Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  “Well that really makes me want to go protect and serve,” Tessa snaps. “Jesus, dad. What the frick are we meant to do?”

  “What we can, honey. What we can.”

  *

  SADLY, “WHAT WE can” might not amount to a whole heap. We burn a couple of hours in continued debate, my daughter reluctant to quit her sanctuary and Syzygy with some kind of martyr complex so she keeps offering to do almost anything to keep the rest of us happy – except she baulks at the only other option that might actually be kind of helpful, which is to fly north or west and report back just how far this lockdown stretches. Clearly, the ex-New Sentinel wants to stick close to Tessa and the feeling’s mutual, so when we finally prise Syzygy out of there with a plan to regroup, yet again, this time at Twilight’s island, Tessa begrudgingly comes too.

  All four of us are fliers, so we wing our way through the advancing daylight, afternoon rays piercing the clouds and refracting off rooftops as we head north and east for the ocean in the direction of Twilight’s demesne.

  For just a moment I feel free, buffeted by the wind that is my native element and a constant source for refueling of my powers, kindred spirits young and not quite so young at my wing and another mystery we shall overcome before us. The exhaustion of my Afghan marathon is already fading into the rear-view mirror thanks to bulk carbs, a glut of sleep and some good ol’ fashioned fucking. Like I said, for just a moment this is about as good as it gets.

  And then the FBI helicarrier moves into view.

  Zephyr 20.7 “Majestic”

  THE LOUDSPEAKER CALLS my name. I do not recognize the mechanical voice, but the first and wisest temptation is to flee even though I see several more identical dual-rotor choppers hovering above the city in the distance ahead.

  “IMMEDIATELY SET DOWN WHERE WE CAN TAKE YOU INTO CUSTODY,” the voice calls out. “YOU AND YOUR COMPANIONS MUST IMMEDIATELY COMPLY OR FACE FORCED ARREST.”

  The doors on the helicarrier slide open and Vanguard drops out, his helmet in place for once, the blue metal armor styled to give him the appearance of a chivalric knight despite there being little chivalrous about the man, in my personal experience. He’s followed out of the craft by two other turncoat masks who figured taking the government’s paycheck to fight crime was easier than doing it on the lam: fire-bending Sunstorm and the much prettier Eurasian mask Aura. After them comes Siren in her usual off-white pants suit, the air about her distorting with telekinesis; and Annie Black, who leaps onto the back of a conjured winged horse and joins the fray as cheerfully as anyone.

  But she’s not alone. I recognize the figure on the horse behind Miss Black: a balding, anonymous-looking mulatto I haven’t seen since skulking in the background of the wedding of the century – the power-drainer Stalemate.

  A rising sense of panic grips me as I cast about at my own scattered teammates.

  “Get out of here!”

  Again the bullhorn berates us from the massive helicopter, but my entire focus is on Cusp drifting left while my daughter and Syzygy remain direct in harm’s way. Caution be damned, I spin wide of an exploratory solar heat ray from Sunstorm and gun my engine to flit past Annie Black.

  “What the fuck are you doing Annie?” I yell, passing her as a blur.

  My trajectory carries me towards Windsong and past any sensible reply. I all but collide with my daughter and grab her leather sleeve, fighting to keep the falsetto panic from my voice.

  “You have to scram,” I say. “Stalemate’s a drainer.”

  Before I can add more urgency to the command, the air fills with the sickening hypnosis of Siren’s mental attack. I clasp my hands over my ears for all the good that will do and quickly catalogue the various players in their positions. Cusp knocks out Vanguard with an excellently-timed blast of her own and Sunstorm takes off to retrieve him from the otherwise fatal fall. I throw a lightning bolt in Cusp’s wake to keep Sunstorm on his figurative if not literal toes and scan the helicarrier, a trio of Kevlar-clad FBI field agents quickly unfolding and tracking me with a .50cal cannon.

  “Scatter!” I yell again to Windsong, but I am dismayed to see her under the spell of Siren’s attack and simply hovering in midair with her face slack and her eyes rolling up into her head.

  I could stay and try to slap some sense into her, or take the fight to the source.

  Checking Syzygy’s finally got wise and lit out for the outer suburbs, I spring at Siren and the next few moments are a pinball-style dogfight as she in her white suit ruins her 80s New Wave hairdo trying to evade me even though the chips are stacked pretty high against her ever being able to do so and she knows it. At the last moment, the FBI mentalist turns and opens on me full-bore, not counting on my momentum as my flight path nearly cuts her in half. I swing with my left and catch her in the midriff and she doubles up, floating half-a-mile above the city’s choked streets, and the mental blunderbuss is neutered before it ever begins.

  “How’s that feel?” I jeer at her. Not my proudest moment. “Looks like it hurts?”

  I sense the disruption of huge wings behind me and swivel as Miss Black comes at me on her black Pegasus. It’s a cool image, but I am too freaked by the prospect of her shadowy power-draining co-rider.

  “Annie, you fucking sell-out,” I bawl, knowing there’s not a moment to lose.

  The explosion from the chopper distracts us all, but not Stalemate. That motherfucker stays disturbingly on song for a mercenary called in on what I assume to be a short contract. While I’m whipping about, concerned Cusp’s laser beam might’ve actually killed someone – and propelled us from mystery wrongdoers into wanted felons – Stalemate throws his hand wide and a taste like crushed almonds fills my mouth as I scowl and watch Aura and Siren flexing their powers to keep the smoking helicarrier afloat at the same time my own propulsion shits out completely and I succumb to the inexorable groping of Earth’s gravity well.

  My powers are gone. Again.

  *

  FALLING, I USELESSLY flex my muscles, spasming, twitching, scowling and frowning to try and kick my kinetic abilities into gear to get me out of this increasingly terrifying-by-the-moment clusterfuck.

  Like the skilled skydiver I guess I inadvertently am, I manage myself out of the flailing chaos and into a controlled plunge towards Mother Earth, throwing looks above me I frankly don’t know if they’re designed to check on the status of my enemies or hope they are on their way to help. What I do get is a glimpse of Windsong’s stupefied manhandling onto Annie Black’s winged pony against the backdrop of the smoke-churning helicarrier levitating under Aura and Siren’s control.

  Sunstorm flies past with Vanguard in his arms and still the city rushes up at me.

  This is not the first time I’ve found myself in this vomit-inducing predicament without powers in the last couple of years, but it’s not a sensation I’m going to get used to any time soon. Having exhausted my range of spastic facial expressions and the number of times I can think “OK, for real now”, I know I have less than a minute to figure out a solution before I decorate a sidewalk somewhere in what used to be part of New Jersey.

  Or maybe not.

  Just seconds from the ground, Cusp streaks out of the declining sun and grabs a handful of my costume, just enough that my momentum slows as I hurtle groundwards, the broad skillion roof of some kind of warehouse or factory rising up to meet me. I hear Cusp and it sounds like she’s straining and a quarter-mile from the roof my costume slips between her fingers and I fall again, moments later crashing through the metal sheeting with a percussion loud enough to make Animal from The Muppets proud.

  Daylight dies as I carry on through the metal dentata, legs clipping some kind of cast-iron walkway that flips me on my back into the top of a stack of wooden packing crates which explode in fibers at my transgression. The pile barely slows my fall. Pain flares in all quadrants of my body, but before I can truly register the calamity, I’m no longer moving, instead just splayed out unevenly with my ass higher than my h
ead atop of a pile of wreckage and thousands upon thousands of ball bearings each in their own little bubble wraps which don’t defray the pain anywhere near like what you might imagine and I wish.

  The slush pile slowly gives way and I manage to slide so I am flat on the oil-stained concrete, dimly registering a few dozen civilians high-tailing it for the flung wide-open exits ablaze with daylight. Pain like I’ve been delivered by forceps from the loins of some ungodly fire giantess flares all along me and it’s only belatedly I even register I’m capable of thought, let alone some semblance of action as Cusp touches down near my unmoving feet.

  Stalemate might’ve cancelled my powers, but that’s all, I guess. My homo superior physiognomy remains, just without the power to give it life and true expression. In agony, I start moving only to freeze up amid a riot of agonies, conscious of Cusp pacing slowly beyond me rather than helping me out.

  It takes me even longer to register her gentle laughter.

  “What . . . the fuck . . . do you think’s . . . so funny?” I gasp.

  Her laughter rises a moment before fading away like the tide. Curious isn’t the word, but I rise with struggled difficulty on one elbow to see my lover staring at me with anything but a fond regard.

  “I didn’t expect this to happen so soon, but I guess I shouldn’t pass up the opportunity,” she says.

  “What are you talking about?” I manage. “Help me up.”

  “No, Joe. You lay there a moment more.”

  “What?”

  I’m as conscious as she must be of distant sirens which are only going to grow louder. Yet Cusp appears unconcerned. In fact, she slowly peels off her mask, letting it hang by its concealed straps under her chin as if it’s just another way to frame that Olympian bosom barely constrained by the vinyl v-neck bustier.

  “I thought we were going to have a few more little adventures together before I prised the scales from your eyes,” she says.

  “Holland honey, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell her. “My powers –”

  “– are fried,” she replies. “I know. All the easier for me to do this.”

  “. . . this?”

  Again with the throaty laugh I might find sexy another time when it doesn’t sound so fucking sinister. I start struggling to my feet and Cusp takes three steps and plants a size eight stiletto-heeled boot on my chest, pinning me as easily to the concrete as if I were a child.

  “Stay right there.”

  “What are you . . . doing?”

  “I’m sorry to tell you your little friend’s gone.”

  “Holland?”

  “That’s right,” Cusp replies – only now I’m not speaking with Cusp and it dawns on me that maybe I never was.

  My watering eyes hone in on those big blue orbs to discern the unique hue of cruelty within – and the same moment a gentle if insistent white-noise hum starts to build behind my forehead.

  “Belle?”

  “You guessed it in one,” Matrioshka says in Holland’s dulcet voice.

  “You fucking . . . bitch,” I struggle to say. “How long’s it been?”

  “Ha . . . since Afghanistan.”

  “And . . . why?”

  “Why?” Matrioshka/Cusp tilts her head – and quite rightly so. Even I’m uncertain of the real question I’m asking.

  “Why did I take her?” Matrioshka muses aloud. “I should think that would be obvious. Why did I bed you? Ha, that should be obvious too. What a delight you were, Zephyr, riding you for my pleasure while feasting on every one of your petty weaknesses and conceits. Oh yes, what a great lover you are. What a masterful man. What a stunning ball of anxieties and neuroses. Delicious. And so hot.”

  “What have you done with her?”

  Weak as a babe, I fail to dislodge her boot from near my throat.

  “Who?”

  “Who? Who the fuck do you think I mean?”

  “Holland’s gone, Joe.”

  “She was getting her memory back,” I say and give a wretched sob, a sound so fucking unnatural and forlorn it even freaks me out until I realize I’m the one giving voice to it.

  “She was. . . .” I say, trying to start in on it again. “We were . . . There was a chance –”

  “No,” Cusp says cold and simply. “There was no chance.”

  Laughs.

  “Never was.”

  “You don’t know that,” I say.

  “I do. I tasted it all, knew it all – the instant before I snuffed her out.”

  “Why?”

  Cusp looks down at me with that terrible alien gaze so familiar it’s like I’m looking into the face of the girl Matrioshka once was – and in whose face I was too gullible and naïve to discern any trace of the majestic sadist lurking within.

  “Why?” she asks, and the beautiful face of a woman I could have loved so easily splits into the most heinous smile imaginable.

  “Why? Because she fought, Zephyr. And so I had to extinguish her – exactly like it is now time to extinguish you.”

  Cusp’s booted foot presses harder on my chest, but that’s nothing.

  The white pressure behind my eyes builds like a buzzing water-blade in my grey matter and I start to scream.

  And then I start to die.

  Zephyr 20.8 “Comes Instead The Darkness”

  THE LAST THING I see of Cusp is her eyes rolling into the back of her head and her legs giving out as she collapses like a felled deer, the malevolent presence instilling her with life now hell-bent on mine.

  I cannot see sufficiently far into the spectrum in which such horrors exist to actually see Matrioshka leap from Holland’s brow like some daughter of Zeus, yet there’s an effervescence to the air that can’t be explained by my watering eyes alone. The blurring pain inside my skull ratchets up a thousand notches and I’m only distantly aware as my shrieking cries fill the warehouse and my bowels fill the costume which accepts me like no one else perhaps ever could.

  What happens next is within me.

  The mind, it’s a canny thing. I picture it so clearly, the unfolding white wisp of Matrioshka’s spirit funneling like a plume of smoke in reverse, a cheap Hammer Horror vampire film effect as if she curls under the locked and bolted door to the inner sanctum of my mind.

  And what an impoverished throne room it is.

  The pressure is unbearable. Within me, this once slip of a girl is a leviathan, gargantuan in form and power as she grows and expands and grows and expands, invading the blank mindscape to be the one-and-all, playing me at my own life’s purpose, competing for the chance to be me, the animus that gives this mechanism of flesh and bone life and the logic-defying illusion of spirit.

  For a moment – and that moment is brief, friend – I think I can resist. Like with so many other challenges in my life, I fool myself to think this one might be the same, and the seed of my salvation is to be found at the eleventh hour if only serendipity and prudence unite. But that cheap painted surface is annihilated, karmic confidence gone in an instant so swift it’s like it was never there at all. Matrioshka is a tsunami, a tidal wave, Cyclopean, a planetary event, a force of intergalactic nature.

  She’s won.

  *

  SOMEWHERE DEEP DOWN inside myself I retain whatever kernel of truth was writ within the varicose layers of bullshit spun by my once woebegone sire. Fueled by desperation for my literal existence, in those last nanoseconds before the white fire of the Matrioshka holocaust erases me completely, I focus myself into what I imagine is a tiny spark of light and seek egress by any means available.

  I am no first-timer when it comes to the intersection of the existential and the spiritual, and I’ve been forcibly enlightened on at least one occasion in recent memory. In that high intensity soul-shrieking moment I make the ultimate Hail Mary pass and leap into the psychic hurricane beyond my own being, vacating the house of my soul at the last instant imaginable.

  Beyond, it is terrifying.

  I am not seeing the world – th
e warehouse, the day, the city, my corporeal remains – but look out upon a wasteland of colors, the prosaic world rewritten as pure metaphor, the pragmatic and ideational planes of action clashing together in the one psionic mélange like the Rorschach patterns of rainbow-colored paints squeezed together between glass plates, the very fascia which underlies the structure of what we take to be our planet-borne world. And in that landscape is a rapidly fading but welcoming hue of cooling blue to which I flit, knowing this butterfly-frail existence won’t last a second longer without somewhere to roost.

  The spark-that-is-me crosses from one host to another.

  Same engine, different driver.

  Like a drowning man dragged free spluttering and choking, I sit up in Holland’s body and am on my feet and falling again faster than even Matrioshka can react.

  I try to rise a second time only to damn near break an ankle as the ridiculous elevator boots twist sideways with minds of their own I cannot master either and I gasp and stammer and try not to piss myself as the fine white hairs on my slender arms stand on end and the adrenal response is like defibrillation with a car battery, a hank of green hair in my/her mouth as I look back to see me, Zephyr gently chuckling with that same familiar tone and getting slowly to his feet and shooting me the most truculent and sardonic of looks known to man.

  “You –”

  I freeze at the sound of Cusp’s voice delivering my rebuke.

  My sanity snaps back with an elastic twang as I look down myself, disoriented, confused, terrified, and hell, probably even a little aroused as I try to impose sense and order where there is none. Over it all comes the sound of my own jackass laughter as Zephyr flexes and unflexes his fists, all the while looking at me with that cocky expression, head tilted at a jaunty angle, and I can’t even put one foot straight in front of the other to punch the fucker.

  “You’re going to pay for this, Belle,” I say huskily.

  “Joseph, you surprise me,” Matrioshka-as-me replies. “Hell, I’m impressed.”