Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  *

  THE KID IS not really a kid, but he’s built like one, an Asian guy in what at first flush appears to be a black-and-purple body suit made of a thick rubbery material stretching right up into a mask that covers his mouth, chin and nose and contours into wide goggles covering his narrowed, suspicious, hesitant eyes. Loose, sweat-moistened black hair somehow masks his appearance rather than defining it as he moves a heavily gloved hand to his waist where he wears a Han Solo-style utility belt and holster where the thick black handle of some kind of blaster protrudes.

  “You’re Zephyr?”

  “Uh-huh,” I nod slowly. “That’s right. You’re Strike?”

  “Yeah. You heard of me?”

  “Not really. It’s what one of the other guys said.”

  “That guy?” Strike motions with one thumb at the unconscious Titan.

  I shake my head. “A different other guy.”

  “OK.”

  “You’re helping out?”

  “Yeah,” Strike says. “It was all over the RSS feeds.”

  I nod like I know what the fuck he’s talking about as I become aware of the prickly sensation of Strike’s secretive gaze picking slowly over me, not so much lecherous as like a snake looking for a crevice to crawl into.

  “You’re part of the defense effort,” he asks, I realize, quite tentatively.

  “Yup. Like you, huh?”

  I don’t get the verbal sparring, but anyway. . . .

  “I just thought I’d see what needed doing,” he answers. “These guys hijacked me on my bike. Took out one of them, but they had . . . back-up.”

  “Bike, huh. What’re you riding?”

  Strike only looks at me a moment.

  “You’re part of the defense effort?”

  “I said that already.”

  “Hmmm, OK.” An unfortunate dream-like quality to the kid’s voice as he distractedly pulls his gaze off me and looks to the window as Heracleon, then Manticore and Lynx swing through.

  Strike moves off a few steps and holds his hands out in a weird way. From his palms we watch as a complete motorcycle quickly assembles itself, constructed of the same purple-and-black color scheme as Strike’s suit, the purple parts now glowing darkly in tune with similar panels along the phantasmal bike until they stop just as quickly as they’ve started. Strike throws a leg over his ride and nods to me, coolly looking across to the others as they shuffle into the warehouse space.

  “Thanks for the save,” the kid says. “See you next time.”

  I barely notice the purring engine of the motorcycle as he takes off across the concrete, lifts the front wheel and hops it up and smashes through the back series of glass windows and just as quickly disappears from view a dozen-or-so storeys in the air.

  “Was that Strike?” Heracleon says.

  “What, you don’t know?” I ask in mock surprise.

  I am briefly distracted by Manticore kneeling to lobotomize the unconscious Titan before the hero stands and nods to me and I look back to Heracleon’s clear discomfort. Lynx stands at my elbow purring, Syzygy and Volt entering in Strike’s wake.

  “There’s a storm coming,” Heracelon says.

  I briefly “feel” the air and shrug. “No there’s not.”

  Somehow during the latest fracas, day has dawned, but now the soft cold glow of morning darkens again as we see Heracleon’s storm gathering overhead.

  Like refugees hiding from the Gestapo, our rebels move to the broken windows and look out to see the sky dotted with dozens upon dozens of Titans moving across the city. I can scarce believe what we are seeing, but I look to Heracleon and furrow my brow.

  “What about the other groups?”

  “There’s another battle nearby,” Heracleon says.

  He points. It could be yards or miles distant for all I know, judging by the look on his face.

  “Your daughter is there.”

  I shake my head at the inevitable, shoulders hunched like a boxer.

  “Tell me where,” I whisper.

  Zephyr 14.5 “The Perlocutionary Effect”

  MY INSTRUCTIONS BOIL down to getting everyone else the hell out of Dodge as I hurriedly snap my fingers, hoping those around me will just follow the plan a little better than Tessa. Syzygy hangs at my elbow like she’s just found a father figure and isn’t letting go, but the determined look on my face and the evidently stark doom into which I’m about to walk give even her pause, and I glance back to basically see them all hanging back and wishing me luck. I nod to Chamber and Volt, the nominal leaders of the party in my wake.

  “Get everyone you can to the fortress and get out of here, got it?”

  They nod and I throw myself out of the windows and up and across the city as fast as I can under the blanket of the Titans’ creepy robot-like army, the flying phalanx of about two hundred generally identical parahumans descending on the grounds around the Capitol building.

  I never knew my daughter had such a strong interest in politics, let alone a warm humanitarian streak for one of the lowest species known to mankind.

  Giving my best inner banzai shriek, I hit Mach and jostle several Titans in my wake as I smash through their formation to crash down and into the flaming wreck of our once iconic landmark. Beyond the half-doused flames and Neo-Classical wreckage I see a huddle of grimy men and women in suits hanging back as Windsong, Paragon and Coalface wage war against a dozen-odd Titans. Seeing Paragon there, still all maudlin and damned-near suicidal-looking as he exorcises his personal demons in the crucible of battle, I am not exactly filled with optimism, but I come behind one of the Titans and grab a length of jagged twisted iron from a pile of rubble and slash it across the guy’s lower back hard enough to what you’d call disemboweling the guy, if only he were facing the other way around. The Titan sinks to his knees with a shrill shriek and clutches the pumping wound at his kidneys, and I throw him by the hair into two of his fellows before Tasering a fourth, blocking another one’s attempt to grapple me as I fly up, then straight down again with a piledriver punch at just the right angle to the top of the guy’s skull to avoid demolishing my hand while managing to grind his face into the sodden brickwork beneath his feet. I backhand another one, or hell, maybe one of the same ones I’ve already attacked, pour lightning into the next one closest, and shoulder-barge my way forward until I’m alongside Tessa.

  “I warned you about this!” I yell.

  Sheer panic’s etched on her lovely face. It pains me – sends an existential trill through the ragged black nicotine stain-colored flag that is my soul – to see my daughter clutched in the skeletal grip of what looks like Death’s winning hand.

  “Fuck you!” I yell, obviously not at her, and hit hyperdrive mode as hard as I can, machine-gunning electrical attacks that drop every second one of these motherfuckers, perturbed as I am that more and more of them arrive every moment.

  Somewhere amid this turbulence Coalface disappears from view and Paragon, damned near invincible biodynamic gold force field glowing, staggers away from us with about five Titans trying to pin him down. Tessa and I are back-to-back as she kicks and karate chops and basically forgets her training as the lone female Titan I’ve seen clutches her by the hair in an utter bitch move and tries swinging her around until I put my powered-up fist through her jaw, the smell of burnt hair my only reward as Tessa yowls and the back of my costume tears away from me as I evade another two Titans’ grasps.

  “Let’s go!” I bawl.

  “What about them?” Tessa yells back, probably meaning the Capitol civilians, the very same who’ve now either fled, disappeared from view, or been buried alive like human detritus amid our struggle.

  My answer is a growl as I wrap my arms around Tessa and do the crouch thing, taking out a corner of the missing roof as we rocket skywards and clear of the immediate red-and-gold throng.

  Impossibly, the Wallachian Fortress still hovers above us.

  Up close, Tessa’s sooty, tear-stricken face blazes with hope amid
the terror as the chance for our escape is confirmed and I bite my lip, hoping against hope this isn’t one of those to good-to-be-true deals.

  Which of course it is.

  *

  LIKE A VISION of burning Olympus, I realize there’s something wrong with this picture at about the same moment a telepathic scream cuts through the ether with the sound of Manticore discovering a far greater range to his psionic abilities at the metaphoric point of a sword.

  Tessa and I hove toward the open drawbridge, flashes and flares going off inside to confirm the New Sentinels’ flying headquarters has been invaded.

  I barely slow on entry, hyper-acute senses taking in Mastodon wrestling with two Titans, a costumed hero I don’t even recognize kneeling nearby as he tries to stop the blood pumping from his torn-off arm, Chamber opening up with rapid flashes of his chest beam across the way, Silhouette just a black flicker as she ducks and dodges through a vanguard of attackers I scatter like skittles as I crash land in my arrival.

  The moment I am up, one of the Titans grabs me and I clutch his wrist and twist it, about to actually get somewhere before I’m smothered from behind by hands grasping me until there’s an electrical flash and they fall away, my view unimpeded by my daughter with both hands outstretched and the wide-eyed look of a first-time murderess on her face, though a quick glance tells me nothing so useful’s been achieved.

  I blast one of the guys holding onto the ‘Don and the other one takes a sickening elbow strike in the face before he’s picked up and bodily hurled out the drawbridge gate. Breathing heavily, Mastodon turns cumbersomely about.

  “Where are the others?” I yell at him.

  “Inside,” he answers and stops to vomit what appears to be huge clots of internal hemorrhaging. The ‘Don points, clicking his fingers, distracted like he’s just an average drunken office worker emptying his guts into a gutter instead of perhaps a mortally stricken mask. “Inside. They’re everywhere.”

  “Get us out of here!” I yell, hoping the effort as well as the psychic acoustics of the fortress will ken to my meaning as I tear down the closest white-paneled corridor and immediately come on two Titans basically fist-fucking Manticore, his handsome face a jellied mess.

  I grab the first Titan and smash him face-first into the nearest wall, but the second one is onto me just as fast and I go down on my back, him doing the reverse cowboy and leaving me to clutch his red cape and strangle him with it, victim to the same poor design that made me ditch my red-and-white lycra get-up more than ten years back.

  I get free in time to take several kicks to the face, then manage to catch the offending boot and channel my weakening energy supply into the dude, a hand still full of the other guy’s costume, pulling him back off Manticore and slowly wrestling my arms around his neck by main force alone, pressing down, a lot like suffocating a panther with a pillow as I force the Titan’s face down into the floor. I’m about to deliver the coup de grace when a heat beam comes out of nowhere and knocks me twenty yards back, twisting and flopping like the proverbial fish out of water as I glimpse the corridor literally choked with clone Titans coming in the other direction.

  I break and run.

  “Windsong!” I yell, again hoping against hope my words or at least the perlocutionary effect of them will carry to my daughter who I’ve unwittingly abandoned.

  The corridors of the Wallachian Fortress unfold around me like the petals of some vast white flower of confusing biology, so much so that within moments it is just me half-running, half-scooting across the polished floor with nothing in my ear except the sound of my own laboring breathing and quite a few f-words.

  I stop. The wall in front of me sphincters open to reveal a trio of Wallachian monks standing about a riot of crystalline rods emerging at different angles from a nest of otherworldly technology I can only guess is the heart of the fortress, the so-called ideational drive.

  The trio turn and silently regard me, egg-bald, ancient-looking vultures, one with apparent cracks like of a desert creek-bed. The lead one tilts his head slightly and for the first time I’m truly confronted by the alien nature of our weird chaperones.

  I gesture to the crystal controls. “That’s a bit low budget sci-fi, isn’t it?”

  “The ideational drive is however you perceive it to be,” the monk not so much says as thinks at me.

  My breathing slows as I experience a moment of lucid clarity, thoughts of the chaos and death and destruction I’ve left behind – even my daughter’s peril – brushed aside.

  “Why do you do this?” I ask. “Who are you?”

  “We serve the Design,” the monk replies matter-of-fact.

  “What Design?”

  “That of the cosmos.”

  “Na,” I answer him like a disbelieving drunk at a quiz night. “You’re talking some predetermination hokum? No way. It’s way more complex than that.”

  “You are correct, as ever, Antichrist,” the monk replies. “The universal paradox is pregnant with its contrary.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I mutter.

  The monks bow their heads in assent. I ask the only question that really matters.

  “You’re on our side?”

  “We serve the Design, of which your people are a concentric component.”

  I nod, not really getting anything other than the basic gist, which proves enough.

  “Then do what you have to to protect them,” I say. “Expel the invaders and take my people to safety and keep them safe, until they are ready to return.”

  The monks bow their heads. The lead one asks, “And you, Antichrist?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “It is a designation, not a literal truth,” the monk says, patient, waiting.

  I can’t help my expression being truculent at that moment, juggling exhaustion with relief as I nod, raised hand hovering before me a signifier of my own surrender to the unknown.

  “Drop me off somewhere away from here, then get gone,” I say.

  The monks nod and the room closes down, shrinking in on me like a slow motion nightmare, a white dream, the feeling of space-time being voided from the bowels of the vast Wallachian enterprise as unnerving as it is an affirmation of our survival.

  Zephyr 14.6 “Writ Large Across The Skyline”

  THE MONKS LET me off on the far side of the disaster zone, but I am on my toes, aware the air is peppered with my latest nemesis writ large across the skyline.

  Every bit the fugitive, I’m disgorged via some spectral means behind dumpsters like one of the cut-price science fiction action heroes I once so much admired, crouched in the tatters of yet another costume, the bleak day too cold for the week before summer. The city streets resound like a pained animal, horns, breaking glass, women and children crying, alarms going off, the rumbling and thundering noise of heavy vehicles bullying their way through gridlock as I scan the crowd pulsing past the end of the alleyway like corpuscles in a blood stream or if in fact Atlantic City had become just one gigantic theatrical set to represent a human body when under attack from a particularly virulent form of cancer.

  However many Titans remain in DC, there’s clearly dozens here as well. The Prime, as they call him, must’ve been a busy boy, but I’m not going to find out any more about that squatting here like a homeless dude looking for somewhere to shit. I fish out my phone as I check both ends of the alley and then the sky overhead, thumbing in the number from the scrunched piece of paper I’m thanking my lucky stars I still possess.

  Draven answers on the third ring like someone who’s been anticipating my call.

  “You’re not so goddamn flippant now, are you?” he shouts down the line.

  “OK, OK, settle down,” I answer tiredly. “We need to meet.”

  “Meet? Hey, screw you,” Draven replies. “I warned you and warned you. I’ve been trying to get through to you for the best part of a year to avoid exactly what’s happening now.”

  “I’m not perfect, Eric,” I say. “I
think I can accept that.”

  “Big of you,” he snorts. “Where are you?”

  “You remember that building where we met? You think you could meet me there?”

  “These guys are everywhere,” Draven answers. “I have to wear a disguise or I’m dead.”

  “I think you’re being a little paranoid. Now they’ve hatched their plan, I think they’ve got bigger fish to fry, if I’m not mixing metaphors too much.”

  “I’ll take my precautions if it’s all the same to you,” Draven answers. “You don’t have much of a . . . goddamn track record, OK?”

  I hang up, not much more to say than that, and contemplate the shamefully unthinkable as pedestrians continue to surge past just yards away from my hidey hole. Those who aren’t running for their lives amid the chaos into which the city’s fallen are quickly throwing themselves into looting efforts with gay abandon, and I exit the alley to hustle across and into a big menswear store where I startle a dozen youths laying into the mannequins with iron bars, clearing the store with nothing more than my eagle eye before I turn to a rack and select a black motorcycle jacket to sling over my ruined costume, then also free a natty knee-length Armani duster I throw over the ensemble to disguise myself as I move through the back of the shop and palm my domino mask and kick open the chained fire escape and step out the back furtively and away.