Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “I wanted to ask you the same question, doll-face,” he smirks.

  What an ass. It’s almost a pleasure to watch the smug grin slide like mangled eggs off the frying pan of his face as any number of my companions and Shade as well alerts him to the fact I am technically or not technically but perhaps empirically “a guy”.

  “What the crud?” he winces and looks me up and down like he’s looking for where I’ve tucked my package, which I realize is exactly what he’s doing.

  “Jesus Christ,” I sigh and move past him, leaving it to my fan-base to explain the mechanics of my unique transgender crisis.

  “So who are these guys?” I ask Shade. “And who’s the slimeball?”

  “That’s Lancaster. NME mag called him ‘Britain’s answer to Zephyr’. Just ignore him,” she says and winks so I don’t know if she’s joking and also I don’t know what NME is. Shade motions to the figures beside her. “I also have Gorilla Man, Iron John and the London Whiz.”

  The hulking brute with the faceplate like a nineteenth century steam train grille is more than just the elephant in powered armor in the room. He, me and Shade share an uncomfortably violent past, but in that moment I am tickled pink to see him standing beside an accountant-looking guy in a baggy body suit and a gold-and-red figure in lycra complete with racing bike.

  “OK, the idiot with the bicycle isn’t coming,” I say. “And I bet that really burnt to get second credit after Gorilla Man eh John?”

  While the armored Brit hero Iron John glowers at me, Gorilla Man transforms as if to prove a point and Shade rounds on me in defense of the “idiot with the bicycle”.

  “Honey,” I tell her unequivocally. “It’s a fucking nuclear submarine. Do you really think a bike will help?”

  “You haven’t seen what this guy can do on a bicycle.”

  “And you haven’t seen how far back I can get my ankles behind my ears in this body, but that doesn’t mean this is the time or place for showing you. Likewise your boyfriend with the bike.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  London Whiz says something indicative of “this can all go get fucked” and takes himself and his super-bike and disappears down the open staircase in the pillbox off to our right. Gorilla Man uses this moment to scratch his armpit and look at me expectantly. Shade raises her eyebrow and perhaps might say more, except Portal appears at my elbow and nods.

  “All here.”

  I give him the thumbs up. He opens another portal.

  “What’s the plan?” Shade asks.

  Seeker steps into our huddle and motions for my phone. I give it to her and address Shade, the English woman slowly growing darker and darker until I am just staring at a carbon-chiseled beauty with shockingly white eyes and teeth – features embedded in living darkness. It feels like a preternatural moment, and I get a chill or maybe it is an ominous quiver as I remember the fact of my deep possession – of the unnamed and monstrous kraken roiling in the unlighted depths of my Being. Only the immediacy of the situation snaps me into ongoing action.

  “Portal’s got the co-ordinates,” I tell Shade. “It should only take him a moment to find us a way in.”

  “Then?”

  “Then we go in.”

  “Are you sure there’s going to be enough room in there?” Seeker asks.

  I give her a pained shrug by way of thanks for her interjection.

  “Let’s just hope Portal can get us there,” I say gloomily. “I don’t know if you noticed he’s looking a little shaky.”

  “What’s his deal?” Shade asks in clipped Cockney tones.

  “He thinks there’s some nasty life-forms hiding in the dimension he portals through,” I say and shrug. “He’s kinda. . . .”

  “Sidekick material,” Shade asks.

  “Well I didn’t say that, but yeah.”

  “So we’re just going in?” Shade asks unperturbed. “I’ll back you up.”

  “You have to stay here,” I tell her. “We go in as a line. I need someone I can trust pushing through the troops.”

  “Fuck that,” Shade says. “You want Gorilla Man to get your back or you want me, you silly bitch?”

  I laugh and might say more except Seeker hands me my phone at that instant.

  “There. I’ll be able to contact you now,” she says. “I’ve worked out how to hack into the Earth’s geo-magnetic grid. It’s like ley lines. We can use them to access any cellular device regardless of networks. And possibly power source.”

  Shade and I stare back without anything to add. Loren shrugs prettily inside her halo-like force-helmet.

  “Shade can go with you,” Seeker says. “I’ll take the back of the line. I know the drill, Joe. It won’t be like last time.”

  We swap a look.

  “It better not be,” one of us says.

  Portal’s sizzling green doorway erupts into our universe and the man in question appears like a drowned rat. Gallons of sea water spill out before he looks at me doggedly, face haggard and dripping beneath the padded visor and goggles.

  “Ready in ten seconds,” he says and ducks back into the portal as a wave breaks and kelp and water splashes through, splattering on the dusty British rooftop as the doorway seals itself shut.

  I meet Shade’s eyes, then Loren’s.

  “You’ve got this, Joe,” Seeker says.

  I turn to Shade as a line forms and Enigma and Mr Magnificent and Golden and Iron John and Gorilla Man and Sentinel and everyone else step forward and then another green doorway ensorcels open and I wait a moment, but there’s no water coming and no immediate sign of Portal.

  “What are you waiting for, Joe?” Shade extolls me. “Don’t freeze! Go!”

  The indignity of the comment cuts, but now’s not the time for argument. I bull forward at the green gateway and fly through.

  Zephyr 23.1 “Into The Great Green Beyond”

  WITH ALL THE glee of amateur phlebotomists, I lead us into the great green beyond with a girlish swagger I no longer notice. Now there is only a limbic sense of my dissociated state, and thus that hardwired reptilian reflex is much reduced in the egoic scream of my cerebellum still caught wondering where my true body resides, Cusp’s wearily grinning face an outward mask, in this sense maybe not too much more than a fleshly robotic simulacrum betraying nothing of the yet more layers upon layers of my inhabited persona . . . and my dark, cave-dwelling demon slithers wetly in the mirk in the most shadow-throned realms of my unconscious.

  What I’m telling you is I’m in a neither-Zephyr-nor-Cusp mental state, entirely present in the moment of rushing headlong forward into what would send an ordinary rational Being into immediate rebellion. It’s like I actually absorbed something during my Lennon-as-Sting sojourn in auld Afghanistan. Fully ready-to-hand, the passage between Portal’s Green Realms is nary a flicker, my next coherent thoughts focused solely on the metallic subterranea and industrial mood lighting of Earthsong’s alleged submarine.

  Right in front of me stands a startled-looking sailor or soldier or terrorist or I don’t know what he is, a mildly handsome, brown-skinned polyethnic social justice warrior-gone-bad. He clutches something like an Ak-47 but bigger, and that’s reason enough for me to clock him with a solid left jab that drops him on his ass, only I introduce my knee to his face on the way down. Just to keep him settled, I then kneel prettily and deliver a hard knife-hand strike to the side of his neck to leave him spasming between the bulkheads of the cramped interior as I take in his most immediate companion just inside the next open pressurized doorway, my moves so swift and my vengeance so clearly awesome that he’s still stuck in the act of expressing his astonishment instead of yelling that the terrorists’ submarine bad guy lair’s been breached. Leaving my first dance partner behind, I continue my crouch, throwing it into a lunge as I make for and through the door as the zealot only then thinks to try and throw the fucking thing shut. It’s way too late for that. I rebound through, on
e palm outstretched to steady my ingress as I storm the next section and I can hear and almost feel my fellow invaders pouring through behind me. One sharp elbow and a swiveling kick and the second baddie’s on his knees groaning for his momma.

  At first I don’t actually register the screams. I’m way too focused on the opponent before me, who takes a palm strike to his upper sternum that sends him into the whole gang of Kevlar’d dudes just behind him. FNORD. I am through them like an eel, like an oil slick, like ink in water as I crouch again, this time delivering a nasty downwards strike into the third guard with my darkness-encrusted fist, his unhelmeted skull rebounding off the steel floor and thus wise ushering in unconsciousness.

  Ahead of me is another wheel-sealed door, but Shade bounds past, black as the plague and twice as deadly, so I have a moment to veer back and I’m shocked to see Gorilla Man bound past with a terrified yowl and then actual blood flicks into my eyes and when I clear them I see the beautiful girl Golden clutching the stump of her missing arm. Blood hisses between her fingers like we’re in a Chinese horror movie and I look around trying to comprehend this moment of space-time, let alone how such an injury could’ve happened – and that’s about when my deafened ears take in all the other wild shrieking.

  “They’re in here with us!”

  I can’t locate the source of it, though somehow I know it is Portal’s strangled cry, and then the flickering green rift at the other end of the chamber vanishes, which really only draws my attention to the Enigma laying in Mr Magnificent’s arms, something nonsensical about his sudden inside-outside biology as the pair of them stare in shocked fascination at the veteran hero’s innards sprayed outwards from his ruptured abdomen like shit from a rhino’s ass, a volcano of gory torment busting from his torso in a tangle of ruinous intestines and other gunk which barely coheres into anything understandable – and in that half-instant before I scan back to the Enigma, his eyes are closed, and I think maybe the masked hero cradling him is whispering something, but I’m still distracted by the chaos in-between, yelling instinctively for Shade like it was never OK to yell for my mother at the moment some infernal blur hisses past me and I dodge for dear life.

  The phrase “they’re in here with us” doesn’t bode at all well, and among the carnage to the rear of the sub I spot two more cadavers in Earthsong’s customary bandit olive and green, garnished with gizzards and gore not just by Enigma and Golden, but the two hapless submariners themselves, disemboweled as a matching pair felled in the first moments of our deadly intruder’s loosening amongst us.

  Grunting and thumps sound, but there’s no immediate sign of Shade beyond the next doorway. Also with us this side of the sundered gate are Sentinel, Iron John and Gorilla Man, though when I swing back in his direction I see something like what you might imagine if I said a figure glimpsed in a blizzard who lifts the transformed gorilla by the throat as easily as a child, something spectral, non-corporeal, or not entirely real about him and the arm he plunges into the ape hero’s bulging costume-clad chest. The green-and-purple of Gorilla-Man’s uniform vanishes in a vomit of its inner workings as the ape makes a noise like an organic balloon might with the wind let out of it, and as the sigh breaks, the spell is broken or whatever and Gorilla Man transforms into his normal dead self which the flickering figure discards like a rich kid with last year’s now broken toy.

  “What the fuck is that?” I bawl and admit to being quite startled into paralysis.

  Sentinel charges past me with Iron John close behind, the not-quite steampunk avenger knocking me to the deck with his rough transit.

  From that vantage I watch with a terrifying feeling of finality as the entity maneuvers, almost seeming to teleport from one spot to another constantly out of reach like a flickering, see-through flame.

  I haul myself up as Sentinel swings a dozen times and misses, aiming each blow at an opponent who might as well be imaginary, he’s so consistently not there. I likewise see Iron John try to circle for advantage in the difficult terrain and despite his armor’s many functions, the Brit super hesitates like some guilty bed-wetter.

  “It’s one of those possessed villains! The Omega!” I yell, hoping my deductive intel might be of some use.

  “I can’t lay a mitt on him,” Sentinel snarls.

  As if making a case for pride, the vanishing blur re-appears alongside the veteran strongman, a face melting into view grinning like a mortician with a hard-on.

  “Shit.”

  There’s a horrible buzzing sound made worse by having every kid’s Saturday morning TV idol let loose with a scream channeling a noise like an alien world peopled entirely by retarded babies giving birth to each other. It is literally a gut-wrenching sound, the bone-saw tone of Sentinel’s impossibly invulnerable hide giving way under the monster’s onslaught. Sentinel’s shriek is short-lived though as he gets his hands on his attacker and applies a vise-hold strong enough to stop a battleship in harbor. Over his own agony and the sound of the blur’s own screams, he hisses a command to Iron John.

  “Give it everything you’ve got!”

  The old man’s insides dangle from his torn-open guts like they too refuse to give in, Sentinel crucifying the possessed Blur in his grasp.

  Swept up in it all, I have to clasp a bulkhead to steady my balance, clamping down against the rising tide of my inner demon clawing its way into my driver’s seat like a whole person trying to birth themselves from my gut via my throat. I see Shade coming back through the far side of the submarine getting her first proper glimpse of what’s going on – and I throw up my hand as our eyes lock and I yell for her to get to cover.

  As Sentinel wills it, Iron John does as told.

  In the close proximity it’s like we simply explode.

  And next thing we are in a hell of fire and water.

  *

  THE CONCUSSION ALONE is enough to kill whichever mere ideology-soaked mortals were still alive on the good ship Earthsong. I don’t know if I survive on my own merits or thanks to the thing which possesses me or sometimes I it. Without even getting a chance to find the lady in command of the sub, I’m caught up in the detonation as something goes monstrously wrong with Iron John’s suit and the resulting fusion breaches the submarine hull.

  Often, saying “words fail to convey” is a cop-out, but I don’t even know if I am entirely conscious nor even actually completely alive through the many intermittent parts that seem to make up the broken reel of the next few minutes that leaves me clutching on to a huge fucking section of the outside of the submarine’s hull as it rights itself in the water off the old waterfront where Loren and I once lived. My ears are deaf if not bleeding and I am catastrophically aware of only my own near consciousness, the sky and sea warbling in and out of focus in some disastrous play with each other, or I think that’s what’s going on until the slow moments spill on long enough for me to grasp the whole side of this metallic deck is on its way to turning vertical before it capsizes and sinks into the Hudson forever.

  The aft section of the sub continues to lift and lift out of the water as it dances towards its demise like the very metal glacier it has now become. I soar on it above the water level and have to hang on to random handholds to stop myself falling in utter disorientation into the water below which now teems with all manner of debris, not the least of it thirty or more bodies among which I imagine are men whom I never would’ve chosen as teammates who still sacrificed themselves for the greater good.

  But not Iron John. That was just a fuck-up. Or I gotta presume so.

  We tussled once and I got a sense of maybe I hadn’t seen him at full capacity and maybe I was glad for that. He’s unlikely to be hydrodynamic, so I cease scanning the debris field for him, my wandering, slightly shattered gaze falling on Shade slow-lapping it to the water’s edge.

  Bleak relief washes through me.

  “Shade!”

  The Brit super stops in the water, as exhausted as me and now almost as pale as she orients herself to se
e me waving one arm from my perch a hundred feet in the air. Shade tiredly motions me down.

  “Fly!” I yell. “To the shore. Meet me there!”

  I can barely hear her reply, but her angry-looking gesticulation focuses my gaze on what I’d missed before: a green-canopied power boat speeding away from us and headed for the trendy-tacky shopping arcade piers.

  I curse and check myself and can already feel the iron cathedral of the sub’s carcass commencing its date with entropy, so I gather my resolve and test the still waters of my unconscious and take a deep breath and think briefly about where my body might be now as I launch myself from this aerie and manage to thrust myself out into the air in a slow arc taking me after the fleeing goons in the boat.

  Passing over Shade, I catch her gesture for me to go after them without her.

  “I was coming back to tell you some got away,” Shade yells at me and nearly goes under water. “And then what the fuck happened?”

  There’s no time to answer except give an empathic nod I don’t entirely feel as I coast onwards with my trajectory for the small craft, a lone gunman in the back with an Uzi, a black scarf and goggles concealing his features.

  The new risk refires my aching powers and I up the ante, hurtling like a hurricane towards and above the ship before the lone goon can track me with the Uzi. Bullets flick past in my lazy wake and then I am over the top of the vessel and landing less gracefully than I’d like on its front bit, whatever you call that thing. More automatic gunfire expletes into the night and I vault up with a little centrifugal lift and come down hard again as the power boat completely misses wherever it was meant to be going and the side grazes a huge concrete pylon as we pass from the open water and into the underdark of the post-Reconstruction Van Buren waterfront, the boat only instants later slamming on the shallower water. The gunman in the back flips out, vanishing as he cries out in surprise, while the boat itself continues on to crash into the base of one of the many huge sloping concrete foundations of the gigantic architecture above.