Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “What’s . . . I mean, how are things in England?”

  “Would you like to watch telly?”

  “Telly?” I repeat dumbly. “You have television?”

  Rose cracks a giggle – the first I’ve seen. It’s strangely reassuring despite the gnawing feeling of wrongness in residence beneath my ovaries.

  The girl gestures to the room and for some reason, only now do I register the naked glowing bulb hanging from the many-times-painted roof.

  “We have electricity,” Rose says. “Britain is under martial law. That’s the word they use anyway. Lots of people ran away to Scotland. And to Wales.”

  “I can’t imagine the Scots are too happy about that.”

  Rose doesn’t get my adult tone and for the first time in a while I decide it can probably slide.

  “You still have government? Police?” I ask her.

  “The city’s full of rioters and looters, but we have law and order,” Rose says. “Moaner and me took up here once we saw so many places left empty. We was living in the canals with the others before movin’ up here.”

  The little girl immediately fixes me with a look, cutting short any extended inquiries. All I really want to know is about Atlantic City and if anyone’s figured out what the fuck has happened and how the hell I was healed, but instead I am ground zero as Rose’s light bulb effect peaks and diminishes with her sudden show of emotion.

  “What are you doing here in England?” she asks.

  I stop. Pause. Stare.

  “How old are you?”

  “Answer my question,” she says with a gentle nervous whine.

  “No. You answer mine.”

  “I’m twelve. Nearly thirteen.”

  “What?”

  “I have boobs and everything,” she says and starts like she’s going to show me.

  My hands come up faster than that time I had to catch the head of Miracle Man’s robot double or we were all going to get nuked. The only fate worse than death at this moment is the prospect of unwittingly getting branded a pedophile once a UN Truth and Reconciliation Committee sorts all this mess out retrospectively.

  “Keep your shirt on, Sally,” I say. “You’re a mutant, huh?”

  She adopts a sullen look and says nothing. We are at an impasse. I am still weak as a lamb and there is a surreal quality to the light, the passage of the seconds, the sound of my own voice, the telltale traces of dust in the air, the weird alien smell of this ancient city oozing from every particle.

  Soothingly, I ask her, “Tell me about Atlantic City.”

  “Tell us why you’re here, first,” Rose says. “We took a risk for you.”

  “Fine. I’m here hunting someone called the Baroness. You might even know who she is or where I can find her?”

  Rose crinkles her nose and looks at me like I’m retarded.

  “It’s a big city and I can’t know everyone,” she answers. “Do I look like I’m normally dinin’ with royalty? Who’s this Baroness and what’s she done? You never told me your name.”

  “It’s . . . Cusp,” I say.

  “Is it? You don’t sound very sure.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You’re not making things up just to get your way, are you?” Rose says and I immediately sense her genuine fear as she and the bandage-wrapped and apparently unspeaking Mona ease back towards the door despite my bed-wrecked state.

  “It’s just a long story and I am tired. I don’t know much about Baroness. I need to find her. Speak with her.”

  “Why?”

  I shake my head as I lay down fully.

  “Later,” I say.

  The muffledness of unconsciousness nearly overwhelms me, but God damn I am an American and right now I would very much like to watch some TV.

  I maybe even say as much, somewhere between here and oblivion.

  *

  MUSIC, ON AN elfin breeze. Bizarre and sincere and theatrical. I lie half-asleep and only listen.

  How I needed you

  How I grieve now you’re gone

  In my dreams I see you

  I awake so alone

  I know you didn’t want to leave

  Your heart yearned to stay

  But the strength I always loved in you finally gave way

  Somehow I knew you would leave me this way

  Somehow I knew you could never, never stay

  And in the early morning light

  After a silent, peaceful night

  You took my heart away and my being

  The music cavorts on, but I sit up to more closely examine the little girl sitting with her back to me, illuminated by the lamp her body shields as she kneels adjusting a turntable on a low sideboard.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “English band,” Rose says.

  “I don’t think we get English music where I’m from,” I tell her almost as sincerely as the lyrics in that song, though probably it is equally a nonsense.

  The girl looks at me quite deliberately and cranks the music. The room echoes with volume. The words rebound forth, repeating themselves with slight changes to nuance the meaning. The lyrics drown me like syrup, or maybe that’s just the drugs again as I sink into the bedding on my way to the center of the earth.

  *

  IT IS MORNING outside, according to an indignation of light seething through gaps in the curtains as I lie like a horizontal crucifixion thanks to injuries and my new drug of choice. It’s such a weird feeling to be vulnerable to everyday medication again that I know a more-than-small part of me could lose himself/herself/eirselves to it. That deadly allure is no different than I have seen writ in the hard-etched faces of drug addicts I’ve variously pummeled, entrapped, defenestrated or simply heaped scorn upon during my years as Zephyr, and hell, it hasn’t really slowed down much since gender re-assignment. This brief parlay amid the cut and thrust of that never-ending grind is welcome, if only the surreal, dreamlike quality to my ensorcellment would ease up a little.

  “What gives?” I croak aloud to the room.

  The door slowly opens. Seems to take forever, in fact. It’s possible I have a short nap in the meanwhile. When I blink awake again I see the shrouded Mona staring at me with her burns victim eyes.

  “Where’s Rose?”

  Mona takes a few hesitant steps towards me, then teeters like a drunk. Her hands come up like to receive defensive wounds, and then the most godawful noise I’ve ever heard in my life starts emitting from her gaping, broken mouth, and I realize with a certain wan irony that I misunderstood her name before.

  Moaner.

  Zephyr 22.8 “Postmodern Woman”

  MOANER’S LITTLE PERFORMANCE costs me a few more hours in the darkness, so when I resume consciousness it’s late afternoon. The day is coming on all beautiful and English and shit outside, threatening weather only adding to the appeal, or at least while I am trussed up warm and well sedated inside.

  I glimpse Rose and turn my head in time to see her start a record. The music is loud enough to make me wince.

  “Hey!” I say as loud as I feel able.

  Rose hurries to me, dropping on her knees so we are at the same level, me struggling against my languor to rise in the quicksand bed.

  “You have to tell me what you know about Baroness or I can’t save you,” the little girl says.

  “What?” I am puzzled. “Why?”

  “Don’t talk. She is here. Now.”

  Rose backs away with a let’s-talk-of-this-no-further look on her patently aged face. The childish innocence seems to melt off her like candle wax, astute, sorrowful eyes swinging on me like black lamps.

  “Fuck,” I mutter relatively needlessly to myself, but it’s a control pattern I’d rather not do without right now. I try to sift the import of what Rose’s said, a little like playing Connect 4 while smashed on rum.

  “I don’t get it,” I say aloud.

  The music diminishes. Rose makes a sickly sweet play-act of apologizing.
r />   “Sorry. The volume slipped.”

  “Volume slipped – my ass,” I say.

  The medication seems to peel off me as I find my anger and rise from the bed, shakily on two feet on the rug beside my sick bed. I’m wearing a white gown and only the lightest gauze tape bandages my left arm and right leg, long greenish hair plastered by days of bed rest and matted and knotted at the back.

  Rose shoots a warning look I ignore. I got the message. Someone – presumably this Baroness – is somehow listening in. And I’m meant to play along or she’ll be sending in some big bad for the slice and dice.

  This isn’t the first time some fucking idiot’s tried to do this to me in my career and the fact they’re exploiting this tiny mutant girl and her fucked up friend doesn’t exactly incentivize me against actioning an immediate strategic review to prioritize an organizational restructure of work flow practices, as some of you public service types might like to call it.

  The new Cusp corporate policy involves me unsteadily crossing the room, ignoring Rose’s anxiously proffered hand. I grab the chair beside the door, swivel and throw it as hard as I can across the room. This turns out to be nowhere near as hard as I thought, apparently, because the chair rebounds without even dislodging decorative plates celebrating some patently vampiric-looking member of the royal family turning 300 or whatever the fuck.

  I’m still midway through a disappointed “Huh?” as Rose re-adheres to my side, her childlike-because-they-are hands digging into my hips like some pervert PUA at a Vegas club.

  “Please stop what you are doing,” she insists. “You are in danger.”

  “Danger?”

  The room seems to be expanding and contracting around us and I feel like throwing up. The little girl sizes herself up much in the manner of an adult restraining someone else from a potential tantrum. I’m not entirely comfortable with my subjectivity as Rose speaks once more.

  “Tell me why are you looking for the Baroness.”

  “Because I heard she makes little mutant kids work for her because she’s too fucking weak to do it herself,” I snarl, pleased with the feminine bite-through-your-nut-sack menace in Holland’s husky voice.

  Rose’s eyes bulge. I am moving, though I’m not going anywhere.

  “Where is she?” I say. “Is she listening? Are you? Are you out there, bitch?”

  I now basically yell at the empty room, ignoring Rose trembling as the walls vibrate, curving inwards and out with some kind of manic heartbeat pulse which it takes me a few moments to recognize is in rhythm with Rose’s wracking sobs.

  “Holy shit,” I say, just flummoxed now and at a loss.

  I look around me, the walls sucking in and out like the ventricles of a heart, the golden mildewed wallpaper thrusting itself at me like a smoker’s lung.

  “What’s going on?”

  And that’s when I wake up.

  *

  THE LABORATORY WHITENESS of the room blinds me as I stir, sucking in one great lungful of air that has me arching my back in a swift spastic motion that breaks the left shackle around my wrist. I can allow myself only a moment’s sense impressions to judge this do-or-die moment, a shadow, a figure of some sort looming over my right shoulder the most immediate threat.

  My left arm is free. Giving in to the powerful motion of the spasm that freed me helps me roll atop the wheeled gurney I am on, the shifting weight tipping the whole device between me and the closest of the Baroness’s bubble-headed worker drones.

  I don’t know what the fuck the things are. I rise to one knee and assess three black-clad figures closing in from different angles and a woman of significance directing affairs on the far side of the surgical theatre. Crouched nearby is the tragically fell Rose, her real world body restrained in a wheel chair, the mutant healer Moaner hunchbacked beside her, fingers curled in guard around the bundle of tubes and accessories puncturing the psychic little mutant girl’s arms and face.

  Kneeling, it’s easy to pull my other wrist free of the cuff and kick the sideways trolley into the first mook. I can’t tell whether these things are alive or simply just weird, cartoonish robots, something animatronic and yet dastardly preternatural about the feral gaze contained within its bloated and flushed caricature face, the butler’s attire complete with folded kerchief and pocket watch rather out of place now as the mistress’s bizarre creation clatters backwards with a cry, the noise infantile, the table skidding into the minion like the last pin in the gutter.

  The move leaves me at the mercy of Muppets one and two, but I needn’t worry. A deep ultrasonic howl swells within my chest and erupts from me like a volcano in darkness, killing rage in full flight, Cusp transformed at one fell switch, me in the passenger seat rather than the driver as I punch through the face and chest of the two mooks seeking to pin me down. My fists plough through their brittle, quasi-organic bodies, a sullen goop inside them like vegetable pulp and nothing in the way of organs or anything else to convince me they are alive except for their haunting screams. Over their corpses I step, a mecha of light and darkness and a demon my pilot, the blood, such as it is, of the two bobble-heads dripping from my fingers as he-in-me ascends the observation platform to which this Baroness retreats.

  She is a tall and skeletal woman in black like a Victorian widow. A phylactery of some sort adorns a hair-net under which dark, not entirely natural-looking hair nests like another Medusa in waiting. Her dark, almost Asiatic eyes look out like finger-holes in what is just a mask of a face, the crone’s skin runnelled and powdered, something disturbingly vaginal about her drooping lids dripping disapproval and now terror.

  Fascinated, I watch her expression change like patterns in clouds, the creature within me becalmed as it slakes some even darker thirst on this terrified woman of uncertain years now regretting the very fact of her existence come face-to-face with a demonic beast she had no way of knowing lurked within me. And something about that acknowledgement calms my dark inner passenger, who retreats as if sated like a swamp monster beneath the surface of my otherwise exterior calm.

  “You are the Baroness?” I say to her, raising one grimy fist and squeezing the last goo from my grip.

  The old woman nods, submitting to my glower like some courtesan aged since yesteryear and lacking the looks to pull it off. And she knows it, eyes averted, frozen and waiting to see if that fist becomes the implement of her doom as well. I can barely think of any purpose to her existence, but my Being feels torn between bodies and essences and I don’t know where my desires become the wishes of the other forces inhabiting my life.

  “I have questions for you, and you will answer them,” I say to her through gritted teeth, it being no act for me to barely restrain my murderous thirst as I listen to sobs and Mona’s moans emanating from behind.

  “You will answer my questions,” I tell her. “Every one of them. If you try to flee or trick me or lie to me or entrap me, I will pull you apart with my bare hands. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “I . . . Please don’t hurt me.”

  “Who are you? I’ve never heard of you.”

  “I was . . . a crim- uh, crime . . . criminal . . . I was a villainess. Once. In the 60s. I got . . . hurt. Sentinel. He. . . .”

  “You’re retired?”

  “Not . . . entirely,” the old woman says and finds another place that isn’t anywhere near me to refocus her shamed gaze. “I moved into . . . procurement.”

  “That a classy way of saying you became a fixer, or are we being highly metaphoric and you’re smuggling kids or women or . . . ?”

  “No, no,” Baroness says, almost panicked at the misimplication. “Nothing like that. I have my . . . my creations for anything I might wish, or who others. . . .”

  “Ew, gross,” I say. “Please spare me the fucking details or I might just beat you to death just to stay sane. What the fuck are you doing with this kid?”

  My anger buries any possible imputatio
n or connotation that I might be in a cheery mood as I stalk from Baroness down to where Mona moans and huddles around a drooling Rose. This is not the kid I briefly knew from my time inside her world but her idiot double. Something dies inside me.

  Mona takes my hand and presses it against Rose’s sullen cheek and at once I am sucked back inside the faux creation of the little girl’s universe. It is the same bedroom and she sits on the unmade bed as a yellow rain falls outside through lambent cloud cover overlooking the Manchester skyline in a world ruined by some dolorous stroke of its own apocalypse.

  “You came back,” she says and gives a little sob.

  “Yes,” I say to her. “It’s not as good out there.”

  “Not for me, it isn’t,” Rose says.

  “Do you know what’s out there?”

  “Yes. They think I can’t hear them, but I do. I just can’t move.”

  “Jesus kid, I’m sorry,” I say and sigh.

  “I know. Me too. But you can help me.”

  I look up again. I guess I thought I was going to interrogate her about the Baroness, but I see all that’s pointless now.

  “What is it?” I ask her with the requisite dread demanded by this inevitable moment.

  Rose reaches out implicit for me to take her hands, but I don’t want.

  “Kill me,” she says. “Please? OK?”

  *

  I SNAP BACK to reality and quickly scan the lab to confirm the Baroness hovering in place, unwilling to risk flight despite the nearby door, while a fourth of her minions, sprung from nowhere I assume, delicately serves tea from a silver tray. Another one enters carrying buckets and a broom. My stomach growls, urging me to heave, but instead my heavy gaze returns to Rose drooling unwittingly down the collar of her stained and faded dress, pom-pom covering one eye, her mutant carer meeting my eyes uncertainly and my hand lifts, no power of this dark god in it right now, and lights sparkle, the hand illuminating like a halogen globe as I imagine burning out the fuse of Rose’s life, and my hand shakes and the light gets brighter, but in the end I can’t do this anymore than I could’ve taken Candace’s life on the Amari ship, and she knew it. And so did Sting and St George. And so does Rose.