Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  The other costumes are so distracted by the drama before them they don’t clue into the gravid animal noises coming from another of the ambulances near where Windsong and Synergy so recently evacuated. I give Twilight a surprisingly comrade-like pat on the shoulder with a look that suggests “I’ll be back, but see you later if I’m not,” and then I trot over to the row of ambulances and shoot a curious glance at one of the paramedics, who looks like a woman on a mission as she runs over to some cops nearby to get them to start clearing a path through the debris.

  Seeker provides the field hospital a muted radiance as she stands, her face a mask of concern, watching a civilian and three more ambulance officers tending to Constance Da Silva. Better known to the world as the former Sentinel Vulcana, she now thrashes on a blood-stained trolley while others struggle to keep her in place. Vulcana mutters, over and over, words I barely absorb as my eyes remain locked on the jagged stump of her arm.

  “I can’t hold it, I can’t, I can’t hold it, oh God. . . .”

  And just like that a flush goes through the blue-skinned woman and she’s just an ordinary woman, the sweating, dying sort, and the freaked-out ambos stab the dark with their wild eyes and the doctor looks at me and says something he has to repeat to get me to understand.

  “This woman needs to get to a hospital five minutes ago.”

  I nod. “Right.”

  This is the part where I take the wounded heroine in my arms – I don’t know what we do about the severed arm – and fly in desperation to the hospital and where the city’s finest surgeons perform the night’s real miracle. Except Connie is a weeping, thrashing mess, and there’s blood everywhere as a rubber tourniquet comes loose.

  “Oh shit . . . shit,” the doctor gapes.

  “She has to come with me,” Seeker says and gently thrusts me aside.

  In her hand is some small weird device, like a remote control fashioned by Hobbits. She gestures and perhaps it is telepathy that instructs me to bring the trolley. So I push Connie free of the desperate paramedics as Seeker goes ahead of us, walking toward the end of the ruined street and the river beyond, something like the keyless entry for a sports car in her hand. Blood is thick in my nostrils like off soup.

  “This way,” Seeker says. “Come on.”

  There’s a subsonic beep and the crowds, attentive now, gasp as an enormous stone castle materializes into wobbly view in a move so implausibly real that only the very dodgiest of 1980s special effects could truly capture it.

  “What the fuck?”

  Seeker turns.

  “Zephyr, we have much to talk about. I’ll call you.”

  With that, she takes the handles of the gurney from my fingers and starts pushing it up a vague slope I eventually realize is a drawbridge, and then Seeker, with Vulcana, is disappearing into the enormous black skull face of the strange ancient castle and after the vaguely intangible wooden bridge has drawn up once more, the whole thing fades like a spectral vision with the dawn.

  Dawn, however, is still in fact some time away.

  The supers chat animatedly about “Seeker’s awesome castle” for a while, circling like we’ve licensed an open-air nightclub just for freaks, small groups forming and reforming amid the emergency crews and the traumatized paramedics and the tired cops and the surly city council crews arriving in their yellow vehicles to start making head or tail of this mess, the international journalists filing for their prime time slots despite the hour, the autograph hunters back at the cordons calling for their favorite masks like there couldn’t be anything more important in the world.

  When the cool air does start to glow with the first sign of day, a number of us make arrangements to catch up at the Silver Tower later on, drinks on Amadeus, and while Tessa fields a few invites half-heartedly, I know she is cluing in to the fact that this is the part where reality has to step back in and there’s no way on earth she’s going to be going with Cipher to the new Terminator series wrap party or the opening of a new restaurant called Crayons across town with Miss Black. And I have to ask myself if it is a school night until I remember we haven’t actually worked out the school arrangements yet, with George and Max offering to pay for the fucking Academy, much to Elisabeth’s chagrin.

  I’m like a statue or something: a grinning, wry, admittedly exhausted homage to dads everywhere in my tattered red-and-white suit, Vulcana’s blood dappling my shredded cape as I wait through the lessening crowds until we are nearly alone and Windsong daintily treads my way in her expensive-looking boots. I don’t care if the dawn sweepers or the displaced homeless people or Nigel the Troll or the last psychotic fans are watching as I sling an arm around my daughter’s shoulder and we walk through the trampled wasteland where an hour or so previous an imaginary castle touched down or where, an hour previous to that, we vanquished the earthly incarnation of a living star, or something like it.

  Windsong and I get to the river and I admit it feels not only good to be alive, but there’s a resonance of Old New York here as the grey clouds scud across the horizon and the city begins waking up, the smell of rotting garbage and fresh-ground coffee mingling into one heady mix as we inhale the brisk freshness of the breeze that lifts Tessa’s hair trailing and coiling like a scarf and my cloak flaps backwards like the flag I guess these things were made to imitate.

  “That was one crazy night,” I say at long last, it almost being a profane thing to intrude on the meditative silence of daybreak and the weird intimacy of us being in costume together.

  “Tell me it’s not always going to be like that,” Tessa replies.

  “No,” I say and turn so she knows it’s serious. “It won’t be. Take it from me, you just got pretty much all the good bits without too much of the shit. I’d consider retirement.”

  After a moment I let the grin break through and it conjures a levity in Tessa’s face I haven’t often seen, masked or otherwise, and we briefly hold hands and she squeezes my fingers and I concede she has a hell of a grip for a fourteen-year-old girl.

  “I love you, dad.”

  “Yes, baby. I love you too . . . Windsong.”

  Tessa gives a giddy laugh, every inch the teenager.

  By osmosis, we agree not to discuss all the shit things, not the least being the imminent divorce. Instead, Windsong adjusts her mask and winks at me and punches me in the shoulder and shoots up into the sky and I just stand there, watching for a moment as my daughter ascends in a blurry arc across the city where a bridge once stood, and then I do the crouch thing, and well, for a guy with the power of however many fucking light bulbs it’s meant to be, I don’t think I’m gonna catch her. Not today. Or at least not if I don’t want to spoil the moment.

  CONTINUED IN ZEPHYR II

  ZEPHYR II

  Zephyr 4.1 “Hatching”

  IT IS NOVEMBER 6th, 1971. The footage is drab, so unlike the era, the shifting, turbulent crowds, the thrashing of the desperate as they choke London’s streets with their faces a riot of the worst emotions. Anything you might care to name – horror, terror, fear, grief, anger – is stamped indelibly in the grain of the historical recording. Yet watching it, all I can think is, “Fuck, that’s my dad, that’s my dad!” and watch on in disbelief as the cavalry arrives in a psychedelic wash of lights that break like soap bubbles over the crowd.

  The four of them appear in a wave, Starkey in those terrible elastic pants he had to wear, all of them in their matching blue marching band jackets, the closest thing they ever had to a uniform since they grew out their awful fucking 60s hair, a long way from the leather-jacketed young hoods they’d first been cleaning up the waterfront. In seconds the Wolfman transforms, hirsute top half practically hanging out of his sleeves and the open top, a feral grin on his face as he leaps from the tableau before St George has even lowered his arms from the teleport that brought them from their secret base on the Isle of White.

  Within a year, Ringo will be dead, but that doesn’t trouble him obviously as he powers through the crowd o
n all fours, people throwing themselves like the Red Sea out of his loping path. There had been a terrible mood in Britain that winter with the miners’ strikes and the government’s debt default and the renewed IRA bombings and the Manchester rail disaster, and like meat left in the sun, the public rage stayed cold and hard all winter and then boiled over once the warm weather arrived and the Beatles, along with the other loose change of British superdom, found themselves at the front again, advocating violent social change as if by accident. And the Summer Rebellion was born, an inevitable expression of the twisted logic of metahumanity which, if not destroying them, would at least ruin any hope for the way things could’ve been.

  In the footage you can hardly see my dad’s face for the radiant smile and those stupid little glasses he wore. I can’t see that I really look anything like him. He lifts his hand to the cheering crowd as Paul shoulders past with what seems to be a look of unrestrained menace. George already has the moustache he wears today, whenever that was the last time I saw him on the news, anyway, and he and Lennon lift from the ground and float towards where the wall of British policemen in their Saturday morning cartoon helmets are being slaughtered.

  No one seems to even remember the Spiders from Mars – Bowie’s term, if I recall. And even fewer remember what they were called until they put the words into song. All anyone knew was these dark evil fuckers from outer space had been hatching inside members of Parliament for a lot longer than anyone would care to admit and it wasn’t until the Preacher, my dad, stumbled across their alien thought-waves that their conspiracy came unstuck. How much of the country’s woes at that time were down to their influence, no one could really tell. And even after the events of November 6th, the people weren’t in much of a forgiving mood. The fact the ruling elite could even be vulnerable to such a threat inspired the fury of the common people, like their masters’ weakness was just a new form of an ages old betrayal.

  Ironically the news crews couldn’t get close to the action. The crowds and the retreating police, hopelessly under-armed to face such threats, carrying their dead and injured like from a terrorist attack and crying and moaning and bleeding and stoppering their wounds with little more than their handkerchiefs, they all blocked the path to the burning street where the Spiders were finally routed. There is little to see of the well-upholstered members of parliament with their heads burst open directing desperate and powerful attacks. There are white balance-destroying flashes of red as McCartney unleashes his eyebeams and another bang, the crowd reacting like a single flinching organism as a car explodes, but otherwise the cameraman’s testimony blurs softly in and out as he plays at the far extremes of the camera’s focal range.

  If you sit through the whole thing, eventually there’s this enormous ragged cheer and an hour later, a victorious procession as the four of them are carried on the crowd’s shoulders under the shadow of Big Ben, huge grins on their comfortably adored faces. I don’t have the patience for that sort of thing and my back’s aching from sitting hunched at the computer and I switch off Youtube to spare my download limit and call up the web archive instead with the grainy Leibovitz photos from autumn 1972 – their last photo shoot as a powers team, taken for Rolling Stone.

  Outside the panorama windows, the city is quiet. I call it that even when I can hear the odd car horn, a distant siren, a drunk guy retching his heart out in the alley down the side. This is as close as the city ever comes to being at peace, four o’clock in the morning and the weather turning cold and sunrise still effectively a long way off and me without a cold woman to warm my bed or a child to do the same for my heart. Instead, it’s just me and Wikipedia as my hand trawls over the mouse sensor and the facts flick by.

  Lennon wrote two books: one just before they went to India, and one in ‘74, after the Wolfman died. And he fathered one child the world knew about. I guess I should call him my half-brother, Julian, but I can’t help wondering how many more half-brothers I have out there.

  It is a while before I realize I have closed my eyes, unconsciously asleep. That’s the mixed curse of total freedom in the postmodern. In track pants and a Starbucks tee, I stumble as far as the settee and let the darkness wash over me.

  In the early premonitions of my sleep, I see myself as a baby, lifted up into the arms of a strange man with a hoary beard and small round glasses that reflect my innocent curiosity and mirror his own.

  *

  THERE IS SOMETHING appropriate about the bass throb of the wind turbines as my daughter and I land like two refugees from the postmodern astride the same Newfoundland coast on which mad Viking explorers once fumbled their colonization so badly. Like the thirty-odd unit wind farm, we are on this squall-battered peninsula for the elevation and the isolation. And like the turbines, we are far enough from civilization that not even the most vocal civic association could object to what we propose.

  Far to the north the land turns dark green with fir and spruce and I expect there are concrete barricades eventually as the crumbling Canadian highways head like a thwarted destiny to No-Man’s Land, the rusting watch-towers with their big-breasted, shaven-headed, woollen pullover’d guards forever on duty protecting the tiny principality from the patriarchal threats of the outside world. A cruel joke and a living irony in one breath. The pun on their name is a testament to what so many costumed freaks like myself discover: you can choose a dandy title (in the late 70s, the separatists declared they were Wimminsland), but the newspapers will ultimately decide whether or not it takes. Some grumpy sub-editor, or perhaps a legion of them, ire multiplied, eyeing the gap in the headline or the cadence of some inferior cub reporter’s sentence and deciding to rewrite the course of history in a clatter of keystrokes.

  Here on this pulsing scarp we are safe from any threat and small enough not to present one on the separatists’ Cuban-supplied radar. If there are blobs, they do not tell the story of a father simply trying to do the best thing by his child.

  Windsong is a name the media have taken to with a fury. In her mask and vandalized leather jacket, Tessa is as much a stranger as any teenage daughter could be, the disaffected teenager par excellence. Yet she has a knowing wink for me and flushed cheeks that belie great expectations. We are both of us “leathered up,” as she put it, spare civvies in a Dulce & Gabana shoulder bag her mother bought as a surreptitious divorce present, a way of letting Tessa know things were only looking up with deadweight dad out of the picture. I have my street clothes stashed in the flat panel of the back of my jacket. The screwed-on plates of the stylized zed, now in gold, on advice from my new publicist, mist over with the cold, but I don’t feel it and Tessa tells me it’s the same for her. We are built to withstand such lesser things. We are in our element.

  “You know, when I was a kid –”

  “A kid who knew I was Zephyr,” I say.

  “Yes,” Windsong slowly exhales. “When I was a kid, when I was eight or something, I went through a long patch thinking you were gonna leave us.”

  “You must find this ironic.”

  “Dad,” she fumes.

  “Let’s practice,” I reply. “Zephyr, remember?”

  “Okay.”

  “Why did you think I was going to leave?” I relent and ask. “Because I was Zephyr?”

  “No,” Windsong replies. “You know I said it was never a conscious thing, understanding you were Zephyr. It’s only the past few years, you know, that I was hiding from mom that I knew.”

  “Just as well,” I say. “Being a kid, knowing that sort of thing? I dunno.”

  In my head I imagine a quick thousand-odd scenarios where my secret ID could’ve been blown, most of them are during a school Christmas concert.

  “It’s not a good thing,” I say at last. “A kid could spend their life worrying I wouldn’t come home, some of the things I’ve done.”

  Windsong bites her lip and says nothing. A light breeze stirs and I know it is my baby weather-controller testing out her powers, flexing her muscles, so to speak,
now we are far from prying eyes. My other super sense – the one attuned to my role as a parent – tells me I just stifled whatever point she was trying to make. I snap my mouth shut and contemplate for perhaps the hundredth time this morning that having a split life really is more than just a very obvious metaphor. I fear what a psychiatrist would think, observing that I could be such very different people with and without the mask. Tessa desperately needs training if she is going to persist in flying out her bedroom window at night looking to thwart bad guys. It’s so ironic that now we’re finally here, it’s Zephyr-her-dad she needs more than anyone.

  So I peel off the mask. The spirit gum leaves gunky pores, but no actual telltale residue. If there’s someone gunning for me with a telephoto lens then I’m fucked, right about now, though in all likelihood it’s just us and the seals down on the rocks. The air is cold enough it seems to congeal in the swirls and eddies Tessa makes rise up out of the damp and silent earth, brief glimpses of shapes appearing and disappearing in the mist.

  “Is that you doing that?”

  “Yeah,” she says, seemingly as astounded as I. “Never tried before. Hell, I don’t even think I’ve been out in the cold like this with my, you know, powers before. I just wondered if it could be done, and . . . well, there you are.”

  “Not sure it has a combat application,” I grin.

  She looks up and notices for the first time I have demasked. Her face contorts with caution, but she says nothing.

  “You were going to tell me why you worried I would leave.”

  “Because of me.”

  The voice is small, the gaze turned away. Tessa removes her own mask and dabs at a tear that has come from nowhere.