Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  “And who’s that guy?” I ask with my thumb cocked.

  “Really, Zephyr, a lot of the people who are with the project, now, they’re kind of trying to leave their former lives behind,” Hennessy says. “That’s Mike. That’s all you really need to know. Go over and say hi if you really want to know more – but I hope you’ve got good Icelandic.”

  “OK,” I harrumph. “Where’s the boss?”

  “Come this way, please,” Hennessy says and leads with the clipboard.

  We walk down the jetty a bit further, past the agro of the unloading and the whine of electric-motor forklifts.

  “I need to ask you a few questions about exactly how much you know,” Hennessy says. “Guardians Without Borders is a kind of low-key, some might say clandestine organization. Obviously you’re very well known, Zephyr, and your credentials are excellent. All the same I am hoping we can rely on your discretion.”

  The emphasis on the final word is a shade doubtful and I swear I can practically read what the guy’s thinking. I blow out my cheeks and stop short of the next warehouse, which has office doors and a few more dudes in slacks rather than the light grey and blue get-up favored further along.

  “Actually, I don’t have a clue what kind of operation you’re running here,” I say with a degree of steel in my voice. “For all I know, as you say, this appears to be a tad secretive for my liking and I wonder how the boys and girls at Homeland Security would feel about what you’ve got going on here?”

  “Zephyr, really. Please.”

  “Seems to me you should get the boss, don’t you think?”

  “Zephyr, please. We really need you to stay with us on this,” Hennessy squeaks.

  “I’m really gonna have to insist.”

  I am about to laud it over him a bit more when the second warehouse door swings open and the space is filled by a figure in a grey suit. An unmistakable and extremely historic figure.

  Zephyr 11.8 (Flashback) “A Perfectly Reasonable Request”

  IT MAY HAVE been a long while since I last saw footage or photos of the Sentinel in action, but even without his fighting gear on there’s no misunderstanding as the gent with the gently greying temples appears to one side and nods, significantly, once, and Hennessy snaps his jaw shut.

  “Seems like a perfectly reasonable request to me, Rich,” Sentinel says in his light Texan drawl. “How about you give Zephyr an’ me a few minutes and I’ll catch up with you first thing tomorrow?”

  Hennessy’s eyes go from the man in the doorway to the clipboard and then to his wristwatch. It’s after five and whatever arrangement the dockworkers have, it clearly doesn’t extend to the suits – apart from the Sentinel, of course.

  “Uh, sure thing, Walt. I’ll, uh, I’ll catch up with you for our 9am.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Hennessy gives me one studied nod farewell and turns crisply on his heel to get the fuck out of there. Meanwhile, I feel the heat of Sentinel’s gaze in a metaphoric sense, but wait long seconds before it’s just he and me who are able to talk.

  “So you’re the Sentinel?” I say eventually. “It’s an honor,” I add in an off-hand and entirely dismissive way I don’t really mean.

  “Actually, as Rich said, I’m just Walt these days. Walt Simonson. That’s an assumed name, just to be clear. As you probably know, I hung up my Sentinel rags over twenty years ago.”

  Despite the greying side whiskers and the missing costume, Simonson doesn’t look a day over forty, which I know is impossible. Like the Superman he inspired, he’s a barrel-chested, narrow-waisted son-of-a-gun with shoulders like a wildebeest and wise, strangely kind dark eyes. In the suit he looks like a company president who would lead from the front, an inspiration to the troops downstairs and enough to make the gals in the typing pool sweat themselves into oblivion. But the costume really is missing. And while it is little concession to his obvious powers, I find the gesture a strangely powerful one.

  “We’ve never met,” I say, walking forward and extending my hand. “My name is Zephyr.”

  The humility is unusual even for me. To be completely candid I guess you could say I was inspired by the example of heroes like Fury and Sentinel as much as the postwar cool of hero groups like the Beatles, the Furious Five and the Union Jacks. This is a man who knew my father. Although I haven’t spent more than fifteen seconds thinking about him in the past decade, to suddenly be in the company of such a living historic receptacle I am awed, my inner asshole calmed by the proximity to such legend.

  “You’re a man who doesn’t need much of an introduction,” Sentinel drawls and grins lopsidedly and takes my hand and gives it a respectable squeeze, knowing I can take it. “So no need to talk like a stranger even though we’ve never met. I have a feeling, folks like you and me, we’re on the same level. No names needed.”

  “OK,” I reply, genuinely honored and more than a little confused.

  “I’ve always heard you were a good man to have in a fight, Zeph, if you don’t mind me callin’ you that,” Sentinel says. “Truth is, we could do with a fella like you if you were ever thinkin’ about putting the mask aside.”

  “Mask . . . aside?”

  The big man laughs. He has three-quarters of a foot on me.

  “I know that sound, trust me. Heard it in the mirror often enough back before I decided to give it all away.”

  “You retired.”

  “Hell no, I didn’t retire,” he replies swiftly.

  He opens his arms, the suit gaping and threatening to explode.

  “Do I look retired? Well, there was a few years there I had a struggle on my hands. Until I started the Guardians.”

  “So it’s true, you’re behind all this?” I say. “I’ve just been cozying up to a mutual friend: Freakasaurus. He had a bit to say, that’s for sure.”

  “Yeah, well, fellas like that, they’re what I guess you would call a necessary evil,” Simonson says.

  The expression doesn’t sit well on his face, but I guess you’re due a bit of unease after a lifetime of confronting problems with a giant can of whip-ass.

  “Fairly unpleasant, actually.”

  “Fairly unpleasant, but what, necessary?” I repeat back to him.

  The former hero waves his hand a bit.

  “It’s some of that ‘the enemy of my enemy’ horse-shit,” he says. “Keeping in with the Freak keeps Mentor and his many goons off our backs. And that’s what we need right now.”

  “You’ve got something going on here, but frankly I don’t know what the hell it is,” I say with more of the unaccustomed confession.

  It makes “Walt” laugh and then he checks his watch.

  “Well, you’re almost right on time for a demonstration, so let’s walk.”

  I fall into step and we wade back into the chaos that is the disembarkation of the catamaran. I get a closer look at some of these boxes, seeing tinned peas, industrial packs of cornflakes, tinned milk, sugar, toilet paper . . . the list goes on.

  “How are we doing, Harvard?” Walt calls to someone, a guy with a face like a brown smear with teeth.

  “Just got the haberdashery,” the guy replies.

  “OK, good job.”

  When I look more closely at the stacks of boxes, I realize it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense that so much effort has gone to unloading them from the boat, carting them through the warehouse, and then just to leave them in the middle of the pier. After a few seconds’ idleness, the air starts to shimmer and I take a step back, proceeded by Sentinel’s vaguely amused chuckle, and the whole scene shifts and I see a shopfront, a light post, a fire hydrant, sealed tarmac where wooden planks formerly stood, and in the middle a skinny, vaguely albino figure in a white singlet, fur-lined pimp’s jacket and under that a red hooded blazer. He tosses away the stub of a cigarillo and big mirrorshades hide the enormous black eyes otherwise lurking in that face.

  “Fuck, I know this guy,” I remark.

  The mutant villain formerly known
imaginatively as Warp saunters across and he and Walt Simonson shake hands. This is obviously not the first time they’ve met. There’s something conversational about the exchange and I just stand and stare for a few seconds before closing in for a better look.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  Walt has accepted one of Warp’s thin cigars and he indicates the incongruous section of warped space, a temporary Moebius strip in space-time caused by the bluish-tinged albino’s ability. Warp is from early in my career, though he doesn’t look to have aged much. When he removes the goggles I blanch, it looks like someone has upturned two spoonfuls of black caviar where his eyes should be, though like the multi-faceted eyes of an insect I understand in a sense each of the tiny black jewels are actually eyes themselves. Getting the thousand-mile stare from those babies is an uncomfortable experience, but I can get my freak on as good as anybody, dodgy eyewear notwithstanding, so I puff out my chest and thrust out my chin and a few sparks crackle off my fingertips.

  “Danny here is just helping us make a delivery,” Walt says calmingly.

  “A delivery?”

  “To Jokertown,” the erstwhile villain says in a thin, reedy voice.

  “Jokertown?”

  “Yeah, you read them books?”

  “Um, no?”

  Warp – or Danny – gestures obliquely to the old man.

  “You wanna show him the show?”

  “That’s what I was hopin’ for, Danny, if you’d be so kind.”

  The mutant takes a toke on the cigar and sizes up the situation and shrugs. He then nods and motions Walt and I to follow him back into the middle of the space, wherever it is from, crudely inserted into where the pier previously stood.

  “Should be fine by now,” Warp says. “We got Superboy helping.”

  “Great,” Walt says.

  Danny snaps the sheriff’s glasses back into place and looks at me.

  “Hold on to your lunch.”

  *

  AT THE PSIONIC mutant’s direction, time and space which were raveled now swiftly unravel and there’s a silent ripping sensation and I know what Warp means because it is awfully tempting to puke and possibly even crap myself right then and there. Instead, I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. It’s something Chamber taught us, back in the early days of the first Sentinels, yeah gee there’s that name again – influential much? – and the Tin Man’s wisdom remains as valid today because if you can’t see the thing that makes you sick, and if you’re distracted at the moment you’re meant to be disoriented, and if it passes quickly enough, then you pretty much miss most the ill effects.

  When things revert to how they’re meant to be we are standing further in the ruins of downtown Manhattan and fuck me if it isn’t Christmas because all the lights are on.

  The sun has barely set behind the skyscrapers of Atlantic City, but that’s enough to bring on the darkness. Yet here we are, against all logic and common knowledge, standing in a busy-looking inner city street with shopfronts and people milling about left, right and center. Only they aren’t normal people. The cold weather gives most an excuse to hide the worst excesses of their mutanthood, but close to us there is a guy with a seal’s proboscis and beside him a girl with red skin and yellow eyes. Further back from the scene Warp has translocated in space-time, there’s a big pile of packing crates and forklift trolleys and in the middle of a bunch of industrious-looking muties is a guy with the body of a first-rate brick, clad in a red-and-yellow spandex top. The only thing off is his head, which is a gelatinous green slab with eyes like floating currents and dozens of tiny mandibles dripping slobber down the front of his tee.

  “That’s Superboy,” Sentinel says to me on the quiet.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Like I’ve said, with mutants you’ve got to forget what you’ve read in the comics. Ninety-nine per cent of muties are disgusting, socially disfigured or quasi-reptilian freaks. It’s rare that ones like Mentor or my new pal Warp here have genuine superpowers as well as their disfigurements. And the so-called Superboy, the name a cruel parody, seems to be another. Clearly he has the body of a Jovean Adonis, super-strength, invulnerability, the works. The head, though, looks like an upturned can of silly putty. And I quickly establish he has the brains to match. A kind-looking old black mutant, eyes like a baby harp seal, cajoles the goo-brained oaf back to the packing crates and Superboy scoops up a pallet with seemingly no effort at all. He and the old man, from which tiny pieces seem to be constantly breaking off to leave a trail of rusty black crumbs behind, shuffle off in the same direction where others are taking individual boxes from the Guardians Without Borders delivery.

  “Okay, so what gives here?” I ask our curious benefactor.

  “Civilization,” Sentinel says. “A chance for these folks to regain some of what they lost when they quit the twenty-first century and were forced to start living like rats in a sewer.”

  “A hell of a sewer,” I remark.

  The old man scowls.

  “This is their chance to make a society on their own terms. No one’s normal here . . . and so they’re all normal.”

  “And when someone wises up to the fact there’s late-night shopping going on in the ruins of Old Manhattan?”

  “We aim to come out, before that happens.”

  “Come out?” I reply, admittedly astonished.

  “That’s right. And then we apply for statehood. The fifty-first state of the United States of America. Mutant Manhattan.”

  Zephyr 11.9 (Flashback) “Strung Up”

  THINGS ARE LOOKING pretty peachy there for about, oh, I’d say three-point-eight-three seconds, and then a funny feeling starts to come over me. Not sure how I’d describe it and frankly, given the fuckstorm-apocalypse that follows, lingering on a Merchant Ivory outline of whether my fingers start tingling or my ball-sac retracts first is rather beside the point. Next thing I know it feels like a bunch of white supremacists have hooded me from behind as something – or yeah, I should say someone (and you should know who) – slips into the driver’s seat left all warm and toasty by my recently vacated mind.

  Mentor leaves me with a ticket to the corporate box of my own self-destruction as he quickly accesses my nicely recovering power reserves and sends a harsh wave of defocused electrical energy cutting through the nearby crowds. Like I was lecturing just before, funky features or not, most these muties are basically ordinary folks when it comes to things like armor class and hit points and my power attack is too much, it sobers me to recall. A man with a Father Christmas beard and uselessly glowing green eyes is at ground zero to the assault and looks like a baked potato public artwork seconds later. A mutant woman with long slimy tendrils for hair joins the spasms. A man with a charcoal complexion carrying a toddler in a trendy baby carrier is also hit and killed, the child unscathed. A dwarven figure eyeing the Guardians supplies is fried too. A woman, maybe I should say two women, given the heads, is thrown into the security mesh of an old shop window and crucified there by the current. My fingers lower, smoke curling off them as a grin-not-my-own making carves itself across my face.

  Sentinel might be retired, but he’s over the momentary shock and ready to rumble in microseconds. His fist clangs into my mug and I fly helplessly back, rebounding off a streetlamp that bends in my wake as I then smash through the masonry of the corner store and roll across the tattered bitumen. I don’t know if it’s the feedback loop or not, but I get the sense of Mentor’s control loosening for a moment and manage to scream out a strangle, “No!” before my throat constricts and I jet to my feet, opening up another torrent at Sentinel.

  The old guy braces for the attack, the clothes burning off him, but again the crowd behind isn’t so lucky. A woman and her kid using Sentinel for cover are spared, but three other mutants not yet fled for cover are cactus. Death tally so far about eight and counting.

  With charred cloth sloughing off him, Sentinel’s handsome face clenches into a look of pure rage and he powers into me
. There’s a noise like a thunderclap and he drives us straight across the street and into another shopfront. Kaboom! Add any other comic book superlatives you like. He’s raining blows on me faster than Mentor has the wits to parry and the pain sinking through the layers of my suppressed neural cortex play no small part in me spluttering like a goldfish slipped from its tank. I manage to get a hand up – actually catch one of Sentinel’s size thirteen fists in my palm – and cough out something sufficiently intelligible that the old man lets up for a second. I look up, blood streaming from my crushed nose and mashed lips, a clicky feeling in my jaw, teeth loosened, and see a reflection of myself being weighed up in those once-soulful eyes.

  “It was Mentor,” I moan. “Not me.”

  *

  SENTINEL LETS ME sit up amid the pulverized brick and plaster of what used to be a shoe store more than thirty-five years previous. I hawk blood, snot and dust from my leaking orifices and catch a few looks at the horror scene out on the street, the residents of Mutant Manhattan have their own rolling disaster moment far from the prying eyes of any would-be interested media. Grief – and worse, guilt – choke me and the look on Sentinel’s face only make me feel worse.

  Begrudgingly – and I sense the solid desire to keep punching me – Sentinel offers me a hand to my feet. It’s too much for the old guy to apologize though, and I don’t blame him. He sniffs at my fashionably blood-stained costume and shrugs.