New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (3 page)

There were plenty more news. Apparently it had been a pretty eventful day for a lot of other people too. Two days before, someone had attacked one of the main bases of the world’s greatest superhero group, the Freedom Legion; John was a charter member. The attackers had blown up buildings and lured a bunch of heroes to a flying fortress ship that had turned out to have a nuclear booby-trap. While Christine and her pals had been doing their stuff, the Legionnaires investigating the attack had gotten into a running fight over the streets of Hong Kong, leaving one of them dead. A lot of news pundits were speculating that the Chinese Empire might have been involved.

Earth Alpha had two Chinas like in her world, but instead of Taiwan and the People’s Republic they had the Republic of China and the Empire of China, a.k.a. the Dragon Empire. The Republic was like Taiwan on steroids; the Empire was like North Korea on steroids, except its Supreme Leader was a Neolympian with godlike powers. There had already been two wars with the Empire. The news people were speculating that a third one might be coming up.

And of course, everybody and their brother were worrying about the possibility that Ultimate the Invincible Man might have gone rogue. That seemed to be even more terrifying than a land war in Asia, which everybody knew was a bad idea.

Christine glanced at John again. He was dreaming, and whatever he was dreaming about was stirring some serious emotions: anger followed by… utter terror? What the frak could scare a guy who could survive nuclear explosions?

Things were going to get interesting again, and she had barely survived all the interesting things that happened yesterday.

Face-Off

Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013

Last week, my world had made sense.

I protected mostly low-income New Yorkers from assorted psychos and predators by regularly stomping on said psychos and predators for fun and profit. The profit was mostly limited to lifting whatever cash they had on them after I was done subduing or disassembling them. The fun was the joy I felt when I pounded on any truly evil assholes that crossed my path until they were dead, dead, dead. I had few friends and my free time was spent reading books and watching movies, mostly by myself, except when I was – for the most part briefly – hooking up with assorted not very nice women. Was it a great life? Perhaps not. I would often walk away from a midnight burial wishing for something different.

I guess wishes can come true.

If someone had told me I’d be sitting in a fancy hunting lodge in Canada alongside Ultimate the Invincible Motherfucking Man (who was still sleeping like a baby, the prick), my old buddy Condor, who was now banging my ex-fuck buddy Kestrel, also present, and a petite redheaded girl by the unlikely name of Christine Dark, a girl who happened to be the key to the planet’s salvation from an as yet pretty vague threat, well, if someone had told me that, I’d have made a face just so I could laugh my ass off. If that someone had also mentioned that along the way I’d get nearly electrocuted by a former
Tonton Macoute
, have my powers disrupted by some new fancy gizmo, watch my ex-fuck buddy get tortured half to death with a blowtorch, and then gotten my insides rearranged courtesy of an evil mime with an energy sword, followed by being brought back from the brink of death by the aforementioned redheaded savior of the world, I’d’ve tossed in a few smacks to go with the derisive laughter.

My best friend and mentor, the blind psychic with the too-on-the-nose name of Cassandra, had laid down her life to get me to this point. A lot of people had gotten killed along the way, several of them at my hands. And for what? A rational person would have excused himself, asked Condor to drop him off in Chicago, and gotten a Greyhound ticket back to New York City, where he belonged. A rational, or mildly smart person would have realized that a middle-weight Neo had no business sticking his nose in world-ending affairs, where he might as well be a bug charging the windshield of a speeding car. And yet, here I was, which made me the dumbest fucker in the room.

I was even dumber than that. Cassandra had told me my job was to help out Christine Dark, and along the way I’d grown pretty damn fond of her. Downright protective and possessive and attracted to her, surprisingly so since the first time I’d laid eyes on her had been a whole seventy-something hours ago, when I had unwrapped her from half a mile of duct tape like an overdue Christmas present. Christine was as endearing as a box of kittens, which normally would have been a total turn-off for me. I don’t do endearing. I like my women with lots of sharp edges, a nasty sense of humor and a deep appreciation for the darker things in life. I’d sworn off nice girls a long time ago.

And yet, here I was, making notional googly eyes at a nice girl, a nice girl who, to make matters worse, could tell exactly what I was feeling. That should have bothered me a great deal. I’d gotten used to people not having a clue what was going on behind my blank exterior. It makes me a killer poker player, among many other things. Christine could see through my permanent mask. She’d done more than that. When I was dying on a cold cavern floor with a giant steaming hole where my lower torso used to be, she had reached out and dragged me back from the abyss. It had been the most fucking painful, intense,
intimate
experience of my life. I still didn’t know what to make of it.

Christine caught me looking at her. Her pale blue-gray eyes regarded my blank face, and she gave me a weak smile. I wasn’t sure what she made of my current emotional state. Neither did I, to be honest. My normal emotional state comes in two flavors: neutral and murderous.

“What a mess, eh?” she said.

“The messiest,” I replied.

She started to respond, but the sleeping Invincible Man groaned loudly and she turned towards him with a worried expression. She could tell what the big lug was feeling too, and he didn’t seem to be feeling anything good, which was worrisome, considering the guy could knock down buildings with his fists. If he started sleep-walking, it’d be about as much fun as having a Category Five tornado show up in your living room.

What worried me most, though, was the fact that I cared more about the way she looked at him than about anything else.

Chapter Two

The Invincible Man

Berlin, Germany, March 27, 1945

The Sky God struck with all his might.

John Clarke had been on the receiving end of lightning bolts before. He had survived them, along with laser beams, death rays and plasma discharges. None of those had prepared him for Donner’s wrath.

The first blast caught him in mid-air, a twisting ribbon of blue-white energy that set ablaze every nerve ending in his body, paralyzing him. Blinded and overwhelmed with agony, he only distantly felt the second bolt of lightning boring into his flesh as he fell. When he opened his eyes, he was in the ruins of a house, well over a mile away from where he had been hit.

His landing had shattered the house as thoroughly as a one-thousand pound bomb would have. It had also slaughtered the family huddled in the basement beneath. A hand, too small to belong to an adult male, lay half buried under rubble, terribly still. John looked at it for a second. He’d seen plenty of similar sights, but he hadn’t grown used to them. A part of him dreaded the idea that he might grow used to them.

No time to waste
, he told himself, and struggled free from the debris.

Up in the sky, Donner found him and threw another lightning spear.

John flew away, barely avoiding the missile as it destroyed the remains of the house and the closely spaced homes on either side of it. More dead children. He darted towards the German Aesir, the last of Hitler’s new gods. Time to put an end to this.

Friedhelm Kastner, better known as Donner, was a giant of a man. According to the files John had read, the Teutonic Knight had been six and a half feet tall before his Neolympian powers manifested, and had grown another foot in height after that. Unlike the mythical god, Kastner had black hair and brown eyes, but the Reich’s designers had made him wear a helmet with a built-in red wig to make his appearance match his mythical namesake’s appearance. Donner was not wearing his wig today; he had eschewed his ornate costume as well. The man traversing the skies over Berlin wore a simple Wehrmacht uniform with no insignias or medals. The nimbus of light surrounding him and his inhuman size left no doubts as to who he was, though. John noted those details as he closed the distance between them at a speed that should have left him no time to notice anything. Of late, he’d found himself able to process information in the span of milliseconds. He even had time to wonder what these changes meant before he reached his target.

Donner conjured more lightning, but John hit the German before he could cast it. The impact would have shattered windows all over the city, had there been any glass left to shatter in Berlin; months of relentless bombardment had seen to that. Donner was flung higher into the sky by the devastating collision. John followed him relentlessly, pounding the Aesir with his fists, feeling bones break under the blows. The German did not give up, however: a flash of lightning knocked John away. The strike was painful but not disabling, however. Donner was weakening.

John sidestepped a second blast and crashed into Donner. Both combatants plummeted toward the ground. John directed the course of the fall carefully, and they crashed into the city’s famed Victory Column across from the Reichstag, smashing the monument to pieces.

He rose to his feet. Donner was on his hands and knees, trying to get up despite his broken bones and torn flesh. “Surrender,” John said, and repeated the order in rote-memorized German. The Aesir’s response was to call forth another lightning spear. John struck before his foe could use it.

The
coup de grace
was a hammer blow to the back of Donner’s head, delivered with all the strength John could muster. The lightning spear vanished in a harmless shower of sparks as the German’s headless body collapsed, not far from the fallen statue of Victoria.

The fall of the last Aesir had been followed less than an hour later by the death of Himmler at the hands of his own men as he tried to flee his bunker. The next day, the highest-ranking German military officer left, a Navy man of all things, had offered the Reich’s unconditional surrender. That was the story featured in the
New York Times
and the special unnumbered V-Day Issue of
Action Tales
, the story found in textbooks, the story John remembered.

Something else had happened that day, however. Something he had forgotten for seven decades.

For several seconds, he had stood over Donner’s corpse. The fight had left him exhausted, although he knew from experience he would recover in a few minutes. He could just rest there for a bit, and then…

John Clarke.

The whispered name had sent chills down his back. He turned towards the speaker, certain of his location even though he hadn’t heard the words with his ears.

A thin emaciated form stood amidst the ruins of the Victory Monument, even though the shockwaves generated by the fight should have been lethal to any human caught in the open. The near-skeletal apparition was clad in a striped concentration camp uniform, and his head was shaved. John had seen pictures of similarly clad prisoners. This man was an inmate of one such camp. What was he doing in Berlin?

John Clarke.

The man’s lips didn’t move, but the words were coming from him.  Except for his dark staring eyes, he could have been dead. His motionless posture was corpselike, unnatural. He didn’t breathe or blink.

John had fought hordes of reanimated corpses in the battlefields of France and Germany, the creations of the dread Teutonic Knight known as Totenkopf. At first, he thought that was what he was facing. The walking dead the Nazi Aesir had thrown at the Allies had been mindless creatures, however. The eyes staring at him were bright with intelligence and hatred.

It is time, John Clarke.

He started to react but he wasn’t fast enough. Something like a shadow darted from the figure in the death camp uniform. John had barely enough time to notice the skeletal body had started to collapse before the shadow reached him. He felt something push liquidly through his protective aura, a cold grasping force that gripped his insides, his mind, his soul. Icy talons ripped at him from within.

You will be ours, John Clarke.

The fight was brutal, the more so because it wasn’t physical. The entity trying to destroy his will had picked its time well, striking when John was at his lowest ebb. Incredulity gave way to fear. Fear became terror. He was helpless in the face of the entity, helpless like a child. John felt himself letting go, surrendering to the black pressure besetting him. Giving up would be so easy. It would mean an end to the terror. He could let it be over, and go gently into oblivion. It would be easy, so easy…

In the end, her eyes had dragged him back from the abyss. Her blue eyes, looking at him as they said their goodbyes in Paris before he went off on the last campaign of the war, the answer to his hesitant question ringing in his ears like sweet music. To surrender to the darkness was to renounce that mutual promise.

Linda Lamar saved John’s life that day.

Resistance became rage, became a searing light that thrust back the force trying to overcome him, shredding its essence. An inhuman shriek of rage and agony hammered at the insides of his skull for one unbearable moment before fading away.

Ours
, it said again as it vanished without a trace, taking even the memories of the battle with it.

John shook his head, his eyes blinking furiously. How long had he been standing there? He noticed a group of children in uniform, their helmets looking comically oversized on their heads. The child soldiers had emerged from a nearby trench and were deploying an anti-tank launcher across the remains of the plaza. Hitler Youths, too young to understand there was nothing left to do, nothing worth dying for. He let them fire their
Panzerfaust
at him, let them run away in terror when the smoke dissipated and they saw him stand unscathed after the explosion.