Getting to the Marshes had been no fun at all. We’d been hiding in a dark and cramped secret compartment in a cargo truck, a German-made eighteen-wheeler behemoth that we had boarded in Minsk. We sat in the dark for a good twelve hours as the truck made its run, bouncing around like dice in a cup. The loud engine noise would have made it impossible to sleep even if we hadn’t been tossed up and down with every bump on the road. Normal humans would have probably ended up in the hospital from the constant battering; our bruises healed quickly enough, but even Christine’s normally sunny disposition hadn’t survived the trip. She looked downright grim as she took in the sights.
Our ride had dropped us off in the Ukrainian equivalent of a truck stop. There was a small village whose only notable features were a maintenance depot and police station. None of the cops at the station gave us a second glance. Somebody had greased the right palms, just as Akula had promised. Vasyl had been waiting for us in our new ride, an ancient Ford G87 that, like his rifle, had been new sometime about the time Hitler and Stalin had been trying to settle the question of who would rule the world. As it turned out, the answer had been ‘none of the above.’ The truck was painted in a camouflage pattern and sported a canvas-covered cargo area. You could see where the bodywork had been patched to cover a series of bullet holes that were still faintly visible, running from the front right side all the way into the driver’s compartment. I hoped we’d have better luck than the poor bastards who’d been on the receiving end of those bullets.
It was cold out in the Ukrainian boondocks, cold enough to make me glad for the thick winter gear we’d picked up before our uncomfortable ride south. Normally I would have relied on my self-heating trick, but ever since our arrival in frigid Russia, I’d found myself getting uncomfortably hot whenever I tried it. I wasn’t sure why, but I worried it might have something to do with Christine’s boosting my power level. Remembering how Christine set herself on fire back in Canada wasn’t so funny when I started feeling it happen to me.
I’d talked to Christine about it, and she’d done a quick check up on me but hadn’t found anything wrong. She figured I’d need to relearn the trick to account for my increased power bandwidth. I hoped she was right. So far I’d been holding off on using that ability as much as possible, relying on clothing instead.
Christine was also wearing a thick coat but clearly wasn’t being bothered by the below-freezing temps, lucky her. She kept looking around, as if hoping the scenery would improve somehow. There wasn’t much to see: the road leading to the town and the service building was gravel and could use some maintenance. Beyond the village proper, which a kind person would describe as ‘somewhat picturesque’ and somebody like me would just call ‘squalid,’ all we could see were trees, naked trees waiting for a spring that might never come. I found myself missing Manhattan very badly. You never learned to appreciate the true meaning of ‘the dead of winter’ in New York; spring in the Ukraine was turning out to be quite educational that way. And fucking cold.
“At least we’re out of that metal box,” Christine said, trying to smile but not quite pulling it off. The hours of mild but constant torment in the dark, unable to do anything except sit quietly and try not to get slammed into the walls again and again had taken a lot out of her. The bathroom breaks – all three of them for the whole trip – had been embarrassing as hell for all of us but particularly bad for her. She wasn’t used to doing her business a few feet away from two men. That little bit of forced intimacy hadn’t been pleasant at all.
I put an arm around her and gave her a friendly squeeze. “Hey, look at the bright side. We’re right smack in Mordor already, and we didn’t have to walk the whole way there.”
She gave me a mock glare as I opened the rear of the truck. Most of the space was taken up with supplies, but where was a clear section that whoever wasn’t riding shotgun in the front was going to use for the next leg of the trip. Compared to our previous accommodations, sitting on a bench used to carry World War Two infantrymen was like traveling first class.
I stowed our gear as I heard Father Aleksander walk up to us. “Vasyl wants to know where we want to go,” he said.
Christine closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. “That way,” she said after a few seconds of concentration, pointing in what a quick glance at the sun told me was south by southeast. “We need to go about… oh, sixty miles, maybe seventy miles in that direction.” Father Alex nodded and walked towards the front of the truck to tell Vasyl where to go. I guessed he’d be riding shotgun. Christine turned to me. “I can feel his presence, the First Neo. He’s calling to me.”
“That’s nice of him. At least we won’t have to explore a thousand square miles of frozen swamp and forest looking for his hidey-hole.”
We noticed that Father Alex and Vasyl were arguing loudly, over by the front of the truck. More good news, I supposed. We went to see what was going on.
Vasyl continued grumbling as he took another swig from his flask. His expression had gotten even shittier than before. Father Alex looked fairly grim as well. “Vasyl tells me we’ll only be able to take the truck for another ten, fifteen miles in that direction. After that there are no more roads. We will have to walk the rest of the way. He has camping gear, so it shouldn’t be a problem, but he’s not happy about it.”
“Amerikansky Shit,” Vasyl muttered darkly.
I couldn’t blame him for the sentiment.
The Twisted Twosome
Staten Island, New York, March 22, 2013
Kestrel was getting bored.
Going off into the night wearing their costumes was usually fun, but instead of finding people to hurt, they’d been mostly talking. Talking and spending money, with Kyle doing most of both. To be fair, it was all his money. She didn’t care. She wasn’t with Kyle for his money. Over the years, she had amassed a nice nest egg, courtesy of some very generous clients, some shrewd investments, and the occasional big score on a worthy target. Money was something she’d never had to worry about, not since she was a little girl.
(She’d been a nice little girl, a nice pretty little girl, hadn’t she? Even after Daddy and Mommy had taken her to the basement with the dead people and taught her the meaning of the words Grand Guignol. She’d been good, had danced for them and done everything they’d asked – )
She shrugged – or was it a shiver? Never mind.
If Kyle had let her play with Lady Shi, she wouldn’t have been so grumpy. The Japanese killer was a run-of-the-mill sociopath, someone who had no finesse or panache when it came to torture. Kestrel would have loved to educate her in the ways and arts of pain. But no, Kyle had actually let the little bitch loose in the mansion, after getting her to promise she’d stay put. The mansion’s security systems would make sure she’d keep that promise, but Kestrel wished they’d brought her along for entertainment. It’d been a while since they’d double-teamed anybody, let alone a Neo who could take a lot of punishment before breaking.
Almost as annoyingly, they couldn’t drive around in the Condor Car. Even if Kyle’s fancy tank-on-wheels weren’t sitting in some Federal impound lot at the moment, they were trying to keep a low profile. They were doing all their traveling in a nondescript black van. That was rather unbecoming of notorious vigilantes like themselves, she thought, although the van’s tinted windows and spacious cargo area had potential for a number of wet work-related activities. Currently, however, all Kestrel was doing was sitting in the driver’s seat and waiting for Kyle to finish having a chat with a former Hiram Hades henchman known as Tony Tonka. Boring.
The sound of glass shattering brought her head up, and she saw a large figure land on top of a car after leaping from three stories up. The car, a cheap Chinese hybrid, was flattened into scrap metal and plastic.
Unaffected by the fall, Tony Tonka took off running. Kestrel was out of the van by the time the big cyborg had gotten to his feet, and rushing behind him a second later.
Tony was a relative oddity, a vanilla human w
ho’d ended up enhanced by Neo pseudo-technology. The tech in question included one artificial arm, two legs and a set of cybernetic implants that replaced most of his spine and rib cage with assorted metal and plastic parts. He’d been a prototype, part of Hiram Hades’ plot to build an army of cyborg warriors. Ultimate had put paid to that scheme as he had to so many others. Tony’d had one hell of a lawyer who’d convinced the jury that he not only was an innocent victim (a total lie; he’d been a loyal henchman of the mad genius) but that he was also exempt from the Parahuman Registration Act. So there he was, a bullet-proof metal man able to bench-press two tons, running around free as a bird.
The cyborg made a decent living selling bits and pieces of Hiram Hades’ technological wonders: his customers included assorted criminals and a few low-power Neo illegals looking for an edge. Why had he decided to rabbit when Kyle came calling, though? The wicked man fleeth when no man pursueth; so says the Good Book. Kestrel knew most of the Bible by heart. Her parents had seen to that, along with so many other things.
If Tony was being wicked, Kestrel would get to play with him. She’d always wanted a Tonka truck of her own.
The cyborg’s mad dash had a goal: a parked specialty van at the end of the street, built to his specifications. Tony Tonka was almost seven feet tall and nearly as wide, and weighed in at well over five hundred pounds, which ruled out most regular motor transport. His van was custom-made, and to add insult to injury, it had a handicapped tag. Tony fumbled for the keys in the pocket of his oversized blue jean overalls. He pulled them out just in time for Kestrel to snatch them off his mechanical hand with one flick of her whip. The keys landed in her hand; she dangled them at him. “I can’t believe you get to park in a handicapped spot, Tony,” she said. “That’s pretty unfair, don’t you think?” If the cyborg continued to be uncooperative, she might just have the chance to perform a few surgical procedures on him. By the time she was done, Tony would deserve his handicapped medallion. The thought warmed her a bit.
“Give me the keys, Kestrel,” Tony said, trying to sound intimidating and failing miserably. He was out of his league and he knew it. “I don’t got to talk to you, or to your boyfriend, awright? Just leave me alone!”
“If you want them, you’re going to have to come and get them, big boy.”
Tony must have really wanted to get away, because he actually started a lumbering charge in her direction, his oversized metal hands reaching for her. She somersaulted over his head, landed behind him and kicked him in the back with enough force to knock him facedown onto the street. The cyborg screamed in agony; there was plenty of flesh left in him, flesh that did not care for getting slammed into a hard surface. Kestrel smiled.
Kyle arrived seconds later. “Come on, let’s get him in the van before someone calls the cops,” he said.
“Which van, his or ours?”
“Ours,” he replied, picking up the stunned Tony as if he weighed nothing. “We’re not handicapped, after all. Let’s move.”
* * *
Tony’s glance swung between Kyle and Melanie, trying to figure out which one represented the greater threat. He finally settled on Melanie, which showed more smarts than Kyle would have given him credit for.
They’d driven him out to a nearby scrapyard, which was deserted at that time of night except for some guard dogs; a generous portion drugged raw hamburger had taken care of them. The locale hadn’t been lost on Tony. The cyborg was scared out of his mind, but he still wasn’t saying anything useful.
“Tony,” Kyle began once again. So far he’d been getting a lot of whining and posturing and very little useful information. He was getting frustrated enough to let Kestrel have a go at the stupid half-man. “I just wanted to talk to you about a project I’ve got going. You know I’m no longer in the NYPD’s good graces. I don’t care what kind of garbage you’re selling off the back of your handicapped van these days. So why did you decide to take off running?”
“Just feeling jumpy, I guess,” Tony replied.
“I’d like straight answers from now on, Tony, or I’m going to take you apart and turn you into a modern art sculpture. I have the technology. Kestrel has the imagination. We have the capability of turning you into something you won’t like one bit.”
“Jeeze, Condor. I’ve always played fair with you, man! I just can’t help you right now. I’ve got some serious shit going on!”
Kyle wondered if he should just get the information he was looking for, which was any stuff Tony’s long-dead boss had dug up on Freedom Island, plus anything Tony might have come up with lately, or if he should dig further into whatever ‘serious shit’ Tony was into. He decided to stick to his business. They were trying to save the world, not stop pretty crime. “Forget about your shit, Tony. I want to talk about your old boss. You know, the big double-H.”
The cyborg’s human bits became several shades paler, and his mouth gaped open. “How the fuck didya find out about him? I just got the word a couple of days ago!”
What was he talking about? “Heard about what?”
Before Tony could respond, someone knocked on the side of the van.
Kyle turned and opened the van’s side door with one hand as he reached for his stun baton with the other. Nobody should be out there, which meant nothing good was likely to be out there.
The man standing by the van’s door was tall and wide-shouldered, with the build of a defensive lineman. He was wearing a blue-and-yellow tracksuit and sneakers, and looked ordinary enough other than his size. Kyle recognized him immediately, however. The big man had shaved his trademark beard and shorn his traditionally long curls into a severe crew-cut, but his face was unmistakable. It was a face that had been on newspaper covers and wanted posters for six decades, before its last appearance on the obit pages.
He was looking at a man who’d been dead for years.
“Good evening, Kestrel, Condor,” Hiram Hades said. “I hope you’ll do me the courtesy of hearing me out before you start attacking.
“You see, I’m here to help you.”
Face-Off
Pripet Marshes, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 25, 2013
It was day three of our little trip into the Pripet Marshes, and so far the Ukraine hadn’t grown on me. I emerged from my tent into the frigid morning and saw a big pile of nothing much, same as the day before or the day before that. Lots of frozen water: frozen lakes and frozen rivulets and frozen swampland, not to mention big heaping piles of snow. We’d been walking through the woods and the most interesting thing we’d seen so far had been a beaver dam. Yipee. There were supposedly lots of interesting water fowl in the area, or so Google said, but most of them were away for the winter. Not that seeing a bunch of Ukrainian ducks would have cheered me up all that much anyway.
Neos don’t get tired from something as mundane as walking, even walking through frozen forest and swampland. We could have covered the sixty miles in a day, but our guide Vasyl was human and he had to take breaks. I’d thought about just telling him to go away and continuing on our own. Christine could point the way, after all. As it turned out, you couldn’t walk in a straight line in the tangled swampy forest. Father Alex had explained the realities of the situation when I mentioned my idea to him: unless we wanted to chance flying around, we’d probably end up running into impassable terrain and waste even more time backtracking and looking for alternative routes. Relying on Vasyl would probably be quicker, even if I used my newfound super-muscles to tear a way through ‘impassable’ terrain. Using Neo powers also increased the risk someone would notice us. The swamps were sparsely populated but not completely empty, and a couple of times we heard helicopters flying not too far away. Making a ruckus wasn’t a good idea.
All that mean was that we covered a bit under thirty miles the first day, and less than ten miles the second day. At this rate it’d take us another day or two to get there. That was about three days too many for my taste.
Vasyl was eating his breakfast, a big chunk
of sausage, another big chunk of cheese and plenty of vodka. I munched on some power bars and drank orange juice made from concentrate. Not exactly the breakfast of champions, but we mostly ate out of habit rather than need. Some Neos had learned to do without food altogether. Janus, for one: he’d left to wander around space for a couple of decades with nothing but a wrist-comp and a dream, had carried no rations or water or needed either. That was somebody I could respect. I hoped the big guy would make it back from wherever Mr. Night had taken him.
Christine emerged from the tent. She hadn’t been sleeping well ever since we entered the forest. She’d tossed and turned every night, mumbling words I couldn’t quite make out. I’d asked her about it but she said she couldn’t remember anything. It could be nothing; it’s not as if she didn’t have plenty of nightmare material floating around in her head. But I suspected the little asshole waiting for us was responsible, and if she couldn’t remember anything it was because he didn’t want her to. I felt like we were walking into a trap, even though it made no sense. We were already in Dominion territory, so luring us deeper into the forest wasn’t necessary. They could have grabbed us – or tried to; I sure as hell wasn’t going to surrender without a fight – at any point during this trip. If the Doms wanted us, Russia and Belarus would have cooperated like the good little puppets they were. Logic did nothing to dispel my mood, however. Being out in the woods didn’t help, either. I’m a city guy.
“Good morning,” Christine said, and gave me a peck on the cheek. “What’s for breakfast?”
I handed her a couple of power bars. “Your favorites. Raspberry and chocolate.”
“You mean the ones I hate the least,” she replied, but took them.
We ate in companionable silence for a while before she spoke again. “We’re very close. I think I’m going to see him today.”
“We’re going to see him, you mean.” I didn’t like where this was going.
New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Page 34