New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (12 page)

“Maybe. Another thing, when do you get
powers if you’re a Neo? I mean, there’s been plenty of times when I’ve wished I
could set somebody on fire. Like every day when I was in high school, but I’ve
never gone Carrie or Firestarter on anybody.”

“Neo powers manifest at different times
for different people,” I explained. “Usually after puberty, although there are
exceptions, and usually before middle age, but again, there’s exceptions there
too. As far as I know, there’s no hard and fast rules, either, sometimes a
potential Neo just wakes up with super powers, sometimes a traumatic event
triggers them. I figure your abilities triggered when you crossed over. That’s
why you’ve fully recovered from the kidnapping. All Neos heal fast.”

‘Which leads to my next question: what
are my super-powers? Other than 20-20 vision and healing fast. Should I try to
concentrate and set something on fire, or something like that?”

“Let’s take it one step at a time,” I
said quickly before she actually tried to set something on fire. There had been
some tragic incidents along those lines. “Usually when powers manifest it’s
pretty obvious, but you were unconscious at the time. Just don’t try anything
right now, okay? You might accidentally set me or the good father on fire.”

“Oh, God, okay, I see your point.”

I could tell that Father Aleksander
wasn’t crazy about all the taking of the Lord’s name in vain Christine favored,
but he was restraining himself from saying something. I’d also caught him
smiling while watching Christine and me talking. I wasn’t sure why.

“At the very least, you can interfere
with precognitive and clairvoyant abilities,” I went on. Jesus H. Christ, I'd
never spoken for so long with somebody I‘d just met except when doing
undercover work. “That’s why Cassandra wanted you as far from her as possible
while she tried to figure things out. And you might be able to travel between
worlds, in which case nobody brought you here, you did it yourself.”

“But if I did it myself, why did someone
try to kidnap me?”

“Point. And we still don’t know why you
appeared in Central Park. If someone was bringing you here, why wouldn’t they
drag you directly to their home base?” I shrugged. “Not enough information. We can
make guesses until the cows come home, but we need information. Cassandra is
working on it; meanwhile we can learn more about you. Your powers, for one.”

“So where can I learn about my powers?”

“Well, I do know a guy.”

Chapter Six

The Freedom Legion

Caribbean Sea, March 13, 2013

After a while, he dreamed.

“Clarke! John Clarke!”

He turned around and saw her for the
first time, standing in the bullpen of
The World’s Journal
. She was
beautiful, and angry, and beautiful when she was angry. Her fiery red hair and
blazing blue-grey eyes expressed her anger beautifully. She walked determinedly
toward him, a rolled-up newspaper in her hand.

“Yes, I’m talking to you, buster! You
stole my story. Nobody steals Linda Lamar’s stories, let alone some upstate
small-town bumpkin fresh off the farm! Who do you think you are?”

“Ma’am?” he said, confused and
bewildered. He had no idea what she was talking about. For one, his father
wasn’t a farmer, but a doctor, albeit a small town doctor.

She poked his chest with the rolled-up
newspaper. “Don’t ma’am me, you gaping chimpanzee! I spent three weeks working
on the O’Doule brothers and their extortion racket! I was about to write a
whole feature on it, and what happens? Some mystery man busts them up, and you
write about it!” She poked him again. “You get a Page One byline and a job at
the
Journal
! What do I get? Not a heck of a lot! Thanks for nothing,
buster! You pull that stunt on me again, you’re going to be walking funny for a
week!” She stalked off before he could formulate a reply.

That had been the first time.

“John, please go away.”

That had been the last time.

The pallid scarecrow on the hospital bed
was ninety-three years old. Linda Lamar had endured three cancer operations, a
heart transplant and every measure modern medicine had developed against old
age and death. She had been shot nine times, stabbed six times, and had lived
through more narrow escapes than possibly any other normal human being. She had
celebrated her ninetieth birthday singing and dancing, looking like a vigorous
woman in her early sixties. The collapse had happened two years later and it
had been sudden and total, as if a dam had broken and let all the ravages of
time flow at last.

“I can’t bear to have you look at me like
this. Before, it was all right, but now…”

He gently shushed her and held her hand,
weeping silently as he watched her go. He whispered the only three words that
mattered, and she whispered them back. At the end he had seen her fear, and had
been overwhelmed by despair. For all his power, he had not been able to help
her. She died in fear and pain, and he couldn’t make it better.

Slow mocking applause started behind him.

“Pathetic.”

The hospital room was gone. John now
stood in one of the many lairs of his greatest foe.

Hiram Hades clapped his hands a few more
times. “You are so very weak, for a man who can move mountains,” he said with a
contemptuous smile. “She didn’t die of cancer, or even old age. What did
finally kill her? It was your ethics, boy. Your moral cowardice did her in.”

“I did everything I could,” John said.
The words sounded hollow and false even as he spoke them.

“Buffalo chips. Daedalus Smith offered
you an alternative. All you had to do was take him up on it.”

“Cloning a full adult body is illegal!”
John snapped back. “And a brain transplant would have resulted in the clone’s
death! Linda wouldn’t have wanted to live by murdering an innocent.”

“Ah, but you never asked her, did you?”
Hiram said triumphantly. “You didn’t dare tempt her with the chance of youth
and vitality. You were afraid she might have asked for it, begged you for it.”

John didn’t say anything.

“They call you the Defender of Liberty,
but you never gave her the freedom to choose. You knew better than her, of
course. She was only human, and you are a living god. The only difference
between you and me, boy, is that I never hid my certainty than I was better
than the mortal rabble beneath us.”

“You may have been better than them, but
you weren’t better than me,” John growled, and the scenery shifted again.
Another lair, this one high in the Peruvian mountains. Hiram was there as well,
lying broken and bleeding at John’s feet. Hiram’s adamantine black armor and
all his gadgets and artifacts lay shattered and scattered around him. He was
dying, but his mocking smile still showed through his bleeding mouth and
splintered teeth.

“That was the day you finally grew some
balls, boy. How many lives would have been spared if you had done what was
necessary the first time you beat me?”

“I wised up. You would have gotten the
death penalty in any case, but I couldn’t risk you escaping while you went to
trial. You had done it too many times before.”

“So you stepped on my neck until it
snapped, and all my cybernetics and healing systems could not put Humpty Dumpty
back together again. It was your finest moment, Ultimate. But you squandered it
and went back to your old phony persona, merciful and compassionate when all
you really want is to kick apart the miserable anthills humanity has erected.
You let people who are your inferiors in every way tell you what to do, mock
you and insult you. You think your restraint makes you better than they are,
when all you are doing is bringing yourself down to their level. Pathetic.”

“So what should I do, then? Become like
you? Kill and destroy, only to end up dead and unlamented?”

“I tried to rule humankind and lost,”
Hiram admitted. “But think about it, boy. You could try and win.”

John started to reply, but cold water
filled his throat, his lungs.

He woke up at the bottom of the sea,
surrounded by the darkness, cold and pressure of the deep.  His body had been
brutally battered, burned and irradiated by the explosion, but he was
recovering quickly. His costume had been mostly torn off, but he was fine,
physically, at least.

John was not much given to introspection,
not until the last few months. He had grieved Linda and moved on, acknowledging
his regrets and losses but not obsessively dwelling on them. Recently, however,
it seemed like the past was all he could think about.

He needed to do something about this.

Christine Dark

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

“It’s freaking surreal,” Christine
whispered to herself as she strolled through the brave new world she’d found
herself in.

She’d never been a fashionista, something
that Sophie was never reluctant to remind her of, but there were things that
just jumped at you. Men’s hats, for example: about one third of the people over
thirty she saw on her way to the subway wore them. Old-style hats, the kind of
thing she’d last seen on
Mad Men
. Her uncle Pete had once joked that JFK
had killed the hat industry by refusing to wear one, and that maybe people
should have looked for a disgruntled hatter at the grassy knoll. Maybe JFK
turning into a disgraced one-term president instead of the Martyr of Camelot
had changed fashion history along with capital-H history. Neat theory, and
probably wrong, of course. Other than hats, she noticed more men of all ages
wearing button-down shirts. T-shirts were there aplenty, though, and a lot of
them seemed to have stylized insignias for assorted superheroes. She saw dozens
of red-on-silver ‘U’ symbols, which must stand for Ultimate, who certainly
seemed to be a popular guy. Comic-book t-shirts weren’t just for children or
geeks on this planet. That cheered her up quite a bit.

She didn’t see any Face-Off merch
anywhere. Her rescuer didn’t seem to be much for self-promotion. Or maybe he
had a lousy publicist.

Women wore skirts and dresses of all
lengths, from micro-minis to down-to-the-ankle numbers, with a minority in
jeans or slacks, and a larger minority wearing tight and shiny leggings in
various colors, including several people who really, really shouldn’t be
wearing anything tight or shiny. A lot of them also favored 80s style big hair,
with lots of product to keep it just so. It made her shoulder length,
just-hanging-there hair seem drab, and she’d been lucky to get a hair brush
from Father Aleksander to undo some of the damage her abductors had inflicted
on it.

Since Christine couldn’t really go out on
the street wearing striped pajamas and fuzzy slippers, Father Aleksander had
let her rummage through the church’s donation box clothes selection. She’d
ended up in faded blue jeans, sneakers, a plain t-shirt and a pink sweater. One
of the priest’s parishioners had also dropped off some new underwear for her,
so at least that wasn’t second hand. She didn’t stand out much, and nobody was
going to mistake her for a fashion model, so that was okay. As long as they
didn’t figure out she was an alien from another dimension, she’d be happy.

Cars looked different, too. Christine was
into cars even less than she was into fashion, but she did notice a ton of
electric cars on the streets, noticeable because they made a funny buzzing
sound which Face-Off explained was built in so they wouldn’t sneak up on
people. Some brands she recognized – Ford and General Motors – and others she
didn’t, like Tucker. Whatever company Tucker was, it made a lot of cars in this
world. The foreign cars she could see were European (mostly German Mercedes), a
few Japanese models and lots of others she’d never heard of, like Donfeng and
Fujian Motors, which Face-Off explained were Chinese. “Made by the good Chinese
of the Republic of China,” he added. “As opposed to the evil Chinese of the
Chinese Empire.” Which definitely would merit a whole other conversation
sometime soon.

People were on the phone as they walked,
same as in her world, but most of them were using the wrist-thingies instead,
and most of them were Skype-ing or whatever they called it here, using screens
on said wrist-thingies. She had no idea how people could walk and do video
conferencing at the same time but they seemed to manage just fine. A lot of
people were also wearing goggles or mirror shades with antennas on the side,
which were the most common alternative to the wrist-thingies.

They were in Times Square, which was as
crowded as the one in her universe, and had just as many neon signs and giant
screens. At first glance most of the buildings and stores she could see were
pretty similar to the ones in her world. This Times Square also had flying guys
in leotards, though.

“Flying dude. That’s a flying dude over
there,” she blurted out.

“Stop staring, you look like a tourist,”
Face-Off said in an amused tone.

“I
am
a tourist. Do you know him?”
she asked. Flying Dude cut an impressive figure in his skin-tight red and
yellow costume and shiny full face helmet in the same colors.
Color-coordination was a must in superhero world, apparently.

“Little bit. Name’s Star Eagle. He’s a
prick.”

“Bummer.”

Face-Off had a face on right now, as well
as hair, which he could grow and remove at will. He looked a bit like Christian
Bale. Christine wanted to ask him if Christian Bale existed in this world, but
she had way too many questions ahead of that one. Maybe when she had a chance
she’d check Imdb.com and find out, assuming they had Imdb.com in this world,
which was yet another question on the list. She’d managed to ask only about a
dozen questions on the subway trip to Times Square, which left her with about
three or four hundred to go.

The subway cars in this world were a bit
cleaner and more comfortable than back home: the cars were more like the ones
in the London Underground, which she had seen firsthand on a trip with her
mother and one of her few rich boyfriends. The trip had been a last-ditch
attempt by the boyfriend to impress her mom, an attempt that had failed rather
messily. The sights had been awesome, but the drama had spoiled much of the
fun. London had been cool and different, but she’d never been as
culture-shocked as she was now. The combination of familiar sights and stuff
straight out of Bizarro Sunnydale was making her head spin.

Christine tried not to stare at the
flying dude, which wasn’t easy to do, as he kept circling Times Square and
performing aerial maneuvers, to the delight of hundreds of picture-snapping
tourists. The local New Yorkers hardly spared him a glance, which went to show
that New Yorkers were the same throughout the multiverse. After a while, they
walked out of Times Square and left Star Eagle the flying prick behind.

“I don’t want to sound like a nine-year
old, but are we there yet?” she asked Face-Off. “I need to sit down and process
all this stuff.”

“We’re close. Just another couple of
blocks.”

“Okey-dokey,” Christine said, somewhat
uncertainly. A part of her still wasn’t a hundred percent sure she wasn’t
imagining the whole thing. On the other hand, if her imagination was that good,
she might have to start writing movie scripts as soon as she woke up. She
turned her attention on the tourists. They were an international bunch, lots of
Chinese and East Indian ones, plus the usual assortment from every continent. A
few were using their wrist-thingies to take the pictures, but most of them were
using dedicated cameras or some sort of goggle-built devices.

“So what’s the deal with the
wrist-thingies?” she asked, trying to at least cross a few more questions off
as they walked. “Back home we have cell phones, and we keep them in our pocket,
or purse, belt-holder or even fanny packs.”

“Not much to tell. We’ve had wrist-comms
here for over fifty years, and wrist-comps for about twenty. I think the first
one who started using them was a Chicago police detective back in the 1940s,
Richard something or other. It wasn’t a phone, just a two-way radio, but a few
years later he started using a wrist communicator with a TV screen. Someone
started calling them wrist-comms, and after a couple decades everybody started
using them. I keep mine in a pocket, though. Having an electronic gizmo
strapped to your wrist while you’re punching people out isn’t a good idea.”

“Interesting.” Christine’s brain had been
getting bored of watching stuff like a slack-jawed yokel, and it jumped at the
chance to work on a new problem. Wrist TV-phones for fifty years, that was way
older than cell phones in her world. Older than personal computers; had PCs
developed earlier in this world, too? Add another question to the list, darn
it.

Speaking of worlds, she needed to have
some shorthand when thinking about them. Christine decided to name her world
Earth Prime. Her current location in the multiverse would thereafter be known
as Earth Alpha. There you go, neither world would have to feel bad or
marginalized.

“I wish we had more time so I could show
you the town properly,” Face-Off said. “Maybe after this is over, we can take
some time off and you can play tourist and I can play local guide, unless
you’re in a rush to get back home.”

“That’d be cool,” she said. Except for
the whole kidnapping thing, and luckily she’d mostly slept through that, this
whole situation was pretty freaking awesome. She definitely wanted to get all
her questions answered and Earth Alpha was an uber-geek wonderland. She wasn’t into
comic books all that much; she’d gone through a short-lived
X-Men
movie
madness phase, but had outgrown it early in life. She was still burning to know
how superheroes would work in real life, even if this wouldn’t have been her
choice of alternate universe to visit. If given her druthers, which nobody was
handing out so far, she’d have stumbled into one of her guilty-pleasure fantasy
romance worlds, complete with bare-chested silent and strong men with hidden
sensitive sides (although, to be honest with herself, those worlds would also
be sorely lacking in basic sanitation and other modern conveniences, and people
would be somewhat more rapey than she’d like).

Come to think of it, she had a silent and
strong male companion right by her side, if not all that bare-chested, and he
kinda-sorta had just asked her out on a kinda-sorta date. Face-Off wasn’t a
muscle-bound type, and he had no flowing hair or soulful eyes – or any kind of
hair or eyes when he was himself, but on the other hand he could look like
anybody he wanted to, which meant she could get flowing hair and soulful eyes a
la carte. Not that she really wanted to hook up at the moment, especially with
a very strange stranger.

Christine knew few actual facts about her
rescuer, but she was certain about a couple things about him. Face-Off was in a
lot of pain, and there was a lot of pent-up rage inside him. Something bad had
happened to him, or lots of bad somethings. She didn’t know why she felt so
sure about that; they hadn’t had an Oprah-style interview or anything, and he
hadn’t really volunteered much information about himself. She suspected that
one of her Neolympian powers was some sort of super-empathy.

Her Christine-sense also told her that
Face-Off was a pretty lonely guy, something she could sympathize with. She’d
never been good at making friends. In high-school she’d been a total nerd; her
love of books, computer games and obscure TV shows and movies had been her
first social strike. A brutal acne outbreak and braces that didn’t come out
until her seventeenth birthday had pretty much been strikes two and three.
Throw in her absent-mindedness and endless chattering whenever she got nervous,
except when she got so nervous she just shut down and couldn’t speak at all,
and it all added up to a perfect pariah paella recipe. In college she’d gotten
a bit better, but even there half of her friends were people she’d never seen
except as avatars on online games. Agreeing to go to the fateful frat party had
been an impulsive last-ditch attempt to come out of her shell, and instead
she’d ended up in another world, shell and all.

Speaking of absent-mindedness, she barely
noticed Face-Off had led her to an elevator leading to the subway, the kind
of thing most people that weren’t on wheelchairs or carrying luggage never even
noticed, since the stairs were so much quicker and more visible. They got on
the elevator, and Face-Off started pushing its buttons in a complex pattern.
Now that she was paying attention to her surroundings, Christine followed the
pattern and memorized it. It was a thirteen number combo punched in a rapid
fashion. The elevator went down, and down, at least two levels lower than it
should have. Pretty neat. Christine wondered how somebody had managed to build
entire elevator levels on the down-low, and sighed. The last thing she needed
was more questions.

The elevator doors opened up into total
darkness. Face-Off produced a flashlight out of a coat pocket and turned it on,
casting a small island of light ahead of them. From what little she could see,
they were in a disused section of the subway system. The concrete floor was
covered with dirt and assorted detritus, and she was pretty sure she saw a couple
of rats the size of Boston terriers scurrying about. Yuck.

“Looks cozy,” she said, trying to sound
nonchalant. Her voice broke halfway through ‘cozy,’ so she failed miserably.

“All part of the ambiance,” Face-Off said
without a trace of chalant in his voice. “This is an entrance to my buddy’s
secret lair, and he doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for visitors.”

“But you guys are friends, so it’s okay,
right?”

“Yeah. Haven’t seen him in a while, but
he’s good people. We’ve worked together a lot, and he’s the go-to guy for Neos
who need to learn about their abilities but don’t want to go into the system.
He was my teacher.”

“System, as in prison?” Christine asked
as they walked into the darkness, down an old tunnel with old and rusting
railroad tracks running along its length. This wasn’t her idea of a good time;
talking about something, anything, helped her anxiety a little.