“Here it is,” Lou said, using a small flashlight to find his way. The wall safe seemed to be in pristine condition. Lou couldn’t believe his luck. Normally, all his plans turned to shit in short order.
He tried the combination he’d memorized from a strip of paper the owner kept at his desk, the fucking idiot. The safe clicked open.
“Fucking-A.”
It all seemed too good to be true, but the safe door swung open and Lou found himself looking at a dream come true: there were fat stacks of fifties and hundreds, bound neatly with elastic bands; some rare Dominion rayguns, easily worth ten grand each; and a small stash of coke and Ultra-Drops. That was a hundred, maybe two hundred grand score, and even split three ways it was the most money he’d ever had.
It was the happiest day of his life.
“All right, let’s pack up this bitch and get going,” he said. He was the luckiest sumbitch that ever lived, he thought.
Lou and his cousins were so busy filling their backpacks with loot that they completely missed the light show at the bottom of the crater.
A small sphere, glowing red and purple, took form out of thin air, sparkled merrily for a few seconds, and dissipated as suddenly as it had arrived, leaving behind a human form.
“That’s it,” Lou said, zipping up his backpack after taking one last loving look at the money inside. He wanted to laugh like a loon. “Let’s get…”
“Your clothes. Give them to me, now.”
“What the fuck?” Lou and his cousins turned around and found themselves facing a short red-haired girl. A short, totally naked red-haired girl.
“Nice night for a walk,” the naked girl said; her voice had a harsh accent and tone, like she was trying to sound like a man, and some sort of foreigner at that.
“Yeah, sure, lady,” Lou said with a placating grin while he tried to reach the Dominion blaster he’d stuck into his waistband. Someone crazy enough to wander around naked had a to be a Neo; his only hope was to put a plasma bolt in her head and scram before the cops could come check on the noise.
“No, no,” the crazy bitch went on. “You’re supposed to say ‘Fuck you asshole’ and pull out a switchblade. Fucking shitty alternate reality without Terminator movies.”
“Fuck you, asshole!” Lou shouted, leveling the energy pistol at her. He pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
“A little bit of telekinesis,” the girl said. “Trigger don’t work so good no more. Bummer. But thanks for playing.”
“Oh, shit.”
“That’s Dark Justice!” cousin Felipe said, recognizing her face. “We’re fucked!”
“Close, but no cigar,” the crazy naked girl said. “But you’re half right. You are fucked.”
It turned out to be the worst night in Lou’s life, as well as his last.
* * *
One of the Three Dead Amigos had been wearing a leather jacket, barely long enough to serve as a mini-dress once she zipped it up and tied a belt around her waist. The rest of their clothes had been ruined by all the blood and other less appetizing bodily fluids they’d spewed while she rearranged their insides. She probably should have killed them a bit more cleanly, but she’d been in a killing mood.
She giggled. She was always in a killing mood.
“Okay, Pissy Chrissy,” she muttered. “This may be your world, but as it turns out, you’re only living in it.”
She took to the air and was gone before the first cops arrived to the scene.
Chapter Three
Face-Off
Dreamland/Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, July 6-July 14, 2014
“We should take a break,” I told her.
The relived memories dissolved away, leaving us back in the fake Hell she’d built.
“It’s hurting you, isn’t it?” Christine said. “The whole living my memories thingy.”
“Pain won’t kill me. I want to know everything that happened.”
“I doubt it.”
“The important thing is, you managed to escape Earth FUBAR. And saved my ass when the evil version of you tried to mind-fuck me. Everything else is just details.”
“Yes, but…”
“Whatever it is, we can deal with it. But let’s get out of Dreamland and let everyone know you’re okay. All the sensors in our apartment must have twigged to my going under. They’ll send someone to check on us, and if they find us both unconscious they’ll get worried. And if they get worried enough…”
“They wouldn’t hit the kill switch just because I’m taking a nap,” Christine said.
Before the Genocide War she’d had a set of miniaturized bombs built into her skull. They were still there, just in case she turned evil. I’d argued against that, but they wouldn’t listen, even after the arguments degenerated into death threats. Christine approved of the bombs. Doc Slaughter-Trent assured me the devices couldn’t go off by accident, or even if someone cut open her skull with a laser beam. I still wasn’t convinced.
“Yeah, they probably won’t push the button just because we’re both sleeping, but why take chances? Let’s comfort everyone, maybe grab some pancakes, and you can finish your story. And when you’re done we can decide what to tell our super-pals.”
I was worried about what Christine had done while trapped in Earth FUBAR. She clearly thought it was something that might appall even me. Very few things appalled me, so it must have been pretty bad. If it was bad enough, I’d make sure the Legion didn’t find out. Those sanctimonious assholes wouldn’t understand that sometimes you did what you had to and worked on living with yourself afterwards.
For all I cared, she could have blown up the entire planet. I would stand by her.
She picked up my feelings, and looked down, not meeting my eyes.
And that really worried me.
* * *
“Everything seems to be in order,” Doc Slaughter-Trent said.
Christine sat up on the examination table, looking past a dozen scanning and probing robo-tools to look at me. I made a face and gave her a reassuring grin. Neither of us liked hospitals.
“On the other hand, you were in perfect health for several hours before you regained consciousness,” Doc continued.
We exchanged glances, and I gave her a shrug.
She spoke out loud: “I’m beginning to remember what happened to me during my coma vacation.”
“I see,” Doc said.
“I was sent to an alternate universe by the First.”
Adam frowned slightly, which make him look a lot more like Damon Trent, but didn’t say anything else.
“It was the world where I went evil and killed most everyone. I was there for a while. I… I was captured. I managed to get away.”
My heart skipped a beat. I’d suspected that was what happened, but I’d hoped I was wrong. My new life had softened my head enough to actually hope for something good. Reality would take care of curing me from that sort of bullshit, though. It never disappointed when it came to destroying hope.
There was an awkward silence after that. Christine clearly didn’t want to elaborate.
“I suppose the rest of the story is really none of my business,” Adam finally said. “Unless you think there is any information that might impact our local space-time continuum.”
“I… I don’t think so. I mean, my evil twin followed me, in astral form, and tried to attack Mark in Dreamland, but I clobbered her pretty badly. Like dead badly. And even if she survived that… well, she didn’t really have much of a home base to go back to.”
Adam raised an eyebrow at that.
“Yeah, okay, Mr. Spock
, there’s more to the story,” Christine said. “Short version: Earth FUBAR is gone. Destroyed. Kaput. Along with like ten million mostly innocent people. All dead.”
“That world was already dead,” Adam said. He could see the same thing I did: Christine blamed herself for the destruction of Planet Fucked Up. That was why she wasn’t ready to give up all the details.
The look she gave me, and the feelings beneath, told me there was more to the story, though.
* * *
We walked home in silence.
As soon as I closed the door to our apartment, she hugged me tightly. I could feel a toxic emotional stew boiling inside her: terror, guilt, sheer trauma and under all of it a deep, abiding sadness. She was mourning the dead from that other world; those deaths had affected her more than all the losses we’d experienced here, even the ones of the Genocide War. Even the time when she’d thought I was dead hadn’t hurt her as badly as what happened in that other world.
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “Not yet. It’s too fresh. It’s too raw. It hurts too much to think about it.”
“That’s okay. Whenever you’re ready. Fuck the past. You’re here, I’m here. That’s all that matters. Fuck the past.”
She looked at me and tried to smile, but couldn’t quite pull it off.
I was terrified that she might not have made it back after all. That she was no longer Christine.
But I didn’t let go of her. Fuck the past. And fuck the assholes who had done this to her. My only regret was that I couldn’t kill them myself.
* * *
A week went by, and she still wouldn’t talk about it.
On the surface, things went back to normal. We didn’t mention the elephant in the room. She caught up with all the paperwork from the fight with Maxwell Henderssen, a.k.a. Molten Max. We got some disturbing news about the murders of three looters at the site of the battle – an unknown Neo was suspected – but whoever it had been had covered his tracks pretty well, and his identity remained unknown. I asked my buddy Condor to keep me posted and quickly forgot about it.
Whenever we had some free time, we went out, caught a movie at the Liberty City Multiplex, came home, made love. Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night, but we both did that. Nightmares are part of the life; mine had started the day after I killed my stepfather, seconds after going Neo. The dreams had only gotten more varied and intense over time. But hers had taken a turn for the worse, and there wasn’t much I could do about it, not without bringing up stuff we’d agreed not to bring up.
It’s amazing how far you can get on sheer denial. Having work helped, of course. We both spent a good fifty hours doing Legion stuff that week, everything from PR shit to putting satellites in orbit. There were no new crises, no natural disasters, mad geniuses trying to take over the world, nor any international conflicts. That was true of most weeks, of course – on average there were maybe four or five Legion-worthy incidents a year – but a part of me felt like this was the proverbial calm before the storm, and the storm was going to be a royal bitch.
I had no idea.
The Invincible Man
Off Florida’s East Coast, July 14, 2014
For nearly fifteen years, no hurricane had reached any populated land mass in the world, courtesy of the Freedom Legion’s Weather Management Program. A dedicated team of climate controllers made sure of that.
What Neos could make, other Neos could destroy, however.
The monstrous cyclone moving ponderously towards Florida wasn’t natural. Someone had seized upon a minor tropical storm and injected enormous power into it, creating a swirling mass of wind and rain, over three hundred miles wide, producing wind speeds exceeding two hundred miles an hour. If the hurricane made it to land, the loss of life would be catastrophic. The freak storm was moving too fast to evacuate most of the people in its projected path.
We’ll just have to make sure it doesn’t get there, John Clarke thought.
It was easier said than done, however. The Legion and assorted auxiliaries had to figure out how to stop a heat engine with an output in the order of two hundred exajoules, almost a hundred times the planet’s total electrical generation, concentrated in a relatively small area. The Legion’s weather wizards had tried to dissipate the storm by the usual means of cooling the waters beneath it and sapping its power, but whoever was controlling Hurricane Thanatos was having none of it. As of the last report, Tempesta and Ocean Goddess had both collapsed after pushing themselves well past their limits in a vain attempt to stop the cyclone. The remaining weather-oriented Neos were acting as a reserve that would try to minimize the damage if the worst happened and the hurricane made landfall on schedule, less than an hour away. Tropical-storm winds and rain were already lashing Florida’s coastline.
It was up to Freedom Squad One to prevent the worst from happening.
The seven figures flying towards the mass of swirling clouds that filled the horizon were less than specks of dust in comparison. To expect them to stop the storm seemed insane.
Their plan was simple: find the Neo responsible for the hurricane’s creation and stop him or her by any means necessary.
“Twenty seconds before we hit the storm’s front,” John announced through his comm implants. The team was already facing fifty, seventy miles an hour winds even this far away from the hard core of the hurricane. Visibility and maneuvering would be severely compromised once they reached it, especially for relatively weak fliers like the Fairy Godfather. This was going to be tricky. “Anybody have eyes on the target?”
“He’s somewhere near the eye,” Dark Justice reported. “That’s where all the Source energy powering the storm is coming from.”
“Concur,” Brass Man said. “My sensors confirm the point of origin and have narrowed it down to a one-mile radius. We’ll need to get closer to give you a better vector.”
“Very well. Dark Justice, Brass Man and I will go in. The rest of you remain outside the eye wall to serve as reserve.”
Everyone acknowledged the order, even Face-Off, who would resent being kept away from his girlfriend. Too bad.
John led the way, spinning his body as he pushed his way through the strengthening winds to provide a wake for Brass Man and Dark Justice to follow. He and his allies pushed through the eye wall, the almost solid mass of devastating winds that surrounded the calm center of the storm. Once they were there, finding the culprit would be far easier.
Their quarry was ready for them, however.
A lightning storm erupted around the three Legionnaires. In a moment they’d all been struck by multiple bolts. Sudden agony caused John to lose control; the swirling winds of the storm wall swept him away. The pain was bad; the shock of surprise was worse. He’d been struck by lightning many times before, and been relatively unscathed. The energy unleashed by the bolts was enormous, but the human body, even the Neo version, wouldn’t absorb it; only a tiny fraction of that power should have affected him, the rest passing through him without inflicting damage.
Not these strikes. They transferred their full hundred terawatts of power right into him, encasing him in superheated air, fifty thousand degrees of Hell. And, driven by a Neo’s power and will, they were able to penetrate his protective aura in a way normal lightning wouldn’t have.
Even so, John would have shrugged off a single bolt without losing a beat. Two or three might have given him pause. Six or seven would have been enough to knock him off balance.
He was struck thirty times in under a second.
John dimly heard shouts of pain from his companions; his enhanced hearing was enough to pick up their voices from the staccato cracks of the multiple lightning strikes. The winds carried him off as more bolts struck him. The constant barrage was overwhelming. He tried to fight it, but the hits kept on coming, a relentless onslaught of electric devastation that precluded action or even thought. He…
“Got you!” Christine yelled through the comm. The relentless lightning strikes stopped
and a slender but surprisingly strong arm stopped his flailing form and held him aloft.
Dark Justice was carrying Brass Man as well; Doc’s suit of armor had several smoking dimples where lightning strikes had nearly punched through its hyper-alloy plates. Dark Justice had generated an energy bubble around the three of them, protecting them from the electrical storm.
“Took me a second to figure out the best polarity to use for the force field, but now I got its number. Near zero energy transfer,” she said. “Neat, isn’t it?”
“I’ll write the commendation myself,” John said. “But let’s get the miscreant first, shall we?”
“You got it, Captain my Captain. And bonus points for using the word ‘miscreant’ without a trace of sarcasm.”
John suppressed a surge of irritation and allowed himself to be carried like one of the damsels he’d be holding in a typical comic book cover. He knew that it wasn’t so much raw power as versatility that had allowed Christine to endure the same attack that had brought him down. Being shown up still grated.
“My systems are operating at eighty-three percent capacity,” Brass Man reported. “My sensors have reduced the acquisition box to under a hundred yards. We should be able to locate our target visually once we’re there. And then…” He laughed, a very Lurker-like sound that the old Kenneth Slaughter would never have uttered.
“Thanks for the creepiness, da… Uncle Adam. Point the way.”
Dark Justice flew through the constant fusillade of lightning. Her electromagnetic field caused most of its power to dissipate harmlessly. As they pushed through to the eye of the storm, sunlight and calm weather greeted them, along with their target.
New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative Page 5
