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.
“What do you want?” I gasp, frustrated, not yet completely defeated. Standing. Taking in the calm implacable confident smug shit-eating grin as the handsome interloper circles me, eyes flashing red for just an instant.
“To rebuild your world in our image. To fashion it according to our design,” he replies matter-of-factly, however theatrical it might be.
“There some big problem you couldn’t do this where you came from?”
“This is just the first step. The Prime, he had the key. Genesis. The craft in our idea was his,” this Titan says. “Individually, we were weak. Downtrodden. Oft defeated. Like yourself now, if you can commiserate as a devil in angels’ presence.”
“I’m no angel, pal, but neither are you.”
“Kneel before me and I’ll end the misery you call life,” he says.
“Jesus, get a grip on yourself,” I say and actually chuckle, feeling like something’s broken inside my skull, the grin turning pained but fey, cautious yet cunning.
I light him up. He dances just as good as his teammate I electrocuted earlier. I hose him good and proper and then give him some more, and then the fucker lays out on the cracked and broken cobbles twitching like a lobotomized goldfish, as well he might be.
Then I kneel beside him swift as I can and twist his neck until I hear it crack.
Standing, I take in the wrack of the battle dying down around me. A half-dozen of these interdimensional assholes seeing my handiwork and all of us knowing the score. Their plan isn’t happening without bloodshed and I’m not going down without giving everything I’ve got.
Brasseye lands next to me, barely scanning the dead Titan.
“Six down,” he says. “Six to go.”
I nod. We get into it.
Zephyr 13.14 (Coda)
IT IS HARD knowing you’re fighting a losing battle. We do it anyway. As much as I wanted to cut the robot’s bravado short and suggest we retreat, I’m in no doubt if we abandon our unconscious teammates, they won’t be alive to rescue later. I’ve barely pricked the surface in clutching for straws in these bastards’ motivation, but I know they don’t plan to show mercy. Like me, I guess. It’s just not in the game plan.
That said, even with O’Clock turning the air into sludge, switching off their heat beams, screwing with the laws of momentum every time he lands a punch, it’s like we’re fighting the tide against these guys. Eventually three of them wrap the robot up, and my own prejudices aside, when they pin him down and rip his arm free of its socket, even I wince in sympathy, putting a little extra oomph into a piledriver that leaves at least one of the six without the use of his legs for the rest of his life.
I take in Brasseye’s stoic look and follow his gaze to where full-sized Smidgeon carries an unconscious Vulcana away, Windsong sweeping in laying covering fire as Heracleon picks up Susurrus in his inert form before flitting away dragonfly fast. I nod, using a force push to leverage away from the last Titan directly engaging me, and then I run, drag Mastodon to his feet, and we lope off through the ruins as a noise like of a breaking gearbox resounds behind us.
I look back. The five Titans are just ape-like shadows back-lit by flames. One holds Brasseye’s head aloft and they cheer, victorious even amid our escape.
Mastodon bleeds on my costume. I jerk him upright and he looks blearily about.
“I’m gettin’ too old for this shit,” he slurs.
I concur. We make away, defeated.
Zephyr 14.1 “The Tower Of Babel”
RETREATED TO THE tower of Babel, it is a relief to have the gormless Wallachian monks take the battered forms of Vulcana, Manticore, Mastodon and Susurrus away. I have just a moment’s remorse, maybe hesitation – call it the twinkling of an intuition that’s as much muscle memory as exhausted delusion, an ill feeling about whatever dark arts these silent, sinister do-gooders have at their disposal – and then it’s just me, Smidgeon, Heracleon, and my daughter breathing hard and fast in the Logan’s Run-esque landing bay now the drawbridge has been raised and we’ve transported out of there.
“O’Clock?” Smidgeon asks glumly.
I only shake my head, trying to give a reassuring look to Windsong that falls so short of the needed conviction I fear I might’ve done more harm than good. My gaze settles on Heracleon, unscathed at my command, but conspicuous all the same like some escapee from an old Olivia Newton-John video.
“Nice headband,” I mutter. “You do what, exactly?”
“I’m an oracle,” he calmly replies, practically challenging my rebuke.
“Wait a minute,” I say, eyes almost rolling up into my head as I ponder that and try to frame the precise response that deserves.
The moment rolls on and on. I realize the appropriate response is to walk away shaking my head, which just turns into a prolonged existential me-gripping-my-face and silently-screaming-at-the-world-inside as a corridor opens up and I blindly take it and the others follow, lost I guess for what else to do, and with Vulcana down for the count, me somehow the fucking leader again, as ever a crown of thorns I never wanted, never suited and never really deserved.
We are in the ready room before I consciously start navigating my surroundings, which is just as well as I’m fucked if I know how to get here when I actually consciously desire it. A Wallachian slips from the room and doing nothing more untoward than arranging a platter of refreshments, which leaves me shaking my head some more as I flop onto a couch and grab a Pabst and guzzle the fucking thing, crushing the can, tossing it aside and tearing open another.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Heracleon says.
“Please,” I practically beg, unable to handle any more irony. “Is that meant to be an actual announcement, or. . . ?”
“No, I don’t mean I can read your mind,” Mr Headband says as he sits on a couch across from me and takes a sandwich. “I know you think I should’ve foreseen this disaster.”
“Gee, you think?”
“Go easy, dad. Heracleon’s been having trouble since –”
Tessa goes silent as she kens to her error. Heracleon makes a face, Smidgeon fortunately appears to be focused elsewhere. I stab a finger at the self-described oracle.
“You’ll forget you ever heard that.”
“Agreed,” he says, but after a moment adds, “Sort of explains the matching costumes. I always thought it was like a tribute thing.”
“Hey,” Windsong growls prettily. “I’m a crimefighter in my own right. I’m not some fake like Vanilla Ice.”
“Hey,” I snap back at her. “What are you saying about the Iceman?”
“Oh come off it,” she replies. “Everyone knows he totally mimes his live shows.”
“That’s crap and you should know it. A guy doesn’t release ten Grammy-winning albums and get away with that sort of nonsense,” I explain as patiently as I can, incensed.
“What are we gonna do?” Smidgeon asks.
Before I can answer, Vulcana, Manticore, Susurrus and the ‘Don stalk back into the room in fresh attire and grim expressions.
“We have to take them down, and now,” Vulcana says. “There’s even more of them than we feared.”
*
WE SWITCH ON the live feed again and watch as a living Bosch painting unfolds in DC. Not for the first time this hour I find myself thumb-wrestling my own face as I watch in horror, colorful bodies droppi
ng from the roiling black smoke could-filled sky and all of them are ours. Titan clones buzz about the ruins of the Capitol building like flies on a barbecued corpse.
“I thought the Wallachians were contacting everyone,” I say to Vulcana.
She looks back at me with black eyes so dead that I blink.
“That is everyone,” she says.
“What about the heavy hitters? Sting? St George?”
Vulcana shrugs, slowly looking back at the montage of news clips as central Washington basically burns. The screen whitens as several explosions go off. Flashes that strobe the destruction like one of those old comic books you animate by flicking the page corners with your thumb. I feel sick inside, yet curiously elated, that horrible feeling I guess only sick puppies like us who live on the edge and yearn for these sorts of ridiculous adventures to give life meaning and distract from the unbearable quantum of knowing we are like moths trapped in the bell jar of the cosmos, God maybe nothing more than a demented kid with a stick and no medication able to tame him.
“This is bullshit,” I say, moving away from the oracular glass even though the thing is piping images directly into my head except when I will them away.
Stopping before Heracleon, I know I have the nervous jitter of a junkie looking for his next fix, but that reckless energy might be my only saving grace.
“What did she mean before?” I ask him. “You see the future, but not this?”
“I’m not a clairvoyant,” he tells me, opting for a stiff rather than arch reply in what I take to be the spirit of co-operation. “I ask questions of the void and sometimes it answers back.”
“I don’t know what Nietzsche would say about that.”
“It sounds rather twisted, I grant you.”
“You can’t tell me what’s going to happen next?”
“No, but I can ask questions about what’s happening now.”
I nod. Somehow, it sounds like something. I nod to Windsong hovering close by, my team coach demeanor taking a slight hit as I glance to the kid who normally masquerades as our strongman Susurrus, the lack of luster in his eyes, gaze hooded and bleak and dangerous.
Distracted, I say to Heracleon and Tessa, “You two get your heads together and think about what we need to know, so we’re asking the right questions. If your resources are limited like you seem to be saying here, then make every one count.”
Heracleon nods and stage-whispers.
“You’re OK with me working closely with your . . . daughter?”
I only laugh at the idiot and move across to where Mastodon skulks, an unopened beer in his goofy mitts a sure sign that something’s not right here.
“‘Don, what the fuck’s going on?”
Mastodon’s eyes shoot up, busted in some infernal internal navel-gazing I can’t even guess at. That same black sheen that clouds the others’ eyes briefly recedes from his.
“What?”
I get in close, voice audible to just me and him.
“What the fuck did they do to you back there, buddy?”
“Titan?”
“No,” I say. “The frigging Wallachians.”
The ‘Don blinks, shrugging in a helpless way I don’t like.
“I dunno, Zeph. I can’t . . . It’s all a blank. They hurt me pretty good, those copycat assholes. I think I . . . I think I might’ve died, Zeph.”
I take one look at the guy. He needs a hug or something, whole universe crumbling in around him even as the years of substance abuse has left him without the brain cells to really handle it. I pat his beefy haunch, shaking my head encouragingly.
“Naw, don’t be ridiculous, ‘Don. You’re here now, aren’t you?”
I stow my suspicions and move away, my glare poorly concealed as I check on Susurrus, Manticore and Vulcana. It’s the second time for Connie they’ve brought her back. My misgivings about these motherfuckers might be coming right after all, and right at the worst possible time. You wouldn’t knock back the gift of life if it was offered, I know, but sometimes we four-dimensional human plasticine people only see a tiny part of the overall picture.
Zephyr 14.2 “A Deathly Whisper”
I WALK INTO the corridor, fingers massaging my temples as I take a few breaths to calm my stalling heart. Then calmly I start gently repeating the name Roxanne.
“What’re you doing that for?”
Vulcana pads behind me with an unmistakable air of menace. We size each other up a moment, me at a loss, but there’s no immediate attack. I grunt, shift my posture and Connie puts her hands on her shapely hips, black-hair a helm framing her inscrutable Latino features.
“I’m trying to raise Sting. They’re always telling me they’re here for the global-level catastrophes, which if this ain’t one of them, I don’t know what is.”
“Roxanne?”
“It’s a key word. Some hooker Sting loved and lost or something like that.”
“Uh-huh. No response?”
My mouth screws up. “No.”
Vulcana nods, arms crossing. She leans innocently enough against the wall, black-eyed gaze sliding over my costume and back up to my face. Her look hardens.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Zephyr?”
“What? Same as you –”
“Don’t give me that. You bugged out on this team minutes after you formed it. You collect a nice big check from someone for that? We all got stiffed on the licensing dues for those fucking figurines we had to sign for release forms.”
“Really?” I ask, distracted by the prospect of a royalties check I haven’t received yet.
“Hell yeah. You should ask the Jacks what Tourism UK paid to use their mugs on TV ads. Puts our little zinger to shame.”
“I didn’t reform the Sentinels for money, Connie,” I basically lie.
“Don’t call me that,” she says, wincing at the name almost literally like I touched a wound.
“What’s the matter?” I ask, moving closer. Trying to go for comradely and instead getting more like creepy uncle as I brush the back of my fingers across the shadow line of her cheekbone.
Vulcana turns blue and slaps my hand away in an instant, growling, poised now for hand-to-hand, but I’m just not even going to go there with our cities under attack and half the masks in the country looking like they’ve been outmatched.
“This isn’t the time for our petty squabbles,” I say to her. “You as the leader of the New Sentinels should know that, ‘Cana. But you’ve got a darkness in you. What gives? You haven’t been the same since the Hellgate Bridge, and I see that same look stronger than ever now in the others Seeker’s goddamn Wallachians saved.”
“I don’t know what you’re on about, Zephyr.”
“They can bring people back to life, Connie, but do they bring them back from the dead?”
Vulcana stares at me hotly, some vague relief washing over me that she’s still even capable of such fiery emotions. Mastodon and Tessa spill into the corridor to check we’re OK. Neither’s able to get a word out before the corridor morphs behind us and we glimpse the landing bay, the drawbridge raising again, crowd noises as I glimpse a few dozen figures in a variety of costumes now filling the flying fortress’s internal bailey.
“That’s what I came to tell you,” Vulcana says in a deathly whisper.
She nods to the new arrivals and pushes past me towards them.
*
THE ANTECHAMBER BRISTLES with a bunch of well-meaning folks who basically don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. The Wallachians have used every eldritch and mundane method at their disposal to summon those costumes not already in battle or vanquished by our alt-world invaders, which as you might imagine, doesn’t exactly leave us with the cream of the crop. Among the thirty-odd faces I spot Animal Boy, The Lark, Maxtor, the unfortunately-titled Human Shield, Snow Leopard, the latest Grasshopper, Herald, Lady Domino, Treesinger, Barbarian, Blaster, Blizzard and Black Honey. Hiding at the back perhaps from my view is Madame Lash, but I also spot Chamber, Coal
face and Streethawk, so it is not entirely bad news. There’s more than a smattering of different dialects in the gathering and I quickly surmise that in their haste, the Wallachians have also scooped up a visiting Argentine crime-fighting trio Arana (a spider-themed hottie), Castillo (super-tall brick) and Firebird (great figure, but a face much like the hawk featured on her costume).
I quickly get Chamber, Coalface and Streethawk in a huddle. It’s been a while since Chamber and I spoke, but he gives me a cool nod with that silver box-shaped helmet of his and the taciturn air cuts short the need for witty banter from the man I have never met in the armor’s latest incarnation. Streethawk’s face is smudged with grime I assume not from just living dirty. His hand’s wrapped in a self-made bandage I tell him he should let the monks take a look at.
“What’s the situation?” Coalface asks in that deep Ving Rhames voice of his, disconcerting coming from a hulking brute with tiny flames leaking through the cracks in his smoking exterior carapace.
“There’s more of these motherfuckers than we thought,” I reply. “They’ve hit five locations and we figured there might be about thirty in total. There’s twice that.”
“There’s more than sixty,” Streethawk says. “At least a hundred in Atlantic City itself. You should double that if they’re in the capital.”
“Shit,” Coalface groans.
I nod in agreement, notice Chamber slowly moving from foot to foot.
“What’re you thinking?” he asks, voice metallic.
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