Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  “As far as I can figure it, there used to be a sort of global superhero team, The Twelve, they called themselves, and the Preacher Man and Spectra were with them until one day they somehow convinced the others to give up their powers and their identities and . . . well, fuck me if I really know how they did it.

  “A guy who died last month called Tom Hilfiger told the police they somehow collapsed their reality into another parallel and everyone was supposed to get new lives. They were all success stories, but none of them had powers, nothing like what they’d been. But Hilfiger could remember bits and pieces even though they’d said he wouldn’t and he started tracking the others down because he was so fucking rich he could do anything he liked.

  “This guy, Arsenal, he used to be one of them. He’s the killer. Some Californian karate instructor now. He killed Hilfiger and that fucking horror writer Stephen King, too, he used to be one of them, and now he’s killed my . . . my mother. My birth mother. Fuck.”

  I wipe away the boogers and Hawkwind just keeps staring until I look up and he makes a half-chewed noise and stands properly.

  “And how’s dressing up as the B&D Tooth Fairy helping you with that, handsome?”

  *

  “I JUST DON’T understand why he killed her,” I say weakly. “I don’t even understand how it was possible. And why now? And why this other guy too? If he was going to kill him, you’d think he would do it back when the fucking guy was acting like a madman and talking to the police.”

  “You sound like you’re over-thinking this one again,” the Hawk says.

  The words take me back in years and I halt in the middle of my vain efforts to justify myself and hang my head and choke on the unborn laughter and nod.

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you remember this one? ‘A slave takes his revenge at once; a coward never’.”

  “I remember it,” I tell him. “What do you mean by that exactly: that I’m a coward?”

  “I’m only recounting the wisdom of my ancestors – a wonderfully practical people. It’s up to you to decide how you fit that saying.”

  “Maybe your saying is bullshit.”

  “Well, you’re here. The guy who killed your mother, you’re telling me, is on the west coast. Seems to me like you’re halfway there.”

  “But my . . . my fucking powers.”

  “‘No powers, but not powerless,’ you said.”

  Rather than reply and convey my frustration, I look away into the nearest bank of cardboard boxes stamped Guardians Without Borders.

  “What did you hope I would tell you? How to reclaim your powers?”

  “You were never very fucking nice to me,” I say and don’t even bother to mask the petulant tone I know is there.

  “I’ve trained many young crime-fighters. It’s what I did, before I found my new calling.”

  “I knew I was just one of a bunch. Nightfighter, Wendigo, Bearcat, Black Jester. . . .”

  “Black Jester turned to crime,” Hawkwind says.

  “You still seemed to like him more than me.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re saying. We weren’t close? I trained you. I wasn’t your father, Joseph.”

  I stand up.

  “You think I wanted a father figure? Gee, a kid grows up with two fucking dykes playing house and you think it never occurred to me I was lacking in the father figure department? Hawk, you trained me. You helped make me what I was. You’re my mentor, man, like it or not. That means you owe it to me!”

  “Owe what?”

  “Just . . . just tell me what to fucking do,” I say and let the anger wash out. “I don’t know what I’m doing. My life’s a mess. If I keep on like this without my powers, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

  “You have your life,” Hawkwind says. “You have a good woman.”

  “I don’t know it means anything.”

  “Then go and avenge your mother, you fucking baby.”

  I nod – teeth gritted and still standing – and make a fist I don’t know what I’m going to do with.

  “Right. Thanks. And fuck you.”

  I stride from the room and barely refrain from punching a stack of boxes that would probably just snap my wrist. Loren leaps up in surprise from resting on the pillion and I toss her the keys.

  “Start her up. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”

  And before anyone can see my shame I slide on the Zorro mask and sling my ass over the seat and put my hand on Loren’s hip and the lights come on as the bike roars into life and we burn rubber through the shipping container-wide doors and within an hour we’re on Route 401 headed for California.

  Zephyr 8.3 “Gone To Hell”

  IT IS MID-AFTERNOON by the time we arrive in Los Feliz. The Triumph saunters up the wide streets brimming with lawns and climatically-inappropriate trees, the motorbike’s mix of strength and lazy exhaust a semaphore for our own. Loren holds my hips in a gentle clinch as we ignore the slumbering commuters gawping from their car windows as we cruise past, ascending the cityscape, the GPS on the Enercom phone guiding us ever on.

  Eventually I pull the bike up at an intersection. The huge, fortress-like Spanish homes guard their swimming pools and their secrets, the occasional kept woman peering with evident boredom from a balcony or an upper storey bedroom. The sun is lowering itself into the Pacific like a woman uncertain of the temperature and I can feel Loren’s fragrant breath on the sweat on the back of my neck.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  “This guy is some kind of sworn deputy or something. I’m wondering if he’s at his house or at the station,” I reply.

  Lioness slips from the back of the Triumph like a shadow. She gestures at the big stucco gatehouse of the mansion across from us, the tiers of tiled roof all but concealed by palms and the high pink wall.

  “This is his place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll slip in and scout for signs of life if you swing past the station,” Loren says. “I’ll call you if I spot him.”

  And she winks at me, holding up her own pert little mobile phone.

  I pat her on her leather rear as she jogs off and across the street and a passing Delorean slows so the Hispanic guys can leer, vacating the scene before witnessing Loren’s deft illegality as she parkours up and over the wall. I nod to myself, foolishly well pleased, and gun the Triumph that starts forward of its own volition back on the course like some delusion of a knightly charger vaulting onward to our mutual destiny.

  I swing past the tastefully-accoutered police offices, the pink flamingos missing from its manicured lawns, nothing more unsightly than a man coming in to pay his parking ticket only to find the office hours are now closed.

  And of course by the time I head back to this Seagal character’s hacienda, the whole thing has gone to hell.

  *

  THE TRIUMPH NESTLES into a space between the pink plasterwork and the rotting timber of the less upmarket place next door. Once I’m satisfied the bike can’t be easily seen from the street, I do a bad imitation of Lioness’s scale of the wall. I rue the day I lost my powers, but losing the power to fly, man, that’s the lowest blow of all. Sweating and groaning, I finally get my gloved fingers over the top of the wall and I smart at the broken glass embedded in the concrete and go over as gracefully as I can manage.

  It is a beautiful house, but the grounds look like it’s been a while since anyone swept. A black metal fence surrounds the pool and the water is sludge, millions of leaves from the sparse lawn piled into the water that now croaks with a habitat of its own. More leaves and the odd piece of litter mark the walk to the back door of what I mistake as the house. Instead, it’s just an outbuilding for the pool man or something. As I head around the corner, the estate yields another house, a big barn-like shed, and a stand-alone metal-framed outdoor patio.

  I check my phone, but there’s nothing from Loren. Crouching beside a flowering palm, I text her as quickly as I’m able and a blee
p comes from the direction of the patio once the message is sent. The response sends my paranoia tingling, and remaining in a crouch, I sprint from the pool house to the patio and freeze in horror.

  We have only been apart fifteen minutes – evidently long enough for my mother’s murderer to begin what it takes to ruin my life completely.

  I have to freeze just before reaching out my hand. Loren hangs from a chain normally reserved for an outdoor punching bag. She has taken its place. Her hair is loose and covers most her face, slick and red with blood. Her costume is cut from the neck to the knees without much regard to the flesh beneath, which has scored deeply, one long awful line that makes the skin pucker open like a vast pair of lips and the redness pumping from that wound is mirrored in the tears weeping from her eyes as she lifts her head and opens her broken mouth.

  “Baby?”

  There is a high-pitched whine and my only thought is to dive for cover as I wrongly assume the attack is meant for me.

  Wrongly.

  Wrong again.

  Zephyr 8.4 “That Split Second”

  I AM STILL rolling as Loren bursts into flames, the svelte wrists shackled above her head holding her in place as the tasteful outdoor patio becomes a living abattoir and the siren shrieking is my lover as the flames lance up her body and the crackling noise is her delicious curves rupturing in the monstrously accelerated conditions.

  I come up to see a heavyset man in a rubbery black bodysuit, a silver helmet covering his head from just above the mustache, enormous fuck-off silver metal gloves on his hands. Gauntlets. They are not the same. A device of some sort sits astride the wrist of his right glove. A little fin like from a shark’s back is atop the helmet, something art deco in the design. The evil smirk resolves through my adrenal vision.

  “Shame,” Arsenal says. “That’s another one of your bitches I never got to fuck.”

  I launch myself at him, powerlessness forgotten. Arsenal simply melts away, faster than I can possibly be. A super-speedster. The metal fist crosses my jaw instants later and I’m still locked into the vector of momentum from my charge and the blow redirects me into the nearby brickwork that I half-demolish with the forearms thrown up to protect my face. I’m still picking bricks and plaster from my vision when I hear that split-second signal again and I throw myself into cover as the remaining column becomes a burning sepulcher and I shield my eyes from the glare and watch discordantly as Arsenal turns and runs off.

  “No.”

  The urge to gesture with my powers is almost unbearable, but there’s nothing I can do. Her noise has stopped, though there’s something of Hell’s rotisserie about the way Loren’s mangled frame turns slowly on its gyre. Hot fluid of some sort spatters from her body to pool beneath booted feet, arched but not quite able to touch the ground. The air smells like a beach cook-out on a forest fire breeze, a mad scene, just a vignette from some Boschean nightmare.

  I explete for a short while. What do I tell you? The word no has so many meanings and uses and each one of them is null and void as I kneel in the yard and my lover heats my tears until they have dried.

  For a moment I think she is trying to tell me something, so I stand. There’s nothing at hand to cut the chains pinning Loren up and no way to douse the smoking hell that is her final torment in a life whose destruction I have played such a disgustingly large role. But it is only the wind picking up in the canyon and whistling through her ribs, her blackened jaw agape, eyes closed on my guilt and horror in a scene that will plague me for eternity, I hope, otherwise what sort of fucking man am I?

  *

  A NOISE COMES from the huge barn. I mistake it for an engine and in my anger, thinking Seagal is going to escape, I stagger for the sound as the lights come on in the main house and I blindly change course, kicking in the back door like a madman come to collect destiny, throwing away any possible advantage in the hope whatever fate I’ve come to meet is worthy enough to expunge the awful doom meted out on those around me.

  The bungalow is mostly darkness. The lights are on in the kitchen and then a terra cotta-tiled hall, a halogen oblong the open doorway to a trapdoor under the stairs and I am down them in an instant, the baseball bat in my hands and my tears have resumed, dripping on the wooden grip as I remember a night bathed under the glow of the neon beer sign and a girl’s arching back I took so little solace in thinking would be mine forever.

  Arsenal’s laboratory makes Doc Prendergast’s place look like a Buddhist retreat. The benches are covered in hardware and half-finished gadgets, a mechanical alchemist’s lab lit by the countless monitors that people the shelves like votive offerings in some obscure technophile religion, flowering forgotten and obscene on any number of alternate worlds. In my fevered, vengeful state, I don’t think there’s anything that can shock me or give me pause, but then amid the rubbish I am confronted by the image of the FBI agent Vanguard alive and strapped to a work bench in full regalia, the helmet and gauntlets removed, his left hand raw to the bone; and the tendons and exposed metacarpals are a solid indicator of the obvious pain in the unconscious agent’s furrowed surfer-boy brow.

  I would wake him. Ask him what the fuck has happened to the world. Instead, there’s a silver flash and the matricide is behind me, the rubbery black arm at my throat as Arsenal puts me into a choke hold, his knee in the middle of my back.

  “How does it feel now, you chicken-shit fuckin’ pussy asshole?”

  I try to be calm. Then I try just to breathe. Neither are possible.

  Hawkwind’s face and more importantly his training run through my mind, and I do the aikido move that inches his elbow to the left and lets me get my shoulder behind his grappling arm and then I am the one forcing him forward and I get my leg in the way and we go over, except this Seagal motherfucker is some martial arts master as well and the moment my neck is released from his vise-like grip, he has my right arm locked straight out behind my body and it is probably pretty fortunate he elects to ram me face-first into one of the work benches rather than attempt anything more malign. I get free, barely feeling the wreck of my nose, my face a tapestry of fine cuts as I wrench back and swing a fist and Arsenal guides me on so that I crash into another bench at chest height.

  “You’re wreckin’ the joint, you clumsy fuck,” he snaps.

  The silver fist comes out of nowhere, a thunderbolt to the side of my mouth that snaps me into a back-flip over one of the tables. I’m still pulling my shit together as Arsenal retreats up the stairs with another device held two-handed.

  “Bastard,” I retch and a sliver of tooth falls with the blood I snort out of my nose and I grab the table and practically pull it over trying to charge into pursuit.

  We go up and into the house. A microwave oven bounces off my raised forearms. I have lost my bat, but I take a kitchen knife from its block and it is as sharp as my desire for murder as I follow the fleeing speedster like I am his tattered shadow, my coat flapping open as I leave through the shattered back door and pitch myself to the right as Arsenal fires his heat beam again and the side of the wall sparks and there’s a bang that was meant to be me.

  *

  “ARE YOU EAGER to die, boy?”

  “You should keep running,” I reply, stalking across the lawn littered with tiny black flakes from the burnt wall. “I’m going to cut you to pieces, you crazy motherfucker.”

  “You call me the crazy one?”

  He laughs.

  “You’ve got no reason to be doing this,” I tell him.

  We’re facing off now, me with the carving knife and him in a classic pose, the helmet only adding to the sardonic twist of what little expression’s visible on his lantern-jawed face.

  “Killing you would be a favor,” Arsenal says and chuckles again. “Maybe just before you die, you can wake up to realize the lie we’ve been living. Those fuckers cheated me. You. All of you. You should be cheering me on, you stupid fucking clown.”

  He snaps forward to disarm me and I withdraw my hand just in
time. My left hand forms a wedge and I stab it into the side of his neck, but the rim of the helmet thwarts me and I’m still registering the pain in possible broken fingers when he goes low and punches me in the meat of my left thigh. My leg goes numb and I drop to my knee and ward my face as he kicks and I get an arm behind his leg and drive the knife into his stomach, only Arsenal twists so the blade thrusts across the surface of the weird black fabric that covers him.

  A hand behind my skull guides me into the ground and I manage to roll from the grapple, but the knife is forfeit and we get to our feet at the same time, Arsenal’s reactions seemingly no faster than my own despite his apparently augmented speed. The only defense is to attack, so I step in and feint a blow to his face and hammer my left into his ribs, the blow hard enough to lift him from the ground. He replies with a side snap kick as soon as he’s able and I dance away, try to sweep his leg, fail, and throw myself back to avoid an axe-kick into my face.

  As I pick myself up from the lawn a second time, the speedster barrels away across the yard in the direction of the huge garage.

  The lights are on in the big building, making me register how the sun has finally set and taken my hopes for a better life with it. I am panting and getting dangerously tired, limping on the leg still half-dead from where Arsenal attacked me as I lope across a dirt path that may or may not be a driveway to what I take to be a shed or garage.

  The double doors are open. Read: they are left open, inviting me in, luring me on with the whisper-thin promise of vengeance wrapped in deceit.

  Arsenal’s laugh is the trigger.

  Just inside the barn doorway, the shadows falling like huge black Tetris blocks of coarse geometry, I realize I am too late.

  The low-level thrum of energy from the generators that must power his underground experimentation and whatever he has rigged to let him travel the multiverse is a cue to my reptilian brain, but I am too far in, too far gone, and then he throws the lever in what he must think is the final act in this grand set piece.