Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  A second figure sticks his head out the doorway, a bona fide bone piercing through the guy’s nose, intricate black tattoos somehow intertwining across the cracked-looking plates of his augmented musculature, the skin like badly-fired terra cotta tiles. He even makes a vague crackling noise as he moves, hardly pausing to assess the scene before hurling a big chunky fist at me resembling something made by a pre-schooler.

  Me ducking doesn’t do much. I mean, I get the hell out of the way and half the door frame explodes, suggesting I should be glad my head wasn’t there, but the guy keeps coming like a locomotive, heavy and unagile, so that my two hands quickly jab-pushing him in the chest make him collapse back just like a stack of poorly-balanced bricks. Then I sweep his leg out from under him and jump as he tries to kick at me with his other leg, even as he’s caught in the act of going down. I come down hard with both feet on his chest and grind into it before back-flipping away.

  “Zephyr, get down!” I hear Streethawk cry a moment before my world explodes in blue pain.

  Fire from the first of these strange street-level supers catches up my left arm and shoulder, incorporeal flames licking at my face like the most savage of dogs. I spin quickly, velocity extinguishing them before my costume can even start the repair work, and Streethawk bounds past and over the tossed sofa and lands a series of incredibly brutal kicks and backhanded roundhouse punches that leaves the guy in a puddle of his own misery there under the shadow of the stairwell.

  I glance at the terra cotta warrior who isn’t unconscious, but he’s lost any sense of fight. The ‘Hawk rejoins my side with a look of knowing.

  “She’s gone,” he says, gesturing through the doorway where I was headed.

  Zephyr 16.9 “The Black And White Era”

  AS DIRECTED, I rush through the smelly flop house in pursuit of my now junkie darling. Basic services were disconnected here a long time ago, but there’s a kitchen and bathroom, however filthy, and then a mildewed Army blanket curtain concealing an escape route to an old, once-upon-a-time bricked over doorway returned to its former glory, a coffin-sized rectangle of gaping daylight beyond. Unmindful of whether my companion is behind me or not, I barrel through ready for more attackers, uncertain though I might be about why they are even here or how they are empowered, but there is nothing but scattered pigeons and the flags of someone’s forgotten laundry hanging in the alley.

  I vault into the sky to ascend as quickly as I can, readying to scan the roofscape in all directions for trace of my quarry. Instead, a once familiar glow draws my attention to the left – and there she is, hovering twenty feet above the tenement’s filthy roof.

  Seeker.

  She is at one and the same time a ghost and the reincarnation of the woman I once hesitated to call my love, to my eternal shame, and more to my own eventual frustration than hers. For Loren it was a silent acknowledgement of the truth she’d been burdened with long before I took her so-called maidenhood and thus her powers, deflowering her of her ancient mantle as humankind’s appointed protector – at least as far as one particular alien threat among thousands counts.

  Loren looks better than I can even recall. Her face is tanned and lit from within by an ethereal glow, caramel-colored hair moving like seagrass on the invisible astral breeze. Her brown eyes lock on mine with humility and kindness and a strange sense of non-recognition that isn’t the same as saying she doesn’t know who I am. Maybe she never did, and now she’s letting it show. Yet a firm, warm smile plays at those beautiful lips, glowing eyes no longer in sockets sunken by jaundice, starvation, ill health, misery, lovesickness, and drug abuse.

  “Loren?”

  “Hello, Joe,” she says. “What do you know?”

  I laugh and stop, that corny old line of hers I’d never have suffered from anyone else. But I don’t let myself get comfortable. There’s something odd here, and I don’t just mean that we’re in one of the skankiest parts of Atlantic City, or even that we were just jumped by super-powered hoods.

  “Loren,” I say, taking in her white costume again and frowning. “Seeker. Is it really you?”

  She nods and slowly lands on the roof as if inviting me to do the same, or at least that’s how I take it as I drop from the sky into a crouch, quickly readjusting my pose as Loren’s infused glow diminishes a tiny amount, conserving energy perhaps as she rests hands on her fulsome hips, my eyes drawn to her glorious cleavage not so much for old time’s sake, but because it’s some kind of litmus test of the reality of her miraculously returned health.

  “OK, I’m confused,” I say.

  “You needn’t be.”

  “You want to explain who those guys were who jumped me?”

  “Friends,” Seeker says. “Colleagues.”

  “You have colleagues . . . here?”

  “They’re local boys,” she says. “And I am somewhere where I am trying to do good.”

  “But you have your powers back?”

  She shrugs. As ever, I am skeptical when there’s no immediate explanation.

  “I thought the line of the Seeker ended with the Amari threat?” I ask.

  “Poor Candace,” Loren says. “She died so I could live.”

  I think on Streethawk’s words of earlier that morning and feel a weird giddy flowering of hope somewhere in the less black corners of my heart, praying that maybe he isn’t alone in his more favorable interpretation of what my actions meant.

  “The Seeker was only ever meant to protect the world from the Amari,” I say, feeling like I am reminding a kindergarten child about advanced trigonometry. “Since the most ancient times, Loren. Their transit through the galaxy –”

  “I know, Joe,” she says. “I’m still me.”

  She shakes her head. Irritated. The look surprises me, and I might even try to explain myself except she seems to lose her shit then and there, an unexpected tantrum that sees her step forward and open her palms, bathing me in pure white light that hits me like a freight train. The strength leaves me – my very life force – and I fall to my knees gasping like a fish out of water, except it’s not that I can’t breathe – I kneel there, drawing in deep wretched lungfuls of the stuff – but a huge cosmic pressure builds and builds like an invisible vice pressuring in on me.

  A second before I black out, she withdraws the rapture while dodging a karate kick from Streethawk. I am damned if I know what debt of loyalty this idiot thinks he owes me, but I’m reminded to ponder on it more at a later time if I deserve the camaraderie I often enjoy from some of the city’s best masks. The ‘Hawk keeps Loren busy enough ducking and weaving that I get up off hands and knees and flex my fists and step in close to see if her dance card’s completely full.

  *

  SEEKER SPENT MUCH of her earlier career fighting crime on the waterfront like a hero from the black and white era of the Comics Code. It was to her credit that even with her powers gone, she could still kick some serious ass, and now watching her evading Streethawk’s furious hand-to-hand combos has me almost yelling out encouragement. But there’s much to be answered here, and the feeling I get is it’s not going to happen without someone getting hurt.

  I pour on a burst of speed to get behind Seeker as she twists away from a short flying kick, but before I can gently apply my lit-up hands against her in a Taser attack, Loren spins about and kicks across my chest, flattening me even as she lands on her hands and rolls across the asphalt roof and gets into a run and goes diving over the edge.

  I look to Streethawk breathing heavy and covered in a light sheen of sweat and he grins and shrugs at me, wishing me luck now the fight has gone airborne again, and I lope in Loren’s wake and take to the sky confident there wasn’t a day yet she could outpace me in the air. Sure enough, in just a moment I come up beneath her as she spirals skyward, but another heavy dose of her whiteout attack wipes the grin quite literally from my face as the reverse healing basically drains the life from me, leaving me hanging a moment in midair before gravity sinks in its hooks and I start
tumbling.

  It takes a moment to even give a shit about living and dying thanks to the wash of Seeker’s attack. By the time my fall takes me out of range of her draining power, Seeker is halfway across the city block and I have to break the sound barrier to catch up before she hits her straps.

  Loren isn’t fast enough to try the same trick twice. Not now with me wise to it. I grab one ankle from behind and pull, twisting and throwing her at the nearest passing roof. She hits half-frozen laundry line in a tangle and clatters across the dirty tarmac noisily as I land with a starting-to-get-angry look and charge at her full throttle, not even sure what I’m going to do when I get there and sure as fuck not expecting to find her slumped to one side with hair covering her face as she sobs her heart out.

  Shoot me if I don’t take a moment to make sure I’m not being suckered. I circle Loren’s position as the nearby pigeons resettle and a cat breaks from hiding like a ginger ninja, scattering the birds all over again. Loren weeps until finally I crouch next to her.

  “You know I’ve had Streethawk looking for you for a couple of months,” I say. “Ironic for someone called Seeker, you know, that you’re so goddamned hard to find.”

  I don’t get the answer I’m wanting so I brush the hair out of her face.

  Her aura has gone. Loren looks haggard and skeletal, lank hair without luster as she looks between it like through the bars of a prison cell of her own making. She wipes her eyes and sits up, the vanished evanescence rendering the white body stocking more prosaic, several tiny fine detail patch jobs, a discoloration on one thigh no amount of washing will get out. Worse is that the costume clings in some places where it shouldn’t and hangs looser where just moments before it at least seemed her curves were more generous. Heroin chic doesn’t become her.

  “Loren?” I ask, genuinely befuddled. “What’s happened?”

  “The glow’s gone,” she says weakly, still spluttering, voice a plaintive and unfamiliar whine. “God damn you, Joe. You made me use it all up and I’m broke. I can’t even get any more till tomorrow anyway.”

  She looks up at me with her best doe eyes, a look she can’t really manage any more despite her waifish demeanor.

  “You got a hundred bucks I could borrow, Joey?”

  I sigh, somehow relieved when my ringing phone breaks the moment.

  Zephyr 16.10 “Synchronicity”

  I STAND OVER Loren as she gets her mental shit together and I hear Sal Doro’s panicked voice on the other end of the line.

  “Zephyr, that you?”

  “I just said my own damned name like a frigging asshole didn’t I?”

  “Zephyr, it’s Sal –”

  “Jesus, Sal, I recognize your voice. I’m sort of in the middle of something right now, OK?”

  “Don’t give me any of your made up shit or you got to return some videos or something, OK Zephyr? I need help. Quickly. My place.”

  Perhaps it’s just looking at Loren doing her best junkie shrug and wiping her eyes and me feeling the sudden implosion of a huge, long-held desire I never really articulated to myself until now, but the imperative tone in Sal’s voice leaves me cold. I resist hanging up on him because I can tell the old newshound hasn’t called me just for shits and giggles. I weigh the Enercom phone a long moment in one hand, moving away from Loren’s immediate orbit as she stands shaky as a newborn foal.

  “OK Sal, what gives?”

  “There’s someone here. I can’t see ‘em. Please.”

  “OK, I’m on my way, but call the cops, OK Sal?”

  Sal mutters that he will and I disconnect, rounding back on Loren.

  “You found me and now you’re gonna go?” she asks weakly.

  “It seems that way. It’s not intentional.”

  Streethawk appears over the lip of the roof, clambering to his feet as gracefully as if he’s just dusted off his dinner jacket on return from the smoking room. He clearly plans to hang back, but I motion him forward as I peel my last two twenties from the compartment on my belt and give them to him rather than Loren.

  “My friend here you know, Loren. Seeker. Streethawk, right?” I press the money into his strangely dry, blunt-fingered hand, my eyes locked on hers watching the money like a bear watching salmon leap upstream.

  “Why’re you . . . giving the money to him?”

  “You need something to eat, honey. And a hotel room. ‘Hawk’ll find somewhere for you clean and let me know where you are and I’ll come back when my business uptown’s done, OK? We’ll talk.”

  “I know this doesn’t look good, Joe, but I just need the Glow,” she says, mindful and irritated, but like good addicts everywhere, also not willing to put modesty ahead of the need to feed their need.

  I eye her a moment, pondering over what she even means, little sense to the grammar, let alone the content. But Sal’s insistent, almost eerily shrill tone persists in my memory’s ear and I know I need to be away. I turn and clutch Streethawk’s shoulder, no gay gags now as I look at him a moment, and unlike Loren, there’s too much I could say that I do not want to expose in this moment, and if the guy can read the city as well as he does, and if any of me is in there, then perhaps he already knows half of what I might tell him. He curtly nods, a battle-weary lieutenant who backs away, stashing the money in his denims as he looks to Loren looking forlornly after me in a way not unlike the one I got from Elisabeth for so many years as I headed out the door. I shrug, wanting to make a light-hearted joke of it, but there’s no lightness there. Not any more.

  I turn and do the crouch thing and wing uptown.

  *

  I HIT SAL’S apartment. Literally. I figure if it’s as urgent as he says, he can pay for a new window. So I crash through the third-floor kitchen window just beside the fire escape and stop myself on the refrigerator and spook the cat and see into the shitty cigar-stinking living room and see Sal lying there dead.

  “Fuck.”

  The blood has already turned a disgusting dark syrupy color, seeping into the retro nicotine-colored rug, Sal laid out strangely calm-looking between the two converging sofas in the home I know where he lived alone, the wife dead five years or more after something went wrong with her brain or cancer or something I probably should’ve paid more attention to at the time, and which it now occurs to me Sal probably told me in between some feat of derring-do or bout of private debauchery of mine where I was barely listening. And now I’ll never get the chance to hear anything from him again.

  And there also goes my easy line of credit.

  “Fuck.”

  I kneel and check to see if he’s breathing even though Stevie Wonder could tell you the guy’s been murdered. Cause of death looks like a throat wound. Damned near sawn through. Flecks of meat and shit everywhere. I look at Sal’s right hand, the fingertips blood-flecked, the wrist at a weird angle, and something tells me someone restrained him from tending to his own fatality. Someone crouched here and pinned his arm to the floor until the wrist broke and watched Sal Doro die.

  “Fuck.”

  Sal said he thought there was someone in his apartment, but there’s no sign of movement or even a disturbance. Through the nearest open doorways I can see a widower’s bedroom and his den, a few drawers open in a metal filing cabinet, and that’s about it, but before I can do any investigation of my own there’s a pounding on the door.

  “Police! Anyone in there?”

  I sigh tightly, looking back wistfully at the shattered kitchen window and pondering the wisdom of an escape, and I am still standing there beside Sal’s cooling cadaver doing just that when the cops let themselves in and draw their Glocks on me.

  *

  “Z-ZEPHYR? ZEPHYR? IS that you?” the young Korean cop gapes, gun shaky as his big eyes go from me to the body on the carpet.

  The no-nonsense, wide-hipped woman with him gives me a surly look and moves into the room, circling the immediate crime scene to scope the kitchen and the other sight lines before flicking her heavy-lidded gaze at me.
<
br />   “Anyone else here?”

  “Not that I can see,” I tell her.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means ‘no ma’am’,” I say.

  She nods, settled by my compliance, and holsters her gun and gestures for her partner to do the same. She then quickly calls the murder in as the young guy steps around to me.

  “You’re Zephyr, right?”

  “Guilty as charged,” I answer.

  The cop screws up his nose at that and looks down at dead Sal.

  “You’re not gonna try to pin this on me, right?” I ask.

  “You do it?” the matron asks.

  “Fuck no.”

  “Then chillax. And get your skinny butt out of my crime scene.”

  I settle for that, moving into the kitchen and pointlessly tidying some of the coffee cups I scattered on arrival. It then occurs to me to put a brew on, and since I’ve seen Sal do it a few times, I quickly get the makings in order so by the time the detectives arrive I have six hot brimming cups waiting for everyone. I know, all that and a domestic goddess too. I don’t understand why Elisabeth left me.

  Tiger Murphy walks in clutching a wad of folders and a bemused expression.

  “Looks like you missed your calling.”

  “Coffee’s free. How you cops like it, right? On the house. Sal wouldn’t mind. He’d just hate missing the story.”

  “I took the call when I heard your name,” the detective says. “Crane’s on the phone to the techs. Twice in one long day. Synchronicity?”

  “Coincidence,” I say to her and shrug and blow on my coffee and take a sip.

  John Crane enters the kitchen with all the cheer of Siberian permafrost.

  “You didn’t do it?” he asks straight out.

  Tiger gives a light chuckle at my aggrieved look and passes a coffee to her fellow detective and snags one for herself. Crane just keeps staring at me with those pretty boy blue eyes so misplaced in his head, more resembling the painfully pale and thin front man of an 80s darkwave band than a homicide investigator.