A rain barrel stood under an eave. He bucked it with his hip and torso until it tipped, then pushed with his thighs and elbows, aiming for the spot where Unferth’s ride had started.
Below, the other man stood. “Give up yet, Wulf? You’re slower than a three-day shit.” At this distance the shout sounded thin and weak. “Hear your brother’s calling a meeting of the Thing to remind everyone that he’s in charge. Can’t imagine what they’ll think of his hand.”
“Imagine away.” Freezing air sliced deep in his lungs with each panting breath. He’d have to remember to tell Ivar one of the supposedly loyal immortals was double-dealing, although thankfully none had fought alongside Unferth today. “Where are your usual toads? Dumped you too?”
He ducked into the barrel and pushed with his stronger leg until gravity took charge of the roll. His head snapped from his chest and banged against the wood as he thumped down the slope, braced with his knees and elbows while the world churned and he rode his idea to the end.
Krrrakk. The barrel slammed into an immoveable object and disintegrated. Blood filled his mouth, so much that he had to spit into the snow. As he came to his knees using the strength in his abdomen and legs, his eyes tracked footprints from Unferth’s abandoned board to the edge of the woods. Using his elbows and chest, he maneuvered a broken barrel stave into the pocket between his armpit and his triceps. The primitive weapon and the wind-borne ashes fluttering around him combined to strip him of the soft lures of modern life and drive him to his feet. Warriors went to their destinies upright, not crawling like a worm or kneeling like a supplicant.
The barrel had crashed into a stand of marsh alders, ice rivulets twining between their roots like snares. He hadn’t entered this bog in fifteen hundred years, not since they’d followed the gore trail from Heorot. Logically, he knew they hadn’t walked over this exact spot. That trail would be gone or farther south or drained by generations of farmers, but his gut roiled with fear staring into the wasteland of his nightmares. Armed only with a piece of shattered wood, no sword, no shield, no brother in the lead, he had to proceed. Tonight the fight was his alone.
The van was too dark inside to see Deavers’s injuries without night vision gear. Why she was surprised when Cruz pulled a set of NVG out of his bag, she didn’t know. He also provided a complete medical pack, so she set to snipping her patient’s pants in order to clean and assess his wounds. His vitals were already improving.
Before she finished, Chris opened his eyes and muttered, “What happened?”
“Don’t move, okay?” She raised one surgically gloved hand to reassure him, but he groaned and his eyes again rolled back and out he went. She looked at her glove. Saw blood.
“How’s the boss?” Cruz knelt beside her while Kahananui drove. He had to raise his voice over the grind of the van’s gears, but he didn’t take his gaze or his rifle scope off the road behind them. “How bad?”
She knew every Special Forces soldier had medical training exceeding that of most EMTs, so Cruz would know in a glance that the nickel-size hole inches below Chris’s buttock was more annoying than dangerous. Hand on the floor, she balanced herself through another fishtailing swerve. “See for yourself.”
“That’s it? Did you check for an exit wound?”
“That is the exit wound.” The entrance wound was an even cleaner circle on his quadriceps. “He stuck his leg out too far.”
“Then what’s wrong—”
“I suspect your fearless leader is having an episode of vasovagal syncope. He’ll recover.”
“Huh?” Cruz looked between them again, then back at the road, but the grooves around his eyes and nose had deepened. “That’s one I don’t know. What do you do for it?”
“Kahananui had the right idea when he pulled his hair. Does your kit have sal volatile?”
“Wulf’s not here to translate that, ma’am.”
No, he wasn’t, and that cut into her, so she kept talking. “Smelling salts. In vasovagal syncope, the patient’s heart rate and blood pressure drop after a trigger, such as anxiety caused by the sight of one’s own blood. All those guys who hit the floor when they see the needle pull out after immunizations? Vasovagal syncope.”
“You’re saying he fainted? That’s all?” As she nodded, Cruz began to grin. “From seeing his own blood?” The last word stretched with disbelief.
“He did lose a fair amount.” Her caveat didn’t stop the other soldier’s laughter. Poor Chris. “But yeah, he’s basically—”
“A pussy.” It must have taken years of training to learn to steady a weapon while laughing that hard, but Cruz managed.
“That’s not quite how I would’ve put it.”
“’Course not, Doc, you’re too polite. But you’ve got more balls than Miss Christy here.”
Tree trunks closed behind Wulf. He stumbled over a bottle and saw a plastic bag pinned by brambles, but deeper in the woods, signs of modern life disappeared. The crunch of crusted snow, the rattle when he snagged underbrush and the squelch where patches of sulfuric mud hadn’t frozen returned him to his Nordic origins.
He heard a metallic clink behind him and spun with the barrel stave clutched as lancelike as he could manage without useable hands. It slapped Unferth’s chest and knocked him to his knees. Gouging with the splintered plank would’ve been effective, but the other Viking ducked.
When Wulf tried to readjust the angle of his wooden weapon, it fell from his armpit, so instead he kicked the side of the immortal’s helmet.
Unferth’s scream stretched longer than the startled flights of crows from the far trees. He rolled on the ground, clutching the helmet, and jerked it from his head.
Wulf’s first look at the other man’s exposed face repulsed him into backing away from the next kick. In the forge of the burning warehouse, the protective cover had melded with Unferth’s scalp, jaw and cheeks. Charred skin and muscle filled the helmet, and its removal revealed Unferth’s skull. A rectangular patch of skin remained around his eye sockets, where scorching metal hadn’t flayed his face, but the rest of the Viking had become a death’s-head.
“We’re where we started,” he rasped from Wulf’s feet. “Aren’t we?”
Horror bred pity for the man below him, and with it the need to understand. He couldn’t reconcile the swathe of destruction with the broken shell at his feet. “In the name of Balder’s son, why?”
The immortal tried to roll toward a rock, but the bubbling mud at the edge of the dark pond sucked at his chain mail, and Wulf remembered Unferth’s earlier taunt.
“Who else did you capture?” If one of the men he’d known for centuries, someone he’d shared bread and battles with, was being tortured like Ivar had been, he’d kick the information out of Unferth. “Who?”
“Expecting a deathbed confession?” Unferth’s fingers stretched toward the stone. “Find someone who dies.”
Wulf no longer controlled even a stick, but with hands, the most deadly weapon, Unferth could still threaten.
Beowulf had killed Grendel with his hands.
If Wulf waited for Unferth’s answers, he’d have another fight. Rotted logs dotted the waterline, and Wulf slammed his burnt arm stubs deep into a soft chunk of wood. He shrieked with the agony the impact shot through him, but the log stuck on his forearms as he raised it.
If he closed his eyes while he crushed Unferth, he could miss. So he had to witness each blow. Witness the skull, eyes now glazed, break off the neck.