*
I CHECK THE time on my Enercom phone, mindful of the details my website guy gave me about a one Robert Rogers, the guy who claims to’ve been trying to contact me for the past year or whatever. Even with my usual languor, I’m more than a little intrigued about what the nobody can tell me. Anyone who can give me details aiding and abetting my renewed appetite for revenge is on my invite list, though apparently I have to come to him. That being the case, he’s gonna have to wait a while.
I shoot past Silver Tower and its panoply of construction rigging. I can practically hear Amadeus Chancel cussing the bottoming out of his fortune and I have no idea if skyscraper insurance would cover destruction at the hands of incarnate star gods. The convenient telecommunications hub has gone along with the crest of the building, but it’s as good a location to confirm yet again Tessa isn’t taking calls.
Crayons is an upmarket eatery with a mezzanine view over the gentrified badlands of old New Jersey towards the Van Buren waterfront, ghost towers of Manhattan spectral in the hazy distance. No one takes in the view except me, but then again I’m the only guest who lands on the balcony without first coming up the stairs. A few cameras flash and I sign an autograph as I scan the room and find the scrumptious Ms O’Hagan watching me with her wry wrinkle-nosed look to which I reply with my best Rat Pack grin, arms open indifferent to the half-dozen fans about me like they are just spirits in the material world. Eventually I make my way over to the table and a lady clearly unused to having to wait. I sit with aplomb, just wishing there was a martini I could nab from a passing tray.
“How’re we doing?” I ask with a grin.
“I’m out three hundred buckaroos and whatever apocalypse you’ve unleashed on my agency credit card,” Hallory says. “But I’ve got a proposal for you.”
“An indecent proposal, I hope,” I say and wink.
“I hated Meg Ryan in that film,” Hallory replies without breaking stride. “What I’m talking about here comes from a major agency and I think – we think – you’d be perfect.”
“Business before ordering. Must be serious.”
“You’ve heard of Pal-mart, right?”
I stare at her like she’s just peed on my foot. She ahems and moves on.
“OK, but you probably haven’t heard about the Pal-mart Punisher.”
“I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.”
Frowns aplenty.
“So they have this young super from the west coast. Originally called himself Bouncer or something like that. You know, super-strong, resilient skin, super-jumping and some kind of weird multi-tasking power as well.”
“Multi-tasking’s not actually a superpower. I know women think it is.”
“I mean something other than that. Anyway, Bouncer came east, fell on hard times, the woman of his dreams something something something, you know the rest.”
I frown again, no idea what the fuck she’s talking about.
“So Pal-mart made Bouncer an offer he didn’t want to refuse. New name and costume, a whole new identity. Lucrative pay packet. In-store Caesar card. The whole nine yards. Practically gave the kid prima nocta with the check-out girls.”
“I don’t know where this is going, but I don’t think I like it.”
“He needs someone to fight to give him a reputation and show advertisers and clients who the Pal-mart Punisher really is.”
“Who he really is? That doesn’t make any sense. In fact, that’s a total contradiction.”
I stab my glare at her. A waitress comes and goes. I barely notice.
“And you want him to fight Zephyr?”
Hallory laughs. Not just laughs. Explodes. She somehow orders a bottle of Cristal with just a hand signal.
“No Zephyr, we don’t want the Punisher to fight you.”
“Well fuck, that’s a relief –”
“We want you to dress in a costume we’ve designed and fight him under an assumed costumed identity.”
I blink. The awful thing is that my first thought isn’t to be repulsed by the idea, but to be glad at least it’s not something that’s going to tarnish Zephyr’s reputation, you know, any further than I’ve tarnished it myself. The second sickly thought is to wonder how much they’re paying, and Freud be damned, I voice the question without even willing myself to speak.
“Fifty thousand,” Hallory says, another cat-got-the-cream smirk. “Double that if you’re injured or your identity’s exposed in the course of duties.”
“How do I know you’re not just going to unmask me once I’m done as part of some kind of slimy back door deal and make all your losses back through the tabloids?”
“Because I thought that’d be your play,” she calmly replies. “Besides, I don’t know if you’ve heard the news about newspapers, Zeph, but they don’t exactly have many shekels to rub together these days.”
I mutter something about the death of newspapers being greatly over-reported and sink lower in my chair, only sating my gloom with a solid slug of champagne once the mincing fairy in black-and-whites uncorks the fucker for us.
Hallory orders us the steaks as she watches me from across the other side of the table like a pool shark on the prowl. My own gloom deepens, knowing complicity’s just a nod of my head away.
“When are we talking about doing this?”
“They want to roll next week. If you pass, we’re approaching Negator.”
“Crap. Don’t tell him he’s being offered the same fee?”
“It’s danger money, Zephyr. We’re not paying for your name, so it’s the same price first come, first served.”
As we dine, Hallory pulls out her tablet and shows me the not entirely Priscilla Queen of the Desert designs for my future alter ego. It has a head-dress, but at least the mask covers most of my face.
“You can choose the name, provided it passes approval. We have a few provisional monikers, but you know, with you guys, your powers and stuff. . . .”
I wish the food tasted worse for my self-betrayal, but we dine like Roman senators, just without all the barfing and stabbing slaves in the bladder.
And I’m trying to hint about another bottle of liquor right when the next attempt on my life kicks off.
Zephyr 13.8 “The Impossible Nowhere”
YES YOU’RE PROBABLY wondering why I hadn’t put anything on my list about trying to isolate who put a price on my head. I may have mentioned knowing there were things missing from the list I might later regret.
Case in point: one black-and-red leather-clad vixen who cartwheels through the busy restaurant hurling a hailstorm of flechette darts from which I only just manage to pull Hallory down and flip over the table as cover. The woman’s hard-heeled kick smashes the table away into the crowd, taking out our waiter, but otherwise missing the majority of other patrons streaking for the exits faster than a fat man with Crohn’s disease on a toilet sprint.
Hallory scrambles away, hopefully anonymous in the throng as I light up and scan for other targets before the lights dim, lambent energy sucked from the lighting and into the attack I unleash like a storm-burst on the mystery woman, only to have her cartwheel nimbly away.
Or so it appears.
A bronze-knuckled fist crosses my jaw from the impossible nowhere. It’s more than a love tap, but as I turn to counter-attack, the black-haired woman winks out of existence. My karate chop scorches nothing. A split-second later I take a kick in the kidneys and I am turning, grabbing the tablecloth from a nearby place setting to throw over my attacker, but it only caresses empty air as another vision vanishes.
“Great.”
The woman who first attacked hangs back, smiling sly, red panels up the sides of her mimic’s get-up, arms bare, dolphin-beaked leather face mask leaving thick swathes of black hair clinging to her lightly sweating arms like gossamer spider’s web.
OK, so I’m turned on now too.
“Who the fuck are you?” I ask.
“You wouldn’t know me,” she replies in a husky voic
e that only deepens the appeal, however much trying to kill me counteracts it. “I’m Q.”
“Q?”
My look says it all. Stupid name. Not even a name. She shrugs it off.
“And why do they call you that?” I ask.
(Digging for intel, not just making small talk, I’ll have you know.)
“They don’t,” she snaps. “I chose the name myself.”
And she moves. Quick, but not super-fast. What happens next puzzles me, gasping as a blade cuts across my thigh. Before my eyes, Q splits into a half-dozen versions of herself, and by that I really mean versions. One has an eye patch. One’s costume is purple and black rather than red. Another wears a shorter bob. And they each wield different weapons: a spiked baton, a kusari gama, an electric whip, brass knuckles, a pair of stun guns. And a katana.
I land a punch on the bitch with the sword. Pretty sure I feel something crack and it’s not me. Problem is the moment I do the business, that specific iteration of my attacker disappears into the ether just as quick.
“Fuck!”
In the time it takes me to swear, another half-dozen near-identical women appear to replace those already departing into nothingness. I’m punched in the side of the head and in the ribs. Twice. I deflect a gloved hand wielding a .50cal Desert Eagle. The shot goes off into a chandelier and glass and shards of plastic clatter around us. I get a woman in a choke hold with one side of her face burned the color of snake skin and deliver a crushing headbutt into my own palm as she winks out of existence in the blink of an eye.
Frustrating.
*
“LET ME GUESS,” I say after a moment more of this nonsense. “Q is for Quantum, right?”
“Not just a pretty face,” the assassin says with a smirk. “Quantum. Quorum. Quotient. I’ve got the Q-market covered.”
“You know I’m gonna have to do more than put you over my knee for this.”
“You can try.”
Again she dopplers into a half-dozen versions of herself.
“The more the merrier,” I say flippantly.
One of the clones has an Uzi. I hit a burst of super speed, dancing past the cherry-hot slugs as they rip across the restaurant and explode crockery in display cases along the far wall. The gunwoman disappears before I can land a fist. I take out my frustration on a shaven-headed replica, fist exploding her jaw with such vigor I’m momentarily aghast at my own strength, not having reckoned on her failure to escape. I guess there’s under-performers in every parallel. My rectitude doesn’t last long. Brass knuckles dig into my ribs. I block a knife-hand strike, push away an armored knee attack, backhand a version of Q with one dead eye and a crazed look in the other. A Japanese dagger sinks into the back of my thigh with surgical precision and I go to one knee, just narrowly defending myself as a garrote loops about my throat from behind. I tear it away, tossing it as far as I can as a rain of kicks snap along my upper arm and then the side of my head. I take the momentum, rolling with it, rolling free, electrical burst backward making two of the conjured assassins ragdoll before they vanish back whence they came. My hands come together almost at prayer as I rise, the wave of compressed air throwing off two more leaping in to attack me with batons and a ceremonial claymore. Steadily I whittle the tide back, Q’s horde turning into an army of one. We face off, sweat dripping from my brow as I gingerly check the thigh wound while a look at once aggrieved yet curious passes across my attacker’s face.
“What happens to them?” I ask.
Q shakes her head. Not information she’s willing to trade.
“Who sent you?” I try again.
The woman studies me like a mongoose before a cobra, or so I fancy. A mongoose with second thoughts. She scans quickly. The look of a woman who always knows where’s the exit.
“C’mon, give a guy a break,” I say as I take a few tentative steps closer. “I don’t even know who’s gunning for me. You weren’t the first.”
“And I won’t be the last,” Q says.
“Am I going to see you again?” I ask, knowing I totally have the wrong tone.
It takes her by surprise. I imagine a classic beauty behind the mask of that gorgeous smile. I could be wrong. Some of her shadow-selves weren’t exactly showstoppers.
“Not like this,” she says, and that’s all she says.
Q turns like the athlete she is and sprints for the exit as the sirens of the city’s ever second best sentries echo from the streets nearby. Patrons who did their best duck and cover now stand, shivering and sullen, many shooting me looks heavy with misgiving, but I focus on helping Hallory from her hidey-hole, plaster and flecks of someone’s appetizer in her riotous red hair.
“Who the hell was that?” she asks in a shaky voice.
“What, you weren’t listening to my banter?”
“Banter? It sounded to me like you were trying to get laid.”
I hum, looking away. “Guilty as charged,” I shrug. “It’s like that Buddhist story about the guy hanging off a cliff with a strawberry vine. Sometimes you have to just enjoy the moment.”
Zephyr 13.9 “The Titan Situation”
I LEAVE MY lunch date with a bad taste in her mouth as I jet southward away over the city, angling my scimitar flight path away from an approaching storm-front boiling like a witch’s cauldron beyond the eastern seaboard. The afternoon light weakens under the veil of gloom, but it’s mere seconds for me as I reach the next pigeon-caked rooftop and alight, answering a random call from the mayor’s office and quickly mass-deleting my voice mail before calling up the number I need.
“Yo, ‘Don? It’s me, Zephyr.”
Mastodon’s voice comes back tinny through whatever infernal subspace channeling’s made possible by the Wallachians’ arcane tech. I quickly make the dinner date, all part of my own nefarious grand plan that will have me out with the new New Sentinels if they catch wind of my true intentions. Then I shuck the Enercom phone away and contemplate my options, eyes turning now to the busy subway nexus spilling midafternoon commuters into the same public square where I once squashed a self-styled insect god, admittedly with Twilight’s help.
The guy I’ve been told to seek out stands just as my website guy said he would. A look of impatience on his strangely handsome, lantern-jawed face that plucks at residual memories. He’s done this dance before, I know, leaving messages for me throughout the last year after allegedly trying to get my attention half-a-dozen times at different public appearances. I don’t try and pretend I am one of the common people when almost everything I’ve ever worked towards has been to get me the fuck away from them. That’s what we’re all doing, most the time, if you admit this truth to yourself for a moment no matter what kind of asshole it makes you appear. There’s plenty of people who never bother trying to drag themselves out of the mire of their own circumstances, and then the billions of us in one way or another shackled to the rat race, but even in the reptilian minds of our ancient ancestors there were two drives now playing out with cataclysmic results in our fading post-consumer culture: the drive for survival through convenience, and the urge to get above our betters.
I drop from the rooftop, plunging twenty storeys to slow to a grunt-inducing landing directly in front of where the Clark Kent-looking sonofabitch stands with his briefcase clutched to the retro tie and burgundy Burberry-clad chest. The glasses damn near leap off his face, a lick of black hair held in place with the soft scent of vanilla undiminished by the subway’s disgorging hordes.
“Z-Zephyr? You came!”
“I’m not even gonna make a pun of that. Heard you had something important to tell me,” I tell the guy gasping before me in astonishment not unlike a particularly good-looking goldfish asphyxiating outside the fish bowl.
“I’ve been trying to warn you about this for months, but no one –”
“OK, I’m here now,” I say soothingly, just trying to get past the panicked reaction as other commuters stop in their transit to gawp, the crowd gathering as quick as if I’d thro
wn twenty-dollar bills.
I didn’t get it before apparently, but I know without the guy telling me the source of his inside knowledge. He might not be wearing a gold tiara or a pair of lamé hot pants, but he clearly resembles the Latin-speaking dude who damned near barbecued me further up the city a few months back – back when both my mothers were still alive and I lived like a child still in blessed ignorance at just how many brutal things must pass for me to accept the mantle of my own circumstances.
I gesture with a thumb. “You wanna get out of here? I’ll meet you on the roof.”
The guy’s puzzled look stops me in my tracks. He stammers, nothing sensible really coming out.
“What?” I say. “You can’t fly?”
“That’s what I’m trying to get at,” he answers. “I’m not one of them,” he says with a low hiss quickly evaporating into the growing hubbub around us.
“OK, this is pretty gay, but I don’t see much option right now.”
Then louder as I start manhandling the guy, “‘scuse me folks! Back up a little.”
I ignore some kids pushing improvised autograph books in my face and rocket skywards with my informant clutched under the armpits, hoping the guy won’t puke or make water on the crowds below as we soar into Atlantic City’s soupy empyrean and back onto the rooftop I surveilled him from before.
*
THE MAN OF the moment manages to recover from his close brush with fame as well as the city’s stratospheric pollution. Not only does he apparently have no superpowers, he uses a frigging puffer to get his breath back as he pushes those annoying glasses back up his nose. You know the type, glasses that would make you or me look like total book-ends, but somehow elevate this dude’s good looks to male model proportions.
“It’s Eric. Eric Draven,” he says, still a tad wheezy. “And that’s my real name before you say anything.”
“Draven? Never heard of you.”
“I’ve been trying to warn you –”
“Dude, I do a cold open, OK? Enough with the recap. Spill.”
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