New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance by C.J. Carella Read Free Book Online Page A

had been murdered in 2010; she’d gotten a new manager, but a new best friend wasn’t so easily replaced. Under her gregarious personality, Ali rarely got close to other people. She’d happily drink and hang out with her fellow Legionnaires, and her reputation as the life of the party was well-deserved, but she rarely shared anything important with them. The one person she’d let all the way in, Jason Merrill, a.k.a. Mesmer, was also dead, killed during the attack on the Island, and they’d been estranged long before that.
    She didn’t know what to do, only that she had to do something.
    Her wrist-comp rang, the designated ring-tone indicating the call was coming from her personal number. Ali frowned. Only two people had that number. The two dead people she’d just been thinking about, as a matter of fact. Had Jason’s widow decided to dial every number in his directory? If so, that was going to be one awful call. Reluctantly, Ali answered.
    The woman that appeared on the screen looked nothing like Mrs. Merrill, who could have run for Miss Sweden; the caller was a brunette in her mid-forties, rail thin, with a long, horsey face framed by a pixie cut. She looked scared. “Miss Hyperia?”
    “That’s me. How did you get this number?”
    “Uh, it’s a long story. I’m on the Island and I need to see you, but, uh, nobody’s supposed to see us together.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “He’s telling me to say this: ‘Sandy: On our first date, I swore to you I’d keep the bullshit down to a minimum; and on our last day together, you told me that we don’t turn on our own.’”
    Ali froze. The woman on the other end was saying things only Jason Merrill could have known.
    “He’s inside my head,” the woman said. “Well, he’s inside Comatown.”
    Comatown was a collective mental construct created almost fifty years ago when several people had become linked in a psychic gestalt, courtesy of a Neo-developed drug called Dreamtime. Jason had been monitoring Comatown on and off for decades. Had he managed to transfer his mind there after he was killed? The woman’s words seemed like damn good proof of it.
    “When and where?’ Ali asked.
    “He says meet us at your old favorite spot, the one the cameras don’t cover.”
    Ali knew exactly what the woman was talking about. “I’ll be there.”
     
    * * *
     
    The Old Archives were six floors underground, beneath the former Administration Building, built back in the early Fifties. The building was now an office annex, and the archive rooms had fallen into disuse. The contents of their dust-covered file cabinets had long been transferred into electronic formats, but bureaucratic inertia had kept the room intact. Nobody was eager to work so deep underground, so nobody came there. The place was locked, but its security door only had an old-school keypad and hadn’t been upgraded with biometric recognition systems. That explained how the woman was already waiting there for Ali. If she was in contact with Jason, she would have been able to enter his ID code; the code wouldn’t be good for much longer now that he was dead, but deactivating the IDs of deceased personnel was way down the list of things that needed doing in the aftermath of the attack.
    The woman had turned on the lights, revealing seemingly endless rows of file cabinets. The sight brought back fond memories for Ali. At first, dating Jason had been against the rules: she’d been a probationary member at the time, and fraternization between full members and probies was strictly forbidden. They’d had to sneak around for a couple of years until she became a full member, and had enjoyed it so much they’d kept sneaking around for a while later. Getting it on between the dusty file cabinets and bookshelves had felt like doing it in a library, adding spice to their lovemaking. The vaguely moldy smell brought back pleasant images mixed in with a burst of painful nostalgia for those simpler times.