And then he turns back to the starlet amid a round of bawdy laughter and I sit frozen to the spot, the cloying paranoid feel of the crowd around me as a chill sweat breaks down the middle of my back and I wonder what I’ve unleashed now.
***
ZEPHYR V
Zephyr 16.1 “Step Back And Step Off”
YOU MIGHT BE surprised to know my gear comes in a formal wear version, but not as surprised as me.
Hallory and I are backstage to the secret gala event of the century. The crowd noise gives even yours truly a case of the heebie jeebies. I’m about a million light years away from being the guy with the power of six million light globes or whatever it is.
Yes, that still strikes me as a really dorky line even after all these years.
I scowl at the white zee etched on my almost band leader-style jacket that some lackey of Hallory’s PR unit has ironed to within an inch of its life. I wear it with a mix of confusion and disdain on top of my now customary body suit. I wish I could spare you the details, but the settled feeling of the suit’s waste recycling sphincter around my cock and balls is strangely reassuring, like being held by your mother, but you know, not in that way.
It’s dark behind the curtains. I have a ridiculous case of nerves. Hallory finishes adjusting the clip-on bow tie that has usurped my customary black leather priest’s collar for tonight. I not so much slap as gently prise away the gorgeous redhead’s hand, the soft cold freckled thing in my brick-crushing grasp like a trapped bird, yet far more expressive.
“You’re nervous,” she says in a tone of surprise and rebuke.
“A little. This is out of my comfort zone.”
“It’s just a social gathering,” she says. “Relax. Play this right and you’re up ten grand, uh-huh?”
“I guess so,” I answer, gaze finding hers in the gloom like a short-sighted goldfish. “But you know, I’d be less stressed out if we had a quickie. You know, bring me down from the edge.”
“Ha,” Hallory says, somehow without the requisite amusement such a noise normally requires. “Nice try.”
“Don’t tell me you’re tempted. It worked last time,” I say.
“Last time? Zephyr . . . we have not had sex before.”
“We made out –”
“I know, I know,” she says. “But we did not have sex.”
“I don’t know how you can say that.”
“If we’d had sex, trust me, I would remember,” the agent says with the sort of nervous laugh I somehow associate with a cartoon horse about to face the gallows.
“You sure would.”
“But I don’t, so ergo, we have not had sex before.”
I stare off through the gap in the curtain. Mingling arms and legs clad in formal wear.
“I’m pretty sure we did,” I say to no one in particular.
Hallory rounds on me. “You don’t actually remember at all, do you?”
I stop, teeth silently parted in some kind of witty rebuke that fails to materialize. Trying to trigger my own memory, I think about all my typical special moves, coming damn close to almost acting one or two of them out on the empty air between us as I strain my hippocampus, brows furrowing accordingly. In counter-point to this, Hallory’s freckled Irish perfection slowly grows more and more hostile.
“How can you say we had sex when you don’t even remember?” she snaps. “What are you doing? Guessing? Assuming we had sex? Is that how you think of me? Just another bimbo you tupped?”
“Tupped?”
“It’s a medieval phrase.”
“I’ll use that, thanks.”
But my grin fades as I consider the substantive bulk of her comments. Before I can say anything else of use, the curtain’s roughly pulled aside by one of the walking slabs of man-meat they call security at this place. The grouch nods to me curtly, towering by nearly a foot. I could still cripple him in an instant and he knows it, but either the steroids have rotted his brain to the state of a dried sea sponge or his machismo is so in charge that he still can’t step back and step off.
“You’re up,” the goon says.
Hallory musters her far more chipper public face and pats me on the shoulder.
“You’re on,” she says. “Good luck, OK?”
“I feel like a man-whore,” I say in monotone, again to no one in particular.
“Oh Zephyr. Jesus. How many times do we have to have this talk? It’s not like you have to sleep with anyone. And if you do, it’s extra. OK?”
I sigh, shake my head, summon my courage, and enter the plush state room putting on my other kind of mask.
*
THE WHO’S WHO of I don’t know who – people I’ve never seen before – stand politely mingling against the backdrop of trillion dollar views. The sun sets over Atlantic City and the chromatic settings on the wide seamless glass that wraps around the whole side of the chamber like a giant visor throws a delicious syrupy golden sepia over everything.
There’s two dozen men and a score of women, everyone dressed to the nines, a couple of the figures standing out like peacocks, just like yours truly, part of the entertainment for the night. Oiled waiters dressed or maybe I should say undressed like gladiators move through the gathering to the chinking and tinkling of glasses, cutlery and small talk. A long table dominates one stretch of the room and several of these nearly naked musclemen set down huge platters and remove ceremonial lids to reveal weird-looking roasts. I spy a swan, but the closest one is some exotic creature quite literally not of this world with bright yellow and black skin, a crooked tail crusty and glistening with secret herbs and spices infused within a honey glaze.
“Does it whet your appetite, Zephyr?” a faux heavy woman’s voice sounds behind me.
I turn, a pained smile to acknowledge our host Maryam Delacroix, voluptuousness turning to sludge even in a bright indigo, ten thousand dollar Versace gown. A crown of platinum tresses artfully disguising her aging persona frames a smile that lacks nothing in its lasciviousness, despite her advancing years. The old crone’s talons find my arm and won’t let go as she awaits my befuddled reply.
“It smells, uh, delicious,” I say. “What is it?”
“You will enjoy the rarest of delicacies in our company, Zephyr, just as we enjoy the delicacy of yours,” she says and practically slithers, a hand discreetly wiping drool from her permafrost smile that probably lost independent movement about six operations back. “The Japanese call them ‘pocket monsters’. A term too cute to describe something so mouth-watering, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “I’m a hot dogs-and-beans sort of man, myself.”
Maryam laughs – hell, cackles – like I just made the world’s most amusing joke. Her nails dig into the reinforced sleeve of my costume and I grimace, not from pain, but the sheer moral discomfort I find myself in thanks to my own rectitude, but I remind myself I’m living in basically an abandoned office at the moment and I need the funds. Elisabeth’s payout from the sale of our apartment and the final cessation of our married life has still failed to turn up, hence my latest predicament.
At some unknown or perhaps ultrasonic signal, Maryam promptly disengages my arm and mutters something under her breath that sounds a lot like shibnitz as she hurries off across the chamber. I belatedly massage blood back into my arm where her hand was and do my best to circulate the party as well. I’m part of the paid entertainment after all and the lighting up of faces everywhere I turn tells me these more than well-heeled modern day aristocrats aren’t just here for the sunset.
For once there’s not a single face among the plosi I could name. The gathering is exclusively the Illuminati of the western jet set. These are the rich, the widows, the wives and scions of industrial powerhouses so vast and whose reach is so broad we no longer even recognize their names for all the masks and icons and better known brands they hide behind. In the same stupid reverential tones she saves for describing her various money-making shenanigans, Hallory told me eac
h person here had the wealth of a small European nation or more, and there would be value for me in playing along with the paid appearance. Now I know how Gloria Estefan and Marky Mark feel gyrating their booties for the Sultan of Brunei or appearing on an oil sheik’s luxury boat. But even my sometimes backward intuition can’t fail to note among the mega-rich, boredom and satisfaction are constantly at war, and it’s likely a race to the bottom to stave off such woes, requiring ever greater indulgencies that I dare say neither start nor end with par-boiling sentient Far Eastern delicacies for the amused palates of the mob.
On my casual sojourn around the table my eyes lock with one of the other women I somehow mistake as a guest for a few vital seconds before I note that a) she’s the only person of color apart from some vampiric-looking Taiwanese dudes b) she’s wearing hardly any clothes c) she appears to be wearing a leash, and d) she’s Black Honey.
“Holy shit,” I say belatedly, keeping my tone low as my eyes trace the fine silver chain from her neck collar to where it loops into the lank grasp of a portly silver-haired, egg-shaped train inspector of a man wearing a five-thousand dollar tux and a serial killer’s smile, his attention focused down the table plucking a cooked wing from one of the evening’s gustatory delights.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her.
“This is what it takes for you to finally acknowledge me?” she asks, ridiculous non-costume (think slave girl Princess Leia but with less dignity) no reason for her to cut me any sass.
“If this is how you get acknowledgement, you’re doing it wrong,” I tell the B-grade heroine.
“You can talk, mister,” she says. “You ain’t so much higher’n me. What’re you doing here?”
“Shhh,” I say with all the calm in the world. “I’m here undercover.”
“You’re wearing a mask.”
“Exactly.”
“You have a zee on your tuxedo.”
“Uh-huh,” I reassure her meaninglessly. “That’s right.”
Black Honey squints at me a moment. She’s a bulldoggishly attractive woman in a domino mask and not much else but a patina of sweat that honey barbecues her skin almost as well as the glazes on the nearby roasts.
“So . . . what’s the story, then?”
I make a quitting motion. “I’ll fill you in later,” I say and sashay on.
There’s a low chime behind us as another costumed figure enters and I sigh loudly into the crowd’s pregnant pause.
Negator.
*
THEY HAVE PAID for the former villain in all his madcap finery. Clearly Negator’s been back to the tailor since last time we tussled, no signs of the wear and tear you’d expect to see from being trapped together fighting for survival through three months off-world in a living nightmare.
With goblin-mask and curiously evocative horned headgear in place and playing every bit the menacing villain, Negator scans over the tops of the heads of the crowd from his position athwart the same curtained podium from which I entered, gaze settling on me the same time his lips curl into a grin of forced amusement.
I nod back, unnoticed by the crowd just a split second before all eyes swivel to take in my reaction to this so called revoltin’ development.
My face is just an extension of my costume at this point, playing this as I think they expect with a staged measure of disgust.
“What do you think, Zephyr?” Maryam says, once more in my ear and at my arm. “Are you happy to see your old nemesis? Or is this the occasion for a smackdown?”
It’s as strange for me to hear the term in the cultured French woman’s accent as it is for her to say it, I think, but her own performance is part of the overall show and I don’t have to fake my reluctance as I look upon her from my eight-inch height advantage and tut slowly, gaze roaming back to Negator looking back at me, every inch the villain with his cocksure grin.
“What do you expect me to do?” I ask the hostess. “Wreck the joint?”
“God no, Zephyr,” she hisses low, out of the hearing of the nearby enthralled throng. “Just give our guests a bit of a show, you understand?”
Barely able to believe I am complicit in this, I nod and the old woman eases away leaving behind a faint smell of breath mints and decay, and I inhale Bruce Lee-style, resisting the urge to spit (out my nose) as I circle the table at the same time Negator starts loud, slow, deliberate steps in his quasi-high heels until they touch down on the rare marble floor at an even level to me. We eye each other up, every other punter spellbound as we circle like alley cats, Negator’s grin as vaudeville as his gear.
Having turned a one-eighty, we stop by mutual accord, lock eyes and burst into tight laughter, clasping arms and embracing.
“Good to see you pal,” I say.
“Keeping safe, I hope Joe?” Negator says. In my ear he adds, “Don’t fuck this up for me though, OK? I need the cash.”
“I hear you, brother,” I say and we disentangle our bromantic grips.
The crowd deflates and Maryam shoots me a look that could wither armies. I only grin, channeling my inner Narcissus, winking charmingly as Negator and I break contact and I circle back around the room and think I might just take a stab at what the roast tastes like after all, but it’s right then one of the more geriatric members of tonight’s secret gathering pipes up about what he decides must be a world-shaking disturbance. In instants, the chromatic glass wall blackens and we find ourselves watching the most curious of scenes unfolding over China.
Zephyr 16.2 “Disappearing Skywards”
THE SATELLITE VIEW shows frozen bodies drifting in space.
The Chinese wear street clothes. Some clutch their iPhones still, others shopping bags, garden equipment, children’s hands. Each woefully unprepared for whatever catastrophe plunged them beyond the Earth’s stratosphere and into the freezing deeps of space. There are dozens upon dozens of them, floating face up and frozen eyed in strange symmetry like a new asteroid belt miles high above the uncaring globe of the world below.
The news feed cuts to Chinese State TV and images of what looks like a dust storm cutting across the roads and streets and fields of a rural township rendered pitifully gaunt in the lucid daylight on the other side of the world. And while dust and grit and excreta and all matter of other junk flies whipping into the air at the approaching disturbance, the zoom lens and modern technology shows predominantly it is people caught in the strange effect. It jettisons them into the sky where they continue their hay ride to hell, winking out of human eyesight several miles above the misleadingly peaceful blue.
“What the hell is this?” I mutter to myself, hands clenched into fists unawares.
Ms Delacroix places her reassuring hand on my arm once more.
“Do not trouble yourself, Zephyr. It must be hundreds of miles away.”
“Those are people dying,” I say. “The lucky ones.”
I tune the French woman out as I strain to pick out the newsreader’s explanation over the hubbub of the upmarket gathering: something about unexplained phenomena and a shutdown in external transmissions from State-sponsored media including the worldwide web. My feelings accelerate from alarm through to unease and right past borderline freak-out as a talking head explains the expanding sphere of influence has likely affected Chinese population centers involving about one hundred thousand people and is moving at such a rate that it will hit the coast inside of the next five hours – by which time the death toll will top about thirty million, provided few are immune to the unexplained effects of whatever is driving this disaster.
“Holy shit,” I say to myself several times, Maryam now moving like the good hostess she is among the guests trying to reassure people and freshen their drinks.
Under my breath I start to repeat the name Roxanne over and over, wondering to myself what’s the point having Sting’s secret password if he never shows.
Negator comes in close and shoulder-bumps me.
“What’s up?”
“There’s peopl
e dying,” I say.
“Don’t do anything stupid to screw up this gig, bro.”
“Are you serious?”
But one glance at his stony expression – what little I can see of it – confirms Negator’s serious. I shake off his gloved hand before he can reach out, me muscling my way through the crowd like I’m in need of a phone booth to change, muttering Roxanne again under my breath without effect.
I bump into one of the greased waiters and stop him before he can squirm past.
“There an exit around here somewhere?”
The dumb-looking guy gestures with a thumb and I thank him, moving past another ensorcelled-looking doorway into the kitchen area, back stage at the Coliseum as I nod to waiters and waitresses and staff and hit the back door and draw a deep breath of relief at the stink of concrete and old paint and freedom, tugging the jacket off and throwing it in the doorway as I get the hell out of there.
*
AT TRIPLE MACH I am still party to the death of nearly a million innocent Chinese.
I hit foreign landfall and check the Enercom phone I’ve set to the website of some 4Chan guys with a live satellite feed tracking the affected zone as conspiracy theorists and the so called intelligentsia of the internet cook up and discard one theory after another like so many failed batches of soufflé. The important thing is the raw data, which allows me to course-correct over Hainan and rocket inland, low enough that I hope I don’t trigger any radar.
Twenty minutes later I see the cyclonic wall ahead somehow less impressive and yet far more compelling than it was on television, all sorts of rural bric-a-brac from the Chinese hinterland disappearing skywards with nary a flicker of protest from the silent, nearly somnolent countryside around.
The earth I fly over is barren. A fine dust covers everything – that which has settled after the gravimetric effects have had their field day, no pun intended – but there’s a subtle absence at work in the landscape as I register that basically everything not nailed down has disappeared into the ether.
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