Valhalla Virus, Nick Harrow [simple ebook reader txt] 📗

his father, one bite at a time. Paranoia had always crept in around the edges, but toward the end it had dug its hooks in deep. The old man had cautioned Gunnar, time and again, to mind his own business, to help those closest to him and ignore the rest of the world. He’d always warned his son that there was no one outside his own family he could, or should, trust.

So when his dad had warned Gunnar of a changing world and bad things on the horizon, the bodyguard hadn’t paid much attention. Now, though, he felt different.

Something was coming. It was big and hungry, and it was sick of all the bullshit humanity had raised up from the dirt. It had a wolf’s snout and fangs as sharp as midwinter icicles. If it had its way, the monster would eat them all and shit out their bones. All of mankind’s cities would be gone, sandcastles washed away by a bitter tide.

Ray shook Gunnar awake. She leaned over, her hand on his forehead. “Jesus, babe, you’re on fire.”

“Yeah, you’re sexy, too,” Gunnar said, forcing a laugh that became a ragged cough. The car wasn’t moving. They’d made it to Mimi’s. “Let’s get inside.”

Gunnar pushed the door open, ripped off his seatbelt, and dragged his long legs out of the Accord’s cramped footwell. Burger wrappers and cardboard fry trays spilled out onto the concrete driveway and were promptly carried away by an unseasonably cool wind that howled through the streets like the monster Gunnar’s dad had warned him about. The sound chilled him more than the temperature.

“Look at this mess,” a woman called out from beneath the opening garage door at the front of the two-story house. “Pull that shit heap in here and get out of sight. Last thing I need is the neighbors wondering why the jolly green giant showed up on my doorstep looking like he’s caught himself a bad case of the clap.”

Gunnar looked up at the house, his vision blurred, as Ray pulled the car past him and into the oversized garage. The peaked roof sagged in the middle and rose on each end where a pair of crossed beams stabbed at the sky. The faint sound of a blowing horn reached his ears as he tried to get his bearings, and the ground rushed up to slap him in the face as the last of the strength leaked out of his legs.

Chapter 4

GUNNAR CAME TO SOMEWHERE inside Mimi’s place, one arm slung over Ray’s shoulder, the other hooked over the much taller Bridget’s. The women huffed and puffed under his weight, and he mumbled an apology and forced himself to take the weight off the ladies. His virus-ravaged voice sounded like a bullfrog caught in a tin can.

“Windows are all ballistic glass with one-way coating,” Mimi explained as they passed through a living room that was a time capsule from the seventies. Orange shag carpeting covered the floor and a sunken sectional surrounded the only modern piece in the room: an eighty-inch flat screen. Their guide rapped her knuckles on the door, then rested her hand on one of the heavy metal bars that barricaded it from the inside. “My current employer upgraded the place to withstand an assault. Until you all showed up, I thought they’d overreacted. Maybe not.”

“Sorry,” Gunnar sighed, and shuddered as another chill racked his frame. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come.”

Mimi muttered something that Gunnar couldn’t hear after that, though he was sure it was a string of curses directed at him. Mimi had semi-retired from the game a few years ago, and she didn’t like anyone, especially not refugees with trouble on their heels, showing up at her door. The last time the bodyguard had seen her, his former mentor had made it clear she did not want him darkening her doorstep unless he was walking the straight and narrow. “No offense, Gun,” she’d said as she shrugged into one of her too-tight tour shirts, “but I’ve gone through too much crawling out of that hole to let you drag me back into it.”

“I wouldn’t have let you in if there was another option,” Mimi said at last, blowing a strand of her curly red hair out of her eyes with an exasperated sigh. “Get your sorry asses into the elevator, and I’ll get you tucked in somewhere you can sleep off whatever the hell got into you. We’ll worry about what my bosses think tomorrow.”

Bridget entered a glass-walled box at the end of a short hallway. She leaned against the far wall, crossed her arms beneath her breasts, face turned to the floor. The white ponytail hung over her face like a veil, but it couldn’t hide the sounds of her sniffling or the coughs she tried to stifle. Ray went next, without bothering to hide her red eyes or running nose. They looked like hell, but Gunnar knew he must have been even worse from the way Mimi stared at him when she joined him in the elevator and pushed the down arrow button.

“We need some place secure,” Ray piped up, her voice as ragged as a career smoker’s. “A separate room for each of us, if you can.”

Mimi pulled the frayed collar of her ancient concert T-shirt up over her nose and gave her visitors the evil eye. “What did you bring here, Gun?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “People are going crazy. We needed a place to hole up, and you were the only one I could trust. We weren’t all sick when I called.”

“Motherfucker,” Mimi muttered. “If I catch Captain Trips or some other Stephen King plague, I will string you up by your balls.”

Gunnar wanted to tell Mimi she was welcome to fondle his balls whenever she liked, but he’d run out of gas again. His eyes drifted closed, and he leaned back against the wall.

Someone had painted a whimsical mineshaft scene on the other side of the elevator’s glass wall. The