The Beasts Of Valhalla

insane laughter. His upper lip kept catching on the edges of his broken teeth, giving him a very wet lisp. 'Now I'm gong to fix you and your brother up good.'

I winced and screwed my eyes shut as the needle sliced into the soft flesh of my left shoulder-reacting not to pain, but in terror of just what might be in the solution Bolesh was injecting into me, and what its effect would be; I had a gnawing suspicion it would make my memories of the rabies shots seem like morphine dreams.

Bolesh refilled the syringe, repeated the procedure with Garth. Then he went across the barn, sat down on the dirty straw about fifteen yards from us, and leaned back against another support pillar. Rolling the hypodermic like a cigar in his fingers, he drew his knees up to his chest, rested his forearms on them and stared at us with a childlike grin of anticipation on his face.

Garth and I stared back at him.

After a half hour or so Bolesh began to look unhappy. After another half hour he gave each of us a second shot. He'd emptied almost a quarter of the bottle into our veins.

More staring. Garth began to snore loudly, although I suspected he wasn't really asleep.

Finally, around what my stomach told me was lunchtime, Bolesh got up. He cursed, spat at us, then picked up his pharmaceutical outfit and stalked out of the barn.

'Hi, shithead,' Garth announced in a determinedly cheerful tone as Bolesh and bag entered the barn in the afternoon. 'Good to see you, Jake. We've really missed you. How about another shot of that happy juice? That's good stuff.'

Bolesh's jaw muscles clenched tightly, and his eyes narrowed to slits. He didn't seem to be able to believe what he was seeing-or wasn't seeing. He set the bag down, came over and, still being careful to stay out of kicking range, tore off our shirts and examined the flesh of our necks and torsos. He looked like he wanted to take our pants off but was afraid of what we might be able to do with our feet.

Then he obliged Garth, gave us both another injection. This time he gave the shots directly in a vein in the neck, as if he wanted to make certain the fluid was entering our bloodstreams. Then he sat down against his pillar and stared.

We stared back.

This time it took him until dusk to get impatient. He gave us both still another shot, paced around until it got dark, left.

Bolesh brought us water, but no food. It was just as well; with nothing solid going in, nothing solid came out. Our keeper obviously wasn't worried about surprise visits from state health inspectors. 'It's gone, you fuckers, all gone!' Bolesh shouted as he entered the barn on the morning of the next day.

'Come on, shithead,' Garth replied. 'Stop teasing us. I can see the bottle right there in your hand; there's lots of that good stuff left. Be a sport and give us another shot.'

He did.

By late afternoon, something was starting to happen.

Garth had begun to suffer occasional muscle spasms which rippled up and down his body in undulating waves, causing his knees to knock and teeth to chatter. However, each time the spasms passed after two or three minutes and Garth assured me that he was all right, insisting there was nothing wrong with him that three steaks and a gallon of whiskey sours wouldn't cure.

I wasn't certain I believed him. His vicious and insistent defiance of Bolesh was no mere act of wasted macho or false bravado; it was, I knew, part of a ritual. Like a samurai, Garth was preparing to die, and refusal to give Bolesh the slightest bit of satisfaction was part of his death song.

My own symptoms were more subtle, but no less real. Although the sun was starting to go down, I noticed that I was squinting against the twilight. I realized I had been squinting all day and had suffered a hammering headache until an hour or so before, when it had begun to grow darker and cooler.

My eyes were becoming intensely photosensitive.

The symptoms were uncomfortable and distressing, but-even if Bolesh had been aware of them-I was certain they weren't what he seemed so anxious to write home about; our host was looking for something a lot more dramatic, and he was very annoyed by the fact that he wasn't getting it.

'It's gotta' work,' Bolesh mumbled thickly as he injected the last of the solution into our veins. 'I've seen it work.'

Finding out what would happen when the stuff 'worked' was not high on my list of priorities. I was no samurai.

The next morning it was clear that Bolesh was all out of patience. He arrived with a shotgun.

'Hi, shithead,' Garth said. 'If you've run out of happy juice, why don't you get the hell out of here so we won't have to look at your ugly face?'

'Yeah,' I said wearily. 'Jake, why don't you just unlock our handcuffs and go away?' I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for Garth's ritual, or hope to match his fanciful, New York City-detective type sense of humor. I had the most absurd yet insistent urge to take a bath, smell a rose, eat three eggs boiled for exactly three minutes, and drink one cup of coffee. Not necessarily in that order.

Bolesh propped up his shotgun by the door, came over to examine us once more. No sale. He cursed, kicked at us, stalked back toward his shotgun.

Fortunately, we had a visitor. A trim but solidly built man dressed in combat boots, khaki slacks, and matching tank top stepped silent as a flesh-colored shadow into the barn. He was totally bald, with large, almost soulful, brown eyes. There had been a time when he hadn't been able to walk around in the summer without a coat-a psychological malady caused by repeated dousings in Nazi ice baths. Our 'mutual friend' had cured that. The man had to be pushing seventy, but you certainly couldn't tell by looking at his flat stomach, his toned, rippling muscles, or his eyes.

He could have used Bolesh's gun, but preferred to wield his own-a Remington 870 with modified choke and combat barrel designed to tighten the focus of a buckshot pattern. He shot from the hip. The charge caught Bolesh in the neck just below the jaw, permanently fixing his teeth as it blew his head off.

Garth's astonished shout pierced the deafening echo of the blast. 'Lippitt!'

'Oh, yeah,' I breathed, staring transfixed at Bolesh's decapitated body and the shiny mop of greasy, blood- stained hair that had somehow managed to land on a wall peg fifteen yards away. I would dearly have loved to kill Bolesh myself, but I decided I was willing to settle for the status quo. 'I forgot to tell you about him. He's been playing chauffeur for the Volsung Corporation.'

'Jesus,' Garth gasped. 'Jesus!' He had expected to die, had prepared himself for it from the moment he had found himself handcuffed to the post. Now, like me, he wasn't quite sure what to make of the fact that he was going to live.

'Where the hell have you been, Lippitt?' I said, still unable to take my eyes off Bolesh's twitching corpse. 'You took your sweet time getting here. We've been sitting here pissing our pants in anticipation.'

Lippitt stared at me hard, a single question in his eyes; he wanted to know if I had broken our pact, with Garth or anyone else. I shook my head slightly. He grunted softly, put his Remington aside, and searched through Bolesh's pockets until he found the keys to the handcuffs. He came around behind us, unlocked the cuffs.

'It took me a while to find you. You two threw Bolesh off his feed; he's been holed-up in the farmhouse.'

'Where's your wizard costume, Lippitt?' I asked. 'I rather liked that. Nice touch.'

'Being currently unemployed, I don't need a disguise any longer.'

Our handcuffs off, Garth and I slowly got up, stretched to the accompaniment of cracking joints, rubbed our raw wrists.

'Mongo's told me half the story,' Garth said softly to Lippitt, a slight threatening edge to his voice. After an afternoon of smoke and gunfire a few years before on a New York dock, Garth had never much cared for Lippitt. 'Why don't you give us the punch line?'

'Later,' Lippitt replied evenly as he walked to a corner where Bolesh had thrown the valise, empty bottle, and syringe. He knelt down and tore the rubber sheeting off the top of the bottle. He sniffed at the inside of the bottle, rubbed his index finger around the rim, put the tip of his finger on his tongue. He spat, bowed his head, sighed.