New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl

by C. J. Carella

  ‘Which leads to my next question: what are my super-powers? Other than 20-20 vision and healing fast. Should I try to concentrate and set something on fire, or something like that?”

  “Let’s take it one step at a time,” I said quickly before she actually tried to set something on fire. There had been some tragic incidents along those lines. “Usually when powers manifest it’s pretty obvious, but you were unconscious at the time. Just don’t try anything right now, okay? You might accidentally set me or the good father on fire.”

  “Oh, God, okay, I see your point.”

  I could tell that Father Aleksander wasn’t crazy about all the taking of the Lord’s name in vain Christine favored, but he was restraining himself from saying something. I’d also caught him smiling while watching Christine and me talking. I wasn’t sure why.

  “At the very least, you can interfere with precognitive and clairvoyant abilities,” I went on. Jesus H. Christ, I'd never spoken for so long with somebody I‘d just met except when doing undercover work. “That’s why Cassandra wanted you as far from her as possible while she tried to figure things out. And you might be able to travel between worlds, in which case nobody brought you here, you did it yourself.”

  “But if I did it myself, why did someone try to kidnap me?”

  “Point. And we still don’t know why you appeared in Central Park. If someone was bringing you here, why wouldn’t they drag you directly to their home base?” I shrugged. “Not enough information. We can make guesses until the cows come home, but we need information. Cassandra is working on it; meanwhile we can learn more about you. Your powers, for one.”

  “So where can I learn about my powers?”

  “Well, I do know a guy.”

  Chapter Six

  The Freedom Legion

  Caribbean Sea, March 13, 2013

  After a while, he dreamed.

  “Clarke! John Clarke!”

  He turned around and saw her for the first time, standing in the bullpen of The World’s Journal. She was beautiful, and angry, and beautiful when she was angry. Her fiery red hair and blazing blue-grey eyes expressed her anger beautifully. She walked determinedly toward him, a rolled-up newspaper in her hand.

  “Yes, I’m talking to you, buster! You stole my story. Nobody steals Linda Lamar’s stories, let alone some upstate small-town bumpkin fresh off the farm! Who do you think you are?”

  “Ma’am?” he said, confused and bewildered. He had no idea what she was talking about. For one, his father wasn’t a farmer, but a doctor, albeit a small town doctor.

  She poked his chest with the rolled-up newspaper. “Don’t ma’am me, you gaping chimpanzee! I spent three weeks working on the O’Doule brothers and their extortion racket! I was about to write a whole feature on it, and what happens? Some mystery man busts them up, and you write about it!” She poked him again. “You get a Page One byline and a job at the Journal! What do I get? Not a heck of a lot! Thanks for nothing, buster! You pull that stunt on me again, you’re going to be walking funny for a week!” She stalked off before he could formulate a reply.

  That had been the first time.

  “John, please go away.”

  That had been the last time.

  The pallid scarecrow on the hospital bed was ninety-three years old. Linda Lamar had endured three cancer operations, a heart transplant and every measure modern medicine had developed against old age and death. She had been shot nine times, stabbed six times, and had lived through more narrow escapes than possibly any other normal human being. She had celebrated her ninetieth birthday singing and dancing, looking like a vigorous woman in her early sixties. The collapse had happened two years later and it had been sudden and total, as if a dam had broken and let all the ravages of time flow at last.

  “I can’t bear to have you look at me like this. Before, it was all right, but now…”

  He gently shushed her and held her hand, weeping silently as he watched her go. He whispered the only three words that mattered, and she whispered them back. At the end he had seen her fear, and had been overwhelmed by despair. For all his power, he had not been able to help her. She died in fear and pain, and he couldn’t make it better.

  Slow mocking applause started behind him.

  “Pathetic.”

  The hospital room was gone. John now stood in one of the many lairs of his greatest foe.

  Hiram Hades clapped his hands a few more times. “You are so very weak, for a man who can move mountains,” he said with a contemptuous smile. “She didn’t die of cancer, or even old age. What did finally kill her? It was your ethics, boy. Your moral cowardice did her in.”

  “I did everything I could,” John said. The words sounded hollow and false even as he spoke them.

  “Buffalo chips. Daedalus Smith offered you an alternative. All you had to do was take him up on it.”

  “Cloning a full adult body is illegal!” John snapped back. “And a brain transplant would have resulted in the clone’s death! Linda wouldn’t have wanted to live by murdering an innocent.”

  “Ah, but you never asked her, did you?” Hiram said triumphantly. “You didn’t dare tempt her with the chance of youth and vitality. You were afraid she might have asked for it, begged you for it.”

  John didn’t say anything.

  “They call you the Defender of Liberty, but you never gave her the freedom to choose. You knew better than her, of course. She was only human, and you are a living god. The only difference between you and me, boy, is that I never hid my certainty than I was better than the mortal rabble beneath us.”

  “You may have been better than them, but you weren’t better than me,” John growled, and the scenery shifted again. Another lair, this one high in the Peruvian mountains. Hiram was there as well, lying broken and bleeding at John’s feet. Hiram’s adamantine black armor and all his gadgets and artifacts lay shattered and scattered around him. He was dying, but his mocking smile still showed through his bleeding mouth and splintered teeth.

  “That was the day you finally grew some balls, boy. How many lives would have been spared if you had done what was necessary the first time you beat me?”

  “I wised up. You would have gotten the death penalty in any case, but I couldn’t risk you escaping while you went to trial. You had done it too many times before.”

  “So you stepped on my neck until it snapped, and all my cybernetics and healing systems could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It was your finest moment, Ultimate. But you squandered it and went back to your old phony persona, merciful and compassionate when all you really want is to kick apart the miserable anthills humanity has erected. You let people who are your inferiors in every way tell you what to do, mock you and insult you. You think your restraint makes you better than they are, when all you are doing is bringing yourself down to their level. Pathetic.”

  “So what should I do, then? Become like you? Kill and destroy, only to end up dead and unlamented?”

  “I tried to rule humankind and lost,” Hiram admitted. “But think about it, boy. You could try and win.”

  John started to reply, but cold water filled his throat, his lungs.

  He woke up at the bottom of the sea, surrounded by the darkness, cold and pressure of the deep. His body had been brutally battered, burned and irradiated by the explosion, but he was recovering quickly. His costume had been mostly torn off, but he was fine, physically, at least.

  John was not much given to introspection, not until the last few months. He had grieved Linda and moved on, acknowledging his regrets and losses but not obsessively dwelling on them. Recently, however, it seemed like the past was all he could think about.

  He needed to do something about this.

  Christine Dark

  New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

  “It’s freaking surreal,” Christine whispered to herself as she strolled through the brave new world she’d found herself in.

  She’d never been a fashionista, so
mething that Sophie was never reluctant to remind her of, but there were things that just jumped at you. Men’s hats, for example: about one third of the people over thirty she saw on her way to the subway wore them. Old-style hats, the kind of thing she’d last seen on Mad Men. Her uncle Pete had once joked that JFK had killed the hat industry by refusing to wear one, and that maybe people should have looked for a disgruntled hatter at the grassy knoll. Maybe JFK turning into a disgraced one-term president instead of the Martyr of Camelot had changed fashion history along with capital-H history. Neat theory, and probably wrong, of course. Other than hats, she noticed more men of all ages wearing button-down shirts. T-shirts were there aplenty, though, and a lot of them seemed to have stylized insignias for assorted superheroes. She saw dozens of red-on-silver ‘U’ symbols, which must stand for Ultimate, who certainly seemed to be a popular guy. Comic-book t-shirts weren’t just for children or geeks on this planet. That cheered her up quite a bit.

  She didn’t see any Face-Off merch anywhere. Her rescuer didn’t seem to be much for self-promotion. Or maybe he had a lousy publicist.

  Women wore skirts and dresses of all lengths, from micro-minis to down-to-the-ankle numbers, with a minority in jeans or slacks, and a larger minority wearing tight and shiny leggings in various colors, including several people who really, really shouldn’t be wearing anything tight or shiny. A lot of them also favored 80s style big hair, with lots of product to keep it just so. It made her shoulder length, just-hanging-there hair seem drab, and she’d been lucky to get a hair brush from Father Aleksander to undo some of the damage her abductors had inflicted on it.

  Since Christine couldn’t really go out on the street wearing striped pajamas and fuzzy slippers, Father Aleksander had let her rummage through the church’s donation box clothes selection. She’d ended up in faded blue jeans, sneakers, a plain t-shirt and a pink sweater. One of the priest’s parishioners had also dropped off some new underwear for her, so at least that wasn’t second hand. She didn’t stand out much, and nobody was going to mistake her for a fashion model, so that was okay. As long as they didn’t figure out she was an alien from another dimension, she’d be happy.

  Cars looked different, too. Christine was into cars even less than she was into fashion, but she did notice a ton of electric cars on the streets, noticeable because they made a funny buzzing sound which Face-Off explained was built in so they wouldn’t sneak up on people. Some brands she recognized – Ford and General Motors – and others she didn’t, like Tucker. Whatever company Tucker was, it made a lot of cars in this world. The foreign cars she could see were European (mostly German Mercedes), a few Japanese models and lots of others she’d never heard of, like Donfeng and Fujian Motors, which Face-Off explained were Chinese. “Made by the good Chinese of the Republic of China,” he added. “As opposed to the evil Chinese of the Chinese Empire.” Which definitely would merit a whole other conversation sometime soon.

  People were on the phone as they walked, same as in her world, but most of them were using the wrist-thingies instead, and most of them were Skype-ing or whatever they called it here, using screens on said wrist-thingies. She had no idea how people could walk and do video conferencing at the same time but they seemed to manage just fine. A lot of people were also wearing goggles or mirror shades with antennas on the side, which were the most common alternative to the wrist-thingies.

  They were in Times Square, which was as crowded as the one in her universe, and had just as many neon signs and giant screens. At first glance most of the buildings and stores she could see were pretty similar to the ones in her world. This Times Square also had flying guys in leotards, though.

  “Flying dude. That’s a flying dude over there,” she blurted out.

  “Stop staring, you look like a tourist,” Face-Off said in an amused tone.

  “I am a tourist. Do you know him?” she asked. Flying Dude cut an impressive figure in his skin-tight red and yellow costume and shiny full face helmet in the same colors. Color-coordination was a must in superhero world, apparently.

  “Little bit. Name’s Star Eagle. He’s a prick.”

  “Bummer.”

  Face-Off had a face on right now, as well as hair, which he could grow and remove at will. He looked a bit like Christian Bale. Christine wanted to ask him if Christian Bale existed in this world, but she had way too many questions ahead of that one. Maybe when she had a chance she’d check Imdb.com and find out, assuming they had Imdb.com in this world, which was yet another question on the list. She’d managed to ask only about a dozen questions on the subway trip to Times Square, which left her with about three or four hundred to go.

  The subway cars in this world were a bit cleaner and more comfortable than back home: the cars were more like the ones in the London Underground, which she had seen firsthand on a trip with her mother and one of her few rich boyfriends. The trip had been a last-ditch attempt by the boyfriend to impress her mom, an attempt that had failed rather messily. The sights had been awesome, but the drama had spoiled much of the fun. London had been cool and different, but she’d never been as culture-shocked as she was now. The combination of familiar sights and stuff straight out of Bizarro Sunnydale was making her head spin.

  Christine tried not to stare at the flying dude, which wasn’t easy to do, as he kept circling Times Square and performing aerial maneuvers, to the delight of hundreds of picture-snapping tourists. The local New Yorkers hardly spared him a glance, which went to show that New Yorkers were the same throughout the multiverse. After a while, they walked out of Times Square and left Star Eagle the flying prick behind.

  “I don’t want to sound like a nine-year old, but are we there yet?” she asked Face-Off. “I need to sit down and process all this stuff.”

  “We’re close. Just another couple of blocks.”

  “Okey-dokey,” Christine said, somewhat uncertainly. A part of her still wasn’t a hundred percent sure she wasn’t imagining the whole thing. On the other hand, if her imagination was that good, she might have to start writing movie scripts as soon as she woke up. She turned her attention on the tourists. They were an international bunch, lots of Chinese and East Indian ones, plus the usual assortment from every continent. A few were using their wrist-thingies to take the pictures, but most of them were using dedicated cameras or some sort of goggle-built devices.

  “So what’s the deal with the wrist-thingies?” she asked, trying to at least cross a few more questions off as they walked. “Back home we have cell phones, and we keep them in our pocket, or purse, belt-holder or even fanny packs.”

  “Not much to tell. We’ve had wrist-comms here for over fifty years, and wrist-comps for about twenty. I think the first one who started using them was a Chicago police detective back in the 1940s, Richard something or other. It wasn’t a phone, just a two-way radio, but a few years later he started using a wrist communicator with a TV screen. Someone started calling them wrist-comms, and after a couple decades everybody started using them. I keep mine in a pocket, though. Having an electronic gizmo strapped to your wrist while you’re punching people out isn’t a good idea.”

  “Interesting.” Christine’s brain had been getting bored of watching stuff like a slack-jawed yokel, and it jumped at the chance to work on a new problem. Wrist TV-phones for fifty years, that was way older than cell phones in her world. Older than personal computers; had PCs developed earlier in this world, too? Add another question to the list, darn it.

  Speaking of worlds, she needed to have some shorthand when thinking about them. Christine decided to name her world Earth Prime. Her current location in the multiverse would thereafter be known as Earth Alpha. There you go, neither world would have to feel bad or marginalized.

  “I wish we had more time so I could show you the town properly,” Face-Off said. “Maybe after this is over, we can take some time off and you can play tourist and I can play local guide, unless you’re in a rush to get back home.”

  “That’d be cool,�
�� she said. Except for the whole kidnapping thing, and luckily she’d mostly slept through that, this whole situation was pretty freaking awesome. She definitely wanted to get all her questions answered and Earth Alpha was an uber-geek wonderland. She wasn’t into comic books all that much; she’d gone through a short-lived X-Men movie madness phase, but had outgrown it early in life. She was still burning to know how superheroes would work in real life, even if this wouldn’t have been her choice of alternate universe to visit. If given her druthers, which nobody was handing out so far, she’d have stumbled into one of her guilty-pleasure fantasy romance worlds, complete with bare-chested silent and strong men with hidden sensitive sides (although, to be honest with herself, those worlds would also be sorely lacking in basic sanitation and other modern conveniences, and people would be somewhat more rapey than she’d like).

  Come to think of it, she had a silent and strong male companion right by her side, if not all that bare-chested, and he kinda-sorta had just asked her out on a kinda-sorta date. Face-Off wasn’t a muscle-bound type, and he had no flowing hair or soulful eyes – or any kind of hair or eyes when he was himself, but on the other hand he could look like anybody he wanted to, which meant she could get flowing hair and soulful eyes a la carte. Not that she really wanted to hook up at the moment, especially with a very strange stranger.

  Christine knew few actual facts about her rescuer, but she was certain about a couple things about him. Face-Off was in a lot of pain, and there was a lot of pent-up rage inside him. Something bad had happened to him, or lots of bad somethings. She didn’t know why she felt so sure about that; they hadn’t had an Oprah-style interview or anything, and he hadn’t really volunteered much information about himself. She suspected that one of her Neolympian powers was some sort of super-empathy.