The Cult of Kronos Read online

  “I'll try not to.”

  She exited the elevator ahead of Zach and disappeared around a corner. Zach stopped at the receptionist, who stayed on the phone, loudly chomping at gum, as she pointed towards a pair of double doors. Zach said, “Thanks,” but she waved him on, clearly bothered by his interruption.

  Zach pushed open the double doors and stood in a large, spacious office. The office was larger than most of the classrooms at Olympia Heights Senior High. It had high ceilings, and the opposite wall was completely composed of windows. The windows looked down over Orlando and the bright blue waters of Lake Eola as they reflected the cloudless sky. Caleb Jacobs, a tall, broad-shouldered man, stood with his back to the door. His desk, a glass slab with a stainless steel frame, was practically bare. It stood in the center of the large room. A high-backed leather chair was tucked under it and two, smaller black chairs were placed in front for guests. There was nothing on the desk aside from a pen, a hardcover book, a MacBook Air, and an empty takeout container with chopsticks balanced on the edge.

  “Dad,” Zach said, his voice sounding alarmingly large in the expansive office. He lowered his voice, “Hey.”

  Caleb Jacobs spun around. He was middle-aged man with graying brown hair and a long, cleft chin. His face was covered in a very neatly cropped beard, just long enough to not be considered stubble. He flashed a smile, the same smile Zach had used to charm his way through life. “Zach,” he said. “It's good to see you, son. Come, sit down.” Caleb Jacobs crossed to his desk and pulled out a drawer. Zach saw the phone tucked away inside. He pressed a button. “Ashley, could you bring a glass of water for my guest?”

  “Yes sir,” a squeaky voice replied. Caleb closed the drawer. “I like to keep my workspace clutter-free.”

  “I see that,” Zach said, sitting down and bracing his hands on the arm of the chair.

  A young woman with long black hair rushed in, holding a tall, thin glass of ice water. There was even a lemon wedged onto the rim. Zach took the water and thanked her. Ashley grabbed Caleb's empty takeout container and swept out of the office without saying a word.

  “So, my son the college quarterback,” Caleb said. “That's exciting.”

  “That's actually why I'm here,” Zach said. “I never got a check for my schoolbooks.”

  “Sorry about that. I've been swamped with the Miller account closing. I forgot that you're going to learn, not just play football.” Caleb laughed.

  “Yeah,” Zach said. “I uh…gotta learn. Can't play football forever.”

  “Yes, but if you do it right, you can play football and then do nothing forever.”

  “My wife would rather I didn't do that,” Zach said.

  “Wife? Aren't you eighteen.”

  “Mom told you. I got married in March.”

  Caleb scratched his beard and shook his head. “Must have forgotten. We were finishing up the Stevens account in March. That was a tricky one. Mr. Stevens is a fickle man.”

  “To June,” Zach said. “You remember June. I've been dating her for most of my life.”

  “She's not pregnant, right?”

  Zach shook his head. He sipped his water and paused to wonder how someone made water taste so damn good.

  “Good. Don't have kids.”

  Zach blinked. “Uh…okay.”

  Caleb Jacobs reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled out a checkbook. He scribbled on it for a moment before tearing off a check and passing it to Zach. “Is that enough?”

  Zach looked down at the check. Five thousand dollars. “Yeah, that should cover a semester,” he lied. That could have covered ten semesters of books, but Zach’s father was so out of touch with money that he wouldn’t know or care about the difference. Zach reached forward and set the water down on the glass desktop.

  “Well,” Caleb said. “I have to get back to work, but listen…” He picked up the book on his desk and handed it to Zach. “If you get time this semester, read this. It's amazing. Really, it's a life changer.”

  Zach looked down at the book. Atticus Speal, Becoming Your Golden Self. Zach had seen this guy on TV. He flipped the cover over and looked at the photo. There was something familiar about that man, aside from his talk show appearances. “Uh, what is it?”

  “It's a self-help book. It's about surrendering control to find peace.”

  Zach fanned through the pages. The end of the book had a pledge. His father had signed it.

  “That sounds great,” Zach lied. “I'll get right on it.”

  “Don't lie to me,” Caleb said.

  “I'm not.” Zach avoided his father's gaze. The book looked like a load of hippie crap, but he didn't want to insult his father on their biannual meeting.

  “You've always had a problem with honesty, Zeus.”

  Zach's eyes shot up. Caleb Jacobs was leaning over his desk, his face looming close to Zach's. His eyes were completely dilated; the black pupils were so large that Zach could hardly tell what color his father's eyes were supposed to be. Zach pushed his chair away from the desk and scrambled to get to his feet. Caleb Jacobs laughed, though Zach could tell that his father was gone. Someone else was in his body.

  “Surprised to see me?” Mr. Jacobs asked.

  Zach backed towards the door. “Just who am I seeing, exactly?”

  “Your dear old Daddy,” Caleb said.

  “Kronos.”

  “Ding ding ding! Took you long enough.”

  Zach clenched his fists at his side, ready to go Tesla on him if he came any closer. “You killed Dr. Davis.”

  “Yes, but I hear from my sources that she didn't stay dead.”

  “You were supposed to be in the Canary Islands.”

  “And you were supposed to be in Tartarus, but your sweet old grandmother decided to give you another chance.”

  Zach tried to sort through the jumble of memories. Rhea was his mother. Gaia. “Gaia?”

  “She let you out, scrubbed you in the Lethe, and put you back in mortal bodies. Except Lethe doesn't really get out those tough immortal stains. Your memories started leaking out. And now that Prometheus, that idealistic fool, is locked where you belong, Daddy has to come back from vacation to clean up your mess.”

  “You can't kill us,” Zach said. “We'll just leave the underworld and come back until we stop you.”

  “That book,” Kronos said, pointing Caleb's hand at the book that Zach had dropped on the floor. “Have you heard of it?”

  “It's everywhere.”

  “Everywhere and in ten different languages. The moment someone signs their name to that pledge, they relinquish control of their lives. Have fun getting to me when I have forty million people worldwide under my control. Thirty million in America. And you can bet some of those couples are sharing a book.

  “I bet not everyone signed it,” Zach said.

  Caleb Jacobs shrugged. “But enough.” He stepped around the desk, his shoulders back, his head held high. “With millions of followers under my control, I can capture every one of you and not just kill you, but lock you away in Tartarus where you belong. For good. I won't be a lax prison guard like Prometheus, either. I'll have you watched twenty-four hours a day. You'll spend eternity in that pit where you belong.”

  Someone pounded on the door.

  “You know what I love about your mortal father?” Kronos asked.

  “Nice beard?”

  He laughed. “He had every one of his employees read that book. Even if they just pretended to read it, they all signed it.”

  The doors to the office burst open and fifteen people poured in. Ashley (the woman from the elevator) and the gum-chewing receptionist were the first through the door, but a group of burly security guards followed and tackled Zach. His hands crackled with electricity as he struggled, but Zach was afraid to unleash. These were people, trapped as puppets, and he didn't want to hurt any of them.

  Zach kicked one of the guards off and rolled to the side. He scrambled to his feet and ran out the door. Zach fol
lowed the glowing, red emergency exit sign and ran down the stairwell. The mob pursued him, temporarily getting jammed in the doorway and then following one at a time. Zach began to skip steps. With his hands on the railing, he leapt down each set of steps. Half-way down, a stitch growing in his side, Zach burst into one of the other offices and ran for the elevator. It closed with him inside just as the gum-chewer made it to the door.

  Zach slid to the floor of the mirrored elevator. He took a moment to dig his hand into the stitch in his side and catch his breath. The elevator opened. The lobby was clear. Zach made a break for the door, but a different mob came in from the street and ran at him. The crowd, a group of at least fifty people, swarmed him like insects. Zach crouched down, covering his head, as countless hands struck his back and neck.

  “No,” he groaned, trying to think of a way out. No, he wasn't going down like this. It had been such a good morning. He was Zeus, King of Olympus. He was a god! Zach stood up, throwing his arms outward. He swelled, his whole figure growing to an impressive twenty feet tall. The attackers were thrown off of him. With one large sweep of his arm, Zach knocked over the first row of the mob. He stepped over them and ran for the door. His body shrank down to its normal size just as he pushed open the glass door and ran out onto the street.

  Police officers were pulling up outside the office building. “What's going on here?” one of them asked as Zach ran out into the daylight, his eyes filling with spots from sudden exposure to the midday sun.

  Another cop was clearly a fan of Becoming Your Golden Self and fired his gun, narrowly missing Zach's head. Zach ducked into a crowd of onlookers and kept running until he came to his car. He jumped in the Roadster and sped off, his foot never leaving the gas until he got far outside of Orlando. He ditched his car on the side of the road—if his father knew what Zach drove, it stood to reason that Kronos and all of his followers knew—and ran into the woods until he was too exhausted to move anymore.

  Zach collapsed against a tree—his shirt torn, his back bruised, his arms scratched and bleeding— and pulled out his phone. He had to warn the others.

  “Victory passes back and forth between men.”

  -Homer

  XI.

  Evan Fuller had borrowed his mother's minivan and hauled The Night Prowler out past the golf course in Kendall. He had spent two years tweaking his all-terrain go kart, and now he wanted to give it a test drive.

  He parked at the access road at the edge of the woods and braced two planks against the bumper so that he could gently roll The Night Prowler out of the van. The kart had enormous round tires, a concave seat covered in straps, and a roll-cage to protect him from a flip. Evan strapped a helmet on and jiggled it to check that it was secure. He slipped a mouth guard over his top row of teeth. It might have been extreme, but Evan figured that safety was never a bad thing. A little over-caution was better than being toothless in addition to being scarred and walking with a limp.

  Evan buckled himself in and turned the ignition key, something he'd ripped from a wrecked Harley at the junk yard. He gripped the yoke, a piece from an small plane that had been thrown away and replaced because the leather grips were decaying. Evan had coated the handles in a little electrical tape and called them good-as-new.

  He put his foot over the gas and hesitated. “Alright,” Evan said, talking to himself, muffled through his mouth guard. “Two years of dreaming. Take it nice and slow to start. Remember, her top speed is over a hundred, so don't hit a tree.”

  A truck stopped on the main road. Evan looked up as a man got out and walked around to the pickup bed. He reached in and pulled out a .22 long rifle. Evan wondered if he spotted an animal up ahead, but the man turned and aimed the gun at Evan. He fired, and the bullet clipped the side of Evan's helmet and filled his ears with a thunderous crack.

  Evan stomped on the accelerator and took off into the woods. Why on earth, he wondered, was this complete stranger trying to kill him? He glanced back to see the man running after him, gun still in hand. Evan gripped the yoke and turned quickly. The Night Prowler took a sharp left onto a new trail, but the wheels on the right side picked up off the ground and the vehicle tilted. The moment of truth— the cart teetered on two wheels before rolling back down and landing squarely on four.

  A bullet whizzed by. Evan pressed his foot down harder, watching the speedometer tick up to seventy. Why was he going away from the road? He realized that he needed to find a way back to the highway if he was going to get help.

  Someone ran out into the path. Evan jerked the wheel, barely cutting around a tree as he left the path to avoid collision. An explosion of bark and oak splinters nearby told Evan that someone else was shooting. What was this, “The Most Dangerous Game?”

  The Night Prowler hopped back onto the path. Evan sped up another ten miles per hour, knowing now that a collision with a tree could kill him. He took the risk; after all, a collision with a bullet was guaranteed to be more deadly.

  A loud pop! sounded to his right, followed by a whistle. The Night Prowler jerked to the right as the tire was blown out. Evan was wrenched to the side. It spun and flipped. The roll-cage struck the ground and then turned topside and then struck the ground again. Evan bit hard into his mouth guard as the vehicle rolled and then came to a halt.

  When it fell still, the cart turned upside-down, the engine still rumbling, Evan fumbled with the latch on the roll-cage. It was stuck. He kicked and fought. A pair of steel-toed boots stopped next to the cart, then a pair of dusty-but-new dress shoes. Evan looked up to see two men standing over him, one a hunter, the other a business man. Something was wrong with their eyes.

  “You gotta help me,” Evan said, spitting out his mouthguard.

  “Oh, we'll help you, Hephaestus,” the hunter said. “We're here to escort you to hell.”

  June Jacobs was sitting on the floor of the empty living room at her apartment in Gainesville. She and Zach had ordered furniture, but it would be weeks before it came. They were, essentially, camping. A stove, a refrigerator, and a dishwasher had been provided by the landlord, but everything else was up to them. Before Zach had left for an urgent meeting in Olympia Heights, they had made a run to Target to buy a TV stand and air mattress to get them through the weeks before their living room and bedroom sets arrived.

  She stood up and started pacing the room. Zach's call when he had left the Miami area was cryptic. He couldn't talk about what had been discussed, though he seemed excited to share the news with her. She was tempted to call him back and grill him for information, but she knew he had plans to stop and visit his father, and June did not want to interrupt that awkward meeting. They needed the money that Mr. Jacobs could supply.

  The doorknob jiggled. Someone was unlocking the door. June ran to greet Zach, surprised that he had made it back so early, and was surprised to see someone else standing in the hallway. The realtor who was managing their rental stood in the hallway, dressed in yoga pants and a tank top as if she had just been to the gym. Something was wrong with her eyes.

  “Oh, I thought it was my husband,” June said, embarrassed at how eagerly she had rushed to the door.

  The realtor did not reply. She just shut the door behind her and stared at June.

  “Um, so what can I help you with?” June asked.

  More silence.

  Footsteps in the hall let June know that others were arriving. The door opened and two men in suits walked in. They had the same blank look on their faces, and their eyes were fully dilated.

  “What is this?” June asked, backing up and wondering if she had anything on-hand to defend herself.”

  “Hera,” the realtor said, her voice apathetic and steady. “Come with us.”

  “And what if I say no?” she said, trying to inch back towards the kitchen where she knew there was a ready knife block.

  “Then we'll have to take you by force,” one of the men said with the same lackluster cadence.

  “Alright, bitch,” June said, her li
p curling into an almost snarl. “Try.”

  When the two men, bruised and scratched, carried June Jacobs, unconscious, out of the apartment, the realtor limped behind her, clamping her hand over a bloody gash on her arm. June had gone down, but she hadn't gone down without a fight.

  Felon of Troy. That was the name printed on the back of the sleeveless jersey that Minnie Rutherford wore. Her number was 1100 BC. She had tried out for the Boston team on a trip north to tour Harvard in July. Now she was here for the semester and ready to play. The girls had presented her with a jersey upon arrival.

  Minnie wasn't the largest or the strongest girl on the team, but she was fast, smart, and she knew the rule book by heart. She hardly ever spent any time in the penalty box; that was a rarity in the Women's Flat Track Derby Association.

  The rink had glossy wooden floors and strips of neon lights around the concrete block walls. The carpet outside the rink was decorated with planets and stars, just like every other skating rink Minnie had ever been to in her life. The team was a mix of women from all professions. The captain was a veterinarian. The assistant captain was a hairdresser. Her son, ten years old, brought a bag of quarters to every practice to play arcade games. At the arcade end of the rink, the end where they set up cones to mimic a regulation flat track, a row of black lights made the neon stars and planets glow in the dark.

  Minnie laced up her skates and double-checked her pads. Everything was ready to go. She skated a few laps before doing a knee-drop in the middle of the rink and starting her stretches. Once she was done stretching, she went back to get water. Minnie wasn't a starter because she had just arrived, but they were training for a tournament. Minnie knew that water breaks would be few and far between.

  The girls were bigger and the hits were harder than they had been in the junior league. Minnie made a few glorious wipeouts before her mind wrapped around the skaters and their habits. By the end of practice, she was sneaking by without taking any solid hits. She could move, predict the direction of the pack, and dart through the gaps without effort.