Bjorn This Way: A Bjorn Trilogeé Adventure

Chapter Nine

Reaching the second story of the stairwell, Bjorn paused to catch his breathe. He had seen many things in his life, but never a man being devoured by cats. Cats being devoured by a man? Yes, one time when he was vacationing in Korea, but never vice versa.

Bjorn gazed around the gray stairwell landing, no sign of a door but there was a ladder leading up to an odd mushroom shaped glass dome that protruding from the wall a few inches from the ceiling. Seemed like the only way out, so he climbed.

Once at the top of the ladder, Bjorn examined the glass dome. It was glass and rather domey. It also had a vertical slit down the center just barely wide enough for him to squeeze his body through. Beyond that was darkness. To his eyes it seemed like an obvious trap but a voice in his head told him that this was the way to go. So he squeezed himself in, head first, one hand in front of the other. Instantly he began to slide downward on an incline. Bjorn tried to grab onto something, anything, but it soon became clear that he was in a perfectly smooth long tube. Before he could even comprehend what was happening, he was dropped from the ceiling into a room bathed in orange light. Bjorn's body hurdled towards the floor, but instead of landing with a thud, he found himself lying supine in a giant white lotus flower. The room smelled like bleach.

Certainly a lotus this large could only exist in a fucked up place such as this. Bjorn also noticed that there were crescent moon shapes instilled into each of the four walls. The moons glowed white despite the rooms orange hue.

"Greater in battle than the man who would conquer a thousand-thousand men" said a voice from above. The tone was that of a snooty aristocrat, "quote Buddha".

"I'm not one for religion, I'm a Democrat" said Bjorn

"Regardless, I welcome you to one's own base" said the voice

Bjorn finally followed the voices echo and located its source. Above him, to the right of the tubes opening was a small metal landing about ten feet off of the ground. In a leather recliner sat a figure smoking a pipe. He wore a red smoking jacket and sat with legs crossed. Although the man had a bad comb-over and a thin mustache, Bjorn noticed something terrible about the man's appearance. The entire head was that of a crocodile!

"I see you are disturbed about my appearance. I don't blame you, comb-overs are incredibly hideous. Ha! Just joking, obviously you are wondering about my crocodile head. Well we have access to amazing technology here. This little beauty is called genetic splicing. Go ahead and Google it or something, I'm not going to bother explaining it."

Bjorn looked around the room for an exit but saw no obvious sign of one.

The crocodile laughed. "Much like Robert Tepper said on the Rocky IV soundtrack, there is no easy way out. By the way, my name is Svad and my job is to make sure you die ... and the games begin now!" Svad said as he clapped his human hands twice.

Bjorn recoiled, waiting for some kind of attack, but nothing happened. Svad clapped twice again and then looked around the room with some annoyance. "Oh hell" he said as he walked over to a panel on the wall. "I told them not to install the Clapper. So dumb" Svad opened the panel and pointed his index finger at it, "So sorry about this delay Bjorn. As I was saying. The games begin now!" He pressed a button on the control panel and two wires shot from the wall. One on Bjorn's left, the other to his right.

Bjorn raised his arms to block the wires but he was a second too slow. They wooshed through the air smashed through his helmet leaving two tiny pinholes on either side. The wires then smashed into his skull with almost surgical like precision . His body bolted straight as an electric current crackled along the wires and into Bjorn's head.