Snapping my attention away from the zombies around us, I nod to Warp and point so Titania can see my intentions. The twin towers of Spectra’s building dot the middle distance beyond the Skyrail and the lowering blimps. From our vantage I can see a chunk of wall missing most the way to the top of the second tower and grunt in recognition of past deeds done.
Titania tells the others to stay alert and she and I flit into the sky with Olga on our contrails, me grudgingly mindful that she’s living baggage if Jane is going to throw herself into my hastily apportioned fantasy where we ride back to our home worlds and everything is somehow magically alright again.
As fliers, it’s only a few seconds before we are able to make through the jagged exit and into the scene of Spectra’s first demise. The cleaners haven’t been in. Hell, I can’t even imagine what contingencies The Twelve have in place with the power play underway and with so many of their members getting waxed. Rubble and broken glass and twisted pipes and plaster dust and chunks of rubbery stuff that could be flesh litter the once slickly-finished slate floors, dents where recent scuffles have marred them causing us to trip more than once as we examine avenues of ambush and scour for clues about this mysterious way out of here the Preacher mentioned.
Moving through the scenery, we find another concealed door limned with dead zircon lights, Olga shouldering it in to reveal a coy staircase spiraling down into a cozy laboratory-meets-reading nook. Here we leave the chaos behind and Titania looks at me nervously, Olga’s looming presence the eight-hundred pound marsupial in the room.
A corpse sprawls under weak tea lights in the middle of the chamber. Decay has barely set in and the uniform makes me lose interest before my inspection’s even begun.
“Sentry,” Titania says with a faux morose voice like we’re not meant to drop the masquerade that human life has much intrinsic meaning, even when we’re among ourselves.
The guard died protecting whatever was on the podium. Even its absence is familiar, as I picture the whirling contraption that bid me thither, materializing in the crusted remains of my half-brother’s six-hundred year-old farm manor. Clearly a similar device once rested here. Quite recently, I am thinking. Along with the familiar sinking feeling in my guts, I step up onto the small stage, admiring the hardwired electrics, the mounts for the device and the broken cables redolent of a recent escape, and there I see dried splotches only visible by catching the right angle of light on the matte black wall.
“Sorry Joe,” my father’s escapee scrawl reads, inked by human blood.
A nice calling card for a man trying to convince me he’s not a mass murderer.
I’m stranded.
Zephyr 11.1 (Flashback) “Secret Window”
The events of Chapter 11 fill a memory gap exposed by Zephyr’s treatment at the hands of the FBI Parahuman Taskforce.
THERE’S SOMETHING THAT hasn’t been quite right for almost a week and I’m damned if I can put my finger on it. For a guy who can do all the things I can, the whole hurling-lightning-bolt, flipping-over-cars deal, the irony is I can wake up as sore and angsty as the next pussycat. It takes me a couple of days to realize my nights haven’t been what they were, and it’s a few days more before I ping to the fact this isn’t just abnormal, but bordering on the highly frigging unlikely.
I start my search over a bowl of weetabix, the silent kitchen a rebuke, the smell of stale milk and aged linoleum my only company. In my Diehard singlet and toothpaste-striped pajama pants I hulk over the innocent bowl and methodically consume the fuel my body demands, thinking about the different times my metabolism has crapped out on me and all the while trying not to let on I am sensitive to a pin dropping, or maybe close to it, as I cast the net of my attention wide across my soon-to-be ex-apartment.
There is a spy here. Somewhere, close by and lurking. I know it.
There is only one bad guy I know who could pull this kind of gig – or perhaps I should say there is only one guy I know who was the ability to do this and still has an active relationship with oxygen and sunlight. He’s also the only guy who would have the stones to send one of his flunkies across the water to keep tabs on me, acting as a psychic proxy so the old goat can try and get his feeble fingers on me in ways he never could in real life.
I ignored the call from Mentor – Manhattan’s resident Quasimodo – for me to come visit. Though the slippery old fucker piqued my interest at the time by telling me he had valuable information on a mutual foe, it was a month or so now down the track and as far as months went it had been a long one. Too long, as the cliché goes. I never really managed to get back on top of whatever Mentor was saying and I was completely untroubled to find I’d moved on. Life’s hectic, you dig? As I knew from fifteen years in this game, there’s no good gonna come from sweating every damned thing. The important shit, good and bad, usually comes to find you in the end.
So it was with him. He was what they used to call a grand masterclass psionic, back in the days when dudes at the Federal Bureau of Investigations (Paranormal Division) were reading too many Julian May books. I knew if Old Porridge Stockings (yeah, I really did used to call him that, once) could get a bead on me then there was a chance he wouldn’t lose that trace even across the water from Manhattan and with half-a-kabillion people in between.
*
IT IS ONE of those bright sunshine days in the ides of winter and there’s an unpleasant taste in my mouth that can’t really be explained by breakfasting on off milk alone. And alone. No, it’s the discomfortable fucking anomaly of knowing there’s a rat somewhere close by and now my home is compromised by some mad fuck who can possess a regular person as quick and easy as you or I might do a shit. Taking a crap isn’t easy for Mentor, but burrowing into the human mind – or even the mutant mind, since that’s who he spends his days surrounded by – that comes pretty easy.
I am in my leathers and the sunlight catches off the quasi-ostentatious bling on my chest and my exit from the secret window sets off a cloud of pigeons who thankfully manage to rain their crap past me as I accelerate into the clouds and do a quick flip and veer down over the apartment building. There’s a movement in the alleyway, shadowed by the height of the tenement and the hour of the day, and I swoop down as the unlucky fuck tries to make love to the nearest dumpster. It’s not his day, though clearly it’s not mine either. I make a snatch for the piss-stained overcoat and battered fedora and flinch a double-take as Mentor’s mutant joy-boy whirls around and glares at me.
“So you found me, Zephyr,” the disgusting little clown sneers. “Big deal. The boss said I was to approach you once you showed signs of unease.”
I look the guy up and down, his hat in one of my big hands. Tattered lids lower over bulbous rat eyes and his face is little more than a skull with a theatre of skin attached, the neck a ruined mess, the skin beneath a wool vest and the trenchie awash with disease. There’s something about the way he fails to fill the workman’s pants and heavy boots that tells me there’s little more than a skeleton beneath his show of bravado.
“They call me Korpse,” the tough guy says. “With a K, in case you ain’t hearin’ it in my voice.”
“Yeah well, I don’t see any speech bubbles coming out that excuse of yours for a mouth,” I mutter by way of reply and finish off eyeing him up and down just late enough for him to glean I’m no big fan.
“Mentor in there?” I ask.
The skull-faced turd gives an unhappy sniff, then suddenly his face moves, jaw working and neck twisting like a man on the verge of a killer sneeze. Just as quickly he’s still. Dead eyes lift to glower at me. There’s no pretense otherwise that the main man just took over the reins.
“Good morning, Zephyr.”
“You’re a long way from Madison Avenue, toots,” I say.
“You have forced upon me the indignity of a house call, old friend.”
“Old friend?” I give him a stare for all of three seconds. “Let’s refresh.”
“No need, Zephyr,” he replie
s in that English headmaster way he has. “I remain well acquainted with your peculiar determination to maintain the enmity that has characterized so much of our interactions in the past.”
“This coming from the man who’s stalking me to my hideout.”
“I had the seed of your mental signal,” he replies slowly, blindly stepping his way through the half-perceived but mangled etiquette. “Forgive me if I was too forthcoming.”
“Seems like it’s your pal Korpse who deserves the apology,” I say. “What do they do in there while you’re riding ‘em round like ponies?”
“They sleep, Zephyr. My servants sleep like I no longer can thanks to the mutual enemy I am keeping at bay for all our sakes.”
“Oh yeah,” I say and shrug. “Think-Tank.”
“Indeed.”
City crowds continue unabated past the end of the alley. I fold my arms and consider flash-frying Mentor and his sidekick then and there. Unwisely, for once, I make the merciful decision.
“So all this is the reason why you’ve had this guy outside my window for the past week, stirring shit up in my dreams, hoping, what, that the penny would drop and suddenly I’d come running over to your Fantasy Island?”
I glare at the desiccated figured for a second and add, “Did it ever occur to you maybe I was ignoring you? Not interested?”
“You should be –”
“Keep out of my head, motherfucker.”
“At this distance, your dreams are all I can influence, Zephyr,” the mutant manages with a fey smile, something disturbingly gentleman-like about all this with the human corpse bobbing his hairless head and drool leaking from between gapped teeth. I push the fedora back into his hands.
“I can’t even remember half of it,” I say as much to myself as him. “It’s a curiously fucking backward way of communicatin’ for someone with such supposedly vast powers as yourself, Mentor. Next time, send me a fucking email, OK?”
“I . . . didn’t know you were on the Net.”
“Yeah. Shit, I’ve got a publicist now.”
“Really.”
“Yeah it’s really taking off,” I say without as much enthusiasm as I should.
And then it’s just me and the living dead guy eyeing each other in an alley that already smelled like cat pee before Korpse-boy showed up and started funking the place out with his cryptic stench.
Korpse looks at me, eyes widening in the way only a guy with tattered lampshades for eyelids can manage, and he gives a little start and snatches the hat in his hands up onto his head.
“What?” he demands.
“Mentor,” I say. “Where is he?”
“He’s gone,” the ugly mutant sniffs. “Gone. Completely.”
“You’re, uh, sure about that?”
“I can tell when I have a dick up my ass, pal.”
Korpse looks around the alley like it’s just dawned on him that he’s in the new Big Apple and there’s a thousand better places he could go. He nods to me and moves off.
“What are you gonna do?” I call after him.
“Anything,” he yells over his shoulder.
“Well, you better behave yourself, pal,” I say lamely. “You’re in my city now. I’ll be watching.”
The mutie doesn’t even have the decency to glance back.
Zephyr 11.2 (Flashback) “Payday”
MY PUBLICIST CALLS at 10am sharp. This is one of delectable Miss O’Hagan’s mid-level handlers called Janice. Janice is kind of bossy. And flat-chested. It’s fair to say we haven’t got off to a good start and now she’s telling me I’m in danger of running late.
It is kinda hard to hear her over the sirens of the crime scene and I pull an aggrieved face at the guys loitering at the open doors of the cruisers and they catch themselves on and it’s only a few seconds before I can make do just with a finger in my ear. The crowds lining the hasty cordon keep calling out as I wander back and forth trying to find a sweet spot in the phone reception and I’m distracted as hell by what I take to be a lady-boy or something in high heels and seriously unshaven legs who keeps trying to flash me his/her/its titties, as concealed by a late 90s commemorative Zephyr & the Jersey Ferry t-shirt.
“Why aren’t you at the studio?” Janice growls down the line.
I glance around at the armored van jutting from the front of a Starbucks, the scorched rear doors peeled open comically like a green platemail banana. Two of the perps are still sitting together in the back of a cruiser, while the one with the homemade powered armor is in the ambulance, his face the color of puke, a far too good-looking paramedic shooting him expressions of concern.
“I was just returning some videos,” I say.
“Honestly, I don’t know what’s the matter with you people,” Janice says in her waspish, never-been-laid voice.
“Um, we pay your wages?”
“You couldn’t find your way to the bathroom without an assistant, let alone pull down enough to pay my wages, mister hotshot hero,” Janice bleats.
Her tone is so acid I actually laugh, marveling at the balls of some people. My levity only sets her off again.
“Miss O’Hagan warned me I’d have to watch you –”
“Trust me, Janice, you’ve got nothing I want.”
“This is the biggest gig of your life and if you’re not across town and in that chair getting your face done in ten minutes, you can kiss your big payday goodbye.”
There is an element in truth in what she says, so I decide not to offer a few choice alternatives that I might consider my biggest gig yet. I snap closed the latest edition Enercom phone with disdain and give some of the watching cops a ho-hum smile that at least makes them laugh, then I wave my goodbyes and launch into the air. It isn’t hard to be across town in ten – I make it in five – but it’s another ten minutes before I clear security, get checked in and navigate through a bunch of thick-as-bricks PR people clustered around the cappuccino machine in the Questor Studios lobby.
A skinny bald guy with a clipboard strides up to me with an air of authority and grins.
“Hey there, Zephyr. Thrilled you could make it. I’m Steve Soderbergh. I’m directing this extravaganza.”
I adopt a bemused face, the irony not lost on me that we’re here to shoot a hamburger commercial and there’s a sodomy joke somewhere in this guy’s name. However, for a change I am the soul of discretion and I shake his hand without giving him the joy buzzer and he practically drags me through the lobby and down a concrete ramp into a large sound stage. The ceiling has got to be a hundred yards high and there’s half a ruined city in the background fashioned out of plaster and foam. Crew members loaf about, some picking from a luncheon cart, and my stomach gurgles as the director leads me past a few half-familiar faces, rattling off names in their order of importance.
“And of course, last but not least, this is Ralph Esquigiet.”
“Escar-what?” I frown.
The little man practically has artiste stamped on his forehead. Curly black locks surround a pouting, designer stubbled face. Although he’s dressed like a chump, I know the ensemble probably adds up to more than my pre-tax income last year. And yet he’s not wearing much more than a jacket, faded red t-shirt, corduroy pants and stained trainers.
“Ralph Esquigiet,” he says in a brisk rush of heavily accented syllables.
“Oh OK, my apologies.”
I look to Mr Soderbergh for a clue and he ahems politely and says, “Ralph is from the Wimpy people. He’s their, uh, hamburger artist.”
“OK.”
I smile, waiting for the joke, but clearly they are serious because there is only so much discomfort one man can channel. I glance again at the dishabille Frenchman and frown.
“And that’s a . . . what, exactly?”
“I make the hamburger come to life,” he replies in excellent though muddy English.
“Is that in the . . . script?”
“Please tell me someone couriered you the script?” Soderbergh asks and I nod, t
hough this isn’t the same as telling him I read it.
“Forget the script,” the snail guy says, reading my thoughts precisely. “In this story, like in all stories, there is only one character. Everything else is scenery.”
I smile, but he adds, “Le hamburger!.”
“Shit,” I remark. “This guy’s for real, isn’t he?”
The director coughs into his fist. “Yeah, I’m afraid he is.” He coughs some more and smiles politely to the Frenchman and again takes me by the arm and says, “There’s just a few more things we have to run through.”
*
WE PASS JANICE, standing looking at her blackberry and scowling like I already disappointed her more than I’ll ever know. Then we are through into the middle of the set and the cameras are behind us and I can sense the technicians warming up, lights switching on and test runs getting underway on the big crane-heavy cameras that rotate above us like a hydra.
“This is Natalie,” the director says, introducing me to a lovely Latina honey in cut-off denims and a distracting top. “Miss Martinez is the one who will deliver you the hamburger in your moment of victory.”
“I bet you never expected to say those words in the same sentence.”
“And of course you’ve met Negator before.”
The guy in the Negator costume is a fair match, though the real villain never had a goatee. Otherwise the outfit is the same, some of the harlequin in the alternating black and white color scheme, the narrow, forked cloak, the black face mask flaring into twin points like horns above the crown of his skullcap. He looks at me sheepishly and I give my best cover boy grin and promise not to hurt him too much, doing my best to recall what the hell is actually meant to happen in this thirty-second promo. Janice is right in one thing, which is that the Wimpy endorsement promises to be the single biggest payday in my life behind the mask and the very reason I approached the O’Hagan agency in the first place.
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