Grapeshot Pantheon Read online

  “This still feels like it’s going to be Waco all over again,” she said.

  “At least there’s been a rain recently,” Simone said, shading her eyes as she looked up at the sky, which was still peppered with wispy clouds. “The buildings are still wet.”

  But the name ‘Waco’ echoed in her head. That had been a class A clusterfuck. And Waco had, by comparison, been dirt simple. If this went wrong, there were nearly two thousand people crammed into a few school buildings, surrounded by lunatics with fully automatic rifles, who were all immune to bullets and more than willing to start massacring people if they thought it would please their new Sky Daddy. Simone shook her head.

  At least all the civilians from other towns were being kept at a safe distance.

  ***

  “How long did it take?” Sun asked, lowering his binoculars as evening dusted the sky in purples and gold. “Like, a month? A month and a half? And they’re already fucking it up.”

  Coyo grunted. He was sitting with his back to a tree, trying to be as ‘bushy’ as he possibly could. The thick undergrowth that shrouded them felt all too thin compared to the high powered hunting rifles carried by the Dodekatheon worshipers on the roof of what had once been Blackberry’s high school. The men were dressed in rough hunter’s garb and military hand-me-downs which ended up making them look like people dressing up for a post-apocalyptic LARP. But their guns were definitely real.

  “You know I can’t dodge bullets right, Sun?” Coyo hissed.

  “Don’t worry. I can handle that,” Sun said, scowling. “But seriously. Fuck the Greeks. Fuck the Greeks. If I had known I’d ever have to deal with them again, I’d have stayed under that fucking mountain.” He paused. “Okay, maybe not.”

  “If you’re going to say the pussy’s worth it...” Coyo muttered.

  Sun scoffed. “Nah. That idiot monk would have gotten himself eaten at least ten times without me.” A fraction of a second later, he grinned. “But the pussy was sweeeeeet.”

  “Shh!” Coyo lifted his hand. “Do you hear that?”

  Sun frowned and stopped twirling his toothpick. Coyo stood and looked left. Then right.

  “Sup?”

  Coyo and Sun both had to clench their jaws to not scream out in shock. Both had seen a great many bizarre things in their long, varied lives. But neither of them had ever seen a blue haired elven woman, floating near the branch above their heads. She soared down with a faint woosh and landed before Coyo and Sun. She was lean and muscled. Her breasts were small and perky and clearly bra-less considering the way they bounced fetchingly as her feet touched the ground. She wore thick combat boots and form fitting jeans.

  She also had a sword strapped to her back and a pistol holstered at her kidney.

  Coyo leaped to divert disaster. He clapped his hand over Sun’s mouth and hissed: “She has a sword, dude!”

  Sun shot him a look that said: What are you talking about, that makes her hotter!

  The elf frowned, then grabbed both of them, slinging them over her shoulder. She leaped up into the air with a rush of air, branches slapping at Coyo’s head. The elf gritted her teeth as she flew up, making for the thickest, leafiest branches of a nearby tree, then set the two of them down. Sun whistled softly as she held up her hand for silence. Looking down, Coyo could see figures moving through the forest.

  They were armed with hunting rifles and modified AR-15s. Their heads were covered with hoods and beat up goggles that cast greenish glows on their faces. Their bodies were strapped with bulletproof vests and covered in sticks and leaves, to make them look like slumping, shifting bushes. As they flowed past the trees, silent and intent, the elf sighed.

  “And that’s why they should have taken me,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Who are you?” Sun whispered.

  “Who are you?” the elf shot back, glaring at Sun. “Also, are you morbidly obese or something?” She scowled. “I nearly dropped you.”

  Sun grinned, then plucked his toothpick from behind his ear. He started to twirl it – and as he twirled it, it lengthened. The tooth pick swelled to chopstick size, then baton size, then staff sized. The two edges were capped with golden rings, covered with Chinese lettering. The entire staff was made of a kind of iron which drank in light like the event horizon of a black hole, and the tree creaked in alarming ways as he swung it about. Finished, Sun set the staff down on the edge of his foot, rather than risking the weight on the branch.

  “The name’s Sun Wukong, Miss Arwen.” Sun grinned. “This poor hangdog fellow is Coyote.”

  He smirked. “We’re kind of gods. No biggie, though.”

  Chapter Five

  “How do you not go crazy in situations like this, Madam President?”

  President Deinhardt turned to look at Liam. The situation room had a rotating population as the siege of the LAJC dragged on. Aides came with coffee and snacks – mostly fruits and crackers – while officials of various stripes flowed in and out as they checked on the feeds coming in from the camp. Even the Secret Service worked shifts. But the four of them had never left. Liam, who was slowly going insane from the tension. Meg, who was currently tapping through her cellphone, marveling at the ability to Google anything and have it be answered for her, was seated as far from the projector as possible, so her wings wouldn’t block the light. Tethis, who was looking at every bit of data coming in and nervously chewing her normally pristine fingernails down to the quick, was seated to Liam’s left.

  And, finally, the President herself.

  Despite the late hour and the tension she had to be feeling, there was no sign of it on her face, save that she had let her hair down.

  She looked good that way, with her locks coiling around her face, framing those intense gray-brown eyes of hers. Liam, as the hours wore on, had found himself looking at her sidelong. She had been a senator when he had been dragged to Purgatory. And not even one from his state. Despite that, he still thought he should have remembered more details about her. But he was drawing a total blank on her past policy decisions, any major scandals, her character.

  All he had to go on was what he had seen and read since first contact between Babylon and the USA had been established.

  He should have been thinking about that.

  Instead, he was thinking of her firm lips and wondering if she kept herself in as fearsomely good shape as it looked.

  “I remember that we have good people working for me,” the President said, shrugging slightly. Liam forced himself to not imagine how her chest would look with that shrug. Instead, he ended up thinking about how nice her twangy, Texan accent sounded. “And I go quietly insane on the inside, where no one else can see it.” She smirked. “Also, you can just call me Amanda.”

  Liam tried to not show how fucking excited that idea made him.

  Ugh, is Mom right? Did Purgatory totally ruin my sense of decorum? My way of interacting with other people? He looked away from her. His phone buzzed in his pocket. Liam pulled it out and saw a text from Meg.

  10 bucks on you tapping her by the end of the week :D

  Liam snorted.

  “How did you do it, though?” Amanda asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “Not go crazy on Purgatory, I mean.”

  Liam smiled and pocketed his phone. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  Amanda arched her eyebrow. “If even half of the report Lt. Fong gave me is accurate, that’s quite a whopper. And remember, I need to approve national defense budgets. I see big whoppers.” She grinned. “She said that you killed a basilisk with a sword. That you faced down an alien super-computer and an army of hopped up lizardmen.”

  “Technically,” Liam said. “I did have an army helping me at the time.”

  “I mean, I’m the Commander in Chief, but the closest I get to the military is touring a base in the Green Zone and shaking hands with the joint chiefs,” Amanda said. “You were doing stuff that would have made George Washington’s hair turn white.”

  “Didn’t
he wear a white wig?” Liam asked.

  Amanda chuckled. “Whiter then.”

  Liam shook his head. “Do you want to know what helped the most?” He paused. “It’s knowing that I had good people with me. Also, Tethis can heal pretty much anything assuming you don’t suffer immediate brain death.”

  “That does help, I reckon,” Amanda said, her eyebrows shooting up.

  Liam looked at the screen. “This is harder.”

  Amanda nodded.

  “This is Team Alpha,” a gruff voice came from the speaker phone set up in the center of the table. “We’re prepped to enter the town.”

  ***

  Liv frowned as she knelt down on the branch. The sword in her hand was the best thing she could have gotten, considering the time constraints. Flying from Washington DC to here had been easier than she had expected, after glancing at the maps that Earthers provided for free to literally anyone who had a godsdamned phone. She shook her head in bemusement at that. Not only were they better than anything on Purgatory, even those maps used by Babylon, but they had kept track of her position, even as she had flown over states.

  Well. Kind of.

  The Gee Pee Ess had gotten confused at how she was able to go so fast, and over such rough terrain. It kept trying to recalculate routes. So, she had shifted to just checking her position every twenty minutes, to ensure she was still heading the right way. Getting weaponry was easy too. The sword she had found in a store called Armorgeddon. It was a fake, but it was close enough to real thing that she was fairly sure she could use it. The pistols had been even easier, though she had needed to throw a store clerk into one of his racks.

  Gently, of course.

  But now she was trying to solve a more complicated problem. There were twenty fuckers waiting for the Government, spread out and sighted in. Almost like they knew exactly where they were going. Liv’s eyes narrowed and she remembered the way Ares had tapped into Simone’s radio transmissions on Purgatory. That had led straight to Godkillers being dropped on her head. Hurm.

  “I’ll take those five,” Sun Wukong said, pointing with his finger.

  “You fast enough?” Liv asked.

  “I will be in...” Sun looked up. “Fifteen seconds.”

  “You have eleven,” Liv said, focusing. She took the power that she had and felt its shape. She had gotten a handle on the shape required to fly, and she knew there was another shape that she assumed naturally to make herself tougher and stronger. But flight took her items and posessions along with her, right? So, she just had to tease the two forms to match and…

  Ahh.

  Her sword flared with light for just a moment, then settled. She tested it subtly against the bark of the tree, and grinned. It would hold an edge and not snap now. Nice.

  “How did you do that?” Sun whispered.

  “Later,” Liv said, standing. “I’ll take those five.” She nodded the others, then leaped off the tree. She flew forward, darting around branches and leaves to avoid making too much noise. She landed behind one of the bad guys, her sword flashing. She swept it down and his rifle fell into two pieces, the edge of the sliced off barrel shining like a mirror in the thick twilight of the forest. Liv saw his eyes widening behind his NVG and swung her sword in a backwards stroke. The pommel smashed into his temple and he sprawled on the ground. Then she leaped to the next guard.

  Sun Wukong was a bit less subtle.

  With a trilling warcry, he leaped from his tree, dropped five feet, and landed on a bright white cloud that soared from the sky and landed under his feet. He bobbed on the cloud, then seemed to ride it like a skateboard, soaring past three hiding goons. His staff grew twice as long as it had been, allowing him to swing down, smashing one goon in the shoulder, another in the chest, and the last in the back as they all scrambled to try and get out of the way. The impact of steel on flesh was mixed with the crackle of branches as Sun maneuvered his cloud through the Louisiana swamp.

  By this point, Liv had knocked down two more of the bad guys. One she had elbowed as she ran past, and another she had launched into with both feet, kicking him to the ground with a groan. The bad guys who were still standing had all been drawn to the fucking glowing, flying cloud with the screaming maniac on it with the fucking shapeshifting staff and were filling the air with as much lead as Earther guns could manage.

  Liv had been at several battles with muskets.

  She had seen what Simone could do.

  But this was fucking appalling. Trees filled the air with chips and bits of splinters, and branches went crashing to the ground. Sun responded with a laugh, his staff whirling. Bullets sparked and pinged as they struck the whirling staff, ricocheting into the forest. But this gave Liv plenty of cover to run charging towards a trio of camouflaged bad guys. They were all reloading their firearms as quickly as they could manage. She swept her leg in a twist, knocking all three off their feet as she spun on her heel. As they sprawled, she stood and kicked one in the stomach. He flew five feet and smashed into a tree back first, groaning as he hit the ground. Another was standing, still shaking his head. Liv punched him down.

  The last had remained on the ground, his attention entirely on bringing his pistol to bear.

  He fired.

  Liv grunted as she staggered backwards.

  Slowly, she opened the palm that she had snapped up before her face.

  Sitting in a bloody crater on the center of her palm was a mashed up clump of lead. She dropped it.

  The bad guy gaped at her. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered, moments before Sun Wukong brained him with the staff.

  Liv then took a few seconds to curse under her breath.

  That had fucking hurt.

  With the bad guy ambush turned into so much groaning piles of broken bones and concussions and at least one spinal fracture, the American guardsmen were able to advance in the open. One of them sprinted forward, panting. Liv saw it was Simone, her face covered by NVGs, her arms holding an assault rifle that looked fairly similar to what the bad guys were carrying. She also looked horrified.

  “Liv! What the fuck?” she hissed. “The hostages!”

  “Hostages?” Liv asked.

  “Oh, don’t worry about them,” Sun said, grinning. “That’s what I sent Coyo for.”

  A loud roar came from the town. Several explosions leaped into the air and the distant sounds of gunshots and shouts of confusion rang out.

  “What the hell did you just do?” Simone whispered.

  “Coyo’s good at making things break,” Sun said.

  Liv was already flying towards the town.

  She broke the forest and had to weave hard to the side as sniper fire crackled from the rooftop. The men on the roof had been sighted in, but they had expected something a bit slower and a bit less high up than her. Their bullets whined underneath her, hitting trees and dirt. Then Liv was flipping around so her feet planted in the chest of one of the snipers. He went sprawling onto his back, skidding across almost ten feet of black rooftop. Liv rolled and came to her feet before another sniper. She grabbed his rifle, yanked it from his hands, then used the neck strap to fling him as hard as she could off the roof and into the large pool of water some thoughtful soul had placed near the building.

  She had no idea why.

  It smelled awful though, and the man fell head first into the water. He started floundering about, trying to swim to the edge while his ammo and weaponry dragged him down. Liv turned back to face the remaining snipers. But they were both running down the stairs.

  Her ears twitched and she heard, very faintly, the bellowed order: “Kill the heretics!”

  She placed the source of the sound, sprinted forward, leaped, then flew straight down. Her legs hit the roof and the roof cracked inwards, giving way with a spray of cheap roofing and wood and bits of plaster. She dropped through a vast indoor space and crashed down between a massive mob of panicked, terrified looking people and four men armed with those rapid fire rifles. Behind them stood a m
an who radiated with her father’s power.

  It was all in the eyes. They roiled with a furious passion, the mad battle lust that Ares had inspired for millennia. It was somewhat at odds with his more calculating mindset these days, but Liv could immediately see why her father had given this man power. Smart enough to use it, too stupid to not.

  Liv took advantage of the momentary shock to throw her sword at one of the men. It was an awkward grip and a worse weapon to hurl, but at this range, with her strength, it barely mattered. The hilt smashed into his face and he collapsed, blood pouring from a broken nose. Liv drew both of her pistols and started firing. Two rounds, one per knee cap, seemed to be about right. Then men sprawled on the ground, their screams of pain and curses filling the air. Liv then stepped forward and started kicking rifles from their hands.

  The Chosen of Ares gawped at her.

  Then he did the absolute worst thing he possibly could have tried.

  He turned and he ran.

  In that single instant, the power bequeathed to him snapped out of his body. It seemed that Ares could grant blessings to Earthers, but he couldn’t change some parts of his intrinsic nature. No blessing of the god of war could ever rest in the heart of a coward. And that was coward as defined by Ares – honorable retreat was more of an Athena thing.

  Not that this made Liv feel all that bad about stepping forward, grabbing the man by the back of his bullet proof vest, and yank him backwards. She snarled. “Shoot a bunch of innocent kids, huh?” she growled, punching him in the chest. The plates in his armor cracked and turned to powder. The ribs behind the armor might have snapped. She wasn’t sure. “Try and massacre these people, will you?” She brought her knee slamming into his groin. The man made a horrible wheezing gurgling noise, then fell to his knees, clutching at himself. Vomit burst from his mouth.

  Liv panted – about to continue beating him – when she looked up.

  The auditorium, save for the distant sound of fires and the drizzle of plaster that still fell from the ceiling, was silent. Everyone that had been crammed inside was gaping at her. The front row had included more than a few children, ranging in ages from nine to at least sixteen. One of the younger kids, though, walked slowly towards her. He was a young boy, still dressed for school, with a backpack still slung on his back.