Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  I stir the mix by focusing my light powers on the middle of Earthsong’s oncoming attack. The golem’s granite and marble barely scorches, the rock no more than engraved by my most tightly-focused beam.

  I’m saved from any other market research as Killswitch blind-sides me. Pain lances through my ribs as I’m cast aside and Chamber’s concussive blasts fill my ears the next few seconds as I roll backwards, blind through the chaos and painfully over the rubble, getting back on my feet as the armored hero gives ground until we are level and Shade once again grapples with the creature Earthsong has summoned to crush as all flat.

  “Your daughter was right. We needed to attack in force,” Chamber says.

  I stare at him sideways and agape and wonder whether this is really the time or place for an argument.

  “Get reinforcements,” I say.

  Chamber inclines his head and nods once, then the black trapdoor opens in his chest and I have to avert my gaze anyway as Shade tears the legs from beneath Earthsong’s golem and I leap into the air and weave around another huge fist that springs up seemingly readymade from the ground to descend in a wrecking-ball arc which misses me and narrowly does the same for Shade. Amid the crunch of its impact I scan back at the ground where Chamber stood before and then cast my eyes across the storm-crowded rooftops of this devastated section of the financial district and descend, wreathing myself in a banner of darkness.

  Zephyr 23.6 “Blast Registers”

  IT IS ALL we can do to evade Earthsong’s minions as Shade and I stay in the air under chase by Killswitch and Infernus. Earthsong shoots huge boulders at us which she delivers from the ground like some perverse shamanic midwife, each new crater and its corresponding destruction adding to the warlike scenes. Somewhere off behind us a gas main detonates like a small bomb and an abandoned postal van lifts into the air as, from hiding, my wounded daughter conjures lightning from the heavens to strafe Earthsong’s position.

  Aerial combat can easily fall into a vortex among evenly matched foes as the fighters adapt into concentric circuits to avoid taking combat into the open. And there are certain tactics – like the one I pull now – which I’ve deployed to greater success in past years thanks to my Zephyr body’s juiced reflexes. Now when I drop out of my sharp banking, I collide with Infernus more like something thrown out of a bus window than a graceful aerial crime-fighter. I try my best to keep myself sharp, heels and elbows in force to good effect as I slam my right hook into the red-skinned flyer’s face. He twists, body one muscular red ribbon as he throws a fist into my side that gives me nowhere to go, the cringe of broken bones in my ribcage indescribable and unforgettable in one fell swoop.

  He thinks he has me. A grin that would be handsome were it not so literally devilish crosses his face as he moves right into the hand I plant over his startled grimace. I squint with the violence of my will and darkness explodes from his skull via eyes, ears and mouth.

  Infernus drops practically headless to the ground as Chamber folds into being beneath me, beside the newly-minted corpse, a half-dozen reinforcements spilling from the armored hero’s glory hole: Paragon, Lynx, Manticore, Night Angel and Nocturne.

  Just a little further up the slope caged within the ribs of yet another devastated civic building, Earthsong throws up a wall of studded stone she then rams into the late arrivals, and then it is well and truly on, the earth shaking, a nearby wall giving way amid all the excitement as Paragon is flung one way and Lynx the other. A half-dozen lurking militia zealots bravely wager in, one woman going full Braveheart with her top off and a suicide run with a 9mm handgun, her death wish fulfilled when Earthsong’s now-three-legged monster accidentally backs over her in the rush to swing its giant appendages at Shade and I still flitting about in the air.

  Also among the bad guys is a weird-looking cloaked chick with what looks like an fish bowl on her head sparing only her mouth and chin. With her is the yellow-skinned Fallout, big boots crunching on rubble as he wades in to tackle Night Angel, broad grin revealing teeth like white pickets in a head the size and general expression of a Jack O’Lantern. Steam oozes off the hulking brute made worse for the rain. I’m pretty sure Fallout’s left a who’s who of former teammates terminally ill, so his mere presence is enough to undermine my confidence in our chances of victory.

  “Focus on Fallout!” I yell.

  The cyclonic winds whipping around us don’t exactly help my Napoleon routine and I resort to waving to get Nocturne’s attention so she can relay my directions telepathically.

  “Hit Fallout with everything you’ve got,” I think-yell at her.

  He’s immune to my psychic attack, she emotes. It’s like he has no brain.

  “Jesus Christ,” I shriek into the merciless wind as thunder booms off-set and I nearly fly right into the path of another stone fist.

  Falling like a giant, ungainly moth, I land in my heels beneath the sheltering bulk of Earthsong’s behemoth as Lynx bounds by and the smell of Killswitch’s power blast registers to my nose. I dearly wish for the strength to overthrow the giant construct, though his mistress is the only reasonable target. The ground unravels around my booted feet, submerged fiber-optic cables and centuries-old plumbing oozing up out of the ground like from some wakening giant’s colon, the earth turning itself inside-out in its hunger to birth its secrets, proactive archaeology in the violent regurgitation as I glimpse Earthsong moving just out of direct line of site beyond the moving stumps of the earth-shaking creature towering over us as it maneuvers focused on its own particular battles under the villainess’s control, a noise like hammering sheet metal caroming counter-time to another flash as lighting stakes its claim on the Earth and one of the gun-toting guards shrieks his last.

  A tendril of split animated cables throws itself around my waist and catches my arm and maybe that would be the end of me right there except Night Angel sweeps in close and her wing cuts through the fetters and I spring clear and dive into flight to swoop at head height between the still-rotating legs of this conjuration and straight into another wall of rock that erupts from the ground too late for me to steer past. I collide with it shoulder-first and the whole hastily-erected embankment has no real spine to it and caves in as I stumble through off-balance like a small town footballer through his two-hundred game day banner, though I come out swinging and connect with Earthsong’s shoulder and spin the old bitch around, everything familiar and yet nothing like it at the same time as I taste the richness of the dirt that could so easily become my grave as Earthsong lands a piledriver right that takes me across the jaw and would take my head clean off if she didn’t telegraph it so, giving me time to roll with the blow.

  The punch knocks me off-balance and I trip backwards and roll aside as the elephantine foot of one of this mud monster’s legs stomps down and Earthsong conjures stalagmites of ill intent cursing my path as I stumble free and the villainess keeps the earth alive to my egress at the same time Raveness crosses my path and I throw the disoriented-looking warrior woman aside with a blast of eldritch darkness which ends barely after it begins, a giant earthen hand grabbing me from behind to haul me back, reeling me in so that my head collides with one of the stalagmites which explodes from the impact doing very little for my premenstrual headache, twisting about in Earthsong’s remote control grip as I groggily, yet again blindly kick and break free to be deposited on the soil before her.

  There is just the briefest moment as she lifts her gloved fist. A majestic smirk adorns her masked face.

  “Is this really what you were after, Jane?” I ask her.

  The ground continues its undulating ovulation, more metal and rotting piping breaking free and twisting under Earthsong’s control, though she holds the blow.

  “How do you know my name?”

  I vault forward and unthinkingly deflect the gaunt clubbing metal arm Earthsong animates, radius and ulna aching if not fractured as I duck a similar attack from another nearby earthen tentacle, ignoring the pain to cast a jellyfish-
like shield of darkforce which leaps into being to block a third attack as I crouch, gathering my disoriented strength to vault to the top of Earthsong’s stalled creature. Its mistress ascends upon a column of earth to loom over me, and I guess it seems like it’s all going swimmingly for her when there is a godawful flash over my shoulder made all the more terrible for the silence that follows.

  I feel it like a hot ashen gust of wind on my back and a sere force that passes us and is just as quickly gone, the cosmic brilliance of the burst fading before it truly registers.

  Shielding my eyes, I swivel towards the source of the explosion some miles away across the city – and Earthsong seems frozen in horror as I chance that look back from my forty-foot-tall vantage point. The backwash of the flash hits us and dust fills my mouth and my gritted eyes and at once, wiping at my face and hawking spit, I clear my vision in time to see the bone-chillingly familiar mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion framed in the grey territories beyond the immediate cityscape some ten or twenty miles away.

  “In God’s name, what have you done?” I stammer.

  The flames rapidly embroil the distance between us and will be on us in mere moments as the holocaust’s crescendo skips past dozens of city blocks in seconds and I leap down from the turtle’s back into the skeletal remains of the building around us more like the ruins of some medieval church yard as the rain cuts out and I hold up a hand that barely sizzles with nascent light and almost don’t notice Earthsong’s stone creature collapse in on itself behind me as I check to see Nocturne holding back in astonishment as if still waiting for my command and Tessa hurries at me and the others start hitting cover all around.

  “Get down!” I yell fashionably late.

  Tessa pushes me into the lee of the collapsed stone golem’s bulk as the sky overhead roars with flames and somewhere Earthsong gives a high-pitched wail as she is left to blindly confront the fire storm unsheltered, and masks all around us, friend and foe alike, bury themselves under cover to avoid the heavens’ catastrophic rage.

  *

  I CAN STILL claim father’s prerogative as I cover as much of Tessa’s body as I can and she fights to do the same for me even though she is weak from blood loss and I have to pin her in place like a butch dom and yell in her face for her to lay the fuck down as the blast drowns out my words as it recedes past us in our unquiet hollow and I look up the fallen slope through hair falling in skewiff waves, Earthsong lying cradled in the scorched rubble, twisting and writhing in pain.

  I can’t let myself get distracted by the destruction of the distant scenery or what I can imagine of the associated loss in life. I force myself past Nocturne reduced to a charcoal sculpture and the enemy villainess likewise dead beside her. Windsong dogs my wake, valiantly clutching her weeping shoulder as I struggle uphill to Earthsong’s position, the fallen woman emitting groans and moans like a distress beacon.

  “That was one of the nukes,” Tessa says behind me.

  “I know,” I say. “Give me a moment here. Find Chamber and . . . and the others.”

  God bless her, Tessa nods and departs and I reach my position scrambling up into the funereal aerie Earthsong has unwitting won for herself in the ruins of the world she so dearly loathed.

  Her eyes are gone and whatever resemblance she bore to the woman I once knew has been erased by the nuclear blast. Even Titanium Girl’s imperial rule must bow to some force at some time and so it seems this is true for her doppelganger as well. Her burnt-black profile quests about like a mole sensing my presence. So little of the machinery of her face actually works that any of her recognizable responses are largely guesswork on my part.

  “Who is there?” she croaks. “The woman?”

  “Yes, it’s me. Cusp,” I say.

  “The others?”

  “I think they’ve fled . . . or died,” I say. “Tell me about the other nukes so I can stop this.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “They went early,” she says and groans loudly and twists and I can see bits of her breaking off and a tremor runs through my bowels and I set aside the violent urge to run off and do a shit as Earthsong spasms loudly and goes still again.

  “… wasn’t meant to happen that way,” she says.

  “I figured.”

  “Too late anyway.”

  “Why too late? The other nukes –” I start to argue.

  “You are too late,” she gasps and coughs and regrets it, pain lancing through her wrecked frame. “This is the . . . end of the plan, not its start.”

  “I don’t understand,” I tell her. “Tell me.”

  “No,” she says and eases back with a groan. “No. You can answer to him . . . I’ve played my part.”

  I look at her, aware of the life slipping away before me.

  “Who?”

  Earthsong wheezes and her jaw flakes open like grilled fish to reveal the white of bone which slowly moves.

  “Inside,” she says. “Terminus.”

  “Terminus?”

  “Khodor- . . . Khodorkovsky’s creature.”

  And then she dies.

  I gaze down on the nearly crystalline forest of terrain replacing what was once this woman’s flesh, whatever elements which made it so hard-forged in life manifesting at her demise in the strange beauty of her wounds transformed under the nuclear gaze of her own denouement. Someone moves past me and I don’t even look up to ward myself and whoever it is, they move on.

  There is a meaning to her words that is also the answer to this riddle I didn’t even realize I’ve been trying to solve these last few months.

  For now, that answer must wait – and I must meet this Terminus, but I’m going to have my speech first, and regardless of my audience being dead. I cannot believe the futility and pointlessness of it all and now . . . Terminus?

  “You’re right, you know,” I say blithely. “People are a plague on this world. The planet would be better off without us. I don’t see us fixing things. I see us getting smarter and greedier and I think that will mean the ‘us’ and ‘them’ are gonna get further and further apart: not too many one per centers left, and then the rest of us, just a faceless mob.

  “But you too,” I address the corpse. “You’re also part of why we don’t deserve to survive, as a species. How could you usher in this madness, Jane? How . . . and why?”

  The only one watching my one-act play is Shade. She rests half-buried beneath a collapsed brick wall where she throws the bricks off her one by one, clearly too injured to do much more.

  “Shade,” I say like a woman just waking as I move across to her. “Where is everyone?”

  “Someone said a nuke went off,” she says bitterly.

  There’s blood on her lips. I kneel beside her and start snatching away more bricks. Shade stills my hand. Her eyes water.

  “Chamber took your daughter to White Nine for that bullet wound,” Shade says. “He’ll come back for me.”

  “I’m not leaving you buried here under –”

  “What did she say and why were you talking to her? Ain’t she dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She told you something?”

  “Terminus . . . Khodorkovsky’s mutant. He’s the spider at the middle of all this, or . . . the one controlling all this. I’ve got to shut him down or they can’t get the city back online.”

  Shade looks worryingly pale as she lays back and her eyes narrow.

  “Find him,” she whispers.

  I nod and look back up the slope to the exposed surviving wing of the Stock Exchange building. Somehow fluorescent light shines from the gaping interior, the sheared-off edge of the building more resembling a hangar for x-wing fighters than a former ziggurat of bureaucracy. Ignoring the raw pain in my side, I trust the new Chamber to do the right thing by Shade and lurch away up the debris-spackled slope and then remember I can fly.

  Lifting off with the gyres of force beneath me, my arc takes me to the exposed second storey of the office bui
lding. It makes little sense that the power is on, and that perplexity drives my continued advance once I alight at the sawn-off edge of a series of long-since shattered windows corralling an open plan office space. Despite the slight wrong angle, the rows of monitors show flickering designs, the air itself tasting of electricity in a weird moment of sense memory that only serves to underscore my isolation from my Zephyr body. I take a deep breath and wonder whether the feeling of impending doom at this moment has lain dormant my entire life and maybe I just never registered it till now. I’m half-expecting Raveness to bound in with a new lease on life, or something similar, because that’s so much how these things ordinarily go that I’m almost resigned to it. Yet no such foe presents themselves and I follow dangling fluorescent tubes to the edge of an open metal staircase offering entrance to a subterranean sanctuary with the smell of hard drives thick in the air.

  The Stock Exchange computer core is more cramped than I expected, but it doesn’t seem to trouble Terminus. The mutant sits in the luminous dark at the back of a cluster of computer terminals, and dozens upon dozens of cables snake around him like the roots and vines grown from the base of an eldritch tree in some dark fairytale, the tiny winking colored lights around the greyscale figure are like lights in the branches, something cocoon-like about the bluish shadowed form, the husks of previous attempts at incarnation on the ground like fallen leaves moldering the metal platform on which his throne is set leading me to somehow make the intuitive leap that this is no son of Adam nestled in the electromagnetic topiary of the Stock Exchange core.

  My fears are confirmed as the various monitors light up like a constellation in a universe of metal warehouse shelving that disappears beyond the metal platform beneath my intrepid feet as I take careful steps, continuing to watch the huddled humanoid as if wishing to believe life of some kind might reside therein, and not instead within the various faces that wink into existence on the multi-platformed monitors that bear witness to my advance.