Zephyr III

by Warren Hately

  I move to the broken doorway and a boy no more than ten or twelve passes me a crusty loaf studded with chips of concrete and I chew stolidly, eyes cast over the apocalyptic horizon of the ruined settlement. The street is awash with chunks of masonry and rusting ancient 5.56 parabellum casings and twisted street signs and blackened car wrecks and fabrics, tattered and discolored by the years since this place was overrun. If we are on the outskirts of the old Russian empire, then this is the Ottoman’s realm into which I’ve been catapulted.

  It occurs to me I am bad news in these people’s peaceful lives. Well, hardly peaceful, given the evidence, but they do not need the crawling chaos of a clusterfuck I can be to otherwise well-meaning people. I push off from the bullet-riddled concrete doorframe and start through the town, knowing the eyes watching me from doorways and cellars and sniper holes are silently grateful for my forecast departure. To the north is a black-limned forest, jagged treetops beckoning like a racial memory of my Neanderthal forebears. I lope onwards, like some fallen angel with a compass bearing for the land of the Nephilim. Not so. Instead, it is a short time later and I am huffing up a battered slope, erosion from an ancient artillery barrage exposing a great crusted seam of the earth with the exposed roots of the tangled forest above biting through, something primal, Mesozoic, a sedimentary autopsy as I grasp the dirty vines in tired fingers and haul my way up and into the black forest and turn, no idea where the fuck I am headed or how to get back.

  Fortunately or otherwise, at that moment Titania thumps down across from me and stands, brushing back her brassy locks.

  “Zephyr, why did you go?”

  “I’m bad news, honey,” I reply without even thinking twice about my answer. “Someone told me recently I was the Antichrist. Maybe true.”

  “Sounds like horseshit to me, Joe.”

  “Maybe that too.”

  Shadows flit over us and I look up to see more figures raining down from the sky, a dozen or so piggy-backing on the flyers. There’s Olga, Red Monolith, Nocturne, Stiletto and a handful of others I don’t recognize from before. Most prominent is the crazy-looking shirtless motherfucker with the aquamarine Mohawk and Pictish tattoos, carted like a bad news delivery with Red Monolith playing Stork.

  The newcomers deposit around us. I nod tiredly, hungry, awash with fatigue despite my sleep.

  “They can track us. Any of us, on our own,” Titania says.

  “Yeah,” Monolith says, goofy voice reverberating behind that helmet of his. “We didn’t think we could just leave you out here, big guy.”

  “Hey, you’re the big guy,” I say weakly and smirk, the cold getting to me, looking around. “If they are going to find me, best you were all a million miles away. The Resistance, you know? The people hereabouts . . . I think the damned fools still live in hope.”

  “How are you holding up?” Titania asks.

  “How do I look?” I ask and hold my arms out, my sleeveless shirt rapidly turning into one of those gay singlets bodybuilders wear, the knees gone on my leathers. “The good news is my head is my own again.”

  Jane frowns, not just a casual look of concern. “The bad news?”

  “He’s gone. He carjacked – body-jacked – the Preacher from this world. Ran off with his body. I figured he mind-fried the dude first . . . and his woman.”

  I sniff, still not really able to show much sympathy for Spectra, as much as nobody really deserves to meet their end by way of such a deceit – though if ever there was, she’s be a prime candidate.

  “So the leopard’s finally shown his stripes.”

  I don’t correct her. Titania’s too grim and beautiful standing in the soft-falling light. The rest of her team can only hold their tableau pose for so long. Now they break into little clumps, conversations of twos and threes, just the weird punk-ass dude giving me attitude from the other side of the greyscale clearing.

  “So what now?” I ask. “The dead Preacher, he said they had a wormhole of their own.”

  “They do?” Titania replies.

  There’s a hint of avarice in her voice she does an admirable job of squashing down.

  “Well you’re free, Joe.”

  “So are you, Jane. Don’t you think you’ve done your time here? Preacher – the dead one – he seemed to be saying they needed me, like a lock for a key, to get off-world. He wanted to escape. Don’t you?”

  I can tell she’s torn. Hell, I imagine I can even see her head dip in acknowledgement for a moment, but disinterested as they appear, her teammates still hang on every one of her words and gestures. Her power basically commands them to it, something beyond pheromones that tickles at the edge of my sensorium with a will of its own like a heightened charisma.

  “I don’t know, Joe. I don’t know.”

  Nocturne’s voice fills the awkward pause.

  “Prepare yourself. Someone’s coming.”

  There’s more than just a chill in the air. It’s the feeling of space-time turning inside out and that means only one thing, given our predicament.

  She’s here. Again. Matrioshka.

  Zephyr 10.13 “Giantess”

  FOR A MOMENT I think the witch queen has come on her own. As plastic reality snaps back into place, she simply stands there grinning, almost goofy if she wasn’t so fucking scary, that big oversized head of hers shining in the winsome sunlight. Then a big figure slams into the ground beside her like a pet gorilla. Fortress, the glue in his eyes a signifier of his possession, Matrioshka his only guiding principle after my father mind-wiped him.

  Titania moves with a confidence I can only envy.

  “Defensive pattern delta. You know we’ve drilled this, people. Let’s go.” She takes to the air, as do the other flyers, then yells, “Warp! Take Fortress out of the equation.”

  The Mohawk does as instructed. Fortress stands with power gathering in every fiber of his being and then the broken ground around him is replaced with a completely different landscape, low shrubs, a section of rubble, a single yellow-blossomed cherry tree. Like some Eighteenth Century theatre tableau strung on high-tensile elastic, the whole panorama disappears sucking Fortress along with it. Wherever the little guy has spirited Matrioshka’s puppet, I pray it’s far beyond the limits of her control.

  So, this so-called defense pattern delta swings into action, which seems to consist of Solaris, Nocturne and a little hottie I later hear called Vespa opening up with distance attacks. The psionic effects are like pissing into a rainstorm. I can practically hear Matrioshka laugh as she dismisses Nocturne’s ploy for the distraction it is. The energy attacks glitter on a dome of force the villainess waves into being with a distracted mien. I add a lightning charge to the efforts, holding back my full force as I suspect I’m wasting my time – as it proves to be.

  “This is hopeless,” I remark to no one in particular.

  Matrioshka closes her eyes. I get it. She’s seeing by other, eldritch means. Several of the non-flyers are maneuvering into place and I don’t know why she targets Huntsman, maybe it’s his dicky superhero name, but she splays her fingers and it seems like the air between she and him screams in an effort to be desperately somewhere else. The net effect is a gaping, shredded hole through the middle of his chest, his chin caught in the collateral damage and caving in, raining desiccated chunks of flesh with the blood instantly evaporated as he falls to his knees and twists over in the ash-colored sand.

  “Shit.”

  I have an odd feeling of culpability that finds me tensing my knuckles and preparing to wade in once again. And then it happens.

  The rest of The Twelve spring their trap.

  *

  GOD KNOWS WHAT abilities the other members of the global elite have at their disposal. Clearly they’ve been watching events for some time and positioning themselves to take action against the threat they have themselves created. I doubt we’re going to be catching up about their ambush over pumpkin soy frappuccinos anytime soon, but it’s an irony that they’re finally playing heroic
roles once again.

  They boil out of hyperspace, just five of them including Ottoman and the shackles-free Lord Electric. The fireworks are enough to make even me blink as three-dimensional space goes wobbly like some old 1950s TV show and the ground thrums like with a human heartbeat.

  Matrioshka shrieks. That’s not really the word for it. After, Titania tells me the psychic detonation, fuelled by the mental will of five billion alien minds, kills Ottoman and the woman called Tempest instantly. Their minds are jellified. It falls to the remaining three to combat the grotesque creature as me and the others hit the fucking road.

  We regroup somewhere further along the coast. It’s just another ash drift with Japanese pines jutting from the grey soil. As the refugees arrive around me, I know a few are missing, snatched perhaps by Matrioshka’s desperate strikes as they fled. Yet I am too awkward to say anything as a grey-faced Titania thumps down beside me and Olga follows, Warp in her arms.

  Titania reaches out to me with distressingly motherly concern.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah. Where’s Red?”

  “Monolith?”

  Titania looks around like someone else might know the answer. Her gaze falls on Olga, who just shoots us a sad look.

  “Fuck,” I say.

  My head starts to hang, but I jerk erect, more than a touch of ornamental fireplace in my eye as I take my turn to grasp Jane by her sculpture-perfect shoulder.

  “Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  A doe-like look of confusion crosses her face, not at my words, but her own inner conflict.

  “I . . . Joe . . . I can’t.”

  “Spectra had a way out. The wormhole? Lennon was taking me with him. He said I was his lucky ticket. Come on. What do you say? Come with me?”

  “Home?”

  I laugh as I nod, suddenly jubilant. It’s only been a few days to me, but already lifetimes seem to’ve elapsed since I was in the ruins of Old New York with all my petty insular torpid troubles and lies.

  Titania takes my hand. “I would be abandoning them, Joe. I can’t.”

  I squeeze her back. “You’ve done your time.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Come with me. At least help me find the machine. Then decide.”

  It’s just the bait she needs. Titania nods and I turn immediately in the direction I hope is to Tokyo.

  “Let’s go.”

  Again, another hand stills me. This time it’s her lover, the giantess Olga.

  “We have a faster way, beautiful, and I think time might be of the essence, ja?”

  The geek with the blue Mohawk comes forward, persnickety despite being center stage. He flexes his wiry muscles, hands conjoined at the knuckles. He spits through his nose like he’s watched one too many Bruce Lee movies.

  “Tokyo?” he says in a surprisingly sonorous voice.

  I barely nod, and the ground starts to shift beneath our feet.

  Zephyr 10.14 (Coda)

  BLINK AND YOU’D miss it, as Warp says himself. One moment we’re escaping the charnel landscape north of Vladivostok, the next we’re in the hectic streets of postmodern Ginza, the obelisks of Nipponese commerce and slavery towering over us. It is just before the onset of night, all the neon slinking out like prostitutes too early for their red light shifts, a crush of salarimen and other commuters marching along the bleeping avenues awash with signs and enticements.

  I am shocked to see half the people wear odd metal collars, most blinking with blue lights, but others with different colors signifying God-knows-what. The wearers have the look of the enthralled and I don’t just mean the Gruen effect typical to the dizzying bombardment of conflicting signals. Clearly Spectra and her cohort in The Twelve had their own means for keeping the populace under control and it sure explains how Tokyo remains a thriving metropolis compared to what little else I’ve seen in this devastated world.

  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.