The Cult of Kronos (10 page)

“
Yeah,” Zach said. “I
uh…gotta learn. Can't play football forever.”

“
Yes, but if you do it
right, you can play football and then do nothing forever.”

“
My wife would rather I
didn't do that,” Zach said.

“
Wife? Aren't you eighteen.”

“
Mom told you. I got married
in March.”

Caleb scratched his beard and
shook his head. “Must have forgotten. We were finishing up the
Stevens account in March. That was a tricky one. Mr. Stevens is a
fickle man.”

“
To June,” Zach said. “You
remember June. I've been dating her for most of my life.”

“
She's not pregnant, right?”

Zach shook his head. He sipped
his water and paused to wonder how someone made water taste so damn
good.

“
Good. Don't have kids.”

Zach blinked. “Uh…okay.”

Caleb Jacobs reached into a
drawer in his desk and pulled out a checkbook. He scribbled on it for
a moment before tearing off a check and passing it to Zach. “Is
that enough?”

Zach looked down at the check.
Five thousand dollars. “Yeah, that should cover a semester,” he
lied. That could have covered ten semesters of books, but Zach’s
father was so out of touch with money that he wouldn’t know or care
about the difference. Zach reached forward and set the water down on
the glass desktop.

“
Well,” Caleb said. “I
have to get back to work, but listen…” He picked up the book on
his desk and handed it to Zach. “If you get time this semester,
read this. It's amazing. Really, it's a life changer.”

Zach
looked down at the book. Atticus Speal,
Becoming
Your Golden Self.
Zach
had seen this guy on TV. He flipped the cover over and looked at the
photo. There was something familiar about that man, aside from his
talk show appearances. “Uh, what is it?”

“
It's a self-help book. It's
about surrendering control to find peace.”

Zach fanned through the pages.
The end of the book had a pledge. His father had signed it.

“
That sounds great,” Zach
lied. “I'll get right on it.”

“
Don't lie to me,” Caleb
said.

“
I'm not.” Zach avoided
his father's gaze. The book looked like a load of hippie crap, but he
didn't want to insult his father on their biannual meeting.

“
You've always had a problem
with honesty, Zeus.”

Zach's eyes shot up. Caleb
Jacobs was leaning over his desk, his face looming close to Zach's.
His eyes were completely dilated; the black pupils were so large that
Zach could hardly tell what color his father's eyes were supposed to
be. Zach pushed his chair away from the desk and scrambled to get to
his feet. Caleb Jacobs laughed, though Zach could tell that his
father was gone. Someone else was in his body.

“
Surprised to see me?” Mr.
Jacobs asked.

Zach backed towards the door.
“Just who am I seeing, exactly?”

“
Your dear old Daddy,”
Caleb said.

“
Kronos.”

“
Ding ding ding! Took you
long enough.”

Zach clenched his fists at his
side, ready to go Tesla on him if he came any closer. “You killed
Dr. Davis.”

“
Yes, but I hear from my
sources that she didn't stay dead.”

“
You were supposed to be in
the Canary Islands.”

“
And you were supposed to be
in Tartarus, but your sweet old grandmother decided to give you
another chance.”

Zach tried to sort through the
jumble of memories. Rhea was his mother. Gaia. “Gaia?”

“
She let you out, scrubbed
you in the Lethe, and put you back in mortal bodies. Except Lethe
doesn't really get out those tough immortal stains. Your memories
started leaking out. And now that Prometheus, that idealistic fool,
is locked where you belong, Daddy has to come back from vacation to
clean up your mess.”

“
You can't kill us,” Zach
said. “We'll just leave the underworld and come back until we stop
you.”

“
That book,” Kronos said,
pointing Caleb's hand at the book that Zach had dropped on the floor.
“Have you heard of it?”

“
It's everywhere.”

“
Everywhere and in ten
different languages. The moment someone signs their name to that
pledge, they relinquish control of their lives. Have fun getting to
me when I have forty million people worldwide under my control.
Thirty million in America. And you can bet some of those couples are
sharing a book.

“
I bet not everyone signed
it,” Zach said.

Caleb Jacobs shrugged. “But
enough.” He stepped around the desk, his shoulders back, his head
held high. “With millions of followers under my control, I can
capture every one of you and not just kill you, but lock you away in
Tartarus where you belong. For good. I won't be a lax prison guard
like Prometheus, either. I'll have you watched twenty-four hours a
day. You'll spend eternity in that pit where you belong.”

Someone pounded on the door.

“
You know what I love about
your mortal father?” Kronos asked.

“
Nice beard?”

He laughed. “He had every
one of his employees read that book. Even if they just pretended to
read it, they all signed it.”

The doors to the office burst
open and fifteen people poured in. Ashley (the woman from the
elevator) and the gum-chewing receptionist were the first through the
door, but a group of burly security guards followed and tackled Zach.
His hands crackled with electricity as he struggled, but Zach was
afraid to unleash. These were people, trapped as puppets, and he
didn't want to hurt any of them.

Zach kicked one of the guards
off and rolled to the side. He scrambled to his feet and ran out the
door. Zach followed the glowing, red emergency exit sign and ran down
the stairwell. The mob pursued him, temporarily getting jammed in the
doorway and then following one at a time. Zach began to skip steps.
With his hands on the railing, he leapt down each set of steps.
Half-way down, a stitch growing in his side, Zach burst into one of
the other offices and ran for the elevator. It closed with him inside
just as the gum-chewer made it to the door.

Zach slid to the floor of the
mirrored elevator. He took a moment to dig his hand into the stitch
in his side and catch his breath. The elevator opened. The lobby was
clear. Zach made a break for the door, but a different mob came in
from the street and ran at him. The crowd, a group of at least fifty
people, swarmed him like insects. Zach crouched down, covering his
head, as countless hands struck his back and neck.

“
No,” he groaned, trying
to think of a way out. No, he wasn't going down like this. It had
been such a good morning. He was Zeus, King of Olympus. He was a god!
Zach stood up, throwing his arms outward. He swelled, his whole
figure growing to an impressive twenty feet tall. The attackers were
thrown off of him. With one large sweep of his arm, Zach knocked over
the first row of the mob. He stepped over them and ran for the door.
His body shrank down to its normal size just as he pushed open the
glass door and ran out onto the street.

Police officers were pulling
up outside the office building. “What's going on here?” one of
them asked as Zach ran out into the daylight, his eyes filling with
spots from sudden exposure to the midday sun.

Another
cop was clearly a fan of
Becoming
Your Golden Self
and fired his gun, narrowly missing Zach's head. Zach ducked into a
crowd of onlookers and kept running until he came to his car. He
jumped in the Roadster and sped off, his foot never leaving the gas
until he got far outside of Orlando. He ditched his car on the side
of the road—if his father knew what Zach drove, it stood to reason
that Kronos and all of his followers knew—and ran into the woods
until he was too exhausted to move anymore.

Zach collapsed against a
tree—his shirt torn, his back bruised, his arms scratched and
bleeding— and pulled out his phone. He had to warn the others.

“
Victory passes back and
forth between men.”

-Homer

XI.

Evan Fuller had borrowed his
mother's minivan and hauled The Night Prowler out past the golf
course in Kendall. He had spent two years tweaking his all-terrain go
kart, and now he wanted to give it a test drive.

He parked at the access road
at the edge of the woods and braced two planks against the bumper so
that he could gently roll The Night Prowler out of the van. The kart
had enormous round tires, a concave seat covered in straps, and a
roll-cage to protect him from a flip. Evan strapped a helmet on and
jiggled it to check that it was secure. He slipped a mouth guard over
his top row of teeth. It might have been extreme, but Evan figured
that safety was never a bad thing. A little over-caution was better
than being toothless in addition to being scarred and walking with a
limp.

Evan buckled himself in and
turned the ignition key, something he'd ripped from a wrecked Harley
at the junk yard. He gripped the yoke, a piece from an small plane
that had been thrown away and replaced because the leather grips were
decaying. Evan had coated the handles in a little electrical tape and
called them good-as-new.

He put his foot over the gas
and hesitated. “Alright,” Evan said, talking to himself, muffled
through his mouth guard. “Two years of dreaming. Take it nice and
slow to start. Remember, her top speed is over a hundred, so don't
hit a tree.”

A truck stopped on the main
road. Evan looked up as a man got out and walked around to the pickup
bed. He reached in and pulled out a .22 long rifle. Evan wondered if
he spotted an animal up ahead, but the man turned and aimed the gun
at Evan. He fired, and the bullet clipped the side of Evan's helmet
and filled his ears with a thunderous crack.

Evan
stomped on the accelerator and took off into the woods. Why on earth,
he wondered, was this complete stranger
trying
to kill him?
He
glanced back to see the man running after him, gun still in hand.
Evan gripped the yoke and turned quickly. The Night Prowler took a
sharp left onto a new trail, but the wheels on the right side picked
up off the ground and the vehicle tilted. The moment of truth— the
cart teetered on two wheels before rolling back down and landing
squarely on four.

A bullet whizzed by. Evan
pressed his foot down harder, watching the speedometer tick up to
seventy. Why was he going away from the road? He realized that he
needed to find a way back to the highway if he was going to get help.

Someone ran out into the path.
Evan jerked the wheel, barely cutting around a tree as he left the
path to avoid collision. An explosion of bark and oak splinters
nearby told Evan that someone else was shooting. What was this, “The
Most Dangerous Game?”

The Night Prowler hopped back
onto the path. Evan sped up another ten miles per hour, knowing now
that a collision with a tree could kill him. He took the risk; after
all, a collision with a bullet was guaranteed to be more deadly.

A
loud
pop!
s
ounded
to his right, followed by a whistle. The Night Prowler jerked to the
right as the tire was blown out. Evan was wrenched to the side. It
spun and flipped. The roll-cage struck the ground and then turned
topside and then struck the ground again. Evan bit hard into his
mouth guard as the vehicle rolled and then came to a halt.

When it fell still, the cart
turned upside-down, the engine still rumbling, Evan fumbled with the
latch on the roll-cage. It was stuck. He kicked and fought. A pair of
steel-toed boots stopped next to the cart, then a pair of
dusty-but-new dress shoes. Evan looked up to see two men standing
over him, one a hunter, the other a business man. Something was wrong
with their eyes.

“
You gotta help me,” Evan
said, spitting out his mouthguard.

“
Oh, we'll help you,
Hephaestus,” the hunter said. “We're here to escort you to hell.”

June Jacobs was sitting on the
floor of the empty living room at her apartment in Gainesville. She
and Zach had ordered furniture, but it would be weeks before it came.
They were, essentially, camping. A stove, a refrigerator, and a
dishwasher had been provided by the landlord, but everything else was
up to them. Before Zach had left for an urgent meeting in Olympia
Heights, they had made a run to Target to buy a TV stand and air
mattress to get them through the weeks before their living room and
bedroom sets arrived.

She stood up and started
pacing the room. Zach's call when he had left the Miami area was
cryptic. He couldn't talk about what had been discussed, though he
seemed excited to share the news with her. She was tempted to call
him back and grill him for information, but she knew he had plans to
stop and visit his father, and June did not want to interrupt that
awkward meeting. They needed the money that Mr. Jacobs could supply.