A Shrouded World (Book 7): Hvergelmir Read online

  I’m running backward, angling away from where Mike and Trip are shooting down from the edge. But I don’t have much room to play with. Another drops suddenly, tangling the feet of two others who go down hard. Then one on the fringes slows, a surprised expression on its face before it eyes roll up and it, too, drops to the ground. I hammer another volley into one close, seeing it fall with several staples embedded across its upper chest. I can’t backpedal anymore, as I’ve reached the opposite edge.

  The five remaining creatures are just feet away and converging on me, not seeming to slow at all. I dive to one side, landing on the ground and kicking back toward one of the night runners at the outer edge of the group. I connect with the side of its knee, hearing it snap. The creature goes down with a howl.

  Rolling to my feet, I fire at another, seeing the staples slam into its side and back. I realize the night runners are so intent on me that they haven’t noticed there is a ledge ahead. They slide to a stop, one cartwheeling its arms to keep its balance. Unsuccessful, it goes over the edge. The one I hit with staples is tearing at the embedded metal, blood streaming. The one with the snapped leg attempts to stand, but falls immediately.

  The other two, having gained their balance, come at me. Their snarling is loud, the only thing I can hear above my panting breaths. I duck under a swiping arm and step behind, coming up to shove it forward. The second one, impeded by the one I ducked under, further shoves the other’s body out of the way and leaps. The silver gleaming of its eyes are locked on to mine, its lips pulled back, the rage in its expression beyond imagination.

  I duck and come up, my hands catching the flying night runner as it sails overhead. With a shove, I push it higher and also send it flying over the edge. The creature attempts to turn in mid-air, its arms reaching out to claw me. It vanishes from sight as it plummets below my line of vision.

  I feel a hand grab my pant leg and pull. I hit the ground on my back, nearly knocking the wind out of me. Looking down, I see the one with the broken knee crawling to get on top of me. I pull back my leg and kick it straight in its face.

  “No…no….no,” I say with each kick.

  Blood spatters from a broken nose and mouth. I don’t have time to continue as there’s still the one that I shoved out of the way. Rolling, I get to my hands and knees, seeing the bottom of the other night runner’s legs next to me.

  I’m too late, I think, looking up.

  The eyes are shining as it looks down, already bending to take my life. I gave it my best shot and came up short. I think of rising, to at least get some vantage point, or perhaps punch it in the crotch when suddenly, its head explodes. One moment I was staring into glowing eyes of death, and the next its head was gone like it had C-4 wired inside. Brain matter and warm blood fall onto my face and back of my neck as the body topples to the side.

  Rising, I see Mike and Trip walking across the tiny mesa with Trip holding his slingshot. I tell you, that fucker is deadly with it. Maybe the whistlers should have tried that instead of oversized staplers.

  “Thanks,” I say, spitting gore from my mouth and turning to Mr. Fuckedupknee.

  I send several staples into the night runner’s back and watch as it collapses to the ground.

  “Are you okay, Jack?” I hear Mike ask.

  “Yeah, I left another one over here,” I respond, walking toward the edge.

  A pale hand grabs the top of the ledge and the head and shoulders of a night runner comes into view.

  “Oh, there you are,” I state.

  I send my steel-toed boot right into its face; blood sprays from its nose. It topples to land on its back, where I send several staples into it. There’s the one that sailed off the cliff, but I can’t see any sign of it. We’ll just have to watch for it to reappear, if it survived the fall.

  “Well, I guess we’ll be dealing with those from now on,” I say.

  “Maybe so. You know, there are a lot of them only napping. I’m thinking we should go take care of them before they wake up,” Mike proposes.

  I look around for BT and see him coiled in a big ball by where Mike and Trip were fighting.

  “Is he okay?”

  “Yeah, he’s not very fond of the night runners, I think his senses are overloaded,” Mike replies.

  “He’s awake though, right?”

  Mike nods and shrugs.

  “Well, in response to your suggestion, that will take most of the night to accomplish, and we need to get some rest. I’m thinking we should leave them be and mount up. When the sun comes up, they’ll be taken care of.

  12

  Mike Journal Entry 1

  Killing in defense of your life, or for that of your squad, was one thing, heat of the battle and all, but walking among the immobile bodies of night runners and sticking them like barbecued pigs, well, that’s a special kind of hell. It’d be one thing if it were whistlers or the Overseers because of the obvious differences; still distasteful, but what we were doing now felt a lot like a war crime. I’d watched enough war movies in my time, and when the victorious army went and started bayoneting or sword thrusting the fallen enemy that made them the bad guy. I was never a fan. War, by its very nature, is a horrible affair, but somehow that made it even worse. Still, in this case, it had to be done. Unlike a scared private, wounded, dying, calling out for his mom, these night runners would shake off the staple effects and get up and eat us, plain and simple. They died or we did, and, as I’ve said before, I’ll always prefer the enemy dying over me or those I’m with.

  “Jack, you know we’re screwed, right?” I wiped my brow as I pulled my letter opener-quality blade from my latest victim.

  “You talking about our lack of ammunition or our barely defendable ledge?”

  “Sure. You can add in lack of water and food and an abundance of enemies, if that makes it any better.”

  “How does that make it better, Mike? Come on; we should go and check on BT.”

  I followed as he went over to the big man. BT looked like he was a lithium dose away from rocking himself into a padded cell.

  “How you doing?” I asked.

  His haunted expression was all the answer I needed. I’d been on enough battlefields to recognize a man freezing up. It wasn’t cowardice, by any stretch. Who in their right mind wants to get shot at? Or, in this case, eaten by a savage enemy? I can’t say it’s old hat, either. I still get terrified every time I’m in a conflict. But locking up is not an option; all that will do is get you killed.

  “I’m really sick of everything trying to kill us,” he said without bringing his eyes to mine.

  “Shit, who isn’t?”

  I turned to Jack; the look we shared told the story that we weren’t going anywhere this night with the shape BT was in. He turned away and began foraging for some small sticks in preparation for a fire. There was something comforting about a fire that could travel deep enough to warm a cold soul.

  “I’ll keep it small,” Jack replied as I watched him. “I doubt there will be another spawning of runners.”

  I wanted to tell him that wasn’t our only problem, but he already knew that. We had to get BT up and functioning again. We already had a dysfunctional team; it would do no good to move closer to catatonic. I stayed close to BT. If he wanted to talk, I’d be there, but I wasn’t going to press him. I didn’t bother with the usual “It’s fines” or “It’ll be okays” because they fall flat when you’re on an alien world, many realities away from those you love, fighting a multitude of enemies in a scenario that is completely rigged against you. Kind of like playing a football team that has paid off the officiating crew. Fifteen minutes later, Jack had a fire going. It wasn’t much bigger than a handful of lighters could produce, and even then he did his best to shield the light from any prying eyes. Trip, surprisingly, shared a bag of Phritos he had procured from who knows where and had stashed on his body in a place better not questioned. The small handful was divine, the swallow of water we were allotted was not.

&nb
sp; BT finally fell asleep. He looked better; I think at one point during the night he even smiled, but when and if he got home and he couldn’t somehow convince himself this had all been a dream, he was going to need some help in the form of therapy, and a lot of it.

  “Can I see the relic?” I asked Jack, holding my hand out.

  Trip and Jack were looking at me; easy enough to see neither of them thought it was a good idea to hand something akin to the keys to the universe to a Marine, and an impulsive one at that.

  “What? It’s not a crayon; I’m not going to eat it,” I said, my hand still empty.

  “That would be preferable to what you might accidentally do.” Trip had sidled up to me just as Jack reluctantly handed it over. I figured he was prepared to try and stop me in mid-attempt with whatever thought I’d conjured up.

  “Relax, I just want to look at the writing on the sides.” That did little to appease either man. Trip was hovering like I’d got hold of his one-of-a-kind signed Grateful Dead t-shirt and Jack like maybe I was a drunk at a birthday party and was swinging a toddler around by the feet as they giggled wildly. You knew it was not going to end well as the drunk fell over and the munchkin went flying, hopefully into the arms of a prepared parent. “Oh shit.” I was holding it close to the fire.

  “What?” Jack leaned in.

  “Made in China,” I told him as I pointed.

  He grumbled something about Marines being dipshits. Given the context, he was right. Still, though, he smiled about it. I didn’t receive the room-tossing charge I had the first time I’d “attuned” myself to the relic, but I could feel an underlying current running through the thing, like I was holding onto a pissed off cobra wrapped in duct tape. The longer I held it, the more my mind opened up to an idea. It started as a faint pinprick of a notion, not even sure if the seed was mine or had quite literally been planted by an alien entity, but there it was. It expanded outward, splashing over the contours of my mind like a rogue wave on the bow of a ship.

  To look at my face, you’d have thought the fire had transfixed me, but my gaze was inward as I tried to take in all I was being exposed to.

  “Mike…Mike!” Jack shook my shoulder.

  I had no idea if that was the second or thirty-second attempt at trying to get my attention, but his right hand was raised as he was about to full-slap my face.

  “I’m here,” I lied.

  “What the fuck, man? You got a thousand-yard stare and your mouth is hanging open, all slack-jawed. It looked like Trip here slipped you something.”

  Trip quickly padded down all his pockets and pulled out a mass of pills, which he counted. “Nope, wasn’t me.”

  “Give me one of those.” I reached over. I stopped when he threatened to eat them all to prevent me from getting any. “I’ve got an idea,” I said once I got over the fact that Trip was prepared to swallow some twenty pills all at once.

  “This ought to be rich,” Trip said as he picked out two oval blue pills and dry swallowed them before placing the rest in various pockets.

  “Really?” was all I could say.

  BT had one eye open and was watching. “If this is anything like his ideas in my world, we should maybe just wait here until everything finds us.”

  “I get it, I get it, I’m not much of a ‘plans’ type of guy,” I used finger quotes and everything, “but it came to me while I was holding the relic. I think I know how to take down the whistlers.”

  I had Jack’s undivided attention, right up until the next words came out of my mouth.

  “We go to the source. We go to their homeworld.”

  “Wait, what?” He sat back like my words had propelled him. “So, instead of seeking out a portal to stop their expansion, you want to go to their place? And do what? Kindly ask them to stop fucking up everything they encounter? Mike, we have these shitty little staple guns; what are we possibly going to do when we get there? Pretty sure they’re not going to give us launch codes, that’s provided they even have nukes. Seems to me a hostile race, hellbent on crushing all they encounter, wouldn’t even have a need for conflict on their homeworld. It’s probably a fucking paradise there.” I couldn’t tell if Jack was pissed at my proposal or the thought that whistler leadership were poolside, sipping mimosas, as their army wrecked the cosmos.

  “We take them out from the inside,” I said.

  “How?” Jack asked.

  “Well…” I stammered, “I haven’t got that far.”

  “So, your plan is more of a notion, then?” BT asked.

  “I was comforting you, asshole. Maybe pretend to have my back for a minute.”

  BT sat up and shrugged.

  “Whoa, is it weird these pills are working already?” Trip was looking at his hands.

  “How would you even know?” Jack asked. “You’re perpetually high.”

  “The silver flashes…I’m seeing them everywhere.” I noticed he was looking past Jack. I followed his line of sight to the plains below.

  “Oh, fuck.” I stood, as did Jack and BT. BT moaned, Jack groaned, I honed my bayonet…not really; I just wanted to rhyme.

  Jack looked to his staple gun. “We’re not going to be able to stop them this time. Not with these.”

  I was still holding the relic. “What do you guys think about my plan now?”

  “You think you can open a portal with that?” Jack asked.

  “I do. I don’t know why; the path, it’s illuminated right there in front of me.”

  “Any chance you can pick a more neutral place, like one of our homeworlds, preferably, a place we can supply ourselves to the hilt?”

  “Jack, I don’t even know why this information is available to me,” I told him.

  “Shouldn’t that be suspect right there?” BT queried. “What if the whistlers got hold of that station we were at and, like, I don’t know, downloaded that information to the relic so we’d do exactly that?”

  “Or the Overseers,” Jack added.

  “I don’t think so.” I was trying to reason out why. “Wouldn’t be the Overseers. Right now, we’re as vulnerable as we’ve ever been; why send us to a place where we are surrounded by the enemy?”

  “Seriously? Even you can’t be this thick.” BT was on the edge of raging.

  “I mean, I could be,” I told him, staying calm.

  “It’s likely this whole thing is a trap. They most likely know we have the relic, and maybe they don’t know where we are, so they give us some bogus location to head to where a thousand of them are waiting,” BT said. “Yeah, that’s possible. Or it could be the same answer for the whistlers—we’ll be like fucking Grub-Hub bringing food and a present!” he continued.

  “You make valid points,” I told him.

  “But?” Jack prompted.

  “We’re on this shitty little mesa and we have staples to deal with those savage, rabid, runners. Seriously, at this point, what do we have to lose?”

  “That’s your argument? That’s the best your finger-painting self can come up with?”

  “Enough with the fucking stupid Marine jokes, BT! If I’m not mistaken, I’ve saved your ass at least a half dozen fucking times since we’ve been out here. How about just a modicum of appreciation!”

  He looked dazed, like I’d sucker-punched him twice in rapid succession. “I, umm, no…wait. Yeah, you’re right. I’m, yeah. I’m sorry. But why does Jack get a free pass?”

  “Military. He’s earned the right, and that’s what we have done for time untold.” Some of the heat had gone out of my voice.

  Jack was eyeing me curiously. “I don’t like that you’re right, Mike. I don’t, but you are. Not about the giving shit part, that I know. We can’t win this battle. We leave this place, we’re most likely jumping from the frying pan into the fire, but maybe, just maybe, there’s a gallon of water nearby.”

  “That’s my flyboy,” I smiled. “Trip, you in?” I had to look down, as he’d never stood.

  “Yeah, yeah, of course. I heard they have a h
ell of a pizza joint downtown.”

  “Now what?” Jack was looking from me, back to the approaching screaming night runners.

  I was concentrating. I didn’t quite have my tongue firmly clenched between my teeth, but I could have. “It’s not working. It was all laid out before me.” Sweat had broken out on my brow. I’d convinced my fellow wayward travelers of this absurd plan, and now I couldn’t deliver when we needed it most.

  “Performance anxiety,” Trip helpfully said as he whipped his junk out to piss. I guess to show he didn’t suffer from the same affliction.

  Jack quickly turned him around so he wasn’t splashing our boots. I was surprised he didn’t yell at him, but at this point, what was the point? Trip was going to keep being Trip. Kind of like yelling at a cat when they knock stuff off a countertop. They’re going to keep doing it and most cats, if you do attempt it, will just make sure you can watch them from a distance where you’re powerless to stop it from happening.

  A thin filament of silver, no thicker than a single strand of silk, issued forth from the relic toward where Jack had gone to head off the rapidly approaching runners. He turned to look as the glowing thread passed over his right shoulder. I couldn’t tell for sure, but something within told me that had it hit him, it would not have worked out favorably. Images of the whistler world came into view; it had to be from the relic itself because these were not stored images within my head. The line traveled another twenty feet, making it somewhere around fifty feet in length before it stopped of its own accord. At this point, it began to pool horizontally. As more of the silver pressed into the air, it became a sphere the size of a golf ball, quickly expanding to beach-ball sized; the edges shimmered and vibrated fluidly. Inside the sphere, it was possible to see the alien world beyond, not like a crystal ball, but more like a mirrored reflection. I could see impossibly thin and tall towers swaying, but that may have had more to do with the effects of the floating orb.

  “Mike!” The runners were close enough that Jack had begun to lay down suppressive fire, such as it was. I knew what he was yelling for. Either I needed to help him before we were overrun, or this shittiest of plans needed to come to fruition.