New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (11 page)

Vincent was many things, but not a
coward. There was a weapons locker in the office, and he and Dominic hurriedly
armed themselves with Thompson M10 submachine guns, big heavy fuckers that
fired a fifty-caliber cartridge. The big bastards kicked like mules even with
their advanced recoil suppression system, but they would take down anything
smaller than an armored truck or a heavy-duty Neo. Toreador didn’t take a gun.
Instead, he concentrated and a metallic black fluid flowed from his pores and
covered him from head to toe, turning him into an ebony statue of living metal.
Twenty-inch blades of the same black material grew out around his hands.
Whoever came through that door was going to get a warm reception.

The smoke in the room cleared fairly
quickly. High-end air scrubbers built into the bunker saw to that. When the
door swung open, the invader was clearly visible. “Mr. Bufalino,” the man said.
“I’d like to speak with you. Will you do me the courtesy of not shooting at me
until I say my piece?” The man’s voice was deep and had a faint Russian accent.

“Yeah, sure,” Vincent said. “We can hear
you fine from the door. But take a step in here and we’re gonna light you up.”

“Fair enough.” The stranger stood on the
threshold. He was a short and skinny fuck, maybe five six; he would weigh a
buck forty soaking wet if he was human, which he sure as shit wasn’t. His face
was a curious mixture of old and young, with deep wrinkles on his forehead and the
sides of his mouth, but bright blue eyes that sparkled with good humor and an
otherwise youthful complexion. His hair was silver-white and parted down the
middle in a style that had been old-fashioned before Vincent had been born. All
his clothes were snow-white, from a well-tailored suit down to his shoes. His
skin was naturally pale but the guy had also powdered it to look as white as a
mime’s. The fucking
finnochio
was the whitest guy Vincent had ever seen.

“You may call me Archangel,” the man in
white continued. “I’ve been sent here for the girl. The organization I
represent does not like it when their associates renege on their promises.”

“The girl ain’t here,” Vincent said. “If
we all calm down and talk about it, I’m sure we can work things out.”

“All I need from you is her location.
Tell me, and I will go in peace. We are not pleased with your actions but they
are forgivable, if you give us the girl.”

Lying would do no good. “I don’t have
her,” Vincent admitted. “A vigilante took her. A shithead by the name of
Face-Off; I’m sure you’ve heard of him. I got my people working on it. We’ll
find him, and her, I swear. I just need a little time. I’ll deliver her to your
people, as agreed. At no extra charge,” he added hopefully.

“That will not be necessary.
Unfortunately, your failure to deliver her as promised cannot be overlooked.”

“Overlook this, motherfucker!” Vincent
fired off a long burst in the middle of his sentence. Dominic fired a second
later. The recoil pushed Vincent’s gun up and half of the shots hit only the
wall and the ceiling, but at least three or four rounds hit the pasty-white
freak dead-center in the chest. Dominic also scored several hits.

The man in white did not fall. The fucker
was bulletproof.

Vincent had emptied the sub gun. He
reached for a fresh clip as the intruder strolled into the room. Toreador
rushed to intercept him, his black blades weaving a complex pattern as he swung
them so quickly they became a blur. The man in white squared off with the
Spanish assassin, the kind of thing comic book assholes loved to put in their
covers. Vincent would have appreciated the spectacle a lot more if his life
didn’t depend on the outcome.

Toreador moved with the grace and speed
of the bullfighter he once had been, but there was power behind his movements.
Vincent had seen those solid black blades cut through metal plates as if they
were made of cheese, and soft cheese at that. Even bulletproof Neos should fear
them.

The intruder produced his own sword, a
thing of solid energy that shone like the heart of a lightning bolt, its light
so intense it left afterimages in Vincent’s eyes as the man in white swung his
weapon as swiftly as Toreador wielded his. There was a flurry of combat, so
quick that even Vincent’s enhanced hand-eye coordination could barely follow
it, and Toreador jumped back. One of his blades was gone; so was the hand that
had been attached to it, severed at the wrist. There was a brief spurt of blood
from the stump before the living metal armor covered it and sealed the wound.
For the first time in his life, Vincent saw Toreador look hesitant. The Spanish
assassin held his remaining blade in a defensive posture and backed away. The
man in white stood his ground, smiling mockingly.

Toreador’s retreat had unmasked the
intruder. Dominic fired another burst from his Thompson. The shots did nothing.
The man in white turned to Dominic, gestured at him with his free hand and
unleashed a solid beam of light the same intense cyan color as his sword.
Dominic didn’t have time to scream. He fell limply to the ground, but not
before Vince could see the saucer-size hole the beam had charred all the way
through his lieutenant’s chest.

Dominic’s death had bought Toreador some
time, and presented him with an apparent opening. The Spaniard pounced like a
cat and unleashed a storm of cuts and thrusts. For a moment, the man in white
was on the defensive, and Toreador even managed to score a couple of hits, drawing
blood and marring the Russian’s clothing. Vincent felt hope for a whole three
seconds. On the fourth second, Toreador’s body fell to the ground; the
Spaniard’s severed head went spinning off and hit a wall with a sickening wet
sound.

The Russian turned towards Vincent. The
cuts he had sustained no longer bled. A second later, his suit was impeccably
white again, no trace of blood anywhere.

“Wait,” Vincent said. “Wait! You can’t do
this. Don’t you know who I am? I own Manhattan! This means war!”

The man in white said nothing. His smile
never wavered as he walked towards Vincent, sword poised to strike.

I fucking hate Neos,
was Vincent’s last thought.

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

Christine took the generous shot of vodka
Father Alex poured for her and downed it in one gulp. She started coughing and
sputtering almost immediately. I turned off the TV while she recovered from the
coughing fit. The news from Freedom Island could wait. An attack on the Freedom
Legion’s headquarters was pretty big news, but the Legion always came out on
top, the self-righteous pricks.

“Take it easy,” I said, and patted her
lightly on the back. She got the coughing under control and leaned back on her
chair.

“I’m okay,” she replied. “I think I
needed that. Okay, maybe not needed, but wanted it. Or thought I wanted it. Now
I’m not so sure.” She took a deep breath, and I braced myself for another
verbal avalanche, but instead of babbling she exhaled slowly and closed her
eyes. I glanced at Father Aleksander, who seemed to be deep in thought, and
back at Christine, who had opened her eyes again.

“Relaxation technique,” she explained.
“Tense up breathing in, loosen up breathing out. I feel a little better now.”

“That’s good,” I said, mainly to try and
keep her from chattering up a storm again. It didn’t work.

“Okay. The Many Worlds Interpretation
must be true,” she said. She looked at our blank faces – well, mine would have
been blank regardless – and went on to explain. “You know, quantum mechanics.
Do you know about wave function collapses, that sort of thing?”

I read a lot, but mostly historical and
pulp fiction. I knew what quantum mechanics were, in the sense that I had heard
the term before, but I’d be damned if I could explain what the words meant.
“All Greek to me,” I said admitted.

“I speak Greek,” Father Aleksander said.
“But I still don’t understand.”

“Okay, no problem. Layman’s terms. Sorry,
I’m kind of a nerd,” she said with a nervous smile. She looked like she smiled
nervously a lot, and my heart went out to her a little bit. “Okay, say I flip a
coin. It can come up heads or tails, right? Right. According to some theories,
there is a universe where it will come up heads and another where it will come
up tails. One universe for each possible outcome. Okay, that’s not the most
accurate explanation but it’s good enough for now.”

“You’re talking about parallel
universes,” I said. “Yeah, we know about those. A few years back, L.A. got hit
by an army of weird South African Nazis who’d gated in from an alternate Earth
where they had taken over the world. They made a big mess before they got
kicked back to where they belonged.”

“Yes, that’s it. Wow, Nazis from another
universe? So this place really is a freaking comic book world come to life.
Holy crap!”

“And you are from a parallel universe,” I
said. “I was trying to figure out a way to tell you, actually.”

“That’s kinda funny, since people that
know me are always saying I must be from a different planet. In my reality,
there are no Neos. No people with superpowers, unless you count doping and
steroids, damn you, Lance Armstrong.”

No Neos? Interesting. Maybe they were better
off without us freaks.

Christine wasn’t done talking, of course.
“Neos, where did they come from? When did they show up? It’d be neat to find
the point of divergence, or points of divergence, between your world and mine.
Can’t be too far back in history. New York is New York, you’re speaking
English, the US is the US. So…” She paused and the nervous grin came up again.
“I guess you need me to stop talking now.”

If I had a mouth, I would have smiled
back. “Just a little bit,” I said, not unkindly; normally I would have told
someone talking that much to shut the fuck up already, but I really didn’t want
to hurt her feelings. Very strange. “Okay, let’s see,” I went on. I’d been a
Neo fanboy long before I became a freak with no face, so answering her question
wasn’t much of a chore for me. “The earliest Mystery Men appeared during the
Roaring Twenties. There was one confirmed Neo during World War I, a German
flyboy, Von Richthofen. The guy got shot in the face a few thousand feet in the
air, crashed his plane, and walked away from it. There were stories about some
American guy with the French Foreign Legion, but those weren’t confirmed. More
Neos showed up during the Nineteen Twenties; the real flashy and powerful ones
appeared during the Thirties. The Berlin Olympics of 1936 was the big turning
point; that’s when the term ‘Neolympian’ was used for the first time. Adolf
Hitler unveiled the Teutonic Knights during the Olympics, made a big splash.
The Knights could do things most people back then thought were impossible; bend
steel with their bare hands, fly, that kind of stuff.”

I waited to see if Christine was about to
launch into another stream of consciousness tirade, but she was listening
raptly, so I kept talking. “Hitler was the first to recruit Neos and put them
to work out in the open. He also dressed them up in costumes and gave them code
names. The US had a bunch of Neos – we still have the largest concentration of
freaks on the planet, for no reason anybody can think of – and some of them had
been featured in pulp magazines and radio shows, but it took a while to figure
out they weren‘t just very talented normals. Then came Ultimate, the Invincible
Man, in 1938. He got his own comic book,
Action Tales
, not too long
before the Germans were rolling through Poland.”

“Okay. World War Two, both here and in my
world, check. Since you’re not speaking German, I’m guessing the good guys
won?”

“Yep. Germany and Japan surrendered in
1945. By then most of the Teutonic Knights were captured or dead. Same with the
Kami Warriors of Japan – well, they were all dead.”

“Wow. Wowie-wow. Okay, I can see we could
spend hours talking about this. Later. I mean, we most definitely will, later.
Let’s get to current events for a sec. Who’s President?”

“John Colletta,” I replied, and saw
Father Aleksander frown. I hoped we wouldn’t get into a political argument.

“That crazy wrestler,” Father Alex said
disapprovingly.

“That crazy war hero,” I replied, and
turned to Christine. “Never mind him. Colletta’s a good man. He beat JFK Jr. and
that bozo from Florida who ran for the GOP; Colletta ran on the Reform Party
ticket, and both Democrats and Republicans are a bit sore about the election.
He’s also our second Neo President.”

“JFK Jr. – you mean John-John is alive?
He died when I was a kid in my world. My mom cried.”

“Serves the Democrats right, sending the
kid of a one-termer to run for the Presidency,” I said.

“One-termer? That’s kinda harsh, isn’t
it? Or… wait, JFK Senior wasn’t assassinated?”

“Unless you mean character assassination,
nope. He just lost in ’64 to the first Neo President: Ray Stephens, a.k.a. The
Patriot.”

“Okay, so we could spend hours talking
about current affairs, too, ‘cause we’re going to have to go back to historical
events to make sense of the current affairs. My head’s so going to explode. Why
don’t we talk about me for a second? We can start with, what the eff am I doing
here?”

“We don’t know. Somebody or something
brought you here, some trans-dimensional portal or para-temporal machine is my
guess. Like those Afrikaner Nazis in L.A., or the Magister in his fucking
teleporting Porta Potty.”

“You’re serious. A teleporting Porta
Potty.”

“I didn’t invent it. Thanks to him,
people get paranoid at construction sites, concerts and anywhere else you need
to use those fucking things. You never know when you go take a crap whether or
not you’ll find yourself in a whole different universe. Don’t ask me why he
didn’t go for something more sensible, like a car or a telephone booth.” Now I
was talking up a storm. She wasn’t just a chatterbox, she was contagious.

Christine started to say something,
stopped herself and shook her head. “Later. Okay, let’s say some super-nutjob
brought me here. Why? Sorry. You don’t know, of course, you’d have to find out
which super-nut brought me here. But some goons took me from the hospital,
right? And you rescued me, thank God. So you do know who’s behind all of this.”

“Well, not really,” I said
apologetically. “They were local Mafia muscle, and I don’t see how they could
have grabbed you from another universe. Somebody must have hired them when you
landed in New York.”

“They didn’t know who hired them? You
didn’t ask them?”

“I, ah, sort of killed them before I had
the chance.”

Christine looked shocked. “You killed
them?”

“They had already murdered four people. I
didn’t want one of them getting to you. And one of them was a Neo himself, a
pretty heavy-duty one.” And – this I didn’t say – I was in a bad mood, and some
people just need killing. And here I was, justifying my actions to someone I’d
just met, and feeling – guilty?

“I’m not going to get all judgmental and
stuff, because I don’t know all the facts, and also because you saved me from
guys who clearly weren’t very nice. But killing is something pretty final, and
you sounded kinda casual about it, but I’m going to stop now.”

“I concur,” Father Aleksander said. “And
I’ve had similar arguments with my young friend here. But perhaps there is a
better time for that, no?”

Christine nodded bleakly. “Okay. Setting
aside morality, it’s going to be hard to find out who hired them, now that they
can’t tell us anything, on account of their being dead.”

First she made me feel like shit, and now
she made me feel like a dumbass. I normally didn’t give a damn what people
thought about me, so this was worrisome. You start doubting yourself out in the
streets, and someone’s going to strangle you with your own guts while you
ponder the whys and wherefores of your actions. I had to admit to myself that I
had been a little too kill-happy at the warehouse. Then again, I normally got
all my info from my psychic pal; I didn’t need to interrogate criminals very
often. Giamatti had been a special case, though I’m sure he hadn’t felt very
special on his way down from the penthouse.

“I normally get all my info from an
associate of mine. Her name’s Cassandra.”

Christine’s face lit up at the mention of
my psychic pal and I felt another grin forming up behind my blank face, not a
common occurrence. “Cassandra! Yes, she came to me in a dream vision thingy
when you rescued me. She seemed pretty cool,” she added.

I nodded. “She is. She would normally
know who did this and why, or at least give me some good clues, but she said
that you are somehow interfering with her visions.”

“Yes, she said something like that in the
dream. Holy crap, I’m in other people’s visions and they are visiting me in my
dreams. I’m probably crazy, but I might as well go with the flow.” She paused
for a second and her eyes went wide. “Wait, my glasses, I don’t need them
anymore. I'm the Amazing Tobey Maguire! And I got roughed up during the
kidnapping, but I feel fine now.” Her eyes got wirder. “I’m one of you, aren’t
I? A Neo? But how? I’m not from a super-world like you...” She paused again,
and her eyes got wide enough I worried her eyeballs would pop out. “Holy crap,
it’s my freaking father. He’s a freaking freak from another reality! I can’t
freaking believe it!”

“Ah, Christine?” I tried to break in, but
she was having none of it. Her stream of consciousness was more of a waterfall
of consciousness now.

“Oh, God, please don’t let it be the
Porta Potty guy! My dad is a freak from another world who travels around in a
Porta Potty? It can’t be.” She turned to me. “Quick, who else can travel
between worlds? There’s more than one, right?”

“Well, the Magister is the best-known Neo
with trans-dimensional abilities, but he’s not the only one. There is Marcus
Magus, and of course the Traveler, he claims he’s been around since Victorian
times, but everybody’s pretty sure he’s full of shit and he just stole the name
from H.G. Wells. But wait, are you sure that..?”

“That my crazy father is a Neo from this
world? Absolutely. I always knew something was seriously wrong with him. And
not just because he knocked up my mom and disappeared, and nobody can ever find
him, except when he shows up once every blue moon to check on me. Oh, God, that
rat bastard!”

“You’re sort of jumping to conclusions,
aren’t you? Although it does seem to fit.”

“He’d better not be Porta Potty Man! I’ll
kill him!”

“Probably not,” I said reassuringly. “The
Magister isn’t much for one-night stands, according to the stories. He mostly
drags some girl or another through assorted adventures through space-time, then
dumps her and gets someone else, and nobody’s claimed he knocked them up as far
as I know. He’s fucking creepy, but I don’t think he’s the guy.”

“Okay. Or I’m going to need another shot
of vodka.”

“Besides, maybe it’s not your father.
Neos who have kids – and not many do – have mostly human children. I think the
chance of having a Neo child is something like twenty-five percent when both
parents are Neos, and something much lower when only one parent is parahuman.
It could have been a naturally-occurring mutation. Nobody knows where Neos came
from in the first place. Maybe you’re the first one on your planet.”