Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  Zephyr nods to concede my point, but I can see Belle is antsy now to go. There’s no witty repartee here and it feels like I’m lecturing a six-year-old on classical morality. She is a creature of vampiric emotional distress like nothing I have ever seen, but deeply intellectual she is not.

  “We live in a world now with many dangers,” I continue the lecture.

  “People like you and me with powers vastly outweighing our ability to use them responsibly, for instance.

  “So you asked me why I do what I do, so I’m telling you it’s so the everyday person out there doesn’t have to feel like those medieval peasants. I can’t promise anyone anything. I don’t always win. Good doesn’t always triumph over evil. I can’t protect everyone. But me and people like me make the choice to try and do good if for no other reason than people out there can go about their lives shopping online or eating junk food or voting Republican or hooking up for gimp sex or whatever, and at least they can be free of that awful soul-destroying fear that used to be etched into the very fabric of human life.”

  “Nice speech.”

  “And you can still go fuck yourself.”

  Zephyr snickers in that way he does as the cell door opens beside him.

  Yes, the adventure never stops.

  Zephyr 21.6 “Goddess Of Destruction Incarnate”

  TAURUS STICKS HIS head in and actually snorts, glaring not just at me, but Zephyr too, who I forget kind of remains the big guy’s nemesis even if it’s not me in the pilot’s seat any more.

  “Zephyr, for God’s sake man, what the fuck you doing?” the erstwhile Federal agent asks. “You know they’re on ten-minute rotations. Enough trying to hit on this silly bitch.”

  “Hey fuck you, cowboy,” I spark back.

  Taurus shakes his head dismissively and Zephyr only cackles, nodding as if at the agent’s sage wisdom as he eases out of the cell.

  “It’s no horsing around with Agent Taurus,” my impersonator says. “Catch you later, sweet cheeks.”

  I’m about to fire right back at him, conscious of the door and any opportunity to sprint for freedom disappearing in front of me, but another feminine outburst just beyond the edge of my vision takes us all by surprise.

  “What’s this asshole doing here?”

  I angle myself so I can better see Zephyr’s patented smug jerk grin waver just a fraction at sight of two identical blondes in manacles escorted by a phalanx of SWAT dudes who emote a predictable mixture of terse apprehension and arousal in the twins’ presence. I personally have no idea who either of these costumed honeys are, but as one, they fix their ocean blue eyes on my imposter with a look of such loathing it even takes me aback.

  “Remember us?” the pair says in unison.

  “Not sure I do,” Zephyr replies with a wink back at me.

  I can’t help noticing a traffic jam of goons out the doorway and seize on the distraction to move closer, view widening as I approach the cell door, giving a quick one-two at the twins, each heavily manacled and with chemical collars on, doped to the eyeballs in fact, but with the closest one to me fighting hard to give those eyeballs a death stare.

  “He doesn’t remember,” the lead one says.

  “He doesn’t remember,” her twin replies.

  “What’d I do?” Zephyr asks.

  The guards push the girls on to clear the passage and in that briefest of pauses the lead sister lunges forward and grabs Zephyr by the chest of his costume, yanking him completely from my doorway.

  Fighting my own lag, I slip into Zephyr’s warm spot and jam my heel against the closing door, left with no one to pull it shut on me as outside I see back down the hall to where yet another FBI goon squad rounds the bend escorting a shackled and dejected-looking Sun Man towards us. A few of the guards jeer loudly at the gridlock, almost drowning out the scuffle between the Twins and Zephyr with their curses.

  Their handlers are efficient, hauling the Twins aside, aided and abetted by the pharmaceuticals claiming dominion over the pair I can’t remember for the life of me. When the guards pull the girls off Zephyr, they more resemble drunks sobbing in the gutters after a hard night clubbing.

  “Do you know what you said to us when we met?” the lead Twin shrieks, plunging on at once to answer herself. “‘So which one of you is fucking me?’ What an asshole.”

  Whatever goes through Matrioshka’s mind at that moment must be something similar to my own as shock lances through us as effectively as a double bitch-slap. While my counterpart proceeds to cackle like a madman at the Twins’ remark – made, I guess, by yours truly, if the hat fits, and much to my shame rather than his – I see Sun Man twisting violently as fire flares into being upon the sleeves of his four closest captors. Sun Man then barrels between the shocked guards, making some kind of effete run for freedom only made worse by the obvious restraints upon his not exactly legendary powers. The other guards busy themselves like a worsening storm and I try to conjure my own light force – a power I know is meant to be inside me, if I have inherited the same powers as the body I survive in.

  That said, I also streak like a running back through the next wave of guards. Immediately to my right, the corridor wall is hundred-year-old masonry studded with big blocks of frosted glass that admit barely any of the light from outside, but I drive my shoulder into the middle of the dense panes and carry through enough momentum with Holland’s enhanced physiognomy that the wall of glass ice cubes tumbles outwards and I am born head-first like a stillbirth from a waking dream into the milky light beyond.

  *

  I CAN SCARCE believe I am free – if by free I mean plunging headlong down a paved decline in cuffs, crashing to the bottom of a grassed slope and taking census of the fact it’s the whole island of White Nine I’m now loose within. These are the precious moments in which my potential pursuers remain as trapped as I was, and fueled by that desperation and knowing I’ve got none of my Zephyr powers to aid me, I hurry across a double lane of tarmac, late afternoon coming on over what looks more like a naval academy than the country’s most secure prison – one I remember now was only recently emptied of its most ill-famed inmates.

  I get free of my restraints, but the shot of whatever they gave me earlier coats my soul in tar and I can’t get airborne, nor can I conjure the increasingly familiar darkforce to help. Sorcery? I’ll have to think about that factoid another time. It makes a future confrontation/conversation with Twilight seem even more inevitable, as if the forces of dramatic irony weren’t enough between us.

  I bound over a parked car as I continue on, casting wild ragged looks around me, but then I nearly collide with a woman carrying way too many files and cases and then there’s a single gunshot that lets me know I should be truly off and away.

  The woman sprawled on the ground now upholstered with stationery looks up at me, legs splayed, surprising sympathy in her bifocal gaze.

  “Are they after you?”

  “This is bullshit,” I tell her. “The city’s under siege and they’re doing the dirty work for whoever’s behind it, scooping up the only people able to actually do anything, excuse my split infinitives.”

  “Which one are you?” she asks, flustered, and I realize however matronly this lady might seem in picking herself and her heavily-padded ass off the ground, a flush of teenagerly arousal rouges her features.

  “Cusp,” I say crisply. “I’m . . . Cusp.”

  There are shouts back in the direction of a main complex that dwarfs the surrounding annexes with its full post-imperial majesty. I have to assume the tactical response tracking me from the main building is now on in hot pursuit, so with barely a nod to the flustered woman, I elbow on through the hedges and vault down a manicured slope, leap a low chain fence and nearly collide with – of all things right now – a bus chugging past the hitherto concealed roadway. My momentum is such that there’s no way I’m not escaping some kind of face time with the bus, but at least I get to choose where I want to take it (there’s a joke in there s
omewhere). So I vault even higher as the full expanse of access road opens up to my vision, and curling like a wide receiver protecting himself on the flight to the end zone, I arc up and smash in through the upper windows of the vehicle. It’s Perspex rather than glass, but it still shatters into bits, as does the shrapnel of destroyed window struts that blast inward with me like tiny elemental heralds of my goddess of destruction incarnate.

  I can’t explain what the bus is doing here except I guess even Ryker’s needs its own internal transport, and obviously I’ve run into the 1.15pm from central admin to dormitory cell A or something similar. And that’s why there’s hardly anyone in it, thank Jesus H.P. Lovecraft, my arrival flattening several rows of poorly-bolted chairs as a couple of ordinary civilian-looking types leap up from seats further back, one of them of course an agent or Fed official or something because he pulls a 9mm and tries to do his civic duty before my hands unfurl and a jet of slithering blackness hits him in the chest and face and knocks him flat.

  Mentally high-fiving once more, but with Holland’s face set in a rictus lure, I pick myself up from the serrated carnage and charge up the aisle of the bus, past the second geezer, me closing in on the panicking driver.

  “Feel free to jump out,” I yell at him.

  The after-effect of the darkness blast is a sap to my reserves, and I feel more like I just ate a two-pound lasagna than a guy in the uncomfortable intellectual space of knowing he is now a girl on the run for her survival. The driver slows the bus and leaps clear, and I think for just one fucking second I could take a breath, but of course then the roof smashes in and Agent Taurus rises like the dreaded minotaur he is.

  I never said anything about driving the bus. It continues with its own momentum, slewing on a very fine angle as I turn to acknowledge the new arrival. Taurus gives a glowering snort and takes one clippity-clop step forward and nearly loses his balance as the bus hits a curb and we’re jostled as the vehicle careens across a lawn and footpath and demolishes a park bench and a bunch of planter boxes beside a row of flag poles.

  The distraction is my advantage and offensiveness is often the best form of attack, right? I hurl one of the wrecked bus seats like a broken Da Vinci contraption, then throw myself into flight through the hole in the roof Taurus himself created.

  Except I don’t make it into the air. I’m not as quick as I used to be and my trajectory falls flat into the flight path of the big guy’s haymaker.

  *

  IT’S NOT LIGHTS out, but I am damned if I know how Holland’s only gently amplified physiology can withstand the blow that would implode the head of any regular person. To make matters worse, I’m not even free of the off-course bus, instead splaying against the shattered far-side windows, hanging momentarily like we are fighters in a cage – but one on wheels taking an increasingly erratic course towards its yet unknown but equally inevitable destiny.

  Taurus grunts like a rapist and surges at me.

  Somehow amid this morass I get my legs up to block him, feet in his chest pushing the big man back as I unwind from my unwitting languor. Taurus is still off-balance and I unload a weak-fisted karate combo he mostly takes on his arms, a huge knee coming up that I only manage to twist and take on my hip instead of between my shapely legs.

  “Hey,” I growl. “Don’t fight dirty. I’m a girl!”

  I elbow him in the side of the face and lose myself in the moment. I don’t know what the fuck is going on that I suddenly think I’m Zephyr again, but that’s basically what happens, and my Mach 1 fury comes through more like throwing a bowl of soggy oatmeal than devastating punches as Cusp’s exhausted fists thump awkwardly into the FBI freak’s ribs and he backhands me like a cliché of disdain.

  I tumble down the aisle of the bus trying not to give him the satisfaction of me also crying like a girl. I’m fucked if I am going to let this asshole disrespect my gender, whatever fucking body I am in, and just that whiff of self-righteous anger is enough to get me back on my feet as he lumbers in at me.

  The difference is I am slightly tucked among the remaining bus seats and he is charging down the middle of the bus only four or five paces away from me when the whole thing collides directly with a huge brick building and the agent’s stampede transforms into ballistic velocity as he disappears past me in a streak, smashing into and partly through the bus windshield – but because we are head-first in the brickwork of the corner block, it means Taurus doesn’t go anywhere except maybe into the rubble leaking into the bus.

  With the FBI agent down for the count, I gauge my aches and bruises and wearily kick open the side door and step onto brick-strewn grass, sirens closing from the middle distance. A chopper shoots past overhead and angles around on sighting the scene of destruction, and by clenching my fists, I somehow assess my readiness for flight, fervently praying that whatever mysterious source fuels Cusp’s powers, they might now be available to me in all their magnitude.

  But they ain’t.

  The tactical squad converges on me from four directions, doing that guns-at-the-ready duck walk that now looks so early 90s. I am exhausted, profligate with sorrow and fatigue. I am but a few steps clear of the bus as I lift my head from where it hangs, hands on my leather-clad thighs.

  “Back off,” I say without much conviction.

  Their staticky laughter emanates despite enclosed headsets and masks, electronic telepathy as they halt at the raised fist of the closest and perhaps most heavyset officer.

  Four of the eight keep me covered with sub-machineguns. The others draw and extend electroshock batons like they’re at the start of a choreographed dance routine. The leader advances several steps and his amplified voice rings out.

  “Lie down bitch, or we’re going to gang you.”

  I am still taking deep breaths, but this time I lift my face, one eye staring between hanks of green hair. The leader’s face-plate snaps open so I can meet the stony blue eyes of the veteran as I reply.

  “Like fuck you will, asspony.”

  I stand up straight and practically right into the squad’s endemic leers, masks perversely raised as their leader and his three nearest lackeys close in on me with clubs like they’re rising to the challenge. The first guy, well, it’s fairly easy to deflect his strike and move past, using him standing in the way as a human shield so I can kick out the leg of the next cowboy, grabbing his wrist and deflecting his baton into the neck of the third. The shocked trooper makes a gagging noise. Static explodes.

  It doesn’t bring me much of a reprieve, and backing away from my attackers for a moment’s safety only triggers the itchy trigger fingers of the other squad members, who chafe the ground around me so that even if I might be able to take the hit, I reflexively bound back into the middle of the still upright three remaining goons, punching one with a wicked haymaker in the side of his helmet and only partly regretting it.

  It is at about that moment one of the electroshockers touches me between the boobs and I nearly piss myself as I collapse, a puppet with its strings cut.

  The leader and the guy I just punched are on me at once.

  “Hold this fucking bitch down, Vance,” the commander growls.

  He has the baton across my throat, the crackling tip just inches from my ear. In the press of his erection against my thigh I can feel how the fear barely contained in my woman’s gaze is almost too much for this anachronistic fuck to resist. His little buddy is no less strident, but struggle as I might, I’m defeated of the strength to lever these assholes off me.

  “I think . . . Vance is gonna cum first,” I growl, trying once again to dislodge the douchebag dry humping my legs.

  “Shut up,” the commander says and rears up and punches me across the jaw.

  The lights dim a little, but he’s no Taurus. I retain focus, spitting blood as the other two baton-wielding guards close in and stab me with their chargers. Arcing up, it’s all I can do not to smash my teeth together and break my jaw. The spasming throws the guy on my legs clear and the mo
ment the tremor leaves my muscles, it’s not my own control I feel return, but some far more threatening and ethereal force within me.

  Somehow I stand, throwing the three adult men off me, though it’s only partly at my control. My soul feels hollow, and I hear myself whisper, almost crooning:

  “Come kiss me.”

  And I light up from within.

  I’m not entirely sure how the fuck else to describe it as I’m flooded from some vast inner wellspring, a huge, chaotic, whirling force of activity swirling like thousands of bats disturbed in a cave, yet bats of light and bats of darkness, rising as one blur in concentric rings to the apex of the cavern of Holland’s mouth, the manifestation of the entity within – the sorcery, I know in an demonic instant – that is the source of this mysterious power that has evaded me for so long.

  And the entity behind it. We are momentarily one in the same, yet I should never delude myself to think that is true.

  A beam of brilliant, searing intensity pulses from my mouth like a trapdoor to the heart of the sun as I grab the first veteran cop by the Kevlar and drag him in close – and shit yeah, he starts to freak because the lightforce now pouring out of my mind has the intensity of a jet fighter plane turbine and just before he can even reckon on his own demise, it happens, his head extinguished for all its protective finery as readily as a candle snuffed out. Before the fused carbon lump of what used to be a head can even disintegrate in my hands, I rise without volition, a steady building feeling of oh-holy-fuck-I’m-about-to-kill-a-bunch-of-cops rising in my chest.

  And so mote it be.

  Zephyr 21.7 “A Biblical Smiting”

  I don’t know where the leg-humping cop goes, but the other two guys with batons stand frozen at the spectacle of their leader’s demise – so much so that they’re sitting ducks as I basically spew . . . I dunno . . . hot molten rainbow or something all over them. They are vaporized by my dragonfire. As Cusp, my mouth is just a faucet for some terrible force from beyond or possibly from between universes – part of the non-Classical matrix of what constitutes existence on the material planes in which we experience it.