The cold and the dark, p.1
The Cold And The Dark, page 1
THE COLD AND THE DARK
a novella, a novelette, and two short stories
James R. Tuck
BLAMMO! BOOKS
CONTENTS
THE COLD AND THE DARK
THE GIRL KING
GODRIDER
CHAMPION OF HOLLOW EARTH
THE COLD AND THE DARK
They came from the outer edge of the world.
Not kaiju, that's Japan's problem.
Yes, they get their ten-story lizards and weird bugs the size of jumbo jets that come off the ocean and stomp the shit out of Tokyo every year or so. The Japanese army rolls out with some tanks and rocket launchers, hems them in while the monsters fight it out for a few hours and then fuck off back to the ocean from whence they came.
Japan loses some property, but their warning system is so on point that nobody ever dies from this anymore, they just rebuild and wait for more.
Big, freaking, whoop.
Here in Oslo, we have motherfucking frost giants.
Those bastards are a real kick in the head.
*
The child pushed the door open.
It scraped across the ice making a sound like a harsh cough.
She stopped, muscles pulled tight, vibrating with tension as she listened for an alarm. She could barely hear anything but her own breath under the Gore-Tex hood of her coat.
No one heard that.
No one was near, all of them huddled in the center of the building, the edges where the doors led outside were too cold to stay in. Too close to the outside. Too close to where they might hear them inside and tear the roof off like so much soggy cardboard.
The outside air fell through the opening, there was no wind to push it so it tumbled inside, instantly turning the moisture of the warmer air into mist first, then into a snow of micro-crystals that fell like faerie dust at her feet. The cold climbed inch by inch, dragging itself up her slight body, pressing through even the thick insulation of waffled goose down and man-crafted fiber. It reached the wool scarf around her face and kissed the tiny sliver of skin between it and the goggles that were her older brother's and too big for her tiny skull. The cold burned, flaring like a stuck match across her cheekbone and making her eyes water. The tears ran down to the edge of rubber pressed to her face and pooled there, chilling instantly. The sting of frostbite fell away like a climber off a cliff as the cold sank to her nerves and froze them dead.
She drew a deep breath through her scarf that burned as it sank into her tiny lungs, stepped carefully out onto the ice covered porch, and pushed the door closed behind her.
*
We were given a GO, a green light, a clear signal to do what we had to.
Up to a point.
Nuclear warheads were off the table. If we dropped nukes in the ice bowl the blast and fallout would do in minutes what the frost giants were doing in weeks. We were desperate, but we weren't fucking suicidal.
Not yet.
So we flew our Vipers loaded with Hammers in a tight triangle formation. Me, Geir, and Ragnhild all staying in sight line with each other. There was no communication from anyone on the ground. The frost giants had destroyed that capability, whether by accident or design we did not know, but we three were on our own to accomplish our mission. We flew low, near the tops of buildings sealed in ice, down where traffic helicopters and drones normally lived. Ice cracked as we tore through the airspace and fell from buildings in sheets. I saw the mirrored sheen of the Raddisson Blu break free. Tallest building in my city, a miracle of man-made craftsmanship.
It only came to the frost giant's knees.
The radio didn't crackle like it does in the movies, Geir's voice was just suddenly in my ear. “Spooky isn't it? Like Oslo has been erased.”
Cold rolled off the canopy above me, even through the mesh of heated wires the ground crew had come up with to keep it warm enough to not frost over. The world was white below us, glowing with light noise, so pure it was impossible to tell how far down the ground actually was. I knew my city was below my jet but every inch of it had been sealed in a scrim of hoarfrost that left it as featureless as copy paper. Hate throbbed in my heart. My city was beautiful from the sky, a goddess in the wilderness waiting to surprise you with her grace and loveliness.
And that had been stolen from her.
The goddess left in the desolation, ravaged and plundered of her comeliness.
And as her worshiper it burned.
“She's still fucking there.” My voice snapped into the speakers in my helmet, making a dissonance in my brain that always happened while flying. I knew I had spoken but the split-second delay between my words leaving my mouth to reaching my ear always jarred me.
“Concentrate. Do not be distracted. We have a job to do.” Ragnhild's voice sounded tight, clear, but strung with tension. She was new, field promoted from simulators to actual piloting because all other pilots with more experience were either dead or flying next to her. When talking to her you could see the pressure she bore from her new status, the tightness around her eyes, the line perma-creased under her bottom lip from a jaw that stayed clenched.
“Ah, precious Hildy,” (she hated when Geir called her that) “if your beauty does not distract us from our task then we will not miss the gods-damned giants because of a conversation.”
Geir did not find Ragnhild beautiful and she knew it. Geir was a throwback of our people, his genetics pulling from a forgotten time making him a prototypical viking with an immense build and a wide, handsome face. He dated exotic dancers and runway models who'd never step on a runway, the frail slips of their bodies such a contrast to his mass. He had no use for Ragnhild's squarish jawline, the crag of brow that shadowed her eyes, or her broad, meaty shoulders.
“Pagan asshole.” Ragnhild muttered.
Geir's laugh was big in my ear.
I even smiled.
Then the first frost giant stood up.
*
She couldn't see.
She couldn't tell if the goggles had frosted over or if everything had vanished into an unrelieved field of white. Her gloved fingers scrubbed the glass and she could see them, bright red to match the coat she wore. Everything past the tips of her fingers disappeared.
She tripped over something.
The ground hit her hard, stealing the shallow air she had in her lungs. Her scarf had frozen in front of her mouth from the moisture of her exhalation, spreading with each breath into a wall of slow suffocation.
Suffocation was better than the option she'd ran from.
Pushing herself up, she kicked at the thing that tripped her. The ice cracked around the object and it rolled over. She looked and saw a brown swirl. It took a minute of staring before her mind made sense of what she was looking at.
A dog.
The thin mutt had curled on itself, trying to stay warm when it had been caught in the storm of ice and snow that announced the arrival of the monsters. She stared at it. The frost had perfectly preserved it, flash freezing the animal into a chunk of fur.
Fur and meat.
Her tiny heart surged. She could take this back, present it to her father and mother. They could thaw the poor animal. It would be food she provided. Food to replace that what had been used up a week ago. They could eat this animal and live.
They would love her.
They would spare her.
Her heart sank.
They did love her.
They had spared her.
As long as they could.
Another tear rolled down her cheek, joining the ones from earlier along the rubber edge of her brother's glasses.
This animal wouldn't last long. Not long enough.
Standing, she began walking again. The cold had crept past her coat and the coveralls beneath. It wouldn't be long. She didn't have much strength and it would be sapped soon. Either the cold would take her or one of the monsters would notice her and she would die between its teeth.
Better that than the ones back at home.
She'd started to shiver when she heard low rumble of three jets tearing through the sky.
*
I watched Ragnhild drop the first salvo and saw immediately where she fucked up.
The bombs were designated GBU-27 Paveway 3. Almost 1000 kilos of destruction. The Americans we bought them from called them “the Hammer”. Geir loved it. It made him feel like Thor as he flew, appealing to his paganism. Before the frost giants had appeared and thrown the door of myth wide fucking open his religion had just been lip service, a playact he'd done to separate his impressionable young harem from their underwear, but now? Now, he was a card-carrying thunder-god worshiper for the modern age with a high-explosive hammer to wield.
But Ragnhild dropped first, beating him to the punch.
The bombs fell, guided by invisible lasers to the frost giant's midsection. It loomed above us, nearly a kilometer tall. Its skin was the color of dull iron and spotted here and there with great chunks of blue-white hoarfrost like a frozen leper. Its mouth, large enough to hanger the jet I was in, hung open, a great black hole in the center of a mountain crag of a face. It was as if all light drained into the creature through its mouth. Two wide eyes, too human and filled with a calculating intelligence, glared at us.
Geir's voice whooped in my ear, a guttural war cry, as the bombs struck and exploded. The giant roared and staggered as fire boiled in its belly and a storm of steam and shrapnel enveloped Ragnhild's F-16, making it disappear from sight.
My stoma
The jet sailed out of the cloud, lower than it had gone in. It glistened in the hazy winter sun, shining like it had been polished.
“What in hell is wrong with her plane?” Geir cursed.
I knew.
I knew exactly what happened. The steam had coated Ragnhild's jet in moisture, moisture that flash-froze the second it hit the clear air, coating the jet in a sheet of ice too thick, too heavy, to allow her to fly.
Her scream of frustration came through the headset.
“Ragnhild, blow the hatch! Eject!”
The plane fell, nose tilting down with each second it dropped. Ragnhild stopped screaming. Now she groaned, low and animal. In my head I pictured her pulling the controller, trying to right the plane through sheer strength.
“Blow the hatch you stupid cow!” Geir screamed, his voice loud enough to make the speaker squawk.
A burst of yellow appeared on the top of the falling plane and the canopy flew away, pushed by the detonation of the hatch explosive and the wind shear. A dark object flipped out of the open cockpit.
Ragnhild.
A thrill ran up my spine as the parachute attached to her pilot seat rolled out and opened.
It lasted for almost a full second.
The frost giant stooped, chunks of ice falling from its ruined midsection, and snatched the floating Ragnhild from the air. Her parachute crumpled in its hand and she dangled by the cords, swaying like some bauble on a string. The frost giant lifted her to its maw and dropped her in chair, chute, and all as her abandoned jet crashed into Holmenkollen leaving a black scar on the white, white ice.
Geir screamed a war cry in my ear as the giant crushed our friend between its gnashing, stalactite teeth.
*
The sky above her burst like an egg yolk, reds and oranges and yellows flaring out brighter than the fireworks her parents had taken them to last New Year's Eve. The ground under her shook with the explosion. The monster roared and the sound shook the ground again, vibrating her bones, making her insides feel like jelly. She screamed and it was lost in the noise and the clamor. Snow fell, a fine powder of frozen steam that swirled around her.
One of the planes, the one that dropped the bombs, curled through the air, sparkling like clear water poured in a glass. Faster and faster it fell, flying nose down toward the ground. Something flew out of it. The monster bent, its face looming down, eyes so big and mean they looked like they would burn her into dust. It plucked the thing that came out of the plane from the air and dropped it into its mouth, chewing it like she did gum.
It swallowed and turned its face back to look at her.
She fell to the ground and covered her eyes.
*
The plane shook around me as I banked hard. Even through the gel pad insulation of my helmet I could hear the Vulcan Cannon firing, spitting 20mm shells at my target. The rounds strafed across the face of the second giant, cutting across its cheek, the bridge of its nose and into its left eye. It screamed, a high-pitched gale wind that made me fight the control stick to hold my course. I pulled up and from the edge of my canopy saw the giant clutching its face. A dark satisfaction made me clench and bare my teeth and scream out loud, “Take THAT you icy fucks!”
The jet whistled under me as I looped up and swung around for another pass.
“Watch this, Arne!” Geir cried in my ear “I'm bringing the thunder!”
His jet swooped up, behind both the frost giants as they watched me. He whooped over the comm, loud enough to make the electronics crackle, and banked the plane hard. Four dark shapes tumbled off the bottom of his wings, dropping like stones. They struck the giant Ragnhild had injured and fire swirled up from the creature's back and shoulders. The frost giant dropped to its knees, steam filling the air above it, but Geir had already cleared it.
“That's for Ragnhild!”
The frost giant he'd bombed slumped back, falling to the ground, its head landing beside the wreckage of Ragnhild's Viper.
Geir's plane curved through the air. The second giant, the one crouching and holding its eye, pushed off, rising like a rolling storm cloud into the air. Its arm swung out, tremendous fingers closing around the tail section of Geir's jet. The giant took an awkward half step as the jets propulsion yanked it forward, but its sheer mass stopped it. I watched the exhaust blow two of the giant's fingers apart, the joints separating and falling away in chunks.
But three of the fingers stayed clamped around the plane.
The giant shook the plane like an angry child with a broken toy. The turbine sputtered and stopped. I jerked the control stick, making my Viper sling sideways in as tight a turn as I could force it to make, the centrifugal force making my stomach lurch against my spine. My finger lay on the trigger for the 20mm guns and I roared from my fucking guts as I raced toward the giant. I had to get it to drop Geir's jet so he could eject. If not the fucking thing would crush him like an empty beer can.
The giant's ugly face seemed to swell as I flew at it, becoming larger and larger. All I wanted was to unleash the bombs strapped under me, to drop the hammer on this monstrosities. Only hours of harsh training held my hand, kept me to task. The bombs would do no damage at my altitude, I was too low. I could drop them and maybe make the giant drop Geir but he would have to fall into the detonation below him. I would kill him.
The machine guns were my only chance.
But they made me get close.
Made me take time.
My headset was silent, Geir making no noise. I didn't know if he was dead or his comms had been destroyed.
Or I couldn't hear him over my own screams of rage.
The giant held the jet, looking at it with a red eye the size of a house. The other one was a hole, a cave that dripped something dark that froze into black icicles that jutted from the socket. It's jaw dropped, beard of hoarfrost grinding against itself like mating glaciers, so loud it screeched through my rage, silencing me like an arctic monsoon on a fireplace.
Geir still didn't speak.
I pulled the trigger, praying to Christ I was fucking close enough for it to make a difference.
*
All was darkness and noise. Thunder and droplets of freezing rain that pelted her coat. She stopped screaming, not enough air filled her tiny lungs around the ice patch in her scarf. She lay in the snow, beneath the raging battle of technology and myth, praying for salvation or death. All the while, the cold crept slowly under her red coat.
*
The 20mm bullets pounded the broken fist of the frost giant, knocking great chunks of ice from its hand. The turbine must have weakened it, or the jet was too heavy for it to hold, but cracks zipped through the knuckles and knobs and the whole thing crumbled as I pumped all the bullets the Vulcan would let me fire into it. Geir's jet teetered, tilting slowly over the axis, sliding as it became free. Fingers tumbled away. The giant tried to catch the jet with its other hand but it was clumsy, and only batted it into a spin. A flower of yellow bloomed and the canopy twirled away from the body and a dark object jettisoned out.
I prayed Geir was alive as the chute on the object flared open.
I had just turned the jet to chase it when the third giant punched me from the air.
*
The ground shook under her, harder than it had, enough to bounce her into the air. The ice was hard as stone as she fell back to it. It was wet and slippery. Strange warmth, so long unfelt it had become a weird, otherworldly sensation. Yellow light spilled over her and the heat intensified. A huge fire burned a hundred feet away, shedding light and warmth like a dike that had failed. Her mind made the connection that it was one of the planes, crashed to the ice. Her eyes turned up, staring into the dimness that the world had become outside the circle cast by the flaming wreckage. The monsters all turned, their backs to the conflagration as they strode away from the heat, disappearing into the gloomy winter mix in only one long stride each.
