Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  Spectra throws herself at me like a hell-cat and after I go down with the surprise of her weight, I ram an elbow into the other side of her head and neck a few times and jostle around, turning on her like a Mexican wrestler, one arm under her chin and stabbing fingers in sheer desperation into the small of her back.

  She is not a big woman and whatever her deal was before Matrioshka took over her pan-fried cerebellum, it didn’t extend to the sort of heightened physiognomy you could say I enjoy. My fingers are like tensile steel compared to her in that moment and before I can think better of what I am doing, they curl around the first crap they find and then I am tearing her spine from her back by the thick lumber vertebrae, blood and Tourette-like profanities ejaculating from her mouth as I peel it back to midway up her back and her legs go floppy and the only thing keeping her standing is my arm under her jaw and the grip around her spine.

  I let go.

  I am weak on my feet and I figure if Matrioshka’s going to take me out now, I might as well savor the meagre satisfaction of killing at least one of the Spectras in this crazy fucking multiverse. Blood drips like syrup from my fist. In the rubble-strewn thirty yards of corridor between the witch queen and me, Sting and Fortress stand ready to do their mistress’s bidding. Instead, I grin.

  One last move.

  I can almost feel the mental vice settling around me as I channel every reserve of strength into propelling myself through the open cavity of the skyscraper’s outer wall. I close my eyes, piloting on hope alone, and in second accelerate so fast across the Tokyo skyline that whatever fetters Matrioshka hoped to throw on me are erased by the physical distance I manage, travelling at just under Mach 8. I leave a waterfall of glittering shards in my wake as if the high-rises of this despotic Tokyo are crying for all the pain they have witnessed, but perhaps that’s a tad too poetic. I am just a man barreling for the horizon as fast as my nature will allow, left not so much with the relief at emerging from the crucible with my life intact again as at the bitter memory of the worst kind of betrayal.

  Next time I see my father, he’s a dead man.

  Zephyr 10.12 “Angel With A Compass”

  I ALMOST LITERALLY crash in the forest somewhere north of Vladivostok, the land like it’s under the spell of a nuclear winter. Thick drifts of ash cover the ground as far as the eye can see, vast slopes of the shit, intangible and grey. But the trees rise from its weird desert, spindly but alive, the foliage a victim more to the time of year than any disaster I can imagine.

  I’m effectively camouflaged in my black leathers streaked with soot, dust coating my bare arms only adding to my haggard, pale face. I’m so weak I simply lie on a bank with the trees raising their arms over me, moving from one side to the other as the irritation drives me until night starts to fall and something gives way inside and I sit up, noticing the ocean from my perch with a half-moon shining off the serrated wave-tops many miles away.

  “Fuck.”

  It is cold, but not cold enough for me to really feel it. After a while I stand with the assistance of the nearest tree and I taste the night air, tongue tingling like a French kiss with a battery, wondering what radiation or desperate bacterium or immuno-virus might be floating towards me in this apocalyptic terrain. Either I will live or I will perish. I’m too shattered to really think about it. I know I need food and proper sleep if I am going to fly again, so for a little while I simply pick my way between the charcoal-colored boles, not so weak as I appear, but feeling every inch the infant as the land slopes towards the sea and I see lights other than the moonstruck waves glittering back at me.

  The town is like something from fervid Y2K imaginings of the previous century. Most the buildings are abandoned, but there are dim lights winking from blanketed windows and doorways in the town center where wrecked cars line the streets with more than a touch of method to their madness. A giant fire-blackened bus with Cyrillic markings blocks a major intersection, dwarfed by eight-storey tenements pock-marked by ancient artillery fire. There is movement in the bus as I shamble down the street, but my flagrant disregard for the red laser sights dancing like randy fireflies across my chest must enchant the hidden sentinels, for they appear from the bus and a nearby sunken concrete stairwell, swaddled in thick clothes and night-vision goggles to let me pass into their inner domain.

  I can’t speak their language, but the men and women who appear surround me like I’m a holy man, their touches gentle as if they have evidence at last for the awful, titanic cosmology that has ruined their lives. For all that, I am led into one of the basements and allowed to rest on a blanket-swathed divan, a jug of something hot and spicy for me to drink before I simply sigh and give up the ghost and think fucking good luck to them if they want to try and slit my throat while I’m asleep.

  Next thing I know it’s daybreak and I’m surrounded by gently snoring sleepers, united in the strange intimacy of surrendering to our most bizarre of natural instincts.

  The light comes like a fugitive itself into the room, squeezing through the few gaps in the barricades thrown up in defense of the survivors’ sanctuary. The men, women – even the children – sleep with sub-machineguns and rocket launchers nearby. A little girl with hair so bright red I think it’s a head wound sleeps with a battle-scarred cabbage patch doll and an Uzi 9mm, a cupid’s face with her tresses the only splash of color in what’s otherwise a greyscale scene.

  A gruff-looking but not unhandsome woman wearing a rolled-up wool balaclava and mittens comes over and crouches before me once she sees I’m awake. Worn over layers of other clothing, her t-shirt reads WAKE ME UP BEFORE YOU GO-GO and I smile slightly at the recognition.

  “Who are you?” she whispers in a thick accent.

  “Zephyr,” I say. “I’m Zephyr.”

  The woman nods. “Resistance?”

  If I thought I grinned before, now I am cackling madly as I nod.

  “That’s right, lady. Me and my army of one.”

  *

  THERE DOESN’T SEEM much point in conversation. I’ve already exhausted my keeper’s supply of malformed English, so I stretch and gesture feebly for food and she just looks at me like any other nightclub hook-up, a sneer of discrimination mingled with the not entirely vanquished curiosity to be so close to one of the cursed super-beings who have run these people’s whole universe off-course.

  I move to the broken doorway and a boy no more than ten or twelve passes me a crusty loaf studded with chips of concrete and I chew stolidly, eyes cast over the apocalyptic horizon of the ruined settlement. The street is awash with chunks of masonry and rusting ancient 5.56 parabellum casings and twisted street signs and blackened car wrecks and fabrics, tattered and discolored by the years since this place was overrun. If we are on the outskirts of the old Russian empire, then this is the Ottoman’s realm into which I’ve been catapulted.

  It occurs to me I am bad news in these people’s peaceful lives. Well, hardly peaceful, given the evidence, but they do not need the crawling chaos of a clusterfuck I can be to otherwise well-meaning people. I push off from the bullet-riddled concrete doorframe and start through the town, knowing the eyes watching me from doorways and cellars and sniper holes are silently grateful for my forecast departure. To the north is a black-limned forest, jagged treetops beckoning like a racial memory of my Neanderthal forebears. I lope onwards, like some fallen angel with a compass bearing for the land of the Nephilim. Not so. Instead, it is a short time later and I am huffing up a battered slope, erosion from an ancient artillery barrage exposing a great crusted seam of the earth with the exposed roots of the tangled forest above biting through, something primal, Mesozoic, a sedimentary autopsy as I grasp the dirty vines in tired fingers and haul my way up and into the black forest and turn, no idea where the fuck I am headed or how to get back.

  Fortunately or otherwise, at that moment Titania thumps down across from me and stands, brushing back her brassy locks.

  “Zephyr, why did you go?”

  “I’m ba
d news, honey,” I reply without even thinking twice about my answer. “Someone told me recently I was the Antichrist. Maybe true.”

  “Sounds like horseshit to me, Joe.”

  “Maybe that too.”

  Shadows flit over us and I look up to see more figures raining down from the sky, a dozen or so piggy-backing on the flyers. There’s Olga, Red Monolith, Nocturne, Stiletto and a handful of others I don’t recognize from before. Most prominent is the crazy-looking shirtless motherfucker with the aquamarine Mohawk and Pictish tattoos, carted like a bad news delivery with Red Monolith playing Stork.

  The newcomers deposit around us. I nod tiredly, hungry, awash with fatigue despite my sleep.

  “They can track us. Any of us, on our own,” Titania says.

  “Yeah,” Monolith says, goofy voice reverberating behind that helmet of his. “We didn’t think we could just leave you out here, big guy.”

  “Hey, you’re the big guy,” I say weakly and smirk, the cold getting to me, looking around. “If they are going to find me, best you were all a million miles away. The Resistance, you know? The people hereabouts . . . I think the damned fools still live in hope.”

  “How are you holding up?” Titania asks.

  “How do I look?” I ask and hold my arms out, my sleeveless shirt rapidly turning into one of those gay singlets bodybuilders wear, the knees gone on my leathers. “The good news is my head is my own again.”

  Jane frowns, not just a casual look of concern. “The bad news?”

  “He’s gone. He carjacked – body-jacked – the Preacher from this world. Ran off with his body. I figured he mind-fried the dude first . . . and his woman.”

  I sniff, still not really able to show much sympathy for Spectra, as much as nobody really deserves to meet their end by way of such a deceit – though if ever there was, she’s be a prime candidate.

  “So the leopard’s finally shown his stripes.”

  I don’t correct her. Titania’s too grim and beautiful standing in the soft-falling light. The rest of her team can only hold their tableau pose for so long. Now they break into little clumps, conversations of twos and threes, just the weird punk-ass dude giving me attitude from the other side of the greyscale clearing.

  “So what now?” I ask. “The dead Preacher, he said they had a wormhole of their own.”

  “They do?” Titania replies.

  There’s a hint of avarice in her voice she does an admirable job of squashing down.

  “Well you’re free, Joe.”

  “So are you, Jane. Don’t you think you’ve done your time here? Preacher – the dead one – he seemed to be saying they needed me, like a lock for a key, to get off-world. He wanted to escape. Don’t you?”

  I can tell she’s torn. Hell, I imagine I can even see her head dip in acknowledgement for a moment, but disinterested as they appear, her teammates still hang on every one of her words and gestures. Her power basically commands them to it, something beyond pheromones that tickles at the edge of my sensorium with a will of its own like a heightened charisma.

  “I don’t know, Joe. I don’t know.”

  Nocturne’s voice fills the awkward pause.

  “Prepare yourself. Someone’s coming.”

  There’s more than just a chill in the air. It’s the feeling of space-time turning inside out and that means only one thing, given our predicament.

  She’s here. Again. Matrioshka.

  Zephyr 10.13 “Giantess”

  FOR A MOMENT I think the witch queen has come on her own. As plastic reality snaps back into place, she simply stands there grinning, almost goofy if she wasn’t so fucking scary, that big oversized head of hers shining in the winsome sunlight. Then a big figure slams into the ground beside her like a pet gorilla. Fortress, the glue in his eyes a signifier of his possession, Matrioshka his only guiding principle after my father mind-wiped him.

  Titania moves with a confidence I can only envy.

  “Defensive pattern delta. You know we’ve drilled this, people. Let’s go.” She takes to the air, as do the other flyers, then yells, “Warp! Take Fortress out of the equation.”

  The Mohawk does as instructed. Fortress stands with power gathering in every fiber of his being and then the broken ground around him is replaced with a completely different landscape, low shrubs, a section of rubble, a single yellow-blossomed cherry tree. Like some Eighteenth Century theatre tableau strung on high-tensile elastic, the whole panorama disappears sucking Fortress along with it. Wherever the little guy has spirited Matrioshka’s puppet, I pray it’s far beyond the limits of her control.

  So, this so-called defense pattern delta swings into action, which seems to consist of Solaris, Nocturne and a little hottie I later hear called Vespa opening up with distance attacks. The psionic effects are like pissing into a rainstorm. I can practically hear Matrioshka laugh as she dismisses Nocturne’s ploy for the distraction it is. The energy attacks glitter on a dome of force the villainess waves into being with a distracted mien. I add a lightning charge to the efforts, holding back my full force as I suspect I’m wasting my time – as it proves to be.

  “This is hopeless,” I remark to no one in particular.

  Matrioshka closes her eyes. I get it. She’s seeing by other, eldritch means. Several of the non-flyers are maneuvering into place and I don’t know why she targets Huntsman, maybe it’s his dicky superhero name, but she splays her fingers and it seems like the air between she and him screams in an effort to be desperately somewhere else. The net effect is a gaping, shredded hole through the middle of his chest, his chin caught in the collateral damage and caving in, raining desiccated chunks of flesh with the blood instantly evaporated as he falls to his knees and twists over in the ash-colored sand.

  “Shit.”

  I have an odd feeling of culpability that finds me tensing my knuckles and preparing to wade in once again. And then it happens.

  The rest of The Twelve spring their trap.

  *

  GOD KNOWS WHAT abilities the other members of the global elite have at their disposal. Clearly they’ve been watching events for some time and positioning themselves to take action against the threat they have themselves created. I doubt we’re going to be catching up about their ambush over pumpkin soy frappuccinos anytime soon, but it’s an irony that they’re finally playing heroic roles once again.

  They boil out of hyperspace, just five of them including Ottoman and the shackles-free Lord Electric. The fireworks are enough to make even me blink as three-dimensional space goes wobbly like some old 1950s TV show and the ground thrums like with a human heartbeat.

  Matrioshka shrieks. That’s not really the word for it. After, Titania tells me the psychic detonation, fuelled by the mental will of five billion alien minds, kills Ottoman and the woman called Tempest instantly. Their minds are jellified. It falls to the remaining three to combat the grotesque creature as me and the others hit the fucking road.

  We regroup somewhere further along the coast. It’s just another ash drift with Japanese pines jutting from the grey soil. As the refugees arrive around me, I know a few are missing, snatched perhaps by Matrioshka’s desperate strikes as they fled. Yet I am too awkward to say anything as a grey-faced Titania thumps down beside me and Olga follows, Warp in her arms.

  Titania reaches out to me with distressingly motherly concern.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah. Where’s Red?”

  “Monolith?”

  Titania looks around like someone else might know the answer. Her gaze falls on Olga, who just shoots us a sad look.

  “Fuck,” I say.

  My head starts to hang, but I jerk erect, more than a touch of ornamental fireplace in my eye as I take my turn to grasp Jane by her sculpture-perfect shoulder.

  “Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  A doe-like look of confusion crosses her face, not at my words, but her own inner conflict.

  “I . . . Joe . . . I can’t.”

  �
��Spectra had a way out. The wormhole? Lennon was taking me with him. He said I was his lucky ticket. Come on. What do you say? Come with me?”

  “Home?”

  I laugh as I nod, suddenly jubilant. It’s only been a few days to me, but already lifetimes seem to’ve elapsed since I was in the ruins of Old New York with all my petty insular torpid troubles and lies.

  Titania takes my hand. “I would be abandoning them, Joe. I can’t.”

  I squeeze her back. “You’ve done your time.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Come with me. At least help me find the machine. Then decide.”

  It’s just the bait she needs. Titania nods and I turn immediately in the direction I hope is to Tokyo.

  “Let’s go.”

  Again, another hand stills me. This time it’s her lover, the giantess Olga.

  “We have a faster way, beautiful, and I think time might be of the essence, ja?”

  The geek with the blue Mohawk comes forward, persnickety despite being center stage. He flexes his wiry muscles, hands conjoined at the knuckles. He spits through his nose like he’s watched one too many Bruce Lee movies.

  “Tokyo?” he says in a surprisingly sonorous voice.

  I barely nod, and the ground starts to shift beneath our feet.

  Zephyr 10.14 (Coda)

  BLINK AND YOU’D miss it, as Warp says himself. One moment we’re escaping the charnel landscape north of Vladivostok, the next we’re in the hectic streets of postmodern Ginza, the obelisks of Nipponese commerce and slavery towering over us. It is just before the onset of night, all the neon slinking out like prostitutes too early for their red light shifts, a crush of salarimen and other commuters marching along the bleeping avenues awash with signs and enticements.

  I am shocked to see half the people wear odd metal collars, most blinking with blue lights, but others with different colors signifying God-knows-what. The wearers have the look of the enthralled and I don’t just mean the Gruen effect typical to the dizzying bombardment of conflicting signals. Clearly Spectra and her cohort in The Twelve had their own means for keeping the populace under control and it sure explains how Tokyo remains a thriving metropolis compared to what little else I’ve seen in this devastated world.