interest to her charges dispensing justice to the terminally stupid. She heard three tortured voices pleading at once, “No…No…Noooooooooooooooo!!!” and then silence.
“Ewww, this one’s lungs smell like nicotine,” Belle heard one of her girls say.
The comment was followed by the playful giggles of the three girls who performed the ritual killings. When away from their mistress, the members of the Valkyries motorcycle club were more like giddy sorority girls than dangerous creatures of the open road.
Brittany and her cohorts came back into the bar, trying to suppress their snickers. They did their best to regain something that resembled composure before addressing Belle.
“It is done, m’lady.”
Belle raised an eyebrow at them and attempted to show a disapproving frown. Inwardly, she had a mother lion sensitivity when it came to her girls; she was amused that her cubs had obediently killed a rabbit but a little annoyed when they played badminton with the corpse rather than treat it as lunch. The facade of anger lifted, and she touched each one affectionately on the head as they passed her to exit the bar.
Belle looked toward the two Hell’s Angels who laughed uproariously after witnessing the events that transpired over the past several minutes. They both got to their feet to give her a standing ovation. She playfully curtsied in their direction. A waitress brought fresh glasses of beer to the bikers. She was neither fazed by the killing nor felt the need to sprint to the nearest phone and dial 911. Instead she mouthed the words, “Thank you,” as she passed Belle. The look on her face told a vivid story of her history with the now deceased Ratchet and his friends. It was not too big a leap to assume that she had, in the past, been an unwilling guest to the sort of party they threatened Belle with.
The tavern’s owner looked at Belle from behind the bar and covered his eyes, then covered his ears, and finally covered his mouth. The “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” sign was a clear indication that he was not about to talk. The police were more likely to be grateful over the removal of three criminal losers from the street rather than curious about the odd circumstances surrounding their demise. The deaths would be stored in the “boys will be boys” file—a file that looked remarkably like a garbage can. No witnesses and complete apathy toward the victims meant she didn’t have to worry about any inconvenient police investigation. Instead she could focus her attention on more important things.
The dwarves Alfrigg and Dvalin emerged from the kitchen. Each had BBQ sauce slathered liberally around their mouths and were chucking the remains of a plate of ribs over their shoulders. Belle imagined that this was what evil, cannibalistic clowns would look like...if evil cannibalistic clowns came in fun size.
“Sorry for the delay, m’lady. Dvalin and I were just enjoying the show.”
“Hear, hear!” Dvalin said raising a half full cup of lager in salute to Belle. “Art, m’lady, pure art! It was a three handkerchief murder for sure.”
“I dare to disagree with dear Dvalin,” Alfrigg said. “It was pedantic, presumptuous, derivative, and really gross. Way too Rob Zombie for my taste. I give the whole performance a thumbs down…hick.”
Belle just rolled her eyes as they began to violently argue about whether or not Martin Scorsese would have done it that way.
“Gentlemen!” Belle said, in a loud authoritative tone. “And I am being generous in the usage of the word. You contacted me stating you had news of Baldr. There is a hefty sum in it for us if we capture him and return him back to Hel; some of which will find its way into your pockets.”
“He was in here this evening,” Alfrigg said, “and he was with Thor. That should make your quarry much easier to find.”
“And make him much harder to get at. How’ya gonna git past a Thunder God, m’lady?” Dvalin asked. It was almost as if he was savoring the problem this presented for Belle.
“Quiet, Dvalin. M’lady may see this as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.”
Belle simply shrugged and looked unconcerned. “It’s a small matter.”
While, to the outside world, she appeared nonchalant about the possibility of confronting Thor, she had mixed feelings about it. On one hand, she knew the Thunder God’s ego was always going to be his undoing. His desire to have the mob chant his name meant that anyone interested in tracking him down needed only an NFL schedule. Finding him meant finding Baldr, which was the easy part. While he had long ago given up his hammer, he was still Thor. This was no small challenge. Getting what she wanted was going to take more than brute force. She needed a plan.
Belle grabbed a Raiders schedule off the bar and tossed the bartender a few gold coins. It was handy knowing where her prey was going to be on any given Sunday. She left the bar to brainstorm a plan of attack.
Chapter 9
Carl Simmons finished his workout with a product called the Shake Weight. This innovation in fitness technology involves a person gripping a rod-shaped piece of equipment with both hands, at about a 45-degree angle, and shaking it up and down until they look like Steve Reeves.
After watching himself in the mirror working the shaft of his weighted rod, Simmons wondered if this looked as obscene as he thought it did. He studied his reflection in the looking glass. Despite the vigorous, if embarrassing, workout, he still physically had more in common with a penguin than he did a young Mohammed Ali. He would give the Shake Weight another few weeks before he gave up and just tossed it in the closet with the Thigh Master and that belt he purchased online that claimed it could sculpt six pa
ck abs by electrocuting the wearer.
He went to the kitchen and grabbed a pint of Häagen-Dazs and a spoon then turned on his television. Simmons’ weaknesses did not end at the freezer section of his supermarket. It extended to the type of voyeuristic television that gave the viewer a window into the private lives of celebrities. It started when he discovered the show The Flavor of Love. Watching an allegedly crack-addicted felon like Flavor Flav get paid some big bucks for the simple act of selecting his soul mate on a reality TV show gave him hope. If Flav could get a bevy of strippers to fight for his love on prime time television, then maybe someday he could actually get a date.
While the staged reality shows were entertaining, they weren’t always real. His growing voyeurism demanded to be fed with real life glimpses into the lives of famous people. It gave him a visceral thrill, similar to the one that a covertly drilled hole into the girl’s locker room gives teenage boys as the get a secret peek at their female classmates. TMZ was, of course, one of his favorite programs.
Simmons settled into his easy chair and was prepared to lose himself in a haze of ice cream and celebrity gossip when what he saw on the screen made him drop his spoon. The images that flickered across his television were that of Thor and an attractive, unidentified man sitting in a bar, laughing and staring into a bottle. The commentary that accompanied this scene speculated about how Thor, while a beast on the football field, would let his inner Liberace run wild and free when off the field. For once, TMZ was way off. They reached an interestingly titillating conclusion based on the cell phone video but had not come to the correct conclusion. He recognized the man with Thor from the paintings in Odin’s offices. That was Baldr, his most favored son.
In his younger days, Simmons read a lot of comic books. The Marvel title, Thor, was among his favorites. Anybody who read these or saw any of the movies based on those comic books would assume that Thor was the favorite of Odin the Allfather. This simply was not true. After serving Odin for a time, he had learned a thing or two about the old God’s opinion of his children.
It was true that Thor was the most powerful of his sons, but Odin had always saw him as the Johnny Bravo of the family. Large, egotistical and completely obtuse. Odin didn’t see any real value in an offspring that he didn’t think could successfully pet a rabbit without accidently killing it.
While incredibly strong with a mastery over lightning and weather, what Thor really brought to the table was the hammer, Mjölnir. Outside of that, Odin had almost no respect for him.
Simmons would never allow himself the fantasy of thinking he knew everything that Odin had up his sleeve. With that said, he did know more than most about his boss’s schemes. Mjölnir was definitely key to Odin’s plans of surviving the apocalypse that Ragnarok would force upon the world.
Odin labored under the belief that his thick-headed son never truly understood or appreciated the true nature of that particular weapon. While in Thor’s hands, Mjölnir was a lethal instrument of blunt force trauma just looking for someplace to happen; in reality, it was much more than that.
According to the briefings that had come across Simmons desk, Mjölnir didn’t just slay the enemies of the Thunder God; it took the very life essence of the person, god, animal, monster, dragon, mime, or whatever else had been killed with it. It added the power of the slain to its own. The more powerful the foe, the stronger the hammer would become after it had absorbed their soul.
There wasn’t a god alive who didn’t know about Mjölnir. Even those second string wannabes that the Greeks and Romans worshipped knew where to find the most powerful weapon ever forged. When, in the throes of a world class identity crisis, Thor renounced his godhood and threw the hammer away, it landed in the desert that would eventually make up the southern part of the state of Nevada. When the United States government found the hammer, they built a military base around it and subtly led people to believe that they were actually housing aliens there. This facility would be known to the world as Area 51. While people focused their attention on whether or not E.T. was phoning home from the 775 area code, they would ignore the existence of the amazing artifact that lay in the desert sand.
The most annoying aspect of the hammer, one the United States military found extremely vexing, was the fact that nobody could lift the damn thing. It wasn’t an issue about how heavy Mjölnir was. If that were the case, they could move it about with cranes and backhoes, which they occasionally did. The problem was that it didn’t want to be lifted.
The fact was that after several millennia of harvesting souls, the hammer had become, in its own way, self-aware. Whether this was part of the original design of the dwarves who forged it or a quirky little aspect it developed on its own is still an open question. How it got this way was largely irrelevant; Mjölnir was what it was. And not only was it self-aware but it had become rather eccentric. The weapon was extremely particular about who it would allow to handle it.
In the old days it was just a magical and lethal hunk of iron wielded by history’s most powerful Northman. Anyone who had the physical strength to shift its weight could lift it. Thor bludgeoned the race of giants nearly into extinction with the war hammer, causing Mjölnir to absorb thousands of powerful souls. Eventually it became conscious enough to call some of its own shots and decide for itself just who it would allow to brandish it. To date, the only ones the hammer would accept were Thor himself and his wife, Sif. Sif was dead, and Thor was currently in denial, so the hammer just sat there.
Along with being finicky, the hammer also seemed to have a bit of temper. While it was discovered that it could be lifted against its will with machinery, it tended to make the offending object pay for its violation. This was discovered when they lifted Mjölnir with a crane. The intension was to move it to the top of a platform, so Odin, who was working with the military, could test if it was possible to somehow electronically patch into the hammer and control the local weather. This experiment came to a screeching halt when the crane accidently dropped the hammer from what could only be considered a dizzying height. As soon as the iron head hit the ground the cabin of the crane was crushed from the top down. The driver compartment looked like a beer can that had been smashed with a mallet. Odin noted with interest that the hammer reversed the damage on anything that was using it against its will. The God or entity trying to use the weapon would take the damage instead of whatever was being whacked with Mjölnir. When it was dropped, instead of a hammer shaped dent in the ground you get a ruined crane and a dead operator.
This meant that even if Odin could manage to somehow lift the weapon it wouldn’t do him any good. If he smacked an enemy in the head with Mjölnir, the King of the Gods would only succeed in comically crushing his own skull.
This left the Odin in a bit of pickle. He was convinced that there was a huge reservoir of untapped power in Mjölnir and knew that he could increase this power a thousand fold by using it to absorb some rather powerful souls. He never openly said it, but it was not beyond the realm of possibility that Odin planned to kill several of his own demigod children to bump the hammer up to boss level. To his chagrin, all his schemes were stonewalled by Mjölnir’s rather particular nature. To use the hammer, he needed Thor.
While they were father and son, that relationship didn’t seem to bridge the gap with this pigheaded hammer. Mjölnir was attuned to the very DNA of Thor. Maybe its affection for Sif was an extension of Thor’s love for her.
Carl Simmons was aware of how much the whole thing irked Odin. Who gets to use the hammer has nothing to do with some fairytale about worthiness or honor. It is simply about who the weapon decides it likes. Odin was incensed that Mjölnir chose only Thor as the one who could lift it.
Simmons, being Odin’s oft-abused right hand flunky, was well aware that his boss had a plan in place for dealing with his reluctant son. There were also some pressure tactics that were prepared to ensure Thor’s obedience. If he couldn’t convince his son to let bygones be bygones, and pledge h
is allegiance to his father, then there was a Plan B in place.
Thor was stubborn and tended to hold a grudge. If his loyalty could not be secured through reason or gifts, Odin was not above torturing his own flesh and blood to get what he wanted. The carrot or the stick was a negotiating tactic that the Allfather had honed to a keen edge. Unfortunately dealing with Thor was not like dealing with the more reasonably minded men of business, so there was every chance that convincing him to wield Mjölnir on Odin’s behalf would not be an easy sell, if possible at all. Hence the comprehensive back-up plan.
Plan B took years to develop and cost a fortune. Odin was a man with both money and time, so he could afford to be patient. As the project went on, and the research became more promising, Odin was becoming more and more enamored with Plan B. Simmons suspected that this secondary strategy had a real shot at becoming the main tactic when it came to dealing with Thor.
Days before the TMZ footage of Thor and Baldr was aired, some of the less reputable scientists in Odin’s employ had put a detailed Plan B road map together. Seeing as the return of Baldr was predicted in the Ragnarok prophecy, though not quite like this, Odin would predictably interpret the resurrection of his previously dead son as a sign that it was time to start putting plans into action. Now that Simmons had a confirmed Baldr-sighting, he had no doubt that his agenda for the next day would be to start the wheels in motion to get control of Mjölnir. Whether this was done with Thor’s willing participation or at gunpoint was immaterial. A few more breakthroughs at the labs of Aesir Engineering and they may not need the Thunder God at all.
Chapter 10
Warren held Freya in a tight embrace and fumbled with the hooks on the back of her bra. When he dreamed of his first time with a woman he thought it would be like Christmas. His girl would be dressed in something bright and pretty, much like a gift under a tree. He would unwrap her the way one removes fancy paper from an expensive present. At least that’s how it was when the scene played out in his head. In reality, the experience was beginning to resemble his days back in high school when he would forget the combination to his locker. He was beginning to think that Freya’s green, lace lingerie was actually made by the Brink’s corporation and not Victoria’s Secret as the label suggested.