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

“Ooookay,” Mimi said. “Time to go before you two kill each other. We’ll be back soon.”

“Don’t let anything happen to him,” Ray said to Mimi. “You know how stupid he gets. I’m still mad at him, but nobody gets to kill him but me.”

“Hey,” Gunnar protested, but the three giggling women drowned him out. Ray gave him a quick hug, and to Gunnar’s surprise, Bridget did the same.

She was tall and firm, all muscles and sleek curves. Her lips brushed against his ear as she whispered, “Thank you.”

“Cop a feel on your own time,” Mimi said as she stepped into the elevator. “We’ve got work to do.”

“You’re just jealous,” Gunnar said.

He followed Mimi into the elevator and leaned back against the car’s back wall, arms crossed over his chest. He and Mimi had gnawed on the problem of how to get the Valknut for a few hours and kept coming back around to the same dilemma.

They couldn’t take the thing from Corso. He had more men and more guns than they did, and there was no chance Gunnar could round up any reinforcements. Sneaking and stealing the thing was out of the question, too. Neither of them was an accomplished burglar, and Cal would have gathered a small army of troops around him to hold down the fort after the city lost its mind. He’d be bunkered up snug as a nun’s tampon until he figured out what had happened and how to capitalize on the disaster.

That only left talking to the gang boss. Mimi hadn’t gone into details, but she clearly had connections with Cal still. She’d wanted to go in there alone and talk to the man, explain why they needed the Valknut.

Gunnar had been one hundred percent against that idea. He didn’t just feel protective of Mimi. Something had happened, and he physically couldn’t let her walk into danger without his protection.

There was still every chance that Cal would shoot first and talk never. But Gunnar didn’t think that would happen. Call it a hunch or instinct, but he believed Cal would let him get close enough to talk. With any luck, they could take their first step on returning the world to some semblance of normal without a shooting match.

Not that Gunnar believed anything would ever return to the old way of life. The virus had ripped the lid off some deep, dark shithole, and even if they screwed it back on, the stink would hang around for a long, long time.

Gunnar tried, and failed, not to imagine what his old man would say about all this. He’d tell the bodyguard to stay put in his bunker and wait this out. Gunnar had the woman of his dreams by his side in the safest place in the city. Going out would only jeopardize that.

And the old man would be right. Holing up was the sensible thing to do when the world went crazy.

But Gunnar couldn’t do it. Ray deserved better than a man who’d cower underground. She deserved the kind of man who’d risk his own neck to make her life better. All the women he’d allied with did.

“Ray’s right,” Mimi said as the elevator came to a stop. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

She led the way to the garage, where the battered Accord sat next to a factory-fresh black Dodge Charger. The contrast between the rusty beater and the blacked-out, debadged muscle car made Gunnar chuckle.

“Nice car, Mimi,” he said. “Who’d you steal this from?”

“It’s mine, Jolly,” she said and grinned when he frowned at the name. “Get in and shut up.”

Mimi piloted the Charger with practiced ease. She stuck to side roads once they left their gated bunker and navigated around piles of burning rubbish and wrecked cars. Bloodstains marred the pavement in far too many places, and scraps of stained clothing lay on the sidewalks. Strange graffiti, symbols that made no sense to either of the car’s passengers, was scrawled on the sides of buildings. “This is bad, Gun,” she said.

“It certainly is,” he said.

It was hard to accept that the dream he’d shared with the others was real. Even faced with clear signs of rioting from the night before, Gunnar still wanted to believe this was just one big, messed-up hallucination.

He even tried to ignore the strange changes to the buildings they drove past. Vinyl siding and crude log walls sat side by side, sometimes on the same house or apartment block. Heavy stones had replaced bricks in some buildings. The road hadn’t escaped unscathed, either. Patches of black asphalt were gone, and thick tufts of grass jutted up through the gaps.

But once Gunnar saw the monster, all his doubts vanished.

The creature was seven feet tall and naked to the waist. A pair of twisted horns curved out of its forehead and back over the top of its head. Grimy sweatpants covered the thing’s lower half. The soiled fabric was rucked up above the knees to reveal hairy legs and black hooves. It held a bloody scrap of meat in its right hand and an aluminum baseball bat in its left. It roared and waved its club overhead as Mimi goosed the Charger and got them out of there.

“Jötnar,” Gunnar said through clenched teeth.

Odin had called them the enemies of Midgard. They were the filth the bodyguard had sworn to fight to save the world. And the sight of one of them so close ignited fury in his heart. He wanted to kick the door open and attack the freaks. He’d tear them apart with his bare hands if he had to.

Hell, he’d like that even more than shooting them.

“Don’t look now, but there’s more of them up ahead,” Mimi said. “They barricaded the street with cars. Time for a detour.”

She pumped the brakes hard enough to break the back end loose, twisted the wheel, then gunned the engine and sent the Charger blasting down an alley in a whirling spray of discarded trash and broken bottles. Sparks