Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  “She can be,” I say and stand and motion obliquely.

  “OK. Let’s go.”

  She crawls from the bed weak as a newborn baby deer and stands smoothing the hair from her face, slightly pigeon-toed or something in her frailty. I step in close to scoop her up in my arms even though I assume she has the flying thing same as Loren did, but Candace stops me as we embrace.

  “I’ll help you on one condition,” she says.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll help your girlfriend, Zephyr. Then you get me out of this thing. I don’t want to be the fucking Seeker. Do you understand?”

  I am inches from her face and staring unflinchingly into those surprisingly luminous adolescent eyes, white teeth playing just at the edge of her swollen lip to either show her nerves or as just another weapon in her fulsome post-pubescent arsenal, I don’t know. I know what she’s saying and she knows I know and she also knows I’m a big enough bastard to possibly not care, so I nod.

  “You have to help her,” I say.

  “And you have to help me.”

  “Agreed.”

  We hit the fucking road.

  *

  FROM THE AIR it seems the city is holding its own, just a few organic-looking mecha stumbling around flailing at the brick and concrete scenery, people in the streets mostly with the good sense to get out of the way as pockets of resistance, the odd mask and the National Guard begin their rearguard action.

  Again, perhaps I can help, but there’s a big picture here. I am halfway towards it when there’s a noise like a horse being neutered and then I’m falling, tumbling through the air with Seeker nowhere to be seen. Instead, I catch a glimpse of Twilight’s lantern-jawed mug and block another punch to the head and then we clatter like canned goods across a roof-top and I put my head through the edge of a brick chimney before managing to stand and dodge aside as the familiar glob of green fire alights nearby.

  “Twilight, you fucking goose. What are you doing?”

  The big guy is breathing heavy in his grey-and-black long johns, gloves doing that demonic thing of his with green fire trickling upwards through his black fingers like pitchforks.

  “I can’t let you do it, Zeph.”

  “Hey, I’m the good guy here, remember?” I say. “Seems like everyone’s having trouble remembering that. And you’re the anti-hero, unless I have to remind you of that, too?”

  “You know the thing about anti-heroes, Zeph?” he asks, not suppressing the wop gangster voice as well as he normally does, all those expensive elocution lessons, the phonics, the cue cards, the rainy days in New Hampshire, the girl from England who looked so good in her tennis outfit, one too many jokes about the accent sounding like she had a plum in her mouth.

  “What’s that, Twilight?”

  “We still come good in the end. Always do.”

  He flings a double-handful of the aforementioned goodness my way and I can only throw up an arm to protect my face as fire like naphtha engulfs me and I shriek and cuss and he moves to dodge the casual underhanded lightning bolt of my reply. A burst of precious super-speed extinguishes the burning sensation for now and we circle the half-broken chimney on the roof-top before my faster footing brings me across the surface and I tackle him and we go hard into the raised lip of the edge of the building and down. Twilight gets a hand under my jaw and he levers my cursing face up and away as I rain a few punches on his face and chest and then I wrest myself aside and move just as his elbow slams down, pulverizing bricks, and I reply with a kick across the ribs while we’re both lying down and then I get up and on top of him only to have a short jab in the side double me sideways and I drop to the dirty roof slabs and Twilight scrabbles free and kicks me away.

  “Twilight,” I gasp. “What the fuck’s this about?”

  “I’ve been in the far realms, Zephyr,” the big lug wheezes and stands, dust and plaster across half his costume. “I can’t let you do it. She’s the world’s anointed savior, at least against this threat. Continuity can’t handle it if you fuck this up.”

  I stand, feeling better by the second even if I do feel like I just got gored by the Matterhorn.

  “Explain,” I say. “Haven’t you fucking learnt yet? Jesus. At least talk to me for a few minutes before you come in swinging.”

  “It’s you, Zephyr.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  He takes a few breaths just to leave me hanging with the most curious look on his face, at least what I can see of it beneath the slightly crooked mask.

  “You’re the Antichrist, Zephyr,” he says.

  “You’ve already robbed this world of its first sacred guardian. For all that’s good and noble, buddy, I can’t let you do it again.”

  *

  I STARE BACK for a few seconds just to give Twilight the chance to break into that cocksucker grin and admit he’s only fucking with me. Instead, he looks away awkwardly and there’s a grin, but it’s a pained, awkward, coming-of-age smirk of burgeoning maturity that I’d much rather be on my face at that moment than the face of the guy who looks set to hand me my ass inside the half-hour.

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “It’s a metaphor, but no, Zephyr. I’m sorry. It’s like the Tarot, pal. Everyone has their role. The belief system might be roulette, but the effect’s the same. Your number’s come up and you’re on the fucking Devil’s team, buddy.”

  “Don’t call me buddy.”

  “It’s a bit too ‘Little Buddy’ for you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Fuck.”

  I let the breath out in a long and abortive gasp, infuriated and gutted to sense the bizarre plausibility, not to mention the conviction in what Twilight’s telling me. It would explain so much – at least the reason I seem to have the reverse Midas touch when it comes to almost everyone I care about in this crummy life.

  “Fuck!”

  “Calm down,” Twilight says, a hand raised for a moment almost like he wants to comfort me. Or fuck me. I dunno.

  “Should we fight now?”

  My so-called friend the anti-hero is about to answer when Candace’s voice cuts across us. She’s on the edge of the building, looking better than before despite self-evident weakness as she hovers two feet above the battered macadam of the roof’s surface.

  “Wait.”

  She puts up a finger and looks away, for all intents and purposes channeling a fat guy about to fart. I think Twilight understands slightly faster than me that she’s having a psychic moment and his guard relaxes.

  “They’re coming.”

  Zephyr 8.10 “Crash Course”

  STANDING ON THE roof turns out to be the perfect stage as we have one of those rotating camera moments as we each turn, boggled to see huge stinking organic shapes looming up and over us. Faceless, the creatures are obviously the size of buildings, arms and legs and people and all sorts of other crap sucked up from the city showing between the muddy surface of their enormous limbs, grassy tendrils like hairs only broken up by the objects and people absorbed to make them the scale and indeed the threat they now appear to be.

  “Shit. Crash course, Candace. What the fuck are these things? And ‘death from space’ isn’t gonna cut it this time, kid.”

  “What, if I don’t tell you, no nookie?”

  “Baby, we don’t make it out of this one and no one’s going to be making love to anyone.”

  “Anywhere,” Twilight says, all goth now in his sudden seriousness. “For a thousand years. These are the Amari. Our equals and opposite in the clockwork of the universe, Zephyr. Unlife. More than just death.”

  I look around. The bad guys hover threateningly for effect.

  “Why do they look like some of the things I normally catch you playing with then, buddy?”

  “These guys will make the things I summon look like desperate housewives, Zephyr,” Twilight replies. “It’s not about their physical form.”

  “They�
��re not just killing people, Zephyr,” Candace says, quite the student to the wise master all of a sudden as she steps closer, that telltale Seeker glow resurfacing as she hopefully shucks off whatever funk has come from her bio-psionic link to my girlfriend.

  “They’re absorbing their souls. Their beliefs. Their psychic contributions to the cosmos.”

  I move quickly as the first of the things sends down what I can best describe as a fist the size and speed of a slow-moving train. The roof begins to crumple in the middle with a sizeable chunk already gone.

  “Meaning?” I yodel.

  “Once they hit a certain point, we’re all fucked. The universe, at least how we perceive it, just gone,” Twilight says.

  “And then?”

  We take to the air. Candace opens up with a full-frontal light show, bathing the first opponent in opalescent force that appears to have a catastrophically withering effect on it. The structure of the creature decays and crumbles and bodies and other rubbish collected from the city rain down like so many children’s toys on the surface of the roof as the Amari monster falls away.

  “The theory is we then fall into their world,” Candace says as she does a neat swoop and opens up on a second of the huge, tripod-like things looming over one quadrant of the building.

  “Scary shit, Zephyr. It’ll make our little adventures with the living star-god look like kids playing tea parties,” Twilight says. “We’ll be in their ideational space and conforming to their belief systems.”

  “Right,” I say, ideational space a strange thing to call familiar territory, but nonetheless something I can hitch my wagon too. “And then we’re all fucked?”

  “Damn straight,” Twilight says.

  “Damn,” I say somewhat needlessly, flitting away as one of the big beasts moves in and my lightning attack seems about as effective as an electric shaver.

  “So, truce?” I call across.

  Twilight nods.

  “For now. OK, little buddy?”

  I grimace and would say something back, but then we’re truly fighting, not just for our lives, but for the fate of the cosmos, or so they tell me.

  *

  THE BIG BADS come at us in waves, and me, fresh with my powers returned, feel like I’m taking flowers to a gun-fight compared to Seeker and Twilight. Obviously she was made for this moment, so Candace’s powers erupt as an impressive blaze of incandescence, wilting the huge quasi-terrestrial monoliths and freeing not just their cargo, but their so-called “souls,” if you believe in such things. Twilight’s Greek fire also plagues the alien attackers, which succumb quite merrily to the flames. Meanwhile, yours truly’s eenie-weenie blaster attack feels about as effective as political theatre in the crucible of this somewhat metonymic conflict.

  The deathly stalking towers are coming from far and wide and we dance between their attacks, the rooftop littered with debris. It is a constant fight not to get sucked into the maws at the end of their crane-like tentacles, my soul, as I understand it, practically clinging to my ribs on more than one occasion before the building starts to wobble and we ride the wave of the disaster down, all three of us thankfully flyers as the building disgorges bricks and dust and plaster and rubble like a three-year-old with the runs, rubbish choking the streets as we dive away from catastrophe several times, me at one stage pulverizing a falling lintel block of stone with a split-second electrical blast.

  There are dried-out corpses everywhere. If I wasn’t such a heartless bastard I’m sure my sanity would be at risk. Instead, we’re just too fucking busy staying alive as the star-born creations endlessly collapse and return around us. Through it all, I hang as close to the new Seeker as I can, conscious Candace might be my ticket back to at least a semblance of the life I once knew.

  The other masks arrive in dribs and drabs, realizing the Amari are more keen on Candace than anything else on our world, drawn like moths to her flame – and about as lucky – as the plucky teenager gives it her all. She is sweaty and grunting, a sheen mixed with her luminescence, the legs gone on her costume and her hair in disarray.

  The space between the buildings is claustrophobic and filthy. I am up to my elbows in grime as I see at least some of my former teammates, the New Sentinels, descend from the phantasmal gateway of the Wallachian fortress. I shout something to them about the risk, but Mastodon only does the stamping thing and swells to impressive size and barrels past an encroaching leg-column like a half-back on the run.

  “Wait,” I yell again. “You got your powers back?”

  “Weeks ago,” the ‘Don replies.

  I move past another of the lumbering megaliths, more intent on Candace than me, and it’s hard to muster anything other than my worst sad panda face.

  “What the fuck? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “The monks figured out how to reverse the flow. Ions or something,” the gargantuan and tusked asswipe says as he extracts a girder from the rubble and uses it to swipe into another errant monstrous limb.

  “You can’t be serious,” I say.

  Manticore disappears under a spray of bricks behind me and Mastodon and I combine to dig the poor bastard free.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You got your powers back. What’s the problem?”

  He strides away, a momentary calm bedecking the trembling streetscape. The nearby brownstones are in ruins. Other costumed figures land around us, but I barely take them in. One manifests as a guy in a black hooded cloak and generally dressed like a ninja warlock.

  “Hey, Zephyr. Where’s your zee?”

  “My what?” I look down at my sleeveless chest where his stare is focused and realize, perhaps not for the first time, I’m not exactly in costume.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m The Lark, dude.”

  “Lark? Like a . . . practical joke?”

  “No, man. Like the bird. You dig? We met at Crayons. I was with David Duchovny and his wife. And Stingray?”

  I shake my head and look around for something urgent to do, but the Lark is still standing there, eyes boring a hole in my chest and my own gaze slowly returns to his.

  “Wash day tomorrow. Nothing clean.”

  “Fuck, man. We can fix that.”

  Before I realize what he’s done, the Lark produces some device that marks out my trademark zed in the center of my chest. He looks at his handiwork skeptically, like any other artistically-challenged vandal.

  “That’s not quite right.”

  “Dude. . . .”

  His hand moves again and after I snatch his wrist away, I look down to see a circle around the zee like a wannabe anarchy symbol gone wrong.

  “Listen up, fuckwit. I’m not a toilet wall.”

  I push him away and I am still noting the street seems to have gone quiet and there’s more than thirty capes and costumes amid the wreckage and then a figure in black lands heavily in front of us and I barely recognize my own daughter at first as I crane my neck to confirm the invaders from space seem to be gone – or reduced to huge piles of landfill at least – for the time being.

  Zephyr 8.11 “Inevitability”

  I NOD TO Windsong, conscious Mastodon and Manticore and The Lark are close by. Tessa’s face is hostile under the mask and she looks pretty fearsome despite struggling to top five foot.

  “Got a lawyer yet?”

  There’s nothing I can say and Windsong harrumphs and strides away and I find myself looking at Mastodon’s dumb slack face and so I make a kind of yeehaw surfer face and a hand gesture and the old boy grunts a laugh tinged with regret.

  “Man, you have to watch yourself with that jailbait, Zephyr. Fuck.”

  Mastodon walks away too and it actually pains me to have someone so irredeemably worthless disappointed in me. The daft expression on my face starts to wilt and The Lark indicates Tessa’s departing back.

  “She thinks she’s hot shit, but she’s not all that,” he says and gestures again. “She’s fucking stumpy, man.”

&nbs
p; I take two fingers and stab them into his solar plexus hard enough to make his sternum crack and The Lark is still gasping for breath and being helped up by Manticore and some guy wrapped in silver foil by the time I hopscotch over the mounds of rubble to catch up with my daughter.

  “How about a hello?”

  Tessa stops and sighs. She takes a deep breath. I feel immature beside her. On the ridge, we survey the devastation of several city blocks. Further away, a number of the Amari are walking like bad stop-motion puppets around buildings further out, as if circling us, biding their time and waiting for a moment of weakness in which to pounce, however laborious such a maneuver might be for them.

  “Hi, dad,” Tessa says.

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Shit. How about you?”

  I actually stop and consider my reply and shrug expansively.

  “Actually, not so great.”

  “Shit. You didn’t break up with Loren, did you?”

  I am about to tell her the bad news when Tessa suddenly does a double-take, to my perverse delight, animation floods into her being and makes me momentarily not so much forget Loren’s plight as want to hold on fast to the preciousness of the moment.

  “Hey, you got your fucking powers back?”

  “Yeah,” I laugh. “Careful with the potty mouth, honey.”

  “Shit, dad. Forget about that. What happened?”

  I smile, but the expression hardens like a sunbaked turd across my face.

  “The guy who killed your grandmother tried to light me up. Electrocute me.”

  “Shit. You kicked his ass, though, right?”

  “No.”

  I stop and stare dramatically back at the city again. The sun descends behind the first of the taller buildings. I think about Synergy trapped in her computational prison and the news she had about my mother’s remains.

  “He hurt Loren, too. Lioness. It’s pretty bad.”

  Windsong hesitates and then puts a hand on my bare, dirt-streaked arm.

  “What did he do?”

  “He burnt her alive.” Before she can begin her astonished reply, I put my hand on Tessa’s shoulder and add, “She’s alive. Somehow. I don’t really understand how.”