New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Read online

  Doomsday Duet

  By C.J. Carella

  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 [email protected]

  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.

  Prologue

  The Lurker’s Tale

  New York City, New York, December 12, 1919

  Damon Trent turned up the collar of his overcoat against the chill winds rushing through Times Square and ignored the revelries around him. Happy partygoers were wandering the streets even at this late hour; it was a Friday night on the last month before Prohibition went into effect, and the good people of New York were enjoying their spirits while they still could. Damon paid no attention to the men and women going to and fro in celebration. Once he would have been one of them, but that had been before the trenches, the rattle of machineguns and the clouds of gas drifting lazily through no-man’s land. His days of celebration were behind him.

  Tonight’s destination lay straight ahead. The building was old, one of the few structures that had not been torn down or remodeled to fit into the ever-growing theater district. It was a throwback to earlier times, a place that could have hosted an illegal gambling establishment or a house of ill repute.

  Damon put a hand in one of his coat’s pockets, where a Mauser Broomhandle pistol was hidden in a carefully tailored holster; the weight of the powerful handgun provided a small measure of comfort. As he looked at the building’s entrance, he wondered once more if he had lost his mind. After a moment of hesitation, he shrugged and walked to the door. If his path led to madness, so be it. He had wandered too far down that road, and it was too late to turn back.

  He knocked on the door. After a few moments, it opened, revealing a darkened corridor leading into the building. A man blocked the entrance, a hulking brute with pale skin and flat, emotionless eyes. There was something wrong about the man, something that made Damon think of death and decay. The guard gestured at Damon, who produced the engraved invitation that had arrived to his mailbox two days before. After a cursory glance at the document, the strange man stepped aside to let Damon pass.

  The inside of the building had seen better days. Damon walked down the dark corridor towards a pool of light cast from a room to his left. The room was largely empty except for a table with an assortment of refreshments and three men and one woman standing around it, glasses in their hands, making small talk. Damon recognized one of them on sight – Daedalus Smith, scion of the notorious Smith-Rockefeller family, and heir apparent to its industrial and financial empire. Damon was part of the same social circles – the Trents were not quite as wealthy, granted – but he had only met young Smith on a few occasions. Damon had been an undergraduate at Yale, while Smith was a Harvard man.

  What the devil is Smith doing here? Damon thought suspiciously. Was this meeting some confidence game meant to separate the gullible from their money?

  Smith was talking to the lone woman at the gathering. Her back was to Damon, but she struck him as beautiful even before he could see her face. Despite her small size – she was over a foot shorter than Smith – she carried herself with confidence and poise. She was wearing unusual clothes: a white peasant blouse over a long red skirt, with a belt made of golden links cinched at the waist. As Damon entered the room she turned towards him. Her eyes were bright and brown, intelligent and piercing. When her penetrating gaze met Damon’s he felt a shiver run down his back, and he was immediately convinced the woman could see his true self with but a glance. There was power behind those bright eyes.

  She was like him, then. That likely meant Smith was likely different as well. Damon was still unsure about the nature of his strange abilities. He’d accepted the invitation to this place in the hopes he could learn more.

  The other two men were enjoying cigars along with their drinks. As Damon forced himself to turn away from the striking woman and examine the rest of the gathering, one of them took an unlighted cigar and held out his index finger. A tiny flame sprung from the finger, and he used it as a match, puffing on the cigar until it caught. The man with the fiery gift was not much older than Damon himself, who had turned twenty-three the month before. He was tall and well-formed, with strong Slavic features framed by a mop of thick black hair, longer than current fashion allowed for, and a thick, well-waxed moustache.

  The other smoker was a Chinaman, a surprising sight among Westerners. This particular Asiatic gentleman was wearing a fine suit straight out of Saville Row. The man’s poise and demeanor seemed as refined as that of any white; he made the fiery-fingered Slav he was speaking with seem coarse and crass by comparison.

  “Trent! Damon Trent!” That was Smith, who had spotted Damon. He and the striking woman walked up to him.

  “Daedalus. How do you do?” Damon said as the two men shook hands. Daedalus Smith was the taller man – Damon barely topped five foot six, a fact that contributed to his pugnacious demeanor, while Smith was six feet tall – and had the physique of a footballer. His handsome face was adorned with a thin moustache, and his smile seemed genuine enough. Damon was clean-shaven, his red hair trimmed down to a military cut, just slightly longer than the nearly-shaved head he had sported in the service, the better to keep lice away. They were both athletic and powerful; Damon was a nine-tenths scale model of the larger man.

  “This is Cassandra,” Smith continued, introducing the woman. She smiled and allowed Damon to briefly hold her hand. Her touch was as electric as her gaze. “She is a true-blood Gypsy seer. She’s the straight goods, old boy. In a few minutes she has already amazed me half a dozen times.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Trent,” Cassandra said in response to Damon’s greeting. Her dazzling smile had wavered after touching Damon’s hand, but it reaffirmed itself as she continued. “It is an honor to meet one of the future’s movers and shakers.”

  Daedalus laughed. “Did you hear that, old boy? Tell me if she isn’t the cat’s meow. You’re destined to be a mover and shaker! Moi aussi, or so Cassandra tells me. So is the Ukrainian fellow over there, and the worthy oriental gentleman in his company. Why, twenty years from now we’ll be the life of the party!”

  “It will take longer than twenty years,” Cassandra said with subdued certainty. “But I speak the truth.”

  “Anything you say, my dear lady,” Smith said agreeably. He turned to Damon. “I hadn’t expected to see you here, Trent. To be honest, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to expect. I take it you’ve been experiencing some unusual things as of late.”

  Damon nodded. For a second his mind took him back to the trenches. The night raid that had awakened him, the charging storm troopers surrounding him, bayonets drawn and the promise of death etched in their desperate expressions. The things Damon had done to them. “You could say that, Smith. You could say that indeed.”

  “Come, have a drink while you still can; the Volstead Act is close at hand, you know,” Smith said, ignoring or dismissing the way Damon’s expression had hardened. Unlike Damon, Smith hadn’t served during the war. “Our host should be here shortly, or so I’m told.”

  “You were told correctly,” a thin, wavering voice cut in, silencing everyone in the room. Damon turned towards the speaker and saw a slight wisp of a man in a black suit, a man with graying hair and, strangely enough, dark eyeglasses obscuring most of his face. His lips were curved upwards in a sim
per that Damon immediately disliked. Something about the old fellow spelled trouble and worse. Unprepossessing as he looked, there was an aura of menace around him that made Damon’s war-honed instincts long for the feel of a gun in his hand.

  “Greetings and salutations,” the newcomer said genially. “I welcome you all to my little gathering.”

  The smile widened slightly. “My name is Mr. Night, and I am here to help you.”

  Chapter One

  Christine Dark

  Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013

  She saw dead people. Lots of them.

  The corpses stood in a circle all around her, glaring accusingly. She spun around in place, looking for a way out, but she was surrounded by the living dead. There were three women and a man, wearing medical scrubs, with bleeding gunshot wounds on their chests and heads: the nurses and orderlies who’d been murdered when she’d been abducted from a hospital. Next to them, several rough-looking dudes leered at her, even the ones missing important organs and body parts. They were mobsters, Italian and Russian varieties. One angry guy, angrily staring at her with his one good eye, had to be the mob dude that her friend Face-Off had thrown off a building: the right side of his skull was hideously flattened. And, of course, she knew exactly who the pale man in the white suit was, the man holding his grinning severed head in his hands. His name was – had been – Archangel. She’d helped chop off his head just a short while ago.

  There were many others. The ghosts of deaths past, present and future. The future dead were the most numerous. Thousands, millions, maybe billions of them.

  The walking corpses surrounded her. All of them were dead or were going to die because of her.

  She wanted to apologize to them, but she didn’t know what to say. That it wasn’t her fault, maybe. That she hadn’t asked for any of this. That she’d been a normal – well, a bit of a geek, but otherwise quite ordinary – person until just a few days ago, and she’d never expected to be dragged into a comic-book world where people died very frakking realistic deaths when hit by assorted super-powers. She would have said those things, but she was sure the dead were in no mood to hear her excuses.

  They moved closer, tightening the circle around her.

  “Go away!” she shouted at them, and they actually hesitated and stepped back a couple of paces. “You may be dead because of me, and I’m sorry about it, but if you come any closer, I’ll kill you again!” The dead vanished back into the shadows, and she was alone once again.

  No, not alone. Something bad was behind her, something worse than the restless dead. She knew who it was. Something dead and deadly, wearing the face of her father. She really didn’t want to see it again. “Go away,” she repeated, refusing to turn around.

  “Christine.”

  “Go away, I said.”

  “Christine?”

  Christine Dark opened her eyes and found herself looking at a man with no face.

  She gasped for a second, but managed not to scream. It took her a second to blink away the last lingering bits of the dream and remember where she was. She was in the Condor Jet, curled up in a passenger seat. The faceless man was Mark Martinez, and even though he had no facial features and thus no facial expressions, Christine knew that he was worried about her. Other than the no-face bit (and also no ears or hair), he looked perfectly normal, a medium-size guy in a leather jacket, t-shirt and jeans. His street name (Christine had never met someone with a street name before) was Face-Off, which went to show that people who came up with street names could use better writers. The jacket and t-shirt sported several scorched holes, where a Big Bad had punctured him with a frakking light saber. Mark shouldn’t have survived the puncturing, but Christine had helped put him back together.

  “Hey,” she said, trying to sound calm, for all that her heart was racing as if she’d run up a few flights of stairs.

  “Hey yourself,” Mark said. “We’re here.”

  “Here being…”

  “Condor’s Canadian time-share. We just landed, sort of.”

  Christine looked around the cabin as she stood up. She spotted a slumped figure lying on the rear seats, a big tall someone, all manly man, muscles over muscles but not in a gross steroid abuser way, a big guy that made her a little weak in the knees when she looked at him for too long. Earlier that night she had saved his butt and developed a bit of a schoolgirl crush on him, which was embarrassing as frak since she was a bit too long in the tooth to have schoolgirl crushes on people, even super-powered demigod types who probably had 1.2 billion Facebook friends.

  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.