Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  And so directed to the gossiping of sirens, I nod, face taking a more serious mien as I acknowledge the apparent gravity of the situation. The view itself yields little: from this height the concrete canyons of Atlantic City are as impersonal as they are remote. On the other hand, the emergency klaxons are unrelenting. Panicked.

  Holland dresses and we eat quietly, the memory of our coupling not so much dismissed by the new mood as held in abeyance. I can only project onto Cusp what she might be thinking at this point – not that it has ever stopped me with anyone – but I fancy we each contemplate the course of our lives from this point forward, and never more importantly the options for the very next step.

  “We should do a patrol,” I say.

  “Patrol?”

  “Like the old days.”

  “Shouldn’t we be looking for Killswitch and his cronies?”

  “Maybe,” I say and shrug. “You tell me where to start and I will.”

  “You’re the man of experience here,” Cusp says. “I thought you might have some kind of technique for this kind of thing.”

  “Experience, technique,” I say and shoot her a wistful smirk. “Your mind still stuck a few hours back?”

  Holland chuckles and shakes her head and looks away.

  “No.”

  “Now you have your memory back, did you work out how you got powers?”

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “Your powers,” I say unhelpfully. “I never understood how you got them.”

  “I don’t understand,” she says. “I was new to the scene when I fell in with Twilight and that whole . . . scene. You know the story from there.”

  “What, you were actually a mask? With powers?”

  “What did you think, Zephyr? That Twilight just chose some random hottie and dyed her hair green and ordered her a costume and. . . ?”

  She trails off before having to list the unpalatable stuff – stuff like my pal the antihero using sorcery to possess her like a meat puppet so he could fuck me and God knows who else on the sly.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I guess that’s exactly what I thought, though spelling it aloud like that, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Precisely.”

  “So what happened to the green hair?”

  Cusp just shrugs. She stands from the table wearing a frayed hotel bathrobe I’ve been carting about with my things since the day Elisabeth kicked me out of the apartment. It looks better on Holland – especially the parts where it barely contains her – but the pouty blonde scans the meagre trappings and gives an effete sigh.

  “You liked it?” she asks.

  “The hair? Yeah.”

  She nods, gestures, there’s a flash, and suddenly her hair is a similar if not identical hue as conforms to my memories. I must be grinning broadly at this point because Holland fixes me with her most arch look and tuts like I’m a naughty school boy in need of paddling, which frankly I would be up for, but at once she struts about five steps from the eating area to the boudoir, divests herself of the old robe, and resumes suiting up. Left to its own devices, my mirth dries up and it’s only a few seconds later I clamber back into the stillsuit, checking it over for bullet holes, and moments later we are alight over the city once more.

  *

  FROM TWO THOUSAND feet the chaos is ever more obvious. Phones are down, and as we perform an overhead circuit, the grid gives out as well. Traffic chokes the main avenues of downtown in a gridlock unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Police man control points because their patrol cars are as useless as all the other vehicles, just horses and motorbikes able to thread their way through the snarling maelstrom. Otherwise, it is still an ordinary day, by which I mean businesses are open, soldiering on without power, and many of the high rise floors we pass have workers in them, however little most of them are probably achieving lit by nothing except natural daylight, computers mercifully dead. The feeling of humanity being three meals away from the war of all against all has never felt so real.

  “What do we do?” Cusp asks, floating beside me. “We’re just two people.”

  I nod, lost for answers myself. The crowd noise below operates at a steady buzz, strangely crystalline without the myriad competing background sounds of everyday postmodernity, just thousands upon thousands of pedestrians forced out of their natural environment and sharing their freak-out with others of their kind and similar temperament. A chopper chugs between the double-glazed towers a couple of blocks away, a camera crew dangling from the open aperture, and I am struck by the absurdity of their mission given the networks apparently collapsed long before the ability to broadcast went completely out the window as well.

  “I wish I could tell whether this was confined to Atlantic City or further afield, but with the phones down. . . .”

  “You fly fast,” Cusp says. “You want to go scout it?”

  “I could,” I say. “I could reach Canada in thirty minutes going full mach. I’m not sure that’s the priority, though.”

  “Tell me what is?”

  “I dunno,” I answer. “I kind of just want to check on my daughter.”

  “If you want us to swing that way, we could.”

  I scan the ground below. Civilians choke the footpaths, more and more of them starting to openly press down the paved avenues where score upon score of yellow cabs and delivery vans are caught in an unmoving stream, horns competing with the dopplering sirens, the shouts and dire imprecations of harried drivers like the tang of foreign spices in an alien marketplace.

  “Maybe,” I say eventually. “There’s nothing else –”

  And then an avalanche of screams directs our attention south.

  Zephyr 20.6 “Hunting Birds”

  THE MASKED MEN exit as the plate glass doors of the bank shatter before them like a frozen waterfall, the robbers loaded with Navy bags stuffed with cash, their ballistic vests, black ski masks and silenced automatic weapons in bristling display. As the glass scatters across the sidewalk, the dozens of people all around start shrieking like they’ve been hired to do it, and one of the masked goons feels the need to empty his long-barreled Uzi into the sky, nominally deadly rounds fut-fut-futting up between Cusp and I as we circle above like a mated pair of hunting birds.

  “Keeping the peace might be the order of the day,” I say.

  Cusp must like the cut of my jib, because she plunges streetwards without further discussion, left fist lighting up, the other side of her body streaking dark neoplasm like she’s been dipped in tar. I keep close to Cusp’s luscious behind, sparks playing across and between my hands as people scatter at our arrival on the street.

  “Hold it right there,” Cusp yells.

  Without further ado, she opens up with a laser beam that takes out the closest gunman and shears off the barrel of the mook’s gun next to him.

  Sub-machine guns swivel our way, but before they can do more than burp a few rounds, I fling my sparks into the next two paramilitaries – sending them flying backwards and into either concrete or glass depending in their position. I’m rewarded with a well-aimed circle of lead rounds that hit me in the chest and knock me flat, a ragged hole like a tear in the flag of my black-clad chest, the hair blasted from my sternum as I rub the spot wincing and trying to diffuse the contact. I’ll never get over the innate anxiety of getting gunned down, however tough I am and however brief it might be.

  Cusp charges into the fray, leaping in a graceful if slow-moving somersault to wallop the next guy with her blackened fist, thumping him face-first into the pavement. Before goon number five can open up at close quarters, Cusp reverses about and kicks him across the jaw. He spins like on a wire, crunching down on the broken glass as he slides back into the bank foyer. Gunman six is the guy with the ruined weapon, and he takes one look at Cusp and another at me rising from the sidewalk, and turns to scarper. Cusp gathers her right arm back and hurls her darkforce and the guy sprawls like he’s shotgunned, the black stuff splaying like syrup in zero-g, wra
pping around him as he staggers forward off-balance – and with one gesture Cusp draws the whole bundle tight to yank him back the other way so he cracks his coccyx on the concrete before giving a howl and lying flat writhing in agony unmindful of the strange, quasi-eldritch energy clasping him tight.

  I land alongside Cusp, trying not to limp with my grazes and bruised pride. She stares at the darkforce like it’s the Devil’s very own cotton candy sticking to her fingers, seemingly marveling at the substance as if taking it in for the first time. Then she catches herself out and looks to me, blue eyes behind the mask a thousand miles away as she looks at me like I’m a stranger.

  I go about the journeyman’s work of collaring the various hoodlums, disabling their guns and dragging them squirming into a pile. A handful of civilians with juice still in their phones catch the whole thing up close and personal, including the left uppercut I deliver to one of the guys who tries to make out like he still has some fight in him. The rabbit punch dissuades him of this idea, and as I do this, several foot cops emerge breathlessly from the crowd with their Glocks drawn. And as much as I am not really in the mood for my usual wiseass bullshit, I double-take to see their wide-eyed, open-mouthed looks haven’t abated despite the defusal of the threat – which can only mean one thing.

  We’re the threat.

  The four cops’ guns come up on Cusp and me as they bark over the top of each other for us to freeze and not move an inch and hold it right there.

  I look to my comely comrade and she looks to me and slowly, reluctantly, we put our hands up.

  *

  BARELY MOVING, I try to catch all four cops’ eyes at once.

  “Hey officers, I think there’s been a misunderstanding here,” I say and nudge one of the unconscious gunmen with my foot. “I don’t mean to sound like an ass, but don’t you recognize me? These guys are there –”

  “We know you, Zepha,” one of the cops nods, sweating and blinking like a gecko.

  The same as his pals, the veteran beat cop is packing his pants at the prospect of taking Cusp and me into custody. Hell, the police barely give Holland’s overwhelming cleavage a second look, such is the enormity of the task before them.

  A Korean cop who seems familiar squares off at me, gun levelled.

  “Don’t like it much either, Zephyr, but your name came up on the wire,” he says. “You and your lady friend, we gotta take you in.”

  “Boys, I think there’s some confusion –”

  “Maybe,” the first cop says. “Alla more reason to come quietly, huh?”

  “Take a look around you, officer,” Cusp says.

  It’s like the male cops don’t even hear her. Talk about patriarchy.

  “Guys, c’mon, this is bullshit.”

  “Sorry Zephyr. Hands up.”

  “What, you think I’m holding a gun?”

  The watching crowd births a couple more cops as I give Cusp another look dark with misgivings, and hearing my comment, a butch-looking female cop steps right in close with her sidearm.

  “You making threats, fancy man?”

  “‘Fancy man’? What the fuck?”

  “That’s it,” the cop says. “We’ll take you in on disorderly conduct if we have to. We’re not fucking around here. Hands behind your back.”

  “Disorderly?” I say. “I don’t see any members of the public being affected. You can’t level disorderly just ‘cos of a little bad language, officer. You’re pitching for obstructing a public officer, and that I ain’t doing.”

  I waggle my hands still in the air, but taking in the cops’ fixed and frozen faces and the sheer aura of fear presiding over the day, I flick Cusp the last of my broody looks and hope she understands this is the end of the line as far as I’m concerned.

  I do the crouch thing and rocket into the air. There’s a few gunshots – I feel a hot slug pass marvelously close by – and then Cusp is on my tail and we rise and turn and head further south, leaving the angry cops far behind.

  *

  THE CITY IS uneasy and it’s not alone. Cusp and I blast a few miles away from the last disaster before I sense her lagging behind and I swoop back to find her scowling fetchingly at the tumult of horns and sirens and angry commuters below.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to work out,” she says.

  “ My daughter’s place isn’t far away. Let’s regroup there and discuss.”

  “Don’t you want to understand what’s happened?”

  I study Cusp moments longer, as usual with no real clue what might be going on behind this woman’s mask. Like she has just issued a challenge to my manhood or something, I nod resolutely and drop streetwards.

  It is a more sedate scene on the corner of 8th Avenue and 465th Street. A single, skinny, nervous-looking black cop looks startled when I land in a crouch like I’ve fallen directly in front of him from Santa’s sleigh. I lift my hand, palm out like I might blast the sucker if he moves – just a precautionary measure, you understand – and Cusp descends more gracefully behind me.

  “You’ve got an arrest warrant out on me?” I ask him.

  “N-not just you,” he says. “All masks. Anyone.”

  “Huh. And when did this come through?”

  “This morning,” the officer says. “Just when we started realizin’ how much shit was hittin’ the fan, apologies lady.”

  “That’s Cusp,” I say with a thumb over my shoulder.

  “Sorry about the language, Miss Cusp.”

  Trying not to chuckle at the manners, I feel Cusp’s eyes boring into me like just another kind of performance pressure. I nod to the cop to regain his attention as he looks salaciously up and down Holland’s admittedly horn-inducing gear.

  “How’d you get these orders?” I ask him. “Phones, computers, everything’s down.”

  “Stations mostly got generator back-ups,” the cop says. “Some bright spark at HQ got the old telex operating. Orders come through on the wire.”

  “The wire?”

  “Saying what, exactly?” Cusp asks.

  “All masked adventurers to be detained for questioning by Parahuman Affairs.”

  “The Feebs?” I say incredulously.

  The cop shrugs and I actually feel bad for the guy.

  “They don’t explain all directives you know,” he says. “I’m just following orders.”

  “Something’s gone haywire at head office,” I tell him. “You understand there’s no way in hell I’m letting you arrest me, right?”

  “I’m no fool, mister.”

  “Mister? You know who I am, right?”

  “Yeah, you’re that weather-controllin’ guy. Zephyr?”

  I mutter “Fuck you” under my breath and nod to Cusp and we take to the air again. To his credit, the patrolman doesn’t even draw on us, just shades his eyes for one last look at Cusp’s ass before we become dots on the smoggy horizon.

  *

  I ADMIT I’M vaguely astonished I can actually find my way back to Tessa’s apartment, but desperate times bring out hidden talents, I guess. Following some terse instructions to Cusp, we alight on the roof and bang down the metal fire escape to the pot plant-festooned window sill, ignoring the scent of ganja as I grab the overhead shelf and swing in like I’m fucking Batman or something, surprising Tess and her girlfriend Syzygy in their civvies (which is to say their PJs) sharing a joint amid a riot of colorful cushions on the threadbare living room floor, the TV like a dead idol before them.

  “Dad?”

  Tessa and her girlfriend stand and Syzygy – I don’t know or remember her real name – looks around, desperately left clutching the scoob as if I’m going to haul her skinny ass to White Nine or something. I take it from her awestruck fingers and sink into the thrift store sofa amid the sound of rusting springs and a smell that is equal parts mildew, patchouli and girl sex.

  “Dad, what are you doing here?” Tessa says and rounds on Cusp. “And with her? Who is this, your latest floozy?�
��

  “Watch your lip, honey-bunch,” Cusp says in that false sweetness-and-light thing women can pull off so much better than men.

  Tessa and Holland face off a moment like lionesses. Syzygy makes herself scarce and returns moments later in her black-and-white costume as the two women in my life call an uneasy truce. Tessa flicks her petulant yet honeyed gaze at me and I sigh and take a drag on the reefer, but it’s gone out. I toss the thing out the window like I should have on entry.

  “I’m glad you’re feeling pretty relaxed about the city going to hell,” I say.

  “What are we meant to do?”

  “Suit up,” I say and stand as if I’m some kind of example. “We’re heroes, damn it.”

  “It always sounds so hokey when you put it that way,” Tessa says.

  I know what she means, but now’s not to the time for existential quibbles about the various reasons why we dress up like peacocks to fight crime.

  “Just get changed,” I say. “You got anything to eat around here?”

  “You’re hungry again?” Cusp says.

  “Who are you? One of my mothers?”

  Suitably chastened if not outright offended, Cusp moves off to the window sill and falls into broken conversation with Syzygy while Tessa flounces from the room and I move into the kitchen, disturbed at the emptiness of my daughter’s refrigerator. After a good five seconds seriously thinking about eating a block of butter, I return to the living room scooping pickles from a jar and crunching as Tessa re-enters dressed as Windsong.

  “That’s more like it,” I commend her.

  “A lot of good use it’s going to do,” she says. “We can’t get the TV up or the Internet. I don’t even know what’s happened.”

  “Everything’s down: phones, power, even traffic’s stalled out there.”

  “And there’s that other thing,” Cusp says.

  “Oh yeah. There’s a citywide arrest warrant – hell, maybe it’s nation-wide – on our heads.”

  “You and . . . your girlfriend?”

  “No, on all of us. Anyone in costume.”