New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (2 page)

John Clarke – a.k.a Ultimate the Invincible Man – wasn’t doing all too great at the moment, though. His silver, red and gold costume had been ripped at the mid-section – revealing some amazingly washboard abs – where a big bearded guy had nearly torn him in half. The Invincible Man was still unconscious. He was dreaming, too; she could pick up a complex stew of emotions coming off him like radio waves. One of the first things Christine had discovered upon waking up in this alternate reality where superheroes were real was that one of her kewl powerz was super-empathy. Knowing what people were feeling around her was turning out to be a major complication in her life, a life which was rapidly accumulating enough complications for an entire season of
Downton Abbey
.

Her home was Earth Prime, a world where superheroes existed only in comic books and overpriced FX-laden movies, the place where Christine had lived a relatively normal life until a few fairly eventful days ago. She was in another world, which she’d dubbed Earth Alpha, where comic books chronicled the adventures of real men and women with godlike powers and ridiculous costumes. She was quickly discovering that having super powers caused as many problems as it solved.

Mark walked over to the back seats and slung John over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. It made for a funny image, since John was a good half a foot taller than Mark and much wider at the shoulders: it looked like as if a child was carrying an adult. Mark could lift over ten tons without straining himself, though, so toting around an unconscious All-American Hero was no big deal. Her faceless friend headed for the exit. He was feeling somewhat amused about John’s unconscious state, which was a bit petty of him. Christine shook her head and followed him out.

Another day, another remote island: the last island she’d been in had blown up, which she hoped wasn’t the start of a pattern. Maybe this wasn’t an island, though; she could really only see a shoreline of sorts, a thin clear strip by the water; thick woods blocked the view everywhere else, except for a structure some distance inland. Condor had set his aircraft down on the water, because his cabin in the woods didn’t spot a landing pad. Mark waded through the shallow water before making it to shore. Christine didn’t feel like getting her second-hand sneakers wet, so she flew onto dry land. Well, she tried to. She’d discovered she could kinda sorta fly, but she still hadn’t mastered such fine points as steering and controlling her speed. Instead of gracefully floating to the shore, she catapulted herself forward, barely missing Mark and smashing into a poor defenseless tree. The impact hurt the tree a lot more than it hurt her.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Mark told her as she picked herself up and brushed pine cones and bark off of her hair.

“It would have been nice if I’d gotten some flying lessons back at the Condor Lair,” Christine replied, trying not to let her bad mood show in her voice. She was feeling rumpled and hard done by. Only a few hours ago, she had discovered her father was totally insane and probably didn’t really love her, and then he’d gone and – almost certainly – died on her. That little crap sandwich had been accompanied by a peek into the Truths of the Universe (cue ominous organ music), which mighty have driven her as crazy as her father if some guy with a light saber hadn’t shown up and tried to chop her to bits. Throw in another half dozen or so narrow escapes in the previous twenty-four hours (she had lost count early in the day) and it all added up to a textbook case of a really bad day.

“Give it time, Christine,” Mark said. “Even Ultimate started out by jumping around before he figured out how to fly.”

The last two people out of the Condor Jet were Condor his own self and his uber-skank girlfriend the Kinky Kestrel. Condor was another manly man in thighs, something like 0.92 of a John, a bit shorter but just as imposing. Apparently Neos – short for Neolympians, which was short for New Olympians which was long for supers – all tended towards good looks, like jocks on hyperdrive. Mark had gotten the short end of the stick, pun kinda intended, being a mere five ten or so. Condor was taller, more ripped and cuter, although Christine didn’t find him all that attractive. The magnificent man with the flying machine looked pretty imposing in his black-and-silver costume and condor-head helmet, but Christine could sense the emotions under the good looks, and they didn’t paint a pretty picture.

Condor’s girlfriend was also great looking, with all the T-and-A a horny teenage boy could want, all of which she proudly put on display, courtesy of a painted-on black latex catsuit and thigh-high high-heeled boots that would absolutely require super-powers to run on; her face was partially covered by a bird-head helmet not too different from Condor’s, with just a bit of her jet-black hair showing. Her dark brown eyes were always bright with mirth, lust, or just plain meanness. Christine’s problem with Kestrel wasn’t her costume choice, but the fact that she was a BDSM freak (pitcher
and
catcher) who seemed ready and willing to shag any bipedal life form that crossed her path, probably up to and including kangaroos and ostriches. Before becoming Condor’s sidekick-with-benefits, Kestrel had been with Mark for a while, a relationship that hadn’t ended on a happy note. Christine wasn’t sure if that made her feel jealous or threatened; she was sure it pissed her off, though. Kestrel’s dressing up like the dominatrix she was during her free time was just a minor irritant on top of everything.

Cosplay in this universe wasn’t play at all, but a way of life for Neos. Christine’s costume so far consisted of non-skinny jeans, a plain white t-shirt under a pink sweater, and sneakers. Her own T-and-A were underwhelming in her humble – much too humble, some of her friends insisted – opinion, and she had no intention of wearing any sort of painted-on garments, although she had committed similar transgressions against taste and common decency at a few sci-fi conventions back on Earth Prime. But that was at conventions, weekends where she wasn’t being herself for a couple days. To do that every day, in front of everybody (and thanks to YouTube, which existed in this world, everybody meant a lot of everybodies)… No effing way.

Condor was carrying a couple hundred pounds’ worth of metal cases without even breaking a sweat; he had proudly told Christine he could deadlift fifteen tons. All Neos were stronger than humans. Christine herself could bench press over a thousand pounds; back in her pre-Neo days, she probably couldn’t have lifted a thousand ounces. “Computers and other useful equipment," Condor explained when he noticed Christine looking at him and all the boxes he was toting.

“This way,” Condor continued, and led them to the lodge itself, a pretty big house that should have enough bedrooms for a basketball team, let alone the Fellowship of the Crap Storm, as Christine had unofficially dubbed her little gang. The lodge – more of a rustic manor – was well off the beaten path. A dirt road led away from it, and while Christine had seen plenty of lights on the far end of the lake, indicating a nearby town, this side was empty except for the local critters. It was March, so maybe hunting and fishing season didn’t start for a while. She had no idea, since her version of hunting and fishing began and ended at the Whole Foods’ fresh produce section.

The lodge’s front door looked all quaint and antique-y, but it had a retina scanner lock and probably hidden machineguns and lasers to deal with anybody who didn’t have the right eyeballs to gain admittance to the premises. Condor’s eyeballs passed muster and the door opened, leading to a living room. It was a big living room, with plenty of sitting space, a fireplace big enough to accommodate 2.3 Santas, and walls covered with trophies featuring animal heads from all over the world. Apparently, Condor’s idea of hunting had been conventional and old-fashioned: travel to exotic places, find exotic and probably endangered critters, and kill them to death. Not very enlightened of him, but Condor was old-fashioned, mostly because he was old; dude was pushing seventy, if her math was right. Neos didn’t age, although many of them died young, due mostly to poor lifestyle choices.

Christine’s father had been even older, possibly over a hundred years young, which made him like eighty when he knocked up her mother, which was uber-creepy. She used to love reading vampire romances where two-hundred year old men hit on teenage girls, but now the idea turned her stomach. And yet, here she was, getting all aflutter around John Clarke, who was also pushing the century mark. How
Lolita
of her, not to mention hypocritical. Just like the teenage girls that fell for two-hundred year old vampires, the creepy bits didn’t sink in because the dirty old men looked young enough not to trip any creep-o-meters. Given that, maybe Dad and Mom’s dalliance wasn’t all that creepy.

Of course, Dad’s not likely to get any older anymore,
her brain helpfully threw in. Her brain loved to make her feel like crap sometimes.

The last time she’d seen her father, he’d been doing battle with a thing that looked like a man but wasn’t, a thing that hadn’t been human in a very long time. It had been very Gandalf at Moria-like, with an explosion that had felt nuclear-like in intensity as a parting gift; it had nearly knocked the Condor Jet into the lake even from a mile or two away. The explosion had turned the island where they had left Dad behind into a short-lived giant hole in the water. Maybe Dad had teleported away – she’d seen him do that, as well as produce the creepiest laugh she’d ever heard, along with a bevy of other abilities – before the earth-shattering ka-boom. It’d make for a trite plot device if this was a movie, but it would be really, really nice if he wasn’t dead. She still hadn’t cried over him, either because she didn’t believe he was dead or because a bunch of bad things had happened at once and she still hadn’t begun to deal with half of them.

“How are you doing?” Mark asked her, breaking her midnight train of thought. He’d plopped John down on an expensive-looking couch before turning his attention to her.

“Like I could use a hot bath, a fifteen hour nap, and waking up to find out all of this was just a really bad dream.”

“I hear you,” he said. He’d lost his best friend that night, and he probably also wished he could wake up and find things back to normal. Of course, her normal was worrying if she had chosen the right major in college, and his normal involved finding criminals and putting them in jail – or the morgue. Amusingly enough, they were both out of their element. Saving the world from cosmic menaces was a bit out of both their comfort zones.

“Come on,” Mark said, trying to sound cheerful. “Condor said the kitchen’s got food; nothing fresh, mostly canned crap and frozen concentrated shit, but I promised you pancakes and I’m going to make some fucking pancakes.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Neos didn’t need to eat or breathe, but they got hungry anyway. Mark’s mention of food reminded her she was starving. Even better, she could pig out and not gain a pound as long as she kept her food intake somewhere under 20,000 calories a day or so. She was looking forward to burying her feelings under copious amounts of sugars and fats. They went to the kitchen, which was big enough to service a small restaurant. Mark rustled up pancake ingredients for their meal – it was two in the morning, so this would be somewhere between dinner and breakfast.

She and Mark made pancakes and hot chocolate for everyone. While they cooked, Christine told Mark some of the stuff she’d picked up from her dad’s Cube of Cosmic Wisdom – it had been his gift to her, or, to be precise, she had been born to wield it. During the brief time she had held the Cube, Christine had learned a few cosmic truths. It was funny, talking about the origins of the universe while making pancakes, but it kind of relaxed her.

By the time they got back to the living room, Condor had set up a miniature version of NASA’s control center, complete with multiple screens and terminals and a central computer-slash-server in the middle. The high-tech stuff clashed pretty badly with the lodge’s décor.

They sat down and ate while watching the boob-tubes. Kestrel headed upstairs as soon as she’d scarfed a plate of pancakes, to take a shower or break in a new vibrator or whatever; Christine didn’t want to know. John was still sleeping. Christine checked on him, using her special senses to monitor his health. He was fully healed – the nasty Outsider-energy that had poisoned him was finally gone from his system, and he would probably wake up on his own soon. She decided to let him rest and sat back to not-really-enjoy the show.

News reports were on all the screens. There was lots of stuff about Christine’s little run-in with the Chicago Sentinels. All that mess had started because she wouldn’t let one of the Sentinels arrest her. In retrospect, it had been the right thing; the handcuffs he’d wanted to use on her were designed to interfere with Neo powers, and without her powers she would have been helpless like a kitten when John came after her. Well, not John, but a bad guy who called himself the Dreamer and who had been possessing John’s body. The whole thing was more complicated than the last season of
Lost
.

Other news bulletins were talking about the freak explosion in Lake Michigan. The blast had broken windows in a two-mile radius, and created mini-tsunamis that caused a lot of property damage and killed half a dozen people. Knowing she had been involved even indirectly in people’s deaths made the pancakes roil in her stomach. She didn’t want to deal with any of it; the danger was bad enough, but the effing responsibility of knowing that if you messed up a lot of people could die was the worst. People had died because she hadn’t prevented Dad and the thing he’d been fighting from blowing up the island.

“Hey.” That was Mark again. He was no empath but the guy picked up on facial cues pretty well for someone who didn’t have a face of his own. He squeezed her shoulder. “That wasn’t us. It wasn’t even your dad.”

“I guess you’re right,” she admitted.

“Had to happen eventually,” he said in a deadpan tone and she snorted. She felt a little better. Not happy or anything, just slightly less crappy.