Suffice to say, a force too strong for a few jarhead cops to survive.
It is a biblical smiting as I burn them down to their boots in one fell swoop, my rising gesture reaching its zenith as I step from of the immediate carnage and silenced sub-machineguns again fill the air with their racket.
A nimbus of pure energy pulses out of every pore of my skin – except it is not my skin. It is through the pores of whatever Being is superimposed on the physical structure of how we think of ourselves at this level of consciousness.
The bullets dematerialize or vanish or disintegrate or otherwise become merely conjectural, and the SWAT guys witnessing this fairly poop their pants and back off to at least a hundred paces. One tosses a spark grenade that goes off next to my foot without me even having the freedom to blink, completely under sway of the force possessing me and which at the same time I am, a curious, hitherto unidentified and undetected co-inhabitant whose very presence causes me to question my own nature (and that of my predicament).
Despite the line uttered moments before, this is not a creature of thoughts and structures that might make themselves understood through language or any other construct of the rational human mind. I am chilled, truly terrified to know I am spliced so close to such a cosmic threat which could render me so unsafe in my Being, tethered as it now is to the material shell I once knew and admired and lusted after as Holland. I am more than just a man without a home. I’m a hitchhiker on the astral breeze, and I do not believe any of the bullshit I learnt from Lennon or any other tricks I’ve picked up during the years is going to sustain me if I lose track of this sanctuary.
And so the thing has its way with me. And with the cops. One of them escapes with a broken arm and PTSD. I remain caught in a state of constant horrification.
I can’t tell you what manner of thing this thing even is, except I know that’s barely the right term for such a fell entity. I imagine we might call it a demon, if we could unfetter that term from the expectations and exculpations of normative Judaeo-Christianity. This blasphemous presence within me basks in the aftermath of the carnage like a peacock enjoys the last rays of sunlight, something finite about its freedom, and like me in its outward manner, struts towards the road’s edge, glances up between the genteel trees and blasts into the sky.
I come back into my own some way over the western reaches of Atlantic City.
The wear and tear and the cracks worsening in this city teetering close to the edge of apocalypse only really register now despite tracking over these scenes during the past hour. I temper my breath, drinking back in my own consciousness. Dozens of smoke plumes rise into the sky and somewhere near the coast an entire skyscraper burns. Armageddon writ upon the canvas of the world’s biggest city is more than any CGI spectacle could hope to impart, because it is not in the big showy effects, but the sheer grainy, gritty ordinariness of the destruction that marks it for the stark and almost elemental reality it possesses.
With my awakening comes exhaustion. The demon force propelling me thus far weakens, spluttering like a dying fire, and wary of my immediate surroundings I descend to an elm-lined street with well-behaved McMansions sucking in their guts and staring at each other in the crepuscular light of day’s end.
The tree-line obscures sight of the city that must be a minimum two-hour commute for the average well-to-do wage slave buttressed in the homes around me. The scene settles into something almost tranquil, just a barking dog off somewhere to give it the hint of alarm. A few 9mm shell casings pepper the leaves in the gutter beside me and the way the kicked-in door on one of the houses across the street tells me even this place is no safe haven any more. Suburban Armageddon.
For all that, exhaustion threatens to flatten me where I stand, so it’s the only course feasible now to thread my way across the opposite yard and stagger into its well-appointed living room, hoping the looting indicated by the gaping shelves and strewn belongings is long past so I might recover with decency.
I crash onto one of the two suede sofas in the TV room and resist the urge to dry heave vomit as nausea, vertigo and unconsciousness overpower me all at once.
*
MIDAFTERNOON DAYLIGHT PLAYS like a tractor beam across the side of my face as I wince and move from the laser playing in through the narrowest of gaps between the heavy drapes opposite. Once I am sitting up, hair falling like a shawl around me, I get the wobbly sense of early afternoon and the tranquil serenity that only comes being in a place with no other people around.
The water upstairs is still working. I grab a shower and use a bunch of expensive clothes as towels until I can lever my sexy, battered and bruised body back into its jerry-rigged work clothes. I’m so hungry I could eat my own barf, and in the kitchen I luckily find chocolate biscuits and crack open a soda, guzzling the thing in record time and helping myself to another from the warm supply under the kitchen sink. As the sugars fizzle less perceptibly than normal within me, I test my right hand and watch darkness slowly build around it. Unlike before, now as I wiggle my fingers, the darkness becomes wisps banished by the growing radiance of my hand. The glow is no more akin to light than it is to the color red, and yet its brightness intensifies to the point where I narrow my own eyes.
“Groovy.”
Still belching ten minutes later, I lope out of the house like any ordinary intruder. I dare say there are families and couples ensconced in the homes around me, but the autumnal daylight shows roaming metrosexuals have been through here in fair number in recent times. An SUV’s tipped over down the block and more than a few pickets are staved in along various fences. I walk as much for the reawakening as to actually go anywhere, thoughts and strategies and dead ends somersaulting through my head as I take in a house gently burning, visible from the next corner, and at the next a black man hanging by his neck from a light pole down the way with a sign around his neck I can’t read at this distance. Any reinvigoration I might’ve felt quickly vanishes as cellular revulsion fills my throat with stomach juices. I continue warily on.
It is not quite a week since I stepped in another body through a hole in space-time to give aid to the city of my birth in a moment of profound distress. And that is a hell of a lot more than three square meals ago. A chopper scuttling past overhead is really the only thing to tell me right now that people still live on the earth, given the trees and the crowded, affluent streets corralling my vision. I see tumbleweeds of newspaper, smoke in the air and drifting ash and roaming dogs and one-armed men staggering off in the whispery distance, and vehicle crashes so long abandoned they look like public art. As the streets open and I move through the hour to the commercial corner of the arcology, I see a jarring sight as the skyline of the eastern city hovers into view.
Several of the bigger skyscrapers are now entirely ablaze. The fire in the Jensen Building looks perhaps a few days old now, yet the molten superstructure is still not at point of collapse, dozens of inner blazes banded together rather than any one monstrous act. An oily smear like from an artist’s failed canvas blankets the far horizon, the sun already lowering towards its nocturnal demise. I lift into the air, light-borne by gyres of darkness, mind spinning as my ascent brings the devastation of the city into ever greater levels of detail.
There is a big part of me that isn’t actually that good at the whole superhero thing. I know you might be shocked to think about me that way given what a powerful impression I must’ve left on you by now, but I’m not a man blessed with superhuman levels of patience, and there’s a few aspects of the crime-fighting caper more easily solved with blazing fists than more intricate means. What I’m saying is, the mental cog-work feels a little rusty as my mind struggles to fathom and to actually cogitate what chain of events has exactly transpired here, for this is no uncanny consequence of the initial attack that led me here from Afghanistan, which feels a thousand years distant despite the fact I barely remember sleeping betwixt then and now, and yes that includes the half-day nap from which I’ve just exhumed myse
lf.
The burning Jensen Building is like a beacon. Up high, the sun is goldening, tawny through scudding cloud banks and lacking menace like a bully frightened by the dark as indeed the sun must be as it loses grip on its zenith and sinks and fades away and a lambent breeze plucks at my tattered costume, eyes that are not mine scanning across the expanse of Atlantic City gripped by pre-organized chaos, this staged disaster, a deliberate sabotage of the world’s biggest if not greatest if not most foolhardy city.
For who? For what? For why?
The absence of far too many answers threatens to swamp me, but for once I do not sink into that total dejection common to personality types along my quadrant of the spectrum. Instead, I breathe deeper, a soporific calm underscored by my residual awareness of the unidentified life-force trapped under the same skin – a force which breathes far more deeply than me and at levels of consciousness I can barely contemplate.
And I am too afraid for surrender.
*
RIDING UP ABOVE the city, the slow monochromization of the aerial view precedes me like an augury as I take in the distant sounds and signs of the life that remains within the broad inner city. Gunshots rip out close by and then a loud but tinny-sounding bang. I swoop that way, coming upon box carton streets, sagging fencing between vacant alleyways, the few neighborhood shops just burnt-out gutters now, abandoned clothes and packaging trampled into the street commandeered by the burnt wreck of a classic Buick.
Three green-armored figures in fatigues bunker inside an abandoned laundromat, the fourth member behind the charnel automobile disguised by his combat helmet, chromatic visor somehow not concealing the sense of a battle-weary gaze as he hefts a wicked-looking automatic of some description.
The terrorists trade fire with a cavalcade of equally battle-stained cops advancing along either side of the road using natural cover like only experienced men know how, several more of their number moving behind a bullet-pitted police cruiser literally duct-taped all over with Perspex riot shields. These cops are men who have learnt on the job during the past week and it hasn’t been an easy lesson. I can read it on their faces with a glance. One of them has a short-barreled grenade launcher, and as I move above them, my shadow unnoticed in the gathering gloom, a silver bauble skitters into the laundromat and explodes, taking out the three closest targets.
Flinching, the lone survivor turns to run and that’s when I swoop.
Like a hawk on a hare, I carry the squirming, potentially suicidal assassin to a twelfth-floor roof, swiftly beyond the cops’ reach to maybe a mile away and where I quickly pat the cuffed man down, punching him a few times in the ribs to abolish any last minute resistance, undoing the fasteners on his bulletproof vest to see it lined with packages of high explosives studded with ball bearings. I throw the booby-trap away and remove the terrorist’s helmet so that a riot of henna’d dreadlocks flop out like so many flaccid cocks, a woman’s dark face with a tribal tattoo around her left eye glaring at me with zealous rage, hands immobilized by Cusp’s superior grip, snarling, as if she’ll bite if I draw too close.
“Who are you?” I snap, not for the first time frustrated at the feminine lilt undercutting the inherent threat in my tone.
“Fuck you, bitch,” the woman answers me back.
Perhaps she might say more, but I plough a fist into her midriff and she doubles over coughing and dry retching. I then release her, suicide vest thrown far aside, and the woman drops to the dirty rooftop painting the dust and pigeon droppings with strings of puke.
“I’m only asking one more time before I throw you off the roof,” I say.
“You won’t do that.”
“You don’t know me.”
“No,” she replies. “Which one are you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Naw,” she says and spits. “Look at you, some white bitch in leather like it makes you tough or something –”
I edit her hate speech with another haymaker. This time she goes down and stays down, doing that drawn out airless gasp thing that has my inner feminist deeply conflicted.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I say to her calmly. At least Holland’s voice is good for that. “I want to know who you work for and what the plan is.”
The woman squeezes out another “fuck you” before dry retching some more.
I see red, scooping her up and dragging her to the edge of the roof.
We’re a dozen floors above pavement, the column of soot and ashes rising from the city’s wounds framing the far architectural horizon.
“I don’t know how many people you’ve killed, but it’s enough that I don’t have any qualms about what happens to you,” I snarl at her.
“I’m not telling you shit.”
“You talk pretty tough,” I say. “I guess I’m a white bitch who gets off in leather just like you’re a righteous black woman with some equally pre-ordained role you feel obliged to play. What a drag. We’re more than this, you and me. But I am not playing games. Drop the fucking act and tell me who you work for. I want to know what’s behind all this.”
“I don’t work for no one. . . .”
“But you’re part of a group.”
The terrorist gives a gruff look and clams up. Even dragging her right to the dangling edge of the precipice doesn’t move her – which shouldn’t surprise me from someone going into action wearing a suicide vest.
I shake my head, hand still holding her shirt in my fist.
“There’s something about this that isn’t right,” I say. “You look like you should be baking chia seed muffins, not fighting a guerrilla war.”
“For freedom,” the woman says.
And something about that giddy remark makes me snap and God help me, I throw her off the building.
Zephyr 21.8 “True Identity”
ALTHOUGH IT’S DONE in anger, I fully intend to swoop down and pluck the falling woman from midair and drag her back to the rooftop for one final chance of confessional, the whole routine like a live theatre version of Russian roulette. Cusp has the strength to haul the woman out over the drop one-handed, so that’s what I do, discarding her like a sack of unwanted trash.
Only . . . at the point where I should be diving after her and pouring on a burst of speed, I find my eyes locked on the falling woman silently, gracefully plunging groundwards, twisting as the wind whistles past her limbs on their way to her deadly rendezvous with the ground.
And I do nothing.
At this distance the details are unclear, but she hits the pavement like a bag of cement and the spray sets off the alarm of an ash-covered sedan parked nearby. And I just stand with one foot on the roof’s edge looking down with Cusp’s masked face unmoving as I gingerly contemplate my own inaction and feel where exhaustion has worn smooth my capacity for remorse.
The wind picks up, carrying with it a trace of moisture, friction I once would’ve welcomed as Zephyr. Now as Cusp I shiver and gently cross my bare arms, angling my face so the breeze clears long hanks of greenish hair away from me, strands caught in my mouth the most alien and bizarre of sensations.
At this point I am on the edge of my own collapse as the woman’s death somehow reminds me of everything I myself have lost – not least of it my own body and its powers – going right back to the deep unleavened sorrow I’ve been carting around with me these many months. I sink into it like a warm bed and feel the cloying dull embrace of a vast depression.
And then a huge bomb goes off a dozen miles away.
The head offices of the Bank of America goes up in a dull roar. No sooner does the whole thirty-five-floor structure start to buckle than similar detonations go off in the block around it, the building’s grand collapse almost soundless within the competing furor. The roar of the building falling down and more explosions and wailing sirens and ghostly screams and the bellowing of thermals between the high rises builds to a terrific, epic crescendo, and I lift and rise into that cyclonic fury, conjuring this still unknown power beneath m
e to return to my prior course more determined than ever to uncover what the flying fuck is going on here.
*
NORTH, AND THE barrio comes into view through the haze filtering the morning. A sense of ceasefire hangs over the lower buildings, the stuttering of a sub-machine gun nearby heralding my arrival.
The streets are nearly empty. A few cars bear the marks of nights now long past spent in riot, and the sidewalks glitter with broken glass and the smell of gasoline bombs. Many windows are broken in the apartments overlooking major thoroughfares, boarded up like the businesses also rendered mere ghosts of their former selves by the citywide collapse.
Outside Loren’s street, three homeboys with red bandanas across their faces guard the entry to the units, AK-47s in their grasps. Dark glasses render them as anonymous as the thick jackets they wear against the cold, but at my approach they saunter out from behind their self-made barricade, enticed by the hot blonde despite the costume displaying her/my obvious allusions to grandeur.
“Hey chica,” one guy leers, a walking cliché, as beholden to his cultural narrative as the she-hadist I just left looking messy on the city sidewalk.
“What’re you doing here, baby?” another catcalls.
“You talk like that to the Seeker, do you?”
They’re nonsensically stunned at this for some reason, and one nods to the third member, who darts back inside. The clay man Ricky exits the hovel clutching a Glock with an extended mag, no sign of his Glow-induced powers present. His queer gaze slides over me with only surprise and none of the sleaze to which I’m rapidly becoming accustomed.
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