Valhalla Virus by Nick Harrow (best management books of all time TXT) 📕

“It’s real,” Ray said. “This is exactly what Kyrolina wanted when she turned the Valhalla Virus loose.”

Ray cleared her throat and pushed her half-eaten sandwich toward the center of the table. She took a sip from her water bottle, wiped the moisture from her lips with the back of her hand, then started talking. No one interrupted her as she laid out the crazy story that had led them all to this moment.

Ray had run across some strange material about YmirRe’s research during a routine audit of the databases. They were supposed to encrypt all the test results before they hit storage, but somebody had messed up and committed a log update in plaintext. Before she could stop herself, Ray had read a synopsis that curled her toes.

She’d downloaded as much as she dared, then covered her tracks. The company she’d devoted her life to for the past seven years was running experiments with modified varieties of a coronavirus. The purpose, as near as Ray could tell, was to activate genetic memories of a past that was, as far as she knew, completely mythical. That was weird enough, but what really worried Ray was the plan to unleash this virus as part of a wide-ranging plan to bring about some purer, primal age where YmirRe could rule.

“I thought it was crazy,” Ray said. “But YmirRe works on a bunch of defense projects, so there’s no end to the crazy stuff they could do. I made a call to a contact I had in the DHS. I wanted to show them what I had, see what we could do to stop YmirRe from unleashing a plague. Then I called Gunnar and hightailed it to Vegas. I thought I’d gotten away clean. But then everyone got sick, and Arthur showed up...”

Ray ended her story with a sigh and buried her face in her hands. She didn’t need to fill in the rest of the blanks. It was obvious to all of them. YmirRe was onto her. They’d been afraid the DHS would shut them down, so they stepped up their operation and dumped the virus over the Strip. If Arthur captured Ray they could tie everything up with a neat little bow by disappearing her. Then Gunnar had showed up, everyone had gone crazy, and here they were.

“Why didn’t we freak out?” Gunnar asked Ray. “We got sick, but none of us went berserk.”

“I don’t know,” Ray admitted. “Some of what I read said almost everyone who got sick would go berserk, and then die. But my information was clearly out of date because it showed the onset time of the rage at seventy-two hours, and I’d only been gone from the lab for twelve hours when you showed up. Even if Kyrolina released the bug as soon as I left the lab, the virus shouldn’t have had time to kick in yet.”

“Mimi was sick last night,” Gunnar said. “If we exposed her, the bug tore through her in less than twelve hours. Seems awfully fast. How long ago did you swipe the data?”

Ray’s face paled. “Two days ago. That means—”

“They dropped a plague on Vegas to stop you from spilling the beans,” Bridget said. “We need to hit the highway before they do something even worse.”

Mimi leaned back in her chair and pinched the bridge of her nose. She let out a long, slow sigh, then looked Gunnar square in the eye. “That isn’t going to happen. There is, or at least was, a secure telecom line into my humble abode. My bosses used it to reach out last night. Theysay Vegas is already quarantined. Nobody in, nobody out. The National Guard is setting up a perimeter, but even they aren’t moving in until the eggheads can tell them more about what happened. I tried to call out on that line this morning, though, and it’s just dead air.”

Gunnar’s fists clenched under the table. They were trapped in the city with a bunch of monsters. While they were safe inside the bunker, the same wasn’t true for the poor bastards on the surface. Anyone the virus hadn’t killed would be easy prey for the monsters he’d seen in his dream. Someone had to do something.

And, according to the dream that he’d shared with Rayleigh, Bridget, and Mimi, that someone was him.

“I have to go after the relics,” he said. “That’s what the old man said in the dream. It’s up to me to stop this from spreading.”

“Up to us,” Mimi corrected him. “And Freya insisted that one of the three of us already knew where the first relic was.”

“Which one?” Gunnar asked.

“The Valknut,” Bridget said. “Not that I have any idea what that is.”

“Me, either,” Ray agreed. “Mimi?”

“No,” she said. “I really wish these magic powers came with a user manual.”

The remnants of the dream surfaced through Gunnar’s thoughts, showing him the old man’s glowing eye socket and the symbol that had filled it. Gunnar pushed back from the table and ran into the kitchen, coming back with the bottle of sriracha. He scooped his sandwich off his paper plate and drew the three interlocked triangles on it in spicy red sauce. Then he showed it to each of the women. They all shrugged until he got to Mimi.

“Oh, shit,” she groaned. “I saw that. Not even two weeks ago. You’re not gonna be happy when I tell you who has it.”

“Spill it,” Gunnar said, his gut curling into a fist of worry.

“It was on a necklace, a stone pendant thing,” she said.

“Where’d you see it?” Gunnar demanded.

“I ran into Cal Corso at a party at the Aria.” Mimi lowered her eyes. “He was wearing it.”

“Oh,” Gunnar groaned. “Fuck me.”

Chapter 6

GUNNAR’S THOUGHTS RACED for a solution to this new problem. Cal had lost an enormous amount of money when Gunnar turned a cargo ship full of trafficking victims over to the law. And that was a