“I’m done with this fucking world. It’s all yours.”
“But it was just a few weeks back we were –”
“Things change,” he says, turning to me so I can absorb his sincerity. “What’d I always so to you, Zeph?”
I pause.
“You’re the antihero.”
Twilight grins, makes a gun with his fingers and winks.
“You got it in one. Now get outta here. I need to sleep.”
I don’t go. Not straight away. Tragically, my man-crush aside, I realize there’s absolutely nothing further to be said or had standing here and pleading with the guy. When someone decides they want to leave, that’s what they’re going to do. You can try to intuit the changes you think they might want or need to try and find a way back to normal, but ultimately you can lead a horse to water, but shoving their head repeatedly into a bucket is just going to get you bitten or stomped on or worse.
I sniff, nod, crack my knuckles and try to walk out of the place with my dignity intact.
Zephyr 14.10 “Killjoy”
SO I’M BACK to square one.
Outside Twilight’s digs, the Atlantic breeze picks up and I find myself all solitary and brooding and shit as the gulls ease out overhead, hanging over me like weird Chinese lanterns or Hallowe’en decorations or more like some cosmic child’s mobile meant to pacify me as I cogitate on this latest mess of mine, alone in a thankless universe without even the sympathy of Twilight’s hard-bitten security minders as they swap anecdotes and cigarette smoke sotto voce and eye me nervelessly, waiting for me to get the hell out of there and leave them to their empty intertextual gangsterism, the sky glowering with lambent rainfall I have little urge to push aside as I angle back, twisting to look along the distant blinking coast and the road back to the seaboard-sprawling city that is my prison as much as my home and I fear will one day become my tomb.
With a begrudging little wave I spring into the air and in moments am going flat-tack across the ocean again, the whole Moses-and-the-Red-Sea thing as I hit hyperflight and suck in a few gulls or maybe they are cormorants into my wake, me grinning gleefully like the killjoy I am, a petty revenge for their years of mocking cries as I scud across the wavelets, buzz a trawler ignorant of the chaos among their landlubber kin, then wing west and cross the urban sprawl to the north of what used to be Rhode Island until it was consumed by the reclamation sprawl of a revitalized post-1984 Atlantic City.
Believe me, I’m conscious of my predicament and aware that with the city, if not the country under siege, my very appearance in the flight path is a risk, but it’s hard to think however many score Titans there are trying to throw their net over Atlantic City that there’s enough of them to keep track on a pesky minnow like me.
As often appears to be the case, I’m dead wrong.
*
I PICK UP my bogey near Montauk, something burning there tempting me in for a closer look until I see it is a deep sea liner crashed and aflame on the shore, a spawn of communication antennae quivering as fire consumes the ocean-goer’s carapace, no emergency crews in sight, but also no one in obvious danger, just this weird juxtaposition of land and sea, the ship burning merrily, the air sooty with fluorocarbons, ghost-lit, haunted-looking bystanders further down the beach filming the scene with iPhones and camcorders.
The Titan drops out of the cloud cover, and frowning to myself, I hit the accelerator hoping I might be able to shake him off as I weave through the smog and break the sound barrier and barely notice the second Titan coming on a vector overland.
He crosses me like an aerial hockey check, an elbow and knee slamming across me and sending me spinning at about eight-hundred miles per hour, a whirling disorientation that nearly has me blacking out as I clutch my jaw and reassure myself it’s not broken as I tumble to the ground below and pull out of the fatal dive a hundred feet above the wood-shingled roofs of the old holiday homes along the sea shore, more civilians out in the balmy summer’s evening gawping in wonder as I correct course, avoid taking out a picturesque small coastal holiday town church steeple, and throw a stream of lightning blind in my wake like a fighter pilot throwing flares to put off heat-seeking missiles.
Red eyebeams track my wake, but I am a fucking ballerina here, cavorting, twisting, thinking “not again” as the lasers or whatever they are cut through a parked car that promptly explodes in a chorus of alarms, power lines that crash down spewing sparks, civilians running from a corner store carrying packaged liquor, obviously the end of the world not occasion enough to refrain from the demon drink as the twin Titans follow, razing suburbia in my wake as I crash against a metal fence, pick myself up and hurl myself with abandon back into the sky in a desperate bid to get away from the built-up neighborhood, a feeling like night descending in the middle of the day, my arcing into the sky like a comet reversed. The terrible twos follow, not realizing I could pour on speed – speed, admittedly, I fear they can match – to get away, and instead I head across the water, playing possum, shooting anxious looks back that hopefully look even more theatrical than I intend them, me the lure, them the prey.
Before I can spring any ruse, theoretical or otherwise, a third Titan comes hurtling in a nimbus of energy across the darkening city and I realize these motherfuckers have been herding me like the cat I am. I turn tail once more, dosing the closest Titan good and proper. He drops from the sky and his little gal pal takes off after to save him from the fall. For a moment at least it’s just me and the new arrival, a blue tint to his costume I ain’t seen before, not that I care. There’s a seedy grin on the interloper’s face that makes me think he’s gonna try to fuck me if he gets me down, so as if I need any more motivation I whip about breakneck fast and my left crosses his face and sends him flipping away, though I am too hopeful to think that might be that.
The other two Titans emerge from below, the one I zapped with a dark look I meet with a fuck-you grin. Hovering, I throw my hands wide, a Vaudeville moment as electricity courses between my fingers.
A noise, a harsh bellowing, builds off to the right for just a second. My smile vanishes, but not as fast as the others’ as a dark figure smashes through our formation, taking out the savior Titan before zooming back around to reveal my old nemesis Negator in full regalia, the face mask covering his rigid leer, the corners of the eye-mask rising up like some perverse crown either side of his brows, a signifier of demonic horns, the imperious scowl I have seen so many other times, but which I now see turned on these red-and-gold fools.
“Thought you could do with a hand, Zephyr,” Negator says.
“No shit?”
Negator doesn’t have time to answer. The blue-tinted Titan busts a move which I know he’s about to regret. Negator can be one deadly motherfucker. His powers almost left him no option but villainy. Here, they are the perfect expression of our biosphere’s rejection of these otherworldly intruders. A dazzling electric blue glow erupts from Negator’s clasped-together fists and cuts right through the Titan’s chest, disintegrating the bulk of his torso and leaving just arms and legs to rain down on the uncaring ocean below.
The Titan’s comrades freak. My own grin is as wretched as theirs, though I embrace it, pure triumphalism that perhaps saves at least one of them from a fated death as I swing in, executing powerful short body blows up and down the one I zapped’s torso, him blocking a couple of strikes, but too befuddled or otherwise fucked up to fend off clubbing blows to his face and ribs. Although we’re hovering hundreds of yards above the pulverizing sea, I abort my rain of terror to clutch him bodily, putting my boots in his chest before I let go, propelling him away.
The Titan takes off, not even a final backward glance for the clone who saved him moments ago. I look across to see the remaining Titan caught in a headlock, Negator fiercely grinning, eyes finding mine in the overcast conditions, the glow of the city far away and below like a Faerie realm from up here.
“What do you say, Zephyr? Arrest him?”
“There�
�s no prison for these motherfuckers,” I say.
Negator nods. The spectral blue energy washes around him and the trapped Titan screams giddily, honest-to-god boots kicking in panic as his upper body vaporizes, the rest falling like a desiccated husk into the dark churning nothingness below.
My own words about prison pluck over my cerebral cortex, but I file those inklings for now as Negator brushes charcoal molecules from the black spandex of his arms, long gloves somehow immune to his own destructive powers.
“Thanks for the assist,” I say. “But I had this.”
“Sure you did,” Negator answers after the slightest hesitation, his chance to play the asshole, unlike mine, lost to the moment. “I wanted to help.”
I nod.
“And I’m glad you did.”
Zephyr 14.11 “Animosity Flowers”
NEGATOR EXPLAINS HE was with a few ex-villain pals, the sort of sad-assed characters who gather for card nights to drink themselves into unconsciousness while reliving their glory days, comparing prison sentences and yellowing headlines like some kind of dick-measuring contest. And like the losers they once were, when the shit hit the fan and they realized our city was under attack, the others went underground and hid like roaches.
But not Negator. Or not now, anyway.
“I could only lay low so long, you know?”
We’re still hovering. A bank of fog curls around us like a moist blanket, not entirely unpleasant. I nod sympathetically, but I’m no guidance counsellor.
“You want to help kick some ass?”
“I dunno, Zephyr,” Negator says. “I’m not cut out for this gig like you.”
“It doesn’t sit on me as easy as you’d think,” I say to him. “Never did.”
“I can believe it. I’ve seen you do some shitty things, away from the cameras.”
“Only to ass-wipes like you.”
The animosity flowers again like some monstrous dark plant, but after a second Negator chuckles, somehow the bigger man, I fear for a moment, as he puts all our baggage aside in a feat that really does require super strength.
“What’s your plan?”
“You’re looking at it,” I say, the plan in shambles.
“Well you’re the hero. I’m happy to play sidekick, at least for now. We get these goons out of our country, who knows? I go back to my shitty rent-controlled apartment and be glad to have my health.”
“Never figured you for a patriot, Neg.”
“Hey, it’s one thing for me to shit on America,” he says. “I’ll be damned if I stand by and let these assholes from nowhere do it.”
“They might think themselves Americans too,” I say, not entirely convinced.
“It’s not our America they’re from though, is it?”
I ponder this, no longer really listening as I scrub my jaw and consider the proposition before me afresh.
“These other guys. These ex-villains. Anyone I know? Anyone worth knowing?”
“Forget about them. They’re –”
“Who are they? Just tell me.”
“They’re not gonna come out and play, Zephyr. I’m talking guys you probably don’t even remember: the Crab, Dirge, Black Jester. . . .”
I squint. Negator’s right. That’s hardly a posse to ride to the rescue.
My own thoughts slowly come back to haunt me and at first the idea is so crazy that I can only grin, but as my thinking deepens, so does my evil smile. Negator gets the look and I can tell even through the mask he wears a look of growing alarm.
“I don’t like that look on you,” Negator says.
“I’ve got an evil plan.”
“Yeah?”
“We need to invade a space station.”
“Really?” Negator blinks. “Shit.”
“No no, it’s all good,” I say. “I know the perfect man.”
“How’re you gonna find him then?”
“You gave me the idea yourself,” I say. He’s locked up.”
“Locked up . . . where?”
My grin turns sickly as the words are made flesh.
“White Nine,” I say. “We need the Ill Centurion.”
*
WITHOUT FURTHER ADO we blast across the stratosphere headed for the Riker’s Island cold storage facility for naughty little schoolboys. Hogwarts it ain’t.
Negator follows, emitting second thoughts like a radio beacon, gloom generation his unknown second superpower as he guns alongside me and shoots the occasional maybe-we-should-reconsider look that I answer each time with increasingly madman-like cackling. It’s a role reversal I know that leaves him greatly discomfited and he’s not alone. Like Lennon himself, once trapped at the back of my mind, my own conscience jabbers madly in a Woody Allen monologue stammering for me to reconsider this crazy scheme.
We angle over Riker’s. The missile defenses are down and I guess as much since I actually suspect the facility is laying low, hoping it has flown under the radar with the goons now running the city. Thinking back on the time I witnessed an attempted breakout here, I angle in low over one of the outer walls, a stubbled guard with a cheroot recognizing me. It looks like the guy’s been on shift for forty-eight hours and fortunately he doesn’t take exception to my more shadowy companion – not that it would do him any good. Negator’s only ever served time for the soft stuff. His real crimes, like most of us costumed madmen, have gone largely unpunished.
Like a returning housemate, I lead the way in through the side door of the facility looking around for a familiar face without luck. Three guards and a woman in a crisp, misleadingly white nurse’s uniform rush out to stop us in the anteroom and I quickly bark for the director. Damned if I can remember the guy’s name, which doesn’t matter much anyway because apparently there’s been some kind of internal pogrom since I was here last. A small guy with an odd resemblance to Paul Giamatti exits a nearby office adjusting his tie and jacket for all the world like I’ve interrupted him screwing one of the temps, but the nurse quickly whispers that all staff have been staying at the super prison since the world went to hell.
“To ensure the security of the prisoners,” she says in a falsetto.
I grimace, not wanting to let on just yet to my purpose.
It’s a fucking long corridor. Dr Giamatti – yeah, I’m just gonna call him that for now – keeps hurrying towards us and I glance around at the guards, seeing in their faces the sort of nerveless excitement more familiar to housewives quickly dispensing chatter and acid barbs on social media over a steaming mug of my-life-is-fucked-but-I’m-gonna-make-yours-worse. My eyes pick over Negator, standing uncomfortably at my side, the leathery black edges of his flanged cloak attached to his wrists, the black quasi-devil’s mask concealing a conciliatory grin.
“You look pretty badass,” I tell him.
“Really? Thanks.”
“Probably shouldn’t take that as a compliment.”
“Oh yeah. Right.”
The doc arrives and it’s handshakes all around. He obviously doesn’t recognize Negator, a past internee. Instead, he’s all smiles.
“Zephyr. Nice to meet you. I’m Dr Tchaikorvski. I’m a big fan.”
“Tchaikovsky?”
“Tchaikorvski,” he says with a mincing grimace. “Plagued me my whole life.”
“Why not just change it?”
The director deadpans me.
“My grandfather walked a thousand miles across freezing tundra to –”
“Anyhoo,” I cut in. “The reason for our visit. Maybe we should talk privately, doc?”
The flustered little guy nods, changing gears to keep up with me as Negator and I start down the corridor he’s just traversed like the icy tundra of which he’s so fond. A few paces out of earshot, I drop it on him.
“We need to thaw out one of your bad boys, doc.”
Tchaikorvski’s expression drops like a turd in the bowl.
“Um, I think they say, ‘Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?’” he replies.
&nbs
p; “I actually always found that pretty racist,” I say in a dry voice, looking to Negator who totally backs me up. We’re like Starsky and Hutch or something, we’re so smug.
“Who are you after?”
“Well, we’re after all the crazy pricks who’ve taken over our city,” I answer. “Who we need from you is the Ill Centurion.”
“The Centurion? He’s a class three –”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Jesus. You can’t really be asking –”
“He is,” Negator chimes in with a note of menace.
“But our whole thesis here is to safely incarcerate these dangerous, often psychotic, often megalomaniac individuals, Zephyr, mister. . . ?”
“Negator,” Negator replies.
The penny drops.
“Oh,” Dr Tchaikorvski says.
He looks back to me as if to double-check my identity, making sure it’s not my doppelganger or something. Then there’s the tiniest readjustment and he nods, getting his game face on.
“OK gentlemen. Come this way.”
Zephyr 14.12 “Faster Than A Speeding Bullet”
THERE IS A bank of equipment that wouldn’t look out of place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise and the doc works the controls like Stevie Wonder, monitors flicking into life with the spirit of Frankenstein, the high-talking nurse scooting in and calmly assisting like Tchaikorvski’s going to start operating on a patient instead of liberating one.
Negator hangs back. There’s past trauma here I’m not even going to get into. But I edge close to one of the monitors as the code goes in to call up the inventory of White Nine inmates, bad guys in deep sleep to keep the rest of us having sweet dreams. It’s fair to say my eyes bulge at the human who’s who, options like a fantasy footballer’s dream trade list.
“Hang on, you’ve still got Crescendo in here?”
“Uh, yeah,” the director replies, going back to his switching and flicking.
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