“Can’t you just give me the Cliff’s Notes on this one?”
“I gave you a frickin’ disc full o’ data you shoulda been doin’ somethin’ with, an’ now you want the executive fuckin’ summary?”
Pushing sixty or not, Doro shakes his fist at me like he’s something other than a miserable old hack with nicotine and colostomy problems.
“Sal, you’re not yourself,” I say, trying to be the voice of reason. “What is it?”
“I thought the headline would spell it out for you Zephyr, but maybe I’m wrong,” he says and shuffles across to another aluminum box fixture to park his ass, peeling open the lunch bag and inspecting the contents like a man long unused to thrills.
“Darkstorm’s missing.”
“Yeah. And the Crusader.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Manitou?”
“That . . . white-haired chick?”
“Correct. Ansolom?”
“Ansolom?” I look back at him and peer more closely, the old man’s face suddenly strangely unfamiliar. “Uh, biggish? Grey skin? Strong?”
“Bingo. All missing.”
“Uh-huh. OK?”
“Now, your missing Dr Martin Thurson, remember him?”
“The, uh, guy who was an associate of the science dude who made that robot,” I say. “Hermes,” I add like it might be helpful.
“He’s dead.”
“Hermes?”
“Dr Thurson. Not missing any more, it seems. They had to ID him by DNA,” Sal says.
Finally giving up his interest in the pastrami on rye, he lights a cigarette and waves it at me like it’s his very own little American Indian cleansing ceremony.
“Police turned up his body. Get this: in a fuckin’ cocoon, man. A cocoon, Zephyr. In the old brickworks down on East Street, used to be the Bronx. Johnson, now.”
“Someone killed him?”
“They don’t think so. You’d need to speak to the Feds. They took the body, took over the autopsy,” the old reporter says and shrugs.
I don’t know where he’s getting his info, but I am as confident in it as I would be of my own.
“Whisper I heard was he died of a natural mutation. Guy looked like The Fly or something.”
Doro smokes for a bit. Tired or something, he looks at me.
“There’s things going on, Zephyr. Ordinary folks like me, we got limits. You gotta, you know, take the ball and run with it. I just don’t get the feelin’ any of you super guys is too interested. What’s going on? Clash with your corporate itinerary?”
“Very funny, Sal.”
“Not lookin’ like a joke from where I’m standin’, Zeph.”
I shrug and look away, but Doro is far too experienced with my worst performances, the ones I keep private. He nudges me and lights another cigarette.
“You got something for me?”
“It’s an exclusive,” I mumble.
Then I tell him about the Sentinels launch and Sal promises to cut me a check for ten grand. The reporter can barely get the facts straight, he’s in such a hurry to get back to the newsroom to file tomorrow’s front page. It’s the usual arrangement and he’ll be quoting a source close to the new team, yet he leaves with me feeling my usual war within, the grimy experience of having sold my hole only lessened by the deep and almost completely unconscious conviction it’s all so trivial it barely matters anyway.
Soon it is just me and my silent, bird-poo spattered companion. I roll up a twenty spot and put it in the mouthpiece of the only booze bottle unbroken, and then take to the sky, headed halfway for home before I remember I no longer live there. A device on my phone synchs me to the Wallachian Fortress and I bust a move over downtown, airships dopplered across the horizon with the sunset, and in the end I descend toward the park where today’s portcullis has anchored. Moments later, I’m striding with my heavy footfalls down the slowly more familiar dank stone halls and thinking about my room. And when I get there, the door sliding ajar at my approach, I pull free the mask with the satisfying feeling I can only remember as a kid, finally hooking fingernails under a week-old scab and prising that sucker loose. There are messages on the laptop from the team intranet and direct messages via the new Zephyr Twitter feed my PR guys are maintaining, but I’m too screwed for any of them. I feel like a plastic skin of wine after the alcoholics have twisted every last drop free and so I drop onto the bed and kick off my boots and it’s damned lucky I don’t sleep for a month.
Zephyr 4.18 Coda
WELL, YOU KNOW, the big night. Or maybe that should be, the Big Night. Woo-hoo. If that’s not enough feigned enthusiasm for ya, then you can go screw yourself.
Atlantic City has a new super team. A team of young gods. Buyer beware and all that. We’re here to save the day and if you’re not sufficiently grateful, we may just end up trashing the place. You never know. We don’t mean to be, but we’re an unpredictable lot, even us New Sentinels standing up on the media dais in our new-as-new costumes, a score of similarly masked publicity whores in the special audience alongside the red carpet, the slavering cameramen, the girls in tasseled skirts waving pom-poms (my idea), the beer company guy, the car company guy, my phone people, the computer company people, the agents, the gay dudes from my PR firm, Hallory O’Hagan in a skirt split high enough I can almost see her breakfast, a goodly number of security guys, which is a bit of a laugh when you consider the irony, the TV reporters, the corporate guests, the celebrities alongside the celebrity masks, the celebrities who nonsensically came in costumes, Micky Rourke who is eyeing me like an eager prom date, Kate Winslet in a Titanium Girl costume looking eminently fuckable and back to her best at long last, the banking guys basically steamrolling this whole damned thing, and behind and somehow between them all, the dark-cloaked forms of the Wallachians strangely at home in this paradise of confused Hollywood clichés.
I am not drunk yet, though of course I don’t really get drunk, not without help, though at least I am actually sober, which is more than I could say for the last time I did this, with a lot less aplomb on a crystalline November eve seven or eight years previous. Here I am, standing with a bunch of people, ostensibly strangers, few of us even sharing our first names for fear of what some psycho madman might do, and yet we’re pledging to the public not only to help protect them, but to be each other’s back-up as well. It’s like a bizarre wedding. No wonder the cops sometimes hate us, peacocks in our skin-tight teasing costumes. Yes the latex and lycra and leather really are that much better to fight in, or more aerodynamic, or help make our physiques strike fear into the hearts of the bad guys, or whatever the hell the dominant explanation has become. And unless you’re like me and feeling somewhat over this weird scene before its even truly begun already, then you’re straining at the leash, drunk already without a hint of champagne popped thanks to this fantasy of power and perfection unwrapped as a gaudy non-secret before the media, a few friends and half the world.
I don’t think they are glued to their screens in Africa. Or well, at least not outside the silver corporate towers of the Zion city state. Otherwise, there’s no greater show on Earth than the stampeding cavalcade as Seeker and I mock-compere the denouement of this spectacle of our own orchestration.
And the star-gazing fuckers lap it up. Flies could settle on their eyes, they’re so teary with excitement and absorbed in the cattle-call of new and old faces, famous all. Mastodon. Vulcana. Samurai Girl. Nocturne. Smidgeon. Hmmm, I’m forgetting one. Oh, and Brasseye (as we reluctantly agreed to let him be known). Call me cynical or clinically depressed, but this grand unveiling feels more like an abattoir for the culturally deranged, an outdoor asylum, all sense of scale and proportion gone. If we matter at all, it’s not like this, should never have been allowed to become like this, even if the alternative is dying in some foreign field forgotten except for a flower that grows each year, a real sacrifice, a real purpose, a justifiable honorific for a challenge met and an effort made.
Instead
, I have to make sure I slip in the names of our sponsors as I ad lib my way down the carpeted stairs to the bottom of the media pen where my new teammates have gathered. Of all the people to trust this to, it seems laughable that it would be me. I resisted hitting up the ‘Don for a few happy pills to take away the shakes, determined I should be my rare and dignified best for this austere event, daunted, even little old me, by the responsibility required – only now I’m here, with Leeza making little hand signals at me like we have some relationship she can trade on to be the only reporter with a boom mike allowed past the bollards and the paparazzi and the omniscient hordes of the unwashed public pulsing like an ocean of organic life unseen beyond the sodium lamps and the set dressings and the enormous palm trees in their even bigger pots.
I remember now why I nervously try and ingest almost any damned thing that might make a dent in my constitution. You’ll have to excuse me for being such a downer, but like any other poor helpless loser doomed to be his own greatest downfall, it’s really in my moments of glory that I’m my own worst enemy.
I mumble something inane and laugh and there are actually goddamn cue cards in my hand and I catch one of the bankers’ eyes and admire his black turtleneck for a moment, and then, like there’s a speck in my eye, I grin and put a thumb up to my cheek and the cards scatter, the move a deliberate one, and good old Zephyr is the only one who can drawl and get away with saying, “Well God damn, they know who they are – and if they don’t, maybe they should read their own advertising a little more,” and while they can gasp and cuss and groan and slap their foreheads and glare at Hallory and whatever, it’s me we’re talking about, this is what they’re actually paying for: Atlantic City’s most commodified man. A hero to endorsement agents and hedge funds everywhere.
Fuck ‘em. If I had any guts at all I would grasp my head and explode myself in front of the whole fucking lot.
Zephyr 5.1 “Ghosts in the Room”
THE REAL PARTY is at Transit. Somehow, they have redecorated in the last week on the strength of our opening and now there’s better light for the photographers and the top of the split level has these awesome big round tables and booth seating. The whole team except for Seeker and the robot are squeezed in there with room for Stiletto, Nautilus, Paragon, Devil Betty, Snow Leopard, the young guy who has taken on the new Grasshopper mantle, Cipher, the Lark, and this guy Coalface, who turns out to be real after all, though he has to kind of stand off to the side with his own designated bouncer who wears an asbestos jacket and clutches a fire extinguisher and keeps looking like he’s about to fall terminally ill. Nobody mentions Twilight, as if Seeker briefed them all privately before the event. And of course, no one has seen Darkstorm either, but even with Stiletto in a maudlin drunk, we manage not to dwell on it for long. The feeling of ghosts in the room is palpable, and if the young guy in the green body stocking wasn’t so damned agreeable then I don’t really know how this party would kick along at all.
But it does. Some time late into the a.m., the music is lounge jazz and the drink of choice absinthe. The conversation turns inexorably toward favorite parallel universes, eliciting more than a few laughs. I’m smoking a cigar just because it fits the moment and Kate Hudson only leaves my knee to go periodically to the bathroom to snort huge chunks of cocaine and make cell calls to sleeping journos, making sure she’s in the morning papers.
“Do you remember that one where all the malls had churches in them?” Mastodon says with a heavy-lidded sense of the ironic.
There is a tinkling of broken glass that sounds like an after-thought, but it’s enough to draw my eyes to the wider scene just as two late arrivals strut through the alcoholic haze toward our table. I’m only slightly more surprised to see my daughter than I am to see the company she’s keeping.
Shade is a good-looking, slightly macho slice of nougat-colored Afro-English woman in an 80s-style metallic jacket over a black bodysuit. Her hair’s a stark, tightly-curled triangle in silhouette, the Pyramid of Giza of women’s haircuts, with tiny little silver spheres winking from her ears. For a moment I could swear she and Tessa were holding hands, but apparently it’s just a trick of the light or an old man’s frightened imaginings. As I understand it, Shade absorbs light to make her super-strong and damage-resilient, and so the dark club atmosphere won’t be doing her any favors. Yet she has a piggish set to her strong chin that makes me instantly think she’d be a nasty piece of work when backed into a corner, powers or no powers.
She used to roll with a short-lived team inexplicably called the Spice Girls, but in recent years and after a stint in LA shacked up with femme-dom heroine Queen Bee, I think she moved back to Blighty and joined up with the Union Jacks. We’ve met two or three times before and there’s a pretty good chance, though my memory’s playing tricks on me, that once I kenned she only hearkened to girl-flesh I mightn’t’ve left the best impression. Pub-crawling (as they call it over there) with a hero of the caliber of Lionheart doesn’t leave much room for finesse, especially if you’ve got a pretty dim view of chaps already. The fact she’s now cozying up to Windsong should have me suspicious at the least – but I’m already more freaked than that.
“Hey hey, well look who it is,” Mastodon manages to drawl.
Someone should tell him he has a string of drool connected to his bull-bar, but that might undercut the chilled lothario act he seems to be aiming at my daughter.
“It’s the girl who saved Atlantic City.”
“Sheesh, it’s Shade,” I say in a somewhat too forced, loud and cheesy voice. “Gosh love,” I say and swap to my best Guy Ritchie impersonation. “What brings you down to the old watering hole?”
“Hey don’t mind me,” Shade says and nods to Jude Law as he walks past and smiles to accept the welcome from a few of the big table’s other surviving costumes as they move over to give the newcomers room for a seat. Cypher – who I haven’t heard talking for a while and who perhaps should be checked to make sure he’s still breathing – slumps under the table and vanishes for the rest of the night.
My eyes swivel to Windsong. I am in need of lubrication, throat dry in a heartbeat. There are conversations going on at a merry pace all around us, yet the crazy hubbub still allows a tiny zone of silence to develop almost instantly and unnoticed between my daughter and I.
“Uh, hi,” or words very similar come belatedly from my mouth.
Tessa’s eyes are locked on mine and possibly she is about to say something equally awkward when Maxtor, a super-dude I haven’t seen in close to three years, crosses my line-of-sight and throws himself down next to me, ignoring the young starlet on my right.
*
LATER, AND SHADE keeps subtly trying to get my attention, but I’m wedged in by Maxtor, who has quickly confessed to me it’s been three years since he pulled on his brown-black-and-white armored suit. The New Sentinels launch inspired him to come out of retirement, but just for a night.
“How the hell could you just walk away like that?” I ask.
I had relied on this dude for back-up on more than a few occasions.
“What, officially retire? Through, like, a publicist?”
“Well that’s how it’s done,” I shrug by way of reply.
“No way, man,” Maxtor says, familiar and at once a stranger beneath his face mask and big goggles, the same way old school chums may as well be people you remember from television, ten years after the fact. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t want to be like St George. Hell, like Mastodon, in fact. You know, call it quits only to show up in the old costume again next time there’s a major event or Crescendo goes on the rampage or, fuck, just because I got lonely and missed the life.”
I sniff at this otherwise completely sensible statement.
“I take it you didn’t ‘miss the life,’ then?”
I can tell he’s faintly embarrassed when he laughs awkwardly and says, “Uh, well no. Actually, I didn’t. I found something, er, actually quite a bit more rewarding.”
“So who’s the lucky girl?” I ask disinterestedly, the question actually meant to be the terminus for the conversation now that talking to my erstwhile old ally is more like discussing the merits of giving up cigarettes with a born-again non-smoker.
“No, no there’s no girl,” he replies. “Look Zephyr, I’d like to talk to you about it actually, but maybe now’s not the right time. I think you’d be surprised at how interested you’d be and of all my former, you know, colleagues, I think you might really get a lot out of this.”
“It’s not a pyramid scheme, is it?”
Maxtor barks a laugh, an anxious one, that doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence. He had a good memory, as far as I recall, so he shouldn’t’ve forgotten I don’t suffer fools gladly – or easily, for that matter.
I snap my gaze to Shade just at the moment Paragon says my name in that redneck voice of his that comes out when he’s drunk.
“What?” I ask and stare through the dim alcohol fug, the faces of the others bloated by their drunkenness, except for Tessa, squeezed in between Samurai Girl and Vulcana and who is eyeing me in this intense way that I cannot interpret, her mask cancelling out my parenting skills as I acknowledge I should probably be moving with far more haste to de-limit my fifteen-year-old’s involvement in this shambolic celebratory disaster, but as I said I have no idea if she is trying to signal me to get her out of there or staring daggers at me for my lightly addled state. Perhaps it’s the tranquilizers, but I suspect this is doomed to be an ongoing state-of-affairs if we don’t resolve it soon.
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