Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  The mercenary villain heads for the Stock Exchange proper, and just as I’m gaining on him easily – and fearing he’s about to take our game of tag indoors – the armored mutant tacks hard right and ascends, misjudging his own dexterity as he clips the top of the façade with his armored legs and rains stone and concrete on me as I follow, both of us climbing and then descending past the ACSX as Killswitch pitches it low and we enter the inner city street behind, the back lots here more like a stockbroker’s corporate nursery than part of the city proper, expensive hybrid cars uniformly black or navy dark, parked and asleep in the street in front of coffee shops and bakeries and men’s hairdressers and a temple to Steve Jobs and a newspaper stand and FedEx office and boutique cigar and wine stores and a fucking high end hat shop of all things.

  The villain’s jet stream buffets a line of parked cars which snap from their slumber with a trilling chorus of alarms. I dodge aside in my chase as Killswitch fires back at me one-handed and the blast hits a midnight blue BMW in the trunk and the whole vehicle goes up in a ball of light. Impotently, I return fire with my electrical attack, but while Killswitch mightn’t be as fast as me, his maneuverability is pretty good as he turns effortlessly down a side lane I didn’t even recognize, men in suits hiding at the doors of a comic book store for grown-ups as I make my move, not exactly a masterpiece of chess-like precision, me driving up fast from behind to clinch Killswitch about the waist and wrest him out of his own preordained trajectory, throwing him with his own momentum into a row of glass-fronted haberdasheries, boutiques and lingerie shops probably never frequented by a woman unless she’s a stockbroker too and pulling down more than half-a-mil per annum.

  The contact is ferocious. The almost quaint side street becomes a killing ground with glass shrapnel, thankfully no civilians further along in sight as the closet comics nerds spill into the street to see us halfwits sprung from those selfsame distractions fully formed in every way except that which counts most.

  *

  I WOULD BE fooling myself to think smashing through a few plate glass windows is going to slow Killswitch down, but as he picks himself out of the nearby window dressings, I feel the pressing sense of far more important things afoot than this momentary Kapow! Boom! Crash! distraction.

  The civilians scatter for good as Killswitch steps into the street. Maybe they know something he doesn’t, because I’m not on my best manners here and someone’s feelings are about to be hurt. While the groggy bad guy gets his bearings, I doppler in as fast as I can to lance a dozen rapid-fire body blows up his torso, fists smarting from the high-tech carapace as I nonetheless take in the pleasing sound of advanced metals splintering with each strike. At some point in the barrage, Killswitch manages to block me with one forearm, and then his whole suit peels open down the middle like a Venus fly trap smiling for the camera, catching little old me right in the midst of the blinding freight train of light that pours out, flattening me on the tarmac.

  The villain closes up his suit again, well pleased with himself no doubt, leaping into the air and performing a lazy somersault to come down for the heel stomp special move you’d ordinarily expect I’d avoid at this point, but apparently not this time. I don’t know what it is – still got the wind knocked out of my sails, I guess – but the metal-clad asshole comes right down onto me with both feet. The street gives a jarring crunch, the force of the blow splitting the asphalt and forcing me into the resulting fissure. I’m sure Killswitch is as surprised as me to find we’re directly above one of the subway tunnels and the impact causes the road to cave in.

  For a moment I’m able to clutch to the broken sides of the crevasse, chunks of road surface and the layers upon layers of historic concrete splitting beneath me to fall away like I’m the hero in some Arctic crossing gone wrong, the inky blackness below redolent of dust, engine oil, rat carcasses and stale air, but Killswitch realizes what’s happening and goes with the flow, bringing his heel down on me several more times so that in the end I lose my grip and drop.

  It’s a Pyrrhic victory that I stop my fall before I can collide with the subway tracks and the gigantic mound of crap we’ve produced down below from our slugfest. True to form, Killswitch banzais through the gap and I lash him with a dose of my best wattage, as ineffectual as it might be, the flickering blue tendrils coruscating over his armor aesthetically satisfying if nothing else. He replies with a trio of palm blasts, but I am in my native element down here clad in black and moving like a case of the runs, sweeping in running just under Mach 1 to hammer him across the jaw with my left. Killswitch pings away, rebounding off the mural-covered concrete tunnel wall as lights play towards us.

  At first logic refuses to accept the subway train is coming. I know there’s been a tac-nuke or something go off at the nearby interchange, so the idea of a carriage travelling this way seems downright crazy.

  And worse, I can’t see a driver.

  “Shit.”

  *

  I TURN BACK as fast as I can, which is fortunately plenty fast – but I forget about the debris field and run straight into chunks of concrete rendered nearly invisible by the light conditions, little more than a vague luminosity from the hole above. The breath leaves my body with the impact and I scramble free just as the subway train hammers into that very same minefield of rubble, the screaming, screeching, clattering crash of the train suddenly meeting its irresistibly immovable force a flowering of chaos behind me as I light down the tunnel and round the bend, vaguely aware of Killswitch following above like a deadly Tinkerbell.

  The light increases as I traverse the turn in the tracks, but a fresh case of disorientation grips me as I flit out into a well-lit underground subway station, the platforms on either side choked with hundreds upon hundreds of surface dwellers clearly hiding out from the nightmare above. Suit-clad wage slaves gape at me, some more than a little thrown off by my own obvious failure to be immediately superheroic as I scan about, unsure of where I am with all the underground navigation, the signage identifying it as Concourse, the stop for the museum precinct.

  “Shit,” I mutter yet again, not yet alighted and already wheeling about for fear of drawing my wannabe Angel of Death into such an easy killing ground.

  Killswitch is right behind me. I throw a shower of sparks into his face and body check him as he covers his head and shoulders out of the natural instinct for self-preservation. I push him away in that blind moment and then I fly past, forgetting my earlier clamor about being the pursuer. Again Killswitch wheels about, my speed advantage reduced by the dark confines and wreckage all around, steering past the violently derailed subway train, flitting past fluoro-lit carriages I’m relieved to see are without passengers. I throw a few cursory evasion maneuvers moments before the obligatory palm blasts flit past me, then I glimpse an emergency-lit stairwell and rocket up it, slamming through a flimsy metal door and out into the marvelously crisp early evening air.

  Zephyr 20.3 “The Lady Snarls”

  I SCATTER A bunch of startled cops as I zoom out of the subway engineering door and into a street crammed with flashing cruisers, a huge-ass fire truck barricading the way to the yards-distant Stock Exchange.

  Rebounding from the now dented door of one of our city’s finest, I look up to see Killswitch emerge from the doorway behind me like some shade risen from the Classical Underworld, glowing fists poised over his head. God bless ‘em, the cops surrounding me open fire with Glocks and shotguns and suddenly Killswitch has second thoughts about crashing this party. He abruptly turns tail and wings it in the direction of the Antiquities Museum.

  I wave my thanks and do the crouch thing and get after him.

  In mid-air pursuit, again from behind, I latch hands on the sneaky fucker, clapping palms upon his shoulders as I clinch and twist, the two of us in a different sort of unnatural congress as our trajectory nosedives and the next thing I know we blitz through a sandstone balustrade and floor-to-ceiling window to go caroming into a Napoleonic war room display, maps and
glass cabinets and costumed mannequins, the whole nine yards, Killswitch skidding to a halt on the marble floor, chest heaving as he glowers back at me before peeling himself upright, gauntlets clicking back to bare his entire blue-glowing forearms, power levels clearly depleted as he summons a charge and unleashes on me.

  Pain or exhaustion makes his aim predictable. I duck right out of the way, rolling into the next exhibit room where I listen to the collateral damage from the villain’s blast, then I swagger back into frame as Killswitch re-suits and simply stands there staring at me with deathly intent.

  “You want to tell me what the score is here?”

  “You’re not doing this to me,” he replies. “I’m not telling you shit, Zephyr.”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing hitting the Stock Exchange?” I say, circling and causing Killswitch to likewise circumnavigate the room.

  “You can’t steal stocks,” I tell him. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “You don’t understand anything,” the villain says.

  I pause. “That’s not what you were doing, right? Tell me.”

  Killswitch says nothing. I feel deep laughter welling within.

  “You cannot be fucking serious,” I say. “Introduction to Economics 101, shit-heel. Stock trades these days are nothing more than electronic receipts – like a fucking email. Did you think you were going for a big score?”

  “We are doing more than just plundering the Stock Exchange Zephyr, but if nothing else comes from today, killing you will do me just fine.”

  “I might give you a chance, but first tell me why you hit the Wall Street subway?” I say. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s a quarter mile away.”

  Again Killswitch tries for mysterious with the silence, but hits only borderline irritating instead. He sees me shaking my head and it doesn’t sit easily, the ridicule coming from a hated enemy.

  His gauntlets click open as he lifts his hands, but I jet right in close as the twin blasts take out a section of exterior wall. My tight arc ends with my left hammering across his jaw, Killswitch hitting one of those huge Dutch master-y looking paintings from the era, neatly caving it in and the wall behind him with it as he crunches through into another room.

  At once I go to follow, walking into his twin blasts that blow me back and into and through a huge taxidermied Napoleonic general on a horse (the horse is stuffed, the dude’s a mannequin), and as I pick pieces of crap off me and scramble to my feet, I hear Killswitch’s metallic footfalls clattering away as he runs, maybe low on juice, through the deserted museum.

  I give chase, following him out onto an epic elevated concourse, atrium museum roof above us showing only refracted lights from the city and the distant fires, statues and shit on plinths ahead like cover in a designer battlefield. I start after my foe, puzzling at why those artworks and antiquities before me explode like crockery beneath the nonsensical chatter of machine-gun fire, but then I discern a trio of armor-clad goons advancing in tactical formation on my six in Killswitch’s wake.

  How and why these guys are working together might be a mystery for another time.

  Dipping right, I slip into the recess provided by a locked security door. The heavy rounds tear plaster and shards of plywood from the hollow wall. The left-most goon appears on a triangulation, aiming to zero me, but I flick open my hand and Taser the prick good and hard so he goes down with an epic case of the St Vitus dance. I then plunge back into the hail of gunfire, stray rounds clipping me and ripping strips from my stillsuit which furiously repairs itself even as I weather the storm, momentum punished by the goons’ bullets, my other hand coming up to explode blinding sparks, my left hand swinging around in a fist to lash current into the next guy I see, Killswitch swiveling two hundred yards down the walkway hoping to witness my doom, but my masked face is alight with the feral glow of victory – a victory torn away from me by a shadow that streaks out of nowhere, tackling me around the waist in an explosion of familiar perfume as she propels me back into the flimsy wall we smash through together, skidding and sliding quite unlike the young Liam Neeson in Risky Business as we come to rest against a towering installation of two Native American hunters learning the hard way about the early Vikings’ proclivities for direct negotiation.

  A gnarly tangle of black hair and sinew growls femininely and I elbow my way clear to confirm Raveness rising from our clinch, an evil smirk on her strangely handsome, decidedly frightening visage.

  “Ness?”

  “Put yer dukes up, Zephyr,” she growls low.

  I back away, nudging the nearby plinth which promptly craps mannequins all over the floor. I scoop up the Viking’s Danish axe and hold it one-handed like I’m fucking Harry Potter or something.

  “What’s going on?” I ask the villainess.

  Clearly our semi-recent history doesn’t mean squat and I’m not sure why it should. Raveness circles me like the killing machine she is and I swallow nervously, not sure I really have it in me following my tête-à-tête with Killswitch.

  “I thought I left more of an impression than that,” I say to her.

  She smirks. “You do impressions?”

  She stops as if that might change the whole dealio – and I stop as well, caught in the embarrassing double-take of looking like I have walked right into the trap when I haven’t, just struggling to change gears with the psychopathic villainess’s sadistic and erratic sense of humor as fast-paced as the rest of her is.

  “OK. Well, we were in a tough spot off-world with the Prime and your other punk friends,” I say and shrug like our one-off tryst didn’t mean much to me either. “I guess back in the world, we play by the old rules.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re on about as usual Zephyr, but there’s never any rules with me hon’,” she says – and steps back as the three goons catch up and hose me with gunfire.

  *

  IT’S NOT PRETTY. The guns can’t kill me, but that doesn’t mean they don’t hurt like a motherfucker and tear my costume to shreds at the same time. Like a pack-rape by hornets, I end up crouching covering my head and vitals until the weapons’ storm fades, the weird heavy duty plastic cartridges of the strange weapons tinkling and scrunching on the ground. My suit desperately tries to restore my dignity as I straighten, readjusting the mask as I throw a spark into two of the gunmen – and Raveness only laughs, knowing what I’m about and clearly not giving a shit about what happens to them either.

  The third guy sees which way the wind is blowing and takes a hike and for me, discretion is the better part of valor as I try to carry off like it’s just my pride wounded and I don’t feel like one of the guys from Big Bang Theory worked over by a posse of rednecks.

  “You ready?” I ask Raveness.

  “Always.”

  She spreads her serrated fingers wide and throws herself at me, but true to the lady’s own word, there’s no rules in this affair. I melt aside and club her with the Viking axe, the handle snapping as I send Raveness ploughing off at right angles and into an interactive display of Pilgrims showing off their tomfoolery to natives frozen in permanently astonished, and in one thankful case, slightly skeptical expressions.

  Knowing she’s not down for the count, I leg it back onto the main concourse, clearly not as quick as I think I am as Raveness again tackles me from behind and I now see for the first time the left balustrade is actually a glass railing protecting ordinary citizens from the plunge to the main lobby twenty yards below. I twist about as we fall and slide on the polished surface still entirely unlike Liam Neeson, the canny bitch’s face up close grinning and showing how she fully expects me to use my powers to avert this crisis to our mutual advantage, and fuck me if it doesn’t all go past too fast for me to wrest any leverage as I slap at her face, trying to get a grip to turn her about so at least she can cushion my fall. Instead, like the most predictable sack of shit on the planet, I break our momentum with a burst of pressure, though the impact is still enough to cause my teeth to cla
ck together like a bear trap.

  I push Raveness off me like a bum forcing his way out a filthy skip at dawn, the deadly woman spinning about to rake me with her claws. Instead, I punch her hard in the face up close, putting her on her literal ass as I scan about wary of unseen gunmen sneaking up invisible in the shadows cast by the flickering lighting and the various booths, public seating, book displays, statues, low-hanging signs, ticket stalls, divider walls, coat room signs, bollards, public artworks and postmodern sculptures dotting the museum’s downstairs plaza.

  Further across, structural walls of glass cubes blaze with a God almighty flash, then tumble inwards as another of those huge explosions somewhere unsettlingly close rock the whole precinct and the floor shakes and I stagger back, grabbing hold of a bronzed sculpture made from broken motorcycles as Raveness snaps to her feet with a cat’s grace, feral grin unbroken.

  “And that’s my cue to skedaddle,” she says.

  I’m about to fire a rejoinder about how exactly she plans to make her escape when Killswitch swoops from above, spectral energy unspooling from his retracted booties, and while I’m still gaping like some drug-fucked bukkake actress/victim, the villain scoops Raveness under her arms and they flit away through the colossal rent in the museum wall.

  “Next time you’re a dead man, Zephyr,” Killswitch yells.

  He pours on the speed to guarantee himself the last word, but I’m speechless anyway, taking in the growing crescendo of sirens muffling the dozens of screams and the phosphor glow now providing a new light source for the night.

  “What the fuck was that?” I mutter aloud.