18

 

They entered a vast rectangular clearing fringed by tree stumps and jagged bits of metal sticking up out of the ground. Surrounding the stumps were lines of sentinel trees, acting like a wall, or border. But what filled the clearing felt otherworldly. The strangely shaped buildings, tall metal spires, a huge wooden boat trapped in a pond, and red rails of jumbled metal twisted and curled skyward, felt like a slap in the face. They had been expecting an ambush, not a strange wonderland of unusual shapes.

Ulrik stopped his ATV as soon as the strange visual delights appeared.

“Nils?” Val asked. “What in the name of the gods are we looking at here?”

“I have no idea. Nothing like this was in any book I ever read.”

Metal loops soared into the sky, and buildings with tops like turnips dotted the clearing. Giant human skulls sat impaled on fences, and towers dangled what looked like chairs from chains. There were huge machines that resembled spiders, with mechanical limbs. One building had multiple stacked roofs, with the corners extending past the building and turning up, as if they had curled in from the rain. But the most curious things were the winding, snaking rails of metal. They climbed, dipped and looped all through the park. White support struts held the thing in the air, like the parts of some long dragon.

“I think this was some kind of place for people to come with their children. For fun.” Nils shrugged his shoulders.

Val turned to look at the historian. “For fun? This place looks like the heart of Hel’s domain.”

She took the lead and they wound through the strange park, passing stone lions, plastic sculptures of creatures Nils identified as ‘giraffes’ and low walls and bench seats made of stone.

There were countless places for people to hide in wait, but they saw no one. But they are here, Val thought. They are here, somewhere. All of this is free of vegetation. Without humans keeping the structures free of creeping vines and trees, the whole park would have been covered in an ocean of green within a decade or two.

Val stopped in front of a plastic purple octopus, whose tentacles each held a small metal car with a chair.

“They worshipped that thing at the bridge?” Ulrik said in disbelief.

“I do not think so,” Nils said. “This looks like a plaything for children.”

“The seats are too small for a man,” Ulrik agreed.

The air was suddenly pierced by a shrill, shrieking noise that could not have come from any animal or human. It was so loud several of them clapped their hands to their ears to block out the noise.

“There it is,” Ulrik said, grinning at Val while pulling his ax out of the holster on his back.

The others looked around for the source of the noise, but Val stepped from her ATV and pulled her long ax and her hand ax. “They are coming.”

“Who?” Morten said, drawing a sword.

Then several ululating cries echoed around the park as thin naked men with long greasy hair, their bodies and faces covered in blue paint, came rushing from every one of the doors and windows of the buildings scattered around the park. Any space, no matter how small, belched the human-shaped blue blurs. There were hundreds of them, but they were all unarmed.

Stig and Oskar looked to Val for silent advice.

“We fight,” she said.

Escape was not a possibility anyway. The onrushing wave of human limbs would hit them in seconds, and they didn’t know the way out of the strange park yet.

Bodies crashed into them like a suicidal wave. The Vikings arrayed themselves in front of their vehicles. Even Erlend and Nils, armed with axes, hacked at the swarming bodies that came in wave after wave, like the crashing of the sea. The Blue Men seemed not to have any agenda or fighting skills. They just rushed at the Northmen, their lemming bodies thin and emaciated.

Stig and Morten were soon weaponless, their blades having been knocked from their hands by the crush of incoming bodies. The men resorted to punching and headbutting, dropping frail bodies with a single strike. Ulrik swung his ax wide in front of them, the blade slicing or grazing three men with each mighty sweep.

Anders plugged a dozen of the frantic runners with arrows, and then started tearing into the running men with his hands. Nearby, Skjold swooped in and razed men with its talons, before taking off back into the sky. Nils and Erlend worked together, first side-by-side, and then back-to-back, each man with a sharpened blade in each hand and spinning in a dance of death, dropping foe after foe with the slightest cut.

Val soon realized the Blue Men would fall with the slightest strike or cut—they were not used to fighting, and that meant that their only advantage was numbers. As the bodies began to pile in front of the Northmen like a seawall, Val raced atop the bodies and leapt out away from the arced ATVs, and deeper into the fray.

Her arms were a blur as she cut, dodged and stabbed anything blue in her sight. Writhing bodies spilled out around her, bleeding blue.

The onrushing wave of blue humans had lessened, but they were still coming.

Val turned and ran back to the safety of her group, who were dropping the most recent arrivals. “We need to get out of here. There are too many. Soon we will be too tired to raise our arms.”

She expected opposition from Morten, but he was too busy swinging his long sword and cleaving away more of the scrawny attackers.

“Stig,” Ulrik called. “Go with Nils and Erlend behind us toward the trees. Try to find a way out. Then get back here and start the quads.”

The men ran off as ordered, and Val closed ranks with Anders, Morten, Oskar and Ulrik, the five of them forming a wall in front of the vehicles. Without needing to be told, they each recognized the need to keep the flailing blue maniacs from the quads. The Vikings were already short a vehicle, and if they lost more in the battle, they would need to flee the horde on foot.

Val thought that might have been their opponents’ plan. Wear the Northmen down with wave after wave of human onslaught, and then seize the vehicles when they were too exhausted to fight anymore.

The Blue Men around them fell in a moaning, wailing pile. Still the slightest injury caused them to drop to the ground in the ever-expanding sea of blood and blue-painted limbs.

There was a brief reprieve as Ulrik cleaved the head off the last attacker. But they could hear the strange gargling calls, as more Blue Men rushed across the park, making for their position. Stig returned from the trees behind them, leapt atop his ATV, turned and raced back into the woods, just as Nils and Erlend ran out of the trees.

“A way out?” Morten asked.

“No,” Nils heaved. “There is a fence, like at the front. But it is old. Stig will try to knock it down.”

Erlend ran to an ATV and jumped atop it, kickstarting the vehicle to life. Nils did the same. Then they each ran to yet another vehicle and repeated the motions.

“Ulrik, stay with me.” Val said. “The rest of you go. Get the fence open.”

Morten ran past Ulrik, slowing to offer the man his long sword. Ulrik accepted it without a word. They all understood the situation. If he and Val couldn’t hold back the Blue Men, none of them would get out alive. He held the sword in one hand and his ax in the other. Val stepped up next to the broad-chested man, and they waited for the running, screaming swarm to reach their position.

The others took off with their vehicles, leaving Ulrik’s and Val’s standing and ready, already turned toward the distant fence.

“I will come back for you when the way is clear,” Morten promised.

Val was dubious, but then the next wave of Blue Men arrived. She and Ulrik aimed for the legs, dropping man after man into the heap of bodies. The pile was now to Val’s chest, and she realized that if the Blues kept coming at them, she would have to retreat partially, or they would be scaling the wall and leaping onto her from above.

Ulrik holstered his ax, and swung at the full extension of his arm with Morten’s blade, increasing the killing distance to nearly seven feet.

“Back up!” Val called.

They both stepped back toward their waiting ATVs. Four blue bodies scrambled and toppled over the low wall of carnage, the men slipping in the blood as they came down the other side. One of them slid down and cracked the back of his own skull on the ground. He stopped moving immediately. Another got close enough for Val to swipe at his neck with the ax, and an arc of blood sprayed laterally away from the man before his face planted into the stone in front of her feet.

“Back again,” she said, and she and Ulrik took two steps again, this time until the backs of their legs reached the parked vehicles. “Ulrik. Get on your quad and go.”

Three more men climbed the human blockade and slid down the other side.

“Are you sure?”

Val swung her long ax, cleaving through two more necks before she sank the smaller hand ax into the third’s face. As her body completed the turn and she came back to face him, the entire front of her body was coated in blood. “Go!”

Just then, Morten came roaring out of the trees on his ATV, and he arced in front of them both, extending his arm and clothes-lining two more men in the necks, before he needed his hand for the throttle again. “The way is clear,” he shouted. Then he took off into the woods again.

Val wasted no time, hopping on her quad. She and Ulrik followed Morten into the trees, and the crazed Blue Men chased after them on foot. Val had to steer between thick tree trunks, and she feared the leading Blue Man would catch up with her, but the strange, thin men moved like they were drugged, smashing headlong into trees and falling down as if they had been stabbed.

On the other side of the thin belt of forest, Val found a section of gate on the ground. Morten raced over it with his ATV, then tore off down a road following the others.

Val glanced over her shoulder to see the Blues still giving chase as the ATVs outran them.

The rest of the crazy city awaited.