Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  A blue sun blazes in the darkness, engulfing me as serpentine whips of electricity disintegrate the air between the two huge vat-like cylinders either side of the shed door.

  The power charges through me like the day I was born, atomizing the cells in my blood, flipping the switch in some unknown quadrant of the brain. The pain is immeasurable, a vast orgasmic birth I couldn’t ever explain without appearing ridiculous.

  Seagal is gone by the time I lift myself steaming from the sawdust floor, the bastard figuring me dead thanks to his booby-trap, I guess. Instead, sparks leak from my eyes and splash on the ground, upon the claws of my hand as I peel the Zorro mask from my skull and stare unseeing through the nimbus of light.

  I don’t know at this point if I am reborn or merely summoned back into life for a few moments more, as if to entertain some unseen, malicious higher power.

  Zephyr 8.5 “Out Of The Bowels Of The Earth”

  PERHAPS IT IS too soon.

  I do not actually have this thought. Instead, I release one inchoate shout and wrap my meaty arms around my torso and hurtle into the sky, smashing a hole insensate in the barn roof as I jet into the lower atmosphere and glare hungrily for any sign of the one who would kill me and those I care about.

  If Arsenal has left a trace, I lack the senses to see it. The traffic beeps past on a distant boulevard and the corrugations of the tasteful neighborhood are alive with up-lit trees and colorful signage. Below, the hacienda is on its way to becoming a miniature volcano as one wall and the structure of the outdoor patio blaze. There are sirens in the distance – police, fire trucks and an ambulance – and their tiny lights appear at the various points of the compass, their wails a stark music, the firefly flicker of their different colors as the converge on the crime scene conveying a harsh operatic beauty. I could flee. I am hovering, graven features no concession to the powerful, contradictory emotions stabbing through me like the strobe of Seagal’s generator. But now I want to tell this story, to make them aware.

  I drop to the ground in the back yard and glance like an exile at the skeletal frame of my lover hanging from the steel frame. In my pocket is a domino mask, a keepsake or lucky token or a sign of hope – I could never decide which – and I slip it on, pressing down on my face an easy excuse to clamp my eyes shut as fresh waves of grief roll through me.

  But simple mourning couldn’t be so easy.

  “Jo-seph. . . .”

  The voice shocks me to my feet and I don’t know what way to stagger even though it’s clear my name has come from Loren.

  I’m caught in that too-afraid-to-know, too-ashamed-to-flee emotional maelstrom and I take step after step towards the dangling charnel shape knowing each one brings me closer to a fresh revelation I’m not sure I can bear, but I am powerless to do otherwise. And then I am close enough to reach out one hand, uncertain if it is safe to even cup the cheek in which one butterscotch eye flicks open with the noise of a butterfly’s wing tearing.

  “Loren?”

  “. . . –seph.”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  I can’t touch her, but I can bring her down from the torturer’s gallows. I hover without thinking and prise apart the chain links, holding the ends to lower Loren onto the pavers. A noise like a punctured football emanates from the thing I still can’t help thinking of as Loren’s corpse.

  “Baby baby. . . .”

  I push the mask back into place as the tears seek to loosen it. Somewhere there is a crashing noise and the first cops fan out across the scene with their sidearms raised, braver than I ever was, eyes agog at the disaster and the sense of imminent risk.

  “Zephyr? Zephyr? Is that you?”

  I look up at some Hispanic kid, LAPD cap in place. I stand and try to man up, nodding, but my face is caught in a living rictus of disbelief and the words struggle to come.

  “I need an ambulance.”

  “You need the fuckin’ Coroner,” another cop says.

  I take him down just by raising my hand. The flash is only a blue spark and then the career cop is twitching a few paces from where Loren lays.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” I say stupidly.

  The young cop backs away, careful not to point the Glock at me, and I ignore him like he’s just some kid wanting an autograph as I turn back to Loren. She’s not moving or saying anything. It’s hard to believe her frame sustains any life. Actually, impossible. I’m still trying to make sense of it when the first paramedics arrive and they push me back, physically, no thought to their own safety as they get on with the job they are trained to do and I can respect that, so I wander off a few paces and find myself resting my arm across my forehead against one of the palm trees that decorate the front of the property, cops and firemen and others parting around me like I don’t even belong in this scene just as hard as I wish I didn’t.

  *

  IT HITS ME sometime between when the first police arrive and the FBI Blackhawk settles down in the front yard of Seagal’s Californian mansion, but the revelations are like a train derailment and I am kneeling again and I don’t have any lower to go. I just crouch there as the agents crunch across the imported lawn towards me and then stand, waiting for me to act like a costumed hero or something rather than like a victim at any other horrendous crime scene.

  I don’t look up. Counter-point to their expectations. It’s only when the quick response medivac team bustle past with the grotesque thing that was once my girlfriend under plastic wrap on a stretcher that I stagger up and moan something incoherent, only to have a guy with a Star Trek captain haircut and a blue-and-red bodysuit stop me with a hand more than keen to demonstrate its super strength. I take his thumb and the soft pad of his hand between my fingers and twist without even locking eyes and when he kneels in agony, I twist again and release and he drops to the lawn like the proverbial sack and I step over him, only to have the peacock’s partner, a robot, step into my path.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I growl, distracted just enough as the gurney disappears around the pink stucco wall.

  The robot looks like it recently escaped a large furnace. Its metal surface is lumpy and discolored, like molten steel gathered into the form of a man and then cooled rather than carefully contrived via some artifice.

  “I’m Temper,” it replies. “Agent Temper.”

  “And him?”

  “Excelsior.”

  “Since when did they start letting AIs join the Feebs?”

  “AIs?” Temper looks at me a moment, expression suitably iron. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m not a droid. I’m a ferro-organic lifeform. My homeworld was destroyed in a –”

  “Look pal, I’ve got problems of my own right now,” I tell him.

  “No shit.”

  “Where’s Synergy? What are you fucking clowns doing here?”

  “You tellin’ me you didn’t notice Agent Vanguard downstairs in that dungeon?” the surfer boy says to me, waltzing over now he’s dusted the grass off his long-johns.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Where’s Synergy?”

  “Agent Synergy is dead,” Excelsior says bitterly. “Your friend here killed her.”

  “Synergy is . . . dead?”

  “That’s right,” the blonde tells me. “And, oh yeah. You’re under arrest.”

  I go to move, but there is a zap. My nerveless falling body gives me a slight glimpse of the hazard response team that has crept up behind me at the agent’s signal. In the face-plate of the guy holding the industrial immobilizer, I see myself reflected, expression something like a goldfish falling out of its bowl. I’m almost glad they’re using the suppressor type that causes blackouts. Oblivion is a bliss I don’t even have time to be thankful for as it comes rushing up out of the bowels of the earth to take me in its grubby hands.

  Zephyr 8.6 “A Momentary Dead End”

  THE ROOM IS white and clinical. The guy in the little glasses is too good looking to be a doctor, but that’s what his lapel pin tells me. The white coat and sheaf of manila fol
ders are pure theatre and it is only a few seconds before I realize I am in the panopticon for such things.

  White Nine.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  The guy in the coat looks up and gives a fey little smile and resumes scratching notes into a pad with a black marker. His tiny black goatee and anime hair are too cute to be true. Likewise his flawless complexion, his cocksucker’s mouth, the Bambi eyes. Inside the matrix, they render the good guys more favorably and the bad guys get the low-res simulacra. Residual self-image. I should know, having been on the other side before. But now when I speak, my voice is thin and reedy, even though recognizably my own. I’m sitting on a plain hospital bed, 1950s chic, costume gone but my mask in place.

  There’s no way my legs are that fucking hairy.

  “I asked you what’s going on?” I whine.

  The doc holds a finger up to his lips.

  “Just a minute, please.”

  “We’re in White Nine. That right?”

  A blink of a smile plays across the other guy’s lips and he hesitates before putting down his pen.

  “That didn’t take you very long.”

  “I’m used to being here as a visitor. That should tell you something.”

  “What should that tell me?” the young doctor asks.

  “That I’m a good guy. This is bullshit. What’s happening here?”

  In the time between my question ends and the other guy replies, my thoughts are filled with charcoaled flesh and eyes blackened to awful pits.

  “I’m interested to know how you know you are, as you said, one of the good guys,” the doctor replies. “Why is that?”

  “I didn’t say ‘one of the good guys’,” I tell him. “You’re a shrink, right?”

  “I’m a clinical psychiatrist. How did you know?”

  “You answer every question with another question.”

  Again comes the pretty smile. It irritates me, but there’s no strength in my arms to do anything about it. In fact, I know for certain there’s no chance in hell I’d be able to move from sitting up on the side of the bed, should I get the idea to do something crazy. The suppressors are still keenly in place.

  “I’m Boromir Krgin,” the shrink says. No handshake.

  “Boromir?”

  “My folks were Tolkien fans. Hippies.”

  He shrugs and makes a pained face.

  “What am I doing here?”

  “You’re under arrest. They’ve asked me to do an assessment.”

  “What’s the charge?”

  “I’m sorry, Zephyr. I’m just a psychiatrist.”

  “So you know who I am,” I say and manage to fold my arms together once I convince them I have no ill intent.

  “Sure.”

  “So I am one of the good guys,” I say to him, daring he confirm it, but again there’s just that wry little introverted smirk and he moves some of the papers around on his desk.

  “I wanted to ask you a question,” Krgin says. “Bear with me on this one. I want you to imagine something for me and I’m going to ask for your reactions, OK?”

  “If I’m in White Nine then my real body is laying on a slab somewhere with a fiber-carbon enema, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Smirk = confirmation.

  “I want you to imagine you’re in the desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and you see a tortoise. It’s crawling towards you.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say and sway lightly on the bed.

  “You reach down and you flip the tortoise on its back –”

  “What? Why the hell would I do that?”

  “The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help.”

  “So I fucking help it. Jesus. What’s the matter with you?” I ask him. “Do you write these questions yourself? I’m guessing you’re in a room somewhere beating off furiously right now. Am I right?”

  The doctor is about to say something else, shocked and flustered, when the white wall behind us cracks open in the shape of a door and somehow Synergy is standing there, radiant, serious, and even more beautiful than ever.

  Not bad for a dead chick.

  *

  “THANKS DOC. I’LL take it from here,” my tall Ethiopian goddess says and demurely waits by the door as Krgin frowns and collects his imaginary folders and nods to me and begins his exit.

  “How’d I do, doc? Did I pass?”

  “Well, there’s a battery of questions. . . .”

  I snicker and though I still can’t move much, I am relieved by the sight of the Federal agent pushing further into the room and the white panel door clicking invisibly back into place with the head-doctor gone. Synergy moves like a broken person as she slides into the vacant chair.

  “They told me you were dead,” I say softly. “Glad to see the rumors of your demise –”

  “They’re true.”

  I look Synergy in the face, but she doesn’t meet my eyes. Her expression is more like someone who has seen a ghost than become one.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your suspect killed me. This Seagal. Bushwhacked us when we stopped him for questioning. Never guessed he had any powers since he had a negative genetic profile. Gadgets though. Twenty-Third Century tech, if you can explain that.”

  “I can’t.”

  “But you knew about him.”

  Now with a flame of anger in her cheeks, the agent can look up, staring at me hotly.

  “I don’t know what I knew,” I say.

  An indeterminate length of time passes. I’m not sure if they switched me off for a minute there or what, but suddenly the room comes back into focus and Synergy has my attention again.

  “You were right about your mother. She’s not dead. Not that we know of, anyway.”

  “What?”

  The news hits me like a kick in the balls. It’s the last thing I expect to hear and it strikes me like a drunk’s explanation of an abstract mathematical concept.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her vibrations,” Synergy says. “I asked for a full spectrum breakdown after you came in and IDed the body. I guess you must’ve convinced me.”

  “What did you find?”

  “We’re pretty sure it’s Catchfire, but not the one from this dimension. The vibrations are from another parallel. Each cell, you know, each atom of our body vibrates to the same frequency of the cosmos. . . .”

  “Like the whole multiverse is some immense lyre,” I say off-handedly, having heard this one before from – of all people – Black Honey, once, all the B-graders bombed on absinthe at the opening of some new Lindsay Lohan theme park in Jackson.

  “Yeah. So there’s a good chance your real mother is still out there.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  I have such an overwhelmingly unconscious need to wipe my face and ponder the imponderable that the room programming allows it and I am staring at my hand in front of my face before I realize what has happened and when the matrix catches up it flips out and then I am frozen again, hand in front of my face for three or four seconds before a technician somewhere cleans up the glitch and it drops into my lap like a dead fish.

  “So it’s not all bad news,” Synergy says softly.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Tempo managed to get an ID from his psychic . . . um, you know, that thing he does. We got the address yesterday – it’s still today, right? – and we landed a Chinook in the street and went up to the door. Seagal ambushed us, hit me with that fucking heat ray of his and had some other thing that killed the circuitry in Vanguard’s suit.”

  “You’re . . . dead?”

  “My body,” Synergy says.

  “Man, what a waste.”

  “They managed to download me here.”

  Synergy looks around the room, hands straight down on the edges of her seat and her black curly locks tumbling
like an illustration around the white edges of her shoulders, suddenly younger and more fragile than she ever was in life.

  “I don’t even know what that means, Zephyr,” the agent says softly, not looking my way. “Am I still me or am I just a program designed to think that?”

  “Um. . . .”

  “How do you know you’re really self-aware?”

  “Would you like me to hold you?” I ask.

  The crass come-on does the trick and she breaks free from the syrupy grip of introspection.

  “No, Zephyr. I want you to tell me what’s really going on.”

  *

  I EXPLAIN AS well as I’m able the same outline so recently sketched for Hawkwind. About my father. My mother. The island. The Twelve. I even throw in my half-brother Julian and it really occurs to me I need to go back to Jersey and kick some faux French butt. As the Red Cowl, Julian’s been waging a war against his father’s legacy for years, it seems, though a war where it seems almost any of us could wind up a target.

  The Feebs tracked Seagal from computer files found in Tommy Hilfiger’s lair. I guess I should’ve seen it coming, though the silent recrimination and the tacit implication I am a factor in her murder smarts. After holding out on them, now my information seems stale compared to the latest developments, and it strikes me my own journey – tenure in a virtual jail cell notwithstanding – has reached a momentary dead end.

  “I need to get out of here,” I say with a tiredness I am apparently unable to feel. “My . . . girlfriend. My partner. She was also attacked by Arsenal.”

  “Lioness. She’s still alive. Barely.”

  I look around as if they might upload her to the imaginarium at any second, and Synergy gives an uncharacteristically coarse laugh.

  “Jumping at shadows, Zeph?”

  “Why am I here, Syn?”

  “Just for an assessment. It was a pretty crazy situation, they tell me,” Synergy explains. “You’re not facing any Federal charges. Just assault and battery.”