Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (Vikings Underground #2)(21)
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

Nothing. Not a flare, not a radio, not even a solitary bandage or a crumb of bread. Nothing.

She sighed, her eyes briefly closing before flicking back open. “What do I do now?” Ronda whispered. “Think, girl. Think.”

There was but one course of action: find a way off this mountain, and find it now.

Easier said than done.

Ronda sat on a sizable boulder nearby, leaned back against the snowy mountain, and tried to figure out just how in the world she would get out of this nightmare. She wasn’t Superwoman—she couldn’t fly off the damn thing like some comic-book hero. And without the proper equipment, she couldn’t climb down off of it, either. Which left her…

Sitting right where she was.

A part of Ronda morbidly wondered if she’d have been better off going down with Phantom III. At least the other crew members had died on impact. She was facing starvation, hypothermia, and a painfully slow death.

Jaw tight, Ronda forced herself back up to her feet. “I’m not dying like this!” she yelled, her voice echoing throughout the mountains. She took a deep, icy breath and expelled it, realizing how stupid it was to holler out her frustration and fear when nobody would hear it. She needed to conserve her energy for whatever lay ahead.

“I’m not dying like this,” she repeated more quietly. In active duty—okay. While in enemy territory—okay. But not standing on a cold, lonely mountaintop. Turning to face the boulder, she sank one booted foot in a crevice near its base, leaned a palm against the solid mountain wall to her left, and tried to think. There had to be a way off this mountain.

Both of Ronda’s parents had died as military heroes: her mother in Russia during the Cold War, her father several years ago in Afghanistan. As a child, the loss of her mom had been a kid’s worst nightmare realized. As an adult, the death of her dad had been more tragic still, for she’d lived with him and loved him for so much longer. Ronda’s only consolation at their funerals was knowing they had died as honored American heroes. Nothing less than what either of them would have wanted.

She didn’t want to be a hero if it meant dying. Odd as it might sound coming from a career military woman, she wasn’t a pro-war person. She believed that the function of the armed forces should be defensive only—to protect and defend the country, that Americans might know peace and safety. She didn’t agree with quite a few stances the military had taken over the years, but she wisely kept her mouth shut and her job intact.

The payoff was this assignment: a top-secret experiment that might just, after thousands of years of war, bring peace to the entire planet. Her role here, as a paper-pushing geek with an eye for budgets and enough finesse to talk the Pentagon into spending whatever funds were necessary, wasn’t particularly exciting. But the project itself was the most exciting work she’d had in years. And now, because of it, she was facing a slow, painful death.

“What do I do?” Ronda removed her hand from the mountain wall, absently watching snow fall from where her glove had once rested. “Maybe I—”

Her dark brown eyes narrowed, a frown marring her features. What the…

Her hand flew back to the mountain wall, and she quickly brushed more snow away. Ronda sucked in her breath when she realized that behind the snow sat a stone door.

A door?

Of course! Phantom III must have crashed directly atop the secret military compound! But then, why hadn’t army soldiers come to her rescue? Maybe the compound sat toward the mountain’s root and nobody had heard the crash?

It didn’t matter. Ronda’s heart was pounding with too much adrenaline to care. Where there was a door, there was bound to be a civilization—and food and warmth and medical supplies. Hope surged inside her.

She would live! Against all odds, she would survive.

The door resisted her efforts to open it. She marched back to the remains of the chopper and found a piece of metal that would work as a crowbar. Where there was a will, there was also a way.

Ronda excitedly set to work, methodically prying the stone door open from behind the boulder. Her muscles burned and her teeth gritted from the labor, but she didn’t relent. A smile of victory and relief curved her lips when the stone door finally yielded. Not much, but she was pretty sure she’d jacked it open far enough to get in.

Throwing the makeshift crowbar to the ground, Ronda squeezed through the tight portal.

Chapter Two

It was dark inside the mountain. It took Ronda’s eyes several moments to adjust to the atmosphere. Even then, there was only so much adjusting retinas could do in pitch-blackness.

“Hello?” she called out. Her voice echoed off the walls. “Is anybody in here?”

Silence.

“Hello? I’m Corporal Ronda Tipton of the United States army. Can anybody hear me?”

Again, silence.

Obviously she was too high up for anyone to hear her. She’d have to inch her way down the mountain. One thing was for certain—it was definitely warmer inside the mountain than outside it. She knew in her gut that signaled civilization. It had to.

Whoever had received their distress signal probably assumed that all the passengers of Phantom III had died on impact. How surprised they’d be to see her walking down the passageway that had neatly been carved inside the mountain. Now, if only she could actually find her way down it…

Ronda put her hands up in front of her and slowly walked forward. When she felt a wall, she took off her right glove, stuffed it into a pocket, and used that hand to feel her way down. She kept her left hand in front of her so as not to bump into any barriers.

For the next hour, Ronda wound farther and farther down the mountain. She stayed steady, keeping at a snail’s pace, so as not to cause further injury to herself. After what felt like half of forever, she finally saw light up ahead. It was dim, but it was definitely light. Yes!

“Keep it steady, Ronda,” she murmured to herself. “No tripping.”

The urge to bolt toward the light was strong. She resisted it, even though this slow shuffling was driving her mad. But she’d carefully inched her way down the spiral of the mountain interior for over an hour. She could resist the temptation to run for another few minutes.

Finally—finally!—she got close enough to the dim light to walk a bit faster, and without needing to use her hands as guides. She still couldn’t move too hastily, though, for the footing had become trickier. Another half hour, and Ronda was at last inside the mountain chamber that was emitting the light.

Her eyes widened. What in the world…?

In the mountain’s belly was a hollowed-out cavity that contained twenty huge pits of some boiling substance. Wax? Oil? She didn’t know. It wasn’t the right color to be lava, so people had put the substance inside the man-made pits, which looked too crude to be army-made. They were well crafted, but lacked the technical appearance of military manufacturing.

“Kom och titta på det här!”

The booming male voice startled Ronda. That he wasn’t speaking English sent warning bumps down her spine. Military-bred instincts taking over, she jumped behind the closest boulder to hide and found a crack to watch through.

Oh my God.

A six-and-a-half-foot-tall man in his fifties made his way into the cavern with a cloaked woman who appeared to be in her eighties or nineties. The old woman dressed and looked like your average crone out of a movie—nothing too shocking there. But the man? He was dressed like…

A Viking. Yes, that’s what he resembled—some ancient Nordic warrior! Long, white-blond hair plaited at the temples, two bangles with dragon heads clasped unforgivingly around both bulging biceps, no shirt, brown leather brais for pants, huge musculature.

He was terrifying looking.

Ronda watched the conversation between the giant man and the old woman with intense curiosity. Who were these people? What were they doing here? The only non-English-speaking peoples she knew of in this remote area were the Inuit Eskimos, and most of them spoke English too.

The old woman nodded. “Det ser bra ut för min del.”

“Så det är klart då?”

“Ja.”

Ja. The old woman had phonetically said yah. That was a Nordic word! Swedish? Norwegian?

This was getting stranger by the second.

“Kom. Vi går tillbaka.” The man led the old, cloaked woman from the chamber. “Jag ska hämta några krigare så vi kan ta tillbaka det.”

“Perfekt.”

As they disappeared, Ronda had but a split second to decide to follow them or not. Though something quite bizarre was going on here, these people might also be her only way out of the mountain.

She decided to follow, but to keep a safe distance between her and them. She didn’t want to alert them to her presence until she knew more about who they were, what they were doing, and why they were here. Maybe they were just two harmless people who lived in the rough terrain of the Arctic and used this mountain for boiling waxes and oils—or something. Though that didn’t explain the male’s weird manner of dress.

Wherever Ronda was following them to, it was becoming warmer by the second. And louder; she could hear the clang of metal striking metal. As she continued to trail the duo, ducking behind this rock and that, the sound of voices caught her ear, all speaking that foreign tongue.

Ronda rounded a bend, then ducked behind a large boulder next to a stone wall as she watched the old woman and her escort make their way to a crude iron-wrought elevator. As the caged elevator went down, large bars of metal acting as counterweights rose up.

Clearly this was no army complex. Taking a deep breath and quietly exhaling, Ronda worked up her nerve to peer over the stone wall and see what lay below it. When she did, her jaw dropped open in disbelief.

“This can’t be real,” she whispered. “A primitive city?”

In science fiction movies, whenever earthlings found a planet with other humanoid life-forms, the discovered civilization was primitive in some ways and advanced in other ways—exactly like the city below. The foundation of the settlement was stone, mud, and huts, yet the people were advanced enough to fashion caged elevators and what looked like weapons.

Ronda wondered if she was the first person from the outside world to ever lay eyes on this civilization. After all, the colony was in the middle of nowhere, existing below some of the most rugged and frigid terrain on earth.

Like an awe-filled kid who’d just found Santa’s hiding place at the north pole, Ronda studied everything she could see. This main atrium had several levels, and they went down so many thousands of feet that she could only make out what lay on the upper five.

The fifth and fourth levels looked like primitive shopping malls with huts and booths that resembled stalls more than actual stores. It brought to mind a Hawaiian flea market or Covent Garden in London—except that the people dressed like they’d just walked out of a history book, and the shoppers appeared to barter for what they wanted rather than buy it outright. Apparently money wasn’t used here.

Does the army know about this place? Does anyone?

The third level up was also a place to shop—but, sweet Lord, what was being sold was too incredible to believe! If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes—

“Oh my God,” Ronda breathed out. “This isn’t happening.” The huge, Viking-dressed males on the third level up were bartering for…

Women. Naked women! And, what was worse, by the manner in which the women of various colors were being cajoled toward the stage in shackled feet, Ronda knew they were unwilling auction chattel.

Ronda’s hand flew up to cover her mouth. This just couldn’t be real.

She wasn’t able to make out what was being said by anybody on the third level. It was too far away to hear anything, and the sounds competed against the loud clanging of metal striking metal on the second level.

A nude, redheaded woman with fair skin was dragged, kicking and screaming, to the center of the platform by two huge men. Her large br**sts bobbed up and down as she tried to break free from their hold, to no avail. It was like watching a squirming fish try to elude two hungry bears. The guards held her still while twenty potential buyers boldly inspected her. They forced her mouth open to scrutinize her teeth, ran their hands over her large br**sts with extended pink ni**les, and—

Ronda couldn’t bear to watch anymore.

Scared and shaking, she knew if she was captured by these people, she might find herself up on one of those very platforms.

“Keep it together, girlfriend,” she murmured. “You’ve made it this far.”

She’d survived at least ten ambushes in her life, the death of two parents, and a helicopter crash. She could survive this too. She just had to think of what to do.

The quiet before the storm.

The thought entered her mind from seemingly nowhere, and it took her a second to figure out why. The clanging sound of metal striking metal had abruptly stopped. She blinked.

Her gaze flew down to the now quiet second floor from her hiding place. She stilled, even as her heart began to pound against her chest. “Holy shit,” Ronda muttered.