“Do you have a problem with that?”
Shaking with silent mirth, Soren shook his head. “No, Mr.
Slayne, no problem at all.”
“What did I just tell you?”
“Oh, sorry. No, Solo, I don’t.”
Twenty minutes later, as abruptly as the winds had started, they died. In the sudden stillness Slayne rolled down his window. Quiet reigned. The gray sky once again moved at a snail’s pace. He turned the Hunster over and drove out of the gully.
Every last vestige of vegetation for miles around had been destroyed. The grass and weeds had been scoured from the earth.
Most of the trees were down.
Not one had any leaves left, or much bark.
“Let’s hope we don’t run into that again.” Slayne drove to the road and continued west.
They took 200 to State Highway 83 and crossed the Missouri River at Washburn. Half a dozen times they spotted other people but always at a distance.
“Is it me, or is everyone avoiding the roads?” Montoya mentioned.
They saw deer. They saw a few birds. They braked for a black bear that crossed in front of them, but it paid them no mind. A lot of its fur was missing and it kept twitching and jerking as it walked.
Avoiding cities and towns, they made it across North Dakota and into Montana. Slayne decided to dare Interstate 94 in the belief that they would make better time. For a while, they did.
Then, northeast of Miles City, they crested a low rise and beheld a sight that caused Slayne to stomp on the brake to bring the Hunster to a stop.
A man lay on his back in the middle of the highway. He was surrounded by people—and they were eating him.
A Taste of Things
to Come
Soren Anderson reeled. He kept thinking that he couldn’t be seeing what he thought he was seeing.
There were about twenty of them. Their clothes were filthy and torn and some were in ratters. The people were filthy, too.
But it wasn’t the filth that shocked Soren. It was the sores or lesions that spotted their skin, boiling festers that oozed green pus.
Their eyes, when they raised their heads and stared dumbly at the Hunster, were dull and glazed and so bloodshot they were pits of red. Saliva oozed from their open mouths in steady streams of drool.
“Dear Odin,” Soren breathed. “What’s wrong with them?”
“A chemical weapon, maybe,” Slayne said. “Or one of the new bio bugs.”
As CEO of Tekco he had heard rumors of things like this, and worse.
Montoya gaped in disgust. “But why are they eating him?
Why not hunt or find canned food?”
The things went back to their feeding. One gnawed on an intestine. Another chewed on a dripping chunk of leg.
“They’re ignoring us,” Montoya said. “Go around them. Let’s get out of here.”
Slayne nodded, but as he went to press the gas, the back door opened. “Thor? What in hell are you doing?”
“This is an abomination. It must not be.” Soren walked around to the front of the Hunster, Mjolnir at his side. He remembered what the Family Armorer had told him. The hammer could be set to Arc or Bolt. In addition there were four power settings. The lowest was a million volts, and it went up in million-volt increments from here. At four million, the highest, the blast drained the hammer completely and Mjolnir couldn’t be used again until he recharged it using the power belt. But he wouldn’t need that much now. He pressed the appropriate rune, setting the hammer to Arc and one million volts. He raised Mjolnir. “I am Thor. I command you to stop.”
The festering horrors fixed their red eyes on him. They were eerily silent.
Then those on their knees rose, and they all came toward him at once, moving with a peculiar shambling gait, their mouths opening and closing as if they were gulping for air.
Soren’s skin crawled, but he held his ground. He pressed the rune to fire.
Mjolnir jumped in Soren’s hands. The head glowed bright and hummed.
From the weapon lanced crackling lightning bolts that arced and leaped at the advancing monstrosities, striking them in the head, face, and chest. Half died on their feet, writhing and contorting and jerking like puppets on invisible strings. They didn’t scream. They didn’t cry out. Those still standing closed in and Soren unleashed a second blast.
Bodies dropped, thud after thud.
“Sweet Odin,” Soren breathed. He had practiced with Mjolnir but not on living foes. Only two were still alive, and they came for him, their hands outstretched. Revulsion swept through him.
He crushed the skull of the first and reduced the face of the second to splintered pulp.
Soren moved among them, making sure. Some had burn marks. Some were giving off smoke. He swallowed and looked at Mjolnir, felt the familiar tingle down his spine. “So much power,” he said in awe.
“What in hell did you think you were doing?” Slayne and Montoya had come out of the Hunster, and Slayne wasn’t happy.
“You could have been killed.”
“I couldn’t just sit there. I had to do something.”
“They were no threat to us. We could have gone on by. Get it through your head that you can’t go taking needless risks.”
“I did what the son of Odin would do.”
Slayne held his temper. “Just because we call you Thor doesn’t make you Thor. Damn it, Anderson. You have a responsibility to the Family. You can’t go throwing your life away on a whim.”
“I do what I must,” Soren insisted.
Montoya stared at Mjolnir. “I’ve never seen anything like it,”
he said in awe. “I want one of those.”
Soren reverently held the hammer to his chest. “Mjolnir is the only one of its kind.”
“How does it work?”
“I don’t understand all the science,” Soren admitted. Richter and Allan had told him that the higher the power setting, the higher the current it induced, and that it was the current more than the volts that killed. But then they had also told him that it was the
