New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (40 page)

We came to a stop in front of a brick-faced building. A handful of teenagers outside were smoking, lounging around and comparing prison-style tats, apparently as inured to the cold as the hookers we’d seen. They watched us intently as we got out of the cab and grabbed our luggage from the trunk. The vibe I got wasn’t all that different from the rougher neighborhoods in New York, except it was damn colder. The atmosphere of despondence and despair was similar, if perhaps a little deeper here. As soon as I shut down the trunk, the cab sped off and left us to the tender mercies of the locals.

“This way,” Father Alex said. We started to walk through the snow-covered sidewalk towards the building’s entrance, but the teenagers headed us off. A few of them were calling out to Christine, and I didn’t need to understand them to figure out what they were saying. They spread out in a half circle around us. I’d checked them out on our way in; at least three of them were packing heat. Handguns, and one of them had a sawed-off shotgun poorly concealed under his greatcoat. Things might get interesting. I wouldn’t be particularly worried about a confrontation, even before my power boost, if not for the fact it would draw attention to us, which we really couldn’t afford.

The biggest and meanest-looking one said something to Father Alex. He only said one word in return. “
Akula
.”

The gang banger blanched, suddenly looking a like a scared little kid. He stepped back and his friends did likewise. We walked past them and made it to the building.

It was warmer inside, but not much. Two bored-looking guys with military-style crew-cuts and impressive tattoo per square inch ratios were keeping watch in the lobby. Father Alex spoke to them, and I heard that word again,
Akula
. One of them showed us to the elevators while the other called ahead on his wrist-comp.

The inside of the elevator had seen better days and had a faint smell of old urine and some suspicious stains here and there that had the rusty-brown hue of dried blood. Father Alex pressed the button for the penthouse and up we went.

“Who or what is
Akula
?” I asked.

“It means ‘shark,”” Father Alex explained. “He is the man we’re here to see.”

The good father was the man with the contacts, so I let him take the lead. It was weird. In New York he really hadn’t had any dealings with the Russian underworld. His one run-in with the Mafyia had involved a couple of parishioners with bad gambling debts, and it had ended when I had a little talk with the debt collectors. He’d never given any indication that he knew much about either the Russian or Ukrainian criminal underworld, although I knew he had helped a lot of immigrants, legal or otherwise, from all over the region. I had a feeling I was in for some interesting revelations.

I met Christine’s eyes and gave her a reassuring grin. She smiled back; she looked a little apprehensive but not all that nervous. After the week she’d been having, being in a strange country on her way to meet with some local crime lord just wasn’t something to get overly excited about.

The elevator opened and we stepped into a carpeted hallway, much cleaner and neater than what we’d seen of the building so far. Loud music and computer FX sounds were coming through the open door of the apartment at the end of the hall. We headed there.

Through the open door, we saw three men sitting on a couch and playing
Neo Apocalypse VII
. On the big plasma screen across the living room, a CGI Ultimate delivered a fatal blow to Hyperia, eliciting a roar of laughter from all of the players; from the blood spatter on the screen, I figured they were using one of the unauthorized mods that turned the game into a gore-fest. One of the men glanced casually in our direction, waved us in and pointed towards a doorway covered by beaded curtain that led deeper into the apartment. I noticed that the coffee table between the couch and the big screen TV was heaped with piles of cash in various currencies, as well as a fair assortment of handguns and a mirror with a mound of coke next to a razor blade and sniffing tube.

Nobody ever takes me anywhere nice.

We went through the beaded curtain, down a short corridor leading to an office, where a man sat behind a desk. No, not a man. A Neo, a Freak like me. About one in ten Neolympians are Freaks, all of them Type Twos and Threes. They don’t just get super powers; they also end up with a little something extra, a deformity or two that clearly marks them as something both more and less than human. This Neo had gray, leathery skin, oversized yellow eyes and a flat, almost vestigial nose; his skull was sloped and elongated towards the back. His shoulders were inhumanly broad, and his arms far too long for his body. He didn’t quite look like a humanoid shark, but it was close enough for the nickname to fit. I would have bet the skin was as rough and abrasive as sandpaper, too. A sight for sore eyes, the kind of creature most would fear and none would love. If you look like a monster it’s damn easy to turn into one. I knew that only too well.

Akula rose from behind the desk. He was tall, six seven at least, although his inhumanly wide shoulders gave him a squat appearance. He was wearing a white undershirt and military camo pants tucked into combat boots. His lips parted into a huge carnivorous smile, revealing double rows of pointed teeth. That was one ugly motherfucker.

“Mykhailo,” he said in a growling voice.

“Fedir,” Father Alex replied.

The two men met in a hearty embrace, laughing and trading quips in Ukrainian. Father Aleksander’s demeanor and tone had changed noticeably. He sounded younger, more irreverent and rougher around the edges. I had the feeling he was being more himself now than the way he conducted himself around Saint Theodosius’.

After they were done exchanging pleasantries, the two Ukrainians turned towards us. “These are my friends,” Father Alex said in English. “Herb and Kimberly.”

“Any friends of Mykhailo are welcome here,” Akula said. His English had a British accent intermixed with the Ukrainian one. “Come, sit. Fancy a drink?”

A few minutes later we were all sitting on one of the half dozen or so sofas in a large meeting room adjacent to the office, glasses of vodka in our hands. Akula and Father Alex chattered in Ukrainian while we got our drinks and sat down. I downed my glass in one gulp and got another one. Christine mixed a lot of orange juice into hers, sipped it and tried not to grimace at the taste. She clearly wasn’t a vodka girl; nobody’s perfect, I guess.

I’d known Father Alex had not been a simple Orthodox priest. For one, he was a Neo, not a very powerful one, true, but he had empathic powers and the ability to speed up healing in others. His empathy couldn’t hold a candle to Christine’s, but it had been one reason we had become friends; he could pick up my surface emotions, which had allowed him to get a sense of who I was. His healing abilities were too weak to help Neos, but by concentrating he could boost a normal human’s healing rate to that of a Type One Neo, which meant broken bones and gunshot wounds could be fully mended in a matter of a few days, or even hours, depending on the severity of the injury.

Healers could pretty much write their own ticket in the US and most of the rest of the world. Most of them worked in hospitals and private clinics and even the weakest of them made more money than a top-rated neurosurgeon. Father Alex had preferred to remain out of the spotlight, however, quietly helping people in the community for free. He’d intimated that he preferred the anonymity not just out of humility but because his past had been on the shady side and apt to catch up with him if he became too well-known. He hadn’t volunteered any details, and I hadn’t asked for any. I preferred to judge my friends by their actions, not their pasts.

I figured Father Alex’s past was going to become pretty important in the near future, though.

Chapter Seventeen

The Twisted Twosome

New York City, New York, March 20, 2013

He was a wanted man now. He’d lost everything.

Kyle Carmichael shook his head and smiled, amused at his own conceit. ‘Everything’ meant something very different when you were as wealthy as he was. Yes, his identity would become part of the public record soon enough, but he had dozens of new others, and ways to generate more. Sure, his assets had been frozen by the Feds – except for the hundred million or so he had carefully laundered and placed in a multitude of bank accounts across the world, plus another five million in cash hidden in a dozen safe deposit boxes around the world. He’d prepared for a life on the run for a long time. He might no longer have many toys as he used to, but he hadn’t lost everything.

He glanced at Melanie’s sleeping form. He hadn’t lost anything important, not really.

Careful not to wake his beloved, he left the bed and headed for the bathroom. He examined himself in the mirror. He no longer looked remotely like Kyle Carmichael; Kyle might not have his buddy Face-Off’s abilities, but he had enough gizmos to change his appearance well enough to fool face recognition programs, let alone the old Mark-I eyeball. Cheek and nose nano-tech alterations changed his facial configuration enough to spoof even the most advanced NSA systems. Even better, his new face came with its own identity, including a retina-scan signature and a credit and job history that he had carefully built over the years. All of it would pass muster even if the FBI decided to run a background check on his new identity. As far as anybody who looked at him could tell, he was a normal, solid citizen by the name of Fred Humboltd. He was safe.

Kyle grinned again. Well, he was safe as long as he didn’t put on the Condor costume. He wasn’t going to give
that
up, though. The world hadn’t seen the last of Condor, not by a long shot. Condor and Kestrel were here to stay.

Kestrel. He looked back at Melanie’s sleeping form, remembering how they’d spent the night.

* * *

Kyle pinned her against the wall, holding her wrists behind her back with one hand, controlling her with his greater strength. A part of him knew that she could have broken free in a dozen different ways, that she was letting him overpower her, but it didn’t matter. The beast within felt in control, and that was all that mattered. He pressed his free hand over her mouth and nose, smothering her, and she made little choked noises as he pushed himself inside her, slamming Melanie into the wall with each brusque thrust. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she struggled to breathe, and the sight of her, helpless and in his power, his to do as he pleased, drove him to the brink. The beautiful and terrible knowledge that he could kill her right then and there set him off.

(Memories: there had been two of them. Monica and Hakim: they had made him bleed, and scream, and beg. They had made him like it.)

Shame and old terrors made him hard again, and he hammered into her again, still smothering her, and she convulsed against him as he brought her to the edge of unconsciousness, released her just long enough to let her take one desperate breath, and covered her mouth and nose once again. He wondered idly about the things he would do to her after she passed out, how he would toy with her limp body. He’d pretend she was dead, perhaps.

She bit his hand, hard enough to make blood run down his wrist, and he went off again, their orgasms nearly simultaneous. Her hands escaped from his grasp, and she slapped him with enough force to loosen teeth, knocking him off her. She wasn’t done punishing him. Her nails were short, but she covered them with a special lacquer that made them hard as steel, and she used them to draw two cuts on his chest.
There goes our security deposit
, he thought idly, seeing the blood spatter on the apartment’s carpet.

“Not in the mood to be unconscious, lover,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow. How about some edge play instead?”

He smiled at her as she paid him back.

* * *

It had been a fun night. Kyle wondered how Face and Christine had spent their last night in the States. Something sweet and vanilla, he supposed.

Something normal. Something you’ll never have.

He was used to the self-recriminations by now. He wasn’t going to change, and neither were the accusing voices in his head. He was a man used to holding conflicting thoughts and emotions and to ignoring the contradictions. 
To thine own self be true
. For decades, he had tried to pretend that hungry part of himself didn’t exist. For the most part, he’d succeeded, although there had been a few close calls – prostitutes, mostly, times when he’d almost gone beyond the pale and done something that couldn’t be undone. Those episodes had been followed by guilt and shame, years of celibacy, years of concentrating on punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent while the urges slowly grew back until they could no longer be denied.

Melanie had rescued him from all that.

He checked the time. It would soon be dark out. He looked at Melanie’s sleeping form. It was time for her to wake up, and for them to go forth and fight the good fight.

How to wake her up? He grabbed a towel and tore out a long strip. It would make for a nice noose.

Jersey City, New Jersey, March 20
^th
, 2013

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” the man formerly known as Cosmo-Nought said. He took a swig from a bottle of Jack Daniels before continuing; his place of business, a workshop under a strip joint in a bad part of Jersey City, stank of cigarettes, booze and low-grade cocaine. “Freedom Fucking Island? Do you have a motherfucking death wish? ‘Cause I sure as fuck don’t. Don’t you fucking get me started on Freedom Fucking Island!”

Once upon a time, Hubert Meadows had been a minister’s son who’d never raised his voice, cursed, drank or smoked. When his powers had manifested he’d become an Artificer and designed a suit of armor nearly as powerful as the Brass Man. Hubert had donned the armor and become Cosmo-Naught, squeaky-clean hero and role model. He’d served in the Legion with distinction, had not one but two comic books devoted to his adventures, and ended up with several lucrative movie deals.