Cosplay in this universe wasn’t play at all, but a way of life for Neos. Christine’s costume so far consisted of non-skinny jeans, a plain white t-shirt under a pink sweater, and sneakers. Her own T-and-A were underwhelming in her humble – much too humble, some of her friends insisted – opinion, and she had no intention of wearing any sort of painted-on garments, although she had committed similar transgressions against taste and common decency at a few sci-fi conventions back on Earth Prime. But that was at conventions, weekends where she wasn’t being herself for a couple days. To do that every day, in front of everybody (and thanks to YouTube, which existed in this world, everybody meant a lot of everybodies)… No effing way.
Condor was carrying a couple hundred pounds’ worth of metal cases without even breaking a sweat; he had proudly told Christine he could deadlift fifteen tons. All Neos were stronger than humans. Christine herself could bench press over a thousand pounds; back in her pre-Neo days, she probably couldn’t have lifted a thousand ounces. “Computers and other useful equipment," Condor explained when he noticed Christine looking at him and all the boxes he was toting.
“This way,” Condor continued, and led them to the lodge itself, a pretty big house that should have enough bedrooms for a basketball team, let alone the Fellowship of the Crap Storm, as Christine had unofficially dubbed her little gang. The lodge – more of a rustic manor – was well off the beaten path. A dirt road led away from it, and while Christine had seen plenty of lights on the far end of the lake, indicating a nearby town, this side was empty except for the local critters. It was March, so maybe hunting and fishing season didn’t start for a while. She had no idea, since her version of hunting and fishing began and ended at the Whole Foods’ fresh produce section.
The lodge’s front door looked all quaint and antique-y, but it had a retina scanner lock and probably hidden machineguns and lasers to deal with anybody who didn’t have the right eyeballs to gain admittance to the premises. Condor’s eyeballs passed muster and the door opened, leading to a living room. It was a big living room, with plenty of sitting space, a fireplace big enough to accommodate 2.3 Santas, and walls covered with trophies featuring animal heads from all over the world. Apparently, Condor’s idea of hunting had been conventional and old-fashioned: travel to exotic places, find exotic and probably endangered critters, and kill them to death. Not very enlightened of him, but Condor was old-fashioned, mostly because he was old; dude was pushing seventy, if her math was right. Neos didn’t age, although many of them died young, due mostly to poor lifestyle choices.
Christine’s father had been even older, possibly over a hundred years young, which made him like eighty when he knocked up her mother, which was uber-creepy. She used to love reading vampire romances where two-hundred year old men hit on teenage girls, but now the idea turned her stomach. And yet, here she was, getting all aflutter around John Clarke, who was also pushing the century mark. How Lolita of her, not to mention hypocritical. Just like the teenage girls that fell for two-hundred year old vampires, the creepy bits didn’t sink in because the dirty old men looked young enough not to trip any creep-o-meters. Given that, maybe Dad and Mom’s dalliance wasn’t all that creepy.
Of course, Dad’s not likely to get any older anymore, her brain helpfully threw in. Her brain loved to make her feel like crap sometimes.
The last time she’d seen her father, he’d been doing battle with a thing that looked like a man but wasn’t, a thing that hadn’t been human in a very long time. It had been very Gandalf at Moria-like, with an explosion that had felt nuclear-like in intensity as a parting gift; it had nearly knocked the Condor Jet into the lake even from a mile or two away. The explosion had turned the island where they had left Dad behind into a short-lived giant hole in the water. Maybe Dad had teleported away – she’d seen him do that, as well as produce the creepiest laugh she’d ever heard, along with a bevy of other abilities – before the earth-shattering ka-boom. It’d make for a trite plot device if this was a movie, but it would be really, really nice if he wasn’t dead. She still hadn’t cried over him, either because she didn’t believe he was dead or because a bunch of bad things had happened at once and she still hadn’t begun to deal with half of them.
“How are you doing?” Mark asked her, breaking her midnight train of thought. He’d plopped John down on an expensive-looking couch before turning his attention to her.
“Like I could use a hot bath, a fifteen hour nap, and waking up to find out all of this was just a really bad dream.”
“I hear you,” he said. He’d lost his best friend that night, and he probably also wished he could wake up and find things back to normal. Of course, her normal was worrying if she had chosen the right major in college, and his normal involved finding criminals and putting them in jail – or the morgue. Amusingly enough, they were both out of their element. Saving the world from cosmic menaces was a bit out of both their comfort zones.
“Come on,” Mark said, trying to sound cheerful. “Condor said the kitchen’s got food; nothing fresh, mostly canned crap and frozen concentrated shit, but I promised you pancakes and I’m going to make some fucking pancakes.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Neos didn’t need to eat or breathe, but they got hungry anyway. Mark’s mention of food reminded her she was starving. Even better, she could pig out and not gain a pound as long as she kept her food intake somewhere under 20,000 calories a day or so. She was looking forward to burying her feelings under copious amounts of sugars and fats. They went to the kitchen, which was big enough to service a small restaurant. Mark rustled up pancake ingredients for their meal – it was two in the morning, so this would be somewhere between dinner and breakfast.
She and Mark made pancakes and hot chocolate for everyone. While they cooked, Christine told Mark some of the stuff she’d picked up from her dad’s Cube of Cosmic Wisdom – it had been his gift to her, or, to be precise, she had been born to wield it. During the brief time she had held the Cube, Christine had learned a few cosmic truths. It was funny, talking about the origins of the universe while making pancakes, but it kind of relaxed her.
By the time they got back to the living room, Condor had set up a miniature version of NASA’s control center, complete with multiple screens and terminals and a central computer-slash-server in the middle. The high-tech stuff clashed pretty badly with the lodge’s décor.
They sat down and ate while watching the boob-tubes. Kestrel headed upstairs as soon as she’d scarfed a plate of pancakes, to take a shower or break in a new vibrator or whatever; Christine didn’t want to know. John was still sleeping. Christine checked on him, using her special senses to monitor his health. He was fully healed – the nasty Outsider-energy that had poisoned him was finally gone from his system, and he would probably wake up on his own soon. She decided to let him rest and sat back to not-really-enjoy the show.
News reports were on all the screens. There was lots of stuff about Christine’s little run-in with the Chicago Sentinels. All that mess had started because she wouldn’t let one of the Sentinels arrest her. In retrospect, it had been the right thing; the handcuffs he’d wanted to use on her were designed to interfere with Neo powers, and without her powers she would have been helpless like a kitten when John came after her. Well, not John, but a bad guy who called himself the Dreamer and who had been possessing John’s body. The whole thing was more complicated than the last season of Lost.
Other news bulletins were talking about the freak explosion in Lake Michigan. The blast had broken windows in a two-mile radius, and created mini-tsunamis that caused a lot of property damage and killed half a dozen people. Knowing she had been involved even indirectly in people’s deaths made the pancakes roil in her stomach. She didn’t want to deal with any of it; the danger was bad enough, but the effing responsibility of knowing that if you messed up a lot of people could die was the worst. People had died because she hadn’t prevented Dad and the thing he’d been fighting from blowing up the island.
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“Hey.” That was Mark again. He was no empath but the guy picked up on facial cues pretty well for someone who didn’t have a face of his own. He squeezed her shoulder. “That wasn’t us. It wasn’t even your dad.”
“I guess you’re right,” she admitted.
“Had to happen eventually,” he said in a deadpan tone and she snorted. She felt a little better. Not happy or anything, just slightly less crappy.
There were plenty more news. Apparently it had been a pretty eventful day for a lot of other people too. Two days before, someone had attacked one of the main bases of the world’s greatest superhero group, the Freedom Legion; John was a charter member. The attackers had blown up buildings and lured a bunch of heroes to a flying fortress ship that had turned out to have a nuclear booby-trap. While Christine and her pals had been doing their stuff, the Legionnaires investigating the attack had gotten into a running fight over the streets of Hong Kong, leaving one of them dead. A lot of news pundits were speculating that the Chinese Empire might have been involved.
Earth Alpha had two Chinas like in her world, but instead of Taiwan and the People’s Republic they had the Republic of China and the Empire of China, a.k.a. the Dragon Empire. The Republic was like Taiwan on steroids; the Empire was like North Korea on steroids, except its Supreme Leader was a Neolympian with godlike powers. There had already been two wars with the Empire. The news people were speculating that a third one might be coming up.
And of course, everybody and their brother were worrying about the possibility that Ultimate the Invincible Man might have gone rogue. That seemed to be even more terrifying than a land war in Asia, which everybody knew was a bad idea.
Christine glanced at John again. He was dreaming, and whatever he was dreaming about was stirring some serious emotions: anger followed by… utter terror? What the frak could scare a guy who could survive nuclear explosions?
Things were going to get interesting again, and she had barely survived all the interesting things that happened yesterday.
Face-Off
Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013
Last week, my world had made sense.
I protected mostly low-income New Yorkers from assorted psychos and predators by regularly stomping on said psychos and predators for fun and profit. The profit was mostly limited to lifting whatever cash they had on them after I was done subduing or disassembling them. The fun was the joy I felt when I pounded on any truly evil assholes that crossed my path until they were dead, dead, dead. I had few friends and my free time was spent reading books and watching movies, mostly by myself, except when I was – for the most part briefly – hooking up with assorted not very nice women. Was it a great life? Perhaps not. I would often walk away from a midnight burial wishing for something different.
I guess wishes can come true.
If someone had told me I’d be sitting in a fancy hunting lodge in Canada alongside Ultimate the Invincible Motherfucking Man (who was still sleeping like a baby, the prick), my old buddy Condor, who was now banging my ex-fuck buddy Kestrel, also present, and a petite redheaded girl by the unlikely name of Christine Dark, a girl who happened to be the key to the planet’s salvation from an as yet pretty vague threat, well, if someone had told me that, I’d have made a face just so I could laugh my ass off. If that someone had also mentioned that along the way I’d get nearly electrocuted by a former Tonton Macoute, have my powers disrupted by some new fancy gizmo, watch my ex-fuck buddy get tortured half to death with a blowtorch, and then gotten my insides rearranged courtesy of an evil mime with an energy sword, followed by being brought back from the brink of death by the aforementioned redheaded savior of the world, I’d’ve tossed in a few smacks to go with the derisive laughter.
My best friend and mentor, the blind psychic with the too-on-the-nose name of Cassandra, had laid down her life to get me to this point. A lot of people had gotten killed along the way, several of them at my hands. And for what? A rational person would have excused himself, asked Condor to drop him off in Chicago, and gotten a Greyhound ticket back to New York City, where he belonged. A rational, or mildly smart person would have realized that a middle-weight Neo had no business sticking his nose in world-ending affairs, where he might as well be a bug charging the windshield of a speeding car. And yet, here I was, which made me the dumbest fucker in the room.
I was even dumber than that. Cassandra had told me my job was to help out Christine Dark, and along the way I’d grown pretty damn fond of her. Downright protective and possessive and attracted to her, surprisingly so since the first time I’d laid eyes on her had been a whole seventy-something hours ago, when I had unwrapped her from half a mile of duct tape like an overdue Christmas present. Christine was as endearing as a box of kittens, which normally would have been a total turn-off for me. I don’t do endearing. I like my women with lots of sharp edges, a nasty sense of humor and a deep appreciation for the darker things in life. I’d sworn off nice girls a long time ago.
And yet, here I was, making notional googly eyes at a nice girl, a nice girl who, to make matters worse, could tell exactly what I was feeling. That should have bothered me a great deal. I’d gotten used to people not having a clue what was going on behind my blank exterior. It makes me a killer poker player, among many other things. Christine could see through my permanent mask. She’d done more than that. When I was dying on a cold cavern floor with a giant steaming hole where my lower torso used to be, she had reached out and dragged me back from the abyss. It had been the most fucking painful, intense, intimate experience of my life. I still didn’t know what to make of it.
Christine caught me looking at her. Her pale blue-gray eyes regarded my blank face, and she gave me a weak smile. I wasn’t sure what she made of my current emotional state. Neither did I, to be honest. My normal emotional state comes in two flavors: neutral and murderous.
“What a mess, eh?” she said.
“The messiest,” I replied.
She started to respond, but the sleeping Invincible Man groaned loudly and she turned towards him with a worried expression. She could tell what the big lug was feeling too, and he didn’t seem to be feeling anything good, which was worrisome, considering the guy could knock down buildings with his fists. If he started sleep-walking, it’d be about as much fun as having a Category Five tornado show up in your living room.
What worried me most, though, was the fact that I cared more about the way she looked at him than about anything else.
Chapter Two
The Invincible Man
Berlin, Germany, March 27, 1945
The Sky God struck with all his might.
John Clarke had been on the receiving end of lightning bolts before. He had survived them, along with laser beams, death rays and plasma discharges. None of those had prepared him for Donner’s wrath.
The first blast caught him in mid-air, a twisting ribbon of blue-white energy that set ablaze every nerve ending in his body, paralyzing him. Blinded and overwhelmed with agony, he only distantly felt the second bolt of lightning boring into his flesh as he fell. When he opened his eyes, he was in the ruins of a house, well over a mile away from where he had been hit.
His landing had shattered the house as thoroughly as a one-thousand pound bomb would have. It had also slaughtered the family huddled in the basement beneath. A hand, too small to belong to an adult male, lay half buried under rubble, terribly still. John looked at it for a second. He’d seen plenty of similar sights, but he hadn’t grown used to them. A part of him dreaded the idea that he might grow used to them.
No time to waste, he told himself, and struggled free from the debris.
Up in the sky, Donner found him and threw another lightning spear.
John flew away, barely avoiding the missile as it destroyed the remains of the house and the closely spaced homes on either side of it. More dead children. He darted towards the German Aesir, the last of Hitler’s new gods. Time to put an end to this.
; Friedhelm Kastner, better known as Donner, was a giant of a man. According to the files John had read, the Teutonic Knight had been six and a half feet tall before his Neolympian powers manifested, and had grown another foot in height after that. Unlike the mythical god, Kastner had black hair and brown eyes, but the Reich’s designers had made him wear a helmet with a built-in red wig to make his appearance match his mythical namesake’s appearance. Donner was not wearing his wig today; he had eschewed his ornate costume as well. The man traversing the skies over Berlin wore a simple Wehrmacht uniform with no insignias or medals. The nimbus of light surrounding him and his inhuman size left no doubts as to who he was, though. John noted those details as he closed the distance between them at a speed that should have left him no time to notice anything. Of late, he’d found himself able to process information in the span of milliseconds. He even had time to wonder what these changes meant before he reached his target.
Donner conjured more lightning, but John hit the German before he could cast it. The impact would have shattered windows all over the city, had there been any glass left to shatter in Berlin; months of relentless bombardment had seen to that. Donner was flung higher into the sky by the devastating collision. John followed him relentlessly, pounding the Aesir with his fists, feeling bones break under the blows. The German did not give up, however: a flash of lightning knocked John away. The strike was painful but not disabling, however. Donner was weakening.
John sidestepped a second blast and crashed into Donner. Both combatants plummeted toward the ground. John directed the course of the fall carefully, and they crashed into the city’s famed Victory Column across from the Reichstag, smashing the monument to pieces.
He rose to his feet. Donner was on his hands and knees, trying to get up despite his broken bones and torn flesh. “Surrender,” John said, and repeated the order in rote-memorized German. The Aesir’s response was to call forth another lightning spear. John struck before his foe could use it.
New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Page 2