“You’re Zephyr, right?”
“Ten points. Yes.”
“And what is your business in the facility?”
I glimpse a name tag on his lap above a ketchup stain and nod mock-seriously, not that he can tell the difference.
“Well Dr Newman, I’m here to ask a few questions of my own,” I say in my best CSI New Zealand voice. “There’s a few unanswered queries we have about the Hubris escape last week and I’d like to know what your facility’s doing about it.”
I offer him my phone for no particular reason – open at that moment to a shot of Tessa laughing and trying to cover the camera lens from about two years ago – and the scientist adopts a self-concerned mien.
“Uh, what about the Hubris escape? He was recaptured.”
“At great expense to the city and myself, doctor.”
“I’m just the carceral scientist here, Zephyr, any questions –”
“You’re trying to tell me you haven’t even implemented a review, aren’t you?”
The scientist’s lips move like in a silent movie.
“Doctor?” I’m quite enjoying this. I strut around him while the security guys look confused, one of them actually drifting away.
“Well, of course there was a review.”
“And?”
“You’re really investigating this?”
“Bet your sweet tushy I am.”
“It was a minor security lapse with . . . unintended consequences, Zephyr.”
“The Hubris escape? Not so minor if you ask me.”
Dr Newman looks like he’d rather be elsewhere.
“Not just the Hubris escape,” he says weakly.
It’s at this point I drop my act, curiosity piqued as I raise one interrogatory eyebrow and say, “Whatchoo talkin’ about, Willis?”
“We lost a few others, too,” he says, a look on his face like he might puke on my boots at any moment from the admission. “A few others who haven’t come back.”
The scientist looks to the three remaining goons and makes an ushering motion. They move away, one with fairly well qualified misgivings, leaving Dr Newman and I alone in the antiseptic hall.
“You tell me, and I’ll keep your name out of it,” I say.
The scientist clutches his thinning hair a moment, caught between a rock and my ever-hardening gaze. I’m tempted to slap the admission out of him, as unnecessary as that looks, because of my so far unspoken fears of what he has to say.
“The . . . bodies.”
“Dead bodies?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, they were alive. Technically. But brain dead. Nine of them.”
“Holy shit,” I say, thoughts flicking rapidly like bicycle spokes, going back through the little tour of this place I just had. “Who?”
“The Titans,” Dr Newman says. “The ones we recovered after the invasion. The brain dead ones. We had them on ice just like our regular inmates.”
“And they were boosted during the Hubris escape?”
The scientist nods, dejected, and I give a sickened look he misinterprets as me going back on my word to keep him out of it as requested. I don’t have anything to say to reassure him, just shaking my head and turning, walking out forgetting I was here under false pretenses anyway.
Matrioshka, my newfound bane, has reared her medusa’s head again.
Zephyr 18.5 “The Grey Below”
TWILIGHT SAYS HE’LL meet me at the Flyaway since he has one of his goddamned magic circles there from years back, one he doesn’t mind abusing for the sake of convenience and is in fact happy to regale anyone who’ll listen when he’s in one of those rare lugubrious moods about how he and Christian Slater got bombed on vodka and nitrous and fashioned the magickal sigil out of vermouth he then set alight with a cigarette cadged from Black Honey. Unfortunately, the big lug isn’t on hand when I first arrive and after my third drink and not a fucking tinkle in the old engine room, I start drinking the hard stuff in a corner with a morose-looking Portal plus British actor Tom Sizemore, Kate Mara, Ana Ivanovic and a totally in-his-cups David Lynch.
Also in the club tonight: Tom Daley, Mark Ruffalo, Nana Mouskouri, Mikka Luttinen, Paul Walker, Christian Bale, Impasse (that’s a singer, not a mask), Joe Gazzam, Katie Couric, Richard Wilkins, Morrissey, Spike Lee, Christopher Tolkien, Patrick Bateman, Spike Jonze, Gina Carano, Nigella Lawson, Monty Panessar, Gemma Ward, Liv Tyler, Vivienne Westwood and Stephen Fry. There’s not another super in sight – at least until Twilight reveals himself sometime after the witching hour has come and gone.
In the meantime, I debauch myself with a drip feed of Stolis until the disinterested hotties at our table stagger away together, and then it’s just Portal and me babysitting Lynch to make sure the washed up director doesn’t choke on his own vomit – or as the case seems to be tonight – the neck tie he keeps trying to stuff into his soundlessly working mouth.
“Jesus, drink up,” I say to Portal. “You look so fucking glum.”
A few years younger than me, Portal’s never really amounted to much. He’s what you’d call a B-list player – and that’s if you’re being polite. My view and my view only, he hitched his wagon to the wrong crowd early on and never stepped too far afield. I guess for a guy who’s basically a slow motion teleporter, that kind of security is difficult to shake. In full costume at our round table he wears a beaked mask and goggles, a charcoal hooded huntsman cape and utilitarian black and green costume with the whole 80s look: broad belt, boots and flared gloves, Kevlar in the chest, arms and crotch of his get-up.
“I flunked out of the Ascension, Zephyr,” he moans in reply to my chiding. “It’s OK for guys like you. I never amounted to anything. Jeez, you know that of all people. I thought, with what Sting was preaching, like for the first time in my life I had some options. But no, I fouled that up too.”
I look away halfway through his rambling and slightly slurry speech, checking in with Lynch and then letting my hooded eyes pick across the writhing crowd, music like trip-hop dipped in treacle playing at slightly below the level of a plane taking off. On monitors over the bar there’s live news feeds of a mass whale stranding somewhere remote, the tragedy lit by the sun of early morning, and I muse before turning away that once upon a time there would’ve been superheroes on hand to help.
“Where the fuck is everybody?” I say to Portal.
“They’re with Sting, man,” he replies. “I know Legion’s got a charter flight to Afghanistan leaving the day after tomorrow.”
“To Afghanistan? Why not just fly direct?”
“Not everyone can fly, Zephyr.”
“No, some of you can teleport,” I say.
“Only if you know where it is,” he replies. “Sting and his guys are being . . . pretty secretive about the location. It’s up in the mountains.”
“Afghanistan,” I say morosely for no particular reason.
“It’s a beautiful country. The retreat is actually built into the side of the mountain and there’s a rustic village below –”
“Save it for the Travel section of the Post, Portal.”
“Are you going to go?”
“I would sooner drink a jar of my own splooge,” I tell him. “Not that I could fill a jar in one go, it might surprise you to know. Or, for that matter, how long it would take to fill a jar. Not long.” My gaze goes wandering again. “Unless of course splooge ferments. That’s a cocktail I don’t think you could – oh hey, there’s Twilight.”
And indeed it is. He bamfs in from the burning green circle which causes two nearby hardbodies to shit their skirts, one staggering away on killer heels batting at her hair which has gone up like a Halloween lantern. Her friends console her as Twilight’s grinning mug wades its way toward us.
“Well met, fellow travelers.”
“This isn’t a Tolkien novel,” I scowl and pull the plastic doggie bag from my belt.
“Ew,” he remarks. “What’s that?”
�
�The . . . you know, the stuff,” I answer. “High Roller? Matrioshka?”
“Oh, OK. I’m not doing any of that right now,” he says drily and then grins, winking at me like it’s all just a ruse despite me knowing he’s deadly serious as he pockets the human errata. Instead, he looks around, periscope eyes for nubiles and hard liquor.
“The search can wait,” he says. “Let’s party.”
*
TWILIGHT GETS IN a round of drinks for the table, his willingness to dispense cash one of his most winning traits, I will admit. After effectively paying off the hangers on, he settles into a seat, the emperor at his table, somehow none of us out of place in the club despite the superheroic trappings. With his bristling blonde quiff, Twilight has a perma-grin for everyone, probably on account of whatever drugs he loaded up on before arrival, the black domino mask oversized compared to mine and covering the bridge of his nose, black cloak draped around his black upper costume that darkens from the grey below.
“How’s business?” I ask him pointedly.
“What?”
“I said,” repeating myself and adding greater volume this time, “how’s the business coming along?”
“Oh, I thought you said ‘What’s glibness’ and I was trying to come up with a suitably glib reply.”
“What?”
He starts to repeat himself, but I cut Twilight off, a hurt look even I can’t fathom as I punch him not that lightly in the shoulder.
“I meant the family business, you douche.”
“Oh, that shit? Forget about it.”
“Hard for me to do,” I say.
Twilight squints, deciphering me again over the shrieking volume of the music as it crescendos like a swan being hacked to death. The club plunges into silence a moment, just that split second between tracks where men and women, no matter how blasted they might be, are forced to confront the fact they’re standing in public property gyrating to rhythmic impressions on a badly painted black wooden surface. Our crew always flouts the rules about public smoking and the carpets, if not every roach-crawling inch of the place, are scarred and pitted with those marks as well as far more salubrious stains.
The next song starts. All is forgotten if not forgiven. I look to Twilight.
“Look, your little drug problem’s over, Zeph. Be happy.”
“I’m not happy,” I say to him. “We’re meant to be heroes. Yes, even you, Mr Anti-hero.”
“That’s why I’ve got your boy heading things up for me.”
“Negator?”
“Guy’s got talent.”
“Negator’s been trying to reform,” I snap. “Danny’s . . . a good guy. He doesn’t need this.”
“The dude’s eight inches deep in models and a new Mustang convertible,” Twilight says, blinking at me like I’m the one who doesn’t get it.
“What does he need a Mustang for? He can fly.”
“Status, I guess.” Twilight shrugs. “You seriously wanted him to head upstate to ol’ grampa Jim’s auto shop or whatever the fuck you were on about before? Negator’s a criminal. And just because he’s a career criminal doesn’t mean he’s not good people.”
“You really do live in quite a different world, don’t you?” I say.
Twilight rises from the table in a flapping of his black bat-winged cloak, brushing past and knocking over empties as he bulls for the men’s room, something he is clearly not telling me that, for now, I don’t have the stomach to pursue.
*
IT IS GETTING late, but here in Gomorrah, the party may literally never end. Twilight holds court with Lynch, an equally sozzled Orlando Bloom, Heston Blumenthal, Mutassim Billah Gaddafi and several strippers spilling out from the table, some comedian called Paul Rudd attempting to build a replica sailing ship out of empty Stoli bottles and cigarette ends with a resultantly riotous crash that barely raises an eyebrow from the battle-weary Flyaway staff.
For some reason I am in a somber, agitated and weary mood, yet sleep or even the idea of it feels about as far away as any possible sense of satisfaction too, so I go on a search and find Portal slumped beside a speaker stack near the men’s bathroom, some clearly under-age trophy hunter literally trying to drag him to his feet. The girl’s baby blues light up at my arrival, but I give my patented mean scowl and hurry her a long with a few choice obscenities, jerking Portal to stand and hauling him over my shoulder in a fireman’s lift, taking him through one of the back doors and up and outside.
The cusp of dawn manifests in the first crinkly lines of a distant red sunrise beyond the stoic skyline, pigeons wakening in their nests on the roof and the city’s taxi fleet waking up as the unspoken truce on honking horns fades with the passage of night into day. I set Portal down and step off a few paces, taking a slash against a drain pipe before moving back and slapping the low-grade super around a few times until he starts to sober.
“Zephyr, stop it. What is it?”
“I need a favor.”
He mumbles something along the lines of it being a funny way to ask. I concede his point, not that I say anything aloud.
“I need a lift to Japan,” I tell him.
“Where?”
“Japan. In the north. Near the mountains.”
“No, Zephyr,” Portal says, managing despite his challenged sobriety to put every inflection of stupid into his words. “I mean, where exactly in Japan?”
“What do you want, a fucking postal address?”
“GPS would do.”
I sigh. Look around. Draw my phone and look at it like an artefact from 3000BC.
“You got Google Earth on that thing?” he asks.
“I think so.”
“Then we’re all good.”
Zephyr 18.6 “No Ordinary Intruders”
NOT LONG LATER, inky night reclaims us as I step like a ninja from Portal’s portable rent in space-time. The air is moist with tropical warmth, the jungle-like gardens around us alive with cicadas chirruping in Japanese as light winks alluringly from between the trees. Moving closer, the garden opens up to reveal a huge stone wall built partly to reinforce the sloping ground, and where a pagoda once stood, a huge architectural wedge emerges from the hillside seemingly made from thousands upon thousands of Rubik’s cubes. Slitted windows, tiny at this distance, but each wider and taller than a man, throw warm yellow light across the grounds like fire glimpsed through a stove’s grate.
We circle for a bit, me fancying myself like a black panther stalking through the night, Portal less convincing in his get-up that seemed so practical back in the club in Atlantic City, and like, who knew out in the field he’d be tripping over that hooded cape and clomping about in those badass boots? I hush him twice, then spy a dark figure moving quiet and serene through the landscaped woods ahead of us, and then my phone gives a bleep to let me know I’ve got a text from my daughter.
“Shit.”
“Good going, Zephyr,” Portal says haughtily.
The security guard in Kevlar vest and tactical webbing advances through the trees at us, red laser sight playing over my black leather chest before he knows what he’s even looking at. There’s no time to waste. I veer right, hitting hyperspeed to run in a short tight arc to land my fist across his jaw, helping his unconscious body slump to the ground an instant later.
Another guard behind me bawls in the local language for me to freeze, then hypocritically opens fire with the silenced Paladin Corp sub-machinegun. Foliage goes chopping to the ground around me as I dive and roll out of self-preservation, then pop up from behind a log to blast the guy with a short sharp dose of current.
My electrical attack lights up the night, and soon we hear several more patrol teams advancing on our position. Even masked, Portal looks pained and anxious.
“You’ve got this, right?” I say to him.
“What are we doing? Just waiting for them?” he asks in a reedy voice.
“Better we take ‘em on when we know where they are than they come on us by surprise,” I say.
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“What are we even doing here? Should we be doing this? I don’t want to end up in a Japanese prison, man. I can’t eat that food.”
“Jeez Louise, settle down.”
My statement is punctuated by two more Japanese security guards going banzai, rushing out of the nearest bushes and clearly deciding attack is the best form of defense as they assess in a moment we’re no ordinary intruders. To his credit, Portal steps up to the plate, throwing his gloved hands in front of himself and opening a rip directly in their path. The left guy manages to skip aside, but his pal tumbles into somewhere else’s weak morning light emanating from the momentary interruption, and the last I hear is a few perplexed syllables and a yowl of pain before Portal’s portal snaps shut.
A few 9mm rounds snap, crackle and pop off my shoulders, but rather than chance giving away our position further, I narrow my eyes and lumber forward, swinging a meaty right without much restraint, punching the advancing goon in the middle of his armor-plated chest and flinging him twenty yards back into the jungle. He lands with a cry of pain, but goes still, the manicured forest returning to what I guess it might be a bit of a stretch to call preternatural silence.
“Come on,” I say to Portal and start to weave between the trees, abandoning stealth to aim for the house looming closer and closer above us.
Portal gives a weary little sigh and follows.
*
BENEATH THE SHADOW of the house, there is an honest to God paved driveway that ends abruptly at a huge walnut-finished roller door. Paved stairs curl around the base of the hillside, one imagines, to reach the house perched above, just a glimmer from glass and steel of a balcony that surrounds the far side beyond the slitted windows, but I pick up the pace as I race out of the greenery and shoulder-barge the garage doors, smashing through into a showroom for six different kinds of expensive-looking vehicles as emergency fluorescent lights stutter on and I see a trio of functional concrete steps rising to a glass-and-steel door on the far side of the chamber. I vault above the convertibles and armored BMWs, sailing on projected air currents to touchdown at the steps, looking back as Portal shortens the widening distance between us by running between portals and appearing right at my heels.
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