Category: Humor

“It’s called a polar vortex, Mr. Slaymaster.”

Thor Slaymaster grunted. Thor Slaymaster liked cold weather, the way that he liked beer and nachos and hot alien women. Zombies were easier to kill in cold weather. The shapeshifter aliens were easier to spot, as the mist from their breath tended to glow in a pale lavender color. And Thor Slaymaster’s hot alien girlfriend positively hated cold weather, and wanted to spend every cold day wrapped up in blankets with a warm body beside her.

But the snow made the roadways impassable, and the winds made the helicopter unflyable, and Thor Slaymaster was restless. Beer and nachos and sex had fulfilled his basic requirements, but he hadn’t killed anything in days and the forced inactivity wore on his nerves.

“Has everything shut down?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

Terry bit his lip and stared at his monitors. “Everything’s still quiet, Mr. Slaymaster. Air traffic is shut down. All the bad guys are stuck inside drinking hot chocolate. Only thing running is the subway.”

“Then that is where I must go.”

“Why?”

“Revenge,” Thor Slaymaster said.

---

---

Down in the tunnels, deep beneath the city, there lived an angel. Thor Slaymaster had seen her once, and she had defeated him. But he was still alive, and it was a good day for revenge.

Thor Slaymaster had no idea who she was or even if she was still alive. She had attacked him after he had agreed to help relocate the local mutant community to a new housing project in Baltimore. The mutants had moved willingly, and were rapidly gentrifying a bombed-out sector of the city. But the angel had not reappeared, and Thor Slaymaster had been bogged down with a zombie uprising in Miami and had not been able to track her down. He reasoned that she was likely a mutant herself, and had stayed behind in the tunnels. It was a decent place to start.

Thor Slaymaster took the subway to the end of the Green Line and went exploring down the far end of the tunnel. The area where the mutants had been looked like a beehive without the bees. There was a startling assortment of earthmovers and tunneling equipment everywhere, but all the workers were home due to the freezing weather.

Thor Slaymaster trudged through the mess left by the construction crews until he came to the place where the new station was being prepared. He saw the woman with the angel wings and the dead-white mask standing on the platform, as though she was waiting for the next train.

“Thor Slaymaster,” she said. “Predictable.”

“As predictable as me finding you here.”

“Have you come to gloat over your triumph?” the angel asked.

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said.

Thor Slaymaster was talented, athletic, and deadly, but certain things were not part of his skillset, and leaping was one of them. He had no more chance of leaping six feet off the railbed to confront the angel standing on the platform than he did of, well, growing wings. He thought about taking a shotgun from out of his over-the-shoulder harness and just blasting the angel into the next world. But Thor didn’t know what defenses the angel had against such an attack–she could be a shapeshifter, or another kind of alien altogether with unguessable powers. And the revenge he truly wanted was to wrap the angel’s whip around her throat and squeeze.

“You have a mission,” the angel said. “So did I, once.”

“Everyone knows my origin story,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I did not come down here to listen to yours. If you want to defeat me, here I am.”

“And give up my strategic advantage? If you want your revenge, come and get it. Don’t think you can taunt me into coming down there, either.”

The only reason that Thor Slaymaster was still alive was his ability to recognize and exploit the weaknesses in the strategies of others. He searched his mind for anything that could give him an advantage. He could fetch one of the construction machines waiting down the track, but they would be slow and he would be a sitting target. He could approach the subway platform from above, but the angel would be ready for such a tactic. There were no ramps or ladders or jetpacks lying around.

“You showed wisdom in dealing with the mutants,” the angel said. “Show wisdom now, and leave this place.”

Thor Slaymaster said nothing.

“I will not harm you. I would even give you some hot chocolate if you wanted some. It is cold, even down here, and far too windy for me to fly.”

Thor Slaymaster said nothing.

“Ah, the famous Thor Slaymaster silent treatment. Let me ask you this, silent man. Why did you come down here? It wasn’t for revenge.”

“Revenge,” Thor Slaymaster said, “is a dish best served cold.”

“That is an excuse,” the angel said. “An excuse made by incompetent or inefficient men. If vengeance works at all, it works when it is sudden and bloody and violent and unrestrained. You know this, in your heart, and yet you did not seek vengeance against me until now. Why?”

“My duties lie elsewhere,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“Then I give you a blessing,” the angel said. “And, as is traditional, a curse. Do your duty. Fight the monsters and aliens that infest this world. Protect the innocent where you can, and fight ruthlessly where you can’t. When you are done with your duties, and if you still want revenge, then meet me here. I will be waiting.”

---

---

“Back so soon?” Charlie said. She was still in bed, wrapped up against the chill. Thor Slaymaster thought he saw a small movement in her lower body, under the thick covers, that might have been her tentacles.

“Yes,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“That didn’t take long,” she said.

“Duty called,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“Zombies?” Charlie asked.

“Something more important,” Thor Slaymaster said. He flipped the covers back. He had been right about the tentacles.

Thor Slaymaster sat quietly in the dark room. He had been there for three days, more or less. In that time, he had determined that the floor and walls were constructed of hard, durable, seamless plastic, probably overlaid on solid concrete or stone. Temperature and humidity were controlled, which suggested some kind of ventilation port, somewhere above his reach. He had not been provided with any sort of food or water or anything that even pretended at being a toilet, and had therefore determined that the room did not have a drain built into the floor.

The good news was that there weren’t any zombies in the room. Thor Slaymaster could handle being in a dark, stinking, escape-proof cell as long as there weren’t any zombies in there making life difficult for him. So he slept when he could, and sat quietly when he couldn’t sleep, conserving as much energy as possible against the time when his situation changed enough that escape and bloody vengeance were possible.

Twenty feet above Thor Slaymaster, an eight-foot tall alien in a brown robe impassively watched a monitor showing Thor Slaymaster impassively sitting in his cell. “This one is not reacting as the others have,” he said.

A human in a filthy lab coat nodded. “He is taking longer to reach his breaking point. But he will. All men reach their breaking point, sooner or later.”

“As you have said, Dr. Slaughter. What else can you do?” the alien asked. His squirming mouth-tentacles were the only outward sign of impatience.

“I can introduce pain,” the doctor said. “This specimen is very large and very tough, and probably not very smart.”

“He could be smarter than he looks,” the alien said.

“I don’t think so. He’s probably survived much worse privation than this in the wilderness where we picked him up. It will be difficult to break him using our standard tactics.”

The alien’s mouth-tentacles spasmed and went slack. “We have discussed this, Dr. Slaughter. Our race does not believe in violence. We intend to subjugate Earth through persuasion and logic, not force. There is no need to cause this man any more pain.”

“But we must break him,” Dr. Slaughter said.

“Yes,” the alien said. “Do you remember how we broke you?”

Dr. Slaughter went pale. He repressed a violent shudder, then went to the control panel next to the monitor. He paused for a long moment, considering a large red button that read “NICKELBACK,” but thought better of it. He opened a plastic cover and pushed a smaller, black button, to be used only in emergencies. It read “LANA DEL REY.”

Thor Slaymaster heard the opening strains of “Young and Beautiful” and smiled. Up until this moment, he had only known one thing about his captors. Now he knew several things. He knew that they used some sort of power source to power the hidden speakers above his cell. He knew that they were at least conversant with some elements of human culture, even if they might not be human themselves. He knew that they were wholly irredeemable and therefore not entitled to anything even approaching mercy.

And he knew they would come for him, eventually, and try to subject him to something worse. He would be ready.

About sixteen hours into the musical torture, a bright light came down from the darkened ceiling. Thor Slaymaster was caught in its beam. He was unsurprised to find that he was immobilized, and that he was drifting upwards.

“It’s a stasis field,” Dr. Slaughter explained. “The sensation will pass in a few minutes. You’ll be taken to our recovery room for analysis.”

The recovery room proved to be brightly lit and quiet, without a hint of twenty-first century torch music. The bed was nice and comfortable. The restraints were well-padded. A small medical robot crawled up Thor Slaymaster’s arm and injected an IV saline solution. A larger robot held out a bedpan.

The alien in the brown robe glided over to the foot of the bed. “Welcome,” it said. “Are you ready to accept my unquestioned authority?”

Thor Slaymaster stayed silent.

“He must have survived his ordeal only through his brute strength,” the alien said. “He does not appear to have much in the way of reasoning function.”

“It may be a lingering aftereffect of the stasis field,” Dr. Slaughter explained. “More likely, he’s just too stupid to understand.”

“Maybe a different question, one that’s easier for him to answer?”

“You can try. He’s not going anywhere.”

“Well, then. Do you have any questions of us?” the alien asked Thor Slaymaster. “Who we are? Why we’re doing this to you? What do we hope to accomplish?”

“Why do you want to die?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

“A metaphysical question,” the alien said. “See, Doctor, he is smarter than he looks. And to answer your question, what I want is to rule this planet, and end its plague of violence, and I cannot do that if I die. So your premise is invalid.”

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said. “You kidnapped and tortured a Slaymaster, so you must want to die. If I know why, I can kill you more efficiently.”

“Clearly,” the alien said, “this one is not at his breaking point.”

Dr. Slaughter started to say something about the limits of operational conditioning, and then started to say something about the padded restraint on Thor Slaymaster’s left arm being loose, and then didn’t say anything at all because Thor Slaymaster had yanked on his cheap polyester tie and had fractured his windpipe.

“Violence,” the alien said. “Is it all you humans know?”

Thor Slaymaster grabbed hold of a medical robot that was trying to refasten his restraints. “Pretty much,” he said, as he threw the robot in the general direction of the alien’s head.

As the alien screamed in unaccustomed pain, Thor Slaymaster removed the rest of his restraints and his IV. Unfortunately, the alien recovery room did not seem to have anything in the way of usable weapons. “I have one more question for you,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Do you like your justice swift, or poetic?”

“I thought you were smarter than you looked,” the alien said.

“Poetic, then,” Thor Slaymaster said. He picked up the IV stand and whacked the alien in the midsection. The alien doubled over, and it was easy work for Thor Slaymaster to push him down into the cell below.

“Get me out of here,” the alien said. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

Thor Slaymaster smiled. He had what he wanted. He had his freedom, a new race of aliens to fight, and fellow human beings to rescue. Thor Slaymaster had a breaking point, but it would take a lot more than nonviolent aliens, turncoat doctors, and cheesy twenty-first century popular music for anyone to get anywhere near it.

“This was supposed to be a very short budget meeting,” Alvy said.

Thor Slaymaster didn’t say anything. He was trying to figure out the readings on the controls of the spacecraft. The changing green figures on the center display looked to be a proximity range of some sort. Whether the figures represented the proximity to the Alphabet ship or to the firm, flat, unyielding, deadly surface of the Earth was a matter of some current concern for Thor Slaymaster.

“You’d canceled it three times,” Alvy said. “Killbot invasion last Monday, helicopter malfunction last Thursday, and I don’t remember your last excuse.”

“Hangover,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“That’s not what you told me.”

“At the moment,” Thor Slaymaster said, “it is not that important.”

Thor Slaymaster was uncomfortable in spacecraft, the way he was uncomfortable in formal wear or chairs with armrests. Thor Slaymaster’s skillset did not encompass orbital dynamics or ballistic navigation or any of the approximately seventeen other specific knowledge bases that one would need to guide a damaged, pilotless spacecraft to either a convenient local space station or the surface of the large, blue planet below. Since neither the spaceship or the inconveniently deceased pilot was of human origin, this made Thor Slaymaster’s task of keeping himself alive unreasonably difficult.

“What you told me was that you were taking a quick trip up to the Alphabet ship to see Charlie, and that I could ride along, and we could go over the budget figures on the way up. That doesn’t seem to be working out so far.”

Thor Slaymaster briefly considered whether a controlled experiment involving throwing Alvy out the nearest airlock to reduce the ship’s drag coefficient would be beneficial. He concluded that it might be, but that other matters took precedence and that good combat accountants did not grow on trees.

“Do you know what is wrong with the pilot?” Alvy asked. “If we could wake him up, maybe he could tell us what to do.”

“Unlikely,” Thor Slaymaster said. While Thor Slaymaster had substantial experience with the anatomy of the aliens commonly known as “Alphabets,” his knowledge was mostly confined to the female of the species. However, he had every reason to think that the crack in the rear skull carapace that the pilot had experienced was as fatal as injuries get.

“Maybe I could do CPR,” Alvy said.

“They don’t have hearts,” Thor Slaymaster explained. “You’re an accountant. Do you know what the numbers there mean?”

“I think that one that looks like a saxophone might be a twelve.”

Thor Slaymaster considered the situation. He and Alvy were trapped on a small, not to say claustrophobic, spacecraft with a damaged communication system and a dead pilot, which, depending on just how you looked at the controls, was either hurtling out of control towards the oblivion of the asteroid belt or headed straight on a collision course with what looked to be Madagascar.

Thor Slaymaster knew his limitations. No man alive could do more damage to an oncoming zombie horde. But here, in deep space, most of what he knew was working against him. He needed help, but the only member of Team Slaymaster around for several hundred cubic miles of deep vacuum was not being very helpful right at the moment.

“Alvy,” Thor Slaymaster asked, “what exactly is it that you specialize in?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Slaymaster?”

“Well, I mean, we have you on Team Slaymaster for a reason. What are you good at? It can’t be just accounting. For both of our sakes.”

“You mean like Excel? Data mining?”

“You misunderstand. I mean like, skills that can help us get out of this spacecraft and somewhere safer.”

“You mean like an exit strategy?”

“Precisely,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“Okay,” Alvy said. “Exit strategy. What most people do is assess where they are and how they get out of it. Unfortunately, that’s counterproductive, because it focuses all your attention on where you are. What you want to do is figure out where you want to go, and work backwards from there to get to where you are.”

Thor looked out the pilot’s window at the blue mass of Earth. “How about there?”

“You’re not getting it,” Alvy said. “Your exit strategy has to be fixed on a specific goal. The Earth, for example, is a good place to go, but it is also a very big place. It’s mostly ocean, and if you land in the ocean there needs to be a ship around that can pick you up. I also think the prospect of landing a spacecraft in the uncharted ocean would frighten me just a little bit.”

“Slaymaster HQ, then.”

“Better. Now you just have to figure out how to find it after you decelerate from orbit. You know how to decelerate from orbit, right?”

“It is not my strong suit,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“If landing on Earth is not realistic, then what else do you have?”

Thor Slaymaster considered his options. “Shapeshifter mothership is a no-go. The moon is two days away, and I didn’t bring any snacks. I don’t want to go to the International Space Station if I can avoid it.”

“Why not?” Alvy asked.

“Their coffee is lousy. The Alphabet ship is probably our best option. They can probably get us back home faster than anywhere else.”

“Do you know the name of the ship, by any chance?”

“I think it’s called the EXPHARLABLIGZWOOZLEBLORGLE.” Every word in the native language of the Alphabet aliens had at least twenty-six letters.

“Because there’s a button on the left there that says that, and under that there’s another button that says WOOLERBLINGLEQUABBLEBLONGER, which I think means something like ‘autopilot’.”

Thor Slaymaster pushed the WOOLERBLINGLEQUABBLEBLONGER button, and the ship automatically fired its retro-rockets and slowed to a more survivable speed. He pushed the button for the Alphabet ship, and the spacecraft made a gentle turn until it was within the range of the ship’s tractor beams.

“Well done, Alvy,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“Thank you, Mr. Slaymaster. Now, if you could just take a quick look at the third quarter ammunition spending. What we’re seeing here is a trend…”

“No,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“It’s an important mission, Mr. Slaymaster. The President knows you’re the best person to handle it.”

Thor Slaymaster stayed silent. He knew if he did this long enough, the little man with the neatly parted hair, the horn-rimmed glasses, and the briefcase would go away, allowing Thor Slaymaster to recalibrate his air-defense system.

“Satellite imagery says the National Gallery is still intact. We know the Matisse was being stored in the sub-basement. We have the security codes. What we need now is someone to retrieve it, and you’re the best qualified person to do that.”

The State Department official was correct, but only because Washington, D.C. was the largest zombie population cluster in North America. Although the zombie outbreak had been largely confined to the Southeast, the hardiest zombie tribes had made their way to Washington and had settled there. Determined opposition had kept the zombies contained within the Beltway, but penetrating deep within Washington itself was a challenge for even the most determined zombie hunter.

“Look, Mr. Slaymaster. The President owes the French Premier a big favor after the incident with the Omega Box. Returning this painting to France is a matter of national honor. He has instructed me to give you whatever you need to accomplish this mission.”

Charlie stuck her head out from the ordnance room. “Does that include a new helicopter? Mil-spec?”

“I can have one here within the hour,” the State Department representative said.

“He’ll go,” Charlie said.

“Charlie,” Thor Slaymaster said. “This is not your decision.”

“If I have to hear you complain about your old helicopter one more time, you will have a different decision to make, one that you won’t like.”

Thor Slaymaster didn’t like being cornered by his girlfriend, the way that he didn’t like movies with subtitles or plain-cake donuts. But there are times when every man has to bow to the inevitable.

“Make sure you get them to fill up the fuel tank on the helicopter first,” Thor Slaymaster said. “You. Tell me about this painting.”

“It is called Pot of Geraniums,” the State Department representative said. “It shows a pink flower with a large green stem in, well, a pot.”

“This is a national treasure?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

“For the French.”

“Remind me never to go there.”

---

The stretch of open grass between the National Gallery and the Air and Space Museum would have been a perfect place to land a new, mil-spec helicopter, if it wasn’t for the teeming hordes of zombies milling around.

“What do you think?” Charlie asked.

“I think this is a suicide mission,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“You like those.”

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I do not like suicide missions. Sometimes, they are necessary. This mission is about retrieving a picture of a flower in a pot. It is not necessary.”

“So, what’s the plan?” Charlie asked. “You want to try going through the roof?”

“Cause a distraction,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Pick the ugliest building you see and blast it.”

“Is that one ugly enough?” Richie the helicopter pilot asked, pointing towards a large pile of crumbling concrete just to the north.

“That’ll do.”

Most of the zombie horde around the Gallery moved towards the smoking rubble of the nearby Hoover Building, but there were still a few stragglers. Charlie fired her chain guns into the remaining zombies, clearing enough open space for a quick landing. From there, it was a straightforward march into the Gallery, interrupted by shotgun blasts and the dying moans of zombies.

Generations of thieves and looters had taken every scrap of artwork out of the Gallery long ago. Thor dashed through the Rotunda, taking care not to step on the few remaining shards of sculpture. A few zombies lingered in the corridors, and Thor dispatched them with his shotgun. He found a stairwell that looked clear of zombies, and jammed the door behind him shut, taking a moment to reload.

To Thor’s surprise, the sub-basement was well-lit. The room where the painting was supposed to be kept opened with a touch. The Matisse was there, sitting on an easel, in plain view.

Thor Slaymaster activated his wireless headset. “It’s a trap, Charlie,” he said.

“Isn’t it usually? Who is this time?”

“One way to find out,” Thor Slaymaster said.

Thor Slaymaster pulled a handgun out of a shoulder holster and took careful aim at the painting. He fired, and the painting toppled off its easel. He waited a long moment for a net to fall from the ceiling, or a cloud of toxic gas to be released, or an explosion. The explosion took a few seconds longer than he expected, and came from a different direction.

“God damn it, Slaymaster,” a very loud voice shouted. “You weren’t supposed to do that!”

Thor Slaymaster turned and found a very large, angry man in the remnants of an Air Force general’s uniform screaming at him.

“I was careful,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I made a tiny hole in the corner. Easy to fix.”

“You were supposed to return that to the god-damned French Ambassador! That was a priceless work of art! A national treasure! The President will be furious!”

“I did not vote for him,” Thor Slaymaster said.

The general’s red face clashed horribly with his ragged blue uniform. “We brought you down here to recruit you. To see if you had what it took to help us reclaim this city from the zombies.”

“This is how you recruit? No wonder the military is losing people.”

“But you’re a loose cannon, Thor Slaymaster. You’re a menace to everyone and everything around you.”

“I was designed that way,” Thor Slaymaster said. “What’s your excuse?”

“You listen to me, Slaymaster,” the general said.

“Why? You haven’t said anything interesting yet.”

“You think you’re tough? I have spent my whole career crawling down the tunnels and subways of this fair city, killing every zombie I saw, just to try to keep some semblance of a national security apparatus up and running. I don’t need you to come down here and tell me jack-squat, Slaymaster.”

“There is no national security, General. There is no nation. All we are is a collection of problems. And most of those problems accumulated right here, in this city, because people refused to face up to their responsibilities.”

“Fancy talk,” the general said, “coming from someone with no real responsibilities.”

Thor Slaymaster smiled a smile fierce enough to cause even a dedicated zombie-hunter to take a step back and reconsider his lifestyle choices. “I am responsible, General. I am responsible to my team. And right now, they are waiting for me. Do you have the real painting?”

The general reached into a nearby file drawer and extracted a hard, cylindrical plastic case. “Here it is. How did you know?”

“You would not have endangered the mission by leaving the real painting in a vulnerable location.”

“Just so,” the general said. He handed the painting to Thor. “You shouldn’t keep your team waiting.”

“Thank you, General. And… good luck, with the whole national-security thing.”

“Good luck to you, Thor Slaymaster, with the whole zombie-killing thing.”

Thor Slaymaster headed back up the stairwell and fired a small rocket into the jammed door at the top of the stairs. When the echoes faded, he reactivated his wireless headset and stepped over a pile of charred zombie corpses. “Coming up, Charlie. Hot LZ. Be ready for pickup.”

Thor Slaymaster hated after-action reports, the way that he hated light beer and heavy body armor. But they were a necessary part of his profession. More than once, he had made it through a narrow scrape because of some piece of information that had been written down in an after-action report. So the first thing that Thor Slaymaster did after he got back to Team Slaymaster headquarters was to ask Andy to bring the recording equipment for the AAR. Then he asked Charlie to bring disinfectant and bandages.

“You’re a mess,” Charlie said. Thor Slaymaster’s alien girlfriend examined the mass of scratches and scrapes that covered Thor Slaymaster’s upper body. “And here I thought that you were out there on business. What was her name?”

“I do not know,” Thor Slaymaster said. “But I am going to find out.”

“I was teasing you, sweetheart,” Charlie said.

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said.

---

---

The city was rebuilding the ancient subway system, which was good news for commuters but bad news for the mutants. The city had offered to relocate all mutants affected by the expansion to Baltimore, but quite a few of them refused, for the obvious reason. The city contracted Team Slaymaster to remove the remaining mutants with as little bloodshed as possible. “As little bloodshed as possible” wasn’t really in Thor Slaymaster’s wheelhouse, but it was a good opportunity to try diplomacy for a change.

Thor Slaymaster asked the subway conductor to hold the train for him at the end of the line, and when you’re a subway conductor on a subway line populated by rebellious mutants, and Thor Slaymaster asks you to wait for him, you wait for him. Thor walked down the tracks to the largest of the mutant settlements. There, he met with the mutant leadership, and explained the (admittedly, relative) advantages of moving to Baltimore, and the disadvantages of facing Team Slaymaster in a small, enclosed space.

“We will discuss what you have said, Thor Slaymaster, and give you our answer tomorrow,” the mutant spokesman said, out of one of his three mouths. Thor Slaymaster shook the less scaly of the mutant’s hands and headed back to the subway, confident that he had done a good day’s work and had earned a big plate of General Tso’s chicken, two or three cold beers, and a deep-tissue tentacle massage from Charlie.

There was one other person on the subway, and she was waiting for Thor Slaymaster. She was tall. That’s the first thing that Thor Slaymaster noticed, because he didn’t notice it all that often. She was tall, and she was wearing a dead-white mask, high black-leather boots, and a long, black dress with huge bat wings at the back.

“How did it go?” she asked.

Thor Slaymaster didn’t answer random questions from strangers on public transportation conveyances.

“Are you going to slaughter the mutants?” she asked.

Thor Slaymaster shrugged.

“Is that supposed to be an answer?”

“Yes,” Thor Slaymaster said.

The winged woman with the white mask whipped out a whip, which wrapped around Thor Slaymaster’s chest.

“That was uncalled for,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“So is the senseless murder of innocent victims,” the woman said. “Now, tell me, what are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” Thor Slaymaster said. “They must choose. If they will live, they will live. If they will die, they will be killed. All men choose their own path.”

“What path will you choose?”

“The one that gets you to take your whip back, before I wrap it around your neck.”

“You disappoint me, Thor Slaymaster. I did not think that you were given to idle threats.”

“You will find out if it’s an idle threat,” Thor Slaymaster said.

The subway car went around an unexpected curve, which threw Thor Slaymaster’s balance off, just enough that the winged woman was able to push Thor Slaymaster back a step. “You’ve been riding high for a long time, Thor Slaymaster,” she said. “But you’ve made some powerful enemies.”

“Like who?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

She didn’t answer. Thor Slaymaster looked at her eyes, behind her mask, and saw a deep, bright well of anger, and then a flash of radiant energy which flooded the car. The force of the energy shattered the door, and pushed Thor Slaymaster back towards the edge.

“You’re no match for me, Thor Slaymaster,” she said.

“I haven’t laid a finger on you,” Thor Slaymaster said. “That can change.”

The winged woman laid a finger on Thor Slaymaster, and it felt like a hammer blow. Thor fell out of the back of the subway. He was dragged along the tracks by the whip.

---

---

“What happened next?” Andy asked.

“She let go,” Thor Slaymaster said. “A full-grown Slaymaster is a hard thing to tow. I unwrapped the whip, walked to the next station, and took a cab over here.”

“You poor baby,” Charlie said. “I think you may have a broken rib or two. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Thor Slaymaster said. “I have never been defeated before.”

“You weren’t defeated,” Charlie said. “You were caught off guard. If you had been properly armed, you would have destroyed her. It could have happened to anyone.”

“It has never happened to me before,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Up until today, the only reason I was still alive was that I had never been caught off guard. Now, the only reason I am still alive was because the dark angel did not kill me. I don’t know what to do with that knowledge.”

“Don’t you?” Charlie asked.

Thor Slaymaster thought for a long moment, and then realized that he was feeling something that he never had before, a desire, a deep-seated yearning for one thing.

“Revenge,” he said.

Charlie’s long, alien tongue darted over Thor’s naked chest, dabbling at the bright red blood that was still seeping from his wounds. “Bet your ass. Nobody does this to my boyfriend and gets away with it.”

“Andy?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

“Leaving now, Mr. Slaymaster.””