"Are you my new master?" it asked softly in my mind.
"Yep,” I replied.
"Then taste of the power. Draw me."
I did, and suddenly all of my doubts fled like ghosts from the sun. What was there to worry about? With my training and weapons, I didn't need my team. Bunch of pansies, anyway.
Striding from the vault, I headed for the street, my steely gaze boldly daring somebody to cause trouble.
"Master, are we soon to do battle?"
"Yes. Within mere minutes."
There was a telepathic sigh. "At last."
Once more, my wristwatch sounded its warning. Fifty minutes till the missiles flew. I sidestepped across the moat and at nigh Olympic speed I sprinted through the crowded city.
My destination: the coliseum.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
My boots pounded a savage disco beat on the pavement and the city flew by in a blur. Of course, I made it to the temple in record time. How else?
The place resembled your typical coliseum. An endless series of gray stone columns about a hundred feet tall supported an elaborately carved colonnade. Only a single doorway was apparent, at the top of a broad expanse of white marble stairs wide enough to march in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sideways.
Bounding up the stairs, I jumped a turnstile, and proceeded along a mosaic tile corridor, past a lavatory and a snack bar with a flashing neon beer sign. Okay, maybe these island guys weren't totally evil. Briefly, I checked both doors. Nothing special about either. Where was the entrance to the mountain top?
At the end of the corridor was a huge, brass double door, the surface adorned with mystic symbols, and blocking the entrance, was a guard twice my size. He was dressed in a suit of polished red armor, the style a wild mixture of a dozen cultures, its every attribute seeming to be offensive. Held before him, the point resting in the light gray floor, was a long sword some two meters in length. The blade a shiny black material, its edges feathered with rippled wafers that glinted as prisms in the fluorescent light.
"Hold!” the dire sentry commanded.
Without missing a step, I shot Armor Boy once through the tiny mouth slit and cut off his head with a backhand swing, eating the soul before the body pieces hit the floor. Battle, yes! We loved to fight! Lived to fight!
I didn't bother to check and see if the door was locked. Just blew her open with a grenade to announce my presence with authority. But there was no mountain, just the inside of the coliseum.
Sheathing the blade, I marched forward. The whole interior was one vast room, to be measured in acres, not meters. Truncated walls became the ceiling, leaving the stupendous central span free of obstructing support columns. And the cool expanse of the marble abyss was totally bare, except for a lone chair and a man.
At the far end of the palatial room, dominating the entire scene, was a true giant, sprawled asleep on a mammoth throne of metal bound stone. A humanoid dinosaur, the being must have been fifty, sixty feet tall, totally defying the Inverse Square Law of biology. Only primordial magic of the most puissant kind could support this voluminous a life form.
His smooth skin was dark purple and totally hairless. Great club hands rested on oddly formed knees, with hooked claws tipping each blunt, powerful, finger. His head was cleft, almost split in two, the pig-like nostrils separated and the bulbous closed eyes seeming to point in different directions. There were no ears. A jagged crown of gold encircled his head. He was stark naked and blatantly male. It would take an army of rabbi's armed with chainsaws to make this guy Jewish.
So this was the king of Atlantis. I was not impressed, having seen similar giants before, although not on such a grand scale. The grotesque physical mutations were a permanent side-effect of using far too many Growth potions, mixed with Strength and Anti-Aging. Everybody wants to be an immortal superman, but are always too damn dumb to realize that there will be a price.
Promptly, I dubbed him ‘Fred', after a schoolyard bully I once beat the living snot out of for bothering my kid sister. Ugly and big don't make them tough. I was tough.
Completely unafraid, I advanced and drew my sword. Or rather, I tried to draw the black sword, but it was stuck in the sheath. Hey, why had I sheathed it in the first place?
"Him, Master? You want to fight ... Him? Lord O'Don?"
Odin, shmoe-din. I pulled harder. “Yes!"
"The being that created me? Forging my blade from lifeless metal, bathed in the fire of his own soul?"
"That's the guy! Come on, let's take him!"
"Fare thee well."
...and the madness departed, flowing from my body like sewage down a drain. When my mind cleared of the sword's influence, I stared at it in horror. Holy Hannah, what the fuck was this thing? The Amazing Blade of Stupidity? I unbuckled the belt, let the scabbard drop to the floor and kicked it away. Goodbye, so long, farewell.
However, the blade had gotten me this far. Steadfast, I donned my Bureau sunglasses and got the second greatest shock of my life. The big guy's aura was orange and purple. Orange and purple? Impossible. What the hell did those colors mean? Just how far had this clown mutated?
Sluggishly, huge eyelids began to flutter as Odin started to come awake. Was this caused by me blowing the door, or was something else rousting Fearsome Fred from his much needed beauty sleep? In response, my watch beeped. Forty minutes till the missiles fell. Damnation, where was that door?
"Who are you?” the titanic goyim loudly rumbled, the rafters of the building shaking.
The words did not match the motions of his mouth. Must be another built-in translator like the Gate. Okay, think fast, Alvarez.
Removing my cap, I bowed. “A humble worshipper, Lord Odin."
Shit, wrong pronunciation, but he didn't seem to notice.
An arm thicker than a Greyhound Bus rose and pointed in my general direction. “And what is that before you?"
I gave the sword a little nudge with my boot. “A meager offering, Mighty King. A magic sword.” Well, sort of.
The rubbery lips parted in a double smile. “Ah yes, I recognize the offering. It is the toy I built in my youth"
Toy? He considered this sword a toy? Cowardly, yes, but it was no child's plaything. Or maybe it was to him. Gulp.
"I was unaware that it has been missing,” the grotesque monstrosity continued. “How long have I been asleep?"
Tactfully, I tried to change the course of the conversation. “Many years, your highness, but that is unimportant. There is trouble on the mountain and—"
"Nothing I do is unimportant!” Odin bellowed, nearly deafening me. Then he blinked. “What happened to my door?"
Yes! The door! No, the idiot meant the exploded front door. I wanted to shout at him to stop meandering. Fred was obviously not a morning person.
"An accident, sire,” somebody said behind me. “We'll have the slaves clean it away immediately."
My heart stopped. That voice! Twirling about, I could only wordlessly stare with unabashed joy as the gang came walking towards me, Donaher picking his way carefully through the steaming ruin of the bronze door. Alive! They were alive! Jess, Mindy, George, every blessed one of them! Wearing battle helmets and loaded down with all of our weapons. Including the stuff from the plane and even my briefcase! Yowsa, back in business!
How the hell had they gotten that stuff? Briefly, I checked them out with my glasses to make sure they weren't zombies, or under mind control. Nope, auras read clean.
"Who are these beings?” Odin said frowning, sniffing the air suspiciously.
Damn. Momentarily, I'd forgotten The Amazing Colossal Nudist. The team needed to talk and fast. This called for emergency measures. I whispered, “Jess, love, do you feel able to do a Conference?"
She smiled. “No problem.” Taking a deep breath, the telepath joined our six minds into mass communication.
* * * *
There was disorientation, and as the throne room disappeared I found
my team standing on a cloudy plane. After heartfelt greetings were exchanged, I briefed them on what had been happening with me.
Typical, Ed, thought Donaher in summation. Run around blowing up things.
Thanks, I said mentally. What happened at the zoo?
Satan Department agents swooped out of the sky on a flying carpet dropping gas bombs, sent Richard. A nasty new type of neuro-anesthesia. Our gas masks were useless. It worked by skin contact. We woke chained to a wall in a high rise building downtown. Things were getting ugly when George saved us.
How?
George broadcast a grin. They took every visible weapon and thoroughly searched us, but never considered untying our boots and looking inside.
Before I could respond he continued. Oh, they found the Bureau derringer tucked in the boot, I said inside. Under my sock.
Not surprising. In spite of their many positive features, Army boots take five minutes to get off. Any weapon hidden in there would be useless in the short term. And George's socks would dissuade even the most ardent examination.
That's why I put it there, he agreed.
Put what where?
Arching an eyebrow, George looked at me as if I was retarded. My magic bracelet.
Ah. Guess I was out of sync today. The bracelet only required contact. You could swallow it and the bracelet would still work.
Yep, thought Mindy. When our captors were busy. entertaining themselves, George waited until they were in a cluster and then hit the bastards with a flamelance. Fried most of them where they stood. The two that survived, Jessica mindblasted.
Entertaining? I asked. My heart was pounding in my chest and I wasn't sure I could handle hearing the details.
Richard answered. Apparently, Big Bird had brought them the plane and Hassan's body. They were furious over a fellow Arab working against them and decided to ... punish the traitor.
I could sense their repulsion and got the picture. Feh.
They mostly did it just to psychologically soften us, noted George pragmatically. Old interrogation trick.
Disgusting.
But effective.
A brutal thought swirled from Mindy. Before the chief agent died of his burns, I made him eat it.
Eat what? I asked.
Mindy gave me a hard stare. I made a fast mental note to never, ever, piss this lady off. So how did you find me?
Richard talked to the spirit of a dead Satan Department agent and we discovered we had to get to the coliseum, pronto. So we climbed to the observation platform above the city library and had to get rid of a reverse vampire.
Reverse ... its what killed that water-balloon guy in the forest.
Bingo. The monster injected blood into you, liked sunlight, garlic had no effect and was fatally attracted to the good Father. But once we hammered the stake out of its heart, he died quick enough.
Hammered the stake out?
A telepathic nod. When we tried to use the optical telescope mounted in the observatory, we found the creature's nest inside, with another blood bloated Satan Department agent laying in the straw. The dolt had a drained laser pistol in his pudgy hand.
Fool.
Richard agreed. A concentrated light beam weapon would only heal, not hurt, a reverse vampire.
Did you take the weapon? I asked eagerly.
Yes. I take all useable weapons. Why?
I have the spare power magazine from the guy in the forest! Jess, take us back!
* * * *
In a melting dissolve, we were back in the temple. As the team scooped out the place, a sudden thought came to me. One dead, one violated, said the genie. But both were Hassan. The gjinn had been having a bit o’ fun at my expense. I hoped a horse stomped on his foot at the rodeo. Wonder if anything else he said could have alternate meanings?
"Yes!” Jessica said aloud. “He told you ‘defeat lead to victory', not, ‘defeat leads to victory'."
I arched an eyebrow. “What possible difference is there?"
In response, she pointed. There between the gargantuan, three toed, feet of the gray giant, was a little tiny man-size door. Defeat ... da feet. I hate genies.
"His goodbye joke,” the telepath said aloud.
"For the last time, who are you strangers?"
Almost forgotten about our mutant host there. He didn't sound particularly angry, but then our conversation had taken only a second, as it was conducted at the speed of thought.
Clearing my throat to speak, my watch sounded. Thirty minutes to go. No time to waste chatting. I had my team and the location of the door. Time to boogey.
Subserviently, I smiled. “Excuse us, King Odin,” I said calmly walking towards the door underneath him. “But there is trouble on the mountain and we must take our leave."
A double-scowl distorted his faces. Rudely, the big guy didn't even say, ‘None may use that door, foolish mortals!’ He just launched a lightning bolt from his foreheads. The crackling discharge hit the marble floor in a blinding explosion and as the smoke cleared, there stood a dozen crystal humanoids, their flat plane skin as transparent as glass.
The hollow interior of the first was filled with a swirling white powder. The insides of the second crawling with buzzing hornets. The third was topped off with a red-white liquid that resembled molten steel. Others held: worms with snapping teeth, a blood skeleton, a fire demon, a storm cloud with eyes, boiling oil, winged piranha fish, cobras, tarantulas, scorpions and a big one appeared to be empty. Yeah, right.
George raised his assault cannon, then lowered it. Shooting these guys would be an incredibly bad idea.
"Abraham Lincoln!” I shouted, knowing it was our only hope.
Turning their attention to killing-the-leader in the chair, Richard began to chant the word ‘tunafish’ non-stop. Drawing the Veri pistol, Father Donaher boomed a Navy flare directly into Odin's face, the sizzling impact almost lost in the giant's scream of rage and pain. George stitched him with caseless high explosives. Mindy shot him in the throat with a poisoned arrow, and I pumped my last 40mm grenade into his exposed groin. I don't fight dirty, I fight to win.
Purple hands clawing at his ruined face, Odin howled and lightning randomly crashed everywhere, forming crystal warriors on the roof, the walls, atop his own knee. There were hundreds of them, maybe a thousand, and they all started marching straight towards us.
"Siagon Bug-out!” I cried.
Retreating for the door, the team dodged lightning bolts as best we could, dashing between the waddling crystal warriors. Richard waved his staff in a complex pattern and a heavy braided net fell over six of the things, binding them together. Jessica grabbed her forehead and stared. Nothing. Donaher shot a group with Holy Water. They got wet. George started throwing canisters of tear gas, vomit gas, stun gas, and BZ hallucinogenic. Bastards seemed to like the stuff. Mindy tried a Kung-Fu nerve pinch on the neck of one filled with army ants. It took a swing and almost busted her jaw.
More lightning. More crystal warriors.
Fumbling with the mechanism, I paused to launch the last LAW at Lord Odin, but he had a magical shield erected and the streaking rocket vanished in mid-air without a trace.
As we reached the door, Odin the Odious began to swing a foot in our way, so Mindy shot the floor with an incendiary arrow. Flame erupted and the foot jerked away from the wave of heat. Up close, we could now see that a prominent lock on the marble door barred our exit. A short burst from George's assault cannon blew that to smithereens. With a creak, the bedraggled door swung aside. At top speed, we charged through the flames and into the blackness beyond.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
...and we stepped onto a stone ledge high on the side of Mt. Lympus. Raw stone was to our right, and on the left was a parapet.
Over the stone railing we could see the domed city far below spreading out like a museum exhibit, with the rest of the island lost in the distance. We must have been transported a hundred miles in a split second. A
s the team spread out in a standard defense pattern, a cold sea wind ruffled our hair and my skin began to prickle at our nearness to the gray cloud. Whew, smelled like Jersey in the summer.
I moved away from the door to try and get a better look around when from the other side of the parapet a hideous iron gorgon hopped into view. Its skin was a uniform dull gray, with fiery red light beaming from its mouth and misshapen eyes.
"Halt!” the monster commanded. “To pass me, you must first answer a riddle!"
"Come again?” Mindy gasped in shock.
"Yes, a riddle! A mighty tree, small in size, digs and digs, for a tasty prize.” The metallic beast leered expectantly. “Answer or perish. What am I?"
"Dead meat,” Donaher said stroking the shotgun and firing. The storm of double-ought buck blew the gorgon off its perch and it tumbled over the edge with a very surprised expression.
Mindy patted the priest on the shoulder in congratulations. This wasn't a frigging game, we were here on business.
Glancing over the edge, I watched the creature bounce off several rocky ledges, losing an arm here, a leg there. It was flapping its iron wings like crazy, but still quickly dwindled into the distance becoming a tiny speck hurtling towards what was certainly going to be a most uncomfortable meeting the dome over the city.
Rejoining the crew, I noted that the ledge we stood on was part of an impossibly long flight of stairs that disappeared into the mists below, and extended to the distant snowy peak of the huge mountain. Slinky heaven. Zigzagging across the steep slope, each level of the stairway was adorned with a towering statue of a rampart griffin made of bluish ice. More guards, had to be. This Odin was going to give paranoids a bad name.
Why can't we ever get an easy assignment? Like that time when a mad wizard at Stonehenge cast a spell to bring down the moon to destroy the world. We arrived just as he was finishing the conjure so I chanced a hip shot with my Magnum from 200 meters. The bullet got him directly between the eyes and as he slumped over, the massive release of ethereal power stored within him exploded into the nighttime air, a burning lance of hellish destruction that radiated away harmlessly to have absolutely no effect on anything. It was a freak occurrence, but we sure remember it fondly.
Judgment Night [BUREAU 13 Book One] Page 18