New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance
Page 30
This was the place of her nightmares about Mark; her visions about Mark, to be accurate. While she’d been moving on and getting it on with John, Mark had been trapped in this colorless Hell. Which made her the Worst Significant Other Ever.
This was no time to wallow in self-guilt. Christine rose to her feet, and realized she was wearing the clothes, weapons and pointed ears of her favorite World of Warcraft character, the Elven rogue, Snipe. That only happened when she ended up in Dreamland. She hated being in that weird mental realm. You could suffer and die there, but it rarely took, which meant you could suffer and die over and over again.
Mark was trapped in a dream world created by Mr. Night. That had to be at least as bad as it sounded, if not worse. She had to find him.
She could feel his near-panicked worry painfully loud and clear as well.
As if Mark’s thoughts had summoned them, several figures came around a corner and started moving toward her. Their leader didn’t have a head; well, he did, but he was carrying it under one arm. He was wearing a white outfit that matched the unnatural pallor of his skin. She knew him well, from brief but intense acquaintance. Archangel. None of the others looked familiar, except for a guy who reminded her of pictures of Joseph Stalin.
The hungry ghosts charged her, growling obscenities and brandishing assorted pointy things. Uh, oh cubed.
In Dreamland, the rules were different than in the real world, and they changed depending on the wishes and the willpower of the people involved. Christine didn’t have her usual superpowers while she was there. On the other hand, she wasn’t a powerless human, either. Her Snipe persona had a host of little roguish spells, at level 90 proficiency. She used a basic ability and vanished in a puff of smoke before the ghost mob reached her. The pack of d-bags milled around uncertainly while she tiptoed the eff away from them.
She was. There were a good dozen bands of marauding dream critters – they weren’t ghosts; she was pretty sure they were nothing but bad memories given form, just to torment the actual ghosts trapped there – but she stealthily slipped past them until she reached a section of ruins with three fairly intact walls; it had been turned into an impromptu fort by barricading the fourth wall with a pile of debris. Several people carrying a variety of improvised weapons stood within the fort; two of them were keeping watch by the barricade.
One of the guards was Mark.
She got a bit weak in the knees when she saw him, and her eyes stung. Seeing him should have been the best moment in her life, but amidst the intense joy Christine also felt sick to her stomach, and so guilty about everything she just wanted to curl up and die.
She set her feelings aside. There was no time.
“Here,” she said out loud, and dropped her stealth.
“Get in here, before the ghosts decide to rush you,” were his first words to her. Always practical, Mark was. Christine did as she was told; the others looked curiously at her but didn’t say anything. She only recognized one of Mark’s new friends – Medved, the big Russian dude, and Mr. Night’s previous stolen body.
Once inside, she and Mark looked at each other silently for a few seconds.
Mark was the first to break the silence. “What’s with the pointy ears? Love the outfit, by the way.”
“I become this gaming character of mine whenever I end up in Dreamland,” she explained.
“Neat. I’m gonna have to try that game one of these days. Do they have big dumb berserker types in it?”
“You could be an Orc, but they are Horde, and my characters are all Alliance. I suppose you could be a Dwarf.”
“I think they prefer to be called ‘little people’ nowadays,” he said in the deadpan tone she’d come to love.
She started to laugh, but burst into tears instead.
In an instant, he was there, holding her in her arms; he was shaking. “I thought I’d never see you again,” he said, and even though he had no face she knew he was sobbing as well.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “I thought you were dead, Mark, we all did, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Hey,” he said, tightening his embrace. “Hey. You got nothing to be sorry about. You didn’t do this to me.”
No, but a few months after we buried your notional corpse, I ended up in bed with John Clarke, she thought but didn’t say out loud, and made sure the thought didn’t seep through their mental connection. This wasn’t the time or place to fess up.
They stopped talking for a bit, and just held each other, probably longer than they should have. “You mentioned time was of the essence,” he finally said. “We’ve beaten off a ghost attack already, but they usually try to get us a couple of times a night. We’d better get down to business before they come back.”
Christine read between the lines: every day and night must be an endless series of raids and small battles, ending in victory or death by torture, only to start all over again the next day. A Tim Burton-Marquis De Sade collaborative version of Valhalla, torture-porn style. Just the kind of thing to appeal to Mr. Night.
“Okay,” she said, still holding on to him, and avoiding looking him in the figurative eye, because if she did she’d start crying all over again. “Out in the real world, I’m being teleported by Mr. Night, kinda like he did to Janus, back at that base in New York.”
“Fuck. Janus was never the same after that.”
“Yeah. Mr. Night said something about meeting his Masters.”
“How do we stop him?”
“Well, he’s using your body.”
“I know. I can tell.” From the way he tensed up, she knew he was thinking the same thing she was: her trip to an alternate timeline where Dark Christine Dark ruled the earth, side by side with her consort, Mr. Night – who resided in Mark’s body. History seemed to be repeating itself.
“Yeah, it’s all kinds of bad. On the other hand, it is your body. Maybe you can take the steering wheel away from him.”
“Yeah. I guess I might.” He paused for a second before going on. “Even if I reclaim control, I’m still fucked, you know that. The Outside stuff got into me. I remember what your other self said about that.”
The stuff doesn’t go away after you let it in. Mark had let the Outside in. “I know what she said. That doesn’t mean it’s the truth, okay? Maybe I can figure a way out. An exorcism, whatever. Uncle Adam will help, he used to be tainted, and now he’s free from the stuff. All clear, no darkness or evil Thetans or whatever.”
“Okay, we can talk about it later. We can’t let Mr. Night deliver you to the Outsiders. So let’s do it.”
“Oh, so you expect me to come up with the plan, figure out how to implement it, and do all the heavy lifting?” she said, half in jest.
“I’m just the sidekick, Armageddon Girl.”
“I’m Dark Justice.”
“You say potato, I say Armageddon Girl. Anyway, this was your idea, Frodo, so you get to figure out how to get us to Mount Doom.”
“Whatever, Samwise.” Or are you Gollum, doomed to sacrifice yourself? The nasty thought stuck to her like an indelible stain. “I figure this is going
to work kinda like when I followed the Dreamer inside John’s head, only in reverse.” And back then my super-empathy and semi-telepathy and whatnot were all in working order, instead of working only half the time. Well, there was only one way to find out if she was up to the job. At the very least, her head was going to end up hurting. A lot.
“Okay, I’m going in.”
Face-Off
The Darkling Plains, Time Undetermined
I watch Christine close her eyes and concentrate. I have no idea how she’s going to pull this latest trick, but I know she will.
All I have to do is keep her alive.
Nothing happens for a bit. I can hear screams out in the distance – the ghosts have found someone else nearby, and are having their fun with him – but nothing close enough to worry me. I take a quick look back at Christine. She’s still concentrating, her face screwed up in a determined expression, and I get the feeling that she’s hurting, although with our weakened connection it’s hard to tell for sure.
She’s feeling guilty about something, I can feel that much. I figure she can tell me about it after we’re out of here.
I have no clue how I know this, but the knowledge is in my head. To get somewhere, you need to visualize your destination and then jump into the realm in-between, a place that is somehow linked to all of spacetime, an echo of the time when the whole universe was contained within a single point. I can see our destination, a place so far away it’s taking a good while to get there. There are Things waiting for us, and even the brief glimpse I catch of them is enough to make me want to die. The burst of horror and revulsion actually works in our favor, because we come to a stop in the blackness.
Home. I try to visualize our place at Freedom Island, but I can’t get it right. I was too busy being happy to really let things sink in and pay attention to my surroundings. So I go for the place I’m most familiar with.
I picture Cassandra’s home and my crash pad there. Not home, but the closest thing to it I had for most of my adult life.
We arrive with a bang, and I find out that my teleportation skills suck. A good teleport arrives to his destination standing perfectly still, able to match speeds with his target location. When I do it, we come out of the portal moving at several hundred miles an hour. Don’t ask me why; I figure that Christine can explain it to me when she has the chance. I catch a very brief glimpse of my room before everything explodes as we plow through the old building and end up tumbling through the streets in an avalanche of debris. The street had plenty of potholes to begin with, so the property damage we inflict is relatively minor, and the crash only hurts my pride.
“Guess we made it,” I say, still holding on to her.
She looks at me, her eyes wide with terror. “Oh, no.”
I try to ask her what’s wrong, and I feel something cold and slimy crawling under my skin. My vision shuts off, and I feel my arms and hands trembling uncontrollably as Christine pushes me away. And then they are no longer my arms and hands, it’s no longer my body. For a brief moment, my mind touches Mr. Night’s as he takes control once again.
It’s bad. Most of what I see doesn’t stick; my brain blocks it out, luckily. What little I remember is horrible enough, like bleeding out while submerged in an open sewer that has been heated to the boiling point, while screeching demons beneath the surface slash at you with razor blades, only worse. The insanity is the worst part, his gleeful desperate search for oblivion because existence has become sheer torture, alleviated only by the suffering of others.
I call back. Sappy, but I don’t mind.
I head back into Hell.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Freedom Legion
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, December 13, 2013
“And after that, Mr. Night teleported away,” Christine Dark said, concluding her report. “I didn’t dare grabbing him again, and I was too weak to take him out. So he got away, with Mark’s body. With Mark’s mind trapped somewhere inside.”
John Clarke touched her shoulder. She shrugged off his hand; he felt as if someone had stabbed his heart with a shard of ice. “I’m sorry,” she said when she noticed what she had done. “I just… I just don’t want to be touched right now, okay? Mark was holding me, and then it was Mr. Night touching me, and I could feel his mind, his…” She shivered. “I’ve taken two showers and I still feel unclean.”
“I’m so sorry,” John said numbly.
“It’s understandable,” Olivia O’Brien said; Artemis was debriefing Christine, with John attempting to provide moral support, and failing miserably. “You’ve been through a lot, Christine. We don’t have to debrief you tonight.”
“It’s okay,” she said, sounding anything but. “Maybe something I saw will help. I can’t believe we went through all that mess to get him, and he still managed to escape.”
“It wasn’t all for nothing,” Olivia said. “Nebiru got a good read of his aura and psychic signature. Our Kirlian detectors should be able to pick him up if he shows up within a quarter mile of them, and we can calibrate teleport inhibitors to identity and intercept him. If he makes even the smallest mistake, we’ll be able to take him down.”
“Just try not to kill him outright, okay? I think I might be able to release Mark, if I have enough time.”
“We’ll do our best,” Olivia said, which was a diplomatic way of saying ‘Fat chance.’ Overpowering a Type Three without killing him was almost impossible; John’s capture had been a glaring exception to that rule. They would try, John knew. He knew he would try himself, even if that meant the return of his woman’s ex-lover. Unfortunately, or not so unfortunately, they would most likely fail.
They went over the events of the night a couple more times before it was over. “If you can think of anything else, let us know,” Olivia said, concluding the interview. “Go get some rest.”
“Thank you,” Christine said. They left the office and headed out of Freedom Hall.
“Christine…” John began to say when they were on the elevator down. He stopped when he realized he had no idea how to continue.
“I couldn’t tell him,” she said. “I didn’t want to upset him when we were about to fight for our lives, and there wasn’t time afterwards. I couldn’t tell him I’d been cheating on him for two months.”
“Christine… I love you.” It was a simple statement, and it had the advantage of being nothing but the truth.
She didn’t say it back. “I know. Mark said the same thing to me, just before Mr. Night pushed him back into his Dreamland version of Hell. Oh, God, I thought he was dead.” She furiously wiped her eyes. “I don’t want to cry anymore.”
John hugged her, and, after a heartbreaking moment of hesitation, she hugged him back. “I don’t know what to do, okay?” she said in between sobs. “And yes, I love you too, John.”
They rode the rest of the way to the ground floor in silence. John was torn between joy and dread.
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, December 16, 2013
Adam Slaughter-Trent woke up with a start, the last images of the nightmare still flashing in front of his eyes.
Ever since he’d fought the tainted soul fragment of Damon Trent – and lost – his nights had been plagued with dreams of that night. Sleeping had become a difficult chore. Luckily he didn’t have much time for sleep.
Today’s schedule would eat up nineteen of the next twenty-four hours. He hurriedly got ready for the grueling workday and headed for his office.
The first item on his schedule involved yet another revision of the training regime
n for new recruits. There were too many young Neos who needed to learn the basics of handling their powers, and not enough time or teachers, so once again they’d had to cut corners. The Legion had inducted almost a hundred new members in the past month, including (shockingly) half a dozen Type Threes. Getting them ready in time was an impossible task; new candidate classes usually averaged thirty to forty students, of which only ten or so were accepted. During this emergency, they were inducting as many people as they could, and training was suffering as a result. Adam wondered how many young Neos would die because they’d go into battle unprepared.
Less than if the Genocide kills everyone on the planet, was the harsh answer. Future historians would have the luxury to dissect and critique the decisions made by the Legion and the rest of the planet. The existence of future historians would mean their ancestors’ decisions had led to victory, or at least survival, which was victorious enough.
Somebody was waiting for him at his office. “Uncle Adam?”
His dual nature warred briefly inside of him. A flash of irritation at the disruption of his impossibly busy schedule was pushed aside by a surge of concern – this was his only living relative, after all, and he owed her a great deal, not least because his failure had led to her lover’s death. “Hello, Christine,” he said as he sat down facing her. She’d been curled up in the armchair he had set up across his desk. From the looks of it, she’d been crying. “What can I do for you?”
“You can tell me how to save Mark,” she said. “Even if I manage to evict Mr. Night from his body, he’s still going to be contaminated with Outsider-stuff. Is there any way to get rid of it?”
Adam had read the reports, although he’d been too busy to speak with Christine himself until now. He chided himself for his coldness towards someone he loved almost like a daughter. “It’s not impossible,” he said, which was true enough, if perhaps more optimistic than circumstances warranted. “Your father managed to exorcise the taint by fragmenting his Mind-Soul Construct.” He hated that cumbersome term, but it was the closest the English language could come to expressing the phenomenon underlying the consciousness of every sentient being.