Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  “You thinkin’ he was in you the whole time?”

  “Jesus,” I gasp. “I dunno. I’m so sorry –”

  “Save it,” Sentinel snaps. He indicates outside with his thumb. “Save it for them.”

  But I don’t think I can face them and the look on my face tells that story plain and true. Those few cauterized glares that find their way to me swell with hurt and I weakly pick off my tattered duds, dusting off my leathers and try not to weep, though I am paradoxically at the same time ashamed at just how quickly my equilibrium returns. Maybe it’s another, as yet unquantified component of my superhuman healing power, I darkly muse.

  “You’d better skedaddle,” Sentinel says. “Could be a mob scene soon. Lynch mob, in fact.”

  I curse, the four-letter word like a relic of yesteryear despite Sentinel’s raised eyebrow. I can almost literally hear myself crashing down the ladder of his expectations and I step aside, slump-shouldered, averting my gaze from the hostile and simply grief-stricken recriminations of the growing throng.

  “I’m gonna kill Mentor for this.”

  I nod once to Sentinel and vault into the air, leaving him with the quite wrong-headed impression I am probably joking.

  *

  MY OWN ANGER and self-loathing drives me in a tight, but wild spiral hurtling over the jagged ruins of Manhattan like a time traveler, the otherwise advanced, redeveloped cosmopolis of Atlantic City throwing not-exactly-embracing arms around the Hudson. The old Big Apple is more a shriveled raisin, a rotten apple forgotten in the thick carpet at the corner of the living room.

  In the clouds I am better able to gather my thoughts and this is what saves me from a near-suicidal plunge into Mentor’s headquarters on a one-man spree attack. As Mentor has already shown, he can play me like a jukebox – and that’s from afar. If he burrowed into my cerebrum like some psionic broke Mexican smuggled across the Jokertown border, then on his home turf I would be veritable clay under his control – and mayhap an even more dangerous weapon.

  So for the time being I quit Manhattan, but I’m determined it won’t be for long. It’s true this whole sorry little episode could be behind me in a nanosecond and no one would be the wiser to the massacre that bears my signature. It’s not exactly for the most ethical reasons that I can’t let it rest that way. Personal heroics be damned, this is more about histrionics. My fucking bruised ego is feeling far too savaged for me to let these sleeping dogs lie – die, perhaps, but not lie.

  It’s by the light of this cold-burning candle of fury that my mind lights on a particularly twisted idea that gets me grinning again. Knowing what I can do to aid and abet my vision of Mentor strung up by his cojones, I dart back in the vicinity of the old waterfront.

  Zephyr 11.10 (Flashback) “Public Nuisance”

  DAYBREAK, AND I am listening to the splintering crash of bad guys getting beat up. One flies through a window with the operatic quality only breaking glass can manage, hitting the sidewalk like a bag of shit and bones, the grunt escaping the goon’s breath, a tooth breaking, skidding on his own blood. Bloodshot eyes roll up in a head adorned with safety pin earrings, the Illuminati symbol tattooed on the idiot’s forehead. His buddy follows him a moment later to exactly the same results.

  Streethawk steps through the broken aperture to cop an eyeful of me lounging all insouciant and shit against the waning light of the streetlamp. The crusty old poofter’s Mohawk shows signs of the long night’s war against crime. Plasters bandage his knuckles and the bridge of his nose like he’s escaped from an Adam Ant tribute band. He only stares at me, battlefield glare at odds with the once sullen good looks broken by a lifetime’s boxer’s antics. As the second thug goes to stand, I Tase him good and proper and the mook pukes, doubled over, and Streethawk floors him with a solid kick.

  “Oh my stars and garters,” Streethawk says in his ironic, utterly deadpan voice.

  His face gives another sniff of complete disinterest as he saunters towards me.

  “What brings you to my alleyway, Zephyr?”

  “Just getting a taste of your world. I tried a public toilet, but. . . .”

  “Cute. What do you want?”

  “A hand.”

  Streethawk harrumphs, but there’s a smirk in there somewhere.

  “A hand? Hand is extra.”

  “Well I was going to say I wanted to borrow your ear for a minute, but thought you might get the wrong idea. There I go again.”

  “Cut to the chase, Zephyr.”

  “Gary someone. I’m looking for him. Animal Boy.”

  “Animal Boy? Shit. Is he still alive?”

  “He was last time I saw him – despite the temptation to make it otherwise,” I reply. “Besides, he’s not Animal Boy any more.”

  “Yeah, he’d be pushing on a bit.”

  Streethawk looks around. One of the goons gets up and starts to crawl and then collapses flat-out again. The ‘hawk only grunts a laugh and motions for me to follow.

  We stroll out of the alley into the pending crime scene that is the Van Buren waterfront. The world-weary crowds stare leeringly at us as we walk past a broken down Cineplex, a row of porn shops, a pawnbrokers, a gun shop, a dollar junk shop and cross past the authentic-looking Vietnamese place, the waiters in traditional knee-length white rubber boots hosing out the tile floor.

  Down near the docks, the rust-hulled tankers moon us along with the passing gulls. Streethawk takes a deep chug of sullen air and stretches, looking around. The knee-length acid-wash denim jacket somehow looks less gay than you might expect on his wiry fighter’s frame. He catches my eye like he’s caught me scoping out his action and his smirk flashes a chipped tough.

  “You’re one tough faggot, ‘hawk,” I say before sense gets the better of me.

  “I’m too tired to put you through the motions, Zephyr, so relax. I wanted to put you in casualty, you’d be there already.”

  “Haughty little bitch though, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t make me change my mind,” he says.

  “Gary?”

  “Gary Spade. I’ve got the feelers out. Started while we was walkin’.”

  “I figured as much. What now?”

  “What I’m wonderin’ is what you’re gonna do for me?”

  “Jesus,” I remark. “Is that why we’re down at the waterfront?”

  “Well you know you want it, Zeph. Don’t tell me you ain’t curious.”

  “Sheesh, pal, even if I was gay, you’d be safe.”

  “Yeah, I figure you for a cub-fucker anyway.”

  “I . . . have no idea what that is.”

  “Tough guys like you gotta be the man even –”

  “Please,” I say, holding up a hand and a pained expression. “Make it stop. Gary?”

  Streethawk sniffs again and nods, producing a cigarette.

  “OK. Follow me. But you owe me, Zephyr. And not a little one. Come on.”

  *

  I SAY GOODBYE to Streethawk on a fire escape and creep down to where the city says my former teammate lives these days. The rusty metal steps creak as I tiptoe down, eyes on a tea-stained curtain fluttering loose from a half-open window. I figure the city might tell me six kinds of lies, but I don’t have the same cellular connection as Streethawk, so I trust his info’s good to go.

  There’s a smashing noise that makes me briefly contemplate the cliché of whether my decision to gatecrash Animal Boy’s apartment coincides with his drug debt to the Russian mafia, a break-in from Scientologists, or an Atlantis cult convinced Gary’s pregnant with their messiah. Instead, the shrill voice that follows assures me it’s nothing more peculiar than your everyday pedestrian dust-up between a spineless married guy and his overbearing wife.

  “I can’t do this anymore Gary! I just can’t do it!” a strong Canarsie accent through yonder window breaks.

  At just a glance through the curtain-framed view, the aptly-named Juliet looks like she ate a pretty, thin girl of the same name about ten years and six thousand v
isits to the Golden Arches earlier. Animal Boy’s super-sized wife stands in the middle of their pathetic, piss-stained living room with a dust pan in one hand and a folded newspaper in the other.

  My erstwhile teammate crouches in the middle of the floor naked, every rib in his body on display and a steaming pile of fresh number twos beside his foot.

  “Ahem,” I say, stepping through and wiggling my eyebrows kind of like a young Tom Selleck (or so I fancy). “I hope this isn’t a bad time?”

  Gary stands, furious and agog to see me invading his happy place. He snatches the newspaper from Juliet’s hand and covers his excoriated crotch.

  “Zephyr? F-fuck, man. What gives?”

  “Oh great,” Juliet bleats, her jowls wobbling as she stares at me from the pits of her sunken eyes. “Second day in a row one of your superhero buddies wants to whistle by just for shits and giggles. What’s going on, Gary? I can’t take it –”

  “Yeah yeah,” I interrupt. “You can’t take it any more. Me and half the fucking projects heard you, Fatty Arbuckle. Now buckle up and give me a few minutes with my old pal here, ‘kay.”

  Juliet looks shocked. Whatever.

  “You should probably listen to him,” Gary says, shooting me a look caught halfway between gratitude and resentment.

  “He’ll probably electrocute you if you don’t listen. That’s the way you do things, isn’t it, Zephyr?”

  “I coined the phrase Shock and Awe, but they never paid me any royalties. Why is that?” I grin.

  “Maybe because you’re an asshole?” he fires back.

  “I guess I shouldn’t mention royalties. How’s that all going? Owe much, still?”

  “He owes those bloodsucking creeps another three-quarter mil –”

  “Juliet!”

  Wifey goes back into the seething, bubbling silence from which she has only lately been summoned. She shoots me a foul look and lopes from the room, the smell if not the décor of a disgraceful kitchen beyond the doorway.

  “What do you want, Zephyr?” Gary asks, rounding on me. “And how the fuck did you find me, anyway?”

  *

  “HOLD ON A second,” I say. “Jabba said something before, but I didn’t quite catch the translation. Who was here yesterday?”

  “None of your fucking business. What do you want?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “You . . . what?”

  “Psiclone’s helmet. You still got it?”

  “Psiclone. Why?”

  “So you have it?” I ask. “I needs it. The precious.”

  “Fuck you, Zephyr.”

  A trace of static crawls across fingers I hold up and wiggle, grinning.

  “Don’t make me go all Guantanamo on your ass, baby.”

  “Zephyr –”

  A spark leaps from me to him. Gary hasn’t really explained why he’s naked, but it lends him that air of vulnerability helpful to the moment as he yelps and backs away, looking for the kind of exit you only get in the Matrix. It’s not going to be easy, this way.

  “Come on, Gary. Help me out. You must keep a lot of mementos, keepsakes, trophies, you know, stashed somewhere?”

  “You know I sold almost everything I got. You think I’m living in the lap of luxury here?” he gibbers back, once familiar tears starting again.

  “You hook up with a woman into bestiality, you kinda get what you deserve, Gary.”

  “I’m not a hero any more.”

  “Oh that’s right,” I said. “You’re not Animal Boy any more. But you’re not Animal Man, either, are you, huh Gary?”

  The naked 98-pound weakling’s face goes bright red with frustration.

  “People could see you right now, no one would buy the hero you pretend to be,” he fires back, lower lip pouting like a period piece actress.

  “You’re not allowed to be Animal Man, are you, Gary? Copyright, huh?”

  “You know I had other names –”

  “But there’s not too many cool names for guys who shift into different animals, is there?”

  “There’s not much time to play hero when you got to work six jobs just to pay off some stupid motherfucking lawsuit just ‘cos some toy company says you’ve infringed their copyright. . . .”

  Gary stops, halting himself from hyperventilating. We stare at each other unhappily a few moments and Gary throws aside the newspaper shielding his boyhood. I look away, unfortunately with nothing else for my gaze to fall on than the pile of what looks like goat droppings on the living room floor. My nose crinkles.

  “I’m – I’m still learning to deal with a lot of issues from my Sentinels days,” he starts up as I stare embarrassedly at the cairn of tiny toffee-colored turds. “You play a starring role in a lot of that trauma, Zephyr.”

  “What, you don’t blame the Ill Centurion for that time you were a horse –”

  “Hey, I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done. My analyst keeps asking to meet you.”

  “How do you afford an analyst?”

  Gary looks away. Juliet’s voice wafts from the kitchen.

  “Court order. Public nuisance.”

  “I had to go,” Gary says weakly. “I thought it wouldn’t be a crime if I was a dog, you know?”

  “Shit. You’re a walking Supreme Court precedent, aren’t you?” I shrug and soldier on. “How about this helmet?”

  Zephyr 11.11 (Flashback) “An Extra Hand”

  EVENTUALLY GARY AGREES to explain what happened with Psiclone’s helmet. It was a little knick-knack we picked up years back, too long ago to count really, after we trounced the bad guy in his lair after some half-baked scheme with Voodoo Queen Mitsy (yes, seriously) to turn the city into a living graveyard of the undead or some-such nonsense.

  “I sold it to Raptor,” Gary says after a quick costume change.

  We’re at a bar on Eighteen Street. I agreed to buy him a drink and he agreed not to turn into a cat or a bat or a fucking bathmat (he can’t actually do that) while tipsy and then piss everywhere, which explained the shit-hitting-the-fan-or-should-I-say-carpet scene I just walked in on (or should I say, out of, or even running-desperately-away-from).

  Gary’s hand shakes as he lowers the glass to the dented, sour-smelling bar cloth and wipes his droopy lip, scanning the empty early-openers like he might be recognized by some of the other barflies. Price of fame, I guess.

  “Raptor. Who is that again?”

  “Uh, about yay-big.”

  He holds his hand up to show Raptor’s what we’d call a little person.

  “Alligator skin, wall-crawling, has an extra hand on the end of his tail. Took down the Night Squadron, if you remember them? He’s got this hallucinogenic spit-power or something. . . .”

  “Wait. He’s a villain?”

  Gary drinks. Swallows. Gulps.

  “Yeah.”

  “You fucking doofus. What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking ten-fucking-large, OK?”

  “Jesus. You must be really hard up.”

  “You have no idea . . . some of the things I’ve done. . . .”

  Gary finishes the beer in one big slug and thankfully not that sentence and puts the glass down in a not-so-subtle hint that he expects another. I wave a finger to the barman. I can’t be bothered drinking this piss-water if I can’t even get drunk.

  “I appreciate your sharing Gary, but I don’t want to know about your sideline in animal porn, OK? Just tell me how I can get the helmet.”

  “What do you want it for, anyway?”

  “What do you think?” I ask archly. “Same reason as this Raptor dude. Psiclone’s helmet made him immune to mental attacks. I need it.”

  “It’s not really your look though, is it?”

  “Jesus. Go spray a pole or chase a fucking police car, will you? I just need it for this one . . . mission.”

  “Mission?” Gary looks at me, something mildly retarded in his myopic stare, curiosity like a swirl of cinnamon in the week-old coffee of his gaze. “You seriou
sly call them that?”

  “No I . . . fuck, bad word choice, okay? I have a job. It’s Mentor.”

  “Yeah. You always were a light touch to the psions,” he says.

  “Like you can talk, Animal Noob.”

  “I remember there was this one time. Who was that chalk-white chick you fancied? The villainess? The skinny one with the boobs?”

  “Look, Frost and I aren’t on good terms these days,” I mutter and signal for a drink as the barman brings the second round for Gary.

  “You got money for these?” the gruff old dude asks.

  “Ha! Your reputation’s proceeded you, Zeph.”

  “Yes, I have money,” I snap back at the barman and resist elbowing Gary off his stool. I produce a crumpled twenty from my belt.

  The barman sniffs and takes it, shrugging.

  “You know, superheroes and their tight costumes. Never did know where you fuckers put your bill-folds.”

  He wanders away and I give a brief hurt look I share with Gary.

  “Fuckers?”

  “I know. The attitude of some people.”

  I grunt.

  “Where’s Raptor? How can I get a hold of him.”

  “You got a mission, huh?” Again Gary’s with the drool-wipe and grin.

  I don’t like the way this is going. “Uh-huh.”

  “Sounds like a mission for. . . .”

  The grin clouds over along with his eyes. He stutters.

  “What,” I say. “You seriously don’t have a replacement name still?”

  “It’s been a while since I wore the costume, you know, for real.”

  “Great.”

  *

  THIS IS DRAGGING on longer than I would like. I’m keen to open a can of whoop-ass on Mentor, but instead Menagerie Man and me (no I don’t like it either, but what the fuck am I meant to say to the guy?) are doing our best Batman and Robin across the benighted rooftops of downtown Lincoln.

  Gary’s “costume” these days consists of a pair of rubberized y-fronts, boots and a huge furry parka he can ditch at a moment’s notice. The boots are more like galoshes. They’re a couple of sizes too big and he keeps stumbling as we creep towards where he says Raptor met him a few years previous.