Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  “Shit,” I mutter, angry at my crestfallen response to such an abjectly futile strategy.

  Then I clench my fists as Mentor’s wolf-pack starts to converge.

  Zephyr 11.14 (Flashback) “Disharmonic Orchestra”

  THE TOUGH ONES lead the charge: the brownstone, a guy with the complexion of old tires, a woman with flaming hair and brass knuckles, a kid with nails growing from his red-hued arms, a brawny guy indistinct from a regular Joe except for the whitish mucus leaking from his eyes and a big-ass combat knife with studded grip in his fist. I karate chop the girl and the nailed boy with hard strikes designed to disable them. It works. The Michelin man bounces away when I swing my doubled-up fists into his chest, fighting off the grapple from Mr Brownstone. I headbutt backwards into him, the resulting noise like breaking crockery. There’s vague pain under my armpit at the knife strike. I turn and pincer-grip the weeping man’s throat, lifting him from the ground and tossing him into the shadows beneath the crashed jet liner.

  I punch the brownstone guy hard to the accompaniment of more feral growls. Something crucial inside the huge guy snaps and he goes down making a strangely effeminate gurgling noise. Unfortunately, he’s replaced by the rubber-coated dude, literally bounding back from the latest defeat, trying to wrap me up with big grey-black hands until I light up like a Christmas tree to the satisfying smell of scorched tire.

  He wilts away and the next wave attacks: six or seven men and women, the most dangerous a rhino-horned obese woman, huge horny talons like sharpened hooves she swings at me in big clumsy roundhouses. I blast her back with some spare current, deflect a baseball bat, deliver a quick combo to a guy with six eyes and lipstick, then throw off the rest in one concerted effort.

  “Mentor!” I yell.

  The girl with flaming hair struggles up. Her and a guy with a katana attack me. I’m distracted, eyes lancing over the angry mob looking for angles, knowing I am no Mentor and not about to go massacring these people as much as I want to threaten such, hoping I can flush him from his hole.

  The stakes are pretty grim. I hit the guy with the sword with a devastating elbow strike probably harder than is safe. He groans, spitting teeth. As he slumps, I put a toe into his chest and send his flailing, unconscious body into three more mutants sitting on the fence when it comes to throwing themselves at me. The girl with the lava for hair yelps as I backhand her, my chest heaving in frustration.

  “Mentor!” I bellow, now sounding like a wounded if not deranged bull.

  A little guy leaps at me. I barely look. Fry him. He peels away like he’s made of leaves.

  There’s a warm wind and I look up. A figure. Stocky. Familiar.

  Sentinel.

  *

  THE OLD MAN thumps down in a buckling of concrete, pulling aside his suit jacket and shirt to reveal the same rippling bulk made famous in yesteryear before costumers invented latex and heroes wore suits more like circus outfits than the shiny rigs we know today. Wearing just a t-shirt and slacks, the greying-at-the-temples Sentinel glowers at me with eyes not his own.

  “You seem to forget I called you here,” Mentor-Sentinel says.

  “I don’t forget anything – including the innocent people you killed.”

  “Mutants, you mean, Zephyr.”

  “Don’t tell me what I mean,” I answer back. “People. If you think less of them because they’re mutants, well, I can’t tell you how many shades of fucked up that is, you being you and all.”

  Sentinel rolls his bullish shoulders. It’s been years since he’s really scrapped, but Mentor and me, not quite such a long time ago. Mentor’s pulled this trick on me before, but never with a powerhouse like Sentinel. Age doesn’t look to have wearied him. I’m replete with genuine hesitation. I swallow hard as the big guy circles me. The costume and mask are long gone, but the intimidation factor is still there in that graven face even knowing the man inside is probably screaming in frustration, if he’s conscious of the experience at all. It is to him that I narrow my gaze and look back apologetically.

  “OK. Let’s do this.”

  “I am ready,” Mentor says.

  I know he’s feeling drunk on the power of Sentinel’s body. I aim to use that to my advantage. He’s got all the strength, but none of the skill. He’s a master class psion, not a streetfighter like me.

  All the same, he puts his head down and charges forward. I dance aside, slapping him with a low order charge he rightly shrugs off.

  Surprisingly quick, Sentinel whips about and swings a powerful left roundhouse I barely evade, leaning back, the breeze of the missed punch brushing my teeth. I reply with a quick one-two-three-four body blows that lack the leverage to really make an impact. I hear the satisfying grunts as Mentor registers the blows, harmless as they might seem. He thrusts forward and headbutts me hard, my nose exploding again to a bright disharmonic orchestra of pain, not a move I’d ever expect from Sentinel, and I lance back as he gives me the hard stare, not quite able to access the eye beams on instant command that I have a split second to be somewhere else before the heat rays shoot out and the crashed jetliner is split in half off in the distance behind us.

  I land on Sentinel from behind with doubled up fists. The knock-on effect sends him crashing across the rank overgrown lawn. Clods of turf fly in the air as he grounds himself and hurtles back, spinning like a top as he torpedoes towards me and I meet him with a perfect switch-hitter, my left like the fist of God across his jaw that sends him flying out of the park and into the choked-up, dust-covered wrecks of once-magnificent street cars lining the closest boulevard. I am up and in the air in a moment, keen to follow up on my homer.

  Only dented cars greet my arrival. There’s a surge of mutant humanity (mutanity, I think) behind me as they follow their man, but Mentor-in-Sentinel’s-clothing appears gone.

  “Yoo-hoo!”

  I look up to see the curious picture of Sentinel clinging to the third-floor façade of the closest building and then I’m awash in boiling microwave radiation. I can only power straight up into the sky to avoid the deadly wash as cars catch fire in my wake.

  I blink away pain and rip off my burning top as a speck behind me grows into the form of Sentinel in pursuit. We clash midair, and then it is the slugfest of supermen, me and him each swinging punishing blows mostly blocked on forearms and shoulders that will sing their bruises for a month.

  “Give it up, Mentor!” I scream.

  “Never!” he yells wildly, joyously back.

  Hovering, I lift both legs and kick out, Mentor unpracticed in the art of near zero-g combat, and so goes tumbling back as I light upon a mad and ridiculous ruse and go flying fast as I can straight up.

  The air starts to thin. Sentinel pours on the speed and I turn as he explodes the sound barrier and I fancy we can start to drink in the blackness of space above. I set myself for the next encounter, unsure of my gambit, and as you can probably predict, Sentinel’s face starts to turn strange and he not so much barrels into me as collides with my embrace and looks at me strange, a tiny trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth.

  “What . . . what the hell?”

  “Do me a favor?” I gasp.

  “What?”

  “Stay out of Manhattan for the next twenty minutes.”

  Sentinel only nods, bewildered, free now beyond range of Mentor’s grasp.

  I turn tail and start the return plunge, targeting myself over the Rosencrantz like a stealth bomber with a fatal payload.

  Zephyr 11.15 (Flashback) “Signs Of Life”

  UNLIKE THE FREAKASAURUS’ peeps, the muties guarding Mentor don’t do a great line in heavy ordnance. Just a couple of them spot the rapidly descending speck which ‘tis I, the crackle of a few Glocks not much more than salutary fireworks as I smash through the sagging copper-laced roof of the waterlogged hotel.

  Amid the plaster and brick and water run-off, I wave at lazy motes in the air and move through the upper rooms with the metallic anti-psionic helmet snapping int
o place. I am less unnerved now by the translucency of the material than I was before. Something about the Quantico-style training run of moving through the deserted and neglected hallways on the lookout for bad guys does that for me. I descend stairs, looking for signs of life and see a fat ginger tabby run for it.

  My ear trains on the sound of strange music, ethereal, classical, just the sort of pompous suck-your-own-dick tunes Mentor would dig to fancy himself some reclusive master of the fine as well as the dark arts. I follow the telltale vibes down the aging banister, wary to enshadowed underlings, but there are none.

  In his moment of weakness, the serfs have abandoned their master.

  *

  I MOVE INTO the lavishly-appointed ballroom now Mentor’s home suite, though in truth it is far more like home detention. Never mind the pilfered relics and antiquities of Old Manhattan – the guy has artworks from the Met and MoMA stacked three deep along the cracked and pitted walls, stuffed animals, rotting taxidermy horses in medieval barding, Ming vases, Warhol originals, treasures and a trove of goodies looted from across the city by Mentor’s mutant henchmen – the dragon-like hoard piles up at the end of the golden-lit room with swathes of old comforters and quilts atop which the withered-legged, worm-skinned Mentor rides side-saddle, staring at me balefully with his myopic yellow eyes.

  He is a sight to behold, porridge poured into the likeness of a man, or something close to it. His head glows with a gentle light, the weird yellow cat’s eyes like badly-cast glass marbles throwing off the sense he’s looking beyond the simple skin of the world. His body is a mess, unable to support his own weight, and since we tussled last in person the degeneration has continued apace, the globular white substance of his quasi-flesh spreading like a contagion across the bed to obscure any clear sense of legs, just one arm clutching a walking stick with an Egyptian artwork handle he lifts at me like a pointer.

  “Z-z-zephyr. You came.”

  “Don’t make out like I’m welcome, you murderous piece of shit. It’s just you and me. Your people have run for the hills. Tell me why I shouldn’t just kill you now?”

  Mentor makes the sickly sonic surrogate he thinks of as laughter. It’s a disturbing sound, giving way too much insight into the baneful condition of his internal workings.

  “Kill me, Zephyr? No. You want to bring me in. Bring me to justice, no?”

  “I’m not sure you can rely on that, Mentor. Not after what you did.”

  “A grand master sacrifices his pawns when needed.”

  “You don’t deserve such metaphors,” I answer him. “Those were people you killed. I’d expect you to understand that.”

  “I am not some proto-fascist, Hitlerian eugenicist, Zephyr.”

  “I’m glad you can see, as far as the master race goes, you’re losing.”

  “I didn’t ask to be like this. My . . . powers . . . are the only solace I’ve ever had, since I was a child, I –”

  Losing my temper along with my patience, I light him up and grin-grimace at the crackling smell of frying meat. The sickly sweet smell of death is in the air, and now its shadow too. I clench a fist and energy coruscates over my hand and up my tattered sleeve.

  “Cut the crap, Mentor. You don’t get a speech,” I say and find myself really losing it, spit flying as I think about the mutants killed by my hand.

  “You don’t get a fucking speech!”

  I lift my fist like Zeus, like Jupiter. Mentor’s yellow eyes flash in terror. The power gathers in my palm like a miniature sun as I give in to that orgasm-fierce freedom knowing yes, this time, there will be no restraint.

  And the metal clasp of Raptor’s helmet pops.

  Zephyr 11.16 (Flashback) (Coda)

  I AM, SAD to say, momentarily distracted. For Mentor, it’s enough.

  The magnetic attack peels back the liquid metal from my skull and at once I feel Mentor sink his hooks into my cerebellum – not taking control other than to hold me there immobile like some abducted living creature awaiting alien dissection.

  The second figure in the room moves beyond range of my peripheral vision, entering from the vast open entryway behind me. I get the impression of feminine grace in each careful heavy heel-click as she makes her way around Mentor’s parlor. As she sweeps into view, the pit of my stomach falls as I drink in her bizarre and statuesque beauty.

  The woman is made entirely out of metal. Another mutant, clearly, but a fearsome one. As she continues her semicircular perambulation to stand beside Mentor propped on his bed of shame, the mask-like, oddly beautiful face turns and tilts at me like a gloriously weird alien bird trying to comprehend what it sees, long wavy hair like metal shavings or more like the blades of some exotic knife. With the final footstep, she flexes her burnished iron fingers and the metal transforms into a nightmare of knives and hooks and a single spear-point long sword blade that extends towards me as she points.

  “Thank you, Zephyr,” she says in a rich Blaxploitation drawl.

  I am fixed fast and frozen. I can barely turn my eyes to judder a look that is half-question, half-please-don’t-fucking-stab-me-lady. She gives a laugh – a curious mix of rusty hinges and blues singer.

  There is the beginnings of what passes these days for a smile for Mentor as the woman inclines her head to me, burnished metal lips flexing like she means to blow me a kiss.

  “You can call me Nepenthe,” she says.

  And the sword-blade jutting from her wrist drives into the egg-sac that is Mentor’s skull. At once those liquid yellow eyes roll askew, each in its own orbit as the white-hot death-gasm rush leaps the psychic bridge between us and me, strapped into the front of Mentor’s rollercoaster ride into oblivion, the shock and surprise and mild rebuke and silent shame of his own easy assassination and being played for an ass after all his ye lordly braggadocio coming back to him and on through me, a bizarre unwilling witness to his final moments courtesy of the power that assuaged the curse he thought of life, dispatched like an unwanted pizza into the phone box obsidian broke rectitude of a morning sunset with kittens, a broken cardboard box, music playing, the image of a child crying in a lonely street with birds congregating on the phone wires overhead, the sound of voltage, vintage, yesteryear, mourning a childhood before the changes came and the milkmen roamed the streets like hunters in the dark beyond the asphalt canyons of the old territories apropos a priori the day of the great whiteout and so much was erased, the many lives, the buildings desiccated with blind-eyed corpses as the death machines flew, twittered and hovered over the charcoalized streets and he knew his family was out there sheltering somehow, the spark of a renewed link, but of course they had jettisoned him to the orphanage when he slid from his mother more like a larvae than a bouncing beautiful baby boy –

  Whew.

  My hands free themselves and I blink, sucked back from the void of going with Mentor into that undiscovered country. My jaw aches, stinging from an iron-fisted backhander. I guess I should thank her. I look up at the woman, Nepenthe, fingers reshaping themselves like an artistic impression of opera gloves. She grins, thinking she has played me for a patsy and completely ignorant for the fact that were it not for her own betrayal, it was probably me set to play Mentor the murder card.

  My thoughts are barely my own. I sense she wishes to speak to me, to boast, to explain herself. I am filled with a bizarre surrogate loathing and do the only thing I can.

  I flee.

  Home awaits me, I remember.

  ***

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  Zephyr 12.1 “Oblique Parallel”

  The storyline resumes from the action of Zephyr III, Chapter 10.14 with Zephyr’s journey to the parallel dystopia governed by The Twelve.

  AS REALISATION CRASHES on top of mounting reality, I move
away from the podium that should house a wormhole generator, my fingers clawed into my increasingly unruly hair, a look of guarded horror unmatched by the pensive expressions on Titania and Olga’s faces.

  What dampens my mood for the better is seeing the two women nervously eying each other off, Titania submissive, her even taller offsider with an air of rebuke as her lover slinks back towards her.

  “I wasn’t going to go,” Titania says. “I promise.”

  I can hear the conviction in her voice, but I’m not so sure about Olga. Her Nordic profile slowly cracks like a time lapse of an iceberg’s collapse, warmth the culprit as you’d expect as she finds like any of us, it’s hard to resist the waves of charisma washing off the other woman. They fold into a clinch that leaves me even more on the outer than before as I turn back to the dirty, blood-scrawled characters of my erstwhile father’s message to me on departure.

  “Fucking hell.”

  It’s about the most intelligent thing I can say at this point.

  We are still regrouping from the shock of having my escape route pulled out from under us when a half-dozen lackeys in shock armor, shiny black face-plated helmets and Lego guns come barreling into the room. With a dismissive wave I electrocute them so they form a puzzling pool of men, some kind of richly significant unspoken semiotic for the two powerhouse part-time lesbians to step over daintily as we make our way back from Spectra’s obsidian chamber of disappointment.

  “You should believe her, you know,” I say to Olga.

  The Danish woman shrugs. “It’s hard not to.”

  “I know. But I didn’t really think she’d come.”