Perhaps I didn’t use enough charge on one of the first two guys because he manages to sit up, spluttering, reclining in a pool of his own urine as he stares up at me open-mouthed, voice shrill as he yells, “Z-Zephyr? But you’re meant to be a superhero!”
“I am a fucking superhero,” I snarl back and kneel just enough so that I am not in the guy’s piss, slamming my fist under his jaw to hurl him across the room and smashing into a crappy-looking bookcase full of jewel cases that crash down on him. He doesn’t say anything after that and I stand, chest heaving as I realize the far reaching enormity of the anger I yet again feel welling deep within my soul.
Just randomly I start overturning the furniture, a series of DVD-copying personal computers crashing in the tumult as I literally try to oust these human cockroaches from wherever their hiding.
The staggering impact of automatic gunfire in the middle of my back tells me I’ve had success. Without even looking I throw off a wave of electrical force, less a blast than an expressed billowing of magnetized current that engulfs the frighteningly young guy with the Belgian sub-machinegun aimed at me, giving him the St Vitus Dance before he falls amid his friends and defecates loudly. I lope over, snatching the gun from his grasp and snapping it in half on the second try, hurling the pieces against the fractured reinforced glass windows abutting the shuttered grilles, mindful of other predators circling my location.
I find the next one in the hallway off the back door. The guy lurks there with a cut-down shotgun I catch in one hand, forcing it into the wall beside him even as it goes off, backhanding him with little more force than a wet fish, just wanting him to feel the indignity of my attack instead of passing out straight away like the others. But it’s too much for me. What repose I might’ve felt evaporates like rain water in a heatwave as the gangsta looks up with his bloody teeth and his hey-what’d-I-do look. I punch him hard in the face till something snaps, then realize I am still keeping him upright with the shotgun handle under the crook of his arm, so I drop both, stepping over him like the dog shit that he is as I enter the back room, more daylight streaming in through big empty broken windows that exit onto an internal courtyard in the housing complex now a ghost tower thanks to these clowns.
“Why are you targeting us?” a young Latino kid with a duster jacket and a Colt Python asks me, caught in the act of resistance and going to water straight away.
“The people here are doing it tough enough without insects like you coming and sucking the life out of them,” I say in a response barely audible through my clenched teeth. “Been through here last time with my head in my ass, thought I was doing something more important. Realize there’s nothing more important than this. Making a difference.”
The kid tosses the gun on the floor. Puts up his hands. Backs away to the doorless doorway. Clearly preparing to run. I just watch him doing it, something burning out in me. I stand over what passes for a kitchen table in the slum, a sports bag with $20 bags of heroin in the middle along with what you’d call a riot of medication if they were pills, but instead its bullets of all make and caliber all over the table top I overturn after just a moment’s quiet contemplation.
The guy crouched behind the table leaps up, trying to swing his Uzi into my chest. I slap it from his grip. Grab him by the shirt-front. Lift my fist as he freezes up. Drive my knee into his gut instead. He goes down and I up-end the sports bag onto him, shaking the bag like emptying trash.
“I’m coming back and next time I’m not going to be in a good mood like today,” I tell him. “Don’t be here when I do. Move on.”
The guy scurries away with cartoon stink lines emanating from his ass, leaving me with just the sound of the groaning wind as it date-rapes the derelict premises amid the sound of distant sirens, the lonely cry of what I first think is a child and then come to recognize as the noise of cats mating in the trash-strewn rear court of the ghetto building. Like probing a tooth with my tongue, I stop for a moment, drug lab kitchen for all intents and purposes my own private cathedral as I contemplate the rage within, wondering if there’s any left.
Oh yes.
*
FAIR TO SAY I am more than adequately able to cool off by the time I land on Twilight’s island, but the truth is I just don’t want to. Call it hubris or madness or hell, petulance for all I care. I want to express my anger. I want the world and those who’ve angered me to know and understand.
Brave souls that they are, Twilight’s security detail drop back at my approach. I guess in their defense they can say I’ve been here before and not tried to tear their boss a new asshole on every visit, so fair enough they give me a free pass this time. When I kick in the side door and start bellowing like a heartbroken Tony Danza in Rocky, they really should come running with their weapons drawn, but instead remain curiously absent as I stride in through the billiards room and into Twilight’s library, probing every corner and recess like I have heat beams of my own, no sign of the big guy, but instead a cute, dark-skinned maid, or perhaps she’s just another trollop in a costume hightailing it out of there as I clear the main entrance, the huge showy lobby, the self-aggrandizing wopdom of it all, me vaulting up the marble staircase to the upper landing like a guy who can’t fly, Twilight’s name again and again coming from my lips.
“Hell’s bells, Zephyr. Keep it down.”
Athwart the landing now, I turn to see the big lug himself emerge tousle-haired from one of the doorways at the far end.
“It’s 2pm,” I say, almost as surprised as Twilight that I know the time.
“That your excuse for kicking my door in, or was that breaking glass related to something else on my personal property?”
“Hey, fuck you and your personal property. What’s this?” I say and throw my open palm at him, for all the world sounding like Twilight’s dead mother or something, scolding him for yet another way-late start.
“I don’t think you get to lecture me about healthy livin’, Zeph. You should get going.”
“I came to you for help,” I say. Plaintive. “We were overrun. Dire straits. And you were banging hoes. What’s up with that? I know I’m bad, Twilight, but when are you going to . . . grow the fuck up?”
“Are you serious?”
I stop. Ease out my tightly-held breath. Contemplate what he’s saying when he says that to me, reflecting me back in the mirror of my conscience.
“Fuck.”
“You owe me a new door.”
I sit down on the top step.
“C’mon,” Twilight says and walks over, slapping me on the shoulder. “Let’s try and get you drunk.”
Zephyr 15.4 “Good Old-Fashioned American Wiseass”
NIGHT. A JANE Austen novel, this is not. Strobe ultraviolets I once told Red Monolith were designed to keep the club free of vampires highlight the playful messages scrawled across the tanned backs and taut stomachs of the hardbodies gyrating before Emperor Twilight and I as the music chews through the knots in my soul and whatever elixir Twilight hands me next dissolves my conscience or liberates my unconscious or exorcises my demons or what have you, the hot humid warm moist tropical incessant nerve-wracking heat of the dance floor undulating through waves of discordant light, colors spiraling and unfurling before my exhausted gaze as a frighteningly perfect girl in a pink two-piece outfit with abuse me written between her clavicles looks up from beneath my chin with a drugged gaze and a fecund smile, the teeth her father paid so much to straighten now set like white jewels in a crooked lazy bewitching grin as she lists the physiological unlikelihoods she wants to perform on me, either unaware or unconcerned that not only can I not hear a word she’s saying above music that sounds like a techno version of London in the Blitz, but her equally perfect and corrupt BFF already has her hand down the front of my costume clutching my member like a learner driver trying to get the gas nozzle into her car.
In the club tonight are Black Honey, The Lark, Miss Black, Mantas, Golden, Devil Betty, Manticore, Cipher, Blue Streak, Fortuna, Jac
kanape, Black Arrow, Calliope, Trigger, Swedish hero Thunderfall and wanted villain Killswitch, as well as lesser celebs like Keanu and Richard, Paul Rudd, Hugh Jackman, Dario Argento, Bret Easton Ellis, Jeff Buckley, Tony Hawk, Penelope Cruz, Selma Blair, Geoffrey Rush, a painfully out-of-place Richard Dawkins, Lee Majors, Varg Vikernes, William Hurt, Natalie Martinez, Rinko Kikuchi, Robyn Lawley, Chow Yun-Fat, Milla Jovovich and Alvin and the Chipmunks.
It is almost foggy in here. The waiters and waitresses wear bondage gear, struggling with their orders as they mince on clog heels, constrained by leather corsets, men and women alike, leather straps and belts limiting their strides as the packed-to-the-rafters crowd hugs the dank carpeted walls and laugh and make out and smoke synthetic cigarettes and talk shit, the whole riotous zoo giving me literal flashbacks to my three-month exile, the taste and smell of the Dreamtime inescapable. I extricate the girl’s hand from my costume which neatly zips itself up in the aftermath, me stumbling away, nearly tripping over a pair of abandoned Jenniston Cross four-inch burgundy heels, ignoring Twilight’s outstretched hand as I push my way through the hordes and eye speaker stacks festooned with abandoned Stoli bottles, none of them mine, a kaleidoscope of familiar faces as I press through to the back, belt open the john door and move into unblinking white tiles hard and crisp as cyberspace. I get into a stall and shut the door and slump, head in my hands, switching from self-pity as quickly as it registers, the Enercom phone, sorting through the dozens of quickly-snapped photos taken months ago now in a hurried rush, surely much of the intel I pilfered from the Wallachians’ HQ now redundant, the trail as cold as the crime scene at Bryant Gumbel’s upstate mansion.
But the photo that looks back at me isn’t a clue. A hastily scrawled list in dark lipstick on a hotel mirror. Like a slap in the face. Ignoring the grunting of two guys digging for chocolate in the stall next door, I nod resolutely and stand, take a quick leak and exit the men’s room pushing off fawning hands of would-be underlings, a girl with the haunted look of a beaten dog falling back, disappear here and an arrow going up to her mouth in luminous blue on bare lightly-sweating skin between pendulous fake breasts, silver mascara around her eyes like a substitute for tears I do not care if she ever sheds.
On the rooftop, the night is refreshingly cold and stark. I take in a deep double lungful and feel my head clear. Footsteps booming in the stairwell behind me. I point in the rough general direction of London and do the crouch thing and get the hell out of there.
*
I HAMMER THROUGH the night, sometimes almost falling asleep as the thermals buffet me in a cosmic womb-like rhythm and I shoot across the Atlantic like a stone thrown from the hand of Zeus. I get to about Mach 3 before I slow over the Dorset coast and veer north to Manchester about twenty minutes later looking all sleepy and safe and startlingly picturesque as a milky crepuscular autumn fog blankets the neighborhoods making my ex-wife’s new abode look more like the fairytale realm from which all England was once sprung to the abysmal horror show it is in broad daylight.
Guided by Tessa’s intel, I light upon an historic street, keeping to the shadows as an honest-to-God milkman finishes his round, me slipping in through a side gate in the tastefully retrofitted row house made fashionable by an architect’s interior redesign. The back yard houses a small aviary and the birds’ tweeting welcomes me through the gate, a single red-leafed tree towering in the surprisingly large and lush grounds, a small covered rotunda with twinkling outdoor lights still on, a table from the night before set for two with empty wine glasses and the remains of a classy meal now picked over by a fox who stares once at me before making his swiftling departure.
There is a chance to wonder what the fuck I am doing here, but the obviousness of the answer and its remedy are little excuse to turn back now. There are noises inside my wife’s love nest. Sleepy sounds for the household nonetheless captive to the cruel economics of a weekday. I rap gently on the antique door which quickly cracks ajar to reveal Elisabeth scowling at me from beneath a new, shorter and more European hair-do.
“Joe? I mean . . . Zephyr? What are you doing here?”
“I came to talk.”
“Talking. They invented something for that. It’s called a phone,” Beth says, not lacking any of her good old-fashioned American wiseass nature despite her British surrounds. “Speaking of which, why don’t you ever answer yours?”
“You left messages?”
“No I called, and. . . .”
She shrugs.
“You don’t read the papers? I’ve been away. Missing in action again, they call it.”
“I don’t read those sorts of papers,” Beth says haughtily. “Papers here are more focused on real news.”
“Oh what, like the royal family are descended from Hobbits? That sort of thing?”
“The other papers.”
“Congratulations,” I say and let my way in to the darling little kitchen. “You’ve become one of those wankers in record time.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
We face off in the gloomy if well-appointed kitchen. All the mod cons but nowhere to hide.
“What are you doing here?” she asks. “What have you come all this way to ask that a simple phone call couldn’t achieve?”
“I want custody of our daughter.”
Beth looks at me for a full two seconds. My heart is in my mouth. A cliché I apologize for invoking, but I would rather go another twelve rounds with the Prime than have to endure moments more of this anxiety. But then, quick as it came, the tension disappears as Beth gives an inchoate shudder, eyes flicking away to the power outlet at the corner of the room, and she nods, shoulders slumped.
“Fine.”
“Really?”
“Do you see me with custody now?”
“Well no, but –”
“Bring any paperwork?”
“Um, no to that either, but I –”
“Then congratulations for your achievement. You’re a father. And making about as much difference now as you ever did before.”
“Honey, come on. That’s hardly fair.”
“Thanks to you and your screwy family and your stupid fucking genetic tree there’s nothing I can do to make Tessa live with me even if I had all the court orders in the world. The girl can’t stand me anyway.”
“You ever wonder why?”
“Don’t play that card with me,” Elisabeth hisses.
“I’m not playing cards. I’m kinda hoping for . . . honesty, here.”
“I’m not interested in your honesty, Joe. You got what you came here for. Now go on. Scram.”
Her words make an awful kind of sense, a finality in their echo. I move to the door gently nodding, start to turn back in that sort of hey-we-had-a-groovy-kind-of-love moment you might expect to soften the sucker punches we just traded. Instead, Beth is choking up at the sink with her hands clutching the stainless steel edge. Desire as I might to go back offer comfort, Harald emerges through the door to the main living room brushing his teeth and freezes in concern at seeing me, and then his man-wife instincts get the better of him and he moves slowly behind Elisabeth to offer a conciliatory back rub with a look showing he’s been here numerous times before.
I leave them to it.
Zephyr 15.5 “Signs Of Life”
HOURS LATER AND I am back across the Atlantic like a diligent alcoholic, having resisted the tidal scrum of London’s sweaty nightlife aided and abetted by it being only midmorning. All my customary playmates are in their hidey holes sleeping things off, and besides, I am a man on a mission guided by the smart phone in my pocket I carry like it might be some Nietzschean lantern to liberate my sanity.
Gumbel’s mansion is an abomination in the sepulchral New England dawn. Stucco walls and Spanish archways and red-tiled stables with their throwback to Andalusia and ancient Rome before them glimmer brightly in the morning light, the susurrus of twigs and other Fall detritus beneath my boots as I creep like a parole-breaking lowlife to case t
he joint. There is no point being here. The crime scene is more than three months old, the trail cold, not all that glimmers in my smart phone gold. Yet these are the clues I assembled, back when I made my Boy Scout’s vow to chase this thread to the very end of the weave. And so here I am, placing one awkward foot in front of the other.
Eventually it’s clear there is no one around. I make into the open, listening for the sounds or even the pluming nostrils of the horses that once dwelt in these wintry stalls. Nada. Moving along the leaf-strewn crushed pebble avenue between the stables and the back sheds, I scan the castillo ahead for signs of life, but there are none. None that I can discern, anyway.
When the one-time Avenger Tommy Hilfiger was killed, I unearthed a veritable Aladdin’s cave of his secret life for the authorities. With Synergy now dead or in some kind of un-life, I can’t be assured the latest investigation was carried out with the same due acumen and I am in no rush to reacquaint myself with my fan base at the FBI’s parahuman affairs division. The longer I can put between me and having to own up to releasing a handful of the world’s most dangerous villains from secure confinement the better, as far as I’m concerned. In which case it falls to this little brown duck to move up to a glass side door and do what I seem to do best these days, elbowing out a pane and letting myself into the cool, positively frigid interior of the stylized mansion.
The noise tells me I am not alone. Unless my crashing arrival startled a family of rats, the pitter-patter of tiny feet suggests a human presence upstairs.
Although I don’t know the layout and I am normally not one for rushing entirely headlong into unknown danger – well OK, you’ve got me there – I burn some calories hurtling around the main lobby and up the ballroom steps so reminiscent of Twilight’s place in everything except décor. Gumbel’s home has a varied layout on the first floor, but it’s much the same in that basically its bedrooms and en suites and the end of the second hall betrays a flash of movement as I club through the door before Gumbel’s uninvited guest can get away.
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