New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (31 page)

This was insane. They were going to wreck
half the city. She probably should have let Le Fletchier handcuff her and be
done with it.

Christine came charging out of the store,
shields at one hundred percent, but they were waiting for her. Fletch,
Mini-Metal and Lightning Slut were all back in action, and they had been joined
by something that looked like a cross between several breeds of dinosaur and
Billy Bob Thornton and a woman in a blue jumpsuit surrounded in a nimbus of
pale light that looked a lot like Christine’s own force field. She barely had
time to register their presence when they came down on her like a waterfall of
anvils.

Lightning bolts and smoke arrows
distracted her until she got clobbered by Day-Glo Boy and Billy Bob Dino, who
smacked her back and forth like she was a Ping Pong ball. One smack, two
smacks, three. They hurt. She smacked back. She pictured two giant fists
closing down on Day-Glo from opposite directions. There was another deafening
clang and Day-Glo tottered and went down. Christine blocked Dino-Bill’s next
claw attack and gave him a blast in the face that sent him reeling. Her shields
shimmered and crackled under more electrical attacks from Storm Skank, which
made her miss the fact that Blue Jumpsuit was coming up from behind her with a
giant mallet made out of blue energy in her hands. Christine turned around
just in time to see the mallet coming down on her –  

Ouch.

– head.

Christine found herself lying in a small
crater. Water from a busted water main was splashing down on her, and her
shields were weak enough that the water was getting through to her. The Power
Strangers were coming after her, and everything hurt. Something felt broken on the
right side of her chest, and every breath she took hurt like someone was poking
her with a knife. Lethal force was on the menu all right. She was about to get
zerged into oblivion.

A silver and red blur flashed overhead.
Bam. Day-Glo was lying next to her now, and he wasn’t even twitching. Bam, bam,
and Mallet Bitch and Fletchorino were gone from view. Lightning Beotch started
flying up, and the blur caught up with her. Bam, and she was down too. Dino Bob
managed to land a punch on the blur. It didn’t seem to do anything. Bam. Dino
went down.

The blur became a tall man in a bright
costume, a tall man who could have posed for a Greek sculptor. He loomed over
Christine, looking at her with a maniacal grin on his face. She recognized him
from Hyperpedia, except in the pictures she had seen of the man, his expression
hadn’t looked as crazy as it did now. He was looking at her in a way that made
her want to blow a rape whistle.

Bam.

Face-Off

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

The lights went out.

The only illumination left in the room
was the blowtorch flickering over Kestrel’s twisting body. The stench of
charred flesh was overwhelming. Boris stood up, the torch in his hand still
flaring but no longer burning Kestrel. Her screams died out, replaced by harsh,
panting breaths. You could kill her but you couldn’t make her cry.

Cold, unearthly laughter echoed outside.

The radio show producers hadn’t done
justice to that laughter. Maybe they hadn’t done it justice on purpose. That
sound was not something you wanted in your living room at any time of the day
or night, even if you knew it was a silly make-believe radio program.

Nothing sane could laugh like that.
Nothing human, either.

“The Lurker’s here!” Blondie shouted
before giving out a stream of barked orders in Russian. Boris turned off the
torch and everyone trooped out and shut the door behind them, leaving us lying
in the dark.

“Mel! Melanie!” Condor said. I had never
heard so much anguish in his voice. He flopped towards Kestrel – Melanie Bauer;
I’d never called her Mel, and she’d have punched me in the throat if I’d tried.
Kestrel grunted, took a deep breath, exhaled. “Let me suffer in peace for a
sec, lover,” she said finally, and if her voice wasn’t as steady as it normally
was, I couldn’t blame her. She took another breath. “I couldn’t stay in
subspace, dammit. Sorry for the screaming.”

“Sorry for…” Condor’s voice broke in a
harsh laugh, with more than a bit of a sob mixed in it.

Outside the door, gunfire and the sharper
sound of energy weapons started out, single shots at first, followed by long
fusillades. Interspaced amidst the gunshots, the laughter continued.

“Those sorry bastards are so screwed
now,” Lester Harris said.

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch,” I
commented. Someone started screaming in terror and agony, more loudly than
anything they had gotten out of Kestrel. The scream died with a gurgling sound
that sent a chill down my back.

The buzzing sound that the backpack
disruptors made joined the symphony of destruction playing outside. Shit. If
they took the Lurker down, we were done. “We have to do something.” I turned to
Lester. “We'll get you loose first.”

“How?”

“You are tied up with duct tape. Condor
should be able to chew through it. I'd do it, but I can't make a face right
now.”

Lester crawled towards Condor, who gnawed
through the duct tape binding Lester, and after a few seconds the Lurker's
sidekick was free and rubbing his wrists. “I'd love to return the favor,”
Lester said. “But how? Those shackles are solid steel.”

“The Russkies didn’t think things
through,” I said. “They left their toy behind.”

Kestrel managed to laugh at that.

It took some blind groping for Lester to
find the acetylene torch in the dark, and some fumbling to get it working. He’d
never used a blowtorch before but Condor had, and he talked Lester through it.
Lester didn’t even have to cut all the way through the cuffs, just burn through
them enough to destroy the circuitry zapping our nervous systems. He did my
cuffs first, and he burned me pretty good while doing it, but after what
Kestrel had gone through I didn’t make a peep. As soon as feeling returned to
my hands, I tore the shackles off me and freed everybody else.

Under the blowtorch’s flickering light,
we examined Kestrel. The burns were horrible, and her spine had been damaged;
her legs wouldn't work even after she was free. I had no idea how long it would
take for Kestrel’s regenerative abilities to repair the damage. She certainly
was out of this fight.

“Stop crowding me,” Kestrel said after a
few seconds. “I'll heal sooner or later. Now do me a favor, get out there and
kill them all.”

“Can do,” I replied. Condor squeezed
Kestrel's hand one more time and whispered something into her ear. That let me
deal with the metal door on my own, which was good, because I had a lot of
energy to burn. One kick and the door buckled enough I could get a good grip on
it. I grabbed one of the door's bent corners, braced myself against the wall,
and ripped it clear off its hinges. We walked out.

Condor and I found ourselves in a utility
tunnel, pipes and cables running all along the walls and ceiling. Emergency
lights had come on, illuminating everything in a dull red hue. Above us we
could hear the muted sounds of loud Euro-Tech music. We must be underneath some
Mafiya
-owned nightclub.

“I’ll go left,” I said. Condor nodded and
went right.

The tunnel made a turn some fifty feet
out. As I rounded the corner, I found Boris’ body. He’d traded the blowtorch
for a large machete. It hadn’t done him much good. The blade and the tattooed
arm and hand that had been holding it lay six feet away from the rest of him;
other pieces were scattered around the tunnel. Much as I’d wanted to kill the
sick fuck, I didn't enjoy the sight. There were other bodies strewn around.
They were all very messily dead, as if someone had run them through various
industrial devices, the kind that crushed, shredded and chipped whatever was
thrown into them.

More gunfire rattled further on. I ran
towards it.

I turned another corner and saw two
Russians advancing slowly and trying to look in every direction at once. One
had an assault rifle, the other an A-75. They started to turn the guns towards
me.

They never had a chance.

I closed the distance before they fully
realized what was going on, grabbed them by their faces and smashed their
skulls together. The guy with the A-75 managed to squeeze the trigger before he
died, and I got a nasty flash burn on the side of my head. The blast also set
the corpses’ clothes on fire. My own clothes, even though they look normal, are
highly resistant to fire, so I was only singed a little. The energy rifles
really weren’t meant to be used in an enclosed space. I stomped on the
smoldering corpses until the flames went out, just to be a good citizen.

Another corner, and lots more bodies. At
the other end of the tunnel, I saw a Russian fly towards a wall and bounce off
it before landing limply face down. A second later, Condor came into view. We
had cleared the tunnel, except for the one corridor between us. Sporadic
gunfire was still coming from there.

I backpedaled and picked up the A-75. Its
finish was a bit crispy from the back blast, but it was still in working order.
They made them tough in the Ukraine. Condor saw me pick up a gun, nodded and
grabbed a submachine gun off another corpse. We approached the central corridor
from opposite sides, and I took a quick peek around the corner.

It was a very quick peek, since somebody started
shooting the second they saw me. I ducked back as gun and blaster fire tore
through the corridor, punching holes and blasting chunks of concrete into the
wall. I managed to get a good look before ducking, though.

The corridor led to a large storage area.
Blondie and half a dozen thugs had made a rough barricade with boxes and crates
and were forted up there. I crouched low to the ground holding the A-75 by its
pistol grip, and fired a couple of blasts in their direction. The return fire
was pretty heavy, but someone started screaming in pain. Even a near miss from
a blaster would do serious damage. On the other side, Condor fired a couple of
bursts at them, letting them know I wasn’t alone.

This could take a while. The Russkies had
too much firepower for us to charge in. And one of their disruptors was still
in play. I could see the twisting energy coiling against the wall – and
reaching towards me. Luckily there was a limit to how far the energy stream
could bend, but I really didn’t like how it seemed to be alive. Just for shits
and giggles, I shot the stream with my blaster. The back blast would have
singed my eyebrows off if I’d had any, but did not seem to have any effect on
the disruptive stream. Oh, well.

A couple of seconds later, the energy stream
ceased abruptly. Someone kept shooting short bursts with a regular gun, but
they were not being aimed in our direction.

The laughter was back.

I risked another peek just in time to see
Blondie shoot at a cloaked figure as it closed in on him. Nobody else was
standing. There was a pulse of darkness that swallowed the emergency lights for
a second. When the lights came back on, the cloaked figure stepped back and
what was left of Blondie dropped to the floor. From the sternum down, Blondie’s
body looked like it had been run through a meat grinder. No Type One Neo could
survive that. His face was grey and had been twisted into something that you
knew could not be alive even without any evidence of injury.

The Lurker laughed again and turned to
face us.

His cloak was long and had a hood that
shrouded his head. There was something wrong with the cloak’s edges: they
seemed to get longer or shorter between eye blinks, and they fluttered as if
caught by a breeze that wasn’t there. The Lurker’s trademark Great War-issue
gas mask protruded under his hood like some monstrous snout. Unlike the one I'd
seen on dozens of magazine covers and trading cards, this mask was covered with
glowing geometric patterns that made me queasy if I looked at them for more
than a few seconds. The glowing symbols were new, that was sure.

“Lurker. It’s good to see you,” Condor
said, sounding a lot less certain than he usually did.

“Condor,” Lurker said, giving him a brief
nod. His voice had the same creepy, whispering and echoing undertones as his
laughter, like it was being distorted by distance – or as if it was traveling
through a medium other than air.

Having performed as many pleasantries as
he was going to, the Lurker turned to one of the backpack disruptors the late
Russians had been packing. He started disassembling it – and the pieces
remained floating in the air as he took the device apart, linked by thin lines
of dark light that seemed to create a blueprint around the pieces.

“No, no, this is all wrong. All wrong,”
the Lurker hissed. “He's tapping into the Outside, the fool.” More disturbing
laughter. “What’s his plan? His plan. My plan. He knows too much. Have to fix
that.”

Oh, boy. I glanced at Condor, and he
looked as disturbed as I felt. The Lurker was not playing with a full deck,
which thrilled me to no fucking end.

The mystery man finished dismantling the
back-pack component of the disruptor. A ball of swirling dark energy emerged
from it, the same twisting sinuous stuff that had taken us down at the
warehouse. The Lurker saw it, clapped his hands in delight and did a little
hop. “Pretty.” He sounded like a child – a child who’d shambled back from the
dark lake where he had drowned to share something cold and terrible with his
dearly beloved.

I don’t creep out easily, but this was
doing the job just fine.

“Go get Lester and Kestrel,” I told
Condor. “We need to get out of here.” Sooner or later more Russians were going
to show up, and if they had more of those disruptors the Lurker was so
enthralled with, they might bag us again, him included. Condor nodded and left.

“Ah, Lurker,” I said, and he turned
towards me. The blob of swirling lights vanished the second his attention was
diverted, along with a buzzing sound I hadn’t quite noticed. The disruptor’s
pieces clattered loudly on the ground.

“Thanks for the help,” I continued. He
said nothing, just looked at me through his disturbing gas mask, his head
slightly cocked to one side. “These assholes were after you, and there's
probably more where they came from. We need to get out of here.”

The Lurker cocked his head the other way.
An eye blink later, he was right in front of me. I was positive I didn’t see
him cross the intervening distance. “You were with her,” he said. “Where is
she? Is she here? She’s not here. Not here but near. Where?”

I wanted to step away from the whacko in
the gas mask – hell, I wanted to run away – but held my ground. Turning one’s
back on the insane rarely turns out well.

“Christine?” I said. “You know
Christine.” I didn’t like where this was going.

“Christine,” the Lurker repeated. “Where
is she? Where is my daughter?”