It was just what I needed: an asshole to kill.
I slammed into him at bullet speeds, held on to him with one hand, and used the other to hammer at his head as we went careening off into the air. He was tough. Each time my clenched fist smashed into his head, shoulders or outraised arms, I hit him hard enough to shatter a tank like a crystal vase, but the asshole took the punches on his dark energy shield and fought back. Fighting in close quarters made it hard for him to slash me with his claws, but he still did some damage. The cuts he landed were shallow, but they went right through my defensive aura and into my flesh, just like the Lurker’s attacks had, and the Outsider energy poured into the wounds like a corrosive poison.
The only way to deal with it was to burn out that poison with more power from the Source. Once again, I started burning from the inside as I grabbed more energy than was good for me. I raised my strength; each new blow I rained upon Mr. Night rang with thunder, and his shields shattered; the last few punches cracked his skull open. He didn’t die like he should have, but if I kept it up, he eventually would. Keeping it up was hard, though. I was hurting myself almost as much as he was, and I was able to keep going only by channeling my rage, just like I’d done in the Ukraine. I let the old grievances come flooding out of their hiding places, tapped the endless anger that never seemed to go away, even after these last few weeks, when I’d been happier than ever before. That anger was my oldest friend, my bosom companion; it had nurtured and kept me alive, had driven my actions and my thoughts, and I had never truly wanted to give it up.
I should have known it would turn on me when I needed it most.
It was simple, really. Anger was a manifestation of hatred, and hatred was the one emotion the Outsiders had in common with the dwellers of this universe. I called on my hatred to fuel my power – and it touched the purple-black stuff trying to poison me.
Janus had told us about the Taint, how it had seeped into the insane extraterrestrial he had encountered in his travels through the galaxy. Adam had explained how a similar process had contaminated the Lurker and slowly but surely driven him insane.
I felt it happen to me. My rage became something alien, no longer my own, something aimed not at the assholes of the world, but at everything and everyone. It became a weight pressing down on my heart, turning any joy I’d ever felt into ashes. I kept pounding on Mr. Night, but only because he was there. I would have done the same to anybody who’d come into range.
I believed I would have done the same to Christine.
Determination, stubbornness, shining out from her.
This was how it was supposed to happen, just the way her dark twin had prophesized in another world. She would try to stop the process, and the Taint would jump into her. The cold knowledge cut through my rage for a moment and let me think clearly. For that moment, I was myself long enough to understand what was about to happen.
No.
Over the last few weeks I’d learned a lot about our special connection. How to use it. How to sever it if I had to. I used my treacherous rage one last time, used it against out soul link, and shut her out. An echo of Christine’s cry of anguish bounced around in my head for a few seconds, and then I was alone.
Except that wasn’t quite true. I still had company in there. My rage, and the Taint, mixing together, feeding off each other, changing me into their creature, faster than I’d feared.
Welcome to my world, Mr. Night whispered in my mind. I could tell he was dying, and he didn’t care. Come to think of it, I felt the same way.
I could still call upon the Source; there wasn’t enough Taint in me to stop that process, not yet; I’d go utterly insane long before I lost my powers. So I pulled all the stops, called the fire into me. We flew up in the sky and we burned together. It was almost over, and I found myself calling forth my true face, just so I could smile upon the asshole as I killed him, and me along with him.
I hated the assholes. I would kill them all if I could, but taking out this one would do just fine.
There was only one regret.
I’m sorry, Christine.
All that remained was fire and pain.
But only for a little whi –
Christine Dark
New York City, New York, May 22, 2013
She flew after them, after the struggling forms of Mark and Mr. Night, and a part of her – we all know which part – knew she was too late, but she tried anyway.
Her Christine-vision was up; she forced herself to look unto the awfulness that was Mr. Night, the better to blast him to smithereens, but Mark was too close, she needed a better angle to hit the monstrous creature without hitting Mark. Which meant she saw the Outsider energy blossom inside Mark like a malignant tumor that grew and spread and started eating him.
No, please God, no.
Christine reached out to him anyway.
She knew he was right, but she had to try, maybe she could contain the darkness, cut it out, do something!
He severed the connection. The brutal sundering shut off her special vision and made her tumble through the air. It felt as if one of her fingers, or even a whole limb, had been loped off.
She was alone.
While she recovered, Mark had disappeared into the clouds above, flying faster than he ever had before. Christine flew after him, but she was miles behind him when the cataclysmic explosion illuminated the skies over Manhattan. She pushed through the thermal pulse and the massive shockwave and saw the expanding ball of superheated gas, a miniature sun forming before her.
She couldn’t feel Mark’s presence anywhere.
Christine flew into the flames, not caring about the brutal heat that burned her skin through her aura and shield, screaming his name.
She flew back and forth for hours, for the rest of the night and most of the next day, calling out for him. She didn’t listen to Adam when he approached and tried to get her to stop. John couldn’t convince her, either, nor Olivia. In the end, it had been Condor who finally talked her into stopping the useless search. “You need rest,” he told her. “You know Face would have wanted you to rest.”
There were no tears that first night, or the night after, when she returned to Freedom Island. She asked for a place to sleep. Not her apartment, their apartment; she would never set foot there again. John gently set her down on a bed, covered her with a blanket, and let her be. She fell asleep almost immediately, and for that blessed span of time she found a little refuge in slumber.
But morning and reality came back soon enough, and there were plenty of tears then.
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, May 27, 2013
There were ninety-three graves on the Hill of Remembrance, and a hundred and seventy-five plaques on the Wall of Heroes; the names on the Wall represented the fallen who’d left behind no body to bury, or who had been claimed by their loved ones and laid to rest elsewhere.
Marco Ernesto Martinez got a plaque, standard Legionnaire issue: it had his name, date of birth and death, and the same simple phrase as on every other plaque on the Wall: ‘Died in defense of Humankind.’
Just another brick on the wall.
The ceremony took place the day after they’d given up the search for a body, and Mark had been officially declared dead. About fifty people had shown up; most of them hadn’t known Mark at all, or been mere acquaintances, people who only knew him as that ghetto guy without a face who liked to curse a lot. Their emotions had been shallow and remote, impersonal, even the ones who’d actually felt sorrow instead of cold satisfaction that Face-Off wasn’t
sullying the Legion’s good name any longer. Condor and Kestrel had been there, of course. Kestrel had actually wept quietly while the Legion’s Catholic chaplain – Mark had been raised Catholic, although he’d told her he’d been to one of their churches maybe three times in the last decade – gave a nice generic homily. Condor’s face had been frozen in a grim expression that appeared to have been carved in granite. He’d been the only speaker who actually said something meaningful during the service, and his pain had been like an extra spike in her heart.
Condor and Kestrel were the last people who’d known Mark, other than herself. His family was gone, and all his other friends were dead.
All thanks to me. They tried to help me, and they all got killed because of me.
The thought should have brought tears to her eyes but she had no tears left. She mostly felt cold, detached and hollow; she was drained, empty.
People had come by to commiserate. “He was a good man,” Uncle Adam said, his sorrow for her mixed with a terrible shame that he hadn’t been able to do more in the brutal fight over the Hudson. John, pretty much said the same thing. She’d wanted to scream at them. How could you know what kind of man he was? You didn’t know him!
Condor walked over to her. He didn’t say he was sorry, didn’t spit out some meaningless platitude. “It’s time to get back to work,” he told her.
She just looked at him.
“Today you bury Mark. Mourn him as long as you have to. I know I will. But you know what Mark would say if you let your grief paralyze you.”
Christine nodded. “He’d say it was time to stop fucking around,” she replied. She wanted to be angry at him, but thinking about what Mark would say actually brought a smile to her face. “He’d say that if I let this destroy me, the assholes would have won.”
“Exactly. They were trying to kill you, but taking Mark out was their Plan B.”
“They’ll do anything just so I don’t fulfill my shitty destiny. And I really want to just forget the whole thing.” She shook her head. “Mark would hate me if he saw how weak I am.”
“He’d never hate you, Christine. While we were cooling our heels after we stopped the New York bomb plot, we got to talking, a lot more than we ever had. He told me how much he admired you. You were completely unprepared for this whole mess, and you still kept your head and did what you had to. You just have to keep doing it.”
She nodded, her eyes closed tightly, and she felt the tears coming back. Mark’s first love, a runaway girl named Faye, had ended up dead in his arms. He’d kept on doing what he thought was right. He would have done so at any cost. If Christine had ended up corrupted by the Source or the Outsiders, he’d promised to kill her. His biggest fear was that she would die on him, or worse, that she would die at his hands, but he’d been willing to do whatever it took.
You were supposed to be the one mourning me, Mark. You were supposed to be the one who stopped me if I screwed up.
“Fuck it,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry?”
She spoke more loudly, so much so that people at the memorial service stopped talking and looked at her. “I said fuck it! You’re right, if I lie down like some weeping willow in a shitty romance novel, the assholes win! Uncle Adam!” she shouted.
He came over right quick. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything sucks! Everything is shit, but you know what? I’m not going to take it anymore!”
She was crying now, but she was also smiling, a nasty smile that made people turn their heads when they saw it. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.
“Let’s go deal with the Source.”
* * *
It hadn’t been that easy, of course.
For one, she probably shouldn’t have blurted out her announcement where half the Legion Council could hear it. They’d all had an opinion of what she should do, as well as a billion concerns about what could happen. After gently and not-so gently prodding her to act, they’d discovered plenty of reasons to wait when she made her decision.
She smiled and nodded and said the right things, and later that night she stood in Uncle Adam’s laboratory and workshop, surrounded by force fields and sensor systems and a dozen other doodads, none of which would be much help if things went wrong, except for the weapon systems ready to blast her at a moment’s notice.
“I still think this might be easier if we began the process in closer proximity to the Source itself,” Adam said for the umpteenth time.
“Sure, but if something goes wrong, New York might get blown up. I already saved the city from that once, and I don’t want to worry about it.”
From Adam’s expression, he’d also thought about the danger but had been willing to take the chance. This was the moment his Damon half had been waiting for, and that his Kenneth half had become just as obsessed about. Their new persona had been learning new Words whenever Christine let him borrow the Codex, and it was going a lot faster than it had for Damon, but it was still too slow for his liking. He was hoping that, when Christine took over the Source, she would help him fulfill his potential.
They’d all find out what she was capable of soon enough. And if things went wrong… They could only hope that all the lethal doodads aimed at her would suffice to put her down before she could do too much damage. Condor was the designated trigger-man, at her request and over the objections of many Legionnaires. She thought Mark would have approved of the choice. All the Legion heavy hitters were on stand-by as well, as yet another fail-safe. She hoped they wouldn’t need to find out whether or not all the precautions they’d taken were enough.
“Ready when you are, Christine,” Adam said.
“Okay. Starting now.” She leaned back on the chair in the center of the room and closed her yes.
Christine thought about the Source, visualized the ever-shifting object she’d seen in that special underground facility in Central Park; which also was where she’d been abducted from her universe. That was the place where the First Neo had spoken to her and tricked her into coming to his lair. She visualized the base, the holding pit where the Source had been contained.
You mustn’t do this.
Speak of the little devil.
Shut the fuck up, she told the First. Her perceptions shifted, and she found herself floating through some sort of astral plane, a swirling fog speckled with glimpses of color here and there that she realized were thoughts and memories, some of them her own. Up ahead was a glowing mass of shifting energies: the Source. And standing between her and her goal, the wizened man-child who had offered her wisdom and tried to kill her instead.
You really don’t want to get in my way, shorty.
The First didn’t waste any more time trying to talk her out of it. He attacked.
In a way, it was heroic; the little guy didn’t have enough power to fight her, but he felt he had to try, so he went and did it anyway. Mark would have appreciated it, and that was why she didn’t kill him after his psychic attacks bounced off her like so many spitballs. That, and a sudden thought: if the First had been able to send her to an alternate future, he might be able to send her home if her other options failed. So she swatted him aside, strongly enough to make him leave her alone, but not so much she fried his brain. She might have a use for him one day.
After the child-thing disappeared, crying and whining all the way, only the Source remained.
Here goes nothing.
The Source didn’t have a mind; it wasn’t self-aware, not even to the degree that an ant or a fruit fly were. It was a thing of instincts and hardwired programming, more than a computer but less than true artificial intelligence. She wondered if this was the best the Cosmic Nerds could do when it came to sentient devices, or if this was the only form of AI they trusted to be out on its own. Something more advanced might choose to deviate from its predetermined path and start blowing up stars because they looked so pretty when they went nova.
There was too much power and information in the Source for even
a Neo to handle safely, but she’d prepared for it and built some pretty strong filters in her mind, letting her do her thing without getting turned into a drooling zombie. The first thing she saw was just how much power was contained within the Source: more raw energy than the sun possessed lurked beneath the colorful multihued shell. She couldn’t begin to understand how it was safely contained, how it avoided turning the Earth into a cloud of sublimated matter just from the waste heat something this powerful should be radiating. And yet there it was, cool as a cucumber, buried a few hundred feet beneath New York City with no one the wiser.
And those silly men from the Humanity Foundation had thought their big bad H-bomb could destroy something this powerful. That would have never happened. It might have cracked open the container, however, and the ensuing conflagration would have probably deep fried everything all the way to the Appalachians and boiled off a substantial proportion of the Atlantic Ocean. Christine shuddered just thinking about the disaster they’d almost failed to prevent. They should have gotten the keys to every city in the world, because nowhere on Earth would have been spared from that mess.
No time to dwell on that, though. It was time to stop another disaster.
There was something wrong with the Source, like a flaw in a diamond. It had been sabotaged early on by an agent of the Outsiders, maybe even before it’d arrived on Earth like a crashing comet. Originally, the Source was supposed to seek out and empower a handful of people with the right combination of ethics, mental acumen and strength of character, and turn them into the guardians of the planet, meant to gently guide the species towards higher levels of civilization over the next couple of centuries. Instead, the flaw had caused the Source to send out power packets more or less at random. Not completely at random, she saw: most of the people who ended up winning the cosmic Powerball met some of the criteria to become a guardian, just not all of it. Some had the brains but not the character; others had the ethics but weren’t that smart, or had strong wills but the moral sense of a sewer rat. A few had the whole package, just not quite enough of it. All of which had led to the mess the world had become over the ensuing century.
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 21