But they don’t call him Fallout for nothing.
Zephyr 20.4 “Sleepwalker”
THE STOCK EXCHANGE is gone.
My heart is in my mouth as I scramble through the wreckage like any other desperate bystander, pushing through the first shocked and ash-streaked civilians to get a clear view of where the main bulk of the building no longer stands. Instead, a viridescent fog churns from the building’s shell, just the stumps of its exterior walls still standing, the neighboring architecture bizarrely intact minus a few hundred windows or so.
That doesn’t mean there’s not carnage. Rubble and twisted metal choke the street along with those expensive European vehicles now littering the avenue like just so many empty candy wrappers. And police on the scene are already doing the unsung heroes’ work of dragging the dead and dying from that devastation. The cries of the wounded caterwaul in the night, perversely reminiscent of dogs howling in sympathy with the passing sirens. I stop to help an anguished-looking young officer with a teenage boy clutching the stump of his bleeding arm and I stop to cauterize the wound, and as the cop looks at me with near biblical awe and the boy gapes at me through a miasma of his own tears, I am struck by the savage wish to mercy kill him and then the cop and then nearly everyone else in my vicinity, myself included, as I drink in the awful devastation wrought by my own kind tonight in the name of a scheme I struggle to believe could truly be as idiotic as it appears.
My halo must dim a little or something, because the cop lowers his gaze with a solemn thank you and the boy passes out, and I straighten, setting my resolute chin as I hear my name called out from up ahead.
Cusp picks her way through the rubble with a fetching number of rips to her already implausibly designed costume. On reflex, I give myself the once over and am as astonished as always to see this creepy fucking outfit nearly completely repaired. Behind Cusp trudges Stiletto and then two Legion clones carry their unconscious and bleeding master between themselves.
“You’re OK?” I say to Cusp, quickly catching Stiletto’s gaze so I can nod her over yonder in the direction of the wounded as Cusp nods her OKness back to me.
I lift the unconscious boy over to Stiletto.
“Get him to an ambulance,” I tell her, then close on Holland.
“How are you holding up?”
“I see you survived, Zephyr,” she says. “You’ve got nine lives or something.”
“What the hell happened in there?”
“Fallout,” she says simply.
“Christ,” I say somberly. “How many. . . ?”
“Inside? Hopefully none,” Cusp says. “As far as we could tell most the people fled to the subway the moment these guys turned up. Anyone still inside though, they wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“But why would they blow the fucking place up?”
“We couldn’t even work out what they were doing here,” Cusp says. “It was Fallout, Madrigal and some Asian chick with a katana.”
“Madrigal?” I say, boggling at the last time I can even remember seeing that guy, which was actually him being dragged out of Silver Towers or Crayons or Aubergine or Transit or fuck-knows-where-else by security for allegedly putting his cock in some two-bit actress’s drink. Then the rest of what Cusp said filters through to me and I screw up my photogenic brow.
“An Asian chick with a katana?”
“Yeah.”
“Powers?”
“Yes.”
“Like, she made copies of herself?”
“Yes,” Cusp nods. “Not real copies, though.” She nods in Legion’s direction as if to underline the distinction. Not copies that can actually get killed.
“Yeah I know her. Ruse.”
One of the Lennon kids. I guess it was inevitable some of them got into business for themselves with the whole Yoko Ono clan mother thing going to hell.
My brow further crinkles at the thought of business, playing back images in my mind of the goons we unmasked on first arrival. Not your average rent-a-mook – or not in my experience, anyway.
There’s a thump behind us as Twilight lands dusting ash and soot from his cloak as he peers around with a vague expression of dissatisfaction – about what, I may never know, since his worries are the least of mine right now.
“How did you go?” I ask him. “We’ve IDed Killswitch, Raveness, Fallout, and a girl called Ruse. You?”
“Infernus,” Twilight says, the name explaining the disdain.
“Infernus and Raveness in the same crew again?” I frown, tilting my head like my brain is one of those puzzles where you have to get the ball-bearing in the right slot to win, and like always, I just don’t have the patience.
“Whaffuck? This isn’t like them. They’re –”
“Mercenaries,” Twilight says.
“Yeah.” I nod. “Exactamundo.”
“What are they even doing here?” Cusps asks.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I had a week to explain it,” I say and shake my head. “In a nutshell, I think they were trying to rob the share market, but there’s something fishy still about their way of going about it.”
My colleagues stand looking stupefied in ponderment as more and more emergency crews pour into the area. The cop from before jogs up to me, emboldened by my earlier humanitarianism.
“We could do with some help,” he says. “Just found a pocket of commuters trapped under heavy rubble.”
I nod and follow him like a sleepwalker to do my civic duty, conscious as Cusp and Twilight face off unchaperoned behind me in my wake.
*
LATER – IT IS nearly dawn or something, following an exhaustive and depressing night toiling amid the ruins of the ACSX under the halogen lights of the emergency personnel who surround and support us – the first media are let past the police barricades, rushing into the wreckage like white blood cells fighting an infection, except maybe they are more like the AIDS virus, forgetting they have now become one of the very ailments they originally sought to combat. With the pinkish haze of morning not too far off and the toll of my transglobal adventures weighing on me, I look to my fellows, Twilight already long departed following a spat with Portal, the latter apparently having teleported Infernus to Italy before they got the chance to clash. Cusp gives me a weary smile, a fetching streak of soot on one cheek, while Stiletto, Portal and Vorstellung simply look like their souls slunk off to bed several hours ago and left their bodies behind.
“I’m fucked,” I proudly announce, moving clear of the swing of boom mikes as the TV crews hone in on our vector. “I can’t even remember the last time I slept and my body still feels like it’s in Afghanistan. I’m going home.”
The others wave me off, but Cusp hovers close. Too much for me to maybe hope for, I let her linger, inviting any smidgeon of interest from the comely, curvy blonde. She catches my fey smirk and shrugs.
“It’s all coming back to you?” I ask.
“What?”
“You said you remembered who you are.”
“Oh,” she says and nods. “Yeah.”
“You got a home to go to?”
“The one you’re thinking of probably isn’t there anymore,” she answers. “And the one I had more recently was a temporary fix at best.”
“Plenty of space at my place.”
“Zephyr,” Cusp says and shakes her head. I don’t like the thrust of her sisterly tone and my masked face shows it, which elicits a more devilish grin from Holland.
“I’m going,” I say to her. “Coming or not?”
“OK. Lead the way.”
So we vault into the sunrise, caught by the cameras as just two more fickle creatures of the night making their exit.
*
NOT SURE WHAT I expect to happen next or even what I’m hoping for, but there’s no easy rapport between Cusp and I. She has been a lot of different women in my life, from sex puppet to woman scorned, and taking her home to see my etchings isn’t exactly a transparent move on my behalf.
; On the far side of Atlantic City it is quiet, here among the rooftops of the still awakening office towers, and from my aerie athwart the deserted dot-com offices, full daylight manifests beyond windows I have mostly taped up with black bin-liners. Cusp checks over my meagre lodgings with her arms folded, all the poise of a nervous college girl on her first time in a guys’ dorm as I exhume the contents of the bar fridge and start whipping up a disorientating feast of hotdogs, scrambled eggs, flapjacks, crème caramel, pop tarts, toast, tinned spaghetti and by-the-carton eggnog. Cusp sits demurely among the unique cuisine as I pass her a fork, my etiquette nearly eroded by hunger as I start scooping portions into a laminate bowl, eating in a way I’m not entirely proud about, desperate for the sustenance after so much exertion and so many hours awake.
Cusp picks at a chocolate pop tart, breaking off the corner and watching me with her wide yet somehow perpetually narrowed blue eyes.
“What’s your move from here?”
“If I had a handle on Killswitch or Infernus, I don’t know –”
“Ha, that’s not what I meant,” she says and takes a nibble. “Seems like your urges are at war within.”
Uncomfortable, I ask, “Define ‘urges’.”
“You would really make the effort to track those guys down?”
I let the ball pass to the keeper and nod, conversation back on track.
“If I could, hell yeah,” I say and pause to bite through an over-ambitious mouthful, dropping half a frank back into my bowl while trying to cover the maneuver – which is to say my face – with one hand.
“They took out the fucking Stock Exchange, for chrissakes, and Christ knows the death toll,” I say. “I can’t understand why they’d do such a thing.”
“Yeah, I wondered about that,” Cusp says. “You have a TV?”
I switch on the flat screen and we eat in silence as the local broadcast breathlessly recounts the events of the night we’ve just lived. The tape along the bottom of the screen informs us of everyday calamities happening live around the world, but its rolling coverage for the disaster in Atlantic City, with the score – which is to say the body count – put at 63 and climbing. I am admittedly nonplussed by the low number, and it’s not like the mild death toll puts dampeners on my fury, in the grand scheme of things I acknowledge surprise and maybe even a touch of pride that our intervention might’ve kept the fatalities from being worse.
There’s still no clue about what Killswitch and his crew were after, however.
I lift my gaze from the running commentary to study Cusp’s profile as she sips eggnog from a chipped dot-com coffee mug and her eyes briefly meet mine.
“What?” she says.
“I was thinking about Matrioshka and Lennon, and whether they survived the mountain coming down,” I say. “Matrioshka liked pop tarts too.”
Cusp snorts. “How do you know that? Don’t tell me: you bedded her too.”
“No, I never did,” I say, trying to keep the wistfulness from my voice.
“Not for lack of trying, I bet.”
I shrug. The coverage returns to the live feed of the disaster relief efforts now under the full cascade of morning light, the news chopper’s shadow hovering like a spinning crucifix over the crime scene writ large. Just as quickly, the screen turns to snow. Frowning, Cusp switches the remote on and off again without results.
“Try CNN.”
She switches several channels, but it’s the same on every one. Static. Not even the hint of a broadcast.
“Strange,” Cusp says.
I give an enormous yawn, looking back to her still scrying my face for denouement.
“I’m hitting the hay. There’s a few sofas out there beyond those dividers,” I tell her. “Of course, plenty of room in my bed too.”
“I bet,” Cusp says.
“Fat lot of good it’d do me anyway,” I say. “I’m all shagged out as it is.”
And true to my word I wipe crumbs from my lips and slouch towards respite confident that the world of television – like everything else in this ghastly shadow existence – will be in place on the morrow no matter what I do or don’t do about it.
Zephyr 20.5 “Hills And Valleys”
HOURS LATER, I wake to the press of a warm body alongside me. And in my sleep-startled state, I take in the hills and valleys of Cusp’s sheet-covered silhouette and briefly marvel at my own powers as the sleep-drunk beauty slides closer and I turn into her, erection probing her navel as something like a deep, dark chuckle emerges like startled birds from the cave of her mouth and her arm slides under my neck and we kiss.
If I thought to ask a question, to query my strange new surroundings, to ask for some guide to navigate this unfamiliar terrain, Cusp hushes me with a literal finger to my lips before sliding infinitesimally lower and biting gently into my throat, and after a moment’s pause to judge whether I should panic or fear attack, I settle back and let her slowly vampirize me, the throat-sucking turning into a straddle, the woman a vision, a goddess astride me, nothing of the succubus about her except for the intent as she rises from the middle of my sheets like the Lady of the Lake, hair a waterfall of starlight as the fluorescence of the city plays much diluted within the blacked-out office space behind us; and I let my hands express my will, long held desires and forgotten memories taking action as I clasp Holland’s wide hips, curvature a challenge at the best of times to conventional superhero garb, something more fulsome yet lissome than when we fucked like animals in the bathrooms of the Silver Towers or Crayons or Aubergine or Transit or fuck-knows-where-it-was a thousand years ago. The green hair might be gone, but soon I am reacquainted with the honeyed taste of her as she moves astride to sink fingers into my skull, grinding her sex into my face as I am suffocated by the soundtrack of her muffled moans, gasping, pleasantly water-boarded by the trickling of her cunt, my face masked in musk, tongue thrust deep as I make my whole face like a sex organ desperate to please her, to convince her of the rightness of this choice, convinced at the same time I can have little effect on how things play out here, that tragi-comic unconfidence lurking behind the gates of all our souls as we play naked in every sense except with our eyes which we close to guard against true vulnerability no matter what our orifices allow, our eyes not windows to our souls, but truly passageways to which we can admit few fellow travelers in this journey bookended by birth and nothingness. As Holland cums, something akin to an overwhelming sadness bursts in me and it’s all I can do not to collapse with it, to lay back in the bed with my soul-crushing aloneness never more underscored than at this peak of intimacy that often feels – even here, even now with this goddess in rapture before me – like a shallow observance of some higher rite that primitive creatures like me have long used as a semaphore for a reality our blackened souls can barely conceive, let alone articulate. And into that empty space rushes almost every face that ever mattered to me, so that when Holland comes down from her high, face aglow with post-coital luminescence conjured like a magician’s trick, I barely respond to her touch until I make myself the statue I wish to appear, reliably rock hard as I’m expected to be, face etched into a sardonic and unfeeling grin that reflects the bastardry of which I’m imagined capable. And I tip her on her side, sliding her scissored legs apart and then embedding myself as deeply as I can go, knowing I should be sated by the satin feel of our loins locking, the glaze of her wetness mirrored by the gentle sheen on her skin as I watch those magnificent breasts sway in time with my thrusts. Whether I bring this doom upon myself in my imaginings or otherwise, my performance is always part chess and part second guessing the shadow puppets. After cycling through the requisite positions and variations on technique, I return my cock to the nest between her thighs and focus myself like an automaton, quiet desperation in the effort to keep distractions and dark thoughts that might kill my momentum at bay as I hurtle towards orgasm along the tunnel of Holland’s fevered sighs.
And finish at last I do. Collapsing beside her intertwined in twiste
d sheets, Cusp’s graceful fingertips stroke my forehead and pluck meditatively at my sweat-damp hair, my cheek against her heaving breast, heartbeat fluttering like a double-kick drum as I feel her caress somehow so much more soothing than our recently completed carnal gymnastics. At once I sense her contemplative mood and I lay as close to unmoving as I am able, readjusting for comfort as I gently take in the feel and smell and taste of her delicate skin.
“That was a surprise,” I say, and would say more except she interrupts me.
“Shh, Joe,” she says. “Let me enjoy the moment.”
And so we return to our slumber.
*
DIMLY THE SOUND of the city in distress disturbs our rest, not just police sirens, but the long low preternatural lowing of emergency response horns blowing through the morning of the night we have slept right through, a bleak day outside, light filtered like through a dirty milk glass. I sit up with that alcoholic feeling common to being so wrung out and jetlagged, circadian rhythms shot to hell, face perhaps a gruesome sight as I pinch my eyes against the dull glare gleaming through gaps in the black plastic, aware of the hazy form of Cusp standing naked looking outside the high-rise through one of those aforementioned breaks.
If you’ve been playing along at home, you know they might as well go ahead and invent a drinking game for each time Zephyr thinks he might finally have some kind of inner peace with a woman only to then have it all turn to shit, but right at this moment I have no idea about the dark days coming. I adopt a goofy smug grin Holland can’t see with her back turned, then slip into my boxers and pad up behind her, impervious to the mood presaged by stiff shoulders I only notice as I touch her softly to have her flinch away.
“What is it?”
“The TV’s still out,” she says, pointing to the set I didn’t notice showing snow before. “There’s something not right. The city sounds . . . ill.”
“You sound like Streethawk.”
“Seriously, Joe. Listen.”
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