I HAVE THE fortress drop me downtown, and from there I quickly bust a move to Johnson and a little egg noodle place I know where I wolf down three quick serves along with a couple of cups of scalding Chinese tea. Almost immediately I hit up a street dealer for a chili dog and a Coke and I am still slurping these when the phone reverts to It’s Raining Men on my belt.
I swear, splashing cola in the rush to silence the cell.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“I thought you might want to ask me that,” Tessa says. “That bitch dropped me in the middle of the Renaissance.”
“Really?”
“It’s not cool, dad. I had to show the Pope my breasts to get home.”
Words cannot express my shock, so my tongue simply flails around until Tessa continues.
“Good thing my hunch paid off, anyway. I don’t know where else I was going to find time travel technology in the early sixteenth century.”
“Are you OK?”
“I should ask you the same thing,” Tessa says. “Did you sort things out with Seeker? Did she really think you were making a move on me? Yuck.”
“Uh, yeah, no, things have settled down a bit with her,” I stammer. “Actually, I might be out of the Sentinels for a while. It’s probably for the best.”
“Really? Wow. Is Seeker taking over full-time then?”
“Um, no. Seeker’s probably stepping down as team leader too. . . .”
“How does that make sense?”
“Uh, look,” I say and eye the street knowing there’s way too many people looking at me standing with a ketchup dribble on my gold zed. “There was a letter from your mom’s lawyer. Has she said anything else about her plans to move?”
“You haven’t called her yet?” Tessa half-asks, half-groans.
“Well, there was this little thing called a worldquake. . . .”
“Jesus, you’ll use anything as an excuse, won’t you, dad?”
“I’m on the case, honey. Trust me.”
“OK. And what are you doing now?”
“I’ve got to pop in on an old family friend.”
I hang up and clip the cell away. A gentle shower starts falling and then ceases immediately as clouds cross the sun and disintegrate high above the towers of Atlantic City. In a quick move, I bound into the air and veer sharply south.
Zephyr 6.6 “Wet Dream Masterpiece”
I’M NOT SURE exactly what I was expecting as I cross the Keys and motor for one of the big reclaimed island estates, but a yard littered with FBI agents wasn’t even close on the list.
Tom Hilfiger’s place is a deep south plantation wet dream masterpiece with a vague Tuscan influence, big white plaster-slapped walls around the yard topped by iron spikes and security cameras. The technology obviously wasn’t enough. A double-ended FBI helicarrier menaces on the mansion’s palatial grounds and there’s twenty-odd guys in suits along with the usual crowd of technicians and hangers-on that just screams crime scene. Before I’ve even really eyeballed the vicinity, my paranoid inner voice starts shrieking for me to jet clear of the area, but taking off would mean the answers I seek will remain even more elusive than they already are. Reminding myself I haven’t done anything wrong, I head straight for the main building and slap down in my leathers before a few astonished agents who flex like cats as they go for their guns until they realize who I am.
“Morning,” I smile and gesture with my hand like I’m holding an invisible coffee.
My chuckle falters as I look at some of the close details of the lawn. Pixelated from the sky, the colors made little sense, and nearer to the ground it still takes my eyes several seconds to comprehend the cartoonish aspect to the violence. Technicians are still putting coronial sheets over some of the corpses. The foam suits of the dead cartoon mascots are only mildly gore-splattered. I can’t tell how they were killed. The closest guy is entombed in the costume of a popular TV cat with a magic bag, only his tricks seem to have finally run out. I also don’t think an Uzi was part of his normal routine. A gaudier, blue-clad mascot from Yo Gabba Gabba lies on his side, the headpiece off, a surprised expression on the tough-looking corpse’s face eclipsed by the white canvas as it slips over him.
I turn back to the suits with a wry smile I don’t feel.
“Boss around?”
“That would be me,” Agent Synergy says like the cool glass of water she is, stepping down the faux Eighteenth Century steps from the mansion doors gaping more like the entrance to an ancestral tomb than someone’s house. The tall woman wears the customary gauzy white gown over her white lycra, her badge of office clipped above one of her fashionably dissembled breasts.
“Synergy,” I say in what just passes for a badly scripted moment. “What’s going on?”
“I think I should be asking the questions, Zephyr. Why are you here?”
“I know I didn’t bring doughnuts or anything, but we’re on the same team,” I say right back to her. “Remember?”
Remembering is obviously an unpleasant thing, judging by the face she pulls. Vanguard steps down from the manor house in his high tech yet anachronistic armor and looks about to say something utterly procedural until he glimpses me. The blonde footballer’s face turns from business to a scowl, but like usual, he keeps his mouth mostly closed as he orients himself to the unexpectedly fluid situation.
“Zephyr, please,” Synergy says. “This is a crime scene. Why are you here? Surely it can’t be coincidence.”
“I’m pretty keen on the old coincidence,” I say, but my disarming grin backfires and Synergy casts her glare around like she might corral someone into trying to cuff me. So I give my conciliatory Han Solo grimace and add, “I came to see this Tom Hilfiger guy about something personal. Is he dead?”
The two agents stare at me with reluctance for a short moment. Whatever professional computation needs to take place happens and I feel myself ticked off against a long list of possible suspects. Synergy’s face softens, almost crumples, and she speaks as she looks away.
“It looks like it. We’ll have to ID the body. But you might want to see it.”
“Really?” I say with an astonishment that can only come with finding oneself elevated to the Feds’ inner circle.
“Yeah,” the female agent says tiredly. “Cause of death looks like the same as for your mother.”
*
THE BLACK GUY steps between them and barely blinks at me.
“We’re ready,” the agent known as Tempo says.
Considering myself part of that invite, I follow into the monastic gloom of the building and nod to Annie Black looking a little on the thin side as she keeps it formal with a group of the deceased’s female relatives and a bunch of small children. The colorful balloons and bunting barely dent the somber décor of the interior, the huge egotistical book and trophy cases, the signs a wealthy industrialist obviously relies on to remind him who he is each day when he awakens. From what they tell me, Thomas Hilfiger won’t be roused again.
Perhaps the smell of roast meat is just in my imagination, but I enter the big room with trepidation. I glance once at the miserable crowd held in restraint by the mere presence of a few female agents in pants suits and Miss Black in her customary trench coat with arched collar, her dirty blonde hair cut shorter than I’ve seen in years. I try to wink, but let’s be honest, it’s more of a leer, and in the muggy air it’s like she doesn’t see me and then Tempo gestures for us to hurry up (which makes sense with a name like that).
I follow them to a quiet alcove in the towering main room, but the light glinting off a huge sculpture of an eagle stops me dead. The artwork is gold leaf, the wingspan a good five feet, the raptor’s head in a downward attitude of imminent serious business, beak agape. The tiny bell-like tongue, golden, draws my attention almost before I’ve seen it, and it’s only Synergy’s impatient noises that draw me away to the agents’ impromptu confab.
“I’m ready with the time-sight, Synergy, if you’re able to assist?” Tempo s
ays in an impossibly rich voice.
The female agent nods and takes my hand and his, leaving Vanguard to hesitate joining the circle on the other side. We look at each other a moment.
“Just get on with it, you fools,” Synergy says, and then he and I close the circuit in as manly a fashion as we can.
“I thought I was going to see the body?” I say.
“You can see the murder, first,” Tempo says.
The feeling slowly builds as a directionless light source casts the entire area in an unnatural glow that draws only certain tones of the rich carpentry and green drapes into the mote-heavy air. We are seeing light that isn’t really there, conflicting with the angles of the day. There is a suggestion of noises, muffled gunfire I suspect, but I know the sounds are illusory and there’s no need to panic as the nameless agents and the frightened onlookers vanish from the scene. Time plays backwards and forwards at the same time and some of those same people, mere partygoers once again, move through the chamber like phantoms, blurs of blue and red and well-heeled flesh stretched and ribbon-y in the air like on a camera’s long exposure.
At Tempo’s silent instruction we turn our eyes to the sparkling doorway and a burly, silver-clad figure steps through with molten hands in enormous silver gloves, a metal helm shielding his skull and most the upper part of his face with a distinctly 1950s sci-fi look. At the same time, moving our eyes to the grandiose swirl of staircase at the far back of the room, a time-staggered image appears of the man in question, Hilfiger looking very much the terrified older playboy as he clutches the thick banister and nearly falls as a spark of too-bright light hits him and explodes.
The three agents concentrate on the wisp of smoke that rises from the man as he gawps something unheard at the intruder and then his whole body gives way to the perilously intense flames.
Me, I’m still riveted on the doorway and the merest slip of a dark shadow beyond the frame as the deadly intruder lowers his arm, his work done.
Her face appears like in a photo of a haunting, the writhing black hair a curtain against which the hollow face is a black-and-white painting by Munch. No sooner do we see her than she is gone, like the suggestion of a dream she has always been, but in truth a nightmare, the demoness, Yoko Ono.
Zephyr 6.7 “Reveal The Man Beneath”
“WELL FUCK, THAT was intense,” Vanguard says as much to himself as anyone.
I have to concur, though I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing it. Still tingling from the vision I’ve seen, I turn dry-lipped back to the others and they are already breaking formation to stride across the chamber to the place on the stairs where the carcass lays. I follow them like in a fog and again pause by the huge gold eagle as agents are told it’s safe now to take the family outside.
I glance at the backs of the three super-powered officers as they move up the stairs and instead put my hand into the eagle’s mouth and press the gold button disguised as the bird’s tongue. There’s a nearly silent buzz and then the wood panel behind me snickers apart.
The first thing I notice about the lighted doorway is the sound of Hotel California playing like from an old timer’s radio.
A washed-out lime green light comes from the darkness, just enough to illuminate a metal ramp big enough to drive a car up, which makes sense when I glimpse the shape of what was probably once considered a futuristic-looking automobile with a dirty great tarpaulin slung over it.
Once I move my eyes from the concealed vehicle, the scale and scope of the hidden garage is breath-taking. There are upper walkways and a metal gangplank and rows of dormant computers and trophies and display cases and walls peppered with framed photographs and first stop is a glass-enclosed pedestal with a Crimson Cowl head upon it, and my head spins at the reality of this lair, the headquarters of some crime-fighter the world has inexplicably forgotten, because I am damned sure I’ve never seen the blue and gold space suit and helmet that stands on display in various iterations down the back of the chamber. Ignoring the white sheets over some things and the layers of dust, something suggests a kind of readiness to the various costumes. As I walk past the concealed car and closer, I quickly ken there’s different versions for hostile climates, night work, underwater, formal occasions, smart casual.
“Look at this place,” I hear Synergy’s startled voice come from the ramp as she and her fellow agents follow me down.
By the time they have the sheet off the retro sedan, I’m up on one of the walkways looking at the photographs, black and whites of men in costume standing with presidents, a veritable United Nations of different colors and ethnicities in a fellowship characterized by underwear outside their tights and a kink for dressing up. There are some faces I know – I recognize my father, Titanium Girl, Catchfire my mom – but something about these other identities suggests they are secondary to a core repeating group. Finally, I come upon a framed photo of the twelve of them standing on the White House lawn, a Vietnam-era helicopter and armed soldiers keeping watch in the background, the signature on the corner unrecognizable. And I think about the photo book from my mother’s house and wonder with sudden heart-clutching sincerity how badly I wanted to see what was within.
There are walls and walls of this stuff. I mosey back and forth along the walkway and take in posters and postcards and mint condition stamps and news pages of people and even places I’ve simply never seen before. There’s a neatly preserved box of Weetabix with three goofy-looking British supers on it – I’m presuming they’re Poms since one’s practically clad all over in the Union Jack – and a graffiti-looking poster with another bunch of tough guys apparently called The 101ers. This curious anonymity seemingly extends across the Atlantic, for everywhere I look there are famous faces I don’t recognize and news print detailing derring-do I doubt even my fan-girl daughter could remember. It strikes me this Aladdin’s cave of superhero memorabilia only seems like a lair because of its hidden nature. Inside, it’s more a museum to the forgotten – heroes from some weird and outré parallel. Certainly nothing from our own.
I glance quickly at the Feds, but they are too lost in Wonderland to pay any attention to me, so I lift the photo from the wall and pop the back, neat as any kleptomaniac as I extricate the old picture and slide it through the zipper on my chest. The empty frame hanging on the wall can beg the question all it likes. In a treasure trove like this, the agents will be fielding inquiries until the Apocalypse.
A short time later I am with Tempo and Synergy once again. The time-sight has apparently confirmed the deceased was the man in costume known as Avenger, though none of the agents have heard of him either.
“How’s that possible?” Synergy asks in such a tone of voice it shows she’s genuinely spooked. “I mean, I don’t know about you, Po, but I’ve pretty much memorized the names in our files going back forty years and there’s no Avenger and I don’t recognize most these other guys either.”
“There’s got to be some kind of explanation,” Tempo says curtly, perhaps more concerned than his colleague that he’s in a freelancer’s company.
“Either way, I guess this means you were on the money to be skeptical about Catchfire’s death, Zephyr,” Synergy says. “I’m sorry about that. But if there’s more you know than you’re telling us, you really need to say.”
I shrug, and frankly at the moment I am a little unsure about what I know. Vanguard walks over as much like a cowboy as any man could in five hundred pounds of techno-organic battle armor. He cocks his gauntlet at me.
“Should I give him the good news?” he asks Synergy.
The black woman flicks her eyes away as if mildly concerned.
“No need. It’s a state matter. None of our concern.”
“Still,” Vanguard says with an asshole grin, but I’m not paying attention at the time. “I wish I could be there to see his face when he finds out.”
I smile, that pained grimace thing I do when I don’t have the strength to make it believable.
“It’s
been nice hanging with you all, but I’ve got to return some videos.”
Tempo says something I don’t catch and then I am free of the Avenger’s lair, taking one last look behind before bounding outside and past the dead children’s entertainment and then I am up and away with my purloined photograph close to my racing heart.
*
I CATCH UP with the castle outside of Newark and manage to get into the ready room without anyone sneaking up on me. Some of the monks have been playing housemaid and things are tidy again with the slightest hint of camphor and I move to the middle of the room as the black glass table sparkles into quiescence like the vast and glimmering alien intelligence it sometimes resembles, a single spark of light on the darkened surface like the eye of some great interdimensional whale winking at me from its slumber with a knowing, secretive grin.
I slip the photograph from my costume and turn it over, noticing for the first time there’s a helpful list in faded pencil naming the two rows of oddball characters from long ago: the Ottoman, Lord Electric, Darkbane, Torpedo, Tempest, Aquarian – these names leap up like negative images of a knowledge stolen from the world and which the table soon confirms. Again, personally I recognize none of them until I come to the end of the second row and there he is (I flip the picture to confirm and my father’s face looks out at me through his fashionable pince-nez, the stylized band-leader costume transformed now to resemble a militaristic priest, his haircut shaved savagely short above his ears), The Preacher, as he must’ve abbreviated his name by then. The year is 1974 – the year I was born. And standing beside him is another figure, the futuristic helmet and Golden Age body armor that must’ve seemed so impressive at the time, but which hasn’t kept up with its owner’s growing bulk. In ’74, he called himself Arsenal. This morning I believed he killed a man, a former colleague, though the world has heard of neither of them.
I place the photo on the table. I guess my thoughts are focused if unspoken and associations immediately leap into play. Only where I’d normally see images and information pouring across the screen like a Tourette’s sufferer spewing profanities, here there are just grey spaces, emptinesses where data has been edited from the universe by an unknown means and hand.
Zephyr Box Set 1 Page 56