New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (8 page)

“What’s that?” Cecilia asked, looking out
the window behind Olivia.

Olivia swiveled around on her chair just
in time to see fire and smoke erupt from the old Freedom Tower, now turned into
a museum. “No!” The sky was full of missiles plunging down on their final
trajectories. Pillars of smoke in the distance revealed the source of the
explosions she had heard. Instincts honed by decades of combat took over. She
was already moving and creating a flaming shield when the first cruise missile
hit her office window.

The reinforced glass only served to
detonate the high-explosive warhead and provide shrapnel for the fiery
explosion. The shockwave washed over her, but she had planted her feet and
willed herself not to be moved, and she remained standing. She glanced back.
Cecilia had been partially shielded from the explosion and the shrapnel by
Olivia’s shield, but the petite woman had still been knocked down and was lying
semi-conscious on the office floor.

More missiles were coming in. Olivia felt
the building shake noticeably as it was struck somewhere below her, and saw
more missiles flying directly at her. She created and flung a flame spear at
the speed of thought, and detonated one of the missiles a hundred yards away.
The other two struck, one exploding directly on her shield, and the heavy
warhead was powerful enough to knock her back and stun her for a couple of
seconds. Parts of the ceiling collapsed over her

When she recovered, Olivia found herself half
buried under fallen masonry. Her head was ringing, but her shield had blunted
most of the damage and her superhuman physique had weathered the rest. She
could hear other explosions. The building shook alarmingly beneath her.

Olivia lifted a reinforced metal beam off
her and staggered to her feet, shrugging off pieces of concrete and rebar that
would have crushed a normal human being. The office was a raging inferno. There
was no sign of Cecilia or any of the other dozen people that worked in her
office. 

“Cecilia!” she yelled, but her voice was
lost in the conflagration and the new explosions. This couldn’t be happening!
Freedom Island was one of the most highly protected sites on Earth!

The floor gave way, and Olivia fell as
the building collapsed around her.

Chapter Four

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

I leaned back on the subway car seat and
thought deep thoughts.

I was wearing the face of one of my old high
school teachers so I wouldn’t scare the tourists. Mr. Grover had been a
mean-looking son of a bitch, and his face fit my mood and convinced people
around me to respect my space. My usual costume is a leather jacket (with
discreet Hyper-Kevlar inserts), jeans and combat boots, so people only recognize
me when I go faceless. While wearing a borrowed face I was just another
disgruntled New Yorker.

Yeah, I know. I may be one of the top
vigilantes in the Big Apple, but I usually take the subway to get where I’m
going. I had dumped Giamatti’s car somewhere in the Bronx, just in case the bad
guys had a way to track it other than the GPS device I had disabled before
driving off with it. By now Giamatti’s Tucker Raptor was probably being
stripped for parts at some chop shop, and I was back to using my usual mode of
transportation. My other method of travel, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, was
fine for short trips but not the best way to get around for anything involving
more than a few blocks. When I really needed a car, I would steal it: pimps had
the best wheels and they rarely called the cops, so they were my go-to people
when I wanted a ride. At the moment, the train suited me fine. It gave me time
to think.

This job was getting weirder and weirder.
Cassandra had sent me off to check on the girl while she figured out the next
step. If Christine was up and about I was supposed to learn as much as possible
from her while I waited for Cassandra to get in touch with further
instructions. My immediate worry was thinking of ways to keep the ex-hostage
from contacting the authorities. While I traveled from the East Village to the
Bronx and back, she might well have woken up and demanded to be let go. Father
Alex wouldn’t keep her against her will, and neither would I, for that matter.
My only hope would be to convince her it was in her best interests to stay
under wraps while we figured who had ordered the kidnapping and why. Which was
something that Cassandra would usually know by now, but with the astral plane
or whatever being fucked up, we were flying blind. I was not happy.

I got off the subway and headed for Saint
Theodosius. If the girl was awake, I’d offer to buy her lunch and see if I
could persuade her to hang around. Talking to somebody I hadn’t beaten up or otherwise
put the fear of God into wasn’t my specialty, except when I had a fake face and
identity on. Maybe that was the way to go. Pretend to be an undercover cop or
something like that. I lie to people all the time, but the idea of deceiving an
abduction victim didn’t sit well with me. I’d play it by ear and see what
happened.

I went to the back entrance of the
Church. The door was open, as usual. I could hear Father Aleksander’s voice
from the kitchen, so I headed there. He was talking to a woman. The damsel in
distress must have woken up, then, and at least it didn’t sound like she was
going to run right away. I walked into the kitchen, still undecided about what
to say. I was leaning toward just laying my cards on the table and telling her
everything.

Father Aleksander and the girl were
sitting by the kitchen table while an inane morning show played on the flat
screen TV hanging on the wall. The girl, wearing silly striped pajamas and a
bathrobe a few sizes too large for her, was spooning up the last remains of a
bowl of soup – borscht by the smell of it. A wrist-comm lay on the table next
to her; hopefully she hadn’t used it to call the police.

“Hello,” I said; not much of an entrance
line, but my normal entrance line is ‘Freeze, motherfuckers!’ and that really
didn’t fit the setting.

“Ah, there you are,” Father Aleksander
said amiably. He always knew it was me, no matter what face I had on.
“Christine, this is your rescuer, the Faceless Vigilante.” Okay, we were going
for all the truth and nothing but.

The girl looked at me, and I remembered I
was still wearing Mr. Grover’s face, which made me look about fifteen years
older than I really was, and not a sight for sore eyes at any age. But when her
eyes met mine, I forgot about my face. I felt like she was looking through my
fake face – through all the faces I could wear. It was like the first time I
met Cassandra. This girl – Christine, her name was Christine – could see
me
.

Before I could start to process that
first impression, Christine all but leaped from her seat. Next thing I knew she
was hugging me like I was her long-lost brother or something.

I usually don’t react well when people
make sudden moves. I react even worse when people invade my personal space and
touch me uninvited. And I most definitely react very badly when someone hugs me
without warning. Typical reactions to any of the above range from shoves to
harsh language. If I’m in a pissy mood, gunfire isn’t out of the question.

Instead, I let her hug me. Nobody had
hugged me like that since my childhood days with my mother, not even Aleksander
when he got sentimentally drunk. It felt pretty good. Not that I would admit it
to save my life. I’m fucking Face-Off. I don’t do affectionate.

“Thank you for saving me,” Christine
said, still clutching me tightly.

“Yeah, sure, no problem,” I said
awkwardly and lightly patted her back. I wanted to hug her in return, but I
couldn’t muster the courage to do it, tough guy that I was. Especially not in
front of Father Aleksander, whose face seemed to be struggling between
expressions of amazement and delight. A second later he looked concerned, but
he couldn’t say anything because Christine was talking at a few miles a minute.

“Also, thank you for taking me here,
Father Aleksander is the nicest guy even if he’s not Presbyterian, which is
okay. I still don’t understand what’s going on, but thank you anyway.” She let
go of me and stepped back, still talking. “But I’m sure we can figure it out
and holy crap where is your face.”

I realized I had let go of Mr. Grover’s
features when Christine hugged me. That happens sometimes when I’m startled or
lose concentration, both of which had happened this time. No wonder Father Alex
had looked concerned. Christine fell silent for a whole second, and I braced myself
for the shrieking that was the usual reaction when people caught me being
myself. Instead, she stepped close to me. “That’s incredible! Is that why they
call you the Faceless Vigilante?”

“Well, they mostly call me Face-Off, but
yeah,” I said.

“Like that old movie with John Travolta
and Nick Cage?”

“Uu, I don’t remember that movie. And I
know who Nicholas Cage is, but John Travolta? You mean Joseph Travolta?” This
was turning into the strangest conversation in my life.

“No biggie. Wow, your voice sounds just
like before, but you have no mouth. No anything!” She stepped closer, her hands
reaching for my head. “May I?”

Typically, people who reach for my face
end up with broken fingers, but I found myself saying “Sure.” Mind control, it
must be some form of mind control.

Christine gently touched my un-face. Her
fingers ran down the smooth surface, pausing near the area where my eyes should
be. “Does that bother you?”

“No. It’s as if I was wearing goggles. I
can see you touching the surface, but it doesn’t feel as if you were actually
touching my eyeballs,” I said.

“That’s amazing. It feels like touching
the back of a skull, but on the front. Has someone done an X-ray of your head?
And you can change face shapes, which means you must change your bone
structure. We’d have to run an X-ray of your head before and after a shape
change. Or an MRI would be better. Holy mother of crap, this is the awesomest
thing I’ve seen!” She was smiling like a kid at a candy store, but all of a
sudden she sobered up. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound like you’re a lab rat
or something.”

“Oh, ah, it’s okay,” I said lamely. I
wasn’t mad at her. I didn’t know what I was feeling, other than shell-shocked.
I was supposed to be interrogating her, and she was ready to conduct a full
parahuman power study on my no-face. Why wasn’t she scared of me?

“How can you do that?” she asked me, and
there wasn’t a trace of fear or disgust in her voice, just open, almost
innocent curiosity. “How is it even possible?”

“How can some people fly or pick up
tanks? I’m a Neo, of course.”

“Neo? Like Keanu Reeves in
The Matrix
movies?
‘Take the red pill’ Neo?”

More movies I’d never heard of. And I
loved going to the movies, usually on weekdays during the day, when I could sit
quietly in a mostly empty theater. Cassandra’s words came back to me. Christine
was some sort of alien, supposedly. Except I was beginning to realize she
wasn’t from another planet, not exactly.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of that
movie, either. Neo is short for Neolympian.”

“Okay, now it’s my turn to never have
heard of something,” Christine said.

Definitely not from around here. This was
going to be interesting. “Neolympians? Parahumans? Superheroes?” 

“Superheroes?”

“And super-villains, but most people just
prefer to call us Neos.”

“I’m going to sit down now,” Christine
said and went and did it. She was clearly upset, and seeing her like that was
upsetting me, which again wasn’t like me at all. Other people’s problems don’t
upset me, except for the urge to smack down the people responsible. Christine
was looking at the wrist-comm on the table as if it was going to jump up and
bite her. “Do you know what this is?” she asked, pointing at it.

“The wrist-comm? It’s a wrist-comm. Well,
a wrist-comp officially, since you can surf the web with it and write e-mails,
but everybody still calls them wrist-comms.” I said. One of the most common
personal items since the 1970s, and she was looking at it like it was Smith
Industries’ newest wonder gadget.

“Not a cell phone?”

I had a mental image of a phone inside a
prison cell, and almost laughed, but Christine wasn’t laughing. “I don’t know
what a cell phone is,” I said.

“Oh, this is not good at all,” Christine
muttered.

Father Aleksander turned the TV up,
interrupting the conversation before I had the chance to break the news to her.
Not that I really knew how I was going to do that. Maybe I could say something
like ‘Welcome to Wonderland.’

“I’m sorry, but something is happening,”
Father Alex said before I could try the Wonderland line. Sure enough, Special Report
banners were flashing and a news anchor had shown up and replaced the morning
show.

Christine and I stopped talking and
watched history being made.

The Freedom Legion

Atlantic Headquarters, March 13, 2013

The fastest man in the world was a day late
and a dollar short.

The attack caught Larry Graham with his
pants down, literally. When the first wave of missiles struck, Larry was busy
cheating on his wife with a young Legion recruit in an out-of-the-way hiding
spot. It was the worst possible time and place.

Even as he lay on his back while Dawn Zhang
– code name Dawn Windstorm – rode him like a bronco, Larry didn’t think of
himself as a bad guy. Weak and contemptible, yes, but not a bad guy. He had
loved Olivia O'Brien passionately for over four decades, and he still loved
her, just not the way a husband was supposed to love his wife. Larry had been
raised to mean the words ‘until death do us part.’ “Now and forever,” he’d
whispered to Olivia just before kissing her on their wedding night.

What he hadn’t counted on was how long
forever would turn out to be.

Back when he’d been regular Joe College
Larry at Boston U, he read a great deal about the Greek gods of mythology. He’d
done so partly because Greek mythology had been all the rage after the rise of
Neolympians, and partly because he’d picked up Greek as his language elective,
and a lot of what the Greeks had written down involved their whimsical and oft
malicious deities. The relationship between Zeus and Hera particularly
fascinated him. Zeus just couldn’t keep his hands – and the rest of his anatomy
– to himself. He just ended up with one dame after another – human or Olympian,
married or a virgin, it was all grist for the mill to the horny bastard. Zeus
was the ultimate dirty old man. Even though the tales amused Larry greatly, he
had never figured out why Zeus did what he did. Hera must have been the
ultimate ball and chain to drive her hubby to such extremes.

On his sophomore year in college, he went
from reading about gods to becoming one. He was walking to his next class when
he saw an old jalopy about to run over a woman crossing the street, well over a
block away. He ran the intervening distance in the blink of an eye and got her
out of the way just in time. A new hero was born that day. Larry tried to use
Hermes as his code name, but some idiot newsie stuck him with the moniker
Swift, and Swift he became.

Larry kept his identity a secret at
first. It was 1940 and the war was in full swing, and even with the US
remaining neutral, a few incautious New Olympians had been murdered, either by
foreign agents or local super-criminals. He wore a mask and made sure Larry
Graham remained well away from the limelight. While wearing the mask and
costume, however, Swift became a hit with the ladies. It turned out that gods
did get all the girls. Larry cut a swath through Beantown’s best and brightest,
loving every minute of it. He only slowed down when he joined the Freedom
Legion shortly after Pearl Harbor, and that only because Doc Slaughter gave him
a pointed talk about the image the Legion had to maintain.

 Larry had been more discreet while he
went to war, but even as he helped the Allies march through France, the Low
Countries and Germany he rarely had to sleep alone. After the Legion became an
international organization, he revealed his identity to the world, and Larry
Graham became a celebrity. He dated movie stars and fashion models. He finally
understood where Zeus was coming from.

He had thought he understood, at least.
When Olivia came around, his world view turned upside down. They met in another
continent, another war. Olivia was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever
seen, with
cafe au lait
skin, deep emerald eyes and a dazzling smile
that turned ladies’ man Larry into a fool for love. Her exotic looks, her
bravery and strength, the hidden vulnerability beneath, they had swept him off
his feet. He’d turned his back on twenty-odd years as a happy bachelor, wooed
her – yes, at first he had only thought about getting in her pants, but that
had changed quickly – and eventually won her heart. In the midst of the death
and destruction of the First Asian War, he made her his bride. He had never been
happier.

For a while.

Forever was such a long time.

A year had become ten, had become twenty.
On their twentieth anniversary, she looked as beautiful as ever. Nothing had
changed. Nothing had fucking changed at all. That is, nothing except how he
felt.

Little things grew and became big things.
Habits and mannerisms that once had been charming became annoying. He knew what
she would say or do in almost every situation, and vice versa. Jokes that had
made her laugh now only brought about tolerant smiles or annoyed grimaces. They
got on each other’s nerves. She wanted to talk about their problems. He most
definitely didn’t.

It wasn’t all bad, of course. Rome didn’t
collapse in one day. Their work in the Legion had often kept them apart for
weeks or even months at a time, and their reunions had been sweet. Their love
would spark and rekindle, and things would once again be well. For a while. For
some time. For a week or a month, or even a whole year.

But not forever.

Forever. The word became hateful. As
twenty years together became thirty, Larry had fully understood Zeus’ plight.
Even if Hera had been the sweetest, most beautiful woman in the world, he would
have gotten sick of her, given enough time. Immortals could not be monogamous,
he decided. At least Larry couldn’t be monogamous, not for longer than a
lengthy prison term he couldn’t. He never could figure out how John Clarke
managed to stay faithful to his woman. That smug, self-righteous stick in the
mud never strayed; Larry had watched him carefully over the years, sure his
fidelity was an act, and had found nothing. He even arranged a couple of
blatant opportunities for John, ‘chance‘ encounters with very interested women,
to no avail. Ultimate seemed to be perfectly happy with his rapidly aging
vanilla wife. Larry envied John bitterly for that, and despised him as much as
he despised himself. Unlike John, he hadn’t been able to resist when
opportunities presented themselves.

It had started slowly, in fits and
starts. A night with a secret agent in Minsk during a covert operation,
followed by months of guilt and, perversely enough, a renewed passion for
Olivia, which, as always, did not last. Discreet call girls while on station in
Beijing. A particularly wild fling with Chastity Baal – and boy, didn’t that
almost let the cat out of the bag! And many more. Larry always regretted the
affairs, always came crawling back to Olivia. She never suspected anything, or
if she did, she kept her suspicions to herself. Of late, Larry had come to
resent that. Why didn’t she know something was wrong?

The one-night stands and short-lived
affairs had become a habit after a while. Larry had thought about coming clean
and taking things to their logical conclusion. That was when he discovered
another aspect of the tragedy of Zeus. The marriage, flawed and hollow as it
was, had become part of his identity. He could not conceive of not being
married to Olivia. The thought of their parting ways simply terrified him. That
realization had led to almost a year of fidelity.

On the eleventh month, Dawn Zhang had
joined the Freedom Legion and Larry’s downfall had begun.

Dawn was twenty-two, of mixed Chinese and
European ancestry, tall and slender and utterly beautiful. Her hair had turned
platinum blond the day her ability to control and create winds manifested
itself. Her smile melted Larry’s heart. Feelings he had not experienced since
the beginning of his relationship with Olivia came back with a  vengeance.

It was a complete disaster. She was a
junior member of the Legion. He was one of her instructors, in a position of
power over her, which made fraternization a clear violation of the Legion’s
by-laws. She was in her early twenties and he had just celebrated his
ninety-first birthday. They had nothing in common; the music she listened to
was excruciating noise to him, and his cultural background was prehistoric
twaddle to her. And yet his old jokes had made her laugh, possibly because they
were so old she’d never heard of them. And Dawn’s initial hero worship had
turned into friendship and mutual attraction. A late night's conversation had
ended with a kiss. Things had snowballed quickly after that.

Having an affair in the days of
goggle-cams and wrist-comps was hard enough. Having an affair in the Atlantic
Headquarters of the Freedom Legion, one of the most heavily guarded and watched
facilities on the planet, was a heroic undertaking. Rank hath its privileges,
fortunately, and Larry was a Founder, with access to the highest level codes
and overrides. They had found secret times and places to be together, and the
sneakiness of it all had only added spice to the whole thing.

Larry and Dawn had been in the throes of
passion – or, as Dawn put it, screwing like two minks in heat – in a
little-used subterranean hangar where several obsolete Legion aircraft gathered
dust before being decommissioned. The hangar was deep enough underground and
far enough away from the central headquarters that neither of them even noticed
the first few explosions. It was only when the hangar lights dimmed and were
replaced by red emergency lights that Larry realized something was wrong. Dawn
paused her pounding for a second, and Larry grabbed her, got on top and
finished what they had started. Whatever was happening topside, some things
just couldn’t be interrupted.

Larry’s post-coital aftermath was
normally pleasant and lazy. Now as sex faded away dread filled him. The hangar
shook noticeably.

“We’re under attack!” Dawn shouted
needlessly as she groped around for her uniform. Larry did not waste his breath
while he poured himself into his iconic blue and yellow jumpsuit. Comic book
mythology to the contrary, he was only the fastest man in the world when he
ran; getting dressed took as long for him as for any highly agile Neo. In other
words, it was a matter of seconds, but not the blink of an eye.

He didn’t wait for Dawn. The calculating
part of his mind that was always on, even in times of passion or stress,
figured that it would be best if they joined the action separately. They were
fifty feet underground but luckily even this mostly mothballed hangar had
fast-deployment hydraulic catapults. He stepped into a cylindrical chamber and
was launched up like a cannonball. He emerged from the hangar already moving at
a good fifty miles an hour.

When his feet hit the ground, he raised
that speed tenfold in one second.

Swift’s power had two main components.
First, he created a frictionless force field around him that made him nearly
invulnerable in addition to reducing air drag. To achieve higher speeds, the
force field changed and he became intangible, no longer subject to friction and
able to move at five or six times the speed of sound without unleashing a
devastating sonic boom in his wake. All those powers only worked when he ran or
spun in place, for reasons nobody had been able to fathom. The mechanisms
behind his abilities remained a mystery. A liberal arts major, Larry had never
been much for the hard sciences, and he didn’t care much about how his powers
worked.

All he cared about was his speed, and all
the tricks he could play with it.

Inside the field, the world slowed to a
crawl. A cruise missile floated lazily overhead. Larry altered his trajectory
and he shot up into the air, intercepting the missile and becoming solid just
as he met his target, obliterating it. As he emerged from the explosion, he
turned insubstantial again and ran through the air until he caught another
missile and destroyed it. Neither explosion made an impression on him; he was
back on the ground a fraction of a second later. Unfortunately those had been
the only missiles within his reach, and too many of them had already struck
their targets.

Where the Freedom Building had once stood
there was nothing but a billowing cloud of dust and smoke.

Olivia had been there. He had memorized
her schedule, the better to plan his date with Dawn.

Larry screamed his wife’s name and
charged into the burning ruin.