She took a few steps back in the direction of the door and her Vikings.
“Ulrik,” she hissed in a loud whisper. “It is over this way. Come. I will need your help.”
She heard a footstep in the dark, but it had come from behind her.
When she whirled around, her arm snapped up and the light blazed on.
She had just enough time to recognize the man looking at her in the dark before the fist that went with it slammed into her face.
Anders.
63
The sounds came from everywhere. Morten the Hammer heard the unmistakable thrum of rushing footfalls, and he realized three things: his cousin Oskar was in danger, the Vectors had been waiting for them, and there were far too many men closing in for the Vikings to have any chance of escape.
“Oskar! Val!” he shouted into the dark. “Fight!” As he shouted, the first part of his call had been drowned out by someone screaming in the dark, but he hadn’t made out the words.
He abandoned stealth, instead opting for speed and violence. His sword was up and out in the dark as he raced past the ends of countless racks of shelves.
Shadowy shapes flitted through the doorway as he approached, just barely visible in the slight ambient light from outside. The silhouettes carried the thick clubs he had seen the Vectors using earlier, long wooden things with X-shaped metal spikes the thickness of his fingers. The only advantage he had was his sword’s longer reach and that the men wouldn’t expect him to barrel into them.
He let out a scream in the dark as he swung his sword across the aisle, the sharp blade sluicing into flesh with its customary thunking noise. Men shrieked in the dark. A club swung in from his left. He pivoted right and the weapon slammed down into the concrete floor hard enough to crack it. The man dropped the club and staggered backward.
Morten threw his weight further right, his elbow smashing into a face, as another club went toppling into the metal shelves with a clang. Morten swung his sword back again.
This time the screams were met with a spray of blood that coated him, and he knew he had hit an artery—probably on an arm. Then a man slammed into him from behind, as if he were rushing into the fray and didn’t realize Morten was right there. Morton threw his head back, slamming the top of his skull into his attacker.
Cartilage crunched.
Morten dropped to a crouch and swung a full circle, his blade chewing into legs, slicing muscle and tendon. Inhuman howls of pain and surprise filled the air.
Wasting no time, the Laplander sprang up, crashing into the tumbling bodies that crowded around him. He didn’t bother finishing them off. These men were down, but there were plenty more flooding into the building, and he could hear Oskar slicing and grunting a few aisles to his side.
Further away, Morten could hear more running feet. They were heading for Ulrik, Agnes and Val, but he was too far away to help them. They would need to rely on Ulrik’s brawn until he and Oskar could get to them.
If Morten could just get to Oskar. He and his cousin had fought side by side for decades. They knew each other’s moves and thoughts, and even in a fight such as this, in the dark and outnumbered, they could hold their opponents at bay and triumph. They would fight back-to-back, as they had on many occasions. He just needed to get there.
“Oskar, I am coming,” Morten shouted. Then he dodged left in the dark, so his voice would not betray his position. From the fact that the Vectors were disorganized, and one had even walked into him, Morten assumed they were having just as much trouble seeing in the dark as he was.
“To your left,” was Oskar’s calculated reply from the dark. He spoke in the Lapland accent that only the cousins would know, and he meant that Morten should stay to the left of the corridor, joining up with Oskar, where he would be waiting on the right, so they might fight in their circular dance of death-dealing. “Light in five,” came the next instruction.
Morten knew his cousin was about to use a light, and he remembered the solar-powered light Oskar had, which was identical to the one Ulrik used. They had found the items in the German castle, and had used them many times at camps in the past. The instruction was not just a warning to shield Morten’s vision, but also another audio clue as to Oskar’s position.
Morten poured on the speed, colliding with another body and flinging it aside before spinning around, his sword raised at neck height. He felt a brief resistance as he spun, and then he was running again, chased only by the sound of a body tumbling to the floor.
“Now,” Oskar shouted.
A brilliant and blinding white glow filled the corridor at the end of all the storage aisles. It stretched most of the way back to the door. The Vectors shouted out, all instantly recoiling and covering their eyes. Morten, forewarned, had already shielded his face with his hand, and still the light was almost too bright with its otherworldly blue-tinted glare.
Now Morten could see the situation around him. He was ten feet from Oskar, who was surrounded by five Vector opponents. They all wore grimy clothing, as if they had crawled through the mud. Their hair was uniformly short, and most of the muscular attackers were between twenty and thirty years of age. One of them was much older, sporting a scrub of white beard on his chin, but no mustache.
Behind him on the ground, Morten counted three more tangled bodies, one desperately clutching at his throat, and doing a terrible job of holding in the spurting arcs of crimson that pooled around him on the dusty concrete floor. Further down the corridor, the way Morten had come, more of the Vectors rushed toward them.
Morten leapt ahead, swinging his sword as far out as he could, but the Vectors saw it coming and all but the nearest of them lunged away from the strike. The nearest one moved his head just enough that only the tip of the long blade struck, severing the top of the man’s ear.
The yell was strangled and high-pitched, and as the Vector spun away, Morten got a good look at the face attached to the muscular body.
It was a woman.
Her face was clean and soft, but he could see her femininity in the shape of her cheeks and lips. Her body, however, was as muscular as the others, who were all clearly men. Morten saw no indication that her tight-fitting shirt hid breasts. Her chest was muscled, but flat. She raised her heavy spiked club, the bulky muscles of her biceps and triceps rippling, but Morten was past her before her foolish swing.
It overextended her, and if he had still been there, he would have dealt her a deathblow while stomping the weapon out of her grip with his boot. But he needed to run the last five feet to his cousin.
Oskar had pulled a long knife, and darted it back and forth at one of the Vector men, while his long sword thrust at a second, skewering the man in the lung. As the blade came slipping out, a harsh gust of air burst from punctured chest before a whistling sucking noise followed it.
But then another sound took over as Morten lunged the last few feet to his kin. His sword was extended outward ahead of him as he flew over the floor, his body like an arrow seeking to pierce its target. Ahead of him, the older Vector with the chinstrap beard swung his mighty club downward, from where it had been raised over his head, at the highest extent of his thickly muscled arms. The wooden club hummed as it bore down toward the back of Oskar’s head, the dull metal spike leading.
64
Val tried to dodge as the fist came for her face, but she wasn’t fast enough. She turned her cheek slightly and the knuckles rocketed into the side of her jaw, snapping her head sideways. Her body flew backward, and the flashlight launched from her hand. The device clattered to the floor and spun on the flat concrete. Its fading light pirouetted around the space.
Val tumbled to the ground, her stomach scraping the floor. Her head vibrated, like a numb limb after sleeping on it wrong. Her arms took the brunt of the landing, the thick leather sleeves of her jacket sparing her skin from being torn. She slid on the dusty ground before coming to a stop, her back to Anders.
Dust poofed up in a cloud around her head, making
breathing that much more difficult, as she shook her head.
Unsure of what was happening or why, she knew only that she needed to get away. She tried to scrabble forward as the light from her crank flashlight faded from white to orange, the device now pointing off to the side.
Her fingers scrambled forward, clawing at the concrete to get her away, but it was too late. She felt a pressure on her ankle as Anders grabbed her and tugged her backward. The pull was so startling that her forearms went out to the sides and her forehead smacked into the floor.
She screamed in frustration and rage, her hand slipping down to the head of her long ax, which had slid out of its holster as her body was pulled back and away from the weapon. Snatching it up, she swung backward blindly. She didn’t connect with anything, but her ankle was dropped as her opponent stepped out of range.
Val let the momentum of her arm pull her body over onto her back, just as the last of the light from the crank flashlight died, plunging them both into blackness.
Val flipped over backward, staggering to her feet, her balance still off from the shot to her face. In the last sliver of light, she had seen Anders take a step backward, allowing himself room to maneuver and space beyond the reach of her ax. The man’s determined face suggested he had no plans of fleeing from the fight.
It is him, Val thought, still struggling to believe it. Anders is our betrayer.
All at once, his long hunting trips with no yield, and the extended absences of his bird made sense. He has been informing someone of our movements. Then she realized to whom. Borss.
In the absolute dark, Val listened, and this time she realized she had in fact heard the scuffling noises of movement before—it was Anders, stalking her in the shadows.
But why?
“Why?” she shouted, her voice echoing around the huge warehouse. She slid silently across the darkened aisle as soon as the word slipped past her lips, cognizant of her opponent marking her location by sound.
Instead of her word ricocheting off the metal crates back at her, she heard Morten’s distant shout on top of it: “Fight!”
In the rest of the warehouse she could hear the sounds of battle. Scuffling feet on concrete. Grunts and groans. Metal clanging off wood. Flesh rupturing and spraying blood.
Val’s free hand went to her hand-ax, unsnapping the black leather sheath slowly, with her thumb applying constant pressure, so the metal snap would not make an audible sound in the midnight pitch around her. She slid the handle down, the wickedly pointed and curved blade scraping against the fibrous-like leather.
When she heard her opponent again, Val was startled to hear the sound come from behind her, maybe five feet further up the aisle. Anders had unknowingly passed her in the dark. She lowered herself to a squat, keeping the long ax out in one arm for balance, and as an early warning system, should Anders reverse course.
The sharper hand-ax, with a blade so fine it could split an eyelash, was gripped in her left hand so tightly she was losing feeling in the knuckles. She was ready to strike with it or throw it, whichever seemed best.
Morten’s voice again called out in the echoing warehouse. “Oskar, I am on the way!”
His voice was punctuated by more sounds of battle. Val wondered if Ulrik had also been ambushed. Have they captured Agnes? Heinrich? Why? If Anders wanted to do us harm, he could have killed us at any time. It makes no sense.
But it did. All the attacks they had faced—at least the Hangers and the Long Knives—had been no coincidence. The question was to what end. Why would someone want to stop them from rescuing humanity?
This is not the time to wonder about such things, she decided, and she clamped down on the runaway burst of thoughts like the metal gate at Venice slamming down into the surf.
Focus, she told herself. Despite the darkness, she closed her eyes, blacking out even the slightest ambient light, and intensifying her other senses.
She did it just in time.
She didn’t hear Anders or smell him, but her skin felt his body rushing at her in the dark, and she had a fraction of a second to decide on a course of action.
Keeping the hand-ax in reserve, she mashed the hand holding it knuckles down, toward the concrete floor, and threw her weight up onto that arm, kicking out blindly.
The heel of her boot connected hard with Anders’s stomach, his own momentum driving the air out of his lungs with a grunt. The force of her kick sent him sprawling backward.
She extended the long ax, and took a chance on swinging hard into the dark.
She hit nothing, and was rewarded with an elbow to her ribs. She had thought he was still ahead of her, but he had again passed her in the dark, striking from slightly behind her. The blow compressed her rib to the point of cracking. At least it was on the other side of her chest. Her last broken rib had only recently healed. The long ax fell from her grip, but she still had the sharper blade, and she whirled, slicing left and right.
She heard him gasp in the dark, and swear under his breath, and she knew she’d hit him. Probably not a deep cut, but any cut was better than none.
Then Morten’s voice sliced through the lightlessness. “NO!”
The scream was louder than any she had heard so far during the chaotic warehouse battle, and the voice was tinged with anger, pain and despair. Without seeing the other side of the warehouse, Val knew precisely what had happened. One of the Vectors had killed Oskar—right before Morten’s eyes. Although she still felt anger in her heart toward Morten and Oskar, the desperate loss of family she heard in Morten’s voice as it screamed itself hoarse, broke something deep inside her. She felt unexpected agony and sympathy for the Laplander who had become her companion these last many months.
Lashing out in the gloom, Val swung the smaller ax in vicious vertical and horizontal strikes, the sweeps of her arms coming so quickly that the whooshing noise of her passing through the air became an endless loop of distortion, masking her exact location.
Orange-red flame exploded before her eyes. She recoiled from the intense glare, her eyes snapping shut and her arm raising up to cover her face as she staggered back.
When she pulled her arm down, and squinted past her squeezed eyelids, she saw what had caused the horrible glare. Anders had thrown something to the floor. It was a stick, half the thickness of her long ax’s handle, and a foot long. One end of the stick threw off red and orange sparks of flame. Nils had shown her one at Neuschwanstein. ‘It is called a flare,’ she recalled him saying. But the ones he had were well past their functional dates. He and Anders had tried a few, but they had not lit. She had forgotten all about them. But now it seemed Anders had kept a few, and not all of them were dead.
Val blocked her eyes from the blinding light. She heard Anders ahead of her and running feet coming from behind her in the now fully illuminated aisle.
She could only handle one threat at a time, though, and every fiber of her being cried out for Anders’s blood.
When she looked up, her eyes adjusting to the light, he stood ten feet further down the narrow corridor. In his hands, he held his bow, with an arrow nocked and pointed at her face.
65
The arrow began its trajectory in such slow motion, Val thought it was still not released. It warbled slightly and twisted as it came, and she had time to think she could easily outpace it, because it looked like it was traveling through thick, sludgy syrup.
But then she tried to move, throwing her body to the left and simultaneously bringing her arm up to hack at the oncoming missile with the hand-ax.
There was just one problem.
She didn’t move.
Then she realized she was moving. She was just moving through the same sucking muck of time the arrow was. Her arm wasn’t coming up fast enough to block the projectile, and while her body was beginning to fall to her left, she wasn’t going to make it.
She thought to twist away, too, but then she was out of time. Or rather, time had caught up to her.
The arrow r
ipped into the meat of her shoulder, slipping under the clavicle and creasing the shoulder blade. The bladed metal tip of the weapon pushed straight through the leather jacket in front and in back. Strangely, Val felt it coming out the back of her shoulder more than she felt it going in the front.
She tried to shout a profanity, but the pain ripped her voice away just as she slammed into the shelves, where she bounced, turned, struck the protruding end of the lodged arrow and screamed again.
Without thinking, she launched her hand-ax at Anders. The blade whirled through the air, but Anders dodged as fast as Val threw. His black shirt took a bloodless nick just above the elbow.
Steadying herself on her feet, Val slid her knife from its sheath, the four-inch blade her last weapon. She scowled at Anders as she slashed at the arrow’s wooden shaft protruding from her shoulder. A second and an intense burst of pain later, the black crow feathers on the end of the wooden stick fell away, and half the arrow went with it.
She switched the knife to her wounded hand, and looked down at the half inch of an arrow still protruding from her shoulder like the tip of a pinky finger.
She glanced back up and saw Anders nocking another arrow. Behind her, a rushing sound built like a waterfall, progressing from soft to loud, and she recognized the angry howl as Morten, screaming like a loon, ran to Val’s assistance. All around them in the shadows not lit by the flickering flare, Val heard running feet.
Her Vikings—what remained of them—would lose this fight.
She lunged under her armpit with her left hand, grasping the arrow’s haft, the bladed tip slicing into the meat of one fingertip. In the same move, she tugged the thing out of her back, and brought it in front of her, under her arm. It wasn’t much, but she could use it as another weapon.
She held the broken arrow shaft in her left hand and the knife in her right, prepared to run at Anders and dodge the oncoming arrows at the same time. His eyes darkened, as if he had had enough, and he foolishly rushed forward, too.
Viking Tomorrow (The Berserker Saga Book 1) Page 27