Valhalla, page 7
‘But that’s crazy,’ Howard said, while the machine-gun reduced the fallen blocks and bricks to gravel and dust. ‘What about survival instincts, self-preservation? They’re part of every living thing’s DNA.’
‘The key word there is “living”,’ the sergeant said. ‘And you ain’t. Immortal, yes. Alive, no. Now deal with it, and get fighting.’
Another explosion lifted the debris into the air and rearranged it, uncovering the sergeant’s body. What with one thing and another, it looked like the sort of jigsaw you’d expect to find given away free with the Butcher’s Gazette. ‘No,’ Howard said firmly. ‘Now, what’re you going to do about it?’
‘Remember it, next time we can’t find a volunteer for the burning-house scenario. And that’s a promise. About the only thing around here that never gets shot off or blown up is the memory. And I can prove it, too; go on, ask me something. Ask me who was the losing team in the 1974 FA Cup final.’
‘I’ll fight,’ Howard said wretchedly. ‘Anything to get away from the sound of your voice. What do I fight with, exactly?’
‘The choice is yours,’ the sergeant said. ‘We got guns, grenades, rockets, bazookas, bayonets, axes, flame-throwers - you name it. Weapons R Us.’
‘Wonderful,’ Howard sighed. ‘And where do you go to get some?’
‘Easy. Find someone who’s got what you want, stove his head in with a lump of rock, help yourself. Here, can you fly a helicopter gunship?’
‘No.’
‘Doesn’t matter. After all, the worst thing that can happen to you is you crash it.’
‘Fine. And how do I know which side is us and which is the enemy?’
‘Don’t talk soft, son. We don’t bother with sides. Where’s the point?’
The machine-gun stopped firing, and Howard jumped to his feet and ran. A line of bullet holes followed him all the way across the street to the burnt-out jeep he’d selected as cover. He huddled under it until he got his breath back, then set off again. Ten seconds later, the jeep was hit by a mortar bomb and blown into piranha confetti; by then, however, Howard was cowering at the bottom of a shell-crater. The next leg of his journey landed him behind a toppled wall. No sooner had he dropped down, breathing heavily through his nose, than he realised he wasn’t alone; there was another man there with him, trying to unblock a jammed machine-gun.
‘Hello,’ said the man cheerfully, and lashed out with a length of broken gaspipe. ‘Turned out quite mild again, hasn’t it?’
Howard managed to avoid the blow but tripped on a stray breeze-block and ended up on his backside in the mud. The other man stood over him and raised the gaspipe; then he toppled forward, riddled with bullet holes.
‘But the forecast says rain later,’ he croaked; then he died.
Howard allowed himself a moment to get over the feelings of numb terror; then he grabbed the machine-gun and ducked down out of the way of the next spate of gunfire. He was kneeling on the dead man.
‘Some time after lunch,’ the dead man added. ‘Intermittent showers followed by sunny intervals.’
Without waiting to see if the coast was clear, Howard jumped up and sprinted away, the jammed machine-gun tucked under his arm. The blast from a nearby shellburst lifted him up and hurled him into a pile of rubble, the hot gases roasting half the skin off his face as it did so. He landed right on top of a dead body.
‘Morning,’ said the body. ‘You didn’t happen to catch the weather forecast, did you?’
‘Rain after lunch, sunny intervals,’ Howard replied. ‘Do you know how to unjam a machine-gun?’
‘Pulling back sharply on the cocking handle usually does the trick,’ the corpse said. ‘Failing that, you’re looking at stripping it right down. Here, take mine instead if you like.’
Howard noticed that there was another machine-gun, bigger and blacker and shinier, under the dead man’s left leg. ‘Thanks,’ Howard said.
‘You’re welcome.’
Behind the next burnt-out building shell Howard came to, he found two men still alive and on their feet, grappling with each other over an RPG7. He pointed the machine-gun at them and blew them both into mincemeat.
‘Snow forecast for Tuesday,’ one of them remarked, though after what Howard had done to him with the M-60, it was difficult to imagine what he said it with.
‘They said the same thing last week,’ remarked the other one scornfully. ‘Sometimes I think they just make it up as they go along.’
Howard looked at his handiwork and shuddered. ‘The weather,’ he said. ‘Is that all you people talk about here?’
‘Yes,’ the dead men replied together.
Howard thought about that for a moment. ‘Figures,’ he said. ‘And why not, after all?’
‘See you tomorrow,’ they called out after him as he dashed into the street, the machine-gun in his hands spitting out bullets and spent cases. ‘Light showers, turning into heavy rain around teatime.’
After a few hours of this sort of thing, Howard was almost beginning to enjoy himself. Before he lost count he reckoned he’d killed seventy-four men, and by a succession of miracles that ought to have set back the study of probability theory about a hundred years, his own injuries were confined to a few minor scrapes and bruises. He’d single-handedly wiped out the four platoons guarding the junction of the High Street and Cooper’s Lane, defended the Warley College of Technology against greatly superior forces and driven them back into the Victoria Park boating lake, and left the Council Offices looking like a sequence that Tarantino had cut from the final version of one of his films as being just a trifle excessive; he only stopped, in fact, when he couldn’t find anyone else to kill. He felt like a cross between James Bond and an American postman. It was scary, but—well, fun.
‘Bet you’re glad you came now, aren’t you?’
He whirled round, aimed from the hip and pulled the trigger. Clunk, no bang-bang-bang; he let the machine-gun fall from his hands and brought up the 9mm Ingram that hung round his neck on a strap. That appeared to have jammed, too, so he let it drop and reached for his grenade belt. It was empty, which was odd; there’d been at least five left after he finished mopping up round the Council Offices.
‘Remember me?’
He realised he hadn’t looked at the man, except fleetingly as a silhouetted target. ‘You,’ he said, as he recognised the bastard who’d stabbed him at the ox roast and sent him here in the first place.
The man nodded. ‘Me,’ he said. ‘Oh, by the way, none of the guns and bombs seem to work when I’m around, so if you want to get your own back, you’ll have to use something with no significant moving parts, like a rock or a bit of old stick.’
‘Like this?’ Howard snarled, brandishing a jagged strip of scrap steel.
‘Ideal,’ the man replied.
Howard lunged forward, aiming a vicious slash at the man’s head. He blocked it with his forearm - there should have been a thin spray of blood as the metal cut him to the bone, but there wasn’t - pulled the strip out of Howard’s hands and threw it away. ‘Pathetic,’ he said. ‘A dying Tele-tubby could do better than that.’
Howard grunted like a bull rhino and snatched up a lump of shattered breeze-block. Yesterday he could barely have lifted it; now he hurled it like a man throwing a rubber ball for his dog. It bounced off the man’s forehead without apparent effect.
‘Sticks and stones won’t break my bones,’ the man said, sounding bored. ‘You could try some really barbed repartee, if you like.’
‘Arsehole.’
The man considered this. ‘No,’ he said, ‘sorry, doesn’t cut it. You’d better stick to the physical stuff, I reckon.’
Howard stooped, picked up a discarded bayonet, and lunged with it. The man fended him off with the tip of his little finger, then flicked him on the nose, the way you flick a screwed-up ball of paper across a table. Howard flew through the air and landed in a painful, complicated heap on a pile of twisted aluminium window frames and broken glass. When he held his hand up, it was streaming blood.
‘Your go,’ the man said.
Howard tried again, this time with a long-handled fire-axe that just happened to be handy. Instead of simply lashing out, he cunningly feinted a blow to the man’s head and then brought the blade whirling down on his left ankle. The handle snapped, and the axehead whizzed past his own ear.
‘You may find there’s something of a pattern emerging,’ the man said. ‘Let’s see, silver bullets are out, so how about a sharpened stake through the heart? That always seems to do the job on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’
By a remarkable coincidence, there was a sharp-ended wooden tent peg lying a couple of inches from Howard’s feet. He collected it deftly, sprang forward and drove it into the man’s chest on the left side. It broke.
‘It was just a suggestion,’ the man said apologetically. ‘One more step in an ongoing process of, no pun intended, elimination. I know; since a benign Providence has seen fit to bless you with a working flame-thrower - there, look, just behind you; and gosh, there’s the user’s manual, open at the right page, too.’
The curtain of fire from the flame-thrower vaporised the wooden door frame the man was leaning against, melted the hinges and turned the door into fine white ash. The man used the blaze to light a cigarette.
‘Terribly bad for you, these,’ he remarked. ‘My children don’t approve; they keep saying I should take more care of myself.’ He blew smoke in Howard’s face, and the gust swept him off his feet and dumped him in a pile of burst dustbin-bags. ‘That’s a thought,’ he said, ‘why don’t you try chemical weapons? By some million-to-one chance, there’s a nearly full cylinder of mustard gas just behind that fallen rafter.’
Howard shook his head and slumped to his knees. ‘I give in,’ he said.
‘Can’t do that, I’m afraid,’ the man replied with a sympathetic grimace. ‘Got to keep trying until either you succeed or the sun sets. Rules is rules.’
Howard scowled. ‘And if I don’t?’
‘Then this happens.’ The man tipped the ash from his cigarette and inclined his head just a little. At once every nerve in Howard’s body started to shriek with pain. ‘Normally I’d be inclined to say that this hurts me more than it hurts you, but I sense you aren’t in the mood for light-hearted wordplay. If it’s the legal aspect of using the mustard gas that’s bothering you, then try something else: you don’t have to use it. Again, it was just a suggestion.’
By a supreme effort of will, Howard managed to break free from the paralysing effect of the pain just long enough to pick up a small stone and lob it gently. The man ducked, and the pain stopped as abruptly as it had started. ‘Good boy,’ he said. ‘Like I always say, it’s the thought that counts.’
Howard slid full-length on the ground, his face in the dust. ‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘My name is Odin,’ the man replied.
Howard lifted his head. ‘Odin,’ he repeated. ‘Like the god?’
‘Very like,’ Odin replied with a smile. ‘I expect this is the crowning moment of your existence, actually getting to meet the god you and your enthusiastic re-enacter chums spent so much time and energy honouring. Not to mention money,’ he added. ‘I don’t suppose all that gear comes cheap.’
‘Mostly we make it ourselves,’ Howard mumbled.
‘Out of empty Fairy Liquid bottles and sticky-backed plastic? Oh well. Blessed are the cheapskates, for they shall see God and still have change out of a fiver. Anyway, don’t let me stop you savouring the moment.’
Howard spat out a mouthful of brick dust. ‘You killed me,’ he said bitterly. ‘I never did you any harm, and you—’
‘Didn’t you? Well, matter of opinion, I suppose. If you ask me, keeping me hanging around in this dimension when all the other pagan gods have long since fallen into disuse and gone off to run bars in the Algarve or start their own production companies strikes me as ill-mannered, to say the least. When I think of Jupiter and Baal and Zoroaster lounging beside the pool in their pyjamas while I still have to turf myself out of bed at half past five every morning, I don’t mind admitting I feel a little bit put upon, at times. Still, one has one’s duty to one’s public, and the show must go on.’
Howard stared at him. ‘But we didn’t believe in you,’ he said. ‘Perish the thought. I mean, it was only fun.’
‘Fun.’ Odin’s brows drew together like two shrubberies fighting to the death. ‘Best part of a thousand years of unpaid overtime, and you tell me you didn’t actually believe, it was just for fun. Oh dear. Does the concept of consideration for others have any meaning whatsoever in your nasty little mindset?’
‘I - I’m sorry.’
‘And what about all this?’ Odin continued. ‘All the work I’ve put into getting this place ready for you, making sure everything’s just the way you want it. I suppose you’re going to tell me you’d have preferred something quieter in eggshell blue?’
Howard had great difficulty regaining control of his lower jaw, which had swung open like the lid of a broken suitcase. ‘For me?’ he said.
‘All for you. Every last brick, blade of grass and razor-edged fragment of shell casing, lovingly handcrafted in perfect detail, just so that you can experience killing and mayhem in all their multifaceted splendour.’
‘But I don’t want—’ Howard wailed. Odin cut him off short with a horrible scowl.
‘Talk about your serpent’s tooth,’ he sighed. ‘And please, don’t insult my intelligence. Every weekend, fifty-two weeks of the year, devoted to playing at fighting; obviously this is what you wanted. No question about it.’
‘No!’ Howard cried. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I only joined the club to make new friends and meet girls.’
Odin raised one shaggy eyebrow. ‘Girls?’ he repeated.
Howard nodded. ‘Girls,’ he said. ‘You know, young women. You see, all my life I never had the knack; and then a friend of mine from work - well, not a friend, exactly, I never had any of them either - he took me along to a club night and there were quite a lot of girls there, and they seemed a bit different, like they were drinking beer and wearing lots of leather and chain mail and stuff, and I thought I might stand a better chance.’
‘I see,’ Odin said. ‘And did you?’
‘No. They used to stare at me and then giggle, just like they all do. But at least some people talked to me after I’d been going regularly for a year or so, and I hadn’t got anything else to do, so I stayed. But all the fighting and stuff was never my cup of tea. The only bit I ever really liked was the embroidery. ’
‘Embroidery?’
‘Yes. If you want to be really authentic, you embroider wall hangings for the clubhouse, using genuine period motifs and organically dyed vegetable fibres. I quite enjoyed that. Well, mostly it was boring, but when you’d finished one it gave you a real sense of achievement.’
‘Right.’ Odin gave him a look of pure scorn. ‘Embroidery. Not the pure love of battle or deeply held religious beliefs. Originally, if I understand you correctly, the vague hope of getting your leg over. It was just something to kill time at the weekends and a passing infatuation with cross-stitch.’ He shook his head. ‘Honestly. You people.’
Howard put his face in his hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s the story of my life, really. All I ever do is cause trouble. ’
‘Yes,’ Odin said. ‘You do. Well, I really wish you’d thought of doing evening classes or amateur dramatics instead; it’d have saved us both an eternity of boredom and misery. Too late now, though. Anyway,’ he added, as the world around them suddenly fell into shadow, ‘bright and early tomorrow morning, remember, it’s your turn for the burning-buildings shift.’
‘Oh.’
‘Well, tough. Like I said, this Valhalla is expressly designed to enable you to sample every aspect of the death-in-battle experience, and burning slowly to death is an essential part of it. And you had your day’s victory today, so you can’t grumble.’
‘My day’s victory?’ A thought occurred to Howard; not a nice one. ‘Are you telling me that I killed all those people and survived all those explosions just because it was my turn? Like, I didn’t have anything to do with it?’
Odin laughed unkindly. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Do you seriously believe a total loser like you could last five seconds in a battle unless the script was a hundred and ten per cent on your side? That was a whole century’s worth of good luck you just used up in one day. I thought at the time you were being a bit extravagant with it, but I didn’t want to spoil it, not when you were obviously having such a good time. Well, it seemed obvious. Apparently it wasn’t.’
Odin turned to go. ‘Wait,’ Howard shouted, ‘there’s been a mistake, obviously. Isn’t there anything at all we can do about it? For both our sakes,’ he added imploringly.
‘No.’
‘But surely—’
Odin frowned. ‘Look, son, this isn’t a week’s free trial, this is Death. You’ve dug your grave and now you must lie in it. Oops, almost forgot.’ With a movement that was too quick for Howard to follow, Odin swept up a discarded Kalashnikov and emptied its magazine into him, starting with the feet and working his way methodically up to the top of Howard’s head. ‘Just in time,’ the god said as the sun dipped below the horizon. ‘House rule: nobody on their feet at lights out except me. And now I’ve got to go round tidying up and putting everything back together; don’t suppose I’ll see my bed much before four-thirty a.m. If you think you’ve got it rough, just you try rebuilding war-torn Smethwick every night for a thousand years.’
Howard called out after Odin as he walked away; but Howard’s lower jaw had been completely shot away, and his throat was like a colander. His last conscious thought, before slipping away into the abyss of pain, was a vague but devout wish that he’d done as his cousin Steve had suggested and joined the St John’s Ambulance instead. He might have ended up in some similar heap of shit - with his luck, he was beginning to see that as inevitable - but at least he’d have had the basic grounding in anatomy to be able to put himself together again.
