Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  Sure, I know that wasn’t the wittiest line in history, but this is no comic book. I hate this guy, hate everything he has ever done and hate nothing so much as the total disdain he has for how we do things here on my patch – and by that I mean the whole of Atlantic City. So once again, it’s my turn to hand this guy his asshole and show him how to wear it as a hat.

  I figure it’ll be a good training exercise for the kids.

  Zephyr 4.3 “Beneath The Metal Rain”

  IT TAKES MASTODON a second or so to realize we really are going to have a rumble. Then he does his foot-stamping trick and if things were quieter you’d hear the leather straps of his chest harness strain with the stretch as he swells from just over six foot to a little over nine. Now his shoulders are the size of Christmas hams and his mutton chops loom about the size of small cats duct-taped to the side of his grinning, leering face.

  “Alright Zephyr, this is more like it.”

  “Take it easy, Lemmy,” I say as I hurtle across the chamber. “Don’t break anything.”

  By that I mean anything of his own, of course. I’m quite happy for him to hand these guys their heads and we’ll just bury the corpses wherever the Wallachians suggest. Across the room I see Ash dragging himself away from the mound of disgustingness he’s only really added to, while the chick with the whip and the chick with the sword seem intent on looking scenic rather than helpful.

  I crash into the space previously occupied by Captain Jackass. In my wake, another portal opens overhead and I should’ve seen this one coming, knowing this motherfucker plans ahead for these sorts of things as metal shopping cart after metal shopping cart start plunging down onto me and into the room. There’s something awkwardly painful about being hit by raining metal trolleys I think the madman kens only too well. Even for me, as the first one rebounds from my forearms, head and knee simultaneously, it’s more than just my ego taking a battering.

  Pouring on a bit of super-speed, I manage to get out from beneath the metal rain, but Seeker and the Don aren’t so lucky. It’s only that I manage to wing Jackass with another lightning bolt that the portal sucks closed and the damned things stop coming. Moments later on the other side of the room, there’s another sizzling noise, and through a hole no bigger than my fist, a shower of golf balls pour into the room. Ash and Madame Lash – there’s a good rhyming couple for you – go down on their butts and its only by the grace of her rubber-band teleporting trick that Samurai Girl gets to bitch-slap Jackass and force the latest wormhole closed as well.

  “Nice moves!” I yell. “Now watch your back.”

  The dude calling himself The Drill flies straight for Seeker, but there’s nothing I can do for her right now as the one with the kneepads unhooks goodies from his belt-pack and tosses ‘em at me in the center of the room. The first one is little more than a firecracker and then the next thing I know there’s tear gas flooding across the scene and I have to cover my nose and mouth with my hand and squint to get a good sense of his location. Perhaps Prankster has superhuman powers of regeneration to back up his gimmicks. If not, he may have a problem eating with anything other than a straw or perhaps a wet nurse after my tightly-clenched left connects with the side of his jaw and introduces him to the hard stone floor.

  Madame Lash does something lame with her whip. I suspect she’s trying to create a vortex to disperse the gas, which is a sweet idea except for Murderboy leaping from one wall to another and finally landing on her back and sinking his teeth into the side of her neck. To her credit, powers or none, the lady freaks out just fine enough to fling the weird-ass villain over her shoulder in a practiced judo move. Just as Emo-boi rights himself, she does a reverse spinning kick that sends him across the room and into the aforementioned pile of shopping trolleys.

  I am distracted by a right cross to my jaw. Spinning about, I can’t see anyone, and then fingers tap me on the shoulder, and like a total cad, I flip about and yet another punch snaps across my jaw. Their saving grace is there’s no superhuman strength in the blows. Across the chamber I see the so-called captain give a little wave and then, through one of his teleport discs, his foot comes through and tries to get me in the jewels. No dice. I grab the good captain’s ankle and channel more than a handful of volts back through the portal. If he doesn’t shit himself, I’ll be astonished.

  The hole in space collapses taking his errant limbs with it.

  Time to get things moving.

  Through the tear-gas haze, Ash appears like a homeless man to grab The Drill either side of his helmet. The bad guy has put a few holes in Seeker’s shoulder and she lies on the floor looking uncharacteristically limp. It doesn’t matter. Ash is pissed. His fully unleashed power is lethal. The Drill’s head disintegrates into a hissing pile of white-hot dust and the helmet kind of falls apart as the silica of the dead bad guy’s skull and tissue pour from the front vent like sand from a broken hourglass. The still very rubbery and real headless body plops onto the floor next to Seeker, who screams shrilly, thereby drawing almost every eye in the room to the scene.

  Mastodon has been maced by Prankster. Samurai Girl has lines of drool hanging from her chin, two canisters of tear gas still gushing nearby. Madame Lash has lost her whip. She has a black eye and bleeds heavily from a neck bite and another to one of her breasts, which has slipped free from her heavy corset. I direct a quick zap toward her assailant and the hair-dyed freak cartwheels away with the sort of noise I’d expect a cat to make.

  “Time to finish up, ‘Don!” I yell with my eyes streaming, half-squeezed shut.

  I almost stumble over The Drill’s corpse, shielding supine Seeker with my body as Prankster and then Jackass circle. I’m trying to do the math and it won’t add up and that’s when I belatedly realize we’re missing someone.

  “Okay, where’s the other fucker?”

  If you thought Murderboy was creepy, it’s Kid Kaos who’s the real psycho case on their team: Captain Jackass’s pet serial killer, which he keeps on a close emotional leash – except when he lets the leash go pretty long. And when he does, that’s trouble, because the Kid is a natural assassin. He can ghost as well as turn see-through, so you never know where he’s gonna appear.

  This time he wobbles back into view directly behind Ash, who stands there in the white body stocking I know his mum probably sewed for him, palms clawed and radiating their own dangerous vibe. Only he doesn’t have a clue about the danger immediately to his rear and the ‘Don and I barely open our mouths before Kid Kaos slots into place, his turn to grab Ash by the skull and twist.

  Shit just got real. I guess we got one of theirs so. . . ?

  Somehow amid his descent to the hard stones, Ash’s rolling eyes swivel around until they find mine, and then stay locked on me as Kid Kaos ghosts the young hero’s head into the stone floor and leaves it there, buried, fused, the corpse’s back painfully arched, arms splayed. And I swear, a hot white rage starts inside me, but it’s tempered by a tiredness too, that everything has to end like this and that it’s not just Captain Jackass and his crew who have no respect for how things should be, but that it’s life itself that doesn’t respect the conventions of our particular genre. Ash was a nineteen-year-old hero just starting out in the world. He’d moved here from Detroit because he never had anything to do. Now he’s just a hundred-and-eighty pounds of pre-packaged meat going to spoil, or more likely to wind up alongside the guy he killed in some nameless Wallachian garbage dump or swamp or unholy fucking backwater.

  I’m tired of the idea of payback, but until something better comes along, that’s the only option I have.

  *

  SO WE TEAR into them. Kid Kaos fades from view before I can blow a few thousand volts through his chest. Murderboy runs up one wall and vaults, something sticky about his hands as he crosses the ceiling like a monkey and comes down on Mastodon, who promptly throws him halfway across the room.

  Prankster pulls another weird-looking gun and fires at me and a net flops out, heavy little balls o
n the edges as it goes over. I put a scorch mark in the middle of his chest and he flies backward, adding to his bruise collection for today, but in the moment I struggle with the net, Jackass throws up one of his discs over my head and dusty red recycled house bricks pour down in their hundreds. Between the bricks and the dust I go down for a moment.

  I’m relieved to see Samurai Girl run around the room at just under Mach. She swings with practiced swipes and cuts Murderboy and Jackass and bounds out of the way as Kid Kaos rematerializes. If I weren’t so angry I’d be amused by the sight of the hockey-masked freak picking up a pair of bricks and disappearing with them again. It’s not so funny when he materializes near Mastodon, phases the brick invisible and leaves it lodged in the big guy’s stomach. The ‘Don twitches and drops as his system goes into shock and it’s really only blind luck that my own short circuit hits the fading assassin before he’s gone completely. Mask and all, Kid Kaos slides about ten feet and remains curled with a smoky residue over his head.

  I’m on hyper alert. When a teleport disc appears beside me, I throw myself into it and out the other end, suddenly grappling with the team leader before Jackass headbutts me with the helmet and I feel my nose break, no big deal, the blood running down my face merely unnerving as I blindly grasp his scarred, malignant face with one hand and start to squeeze. I hammer short right jabs into his ribs, feeling them break, and somewhere amid all that the laughter goes out of him and he starts to freak, thrashing wildly, screaming, clawing at my grimace as I ram my knee into his crotch and then make the mistake of hurling him bodily across the room.

  He bounces across the stone and comes up with his face bleeding almost as bad as the sword-wound to his side. The Captain spits blood and shakes his head, expression furious.

  “You can have this one, Zeph,” he growls. “Next time you won’t be so lucky. I’ll make sure of it.”

  I am left to ponder any hidden meanings in this as he throws teleport discs beneath his mates, including the unconscious ones, and they disappear from view at short notice.

  I wipe leather across my bleeding face without much satisfaction as Samurai Girl tends to Seeker’s pierced shoulder. Madame Lash isn’t going anywhere and that’s even more terribly true for Ash. Mastodon drops to his knees as well and gives me a nod with his graven face.

  “Could do with a few more hit points there, boss,” he says.

  I can only nod. “At least this time the little bastard didn’t dump me in the Himalayas when he was finished,” I try and grin and fail.

  The silent cowled figures of the Wallachian monks appear through a doorway bearing the now familiar sight of a floating stretcher. I hold up my hands for two more.

  “Not so crash hot, huh Zephyr?” Seeker says in a pained voice.

  “I guess we weren’t really geared up for that,” I say. “Any idea how the hell they found us here?”

  “I’ll have to ask the priests in charge of the cloaking device,” Seeker replies. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  I motion to the dead kid. “Tell it to him.”

  “The Wallachians, you know. . . .”

  “Keep your fucking priests off him,” I say more harshly than I intend, but the vision in my mind’s eye is compelling and probably not completely inaccurate. “It could’ve been a worse death.”

  “Ash might have something different to say to that.”

  “I’m not about to find out. Leave it be.”

  We exchange knowing looks, hers doe-like, mine taciturn, and Madame Lash gets up in the middle of our exchange and grabs her rig and staggers for the door like a drunk hooker in search of a payphone.

  I harrumph.

  “I’d better see the lady out.”

  And that’s that.

  Zephyr 4.4 “Fruit In A Costume”

  I’M READING the Post with some disdain, my back to a girder in the otherwise fully translucent diner, trying to kid myself I am flicking through the political and world news sections to get to the sports and not Nate Simon’s Tuesday column. The little fuck has been hinting at the breakdown in my friendship with Twilight for two weeks running now, but he hasn’t even tried to call to verify his information. Thanks to Christ he doesn’t know half as much as he could, even if he’s already spilled twice as much as I’d ever want the average Joe Public to know about how Twilight and I came to blows and sent half the city (actually just Rhode Island) into the Abyss. I am not presently accepting calls from the Mayor’s office for fear they might have some crazy idea about reparations.

  Fortunately, the Post reporter has a new bag. Sal Doro covers the big fish (like me, normally), which is why I guess Simon is left speculating on the disappearance of some dude who works the south city and calls himself Crusader. Original. While I have barely heard of this guy before, I don’t think the fact some fruit in a costume fails to stop three daytime robberies and a laundry fire justifies a missing person report. If he’s anything like I was when I was starting out, a really bad zit was enough to keep me low for two weeks at a time.

  I flick through this trivia and check the other items. I see Eris has been at her own unique brand of chaos again, hospitalizing a guard at the storage vaults attached to the State Museum of the Americas. Hebrew parahuman Allan Silverman has demanded an invite to an upcoming session of the City States Symposium in Atlantic City with predictable results. Mastodon and Cipher teamed up to smash a Yardie drug den, which begs a far more interesting story given the old man’s pharmaceutical pursuits. An emissary from a parallel earth has apparently left Atlantic City in disgust after being refused entry to the Flyaway. The stock price for most major drug companies took a hit last week following rumors a German sorcerer had eradicated all strains of influenza. Turned out not to be true. Pity. Meanwhile, a villain called Dragonmaster, a Brit, I assume, since I’ve never heard of him, has come out of the closet to a men’s mag. One look at the scaled leather costume the guy wears and you’ve got to wonder who was left to gasp in surprise at that particular revelation.

  Oh, and Windsong has been seen flying formations over Staten Island with a British super, the renowned bisexual beauty Shade. The thirty-something bisexual beauty Shade. I make a note to self and grit my teeth and barely look up at the sweet Minnesotan farm girl delivering my espresso as a pizza delivery guy cutting up the sidewalk outside hits a dude in a suit and his moped goes hissing out-of-control toward a fountain. I snap the newspaper shut and patently ignore the chaos, my hand around the warm mug a pleasure to savor as I fight against the invisible forces that would otherwise suck my mood.

  Surprisingly, the gossip pages have absolutely nothing about Seeker’s decision to form a new group of Sentinels. Considering it’s been the talk of the top end of town the whole week past, I find that amazing. Either someone has hushed the city’s reporters, they’re saving it for a special issue, or else Atlantic City’s costumed elite are keeping quiet for one rare moment in their lives, reasons unknown.

  Mickey Rourke enters the diner and I sink lower in my chair. I owe him thirty bucks and last time we got wrecked at Halogen I may have told him I’d pay him back with a hand-job. He’s just crazy enough to want to collect just so he can see me squirm.

  I snap the paper again to straighten the crooked columns and my phone, sitting on the table with more papers from my agent and my house keys, lights up and displays Seeker’s name.

  “Speak of the Devil,” I grin in answer somewhat inappropriately.

  “We need to talk.”

  “About the Sentinels?”

  “. . . yes, about the Sentinels. The New Sentinels.”

  I nod and smile to myself.

  “Where’ve you got that castle parked?”

  The door to the diner swings open and she’s standing there with her phone to her ear in some ridiculous Paula Abdul outfit.

  “I brought a ride,” she says. “Come on.”

  *

  IT IS WEIRD in the cab, the feeling we’re both thoroughly disguised as we play-act in our secr
et identities. Seeker’s trying pretty hard to show she’s a street-smart and stylish broad, not at all the arch conservative, borderline religious psycho we’ve sometimes considered her during the years. Great jugs an’ all, but any time the old Sentinels tried to have the least bit of fun, either Seeker would blow up in a tirade reminding us of our higher calling, calling us all juveniles, or else she’d go off in a sulk that managed to cast a pall over at least the majority of our worst excesses. So if someone could explain why in the back seat of a yellow cab there’s more sexual tension than my junior high prom, I’d really appreciate it.

  “So, uh, it’s Loren, right?”

  “It seems like a million years ago, but yeah,” she replies.

  “You’re from . . . Atlantic City?”

  “Is anyone?”

  She gives a breathtaking laugh filled with only half the confidence she’s trying to project. I glare at the cabbie through the rear view mirror and make sure he’s got his eyes on the road.

  “My folks were from Willagee, Nebraska. Pa brought us to Atlantic City right after the Kirlians. He was a builder. Made his money in the upgrade.”

  “And so it’s here where you . . . ?”

  Seeker wrinkles her nose, acknowledging we don’t have the best privacy by giving just a curt nod. Adorable. Fucking hell. I nod to myself and stare out the window and am kinda surprised when she keeps talking.

  “I was fourteen,” she says. “The visions came first. Apocalypse. Death from Space. All very sci-fi. I woke up one night re-enacting that scene from Ghostbusters, you know, floating above the bed covers? Our family priest knew a pastor who knew a rabbi who knew a cardinal. I’m sure you can follow what I mean.”

  “And from there?”

  “Well, to cut a long story short: the Wallachian Brotherhood.”

  “The guys in the castle?”

  “Yes.”

  “The . . . brotherhood?”