As if on cue there’s a knock on the door and whoever it is lets themselves in.
Shade.
She eyes Twilight’s glistening figure up and down as any regular lady not impaled on a gigantic louse might do, then turns her head to me with a gaunt expressionlessness in her eyes that shows it’s all just play-acting.
“Zephyr,” she says. “Sting would like a word, if you’d come with me?”
I shoot Twilight a look, but he merely shrugs, making that annoying you-got-yourself-into-this-mess look as he towels off and makes little secret of his impressive package. Shade bats nary an eyelid and I shuffle after her like a scolded child off to sit in the principal’s office.
*
WE MAKE BACK for the caverns without talking, Shade walking stoically slightly ahead and me shooting glances around at this weird simulacrum of village life where the residents dress like four-color comic rejects and lounge in doorways sipping from soda bottles like they’re allergic to the daylight. Nursing a hangover, Cavalier removes his helmet from his sweaty head and nods to me as I pass, but I must look distracted or aggravated or too self-important or something because he scowls like he thinks I think I’m too good for nobodies like him, or hell, maybe I’m just overthinking it as he stands and slams on the helm again, disappearing back into the 7-11.
“Where are we going?” I call after Shade, hurrying after her like a little kid.
“To see our leader,” she says.
“You remember me, right?”
“Of course I remember you,” she says and snaps me a frosty look that belies any memories she might still possess. “We had relations.”
I muse about “relations” as the day vanishes beyond the cliff wall. We enter the main hangar and quickly detour to the huge chamber below where the morning meditation was held. A few hangers-on are still around, but I don’t catch any glimpse of Cusp/Matrioshka. Sting poses in the midst of the love-in, but seeing us coming he literally claps his hands and strides away, dismissing the half-dozen supers like they were so many teenage girls hunting autographs.
“Zephyr,” Sting says, that handsome skull grin of his evanescent on his leonine stubbled face. “I made a note to make some time for us to talk. I hope you don’t feel I was ignoring you.”
I push a smile onto my face like a pirate forced at sword-point to walk the plank. It takes an effort, not just to ignore the golden cumulonimbus constantly taking shape with various impressions of Lennon’s face just inches above Sting’s head, but to play my role and not clue Lennon into the fact I know he’s hitching a ride.
And that this entire conversation is horse-shit.
“Well, I thought after last night you might be pissed at me,” I say to him.
“Your scuffle with Twilight? No.”
“It’s been a while since we spoke,” I say, playing the part circumstances have written out for me. “Is all forgiven about, you know, that other thing?”
“What other thing?”
“Come on, you can say it. We’re with friends,” I say motioning to Shade, now the only one left in close proximity within the vast empty space.
“I am . . . not certain what you’re talking about,” Sting says.
I try not to grin, relishing the difficulties I’m creating for my erstwhile father or whichever version of him I’m now facing. This could be any one of the bastards, including the not-seen-for-decades Doomsday Man himself.
“Then we’ll let bygones be bygones?” I say after a moment. “Good.”
“I was pleased and . . . surprised to see you here,” Sting says.
Those blue eyes pass over me like a CAT scan.
“I was curious,” I say. “You know half the masks in Atlantic City are here.”
I give a theatrical laugh and would elbow him in the ribs if he let me closer.
“It’s created a few problems for the city police I’m sure, suddenly having to clean up their own messes without our help.”
“As they should,” Sting says. “They are only human.”
“So are we. ‘All too human,’ as Nietzsche would say.”
“Nietzsche?” Sting laughs. “There was a man who understood the concept of the Superman. The perfect –”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever actually read any Nietzsche,” I rudely interrupt, though I wear a smile like I’m waving a peace flag. “In my experience people who mouth off about Nietzsche can’t name a book he wrote.”
“You’re quite the bookworm, Zephyr,” Sting says.
“You should know.”
“Should I?”
Again, Sting pins me like a bug with those deathly blue eyes of his and I freeze, my hand overplayed as I avert my gaze from staring at the spectral image of Lennon’s disapproving scowl hovering above and I try to rapidly come up with an excuse why I said what I did when in truth I was thinking about the man who spent thirty years playing peek-a-boo inside my skull.
“We’ve had this conversation before,” I say weakly.
“I cannot access that . . . or remember that, in my . . . memories,” he says with equal vagueness, a dissembling look to Shade that basically completely escapes her attention, though I’m left wondering how Lennon and the Bugs otherwise communicate.
“Maybe I am thinking about someone else,” I say off-handedly. “You know how I confuse you English dudes. You all look alike to me.”
For once Lennon gets the joke and he works his marionette to laugh good-naturedly, an actual hint of gratitude that we have moved on from a moment where we were at equal risk of exposing each other.
“Is there something else you wanted to discuss?”
“I just wanted to let you know your arrival was noted,” Sting says with Lennon’s malice dripping from the words. “And of course you are very welcome, if you come with an open mind.”
“Well there’s open and there’s open,” I say as if suddenly philosophical. “In my experience, you keep it too open, someone else is likely to end up in the driver’s seat.”
“Quite,” Sting says evenly. “Quite.”
I nod to him, then Shade, and bid them adieu.
Zephyr 19.3 “The Present Conundrum”
I DETOUR QUICKLY from Sting’s august presence, moving upstairs and back in the direction of the male dormitory, but I catch a glimpse of Cusp in the polished concrete corridor leading to the female wing and I throw on a burst of super-speed to catch up with her, spinning her about by the arm.
“I need to talk to you.”
Cusp turns about, her pretty masked face curled into a discomfiting sneer.
“Touch me like that again and I’ll burn that hand off,” she says, left fist curling and sparkling with white-hot light.
“Belle?”
“What?”
“Are you feeling OK?” I ask her.
Cusp stares at me a moment longer, puzzling and perhaps silently willing for a better explanation of my erratic behavior to emerge. It only nails the coffin on Matrioshka not being home, which puts the lovely lunatic at large and worsening my headache. I resist the urge to clutch my forehead with my hand halfway to the goal. Instead, I slap an imaginary fly and nod.
“Sorry to have bothered you.”
“Where are you going?”
“Away,” I answer. “Isn’t that what you want?”
“Why did you just stop me? Zephyr, what’s going on that you’re not telling me.”
“I don’t know,” I say, just basically totally ad-libbing now. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Cusp blinks. I give an unvoiced “A-ha!” and swivel on my heel leaving her as confused as ever in my wake.
*
WITH NOTHING BUT candy bubbling in my guts, I keep my eyes peeled for more Bug patrols and start a sweep of the mountain facility. Frankly I have no idea what I’m looking for, but short of getting caught in the villain’s lair and having the bad guy spill the beans, I’m not exactly sure how to work out what’s the ultimate plan here without hoping for a
bit of luck – and making your own luck is a definite life philosophy of mine, however often it seems luck itself is a fickle mistress ready to tie you up and start pegging for little or no apparent reason and even less lube.
There’s a network of thin service tunnels given the same civilizing floor treatment as the common areas, yellow safety handrails and polished concrete flooring at odds with the porous, millennia-old rock in which Sting’s operation has made its base. Ladders rather than actual stairs switch between the various levels. There is a small troupe of native Afghans I’ve neglected to mention at work behind the scenes keeping the whole show running, and once or twice we cross paths, but the dark-eyed and eminently pragmatic denizens of this strange place are far too enigmatic and scrupulous to say anything as I continue to bumble my way around.
Eventually I am far from the madding crowd, several levels deep inside the mountain and following what feels like a prescient machine hum that eludes any sort of precision in my ear. I feel along the corridor’s raw tunnel walls, attuned yet bewildered by the deep thrum of vibrations at work within the rock. After some time – and I am really starting to regret missing breakfast, let alone what is now probably lunch – bright light overwhelms the safety globes of the corridor, the tunnel opening into a natural atrium with what I first mistake to be daylight flooding down from above. Instead, an array of sodium or halogen lights illuminates three steel doors that would be more at home in a submarine than here within this mountain of madness.
Apart from the usual hydraulics, electronic number pads encode the door locks, and I am absolutely without any clue how to bypass them. I stand there as useless as a man with no thumbs, slowly becoming aware of the chitinous clicking of insubstantial tarsus as they slip and claw on the polished floor behind me.
I swivel. The thing is as big as a rhinoceros, if one was standing on hind feet. It shadows me into the cross-space, as terrifying as a ghost, as alien as any lifeform could be. There is nothing like a face to even get close to a read on what the creature’s thinking. It simply circumnavigates the atrium, then stops, oriented on me, on the far side of the chamber as I stand frozen with indecision, the situation too outré and bizarre for even fight-or-flight instincts to get kick in. I realize I’m holding my breath as the bug tilts its upper body, then swivels faster than I’d expect and moves away out the far passage, returning the atrium to silence except for the deep subsonic hum of whatever mechanics are at work within the bowels of the mountain.
“That is fucking creepy, no pun intended,” I say to the ether.
The moment allows my unconscious to chew on the present conundrum. I choose the middle door and hover my palm over the keypad and let the subtle electrics of my biochemistry leach out, draining and at the same time emanating power from my hand in a cycle somehow deeply connected to the cosmic pulse of the universe or perhaps just some other far more mundane cycle I can barely intuit, the end result being the electronics just shit themselves and there’s a hiss and somewhere behind the door comes a subtle clicking. I try the metal wheel and the door grinds open.
*
IT IS DARK beyond, but as I step inside the steel-walled chamber, sensor lights flick on throwing harsh fluorescence over me and a huge mound of refuse in the middle of the bare, cinderblock-walled chamber.
Except this isn’t ordinary refuse.
Bodies. Colorful ones, but bodies all the same. And judging by the stink, some have lain here for some time.
The dead Ascended have been dumped unceremoniously, sprawled lolling and lifeless on the floor and then built into some grotesquely unwitting human pyramid over time as the death toll mounts, Mr Magnificent a familiar face from SuperScene and such mags, his waxen cadaver a cruel mimic, the perfection of his Brylcreemed hair an horrific mockery in death as he tops the pile, arms outstretched over more than a dozen of our kind, each one a heralded testament to Lennon’s mad power game.
My stomach churns as my eyes play over the deceased, the abandoned bodies at the bottom rank with the reek of putrefaction. I recognize Crysis, a sweet enough kid I once partnered with to track down a bunch of kids abducted by a parahuman nightmare named Dirge. Crysis was a powerful telepath even then, and that must’ve been ten years ago. I can’t even remember seeing her around much since, yet there she lays, the familiar costume, the silver cape somehow ridiculous cushioning her moldering flesh, the strawberry blonde ponytail shot through with early grey strands as I am forced to review my memories of her youth.
This is a sick game I’m not sure I want to play anymore.
I move from the chamber of deadly secrets, the smell of death in my nostrils as well as my mouth.
Back in the atrium, I repeat my palmistry with the next door, which slides open just as readily to admit me into the grim dimness beyond. Again the sensor lights flick on, this time revealing a figure laying on a hospital gurney.
Lennon.
The unconscious body wears breathing apparatus attached to an oxygen tank, but otherwise he looks shoveled onto the bed like any other Saturday night drunk. Lennon wears a white suit and waistcoat like the type St George favors too, one of the things the Beatles took up after dumping their iconic marching band apparel. The face is waxen, thin but alive, a stranger to me – and vulnerable.
After a moment holding my breath some more, I accept the logic of the scenario, which means this motherfucker isn’t waking up any time soon. The life force or psyche or soul or Being or whatever-you-call-it that powers the slumbering figure is busy elsewhere. So I stand over the grizzled, skeleton-thin Lennon aged two decades further than most the images of him that exist in our world, aware that for all my powers, all it would take is pinching his nostrils closed for me to kill him.
My hand actually lifts, seemingly of its own accord, as if limbs themselves could plot murder. And if only I could blame it on my hand and not my heart. But as frequently as life proves itself to have so little value in the morally bankrupt universe in which I dwell, for now I find I don’t have the appetite for adding yet another life to my life’s black toll, that phantom itch of the good Catholic superstition never quite receding as we think maybe one day we might have to answer to a higher power.
If I kill his preferred vessel, the Doomsday Man will be even more determined to keep hold of Sting, and if I’m going to have any impact in this mess, I’m going to need the egotistical Englishman on my side – and to bring his comrades with him.
“What are you doing in here?”
The French-accented voice sounds behind me and as fast as I whip about, I sense the comely Whisperer is one step ahead. I barely get an arm up in time to block the high kick at my head that falls not once, but a half-dozen times in under a second.
Rocking from the blows, I clumsily swing a left, staggering off-balance when she cleverly doesn’t stand still long enough for me to hit her. Instead, I only expose myself more. My kidneys are peppered by rabbit punches that have me swinging about angrily at the French woman like a wounded bull.
“You gonna let me answer the question or what?”
“Your transgression is its own answer.”
For the briefest moment we are face to face, and I am painfully aware there is nothing about Whisperer in control of her movements. Slowly my head tilts up, still able to perceive the Bug pulling her strings, hind legs walking in that unnatural way it shares with others of its species.
“Who are you?” I slowly growl. “Or what are you, and where are you from?”
“There is no function to this discussion,” Whisperer says in a low, husky voice that might arouse me under much different circumstances.
“You must be silenced.”
And she closes in for the kill.
Zephyr 19.4 “Not Dead But Dreaming”
IT’S BEEN A while since I locked horns with another speedster, and truth is, as far as speedsters go, I’m a slow coach: too heavy and too strong to be as graceful as the best, and with powers derived from a whole other suite of abilities that mean m
y speed is often more a side effect than the main focus of what I do.
The enclosed space helps and hinders. It takes me a few seconds to see the Bug has misconstrued my menacing posture in the presence of their distinguished not-dead-but-dreaming leader and it thinks it’s protecting the comatose Lennon. Non-corporeal, the Bug wields Whisperer like an expert weapon, and though she’s nowhere near as strong as me, the girl has serious kung fu, unleashing one rapid fire combo after another with barely a pause in between, leaving me sweating like a fat man at the beach as I barely cover my head and my gonads, taking multiple body blows as if body-wide contusions is the best case scenario here. Try as I might, the woman’s greased lightning. I can’t get a frigging hand on her, and pinning her down is my best chance as the lissome, white-clad figure cartwheels around and runs up the walls and flips over me while still managing to deliver a handful of otherwise deadly blows to my bruised and battered arms.
In desperation, I light up my hands like a veritable orchestra conductor and let rip, but the lancing charge only threatens the unconscious Lennon further, and sensing the Bug’s rising panic, I manage to do a judo roll out of the room and into the atrium, getting to my feet as my would-be killer follows.
Again, I barely adequately defend myself against a half-dozen airborne kicks and counter-strikes, my own feeble haymakers glancing off the slipstream created around Whisperer’s body as she moves in her hyperspeed state.
“God damn it, stay still,” I say, echoing the frustration, I know, of others who’ve fought me in times gone by.
Sadly, Whisperer doesn’t comply. One mis-timed move and I take a knee in the solar plexus, glad to be running on empty because otherwise we’d be up to our ankles in barf, but all the same I falter to one knee and barely protect my head before finally managing to get a hand around Whisperer’s wrist, only to be pulled off balance and thrown against the far wall by some law of physics that possibly hasn’t been invented yet.
The Bug really wants me dead. Whisperer comes running at me like I’m a wooden vaulting horse and she’s in the Olympics, and I only just arch and roll backwards and out of reach at the last instant as she delivers a two-step heel strike that chips the concrete where I was resting.
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