New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (43 page)

Christine ran a hand down the side of my featureless face. “Father Alex,” she said.

I nodded. “Role models just ain’t what they used to be, I guess.” Condor was a closet sicko. Father Alex had left behind a trail of bodies longer than mine. If Cassandra turned out to have a basement full of dead transients somewhere, I’d never get over it.

“He is a good man,” Christine said.

“Tell that to all the widows and orphans. Tell that to the dead.” The Judge, the Shark and the Knight, champions of the Iron Guard. I’d actually read a few comic books featuring them, come to think of it, usually as villains that fought the likes of the Legion, although the Guard had mostly avoided that kind of conflict in real life. They hadn’t had pictures of the actual Guards, so the comics’ versions of the Shark hadn’t been accurate at all, and the Judge was portrayed as some tall blonde guy that looked more like a Nazi than a Ukrainian, and he’d been a powerful telepath that nobody could lie to. There’s no truth in advertising. Turns out the Judge was just a big guy with some empathic abilities, and he was now alive and well in New York City. What would his parishioners think if they knew that they were hearing Mass from one of the bogeymen from the old country?

Christine leaned forward until her forehead touched mine. “He’s trying to atone for what he did. Has been ever since he left the Ukraine.”

I ran my hand through her hair, and its silky feel on my fingers helped make me feel a little better. “All the times he talked to me about how killing tainted your soul, poisoned you, I always wanted to yell at him he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. But something always held me back. I always had a feeling that maybe he did know what the fuck he was talking about. I didn’t know the half of it.”

“I’m not going to excuse what he did. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it.” I’d seen tears form in Christine eyes while Father Aleksander told his tale. He hadn’t noticed. His steady, emotionless tone hadn’t wavered throughout the story, as if he’d gone into a hypnotic trance.

“My friend. My fellow monster. Makes sense.”

“If you’d been there, if I’d been there, would we have done any better?”

I thought about it. The answer that first came to me was simple and easy. Yes. I’d have made them kill me before I hurt those people. But then those people would have died anyway, and more besides them. Father Alex had chosen the lesser evil.

I still didn’t know if I could forgive him. And if I couldn’t, I didn’t know if I could ever forgive myself, either.

“Hey, it’s okay, Mark,” Christine said softly. “It’s okay.” She sounded like someone trying to console a crying friend.

I wasn’t crying. Can’t cry without a face.

She turned the light off and we held each other in the dark.

At some point we slept.

Pripet Marshes, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 23, 2013

Our guide to the marshes was a wiry man with weathered skin, sparse beard and small, squinting eyes. He looked as tough as old leather, with an expression that said he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and that he wasn’t glad to be suffering our company. He also didn’t speak three words of English. The two words he did know were ‘Shit’ and ‘Bitch.’ While he talked to Father Aleksander, I was able to read between the lines and figure out his nickname for me was ‘that American Shit.’ It didn’t take a giant leap of logic to determine what Christine’s nickname was.

The guy was wearing a fur coat and hat, thick padded pants and sturdy boots. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder. I was enough of a gun nut to recognize it: a German Mauser, probably a Model 98 or 98K of World War Two vintage, or maybe even World War One. It looked pretty well-maintained, and something about the guy told me he’d used it for more than hunting bear or wolf. He didn’t look quite old enough to have served in the Great Patriotic War, but the Russian-Ukrainian conflict had gone on long after all the wars were officially over, and there’d been plenty of dust-ups in the intervening years; the guide looked like he’d been in a few of them. I could tell. The guy was a killer, a hard case. Takes one to know one.

Father Aleksander made the introductions. “This is Vasyl.” Vasyl didn’t bother shaking hands. He looked us up and down, made it clear he wasn’t much impressed by what he saw, and took a swig of something in a flask by his belt. I was fairly sure it wasn’t lemonade. He didn’t offer to share.

This looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Getting to the Marshes had been no fun at all. We’d been hiding in a dark and cramped secret compartment in a cargo truck, a German-made eighteen-wheeler behemoth that we had boarded in Minsk. We sat in the dark for a good twelve hours as the truck made its run, bouncing around like dice in a cup. The loud engine noise would have made it impossible to sleep even if we hadn’t been tossed up and down with every bump on the road. Normal humans would have probably ended up in the hospital from the constant battering; our bruises healed quickly enough, but even Christine’s normally sunny disposition hadn’t survived the trip. She looked downright grim as she took in the sights.

Our ride had dropped us off in the Ukrainian equivalent of a truck stop. There was a small village whose only notable features were a maintenance depot and police station. None of the cops at the station gave us a second glance. Somebody had greased the right palms, just as Akula had promised. Vasyl had been waiting for us in our new ride, an ancient Ford G87 that, like his rifle, had been new sometime about the time Hitler and Stalin had been trying to settle the question of who would rule the world. As it turned out, the answer had been ‘none of the above.’ The truck was painted in a camouflage pattern and sported a canvas-covered cargo area. You could see where the bodywork had been patched to cover a series of bullet holes that were still faintly visible, running from the front right side all the way into the driver’s compartment. I hoped we’d have better luck than the poor bastards who’d been on the receiving end of those bullets.

It was cold out in the Ukrainian boondocks, cold enough to make me glad for the thick winter gear we’d picked up before our uncomfortable ride south. Normally I would have relied on my self-heating trick, but ever since our arrival in frigid Russia, I’d found myself getting uncomfortably hot whenever I tried it. I wasn’t sure why, but I worried it might have something to do with Christine’s boosting my power level. Remembering how Christine set herself on fire back in Canada wasn’t so funny when I started feeling it happen to me.

I’d talked to Christine about it, and she’d done a quick check up on me but hadn’t found anything wrong. She figured I’d need to relearn the trick to account for my increased power bandwidth. I hoped she was right. So far I’d been holding off on using that ability as much as possible, relying on clothing instead.

Christine was also wearing a thick coat but clearly wasn’t being bothered by the below-freezing temps, lucky her. She kept looking around, as if hoping the scenery would improve somehow. There wasn’t much to see: the road leading to the town and the service building was gravel and could use some maintenance. Beyond the village proper, which a kind person would describe as ‘somewhat picturesque’ and somebody like me would just call ‘squalid,’ all we could see were trees, naked trees waiting for a spring that might never come. I found myself missing Manhattan very badly. You never learned to appreciate the true meaning of ‘the dead of winter’ in New York; spring in the Ukraine was turning out to be quite educational that way. And fucking cold.

“At least we’re out of that metal box,” Christine said, trying to smile but not quite pulling it off. The hours of mild but constant torment in the dark, unable to do anything except sit quietly and try not to get slammed into the walls again and again had taken a lot out of her. The bathroom breaks – all three of them for the whole trip – had been embarrassing as hell for all of us but particularly bad for her. She wasn’t used to doing her business a few feet away from two men. That little bit of forced intimacy hadn’t been pleasant at all.

I put an arm around her and gave her a friendly squeeze. “Hey, look at the bright side. We’re right smack in Mordor already, and we didn’t have to walk the whole way there.”

She gave me a mock glare as I opened the rear of the truck. Most of the space was taken up with supplies, but where was a clear section that whoever wasn’t riding shotgun in the front was going to use for the next leg of the trip. Compared to our previous accommodations, sitting on a bench used to carry World War Two infantrymen was like traveling first class.

I stowed our gear as I heard Father Aleksander walk up to us. “Vasyl wants to know where we want to go,” he said.

Christine closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. “That way,” she said after a few seconds of concentration, pointing in what a quick glance at the sun told me was south by southeast. “We need to go about… oh, sixty miles, maybe seventy miles in that direction.” Father Alex nodded and walked towards the front of the truck to tell Vasyl where to go. I guessed he’d be riding shotgun. Christine turned to me. “I can feel his presence, the First Neo. He’s calling to me.”

“That’s nice of him. At least we won’t have to explore a thousand square miles of frozen swamp and forest looking for his hidey-hole.”

We noticed that Father Alex and Vasyl were arguing loudly, over by the front of the truck. More good news, I supposed. We went to see what was going on.

Vasyl continued grumbling as he took another swig from his flask. His expression had gotten even shittier than before. Father Alex looked fairly grim as well. “Vasyl tells me we’ll only be able to take the truck for another ten, fifteen miles in that direction. After that there are no more roads. We will have to walk the rest of the way. He has camping gear, so it shouldn’t be a problem, but he’s not happy about it.”

“
Amerikansky
Shit,” Vasyl muttered darkly.

I couldn’t blame him for the sentiment.

The Twisted Twosome

Staten Island, New York, March 22, 2013

Kestrel was getting bored.

Going off into the night wearing their costumes was usually fun, but instead of finding people to hurt, they’d been mostly talking. Talking and spending money, with Kyle doing most of both. To be fair, it was all his money. She didn’t care. She wasn’t with Kyle for his money. Over the years, she had amassed a nice nest egg, courtesy of some very generous clients, some shrewd investments, and the occasional big score on a worthy target. Money was something she’d never had to worry about, not since she was a little girl.

(She’d been a nice little girl, a nice pretty little girl, hadn’t she? Even after Daddy and Mommy had taken her to the basement with the dead people and taught her the meaning of the words
Grand Guignol
. She’d been good, had danced for them and done everything they’d asked – )

She shrugged – or was it a shiver? Never mind.

If Kyle had let her play with Lady Shi, she wouldn’t have been so grumpy. The Japanese killer was a run-of-the-mill sociopath, someone who had no finesse or panache when it came to torture. Kestrel would have loved to educate her in the ways and arts of pain. But no, Kyle had actually let the little bitch loose in the mansion, after getting her to promise she’d stay put. The mansion’s security systems would make sure she’d keep that promise, but Kestrel wished they’d brought her along for entertainment. It’d been a while since they’d double-teamed anybody, let alone a Neo who could take a lot of punishment before breaking.

Almost as annoyingly, they couldn’t drive around in the Condor Car. Even if Kyle’s fancy tank-on-wheels weren’t sitting in some Federal impound lot at the moment, they were trying to keep a low profile. They were doing all their traveling in a nondescript black van. That was rather unbecoming of notorious vigilantes like themselves, she thought, although the van’s tinted windows and spacious cargo area had potential for a number of wet work-related activities. Currently, however, all Kestrel was doing was sitting in the driver’s seat and waiting for Kyle to finish having a chat with a former Hiram Hades henchman known as Tony Tonka. Boring.

The sound of glass shattering brought her head up, and she saw a large figure land on top of a car after leaping from three stories up. The car, a cheap Chinese hybrid, was flattened into scrap metal and plastic.

Unaffected by the fall, Tony Tonka took off running. Kestrel was out of the van by the time the big cyborg had gotten to his feet, and rushing behind him a second later.

Tony was a relative oddity, a vanilla human who’d ended up enhanced by Neo pseudo-technology. The tech in question included one artificial arm, two legs and a set of cybernetic implants that replaced most of his spine and rib cage with assorted metal and plastic parts. He’d been a prototype, part of Hiram Hades’ plot to build an army of cyborg warriors. Ultimate had put paid to that scheme as he had to so many others. Tony’d had one hell of a lawyer who’d convinced the jury that he not only was an innocent victim (a total lie; he’d been a loyal henchman of the mad genius) but that he was also exempt from the Parahuman Registration Act. So there he was, a bullet-proof metal man able to bench-press two tons, running around free as a bird.

The cyborg made a decent living selling bits and pieces of Hiram Hades’ technological wonders: his customers included assorted criminals and a few low-power Neo illegals looking for an edge. Why had he decided to rabbit when Kyle came calling, though?
The wicked man fleeth when no man pursueth
; so says the Good Book. Kestrel knew most of the Bible by heart. Her parents had seen to that, along with so many other things.

If Tony was being wicked, Kestrel would get to play with him. She’d always wanted a Tonka truck of her own.

The cyborg’s mad dash had a goal: a parked specialty van at the end of the street, built to his specifications. Tony Tonka was almost seven feet tall and nearly as wide, and weighed in at well over five hundred pounds, which ruled out most regular motor transport. His van was custom-made, and to add insult to injury, it had a handicapped tag. Tony fumbled for the keys in the pocket of his oversized blue jean overalls. He pulled them out just in time for Kestrel to snatch them off his mechanical hand with one flick of her whip. The keys landed in her hand; she dangled them at him. “I can’t believe you get to park in a handicapped spot, Tony,” she said. “That’s pretty unfair, don’t you think?” If the cyborg continued to be uncooperative, she might just have the chance to perform a few surgical procedures on him. By the time she was done, Tony would deserve his handicapped medallion. The thought warmed her a bit.