New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (2 page)

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 12, 2013

Humans in pain can make the most curious
noises.

Case in point: Dan Giamatti, enforcer –
soon to be former enforcer – for the D’Agostino crime family. The injuries:
three broken ribs; one compound fracture, right forearm; two dislocated
fingers, left hand, and several broken teeth. The sound: a panting moan,
reaching scream levels only to turn into a strangled heaving gasp when the
broken ribs made their presence known. It was a disturbing, pitiful sound. It
even bothered me a little, and I was the one who had done the bone breaking.

Giamatti started a new tune, this one
something between a wheeze and a sob.

“Can we talk now?” I said reasonably. I
had been perfectly willing to have a peaceful conversation with the guy before
killing him, but Giamatti had gone for a gun, a knife and finally a hand grenade.
The hand grenade had earned him the compound fracture. Luckily for him I had
been able to find the pin and put it back before the fucking thing exploded. A
grenade explosion would have been a painful inconvenience for me, but rather
lethal for him. That was some crazy-ass shit, deploying high explosives
indoors, even for our crazy-ass world. Giamatti’s reputation as a hard case was
well-deserved, but even tough guys could be broken if you applied enough
pressure.

“Fuck you, Face-Off,” Giamatti blurted,
spraying a bloody froth through his broken teeth.

I sighed. It figured; someone crazy
enough to go
mano a mano
with a Neo was too crazy to know when to quit.
Neos – Neolympians, or parahumans if you really want to get pretentious about
it – have been around for close to a hundred years. Sure, most of us aren’t
godlike unstoppable forces that can take over entire countries single-handedly,
but even the weakest among us is stronger and tougher than your average bear.
Giamatti should have known better. When I came bursting through the bedroom
window, he knew he was dealing with the Faceless Vigilante, or Face-Off,
depending on who you ask. He should have tried to talk, or even asked for his
lawyer, even if the latter option wouldn’t have done him much good. Instead he
got into a pissing match with me. He might as well have tried to outwrestle the
F train.

I’d been careful not to inflict any
permanent damage, which isn’t as easy as you think. I’m no heavyweight, but I
can still bench press twenty thousand pounds. I could have wrung Giamatti’s
neck like a chicken’s right from the get go, but it would have been harder to
have a conversation with him afterward. Instead, I love-tapped him a couple of
times, and only started breaking things when he wouldn’t stop trying to kill
me.

"Just tell me where the girl is,
Giamatti," I said. All I got back was more garbled profanities.

Time to apply more pressure. I grabbed
Giamatti by an ankle, avoiding his feeble attempts to kick me, and dragged him
from the living room of his expensive penthouse to the balcony. I resisted the
temptation to smash him through the plate glass sliding door leading outside,
and instead opened it before pulling his thrashing body out.

“Okay, Danny, it’s truth or flight time.”

“Fuck you!”

“Flight it is, then.” I swung Giamatti
off the balcony. He had time to start a choked howl before he smacked against
the side of the building, which didn’t help his cracked ribs one bit. I kept my
grip on his ankle, so he ended up dangling upside down with nothing but
twenty-five stories of New York City air beneath him. I swung him back and
forth a few times to make my point. The howls got shriller.

“They’ve got some good Healer EMTs
working for the city, Danny. They can fix everything I’ve done to you so far.
But no Healer is going to put your Humpty Dumpty ass together if I let go of
you. Capisce?”

Giamatti nodded frantically. Even hard
cases can be afraid of heights.

“So, where were we before you tried to
shoot me? Oh, yeah. Where did you take the Jane Doe you kidnapped from the
hospital?”

Giamatti spilled the beans most
satisfactorily. I leaned over the balcony, still holding him by one leg. There
is a trick to doing things like that when you are superhumanly strong but don’t
weigh much more than a normal human – if I wasn’t careful, I’d go over the
balcony and we’d both fall to his death; I wouldn’t like the experience, but
I’d recover after a while. To avoid falling, I had to brace myself carefully
against the balcony. No big deal. I’d had a lot of practice and a couple good
teachers.

“One more thing, Danny. You really
shouldn’t have murdered those nurses when you kidnapped the girl.” Three nurses
and one orderly, to be exact. Giamatti and his goons hadn’t left any witnesses
behind. “Kidnapping was bad enough, but I’d have given you a pass. Killing four
people because they were an inconvenience? You know I can’t let that go.”

Giamatti didn’t say anything to that. He
understood what was coming.

I couldn’t let the murders go, so I let
him go instead.

He howled all the way down.

* * *

Hell’s Kitchen isn’t what it used to be,
but here and there you can still find small bits of Hell.

The warehouse was squatting on a prime
piece of real estate, and would likely turn into overpriced condos in the not
too distant future. For now, it remained a featureless box of concrete and
steel with a two-truck wide loading dock and heavy security doors. From the
looks of it, it was a mostly legit warehouse that only occasionally acted as a
haven for the kind of stuff the authorities frowned upon, like holding stolen
goods or abduction victims.

I walked right to the front door and
waved at the security camera mounted above it. I didn’t even have to knock
before the door opened and a big Italian guy who obviously didn’t believe in
low-cal meals let me in.

“What are you doin’ here, Danny?” he
asked me as I walked in. “Thought you were gonna take the night off.”

I smiled, and that’s when the goombah
started to figure out something wasn’t right. I was wearing Dan Giamatti’s face
as well as his clothes, and my build wasn’t all that different from his, but
the smile didn’t look right. I hadn’t spent enough time studying Giamatti,
mainly because I hadn’t even met the guy until a few minutes before I dropped
him off a building, and apparently his normal grin didn’t look like what I had
produced. Or maybe the guy just didn’t smile very often. He sure as hell hadn’t
done any smiling during our time together.

“DG?” the guard said dubiously.

“DG sleeps with the fishes,” I said
ominously. Well, with the rats at the dumpster he hit at the end of his final
descent, but why let reality get in the way of a corny line?

“What the fuck?” The mobster was
beginning to catch on that something was very wrong. He soon found out just how
wrong things were.

I let Giamatti’s face go. His features sank
into my head, and the Mafia henchman was now staring into a featureless span of
skin. No nose, no eyes, no hair, no ears. That was the face, or lack thereof, I
woke up to every morning. It usually made for a great first impression. I could
make little kids cry and grown men soil themselves just by being me.

“Motherfuck!” the goombah shouted,
looking for all the world like someone who has found a king cobra swimming
amongst his morning Cheerios. He went for his gun, which I had to respect,
since most people freeze for several seconds when I show them my real face.
Unfortunately for him, he didn’t notice my fist moving towards his head until
the right cross connected and broke his jaw and neck, at which point he stopped
noticing anything.

The big guy’s body plopped to the ground
with the limp finality of those who are never getting up again. I stepped over
him, walked into the warehouse and took in the sights. Not much to see: the
space was mostly filled with stacks of wooden crates and rows of metal shelves,
some empty, some packed with boxes. The place was mostly shrouded in darkness.
There was a light by the entrance creating a little island of illumination
there, and another on a second level office. Two men up there had just
witnessed their pal’s demise. They recognized me, which isn't that surprising;
my no-face is fairly well-known.

“Shit, that’s Face-Off!” said another big
guy in a track suit that could have been the recently departed’s brother or
cousin and probably was.

“Fuckin’ Face-Off!” said his partner, a
short skinny rat-faced guy. Nothing wrong with his reflexes; even as he spoke
he drew out a huge revolver, a Smith & Wesson .500 Magnum, the kind of
wrist breaker some people think will give them a chance against Neos.

I hate the name Face-Off, but since I’m
not bonded and licensed, I don’t really get a say in what people call me. I
don’t even own the trademark to (or get any royalties out of) either the
Faceless Vigilante or Face-Off, not that there’s a big market for stories about
freaks with no face. I’m not in this for the money, which is a good thing
because I wasn’t going to make any. The mass media prefers good-looking guys
and girls in tight and skimpy hyper-latex outfits. Last time I was featured in
Buck
Comics Presents
, I was the villain of the piece, and one of the New York
Guardians beat the crap out of me. None of that happened, but they never pay
attention to the angry e-mails I occasionally send to
BCP
’s editors. Oh
well, I’m not in this business for the glory, either.

I’m in it because I can’t help it.
Because the rush you get when you stomp on someone who deserves being stomped
becomes addictive after a while.

The little guy with the big gun opened
fire. His first shot missed me by a country mile, and the next one was even
worse. Idiot. I pulled out my own gun, a sensible Ruger nine millimeter, took
aim while the little punk missed me with a third shot, and double-tapped him
before he could fire a fourth time. All the while, his friend had been futilely
trying to get his own oversized gun out of its shoulder holster. In all the
excitement he seemed to have forgotten how to undo the clasp. He saw his little
buddy go down and froze, his gun still safely holstered. Sucked to be him: I
double-tapped him as well.

Most Neos disdain or positively loathe
guns. I myself prefer to punch or kick my targets to death. But since I can’t
throw fireballs or make people’s heads explode with my mind, I need a way to
reach out and touch someone beyond arm’s length. Guns are fairly effective
people-killing tools, especially when you throw in superhuman hand-eye
coordination that allows you to hit a target at the maximum theoretical range
of a handgun. In other words, the anti-gun caped crusaders can kiss my ass.

Three goons down. I replaced the gun’s
magazine with a fresh one while I headed for the office. According to
Cassandra, there had been five people in the snatch team, including the late
Danny Giamatti. One of them was supposed to be a Neo. Where the hell was he? Maybe
he had taken the night off like Danny had. My luck was rarely that good, so I
wasn’t counting on it.

I was halfway up the stairs to the office
when I heard a loud crackling noise behind me and realized I’d better be
somewhere else very soon. I leaped off the stairs just ahead of a bolt of
lightning that would have turned me into a crispy critter if it had hit me. I
landed in a rolling tumble and saw my attacker standing by the entrance to the
restroom downstairs. Apparently the superhuman member of the snatch team had
been in the crapper when I made my grand entrance. I hoped he’d remembered to
wash his hands.

The Neo was tall, black and handsome, and
looked like a total badass, complete with shaved head, mirror shades, black
leather coat and pants, and a combat stance that said ‘ex-military’ to me. I
couldn’t identify him off-hand, so he had to be new or really, really discreet.
I was hoping he was new.

“Face-Off,” he said, a big shit-eating
grin on his face. “This is going to be quite the coup.” He had a slight French
West Indies accent. Haitian, probably, which likely made him a veteran of Papa
Doc’s bad boy squad. That pack of psychos had been holy terrors before the
Freedom Legion went in and cleaned up the whole island a few years ago. That
meant he wasn’t new, just discreet. Not good.

“Fucking hell,” I said while I picked
myself off the floor. Giamatti’s clothes had gotten more than a bit singed by
the near-miss. Too bad; they’d been pretty nice and I really needed a new suit.
I’d held on to my gun, but decided to wait a sec before using it. Chances were
it’d do me no good to shoot him from this distance anyway; even when they
aren’t bullet proof (and most of us are at least bullet-resistant), Neos have
reflexes like leopards on catnip, so you want to shoot them at point-blank
range, preferably in the eye. No wonder so many people hate our guts.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” the Neo
continued. “You may call me the Lightning King. And tonight I will be your
executioner.”

“Pleasure,” I said, and shot him. I wasn’t
expecting he’d oblige me and die, but some Neos like to trash talk before a
fight. I blame comic books, movies and TV; all that bullshit makes many of them
think they’re the stars of their own epic tale, never realizing they might just
be bit players in someone else’s. If they are in the middle of a grandiose
spiel, sometimes you can catch them off-guard and put a bullet in their eye.