Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  Lights burn in the house and within the observatory too, I am willing to wager. Seconds after I arrive – just long enough for security personnel to confirm the electronic gates have not been activated despite the registered intruder – the main doors of the house open and two men in butlers’ garb descend cautiously with submachineguns in their gloved hands.

  “Attendez! Comment vous appellez-vous?”

  “Shit guys, my high school French really isn’t anything to brag about.”

  I hear one of the dudes mutter Americaine and the other dutifully slaps his forehead.

  “My name is Zephyr. I’m here to see the boss. Julian.”

  The two butlers reach the crunchy white gravel of the carpark now and they advance toward me with their guns still handy. Quite possibly they have no idea who I am. I find the idea vaguely thrilling, though it’s not a feeling that will last long.

  “American?” the lead butler asks.

  He is a smallish man with a bald spot, a goatee, a Muppet nose. All in all he resembles a boiled egg decorated for Bastille Day.

  “How did you get here without triggerin’ the perimeter defenses?”

  I stare at him a minute, conscious of the other guy moving to a better angle for shooting me, and just when I am about to answer, another heavily-accented voice does it for me.

  “He didn’t trigger ze perimeter because he flew, Robilliard.”

  I look up to see Julian Lennon in a wheelchair on the small landing in front of the main house doors, a checkered blankie across his lap. He stares at me without a moment’s recognition and continues in perhaps the most atrociously fake French accent I have ever heard.

  “You are ze superhero Zephyr, non? Please. Come forward. Jacques and Robilliard will not ‘arm you.”

  I swallow hard on the smartass reply and curl my shoulders, fingers forming thoughtlessly into fists as I nod to the nearest guard and start stiffly up the steps to the manor. From his motorized wheelchair, my half-brother adopts a bemused expression and actually steeples his fingers in anticipation of my advance.

  It occurs to me I have absolutely no idea what to say to him.

  *

  MY BROTHER ROLLS his wheelchair in ignorance back through the manor doors, allowing me to follow as I finish trudging up the elaborate steps and then pass on in to a scene of glowing splendor, two big Irish wolfhounds disinterested near a roaring fire, leather couches set for guests across a costly imported rug, a side table with freshly-decantered wine, nearby an armoire with an expensive-looking game of chess in progress. Tapestries of the vintage of Bayeux are fixed to the walls. Julian has a bit more flesh on him and just a little less hair than last time I looked, which was on Google images, admittedly, and the whole wheelchair things is new to me. He moves the machine deftly, using hands rather than the controls, taking up a position on the middle of the rug across from the fire. I give the briefest glance to a curving marble staircase heading to upper rooms, the doors to an elevator built beneath them.

  He doesn’t say, “I am Julian Lennon.” Oh no. It comes out more like Zhou-whee-enne, though contract the whole damn thing and then stretch it out like taffy. Imagine the effect with the ridiculous French brogue, the weird formality. He wears a cravat. There is a poppy in the buttonhole of the black corduroy coat he wears. I am not mistaken to think there is more than a hint of rouge on his cheeks, a chap stick in his pocket to keep his lips fresh and shiny.

  “This is weird,” I say loudly.

  My faux pas echoes off the stonework, the living room basically a two-storey chamber given the internal balustrade above. My half-brother only readjusts himself in the chair and pouts, looking at me with more than a hint of there being something wrong with more than just his legs.

  “Maybe you would like to explain yourself, M’sieu Zephyr,” he says.

  Or it’s more like mebbe you oold lark to ezplain yourseff, m’sieu zeffer.

  “Um, I thought you were British. Your dad was a Brit. From Britain.”

  “I have renounced l’Angleterre, m’sieu.”

  “It’s Zephyr,” I say. “Please. Just Zephyr.”

  If I had thought I was going to come here and unmask myself, on eggshells hoping to receive my half-brother’s acceptance – and let’s face it, I am lucky I even flew here in costume, such was my lack of caution – here’s another example of how life sometimes likes to fuck you sideways just to keep things interesting. Zhweeun rolls his pebbly little eyes at me and slowly reaches into his blanket to retrieve a pair of ornate pinz-nez glasses which he now slides onto the bridge of his long nose.

  “What is your business here in France tonight, Zephyr?” he asks.

  “I have come to see you,” I reply. “I am . . . I am looking for your father.”

  “L’homme Doomsday.”

  “If he still goes by that moniker, which frankly I doubt,” I say, hoping my voice sounds sympathetic.

  It doesn’t help. Any kind of empathy swiftly departs as Julian’s face shuts up shop.

  “I am afraid I cannot ‘elp you, m’sieu,” he replies and does not bother to meet my gaze. “If I was of any concern to my father, I would be dead instead of crippled. You will forgive me if I do not sound like a very good son. Being nearly killed by my father has made that quite difficult.”

  “Your father . . . attacked you?”

  “I am sorry,” he says in that stiff French voice of his. “I thought you ‘ad ‘eard, my father is a, how d’you say, homicidal maniac?”

  “Well, yes,” I respond. “But to attack his own son?”

  “I should consider myself lucky, I suppose,” Julian says with a fey laugh. “Un apéritif, Zephyr?”

  He pushes the wheel and rolls over to the drinks buffet, slamming into the damned thing and nearly knocking a glass loose. Instead, he takes it and pours a healthy slug of whiskey. I nod and he repeats the ritual and I move across and take the drink.

  “Merci,” I say more than a little self-consciously.

  “Ooh, pas de problème, mon cher. Vous-parlez, un peu?”

  I look at him and he looks at me, eager, expectant. We really are going to do this thing. Fuck.

  “Um, j’ai étudais a l’école.”

  “Etudié? Oui?” he corrects me with a smile.

  My mind goes blank. I feel sweat beading at the small of my back, my nape.

  “You said you should consider yourself lucky, Julian,” I blurt. “Why is that?”

  “Because I escaped to live, my friend. I am sure some of his other progeny were not so fortunate.”

  There is a curl to his lips when he speaks that even I can’t help but notice, an acknowledgement there are others of us out there. Inferiors. Saboteurs. Or were we?

  “Other . . . progeny?”

  “You want to know where my father is? Well, I cannot say. I do not know. However, I do not think you will find him on his island. Not any more.”

  “His island . . . You mean Jersey?”

  I had practically flown over it on the way here.

  “Jersey?” Zherzhie? “No, this is of the ancient past, Zephyr. I am speaking of Kra-ka-to-a, though of course in my father’s case, Krakatoa is the island he blew up, not the one that simply blew up by itself.”

  “Where is the island?”

  “It’s where he kept all my poor bastard siblings and the women,” Julian says with an understandable whiff of distaste, though I can’t explain the curious accent with which he declaims it. “Perhaps if you go there, you will find the answers you seek.”

  He looks down now with an air of defeat. It manifests in every line of his strange face, which I guess is a curious mirror to my own, yet less so. And most obvious in his dejection is the fact he does not even ask why I want to know.

  I look down at my brother and can see the mask conceals me even from him. And perhaps this is not a bad thing.

  As he begins to weep, Julian explains how John Lennon appeared to him eight or nine years previously, simply manifesting in the air wit
h his hands bathed in colored lights. He demanded Julian demonstrate his powers, to call forth the abilities his father’s genetic legacy ensured.

  Except Julian had none. The Doomsday Man did not believe him or either could not bring himself to do so. He pelted the young man with attacks, finally blasting his legs until they were just withered stumps. His powers were biological in nature, somehow, yet created a lightshow big enough to call down two tactical response squads from the Manchester Police and a flying squad of Union Jacks. By the time they came, Lennon was gone and his son was in a coma. After he recovered, he abandoned the music career that had made him a considerable sum, investing in the Norman castle and its extensive security apparatus. Julian had believed his father was returned until he saw me with his own eyes.

  “I guess having a flying man land in your driveway is a jolt to your nerves, after all that has happened,” I say soothingly, sipping from my second glass.

  My host smiles the gentle post-trauma smile of one made sleepy by tears’ catharsis. And he shakes his head.

  “No, Zephyr. I have close friendships with Hyperman (Eeperman) and La Belle Noir, heroes in this country, and also Shade is well known to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Superhuman visitors are not new to me. I expected my father because the defense system is designed to react to his unique biological signature – a signature you very closely possess, mon frère.”

  Julian smiles tiredly as he looks up at me. “My brother.”

  Zephyr 4.14 “The Sheer Particles of Time”

  WE TALK THEN into the night. I fancy, even as the top shelf liquor floats his tongue, that some of that weird-ass accent slips away. Mostly it is him doing the talking and I listen, rapt, as his recollections of an ordinary life put more flesh on the picture of my father and the childhood I never knew than anything my two mothers combined have ever said.

  Julian doesn’t ask much of me. He doesn’t want to know “which one of zem” my mother was. He has a hole where his heart should be and everything from the withered legs – he shows them to me, in a moment more intimate than repulsive; they look like they belong to a palsied eight-year-old – right through to his astonishingly overdone French accent are a reflection of the abuse and indifference heaped on him by our father. I cannot explain the thousand-and-one odd mannerisms he has adopted to cope and I do not bring myself to ask about the Francophilia.

  As he puts it, he was the first of them. A child of Lennon’s brief marriage during his Preacher Man phase. A marriage purportedly snuffed out by the other members of the team who felt such physical connections would hold back their pursuit of Enlightenment – the pursuit of Godhood as superhumans.

  “That is where it all started. In India,” Julian said. “It is not just coincidence that Hitler took his swastika from them. People would have you believe it was that Japanese demoness who began him on the path to madness, but really it was the other ones. After their time with the holy men, eating opium and meditating and starving themselves in their ashrams, it was the Beatles themselves who began on the path to what I guess you would call a new kind of eugenics.”

  He spent time on the island in the early years because Lennon believed his son would carry dormant meta-genes even though his mother was a “normal” woman. (He says it like a curse word). She died in a car crash, conveniently leaving young Julian in John’s care, though now Julian hints he has evidence to suggest the crash was caused by McCartney – “Witnesses said there was a flash of red light before the car went off the road,” Julian whispers, eyes huge and dreadful with the recollection, and in that moment showing me the child he once was – and in those early years the boy was like a young prince among his father’s consorts.

  I try to console him, but I don’t really pull it off. I guess I’m pretty new to this brother thing.

  “I can’t imagine what it was like for you,” I say.

  “Why not?” he chuckles, wiping away the tears. “You were there.”

  “No,” I reply softly, almost guilty at the confession. “My mother went into hiding when John came for me. I was four or five at the time.”

  Julian frowns. “This year is . . . what?”

  I tell him my best guess and his frown deepens, losing the comedic edge.

  “My friend, I am ten years older than you?”

  I nod. “If you say so.”

  “We went to the island when I was seven,” he replies. “We went with the first five women, before there were any babies. Only one of them, er, Titanium Girl, was pregnant.”

  “Titanium Girl was on the island?” I ask.

  There’s a bad feeling in my stomach, kinda like a colony of spiders trying to push their way up my esophagus.

  “She carried one of his children?”

  “Two,” Julian replied. “Though when she escaped, she had to leave the girl behind. She took Jimmy with her. And Catchfire, of course.”

  “Catchfire,” I repeat.

  Julian meets my gaze, but he’s too damned inward-looking to see the spots before my vision through the eye-holes of my mask.

  “Yes. Titanium Girl with her little boy and Catchfire with her son, too. Joseph.”

  “Well fuck me.”

  Julian doesn’t noticeably hear. His eyes are trained on a memory made rare and insubstantial by adulthood as the taste of cotton candy or the fear of the dark.

  “They were among the first true believers, the ones who agreed to start the Colony,” Julian says. “It was only later – I think, perhaps like any man with a harem, my father grew greedy and neglected the ones who had served him best. He scoured down more women with the right genes, who evidenced powers. And they bore him children until the island was bulging with them.”

  “And he . . . blew up this island, you said?”

  “Yes. Around the time he tracked me down,” Julian says and sniffs.

  “I need to go there.”

  “D’accord.” He snorts again, thumbs mucus away from his nose and adds very casually, “If you have some sort of data device or GPS, I can download the location and some maps I have drawn from recollections.”

  I nod and stand, sobriety fuelled by a chill anger thumping through my veins. Half a bottle of the stuff isn’t going to put a dent in me, though the same can’t be said for my host. He steers clumsily across the room and we go through a doorway. It leads to a hall and on into the observatory beyond. There are rows of computers in there and he goes to one of them even as I pause inside the door to stare up and marvel at the sheer expense of the set-up.

  “This is my sanctum,” Julian says as he butts into the first of the PCs and places down the GPS and my phone I have given him.

  “It is my only salve, after what my father did, to consider how small we are in the cosmos of space, how little our lives matter when we remain trapped to this ball of spinning earth.”

  He says all this with the splutter of his heavy French accent returned.

  He taps and clicks a moment and then connects up the devices. After a few moments more, Julian stops and turns.

  “You have trusted me with your secret, brother,” he says. “Now I shall trust you with mine.”

  He has the sort of little smile I don’t normally like on men like him. After another moment of fiddling, he scoots the wheelchair across the walkway and over to another row of instruments. There’s all sorts of crap over there, so I barely notice when he reaches up and pulls down a big space age-looking helmet with cables snaking from the top and back. He puts the gizmo on and promptly goes nigh-nighs.

  A black-curtained doorway on the far side of the chamber bursts open and an armored figure in a crimson red cloak strides through with none of the difficulties you’d expect of a man with the legs of stillborn, if I am making the right connection here. It only takes a second or two for recognition to set in as the silver-and-red form pulls the hood up over his helmeted head.

  “Bloody hell,” I remark. “You’re the Crimson Cowl.”

  “That is co
rrect,” Julian replies in the familiar machine voice the world has come to know and often fear. There’s none of the French effete whatsoever.

  “When you find our father, you must let me know,” the sinister automaton says. “He and I have a score that must be settled.”

  *

  I GET THE fuck out of Normandy without much further ado, politely accepting my topped up phone and GPS from the, how do you say, homicidal maniac in the robot body, before getting the hell out of Brooklyn with my ass intact. The Crimson Cowl and I have tussled on several occasions and last time we met, I ended up flogging him with his own severed arm. He escaped – like he always escapes, or else returns at a later date even after Chamber has twisted his head off or Mister Magnetic has turned him into a living Moebius strip – and now I understand finally how he does it. The face is like a fencer’s mask, a hard crease down the middle of the black grille, flat featurelessness on either side. The voice is likewise artificial, threatening in the way only a piece of fiction can be.

  I recall the rumors too about a “good” Crimson Cowl. He even showed up when the Iceman Cometh the previous month, though I was too busy to notice exactly what was going on. I can’t reconcile the two different visions of the famous nemesis and after realizing I’ve spent the night kicking back with my older brother who is far more fucked up and delusional than even I knew, I can’t say I’ll be in a hurry to get back and report in to him.

  I may need Sting and St George’s help after all, though this seems a little at odds with launching my own new revitalized super team in just three days’ time.

  I am hot to get to Doomsday Island now, except I am missing a night’s sleep and my hyped-up constitution has been snacking on nothing but single malt since about twelve hours ago. The sun is up when I leave Chez Madhouse and there’s not much option but to wing it for home. I’ve learnt my lesson flying off unprepared from Twilight’s Grand Turkey Roast, and I’m not about to repeat that mistake without a very good reason.