‘Y-, y-, yes sir,’ Adriana stammered.
Some cleaners dressed in surgical masks and black overalls entered the room, and they wordlessly and unceremoniously dumped the corpse and its severed head into a body bag, and then began mopping the blood off the floor. Sigurd, meanwhile, ran his fingers through his platinum hair and stared emotionlessly at the women.
‘Remember, sluts, you are my investments, that much is true, but I won’t hesitate to end your pathetic lives if I see it as a profitable move – or, more simply, if you make me angry. Now as you can see, Hrothgar is rock hard and ready to go! I do believe the sight of blood is quite a turn-on for him. It always has been, ever since our days on the longships. Hahaha! Now go on and get your training started. Go, you worthless animals! Move!’
‘Yes sir,’ one of the women tittered, her voice quavering with naked terror. ‘Come on girls,’ she continued. ‘Let’s not disappoint our new master.’
Sigurd let out a malicious bellow of laughter as he left the room. Adriana watched the women creeping on trembling limbs over to the leering Hrothgar, and then she swallowed a lumpy knot of horror as she prepared for her own descent into hell.
6
SIGURD
14th August 2020. An abandoned village in Yunnan Province, Western China.
‘It fucking stinks out here,’ Sigurd growled in Old Norse as the 4x4 bounced along the dirt track through the deserted village.
‘Savages, these people,’ Hrothgar gnarled in response as he stared out of the window at the mess of crumbled cement boxes.
The gutted ruins featured caved-in roofs, smashed-out doors and windows, and had brown, crumbly rebar sticking out of them at all angles; jutting porcupine quills protruding from burnt-out corpses. Rusting, stripped-bare shells of scooters, small motorcycles, bicycles and a few broken-down cars lined the broken road, melding with the rubble and weeds in a vertical triptych of decay. Above this ugliness the brown-white sky, tattooed with a haze of industrial smog, hovered as an incomplete panel to mirror its yang – the grey, litter-strewn earth beneath it.
Almost drowning out the Norsemen’s voices was a saccharine Mando-pop tune blaring from the vehicle’s speakers, its insincere effervescence serving only to mock the devastated landscape. No presence of anything that walked, crawled, slithered or flew could be detected, aside from the odd resilient cockroach they would spot scuttling across the broken walls.
The driver lowered the volume of the music as he turned to speak to Hrothgar and Sigurd in broken, heavily accented English.
‘Okay, we very very careful now, see, bridge broken, okay? We drive through river, it a little … how to say, ah … unstable. You careful, hold careful, okay?’
The man beamed a rotten-toothed smile at them and then cranked up the music again, muttering to himself as he navigated his way down the slope toward the stream. Sigurd peered through the gloom and saw that the shabbily constructed bridge had indeed been partially washed away, presumably by the massive floods that now regularly plagued this region. The stream was an unnatural yellow hue, almost fluorescent, and the water itself looked completely opaque. An oily metallic sheen shimmered on the surface, giving the flowing liquid the unsettling appearance of mercury.
‘By Geirröd,’ Sigurd muttered as he stared at the heavily polluted water. ‘This land has been hung, drawn, quartered … and slaughtered.’
Hrothgar chuckled coldly.
‘One of the traditional execution methods here used to be that of, what do they call it, “a thousand cuts”? They have translated it well, no? They must have slashed a million cuts across this earth before giving it the coup de grâce.’
Sigurd cracked his knuckles as the SUV ploughed through the polluted stream.
‘We in the West did the same to our lands. We lived through the age of industry, and what most of Europe did to their lands was not much different to this, as I recall. Mortals are short-sighted fools the world over, shield-brother. Myself, I prefer to finish my opponent with one stroke of the sword or axe. A warrior’s death should be clean and quick.’
‘Of course, but is Nature really an opponent to be bested in battle?’
‘We once thought so, didn’t we? But after all I’ve seen, all I’ve lived through, I must now say … no. The earth is a whore to be fucked, or a wealthy man whose riches are to be plundered, but not a foe to be massacred in battle. Keep your whore alive, so that you can keep fucking her. Keep your rich victim’s heart pumping, so that you can continue stealing from him. How can you profit endlessly off a dead thing?’
Hrothgar shook his head and grimaced.
‘Tell that to these idiots.’
‘Fuck. Tell it to this glorified peasant who’s driving us. He’s profited handsomely from the drawn-out execution of his land. How much do you think this car is worth?’
‘German-made, top of the line … this wasn’t cheap, I can tell you that. He’s got taste … in vehicles. Perhaps not in clothing,’ Hrothgar smirked.
Sigurd laughed with a brassy cackle.
‘Fucking nouveau riche prick! They’re the same everywhere, aren’t they?’
‘The same throughout the ages, shield-brother!’ Hrothgar replied with a chortle. ‘I hear there are plenty of them in this part of the world, particularly.’
The SUV plunged into the yellow depths of the polluted stream, and bilious-looking water splashed up onto the windows, leaving a slick of oily film as it dribbled down the glass.
‘We don’t get sick like mortals do,’ Hrothgar remarked, a look of consternation suddenly drawn across his long, angular face, his, hard, craggy features folding into an
