Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  Raveness inhales my scent, filing it away for future reference no doubt. In a sudden switch of mood – changes to which I am no stranger, courtesy to the recent weeks – she gives a sly grin and winks at me.

  “You’ll keep.”

  And she bounds away among the trees before any of us have the good conscience to try and re-apprehend her.

  “What now?” Negator asks.

  “That’s a good question for you,” I say to him, turning from watching Raveness’ shapely buttocks vanishing into a thicket, something grotesque yet undeniably erotic about the giant-sized woman, a plus-size model on steroids.

  Negator nods, dragging fingers through overlong hair to even more resemble some random surfie dude. I offer him my hand and we shake, strong eye contact, nothing too gay as he turns and walks away into the quietening day.

  *

  I PULL THE Enercom phone from my utility belt, pleased as always to see the low-lying magnetic field about my body keeps it charged. Reception is good as Travis and I leave the trees behind us, getting onto a path that leads to steps up to the top of a public amphitheater from which we can see the immediate skyline, no towering columns of black smoke, civilians around us enjoying the brisk day, a midweek vibe, only a few hurried glances at me looking filthy, and of course the underwear model beside me.

  The phone rings out as I stare across the scene, Travis slow-breathing at my side, quite the Tarzan now thanks to our adventures. Everything looks just too fucking normal. When Tessa doesn’t answer, I hang up and snag a passing hardbody.

  “Hey, what happened to the city? I thought we were overrun by bad guys?”

  “Bad guys?” she asks me and squints, eyes me up and down quickly, smiles at Travis and disappears into the flow past a hotdog cart.

  “You talkin’ about all those Titan guys?” the vendor calls to us, casual, one eye still on the makings of a hand-rolled cigarette.

  “Glad to know someone remembers what I’m talking about,” I say, swaggering over and trying not to drool at the smell of chili sauce and onions. “We’ve been out of the loop. Not sure if you recognize me –”

  “Yeah, you’re Zephyr,” the guy says with the casual welcomingly air of someone who hasn’t had his mind mysteriously wiped or certain elements of our existences burned from the parallel around us.

  He shrugs, adjusts the position of a pair of tongs and scans about looking for anyone other than me with a hankering for a Sabret.

  “You saved a kid in my kid’s class once. Burning school bus.”

  “Groovy,” I say. “What can you tell me about the Titan situation?”

  “Gotta cast my mind back. You look hungry. Want something?”

  “I’m sorta broke right now,” I say.

  “Hey, help yourself. Treat your boyfriend too.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend –”

  “Figure of speech. What are you, one of them homophobios?”

  “I don’t . . . think that’s a word,” I say, pausing only long enough to assert that fact before I do as the man suggested and start putting together something to eat with the frenetic lack of skills one finds in the famished unprofessional.

  Travis angles in to share the kill and we jostle shoulders with an air of familiarity the kindly vendor watches with bemusement.

  “Good fuckin’ advertisement,” he smirks.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Not you. Him,” he says. “You look like shit, Zeph. What happened to your costume?”

  “This actually is my costume,” I say between wolfing mouthfuls. “Apparently this is the color black leather turns when exposed to Taur-gammion dragon puke.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “You don’t want to,” Travis tells him.

  We share a smirk. No high-fives.

  “Titan?” I prompt the vendor.

  “Yeah those British supers turned up, cleaned the whole country out. Weeks ago now,” the old guy says.

  “Sting? St George?”

  “That’s them.”

  “Shit.”

  “Did you hear anything about the international space station. . . ?” Travis asks.

  “Wait a minute,” the vendor pauses, tuning into the ex-Punisher’s accent. “Are you Steve Irwin?”

  “In what universe do you think Steve Irwin is that buff?” I ask, aware of the recurring homoerotic subtext.

  “Meh,” the vendor says. “I always like Steve Irwin, you know, before he got into politics.”

  I sigh, take another dog and nod my thanks. Travis wanders after me.

  “You must get sick of that,” I say.

  “Not really. People in Atlantic City don’t normally give a shit where you come from,” he says, finishing eating, eyes always playing at the perimeter of our surroundings like we’ve all learnt to do, dealing with hostile environments that only want us dead.

  “I think we can step down,” I say to him. “Home. At least home for me.”

  Travis and I shake hands, his time for departure nigh. He doesn’t know what he’s doing and neither do I, but there is a peace about him that never existed before, an ironic gift of our near-death experience. I wish him well and he disappears, anonymous in the crowd.

  And then the Enercom phone rings and it’s my daughter and she’s ecstatic to hear from me, to learn I’m still alive, and just moments later the Wallachian’s Fortress is unfolding itself across from the artificial lake and we alight and after a teary homecoming, sleep beckons, dark and endless as ever.

  Zephyr 15.2 “Eliminations”

  DAY TWO, AND I wake to find Tessa sitting on the end of my bed. The good feelings have gone and she is sobbing quietly, unmindful of me nearly naked beneath what passes for Manchester around here.

  “Hey,” I say, the words malformed by the detritus of sleep, me sitting up, wiping phlegm from my freshly-shaved cheek. “What’s the matter?”

  “I was so worried you were dead this time,” Tessa says and takes the hand I offer. “You know, really really dead this time?”

  “I get it. I’m not. I don’t know how, but there you have it. I’m here.”

  Tessa sets to sobbing again and I sigh in a fatherly way, pulling sheets securely around me before pulling her closer for a hug.

  I notice the Wallachians have laid out a new costume for me and redesigned it in the process. With my darling daughter quietening beside me, I give a bemused look in the hopes my relative humor might catch on, stretching, aided and abetted by her to drag the alarmingly one-piece outfit into my reach.

  “OK, what the fuck is this?”

  “I think one of the monks might be a frustrated fashion designer,” Tessa sniffles and laughs. “They’re often leaving little presents like this around.”

  The first thing I take in is the white lacquered zee on the chest and nod to myself, the symbol of the past returned, my anarchist-inspired redesign no doubt gracing a trashcan in some unknown parallel cosmos wherever the Wallachians dump their rubbish. My recently purloined leather jacket hangs over the back of the room’s sole chair, something unsettling about Ikea creations finding their way to even here. The new costume cuts at wrist and ankles, but otherwise a curious mix of space age fabrics clearly designed to imitate all the benefits of my leather outfit without actually mirroring the look. The fabric is thick, though it seems to respond to my touch. It’s hard to get too het up about it, knowing it’ll probably be in shreds by the end of the week if not the end of the day. Still, as Tessa turns her back with a giggle and I ease into the weirdly slippery thing, it feels a bit like wearing a body stocking, right up until the point where the back seals itself up and a warm clinch settles about my gonads.

  “OK, what the hell is that?”

  “What?”

  “I think this suit is . . . blowing me.”

  Tessa laughs. Laughs hard. I smirk too, glad for the levity as she struggles for breath and explains there’s a variety of interdimensional tech factored into the costumes the Wallachians freque
ntly supply their enigmatically-supported guests, including Dune-style still-suit technologies to basically eliminate the need for eliminations, if you follow my drift.

  “Well OK, but this is awkward.”

  “My costume, it’s like being gone down on by goldfish,” my daughter says matter-of-factly. “You get used to it after a while. And it’s handy.”

  Our hilarity settles. I slip on the acid-etched jacket and find my boots. Contemplate wearing gloves again even though it makes me look a bit like a gay biker. Tessa settles into a clinch and I kiss the top of her head, her resigned that she’s probably never going to top either me or her mother in height. She smells like everything good in the world and I close my eyes a moment as safe and secure as if we are holidaying at some French farm house, fresh-cut tulips on the wind, bread baking and wine airing on a freshly-painted window sill nearby. Sadly not. I re-open my eyes to the reality of the Wallachians’ clinical hospitality, the suit still settling on me like tiny fingers probing my every crevice, and I realize the gift of the new duds is really just an adumbration of something even more mysterious and yet to be explained.

  *

  “I’VE BEEN AWAY,” I say needlessly to Tessa. “How are things with your mother? You guys patch things up?”

  The moment the words are out I realize I’ve walked into a shit-storm. All my carefully woven good feelings disappear as Tessa starts to stutter.

  “She’s gone,” she says. “No. Short answer. No. Fuck.”

  “Don’t cuss, honey –”

  “Dad,” Tessa scowls at me, struggling to rein in her raw emotions. “She moved to England with the Harald Hardrada.”

  “Hardrada?”

  “Look it up,” Tessa snaps. “We barely spoke. The custody thing’s still a . . . a thing, I guess, but me up here, there’s not a lot she can do about it.”

  “Christ,” I say. “And the apartment?”

  “Jeez, thanks for making your priorities clear, pops.”

  “What, I can’t wonder at where the hell I’m going to sleep tonight?”

  Tessa gives me a new, fresh-out-of-the-packet variety of her hurt look and I quiz her back.

  “What?”

  “I sort of thought you were going to stay here . . . for a while?”

  “In the Fortress of Doom? I don’t think so,” I say and laugh and stop laughing when I realize this is touching on some serious daddy issues.

  “There’s something not right about this place, honey,” I tell her, “and not right about these monks. I’m not comfortable with you being here either, truth be told, but we sort of arrived at this whole situation kinda sideways, and well, I dunno, I guess you’re a big girl now. Or I should say, you know, in the interests of full disclosure, I think that’s complete bullshit. You’re sixteen. You’re still sixteen, right? An-an-and there’s no way you should be living away from home, let alone part of the crappiest superhero teams this city’s ever seen. No offence. But we both know this situation way overcooked itself long before I disappeared for three months.”

  Tessa blinks back at me.

  “Sorry dad. Having overload. This is the longest we’ve spoken in months and months,” she says.

  Before we can speak any further, a shadow appears in the doorway.

  Manticore.

  “Uh, group meeting,” he says. “And you’re both invited.”

  The hair model gives a serious curt nod to me and withdraws. I raise my eyebrow at Tessa, but my daughter looks away with the air of a guilty conscience.

  *

  SO I TRAIPSE into the ready room and note the others standing or lounging about. There’s been a slight roster change since the Titan Situation™. In the room are Vulcana, Manticore, Smidgeon and my daughter. Mastodon, Susurrus and Heracleon are out, and of course so is Brasseye, the magic robot last seen getting his head torn clean off in the ruins of our nation’s capitol. Replacing those members are the cutesy young gravity-wielder Syzygy and the brick Coalface, though he’s not on fire at the moment, and in his dormant state resembles an overlarge Ving Rhames with slightly smeared, blunt, plasticine features. The big screen TVs behind them play images of some cataclysmic fight between man-gods in another parallel or something and I’m just about to state the obvious, like maybe we should be going to see what we can do, when Tessa whispers to me that it’s just a DVD.

  Vulcana shoots me a tight and strangely welcoming smile.

  “Thanks everybody for coming so quickly,” she says, then motions to me. “I asked Zephyr to sit in with us because I know you’re all eager for me to. . . well, I’ll just cut to the point.”

  All eyes are on me. For a nanosecond I fear it’s the costume, which makes every slight swelling of my gonads apparent, or so I think, even with the strangely light-absorbing quality of the plasticky black fabric that wants to be leather a bit like most high school kids want to be me (or at least once did).

  I home in on Vulcana’s glassy, uncomfortable, I’m-eating-a-shit-sandwich-but-at-least-I-used-thick-bread smile. My own empathic best manners wilt.

  “OK. What gives?” I say, sotto voce.

  “We want you to rejoin the team,” Manticore says.

  “And more than that,” Vulcana says. “The guys want you to lead it.”

  A tiny bomb goes off inside my head (that’s a metaphor, don’t freak). Everything since my return now makes sense and I nod slowly, the nod just as slowly becoming a furious head shaking.

  “No. Thanks, but no.”

  I stand up, smile, actually dust my hand together, which I know is kind of a bad move, you know, considering people’s feelings and everything, and I start towards the door hoping against hope that I can actually get away with this. Foolish, I know, but I’ve always been an optimist.

  “Hang on,” Vulcana snaps. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize I encrypted it,” I answer her. “No means no. You’re a chick. You understand that.”

  “But. . . .”

  Vulcana looks around the room emptily. She’s got nothing. And then Connie makes it worse by bursting into tears. And then her “team” make it even worse by looking away awkwardly and it sort of falls to the new girl Syzygy to comfort Vulcana, or at least try (she gets her hands slapped away angrily), even though it’s clear she barely knows the erstwhile team leader from a bar of soap, and I scan the other new New Sentinels (in the interests of accuracy I should probably say new new New Sentinels, but that joke is getting old) and realize, like, I am probably the last one to the party here, that Vulcana has been on the outer for a while now and without Smidgeon and maybe the ‘Don to back her up, she doesn’t have the group’s support.

  “Well this is awkward, but I still mean no,” I say. “I’m really sorry, ‘Cana, but I have other things to do and leading the Sentinels isn’t it. Maybe in the future. I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you.”

  “You reformed the team, Zephyr,” Vulcana blurts. “You promised.”

  “I am not a wizard, Connie,” I find myself saying nonsensically, unable to switch off that particular tap. “If I was a wizard and I had magical powers and I could tell the future I can guarantee you I would be somewhere else doing something else right this very instant, OK?”

  I leave the room with the others’ irritable looks pricking at my back, and Tessa, trying to play it cool, gives it about three seconds before hurrying after me while Manticore tells everyone else in the room what they’ve probably known for weeks now, which is that Windsong is my daughter.

  Zephyr 15.3 “The Turning Season”

  THANKFULLY, TESSA AT least understands my predicament and after a chance to grab my meagre things and catch up a little more and eat another meal at the Wallachians’ expense, I manage to get the castle to materialize on the outskirts of old Buffalo.

  The crime-riddled slum of Adams is no different than when I visited last, except the turning season has blanched the crumbling edifices of urban neglect, roads quite literally choked with garbage, broken b
ricks, fallen telephone poles, twisted street signs, bottles, crushed concrete blocks, the waste to a degree that it’s difficult to posit this is still America as the half-empty buildings scowl down on me, a leatherine intruder, a will-o-the-wisp in their ghetto. It feels like snow is falling or should be falling, but it’s not. A fine grit floats in the air, smoky from the ruined buildings. And as the Wallachian Fortress vanishes into memory, I feel eyes hidden in the rubble track over me with all the warm comfort of a laser sight.

  I growl, low in my chest, pulling the leather jacket tight to my front as I storm across the broken lot to where three battered but souped-up looking vehicles are crookedly parked like extras from The Road Warrior. Music – a curious and entirely unpleasant mash-up of gangsta rap and German industrial they call rapecore – oozes across the otherwise lifeless plaza from the low buttressed grilles erected over the sunken pock-marked concrete shop fronts and units the local gang has taken as their own, layers upon layers of clan tags scrawled in paint over the walls testament to the years in which these parasites have been making life a presumable living hell for those around them.

  Like all good gang hideouts, the front door is three inch-thick metal and festooned with cameras. I wave my hand like a magician, electromagnetic signature erasing anything that might be recorded at the same time as I neuter the electronics themselves. One good kick and the door buckles in, flying off its hinges as fast as a Hong Kong stunt double. It takes out the big slobbery fat guy just rising from his camp chair behind and to one side of the door, the Uzi in his lap disappearing into the shadows with the scuttling rats as I duck low and step through into the paint-scrawled hallway, one guttering light bulb nude in its socket overhead throwing a disarmingly theatrical strobe over my sudden violence as I veer left, two young dudes in a mix of sports and paramilitary gear leaping up to draw their sidearms as I growl again and dose them good and proper with hot current. My right hand comes up as a bigger version of the first two bangers barrels into the room from an internal doorway, street-sweeper shotgun coming into play, but he eats another long discharge and goes down, clattering, face catching the back of an Ikea chair identical to the one from my cell in the Wallachian castle.