Linda Evans - Sleipnir

"Randy, don't shoot—dammit, get his fingers loose—don't shoot—it's us—Crater and Wally—"

I finally managed to get my eyes focused. Crater's long frame leaned dizzily over me. The lower part of him seemed to be drifting in lazy white fog... .

Rage—sudden and terrible—spread a bloody film across that innocent white fog. I struggled to get up. Goddammit, if Odin wouldn't come fight me, fair and goddamned square, I'd show the bastard, I'd get up and walk all the bloody way to Valhalla—

A wave of intense nausea hit about the same time my head exploded in a twenty-megaton burst. I doubled up, and decided being dead would be a great deal more pleasant.

"Hey, man, don't move, you musta broken something—you shouldn't move 'til the medics get here."

They were pushing me back down. Pain drained the strength anger had brought. I sagged back into the mud. Then slowly I realized I didn't hear any more gunfire.

Crater blurred again. I muttered, "Hold still—you got two heads, dammit—"

"What'd he say?" Wally's voice asked from somewhere off in the fog.

"Shut up!" Crater hissed. Then, "Just hang on, Randy; the medics are coming."

"Did we get 'em?"

Had I actually got that out?

Crater answered, so I must have.

"We stopped the s.o.b.'s, Randy. We stopped 'em. There's a guy with a loaded rifle in his hand and four holes in his chest hanging right there in the inner fence, dead as a doornail. There's another dead one behind him, down in the outer fence by the washout. We found a blood trail off into the woodline. Sergeant Baker's out there with the rest of the relief, tracking it. Even Stanley got one, down by his tower."

Stanley? Good God.

"Did—you—get any—?" I tried to keep my eyes focused on a face that kept blurring out of shape, and heard Crater laugh.

"Hell, Randy, I got one in the head but you'd already killed him. He's the one who crawled off and got stuck in the outer fence. And Butler went nuts. Fifteen, twenty rounds out into the trees. I think he even hit a couple of rabbits, poor little bastards."

The laughter left his voice then. "Brunowski's dead. Stanley's dead, too. One hole in the front window, one in the back, and one clear through his head. His rifle jammed. You were one lucky s.o.b., man. There's holes in the floor, the desk, the radiator; not to mention the roof. Damn lucky all that wood and crap slowed 'em down. Medics ought to be here any minute." Then, dimly, "Dammit, Wally, aren't they here yet?"

I wasn't listening anymore. I was floating on a foggy sea of pain, thinking about a good noncom's death, and a newbie's useless one, and cursing a cowardly god who wouldn't show his face in an honest fight. The pain intensified. I wondered absently what they'd tell Stanley's wife back home—not that it made any real difference to me or anyone else—then I slipped into darkness and mercifully left the pain behind.

We never did find out who'd shot us up that night. Most of them got away, and the ones that stayed as corpses just disappeared, same as the ones I'd cut up with Gary's black knife. Nameless, faceless, they'd slipped away into the night to regroup somewhere else, while our officers figured out ways to keep the whole mess quiet. I never did find out what they told Stanley's widow.

I ended up in Frankfurt for a while, in the main hospital for the forces based in Germany. Actually, I'd been damned lucky. I'd been hit four times, and falling off the back of that stupid tower had netted me a concussion and several assorted nasty sprains and bruises. It was several days before I stopped seeing double images; but then, it was several weeks before I could walk on my shot-up foot, and even with crutches it hurt like bloody blazes.

One bullet had grazed my arm, just a flesh wound, not much deeper than a scratch. The second round had punched through the tower itself, then through my rifle's magazine before hitting my flakvest, leaving nothing more serious than a good-sized bruise, although it had hurt like I'd been kicked by a horse. The baby coronary I'd had in the ambulance on the way in had convinced me I'd been shot through the heart itself—and was just too slow on the uptake to go ahead and die.

The third round had shattered the handle of my M-16; quite a bit of flying debris as well as the spent round had slammed into my face. The stitches had left some very interesting scars that had proven surprisingly successful in rousing the nurses' sympathies. (So I'm an asshole—I'll take the attention of beautiful women any way I can get it.)

Of course, I was really lucky that my jawbone hadn't been shattered—which would've left me wired shut and sipping pizza through a straw for months—or that none of the shrapnel had hit my eyes. One handicap I could not afford was blindness. I figured Odin was going to be hard enough to find as it was.

The round that hit my foot had shoved all the bones aside on its way through, drilling through the boot sole, the fleshy muscles in my foot, and the top of my boot through the laces. Because of the concussion, they hadn't dared give me any morphine in the emergency room; but they had managed a local anesthetic in my foot while they cleaned leather and wool scraps out of it.

As for falling off the tower... I could easily have killed myself, or at the very least have busted up a leg or ankle to the point of being permanently crippled. My therapist—a sadist if ever I met one—had taken great glee in telling me about several of the guys he'd worked on, who'd fallen out of various buildings from the same height. I figured I'd gotten off one helluva lot luckier than I deserved.

By the time I was released from the hospital, I was officially out of the Army. Most of the guys I would have wanted to say goodbye to had called one afternoon from a pay phone while I was still in the hospital. They took turns telling me which Frankfurt whores to look up once I got back on my feet. Chuck even mailed me a box of rubbers, and a get-well card signed by everybody. A good bunch of guys...

When they finally pronounced me fit and discharged me, I packed up everything I owned, headed for the far north—toward good caving country—and hunted up a spelunking guide. I told Klaus what I needed, and good old Klaus outdid himself. He led me into a cave that had been discovered three weeks before my discharge, when a freak rockslide broke open the fissure. Professional spelunkers were still pushing it, and they hadn't found bottom yet. The first man to set foot in the cave had almost died in a nasty accident. When local kids saw him carried out, they said he looked like he'd been mauled.

Within days, everyone was calling the cavern "Garm's Cave."

My last cyalume stick was close to going out. So close, I very nearly didn't find the only way out of the blind end I had stumbled into. I had begun to hyperventilate, spraying sweat in every direction, before I finally noticed the opening. It was barely three feet high, down on the floor, so low I passed it at least twice.

I got down on my knees, shook the cyalume vigorously to coax the last of the light from it, and thrust the lightstick as far as I could reach. Although I couldn't see much, the hole didn't seem to narrow down any.

It was the only opening available.

For a moment I sat down outside the crawlway and stared into the darkness. No more light. Damn little food. Damn little water, either. If I went on, I risked getting stuck somewhere down that rabbit's hole. My fingers played with the flap of my holster, rubbing the smooth butt of the P-7.

—Well, if I got stuck, I could always end it quick.

I had an eerie feeling I wouldn't get stuck. I dragged Gary's knife out of the sheath on my calf and felt the warm tail wrap itself firmly around my arm. That was strangely reassuring; although I wasn't certain it should have been.