Zephyr IV

by Warren Hately

  *

  WITH THE FALSE premise dispelled, the Demoness has had enough of exposition. She signals to her troops and this time it means business.

  Despite the revelations, it doesn’t feel any less that Catchfire was my mother – any more than it never really felt like Lennon was my dad, because I grew up without a father and that feeling doesn’t just vanish overnight the moment someone tells you the identity of your alleged sperm donor.

  Ironic, that I came here seeking answers, and like some bad fortune cookie, discovered those answers lay within myself all along.

  And I am no less interested in my revenge than before.

  Ono snarls. She wants me dead and I’ve removed the only sanction keeping me safe. Her whole arm morphs into one gigantic killing instrument, more a gigantic spork than razor-sharp lobster claw, but it aims to do the job good and proper all the same.

  My best aikido move isn’t enough to stop the keen oyster-shell edge slicing across my forearm and I yelp in pain, the first real serious hit of the encounter wakening something dormant from within.

  For a moment, Bellwether is with me, within me, a glowing crucifix upon which my physical shell is merely superimposed. Like a tornado within my skull, she turns my head and opens fire at Ono, the psionic blast as much a barrage of harrowing kinetic force than any psychic grand mal explosion. Ono goes flying away like someone hit the rewind button in a horror movie, disappearing into the inky blackness from which her soul was begat.

  And then Belle goes silent once more.

  Leaving me to slowly re-orient on Lennon’s brood swapping nasty looks as they prepare to finish what they started.

  Zephyr 15.12 “Victory Parade”

  CARBON VOLUNTEERS TO be the first head kicked in. Good of him. He comes at me with that crooked leer, mouth porcelain white in a black face. I fend off his clumsy strikes and deliver rapidfire body blows that sound like crockery smashing, the kid unable to countenance such injuries until I finish by capturing his arm, turning with my body to execute a neat judo shoulder throw I decline to release at the end, meaning I twist and break his arm at shoulder and elbow joints. Even in his carbon form he shrieks, shedding tiny flakes that disappear into the grass.

  I only let go as flames gush towards me, Blaze, I sense, the most reluctant of the Lennon kids to attack. I execute a neat roll, Ruse’s mirror forms leaping away from me, then Hardass piledrives into me from behind and we go smashing through the closest of the pagoda’s external walls, sliding on the polished wood amid a riot of jagged pieces before momentum slows and I flick him up and off me, his ultra-dense body a handy projectile as he flings away, crashing through an intricately-carved lattice.

  Barely up in time, I fend off snarling Carnage, reverting to boxing to deal with his undisciplined claw attacks. What these kids lack in training, they make up for in ferocity and power, but there’s something disappointing if not downright criminal about the lack of skills on show. Ono should’ve done a better job. In moments I sidestep what’s meant to be a deadly double claw rake, grab the kid inside his arm, other wrist snaking about beside his head to throw him bodily across the room and crashing into another internal wall.

  Next I face off against Ruse. There’s a dozen of her. The girl hides somewhere in the middle of her impromptu crowd scene, a clear indicator if nothing else that she doesn’t yearn for this conflict as she might.

  “You can go, you know,” I tell her quietly as Blaze enters the room dripping liquid fire. “You have a sword and illusions. That’s it, sister. You do this, and you’re going to get hurt.”

  Carbon’s cries still ring out from beyond. He’s spluttering something about needing to stay conscious so he doesn’t change back to normal form. Good advice. Ruse hears his plaintive moans and something breaks in her spirit. She backs away. Several of the illusions flicker out of existence, shadows penetrated by the flames licking off Blaze and now catching along the floor and the doorway.

  I include her in my gaze, opening my palms to show the straits we’re in.

  Hardass and Carnage regroup, circling me like a tag team, neither one wanting to be next in line. I flick a maddeningly insouciant look their way, the poster boy for devil-may-care. It might not be what I’m feeling, but I’ll be damned if I’ll show weakness – that’s what separates us pros.

  “Johnny’s hurt,” Ruse says, indicating Carbon outside. “We should call Gretchen and go.”

  “We’re here to kill him,” Carnage slithers, words malformed in his lizard’s mouth.

  Before another word can be spoken, there’s a high pitched whine and I barely get a look at the fast-incoming figure before a blast takes out the whole pagoda. Shattered wood and my one-time siblings go flying fast as three-quarters of the surface structure explodes in one giant shredding detonation.

  The world goes grey, white, brown, black.

  A second or two and I am on my feet again, ears ringing, pushing a wood column from me as I see Ruse lying beneath various planks, most the fine detail of the exquisite pagoda reduced to sawdust, the night coming in, breeze picking up off the ocean with more savagery as I clear dust and grit from my fast-blinking eyes to see a metallic figure with a snapping red cloak standing where once there was an entryway.

  Crimson Cowl.

  “Holy shit,” I say and cough and stagger a couple more steps as Hardass picks himself up from under some debris and I see Carnage in his boy form dragging a groggy Blaze from beneath other wreckage. To her credit, the girl gets to her feet at a moment’s notice and spins, flame on.

  “What are you doing here?” I growl at the robot. “Last I saw you, you killed your own fucking body. What have you been doing? Running scared ever since you realized what you’d done?”

  “I freed myself, Zephyr,” the android says in its cold emotionless voice, made worse by the red hood throwing its face-plate into shadows. None of Julian’s effete tone in that speech now. “And as for what I’ve been doing, I thought I’d made that self-evident: tracking you.”

  “Me?” I am still hard of breath, if not hard of hearing from the ambush. “Why?”

  “Sooner or later I knew you would take me to my half-brothers . . . so I could destroy them.”

  Whatever the tone was before, the youngsters freak. Crimson Cowl comes with a reputation and not one to be missed. I notice Ruse is only barely conscious amid the wood shavings and I crouch, dragging her free and pushing her into Hardass’s startled arms.

  “You want Lennon’s brood, you can start with me first,” I tell him. “You’re not killing any more.”

  “And why would I want to do that?” the android says, stepping into the room and almost daintily over the immediate ruins despite weighing a half-ton at least. “You are no more Lennon’s child than now I am, freed of my weakling earthly body, Zephyr.”

  “How do you know that?” I ask him, puzzled how he could know what was a secret about my parentage.

  “As I said,” the android replies, “I’ve had you under monitoring ever since our last exchange, though you went beyond my reach several times. Like a bad penny, Zephyr, you always turn up in the end. Now stand aside. As far as I am concerned, we have no quarrel unless you cross me. My mission is nearly at an end.”

  And loath as I am to do it, I shake my head “no” and flex my arms, current trickling across my knuckles in readiness.

  “Can’t do that,” I say to him. “Did I mention to you how much I hate robots?”

  And so it begins.

  *

  AS I YIELD a few yards, desperately trying to strategize while the futuristic monolith advances, I note a huge gaping hole in the ground beyond the shattered frames of the pagoda’s other rooms where once a subterranean layer was concealed. Glancing betwixt it and my sentient nemesis, I give a fevered grin and lock eyes with Hardass.

  “Get going.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” I hiss. “Only gonna say it once. Scram. I’ve got this.”

  “You heard
him, Billy,” the girl Blaze says.

  They swap looks as Crimson Cowl strides through the blitzed dojo. I snap forward, grabbing a fallen wood pillar and swinging it hard, collecting the android before he registers it coming, effectively batting him like a curve ball across the wreckage and into the pit observed earlier. With the murderous robot gone, momentarily at least, Hardass and Blaze swap concerted nods and they run for the front of the demolished building and where Carbon was last seen moaning.

  I still rue my squandered opportunities for vengeance. It seems the saints are not on my side today, though I’m reminded the whole turn-the-other-cheek thing means probably there is no patron saint of ruthless cold-hearted vengeance-seeking gangsterillos like me. First Arsenal, now the Demoness disappeared in the bushes. I’ll have to take the chance I have and look for what you might call closure with my old pal the Crimson Cowl.

  *

  THE COWL IS still getting to his feet in the stone-lined basement when I vault down, smashing my knee against the side of his tin can head. The android rolls away like an MMA fighter, barely glancing at our monastic surrounds, the pagoda’s basement another mad scientist’s workshop complete with familiar-looking transwarp podium.

  Each iteration of the Cowls has had its advances and this one is no different. He strikes a pose, stubby 7.62mm caliber fingers outstretched, and the tips on each metal digit rocket free and hiss and whiz across the room at me. Homotropic, the tiny missiles follow me as I freak, unable to discern and for all I know quite terrifyingly lethal, sending me spinning and cartwheeling my way around the big chamber. I throw up an electrified net that causes half of them to explode in tiny bright controlled flashes, then three more fail in the narrow maneuvering between lintel and shelf space. I swing back and blast the ninth one straight out of the air and the tenth one implodes directly in my chest sending me back across the room and clanging discordantly among Yoko Ono’s most carefully hoarded ultra-high tech.

  Crimson Cowl advances all Darth Vader and shit, his denuded hands curled into ill-meaning fists. I shelter behind a huge stone plinth like a tribal altar and he calmly and quite thoroughly shoves it out of the way in his efforts getting at me.

  “You have interfered enough, Zephyr,” the Cowl says in that sinister expressionless machine voice. “It is more expedient for me to terminate you than risk further interference in my plans.”

  I try to get to my feet before the robot can haul me up, but the weariness overcomes my adrenaline and I am up and then hurled through the air, cracking against the far stone-reinforced wall a moment later, upside down, dropping and rolling again, coughing with pain like from a broken rib as the Cowl strides back across the chamber.

  I lift my hand to give him a spray and he calmly doses me with some kind of gas from a compartment in his palm that cloys and sickens me, weakness redoubled. I drop to my knees, juddering, dry retching coming over me just as the villain strides up and kicks me hard enough in the side that I’m flipped up and crashing over into an electronics rack of mysterious design. I total the thing. Fucking wreck it, ripping cables from sockets as I fight to get my hand free in time before the Cowl arrives once more, grabbing me by the front of my far too compliant uniform. I drive my knee nonsensically into the space where its balls should be, you know, if it was a guy and not a soulless machine. And when I slam my left hand into the Cowl’s partly-cloaked throat, hoping I might manage to choke it, he clubs down my arm with one forearm and then backhands me like Rafael Nadal. I rebound from the rack and go spilling among various instruments, trashing a giant toolbox thingy on wheels. I fling a few wrenches and sonic screwdrivers at my assailant as he advances. This scrapping is so unlike me. Honest. He treads over the gadgets or outright ignores them like they’re little more the confetti in the victory parade he’s eternally re-enacting.

  “OK, screw this,” I mutter to myself, the nausea wearing off as fast as it came and I coil into some measure of readiness and throw myself directly at the bad guy.

  His guidance system sees me coming. Probably saw me coming before I even had the thought, if what he said before is true. He twists so I go slightly past him, then swings a devastating right hook into my ribs, throwing my bodywise against the stone slab moved just moments before. I roll over, me managing to land on my feet not really much to boast about as the Cowl steps up onto the ledge and down next to me, grabbing me again by the costumed nape.

  This time, I am ready for him. Throwing my arms around his wrist, I get the bastard in a Brazilian jiujitsu lock that I’m frankly not sure is going to work if he doesn’t have pain receptors. Throwing my weight back, I swing a leg over his shoulder and let my body weight do the rest, what they call an arm bar, and Crimson Cowl is flung somehow over me and onto his back with my wrists twisting around his arm.

  It’s not enough though. A kind of shocked silence emits from the android and I take that moment to brace my boots against the Cowl’s side, firm hold on the arm as I kick out and wrench the fucking thing free with all my might and power, then just as quickly up and scramble away still carrying it. I’d do anything to have that big plasma cannon the cyborg Titan pulled on me back in my home time, but beating the Crimson Cowl to pieces with his own impregnable arm looks like it’s gonna have to suffice.

  Zephyr 15.13 “Artificial Life”

  IF ARTIFICIAL LIFE forms can experience shock, that’s all I can do to explain the way the Crimson Cowl staggers after me as I skip away across Ono’s dungeon antechamber, swinging at him with his own arm like it’s a double-jointed baseball bat. If there is any remnant of Julian inside, then I pity him, because extinguishing that flame is all that stands now between me and my revenge.

  I duck as the android hefts his remaining hand, a swing lock on his chest spiraling open and another of those massive shredding disintegration attacks unleash barely over the top of my head as I drop flat. Huge swathes of the downstairs confines are totaled, though not the main podium and its associated racks, and debris and fine granulated clutter sharp as broken glass swirls around, bouncing off the rock walls as the cyclonic force has nowhere to go but up and out the gaping aperture above us.

  I take flight as the Cowl does his best staggering Herman Munster impersonation, but he’s a flier too, hot on my tail, but not as fast as me as I go twisting up and out of the glowing ruins of the pagoda, Blaze’s flames or perhaps simply spilled lamps causing the remaining far wing of the stately wooden building to go up in a miniature inferno, me simply another spark as I light into the Sixteenth Century night with the one-armed murderer hot on my heels.

  In the air, the Crimson Cowl is more on my territory and I let slip the speed a moment – we’re about a half-mile into the air and I can see late medieval Japan spread out in the moonlit countryside around me, rice fields and a few tiny fire-prone hamlets and honest-to-god Mount Fuji or something similar in the far distance, snowy upper slopes winking in the natural luminescence of a million myriad stars birthing and dying like distant whales in the black ocean of the heavens above us – and the Cowl comes up faster than he expects, letting me bash into him as he approaches, two feet mashing his head and chest and propelling him away as I twist and turn like Tinkerbell by comparison, hitting Mach in an instant and tearing away.

  There’s no intention to run, but I need to level the stakes. The android gives belated pursuit and I sense more of his miniature Stinger missiles chasing me, but they drop away and explode like microcosms above the somnolent Nipponese villages, giving those crouched fearfully inside something to remember as I cut low, swooping into a venerable pine forest going hard and fast between the trees.

  Crimson Cowl doesn’t have the same upper echelon navigation system my biochemistry designed for me as a natural supersonic flier. After just a moment’s pursuit in the forest he clips the first tree, rebounds off a second, and realizes the error of his ways in trying to take me on my own terms. Shrewdly, the mechanical assassin lands on his hydraulic feet and unleashes with the chest blast again, a wave of
force in my wake, me racing the tide as dozens upon dozens of trees are blasted to bits, the air thick with matchsticks, trees more close by simply lifting up by their roots and tumbling free so my evasive maneuvers are like escaping hundreds of flying pins in a bowling alley.

  Panting, I land at the periphery of the Cowl’s destruction, a huge swathe of wrecked moonlit earth behind. Seeing me in plain sight, the robot starts running towards me across the wasteland, every inch of his power evident in the slamming footfalls, but I grin, slipping back into the remaining undamaged forest, evading him between the trees as he starts swinging with his one good arm, metal fist smashing chunks from splintering trees.

  In the end, it’s my quickness, not power that overwhelms him. There is grit or sawdust in his rotors and I get behind him, double handfuls of leg as I tip him like a college prank. Once he’s down, he’s off-balance, and rather than pulping my fists on his adamantine shell, I push and trip and redirect him into the sturdy tree boles, the scuff marks and dents mounting up on his armor. He goes to unload with the chest blast once more, but I tear a sapling from the fertile soil and bat his legs from beneath him and the cone of destruction does little more than shred air and upper branches, pine needles wafting around us like green snow before I get atop him, the android making weird staticky noises like a machine blubbering for its mother as I lever the fucking thing’s head off, and amid the zapping and snapping, for a moment I almost imagine I feel Julian’s spirit passing, and in my anger I hurl the head as far as I can, dropping to my ass in the dirt and feeling one huge racking sob rack my chest before I realize I’m empty.

  Crimson Cowl lifts his remaining hand a moment and then it drops heavily to the soil.

  You’ll need the head, Belle’s tiny voice echoes in my cerebellum. If he followed you, he followed others as well.