New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (16 page)

Hunters and Hunted

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

Peter Fowler felt a bit wobbly and
light-headed as he walked to his crappy studio apartment from the liquor store,
where he had spent more than he could really afford. He needed a drink or ten
after his harrowing experience at Freedom Island, though. He’d almost gotten
killed twice in one day, and if that didn’t warrant getting sloshed, nothing
did.

Life as a Hypernet blogger was never
easy. Making a decent living at it was nearly impossible unless you were in the
top one hundred or so, and the field was crowded with thousands of wannabes.
Fowler had started out early, clawed his way up and attracted a small but loyal
following. He’d managed to scrape by, although only because his mother would
send him a check every other month or so to help cover the bills. Every check
came with a handwritten warning in impeccable Palmer script that this was the
last time she would help him, and sooner or later that last time would come.
Fowler was looking at a future that involved waiting tables to supplement his
income. That's when the GNN people had come calling.

GNN had offered to buy his domain name
(xw.fowlertalks.net) for the equivalent of five times the advertisement revenue
he had made on his best year; it wasn’t exactly big money, but it was real
money, enough that he wouldn’t need to bother his mother for a good long while.
More importantly, the network would add his blog to its opinion section and put
him on salary as part of its editorial staff. His articles would be viewed by
millions of people and he would make at least three times what he had before.
Fowler had thought about it for about four seconds before saying yes, never
bothering to look for any attached strings.

He’d been in GNN’s thrall for a couple of
weeks. When the first check came, he’d celebrated by buying a brand-new
computer and using it to send a nasty e-mail to his girlfriend. He’d rubbed his
success in her face and broken up with her – he could do better now. He’d
followed that bit of conspicuous douchebaggery with some wild partying. He had
gone a little crazy and managed to blow most of the money before the strings
attached to his newfound fortune made their presence known.

Fowler had a lot of pet peeves: he hated
the government (any government; he wasn’t picky), he hated the mainstream press
(who were all lackeys of the government, natch), and he hated Neos. Neos were
above the law. They could do whatever the hell they wanted, unless other Neos
deigned to step in and stop them. And, although this was something he only
admitted to himself when he was well and truly drunk, he hated them because he
wasn’t one of them. Like so many children of the modern world, Fowler had grown
up idolizing the costumed freaks and wishing he could join their ranks. In his
case the disappointing realization it wasn’t going to happen had turned into
resentment.

Word from above had come quickly enough.
Tone down the anti-government and anti-press stuff, and concentrate on the
anti-Neo stuff. Fowler had been indignant for a whole fifteen minutes, until a look
at all the crap he had bought with the domain name sale money provided him with
a moment of clarity. He’d sold out, plain and simple, and now it was time to
sing for his supper. All in all, he didn’t particularly mind concentrating on Neos.
Those freaks deserved whatever they got.

The strings got pulled again right after
he’d gotten invited to Freedom freaking Island to be part of the monthly Legion
press conference. The importance of the invitation wasn’t lost on him. Few
bloggers ever got to join the respectable members of the mainstream media for
events of that magnitude. Peter might have sold out, but he hadn’t sold out
cheaply.

The day before he was supposed to fly to
the island with the rest of the press corps, a creepy little man from GNN –
he’d said his name was Mr. Night – had dropped by and told Fowler what to ask
Ultimate during the press conference. Fowler hadn’t been thrilled about being
told what to do, but he’d gone along and done his best to make Ultimate lose
his shit live on international TV and Hypernet newsfeeds.

The story about Ultimate’s wife leaving
him was not completely groundless: the power couple had gone through a two year
separation back in the 1970s. By then Mrs. Ultimate was getting on in years,
being a normal human being. Fowler figured being afraid of Ultimate had nothing
to do with it: she was probably not revving up his Ultimate-motor anymore and
he’d sent her packing before the bad publicity made him take her back. You
couldn’t have the Defender of Liberty dumping wifey because she was getting a
bit thick in the middle, could you? In any case, the facts didn’t matter. If
his new bosses wanted him to run with a ‘have you stopped beating your wife’
angle, that was fine by him.

At least in theory, that was. For a
second there he’d thought Ultimate had been mad enough to actually go after
him. If the Invincible Man decided to pop Fowler’s head like a pimple, who the
hell could stop him? That could have been pretty bad. He’d never been in fear
for his life before. Peter had survived, but his performance got him punted off
the island via the next available flight that very morning; he left with the
impression he was lucky he hadn’t had to swim all the way back to New York
instead. No buffet lunch or island tours for him, and he guessed he would never
get invited back, GNN connections or not.

On the other hand, being thrown out meant
he’d dodged yet another bullet. A few hours after the press conference,
somebody had bombed the crap out of Freedom Island. Fowler had followed the
news, and it looked like several journalists had gotten blown up along with the
freaks and their pet humans. He had been spared, but the scathing op-ed he’d
spent the flight home writing was useless now. You couldn’t blast Ultimate and
the Freedom Legion on the same day they had gotten bombed and then nuked. He’d
have to come up with a softball piece, get in a few subtle digs while praising
the selfless heroes and their human friends. Maybe focus on the human victims
of the attack? After all, only a few freaks had died while hundreds of innocent
people had been slaughtered right in the raid. Yeah, that could work. He’d
think about it after a few drinks.

He was a few steps away from his
building’s front door when somebody grabbed him and shoved him into a blind
alley. Fowler slammed into a trash dumpster; the paper bag he’d been carrying was
knocked out of his hands and the sound of breaking glass was quickly followed
by the smell of booze.

“Hey! What the fuck…” Peter’s words froze
in his throat. Three men were blocking the alleyway. They wore leather jackets
over silver t-shirts with the letter ‘U’ in red.

They all had Ultimate rubber masks over
their faces.

“You don’t fuck with heroes,” one of them
said, his voice muffled under the rubber mask.

“Hey, man, hey,” Fowler replied feebly.
He wanted to say something that would make things better. He considered himself
a wordsmith. All his words deserted him when he needed them most.

“You don’t fuck with heroes,” the man
repeated. The three moved in on him, brass knuckles in their hands. Fowler had
time for one brief scream before one of them punched him in the pit of the
stomach, paralyzing and silencing him. Fowler fell and the trio stomped and
punched him until he stopped twitching. The attackers spray-painted a slogan on
the alley’s wall, rushed out and drove off in a van.

A slight man wearing a black suit and
sunglasses emerged from behind a dumpster in the alley. There had been nobody
there a moment before. He was old and deeply unattractive, with a lopsided
smile on his face, an awful thing that most people couldn’t look at for long.
He sauntered over to Fowler, who was wheezing in agony. The slogan painted on the
alley wall over the dying man was simple and to the point: ‘Don’t Fuck with Ultimate.’
The man in black leaned over Fowler. The blogger only had one functioning eye
at the moment, but even through the shock and pain he recognized the man looming
over him. It was the weird GNN guy who’d given him his marching orders for the
interview. Mr. Night, the little man with the creepy smile.

“Help,” Fowler tried to say. It came out
as a choked, meaningless sound.

“Sorry, little boy,” the man said in the
reedy voice that had set Fowler’s teeth on edge the first time he’d heard it.
“Martyrs have to be dead.” Mr. Night examined Fowler’s injuries with a clinical
eye. “You really don’t look too bad. You might even recover if given proper
medical attention. Can’t have that.”

Mr. Night’s brow furrowed in
concentration and Fowler stopped breathing. The blogger tried desperately to
force air in his lungs, but nothing happened. “Off you go,” Mr. Night said
pleasantly.

The last thing Fowler saw was Mr. Night’s
smiling face. Something dark and inhuman seemed to be floating behind his
sunglasses.

He’d escaped death twice that day, but the third time,
as everyone knows, is the charm.

* * *

Fowler’s body was discovered seconds
later. By then Mr. Night was well away from the scene. His work was never done,
and even with his little gifts he had to hustle to keep up with his many
duties. The little man in the black suit vanished as soon as good Mr. Fowler
had breathed his last. He reappeared somewhere not quite in the physical world,
wrapped in comforting darkness and pondering about the work of the day.

Great things often came from humble
beginnings. The death of an unlamented blogger was of little consequence in and
of itself, but it added color to the little tableau Mr. Night was carefully
sketching. The paranoids on the web would spread their own pet theories. Fowler
had dared to question Ultimate and had paid the ultimate price, pun definitely
intended. While few would actually blame Ultimate directly, the death would
plant seeds of doubt in the minds of many. It was all part of a delightful
scheme to turn the beloved hero of millions into a despised villain. Mr. Night
appreciated the beauty of the plan, even if he wasn’t its mastermind.

He wore many figurative hats. To the
well-intentioned members of the Foundation for Humanity, he was plain vanilla
human Mr. Night, doing his bit to save the world from the growing Neo threat.
To the vast Neo conspiracy that sought to rule the world by seizing control of
the source of parahumanity’s powers, he was a trusted operative, using his
strange abilities to carry out the orders of his putative masters. And to his
true masters, Mr. Night was a man who had sought knowledge and found it,
terrible knowledge that had flensed off his humanity and left him only with a
somewhat twisted sense of humor and an overriding purpose. He very much looked
forward to the time when he would reveal who and what he really was to his
purported employers.

Mr. Night returned to the world he
despised, the world of harsh lights and sharp edges where the teeming plague of
humanity crawled and sweated and spawned. He longed for the day when the whole
planet would be cleansed of the plague of life. There was still much work to do
before that blessed event, but the day was creeping closer, very close indeed.

He emerged from a shadowy corner in an
office, startling a man working at a computer. The flunky jumped in his seat,
spilling coffee all over himself. “Holy shit!” he shouted. “Mr. Night, sir,” he
went on more respectfully. Everybody at the secret facility had been exposed to
Mr. Night’s eerie comings and goings for some time now, but nobody had gotten
used to them.

“Has the girl been found?” Mr. Night
asked. So many things revolved around the little girl from another world. He
had caught a brief glimpse of her during the extraction operation, when she had
been dragged into this plane of existence. She was a thing of bright light and
colors, hope and power made flesh. He could hardly bear to look at her. Only
the knowledge she wouldn’t survive the uses the plan had in store for her made
her presence tolerable. But he hadn’t had to endure said presence for long; the
cursed girl had managed to fight off the summoning process and ended up
relocating elsewhere.

The flunky visibly hesitated before
delivering the bad news. “She was taken from the hospital, but something went
wrong. Archangel is still trying to sort things out.”

Mr. Night’s smile didn’t waver. It rarely
did, mainly because it was no more a reflection of his actual moods than the
flesh and bone he hid behind were representative of what he really was.

“Place a call to Archangel, would you?”
he said. The Russian troubleshooter might need help in finding the girl, and
Mr. Night would make sure he got it.

The girl was proving to be rather
troublesome. If time permitted, he would have to put some effort in making her
demise a memorable experience for everyone concerned.

Chapter Eight

Christine Dark

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

“No way! That’s not just impossible,
that’s ridiculous!”

It turned out that the first weird
machine Face-Off had made her get into was, among other things, a scale. A
scale which had promptly declared Christine weighed... a lot more than she
had. “I’ve gained forty pounds? WTF!”

Christine had never been a Weight
Watcher, and she had been blessed with a darn good metabolism, which had earned
the sincere hatred of most women around her. She could eat pizza and other
forbidden foods and not gain a pound. Sophie cordially detested her for it, and
Christine could understand why, since she’d seen Sophie literally agonize over
taking a second bite out of anything with a higher caloric content than a
celery stick.

While she didn’t indulge in threesomes
with Ben and Jerry except when terminally depressed, Christine didn’t really
watch what she ate. She also didn’t care about her weight and appearance as
much as most of her friends did. But she still wasn’t thrilled to hear she’d
somehow put on over forty pounds in the last twenty-four hours. She didn’t feel
bloated or fatter. Stupid scale.

Bad enough this whole testing thing was giving
her flashbacks of P.E. class back in high school. Her P.E. experiences had
consisted of equal parts embarrassment, pain and discomfort, with excessive
sweating added for good measure. The fact that before the test they’d had her
change into a padded gray bodysuit that felt a bit too tight for her taste
didn’t help, either.

“Ah, I sort of expected that,” Face-Off
said.

“So what happened? Did I grow two feet?
Are my boobs the size of basketballs and I somehow missed it? Is my butt the
size of a car?”

“Remember what I said about your bones
getting denser and stronger? That also makes them heavier. Neos are usually
twenty to fifty percent heavier than a human of the same size. Some are even
heavier.”

“Well, doh. I should have figured that
one out. That’s cool, I guess. Nice to be all tough and resilient, but swimming
is going to suck – if we are that much denser we should sink like stones.”

Face-Off nodded. “Yep. Can’t float, can’t
do the backstroke.”

“Bummer. Do many Neos, uh, hulk out?”

“Hulk out?”

“Sorry, cultural reference from the
completely fictional superheroes in my world. I mean, get bigger and bulkier
than normal.”

“Gotcha. A few, yes, but not many. Most
Neos look perfectly normal. A few are a bit freakish, like
moi
.” He
patted his featureless face, but he was grinning underneath, so Christine
smiled back at him. “You look perfectly normal,” he told her.

That sounded perilously close to
‘perfectly plain’ to her, but she set that aside. “Okay, got me weighted up and
I’m all dense and stuff. What next?”

“If you can grab those handles above your
head, we’ll see how much weight you can lift and press.” She did. “Okay, the
machine will start pushing down; just push back against it,” Face-Off
explained. “If it gets too heavy, just stop and the machine will automatically
stop as well.”

“Not getting squished sounds good,”
Christine said as the machine pushed down on her like a vertical version of the
Death Star’s trash compactor of doom. She pushed back, and a digital readout on
the machine started spitting out numbers. A hundred pounds. Pretty impressive,
that’s like two dozen kittens. Two hundred pounds.
Even nicer, I can bench
press a football player.
That sounded kinda dirty. Four hundred pounds, and
she could still push back without even working up a sweat. At eight hundred
pounds she was beginning to feel a bit of a burn, but she made it to over a
thousand pounds before giving up. Half a ton. She could lift half a ton over
her head! “So I can pick up a car and throw it at someone?”

“Not quite a car. The average car is
about four, five thousand pounds. You could tip over a car, though.”

That didn’t sound as impressive as
picking up a car and tossing it like a kitten, not that she would toss a kitten
anywhere. “Bummer. I bet you can throw cars around,” she told Face-Off. Guys
always loved to show off how big and strong they were. And since when had she
started trying to flatter guys? Apparently since right after meeting this
particular guy.

“Well, yes,” said the guy, not sounding
particularly proud or flattered. “It’s trickier than it sounds, though. If you
don’t pick up a car the right way, you usually end up tearing chunks off it
instead. At least if you are super-strong but don’t have the ability to somehow
pick up huge and bulky objects without destroying them. The heavy hitters like
Ultimate can grasp things as big as a battleship and use some form of
telekinesis to keep it in one piece while they pick them up. Middle-weights
like myself, we have to be careful with the stuff we lift.”

“So how much can you lift over your head?
If you don’t mind my asking, that is. Just want to get a feel of how much of a
super-womyn I am.”

“Uh, about ten tons, maybe a bit more if
I push it.”

Great. She was a total wimp. “I’m a total
wimp.”

“Not really,” Face-Off replied. “You’re
stronger than most Type One Neos, and much stronger than a normal human. You
can break a normal guy’s neck without half trying, so you are going to need
lessons on how to fight and manage your strength. If you get excited, you can
easily smash furniture, pull doors off their hinges, and so on. No roughhousing
for you until you get some training. You could knock somebody out during a
pillow fight.”

That didn’t sound wimpy at all. It
sounded a bit scary, as a matter of fact. On the other hand, she had always
been easily intimidated by even implied violence, let alone actual violence.
Knowing she could pick somebody up by the throat in the inimitable style of
Darth Vader was pretty good for her self-esteem, even if she would never do
that for real.

“I’m kind of a klutz normally, so it’s
going to suck if I’m a super-strong klutz.”

“We can test you reflexes and hand-eye
coordination next. They should be a lot better than they were before your
abilities manifested themselves.” He led her to another section of the Danger
Gym.

Ooh, she was going to be graceful, too?
She would love that. Her short stint taking ballet lessons had made her feel
like a total Ugly Duckling. Anything that involved pirouetting, jumping and
dancing had usually ended in unintentionally hilarious ways. “So how come I
don’t feel super-agile, not to mention super-strong?”

“It’s a Neo thing. Unless you consciously
push your body, it somehow restrains itself to the speed and power of a normal
human being. If you get startled or angry or scared, though, all bets are off.
That’s when doors and necks get broken by accident. With some training, you can
also learn to turn off your strength consciously, but even then it’s still not
a good idea to startle a Neo.”

“So people really shouldn’t throw me any
surprise parties,” Christine said. “I’ll have to mention that next time I
update my Facebook page.”

The agility testing equipment looked
suspiciously like a gymnastics set. Pretty soon Face-Off had her jumping around
like it was the Olympics.

One of the first things she learned was
that she could jump really far. So far, in fact, that the first time she tried
a long jump she overshot her target and smacked into a wall, hard. Which was
embarrassing, but didn’t hurt as much as it should have. Those extra-heavy
bones were paying for themselves already. Once she got used to it, though, she
discovered she was graceful like a cat. She could even do jazz hands while
prancing on a tight rope, which she’d never been able to do before, much to her
shame and sorrow. Her klutz days were over.

“Not bad,” Face-Off commented. “Okay,
let’s take a short break.” Christine followed him to a snack and drinks area,
and gratefully slurped on some ice tea. Condor appeared from a sliding door on
the wall and joined them.

“I’ve been monitoring your biometrics,”
Condor said. “Trying to figure out what kind of powers you have.”

“Any luck? Am I a healer, tank or DPS? I
like playing rogues, so if I can turn invisible and stuff, that’d be awesome.”

“DPS?” Face-Off said dubiously, but
Condor smiled.

“Damage per second,” Condor explained.
“Which makes you a gamer chick,” he said, eyeing her appreciatively. “They are
about as rare as unicorns around here. Kestrel thinks that stuff is for losers.
What do you play?”

“Well, mostly
World of Warcraft
–
do you guys have that in this world?”

“That’s my game too!” Condor said,
surprising her. “That’s what I usually play when I’m waiting for something to
happen – or I did before Kestrel started hanging around. It’s not the most
popular game around, but I like it. Most people are into
City of Heroes
,
which as you can guess is all about costumed freaks like ourselves.”

“I guess with people flying around and
throwing lightning bolts for real, playing elves and mages isn’t all that
special. That sucks.”

“It’s got some appeal. Some people like
being in a world without Neos, even if it’s only a game.”

Christine thought about being a normal
person in a world where a select few could throw cars around or fly. It
probably wasn’t all that great.

“Anyways,” Condor said. “As your
adrenaline levels went up, I got some interesting energy fluctuations. And when
you hit that wall, there was an energy spike. Electro-magnetic and kinetic I
think it could be a protective aura of some kind. I’d like to explore that a
bit further.”

“Okay. Explore it how?”

“Here, let me show you.”

Condor led her to a blank section of
wall. A bunch of what looked like guns, hoses and those tennis and baseball
things that shoot balls at you were lined up facing the wall, some twenty yards
away. “Er, this kinda looks like an automated firing squad,” she commented,
feeling a little nervous.

“That’s exactly what it is,” Condor said.
“Don’t worry, we’re not firing anything lethal at you, not until we are sure
you can handle it. If you can stand over there – yeah, right there is fine.
We’ll stand over here.” Condor and Face-Off walked out of the line of fire and
stood by the assortment of missile launchers.

“I’m getting a bit anxious here,”
Christine said, only half-joking.

“It’s okay, Christine,” Face-Off said.
“Condor did the same thing for me, a while back. He’s going to start with
things like beach balls and water balloons.”

“Yeah, I just love getting smacked with
water balloons,” Christine muttered. She stood her ground, though. Time to grrl
up, grrl.

“Feel free to dodge the attacks if you want
to, but try to concentrate on defending against them with your mind.”

“How the eff am I supposed to –“ A foam
ball with something heavy in the middle bounced off her head. It didn’t hurt,
but it startled her into silence. Another one hit her left boob. “Hey!” She
sidestepped the next ball. Now that she was paying attention, she saw they
weren’t all that fast, at least not at first, and she could duck away from
them. But the rate of fire of the ball-launchers started going up. She got
smacked on her shoulder; she dodged a couple of shots but walked right into a
few more. And they were flying faster now; they were starting to sting a little
when they connected. “Hey!”

“Try to concentrate,” Condor said,
sounding a lot like Mr. Phelps, the d-bag of a P.E. teacher she’d had the
misfortune to endure during her last two years of high school. This whole thing
was bringing her back to the nasty dodge ball games he liked to organize for
his sadistic pleasure.

Okay, concentrate. Smack. Dodging wasn’t
working so well now that a dozen balls or more were being sent her way in each
volley. Smack, smack. She slapped a few balls away, but one got through and got
her in the eye. That hurt a bit, and now she was getting mad. Curling into a
ball was an option, but if Condor was anything like Mr. Phelps, he’d just kept
bouncing balls off her until she snapped out of it. Maybe – smack! She couldn’t
think, she –

Three or four balls were flying straight
at her face. She raised her hands, knowing she wasn’t going to get them all,
and something appeared between her and the balls. Something like a circular
wall: a semi-transparent wall that sparkled with energy. The balls hit the wall
and bounced off, and the smell of ozone and burning plastic filled her
nostrils.

“Holy crap!” she said. Unfortunately, the
energy wall disappeared a second later and a follow-up ball hit her right in
the mouth, pretty hard. “Ow! Dammit!” Her concentration was shot, and she got
smacked a few more times. It took her a few seconds, and several more hits, to figure
out what she had done. She flexed something within her, and a bigger wall – no,
not a wall, a
shield
– appeared in front of her, and this time she
stopped all of them.

After holding the shield up for a bit,
Christine started learning a few things about it. First of all, she could feel
the impacts on its surface, not as if the shield was her skin, but more like
feeling rain drops through a jacket – distant and muted, but still there. The
balls were not just bouncing off, but were getting burned a little bit – that’s
where the smell was coming from. It was pretty awesome.
Shields at ninety
percent, O Captain! My Captain!