The one chance she had at happiness for twenty-five years and it was a lie.
*
I MOMENTARILY FORGET about my father, a bit like how we manage to forget most days we could drop dead at any minute, anything from undiagnosed heart defects to the work of micro-cosmic particles punching their way through space able to tear us and our miserable souls away from the planet and all life.
Loren is standing with her back to me, but she turns about in her short, off-white hospital gown as I enter the room. I am shocked to see how normal she looks – or something close to it. She’s hollow-eyed and her hair is loose, scattered just like you’d expect from someone who has had more pressing issues than personal grooming. Normal really is the word, but it’s fair to say I’ve been spoilt. Normal is almost an insult compared to the godly being I’ve known as Loren, the Seeker.
One hand moves nervously to the inside of her opposite elbow and Loren takes half a step, nothing more, her eyes drawn to the floor as I gawp from the doorway. My gaze pores over her blotchy complexion, her halo of bed hair, the cracked lips and bleary eyes I once called caramel and are now simple hardware store brown. Seeker’s aura has departed for good, a blessing with one final get-out-of-jail-free card, it seems, and the glow of Loren’s perfection smokes like a candle extinguished in the wind.
“Baby. . . .”
“Joseph.”
She moves away rather than toward me. Not a good sign. Her skittish posture reminds me of a junkie, nails scrabbling at the habit as she breaks the briefest of eye contacts and goes around to the end of the bed and curls both hands on the white metal bed-post.
“I can’t believe you’re alive,” I say and walk into the room, awkwardness be damned. “Are you . . . OK? Fuck. I know that’s a totally retarded thing to ask, but you’ve gotta cut me some slack, baby. I’m still playing catch-up here.”
“He killed me, Joe.”
I pull up, spooked, and nod.
“Arsenal –”
“He killed me. As good as killed me. And where were you?”
I suck in a slow breath.
“Baby, I –”
“Stop calling me baby!” Loren all but screams.
Tears dribble from her eyes and her hands go as white as the enamel pipe as she clutches the infrastructure.
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, what’s that for Joe?”
“Anything. Everything,” I say.
Tentative steps, like cornering a wild animal or a naughty child. I lift my hand.
“Sorry for anything that might’ve hurt you.”
She sniffs. “Too late.”
I move in and think it’s all going to be good. She’s crumpling into my arms and my hand moves to smooth the back of her head, but my heart’s hammering with disquiet and she feels strange, foreign, a stranger. Even with Seeker’s powers gone, as Lioness, there was a vitality, an essence now missing from this woefully prosaic, depleted being – this girl, whose love I can feel draining away almost faster than my own.
“Loren?”
She looks up. Watery eyes betray her thoughts and mine as well. Her lip trembles in that great tradition of Hollywood actresses everywhere, the helplessness of her inner conflict matched only by the shit-fight her life’s become in the universe outside her skull. We never really ponder how it is we become ourselves and not somehow someone else in life’s great eschatological roulette, how we incarnate into the one historico-biological entity that we’re then shackled to like a warden with the asylum’s worst inmate on day release for seventy or eighty years, if we’re lucky. Here up close I see that private life more alive and aflame in those pallid brown eyes than ever I registered when we were together and empowered, yet the more real she has become – and less fantastical – the more pain for us both.
“Don’t say it, Joe,” she says, tiredly drawing away.
Any fear she might collapse on me is gone and instead Loren simply looks exhausted and very, very disappointed.
“Just don’t lie to me. Go.”
“Go?”
I say it with a howl, almost convincing myself I really am as irate as I sound.
“Please, Joe. Zephyr. Just go.”
“I love you,” I say and gulp.
“The hell you do, Joseph. Please. I asked you not to say that.”
“I didn’t know I was going to,” I tell her.
Loren shrugs. She won’t look at me. She walks from the end of the bed to the chair across the room like a cripple would, supporting herself on the furniture in-between. As she sits, the air comes out of her like from the sails of a plague ship and her lashes remain low and I realize she ain’t ever gonna to look up at me again, at least not with the eyes I want.
The door bangs closed behind me.
Zephyr 9.6 “My Nemesis Befriended”
THAT WAS A terrible scene back there, Joey-boy. What’s going on?
“You tell me, pops,” I snap as I march down the hospital-white halls.
Hang on, lad. You left that beautiful girl back there thinking you don’t love her. What’s going on?
“I told her I loved her.”
Well yeah, you told her that. It’s not true though, is it?
“Please. Leave me alone.”
I ask an orderly for directions to an exit and wind up on another roof-top, a nice view of the missile array as I startle a few doctors smoking between shifts, the low hum of the air-conditioning a veritable symphony compared to the sterile torpor inside the Foucauldian nightmare that is White Nine.
I move off by myself and eye the stark horizon, crenulated with the silhouettes of the other buildings making up the complex on Rykers. The complete non-presence of my father inside my skull weighs on me heavily.
“I did love her,” I say quietly, just another patient having a word with himself. “I can’t explain it. I’m the fucking Antichrist, OK?”
You know that’s not true.
“Well actually I don’t,” I reply softly. “It sounded pretty convincing coming from Twilight. Explained a whole heap, to be honest.”
What, that Nancy-boy?
“World’s changed since you, uh, went inside, pa.”
Pa? You called me “pa”. Never thought anyone would.
“Probably didn’t expect your kid to have a Yankee accent, either.”
True. No surprise though. I was knobbing a United Nations of prime, A-grade parahuman tottie, my boy. Wouldn’t shock me if you were made of chocolate and had a tail, Joe.
“That’s very . . . honest of you,” I say and find I can’t really do anything but make a sort of goofy face, admitting anything Lennon says that sounds sexist or off-color’s really nothing compared to things I’ve said and done, pretty much all of which he’s witnessed if not enjoyed as a sort of de facto privilege. My thoughts trail back to Loren, sitting downstairs somewhere with misery etched into her no-longer supernaturally infused DNA.
A nice girl, Joey-lad. She deserves better.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” I say.
And I take to the air.
*
MY FATHER HAS a craving for Mexican food, which I rarely eat, he complains inside my head, so we – or I should say I – swing out over the city and angle downtown like a cruise missile with the munchies, and true enough I am hungry as an ox or a cow or whatever the frigging saying is, so we amble over Mexicola, which used to be part of the old Bronx, ruined Manhattan maddeningly close as we, I mean I, land on the potholed asphalt of the barrio.
After more refried beans than a man really has any sense to eat, I drink a jug of cerveza and engage in petty small-talk with the voice inside my head. The tattooed waitresses and the zombie punk gringos eyeball me, a real-life superhero to all intents and purposes writing himself off at the cheap eats, though of course the fizzy beer barely touches the sides, so to speak. It doesn’t stop me trying. Fortunately my constitution evaporates most the fluid and turns it into mystical power juice or however the hell it all works, otherwise
I’d be using my super-speed for the bathroom.
So, not even the slightest part tipsy, it’s close to sunset when I bust it from my private booth and get a signal on the Enercom phone. Using a fake name I get through two layers of the Atlantic City Post newsroom before Nate Simon answers.
“I’m surprised you’re at work. Couldn’t you be claiming stress leave?”
“What, and miss the story of the year? It’s not every day you nearly get your head handed to you by a real-life hero gone bad,” the other guy replies.
“I guess I should’ve IDed myself first,” I tell him. “It’s Zephyr.”
“Oh.”
I can hear my alleged half-brother trying to think up a ret-con and peddling only air.
“Forget it, Simon. I know what a smarmy fuck you are. You’re Nightwind, after all – the human PR stunt.”
“Like you can talk, Zephyr.”
“We need to speak.”
“What are we doing? Playing mah jong?”
“I mean really speak. Mano-a-guano. Tonight.”
“Yeah. OK.”
He sounds dubious, which I guess comes with being dangled out of a thirty-floor office window. I should know. He did similar to me.
“There’s a building across from the Post. Five floors. There’s a Budweiser sign on the roof. I’ll see you at ten,” my erstwhile nemesis says.
Then the little fucker hangs up on me.
This could turn into a real bitch.
*
THE AIR BREAKS around me as I funnel the tension, throwing myself across the city in a heady mix of particle acceleration and telekinesis. The vibrating molecules bounce off the unconscious shield of under-control air particles and what force gets through is countered by my super-dense physiognomy, eyeballs that resist a nail gun (as I’ve found out), skin not thicker but more dense than a rhino’s hide.
Beneath us, those parts of the city that played host to the most recent alien invasion are band-aided by civil work crews, police barricades, volunteer emergency service teams and local church groups crewing hot-coffee-and-sandwich stalls. So much of the architecture is under tarpaulins at some locations it’s like a view from space of one gigantic crime scene. Certainly there were bodies enough for every agency.
I land at the end of the street I grew up on and I’m not really sure of the point of the visit given Lennon was trapped inside me the whole time, so I’m sure the place has an eerie sort of nostalgia for him too, but there’s something about the prospect of getting my mitts on Ono again that makes me want to drop by, looking for the haunts of ghosts past, wondering about the woman my nemesis befriended and murdered so she could impersonate her practically from the moment I was brought to New York, as it was known then, from the wacky island on which I was conceived.
Lennon feels it with me. Like some doddery granddad, he peers out through my eyes at the half-completed build and is basically lost for words, which is a new one for me. I mentally indicate a few landmarks of significance as we trudge up the drive and I dismiss his concerns about being spotted in uniform. I find I can barely muster a damn, which is just as well as there’s no one about in the cool evening air except the occasional town car rolling past and idling into a well-heeled drive. I barely noticed this area get so up-market, like my downfall is some perverse indicator of a personal zeitgeist.
How’re you going to finish all this off then, lad?
“I don’t know,” I mutter under-breath. “You any good for a loan, old man?”
I’m surprised and disappointed to realize Lennon doesn’t have any zillions stashed away for a rainy day, growing exponentially in the years of his absence.
Anything I might’ve had was lost when fuck-face called in the Editors.
There’s a bitterness to his Liverpudlian twang that I decide to leave alone, despite the classic opportunity to rub the old man’s nose in his self-abuse. Instead, we stare at the open plan replacement of the abode I once knew, more tarpaulins covering things and puddles replete from the recent rains. It’s depressing, and suddenly I wonder what the hell I’m doing here.
“I’m getting hungry again,” I whisper, not to myself.
There’s a few hours to go yet, so we crack across the Hudson and I still the debate about what we’re eating by insisting on pizza from Clive’s.
Zephyr 9.7 “Physical Therapy”
EVEN AT MACH, the sound of a burglar alarm has a particular zing I’m not likely to miss, especially if I’m in the market for taking my frustrations out on some lowlife while impressing my dad at the same time.
I land in downtown Grant, lights spilling from a megaplex like the long-lost loves of the sirens issuing from a slew of police cruisers around it. A dozen cops are doing the whole cliché thing, rocking out with their Glocks out, waiting for the SWAT team to arrive and get a bead on the bad guys holed up inside.
I tap a balding, seagull-complexioned older sergeant on the shoulder and ask for a précis.
“Four little sons of bitches. Thought they’d hit the weekly cash take at the megaplex and it all went to shit. They’ve got two ushers in there, but they’re armed to the teeth.”
“Shit. OK.”
I think about something subtle, but that’s not really me. Instead, I shoot into the air and then down again through the second floor balcony and a vacant Barnes and Noble, crashing into about the middle of the candy bar just in time to see some Latino hoodlum gutsing himself on Coke slushies. I Tase him good and proper (I hear that’s a verb now) and he goes back into the popcorn machine to the orgiastic accompaniment of things smashing. It makes the goon I didn’t even notice working a crowbar on a cash machine make a noise like a donkey, so I light him up as well.
There’s a very feminine scream from behind the smoked glass counter that draws my eye from the fact these creeps are armed with paintball guns. Next thing, I smash through into the office area of the cinema foyer and dodging as the next little hardass tries to pepper me with brightly-colored yellow globs of paint. I don’t check my momentum, introducing him to the row of shelves behind to the accompaniment of popping ribs.
I turn, sans quips, and eye the two teenage girls bound ankle-to-wrist kneeling on the floor of the office, the remaining armed desperado caught in the act of lowering his coveralls around his work boots.
“Jeez, dude,” I say, eyeing his member. “That’s a weak effort.”
I punch the guy in the face before he can even recover and something vital goes snap in his skull bones and he slumps, rebounding from a computer desk so hard that he might need physical therapy to recover. Then I kneel beside the two sobbing girls, thinking about my own daughter, for chrissakes, and snap the cable ties keeping them together.
The girls are so distraught they cling on to me, weeping and thanking me over and over again, but apart from my nascent boner, I can’t help thinking about the inevitable media attention and right now Zephyr with twin fifteen-year-olds on him isn’t the angle I’m really going for. So I gently disengage, smoothing back one of the girl’s curly hair, caught for a moment by her likeness to Candace.
The grief – inexplicable, incandescent as she was herself – hits me like a freight train and tears start spilling from my face like from a tap.
It’s enough to give the girls pause. They check themselves mid-freakout and dab their eyes, moving away from me as I go from kneeling to all fours, hot tears staining the worn-thin grey carpet.
“Shit. Shit. Sorry girls,” I manage to bark after a couple of cringe-inducing instants. “I’m just so, you know, freaking angry at these perverts. Such nice girls like you.”
They look at me in horror.
“He smells funny,” one says to the other.
I can only nod. I guess they’re right. It’s been a while since wash day.
*
A POLICE LIAISON escorts the girls out into the glare of the TV cameras and I follow, irritable for too many reasons to count, pushing aside the metal bollards as the ex-hostages slip away onto a p
olice escort bus leaving me like the sacrificial lamb for these so-called journalists. Leeza and a bunch of other plucked, waxed, fine-browed bimbettes thrust microphones in my face that I bat away like flies, frustration reaching a slow, even boil.
“Get that goddamned thing out of my face.”
“Zephyr, what’s the latest on Loren?”
“Are her powers gone?”
“Is it true Candace McArthur’s parents are holding you responsible for her death?”
“Zephyr, what’s the rumor you’re considering a singing career . . . again?”
“What do you say to accusations you used excessive force on your one-time adversary Negator, Zephyr?”
“I still don’t know what the bleep you’re talkin’ about,” I reply.
A cute brunette with milkmaid freckles sticks her thing in front of me.
“Zephyr, they’re saying Nate Simon’s going to sue. Your response?”
“My response is to say, what’s your name, cute-thing?”
I grin and wink and the flustered reporter doesn’t know what else to say – which is to say mission accomplished. I push through the throng like a man trying to hail a taxi, though really I’m just looking for a little clearance for take-off.
A rugged-looking blonde with a chin like the surface of the moon covered in brown make-up pushes aside a few of her peers and jogs up in steady heels, no mean feat, her begrudging cameraman behind.
“Zephyr, there’s still no word about some of the costumed adventurers missing since before Christmas, including your one-time colleague Samurai Girl, and now we hear The Blur is missing too. What can you tell us?”
I look around. I’m ringed by live-streaming media like a clown at the circus. I adopt my casual, too-cool-for-school smirk I use specifically for the TV.
“You ask the New Sentinels about that?”
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