New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (29 page)

The Darkling Plains, Time Undetermined

“Thank you! Thank you so much!”

The latest addition to our gang won’t stop babbling. Can’t blame the guy; what the hungry ghosts had been doing to him when we broke up their party just wasn’t right, even for Hell. The newbie – some blogger named Peter Fowler – is going to need some major psychotherapy if we ever manage to get out of here.

There’s six of us now. Besides Fowler, we’ve picked up a couple more people along the way. Annie is a little girl that ended up here after some hideous sacrificial ritual in the 1930s. She’s our secret weapon; she has psychic powers, and they’re still working here in Hell. We also rescued a quiet guy who goes by the name Jeffrey and hasn’t volunteered a last name. Jeffrey worries me a little. Not as much as Medved, who is trying to become top dog in the gang, but the guy creeps me out. For one, he hasn’t told us how he ended up here. For another, I don’t like the way he looks at us, especially when he thinks nobody’s paying attention. Just because Mr. Night fucked him over doesn’t make him a good guy.

Then again, when we found Jeffrey three ghosts were eating him alive. Maybe he’s too traumatized by his time in Hell. We’ll see.

“All right,” I tell the gang. “We’ve got some time before dark, so let’s try to make one more sweep and see if we can pick up someone else.” We can tell the passage of time by the way light changes, from the twilight dark during the ‘day’ to pitch black at night. We’ve got no idea how it corresponds to time out in the real world, though. So far we’ve managed to make it through a dozen nights in one piece.

We lost a fight one time, and it was bad. We ran into a gang of hungry ghosts, too many for us to handle, and they killed us all. We came back, of course, but it took us days to find each other again, and in that time a few of us got killed a couple more times. What they did to us… Defeat is not a good outcome in here.

Medved objects to the plan, just as I expected. “It’s already getting darker,” he grumbles. “What if we are caught in the open when night falls?”

“That’d be bad,” Fowler says. “Bad, bad.”

“Mark is right,” Wanda says. Annie is by her side; the two have adopted each other. “We’ve still got time. Even if we can’t rescue anybody else, we might find someone we can go after tomorrow.” We’ve discovered that the ghosts and their victims tend to stick to the same locations, on some sort of schedule. Hell means being stuck in a rut. A painful, horrible rut.

Jeffrey stays silent, looking at Medved and me, back and forth, trying to decide which big dog is worth following.

“We go on,” I say.

“Who says you are the boss here?”

I give him one of my gruesome smiles. “I say, Russki. If you think you deserve to be top dog, you know how it works.”

Medved nods and then comes at me. No warning, no hesitation, just the way you should start a fight. Most people act instinctively, like monkeys, hollering and waving their arms and working themselves into a frenzy. The Russian knows the way to do it is to strike the first blow before the other guy knows the fight has started.

Unfortunately for him, I know the same tricks.

He moves fast for a big guy. He’s going for a grapple and takedown. Once he has me on the ground, I’m meat. He can sit on me and hammer me to a pulp. Been there, done that, a hell of a lot more often of late, courtesy of the ghosts. So I sidestep his grab and kick one of his knees out. That sends him facedown into the dirt, and I crush his skull with two stomps of my boots. His body dissolves into shadow. It looks bad, but he’ll be back tomorrow, hopefully with a better attitude.

Wanda rushes to my side, Annie tagging along. “You okay?” she asks me, and puts a hand on my shoulder.

I nod, and wish I could make a face so I can give her a smile she might want to look at. I turn to the other two members of our gang. “Anyone else got something to say?”

“Fuck, no,” Fowler says. “You’re Mr. Badass. You’re like fucking Alexis Machine in those George Stark novels.”

I don’t read crime novels – it’d be pretty redundant, given my line of work – but I’ve seen the Stark movies, so I know Fowler is comparing me with a sociopathic murderous monster as his way to kiss my ass. I decide to take it as a compliment. “That’s right, fucko. What’s his line? Oh, yeah: ‘When you fuck with me, you’re fucking with the best.’” It’s not bad at all, actually. I’d steal it, but plagiarism isn’t one of my many sins.

Fowler nods, an almost-worshipful look in his face. “Man, if you can get us out of here, I’ll do anything, okay?”

Jeffrey licks his lips but remains quiet. I’ll take that as an endorsement.

“All right, let’s move on.” We gather our improvised weapons and wander through the ruins, looking for trouble.

“I wish you’d watch your language around Annie,” Wanda tells me. “She’s just a kid.”

Damn, she’s right. I don’t deal with children very often, which is best for everyone concerned. “Hey, kid,” I tell her. “Hey, Annie,” I say when Wanda gives me a look. “I didn’t mean to scare you, okay?”

She nods and gives me a very serious look. “I know.”

“Good. Now you stick close to Wanda, and do what she tells you to.” I really don’t want to bring a kid into a fight, but leaving her alone is a nonstarter: the ghosts will find her. They gravitate toward anybody who is alone. Besides, Annie is no good in a fight but her psychic skills have been a huge help. Which means that if we lose, she gets to be tortured along with us, and we get to watch.

The one time it happened was a time too many. I’ve told Wanda what to do if it looks like we’re going to lose a fight, so she can make a quick end of it. Death is temporary, but the memories go on, possibly forever.

Soon enough, we hear the familiar sound of a human being screaming in endless agony. We’ve learned that sound doesn’t carry very far in Hell, so whatever is happening is fairly close by. I gesture to the others to halt, and nod to Annie. The little girl concentrates, and links our minds together.

It’s a funny feeling, a little bit like my special connection with Christine, but not as deep and personal. I can sense everyone in the mental network, so I know their positions and can send them brief mental commands. Nothing deeper than that, which means I still know dick about Jeffrey, and I learn very little about Peter, other than he’s shocked when he’s plugged into the psychic network, and I catch a little burst of loathing when it happens. I think he’s got some prejudices about Neos. The psychic network isn’t very powerful, but it lets us coordinate our actions, and coordination is the key to making our tactics work.

Now that I know where everybody is, I head on out. I can move quietly when I have to, and I reach the spot where the screams are coming from without being noticed.

The party is taking place in the remains of a car wash. An Asian guy is being slowly dismembered by five ghosts I haven’t seen before: they all look like teenage Asian girls. My guess is the victim brought this on himself – I can think of plenty of reasons a gaggle of girls might want some payback from somebody – but beggars can’t be choosers and we might need him, so I call out to the gang as I formulate a plan of attack.
There’s five of them, so there’s no margin for error
, I tell them, and send them a little map of the area.
I’m going in first. Fowler, come along; our job it to keep them busy. Jeffrey and Wanda, you circle around and come up behind them when their attention is on us two
. That’s our usual routine: it’s a race between my pals and the assholes. If my buddies can bushwhack them before the assholes kill me, we win. Fowler hefts his metal club – a length of copper pipe – and nods. I’m not expecting miracles from the guy, just that he stays in play long enough for the other two to spring their ambush. So far the ghosts don’t believe in holding back a tactical reserve; they just swarm me and whoever else I bring along, usually Medved; if the Russian asshole hadn’t decided to play games today, this fight would be as good as won already.

We’ll see how this goes. This is going to be Fowler’s first fight, and the guy’s a blogger, for fuck’s sake. Probably hasn’t thrown a punch in anger since the fourth grade, if ever. But if he can keep one of the ghosts off my back for a few seconds, we’re golden.

We crawl as close as we can and get ready behind a burned-out delivery truck. The Asian ladies all have razor blades in their hands, and from the way they’re taking bits off the guy with each slice, they know how to use them. We better get in there before he drops dead.

The first moves go off pretty much the as we planned. Things happen fast: the rushing charge, the scream that freezes the ghosts for just a moment, the jabs with the rebar spear. These girls are as quick as I feared, though. I try to drive my spear right into the skull of the nearest one, but she twists away and I only score a ragged wound on her face. I shift my grip and use the rebar like a staff, deflecting her counter slash, and crush her head on the back swing, but that takes time, too much time. Fowler screams when two girls go after him, leaving me with two dance partners.

Fowler panics when he finds himself outnumbered. He tries to run, and they pounce on him from behind. Meanwhile, I have my own problems. The two girls score deep slashes on my arm and back. I’ve got reach on them, but they move quickly and spread out so I can only face one of them. I take several cuts before I get lucky and impale one of them with a back thrust before she can leap away, but that costs me my weapon when she falls and drags it away, and as that happens I feel Fowler die through Annie’s connection.

Now it’s three to one; Fowler is already dissolving into shadowy goo and her dance partners have joined in the fun. I pull my secondary weapon, a shiv I made with a piece of mirror and some duct tape, and shout a few insults in Cantonese I learned from a hard case from Chinatown. They come at me in a semicircle, moving sinuously like cats, razor blades spinning in their hands. This isn’t going as well as I hoped.

The second ambush goes off as planned, though.

Jeffrey creeps quietly behind one of the girls, pulls her head back by the hair, and slits her throat with a swift economical motion that tells me this isn’t his first rodeo. Wanda isn’t quite as lucky: her spear thrust isn’t immediately fatal, and the chick whirls around and starts slashing at her. I can’t see how that fight goes, though, because I have one on me. I brute-force it, taking a slash on a shoulder that was aimed at my neck for the chance to grapple and stab her with my shiv, over and over, my arm working like a sewing machine needle. By the time she goes down, Jeffrey has cut the last girl’s throat while Wanda fends her off with her spear.

It’s victory of sorts, but we’re going to have to make camp here or risk losing Fowler when he wakes up the next day. The guy’s probably not going to be thrilled with us, but at least he didn’t get tortured to death, just cut up a bit and killed. The way things are, that’s an above-average day in Hell. Finding Medved is going to take days, though. Hopefully the Russian will learn not to fuck with me.

We walk over to the Chinese guy. He’s been nailed to the ground with railroad spikes. “We’ll get you out of those as soon as we can,” I tell him, and he nods, his eyes glazed over with pain.

“Hold on,” Wanda tells me. “Let me fix you up first or you’re going to drop dead halfway through.” I stop and let her check on me while Jeffrey goes over to help the new rescue. I idly notice that he lingers a few moments too long while examining the sight, as if he’s savoring it. Yep, Jeffrey wasn’t a good guy long before he ended up in here.

“They really got you,” Wanda comments, and it’s only when she puts pressure on the wound that I notice the deep slash right around where my ear would be if I had any. I hadn’t felt anything, but when Wanda takes the flap of skin and flesh hanging off the side of my head, and pushes it back into place I feel it, alright. I try not to howl like a monkey in a wood chipper while she plasters duct tape on the wound – that one roll we found at this morning has been a godsend; we’ll miss it when it’s gone – but the burst of agony almost makes me black out.

What happens next makes the pain worth it.

Faint, garbled, dreamlike – but it’s her voice, Christine’s voice.

“Christine!” I shout, mentally and out loud; that makes Wanda recoil back, rewarding me with another burst of pain as she accidentally pulls on my mauled head. When I recover, the voice in my head is gone.

I don’t care. I know I didn’t imagine it. My connection with Christine is coming back. It may be weak and intermittent, but it’s coming back.

She’s out there. I’m going to figure out a way out.

I’m going to find her.

Miami, Florida/Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, December 13, 2013

A freak malfunction in a SpaceX orbital shuttle had sent the vessel and its cargo – over three thousand tons of valuable off-Earth imports – into an uncontrolled fall towards Miami. The lives of thousands were at stake.

Never fear, boys and girls. Ultimate’s here!

The uncharacteristically sarcastic thought flashed through John’s head as he flew towards the massive burning missile the shuttle had become. He grimaced angrily as he matched speeds with the plunging craft, grabbed hold of it, and then began to slow it down, carefully making sure the stress didn’t shred the shuttle. Just another day in his life, saving people, expecting no gratitude or reward.
Just doin’ my job, ma’am. Aw-shucks, yer welcome. I’m just a big lug performing for you, just like a trained monkey at the circus
.

He was in a savage mood today, and he knew exactly why.

Face-Off might still be alive.

Chastity Baal’s discovery that Mr. Night had survived and taken over Face-Off’s body had been a shock to everyone. Bad enough John’d had to compete on an almost daily basis with the idealized ghost of the dead vigilante. John had known that a part of Christine would always be silently comparing him with her former lover. He hadn’t minded, much; after all, he was doing the same thing. Linda’s memories would always linger within him. One of the reasons they’d grown fond of each other was their common grief over dead lovers. He would always draw comparisons between Christine and Linda, so he could understand her doing the same.

The difference, of course, was that Linda wasn’t about to make a comeback. Mark Martinez might just do that. Chances were the vigilante was dead and gone, of course. All that remained was a shell inhabited by Mr. Night. Still, that meant Christine would end up experiencing loss and devastation yet again, especially after they finally put Mr. Night down, which would require destroying Face-Off’s body.

Goddammit. Goddammit to Hell
.

John held the shuttle above his head, keeping the massive weight aloft through the force of his will – no combination of muscle and bone could do what he did – and after he bled off the last of the ship’s excess speed, he changed course. He flew the vessel to its destination point at Cape Canaveral, where its cargo of rare metals and bottled Helium-3 would be offloaded for transshipment. At his current speed, he would reach Canaveral in five minutes, plenty of time for the local press to show up and immortalize the rescue in photos and video. He would have to smile for the cameras and say a few words, something pleasant and innocuous. Normally he didn’t mind any of it.

Today he minded. He hadn’t been this short-tempered since…

Since Daedalus’ gaslight project started.

That thought sobered him.
Am I losing my mind again?
There was no way his cochlear implants had been tampered with. Now that they knew what to look for, the Legion’s psychics had scoured every inch of the Legion’s homes and equipment looking for any traces of Outsider energy. They’d found some, not a lot of it, thankfully, and cleansed it all off. If anything was going wrong, it wasn’t coming from an outside source.

What if Daedalus’ tampering had only accelerated something that was already there?

This is ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with me
.

He was just being affected by the situation; that was all. The planet was facing an unprecedented threat, and everybody involved in its defense was under constant, massive stress. That would be plenty to unhinge the most stable of minds. Add on top of that the personal stresses of his relationship with Christine, and the sudden revelation that Mr. Night was running rampant with her dead lover’s body, and it was no wonder he wasn’t his usual chipper self.

They were all impossibly busy as well, which didn’t help. Rescuing the orbital shuttle had been an almost welcome interruption of his current routine. In addition to his regular duties, John spent eight hours a day putting thousands of tons of cargo into orbit, along with all Neos capable of moving objects beyond Earth’s gravity well. Weapon platforms, ammunition, the thousands of tiny anti-teleport wards that would be seeded throughout the Solar System to keep the Genocide from striking wherever he wanted, and much more. All part of the war effort.

And still the visions of the future remained grim. That was the worst part. All precogs had been quietly quarantined, and their predictions kept from the public, to avoid even more panic. Their prognostications were universally bleak. They included several charming scenarios: the Earth breaking apart when the Moon was hurted towards it by the merciless Genocide; the world in flames as the alien chose instead to destroy each city individually; after the cities he targeted towns, then villages, and finally hunted down each dwindling group of survivors until none remained. Others had seen a Pyrrhic victory where the last line of defense had finally put an end to the alien, and where a few hundred thousand survivors had emerged from their shelters and found themselves the heirs of a largely barren planet.

They were working as hard as they could, and none of it might matter. That should have bothered him more than his personal problems, but perversely, it didn’t. Maybe it was because worrying about his love life was less demoralizing than contemplating the end of the world, or maybe he’d turned into a self-centered adolescent in his old age.

Either way, it wasn’t good.

* * *

Christine stood at his threshold, looking as upset as he’d ever seen her.

“Come in,” John said. Neither of them was smiling.

They sat down in his living room, not side by side like they were used to, but in different chairs, facing each other, and the new arrangement felt like the beginning of the end.

“What’s wrong?” John asked after a few moments of awkward silence.

She hung her head. “Mark’s alive.”

“Christine, you know his body’s only a…”

She cut him off. “I contacted his mind, okay? Earlier today, while working with Uncle Adam to try and restore my powers. It happened only for a second, and I haven’t been able to reach him again, because my powers are still all effed up, but I heard him, he’s alive, he’s been alive all along, and he was in pain. I’ve been dreaming about him for
weeks
, about him suffering, being tortured, and it was all true. I should have known those weren’t just dreams, but instead I set them aside. He’s been alive all along, and I’ve been cheating on him like a complete asshole!”

“You didn’t know,” John said. She wasn’t crying; she was too angry to cry, angry at herself and, he was sure, at him as well.

“I should’ve known.”

“You’re not God, Christine. None of us are.” He wanted to do more than say the usual platitudes; he wanted to hold her in his arms, but he could tell she didn’t want to be touched right now.

“This is totally effed up,” she said. She looked up and now he saw tears beginning to form in her eyes; she wiped them off absently as she went on. “Look, until we rescue him, until I can look him in the eye, well, you know what I mean, and tell him what happened, you and I, we can’t, not now, you know? I can’t keep doing this, us, not while he’s still alive.”

“I understand,” John said. He did understand, but he also felt an undercurrent of anger as he said the words, and he saw Christine’s eyes widen as she sensed his emotions with her returning powers.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for hurting you, I’m sorry for dragging you into this mess.”

“It’s all right,” he lied, and he tried to keep his anger at bay, and he either succeeded or her powers were still too erratic because she seemed to accept the lies at face value.

“There’s more,” she went on. “Chastity Baal made contact with Lady Shi, and between the two of them they’re working on a plan to take down Mr. Night. I know that means Mark is almost as good as dead, because capturing Mr. Night alive is just not an option. Even killing him is apparently next to impossible, so we’re not going to even try to take him alive. We’re going to go at him all-out. Full lethal force protocols have been authorized by the Council. Awesome.”

“We can try,” John said. “If there is a chance to free Mark, to release his body and soul, we’ll take it. The Legion will help. I will help.” Those were the right words, the right sentiments, the kind of thing a hero would say, should say. And yet, he felt numb, cold, alone.

The gratitude in her eyes helped a little bit.

Not enough, though. Never enough.

Macau, Republic of China, December 14, 2013

Chastity Baal faced a roomful of killers and smiled.

“You should drop your weapons,” she said in Cantonese. The Tong enforcers knew her reputation well – she had grown up in the streets of Macau, after all – and all but one of them did as she said, lowering an assortment of guns and blades to the floor. The sole holdout was young and stupid, a typical case of testosterone poisoning coupled with a teenager’s sense of immortality.

“Fuck your mother!” the youngster roared and fired a burst of bullets from his venerable AK-47. He even did it right, shooting low and guiding the recoil of the weapon in a diagonal motion that would put at least one or two of the three or four rounds right on target.

Back in the old days, Chastity would have been in motion before the youth finished his insult, stepping away from the line of fire while shooting from the hip. She’d favored accurate, small caliber handguns, and she could reliably put a couple of rounds in a man’s throat and forehead – her associate Tommy Leary called that particular shot grouping the ‘Chastity Love-Tap.’

This time, she didn’t bother. She now had the full powers of a Celestial Warrior, after all. Her newfound invulnerability and strength weren’t worth the price she’d unwillingly paid for them. Christine was beginning to work on a cure as her powers returned, but Chastity remained plagued with nightmares. Still, she might as well make use of her gifts.

Two 7.62mm rounds hit her, one in the upper thigh and the other just over her left breast. The deformed rounds ricocheted away; with perverse randomness, one of them bounced right back into the shooter’s face. Howling, the young Tong gangster fired a burst into the floor before collapsing. The remaining thugs recoiled away, terrified of being massacred in retaliation.

“Somebody should see to his injuries,” she said calmly through the gunfire’s fading echoes. The shooter was writhing on the floor; in addition to the wound to his face, which hadn’t been immediately fatal, he had shot himself in the foot with his last burst.

“What do you want, Golden Hair?” the leader of the gang asked, using her old nickname from her days in Macau.

“Tomorrow, you are going to meet with the man who hired you to steal the blueprints for the new space corvettes,” she said. It wasn’t a question, but the man nodded in confirmation. “I and two of my friends are going to join you for that meeting.”

The leader knew her reputation well enough to know there would be no negotiations. He nodded again.

* * *

The meeting took place in a stretch of the Macau docks that was undergoing renovations and thus was largely deserted at this time of night. The handful of security guards on the site had been bribed away, and now the only people there were the Tong leader and a dozen bodyguards. Four of those bodyguards were not who they appeared to be.

Two of Chastity’s three companions had very little experience with covert operations. One had spent decades out in the public eye wearing outlandish costumes, the literal opposite of covert. The other at least had some experience at being on the run from the authorities, but that was about it. Luckily all they had to do was stay quiet and let their holographic disguises do their work. The last member of the group was as skilled in working in the shadows as Chastity, but she also was a criminal and not a member of the Legion.

Christine Dark (a.k.a. Dark Justice), Nebiru and Lady Shi made an unlikely team for Chastity to lead, but their quarry required an unconventional strategy. It would take their combined skills to bring down the elusive Mr. Night. Christine Dark was there because her innate ability to spoof extra-sensory detection would prevent their target from spotting them. Nebiru’s spells would neutralize Mr. Night’s teleportation capabilities. Lady Shi would be of little help in the upcoming confrontation, but her contacts and psychic abilities had been indispensable in getting them to this point, and the price for her cooperation had been to be in at the kill. Two Legion squads waited some three miles away, ready to pounce once the signal was given, but for the first few seconds, the four of them would have to handle their adversary on their own.

The Tong criminals were doing their best to appear nonchalant, but their acting abilities were barely on par with their marksmanship. Chastity hoped that their quarry wouldn’t be able to sense their fear. A great deal of effort had gone into setting up the trap, and it would be unlikely the Legion would have another opportunity like this one.

The sound of footsteps from a blind alley that had been empty moments before preceded the emergence of a man in an old-fashioned black business suit, and Chastity beheld Mr. Night for the first time. The old man’s face was unsettling enough, but the tingling she felt on the palm of her hand, where Daedalus’ tainted dagger had marked her, was far worse. Chastity had no intention to absorb Mr. Night’s powers and memories. She’d actually left the weapon behind to avoid any chance of contamination.