Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  We fly or haul each other like a bedraggled band of geese, survivors of this holocaust beyond our comprehension. Lionheart on point. Sentinel is across from me in the middle of the vee, Mistress Frost curled in his arms like the feline she fancies herself, I think, to be. Seeker carries the lightweight Enigma – who I later find, through his agent, prefers the spelling eNiGmA (like there is any way on earth I am going to allow that shit) if I am going to “use his likeness in publications”. (Wh-a-at?)

  “OK Cusp, you asked for this. Now where to?” Sentinel cat-calls.

  I gotta admit I’m somewhat surprised we haven’t already been jumped on the approach to the villains’ alleged lair, which was what I was half-heartedly relying on to deflect exactly this dilemma of leadership. I glower back at my unwanted comrades and quietly wish Negator was here, except I’m pretty sure he’d try to bang me regardless.

  The cops said these Omega doodads were “praying” to the Unisphere. In the absence of anything else making sense, I take the lead and wing my way in its direction with my little ducks angling on behind, and in just seconds the shiny sculpture hoves into view, gorgeous and idealistic as a piece of art, but transmogrified now into something entirely different.

  *

  IT IS AN enormous cage. Fire clouds the sky around it, and enormous spears fashioned from the goal posts of the nearby stadium offer even more places from which human figures can hang, impaled or otherwise crucified on charnel display before the flickering lights and the still-moving captives imprisoned in the ten storey-high globe, its metals darkened, the continents and the spaces in-between created for the 1965 World Fair now a blasphemous inversion of its original theme of international peace through cultural understanding.

  The keening of the captives somehow does sound like singing. The cops were right about that at least – it was not the bad guys, but their prey, seventy or eighty people somehow imprisoned in the big metal structure augmented by hundreds of yards of pilfered razor wire. Their voices interact with the metal or perhaps it is something wrong with space-time that it instantly raises those adorable hackles of mine once more. I notice an actual guillotine on the stained concrete surrounding the giant plinth, the night conspiring to obscure the details of the mess amid which it reigns.

  We have too great an urgency to plot and strategise. I land in a hard crouch adjacent to the executioner’s stand and scour for enemy targets as my accomplices descend about me.

  “Sentinel!” I hear a ragged voice cry from the direction of the cage.

  There is a silent moment, those trapped within taking a collective breath and sharing but one thought before action turns them into a dolorous choir, a giant, emergent gasp which transforms into more ragged screeching and cheering as the watchword for superheroics appears front and center before them. To his credit, Sentinel goes straight for the closest metal bars with his hands extended with such obvious intent that he looks more like a storyboard for this moment than the man himself – and it is in exactly that pose that he bursts into flame, the wash of malignant fire bursting out of the darkness on the far side of the enormous sphere now looming overhead like a grisly torturer’s cathedral, more dead bodies lashed by wire to the struts and structure of the awful thing – and not all of them entirely dead, I notice, either.

  I crouch close to one side as Sentinel takes it right in the ass, practically vanishing in the ardent inferno, the force greater than any mere mortal pyrokinetic. And in moments after that thought – registering Sentinel’s curled and blackened form tumbling past me in a Catherine Wheel of sparks and flames – my battlefield intuition is confirmed in the appearance of the enemy, some creature out of a lost culture’s Hell, an entity formed of pure violence without any true corporeal shell.

  Manitou.

  It’s been many years. I thought her long gone. We tussled back in my red-and-white years, when I was unconsciously self-conscious of the hang of my cape in the same way musicians constantly fuck with their long hair.

  Manitou started out as a Native American rights activist with mystical backing, but her actions in the late 70s and 1980s landed her on the FBI’s most wanted list when Carter was still dismantling McCarthy’s Parahuman Affairs Bureau and no one yet trusted masks in law enforcement roles. Anyone who fought Manitou knew she had an ungodly amount of power at her disposal, no pun intended, since the origins of that power were always assumed to be the supernatural force after which she was named, but the woman herself always struck me as fairly balanced given the fugitive status put on her by the government of the day.

  Yet what we see here is nothing like that person. This is Fury unrestrained. She bowls through us like a ghost in a Chinese horror movie, except her gliding wire-fu passage is a hurricane of deadly fire, and Maxtor, Lionheart and the Enigma only get to safety by the skins of their teeth, while Mistress Snow invokes her element in a freezing sphere that is instantly extinguished – but not without saving her life first.

  It doesn’t stop Seeker.

  Loren is equally awe-inspiring as she rotates in her metallic get-up, manifesting her strangely or perhaps not-so-strangely alien energy tendrils, half-a-dozen whip-like strands of lambent ideational force, sparks of potential God-power that float upon a metonymic breeze – signifiers of the otherworldly power once her domain as this world’s solitary Seeker, a defender of the manifest eschatologosphere who now merely furrows her brow as Manitou blows through. A searing, swirling gas cloud burnishes Loren’s armor, though God knows how her face escapes the damage from this force which is too fierce to be called heat, but rather some cosmic expression of deranged physics way too many pay grades above my ken. The enormous blowback knocks me and everyone else to the tiles.

  Manitou’s physical body is suspended somewhere within her core radiance, though it seems the relationship between her and her energy field is more than a little conjectural the way her powers blaze as she hovers over my dear Loren with all the extreme menace only serial killers and Disney villains can conjure. Ignoring visceral reality melting around her, Seeker’s right arm swings like a mechanized trap, fist punching through Manitou’s disintegrating chest and out her back at the same time Seeker’s sundry tentacles follow suit to pincer in, each from its own angle to dissect or trisect this once unfathomable creature. The deranged villainess gives an inchoate howl and I throw myself flat alongside everyone else as her burning witch face expands and explodes and a plasmatic fire-storm punches outwards. I bury my face to save my eyes and feel miraculously little, and when it seems safe to lift my head, the light is strangely purple and shimmers with bands of aquamarine blue as Seeker’s spectral appendages fan outwards to create a protective globe around us.

  I am not saying Manitou is gone. I’m not sure if that’s entirely possible, based on what little I know about her (which I gotta confess I’m only recalling right now from a feature I read once in SuperScene). But for the moment it’s difficult to take her banishment as a respite, because of course that’s when they launch the main attack.

  *

  THE FLAMES CLING to everything, not least of them the unfortunates crucified to the closest barbed flanges of the Unisphere near where Manitou exploded. And into this screaming chaos fall these other Omeganauts, wind and dirt rising around us in the night fight. The darkness seems thicker, like the air is filled with ghosts, and I know this is Darkstorm’s work. Cusp’s everyday light powers make me little more than a beacon in the dark, which is not a good place to be in ground zero.

  I am fairly shitting my pants already, watching all the angles while unable to see anything and knowing just how weak I am in Holland’s form compared to my sorely-missed Zephyr powers which saved my skinny butt far too many times in the past to mention. And my vulnerability is proven true as sharp pain blossoms across my left thigh. Amid a hurricane of dirt and blood and debris I hear Maxtor give the most tremendous bloodcurdling yell and there is no pause at all in this maelstrom of violence for me to even see what has even happened or who caused it as
I right myself and come face-to-face with “the Asian chick with the sword” – my erstwhile and rather fleeting teammate Samurai Girl.

  Something dark and altogether unpleasant dulls the sparkle of her already dark eyes, and there isn’t a single hint of recognition for the time we were briefly albeit not exactly successfully rostered in one of the manifestations of the New or New New Sentinels (or even Southside Sentinels, as we’d been known in the early days when Firehawk’s Northern Patriots were active, back before the Federal cocaine bust and all them dudes getting linked to a pile of dead hookers).

  The black-haired girl in her soiled kimono tries to slice me up good and proper. She’s not as quick as I used to be, but she’s viper-fast compared to what I can do now, still kind of on probation driving Cusp’s body, and inevitably that means I’m about to get cut again.

  Except I’m not. Yeah.

  Instead, I’m not sure what happens. Maybe the inexperienced Samurai Girl’s so focused on me she doesn’t even register Sentinel dragging his smoking carcass out of the shadows to launch a pretty flawless left cross that puts her or the being inside her into the next month with thirty-one days. Samurai Girl exits stage left like a felled steer and I am too astonished to say much as Sentinel crouches beside me and pukes a pile of incinerated lung onto the gore-speckled slabs of the giant courtyard.

  My eyes can’t help track Samurai Girl coming to rest and then scanning left and right quickly for other enemies as I rapidly think through the logic of what we face here. Possession? From who and from where? Throw a “why” into the mix for me for good measure.

  The winds continue to beat around us, the vortex a side-effect of some unknown power. Blind and powerless and far from the body of my birth, I feel like God’s greatest joke – or perhaps just his metaphor for an abstract concept I’ve not yet understood. A black shape slices past me and I let off a reflexive burst of power that accomplishes little. There are screams and yells all about and more than a few of them are mine and my newly-minted teammates as the cloaking dust storm and the whip-like darkness and the sound of blows inflicting pain fill my ears.

  I hurtle forward, crouching down against the racket and glimpse the once familiar figure of Darkstorm blurring past my line of sight. A purely arcane aura surrounds him, casting him as a caricature of menace, a dark Balinese puppet show villain sprung to life. And any doubt an alien force possesses these fellow masks vanishes in an instant. The black helmet negates anything but an intuitive confirmation of my fears, and I can’t help wonder where these bodies’ valiant souls have gone, perhaps ejected into the cosmos of nothingness to keep company with Holland’s essence. In this life-and-death moment, there can be no thought for sparing the monsters they have become in their hosts’ defilement.

  If anything, the simpler choice makes it easier (just like everything).

  I lope after Sentinel and grab his upraised wrist midway through pounding Samurai Girl into hamburger. The veteran superhero’s blackened costume peels off in my grasp, but beneath it the old man looks more resilient than any sixty-something-year-old has a right to be.

  “What?”

  “Darkstorm,” I yell at him.

  Mistress Snow whirtles past in a snowstorm of flakes and freezing particles, a look on her face not unlike that of some thwarted mythological witch. Something nearby explodes, and a solid-looking body flies past and crashes into one of the support struts of the gigantic spherical sculpture – which is to say, you know, of course it fucking does.

  Smoke from the explosion palls my vision as I cautiously advance, illogically for that moment praying again that my daughter is safe inside the FBI’s prison. My leg burns with pain and I can’t see clear enough to know exactly how badly I’ve fucked up the rental. Probably just as well the previous owner won’t be needing it. And here’s to hoping the same for me too, except for right now where I need to protect my own biological integrity. I might’ve somehow made the leap from one skull to another, but it’s not a trick I want to get into needing on a regular basis. There’s something cold and vast and endless and eyeball-burning bright out there in that brief moment betwixt one abode and another that I don’t think I could experience for many moments longer before erupting in Lovecraftian prose. The unspoken pact I have with myself right now is to try and need that back door escape route as infrequently as possible.

  I push forward with Sentinel vaguely committed as we track Darkstorm’s shrouded silhouette through the shape-shifting black surroundings, but any sort of allusion to calm falls away as something like a thunderclap sounds behind our position. An enormous percussive force spins me around. I conjure a pulsating globe of darkness in one fist and prepare to hurl it, but instead catching the tail end of Enigma unloading a full charge on some bearded, ratty-caped superhero figure once known as Crusader. The Enigma’s blue-white lightwave shears through the down-and-out Crusader’s midriff. His upper and lower body fly apart as his limbs leap as if seeking their own individual survival from the deadly energy beam only to find their survival is a job lot. While the brutality of the kill seems a tad extreme, for just that one moment I have a glib and somewhat unsubstantiated feeling we might just be able to pull through this one.

  If only Crusader was the final member of the Omega.

  *

  Zephyr 22.6 “Dead Medusa”

  IN THE ERRATIC light of this dark carnival we are helping turn into a full-scale conflagration, I happen upon Maxtor’s body.

  The armored hero’s helmet hasn’t saved the beefy crime-fighter. A raking force cleaving upward through his jaw and face leaves the actual helmet intact, eyes still staring out from over the brim of those over-wide slits, frozen in the startled surprise of registering his consciousness snuffing out. One arm is bent at a difficult angle, and the obviousness of his death is enough to stop me actually slowing to check him any further, the many evident threats swirling about me far more deserving of attention. Mistress Snow’s frost powers add to the swirling warfare against the terrifying darkness-wrapped Darkstorm as the big, black-helmeted ex-hero wards off Seeker’s lashes, and behind them I see Sentinel in a rag of costume and trading enormous, wrecking ball blows with a towering Frankenstein-like albino.

  I recognize Absolom at once. He is a monobrowed man-giant of chalk-white hue with an impressive, impassive demeanor, something inhuman about his pain threshold as the fisticuffs with Sentinel sound like thunder rolling in the heavens above them. Absolom is sure to fucketty-fuck giving the veteran a pretty good go for his money, the old man lathered with sweat. In a sure sign of Sentinel’s waning powers, he tries to wrap up the taller Absolom in his arms and instead receives a negligent, out-thrust palm that sends the household name off the edge of the pulpit in the shadows beyond the grisly sphere.

  I fire a light blast the monster evades with a dismissive twist, but in that same nanosecond, Seeker spotlights Absolom in her cross-hairs and coruscating hurricane of ideational tendrils ploughs into the brutally strong albino – and I realize a moment later, also into another of the support struts for the enormous metal sculpture towering over us.

  Yelling “Shit!” is about my most useful contribution to the moment. There comes the brilliant flash from concentric rings of ideational force colliding in a shitstorm of dust. I hear a few more screams. Absolom is nowhere to be seen. I limp a step closer, clearly late to register the huge sphere ever-so-slowly tumbling free of the remainder of its base which shrieks like only a metal structure in pain can – and amid a tidal wave of broken concrete and mortar and grit and body parts and burning cinders and chunks of wood and metal fragments and offcasts of wire lash and smash and crash past me and the others, a furrow on my left arm opening up and something hard and entirely unfriendly rebounding off my temple to send me low.

  Flat out, in fact, as the tons-heavy load rolls its crushing way towards me.

  *

  I GUESS I would be dead, but you know this story would be a lot shittier or maybe just as shitty but mercifully short if
indeed I was cut down in the flower of my girlhood by the all-consuming Death Star™ of the magnificent yet despicable world peace artwork rolling toward me like some harbinger of the Reaper himself. And I don’t escape death’s brush through any particular brilliance of my own. Sometimes it’s just sheer dumb luck in this business.

  I’m completely laid out as the obelisk rolls over me, an aural kaleidoscope of moans and groans and shrieks and weeping as it passes on and its shadow, such as it is in the flame-rich darkness, lifts over me, and the huge tumbling ball of death crushes over the edge of the paved public open space.

  The passing shadow of the weighty thing reveals the misfortunate Darkstorm laying across from me a shrieking victim, something eerily Darth Vader-like about him lying with most of his black vinyl-clad legs reduced to a poorly-contained pulp. I am mesmerized like some naturalist in the wild with a documentary crew watching as Darkstorm cuts his shrieking and levers up on his hands, a mad grin which is the only part of his face visible beneath his helm. With the powers at his command he lifts from the ground with a wretched, maniac shriek, leaving behind a good part of himself burst and trampled like only a few dozen-odd tons of metal can do. Fortunately for me – and yeah, it’s all about me, I’m getting used to this femininity thing already – I’m too groggy to feel much concern as Darkstorm cackles maniacally and flies away dripping blood from his stumps.

  I crawl free of the detritus, conscious now of the nasty wound bleeding freely down my arm and giving the unwanted appearance of some intricate tattoo, the dark swirls of my own clotting blood and the collected grime of the battlefield dripping down me. Loren looks astonished at the destruction she has wrought, and an almost dangerously near-invisible blue force bubble dissipates around her as the immediate threat level drops.