Valhalla, p.3
Valhalla, page 3
And then there was a moment when everything stopped.
When it slowly began to move again, Lin Kortright lowered his voice and said, ‘Christ’s sake, Julie, she can’t be. Not Carol. I mean, how can Carol be dead, for crying out loud? She’s only twenty-four. No, no, there’s got to be some mistake, you can’t . . . All right. All right, you stay there, I’m on my way. No, I’m not going to accept this, Julie. It so happens I know some pretty damn influential guys in the death business and—Julie? Julie? Oh, for fuck’s sake.’
He folded the mobile away and stowed it in its shoulder holster. On his desk the scratch pad seemed to grin up at him, its two square centimetres of blank space taunting him. At least he knew what the one word was now, but he didn’t write it in. Instead he tore off the sheet and started a new one.
On it he wrote:
WHAT DO I WANT OUT OF DEATH?
- and under that:
I WANT MY KID BACK, YOU BASTARD.
He stood up and reached for his overcoat (it could be cold in Cleveland at this time of year); then he stopped, turned back and scrawled a line through ‘YOU BASTARD’. Above it, he wrote:
PLEASE.
Just as he was walking out through the door, the phone rang again. Instinctively he picked it up, yelped as the hot surface burned his fingers, whipped the handkerchief out of his top pocket and wrapped it round the receiver.
‘Mr Kawaguchi? Hey, Toshi-san, this is unreal, I was just about to call you. Yes, I swear to God, my fingertips were actually in contact with the numbers at the precise moment—Yeah, sure, Toshi, but first there’s this favour I want to ask—Yeah, sure it’s about the project.’ Kortright pulled out a chair and folded himself into it, still talking fast. ‘Toshi, I have here a proposition that’s going to be so much to our mutual advantage you simply won’t believe—Yeah, listen, it’s market research. Well, I’m coming to that, Toshi-san. What makes this market research different is—’ Kortright paused for a moment, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘The difference is,’ he said, ‘I got someone on the inside.’
CHAPTER TWO
Howard opened his eyes. ‘Where—?’ he said. Then something exploded a few yards away, and the force of the blast picked him up and threw him through the air. He landed heavily, painfully, on his back, unable to move, as chunks of masonry the size of fists and footballs sleeted down all round him and on him; their impact was like a succession of express-delivery punches from the reigning heavyweight champion. Just when he thought it was clear at last, a flying roof tile smacked against the side of his head, temporarily blinding him with pain, shock and fear. It was the next thing to incredible that he was still alive after that.
He still couldn’t move; worse, he couldn’t feel his feet or his legs. Did that mean his back was broken?
Not far away he could hear a repetitive thudding noise. It was like the sound of machine-guns that you heard every night on the TV news, except that it was much, much louder; he could feel the vibration pulsating through the ground beneath him. (Figures: they have to tone the sound down for TV; if it was this loud they’d get complaints. Not about the war, of course, just the antisocial noise levels.) Another explosion, also quite painfully close. He realised that he had drastic burns all down one side of his face and body. By rights he ought to be dead.
No. Hold that. By rights I shouldn’t be dead at all. Shouldn’t even be here, because this isn’t Smethwick.
This can’t be Smethwick. Surely.
Another explosion erupted a few hundred yards away, reducing a large building to flying rubble. Just before it ceased to exist, Howard recognised it as the Fire Station—
Which means this must be Stony Lane, and that crossroads over there is the intersection with Green Lane. Hey, my cousin Trevor lives in that - that pile of disintegrated rubble over there. This is Smethwick.
War? In the West Midlands? How the hell could there be war in Smethwick? Unless West Bromwich had finally invaded, or diplomatic efforts to resolve the vexed question of the sovereignty of Chad Valley had finally broken down . . . Impossible. Out of the question. War only happened abroad, in hot, foreign countries where people didn’t know any better.
(A deafening whump! and a tremor like the earth shuddering; to judge by the direction of the blast, a Scud missile had just taken out the public library.)
Just enough sensation had returned to Howard’s left arm to enable him to lift it, and he saw that instead of his utterly authentic reproduction chain mail (lovingly hand-crafted by himself using two pairs of pliers and approximately sixty thousand 8mm split-spring washers) he was wearing some sort of camouflage jacket, the kind that smells of camphor and costs you twenty-quid in an army-surplus shop. The little he could see of it, just about from cuff to elbow, was filthy with brick dust, smoke and blood. Crazy, he thought. The last thing I can remember is sitting round the table in the mead hall, feasting on roast ox. How the hell can I suddenly be—?
‘In Valhalla.’
He tried to turn his head, but it wouldn’t budge. The voice, however, was familiar. It was the last voice he could remember hearing before—well, before this happened, whatever ‘this’ was. It was, in fact, the voice of the nutcase who’d stabbed him with a knife.
‘Hey,’ he wailed. ‘Get away from me.’
‘Or?’ The voice laughed. ‘Or what? You’ll call the police? Loosen up, will you? You’re supposed to be enjoying yourself.’
‘Enjoying—’ The rest of what he’d been going to say was lost in a bout of agonising coughing. He could taste blood, trickling down over his lower lip.
‘Of course,’ said the voice. ‘This is Valhalla. This is where heroes go when they die gloriously in battle. Here, for ever, they fight all day and feast all night, and at dawn the next day the dead stand up reborn and start up where they left off. Just as well for you, that,’ the voice added, ‘because otherwise you’d be a complete write-off.’
Howard could hear something gurgling in his own throat. He couldn’t speak.
‘I mean,’ the voice went on, ‘broken neck, broken back, two lungs punctured by shrapnel, skull smashed in four places, catastrophic internal bleeding from multiple bullet wounds; my friend, all the king’s horses and Hawkeye Pierce and BeeJay and the tech team from Bionic Man couldn’t put you back together again. Still, tomorrow’s another day.’
With a last frantic effort and the final few cubic centimetres of air left in his shredded lungs, Howard managed to croak, ‘What the fuck do you mean, Valhalla?’
The voice clicked its notional tongue. ‘Oh, come on,’ it said reprovingly. ‘Isn’t this what you always wanted? Only this isn’t the silly pretend dressing-up-basket version; this is the real thing. You wanted total uncompromising authenticity? You got it. Jesus, and here was me thinking you’d be grateful.’
Another shell (or missile or whatever was causing the explosions) went off a few yards away. Howard watched the whizzing fragment of razor-edged steel casing all the way, from so high up in the sky that it was hardly visible, right down to the moment when it became too close to focus on and buried itself four inches deep in his forehead.
‘Brought up to date, of course,’ the voice went on. ‘After all, the Vikings envisaged it in modern dress - modern by their standards, that is. They didn’t dress up in bearskins and woad and pretend they were living hundreds of years earlier than they actually were, and neither should you. This is Valhalla with the benefit of modern cutting-edge technology; no pun intended, of course,’ it added, as the blood stopped oozing out of the wound in Howard’s forehead. ‘Well, there you go,’ it went on. ‘Your heart’s stopped beating, so I’d better be on my way. See you tomorrow, I expect.’
Don’t leave me. He watched a pair of army boots walking away from him, until sight failed and he was left alone in darkness and pain, no longer even able to hear or feel the explosions. This isn’t Smethwick, he tried to tell himself. This is just a bad dream.
This is Valhalla.
‘First,’ said Big Olga, ‘we are to be the lavatories cleaning. This a job distasteful is, but to be doing it must someone.’
She handed Carol a wooden bucket, a bunch of thorn twigs bound together with a strip of rawhide, and a shovel.
‘Excuse me?’ Carol said.
‘To be cleaning. Hastily.’
Carol took a step backwards, shaking her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I think there’s been, like, a mistake. I don’t live here. This is not my home. And that,’ she added, letting the bucket, thorn brush and shovel fall noisily to the floor, ‘is not my job.’
Big Olga sighed; then, with a movement too fast for Carol’s eyes to follow, she grabbed Carol by the back hair and lifted her off the ground. ‘To be cleaning,’ she said, slowly, like a native English speaker in a foreign land. ‘Hastily. To be a Valkyrie is this what it is.’
Then she let go, and Carol found herself on her hands and knees on the floor, which was damp and covered in extremely smelly, mouldy rushes. ‘All right, already,’ she mumbled. ‘To be cleaning, I’m on to it. And then,’ she added, as she got up again, ‘I’m going straight to the US embassy, and they’re gonna send the Air Force to nuke your butt to hell. You got that?’
‘Youess?’ Big Olga frowned at her curiously. ‘And what is meaning nooke and butt?’
Carol opened her mouth, but nothing came out. My God. This crazy woman has never heard of the United States. Where is this?
‘Ah, come on,’ she said nervously. ‘Quit fooling around; you’re beginning to scare me. We’re in Arizona and this is one of those survivalist camp places, right? And you’re all militia nuts, or religious freaks. Hey, I can handle that, it’s okay. Just don’t look at me like you’ve never heard of America.’
Big Olga’s puzzled look relaxed into a contemptuous smirk. ‘Ach,’ she said. ‘Amerikan.’
‘That’s right,’ Carol said. ‘Hey, thank God for that, you had me worried there.’
‘Skyfather,’ Big Olga continued. ‘Skyfather he us instructs, when to here are Amerikans to be Valkyries coming, them this to be telling. I for a moment thinking, to recollect exact words.’ She frowned, and the sight of her vast eyebrows being drawn together put Carol in mind of frontiersmen dragging their wagons into a circle. ‘Skyfather, his message: You in Kansas any more are not. What is meaning,’ she went on, ‘me it beats, but is of Skyfather the word, for damn you good enough. Lavatories.’ She scooped up the bucket, the brush and the shovel, dropped them on Carol’s toes and clumped out of the door into the driving snow.
Carol looked round. Daylight was pouring in through the smoke-holes in the roof, seeping across the floor in puddles, but there were parts of this hall that would never see the light, let alone a damp cloth or the business end of a vacuum cleaner. The ugly wooden furniture was liberally draped with discarded animal pelts, bones and sleeping Vikings; the roar of their snoring was like a great waterfall, or the inside of a giant lumber mill. There were enormous dogs curled up in the cold ashes of the long fire, and dirty crockery everywhere. Carol shook herself. Had to be some kind of loony religious sect, Heaven’s Gate or neo-pagan: no rocket launchers or AK-47s to be seen, which was something, but plenty of nastily genuine-looking swords, axes, daggers stuck in tables; all superfluous, since the smell alone was enough to stun. Think, think; these fruitcakes like to hole up out in the desert somewhere. (Desert? Too damn cold for the desert, and when she opened the door, didn’t I see snow?) Or at any rate in the wildernesst, miles door, didn’t I see snow?) Or at any rate in the wilderness, miles from anywhere. Alternatives, then, were stealing a jeep and hoping she could make her own way back to civilisation, or finding a telephone, radio, whatever - except she hadn’t a clue where she was, so how could she tell them where to come and fetch her from? Snow; could be Maine, Vermont, Canada, maybe even Alaska. Unless someone had these geeks on file and knew exactly where to look, she’d be asking them to scour a sizeable proportion of the planet’s surface. Asking that of a government that can’t even be relied on to deliver a letter was probably a bit too much.
She sat down on a bench, having first removed from it a half-eaten rabbit leg and a pair of wolfskin underpants. There was a third alternative, one that couldn’t possibly be true: that she had died and gone to Valhalla, and all this was real. She felt ill at the very thought and had to put out a hand to stop herself falling off the bench; then, when she’d reset her internal gyros, she wiped whatever-it-was off her hand on the only semi-clean surface available, which was regrettably the skirt of this outlandish get-up they’d put on her. One thing was for sure: whoever and wherever, this costume had been designed by a man. Necklines like this one, in sub-zero temperatures; no way . . .
Yeah, but if I died, what did I die from? I’m not ill. People my age don’t just die in their sleep. Okay, there’s murder, or suicide, or a massive OD, or the building collapses; something like that I’d have noticed, surely. You must know it if you’re dead. Mustn’t you? Can you really die without realising?
She thought about that for a moment. Then she pinched her arm. Ouch. There, you see? Alive.
Or after-alive.
Presumably the woman knew; the one who’d dragged her out of bed and introduced herself as Big Olga. Surely she knew if she was alive or not. And all these Vikings: well, they seemed pretty much alive. Nobody snored like that when they were dead.
Valhalla. The afterlife for uppity cocktail waitresses. In the absence of decisive proof, it’d have to be a question of belief. Unfortunately, she believed. Because nobody from the twenty-first century, no matter how deluded or deranged, could ever possibly choose to live like this. Logic could gnaw holes in that line of argument in no time flat, no doubt about it. But logic, like a second-hand Lada, would only take you so far. The more she saw of this place and its inhabitants, the easier she found it to believe.
On a nearby bench, a Viking groaned and stirred. There was no way of knowing whether this was a Viking she’d already encountered or a new one; irrelevant, anyway, since they all looked pretty well identical: shaggy, grubby, greasy and lank, like an unwashed sheepdog but with absolutely none of the charm. They were so alike, in fact, they could all be brothers. Twins, even—
Or something else. Began with C. For some reason, Carol couldn’t remember the word.
‘Ale,’ groaned the Viking. ‘Of the that bit me dog in haste a hair. Very over am I hung, alas!’ He dragged himself round and flumped onto the table, his head lolling across his enormous forearms. ‘Also, for the love of Odin, a pastry Danske.’
Carol waited for a few seconds before replying. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘You talking to me?’
‘Ya, ya. You Valkyrie, ya? To be hurriedly ale bringing. Of my head the anguish!’
Carol folded her arms. ‘First, I got some questions. Where is this?’
‘Valholl. With ale what that has to do?’
‘Valhalla; I see.’ She was frowning now. The more intelligent of her colleagues in the bar had taken that frown as a cue to go collect glasses from distant outlying tables. ‘And you are?’
‘Ragnar Earwax. In life being a great hero I was.’
‘Really? Where I come from, there’s a lot of guys that look like you sleeping in cardboard boxes under road bridges. Okay, Mr Earwax, I want you to do something for me.’
The Viking lifted his head an inch or so. ‘Talking not good is. Ale I am needing, not chittering-chatter.’
‘One little thing, Mr Earwax; then maybe you get your ale. Say something for me in Viking.’
‘Chittering-chatter,’ growled the Viking, ‘and double Deutsch. Of this the point what?’
Carol shook her head. ‘Go on, say something in Norwegian.’
‘Was?’
‘Norsk. Svensk. Dansk. Islensk. Anything. Ask me for ale in Islensk and you can have the whole goddamn barrel.’
The Viking looked at her pitifully. ‘Was is Islensk?’ he asked.
‘You can’t, can you? All you can talk is this funny-broken-English shit. You haven’t got a language of your own; you can only talk what I’m supposed to be expected to hear.’
‘For talking is Valholl not,’ grumbled the Viking evasively. ‘For fighting and drinking is Valholl, and so fit for heroes.’
Carol took a step closer; the Viking squirmed away. ‘You aren’t real, are you?’ she said. ‘You’re some kind of lousy hologram or back-projection. You’re a goddamn prop.’
She reached out, grabbed a handful of his copious beard, and yanked hard. The Viking yowled, slipped off the bench and crashed to the floor, leaving her holding a dozen or so long blond hairs. The Viking, meanwhile, had grabbed hold of her ankle and was trying to bite it, so she jabbed her toe into his mouth. He howled again and scuttled under the table like a crab.
‘My big brother,’ he whined, ‘on you to be telling.’
‘You haven’t got a big brother, you freak!’ Carol yelled. ‘You aren’t human, you’re a—’ She froze. She couldn’t think of the word that began with C. ‘Pain in the ass,’ she concluded, so as not to leave the sentence incomplete. ‘Ah for Christ’s sake, come out of there.’
‘Yours to be up.’
She aimed a sharp kick at the only bit of the Viking that wasn’t protected by the table, namely his right heel. He yelped, and quickly drew it back out of harm’s way. ‘Out!’ she commanded. ‘I want answers, and I want them—’
Then someone hit her with a beer-jug, knocking her out cold.
‘In the old days, of course,’ droned the voice next to him, ‘before the latest round of cuts, we had proper Dulux brilliant white gloss, not this cheap own-brand stuff. Now Dulux, there’s a brand you can really watch, you know? Why, I spent the whole of the fifteenth century just following this one minute little run forming on the bottom left-hand corner. This modern non-drip rubbish—’
