New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (25 page)

Hunters and Hunted

New York City, New York, March 14, 2013

Archangel looked around the decaying
neighborhood with slight twinge of nostalgia. Oh, this was not quite like the
slums where he had grown up in the
Rodina
. For one, things were in less
disrepair than in the world of his youth, the post-war Russia that had been
abandoned by her erstwhile allies and left to wither and die. Still, the
atmosphere of neglect and despair was similar enough to bring back memories.
Here dwelt many with nothing to lose, and those with nothing to lose enjoyed a
form of freedom that he could appreciate even if he no longer shared it. He had
much to lose now, and even more to take.

“This is the place,” Lady Shi said
confidently, pointing at the derelict building that squatted forlornly on a
seemingly uninhabited city block. “This is as close to a home as the Faceless
Vigilante has ever had. I can feel it calling to me.”

“Is he here?” Archangel asked.

Lady Shi shrugged. “Perhaps. There are
psychic defenses in the building. I can sense he has come and gone in there
many times, and fairly recently. The rest is hidden from me.” She clearly did
not like being thwarted even in this minor way, and her smile had a definite
edge now. Archangel filed the information for future reference. He seldom let
anything make him angry. Anger gave others power over you. He might need to
make Lady Shi angry one day.

They had arrived in three cars, luxury
versions of the Jeep Seven that the American military loved so much. The
vehicles very obviously did not belong in this neighborhood, but the locals
knew that it didn’t pay to be too curious about the affairs of others. The
three Neolympians and a dozen henchmen got out; four of the men were armed with
the new special weapons that were supposed to neutralize Neolympian powers.
Archangel gestured at the group and they took positions surrounding the
building.

“Shall we?” he asked his fellow demigods.
Lady Shi nodded. Medved only grunted. Archangel strolled towards the building’s
entrance and his new colleagues followed. Even as he crossed the sidewalk he
felt a distasteful psychic ambiance around the building, a subtle working that
made people want to stay away without knowing why. While most of his talents
were physical, Archangel had studied under the most accomplished mentalists in
the Dominion and he had learned to recognize and deflect many forms of psychic
attack. He was also wearing a special amulet meant to ward him against such
things. He did not waver at all. Neither did his companions.

The front door was open, and through it
he heard music, a violin, playing a sad and beautiful melody. He smiled –
someone was home, which made for a good start – and walked inside, ready for
action. Nothing. No gunshots or bursts of energy welcomed him, just darkness
and the sad music.

The interior of the building looked as
dilapidated as it had outside. Either the faceless man preferred an ascetic
existence or this was merely part of the façade behind which the real lair hid.
He started up the stairs.

The front door shut behind him, a slam
nearly as loud as a gunshot. The violin playing ceased at the very same
instant, letting the echoes of the slamming door fill the ensuing quietness.
Medved whirled around, his clawed hands at the ready, but there was nobody
there. Archangel chuckled. A horror movie cliché used against three real-life
monsters? How amusing. Medved was not amused. He lifted one leg and kicked the
door open, snapping off its hinges and sending it flying into the street.
Archangel smiled indulgently and started back up the stairs.

On the third step, the stairs changed. He
changed. His perspective twisted, grew smaller. Day became dusk, and he was now
on the third floor of the
kommunalka
where he had lived when he was a
child. Where he lived now, for he was a child once again, a malnourished,
ill-favored boy eking out a miserable existence in the slums of Leningrad. He
was no longer walking up the stairs of an abandoned building in New York, he
was running up the wider stairs of the ill-maintained apartment building in
Leningrad that he called his home, and others were running after him. It was
May 16, 1958, and he was eleven years old. Archangel was gone. He was little
Feodor Igorovich. Feodor the runt, a weakling in a world where the weak were
prey.

No.

The denial was weak and useless. The fear
that drove him was much more immediate, the more so because he knew what was
going to happen. There was an older boy waiting for him on the fourth floor,
and even as he ran up he saw him. Sergei, the leader of the gang of semi-feral
children who had decided to teach the defiant thieving runt a lesson once and
for all.

“Where are you going,
hooyesos
?”
Sergei asked him, and Feodor froze at the top of the stairs for a second before
trying to push his way through. Even then he had thought things through
clinically. Better to try to evade Sergei alone than to face the half-dozen
boys below. Sergei was briefly surprised, but not for long enough. He grabbed
Feodor before he could rush past him and pushed the smaller boy up against a
wall. Feodor's face slammed into the wall, and blood started running down his
nose. The pain was familiar and paralyzing. “Not so fast, cocksucker,” Sergei
hissed behind Feodor’s ear. His breath stank of cabbage and cheap cigarettes.
“I got you now.”

Feodor struggled. Archangel knew what
would follow, the savage beating he had barely survived, the nightmarish trip
to the hospital where uncaring doctors and nurses had nearly finished what
Sergei had started. The limp that had not healed until his Neolympian powers
had manifested themselves years later. The part of him that was still Archangel
braced itself for the pain to come.

“What will I do with you,
hooyesos
,
little cocksucker?” Sergei wondered. “Ah, yes.”

The agony when the knife pierced Feodor’s
kidney was enormous, all the worse because it was unexpected.

“You think you can steal from me and
live? Fuck your mother!” Sergei hissed as he stabbed Feodor again and again.

No, that did not happen, that’s not how
it...

The pain paid no attention to his
denials. The onrushing darkness as his life ebbed out was too real, too
absolute.

His vision narrowed into a vanishing
point, and he was no more.

Light returned and he found himself
running up the stairs again. Thrown against the wall, again. “What will I do
with you, little cocksucker?” Sergei wondered. “Ah, yes.”

The older boy grabbed Feodor and flung
him over the railing of the stairs. Feodor screamed all the way down. Impact.
Bones broke. Blood streamed out of his mouth, choking him. Darkness. Death.

Again.

This time he survived the fall, became a
cripple. His powers never manifested themselves. He lived a life of ongoing
misery until the day he purposely pushed his wheelchair onto the path of the
Petrograd Metro. Darkness. Death.

Again.

Feodor looked at the blade flashing
towards his eyes, the last thing he would ever see. Suffered a beating that
ended when one of Sergei’s boys stamped on his neck until it broke. Was carried
sobbing to the top of the building and thrown off from it. Had his pants pulled
down and saw Sergei slashing at his genitals.

Again and again. Darkness, death.

The past became eternity, an assault of
might-have-beens that became hell.

* * *

The men outside waited for several
minutes. They saw strange lights flashing from the building, and heard faded
and oddly distorted voices, and possibly screams. The minutes stretched into
nearly half an hour. Eight men went in after their boss. They did not come out.
More muted screams came from inside the structure.

The remaining four looked at each other
and waited some more. Archangel did not encourage initiative among his
underlings. After another hour had passed, they drew straws and the loser
reluctantly approached the doorway, gun drawn. He passed the threshold, and did
not come out. The screams, if that’s what they were, continued unabated. The
remaining three henchmen decided to wait some more.

The afternoon turned to evening.

One of the three suggested they draw
straws again. The response from the other two was a chorus of “
Yob tvoyu mat
!”

A consensus was reached and the men
continued to wait, trying to ignore the sounds coming from the building.

Chapter Thirteen

Christine Dark

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

Christine had never been to Chicago. She
didn’t even know offhand what Chicago’s skyline looked like. She was pretty
sure, however, that the Chicago of her universe did not have a shiny red
skyscraper shaped like a gigantic dildo right in the middle of it.

“Holy crap!” The monstrous erection – no
other word could describe it – towered over all the other buildings of the
city. It shone with an oily sheen, its monochrome awfulness an assault with a
deadly weapon on the senses. She looked at Mark, who was also watching Big Red
raptly.

“Welcome to Chicago, home of the Tower of
Power,” he said. “I’ve seen it on pictures and video, but they don’t do it
justice.” He leaned towards his seat’s window to get a better look. Christine
wanted to look away, but couldn’t turn away from it. It was just too awful.
“When the sun hits it right, entire parts of Chicago turn completely red,” he
added.

“What the hell is it? And who allowed it
to be built?”

The Condor Jet made a stealthy run over
the city, well away from normal flying routes. Its course took them a few
hundred feet past the Tower of Power. Christine could not see any windows,
seams or openings of any kind, just shiny redness everywhere.

“Short story is, an insane Neo built it
in a matter of hours,’ Mark explained. “It sort of grew and literally
ate
the building it replaced. Luckily it did so slowly enough that everyone inside
supposedly managed to escape, although there are rumors that a couple people
never made it out and are missing to this day.”

“And why did the guy built that thing?”

“Why do you assume it was a guy?” Mark
asked; she could sense a smile in his voice.

“That thing isn’t even a phallic symbol,
it’s a freaking mega-dick on a stick!” Christine replied. “That’s the most guy
thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Okay, yeah, it was a guy. The Crimson
Overlord was his name, and he thought he was doing Chicago a favor. The Tower
of Power is a giant electrical generator. It actually provides enough energy
for most of Illinois and Indiana. The Overlord figured he’d get the keys to the
city for his creation. Instead he got lawsuits and arrest warrants. That’s when
he revealed the Tower of Power could also be used as a weapon. It took just
about all the Neos in the Midwest to take him down. Big mess, large death
toll.”

“So why is the tower still standing?”

“Nobody has figured a safe way to knock
it down. For one, the material it is made of is extremely tough and it
self-repairs. Also, it does provide free clean energy; nobody knows how it does
it, even the big brains like Daedalus Smith are baffled, but it does. So now
the Chicago Sentinels, the local Neo team, make their headquarters there. And
people started calling Chicago ‘the Tower City;’ from what I hear the locals
don’t like that name one bit. Even mentioning the Tower of Power will get you
dirty looks or worse. They like to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

“Good luck with that. It’s like not
noticing a, well, you know, right in your face. So just one guy did all that
damage?”

“Yes, it was another Neo crime again
humanity,” Mark said bitterly, his good humor vanishing. To her empathy-sense,
it was like a candle being snuffed by a sudden wind. His mood change actually
hurt her a little bit. “We are a dangerous bunch.”

“You tell her, killer,” Kestrel piped in,
breaking what had been a very nice spell of silence.

“I’m not trying to put Neos down or
anything,” Christine said apologetically. “It’s that I keep seeing things that…
well, they scare the living pee out of me. In my world, a crazy guy with a gun
can kill a dozen people. Here, a crazy Neo can kill a dozen
thousand
people!”

“Yes, it happens, although usually the
nutters get stopped pretty quickly,” Mark said. “On average, about ten, twelve
thousand people a year get killed in Neo-related incidents in the US. But,” he
added quickly when Christine gasped at the figure. “But, car accidents kill
about twenty thousand people a year in the US. Used to be more like forty
thousand, until, get this, a Neo by the name Doc Slaughter designed a crash
survival system that cut fatalities from car accidents by almost fifty percent.
Yeah, we do a lot of damage, but we do a lot of good, too. Some of us have
managed to do things like cure several forms of cancer, which saves hundreds of
thousands of lives a year. We – speaking loosely, I haven’t cured anything
except a few terminal cases of being an asshole – do a lot of good.”

“But when we go bad, we go
really
bad,” Kestrel said. “Cure a disease one day, unleash a plague that turns people
into pink goo the next. Keeps vanillas on their toes.”

Christine didn’t need to ask what
‘vanilla’ stood for.

“Cut it out, Kestrel,” Mark said before
turning back to Christine. “I don’t want to lay this on too thick. Sorry. “

“It’s okay,” Christine said. “I didn’t
mean to upset you.”

Mark looked at Kestrel to curtail any
more smartass commentary, but she had sullenly turned her back on them and was
pointedly ignoring their conversation. He leaned closer to Christine and spoke
in a soft voice. “Truth is, you didn’t say anything that hasn’t crossed my mind
already. I don’t want to sugarcoat things, okay? We’re a mess, us Neos. We are
smarter than humans – our average IQ is in the 140 range – but we also have a
lot of mental issues. Something like mild autism is relatively common. OCD and
the entire spectrum of personality disorders, ditto. We are all adrenaline
junkies. Want to hear a great Neo factoid? There are about five thousand Neos
around, but the total number should be closer to ten thousand; that’s how many
have been recorded over the last century or so. The others all got killed one
way or another, typically while chasing their next thrill ride. We are our own
primary cause of death, by the way. Neos killing Neos.”

“Okay. Scaring me again.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to keep the
bullshit to a minimum, and it’s hard because I don’t know if I’m bullshitting
myself, or being too gloomy.” He managed to sigh despite having no mouth. “I’m
definitely the wrong guy to be a Neo cheerleader. I can see both sides of the
argument, and which side I’m on depends on my mood that morning. I don’t like
being hated, but it’s easy to understand why we are. Not that I want people to
love me, just to leave me the fuck alone. But it’s not a simple situation.”

“I can see that. That’s why I like math.
It’s all pretty black and white, or zero and one if you want to get binary
about it. Except for a few annoying things like irrational numbers, but I
mostly just round them up and ignore them. When it comes to people, well, they
are all irrational numbers.”

“After you work on the streets for a
while, it’s easy to start thinking of most people as either assholes or morons.
You start expecting the worst from everyone.” He shrugged. “If you do you’re
rarely disappointed, but it sort of sours you on everything.”

“I tend to be a proponent of the ‘People
Suck’ theory myself, but then you start finding exceptions to the rule,”
Christine said. Just like Mark, she wasn’t really equipped to defend people in
general. Even her fellow geeks were not exactly plaster saints: half of them
had zero social skills, half of them were eternally horny in the grossest and
most inappropriate ways, and half of them had annoying habits not even their
mothers could love, and yes, she knew that was too many halves. “People can be
a pain, okay.” She paused, at a loss for words for a change.

“I’m assuming there is a ‘but’ after
that,” Mark said after a bit.

“Yeah, I’m working on it.” Thank God
she’d never volunteered at a suicide hotline, or she’d have garnered quite the
body count. “But, really, when you get down to it, most people aren’t evil.
They just want to do their thing and be left alone. Even in high school, the a-holes
were a minority. They are just noticeable because, well, they are a-holes.”

“Yeah, I keep telling myself something
like that,” Mark agreed. “Thanks to Cassandra and Father Alex, I believe it
most days.”

“If you don’t, it’s going to be too easy
to become an a-hole yourself,” Christine said, and he nodded.

“We’ll be landing shortly, kiddies,”
Condor said from the cockpit. “No need to fasten your seat belts.”

Christine looked out a window. The Condor
Jet was hovering over what looked like a warehouse section of Chicago near Lake
Michigan, having left downtown and the giant red dildo behind.

“So, this friend of Condor’s, he’s on the
up and up?” Christine asked, trying to change the subject, which was getting
way too emo for comfort.

“Yeah, Lester Harris has worked with the
Lurker all his life,” Mark replied, also glad to talk about something else.
“It’s a family thing; his great-grandfather was with the Lurker back in the 1930s.
The Lurker’s had a lot of human helpers over the years. A lot of the old-time
mystery men did – they were Type Ones, and they didn’t know they weren’t normal
humans at first. Eventually the vanilla sidekicks kept getting killed so often
that most Neos stopped using them. The Lurker still has a network of informants
and investigators, though.”

“I see. That reminds me of, surprise
squared, another question: do you have a lot of normal humans putting on
costumes and trying to be superheroes?”

“Used to happen a lot at first, but not
that much anymore. The lucky ones get a close call or two and realize that if
you can’t heal from injuries like a Neo, you aren’t going to last very long in
this game. The others… I’m sure you can figure it out.”

Christine nodded. In the real world, a
normal person would catch a bullet sooner or later, or end up totally messed up
from assorted injuries or even repetitive stress syndrome from all the
ass-kicking. And if the wannabe hero ran into someone who could melt someone’s
face off with a glance or whatever – yeah, that would suck.

“The Lurker’s people mostly stay out of
harm’s way. Lester helped Condor and the Lurker coordinate their hunt for a Neo
serial killer. He did a lot of the legwork but didn't join in the action.
Condor and the Lurker inflicted all the violence. Much safer that way.”

While they talked, the Condor Jet, still
invisible, descended until it was facing a large warehouse and hovering – and
vibrating again, much to Christine’s discomfort – a few feet off the parking
lot. A wide rolling door in front of the warehouse rolled up. The entrance didn’t
look quite big enough for the Condor Jet, but Condor expertly guided the
aircraft through it and set the ship down as the door slowly rolled shut behind
them.

“All right, we are here. Thank you for
flying Condor Airlines. Now get the hell out,” Condor announced.

As they exited the aircraft, Christine
could see the ship's insides and the ramp leading out. The rest of the aircraft
remained invisible except for a very vague shimmer around the edges, better
than the camouflage screen in
Predator
. How does he do it? Christine
wondered, and as the exit hatch closed and the aircraft became completely
invisible again, she decided to use her Christine senses on it. She still
hadn’t quite figured out exactly how to trigger her super-vision thingy, but
after she squinted long enough it kind of just happened.

She got an eyeful. The Condor Jet looked
very visible to her Christine-vision. Another bundle of swirling lights was
overlaid over the frame of the aircraft, and it was somehow connected to
Condor, as if it was an extension of him. She was beginning to get a feel for
how super-gizmos worked; the creator somehow used his own aura or Chi or
whatever to empower the devices. Pretty cool.

Condor and Kestrel were carrying luggage,
so they probably had brought along some civilian clothes, but they currently were
wearing their skin-tight outfits. Good thing they were indoors; the locals
would have probably noticed two people in costumes appearing out of an
invisible plane. Mark was in civvies, so he looked fine except for the faceless
bit. Christine had politely declined to wear her Condor groupie costume in
favor of her regular second-hand clothes, which unfortunately were all she had.
She’d been in New York all day yesterday and she hadn’t done any shopping. That
was just wrong. Maybe after they had set up an appointment with the Lurker she
might get to buy something else to wear. 

The warehouse looked like it hadn’t been
used for anything for some time. There was a large Humvee-like vehicle next to
the roll-down door. Christine wondered if there was enough clearance for the car
to drive out now that the Condor Jet was filling up most of the warehouse
space. An older guy – forty-something at least – in a business suit was
standing next to the car. Said older guy shook hands with Condor. They made
their introductions while they loaded their luggage into the car.

“Good to see you again, Lester,” Condor
said after they were loaded up. Lester did not look particularly happy to see
Condor, or happy about much of anything for that matter.

“Wish I could say the same,” Lester said.
“I almost called you to tell you not to show up, but then I figured the boss
could use some backup.”