19

 

The journey continued day after day, the eight Vikings crawling across the endless landscape on their motorized steeds. They had made it out of Copenhagen without further incident, although the roads had been similarly orchestrated and blockaded until they had found their way to an open field and out of the maze.

The rest of the trip across the island of Sealand was uneventful, until Nils spotted a bent and mangled road sign for Odense—a town they skirted. He then told Val that they had somehow crossed off the island and onto the next without moving across the body of water once known as The Great Belt.

Much discussion followed, and the consensus—and Val agreed—was that the strait had either been emptied by decades of geologic upheaval caused by the great annihilation, or perhaps mankind had changed the landscape. Proceeding south, they circumvented larger towns unless they needed to forage for more propane again. Once the southern region of Denmark turned into a never-ending progression of fields with tall grasses and shallow marshland, they left the road for good. It had been too crowded with abandoned cars and road blocks. Still, they had seen no more people—blue or otherwise.

Now the landscape was filled with grasses as high as the handlebars on the ATVs, and their progress was slow. The day was warm, and Val was tired. The frigid winter loomed, encroaching with each passing day, and she felt some pressure to continue. But she also had come to recognize when the others needed down time.

Val raised her arm at the head of the convoy, and they all slowed to a stop. “Let us take a rest here.”

They stopped single file because, to the sides of them, the grasses were a few feet shorter, indicating they were on one of the many raised dikes in the area. The land below the grasses to either side of the dike was marshy peat bog. The Vikings had been stuck in shallow bogs on many occasions. They knew to stick to the high ground now.

“It is about time. I thought we would never stop,” Erlend said, stretching his sore limbs. He and Nils had begun taking turns driving their shared ATV, with the other riding on a cobbled-together saddle secured over the twin propane tanks. The passenger faced backward, offering their convoy a rear lookout. Today Erlend had been manning the rear-facing seat. “If I had known I’d be riding on the back of one of these, I would have made it a lot more comfortable.”

“You could not make it better now?” Nils asked, eager for the answer. He knew he would be riding in the jump seat as soon as they began again, and already his ass ached at the thought.

“Not without more tools and materials. Perhaps when we reach the next town we can put something together.”

“There is probably nothing more to see today,” Val announced, ending the discussion. “More miles of farming land and bogs. We should camp here for the night. Take the afternoon to rest.”

The news was greeted with great applause and hooting. They had rarely taken any breaks. The last time had been after clearing Copenhagen, when they had performed a small ceremony to remember fallen Trond.

“With that excellent news, I will venture into this bog and anoint it with my urine,” Morten announced with great cheer. The others laughed, Val included.

Ulrik spread a large blanket over the tall grass behind the parked vehicles, and Val sank onto it next to him, while the others unpacked. She was grateful to take a break, herself, and laid back on the blanket. She looked up at the clear blue sky turned purple by her ever-present red tinted goggles. Her mind wandered, back to her early days after marauders had killed her parents. After the polar bear. Then through the hardships she had faced on her own as a child on the islands of Åland, and later as a young woman on the Swedish mainland, before she had traveled to Stavanger. Her life had been filled with battle and strife, so when the chance presented itself, she soaked in the quiet moments.

“What sort of name is Val?” Ulrik asked her, startling her out of her reverie. The sudden attempt at casual conversation caught her off guard. He was not normally one to chat. “Is it a usual name for the women of Åland?”

Val laughed. “No. Not a normal name for a woman. It is short for Valkyrie.”

Ulrik grunted in amazement. “Fitting. How did you learn to fight?”

Val smiled. She knew Ulrik was politely trying to press for details on her past. It wasn’t unheard of for a woman to be a fighter in the north. Shield-maidens joined great battles, but more often in a support role to the larger fighters like Trond. Ulrik had rarely encountered anyone like her: a full time fighter. A traveler. A mercenary. Someone willing to fight for pay or food. Those roles were nearly always filled by men.

“Mostly by watching others,” she said, looking at Ulrik. “I understood that I would not always be stronger than my foes. I needed to be faster, and more agile.”

She knew the answer was vague, but it would suffice for now.

Before he could respond, Morten began yelling from the nearby bog.

He was calling for help, and the others rushed into the marsh, water splashing up above the tall grasses, splattering them with mud. They pushed through the tall weeds to a clearing with shorter grasses and spongy peat under foot. “Come quickly,” Morten called, the initial panic in his voice subsiding.

All around him, across the glade, were bodies frozen in time. They were completely black, their skin and clothing alike. Many of them appeared to be clawing their way out of the earth and frozen in place. Some were on the ground in various poses. Others had degenerated to little more than skeletons before turning black and rock-like.

Val nudged the toe of one of her black leather boots against the upraised hand of one of the strange bodies. It did not give. It was as hard as stone.

“What are they?” Anders asked, his bow at the ready, despite the lack of threat from the statues.

No one could answer him. The Vikings wandered the field, examining the petrified dead. Val thought at first that the bodies might have been some macabre sculptures, like the lions at the Tivoli park in Copenhagen, but these were too life-like. The veins of the arms and even the creases of the skin were visible on the surfaces of the blackened bodies. Val bent down to the one nearest to her, and saw fingerprints on the figure’s thumb. No, these are the dead. Somehow turned to stone.

“It must be the water in the bogs,” Nils hypothesized.

“Should we get out?” Oskar asked, panic rising.

Val patted him on the shoulder. “It would have taken years for them to turn to stone like this.”

They spent the next few minutes looking at the various corpses. Many appeared to have been executed. Ropes hung around their necks, petrified as much as the skin below them.

One particularly gruesome body was still submerged from the torso down, his legs extending up in the air, as if he had dived into the bog, his head stuck in the mud below the water—or he had been forcibly held down.

Morten walked across the field of the dead back to Val. “Perhaps we could find a different campsite for the night?”

“For once we agree,” she said. It was habit for her to think that way, but the truth was that her estimation of the man had risen several steps since the battle with the Blue Men. According to his word, he had come back for her and Ulrik, and since that day he had been less abrasive, and often quite helpful.

The group returned to the dike and continued south, well away from the morbid field of bodies, before making their camp. Their planned day of rest had been taken away. Their dreams that night were filled with the hauntings of the aquatic creature at the Øresund Strait, the manic Blue Men and the ghosts of the murdered dead from the field that day.

The next day they made their way into an abandoned village with a sign by its road proclaiming ‘Handewitt.’ Nils informed them, based on the other writing on the sign, that at some point during the day they had crossed into a region known as Germany.

They came across no other people—alive or dead—that day. But Val keenly felt some sort of presence watching them. Maybe hunting them.