“I’m not going down like this,” I tell her.
“You did that thing where you talk out your thoughts . . . Like a loonytunes,” Zephyr says and moves casually into our orbit as Shade and I slowly move into a circuit guarding each other’s backs and tracked by the half-a-dozen guards still on their feet and Miss Black like a moon in this constellation peopled in the background by the injured and the various denizens of this island gathered around us watching a rationale for the tableau unfold.
And it’s not just me alone who notices “Zephyr” circling closer to where the former teen sorceress still holds her hands above her head, lambent energies scissoring each other expressed through a purple radiance, a look of caution joining the tiredness etched into her face as if she is in fact holding up a massive weight through sheer will alone.
“Don’t believe him, Annie,” I say to her. “We were teammates once. I can’t explain it all now –”
“Convenient,” my doppelganger spits. “This is a mind-trick Annie. Detain them and we’ll sort it out in storage.”
I growl and make my move and Zephyr spins like Han Solo and unloads a decent bolt of energy directly into my chest.
The blast throws me into the wall alongside the blast plate doors, and at that point Annie’s genius idea is to dispose of her exhausting conjuration by throwing it onto Shade the moment Shade moves to join my rebellion. Poor Mel gives a violent squawk and it’s lights out from there, and I barely cling to awakeness myself, groggy from the second blast and only prodded into action by the peri-perceptual awareness of the nearest three guards screwing their courage to their sticking places and lunging into a mad headlong charging rush at me. That awareness snaps me into fight-or-flight and I manage just enough self-control to launch into the air from a squat – which is no mean feat, if you can’t imagine it – and the guards fail to collide into me, one actually kissing the metal wall and going down at the same time my momentum craps out and the best I can do at that point is land on my feet again ten feet further behind them all.
At once I swerve and spin, anticipating Zephyr’s counter-attack, but this time it is Annie who commands the scene.
“Hold on!” she screams. “Just back the fuck up!”
Miss Black holds my stammering gaze a moment and then we each flick looks to my simulacra standing there, Matrioshka choosing to go with smug as the most in-character response as if “agreeing” to hold up his/her part of the action.
“Hey, I’m just a deputy, right? The fuck do I know?” Zephyr says with a clear passive aggressive intent I honestly don’t believe I would ever really convey.
Annie shrugs him off and looks at me.
“Why are you saying what you’re saying?”
“Watch your back, Annie,” I tell her. “In a few minutes this is going to go fucking sideways. You know it. Always does.”
Miss Black looks at me and nods. A slow burn of understanding enters the space between us.
“How the fuck are you going to believe her?” Zephyr bawls as laconically as he somehow manages. “We go how far back, Annie? You know I can remember things about you no else can. Right?”
“Prove it,” I say.
“Yeah,” Annie says. Then slowly, as she thinks the idea through, more carefully enunciates, “Tell me something only you and I would know, Zeph.”
Wearing my face for her mask, Matrioshka stares over at me and I wonder at this bluff. Zephyr’s cocky grin slowly falters, but it turns into a caricature, a mime, my copy laughing out loud and straightening up straight away again to play the straight man who is the true joker.
“Sorry, the chance for a little drama was too good to pass up,” he sniggers. “You want me to tell you about the time we fucked, Annie? Is that the sort of secret you think I think you wanna hear?”
I flinch for a moment, but it’s a fair bet I think Belle is making – except this is no act.
“There was garbage everywhere,” Zephyr says calmly. “I was wondering what sort of girl lets a guy like me bang her there under a bridge like some bad song just waiting to get written, huh? Bring back any memories for you, doll?”
“How can you remember that?” I yell in frustration.
Zephyr only eyeballs me again and smirks. As he keeps on speaking, he slowly turns back to a confused-looking Annie Black.
“Or do you want me to tell you about the other time?”
“What?” I practically bark in frustration.
“See, if she’s meant to be me, it can’t be, can it? She’s not going to know about that time back when you were only just legal. Remember?”
Annie goes red-faced. She looks at me and her expression just . . . breaks.
“It was my first time,” she says like an apology.
“That’s right, your virginity,” Zephyr says and now includes me in his reply. “I would’ve been, what, twenty? Still in the red-and-white suit. We were all high and you were drinking. It didn’t work on me. We were celebrating the Sentinels’ first big win. Monster Man, wasn’t it?”
“And his Monster Minions,” Annie says deadpan.
I look on confused and I don’t know what the eff these two are on about, like I’m stuck in some parallel other universe or something as Annie gives a surrendering sigh which tells me maybe my nefarious twin isn’t making this shit up after all.
Annie’s long exhalation ends with a tired yet slightly bemused tut.
“The problem is you just somehow showed you know too much,” she says to the imposter, moving ever-so slightly closer to me.
Miss Black hand signals at the loitering guards and they spread out behind us as Zephyr gives a confused and slightly hurt frown, but Matrioshka is too proud to continue the masquerade once knowing she’s well and truly debunked.
“How do you know all that?” I ask, hoarsely this time.
“That’s the problem,” Annie says – and now she includes me in the scorn of her reply.
“You never did remember, Joe,” she says to me. “I knew you were wasted at the time because . . . you know, before that, we all knew you had a girlfriend and she was pregnant.”
“Did you . . . put a fucking spell on me?” I ask incredulously.
“Oh give me a break.”
Annie shoots Zephyr a look to ensure he’s still in the same spot, though for a moment I think maybe she’s changing her mind and not because she doubts I’m the real deal.
“I said I knew you were wasted, that’s all, and yeah, I made a move. I had the biggest crush on you. Didn’t know what an asshole you were then. Zephyr and that stupid red-and-white suit, everyone could see the outline of your cock in it.”
“That was deliberate.”
“You were the reason I even became a . . . a mask,” Annie says despondently.
“OK, this is lovely, but since my cover’s blown. . . .”
Everyone circles back to Zephyr. Shade makes angry spitting noises from the floor which finally draws my attention – yeah I know, I’m not much of a girlfriend – and I quickly cross and kneel to check on her as the guards fan out some more around us, the room’s lungs taking another pull of the air, and electricity crackles over Zephyr’s head and torso as Matrioshka flexes my stoic frame and I almost admire how badass I look as I also scan the room to see what other avenues for genius await my inspiration. Shade clutches my arm, too spastic to lever herself up, and I’m not much help myself in my distracted state.
“How did you know that about me?” I nearly bellow at him. “I jumped, god-damn it. I’m me. I’m the real deal.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Matrioshka-as-me grins.
“You can access my memories?” I say.
“Memories are biological, baby.”
“But I remember –”
“For now you do,” my nemesis says with a sneer. “Enjoy it while you can, Joe. Surely you can feel that woman’s body drawing you in, pulling you closer, right?”
Matrioshka eyes me up a second more, gauging my response with Zephy
r’s disdainful grin, drinking in every nuance while sucking in every drop of telepathic or radiant empathic energy with a sadist’s glee and a pervert’s fascination.
“The longer you stay in her, the more it’ll be her memories replacing yours,” Zephyr says to me. “Her life, her cycles, her emotions – you will become one with that feminine other. You won’t know where she starts and you end and after a while it will be like all you’ve ever known. Kind of beautiful, don’t you think? Like art. Like a new medium for meaning, for beauty, poetry, music, do you understand me?”
My return stare says that I probably do not.
“You seemed upset at Holland’s death,” Matrioshka says slowly. “You should be happy. Am I wrong?”
“You are all kinds of wrong, lady.”
“I’m a lady and you’re a man,” Zephyr replies and gives a faint laugh. “I struggle to remember that already. I’ve crossed that divide, Joe. Josephine. How about you?”
I stare angrily at my hijacked existence and try not to let my lip tremble like some matinee thespian in a community theatre troupe.
“Your clock’s ticking, Joe. Goodbye,” Zephyr says with a stomach-wrenching sense of finality, gesturing as if to complete a visual semaphore for just how insubstantial and fleeting this universe must seem to the Being within the body that is my only true birthright.
I rise up to my full purloined height, intent on just throwing myself at him if nothing else appears, and with that sort of plan it’s no wonder all I can manage is to follow through on it, annihilation be damned, sparkling lights emanating around me like diamond-studded snowflakes as I crash into myself and we go tumbling across the room before Zephyr can fly off or whatever the hell he was planning, me getting in three or four pretty solid hits to the side of his head before Zephyr elegantly electrocutes himself and me with him, the shock short and sharp and strong enough to flip the table on me, a knee into my bladder and a fist raised and barbed with electricity which thankfully lands nowhere because instead a sudden whirlwind noise fills the chamber like we are but motes under the spell of a giant vacuum and Zephyr yells in frustration at this revoltin’ development as he’s sucked backwards off me and promptly vanishes into a violet vortex that slams shut with him beyond it.
Shaking off paralysis, I stand and shakily acknowledge Annie with her hand still outstretched from her latest enchantment.
“You got good,” I say. “But I need that body. Where did you send him?”
“Him?” Annie says, but she can’t maintain her moral high ground long enough to continue the conversation, her expression faltering as tears course down her cheeks.
“Not even that was good enough? Fuck you, Zephyr.”
“Hey.”
Annie walks away from me and the goons as Shade slowly manages to her knees, but I jog after Annie trying hard not to flounce as I stop her with a hand to her shoulder.
“I’m not going to have lesbian sex with you, Joe,” Annie says and shrugs me off without turning.
“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” I say and it rings with truth because right at that mathematically precise instant it is the farthest thing from my mind, however much I acknowledge it’s an appealing concept.
“You’re upset,” I say to her as earnestly as I can. “I am a human being, you know. A person. I’m not deaf to what you said back there. I’m sorry. I hate to see you hurt like that and know it’s my fault.”
“Fuck off, Zephyr,” Annie snaps.
She furiously wipes mascara-bleary eyes.
“I’m not crying over you,” she says. “I’m sad for that girl I used to be, and sad for all sorts of reasons. Sad we have to grow up . . . and grow old. It’s not just all about you every single fucking time.”
I don’t say anything, content to allow any insult to bounce off my chest if it means I can also escape further punishment for this past distant and seemingly forgotten act of obvious douchebaggery. Annie takes a few deep breaths, retaining her composure and checking in to make sure Shade and the remaining goons aren’t resuming fisticuffs. Instead, the guards attend their colleagues, helping those to rise who can and arranging triage for those who can’t. The battleship doors bleep slowly apart and several of the other government masks enter hesitantly. I’ve no fucking idea where Taurus went and Shade looks like she’s beyond talking “right at this minute,” as I imagine she’d say.
Annie’s unalloyed stare draws my attention once more.
“What happened to dreaming dreams, Zephyr?”
“What do you mean by ‘dreams’?” I say and catch myself somehow in exactly my Zephyr voice apart from the female intonation.
I have no idea what to say to her and for the first time in my life, in a sort of nervous awakening, I hate myself for my inner cringe, the flexing of spectral muscles tethered not to bones, but emotions – a disabling inner constraint that means I really almost literally just can’t go there sometimes.
“Aspirations?” I say and hear my own stammer, like I’m stalling for time to get a right answer and in the meanwhile talk utter shit. “Don’t you have . . have aspirations, Annie?”
The sorceress shakes her head, dismissing me with the same blow-off she’s been using all these years knowing I never recalled one of the more important nights that defined her once-young life. I just can’t remember the night in question. I can’t even remember fighting anyone called Monster Man. I feel a spectral chill at the thought of the memories of my life leaving my Being like so many popping soap bubbles.
“Listen to me, huh?” Annie says wearily. “Thinking I can actually have a philosophical conversation with you, the human erection.”
She gestures at our interloper so recently departed and adds, “From the sound of that, you might not be the man I knew anymore anyway, and I’m not scoring any cheap points by playing the sex card on you, Joe.”
Miss Black looks at me a moment more, and chastened as well as chagrined, I look aside and scowl as life inside the penitentiary resumes its busyness.
“Don’t call me Zephyr anymore then,” I say. “I’m Cusp.”
Zephyr 23.4 “This Latest Series Of Natural Disasters”
I AM LEFT alone for a moment as the medics and base support crews hurry in to attend their fallen comrades, ably supported by civilians and family members emigrated to this safe haven back when shit got real.
Now with Annie departed, my emotional armor loosens a notch, threatening to release a tsunami of pent-up if not outright repressed trauma. Like a long held breath, the tension breaks physiologically through me and with Cusp’s hand and perhaps the only hand I will know again in this brief eternity allotted to me, I have to grasp a nearby concrete pillar to keep myself on my feet as my enemy’s departure registers in the deepest fiber, if not of my soul, then of my being.
If Matrioshka speaks the truth – itself a fact known to be questionable – in time the essence of my Being will fuse with the somatic memory of who Holland was, with or without a mask, demon or alien life-force within notwithstanding. It brings on a cursive, otherworldly, existential dread that plunges through my bowels and leaves me sweatily pondering the dissolution of my essential me-hood across the biological spectrum of another expunged soul’s DNA. A deep existential tremor runs through me, made worse for there being nowhere to hide from this curious simulacra of death itself.
I drop to my knees in the first unique freakout like this in my life. I’ve been dead beat or too depressed and debilitated to function, but never possessed like this as I pound the hard tiles with my battering forearms as I shriek and hiss and growl – or not quite growl, but something like it, or more like the noise I imagine a swan would make being slowly strangled as a man rapes it. A white noise staccato vision of nothingness oscillates through me and when it clears I am on my side a short distance from the dozen-odd tiles I’ve pulverized, searing exhaustion working through my limbs and the taste of blood at the back of my mouth.
Shade kneels and offers me a hand and after a while I a
m levered up. I can’t quite meet her eyes, lost not just to the swirling-down-the-drain-pipe exodus of my limbic emotions, but the feminine mystique I feel clouding me as my body reacts like its own biome to this latest series of natural disasters. For her part, Shade only chuckles, that simple down low gesture doing as much to alleviate the weird burning shame-anxiety within my face as anything else ever could. The back of my knuckles graze her hip and my darker shadow’s face turns grim as we swivel together, taking in the flow of compound life beyond us and I slowly exhale.
*
WE WATCH UNASSAILED as the extended post-apocalyptic White Nine community moves through this once-secure facility with less than the clinical caution and precision I remember from past visits. In the momentary downtime, Shade and I get a better sense of how this outpost in a sea of anarchy has survived. Quasi-military order remains and Annie Black appears forged by the disaster into some kind of taciturn leader among the otherwise lost causes of my good friends Taurus, Vanguard and Siren, et al. Shade is still weak from the spell cast on her (can’t believe I just said that), so she begs off to recuperate, and I follow Annie as she directs personnel to various areas of responsibility. Everything has a lived-in feeling you only get when people are working, eating, sleeping and shitting together day after day.
“Annie,” I say, “where are all the masks you guys rounded up? Don’t tell me you’re still holding all those supers on ice.”
The sorceress orders some of the arc lights cut to manage the power supply and then inspects the security goons stretchered out by their colleagues before returning to me her renewed withering glare. I don’t give any ground and figure whatever matriarch Annie Black thinks she’s become, it’s still relatively new-forged steel in those eyes. Instead, she harrumphs and moves with her arms crossed in a tacit invitation for me to follow her out into the night air.
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