Zephyr IV

by Warren Hately

  Except of course, now I know that I’m not one of them. Or at least that’s what I’m to believe if I go on the word of a freaky-looking blue-skinned young Adonis from the future who I basically wished into non-existence within minutes of meeting my own alleged progeny.

  Strummer.

  I check on Tessa swanning between checking the doorway and helping herself to another refreshing beverage, then place my palm on the table.

  “Strummer. Who is Strummer . . . and the 101ers?”

  A bunch of 70s pictures fade in like old school black-and-white photographs developing in a chemical trough. A pale, skinny guy, hairline like mine, confused about whether he’s a movie star or a beatnik by the look of him in a dirty-collared white tee and an open leather cycle jacket.

  I’ve seen him before, I realize now. A single photo fallen from an album at ground zero of my parents’ house. If my personal life wasn’t such a shambles I might be able to tell you where that photograph was now, but it’s gone like Loren, like my marriage, like my daughter’s faith in me . . . like any belief I might’ve had in a fair and loving God.

  It’s hard not to see the resemblance to myself in this guy.

  Among the photos, a news broadcast plays. “This is a public service announcement . . . with guitar!” The sound, harsh jangling chords breaking into static in the neural-audio connection between myself and the table. A scrawled logo “101ers” in spray paint on a brick wall an unwitting semaphore to the hand-drawn anarchist zed on my own uniform. London Bridge, Westminster, Tower of London I recognize by their silhouettes from pub crawls with Lionheart. Against a storm-riddled sky, this Strummer guy appears. Flying. A Stratocaster in one hand he wields cordless from a rooftop. The other members of his troupe confused about whether they’re a super team or a pop band. A slinky black chick with hair like a pyramid. An enormous hulk of a guy, black, dreads swaying, the legs of his shapeless pants seemingly blended into the surface of the roof, beside him a tall skinny guy with spiky black hair, mirror shades, a baggy pullover in bands of green and black like Dennis the Menace.

  The photos, the footage, over and over the same crew, except in one. The 101ers gathered around a handsome guy with jet black hair, cocksucker’s grin, white costume studded with rhinestones and other junk. I blink. The unfamiliar motto or logo “Elvis” embroidered across the chest.

  Just as quick, the table goes black. I give it a death stare, as you do when the power’s out a moment, and like a child, think maybe clapping your hands together will make the world right itself again.

  But after that pause, the full lights of the ready room throw on. A gentle yet insistent chiming emanates through the very walls of the mausoleum. Perhaps it’s a trick of my eyes, but the walls seem to become momentarily translucent as if bombarded by x-rays.

  “What is it?” I ask Tessa aka Windsong with unease.

  “Priority alert,” she replies, looking tense.

  Zephyr 13.12 “Ready To Rumble”

  TESSA STANDS ASIDE as Vulcana, then the other members of the new New Sentinels file into the room, several of them shooting me looks like they’ve just jumped out of bed to find someone shat on the rug, which might be a fairly apt summary as far as a few of them are concerned.

  I nod, give the cheesy made-for-TV smile. Manticore’s the only one unfazed, though Mastodon looks more like he’s going to shit himself in worry than dump on me, his bin-liner eyes shooting nervous looks to Vulcana.

  “What’s he still doing here?” she snaps at Tessa in her commanding tone.

  “What’s he doing here at all?” Smidgeon asks.

  The sawed-off little shit gives me his worst puckish stare, small man’s complex going full peacock as he swaggers in with O’Clock, a nerdy guy in glasses I know doubles as the stick brick Susurrus, and a guy I’m yet to meet called Heracleon who wears a gay-looking cape, phylactery or headband sort of thing restraining his blonde 80s locks, biceps wrapped by similar gold chicanery. Adding Windsong to the mix, these guys go through new members like curry through the morbidly obese.

  “Just calm down. I was only visiting,” I tell ‘em.

  “In our ready room?”

  Vulcana gives a rich look at the oracular glass and I try to pull that face you do when you’ve been caught out and try to act offended instead.

  It doesn’t wash. My shoulders slump in the defeat of acknowledgement. Shrugging, blustery, I’m the incarnation of “fuck it” in my return glare, challenging my former teammate to make something of it. ‘Cana only glowers, her expression hardening as she makes the transition to the toughened rubber form that is her namesake.

  Windsong gives a quiet “What’s going on?” to Mastodon, who only shrugs, his broad arm encompassing the table as it lights up.

  The Wallachians’ far-flung advanced computing system’s telemetry helps itself to our cranial egg sacks. I’m included even if I am the black sheep of this informal family, if not the redheaded step-child. We no longer need the table itself as our sensoria fill with images from the Capitol building, the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI complex in Quantico and Atlantic City’s own United Nations headquarters. Smoke, fire, chaos, noise, crowds screaming, the air thick with fumes and choppers and flying figures, all variations on the same theme.

  Titan.

  “Jesus Christ, he said this wasn’t happening till tomorrow!” I growl loudly and instantly draw every eye in the room.

  Over will o’ wisp-like images of black haired, muscle heaving Adonises throwing tanks, smashing down walls, incinerating bureaucrats with red hot laser eye beams, I stare down the other Sentinels with my coolest and most icy shrug.

  “I didn’t think you fucks were ready for this, but I’m only gonna say it once.”

  I take a deep breath.

  “You ready to rumble?”

  *

  MA AND PA Wallachia drop the kids off downtown and I give them instructions to access every known telecommunications method at their disposal to alert costumed heroes in our parallel to rise to the occasion. Meanwhile, I lead Vulcana’s team from the ensorcelled fortress into a doomsday scene of burning cars, the air thick with the smell of treaclized rubber, multimillion dollar architecture turning to slag as the huge bronze United Nations logo melts and clatters from the side of the main building in a moment too filmic to be anything but surreal.

  Crowds of workers and general public pour away from the UN complex, smoke gushing to fill the nearby streets choked with cars and buses abandoned under the assault of the clones from god-knows-how-many parallel worlds. I catch a glimpse of a red-and-gold-clad shape hovering above the billowing darkness, red-eyed gaze surveying his destruction, beams like twin laser sights, gold cape flapping in the thermals generated by the fires raging in the bottom-storey windows of the main building.

  “Are we going in?” Windsong asks.

  I pull my daughter aside, hand clasping her upper arm hard enough to leave marks.

  “You’re staying here. Stick with this Heracleon dude. That’s like a – a Hercules cyclone or something, right?”

  “No, it’s something different,” Heracleon says in a droll mood to the side.

  I pull Tessa even further out of earshot.

  “You run interference and help any civilians who get in trouble, OK?”

  “Jesus dad, I –”

  “Dad nothing. This is important work, Tessa. Windsong. Saving lives. Got it?”

  Thanks to Christ she nods. I nod back, relieved, too conscious of our public guises to ruffle her hair or otherwise give the sort of fatherly reassurance she stopped needing from me years ago. Instead, I turn back into Vulcana’s wary look.

  “You’re taking the lead in this, Zeph?”

  “I’m not treading on your boots,” I say firmly. “Big shoes to fill and I got no interest in that. But I’m here to fight.”

  “Then lead the way,” Vulcana says.

  I snap my fingers. Susurrus has done whatever it is he does to transform from 120 pounds of pure ge
ek into a shambling mass of stick-like fibers that top about eight-foot tall. Mastodon does the stamping thing and expands out to about the same height, though even with his extra slabs of muscle he looks like lean cuisine by comparison. The robot Brasseye whirs and twitters to himself above us, rustic green cloak like a flag in the breeze. He’s joined by the leonine Manticore, an excess of bare chest in the Chippendales sensibility of his costume design, the purple skin-tight fabric connoting nothing if not the image of a giant pulsing erect member. I don’t even want his shadow to touch me. Vulcana and Smidgeon take up the flanks.

  “Let’s go,” ‘Cana says.

  And so we do.

  *

  WE BARREL INTO the inner courtyard of the complex, a big open rambling wannabe peace park with expensive postmodern sculptures dotted among the rubble from the exploded glass windows and shattered concrete of the main skyscraper reaching up like a monolith from another world. Nothing says the best intentions of mankind like forty storeys of semiotic phallus, though the building’s pubis is scorched and cracked from the events of the past twenty minutes.

  Another of the Titans is caught in the open as we charge in. He and his clone brothers must’ve been expecting a response, but his reaction suggests a moment’s panic. Like the villainess assassin Q I fought to a standstill the day before, this version of Titan varies slightly from the others if in no other way than the cut of his cape’s shorter, his frame not quite as wide as the others of his ilk.

  I’m surprised when he takes off like a super-speedster. A red-and-gold lamé flash.

  Mastodon bulls off after the guy only to stop a second later once he realizes who he’s up against. The evil dude’s gone. Stopping with a curse, the old brawler turns and shoots me a disgruntled look with a slightly cadaveric upturn to the caterpillar mo dying of old age across his upper lip.

  “I don’t get it,” Mastodon snaps.

  “Get what?” Smidgeon practically squeaks from the side, pre-emptively shrunk down to tiny size and perched on Manticore’s shoulder, fingers holding on to a hank of the psionic hero’s shoulder-length mane.

  “What the fuck’re they doing tearing up the UN?”

  “They’re bad guys, ‘Don. You think they need, what, a rationale?”

  “Sure Zeph, but think about it,” Mastodon says, the thoughtful, dare I say philosophical look on his face about as uncomfortable a match as if he was trying on ball gowns.

  “How often do places like this get hit? Practically never,” the ‘Don says. “It’s one idea to, you know, wanna take over the world an’ shit, but just smashin’ up the real estate and spookin’ a few office workers, you gotta do more’n that.”

  “You saw the footage,” Vulcana says. “If what Zephyr’s relayed to us is true, there could be twenty or more of these parallel villains. It’s a co-ordinated attack on all our government sites.”

  Manticore pipes up.

  “I think what Mastodon’s getting at is just, you know, pulverizing public landmarks doesn’t equate with instant tyrannical rule over a complex geo-political situation.”

  I ponder that and the apparent big brain on our resident hair model, nodding, thinking back on the times I’ve done this dance before. I have to agree it’s a proposition that’s easier said than done when it comes to world domination.

  “Then why else would you start randomly destroying the UN?” I ask.

  My innocent tone dies in my throat as I look around at my fellows, their gazes turning as we scan about the now deserted, smoke-strewn courtyard to see ourselves ringed by Titans, a dozen of them, each one grinning nastier and more menacingly than the one before as their eyes light up.

  “Shit,” I say needlessly. “It’s a trap.”

  Zephyr 13.13 “Götterdämmerung”

  THE ENEMY IS clever enough not to simply open up on us while standing in a big circle. Each picks its target, and if you’ve ever dealt with an opponent with gaze-sighted weapons before, you know there’s few modes of attack more accurate or deadly if used to appropriate effect.

  Thankfully, we have Thomas O’Clock.

  The robot Brasseye is a quick-thinker. I guess the nth-level Babbage engine that houses his mind if not his soul computed the likely consequences of our predicament in clockwork-measured milliseconds just as the first red-light flashes open up.

  Once describing his powers as like the effect produced where the stylus meets the vinyl on an old-fashioned record player, Brasseye deals not with sound, but with core principles of physics. In this one moment, Brasseye, as the interface between the Classical principles of our world and the otherworldly magical phenomena that in part fills him with life, simply decides for the present moment that heat is not hot.

  The red eyebeams wash over us with all the ferocity of a warm fart.

  Vulcana, Manticore and Susurrus arise from their oh-god-we’re-fucked crouches, the latter barracking with astonishment and delight to find our dreaded foemen sucker-punched by powerlessness. Fortunately, the rest of us ain’t so slow on the uptake.

  I lay on a burst of speed, wanting to capitalize on the surprise factor in our robot-powered reversal, barreling towards two near identical members of the dozen-odd fleet of Titans surrounding us. With vivid memories of my clobbering at the Silver Tower, I land a devastating left haymaker in the first one’s face that catapults him into and through a nearby concrete curtain wall at about the same moment I lay my right hand on his teammate and channel enough voltage through his chest to neuter a stable of racehorses.

  Titan 2b heaves backwards, a smoking black hand print in the middle of his costumed chest as his eyes roll up into his head. He lands just as the guy I decked digs himself out from under chunks of shattered masonry, an ugly look on his handsome, concrete-dusted mug as he vaults towards me, making up in anger for what he lacks in finesse.

  I only hope the others are making good on our opportunity.

  Titan 2a and I go down, rolling, elbows and the odd fist trying to make their marks and more often than not failing. I smash my knuckles into pebbled concrete flagstones, finally clawing one of the damn things up with my fingernails and smashing it side-on into my opponent’s gaping mouth. He goes down spitting blood and shards of enamel and I follow up, pounding down good and hard six or eight times until the motherfucker lays unmoving in a faint crater.

  I whip about, wiping dust from my eyes to see a less than rosy picture.

  Vulcana bounds and kicks daintily between swarming foes, nigh untouchable as she executes expert karate roundhouse kicks utilizing the strange physics bestowed by her namesake condition, but Manticore and somehow Susurrus are already down and out, Smidgeon’s nowhere to be seen, and Brasseye holds back a half-dozen clone attackers with desperate defensive maneuvers, solidifying air as force fields or something close to it. Mastodon brawls mightily nearby. It’s Götterdämmerung over there as he tosses one Titan away only to cop it from two more. The old brawler wears an expression like an east European sex slave might during induction, guys to left and right wishing him nothing but ill.

  I yell the ‘Don’s name and fly across, parallel to the earth, pulling a version of Titan clad in gold sandals rather than boots from Mastodon’s back only to have my right cross blocked by a quick MMA move. I headbutt the smart alec, sink my knee into his balls as he slumps, then loop my forearms beneath his thigh and around one armpit before twisting like an Olympic discus thrower and hurling him bodily about five car-lengths away.

  Immediately, I’m smashed, taken out like by a freight train, flipping and flopping over the tortured debris of the peace park until I stop against the low-rise granite wall of a trench fountain. Another of the off-world bastards stands grinning a short distance away, hands on hips, barely a smudge on his red tunic as he invites me to stand and try to come again.

  *

  “YOU GOT A name?” I bawl at the guy as I get to my feet picking shards of cobblestone from the knees of my leathers. “Hard to tell you guys apart.”

  “It matt
ers not,” the invader says. “What you’ll commit to memory will in moments be nothing more than gossamer, lost to the threads of time.”

  “Hmm, fancy talking,” I say, still getting a breather. “If you don’t want to ID yourself, you force my hand, pal. I’ll have to give you a stupid nickname instead.”

  “Do your worst, vassal.”

  “Vassal? Oh-ho, rich. I like it.”

  I rush him just as he goes to angle his eye beams on me, me going down low, diving forward in a move that would see anyone else eating dirt. Instead, I create a cushion of air particles that I skim across, arms curling about the madman’s legs to sack him clean and simple.

  It doesn’t stop there. For a moment I think I have this sucker, but he’s as strong as me if not stronger, lithe and fresh, ten years younger maybe, and he wrestles me back before squirming out of my hold like shedding a snake skin. One moment I have his cape bunched in my fist, the next I have a mouthful of dirt, then I look up to take a sucker punch to the top half of my face that pummels me back into the ground, blacking out briefly – while he kicks me three times – then I roll over and away and it’s only a blind, wildly coruscating wave of electricity that backs this Titan off. I get to my feet like a drowning man breaking the ocean’s surface to hear laughter pealing off the broken walls of the building towering over us like a cancer-crippled old man.

  I mutter some imprecation against the gods as Titan circles me. A glance behind shows Brasseye still fighting the good fight, Vulcana getting double banged, and Mastodon seemingly pleading for his life before one of the bruisers repeatedly brings down a wrought iron sculpture of the globe.

  “Fuck.”

  I roar, pure adrenal rage coursing through me as I jet into and through the space where my opponent was standing just split seconds before turning matador. His fist catches me behind the ear and I spiral off in confusion, colliding head-first with the granite trencher and smashing through it, cold water and panicked koi splashing about me.