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

fashioned from street signs, knives stolen from kitchens, even a homemade axe with a haft as thick as a telephone pole.

“Looks like Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro got together to make the Lord of the Rings meets Apocalypse Now,” Gunnar said. “This is the most messed-up hallucination I’ve ever had.”

The old man joined Gunnar at the edge of the roof. He leaned on a spear that he’d produced from thin air, further proof that none of this was real. “Look at me if this isn’t real,” the old man said.

Gunnar did as the old man asked and earned a sharp poke in the eye from a bony finger for his trouble. “What’s wrong with you? That hurt.”

“You’re the one who thinks it’s just a dream,” the old man said. “Stop being such a weakling.”

Gunnar rubbed one palm against his aching eye. It certainly didn’t feel like any dream he’d ever had. There was something more grounded, more visceral to this experience. His eye smarted like hell. The raised lip of the roof was gritty under his fingers, the smells from the Strip below far too complex to be just a figment of his imagination. And, he had to admit, this didn’t seem all that much harder to believe than that the entire city of Las Vegas would lose its mind, and that had happened while he was fully awake.

“Okay,” Gunnar said. “Let’s say I swallow the idea that you somehow dragged me out of my bed to a mountaintop, then did some woo-woo magic to bring me down to the Strip. Why go to all this trouble?”

The raven took flight, its talons dripping blood from the old man’s wounded shoulder. It unleashed a raucous caw is it wheeled into the sky and soared out over the concrete and neon canyon. Seconds later, the enormous bird caught a thermal rising from the largest bonfire, spiraled around a plume of smoke, and vanished into the dark clouds overhead. The old man chuckled as the bird left, rubbed a hand over the wounds it had opened, then took a sniff of his bloodied palm.

“The end of the old world,” he said and pointed his bloodstained hand at the strange creatures dancing in the street below, “and the beginning of a new one. Some very bad beasties are making choices about how this might play out. It’s your turn to make a decision about what kind of world you wake up to, kid.”

“Not much of a choice,” Gunnar mused. “So, what? I just snap my fingers and all this goes away, the virus vanishes, and we’re back to the good old days where the biggest worry I had in Vegas was whether the dice were hot or cold?”

“Not exactly. One way or another, your world is changing. The gates of chaos are thrown wide, and the world you knew is dying. You can either help to rebuild a new one, or let the wild things run riot until there’s nothing left. Make sure you know what you’re deciding, though,” the old man said. “Take a good look at what’s down there. Really soak it in for a minute. I don’t want you to come back whining you didn’t know what you were choosing when you trip over the first rough spot in the road.”

Gunnar watched the scene unfolding below him with narrowed eyes. The creatures down there looked like monsters plucked out of some twisted fairy-tale picture book. But not all the shouts and cries rising up from that street were of pain or anger. They were celebrating, feasting and fucking without a care in the world. For these creatures, whatever they were, the only rule was to do whatever they wanted.

After all Gunnar had been through—both his parents taken early by ugly cancers, his job ripped away by Arthur’s conniving, the love of a good woman denied to him by rules that held her prisoner, a life of crime forced on him by circumstance—what had taken over the Strip didn’t seem half bad. The idea of scrambling down the side of the tower to join in the festivities had a certain allure to it. He couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if his biggest worry was what to kill for his next meal or which woman to fuck.

“I can go down there, right now, and join the fun?” Gunnar asked.

The old man flashed him a toothy grin, and Gunnar swore he saw the white-hot glow of lightning leaking around the ancient prick’s ratty eyepatch. “Sure. Leave your worries behind. Join the jötnar and indulge every primal dream you’ve ever had. Be a jötunn, part of the chaos, and shrug off the rules of the world men built here on Midgard. You can make that choice, right now. But you only get to decide which path to walk once.”

“What’s the other option?” Gunnar asked. “Stay on this roof with you and get my ear gummed off?”

“I won’t be bothering you much longer, one way or another,” Gunnar’s companion said. “If you don’t want to hang out with the wild ones, go back to that cave with the women you rescued. Build a fortress for yourself, something to protect you and yours from the storm of evil headed your way. Be the protector of Midgard, rebuild a new world of order from the madness. Be a hero in a time when most men have forgotten what that means.”

Gunnar couldn’t take his eyes off the crazy caveman carnival playing out beneath him. Though it was at least a hundred feet from his perch to the street, he saw everything with perfect clarity. A horned beast of a creature with cloven hooves ripped steaming meat from a blackened rib bone with ivory teeth. A sleek female with a whipping tail and skin that gleamed like a blue mirror clambered on top of a short, hairy man with a cock the size of a bowling pin. Another pair of monsters in scorched police uniforms