Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “You’re looking for Seeker?”

  “That’s right, Ricky.”

  “I’m sorry?” he replies. “Do I know you?”

  “Just take me to Loren.”

  Ricky pauses and looks at me and for one giddy moment I think he’s somehow going to make this unbelievable intuitive leap and guess my true identity, but then his dark eyes flick away with disinterest and doused curiosity and he nods, rolling one shoulder for me to follow.

  *

  INSIDE, I SUSPECT Sarah Connor is in charge of the relief effort. The once almost bucolic peace of the inner city slum is banished by the urban refugees choking its corridors and various rooms, the apartments overflowing with women and children, many of them in distress, the majority from non-Anglo backgrounds, the air humid with spicy cooking and the twang of intermingling accents and children’s piss.

  Among them move armed men and more than a few younger women, the red bandanas some badge of office. Following Ricky’s wake, I squeeze past a masked woman with glowing sea-blue eyes, a shimmering displacement field emanating from her dusky skin.

  “How’s that Glow supply treating you?” I call in Ricky’s wake.

  “You know an awful lot about our operation for someone I ain’t never met before,” he says over his shoulder as we ascend familiar stairs and he nods to a muscle-bound guard toting an M-60.

  “I know a thing or two,” I tell him.

  On the next level, someone with a hammer or maybe just super strength has knocked down a few walls to provide a bigger marshalling area, powdered brick still clinging to the ancient carpet. Loren stands in the middle looking as winsome and beautiful as I remember, her hair doing its spectral dance, an otherworldly aura spilling off her very Being like a candle at work within, curvaceous figure just a lamp for that light. Ricky whispers in her ear, distracting my former lover from addressing a four-man cadre of gunmen examining sketches on a whiteboard. Loren’s honeyed eyes flick my way and she hands Ricky a sharpie and moves through to me, our conversation rendered semi-inaudible by the close press of the crowds flowing in and out of the room.

  “Enrique said you wanted to speak to me,” she says. “You’re Cusp, right?”

  “Sort of,” I say. “This is awkward. Can we go somewhere private?”

  Loren frowns, examining me afresh. Her powers are in place and I should’ve guessed I couldn’t conceal this ruse from someone whose extrasensory abilities are almost as vague and extraordinary as my own, however much they might be on a completely different register.

  “Joe?”

  “I told you this was awkward,” I tell her.

  Loren looks at me aghast for a long moment, then throws her arms around me with a great racking sob.

  “Jesus! I thought you were dead,” she says. “The Undernet’s reporting you MIA.”

  “Undernet?”

  “The uh . . . It’s just sprung up,” Loren says. “It’s all we have now. Sort of like an . . . an eighteenth century internet or something.”

  It is a weird moment, and increasingly those around us clue in on the lesbo vibe of Loren’s hand resting on Cusp’s taller, but equally silky smooth bare shoulder, eyes brimming with emotion I don’t recall being so forthcoming during our last encounter, unless maybe when she thought I was going to score her another hit of the power-giving drug she now has on personal supply.

  “Do you have somewhere private?” I prompt her again.

  “Yeah, this way. Come on,” she says. “We still have your old room.”

  “Great.”

  *

  SO ONLY A few seconds later, Loren firmly shuts the door on the outside rabble and I tiredly sink my leather-clad behind onto the ratty cot on which I convalesced another battered body not so long ago.

  “Jesus Joe, what the hell happened?”

  Pointedly, Loren looks me up and down with an expression caught between shock, puzzlement, admiration and a dose of bemusement thrown in for good measure.

  “I mean, look at you,” she adds while I’m still mustering my narrative. “You’re gorgeous.”

  “So are you,” I say softly, for indeed she is, but my words come like a fetid breeze that turns her glowing expression into one of forbearance.

  “It’s the Glow,” she says. “You have seen me –”

  “You are beautiful to me,” I say, not sure it’s the truth. “Always.”

  “Are you sure that’s not her talking? Bringing out your sensitive side?”

  “I don’t think that’s possible –”

  “Oh, welcome to the world of female hormones, buddy,” she says and laughs, wiping away one of these odd tears of hers, eyes sparkling through the Seeker effect like a living shrine weeping diamonds.

  “Hormones? I haven’t even thought about that.”

  “Where is she . . . where are you in her cycle?”

  “Jesus Christ, Loren. . . .”

  Good thing I’m sitting down. Conciliatory, Loren sits next to me and hesitantly puts an arm around my narrower shoulders.

  “God, I think I’m having my first girl crush,” she says. “You’re really, really, ridiculously good looking.”

  “Heh,” I say and nod wearily. “It must be a double whammy, knowing I’m in here.” I go to tap my head, but tap between Cusp’s breasts instead.

  “No, it’s not about that,” Loren replies more calmly and backs off a fraction.

  I nod, exhaling, thinking maybe I can rest a moment, and instead I go to pieces again. Loren’s sensitive to my distress and gives a sisterly squeeze, but it lingers on my shoulder. I turn into her gaze with all the watering-eyed, lip-trembling beauty I unintentionally possess, fixed on unburdening myself with someone who at least understands what it’s like to go to Hell and back in the service of greater powers.

  And instead she kisses me.

  *

  LATER, CURLED IN a tangle of nakedness beneath a thick comforter, I might be a ball of contradictions and mixed feelings, but the sex has rendered me unashamedly calm. With Loren’s syrupy form pressed against my flank, the day progresses outside without us and I peer out at the polluted sky through the chicken wire that occluded my view once for many weeks. My thoughts are like a scattered flight of crows and I’m not mindful to do anything about them, lost instead to sense memories of times past, places for which my fondness grows counter-point to my distance from them. I am floating in the present dilemma, the afterglow of endorphins banishing more material cares and worries and even abducting more existential fears to some foreign quadrant of my mind, a dungeon without doors from which I know they will too easily escape – but not for now.

  My sleeping beauty mimes a slow awakening and gently kisses my cheek before rising from the bed’s edge, languid bare back to me concealing what her powers might blunt, but the acerbic afternoon light exposes those ravages like a gossipy magazine.

  “You came to me for help,” Loren says without turning. “I’m not exactly sure this is what you were after.”

  “Maybe not,” I say. “Freud would probably disagree.”

  “Freud would be spinning in his grave.”

  I shrug, knowing how unqualified I am to even contemplate what Freud’s farts might smell like, watching instead as Loren stands and slips into frayed cotton briefs and a vest, a sinewy, hard-edged tone to a body that was once a wet dream of erotic portraiture.

  In moments she is dressed again, me sitting up in bed naked but for the quilt, knees to my chin.

  “How can I help, Joe?” she asks.

  Loren knows I am looking for answers – to get to the source of this disaster. We are in a time of oral history once more. The last few working iPhones and laptops of the Undernet report or rather wildly speculate about Zephyr’s place amid the chaos of recent days. There is no solid clue to give me even the tiniest idea where to track down my maverick body, except of course maybe at White Nine, if any of them remain there still. And yet I don’t even know what to do if I do catch up with Matrioshka again.

>   She must be stopped if for no other reason than to spare others, but as my old mentor Hawkwind used to tell me, if I focus on my goals, many problems will fall by the wayside. And Atlantic City is chock full of problems.

  “I need to find the people behind this attack on the Stock Exchange,” I say.

  “Don’t you have more immediate problems?”

  “Unless you want to end up part of my inner monologue, I’d leave the problem-spotting to me. I’m playing on Matrioshka’s terms now. She’s not going to make herself known until she wants to,” I say. “Unless I get lucky, I’m going to have to endure all this and hope against hope she doesn’t get me . . . my body killed somewhere along the way.”

  “You could get used to your new host, I’m sure?”

  Whatever mirth Loren hopes to instill, the grave seriousness in my eyes dispels it. Soberly, I shake my head. She folds her arms as she would often do in the past to ward against rebukes. And I sigh more deeply.

  “Holland is dead,” I say with an emptiness that describes nothing of the blurry grey fury I feel. “I can’t envisage a scenario in which I can fix that, and I’ve imagined plenty.”

  “Then?”

  “I want my body back,” I say and my voice nearly breaks. “Once upon a time I might’ve said I’d do anything to get a break from being me. Problem is, the only part of me that I need relief from is the part I bring with me. My powers – hell, my physical shell – was the best part of me, I think. All that’s left is this. . . .”

  The words escape me like a storm-front of grief and rage and self-loathing. Loren is no stranger to this phenomenon and sits cautiously on the other side of the bed, waiting for the tsunami to pass as she has before. Instead, this time I hang my head, disoriented to see long strands of green hair lit by the random afternoon light – brought back into my body (my wrong body) with a shock that reinforces just how lost in my head I’ve been.

  I give a mighty groan and push off the covers and slip, graceful as a faun from the bed, daintily retrieving my lady things and getting dressed, aware Loren watches with a cool resolve quite separate to the feline frenzy of our earlier love-making.

  “So you’re still stuck playing the hero?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Why come to me?”

  “It’s been a long time since I really patrolled the streets,” I tell her. “Unless I can find someone like Streethawk, I don’t know where to start to get a tab on the goons I’m after: Killswitch, Fallout, Madrigal, I think maybe even Infernus and Raveness. Those guys, I know they’re out for hire. So who hired them and why?”

  “OK,” Loren says. “I might have a lead or two for you. You want company?”

  “Like the old days,” I say. “The Devil’s Advocate rides again.”

  “Maybe,” she laughs, eyeing me up more lasciviously as I cram this obnoxiously svelte body into leather pants. “You’re a she-devil, I’ll give you that.”

  “You can fill me in on where we start while I find some breakfast.”

  “Shit Joe, maybe you don’t change that much really at all, huh?”

  “What?”

  Loren only laughs.

  “Come downstairs once you’re decent.”

  And she exits the room with a smirk.

  Zephyr 21.9 “Into That Momentary Reminiscence”

  AS THE SHADOWS lengthen, Seeker and I pad across the bituminized rooftop of the boarded up gun shop, conscious of the movements inside from the proprietor and his sons and sons-in-law ready to unleash Armageddon on any looters who happen inside.

  Our real target is the dormant building opposite: a sun-faded sign under moonlight in the second floor window advertising television repairs showing its obsolescence in more ways than one. When’s the last time anyone actually got an appliance fixed when it was cheaper to buy a new one?

  “You sure that’s it?” I ask in a whisper.

  Loren shoots me a look that underscores the stupidity of the question.

  “OK, sorry,” I say, then follow it up immediately by nodding my chin at her and the soft glow emanating from her skin. “You dosed up OK?”

  “Stop asking questions, Josephine,” she says. “It’s weird. Ready?”

  “Are you sure this is a front for bad guys? It looks deserted.”

  And truly it does. It’s a quiet end of town, but even as the shades are drawn down over the city, the chaos of distant urban warfare sounds like from half a world away.

  “The rent-a-tough crowd’s been using these digs for ages,” Loren says. “We scared a few off back when we first started patrols. I never pushed it after that.”

  “Too risky?”

  “These aren’t just any assholes. This is the Lyceum we’re talking about,” she says. “And they played it smart. They didn’t want to lose their anonymity. It’s just a business to these guys.”

  “OK, well let’s see if this Spider guy is home. That’s his name, right?”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  And yet a pregnant pause hangs in the air, and after soft seconds I notice Loren looking at me gently, and as usual, I misread so much into that momentary reminiscence that I can only end up confused.

  “It was nice,” I say. “You know, to be with you again. Thank you.”

  “I promised myself I’d never sleep with you again,” she says. “I guess you found a loophole.”

  I shrug wistfully – that’s the kind of gal I am.

  *

  WE SOAR SILENTLY from one roof to the other, crossing the derelict street, errant snowflakes winking in the moonlight where street lights should reign supreme.

  Loren is first and I go second as we crunch across the icy asbestos, dead pigeons, cigarette butts, empty bottles, shell casings, take-out food containers, a broken packing crate, a side-view mirror, golf balls, crushed glass, stones, rotting French fries, dead insects, a shattered ukulele, cat shit, rusting barbed wire, a twisted bird cage, faded cardboard tubes and a whole SUV tire littering our path as I follow Seeker to a metal grille trapdoor which gives a view down onto a concrete passageway running the middle of the two-storey building and thereby splitting it in two squat brick-walled wings.

  I give Loren a nod of resolve and she kicks down, the bolt giving way and the hinged door clanging with enough noise to wake the dead. She clears aside so I can drop and swing down and through, landing in a crouch with the squeaky echo of the swinging, still vibrating trapdoor and the drip of condensation running onto the concrete pavers.

  Seeker joins me, indicating the way down the line of moisture-bloated plywood doors, padlocks an inefficiency as we pass them, our heads turning for any sign of threat as our crashing intrusion triggers noises somewhere in the depths of the building. We reach the end of the roofless corridor without incident and I high kick the safety door off its hinges with an ongoing echoing clatter which greatly resembles someone’s solo industrial noise project, and I then push through into the back of the main room servicing the front of this building, which is a big, barely lit, cavernous space concealing a row of steps I nearly fall down as I navigate the way in the near dark.

  A match flares across the room to illuminate a haggard, devil-bearded man, chiaroscuro features somehow animated by the brief light which glints off the metallic collars of some apparatus he wears, concealed to us by a conspiracy of the darkness and the gigantic desk he sits behind.

  I hone in on the match flame as he lights a cheroot and then inspects the end, blowing off the ashes before the match gutters and dies and it is just us and this calm defender indicated by the glowing cherry in the dark.

  “Have you ladies lost your way or something?” he asks conversationally.

  “No,” I say with a firmness I’m not entirely sure I can back up.

  “Do you understand the web you’ve walked into?”

  When neither of us immediately reply, I feel a prickle of changing barometry I’m sure would’ve put me on high alert as Zephyr, and I react accordingly as bizarre, barely perceptible tend
rils of force appear all around us, like a dozen sinister eels wrought of quantum physics ousted out from hiding under this man’s control – or the metallic suit he wears.

  The tendrils cohere as if solidified by the fine particles of dust and crap in the air as they hurl the industrial furnishings away from us, writhing and twisting and snapping like live power-lines, more metaphor than reality as they close around us manifesting an energy I am not even sure is real.

  Mystery man has himself an ideational weapon.

  *

  IDEATIONAL TECH HAS nearly brought about my downfall once already in recent weeks, but its reappearance now is a potential deadly game-changer. The guy before us – who actually goes by the name Diablo – rises now from his perch, propelled by those very same forces he wields like near-invisible tentacles to ensnare us in the middle of the clearing he’s created. As he lifts, I see his body encased in a sheath of silvery metal which pulses and writhes and re-orients as if individual horizontal bands are under his control despite also appearing to defy the laws of physics – or at least laws by which Diablo’s ongoing biological integrity remains assured.

  The technology we are facing is powerful and I am tempted to say ancient, but I am not sure it can be so readily assigned to any period in history and beyond that my thinking gets kind of blurry. I was led to believe such devices were almost never encountered at the level of reality at which we mere lightning bolt-wielding superheroes operate. My estranged not-father the Doomsday Man once sought to make himself a conduit for the very same spectral energies which this mysterious technology can conjure, and the alien Editors and their unpronounceable insectoid accomplices were party to it in ways I still cannot fathom, except to think they believed the vessel of Lennon’s body could withstand contact with the realm of pure ideas due to his enormous psychic potential.

  It’s as if I am frozen to the spot as the avalanche of quasi-visible tendrils collapse in on us, and I hiss totally redundantly for Loren to move even though she’s already streaking away like the leonine goddess she once was.