Bonereapers Read Online Free Page B

stool beside the tub, stripped off her coat and the numerous but insufficient layers underneath, and climbed into the hot water.
    “Ahhh.” She laid back and let the hot water and the vodka seep into her frozen veins. After a few minutes, she began to thaw. Her headache subsided and her thoughts reverted to Herr Dybdahl. As horrible as it was to have one’s eyes burned by a laser, it could have been worse. Someone in the crowd had seen a gun, or imagined he saw one. If the protester had had a gun instead of a laser, Dybdahl might be dead. Senator Sheridan, too. If it had been one of those guns with laser sights, or a semi-automatic blaster with an oversized clip that could fire dozens of shots in a few seconds, the entire assembly might have been murdered, their bodies already loaded onto a plane for shipment south, to a burial place in softer ground.
    Dinah shivered and immersed herself to the neck in the steaming water. The last two years of her life had been haunted by murder, first in Australia and last summer in Hawaii. Those events still gave her nightmares and she hoped with all her heart that she would never find herself in the vicinity of another murder.
    She took a sip of her Bloody Mary, dried her hands, and reached for her book of Norse mythology. She hadn’t read five pages when the first murder transpired. Literally, the first murder. The Norsemen believed that the earth was created by an act of murder.
    In the beginning, there was nothing but black emptiness bounded on one side by a region of fire, Muspelheim, and on the other by a region of ice, Niflheim. At the dawn of time, a few sparks of fire escaped and melted some of the ice, which formed into a primordial, hermaphroditic frost giant named Ymir. The sweat under Ymir’s arms dripped and formed two more giants and one of his legs mated with the other to form a third. Other giants emerged and somewhere down the line a giant cow, Audumla, came along and licked a salty block of ice into the shape of a man, Buri.
    Dinah drank another sip of her Bloody Mary. Hermaphroditic frost giants? A primeval cow licking blocks of ice into human form? What a twisted imagination those Vikings had. She read on, transfixed.
    Buri, who possessed the reproductive attributes of both male and female, mated with himself and begat Borr. Borr represented a break with Ymir’s brutishness and a genealogical advance toward humanness. He eventually mated with Bestla, a benign frost giant who exemplified the nourishing forces of Nature and out of this union was born the triumvirate of Norse gods—Vili, Vé, and Odin.
    But there was still no earth—only fire and ice, with a space of dark, lawless emptiness in between. The gods were constantly at war with Ymir and his marauding gangs of frost giants, as well as giants of other races—fire giants and mountain giants. The gods longed for a pleasant, orderly universe. But unlike the Judeo-Christian God, they couldn’t create something out of nothing. They needed raw materials to work with. They looked around and saw Ymir, whom they hated, and a light bulb went on. They saw in the giant everything that a well-structured world would need and, in short order, they murdered him for his parts. They fashioned the earth out of his skull and ground up his flesh to make dirt. The blood gushing from his wounds became the lakes and the seas. They made his teeth and bones into the rocks and mountains, his thick and curly hair into the trees, and his brains into clouds.
    Dinah closed the book and turned on the hot water tap with her toes. Norse mythology was not for the squeamish. Offhand, she couldn’t recall another creation story that was quite so grisly.
    Arriving in Norway to shouts of “death gene” was a pretty grisly introduction to the country. The protester’s words were directed at Americans, but what had he meant? Was he talking about seeds? It was common knowledge that Tillcorp had developed seeds that didn’t reproduce after a