Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  The boat’s pilot smashes on the rocks like a ragdoll, but the other passenger flits nimbly up the slope in a familiar flash of court jester bells and green-and-red threads.

  “Madrigal!” I yell and swoop.

  I manage a pretty damned tight parabola only to have the fucker whip out his blaster and point back at me as he skips up the huge concrete plinths. I veer sideways just as quick and the energy bolt flits away into the labyrinthine waters. By the time I correct myself, the villain-for-hire clambers through an access hatch in a metal walkway in the daylight far above.

  “I said catch ‘em, not kill ‘em,” Shade heckles from behind me.

  Emerging from the water, she shakes off her arms and points above us.

  “Up there?” I say. “It’s Madrigal. He must be part of Earthsong’s crew supplied by Baroness.”

  “Who and what?”

  “Didn’t I explain any of this stuff to you?”

  “As unlikely as it sounds, no,” Shade says and ascends to pass me, flying for the metal hatchway with me on her tail.

  “I guess we had a lot of rushed conversations.”

  “And not that many of ‘em,” Shade replies.

  “Sorry.”

  I catch myself staring at her like this is a deeper conversation than we should really be having right now. Shade breaks off seemingly unaware and takes point through the metal trapdoor, which screeches open to reveal a metal mesh-reinforced platform along the service access for the ten-years-new boardwalk complex that hovers along this part of the Hudson like a magician’s trick, the glittery discount malls and cheap amusements tarnished by days of rioting and abuse. Glass litters everywhere the eye can see, sharp and shiny enough I fear splinters just looking at it all. Sure enough, Madrigal jogs steadily away across the boardwalk to the crashed-open canyon entrance of one gigantic glass cathedral to spiritus oeconomicus. A sign dangling askew above declares it “Fashion Zentraal”.

  “In,” I grunt at Shade.

  “What the fuck happened back there, Cusp?”

  I decline the bait of my assumed moniker and eloquently shrug.

  “I don’t know I can say for sure, but it went to shit,” I tell her.

  “You can say that again.”

  “I wouldn’t dare waste your time, my dear,” I smirk and for the first time in a while realize I am not ol’ Zephyr, making my corny-sexist-sexy banter come off skewiff. “I think one of those Omega fuckers jumped us out of hyperspace or whatevs. I guess Portal was right. What did you see?”

  As I ask her this, by mutual consent we swoop into the damaged atrium of the mall, the architectural equivalent of a smoker’s lung. Everything is tattered and destroyed by mob violence. Articles of fashionwear that clearly didn’t pass muster with the looters of yesterdays-gone-by carpet the gloomy, unlit avenues. Madrigal doesn’t have much option but to hie for the bowels of the complex praying to the quiet spirits of evasion. He’s not a flier and he knows he’s fucked in a fair fight.

  “The door snapped shut and Portal was long gone,” Shade says as we pad forward like a couple from a Benetton advertisement who lost their adopted baby somewhere in the mall amid a natural disaster. “I don’t know what the fuck happened. And what happened to the . . . guy? The . . . thing who attacked us?”

  “I don’t know,” I say slowly, contemplative as I reconnoiter the path through overturned clothes racks and broken flats and flimsy partitions and broken mirrors and clothes-strewn pathways through the urban terrain like a multi-classed ranger/fashion model. “All I know is it took Iron John taking out a nuclear submarine to stop him. And I don’t think anyone else survived.”

  “And it did stop him?”

  “Barring evidence to the contrary.”

  “Heavy,” Shade says.

  “A-yup.”

  I am too exhausted for anything else but trite sentiments. I push a row of damaged shelving aside as we press on, following what I believe to be the sound of receding footfalls. But of course it’s Madrigal playing tricks on us.

  Zephyr 23.2 “The Rush To Embrace Pragmatism”

  THE NEXT THING I know, Shade and I are surrounded. Hideous hissing, yowling black eel-faced, nightmare-mouthed worms rise around us like living shadows, a sinister taffy conceived of equal parts darkness and dreamstuff.

  Tiny dagger fangs sink into Cusp’s ankle, but it’s me who feels the pain. And it’s me who shrieks and leaps back and kicks away, launching into the air the same moment rational logic tells me what just happened isn’t possible. Just to be safe, I strafe the area with a concussive battery of flash bulbs I frankly didn’t realize I had in me, the hormones triggered by perceived imminent death putting the speedball shot in my coffee I didn’t know I needed. My instinctive counter-attack isn’t super-considerate of Shade, who manages to save her eyesight by slapping her palms over her face, leaving me in charge as she crouches defensively among the writhing, carnivorous black pudding snakes all around her which my attack exposes for the clever illusions they are – and likewise exposes Madrigal crouched at an overturned wooden rostra, jangly fucking court jester-like headgear a little weather-stained, but somehow still in place atop his dimple-chinned mug.

  I drop from my perch a dozen yards into the industrial rafters. Madrigal whips out his blaster and fires a few shots as I execute a lazier-than-I’d-like tumble roll to evade and land a few yards before him, plunging into a fairly enthusiastic forward roll that comes up again in a double-handed piledriver strike. After electing to go at me with the weapon, Madrigal doesn’t have much in the way of options. He doesn’t know me from shit and doesn’t know what strength to expect, and as a professional punching bag, all he really does to spare himself in that moment is brace for impact.

  I send the mad Madrigal flying back about forty feet where he comes to rest at the base of a support pillar beside the bottom of an internal slatted pine-and-steel staircase.

  “Madrigal,” I say and continue to advance.

  “Who are you?” he barks back in that squeaky voice of his.

  I vaguely remember him getting thrown out of Crayons or was it Aubergine or maybe Silver Tower one night way back in the when. Possibly the last time we crossed paths unless he was at Paragon’s wedding. Madrigal slithers upright and realizes the same moment as me that he’s lost touch with his shooter.

  “Doesn’t really matter who I am,” I say to him as I close to high-kicking distance. “You’re working for this Earthsong chick or is it just the Russian guy?”

  “Go to hell.”

  Madrigal opens one gloved palm and a jet of hot smoke hisses out.

  Of course, not ordinary smoke. I’m immediately blind, and all my desperate grasping goes for nothing. Although I don’t see any of it, it’s lucky for me Shade is close on my six while Madrigal’s distracted by his pyrrhic victory. Shade’s left hook takes the bad guy plum on the cheekbone and his face squishes inward as the rest of him cartwheels nauseatingly away.

  There’s some thumping noises, Shade really working the guy over as I stagger about and suck in air with giddy relief as my eyesight slowly fills back in from around the edges. I check in on Shade and see her pinning a bloody-mouthed and broken Madrigal against the nearest pillar.

  “You got questions, you ask ‘em,” she glowers at me.

  I look to Madrigal.

  “Don’t look so fucking put out, you piece of shit. This is pretty much on you, yeah? You’re going to take money for dressing up gay and using your powers for nefarious evil or whatnot, when you get your ass handed to you, there’s no playing ‘no fair,’ got it?”

  “She broke my face,” he slurs.

  Shade shakes him fiercely.

  “I’m gonna twist off your dick and balls like a fucking tick if you don’t spill.”

  Terrified, Madrigal looks back at me and blood hangs from his nose like snot.

  “I’ve been on worlds where you were just musicians!” he yells at us.

  I wince at the spray and Shade punches him in the
ribs. Madrigal goes down again and again Shade lifts him up by the throat.

  “What do you want from me?” the villain cries.

  “You heard her,” I yell at him. “Why wasn’t Earthsong on the sub? Where is she? And what’s the fucking plan?”

  It dawns on Shade that Madrigal can barely speak, especially with her doing the Darth Vader death choke. She eases up a little, merely pinning the ridiculously outclassed mercenary bad guy to the pillar with her vise-like pincer grip, this time with his feet still on the ground.

  “They’ve got nukes,” Madrigal says. “From the submarine. It’s North Korean.”

  “I heard one of them went missing a while back,” Shade says.

  “Nice exposition,” I snap at her. “How many nukes?”

  Madrigal hesitates as if there’s still some kind of chance he’s not going to give up every little thing he’s got on Earthsong. Shade tiredly lifts her fist and the ex-madman stammers in the rush to embrace pragmatism.

  “Five,” he says. “Earthsong, she’s with the others at the Stock Exchange. The nukes have five separate teams.”

  “Where are they heading?”

  “No,” Madrigal says. “They’re already there. Five locations across Atlantic City.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I say in a moment of helpless exhaustion. “Why? Why the fuck would they do that? And you’re helping them? What are they even trying to achieve?”

  Madrigal looks blank-faced and bloody at me, like I’m the only one who didn’t get the memo.

  “They want to tear it all down,” he shrugs matter-of-fact.

  “Tear what down?”

  Another shrug.

  “Everything.”

  “Define ‘everything’,” Shade says.

  “Atlantic City, and then the world. For the planet.”

  He looks at us for a moment, but neither Shade nor I say anything.

  “Earthsong and the others, they want to stop it all working, you know? Technology. Civilization. The cities. It’s the only way to save humanity. And they’re right. You know it. We have to stop this madness.”

  The words register like slow-motion rain drops.

  *

  THE FATE OF Western civilization is a bit too much for me right now. I’m worried I’m getting my period. The real challenge is wondering if the Earth’s even worth saving.

  “Hell, maybe Earthsong is right,” I say to no one in particular.

  “What?”

  Madrigal echoes Shade almost like he finds ushering in a new Dark Age somehow unpalatable despite his recent involvement in greasing doomsday’s mechanics. I look him up and down, an aging never-was bad guy who was middle-aged when I was young and somehow still looks it, like a young grandpa artificially preserved in talcum powder.

  “What the fuck was that thing with the snakes?” I ask him.

  “Neuromantic weaponry.”

  “New Romantic?”

  “Neuromantic,” Madrigal says, enunciating straight from the English For Retards manual.

  “I don’t think that’s . . . actually a thing,” I say back to him slowly.

  “Doc Prendergast made them for me.”

  “He’s doing weapons for villains now?” Anus.

  “Joe,” Shade snaps in her best Brixton drawl. “You know more about what’s going on than I do. What are we doing?”

  Conveniently, the phone Seeker tucked back into my waistband starts bleeping and when I answer it’s my erstwhile lover on the other end.

  “I was just thinking about you,” I say, the lie sweeter on Holland’s lips.

  “What the hell happened, Joe?” Seeker’s voice comes back like she’s inside my head too.

  “I wish people would stop asking me that. I don’t know.”

  “Portal’s here, but he’s a gibbering wreck. He said something about an attack?”

  “We got jumped. One of those . . . things from before. Can Portal get you all back here?”

  “I don’t think you understand, Joe,” Seeker says.

  Clearly, she couches her voice to take account of nearby sensibilities.

  “He’s . . . fried. Portal’s not going anywhere.”

  “I’ve got five rogue nukes in strategic locations around Atlantic City. I need back-up, Loren.”

  “We’re still in London, Joe.”

  My businesslike glance takes in Shade and Madrigal. Mel gets the gist and puts her knee into the bad guy’s gut so he goes down for a minute.

  “Yeah, I gathered as much,” I say to Seeker in London. “Transport?”

  “Do you have the locations of the nukes?”

  “I love how you didn’t even ask me why there are five nukes,” I say with a wry, wrung-out smirk I only feel like vestigial adaptation. “I don’t have those locations, but I think I’m about to. To repeat: transport?”

  I make a winding-up motion to Shade, and as Seeker explains they might have to requisition an actual plane to cross the Atlantic, Madrigal starts shrieking like a lab monkey off-screen, prompting another flurry of inevitable questions.

  “Loren,” I say patiently. “Seeker. I’m sorry, babe. I don’t have time for this. I can’t wait however many hours it’s going to take for you all to get here. Can’t you find St George? I’m pretty sure these guys are moving towards some kind of . . . extinction agenda.”

  “Why?”

  “Earthsong wasn’t hugged as a child? I have no fucking idea.”

  “Have you found her at least?” Loren asks. “No one’s seen Earthsong for a dozen years.”

  “I’m yet to have the pleasure.”

  I tell Loren to call when she might have a way to help. In the meantime, as goddamned usual, I’m back on my own resources.

  Tucking away the phone, I turn to Shade as she drops a limp and bloody Madrigal to the ground. He’s unconscious if not actually dead and I am struggling to give a shit.

  “He doesn’t know the location of the nukes,” she says, fatigued from all the torture.

  “Do you want me to have a go?”

  “I think I just neutered him. I really think he doesn’t know.”

  “Who does?”

  “Earthsong.”

  “How do we find Mama Bear?”

  “That he did know,” Shade says with a nasty grin.

  And so we’re off again.

  *

  WE GET FREE of Van Buren, but not by much. I am hungry again and we raid the desiccated remains of a Gunga Diner to eat gargantuan portions of not easily identifiable frozen meat products I flash fry with Cusp’s light control powers. It’s not exactly breakfast of champions. Or lunch. It must be something like midday as we stand in the remains of the fast-food outlet listening to distant gunshots which go off as precisely as a lesson in basic mathematics, and a pack of scrawny-looking feral dogs hover by the doorway until Shade growls at them and they choose discretion over valor.

  “Where have all the people gone?” I say out loud.

  “California, Canada, Mexico. Your borders are . . . fucked,” Shade replies. “It’s a hell of an ironic reversal, for a country founded by immigrants. The BBC says there might be a million people remaining in Atlantic City, but you lot are so spread out, you know, they could be. . . .”

  “Anywhere?”

  I sigh deeply again and contemplate wiping my hands except everything looks more filthy than I am. I give up and Shade narrows in on my dejected scowl.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “That’s such a girl question.”

  “Have you had your period yet?”

  “No. Don’t remind me.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m just contemplating what we have to do next. You’re not going to like it. Neither am I, for the record, you know, in case anyone’s keeping track.”

  “Hitting Earthsong’s lair?”

  “I thought the ACSX was a ruin, but if what you say is true and this mutant kid or whatever he is,” I say, trailing off with an unrepentant shrug.

  �
�But that’s not what I was thinking about,” I tell her.

  “It took a moment, but now I’m finally starting to get a bad feeling,” Shade says slowly, dark eyes locked on my avoidant gaze. “Is this how most women feel around you Joe, or whatever you’re calling yourself these days?”

  “This is just a phase I’m going through,” I say and actually give an ersatz laugh as I gesture at my ridiculously hyper-feminine physique.

  “So what’s the plan?” Shade asks.

  “I’m guessing the minute I beat the locations of those five nukes out of Earthsong, we’re going to have limited time. Maybe no time.”

  “And?”

  “And what? They’re not going to be grouped all neatly together, are they?”

  “So there’s going to be some we can’t stop?”

  “Fuck that.”

  “Oh, so now you can see letting militant environmentalists flush human civilization down the bog ain’t exactly a good idea?”

  “The world is fucked, but this is my city,” I say to her. “And innocent people shouldn’t die and die horribly, just because of a higher principle.”

  “Please get to the part where you’re telling me what you’re thinking.”

  “You mean the part where I tell you what we’re going to do?”

  Shade makes a hurry-up motion at me not dissimilar to my own instructions for her to pull Madrigal apart with her bare hands. We leave the guy in a puddled heap and take his gadget bag to ditch on a rooftop in transit. Summary execution feels a tad too much like some kind of Nietzschean proverb come to life.

  “We need more masks, and there’s only one place I know to find them.”

  Shade only looks at me, determined as any regular killjoy not to give me my dramatic moment. I exhale noisily to vent displeasure in what TV tells me is true feminine style.

  “We’re going to have to bust everyone out of the Feebs’ jail, if they’re still there. My daughter’s there – yes, Windsong, if you remember her – and plenty of others we could use if we’re going to form some kinda strike team.”

  “Can’t we just go and –”