They had found Erlend and Anders nearby in the forest, and Oskar’s injury had been minimal. Stig’s ribs turned vivid shades of purple and yellow, but he shrugged the injury off as the cost of the journey, which he said he was beginning to enjoy. Ulrik suspected the reemergence of plentiful food had much to do with the man’s newfound enjoyment of their mission.
The food was welcomed by all—especially because as they left the pig fields behind and headed south once more, they traveled for two weeks toward Stuttgart, without once spotting a living thing. No game, no more pigs, not even a bird.
The land was covered in a thick gray mist. The waters they found were tainted with greasy streaks of color, and the trees, when they could be seen, looked pale and sickly.
There was no new food to be found, but in return for the kindness their shadow had left for them, Val took to leaving an amount of the smoked pork behind them on the road each night.
In the mornings, it was always gone.
Although the conditions were not optimal, Ulrik found them tolerable—with food in their packs, most things would be.
The problem came during the third week of moving across the poisoned, empty landscape, when Stig woke up coughing thick, chunky phlegm, peppered with bloody specks.
26
“He is getting worse,” Erlend said. “I fear he will soon be going to Valhalla.”
Ulrik spat on the ground. “It is no way for a warrior to die.” He stalked off across the field, anger making his arms shake.
Stig lay on a makeshift bed they had created with a heap of branches nestled between two piles of rubble and rock, near the middle of a large open field. It had been a long time since they had come across a solid structure. The day was overcast and raining on and off, with the bitter chill behind it, souring moods and implying winter would not be long in coming.
The man lying before Val had lost several pounds, and his skin had turned a pasty yellow. The hue nearly matched the heavy strand of snot that dribbled out of his nose, and the chewy mouthfuls he frequently spat aside.
Despite the midday time, he was trapped in deep sleep. Their travel time, even with Stig strapped to the rear seat of the doubled-up ATV had been cut to just a few hours each day. The man was not well enough for more.
None of the others had developed the sickness, and they debated whether it was a result of the injury to his ribs. The broken bones had begun to mend, and there was no longer a discolored bruise on his chest. But there was no denying his weakness or the non-stop production of mucus.
The nightly discussion also touched on radiation sickness or tainted pork meat—but in both scenarios, they would all be ill. Anders was suspicious of Ull and his supposedly benevolent gifts. But Val had again pointed out to the bowman that they had all eaten the meat, and no one else had contracted the sickness—and they had not needed gifts from their follower since the pigs.
Whatever the cause, hearty, robust Stig was dying, and it would not take long. The man rolled on his side and instead of spitting out a mouth full of heavy mucus, he simply opened his mouth in his sleep and let it drool out.
Erlend turned away at the sight. They didn’t have anyone skilled in medicine, but he did his best to treat the man he had befriended on the journey.
“Do what you can for him,” Val said, understanding this might be the last day Erlend needed to tend to his patient.
She walked a short distance away across the field, the grass sliding past her shins. She had seen a wooden fence set twenty feet inside the edge of the forest. In twenty more years, the seeds from the trees at the edge will have filled this clearing as well. Ulrik had stalked off a good distance, but the others—Anders, Nils, Morten, Erlend and Oskar—were huddled in a group and talking. As she approached them, they stopped speaking, each avoiding her gaze.
“I am not stupid,” she said. “It makes sense to discuss putting the man out of his misery, even if it is not a pleasant topic.”
Relief washed over Nils’s face, and she knew that was precisely what the men had been discussing. She knew Ulrik would have no part in such a topic. He would not even consider it. Val had already accepted that Stig was dying. She had accepted that they would be unable to stop the progression of his illness. Her thoughts had already moved on to making sure no one else contracted the strange sickness, and to surviving the encroaching winter.
Morten ran a hand through his unwashed hair, his slicked-back look returning with natural greasiness. “This place is not good, Val. We need to move from here. We are all agreed.”
“What would you suggest?” she asked. She would not make it easy for them.
Oskar turned away, and Nils looked down at his feet. The answer surprised her when it came instead from Anders, the quiet hunter. “We should just kill him and move on. The pork will not last forever, and the winter snows will soon be upon us. Nils has shown me the maps. If we do not get through the mountains to the south soon, we would be better served by going to the west, through France.”
“That would be well out of our way,” Morten said, suddenly concerned. Val was surprised to discover that he knew the route at all. He had clearly also studied the maps, although she had never seen him display any interest in them.
“The mountains are a vast boundary to the south,” Anders added. “Crossing them, even with the ATVs, will be a challenge. Doing so in the winter would most likely lead to more death.”
“The mountains—they are called the Alps—extend down into France, as well,” Val pointed out.
“Not all the way to the coast of the sea,” Anders countered. “We could then travel into Italy along the shore.”
Val had spent a long time calculating the route with Nils and Halvard back in Stavanger, before they had departed. She had first proposed the sea route herself, but Halvard had warned against it. She knew little of Europe, or the few peoples still living here, but Halvard had assured her that there were, according to his scientist friend, still plenty of pirates on that sea. ‘And the south of France is to be avoided at all costs,’ he had told her.
“We will give Stig until the end of this day. If he is not recovered, we will give him the option of being left behind, or having us end his life. We will not make that decision for him. He has earned that much from us and far more.” Val started to walk toward Ulrik.
“And the mountains?” Morten called to her.
A loud cough interrupted them. Then, “What mountains? I am ready for them.”
All eyes turned to see Stig, standing next to Erlend, and shaking off a helping hand. His beard was crusted with dried snot, but he had a light in his eyes. He looked better than he had in days.
Then his chest erupted in five bursting gouts of red, spraying his blood out into the grass. The unexpected sight was accompanied by the loudest mechanical shattering sound any of them had ever heard.
Only Nils knew what it was. “Get down!” he screamed. Then he threw himself to the grass, and the others followed his lead as Stig’s suddenly perforated body toppled forward. Another burst of fire from the automatic weapon strafed the field, and then abruptly stopped.
Voices shouted in German.
“Scheisse. Es ist kaputt.”
“Sei still, Narr!”
Nils translated to the men on the ground, and Val could just make out what he said from her distance.
“Shit. It is jammed.” “Shut up, fool.”
“Nils, what in the name of Heimdal’s horn was that weapon?” Morten hissed, from his place in the grass.
“It shoots metal pieces very fast and very far. A machine gun.”
“It ripped through Stig and we never saw the man using it,” Oskar said. “How can we fight that?”
“We cannot,” Nils said. “But the weapon is broken. Perhaps only temporarily. Let us hope it is the only one they have.”
“So we should stay in the grass, Nils?” Val called out across the field.
But their new opponents answered for him. A group of the men came
running across the open field toward where they lay in the grass. The men were bald, and they wore dark pants and boots, but their huge chests were bare, and covered in raised scars that formed patterns and decorations like tattoos.
But their heads were the most unusual thing—the men had no ears. Just open holes. The lumpy, mismatched scar tissue suggested the ears had been cut off. The men wore either black make-up that covered their bald heads—or else the entire head had been tattooed black, with just small patches of untouched skin at the throat, back of the head, and on the sides.
More threatening than the makeup, the men running through the field’s shin-high grass carried a long, slim knife in each hand.
“So, no more of the machine weapons,” Val said, scrambling to her feet. The others stood up behind her. “Time to avenge Stig.” Then she ran toward the men with the knives, pulling her ax from its holster.
As she halved the distance between her and the black-headed men, before her comrades had even begun to chase her, two more groups of tattooed attackers entered the open field.
Instead of turning away, Val only sped up.
27
The long knives the attackers carried looked crude, but deadly. They were not quite swords—about two feet long and slim. But the metal looked weak, and poorly formed. Black and lumpy. Val thought she might be able to split one with a good strike from her ax—or even the wood of its handle.
As the first tattooed man closed in, she dipped low, under his twin knife sweeps, and then sprang up into the air. She swung down with her ax, the blade biting into the top of the man’s head, even as she continued her tumble forward, flipping over his falling body and tugging her ax free in the same movement. She landed on her feet behind the man, and he crashed to the grass with blood spraying from his head.
The men on either side of him stopped, stunned. Val’s left hand snapped out laterally, and her hand-ax spun through the air, slicing into one man’s blackened face, as she turned to the third. He pulled up his twin blades and flipped them in his hands, so the tips pointed down. His torso was twice as wide as hers, and this close she could see the patterns on his chest. They were old symbols, but still known for their association with evil—even far to the north where she had lived her entire life.
Swastikas.
The tattoo on his head was a giant black swastika. It started the intersection of its four legs at the bridge of the man’s nose. The bent legs of the design wrapped under his chin, over his bald skull to the back, and across the artificially flattened sides of his head, where the missing ears had once been.
But like everyone in the North, his eyes were a crystalline blue, for a moment revealing uncertainty and awe, and then quickly sliding back toward hatred.
The man rushed at her, one downward arcing blade slashing for her chest. Val swung her ax handle straight up, the head of the weapon tangling with the man’s wrist and the hilt of his blade. The strike blocked, Val snapped a booted foot straight up, catching Long Knife man in the chin, sending his head back, and tugging her ax handle from her hand.
He recovered quickly, and came back at her, the long weapons spinning again in his hands until the blades pointed upward above his clenched thumbs. He thrust forward with both hands, but Val slipped to the right, rolling her body around the outside of the man’s arm, and the side of his body. Her own knife—the blade just four inches long—already in her hand. It was her last weapon. But she brought it in close as she spun, slicing along the man’s side, just above his hip. Then her free arm shot up and backward, her elbow connecting with the base of the man’s skull.
She spun around the Long Knife’s body, even as he started to fall from the blow to his head. With the metal hilt of her knife still in hand, she threw her weight into a punch at the side of the man’s right knee. The cartilage protested with loud cracking noises, as the joint collapsed inward.
The man screamed, his knees impacting the soil. Val reversed her spin, and swept her arm out, slicing through the side of the man’s neck. Arterial blood arced up and over her head, as Val lunged to the ground, rolled and came up with the knife still in one hand and her recovered ax in the other.
She took a moment to orient herself. Ulrik was in the process of ramming his shield into the face of a Long Knife, as he pulled his ax free of another, his foot planted on the man’s chest, heaving the body free of the weapon. Closer still, Morten and Oskar were a whirling tornado of death, sweeping through two and three men with each strike of their long swords, the weapon cleaving through the Knives’ deficient metal as easily as it split Long Knife skin.
Erlend and Nils fought side by side, their blades clashing with the knives of two attackers. Anders was nocking and firing arrows, each shot finding and slipping into a Long Knife head. As she watched, one of the arrows went into an unguarded Long Knife ear hole. The man’s muscled torso snapped around in a circle and dropped. The hunting bird was nowhere to be seen. It made its own decisions whether to fight or fly, it seemed and, not for the first time, she wished Anders had better control over the creature.
Val turned her head back in the direction from which the Long Knives had come. The day’s gray haze still obscured the edge of the forest. But the ten new men rushing her way were easy to spot, as was the knife that had been thrown at her, spinning straight toward her face. She tilted her shoulders right, her head moving left. The blade whipped over her shoulder, the tip of it slicing through her leather jacket and nicking her flesh.
Her attention stayed on the man who had thrown his weapon. He was in the lead, the new group of attackers spread out in a wedge formation. Val stayed in place as the last two men on either side of the wedge split off, heading for her friends. She waited until the leader got closer. As he did, he swung with his remaining knife. Val swung her hardened ax over her head, like she was chopping wood, striking and cutting through the man’s knife blade like it was a head of cabbage.
Before her swing was complete, she reared her head backward and then slammed it forward, mashing her forehead into the bridge of the man’s nose. The hit was so hard it rammed the bone and cartilage backward through his skull, killing him instantly.
The man fell at her feet, and Val spat on him.
The five men who had stayed with the leader slowed to look at her. Then the smallest of them screamed incoherently and charged. His four comrades rushed in from all sides.
There was no way out, and she could not leap over them as she had done with the first man. Not while stationary.
So she did the only thing she could think of. She dropped down into a crouch, swinging her knife in an arc at knee height. When the blade bit into multiple limbs, she struck again and again, shredding legs too committed to the charge to veer away before being sliced open. But it wasn’t enough. A tangle of bodies crumpled down on her like an avalanche of flesh, blood and body odor. She thrashed with her knife, the long wooden handle of her ax, her elbows and her head. But fists and knees pummeled her from countless directions, and eventually, the sharpened tip of one of the long knives found its way into her flesh.
28
Ulrik lunged from behind his shield, sending the man on the other side of it to the ground where he was promptly stomped by Ulrik’s boot. His right heel smashed into the man’s tattooed face, shattering nose and jaw. Ulrik did not know if the man was dead, but he stopped moving, and that was enough.
Val had been surrounded when Ulrik last saw her, and then the five men had tackled her. The other Vikings were all too far back to offer assistance. But Ulrik would kill every earless bastard between him and his fallen leader. His respect for her had only grown on their long voyage, and while he was not sure if his additional loyalty to her was because he had feelings for her or because he simply respected her, he knew she meant more to him than any of the men in their group.
Stepping off the fallen Long Knife, Ulrik raced for the next two, who stood too close to each other. He led with the ax, fooling them into thinking he meant to swing it
overhand. Instead, as he got close, he swung out and back with the heavy ax, and brought his shield up to smash into both men, the velocity of his sprint adding heft to the impact. Knives clattered against the wood and the metal dome of his shield. Then their bodies. Ulrik turned a full circle, dropping the shield and following his ax around. He swung low, the ax hewing through the first man’s thighs, and chopping cleanly through the first leg of the second man, before stopping an inch into the inner thigh of the fourth leg, where resistance tugged the handle from Ulrik’s hand.
The dismembered men screamed in horrified pain and shock, but he just lifted a foot and stamped down on the back of his shield, driving it down on their faces. The man with one leg still attached was silenced in a barrage of crunching sounds. Ulrik pulled his foot off the shield, bent low to pull it up and rammed a fist into the blackened face of the legless man. His screaming stopped when unconsciousness dropped on him like a stone fallen from a great height.
The other man’s silence had not come from the shield, Ulrik saw, but from the man’s long blade, which had sliced his own throat in the second impact.
Good, Ulrik thought, and he was moving again toward the pile of bodies where Val had gone down.
Four more men came at him, two from each side. Ulrik hefted his wooden shield in his left hand and pulled the ax in close with his right, letting the head drop low to the grass, where the blood-drenched blade was nearly concealed from sight. He stood still, waiting for the men to make their move.
In contrast to his stillness, the men bounced on their feet, nervous energy coursing through them, and three of the four twirled their blades in their hands, as if to show off their expertise with the weapons. The fourth man tightened and loosened his grip on his blades. They all looked identical with their naked chests and their large swastika head tattoos, and Ulrik supposed that was the point of the design, and their naked chests. The scarified designs in their flesh were the only individual variations they had. He could only wonder at the purpose for the mutilated ears.
Viking Tomorrow (The Berserker Saga Book 1) Page 12