The Beasts Of Valhalla

22

The door to Reverend Ezra's office was open, and there was nobody home. The first thing I did after closing the door behind me was to hop up on a windowsill, huddle in my robe, and plant my thoroughly frozen feet directly on the metal shield of a radiator. I'd grown seriously concerned about frostbite, but after about five minutes sensation returned to the toes. I rewarded myself for good behavior by letting my feet toast for another minute or so, then got down and began to search the office.

There was nothing in the Reverend's desk drawer but two well-worn Bibles, dozens of bizarre religious tracts which looked like they'd been run off on a mimeograph machine, and two sticks of Juicy Fruit gum. It was all very depressing; there were no letters, no letterheads, and no address book. So far, all Garth and I had managed to accomplish by infiltrating the commune was to get caught; even if we escaped now, our enemies had been alerted to the fact that we were alive. There were going to be a lot of men in brown uniforms with bony hands scouring this part of the country, hunting for us. We desperately needed to mount some kind of an attack, and to do that we needed an address.

It didn't help my mood to find a toilet behind the door under Siegmund Loge's portrait. I tried the door under Jesus, and barely suppressed a whoop of delight. It looked like the Big Bingo-a room used for the temporary storage of "offerings" brought for Father by new commune members. In the center of the room was a table apparently used for sorting and repacking; on it were a number of battered boxes and bags, and a variety of articles. There was a built-in shelf running along one wall; packing boxes, strapping tape, and a postal scale. Above the scale, taped to the wall, was a large card with neat, block-printed letters.

RAMDOR

RFD RTE. 113

CENTRALIA PA

Somewhere, I'd heard or read something strange about Centralia, Pennsylvania, but I couldn't recall what it was. I didn't care; having the address was all that mattered, and I was doubly pleased to find our clothes piled on the shelf, next to the postal scale. I discarded my robe, quickly dressed, then walked across the room, went up on my toes and looked out the window.

Parked behind the building were our car and the Willys.

I allowed myself the luxury of humming a few bars of the Hallelujah Chorus.

All that remained was to spring Garth, and to do that I needed a claw hammer or a crowbar.

Fat chance.

I might have been able to find something in one of the cars, but, having come this far, I was unwilling to risk recapture by being in the open any longer than I had to be. Instead, I began to rummage through the items on the table, looking for anything that might be used to pry loose the boards that had been nailed across the door to the cheese-processing shed.

Under a pile of Styrofoam blocks used for packing, I found a long, heavy case covered with fine-grain, beautifully tooled cordovan leather. I snapped open the case, found a huge knife in a leather-and-chrome scabbard inside. I lifted the knife out of the case, pulled it from its scabbard.

Shhh.

Whisper.

The Anvil Ring had delivered themselves of a beautiful piece of work, all right. The blade itself, almost half the size of a broadsword, was in the shape of a Bowie model. The color of the steel was an odd, very pale gray and, when viewed from a certain angle, displayed a rippling pattern of parallel lines; at first I thought the lines had been engraved into the steel, but when I ran my finger across the flat face of the blade I found that they were a part of the metal itself.

The handle was extremely heavy-black stone, probably onyx or obsidian, reinforced with steel bands, decorated at both ends with rings of diamond chips.

It was a hell of a thing to have to use for prying boards loose-Damascus steel or no, I wondered how much pressure the blade could take. However, it was the only thing on the table or in the room that looked even remotely useful, and so it was going to have to do. I slipped the knife back into its scabbard, slipped myself back out into the night after picking up Garth's clothes.

"Hey," I said, rapping lightly on the door with my knuckles. "Did you wait there like I told you?"

"Mongo?" Garth's anxious whisper was clearly audible; he'd been waiting by the door.

"You guessed."

"Did you get an address?"

"Sure did. I wish I could tell you it was in Florida, but it's not. We're going to Centralia, Pennsylvania. It looks like one of the Loges-maybe both of them-is holed up there."

Shhh.

"What's that?"

"Something I snitched from the collection plate."

"What?"

"Never mind; you'll see for yourself. Give me a chance to work on these boards."

There were two heavy planks nailed in a crisscross pattern over the door, anchored to a doorframe of paired two-by-fours. The wood was heavy and gnarled, and looked as if it would present a respectable workout for a chainsaw. I still intended to use the knife to pry the boards loose, but-out of curiosity, and as a kind of test of the blade I undoubtedly was about to snap-I took a casual whack at the edge of one of the planks.

Whisper didn't so much bite into the wood as kiss and seduce it; although I'd virtually done little more than let the blade fall of its own weight, the razor edge slid more than an inch through the wood. The resulting thwuck was solid, resonant, satisfying, and somehow-confident.

Whisper was a supremely self-confident knife, and to prove her prowess she effortlessly lifted out a sizable triangular plug of knotted wood when I raised her and-applying only slightly more force-slashed into the plank at an angle to the first cut.

Removing my parka and draping it over my head and shoulders to muffle noise, I squatted down on the frozen ground and began-with growing excitement and not a little reverential awe-whacking away at the planks. In less than ten minutes I'd whittled through both of them, and hadn't even worked up a sweat. I sheathed Whisper, stuck the scabbard into my belt, pulled open the door. A shivering but much relieved-looking Garth stood grinning in a box of moonlight.

"Don't spend too much time in the dressing room, brother," I said as I tossed him his clothes. "It's time to take our leave of these sweet, gentle people. Our car awaits us down the block."

Garth handed me my smoked glasses, pointed to the scabbard in my belt. "Is that what you were hacking with out here?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. This is Whisper. Observe."

Shhh.

I barely brushed Whisper against the edge of the doorframe, and a yard-long sliver of wood dropped to the floor.

Garth raised his eyebrows slightly, grunted. "Impressive," he said as he began to dress.

"That she is."

"She?"

"She has a sexy feel to her."

Garth laughed. "You've been too long in the wilderness, brother. You've always tended to anthropomorphize, but this is ridiculous."

Garth finished dressing. We closed the shed door, repositioned the planks across it as best we could, then moved around the building, keeping low and in the moon shadows.

"How much money have you got in your pockets?" I asked.

"Change."

"What about the cash in the car, assuming it's still there?"

"About forty dollars."

"We need money, or goods to barter. Whisper's too specialized an item, and she's the only weapon we have at the moment. There's more stuff where she came from-a room behind the Reverend's office. Maybe I should go back in there and look for something we can sell."

"Agreed," Garth replied tersely. "Make it fast."

"You want to wait outside?"

"No. We'll stick together."

We circled around the building with the Reverend's office, still saw nobody. We went to the front, quickly entered, closed the door behind us. I led Garth through the darkness, positioned him in the second doorway while I went to rummage around in the items on the table.

Most of the stuff was junk, nothing to even begin to compare to Whisper, and would undoubtedly be discarded when it reached Ramdor-whatever that was. However, one item was of more than passing interest-a leather pouch filled with gold coins which must have weighed upwards of five pounds. I put the gold in the pocket of my parka along with the hard plastic case containing my glasses, then turned toward Garth.

The beam of a powerful flashlight hit me squarely in the eyes.

"Hold it right there, dwarf!" Mike Leviticus commanded.

It felt as though someone had poured molten metal into my eye sockets; I shrieked, clapped my hands to my face and slowly crumpled to my knees as white-hot rivers of neon flashed around inside my head with kaleidoscopic, searing fury.

There was a soft coughing sound, like the pop of an air gun, and something whistled through the air over my head and pinged into the wall behind me.

Intent on sneaking up on me in the darkness, Leviticus had apparently missed Garth altogether-until now. There was the thud of a fist hitting flesh, then a crash as the flashlight fell to the floor. Scuffling, muttered curses, then the sharp, ominous sound of wood breaking-that would be Leviticus swinging with the bony side of his hand at Garth's head, missing and hitting a wall.

Leviticus, I assumed, would be a heavy hitter in karate. Garth was not. The popping sound I'd heard had to be a tranquilizer gun, which meant that a Loge or Loges placed a high premium on keeping us alive. However, now that he was being pressed, Leviticus might well feel that he could afford to kill Garth. Garth's body could be preserved… and they still had me.

Me was going to have to get rolling.

The sounds of struggle continued as Garth and Leviticus flailed blindly at each other in the darkness. Somebody fell across the table just above my head. The table collapsed, and I rolled away as various "offerings" rained down on me.

My eyes still burned with acid-heat, but I took my hands away from them and tried a tentative squint just as I heard another soft cough.

The flashlight, unbroken, had rolled across the room, and its strong beam was now focused on a small area in a corner, beneath the window. Garth, blood running from a cut on his forehead and with his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, was a few feet away, struggling to get to his feet amid a pile of junk, cardboard boxes, and blocks of Styrofoam.

Leviticus was by the door, reaching for the light switch.

I picked up a broken table leg and threw it at the bare, overhead bulb just as Leviticus threw the switch. The bulb exploded with a flash which I managed to avoid by closing my eyes and turning my head away. The movement cost me a half second. When I opened my eyes again, Garth had only managed to work his way to his knees, and Leviticus was striding purposefully toward the flashlight.

I leaped to my feet, kicked a section of broken table to the side, and sprinted across the room. I launched myself into the air and landed on the Warrior's back just as he was bending down for the flashlight, knocking him off balance. Instantly I wrapped my left arm around his throat while I searched for his eyes with the fingers of my right hand.

Leviticus knocked my hand away, half turned and lunged backward, banging me into the wall-once, twice. The third time did it. Stunned, the wind knocked out of me, I lost my grip on his neck and ignominiously fell to the floor.

Struggling not to lose consciousness, I groped in my pocket for my glasses, found them, ripped them out of their case and put them on.

With the glasses on, I could only see the beam of light and the things it touched; it touched the tranquilizer gun, then swung around into my face and approached like an attacking sun. Desperately, I struggled with fingers that wouldn't work properly at the zipper of my parka, which seemed to be stuck.

"You two have given me enough trouble," Leviticus said in a dry, almost bored voice as I gave up on the zipper and reached under the edge of my parka. "Now I'm- "

Shhh.

Lunging forward, I swung the huge blade of Damascus steel in an arc, aiming at a point behind the light, and felt only a slight tug on the handle as Whisper cut through the flesh and bone of Mike Leviticus's wrist. Blood splattered over my face. Leviticus's initial grunt of surprise was drawn out to a soul-deep, sorrowful moan as his hand and the flashlight flew across the room and landed against the wall with sufficient force to break the flashlight. Then I heard the Warrior sit down hard on the floor.

I rolled away, sprang to my feet and whipped off my glasses, preparing to strike again. It wasn't necessary. Leviticus had apparently felt he needed only his hands and the tranquilizer gun to handle us, because his shoulder holster was empty. He was slumped against the wall, staring in my direction with eyes that were rapidly glazing over with pain and shock. The fingers of his right hand were wrapped around the stump of his left wrist as he tried to stanch the flow of blood. He wasn't having much success; the blade of bone that made his hand such a formidable weapon also made it more difficult for him to close his fingers tightly. Blood oozed-and occasionally pulsed-out of the stump. The tranquilizer gun had fallen, skidded out of his reach. I turned my attention to Garth.

Garth had never made it out of the pile of debris in the middle of the room. He was sitting with his head lolling back and forth, as if he were asleep. There was a steel dart with narrow green stabilizers sticking out of his left shoulder. I replaced Whisper in her scabbard, kicked the tranquilizer gun even farther across the room, then hurried over to him.

The cut on his forehead had stopped bleeding and looked to be minor. I pulled the dart out of his shoulder, then pulled back his parka and shirt and looked at his shoulder. There was a thin trickle of blood, but it was obvious that the thickness of the parka had prevented him from getting a full dose of the drug in the hypodermic mechanism that was part of the dart. But he'd gotten enough to pose a problem.

"Garth!"

"Mmmmmm."

"Wake up!" I shook him.

"… sleepy…"

"Yeah, well this is no time to take a fucking nap! I Goddamn well can't carry you! The bad guys are after us, remember?"

"Guy… packs one… hell… of a punch."

I slapped him hard, twice. All he did was grin stupidly. I stood up and kicked him in the stomach-just hard enough to get his attention.

Garth's eyes opened, searched for me in the darkness. "You do that again, I'll tear off your head and hand it to you," he said in a clear voice.

I did it again. Then I grabbed two handfuls of parka and struggled to pull him up. "Get up, Garth!" I pleaded. "You have to stay awake just a little longer! Too much noise! Others will be coming!"

Garth grunted, grabbed hold of my forearms and managed to pull himself to his knees. "Yeah. I… know. Sorry about this, Mongo…"

Stepping around behind him, I draped one heavy arm over my shoulder, anchored my forehead in his armpit and shoved with all my might. Slowly, Garth rose to his feet. I shoved him in the direction of the door, and he wobbled forward. I followed him into the Reverend's office, then abruptly grabbed hold of his parka, stopping him.

"Wait here," I said, shoving him back against the wall. His head banged against the plaster, then rolled around on his shoulders-but he stayed on his feet. I went back into the other room. I knew I was probably being incredibly stupid, considering the racket Garth and Leviticus had made, but there was some business I felt I had to attend to.

I took some heavy wrapping twine off the shelf, picked up a shard of wood off the floor, then went over to Leviticus. The Warrior was just barely conscious; in another five minutes, or less, he'd have bled to death.

"Listen to me," I said quietly as I knelt down beside him, pushed his hand away from the bleeding stump and started to fashion a tourniquet. "As my mother would say, some people will believe anything. You people have yourselves one cockamamy religion here, but I'm not going to argue theology-except to tell you that everything you believe about Siegmund Loge is bullshit. Garth and I aren't servants of Satan-even Satan can't get good help these days. The old man you believe is God heads up a project that would have made the Nazis drool with envy, and rumor has it that he's not as crazy as his son, or as mean as his grandson; these are people you and the others here think dance with angels. Can you hold this stick?"

Leviticus nodded weakly, put his hand over the stick controlling the tension of the tourniquet.

"Let go of it and you'll die," I continued, rising to my feet. "So stay awake, and think about what I said."

I hurried back into the office, tore the phone out of the wall, grabbed Garth's parka and slung him in the general direction of the door, which Leviticus had left open. Garth staggered out, and almost knocked over a startled Reverend Ezra.

Shhh.

"Uh, Father love you," Reverend Ezra said tightly as he craned his neck, went up on his toes and stared down at Whisper, which was nestled in his crotch.

"Fuck him and you, Reverend." Lights were coming on all over the place, and I had to squint. My eyes were beginning to burn. "You got a medical kit in this place?"

"Yes, but- "

"Well, I hope it's a good one. Mike Leviticus is inside, and he's hurt badly. Go get the kit. Run, you silly jerk-off!"

Reverend Ezra ran. I grabbed the front of Garth's parka and pulled him around to the rear of the building. The ignition keys were still in our car. I pushed Garth into the rear seat, paused to slash the front tires of the Willys, then jumped behind the wheel of our car and turned the keys in the ignition.

The car wouldn't start.

Garth had begun to snore.

Holding my breath, I turned off the ignition. I pumped the gas pedal, waited three beats, then tried it again.

Grind.

Snore.

The engine finally turned over on the third try. I gunned the motor, popped the clutch and spun around in a power slide, narrowly missing Brothers Amos and Joshua. I straightened the car out, shot up the dirt road leading out to the main highway. The car banged over frozen ridges, crashed into potholes. The door Garth had torn off, and which we'd roped back on, flew off. I hit the ceiling a couple of times, barely managing to keep my grip on the steering wheel, and Garth rolled on the floor with a loud clunk.

"Huh…? Mongo?"

"Go back to sleep," I said through clenched teeth.

Problem. Dozens of flashlight beams were dancing in the orchards to my right, and they were ahead of me; Children of Father were running through the trees, and they obviously intended to cut off the servants of Satan at the pass. I managed to dig my glasses out of my pocket, put them on. I turned on the car's high beams and floored the accelerator. I fishtailed around a sharp bend to find half a dozen Children standing in the middle of the road, arms linked, eyes closed, faces wreathed in ecstasy. More Children poured out of the orchards, lined up behind them.

Convinced they were going to pop up from the dead in Great Time, the Children of Father were obviously perfectly willing to temporarily check out of this not-so-great-time as martyrs; I wasn't willing to oblige them. I slammed on the brakes, managed to bring the car to a halt an inch or two from the closest of the Children, a teenage girl with a bad case of acne. Garth rolled around in the back. Bodies clambered up on the hood. A rock came out of the darkness, shattering the window and just missing my head, spraying glass over the back of my neck.

"Garth, upsy-daisy!" I shouted, slamming the gears into reverse and flooring the accelerator again. "Nap time is over! Wake up!"

"Yeah," Garth said groggily, pulling himself up on the back of the seat. "Where are- "

We hit a rut, silencing Garth and removing half the bodies from the hood. A pothole took care of the rest of the bodies, but behind me, flashlights jumping in their hands, more Children were running up the road.

"Hang on, Garth! When we stop, you've got to get out and run! Do you understand?!"

Garth made a sound which I hoped was a "yes" grunt. I reached over, opened the glove compartment and groped through its contents as I suddenly whipped the steering to the left. The rear of the car veered sharply, hit the frozen shoulder and took off. We soared through the air, crashing through tinder-dry brush in the raw forest on this side of the road. I kept the accelerator to the floor; the car landed, the tires bit, and we continued to shoot backwards, crashing through underbrush and knocking over small trees until we finally hit one large enough to stop us.

It felt as if my teeth were shaking loose and my brains being scrambled, but I had somehow managed to keep one hand on the steering wheel and the other in the glove compartment; now the tips of my fingers touched what I had been desperately hoping to find-a book of matches.

The air was suddenly filled with the acrid odor of gasoline.

My door had sprung open. I leaped out, ran around the car, and was relieved to see that Garth was at least halfway out-the pocket of his parka had caught on the door handle, and he was still too groggy to release it. I unhooked the pocket, helped him stand, then turned him in the general direction of the woods and pushed as hard as I could. Garth wobbled and swayed, but he managed to stay on his feet-and he was walking away.

The lights were closing, converging on us from two directions.

I waited until Garth was perhaps fifteen yards away, then turned back to the car, squinted over the top of my glasses, and lit a match. It went out. I lit another, used it to light the matchbook; when it flared in my hand, I tossed it toward the ruptured gas tank, turned back and sprinted after Garth.

The car's gas tank had been close to three-quarters full, and when it went the concussion of the blast hit me in the small of the back like a giant fist, slamming me to the ground. Flaming pieces of metal and upholstery whistled through the air over my head, rained down to start dozens of little fires in the dry brush that surrounded us. I pushed myself to my feet, pulled the hood of my parka up over my head and ran on.

I found Garth sitting on the ground, legs splayed out in front of him, back braced against the trunk of a tree. His eyes were still glassy and half-closed, but at least he was conscious. I squatted down beside him, turned back and squinted through my smoked glasses at the conflagration I had started.

The car was a roaring inferno of orange-white flame that was rapidly spreading through the dry brush and leafless trees on either side to form a wall of fire between us and the Children of Father. The wind was blowing from our backs, carrying the fire toward the Children, who were beginning to beat a fairly hasty retreat, and the orchards on the other side of the road. It looked like the beginnings of a fairly decent forest fire which could well reach and destroy the buildings of the commune itself.

"Hooee," Garth mumbled in a slurred voice.

"You took the word right out of my mind. Does this utterance indicate that you've decided to stay awake for a while?"

"I'm positively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed," Garth said as he tried to rise and promptly slid down the tree trunk. He made it on the second try. "Nice work, brother-whatever you did. I wish I'd been around to see it. The last thing I remember was feeling this prick in my shoulder."

"Oh, I was brilliant. Actually, losing the car may be for the best; we probably wouldn't have gotten far in it, anyway. Maybe the bad guys will think we burned up in it."

"Sure. Besides, who needs a car? How long a walk is it to Pennsylvania?"

"Oh, probably fifteen hundred miles or so, as the crow flies."

"That's good," Garth mumbled, pushing off the tree and starting to walk southeast. "I was afraid it might be farther."

As we walked through the night forest, Garth gradually became more alert. After a couple of miles I realized that he was softly whistling; when I recognized the tune as "We're Off to See the Wizard," I lunged sideways and drove my shoulder into his hip, pushing him into a bramble bush.