by Mat Nastos
Odin’s response came in the form of clouds boiling overhead and a jagged arrow of lightning ripping itself free from the heavens to blast the tiny clearing where Grimm stood, arms raised to the sky above and legs planted wide against the ground below.
The explosion was great enough to blow leaves and limbs free from ancient trees, powerful enough to shatter the cabin’s thick, glass windows. It had enough force to crack the foot-thick walls of the building itself.
A curse escaped from between MacAndrew’s clenched lips as he jerked his head away from the searing heat and light. The curse was followed by a silent prayer for his new friend, for there was no way anything human could have survived the devastation of the lighting.
Then he heard it.
There, in the midst of the pillar of light splitting the sky, an inhuman scream of pain and triumph joined the thunderbolt that engulfed Grimm. Somehow, in the middle of the inferno, the giant stood defiant and unbowed.
From the corner of his eye, it looked to MacAndrew as if Grimm’s body was going to rip itself apart in the center of the lightning strike. The veins in the German’s arm began to pulsate, to bulge and stretch against his skin, threatening to tear themselves loose in the effort. Grimm’s very form seemed to expand, growing nearly three inches in height and adding another fifty pounds of muscle.
As Grimm’s changes reached their peak, the first group of Nazi soldiers, snarling and foaming at the mouth, broke through the wall of wood and leaves making up the perimeter around the cabin. The soldiers had undergone changes of their own and were now in a transitory state somewhere in the abyss that separated man from beast. Snouts filled with large, rough teeth stretched out from beneath still-human eyes filled with blood. Hair, thick and black in color, covered nearly every inch of the soldier’s mostly-nude bodies, from thick legs to gorilla-like arms that ended in sets of nine-inch-long claws.
MacAndrew’s jaw dropped to his chest in astonishment. These creatures were like the man the pair had faced back in the ghetto of Prague – the one responsible for Rela’s murder. In the confusion of the battle and his grief over the woman’s death, the Scotsman had never asked Grimm what the monster had been. Now, rushing toward them was a pack of the creatures, ten in number, and all with bloodlust in their eyes.
Werebears… the Schwarzbär.
The great beasts of the Jotnar had filled the empty vessels of the once-men with rage, transforming them into hunter-killers with nothing but death and mayhem on their souls; only the thoughts of feasting upon the flesh of their prey remained in what was left of their minds.
MacAndrew opened fire as the first man-beast slammed into the shimmering, undefended form of Grimm with the force of an out-of-control locomotive. The Shanxi belched out twice in MacAndrew’s hand.
Both shots flew true, taking one of the furred creatures dead-center in its chest before it could ambush a distracted Grimm from behind. Effects from the doubly-enchanted shells on the werebear were instantaneous: it wailed in shrill agony and collapsed, lifeless, to the forest floor.
“That’ll do!” shouted MacAndrew. Enjoying the newfound power contained in his hands, he swung the weapon around and took slow aim at another of the devils, a massive brute whose claws had begun to exact a heavy toll across Grimm’s pale-white flesh.
Blackness covered the scene in front of the Scottish soldier, blocking his view and spoiling MacAndrew’s aim completely with a hairy form. MacAndrew swore it was the size of a small car, with razor eyes the color of hate and lust. Talons crashed through the edge of the wall shielding the man inside and sliced into his shoulder with ease.
MacAndrew screamed. Somehow, the inhuman snout filled with needle-edge teeth curled back into the mockery of a smile. The creature yipped out a laugh, twisting its hooked nails and rooted a finger’s length into MacAndrew’s deltoid.
“You wee shite!” MacAndrew planted a bullet point-blank between its eyes, blowing out its frontal lobe.
Outside, Grimm was faring far worse than MacAndrew. The Schwarzbär had encased him in a loose ring and circled, each striking quickly whenever the German’s back was to them or when he raised defense against another of their number. Although his own backhanded slashes with his vorpal blade did great damage whenever they landed, blood-loss levied a grievous fine on the titan. Whatever magic Odin had granted Grimm seemed to be failing quickly under the claws of the werebears.
“We will suck the marrow from your bones and then feast on the peasants of Lezaky!” Hagan mocked Grimm from just outside the oval of once-men battering the faltering German. “Their lives will pay for your failure, toad of the One-Eye!”
The response to Hagan’s taunts shocked them all.
Covered as much by his own blood as that of his enemies, and wounded beyond imagining by the creatures entwining his limbs, Grimm roared and strained against his captors. The giant grabbed the closest Schwarzbär by its head, one hand on each side of its massive maw. With the kind of strength that could shatter pure diamond beneath it, Grimm tore the unnatural beast’s lower jaw free, sending a fresh spray of gore into the air. The werebear gurgled, falling to the ground, still alive but dying. Although enough of a sense of self-preservation still existed somewhere deep within the creature, the second Nazi shapeshifter fared little better against the unrelenting fury possessing Grimm. A flick of his wrist sent Balmung rocketing into the man-monster’s chest, pulverizing bone, liquefying internal organs and severing its spine. It was dead before gravity had the chance to reclaim its corpse.
From his position behind the mill’s stone walls, MacAndrew felt the insane bloodlust overtake Grimm. He could sense the mindless acceptance of death and hunger for destruction flow into the German and fill his soul to its brim. All rational thought fell from Grimm’s mind, replaced by a relentless desire to destroy his enemies at all costs.
* * *
Hagan’s form wavered, his own will and supernatural fury shaken by Grimm’s action. He had thought himself and his men unbeatable, promised immortality by his masters and the Jotnar themselves. How could the servant of an old, forgotten god stand against them and win?
Any other thoughts Hagan might have mustered were lost as Grimm launched himself screaming into the elite Nazi warrior. A white-hot pain erupted in the man’s shoulders as the giant grabbed his arm and, in one quick, jerking motion, yanked it out of the socket.
* * *
Four more of the werebears were felled by strokes of Balmung or bone-shattering blows from Grimm’s hammering fists. Their deaths allowed a beaten Hans Hagan – now shifted back to that of a naked man – to escape into the night. Dropping the corpse of the final werebear to the ground, Grimm’s head snapped up, sniffing the air like an animal. He turned in the direction Hagan had fled and moved to begin pursuit.
“Grimm! Stop, lad! The man’s dead anyway!” MacAndrew called out to his comrade, his voice halting the man mid-stride toward his fleeing prey. He regretted the action almost immediately upon seeing the German turn to him, madness still seated in his gaze. “Bollocks.”
It took Grimm two great leaps, each spanning fifteen feet or more, to reach the stunned Scotsman. In his friend’s face, as Grimm’s fingers clenched about his throat, MacAndrew saw only his death.
This is it. Grimm began to throttle the life out of him, and against the giant’s strength there was no safeguard.
Then, as if from the wind itself, whispers of a woman and young girl called out to Grimm soothingly.
“The Lord Odin is within you. May his blessings be with you,” they said in unison.
The runes flowing down Grimm’s arm pulsed in response to each syllable they spoke. The prayer repeated twice more in the sad, lilting voices of Grimm’s departed family. The words brought clear blue back to eyes clouded with frenzy. One blink. Then two. Grimm shook the cobwebs free from his head, releasing his maniacal grip from its place about MacAndrew’s throat.
“I… I am sorry, little Celt.” A softness the Scotsman had never heard before came from Grimm’s parted lips. “Thor’s passion filled me and I could not contain it. His fury, stretching out from beyond Helheim, was too much for me to resist.”
“Those things… they were like the one we faced in Prague,” said MacAndrew, massaging his throat. A slight nod from Grimm was all the Scotsman received in answer. “What in hell’s name were they?”
“Berserkers,” said Grimm. MacAndrew stared blankly back, unrecognizing of the word. “Men possessed of the rage of beasts.”
Finally gaining enough courage to join the pair of warriors standing in the midst of the bloodied battlefield, Wittgenstein elaborated. “Those men, the Schwarzbär, are a band of elite SS soldiers chosen for their savagery and given a connection to one of the realms of the Jotnar. Gifted with the essence of the great ice bears that serve the Jotnar, they were some of the earliest successes in our work for the Edda Society.”
Grimm snapped, angered by the casualness in which the scientist described his vile work. “Gifted or cursed?”
Wittgenstein gave a sad smile. “We merely enhanced the cruelty of the men. Evil will not bond without evil already present. Our experiments simply reinforced the wickedness already present in wicked souls.”
An accusatory cry bled out of Balmung, its blade sliding a hand’s breadth out of the cracked, leather sheath holding it at Grimm’s waist. For a moment, none of the men present were sure how it moved, but all were aware of its need, of the longing felt in its song to bury itself in Wittgenstein’s chest. Without Wittgenstein’s involvement, the Jotnar would still slumber, ensnared forever more in their lands far across the Yawning Void.
“Were your experiments responsible for the necrogolems as well?” asked MacAndrew in an attempt to break the tension. Images of the macabre freaks crawled into his mind’s eye and elicited a shudder that ran from the top of MacAndrew’s head to the tips of his toes. Horrid as the werebears had been, there was a wrongness to the necrogolems that upset MacAndrew to the core of his Christian upbringing.
“No,” replied Wittgenstein. “The Edda Society had attracted followers with their own connection to the Jotnar, including the necromancers who created the ghastly corpse-golems. Even after a year of dealing with them, neither myself nor Frank ever completely understood how they worked. The science of it all was still beyond us.”
“You are bound too tightly by the need for rationalization. Not everything can be explained by your sciences,” huffed Grimm.
“I am disinclined to agree with you, Herr Grimm,” chided Wittgenstein. “In spite of all I’ve seen, all I’ve learned over the past few years, I fully believe that with enough research and understanding everything can be explained. Even the Jotnar and their reanimated minions. The science is there waiting to be discovered.”
“I hope you discover it before it eats you, laddie,” laughed MacAndrew, thoroughly enjoying watching the two men, scientist and seeming-demigod, banter with one another. It brought to mind a joke the Scotsman once heard about a priest and a rabbi walking into a bar.
Dawn approached, its haggard, sallow light hinting just over the horizon. Somewhere nearby, the Nazis would begin their ceremony of sacrifice. If the men didn’t hurry, the village of Lezaky would be sacrificed to Garm’s hunger and the Jotnar would fully enter the mortal plane. Once that happened, the end of man’s reign on Earth would come.
Tired, beaten, and bloody, the three men headed for their final showdown with Reinhard Heydrich.
High above, the one-eyed raven cawed a final time.
* * *
“Is this everyone?” asked Heinrich Himmler.
“Ja, Herr Reichsführer,” answered Corporal Krupke from behind the line of terrified gypsies who had been awakened from sleep with the barrels of rifles in their faces.
It had taken Krupke’s men far too long to gather what turned out to be fewer than fifty villagers from the tiny cluster of buildings making up the hovel that was Lezaky. Worse than the condition of the homes was that of the peasants themselves: ragged, dirty, and smelling of manure, there wasn’t a single ounce of proper Aryan blood between them. By Himmler’s calculations, it was less than a quarter of what they’d taken in Lidice, and that had barely been enough to quell Heydrich’s hunger for a few days.
When Himmler queried the oddly-glowing Heydrich on whether or not it would be enough to complete the ceremony, he was met with a smirk and upturned nose.
“It will be enough to ignite the way between our worlds,” said Heydrich, derision powering his words.
Turning away from Heydrich to hide the curses building on his lips, Himmler marched to the side of the open-topped car idling nearby. The driver had been waiting since daybreak for the Reichsführer to retire to the airfield in Prague. With Heydrich back to health and proof of the Austrian’s experiments confirmed, Himmler wanted to leave behind the filth of Bohemia and return to the proper civilized streets of his home in Munich. As much as he would enjoy watching the peasants die, preparations within the Edda Society needed attending for the arrival of the Great Old Ones. Himmler had taken his fill of the Romani and, in truth, of the depraved, contemptible creature his former friend had become. Power would soon be his to command, and he would deal with Heydrich then.
Allowing his driver to open the passenger’s side door for him, Himmler mounted the vehicle, calling back tersely, “Then I leave the arrangements to you, dearest Reinhard. I look forward of sharing your achievements with our brothers in the Edda Society when you return to us in Berlin once your mission is complete.”
* * *
The alien thing inhabiting the empty shell of Reinhard Heydrich scoffed to itself as it watched Himmler’s car vanish in a rolling cloud of dust.
Fool. The worthless human still thought he and his kind were the ones in control. Once the gateway to Jotunheim had been created, Garm would show them who the master was. The flames of Muspelheim would cleanse Midgard of the Nazis as quickly as the rest of the mortals. Earth would once again belong to the Great Old Ones.
A raspy breath and the sounds of a body being dragged interrupted Heydrich’s contemplations.
“Obergruppenführer…” Hans Hagan’s speech was weak. The stump where his arm had been was expertly field-dressed but soaked crimson. It was clear the man lacked the strength to do more than mutter a few words at a time before languor overtook him. “My men are all dead. Killed by our enemies.”
Heydrich grabbed Hagan by the front of his uniform and yanked him from the soldiers who had supported him. Heydrich asked with a hiss, “Tell me, pathetic one, why should I not kill you where you stand for your weakness?”
Nearly white from blood loss and barely able to remain on his feet, Hagan answered, “The lackey of Odin lives. He had a strength he should not have had. He comes, Obergruppenführer. He comes !”
“Let him come,” Heydrich seethed. “He will be too late to stop me.” Heydrich tossed Hagan aside and moved to the head of the column of humanity with purpose.
CHAPTER 18
TO SAVE THE INNOCENT
June 2, 1942. Dawn. The Village of Lezaky.
Breaking through the edge of the forest’s dark embrace, the mismatched trio was greeted by a shining luminance, but not one they expected. Instead of the warm, yellow glow of a breaking dawn, a cadaverous emerald radiance flushed from the outskirts of Lezaky, sticking sickly to everything it touched.
“My God, what in bloody hell is that thing?” MacAndrew couldn’t comprehend the monstrosity that jutted high above the tiny hovels splayed out along the only road through the impoverished hamlet.
“They’ve done it,” was all Wittgenstein could say.
Towering thirty feet in height and almost as wide at its base stood a structure the likes of which MacAndrew had never before seen. The wires and neon tubes bulged out in weird geome
tries that threatened to grab a man’s psyche and twist it into madness. It was as if hell had shat out a mechanical nightmare and left it to rot in the morning sun.
And there, standing arrogantly before it, surrounded by a troop of thirty or more Nazi Waffen-SS troops, was Reinhard Heydrich. A stone’s throw away from the Nazi leader’s position sat the villagers of Lezaky, herded into a series of tiny circles. Men, women, the elderly. Children. They all stood, panicked, terrified, and awaiting their fate.
Soon, they would feed the rapacious hunger of Garm.
“Did you know of this?” Grimm asked Wittgenstein, his words loaded with enough force to cause the ailing scientist to shy away as if physically assaulted. “Are you responsible for this travesty, too? Answer!”
“Yes,” came the Austrian’s barely-discernible response. “Himmler must have brought the Edda Society minds here to construct it.”
“I should kill you for the atrocities unleashed by your conceit.”
Restrained by pure willpower, Grimm turned back toward the view before them. It was clear to MacAndrew that it took all the massive German’s willpower to restrain himself from running the arrogant professor through the chest with Balmung’s hungry blade. The fate of the world itself was in danger, thousands had died already: the men and women of Lidice; MacAndrew’s men; Rela, Grimm’s own family had been tortured and sacrificed all because of the weakness of character and the cowardice of men like Wittgenstein. Only the cool song easing from the blue-tinged runes of Megingjord – the song of his wife and daughter’s love – kept his mighty hand at bay.
Grimm closed his eyes and let their song wash over him.
“The size of it,” MacAndrew whispered. “That’s why the Nazis used a train. They needed it to transport something this monumental. The sheer scale. It must weigh ten tons or more.” MacAndrew refused to allow the emotions of the situation to overwhelm him by focusing on the facts at hand. Right now, the trio had to do what they could to stop Heydrich and his men from activating the mystic generator housed in the core of the two-story-tall contraption. They would deal with the ramifications of Wittgenstein’s compliance once the mission was completed. It would end in their victory or their deaths.