He led her to another house, a bigger, older one with a barn, corral and stables, which meant Robb’s family was relatively wealthy. They went behind the barn, to a spot facing a copse of trees, away from prying eyes and watchful commissars.
After sitting down on a fallen log, they looked at each other in silence for a few seconds. He’s trying to nerve himself to take my hand, or maybe kiss me.
“Okay,” she said, forestalling him. “I’ve got amnesia, so I’ve got a bunch of questions. Let’s start with, when did the… the Goddess take over?”
“Uh… I was six, so almost ten years.”
Holy crap. She’d though her encounter with Dark Christine had taken place in the very near future, like maybe a couple of years ahead at the most. If this was 2023 or 2024, was she in yet another alternate timeline, or had she merely been catapulted forward in time? No idea.
“Okay,” she went on after absorbing that bit of data. “Do you know what happened? How she did it?”
“My Da, he used to talk about it when he got drunk, until the Watchers warned him to keep his mouth shut. He was a ‘GNN Correspondent.’ I don’t know what that is. The Goddess, she was a hero, but something happened in this big town called New York City. He said that’s where it started. Then there was a war. My Pa was on assignment in Topeka, another big town, but he ran away to the country when things went bad. Every big town got destroyed. Then the Queen led the survivors here, and put us in these little towns, next to the fields.”
And thus we got the six or seven million slaves in Kansas. Which is about twice as many people as used to live here, before the Bitch Goddess Era. The point of divergence must have happened when she and Mark fought Mister Night and the Evil Lurker in New York. That’s when Mark had been infected, but in this timeline she’d been infected as well. Mark had ‘died’ and ended up being possessed by Mister Night.
That could have been me. If Mark had been a second too slow, it would have been me.
“How about the Genocide?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Did you ever hear a mental scream? I AM BECOME DEATH?”
“Yes. We all did. Nothing came of it. The Goddess protected us.”
She handled the Genocide all by her lonesome? Oy.
Robb frowned. “Hey, how come you remember that but nothing else?”
Crap. “Don’t know. It’s like the only thing I remember,” she lied like a rug.
“That’s weird,” Robb said, but didn’t press the issue.
“Okay, moving on. So, what’s the deal? Government, taxes, religion?”
“Uh… Well, there’s the Town Council, we elect them every two years and they decide disputes, land grants, that kind of stuff. Then there’s the Watchers, they make sure we all show proper respect for the Goddess. There no religion. Just Her.”
Imagine no religion. Christine didn’t think this setup was what John Lennon had had in mind.
“How long have we been dressing up like this?” Christine pointed at the school uniforms.
“Only this last month. Most years we do a couple of big wars, and a lot more people get killed. Last year it was Romans versus Highlanders. We got all dressed up in kilts and got big swords and little shields, and about fifty people from Haven got killed. The guys from Sanctuary kicked our asses. The year before we got Starfleet uniforms and phasers, and the guys from Sanctuary got Martian war machines. We kicked their asses that time, only lost thirteen people.”
“How many people live in Haven?”
“About four, five thousand? Sanctuary is bigger, like eight thousand.”
Interesting. Well, interesting in the sense of being in deep crap. In a small town, people who didn’t behave normally would stand out like a sore thumb. Like someone afflicted with amnesia, say. People would start talking, and sooner or later the Watchers would drop by to say hi. She’d better have an exit strategy in place before then.
“Oh, shit,” Robb said, looking over shoulder.
Or maybe she’d already run out of time.
She turned around. Three guys were walking towards them. Two of them were still wearing the fake school uniforms; the third, a big corn-fed dude, had switched to jeans overalls and a t-shirt. Their smiles looked mean; no empathy was needed to read the expression in their faces.
“That’s the Lowell brothers and Little Jimmy,” Robb whispered.
“What’s their problem?”
“The Lowells and my family been fightin’ over a plot of land for like a year. And Little Jimmy’s sweet on you but you never give him the time of day.”
‘Little’ Jimmy must be overalls boy; he was leering at her.
“Maybe we should leave.”
“Yeah,” Robb agreed.
They got to their feet, but the three amigos caught up to them.
“Leaving so soon, Robbie?” one of the near-interchangeable Lowell brothers said. They were blonde, about the same size, with the same bowl haircuts and pug noses. The talkative one was slightly taller and had a mole on the left side of his face. Other than that, you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart in a police lineup.
“Don’t want no trouble with you,” Robb said. Christine kept quiet and waited. Running was an option, but the school uniform was a bit tight and constrictive, and the shoes were definitely not built with athletics in mind. She wasn’t sure she could outrun them, and trying might just trigger the violent reaction she was hoping they would avoid.
“Well, then, you shouldn’t have stolen our land,” the mole-less Lowell said. “City Council ruled for your fambly while we were at the game. My Pa’s havin’ a fit over it.”
“Ain’t got nothin’ to do with me.”
“You’re wrong ‘bout that,” the bigger Lowell said. He shoved Robb. Robb shoved him back.
Back on Earth Prime, Christine would have had a panic attack just about now. This kind of macro-aggression would have been way too much for her old self. The new Christine, on the other hand, had been in more fights than your average pro boxer. Instead of panicking, she analyzed the situation with cold detachment.
Okay, pushy-pushy right now, but it’s obvious these d-bags are working themselves up into a fighting rage. Sooner or later, they’ll start throwing punches, and I don’t think they’re going to let Robb fight one of them at a time, either.
Little Jimmy was sidling up in her direction. He might join in the fun with Robb, but his main interest was in her. As soon as the fight started, it was going to be sexual assault time. How sexual and how assaulty, she didn’t know. What was allowed in this brave new world her evil twin has created? How rapey would Jimmy get?
I’d rather not find out.
Two more shoves along with some unimaginative cursing later, Lowell-with-a-mole threw the first punch, catching Robb by surprise. He staggered back, and the other Lowell tripped him. As soon as Robb fell on his back, it stopped being a fight. The Lowells started kicking him, ignoring his pleas to stop.
“I got her,” Jimmy said, moving in on Christine.
Her mind conjured Mark’s voice in her head. The key words were: vicious and sudden.
Little Jimmy walked right into a kick to the crotch, so completely unprepared to defend himself that she almost felt bad for him, because she’d put as much power as she could muster up in the snap kick, and her new body had plenty of muscle. Crazy. Didn’t they teach people how to fight around here?
Her instincts kept her going. She throat-punched Jimbo while he doubled over and followed that with a sweeping kick to knock him down. She refrained from stamping on his neck, in the name of not breaking the Sixth Commandment; instead, she gave him a couple kicks to the ribs, just to make sure he stayed down.
Little Jimmy’s downfall happened so fast that the Lowells didn’t realize anything was wrong until she walked over the closest one and punched him in the kidney. She pulled the punch, but from the way Lowell Number Two whimpered and fell to the ground, he was going to be peeing pink for a good while.
&nbs
p; Christine didn’t care all that much. She was scared and angry. She’d watched people die, she was stranded without her powers in the shittiest of all possible worlds, and she wasn’t in the mood for any of this crapola. The last Lowell standing saw the expression on her face and backed off.
Robb looked up from the ground when the kicking stopped. It looked like he’d taken a couple of solid hits to the face; his nose and mouth were bleeding. He also was as shocked as his tormentors.
“I don’t need any of this shit,” Christine hissed at the astonished Lowell boy. “So get the fuck out of here or I’m going to rip off your face and wear it like a Halloween mask.”
She hated using that kind of language, but it was the kind of language that might just reach a testosterone-addled brain. Might. Some guys might decide to accept the challenge. This particular guy ran away without saying a word. He looked like a scared child, and a part of Christine felt ashamed about the violence she’d visited on the other kids. That was what they were. Kids.
Those kids were committing assault and battery and possibly sexual assault, her brain countered. In Mark’s immortal words: fuck ‘em.
“Go see a doctor and fuck off!” she yelled at the two prone figures on the ground. Little Jimmy appeared to be unconscious, but the Lowell brother’s eyes were wide open, so she wasn’t completely wasting her breath. “And if you give us any more shit, you’d better have a plot saved up for your grave!”
She helped Robb up. The running Lowell was already out of sight. She hoped he wasn’t running off to get a gun or something.
“You bitch,” Little Jimmy gasped as they walked past him; he’d woken up, but seemed to be having trouble breathing. “You broke my balls.”
“Come near me again and you won’t have any balls to whine about.”
He didn’t say anything else.
Would the show of force and viciousness be enough? Inspirational fiction to the contrary, most bullies weren’t cowards. They might decide that the solution to their problem would be to come back in overwhelming numbers. Christine hoped for the best, but if there was a next time, they wouldn’t be caught by surprise. She knew all kinds of Kung Fu, but if all three of them attacked her at once, she’d probably be toast.
Violence begat violence. That was why it wasn’t an optimal solution to every problem.
Robb didn’t say a word until they’d gone around the barn and were almost to his house. “What the hell was that, Nellie?”
“That a-hole was going to lay hands on me,” she said.
“I’ve never… You’ve never…”
Before he could articulate whatever it was they’d never done, the front door of the house burst open and a middle-aged woman wearing a long skirt and a flannel shirt came out. “Robb! Robb, you’re bleeding all over your uniform!”
“Oh, crap,” Robb said. His nosebleed had stopped gushing, but the damage was already done. The school uniform was severely stained, and from the look on his face, that was a bad thing.
“They’ll fine us,” the woman said.
“Wasn’t my fault, Ma,” Robb protested feebly. “The Lowells…”
The woman’s expression changed from fear to anger. “They did this to you? Because of the City Council?”
Robb nodded, looking very much like a child. A whiny b-word of a child, actually, the mean part of Christine’s brain decided.
“That’s it! I’m calling the Watchers!”
“Ma, no! You know how they are! Don’t call them, it’s just going to make things worse!”
Before Robb’s Ma could say anything, Christine heard a car come to a sudden stop behind her. She turned around in time to see a pack of Watchers getting out of a pickup truck, along with the unhurt Lowell brother.
He hadn’t run off to get a gun. He’d off run to narc on them.
“Uh, oh,” Robb said.
Dreamland, July 16, 2014
She had to take a break.
“Is that where they got you?” Mark asked her. He could tell that what was coming up was bad; he just didn’t know how bad.
“Not quite. It got complicated. And bad.”
“Christine.”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Mark.”
“Whatever happened over there isn’t going to change that.”
I wish I could believe that, she thought.
Chapter Four
Hunters and Hunted
Secret Facility, Upstate New York, July 16, 2014
MUNNIN DEVICE ACTIVATED
DOWNLOADING
Alive.
Daedalus Smith could still hardly believe he was breathing again. His last memory was of Chastity Baal’s wire garrote sawing through his neck.
The world needs me.
He’d died believing that. Without him, the world was going to hell. That was why he’d taken precautions even as he prepared to abandon Earth, which at the time was indeed going to hell, with or without him. And, as it turned out, those precautions had paid off. Stealing the plans for Doc Slaughter’s Munnin Device, had been child’s play. Duplicating the modifications Hiram Hades had made on the gadget, turning it into a regular resurrection engine, had been a bit tougher but not much. He’d made himself a clone, hooked it to the device, and kept it hidden in Australia, just in case. The funny thing was, he’d almost shut it down when he left on his trip into outer space.
Good thing he hadn’t. How long had he been out? Probably only a few hours. He could still get back to the Puta Madre, his private spaceship. Get out, build a new homestead for the human race, and maybe come back to reclaim the old one after the imbeciles in charge were done wrecking it. The world needed him, but if the world didn’t know what it was good for it, too bad.
Something was bothering him, though, something he couldn’t put his finger on. What was it?
The nutrient vat containing his new body finally drained off, and he was able to step out, shivering in the cold, sterile room. His eyes couldn’t focus; everything was a blur. For the time being, his body was merely human; it would take a couple of days before his Neolympian abilities returned. He hadn’t felt this weak and helpless in a very long time. No matter. He…
He wasn’t alone in there.
“Heya, Daddy Smith,” someone said. Female. A voice he’d only heard once in person, and very briefly, before she teleported away and proceeded to fuck up all of his plans.
“No.”
“Except yes. Although not exactly the way you think.”
He tried to back away from the voice, still blind as a bat, and ended up slipping and falling on his ass. The sudden pain only reminded him how frail he was. How helpless. The woman came closer; he could sense her standing over him.
“How did you find me?”
“Well, you see, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I killed you, and you used the device to come back, and then I killed you again, this time for good. As it turns out, you kept your copy machine in the same place in this universe. Unfortunately, something went wrong with it, and you’ve been trapped in its hard drive for several months. Lucky for you, I found the device and fixed it, and now the transfer is complete.”
Very little of what she was saying made any sense. Or maybe… He fought off surging waves of panic and forced himself to think. If she wanted him dead, he was dead. Might as well go out thinking. He went over her words carefully, and she stayed quiet while he worked things out in his head.
“You’re not Christine Dark,” he finally said. “Not the one I brought here, at least. You’re from a different timeline. One where you killed me.”
Was parallel history about to repeat itself? He’d find out soon enough.
“People kept telling me how smart you were, Daddy D. In my universe, all you accomplished was become an outlaw and until I found you and put you down. Twice. But maybe you do have some brains in there. And maybe I won’t open up your skull to take a good look at them.”
Jesus Christ.
Daedalus had dealt with plenty of psychopaths before, enough to know one when he heard her. He’d never faced one without even his paltry Neo abilities, let alone naked, blind and weak as a kitten. Still, they were talking. Maybe he could figure out a way out of this.
“And your timeline is some time ahead of this one,” he added. It made sense; the many-worlds interpretation basically predicated the existence of a near infinite number of universes. In some of them, the Big Bang might have started a few years, or centuries, or eons before his did. In some other universe, in a myriad other universes, Daedalus Smith had triumphed against the host of cretins of his world and was dealing with the problems of kingship. Of course, from his own personal point of view, that didn’t amount to a hill of beans.
“Bingo,” the madwoman said.
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’m on a quest for revenge. It’s all very Princess Bride, all ‘my name is Inigo Montoya’ and stuff. Or The Count of Monte Cristo, for you culturally-deprived Earth Alphans. My sweet little baby sister, Pissy Chrissy, did some very bad things in my universe. She was tots a pain in my ass, and I’m going to make her pay.”
“I can sympathize,” he said, honestly enough. He loathed the girl with all his heart. “Is that why you brought me back to life? To help you?”
“Your eyes aren’t focusing too well, so you probably don’t see me tapping my nose, but yeah, I’m tapping my nose. You got it, Dee. I need a henchman. A useful henchman. Someone who knows all the players, who can help me get things done.”
“Maybe we can work something out,” he said.
Daedalus Smith was no one’s henchman, but he could play games with the best of them. He’d go along with the crazy bitch for now, but sooner or later he’d turn the tables on her.
“I need to be able to trust you, D-Dog, and right now you’re about as trustworthy as Hitler on meth. But that’s okay, I can fix that. In some ways, the fix is already in.”
New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative Page 7