Blindsided, I turn and grab him and set the switch to deep fry, ploughing enough amperage into him to power a city office block. All I see for my efforts is his widening Sino-American grin, which soon follows a head butt straight to the sweet spot above the bridge of my nose, imploding my brains, breaking my sonofabitch nose, and causing me to stagger backwards clutching my face and trying not to howl like a little kid as I hear the trill of the overgrown oaf’s laughter play across me like a memory of all my childhood bullies rolled into one.
But there’s a difference between now and then. With my face dripping blood, I growl and gesture violently, the air around us becoming an instant aggressive weather system, static crackling through the ether more for dramatic effect than because it will do any harm to the brick. At least it keeps the super-speedster at bay, him circling the outside of our bailiwick as I eye the bigger target, the air synthesizing into fog in response to my anger, channeling that frustrated weather controller inside of me as I zoom forward and ram the guy with a Muay Thai knee strike and follow with close elbow attacks to the head.
The big guy grunts. I can’t tell if the attacks actually hurt him, but he’s not immune to the impetus of the blows and I drive finger strikes into his throat and eyes and knee him in the balls and when he’s protecting his face I squat and sling my arms around the back of his long legs and stand and twist and hurl and he lands hard on the forklift and his costumed companion beneath it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. He’s enraged and vents that frustration and anger picking up the half-melted ton of machinery, throwing it at me with a roar, but I cleverly dart aside and dose him with an electrical blast.
The same moment the speedster rushes in from behind and grapples, holding me fast in place as the juggernaut lopes towards us, face and fists equally clenched.
I give a surge of my own. The speedster is strong, but wiry, not up to the full force of my muscle and kinetic powers combined. I manage to twist back, effectively cartwheeling over the speedster’s head while wrestling, landing on my boots and reversing my hold now to clutch and throw the speedster into his charging mate.
The collision isn’t pretty. Responding to my attacks like a Viking berserker, the bigger Chinese super simply slaps his teammate aside with a noise like punching a dead cow so that the speedster lands in a proverbial puddle ten yards away. Just in time, I leap into the air, avoiding pulverization and kicking the big bad three times upside the head in the process, but he grabs my ankle and throws me into where the forklift was moments before, meaning I thump to the broken soil and lay winded.
“What are you attacking me for? It’s your government who caused this.”
“You are an outsider,” the bruiser says in crisp and articulate English. “You are trespassing.”
“Think about what you’re defending here,” I say. “The indefensible.”
“You speak because you cannot beat me,” he says.
“No,” I correct him. “I speak because there is no need for us to fight.”
“Said the lamb to the lion.”
The bruiser leaps at me. One of those super-leap thingies he obviously does quite frequently. I roll aside, powered by my sizzling inner composure and blind panic, and as he lands where I was just laying, I stupidly jump onto his back and try to channel hundreds of thousands more volts into his head. It only makes him roar, bucking like a nine-year-old girl doing a bad Miley Cyrus video. And I hold on for dear life.
He elbows back at me, but I swat those attacks with ease as my forearm circles his throat and I apply the world’s most fruitless choke hold. The guy has corded muscle like the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge. His face contorts like a Taurean in a China shop, not to make a bad pun.
I almost don’t hear the missile.
Zephyr 16.5 “If Not The Grave”
THE BLAST WIPES out an area within about a three hundred-foot radius, the detonation like opening the gates of Hell and then it’s all just black for me until I barely manage to look up from the crater in which I’m half-buried and the first thing I notice in my delirious state is that I’ve been out cold long enough for my Wallachian-designed costume to pretty much completely repair itself despite the burn wounds to eighty per cent of my body.
The big guy kneels, pretty much naked, cradling the carbonized mess of his female teammate’s body in his arms as big silent teardrops the color of gasoline roll off his oddly manicured face. He senses my movement and his head snaps about, that look of frenzied State-inspired hatred replaced with a look of such animal pain and sorrow that I blanch and cast about for sign of the third member of his team, but either he is gone or buried beneath the detritus kicked up by the government-sponsored airstrike.
I physically stop myself asking if the woman is alright. I can see her fucking skull, the perfect dental work frozen in the death’s head rictus, so I know she’s probably not going to make a full recovery. I know this from incineration experiences of my own, and seeing that skull and the big guy’s devastated face brings my own pain with Loren back quicker and more powerfully than I would like.
Managing to peel myself out of the ditch, I run hands over my singed face, my hair reduced to stubble, eyebrows gone, face somehow preserved from the scorching to the rest of my body by the instinctual duck-and-cover move into which we are habitually hardwired. My shadow falls over the survivor and he stands, costume clinging to those key areas of his decency enough to spare me any manhood issues.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Protocol,” he says softly. Deathly angry. “Protocol is what happened.”
“They launched a missile at us?”
“Not at us,” he corrects me. “At you. Mei-Lin and Yo-Yo and I, we were only in the way.”
“That’s . . . harsh.”
“Like you said, what would you expect of a government that will murder a hundred thousand of its own people in an afternoon and then seek to destroy the ones who might expose their blame?”
I see his own government has radicalized this poor bastard in ways I never could. All that is left to me is to nod and sympathize.
“What were they doing here?”
“Experimental physics. I don’t know,” he answers bleakly. “It is always a race against the American bogeyman. There is no reason for us to be at war. We are not at war. Yet Beijing fears the time when it is inevitable. We do not trust easily.”
He sighs. The noise is long and emotionally stolid.
I nod. About done for the day. Aching all over and yearning for my bed if not the grave. I rest a hand on his bare enlarged shoulder for all of half a second, then launch into the air before any more deadly repercussions can fall.
*
IT TAKES LONGER to return than I would like, but second degree burns will slow down even the best of us.
It is night again by the time I limp back into Atlantic City. The natty duct tape solution to my secret hideout is as effective as ever as I use the night like a cloak to hover at a bank of twelfth floor windows, one just a sheet of double thickness black plastic kept in place with more black strips I peel aside, still floating on the air, and slip inside.
My temporary home courtesy of Twilight is a dot-com company owned by his family concern and maintained as a front for certain offshore transactions even though the company itself went bust in the heady days of ’99 when people were seriously considering Y2K was something more than a good setting for a romantic comedy.
Away from the windows – which are treated to stop prying eyes, Twilight assures me – I have a bed and a bar fridge and a computer station and a jack-off chair and TV screened from the window view behind the long curving arc of the old reception desk still painted with the lively blood red of the defunct company’s logo. A bunch of office dividers with their tickertape of redundant memos and reminders of a mundane life now hopefully eclipsed for those ex-workers only add to the bunker-like feel of my new digs, a bit like living on a film set or backstage at a concert or some other improbable location whe
re public is never really meant to mix with private in quite this way.
There are a few cardboard boxes with all that’s left of my crappy pre-divorce life. Like with many things, it’s funny in a bittersweet sort of way that when you box up those personal effects so laden with meaning, you then find there’s rarely any reason to haul them out of storage again. My dwindling supply of KAAS restorative cream is not such a thing. I strip from my reluctant costume like parting ways from an intimacy of which I must not speak, and stand in the unlit office guided by the phosphorescence of the city outside as I daub my reddened limbs and torso with the cooling cream that quickens my body’s already outstanding healing powers.
I eat two cold dinners from the bar fridge and down several quarts of flavored milk, watching television footage somehow managing to show most of what transpired sans me in China earlier in the day and overnight, international pressure on the Chinese government to come clean on the experimental technologies that proved so deadly to its own people. I channel surf as I munch, flicking between newscasts and sitcoms so rapidly I start to lose sense of which is which, a huge conflagration in St Petersburg, a civil rights protest turned nasty in Belfast, the disappearance of a North Korean nuclear submarine, the death of Lou Reed, a robotic assassination attempt on the new Pope foiled by a Vatican mask, renewable energy stocks at an all-time high, scientists having to rescind dodgy claims to have cured the common cold, a Nobel Prize winner shot dead by an enraged fellow author, atmospheric disturbances in Siberia, a claim for asylum from children escaped from No Man’s Land, and a dozen other items blurring into one improbable, incoherent plot I can only resolve by switching off, laying back on my bed and missing a female presence, something or someone meaningful with whom to share my mostly meaningless and unoriginal thoughts, the flat squares of the ceiling tiles slowly spinning as my dinners digest and my thoughts catch up with the reality of the past thirty-six hour day as I commit my own chronology to the inevitable interrogation room of my mind, playing back through all the flukes and near misses and dwelling on the could’ve beens as well as the probably shouldn’ts.
Halfway through starting to gently snore, legs still hanging off the edge of the bed so my heels tickle at the industrial ply carpet, I snap awake and sit up like an underwear model selling ab crunches, or so I imagine, digging the Enercom phone from my belt beside my boots as I groggily try to second guess the time in London.
*
SHADE ANSWERS SLEEPILY, her phone one of those ones that identifies the caller and cheerily announces it no matter where you are or what you’re doing.
“Hey, handsome. Wish you were here. Momma’s got an itch.”
“Hi, uh, Shade. Look, don’t call yourself momma with me, OK? Wrong guy for that sort of thing.”
“Well hello and pleased to hear from ya right back at you, Zephyr. Fuck,” Shade says, sounding more than a tad put out. “If this is a business call, you might want to leave off a few more hours. It’s still dark out.”
“It’s always dark outside in London this time of year,” I say.
“True enough. Still, it’s early. What do you want?”
“I tried calling Sting today. Yesterday, I mean. When was the last time you saw him?”
“You seriously called me at 6am to ask about Sting?”
She makes a fart noise, or at least I hope she’s just making a noise.
“Not exactly romantic, I’m sorry,” I say, too little and probably too late as always. “I really am sorry. I just thought it was weird, you know? I didn’t just call him. I, you know, called him. And no response. They set themselves up as like world police or something, you know, and then where are they when you need ‘em?”
“What happened?”
“You hear about that China thing?”
“Of course.”
“I was in the middle of that.”
“Shit, boy,” Shade says. “They’re estimatin’ 300,000 dead Chinese.”
I try to absorb that figure, but it’s just a rank number. I imagine those frozen cadavers rocketing groundwards instead and blanch, thinking about my dinner coming up and decide against theatrics.
“So, what about Sting?” I ask.
“I haven’t seen him in weeks. Any of that crew. Surely if you tried the code word and DJ Ali knows you’re asking around, someone would come to you if you needed ‘em. Maybe they knew you had it in hand?”
“Yeah, well I was sort of in the middle of something important at the time.”
“Something or someone,” Shade chuckles with a cheeky laugh.
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Oh.” Shade audibly shrugs. Not sure how that’s possible. “I heard Sting was leading some kind of retreat. Recruiting more UK masks into his . . . Ascension into the Now, or whatever it is he calls it.”
“OK. Please give me a call if you hear anything,” I say, still not entirely sure why I do. “I mean, it’s too late now, but I’m feeling a bit out on my own or something. It’s quiet, you know? Too quiet.”
“Well tiger, any time you want to come to ye olde London town and play, you know how to find me,” she says.
I nod, hoping that’s audible too as I say nothing and hang up.
Zephyr 16.6 “The Witching Hour Upon Us”
THE BACK ROOMS at Aubergine are packed wall-to-wall with celebrity flesh, but there’s no sign of any supers. I am a novelty even more than ever as I squeeze in between the Olson twins, nod to Keanu and Richard holding hands in their habitual corner, smile and give a big fake laugh as I agree to a selfie with Demi and the Hoff, then squeeze Demi on her ass the way I know she likes as I make through up the back dais and onto the platform over which I can inspect the whole gyrating pulsing mass like a general contemplating his armies on the morning of Ragnarok. There’s for sure a Sodom and Gomorrah vibe in here as an industrial band dressed to a tee in corsets and not much else nonsensically mime something this week they are calling tripvil (a mix of trip hop and Vaudeville show tunes heavily modulated by electronic effects) as the club hosts a fashion parade where svelte men and women model frighteningly realistic animal heads alongside the minimalist fashion of the day, nothing sensible about those haut couture concoctions except for where they’re designed to titillate and enliven. Smoke so thick I fear it might be for real gently fills the room and it takes long moments for me to calm myself as I imagine everything from an impending villain attack to a forest fire.
At some point I am in a corner making out with a model called Gretchen or Gisele or something, but she is distracted by a tall thin black man with drugs and takes off after him like a child after an ice-cream truck, leaving me to linger on the taste of her as my eyes track back across the club and the seven Stolis under my belt do little to even blur my vision as the music goes up a notch into an insistent, pulsing ambient replete with forest noises and a heap of subliminal shit it feels like I am the only one able to make out below: animals screaming, roaring, tweeting, generally gesticulating, hidden in pain within the soundscape, nature’s tooth and claw on full display just a swatch of high end frequencies concealed beneath the trilling synthetic Pan pipe melody that seems to take geological time periods to switch between tones and semi-tones as I note the comings and goings, the fabulous and the famous and the not-so famous, nobodies hoping to be somebody or at least to bed one, me amongst them, moving awkwardly from the corner frame as a girl with luminous contacts tries to ingratiate herself by smile alone, a low-cut dress showing off her perfect post-operative globes that barely register for me as I see The Lark and Night Angel descend from the silver-roped back door down steps painted black to conceal the numerous stains that might otherwise betray its status as the favored trysting spot of masks citywide; and The Lark is as astonished as I am to register my raised hand as I gesture him and the angular-boned Night Angel towards me, any port in a storm, or so it appears as I swivel my muscular girth to signal for immediate beverage relief for we warriors three as a girl barmaid in a tight black t-shirt with
the club’s name emblazoned across her hardbody smiles and brings three Stolis just as the two zero league supers finish wading through the crowd to join me, barely able to understand each other’s greetings above the sub-woofing and the ecstatic and oftentimes random exultations of the crowd.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I yell.
“. . . not sure what we’re doing here . . . did you come after?” The Lark says or something like it, conversation like Chinese whispers in an echo chamber.
I blink and nod and give a glassy smile and pass him a drink and chink bottles with Night Angel, who gives me a seductive yet bloodless smile and later I am fucking her back at my apartment, on hands and knees on the bed, we’ve both flown here and she’s wearing nothing but her black wings, and it’s been a while for me, so I am in my groove and in the end zone and perhaps I don’t have full mastery of myself or something, because when I bury myself deep inside her and feel her squirming towards orgasm and it triggers my own, I let loose and the mental barriers wielding my powers quiver as well and suddenly she is twitching and moaning and shrieking on the bed in time to my strobing electrocution, tiny wisps of smoke curling from the sheets as I hurriedly unclutch hands from her nearly skeletal hips and she drops on her side looking up at me, like for a moment I fear I’ve just plosion d her, and the air feels cold and cruel on my skin as Night Angel clutches the scorched sheet and pulls it across her nakedness and for some reason starts laughing hysterically and my cadaveric features break into a smitten grin I in no way feel for this strange creature who I wish would leave now, now almost the moment of my climax is done. I look across the vacant office furnishings to see the black plastic flap is beating slowly like from a drum stroke or a heartbeat or the inhalation and exhalation of alien lungs and I let out a long pent-up breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding.
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