The Age of Odin - James Lovegrove [145]
Thor himself wasn't faring much better. His left arm had been flayed to the muscle and hung useless at his side. Flesh dangled off it in grisly tatters. Blood poured down in rivulets.
He didn't let up, though. One-handed, he pounded with Mjolnir, relentless. The more damage he did to Jormungand, the more damage it did to him in return. The vehicle's "breath" was butchering him, peeling him, rending him to pieces. His left leg was starting to go the way of his left arm. His chest was bared and reddening. The drill ate away at him layer by layer. It was as though he was being sand-blasted to oblivion. And there was little else I could do except stand and watch. If I climbed up there with him, I'd be gone in a nanosecond. It was only because he was a god that he could withstand the drill at all. Divine strength and durability were buying him the time he needed. Those and his own sheer willpower.
Would it be enough?
It had to be enough.
Rib bone glinted. Muscle glistened. The hammer beats slowed but didn't stop. Thor had cleared a hole in the plates that allowed him to step through. He did so. He staggered into the full hurricane force of the drill, which cleaned the hair off his head, the beard from his face. I had no idea how he was able to keep going, how he could even put one foot in front of the other, but nonetheless he somehow managed to stumble on into the throat of the machine. Mjolnir was suffering too, its head turning to dust, its handle to splinters. Both it and its wielder were losing integrity before my very eyes.
Finally Thor raised Mjolnir above his head and delivered an immense, devastating blow to something inside Jormungand. I didn't see precisely what he hit. I was at the wrong angle, not close enough. Whatever it was, though, it must have been vital to the operation of the drill because in an instant the sound died and a silence fell. A silence shot through with the screaming of tinnitus.
Thor, what was left of him, tottered backwards. He took nine steps. He was a ghastly, gory scarecrow version of himself. Barely alive, ruined beyond redemption. He sagged to his knees on the rim of Jormungand's front end, and then slipped off onto the ground. When his body hit the snow it splashed rather than thudded.
I hurried over for a closer look. Was he - could be conceivably be - still alive?
No. Not a hope.
What lay in front of the vehicle was only just recognisable as physical remains, a fractured skeleton in a soupy puddle of blood and organs. Nothing apart from the half-eroded hammer still clutched in one hand would have told you that this mangled mess had once been the god of thunder.
Sixty
Vali, Vidar and Tyr got inside the incapacitated Jormungand and wrought havoc on the crew. As reprisals went it was neither swift nor gentle. They took their time exacting revenge for the death of their brother. Screams came from within the vehicle - raw, pleading, protracted. The windows that were its eyes were spattered with red.
It wasn't unsatisfying to know that this was being done.
Then there was an interval of numbness. A period in which to take stock. Regroup. Lick wounds. Drink. Eat. Tally up how much we'd got left.
Our inventory of assets went something like this:
* a dozen Aesir and Vanir
* the Valkyries
* ten trolls
* just over one hundred and fifty mortal troops
We'd lost our head man, our strongest warrior, our one and only transport helicopter, and most of our castle. Heimdall was out of action for the foreseeable future, lying comatose in bed, blood still leaking from his traumatised eardrums. Frigga was tending to him and to the injured men, most of whom were suffering from wounds inflicted by falling debris, bone breaks, severe contusions, concussion, that sort of thing. One of the intact wings of the castle was now a field hospital. Thwaite was there. He'd been pulled from the wreckage of Sleipnir in very bad shape, and Frigga had promised