“It’s uncanny. Look at this,” Gunnar noted as he turned the inside of Nina’s forearm upwards. Lita’s medical fiends had carved perfect circle on the arm of their limp patient, just deep enough to reach the threshold between tissue and dermis. It appeared that the disc of skin was removed and later placed back like the lid of a jar. What lay beneath was unknown, but from what Gunnar managed to ascertain by some painful scrutiny, it was not anything solid, not any kind of implant that he could detect.
“It looks like their fucking symbol. How sick are these bastards?” Sam cringed from the clearly reminiscent carving of the Black Sun sigil in Nina’s skin. A distraught Nina wailed in agony as Gunnar pressed down upon the tender flesh not yet mended underneath. Sam had to turn his eyes away from the grotesque sight of the fleshy lid shifting ever so lightly over the tissue below as Gunnar’s finger tested its elasticity. Nina caught her breath with great effort, folding her small body in Sam’s embrace as she grew faint from the painful experiment. She panted heavily, her eyes closed to focus on composure, but it was clear that she was losing the battle against the pressing darkness of the pain-induced disorientation.
“I cannot find anything that implies a tracking device or any hardware under this,” Gunnar revealed evenly as if he was conducting an autopsy. He looked at the waning consciousness of Sam’s friend, pale-faced and whimpering in the journalist’s embrace and he realized that he was causing Nina a thorough torturing. “I’m sorry, love. I don’t think we’ll pry any further, okay?” he nodded to Sam who was running his hand sympathetically over Nina’s hair.
“Tomi! Can you get us a metal detector type device? Like soon. Hopefully within the next two hours?” Gunnar asked the techno wizard of Sleipnir who was nursing a bottle of beer and a turkey leg on the porch of the cottage.
“On it, brother!” came the answer through a mouth stuffed with food.
“Right, Sam, get Nina to get some rest while I meet with my family outside to make sure everything is a go. Then see if you can induce more visions,” Gunnar ordered as he raised his powerful frame from the chair and tossed Sam a bankie filled with green.
“Smoke up, brother! If that don’t work, Gunnar will be beating the shit out of you to get that dream center working, aye?” one of the passing Sleipnir boys laughed, slapping Sam hard on the back.
As Sam laid Nina down on the bed in the dimly lit bedroom, something was amiss. How could there be nothing under that patch of skin? Why would they go through such a procedure if there was nothing to plant? Then again, with their reputation for unorthodox practices far beyond the reach of logic, he would not be surprised at anything they came up with. He looked at Nina lying on the bed. Her body was rigid in its position where she lay on her back, hands folded over her stomach. He could hardly hear her breathe, and only the heaving of her chest and stomach eased his concern.
In the gaining darkness of the evening, he fixed his eyes on her in the bright firelight from the column of flames the bonfire outside yielded. Even in the warm yellow glow, the skin of her face was frightfully wan, and it was not from her fainting spell alone. His instincts told him that there was more to her condition than the dizziness of raw pain. Shaking his head, Sam sighed and took a ceremonial athame from one of the small tables in the corner, hidden by the shadows of night. He turned to face the petite woman on the bed and whispered, “Don’t worry, Nina, I will make sure we get there as soon as possible. You don’t know it, and I am only guessing, but they did something sinister to you. I don’t know what it is, but your pretty little face is a testament to some or other deadly fate and I don’t like it one bit.”
With those words Sam pressed the bent silver blade down on the skin of his chest. It hurt, but it was bearable. Sam had never been one for self-mutilation, but he could see his beloved Nina’s condition deteriorate by the hour and although he kept it to himself, the grim truth was waving at her from her face every time he looked at her. He pressed the point deeper, but the skin did not even break yet before he could take no more agony.
“Jesus, you’re a sissy,” he said to himself. “Just go and start a fight with the boys outside.”
Sam scoffed as he threw the knife back on the pile of steel and silver where it landed with a clang to rejoin the mangled orgy of war razors. “But first, some stress relief,” he sniffed and pulled an abused pack of Marlboro’s from his pocket, flicking a fag in between his pursed lips in one skilled motion. He sat down carefully on the bed corner, minding his weight and movement so that he would not disturb Nina.
The ascending billows of blue smoke curled and shape shifted as Sam breathed into the ambience of the beautiful, shimmering light that pulsed lazily upon the frosted window of the room. Deep thoughts came with the smoke, its shamanist thrall invoking Sam’s dormant spirit, the thing he buried most when he had to reason or present facts. This time he allowed it to rise and speak. After all, nobody was here. No-one needed him to be level-headed and logical here and now. It would be his little secret that he nurtured his scorned side for once. He thought of the connotations between history and myth. Between his own research, Nina’s eagerly related historical accounts, and what he had experienced since joining the company of The Brotherhood, he had to admit that there was more to Norse mythology than just old bearded gods with horned helmets.
With all his quite recent adventures involving the Nazi organizations and their nefarious pursuits, Sam had learned to dig deeper into the origins of matters he used to brush off as plain racism or cultural genocide. All those symbols the Nazis enjoyed to flaunt so much, and all free cultures learned to fear and hate, originated from a far more honorable heritage and those true Germanic peoples who wished to honor their old heathen gods in the modern age, were thus constantly harassed as Nazis. Sam used to be one of those ignorant rat’s asses who, without proper investigation, cried ‘racist’ or ‘Nazi’ whenever anyone wore a Swastika or the equally infamous SS-lightning symbols, once borne upon the uniforms of coldblooded killers.
Now he had discovered that these sigils were only adopted by Hitler and his animals to promote their Aryan heritage, of all things, claiming to be direct descendants of the mighty Norse god Odin. This was where the corruption cracked through a valorous and proud culture and reduced its renowned signs to repulsive marks of tyranny and hatred. Through his scrutiny of its origins, Sam learned that the Swastika, also called gammadion, was one of Thor’s representations of thunder, that the ‘SS’ depicted lightning. Further research even showed him that the Swastika was used in Buddhist and Hindu scriptures as a sacred symbol denoting luck or wellness, long before the infamous Austrian defiled it with his regime of terror and prejudice. It was a new age for Sam Cleave. His once rigid trademarks had been shattered by an uninvited awakening, not only in his appearance, but in his approach to information, his perception of things. What the old Sam may have seen as a square line drawing, the new Sam would endeavor to give a walk around to discover that it was a cube, multi-dimensional with depth.
Immersed in thought, Sam’s hand dropped inadvertently and the blazing ash of the cigarette singed the soft hair on his arm before kissing the vulnerable skin underneath.
“FUCK!” he screamed and jumped up at the blistering sensation that spread casually through his nerve endings like a good bourbon. An agonizing, excruciating, good bourbon, that is. He stepped madly on the demon butt to extinguish its audacity and its heat before the room faded suddenly. At first, Sam thought it was the shadows; that perhaps the bonfire outside the window had been doused, but he saw Nina sit up just before she too, vanished into a white haze of oblivion.