Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  “What’re you waiting for?” I holler behind me. “This isn’t Braveheart! Come on!”

  I fly straight into the invisible force-field with a noise like dropped Tupperware. On my ass, I can sense if not actually hear my new teammates chuckling, and these Enforcer guys, a motley mix of French and Germans to judge by their catcalls, quickly fall back into semi-military order as one with a red armband quickly issues instructions in French so fast and brutal I can’t even make sense of the nouns, if there are any.

  The goons wear riot armor and carry short-barreled black submachineguns belt-fed by slim, black metallic backpacks, their chunky belts suggesting more hardware just waiting to get a mention. From my seated position, I spread my palms and fire off a test wattage of sparks, unsurprised when the invisible shield rapidly cycles through a chromatic spectrum to negate my attack.

  Olga, Stiletto and Solaris jog up beside me and the big Danish woman takes my hand to jerk me to my feet.

  “I figure it’s the transport powering the force-field, ja?”

  “That would be right, sweetheart,” she says and nods.

  “How to get through, then?”

  “I’ve got it sorted,” Stiletto says, and before I can even blink, she throws herself down where the energy shield meets the ground and scrabbles flat through a molecule-wide gap none of us could possibly discern.

  The shock troops scatter in surprise to see the fox suddenly among the hens. Stiletto moves with an admirable grace and brutality I’ve never really seen from her before, working hard and fast on the streets of Atlantic City. Clearly the rules have been revised here and Stiletto moves with an abandon outweighed only by its savagery.

  She swings and cuts and dances between the fleeing Enforcers and everywhere her palm or toe strikes, a man goes down howling in pain as her nano-thin living bladed body slices through whatever pathetic armor they are wearing. But she has her eyes on the main prize and is through the mob in an instant, hurtling up the big carrier’s ramp before anyone thinks or is really able to stop her.

  *

  THE ENFORCERS’ WEAPONS-fire doesn’t cut the mustard with a woman who is effectively intangible. Within seconds some sharp detonating noises come from within the big cruiser and it lists on one of its landing struts and the blunt, brick-like nose slumps into the grass sending a thump like a miniature earthquake running beneath our feet. A second later and one of its tinted windshields bursts apart and Stiletto tumbles free, pursued by zippy tracer fire from more Enforcers inside.

  This is our cue. The remaining fifteen-odd Enforcers on the ground give a new definition to shock troops as I light them up in pairs, walking forward with my hands dancing like I’m conducting an orchestra. Solaris has a few pretty neat kung fu moves. I guess she’s too worried about burning these pricks to a crisp to use her energy powers. Olga is less troubled, either slapping her palms together to project these nasty focused attacks, or simply grabbing the Enforcers in pairs and slamming them together until they lay passed out on the ground like so many useless frat boys.

  A few of them get shots off up close. I lift my arm across my face as a burst streams my way, deflecting weird, low velocity gyro rounds that don’t achieve whatever it is they’re meant to do. I get up to the guy and wrest the weapon from him and the line to the ammo pack on his back breaks open spilling undetonated shells that look like sperm from an ICBM. A split-second later and the German trooper is on his back in agony courtesy of a broken jaw.

  I turn and Olga has lifted a guy above her head by his belt and the back of his neck. She’s an impressive-looking lady, maybe seven feet in height and wearing a metal bustier and a grey, arms-free costume that looks like it’s been bolted onto her like battleship armor. The defenseless trooper flies yodeling through the air and I fire a bolt into him as much to quieten his misery as to show off my sharpshooting skills.

  “I think you can save your juice for the main act, don’t you think?” Olga says and she indicates with her thumb where Red Monolith, Huntsman and this other guy Ja surround Fortress like pit bulls on a pensioner.

  “Yeah,” I nod. “Got any tips for me?”

  “Fortress is an energy absorber,” Stiletto says, stepping up beside me.

  I used to tease her about being Jodie Foster’s lost kid sister until an awful life-imitates-art incident at a small town bar left the actress in a permanent coma. Not so funny now.

  “He can take almost any hit and channel it into his own energy attack or into body mass,” Stiletto says in that strange militaristic way of speaking that’s clearly more common on this world.

  “Psionics?”

  I tilt my thumb at Nocturne, wary of any accidental up-skirt if I actually look that way.

  “All of The Twelve have evolved beyond the point where our mental attacks can have any effect on them,” Solaris says. “You probably never met Psychor, but he went one-on-one with Preacher. Left him a vegetable . . . and he was our toughest psion.”

  “So there’s still . . . twelve, you know, of The Twelve?”

  We watch as our three allies throw themselves at Fortress. It reminds me of watching little kids ganging up on a playful dad, only this one doesn’t know his own strength. Huntsman, who looks like a cross between Aragorn and a bondage gimp, goes flying into swampy reeds on the far side of the property.

  “Oh, our movement managed to take out a few of them. Arsenal. Avenger. Torpedo,” Olga says. “Each time, they elevate one of their coven. The cities, the ones that are left, anyway, are crowded with turncoats jockeying for favor.”

  “At least we took out Paris,” Solaris says with undisguised glee.

  Olga smiles, almost winces, but Stiletto’s expression remains unchanged.

  “Took out?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “Solaris led a team from our base in northern Germany,” Olga says.

  “We teleported in a fully-armed Russian nuclear submarine Nautilus found scuttled off the Bering Strait,” Solaris says. “Set the whole fucking thing off. No more Paris. No more High Court for Fortress.”

  I whistle softly, unable to imagine the carnage, the sheer desperation that would sanction such madness.

  “No wonder he seems so pissed.”

  “Shame about Mercator,” Stiletto says. “And Meridian.”

  Her understated quiet is infectious and I sense the accustomed sorrow that clings to these campaigners like cobwebs.

  “Fuck,” I mutter quietly. “How do we take this guy out then?”

  “Take him out?” Olga chuckles. “Beautiful, we just want to get out of here alive. Defeating Fortress is more than we could possibly hope for.”

  “We’re taking a major risk just coming to bail you out,” Solaris says.

  “Why did you, then?”

  “Just following orders,” Solaris says and dishes out another one of those sunny grins of hers.

  “Whose orders?”

  “The boss,” Stiletto says.

  “Supreme leader of our Europe Command,” Olga says. “Titania.”

  “Titania?” I pause a second. “Do you mean Titanium Girl?”

  “They haven’t called her that for years,” Olga laughs. “She went by Titanium Woman for a while, but that was just too hard. Jane’s not into titles anyway, really. That’s why you can call me Olga, cutie. I used to be Iron Maiden.”

  “Jesus,” I say, probably my astonishment a misguided compliment to Olga as if I had heard of her before, which I haven’t.

  I’m thinking about Jane Fonda, my mother’s one-time friend dead these so many years, and her baby boy, the same age as me, murdered by the Crimson Cowl, Julian Lennon now dead, that other Lennon sibling with whom I must’ve been raised side-by-side until the daydream of the Island collapsed around them.

  “This is turning a bit too much like This Is Your Life to me,” I say. “Can we kick the bad guy’s ass now? I need something I can understand.”

  “Sure, honey,” Olga says. “After you.”

  So I
eye up Fortress as he finishes hosing down Red Monolith with the laser-beam milk bath and I crack my fists together and start trying to think of a way out of this mess.

  Zephyr 10.3 “Mask”

  WE HIT THE big guy like the cavalry we hope to be, spelling the exhausted trio running interference on my behalf. Olga disorients Fortress with her sonic attack and Stiletto comes in with a gust of super-speed, the anatomical precision of her strikes something cruelly beautiful. We’re mindful that any damage inflicted is just going into the bank for this guy to unleash on us later, so this situation really needs some thinking outside the box.

  My father’s voice comes crackling inside my head like from a broken radio.

  Don’t believe these fellas can’t be taken down, son.

  “You heard what they said, pops,” I reply.

  Meta-class psionics still have their weaknesses, Joey-lad. I know.

  “You think you could take him?”

  Well . . . I might.

  I watch as it’s Olga’s turn to get picked up and thrown – directly into Red Monolith. Stiletto keeps circling, nipping in like a troublesome dog on a jam-smeared postman, but her war of attrition looks set to backfire.

  “Solaris!” Stiletto yells.

  “What?” the flying woman replies. “I can’t attack him. It’s just a free recharge!”

  “Then give it up, you clowns,” Fortress bellows, darting after Stiletto, who melts away like she’s Teflon-coated.

  I concentrate my thoughts inward.

  “You want a chance in the driver’s seat, dad?”

  If you trust me, lad.

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” I say. “But desperate times and all that.”

  Alright then Joey. Ease back. Take a breath. Let me see.

  “How?”

  Just let me in, lad.

  “OK.”

  And it’s as easy as that.

  *

  SUDDENLY IT’S ME who is the back-seat driver to my own life, the adventures of Zephyr rendered as a slightly dodgy superhero film with surprisingly good special effects. My hands lift, turning over as if Lennon is marveling at his freedom. Yes, you’re right I’d be silly not to have a sinking feeling at this point, but I’m relieved when my father strides forward and yells to get Fortress’s attention.

  The big guy turns, dropping Olga to the ground and wiping sweat from his face.

  “You again.”

  “Not quite.”

  My voice filtered through my father’s vocal patterns isn’t a pretty mix, especially as he seems determined to try and fake my accent, which goes on top of his about as well as a T-bone steak on chocolate cake.

  And you’re a sick puppy if you think that sounds tasty.

  Fortress’s eyes start to whiten. The light gearing up in Gumbel’s skull leaks from his mouth – hell, maybe even his ears as well. But there’s a light in my skull too, to call it that, and I feel myself (us) lift from the ground as that great outpouring floods the scene, transfixing Fortress’s mind like a stone in the middle of a rampaging river. Except Fortress isn’t stone, merely clay. And in seconds it erodes beneath the powerful flood, whittling down next to near nothingness.

  I sense this on the psychic level at which my father’s mind powers operate. In real space, all we see is Fortress crash to his knees with his mouth open, eyes blank, all power gone, his life erased from his head as neatly as one of those new-fangled whiteboards taking the educational world by storm.

  Fortress falls onto his side on the damp ground. There’s barely a sound as the other freedom fighters from this strange mirror world watch in awe and I am almost proud for myself as I descend unwittingly to the ground and hook one thumb in my belt.

  “Min Gud,” Olga says, getting up and wiping ground earth stains from her tight dungarees. “That was some show, little man.”

  There’s a silent thunk and I slot back into control, sensing my father passing the reins back to me. I quietly genuflect.

  Thanks.

  Premier League?

  Maybe. Sure.

  The others gather slowly about the brain-dead supervillain and then they jostle around me like I just won the World Series.

  “How in the hell did you do that?” Solaris asks.

  “It’s sort of a long story.”

  Nocturne lands with a swish of her cloak.

  “We have to get back to Haven. I don’t think I could mask a mental signature like that in a million years.”

  The caramel-colored woman lifts the peaked hood of her cloak and stares at me with sea green eyes, curious, and more than a little afraid.

  Zephyr 10.4 “Silent Running”

  IT TURNS OUT Haven is a person, not a place. A middle-aged woman with a significant psionic power that a sprawling refugee outpost of about two hundred relies on to keep them on silent running 24-7. It’s a tough gig and it shows in the preternatural bruising around her eyes, the sallow demeanor and corpse hair.

  All the same, she, like the dozens of others milling about me on our arrival, seems to just want to touch and acknowledge the legend: the parahuman who took out one of The Twelve single-handedly. Me, a hero by default, it seems.

  The outpost nestles in the ruins of a tiny mountain-side village. Once, rich Americans would’ve given their eye teeth to go trekking thereabouts. It’s like one of dozens we have passed over on the mad flight from Julian Lennon’s place. But the land has reverted to agrarianism in the aftermath of whatever world-destabilizing events the rule of The Twelve has triggered. We are nowhere near any of the cities, but they tell me the few that remain are wild places, vast asylums where mob rule masquerades under the presence of military law.

  “The Twelve rule the whole world, or at least the parts that matter,” Olga says as she shoves away well-wishers.

  With the other returned freedom fighters as my entourage, we push up a muddy alleyway between ramshackle stucco houses, old signs for Orangina and Caltex oils faded in the rigging, great big tarpaulins and camouflage nets stretched between the roofs. As a light rain falls, we duck in through a broken wall and into the town’s taverna.

  Titania stands at the bar waiting for us.

  I expected her to be older. The Titanium Girl of my world descended into a farce of drugs and sexploitation following the death of her little boy. For a few years she was the darling of the New York club scene and then came the Kirlians to foist just another level of trauma on the once beautiful woman. She didn’t do porno, but that’s probably just because she died before she could. I practically memorized her infamous spread in Playboy one-handed in my early teens, no idea at all she and my mother were best friends and fellow fugitives – single moms united by the supposed abuses of the man lurking inside my head.

  The woman in front of me should be about seventy. If she looks forty, maybe forty-five, I’d be surprised. Her long, honey-gold tresses are piled atop her head, a mask on her face almost like butterfly wings pushing the hair from her broad forehead. Titanium Girl’s costume was three parts go-go dancer and one part gymnast. As Titania, she wears boots to mid-thigh over skin-tight ski pants, thighs like old-fashioned telephone poles, a dark brown cloak of leathery hue and a similar bodice, metal rings on her bare upper arms, feminine shoulders broad enough to make most men blush. I have a hard-on and I’ve barely stepped inside the room.

  “Joseph,” she says and smiles weakly. “It’s been a long time.”

  I clear my throat and think I might need to think for a moment, but that moment’s long gone.

  “I didn’t know we’d met before.”

  “Not in this world. No.”

  I think about offering a handshake. She is like the royalty of dudes who dress up in tights, as far as I am concerned, if not our temple goddess. Instead, she wraps her arms around me and practically lifts me from the ground.

  “It’s still good to see you,” she says.

  “How do you know me?” I ask once I’ve recovered.

  I try to nudge my pecker to the
right. Black leather pants camouflage my arousal.

  “I mean, I know who you are, but I’m not from this parallel.”

  “Nor am I,” she says. “I came here with the others and got . . . separated. Well, fuck. Truth is, I chose to stay. We couldn’t get our way home and this world needed . . . needs heroes. Still does. As you’ve shown us, I hear.”

  She smiles, wide-lipped, and carefully unpins her mask. A few thick locks of treacle hair spill down either side, an incredibly handsome woman in the sense back when handsome didn’t mean anything manlike and gay was a word to describe happy strangers. The strength oozes out of her, both physical and I also mean her aura of command. It’s no wonder this rag-tag army follows her. With Titania in the room, it’s hard to believe anyone else knows what they’re doing. I’m only faintly aware this is just another aspect of her powers.

  “I’m . . . really confused,” I say. “Can I sit down?”

  “I’ll do you one better,” she says. “We haven’t got any Stoli, but I could do you vodka and . . . well, just vodka.”

  “Vodka it is.”

  “It’s been a while since Coca Cola made any deliveries, you dig?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  “My . . . ma?”

  My face crumples and I follow it, face to the floor and then in my hand. I mutter a few poorly-phrased lines into my palm and then suck a deep breath, sitting up again, but my face tells the whole story.

  “Fuck,” Titania says. “How? Who?”

  “The . . . I guess you’d say The Twelve, too.”

  “But they were eradicated on your world,” she says and stares at me a moment, mind still ticking over like a cooling automotive. “Or maybe I should say they eradicated themselves?”

  “You’re one of the ones who . . . ?”

  I shake my head again, sitting on a tattered armchair, aware the others are hushed like spectators at the theatre and we’re some five-dollar speaking word tour by performers normally in much bigger productions.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m still confused.”