Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  “Wassup?”

  “A trick of yours, I gather?” I motion to the disappeared bat-things.

  “Yo, easy mon,” Ali says and rubs his knuckles on the shiny front of his shimmery merchandise. “’s hard to fly when you is ain’t knowin’ which way’s up or down.”

  “Information.”

  “Is me bitches,” the Brit super replies.

  “Mate,” I say in inverted commas, “I don’t buy this act of yours, so you don’t have to keep trying so hard. You British fucks are showing me a thing or two. No need for theatrics.”

  “British? What, me is Jamaican, yo.”

  I wipe a hand across my sweating brow and let it go.

  “We need a strategy for taking this bastard down.”

  “Respect. You think me is havin’ a laugh? I gots me bung-hole hangin’ out jus’ keepin’ dis batty boy in his cage.”

  “Can’t you make the information blackout . . . fatal?” I ask.

  The caricature gives a nervous shake of his capped head and for the first time I catch a glimpse beyond his psychotic visage to the ordinary mental patient behind – one who is rapidly losing hold of the situation at hand.

  State-side, we call that strike one. Time to try one of the others.

  I break the too-fragile contact and scan the increasingly end-of-the-world landscape. There’s another flash, less bright than before, and a visible concussive wave repels a concentrated assault by the alien’s tentacles. Sting is at the center of it, hands raised, head down as if he is surveying the scene by senses other than eyes alone. I make a quick decision and speed into the air again, insectoid flyers crackling off me dead in the collision between their haste and my own.

  In the transit between my old position and the new, I can’t help marvel at the truly gargantuan bulk of the intruder. All those old Lovecraftian clichés don’t really do the trick, however hard they try. Up close, it’s easy to forget you’re viewing an individual life form, between the scale of the creature and teeming thousands of parasitic entities either sliding from within the beast or circling like midges around it. And of course, on the sort of scale we’re talking about, some of the parasites are as big as cars, gelatinous shapes full of evil intent, sadism etched on every serrated limb, groping tentacle or razor-sharp spine. Behind them, what I’d loosely call the alien’s torso looks like an organic high-rise, vaguely cylindrical and rotating as it changes its focus between the flying St George and Sting’s levitating yogi routine.

  The Shirtless One greets me telepathically as I draw near.

  “Zephyr,” he says. “Glad you could make it. What do you think of our operation now?”

  I draw up, hovering in the thunderstorm air before him. White incandescence seems to come from within, like his bones are glowing beneath his skin. It is suggestive of life, power, a cosmic attachment to the very principles of the universe to which our alien visitor seems the antithesis. If ever I had doubts in my career about some of my allies, on this occasion – like the nine years we endured of World War Two – it is a clear-cut division between the good and the evil.

  “I see I’m not the only recruit,” I tell him.

  “No, but you might be our most useful.”

  I eye the living mountain a moment and turn back to Sting.

  “Howso?”

  “You have the right attributes to be a powerhouse, Zephyr. If only we had started your education sooner,” he says.

  “Well, I’m here now. And we need to stop this fucking thing.”

  “Easy, chap. I know.”

  Sting smiles uneasily, the bones in his face not letting him present anything other than the picture of Aryan good looks. Yet even I am not blind to the grim undertones.

  “So, what?” I say.

  “Just a moment,” Sting says. “He’s coming again.”

  And indeed he is.

  *

  GEORGE HARRISON’S HARRYING efforts have obviously bored the monster. Again it turns to the other opponent, and for blind seconds, Sting and I battle against a storm of organic contagion squirted from deep within the entity’s cavernous form. Instinctively, we know better than to breathe, together lighting up the sky like a pair of allied thunder gods, like Olympians or something as we incinerate the bio-chemical attack and then have to fight our way free of a few dozen obscene attackers of a much bigger variety, their bodies like enormous double-jointed hands, nightmarish insect wings buzzing invisibly like chopper blades and rending the air with their foul betrayal of the naïve physics of our world.

  It strikes me the creatures are getting more powerful and if we’re having this much trouble with the godling’s minions then we are probably pretty much fucked. Sting has obviously maintained some manner of telepathic bridge and when I half-speak, half-think my observation, he tells me to go make sure the DJ is still in the fight.

  “I know you think he’s a fool,” Sting tells me, “but he’s the only one really keeping these buggers in their place. If Ali falls, we ‘aven’t got a hope in hell.”

  It’s a grim prospect, the fate of the world resting on a guy who spends most of his free time drawing dongs on pictures in the newspaper. I nod, barely voicing my obedience, and drop from the sky like Mickey Rourke in Mission: Impossible, the air thick with a broiling soup of alien gizzards raining around me from Sting’s counter-attack.

  Once on terra firma, I use a rare burst of super-speed to cross the terrain, my thoughts still stuck in the chaos I’ve just escaped, and most importantly, dwelling on Sting’s cautionary tale. If it is true I could be more than I am, I fancy it’ll take a school of psychiatrists to eke out why every fiber of my being screams against such a scenario.

  True to Sting’s fears, I have to tear apart half-a-dozen African huts, grey-flanked monster carcasses everywhere, to find DJ Ali curled in a corner clutching his cap, his trendy sportswear stained with piss and alien blood. I’m breathing heavily, about as subtle as a truck-load of drag queens, and when I try to gently rouse him, I reflect that I probably shouldn’t be surprised if it’s a natural response for a self-proclaimed infopath to scramble my brain’s ability to regulate my blood flow, body temperature and breathing.

  I take one look into the frightened parahuman’s eyes as the darkness streams in and perhaps he says something, an apology, as my legs turn to water and it all goes black.

  *

  I WAKE IN the DJ’s putrid lap. Ali G is no more. In his place is a terrified middle-class Englishman, the faux junglist accent replaced by a stammering, hiccupping, terror-filled soliloquy as his surprisingly delicate hand strokes my hair.

  “. . . Jesus, mate, I’m so sorry. So sorry. I don’t know how this happened. Please breathe. Please. Oh Jesus fuck, did I do this?”

  I get up as quickly as I can. A headache about the scale of the late Eighteen Century makes my vision fade in and out as I confirm we’re in the same shitty-assed hut as before. Somehow without the cap and red-tinted goggles, DJ Ali looks like a completely different person. His vaguely ethnic ‘fro has escaped confinement and bears a slight center part. The eyes below are warm and brown and ooze panic.

  With a gesture I hush the monologue.

  “You’re alright, pal. Do you know where you are?”

  “I’ve got not bloody idea, mate. Is this . . . is this Africa?”

  “See? You’re not as out of it as you feared.”

  “Africa?” the Englishman repeats before clutching his face. “Oh God, this is like some bad fucking dream. You’re Zephyr, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. And you?”

  “My name’s Sascha,” the pants-suited former hero replies. “I’m . . . I’m a long way from home, mister.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I say. “What happened?”

  The Englishman shakes his head.

  “I don’t know. I just . . . there are these things. They were bloody everywhere. I think . . . I think he took care of them. I ran in here, thought there was somewhere I could hide.”

>   “You nearly killed me,” I say with surprisingly little bitterness.

  “I’m sorry. I really don’t know what’s going on.”

  I shake my head and I don’t really want to play the gruff gunnery sergeant in this particular movie, but I can’t help myself as I deliver the inevitable line.

  “Nothing, pal. Just the end of the world.”

  Zephyr 5.17 “Psychic Surgery”

  I LEAVE SASCHA clutching himself in the hut and almost immediately there’s a blur of movement and St George lands in front of me. There are big green stains all over his white suit and his plum-colored tie is askew.

  “Gordon’s holding the interloper at bay for now, but basic physics are falling down. Where’s Ali?”

  I indicate with my thumb.

  “Nowhere to be found. Some bloke called Sascha’s in there, though.”

  “Oh Christ,” Harrison says and the bleakness chills me to the core, underscoring yet again just how important the whimpering ninny in the tracksuit is to our survival.

  “What are we gonna do?” I ask, hardly able to believe some of the words coming from my mouth today.

  Most my life I’ve been the A-list actor and suddenly I’m just the bit part in someone else’s movie, wringing my hands and hoping for a solution. This isn’t me.

  “Sascha’s emotionally fragile,” St George says. “His powers only work in his constructed persona. The real Sascha Cohen . . . well, I’m not quite sure how it happened. Sting has been working on him gradually, trying to get into his neural architecture when his guard’s down to start fixing some of the problems. There’s some deep trauma. Only trouble is, when you’re the single greatest controller of information on the Earth, that means you’re almost practically immune to telepathy unless you want it.”

  Harrison sighs with the force of his last few words and I look unblinkingly at the pitch-black sky behind him as the star creature slowly lumbers west. I have no idea what is in that direction. Sting is just a speck of energy almost lost amid the dark spectacle of eldritch enormity. With a grunt, Shade lands behind us and comes forward looking shaky.

  “The sun’s not getting through,” she says and I register for the first time how dangerously normal she looks.

  The sleeve of her jacket is gone and she’s so covered in a crust of mud-like slime that I suspect she’s been inside the horror, trying to fight it from within – and without much luck.

  George pulls a fob-watch from his jacket and peers at it.

  “There’s a few hours of daylight left,” he says drily. “I’d put this down to the inter-dimensional effect. Pretty soon we’re going to start losing oxygen, gravity, maybe even linear time itself.”

  “Fuckin’ hell,” Shade says.

  “This thing’s already set off earthquakes across half the globe,” I say, adding my own particular gloom to the conversation. “God knows how many dead.”

  Harrison nods. “It’s the same old story, Zephyr. What we tried to tell you earlier this month. It’s down to us and it always will be. Not much point calling in the SAS.”

  I glance at the receding back of the monstrosity.

  “No.”

  St George steps away with a finger in his ear like a man receiving an important phone call.

  “Sting’s coming,” he says. “Bringing him in.”

  Space-time makes a squelchy noise and the missing Brit, staggeringly like at the end of a long run, appears from thin air and practically collides with me. He grasps my shoulder and gives another of his toothy, handsome, world-weary grins.

  “Bloody hell, Zephyr,” he says and smiles and pats my leather shoulder. “Talk about a hairy one.”

  “You said I had potential,” I tell him, our faces close, my determination to snatch a bigger part for myself in this script apparent in my uncharacteristic seriousness.

  “That’s right,” he replies between breaths. “You’ve got the firepower. The right spread of initial abilities, as the boffins might say.”

  I recall the FBI scientist’s reference to my mother’s domain and nod.

  “And you’re a telepath, right? You’ve been trying to fix Sascha for months.”

  “Years,” Sting replies. “Nearly five years.”

  “But he’s been fighting you,” I say. “I won’t.”

  “I don’t know that it’s as simple as all that,” George Harrison says from the side.

  “By training, I mean meditation and the search for Agartha, Zephyr,” Sting says, a mirror to my own hard-set expression. “I don’t know if there’s any cheats for that.”

  “No,” I say and nod like everything so far has been perfectly reasonable. “But I’m not asking for enlightenment. If you can get into my head, you can unshackle whatever mental blocks are holding me back. Whatever they are. And even if it’s a one-off – call it hypnotism, call it mind control – we might be able to trigger something strong enough to beat this thing.

  “Remember,” I tell them. “I’m the son of the Preacher Man.”

  *

  IT IS HARD to recall the experience for you. Certainly there’s next to no memory of whatever psychic surgery Sting performs. At the level of the unconscious there are few concrete signposts for meaning to attach itself, and so I can only really explain that for five or so minutes I feel like I am trying to birth a baby horse through my left eye socket. Any other description would be pure metaphor or fiction, though the others will later tell me I nearly electrocuted Shade as she pinned me by the shoulders to the floor of the dirty hut.

  Likewise, for the minutes needed to defeat the alien god-beast, it isn’t really me who emerges from the telepathic crucible to do battle. Anything superfluous to the flow of power in my veins is momentarily suppressed, dead, non-existent. The me who steps from the flattened village as if from a dream is the unbridled Id, the genetic godhead who controls my powers, the me of my fantasies not beholden to fears, limits, fallibility, and other such previously concrete laws of my inner universe.

  The African breeze caresses my aura as I suck the very life from the world and convert it to raw power. I barely think it and the world leaps to my command. I don’t simply fly. I became the thunderbolt. Like Shade before me, I tear a path straight through the star-creature, but my wake is far more devastating to the godling, as evidenced by a pained bellow that shakes the blank savannah with a psychic echo that leaves springboks and gazelles dead for a hundred miles in every direction.

  In that moment I discover just how wrong it is to ratify the creature as a god. In the dimension from whence this horror has shambled, it is little more than a squamous amoeba, a coherent virulence, a crawling terraformer the true powers of that dissonant universe has sent across to erase all life and prepare the way for their own metaphysical invasion. If people in ancient times kenned to the existence of such things and named them thus and worshipped them as gods, then such is the folly of immature minds. In truth, the powers behind such disastrous offspring are so vast and incoherent and between-the-cracks of what simplistic consciousness can perceive that it isn’t even really possible to posit them as entities in any way that has or forever will make sense to members of the human race. All that matters is the star-creature is their herald and can be killed. The rest, I hope – or patently don’t hope, as my mindless rage sends power coruscating from every pore of my skin – will fall into place once the threat had been banished forever.

  Amid the chaos and slaughter, I fail to see the convoy of Range Rovers throwing up dust across the desert plain. The feeble chatter of the cultists’ automatic weapons don’t even register as I seize great chunks of the beast and incinerate them in my grasp. It is Shade and St George who throw their shadows over the mad bastards who conjured all this and exercise fatal judgement for the greater good of the world. Harrison gestures and the lead vehicle makes a noise like whales mating and becomes a fireball, shards of broken wreckage tangling the others and drawing them into a deadly wake.

  I understand that I face the bastard
child of a vastly alien cosmic consciousness, but at first I don’t connect what exactly the deaths of its summoners means for our universe.

  I am literally up to my neck in alien foulness, teeth set in a fierce grimace, the blackened husks of dozens upon dozens of the menacing symbiotes trickling like empty machinegun casings from a thousand yards high in the air, and it is only when the star-creature again makes a sickening noise that perforates bowels at a hundred paces that I glean that the Classical laws of our side of the barrier have triumphed and the monster is now not only vulnerable, but thoroughly mortal. And then my sense of vengeance truly kicks in and it is not until twenty minutes or so later, with a sun-blackened Shade by my side, that the thing manages to lay a glove on me – a backwards whack with a tusk-encrusted tentacle that flings me to near the Zambian border – that I relax long enough to appreciate the menace is near to its end and we have won the battle despite the severity of the tide.

  From my sudden vantage I watch as the mile-high invader sloughs to one side and begins to fall. Two minutes later, the force of its collision with the earth is the last register for the worldquake that will consume the media in the coming days, although so little of the true tale will ever be told.

  The dust cloud is like something from the apocalypse. When it begins to clear at ground level, there they are, Shade and Sting and George Harrison and the DJ, walking toward me like the Magnificent Seven short a few. Sting has that damnable self-satisfied grin, his close-cropped hair chalk white with the fallout, and Shade’s smile is one of the sweetest photographic negatives I’ve ever seen. Harrison is evidently pleased despite the ruined suit, and DJ Ali stands off to one side trying not to look like a man who recently shat himself. He gives a vague hand gesture with one gold-covered appendage, eye-wear firmly back in place as he says, “Boo-ya,” and kindly leaves it at that.