“We’re not going to wait for them to come to us,” I say, interrupting and in the process blundering right through whatever ultra-important sermon Sentinel was eventually going to wrap-up delivering.
The others fall silent all the same, attentive like I have any real answers. Sentinel bites his tongue, electing to wait for me to fall into a trap of my own making.
“We have to find Portal,” I say. “And any other masks they’ve got. We have to go after them.”
“They’re in control of this whole area,” one of the clones says like he really needs to pee. “Now you’re here, we can fly out, right?”
“And have you come to pieces in my arms?” I reply. “Don’t you want to save yourself?”
“He can be an asshole,” the morose clone says of himself.
“You need him,” I say.
“But those fuckers are crazy,” the scarred one says. “They were hunting us.”
“Fuck them,” I say.
And look to Sentinel.
“Right?”
Reluctantly, the older man nods his agreement.
*
“WE THINK THEY keep the captured masks alive,” the quietest of Legion’s trio says.
Looking to his brethren for confirmation, the copy continues to explain how the elusive sensory connection he and his clone brothers share with their “alpha” means they also feel residual signals of his plight.
“And if the alpha died, we wouldn’t be here now, even in the state we’re in,” the previous one says, palpably embarrassed for his uncomely disintegration.
“And you think the teleporter is in there too?” Sentinel scowls. “Why hasn’t he just teleported out?”
It’s a good question. And not one any of us can answer.
Sentinel looks back at me and Seeker with a put on look upon his mug.
“Do we really need this Portal guy?”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Seeker answers. “We can’t leave our own people to be like . . . prey in some villains’ safari park.”
Loren scans the otherwise silent members of our posse: Maxtor, the Enigma, Lionheart and Mistress Snow. My own gaze tracks Coalface’s retreat, and although I never really had a chance to get to know the guy, I figure it would be a good idea to keep our own resident brick on side if we’re going to do what I think we’re going to do.
“Where’s their lair?”
I ask as much to cut through the bullshit as anything else, including my own irritation at our commitment to do the right thing even right now, when’s it’s really not very fucking convenient in the slightest. The watching cops seem to grow greyer still as the three Legion clones look among themselves, and the tiny little adorable blonde hackles on the back of my neck start to prickle.
“Where?”
“Where do you think?” the one with the simplex scar says and lifts a hand to point with all the weariness of an AIDS patient.
We’re on the edges of my old stomping grounds. For a moment I have the existential fear that the clone is going to point in the distant direction of where my mothers’ house once was, as if this was all just another part of the cosmic plot against me, personally, but instead his wavering finger indicates beyond the relatively low-rise confines of the buildings to the dented twinkle of Queens architecture beyond.
“The Meadow,” says one of the hardboiled cops watching from the side. “They’ve got the Museum. They’ve got the Unisphere. They’re up there.”
“Making weird fuckin’ noises too,” a mulatto cop says and winces in an unneeded apology for the rough language. “Singing. Chanting. It’s like they’re praying to that thing.”
“The Unisphere?” Sentinel asks.
The cops nod and I ask them, “You guys have been up there?”
The two who spoke exchange a look like guilty school boys.
“Last night. Under cover of darkness. But it looks like they control that too. There were three of us who went. Ain’t anymore.”
The haggard cops somehow look apologetic for their heroism and yet again I feel the lesson rubbed in my face that people don’t need super powers to confront the world courageously.
*
WE DISSEMBLE FOR a little while, and I am barely free enough to think about whether I need to pee or not when a pretty older woman with loosely-tied auburn hair pulls me aside. Her hands clasps my wrist as her face wrestles with a wash of strong emotions besmirched by the soot marking her face. She wears glasses and even with those and the dirt, there’s no hiding the beauty she would’ve been in her youth.
“I’m sorry, but can I speak to you?”
I shake her off with a fraction of Cusp’s strength.
“Sure,” I say, addled by her interruption. “But . . . hi. You’re kind of hot, aren’t you?”
“Excuse me?”
The woman looks like she’s been slapped, the effect of which jolts me back again to who and where I am. I shrug sheepishly.
“Oops, sorry. I was thinking out loud.” With even less conviction, I add, “I’m . . . I’m gay.”
“Uh-huh,” the woman says. “I’m not.”
“Yep. Cool. Sorry.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, but nobody here has been able to help. But maybe you’d prefer I leave you alone?”
“Don’t mind me,” I say. “What’s the problem?”
“My name is B-Belinda.”
“B-Belinda?”
“N-no, Belinda. Sorry. I’m . . . My life’s upside down.”
“I think that’s true for everyone.”
“No, not like that. I think I used to be one of you. A mask.”
I study the woman a moment, mentally superimposing a range of masks and head gear to trigger recognition, but nothing works.
“How do you figure that?” I ask her.
“I received a letter, more than a year ago,” she says, and actually digs the much-handled slip of paper out of the leather carryall she wears over one shoulder of her dirty, once expensive cashmere sweater.
“Who is it from?”
“No one I’ve ever met,” she says. “His name was Tom Hilfiger. He says he used to be a superhero called –”
“Avenger.”
The woman stops cold and looks at me with snowflakes falling upon her lightly freckled face, a thick scarf still with twigs caught in it from wherever she slept the night before. Her head turns to the side and she frowns.
“How on earth did you know that and what else can you tell me so I can be sure I’m not going crazy?”
*
I RECOUNT AS much as I’ve ever been able to piece together in the investigation stretching back the past few years in this thing I call my life. The Doomsday Man left the Demoness Yoko Ono running some kind of faulty or decaying observe-and-protect psionic software when he went to jump parallels during the big merger or edit he and she instigated against their fellow members of The Twelve, which I guess was part of some plan Lennon had to win the trust of the subspace-dwelling Editors – or at least access to their power. The equally powerful Lennon he sought to overlay by merging parallel universes instead fled his body a moment before the apocalypse by hiding in the mind of me, the young child of one of the women he was seeing, and who he also assumed was the mother of me as one of his many, many potentially superhuman offspring. In this other parallel there was some kind of resistance movement, led by renegade supers including the 101ers, and it was them I am really only guessing helped get a bunch of people get out before history overwrote them at the quantum level. In following years, Lennon’s erstwhile nemeses in The Twelve found themselves unwittingly trapped in the comfort of affluent new lives (all of them except for Steve Seagal, anyway), but during those years, Tom Hilfiger somehow grew dissatisfied with the life of the billionaire industrialist he’d inherited when he agreed to Lennon’s big edit – or maybe there was some kink in the system that meant after a while, he started to remember his former life, like a kind of reverse Alzheimer’s. Or maybe there’s some othe
r trigger I’m yet to discover. But when Tommy started using his fortune to track down off-world proof of his past life as science hero Avenger, it triggered the tripwire on Ono’s defense mechanism. Either her accomplice Seagal was part of the plan all along or she went and woke him on her own initiative, but the killer Arsenal was her weapon of choice since her own greatest powers work best behind the scenes. Arsenal did Spectra’s dirty work and the only thing that makes sense, if I can call it that, is they started off around the country tracking down and wiping out the other members of The Twelve so no one could go unravelling the dearly departed Doomsday Man’s plan – what was presumably his old plan, since it doesn’t look like he ever came running back. The Lennon I’ve been dealing with all along – and the one whom I thought legitimately was my dad, until my own now never-to-be-born son Frostbite told me otherwise – was the one who piggybacked on me for thirty years or more. As I understand it, and unless I have one of these steps wrong, the Lennon who was the true arch-nemesis of this piece is the Doomsday Man who emerged from that edit, built himself a harem and a utopian island, but hasn’t been conclusively sighted since the 80s. And I don’t understand why.
If the Lennon who was once inside me masterminded Afghanistan, as I believe he did – and I pray to a God I know does not exist that Matrioshka did at least destroy him before setting her sights on pulling my life apart – he isn’t the one who triggered the big Edit. But he somehow made contact with the Doomsday Man’s Editors or at least their servitors, but I don’t know how or why or any of the other fairly crucial specifics. One could assume subspace-dwelling, interdimensional entities are going to trade across a million parallels, but that old adage about assume “making an ASS of U and ME” remains as pertinent as ever.
“So I’m one of the names on Arsenal’s to-do list?” this Belinda Carlisle woman asks me towards the sputtering end of my soliloquy.
“Yes, but I stopped him before he got to you. There’s only a few of you left. What was your code name?”
“Mr Hilfiger said it was Tempest.”
“Weather-controller?”
“No. In my dreams . . . which are increasingly more lucid and vivid . . . I feel like I can control things, like I have this force with my mind?”
“You probably do,” I say. “The splice between the two parallels would have been between realms of similar plasticity.”
“I don’t . . . what does that mean? How do you know so much?”
“Experience.”
“You don’t look a day older than twenty-five.”
“Plasticity means the amount mankind . . . humankind . . . influences reality in its particular parallel. At the ideational level. Reality is a sort of feedback loop, I guess you could say, a living semiotic: reality and the cogent minds who perceive it influencing each other’s shape. Not every alternate world operates on the same laws as you and me. Or actually they do, just at decreasingly plastic levels. The physics in some parallels at the edge of the continuum are totally fixed. If you can believe it, there’s millions of versions of our world that are far more primitive and prosaic. Some don’t even have superheroes.”
Miss Carlisle just gives me a look. I can tell she’s still having trouble coming to terms with the relief that she hasn’t been snared into some madman’s fantasy – except of course that is the very thing that has happened.
“A world without superheroes,” Belinda says. “Maybe then we could be safe.”
“It’s not the heroes you have to worry about.”
“What, The Twelve you just told me about, they weren’t heroes once?”
“It’s . . . complicated.”
“But the killers are dead, so I am safe?”
“Arsenal is dead.”
“And the other one, you called her Demoness?”
“Spectra. She is . . . I believe she’s beyond danger now.”
“She certainly would be if she was dead.”
“Everyone’s a critic,” I say to her. “What life did you get?”
“Pardon me?”
“If you were one of The Twelve, you got a swanky ID. What do you do?”
“I’m just a mom.”
I want to say “Aw, you’re not just a mom,” but frankly I can’t be fucked, and besides, I can’t see any kids hanging around her, so I don’t want to exhume any unintended grief. I make a vague noise and wonder whether overdue fees for a bunch of Vanilla Ice and Genesis live DVDs I rented will continue accruing during this holocaust. Belinda watches me curiously as I go through a few shades of distraction, and then she makes a somewhat adorable throat-clearing noise and starts up again.
“Can you tell me – because this is what I was looking for in the first place – do you know anyone who could help me remember more? Of my . . . other life?”
“I know plenty of people. You might’ve noticed right now we’re scattered to the winds a little, though. The city’s in bad shape. You copied all that?”
“Two nights ago I slept under the Hellgate Bridge while I listened to those sick idiots hunting through the streets above us for the captives they released. It was like cats with mice. All night.”
“OK. Nice story,” I say. “We’re going in there to take them out.”
“Good. I’m coming with you.”
“Oh no you’re not,” I tell her.
The fiery redhead just grins like I’m sure she’s been doing her whole life, living up to the cliché as we are most of us wont to do.
“No one tells me what I can and can’t do.”
“Good, because I wasn’t telling.”
She takes my right cross like a novice, sinking to the ground almost too fast for me to catch, then I drag her unconscious into the warehouse and its animal stink as the gentle snowfall outside turns to sleet.
The others pile in after me and I am a little embarrassed at how little explaining I have to do for why I cold-cocked that woman and then stashed her body like a witch hoarding food for winter cooking. The freezing rain pounds down on the ancient warehouse roof above us and Seeker approaches me while the other masks form a rough group and I also rapidly adapt to the apart new norms for woman-on-woman violence.
“Coalface is hiding something,” Loren says.
“He’s injured.”
Seeker nods. Together, we approach the big figure standing as far away from the others as he can while maintaining the illusion of being part of the group.
“Coalface, what’s going on?” I call to him as we close the distance.
“Waiting . . . for your plan,” he says.
“What happened to you out there?”
The man-mountain just watches us a moment, dark and baleful and difficult to read. I am kind of surprised when he actually answers.
“The one called . . . Ansolom,” he says, big lungs struggling like a bellows to power each syllable in Coalface’s rasping baritone. “He . . . got me. Hurt me.”
“Ansolom?” This is another familiar name, but my inattention to fine detail is finally catching up on me. I wish Tessa were here, then desperately unwish such a foolish thing, hoping for the present she is safe in custody – until such a time as I can do something about that problem, too. At least now I’m a girl I have lipstick for writing my next to-do list.
“Where are you hurt?” Seeker asks, though I can tell she is scanning Coalface already.
“You’ve never been hurt before.”
I say it quietly. It’s as much a whispered thought as anything else. Seeker halts. And Coalface turns his head which looks like some kid’s shitty fifth grade art project except the blackened clay remains red hot. Emotion somehow glows in those eyes, a warmth that tells me how close I burn to the truth.
“No internal injuries,” Seeker says quietly as her scan concludes.
“No,” I say. “He’s not hurt. He’s scared.”
And it’s about then Coalface starts to cry.
“I hope that armor’s good with heat,” I say to her.
“Why?”
“I think Coalface needs a hug.”
And I gently nudge Seeker forward as the big guy goes to bits. He drops to his knees with a massive crunch and ceases cradling his right side armor, which is cracked and broken from the recent encounter with the enemy’s heavy hitter. Seeker looks at me, the beautiful woman I once knew now restored to a very different life, something equally otherworldly if not inhuman in her expression filtered through the blue frieze of her light visor. She quietly kneels in commune with our resident brick and I back off as the rain overhead does the same, and silently I wish for a chocolate pop tart and remember Matrioshka likes them as well.
Zephyr 22.5 “Defender Of The Manifest Eschatologosphere”
SO FOR ONCE the plucky Ms Belinda Carlisle gets a lesson in “no” meaning no as the rest of us advance into the night across the peninsula of the abandoned public park. The battle-scarred Queens Museum glitters with black magic, nothing glamorous about it as we soar in from the ether – me, Seeker, Sentinel, Lionheart, the Enigma, Maxtor, and last and certainly not the quietest, Mistress Snow. I have reluctantly left Coalface guarding the fort as well as the traumatized, quasi-squamous Legion triplets.
There’s a palpable aura that we are in occupied territory. I can’t sense even a squirrel in the trees we fly over. Although it is night, we can see clearly enough by a brightening moon that not a soul stirs in the deserted streets around us, the parkway a tomb for abandoned vehicles. Despite the proximity of the bones of old New York so close by in the river behind us, it is quaint, almost borderline astonishing to see so many lo-fi residences and once healthy stores arrayed in row after row, untrammeled like some child’s ambitious play area made from old cereal boxes and left to gather dust in a gloomy place. To think humanity could once live in such fine order in the shadow of a teeming, sprawling metropolis beggars belief when confronted by the post-Ragnarok certainty of Atlantic City as it now stands.
There are so many places these self-appointed hunters could be hiding that I feel momentarily overwhelmed by how I’m going to make good on this one. It is precisely the wrong moment for world-weariness to wash over me, so I fight it by clenching my jaw and trying not to think about Holland’s frequent need to pee which I have apparently inherited.
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