New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (26 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“I just found out this morning.
Somebody’s looking for him. Somebody who’s not afraid to leave bodies behind if
they don’t get what they want. And they want the Lurker.”

Condor glanced at Mark. “What do you
think, Face?”

“I think I don’t believe in coincidences.
We are looking for the Lurker and now it turns out someone else is? What are
the odds the two things are unrelated?” Mark turned to Lester. “Why don’t you
start at the beginning?”

“Okay,” Lester said, looking nervouser
and nervouser. “When you called last night, I left word with the boss that you
were coming to town. We don’t exactly socialize, you know. We mostly
communicate via dead drops and coded messages. There is something else we use
for emergencies, but he hasn’t gotten back to me. I’m getting worried.”

“Yeah, I know how he operates,” Condor
agreed. “What happened this morning?”

‘I got a call from one of my people. Said
he’d heard about some tough guys asking about the Lurker and spreading cash
around for information. Also, a local police informant was found late last
night. Dead. Someone had used a blowtorch on him. It wasn’t pretty. The dead
guy’s worked with my people before; going after him would be a good place to
start for someone who’s trying to find the boss. I think you can do the math.”

“Yeah, and it’s not adding up to anything
good,” Condor said. “Any ideas on who might be looking for the Lurker?”

“I’m not sure. My guy thinks it might be
the Russian mob, but that makes no sense.”

Christine picked up an emotion spike from
both Condor and Mike when they heard the word 'Russian.' Kestrel didn't seem to
give a crap either way, although she'd been the one who had told them the
Russian mob was looking for Christine in New York.

“What made him think it's the Russians?”
Condor asked.

“The blowtorch stuff. It's sort of a
signature move of the local Russian outfit. They weren't very subtle about it.”

“Oh, this is no fucking good at all,”
Mark commented, seconds before one of the warehouse walls exploded.

Things got really not effing good after
that.

Hunters and Hunted

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

Vladimir Vladimirovich kept his cool,
much as he wanted to start blabbering like his men were. “Shut the fuck up,” he
growled, and his men did. People usually did what Vladimir told them to if they
knew what was good for them.

“That’s the Condor,” Grisha, his second
in command, whispered, pointing at the screen showing the interior of the
warehouse. “He’s got his invisible plane in there. I read an article on
People
Magazine
about it.”

“You’re reading
People
now,
Grisha?” one of the men in the back seat said.

“Fuck you, it was my wife’s and I was
bored.”

“If you fucked your wife more often, you
wouldn’t be so bored.”

“I said shut the fuck up,” Vladimir said,
but without much heat. He was too busy trying to think of a plan of action.

Vladimir Vladimirovich wasn’t a tall man,
but he made up for it with his personality. He was over sixty years old, but
thanks to his Neo abilities he looked about half that age, and thanks to those
selfsame abilities he could take a grown man and break him in half with his
bare hands. His position as a major player in the Russian Outfit in the United
States was due to his skills more than to his Neolympian powers, however. He
had been in one of the last graduating classes of the KGB, which even during
the final days of the Soviet Union had remained a highly effective intelligence
agency. He had risen high in the Russian underworld afterward, although he
obscurely felt he had been denied a greater destiny in the process. Serving the
Ukrainian motherfuckers who kept the Motherland weak and in disarray had always
stuck in his craw, but a man did what he could and not a bit more. It couldn’t
be helped.

His Neo talents weren’t many. Stronger
than most men, but not very strong by Neo standards, he had a gift for
languages that could be natural, and was a superb marksman with any ranged
weapon, from bows to RPG-16s. Most of his achievements had been a result of his
human ability to asses a situation and devise ways of dealing with it,
regardless of who got hurt in the process.

He considered the situation at hand. The
plan had been to follow that Harris cocksucker to see if he made contact with
their target, the Lurker. Harris was meeting with other superheroes instead.
Condor and three others. The woman in the whore’s outfit and the man with no
face he knew. Kestrel and Face-Off, both crime fighters like Condor and the
Lurker. The young girl was not familiar to him, but he would assume she was one
of them as well. The most likely explanation was that the newcomers had shown
up to help the Lurker. They might know where he was, or at worst they might
provide useful hostages. Either way, that made them valuable targets. But could
he take them? Besides him, he had his fellow Neo Boris in one of the other
cars, plus fourteen men and the special weapons they had been given for the
mission. Would that be enough?

Vladimir tried to contact his handler.
Archangel did not respond. He left him a brief voice mail, hung up and went over
the objective conditions he was dealing with. Should he continue to follow
Harris and the new arrivals? If he did, nobody would blame him; those had been
his instructions. Following a human lackey was one thing, however. Condor’s
name was a legend with the underworld. What if the Neo discovered the robot
device he was using to track Harris? It would be best to grab them now, before
they were on the move. He made his decision.

“We take them. Alive, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Grisha replied. “Now we
find out if those fucking toys we got from the Ukraine are any good.”

“They are good.”

“And if they are not?” Grisha asked.

“Then we’re fucked, every last one of
us,” Vladimir responded, and all the men in the car laughed. Good. Keep their
morale up, and maybe most of them would live. “So stop blabbing and get ready.
Grisha, get the others.”

Grisha nodded and stepped out of the car
to gather the rest of the team. They were parked in a shut-down auto shop half
a block from the warehouse where Harris had been waiting for his friends.
Vladimir had been observing the inside of the warehouse through the electronic
eyes of a little mechanical flying bug that sent audio and video right into
Vladimir’s wrist-comm, one of the many toys they had been given for their
mission. The little device had followed Harris to the warehouse and filmed the
arrival of Condor and his friends.

Vladimir had everyone out of their cars
for a quick group conference. “Grisha and me, and you three,” he said, pointing
at his best marksmen. “We use the special weapons. The rest of you, you have
the Ukrainian blasters; those things are better than rocket launchers. Go in
and keep the cocksuckers busy. Boris will lead the way.” Boris, the other Neo
in the team, was a strongman who loved to use a huge mace-and-chain on his
enemies. “Shoot at them, but remember, we want them alive.” Neos took a lot of
killing, so he was willing to let his men shoot them up a bit if necessary.
“Once they are down, don’t finish them off. Understand?” As long as one or two of
them survived, he would be happy.

His men nodded. He looked them over. They
were all tough and experienced, either ex-military or career criminals who had
spilled blood long before their balls dropped, men who had grown up in the
tough streets of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. None of them looked very eager to
get into a firefight with several Neos, which proved they weren’t complete
idiots, but they weren’t pissing their pants about it, either. That was good
enough. They could handle this.

“Let’s go.”

Face-Off

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

When things go wrong, they go wrong fast.

A whole section of wall exploded, close
enough to shower us with flying, burning debris. A hot piece of brick bounced
off my head. I ignored the impact and the pain, moving to interpose myself
between Christine and whatever would be coming through the hole in the wall.
Condor and Kestrel were on the move too. “Stay down!” I shouted at Christine.
She wasn’t ready to get into a real fight. If her concentration lapsed during a
crucial second, she could get killed. She did the sensible thing and dropped to
the ground next to Lester, who was lying down already.

Men burst in through the shattered wall,
shooting from the hip. They weren’t using regular guns. Their muzzles emitted blinking
lights like camera flashes, and whatever they aimed at exploded. Ukrainian
A-75s, copies of the ray guns that had wrecked the Wehrmacht and the Red Army.
Serious artillery, and rare as hell. I might survive one direct hit from them,
but probably not two.

One of the men didn’t have a gun. He was
wielding a morning star, a spiked metal ball at the end of a long chain. He was
whirling that thing so fast it was a blur. A Neo, all right.

I had to duck and roll, narrowly escaping
several blasts that carved deep trenches on the concrete floor of the
warehouse. The Neo with the whirling ball and chain moved closer and the
shooters spread out and kept a steady barrage of energy fire on us.

They’d come in ready to dance, and we
were happy to oblige them. Condor reached into his utility belt while dodging
around, and his hands came out full of stylized throwing knives – his claws, he
liked to call them. He flung them all in one volley. Ball-and-chain used his
spinning weapon as a shield, deflecting a few of the claws, but two of the
attackers went down, twitching uncontrollably. The claws had built-in capacitors
that released enough electricity to knock down a charging horse. Condor was
feeling downright charitable if he was using his Taser claws on the fuckers.
The electrical shock was unlikely to be fatal unless the target happened to
have a pacemaker or a bad heart.

I wasn’t feeling charitable at all. I
shot two of them while ducking their blaster fire. Nothing fancy, two in the
chest for each of them. Then ball-and-chain tried to whack me with his toy. I
sidestepped the spiked mace and managed to snag the chain before he could pull
it away. Tug of war time, asshole. The idiot was a big guy, a good six seven,
six eight, and probably weighted three hundred pounds' worth of muscle and
high-density bones. All of which meant diddly-squat when I pulled on his chain
and yanked him clear off his feet and right towards me, where he masked his
buddies fire for a couple seconds. I welcomed him with a head-butt and an elbow
to his face and he went down like a ton of bricks, dead or unconscious. Big and
ugly was a lightweight, a mid-level Type One was my guess. I would have made
sure he stayed down by snapping his spine with a kick or shooting him in the
face, but when he fell his pals started blasting me again. I rolled away,
moving too fast and erratically for them to get a hit.

In the meanwhile, Condor got one more and
Kestrel, her trademark whip slashing out at supersonic speeds, beheaded three
of the assholes. She wasn’t taking prisoners, either. Condor was probably going
to be upset with her.

Another group had entered the warehouse
while we slaughtered the first bunch. They had some sort of long, bulbous
weapons attached to backpacks. I’d never seen anything like them before.
Whatever those things were, I figured they had to be something worse than the
Ukrainian ray guns. Even as Condor and Kestrel finished off the last two
survivors of the first wave, I managed to shoot one of the newcomers. Four men
with the backpack contraptions lived long enough to shoot back. That was
enough.

Most energy weapons don’t create a
visible beam. These things did. Twisting, almost tentacle-like streams of
purplish-dark energy erupted from the weapons’ barrels and reached towards us.
I rolled away, and saw one of the streams twist in the air and follow me. It
struck.

I’ve been hurt before. Quite a few times,
actually, but nothing like this. What I felt when the twisting energy hit me
was like a full-body terminal toothache, only worse. And that was only a side
effect. All of my voluntary muscles stopped working and I collapsed in an
ungraceful heap on the ground. I couldn’t even scream.

What with all the agony and suffering, it
took me several seconds to realize my face was back. My real face was back and
my powers were gone. Everything went dark and quiet after that.

Chapter Fourteen

Christine Dark

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

She was scared to look, but even more
scared not to look, so she watched the carnage from the floor. Not too far
away, Lester Harris had done the same and seemed to be trying to make himself
as small a target as possible.

Condor, Kestrel and Face-Off charged the
men coming into the warehouse. Condor was flinging some sort of throwing
knives, Face-Off was firing a gun and Kestrel, unsurprisingly, was swinging a
whip-like weapon. The bad guys were not using regular guns, but some sort of
boxy short-barreled weapons that made things burn and blow up a lot better than
guns. Phased plasma rifles in the 40-watt range or something like that, was her
guess.

Funny, if someone had asked her how she
would deal with a firefight taking place a few feet from her face, Christine
would have guessed she’d be curled up in a fetal position, losing bodily fluids
from every available orifice. Instead, scared as she was, Christine was
watching the action with the same rapt attention a football fan would during
the Super Bowl.

The good guys and gal were fast and
graceful, like ballerinas in a speeded-up video. They went through the bad guys
like chainsaws on a bunch of papier-mâché mannequins, despite the fact they
were dodging energy blasts and a guy swinging a spiked wrecking ball along the
way. Except those weren’t mannequins, those were people, people who bled and
screamed and died. It happened too fast for the horrible sights to really sink
in. It didn’t seem real.

A new bunch of bad guys armed with
something that looked for all the world like those things in the
Ghostbuster
movies came in, and started shooting some weird energy streams. She saw
Condor and Face-Off get hit, and they went down like a ton of bricks. Next
thing Christine knew, one of them started shooting at her!

As the energy stream reached for her,
Christine raised her force shield. The result was nothing like stopping the
fast-balls during her tests the night before. The strange swirling energy
reached for the shield and started…
eating
it. She felt the shield being
drained of power. Never mind the shield – she was being drained of power, heat,
life itself. It felt like someone was sucking her blood through every pore. She
had to –

Get

OUT!

She felt a painful impact around her head
and shoulders, and the world grew dim for a few seconds. The next thing she
knew, she was being buffeted by freezing winds, and she was surrounded by… fog?

No. Not fog. Clouds.

Holy mother of crap, I’m somewhere up in
the air!

Like way up in the air. Like, so high up
all she could see were clouds and darkened skies.

For a second or so, she seemed to hang up
in the air. Then, in the best Looney Toons tradition, gravity took over and she
started to fall. She hated flying, but she suddenly realized she hated falling
even more.

“Ooooohh sheee-it!!!” Christine screamed
as she plummeted back to earth.