Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “Need a hand, handsome?” an eerily familiar voice sounds behind me.

  Possessed as she might be, Shade gives an indignant squawk as a hand drags her off me by the hair, twisting her about and backhanding the Brit super with such force that she disappears bodily into the carcass of the sea beast.

  Through battle-weary eyes I look up to see myself standing overhead, chest heaving, handsome and admittedly slightly pugnacious mug grinning with that sardonic wink that I never really imagined was quite as unsettling as it is now I’m witness to it.

  Yes, that’s really me and my shadow over me, offering a hand while the skirmishing continues in the background around us.

  Like me, the other Zephyr is spattered in crust and grime from the current crime scene, though his is a dried frieze across rugged features. For a moment I contemplate the possibility of madness, that my stressed brain has finally succumbed to the inevitable and now I’m completely unhinged, but it’s light bodies that are leaping from cadavers around here, not doppelgangers springing out of thin air. Besides – as I take his grip and he hauls me to my squeaking feet – the other Zephyr gives me a nudge that somehow conveys a vague sort of negligible empathy I know could only come from me.

  “Relax, slim,” he says. “I’m you from about twenty minutes from now. You need to skedaddle.”

  “What . . . the . . . fuck?”

  “Don’t think, dude,” the other me says. “I’ll evacuate the mountain top. You have to hit the ideational weapon in the yoga chamber. Got it?”

  “Shit, that’s what it is?”

  “This isn’t really time for a two-man soliloquy,” he says.

  “But how do you know?”

  The other Zephyr motions with his thumb to where the tornado of inter-twisting lights continue to battle it out in the chamber’s center, Twilight and Cusp getting their asses handed to them close by as if by candlelight.

  “She tells you in a few minutes,” he says. “Now go.”

  “OK.”

  And so yeah, I do.

  *

  FROM STING’S MAN-CAVE I jet through the complex until I find the next level, waving my arms like a crazed harbinger of the zombie apocalypse telling anyone who’ll listen to get the fuck out of Afghanistan while they still can. There are masks all over the place already wondering what the ruckus is about, but my deranged trajectory through Lennon’s labyrinth is about as good a semaphore as they’re going to get.

  There’s a few abandoned yoga mats in the meditation chamber and a huge X scratched by some asshole into the buffed concrete, but I ignore this as I hyperventilate and angle up, examining the weird silver device embedded in the ceiling that resembles nothing so much as a giant colander with a few glued-on 80s-style SF TV show doodads for effect.

  It’s only strange because this is how you perceive it, Zephyr, Matrioshka’s pained-sounding thought-voice wafts through my mind.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  The Doomsday Man has devised his own ideational weapon with the help of the G’th’kargh.

  “Are they the . . . the Editors?”

  They are a servitor race, Matrioshka says. The Editors cannot directly enter what we call space-time – and be glad for it. Now hurry. There isn’t much time.

  “You’re still fighting Lennon?”

  Yes. Hurry, Zephyr.

  I eye the silver doohickey and now I’m aware of its nature, sure enough the damned thing changes before my eyes, becoming like candelabra you might see in the Dark Crystal. Evil purple-black spikes protrude, glimmering with malevolent radiance.

  “Belle, why are you helping us?” I ask.

  And of course she doesn’t answer. Too busy, I guess she could say. Me, color me paranoid, I suspect another equally nefarious agenda on the march, but since there’s no denying the present predicament qualifies as a Truly Bad Situation™, I’m inclined not to look a gift horse in the mouth. So instead, I crane my neck and ogle the device and try to get my head around how the fuck I am meant to do anything about it.

  And that’s about when the goddamned villains attack.

  Zephyr 19.9 “Death Singing A Lullaby”

  YEAH, IN THE midst of such calamity, blow me down if I forgot there were actual villains in this place, however much Sting or Lennon or whoever might’ve swallowed their sob stories about seeking enlightenment and the chance to turn a new page. Or maybe the fuckers really meant it, and like that scorpion story assholes like me are over-fond of quoting, presented with a golden opportunity like this they just can’t help themselves. A bit like my apartment, power abhors a vacuum, as they also say.

  I’m barely aware of the trio’s arrival before they seize the initiative and attack.

  Disastro opens up with his earthquake-inducing gauntlets. Not terribly convenient as you might imagine. The unending serenity of the white-painted concrete erupts in buckling chaos and I’m thrown with it as Disastro’s colleagues Rakshasa and Killjoy leap above the tumult, the feline villainess raking me with diamond-tipped claws, and Killjoy striking with his alien tech broadsword. Pain flares across my side as I come down amid the rubble, huge splinters of rock and broken concrete thrusting out of the no-longer-placid floor, the intangible unthinkable above me forgotten for now as I have to again throw myself aside as Killjoy comes down with the sword double-handed and obliterates the slab on which I momentarily lay, the humming of the vibratory vorpal blade like death singing a lullaby.

  Rakshasa is a tawny-haired hellcat of a career felon, and as much as I do like a redhead, I prefer when it’s not over the entire body. She wears a bunch of cute skull-motif jewellery and a black leather bikini on her sinewy body. No tail, though. I don’t know whether that makes her hotter or worse. For his part, Killjoy is a six-foot-four slab of barely restrained homicidal depression turned outwards on the world. He looks more like an escaped royal executioner than a super villain, head-to-toe in black and red with an enclosed face mask that adds a morbid expressionless to his otherwise enraged carnage. They say he picked up the sword working as a Mob enforcer out west and went into private practice, literally a sell-sword to the highest bidder and never letting on that the incessant drone of alien metadata through the sword’s neural link has driven him even deeper into the deep end.

  That said, I could go toe-to-toe with either of these ass-ponies or even both of them on any given day, but with Disastro added to the mix, I have a job ahead of me.

  I’m momentarily wondering why “future me” didn’t give me the heads up about this particular calamity, but then Killjoy comes in hewing and chopping again, chunks of splintered concrete leaping into the air like popcorn as I dive out of the way and keep rolling. The bastard’s fast for an unenhanced human, but after a few diversionary moves I am ready for the counter-attack – only to have Rakshasa leap at me like a cat off the couch, hitting me mid-stride so we go down sliding on the far side of the wreckage created by Disastro, Rakshasa surfing me sliding on the unfettered polished concrete.

  A few moments in I wrestle myself some personal space and land a devastating left hook to the side of the crazy woman’s head. Her tawny skull rebounds from the concrete with a squishing noise and her eyes roll up in their sockets. Leaping off in time, I avoid being cleaved in twain, an eight-inch cut running with blood along my side despite my costume stitching itself up and staunching the blood-flow in the process. Killjoy’s hot on my tail, sword sizzling in the air, but he eats an open dose of my electrical blast that sends him scorching backwards, clearing a path for Disastro to bound over the desolation to land with bone-crunching force with both boots in front of me. At once one of those manacle-encrusted wrists of his open up with a force attack, the air waves exploding outwards in such violent concentric rings that my ineffable nineteenth sense feels assaulted as I’m blasted backward, rebounding off the metal spiral staircase to up above.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I snap.

  Disastro only grins bloodthirstily and taps his temple above the parallel scars
that run diagonally across one side of his bald head.

  “I picked up your little chat with the mystery babe on the airwaves,” he says. “Ideational tech is some rare shit. Me wants.”

  “You can’t have it, shit-for-brains,” I snap. “Is that why you’ve been hanging out here, waiting for the chance to loot this place?”

  “Oh, I came wonderin’ what it was all about,” he shrugs.

  Killjoy silently steps in alongside Disastro, seemingly none the worse for wear. My eyes flit between them and the engorged crystalline plexus. Every time I stare up at it – which is decreasingly frequent, given my current peril – it flickers at the edge of my vision as if willing to turn into a Marcel Duchamps-type artwork of shopping trolleys and toilet seats and coat hangers and ceramic donuts and bed pans and broken bicycles and used foil take-out containers and discarded door knobs and inverted dustbins and so on and so forth. I’m damned if I know how to make a weapon out of it, except everyone but me knows or is convinced I’m facing the mostly deadly arsenal in the known universe and instead it just looks like salvage from a junk yard.

  “And then what?” I say to Disastro.

  The villain sniffs, channeling his best tough guy leer.

  “And then I changed my fuckin’ mind.”

  He lifts his mitts and the world dances again, but this time I’m wise to his concussion attack and vault into the air at the requisite moment, somersaulting to deliver an axe-heel blow that drives him back. Immediately, I have to make a cat-like crouch to avoid decapitation from Killjoy’s sword stroke, and I almost put out my back flipping away from the follow up swing. Killjoy is on me like a bad smell, and precious seconds are expended simply keeping myself out of harm and from death’s door until I get around behind the red-and-black-suited killer and light him up with the palm of my hand between his shoulder blades.

  Killjoy makes a noise like a nuclear power station venting toxins, but before I can relax, he rises from his slithered position to round on me as I sense Disastro circling at the far side of the wreckage.

  “How are you so fucking fast, man?”

  “The sword and I are one,” Killjoy says in his serial killer’s rasp.

  As if to demonstrate, he comes in with a series of fancy double-handed swings, chopping and hewing like a modern day samurai, but I know he’s the distraction and I put on a burst of my own dwindling powers to dodge Disastro landing to fist me from behind. Instead, his double-handed shockwave attack disrupts his plosio’s performance and I leap and turn in the air like a ballerina, dousing both these insolent fucks with a light show that sees them not so much cackling as crackling on the ruptured ground.

  Things might get easier from here, except somehow that fucking nuisance Rakshasa peels herself off the ground, and just as I relax, she leaps out like a cat from a refrigerator, literally caterwauling as she goes at me with hands and raking feet. Somehow amid the furry chaos I get my left hand around her sinewy neck and land at least six blows to her head, dropping her into a furry puddle a split second before Disastro ploughs into me and we go crunching over the nearby rubble, his metallic body suit protecting him, me also cushioning the fall for the egg-headed fuck as I manage to repeat my trick with the feline for about two seconds, fingers like claws of my own around Disastro’s neck as I land the first of what I imagine to be many blows, only to have Killjoy grapple me from behind so that all three of us go down.

  In a huge feat of strength, I throw the two bastards off and jet upwards in sheer desperation, directly beneath the angelic genitalia crowning Lennon’s glittering hidey-hole. It is but the blink of an eye before I am ready to smash into the ever-shifting omnipresent weapon, but time unfolds strangely in such close proximity to the artefact, giving me a longer pause into which I throw my many harried musings about how exactly one might even wield such a weapon.

  The array continues shifting and changing before my outstretched hand. The world seems to invert. Out of the chaos of crystals and cuneiform, one rod transforms into something like the handle of Excalibur, the cave roof its anvil and stone. My fingers clasp the cold hilt and wavelengths of light coruscate over me and my psyche, obliterating the present, the Now, and everything that has ever been.

  *

  WHEN THE LIGHT fades, I’m as astonished as anyone to find myself in a featureless white space. It could be the Matrix-like confines of White Nine’s simulacra for all I know, but no sooner do I realize I’m not in Kansas anymore than my thoughts are plucked from my cerebellum, creating a sense of place, time, gravity, an atmosphere, the recreation of a forgotten memory, the dingy apartment Elisabeth and I moved into back when she gave up on the college thing the first time and in which we discovered we were having a baby.

  The place smelled of mildew and damp and instantly those forgotten but familiar odors wash over me as I blink, a feeling like dust in my eyes as I scramble to parse this new locale, fists rapidly opening and closing as I scan the shitty living room for dangers.

  From the doorless kitchen a hunched-looking man enters, bringing with him a familiar fug of cheap cigar smoke as he plucks disdainfully at the lint on his shit-brown cardigan that isn’t as imaginary as his routine might make out.

  “Nice job you’re doin’ solving my murder, Zeph,” Sal Doro says. “I didn’t know you cared. I mean that, literally, you know. Guess I was right.”

  “Sal?”

  The wheezing old newshound gives me one of those patented Walter Mathau are-you-shitting-me-or-are-you-just-new looks, glancing around as if looking for a swab to wipe off the afterbirth. Those nicotine-stained eyes settle on mine and he shakes his head.

  “No, Zephyr,” he says almost sadly. “Choose the form of your destroyer.”

  “You are fucking kidding me, right?”

  “Nope,” Sal says. “This here’s the real deal.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “Think of me as the operatin’ system,” Sal says. “Your brain’s running at the highest frame rate of its pitifully short life right now an’ you’ve got about point-three seconds in real time to assert your control of the weapon before it destroys you and levels that fuckin’ mountain in one foul spatio-temporal destructive swoop.”

  “Jesus.”

  “So what’s it gonna be, Zeph?”

  “I’m not thinking of no fucking marshmallow man,” I tell him.

  “It ain’t like that,” he says. “Relax. Open your mind. Your greatest challenge – greatest you’ve ever known – let it come to you. Let it come out of you.”

  “Jesus, Sal, I’m nervous,” I say, throat gluggy with the fear as I momentarily wonder if that’s just another of these phantasmal effects.

  “Kid, you ain’t got no control here,” he says. “Let it go.”

  And it’s not that I choose to do as he says, it’s just that it already started happening about zero-point-one second earlier, and things are moving too fast for me to even realize how badly fucked up this is going to be.

  Zephyr 19.10 “Invisible Masters”

  I GUESS THERE’S a time when you can thank God or Allah or Satan or the big bad wolf of R’lyeh that each and every one of us is at one and the same time a special little snowflake and yet just another sheep in the herd. And sometimes our foibles are our saving graces.

  I guess the Editors or Lennon’s G’th’kargh or whoever else is behind this ideational tech never bet on the human race and our petty idiosyncrasies – or maybe it’s just me who’s the fuck up as my illusory Sal Doro gives a cool nod as if rising to the challenge, tipping an imaginary fedora before shuffling backwards from the room.

  A feeling like ball-bearings passing through my bowels, uh . . . passes through my bowels, and the front door to this god-awful apartment flies open and I brace for imminent attack by my worst nightmare.

  Instead, Tessa swings in with a black look on her face I recognize at once as part of her rich and varied inheritance from her mother. She’s dressed in that ridiculously erotic private school uniform she use
d to wear before she got herself expelled for succumbing to its very understandable appeal on one of her co-students, but there’s something about the swing to this not-real version of my daughter’s hips that speaks of explosive danger closer to the human heart than any superhero slugfest, yet it sends a chill down my spine all the same as I sense deep within my tightening chest that the weapon’s operating system spoke true when it said I would have to face the biggest challenge in my miserable existence.

  What bigger challenge than this?

  Palpably aware of the stakes, I take a step towards Tessa offering a conciliatory hand.

  “Hey, uh, honey, what’s the matter?”

  Tessa shoots a baleful look as if throwing me in with whatever portion of humanity she has freshly consigned to her mental gas chamber, but her expression softens momentarily as I shrug my shoulders and pull my best concerned dad face, aware it makes me look like an ass and not really caring, as ever, so long as it works.

  “Tessa, please,” I say, thinking very carefully on my words and mentally dusting off every parenting manual I’ve even glanced at in passing. “I need to know what’s happened and if you’re OK.”

  Just as she starts to relax and I think maybe we might get somewhere, and you know, maybe this challenge isn’t against the insurmountable odds it appears, the apartment door banging open a second time as my ex-wife’s shockingly real doppelganger enters, arms brimming with groceries.