Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  *

  IN SUCH WISE I cross the city like an explorer of yesteryear, cataloguing the rare forms of life thrown up by our unique conditions: the looter, the anarchist, the small-time hood, the opportunist burglar, and the amateur rapist (I stop that guy with a single charge, my juices running low, though I have enough rage left that I then pummel him into submission to the cheers of his intended victim). I’d grab a cab, since I am laying low and avoiding flight so as not to give my cover away, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself, skulking like a pederast as I move closer and closer to my appointed rendezvous.

  Eric Draven already awaits me when I finally get to the top, my heavy breathing a mix of fatigue and chewing on a half-dozen lukewarm hot dogs I scooped from an abandoned cart in the street down below. I need the energy, but it doesn’t stop Draven eyeing me like a boss with a thieving employee caught red-handed. For the record, I don’t even bother remonstrating with the doofus as I take up a perch amid the guano and empty drug phials on the shit-colored rooftop.

  “They’re telling the Army and the police to set their weapons aside and there will be roles for them in their new regime,” Draven says, downcast suddenly, bluster and anger gone as I glimpse for the first time the weird residual guilt that comes from him knowing that somehow, somewhere, this disaster stems from something lurking within his DNA more than anything else in the whole crappy scheme of things.

  I can sympathize. I offer him a sausage, but he scowls and moves away, frustrated, taking off his glasses for the second time and wiping them and revealing the chiseled profile I have come to dislike so much in recent hours.

  “That’s their plan? Some kind of New World Order?”

  “I’m not privy,” Draven shrugs.

  “They don’t think the UK, our other allies, they aren’t going to have something to say about this?” I ask.

  “You think they will?”

  His question gives me pause. Admittedly our brother and sister countries across the globe will care mightily about what’s transpired in the past 24, and not just because of the global shit storm for finance markets, but whether they have power to do anything about it is another question. I can’t fathom these alien interlopers’ thoughts, but it is one thing to have vast armies, fighter planes, nuclear submarines and indeed a nuclear arsenal at your disposal, and quite another to be able to use it with any sort of precision in dealing with what’s otherwise a rebellion from within.

  I shake my head and sigh, fancying a cigarette for a moment, but without much conviction. I move a little closer to the guy at the heart of all this.

  “You said before, they had a hideout?”

  “A hideout?” he replies, scornful. “This isn’t your little game of villains and vigilantes any more, Zephyr.”

  “You know, the way you talk to me, it’s hard to believe you were once my biggest fan.”

  Draven pulls up. “I wasn’t a fan. I –”

  “You sure used to hang out trying to get my attention.”

  “I wasn’t –”

  “Nightclubs and shit?”

  “Zephyr, listen to me, you pompous ass, this is serious.”

  “I’m only fucking with your head. Relax. Tell me about the old warehouse.”

  Draven gives me a long look, then slowly releases his pent up sigh and nods, knowing he’s shit out of any other real choices.

  *

  IN THE INTERESTS of stealth, we help ourselves to a delivery van left with the motor running in the street below, the back looted for the stale loaves of bread once on their way to homeless shelters across Jackson and Grant. It isn’t easy going, driving through congestion with every other motorist convinced its Ragnarok, the sky falling in, but after me getting out to push a few obstacles clear and a pretty one-sided run-in with a group of young toughs who set up their own private enterprise at one particular choke point, we get clear and then it’s just Eric driving and me shooting looks out and up my window as the occasional Titan appears and disappears in the distance. We’re camouflaged among the little people, just ants to these young gods, and for now that suits me fine.

  “Tell me about the Prime,” I say, voice more like someone who needs the words to keep him awake than a vital source of intelligence from the one guy who might actually know something useful, whether he knows it or not.

  “What’s to say? He’s the one who kicked this whole thing off.”

  “You said he had some kind of device?”

  “Yeah,” Draven says. “Don’t you have any teammates or . . . friends or something?”

  “We got our asses handed to us in DC, bub,” I tell him. “They’re . . . regrouping.”

  “Hiding.”

  “Laying low,” I concede. “At my instruction. We’ll call for back up when we need it.”

  Draven gives an ill-tempered laugh as I reiterate my question about the device.

  “You said something about . . . ancient Aborigine tech . . . or something?”

  “That’s what he said. A Dreamtime device.”

  “Any idea how it works?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any idea how to trigger it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Fuck. Any idea how to . . . track him or identify him out of all the others?”

  Draven goes to answer in the negative again, but he checks himself, frowning, the look I recognize from my own mirror musings, searching the residual memory for a glimmer or something forgotten but meaningful: usually me trying to remember where I left my keys from the night before and wishing I could call them like I do my phone.

  “There might be a way, actually,” Draven says and we slow, taking a corner as a crowd of people watch what look like children fighting. I crane my neck as we pass, but I’m not intervening for anything short of life and death right now.

  “Go on,” I prompt him.

  “They call him the Prime. You notice many wear that gold headband thing.”

  “A phylactery,” I say as much for my own amusement as Eric’s erudition.

  “I think you mean diadem,” Draven replies. “A phylactery’s more like an amulet or bracelet or something, isn’t it?”

  “No, that’s a periapt,” I say.

  “OK, but that’s something else as well,” Draven grudgingly says.

  “You were about to say something useful,” I say. “Please do.”

  “He wears a different headband,” Draven says. “There’s variation between the costumes depending on the . . . the parallel universe they’ve come from, but the others, they’re just wearing circlets, those who wear one at all. I’ve never seen one like his. The Prime’s has a T on it, right smack in the middle.”

  “You know I actually got hopeful there for a moment,” I say.

  Draven chuckles low despite himself. The van pulls into a disused lot. We’re down near the crumbling waterfront, some of the worst vacants still unreclaimed from the Kirlian years, a real badlands I’ve had more than one occasion to patrol over the years. He points to focus my attention on a stained, gunmetal blue factory weeping bird shit and acid rain from its hundreds of empty windows. Some kind of ancient rusting crane throws its shadow across it, lengthening in time with the setting sun. The whole area smells of wet rats, so I’m not exactly filled with glee at the prospect of what I might find therein.

  “They took you here?”

  “Once, yeah,” Draven says.

  I nod, peeling out of my trench coat as I exit the idling van. I pass it back to him and Draven gives the same awkward embarrassed reassuring look the others gave me before I ventured into the inferno.

  Disgusted at the universe at large, I slam the van door shut behind me and stride towards the chain-link fence that sags like a penitent before Golgotha.

  Zephyr 14.7 “Byzantium”

  I JUMP THE fence, literally, brazen in my shiny new jacket as I approach the gigantic factory complex-cum-industrial crypt.

  I’m relieved at the same time as unnerved to sense a weird, distorted
, hair-raising hum that seems to emanate from deeper within the ruins, whispering dark sweet nothings to my underlying senses. The day finally dies within the cavernous space, leaving me to my thoughts as I tread carefully over a landscape of broken plate glass and shattered tiles, the collective output of the old factory, it seems, buried in the dust ever since its workers must’ve fled in mad terror at the Kirlians’ approach.

  The tinkling stutter of my footfalls echo inside the cathedral-like space. Scurrying as if to answer, rats and other feral creatures invisible to the naked eye make their presences known.

  Following my sixth sense, I track the source of the electrical output merrily disrupting air particles down into the underground part of the labyrinth, the odd glimmer of winsome daylight streaking through broken sections of the floor above. I raise a hand, strobing light bulb flashes where I need to, descending steel then concrete staircases into the bowels, a cavernous space contemporaneous with the river outside, industrial waste, the vast carcasses of rusting metal hulks whose purpose and identities I’m unable to fathom left to history in their sunken berths, an estuarine grave site, the river seeping incontinently between the concrete piers, the ceiling dangling with hooks and chains and ferrous museum-piece contraptions lost to detail in the murky damp dark up above.

  One of the big ledges looks like a berth for submarines, and in the wan light I can see ginormous sea doors closed forever on the river outside. With a quick power-assisted jump I’m up and standing in review of the source of the subtle disturbance, some manner of steampunk contraption, the panels softly glowing pale blue, a creation of some futuristic Byzantium I hope to God to never witness, yet nothing more sinister than the power source for these rebels’ home away from home. Up on the concrete shelf there are scores of individual huddled middens, bedrolls and scattered food containers, a treasure trove for the vermin creeping through everything like nature’s ninja. The pent-up breath I’ve been holding for the past minutes slowly leaks from my chest as I take in the dispiriting enormity of what the scene reveals.

  “Shit.”

  “Thou soundest disappointed, Ariel’s son.”

  The voice rings out behind me and to the right, but I don’t want to lose my tough guy mystique, so my reaction is a slow-burning swivel of the hips as I flick a dismissive gaze over the Titan who emerges into the pale iridescence. I have to fight my lids from widening as I take in his scarred form, his footsteps, or one of them, heavy and oppressive from the cybernetic leg matching the arm adorning his right-hand side. He is the same as the others in every regard except this Titan, from whichever world he originates, bears scars his kin otherwise lack, his stoic visage strangely withered, not with age or disease or exposure to the elements or injury, but some strange mix of perhaps all of the above. There’s a streak of grey in his black coif that gives him a more dignified and somehow more threatening air, and the heavy gait courtesy of the robot boot only adds to the gravid air.

  “Ariel’s son? Cause my name’s Zephyr.”

  “From your lips to my ear,” the Titan replies in that mildly infuriating way of talking many of them seem to share.

  I gesture at him up and down. “Who’re you? The janitor? You’re not doing much of a job,” I say, now motioning towards the trash everywhere.

  “Nay, o’ermuch you presume, groundling. Overseer, betwixt various roles.”

  “So you’re the one who got left behind,” I note, droll, eyes on his artificial limbs, the steel a mimicry of the muscled ultra-dense flesh it has replaced.

  My barb scores a hit, the slight narrowing “betwixt” this motherfucker’s eyes. He scans me as I’ve scanned him and when he moves, I’m correct there’s a slight lag in his leg that tells me either the robotics are faulty or there’s some other problem troubling our newest mystery interloper.

  “You should speak your truth before facing judgement of the gods, stranger,” Titan says. “I am a man of little patience and endless means. Be forthcoming.”

  “Screw you,” I reply. “I’m looking for the Prime. Clearly you’re not him, you . . . junk shop reject.”

  “Reject? Nay, you speak to a child of Olympus. However scarred the mighty who have fallen, we rise again, our powers redoubled.”

  “That what you tell yourself to sleep at night?”

  I plainly indicate the leg.

  “Keep you awake much? Phantom limb and all that?”

  Not sure why I’m pushing his buttons. I want answers, not action, but it’s too late. This Titan’s patience evaporates as his eyes light up red and I ditch aside just as the eyebeams open up on where I was just standing.

  *

  MOVING IN HYPERSPEED, I basically flit in a tight semicircle and come back at my latest foe with a full-body punch that snaps his taut skull away from me at just under the speed of sound. Amazingly, Titan doesn’t move more than a few inches as he repositions himself, big hands, one of ‘em metal, clamp down on my shoulders, and I only get a hand under his jaw at the last second to avoid him shearing off my noggin with his eye heaters. The disintegration beams cast wide, hot sparks raining down from the metal-ridden ceiling above as Titan shakes me off, the eyebeams snaking about, me ducking and slamming a huge left uppercut into his jaw before getting his metal arm behind him in a swift jiujitsu move he pulls out of in a way that only a man with no pain receptors in his limb could manage. With said metal limb, he clubs me, a backhander, and I am off and over the concrete shelf in instants, rolling backwards through the river scum and ancient discarded metalwork to come up with both hands spread to hose Titan down with my own electrical current, only the asshole jets into the sky, does a languid cartwheel powered by his flight, and comes down on me with both feet. I roll away again, moving into speed mode, but again somehow not quickly enough as he puts my extended right arm in a clinch as his left fist punches between my shoulder blades, the pain so bright it’s like an epiphany, my vision swimming as I somehow pull my captured arm free and deliver a roundhouse punch with the other only to have Titan catch it in a metal fist like a catcher’s mitt.

  Up close, time slows, and I take in the sheer animal rage coursing through this guy’s features, the narrowed eyes, nostrils flaring, teeth gritted together like the rictus grin we will all one day achieve, and it’s clear to me I did more than hit the mark with my undermining barbs.

  I stop. Just altogether. Titan’s metal hand is crushing mine, but I tilt my head like a quizzical professor and even though the villain’s natural fist is curled back to knock my head off, he freezes a moment too as we lock eyes, his fortunately not spewing hot death right at this very moment as the sound of panicked gulls and pigeons echoes through the vast aquatic barn, and Titan lowers his fist, angry features cracking into what might be a wry grimace if translated in any other language.

  “You’ve bested me, Zephyrous,” he says. “In unmastering myself, I show the weakness to which you rightly ken.”

  “I don’t know about weakness,” I say as I pull my hand away. “Your people have pretty much taken out North America.”

  “But can Atlas hold what he lifts?”

  “Jeez, if even you guys experience moments of self-doubt, I might have to hang up my metaphoric cape,” I say as I rub my sore hand and eye our unpleasant surroundings.

  Titan moves away a short distance as if looking down at himself afresh.

  “You are correct the others labelled me unfit, secondary, extraneous,” he says.

  “You?”

  “Aye. How the mighty have fallen, eh?”

  “So say you,” I tell him. “Any chance you’re so bitter you want to help me get revenge? Take your brethren down?”

  Titan laughs and shakes his head.

  “I am fallen low, Zephyrous, but don’t unglamor me. Trammeled I may be, but smirch not my manhood, the dignity of which is all that remains me within these inglorious spheres.”

  I squint at the effort to understand what the hell he’s saying, though by tone alone I know my play isn’t going to b
e as simple as I’d hoped.

  “You’re not one of them. You’re a minion. They . . . relegated you, pal.”

  “Do not stir again my ardor for battle, wind-warrior. Next time, you will not find my fury lacking, nor my resolve.”

  “I hear you,” I tell him, backing up a little more than I really feel’s necessary, the hand language like communicating with dogs that no threat’s posed here.

  “But think about it from my position,” I say. “You are the invader, the transgressor. I am the knight. The . . . noble champion.”

  “You seek to make mockery of my tongue, Zephyrous?”

  “No, shit. I’m just trying to cut through to you,” I say with enough earnest frustration that I sense Titan listens with renewed interest. “I’m trying to save my people. You talk like you’re all glorious . . . wonderful fucking guys. You’re not. You’re the bad guys.”

  “Villainy is write in –”

  “Don’t give me that shit,” I say, huffing even as I cut in. “You can’t tell yourself otherwise. My city is on fire because of your kind.”

  Titan rocks out on that a few moments, then gives a begrudging thrust with his desiccated cleft chin. There is a glimmer in his black eyes.

  “What would you have me do? I am no kinslayer, nor betrayer.”

  “I need the Prime,” I say. “I’m not blurting out my whole plan to you. Hell, you’d probably only laugh. But the Prime has the device.”

  “Ah, ‘tis the Moonstone you seek?”

  Titan gives an ineluctably fey grin and turns that full expression on me, radiant as a headlight. I can feel my own eyes crinkle with discomfort.

  “Call it a wager, if it makes you feel any better,” I say. “Give us ‘groundlings’ a fighting chance. What do you say, Atlas?”