New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 3

  “It is a dream, my dear, but not an ordinary one.” A new voice, but this one was coming from somebody close by. Christine turned and saw a tiny woman – four foot and not too many inches tall – standing by her bedroom door. She’d never seen her before, in dreams or real life, and she hadn’t been standing there a moment before, either. The woman had long black hair and a dark complexion that could have been Hispanic or Native American, but her features looked like neither. She didn’t look old – late twenties or early thirties, maybe – but something about her said ‘old’ to Christine. The woman’s eyes were sightless solid white orbs. That would have normally creeped the crap out of Christine – and immediately made her feel terribly guilty for feeling that way – but in the dream she wasn’t all that bothered by it.

  “Uh, hello?” Christine said dubiously.

  “I am very sorry to intrude in your mind like this, but I’m afraid this is the only chance we’ll have to talk,” the woman said. She was smiling, but it was a sad smile. “My name is Cassandra. It is nice to meet you, Christine.”

  “Nice to meet you. Am I going insane? Are you going to be the imaginary friend I talk to when the meds wear off at the happy place with the padded walls? Or did I die when I was puking my guts out? If I’m dead, are you an angel?” Whenever she felt nervous or uncomfortable – and this was a twofer – Christine either talked too much or shut down completely.

  Cassandra started to say something but the voice coming from above came back. “What are you doing here? This is a restricted…” There was a sharp metallic sound, and the voice was cut off.

  “Fuck, Danny, why did you go and shoot her?” a man’s voice came in.

  “I thought you said everybody was going to clear out before we got here.” Another male voice, snarling, angry and scary. “Somebody fucked up. Not my problem. No fucking witnesses, capisce? Just grab the bitch and let’s go.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cassandra said. “This is going to be unpleasant.”

  Christine was still trying to figure out what the hell the woman was talking about when she felt rough hands grabbing her. She jumped at the touch, but she couldn’t see anybody. It was terrifying. A sharp stinging pain on her arm followed, kind of like the last time she donated blood, but much more painful. She looked down and saw blood running from a puncture, right where an IV needle would go. “What’s happening to me?”

  “Some bad men are taking you from your hospital room. It’s my fault. Your physical body is unconscious. Unfortunately, contacting you mentally has raised your awareness enough to experience what is happening around you. Help is on the way, however.”

  “What..?”

  More outside sounds. Another man’s voice. “Hey, what are you doing here?” More sharp metallic noises. Gunshots? They didn’t sound loud enough, but she thought that’s what they were.

  Christine was thrown face down on the bed, and realized all of a sudden that she was wearing a hospital gown. Somebody was holding her arms behind her back. There was a tearing sound and she felt clingy tape burning her skin, being wrapped tightly around her arms and legs, over and over, binding them together. More tape covered her mouth, her eyes. She couldn’t see, couldn’t talk. She felt a sharp flare of pain as someone jabbed a needle on her backside. She screamed, but the sound was muffled by all the tape over her mouth.

  “Christine.” Cassandra’s voice was firm. “Look at me.”

  She couldn’t look at anybody, her eyes were taped shut! But a second later she found herself back in her bed, no longer bound and gagged. Cassandra was sitting on the bed, holding Christine’s hand. She could still feel the tape on her skin, but she could move, see…

  Talk? “I’m so going to freak the frak out if you don’t tell me what’s going on!” Christine shouted. Maybe this was a hallucination her brain was making up while in the real world her body was being abused by murderous strangers. Or the whole thing was some delusion and she had finally gone out of her effing gourd. “Freaking out right now!”

  Cassandra squeezed her hand. “Please believe me, child. You will be all right. I have seen that much, if nothing else.”

  It was sheer insanity. Christine was experiencing two sets of feelings at the same time. She was sitting on her old bed in her favorite Hello Kitty pajamas, the ones she had stopped wearing when she was eleven. She was also strewn on the cold and dirty floor of a moving vehicle – probably a van – tied up with duct tape and with her ass hanging out of a freaking hospital gown. She forced herself to concentrate on the Hello Kitty pajamas experience. It was a lot less traumatic that way. “What’s happening to me?”

  “I had to see you,” Cassandra said, which was kind of funny considering her eyes were obviously not in working order. “I wouldn’t be able to do this if you were awake. It would be like staring into the sun. You have so much power, child. I had to see what kind of person you are. I had to see if you can be trusted with all that power.”

  Power? Several of Christine’s teachers had used words like ‘gifted’ and ‘brilliant’ when describing her, but even Mr. Gardener, the math teacher who had called her ‘a prodigy,’ had never referred to her as powerful. So now she was having delusions of grandeur mixed in with an abduction horror fest. It didn’t make any sense.

  Cassandra started playing a violin she hadn’t been holding until just that moment. Trippy. Christine recognized the tune – one of Mozart’s sonatas, Number 18, wasn’t it? Christine loved music. She’d never quite managed to learn to play any instruments herself, but she’d learned to appreciate music. Mozart in particular fascinated her, with all the mathematical symmetry embedded in his work.

  Christine listened to Cassandra’s playing and for a while she was able to deal with the other set of sensations without panicking. The music got her through the feeling of being picked up and carried off over someone’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She was finally dumped on some piece of furniture, like a couch and left alone, still wrapped up in tape. None of that seemed to matter as long as she could be in her old room listening to the strange woman play the violin.

  Eventually, however, her brain kept asking questions she couldn’t ignore. “Uh, Cassandra?” The music stopped and the blind woman turned towards her. “So, what happens if I cannot be trusted with all that power you were talking about?”

  Cassandra’s smile vanished altogether, and all that was left was sadness and grim determination. “In that case, I would have to make sure that power was not abused.”

  I think the nice blind lady just threatened my life, Christine thought. That scared her more than the whole kidnapping bit.

  “You seem like a nice young woman, however,” Cassandra went on. “You have suffered, mostly small hurts, but they have marked you nonetheless. You have been an outsider, an outcast. That could be dangerous for someone with your potential: the temptation to turn against everyone will be strong. On the other hand, your hurts and disappointments have taught you about suffering and made you sensitive to the pain of others.”

  The patient’s deep feelings of inadequacy and demonstrated inability to fit into normal social patterns led to the creation of elaborate delusional constructs. She fashioned an illusory world where she was powerful and important. The patient’s fascination with fantasy fiction and computer games may have contributed to the development of these delusions. Oh, yeah, the psych evaluations just wrote themselves.

  Cassandra smiled again, and despite Christine’s overwhelming need to believe all of this was just a weird-ass dream, she felt a surge of relief. “You will do, I think. You have a solid core, for which I think we must all thank your mother.”

  Back in Abduction Land, she heard a bunch of gunshots and other loud noises she could not identify. It sounded like a small war had broken out.

  “That’s your rescue,” Cassandra explained. “A young friend of mine is risking his life to save you.”

  New pain and discomfort. Someone was taking the duct tape off her. It felt just the way she imag
ined duct tape would feel coming off her skin, except more painful. Her hair! “Can you tell your friend to watch the hair? ‘Cause he’s pulling my hair worse than Ellen Weathersby did back in sixth grade.” The tape coming off her eyelids was the worst. “Son of a bee! That hurt!”

  “I can’t contact him while I’m here with you, unfortunately,” Cassandra said. “But now you are safe, at least for the time being.”

  She could feel herself being wrapped up in a blanket, and whoever was carrying her off was being a lot gentler than the previous bunch. Knight in shining armor rescue fantasies annoyed her, but they were better than nightmares about being victimized by maniacs.

  “Okay, so I pass the test and I’m the Chosen One and all that good stuff. What now? Do I get to go on a quest to find the Golden Dildo of Gondor or something?” Among all the fear and bewilderment, a brief flash of excitement poked through. A quest? That would actually be, really, really, wicked cool.

  The delusions have become so strong the patient may never lead a normal life…

  Screw you, imaginary shrink! I’m off to find the Golden Dildo of Gondor and stick it down the nearest Crack of Doom!

  Cassandra said nothing, but Christine got the feeling the blind woman could hear her inner dialog just fine. Stupid dream know-it-alls.

  “You will see, my dear. It’s going to be a difficult time for you. Try to keep in mind you are stronger than you think.”

  “That should have been ‘Stronger than think you are, remember you must try.’ And you should be green and about two feet shorter,” Christine replied, surprising herself. Smart comebacks weren’t her thing; she could think of smart comebacks, but usually minutes or hours after the actual conversations when the comebacks would have been relevant. Her dream self was quicker on her mental feet, apparently. And sassier. She’d always wanted to be sassy and had never made it past awkward and unintentionally funny.

  “Sleep now, Christine.”

  And sleep she did.

  The Freedom Legion

  Atlantic Headquarters, March 13, 2013

  It once had been an insignificant island in the Caribbean, somewhere off the coast of Haiti. Now it glittered with half a dozen skyscrapers, a permanent population of over ten thousand people, two universities, and one of the most sophisticated communication and sensor networks on the planet. Overlooking it all was a neoclassic monstrosity on a hill. It loosely resembled the Parthenon but was many times larger; the structure had been called ‘the mother of all city halls.’ The huge building was the Western Hemisphere's headquarters for the Freedom Legion. Freedom Island was a living symbol of the greatest accomplishments of humanity and parahumanity, working together for the welfare of all. At least that was what all the brochures said. He even believed it on his good days.

  Watching from the viewing room on top of the tallest building on the island, the hero of the ages took it all in. After a while he closed his eyes and vividly recalled the ground-breaking ceremony, back in 1953. Europe was still recovering from the war, and the world was still struggling with the war’s aftermath. The theme of the ceremony had been ‘Never Again.’ Never again would the good people of the world allow the horrors of the previous two decades to be unleashed on the helpless and innocent. The Freedom Legion would be beholden to no nation or vested interest. It would be a truly transnational organization dedicated to the benefit of the entire planet. In his mind’s eye he saw the gathered leaders and dignitaries of all the great powers. Winston Churchill, who had just regained his seat as Prime Minister, watched the proceedings with a jaundiced eye. Dwight Eisenhower’s smile was forced and stiff, and Chiang Kai-shek had not bothered to conceal his scowl while the ceremony concluded and Freedom Island became an independent territory bound by no law but the Legion’s. Only the Soviet Union had refused to send a representative to the ceremony, but that failing empire was on its way to irrelevancy even then.

  None of the victors of the war approved of the Freedom Legion’s internationalist program, but they could not stop it, not when all but a handful members of the Legion had pledged their support to its independence. The will of thirty-three Legionnaires was backed by more raw power than any nation state could command. Without the Legion, Nazi Germany would still dominate Europe. The Legion would ensure no other nation could become a threat of that magnitude ever again. It had been a lofty goal, and on that day he had felt the thrill of possibility, the promise of a great future almost within reach.

  “John?”

  John Clarke snapped out of his reverie and turned around to greet his old friend. “Kenneth. I thought you were going to skip the press conference.”

  Kenneth Slaughter, a.k.a. Doc Slaughter, and more recently Brass Man, shook his head. “Artemis asked me to un-skip it. As you know, she can be very persuasive.”

  “That she is,” John said wryly as he shook hands with his friend. The two men were very similar, tall and powerful, broad of shoulder, narrow at the waist, sporting the muscular build of professional athletes. Even the cast of their faces was similar, with firm square jaws and chiseled features generally set in calm and confident expressions. Slaughter’s pale blonde hair and sky-blue eyes contrasted with John’s dark brown and green, but otherwise they could have been brothers. In all the ways that counted, they were. “Why did she insist on you being here, though? It’s going to be the usual dog and pony show.” The monthly press conferences at Freedom Island were fairly boring affairs unless some crisis was developing. John suspected he knew the reason, but waited for his friend to confirm those suspicions.

  “Artemis – Olivia – is worried about you. As am I,” Kenneth said, not wasting any more time on pleasantries. John wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t spoken with Kenneth for three weeks and had been avoiding him for even longer than that in order to prevent this very conversation. Now he understood why Kenneth had showed up for the press conference: he wanted to make sure John was up for it.

  “Et tu, Kenneth? I thought a fellow oldster would spare me the touchie-feelie stuff.”

  “Watch it, youngster. I’m a good decade your senior, and you know it.” Kenneth’s smile was brief, and his tone became serious again. “We’ve all noticed it, John. We all feel the temptation to dwell in the past, but of late people have noticed you going into full-fledged fugue states. You were in one just now, weren’t you?”

  “I was reminiscing, yes,” John admitted. He realized with some concern he could not remember how long he had been lost in thought.

  “Even when you are paying attention to the here and now, there are other worrisome signs. You seem unusually unfeeling and disengaged. ”

  “Disengaged? I have been anything but for close to eighty years, Kenneth. You want to worry about disengaged, worry about Janus. He’s the one who went on a twenty-year walkabout in outer space.” Janus had gone on a twenty-year walkabout in outer space and on his return had chosen not to reveal anything about what he had seen. John didn’t know what that meant, except it couldn’t possibly be anything good.

  “Cassius… yes, he also worries us all. And when we worry about two of the mightiest beings on the planet, we’re truly worried. But this is not about Janus. Right now, you are worrying us a great deal.”

  John shrugged. “I wish you hadn’t waited until half an hour before a press conference to bring this up.” Underneath the calm façade, he was very worried himself. What Kenneth did not know was that the cold demeanor John was affecting concealed a growing sense of anger and frustration. John was scared of acknowledging this, even to himself. He had managed to repress those feelings, and if the price was to be seen as emotionless, he would gladly pay it.

  “Lately it seems like there’s never a good time, John. And yes, I know most of that is due to things beyond our control. There’s always some crisis to tend to. But the Legion has over two hundred full time members. You can afford to take some time off if you need to.”

  “Can I? Can I really, Kenneth? Most of those two hundred kids are Type Ones and Two
s. Things I can shrug off will kill them. Do you want to tell a widow or orphan that their dearly beloved bought the farm because I had to take some time off?”

  “All true, but how many will die if your problems get worse?”

  John bowed his head, acknowledging defeat. “All right. You win. You are right. Yes, I’m not feeling one hundred percent. And yes, we’ll talk about it. Say, dinner at six today?” He had been trying to deal with his troubles on his own, and it clearly wasn’t working. Maybe talking to Kenneth would help.

  Doc Slaughter visibly relaxed. “I’m glad to hear it, John. Maybe it’s simply our version of shell shock. We certainly have experienced enough things to warrant it.”

  “We called it ‘combat fatigue’ in my day,” John replied.

  “Yes, and now it’s PTSD, unless they’ve replaced it with something even more harmless-sounding when I wasn’t looking.”

  “People are softer nowadays, aren’t they?”

  “In no small part due to our efforts,” Kenneth admitted. “I tend to think it’s for the best.”

  “Probably true. See you downstairs?”

  Kenneth nodded. “Let’s go make our grand entrance. Artemis should be doing the same.”

  They shook hands, and Kenneth called forth his Brass Man suit of armor. John watched his friend take off, waited a few seconds, and leaped off the balcony.

  John let himself fall for some time. He tried to feel the way a normal human would if he was plunging towards the ground a hundred stories below. Fear was a province of mortality. He felt nothing.

  A minor act of will, and he soared towards the sky. That had once been a source of elation. He could fly higher and higher and leave the blue planet behind. Once, like Icarus, he had gotten close to the sun, close enough for the heat of its corona to envelop him. He had almost died that time; his internal temperature had risen well beyond the melting point of any earthly material and he had been forced to flee for his life.