New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (30 page)

Christine Dark

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

Christine stopped running after she had
put a handful of blocks between her and that little scene from
Sons of
Anarchy
. She’d heard a police siren out in the distance but she couldn’t
tell if it was headed towards her. She hadn’t run so far so fast in her life,
and she wasn’t even winded. After a quick look around, she felt confident
nobody had followed her. People around here minded their own business,
apparently.

And the madness continued, Day Two, or
was it Three? One really loses track when living in a roller coaster ride.
Funny, she’d been in two firefights in the last hour or so, and she was mostly
worried about finding her friends, which would probably lead to Firefight
Numero
Tres
. She’d never even seen or heard a real gun being fired before today,
let alone had one shot at her. Stupid guns. They were so frakking loud.

The neighborhood still looked pretty bad.
Maybe she should try and get on the El and head uptown, or downtown, or the
Loop or whatever, except she didn’t have a dime to her name. Maybe she should
have gone through the pockets of the guy she’d punched out, what’s a little
mugging after assault and battery? What kind of gamer was she? Always loot the
bodies after you take them down! She’d probably missed out on some phat loot.

Brain…

Her train of thought slowed down a bit
and she kept walking. It was beginning to get dark. Hopefully she’d be out of
the worst part of the neighborhood before night time, when she guessed things
got even livelier. They had to have shopping malls in this universe, right? She
would find a mall, sit at the food court after ordering some free water, and
think things through. There, a sensible plan.

“Excuse me, ma’am!”

The voice was loud, male, very serious
and authoritarian, and coming from somewhere up and to her right. Christine
looked up and saw a costumed superhero standing on a hovering metal disk and
looking down at her.

Oh, no.

People on the street were clearing out in
a hurry like this was High Noon in your typical good old Western. Somebody must
have snitched on her. Whatever happened to the code of silence? Christine had
never been busted for anything before. This was bad, so very bad.

The guy on the flying metal Frisbee was
wearing a scarlet and gold costume, complete with a half-mask that covered the
upper part of his face, thigh high boots (
not butch
at all, dude
),
sculpted abs that she couldn’t tell whether they were real or built into the
costume, and a freaking golden bow and quiver of arrows on his back. He wasn’t
very tall but had freakily huge biceps.

“Ma’am, please come with me. I am placing
you under arrest for assault and unlawful use of parahuman abilities.”

And where were you when those creeps
tried to assault me with their human abilities?
“Umm, ah, I didn’t do anything?”

“I have video footage of the assault,”
Frisbee Man said. “Please come with me peacefully.”

Crappity crap. Face-Off had said they
couldn’t go to the authorities or bad things would happen. On the other hand,
where else could she go? Maybe this guy could help. Christine shrugged. “Okay,
I give up, you son of a Katniss.”

“Son of a what?”

“Sorry, nothing.”
This is not a good
idea,
her brain whispered, and she agreed, but what else could she do?
“Listen, some of my friends are in big trouble, and maybe you can help. I
didn’t mean to hurt anybody, those guys back there started it, and I’m really
worried about my friends.” Maybe Frisbee Robin Hood would help, even if he
looked like the king of a Gaudy Pride Parade.

“I’m sure we can help, ma’am. We can sort
things out when you are in custody,” Gaudy Man said, sounding very sure and
confident. Face-Off hadn’t sounded like that but she trusted him a lot more
than this officious guy.
Mark, are you okay?

“Thank you, and you look fabulous, by the
way, er, what’s your name?”

Frisbee guy looked a bit put out by the
question. Christine guessed people who dressed like that wanted to be
recognized, promptly and without room for doubt, and she had lost points for
not being in shock and awe of him and his Lady Gaga-esque outfit, even if she
had complimented him for it. “I’m the Crimson Fletcher, of course.”

“Of course.” All the good names must have
been taken, what with superheroes running around for seventy-odd years. She was
amazed someone could run around in scarlet thigh-high boots and call himself
the Crimson Fletcher with a perfectly straight face, but that wasn’t important
now.

“Here,” the Crimson Fletcher said as he
tossed something to Christine. She caught it by reflex – by brand-new reflex,
since before her rise to superhumandom the only things she caught were colds
and pop culture references.

She’d caught a shiny pair of ultra-tech
handcuffs with electronic circuitry etched on their surface.

“If you can kindly put them on, hands
behind your back, we’ll be on our way,” the Fletch said pleasantly.

Not a good idea at all.
“Uh, thanks, but I’ve already been tied up once this week, and
that’s like my limit.”

“Please do as instructed, ma’am.”

Getting peeved now. Nobody had called her
‘ma’am’ so many times in a row. She dropped the handcuffs; they clattered on
the pavement. “Sorry, but no.”

Frisbee guy didn’t like that. He drew and
shot faster than the eye could follow. Well, faster than the normal human eye
could follow. Christine followed the move just fine, and she got a shield up in
plenty of time to catch the arrow. An arrow with what looked like a trank dart
on its tip.

“CF here. Need back-up, pronto,” the
Fletch said, clearly not speaking to her. “I gave you a chance to surrender
peacefully,” he continued, this time definitely talking to her. He had another
arrow on his bow's string, ready to go.

“So many
Hunger Games
references,
so little time,” Christine muttered to herself. Once again, instead of feeling
like was about to pee herself she now felt a thrill of excitement. She decided
to give peace one more chance. “Hey, I said I’d come along peacefully, just not
in handcuffs, okay?” Especially not handcuffs that looked like they did
something to cancel out people’s powers.

Frisbee Fletch didn’t bother replying
with words. Instead he shot her again, with an arrowhead that exploded into a
dozen metal bands clearly intended to wrap her up from shoulder to ankles. This
guy really wanted to tie her up. Maybe she should introduce him to Kestrel. She
expanded her shield and the metal bands recoiled away in a shower of sparks.
Electrical metal bands? They probably would have hurt a lot if they’d wrapped
around her. Gaudy Pride Fletch was turning out to be quite a prick, and didn’t
she just sound like Face-Off in her head when she thought that? She was
beginning to understand why Mark didn’t like costumed heroes.

“Quit shooting arrows at me!”

“Quit resisting arrest,” El Fletcho
replied even as he shot yet another arrow at her, this time something that
burst onto her shield in a cloud of thick smoke. Or gas; she probably shouldn’t
inhale that stuff. She felt her shield
thickening
somehow, and the gas
could not get through. Air-tight shield. Cool. She held her breath anyway and
scampered away from the gas cloud.

It kept raining arrows. The Scarlet Prick
fired a spread of five blunt arrows that hit way harder than the bullets her
shield had deflected earlier that afternoon. He must be using a gazillion-pound
draw. “Dammit, Legolas! Stop being such a d-bag!”

From the way Fletch-boy’s lips tightened,
he knew who Legolas was, had been called Legolas before, and didn’t like it one
bit. He shot her again.

This arrow exploded.

Christine got picked up and smashed into
a wall by the shockwave. She felt bricks crumbling under her shield and she
found herself lying in the ruins of a building lobby, right next to a row of
mailboxes.

“Dude! This is someone’s
home
you
just blew up!”

Frisbee Prick had to come closer to the
ground to see her through the hole he’d blasted into the building. Christine
didn’t give him a chance to shoot again.

In the marathon practice session at
Condor’s lair, she’d practiced shooting different kinds of energy blasts. A
narrow one would probably blow a hole right through El Pricko, so she smacked
him with a wide beam instead, more like a slap instead of an icepick stab. It
still knocked him clear off his Frisbee and sent him flying in an arc that
ended right on top of a parked car. The car crumpled pretty badly under the
impact. He wasn’t too badly hurt, though. In fact, he sat up and started
reaching for another arrow. Christine visualized a giant fist above his head,
and drove it down, smashing Gaudy Prick right through the roof of the car so
only his legs were showing. They were twitching a little bit, so she guessed
he’d be all right after a while.

Christine started running again. Maybe
she should fly away, but she had to really concentrate to fly, and she didn’t
know if she’d be able to defend herself. What she needed was a fast-flying
gryphon, and nobody was handing those out in this universe. Crap. She stayed on
the ground, running away from Hunger Fletch at full speed.

Running at full speed right into a living
metal guy.

This guy was shiny and looked like a
statue, if you put a statue in a metal crusher and pressed it down until it
looked like a fireplug on short legs, about five foot two or so and almost as
wide as it was tall, and removed any hint of charm and good looks. Oh, and
painted it Day-Glo orange. Metal dude’s face was almost as featureless as
Mark’s, with only a hint of nose and mouth, and eyes that glowed like molten
iron.

C-Fletch’s back-up had arrived.

A metallic fist the size of a
Thanksgiving turkey flashed towards her face. She tried to dodge but didn’t
make it in time, and the lights went out for a second. She came to leaning next
to the stump of a streetlight pole, about a hundred feet from where she’d been
just a second ago. Holy violence against women! Her shield had absorbed most of
the impact, but she still felt like someone had punched her in the face. Nobody
had ever done that to her, not since she was a child, and she found she didn’t
like it any more than she had then.

Day-Glo Man was charging her, bounding
thirty or forty feet with each stride.

“You a-Hole!” Even as peeved off – no,
pissed off – as she was, she still tried to think things through. Day-Glo
Dick’s last jump placed him right over her head: he was clearly planning to
stomp her like a
cucaracha
. Christine let him have a giant-fist style blast
straight up. She put more power into it, too.

There was a very loud – as in thunderous,
car windows exploding all around kind of loud – clang, and Day-Glo Man went off
in a very high ballistic arc that, if Christine’s calculations were correct,
would put him somewhere in Lake Michigan. Or maybe Canada; her calculations
were pretty tentative. At least he wouldn’t be plowing through any buildings
and obliterating innocent housewives and/or toddlers.

OMG, how many people get killed in these
fights?

She didn’t have time to consider things.
Lightning struck her from behind, and she found out what sticking your finger
in a light socket felt like. Her shields did their stuff, but she still found
herself on her hands and knees, twitching like she had the Tourette’s. The
shock went away quickly, thank God, and she jumped to her feet and looked for
the source of the lightning bolt.

Christine’s new tormentor was a flying
woman in a golden string bikini, thigh high boots almost identical to the
Crimson Fucktard’s, and electrical arcs crackling all around her. Christine
mentally dubbed her Lightning Stripper.

“Surrender or we’ll be forced to use
lethal force,” Lightning Stripper shouted. Even her voice sounded
electrically-charged.

Lethal force? So when the Hulk’s ugly
brother punched me he wasn’t playing for keepsies?

“This is your last chance,” Hoobaskank
said, sounding very serious and authoritative, which was weird coming from a
woman in a thong so skimpy the whole world would know if she'd missed her
Brazilian wax.

“Sorry. Fletchgolas already gave me a
last chance, and I blew it,” Christine replied – and by the time she was
halfway through saying ‘Fletchgolas’ she blasted Lightning Lassie straight up,
hopefully into Low Earth Orbit. She would have said something about the
outrageous outfit, but that'd be adding slut-shaming to injury.

Three days before, she would have cowered
in her bus seat if some stranger looked at her funny, and now here she was,
trading quips with superheroes and blasting them into next week. Having super
powers was doing wonders for her self-esteem.

Christine turned around just in time to
catch another exploding arrow with her teeth.

Okay, not quite her teeth, but she felt
the impact all over her face even through the shield. She hit a storefront,
went through the metal bars on the window display, and smashed into a drinks
cooler, destroying a few hundred bucks worth of beer in tall cans. Thanks to
her shields, she didn’t even get wet, but she was feeling a bit battered,
ill-used and very upset. Freaking Crimson Legolas had bounced back a lot faster
than she’d expected.