- and realized he’d gone into a daydream again.
“You just underwent one of your fugue states,” Doctor Cohen said. “This one lasted twenty seconds or so.”
“They are getting worse,” John replied. Being out of control terrified him. He knew how much damage he could inflict in twenty seconds. Combined with his increasingly shorter temper, the fugues made him a walking time bomb. He had come much too close to killing that idiotic blogger over a stupid question. To make matters worse, the blogger had been murdered by pro-Neo fanatics upon his return to the US; John had learned the news just before leaving for Chicago. The backlash from that death was yet to be felt, but it made regaining control of himself even more important.
“Tell me everything you can about the blackouts and the other symptoms you’ve been experiencing.”
John looked into the man's eyes for some moments. He still felt some distrust for the therapist, kind eyes or not. He had no choice, however. He began talking.
Hunters and Hunted
New York City, New York, March 14, 2013
Archangel looked around the decaying neighborhood with slight twinge of nostalgia. Oh, this was not quite like the slums where he had grown up in the Rodina. For one, things were in less disrepair than in the world of his youth, the post-war Russia that had been abandoned by her erstwhile allies and left to wither and die. Still, the atmosphere of neglect and despair was similar enough to bring back memories. Here dwelt many with nothing to lose, and those with nothing to lose enjoyed a form of freedom that he could appreciate even if he no longer shared it. He had much to lose now, and even more to take.
“This is the place,” Lady Shi said confidently, pointing at the derelict building that squatted forlornly on a seemingly uninhabited city block. “This is as close to a home as the Faceless Vigilante has ever had. I can feel it calling to me.”
“Is he here?” Archangel asked.
Lady Shi shrugged. “Perhaps. There are psychic defenses in the building. I can sense he has come and gone in there many times, and fairly recently. The rest is hidden from me.” She clearly did not like being thwarted even in this minor way, and her smile had a definite edge now. Archangel filed the information for future reference. He seldom let anything make him angry. Anger gave others power over you. He might need to make Lady Shi angry one day.
They had arrived in three cars, luxury versions of the Jeep Seven that the American military loved so much. The vehicles very obviously did not belong in this neighborhood, but the locals knew that it didn’t pay to be too curious about the affairs of others. The three Neolympians and a dozen henchmen got out; four of the men were armed with the new special weapons that were supposed to neutralize Neolympian powers. Archangel gestured at the group and they took positions surrounding the building.
“Shall we?” he asked his fellow demigods. Lady Shi nodded. Medved only grunted. Archangel strolled towards the building’s entrance and his new colleagues followed. Even as he crossed the sidewalk he felt a distasteful psychic ambiance around the building, a subtle working that made people want to stay away without knowing why. While most of his talents were physical, Archangel had studied under the most accomplished mentalists in the Dominion and he had learned to recognize and deflect many forms of psychic attack. He was also wearing a special amulet meant to ward him against such things. He did not waver at all. Neither did his companions.
The front door was open, and through it he heard music, a violin, playing a sad and beautiful melody. He smiled – someone was home, which made for a good start – and walked inside, ready for action. Nothing. No gunshots or bursts of energy welcomed him, just darkness and the sad music.
The interior of the building looked as dilapidated as it had outside. Either the faceless man preferred an ascetic existence or this was merely part of the façade behind which the real lair hid. He started up the stairs.
The front door shut behind him, a slam nearly as loud as a gunshot. The violin playing ceased at the very same instant, letting the echoes of the slamming door fill the ensuing quietness. Medved whirled around, his clawed hands at the ready, but there was nobody there. Archangel chuckled. A horror movie cliché used against three real-life monsters? How amusing. Medved was not amused. He lifted one leg and kicked the door open, snapping off its hinges and sending it flying into the street. Archangel smiled indulgently and started back up the stairs.
On the third step, the stairs changed. He changed. His perspective twisted, grew smaller. Day became dusk, and he was now on the third floor of the kommunalka where he had lived when he was a child. Where he lived now, for he was a child once again, a malnourished, ill-favored boy eking out a miserable existence in the slums of Leningrad. He was no longer walking up the stairs of an abandoned building in New York, he was running up the wider stairs of the ill-maintained apartment building in Leningrad that he called his home, and others were running after him. It was May 16, 1958, and he was eleven years old. Archangel was gone. He was little Feodor Igorovich. Feodor the runt, a weakling in a world where the weak were prey.
No.
The denial was weak and useless. The fear that drove him was much more immediate, the more so because he knew what was going to happen. There was an older boy waiting for him on the fourth floor, and even as he ran up he saw him. Sergei, the leader of the gang of semi-feral children who had decided to teach the defiant thieving runt a lesson once and for all.
“Where are you going, hooyesos?” Sergei asked him, and Feodor froze at the top of the stairs for a second before trying to push his way through. Even then he had thought things through clinically. Better to try to evade Sergei alone than to face the half-dozen boys below. Sergei was briefly surprised, but not for long enough. He grabbed Feodor before he could rush past him and pushed the smaller boy up against a wall. Feodor's face slammed into the wall, and blood started running down his nose. The pain was familiar and paralyzing. “Not so fast, cocksucker,” Sergei hissed behind Feodor’s ear. His breath stank of cabbage and cheap cigarettes. “I got you now.”
Feodor struggled. Archangel knew what would follow, the savage beating he had barely survived, the nightmarish trip to the hospital where uncaring doctors and nurses had nearly finished what Sergei had started. The limp that had not healed until his Neolympian powers had manifested themselves years later. The part of him that was still Archangel braced itself for the pain to come.
“What will I do with you, hooyesos, little cocksucker?” Sergei wondered. “Ah, yes.”
The agony when the knife pierced Feodor’s kidney was enormous, all the worse because it was unexpected.
“You think you can steal from me and live? Fuck your mother!” Sergei hissed as he stabbed Feodor again and again.
No, that did not happen, that’s not how it...
The pain paid no attention to his denials. The onrushing darkness as his life ebbed out was too real, too absolute.
His vision narrowed into a vanishing point, and he was no more.
Light returned and he found himself running up the stairs again. Thrown against the wall, again. “What will I do with you, little cocksucker?” Sergei wondered. “Ah, yes.”
The older boy grabbed Feodor and flung him over the railing of the stairs. Feodor screamed all the way down. Impact. Bones broke. Blood streamed out of his mouth, choking him. Darkness. Death.
Again.
This time he survived the fall, became a cripple. His powers never manifested themselves. He lived a life of ongoing misery until the day he purposely pushed his wheelchair onto the path of the Petrograd Metro. Darkness. Death.
Again.
Feodor looked at the blade flashing towards his eyes, the last thing he would ever see. Suffered a beating that ended when one of Sergei’s boys stamped on his neck until it broke. Was carried sobbing to the top of the building and thrown off from it. Had his pants pulled down and saw Sergei slashing at his genitals.
Again and again. Darkness, death.
The p
ast became eternity, an assault of might-have-beens that became hell.
* * *
The men outside waited for several minutes. They saw strange lights flashing from the building, and heard faded and oddly distorted voices, and possibly screams. The minutes stretched into nearly half an hour. Eight men went in after their boss. They did not come out. More muted screams came from inside the structure.
The remaining four looked at each other and waited some more. Archangel did not encourage initiative among his underlings. After another hour had passed, they drew straws and the loser reluctantly approached the doorway, gun drawn. He passed the threshold, and did not come out. The screams, if that’s what they were, continued unabated. The remaining three henchmen decided to wait some more.
The afternoon turned to evening.
One of the three suggested they draw straws again. The response from the other two was a chorus of “Yob tvoyu mat!”
A consensus was reached and the men continued to wait, trying to ignore the sounds coming from the building.
Chapter Thirteen
Christine Dark
Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013
Christine had never been to Chicago. She didn’t even know offhand what Chicago’s skyline looked like. She was pretty sure, however, that the Chicago of her universe did not have a shiny red skyscraper shaped like a gigantic dildo right in the middle of it.
“Holy crap!” The monstrous erection – no other word could describe it – towered over all the other buildings of the city. It shone with an oily sheen, its monochrome awfulness an assault with a deadly weapon on the senses. She looked at Mark, who was also watching Big Red raptly.
“Welcome to Chicago, home of the Tower of Power,” he said. “I’ve seen it on pictures and video, but they don’t do it justice.” He leaned towards his seat’s window to get a better look. Christine wanted to look away, but couldn’t turn away from it. It was just too awful. “When the sun hits it right, entire parts of Chicago turn completely red,” he added.
“What the hell is it? And who allowed it to be built?”
The Condor Jet made a stealthy run over the city, well away from normal flying routes. Its course took them a few hundred feet past the Tower of Power. Christine could not see any windows, seams or openings of any kind, just shiny redness everywhere.
“Short story is, an insane Neo built it in a matter of hours,’ Mark explained. “It sort of grew and literally ate the building it replaced. Luckily it did so slowly enough that everyone inside supposedly managed to escape, although there are rumors that a couple people never made it out and are missing to this day.”
“And why did the guy built that thing?”
“Why do you assume it was a guy?” Mark asked; she could sense a smile in his voice.
“That thing isn’t even a phallic symbol, it’s a freaking mega-dick on a stick!” Christine replied. “That’s the most guy thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Okay, yeah, it was a guy. The Crimson Overlord was his name, and he thought he was doing Chicago a favor. The Tower of Power is a giant electrical generator. It actually provides enough energy for most of Illinois and Indiana. The Overlord figured he’d get the keys to the city for his creation. Instead he got lawsuits and arrest warrants. That’s when he revealed the Tower of Power could also be used as a weapon. It took just about all the Neos in the Midwest to take him down. Big mess, large death toll.”
“So why is the tower still standing?”
“Nobody has figured a safe way to knock it down. For one, the material it is made of is extremely tough and it self-repairs. Also, it does provide free clean energy; nobody knows how it does it, even the big brains like Daedalus Smith are baffled, but it does. So now the Chicago Sentinels, the local Neo team, make their headquarters there. And people started calling Chicago ‘the Tower City;’ from what I hear the locals don’t like that name one bit. Even mentioning the Tower of Power will get you dirty looks or worse. They like to pretend it doesn’t exist.”
“Good luck with that. It’s like not noticing a, well, you know, right in your face. So just one guy did all that damage?”
“Yes, it was another Neo crime again humanity,” Mark said bitterly, his good humor vanishing. To her empathy-sense, it was like a candle being snuffed by a sudden wind. His mood change actually hurt her a little bit. “We are a dangerous bunch.”
“You tell her, killer,” Kestrel piped in, breaking what had been a very nice spell of silence.
“I’m not trying to put Neos down or anything,” Christine said apologetically. “It’s that I keep seeing things that… well, they scare the living pee out of me. In my world, a crazy guy with a gun can kill a dozen people. Here, a crazy Neo can kill a dozen thousand people!”
“Yes, it happens, although usually the nutters get stopped pretty quickly,” Mark said. “On average, about ten, twelve thousand people a year get killed in Neo-related incidents in the US. But,” he added quickly when Christine gasped at the figure. “But, car accidents kill about twenty thousand people a year in the US. Used to be more like forty thousand, until, get this, a Neo by the name Doc Slaughter designed a crash survival system that cut fatalities from car accidents by almost fifty percent. Yeah, we do a lot of damage, but we do a lot of good, too. Some of us have managed to do things like cure several forms of cancer, which saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year. We – speaking loosely, I haven’t cured anything except a few terminal cases of being an asshole – do a lot of good.”
“But when we go bad, we go really bad,” Kestrel said. “Cure a disease one day, unleash a plague that turns people into pink goo the next. Keeps vanillas on their toes.”
Christine didn’t need to ask what ‘vanilla’ stood for.
“Cut it out, Kestrel,” Mark said before turning back to Christine. “I don’t want to lay this on too thick. Sorry. “
“It’s okay,” Christine said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Mark looked at Kestrel to curtail any more smartass commentary, but she had sullenly turned her back on them and was pointedly ignoring their conversation. He leaned closer to Christine and spoke in a soft voice. “Truth is, you didn’t say anything that hasn’t crossed my mind already. I don’t want to sugarcoat things, okay? We’re a mess, us Neos. We are smarter than humans – our average IQ is in the 140 range – but we also have a lot of mental issues. Something like mild autism is relatively common. OCD and the entire spectrum of personality disorders, ditto. We are all adrenaline junkies. Want to hear a great Neo factoid? There are about five thousand Neos around, but the total number should be closer to ten thousand; that’s how many have been recorded over the last century or so. The others all got killed one way or another, typically while chasing their next thrill ride. We are our own primary cause of death, by the way. Neos killing Neos.”
“Okay. Scaring me again.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to keep the bullshit to a minimum, and it’s hard because I don’t know if I’m bullshitting myself, or being too gloomy.” He managed to sigh despite having no mouth. “I’m definitely the wrong guy to be a Neo cheerleader. I can see both sides of the argument, and which side I’m on depends on my mood that morning. I don’t like being hated, but it’s easy to understand why we are. Not that I want people to love me, just to leave me the fuck alone. But it’s not a simple situation.”
“I can see that. That’s why I like math. It’s all pretty black and white, or zero and one if you want to get binary about it. Except for a few annoying things like irrational numbers, but I mostly just round them up and ignore them. When it comes to people, well, they are all irrational numbers.”
“After you work on the streets for a while, it’s easy to start thinking of most people as either assholes or morons. You start expecting the worst from everyone.” He shrugged. “If you do you’re rarely disappointed, but it sort of sours you on everything.”
“I tend to be a proponent of the ‘People Suck’ theory myself, bu
t then you start finding exceptions to the rule,” Christine said. Just like Mark, she wasn’t really equipped to defend people in general. Even her fellow geeks were not exactly plaster saints: half of them had zero social skills, half of them were eternally horny in the grossest and most inappropriate ways, and half of them had annoying habits not even their mothers could love, and yes, she knew that was too many halves. “People can be a pain, okay.” She paused, at a loss for words for a change.
“I’m assuming there is a ‘but’ after that,” Mark said after a bit.
“Yeah, I’m working on it.” Thank God she’d never volunteered at a suicide hotline, or she’d have garnered quite the body count. “But, really, when you get down to it, most people aren’t evil. They just want to do their thing and be left alone. Even in high school, the a-holes were a minority. They are just noticeable because, well, they are a-holes.”
“Yeah, I keep telling myself something like that,” Mark agreed. “Thanks to Cassandra and Father Alex, I believe it most days.”
“If you don’t, it’s going to be too easy to become an a-hole yourself,” Christine said, and he nodded.
“We’ll be landing shortly, kiddies,” Condor said from the cockpit. “No need to fasten your seat belts.”
Christine looked out a window. The Condor Jet was hovering over what looked like a warehouse section of Chicago near Lake Michigan, having left downtown and the giant red dildo behind.
New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 23