Dropping Like Flies (77 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryRating: 2 on 2 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Coyote (View user info) at 2006-09-24 01:22:52 EDT
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No one knew where the giant had come from. He showed up one Friday as the tail end of the lunch crowd was clearing out and spent the rest of the day nursing a large green tea and staring sullenly out at the parking lot. I remember the day because it was that big snowstorm that closed all the schools, and you could barely even see the traffic through the crazy swirling snow that blurred out the world and made the cars crawling slushily down the highway sound distant and unreal.
It was just as well the blizzard was keeping away most of our regular clientele, because the sight of the giant hunched over his mug like an extra from a Viking theme park staffed by ex-wrestlers and pituitary cases would have sent them scurrying before the milk for their skinny decaf caps was even frothed. He lurked at his table like a thundercloud, matter-of-factly dwarfing everything else in the place.
Meg and Larissa wouldn't go out to bus the tables while he was there. They hovered just inside the kitchen door, where they could peek out at him from behind the counter, and giggled about his hat and told war stories about the biggest guys they'd ever had. My only recourse to strangling them was to go out myself to wipe down the tables and sweep the dirty plates and glasses from each into the plastic tub.
The giant's presence filled the room in a way I wouldn't have believed possible. Just the force of his consciousness was like a hard shove to the chest. I was pretty sure they weren't filming any Viking movies in town, although if some Hollywood mogul had chosen to do so, he couldn't have picked a better month for it. And he couldn't have asked for someone with more charisma if the love child of Thor and Marilyn Monroe had shown up to for a screen test. The giant scowled out into the snow with the kind of focus Paul Bunyan brought to chopping down trees, and occasionally took a noisy slurp of his tea and wiped the drops from his beard with the back of his hand.
A trickle of my diehards came by on their way home from—or back to—work, but none of them stayed. A glance at the giant was enough to stop them in their tracks and get their caffeine fix to go. Fuck it, I was happy to have the slow day; not that I could concentrate on the novel I was reading with HIM in the room. I flipped on NPR and let some story about a tsunami in the Norwegian Sea fill the silence in a dry kind of background marginally less irritating than the static of dead air.
I sent the girls home. We sure as hell weren't getting any more customers after nightfall, not in this fucking weather, and not with the giant hulking there at table one. If they were just going to sit and giggle uselessly, they could at least do it where I didn't have to listen. Or pay them. They chose to leave through the back door.
Between the surreally intense snowstorm with the wind caterwauling between the parked SUVs, the almost totally empty shop, and the rapidly lowering twilight, I couldn't stop myself from breaking the silence.
"Get you some more tea, bud?"
The giant ignored me. He was muttering something under his breath, in a language apparently based on the sounds cats make when you step on their necks.
"I said, you want some more tea? We're closing up in twenty minutes. You're gonna have to find some other fortress where you can look out over your dominion and plot the downfall of mankind."
The giant didn't turn from the window, but his reflection made eye contact with me. His voice was so deep the words were not so much heard, as felt by their reverberation.
"The time is upon us. Heroes and gods from the nine corners of creation journey towards the battle-plain of Vigrid, and the clans of giants have set sail on Naglfar, the ferry of nails. Of all the downfalls nigh, mankind's is the one requiring the very least plotting. Interrupt my vigil again, and your doom shall arrive on raven's wings before even the great wolf Skoll devours the sun and Jormungand stains the shattered sky with poison. Are we clear?"
I wanted to laugh at the speech, but I was afraid if I unlocked any of my muscles I'd piss my pants. He carried off the threat without a hint of self-consciousness or pretension, which was my first clue he hadn't just wandered away from whatever Swedish death-metal outfit was on tour this week. What froze me in my tracks was the hint of dry mirth with which he'd responded to the idea of the extinction of the human race. There are instinctive responses to certain situations, buried deep in our brain stems and hardwired by millions of years of natural selection, that still serve us well even when we're standing in a strip-mall coffee shop at twenty to ten on a Friday evening in the twenty-first century. The overpowering urge to shut the hell up and resist the wisecrack when confronted by a surly mythological giant with doom on his mind is one such response.
"I take it by your silence you understand me. Good. Then I will have more of the elixir you call tea. I find it strangely invigorating. It lends me enhanced mental acuity and helps the time until my rendezvous with destiny pass more quickly. With a splash of goat's milk to cut the acidity."
Every cell in my body wanted to leap into action to do what he asked. But what was I gonna do? I'm ready for the freaks that take skim milk in their brew, but goat's milk? The granola types head to the organic place down on Church, they wouldn't be caught dead at a chain.
"We don't have goat's milk. Skim, 2%, whole, half-and-half, or cream."
I got the impression people didn't choose to give disappointing news to the giant very often. He actually turned to face me, and I noticed he'd crumpled and torn up the edge of his table without noticing it. He stared hard at me, as if he suspected I was having a joke at his expense.
"No goat's milk? You have fire, you have drink, you seem to have meager food, of a sort. How can you not have goat's milk? Do you dare make sport of Surt, who will burn the worlds black and see them sink into the sea?"
This time, some response was called for. I said the only thing I could.
"Well, uh, we usually do, only uh, with the blizzard our supplier... well, the time is upon us, I'm sure I don't have to remind... you know, the goats are kind of off their feed, with the gods battling and everything."
He stared at me for a long, uncomfortable moment, but apparently the inability to grasp irony is a flaw not restricted to Swedish death-metal bands. He grunted, rattling the glassware behind the bar.
"Cream, then. And bring me one of those gooseberry muffins, it's going to be a long night."
I didn't have the heart to tell him the muffins were cranberry-orange. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, he was off again on a rumbling, declamatory oration, jabbing his finger at the air or at the ground as the moment demanded.
"You may be a mere mortal, and a humble shopkeep at that, but I can see that even a wretch like you knows the truth of the matter; that the Doom of the Gods is upon us. The endless winter has begun, when brother slays brother and the harbors are choked with ice. Even now the wolf has arisen to devour the stars, and the Midgard Serpent writhes and thrashes in torment at the roots of the Earth. Know then, peasant, that your rude hovel of commerce is in fact a crossroads, where Frey of the Aesir, the lord of the sun and king of the elves, also called Yngvi, world-god, owner of the golden boar and the arrow-swift longship Skidbladnir, terror of the whale-road, must pass. On this very night, in fact. I shall kill him when he passes by, and at that moment all the gods must into battle join. Odin shall fall to the great wolf Fenrir, Thor will suffer the wracking poison of the serpent, and Loki shall triumph on the rainbow bridge. Then will I spread fire across the world, and ally and enemy together will perish in flame. This is written in the roots of the world tree. So it is and shall ever be."
There's not much you can say to that. That little hindmost part of my brain stem was telling me it was all true and it explained things like the Kennedy Assassination, the Bank of England, and the Fluoridation of Water. My cerebellum decided to act as if I had a customer telling me the pointless, stupid, predictable details of his shitty screenplay... again.
"Well, you got the right weather for it. Kind of suck if endless winter started in July. Ruin the mood a bit, eh? I'll bring that muffin out with your tea."
But he was back to his muttering. I caught "...no bleeding goat's milk... Ragnarok's too good for 'em..." before he lapsed back into guttural proto-old Norse.
I don't really remember much about the next half hour or so. I brought him the tea on autopilot because conscious thought had left the building. It didn't even occur to me to be worried he'd have a problem with the muffin. Mostly I remember the face of the clock across from the bar. Guess I was just staring at it for a long while. The ceaseless buffeting of the wind on the storefront and the hypnotic swirl of snow seemed to keep time from flowing at its normal pace.
It didn't even really register when a big, black, shiny tour bus slid to a halt on the empty expanse of asphalt outside, brakes squeaking and hissing fitfully. It took a few moments before I realized there were new glows in the window apart from the reflection of the giant's eyes, and that they were brake lights.
The front door crashed open, hurled by a gust of wind, and a man half-fell in, propelled by the same burst and wreathed by snowflakes. Blessedly, he was normal-sized. Average height, getting a little stout around the middle, haloed by long, lanky yellow hair, and with features that gave him an oddly pouty look. He was wearing leather pants and a leather shirt that did little to contain his stomach. Something about him looked vaguely familiar, and I squinted out the window, recognizing the outline of a guitar painted on the bus.
"Hey, boy am I glad to see you're still open," he said, "I could kill for a cup of coffee right now."
As the blond man started towards the bar, the giant rose from his table, his form seeming to overflow the boundaries of his body and fill the room, blacking out all the light and casting his own reddish glow.
The blond man didn't notice. He was standing right in front of the "Order Here" sign, lips moving as he read the menu on the wall behind my shoulder. The giant tapped him lightly.
"Yngvi, lord of the Sun?"
The man whirled in irritation, seemingly oblivious to the sheer hulking terror of the giant.
"Who the fuck wants to know? I ain't signing a single goddamn autograph for anything less than a D cup, okay? You don't even want to know what kind of fucking day I've had, okay?"
The giant didn't appear to move at all. One moment he was there looming over Yngvi, and the next he was looming over a charred corpse. The only indication there had been any movement at all was a blinding flash of light, a lick of flame that scorched the finish on my countertop and singed my eyebrows, and the giant picking something out of one of his fingernails nonchalantly. Then the smell hit, and if there's one smell besides cat's piss that overpowers freshly brewed coffee, it's freshly incinerated rockstar.
The next thing I knew, there was a cop leaning over me splashing cold water on my face. I was flat out on the floor behind my bar, but if I tilted my head up I could see the smoldering remains of a shiny black tour bus through a living veil of snowflakes.
"Hey Al, this one's gonna make it," the cop said, and helped me up to a sitting position. I blinked and tried to clear my head, because the cop was standing upright, but we were eye to eye as I sat lumpen on the floor. He handed me a paper cup and I drank reflexively. Ice water.
The other cop came around the end of the bar and leaned on the pastry case. He was eating a bearclaw. "You the manager here?"
I nodded.
"Plowing crew reported the bus on fire outside your place. We got here right after fire, spotted your place all torn up. You know this guy sliced up and scorched like Mongolian barbecue here?"
"Yngvi somebody. Never met him before. Didn't know him."
"Well, someone obviously knew him well enough to take a flamethrower to him, and a big edged weapon, maybe a sword. Marine saber, or a replica type deal. You get a look at the perp?"
I cleared my throat and drank some more water. "Yeah, he was here all afternoon, came in out of the snow. Big guy."
The dwarf cop looked at me skeptically. "Your customers always come in here with flamethrowers and cavalry sabers?"
"I didn't see anything like that. Just a big guy, like NFL, pro-wrestler big. Eight feel tall, like. Seriously, you guys go looking for an eight-foot tall blond with a beard, a sweater like you'd buy at a Swedish airport, and a viking hat with horns, you can't miss him. Didn't have any guns or knives that I saw though. Just came in and drank some tea."
"I... see. Maybe we should have a paramedic check you out, you might be suffering from shock. We'd expect it, after something like this. So, this guy do anything unusual, or say anything about why he was in town, what his plans were?"
I thought about the weird charisma the giant had had, how his presence filled the place with a kind of hushed awe that went beyond the normal sound-deadening of deeply drifted snow; I thought about the ruddy light behind his ice-blue eyes, and the bizarre, messianic tirade he'd delivered when I got him his refill; lastly I thought about the licking, snapping tongue of flame that had burst from his fingers while Yngvi had vacillated between a cappucino and a latté. Nah. What's the point? Some things just won't fit neatly into a little notepad designed for traffic incidents and domestic violence calls.
"Uh, no, nothing unusual. Just... you know. Well, he said it was time for the destruction of all the powers, a wolf or something was going to eat the sun, and a serpent would devour the world. Oh, and it was the doom of the gods."
The cop rolled his eyes at me, and his partner chuckled. "Yeah, tell me about it, they been dropping like flies all day. Okay, someone from the precinct will be around to take a full statement tomorrow, if there's time."
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