Apocalypse Dance
By C.J. Carella
Published by Fey Dreams Productions, LLC
Copyright @ 2014 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact [email protected]
This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Prologue
Chicago, Illinois, March 20, 2014
The morgue was overcrowded.
The bodies of some fifteen dead Russian mobsters were still there. Only a handful of corpses had been positively identified, autopsied and turned over to their relatives. The rest had been dismembered so thoroughly it was going to take a while to put them back together, or even determine their respective causes of death (a coroner had joked that they should put down a dozen possibilities on a list and write ‘all of the above’ at the bottom).
One of the bodies in cold storage had once belonged to a Type One Neolympian by the name of Boris Ivanovich Severov. Boris had been taken apart rather thoroughly by the Lurker. He’d died hard, but died he had. His killing had been an intimate affair: the Lurker had used one of his Words – Rend – which exerted tidal forces that had torn bone and tissue apart as if they’d been made of toilet paper. In the process, a link of sorts had been forged between killer and victim. From this, much would occur.
That night, unnoticed by the morgue workers, the corpse opened its eyes and laughed softly in the dark. Its body was whole again, although it no longer looked like Boris Severov. It now looked like a taller and heavily tattooed version of Damon Trent, except for its eyes, which were solid pits of blackness. The process had been arduous, but it was done. Damon Trent walked the Earth once again, a Damon Trent who embraced the darkness and all it represented.
It wielded the powers of the Outside and the Source, and it remembered and could speak seven Words: Dim and Jump, Rend and See, Heal, Connect, and Empower. It lived only to destroy.
Dead but still deadly, Damon-That-Wasn’t laughed once more and vanished.
Chapter One
Christine Dark
Kiev, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 25, 2013
She opened her eyes.
They’d put her in something like a high-tech coffin. Straps held her down and the only source of light was a small glass-covered viewing slit at head level. Through it she could see the curved ceiling of some sort of vehicle. An airplane or a helicopter, she thought. She could feel a slight vibration that suggested movement; they were probably flying her to Big Bad Central in Kiev.
Christine had never liked dark enclosed spaces, or being held down. She tried to move her arms and sudden agony flared from every spot where the metallic straps touched her body. It was the shadow energy from the Outsiders; she could feel its hatred for all of existence flowing through the straps. The whole thing was like being caught in the jaws of a wolf who would bite down on her if she squirmed. Cold terror ran down her spine and blossomed in her chest, and she almost started screaming at the top of her lungs.
Be strong. Her father’s words.
I’ll try, Dad.
Okay, screaming was probably not going to do much good. She decided to use her breathing exercises; they’d always helped her panic attacks, back when things like exams, or giving a presentation in front of the class, made her anxious enough to trigger them. After a while, she actually felt herself relaxing a little bit.
Awesome. I’ll be all chillaxed and stuff when they start pulling out my fingernails, or whatever it is they do for kicks in the Ukraine.
She’d just gotten her breathing under control when she felt the craft touch down. It landed vertically, like a helicopter or the Condor Jet, no runway needed. She heard people moving all around her; military baggage handlers, she supposed, and she was just more baggage to handle. Sure enough, soldiers in menacing helmets with face masks and body armor walked by, close enough to be seen through the viewing slit, lethal presences in gray and black uniforms. They stood her coffin up, and she saw another container being readied for transport, and through the viewing slit she spotted its occupant, a man without a face. Mark.
Her empathy wasn’t working right; she couldn’t feel the emotions of the men around her, or much of anything else. But when she saw Mark, she caught an emotional flash from him: rage and sorrow and shame. And when he saw her, she sensed something else, something that came through despite the Outsider energy disruptors surrounding her. The surge of love-joy-relief he felt when he lay eyes on her was like a shot of hard liquor that burned through her chest and made her eyes mist up a little.
I love you, Mark.
Neither of them was in the mood to play the ‘No, you hang up first’ game. Christine considered the situation; thinking about stuff was better than wondering where the Ukrainian Storm Troopers were wheeling her off to. Whatever link she had forged with Mark during the resurrection spell and the power level thingy was still working, despite the disruptor shackles they had on her. Which meant the Outsider energy did not completely shut down her powers. Which meant she wasn’t as helpless as she’d thought she was.
More importantly, she wasn’t as helpless as they thought she was.
Bide your time until you see a chance. More words of wisdom from Daddy Lurkiest. Her father had been a legendary vigilante that had kicked hundreds, possibly thousands of asses. Her mother didn’t have a body count to her name, but she’d never backed down or taken crap from anybody. Christine was going to live up to the Dark and Trent names, and she was going to make those rat bastards pay for everything they had done.
In the – somewhat paraphrased – immortal words of a fictional hero who would have fit right alongside her father and boyfriend: you think I’m trapped in here with you, but actually, you’re trapped in here with me. Okay, maybe it wasn’t perfectly appropriate to the situation, but close enough.
They were going to regret capturing her.
The Great Escape
Staten Island, New York, March 25, 2013
A couple of street-level vigilantes, one of the five most powerful beings on the planet, a renowned arch-villain, two Golden Age heroes sharing one body, and a Japanese assassin walk into a bar. It was a hell of a joke opener. Too bad it was very likely the joke was on them.
The bar in question was in the basement of an unassuming house in Staten Island. Calling it a basement was a bit of a misnomer, though: it was more of an underground complex, comprising more square footage than the house above. Besides the bar, the complex had a laboratory-workshop that put the Condor Lair’s facilities to shame, an armory chock full of goodies, and a central computer that was a bit outdated, being almost two decades old, but was still better than anything you could find outside the NSA, Freedom Island or Kiev.
In short, it was an ideal locale for planning their mission: to break out Ultimate the Invincible Man from Freedom Island.
Kyle Carmichael (cod
e name Condor) took another sip of his Bloody Mary and considered the gathering of heroes and antiheroes around him.
Their host was supposed to be dead, was in fact a clone of the dead original, a clone that allegedly had renounced his progenitor’s villainous ways. Hiram Hades had been one of the best-known and least-loved villains of the New Heroic Age, a genius inventor who had nearly destroyed New York City in no less than twenty-three documented events; he’d also turned Rhodesia into an abattoir, burned Kingston, Jamaica to the ground, unleashed an army of cyber-zombies onto the streets of Paris, and made his last stand in the Peruvian Andes, where he’d built a sunlight amplification system that had nearly turned the city of Lima into a volcanic caldera. And those were just a few highlights of a long and checkered career. The tall, clean-shaven man in the crew cut had – or at least, his creator had – fought the Freedom Legion to a standstill half a dozen times, killed no less than three dozen Neolympians of various power levels, and generally been designated a clear and present danger and an absolute pain in the ass. At the moment, the clone looked somewhat subdued; he’d remained silent while the gathering listened to Janus’ story.
Janus, the tall black man currently holding the floor during their impromptu cocktail party, was just about as well-known as Hiram Hades, except he was the beloved idol of billions rather than an object of fear and hatred. Lauded as the first African-American superhero – which Kyle knew was untrue; the first known Neo of color had been a Great War vet by the name of Collins, but why let facts get in the way of a living legend? – Cassius Jones had played a crucial role in the Second World War, had been a founding member of the Freedom Legion, and had saved a hundred times more lives than Hiram Hades had taken. Janus’ eyes were haunted as he finished recounting his story. It had been one doozy of a tale, involving a twenty-year trip into outer space, where he’d found little more than death everywhere he looked, a brutal battle with the Freedom Legion triggered by the treachery of another founding member, and finally a brief but intense duel with another foe, the mysterious Mr. Night.
While Janus wrapped up his story, the love of Kyle’s life spent her time mostly glaring at the Hades clone. Melanie Bauer, a.k.a. Kestrel, had a history with Hiram Hades, a history Kyle knew nothing about. That didn’t particularly bother him: they’d exchanged much of their life stories alongside assorted bodily fluids, but there were still more tales to be told. Part of it was due to their long lives. Kyle would be celebrating his seventy-third birthday that coming July, and he knew Kestrel was at least a decade older; she’d told him about her remembrances of VE-Day, 1945, when Kyle had been still learning his ABCs. They’d known each other professionally for about a decade, but they’d only been together for a few, very intense months. He trusted her implicitly – you had to, if you were into such games as the Ecstasy of the Thousand Cuts, played with razor-sharp blades while being restrained by padded titanium handcuffs. Kyle had been on both ends of that game, and hundreds more like it. He trusted her, but he still didn’t know all about her, and vice versa. The striking woman – her features were perhaps too severe to be called beautiful, although Kyle wouldn’t describe her as anything but gorgeous – absently ran a hand over her jet-black hair as she looked back and forth between Hiram and Kyle. When her glance met his, she grinned at him; her smile promised much. She also tipped her head to the other woman in the gathering while she smiled, and Kyle felt a thrill at the implicit promise in the gesture.
The woman in question was Lady Shi, a Japanese assassin who until very recently had been working for the sinister conspiracy they were currently trying to unmask. Her petite, porcelain doll-like face and lithe body concealed an array of deadly Neolympian powers and an even deadlier mind. She had agreed to cast her lot with her former foes. At some point, Lady Shi and Kestrel had held a whispered conversation and come to some sort of arrangement. Later tonight, the three of them would withdraw to their bedroom and do wild things to each other. Having Lady Shi would be akin to clutching a viper to one’s bosom, one that would lash out sooner or later. The prospect excited him a great deal.
Last but far from least was yet another Hades clone, distinguished from the first by his thinner, sickly physique as well as his long curly hair and beard, far more in keeping with the grooming of the original. Inside that body resided the minds and memories of not one but two of the most notorious heroes of the Pulp era. Doc Slaughter was another founding member of the Freedom Legion, a prolific inventor who rivaled Hiram Hades in terms of scientific breakthroughs and far surpassed him in overall accomplishments. Doc Slaughter had helped cure all forms of cancer and the common cold, eradicated hunger in most of the Third World, and provided cheap clean energy to billions of people, and those were just things he’d done on his spare time; his day job had involved protecting the world from hundreds of threats, Neolympian, human and natural. Doc had been murdered by the traitor within the Legion, and come back thanks to one of his own inventions.
The other resurrected hero within the villain’s clone body was Christine Dark’s father, the vigilante known as the Lurker, one of the oldest if not the best-known and certainly not the most beloved Neos of the Golden Age. The Lurker had been fighting their adversaries for most of his long life. He’d revealed that both the Iron Tsar and the Dragon Emperor, as well as Daedalus Smith, had met Mr. Night nearly a century ago, and they had all been tainted somehow by the experience. The Lurker’s tale had explained much of the nature and purposes of their enemies, but Kyle was certain he hadn’t revealed all or even most of what he knew.
“… and after contacting Condor, I made my way here,” Janus concluded. “Since this facility, and Condor’s mansion, are protected against electronic and parahuman detection, I felt confident my presence wouldn’t betray either location.”
“We’ll still have to deal with the transponders in your cochlear implants,” Kyle said.
“That’ll be a trivial exercise,” Hades replied just as his clone brother, speaking in Doc Slaughter’s cadences said: “That’s a simple matter.” The two geniuses looked at each other.
“After you, Doctor,” Doc said.
“No, Doctor,” Hades retorted. “Your knowledge of Legion technology is certainly greater than mine.”
While Doc went on about what they needed to do to neutralize the transponders and Hades jumped in to assure him he had the tools to do so, Kestrel muttered, “We’re one Stooge short of a Doctor, Doctor skit.” Kyle grinned, although, for the first time in his life, he felt outclassed in the brains department. He was sure he’d be able to make a contribution, though.
They would need everybody to do their utmost to win against the odds facing them.
Hunters and Hunted
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, March 26, 2013
Daedalus Smith was a confirmed atheist. The closest thing to God in the universe were the damnable aliens who had seen fit to hand out superpowers like Halloween treats, and they clearly were either abysmally stupid or not playing with a full deck, at least from a human perspective.
Sometimes, however, it was tempting to believe in an overarching intelligence that ruled the universe – and loved nothing more than to fuck with one Daedalus Smith, Squire, for no good reason at all.
The call had come in the middle of a morning meeting with the Freedom Legion Council. It’d been a busy meeting. The three-ring circus of Ultimate’s trial was due to start the next day, the Chimps were getting downright frisky around the Dragon Wall, Janus was still at large, and the little Legionnaires wanted to bitch and bawl about all of it. The meeting had been filled with whining, Monday-morning quarterbacking and nothing of any value whatsoever.
When Daedalus felt the cold psychic alarm go off deep inside his head, where no snoop or spook could detect it, he’d felt a nigh-overwhelming urge to loudly announce: “Sorry, boys and girls, but Uncle Daedalus has an important call from his partner in crime, the Iron Tsar his own goddamn self.” The look on their sanctimonious faces would have been so pr
iceless, it might have been worth the hassle of having to shoot his way out of the island.
Alas, rationality had prevailed. He’d ignored the call and gone about business as usual. Sorry, Hyperia, Ultimate still hasn’t woken up, blah, blah, blah. Sorry, Artemis, nobody’s come up with a reason why the Empire has gone apeshit, blah. Two sentences’ worth of actual meaning had stretched into two hours of empty twaddle, with such luminaries as General Xu pounding on the table and demanding people notice how important he was, or Hyperia asking the same question three times in a row and expecting a different answer each time, all the while making her suspicions of Daedalus – her perfectly accurate suspicions, to be honest – pretty obvious along the way. He was surrounded by morons, and not even the knowledge that he’d soon get to kill them all was enough to lighten his mood.
Finally, the meeting had adjourned and he’d been free to retire to his suite for some mandatory down time. As soon as he was there, he activated the telepathic implants in his head, implants designed specifically to slip under the Island’s sensors unnoticed so he could hold the occasional tete a tete with the Tsar of all Russias, or at least of any Russia he felt like Tsaring over. The luxury room vanished and he found himself in a cold, dark dungeon, its only furnishings two stone chairs around a table with a chess board on it. He and the Tsar traditionally started their meetings by making a move on the board.
Daedalus examined the arrangement as he sat down. It was his move, but no matter what he did, it was going to end in mate in six. The Tsar was a better player. Sighing, Daedalus tipped over his king. “Your game. Congrats, Cushko.”
The man in the iron mask – the man with the iron head, probably; nobody was sure – grumbled wordlessly. He really liked to be addressed by his formal title, His Highness or His Honor or the Great Pumpkin or what have you. Daedalus liked to think the Tsar found his insolence a refreshing change from all the groveling he got day in and day out. If not, he could put on his big girl panties and suck it. “So, what brings us here today?” Nothing good, Daedalus imagined.
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 1
