Maxtor’s gone, but a battered-looking Enigma and Mistress Snow retrieve Sentinel’s smoldering but intact figure from the charcoalized ruins beyond the far side of the sphere’s base where spot fires still burn from the braziers erected in the name of whatever the truth is behind the story of what these crazy bastards were doing. Ever the old warhorse, Sentinel sits up coughing and letting his long-time female colleague Snow dust soot and burnt crap from him, costume tastefully disintegrating to reveal just how powerfully buff the old dude remains.
Cries and frantic screams slowly intrude on my happy place.
A shell-shocked survivor myself, I turn at the haunting chorus to see the metal sphere crashed to a halt a hundred yards away in some natural depression of the despoiled park. A few flames burn along the sphere’s path of egress from braziers now scattered by its passage, but out from under the clouds the remnant moon is enough to show the living now starting to struggle free of the dead.
“We have to help the people,” I yell to Seeker.
She nods and lifts off, vaulting to land in front of the structure only a second later, and leaving me to limp beleaguered after her.
“And Portal,” I yell in Seeker’s wake. “We have to find Portal or we just nearly all got killed for nothing.”
*
IT’S A POOR choice of words, but of course I don’t mean saving the lives of ordinary Atlanteans isn’t worthwhile. I have a bigger picture I can only barely comprehend swirling in my fore-thoughts half the time and it makes life a little too much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle during a snow storm. I join the others lending what of my depleted super strength remains to rend wires, bend bars and generally leverage free those survivors we’re able to help. The crush of bodies inside the now inert structure means a professional rescue should still be mandatory – at least in a world where anything even vaguely resembling a civic response hasn’t been swept away.
It is no coincidence the city is on its knees. Try as I have during recent hours and days, nothing sensible leaps to mind when I think about who else other than the usual grab-bag of crazies might hold such a grudge against the city that they would want to bring that grand lady to such ruin. The bulk of today’s villains don’t want to destroy the planet. They just want to be in charge. Or worshipped. YEMV.
“We have to get to this Baroness,” I say to Seeker, coming at her on an angle and positioning myself so we’re definitely having this conversation.
“I know,” she says and I don’t know why she grunts since her glowing extra limbs scissoring through metal to free yet more trapped people looks effortless. “We have to find Portal first.”
“I’m here,” someone – or actually, pretty obviously Portal – calls out.
Full points to Seeker that she doesn’t abandon her other rescue efforts. Not so much for me. I turn back to the hero in green, pausing only to marvel again – this time with growing alarm – at the serious injury to my arm, which feels like it’s going numb.
The ramifications of how much I’ve come to factor in my own slow-burning regenerative capacities over the years are still only nascent in my new, Cusp-prime consciousness. Given how much we know now about personality being marked by experience and the brain’s capacity for change, for the first time I see with a bizarre and alarming clarity how the very idea of who I am is at threat the longer I remain inside this other host. I can feel the endocrinal, hormonal differences and the subtle push-pull they have on my sense of self and emotions, as much as I was aware of such things as a man, though now they are similar and yet completely different – a somewhat dizzying perspective (wrought as it is through exhaustion) of the sobering and paradoxically real, biological difference between being Man and Woman. Maybe I am one of the few human beings to really ever be able to argue it from such a unique perspective, because I know I lack the language or at least the skills to communicate to almost anyone locked forever into their own native sexual state. And right now, worrying about all of those things is yet again just way too much for one donkey to bear, and I thrust it all to the proverbial backburner and clutch my pulsing wound and step through the shell-shocked milling survivors to stop before Portal, who looks like he’s wrestled his way out of an oil slick of human carnage, clunky boots and vest slimy and rank, his big gloves and also his goggles gone. A look of primal fear roasts on a spit behind his eyes.
“Portal buddy, what’s going on?” I say as soothingly as I can.
“Th-th-they were going to burn us alive.”
“I know, but you’re free,” I tell him. “Cavalry to the rescue, right?”
“Jesus Cusp, this time I thought I was gone for sure,” he says and I realize there’s an uncomfortably large amount of odor of wee hanging between us and it’s not mine.
Portal knows that I know and I know he knows and it’s just fucking awkward, not to mention ridiculous in the grand, star-spangled enormity of everything else that has occurred. Just as I think I might say something, he breaks off and clutches his face and generally resumes his own freak-out, which I’m soon to discover comes with its very own director’s commentary. I guess this is really going to be the defining moment for whichever selfie-addict ends up playing Portal in the movie, so I try to give the guy his due here. If you ever wondered what the difference is between a monologue and a soliloquy, the latter ‘s when none of the other characters in the scene give a shit what the guy’s saying.
“I thought I was dead,” Portal says and swivels back to me, gasping through the mask of his own fingers clutching his face. “I thought they had me. They did have me. I brought them here. But I mean, these aren’t people, you know? The Things I know are out there, you know, I’ve seen them in the flickers, out there beyond time and space. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’ve seen them in the curtains I make. Past the green fire. I thought maybe we came to Their attention, you know? Once people started shifting through time and space and shit, I thought maybe They got curious about us. Maybe They came through somehow? Like maybe it was, some of it, my fault? And this was my Karma. I thought I was going to die, or worse, become one of Their servants, just like Darkstorm and the others. Jesus Christ, Cusp. Darkstorm was my friend. We started out the same year. Holy shit, Cusp. Holy shit. Is he gone? Are the others gone? So where did They go, if they were in them?”
It’s a chilling contemplation, but there’s no way that speech isn’t getting cut in rewrites.
“We don’t have time for this shit now,” I tell Portal.
I motion to him to follow and Portal nods weakly and trails alongside me as I trudge back to Seeker now reassembling her cybernetic body armor into a more discreet state. Stealth mode.
“We need to move right now, before anything else goes wrong,” I tell her.
Loren nods. “OK.”
“Where’s Baroness?”
Seeker understands the scope of what I’m talking about here. Mustering herself, she turns to Portal, soothingly, hands raised like the wife she could’ve been in another life, hating herself, trapped delivering instructions to a moron husband.
“Manchester,” she says. “Do you know it?”
“Roughly,” Portal says.
“Roughly will do,” I snap. “Let’s go. Get the others.”
“You’re quite the general, Joe,” Loren smirks wearily at me.
I’m not even going to waste time explaining the renewed vigor in my pose. There’s nothing about excellence or leadership driving me except rabid self-interest. With certainty borne of a lifetime’s experience, I know we’re in no way clear of the woods yet.
And at precisely this juncture, Enigma huffs up on cue with a depleted look on his dark-featured face.
“The big white guy’s gone,” he says.
“Absolom?”
“Was that who it is?” Enigma replies.
I squint at his grammar, and before I can say more, Sentinel and Mistress Snow join us. The veteran’s brawny chest is on full display thanks to the costume malfunction. Oh,
and Sentinel’s practically topless too.
“What about all these people?” Mistress Snow asks above what I squintingly hope isn’t liver-spotted cleavage.
“We have to go,” I say. “There’s something behind this apocalypse. Someone. If we turn it off at the source, we have to believe there’s a chance of getting things back on track.”
“You believe that, Joe?” Seeker says.
“Why do you call her Jo?” Enigma asks.
I dismiss his question with a wave, which only draws attention to my grievous wound. Seeker recoils in concern and other eyes go large.
“Cusp, you look like you’re still bleeding,” Snow says.
“It’s . . . bad. I agree,” I say with a strange bafflement I’m not used to ascribing to blood loss. “I’m not used to . . . this kind of injury.”
“You need medical care,” Seeker says firmly. “I can help, but this technology is still so new to me. It keeps . . . slipping away from me.”
I shoot her a bleary look and shake my head, lank green hair like that of a dead Medusa.
“First, let’s go. We have to go. I can feel it,” I say with clear pronunciation so no one else misunderstands and because I am too weary to repeat myself.
In fact, I feel myself starting to slip under the brim of consciousness and snap awake like a heroin freak on a couch at a party, and in that wild gesticulation of my one good arm, I grab Portal and squeeze his shoulder.
“Manchester. Now.”
He takes a moment. Another little character arc ticked off. Then he nods and barely changes expression before his hidden clench summons another of his flickering green namesakes.
I step through the curtain self-conscious about the moment’s interstitial shift between-worlds and then I am out in early English morning light, the dappled quality of the scene even gentler than the ash-colored skies of my home city.
Stumbling with my weakness, I look back awaiting the others. Instead, a hideous, high-pitched shriek and then a man’s loud bellow pierce the veil of the spectral green portal and then the whole ragged curtain collapses in on itself leaving me completely stranded and alone.
Zephyr 22.7 “Between Here And Oblivion”
I AM OUT of the furnace of old New York, and that is good news. But it’s kinda hard to overlook possibly bleeding to death in the wrong body in full tattered superhero regalia alone in the middle of an English field.
The field, however, turns out to be bordered by some provincial-looking stone walls which part to reveal a genteel laneway, that beautiful golden light untrammeled by disaster shining now in syrupy bands like a foreign life-force derived primordially of the sun and choosing only now to make its first explorations of our world. I’m distracted by the sight, such beauty falling on the early budding leaves of trees lining the cobble-paved road that it’s like a movie moment, except when it isn’t. A back-firing old MG sedan chugs out the laneway exit with its lights still on from a night just recently departed. Myself, I’m doubled over a few dozen yards from the wending road-side I can now acknowledge beyond the overlong winter grass spiking alien and barren all about me as I clutch my red arm with the posture of someone experiencing fatal diarrhea, conscious now of a nasty burn also stiffening the flesh of my cut left leg.
“Stop,” I croak and limp-vault towards the faded red car as it veers to take the bend onto the road around what I now realize is the outermost fringes of the English city of Manchester.
Against my luck, the car bleeds off like some red-breasted sparrow startled from the gentility of that morning (the morning now sundered by the car’s own exhaust, I might add). And I’m left hunched on the roadside with an aggrieved-at-the-world expression besmirching this once gorgeous face.
“Fuck,” I say not as loudly as I wish. “I don’t even know where Baroness is.”
My breath steams in the freezing air, joining with the fog that reminds me of so long ago and for the first time perhaps since I entered this woman’s body, I think about Elisabeth and try to reconcile where we are at now and what happened to the girl who used to catch the first bus to crawl into my bed on those cold winter mornings of yesteryear so long ago. I am exhausted and sore and barren and possibly bleeding to death, but in that one fractured moment I wish fervently that everything happening now was just some mental blossom that would burst and take me back to how things once used to be, however miserable it seemed I was half those times.
Suffice to say, nothing of the sort happens. The morning groans on like an old man with an ass full of congenital herpes and I drag myself walking up the laneway so recently emptied, moving along side streets dominated by aging walls concealing secluded, quasi-rural homes amid patches of aging industry, old warehouses, horse yards, stables, Citroën mechanics, workshops, defunct businesses, a tile gallery, an antique glass studio, a Wiccan retreat, the Church of the One and Only Lord Our Savior Jesus Christ Nyarlathotep (honest, this is what the sign reads, though the church looks long disused and perhaps the Crawling Chaos doesn’t have the most active congregation in these parts, apart from the graffiti artists), as well as sundry other homes, luxurious and not-so luxurious nestled in the rural glamour of the huge city’s tranquil outskirts and reclaimed agri-industrial nostalgia.
Thoughts of my former wife – I genuinely cannot tell you at this moment if we are still legally married or divorced – continue to churn like wind-borne trash through the deserted carnival of my mind, and I wonder how I can get to Beth’s house before running out of mojo entirely.
And then everything changes.
*
“CAN I HELP you there?” a girl’s English-accented voice rings out.
I am stumbling and bleary at this stage, like your average shitty marathon runner who is just another ordinary wage slave biting off a lot more than she can chew in an office job dominated by reading magazines and blogs and trawling Facebook to eyeball ex-boyfriends and crushes. I glimpse a skinny girl in a weird quilted jacket and a faded pink beret with a pom-pom on top, a stained and equally faded scarf disguising her throat. Collar-length tufts of walnut-colored hair frame pallid features, big eyes watching me with a mixture of fear and understanding from the lee of a half-collapsed wall.
“Are you hurt?” the girl calls. “Are you one of them? Which one are you? I’m sorry, I’m never very good with names.”
The girl advances cautiously across the street to where I sag against a dusty Citroën, her unnaturally big eyes the color of black marbles and something strange as well about the luminosity around her face.
That’s about all I take in for now. Gibbering God-knows-what, I crumple down the side of the car and into the damp street upon a bed of water-logged newspapers and note the escaping air from my burning lungs like angels’ wings and poorly-developed photographs of ephemeral landscapes that evaporate into the blurry behind.
Indeed, the fog comes and goes for a while. Not days, or I fucking hope not, but certainly I’m away with the pixies on a magic cloud for a good day and a night and at some point I sit up to puke all down the side of the bed I’m on and then I lever onto the floor, staggering into a fall that takes me to my target: a battened window on the far side of a small yellowish carpeted room.
The latches evade my drugged grasp for a moment, and then I crank open one of those windows of the type we don’t see very much in Atlantic City, since so much of our old housing stock was destroyed in ’84.
The night breeze awakens me from my stupor, however briefly.
England. I drink in its foreign smell of dust and ageless decay and faded opulence and the fetishism of Empire and think about Atlantic City halfway to ruin on the other side of the ocean and then just shake my head as much to dismiss my inertia as those gloomy thoughts.
The door cracks open behind me and the young girl appears, nearly identical as before except now she wears a white woolen hat, also garnished with a pom-pom. I am conscious at once of the light brightening in the room.
“You have powers?” I ask in Cu
sp’s disused, croaky voice.
Like some Dickensian caricature, the big-eyed girl only looks meekly back at me.
“You were talking before, so what happened?” I say to her. “You’re not afraid of me, I hope?”
I try to inject a little warmth into my delivery despite my drowsiness. By my own lazy gesture I note my injury seemingly gone.
“Mona healed you,” the girl says.
“Mona?”
“We’re the same,” the girl says. “My name is Rose.”
A shadow fills the doorway behind her and I see a woman’s figure shrouded in bandages as tightly as any Egyptian mummy you might pay money to see. Careworn crinkles framing dull grey-blue eyes are the only discernible feature I can see as she moves silently behind the young English girl and lays one cloth-wrapped hand on Rose’s shoulder.
I nod. It all makes sense. A glowing girl and a gauze-clad healer.
Mutants.
*
I HAVE TO sit on the bed again, and Rose kindly guides me by the elbow even though she can’t be older than ten or eleven. She tucks the scraggly, ill-kempt hair from my face as I inadvertently go the downwards-facing dog, nearly succumbing to nausea before I clutch the edge of the bed and lever myself in.
“You were badly injured,” Rose says in her strangely careful way. “You will still need rest.”
“I don’t have time to rest,” I tell her. “How long was I out?”
“Mona had to sing for a day and a night until you were well,” Rose says. “That was nearly a day ago.”
“You gave me medicine?”
“We ransacked the shops,” Rose says with a shrug. “It’s easy.”
My eyes would bulge out of their sockets if I wasn’t so exhausted. It hadn’t occurred to me Atlantic City’s contagion could spread overseas.
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