“I wish I could show you how I see things,” Cassandra said. She looked distracted, which happened when something in the future caught her fancy. In the flickering candle light, her face looked older than normal. She was clearly exhausted, which was rare enough to worry me a little. “The future is fluid, and the very act of observing it often changes it. I sensed this woman’s arrival, and how momentous it would be. Even then, I could not see her directly. I’m seeing the effect she has on the world. She leaves a… I guess you could call it a footprint, or an impression, on the very fabric of reality.”
“Great, that clears up everything. I didn’t see any scuff marks on the fabric of reality when I saved her. Just an unconscious Neo girl. I would have brought her here, but you told me not to. Didn’t tell me why, either.”
“I wish it were otherwise, but I cannot have her near me. Her presence would completely overwhelm my senses. From the moment of her arrival, my abilities have been affected.”
“Her arrival? What do you mean?”
“Whoever this girl is, she was not in this world twenty-four hours ago.”
“Nice. So she’s an alien?” That would be a first. Some Neos claimed to be from other planets, but so far every single one of them had turned out to be full of shit, batshit crazy, or both.
“I only know she’s not from this world.”
“So, like an alien. Or not,” I said. “She’s a Neo, so she’s as human as I am. Unless aliens took her away and just dropped her off. What else could she be? Time traveler? Visitor from a parallel dimension?” You did get some of those every once in a while, and things usually got very messy when they showed up.
Cassandra shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
“Now that’s something I don’t hear every day.”
“I know that her presence here is causing the future to warp in ways I can only vaguely glimpse. Things are going to change, perhaps radically, because of her. Things all around the world.”
This was getting better and better. “Sounds like a job for Ultimate and his super-pals. In case you’ve forgotten, Cassie, I’m just a Type Two vigilante. Since when do I handle threats to the world? I can do Brooklyn, Queens, parts of Jersey if I’m pushing it, Manhattan by special request. Acting locally, y’know?”
“We do what is required of us. Or live with the consequences of our inaction.”
“I’m getting the warms and fuzzies here. If you’re going to share some fortune cookie wisdom with me, do you at least have some leftover Lo Mein I can eat?”
Cassandra smiled. “You shouldn’t underestimate yourself, Marco. You are capable of much more than you expect.”
I shrugged. I was a freak with some superhuman abilities. I wasn’t going to run around saving the planet. If I hadn’t joined forces with Cassandra, I’d be jumping over rooftops at night looking for crimes to stop – and believe me, that’s one of the most useless things a wannabe hero can do. You could spend a year ‘patrolling’ and never see anything – the chances of you being at the right place and right time are not quite in the winning-the-lottery range, but they’re still pretty small. Supposedly Neos seem to find trouble more often than they should, statistically speaking, but even so it never happens as often as it does in movies or TV. My buddy Condor had a billion bucks worth of police scanners, surveillance cameras illegally installed all over town, and he had tapped into the security system networks of a dozen security companies. He still mostly spent his nights playing World of Warcraft while waiting for something to happen. Thanks to Cassandra, I'd been able to do some good, a lot more good than I would have by myself, but I knew my limitations. I wasn’t going to save the world. I wasn’t even going to save the city.
There’d been a handful of times in my dozen years of vigilantism when something major had menaced New York: natural disasters, or a high-powered Neo on a rampage. That kind of thing happens once every two or three years on average; it sucks, but people have gotten used to it. Dealing with major disasters was the job of the licensed and bonded parahuman team of the city, the Empire State Guardians. The Guardians had full legal enforcement powers, not to mention a sweet license deal that gave them a cut of any income generated by anything with their trademarked likeness, from t-shirts and coffee mugs to movies and video games. They got paid big bucks to save the Big Apple, back up the cops in dicey situations, and preen for the paparazzo in their skin-tight costumes. If the Guardians couldn’t handle something, the Freedom Legion would help them out. If the Legion couldn’t handle something, it was time to evacuate the city and move to another state. Luckily that hadn’t happened.
I mostly watched that kind of thing on TV, or did the superhero version of janitorial work – help people evacuate areas in danger, beat on looters, those kinds of shit jobs. Early in my career, I had tried to join the fray, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to help. The first time I did, one of the Guardians politely asked me to leave. I wasn’t trained to work with a team, she explained, and I would end up getting in the way. The second time I’d tried to lend a hand, another Guardian, an officious prick called Star Eagle, tried to arrest me. I wrapped a light pole around his neck and left, and apparently he was so embarrassed by the incident he didn’t press charges. After that I learned to leave well enough alone.
“Capable or not, this doesn’t sound like my usual gig, Cassie. If this chick is going to be involved in some major catastrophe, why don’t we turn her over to the Guardians or the Legion? They handle that kind of thing all the time. This is way above my pay grade.”
“That’s not possible. And no, I don’t know exactly why.” Cassandra frowned. “I don’t like seeing only fog and shadows in the future, but that’s what I get whenever I try to focus on this woman. Remember, I don’t see the future. I see possibilities and probabilities. And she is blocking me somehow, so what I see is fragmented.”
“But you have a hunch taking her to the Guardian’s HQ is a bad idea.” It was a nice HQ, too, a big building with a nice view of Central Park.
“Let me put it this way. When I try to visualize you doing so, all I get is flashes of death. Death everywhere. The whole city and beyond. Death throughout the planet, Marco.”
Oh yeah, this was just up my alley. Planetary death? What part of ‘above my pay grade’ did she not understand? “And if we hold on to her?”
“I see you traveling with her, to many different places. And a great deal of danger wherever you go. The mass deaths are still a probability, but not a certainty. The worst thing is, I think I have seen all of this before, a long time ago, but I can’t remember when.” Her normally placid demeanor had been replaced with a bleak expression I’d never seen before. It made me feel queasy. “I hate not being able tell you more, Marco. This is going to be more dangerous than anything you’ve done before.”
When Cassandra saw danger, it meant that in some possible futures I ended up getting killed. Usually that wasn’t a big deal, since her visions allowed me to prepare for whatever would have killed me if I wasn’t careful. If she couldn’t see clearly, I was on my own. I probably should be worried about that, but it felt like too much effort at the moment. I was more concerned about fucking up than dying, to be honest. Fucking up meant people with something to live for ended up dead.
“I managed to mentally communicate with her while she was incapacitated,” Cassandra went on. “It was very difficult. The whole experience ended up being rather traumatic for both of us.”
“How did you pull that off?”
“With enormous effort and only because she was heavily drugged and even her subconscious abilities were at their lowest ebb. Even so, the task was almost beyond me.”
“I better get back to Saint Theodosius before she wakes up, then. If she is such a badass she can make you sweat when she’s out cold, I don’t know if Father Alex can handle her.”
“She does not pose a danger at the moment. I learned as much from my chat with her,” Cassandra explained, easing my mind a little. “She’s qui
te a nice young woman, as a matter of fact. Her name is Christine.”
“A nice young woman that can end the world. Sounds like my kind of girl.” Not really. My kind of girl was not nice at all. I’d been with a nice girl once. That had ended with me cradling her dead body in a cheap motel room. Never again. “So, to sum things up,” I continued. “I have to convince this Christine chick to stay away from the authorities, and to go on some sort of quest with me. Sounds perfectly reasonable, not creepy at all.” I didn’t have much experience dealing with people I wasn’t supposed to scare or hurt. How the hell was I supposed to convince her to come along with me?
On top of that, I wasn’t crazy about going to far-off places. I’d never been farther away from the city than Jersey and, once, Connecticut. I figured things and people were shit no matter where I went, so I’d never felt any urge to go anywhere. I wasn’t sure how I’d handle the world outside the five boroughs. If that was what Cassandra wanted, I’d do it, though. I trusted her.
It never occurred to me that she would lie to me.
Christine Dark
New York City, New York, March 13, 2013
The universe was nothing but darkness and fear. And cold. The universe was nothing but darkness, fear and cold. And pain. Okay, the universe was nothing but darkness, fear, cold and pain…
Christine woke up with a start. Great Oogly Moogly! What time was it? She was going to be late for her test! Going to that stupid party had been the dumbest idea ever. Freaking Sophie and her drinking and promiscuity and Daddy-bought boob job, why did Christine hang out with her at all? Answer: because a bad BFF was better than no BFF at all. What kind of mess had her kinda sorta best-friend-forever gotten Christine into?
She’d had the worst and weirdest nightmare of her life. She didn’t want to even think about it, not before she was fully awake and halfway through a hot shower.
The bed felt a lot lumpier than usual; the sheets also felt different. She reached for the glasses on her nightstand, but her hand hit only air, so either she was sleeping upside down or she was in someone else’s bed. OMG. Had she and some frat boy..? Had they used protection? Had it been consensual? The idea of some troglodyte from Phi Beta Gecko having his way with her unconscious body almost made her throw up again. She had thrown up earlier last night, hadn’t she?
Christine forced herself to take deep breaths and slow down her racing crazy train of thought. When she got anxious her mind sped up and started spinning out of control, and that wouldn’t do anybody any good. Okay, think. It’s dark, and don’t have my glasses or contacts on, which means I’m blind as a bat. No problem, I still have all my other senses.
She felt around the bed and found no other occupants, which made sense, since her discombobulated awakening should have woken up anybody with a pulse. After some more feeling around, she found a nightstand on the wrong side of the bed, assuming this was her normal bed, which it clearly wasn’t. She felt around that table, but found no eyewear, just a glass of water and a lamp.
“Lamp good, water good.” She turned on the lamp and then there was light. The lamp revealed an unusual room, not what she expected a frat boy’s lair would look like. It was small, with a fairly low ceiling and very little in the way of furnishings and decorations. On one wall there was an industrial-size golden crucifix, very ornate in a style that reminded her of Greek Byzantine art. The other walls were bare; the room was painted in a light pastel color. Besides the bed and nightstand, the only other furnishing was a plain chair. No mirror, no posters on the walls, no signs of individuality or even fashionable pretend individuality anywhere. So maybe this wasn’t a frat boy’s place.
Christine continued to take inventory. She was wearing white and pink striped pajamas, a couple sizes too large. For some reason she’d imagined herself wearing her old Hello Kitty pajamas, but that had been part of the weird-ass nightmare. Christine didn’t own any pajamas, hadn’t since she was a child; she was a t-shirt and sweatpants or undies in bed kind of girl. Which meant…
Someone else had dressed her.
Roofies. Not effing funny. I’m not a victim. This can’t be happening, can’t be happening…
Okay. Back to deep breaths. Slow down, brain. Please.
Christine tried to think things through logically. Logic and math were great tools, might as well use them. Solve the equation, figure out how things work, win valuable prizes. All right. She didn’t think striped pajamas and a big Byzantine cross fit with a date rapist profile. And she didn’t feel sore or in pain. In fact, she felt better than she ever had. Her eyesight, for example, was a lot better than it could be without glasses. She could make out every detail on the cross on the wall, for example, and normally without her glasses she would have been hard pressed to identify the object on the wall as a cross. Okay, not that bad but still, her vision hadn’t been this good since she was a child.
So somebody had roofied her, dressed her up in pajamas, and improved her eyesight? Let’s be logical and discard facts not in evidence. Pajamas, fact. Better eyesight, fact. Roofies, open question. What was the last thing she remembered before waking up here? See? Logic, step by step, cause and effect and we’ll be fit as a fiddle in two shakes of a lamb’s leg and let’s see how many metaphors and similes I can stack in one sentence…
I said slow down, brain!
She lay back on the bed – it was definitely lumpier than the one in her dorm room – and tried to remember the previous night. She’d had that strange dream the night before, which had left her feeling weirded out enough to go with Sophie to the stupid frat party. She had meant to hang out, nurse one drink, see if Jeff’s friend was a nice guy, assuming nice guys weren’t extinct, then go home and be in bed by one a.m. at the latest. She remembered getting more than a little tipsy. And then…
She had experienced the world flickering in and out of existence. She had thrown up; that memory was burned vividly into her cortex. And she had fallen through the world, or felt like she had. It had to be drugs. She had just said no to those during high school. She’d smoked pot a couple of times in college, but it mostly made her paranoid and her train of thought even more frantic, which sucked, so she’d avoided even contact highs like the plague. But there was no telling what devil’s cocktail some fraternity d-bag had slipped into her drink; what had it done to her most prized possession, her mind?
Breathe in, breathe out. What happened next?
The dream. Talking to a strange woman and at the same time being kidnapped from a hospital room, as if reality had gone split-screen on her. It had ended with her being the Chosen One or something like that, all very ponderous and important. Some more weird dreams after, stuff about darkness and pain and stuff she couldn’t remember. And then she woke up.
“That wasn’t as helpful as I hoped,” Christine said to herself. She was her own best audience, so she talked to herself quite a bit, much to the detriment of her social life. “Oh, I know something else. I really, really need to pee.”
She got up and saw that someone had left a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers on the floor. That made her feel a bit better. What kind of evil psycho would leave fuzzy bunny slippers for her? The really, really sick and twisted kind, her brain helpfully suggested. When she got out of there, Christine was going to punish her brain with a marathon run of Jersey Shore episodes.
Hello, door. Locked or not? She tried it, and the door opened. It led to a hallway, a staircase to her right, a room at the other end of the hallway, and – thank you Jesus, Buddha and Great Pumpkin – clearly marked public restrooms on her left. The whole place had a public building vibe, like a library or a community center. She ducked into the ladies’ room and did her business.
Christine looked in the restroom’s mirror after splashing some water on her face. Not much to look at. Red hair and blue-gray eyes, pale skin that burned under any sort of direct sunlight, a face that Sophie insisted was pretty but that Christine could find a dozen things wrong with in as many seconds of looking. She was
skinny – slender, dummy, Sophie kept telling her – but not supermodel skinny. Some guy at the party had told her she looked quote kinda hawt unquote, but that was probably a combination of Sophie’s makeup application skills – all of said makeup was gone except for some smudged eye shadow – and Grade-A beer goggles. Neither of her ex-boyfriends had ever praised her looks except in the most cursory way and they’d both dumped her for prettier girls. Sophie was full of it. It didn’t matter. Looks didn’t last long; brains might not last forever, but they tended to keep on running a good while longer.
Christine had done up her hair for the party, but it was thoroughly messed up. It looked like someone had stuck gum in her hair and then ripped it off. Not having a brush or a comb available, she ran her hands through it, and found something stuck on it. It wasn’t gum; she managed to extricate it and found herself looking at a piece of duct tape.
The frakking dream had involved duct tape. She almost had a panic attack right then and there.
Let’s focus on the positive, shall we? I may have been duct taped at some point, but I’m not anymore. That’s good. So maybe, just maybe, I was in trouble, maybe even in distress, but I’ve been rescued. Yeah, let’s go with that, but be prepared to run and scream if anything seems amiss.
A man was waiting for her in the hallway when she came out of the bathroom.
He was an older gentleman, at least forty-something or older, with a full beard and somewhat scraggly features. And tall, six feet or close to it, which made Christine feel fairly tiny and vulnerable. He was wearing a smaller version of the cross in the bedroom over his gray turtleneck. Under the circumstances, running into him should have made her scream in terror, but she wasn’t scared of him even at first glance. Despite his size, his kind if somewhat tired eyes and deep laugh lines, visible even through the thick beard, comforted her somehow. She felt safe around him, which was weird since she rarely felt safe around strangers, especially ones that towered over her.
New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 5
