The Beasts Of Valhalla

18

"That was the most incredible performance I've ever seen," I said, hitching up the hem of my overly roomy robe as we rounded a sharp bend in the dirt road. "I was ready to shoot the big dumb bast- "

"Mongo, help me," Garth slurred as he suddenly began to stagger.

I felt short of breath, panicky. Garth was about to suffer another seizure, and each time he was in the grip of the terrible electrical and chemical storm taking place inside his body, I feared he was going to die or break his own bones with the uncontrollable, incredibly powerful contractions of his muscles.

Garth swayed, and his entire body began to twitch spasmodically. I put my shoulder against his hip and shoved as hard as I could, pushing him off the road into the orchard; in our time on the road, we had learned that a seizure would pass more quickly if he had some object against which to exert the force.

"Garth, there's a branch over your head!" I shouted, hoping he could hear me through whatever thick mists shrouded his mind whenever he had an attack. "Grab it!"

He didn't respond. As always, he was resisting the attack; his head was thrown back, his teeth were clenched, and low, guttural sounds escaped from deep in his chest and throat. The storm was upon him-every muscle in his body had gone rigid and was twitching. I slapped his right elbow, trying to get it up. The arm jerked and flopped, almost hitting me in the head-then shot up. The other arm whirred like a broken pinwheel until it was stopped by the palm hitting the overhead branch. The fingers of both hands curled over the branch-and stayed there.

There was nothing more I could do except stay out of Garth's way, and I went back out on the road to see if the noises Garth had been making had attracted any attention. The road was empty. Suddenly I heard an explosive crack, then the sound of something heavy falling to the ground. I ran back into the orchard.

Garth was just coming out of the brief period of unconsciousness that always followed his most severe seizures. He was sprawled on the ground, face covered with sweat despite the cool, moist breeze blowing through the trees. Both palms were scraped and bleeding, but there was no sign that the limb, perhaps six inches in diameter, had fallen on him.

"Hey, Godzilla," I said, kneeling beside him and wiping his face and palms with the edge of my robe. "You all right?"

Garth blinked rapidly, then slowly nodded. He rolled away the huge, broken limb, then eased himself up into a sitting position and leaned back against the trunk of the tree. "Sit down a minute, Mongo," he said with a sigh.

"Garth, I'm freezing my ass off and you're going to catch pneumonia. Also, our new friends are waiting for us down the road. I know you're weak now, and I don't want to rush you, but I don't think this is a good time for a chat. We've got to get moving."

"I want you to sit down, Mongo," Garth said evenly. "This is important."

Stepping forward, I grabbed his right wrist with both hands and pulled. The notion that I could pull Garth to his feet against his will was ludicrous, but I was looking to make a point. "Garth, I can't believe you got us this far. They weren't looking for us, which is the break of our lives. That kind of luck isn't going to last. For one thing, we're carrying a whole library on genetics and evolution in the trunk of the car. Leviticus and the others are going to want to know why we're interested in such unholy things-and the answer could come with a phone call at any moment. We have to get in, find the information we're after, and get our asses out of here fast. We may need the minutes we're wasting here."

Garth twisted his wrist free, grabbed my wrist. "We can't outrace a phone call, Mongo. What with all this 'visions of Father' bullshit, Leviticus or somebody else in the commune may already have called the people we're looking for-in which case, an unwelcoming committee is already forming and these minutes won't matter. They matter to me now, because I need to get straight with you."

Not understanding what he meant but responding to the emotion in his voice, I shrugged and sat down on the tree limb.

"I could tell you that I didn't mention the fur growing on my body because I didn't want you to worry," Garth continued in a flat tone as he released my wrist. "That would be a lie. The fact is that I was ashamed and disgusted, and that's why I didn't show you. I was wrong not to tell you. If there's any hope at all of us surviving this Goddamn horror show, there can't be any walls between us. I won't keep secrets from you again."

My response was to slip my right foot out of the sandal. I raised my foot, spread my toes and wiggled my web at him. "Speaking of shameful and disgusting secrets, welcome to the club."

Garth looked at the web, then suddenly burst into laughter. He pushed my foot away from his face, leaned over and put both his hands on my shoulders. "Well, our friend Jake never promised a rose garden when he shot us full of that shit, did he?"

"Now that you mention it, I don't recall that he did."

Garth rose to his feet, grabbed the collar of my robe, and pulled me to mine. "Come on, Brother Boris. It's time to work some more miracles."

The cusps of day-dusk, and the aura just before sunrise-were the most dangerous times for me, periods of a half hour to forty-five minutes when I was almost totally blind; there was enough sunlight to inflict pain on my uncovered eyes, but not enough to penetrate the smoked glasses. Now it was dusk, and I was content to close my eyes and traipse along on Garth's arm.

"Slowly turning into a beastie is a bitch, isn't it?" Garth said drily.

"What the hell are you complaining about? At least you seem to be staying with the mammals. I seem to be slipping off to join the reptiles."

"It's your sneaky, slimy nature, Mongo."

"Another crack like that and I'll pull your fucking fur."

"How's your nose?"

"One hell of a lot prettier than yours."

"Seriously. Do you notice anything different about your sense of smell?"

"No. Do you?"

"I've got another flash for you. Besides providing me with a built-in fur coat, that shit Bolesh gave us has been working overtime on my olfactory nerve. With this new schnoz, I'll go one-on-one with any bloodhound. It turns out that the world is really a pretty smelly place. Right now I can smell apples on the trees, as well as those rotting on the ground. I can smell leaves, wood, dirt."

I stopped walking, pushed the smoked glasses down on the bridge of my nose, and squinted up at the red-haloed figure of my brother. "Back there, you said you knew Leviticus was going to let us in because- "

"I could smell it," Garth interrupted, pushing the glasses back up on my nose and pulling me along. "Don't do that again. You're supposed to be blind, remember?"

"Jesus, you were serious, weren't you?"

"Yep. No joke. I seem to be able to smell emotions-at least I have to believe they're emotions; the odors come and go quickly, and I've noticed a correspondence with people's behavior."

"Pheromones?"

"Must be. Different emotions, it seems, smell differently."

"What the hell did you smell on Leviticus?"

"Religious ecstasy."

"How would you know what religious ecstasy smells like?"

"Certainly not from sniffing around you," Garth replied drily. "Your problem is that you don't understand religion, or religious people. Deep down, you think that people who say they believe in a deity, or miracles, are just funning you. They're not. You let me handle these people, Mongo."

"I am letting you handle them. You didn't answer my question."

"I picked up the scent from the two boys and the girl when I first told them that we'd come to join the commune; at the time I didn't know what it was. At first, Leviticus just smelled of suspicion and hostility-until I told him about the vision of Father. Then he smelled like the others. These people believe in magic; they believe that it will literally rain cats and dogs if God, or Father, wants it to. They were looking for a miracle, so I gave them one. As you see, a miracle is as good as a password any day."

"What does religious ecstasy smell like?"

Garth thought about it. "Turnips," he said at last.

"I'm sorry I asked."

"They believe that Father sent us here for some purpose."

"What purpose?"

Garth laughed. "How the hell should I know? You think I talk to Father?"

"That's great material, Garth; I love it. I can't wait to see what miracle you conjure up to stop a bullet."

"This miracle comes with a strictly limited guarantee; one phone call to or from either of the Loges, and it's canceled."

"Meaning we're canceled. With some luck, we may have a few hours. I'll go out tonight and poke around. All we need is one clue to the whereabouts of the Loges, and we'll be gone before dawn."

"We also have to get our clothes and the car back. I doubt we'll get very far on foot, dressed in sandals and green robes."

"I wonder where the hell Lippitt is?"

"He's probably dead," Garth said distantly. "Regardless of the reasons he gave for taking off on his own, he took the heat off us-and he knew what he was doing. As you know, Lippitt was never one of my favorite people-but the man had guts."

"He also saved our lives. I'm not so sure he's dead."

"He's an old man, Mongo. How long can he keep running and dodging? The Loges and the Pentagon probably have half the world looking for him."

"You saw what he can do with a shotgun. He's a tough old man."

"No question about that. You know, half the world's going to be looking for us if we manage to pull off this little commune caper. We're going to be up to our asses in alligators."

"Gee whiz, Garth, I'd hate to think we could be in any serious difficulty."

"I wish we could call Mom and Dad, at least let them know we're alive."

"No way. If there's a tap on their phone, it would only cause grief for them and us. Right now, a poll of any reasonable group of men and women would guarantee that we're dead. Let's keep it that way."

"Always the eternal optimist. Listen, brother, I'm counting on my close proximity to you to pull me through this. You've got more lives than a litter of cats."

"The problem is that I'm feeling distinctly reptilian of late."

"I guess there'd be no point in getting in touch with the folks, anyway. I mean, what would we say? Hi, Mom and Dad, we're alive, but we can't come home because we have to catch a crazy before his crazies catch us. Any day now we're likely to turn into a couple of slimy blobs, but not to worry. Oh, and by the way, do you know of anything that will remove fur and webs between the toes?"

That set us both to laughing-but it was the laughter of desperate men, or semi-men, trying to fend off despair and tearing memories of a family in Nebraska, people who loved us and whom we might never see or speak to again.

Suddenly Garth stopped laughing and poked me gently in the shoulder. "All right, Brother Boris," he continued, "button up. The wind's blowing in our direction, and the schnoz smells people."

I buttoned up, moved closer to Garth and gripped his arm more tightly. I was at once thankful and regretful that the time for casual conversation and symptom sharing had passed. In fact, I had one secret left, a symptom I hadn't told Garth about, a feeling that filled me with such terror and a sense of revulsion that I could barely stand to think, much less talk, about it. Images of what I could become, or what I was becoming, constantly threatened to drown me in a sea of horror and disgust.

Three days before, I had awoke in the morning to find that the glands on both sides of my neck had grown painfully swollen. They had remained so, and now each time I swallowed, my saliva left behind the taste of burnt, bittersweet chocolate and produced a numbing, prickly sensation in the tip of my nose.