Keeping an eye to the sky, he followed the ever-churning plume of black smoke to its source some twenty miles over the Jersey State Line in a shithole town called Lodi. Standing on the main road into town looking down the hill at the square, Ares saw his first living United States Citizens. The dozen men at the bottom of the hill were strangely dressed in thick orange rubber suits covering them from head to toe with careful attention paid to the wrists and ankles taped tightly shut, their heads protected by tented hoods attached to the suits with long hoses jutting out of the back running to fresh oxygen tanks behind them. All of them wore armbands emblazoned with ARES, worked furiously. From the backs of four garbage trucks, ten of the men tossed bodies by the pitchfork-full, onto the raging inferno churning upward in the sky, its kindling of blood and bones no less than two stories high. Two other men, with black packs on their backs, kept the fire roaring with flamethrower. Any spot that threatened to flicker was instantly brought back to life.
It seemed to Ares that what remained of the Lodi town square was now an open crematorium. And a busy one.
Turn. Stab. Heave. Turn. Toss.
Turn. Stab. Heave. Turn. Toss.
Like robots, they just kept at it, no break, not even to catch their breath. Not even to make sure the dead were dead. Staring down at them, Ares watched one worker go for the next body, stab it forcefully in the chest, go to pick it up, and its eyes opened. It started screaming, or trying to, its mouth hung open in an obvious scream but the sound that emerged was pitiful at best. Without hesitation or remorse, the man tossed the living, but dying, woman, onto the fire. After a few moments, she didn’t move or cry anymore.
Disgusted but glad to find someone, anyone, alive and kicking, Ares sauntered down the steep hill trying to hold back his stomach against the rising tide of vomit that grew stronger the nearer he came to the burning corpses. The men in their heavy suits were so engrossed in what they were doing they didn’t see him approach until he was on top of them. Before Ares could speak, they dropped their pitchforks—bodies and all—to draw the weapons at their sides. “No need for violence,” Ares intoned, cleared his throat, and held up his hands to show he meant no harm. “I just want to talk.”
While the tall rugged stranger looked healthy enough to the workers’ eyes, they had strict orders to shoot any civilian who came near. Lodi was a Hot Zone, everyone here was infected with Major Falls; if they didn’t show outward signs of it they soon would. The foreman of the group, a man by the name of Harold Lauder, a skinny little know-it-all with greasy blonde hair and thick spectacles, fired three shots into the newcomer’s chest. Stunned to find the man still standing, he fired again, right between the stranger’s dark eyes. The man didn’t even blink.
The bullets, all four them, went straight through him.
Ares let out an exasperated sigh that made the dozen men before him step back. “Why’d you go and do that?” He hung his head to look down at his chest and the three holes in his black sweatshirt and then, moving just his eyes, he gazed up at them with a smoldering sneer. “This is brand new.”
Led by Harold Lauder, all of the pitchforking men fired at once. Shots rang out so long and loud, one could hear them on the New York side of the harbor several miles away. Black smoke plumed from the barrels of their Glock and Beretta handguns. Although none of them was apt to get any gold medals for marksmanship, they were all decent shots; few bullets missed the stranger in black but none of them fazed him. The two with their flamethrowers turned them on full blast. Ares smirked, and turned to face the lines of flaming coming for him, held out his hands and called the fire to him. Two shot bolts of fire shot through his palms, into his body, making his brawny shoulders smolder. Passing his hands in front of his body to cross the streams of fire, he shot it back at them, melting the weapons in their hands. They turned so hot they melted through the heavy-duty orange latex gloves to their hands. Each of them let out a cry, a shout, or a howl of pain as they stood there, mouths open, eyes wide staring at him.
“No fuckin’ way,” Harold muttered looking from the gaping wounds on his palms to the stranger in black.
“Way,” Ares crooned, standing there hale, hearty, and without a single scratch on him. “Are we done now? Maybe I can help,” Ares nodded toward the pile of bodies, “check it out.” Pitching backward on one foot, he balled his right hand, shook it twice, swung his body forward and let a bowling ball sized fireball escape from his palm. The bonfire roared so loudly, the men held their burnt palms to their sides of the hoods on their suits. A moment there was nothing left of the two-story pile but ash.
That was it, the men ran away from their work and from Ares never taking a single glance back.
“Yeah, that went well,” he mused as he hurled massive balls of fire at the trucks. Their tires blew out in loud explosions as the vehicles flew high into the air, landing so furiously they shook the ground for miles. The flames purged any disease that clung to the dead and the still dying piled like yesterday’s fish inside the garbage trucks. Blinking his eyes, the God of War disappeared from his spot on the town green and reappeared a few yards before the fleeing men. Short sword in one hand, Ares leaned his long body forward and began slapping the blade against his palm as he blocked their path.
Hands held out in front of their ridiculously bright suits, they skittered on their heels as they tried to avoid colliding with the man in black. “What do you want?” said Harold Lauder, mustering all of the authority his scrawny body could manager.
Ares stared at the leader of the men dressed in their alien get-ups and grabbed him by a puny biceps just below Harold’s armband. “To know why you’ve got my name on your arm.”
“Your name? Who the hell are you?” Harold challenged, though his throat was rapidly running dry.
Ares looked at the armband as though he were reading it, “I am Ares,” he hitched his head to the road behind them and the five blazing infernos lighting up the late afternoon sky, “in case you couldn’t tell. Now what is this?”
No matter what parlor tricks this guy pulled off, Harold didn’t believe for a second the man in front of him was thee Ares. “You been livin’ in a cave?” he retorted.
“No, on Olympus,” Ares returned without flinching as he applied more pressure to Harold’s skinny arm.
“ARES, American Revolutionaries Enforcing Sovereignty, that’s us. We’re the law here now. I’m Harold Lauder, the leader of this division. Get out of our way or I’ll have to arrest you. This place is Off Limits, you shouldn’t even be here.”
“Arrest me?” Ares chuckled, “you couldn’t even shoot me at point blank range. How do you propose to slap cuffs on me?” He looked past Harold’s frightened and somewhat insulted eyes to look at the other men around them. None of them seemed itching for a fight as they all hung back but watched with great interest . “What about the raven?”
Harold looked at his armband. “What about it?”
“That’s what I’m asking you, huh? Keep up, boy.”
“It’s our symbol, our emblem, so what? If I were you I’d start thinking about how soon I was gonna die instead of about what’s on my arm.”
That received a loud grumble of agreement from the men in their hooded suits. “Shit spreads like wildfire man,” one of the workers spoke up, “air, blood, and touch. You’re a walking dead man.”
“Me? What about you?” Ares let his eyes float down to the pavement and the trailing hoses attached to their suits no longer pumping in fresh oxygen to their hooded heads but plain old air. Ares yanked off Harold Lauder’s bright orange hood.
“Are you fuckin’ crazy man?!” Harold scrambled to put it back on before he could breathe in the air but Ares grabbed him by the back of the neck and forced him to look behind at the unattached hose. “Fuck! Fuck! Motherfuckin’-fuckety-fuck-fuck-FUH-UUUU-CK!”
The group of men with him followed his gaze and began to shout.
“Shut up!” Ares growled. “All of you just shut the hell up; your c
aterwauling won’t do you any good now.” He stood silent a moment as their cries died down and, nearly in unison, they did something he found very strange; each of them grabbed their trailing hose and clamped it tight with their hands. “Oh, yeah, I’m sure that’s going to work,” he chirped, “good job, boys.” Still holding Harold by the scruff of the neck he turned the geeky man’s head toward him. “Now, tell me, who is your leader and where can I find him?” Unable to move his head, Harold glanced down at his armband with just his eyes. Ares’ eyes followed. They landed squarely on the image of the raven with its single amber eye and gray pupil. “I’m gonna kill that boy,” Ares muttered and let Harold go with a harsh shove.
Rubbing his arm through the suit with his burned hand, Harold looked closer at the man dressed all in black and thought he saw a very strong family resemblance between him and Raven, but that could be mere coincidence. “Good luck with that, no one ever knows where he is or when he’ll appear, he’s like a…like a ghost or something.”
“Like a God,” Ares corrected, ripping the band from Harold’s arm. “Get out of here. Go!” Ares barked as he gave Harold a little kick in the seat to get him moving. “Go on! Get!” He stood there watching the dozen men take off down the deserted road once more.
Needing to know the scope of the devastation, Ares traveled on through the continental United States. He found that 19.5 million dead seemed like a low number and wondered how many more had perished in less than a month.
It didn’t take long for Ares to understand that Major Falls had made its way eastward across the United States. If he thought New York City was bad, it did nothing to prepare him for the dead silence of the Midwestern states. He wondered how far up into Canada and how far below into South America the dreaded disease spread. He wondered if the disease had been able to survive the cold of Alaska or the Northwest Territory. If it found the tropical weather of Latin American more to its liking and made a rich home there, or if the heat killed it off like the fires consuming the corpses.
Everywhere he went
Had already taken over.
The few people he encountered on his way across the country looked sickly and smelled of dirt, sweat, and desperation, as they talked to him in their ratty clothes with their dirty heads hung low, their eyes hollow and devoid of hope as their stomachs rumbled. He grabbed a few of them to pump for information but they were all too shell-shocked to be of much use to him. Even as intimidating and as threatening as the God of War could be, they’d already seen and done too much to be afraid of him. Most ran from him but some others stammered, others mumbled, and more stuttered out their tales of woe but it was never more than a whisper on the wind. They told of greedy CEOs and corporations that hoarded their wealth, keeping the lower classes down and treating their fellow human beings like peons. They told of their anger at the horrible unequal distribution of wealth and then of the worldwide financial crash that ended it all, leaving with nothing. They told of freedom fighters that called themselves ARES and of their strange but charming leader, Raven, who came and went on the wind. But, like many good terrorists organizations, those freedom fighters who gained the support of the people found themselves with more power and control than they could handle, they turned on the same people they once swore to serve, to protect, and help out of the mess made by their governments.
They told whispered stories of the wicked disease that began in the Nevada desert and rapidly spread among them leaving so many millions of lifeless bodies in its wake. No one knew just how many were dead, in fact no one knew much of anything since they’d all been cut off from each other. Their TVs went blank months ago, their Internet was down, and no one was talking on the radio except for a few pirate DJs babbling about The End of Days. The story went that Raven, the leader of ARES, stormed a military base, he went on a rampage killing all of the soldiers and scientists in his path. In his violent spree he let loose the virus. Whether it was intentional on the part of Raven was not known. But, where once he was revered now Raven was reviled and considered Public Enemy #1 among those who could still hold a gun.
More than a few times, in the midst of conversation the roar of approaching engines met the ears of the Mortals talking to him in their hushed whispers and they panicked. Their eyes widened and they begged him to let them go, told him to get off the street! When he let them go, they scampered away to the darkest corners they could find. Soon after they disappeared from his sight, jeeps and transport trucks laden with heavily armed forces banded with the ARES mark on their forearms rolled onto the street. They claimed to be there to enforce law and order, to protect the citizens, but it was easy to see they were already drunk with a power they couldn’t handle and did nothing to earn.
Having wandered all the way back to the source of Major Falls, a now completely abandoned military base the Mortals he spoke with called Area 51. It was a huge and impressive underground installation, or it had been. Now it was nothing more than a hole in the ground and the first mass grave created by Major Falls. Level after level, deeper and deeper into the Earth he went, the more the bodies piled up and reeked. Hallways were strewn with rotting corpses, many never left their chairs at their desk, they simply died in front of their computers. Others took their own lives or the lives of others in their last moments as evidenced by the dead riddled with bullet holes, some with their throats slit, and other dangling from the light fixtures where they’d hanged themselves.
Ares didn’t smell the lingering scent of his Son here but he did smell Apollo and took in many places on doors and walls where gold dust clung. He fished the armband out of his pocket to wipe up some of it to use when it came time to prove Apollo had been here. Apollo knew, he was in on this whole nasty business, the two of them conjured it up together. But, Raven probably never thought he’d end up as Public Enemy #1, that was Apollo’s doing. It seemed Apollo hadn’t been completely honest with Raven regarding his powers and the fact that Apollo could shift into any shape he liked, taking the form, voice, and mannerisms of anyone who ever walked the Earth. While Raven was setting up Ares to take the fall, Apollo was setting up Raven for the same. Caught in the middle of it all were the Mortals.
He sighed looking around at the devastation in the high-tech facility. “A whimper,” Ares muttered shaking his head with disgust, “it really will end with a whimper.”
Ares thought again of those warships sailing by and of how Major Falls had begun making its way across the Atlantic Ocean. If he were Turkey, and Turkey was still intact, then he’d send a fleet of warships armed with nuclear weapons to obliterate what remained of the United States, maybe even all of North America—South America too for good measure—in hopes of stopping the spread of Major Falls. If that was what the Turkish were up to, how would the Americans defend themselves? What would the Freedom Fighters turned Homegrown Terrorists, American Revolutionaries Enforcing Sovereignty, do that bombs began exploding on American shores? What about Raven or Apollo? Was total nuclear destruction part of the overall plan?
Emerging from the tomb back into the twilight of the Nevada night, Ares wondered how Raven was able to pull of this off so well. Apollo Ares understood, but why the boy wanted to set up his Father to take the fall was a mystery.
Surely, the second any of the Olympians saw that logo, they would blame him.
If that wasn’t enough to seal the frame-job, every place he’d seen that was still in riot mode followed the same themes. Nearly all of the Mortals possessed a pepper spray so strong it made Ares’ eyes water even from a great distance. It melted cloth and seared skin leaving it with blisters and third degree burns. When the water cannons came out, unflinchingly, they all looped arms, moved as close to each other as they could, put their heads down behind homemade shields, and pressed forward letting their combined weight and strength absorb the ferocious spray.
If they were his troops, his army, Ares knew he would have trained them to do the very same. But it was the use of Greek Fire that brought it all togeth
er for him. It was so ancient as to have been forgotten by the Mortal World. The simple but deadly recipe lost to Time. Ares was positive it was Raven, who returned the ancient knowledge to the hungry Mortals. Raven, relying on his genetic memory, who trained them the way he would have.
The only thing he didn’t get was just what Raven was hoping to gain from it all; the respect of the other Olympians? Perhaps. But this was more likely to pit Father against Son in a very spectacular display that the Olympians would greedily gobble and feed for as long as they could. It would bring Raven no glory, only eons of trouble and suspicion. Ares was painfully aware of Raven’s hatred for his Mother but had no idea he was equally despised, that his Son should go to such great lengths to prove his power and his worth was unfathomable to the God of War.
Chapter Sixteen
Backroom Deals
While Ares was busy in the Mortal World, Raven was very busy on Olympus. First he stopped by to see Apollo and feel out the Golden God, whom Raven was beginning to suspect was being less than forthright with him. “Whose side are you on?”
“Well, hello to you as well, Raven,” Apollo chimed as his Nephew stormed into the Temple, walked directly past the servant and up to Apollo. “Congratulations on completing your second Trial, you’re doing wonderfully.”
“Am I?”
“Yes, what’s got you in a huff?” Apollo walked over to the golden bar and poured two large chalices of Nectar. “Are you this upset at my betting against you?” He turned around with the chalices in his hands and held one out to Raven. “I assure you it’s not personal, Nephew, I’m simply playing the game, keeping up a good show for the others. I have the utmost faith in you and that you will best every task they set before you.”
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