Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “Skyhawk? I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Yeah, well the Almighty didn’t exactly take the suggestion kindly.”

  Syzygy raises an eyebrow.

  “Yeah. He got erased from history.”

  “Harsh,” she says. “How did you escape?”

  “Well, we were pretty much doomed, you know, and if the Almighty’s wife didn’t turn up right at that moment I think he was having second thoughts about his support for the existence of organic life, at least in this quadrant of the universe, so. . . .”

  “His wife?”

  “The things they don’t tell you in the bible, huh?”

  “Spoilers or . . . yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, Zephyr,” Syzygy says and moves closer. “I can’t shake knowing you’re this, you know, veteran mask, with all this experience and all these stories, and here you are in the . . . the body . . . of this smoking babe, and I –”

  “Stop whatever Being John Malkovich moment you’re having right there, Syzygy or whatever your real name is –”

  “It’s Joan.”

  “OK, Joan. Cut the crap, OK? Do you care about my daughter?”

  “Of course I do. I just feel so powerless –”

  “I don’t think you’re going to do much good hitting on her old man whether he is or isn’t actually technically a male lesbian or whatever he, I mean I am right now, got it?”

  “I thought you’d be cool with it.”

  “Well, you know, ordinarily, yes I probably would be . . . but not with my daughter’s girlfriend. Have a little . . . fuck . . . fidelity or something, will ya?”

  “Jeez, you really do sound like a straight middle-aged white guy.”

  “Look, I came for some help.”

  Syzygy calms down and nods.

  “You tell me what I can do,” she says.

  I start pulling off my gloves.

  “I need an outfit.”

  Zephyr 20.10 (Coda)

  THE GOOD NEWS, if there is any, is that this city-wide collapse is exactly that. As she and I dig through hers and Tessa’s clothes – which is to say we walk into the bedroom they share and just start picking up random garments off the floor – Syzygy relates how she flew as far as the Canadian border before regaining phone reception and seeing the lights on in that Disneyland of the north, Toronto.

  “Makes me kind of wonder why the fuck the cavalry isn’t charging in,” I say as I pick up and discard a sequined halter top.

  “You know, it’s really hot when you cuss like that.”

  “Cuss?”

  I stare at the girl and don’t really know where to go from there, so I just keep staring and sigh loudly like she’s a TV commercial I am wishing would end. See? I can do hot girl easy. Joan gets the picture (no pun intended) and retrieves a pair of Tessa’s leather pants.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s this goddamned . . . cuirass . . . that’s worrying me,” I say.

  “Queer-ass?”

  “Cuirass. Like a . . . piece of armor or . . . fuck, just forget about it.”

  I take the pants and scan around and shrug and kick off these ridiculous boots while Syzygy gives me a couple of lingering looks and then comes back with a pair of pointy-toed Ariadne Ross black leather boots with buckles down the sides. I shuck into the leather pants inadvertently putting on a little wiggly dance show of my own as I try to squirm Cusp’s curvaceous hips and ass into my daughter’s otherwise quite welcoming pants.

  There’s a dyke pun in there somewhere, but I’ll leave it there like a literary Where’s Waldo.

  Syzygy – or Joan, as she keeps insisting I call her – gives a look like a pervert at a pet show, and at one point I think I see her actually wipe drool from her chin. Tessa’s pants fit well enough in the hips, but they’re about ten inches too short for Holland’s long legs.

  “That shouldn’t really matter once you wear those boots,” Syzygy says.

  And true to that, once the boots are on I feel slightly more reasonably dressed despite the top of the cat suit persisting to squeeze her/my/our tits together like a Subway sandwich. Once again I catch Syzygy looking and I give her a ribald “what?” shrug.

  “Can I touch them?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Your . . . boobs. They’re . . . awesome.”

  I sigh. “Yes, they are pretty awesome.”

  “So . . . can I?”

  “What, like a . . . science experiment?”

  “Totally.”

  “I need another shower anyway,” I say.

  “How long does that take you?”

  “. . . about six hours.”

  And true to my word, some time around the next sunrise it’s time to kick into action and see what the fuck has happened to my city.

  Cusp’s costume is now a slightly more respectful leather dominatrix look with leather pants and boots beneath the deeply v-necked vinyl corset, arms bare except for a single leather bracelet I found at the back of Tessa’s cupboard behind her six vibrators and a dusty copy of Hustler I’m pretty sure used to be mine from about six years ago.

  I flick Syzygy a look, her curiosity I hope more than sated.

  “Well?”

  “Good luck, Tessa’s new mommy,” she says with a wry laugh.

  “Hmmm, I hadn’t thought about it that way,” I admit. “You’re not coming?”

  “I’m gonna hold down the fort a little longer here.”

  “Your girlfriend – my daughter – is in FBI custody,” I say.

  “All the more reason for us to not be out on those streets,” Syzygy says. “We’ll get disappeared too.”

  “The city needs us?”

  “You think?”

  “Don’t get all Gen-Y or whatever the hell generation you are,” I say.

  “I don’t know, Zephyr. The city seems to get along pretty much whatever we do. A bit like the planet, you know?”

  “That’s your philosophy?”

  Syzygy shrugs.

  “Sounds like a cop-out to me,” I tell her. “Madmen – and women – can have a riot out there, and it takes people like us to hold that line.”

  “What, madmen and women like us?”

  Now it’s my turn to shrug.

  “I find your studied indifference wearing a little thin,” I tell her.

  I move from the bedroom back into the living room and the ubiquitous open window to the fire escape, even as it occurs to me it is snowing outside and melted water dribbles in onto the floor. I can practically taste Syzygy’s angst as she follows, teeth nibbling at otherwise well-groomed fingers in a show of nerves.

  “Zephyr . . . Cusp . . . Wait.”

  I look at her: really just a slip of a girl, not even with my daughter’s curves to mask her youth and innocence, however tough her bedroom talk.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m afraid,” she says.

  “Yeah. I get that.”

  “You’re afraid too, right?”

  “Naw,” I say and shrug and tap Cusp’s pretty temple. “I’ve been whacked around a few too many times for that.”

  Syzygy gives a nervous laugh at my bravado and takes a few baby steps forward with her own coltish legs, arms wrapped about herself.

  “OK, what do I do?”

  “Go back, and find out what the hell the outside world is doing,” I tell her. “And if you can find a way to rig some communication so these things aren’t dead,” and I waggle Holland’s cell, inanimate these past few days, “then maybe we can co-ordinate some kind of action.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I don’t know what.”

  “I thought if I said yes, that meant I was coming with you?”

  “No,” I tell her. “I’ve got to catch up with a few friends and see what other help might still be out there. Good luck.”

  I step to the window frame, again curiously unaffected by the cold, launching into the dawn and accelerating before any passing onlo
oker might glimpse me.

  From there, it is straight to the nearest tall rooftop, where I alight with the sunrise throwing candy-colored beams across the city which almost looks beautiful if it weren’t for the smoke churning from the north-east and the sound of emergency sirens warbling like sparrows awakening with the day.

  I take a deep breath and slowly chant “Roxanne” and hope this time it works.

  Zephyr 21.1 “The Bloody Disaster”

  THE ERUPTION OF red light that flowers from St George’s teleport rivals the very sunrise as he and a battered-looking Sting step onto the Atlantic City rooftop. At first they barely pay me (as Cusp) any mind, scanning about as the sunburst fades, and however flattering I find the weak morning, at that moment they look more like a pair of haggard old men searching for the WC than world-class supers.

  “Where the hell is –?” Sting starts to say, but he cuts short at my awkward wave.

  “Right here. It’s me. I was the one who called you.”

  Sting immediately scans me with his high beams, facing blooming as he detects the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  “Zephyr?” he says with his customary skull-faced scowl. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Atlantic City’s in trouble,” I say.

  “Might not be the only one,” George pipes in.

  “And none of us are orphans today, Zephyr,” Sting says. “We’re all stuck in catch-up mode cleaning up after this bloody disaster in Afghanistan.”

  “The bloody disaster I helped avert,” I say, momentarily less fond of the crisp and highly feminine tone with which my words spring.

  The two men stare at me speechless once more, then Sting is the first to shake it off. I notice Harrison’s eyes go to my boobs and I cross my arms and give him a “really?” look that only makes the old perv laugh.

  “I don’t know what’s going on here,” Sting cuts in, “but I can’t have any of it. Not right now. Sorry Zephyr. You’re on your own.”

  “What? I –”

  “You should know the score,” he continues as if he’s already accepted my femininity and decided to plough on no matter what the good damsel might have to say.

  “We offered you a spot on our roster,” he lectures me. “World-beaters. Just for episodes like this. But that fucking dad of yours fried half my friends’ brains and scattered the rest to the four corners of the globe – not to mention three of my mundane employees, he just burnt their minds out entirely like . . . like ticks – and there’s still the matter of those bloody creepy crawlies he was palling up with.”

  “What about them?”

  “Those fucking bugs are still on the loose, Zephyr,” Sting says. “We’ve got to keep this contained, and until we do, that’s my priority.”

  “But Atlantic City –”

  “That’s what you’re for,” he says, then adds with an unkind sneer: “Princess.”

  “Fine. You interrupt me again like that I’m going to kick your balls in,” I tell him.

  They ignore the sledge and St George gives a tremulous sniff.

  “Not to mention we’re knackered,” the older hero says. “Been putting out spot fires for two days. Whisperer’s in a coma and we still can’t find Ali.”

  “Shit,” I sigh. “You’re saying I’m on my own.”

  “Atlantic City’s blacked out to the world,” Sting tells me. “I don’t know what’s happened, or what’s happened to you, Zephyr, but it’s bad mojo.”

  “And what’s the rest of the world doing about it?” I ask.

  St George laughs. “I think they see it as an ‘American problem’.”

  “Charming.”

  The two English veterans shrug, very much the personification of their country’s apparent disdain, and with a final glance back at my cleavage, they disappear into the red aurora of Harrison’s trans-Atlantic warp and vanish.

  Fuckers.

  *

  HEADING NORTH FOR Loren’s barrio is like crossing a war zone. I’m guessing it’s been four days now the city has been frozen incommunicado, and though the rioters look fairly well fed, the old adage about civilization being three meals away from anarchy has never seemed more true.

  That said, the distant freeways of the outer suburbs remain choked with the exodus from Atlantic City. Gunshots rattle over my flight path like Chinese firecrackers. Random acts of savagery are not my purview for now – it’s hard to ignore with looters en masse charging out of electronics stores, unwise to the irony of their predicament given the city’s got no juice to power those fancy gadgets – but crossing the rebuilt Avenue of the Americas, my blue-eyed gaze is drawn by new sprawling bouts of gunfire, and curiosity and self-preservation hone me in on the farrago of police and SWAT vehicles blocking off an inner city intersection, more than twenty lawmen firing with everything they’ve got at several scorched and burning vehicles riddled like Swiss cheese. A half-dozen familiar-looking green-suited, ballistic-armored types crouch in cover, reloading and checking their vectors with quasi-military precision, armed to the teeth and in no apparent hurry as they seemingly defend the smoke-churning lobby of a nearby high-rise into which someone has thoughtfully driven one of the city’s garbage trucks.

  What the fuck is going on here, you might ask.

  A wiser head than mine might also move on, leaving the authorities to their job as I imagine Syzygy sees it, but dead and wounded cops already decorate those streets. I believe it’s within me to make a difference between life and death, so I drop from my vantage, drawing deep within the still unknown crevasse of what feels like Holland’s borrowed unconscious, trying to prise out the wellspring of these fabulous powers on the one hand similar and yet so completely different to my own.

  In that way the mind interacts with the parahuman body, I try to intuit the pathways to Cusp’s light control abilities and instead get lost within a maze built from the blurry grey walls of some misunderstanding I can’t yet fully fathom. The only thing that’s clear – as I plunge from the sky and the very first of these militant gunmen note my impending arrival – is somehow those powers remain out of reach to me. And thus I make a fist of my right hand and – like some preordained cliché – dig deep into the dark side to shroud myself in a comet-like shield of inky black protoplasm which allows me to sweep down and low and through, scattering five of the six surviving hoods like nine-pins.

  The bullets cease at my intrusion as dozens of eyes land on me landing at the far side of the firefight, whipping about to take in the crashed dump truck, the dozens of frantic cops, the smoking wreck of a minivan, the riddled taxis, the visor-masked faces of the majority of the gunmen picking themselves up off the street. It’s like the cops genuinely don’t know if I’m one of them, which is insult enough and a testament to the collective testosterone when one of them wolf whistles from the convenient anonymity of the police barricade.

  The most immediate threat is the one guy I didn’t scatter with my cannonball attack. He pops up from a crouch off to one side, the only gunman alone behind the wreckage left by the garbage truck’s wake. The snub-nosed SMG is similar to the ones in the initial attack on the ACSX and I am still triangulating the clues with what might look like a disregard for my personal safety as the goon hefts the weapon and starts sputtering those weird heavy rounds my way, but it is only a few balletic steps for me to spin, more graceful in Cusp’s body than I could ever hope to be in my own, and with short and powerful knife-hand strikes I deflect the weapon, chop the asswipe across the throat and take his legs out from beneath him.

  The remaining three hopeless cases lift their guns, but the police seize the advantage and two are knocked off their feet by rapid fire converging from multiple angles, their armor protecting them from death but not indignity as burly-looking SWAT guys rush in with plastic restraints. As for the last mook, I swivel about and open my palm at him from twenty paces, firing globular darkness that envelops his head. Dodging blind fire, I jog in and try a tried and trusted Zephyr-style combo of body blows
up his torso, but Cusp’s fists lacks the same oomph and the Kevlar shields the guy, so in the end I wrench his gun arm back and behind his shoulder and quickly cantilever his body in a jiu-jitsu capture that handily shatters the entire joint. The masked gunman gives a scream like some primeval goddess in childbirth and a short sharp chop to the throat silences him – or at least leaves him sputtering and choking on the asphalt as another cop arrives with those nifty disposable cuffs.

  And then I slowly note the police guns trained on me.

  Zephyr 21.2 “Weaponized Physics”

  “YOU GUYS ARE kidding me, right?” I say to the eight or so hard-bitten police advancing with their handguns and M14s drawn.

  There’s no immediate answer. Feeling my way through the moment as blindly as if it were me affected by these powers, I put my hands on my hips in what I hope is an alluring posture, though I probably just somehow look like someone’s mom trying to play hooker for dad’s shitty fantasies, even though Cusp is admittedly smokingly fucking hot, so my spastification of her body language is barely a hindrance.

  The forces surrounding me lick their lips in hesitation and angry arousal, but not a single barrel lowers. Several step closer. The SWAT guys continue to round up the mystery gunmen and one or two of the heavily-armored officers clearly feel brave enough that they start to close in on me with those disposable shackles.

  “Hold on, guys,” I say with my palms up non-threateningly. “What is this even about? What’s your orders? Do you even know who I am?”

  Their replies come back as a panoply.

  “Not important.”

  “You’re Devil Wing, right?”

  “Naw, she’s Flashlight.”

  “Ain’t she Cyclona or . . . Memphis Belle or . . . fuck it.”

  “Orders from the top, missy,” one old chauvinist with a gay porn moustache barks at me and steps clear of the rest. “It doesn’t matter what we might think. Order says to round all you costumed fruitcakes up for questioning.”