New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative (2 page)

New York City, New York, July 4, 2014

In comic books, battle noises are described by simple onomatopoeia, your basic BANG! POW! KA-BOOM!

It’s very different when it’s happening for real.

It’s more like a constant rolling rumble of thunder interspaced with sudden explosive outbursts, mixed with the sound of your own heartbeat drumming through you. Fire and smoke everywhere as you run or fly through sheer chaos, trying to find you target before your target finds you. Knowing that at any second you may get hit, and knowing from hard-earned experience just how much it’s going to hurt.

POW!

Christine didn’t duck fast enough, and the dull roar and billowing clouds coming from the burning buildings below her were replaced by a blinding flash of light and a sharp crack that was more of a feeling than a sound. The world became a kaleidoscope of motion and pain until she was able to regain control and found herself a mile or three up in the air.

That effing hurt
.

Well, she’d wanted to see fireworks this Fourth of July, and there they were. The energy bolt that had sent her up, up and away had turned
her
into a firework. Her force field was glowing in many colors as it shed some of the energy it had absorbed. The display gave any New Yorker looking up into the sky something pretty to watch. Of course, sensible New Yorkers were staying indoors, well away from any windows, because watching Neos fighting was not good for your health.

Christine looked down and saw a puff of smoke and dust below, looking tiny in the distance and contained by Uncle Adam’s area force field, the same force field she’d crashed through on her way up. A few moments later she heard a thunderous sound. That was probably either Ali, John or Mark, letting the bad guy have it. She’d better rejoin the fray.

Flying down took her a fraction of a second, but by the time she got there, the Brooklyn neighborhood where the fight had started had been thoroughly devastated. Despite the containing force field, the shockwaves generated by the fight had hit the surrounding area like a massive earthquake: buildings had collapsed, the streets and sidewalks had cracks big enough to swallow cars whole, and several minor fires and floods had broken out when gas and water pipes were ruptured. Legion SOP was to move fights away from populated areas, but the perp they were fighting was very hard to move. The less powerful members of Freedom Squad One had been busy evacuating the neighborhood. Christine could only hope all innocent bystanders had been taken to safety. The poor people who’d been in the immediate area when the crazy Neo cut loose were beyond help, unfortunately.

At the bottom of the smoking city-block sized hole that once had held assorted business establishments, the Big Bad traded punches with Ultimate and Face-Off. Or, from Christine’s perspective, her ex-boyfriend and current boyfriend. Two macho men who could leap over tall buildings, or pick them up over their heads.

Two macho men who were getting the crap beaten out of them at the moment. The macho woman of the heavy hitter gang, Hyperia, was already down. Christine could only hope she wasn’t too badly injured.

The villain going
mano a mano
with her super-pals had no fancy nickname; his powers had apparently manifested that very day, turning him into an eight-foot tall glowing metal humanoid. Luckily the Legion was in town for the Independence Day celebrations, because this bad guy was too tough for the local superhero team.

Case in point: the glowing dude took a right hook from Ultimate that would have knocked the Statue of Liberty all the way to Canada and responded with a super-fast hammer blow that drilled her ex into the ground, followed by a swing that sent Face-Off flying through the air. Yikes.

One of Christine’s special abilities was a set of extra-sensory powers that let her see the flow of energy coursing through a Neolympian. Glowing dude was shining in more than the visual spectrum: he was a blazing cauldron of power the likes of which she’d only seen back during the Genocide War. This guy wasn’t quite in the same league as the alien who’d killed a good twenty percent of the world’s Neo population, including half of its most powerful members, but he was pretty up in there; they could have really used him during the War. And with the two big machos and big bad Hyperia temporarily out of fight, and Brass Man busy throwing a force field around the combatants to keep the collateral damage down, that left…

Little old me
.

Big tall and glowing turned towards her as she rejoined the fight. She could pick up his emotions now: he was angry and scared and utterly irrational. The sudden influx of power had completely unhinged him, and all he wanted to do was destroy, to throw a temper tantrum with the power of a god. He was gathering energy to send a bolt of pure force her way, much like the one that had nearly knocked her into orbit.

Christine didn’t give him a chance to try it again.

Her go-to powers when it was time to kick evil butt were the manipulation of kinetic energy and the creation of energy shields. She’d refined those abilities in the last few months, and learned a couple of useful new tricks. Besides those powers, she was armed with knowledge, courtesy of a cosmic encyclopedia of sorts, a list of Words that could hack reality itself. She glared at the murderous Neo and thought of a very special Word.

Power
.

She poured all her willpower into that Word, calling as much energy as she could handle, and maybe a little more.

A bubble appeared around the insane Neo. It soon filled with fire as the melting man unleashed his own power against it. His link to the Source was great as any Neo’s that she’d ever met; he tapped into impossible amounts of energy, driven by anger and desperation. The force bubble began to burn, and the feedback began to burn her as well. Christine couldn’t contain him for much longer. So she did the only thing she could think of: she contracted the bubble, suddenly and violently, adding another Word to the mix, giving whatever she had left to empower it.

Crush
. The Word squeezed the fabric of time and space around the rampaging Neolympian.

Visually, the effect wasn’t all that impressive. There were no big explosions, loud noises or any colorful FX. The gigantic form below her just crumpled into a spherical shape that shrunk down to something slightly bigger than a softball ball in less than a second. That’s what happens to even a high Type Three Neolympian when suddenly subjected to a gazillion atmospheres of pressure.

No fuss, no muss. Mama, just killed a man
. 

At the moment, a brutal migraine and total exhaustion made it easy not to dwell on her guilty conscience. The knowledge that a Neo of that power level could have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents before being put down was worth something, but not enough.

Using the Words hurt as badly as getting clobbered by the Big Bad. Christine fell to her knees, struggling to stay conscious. Her head was throbbing, and she felt completely wrung out. The amount of energy she’d used against the nameless, and now lifeless Neo had been enormous, spent not only in crushing the man, but in containing the forces unleashed in said crushing. That much pressure generated huge amounts of heat as a by-product. The little ball contained inside the force bubble was full of hyper-dense plasma, the kind of stuff you’d find in the center of a star. Some of the atoms in there had undergone fission, others fusion, not enough of them to generate a chain reaction, thank God, but still plenty for a heck of a blast. If released, the ball would explode and turn much of the city into a blazing inferno. If she let it go, the sudden decompression would have an explosive force measured in kilotons of TNT.

Mark’s mental voice came through their personal psychic link.

The pain was really bad, and in the past year or so she’d experienced about every possible kind of pain there was. She’d used too much power, too quickly, and now she was paying for it. Echoes of the Words she’d used bounced inside her skull, sending fresh waves of agony through her. And she couldn’t pass out, or there would be a big boom.

Mark was there a moment later, cradling her in his arms. She dimly sensed the rest of the squad forming up around her.

“Can someone toss that energy ball outside the atmosphere?” she asked weakly. “Fifty or a hundred miles up should do, I think. Avoid space traffic.”

“On it,” John said. He was gone a moment later, holding the bubble despite the way it blistered even his super-duper skin; a couple seconds later, he’d taken the cosmic hot potato into outer space and thrown it even further away, where the damage would be minimal. Good. She finally let go, barely noticing the huge explosion that lit up the sky, brightly enough to be seen by most everyone in the Eastern seaboard.

“Happy Fourth of July,” she said, and passed out.

* * *

Mark’s faceless head was looming over hers when she opened her eyes again.

“Hey,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Like crap.” Like dog crap. Her head was still throbbing and her eyes were having trouble focusing. Even her tele-empathic connection to Mark was a bit fuzzy around the edges.

“You almost killed yourself back there,” he said. “And I mean that literally. Adam had to put you back together, and that wore
him
out. He’s sleeping it off.”

“Sorry. I figured if I didn’t finish the fight quickly, the guy was going to break loose, and you saw how powerful he was.”

“Yeah. He packed a punch like Ultimate’s, or worse, and he was at least as tough. And you crushed him like a bug.”

“He was inexperienced, had no idea how to defend himself against an indirect attack. If I’d tried that trick on someone like you or John, I’d have dropped dead long before you did.”

“Still, that was fucking incredible.” He sensed she wasn’t in the mood to be complimented. “And you did the right thing. You saved the city.”

Unlike her, Mark was a stone cold killer who wouldn’t lose any sleep over taking out a dangerous Neo. But he knew her well enough to try to comfort her, to diminish the guilt that she was feeling underneath the pain of her self-inflicted injuries. He held her tightly in his arms, offering her his shoulder to cry on.

She didn’t cry. It hurt too much to cry, and even if it hadn’t, she’d gotten used to doing terrible things with the best of intentions. She didn’t cry, but she held on to him.

“How’s everyone else?” she asked him after a while.

“Everyone’s up and about. John and Ali checked on you a while ago, but after I told them you were on the mend, they left. Probably bumping uglies just about now.”

Christine made a face. John’s hookup with Ali/Hyperia had come about a couple of weeks after Christine had broken up with him. The whole thing had happened a bit too quickly, and rather spitefully in her opinion. They were still going strong, months later, but she didn’t think it was a healthy relationship. Ali was clearly smitten with John, but Christine didn’t think he reciprocated her feelings.

She didn’t know for sure, though. She couldn’t sense John’s feelings anymore. And it was none of her business.

“How is it?” Mark asked her, snapping her out of her deep thoughts.

“How’s what?”

“The soap opera inside your head.”

Mark found the whole situation amusing and irritating at the same time. She could hardly blame him for that.

“Thinking about the drama in our lives actually helped with my headache, until you brought me back to reality.”

“Sorry,” he said, and meant it. He could feel some of her pain, quite literally, through their psychic connection.

“No, I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes. “I think I need a nap.” It wasn’t a good idea to nap with a concussion, if you were human, but she wasn’t.

“Sounds like a plan. Do you want me to sing you a lullaby?”

“I’ve heard you sing, Mark. No need to threaten me.”

“Heh.”

She lay back on her bed, and tried to let her exhaustion overcome the migraine. For a moment, it worked: she started drifting off, letting go…

“NO!”

The whole building shook with her denial.

“NO!”

Mark was holding her. “Christine!”

“I REMEMBER!” she screamed, just before oblivion consumed her.

Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, July 5, 2014

I’d been through this before, but it wasn’t any easier the second time around.

“It’s not a coma this time,” Adam Slaughter-Trent told me for the fourth or fifth time. He was probably right – no, he was right – but it felt the same as before. Christine was lying in bed, unmoving, unconscious. At least they’d let me take her home. “Her vitals are normal; her Neo powers remain intact, and she’s healed off all the damage I wasn’t able to undo after the battle. Her brain activity is normal. She’s in a deep sleep, with heavy REM activity. She’s dreaming.”

“Whatever she remembered must have been so bad she couldn’t handle it,” I said. I couldn’t imagine what could do that to Christine. She’d faced stuff that would reduce most people to quivering jelly and kept on trucking.

“She’s shut me off completely, too,” I added. There was a psychic wall between us, and I couldn’t get through it.

Adam looked about as happy as I felt. The guy had always been a cold fish, but he cared as much for Christine as I did. “It looks like the overexertion of her powers awoke some repressed memories. My guess is that they relate to the time she was in a coma after the Genocide War.”

No shit
. I kept the sarcastic remark to myself. Luckily for me, I didn’t have a face to betray what I was feeling.

“I’ll let her rest, then,” I said. I’d give her a few hours to rest, and if she was still out, I’d try to push past her mental blocks and get in there with her. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it would have to do.

We’d had four great months in a row. I’d been pretty sure the good times weren’t going to last forever. Still, it’s always surprising how quickly things can turn to shit.

“I’ll let you know as soon as she wakes up,” I promised Adam as I walked him to the door.

“Please do,” he said before I all but slammed the door on his face.

With nothing better to do, I went to the living room and looked for a book to read. Our new apartment was nicer and bigger than the one we got when we’d first moved to Freedom Island. Back then, housing had been at a premium. The Genocide War had opened up a lot of vacancies the hard way, though: we’d gotten a huge apartment right in Freedom Hall, right next to the other top dogs in the Legion. It’d belonged to notorious Legionnaire and even more notorious traitor Daedalus Smith, as a matter of fact. He wouldn’t be needing it anymore, now that he was missing and on the wanted list. We’d even kept most of his fancy furniture, after it’d been closely inspected for booby-traps and bugs.

We could have tossed it out and replaced it all, of course. Between the two of us we made more money than an A-list movie star. Well, she did. My merch deals were an order of magnitude smaller than hers. Her comic book was a best-seller; mine had been cancelled twice, once when I was presumed dead, and the second time when it turned out I wasn’t all that popular when I was alive, either. Her deal with Maybelline alone was worth more than all my endorsements combined. Not that either of us cared; the money didn’t feel real. We gave most of it away to assorted charities, and we still had enough to buy whatever we wanted. Neither of us had extravagant needs: books were cheap enough, even with the occasional signed first edition thrown in.

And the funny thing was, rich as we were, people kept giving us free stuff. Them as has, gits, as the saying went.

None of that mattered. I’d give it all away if I could have the old Christine back. Even when she woke up, she wouldn’t be the same person I’d met a year and a bit ago, and I had a bad feeling there were more changes in store for her.

We’d both changed. I still had nightmares about my stay in Mister Night’s version of Hell, among other things. She was having an even worse time. Sometimes she would freeze in the middle of whatever she was doing, when some bad memory or another decided to drop by for a visit, ruining her mood. I knew all about those episodes; I’d been having them for years. Killing and almost dying does that to you: you don’t get to go through those things unscathed, unless you’re a complete sociopath. Neos are more mentally resilient than most people, but the stuff doesn’t go away completely for us, either. It helps to keep busy and not wallow in it, of course. Having each other helped. A lot.

I took the book into the bedroom with me, and sat next to Christine’s sleeping form, where I could keep an eye on her.

At some point I dozed off.

And ended up back in Hell.

* * *

Black ruins reached out towards gray featureless skies.

I’d been there before.

No
.

I was back in Hell. Or maybe I’d never left, maybe everything I’d thought had happened was a dream, an illusion, and I’d finally woken up. No Christine, no victory against Mister Night. Just Hell, scurrying through dead ruins while angry ghosts hunted me. For a moment I just stood there, unable to cope. I wanted to scream and cry, and claw at the ground until I dug a hole big enough to be buried in.

Fuck that
.

You don’t let stuff steamroll you. You deal and you keep fighting until you die, and if you end up in Hell, you keep fighting. Maybe I was back in Mister Night’s psycho-world, but I’d managed to escape before. I’d do it again.

First things first.

Nothing. I concentrated on battering down the wall she’d put up between us.

She was there. I wasn’t alone. She was there.

I could feel her presence now, getting closer to me. Soon enough, she appeared from behind a half-buried Statue of Liberty.

“Mark!” she called out to me, and we ran toward each other. There was some kissing and hugging, and a bit of crying. I don’t usually get emotional, but this was a justifiable exception, if I say so myself.

“Holy crap, I thought… I don’t know what I thought,” she finally said. She turned to the buried remains of the Statue. “Hey, it’s the final scene from
Planet of the Apes
!” I had no idea what she was talking about, but her chatter comforted me. “How long have I been here?”

“Eight hours at least. But if this place is anything like Mister Night’s stomping grounds, time doesn’t work the same here.”

“Yeah, I remember. I’ve been mostly crying and trying not to throw up. I wasn’t really paying attention to my surroundings until you called me.” She turned her face away from me. “I remember, Mark. I remember what happened to me after my brain broke, after we took Mister Night down.”

“Okay, that’s good.”

“No. Nothing about it is good.” She stepped away from me, and I let go of her. “You don’t know what happened to me. You don’t know what I did.”

“So tell me. Whatever it is, we’ll handle it.”

“I… I don’t want to.”

“And maybe I don’t want to hear it, either. What’s that got to do with anything?”

She let out something that was half laugh, half sob.

“Yeah, what’s that got to do with anything?” Her nod ended in a shudder.

“Okay Mark. This is Dreamland, so I don’t have to tell you. I’ll show you.”