The Cult of Kronos (14 page)

“
Stop it!” Celene shouted.
Everyone had erupted into arguing, their voices blending together.
Celene's words were lost among the noise.

“
Just so you know,” Nick
said, “I passed up an opportunity to stab you all in the back just
a few days ago. So don’t you pin that cowardly bullshit on me.”

A pulse filled the room,
radiating out from Valerie. It slowed their hearts and silenced their
voices immediately. “Stop,” she said, hardly above a whisper.
Everyone heard it. “It was me.”

“
I'm sorry, what was you?”
Teddy asked.

“
I betrayed you.” Valerie
closed her eyes. Her form shimmered away. Before them stood Hestia,
the goddess of the hearth and home. She had long, dark brown hair and
fair skin. Her deep set eyes were cool and gray, and her features
soft. A shawl was wrapped around her head, and the rest of her figure
was modestly covered in the same dusty purple cloth. “I saw no
other choice.”

“
Explain yourself,” June
said.

“
It was after I quit the
council. You were hurting people. Zeus impregnated whomever he
wanted, regardless of if she was a virgin or a married woman. You
kept murdering these women and their children.”

“
You betrayed us because of
Zeus and Hera's bickering?” Nick asked.

“
And your raping. And all of
your smiting. You were supposed to bring out the best in people, to
help them, to guide their society. Instead, every time someone
excelled at anything, you massacred them as an example to not shine
brighter than the gods.”

“
Only if they bragged about
it,” Devon said.

“
Not one of you here is
innocent of bringing selfish, needless harm to the mortals. It was
all a game to you. You saw them as so much less. You treated them
like insects.”

“
You sold us out,” Astin
said, rising from his spot on the floor. “You turned us over to
spend thousands of years in Tartarus with people who hate us.”

“
I did what I did,” she
said, casting her eyes down at the floor. “And for my betrayal, I
went with you. But can you not say that you are better people than
you were then?”

“
All for nothing if Kronos
kills us,” Peter said. “We may have been jerks to mortals, but
Kronos is taking away their free will. That was how he reigned in his
golden era. They have no free will.”

“
Kronos was never supposed
to be in charge. Prometheus promised.”

“
Well now Prometheus is
dead,” June said. “Zach saw to that.”

“
Prometheus is in Tartarus,”
Peter corrected. “Where we'll be, permanently, if we don't get out
of here.”

“
What if we get Lewis to go
get him,” Evan suggested, “To free Prometheus.”

“
Then we have to fight
Prometheus again,” Frank said. “He still hates us.”

Their conversation was cut off
by thumping outside. The door at the back of the room, a small metal
door with no handle on the inside, opened.

“
Without a sign, his sword
the brave man draws, and asks no omen, but his country's cause.”

-Homer

XIV.

Traffic lights reflected off
the glass sides of the corporate office building in downtown Orlando.
Zach and Jason pulled up in the Uhaul outside the lobby doors and put
the car in park. “You ready?” Zach asked.

“
To kiss my squeaky clean
criminal record goodbye?”

“
No more working in a
school,” Zach said.

Jason nodded. “Hey Zach.”

“
Yeah?”

“
No regrets, right?”

“
No regrets.”

The lights were on in the
lobby of the building. Zach opened the door of the moving truck and
jumped out, holding his rifle low so that the people on the streets
wouldn't see it and panic. Not everyone was under Kronos's grasp,
just enough of them, and Zach didn't want to cause alarm or call in
well-meaning police.

Jason followed. The door was
unlocked. A guard at the front desk stood up. “Zeus. You came
back,” she said. Zach pulled the trigger on the gun, catching her
in the arm with a dart. She looked at it for a moment before slumping
back in the chair and falling unconscious.

“
You sure this is legal?”
Zach asked.

“
Hell no. I'm not even sure
my father was supposed to have these darts. Probably got them from
his vet friend.”

“
So…police any minute?”

“
Kronos has seen us anyway,
let's move.” Jason pointed to a stairwell. Zach raised his leg,
kicking the push bar and opening the door ahead of him. They moved
into the stairwell, Zach's rifle aimed up, Jason's aimed down.

Jason fired his tranquilizer,
taking down a guard one floor below without being spotted. “He has
guards posted this way,” he whispered to Zach. “Wanna bet our
friends are this way too?”

They
moved down the stairs quickly, stepping gently to avoid making much
noise. Jason checked the chamber of his rifle before opening the door
at the bottom of the stairs. A long hallway lay ahead of them, one
lined with concrete slabs and lit by buzzing, flickering white light.
Two men were posted at a door down the hall. One of them was a
regular security guard, but he was holding a gun that was clearly
not
standard
issue for his job; from the best Jason could guess, it was some kind
of submachine gun. The other was a thin man in a well-cut suit. They
must have been Kronos's men.

Jason raised his gun and fired
at the armed guard, catching him in the back with a tranquilizer
dart. As he slumped forward, the thin man whipped around and fired a
pistol he had been holding. The bullet sank into the door just above
Jason's head. Zach pulled the trigger on his own gun and took down
the thin man.

“
That was close,” Zach
said.

Jason turned his head to spy
the bullet hole. “Too close.”

A sound like thunder came from
the stairwell behind them. Dozens of feet were flooding into the
stairwell. Kronos had sounded the alarm.

Zach braced the doors while
Jason jammed his rifle in between the handles to bar the door. They
ran ahead to the door the men had been guarding. Zach grabbed the
security guard and yanked him to his feet long enough for Jason to
place the man's finger on the scanner by the door. A green light
flashed and made a happy, high-pitched sound before the door swung
open.

Frank was standing over the
door, a fist raised, ready to swing.

“
Whoa there!” Jason
shouted, stepping out of the way. “Don't maim the rescue party.”

June dashed across the room
and threw her arms around Zach. Jason nodded at Celene before
focusing on the moment at hand. They could celebrate later. “There's
an army behind us. Evan,” Jason looked around and found Evan seated
in the corner of the room. “Seal this door.”

They slammed the door shut. It
was the smaller door with no handles on the inside, and Jason worried
that they were closing off their only route of escape. As Evan
finished melting the door to its frame with his hands, however, a
loud bang indicated that the crowd had broken into the hallway. “We
need another way out,” Jason said.

“
The walls are too strong,”
Frank said.

“
And the bay door is too
thick to melt through,” Evan said.

Fists pounded on the door they
had just sealed shut. Jason was sure he had just walked into a death
trap. He looked around the room, counting to see who had been taken.
It looked like everyone except…

“
Where's Lewis?”

As if to answer him, a gear
mounted to a track on the ceiling began to spin and the bay door
started to rise. Lewis stood in the hallway beyond, a huge grin on
his face. “Sorry it took so long,” he said. “First I had to
lead the guards on this side upstairs, then I had to dash back down
here. We don't have very long.”

Zach passed his rifle to June.
“It's got one dart left,” he said. “So don't accidentally shoot
me with it.”

“
Then we'd better go,”
Nick said.

They ran out into the hall and
followed the emergency exit signs. The hall was narrow and there was
no way for sixteen people to be quiet as they fled. Each footstep
echoed off the walls and reverberated down the hall behind them.

They came to a dead end. It
was a door, this time a door with a handle, made of steel. Frank
punched the door, but all it did was mar the surface and create a
thunderous echo that rang in their ears. Evan pushed everyone out of
the way and hunched before the doorknob. “There,” he said as the
door began to swing open. “I picked the lock.”

Zach looked down at Evan's
hand. He was holding the doorknob and lock. The edges of the removed
mechanism were white hot. “Evan, that's not picking the lock.”

“
Whatever,” Lewis said.
“It's open. Let's get the hell out of here.”

They came to a stairwell and
an emergency exit. The door opened out onto the opposite side of the
building from where they came in. Across the street, Zach could see
Lake Eola Park. His father's office was somewhere directly above
them.

“
Crap, the truck is on the
other side of the building,” Jason murmured.

“
I can go get it,” Lewis
offered.

“
Uh…no time for that,”
Teddy said.

They looked across the street.
The few night-time strollers at the park had stopped what they were
doing, either to approach The Pantheon or to look on in confusion as
their loved-ones and friends suddenly abandoned their leisure
activity and started across the street. Even a man in a swan-shaped
boat had tipped it over and swam away while his girlfriend treaded
water and screamed at him. (“Gregory, you jerk! Where are you
going? I'm leaving you!”)

“
How many do you think?”
Devon asked.

“
Focused on us? Easily
fifty.” More people were marching around the corner of the street
and coming right for them. Under the street lights, with shadows all
around them, it was hard to be certain how many people were coming,
but it was clearly a lot. “And now a hundred.”

Baby Xander started crying.
Devon held him close. Frank stepped in front of them. “I can't
promise I won't hurt them this time.”

“
I'm starting to regret
leaving my gun,” Jason said.

The crowd suddenly,
simultaneously broke into a dash. Zach swelled to the enormous form
he had taken when fleeing this building the first time. He and Frank
met the first wave of attackers, knocking them back and creating a
domino effect. Like zombies, however, the crowd pushed forward,
trampling the fallen in front of them to get to The Pantheon.

Lewis jumped high into the air
and began to fly above the crowd. “We're hosed!” he shouted.

Minnie was doing a pretty good
job blocking blows from the crowd and taking people down, but the
crowd was too big and it pressed on them from every side. “There's
at least two hundred now!” she screamed.

As the mob descended upon
them, their sheer numbers weighing Zach and Frank down and pinning
them to the earth, something happened. Someone grabbed Diana from
behind and she screamed. Astin spun around, sunlight blazing from his
fingertips, and a pulse of white light erupted from his core.

The light was more pure and
beautiful than anything they had ever seen. It washed over the crowd,
bathing them in its warmth. Everyone stopped. The pulse only lasted
for seconds, but as the light reached the edges of the crowd and
faded away, The Pantheon could tell that the people attacking them
had come to their senses. The light of truth had shaken the haze.
Their pupils shrank back to their normal size.

“
What am I doing?” a woman
asked, letting go of her grip on Evan's arm. Zach shrank back to his
normal size.

Minnie shrugged, “I dunno.
What were you doing? Are you on drugs, m'am?”

“
I—no!” the woman,
alarmed, turned and rushed back across the street.

“
Smooth,” Lewis chuckled.

“
Someone's gotta explain
your miraculous ascension.”

“
At least they aren't
swarming us,” Diana said, wiping blood from her lip.

As the crowd began to drift
back across the street, wondering if they had just played into some
elaborate marketing stunt, Astin noticed a man left on the ground,
his leg clearly broken. Astin knelt down and pressed his hand to the
leg. With a gentle, white glow, the leg reknit itself. The man sat up
and looked into Astin's light blue eyes. “I…did you just…thank
you.” he said.

“
You're welcome,” Astin
said. “Now get out of here.”

“
Way to blow your cover,”
Zach said. His voice was deep and loud.

“
Oh leave him alone,” Nick
offered a hand to help Astin up. “Our cover was more likely blown
by Lewis flying over the crowd, or you growing twenty feet tall.”