New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (23 page)

Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, December 2, 2013

Mark.

She woke up with the name of her dead lover on the tip of her tongue, but left the word unsaid. Just as well.

John Clarke, lying in bed next to her, would have heard her and been upset.

His arm was draped over her as they lay cuddled together in bed. His massive form made her feel safe most of the time, but at the moment his presence was smothering, stifling. She gently disentangled herself from him and slid out of bed. The move woke him up, of course – supers were light sleepers as a rule – and he gave her a quizzical look.

“Bad dream,” she said. “I’m just going to drink some milk and chill out.”

John nodded. He knew all about bad dreams. “Want to talk about it?”

“Maybe later, ‘kay? Go back to sleep.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied with a grin, and did just that.

He seemed to be fine. Probably was. She didn’t know for sure, though. She had no idea what he was feeling, other than by the way he acted or the things he said.

It drove her crazy, not knowing for sure.

Funny, she thought as she quietly walked to the kitchen and poured herself a glass a milk. One would think she’d get used to not having empathy powers after six months without them. She’d only had the powers for less than three months, had constantly bitched about what a burden they were, and now she felt crippled without them. Hopefully time would heal that wound, along with all the others.

Some old wounds were taking their own sweet time to heal, though.

She’d never gone a day without thinking of Mark at least once, but the little bursts of sorrow and regret had grown weaker over time. Until the last few weeks, that is. She’d been having a semi-recurring dream since before Thanksgiving: Mark and a motley group of people, running and hiding in a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, all grays and blacks, ruins and deserts populated by the living dead. The dreams had filled her with a sense of urgency and panic, a need to go find the place and rescue Mark.

Chrisinte shook her head and sipped her milk, blinking the stinging burn out of her eyes. There was nobody to rescue. Mark was dead. Her empathy had been alive and well at the time, and she had felt his soul being snuffed out like a candle in the Elton-John-loving wind. Her mind was just playing tricks on her.

You just can’t be happy with what you got
, her brain diagnosed.
You just have to second-guess every darn thing, that’s all.

She kinda did, yes. There was no reason for it. Overall, things had finally started getting better. Mostly. She still wanted to go home, but Uncle Adam still hadn’t figured out how, and her ability to connect to the Codex had been crippled as badly as her empathy, so learning new Words was out of the question. She still only knew one – Power – and at a first grade level; attempts to improve her knowledge only managed to trigger brutal migraines, some of which had left her semi-conscious for days at a time.

The First had really effed her up. When she’d severed her connection to the Source, she’d mutilated her mind and soul, and the damage was either not healing or doing so at a glacial pace. She’d considered flying back to the Ukraine, finding the little monster, and doing what she should have done the first time he backstabbed her. John and Olivia had talked her out of it, and truth to tell she hadn’t put up much of a fight. She still didn’t have it in her to commit cold-blooded murder.

Christine had changed a lot in the last several months, but not that much.

The last of the milk went down her gullet. She reminded herself to pick up some more after work. Yep, work. Turned out that being a Legionnaire was a nine-to-five job most of the time. She was due at the new Freedom Tower – a replacement from the one the terrorists had blown up in March; it had been rebuilt in an amazingly short time – by nine a.m., and unless killer robots attacked New York or London, she would spend her morning typing a full after-action report about her last heroic adventure. She was now part of Freedom Squad One, the elite uber-duper-force that most people thought of when somebody mentioned the Legion. Artemis, Brass Man, Berserker, Hyperia, Swift, and Ultimate, plus little old her, Dark Justice.

Two days ago, FS-1 had been dispatched to Cuba when an ill-advised Type Three and his gang of Type Two Neos had tried to rob every casino in Habana. Luckily, she and her band of bros and sis’s had subdued the bad guys quickly and without any civilian casualties or major property damage. Christine’s contribution to the battle had been to surround the Big Bad with a force field and punt him into the ocean, where Ultimate had pummeled him into submission.

The actual fight had taken all of three minutes, but the paperwork would take the best part of a week. In addition to the report, she had to fill out International Incident and Proper Use of Force forms, an Environmental Impact Statement and a Psychological Fitness Report. The After-Action Report was the only remotely fun bit; she was encouraged to be as descriptive as possible, since BC Multimedia would use the report as the basis for at least one of their comic book issues and maybe a TV episode. The other reports and forms were about as much fun as getting your driver’s license renewed while filing your taxes.

After her lunch break, she’d spend the afternoon sparring and training, slightly more fun than gym class in high school, but not something she loved. At least she’d be doing most of the sparring with her teammates, all of which were becoming pretty close friends except for Berserker, who was kind of a d-bag. When that was over she could just check her e-mails and go home for the day. Not a strenuous schedule for a quarter-million a year salary plus millions in merch royalties, besides the very occasional bouts of actual violence and mayhem.

She would trade it all for a chance to go back home and be normal again.

Well, maybe. She would certainly think about it. If she ever managed to link to the Source, she could in theory de-power herself, so she might have the chance to make the choice for real.

That would mean leaving John behind, though. She was sure she didn’t want that.

Christine put the empty glass in the dishwasher and headed back to the bedroom. Her boyfriend had gone back to sleep. John’s schedule was wide open until noon, when he was due to give a speech in front of the UN. He’d rehearsed it for her last night: it called for new sanctions on the Dominion and easing sanctions on the Dragon Empire. The speech had been about as exciting as any political speech ever was, but she’d managed to keep her eyes from glazing over and paid enough attention to actually suggest a couple of changes, one of which ended up in the final version of the speech. After that, there’d been a lot less speechifying and a lot more sexy times.

She stepped into the shower. It was still two hours earlier than her usual wakey-time, but she wasn’t going to get any sleep, and she’d found out that John was not into morning sex, which made him the only guy she’d known with that handicap. Maybe it was because, deep down, he was a creature of deeply-ingrained habits. Sex was for the night, something to be done in the dark – he’d never suggested keeping the lights on, and Christine hadn’t, either, not being the type who liked to talk about what she liked in bed – and done in a certain way, pretty much the same way every time. His ‘usual’ sexy times package was pretty damn good, she had to admit; she always ended up feeling somewhere between satisfied and mind-blown, but in the last couple of weeks she’d wondered how long she’d be happy doing things almost by rote.

As the hot water ran down her skin, she thought about their first time, and started fantasizing about it while going above and beyond her morning ablutions. John might not be into morning sex, but she certainly was, and… Hmmm. Their first time had been intense. It’d happened back in October, when she’d finally started moving on and he’d finally started courting her.

John had been a good friend, helped her deal with the grief, helped her in so many ways. His presence had been the one good constant in her life, and as the pain began to fade – indecently quickly, she thought, although John had explained that Neos rebounded from psychological trauma somewhat faster than normal humans – her attraction to him had finally started to come out and play. After a while, the friendly chats had led to holding hands, to long gazes into each other’s eyes, and finally a kiss. Hmmm.

She’d been considering making the first move before he finally made it, something she’d never done before… No, that wasn’t true. She’d sorta made the first move with Mark, too.

Mark
. The fantasy shifted, and now it was Mark she pictured, his sexy-time face descending between her thighs… Oh. She came quietly the first time, but couldn’t suppress a moan during the second one. She finished washing up, feeling sad. Awesome. Masturbation and sadness in the shower did not make for a good start to her day.

Christine came back into the bedroom and got dressed. John was lying in bed but wasn’t asleep anymore. He’d probably heard her playing with herself in the bathroom, since all his senses were superhumanly sharp. Awkward. Well, she wasn’t going to bring it up if he wasn’t, and fortunately he didn’t. “I’m going to take a walk before going to work,” she said as she leaned over him to kiss him goodbye.

He smiled at her. “Have a good day, sweetheart.”

“I’ll try.” She headed out. He sounded happy enough. But was he? She wanted to
know
, not guess.

Welcome to the world of the other eight billion people on this planet and the seven billion in your home planet, where most everyone has to guess
.

Fine, brain
. She knew she was whining, and it wasn’t as if her empathy had been an unambiguous blessing. As often as not, she’d ended up seeing things she wished she hadn’t. Still, it had been a big help when dealing with the strong, silent men who seemed to be her type nowadays. Which brought her back to one dearly departed strong silent man.

What is it with me today?

The stupid dreams were getting to her. She tried to not think about them while she took a walk down Watchman Plaza, named after a superhero who’d died heroically in France during WWII. The plaza had a nice park with statues of assorted Legionnaires, as well as several monuments honoring the human fallen in that war and a few others. Since it was still oh-God thirty in the morning, the place was pretty deserted, except for a lone jogger doing his thing. Walking through the quiet lanes between the trees and grass helped her relax a bit. She needed more than that, though. It almost felt like she was on the verge of a panic attack, and she hadn’t had one of those in a good while.

Something bad is coming
.

She wasn’t Cassandra, didn’t have precog powers, unless you counted her bad dreams, which were ninety-nine percent nonsense and well under one percent prediction; she’d dreamt about the evil version of her father, for example, which she guessed counted as a foreseeing, but little else of any import. Was this feeling a version of that? Her current recurrent nightmares weren’t about the future; they were about the past, about Mark suffering. Except he was beyond suffering.

How do you know that?

Well, there was that. Her father had died and come back, along with Doc Slaughter, for some values of coming back. They’d had the benefit of a special Neo doodad, though. Mark hadn’t. She’d looked for him for several days after the battle in Manhattan. Her empathy had been in full working order back then, and she hadn’t found any sign that he was alive. She would have kept searching for him, except she’d lost all her extrasensory abilities not too long after. It had taken her weeks to fully accept his loss, over four months before she’d moved on (she still felt guilty about how quickly she’d moved on), and she had no intention of second-guessing herself about him anymore.

She shook her head. It was too late for that crapola. She had moved on, and she needed to stop…

I AM COMING.

It was a thought, a voice, a scream that brought her to her knees. The power and malevolence that came through were almost overwhelming. Christine clapped her hands over her ears, knowing it was useless but desperate to keep out those terrible words. A few feet away, the early-morning jogger stumbled and fell to the ground, also covering his ears. WTF?

NOW I AM BECOME DEATH, DESTROYER OF WORLDS.

Sheer terror followed the second sentence; the words felt heavy, as dense as plutonium and just as poisonous, laden with meaning and truth. Christine believed whoever was talking with every fiber of her being. It was the Word of God, or might as well be, something as real as the Words she’d been trying to learn from the Codex. She wanted to scream and fold into a fetal position. Instead, she forced herself to rush to the aid of the jogger, who had banged his head pretty badly and was bleeding from a scalp wound. Lucky for him, her sensible costume included a first aid kit in one of the pouches of her utility belt.

“Are you okay?” she asked as she knelt next to him.

The wounded jogger looked at her with wide eyes that didn’t focus on anything. “He’s coming!” he screamed. “He’s coming to kill us all!” He tried to scramble away from her like a crab, and only succeeded in smacking his head on a nearby bench. He howled when Christine touched him and she had to physically overpower him before she could put pressure on the head injury. Out in the distance she could hear more screams of terror.