New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (6 page)

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 quite 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.

“Glad to see you are awake,” the man
said. His voice was gruff and had a hint of an accent. Russian or Eastern
European, maybe.

“Are you an Orthodox priest?” Christine
asked. Not ‘Where am I?’ or ‘Who are you?’ That’s how she rolled, and she had
learned to accept herself.

“Yes, I am,” he replied, unfazed by the
question. “I am Father Aleksander. You are in the Church of Saint Theodosius in
New York City.”

“New York? I was in Ann Arbor last night!
That’s in Michigan, by the way, and it’s like a bazillion hour drive from here.
Did they fly me here? I was in a hospital, am I okay? Why am I in church? I was
raised Presbyterian, by the way, not Orthodox, but in any case why any church?
And…“ Christine forced herself to stop talking. “Sorry. I get away from myself
sometimes.”

Father Aleksander smiled. “That is quite
all right. I wish I could be more helpful, but I don’t have all the answers to
those questions. I will tell you what I can, and a friend of mine will tell you
more. Would you like to have something to eat or drink while we talk?”

“Now that you mention it, I’m starving.
And can I keep these slippers? They’re really comfy.”