I got off the subway and headed for Saint Theodosius. If the girl was awake, I’d offer to buy her lunch and see if I could persuade her to hang around. Talking to somebody I hadn’t beaten up or otherwise put the fear of God into wasn’t my specialty, except when I had a fake face and identity on. Maybe that was the way to go. Pretend to be an undercover cop or something like that. I lie to people all the time, but the idea of deceiving an abduction victim didn’t sit well with me. I’d play it by ear and see what happened.
I went to the back entrance of the Church. The door was open, as usual. I could hear Father Aleksander’s voice from the kitchen, so I headed there. He was talking to a woman. The damsel in distress must have woken up, then, and at least it didn’t sound like she was going to run right away. I walked into the kitchen, still undecided about what to say. I was leaning toward just laying my cards on the table and telling her everything.
Father Aleksander and the girl were sitting by the kitchen table while an inane morning show played on the flat screen TV hanging on the wall. The girl, wearing silly striped pajamas and a bathrobe a few sizes too large for her, was spooning up the last remains of a bowl of soup – borscht by the smell of it. A wrist-comm lay on the table next to her; hopefully she hadn’t used it to call the police.
“Hello,” I said; not much of an entrance line, but my normal entrance line is ‘Freeze, motherfuckers!’ and that really didn’t fit the setting.
“Ah, there you are,” Father Aleksander said amiably. He always knew it was me, no matter what face I had on. “Christine, this is your rescuer, the Faceless Vigilante.” Okay, we were going for all the truth and nothing but.
The girl looked at me, and I remembered I was still wearing Mr. Grover’s face, which made me look about fifteen years older than I really was, and not a sight for sore eyes at any age. But when her eyes met mine, I forgot about my face. I felt like she was looking through my fake face – through all the faces I could wear. It was like the first time I met Cassandra. This girl – Christine, her name was Christine – could see me.
Before I could start to process that first impression, Christine all but leaped from her seat. Next thing I knew she was hugging me like I was her long-lost brother or something.
I usually don’t react well when people make sudden moves. I react even worse when people invade my personal space and touch me uninvited. And I most definitely react very badly when someone hugs me without warning. Typical reactions to any of the above range from shoves to harsh language. If I’m in a pissy mood, gunfire isn’t out of the question.
Instead, I let her hug me. Nobody had hugged me like that since my childhood days with my mother, not even Aleksander when he got sentimentally drunk. It felt pretty good. Not that I would admit it to save my life. I’m fucking Face-Off. I don’t do affectionate.
“Thank you for saving me,” Christine said, still clutching me tightly.
“Yeah, sure, no problem,” I said awkwardly and lightly patted her back. I wanted to hug her in return, but I couldn’t muster the courage to do it, tough guy that I was. Especially not in front of Father Aleksander, whose face seemed to be struggling between expressions of amazement and delight. A second later he looked concerned, but he couldn’t say anything because Christine was talking at a few miles a minute.
“Also, thank you for taking me here, Father Aleksander is the nicest guy even if he’s not Presbyterian, which is okay. I still don’t understand what’s going on, but thank you anyway.” She let go of me and stepped back, still talking. “But I’m sure we can figure it out and holy crap where is your face.”
I realized I had let go of Mr. Grover’s features when Christine hugged me. That happens sometimes when I’m startled or lose concentration, both of which had happened this time. No wonder Father Alex had looked concerned. Christine fell silent for a whole second, and I braced myself for the shrieking that was the usual reaction when people caught me being myself. Instead, she stepped close to me. “That’s incredible! Is that why they call you the Faceless Vigilante?”
“Well, they mostly call me Face-Off, but yeah,” I said.
“Like that old movie with John Travolta and Nick Cage?”
“Uu, I don’t remember that movie. And I know who Nicholas Cage is, but John Travolta? You mean Joseph Travolta?” This was turning into the strangest conversation in my life.
“No biggie. Wow, your voice sounds just like before, but you have no mouth. No anything!” She stepped closer, her hands reaching for my head. “May I?”
Typically, people who reach for my face end up with broken fingers, but I found myself saying “Sure.” Mind control, it must be some form of mind control.
Christine gently touched my un-face. Her fingers ran down the smooth surface, pausing near the area where my eyes should be. “Does that bother you?”
“No. It’s as if I was wearing goggles. I can see you touching the surface, but it doesn’t feel as if you were actually touching my eyeballs,” I said.
“That’s amazing. It feels like touching the back of a skull, but on the front. Has someone done an X-ray of your head? And you can change face shapes, which means you must change your bone structure. We’d have to run an X-ray of your head before and after a shape change. Or an MRI would be better. Holy mother of crap, this is the awesomest thing I’ve seen!” She was smiling like a kid at a candy store, but all of a sudden she sobered up. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound like you’re a lab rat or something.”
“Oh, ah, it’s okay,” I said lamely. I wasn’t mad at her. I didn’t know what I was feeling, other than shell-shocked. I was supposed to be interrogating her, and she was ready to conduct a full parahuman power study on my no-face. Why wasn’t she scared of me?
“How can you do that?” she asked me, and there wasn’t a trace of fear or disgust in her voice, just open, almost innocent curiosity. “How is it even possible?”
“How can some people fly or pick up tanks? I’m a Neo, of course.”
“Neo? Like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix movies? ‘Take the red pill’ Neo?”
More movies I’d never heard of. And I loved going to the movies, usually on weekdays during the day, when I could sit quietly in a mostly empty theater. Cassandra’s words came back to me. Christine was some sort of alien, supposedly. Except I was beginning to realize she wasn’t from another planet, not exactly.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of that movie, either. Neo is short for Neolympian.”
“Okay, now it’s my turn to never have heard of something,” Christine said.
Definitely not from around here. This was going to be interesting. “Neolympians? Parahumans? Superheroes?”
“Superheroes?”
“And super-villains, but most people just prefer to call us Neos.”
“I’m going to sit down now,” Christine said and went and did it. She was clearly upset, and seeing her like that was upsetting me, which again wasn’t like me at all. Other people’s problems don’t upset me, except for the urge to smack down the people responsible. Christine was looking at the wrist-comm on the table as if it was going to jump up and bite her. “Do you know what this is?” she asked, pointing at it.
“The wrist-comm? It’s a wrist-comm. Well, a wrist-comp officially, since you can surf the web with it and write e-mails, but everybody still calls them wrist-comms.” I said. One of the most common personal items since the 1970s, and she was looking at it like it was Smith Industries’ newest wonder gadget.
“Not a cell phone?”
I had a mental image of a phone inside a prison cell, and almost laughed, but Christine wasn’t laughing. “I don’t know what a cell phone is,” I said.
“Oh, this is not good at all,” Christine muttered.
Father Aleksander turned the TV up, interrupting the conversation before I had the chance to break the news to her. Not that I really knew how I was going to do that. Maybe I could say something like ‘Welcome to Wonderland.’
“I’m sorr
y, but something is happening,” Father Alex said before I could try the Wonderland line. Sure enough, Special Report banners were flashing and a news anchor had shown up and replaced the morning show.
Christine and I stopped talking and watched history being made.
The Freedom Legion
Atlantic Headquarters, March 13, 2013
The fastest man in the world was a day late and a dollar short.
The attack caught Larry Graham with his pants down, literally. When the first wave of missiles struck, Larry was busy cheating on his wife with a young Legion recruit in an out-of-the-way hiding spot. It was the worst possible time and place.
Even as he lay on his back while Dawn Zhang – code name Dawn Windstorm – rode him like a bronco, Larry didn’t think of himself as a bad guy. Weak and contemptible, yes, but not a bad guy. He had loved Olivia O'Brien passionately for over four decades, and he still loved her, just not the way a husband was supposed to love his wife. Larry had been raised to mean the words ‘until death do us part.’ “Now and forever,” he’d whispered to Olivia just before kissing her on their wedding night.
What he hadn’t counted on was how long forever would turn out to be.
Back when he’d been regular Joe College Larry at Boston U, he read a great deal about the Greek gods of mythology. He’d done so partly because Greek mythology had been all the rage after the rise of Neolympians, and partly because he’d picked up Greek as his language elective, and a lot of what the Greeks had written down involved their whimsical and oft malicious deities. The relationship between Zeus and Hera particularly fascinated him. Zeus just couldn’t keep his hands – and the rest of his anatomy – to himself. He just ended up with one dame after another – human or Olympian, married or a virgin, it was all grist for the mill to the horny bastard. Zeus was the ultimate dirty old man. Even though the tales amused Larry greatly, he had never figured out why Zeus did what he did. Hera must have been the ultimate ball and chain to drive her hubby to such extremes.
On his sophomore year in college, he went from reading about gods to becoming one. He was walking to his next class when he saw an old jalopy about to run over a woman crossing the street, well over a block away. He ran the intervening distance in the blink of an eye and got her out of the way just in time. A new hero was born that day. Larry tried to use Hermes as his code name, but some idiot newsie stuck him with the moniker Swift, and Swift he became.
Larry kept his identity a secret at first. It was 1940 and the war was in full swing, and even with the US remaining neutral, a few incautious New Olympians had been murdered, either by foreign agents or local super-criminals. He wore a mask and made sure Larry Graham remained well away from the limelight. While wearing the mask and costume, however, Swift became a hit with the ladies. It turned out that gods did get all the girls. Larry cut a swath through Beantown’s best and brightest, loving every minute of it. He only slowed down when he joined the Freedom Legion shortly after Pearl Harbor, and that only because Doc Slaughter gave him a pointed talk about the image the Legion had to maintain.
Larry had been more discreet while he went to war, but even as he helped the Allies march through France, the Low Countries and Germany he rarely had to sleep alone. After the Legion became an international organization, he revealed his identity to the world, and Larry Graham became a celebrity. He dated movie stars and fashion models. He finally understood where Zeus was coming from.
He had thought he understood, at least. When Olivia came around, his world view turned upside down. They met in another continent, another war. Olivia was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen, with cafe au lait skin, deep emerald eyes and a dazzling smile that turned ladies’ man Larry into a fool for love. Her exotic looks, her bravery and strength, the hidden vulnerability beneath, they had swept him off his feet. He’d turned his back on twenty-odd years as a happy bachelor, wooed her – yes, at first he had only thought about getting in her pants, but that had changed quickly – and eventually won her heart. In the midst of the death and destruction of the First Asian War, he made her his bride. He had never been happier.
For a while.
Forever was such a long time.
A year had become ten, had become twenty. On their twentieth anniversary, she looked as beautiful as ever. Nothing had changed. Nothing had fucking changed at all. That is, nothing except how he felt.
Little things grew and became big things. Habits and mannerisms that once had been charming became annoying. He knew what she would say or do in almost every situation, and vice versa. Jokes that had made her laugh now only brought about tolerant smiles or annoyed grimaces. They got on each other’s nerves. She wanted to talk about their problems. He most definitely didn’t.
It wasn’t all bad, of course. Rome didn’t collapse in one day. Their work in the Legion had often kept them apart for weeks or even months at a time, and their reunions had been sweet. Their love would spark and rekindle, and things would once again be well. For a while. For some time. For a week or a month, or even a whole year.
But not forever.
Forever. The word became hateful. As twenty years together became thirty, Larry had fully understood Zeus’ plight. Even if Hera had been the sweetest, most beautiful woman in the world, he would have gotten sick of her, given enough time. Immortals could not be monogamous, he decided. At least Larry couldn’t be monogamous, not for longer than a lengthy prison term he couldn’t. He never could figure out how John Clarke managed to stay faithful to his woman. That smug, self-righteous stick in the mud never strayed; Larry had watched him carefully over the years, sure his fidelity was an act, and had found nothing. He even arranged a couple of blatant opportunities for John, ‘chance‘ encounters with very interested women, to no avail. Ultimate seemed to be perfectly happy with his rapidly aging vanilla wife. Larry envied John bitterly for that, and despised him as much as he despised himself. Unlike John, he hadn’t been able to resist when opportunities presented themselves.
It had started slowly, in fits and starts. A night with a secret agent in Minsk during a covert operation, followed by months of guilt and, perversely enough, a renewed passion for Olivia, which, as always, did not last. Discreet call girls while on station in Beijing. A particularly wild fling with Chastity Baal – and boy, didn’t that almost let the cat out of the bag! And many more. Larry always regretted the affairs, always came crawling back to Olivia. She never suspected anything, or if she did, she kept her suspicions to herself. Of late, Larry had come to resent that. Why didn’t she know something was wrong?
The one-night stands and short-lived affairs had become a habit after a while. Larry had thought about coming clean and taking things to their logical conclusion. That was when he discovered another aspect of the tragedy of Zeus. The marriage, flawed and hollow as it was, had become part of his identity. He could not conceive of not being married to Olivia. The thought of their parting ways simply terrified him. That realization had led to almost a year of fidelity.
On the eleventh month, Dawn Zhang had joined the Freedom Legion and Larry’s downfall had begun.
Dawn was twenty-two, of mixed Chinese and European ancestry, tall and slender and utterly beautiful. Her hair had turned platinum blond the day her ability to control and create winds manifested itself. Her smile melted Larry’s heart. Feelings he had not experienced since the beginning of his relationship with Olivia came back with a vengeance.
It was a complete disaster. She was a junior member of the Legion. He was one of her instructors, in a position of power over her, which made fraternization a clear violation of the Legion’s by-laws. She was in her early twenties and he had just celebrated his ninety-first birthday. They had nothing in common; the music she listened to was excruciating noise to him, and his cultural background was prehistoric twaddle to her. And yet his old jokes had made her laugh, possibly because they were so old she’d never heard of them. And Dawn’s initial hero worship had turned into friendship and mutual att
raction. A late night's conversation had ended with a kiss. Things had snowballed quickly after that.
Having an affair in the days of goggle-cams and wrist-comps was hard enough. Having an affair in the Atlantic Headquarters of the Freedom Legion, one of the most heavily guarded and watched facilities on the planet, was a heroic undertaking. Rank hath its privileges, fortunately, and Larry was a Founder, with access to the highest level codes and overrides. They had found secret times and places to be together, and the sneakiness of it all had only added spice to the whole thing.
Larry and Dawn had been in the throes of passion – or, as Dawn put it, screwing like two minks in heat – in a little-used subterranean hangar where several obsolete Legion aircraft gathered dust before being decommissioned. The hangar was deep enough underground and far enough away from the central headquarters that neither of them even noticed the first few explosions. It was only when the hangar lights dimmed and were replaced by red emergency lights that Larry realized something was wrong. Dawn paused her pounding for a second, and Larry grabbed her, got on top and finished what they had started. Whatever was happening topside, some things just couldn’t be interrupted.
Larry’s post-coital aftermath was normally pleasant and lazy. Now as sex faded away dread filled him. The hangar shook noticeably.
“We’re under attack!” Dawn shouted needlessly as she groped around for her uniform. Larry did not waste his breath while he poured himself into his iconic blue and yellow jumpsuit. Comic book mythology to the contrary, he was only the fastest man in the world when he ran; getting dressed took as long for him as for any highly agile Neo. In other words, it was a matter of seconds, but not the blink of an eye.
New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 7