Somewhere behind me there’s a detonation of green fire and several of these Johnny-come-lately mooks shriek in pain, terror and surprise, and I manage a bloody grin of my own, drunk-looking smile on my shattered face. My tongue probes loose front teeth. At first I think my eyes are giving out on me, but I realize it’s just the regenerator casting a shadow. I think he’s going to pick me up for more punishment, but it’s worse than that.
The meat hook gleams gently in the tender light.
“Not laughing now, pretty boy,” the nasty little smiling bastard says.
The power fists guy, the shining armored knight and the big red heavy hitter back him up, all staring down at me in anticipation of what’s next.
The hook takes me under the ribs and for a moment I feel nothing.
Then the screaming starts.
*
THE PAIN FLOODS my system like kick-starting a broke-ass car. The metal hook is a conductor and in one flash my tormentor and the already battered, seemingly permanently blurred guy behind him give horrendous shrieks of their own as my natural defense system kicks in. I am a lightning strike, but in reverse. Then it’s down to me to slide the hook from my own torso, a guttering discharge of thick dark blood running over my hand and slopping down my side as my inner doom-laden monologue tells me that’s seriously not good.
The aftermath of the flash renders me deaf and numb. In the tradition of the best shaky-cam cinema, I see Twilight across the burning warehouse as he flings off his two most immediate attackers, momentarily free as he whirls, cloak in slow motion, eyes falling on me, and I know what he’s thinking in that instant as clearly as if we were telepaths.
Sorry, pal.
And my friend the antihero does the crouch thing and flies up and out through the roof to freedom.
Zephyr 17.7 “Into Which She Has Departed”
IT’S JUST ME and about ten of the remaining Glow-infused gangsters who crowd me like their ready for some bukkake action.
Not to force the pun, but I’m not taking this lying down. Tossing aside the meat hook, a deathly silence falls over the warehouse in the wake of Twilight’s escape and the metal clatters almost musically on the merciless floor. I stagger a moment, hand to the gruesome wound in my side, stunned gaze raking over the regenerator only just now starting to grow skin back onto his bones, the other guy not so lucky.
Nonsensically, I’m trying to think of a good quip because nothing goes for working a crowd of belligerent assholes like showing them you’re not cowed, but the lady of the moment forces her way through her stooges with a sneering arrogant grin.
Her mistake.
I lunge with a burst of super speed, my hand around her throat before she can pee her panties. One of her ornate little hands clutches my wrist like she might get herself free by brute force alone, but then she locks eyes and surprises me, losing none of her acid hostility.
The witch collapses under my grip, pouring downwards in a gaseous swirl, seemingly obliterating herself before reforming again into her woman’s shape a dozen safe paces away.
I’m mobbed by her henchmen amid my surprise. The red brick grabs me by the skull and though I push a few sparks into another of the flunkies, the pain’s all about to start again when there is a harsh cry beyond the flames and an opalescent light floods us like we’re under the beams of a police chopper.
The closest men around me fall to their knees, but I only shield my watering eyes to make out several glowing blue fireballs hurtling through the rapidly collapsing warehouse to take out the blurry guy and the elastic man. Directly before me is the red guy, but he vanishes like an exorcism as a blocky orange figure crashes in between us swinging fists like hammers on anvils.
I collapse on my side, looking between shuffling and running feet and legs to see the Toecutter’s daughter grab her closest men and signal retreat as Seeker and her Glow-powered gang ride to my rescue, the remaining gangsters who can still walk or run beating a hasty retreat along with their mistress.
I slump to the floor and cough weakly and the lights dim and this time they don’t return – at least for a while.
*
I WAKE IN dirty bloodstained sheets in a dim, unfamiliar room that smells of socks and cigarettes. Even without moving anything but my eyelids, the pain in my side is tremendous, but I work myself into a position where I can get a better sense of my surroundings: a flop house somewhere in the barrio, I’m guessing, reality TV blaring in another room interspersed with the sound of someone playing inept Flamenco guitar while trying to carry on a rapidfire argument with a walrus banging a dead fish against the bedroom wall.
Loren moves into my periphery as a white blur and it takes long moments for the world to come into focus. She sits on the bed’s edge and calmly pulls back the covers to check the dressing on my left side, cool hands tracing gently over the fever-hot skin bared by my peeled back costume worn like a wetsuit only from the waist down.
“That suit of yours almost didn’t let us take care of you,” she says gently.
“What’s that?” I murmur quietly in reply. “Reading my thoughts again?”
“You know I only did that once,” she says, demure, eyes moving away from my Jackmanesque physique.
“Thank you,” I say after a moment’s silence. “You really saved my bacon.”
“It was stupid of you to go in there alone.”
“Yeah,” I say, mulling that one over and for now sparing her the full sob story.
“What were you doing?”
“Twilight told me that was where the Glow was being made.”
“Not any more. Not for months,” Loren says. “That’s Martin Thurson’s old lab. They cleared out a long time back.”
“So I discovered,” I say. “It was a set up. Twilight’s cousin Danica –”
“Danica Azzurro?”
“So you know her. . . .”
“Well, duh Joe,” Loren says, briefly almost irritated before she gives a begrudging smirk, making proper eye contact for the first time and letting me drink in the vicarious benefit of her steady Glow addiction.
She looks good. Amazing. Too good. Her ancient Seeker powers rekindled through the wonders of modern chemistry and mutant physics, lush, honey-colored hair floats gently about her sweet, heart-shaped face like on a spectral breeze, the warm caramel eyes set in their frame of equally bronzed skin glowing with an unearthly vibrancy. The emanation erases the reality of the time-ravaged woman I know is true by supplanting it with a higher order truth transposed straight from another world beyond knowledge of mortal men and women.
Loren lays a faintly glowing hand atop the bloody marker of my bandage.
“My powers were able to close and cleanse your wounds, but you need time to rest,” she says. “You can stay here as long as you’re able.”
I do that stupid movie hero move and try to sit up only to find I’m at risk of shitting the bed, frozen in a wincing pose I can’t escape without making the pain even worse. Grimacing in sympathy, Loren closes in and slides arms under my back to ease me gasping to the stained sheets.
“Sorry,” I say.
“You have to believe me about your injuries,” Loren says. “I don’t know what they did to you, but –”
“It’s not as bad as what they would’ve done, if you hadn’t come.”
Our eyes meet. The chemistry is unavoidable. At precisely the right moment Loren breaks away and clears her throat and stands.
“You need to rest.”
“I’m sorry, Loren.”
Like a lost child, Loren looks about the dingy bedroom for anything to draw the attention away from her, but even the rust-stained mirror reflects her back at me, made all the more brilliant for her inner light bewitching the eclipse of the room’s one weak lamp.
“This isn’t the time, Joe,” she says.
“When is the time?” I wave an arm weakly from my enforced repose. “One thing after the other. That’s how it always is for me. For us. I loved you –”
/>
“No you didn’t, Joe.”
“In my own way, God damn it, I did Loren.”
“You’re just feeling that way now and saying it because of my powers,” she replies, sad eyes downcast in what I first mistake as coltish nerves, but realize is her speaking her innermost truth as well as voicing her darkest fear. “The Seeker has that effect on men and women. Heightened reactions. Without it . . . you’ve seen me, Joe.”
“You weren’t like that before,” I tell her.
“But I am now. A lot of water’s gone under the bridge, Joe.”
“And that’s why I want to talk now,” I say. “I blink, babe, and it’s fucking six months from now. That’s what my life’s like. That’s what it’s been like since I first got my powers at sixteen.
“I never meant for you to get hurt.
“I mean I didn’t mean to hurt you and I didn’t mean to get you . . . killed. I’m sorry, Loren. I failed you . . . as a man, and as a friend.”
“We all have our limits,” she says weakly.
I’m floored by the fey admission and the sudden awful realization there is no chemistry here, no convergence, no clearing of the air, no righting of the tables and chairs and straightening the mirrors and getting our house in order. The house blew away in a firestorm a long time ago and it’s only me, not Loren, who doesn’t want to face it.
After a long drum roll Loren’s eyes lift to mine and hold them a moment, a searching power in her gaze as present as the otherworldly manifestation around her.
It’s me who drops my eyes. Ashamed. Again.
“Go easy on yourself, Joe. You’re hurt,” she says kindly. “And human. Just like the rest of us, as much trouble as you might have believing it sometimes yourself.”
And surprising me most of all, she comes back and kneels and kisses where my forehead meets my hairline before turning and leaving the room. And my eyes close long before I’ve finished staring at the dark line of the half-closed door onto the hallway into which she has departed.
*
THE DAYS ROLL on like this for nearly a week. Seeker’s sidekicks Gaslight and Rocky come and check in on me from time to time, Gaslight suspicious and protective of my former girlfriend, Rocky the tattooed, terra cotta dude who seems awestruck in the presence of a real life superhero despite seeing me need a sponge bath and being a hero now himself. I tease him about the copyright on his hero moniker and he does a passably bad Tony Danza impression that makes me laugh enough that I curl up in pain and the kid makes like the boy he really is, doing penance by bringing me pretty much anything I ask in the day or two after that, until I end up asking for all manner of dumb shit to see at what point he realizes I’m poking fun at him, and it turns out it’s a lot longer than either of us are going to be comfortable with, so after a while I start making more obscure requests like getting him to read aloud to me (another mistake) and then he gets the idea himself to rig up a portable TV and we sit silently as my injuries knit and watch the city increasingly descend into chaos.
The news reports call them “outlaw gangs” and no one’s able to explain the sudden super-powered crimewave in Atlantic City, nor why there are so few masks to help police rein it in. Clearly drunk on their own power, Danica Azzurro’s underlings branch out into private enterprise of their own – unless the whole thing’s sanctioned by the Cosa Nostra, which seems doubtful. Those creatures prefer to live in the shadows, and despite many of the Glow-addicted criminals adopting colorful guises and wearing masks of their own, there’s something rag-tag and dime store about the whole operation that makes me reminisce about the days when bad guys had costumed henchmen themed on their own design. That’s what this reminds me of overall: like the mooks have taken over the city and there’s not a real villain or a hero in sight.
Not to say the city is completely devoid of heroes. The bulletins show various two-bit B-grade masks doing their best for their neighborhoods, and a few veterans like Mastodon, Streethawk and even the Lark put in their appearances. Nightwatchman also joins the party, but when three of the Mafiosos are found with broken necks in the bottom of a lift shaft, Commissioner Journey re-issues a lapsed shoot-to-kill order and for a day or two that circus almost manages to shunt the outlaw gangs off lead item in on the non-stop rolling coverage. Also in the news: a North Korean sub is still missing and feared by the UN as a potential weapon of mass destruction; scientists’ discovery of a secret colony of genetically-modified apes in Somalia destroys the perfect society they had formed; martial law is declared in Australia after apathy foils elections; famine and a cholera epidemic rock the No Man’s Land principality; Zionist terror cells at it again in Jerusalem; a new drug promises to grant telepathy-like powers between people and computers; and a new president’s been sworn in following an election I didn’t even know we were having. That means my least favorite time of year (Christmas) can’t be far away.
It’s the most TV I’ve watched in one sitting in years and I’m vaguely appalled and disquieted to see how much news there is now to watch, given so little seems to really be happening. Like constant updates on how the grass is coming along. But Rocky and I do manage to establish a steady banter riffing off the catastrophe that is daytime television, and seeing Nautilus’ soap opera debut in A Time Of Gods is a dramatic high (or should that be low), the pathos of which isn’t lost on even my stalwart and slightly Special Olympics qualifying companion.
“Jesus, he really . . . sucks,” Rocky says in what I know is an effort to be charitable.
“I can’t understand anyone wanting to switch up crime-fighting to act.” I shrug my shoulders and check my dressing. “Surely the pay for daytime TV’s not that much better than the endorsements and stuff.”
“That mean you’re doin’ alright, Zeph?”
“I’m not exactly a case study in fiscal capitalization, my friend,” I sigh.
Lost among the syllables, Rocky nods and returns his attention to the TV where my old teammate ostentatiously removes his t-shirt for about the third time in the past fifteen minutes while delivering a big speech about how he’s never been able to use his powers to help people because he’s afraid of water.
I mean seriously, who writes this shit?
Zephyr 17.8 “Glacial Heart”
WITH THE SITUATION worsening by the day, I can’t lie in bed any longer. I can’t keep declining the FBI’s calls either. On a clear and crispy Tuesday, I hobble to a rare pool of natural light escaping under ratty, blanket-covered metal blinds, fumbling at their drawstring like an incontinent old man.
As the grim and unflattering daylight pours in, it coincides with Loren entering behind me, shying like a creature of the night from the sudden exposure.
And for good reason.
Whatever magic the drug lent her before, now it’s gone. In the prosaic reality of morning, Loren’s eyes look swollen and sore at the same time they are sunk into deep shelves above cheekbones to make a model swoon, even if their skin tone is haggard and unhealthsome. She goes to cover her face with a hand with chipped nails, but somehow I cross the short distance in time and before she can flee, take her fragile-seeming wrist to halt her. We lock eyes a moment, the intensity too much for either of us. Into the momentary void is every unrequited moment, the fevered wanderlust of our once belonging and every dissonance of its betrayal. Loren pulls her hand away like a veterinarian slipping free, lank hair a shield to her true expression like nothing else could be.
“You’ve been avoiding me since the first night here,” I say. “I am so sorry I hurt you, Loren. I would’ve done anything –”
“It’s not that. They cut me off,” she says hoarsely.
“What?”
“I haven’t had a fix for three days,” Loren says. “Ricky likes you. I figured you were better off with him than seeing me this way.”
“Ricky?”
“Rocky. Rocky’s name is Ricky. Enrique.”
“You don’t have to hide from me,” I tell her. “What happened?”
“Let them try,” I say.
“They will. Or they would, if they knew where you were hiding.”
“I’m not hiding, Loren. I’ve been resting up.”
“Then?”
“They’re right. We were gonna shut them down. This drug is too powerful, honey. It’s not just a case of idiots getting high and writing themselves out of the gene pool. The city’s off-kilter. You’ve seen the news.”
“And Twilight?”
I give a loud hmmm and nod thoughtfully. An issue unresolved.
“I need the Glow, Joey. I can’t live like this,” Loren says and indicates herself with such awful disdain that what little is left of my glacial heart breaks just a fraction more and I hang my head, chunks of iceberg floating in my chest as I sigh deeply, feeling a welling behind my eyes I lament won’t come if for no other reason than that she might see it and have some manner of faith restored that I am human and not just superhuman.
But the tears don’t come, drying stillborn, and I heft my heavy eyes back to see Loren studying me with a curious sort of openness. Something bold, almost resolute – and I’m soon to learn, quite desperate in her gaze.
“What?”
She sidles closer. A faux demureness it pains me to see as she traces fingers over my chest hairs, tickling the wound beneath my ribs which is just a question mark-shaped scar now despite only a week going past. Then her hand slides lower.
“Loren.”
“I’m sorry, Joey,” she says and nuzzles into me, and like a total anus, I let her.
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