New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl

  Published by Fey Dreams Productions, LLC

  Copyright @ 2013 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact cjcarella@cjcarella.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements

  Writing may be a solitary occupation, but it's rarely a one-person job. It takes a village to produce a novel. This book wouldn't have made it without the help of many people. The list below is not exhaustive, and my apologies to anybody I left out.

  To Carlos and Carmela Martijena, parents extraordinaire, for their constant help and support.

  To Joan T. Masters, ex-wife and best friend forever, for making me a better person.

  To Igor Buminovich, Erik Fisher, and Scott Palter, for answering assorted questions on history and languages, and double thanks to Scott for all his help and constructive criticism. Any errors and infelicities in this book are mine; there would be plenty of them without those gents' kind help.

  To Kevin Siembieda of Palladium Books, who gave me my first full-time writing gig, for the opportunity to make a living doing what I love and for his generous help with this project.

  To George Vasilakos of Eden Studios, for all his support.

  To MaryAnne Fry and Delia Gable, for being great artists and awesome friends, and to Jesse Belle-Jones for portraying Christine Dark for the cover.

  To Scott Coady, gaming buddy, for all his help and support. The Dude Abides.

  And last but not least, to the talented folk at www.geekandsundry.com. This book is in many ways my love letter to geek culture, and few things embody that culture like their YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/geekandsundry ). Thank you for all the inspiration and entertainment.

  Carlos J. Martijena-Carella

  www.cjcarella.com

  Chapter One

  Christine Dark

  Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 11, 2013

  Last stands suck.

  Outnumbered a gazillion to one. Bullets and rockets and bolts of energy and angry glares and bad language rained down on her in an epic downpour of malice and destruction. She faced the slings and arrows and magic missiles of outrageous bastards and somehow managed to survive the onslaught. No problem, she told herself, I can handle this. Her counterattacks took the bad guys down in droves, stacked their quivering bodies like cordwood, but for every dozen she struck down, another dozen and a half showed up. The center cannot hold, or in other words we are totally effed up, this is the way the world ends, all banging and whimpering and burning sensations and not so fresh feelings. In the words of the ancients, we’re going from suck to blow and it’s going to hurt a lot before it is over…

  Something bad was behind her, worse than the hordes of murderous men and beasties facing her. She most definitely did not want to turn around. So she turned around.

  It was dead, but still deadly. It wore the face of her father.

  She had no idea how badly things would have turned out, but luckily her alarm clock saved the day.

  “Holy mother of crap!” Christine Dark groaned, and smacked the clock until it stopped beeping like an R2 unit in distress. That had been way intense. Her dreams were usually completely nonsensical dreck or small, anxious things. Showing up for class and realizing you had skipped classes for most of the semester, plus had forgotten to wear pants, that sort of thing. Oh, and the occasional dirty dream involving dark handsome strangers with very skilled hands and mouths. This one had been a Michael Bay does Marvel Comics after smoking a hefty dose of meth kind of thing. She had been in fear of her life, and the weirdest thing was, her dream-self had laughed in the face of death. In real life, Christine didn’t laugh even in the face of mild discomfort.

  Her heart was racing. She didn’t ordinarily wake up feeling like she’d run a marathon. Weirdness. Even after showering and getting dressed, the world did not feel quite right to her, almost as if she was still dreaming. The surreal detached feeling persisted all the way through breakfast with her roommate Sophie. Sophie hadn’t spent the night in their dorm room, a not irregular occurrence, and had texted Christine to ask her to meet for breakfast. Christine agreed. She agreed to most of Sophie’s requests and suggestions.

  “There’s a party tonight at the Delta Phi’s,” Sophie said as soon as Christine sat down with her tray-ful of sensible breakfast food.

  “On a Tuesday night?” Christine asked. Most of her attention was on the food in front of her. She was starving and feeling a bit shaky on top of everything else.

  “You should come,” Sophie continued. She hadn’t noticed Christine was feeling off this morning, but Sophie rarely paid attention to matters not pertaining to Sophie. Normally Christine didn’t mind, but her dreamlike state was beginning to be replaced by grumpiness.

  Sophie Beaumont was tall, tan and blonde, built to the specs of your typical fourteen year old boy’s fantasy female ideal. Christine was short, pale and red-haired, and built to far less impressive specs. The two roommates had blue eyes, but Sophie’s were deep and dark blue, while Christine’s were pale and tended to go gray when she wasn’t in a good mood. Like now, for example. Unreality was giving way to dissatisfaction.

  “It should be fun,” Sophie added cheerfully.

  “You know I don’t like that kind of party,” Christine replied. “I’ll fit in like a Jawa at Rivendell.” Doing a little fictional mash-up helped her mood a little, but not enough.

  “Like a what where?” Sophie didn’t get either reference, of course. Sophie didn’t get half of what Christine said, even when she bothered to listen to her. “Never mind. Just come along. Jeff has a friend who’s dying to meet you. He’s into engineering and stuff, so you can talk math to each other.”

  “I don’t really talk about math during casual conversation,” Christine said. She’d rather talk about stuff she was reading, or watching, or playing. Hm. She didn’t talk about what she was doing, because she didn’t do much other than reading, watching or playing stuff. And thinking. She did do a lot of thinking. Maybe she should be doing stuff more often. Something to think about.

  “Earth to Christine,” Sophie said. Christine blinked. “You went away inside your own head again. Boys don’t like that, you know. You need to pay attention to them, make them feel special.”

  “I guess. Every one of them is a precious unique snowflake, or something like that, right?” Most conversations with Sophie ended up revolving about boys, and Christine’s deficiencies when it came to interactions with said boys. My freaking life can’t pass the Bechdel test, she thought bitterly.

  Sophie smiled indulgently. “Whatever you say, Christine. So, are you coming with me?”

  What the heck. She was already having a weird day. Some masochistic impulse drove her to agree to endure an evening of suckitude. “Fine.”

  * * *

  The suckitude, it hurt.

  Christine tried to shrink into a corner, but the senior from the Phi Beta Gecko or Whatever House got all up in her grill anyway. His breath smelled of pepperoni-and-cheese pizza, stale beer and a hint of cheap mouthwash. “’Sup?” he said.

  “Hi,” was her equally suave reply. She probably shouldn’t have had so much punch, but she had needed something to take the edge off. The third of a cup she’d downed had taken the edge and a good thirty or forty IQ points right off.

  “I said wassup,” Phi Beta Gecko repeated in the determined, deliberate tone of the truly drunk.
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  “Uh, not much? My blood pressure? Gas prices?” None of the answers seemed to satisfy him. He leaned over closer.

  “You’re kinda hawt,” he said. Very flattering. Luckily, his utter disregard for her personal space gave her an opening; she ducked and weaved and got out of the corner and away from him. He was too drunk to give chase. It was clearly time to leave. The night had been a total disaster so far and it could only get worse.

  Sophie had tried to get Christine all dressed up in the latest slut wear but Christine had refused. She wasn’t wholly opposed to dressing provocatively – the outfit she’d worn at Dragon Con last year had turned many a head – but not when hanging out with the muggles, where she felt like an outsider, exposed, a fish out of water, loser-girl out on a stage where some d-bags would soon empty a bucket of blood over her head. She’d ended up in jeans and a nice silk blouse, and had acquiesced to borrowing Sophie’s high-heeled boots. After slathering a copious amount of makeup on Christine’s face, Sophie had deemed her fit for public display.

  Upon their arrival to the already crowded, loud and rowdy frat house, Sophie introduced her to Jeff’s friend Donald or Dominic or Damian: something with a D. Something-with-a-D was kinda cute but there was a mean glint in his eyes that had put Christine off almost immediately. He looked her over and Christine had caught what she thought was either a tiny scowl or a twitch on the corner of his mouth, neither of which felt complimentary. Then she’d stopped being able to notice details like that because Sophie had plucked Christine’s glasses right off her face and taken them away. Okay, she probably should have worn contacts to this shindig, but she hated putting the darn things on her eyeballs. In any case, she was half-blind, which didn't help. Some punch-drinking and a few minutes of awkward conversation later, Something-with-a-D had mumbled some excuse and gone away. Sophie and Jeff had disappeared some time before that, so Christine was left alone in a crowd of people she didn’t know. If she wasn’t so drunk she’d be having an anxiety attack just about now.

  She wanted to go home.

  Christine looked around for the exit, which wasn’t easy in the crowded space. She took another sip of punch and tried to make her way through the inmates of this century’s version of Animal House. It wasn’t easy. People kept bumping into her. One of them bumped her hard enough to knock the remainder of her punch all over her, splashing her blouse and the front of her jeans with artificially flavored grain alcohol. Nothing beat the feeling of syrupy alcoholic fluid running down your clothes.

  All in all, she would have been much happier playing World or Warcraft, watching that web show about people playing World of Warcraft, or quietly reading a novel or Supernatural slash fan fic. Or even writing Supernatural slash fan fic, which she’d been guilty of. Well, she’d tried, epic-failed, and now she was cold, wet and just plain annoyed. Time to say ‘Peace,’ head on home and read some Supernatural slash fic before going to bed.

  The world flickered.

  That’s the only way she could describe the sensation. For a second or two, everything – the crowd of partygoers, the loud music, the very floor under her high heel boots – went away, came back, went away and came back. It was like a light bulb on its last legs going on and off, but the flickering covered the entire effing spectrum of her senses. Well, that was weird, she thought to herself when the sensation stopped. A second later, her bafflement was replaced by the urgent realization that everything she had eaten today, and perhaps the week before, was swirling madly in her stomach and trying to come out the way it had gone in. Her eyes bulging, Christine clapped both hands over her mouth and tried desperately to make it outside.

  “Look out, she’s gonna hurl,” one of the more perceptive Phi Beta Geckos warned the room, and people finally gave her a wide berth, plenty of space to stagger outside just as everything came geysering out her mouth and nose. She hated, hated, hated puking. No loved ones around to hold her hair while she did it, either. Christine ended up on her hand and knees on the mostly dead lawn outside the frat house, heaving uncontrollably and hating every second of it. A few partygoers – or more than a few, she really couldn’t see very far without her glasses – were looking on with varying degrees of pity, amusement or contempt, dealer’s choice; some were probably immortalizing the moment on their smartphones. She must be quite a treat for the eyes, down on all fours and giving the world a great shot of her butt if you didn’t mind a little vomit on the side. Hello, YouTube and Vine. Goodbye, dignity. Perfect end point for this particular quest. How could it get any worse?

  The universe is always happy to answer that question, and few ever like the answers they get. She really should have known better.

  The flickering came back. One second she was on her hands and knees on the lawn, trying not to look at what had been a veggie lasagna some hours and assorted digestive processes ago. The next, things went dark and quiet. Another flicker and she was on her hands and knees on a smooth flat surface with bright spotlights shining right into her eyes, blinding her. And the second after that she was back on the lawn outside the frat house. Absolute OMG WTF moment. Brain aneurysm? LSD-laced Rohypnol in the punch? What?

  Christine felt as if something was pulling at her. The nausea came back, now with extra creepy sensations, as if someone’s fingers were reaching right through her skull and grabbing her by the medulla oblongata. Some force was dragging her somewhere. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she felt it down to her bones. She also felt that wherever that somewhere was, she didn’t want to go there. No effing way.

  “What the fuck? Where did she go?” somebody yelled. Christine barely heard the words, too busy concentrating on not going wherever she was going in between flickers. Or firing neurons at random while her brain went bye-bye, one or the other. She felt certain she was fighting back somehow, and she had no idea why she felt that. The whole thing was like a bad dream where the craziest crap appeared to make sense. At least the nausea was gone, replaced by a falling sensation, even though she was mere inches from the ground. If I stumble they’re gonna eat me alive. The Metric lyrics flittered through her head like a bat out of hell.

  Something went pop inside of her. This is it, she thought absently as she felt herself letting go. She was certain she was dying. Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry…

  She was falling for real now, falling through the ground, through the planet, free fall into utter darkness, where is the light? Isn’t there supposed to be a light?

  Oblivion.

  Face-Off

  New York City, New York, March 12, 2013

  Humans in pain can make the most curious noises.

  Case in point: Dan Giamatti, enforcer – soon to be former enforcer – for the D’Agostino crime family. The injuries: three broken ribs; one compound fracture, right forearm; two dislocated fingers, left hand, and several broken teeth. The sound: a panting moan, reaching scream levels only to turn into a strangled heaving gasp when the broken ribs made their presence known. It was a disturbing, pitiful sound. It even bothered me a little, and I was the one who had done the bone breaking.

  Giamatti started a new tune, this one something between a wheeze and a sob.

  “Can we talk now?” I said reasonably. I had been perfectly willing to have a peaceful conversation with the guy before killing him, but Giamatti had gone for a gun, a knife and finally a hand grenade. The hand grenade had earned him the compound fracture. Luckily for him I had been able to find the pin and put it back before the fucking thing exploded. A grenade explosion would have been a painful inconvenience for me, but rather lethal for him. That was some crazy-ass shit, deploying high explosives indoors, even for our crazy-ass world. Giamatti’s reputation as a hard case was well-deserved, but even tough guys could be broken if you applied enough pressure.

  “Fuck you, Face-Off,” Giamatti blurted, spraying a bloody froth through his broken teeth.

  I sighed. It figured; someone crazy enough to go mano a mano with a Neo was too crazy to know when to quit. Neos – Neol
ympians, or parahumans if you really want to get pretentious about it – have been around for close to a hundred years. Sure, most of us aren’t godlike unstoppable forces that can take over entire countries single-handedly, but even the weakest among us is stronger and tougher than your average bear. Giamatti should have known better. When I came bursting through the bedroom window, he knew he was dealing with the Faceless Vigilante, or Face-Off, depending on who you ask. He should have tried to talk, or even asked for his lawyer, even if the latter option wouldn’t have done him much good. Instead he got into a pissing match with me. He might as well have tried to outwrestle the F train.

  I’d been careful not to inflict any permanent damage, which isn’t as easy as you think. I’m no heavyweight, but I can still bench press twenty thousand pounds. I could have wrung Giamatti’s neck like a chicken’s right from the get go, but it would have been harder to have a conversation with him afterward. Instead, I love-tapped him a couple of times, and only started breaking things when he wouldn’t stop trying to kill me.

  "Just tell me where the girl is, Giamatti," I said. All I got back was more garbled profanities.

  Time to apply more pressure. I grabbed Giamatti by an ankle, avoiding his feeble attempts to kick me, and dragged him from the living room of his expensive penthouse to the balcony. I resisted the temptation to smash him through the plate glass sliding door leading outside, and instead opened it before pulling his thrashing body out.

  “Okay, Danny, it’s truth or flight time.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Flight it is, then.” I swung Giamatti off the balcony. He had time to start a choked howl before he smacked against the side of the building, which didn’t help his cracked ribs one bit. I kept my grip on his ankle, so he ended up dangling upside down with nothing but twenty-five stories of New York City air beneath him. I swung him back and forth a few times to make my point. The howls got shriller.