Zephyr VI

by Warren Hately

  That said, I also streak like a running back through the next wave of guards. Immediately to my right, the corridor wall is hundred-year-old masonry studded with big blocks of frosted glass that admit barely any of the light from outside, but I drive my shoulder into the middle of the dense panes and carry through enough momentum with Holland’s enhanced physiognomy that the wall of glass ice cubes tumbles outwards and I am born head-first like a stillbirth from a waking dream into the milky light beyond.

  *

  I CAN SCARCE believe I am free – if by free I mean plunging headlong down a paved decline in cuffs, crashing to the bottom of a grassed slope and taking census of the fact it’s the whole island of White Nine I’m now loose within. These are the precious moments in which my potential pursuers remain as trapped as I was, and fueled by that desperation and knowing I’ve got none of my Zephyr powers to aid me, I hurry across a double lane of tarmac, late afternoon coming on over what looks more like a naval academy than the country’s most secure prison – one I remember now was only recently emptied of its most ill-famed inmates.

  I get free of my restraints, but the shot of whatever they gave me earlier coats my soul in tar and I can’t get airborne, nor can I conjure the increasingly familiar darkforce to help. Sorcery? I’ll have to think about that factoid another time. It makes a future confrontation/conversation with Twilight seem even more inevitable, as if the forces of dramatic irony weren’t enough between us.

  I bound over a parked car as I continue on, casting wild ragged looks around me, but then I nearly collide with a woman carrying way too many files and cases and then there’s a single gunshot that lets me know I should be truly off and away.

  The woman sprawled on the ground now upholstered with stationery looks up at me, legs splayed, surprising sympathy in her bifocal gaze.

  “Are they after you?”

  “This is bullshit,” I tell her. “The city’s under siege and they’re doing the dirty work for whoever’s behind it, scooping up the only people able to actually do anything, excuse my split infinitives.”

  “Which one are you?” she asks, flustered, and I realize however matronly this lady might seem in picking herself and her heavily-padded ass off the ground, a flush of teenagerly arousal rouges her features.

  “Cusp,” I say crisply. “I’m . . . Cusp.”

  There are shouts back in the direction of a main complex that dwarfs the surrounding annexes with its full post-imperial majesty. I have to assume the tactical response tracking me from the main building is now on in hot pursuit, so with barely a nod to the flustered woman, I elbow on through the hedges and vault down a manicured slope, leap a low chain fence and nearly collide with – of all things right now – a bus chugging past the hitherto concealed roadway. My momentum is such that there’s no way I’m not escaping some kind of face time with the bus, but at least I get to choose where I want to take it (there’s a joke in there somewhere). So I vault even higher as the full expanse of access road opens up to my vision, and curling like a wide receiver protecting himself on the flight to the end zone, I arc up and smash in through the upper windows of the vehicle. It’s Perspex rather than glass, but it still shatters into bits, as does the shrapnel of destroyed window struts that blast inward with me like tiny elemental heralds of my goddess of destruction incarnate.

  I can’t explain what the bus is doing here except I guess even Ryker’s needs its own internal transport, and obviously I’ve run into the 1.15pm from central admin to dormitory cell A or something similar. And that’s why there’s hardly anyone in it, thank Jesus H.P. Lovecraft, my arrival flattening several rows of poorly-bolted chairs as a couple of ordinary civilian-looking types leap up from seats further back, one of them of course an agent or Fed official or something because he pulls a 9mm and tries to do his civic duty before my hands unfurl and a jet of slithering blackness hits him in the chest and face and knocks him flat.

  Mentally high-fiving once more, but with Holland’s face set in a rictus lure, I pick myself up from the serrated carnage and charge up the aisle of the bus, past the second geezer, me closing in on the panicking driver.

  “Feel free to jump out,” I yell at him.

  The after-effect of the darkness blast is a sap to my reserves, and I feel more like I just ate a two-pound lasagna than a guy in the uncomfortable intellectual space of knowing he is now a girl on the run for her survival. The driver slows the bus and leaps clear, and I think for just one fucking second I could take a breath, but of course then the roof smashes in and Agent Taurus rises like the dreaded minotaur he is.

  I never said anything about driving the bus. It continues with its own momentum, slewing on a very fine angle as I turn to acknowledge the new arrival. Taurus gives a glowering snort and takes one clippity-clop step forward and nearly loses his balance as the bus hits a curb and we’re jostled as the vehicle careens across a lawn and footpath and demolishes a park bench and a bunch of planter boxes beside a row of flag poles.

  The distraction is my advantage and offensiveness is often the best form of attack, right? I hurl one of the wrecked bus seats like a broken Da Vinci contraption, then throw myself into flight through the hole in the roof Taurus himself created.

  Except I don’t make it into the air. I’m not as quick as I used to be and my trajectory falls flat into the flight path of the big guy’s haymaker.

  *

  IT’S NOT LIGHTS out, but I am damned if I know how Holland’s only gently amplified physiology can withstand the blow that would implode the head of any regular person. To make matters worse, I’m not even free of the off-course bus, instead splaying against the shattered far-side windows, hanging momentarily like we are fighters in a cage – but one on wheels taking an increasingly erratic course towards its yet unknown but equally inevitable destiny.

  Taurus grunts like a rapist and surges at me.

  Somehow amid this morass I get my legs up to block him, feet in his chest pushing the big man back as I unwind from my unwitting languor. Taurus is still off-balance and I unload a weak-fisted karate combo he mostly takes on his arms, a huge knee coming up that I only manage to twist and take on my hip instead of between my shapely legs.

  “Hey,” I growl. “Don’t fight dirty. I’m a girl!”

  I elbow him in the side of the face and lose myself in the moment. I don’t know what the fuck is going on that I suddenly think I’m Zephyr again, but that’s basically what happens, and my Mach 1 fury comes through more like throwing a bowl of soggy oatmeal than devastating punches as Cusp’s exhausted fists thump awkwardly into the FBI freak’s ribs and he backhands me like a cliché of disdain.

  I tumble down the aisle of the bus trying not to give him the satisfaction of me also crying like a girl. I’m fucked if I am going to let this asshole disrespect my gender, whatever fucking body I am in, and just that whiff of self-righteous anger is enough to get me back on my feet as he lumbers in at me.

  The difference is I am slightly tucked among the remaining bus seats and he is charging down the middle of the bus only four or five paces away from me when the whole thing collides directly with a huge brick building and the agent’s stampede transforms into ballistic velocity as he disappears past me in a streak, smashing into and partly through the bus windshield – but because we are head-first in the brickwork of the corner block, it means Taurus doesn’t go anywhere except maybe into the rubble leaking into the bus.

  With the FBI agent down for the count, I gauge my aches and bruises and wearily kick open the side door and step onto brick-strewn grass, sirens closing from the middle distance. A chopper shoots past overhead and angles around on sighting the scene of destruction, and by clenching my fists, I somehow assess my readiness for flight, fervently praying that whatever mysterious source fuels Cusp’s powers, they might now be available to me in all their magnitude.

  But they ain’t.

  The tactical squad converges on me from four directions, doing that guns-at-the-ready duck walk th
at now looks so early 90s. I am exhausted, profligate with sorrow and fatigue. I am but a few steps clear of the bus as I lift my head from where it hangs, hands on my leather-clad thighs.

  “Back off,” I say without much conviction.

  Their staticky laughter emanates despite enclosed headsets and masks, electronic telepathy as they halt at the raised fist of the closest and perhaps most heavyset officer.

  Four of the eight keep me covered with sub-machineguns. The others draw and extend electroshock batons like they’re at the start of a choreographed dance routine. The leader advances several steps and his amplified voice rings out.

  “Lie down bitch, or we’re going to gang you.”

  I am still taking deep breaths, but this time I lift my face, one eye staring between hanks of green hair. The leader’s face-plate snaps open so I can meet the stony blue eyes of the veteran as I reply.

  “Like fuck you will, asspony.”

  I stand up straight and practically right into the squad’s endemic leers, masks perversely raised as their leader and his three nearest lackeys close in on me with clubs like they’re rising to the challenge. The first guy, well, it’s fairly easy to deflect his strike and move past, using him standing in the way as a human shield so I can kick out the leg of the next cowboy, grabbing his wrist and deflecting his baton into the neck of the third. The shocked trooper makes a gagging noise. Static explodes.

  It doesn’t bring me much of a reprieve, and backing away from my attackers for a moment’s safety only triggers the itchy trigger fingers of the other squad members, who chafe the ground around me so that even if I might be able to take the hit, I reflexively bound back into the middle of the still upright three remaining goons, punching one with a wicked haymaker in the side of his helmet and only partly regretting it.

  It is at about that moment one of the electroshockers touches me between the boobs and I nearly piss myself as I collapse, a puppet with its strings cut.

  The leader and the guy I just punched are on me at once.

  “Hold this fucking bitch down, Vance,” the commander growls.

  He has the baton across my throat, the crackling tip just inches from my ear. In the press of his erection against my thigh I can feel how the fear barely contained in my woman’s gaze is almost too much for this anachronistic fuck to resist. His little buddy is no less strident, but struggle as I might, I’m defeated of the strength to lever these assholes off me.

  “I think . . . Vance is gonna cum first,” I growl, trying once again to dislodge the douchebag dry humping my legs.

  “Shut up,” the commander says and rears up and punches me across the jaw.

  The lights dim a little, but he’s no Taurus. I retain focus, spitting blood as the other two baton-wielding guards close in and stab me with their chargers. Arcing up, it’s all I can do not to smash my teeth together and break my jaw. The spasming throws the guy on my legs clear and the moment the tremor leaves my muscles, it’s not my own control I feel return, but some far more threatening and ethereal force within me.

  Somehow I stand, throwing the three adult men off me, though it’s only partly at my control. My soul feels hollow, and I hear myself whisper, almost crooning:

  “Come kiss me.”

  And I light up from within.

  I’m not entirely sure how the fuck else to describe it as I’m flooded from some vast inner wellspring, a huge, chaotic, whirling force of activity swirling like thousands of bats disturbed in a cave, yet bats of light and bats of darkness, rising as one blur in concentric rings to the apex of the cavern of Holland’s mouth, the manifestation of the entity within – the sorcery, I know in an demonic instant – that is the source of this mysterious power that has evaded me for so long.

  And the entity behind it. We are momentarily one in the same, yet I should never delude myself to think that is true.

  A beam of brilliant, searing intensity pulses from my mouth like a trapdoor to the heart of the sun as I grab the first veteran cop by the Kevlar and drag him in close – and shit yeah, he starts to freak because the lightforce now pouring out of my mind has the intensity of a jet fighter plane turbine and just before he can even reckon on his own demise, it happens, his head extinguished for all its protective finery as readily as a candle snuffed out. Before the fused carbon lump of what used to be a head can even disintegrate in my hands, I rise without volition, a steady building feeling of oh-holy-fuck-I’m-about-to-kill-a-bunch-of-cops rising in my chest.

  And so mote it be.

  Zephyr 21.7 “A Biblical Smiting”

  I don’t know where the leg-humping cop goes, but the other two guys with batons stand frozen at the spectacle of their leader’s demise – so much so that they’re sitting ducks as I basically spew . . . I dunno . . . hot molten rainbow or something all over them. They are vaporized by my dragonfire. As Cusp, my mouth is just a faucet for some terrible force from beyond or possibly from between universes – part of the non-Classical matrix of what constitutes existence on the material planes in which we experience it.

  Suffice to say, a force too strong for a few jarhead cops to survive.

  It is a biblical smiting as I burn them down to their boots in one fell swoop, my rising gesture reaching its zenith as I step from of the immediate carnage and silenced sub-machineguns again fill the air with their racket.

  A nimbus of pure energy pulses out of every pore of my skin – except it is not my skin. It is through the pores of whatever Being is superimposed on the physical structure of how we think of ourselves at this level of consciousness.

  The bullets dematerialize or vanish or disintegrate or otherwise become merely conjectural, and the SWAT guys witnessing this fairly poop their pants and back off to at least a hundred paces. One tosses a spark grenade that goes off next to my foot without me even having the freedom to blink, completely under sway of the force possessing me and which at the same time I am, a curious, hitherto unidentified and undetected co-inhabitant whose very presence causes me to question my own nature (and that of my predicament).

  Despite the line uttered moments before, this is not a creature of thoughts and structures that might make themselves understood through language or any other construct of the rational human mind. I am chilled, truly terrified to know I am spliced so close to such a cosmic threat which could render me so unsafe in my Being, tethered as it now is to the material shell I once knew and admired and lusted after as Holland. I am more than just a man without a home. I’m a hitchhiker on the astral breeze, and I do not believe any of the bullshit I learnt from Lennon or any other tricks I’ve picked up during the years is going to sustain me if I lose track of this sanctuary.

  And so the thing has its way with me. And with the cops. One of them escapes with a broken arm and PTSD. I remain caught in a state of constant horrification.

  I can’t tell you what manner of thing this thing even is, except I know that’s barely the right term for such a fell entity. I imagine we might call it a demon, if we could unfetter that term from the expectations and exculpations of normative Judaeo-Christianity. This blasphemous presence within me basks in the aftermath of the carnage like a peacock enjoys the last rays of sunlight, something finite about its freedom, and like me in its outward manner, struts towards the road’s edge, glances up between the genteel trees and blasts into the sky.

  I come back into my own some way over the western reaches of Atlantic City.

  The wear and tear and the cracks worsening in this city teetering close to the edge of apocalypse only really register now despite tracking over these scenes during the past hour. I temper my breath, drinking back in my own consciousness. Dozens of smoke plumes rise into the sky and somewhere near the coast an entire skyscraper burns. Armageddon writ upon the canvas of the world’s biggest city is more than any CGI spectacle could hope to impart, because it is not in the big showy effects, but the sheer grainy, gritty ordinariness of the destruction that marks it for the stark and almost elemental reality
it possesses.

  With my awakening comes exhaustion. The demon force propelling me thus far weakens, spluttering like a dying fire, and wary of my immediate surroundings I descend to an elm-lined street with well-behaved McMansions sucking in their guts and staring at each other in the crepuscular light of day’s end.

  The tree-line obscures sight of the city that must be a minimum two-hour commute for the average well-to-do wage slave buttressed in the homes around me. The scene settles into something almost tranquil, just a barking dog off somewhere to give it the hint of alarm. A few 9mm shell casings pepper the leaves in the gutter beside me and the way the kicked-in door on one of the houses across the street tells me even this place is no safe haven any more. Suburban Armageddon.

  For all that, exhaustion threatens to flatten me where I stand, so it’s the only course feasible now to thread my way across the opposite yard and stagger into its well-appointed living room, hoping the looting indicated by the gaping shelves and strewn belongings is long past so I might recover with decency.

  I crash onto one of the two suede sofas in the TV room and resist the urge to dry heave vomit as nausea, vertigo and unconsciousness overpower me all at once.

  *

  MIDAFTERNOON DAYLIGHT PLAYS like a tractor beam across the side of my face as I wince and move from the laser playing in through the narrowest of gaps between the heavy drapes opposite. Once I am sitting up, hair falling like a shawl around me, I get the wobbly sense of early afternoon and the tranquil serenity that only comes being in a place with no other people around.