New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative (21 page)

“I though the Humanity Foundation was gone and done for,” Condor said, trying to flag down a waiter and get a refill. No luck.

“Me too. Lost their leaders, their funding, and their lives, most of them. You’d think the rest would have learned their lesson. I guess as long as there are assholes out there, someone will pick up their flag and wave it.”

“This must have been a big project for them, infiltrating someone in here, with a hidden device powerful enough to kill a few Neos. And it was a bust. They can’t win. Hopefully that’ll sink in.”

“Hopefully the cops, the feds and you Guardians will find them quickly. That will sink them, which is even better.”

Condor nodded.

New York, New York, July 24, 2014

“Goddammit. Goddammit to Hell.”

Godfrey Lappage didn’t shout the curses. He muttered them softly as he watched the news report. No sense disturbing the neighbors; he’d made it a habit, keeping a low profile. But he was seething on the inside. Over a year of planning and execution, wasted. His cell had spent a small fortune to build a device that could be smuggled past Club X-Tremo’s security systems, and their chosen martyr had blown himself up without achieving a damn thing. The press didn’t even mention the Cause, or even the name of the fallen soldier, who was dismissed as an anonymous ‘terrorist.’ Bastards.

Neos always won. That was why Godfrey Lappage hated them so much. They always won.

He’d tried to join the Humanity Foundation for years. Just finding the elusive organization had been an ordeal, and when he finally made contact he was told he wasn’t up to snuff. Stupid bastards. Maybe if they’d let him help out they might not have been wiped out after their plots were uncovered. Well, if the Humanity Foundation wouldn’t let him in, he’d make his own version. The new Humanity Foundation would rise from the ashes of the old, stronger, smarter, and successful.

Finding members wasn’t hard. There were many like him, people who’d lost friends and family to senseless Neo rampages, or who just couldn’t stand the sight of the costumed freaks that ruled the world. The trick was to find the smart ones, the ones who knew how to keep their mouths shut, the ones who didn’t take stupid risks, and the ones who weren’t undercover cops or feds. Godfrey had managed to survive by being careful and cunning. His first big score – the murder of a Neo bitch whose body lay undiscovered in a landfill in New Jersey – had been a success. The videos of the execution had made the rounds among other true believers, and earned him the cred and the backing he needed for the next op – the bomb attack on Club X-Tremo.

That had turned out to be a total failure, unfortunately. Some of his recruits would desert him. Some might even turn informant. He’d been careful in making sure his activities couldn’t be traced back to him, but you couldn’t be too careful in this business. Creating fake Hypernet accounts was almost impossible, and all it would take to be discovered was having a few Neos with the right powers following his trail. He had to…

Someone knocked on his door.

“Goddammit to Hell,” he whispered again.

Cops? No. Cops would have kicked down his door, filled his basement apartment with tear gas, and shot or tasered him into submission. It wasn’t cops. He had no idea who it could be. None of his associates knew of this address. He’d made sure of that.

“Who is it?” he said. Just in case, he grabbed a silenced pistol from his desk drawer. Its solid weight gave him a small measure of comfort.

“A friend,” a voice on the other side of the door replied. A female voice. Highly unusual.

One thing he’d quickly found out was that anti-Neo activism wasn’t exactly popular with the ladies. There were a few, sure, but most of them were either crazier than weasels on laughing gas, butt-ugly, or both. Any fantasies he’d harbored about having freedom fighter sex with pretty grad students had been quickly dashed. No matter. He wasn’t doing this for the chicks, or the glory, and sure as hell not for the money, either. Come to think about, he wasn’t sure why he was doing this at all, just that he couldn’t stop now.

“I don’t have any friends,” he growled back.

“Just open the door, Godfrey. Unless you want me to start recounting your many sins out in the hall.”

Dammit. To Hell.

He opened the door, holding his gun behind his back. Worst case, he would take the bitch out once she was inside. He still had enough materials for a kill kit in the apartment. And it might be fun.

The girl at the door was short, like five three or four, and there was something wrong with her face, like she’d had a stroke or something. The left half of her mouth was sagging down; her left eye also drooped in an unseemly fashion. Too bad; she would have been pretty otherwise. Her red hair was short, done in a pixie cut. Her skin was unhealthily pale and blotchy, and there was crazy glint in her eyes, even the drooping one. Even partially deformed as she was, she looked familiar, but he couldn’t place her offhand.

“Can I come in?”

He stepped out of her way. She walked in as if she owned the place. He noticed a slight limp in her step, too. Whatever had messed up her face had done a number on the rest of her. That at least proved one thing: she wasn’t a Neo. Neos didn’t have disabilities. They were perfect. The bastards.

“Nice place,” she said, looking over the chipped paint on the walls, the crappy secondhand furniture, the dirt and trash on the corner of the kitchen. All the money he earned – and the much larger amounts he stole – went straight to the Cause. He didn’t care about high living. He was committed. A nice place was for the losers who went along to get along.

“Who are you? What do you want?” he said.

She turned around and saw the gun pointed right at her face.

“Scary,” she said evenly. “Before you shoot me, shouldn’t you lay down some plastic sheets first? Otherwise the blood’s going to ruin the carpet.”

“Screw the carpet. I asked you a question.”

“Two questions, actually. My name is Ms. Night. And I’m here to help you.”

“Yeah, right.”

Now that he thought about it, there had been a Mister Night involved in the old Foundation, hadn’t there? A shadowy name whispered among pro-human circles. Except he’d turned out to be a Neo after all, powerful enough to fight a bunch of heroes over New York before getting blown up to hell.

“Are you a Neo?”

“With a face like this? What do you think?”

“I’ve heard of Mister Night. He turned out to be a Neo.”

She shook her head. “No. He wasn’t a Neo. He was something much, much worse than a Neo. Just like me.”

“Only pureblood humans can join the Cause.”

“I’m not joining your little gang, Godfrey. I’m taking it over.”

He tried to pull the trigger, but his hand wouldn’t obey him. The bitch was doing something to him. That realization helped him recognize her face, even with her damaged features. That face had been on magazine covers and vid-screens everywhere in the last year or so.

“Dark Justice! You
are
a Neo.”

She took the gun away from him and pistol-whipped him with it in one fluid movement. Godfrey ended up on his knees, hands trying to staunch the flow of blood from a scalp wound, tears of pain and terror mixing with the gore dripping onto the carpet.

“Lesson number one, Godfrey: don’t call me a liar.”

She grabbed him by the hair, pulling his head back, and jammed the gun in his mouth, breaking three or four teeth in the process. The pain was overwhelming, the cold reality of the weapon pressing down his throat even more so.

“Lesson number two: don’t argue with me.”

“Please,” he tried to say. All that came out was an unintelligible gibbering sound, along with drool and blood.

“Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?” she said – no, she
sang
to him, although he couldn’t recognize the tune.

He nodded.

“Just a little ballad my momster used to sing to me, but I find it apropos for this little chat. Nod if you agree.”

He did. He very much did not want to die kneeling on his shitty carpet with a gun jammed in his mouth like a dick. Nothing else mattered. Not the Cause, not his dignity. Nothing.

“Goody. What you’re going to do, after we put your mouth to good use – me so horny, you see – is open up your home terminal and give me your membership list. And your bank accounts. And then you’re going to do anything else I tell you to. Can you give us a little nod?”

He did.

“Good.”

She grinned. Her half-smile chilled him to the bone.

Sanctuary, North Pole, July 25, 2014

she asked Mark. He’d reached out to her with news of the terror attack.

She snorted and cut the connection. They’d agreed not to keep it on all the time, or they’d end up losing what little individuality they still retained and become two alien pod people or something. They still could tell each other’s general emotional state. Right now Mark was mildly annoyed, probably at the cops. Before the explosion, he’d been pretty content, even excited about something. Of course, his next feelz had been shock and a bit of fear when the d-bag suicide bomber had detonated. What a world this was.

You know it could be a lot worse
, she reminded herself.

And she was going to make sure that never happened here. Which meant she should try to get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

It took her several minutes of tossing and turning in the unfamiliar bed before she managed to sleep. She was… what? Sad and depressed, yes, but also, weirdly enough happy, and in love. A seven-layer burrito of wildly incongruent emotions was wrapped over her heart.

He still loves me
.

She’d cheated on him and killed someone just like him, and committed all kinds of murders, retail and wholesale, and he hadn’t run away screaming. Maybe hooking up with a stone-cold killer had finally paid off. He definitely wasn’t going to be overly judgmental.

She couldn’t be so understanding, unfortunately.

Ever since she’d regained her memories, they kept haunting her. Flashbacks kept popping up: every single person she’d killed; Mark’s death; sending out the call to the Cosmic Nerds.

Those pesky Cosmic Nerds. Their name for themselves was something like the Civilization, or the Civilized People’s Consortium, with lots of extra meanings added. The actual word she’d found in the Codex enumerated its entire membership, which made it the longest word ever written, a word massive enough to choke a German linguist. If written out in the Latin alphabet, it would be about four million characters long, a bit more than the entire Bible. And that was just the title that went on their letterhead. Once she’d said that trying to understand them was like a Mayan priest trying to understand a nuclear reactor. She was beginning to suspect it was more like a not particularly smart dog trying to understand said nuclear reactor. Human minds just didn’t have the ability to grasp their basic concepts.

A few things about the Nerds were understandable enough, though. If a world was corrupted by the Outsiders, they cleansed it. By the time they were done, nothing was left. Her forays into the Codex to find out what happened hadn’t been very successful, but the end of the process involved collapsing all of the matter and energy of the local star system into a smallish black hole. There was more to it than that, though, stuff that sounded more like a religious tract than a Wiki article, and she hadn’t been able to wrap her head around it.

It didn’t matter. Dead was dead, like Mark said.

She hoped she would learn to live with the things she’d done.

Eventually, she fell asleep.

And soon regretted it.

* * *

In the dream, she wasn’t her, but the other one: Dark Christine Dark in all her evil redundancy.

Her mind had snapped back into her body after Good Christine had blasted her in Dreamland. She was pissed off, but also somewhat satisfied, because she was sure she’d figured out how to travel between worlds physically, just the way Daddy used to do it. Which meant she could go chasing after Pissy Chrissy and make her pay for daring to invade her realm and kill poor Mister Night.

Her satisfaction was soon obliterated by the certainty that something was terribly wrong.

Waves of sheer terror washed over her. It wasn’t coming from her, but from the few million slaves left on the planet. It was so intense even her dulled empathic senses picked it up. Whatever was getting her pets so excited had to do with the sky, so she walked to the nearest balcony in her palace and took a peek.

There were two suns up there, and the new arrival was getting bigger right before her eyes.

In the course of that terrible first glance, Dark Christine understood the new sun was a vessel of sorts, and it was headed for Earth. The Cosmic Nerds had come to town. Earth was Tainted by the Outsider energies flowing freely through most of its lifeless surface, preparing the way for the entities that called themselves the Survivors to manifest themselves. The process would take millions of years, however, and the Cosmic Nerds had arrived a little too soon to the party.

Chrissy had tattled on her, the little narc snitch bitch.

The new sun grew larger, and she felt the temperature begin to rise. Her slaves and servants screamed and prayed – mostly to her – for deliverance, but there was none to give.

She managed to escape the universe just as the burning disk filled half the sky and the Earth’s atmosphere ignited, turning the blue planet into a fireball.

* * *

Christine was eating breakfast alone in the Sanctuary’s kitchen when Cassius Jones walked in.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her as soon as he got a good look at her face.

“Bad dream.”

“Ah.” If anyone was familiar with the concept, the tall, dark and handsome hero would be it. He’d been through even more nightmarish times than Christine had.

“Yeah,” she said, looking mostly at the bowl of Cheerios in front of her, and wishing it was something more appetizing. The Sanctuary had every modern convenience, but the stuff in the pantry wasn’t terribly tasty or good. It didn’t bother John, who cared little about food, or Cassius, who had cured himself of the eating habit in preparation for his personal star trek, but she still liked stuffing her face. Next time she stayed there, she’d go grocery shopping first.

Not that she was feeling particularly hungry at the moment.

“Want to talk about it?”

Strangely enough, she did. At her nod, he sat down beside her, a kind expression on his face. He was getting back to normal, thank God, and knowing she’d played a big part in his recovery made her feel a little better.

“It was more than a dream,” she said after she finished recounting the horrible nightmare. “I think I caught a real memory from the other me. I saw what happened when the Cosmic Nerds answered the call I sent.”

“I imagine the same would have happened to the Genocide’s world if someone had alerted them. I wish I’d known how to do so.”

“It wasn’t pretty, that’s for sure.”

“You did all those people a favor,” he added.

“Everyone keeps telling me that.”

“I know. While I was the Genocide’s captive, it regaled me with stories of what it did to the inhabitants of its home planet. The lucky millions who were killed outright were spared years of suffering and terror. People afflicted with the Taint soon become dedicated sadists. You saw firsthand what was happening to that alternate Earth; it had already become a world of victims and tormentors. It was only going to get worse as the so-called Goddess grew bored and more jaded.”

“I wish I could have saved them,” she said. “Even a few of them. The kid who tried to help me, his name was Robb, for one. Or the healer who saved my life. Anybody.”

“I spent decades wallowing, so I’m not one to judge,” Cassius said. “But I regret the years I wasted in self-pity.”

“So you don’t recommend the wallow option.”

“No.”

“I’ll try to stop, then.”

He smiled at her. “Glad to hear it.”

“Glad to hear what?” John Clarke said, joining them in the kitchen. He was wearing a plain shirt and shorts, and looked more like a high school assistant coach than the All-American Hero. His greeting smile looked forced, though, and his emotional state was still pretty shaky. She’d cleaned a good ninety-three percent of his aura, but he was still pretty messed up.

“That I’m not going to spend years going ‘Oh, woe is me,’” Christine said.

“Yes, that never seems to do much good. Not that it’s stopped any of us from indulging in that vice.”

“True enough,” Cassius said.

She pushed away her half-full bowl. “Well, I’m done with breakfast. You guys ready for some aura cleansing exercises?”

They were.