Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  I turn into Twilight’s portrait and try and keep my genuine apologies low.

  “Fuck, man. I’m sorry about your uncle.”

  “Jesus Christ, Zeph. Did you see that shit?”

  “I saw it, yeah, but man . . . I didn’t know. I didn’t realize it was gonna hit anybody. Otherwise I might’ve been able to do something, you know?”

  “Fuck,” Twilight says and then says it again. “So much for the freakin’ Toecutter.”

  He rubs a hand over his still face in astonishment and turns on the guards.

  “What are you guys fucking worth?” he heckles loudly.

  I am conscious there are seemingly a few billion onlookers, people with mobile phones holding them up to record the scene like they might make a few bucks out of someone’s misery.

  I take Twilight by the elbow and the white-blonde guy sort of winks out of existence. His battle-scarred comrade moves across to what the police might allege is a crime scene and starts looking even more hopeless, but in a somewhat more active way probably meant to throw us off his scent.

  “Twilight, I’m sorry. But keep your cool. Joe Public’s everywhere.”

  If my erstwhile friend hears my words, he indicates in only the worst way, noting a nearby skateboarder with ear buds and holding a phone up to us while intermittently texting away. Twilight throws off my admittedly dandy-esque hold and storms over to the startled mob, the subject of his attention so plugged in to the wider world that he’s lost almost all sense of self-preservation.

  “Yo! Fucktard! You putting this shit up on the Web or something?”

  The skater boi blanches and does nothing as Twilight snatches the phone from his enfeebled grasp. The big guy peers at the screen like one of Kubrick’s apes and looks between it and the owner several times before snapping, “What the hell is this shit?”

  “I’m, uh, tweeting,” the kid says.

  “You’re fucking tweeting about this online? My uncle’s death?”

  “Whoa,” the kid says with surprising temerity given the spittle flying from Twilight’s mouth. “That’s your uncle? I had no idea dude. Sorry. Really.”

  With incredulity still intact, Twilight holds up the phone again, angling it away from the light, but he gives up after several seconds and hands the item dismissively to me like I might translate for him. I look at the screen a moment and decipher the message from geek-speak into plain language: “I just saw Martin Scorsese crushed by a big chunk of the Morris Building.” And then a hyperlink.

  I flick a few buttons. There are comments from the guy’s followers I barely register until one, in full capitals, screams something about the building he is in collapsing too. I move the screen with my thumb almost by accident and see #worldquake in the trending topics.

  “What the hell is this?” I ask with barely suppressed animosity.

  I’m still mindful of the potty mouth when there could be cameras or even journalists around.

  “What?” the skater asks. “Can I have my iPhone back dude?”

  “I don’t like this sound of this,” I say to Twilight, though there are people crowding everywhere around us. “Worldquake.”

  “Worldquake?”

  “It’s on all the stations,” a woman in an ill-becoming woolen hat yells at us. “Almost every major city on the planet.”

  Twilight and I exchange glances and over the ruckus of the crowd we begin to discern faint and terrible rumblings, the sound of a skyscraper somewhere falling down.

  “I don’t know what would cause something like that, but I’m sure it’s not good,” I manage to say after a few moments.

  My hesitation comes from watching the screen. The flicker of movement catches my eye and I scroll across the entries for a moment in perplexity as they begin vanishing from the phone one by one. Although I barely know what I am doing with this thing, I manage to get back over to the topic bar and there is more than disquiet in my bowels as I watch the various quake-related words and the names of cities as they are erased.

  “Zephyr,” Twilight asks. “What’s going on?”

  I have no real idea. In my daze I feel like a drunkard. And I push the nuisance technology back into the chest of the skater dude and pay no more real attention to whether he nearly falls over or if he catches the phone before it falls to the pavement. The world spins around me as I feel the air particles screaming their intuitive sirens’ song.

  The glowing white figure manifests in the air over our heads and I barely have the chance to verify I am not witnessing the Second Coming before he opens up with his malformed British voice.

  “Yo, Zephyr! We was thinkin’ you might like a look-see a’ how we does our business. Aiiiiiight?”

  *

  I CRANE MY neck at the radiant, leisure-suited figure and ball my fists on my hips. I feel like an old lady about to tell DJ Ali to get down from there, so instead I swallow my initial response and think about the disappearing business on the iPhone.

  “So you’re behind all this, are you?” I speak, somewhat biblically, to the air.

  As the yellow-capped rapper nods beneficently, Twilight grabs me by the shoulder and gives a fairly savage tug.

  “Zephyr, man. Who the fuck are you talking to?”

  I blink and gesture upward.

  “See this clown?”

  “I don’t see any clowns, Zeph.”

  “Is you forgettin’, Zeph, dat I is da data master? The master blaster?” the floating DJ says.

  “Oh fuck.”

  I turn back to Twilight like I can explain, and instead the words just fail me. I sigh and shake my head.

  “He’s invisible. And inaudible. It’s a psychic thing.”

  “Who is he?” Twilight asks.

  “A British . . . super.”

  Twilight scans the air in the wrong spot, scowling suspiciously.

  “Why doesn’t he come out where we can all see?”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “It’s complicated.”

  “Yo, Zephyr! Check it!” Ali cat-calls from above. “Is you wiv us? I know what you is finkin’, aiiight? But here it is: dis bother’s your chance to see da Beatles, you know, like ‘live in concert,’ yo?”

  “Sorry Twilight,” I say in mounting frustration. “I’ve gotta go.”

  “Go where?”

  I look up.

  “Good question.”

  The DJ puts his big-ass headphones back in place and smiles, nodding to himself with whatever dub groove he’s hearing. He clicks his fingers.

  “Africa.”

  “Great.”

  He says that annoying word of his meant to confirm my agreement to whatever the hell he and George Harrison and Sting have planned. And then the world converts into a different set of dimensions – one where reality is corridor shaped and has the world’s most powerful vacuum cleaner at the other end.

  I immediately speed away from Twilight and the fanboys and Tony Azzurro’s gruesome death scene and the still-trembling buildings to cross some kind of vast and inexplicable void – not so much teleported as fellated through time and space to where a harsh desert sun pounds unblinkingly down on an ocean of yellow sand and the sun-bleached bones of people’s skeletons that litter the ground in abundance.

  I look for Twilight just to confirm he’s really gone. DJ Ali is nowhere in the sky any more and the sun’s so bright that with my eyes, still open to the Atlantic City night, I’m damned if I would be able to see him up there anyway. Instead, my scalded sight is drawn to a small and crisp white-and-yellow figure dashing from one structure to another in the small African village at the bottom of the sand-colored slope.

  If the source of the worldquake is here, I can’t see a thing. In preparedness, I clench my fists, reassured by my powers as sparks run over my knuckles. My heart’s pounding, otherwise I might have the sense to use those limited extra senses my abilities provide. In the absence of a strategy, I lift over the village as DJ Ali looks up as my shadow crosses him.

  “Resp
ect.”

  “What the hell is going on?” I shout. “Where are the others?”

  “Oh yeah,” the wannabe Rasta says and snaps his fingers once more. “I forgot.”

  There’s no chance for me to inquire. Instead, the world lurches either one-eighty degrees or folds into seventeen new dimensions as night returns to the African plateau through the jagged slit of a space-time vagina dentata yawning vast and obnoxious over our heads. You would think this would be a hard thing to miss – you can see stars blinking beyond the ruptured dimensional veil, and perhaps weird flying things dwarfed by the vast alien presence currently squeezing its way into our universe – and likewise St George and Sting, the former flying through the air in his customary white suit, the later hovering above a nearby dune in the lotus position. Clearly our errant DJ’s informational capabilities are the source of a greater explanation I am neither sure I could ever process nor am I likely now to live to see delivered.

  The death of galaxies is above us.

  I do not have a name for the thing and I do not want to know one, though I am aware others have at least sought to try. Its nightmarish form, which I could really only fail to describe, seeks to devour worlds upon end and yet, like some merely quasi-imagined doom, its center-point somehow appears to be here, today, in this desert, its fangs and suckers and claws and vestigial mouths all part of a devolved apex which is more violent geometry or peripatetic memory than an actual organism. Whatever it hopes to achieve, if such alien minds are even able to conceive of the universe in this way, it begins here, now, and suddenly I understand exactly the stakes Sting and George Harrison tried previously to describe. And it makes the latex-clad peacocking of me and my fellow New Sentinels less than a joke by comparison.

  Zephyr 5.15 “Tactical Error”

  “ZEPHYR! MOVE IT!”

  I barely register the woman’s voice. I’m too struck dumb by the alien horror above me and its slick, gynaecological rain of parasitic lifeforms that are amok on the prehistoric plain, death to whoever lived here before, their lives an unquiet sacrifice, I am certain, to kick this cosmic interlude into action.

  Shade slams into me doing just under Mach, confident I guess because of our recent dog-fight that I can take it as she jets through and physically moves me from the path of some gigantic rampaging appendage big enough to shatter skyscrapers. I am reminded, absurdly, of X-Wing fighters circling mechanical legs with metal grapnels, and then Shade and I slam into the side of a dune three or four miles away with a detonation of sand spraying into the air.

  The handsome Englishwoman is pitch black. I guess the hard light of the sub-Saharan climate suits somebody.

  “Gotta think quicker’n that, matey,” she says, and her white teeth somehow convey the amusement her charcoal demeanor cannot.

  “I’m sorry,” I respond breathlessly and wave my hand at the thing.

  Even here, we have barely moved from the killing radius of the star-creature. It is a wonder we have the practically lifeless desert in which to fight this thing, and I only learn later that this, too, is thanks to the intervention of my erstwhile friends. Harrison, probably the world’s most powerful living telekinetic, threw the mad, murderous thing off its initial target – Paris.

  Shade gives me her black hand and hoists me up. I perceive the merest sliver of whiteness and St George passes by, waving encouragingly.

  “Good to see you Zephyr,” he cries. “Might need all hands on deck for this one.”

  He’s gone before I can reply. There is a noise, strong enough to deafen cities, that sounds like a thousand assholes letting loose at once. A gout of ichor vast enough to drown a village like the one already sundered pours from the air and to the ground, and at least some of the dozens of weird horned, spiked, clawed, rubbery proboscised creatures teeming across the yellow sand terrain are sucked into the ensuing mudslide and removed from sight.

  “Like the man said. All hands,” Shade says.

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Not sure,” the Englishwoman says. “Never even knew these guys existed. So much for the Jacks, eh? Anyway, I’m jacked of the Jacks, as you Yanks might say.”

  “Problems?”

  “Superheroes. You know. Bad as fucking models.”

  For a moment I misunderstand her grammar and my aborted reply almost trips me. Then I remember we’re caught in insanity-threatening peril and its possibly us between the void and the end of the Earth. Again, as St George would say.

  *

  “RIGHT,” I MUTTER and crunch my knuckles into my opposite palm as if it might do us any good. “Who the fuck is this guy?”

  “I don’t think its name was made for human mouths,” Shade replies.

  “Norwegian, is it?”

  If Shade raises an eyebrow, I can’t tell. I wave her off.

  “Plan of attack?”

  “That’d be nice,” she says. “As far as I understand, the DJ bloke is suppressing whatever natural effect the alien environment beyond the void is having on our world.”

  We risk another look front-on at the galactic terror, or more properly the space around it.

  “What, like alien gasses and crap like that?”

  “No,” Shade says with a distracted shake of her stiffly-coiffured head. “That’s more than just your everyday rent in time and space. You’re talking about over-the-border alien physics. Non-Classical principles that challenge the fundamentals of our universe. Let those take hold and you can forget gravity, mass, velocity. It all just becomes alien porridge, or whatever the hell these blokes follow over there.”

  I look at one of the star-god’s myriad eyes.

  “Heh. ‘Blokes’.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  We watch as the beyond-enormous thing re-orients itself, a minor sand-storm around its base obscuring the impossibility of tentacles and limbs and bus-sized genitalia upon which the monster balances.

  The cosmic disturbance has fallen foul of the local weather gods, at least, and they sing their song across my sensorium as a purple-headed thundercloud intrudes on what remains of the ordinary sky. But when there is a flash, moments later, it’s not a weather pattern but Sting, somewhere now on the other side of the celestial intruder, using his famed powers now grown to thankfully cosmic proportions themselves.

  “That’s a pretty easy handle on the theoretical principles you’ve got there, honey,” I remark to Shade.

  “I’m reading physics and quantum mathematics at Harvard in my spare time,” she says with a glibness that can only mean the truth.

  She turns and winks at me, the gesture visible only by the sudden occlusion of her eye.

  “Don’t be fooled by the Dickensian patois, mate.”

  “Sheesh, I don’t even understand what that means, but you’re on,” I reply, her exuberance as well as her accent contagious. “Do you fancy having a go at kicking alien monster god ass, or what?”

  “Ordinarily I’d vote for ‘Or what’,” Shade replies. “Today, I don’t think we’ve got any choice.”

  Counter-point to our assertions, a wave of bizarre, quasi-reptilian bipeds with eyes on the end of their lolling tongues come rushing up the dune embankment and I step forward to flash fry the first few of them before Shade starts laying in with her by-now diamond-hard karate chops. The air’s filled with a symphony of slaughter as alien beastie goo ruptures and flies, spattering us in ectoplasm and mucus like some bizarre New Year’s Eve club party gone wrong.

  Shade grabs the last of the things by its serrated sideways jaws and twists and forces the whole monstrosity down until its pseudo-life ends in a gasped series of crackles.

  “Way to go.”

  “Only way to go,” Shade says. “Afraid to say that was just warmin’ up. You ready to go the whole hog?”

  I glance up at ‘the hog’ in question again and nod, swallowing with difficulty. I have the perverse wish to know its name and think of my erstwhile buddy Twilight and our recent discussion about demons
from space. Whatever we are facing now makes Hariss as-Sama seem almost pedestrian. While I have danced around the edges of such cosmogeny half my career, like the man on the sidewalk who chooses not to stare up at the skyscrapers in the city towering over him for fear of vertigo, I’ve resisted peering into these depths too closely.

  Now we’ll see if that was a tactical error.

  Zephyr 5.16 “Just The End Of The World”

  SHADE AND I fire like rockets into the middle stratosphere. The planetary irruption tracks us, shoots out enormous pseudopods covered in oozing spikes to hunt us down. Flying almost like we’ve co-ordinated it, I slap Shade on her rock-hard rear and fall into her wake, letting the autonomous feelers lock onto her and race straight into the path of my electrical blast. The creature’s fronds sizzle open and fall away and we arc halfway around the thing, taking in the sort of recon of its cavities and fissures like normally you’d study in a landscape – just not one standing up and walking around

  One of its many suggestive ventricles burst open as we pass, and emerging from the gloop is an array of huge, bat-like missiles that look as if they were grown in a giant petri dish in a secret lab at Boeing. As they free themselves from the afterbirth, the wings snap out to reveal serrated edges and bio-chemical burners in the tails, evolved, I suspect, just to account for Shade and I, which mean the fuckers do a pretty mean job of keeping up. I dive and swoop and Shade and I go our separate ways, more than one objective for the Cyclopean deity at least, and I lure three of the flying nightmares into a quick electrical death, consigning them back to the nothing from whence they came while two more remain doggedly locked on my ass.

  I swoop low across the terrain. As we near the burnt-out village again, the creatures suddenly lose all complexity and they crash out of the sky strangely spastic, disappearing amid their own sand burials as DJ Ali sticks his head out from behind a wreck of wattle and daub architecture.