Excelsior puts his finger to an ear-piece and shrugs.
“There’s nothing like this on file. Central Intelligence is assembling a committee. They want us to form a team.”
The big blonde lug looks at me and manages something like a comradely grin.
“What do you say, Zephyr. Are you with us?”
I shake my head and walk slowly from the room with stiff shoulders, like a man already carrying a load if that’s not too pathetically metaphoric for you – and not a very subtle one, at that. The guys with industrial Tasers decide to look the other way as I glower and find an exit and walk up the ramp and into a car park, the sky the color of an old sock and the occasional brown meatball trailing vapor and effluent in a diagonal streak to the south.
I think they call it empathy fatigue.
I pop the Enercom phone and my thumb has found the number before my brain has even formed the words, and this could be a problem as it’s Mastodon who answers the emergency code on the Sentinels phone.
“Who’s this?” the gruff voice comes loud and clear.
“Tell me your genius plan for dealing with this new disaster.”
“Zephyr. Is that you? You fucking cunt.”
“Hi ‘Don. It’s been a while. How’s your ass?”
“Better than yours is gonna be when we catch up with you,” Mastodon growls back. “Where have you been? And where’s Loren?”
“She’s . . . not well.”
“Great. What have you done now?”
“Shut up, Leonard.”
“Don’t fucking call me that.”
“Shouldn’t you be fighting these slimeballs from space or something? That was why I rang. CIA’s crossing the rubicon on this one, or something. I’m sure there’s a role for the Sentinels, or at least a photo op.”
“Jesus, Zephyr. You make me sick. Were we ever friends?” he asks. “You have no idea what’s going on, do you? Or who these invaders are?”
“So tell me.”
I snort and gather a loogie and spit into a pile of rubbish currently being combed through by starved-looking pigeons.
“You remember Seeker’s mission? The one she, and like, ten centuries of nubile young virgins have been trained for and given powers since, like, the dawn of time?”
I swallow. Not gently.
“Yep.”
“And you fucked her and took her powers?”
“Yep.”
“This is what she they were all waiting for,” Mastodon answers.
“These fucking slimeballs from space, mister, they’ve been headed here since Christ was a kid and with one purpose only: to kill every single motherfucking creature on the earth.”
It’s hard to know what to say. Instead, my errant murmur infuriates my former colleague and I can practically hear him squeeze the phone as he stamps his feet to upsize.
“Nice going, asshole.”
“There’s the kid,” I say. “The girl?”
“Yeah. She’s missing. Freaked before the first meteor even hit,” Mastodon says. “Middle of last night, actually. Said something to Stormhawk about feeling hot and then she was gone. Room empty. Brasseye and Smidgeon are out looking for her.”
I think this over for a minute as the tiny gears and levers in my brain whir and hiss and then I gently disconnect from the call and tuck the phone away.
There’s still some link between the new Seeker and Loren.
Zephyr 8.8 “Mythological Creatures”
I THUNDER BACK down the stairs and Excelsior and Tempo and some guy in purple with a face mask look surprised to see me, but it’s not them I’m after. I turn back down the way I came until I manage to navigate back to Loren’s room and it’s just the two of us again, me and the oxygen tent, and this time I stride up to the edge of the space-age fabric and look down at the remains of my love and it’s only the steel in my jaw that keeps me from falling to my knees.
“Loren.”
My voice sounds croaky and fucked in the clinical air. The skeletal black mass on the bed doesn’t move, but the face with the gauze taped over lidless eyes flinches slightly in my direction.
“Loren.”
There is little of the woman I knew left. The majority of her frame is mercifully cloaked by the surgical cover. The tubes and bleepy things might be a constraint for anyone else, but they look to be about the only thing keeping her from breaking into disparate chunks of charcoal peppering the nice clean hospital sheets.
“Loren. Seeker. We need Seeker. To find Seeker.”
She makes a noise, a newborn kitten of a thing.
And then: “They’re here.”
“Yes.”
“Amari.”
“If you say so,” I tell her. “I have to find the new Seeker. She’s missing.”
“Hurt.”
“Maybe.”
Loren goes still for a while. Though it’s strange to be talking to her at all, it’s stranger yet to have her here, cocooned in medical apparatuses, blackened flesh moist and angry and depleted and awful. I can only confirm some unnatural power is keeping her alive as the doctor suggested, and it’s my only hope.
“Honey?”
“She’s calling.”
“Where is she? Candace? Where is she, honey?”
The corpse on the bed tsks me.
“Home.”
*
IT’S POSSIBLE EXCELSIOR tries to waylay me on my way through the facility and I hear him say something about still needing to have me examined by a skilled psion, but the missile array doesn’t move as I leap from the prison quadrangle and take to the air like a thunderbolt, almost breaking my back with the vague out-of-practice unfamiliarity of flying as I throw my body in the direction of Van Buren across the river.
Hurtling over the water, another of these huge turf balls plunge towards the city and because we are on similar vectors, I power forward on an intersect and let lightning revel over my body as I accelerate and slam the fucking thing into the Port Authority building where the walls buckle and shake and the whole disaster comes down, burying the alien terror, people and cars from the evacuated tower spilling further across the roadway as I pass over the land and my shadow looks like a hawk in flight as I take the crow’s path for Van Buren.
Parts of the city are aflame. I don’t know why. It happens every disaster. I know in some areas the looting has already begun. Never mind the threat to life and limb when there are free appliances on offer. Another of these alien wildebeests is downtown, the wreckage of nearby buildings like gaping mechanical vaginas around it as a speedster in a blue costume and someone who I take to be Coalface try and keep the situation under control, a news crew in hot pursuit filming from two angles as the track of destruction widens by the second. I contribute with a wallop of electrical dosage as I zoom overhead, but there is a more strategic and daresay selfish imperative at the forefront of my mind.
The warehouse and in fact the entire street near the pier remain intact. I thump down and continue at a run and absurdly jog up the rusting steel fire escape to my apartment like I’m some conscientious home owner averse to simply smashing in through the roof like any good action hero might. I’m thrilled rather than alarmed to see the door wide open – what am I gonna do, worry about muggers? – and I barrel into the barren living space with my eyes cast wide as nets for the slip of a girl named Candace.
I find her in the bathroom, which is to say the tiled end of the kitchen where the plumbing lends itself to a Giger-esque fusion of pipes and domesticity, stuff on the kitchen table succumbing to rot and otherwise much as Loren and I left it before gallivanting off on the trip that forever changed our lives.
The girl is curled around the toilet in a position that practically gives me déjà vu for all the time I’ve spent there myself, a fur-lined anorak over her ridiculous white bodysuit streaked with vomit like the season’s hottest accessory. Her cornflower blue eyes are bloodshot and raw, abundant blonde ringlets moist from the bowl. She looks miserable and frai
l and every one of her however few years it is as I move in, conscious I am not completely in costume still, and lift her from her repose and carry her easy as a bunch of sticks into the main space with the view over the water and the bed stale with the scents of past lovemaking.
“Candace. What’s going on, honey?”
I put the back of my hand against her forehead, not surprised to find it hot.
She is just a girl, maybe no more than fifteen or sixteen, but not womanly like my own kid, skin like rose petals flushing pink from the fever. Loren’s provocative costume is loose in the wrong places and the big white heat-resistant boots are almost ridiculous on her, like a skinny girl caught dressing in her mother’s clothes. Her face is more curiously adult, the lips full and bruised from whatever has its grip on her. Those full-lidded and suddenly dark-seeming eyes don’t let go of me as I lay her down on the dusty comforter and frown in concern.
“Zephyr?”
“It’s me. You can relax, kid. What is it?”
“You slept with her, didn’t you? And made it go away?”
She is scared and vulnerable and beautiful. Her arms remain locked around my neck. I feel like the huntsman who carries the wounded mythological creatures from the forest.
“Please, Zephyr. Fuck me too?”
Zephyr 8.9 “The Most Curious Look”
WELL, I CAN only laugh.
“I’m not one to turn down a pretty lady, especially one with such nice manners, Candy, but that’s probably illegal in this state, not to mention just being a generally bad fucking idea,” I say as I slide my arms from beneath her and Candace, whom perhaps I should be calling Seeker, reluctantly lets the arms around my neck drop.
“Talk to me, baby. What’s happened?”
“It’s them. The things falling from the sky. I’m the one.”
“The what?”
“The Seeker,” she says and moans and rolls over, not an easy feat on the tangled landscape of the bed, and like some fucking cartoon, I have to practically tug my eyes away from her ass as she rolls over and her bony hips rise into the air like the flags of some metaphoric ship on which I know I cannot sail.
“Who are they, the Amari?”
“Death from space,” she replies and again comes the kittenish moan.
“That doesn’t tell me much, kid.”
“Please, Zephyr.”
She twists around again and sits up, hair tumbling fetchingly about her heart-shaped face.
“You did it for Loren. She’s hurt, isn’t she? The Ancients whisper of her pain. Help me too? Release me?”
To my horror and unwitting arousal, the girl begins tugging at the neck of her costume and the fabric gives a tiny inchoate rip and then my hand flies so fast to stop her I’m surprised there’s not a mini sonic boom or something. Candace’s eyes snap open again and up and she does the puppy dog thing and I scowl and look away.
“Honey, please. Other women have tried and failed. Don’t go there,” I say. “You don’t even know what you’re asking. Your gig, baby, it only comes with the maidenhead. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Jesus Christ, Zephyr. Why do you think I’m asking?”
I blink.
“Because I’m exceptionally hot and you’ve got a thing for older dudes?”
“Maybe.”
She laughs, but any merriment deserts her teenage eyes in an instant and I don’t need to be the earth’s most pre-eminent psychic to understand pain beyond reckoning – at least pain of the spirit – awash in those tears that come tumbling down her pallid cheeks.
I take Candace’s hand.
“You’re still linked to Loren,” I tell her. “And she’s hurt bad. Can you heal her? Help her?”
“I don’t know,” Candace replies. “Is she close?”
“She can be,” I say and stand and motion obliquely.
“OK. Let’s go.”
She crawls from the bed weak as a newborn baby deer and stands smoothing the hair from her face, slightly pigeon-toed or something in her frailty. I step in close to scoop her up in my arms even though I assume she has the flying thing same as Loren did, but Candace stops me as we embrace.
“I’ll help you on one condition,” she says.
“What is it?”
“I’ll help your girlfriend, Zephyr. Then you get me out of this thing. I don’t want to be the fucking Seeker. Do you understand?”
I am inches from her face and staring unflinchingly into those surprisingly luminous adolescent eyes, white teeth playing just at the edge of her swollen lip to either show her nerves or as just another weapon in her fulsome post-pubescent arsenal, I don’t know. I know what she’s saying and she knows I know and she also knows I’m a big enough bastard to possibly not care, so I nod.
“You have to help her,” I say.
“And you have to help me.”
“Agreed.”
We hit the fucking road.
*
FROM THE AIR it seems the city is holding its own, just a few organic-looking mecha stumbling around flailing at the brick and concrete scenery, people in the streets mostly with the good sense to get out of the way as pockets of resistance, the odd mask and the National Guard begin their rearguard action.
Again, perhaps I can help, but there’s a big picture here. I am halfway towards it when there’s a noise like a horse being neutered and then I’m falling, tumbling through the air with Seeker nowhere to be seen. Instead, I catch a glimpse of Twilight’s lantern-jawed mug and block another punch to the head and then we clatter like canned goods across a roof-top and I put my head through the edge of a brick chimney before managing to stand and dodge aside as the familiar glob of green fire alights nearby.
“Twilight, you fucking goose. What are you doing?”
The big guy is breathing heavy in his grey-and-black long johns, gloves doing that demonic thing of his with green fire trickling upwards through his black fingers like pitchforks.
“I can’t let you do it, Zeph.”
“Hey, I’m the good guy here, remember?” I say. “Seems like everyone’s having trouble remembering that. And you’re the anti-hero, unless I have to remind you of that, too?”
“You know the thing about anti-heroes, Zeph?” he asks, not suppressing the wop gangster voice as well as he normally does, all those expensive elocution lessons, the phonics, the cue cards, the rainy days in New Hampshire, the girl from England who looked so good in her tennis outfit, one too many jokes about the accent sounding like she had a plum in her mouth.
“What’s that, Twilight?”
“We still come good in the end. Always do.”
He flings a double-handful of the aforementioned goodness my way and I can only throw up an arm to protect my face as fire like naphtha engulfs me and I shriek and cuss and he moves to dodge the casual underhanded lightning bolt of my reply. A burst of precious super-speed extinguishes the burning sensation for now and we circle the half-broken chimney on the roof-top before my faster footing brings me across the surface and I tackle him and we go hard into the raised lip of the edge of the building and down. Twilight gets a hand under my jaw and he levers my cursing face up and away as I rain a few punches on his face and chest and then I wrest myself aside and move just as his elbow slams down, pulverizing bricks, and I reply with a kick across the ribs while we’re both lying down and then I get up and on top of him only to have a short jab in the side double me sideways and I drop to the dirty roof slabs and Twilight scrabbles free and kicks me away.
“Twilight,” I gasp. “What the fuck’s this about?”
“I’ve been in the far realms, Zephyr,” the big lug wheezes and stands, dust and plaster across half his costume. “I can’t let you do it. She’s the world’s anointed savior, at least against this threat. Continuity can’t handle it if you fuck this up.”
I stand, feeling better by the second even if I do feel like I just got gored by the Matterhorn.
“Explain,” I say. “Haven’t you fucking
learnt yet? Jesus. At least talk to me for a few minutes before you come in swinging.”
“It’s you, Zephyr.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
He takes a few breaths just to leave me hanging with the most curious look on his face, at least what I can see of it beneath the slightly crooked mask.
“You’re the Antichrist, Zephyr,” he says.
“You’ve already robbed this world of its first sacred guardian. For all that’s good and noble, buddy, I can’t let you do it again.”
*
I STARE BACK for a few seconds just to give Twilight the chance to break into that cocksucker grin and admit he’s only fucking with me. Instead, he looks away awkwardly and there’s a grin, but it’s a pained, awkward, coming-of-age smirk of burgeoning maturity that I’d much rather be on my face at that moment than the face of the guy who looks set to hand me my ass inside the half-hour.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“It’s a metaphor, but no, Zephyr. I’m sorry. It’s like the Tarot, pal. Everyone has their role. The belief system might be roulette, but the effect’s the same. Your number’s come up and you’re on the fucking Devil’s team, buddy.”
“Don’t call me buddy.”
“It’s a bit too ‘Little Buddy’ for you?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“Fuck.”
I let the breath out in a long and abortive gasp, infuriated and gutted to sense the bizarre plausibility, not to mention the conviction in what Twilight’s telling me. It would explain so much – at least the reason I seem to have the reverse Midas touch when it comes to almost everyone I care about in this crummy life.
“Fuck!”
“Calm down,” Twilight says, a hand raised for a moment almost like he wants to comfort me. Or fuck me. I dunno.
“Should we fight now?”
My so-called friend the anti-hero is about to answer when Candace’s voice cuts across us. She’s on the edge of the building, looking better than before despite self-evident weakness as she hovers two feet above the battered macadam of the roof’s surface.
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