Zephyr III

by Warren Hately

  “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 cente
r 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.”

  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.”

  “But how, dad?”

  Candace inserts herself in the scene like a human metaphor – or perhaps a metonym, representative of some greater, intangible whole that I am still not really able to explain, much like the rest of my life, really.

  “It’s her,” I say to Tessa, motioning to the other teenager. “She’s got some link. She’s keeping her alive.”

  I turn and nod to Candace.

  “Good work. You handled yourself pretty good back there, for someone who just wanted to tap her shoes together and go home,” I say. “Ready to get out of here? Loren’s waiting for us.”

  Candace clears her throat, the anxious waif again.

  “There’s some bad news,” she says.

  By this stage I don’t say anything. My throat’s constricted and the words, the ones I know are coming, seem inevitable.

  “It seems those aren’t the Amari.”

  She gestures to the sky and makes a pained face.

  “Those are just . . . drones. Vehicles. We still have to face the real threat. Up there.”

  Hope, like the breath escaping my lungs, seems to just ooze out of me. Tessa has her expectant face on beneath the mask and Candace flicks her gaze between the two of us, like someone waiting on an introduction – which she probably is. Into that awkward silence, Windsong clears her throat and motions to my shirt.

  “New symbol, huh? Pretty cool.”

  I close my eyes as Sting and the other Brit supers materialize around us.

  *

  “WHAT’S THE SITUATION, old man?” St George asks from behind a dapper plum-colored cravat with a diamond stick pin. He’s carrying a cane, too, like he’s one-upping the dandyesque affectations of his past.

  Sting, the DJ and Shade descend the pile of rubble closest to us, and being British, somehow instantly affect the mien of survivors of the Blitz. Ali nods his head in time and it takes me several seconds to realize he’s wearing enormous silver headphones on the sides of his head. Shade nods and winks, jet black with her powers, but she keeps her distance. By contrast, Sting, clean-shaven, smiles handsomely and passes homo-erotically close wearing just a tight white singlet and black leggings, barefoot and muscular amid the rubble.

  I look up, a pained expression aimed at the sun, and when I look at Candace, her expression’s equally fraught, even though I can’t kid myself it’s for the same reasons. She shrugs to show she understands my frustration, even if she’s not a partner to it.

  “They’re the Amari, apparently.”

  I am taken aback by the voice, Stormhawk, the purple guy with the white Mohawk, stepping in close while consulting his blackberry.

  “How do you know that?”

  “They have a Facebook page.”

  There’s a few gasps, not the least of them mine. Stormhawk laughs.

  “It’s not real. A tribute page. Just shot up in the last fifteen minutes. Six-hundred likes to the latest post: ‘Human beans. Nom nom nom’.”

  “Jesus,” I say, disgusted. “What the fuck is wrong with people?”

  “If there’s an ants’ nest, someone, somewhere’s gonna put their dick in it.”

  I nod in agreement even though the speaker is Twilight, walking through the hanger-on heroes like a true god among men. He stops when across from me and practically shoulder-to-shoulder with St George.

  Stormhawk gestures again with the wireless device in his hand.

  “CNN’s reporting live from City Hall. How can they estimate three thousand dead already?”

  He looks around and of course there are drained-looking corpses jutting through the rubble almost everywhere. An awkward silence gathers.

  “Where are we at, Zephyr?” Twilight asks.

  “You still talkin’ to me?” I reply in a brief spurt of gangsterism. “I thought I was the Antichrist?”

  George and Sting chuckle and I see Shade raise a barely visible eyebrow, but Twilight’s grey-masked face remains stony and almost expressionless.

  Voice barely audible to anyone else, he asks, “You’re cut up about that?”

  “Maybe you lovers can have your tiff another time?”
Sting says, cheerily enough. “Maybe this young lady can fill us in on what all the trouble’s about? She seems to be the one they were seeking out, after all.”

  “Funny, that,” I say and almost yawn with the inevitability of my own comments. “Sting, this is Seeker.”

  Sting smiles and not exactly bows, a mock gentleman, but his response is colored with confusion.

  “I thought Seeker was a lovely big, um, well, tall girl?”

  “I’m Candace,” the new Seeker replies with a teenagerly wince. “I’m sort of new at this.”

  “Up to the job though, obviously,” George says.

  His voice is impatient, cutting through the idle chatter.

  “So what’s next? What’s the plan?”

  For some reason, the others are looking at me. I cast my eyes over the playing field, shielding them against the sun setting in slits through the canyon of distant skyscrapers. The New Sentinels are here, along with the Brit heroes who want me to be one of theirs. Twilight. Windsong. Coalface. The Lark. A guy in a silver bodywrap that may just be his skin, and another mask all in blue, his face a blur whenever he catches someone looking.

  I give a cheap laugh and think of my lover in a sterile cage at White Nine. And then my eyes fall on Candace and she’s looking at me and there’s something expectant in the poise of her barely pubescent lips that tells me I’m not going to like how this plays out no matter what the ending.

  “Up?”

  She nods, shy and afraid as the others look on mystified. And with that resolved, I grin again and pat St George on the shoulder, my drawl exaggerated as I draw him into our plans.

  Zephyr 8.12 “Stillborn Physics”

  SMOKE THAT SMELLS of corpses drifts across the city from the direction of the so-called children’s park in downtown Jackson. As Candace briefs St George on what’s required, the two of them standing apart like an old man with his granddaughter, I stare up through the grey veil at the chromium sun hanging in the sky like a distended rectum all pink and angry. Mastodon argues with his teammates. I am glad to be free of that. Windsong perches on a chunk of rock, going all Breakfast Club on me with her knees under her chin. The authorities stream about like worker ants into the canyon of destruction we’ve wrought, manifestations of the resilience of mankind.