Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  But it’s the end of the line. Matrioshka is cleaning up and wants me dead.

  Zephyr 23.8 “Monstrosity”

  “IT’S COME TO this, huh?” I say in a low and confidently amused tone I just don’t feel, and my lack of conviction shows in the slightest crack in my voice and Zephyr snickers and electricity crackles up from his booted feet and his unruly hair stands on end and there is something lean and feral and half-starved about him that I don’t like the look of, since it tells me everything about Matrioshka’s frame of mind.

  “I think I’ve wringed about as much enjoyment as I’m going to get out of you,” Zephyr says.

  “Wrung.”

  “Oh shut up, for fuck’s sake, Joe.”

  I’m not ready for this, but I will bring it on regardless. If that death wish is all that’s left of the true me, so be it. I exhale and try not to roll my eyes.

  “So make me.”

  Matrioshka needs no further invitation. Her cool and calm exterior hides vampiric madness. Zephyr’s fist blazes under her control like an arc welder and it is all I can do to conjure urgent darkness which disintegrates just as fast as his fist ploughs into it, burning through the gelid blackness as I move like in tapioca, barely swift enough to evade the follow up right hook as I duck, not just on the defense, but on the run as I throw myself into flight and fail as Zephyr lights me up from behind and there’s nothing I can do not to do that spastic dance of electrocution as I crash artlessly into a pair of desks and a wall divider and roll with terminal velocity through a tangle of power cables and waste paper baskets and boxes of paper clips and balled up photocopy paper and empty plastic water bottles and abandoned lunch boxes and files and books and notepads and keyboards and smash through a cheaply-made wall where I get my knees under me as I feel Zephyr’s fell shadow fall on me from arrears and I surprise him, swiveling even as I fall again and my left hand pulses with light so that the beam hits my pursuer fair in the chest and hurls him back the other way like he’s become subject to some universal product recall.

  The tail end of my momentum carries me into a painfully metallic bookcase and a dead flower pot and a bunch of digital picture frames that crash happy memories around me as I kick off a laminated work station and a bunch of in-and-out trays rain their redundant missives which I brush off to stand and scan the path back the way Zephyr went.

  There is a channel in the wreckage including a hole in an office wall and some kind of abandoned board room beyond. There’s no way I’m going in there. Zephyr picks himself up off the plush carpet and eyes me and makes a show of dusting off one shoulder before stalking the way back.

  I’m just thinking about taking flight when Zephyr uses a burst of speed to blitz past in a rush of displaced air. I duck the predictable fist, but I’m less able to defend against Matrioshka employing my Mach One punch, brutally working off calories by their hundreds as fists land to left and right of my too-skinny arms guarding my neck and chest as I can only wince, time dilated to my detriment with pain flaring along my cracked and broken ribs, and through a red mist of pain I can only lash out with a Hail Mary left cut that distracts Zephyr long enough for him to drop out of hyperspeed.

  I feel like I’m going to have trouble drawing breath unassisted, but I have to live through the next few seconds before worrying about even oxygen. My flailing right fist is an insult to us both and Matrioshka ensures I regret it. She takes her time to double up Zephyr’s powerful right hook and lands a lazy body blow into my exposed right side that lifts me from the ground, causing me to whimper like a kicked dog as I come down hard and barely fend off the subsequent left. I manage to land a karate kick and the plan is to follow up with a blackened fist, but the building gives a thorough lurch and we lock eyes and Zephyr actually cackles as the ground gives out beneath us.

  The whole building comes down.

  I throw up my arms and I’m vaguely aware of Matrioshka doing the same as I summon a dome of darkness and the world turns black and I wonder briefly why Cusp doesn’t have infravision and the rumbling crash of the prefabricated building giving in on itself fills my next few minutes’ concentration.

  When it has stilled, I draw deep breaths in my crouch and focus the darkforce out, the bubble of blackness expanding and throwing off tons of wreckage until the apex peels away to reveal squalid daylight and Zephyr clambering up a slope of broken concrete and scuffed carpet and office furniture. He points back and fires a blast of electricity I dodge at the last instant, dropping down behind some executive dining table that explodes in smoking fragments.

  In that briefest of sanctuaries I probe the inner depths of my sense of Being for my demonic overlord much in the same manner as a man trying to check the oil except I haven’t ever owned a car and don’t even know how to drive. Amid this strange madness, I feel nothing. No answer. And I don’t know whether to be glad or afraid.

  I take off, scrambling across the rubble and then with several giant strides reach a fresh haven exposed by the collapse of the building, a deliberately-aged stone wall yielding some kind of pompous archway and an interior courtyard like an arcade, a fine layer of silt upon the otherwise vast koi pond and the untouched lawn benches and astute vestibules for where I imagine gentlemen of commerce took their cigarette breaks, though I can’t explain the dozens of department store dummies also criss-crossing the enclosed yard which I hurtle across with Zephyr in pursuit.

  And he’s just too fucking fast.

  I leap the pond and there’s a row of reinforced ten-foot glass windows and a double doorway propped ajar by a block of collapsed lintel stone, glass shattered everywhere making this a sharpened stage as Zephyr’s electrified foot finds the middle of my back and the very best I can do is angle and twist and vault the stone blockage and tumble roll clumsily into the carpeted interior of another big building that feels more like a university campus than one of the outlier annexes of the Stock Exchange. More glass crashes behind me, but my eyes are closed against the shards biting into Cusp’s honeyed skin. And I am barely on one knee before Zephyr sweeps in from outside, chortling like a true comic book villain, and the fist takes me across my left cheekbone and I deserve it, but of course I don’t deserve it at all and these florid thoughts occupy my mind for seconds longer than they really should as pain becomes a dim awareness through different parts of my body.

  I notice Zephyr slavering. Actual drool like from the latest blowjob porn hangs in gross threads from his fang-like mouth, madness reducing my body to a basic ape under Matrioshka’s primogeniture. The angles are all wrong, and though I can tell I am constrained, I cast about all the same, trying to understand the basic physics of my predicament, passage of time included, disorientation having me in full grip, and that’s when I distractedly realize he’s holding me aloft with one fist.

  The other fist burns brighter than the heart of the sun.

  Zephyr hits me. I hit myself. The pain is just a nuclear flash and then whiteness.

  I drop to my knees and Matrioshka is saying something, but I can barely perceive of the concept of sight, of there being a visual, a haptic, an olfactory, and so on and so forth, and I am certain I have a series of ground-breaking thoughts in that one-millionth of a second that are great advances in the history of Western thought managed only by abandoning the shoddy infrastructure of our basic language, and I look up, not hearing words, instead seeing symbols and invocations spilling unbidden from my Zephyr-mouth, the communication between us irrefutable, mere words banished in favor of the intersemiotic perfection of the sigils and runes of a quasi-perceptual language underlying our whole reality in which there can be no conflict because the only concepts allowed in the act of communication are universal and thus absent of phrases with which to express it; and right in the middle of this insight weighs the unconscious grief I am also having for myself in this moment, knowing these thoughts will be lost to the ether just as surely as will the purloined life’s blood of this poor hapless bystander of my Fate whom I also know, somehow,
intuitively in that moment, remains alive somewhere, if only I can get back to her through this tangled mess I am yet to satisfactorily explain.

  Zephyr’s fist comes down again. By fluke, I move just so it takes me on the neck and the pain is almost welcome because it registers.

  Time and space are losing me fast and yet where is this monster who dwells within me and would/should/could come at this instant to rescue me?

  As my assassin’s fist lifts one more time, a blackened shape crashes into Zephyr’s midriff and the pair of them go down on the spot as Zephyr hisses and spits at the ambush and the taste of blood and broken teeth and my shattered jaw are nothing in my mouth as I feel the first disgusting uncomfortable promethean stirring of my inner savior the same moment I’m grief-shocked to see Shade now caught in Matrioshka’s hooks.

  “Shade!” I yell in an awful deformed voice which sprays blood and tissue.

  Shade bears wounds already, but with her powers on, must figure herself nigh indestructible – and yet I am losing myself to the moment of liberation she has won for me. I drop slowly back, unable to move as I feel the labyrinthine stirrings synonymous with this dark counter-lifeforce’s exodus from the sinking ship of my body.

  For the lure of my other body.

  Zephyr snarls and I think Matrioshka simply reaches out at that point with her vast untrained mental powers to seize Shade, trapping her mind while pinning her telekinetically in the air, my lovely true rescuer choking, booted feet inches off the ground and defeated already as Zephyr bellows and brings back his fist and the lightning bolt pours in one gigantic point-blank discharge into and through Shade’s chest, and yet she dies just slowly enough for her eyes to swivel my way and her arm to flail out like the expression of nothing more than a body memory of a brief lifetime, because by that point she is already gone, a charcoal figure with a gaping hole showing actual daylight through the burnt toast insides of her crumbling, super-hardened flesh.

  Some kind of noise escapes my mangled mouth, and Zephyr turns, eyes blazing with feral light as Matrioshka-within-him drinks in my pain and rage and desolation and somehow still has no sense of the true threat as she sends Zephyr’s fist crashing down again and somewhere in my skull breaks as she kills me.

  Unlocking the monster within.

  *

  I AM DEAD. I know that. My vision is gone, or perhaps I just see the world differently – or perhaps I am in a different world, the lights bouncing off reflective surfaces registering in the rods and cones of my eye replaced by the coruscating lights of space-time we manifest as in the spectral shadows beyond the veil of the world as we know it.

  In that negative vision quest, Matrioshka’s aura burns like the halo of some medieval saint if not like some medieval witch ablaze in the fetid darkness of a conspiratorial night, tendrils of psionic force as yet undeveloped on this parallel floating lifelessly yet all around us on the astral breeze. My dark secret blazes in response, expanding effortlessly all around me, I now understand, a much bigger vessel within which my lifeforce merely floats, that I am as much possessing it as it is me, though this doesn’t mean I am no closer to understanding it – nor kenning how Matrioshka herself did not encounter or recognize or be destroyed by this antisocial monstrosity while also possessing Holland’s body before taking mine.

  And yet that knowledge is leaking into me, a sort of cosmic osmosis, proximic, and other knowledge too. I am the least of them. I am nothing.

  In this harsh nightmare space, my Being struggles to Be in the same way as a match does, lit on a stormy night, ethereal winds more metaphoric or ideational than actual battering me as I leak from Cusp’s body and into this spiritual maelstrom like paint on a brush dissolving into water and thence to nothingness.

  So little do I matter at that moment as I float close to the gigantic presence of my possessor like some tiny migratory fish alongside a whale it is like I already don’t exist. Yet for vital moments, hard won through these tests of my recent past, I retain a sense of myself like it will come to me in moments if I can just concentrate hard enough against the disintegrating background of my consciousness.

  I cannot read minds. I am outside having any such sense of things except to know these two aberrations have forgotten me as they start their cosmic dance and Matrioshka is either drawn to this even greater source of possible psychic distress and nourishment or she is thrown into a fight for her very existence given the magnitude of the entity confronting her as they radiate like distant suns facing off in a duel to the death – and they are beautiful, or would be, if this all weren’t so terrifying – and then all I want with my last thought is for sanctuary, because it finally comes to me, the understanding which only makes sense once I accept none of this is real in the way I have been thinking it.

  They are like suns because my inner demon is exactly a distant sun.

  The Head of the Kneeler.

  Alpha Herculis.

  Ras Algethi.

  *

  THE STAR-GOD and Matrioshka rage beyond my level of understanding and the same tiny spark of desperation that has driven my life hitherto continues as I allow cosmic magnetism to draw me into my proper vessel. There is nothing to this trick anymore. And I don’t even start drawing conscious thoughts, like a drowning man sucking in great life-giving lungfuls of air, until I am within the ideational cerebellum I still do not comprehend acting like a crystalline frame or cage or prism or rack or framework to nourish and support and give resemblance to my Being.

  It is the ultimate sneak attack. Now Matrioshka is the one who can’t spare a moment’s distraction or the power to defend her stolen corporeal shell, and amid the psychic chaos of their starting clash, I’m the veterinarian with a lubed glove, sliding back into the cockpit with a joyous psychic shout that is my own and is so feeble by comparison it’s thankfully lost to the cataclysmic madness I can now perceive with my shattered brown-eyed gaze as Ras Algethi manifests like an intrusion of nonsensical particles into our classical reality, strobing blue flashes not helping things as time is broken up literally as well as figuratively into disjointed moments where what I perceive to be lightning-fast agglomerations of negative particles springing in all directions from the radiant blue-white core hovering and shifting only metaphorically spider-like within the denuded concrete structure of the building it has ravaged simply in the act of springing into existence, freed of Cusp’s shell, and complemented in the most brutal character by the tragic narcissistic entropic gaping darkness that is the escaping space-time conundrum known as Matrioshka.

  Everything is withering in my sight, ravaged and collapsing. Particles cease to be in their infinite millions with each passing second as reality disintegrates into the sucking inward confluence of these two reciprocal yet antithetical forces. As Zephyr once more, I’m frozen in some kind of ersatz crouch, hands still the claws fashioned by a pathological madwoman, and my cosmologically-betrothed Holland lies on the scorched corporate floor covering just a few yards away and I move to her reflexively, turning my back on the light show which might drive lesser minds mad as instead I feel the crushing gravity of Holland’s demise in ways I now know, like a victim of forced enlightenment, I shouldn’t be triggered so, and yet she is gone, her face bludgeoned of its loveliness, her corpse battered and bruised and yet still I am overdosed with fear and self-interest and Darwinian instinct, and as much as the sheared-off seconds that scream around me urge me to flight, I grit my handsome jaw and stomp on Cusp’s skull so it breaks and squelches beneath my heel and I hate myself and then I throw myself with the little strength left to me through the nearest wall and desperately away.

  *

  CHAMBER APPEARS IN the sky ahead, but maybe the stranger in my old ally’s armor senses I’m not going to make it, because he rematerializes on an intercept with my trajectory towards the ground as unconsciousness and fatigue and heartache overwhelm me, and the paradox of nearly losing the will to live after this enormous ordeal isn’t lost on me, so I figure there is lif
e in me yet, or at least I figure this out moments later when I am throwing up my guts on the polished White Nine tiles and sensing the shadows of Annie Black and Chamber and maybe a few others, but then I sag into the velvety coffin-lining of true unconsciousness, taking with me my terror Ras Algethi remains at large and is coming for my body.

  Hours later, I wake in a hospital bed with Tessa curled on her side watching me from an identical cot in the small clinical ward kept running under Annie Black’s rule. If I have fouled myself in the interim I will never know, the Wallachian-designed still-suit as bonded to this form’s fortunes as I am myself. I fight against a sickened, strychnine trembling to ease up slowly, the bed strangely unmade and bare and every moment of friction like the sound of a buzz saw registering at a sensate level too difficult to name or describe.

  Tessa must catch my confusion. Her drug-softened expression softens further.

  “You kept setting the sheets alight,” she says. “From the static. I think they were debating keeping you in a tub, but Heracleon talked them out of it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They thought about putting you on ice, too.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You’re my dad, right?”

  Tessa exploding into terrified tears isn’t made any easier by my inability to comfort her, because I am not.

  I move from the bed with a liberty not fully conscious, distressed by Tessa’s panic and my wish to soothe her, knowing all I can do is hold her as she cries and shakes and trembles and slowly, a long time coming, she becalms, and my eyes are closed, glad she cannot feel my tears gently falling on the crown of her head, her wild hair blanketing my chest as I let her rock against me, and the warmth of this child is a gift and a cause for yet more heartbreak all the same.

  “Honey, I need you to listen to me,” I say slowly.

  The caution and trepidation in my voice are ripples on the surface of this placid moment. Tessa shifts beneath me, her bandaged weight moving off my chest as I desperately wish I could remain forever in the fragrance of the seconds already lost to us, her seventeen-year-old eyes glazed with pain and fear and yet with no clue at all at what’s in store for her.