Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  Stupidly for Helix, the attack isn’t as strong as the first and I’m sufficiently depleted by my own response that the new blast is like a drink of cool water to a thirsty man. I almost entirely store the current away in my myelin-sheathed reserves. My utter disbelief, I am less able to contain.

  “What the fuck did you do that for?”

  Helix has the biggest shit-eating grin on his face. For a moment I think maybe he knows more than I do. Maybe this is part of a far more elaborate plan. He may just be the point man in a deliberately diffuse ambush. But no. He watches as a fat blue spark leaps from one of his hands to the other and I know his eyebrows are wiggling beneath the mask.

  “Aw, come on, man,” he replies. “I can see through that routine. Don’t you know all the best team-ups start with the heroes slugging it out?”

  As I grasp the sheer idiocy of his proposal, all the adrenaline seeps from my body and my arms drop by my sides and I simply eye him, standing there like a ten-dollar hooker hoping to get a date. My hands curl into fists.

  “We’re not teaming up,” I say. “Now get the hell out of here before I make you dead.”

  *

  THE KID WON’T take a hint. Still with that grin emblazoned across his face in what I am fast appreciating might be his trademark, he sizzles the air as he launches at me with fists incandescent with energy. Still thinking about how I’d like to be winging my way out of here, I pause, crouch, and fairly leisurely leap over him as he hurtles by, collecting the front of the bakery and managing to take a little wall in the process as well as the glass shopfront.

  Alarms are like the background music to this business. Idiot Boy hurls two globs of electrified plasma my way and I easily dodge the lazy attacks. In reply, I test him with little better than a love tap, a Taser tag to the chest that sees his eyes roll up into his head as he staggers backwards like a clockwork automaton misfiring. However – and as I suspected – given his powers at least currently work like mine, receiving the same juice back only seems to power his resolve. He claps his hands together and unleashes a big dose, shattering the windscreens of several parked vehicles as I dive out of the way and roll hard enough over the footpath that I crack slabs.

  “Hey, you fuckin’ menace,” I bawl from behind a parked Impala. “You’ve got a funny way of getting acquainted, but if we’re gonna do this thing, you gotta realize two electricity types zapping each other is a slow fuckin’ way to finish.”

  Walking like a drunk, Helix steps down from the shopfront and wipes a gloved hand across his chin.

  “What would you suggest? Something like this?”

  He scoops up a Honda sedan and throws it like the cheap import it is. Again, I make like a turtle, retracting behind the parked scenery and allowing the missile to carom off the brick wall behind and then rebound from another parked car. As he’s recovering from the throw, I rush Helix, pouring on the speed to improve my force of impact and managing to get us both airborne, smashing through the upper-level brick façade of the bakery and skittering across the tin roof dislodging air-conditioning units and insulation hatchways left, right and center.

  Helix gets in a couple of good shots to my jaw before I snag his forearm between my elbow and my other arm, a judo move I learnt from Hawkwind back in the early days of my training. And this allows me to lever pressure on the exposed limb until the Boy Wonder starts sweating like a pervert in a pet shop.

  “Give it up,” I grunt.

  “No, it’s OK,” Helix manages in reply. “Go ahead. Break it.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  Perhaps it’s my surprise that gets the better of me – otherwise I’m just a soft touch – because suddenly Helix elbows me in the face and wriggles free, grabs me by the foot (of all the fucking things) while I am still astounded, and then he tosses me off the edge of the building and into the locked parking lot down the side.

  I crunch through the soft top of a sporty convertible with rusting plates, kick my way free, and roll into the dirt just in time to see Helix leap from the roof doing scissor motions with his feet headed my way. It is some kind of chop-shop we have floundered into and I figure it’s better to make a mess of a few wrecks than the ordinary cars parked out on the street. Quick as I am able to, I sink my fingers into the grille of an abandoned Buick and make like Yogi Berra. The vehicle produces a surprisingly satisfying noise as it collects my foolish assailant and sends him flying God-knows-where.

  It’s over. I toss down the automobile cadaver and clap dust and engine grime from my hands. Before the idiot can come back, I do the crouch thing and get the hell away.

  Zephyr 4.16 New-Fangled Zombies

  MY MIND IS ticking over with thoughts of Tessa, her desperate tone replaying endlessly in my thoughts as I burn air over the Hudson. The sky around the bridge to Queens aka Lincoln is alive with cranes and choppers as the city makes good on its pledge to rebuild the Hell Gate Bridge, destroyed so recently. I make a note to self that I should really pay a courtesy visit to my mate Nigel, the troll who some errant sorcerer trapped there in the late 1800s, but the alarum surrounding Tessa really pushes such niceties from my mind much sooner than they should. Or maybe that’s exactly how things should be, a doting dad and all that.

  I am moving fast. I know this route, having travelled it hundreds of times in my adolescence and when I was first starting out. I had a hole-in-the-wall behind the community theatre on 8th when I was seventeen; used to meet Beth there for long hard bump-and-grind sessions as well as manning the amateur radio system a geek friend of mine cobbled together, believing my bullshit about ham radio enthusiasm. The theatre is gone now, bought up by some multi-denominational church and turned into aged care units, the façade still intact. The bulk of the building remains, reassuring from the air, and I use it to navigate without slowing to my parents’ place, descending like a miniature tornado into the backyard without the usual care and attention paid to the costume.

  The back door nearly comes off in my hand as I step inside the lovingly-preserved vintage kitchen. This 1960s fetish is starting to cloy with me and I drink in the stale smell of mildew and old furniture and think perhaps the house would be better gone, as long as it took the memories with it. I have no idea how much of my childhood is a lie and it is curious I do not even pause to inspect my half-brother’s comments or to doubt them. While I have done enough hours of postmodern theory at night school during the years to dispense with any sense of the intrinsic or the essential, I can’t deny that his words, weirdly-accented as they were, had the whir of truth to them. How this can be, spun by a perfect stranger, undoing the statements of someone I have known my whole lifetime? I cannot explain. I can only hope to yield greater clarity.

  “Tessa? Mum? Mom?”

  The silence teases me – takes my fibrillating heart and squeezes. I scan the room and note the furnishings unchecked, the invisible but intuitively perceptible barometry completely ordinary. Everything as one would expect. Only the silence echoes back to me, triggering my distrust.

  “Dad? Is that you?”

  Tessa’s voice seems weirdly amplified. I nod, then say something emphatic that wouldn’t pass the censors. A section of vintage wallpapering and a photo of my moms and I at a junior softball game (Maxine’s Women’s Studies Department annual sundowner barbecue and softball game 1987) slides open with a gasp of concealed mechanisms to reveal a narrow, metal-lined safe room. Tessa crouches uncomfortably in the recess along with the two older ladies, each with their own unique expressions to mitigate the unusual circumstances.

  “Sorry about that, son,” Georgia brogues. “House computer. You triggered our velocity alert. What are you doin’ flyin’ straight in like that?”

  “Your mother thought you were a god-damned Exorcet, Joe,” Max says.

  “Since when have you had a . . . house computer?”

  “It’s pretty neat, dad. You should’ve had something similar in the wallspace,” Tessa says.

  I don’t reply. I fix George wit
h a meaningful glare, but she only shrugs.

  “It’s only once in a blue moon,” she says. “Only ever false alarms, too.”

  “That’s a pretty paranoid set-up for someone trying to play at being civilian,” I respond slowly.

  Neither of the old women seem to get me or my changed mood and Maxine crosses the living room and steps down into the kitchen and goes to ready the still-dented kettle while George makes the face she reserves for really wanting a cigarette and crosses to an armchair instead and picks up her knitting.

  Into that domestic silence I feel completely unable to lob the verbal equivalent of a napalm attack. Yet I know that’s what’s required. Helplessly, I catch Tessa’s eye, noting at once the renewed sensitivity, something fragile about her eyeliner, the little teeth-marks on her lip, the way she waits for me to look yet won’t quite catch my eye.

  “You got my message?” she asks.

  “I did. The phone didn’t lie. I was in France.”

  “Oh, France’d be lovely at this time of the year,” George says wistfully and examines her tangled yarns like a pathologist with the intestines of a prized cadaver. “Whatever were you doin’ there, Joseph?”

  “Visiting my brother.”

  I grimace with the hard-won smile as the ambient curiosity bleeds from the room and I watch as Maxine’s expression makes a head-long dash for the morgue. George isn’t much better. She glances several times at the wool and then makes a face, tossing the lot back into the dinky little basket and standing slowly to begin the search for her smokes.

  “You’d remember him, wouldn’t you ma? Little Julian?”

  “Julian? Well, I know him from his records more, you know. . . .”

  “Surely not,” I say.

  “Well. . . .”

  “He remembers you.”

  George looks. The blue eyes remain locked on mine. As I said, my face is in lockdown, but I know she can see the anger and the knowledge, the combined righteousness. It’s a death to the life we’ve known. When her voice comes, it is spidery and slow, afraid like fingers probing in the dark to find something hurtful within the unknown.

  “No. What did he tell you, Joe?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” I reply. “He remembers me. Remembers me as a goddamn five-year-old.”

  George’s gaze flickers and dies away. Half-satisfied, I look at Maxine with the sort of vengeful curiosity one reserves for vanquished enemies rather than family members.

  “He knows,” Max says, not to me, but to my other mother.

  The voice is odd. Something almost robot in the tone if not the delivery. I’m still sizing this up, following her line of sight across the room, and not quite prepared for the look of slack vacation in Georgia’s face. Her glowing blue eyes are dark, her face like a high street bookshop shut up for renovations.

  “Georgia,” Maxine says again. “He knows. I’m sorry. Activating condition Triple Omega.”

  Now I’m alarmed. And when I look to my other mother, the one who nursed me in my childhood illnesses, who let me eat jelly straight from the spoon, who regaled me with gender-neutral fairytales as I drooped toward bedtime, and who always seemed to be making up for the fact it was Georgia who physically carried me into the world, instead a stranger is in her place: a five-foot-nothing Japanese women with hair made from snakes of living darkness that dance and flicker in the suddenly corrupt light.

  “Dad!”

  I look at Tessa staring and backing away in horror from her grandmother George. The old lady has her head down and her hands clenched into fists by her sides. Blue flames crackle up her arms making a distressed rag of her seafarer’s woolens. Then her head snaps up to reveal the face of a grinning mannequin.

  *

  THE ROOM FILLS with blue fire, expanding from a point scant inches from my mother’s face and rushing outward like something only seen in a movie.

  Just as I throw myself to the floor, the gas-fire bubbles strike an invisible wall. The blue flames curl back on themselves and in some areas they’re extinguished and I see Tessa with her wrists crossed before herself and her youthful brow furrowed in concentration that buoys me with pride. From my prostrate view I turn and eye the demoness Ono, shadows like a costume across her shape-shifter’s form. And from the floor, I catapult toward her, determined to wring some manner of explanation.

  I’m pleased the Japanese woman proves more substantial than she appears. While confusion remains around the identity and whereabouts of Maxine, perhaps you can imagine, it’s a satisfying experience to ram Ono into and through the kitchen cabinetry. I picture Beatles fans worldwide would auction their newborn young on eBay to get the chance to play linebacker in this fantasy scenario, though seconds after she and I emerge through the other side of the wall and topple into the gravel-strewn drive, the woman disappears in a whirligig of black medusa tendrils.

  Rolling like the man once taught me, I come up with my kung fu grip at the ready only to see smoke and flames flickering from most the windows of my childhood home. My only real thought is for Tessa, so I deliberately pound through another section of weatherboard outcrop and power upward, shredding ancient carpet and floorboards as I appear across the living room and behind where my baby girl uses her nascent powers to keep her deranged grandma at bay.

  “You’re doing good, honey!” I boom from behind.

  “Dad!” Tess replied. “What the hell is going on?”

  “We’ll figure it out later, babe.”

  One look at mum tells me this isn’t going to be easy. Where before her eyes had merely lost their luster, now they’ve rolled back into her head completely and I’m tempted to think this means she’s not in the driver’s seat. Condition Triple Omega doesn’t sound very good. And somehow I think Condition Triple Omega is me.

  Georgia turns more directly toward us. There’s a zombie-like quality to her movements I’m keen to exploit. I sign-language Tessa to the gaping exit behind her and do the linebacker thing again, in fact moving more like a tight end as I dive and pour on the amps to hit my dear mother in the midriff and carry her more or less directly through the back door.

  We crash into the woodshed. I had joked before about the old yellow motorcycle being stored inside, yet I’m not entirely surprised to see an antique car, an Aston Martin if I’m not going mad, concealed beneath a tarpaulin. Our collision jostles it aside, the closest one of its doors staved in. Without even really looking at me, George swings a powerful fist and catches me cold. One moment we’re sprawled amid ropes and canvas and the next I crash into the greenhouse. I push a few delicate pots out of the way amid my scramble and their destruction fills my ears sufficiently long enough that I don’t hear the fire alarm until I’ve waded from the wreckage and spy Georgia making a bee-line for the house again, blue flames turning yellow in her wake.

  “Stop!”

  There’s only a hint of hesitation before I light her up. Given the punch I just received, I am thinking ol’ Catchfire can take a few volts. I remember newsreel footage showing her getting tagged by a tank, so a few meagre currents aren’t gonna kill her, fingers crossed. In fact, I am readying up a second load when I flashback to George saying it was the Crimson Cowl who killed Titanium Girl’s kid – just some more undiscovered family business to talk about with Julian next time we meet.

  As expected, the lightning only slows George down. She runs like one of them new-fangled zombies straight into the house and disappears, though I am relieved to see Tessa hovering over the roof like a good girl, somehow changed into her Windsong gear, and flames and shit lick up the sides of the wall and it doesn’t look good. In fact it’s hard to believe it has only been a couple of minutes since Catchfire started up with the fire attack because parts of the house are crumbling inward already and I can hear neighbors, and people on the street out front screaming. Next thing it’ll be the fire trucks and then the goddamn media. I wave to get Tess’s attention from the backyard and she flits lithe as a hummingbird down beside me.


  “Honey, we’ve got to clear out of here,” I say.

  “What about Grandma George, dad?” she says in tears. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”

  “Did Grandma go in there?”

  I look at the house. The guttering over the back kitchen door collapses and smoke oozes through the wrecked fissure. I hurl another lightning bolt at the back wall to blast a hole, but it seems nearly useless amid roiling smoke. Tessa concentrates her powers and I can feel the moisture drawing into the air around us, releasing in a fine mist that is a long way from being rain.

  “It’s too hot,” Windsong groans. “Can’t get any water density. Not enough for those flames.”

  I look at the house, my childhood home, burning there before us, my mother presumably inside. Yet a cold voice – one I have only sometimes obeyed throughout my career in costume – tells me to make the choice.

  “Baby, we have to go.”

  I take her upper arm.

  “That’s Grandma George in there,” Tessa sobs.

  “Maybe,” I reply. “Honey, that’s our secret identity on fire. Okay? We have to haul ass. Let’s go.”

  Tessa looks at me, glinting eyes blinking through my own mask, and comprehension fights with emotion until after long seconds she nods.

  Holding hands, we set up into the sky and book.

  *

  TESSA TREMBLES LIKE someone with Parkinson’s, tears cutting tracks through the soot on her sweet face. The whites of her eyes are red and she can barely speak as we alight in a park maybe ten blocks from where ragged plumes of smoke churn into the air. Her hand, strangely adult with her fair, varnished nails, clutch at the leather casing of my chest. The words fall like there’s an individual labor behind each one, difficult and belated. It’s easy to forget that whatever my own feelings, these suddenly mysterious figures have been a mainstay of her whole life.