“One I’ll help. The other I’ll kill – unless you do it for me. All the Doomsday Man’s gene stock must be destroyed – eventually.”
“Shit,” I say, and think he’s serious. Inside my head, my father agrees.
“I wondered where you’d gone,” I think.
I’m still adjusting, Joey-lad. Look what you’ve gone and done now!
Beside me, Nightwind hovers above the boards with his weightless frame poised for an action he clearly doesn’t have the gonads to take. I return my gaze to the Crimson Cowl and scowl.
“We need your help, Julian. Your machine. You got a year, Nate?”
“1565,” Nightwind’s almost equally alien face-mask replies.
“You hear that, Jules?”
“You err,” the deadly-looking mechanoid says.
He puts his hands on his hips and almost pulls a Felix-the-cat laugh.
“You err most grievously. Julian, as they say, isn’t at home.”
The gauntleted hands come out again, poised like a swimmer on the blocks, and serrated beams of destructive energy lash across the chamber and I am stupid enough not to dodge in time. I go flipping back across the observatory and into a glass display case, trinkets and astronomical gadgets showering to the floor along with the shards, pain in my upper arms and chest, but nothing to show for it. Nightwind moves as a similar assault targets him and I use the distraction to power up one fist and take to the air, the high ceiling an advantage as I come down on the robot who meets me with a curled metallic fist of his own and the noise of our collision sounds like a freeway fender-bender.
I pull my jaw back into place and hammer home a low left into the robot’s red-upholstered torso. The noise is like a medieval blacksmith at work, but the Crimson Cowl barely moves. Likewise, I block his uppercut and then a haymaker with the same left, counter-punch, my fist crossing his mesh jaw. That’s got a bit more juice in it and the robot grabs me around the neck and twists and hurls and I flip across the chamber and across from the other side of what I hope is the time machine, at this angle more resembling the love child of an outdoor lawn sprinkler and a Star Trek transporter deck.
“What’s the deal, Crimson?” I say as I wipe blood from my lip and stand, ready to make another tiger strike into enemy territory if it demands it.
“You could hasten the solution you desire by simply killing each other,” the erudite-sounding robot says and gestures to Nightwind. “1565, you say? To the victor goes the spoils. Fortune favors the bold, as Virgil said.”
“Julian, you’re in there, pal. Obviously you’ve flipped,” I say.
My hand lifts of its own accord into that animal trainer thing I sometimes do when dealing with madmen.
“Maybe it’s been a while between drinks, but you’re in there and in control, bro. Step up and take it.”
“You’re being foolish,” the Crimson Cowl replies.
He almost looks around in case I might be talking to somebody else.
“There’s only me. Julian, as you call him, is just a delusion of the flesh. See?”
And to my horror, the robot uncurls his fingers again and there’s a flash. Not even I can move fast enough before the invisible blades of force cut into my queer and curious older brother slumped in his little wheelchair. He bucks in his cradle a split-second before his chest explodes, its gory secrets spraying the nearby armoire and even more display cases, computer screens, me, in human detritus. And I scream and turn, my hands to my head, hoping against hope the act of suicidal monstrosity will have at least backfired.
But the machine is still there.
“Hrm,” it says. “See?”
Zephyr 9.11 (Coda)
TURNS OUT JULIAN was even more deluded than I ever realized. Stupid, to walk into the lion’s den this way. I don’t have much chance to regret it as I have to dive as the red-cloaked robot hurls a handful of tiny grenades across the room and they explode with miniature precision, each one packing the same punch as a normal device.
Nightwind is gone, sunk into the floor and probably swimming for Cuba by now. I don’t have the same luxury. I dodge the vibratory blasts up among the roof struts and drop onto the Crimson Cowl when my enclosed aerobatics allow. The big metal dude and I go down in a ball, punching and kneeing and head-butting before I get a knee into his chest and flip him across the chamber, flattening a not-too-important computer array, I hope.
The Crimson Cowl merely picks himself up like a fine-mannered aristocrat who’s had one too many sherries. The faceless head tilts, dog-like, and there’s an inchoate crack before it straightens.
“He was afraid of you, your brother,” the robot tells me.
“Julian? No need to,” I reply. “Turns out he was his own worst enemy.”
“I wasn’t discussing him. He ceased to matter when he ceased to exist. Flesh. I refer to your living brother, Nate Simon.”
I can’t even imagine what sort of intel this prick has to hand, so I shrug.
“Yeah, well, we had a bit of a thing going.”
“He was right in one regard,” the Crimson Cowl says. “You are a challenging opponent, and one I’d be a fool to battle in my own demesne.”
He lifts his gauntlet, but now he’s showing me the palm rather than the fingers. I flinch, waiting to gauge his reaction before I realize he’s hit me with nothing more secretive than a remote control. I’m standing in the middle of the teleporter platform as the big concentric rings start lazily spinning.
“I wouldn’t step from the module now, Zephyr, unless you want to spend eternity in the agony of disincorporation.”
I hesitate with indecision, which is precisely what the metal-skulled piece of shit wants – though he may well be right about me courting disaster if I step from the high-tech carousel. And predictably enough, it’s not so much that the world starts to spin or me with it, but some curious inner-space confusion of the two.
“You have no concept of the true evil you confront, Zephyr. It’s time you experienced Lennon’s maleficence first-hand.”
The red-garbed robot vanishes like into a snowstorm and the whooping of the twin circular rotor blades cut through time and space like, um, what . . . butter? Fuck. What am I exactly going to say at this point?
I’ve secretly got my fingers crossed for 1565, but somehow I doubt it.
Zephyr 10.1 “A Window In The Twilight”
THERE’S A FLASH. I lift my forearm to shield my face, crouched like a neglected action figure left in a defensive pose. Instead, a fine rain of soot and ash drifts across me and I blink into the peripatetic sunlight. Jagged walls rise to a roofless cathedral at either side. The setting is at one and the same time familiar yet bizarre.
The sky has a red hue and it’s not just a farmer’s sunset. I’m standing in the wreck of Julian Lennon’s observatory. The property has been buried by time and dust, the walls crenulated by ruin, dented and broken and collapsed and scarred. If there were any furnishings, they are gone now, and that includes the half-familiar computer equipment, the long desks and my half-brother’s tragically splattered cadaver. And of course the time machine.
I step from a pile of bricks that shifts under me as I get to level ground, boots crunching over the debris of decades. A sparkle catches my eye and I retrieve a broken fob-watch from the chaos, not sure if I am remembering or just assuming it once hung from Julian’s waistcoat. I crush it to powder in my fist and it trickles from my hand as I skirt the remains of the chamber, duck through a low gap battered into one wall and out into the mausoleum countryside.
The French paysage has returned to nature. It’s impossible to tell what year it is as there is nothing in sight. No cows, vehicles, decorative hedges – you name it. As I circle the manor ruins, I see part of the old house remains roofed and intact and there is gentle smoke wafting from a chimney, a glint of something beckoning through a window in the twilight, and I move back up the mossy hill and notice a big trench, half grassed-over, with the remains of a half-dozen abandoned motor vehicles insi
de. The light isn’t good enough to tell if their damage is courtesy of entropy or actual destruction, but their blackened chassis are riddled with weeds and loose stones, the ground along one side scorched as if from ancient bonfires.
I move my attention back to the house, a curious trill in my heart thinking about my translocation, and at the same time, Nightwind’s betrayal.
“The little fucker could’ve stayed to help,” I mutter.
Easy on your brother, Joey. He’s not the man you are.
“I don’t think you know enough to be dishing out fatherly advice, pops.”
Hey, I’m not trying to. There’s a little coward in all of us. I was sympathizing.
I groan. “You don’t need to pronounce the gee, Lennon.”
Liverpool born and proud. You think we could watch the Premier League some time?
“I might make you a star-chart and let’s see if you can be well-behaved,” I reply.
Hmmm, never did much good with Tessa, did it?
I turn on the cold tap as I approach the house, thinking lewd thoughts to either stultify the old man or at least distract him. But my hand is barely on the rustic handle before there’s a loud thump behind me and my fine-tuned extra sensors tell me there’s a disproportionate amount of displaced air.
I spin about and there’s a big, weary-looking black man in a dark scarlet bodysuit and a tattered, wine-colored cloak that tends to purple at its ragged edges. There’s something lived-in about the suit’s inhabitant, going very slightly at the paunch, enormously broad shoulders slumped with emotion and black shotgun stubble turning to Rasta along with his hair. All that said, there’s something familiar about the guy and if it wasn’t for the suggestion of casual violence in his leer, I might ponder the identity puzzle for longer. Instead, I back up and prepare my fists for yet another bout of ass-whooping.
And then out of nowhere it hits me.
“Holy shit, you’re Bryant Gumbel!”
*
THE OTHER COSTUME merely sniffs at my comment. As I watch, he grows in size and bulk until he’s topping ten feet with shoulders about as broad as I am tall. It’s enough to make even me gulp as he bares bone-white teeth and sneers.
“I don’t know where you little shits are getting your intelligence, but I thought I made it clear last time, you need to stay out of Western Europe.”
He cracks his knuckles and adds, “This is my domain now. Go try the Eastern Bloc and given Ottoman a hard time.”
“Sorry pal, I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Zephyr.”
“Whoever, you fuckin’ amateur. Drop to your knees and put your hands on your head.”
As he says this, he fishes some kind of high-tech collar from under his cloak and looks a little near-sighted as he tries to switch it on. The thing starts to hum, emitting a soft blue light, and I realize Gumbel’s got to be pushing sixty.
Of course, last time I saw him he was doing a live cross when the Atlantic City Zoo got a new fleet of penguins. There’s nothing on Wikipedia about him having super powers – or claiming Europe as his personal stomping ground.
“This is . . . France, right?”
Gumbel ignores me. He fidgets with the collar a moment and then looks into the sky and I see a small black chunk of Lego slowly approaching from the distance.
“Are you listening to me?” he asks, irritated. “Kneel. Or you know what’s coming next.”
“I don’t think you’re listening to me, asshole,” I reply.
Sparks leap across my knuckles as I flex them.
“I don’t know who you are, but I’m not exactly here of my own volition anyway. I’m here for the Preacher Man.”
Gumbel stares at me for longer than I would like before finally speaking in a faintly incredulous voice.
“You don’t know who I am?”
He looks about as far removed as you could imagine from the guy you and I know as a popular albeit long-suffering network weatherman.
“You can call me Fortress. Or sir, if you like.”
“I don’t much like either.” I gesture to the still far-off black hovercraft. “And if these guys are the type of goons I’m guessing they are, it looks like it’s time to kick your hairy black ass.”
“Is that meant to be . . . racist?”
“No, pal. I kick ass in all the colors of the rainbow. Now, batter-up.”
Wanting to end this fight before it starts – and mindful of the space cavalry headed on my six – I lift two hands and open up with a wide-angle electrical blast that keeps on flowing like something from Ghostbusters as I advance on the self-styled Fortress. The big guy staggers, lifting forearms like hams to take the worst of the damage, soaking it up big-time until I come to the end of my “breath” and have to take a second to recharge.
However badly he’s hurt – and I already know it isn’t badly enough for my liking – one consequence of the charge-up is he’s dropped about two feet in height and the resulting mass. I’m happy about this for about three picoseconds. And then the big bruiser lowers his forearms and I can see the whites of his eyes, literally, with nothing but incandescent power leaking from them and then filling the screen as he unleashes that energy in a flashing blast that knocks me back a good hundred feet, rolling and spilling backwards like down a hillside except the ground’s perfectly level.
When I pick myself up, steam curls from my arms and my singed hair seems intent on enhancing my newfound punk credentials. I also feel like baby worms have shat all through my veins. Fortress lifts into the air, a nimbus of power burning like a religious icon in my vision as the rotor-less helicarrier lands beside the shattered observatorium.
If this isn’t the all-is-lost moment, I don’t know what is, but as any good writer will tell you, it’s got to get bad before it gets any better.
Zephyr 10.2 “Life Imitates Art”
FORTRESS HAS GOT his cavalry and it seems I have mine. They come raining down as I manage to scrape myself off the grass, thinking about a strategy other than recharging my enemy’s fuel cells for free.
They are a motley bunch: a flying woman with bright-burning hair carrying a Middle Earth-looking guy; a powerfully built black guy in dark colors; a female brick with a Valkyrie hair-do, and a few more people I actually recognize – Nocturne and Stiletto, and my old buddy Red Monolith. My dead buddy, Red Monolith. He comes down, flying like the rest of them, familiar crash helmet with its red strip in place. And just like the man I knew, he doesn’t hesitate on arrival, barrel-rolling and then smashing straight into the motherfucker who just put me down.
I guess the question stopped being what year, but rather which.
The big blonde woman slaps her palms together and there’s a sound like the Devil’s asshole. I wince, but she grins to have my attention and calls across to me in thickly-accented English.
“You want to lend a hand, pretty boy, or did we come all this way for nothing?”
I stand properly and dust off my knees.
“No, I’m good. Who are you? I’m Zephyr.”
“Uh-huh. I’m Olga. We’re what passes for the Resistance around here. You got that?”
“Sure.”
I watch as Nocturne hovers over the scene, familiar even with most her face covered by the dark hooded cloak she favors. There’s a subtle sense of psychic radiation bathing everything, dampening our presence, but this isn’t going to help much with the shock troops just setting down and disembarking from the hovering helicarrier bigger than even the FBI use back in . . . uh, I guess I should say “my” world.
The ranger-looking dude and the other black guy rush in and join Red Monolith in tackling Fortress, who throws them around like bean bags.
“Huntsman and Ja will keep Fortress occupied long enough for us to deal with these Enforcers. Are you coming, handsome?”
I nod, the whole thing more than a little surreal. I look up at Nocturne, but if she knows me, she doesn’t show it. The same could be said for Stiletto. I move up alongside her and nod, drinki
ng in her familiar dark-haired, black-clad figure like it’s me who’s the amnesiac. The lady leaking permanent daylight from every pore of her skin and hair at least manages to give me a smile as we line up watching these twenty-odd black-armored troopers disembark from the helicarrier.
“Hey. I’m Solaris,” she says in what I think is a Canadian accent.
“You sound like you’re a long way from home. Me too. I’m Zephyr.”
“Yeah,” the woman replies. “What were you thinking? You know they’ve got the whole continent on lockdown with active scanning.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
She wrinkles her nose in a way I think I’d find cute if I didn’t have to shield my eyes.
“Who? Dummy, The Twelve. Who do you think?”
“Enough chit-chat, my cuties,” says Olga. “Time to rumble. Ja?”
*
THE BIG DANISH woman steps into line with the three of us as Fortress’s ongoing shenanigans saturate the background. I feel a little guilty, like I should be helping, but Nocturne’s familiar yet forgotten voice echoes a comment in reply.
Help pacify the Enforcers, she says with a touch of steely command that is unusual. I have the area blanked out for all communication including telepathy. Deal with them and then Fortress will be on his own.
“Sounds like a plan.”
I wink to Stiletto.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “Have we met before?”
“I doubt it,” I say and smile.
“Then keep your fucking leer to yourself.”
She bristles, black-clad, and before I can think of a witty retort containing the right mix of derision and grit, her angles break into a series of overlapping black planes, sharp ones, as she does her two-dimensional trick ready for the looming confrontation. I have to admit everyone’s battle-hardened cocksureness is starting to bite. I’m not too good at feeling like the novice in the room. Muttering something incomprehensible as well as probably unprintable under my breath, I make a fist and propel forward into the middle of these still-assembling, so-called Enforcers.
Zephyr Box Set 1 Page 79