“But why?”
“Why?” He only laughs.
“I just mean, you know, there’s a citywide communications outage and you’re not questioning the orders you’re receiving?” I say back to him.
“There’s pretty good reasons, missy,” the cop replies. “White Nine’s down. Every one of you clowns is a suspect.”
The revelation feels like a kick in the stomach.
But nothing like what happens next.
*
BEHIND US, THE last of the gunmen being wrestled into cuffs wriggles free of his handlers. My eyes are drawn to the frantic yells of surprise, caught between what I can do to help versus whatever avenue this distraction offers for me to get the flying fuck out of here. In one horrible instant I take in the unmasked gunman spinning free, tattoos up the sides of his neck, the sides of his scalp razor-cut to stubble. A gloved hand grasps what looks terrifyingly like a rip cord dangling from beneath its opposite armpit and then the goon yells.
“Freedom!”
He explodes like a firecracker packed with meat.
The greying cop next to him clutches his own now red-painted face with a panicked clamor, staggering away helped by his pals who screech things about the cop’s eyes being gone that sure as fuck aren’t going to help him remain calm until he can get professional medical treatment. I kid you not, the spot where the suicidal gunman stood is literally just a pair of stumps with boots attached, a burst bag of paint effect drunk under the influence of chaos theory snaking out on the scorched pavement around them.
Someone, not me, yells, “The truck!” And sagely, everyone including yours truly starts surging back as fast as we can go, no one game to test whether those dreadful fears are right or if sudden death is imminent as the cops help their buddies and manhandle the remaining five prisoners back as fast as they’ll go from the shattered arcade entrance of the big building I see now belongs to one of the city’s biggest insurance companies, one of the gunmen falling to his feet and staying there as we try to get clear.
I’m still helping slower-moving fuckwads over the hoods of the barricaded police vehicles when the dump truck packed with tons of fertilizer explodes.
If it makes a noise, I couldn’t tell you. We are close to the eye of the cyclone as the explosive vortex opens and Hell comes stampeding into Atlantic City. Several of the blockaded cruisers are flipped, transformed into deadly, two-ton projectiles as the detonation of the terrorists’ device wipes out the foundations of the Emerson International building and debris and chunky shrapnel rains sideways pitting men against the incomprehensible laws of weaponized physics.
Worse, the annihilation has barely finished its business when an enormous creaking groan unlike anything I’ve heard in my life erupts from the bowels of the skyscraper as storey upon storey of concrete starts to concertina down – you could almost say gracefully, despite what little I can see of it through the dusty haze as me and everyone else still alive desperately flee yet further away again from its impending killing radius. There is nothing to describe the feeling of the collapse taking forever and also practically no time at all, the rumbling as much coming up through the shaking ground upon which it pours as from the desiccated structural avalanche. Huge blocks of rubble pound past me and I push a SWAT officer down behind a blackened taxi and dive on top of another two cops leaping into the cover of the building on the opposite corner and then a tsunami of black dirt and smoky debris gushes past, obliterating the cruel morning light.
And then the fucking thing collapses on top of me.
With the almost literal weight of the world upon me, I try not to panic as the cataclysmic colossus of the unburdened skyscraper ploughs down, darkness engulfing me, my arms thrown up and possibly my breakfast as I unwittingly collide with a huge slab or perhaps I should more rightly say it collides with me, my thoughts going about Mach 6 as I mentally compare how much less resilient I feel to having buildings dropped on me than when I was Zephyr. My rational mind bubbles over in one inchoate shriek that I feel safe sacrificing to the shitstorm of carnage as the day vanishes, dust and debris and other flying crap pelting me, threatening to suffocate me, as if a quicker and more immediate death isn’t so much more likely.
Yet somehow I retain my feet. Legs braced, and with arms above my green-tousled head, I feel the huge concrete slab as strangely weightless. With shockingly little effort I manage one step and then another, borrowed boots staggering up an impromptu staircase of rubble, tons upon tons of dead skyscraper in my arms, nothing much making sense right at the moment as I keep my imperiled momentum and try hard not to think too much in case I break the spell as I take a few more steps, the effortlessness starting to give way as if succumbing to the logic of my own barely grasped thoughts.
At that moment, a splinter of grey-flensed daylight appears ahead, casting the reality of this physical feat into stark relief, several cops’ dust-painted faces gawping in astonishment sheltering under me as I heft the huge, almost submarine-sized section of external wall off and to one side, whereupon it immediately breaks into a Mandelbrot cascade of concrete chunks and I can drop to Cusp’s shapely if scuffed leather-clad knees and drink in my own amazement to be alive, gloveless hands upended in my lap as I stare down, not quite able to really understand how I’ve done what I’ve done.
The officers I saved slowly move around me with all the reverence of lapsed Catholics confronted by the Madonna. It’s only when I look up and notice two are carrying cuffs and the third one a hand-held dart gun that I realize they’re not just here for the sunset.
As Cusp, I’m not quick enough to flee before the dart hits my upraised forearm and I also don’t have Zephyr’s fighter plane constitution to resist the tingling bee-sting sensation rapidly spreading along my arm to my chest.
“. . . the fuck is that?” I manage before paralysis takes my jaw.
“Sorry, honey,” a grimy cop replies, looking genuinely aghast at his churlishness. “White Nine in a can.”
I can only think to myself They do that now? as the rictus takes me in its ravishing grasp completely and I topple sideways and lay frozen as the cops close in to truss me like a Thanksgiving dinner.
So much for gratitude.
Zephyr 21.3 “New Buildings Falling Down”
LIKE SOME HASTILY-conceived found footage flick, I get an incomplete perspective on the post-incident response that is more salvage effort than rescue attempt thanks to my incomprehensible trick with the new buildings falling down.
To put it in context: as Zephyr, about the heaviest thing I’ve ever thrown in a fit of rage is a fully-armed, fully-crewed M1A2 Abrams tank (guys inside didn’t appreciate it much, but fuck ‘em). That chunk of high rise I just rassled weighed at least ten if not twenty times that. I dunno. I suck at math. Common sense alone however dictates this is not something that comes with Cusp’s ill-defined power set and nothing she (or me-in-she) has flagged up till now. And even with the winky aspect of me not exactly having the operating manual on how to access the full range of my hostess’s abilities, I still somehow think Leviathan-level strength falls outside the realm of my disbelief.
I contemplate all this while lying on my side, one eye partially blocked by a chunk of wire-infused debris, paralysis a bodywide phenomenon. I can feel my body – or my borrowed body, perhaps that should be – I just can’t move a frigging muscle. After a few minutes of boots passing close around me, sinister hands grasp Cusp’s ass and the hot, fetid male breath of a moustached chimp in an FBI slicker bears down on me, the smell of breath mints as cloying as the smell of the decaying teeth it is meant to disguise. Under the pretence of patting me down, this asspony slides a wedding ring-encrusted flipper inside Cusp’s ill-advised top and cops a feel of my left breast as I desperately try to send signals to my knee to unleash hell on this guy’s balls. I can’t even shoot daggers at him because my eyes can’t properly focus.
“She’s moving,” another male voice sounds from close by, words fogged by whatev
er concoction disables me.
“We have to take her in,” the froiteur says, pulling his hand from my top like a cheapskate from his wallet. “That charge should’ve wiped her out.”
“I’ll give her a dose of Serum Twelve,” the first voice says and I see a guy waft into view with a surprisingly febrile afro for a Federal agent, approaching and then kneeling down opposite my face, extracting some kind of pneumatic hypo from a kit.
“This’ll send her to dreamland on the express train,” the newest piece of shit says.
And the moustached gimp leans down to smooth my hair back from my neck, rank smell on my skin like a morning dew from the Abyss.
“Sweet dreams, sugar-pop.”
A new and unique panic floods me, however little effect it has on my shuttered system. I can’t even mewl and roll my eyes as the chill metal tang of the hypo applies to my taut neck and the hiss adumbrates my descent into utter darkness.
So maybe I can understand what some women go through, but I refuse to believe that makes all of us monsters.
*
THE BOY IS climbing. The tree looms over everything, a miniature Yggdrasil in this child’s suburban mythology. The Grandmother Tree, we used to call it, not exactly sure why, there never being anything like a grandmother on the scene when I was a kid.
I’m still watching this robustly-built young boy aged about nine figuring a way up into the crook of this huge willow’s arms, in his blushing, red-cheeked eagerness throwing off the puffer jacket that is his insurance against the cold, eyes casting fervently behind him for the rebuke I know he fears because of course this child is me.
I am still lying on my side watching from the ground as before, though I cannot feel my body at all and I have no sense of my existence save for my undeniable presence, the particles of a January frost further whitening the manky weeds we once called a lawn, the only bright color in the world the flush on this man-boy’s face.
He is beautiful. The fact that he is me is secondary to this revelation as my frozen gaze hones in like that of a falcon, every curve and line of this irascible child’s features in preternatural, crystalline focus, more than just my soul’s connection through time and space able to discern the impious glint to those dark eyes, the tug-of-war between obedience and rebellion activating inert limbs, the sweet good nature that – like some rare and laboratory-grown flower – cannot possibly survive in this cruel world’s unprotected greenhouse for long.
A deep and uncomfortable sorrow floods through me, along with the estrogen pangs of my woman’s body in seeing this perfect child caught amid the hoary breath-falls of a winter’s morning expunged from my consciousness like an artefact of a thousand years ago, as rare as the buried coins of some Anglo-Saxon king forgotten to an industrial marshland.
The boy-I-was hooks his scuffed Ked into the tree-fork and hauls himself up, one eager, damned near maniacal look back past me at the house
I know is no longer there; and then, like a modern day Ratatosk, he scurries up the tree and into the naked upper branches, neck untroubled as he gazes skywards to where the sun should be, the sky just a whitish frieze as blank as many of my other memories as well as my sense of how I am here and why this is even happening.
“Joseph!”
The voice startles me. Though disembodied, I have no reaction except to come back into presence with snap, aware I could drift away in a moment’s thoughtfulness that would become thoughtlessness as easily as one of this boy’s pluming breaths simply dematerializing into the scenery.
My mother’s legs come into view: black leggings ending in eight-hole Doc Martens in a fashionably abstruse alligator print. Her back is to me, and just as much as my heart caves in with the deep and unmanageable longing to see the child I once was more closely, I also yearn for Maxine to turn around as if I might resurrect her with this gaze of perverse memory. Yet she remains resolutely the wrong way around, the set of her shoulders more stolid than I recall, the svelte figure of her crime-fighting days as Catchfire long since sacrificed to middle age.
If I could give my words voice, I would, urging her to turn, to see me, to conjure me into life through bearing witness, but there is no tongue for me to speak, no voice to summon. I am a ghost, disembodied, and I can only watch with sadness and regret as the spark in the young me’s face slips away at the summons of the woman who delivered him into this world. Reluctantly, young Joseph descends a few branches, dropping to the ground dusting bark from his palms, the nascent charmingly sheepish look I will hone to perfection in later years having none of the designed effect on our clearly irate mother.
I want to tell her not to be angry. If this is a memory, I have no memory of what. This is no special day. This is no crucial landmark unit of my past in which clues to the unfolding present can be found. There is only her and the boy I was, locked into this ideational matrix perhaps forever in this moment – a moment I wish each could cherish more than they obviously do.
The boy is perfect. There is no weight of the world on him yet. No powers. No knowledge. Not a touch of cruelty. Whatever imperfections of mine the world has sharpened in the years since, they are not here in this instant, and I can only pine, not just for the body lost to me, but the prehistoricity of youth, the cliché of innocence, the myth of freedom into which this childhood tangle has passed.
And for Maxine, here she is the mother whom I helped burn to a crisp despite her own powers, who sheltered me against the world and hid me from forces she barely understood and about which she communicated so little before her death.
Now the boy marches to the gas chamber of her motherly arms, head down as she quietly scolds him with words I can barely hear, wanting him to be safe, to stay warm, not to take so many risks. She cannot understand the fire within him, and not just because it is male energy, though yeah, also there is that. There is a gulf that separates them in that moment that is an inversion of my unrealized wish for them to commune with this sliver of our continuum. And the paucity – and palpability – of that moment would take my breath away if I had any to give or take.
“Come inside,” Max says, one woolen arm directing the boy to go before her. “There’s someone who wants to see you.”
Somehow my perspective shifts, turning, concertina-ing, a prismatic collapse of light rays as I invert and follow, now seeing their backs again so I never see my true mother’s face, like she might just be an actor with an uncanny disguise on this found footage moment as she ushers the young me back to the house, and the back door is ajar despite the chill day, thick bronzed leaves cover the ground, my old black Mongoose rests against the weather-board planks, and the sound of a kettle whistling comes from within, the warmth beyond the entry almost visible in a heightening of the colors, the tension as a man’s shape moves from one side of the shadowed doorway to the next and the slant of those narrow features is unmistakable and – even as I plunge into the horror of these implications – my mind races to understand what it means that this scene, if it is true, is locked in my unconscious and only able to boil forth now, as if Siren’s telepathic intrusions wriggled something free.
Joseph approaches the doorway and the vision starts to fade. I cling to it like a drowning man to a life buoy, desperately fighting the darkness that encroaches the edges as Maxine raises her arm again to indicate the man beyond the threshold.
“Joseph,” Maxine lilts in her Derry brogue. “Say hello to your Uncle John.”
And the only worse thing that could happen at that moment happens as Lennon’s features emerge from the shadows like a medieval bas relief, and the scraggly hair framing that hawkish nose lifts, looking up and past the boy doing his best to offer the stranger his hand.
The Doomsday Man’s eyes bore into mine and then I fade and it all goes away.
Zephyr 21.4 “The Present Moment”
THE NOISE OF the holding cells filters through my sleep until I wake at the throbbing pain at my wrists, a lifetime’s habits as Joseph drooling in my sleep not go
ing anywhere despite the switcheroo as I sit up and try to dry my face with numb wrists, startled by the pain of the heavy titanium manacles trapping my hands in bondage.
The echoes of my dream or vision or memory or fantasy or whatever it is resonate through me, aided and abetted by my disorientation as I look at my surroundings and blink and narrow my lashes at the sodium glare of lighting at one and the same time overwhelming yet strangely atmospheric. It takes a few seconds to absorb that the front of my cell is just a Perspex screen or something like it, keeping to the best tradition of serial killer prisons everywhere, and opposite me, beyond a 1960s-era hospital-looking corridor, sits an identical see-through window with a number more stretching off in either direction. In the cell opposite stand two figures: the sinuous and sexy midnight-blue leather-clad figure of my one-time consort, the winged Night Angel, and a stocky-looking black guy in what appears to be rubber lederhosen, the outfit not so much a costume, but as I discern later, the under-suit for his confiscated powered armor. This looks like a unisex operation. Lounging as rebelliously as total confinement in the other cells allows is Demonizer, Mr Magnetic, Farseer, and Sun Man. I don’t know what’s being used to suppress their powers – or mine, for that matter – but as I reach inside myself to see what’s my option, there’s a bizarre numbness that feels like more than just the after-effects of the hypo.
Faint banging brings my head up as I see Night Angel looking like a three-dollar hooker slamming her hand on the glass screen to get my attention, insouciant swagger to those narrow, unmoving hips. She starts yelling something at me, actually chewing gum at the same time that I notice her black wings slowly undulating between half-open and closed. After a few monotone yet smothered syllables I wave my hands back to stop her.
“I can’t hear a fucking word you’re saying,” I shout.
“Wha–?”
Zephyr Box Set 2 Page 63