Anatali: Ragnarok

by A. C. Edwards

  A glimpse of Little Dead Girl nodded, and she was gone.

  And then it was over.

  * * *

  Jessica inhaled deeply. The sensation felt foreign. She opened her eyes, and could see through both again, gazing down at both her hands. On her knees, she touched a palm to her chest, where the egg had struck.

  She felt nothing.

  The stark memory of her split-second eternity in hell, or was it heaven, evaporated, thankfully, as what passed for reality snapped back into focus. Instead of a heartbeat, she felt something incredibly warm. A gargled yell turned her head to the left. A small figure straddled a pair of boots, the same as hers, Jacob's head gnashed down upon Dillon's neck as he tried to fight the boy off.

  “Stop.” the word passed her mouth without a thought. Jacob's body froze. Her fingers clutched that box knife.

  Verdandi lifted her sword...

  She dropped it as she rose to her feet.

  “Move.”

  Jacob robotically stood, blood dripping off his chin and staining his shirt. He turned his back and joined his vanguard, who had become stock-still. If he was talking, she couldn't hear him. Jessica knelt beside Dillon. A large chunk had been torn from his neck. It bled freely. He was dying, and she watched, staring into his pure-black eyes. She lifted his head into her lap.

  “Jessica... I'm...”

  “Don't be afraid,” Jessica said.

  “I'm scared.” he reached a hand for hers, eyes wild, returning to blue. Distant. “Don't l-let me become one of them.”

  “You won't.” She smoothed his hair off his brow and kissed his lips. “It's bright over there. You'll find everyone, and when we're in that place, we can all be better. I'll be there soon enough.”

  “I-I...” tears streamed from his glassy eyes. The sound caught in his throat. Dillon's body convulsed. He shook, shuddered, and twitched head to foot. Jessica smiled, still patting his head:

  “I love you.”

  Her own tears continued to fall even as his blue eyes reopened several minutes later. Jessica silenced the body's hisses with a finger to its lips. She stood Dillon's corpse next to her brother's, next to Fiona's shattered pile. There was a whisper from Jacob. She ignored it. He wasn't in there, not really. None of them were, she could finally see it.

  She found her rifle among the feet of a hundred walking corpses. Jessica changed out the battery and fuel. Bunny saluted.

  Epilogue

  Valkyrie

  ~ 59 ~

  Benediction

  December 1, 4124 — 11:18 AM

  Jessica strolled up the avenue, eyes set on the Jetty. She wasn't surprised when the bots rolled towards her with race-car speed. She had destroyed four Mark Sixes already, and an unnamed Seven when the damn thing insisted she was Satan or some shit and attacked her. Given, she had two-hundred Dvoraks at her back, but they were very much at her back, keeping pace, not really an advance force to intimidate all of Nome's other corpses.

  Who the fuck cared.

  Still a quarter-mile away, Jessica grinned. One of the pair was sleek, painted in camouflage.

  About fucking time.

  She told her tag-a-longs to stay put and continued her walk.

  “Howdy!” Jessica waved her arm overhead as the bots slowed in what seemed to be a cautious approach. “What time is it?”

  The pair of bots' visors blinked back and forth. Jessica just kept walking, biting her tongue about Ayla, Nicky, and Kahn. This wasn't even the third time some fucking bots had failed to ambush her, and who knew what Holly was about at this point. Her army lurched into motion.

  “Valkyrie,” The second bot said in a flat tone, tentacles rattling, “I am overjoyed.”

  “Nicky?” She stared at the blue visor. They were probably just as suspicious of her as she was of them. It sounded like his voice. “You sure sound overjoyed.”

  “Ahem,” a robot clearing his throat, that was Nicky-ish. “So much for mortality?”

  “Same to you,” Jessica smirked, placing a hand over her chest. In the last two hours she'd learned she could forget to breathe, though she still needed to for speech, if nothing else, and she discovered didn't have a heartbeat, though she could still create one: thump, thumpity thump, thump. In a window's reflection she confirmed she had two eyes, both her natural blue, more of a curiosity to her than anything. “Where's Ayla?”

  “Safe.”

  “Safe,” Jessica repeated, relieved, walking up to Nicky, hands on her hips. “Then what's with the cold shoulder?”

  “You're different.”

  “And so are you,” she playfully punched his rubber belly. Other than the lack of some of his more notable battle-scars, he looked just the same as a few hours ago. “Where'd you get the new suit?”

  “The Rosebed,” Holly said, her tone neutral. It was hard to imagine what either of them were thinking now that a twenty-pound American Eskimo was the only confirmed living soul in the city. They'd totally failed their objectives, and with them, their reason for existing. That sense of loss, double-fold, had to sting something fierce. At least it wasn't for lack of effort, or sacrifice. “The Mark Sixes Shannon had deactivated were still sitting idle. Their EMP shielding had, indeed, protected them. The hack and download didn't take long.”

  “See, Nicky, we're not so different,” Jessica said, hopping her butt on top of his new box. “Knock us down and we stand right back up.”

  “Indeed. How do you feel?”

  Jessica stared up at blue skies. The umbrella's shedding was mostly over. Natural summer sun melted the black snow into drain-ditch rivers of slush and dirty water. “Warm. Relieved. Happy.”

  “Happy?” Holly said, an edge to her voice.

  “Yeah. Happy.” She knew what the bots were getting at: that she'd died, come back, and was now some special, deranged corpse who had some crazy-fuck motive now just like everyone else they'd been dealing with since the flare. “Human death isn't oblivion. You see that guy there?”

  Jessica stood on Nicky's box and pointed to a Dvorak on the front line. The man wore pinstripe suit-pants. His loosened tie was the same color as his skin, a light cream as his face and hands thawed. She waved him forward, and he obeyed with far-closer to a natural gait than they'd seen from many.

  “This was Michael Hennessy, like the booze. He was thirty-one when he died. He survived the flare and hid in his wine-cellar for three days until Rose City's wildfire suffocated him. His kid, also Michael, lives with his mother in Juneau. The thing about Michael senior, is that he isn't in this body, even though I can talk to the echo of him in the body, and by knowing his name, I can hear the real him that's moved on. Michael senior is happy. He's with Junior. This lump of flesh hasn't hurt anyone, and really, is just the same as that Mark Six you body-snatched, and the stun-ball that Shannon took over.”

  “And you would let this potentially homicidal robot exist without its host?” Nicky said. “What will you do now that you can control the children of Hel, if not destroy them?”

  “Not really my problem, is it?” Michael paused just short of them. He closed his eyes as Jessica reached down to ruffle his hair. “It'd be a conflict of interests if I said we would holocaust-fucking-cremate everything that died in this city. All I'm saying is that destroying the bodies is as pointless as mourning them. I learned that the hard way.”

  “Master Dillon, your brother?”

  “Yeah.” She let Michael snuggle her leg with the side of his face. It was funny to her, charming now, but it had to look really, really weird, which made her want to laugh even harder. A long silence later, “If we're done being awkward, can we go see him now?”

  Nicky and Holly blinked at each other again in rapid bursts—more private conversation, the kind of thing her friend had been against just a few hours earlier.

  “You realize I won't be offended if—“

  “We were just getting to that, Jessica,” Holly said. “Nicky thinks you're perfectly yourself, yet is afraid for the last remain
ing instance of his 'Odin.'”

  She nodded and invited Michael up on her perch, just to fuck with Nicky. The corpse didn't really understand how to get up there, so Jessica had to get off, direct the body by its hips, and seat the creature into place before taking her spot back. Shoulder to shoulder with the Dvorak, she swayed back and forth, rocking it slowly. “He's nice enough, right? Just like Kahn.”

  “But your other friends...” Nicky said.

  “Each and every one of them has a similar story. Something they lost. Something they want to find, protect, to make up for. They won't find it with me, with us, but they're just so goddamn pitiful as individuals. You see the redhead? That was Marci, my best friend three months ago. The kid beside her wanted to visit Europa, just once. This is my city, and now, finally, now that I understand what I need to know, I'm ok leaving it. I want to tell people about Nome, Alaska, and the people that lived here. The echoes that still exist here.”

  “Any other Einherjar?” Nicky said, making no motion towards the wall of bodies, nor the corpses against his back.

  “All of them.”

  The blinks resumed briefly before he continued. “Each day the Einherjar would kill each other in training, would rest, and the next morning they would awake with no wounds, renewed.”

  “That's us!” Jessica swept an arm wide, across the city itself if she could stretch that far.

  “Loki's damned grandchildren were something else.” Nicky swiveled and started a roll towards the Jetty. The entire wall of Dvoraks shuffled into motion behind them. “Not every soul was meant to be a warrior for the Aesir.”

  “But I am that judgment,” Jessica said, “as a Valkyrie. Maybe Hel was never here at all. And I choose Michael, Marci, little Brendan, and anyone else that knows what happened, and remembers what happened to them. I'm taking them all with me to Valhalla, every single soul with a body and those without one. We're going to fight the people responsible for this, even if this Ragnarok is over. Even if I died. They're talking to me. I can hear every word, every story, and I can repeat them verbatim.”

  “You two will get along fine,” Holly said, curt. “If you wish to keep any of your entourage, you best step them up a pace. This quarantine ends in twenty-six minutes.”

  ~ 60 ~

  Arise

  December 1, 4124 — 11:52 AM

  Jessica lunged forward on both knees, wrapping a fluffy white waist in one arm, and a silver one in the other. The animals licked her face with the affection of a thousand kisses. She couldn't be happier to see them both again. Ayla hopped and hopped, again and again. She was likely as distressed from her confinement in this glorified lobby as she was by whatever Christy had done to her. Kahn looked completely different. How many blue eyes had she seen? His had regrown too. His coat, salt-and-pepper, continued its fade back into white. Right now, he was beautiful, inside and out. He'd likely never look like this again. Nothing would ever look like him again, not for a thousand trillion years.

  She kissed him.

  Ayla skittered around her legs, ignoring what must have been a painful stab-wound on her flank. Jessica lifted her friend against her chest in a standing-twirl. Tears welled in her eyes and spilled down without any effort to stop them. “Such a good girl!”

  “Welcome back!” Shannon's voice, from an overhead monitor. His face now smiled before a white background. “I see most of us have exceeded our expiration dates.”

  “Other than Holly and Ayla, I guess we all know what it feels like.”

  “This isn't my first skin,” Holly replied, pausing as if she didn't want to say more. “I was struck by a rocket during The Mission's night-one assault. Dolores found me a replacement. That's know I knew how to do it.”

  “That is so cool!” Jessica pumped a fist. “We're all dead!”

  “Well, yes,” the bot continued, “but I fail to see how cool that is. What are we meant to do now?”

  “I know I don't seem that bright, but I'm guessing Shannon will be free in what, four minutes, and the Jetty will be operational again, if even for a moment. Long enough.”

  “Long enough,” Shannon nodded, still smiling “What did you find for me, Holly?”

  “Just what you asked.” Her butt box opened, and she reached an arm inside it. Gripped in her flanges, she gently lifted a doll by it's brown hair. Dressed in a tiny pink dress, the half-scale infant was the type that could crawl, fuss, poop, and cry. All its limbs and facial muscles were fully articulated even to the point of teaching it how to speak. An android. How quaint.

  “For Shannon?” Jessica bit her lip from laughing. “Can he handle it?”

  “Odin is highly compressed,” Nicky said, “and the doll's hardware can manage many terabytes of storage. He can survive in it, if they delete this instance too. We would have to keep him safe though, just like a real baby.”

  “Because we're so good at that.” Jessica chuckled, knowing her attitude bothered them. The bots didn't understand her new enthusiasm, and likely never would. She didn't care. “Can we hitch a ride, baby-man?”

  “I was about to say,” the Jetty's inner doors swished open, revealing a large, thirty-foot diameter platform. “We're out of time.”

  “Never,” Jessica accepted the doll from Holly and pressed the tiny button behind it's neck, as instructed. The doll's eyes blinked a slow, creepy, red. Awesome. Hanging out in the lobby, Michael, Marci, and Brendan just stared. If they didn't want to come, she wouldn't force them. Jessica waved goodbye. She could hear the reply.

  Two perfectly healthy corpses, a pair of FireBots, an android baby, a cartoon bunny, and a runt dog entered the lift. The doors closed as Shannon spoke the countdown to noon.

  Five-Four-Three-Two-One...

  * * *

  “Sweet ride,” she stood, hands on hips, looking down a thousand feet below as Nome got smaller and smaller. Ayla yacked up something from motion sickness. Kahn sniffed it. Jessica stroked her dog's back. The entire lift was transparent, save for the floor, which was frosted just enough to keep normal people from freaking out. “Is he in there?”

  Nicky cradled the doll, and jiggled it every couple moments. “I-I don't know. That part was up to him.”

  “Hey, Holly,” Jessica said, pointing to the explosions bursting across the city. It seemed Anatali had its own targets now that they had control back, and The Mission was firing at will. “I know this old joke about the difference between FireBots and limp-dicks. Want to guess the punchline?”

  “You're supposed to be bonding,” Nicky said in his version of a whisper. Holly didn't so much as twitch.

  “I know this is supposed to be The End, but why is she even here? I mean, I couldn't be more grateful for Ayla, Kahn, you, or Shannon. Yes, Holly, you saved every person I could hope to care about, and I can never repay that, but you're being kind of bitchy, just like Dolores. Do we even have a common goal now? You don't talk to me. You're still hiding behind your blinks and boops.”

  All this said and Jessica smiled, aiming Bunny at the bot's back. She mouthed the word 'pow' before letting him fall slack against her thigh. Holly obviously didn't care, she'd barely spoke in the last half hour. “See, my problem isn't with bots, obviously, it's just when—“

  “Don't you ever shut up,” Holly said, pointing am arm at the city below them. “You see that firestorm in the middle? That's Fountain Square. They are burning the Bay District too, Rose City, Osmi Corner, Market Street, Columbine Park, Phelps Park, Jordan Park, the rail line, the marina, and have fired bunker-busters into every cemetery in the city. They've deployed two thousand Mark Fives, armed. My home is destroyed, and everyone I knew with it. Maybe you can speak with the dead, but I can't.“

  As they passed the altitude of The Umbrella, hundreds of red dots of red lit the city like little apple-blooms, each expanding, then retracting, before smoldering, or spreading outward.

  “A Dvorav like you, no matter how much you can retain your living voice, is unable to shoulder the cost of this tragedy, becaus
e all you know is how it effects you. You led people to their deaths, and you died as well, and now you are content with that because you had some sort of euphoric chemical experience with 'the ever after' before you were reanimated as a monster. You've abandoned the loss, and your responsibility within it. Nicolosi is the only reason you're here, with me, unrestrained.”

  “She's a winner.” Jessica said to Nicky, pointing a thumb at the black-painted bot. “Are you kidding me? What has she been doing the last four days?”

  “I-I...”

  Their city burned under them as they ascended into the clouds, and above. Still no word from Baby-Shannon. The ticker on a free-floating screen said they were only five-minutes from the observatory. For Jessica's first argument since her revival, she thought she did well as far as keeping her mood high. And for whatever 'Dvorav' meant, she simply assumed it meant 'smart.'

  “Anything on the news about Nome?” she asked, trusting them to aggregate the FTLS network into something resembling common threads. “I mean, someone had to notice the toybox went black.”

  “Why don't you ask your friends?” Holly said.

  “I am.”

  “Sorry about that,” Shannon blinked onto the screen, dark circles under his eyes. “Jessie, can you try smacking the doll?”

  “Eh? What's wrong?” Millennia of technology preceding him and he wanted her to punch a baby to jump-start it? She reached over to Nicky and tapped the android's forehead with two fingers: tap-tap-tap. The tiny head bounced back each time.

  “This is not how you care for a child,” Nicky said.

  Wake up!

  The doll eyes expanded wide, then blinked twice. Its limbs kicked out—mommy-bot almost dropped it. He let out an earnest squeak before re-securing the android in a nest of tentacles. “My liege?”