New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (40 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

The Invincible Man

Lake Michigan, Illinois, March 14, 2013

Condor filled John in on the story behind
Christine’s appearance and the events that had led them here. The fact that she
came from another world, one where Neolympians did not exist, was fascinating.
If given the chance, he wanted to hear more about this alternate Earth. Had the
absence of Neos been a blessing or a curse? Many people believed only Neo
intervention had prevented the triumph of Nazism and Communism: Christine could
help confirm or deny those theories. Unfortunately, Condor hadn’t had much time
to learn about her world. The girl had been hunted from the start. The main
culprit appeared to be the Dominion of the Ukraine, a troublesome bit of news.

John had learned to distrust
coincidences. Christine’s arrival, the attack on the Legion, the Dreamer’s
attempted takeover of John’s mind, the hunt for the Lurker – all those things
had happened within a few days of each other. If all or even some of those
events were parts of the same puzzle…

“… and that’s when the Lurker came back
with you and Christine in tow. We’d just heard from Face that the Russians
killed Cassandra.” Condor shook his head sadly as he finished his story. “I’m
going to miss her, even if we never spent all that much time together. She
always knew what she was talking about, and she was convinced Christine was
important. She was also certain contacting the Legion would lead to disaster.”

“She was right. The Legion has been
infiltrated,” John reluctantly agreed. The psychic had to be the same Cassandra
John had met decades ago. Their encounter had been brief but memorable. She
would be missed.

“When Cassandra told us to go look for
the Lurker, it never occurred to me he could be Christine’s
pater familias,
although
Christine actually thought about it. No offense, Lurker, but you never struck
me as a family man.”

The Lurker did not respond. He had
remained silent throughout, staring at the tunnel like a puppy waiting for his
master to return. John could hear Christine and Face-Off talking near the
tunnel’s entrance, but he had resisted the temptation to eavesdrop. The girl
just needed to blow off some steam, that was all.

Sure enough, they came back after a
while. Christine looked grim but determined. “Well, here I am,” she said.
“What’s the plan, Dad?”

Instead of responding, the Lurker removed
something from his pocket: a small cube made of some red material, covered with
symbols similar to the ones decorating – or, more accurately, infesting – the
chamber’s walls. “The last time I showed this to you, it didn’t work. I thought
I had failed. I thought you’d live a normal life and never know about any of
this. I tried to do things myself, and that didn’t work. But now you are here.
Maybe I tried to show it to you before you were ready.”

“What is it?”

“A key and a test. I made it for you.”

“Never a straight answer,” Christine
complained. “Would it kill you to just say what it is, maybe toss in a nice
PowerPoint presentation? Fine, let’s see it.” She took the cube and looked it
over. “So what happens next? Do I go invisible and start saying ‘Gollum,
Goll…’” She trailed off. Her gaze was fixed on the cube.

John heard the faint thrumming emanating
from the cube first, but it quickly grew in intensity until the very air seemed
to vibrate along with it.

‘You okay?” Face-Off asked Christine. She
didn’t answer. He turned to the Lurker. “Is she going to be okay?” The Lurker
paid no attention to him, either.

The sound was getting louder, and it was
changing in a way that suggested speech; it was as if a string instrument was
trying to speak. Christine started to glow with a reddish light. Everybody but
Christine and her father looked at each other. Nobody seemed to think the sound
and light portended anything good, but nobody came forth with any ideas of what
to do about it. John kept a close eye on Face-Off, just in case he tried to
take the cube away from her. The vigilante seemed to accept this was what
Christine was there to do, even though he didn’t look at all happy about it.

The thrumming and the light reached a
crescendo and leveled off for several minutes. Christine didn’t move at all.
The Lurker was swaying slightly back and forth, but otherwise remained as
intent on Christine as she was on the cube.

To make things worse, the glowing symbols
on the walls and ceilings came back into view. Either the Lurker had forgotten
to keep hiding them, or the process affecting Christine had brought them back
into sight. John concentrated on Christine and tried not to think about them.
The girl’s expression never changed. She was in a trance.

John lost track of time. Eerie as the
scene was, after a while it started to become tedious. John found himself
wishing for something, anything to happen.

He should have known better.

A blast of cyan energy struck him from
behind and flung him into the nearest wall. John felt a nasty burn on his back
where he had been struck. As he turned to face his attackers, several glowing
starry shapes spun towards him and hit his face and eyes. Those impacts hurt
but did not pierce his defenses the way the first one had but dazzled and
blinded him. A large figure smashed into John before he could recover. Clawed hands
struck his chest and abdomen, ripping through his defenses as if they weren’t
there, tearing into flesh and bone, overwhelming him. Pain like nothing he had
ever endured paralyzed him.

Agony became darkness, became oblivion.

Christine Dark

Lake Michigan, Illinois, March 14, 2013

In the beginning, there could be only
one. One thing that held everything. A Monoblock, which come to think of it
would be a cool name for a band. Monoblock. It was the whole universe, every
bit of space-time compressed into a single point so small and so dense the most
massive black hole was like a butterfly fart by comparison, except things like
small and dense meant nothing, because things like spatial dimensions did not
apply to the Monoblock. It was all very Zen and Zany. She skipped over most of
that part of the history lesson because, well, it looked like it might be kinda
boring and, if she thought too hard about it her brain started skipping a beat
or three.

Then came a big ‘Poof!’ moment, your
basic Big Bang and rapid expansion thingy, cosmologists had gotten that right,
but missed the part that in the beginning there had also been a Mono-Mind
inside the Monoblock and it too had gone bang and fragmented. The other thing
they had missed was that when the universe expanded, it stepped on some toes
along the way. The universe expanded into something else, something completely
different from anything within it, utterly alien.

That alien something – those alien
some-things, actually, because they had identities – got smacked by the
universe’s bubble as it expanded faster than the speed of light, and they
didn’t like it one bit. A few got crushed, turned into cosmic road kill by the
expanding universal bubble. Others packed up and headed off somewhere else,
angrily shaking their figurative fists and vowing to come back. And still
others got swept up by the new universe and hid in the more-or-less empty
spaces between matter and energy, plotting their revenge.

She didn’t look very closely at those
things, those Outsiders. Even thinking about them for too long hurt her mind
and something else that she thought was her soul. A couple of sidelong glances
at the Outsiders had shown her things that made Great Cthulhu look as
threatening as a Hello Kitty doll. Just knowing they existed was bad enough: there
was something Outside, something beyond the stuff of the universe.

Things settled down in the Cosmic Bubble.
Stars were born, the hot gaseous ones, not the paparazzi magnet ones. Planets
and other celestial bodies followed, you might as well cue in the
Big Bang
Theory
theme song. Life was all over the place, if by all over you counted
the tiny lumpy bits in the bubble that held most of the non-dark matter and
energy. And each piece of life, from the smallest virus to the biggest space
whale – okay, she didn’t see any space whales during her Cosmic PowerPoint
Presentation, but there were some pretty big things floating around gas giants
that she dubbed space whales, thanks for all the fish and all that – all life
had a connection to the Mono-Mind.

Fast forward to the time when some of the
living critters became self-aware and started learning the rules of the game,
fun stuff like the Laws of Thermodynamics, algebra and the joys of cooking.
Some eventually figured out even neater tricks like splitting the atom for fun
and profit or how to milk anti-matter and bottle it for easy access. The
smartest ones, the ones who learned not to blow themselves up or kill
their biospheres or run out of gas before learning how to do without gas, they
packed up, left their birth planets and headed for the center of their
respective galaxies. That’s where the action was, where matter and energy and
fun things like black holes and supernovas were concentrated and within easy
reach.

And there’s the answer to Dr. Fermi’s question:
all the smart aliens leave the dirtball planets and most of the galaxy to the
rubes who are still figuring out that putting sharp pieces of flint at the end
of a stick made it easier to kill buffalo, or that
e
was equal to
m
times
c
squared, you know, basic stuff like that. They go forth and join
the big treehouse at the center of the galaxies.

The smart guys in said treehouses figured
out how to read reality’s programming language and made their own cool apps;
they folded space and tap-danced with time, and knew things that Christine
couldn’t even name, let alone understand, much like a caveman or a cheerleader
couldn’t understand how a computer worked, or even what a computer was.

Knowledge that Stephen Hawking would have
killed for flooded into her mind. Her brain, annoying nerdy thingy that it was,
had not evolved enough for most of it, but as long as she was touching the
cube, her ability to comprehend things had grown exponentially. She knew that
the carvings on the cave and on the cube were symbols and referents in one: the
words could create the things the words described. Say ‘Let there be light’ in
that language and light there would be. Learning the words would take a long
while and many sessions with the cube, but even the little bit she’d picked up
in this lesson was enough to scare the bejesus out of her.

The worst part was, all that was just the
tip of the iceberg.

The universe was at war.

The smart kids – let’s call them the
Cosmic Nerds, Bill Gatii and Mark Zuckerbergers of the Universe – at the center
of all galaxies were fighting the Outsiders that were trying to pop the Cosmic
Bubble by expanding it until it grew too thin to hold reality down. And that
war was the reason us puny Earthlings had been handed super powers and the
magic writing of the gods. The Cosmic Nerds needed all the help they could get.
They had started sending little starter kits out to the Lesser Races to give
them a little push in the right direction. Unfortunately the Outsiders had
caught on and were trying to sabotage the project. Which led to…

Lesson interruptus! Christine felt her
brain being compressed down to its regular human size: the sudden loss of
hyper-cognition was painful and humiliating and incredibly sad, a
Flowers
For Algernon
moment that brought tears to her eyes as she desperately
tried to retain ideas and concepts that slipped like oil from her mind and left
her with pathetic generalities. Coming back to reality was like being made to
sit back at the little kids table at Thanksgiving, times a million.

To make things worse, reality just
happened to be sucking big time at the moment.

Somebody had knocked her to the ground
pretty effing hard. Christine saw the cube she had been holding clattering away
on the ground. Mark was lying next to her. “Look out!” he wheezed, as if he
couldn’t gather enough breath to shout.

Christine looked up and saw a pale guy in
white about to slice into her with what looked like a freaking light saber.

“Frak me.”

Face-Off

Lake Michigan, Illinois, March 14, 2013

The freaky sounds and lights had been
nearly hypnotic. No wonder some assholes sneaked up on us without being noticed.
I got my first clue that something was wrong when Ultimate was mowed down by a
barrage of energy attacks and pounced on by a seven-foot plus bearded
man-mountain that tore into him like a rabid organic chainsaw. Ultimate went
down, guts and pieces of flesh and bone flying everywhere, and stopped moving.
It really sucks when the toughest guy in your gang gets taken out right off the
bat.

Big Ugly went after Condor next, and an
Asian chick somersaulted into the chamber and launched a barrage of glowing
spinning stars at Kestrel. I couldn’t pay a lot of attention to either fight
because Asshole Number Three was making a beeline towards me. A short man,
white from head to toe, an energy sword in his hand. I recognized him right
away: he was the motherfucker I’d seen in Cassandra’s last vision.

He’s mine.
I'd never wanted to kill someone so much.

From the look in his eyes as he rushed
toward me, the feeling was mutual.

I sidestepped his flashing blade, which
went on to carve a molten furrow on the cave floor, and tried to drive my fist
right through his face; I was aiming for a point about six inches on the other
side of his head. Instead, my knuckles hit a heavy-duty protective field, the
kind that absorbs and dissipates energy. In other words, the punch didn’t hurt
him very much at all. I rocked him back a step, and I broke his nose. That was
it. Fucking force fields.

His energy sword would hurt me plenty if
it hit me. Even the first near miss gave me a mild case of sunburn. I did a
little dance around a flurry of furious slashes, trying to avoid getting
skewered and deep fried while I looked for an opening.

If Pasty-Face hadn’t been so eager to
carve me a new asshole, it would have been a short fight. He was pissed off and
trying too hard. A particularly wild swing left him wide open and I got him
with a spinning kick right on the throat. I put everything I had on the kick.
He got rocked back and was stunned for a second or two, long enough for me to
land the best punches on my repertoire on all the vital points I could reach.

I hurt him, but nowhere near enough. I
managed to kick him in the balls, which got me a few more seconds to try to kill
him, but he bounced back much faster than he should have and kept me at bay
with his fucking sword.

To make things worse, after he recovered
he stopped fighting stupid. The frenzied cuts stopped, and he started coming
after me like a professional, cool and collected, using the greater reach of
the sword to make me keep my distance. And the fucker healed all the damage I’d
inflicted. The blood on his nose and lips disappeared, and he looked like the
picture of health just again. I was fighting someone who could take my best
punch without going down and could heal at least as quickly as Kestrel.

This is how most Neos buy the farm.
Sooner or later you run into someone several points higher in the pecking
order, someone you can’t beat, and that’s all she wrote. I knew this was it,
and so did he. As long as he didn’t completely fuck up, I wasn’t going to last very
long.

Not that I was going to roll over and die
for him. The asshole was going to have to work for it, and I was going to do my
best to take him with me.

I ducked under a horizontal slash that
would have cut me in half and tried to sweep his legs off under him. He jumped
up, avoiding the sweep – fucker was fast – and tried to pin me to the ground
with a downward stab. I rolled away from that, but not quite fast enough; the
energy sword touched me on the upper arm, burning and slicing through my
armored jacket and the flesh beneath.

I rolled until I was far away enough to
leap to my feet. He came after me, swinging his sword in a figure eight pattern,
leaving behind bright after-images like a sparkler from Hell. I had to
backpedal away from him. A quick glance to the side told me things weren’t
going great for the rest of the crew. Condor and Kestrel were also on the run
from their respective dance partners. The Lurker was engaged in some sort of
staring contest with a creepy little guy in a black suit. Dueling creeps. Not
my kind of spectator sport but I’d rather be watching it than running for my
life from a guy who powdered his face like a fucking mime. I needed to come up
with something.

Sometimes a good idea can be used more
than once. I cartwheeled backwards to get some space and pulled out my gun. I
didn’t even bother shooting Pasty-Face with it; I flung it right at his head.
He took a moment to slash the gun out of the air, and I used that moment to
close in on him. We grappled, and I got the first bit of good news of the night:
I was stronger than him. I grabbed his sword hand and pushed it away while I gripped
him by the throat with my other hand and head-butted him a few times. The blows
didn’t do much, but at least I had the initiative. Maybe I could rip his arms
off, snap his neck, something.

The energy sword in his hand disappeared.
I had just enough time to realize that couldn’t be a good thing.

The dazzling blade reappeared in
Pasty-Face’s other hand, the one that I didn’t have a grip on.

He ran me through.

I felt the burn all the way through my
lower torso; things burst and popped inside of me and I smelled my flesh being
roasted. Pasty-Face kicked me away and had the sword reappear in his right
hand. I landed in a heap with a wide round hole burned clear through me, front
and back. I could have put a whole hand in it. I could feel air blowing through
my insides. I tried to move, but nothing seemed to be working at the moment. It
hurt to breathe. It hurt to exist. The world was beginning to get dark around
the edges, and a part of me wanted to close my notional eyes and go to sleep. I
told that part of me to fuck off.

Pasty-Face looked down on me. “I could
have killed you just now,” he said. He had a nice stage-actor voice, for a
murderous pissant asshole in white-face. “My name’s Archangel. I owe your Gypsy
bitch a debt I intend to repay. Before I kill you, I will show you something
interesting.” He gestured towards Christine, who was still standing in a
trance, looking at her father’s freak show cube. “I have to capture her alive,
but she doesn’t need to have arms or legs when I take her in. Watch this.” He
turned his back on me and strode towards Christine, sword at the ready.

Nobody else was in any position to do
anything. I saw Condor leap over the giant and kick him in the head, which
didn’t even muss the fucker’s hair. I couldn’t see Kestrel anywhere and the
Lurker was still busy. The last thing I was going to see before I died was
Pasty-Face mutilating Christine.

Fuck that.

I sat up, ignoring how bits and pieces of
me were moving around the hole in my midsection; some were falling right out. I
kept moving. No guts, no glory, and I don’t need guts to live, Condor told me
so. I gathered my legs – my leg; the left one wasn’t working for shit – under
me, and jumped. It was the most painful leap I’d ever made; I felt stuff tear
up inside and I was positive a good percentage of my body didn’t make the jump
with me. It a crappy leap, but I slammed into Christine and knocked her down
before the killer mime landed a cut that would have taken off both of her hands
at the wrists. As we rolled on the ground I felt the last bits of energy and
blood leaving my body. I felt cold and thirsty and very sleepy.

Christine was awake. My peripheral vision
caught a glimpse of Pasty-Face walking up to us, sword in hand. “Look out!” I
yelled. Tried to yell. It came out pretty garbled. Next I tried to scream. It
sounded pretty bad.

Neos in pain can make the most curious
noises.