Sleipnir

A burst of raw sound from the phone sent me six inches off the floor. My scalp tingled; the hairs stood on end. There was noise coming from the phone, like nothing I'd ever heard coming over the line before. I picked up the receiver to hear better. Metal grated and clashed against metal, and men's voices shouted hoarsely; but I couldn't make out the words. It wasn't English, or German, exactly... . And screams, too, faint but unmistakable through the static.

I thought of late-night war movies and decided someone was playing an elaborate hoax. They'd probably taped an old movie, messed with the sound a little, and were playing it back over their phone to freak Johnson a little closer to cracking. It was something Chuck could have put together in his sleep—the man was a true artist when it came to messing with people's minds.

I backed away, holding down an involuntary shiver, and told myself to ignore the weird sounds, since there wasn't anything I could do about them now. I looked out the window again—and almost fell down.

I grabbed at the heater and singed my hands in the process. The phone banged against the floor and hung from its trailing cord, forgotten.

There were no stars.

A huge patch of sky was utterly, hideously black.

And the thing that stood between me and the night sky...

I tried to swallow and couldn't; tried to blink, and couldn't. It stood multiple yards higher than the treeline. The fact that I had often seen heads shaped like that, held proudly on muscled necks arched in precisely that ma

Odin's death stallion was hunting in the darkness beyond the perimeter lights.

But who was Sleipnir hunting?

A massive cold shudder that had nothing to do with the temperature seized me.

His ears twitched, blocking out more stars as they moved. The part of my mind which functioned on that level—no matter what else I was doing—took the measure of the angle from the lowest part of the neck to the tips of those silky ears.

Assuming all eight feet were firmly planted on the ground, Sleipnir stood two hundred feet tall.

All six-feet-plus of me shook in the darkness.

His gaze swept across the ground far below, peered through the barren trees, passed across the frozen grass and glittering chain-link fence—

—and rested on me.

Time slowed. We stared at one another while the constellations watched silently. His eyes blazed with an intelligence far greater than any animal had a right to possess. He bared his teeth in a perfect imitation of a wicked grin... .

My hand came to life, groping for my rifle. I didn't give a damn what I'd told Johnson. Could I kill a thing like Sleipnir with an M-16?

Behind me, the sounds of screaming men and ringing metal shrieked, filled the tower... and still Sleipnir held my eyes.

He moved one step closer; if he'd stretched his neck, his teeth could have ripped the flimsy wooden roof off my tower. His head bobbed lower in the starlight as though he'd heard my thought. I threw myself onto the floor behind the big heater. Burning my arm on the back of it had very little to do with the yell I gave out as his enormous head filled the glass windows above me... .

My hands worked the rifle bolt and I crouched lower. My pulse pounded against throat and temples. He'd come for somebody. Goddammit, he'd come for somebody—

Well, it wasn't going to be me. Not without a fight.

The stallion tossed his head against the blackness of the night sky, and half reared. A massive, misshapen chest surged momentarily into view. Then he subsided and peered intently into my tower again. His nostrils flared wider, and his coat rippled and shuddered as muscles bunched smoothly under it. He sidled to my right, treetops whipping violently aside as he moved. He bared glinting teeth and snapped at the air above the double fences; then snorted. The walls of my tower shook as fog engulfed the windows.

I started praying—I didn't even know to Whom.

The glass cleared, and again I saw his eyes, wild and angry. Then he reared up above the trees, and two sets of flailing forefeet raked the treetops. Snow went flying in an explosion of white powder. When he subsided again, he shook his head. Rippling mane hair went flying wild in a sudden wind that roared down across my tower with gale force. The stallion's eyes held mine for a long moment more; then he turned his head away and began sca

I flexed my fingers. Tried breathing again. My lungs rasped once; then started to work. I noticed my shorts were suspiciously warm and damp. Damn.

My pulse still pounded fiercely in my ears, and I blinked sweat out of my eyes despite the intense cold. I eased cautiously to the windowsill, and peered up over the edge as the apparition moved one step away from the site, then another.

The phone fell silent behind me. I started, and glanced around at it. When I looked out again, I saw the stallion rear again. His front legs raked the night sky. I half expected the stars to explode in a shower of sparks as his hooves caught them. There was something—I couldn't tell what—held in his teeth.

Then he was gone.

He didn't fade away. Or disappear. He just... wasn't there. A rumble of thunder struck the tower; then everything fell silent.

Slowly I eased my rifle down; slowly wiped my hands on my pants.

My watch said midnight exactly. I looked at the phone, expecting it to burst into life any second; but it didn't. The silence lasted right up to the end of watch.

I spent the rest of that watch staring out at the snowless treetops and fighting shudders that insisted on crawling up my spine every few moments. I studied the night, traced its frozen patterns from sky to ground and back. It was different, worse than before, tainted somehow with the scent of blood.

Which was crazy.

Count Dracula dropped from the night sky, so close to my tower windows I actually yelled and brought my rifle to my shoulder before I got control of myself again. The Count struck a mouse and devoured it while I struggled to get my heartbeat back down under 120 again. Reluctantly, I had to admit that I now understood—at some primal level I'd never experienced before—why Johnson had shot at that owl. My fingers gripped my rifle so hard I looked later for dents.

When my relief finally arrived and I climbed down, I moved so slowly I felt like a geriatric case; except that I kept trying to look in all directions at once, which I couldn't have done if I were genuinely as old as I felt. I glanced briefly at the guys as we made the round of the towers; but carefully met no one's eyes.

No one seemed anxious to meet mine, either, and none of them appeared to be in any better shape than I was. Crater was determinedly ignoring the sky altogether as he slouched up to the silent group. We assembled in the dark, and no one broke the silence as we trooped into the psychological safety represented by the mess room.

Johnson was a basket case. It took Wally, Crater, and Brunowski to get him into his bunk. When Wally and Crater returned, leaving Johnson in Brunowski's care, we gathered around the coffeepot. No one seemed willing yet to meet anyone else's gaze.

Crater spoke first. "Did, uh, anybody hear anything kind of, well, weird—"

"Yeah," Chuck cut in, his ruddy face sweating. "Kind of like screaming and shit, and metal hitting or scraping or something—"

I didn't want to listen to the half-whispered comparisons of what I'd heard over the phone tonight. I didn't like thinking about it; it soured my stomach thinking about it.