New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl by C.J. Carella Page B

this is?” she asked, pointing at it.
    “The wrist-comm? It’s a wrist-comm. Well,
a wrist-comp officially, since you can surf the web with it and write e-mails,
but everybody still calls them wrist-comms.” I said. One of the most common
personal items since the 1970s, and she was looking at it like it was Smith
Industries’ newest wonder gadget.
    “Not a cell phone?”
    I had a mental image of a phone inside a
prison cell, and almost laughed, but Christine wasn’t laughing. “I don’t know
what a cell phone is,” I said.
    “Oh, this is not good at all,” Christine
muttered.
    Father Aleksander turned the TV up,
interrupting the conversation before I had the chance to break the news to her.
Not that I really knew how I was going to do that. Maybe I could say something
like ‘Welcome to Wonderland.’
    “I’m sorry, but something is happening,”
Father Alex said before I could try the Wonderland line. Sure enough, Special Report
banners were flashing and a news anchor had shown up and replaced the morning
show.
    Christine and I stopped talking and
watched history being made.
     
     

 
    The Freedom Legion
     
    Atlantic Headquarters, March 13, 2013
    The fastest man in the world was a day late
and a dollar short.
    The attack caught Larry Graham with his
pants down, literally. When the first wave of missiles struck, Larry was busy
cheating on his wife with a young Legion recruit in an out-of-the-way hiding
spot. It was the worst possible time and place.
    Even as he lay on his back while Dawn Zhang
– code name Dawn Windstorm – rode him like a bronco, Larry didn’t think of
himself as a bad guy. Weak and contemptible, yes, but not a bad guy. He had
loved Olivia O'Brien passionately for over four decades, and he still loved
her, just not the way a husband was supposed to love his wife. Larry had been
raised to mean the words ‘until death do us part.’ “Now and forever,” he’d
whispered to Olivia just before kissing her on their wedding night.
    What he hadn’t counted on was how long
forever would turn out to be.
    Back when he’d been regular Joe College
Larry at Boston U, he read a great deal about the Greek gods of mythology. He’d
done so partly because Greek mythology had been all the rage after the rise of
Neolympians, and partly because he’d picked up Greek as his language elective,
and a lot of what the Greeks had written down involved their whimsical and oft
malicious deities. The relationship between Zeus and Hera particularly
fascinated him. Zeus just couldn’t keep his hands – and the rest of his anatomy
– to himself. He just ended up with one dame after another – human or Olympian,
married or a virgin, it was all grist for the mill to the horny bastard. Zeus
was the ultimate dirty old man. Even though the tales amused Larry greatly, he
had never figured out why Zeus did what he did. Hera must have been the
ultimate ball and chain to drive her hubby to such extremes.
    On his sophomore year in college, he went
from reading about gods to becoming one. He was walking to his next class when
he saw an old jalopy about to run over a woman crossing the street, well over a
block away. He ran the intervening distance in the blink of an eye and got her
out of the way just in time. A new hero was born that day. Larry tried to use
Hermes as his code name, but some idiot newsie stuck him with the moniker
Swift, and Swift he became.
    Larry kept his identity a secret at
first. It was 1940 and the war was in full swing, and even with the US
remaining neutral, a few incautious New Olympians had been murdered, either by
foreign agents or local super-criminals. He wore a mask and made sure Larry
Graham remained well away from the limelight. While wearing the mask and
costume, however, Swift became a hit with the ladies. It turned out that gods
did get all the girls. Larry cut a swath through Beantown’s best and brightest,
loving every minute of it. He only slowed down when he joined the