New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (23 page)

Okay, moving on. Christine took another bite of her Panini sandwich and savored the rich flavors of prosciutto and Swiss cheese and mayo, enjoying the meal without a shred of guilt about the twenty-two hundred calories or so she was scarfing down. She was even contemplating having a brownie a la mode for dessert. Contemplating her butt; she was having a brownie a la mode, and she was going to like it. She could indulge pretty much all she wanted with no consequences. Melanie had ordered two Panini sandwiches, had already polished off one of them, and she’d been looking at the dessert menu herself. Mark was working on a dinner-size portion of lasagna. Neos could eat like pigs.

And drink, and do drugs, and screw like bunnies and not have to worry about unwanted pregnancies or STDs or getting fat or addicted or anything. She’d read that Neos could kick a heroin habit cold turkey, no problem. Any addictions they suffered were psychological, although a psychological addiction could be bad enough. She certainly wasn’t planning on saying yes to drugs any time soon, but still. The whole deal was just plan decadent. It couldn’t be good for your mental and spiritual health.

How long before even excess became boring? She might have all the time of the world to find out. How did it affect Neos after a decade, two decades, fifty years of doing whatever they wanted? Christine glanced at Kestrel, who looked perfectly nice and normal now but whose sexual preferences would have made Caligula blush. Would Christine end up like that after regular food and sex became boring by simple overexposure? Was the human mind capable of dealing with the ability to indulge oneself without consequence for a lifetime or three?

I guess you’ll learn the answers to those questions sooner or later. Unless you get killed first.
There was that. Neos had the potential to live for a long time, but many of them died awfully young even by normal human standards. There was one addiction they never overcame: the thrill of risking their lives and defying death. They kept taking chances and eventually many of them took one chance too many. Christine had experienced that thrill first hand: she’d faced scary and dangerous situations and she’d gotten a huge rush doing so. So that was the answer. If she got bored enough with life, she’d just do something stupid enough to lose her boring life. Permadeath as endgame content. How charming.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Mark said. He’d gotten over the brooding and had noticed she was off in her own world.

“Thinking about our… condition,” she replied. It was probably not a good idea to speak out loud about being Neos in a public place. They had a booth at the restaurant, but it was pretty crowded. Talking casually about themselves wouldn’t be wise. “I was thinking about living long enough to get bored with everything, how it affects people.”

“If you are doing the same stuff over and over, sure, that’s going to happen. But if you really think about it, there’s always something new to do. Things to learn. Places to see.” He looked thoughtful for a second. “Then again, I’ve been stuck in a rut for ten years and I’m not bored yet. Some guys have been stuck in a rut for fifty years. I guess habits can carry you through for a long time even if you don’t try anything new. But there’s nothing stopping you – or me – from trying new things.”

“Hmm.” Time enough to learn everything she wanted to? Do theoretical and experimental physics and astrophysics and pure math? Best of all, never worry about missing your opportunity to make a contribution – most physicists did their breakthrough work before they hit thirty and stagnated after that; she was going to be under-thirty forever, although she wasn’t sure if her mind was going to remain as spry as her body. Still, she wanted a chance to find out. And learn new languages and read thousands and thousands of books, play a gazillion games, watch every movie, TV show and cat video ever made? Check the tweets of ten thousand of her favorite peeps? Considering all those things, forever didn’t sound so scary anymore. She’d probably get killed long before she became jaded.

Melanie smiled. “Of course, if you enjoy your rut enough, you can stick to it for a long time. A very long time.”

Christine almost asked her how old she was, but realized that it wouldn’t just be rude to ask, she didn’t want to know the answer. The idea of Mark and a kinky woman twice his age or older sent her right into skeevy-land.

And yet you were getting all swoony over a hundred-year old hunk o’ man
, her brain reminded her. She’d gotten all teenage-crushy on Ultimate when they’d met, and the guy was ancient. When people looked young, you didn’t think about how truly creepy some of the vampire stuff she loved was, like the factoid that
Twilight
’s Bella was having vampire babies with an immature dirty old man who liked to cruise high schools looking for fresh meat. She almost choked on her Panini at the idea. In any case, she didn’t have to worry about dating some ageless Golden Oldie anymore. She’d hardly given John Clarke a second thought ever since she and Mark had gotten intimate. Well, she was worried about him, but in a friend-zone kind of way. Her crush on him was old news. She was with Mark now.

For now.

Do shut the eff up, you.

“Okay,” she said. “I think that answers my question. Dessert, anyone?”

Everyone was up for dessert.

The Lurker’s Tale

New York City, New York, 1934

Damon Trent draped himself in darkness and waited for his quarry.

This case had been different from the usual run of thieves, murderers and smugglers he normally dealt with. For years, he had preyed upon those who preyed on the weak, and in the process had learned much about both himself and humanity at large. He’d seen much evil, done some good, and begun to feel like he was redeeming himself. After a few years, he thought he’d seen everything.

He’d been wrong.

Children had been disappearing over the last six months. There were at least twenty-eight victims, very likely more, all ranging in ages from four to eleven. The predator had selected his prey with care, striking amongst the poor and forgotten in the city, the growing legions of the desperate and lost. Many parents hadn’t even bothered going to the police; those who did had received precious little attention or sympathy. The abductor ranged far and wide; the missing hailed from Harlem and Queens, from Brooklyn and Hoboken, as far out as Long Island and New Jersey. No pattern was evident at first. There were no witnesses. Children had disappeared from their beds and cribs, or on their way from school, singly and in pairs or even in small groups.

By the twenty-third disappearance, one of Damon’s agents had seen a pattern.

Branford McGee was a reporter at the
World’s Journal
.  He’d put together all the disparate reports, and using a map and colored pins had discovered that the incidents made a diffuse circle over Manhattan and surrounding areas, a circle centered around Central Park.

The journalist had gone to Damon with the information. At first, Damon had demurred. Even if the pattern was real, Central Park was a huge area. Without more evidence, trying to find the perpetrator would be a waste of time. While he dithered, three more children disappeared. The attacker was growing bolder, and the frequency of the disappearances was escalating.

Damon and his agents spent the next five days watching the park. During that time, two more children went missing. One of his agents, a burly ex-boxer by the name of Charlie Fremantle, went missing as well. That disappearance, unfortunate as it was, gave Damon a place to look. The following two nights, he lay in wait near the spot where Charlie had vanished.

This was the third night. He worried that he might be wasting his time, but some instinct told him to be patient.

The spot was unremarkable enough. Charlie had been checking out the West Drive section of the park when he disappeared. Damon had spent the previous two nights on top of a tree, hidden and watching. From his position he could see a good portion of the road and the surrounding parkland. There wasn’t much to look at. Mayor LaGuardia’s efforts to clean up the park were just beginning to bear fruit, and there were plenty of unkempt lawns growing wild everywhere. Winos and hobos still used the Park as a temporary refuge.

There were no winos and hobos in this area, however. Someone or something had scared them off.

It was close to three in the morning when Damon felt something change. It was akin to a shift in air pressure, or a sudden drop in temperature, but it was neither, it was something he felt with his mind, or perhaps his soul. He turned towards the source of the crawling sensation inside his head and saw a shimmering darkness forming out of thin air, some hundred feet away from his position. A tall figure emerged from it, a man wearing a black robe, a small body draped over his shoulder. The man took three steps forward and stopped in front of an unremarkable patch of grass. He waved his hand as if in greeting, and a Doorway opened. It was not unlike the one he had seen at Milarepa’s Cave a decade ago. The man and his captive walked through the Doorway and disappeared from view.

Damon dropped from the tree and rushed forward, his cloak fluttering in the evening air; he adjusted his gas mask over his head and tossed his cloak’s hood over it, becoming the Lurker, hunter of the night. He reached the spot a few seconds later. To the naked eye, there was no trace of the Doorway, but Damon had trained his senses over the years, and he could perceive the lingering energies that had been used to tear a temporary hole in what modern physicists referred to as spacetime. His will reached out and found a handhold of sorts in the tear in reality. With a mental effort, he established a link to the Doorway.

It was a sophisticated construct, using the knowledge of the Wordsmiths, but powered through the tainted power of the Outsiders. Damon felt part of him recoil in disgust at the familiar darkness, even as another part hungrily reached for it. His two natures briefly warred with each other, until he forced an uneasy truce on them. If the darkness ever gained the upper hand, madness and worse awaited him. He prevailed this time, and shaped his inner darkness into a key, which fooled the Doorway into accepting him. The gate opened without raising any alarms, and he went through.

There was a period of discontinuity, just like the previous times he’d gone through such constructs. The first thing Damon noticed when he emerged from the other side was heat. It was much hotter than the June evening had been outside, and the air felt dense and heavy. Light filled the area, although no light source was in evidence.

He had arrived to a tunnel carved from living rock, with wide rounded walls and ceiling and a flat dust-covered floor. On the clear area of the ground where he was standing, several symbols had been carved on the stone, forming a rough circle. They looked like the marks in the Codex the Scout had given him. Wordsmith Sigils.

The crying of many children echoed faintly from the other end of the tunnel.

Damon concentrated.
Dim
, he thought and willed, and dim he became. Light and sound bent around him. The world became a thing of colored hues he saw with something other than his eyes, as the same process that rendered him invisible also made him blind. He moved quickly but quietly through the tunnel, one of his Mauser pistols in his hand.

He passed patches of dry blood on the floor and the walls, in one case too much blood for one person to lose and survive – especially if the person in question was a child. A cold rage washed over him as he hurried forth.

The tunnel gave way to a large chamber, half of a sphere with a fifty-foot radius. At its center was a large circle, painted in blood, covered with both Wordsmith Sigils and something else, something that radiated madness and malice like the reek of a decomposing corpse. Several cages, the kind used to hold large dogs, were strewn around the circle. Children filled them, crying or quietly trembling or lying still; some of the latter were unconscious, but others were breathing no longer.

One more child lay unmoving on the center of the circle, and over him stood the robed man, a blade in his hand.

Damon fired as soon as he had a target. Three shots hit the back of the man’s head within half an inch from each other. The high-speed 7.63mm bullets struck – and dropped to the ground, flattened, their energy drained so thoroughly they didn’t even ricochet away. The robed man turned to face Damon.

He was an old thin man, seemingly in his sixties, with a gray-white goatee, heavy bags under and around his watery eyes, and thinning hair parted to the right. He could have been a kindly grandfather, except for his eyes. Madness danced within those watery eyes as they regarded Damon, seeing through his shroud of dimness as if it wasn’t there. Those eyes reminded Damon of Mr. Night. “The notorious Lurker,” the old man said. “Come to protect the wee children, he has. My name is Albert Fish. Happy to make your acquaintance.”

Damon answered the greeting with several more gunshots. Albert Fish laughed as the bullets struck and fell away harmlessly once again. In three swift strides, the robed man closed the distance between them, and outstretched hand reaching for Damon’s throat. Damon pivoted and kicked out, a move he’d learned during his travels to the Orient. The side kick struck Albert Fish’s midsection with the power to deform steel or shatter rock. A normal human being would have been flung back like a rag doll, his bones broken, his organs ruptured. Albert Fish was knocked back three steps with a surprised hiss of pain. His expression wavered, became ecstatic. “That hurt,” he said dreamily. “So few things hurt nowadays. That was… nice.”

Damon laughed, the creepy sound fitting the scene perfectly. Albert Fish cackled along with him, two madmen having a grand old time beneath the earth.

“If it’s pain you seek, there’s plenty more where that came from,” Damon said.

“Pain is everything. To inflict it, to experience it, it is the uppermost.”

“Pain it is, then.” Damon charged.

The old man rushed to meet him. His weapon was a straight razor; it gleamed with a dark light that was both disturbing and familiar.