Zephyr II

by Warren Hately

  “Tell me how to get my fucking powers back up, you little bitch,” I growl.

  My hearing’s not what it was, but I think she tells me to go screw myself. I tighten my grip and she makes a vain attempt to heel-stamp my feet and I back away and things would be going so right from there if Ruse didn’t kick me in the back of the knee and make me go down like some school yard prank. Eclipse flops on top of me and wriggles free like a wet fish and I’m still searching for my equilibrium when Hardass joins the party, picking me up bodily and giving me a shake hard enough to make my leg joints crackle, and then he bowls my over his hip and into the wooden inner wall through which they’ve so recently come.

  The wall has far too much resistance for my liking and I slide down it like a snail in heat and meet the ground with my temple and things go woozy for a bit. As I recover, I realize Hardass and the girl Eclipse have been speaking.

  “. . . turkey motherfucker.”

  “We’ve been immunized to the Leveller, you asshole,” Hardass sneers.

  “Any other day I’d copy your powers and beat you to death with them,” the girl adds, looking me up and down before actually spitting at me.

  I hold up a hand.

  “Enough,” I say, and cough with the pain biting into my side. “I don’t understand why we’re fighting. John Lennon was my father too.”

  “We know who you are, Zephyr.”

  Hardass speaks down to me in the sort of voice rich with contempt only a teenager could manage.

  “We know who you are, and we don’t give a shit,” Eclipse adds.

  Zephyr 6.14 “Into The Freudian Glare”

  I GET THE impression maybe Hardass wants to say more, but instead he gives an emasculated yelp and sinks into the floor up to his knees. He’s still shocked and looking around (kinda like the rest of us) and Eclipse adopts her crappy, half-trained judo pose and completely misses Nightwind phasing up from the ground behind her. The expressionless mask looks at me a moment with abject pity, perhaps even scorn, and then he kidney punches the girl and she gasps and falls to her knees and Nightwind back-hands her behind the ear and she lays down flat.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Hardass screams.

  Nightwind’s synthesized voice is surprisingly sinister for a dude who I have consistently written off over the last few years.

  “Have a good time extracting your molecules from that, asshole.”

  Then he looks at me and there’s silence for a good second or so before he says, “Get up.”

  “Just about to,” I fire back and stand and just then it feels like one of my integral rubber bands snap and pain flares from my asshole to my armpit.

  “Oh Jesus,” I manage to stutter and then take a few limping steps.

  Wherever Ono disappeared to, she returns in a blur of black light and brutally karate chops the guy in the background with the long hair before he can even turn around. Mastodon is still on the floor, but the robot, Brasseye, stands over him exchanging fisticuffs with Carbon while Loren makes like the good barbarian’s girlfriend and camps out at his knee.

  Smidgeon struggles up from wherever he’s been playing possum and Ono, like some diminutive Darth Vader in drag, barely pauses as she lashes out and takes him in the side of the head with her long-nailed fist and his head splashes back and he topples to the tiles. The Demoness then grabs the lizard-guy by the shoulder and points to Nightwind and me and throws her hands above her head and suddenly there’s gale-force winds and a banshee screaming and I fall to my knees for the umpteenth fucking time and cover my ears as Nightwind tries to clutch on to a piece of furniture that’s nowhere to be found and then Hardass and Eclipse and the other Lennon kids are either gone or they are disappearing rapidly from my sight down some black tunnel that has opened up midair before us as the torrential breeze dies down and again we’re just a bunch of spent superheroes in the ruin of a Tokyo skyscraper with no sign of the enemy.

  “Fantastic,” Nightwind says and puts his hands on his hips almost like a mockery of me. “Fucking fantastic.”

  Loren scrambles over to Mastodon, who continues gasping like a carp and shooting me evil glances and she cries, “Tony needs triage immediately,” and I kinda wonder when Seeker and Mastodon got on a first name basis. I guess I haven’t been around much. The robot groks out on the whole apparent lifelessness of Smidgeon before managing to get him up and stumbling around like a drunk man walking off the night before, and the tall, long-haired guy in the seriously v-necked superhero costume moves over to me with a concerned expression on his bruised, leonine features.

  “Zephyr? Are you alright?”

  “Who the fuck are you?” I gasp.

  “You don’t remember? Manticore.”

  “Manticore,” I manage to repeat. “Manticore. Right. Rhymes with Man-o-war.”

  The blonde guys grins and he nods. “That’s right.”

  “Makes me think of Manpower. And that costume ain’t helping.”

  I hobble away declining to drink in his crestfallen expression and watch as the injured are loaded into the ghostly apparatus of the Wallachian Fortress which has kindly floated in to co-exist briefly with the Paladin building once more so we can make our escape. Brasseye helps Smidgeon up the slope and is followed by Manticore and Loren directs a group of black-cowled monks floating the ‘Don on one of their mysterious stretchers and then a gloved hand falls on my shoulder from behind.

  “Not so fast, fucktard.”

  *

  I WOULD TURN around myself except the force of Nightwind’s grip twists me back anyway and it’s true to say I am not wholly prepared for the punch to the face that follows. Someone opens up a jar of cranberry juice in my nose and I’m so appalled by the spectacle that I stagger back, bending over to let the bloody fiasco splatter the crushed tile floor of the former conference room.

  “What the . . . ?”

  “You’ve had this a long time coming, you arrogant prick,” Nightwind replies.

  He steps in and I can barely comprehend what he’s doing. The boxing moves seem as alien to the situation as dirty dancing and that’s the only explanation I can offer as to why I let this motherfucker lay another glove on me. I double over as all the air vacates my lungs and rather than knee me in the proffered face, Nightwind grabs me by the hair and pulls me back the other way and like a lazy wrestler performing for a crowd, he scandalously kicks my legs out from beneath me.

  I manage to spit out something about not knowing what the fuck he thinks he’s doing and I stand like a drunken old man and defend myself, still completely powerless as he launches a serious of hard and fast blows to my head. My face I manage to protect. Sadly, I am not so well prepared for the sneak blows to my solar plexus and gut and I resist doubling up again only long enough to catch a left hook that nearly sends me to Nevond-fucking-Nevnend.

  “You asshole,” I stammer, appalled, desperately trying to clear more goo from my mouth and nose, spitting out blood and chips of tooth and wiping the tears of pain from the slits in my mask.

  “Like I said, Zeph. You’ve had this a long time coming. Sorry.”

  “Sorry?”

  Nightwind then actually laughs, putting the lie to the whole charade. And this time we dance like seasoned fighters, him far more lithe and limber than I’ve ever seen him credit since he’s usually first before the cameras and a long way from where any of the actual action occurs. You wouldn’t think he had it in him. Or I certainly wouldn’t, as the circumstances presently show, though now I treat him seriously enough as we block and counter-block karate strikes and I manage to put my booted toe into a painful spot in his thigh, but without my powers there’s nothing but the strength of my yes, still quite considerable frame to make the blows hurt, and I am sure whatever technical apparatus allows Nightwind to avoid Ono’s power eraser, it’s also adequate to the job of helping him wipe the floor with me.

  Nonetheless, I put up a decent fight. He’s faster than I would’ve thought and without my friction-easin
g speed I am not the match I’d like to be. Too many times I move to block a feint and the bastard sinks his knuckles into the vulnerable meat above my hip or under my ribs or even punches into the heaped muscles of my upper arms to leave me numb and staggering like a punch-drunk pony and walking into the killer counter-attack he plots out like a chess nerd strategizing checkmate in under twenty moves. It comes out in my frustration as I roar and try to use brute force alone to bring him down, though just when I feel I am beginning to get a handle on the situation, my haymaker sails literally right through him and my fist smashes through the thick plate glass of the boardroom’s external windows. I miraculously manage not to slash my wrist and Nightwind, using the phasing technology he’s got under the hood, emerges out of subspace with a sarcastic snicker and simply puts his toe forward again and lifts his dukes and mocks me with the energy of a much younger boxer.

  “You fucker,” I gasp and spit. “Must be some freaky enmity you’re finally managing to work out . . . on me. Shame you had to wait till someone cancelled my powers.”

  “This has been coming since long ago.”

  And then he adds, “Brother.”

  I expect him to punch me and in my shock at his statement I’m simply not prepared for any deviation from this strategy as he just pushes me double-handed into the fault-line of the skyscraper window and the huge busted pane gives way with a tumultuous crackle and I desperately try to grab for something, anything, and instead clutch empty air and glass shards and stagger inexorably backwards through the vagina dentata, falling into the Freudian glare of the late Tokyo afternoon.

  Zephyr 6.15 Coda

  I PLUNGE THIRTY floors to my death, not too ashamed to say I am pissing myself goodbye as I flail helplessly and manage to achieve very little but collect a couple of weather bots on the way down. None of them do me any good. There’s no winging my way to safety on the back of an unfeasibly strong meteorological device in this script.

  My desperate trajectory takes me out over several lanes of busy traffic, but not far enough to strike the big erection on the other side of the square. Instead, I can roughly glimpse my own panicked flight in the chromatic glass across from me and marvel at the fact, even without my powers, my heightened physiognomy must be enough to stop me passing out from the fall at this height regardless of what I might wish.

  In full, florid panic I try to activate my powers, fists clenching and rapidly unclenching and arms rigid with the effort to discover some as-yet undiscovered muscle that might somehow propel me from this personal catastrophe. But again, there’s nothing, and right to the very end I somehow hope against hope the persistent failure of predictable outcomes that has dogged my entire life might abate for just one moment so I can have a nice clean comic book conclusion and wrest myself clear and safe from this inevitable disaster.

  I yell, if you can call the broken-throated noise that. And I am pleased to say, having tasted death, my last thought is not for me but my beautiful daughter. There are no words to encapsulate this final desperate hope, since even in the last moment of life the unvoiced speculations of our desperate minds are pitched in the world of possibilities and not the flat-line fatalism of death. I hit the tarmac of the Japanese intersection fully expecting to explode like a week-old melon and instead the surface of the ground gives way like a child’s trampoline and after a moment’s inertia I am flung jubilant and astonished and extremely smelly into the air and then down again, repeating the move with the entropy of motion even Tom O’Clock cannot eliminate entirely, and when I’m more or less lying still on the deceptively hard road surface, I roll over and groan and eye the golden boots descending beside me and look up, the transcendent sun ablaze on the Paladin Corp building behind.

  Brasseye offers me his hand and I take it and stand shakily.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I am tempted to have a C3PO moment with you, but even my stilted interactions with your species tells me humor is not appropriate to the moment,” O’Clock says.

  “You saved my fucking life,” I gasp and stagger away and throw up, hands on the piss-soaked thighs of my leather pants.

  “Correct,” the robot replies. “In the wisdom of the ancient druids and the philosophy of universal balance I strive to embody, saving your life seemed an appropriate response to whatever it was you’d call what Nightwind was doing.”

  “Trying to kill me,” I say, and it comes out like a sob and I’m not terribly proud of myself.

  “I’m not sure there was any actual trying going on.”

  “I don’t need the lesson in grammar.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “You, robot?” I look up and grudgingly laugh. “Anything.”

  “Ah,” O’Clock replies and his weird concentric brass eyes whir and contract and open up again. “It seems then you ‘owe me one,’ if I read this situation right.”

  I nod, and possibly say, “I do.”

  “Ah then. Bully for me.”

  I double over and curse a bit more and spit a few more quarts of bloody phlegm from my mouth and touch my swollen jaw and split eyebrow and stand and decide there’s probably not much dignity or point left to holding on to the half-a-cup of pee pressing in my bladder and I simply let go and lift my gaze to the impossible height of the tower and the one black, jagged ventricle that nearly spelled my doom.

  “I am so going to fucking kill that guy, it’s not even funny.”

  Zephyr 7.1 “There Is A Darkness”

  THE THICK CLOUD cover suits me fine as I gun the throttle on the Triumph and kill the lights, turning off the seedy main strip and angling the bike down the laneway leading to the back of MacGeraghty’s Bar. Loren has a firm grip on my waist as I gut the motor and cruise into a shadowed space beside an overflowing dumpster, rats scurrying in our wake as tentative moonbeams break through and are swallowed up again.

  As Lioness, Loren dismounts from the chopper like from a sex act, and I pull my heavy motorcycle boots over the machine and tuck back the tail of my leather overcoat, check the snug fit of the Zorro bandana and stroke the russet goatee she’s encouraged me to grow. The metal washers sewn into the knuckles and palm of the black fingerless gloves are heavy, though I’m getting used to them now – likewise the metal sewn into the knees of my leather pants. On my thighs and crotch there is Kevlar, and above that a ballistic vest straight from eBay letting me keep my arms bare under the coat to compensate for the almost sticky, humid night.

  I indicate the rusted ladder and Lioness goes ahead of me, something cocky in her wide-hipped walk adopted just for tonight – an overt show of the confidence I know she doesn’t feel. Nonetheless, it’s a fine view as I follow her up, the maroon leathers clinging to her round ass, the twin nightsticks holstered across her mostly bare back with the handles disappearing into the chaos of her honey-brown hair. Under the wan light, with the streetlights along the waterfront on the fritz as usual, we’re monochrome avengers as we pad across the tin warehouse roof with me wincing as I try to compensate for my heavier bulk, exaggerated by the extra protection I’m not accustomed to needing.

  “You still sure about this?” I whisper as we reach the edge of the roof and another fire escape, the back door to the dealer’s bar below us, cigarette smoke and vomit like the spices of India thick in the air.

  “It’s this or nothing,” Loren quietly replies.

  As if responding to our unvoiced fears, a siren starts in the distance, far enough and dopplering away rapidly – not likely to trouble anyone we might visit tonight. All the same, as unregistered masks we’re on a priority list and I for one don’t want to have to explain the situation, unmasked in some grimy, junkie-besieged Van Buren station house.

  “OK,” I say finally, as much to myself as my accomplice.

  We have practiced this. I grab the rails and swing out, letting my weight carry me down the rusty bars until I clutch for a hold at the last moment and my legs snap around and my boots together take the guy with the cigarette in the middle
of the chest and drive him back and through the wooden door.

  I am inside just like that, the red glow of the Miller sign above the mirrored bar a distinct environment from the night air outside. There is no hesitation. Just to the side there’s a bearded guy with a Glock on his belt and I grab his fingers before he can move and twist and they snap and as I hold his arm straight, before he can even scream, I bring my other palm up and destroy his elbow, and then it’s the final cruelty, twisting his broken arm behind his back and he gives up and passes out before he can even really voice his confusion, shock, pain and alarm.

  I turn away from him and lay hard karate chops with my metal-weighted hands into the neck and face of a tough holding a pool cue and still staring at the half-million deal going down in the middle of his table.

  Frank Vincent Morales, aka Vinnie Morals, is the quickest of the bunch. He has the twelve gauge up as a nightstick spins through the air and takes him in the face, busting not just his nose but the bones that keep his upper teeth in, and he drops back, bottles and ornamental beersteins and big decorative glass schooners and shit clattering around him and the gun goes off and finally spooks the other three guys into action.

  I do a quick shuffle and my enormous boot catches a young-looking kid in a linen suit in the middle of the chest and he hits the bar hard enough we can hear the vertebrae crack. Loren’s on my left, twirling her other baton like a cheerleader from Hell and she snaps a big bald motherfucker’s forearm as he reaches inside his Italian suit for a Tec-9 and the sound the hanbo makes as it lifts and then rebounds from the dude’s skull seems to telegraph across the room and reverberate as the final biker guy draws his switchblade and I capture his wrist and turn and swing my superior weight into him and draw him over my shoulder in a judo throw that puts him on the ground with a broken arm and dislocated shoulder.