New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (45 page)

He’d had enough. It was time to return to Earth and rest. He’d seen the future of the world, and he no longer cared. He just needed to go…

Charlotte, North Carolina, March 25, 2013

…home.

“Wake up! Wake up, you insufferable super-queen, and get out of my life!”

That plaintive voice was unmistakable. Cassius opened his eyes and found himself face to face with Javier. He was back in Javier’s penthouse, back where his retirement from worldly affairs had ended and this nightmare had begun.

“Javi,” Cassius said affectionately. His former lover froze and recoiled back.

“Don’t Javi me! You scared me half to death, popping up like that, and then you fell like a downed tree, right on top of my antique coffee table. You
obliterated
it, my priceless coffee table. And then I thought you were dead!”

“Javi…”

“Just don’t, all right? I almost called the cops. I almost did, and you know how much I hate cops in this redneck state, with their smirks and sidelong looks, but I almost called the cops, because I was scared out of my mind! I couldn’t find a pulse. I thought you were dead! What are you doing here anyway? I thought I made myself clear last week. I thought you knew how to respect boundaries!”

Cassius leaned forward and kissed Javier’s forehead, temporarily silencing him. “Thank you for not calling the cops, Javi. I’ll leave now.”

“Wait. I want to know…”

He teleported to the summit of Mount Everest, and arrived in the middle of a blizzard. Cassius let the snow and freezing gusts of wind wash over him. His cochlear implant let him know it was March 25. He’d lost five days, and had no idea what had happened during that time. Had Christine and the others managed to escape? He’d have to return to the US and try to contact Condor.

Unseen and unfelt, a tiny seed of darkness deep within him quietly began to grow.

Christine Dark

Pripet Marshes, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 25, 2013/Somewhere Else Altogether

We’re off to see the wizard.

Well, if by ‘we’ she meant her, and if by ‘the wizard’ she meant a creature that had once been a child and had been destroyed and remade into something else. She felt Mark’s worried emotions for several minutes until they finally faded off. Out of range, she guessed. At some point they would have to test her effective empathy range. In this case, the mist might be interfering with her powers.

She couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in front of her, but she never stumbled or ran into a tree or anything. It was as if she was being guided forward. Nah, scratch the ‘as if;’ she
was
being guided forward. The First could get into her head; he had already demonstrated that.

So she walked and walked some more, between trees and over frozen rivulets and bogs, up and down shallow hills. Christine lost track of time; she glanced at her wrist-thingy and discovered the screen had gone dark. Either the battery had picked a crappy time to die or this was all part and parcel of the Creepy Cosmic Teacher experience, which sucked. She wished that she could play some stuff off her playlist to cheer herself up during this seemingly endless walk. She tried to whistle a tune, but her lips were too dry and she wasn’t all that great at whistling anyway, so she gave up and kept walking in silence. The frozen forest was also quiet, too quiet. Christine felt like the only living thing in the world. She walked for what felt like hours or maybe days.

Something crunched unpleasantly under her foot. She looked down and saw she’d stepped on a piece of a human skull. Holy crap. But what really shocked her was that the skull piece was lying on a flat surface. A flat surface covered with asphalt, black with yellow lines painted on it. A road, in other words. Christine looked around and realized she wasn’t in a forest anymore; she was walking on a highway. She could see the faint outlines of cars through the surrounding mist.

Great, another vision.
It couldn’t be real, since there weren’t supposed to be any highways in this neck of the woods. The First was making her see things. Just effing awesome. At least she wasn’t back in her old room, wearing Hello Kitty pajamas.

She kept walking, and now she could see cars, packed tightly in the mother of all traffic jams, filling the road. Desiccated corpses and skeletons were inside all the vehicles. Christine’s pulse quickened.
It’s okay, it’s just a vision, it’s not real, who are you going to trust, your brain or your lying eyes?
She wanted to trust her brain, but all her senses told her she was walking down a highway of death. The smell was real enough, a faded stench of long-decayed bodies, not strong enough to make her gag, but overlying everything like a thin slimy film.

A broken road sign lying flat on the road caught her attention. I-95 South. This road was in the US, which confirmed this couldn’t be real, because she hadn’t been walking
that
long. She kept going and left the sign behind as she made her way past dozens of coffins on wheels. No biggie, it’s all an illusion, just a little gift from the Ghost of Christmas Crappy.

This whole thing was so unnecessary. It had to be a vision of a future where Christine messed things up and the world ended. She already knew all about that. Showing her all this crap was redundant, stupid, and redundant. She was already planning on not letting this future happen, and this vision-thingy sucked as a motivational tool.

She stopped walking. This was ridiculous. “Hey, you!” she called out. “Yeah, I know, the future sucks. I’ve been told, okay? I don’t need to see any more, I get it already, okay?”

“Yeah, I felt exactly the same way, first time around,” somebody said behind her in a voice that was familiar and strange at the same time.

Christine turned around. A glowing woman was floating behind her, shining so brightly that she could barely see the outlines of her body and her face, with long flowing red hair that fluttered in a wind that wasn’t there. The mist retreated before her, leaving a large cleared area that revealed more cars with bodies inside them. Even though she couldn’t see the glowing figure very clearly, it was pretty obvious who she was. Christine had never liked the sound of her own voice when she heard it on tape or video; it always sounded different from when she heard it coming from her own mouth.

She was facing herself.

“It’s déjà vu all over again,” the other Christine said. “I know, lame, but that’s what I told myself when the stupid Ukrainian sprite sent me over here to meet
my
future self. Which is all kinda weird and meta and incestuous. But I promise, I’m not going to do exactly what the other me did the first time she met me. Just want to see if I can change things a little.”

Christine didn’t say anything, couldn’t think of anything to say, just gaped at her glowing other self.

Future Christine dimmed her aura a little bit. She wasn’t naked, like Christine had first thought when she saw her; she was wearing a skimpy bikini outfit that reminded her of…

“Lightning Stripper,” her alternate self said, completing her thought. “Her real name was Annie Arclight, by the way.  She was kind of a b-word, but that’s cool, she’s dead now. Collateral damage from when I broke the Tower of Power. She and the rest of Chicago and a big chunk of the surrounding states. But I liked her wardrobe, so I took it off her dead body. Don’t worry, I washed it before I put it on.”

Oh, God.
“You went Dark Side.”

“Yeppers. Sorry, Yoda. At some point, being nice stops being nice, and then it’s time to start getting real.” Glowing Christine giggled. “Crap, that’s what my future self said when I was where you are now. Except right after that, my future self tried to kill me. When she did, I ended up back in the First Neo’s hideout in the frozen swamp.”

“So are you going to try to kill me like the other you did?” Christine asked. This temporal crapola was making her head hurt. Except if this was real it probably wasn’t a temporal thingy, it was an –

“An alternate reality thingy,” Evil Christine said. “This is an alternate reality that’s running a little bit ahead of yours. You got it, Chrissy. I know you don’t like being called Chrissy, just like I don’t, but that way we can tell each other apart.”

“Or I could just call you Dark Christine.”

Dark Christine giggled. “Dark Christine Dark. That’s a little bit redundant, don’t you think? And also redundant.”

She even made the same lame jokes. Christine had always thought that if she turned to the dark side the first thing she would lose would be what passed for her sense of humor. Apparently her crazy evil bitch self could still find things to laugh about. Which, considering she’d just copped to killing millions of people, was totally effed up.

“It’s amazing how convenient a Multiverse is,” Dark Christine went on. “No grandfather paradox, no worries about altering events. My timeline just happens to be a few months, or years, ahead of yours. I forget how long. Not very long after that little trip to the Ukraine, I think. Time flies when you’re having fun.”

“In that case, instead of trying to kill me, you could tell me what happened, and I could change things in my timeline,” Christine said. “And then I could drop by later and we could compare notes.”

“That’d be kinda interesting. And I have to admit things have gotten a little boring after I did the whole Armageddon thing. Killing John and the Chinese guy were pretty much the last fun boss fights, and the endgame content has kinda sucked ever since. If this was an MMO I would have ragequit by now. Boooring. But since I’m stuck with it, I manage to make my own fun, one way or another.”

“So? Do we have a deal?”

“I’m thinking about it, Chrissy. Don’t get pushy on me. I don’t push well nowadays. I’ve kinda gotten used to getting my own way, you know?”

“Are you all alone? Did you kill everyone on Earth like that alien Cassius met?”

“No, that wouldn’t be fun, and I’d get lonely. I’ve got a little preserve set up in Kansas. Got about six, seven million people in there, and another one in Australia, maybe two million there. All muggles. They kinda worship me now. I’m their Goddess and stuff. I run a bunch of neat live action games with them. I have them dress up in different period costumes and fight wars and stuff, and the winners get extra canned beans and other valuable prizes. It’s kinda neat. When I run fantasy campaigns, I even give a few of them magical and clerical abilities. Of course, all the clerics are Dark Clerics, just like their patron deity. Namely,
moi
. Like I said, it gets boring after a while, but as long I don’t run out of muggles, I can keep thinking of new ways of entertaining myself.”

Oh god oh god oh god
. This was so bad, so effing bad.

“But that’s not all, Chrissy. I did leave one Neo alive. Want to meet my husband?”

“Not really, no.”

“Come on, don’t be a hater. Come on out, darling!” A figure emerged from the mist and stepped next to Dark Christine. A faceless man in a studded leather outfit.

Mark.

Tears burned in her eyes. She cleared her throat and forced herself not to cry. She wasn’t going to cry in front of her evil bitch self. “Mark?”

“Kinda,” Dark Christine said. “I mean, Mark’s still there somewhere. But he’s not alone.”

Mark made a face. Not his real face, which she’d only glimpsed once when he’d been near death. She recognized the face, however.

Mr. Night smiled at her. His thin, narrow and aged face looked out of place on top of Mark’s solid body, but that was the least of what was wrong with it. “Oh, Christine, my dear, dear Christine, how I love to love you, my darling, my love, my wife.”

The world got gray around the edges in a way that nothing to do with the mist, and Christine felt herself swooning on her feet.
I will not faint, I will not faint, I will not effing faint.

“It’s all good in da hood, Chrissy. Don’t take it so hard, kiddo. I had to make some compromises is all. Shit happens, as Mark used to say, back when he was Mark.”

“You are working for the Outsiders.”

“We came to an arrangement, okay? I had to learn to manipulate their energies, the purple stuff. I thought that was the only way to beat them. Daedalus Smith and the Iron Tsar made the same mistake. Amazing how stupid a couple of geniuses can be, but as it turns out, nobody can be as dumb as smart people. And I shouldn’t talk, I was just as stupid. As stupid as Dad, who did the exact same thing. The stuff doesn’t go away after you let it in. And eventually, either the Outsiders win and everything goes poof, or the Cosmic Nerds send some of their enforcers after me, and I go poof. But eventually is probably millions of years from now, so meanwhile I get to enjoy myself and party like it’s 2099. I got plenty of time and a few million people to play with. Should keep me busy. I never cared much for sandbox games but that’s what I got.”

“And now we have your other self,” Mr. Night said. “I can think of many fascinating games we could play with our brave, albeit naïve heroine.” He licked his lips.

“Tempting. A little PVP, then a little torture – you could say some of Kestrel rubbed off on me before I rubbed her out – and rinse and repeat till little Chrissy starts to get boring. Could be fun.” Dark Christine thought about it, then shook her head. “Too risky, Nighty-boy. She can access the Source as well as I can, and if we give her enough time she could manage to gain control over it. You do remember that my arrangement with the Outsiders is something the Source doesn’t like one bit, don’t you?”

“Of course, my darling. I apologize.”

“You just like causing mischief, because you’re a dick and because you won’t be happy until everyone on Earth is dead, including me. But that’s okay, I like dicks, as long as they know their place.”

Mr. Night bowed graciously.

“Sorry, Chrissy, but you’re too dangerous to have around. As they used to say in the interwebbies, ‘kay, thanks, bye.”

“So how about giving me some hints and letting me go, then?” Christine asked. “Pretty please?”

“I guess I might as well. I’ve decided I
am
going to try to kill you, though, although chances are the First will yank you back when I do, like he did me. He needs you back so he can find out what you saw. And he’s not gonna like what he finds out, either.” She thought about it for a moment. “I’ll give you a couple of portents, all old-school Oracle of Delphi-style. Do you know why?”