Ploughing into people at a hell of a pace seems to be the main strategy, and again I go under. This time, our passage leaves a deep furrow in the soil as we collide as far as the first of the wooden beach shacks, and then I seal a hard uppercut that barely contacts any jaw, thanks to the weird helmet ensconcing the madman’s skull, but the diversion lets me get my boots under his chest again and then it’s just a short effort to push him off. In the meanwhile, I yell something barely coherent, asking the bastard to identify himself, but there’s not a lot going on behind those small black eyes. He simply comes back, relentless like a storm, and walks into a powerful left cross and then I lay solid blows up and down his body, smoke coming off my knuckles with the charge of my carrier blast until the broken brute slumps to his knees and I ram one of mine upside his jaw and he twists back, defeated, and lays slumped on the ground with his curiously hideous legs bent beneath him.
I simply eye the mess. There is the power within me to do something more, but I have no idea who I am dealing with here or his reasons for attacking. Slowly my fist relaxes and my shoulders slump in fatigue.
The voices behind me should come as more of a surprise.
“You have shown mercy,” the sonorous choir remark.
I turn and look at five teenage kids glowing with the power of their own quasi-godhood. Dressed in black. Three girls and two boys. They hold hands like the negative images of a child’s paper people chain. Although young, their expressions are remote and damnably superior. One of the boys looks Asiatic and the girls are Sri Lankan, Amerindian, and a redhead. With their hands held tight they speak with one voice.
“You have shown mercy, and therefore you shall live, but you must leave our father’s isle.”
“Father?” I say tiredly. “Great. I guess you’d call this another family reunion.”
*
THE FIVE SETS of dispassionate eyes do not flinch. There is no curiosity, no twinge of human warmth or natural response to my comment. As the silence unfolds from my pronouncement, so the leering grin slips from my face.
“You must leave the island,” the teenagers tell me.
“I don’t think you guys are hearing what I’m saying,” I reply. “You live here? Your father is my father, too. The, uh, Preacher Man. I came here when I was a kid.”
I could say more, but I’m starting to sound like Woody Allen again with the stammering explanations, so I choose a stiff upper lip as the better part of discretion.
“The Torus does not dwell on the island, but within space-time itself,” these self-professed siblings of mine say.
“The . . . Torus?”
“We are the Torus.”
“Right. Silly of me. Sorry.”
“You must leave the island now.”
“Why?” I ask.
As a concession to their humanity, the teens glance among each other. Clearly they have no explanation that would count as logic to me. All the trappings of higher consciousness is there except for the ability to communicate it. Classic nerds.
“Who’s he?” I ask, pointing to the guy groaning on his back, as if my question solves the social awkwardness of the moment.
“The Torus monitors Doomsday Island from the nethersphere,” the teenagers chime together again, fobbing off my polite social attempts. “You must depart immediately.”
Frustrated at this latest ignorance, I feel like the impatient big brother I may well just possibly be. The Asian kid is last in line, and I’m in his face before his resolved alien demeanor can do anything about it. I snap my hand around his slim wrist and pull him free of the others. Just as suddenly, the light emanating from him cuts out completely and as I release my grip, the young guy staggers with disorientation and comes out sounding like a startled surfer dude.
“Whoa,” he says.
His dark eyes flick around as if I’m not the most obvious thing they need to find.
“Who’re you?”
“Didn’t you hear me just explain? I’m Zephyr. I think we’re related.”
The boy looks at me and I take a moment to check out the greater part of the sundered Torus, each of whom look surprisingly unfazed by my sudden ejection of one of their members.
“I’m Woo,” the teenager says. “Sorry, it’s been a long time since I was out of the group.”
He looks around, the gears and whirs almost audible as he absorbs reality from this new level.
“You’re hooked up with this Torus thing,” I say without making it sound like much of a question. “You guys are Lennon’s kids too?”
“Uh, well yeah,” Woo replies. “I’m sorry, I have to rejoin before my connection’s broken.”
Before the kid can shrug me off and move the three paces he needs to latch back on to the hive mind, I get between them and put my hand to his chest.
“I need to know what the fuck’s going on here, kid, and I need to find Lennon.”
The boy’s face becomes a mask. I’m not quite prepared for the staccato “Get off me,” or the painless burst of power that flings me thirty feet across the sand. By the time I’m on my feet again, there are five glowing teenagers hovering once more.
“The Torus exists to preserve the Continuum,” the eerie chanting voices sound again. “You have shown mercy to our subhuman sibling, and thus you shall live. You must leave Doomsday Island. The island must be empty. If you remain, we shall consider you an agent of the Doomsday Man and destroy you.”
Ultimatum done, there’s a complete absence of special effects as the air collapses in on where the quintet stood. After a few seconds wasting my steely stare to no avail, I turn my gaze to the so called “subhuman”, and when I look up again, I see a handful of local people, Thais in sarongs and linen shirts watching me nervously from beyond the closest wire fence.
“I’m looking for John Lennon,” I call over to them.
There is one old man and three women and a boy, the latter perhaps twelve years old and carrying a soccer ball. I think of the shanty huts the Torus mentioned and wondered how the local population counts as the island being empty. Bare of parahuman energy signatures, I guess, except for the one mutant mug Lennon must’ve begat upon a local woman back when he was trying to repopulate the Earth single-handedly.
An expression blending confusion with mild fear greets my words. I don’t even know how to say hello to these people in their own language, and frustration at my ignorance bites my lip. It’s one thing to be able to streak to any corner of the globe, and quite another to be able to navigate being there.
“I’m sorry,” I say, not quite the same volume in it, and motion at the mutant kid on the ground. “Is he your boy? I think he’ll be okay. I’m sorry. I’m leaving.”
I do the crouch thing. Six trillion light globes and all that.
Zephyr 6.3 “The Greyscale Effect”
LIFE IS A fragile thing. You don’t need me to tell you that, though you might think we who dance through the night in our red-hot spandex and spanking new leathers are immune to the spine-tingling anticipation of the almighty void.
Not so.
Well, to some, I guess, the idea of their own demise is either such a statistically unlikely probability, or they’re not sufficiently equipped to contemplate the great hereafter anyway. In either case, these are a small percentage of us. While it mightn’t be obvious and we might not feel the Reaper’s shadow over our shoulder every moment, believe me when I say we know we’re advocates of death itself, or else we’d never go masked. There’s a wild, improbable logic in the fact we do, which is just part of the ongoing paradox we commit to in taking part in the world outside our bedrooms. We’re daring the void. Some, like Professor Mandela, have theorized we’re enacting some sort of great Freudian kink every time we appear in public. And Dr Phil’s perennial question, “What’s the payoff to make you do the things you do?” hangs as heavy in the air now as when it was first broached on his crappy Texan sound stage.
And it seems to me the more we remember the transitory natu
re of the world and the lives we risk to save others, the more difficult that question becomes to answer.
I’m feeling fairly low as the good ship Zephyr limps back into Atlantic City. This might not be an unusual condition, and my (ex-) wife’s claims it’s a side-effect of my jazzed up, fucked up metabolism might just be on the money, but here again, if there’s any damned thing I can be feeling crap about then I am dredging it up with the glee of an amateur archaeologist. You’d think having recently saved the very fabric of our universe would be a good shot to my derelict ego, but that’s not how this particular showground ride runs, dear believers. Instead, I fly in under a brooding cloud cover with images of my broken marriage, disaffected daughter, freaky relationship with my colleagues, and desultory commitment to the city itself plucking on my bottom strings to effect a generally depressive timbre.
There seem to be more airships than usual hovering above the jagged city roofs. Even under the greyscale effect of the weather, the gaping holes where buildings once stood make the city look a victim to some sort of architectural cancer. Already the drones are back at work, clearing debris ahead of the inevitable rebuild. I’m pretty sure Twilight’s Italian connections have their hooks into the steel and concrete trade as well as the city’s garbage collections, which means civic profits will again be flowing to our favorite criminal element, though I’m less certain what this will mean following Tony Azzurro’s spectacular death-by-scenery.
Landing on the roof of the Jenssen building, I eye the same dreary scenery, feeling like a masturbator sniffing his rag as I return to the scene of former complicity, the smell of Sal Doro’s cigarillos imaginary in the air. Dead pigeons roll away from the alligator grips of my boots as I crunch through broken glass and cigarette butts and gaze at the city in close-up, though still like a voyeur, the world going on beneath me without a clue its being watched.
There must be forty-something messages on my phone and I’m painfully conscious of not having spoken to my daughter or even my ex-wife since prior to the worldquake. Yet staring at the small glowing blue face-plate of the phone, frankly I’d rather have some cock-burgling villain trying to extract my teeth than sort through the various desperate little sound bites. There is only one number in my mind for now and the only image is of my rudimentary bed in Seeker’s ridiculous reality-travelling castle. I press the autodial and sigh and wait for the inevitable terse reply as my erstwhile colleagues grok to the fact of my return.
The Wallachian fortress momentarily superimposes itself on the tenements across the street with the Uighar minimart in the basement. I drop from the crumbling roof like a suicide, only hauling myself up at the lost moment to land straddling the footpath with my badass glare back in place to shield against the impending recriminations.
*
NO ONE COMES down to meet me on my return, and knowing me, I’m equal parts relieved and vaguely offended. I have to order my thoughts several times to get to my private quarters, and when I walk in, I’m slightly astonished to see a row of perfectly made new uniforms hanging from a mobile rack that’s been steered into and abandoned in my Spartan chambers.
The stylized lightning bolt zed is in gold these days at the recommendation of my agent, who is probably among the many hopefuls with a part of themselves trapped inside my message bank. I fire up my computer with a vague thought about browsing the Zephyr forums I know I am not going to seriously entertain, and I eye the bed four or five times before conceding I need to strip down and clean up before I can really defile that ascetic space.
I nod off in the steam room and when I open my eyes, Seeker is standing across the quasi Roman bath with her costumed arms folded over her impressive chest and a look that could wither diamonds.
“Er, hey,” I manage with such startlement that the only appropriate follow-through seems to be to dunk my head in the scalding milky water and massage my face furiously, like it might bring back some of the life I’m not feeling.
“We’ve left messages with you,” Seeker says. “I’ve left messages with you.”
“I know. I’ve been out of range.”
“Obviously,” she replies with elegant disdain.
“What’s been happening?”
“Do you care?”
In my daze I nearly confirm that I do not, but I hang onto my tongue by the last micron and try to grin, looking like a drug-sozzled Robert Downey Jr or something. Seeker tuts audibly and turns away, and I watch her ass go from the chamber with a strange regret given I wouldn’t mind the privacy.
After a change, I linger on the Internet long enough to confirm my forum and the world at large are rife with speculation about my three-day absence in the wake of one of the world’s worst “natural” disasters. I can see another Atlantic City Post payday looming in my near future if this doesn’t sort itself out. And while my own message boards are fairly easy to dismiss, seeing my noggin with a question mark on my chest as the main graphic for today’s Post is less easy to swallow.
Frankly, there should be bigger things on my mind. I ease the scrap of purloined celluloid from my unlaundered costume and clear my thoughts to better navigate my way to the Sentinels’ assembly room. My recent ponderings loom so large, in fact, that I walk straight into the chamber unaware pretty much the entire team is assembled in leisure wear with bad 80s music and a three-dimensional projection of slow motion car crashes playing above the table.
I know this isn’t a particularly visual medium, so let me spell it out for you.
Mastodon is wearing a Hugh Hefner robe with a sullen-looking Vulcana and two identical cosplay sisters on one of the couches with him. Seeker is in full regalia, radiating iciness, but managing to maintain a conversation with Smidgeon, who is wearing his customary mask as well as a brown 1970s pimp suit. He has a fruity-looking cocktail in each hand. To add insult to injury, B-graders Nightwind, Black Honey and Stiletto are mooning over the Sentinels’ personal computer stations.
There are five or six other people in the room I don’t recognize, either new supers or ones dressed so differently that they lack recognition. And on the opposite sofa, our so-called magic robot friend Tom O’Clock is possibly hitting on my teenage daughter Windsong.
“Z-Zephyr,” Smidgeon exclaims.
Several of my teammates immediately betray expressions suggesting they’ve been seeing other people behind my back. As if the evidence wasn’t obvious. Only Seeker gives me a frosty look, though Vulcana’s fierce gaze is a rival of quite different variety. Windsong’s childish lips form an equally childish hoop of surprise at my appearance – given I fucking well live here, her astonishment’s hard to credit, though again I can rarely get over my own amazement, seeing my baby girl not only so comparatively grown up, but knocking around in knee-high boots with the big boys as well. Scary.
“Hey,” one of the cosplayers remark. “That’s an awesome Zephyr costume.”
“That’s actually Zephyr,” Mastodon says in monotone, a voice normally reserved for when the drugs run out.
I nod to my old sparring partner and awkwardly put my hands on my hips. Stiletto says hi because we’ve been cool since we watched her doggie style with Darkstorm at Professor Prendergast’s lab. That kind of intimacy begets, well, intimacy (though I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure). A couple of the other goons wave and I recognize one as Sun Man, though he’s wearing a hotel-style white robe over what inexplicably appear to be swimming trunks.
“So, uh, what’s going on?” I ask.
“Oh, you know,” Smidgeon says. “It’s waffle night.”
“‘It’s waffle night’?” I say like an idiot savant. “We have a waffle night?”
“Uh, sure. Every Thursday,” he replies.
“It’s a team-building thing,” Seeker says archly. “It was Mastodon’s idea.”
“Actually, I suggested –”
“Yes, well waffles seemed more appropriate, given where we are,” Seeker says without even turning around.
“Where’s Samura
i Girl?”
“That’s one of the things we’ve been discussing, Zephyr,” the robot says and stands and Windsong follows suit like she didn’t realize previously she was in the presence of royalty or her boyfriend’s employer or something.
“You still haven’t found Samurai Girl?” I ask, basically incredulous.
“It’s not just Samurai Girl,” Tom O’Clock (codename Brasseye) says. “Stiletto hasn’t seen Darkstorm for nearly a month and the media is reporting Crusader, Ansolom and Manitou and possibly others missing as well.”
I discussed this with Sal Doro and yet the elements of the conversation fail to come together in a coherent memory. The one thing I know clearly is I alerted Seeker to the situation and I expected my pals to be gainfully employed chasing up a mystery of their own while I was keeping higher company with Sting, Shade and St George. Something about this all irks me, and notwithstanding my dear daughter’s presence, I can’t keep the waspish tone from my voice.
“So, what does it say in the Sentinels’ constitution about waffle night if there’s an emergency on a Thursday that maybe keeps a member away?”
The other heroes glance uncomfortably at each other.
“You know we haven’t finalized details of the team charter, Zephyr,” Seeker says. “I’m sure if something comes up on a Thursday we can reschedule.”
“You can?”
“Sure,” Smidgeon says with the ridiculous enthusiasm I’m coming to expect. “Besides, whatever happens on a Thursday?”
“And we haven’t been on any mission, Zephyr,” Mastodon says and joins the crowd by standing.
I swear for a moment the cosplay twins are making out, though it turns out the blue-wigged, scantily clad girls are just checking each other’s mascara.
“Things have been too busy here,” Mastodon says.
He waves his hand like a prestidigitator at the table and the projected footage dissolves into a slideshow of newsprint and TV footage showing my teammates picking through rubble, making speeches out the front of hospitals, shaking hands with Mayor Pykes, Mastodon barrel-chested and impressive as he directs traffic from the roof of his crushed limo, Seeker at a children’s hospital, close-ups of Smidgeon sneaking through cracks in rubble dragging a fiber-optic camera cord with him – in fact, my buddies doing everything under the sun except actually tackling anything to do with the cause of the disaster.
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