Zephyr 22.3 “The Truth At Its Heart”
“I HAVE BEEN reading,” Twilight says and gestures back in the direction of the room we can no longer see, and if the earlier information means anything, is no longer technically on the same planar reality.
“First time in my life I read anything other than grimoires and ancient manuscripts or Nate Simon’s column in the Post. Where’s Sal Doro gone these days? Redundancies?”
“He’s dead. I told you that.”
“That’s right. They wanted you for that?”
“Only briefly.”
“You know Schopenhauer said in life, we are like children in a theatre before the play is about to start, but instead we are ‘innocent prisoners, condemned not to death, but to life’,” Twilight quotes.
“And Schopenhauer was right up there with his pal Nietzsche in the manic depressive stakes,” I say. “Great writers and great minds, Twilight, but probably miserable fucking assholes to live with – especially if you were one of ‘em. What have you been reading?”
“A lot of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.”
“Fucking hell,” I say. “We have to get you off that crap.”
“Crap?”
“Pragmatic philosophy. Guys like you and me are exceptions to the rule. We struggle with mortality, most of us . . . I’m not sure about you,” I say.
“Life is empty without purpose.”
“Look, this is fascinating and all, but I need to find Portal and the others because my purpose is to kick the shit out of whoever’s hijacked my city. Are you in?”
Twilight stares into my silence.
“Oh by the way,” I interject on myself. “If you know anything about how Holland got her powers, if she was just some super-powered groupie, I’d really appreciate it. Especially if it involves anything to do with . . . demons?”
Twilight gives an unconvincing show of looking mystified and concerned, made all the more obvious by his well-known customary disregard for almost anyone and anything. I make a low noise and my thoughts start to sputter off mindlessly and I too reflect on Sting’s preachings.
“Somehow I’m going to let that one go through to the catcher,” I tell him. “Are you coming with us or not, Dominic?”
“I’m retreating, Joe. I might be a superhuman, but I don’t know that I am the superman I might wish to be. Not yet.”
“. . . and your criminal empire?”
“I guess there’s going to be a power vacuum,” he says and shrugs. “Sorry about that.”
“So I can expect an out-and-out turf war on Atlantic City’s streets?”
“Maybe once you get the city back under control. If you can.”
“Jeez, thanks a bunch.”
“Sorry to shit the bed on you, old pal, but you’ll get through. You’re Zephyr. I mean, not right now you’re not, but you are Zephyr. You always get through.”
I stare at my erstwhile friend a moment, refusing to be drawn into the sadness I feel because I don’t want to honor this asshole for it. I want to curse him as a traitor, but if I truly sift my thoughts I know it’s just my yearning for something like the four-color fantasy most of us chase with the gang back together and our wounds patched up ready to go kick bad guy tail. Only it looks like it’s not happening that way this time and it feels all kinds of wrong.
“If you see me around – Zephyr, I mean – give me a shout, OK?”
“When this is over and you want to talk me through what the fuck happened to you, I might be able to help – especially if, like you say, there’s a demon involved,” he says.
“Won’t you be in your Fortress of Solitude or something?”
“I’ll be here,” Twilight says.
I nod, feeling humbled not sitting well with my earlier outrage. I look for where the door should be and just wish the fucking thing would open by itself.
“And if you’re still stuck in that body, well . . .” Twilight says and winks.
“We could have a lot of fun.”
*
TWILIGHT AND I file out of his inner sanctum and there’s a vibe like everyone thinks we’ve been fucking. I don’t help things by nervously checking my hair, which comes about as naturally to me as dancing with an umbrella. Twilight’s nonplussed, probably happy to take the cred as he eyes everyone munching from a platter of food and drink adorning the nearest sideboard. I help myself, sandwiching multiple sandwiches together despite my modest feminine hand span, gorging myself on a random mash of pickles, cucumber, cold venison sausage and curried egg. There’s a pitcher of some kind of weird lemon drink and I pick it up by the gilt handle and take a swig, uncaring of the others watching as I back up just long enough to belch before pouring more in. Fuck it. Crumbs rain down like jumpers from a collapsing office block. It feels like I literally haven’t eaten for about a thousand years.
“Is he coming?” Sentinel asks gruffly.
Twilight stands in the room with us, somehow changed into costume and with the biggest of his batwing cloaks hanging to the floor like a mortuary drape.
“You can stay until you are recovered, and then move on,” Twilight says sternly, one hundred per cent back in character as the others finish the meal I am only beginning. “I am departing these realms for the foreseeable time. I’m tired by the pettiness of ordinary men.”
The antihero’s eyes move to mine and he nods, lifts his hands as he sees there are no last requests – and then he gestures, at once summoning a billowing black cloud amid green flames shooting up his arms, the whole confusion taking a deep breath inwards and vanishing into a speck of nothingness and Twilight with it.
“That’s quite an exit,” the Enigma says.
“He always was a real show pony, that guy,” Mistress Snow adds.
At once there’s another eruption of black fumes and roiling yet thankfully harmless Greek fire which elaborates itself into Twilight once again stepping back into the room in all his demonic finery.
“Forgot something,” he says and moves to a desk, gathering up copies of Camus and Heidegger amid a few journals, tucking them under his arm before depressing the hidden switch again and bidding us adieu, now disappearing into his private sanctuary.
“Now what?” someone asks the room.
“Rest up,” Seeker says.
I concur.
“Sleep if you can,” I tell my companions. “We need to find Portal and the others and then we’re taking a trip to England.”
I look to Seeker and she nods.
“Manchester. It’s near Stratford,” she says. “You’ll like it. Shakespeare country.”
Sentinel’s snicker smothers my grin, which I turn just in time to see the tail end of him shaking his head and dismissing us as “stupid broads” under his breath.
Your day is coming, buddy.
*
THE GENERAL RULE about geriatrics and short sleeping don’t appear to be true the next day as we spend an exceptionally long time kicking around waiting for the older players in this shitty drama to get their skates on and join Seeker and I out in the garden for the defiantly unwholesome breakfast prepared by Twilight’s kitchen staff.
The slow arrival of the others interrupts mine and Seeker’s silent orgasmic commune as we dig through a buffet of waffles, French pastries, succulent sweet breakfast meats and eggs cooked to perfection and to our preference by the small, polite, apparently tongue-less Asian man in a chef’s hat who stands nearby toying with an i-gadget that no longer does anything except complex math, thanks to the collapse of Atlantic City’s communication network, however far we might be from ground zero.
After our communal repast, we take to the air in an unlikely flying squadron of Sentinel carrying Mistress Snow and Maxtor ferrying the Enigma on his back, Lionheart flying loops around us and checking out my ass. I am reminded of the evil flying monkeys from that old film Terms of Endearment.
Daylight is not kind to the city which has been unkind to itself. I yearn to explore the territory due east, since we
are on the cusp of the Atlantic, no pun intended, and I imagine the world’s navies in one gigantic flotilla waiting to spring into action to help America rebuild – except I have it on the good authority of Twilight’s goon squad, who say the Undernet confirms our fair city’s demise has sparked a global pandemic of lawlessness and looting, and so basically the cavalry’s horses might be on fire.
Now deep into its second week without power, the city’s most obvious treasures are smoke-weeping eyesores, the skyscrapers no longer burning, a surprising amount of debris and fallen ash giving the devastation a lived-in look that belies how little time really elapsed before our whole civilization fell into ruin.
Deliberate ruin.
Now it’s obvious to me this scheme was a concerted effort, and not a small one by any means, but it is more than ironic that it looks as if we must leave the city to find the truth at its heart. At least the idea that some failed mega-villainess in Old Blighty holds the key to the whole mystery means the path as I imagine it betwixt here and there is relatively straight-forward.
Like, as if, right?
*
THE RIVERFRONT NEVER looked as shitty as it does now, fresh snow somehow enriching the disaster besetting the wharfs and the sagging buildings crowding in like well-meaning relatives at a wake. A smell it takes me a while to recognize as sheep shit hangs over everything, and it’s only when Maxtor solemnly indicates one of the big live transport ships listing on its side out in the harbor with gore and trails of drying disgustingness crusting its way to the water-line that I yet again drink in the scale of disaster this attack has wrought.
Across the East River and dangerously close to Rikers, the desecration that is Old Manhattan lifts its bony fingers still, the crumbling skyscrapers a prophecy of more destruction to come that we clearly never heeded. I grew up with this view from the edges of Astoria, except the golden haze of childhood suffuses my memories even now so that yesteryear retains its understandable allure compared to the mess my life has become and the way the world around me now mirrors that disaster – and in some way others might say we are all intertwined.
The other masks land behind me and I am sincerely thinking that for once things appear to go according to plan as a big industrial doorway wrenches open from the warehouse in which Azzurro and her Glow-infused goons once attacked me. A half-dozen heavily-armed cops in a mishmash of tactical armor step cautiously into the light, and just as I start to fear what might go wrong, three battered-looking copies of Legion follow, along with the huge hulking form of Coalface, seismic-looking cracks in his magma steaming in the frigid crystalline daylight.
“Who are you guys?” one of the Legions yell.
“You don’t know me?” Sentinel says and steps forward, sweeping past the rest of us to advance on the bunkered masks.
The recognition snaps those assembled out of their caution and the cops lower their guns as more and more people – civilians, women and children – crowd to the edges of the warehouse door to watch us.
“Which one of you is Portal?” Sentinel says to the gathering crowd.
“Settle, gramps,” I say to him and sashay past to reach the three Legions standing together like they’re in need of each other for reassurance.
“You remember me? I’m Cusp.”
“You’re Zephyr’s girlfriend,” one of them says, wiping nervously at what looks like a herpes sore on his lip.
I’m still for some reason bridling at the suggestion as I take in how each of these three look rundown and anxious, like junkies long since strung out to dry and not loving anything about it.
“You’re copies,” I say softly. “All three of you?”
The three slowly nod or look away, just as much an admission of the truth of my statement. The one at the back picks nervously at fingertips pitted and broken like old rubber gloves deteriorating in the sunlight. A subtle, grimy white cataract stains his eyes which won’t meet mine no matter how much I compose myself to the task.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “Where’s Legion?”
“The Omega have him,” the first copy says.
I freeze on the spot. I don’t even want to know, but I know I’m going to have to ask.
“Omega? Tell me.”
“Twilight led us here and then just took off like some emo-kid,” the herpes-lipped copy says.
“Emo?”
Sentinel bulls in. “Just tell us about these fucking Amigos.”
“He said Omega,” I basically just yell at him.
“Omega?” the living legend repeats after me and then just boggle-eyes Legion’s clones.
“That’s what they call themselves,” the first copy says like he’s been trying to choke the words out since last we spoke. “I don’t even know who they are. Or what that means.”
“Masks?”
“Villains,” the copy says.
“Worse than villains,” the one next to him adds.
“And what’s the deal with you?” I ask. “You get separated from your host and you start to . . . fall apart?”
The copies start to cry their hearts out to me – maybe they see me as a mother figure or something, despite their host’s perversions, so many of which have included them – but Sentinel growls, forcing the scared-looking clones to shuffle backwards on the frozen gravel, frightened breaths emerging as tiny wisps.
“Where is the one called Portal?”
“He got captured too. We lost Stiletto. She’s dead. The kraut guy had already gone back to the Fatherland,” the herpes clone says. “These Omega guys, they have a bunch more people . . . and they’re torturing them.”
“Where?”
“Here,” the clone simply remarks. “We’re stuck in the middle of their territory.”
Zephyr 22.4 “The Third Legion”
I ASK THE copies to explain exactly what they mean by “territory,” but in my guts I already know. As the trio of survivors flesh out the picture, a diorama emerges of a small group of super-powered and insanely sadistic bad guys holed up nearby, thriving in the anarchy of the city’s collapse and using it as cover for their depredations.
“Tell us what you can about them,” Sentinel says.
The copies start to speak as one and I seek Loren’s gaze, but find her faraway expression drawn only slightly back to me, the visor-like glow of the insubstantial halo around her forehead like a heads-up display only she can comprehend. Lost contemplating that void for a moment, I’m in no doubt the woman I know has returned when Loren does finally meet my gaze, raising one eyebrow as she mouths the words, “Zephyr’s girlfriend?”
I huff under my breath and do nothing to stop Sentinel getting a briefing from the Legion copies. Coalface does likewise throughout this, standing in the background as if a monument, yet I sense a deep, exhausting unease emanate from the silent brute, and in those moments I watch him, the way his beady eyes evade mine, I suspect the human volcano nurses an unseen injury – and one as much spiritual as anything else. He meets my eyes – picture a gaze limned with tarmac, pinpricks of heat like hot coals submerged under ash – and the moment he sees my knowing, he shuffles away like something from a Henson movie.
I would follow him and uncover the cause of his ills – we need everyone on board now, so I am driven by sheer self-interest more than humanitarian goodwill – but the three trembling clones unburden themselves like it’s Freud himself listening in on them breathlessly describing the sadistic predators it looks like could soon be upon us.
“Their leader is the maddest fucking guy we’ve ever crossed. A huge, grey-looking dude with a Frankenstein haircut and the biggest arms I’ve ever seen on a man.”
“And eyes,” the second one says like it haunts him. “The palest eyes. The worst laugh.”
“Not the worst laugh,” the first clone counters. “The bitches with him. There’s a teenage girl with a fucking sword, man, and then there’s this really crazy bitch. Some kind of witch or demon or something. She can burn people, and . . . shrieks
like she’s cumming while she does it. I don’t think I could hear that again.”
I’m still frowning at the reference to a teenage swordswoman, confused about Ruse’s whereabouts for a moment as Sentinel continues to coach more from the clones – and expertly so. Being a sexist pig clearly doesn’t mean he’s no good at his work. He is Sentinel, ffs.
“There’s more of them, but I didn’t get a good look.”
“None of us did.”
“Except I thought. . . .”
The other clones look at their sibling as if it is a point of contention. Sentinel motions for him to speak.
“I saw the last guy, but it couldn’t be right. Do you remember Darkstorm?”
“A villain?” Sentinel frowns.
“No,” I say, returning from my contemplation about Ruse reminding me about my missing New New Sentinel teammate Samurai Girl.
“Darkstorm was one of us,” I tell them. “A good guy, despite the name. He and Stiletto . . . or was it Silhouette? They had a thing.”
“I saw Darkstorm,” the third Legion says with surprising conviction from a man littering the ground with crumbs of himself. “It was Darkstorm. He was one of them.”
“How is that even possible?”
“You can ask them yourself when they come for us,” the clone with the sore says morosely. “That’s why we were bunkering down here.”
I glance again at the beleaguered-looking cops on about day ten of a night shift that never ended, huddles of scared women and children like the “frails” in some godawful Western of yesteryear. I try to remember the last time I was in a club just kicking back loose and then I try to work out if it’s a bad thing I struggle to remember. The eyes of a frightened little boy meet mine and I am not adequate to the task, visage of nurture notwithstanding. I fail the youngster, averting my gaze as I return to the still-going conversation of the so-called adults around me.
Zephyr Box Set 2 Page 72