There is movement around me. I am not surprised, because I know Manhattan is teeming with wildlife and more denizens than the outside world would care to admit. I don’t know how all the fuckers actually get here, if their mamas do the baby Moses thing on the Miskatonic, pushing their little blue-skinned, red-eyed babies across the water with a prayer and hoping they will find a better, and let’s face it, far less scandalous home. Or maybe they’re growing an army in tanks in the basements of abandoned YMCAs across the boroughs. Like I said, I do not know. There’s plenty of them and though we might not be anywhere close to where the missile attack first targeted me, that doesn’t mean I can expect to ignore Mentor’s influence for long.
The first mutie slithers from an open car boot, dragging itself along the sidewalk for all of three seconds before standing in all its glory, a crowbar in one webbed hand, a combat blade in the other. A grey fin stands like a Mohawk down the middle of its green-blue hairless skull and white eyes watch me without expression. Another steps from the shadows, just a teenage girl with homemade hair and a bone through her nose. The mutation’s not obvious until I notice the spoons and empty tin cans and bits of metallic crap that cling to her Macy’s fur coat and scarf-swaddled legs. The third mutant is a big one, the head and broad shoulders like oak beams and the tiny black eyes regarding me like a possible food source.
“OK kids.”
I hold up my hands. No need to hurt anyone.
*
UNLIKE WHAT THE comic books tell you, very few of these guys have anything more than the power to smell bad, or perhaps the ability to collect flies at eighty yards. They’re throwbacks, kinks in the system, as humanity wends its way towards a higher expression of itself. Or at least that’s what we were taught in high school, though those lesson plans have gone a bit more PC since.
On the other side of the street a garbage can lid clatters noisily and the ancient trashcan vomits forth an absurd ichor that stands up slowly in the form of a man, featureless and gelatin. Behind him comes a girl with machete, plaid skirt and aviator goggles. She looks to have long ropy tendrils like flaccid cocks instead of hair, otherwise a perfectly respectful member of the Lindsay Lohan generation. The third mutie is a bald black guy, muscular and wielding a nail-studded baseball bat. It’s like a bad sequel to that old film where the clown gangs rule the Bronx. Anyway, nothing is apparent about his mutation either at the distance I plan to keep him.
“Alright, alright. Where’s Mentor? I came to see him.”
I’m surprised when it is the girl with the cocks who gives an inhuman shriek and charges at me with the cleaver. There’s plenty of asphalt for her to cover so I kind of look around, the others edging in but by no means joining the fray. I shrug my shoulders and try my best imploring look as I turn back to the kamikaze kid.
“Come on, honey. Put it down.”
I wince because there’s no letting up as her shrill ululations cause pigeons to burst from nearby roosts and what may or may not be a moose busts from cover somewhere in the distance. I hesitantly lift my hand and when the girl comes within about ten feet I regretfully Taser her in the legs and she buckles into a heap.
“Guys, come on.”
I hold up my hands again.
“I really don’t want this. I’ve got powers, OK? No mutant. Powers.”
I realize I am slipping into talking to them like an African slave or something, so I snap my mouth shut. The black guy and the huge wooden dude lead the forefront of this slow motion assault and I point at the big mutant wearing a vast Armani long-sleeve shirt he has somehow pilfered from somewhere and I ask him if he really wants to find out what a tree feels like when it’s hit by lightning.
They hover in a ring of five, no more than five or six yards away. The magnetic girl pulls a serrated knife free from her leg with difficulty and makes a face. It is just about to get really nasty when the fish-guy and the black puddle guy keel over and then the bald guy starts running for his life and it’s just the girl covered in spoons and the wooden fella left. Within a second the girl gets sleepy, actually laying down on the curb and the man of oak turns his enormous blockish head my way.
“My apologies, Zephyr,” he says in that familiar tone. “Some time has elapsed. I didn’t anticipate you and my, ahem, my mind was elsewhere. Forgive me. You will find my children here won’t bring you any further harm.”
“I think you’re saving them from themselves,” I say slowly.
“Very well. Please, follow this one, let me be your guide. I would speak with you presently.”
The Armani-clad mutant turns his ox-like back and begins lumbering down the battered avenue.
Zephyr 11.5 (Flashback) “Sweet Transvestite”
“HANG ON A minute,” I call, hands on fists a sure-fire signifier I’m not going anywhere right away.
Mentor’s pet mutie turns slowly, no ballet dancer, and then he comes back to within speaking distance. He tilts his head at me like a particularly intelligent dog and it’s a moment or two more before he comments.
“Is there a . . . problem, Zephyr?”
“Damn straight,” I tell him. “How far away are you?”
“Well, fly, if you must, dear boy,” the big figure muses. “I didn’t realize you were so impatient. I am in the Rosencrantz. Do you know it?”
“Only the finest,” I say drily. “That hotel is going to be your tomb, porridge-man. I didn’t ask for you to slow down because I’m breathing like a little girl. I don’t trust you, Mentor. Not as far as I can see you, anyway. I’m not ever forgiving you for some of the shit you’ve pulled on me.”
“How is dear Valerie?” the oaken figure laughs. “Do you think of her? Think you are her?”
I take a deep breath rather than lose my top. I spent a month thinking I was this Valerie woman, a hysterical JAP abuse survivor, exactly the sort of human handbag Mentor knew I would loathe to reincarnate. The experience taught me a lesson, and one I’m trying to exercise now.
“Careful, Mentor. The real you is showing. You wanted me to come because you wanted to talk about Think-Tank.”
I crack my knuckles.
The girl with the horny hair stirs, sits up and starts to cry, but we ignore her.
“You know how to play me and you know I’d practically kill for another crack at that deranged sonofabitch,” I say.
“I don’t think there’s any ‘practically’ about it, is there, Zephyr?”
I eye the crying girl a moment. When she catches my eye, I make a waving motion. She gets up slowly, collects her machete, and backs away until she’s far enough that she can just run. I turn back to the hulking figure before me.
“Get on with it.”
“The F-f-freakasaurus is sheltering him,” Mentor says.
“Those fuckers in the park?”
I sigh with frustration. These are not good people.
“The very same.”
The gaping wooden mouth seems to chew the air for a second, make a random noise, and then I can all but visibly see Mentor’s command clamp back down on the big guy.
“I thought your, you know, ‘children’ where a bit better behaved,” I remark.
“Oh, this isn’t one of mine,” Mentor says dismissively.
“Really?”
If I can read a block of wood – and I am not telling you I can – then I would swear the possessed mutie gives an expression suggesting he wants to change the topic pretty bad. So bad that I am not sure why I let him.
“Tell me about the Tank.”
“I believe Freakasaurus and his ‘Peeps’ are harboring him, scavenging parts, enabling him to regrow,” Mentor says. “You know I have eyes everywhere, or wherever I want them.”
“So why haven’t you just waltzed one of your people into the Sideshow and waxed him? That would be about your style.”
“Oh do come on, Zephyr,” the wooden man replies, perturbed. “These are mutants we are talking about. Homo secondus. Inferior. F-f-few are . . . like me.”
“Empowered, Zephyr. And you know damned well what I mean.”
“So you called me?”
“So I called you,” Mentor agrees.
“Well,” I say, and look at him until the eye contact catches. “F-f-f-f-f-fuck.”
“Juvenile.”
I give a tiny wry laugh.
*
IT IS NEWS to me that there’s some of Manhattan’s mutant populace that Mr Pudding-head doesn’t control, but then there have always been the Sideshow Peeps. Mutants and holocaust survivors who took to Central Park and never came out again. First they ate the Zoo dry. Ever since then, they’ve come forth to hunt in the night. Or worse, luring the unfortunate into their killing fields, the whole south side of the park laid with traps and disorienting barrows to confuse and ultimately kill the unwary. Not my problem, since their main diet seems to be fellow Manhattanites, which means mutants. All part of the natural order of things out this way, or at least that’s what I always figured. In Queens, growing up, we had rats the size of house cats. In Manhattan, they’ve got murderous mutant clown killers. Darwin never said nature was fair. I’m pretty sure he would’ve used the word motherfucker if it’d been invented yet, and it wouldn’t have turned his blue blood colleagues red.
In 2001, just weeks after the Pentagon and the rebuilt World Trade Centre attacks, I had to rescue a famous writer’s grand-daughter from the Freakasaurus and his crew. They’re a hard bunch to explain and the way this story is unfolding, it looks like I’ll be getting the opportunity to do so first hand soon enough.
The one advantage I have over the Sideshow Peeps and most their prey is that I can fly. I aim to use it. However, I am just a few seconds over the dark Jurassic glades of Central Park when ground zero opens up with a smoke plume and another fucking stinger missile hurtles up towards me.
Stinger missile mystery solved, by the way.
As explained, going from hover to get-me-the-fuck-outta-here in time to avoid state-of-the-art war technology isn’t as easy as it should be. In fact, it’s about as hard as it sounds. The thing looms up at me like a horny Rottweiler or something and I just have time to curse that I somehow didn’t ask fucking Mentor a thing about the missiles, and then I have to protect myself with a defensive flash blast.
The missile explodes, much shorter than the last, but it still knocks me out of the air and I’m kissing dirt, great big fucking mouthfuls of it, in fact, before I can right myself the way I need to be to avoid sinking any further into this morass. And as I lever myself up from the rich turf, already in the distance I can hear the weird musical cries of the Peeps going about their business.
I stand and dust myself off and there’s just a black shape that appears from nowhere and caroms into me and we both go tumbling across the yards of black earth I have exposed in my crash landing. Although it must only be midafternoon, there’s something dark and arboreal about the overgrown park hidden from the natural light by the hour of the day and the conspiracy of overhead derelict skyscrapers. I cannot get either a bead or an eye on my attacker, so I fling him, her or it free, and stand and blast the damn thing until it lays down and quits moaning.
“Who the fuck was that?” I ask rhetorically.
Something thumps into my back and I turn in disbelief as some stupid fuck with his face masked like a turban tries to Taser me. I wrap up the wires with my arm and pull the weapon and my attacker close enough to slam a fist without a great deal of restraint, I have to tell you, into this goddamn guy’s head. There’s a snapping noise and he goes down like a felled tree.
Small arms fire is a bitch, I am reminded, as a burst of tracers rake across my back and shoulder. I throw myself flat to the ground, on my back rather than my front, and lance lightning intuitively back towards where the attack emanates. I don’t know if it is with the help of my vague, undefined quasi-senses or the power of the unconscious, but I hear a satisfying yelp and the chatter of the machinegun STFUs.
I stand again in the strange ensuing silence, the trees devoid of life, not a squirrel hopping anywhere. The only noise for a moment is something creaking up in one of the trees and when I slowly lift my gaze heavenwards, I spy a length of chain decorated with human hands, or mostly human hands, and most of them intact, high up in the branches of the elm.
“OK you sick fucks,” I growl, wondering for the first time why Mentor didn’t make more of my tattered duds.
I have a bad feeling about all this – it stinks like a set-up.
“Come out now, or I swear to Christ, I’m gonna deep fry each and every one of you.”
Behind me comes the sound of a gentlemanly harrumph. I turn, surprised and yet not surprised as Freakasaurus steps clear of the undergrowth, a long and rusty length of chain between his enormous hands.
“Well, if it isn’t the sweet transvestite himself,” I say to the inevitable effect.
He closes in and tries to go me.
Zephyr 11.6 (Flashback) “Lion’s Den”
THE QUIP ABOUT transvestitism isn’t just my usual distasteful, off-color politically insensitive horse-shit. Me personally, I don’t know what scares the crap out of me more, the fact this guy who preaches operatically to a bunch of mutant serial killers also gets about in fishnet stockings, Gene Simmons boots and a black leather corset, or the fact he’s just a tad under eight foot, covered in murky green scales and built like some badass from Classical mythology. I get no more than a flash of Mr Stiffy’s dinosaur visage before the inevitable collision and we go backwards through the trees, fists swinging and knees going for all they’ve got.
Freakasaurus has one up on me because he also has a four-foot tail he uses to surprisingly good effect in hand-to-hand combat. It’s thick, strong enough to support his whole weight, which really shouldn’t be surprising despite his size because the rest of him is nothing but layer on freaky layer of muscle, the whole thing covered in squamous green alligator hide, because that’s his deal – a rare, bodywide mutation that at least gives something for all it takes away, the chance of a normal life, erectile dysfunction, the usual deal.
The big guy leans back on his tail and one-twos me with his big heavy-metal boots. I block the worst of it on my forearms and slam my fist into his chiseled gut as he rights himself, but then he brings his hard jaw down on the top of my skull and I hit the deck faster than an Italian backpacker’s knickers. Another of the Freaky One’s adaptations is an enormous mug, the whole elongated misery ending in a horn-crusted snout as big and hard as a small boulder.
Freakasaurus soliloquizes into my black-out and I fade back in to consciousness with the big gay dinosaur lifting my face by the chin and grinning toothily down at me as he pulls aside his black codpiece to reveal his perpetually, and I imagine, painfully erect member.
“Is that about right, my little Zephyr?” he croons in a voice mixing the worst parts of Dennis Rodman and Ethel Merman.
“I’m, er, sorry. What?”
I move a moment, and just as Freakasaurus is about to reply, I add, “Hang on a minute. Are we talking? I thought I was pounding your ass!”
I stun gun the big freak at point blank range and he gives a twitching shiver, steam erupting from his vast nostrils pointed heavenwards, and that’s enough leeway for me to roll back over my shoulder and avoid his fist as he punches down into the space I formerly occupied. Again the tail thing works in his favor though, as he hardly hesitates, springing after me so that we go down in this unfortunate missionary position on the ground, him athwart me, a big leer on his dinkus.
“Did you say, ‘pounding your ass,’ Zephyr? How apropos.”
“Not likely, bird brain.”
I dig my fingers into his shoulders and channel enough volts to keep him twitching for two or three seconds after the time it takes me to wriggle free. He’s resilient though, and strong. Me, I’m plenty strong too, but he’s got leverage. And that fucking chain. He pulls it towards him again now, and grinning
evilly, swings it over his head so I have to dive again, stashing myself behind the bole of a tree and within sight of a wrought iron fence, the elaborate spikes displaying several not-so-fresh heads.
Just as I’m about to make a dash for it, one of the boss’s little freaks throws himself in my path. I swear he’s no bigger than a chimpanzee and has a face like my wife’s accountant, complete with the little glasses, so perhaps it’s understandable I delay flight to stomp him into the earth and that’s when Freakasaurus roars his incomprehensible challenge and I block the rusty chain with a forearm that just as quickly becomes entrapped.
My serpentine foe slams a fist into the plate just below my throat and as I’m retching, he twists my arm behind my back and the next thing I know I have the chain around my neck as well, my free arm reaching randomly backwards, my eyes bulging, boots digging up the ground as I yield slowly towards the dangerous-looking fence. Just when I think I can’t hold my breath any longer, Freakasaurus turns me around, trussed like a kinky little black leather Christmas package, and lifts me up into the air above his head.
*
I AM SEMI-conscious from oxygen loss and yet fully aware this is about as bad as it gets. In a second I am to be hurled onto a row of metal stakes and I really only have myself to blame. I start kicking my legs and swinging my arms like crazy, throwing myself off balance above my foe. Freaky gives a growl, rasping the true description as a noise like meat being stripped from bones slithers from between his gargantuan teeth – and then he hauls me down and slams me onto the damp earth in front of him, reptilian penis now thankfully reholstered, and he gives me his best bug eye, hands now on his hips.
“You wanna explain to me what the hell this is about, white boy?”
I crick my neck and pull the chain from about my chest.
“You’re harboring Think-Tank,” I say with a lot less metal in my voice than I wish.
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