Read New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Online
Authors: C.J. Carella
Tags: #Superhero/Alternative Fiction
The stuff doesn’t go away after you let it in
. Mark had let the Outside in. “I know what she said. That doesn’t mean it’s the truth, okay? Maybe I can figure a way out. An exorcism, whatever. Uncle Adam will help, he used to be tainted, and now he’s free from the stuff. All clear, no darkness or evil Thetans or whatever.”
“Okay, we can talk about it later. We can’t let Mr. Night deliver you to the Outsiders. So let’s do it.”
“Oh, so you expect me to come up with the plan, figure out how to implement it, and do all the heavy lifting?” she said, half in jest.
“I’m just the sidekick, Armageddon Girl.”
“I’m Dark Justice.”
“You say potato, I say Armageddon Girl. Anyway, this was your idea, Frodo, so you get to figure out how to get us to Mount Doom.”
“Whatever, Samwise.”
Or are you Gollum, doomed to sacrifice yourself?
The nasty thought stuck to her like an indelible stain. “I figure this is going to work kinda like when I followed the Dreamer inside John’s head, only in reverse.”
And back then my super-empathy and semi-telepathy and whatnot were all in working order, instead of working only half the time
. Well, there was only one way to find out if she was up to the job. At the very least, her head was going to end up hurting. A lot.
“Okay, I’m going in.”
The Darkling Plains, Time Undetermined
I watch Christine close her eyes and concentrate. I have no idea how she’s going to pull this latest trick, but I know she will.
All I have to do is keep her alive.
Nothing happens for a bit. I can hear screams out in the distance – the ghosts have found someone else nearby, and are having their fun with him – but nothing close enough to worry me. I take a quick look back at Christine. She’s still concentrating, her face screwed up in a determined expression, and I get the feeling that she’s hurting, although with our weakened connection it’s hard to tell for sure.
She’s feeling guilty about something, I can feel that much. I figure she can tell me about it after we’re out of here.
I have no clue how I know this, but the knowledge is in my head. To get somewhere, you need to visualize your destination and then jump into the realm in-between, a place that is somehow linked to all of spacetime, an echo of the time when the whole universe was contained within a single point. I can see our destination, a place so far away it’s taking a good while to get there. There are Things waiting for us, and even the brief glimpse I catch of them is enough to make me want to die. The burst of horror and revulsion actually works in our favor, because we come to a stop in the blackness.
Home. I try to visualize our place at Freedom Island, but I can’t get it right. I was too busy being happy to really let things sink in and pay attention to my surroundings. So I go for the place I’m most familiar with.
I picture Cassandra’s home and my crash pad there. Not home, but the closest thing to it I had for most of my adult life.
We arrive with a bang, and I find out that my teleportation skills suck. A good teleport arrives to his destination standing perfectly still, able to match speeds with his target location. When I do it, we come out of the portal moving at several hundred miles an hour. Don’t ask me why; I figure that Christine can explain it to me when she has the chance. I catch a very brief glimpse of my room before everything explodes as we plow through the old building and end up tumbling through the streets in an avalanche of debris. The street had plenty of potholes to begin with, so the property damage we inflict is relatively minor, and the crash only hurts my pride.
“Guess we made it,” I say, still holding on to her.
She looks at me, her eyes wide with terror. “Oh, no.”
I try to ask her what’s wrong, and I feel something cold and slimy crawling under my skin. My vision shuts off, and I feel my arms and hands trembling uncontrollably as Christine pushes me away. And then they are no longer my arms and hands, it’s no longer my body. For a brief moment, my mind touches Mr. Night’s as he takes control once again.
It’s bad. Most of what I see doesn’t stick; my brain blocks it out, luckily. What little I remember is horrible enough, like bleeding out while submerged in an open sewer that has been heated to the boiling point, while screeching demons beneath the surface slash at you with razor blades, only worse. The insanity is the worst part, his gleeful desperate search for oblivion because existence has become sheer torture, alleviated only by the suffering of others.
I call back. Sappy, but I don’t mind.
I head back into Hell.
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, December 13, 2013
“And after that, Mr. Night teleported away,” Christine Dark said, concluding her report. “I didn’t dare grabbing him again, and I was too weak to take him out. So he got away, with Mark’s body. With Mark’s mind trapped somewhere inside.”
John Clarke touched her shoulder. She shrugged off his hand; he felt as if someone had stabbed his heart with a shard of ice. “I’m sorry,” she said when she noticed what she had done. “I just… I just don’t want to be touched right now, okay? Mark was holding me, and then it was Mr. Night touching me, and I could feel his mind, his…” She shivered. “I’ve taken two showers and I still feel unclean.”
“I’m so sorry,” John said numbly.
“It’s understandable,” Olivia O’Brien said; Artemis was debriefing Christine, with John attempting to provide moral support, and failing miserably. “You’ve been through a lot, Christine. We don’t have to debrief you tonight.”
“It’s okay,” she said, sounding anything but. “Maybe something I saw will help. I can’t believe we went through all that mess to get him, and he still managed to escape.”
“It wasn’t all for nothing,” Olivia said. “Nebiru got a good read of his aura and psychic signature. Our Kirlian detectors should be able to pick him up if he shows up within a quarter mile of them, and we can calibrate teleport inhibitors to identity and intercept him. If he makes even the smallest mistake, we’ll be able to take him down.”
“Just try not to kill him outright, okay? I think I might be able to release Mark, if I have enough time.”
“We’ll do our best,” Olivia said, which was a diplomatic way of saying ‘Fat chance.’ Overpowering a Type Three without killing him was almost impossible; John’s capture had been a glaring exception to that rule. They would try, John knew. He knew he would try himself, even if that meant the return of his woman’s ex-lover. Unfortunately, or not so unfortunately, they would most likely fail.
They went over the events of the night a couple more times before it was over. “If you can think of anything else, let us know,” Olivia said, concluding the interview. “Go get some rest.”
“Thank you,” Christine said. They left the office and headed out of Freedom Hall.
“Christine…” John began to say when they were on the elevator down. He stopped when he realized he had no idea how to continue.
“I couldn’t tell him,” she said. “I didn’t want to upset him when we were about to fight for our lives, and there wasn’t time afterwards. I couldn’t tell him I’d been cheating on him for two months.”
“Christine… I love you.” It was a simple statement, and it had the advantage of being nothing but the truth.
She didn’t say it back. “I know. Mark said the same thing to me, just before Mr. Night pushed him back into his Dreamland version of Hell. Oh, God, I thought he was dead.” She furiously wiped her eyes. “I don’t want to cry anymore.”
John hugged her, and, after a heartbreaking moment of hesitation, she hugged him back. “I don’t know what to do, okay?” she said in between sobs. “And yes, I love you too, John.”
They rode the rest of the way to the ground floor in silence. John was torn between joy and dread.
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, December 16, 2013
Adam Slaughter-Trent woke up with a start, the last images of the nightmare still flashing in front of his eyes.
Ever since he’d fought the tainted soul fragment of Damon Trent – and lost – his nights had been plagued with dreams of that night. Sleeping had become a difficult chore. Luckily he didn’t have much time for sleep.
Today’s schedule would eat up nineteen of the next twenty-four hours. He hurriedly got ready for the grueling workday and headed for his office.
The first item on his schedule involved yet another revision of the training regimen for new recruits. There were too many young Neos who needed to learn the basics of handling their powers, and not enough time or teachers, so once again they’d had to cut corners. The Legion had inducted almost a hundred new members in the past month, including (shockingly) half a dozen Type Threes. Getting them ready in time was an impossible task; new candidate classes usually averaged thirty to forty students, of which only ten or so were accepted. During this emergency, they were inducting as many people as they could, and training was suffering as a result. Adam wondered how many young Neos would die because they’d go into battle unprepared.
Less than if the Genocide kills everyone on the planet
, was the harsh answer. Future historians would have the luxury to dissect and critique the decisions made by the Legion and the rest of the planet. The existence of future historians would mean their ancestors’ decisions had led to victory, or at least survival, which was victorious enough.
Somebody was waiting for him at his office. “Uncle Adam?”
His dual nature warred briefly inside of him. A flash of irritation at the disruption of his impossibly busy schedule was pushed aside by a surge of concern – this was his only living relative, after all, and he owed her a great deal, not least because his failure had led to her lover’s death. “Hello, Christine,” he said as he sat down facing her. She’d been curled up in the armchair he had set up across his desk. From the looks of it, she’d been crying. “What can I do for you?”
“You can tell me how to save Mark,” she said. “Even if I manage to evict Mr. Night from his body, he’s still going to be contaminated with Outsider-stuff. Is there any way to get rid of it?”
Adam had read the reports, although he’d been too busy to speak with Christine himself until now. He chided himself for his coldness towards someone he loved almost like a daughter. “It’s not impossible,” he said, which was true enough, if perhaps more optimistic than circumstances warranted. “Your father managed to exorcise the taint by fragmenting his Mind-Soul Construct.” He hated that cumbersome term, but it was the closest the English language could come to expressing the phenomenon underlying the consciousness of every sentient being.
“Okay, sure, but that only happened after he died, or at least after his physical body was destroyed in a big-ass explosion,” Christine said.
“It took more than that. The explosion was merely the physical expression of the destructive interaction between two utterly incompatible forces.”
“Something like a matter-antimatter reaction, right?”
“Only superficially. Both matter and antimatter are part and parcel of our reality, although antimatter’s presence may be indicative of Outside interference during the inflationary process that followed the Big Bang. I haven’t had time to construct a workable hypotheses, however, so this is merely conjecture.”
“It sounds awesome, and when this is all over I’d love to get together with a chalkboard and lots of coffee and really spend some skull-sweat working on it, but let’s focus on the whole Mark thingy, okay?”
“Let’s,” Adam said, smiling despite himself. He did need to spend more time with his daughter-sister-niece. Not only was she his intellectual peer, her unconventional way of looking at things would make her an invaluable collaborator. Just thinking about the papers they could write together… Later. “You have shown the capability to analyze and manipulate the energy patterns that make up the Mind-Soul Construct. In theory, you could detect and remove the infected portions of Mark’s consciousness. Doing so will put you at risk of contamination, however.”
“Which would bring us back to the third alternate universe I’ve visited, namely, Earth Shitty,” Christine grumbled, referring to the world whose fate she desperately wished to avoid. “The one where I become Dark Christine by trying to save Mark.”
“Momentous events tend to have a great deal of inertia,” Adam said. “Changing them isn’t going to be easy.”
‘Momentous momentum, eh? Yeah, I’d thought that being forewarned would help me avoid that disaster. Shows how little I knew.”
“So, in the end, you have to ask yourself, is one life worth risking all of humanity? You could end up destroying billions of lives just to save your friend.”
“When you put it that way, that makes me sound pretty irresponsible, doesn’t it? Hey, everybody, watch Christine destroy the world because she couldn’t let her boyfriend go. Ex-boyfriend, I thought. I mean, I thought he was dead. I waited a whole four months and change before hooking up with John. Does that make me a bad person? I kinda think it does. I should have waited a year. Maybe two. Now even if I rescue Mark, somebody is going to be hurt. At least one of us. What do I do, Uncle Adam?”
Adam blinked. “Uh…”
“Never mind. I know that’s not your thing. Neither of your halves really had a lot of relationships, did you?”
He shook his head. Doc Slaughter had led a nearly-monastic existence. He’d lost his virginity at twenty-five, during a bout of mutual seduction involving a Soviet spy. In the ensuing century, he’d had a handful of brief dalliances with women, most of them mortal humans, the one exception being a fairly intense month with Chastity Baal in 1977, which had ended badly. Damon’s love life had been little better; he’d had an informal arrangement with one of his human agents for several years until her untimely death; besides that, the only other relationship that had lasted more than a few days had been with Patricia Dark, Christine’s mother, and that hadn’t been much of a relationship at all.
“Well, you didn’t miss much,” Christine said. “Relationships are messy, they hurt, and they’re not worth the bother.” She shook her head. “Who am I kidding? They are worth the bother, I think. I don’t know. Maybe they are. I haven’t exactly had any happy endings so far.”
“Life is not about endings,” Adam found himself saying. “Movies and books can have happy endings. Life only ends one way. Even for us.”
“Wow, gloomy much? No, you’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just babbling because I don’t know what to do, and nobody can tell me what to do.”
“Well, the Council will certainly tell you not to try to access Mark Martinez’s soul,” Adam said. “The risk is too great.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able help myself, if I get the chance,” she admitted. “Which means we need a fail-safe, in case I do something stupid. How about this? Can we put our big brains together and come up with something that will stop me from becoming Armageddon Girl?”
“Yes,” Adam said without hesitation. “We could link an Outsider energy detector to a destructive device, so that if you are contaminated it will kill you..”
“Well, there you go! I can carry a miniature antimatter bomb inside my head, and if I go all
Breaking Bad
it’ll make me go puff like a magic dragon.”
“It’d be simple enough to use one of the booby-trapped cochlear implants Daedalus Smith built as a prototype.”
“Yeppers. Except with a much bigger charge. I’m pretty hard to kill nowadays. Something set to go off under my shields and aura. It’s the only way to make sure I don’t become the Destroyer of Worlds for real.”
“I’m sure we can come up with a suitably lethal explosive,” Adam said. The eagerness with which Christine was discussing her own death disturbed him somewhat.
“I know, I sound downright deranged,” Christine said, sensing his emotions. “But I’ve met myself after I went bad, and I’d rather die than become that bitch.”
Adam understood now. He had too many bad memories of the Lurker’s life as the Outsiders’ taint slowly eroded his sanity. And he’d confronted that twisted version of himself, and found himself wanting. Those nightmares would likely haunt him to the end of his life. He would do his best to prevent Christine’s nightmares from coming true. “We won’t let that happen,” he said firmly. “I still hope you won’t risk your life like that.”
“As long as it’s just my life, I’m cool with that. Mark would risk his life… No, he would give up his life for me. He did give up his life for me. I can’t do any less.”
There really wasn’t anything more to say.