“All in one piece again?” I say to Sting and try not to wink to meaningfully.
“It’s just a patch-up job, mate. Field work,” he says. “Same could be said for you. Worn off already?”
“I guess my brain’s not ready to be completely ironed out yet,” I reply.
Shade comes up and throws an arm around my shoulders.
“You can almost hear all the mental defects and phobias falling back into place,” she grins. “It must be like Victoria Station in there.”
I would say something, but I am lost. My stomach growls inaudibly, and I have to keep adjusting my stance for fear my legs will give out completely.
“Nice work, Zephyr,” St George says and leans across and offers me his hand.
“Thanks.”
The word comes easily and I realize I am in danger of grinning like a loon and completely blowing my reputation with these people.
“Problem sorted then? I’ll be off.”
“Do you want me to send you home?” the former Beatle asks.
“Na,” I say and shrug, smiling, hoping my high school geography will be good enough to do the trick.
“You’ll, uh, think about our offer then, Zeph?” Sting asks. “Obviously, we make a pretty good team.”
“Oi,” Shade says with a laugh. “Don’t forget me.”
“How could we,” Sting says with more than a touch of the politician about him.
His eyes never leave mine, something predatory about him despite the kindness.
“I’ve got a lot to sort out,” I say to him. “Leave it with me.”
“OK.”
“Oh, and next time you’ve got a world-shattering catastrophe?”
“Yeah?”
“Leave you out of it?” St George says.
“No,” I reply. “Just send me the co-ordinates. If I want to get sucked on a bad trip through space-time, I’ll watch some old Eddie Murphy films.”
Everyone laughs except for Shade and I fling myself into the air with difficulty and orient myself towards what I hope is home.
Zephyr 5.18 Coda
I SORTA CRAP out over Central America and find a beach, lying flat out near some tropical cantina as the sun sets and the fireflies come out and then a nice lady comes down to find out what the white guy in leather pants is doing passed out in the sand. I think she spends at least ten minutes thinking I am Russell Brand, but we manage to communicate by sign language that I need a few stiff drinks and still without the benefit of language we end up at her house going at it like, I dunno, words fail me, though the expression “wild hyenas” springs to mind, however unflattering the connotations may be.
It is morning again by the time I wake to the Latino sun banging against the window blinds and the woman, the owner of the beach café, it turns out, is dressing primly for work. She smiles and says something, el Zepharo or what sounds close to it, and she departs and leaves me with a wry smile, nursing my boner and thinking of home and the enormity of what I’ve just done – that’s not saving the cosmos from gibbering alien deities, but sleeping with a woman who isn’t my wife, out of wedlock as it were. Yeah, I know you might feel there’s nothing particularly new to this sort of behavior, but there’s an intrinsic difference now that I’m actually on my lonesome once more and it feels mostly bad rather than good, the euphoria of fucking slowly draining from me like the blood from my cock as I try to soberly address the reality in which I’m once again mired.
I don’t know the name of the town. Still in my hero get-up, I wander down to the beachfront and snag a copy of the local daily. My Spanish isn’t so great, but the pictures and numbers tell their own story. They are putting the death toll at 20,000 in North America. Other continents haven’t fared so well. The Australians are practically untouched, again. It was breakfast-time or something and they were all out jogging, or so CNN would have us believe. The Chinese are saying nix about their own casualties and the French are in mourning for Le Tour Eiffel. I hear Pisa went as well, but later I confirm this is just a hoax, though don’t tell me how the damned thing manages to survive.
My heart is drifting in the direction of Atlantic City once more, but my thoughts, my boiler-room unconscious, hammers on the pipes to remind me of a dozen recent conversations. Almost unwittingly I check my phone and confirm the co-ordinates to the island remain within.
Sitting in my hand, the phone comes alive to draw me back from my sudden contemplativeness.
“Daddy? Where are you?”
I smile, the proud father for a moment before memory and reality kick in their mean double act.
“I’m on a mission somewhere,” I tell her, technically the truth. “I couldn’t tell you where.”
“I haven’t heard from you since things went crazy.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I was right in the middle of ‘things’.”
“Figured you were,” Tessa aka Windsong says. “Are you OK?”
“Fine. You survived? And your mom?”
“She’s back at work already. There’s gonna be mucho damages claims, I bet,” my daughter replies. “I was helping out your gang, actually.”
“My gang?”
“I think they think you’ve forgotten them too, so it doesn’t surprise me,” she says. “I mean the Sentinels. We mopped up the harbor after the tsunami hit.”
“Shit. Was it bad?”
“Just the bodies. . . .”
“Bodies you can learn to handle,” I say, probably sounding without much sympathy, but as always my heart is in my mouth for my girl when I think of the risks she’s exposed to.
Tessa nods back down the line without much conviction and I tally up yet another reason to feel like a jerk today.
“When are you coming back?” she asks.
Out to sea, a tanker chugs along on its vector to an unseen port. The gulls hover like hang-gliders in the air above me as the hour creeps towards noon.
“Soon,” I say. “Soon. There’s just a few more things I have to deal with.”
“Will you tell me about it, when you’re done?” Tessa asks.
“Maybe,” I reply in a soft voice.
Tess harrumphs. “Well at least you’re being honest. Love you dad.”
And she hangs up as I stand, tucking the phone away where I can easily double-check my new flight path.
Krakatoa awaits.
Zephyr 6.1 “Impromptu Violent Archaeology”
ARE YOU STILL following this shit? Wow. I guess the Internets must be slow today. Isn’t that how the kids say it now? I digress, I know. And me digressing, well you should know what that means by now. I never thought I would still be messing with this thing when I first felt compelled to keep a private record, and you, my dear figment of the imagination, for surely I won’t ever have to suffer the indignity of these confessionals being unearthed from their cyber-crypt, well you just keep on with the ride – just as I imagined you would.
To recap, the island my half-brother Julian laughingly referred to as Krakatoa doesn’t look too destroyed from my aerial vantage. It’s a comma-shaped blob of leftover real estate with a big grey bunker overlooking the southern beach and a few shanty dwellings to the north where the land narrows into a shoal descending to perfect blue water the same temperature as piss. Coming out of Mach 5, it is just after midday and there’s no movement on the island that my limited patience lets me to espy. I head for the bunker, remembering the electronic records the Sentinels’ future tech managed to uncover for the base which included blueprints I neglected to download.
At ground level, the tilt concrete structure is less supervillain base and more ascetic summer camp. I can tell no one’s been here for a good while and my poster perfect pose of readiness slowly relaxes into a casual stroll as I walk in my tattered dungarees past wire mesh fences ajar, litter cascading from rain-bloated wood doorways, ancient packaging, wind-borne and sea-borne detritus, mummified starfish, a few plastic bottles, a chemical drum, a rusted motorbike, loose bits of sheet metal, a child�
��s plastic doll whitened and made fragile by years in the sun. In the middle of the main courtyard there is a concrete-edged, dirt-filled elevation perhaps thirty feet by the same, two South-East Asian trees leaning into each other like old friends with their aromatic seed pods littering the sandy ground that spark memories as I pause and collect one of the gooey things, the sap on my fingers and the hint of a smell triggering taste memories I didn’t know were in me. There’s an element of my childhood here, so convincingly present, so tangible in my buried thoughts that I need go no further except that I yearn all the more baldly for more answers. I’m not likely to find John Lennon today, I tell myself with a wry expression rendered sardonic by the domino mask – and perhaps it’s just as well. My father remains on Interpol’s top five. I may have the blood of star-faring interdimensional deities on my suit, but I’m not ready to meet the boss I imagine might inhabit this particular level of the game.
Above ground, the building has two sides bordering the square produced by the raised tree setting. Like all good Asian building fronts, the normal architecture is sheltered by the battered, sliding screens pulled down on a day like this long ago and never drawn up again. Krakatoa, if that was really the name bandied around, which I doubt, was abandoned by my father and his people, not destroyed. On that account, it appears Cher Zhouwheenne was wrong.
There are big sheds and out-buildings closer to the beach, and the wire fence sags that way to a paved boulevard, years of sand built up around the foundations. Along its left, these out-houses are made of wood half-destroyed by the elements, but time is yet to hide the efforts made to give these structures the playful seaside feel I barely remember from a time that may well have been physically erased from my thoughts. The parasol umbrellas and small decorative paper fans adorning the cracked white paint of the wooden huts are faded and torn, but the memory is fresh in my childish fingertips of those fans snickering in the monsoonal breeze as strong as the spokes of a bicycle tire, and eliciting much the same response to my frightened investigations.
I was four, five? Was I born here?
Today my shoulders are broad, not because the pose suits me in my gore-hardened leathers, but because without them I might weep like the boy I cannot remember being.
*
I POKE MY nose into the first open doorway I find in the main building, guided by sense memory alone and the uncanny conviction there are concrete stairs here into the undercroft – only it is a broken industrial-style lift shaft, not stairs. The stairs are a metal job, far across the other side of the factory-like hangar, and I skirt the desiccated corpse of a light plane that rests tilted at an angle since one of its landing struts rusted through and broke, one wing brushing the floor a stairway to heaven for the tropical rats that have covered everything with their spoor.
I lift my hand and do a pretty good impersonation of a flashbulb, then drop down the thirty-odd feet to the concrete level below.
The undercroft is divided into cubicles and work stations. The details of exactly what went on here have been erased by the passage of years, and while I can recognize some of the machines and various odds and ends, I doubt the presence of a few sewing machines means the Doomsday Man was running an illegal sweatshop. Hopefully, for the sake of the family name, his ambitions were a bit more astronomical than that. I sift through some of the crap, startled by the amount of sand that has come in and live crabs digging through moldy cardboard boxes full of someone else’s mementos, and after pushing in a few soggy doors I come into the theatre room.
Perhaps it is the soundproof padding that has kept things in a better state. I blow the dust from the projector and tilt the first canister of film to the nascent light, angling to understand the writing which might as well be cuneiform for all I can tell. Again, the rats have been into things. There’s a hole in the ceiling the size of my torso. And when I retrieve the next canister it springs apart in my hands and flakes of celluloid dribble to the sodden shag carpet. It occurs to me then to examine the film already loaded into the machine, and after a minute’s fumbling, Elisabeth’s exhortations that I was never the handiest of husbands echoing in my ears (but I’ve saved the city a few times), I manage to channel enough power into the thing to get the lights up so that blurry images of kids on bicycles sporting inane grins come into wild focus. I have no idea of the mechanism involved, but the principle of the projector I understand well enough and I move the device back until the focus is crisp despite the sagging colors of the ancient family film.
The boys and girls ride rings around the public square glimpsed on my arrival. The two trees are just babies, and so too some of the children in the arms of various women onlookers. The camera sweeps over them so fast, careless in its caress and capture of history, that I could damn the filmmaker to oblivion except I can only guess whose hand guides the machine. There are no men, though the women, like the children hooting like monkeys and ringing their bells, are of many different colors, including a lady with just a hint of fish-like scales to her grayish skin.
The film snaps and changes, the children dressed like refugees from some 1950s communist exploitation film now streaking away from the camera’s point-of-view, their backs bare as they ride down the paved strip to the water and abandon their bikes in such a riotous profusion they do not register there must be more than a dozen bicycles there as the children run joyfully into the ocean. Blurred by time and distance, a red-sailed yacht sits off-shore and I am taken by the image of a pentagon with a stylized eye in the middle, such an occult cliché that I blink and almost imagine it’s a fiction until the white design on red leaps again as if the unknown cameraman sought to capture this amid the remote merriment as a message to me from across time.
One of the boys looks back and gestures. He is a skinny white kid with short dark hair in oversized shorts, and just for a moment I imagine, despite the flow of probabilities, that this is me as a boy, portending a similarly meaningful exchange happening again through the film. And then I notice almost every second kid, at least among the most reckless chargers-into-the-water, are boys of similar complexion and age, none perhaps older than seven.
The image sputters and whites out as the last of the tape clears the reel and hisses onto the ground.
I am bending over to retrieve the precious archive when the intruder hits me from behind hard enough to break the average man’s back and I go hurtling into the lit square of the wall and then into darkness as the cinder blocks give way to further unlit spaces revealed by the brute’s unceremonious and impromptu violent archaeology.
Zephyr 6.2 “Surprise Vector”
THE DUST CLEARS yet I’m still not entirely sure what I am looking at. Before much else settles into place, my attacker picks me up bodily and throws me through another cinder-block wall and a burst of electrical fire in my own defense gets me clear just long enough to establish we’re still in the undercroft, three or four walls caved in, the colony’s leftovers strewn to decorate the place like the slums of Calcutta.
Across from me is a mahogany-skinned man with arms the size of tree trunks and what appears to be random pieces of metal jutting from his skin, extending from the end of his hands into the mother of all Edward Scissorhands-type personal weaponry. His comparatively tiny head is crammed nonsensically into what I first mistake to be one of those things injured dogs wear to stop them scratching. The man’s face is a small, shadowed bruise of negative emotions astride a powerhouse physique of imperfect proportions. He is hunchbacked, his legs withered by comparison to the enormous upper body. Drool collects in the bottom of his pipe-like headwear and spills down his chest, and across the room I slowly notice small pieces of metal trash are attaching themselves to the mutant’s arms and back, none of which seem to leaven his mood.
I’m about to ask him to explain himself when he launches at me again. This time I have a modicum of warning and we grapple like Greek wrestlers until he somehow gets the better of me and scoops me into his arms and again I am thrown across the room
, though I use my powers to minimize the impact now I know where I’m meant to be going. A heavy dose of electricity should slow my assailant down, but instead he lifts those enormous guns above his head and flexes muscles that sound like ropes straining to hold back an eight-hundred pound gorilla – and then he hammers across the room again, actually propelling himself ape-like off his fists and then slashing and slamming down at me. It’s all I can do to kick him back, pushing off with my boots, and then I flick into the air like a nimble Tinkerbell and up through the lift-shaft seeking daylight.
My misshapen attacker bursts from the ground having taken a more direct route, but he appears right in front of my solid haymaker that sends him on a surprise vector barreling across my childhood playground and into the big storage shed across from the boulevard shelters. It is dark in there despite the sweltering heat of the bright day and rather than try to discern his fate, I check my surroundings to make sure there aren’t other foes afield, whoever they might be.
But whoever the other fella is, he’s not down for the count. The sound of machine parts and trash crunching resounds across the lot as I scan the other approaches and quickly glance at the sky for good measure. When mystery boy charges out again, I hose him down with an experimental measure of concentrated electrical energy and there’s little surprise to see him shrug it off like a bucket of water. Electro-magnetism of some sort forms part of the basis for his twisted powers, though already I suspect the madman is more sideshow freak than superhuman, and considering the locale, the conclusions feel inevitable.
I do the crouch thing just as he crashes into my personal space, but he’s fast, despite the baggage, and snags my ankle and throws me like a discarded baseball bat into the foundation of the square rotunda. Concrete and dirt explode off me and I feel one of my teeth chip. There is blood from a nick above my eye that closes almost immediately that it opens, little more than a theatrical signifier to show I’m getting my ass kicked. Thanks for that.
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