The Cat Lady rebounded quickly and went back on the attack. Kyle met the panther’s charge, using one gauntleted hand to ward off its swipes while he reached for the shock baton in his utility belt with the other. The charge in the baton was much higher than the Taser darts’; the giant panther went into galvanic convulsions and collapsed in a twitching heap, its fur smoldering where Kyle had shocked it. Melanie’s whip wrapped itself around the great cat’s neck and she swung it against a wall with enough force to drive its body right through it.
Hands burst through the floor underneath Kyle’s feet, reaching for his ankles. He barely managed to jump out of their grasp.
Hercules-8 levered himself through the opening he’s made. He looked royally pissed off. “I’m gonna fuck you up, man.”
Melanie’s whip snared one of the strongman’s ankles and she yanked it back, throwing the Guardian forward and right into Kyle’s high kick. Kyle followed the kick with a hammer blow to the back of Hercules-8’s neck. The Guardian was tough, though. Even on his hands and knees, he managed to grab Kestrel’s whip and tear it in two, ignoring the punches and kicks Kyle rained upon him. The strongman got to his feet and his oversized fists lashed out at Kyle, quick boxing jabs that could punch through several inches of hardened steel. Kyle backpedaled away; the shock baton needed several seconds to recharge, so he dropped it while he reached for another gizmo. He’d come loaded for bear tonight; the almost-disastrous fight at the Lurker’s cavern had been a wakeup call.
The muscle-bound Guardian kept pressing his attack. Mel maneuvered to get behind him, holding the remnants of her whip like a fighting stick. Kyle ducked under a punch and slapped a small square box on Hercules-8 chest. He dodged away, but not quite fast enough; one of the Guardian’s massive fists connected.
The world exploded in a burst of light.
Kestrel’s heart lurched when she saw Kyle being flung across the hallway by the force of Hercules-8’s blow. He bounced off a wall and landed limply on the ground. A second later, the directional charge he’d placed on the Guardian’s chest went off. Directional or not, the blast was enough to knock her down. As she leapt back to her feet, she saw Hercules-8 fall to his knees, clutching at the gaping wound in his torso. The big bastard might recover if given the chance, however; she didn’t give him one. Kestrel swung the whip’s handle at his head with all her strength, hard enough to deform the titanium-steel alloy handle and, hopefully, the Guardian’s skull as well. Herc fell on his face. He didn’t get up. He’d probably be okay, but Kestrel didn’t care either way. She kicked him off the building, figuring the six-story fall would help keep him down and out.
The sound of the directional blast going off woke Kyle up. He looked up in time to see Mel finish off Hercules-8 – and to see a man in a blue and yellow costume grab her from behind. It was Vance Voltage, yet another Guardian. Melanie convulsed helplessly as Vance sent a torrent of electricity into her.
Kyle charged. If the Guardians were here in full force, he didn’t think they could get away. He would do his best, though.
It’s what he did.
Face-Off
New York, New York, March 17, 2013
Being a mind-snoop is a miserable, ungrateful occupation. I knew that much just from watching Cassandra doing her thing. People – including myself – expect miracles from them and get pissed off when they snoops don’t deliver. Sure, they can literally work miracles, but not all the time, and not on demand. So they end up taking a lot of shit from everyone.
This particular bunch looked pretty hard done by. They clearly hadn’t been all smiles and champagne glasses even before we dropped in on their little get-together. The lone woman in the group was skinny and looked like a teenager except around the eyes. She wore a shapeless floral frock, was clearly exhausted, and had been chain-smoking for quite some time, judging from the full ashtray in front of her. One of the male snoops was short and frail-looking, with a head a good three sizes too big for his body, and an oversized face to match. He’d barely noticed our entrance at first, but now he was watching Christine with a look of rapt adoration on his face.
The last guy had leaped to his feet when we came in but had frozen when Condor’s flash-bang blinded him and had sat down when I pointed my gun at his face. From his reactions, he’d been around the block a few times, and I pegged him as the most dangerous one in the bunch. He was balding, had a grayish beard and generally appeared to be in his late forties. A late bloomer, and likely one with some sort of military training. He was clearly waiting for an opportunity. I wasn’t planning on giving him one.
Outside the office, gunfire and explosions broke out. Christine flinched at the sounds of battle, and I felt bad for her. She was tough, but all this was way beyond her experience. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see her becoming accustomed to the sound of guns and bombs, either.
I ignored the mess outside and got on with the task at hand. “Where’s your boss?” I asked them.
“Mr. Night?” the kid with the oversized head blurted out. “He…”
“Shut the fuck up!” Graybeard cut him off.
Normally, I would have expressed my opinion of Graybeard’s outburst with a bullet through his kneecap, but for Christine’s sake I just fired a round that hit the sofa he was sitting on, an inch or so from his head. I didn’t even shoot off his ear. She was turning me into a mellow fellow.
“No, you shut the fuck up.” I told Graybeard. He did. I turned to Big Face. “Yeah, Mr. Night. Where is he?”
“We haven’t seen him in two days!” Big Face said. I looked at Christine, who confirmed he was telling the truth. Big Face turned back to Christine. “You’re the one,” he whispered.
The woman with the young girl’s body gasped. “She is,” she said in a flat done. “The one who heals. The one who destroys.”
I really wasn’t in the mood to hear cryptic bullshit from the local peanut gallery. “Stop with the fortune cookie shit or your personal fortune is going to read ‘You’ll have a terminal case of You Fucked with the Wrong Guy Syndrome.’”
“Wait,” Christine said. She was looking intently at the snoops, and all of them, even Graybeard, were looking back like they couldn’t help themselves. I felt something pass between them, like a gust of wind or an invisible wave. The snoops staggered in their armchairs at the same time; the woman’s eyes rolled in her head and she started shaking; Big Face dry heaved a few times; Graybeard slumped on his chair, all trace of defiance gone from his demeanor. Fucking hell.
Outside the office there was a brief fusillade of gunfire, followed by more explosions. Condor and Kestrel were hopefully taking care of business. I began to feel as useful as tits on a boar. Surprisingly enough, it didn’t bother me as much as I would have expected. It was sort of relaxing, not being the guy doing the heavy lifting for a change.
Christine exhaled deeply and swayed on her feet. “Okay,” she said. “They didn’t know where the bad guys’ base of operations was, but I kinda used their powers to help me find it. I don’t have the exact location, but it’s in Central Park. In it, or under it, something.”
Holy shit. She really hadn’t gotten very far from the abduction site.
“We’ve got the fuckers now,” I said triumphantly. I should have known better.
A second later, the roof came down on us.
I fucking hate surprises.
Chunks of masonry were falling everywhere. Christine created a shield over our heads like a giant umbrella, wide enough to protect us and the snoops. Whoever the prick that had smashed through the roof was, he didn’t seem to care all that much about collateral damage. I caught sight of him as he floated down through the opening. It was none other than Star Eagle of the Empire State Guardians, certified hero and absolute bleeding asshole, glowing like a human-shaped spotlight. This wasn’t going to be fun.
“Flying Dude?” Christine said dubiously. She’d seen Star Eagle a few days before while he was flying around Times Square to give the tourists somethin
g to gawk at. She’d been impressed then, but back then she was fairly easy to impress, being a tourist herself.
“You’re all under arrest!” Star Eagle shouted as he hovered over us.
“Not again,” Christine groaned.
“Can you knock him down?” I asked her. She didn’t bother answering with words. Her eyes narrowed and Star Eagle slammed into the ground as if an invisible King Kong-sized hammer had come down on him. He ended up half-embedded on the floor, stunned and confused. In other words, he was in the perfect position for me to kick his head as if I was punting a football. The kick knocked his golden helmet off, but not his whole head, worse luck. The prick was tough; I’d learned that the one time we tussled a few years back. Still, he was stunned long enough for me to sit on top of him and start punching him. I didn’t want to give him a chance to recover and light us up with his so-called ‘star blasts.’ I’d been on the receiving end of those before, and they weren’t pleasant. I was going to pound on the prick until I was sure he was down and out. I noticed the snoops running away, but I didn’t care. They were harmless; Star Eagle would only be harmless after I’d hammered him into a coma.
“Mark!” I turned and saw Christine looking at me in shock. The expression in her face was horrified, and all of a sudden I saw myself in her eyes, sitting on the guy’s chest, pounding on his face while he was helpless.
“Oh, come on!” I yelled at her, and punched the prick once more, because I thought I’d seen him twitch. “He’s not a teenage kid, he’s not trying to protect his mother, and I’m not doing this for kicks!” I suddenly realized I was getting some kicks out of it, though. I wasn’t getting a hard-on like my stepfather had, but I was enjoying beating Star Eagle to a pulp. “Fuck me!” I shouted, getting off the guy like he was on fire. This was a really shitty time to have a psychological epiphany. Star Eagle started to stir. “Goddammit!” I stomped on his face like I was stepping on a cockroach, and he stopped moving. “Stay down, you stupid fuck! I’m having a breakthrough here!”
“Mark!”
“Jesus H. Christ, do you want me to hug and kiss him? Okay, maybe I’m turning into an asshole, or I’ve turned into an asshole, and maybe I don’t want to be an asshole, but we’re in the middle of a fight right now, in case you haven’t…”
Something smashed into me from behind, bending my spine far enough back I felt it crack and nearly snap in two. A wall that had been twenty feet away suddenly rushed toward me and slapped me in the face, hard. As I tried to pick myself up through assorted debris weighing me down, I belatedly realized the wall hadn’t moved; I had. I ignored the almost overwhelming impulse to curl into a ball and quietly die, and glanced behind me. Christine was facing another Guardian, a tall woman with long flowing auburn hair in a gold and silver outfit with matching boots and tiara. She was the Justice Princess, who wielded psychokinetic powers pretty similar to Christine’s. This was going to be interesting, as in the Chinese curse.
Christine was gaping at the Justice Princes, her eyes as wide as I’d ever seen them.
“Mom?” she said.
Fucking. Hell.
Chapter Twelve
Christine Dark
New York, New York, March 17, 2013
“Mom?”
Even as she spoke, Christine knew it wasn’t so. For one, her mother wouldn’t be caught dead running around in gold-and-silver panties, corset and boots, not even on Halloween, although she might appreciate the tiara. For another, this woman looked more like Christine’s older sister. Mom’s laugh lines and other signs of aging weren’t there, and she’d never been as body-sculpted as gold-and-silver panty girl was. This woman appeared to be no older than twenty-five, although she’d almost certainly been born on April 14, 1969, just like her real mother. Christine was facing Patricia Dark, but not the Patricia Dark from her universe. Here on Earth Alpha, Patricia Dark had obviously turned into a Neolympian and become a superhero.
It completely messed up her mind, though. Christine loved her mother, loved her to death, and nothing, not even the discovery Patricia had named her daughter after a haunted car from a Stephen King novel, had changed that. The most important reason she wanted to go back to Earth Prime (displacing even the longing to return to a world where she didn’t face death on an hourly basis) was to let her know she was all right, for some values of all right, at least. Seeing this younger-looking version of Patricia Dark broke her heart and made her head spin.
“Sorry, kid. I don’t have any children,” Patricia 2.0 said. She even sounded like Mom, so much so that Christine wanted to rush her and give her a hug and cry on her shoulder. “But why don’t you surrender peacefully before I have to knock you unconscious, like Cue Ball over there?” She gestured toward Face-Off, who was lying half buried under the wall that had collapsed on top of him. He wasn’t unconscious, though, just biding his time to strike.
“Hey, you’ve got it wrong, uh, Patricia?” Christine said.
Patricia’s eyes narrowed. “Do I know you?”
“Look, we’re the good guys here. Those Russian mobsters are involved in some really bad business. As in ‘destroy the world’ kind of bad business. You and your friends need to back off. Or better yet, help us. My name’s Christine, Christine Dark, by the way.”
“Holy crap. You do look like family. Are you one of the Darks from Ohio? Never mind. Listen, Christine, you and your pals are wanted on a dozen Federal charges. I can’t let you go, even if we’re cousins or whatever. You can tell me your life story later, but you’re not going anywhere other than a jail cell right now.”
This was so utterly effed up. Same song, different verse in the same universe. This was turning out just the way it did when she’d been in Chicago a couple of days ago. SOP when dealing with potentially dangerous Neos was to subdue first and ask questions later, which made peaceful communication a no-go. The only difference now was that if Christine wasn’t willing to surrender she was going to have to fight Bizarro Sunnydale Mom, which she really, really didn’t want to do.
There was a flash of light somewhere else in the building, and she felt the whole structure shake under her feet. Condor and Kestrel must be having their own rumble with the other Guardians. This wasn’t good at all.
Patricia didn’t like the situation either, but she was determined and ready to dance. Christine picked all of that through her super-empathy. “Last chance,” Patricia 2.0 said, and her stern voice sounded so much like Mom’s when she was angry that Christine’s first impulse was to give up.
Instead, she grimaced and put up her hands in a fighting pose. “Guess we’re PVPing, pseudo-Mom.” She created a shield, and Patricia created one, too. Her faux-mother’s shield had a pink shade but the similarities were pretty eerie otherwise. Christine couldn’t bring herself to shoot first, so she just stood there.
Patricia had no such compunctions. She opened up with two pink blasts of kinetic force, which Christine blocked without any problems. Her mother from another planet was nowhere near as strong as she was. “Okay,” she said resignedly and let Patty Part Deux have it. Her blast hit the pink shield, shattered it and knocked the superheroine right through a wall. “Mom! Crap!”
Mark ran past Christine. “Wait! Don’t hurt her, Mar… Face!” Probably not a good idea to use real names while mixing it up with the super-PoPo. She rushed after him as he ducked through the hole Christine had made with Patricia’s body. When she got there, she saw her almost-Mom lying dazed on the ground. Mark had taken a pair of handcuffs off Patricia’s utility belt. “She’ll be fine,” he said, cuffing her arms behind her. He got another set of cuffs and used them to secure her ankles to her wrists. “Type Four Restraints. The cuffs will keep her stunned and unable to concentrate. She’ll have a headache, but that’s about it.”
“Okay,” Christine said. She hated the idea of leaving Patricia lying there like somebody in a Kestrel bondage party, but at least she wouldn’t get hurt.
Mark grabbed a third set of cuffs from Patricia an
d went to the still unconscious Star Eagle; he relieved him of his own handcuffs, and manacled him the same way. “Let’s find Condor and Kestrel and get the Hell out of Dodge.”
“Sounds like a plan, Stan.”
He took a look at the semiconscious heroine. “Why did you call her Mom?” He took a second look. “She really looks a lot of you.”
“Yeah, she should. You just met my mother. Well, her Earth Alpha version, I guess.”
“The Justice Princess is your mother? Jesus H. Christ. What a mess.”
Justice Princess? Who came up with these names?
“Oh, you have no idea. But we can deal with that later.” Down on the ground, Patricia Dark was struggling feebly. “Sorry, quasi-Mom. Be okay, okay?”
Princess Patricia mumbled something unintelligible and passed out. Worst family reunion ever.
They headed towards the fighting.
* * *
The first thing Christine saw as she followed Mark out into the hallway was a guy electrocuting Kestrel and using her body as a human shield to keep Condor from hitting him. Not very nice. Christine visualized a fist, a normal-sized fist, and used it to pummel Electric Dude over the head. The first whack got his attention but little else, so she put a little extra oomph into the next one. That whack made the guy drop Kestrel and stumble around with his hands over his noggin, which let Condor land a pretty cool-looking jumping spinning kick that bounced Electric Dude off a wall; he went down and didn’t get up. Face-Off rushed toward him and started cuffing him. That made three down. How many more to go?
Condor was checking on Kestrel, who was still shaking spasmodically. Christine could sympathize, having been electrocuted in the very recent past. It was no fun at all.
“She’s going to be…” Condor started to say when something cracked his titanium helmet wide open and knocked him on his ass. Christine raised a shield just in time to catch something aimed at her. Whatever it was, it hit like a frakking cannonball. She felt the impact bend her shield. The object was about the size of a baseball but far harder and heavier, and it had been traveling faster than a bullet.
New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Page 21