“Jesus Christ.”
“I am tempted to have a C3PO moment with you, but even my stilted interactions with your species tells me humor is not appropriate to the moment,” O’Clock says.
“You saved my fucking life,” I gasp and stagger away and throw up, hands on the piss-soaked thighs of my leather pants.
“Correct,” the robot replies. “In the wisdom of the ancient druids and the philosophy of universal balance I strive to embody, saving your life seemed an appropriate response to whatever it was you’d call what Nightwind was doing.”
“Trying to kill me,” I say, and it comes out like a sob and I’m not terribly proud of myself.
“I’m not sure there was any actual trying going on.”
“I don’t need the lesson in grammar.”
“Forgive me.”
“You, robot?” I look up and grudgingly laugh. “Anything.”
“Ah,” O’Clock replies and his weird concentric brass eyes whir and contract and open up again. “It seems then you ‘owe me one,’ if I read this situation right.”
I nod, and possibly say, “I do.”
“Ah then. Bully for me.”
I double over and curse a bit more and spit a few more quarts of bloody phlegm from my mouth and touch my swollen jaw and split eyebrow and stand and decide there’s probably not much dignity or point left to holding on to the half-a-cup of pee pressing in my bladder and I simply let go and lift my gaze to the impossible height of the tower and the one black, jagged ventricle that nearly spelled my doom.
“I am so going to fucking kill that guy, it’s not even funny.”
Zephyr 7.1 “There Is A Darkness”
THE THICK CLOUD cover suits me fine as I gun the throttle on the Triumph and kill the lights, turning off the seedy main strip and angling the bike down the laneway leading to the back of MacGeraghty’s Bar. Loren has a firm grip on my waist as I gut the motor and cruise into a shadowed space beside an overflowing dumpster, rats scurrying in our wake as tentative moonbeams break through and are swallowed up again.
As Lioness, Loren dismounts from the chopper like from a sex act, and I pull my heavy motorcycle boots over the machine and tuck back the tail of my leather overcoat, check the snug fit of the Zorro bandana and stroke the russet goatee she’s encouraged me to grow. The metal washers sewn into the knuckles and palm of the black fingerless gloves are heavy, though I’m getting used to them now – likewise the metal sewn into the knees of my leather pants. On my thighs and crotch there is Kevlar, and above that a ballistic vest straight from eBay letting me keep my arms bare under the coat to compensate for the almost sticky, humid night.
I indicate the rusted ladder and Lioness goes ahead of me, something cocky in her wide-hipped walk adopted just for tonight – an overt show of the confidence I know she doesn’t feel. Nonetheless, it’s a fine view as I follow her up, the maroon leathers clinging to her round ass, the twin nightsticks holstered across her mostly bare back with the handles disappearing into the chaos of her honey-brown hair. Under the wan light, with the streetlights along the waterfront on the fritz as usual, we’re monochrome avengers as we pad across the tin warehouse roof with me wincing as I try to compensate for my heavier bulk, exaggerated by the extra protection I’m not accustomed to needing.
“You still sure about this?” I whisper as we reach the edge of the roof and another fire escape, the back door to the dealer’s bar below us, cigarette smoke and vomit like the spices of India thick in the air.
“It’s this or nothing,” Loren quietly replies.
As if responding to our unvoiced fears, a siren starts in the distance, far enough and dopplering away rapidly – not likely to trouble anyone we might visit tonight. All the same, as unregistered masks we’re on a priority list and I for one don’t want to have to explain the situation, unmasked in some grimy, junkie-besieged Van Buren station house.
“OK,” I say finally, as much to myself as my accomplice.
We have practiced this. I grab the rails and swing out, letting my weight carry me down the rusty bars until I clutch for a hold at the last moment and my legs snap around and my boots together take the guy with the cigarette in the middle of the chest and drive him back and through the wooden door.
I am inside just like that, the red glow of the Miller sign above the mirrored bar a distinct environment from the night air outside. There is no hesitation. Just to the side there’s a bearded guy with a Glock on his belt and I grab his fingers before he can move and twist and they snap and as I hold his arm straight, before he can even scream, I bring my other palm up and destroy his elbow, and then it’s the final cruelty, twisting his broken arm behind his back and he gives up and passes out before he can even really voice his confusion, shock, pain and alarm.
I turn away from him and lay hard karate chops with my metal-weighted hands into the neck and face of a tough holding a pool cue and still staring at the half-million deal going down in the middle of his table.
Frank Vincent Morales, aka Vinnie Morals, is the quickest of the bunch. He has the twelve gauge up as a nightstick spins through the air and takes him in the face, busting not just his nose but the bones that keep his upper teeth in, and he drops back, bottles and ornamental beersteins and big decorative glass schooners and shit clattering around him and the gun goes off and finally spooks the other three guys into action.
I do a quick shuffle and my enormous boot catches a young-looking kid in a linen suit in the middle of the chest and he hits the bar hard enough we can hear the vertebrae crack. Loren’s on my left, twirling her other baton like a cheerleader from Hell and she snaps a big bald motherfucker’s forearm as he reaches inside his Italian suit for a Tec-9 and the sound the hanbo makes as it lifts and then rebounds from the dude’s skull seems to telegraph across the room and reverberate as the final biker guy draws his switchblade and I capture his wrist and turn and swing my superior weight into him and draw him over my shoulder in a judo throw that puts him on the ground with a broken arm and dislocated shoulder.
After this, I am up and over the bar as Morales spits teeth and his black, beady eyes dart around and I pluck the street sweeper from his mitts and throw it to Loren, who coolly starts ejecting shells from the slide.
I lift the dealer by his shirt and feel buttons and his gold chain pop.
“Is this everything, Frank?”
“Wh-who the fuck are you?” the dealer splutters.
I smile in an unpleasant way and let him fall back now I know he’s unarmed. Then, still smiling, I slide the baseball bat from its saddle upside-down on my back.
“I’m the Devil’s Advocate, motherfucker.”
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.
*
IT IS MONDAY, they tell me.
I only have the Friday paper, my torso taped from hips to nips, to guide my admittedly decreased interest in world affairs. I can’t even summon much venom for Paragon and Jocelyn, who have postponed their wedding as a mark of respect to the thousands dead from the recent worldquake tragedy, though Sal Doro from the Post has it that their venue of choice lost its chapel during the tremors and they’re waiting on a six-to-eight week rebuild. It’s front page in a city home to forty million people, with famine, flood and pestilence afoot as usual on their dark missions in the rest of the world.
Then again, I usually start with the sports pages.
There are magazines, though, and the Internet, but apart from the pain of sitting upright, I find myself without much appetite for the online world. Like the letters now opened beside my cot in the Wallachian fortress that has become my hospital and which I know I must soon depart, there’s little solace in what news it can bring.
I’ve missed Christmas, in my convalescence.
Although every muscle in my body aches, there is not ten minutes that go by where I don’t hesitantly flex and try to summon even a hint of my former powers. They are as good as gone forever, for all I know. Me, who craved so badly for life
just a few days before, now lies listlessly upon the sheets that might as well be my grave for all the enthusiasm I bring to their occupation.
There is a darkness here, and not just in the momentary flashbacks to whatever black science the Wallachian monks used to stabilize my internal bleeding and save me from a brain dead coma. It’s like someone’s flicked a switch and thrown my world into shades of grey, an actualization of a depression from which, like depression itself, I have absolutely no power to lift myself.
Loren comes, inserting herself hesitantly into one of those moments where I am paying so little attention to things I might as well be dead for all the difference it would make, and suddenly there she is smelling of blossom and shampoo and womanhood and she kneels beside the bed in her new maroon leather duds, only the inexpressible delicacy of her cleavage able to rouse me from my yawnsome inner torpor.
“How are you?” she asks. “Are they . . . are you any better?”
“No, babe,” I reply and sigh and think about turning away except for all the effort it would require. “There’s no sign of them.”
“I was asking how you were,” she gently chides. “I’m interested in you, not your powers, Joe.”
“Don’t kid me, Loren. I’m worried about them too. Jesus. What are the others saying?”
We don’t even touch on her missing powers. They are gone for good and she seems happier for it.
Loren says nothing for a while and simply strokes my brow. It’s like the best sponge bath, yet for all that I just wish she’d just stop and speak. Something of the tightening of my brows tells her that.
“Smidgeon’s in a coma,” she says at last. “Mastodon’s out of surgery and should be fine. No one knows anything about his powers. Manticore says his are still out. I guess he’s being brave, you know, not saying anything, but you know what we’re all thinking.”
“I don’t know what that bitch hit us with,” I say, far too wistful for my own liking, my voice with a faraway quality I wish I could blame on the drugs.
Loren stands and fusses with something. I scan her new costume again and despite everything, it’s hard to repress a smile.
“Any sign of Vulcana?” I ask.
“No.”
“So where’s the katana?”
She turns, the playfulness of her girl persona evident without the Lioness mask. The two nightsticks in their holsters across her bare back click gently together as her tawny mane swishes in the antiseptic gloom.
“I told you I’d probably kill myself with one of those.”
“You could do me a favor and kill me at the same time,” I remark. “I don’t suppose I could survive being stabbed if what the monks say is true about my metabolism.”
“What did they say?”
“Like I guessed before,” I tell her. “Without powers, it’s still left me with thicker bones, wind resistance, heightened musculature, but that just puts me at the upper end of the human spectrum. After those moves that fucking asswipe Nightwind pulled on me, it shows my speed’s shot. If anything, I’m slower than I should be because I’m so damned heavy.”
Loren’s face darkens and I know it’s the reference to my attacker rather than my ebullient potty mouth.
“They told me,” she hesitates, meaning the monks were gossiping again. “They told me he was your brother?”
“Honey, what I don’t know about my family could fill a cookbook,” I answer. “One of these days I may bore you with the whole ordeal. Who knows, it might help me get it straight in my own head.”
“He’s been sleeping with Vulcana,” Loren says. “That’s why he was here. Connie acts like he’s just some hanger-on in the daytime, but Brasseye says he’s been coming in, on and off, for more than a week.”
“It’s all just to get at me, I’m guessing,” I say. “But Connie hasn’t been right since her arm came off and you can’t tell me you haven’t noticed it. There’s something not right about these kooks you hang out with, Loren, and I don’t mean the guys with their underpants outside their tights.”
“Yeah, well, these ‘kooks’ and I won’t have much to do with each other soon,” she says.
I give an inquiring look, but say nothing, passingly aware I am sitting up and have my legs dangling now over the edge of the bed. A positive sign, a doctor in a parallel universe might call it.
“I’m not Seeker any more, Joe. They’ve already brought the new girl in.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. There’s a few things I have to show her, but after that, I guess I’m out.”
“But you’re, what is it, Lioness, now?”
“I really don’t know about that,” she says and looks sadly away. “I did it for you, but I think the Sentinels . . . I think it’s gonna be a while. . . .”
“Shit,” I say slowly and find myself watching her porcelain profile, her perfectly upturned nose. “So you’re in the same boat as me after all.”
Zephyr 7.2 “Anxious, Wounded, Hopeful”
IT IS MIDNIGHT inside the clockwork fortress.
I have read the letter three times and can’t quite bring myself to put it down. Of all the rich and varied things in my life to consider surreal, the half-dozen jaggedly typed lines somehow beat them all.
Back in the day, I used to tell the other masks I was a writer in my day job. I had the couch and the stubble and the late sleeping and the finicky attachment to words that comes with the territory and for a while there, probably just before Beth gave up trying to encourage me out of the doldrums and to stop mooching on her, I set myself some tasks, cleaned up my portfolio and put a few freelance submissions out there. I was more like a well-read guy without any real ideas of my own than a bona fide prospective author – God knows, there are no half-finished manuscripts apart from the disaster we no longer talk about that was the Zephyr: The Motion Picture screenplay – and pretty soon this reality came back to bite me on the end in rejection letter after letter after email after straight out slap in the face.
In this world at least, a guy who can channel lightning, beat the speed of sound and ignore bullets has more direct ways of establishing self-worth and it wasn’t long before I put the whole writer thing back into the perspective it deserved, as a handy cover story for when my fellow costumed nuts and I were knocking back cocktails at Gliders and divulging candid fictions about ourselves and each other.
Only the letter in my hand now tells a different story.
Dear Joseph, the cockhead editor writes. First, you’ll have to excuse my extreme unprofessionalism. It seems one of our old mail bags was misplaced by an intern when we were moving into our offices about three years ago. Your piece on the Yankees was in there, but I’ve got to say I am still impressed. It holds up pretty good even after all this time, though maybe that says more about the state of baseball at the moment than anything else. I would be interested in any other pieces you might have about our great American game, along similar lines to your submission and mixing observations about our city’s caped crusaders with today’s league players and pithy insights about current affairs and the latest game results as you have in this piece. If you could show you were able to stitch these together pretty regularly, we could maybe talk about a column. Apologies, but I couldn’t find an email address on your CV. Please call me ASAP to discuss.
Fucker. Come along and throw my life into chaos by suggesting a perfectly reasonable line of work?
My hands shake. I put the letter next to the steel pitcher and take a sip from a mug that shows a cartoon of ex-President Jeb Bush smiling and hugging one of the aliens from Predator.
It’s not enough to say the letter knocks my equilibrium. Even for a writer, it’s hard to put into words the feeling, the sheer unconscious weight of significance attached to such acknowledgment, an external validation of your worth as a person all quite ludicrously wrapped up in some lottery where one, randomly-produced syntagmatic burst of creativity lands miraculously in front of the very right, most highly subjective pair of
eyes you need and there’s a synergy, an acceptance, where on so many other occasions there would be nothing. I am a guy who made a name for himself by not revealing my name, by performing feats I can only acknowledge with a mask over my face and a quick getaway up my sleeve. Who would think it was even credible to be literally close to bulletproof and yet so fucking vulnerable?
I fold the paper away, calmer for the half-dozen tears I disavow and whose origins I can’t really explain, so many factors rife at present that picking one is like firing an arrow into a crowd of pedophiles.
All I can say is that a good whiff of pathos is like nature’s own sedative. I turn over on the bed and pull the cover to my chin and only wince briefly as my ribs flare and within minutes I am stumbling through the white mist of my own sleepytime imaginings for the moment pleasantly free and untroubled.
*
THE PURPLE GUY with the Mohawk takes me by surprise as I step into the ready room. He takes one look at me and drinks in the jeans and stained t-shirt and gives a subtle double-take at the domino mask I felt too naked to appear without.
“Uh, who are you?” he asks.
“I should ask you the same thing.”
“Stormhawk. I’m Stormhawk. Smidgeon asked me to come.”
“Smidgeon’s awake?”
“Awake?” He tilts his head at me.
“Sorry, I’ve been out of the loop. I’m Zephyr. I heard Smidge was in a coma.”
“That was a couple of days ago,” Stormhawk replies.
He can’t quite keep the tone from his voice that tells me my name’s been discussed in bitchy circles.
“He’s up and about now. Actually, uh, I’m meant to be here for an interview for the team.”
Stormhawk wears a face mask despite the purple skin and whitish hair-do. His costume is dark blue and purple and he has an elaborate-looking plum-colored cloak that makes me think he’s never been smacked around much. He looks at me expectantly and I smile, faux clueless, and shrug as I move around toward the magic table.
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