New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (32 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Christine Dark

Somewhere over the Eastern Seaboard, March 14, 2013

So cold. Everything hurts.
She didn’t want to wake up. Something bad was on the other side
of her closed eyelids, and she wasn’t looking forward to knowing what it was.

The universe doesn’t give a rat’s ass
about what you want
, her brain helpfully
whispered.
Do, or do not, and all that crap.

Christine opened her eyes and regretted
it immediately. She was moving through thin clouds that rushed by at ludicrous
speeds. Down below she saw glimpses of the earth below, at about the cruising
altitude of a jetliner. Wicked high, to be technical about it. She felt cold,
but nothing like she should be feeling that high up. She also was being held at
the waist by a very well-muscled arm and hanging face down. They were moving
fast, so fast she could see the ground moving below her, moving faster than
she'd ever seen from an airliner. Strangely enough, her hair wasn’t even
fluttering – and at those speeds her hair should be not just fluttering, but
being ripped clean off along with her face.

“Don’t try to move, little girl, or I’ll
break both your arms,” Ultimate the Invincible Man snarled at her. Conversation
shouldn’t be possible when moving through the air at those speeds, either, but
she could hear his voice perfectly clearly.

Force field around both of us?
She wondered. Next time she tried flying by herself she’d try
that trick. Of course, first she had to deal with her current predicament or
there wouldn’t be any next times or first times for anything.

“Good girl,” Ultimate said when she
stopped squirming. Her current position wasn’t very comfortable, but having her
arms broken would be worse. She’d seen him wipe the floor with the super-gang
that had wiped the floor with her, which in superhero math meant she was in
deep doo doo. “This will be over soon,” he continued.

“Where are you taking me?” That was such
a damsel in distress phrase she wanted to puke, but bad guys were supposed to
like to talk. Maybe she would learn something useful.

“You’ll find out soon enough, little
girl.” Crap. Creepy.

Christine had watched some Ultimate video
clips on the computer during her Hyperpedia-gasmic experience the previous
night. He sounded nothing like this creep carrying her off to wherever.
Something wasn’t right. Mind control, alien puppet masters or a cloning
experiment gone horribly wrong might be involved. Trying not to squirm too
much, Christine twisted her head until she could see Ultimate and turned on her
super-duper senses. As usual, she got more than she bargained for.

Ultimate was sheer power made solid,
glowing like a halogen lamp on steroids, shiniest of all shinies. His aura was
blindingly bright for the most part, but there were dark spots embedded in it
like malignant tumors. The sickening purple-black spots reminded her of the
weird energy beams that had taken her friends down during the warehouse
firefight.  Bad as that was, there was more.

Somebody was riding Ultimate like the
proverbial back monkey.

Her Christine-sight revealed a psychic
image of the body snatcher: a man in an old style suit and hat, with a laughing
ceramic mask covering his face. Tendrils of slimy-looking green energy
emanating from the masked man surrounded Ultimate’s body and head and sank into
the dark spots in his aura. Christine could sense Ultimate’s mind somewhere
under all the tendrils. Ultimate was blissfully unaware anything was wrong; he
was happy, as a matter of fact. Happy as a clam, maybe happier than he’d ever
been, because Christine sensed that Ultimate and happiness were at best passing
acquaintances. The big guy had no idea that someone else was on the driver's
seat.

The masked man somehow realized she could
see him. Maybe he had his own version of Christine’s senses. “I think this
warrants one broken arm,” he said in the same tone he’d been using through
Ultimate’s mouth.

Something went
ding
inside
Christine’s head. She understood what Laughing Mask was doing. The green
tendrils worked like her own empathy. They created a connection between him and
his target, except where Christine sensed a target’s emotional state through
that connection, Laughing Man could actually go in and manipulate stuff inside
his victims, stuff like thoughts, emotions and memories. The dark spots in
Ultimate's aura had created openings that allowed the masked man to enter his
mind and take over.

Her captor reached for her with his free
arm. Christine pushed with her mind, using her special sight as a guide. Maybe
she could break the connection. Maybe –

She wasn’t being carried through the air
by a psycho controlling Ultimate anymore. She was standing in a large office space,
filled with desks cluttered with piles of paper and ancient typewriters and
telephones. There were newspaper clippings affixed to just about every wall.
The biggest headline she could see read ‘Hitler Invades Poland.’ Second place
went to another headline: ‘Ultimate’s Identity Revealed.’ The newspaper’s name
was
The World’s Journal
, which she’d never heard of before.

That was all pretty weird. But not as
weird as the fact that she was dressed like her favorite gaming character, an
Elven rogue named Snipe, all decked out in her Tier Ten leather armor, with
twin epic daggers glowing right through the scabbards belted around her waist.
The armor looked great, but it was riding up in places where it really
shouldn’t. She touched her ears. They were long and pointy and elf-y, or was
that supposed to be elfin? WTF?

I didn’t break the connection
, she realized.
But I think I hitched a ride inside
Ultimate’s brain.
She was in Dreamland, and in Dreamland she was Snipe. It
made sense if you were a little bit crazy to begin with.

Christine didn’t get much of a chance to
appreciate her situation. One of the walls of the newspaper bullpen started
bulging inward like a plastic membrane being pushed from the other side. The
man in the laughing mask burst through it. Laughing mask or not, he was pissed.
She was picking up his emotional state in here just like she did in the real
world.

“You insufferable bitch!” he screamed.
“You are going to pay for this. I’m not allowed to kill you, but here I can
hurt you as much as I want.”

Her daggers were in her hands now, and
she felt an irresistible urge to let fly with sinister strikes and all her
other rogue tricks. “I’m going to gank you like a n00b,” she hissed, and she
sounded just the way she imagined Snipe would.

The man pounced like a cat, long claws at
the end of his fingers reaching towards her. Christine’s daggers flashed in a
blur of light, and she severed both of his hands off at the wrist. From out of
nowhere, 'Kiss with a Fist' started playing, one of the songs she liked to
listen to while gaming. In the land of the Mind Trip you got your own
soundtrack, apparently. It would have been more awesome if she wasn’t so pissed
off.

The masked man roared in pain and
recoiled, stumps spurting dark blood. Christine followed him, daggers whirling.
She stabbed him in the chest just as new hands grew out of his stumps. The
wounds didn’t seem to make much of an impression. She had to duck under a
haymaker that felt like it would have taken her head off if it had landed.
Christine hacked and slashed, and Laughing Mask shouted in rage, but he didn’t
go down. Dreamland unfortunately did not provide a hit point counter over his
head, so she couldn’t tell how much she was really hurting him. She was sure
she was hurting him, though. Every time she landed a hit, she felt a flare of
pain and fear from the a-hole. 

When she didn’t duck fast enough, he
landed a punch and she discovered that he definitely could hurt her back. She
went flying across the bullpen, hit a wall and bounced off it. No force field
protected her. Christine ended up on her hands and knees, coughing up blood.

Urk! Healz, please!

The pain disappeared. She looked around
to see if she’d conjured a healer out of thin air. She hadn’t, but she had
managed to heal all the damage she had taken anyway. Awesome.

The masked man had been about to gloat
when he saw Christine get up. His shock when he saw her recovery felt like a
bucket of cold water to her empathy senses.
Surprise, d-bag.
Surprised
or not, he was ready to keep playing. He went after her, his hands turning into
clawed limbs once again. This could go on all day. Which was just what Laughing
Boy wanted, Christine realized with a sick feeling. In the real world, Ultimate
might be still flying her to wherever the bad guy wanted to take her, and she
didn’t think she’d like it there. Time to get the eff out, find the big guy and
wake him up. This bullpen must be from Ultimate’s past. They were dancing
around Ultimate’s memories: he had to be somewhere in there.

“Peace out, bitches!” Christine yelled
and tried to go into her rogue’s stealth mode. She disappeared in a puff of
smoke and rolled away from Masked Man, who looked confused and started turning
around, vainly looking for her. Ha! Okay, where to go? A door stood out in the
office. It didn’t match the other doors, and it was glowing faintly. Christine
reached it and started opening it. An angry shout from behind her made her look
back. Laughing Mask had managed to spot her. Crap. She ran out the door.

She ran out the door right into a scene
from
Saving Private Ryan
. The door was gone and she was wading on
shallow water on a sandy beach littered with broken equipment – and dead
people. Unlike the bullpen, there was a full cast of characters, props and FX
there, mostly screaming American GI’s, explosions, dead bodies and pieces of
dead bodies on the blood-drenched beach, and Nazis raining death from the high
ground overlooking them. Not good. She ducked into a shell hole as bullets flew
all around her. Christine had never been a big fan of war movies, and she
quickly found out that being inside one sucked a lot worse than watching one.

“Catch.”

She looked up and saw the masked man
dropping a grenade-on-a-stick right into her shell hole. She jumped out as with
the full grace and speed of her rogue reflexes, but the blast got her before
she was clear. She was knocked sideways and felt shrapnel ripping into her. It
hurt a hell of a lot.

Healz…

It worked again, thank God, but she had
to keep moving – dodge and weave around soldiers and barbed wire and bursts of
automatic fire, and it wasn’t half as much fun as it sounded, especially with a
masked maniac chasing her. She put him down for a few seconds when she grabbed
a big rifle-like thingy she thought was called a BAR and shot him up pretty
good, but he didn’t stay down for long. She went into stealth mode again and
managed to leave him behind for a bit while he tried to find her again.

Wasting time here. Have to find Ultimate.

She tried to use her Christine senses. It
didn’t work the same way as it did outside Dreamland. The scene didn’t change
very much, but she saw a golden light shaped like a six-foot tall oval,
hovering a few inches off the ground near the remains of a landing craft. It
felt like the door she had used to get out of the newspaper offices. Hopefully
this one would get her to Ultimate. She ran through it.

The beach battle bingo went away.
Christine came to a stop in a bedroom, watching a man and a woman screwing like
bunnies.

Very embarrassing.

Face-Off

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

“Lurker, we’ve got to get out of here,”
Condor said, interrupting our little chat before I did something I would almost
certainly regret. He had Kestrel in his arms. Lester Harris was behind him.

“Condor! You’ll tell me where Christine
is.”

“Yes. Sure. But we need to go back to my
ship first. Kestrel needs medical attention.”

“Oh, that.” The Lurker walked over to
Condor and examined Kestrel for a second. Before anybody else could react, he
took Kestrel’s head in his hands. The air around the Lurker
shuddered
.
It was like a mirage, or heat daze, but I didn’t just see it, I felt it in my
bones. Kestrel’s body convulsed as if she was being electrocuted.

“What..?” Condor started to say, too surprised
to react.

“She’s fine now,” the Lurker said,
stepping away from them.

“He’s right, Kyle,” Kestrel confirmed.
She stood up, stretching her arms and shoulders.

“My daughter,” the Lurker repeated.

“I put a tracer on her,” Condor said. “If
we can get to my ship, I can find her.”

“Where?” Lester Harris gave him the
address to the warehouse.

The Lurker spun around. His cloak spun,
grew larger, and became a sheet of solid darkness. It swallowed us. I felt
surrounded by something like a very thick fog, almost liquid in consistency,
and cold. I couldn’t see or hear anything. For all I knew I could be the only
living thing in the dark. For a couple of seconds, I stood in the cold
blackness, wondering what the fuck was happening. Luckily, the darkness dissipated,
and I saw we were back at the warehouse where we’d been ambushed. I was
impressed. Teleports were fairly rare. Instant or near-instant teleports were
incredibly rare; it usually takes a while for teleports to visualize their
destination and move themselves there safely. The only quick jumpers I could
think of offhand were Janus, who was among the top ten most powerful Neos in
the world, and the Scourge, the Holocaust survivor who had gone on to help
found Israel.

The Lurker had been hiding quite a few things,
or had learned some new tricks recently. He’d certainly grown more eccentric,
or, more accurately, batshit crazy.

There was no time to deal with that now,
though. We had to find Christine and arrange a little family reunion. That was
probably going to end in tears, but it had to be done. Cassandra, as usual, had
been right. I’d have to remember to grovel a little next time I saw her.

Condor rushed into his ship, the Lurker
right behind him. Kestrel, Lester and I followed a bit more slowly.

“How are you doing?” I asked Kestrel. She
might be a pain slut – her own and everybody else’s – but nobody enjoys having
their flesh seared off with a blowtorch.

“I’ll live. All I need is a bit of
killing to work off some stress. You guys had all the fun back there.”

She sounded like she was back to normal,
at least. “I’m sure we’ll find all the action you’ll ever want before this is
over,” I said.

“I always want more,” she replied. “It’s
the only thing that keeps me going.” Yep, back to normal, all right. She gestured
towards the ship. “The Lurker is something else, isn’t he?” She didn’t sound
like she was interested in learning more about his powers. “I love crazy
weirdos. They have the most interesting hang-ups.”

“You really don’t want to go there,” I
growled at her. “Jesus H. Christ, that’s the last thing we need.”

“I wasn’t really serious,” she said,
grinning. “That would be biting more than even I can chew. Besides, it would
hurt Kyle.”

I looked at her. “You really do give a
shit about him, don’t you?”

Her smile had an edge now. “More than I
ever did for you, killer.”

I nodded. “Fair enough.” What else could
I say? I wished them the best.

Condor was at a communications console, a
dozen screens lit in front of him, the Lurker looming behind him, his cloak
taking more room inside the Condor Jet than it should. Weird shadows formed
around him and gave the ship a gloomy, Gothic feel. The screens I could see
were all tuned to news channels. There were Breaking News signs on every one. A
video feed showed a street that had clearly been the site of a Neo brawl.
Burning cars, shattered concrete, broken water mains, sparkling electrical arcs
from downed power lines. Your basic shit storm, in other words. Another screen
showed shaky video from someone’s cheap Goggle-cam. In it, Christine was
kicking a gang banger in the face. I gave her a mental thumbs up and fervently
hoped I’d get to see her again.

“She’s on the move,” Condor reported.
“Moving fast, Mach Four and still accelerating.” He pounded a fist against the
console, denting the metal alloy. “We’ll never catch up.”

“I will,” the Lurker said.

“… reports that Ultimate himself joined
the fray remain inconclusive, but somebody disabled the entire roster of the
Chicago Sentinels and made off with the young woman who had been fighting the
heroes,” a TV reporter said on one of the screens.

Ultimate? Fuck.

Even if Condor let loose with every
gadget in his arsenal, trying to fight Ultimate would be like spitting into a
hurricane. I looked at the Lurker. Maybe the old mystery man had more tricks up
his sleeve than he’d shown so far, and what he had shown was impressive enough.
Even so, if Ultimate was involved in this, we were in for the fight of our
lives. And very possibly our deaths.

Dying didn’t bother me all that much. I’d
been living on borrowed time since that night on a kitchen floor where I’d been
choking on my own blood and teeth fragments while my stepfather pounded my face
into hamburger. Dying a failure, that bothered the shit out of me. I’d found
Christine. She was my responsibility. If that meant I had to figure out a way
to take down the Invincible Man, I’d have to think of something.

“I’m going to go get my daughter,” the
Lurker announced, and did his spin the cloak trick. Just like that, poof, he
was gone.

He didn’t bother taking us along.

Fucking hell.