“Table, can you tell me what it means?”
The thing is mute, of course. This isn’t Star Trek. I stare at the grey spots as they slowly dissolve back into the deceptive nothingness of the glass and then I focus on the man with the helmet who may or may not have also killed my mother. One thing the table can do is strip the gaudy costume and reveal the man beneath and it does this with scary immediacy, a name and face I don’t recognize from California, an employee of the Paladin Group I’ve already linked to Yoko Ono.
There’s nothing on anyone called Arsenal except a minor bad guy who died during an equipment malfunction in Paris in the early 90s, the detonation taking out half a city block and killing twelve. Whatever secretly rich history Arsenal and his comrades once enjoyed, about the most exciting thing about the man behind the mask is a black belt in aikido and a position as an unarmed combat trainer with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Steven Seagal is not a name I think anyone would recognize unless they had come into direct contact with him in such a role.
I have more questions, but my table sessions always seem to be getting cut short. I sense a movement in the doorway and Loren is there, beautiful but no longer radiant in a gown of Japanese silk. The black and green do amazing things for her honeyed complexion and rich almond eyes and I cannot explain the lack of any reaction in my heart except a sudden violent nervousness.
“Where did you go?”
“I had something I had to do.”
“It’s done now?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
I smile tightly and she moves from the door and I imagine her trajectory would bring her across the room and expectantly into my arms, except suddenly Brasseye, Smidgeon and Mastodon burl into the room.
Zephyr 6.8 “According To The Liner Notes”
“HEY GUYS,” THE ‘Don says anxiously, the wounds still fresh from our last encounter.
“Hi,” I reply quietly.
I meet Smidgeon’s eye and nod seriously, trying to show some of the respect maybe I neglected last time or something like that, but there is a hurt there and a reticence to engage fortunately not shared by the robot, who continues into the room and then pauses, swiveling at the waist to stab its contracting brass-ringed gaze at Seeker.
“Comrade, I detect a change in your aura,” the ensorcelled android says. “Are you aware your mystical energy has depleted more than ninety per cent?”
“You what?” Mastodon says.
Smidgeon simply stares and Loren sighs tightly, like this is her brave little moment or something, though I realize that lip-biting smile and the completion of her swan across the room means it’s meant to be our brave little moment.
“We’ll have to tell them.”
Vulcana and – I’m afraid to say it – Nightwind come into the chamber as if by pre-arrangement. I do not understand what this fucking guy is still doing here.
“Tell us what?” Connie asks, trepidation etched in the dark lines worsened by her blue complexion.
“I’m stepping down as co-captain of the Sentinels,” Loren says. “I’ve lost my powers. The mantle of Seeker has moved to another.”
“You what?” Mastodon barks.
“Hang on a minute,” Vulcana says with the irritation of a woman trying to calm traffic. “What do you mean you ‘lost your powers’? Have they been taken from you?”
“They’ve passed on,” Loren says and blushes and links her arm through my reluctant hold.
“Oh shit,” Vulcana says.
Her black-eyed gaze settles on me.
“Zephyr, you philandering shit.”
“What are you talking about, Vulcana?” Smidgeon asks.
“We were talking about it last month,” Vulcana says in an increasingly slack voice. “Just a girlie session, you know? Seeker told me her powers would disappear if she, you know, ‘found mortal love’. I knew she had the hots for someone, but she never said who.”
“Mortal love must be code for doing the two-hip shuffle,” Mastodon says.
“It’s not like that!” Seeker says. “You don’t understand.”
Vulcana’s gaze refuses to leave me. I swear she’s not been the same woman since the Wallachians saved her arm, and now I find myself thinking some fairly unchristian thoughts.
“Is that right, Zephyr? You two have ‘found mortal love’?”
“Fuck off, Connie.”
“Don’t call me that, you bastard,” Vulcana hisses, her gaze finally dislodged as she shoots black looks at Smidgeon and other late allies who don’t share the same history we do.
Seeker squeezes my leather-clad bicep trapped in her embrace. She’s radiant again, for a moment, smiling in the flush of her rich inner feelings.
“You can’t understand what Joseph and I share. You never will.”
“Seeker, honey. . . .” Vulcana says and sighs.
“Well what the fuck are we gonna do then?” Smidgeon says. “We’re not all here in costume for a joke, you know. There’s an airplane missing off the Rhode Island coast. Who’s gonna lead now?”
It feels like Mastodon has turned completely full circle when he stabs a big finger at me, sounding like a black dude as he gruffly complains.
“I thought you were leaving anyway? What did you do – figure it’s not just good enough to pull one co-captain, you have to ruin the other one as well?”
“I think Zephyr needs to continue as captain through the transition,” Seeker says.
“Screw this,” Vulcana mutters and pushes from the room, taking just enough time to shoot me another withering look before making the hallway.
“Someone should really go after her,” Brasseye says.
“Just like someone should’ve gone after Samurai Girl, you mean?” I add.
There is an audible intake of their collective breath, but when the abuse comes, I don’t expect it to be from Nightwind, who’s not even a member of the team.
“Jesus Zephyr,” he growls in his unfamiliar voice. “You’re such a goddamned coward. You don’t even deserve to lead this team.”
*
I HAVE TO restrain myself, or at least that’s what I think for a moment until I am true to myself and the reality is I really just want to get the hell out of here with the minimum fuss, no matter what ass-wipes like Nightwind want to say. I raise an eyebrow not lost on the other members of the squad despite my ever-present black domino and Nightwind, his black rubber face-mask in his hand, pulls back his hood to reveal a frustrated and angry face.
At first I think I am looking at a double of myself, the sweat pasting back dark gingery-brown hair and clinging to a few days’ stubble. But the intense blue eyes aren’t mine and the complexion, made sickly by the rubber costume, won’t leap back into health like my own wind-burnished visage. I think for a moment I know this face from elsewhere, some bit-part actor in a film I may or may not have caught late at night on the wall-hugging couch of my old apartment, Elisabeth snoring in the bedroom with a pussy full of cum, the flatscreen on low and dialed to pay-per-view we could never afford.
“Who the fuck are you, buddy, to say anything about anything?” I say to him.
I look at the photo in my hand and then angrily back at the demasked Nightwind, his blue eyes boring into my skull. My posture tenses and I put the photo on the table to better prepare myself, for all the world like a man about to whoop ass.
“You’re a coward, Zephyr. Don’t try and pose like a big man. You’re not gonna thrash me.”
“I’m not sure what makes you so confident,” I reply in a cool voice.
“Because you’re lazy . . . and you just want out.”
Nightwind’s comment isn’t what I expected and quite apart from the fact he’s pretty much completely on the money, I have no idea where the dude’s getting his intel. It’s not like I’m above beating the crap out of him here and now, just because I can, so long as the Wallachians and my little gal pals don’t get in the way. But he’s right that I’m in no mood for picking a fight. That li
ttle part of me that retains a sense of wrongness about my last tirade doesn’t have the energy for this nonsense and it’s possible to say I don’t take most of these people serious enough to even need to thrash them.
“Sounds like you know all there is to know,” I reply tersely. “I didn’t realize you were such a big fan.”
“Once was, believe it or not,” Nightwind says.
I am guessing that was about fourteen million years ago.
“Yeah, well, it’s hard to grow up, kid.”
Nightwind looks at the other guys. There’s no way Vulcana is going to come back, but Smidgeon and Mastodon have different breeds of the same incensed expression on their faces. The ‘Don’s flowing moustaches are flecked with grey and his dark eyes are furrowed beneath caveman brows.
“When did you turn into such an asshole?” he asks me.
I shake my head in reply.
“Jeez, ‘Don. That’s rich coming from you. You’re lucky you’re even still on the team. You were meant to be a reserve except Annie Black sold out to the Feds.”
Mastodon’s shocked look isn’t exactly the payoff my nasty competitive streak promised. I avoid his eyes and ignore Brasseye, who’s pretty much just a spectator in all this, and glance instead at Smidgeon and then Seeker, costume-less as I guess she is likely to be hereafter.
“This missing passenger plane isn’t going to find itself, gentlemen,” the robot says at last.
The other heroes look lost for words and action. Loren has since relinquished her hold and I drop my eyes to the ancient team photograph on the almond-shaped glass table, aware there’s probably some postmodern intertextual shit going on with one team under scrutiny while another one collapses around me. Instead, my gaze focuses on a dark-haired woman at the left of the front row, her arm in a comradely pose around the shoulders of a guy apparently called Fortress, according to the liner notes.
“We’re better than this sort of bickering, Zephyr,” Smidgeon says. “Seeker said it and no one doubts your experience. You can still come with us if you want.”
I pick up the photo and turn it over.
The woman’s name is Spectra. The granulation of the photo makes it impossible to tell and she has a very 60s-style spiked face mask like numerous heroines once wore. The lavish black hair and the willowy uniform give nothing away, but in my gut I know I am again looking at the Demoness.
Funny how she evades the eye like that.
“Zephyr,” Mastodon says. “People are missing. Coast Guard registered a series of purple flashes.”
Admittedly, I barely hear him.
“No, you go,” I say, and start from the room with my mind locked on the photograph in my hand. “There’s someone I’ve got to see.”
It strikes me where I should be: seeking answers to this whole thing. The Isle of White, where the Beatles had their home and where one of them, the Visionary, still dwells.
As I pass Nightwind, he declines to move aside and I shoulder him back easily enough and continue through the door. I am barely a few paces away, destination already set in my head, as my teammates contemplate the sudden thinning of their ranks.
Zephyr 6.9 “A Seasoned Adventurer”
IT IS NIGHT above the dark and surging grey Atlantic, the womb of oceans as I descend through the pelting rain to the bleak island, the one-time famous base strangely antiquated after twenty, thirty years away from public scrutiny. The castle and lighthouse at the other end of the rocky scarp near the established township throw a feeble glow over my immediate horizon, but there aren’t even emergency lights over the razor-wire fences of the Beatles’ enclosure.
I land with water gushing off me, the prison-like door in the huge white plaster stone wall as good a point of entry as any. As I walk towards it, the metal door cracks open and light like from a naked globe spills out to frame a tall, well-groomed and inimitably sad-looking gentleman in butler’s attire.
“Please come out of the weather, Master Zephyr. If you had sent notice of your arrival we could have turned on the meteorological systems.”
I nod curtly and squeeze past the plum-speaking servant, not entirely successful in keeping my moisture to myself.
“I am Ames, if it pleases you, sir – Master McCartney’s chief aide.”
“How’d you know I was coming? Radar?”
“Master McCartney insists on the very best security,” the butler says. “It may not look it to speak of it, sir, but the Beatles Sanctum is equipped with state-of-the-art systems.”
“From which decade?”
The butler turns his face away in a clear sign of displeasure. I can live with it. I’ve offended people I actually care about recently enough.
“This way, please. Mr McCartney is just getting changed to greet you.”
“He doesn’t have to do anything special on my behalf,” I say. “I’ve just got a few questions.”
“Believe me, sir,” the butler says in a rare moment of candor. “He most definitely does.”
There is something of the submarine to the whole set-up. I am reminded of Julian Lennon’s observatory, except where that was elegant and expensive, this place is pure boiler room. There have been concessions to human comfort over the years, though there’s a palpable sense of much of the upholstery being ripped up and sold off in later years, like I’m inspecting just the shell of what was once the headquarters of the greatest superhero team on Earth. Now and then on the industrial walls there are alcoves with dusty trophies and framed photographs, casting my mind back to the Avenger’s lair, but while both needed a good spring clean, there’s more than the neglect of years at work here. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the place was being cannibalized.
We go up metal stairs and into a big round chamber and the man in the middle of the practically unlit space is perhaps one of the biggest human beings I have seen in my life. With effort, he has squeezed into the pants and jacket that once made the Beatles so iconic, but McCartney’s girth has long since escaped the confines of mere mortal clothes.
I suspect his waistline went some time not long after his eyes. It is truly sad and pathetic to see the scarred, fleshy face casting about like a robotic chicken until our heavy footfalls on the metal floor alert him to our arrival.
“Ames,” Visionary says in a voice that sounds like it’s choking on itself. “I can’t find the fucking gizmo-whatsit. Can you see it? Fucking eyes.”
I wouldn’t have a clue to what he’s referring, so I demur to the butler, who steps like a seasoned adventurer into the middle of the trash-cluttered chamber and removes a huge goggle-like device with a heavy metal cable from a long desk housing snowed-over computer monitors. I recognize various approaches through the storm rendered as slow motion camera tracks and then turn back to McCartney as he slips the cybernetics into place.
“That’s better,” he says and burps and tiredly eases his bulk onto a tiny swivel chair near a bunch of other screens, at least one of which shows a website for amputee women. “Who are you? That American lad?”
“I’m Zephyr,” I say as straight as I can manage, uncomfortable to be looking back into the insectoid gaze.
“John Lennon was my father.”
*
THE VISIONARY STARES at me through his computerized vision for long moments and swallows his own belch and looks away, fumbling among the rubbish on the nearby counter to find a cigarette.
“You and all the others.”
“I’ve only found out about that recently.”
“Poor cunt. What do you want? Money? There isn’t none.”
“I’m not after money,” I say cautiously.
Paul McCartney lights the cigarette and coughs professionally, like a concession to the role he’s playing, and then he waves the smoke at me.
“Not very impressive, am I?”
“That’s, um, not for me to judge. . . .”
“Fuck, that’s weak even for you, Zephyr.”
I say nothing at his suggestion perhaps he’s mor
e familiar with my oeuvre than he at first let on. And McCartney puffs away for more than a minute, using his undoubtedly expensive optics to scroll through another monitor that might be email and might be the contents of an FTP server. Hell, it could well be midget porn, for all I know.
“What do you want, then?” he asks finally. “If you’re looking for John, I don’t know how to find him. I’d say follow the trail of pussy, but that trail’s probably a bit stale. Who was your mum?”
“Catchfire.”
“Catchfire? Never heard of her.”
Beneath him, I gather. And in his words I hear my own dismissal of various actresses and TV reporters I’ve nonetheless been happy enough to nail over the years.
“I want to ask you about these guys.”
Without making it too homo-erotic, I pull the sweat-stained photograph from my jacket, rise, and place it on the counter near his ashtray.
McCartney looks down at the image for a long while. With the silver box of the optics over his face, for all I know he has gone to sleep as the cigarette burns to a withered ghost of itself between his baby-fat fingers. Then he drops the butt onto the metal grille and grinds it into an extinction of glowing sparks beneath what appears to be a slightly chewed slipper.
“Who are they?” he asks, mesmerized.
“I was hoping you could tell me,” I reply and confess to a mild disappointment despite my hunch paying off. “I’ve had one of the most sophisticated computer systems in the world hunting for info on these guys and all its hit is an apparent absence of data – places where there should be information, only its missing.”
“A cover-up,” the fat man says. “That’ll be John, then. Find them and the trail will lead to him. He was always a sneaky bastard. Sneaky about fucking everything. Turn your back on a bint and he’d be shaggin’ her. Didn’t matter back when we was drowning in the cunts, but it’s been a while between drinks now for some of us.”
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