“Shit.”
“Those pipes in her fucking head give her an extragalactic connection to this other place. The place she found. A whole planet devoted to the mind – which she’s conquered. One by one she’s turning The Twelve into her puppets. Frying the Fortress just hastened her cause. She’s already got half the others under her command, and the world, mate . . . this world is fucked.”
“They are fighting her, though. Titania and others.”
“That silly bitch,” Lennon says and spits, wipes his chin. “Like you, she’s not even from here. Her and her band of merry fucking wanderers came through here and she told ‘em to move on without her. Something about a crusade.”
Lennon sighs and it seems like the light darkens just a tad. Nightfall.
“Come on,” he says. “There’s a way out of here. But it’s going to take everything we’ve got.”
We barely start to move – I am at least on my own two feet again – when the wall buckles in behind us and new figures step through the dust haze, their heads aglow in a clear sign of the Matrioshka effect.
I’m not quite prepared for who I see next though.
Sting, St George and Shade, each with that dead-eyed glow, fists curled ready for their assault.
*
“FLY!” LENNON YELLS as he pushes me to one side and an almost visible cone of psionic energy blasts all three of Matrioshka’s puppets flat.
I don’t expect it to lay them low for long and likewise I don’t really anticipate making any dramatic exit. I regroup just long enough to confirm my powers are leaking back into their internal reservoirs, energy crackling over my knuckles. Then I dive into Sting and George Harrison, barely recovered and swinging wild, deadly punches to keep them down while logic struggles to penetrate my thoughts.
“Pops!” I shout. “Can you take over?”
Odd looks be damned.
Steady on, Joe. You might be better here than me. I could mind-wipe these three, but that sounds like it’s not going to hurt this mad woman none.
St George starts to rise and I backhand him so savagely that something inside his head snaps and he drops to the ground dead. I’m not as quick with Sting and he gets his psychic attack in at me and as I’m staggering, a charged-up Shade jumps on my back and actually sinks her white teeth into my neck. I shriek like a housewife at a spider and spin around, Shade’s legs taking out another concrete support pillar, and half the floor above us slumps on top of me. Amid the dust and slabs of industrial rubble, I elbow the English woman in the side of the head eight or nine times and then notice tempered steel skewers poking through her midriff from the concrete, her legs pinned beneath a huge shelf of the stuff. I lever her off me, blood gushing from the corpse like from a sponge, and choke through the haze to find Lennon slumped against an outer wall with plastered blood leaking from his temple. I grab him by the arm.
“Come on. Where are we going?”
“Tokyo.”
“Christ. Spectra?”
“You know her?”
I don’t even answer this. I turn and fire a bolt of electricity at Sting, who dives for cover amid the ruins. Then Lennon and I vault down five or six storeys to a landscape of shattered bricks and submerged car ruins. Skeletons pave the streets, bones wrapped in the fashions of yesteryear turned the color of autumn leaves. As we move, there’s a keening sound and the ground rises up in a silent explosion and we’re whipped with the flying debris into the nave of a ruined cathedral across from the previous building. Lennon doesn’t look well, coughing and choking, and I poke him into a recess for safety’s sake and turn to address the latest threat.
“Lord Electric,” Lennon wheezes. “Jaysus.”
The big guy wears a toga over a midnight blue bodysuit. Wild, Greco-Roman beard and curly hair despite an Asiatic cast to his looks. On close inspection, I see the costume is actually skillfully crafted armor. Tech. It fits like cloth to his skin, though the dark fabric is layered like plates, bulking up his physique beneath the decorative short gladiator costume.
The newcomer’s gaze narrows in on me as I break from cover, hoping to lure him away from Lennon if for no other reason than the rebel tyrant seems to be hinting at a way off this parallel. Lightning blasts from this Lord Electric’s fists and I lift off, swooping around the shattered plaza and up faster than he can track to land a kick upside his jaw.
“Eat that, you fuck!”
He goes flying off in one direction and Sting descends from another. I fire another electrical blast just for cover, doing a high dive loop to make the distance as fast as I can while my erstwhile teammate’s still pulling evasive maneuvers, I assume with Matrioshka at the controls.
I come down on Sting with an elbow piledriving into his collar just as he’s getting back some equilibrium. There’s no one home in his gaze as he whips his head up at me, mouth open, eyes vacant, and I headbutt him to the ground and stab my spread fingers into his chest and pour all the current at my disposal into his bucking and twisting body.
“Sorry, old chum.”
When I stand, smoke curls from ten black finger holes in the dead Englishman’s chest. The stubble on his fair face gently burns.
Get moving, son. She’s coming. The Witch Queen herself.
I nod, loping off through the shattered city. The other Lennon appears in the cathedral doorway, nods to me, and we take to the sky together.
Next stop: Japan.
Zephyr 10.10 “A Kind Of Freedom”
TOKYO IS A shock compared to my latest city tour. It remains a bustling megalopolis, forty million people spread out over hundreds of miles, hardly any of the coast not turned into some kind of vast city-planet, like something out of Star Wars or a French animator’s fantasy.
Lennon tries to tell me Spectra is some kind of just ruler, but I don’t want to hear it. Fascism is just another name for evil, as far as I’m concerned.
In Europe, the people are at war with The Twelve. Here, they seem to be . . . moving on. Adapting. I guess that’s our great skill as a species.
In the heart of old Shinjuku, a gigantic black glass building rises from among the other architecturally-designed ziggurats, two columns with a vast crescent-shaped connection, conjoined at the summit.
There’s something ancient in the postmodern design, harkening back to the days of simple pagodas and temples. But the apex is also the hovercraft landing bay and we head towards it unerringly, our scarred Lennon-Christ at the lead.
We touch down, but there is a thought that won’t leave me.
“America. What is it like?”
“Does it matter?” Preacher asks.
“Europe is a glowing wasteland. It seems Japan is thriving. Russia? America?”
Lennon stares at me a moment. I don’t need to hear his words for my heart to sink.
“America was the first to fall,” he says. “Darkbane took it. Los Angeles became his orgy pit. The madness spread from there. Now it’s just . . . dead. The rebels engineered a virus. It was suicide, but, well, I think by then even suicide was a kind of freedom.”
“And this Darkbane?”
“Under Matrioshka’s spell.”
“Good,” I say tensely. “I hope we meet him.”
“No. No you don’t.”
Preacher strides to a terminal point and a cube of glass beeps and slides open for us. Onyx steps light up as Lennon leads the way down and I foolishly follow.
It descends only a short distance. Spectra likes a height from which she can command. The architecture reminds me of the other Japanese conference room where I encountered such spectacular failure, though it’s more like something from Tron, black smoked glass, embedded strips of glowing zircon light, a long elliptical table with tall black thrones in leather and chrome. The darkness seems to congeal at one end and there appears the woman I would give my own heart to kill, and she looks . . . strangely beautiful.
Perhaps it’s just another of her tricks, but Ono steps from the table with her long black ha
ir swaying like carbon fiber, a sheaf of black swords one moment, a dark, moving waterfall the next. She wears a black leather bodysuit with the shoulders bare, a single silver line tracing straight up one boot and disappearing beneath her breast. Although she’s not tall, her angular features lend an imposing quality backed up by the aura of her command.
“Darling,” she says in her stilted voice.
Preacher is a child in love. He crosses the room, almost at a trot. They embrace and then Lennon steps aside as if to introduce me.
“Zephyr,” he says.
“Preacher tells me you have a way out of here,” I say with effort.
“Yes,” she says.
“You’d better show us soon. Matrioshka’s coming.”
A quiver of fear disrupts the meditative stillness of her face and she glances to her lover, who nods, somber. Sorrowful.
And inside my skull, my father re-awakens.
Okay, Joe. Now. Now’s the time. Give me control. This should just take an instant.
*
I BARELY THINK. It’s a common excuse of mine, I know. That unfamiliar mental unclenching is all it takes for Lennon to slither from the unknowing, unconscious back lot of my mind and into the cushy leather bucket seat, fingers playing like an expert over the controls.
And then he leaps head-first through the windshield.
Just as quickly as I lost it, I gain control. I’m back into the thick of the action by default, my mind free and empty and clear. It’s like a cure for the headache I never knew I had.
Preacher writhes and screams on the floor, hands formed into claws to his face, though he doesn’t add any further to the scarification. Spectra stands poised at the invisible exit she has conjured in the onyx wall, a look of confusion, concern and – if I’m right – just a tiny mix of apprehension and disgust.
On the floor, Lennon whips about like a reject from The Exorcist and then flips from a crouch to standing, snapping out the arms of his mangy mottled suit and checking the fold on his collar. He barely glances my way.
“Sorry, Joey-lad.”
I barely have the chance to blink. “What the fuck?”
My father the fugitive moves slowly towards Spectra, hands by his sides like a wino seeking compassion.
“And I’m sorry to you too, Yoko-me-love.”
The Japanese woman’s austere face melts into a look of passion and then I feel the psychic blowback as he opens the full gauge of his mental attack on her and she crumples to the ground with a sound any other dead hooker might make.
“Fuck,” I say and only then realize it’s me speaking.
“Dad? Pops? What the fuck are you doing?”
The Preacher Man turns about and tugs on his lapels. A smile, not exactly pleased with himself, flares across his scarred face.
“What do you think about the duds, Joe? Not bad, eh?”
“The clothes, or the . . . body you stole?”
“It’s better than the one I left behind.”
“Really?”
“Different. This me has greater physical power. It all stems from how the psychics have been channeled, I guess.”
“Why did you kill her, dad?”
“What Joe, you care?”
“Fuck. I’m not a murderer.”
“No? You should look inside yourself, lad. But this isn’t murder, Joe,” Lennon replies with a straight face. “This is pre-emptive self-preservation.”
“A fancy name for cold-blooded killing if you ask me.”
As I am standing there, waiting for the other shoe to drop and for my father to tell me I’m also collateral damage in his fight for life, Spectra stands up behind him with telltale white light leaking from her eye sockets.
“Oh-oh.”
“What?” he asks.
Then there’s a noise like the heat death of the universe and more sickly light fills the boardroom and I know for a fact it’s time to bend over, because here it comes again.
Zephyr 10.11 “Erased”
STING, FORTRESS AND Ottoman step through the shimmering rift and their handler isn’t far behind. Like Spectra, the three newcomers radiate with the soulless glow of Matrioshka’s possession. I was pretty sure I’d killed my erstwhile teammate, but Sting’s hanging in there despite scorch marks to his chest and face. Even with his soulless eyes, there’s a cast of accusation to his tilt-headed glare.
Spectra is closest. Her shadowstuff limbs form into a flechette nightmare as she comes in, swinging punches with black fists like an orgy of carving knives. I block the first attack and feel the fiber-thin lacerations across my forearm and I yelp in surprise and back off and Fortress rushes forward ahead of the pack. Preacher Man conveniently ducks out of the way and it’s up to me to meet the blocky battering ram head on, hands clutching his head and shoulders to steer him like a train wreck into and through the nearest wall.
“Need some help over here pops!” I yell.
I Taser Spectra as a sort of visual punctuation to the statement, but my father backs away in his purloined, rakishly dressed body.
“Sorry, Joe. This is survival too.”
“You fucker,” I gasp in astonishment.
The Russian-speaking Ottoman charges at me, swinging punches and stomping with his big boots, taking my rabbit punches in the ribs without even flinching. This is what I’d expect from a possessed drone, but beating the other guy to a pulp amounts to strategy when you’re a brawler like me. I don’t know how many of these evil muppets Matrioshka can keep moving at once with her funky remote hive-mind mind control, but I’m having trouble even keeping my eye on them all as they circle me, curiously ignoring Lennon as he backs to the back of the room.
Ottoman has me pinned. Sting and Spectra hover. Fortress opens up with that milky white glare of his and I throw myself aside as it evaporates a wide bank of the skyscraper windows, the wall now a yawning opening with air sucking at us at a great height.
I see my father move to the entrance.
“Sorry, Joe,” he yells.
“Thanks for fuck-all, pal,” I yodel back.
He points at the back of the boardroom where bulb-headed Matrioshka has sidled through N-space like a regal nightmare, broad collar like a platter for her skull with its maniac vibrant grin throbbing at me like a migraine.
“I can’t protect you from her now, Joey. Run.”
He moves and it’s like he’s sucked from the building, gone in an instant.
And that means it’s now entirely down to me.
*
WHATEVER PAUSE FOR dramatics the Matrioshka drones were giving us, their patience is at an end. I barely move aside as Ottoman comes in with the elbow strikes and boot-stomps. I charge up my fists and put my hands to his chest like a defibrillator from Hell, and the Turk emits a satisfyingly unwitting shriek as he’s ejected from the building after my dad.
I only just manage to turn in time to avoid Fortress. He’s nearly ten-foot tall by this point, shoulders on him like a buffalo. I block a swing at my head that would turn me into Rain Man and I wrap my own grip around him and we tussle, I’d be loath to call it wrestling, him with all the advantages except the sheer mad-as-fuck desperation of a man who knows all too clearly what the price of failure means.
Fortress, like the others, is just a latex glove for Matrioshka’s fist, and in her hands the other members of The Twelve are blunter instruments than they really should be. I’m finally able to lever him off me with a hand upside his craggy jaw, foam spattering me like a German porno. With a mighty effort, I twist around and we go spinning, Fortress with his head back like a child on a swing-set, and together go crashing into another internal wall, through pipes and cables and marble veneers. His grip loosens for a fraction of a second and I push him off me, staggering off-balance in the wide reception area on the other side of the boardroom doors which promptly smash open with Spectra and Sting coming forward, Matrioshka floating behind. I’m mindful of my fugitive father’s words and terrified the moment Matrioshka decides
to try a more direct approach in suppressing me.
In my hand is a metal bar, twisted slightly, but nearly ten-feet long. I dance with it, swinging with all my might and slightly astonished to see Spectra doesn’t even flinch to protect herself as it slams across the side of her head. There’s a sickening crack – more of a crunch, really – and when the pipe slides free, her face is caved-in to one side, an eye gone, but the same glistening madness radiates from her face as before.
“I don’t know what you want,” I grunt at Matrioshka.
Take him, she says, a mental force of nature.
Sting hovers forward, arms wide, and his neurological attack lashes me with indescribable pain. There’s very little of it I can simply absorb, more psionic than electric, and after I’ve dropped to my knees, he jogs forward and grabs me by the hair, tilting, lifting me up, and a good back-hander sends me down the long marble hallway and into two enormous Japanese ceramic urns that shatter like something funereal, dark earth like from a grave spreading across the scene from which I can only weakly pick myself up, face down, eyes raised to glare across the intervening yards at the dark, neurotic animateur of the whole affair. A sick sickle grin alights her face, eyes like vortices, whirlpools, maelstroms, sewers.
“Shit.”
I abandon strategy and perhaps the witch queen is so unprepared for such a straight-forward attack that my radiant electrical blast takes her by surprise. There’s a noise like numerous cats in pain. I can sympathize. Sting drops like he’s taken a head-shot and Spectra goes over on her ass as well. Only Fortress stands unfazed, costume a blackened mess as he gains yet more inches on me in every sense imaginable.
I move for a door, no real sense of where I’m going, and just as quick sense Fortress about to unload again, and it takes every iota of my limited acrobatics to throw myself clear as the dizzying whiteness burns through the concrete stairwell beyond, admitting yet more daylight and the ill-conceived plans of pigeons fluttering through the sudden vent in the skyscraper wall.
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