New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (39 page)

Face-Off

Somewhere in Lake Michigan, March 14, 2013

The island was a wind-swept rocky
wasteland, consisting of two hill surrounded by a beach barely large enough to
fit the Condor Jet. A handful of scrawny trees on the hills were the only sign
of life; other than that the island was a misshapen mound of dirt protruding
from the lake like an infected pimple. It fit my mood perfectly.

The Lurker led the way. He took us down a
natural path between the hills into a cave that did not look natural at all. It
was a round tunnel carved into the rock, with walls so smooth they reflected
the moonlight at the entrance almost as well as mirrored glass. As we went
underground, the Lurker’s mask started glowing with a bluish light that
provided enough illumination for us to find our way. We went down the spiraling
tunnel for quite a ways, certainly well below the lake’s surface. Nobody spoke
as we walked down. I guessed everyone had stuff to think about.

I didn’t want to do any thinking. If I
let myself think, I would have to face the fact that Cassandra was gone. She
would never again let me know when I screwed up, or laugh at my jokes. I’d been
halfway through reading
The Wide Sargasso Sea
to her. She didn’t need me
to read for her, but she liked hearing me do it. Now I would have to finish the
book by myself. Alone. I tried to spend the walk down checking the tunnel
walls, admiring how smooth they were, wondering if the Lurker had built it or
had found it the way it was.

We arrived to a large chamber below the
earth. The ceiling was fairly high, about twenty feet, but the place still felt
claustrophobic to me. Maybe it felt that way because almost every square inch
of the walls and ceiling were covered with glowing signs that waxed and waned
in a steady pattern. The signs were larger versions of the ones on the Lurker’s
mask. I couldn’t look at them for very long before my head started to hurt. I
ended up keeping my gaze mostly on the nice, ordinary dirt floor. No wonder the
Lurker had gone batshit crazy. If I had to look at that kind of wallpaper for very
long, I’d be bashing my brains out against a rock faster than you could say
Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

The walls were making an impression on
everyone else, too. Kestrel was staring at them while swaying her head back and
forth, looking hypnotized. Condor was pointedly looking at her rather than the
walls. Ultimate was trying hard to look unimpressed. A little too hard, I
thought, but I wasn’t feeling particularly charitable towards the All-American
Hero.

Christine was shaking.

I rushed towards her as soon as I noticed
her reaction. I had to get past Ultimate, and I shouldered him out of the way –
he might be a thousand times stronger than me and a good five inches taller,
but unless he willed himself not to be moved, I could move him. He didn’t
react, not that I was paying attention to him. I tentatively put an arm around
Christine. She did not seem to notice. Her attention was fixed on those
symbols.

“It helps if you don’t look at them for
very long,” I said.

“They are words,” she whispered. I wasn’t
sure if she knew she had spoken out loud. “And the words can change reality. I
can almost read them.” The shaking grew stronger, as if she was having an
epileptic attack.

I turned to the Lurker, who was just
standing there, looking at us as if we were so many lab rats. “Hey!” I said in
a tone that usually preceded violence and bloodshed. He did not seem to hear
me. “Hey, asshole!” That got his attention. “Turn those fucking things off or
take us somewhere we don’t have to look at them. Or I’m leaving and taking her
with me.” If he tried stopping me, we were going to find out exactly how much
of a badass he really was.

The Lurker shrugged. A second later, a
sheet of darkness spread through the walls and ceiling, obscuring the
constellation of mind-fuck doodles from sight. The illumination level did not
change somehow. ‘Somehow’ is a very useful word when dealing with Neo powers.
Christine staggered a little when the signs were hidden away. I held on to her
until she felt steady on her feet. “That was the weirdest thing I’ve seen,” she
said. “And after the last couple of days, that’s saying a frak of a lot.” She
smiled at me. “Thank you.”

“It’s just a bunch of shiny chicken
scratches,” Kestrel said. “Just some sort of hoodoo your daddy’s conjured up,
that’s all. He sees the darkness in all men’s souls.” She laughed. The laughter
sounded less amused than hysterical, spoiling the attempt at nonchalance.

“What are those things?” Christine asked
her father.

The Lurker had taken his mask off. Without
it, he looked like a skinny man with a mop of reddish hair and incongruous
freckles on a face lined with either years or a stressful life. The family
resemblance to Christine was there, if you took away the wrinkles and insanity.
“I do not truly know,” he said, sounding a little more normal than usual. “I
suspect many things. They make up a language, but much more than that. I
suspect they may be access codes to reality itself.”

Whatever the hell that meant. It sounded
impressive enough, though.

“I also believe they come from the same
source as our powers.”

“Aliens! I knew it!” Condor said
triumphantly. That was one of those perennial arguments people with time to
kill loved to get into. Where did Neo powers come from? Schools of thought
included Aliens Did It (we had so far met no aliens who could deny or confirm
it; no aliens at all for that matter), Divine (or Infernal) Origins, Natural
Evolution (highly discredited since the Human Genome project came to fruition
and found no Neo Gene), Cosmic Rays, They Were Always Here But Hid Themselves,
and Someone Put Some Weird Shit in the Water. I usually argued in favor of
Nobody Knows and I Don’t Give a Fuck; Let’s Order some Pizza. Condor was an
Aliens Did It man.

“I have a question,” Ultimate said. “How
did you come to gain this knowledge? I know people who have been studying
Neolympian powers for nearly a century. Nobody I know of has made any
meaningful discoveries.”

“I was shown,” the Lurker replied; he was
reverting back to the muttering, batshit crazy guy we all knew and hated. “I
had eyes, but did not see. I could only understand the simplest words. I needed
fresh eyes.” He was looking at Christine when he said that. “That’s why I made
you what you are, to see and to help me understand. You will be my eyes,
Christine.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Is that all I am,
Dad? Your interpreter? Living prescription glasses so you could read the
writing on the wall?”

“I had to see,” he said as if that
explained everything. I guess if you were batshit crazy, it did.

“So now what, Dad?” Christine almost
shouted. I’d never seen her so angry before. “You want me to read the words out
loud while you take notes? And when I’m done you can send me home and forget
about me? Mom was right about you. You’re an asshole.”

If her words hurt the Lurker at all, he
showed very few signs of it. His eyes narrowed a little, and his grim
expression got a tiny bit grimmer. “There had to be the right elements in one
person,” he explained. “It had to be someone hidden somewhere the others could
not find. It had to be you.”

“Well, find someone else, Dad. Screw you,
and screw this.” Christine started walking back up the tunnel.

I started to go after her. So did
Ultimate. I tried to push him aside, but this time he had braced himself and I
bounced off him. “Get out of my way,” I told him.

“She and I have fought together,”
Ultimate said. “I owe her. I’ll go talk to her.”

He and Christine had fought the Dreamer
together. She and I had chatted for a bit. Maybe he was the guy who should go
see if she was okay. Hell, Ultimate was the guy to call if you needed help. I
was the guy to call if you needed to murder some asshole. He was the right man
for the job. I didn’t give a shit. “Get out of my way,” I repeated.

Ultimate gave me a pitying, understanding
look that made me want to punch him in the face. Only the certainty I’d just
break my hand without messing a hair on his head stopped me. He stepped aside.
“Give it your best shot,” he said. He was so sympathetic, so contemptuous, I
wanted to vomit all over his silver costume. But I went. He let me go after her
and I went.

Christine Dark

Lake Michigan, Illinois, March 14, 2013

She didn’t know where she was going.
Anywhere but the Island of Doctor Moron, she supposed. She would get to the
surface and fly away. She’d almost made it to the mouth of the tunnel when he
called out to her.

“Christine.”

She turned around. Mark had caught up
with her. He was worried.

“Hey.”

“Hey. Just wanted to see if you were
okay.”

“I haven’t been okay since I went to that
stupid frat party I can’t even remember how many days ago.”
I’m never going
to be okay.
“So what’s up? Did they send you to talk some sense into me?”

Mark shrugged. “Nobody sent me anywhere.
And I don’t know if anything makes any sense.” He paused for a second or two.
“I’m sorry your father’s crazier than a shithouse rat,” he finally said.

Christine actually laughed at that.
“Yeah, Dad turned out to be a dud, didn’t he?”

“Dud you just make a pun?”

She started to laugh again, then sat down
on the tunnel floor as the laughter turned into sobbing. He sat down by her
side and she hugged him. He let her cry quietly on his shoulder. She could feel
him crying too, just on the inside. Christine might have found her father was a
whacko who had bred her to be his Seeing Eye Bitch, but Mark had lost the
closest thing he’d had to a mother. So they just sat on the cavern floor for
some time, two hurting people grieving together. Having someone to grieve with
helped a little bit.

“Thank you,” she said after a while.

“Thank you,” he replied. She guessed it
had been good for him, too. “Wish I was better at the pep talk shit. Ultimate
wanted to come talk to you. He’s probably great at talking people off ledges
and consoling the bereaved.”

“Heh.” John probably would have had a
great spiel or three. She started to grin at the thought but suppressed it
quickly when she caught a spike a pain from Mark. Oh, God. Things were getting
complicated. Just the kind of thing she liked to read about sometimes, but
which was no fun at all when it happened to you in the real world, or even in
this effed up version of the real world.

They got to their feet. Christine looked
at the exit. It was so tempting, to just take off and see how far she could
fly. Timbuktu was probably nice this time of year. “Got any ideas, Mark? I’d
love to go home. Maybe we can hunt down Porta Potty Man and see if he can get
me there. Do you want to come along?” Christine tried to imagine introducing
Mark to her friends and relatives. That would be a trip.

“I’ll back you up whatever you decide,”
he said. “But people are still looking for you. People with enough muscle to
use Ultimate the Invincible Man as a meat puppet, not to mention drag you from
your home universe. The Lurker is nuts, and a dick, but he might be able to help
us. Maybe all he wants to do is to use you. But we can use him, too.”

“I really don’t want to have anything to
do with him,” Christine said, knowing even as she spoke that she was going back
down the effing tunnel. “He is crazier than you know. Looking back, I think he
murdered half the cheerleader squad in my school because they were mean to me.
Thanks to him, I’m a complete mess and I’m probably going to die in some
horrible, stomach-turning way.”

“Sure. But thanks to him, you are.”

“Am what?”

“Here. Existing and shit.”

“The saving grace of every father, eh? I
fertilized some eggs with my man-juice, so you’ll have to forgive me for being
an absentee insane murdering freak from another universe. Worst daddy issues
ever.”

“My father got killed when I was seven,”
Mark said, shocking her into silence. “He was a nice guy, from what I remember.
Had a temper, but never raised a hand to me or my mother. His temper got him in
a bar fight, though. Somebody punched him in the chest and he just keeled over.
Dead before he hit the ground. Turned out he had a bad ticker and the punch hit
him in just the right spot to stop it.”

“Oh, God, Mark. I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know why I just
told you that. Trading daddy stories, I guess. Or maybe I’m trying to say your
father ain’t perfect, but he’s still alive, so there’s still a chance you two
can work shit out. And maybe he’s not just using you. People aren’t that
simple; they almost always have more than one reason for whatever the hell they
do. So yeah, he was building himself a translator, but on the other hand he
wouldn’t have killed those cheerleaders if he didn’t give a shit, right?”

“That’s just horrible.”

Mark shrugged. “Well, yeah, I didn’t say
he wasn’t batshit crazy and probably should be institutionalized or even put
down, just that he cared about you in his own batshit crazy way. Oh, Cassandra
also said if we don’t make the right choices, the world is going to end. Does
that count as a pep talk?”

Christine patted him on the shoulder. “It
was good enough. Let’s go back down to the Lurker’s Lair and see what Dad Vader
has in mind.”

Nothing good
came to mind all too readily.