Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

“Potty mouth, dad.”

  “No, seriously,” I say, standing, trying unsuccessfully to take the letter from her hands as she turns, inordinately pleased with herself, and I follow her into the modest kitchen which obviously doubles as their laundry, me suddenly uncomfortable in a jungle of teenage girls’ underthings dangling on tripwires from every imaginable angle.

  “You can’t write a book, babe.”

  “I’m not writing it,” she laughs like a hyena. A pretty hyena, but a hyena nonetheless. “Some jackass they got off Twitter’s going to write it. Ghost write, you know?”

  “No, you don’t get me,” I say and take Tessa by both shoulders, as if willing my conviction to travel straight from my thoughts and into her skull. “You can’t let anyone write about us. We have to keep a lid on things.”

  “Come on, dad. Half of Atlantic City’s already caught on to you being my dad. What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal?” I say slowly, winding up like an old-time baseball pitcher and only really getting the logic I’m about to deliver as I’m delivering it. “The big deal is that someone is trying to assassinate me, and that may or may not be linked to someone killing a journalist I was friendly with to get a folder containing God knows how many secrets about who we are and where we live.”

  “Big deal.”

  “Jesus. Honey, OK. You’re really scaring me now. Please don’t do this.”

  “You saw the advance they’re offering, right? Twenty grand?”

  “I know that money’s really tempting, but I could –”

  “What? Pay my rent? Just add that to Loren’s drug habit?”

  “Actually, that deal’s not really standing any more. . . .”

  “Well there’s some good news then,” Tessa says and harrumphs, actually putting her foot down as she shelves the letter.

  I grab it up again in turn, scanning it desperately for grammatical errors that might nullify the deal while my daughter pours us huge 16oz glasses of V8.

  “You know,” she says, impersonating me as she wipes the first taste from her upper lip, “you really have to get onto this whole ‘someone’s put a contract out on me’ thing, you know, if you think it might have wider . . . whaddayacallem . . . repercussions.”

  “I don’t know where to start,” I say tiredly, dropping the letter on the counter.

  “You seriously don’t know who wants you dead?”

  “The list seems pretty endless.”

  “Maybe, but it’s someone with resources. Someone who you obviously defeated or injured pretty badly in the past. Someone who doesn’t think they could take you out themselves. And someone who knows enough about you to kill your journalist buddy – sorry about that, by the way – but does that ring any bells?”

  I think about it a moment, a veritable whirring of cogs and gears.

  “You know, when you put it like that, one name does come to the top of the list.”

  “Demoness,” Tessa says.

  I nod. “Yoko fucking Ono.”

  Zephyr 18.3 “Like The Glittering Snow Outside”

  NEON LIGHT PENETRATES my hidden fortress in the clouds, or at least that’s how I imagine my twelfth-storey former corporate crash pad as snow glitters pink under the alien lights, gushing down from the invisible heavens above as the city’s temperature finally plunges to match its demeanor.

  In my hand I turn over a slim, attractive-looking watch, the shiny temporal relocator I stole from Arsenal in the days leading up to his death. Sadly, the intervening months or perhaps my one-off use of the device to take me to the Demoness’ lair in Sixteenth Century Japan drained it of any further use. The gadget is little more than a silver bauble, something for the trophy room I’ve never had. Cardboard boxes in the back of my old shower recess are about as good as I’ve ever managed.

  However, the thought sparks memories of the impressive collection dead Tom Hilfiger managed to sequester away in his mansion’s secret basement. Like so many things I wish I could access, it’s now in the FBI’s hands and way out of my grasp. Closing my fist around Arsenal’s device, I squeeze until the mechanism crunches, dropping chunks to the office floor too big for me to fool myself are like the glittering snow outside.

  For the second time I consult the Enercom phone, not pulling up my embarrassingly over-reaching and incomplete to-do list, but the snapshots of the intel I gathered months before from the Wallachians’ Fortress. It makes me more than sad to think any future access to their scrying glass might be out of bounds. I would quite literally kill for one of those tables of my own, if for no other reason to live stream episodes of The Wire from a parallel where it not only runs into a tenth season, but spawned a range of spinoffs.

  The pics contain a treasure trove of intel about my enemies, tracked and compiled and averaged out from their known movements and the movements of their parallel others across the countless however many counter-Earths on which they have grown. Yet I’ve already plumbed the median data. If Ono is no longer hiding out in the past, she’s either ensconced within that ghastly downtown tower I fear to enter, or hidden away in her architect-designed retreat in the mountains – the same location, I belatedly suspect, as her feudal era abode simply updated for the passage of five centuries.

  The phone chimes as I stare at the zoomed-in charts and data trees stored in my gallery. The message from Mastodon: Gettn recked @ Flyaway. U cumming?

  Not yet, my friend. Not yet.

  *

  THE MUSIC PULSES fierce enough to induce nausea, vertigo, arachnophobia, shingles, rickets, the bends. I am sandwiched between a two-bit young blonded actress named after a famous cheese, and an R&B star with an apparent penchant for intimate physical violence, me not knowing if I’m coming or going with their nubile young bodies pressing in on me, ultraviolet tattoos all the rage this season as I swim through my fogged state to follow the swirling spirals under the bust-line of the black girl’s one-piece Westwood streetwalker-inspired dress, the gauzy black ruffle beneath her ample rear end a fitting sanctuary for my right hand, thumb a mimicry of the member aching inside my still-suit as I co-ordinate my comfortable entrapment within the delicious twosome while making sure the ‘Don is still drawing breath, slumped beneath the table in the rear VIP booth beside us, and me also exchanging courtesies with a senator apparently causing a stir on Capitol Hill right now by dating LA’s Queen Bee, the female mask in absentia, and I later learn, actually in the bathroom making out with one of the young Brit supers from One Direction. The swirling lights play across me, deep yellows in the darkness that only render me at one and the same time more wretched and more beatific as the young singer gyrates against my wrist, the actress, high on the same cocktail of pharmaceuticals and taking it much more heavily than me, muttering sweet nothings about Tantric sex and numerology and the Kabbalah and real estate prices and the calorie count of a New England iced tea and that designer hotdogs are the latest gourmet fashion and she’s got to lose a further ten pounds by New Year or she’s going to be replaced by Zooey Deschaniel, all while I’m struggling to make out the words of this bloated politician who’s being cuckolded by a ten-year-old or something right at this very instant, the senator’s head swelling up in my addled vision like those helium balloons we once bought at the Atlantic City Fair when Tessa was small and my wife and I were still capable of being civil. I want to tell someone to stop – the actress or the singer or the politician, but I guess preferably the latter – except I can’t get a word in edgewise to his monologue and besides, I seem to have lost my voice or at least my will to communicate as increasingly antisocial grunts of passion emanate from the girl wedged in front of me and I shrug, a pliant face, my own features like play dough as I try to communicate via body language alone, my trapped boner not included, and it takes long moments to realize the senator isn’t talking to me anyway, but is on a hands-free phone with a little winking blue chip attached to his ear. I resist the temptation to be offended, clutching relief instead as the songstress cums and curls ar
ound and back into me and kisses me, then starts making out with my companion who I then guide, the pair of them together through the packed club’s crowd, a beast with six legs, faces looming in at us like exhibits on a ghost train ride from one of those old-fashioned fairs I just mentioned, trusting Mastodon will sleep it off in safety provided there’s no more public attempts on my life, despite how safe I feel if this is my world, with which I am not entirely comfortable, if that’s the case, me shifting us closer to the back exit and the doorman in ballistic Kevlar who just looks at me and nods “Good night, sir,” for all intents and purposes me a telepath able to read the scorn and resentment there for me even making his employment possible.

  *

  RED MONOLITH AND I used to often joke about incorporating sunglasses into my look to account for mornings like this. That tall bastard always had his visor to hide behind, but me, entering FBI headquarters like any other leather-clad pedestrian, I can only sigh in relief at the respite from the glaring winter daylight outside.

  Three nervous-looking young greeters in suits head me off before I even get to the inquiries counter. One carries a clipboard and the others I suspect wear Tec-9s under their suit jackets.

  “I got an appointment,” I mutter, jaw aching from my revelries.

  “You’re Zephyr, right?”

  “What, you want an autograph?”

  “No, I’m . . . recording your arrival for our records.”

  I shrug, letting them herd me into a small, electronics-lined room in the lobby before another metal door opens and an officious-looking hardbody escorts me through to their internal elevator, which promptly opens to reveal a dour-looking Annie Black backed up by her bull-headed partner Taurus.

  “Good news or bad news, Zephyr?” the minotaur asks.

  I give him the look, my mouth like an ashtray, which is strange given it was used more like a bidet the night before.

  “You gonna let me into your little elevator or what? I need coffee.”

  “Charming as ever,” Miss Black says.

  I eye her up. Wink half-heartedly.

  “How’s my favorite super agent?”

  “Sit on it and swivel, Zephyr,” Annie replies.

  “Show me the ‘it’ and I’d consider it for you, honey.”

  “Jesus Christ, he really doesn’t let up, does he?” Taurus says in his best Ving Rhames bass drawl.

  We squeeze into the small elevator and exit moments later in the familiar banal open office of the parahuman division. I spot Tempo approaching, his bald black head waxed and glistening as he adjusts his dapper Yves Saint-Laurent suit.

  “You tell him yet?”

  “We haven’t had the pleasure,” Miss Black says.

  I slump my skinny ass on a nearby desk corner and scan around for the coffee urn. Annie gets my hint and stomps off in a huff. So much unbridled anger in one woman. It almost reminds me of coming home again.

  “OK guys, what’s the dealio?”

  “FBI’s in charge of your murder case.”

  “Murder case?” I ask.

  “Look at him,” Taurus says to Tempo. “Smooth motherfucker, doesn’t even remember which murder we’re talking about, got so many bodies stacked up high.”

  “Oh bullshit,” I say, a deliberate dig that makes the big man’s flat nose scrunch up, though he self-consciously refrains from snorting. “If you mean the Doro investigation, I’m pleased. I don’t think the killer was an ordinary person.”

  “No shit,” Taurus says.

  Annie returns, all but thrusting her mug into my face. I try to say thanks, but she swivels away, shoulder-to-shoulder with her colleagues all with their beady eyes on me.

  “What do you want me to say? I’m glad.”

  “Crane and Murphy are both on sick leave after you got them hospitalized,” Taurus says.

  “Yeah, I should have my PA send them chocolates or something,” I softly lie, shrug, look back to them again. Of course, I don’t have a PA. “What do you need from me?”

  They swap puzzled looks.

  “It was you who made the appointment, Zephyr,” Annie says.

  “Oh. That.” I nod, trying to change gears, face contorting from insouciance to earnestness and frankly not really quite pulling it off.

  “Shit,” Taurus says obliquely. “He needs a favor.”

  And indeed I do.

  Zephyr 18.4 “Between Existential Angst And Eschatological Terror”

  THE FEEBS ARE surprisingly understanding of my plight. Then again, I guess handballing me to White Nine is no skin off their collective noses/snouts. It’s not every day one of the city’s most pre-eminent sons (yeah yeah) come asking for access to a piece of evidence, and probably even more rare when that evidence is the body of the deceased.

  “It’s just for a minute,” I smile, offering the copy of the email sent to my phone to the young guy in the ubiquitous white lab coat. “Is Dr Tchaikorvski around?”

  “Korvski?” The kid gives me the hairy eyeball. “You didn’t hear? He quit after you eloped with some of our omega-level –”

  “You don’t really call them that. . . .”

  “– confinement subjects, and yes we do. We really do call them that.”

  “Sorry to hear the doc’s gone. We go way back. I was kinda relying on him to grease the wheels for this favor the FBI owe me,” I say and thrust the phone once more in the pimply young motherfucker’s disinterested direction.

  “I don’t . . . know anyone at the FBI,” he says.

  “You don’t know Miss Black?” I get a flash of his surprise and interest, my inner bastard waking up and yawning.

  “Shame,” I tell the guy. “You’re kind of her type.”

  “Miss Black’s type?”

  “Sure. She’s a bit of a MILF. Though she doesn’t have kids. I think. I don’t know what that makes her.”

  “It makes her a babe.”

  “Actually, I think the term I was looking for was ‘cougar,’ but she’s a babe, yeah,” I say. “A babe whose cell number I happen to also have on my phone.”

  I waggle the cell towards him again and the young guy licks his lips nervously, scanning about to see if we’re attracting any notice from the nearby security types before he reaches out to me.

  *

  DOWN IN THE cooler, like a dungeon designed by Swedish architects, my newfound best bud Tony thumbs in a pin code, pauses for a retina scan, then looks self-consciously back at me before turning to the wall again and muttering, “Buck Rogers”.

  Yeah, I don’t know what that’s about either.

  The walls part to reveal a vast hall studded with morgue-style hatches.

  “The body was stored here because we didn’t have any next of kin and it’s still subject to the ongoing investigation before we authorize disposal,” Tony says.

  “Or, you know, a funeral,” I say.

  “Oh, that never happens,” he says glibly.

  I look around, distracted from the grand tour as we stop before one particular alpha-numeric-stamped hatch.

  “You sure got a lot of slots down here. Mostly empty?”

  “You’d be surprised how many dead supers have accumulated over the years with no one to claim ‘em,” my guide says.

  “Sure, but you don’t. . . ?”

  “Keep ‘em all? Well, if the case isn’t closed, we can’t authorize dis– . . . Uh, the funeral arrangements, right?”

  I check over the big hall again, the greenish tinge to the overhead fluoros only adding to the sickening feeling as I am sandwiched between existential angst and eschatological terror at the thought of so many of my superheroic and not-so-heroic brethren literally on ice here for an eternity with no rest in sight.

  The metallic cranking of the handle breaks me from my morbid reverie. A body-bagged form emerges on the sliding tray and Tony wastes no time unzipping with an unnecessary and entirely unwelcome theatrical flourish. This is a show of nightmares though, as even the technician sicks up a little to see the huma
n mash that remains of the High Roller.

  “Fucking Jeez,” Tony gasps and covers his nose. “Shit, they messed him up pretty bad, huh?”

  “No, I think they did a pretty good job of it, actually,” I say.

  “This is who you’re after?”

  “Yep,” I nod. “Just give me a sec.”

  Tony nods, still making a mask with his hand, and looks away as my own face contorts with the disgustingness of the act required. I reach into the bag and find the dried split pulp of Seagal’s head and pluck a half-dozen hairs from the scalp, tiny bloody giblets attached to the roots that make me shudder as I drop them into the plastic sample bag provided earlier which I tuck away on my belt.

  “OK,” I say loudly. “I need a drink.”

  *

  SECURITY STOPS ME at the doors just milliseconds after I’ve parted ways with my new best pal Tony. The four guards swap nervous looks, the air redolent with their imminently voiding bowels as they look to each other to see who’s going to deliver the bad news. They and therefore I am spared that particular endeavor by a guy with a voice like a bullhorn calling from behind, a burly figure in a lab coat who waves the overlong flapping arms at us as he hurries up from the guts of the building.

  “You need to stop there!” the guy yells.

  I’m not fighting it. I tell the security goons to settle, and everyone breathes a little easier except the incoming lab coat, who takes an interminable time huffing and puffing to finally get to us, burly being a bit of a euphemism for the considerable paunch he’s lugging over the guillotine line of his belt.

  “Is there a problem, officer?” I say in one of those weird accents I sometimes do just because I’m bored.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Just catching up with an old friend. You?”

  “What I mean is, do you have access clearance?”

  “Sure. I gave at the office.”

  The professor here peers at me like maybe I’m speaking Finno-Ugric or something, then gets it’s a joke.