It occurs to me he might be high. I tell him to stop quoting Highlander.
“Tell me about this magic?”
“Zephyr, stop acting like a schoolgirl,” Twilight replies. “You came over here bitching and moaning about how hard it is to be a hero and have a home-life too. Here’s your chance. I don’t see your two hands grasping for it.”
“I’m not sure what you’re offering, dude.”
“A solution.”
“That’s what Hitler offered the Jews,” I remark obliquely.
“Well, it’ll be a gas, but not that kind.”
We both let that one sit a moment.
“Let me think it over some more.”
“Dude, get a grip, OK?”
“I’m gripping,” I reply.
“OK. See you at De Lux tomorrow? I hear that scientist guy is a chemist as well.”
“Prendergast?”
“That’s the one.”
“Hmm, super-drugs. I should’ve known. Seeya.”
My phone blips as I hang it up and barely a split second after I have put it away, a shadow on my right displaces itself and I see a hood and black cloak, and thinking it is Nightwind, I do a flash-bulb with my left hand.
It reveals the Nightwatchman instead.
Zephyr 2.7 “Obscure Theoretical Principles”
“CHRIST, JEFF, YOU gave me a scare there,” I swear.
“Jeff’s not home,” the black-clad figure replies, stepping calmly over a crane strut and moving slowly but steadily towards me.
“OK, who’s this? Allison?”
The Nightwatchman stops a few yards away and stares hard, only the lower part of the skull-like face visible. And then he cracks a grin and yanks back the hood, the visor with the in-built night-vision lenses and other gizmos obscuring his identity to anyone who didn’t already know him from school.
Jeffrey Rushbaum was the kid I would point at to distract the bullies when I was in junior high. A child of Orthodox Jews who quit Israel after a disagreement in a kibbutz left three people dead, Jeffrey moved schools when we were both fourteen. Imagine my surprise, ten or more years back, finding out I recognized my assailant when helping the boys in blue trying to nab the suspicious lone mask responsible for a string of violent street gang reprisals.
The eyewear makes the Nightwatchman look like an alien, sex predator and serial killer all rolled into one. And he is all those things, and more, the poor bastard. The face mask is just an external semiotic, a dark indicator of an even deeper blackness. Jeff shifts between three main personalities, but there are dozens of them in there, thanks to the unique curse of his powers.
“Once upon a time, can you believe I tried to limit how many people I absorbed?” he says aloud to me.
“You’re reading my thoughts again.”
“Just for a moment. It’s passing,” he replies.
“I can handle it.”
“Yes, Zephyr, you can, can’t you?”
The rictus grin returns. It’s unpleasant. Oral hygiene isn’t high on his list of priorities.
“Maybe I should add you to the mix, Joseph. Maybe you can help bring me into balance . . . as part of the overall cocktail, yes?”
“Is that what you’re doing now?” I ask, and, so sue me, I step away.
The Nightwatchman turns his back and moves to the edge of the building again. He can’t fly. You wouldn’t guess it, the way he turns on a pin standing on the girders hundreds of yards above the street.
A spotlight plays across the city in search of a stage. Sirens warble past below and the horn of an incoming airship resounds out in the bay towards the ruins of Manhattan. Gulls, driven to the nocturnal by the city that never sleeps, whirl past like a dream of albino bats.
“Hmm,” is all Jeff says. “Balance would be nice.”
“When are you gonna make nice with the police?”
“When Commissioner Journey comes up here and kisses my ass.”
I tsk. “Journey’s not such a bad dude once you’ve met him.”
Jeff turns and gives me such a look that even through the technogoggles I blush in the darkness. This is made worse knowing he can detect it on infrared.
“OK,” I demur. “Your bodycount might make that a slight problem.”
“So would yours, if anyone knew,” he replies, almost mirthful.
“If they knew,” I add warningly. “And I don’t kill cops.”
“My understanding is the cops return the courtesy. Not so for me.”
This is too heavy for me. I let this be known with a casual snort.
“They ain’t got you yet, as I understand it. Maybe you should go easy on ‘em? It’s not like they’re powered.”
“What, like I am?”
Nightwatchman strides back towards me like a black panther. You’d never guess he’d been the schoolyard wimp, let alone a ratty little Jewish one at that. He’s more De Niro, with the pugnacious iron jaw, the bully at last instead of the other way round.
“You’re the one with powers, Zephyr,” he replies. “Don’t go confusing the two of us. One of us is a hero and the other one’s cursed.”
I clear my throat. “Gee, is that the time?”
Jeff backs down and I relax my posture as well, though my threatened departure remains a reality.
“I think I prefer Allison.”
“I’ll tell her you called.”
“OK. See you in the funny pages.”
And again, I take to flight.
*
THE SCANNER TELLS me it’s 3am and an alarm has gone off at the premises of Mys-tech Laboratories. According to the neat hundred-year plan of our architectural forefathers, most industrial development was shunted inland from the lower east coast, behind what once really was known as Atlantic City. Today, the area is known as Truman.
I should be turning in, except the hard partying since the end of the Creeping Death situation has left my body-clock in Mongolia. Besides, the word “home” doesn’t really have the same warm feel it once did.
The high-tech end of Truman is all landscaped gardens and roll-on lawn behind razor-wire fences, low complexes of off-white buildings with tinted glass, polished chrome and the occasional wrought-iron sculpture dedicated to obscure theoretical principles.
There’s only the little flashing blue light to indicate anything’s amiss at Mys-tech. The connotations of the name don’t exactly escape me as I sail under the radar, the gradual jingoisation of the whole world giving a healthy amount of skepticism as to the actual significance of everything and anything. I land on the crunchy grass and what I think at first’s an automatic sprinkler pops its head up in the lawn twenty yards away. Instead, I’m scanned by a red laser beam, there’s a brief moment of R2D2 talk, and then the thing disappears. The grass glistens with frost in the cold night air. My breath, at least for a moment, comes out in huge clouds.
Someone has melted a huge and perfect circle in the iron-shuttered automatic glass doors to the visitors’ entrance. Down the main corridor past a scorched personnel desk, various fluorescent lights are on. As I follow through, I track patches of the linoleum melted in the shape of footprints, reminding me of someone I have encountered a number of times before. The air is warm and fuggy: another telltale giveaway.
It occurs to me I should probably ring someone, you know, call for back-up, but the scanner, now switched off, let me know the police were definitely on their way. My Enercom phone even has a special life-line button I’ve fortunately never had to use. I’m not about to start now. Instead, I plough further into the building, invigorated by the loud crashing noises deeper within.
I think I’m halfway towards the source of the distress when a head of black hair and a violet cat-suit pop out of an open doorway immediately to my right.
“Hey, I know you,” a husky female voice says.
For some reason my brain goes into snappy comeback mode and I just don’t see the haymaker coming. Next thing, I’m back about twenty yards down the hallway and
Raveness, who I’ve read about but never met, steps in her full glory from the doorway.
Standing at about six-foot-two with a fall of wild, glossy black hair, the violet outfit suggests Raveness is just some sexy vamp, maybe a very tall sexy vamp. A criminal arrest sheet as long as my arm as well as possibly the state’s only recent conviction for cannibalism tells a completely different story – a bit like the Versace cloak she’s wearing.
Dusting myself off, I opt for a little of the time-honored superhero wisecracking in the hope it might draw Raveness’s playmates out instead of letting them put their heads together. It’s a stupid ploy, but I only do it because it works – most of the time.
“People often ask me,” I say, grimacing and wiping plaster from my sleeves, “how come I ever get in close when I can hurl lightning bolts from a safe distance?”
Raveness wipes her palm along a line of saliva hanging from her jaw. Her heavy-lidded eyes give the impression of something eastern European, but maybe that’s just me.
I throw a dose of electricity her way. The silly bitch blocks it with her arms and staggers back, teeth audibly clacking together. I hit the super-speed button, closing to a few yards in the space of a second, and once the rest of me arrives, I lay in with a dedicated combination of jabs and hooks that travel up the tall woman’s ribs and end at her jaw. Raveness staggers through a shattered doorway and goes backwards over a pile of debris and office furniture.
I don’t like hitting a lady, but fuck it.
One down. How many to go?
*
I’VE NO SOONER shaken the excess static from my fingertips than the hallway ahead fills with figures. At first, I expect it’s Raveness’s buddies come to whoop ass on her behalf. Instead, there’s a strike-force of six dudes in black Kevlar and laminate armor, heads like praying mantises, their sidearms resembling some kid’s weird experiments in black Lego rather than any weapon I’ve ever seen. I’m unsurprised to see pulsing, rippling purple energy hose out the end of the first few guns and I crash through the nearest plywood wall to escape the imagined effects.
I flounder through what’s ostensibly an Ikea display for two or three seconds, sparks leaping from my shoulders and hands, and then I hit the fast forward button again. I can’t accelerate time itself, just move super-quick by erasing all sources of friction and inertia in my path. That means while I can hit a guy twenty times in a second on a really good day, my brain’s as slow as the next Joe (no pun intended) and I pretty much have to plan my combinations before I land them, otherwise they go nowhere. If there’s something off in my calculations – and hell, it wouldn’t be the first time – then the bad guys get the comical sight of Zephyr flailing at empty air while they whoop from the sidelines.
On this occasion, I come through the wall an estimated fifteen feet further down from where the goons are massing. I’m guessing they’re security, though a known merc like Raveness suggests there’s a high-tech player with an interest in whatever Mys-tech makes. My hunch is confirmed in favor of the former as I emerge from the wreckage to see six prostrate guys, two of them still twitching with little droplets of flame all around.
Infernus and I have tussled before – too many times before.
I figure he holds the record for escapes from White Nine, which is meant to be a serious Guantanamo Bay-style upgrade from the run-of-the-mill parahuman detention measures previously offered to America’s finest bad guys. In his case, imagine a six-foot-three Afro-American linebacker, fire dancing across all his limbs, a helmet flared into two great horns and a red cloak no wider than a bath towel complementing his swirling silver bodysuit. What little I can see of the bad guy’s skin is bright red. It’s no trick of the light (or the flames). Infernus is seriously pissed about his proud African heritage being undermined by the same genetic lottery endowing his flame powers. And he knows how to channel that anger pretty well.
The master blaster is keeping good company. I don’t recognize either of the two guys with him: a nondescript, stick-thin fella in a dark purple body stocking, chunky white combat boots, no gloves, a white domino mask not unlike my own, and a pugnacious sneer; the second figure is slope-shouldered and menacing, masked but with loose, sparse blonde hair hanging to his collar, black GPs and military fatigues with a black vest and military-style short-cut jacket over the top. The moment I look at the second guy my heart gives a lurch that can only be a taste of things to come.
“Infernus,” I croak. “What gives?”
“Zephyr,” the royal villain explodes a laugh that vanishes just as instantly as it appeared. “Never one to let sleeping dogs die.”
“Sleeping dogs lie.”
“I prefer it my way,” he replies.
I duck the first jet of flames, but I lose all balance and stagger as I go into a defensive crouch, a feeling like vertigo flooding through me. I hit the corridor wall with my palm leaving a depression, and the stick insect in purple hits me with a spark of my very own flavor. The electricity seems to steady me and I grimace a grin, opening my palm and returning the favor. He disappears backwards quicker than a German civil rights protestor beneath a water cannon.
“You didn’t introduce your friends,” I remark.
“I figured they know you already, since you’re always posing on TV.”
“Not nice,” I reply, leaping into a mid-air hover and spinning away from another controlled jet of Infernus’s favorite super-heated plasma.
“Fuse you’ve already met,” Infernus gestures behind him.
“And who’s your other pal, Captain Seasick?”
Infernus grins in a way I know I’m not going to like. It’s matched in a more animalistic way by the dude in black. I can’t help wondering what’s up with Infernus, a classic paranoid delusional, usually a class above hanging with convicted cannibals and an apparent rabies case. I don’t know whether his offsider is going to sniff my balls, bark or speak when Infernus does it for him.
“I’m sure you won’t forget Quietus.”
In what seems like the longest heartbeat imaginable, Quietus teleports just behind me, hands on unnaturally long arms reaching up to clutch either side of my head and wrench me down to earth. Nothing seems to be normal – including my relationship to gravity – as I kick out and strike empty air and suddenly, sickeningly, get thrown haphazardly down the hall, bouncing off the walls and floor.
In so doing I pass Fuse, who thankfully seems down for the count. I’ve no more than asserted my ability to stand than Quietus teleports in again and my heart feels like it’s going to explode, possibly taking the contents of my stomach with it. He lands a couple of good punches across my chin before my brain is able to discern right from left and I latch my hand on the villain’s wrist and channel a few thousand volts. He doesn’t even gasp, though he does at least go down in a satisfying crumple.
“You know I’d kick your ass on any normal day Zephyr, and with back-up, I’m gonna do it in style,” Infernus bawls from twenty yards away.
“Your back-up’s all unconscious, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Not before taking you down a few notches, hardass.”
“Oh, very Mao Tse-Tung of you,” I growl back, not really sure what that means.
It doesn’t matter because Infernus has a pretty short attention span and even the suggestion of a little verbal detour has him dropping his dukes and charging.
We exchange punches for a few seconds, taking out the last of the plasterboard sheeting and running on into the concrete-reinforced columns and laminated technical walls. He catches me napping long enough to cram my face through a length of plastic-covered brickwork and suddenly we’re wrestling through a room with the characteristics of a giant filing cabinet, plastic containers of paperwork and God knows what else spilling around us. It doesn’t take long for the whole place to start smoldering, thanks to the scorching heat Infernus gives off. I connect a fist to his chin and download a charge strong enough to blow him through an industrial door and out into what rem
ains of the original corridor.
“Tell me who you’re working for, Toby,” I yell.
“Man, don’t you fucken call me that!”
“Settle down, Toby. Your momma wouldn’t want you to cuss so much.”
If Infernus was able to look any angrier, he’d just explode. Although it’s a little counter-productive to taunt bad guys with their secret identities, it’s also pretty hard to resist. It’s one of the few perks of being a good guy and keeping your nose clean that, generally speaking, that sort of information doesn’t get on the public record. With over twelve appearances in the big house, Toby Ramon O’Shea aka Hot Spark a.k.a Infernus ain’t so lucky.
We face off again, Infernus with his big mitts trickling flames, the overhead sprinkler system doing little to dampen the bad boy’s enthusiasm.
“Tell me what the hell you’re doing here,” I say to him.
“Shut your fucken ass, Zephyr,” Infernus replies in his best gangster voice.
I open my mouth, but Raveness roars in my ear, coming from nowhere, me and she going through the nearest wall, an external one as it turns out, and tumbling amid the broken bricks upon the complex’s spongy, unreasonably well-irrigated lawn.
I manage to land one good punch to the underside of the bitch’s jaw and then she wrestles me down again, gets an arm behind my back (my arm, my back) and amid the pain of that, Infernus rushes out and lands a disgustingly solid kick to the side of my head.
After that, well, suffice to say I was never happier to see the FBI than when they woke me up.
Zephyr 2.8 “Face Like A Weather Map”
THERE SEEMS TO be some sort of general agreement among the Parahuman and Powers Taskforce members that I am no longer needed at the scene. The lesser of my aches and bruises have departed along with the ambulances, most of an hour earlier, conveying Mys-tech’s six unconscious employees to St Joan’s. I’m left with a nagging headache and the knowledge that, yet again, I’m lucky I’m not dead. My neck feels like my head really was twisted all the way around and not just in the fantasies of certain FBI agents.
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