I woozily stand and Freakasaurus clearly doesn’t consider me sufficient threat to change from his hips-outthrust posture of defiance.
“Think-Tank,” he says simply. “This is about Think-Tank? Well fuck my little green ass.”
Little doesn’t really seem to be the word to use. Not with that crocodile tail swinging around like it’s got a mind of its own. I wipe my jaw and hum nervously.
“So, like, where is he?”
Freakasaurus laughs. “Oh, he’s here.”
“So Mentor was right.”
“Mentor?”
Again he speaks with the undignified pitch, the four-hundred pound drag queen voice not becoming – but who am I to judge?
“Tell me what that moldy sack of fucking potatoes said to you.”
“Mentor? That you’ve got the Tank holed up over here. You’re helping him out. Setting him up and shit.”
The gender-confused lizardman gives a deep ironic laugh and shakes his head. He eyes me a moment more than really feels necessary and laughs again.
“Girlfriend, you’ve got to be more careful who you listen to. Think about it, bitch. We nearly had words!”
“If that’s what you call it.”
Although it’s the top of my head that feels like I have a meat skewer through it, I also find it hard to resist testing my jaw with my fingertips as I watch the big green mutant warily. While hostilities have inexplicably died down – and I am more than cool with acting cool to give myself at least the chance to catch my breath – we are still talking about probably one of the world’s most fucked up and prolific murderers, not to mention his Merry Men. The reality of my situation is gently fed back to me as more and more of the predatory Sideshow Peeps fade in through the trees all around, only half of them in clown gear, the rest of them, with their various mutations, scary enough in their own rights they don’t need it.
“OK,” their leader says, snapping his big fingers as he resolves some internal dilemma. “Come this way.”
He grabs me by the shoulder and I shrug off the hand. Rather than retaliate, Freakasaurus slows and turns, hands on his hips again and fangs bared. I do believe he is wearing black lipstick. His breath at this distance smells like a lion’s den.
“What?” he growls. “You wanted Think-Tank? Let’s go see him.”
The big guy then turns tail and stomps on ahead while his henchmen form a discreet convoy around me.
Zephyr 11.6 (Flashback) “A Fearsome Thing”
THE DEVESTATED ARCHITECTURE of the park looms in the sinking light like some deserted, war-torn fairground. The moist air is rank and gloomy, coalescing in a visible haze that catches the late afternoon sunlight like a stain. We move through scenes shrouded by silhouettes and dirty sheets, every now and then more Peeps popping up to open improvised barricades or unbolt hidden doorways, allowing us to descend – and for them to lead me – further into their dark and diseased domain. It smells like an abattoir long abandoned, though I think this indicates nothing about the recentness of any killings.
Beyond a log wall there is the faded and curtailed wreckage of a summer pavilion. Charcoalized skeletons have been strung up like party decorations on barbed wire around it. A single big mutant with a .50 Barrett sniper rifle and a head like a sack of rotting eggs steps down from the terraced steps and almost negligently flicks back a scarf. The malice in the air is palpable, downright visible as we move into the old Zoo precinct, through battered, twisted gates and down a concrete slope lined with kitchen litter and ancient bones. The skull of what I perceive to be an elephant, tusks intact, has been positioned above the door of a low flat structure, most of the letters missing from the sign for the nocturnal house.
Someone provides Freakasaurus with an enormous Edwardian cloak. He still grips the rusty chain, perhaps a hundred pounds of it, his weapon of choice and fashion statement par excellence. He stops and turns at the door and eyes me, and while the light hasn’t been fantastic up until now, everything drained and shadowy like a conspiracy of the eyes urged on by morbid psychic dread, now in the sepulcher of the long-dead animal house I see the leader of the mad mutants in startling clarity, the absurd details of his scaled proboscis and the chipped curve of the horn protruding from the end of his nose, the deranged glimmer of his deep reptilian eyes, his baited mouth, the teeth ajar, stained, dangerous, immersed in mysteries I don’t even want to know about.
I find my bluster strangely challenged.
“Yes?” I ask.
The dinosaur just stares at me for five or more seconds, grinning, I think, and then gives a low bow and flourish from his great height.
“After you.”
I look at the utterly black entrance with trepidation, pausing fortunately just long enough to realize the complete absence of light is nothing to do with the darkness. A thick black theatrical curtain hangs across the door and I sweep it aside with something bordering on annoyance. It gives me fuel, though I daren’t emit much more than a crackle as I push forward and breach the entrance.
The light is poor inside, but far less than the total darkness expected. The first section sees walls lined with glass booths, the resident snakes and Australian marsupials and rare frogs and bats and frog-eating bats long since turned into curries. Freakasaurus follows, but it is just he and I now as we tread with vague reverence up a hollow wooden slope, taking the tour of abandoned exhibits until the air turns greenish and we round a bend and I see what the damned dinosaur has led me here to see and I understand finally where this game is at.
*
THERE IS A withered human torso immersed in an enormous tank of putrid water. Algae and slime in the water turns the light from two submerged globes green. The torso has two arms that are held aloft, though the waist ends in a confusion of machine parts and biological-looking abstractions that dangle in the water, one of the tubes emitting bubbles. There are metal devices of some sort around his wrists that hold him suspended. The head is down, face invisible to me. Long tangled hair like grey kelp masks the face and sticks to the weirdly-muscled chest and shoulders of the man who, on and off, has been one of my greatest foes.
“Not what I expected,” I say eventually.
“I figured not,” the Freak replies.
Even he sounds hushed, considerate, thoughtful.
“But you came looking for the Tank, right?”
“A-yup.”
“Well, the Tank is in the tank.” He gives a brief laugh.
“Yeah. So I see.”
I look at my guide then and adopt a contemplative mien.
“I guess this doesn’t exactly constitute you guys fitting him out for a rebuild.”
“Oh, we got the rest of the shit through here,” Freakasaurus says and gestures up another slope going off to the left, more light creating a nimbus around another drape and I follow, shooting a wary glance over my shoulder at the man in the tank as his head lolls and nothing of the villain I have known and hated presents itself to my eye, though I am in no doubt that it’s him. No doubt at all.
The spectacle beyond the curtain confirms it. I cannot guess what purpose such a grand chamber once held to this theatre of live nocturnal amusements, but the metal walkway of the circumference now approaches an amphitheater of sorts where the workers have laid down their tools forever. In the middle of a bunch of broken packing crates and rusty tools and glass bottles and swathes of rags and an old fire hydrant and spare car tires and discarded LPG cylinders is an enormous, battle-scarred black metal carapace about the size of a Sherman tank without the turret on top. Of course, Think-Tank’s battle armor, or whatever it is we’re calling this, isn’t in the best condition. Under the winking lights I can see the dents along its black-painted surface. Nonetheless, it is a fearsome thing, iron and malevolent. Athwart the top is a black maw, the connection for the cybernetics of the villain’s lower body. Without him in place there is something Gigeresque and mechanically sphincter-like about the hole which is inevitably menacing. I would no more pu
t a foot in there than any other part of my anatomy. In fact, even looking at the damned thing gives me an urge to vomit and I look away, ignoring the fact my leathery tour guide appears to be laughing at me. Then again, he hasn’t had some of the confrontations I have had with this mad fuck. Although I’ve never uncovered evidence of anything beyond ordinary rocket science, there is something blasphemous and ill and sorcerous about the tank’s amour, especially without him in it, yelling delirious commands, intent on taking over the world or at least wrecking everyone living in it. It is hard to explain. And if Freakasaurus smirks because he thinks this is the occasion for seeing me weakened, then he really has no bloody idea.
I give the contraption a final dismissive wave.
“You should destroy it.”
“Is that what you think?” the freak replies.
“Yes,” I say. “If you have any normal moral fiber left in you.”
“Heh, that’s just what the old guy said.”
I give the tall mutant the eyeball for a moment or so.
“What old guy?”
“Dude from the bad old days,” Freakasaurus replies. “He’s the one who’s behind all this.”
“This?”
Freakasaurus motions.
“The reason I’m not ripping your arms off and doing unpleasant things to your wounds.”
We let that one pass and I point to the ceiling, ostensibly the exit, and by silent contract we move through the rest of the building and out into the rear lot, an ancient New York Post Office van tipped on its side and marred by scorch marks. I have a sense of many more figures than I can see silently retracting into the late shadows of the day. It is a rare occasion that I let me extra-sensory barometric awareness leak out and gently detect the spaces where displaced air suggest lifeforms. I assume these are yet more of the dinosaur’s Sideshow Peeps and for the moment I have nothing really to worry about.
Now we have something passing for fresh air around us, I signal yet another halt.
“So you’re gonna have to tell me how you came by this, uh, situation here.”
“With the Tank?”
“And the whole, er, as you said, ripping arms off and whatnot.”
I make an appropriately vague gesture.
“Like I said, comes down to the old dude. Mr Boy Scout himself.”
“Old man have a name?”
“Sure,” Freakasaurus shrugs. “Sentinel.”
Zephyr 11.7 (Flashback) “In Obscurity”
WHEN THE COMICS industry finally started to clue in on the whole costumed crime-fighter thing they were a little late and a little flat. Their early contributions didn’t exactly fire the public imaginations. The Batman was a pretty limp-wristed competitor when you had folks like Jack Fury and Mistress Snow duking it out on prime-time black-and-white TV. When Sentinel came along, I guess some bright spark got the idea to nab the details while he was still slugging away in obscurity so that by the time the Nazi-smashing superman was coming into his own, he already had a legion of fans who knew him through the purloined identity of his comic book. As things so often do in this industry, when push came to shove, all that did was open the door for the lawyers to come in. The funny book publishers were legally required to change the name and origins of their darling creation to distinguish him from the legitimate copyright of the Sentinel, whose likeness they had infringed. And that’s how we got Superman, folks. The rest is history, at least on this world.
And of course the Sentinel’s been missing presumed dead for twenty years. I say this to the Freak, who just shrugs those big scaly guns of his and pouts and twists in his leather lingerie and the darkness continues with its weirdly peopled susurrus.
“Explain to me the Think-Tank thing at least,” I say.
“Mother-fucker turned up in one of the sewers,” my host replies. “Looked just like you saw him now. Half-dead. Hell, only half of him. We already had a peace with your old man Sentinel and the shit him and his people are pulling down at the wharf, but I guess old Ironsides figured we needed a sweetener.”
“A sweetener? How so?”
“Well, one of the things we agreed to do was keep your stinky pen-pal Mentor out of the area, you know, especially durin’ the settin’ up stage.”
“Well, I don’t know, but go on anyway,” I say.
“Sentinel just shows up again in the middle of the park one day with your old-time nemesis there, gives him to me and explains how to rig up the aqualung you just seen,” Freakasaurus explains. “Dude says where the Tank is, armor’s sure to follow. If Mentor thinks we’ve got Think-Tank on our side, there’s no way he’s gonna cross the park – and that means leavin’ Sentinel and his Peeps alone.”
“OK, you’re telling me the Sentinel has set up in Manhattan?” I ask just to be sure. “What the hell is he doing?”
“You wanna know that, you’ve got to talk to the man himself.”
“At the wharves, you say?”
“That’s right, sister.”
I give the tall mutant a once-over once again and frown.
“Hard to believe you’re playing into his hands like this, no matter what you say.”
“Sentinel?” Freakasaurus expels dismissiveness through slitted nostrils. “He’s not doin’ a thing to me. It’s your man Mentor who’s got the shits on.”
“How come?”
But the talking dinosaur just laughs, jutting that helluva jawbone out at me with a wry grimace.
“You go see for yourself. All the explaining you need all in one spot.”
“And . . . we’re cool?”
“Boyfriend, we’re a long way from cool,” Freakasaurus laughs. “Just remember the Stingers.”
Smarting from my lack of a smackdown confrontation, I grudgingly leave the park, taking to the air and twisting hard to veer for the solemn and abandoned piers to the west.
*
IT ALL LOOKS quiet. I am picking pieces of scorched leather from my tattered costume as I walk from one moldering, decaying warehouse to another, my belligerence and cynicism doing the yin-yang thing as I start wondering just how hard Freakasaurus might’ve been pulling my chain. The only thing I can’t escape – apart from a Stinger missile, today, apparently – is the inevitable conclusion I emerged relatively unscathed from the Sideshow and there’s gotta be a reason for that.
At the fourth pier I stand around frustratedly long enough to get a whiff of fresh boat oil and I walk with increasing suspicion down the quay to the first of a row of big sheds which ripples and dissolves as I pierce their illusion.
The thirty-odd dudes in overalls and a handful more in mook costumes cradling rifles must’ve been doing their damnedest to hold their collective breath while I was about my perambulation. There’s an air of relief as I walk inside the range of the hologram projector and my eyes widen in alarm at the set-up, a classic supervillain out-station, though none of the armed guards react as I would expect them to if this were the case.
A stentorian tone rings out across the pier.
“OK, hold it right there.”
I turn to the dispiriting sight of a guy in a fawn-colored suit with a clipboard bearing down on me from the direction of the nearest hangar, neither he nor it anywhere near as dilapidated as the illusion would otherwise suggest. Since it is bureaucracy rather than bullets hurtling toward me, I decide to give a moment’s lenience and await the next with steely-jawed determination.
“Well done,” the guy in the suit says. “Hope you’re proud of yourself, studmuffin. You just compromised a ten million dollar operation.”
“And you are?”
“Rich Hennessy, Guardians Without Borders.”
The suit reaches handshake distance, at which point I know he’s at his most dangerous. A disarming smile bleaches through the gravel interlocution and I glimpse the sticker on the back of his stationery showing the same icon as the breast pockets of the guards and the other loafers: a globe in the palm of a stylized glove. Hennessy himself is a drowned rat of a m
an, sleek hair and prehensile nose something mole-like despite good tailoring and a voice well-suited to speaking in public. His grip is good – too good – and I know there’s a less-than-subtle message in that non-verbal exchange.
“Guardians Without Borders?”
“We followed the French model. You know? Medecins sans Frontieres?”
“Yeah sure,” I reply. “Why didn’t you go for Global Guardians? Catchier.”
“Actually that name was copyright,” Hennessy replies. “Doesn’t matter anyway.”
We exchange puzzled looks for a moment as I try to recall where I am meant to have heard that moniker before. Hennessy, the foreman or whatever he is, gives me a pained smile and asks, “You’re Zephyr, right?” in a voice that can’t help but betray he knows full well who I am – as I would expect.
“Yeah,” I shrug. “You wanna tell me what gives? Either you’ve got a secret you’re burning to tell me or otherwise you’ve gotta go pee. I came here looking for the Sentinel.”
“Oh right, so you know,” Hennessy replies. “Yeah, right. Yeah. I used to be known as Bison. Remember me? I dropped out of public life about five years ago.”
I stare at this dude for a few seconds more before blocks of memory fall in place like a game of Tetris.
“Didn’t you use to be, like, red and shit?”
“I have an alternate form,” Hennessy explains.
“Still got it?”
“Last time I checked.”
“You still got a good grip,” I say, trying to tease him out.
Hennessy shrugs.
“I have a fair bit of strength in my residual form. Like I said, as Bison, there’s a lot more where that came from, but thanks to the Guardians I can honestly say it’s a good while since I needed to use it.”
Around us the men on the wharf have gone back to what they were doing before I came along. There’s a big-ass catamaran pulled in to the rear of one of the warehouses and between it and the main building and the front of the pier there’s a steady stream of worker ants and just a handful of machinegun-toting flunkies with respirators at ease around their necks and something of a holiday atmosphere compared to some of these sorts of operations I’ve come across in the past, most of them run by bad guys with the whole secret island/submerged missile silo/underwater cave-headquarters thing happening. I note among the unloading there’s a sole heavily-built guy with a blonde braid hanging down his back, uniform coveralls peeled back to reveal the physique of a Martian god. He juggles a pallet of deliveries at a time, making light work of it for the guys running forklifts in and around the depot.
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