Part 20 (1/2)

”Is this about my performance review?” Mist called back. Crouching between cars, she and Hermod moved toward the other end of the roof.

”We can discuss your unexcused absences later. Right now I want to talk to you about some of your a.s.sociates.”

They hid behind a minivan, listening to Radgrid's thugs prowling over gla.s.s and gravel.

”Surrender to me, Mist, and I will spare your life.”

Mist looked at Hermod and rolled her eyes.

A huge, bearded man came around the rear of the van, rifle pointed at them. Hermod hurled a stone at his chest and the man flew back in a spray of blood, firing his gun in the air.

”Fine, then. Open up,” Radgrid shouted. ”Shoot everything!”

Bullets ripped through the air, shattering gla.s.s, puncturing metal and rubber. Shots pa.s.sed close enough to shave Hermod's stubble. Maybe this is it, he thought. Maybe I die on the eve of Ragnarok, just before everything goes down the big toilet. Covering Mist with his body, he was sorry he never got to spend time with her on a white-sand beach.

Over the clatter and roar of the gunfire, Hermod heard the distinct drumming of Sleipnir's hooves. He dared peer up, and there the horse was, eyes blazing in the parking-lot aisle. Winston crouched, barking, beneath the horse.

Hermod grabbed Mist's arm. ”Come on!”

He hoisted Mist onto Sleipnir's back and stuffed Winston into the harness, then leaped behind the horse's withers. Steam curling from flared nostrils, Sleipnir trotted to the far end of the roof and turned himself around. Bullets shattered car winds.h.i.+elds and punctured steel.

”Hold on tight,” Hermod warned Mist. Leaning forward, he whispered encouragement in Sleipnir's ear.

Sleipnir took off with a shock, jolting the riders back, his muscles compressing and releasing in a thundering rush. Sparks danced from his hooves. Cement cracked beneath him. Radgrid's men fell away as Sleipnir ran them down. Bare inches from the edge of the roof, he took a great galloping leap into the sky.

Hermod twisted around and looked down. Radgrid fired off shots from the roof, but soon they were out of her range, a hundred feet up, two hundred, the whole city block beneath them, people running, black smoke, ocean swells flooding the streets. Then, a wider expanse as Sleipnir climbed ever higher, his eight legs moving like the oars of a s.h.i.+p.

As they drew close to Naglfar, Hermod realized he'd misjudged the s.h.i.+p's size and thus its alt.i.tude. It was much larger than he'd thought. Perhaps it had grown.

Sleipnir came even with the keel, and then the horse's hooves struck the hull. He galloped up at a sheer vertical. His mane cut into Hermod's palms as Hermod gripped two handfuls of hair to keep from falling. Mist squeezed Hermod's waist, while Winston cried, dangling from his harness. Sleipnir charged up the side of the s.h.i.+p, a froth streaming from his mouth. The horse landed on the deck with an explosion of splintering planks. He reared up and shrieked, his front hooves slas.h.i.+ng the air.

The s.h.i.+p was awash in full-scale combat. Hermod couldn't quite discern who was fighting whom. The majority of the conflict seemed to be between soldiers and unarmed dead, and the soldiers were outnumbered. They desperately hacked away at the swarming ma.s.ses that kept coming at them. The mutineers pried weapons loose from the soldiers' grips, gouged eyes, smothered the soldiers with overwhelming force.

”It's a revolt,” Mist shouted over the din. ”Let's help out!”

Hermod would have been glad to oblige, but it was easier enthused than done. An Ottoman Janissary in an ostrich-plumed hat aimed his rifle of bra.s.s and oiled wood at Hermod, but before the man could work the complex firing mechanism, Sleipnir rushed forward and bit his face. The Janissary fell, but a Zulu wrested the gun from him and took aim to fire. Hermod unsheathed the Sword of Seven and cut the Zulu in half.

Some of the fighters ran from the sight of the blade, while others were gripped with dry heaves. But for the most part, Hel's army was comprised of soldiers at least as hearty as their counterpart Einherjar, and most of the fighters pressed on with their attack.

The direction of the conflict s.h.i.+fted and started to swirl around Sleipnir like a whirlpool. The soldiers and mutineers both saw Sleipnir as a threat, or as a weapon to claim for their side, and Hermod and Mist could only struggle to remain mounted as the horse kicked and bit and whipped his tail at the attackers.

Hermod felt something zing past his ear and craned his neck around to see a man in desert camouflage gear firing an M16. Three meaty thunks, and Sleipnir bucked, screaming. Blood welled up from a trio of sloppy bullet holes in his neck. The man held his ground, firing, as Sleipnir ran him down.

”We're making things worse,” Mist shouted, hacking away at a soldier wearing a George Custer mustache, while kicking at a woman in a postal-clerk uniform. Armed dead and press-ganged galley slaves were becoming an undifferentiated swirl.

Hermod yanked on Sleipnir's mane, trying to get him to reverse direction and head for the stern, where they might be able to fight for control of the helm, but the horse was in a rage, storming through anyone in his path and leaving a wake of wrecked bodies.

A high voice rose above the clamor: ”Leave the horse alone!”

Hermod sought out the speaker, and he and Mist found her at the same time. Lilly Castillo stood upon a pile of corpses, her face scratched and bleeding, her blood-greased fingers gripping a long spear with a diamond-shaped point. Beside her, wielding a trident and a Chinese hook sword, respectively, stood the Iowans, Henry Verdant and Alice Kirkpatrick, grinning fiercely in their blood-splattered clothes.

A red-coated soldier sprang up and aimed a curve-handled pistol at Lilly. Alice Kirkpatrick ripped his throat open.

”Lilly!” Mist shouted, waving her arms at her sister, while Hermod looked about for Hod.

”Take the helm” was Lilly's only acknowledgment.

Blood flowed freely from the bullet wounds in Sleipnir's neck, making Hermod's hands slippery as he tugged with all his might on the horse's mane to get him to turn around. Whether in response to Hermod's exhortations or acting on his own, Sleipnir spun around and spider-scuttled sideways down the length of the s.h.i.+p.

Hermod chanced to look down, over the rail. They were no longer in Midgard, but where they'd arrived, he couldn't say. A few miles toward the horizon rose stately pillars of trees, perhaps a thousand feet tall, their boughs consumed in flame. Hermod had never seen such trees anywhere outside the forests of Jotunheim. But there were also black mountains pocked with cave openings of the kind native to Svartalfheim. The Asgardian hall of Valhalla was down there, its roof caved in. A shopping mall with a Home Depot and a Costco smoked below.

Vidar must have sliced seams into the tissue of the World Tree, and the worlds had spilled out of their confines. Now they b.u.t.ted against one another like a puzzle of ill-matched pieces. At the very center of the parking lot was a vast asphalt field. A shopping-mall parking lot, then, would serve as Vigrid, the pivot point of Ragnarok.

The s.h.i.+p sailed over the armed force gathered on the nearer end of the parking lot. The armor of the Einherjar glinted in reflected flames, but their numbers seemed scant, thinly distributed over the field. Arrows flew past the s.h.i.+p-some of those Einherjar were d.a.m.ned mighty archers, Hermod thought-but the few that hit the hull did no harm, and Naglfar sailed on toward the opposing army on the other end of the lot. This was a much larger force, made up of giants. Some were as beautiful as any G.o.d, resplendent in mirror-bright gold armor, and some were shambling grotesqueries with mouths like basking sharks or skin covered in mud and turf. Rocks and snow avalanched down the backs of the frost giants as they drummed their chests, and when they threw their heads back and shouted war cries, Hermod felt the shrieking cold wind even at this alt.i.tude.

Towering over them all, a swirling ma.s.s of flame, too bright to look at directly, rocked the earth with every step. This had to be Surt, holding a sword big enough to sever mountains from their roots.

It was too much. It was laughable. Compared to the giants, the Einherjar were a Cub Scout troop. They wouldn't die bravely. They would be rendered into grease and dust and ash. Hermod at long last truly grasped the concept of a futile battle. The world was over. It just didn't know it yet.

His sore ribs complaining, he raised himself off Sleipnir's back to gaze across the length of the s.h.i.+p's deck, past the heads of the soldiers and mutineers. At the stern, perhaps fifty yards away, Loki manned the tiller. His posture was relaxed, like a weekend sailor steering his yacht, and he looked out over the carnage on the deck with smug satisfaction.

”Loki!” Hermod shouted. ”You f.u.c.king hermaphrodite! I'm coming for you!”

Loki's eyes locked on Hermod's, and he laughed with malicious glee.

”Hold on,” Hermod warned Mist. He raised the Sword of Seven high over his head and kicked his heels into Sleipnir's sides, urging him into a charge. The deck cleared, the fight forgotten, combatants breaking off to get out of the way, and Sleipnir growled, a noise like that of no horse or any other animal in Hermod's experience. With great pleasure, Hermod saw Loki's expression s.h.i.+ft into a frightened grimace.

In a bid to slow Sleipnir's charge, Loki gave the tiller a harsh tug. The bow lurched up. Bodies fell and tumbled down the inclined deck past Sleipnir's legs, but the horse continued up the steep grade, gaining speed.

Loki was scarcely two dozen yards away now, and Hermod whirled the sword around, building momentum for his final strike. Hot rain fell from the interdimensional incisions he made in the air.

Draugr threw themselves at Sleipnir, but most were crushed to pulp beneath his hooves or fell to Hermod's and Mist's swords. Some managed to claw their way up Sleipnir's sides, using Mist's and Hermod's bodies for hand- and footholds. Fingers raked Hermod's face. Draugr hung on his arms and legs like heavy parasites, dragging him off Sleipnir's back. Smas.h.i.+ng to the deck, he swung the sword back and forth, trying to drive away the draugr. Limbs flew, heads separated from bodies, but the full force of the draugr squad was on him, and they were fearless. No matter how many he cut down, replacements crawled through the gory mess he made. One bit into his shoulder, another into his calf.

So this is how I die, thought Hermod. Flesh-eating zombies. Of all the ways to go.

He kicked a draugr in the face, smashed the face of another with his elbow, drove the sword's hilt into another's chin, and now, afforded some small freedom of movement, swept his blade around in a 360-degree arc that split torsos from legs and sliced a wind-sucking hole in the air.

The draugr kept coming.

With the rowers completely involved in the melee, the s.h.i.+p was being propelled only by the sail. If Naglfar lost her sail, and therefore her forward momentum, would she fall?

Hermod drove through the draugr mob, fighting his way to the mast. The Sword of Seven slid through bodies, parting the air with thunder cracks, and when Hermod had gained a yard of clear path, he jumped to the mast of Jotun bones and started climbing. The sail battered him, crackling and flapping in the wind, smas.h.i.+ng him against the mast. He kept climbing, draugr coming up after him, like a treed bear with hounds snapping at his feet.

Reaching the crossbeam-a single giant femur-Hermod sliced through the thick bone, and it fell away from the mast. The sail went with it, tangling in Hermod's legs.

His bones sang like a hammered steel rod when he crashed to the deck. He could take punishment, but, d.a.m.n, he was getting tired of pain. Groaning, he struggled to free himself from the sail, now wrapped around him like a shroud.