Zephyr III

by Warren Hately

  I sniff, looking away and doing my best Terminator impression.

  “I don’t care. Where is he? What does he look like?”

  “Zephyr. You’ve got to calm down.”

  And then the rabbit bolts from hiding.

  Zephyr 9.2 “Gridlocked”

  ALL I SEE is a pair of skinny legs, Argyle socks and a chartreuse pullover. My quarry streaks down the back of the next row of cubicles, but I am not as subtle as him or as fearing for my life. I lift over the nearest row of computers and land behind the running journalist and hook my boot under his shin and he stumbles and his head actually goes into someone’s waste paper basket.

  Knowing he is caught, the young guy sits up slowly and loosens the tie around his neck before removing the idiotic container from his head.

  And so I see him for the first time and make the connection.

  “You.”

  “That’s right.”

  He’s breathing heavy and he’s scared – he has a right to be – pale cheeks florid with the emotion. But he seems intent on taking it like a man.

  If you’re not keeping up, Nate Simon is Nightwind – and apparently my brother. I guess that explains his unhealthy attraction to all things Zephyr.

  “Get up,” I say with a calm I don’t feel.

  Nate stands slowly, nerves making his legs shaky. I can almost smell the pee, he looks so rightfully frightened. I put my hands together and crack my knuckles and before he can freeze up, I grab him by the tie and start dragging him through the office.

  A few more co-workers try and leap in our path, but it only takes the crackles for them to keep out of the way. Nate mewls something, words lost to the constriction of the neck-tie, and I push away another office divider before I finally see what I’m looking for.

  The windows.

  “I’ll show you what it’s like to fly, you little cunt.”

  “Zephyr! Zephyr!”

  “What?”

  I throw him onto the pastel grey carpet in front of the banks of windows, morning traffic below, police sirens in the distance.

  “I know you’re angry, but this isn’t a fair fight.”

  “You really want me to out you in front of all these people?” I yell at him.

  Nate sniffs and tugs the tie free, pulls it through and tosses it aside.

  “Do you?”

  The threat gives me pause, but only for a second.

  “I don’t know what you think you know about me. . . .”

  “And don’t you want to know about me?”

  The panic is thick in his voice.

  “We’re brothers. Half-brothers. I’m another of the Doomsday Man’s kids. Please.”

  “Curious? No. I’m too fucking angry to be curious.”

  He can’t do much as I pull him to his feet by the front of his pullover and the fabric breaks its weft as I put my knee into his stomach and Nate Simon drops to the floor. Despite my posing, I am curious to all Hell and this almost makes me angrier, so I put my elbow through the nearest window and then backhand it, shredding the manky frame to pull the shattered screen out of the way, cold morning air flooding in to elicit gasps from the crowd of people milling what they hope’s a safe distance away. The first cops start pushing through the crowd, yelling, but I can barely hear anything over the hammering of my heart.

  “I don’t have any powers,” Nate sobs. “You can’t do this to me.”

  He turns over and starts trying to crawl away and the sneer grabs my face as powerfully as some supervillain’s hand.

  “I guess the shoe really is on the other foot!”

  I wind back and embed the toe of my boot squarely between his ass cheeks. The seam of his pants snaps and so do the bones in his coccyx. Nate screams and I reach down as the police yell at me and I lift him by the back of his collar and drag him to the open window as the air sucks at us like a worn-out old hooker. The view, the vertigo, the suicide effect – it’s all temptation. I almost want to jump with him as I shake the bastard hard and half-dangle him from the aperture.

  “Is this what you want, motherfucker?”

  “Please, Zephyr. No! You’re not making any sense!”

  I shake him again hard enough to make his jaws clack together. Then I put my face alongside his, voice a whisper I hope even the digital media types won’t be able to record.

  “You were happy enough to try and kill me, Simon. What gives?”

  “I was angry,” he says, snot streaked across his face, a cheek red from where I may have slapped him. “I didn’t mean it. I just snapped. You were powerless and I was angry. I’m sorry. You don’t know what it’s been like for me.”

  “Poor baby,” I growl. “How what’s been like?”

  “I’m the only one of his offspring without any powers.”

  “Ha.”

  “You can’t kill me though.”

  “No?”

  “You’re a good guy. You’re an asshole, but you’re a hero. Right?”

  “I’m not feeling it, boy.”

  “You still can’t kill me,” Nate says.

  “And why’s that?”

  “Ono,” he replies. “I can take you to her.”

  Shit.

  *

  I DROP NATE Simon into a whimpering ball and the five cops holding their Glocks on me look mightily relieved, none of them yet willing to make the call on what would effectively be a career’s death sentence even if I did deserve it. Not with half a newspaper office watching and filming the whole thing on phones and portable cameras, anyway.

  As I turn, I lift my fingers and make the peace sign that will be run big over five columns in the special afternoon edition, the dying print media desperate to get the scoop on their electronic rivals. The cops lower their guns and we stare at each other for a second before I make a few quips and they’re so fucking relieved they actually chuckle at the good ones and then the quick response unit arrives from the Feebs with Tempo and a big, minotaur-looking motherfucker named Taurus who I’ve only heard about and never actually met before.

  The crowds have been pushed back by half a division of police. It means the FBI unit in their polished black battle armor can advance across the office just like they’ve trained for situations just like this. The heavy Tasers and net guns and other gadgets have replaced their heavy bore sidearms they know aren’t going to do much more than put me back in a bad mood.

  “Tell them to chill, Tempo. I’m not resisting.”

  “Call went out, Zephyr,” the black guy says. “What gives?”

  Nate is sniveling on an office chair, wrapped in a silver blanket. He looks at me as I look at him and he looks away.

  “I was angry about a story.”

  Tempo holds up the morning edition of the Post, the hated headline.

  “This?”

  “Yep.”

  Tempo’s partner takes the paper off him and snorts. He’s about eight-six and maybe six, seven-hundred pounds. The hairs on his bare arm look like quills. He wears a short-sleeved brown-and-burnt-orange bodysuit with plenty of room for the chest hair and a thick mane of mangy-looking head hair flowering from behind white horns. He looks at me with curiously intelligent eyes and reads in his best newscaster’s voice.

  “Sources close to the parahuman community believe a worldwide crisis was averted overnight with the sacrifice of a young woman’s life in orbit above our blue planet.

  “An alliance of costumed heroes led by a mysteriously returned Zephyr thwarted the entities behind the bizarre random attacks that battered Atlantic City yesterday and last night.

  “The dead woman was identified only as Seeker, who replaced the previous office holder in that role six weeks ago.

  “As the Post revealed last month, a sexual dalliance with Zephyr ended Loren Alicia Lang’s tenure as an occult superhero.

  “The Post can now reveal that affair nearly spelled doom for the entire planet as the attack overnight was the threat against which Seeker and her predecessors were appointed t
o avert.”

  “Cute,” I tell Taurus. “You’ve got a voice for radio. Face too.”

  The bull-headed guy just growls and throws the paper onto a desk.

  “Oh, keep reading. I was just getting into it.”

  Motioning to Simon, I add, “Keep going and Nate here might just shuck his pants down and start yanking himself. That’s a fucking sexy Barry White drawl you’ve got yourself there.”

  Tempo shakes his head and Taurus snorts and gestures at the squad. I snicker and step backwards out of the window as the mechanism goes off on the net gun, which sails out the building past me as I descend to the street, eighty yards below, a sea of police vehicles blocking the street.

  The openly transgender cop looks surprised as I offer em my wrists.

  “You got me, pal. Quick. Before I change my mind.”

  After a second caught stroking eir moustache, the officer produces eir handcuffs and does as I suggest and a couple more senior police come forward and then I am fairly politely bundled into the back of one of the cruisers most likely to be able to actually drive down the gridlocked street.

  “You’re handing yourself in, Zephyr?” the driver asks as we head back into open traffic.

  “Looks like it.”

  “Um, why?”

  “Do you think I want to be a fugitive?”

  “Well, no. . . .”

  “I also don’t want to give the FBI the satisfaction.”

  The sergeant riding beside me tee-hees and slaps the seat.

  “Damned straight.”

  “So take me to a cell of my own. I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

  Zephyr 9.3 “Early Days Yet”

  SOME HOURS LATER I am let into an interview room where a guy in an expensive-looking suit checks through his briefcase, an empty chair beside him. On the other side is Tempo and Taurus, who look alarmed when they see the cops haven’t kept the restraints on me. Standing in the corner is a tall, painfully thin woman I haven’t seen in some time.

  “Agent Siren,” I say. “Long time no see.”

  Siren looks like she’d rather be smoking. Her long black hair is like a crow’s wing over her face, one eye concealed as always like an alabaster Cyclops.

  “We could say the same of you, Zephyr, but it might not be true. I’ll let my colleagues lead the interview.”

  “Sit down, Zephyr,” Tempo says.

  I do as asked and look at the guy in the suit, just inches away from me.

  “Who are you?”

  “Peter Liebenthal. Your lawyer.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “O’Hagan.”

  “Shit,” I say and whistle between my teeth. “I hope she’s paying.”

  “Zephyr,” Taurus says with a voice raised like how you deal with young children. “We’re not laying any charges at present. We want your consent to invoke the Mirror Act.”

  “I didn’t think Siren was here just because she fancies me.”

  “My client’s not going to be –”

  “Steady,” I say to the lawyer, pleased to command him like my very own pet Rottweiler. “Not so fast, you guys.”

  “I thought you’d be wanting to get out of here sometime soon, Zephyr,” Siren says coldly from the back of the room. “To see Loren?”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t forgotten Miss Lang, have you, Joe? That would be pretty harsh, even for you.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “Alive, and . . . well. . . .”

  “Fine,” I say, the syllable like a gunshot.

  “What? Zephyr, as your lawyer, I really recommend –”

  “No,” I reply. “You don’t understand. They’ve said I’ve done things I can’t even remember. Now Twilight’s telling me I’m the frigging Antichrist. I don’t care what they do. I want answers. And if Loren really is alive, god damn it, well. . . .”

  My shoulders begin to heave and I sink my face into my hands like they’re a cold bath.

  “Your co-operation’s very welcome, Zephyr.”

  “In exchange for full indemnity,” I say.

  The agents look like they’ve been served up turds, but Siren almost invisibly nods and I smile grimly and the lawyer relaxes.

  “Maybe you’re not as stupid as Ms O’Hagan says,” Liebenthal says.

  “Hang in there, chief,” I say. “It’s early days yet.”

  *

  THE TELEPATH SITS across from me like an A-grade student preparing for yet another exam. I fidget because that’s all there is to do before Siren snaps irritably and tells me to open my mind.

  “How do I do that, exactly?”

  “You wanted this, Zephyr.”

  “Perhaps not as badly as you.”

  “I’ve read Synergy’s case notes,” the aged agent replies. “There might be the chance for some closure here.”

  A short while later and I am falling into sleep like a long-distance trucker. Each time I start to go into the zone I jerk awake, face leaning towards the interview room table, and Siren growls again telling me to “stay unfocused”.

  Easier said than done.

  “Holy shit.”

  I snap awake again. The room is windowless, so it’s hard to tell how much time has passed through this whole ordeal.

  “What?”

  “I need you out cold, Zephyr. There’s . . . an unusual reading.”

  “How unusual?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says and gestures and a train drives through my forehead and they tell me later my head struck the table hard enough to bounce.

  To sleep perchance to dream. Of course Shakespeare was drawing an analogy to death and the possibility that escape from this mortal coil might be pointless if it only propels our benighted souls into a worse afterlife. Me, I’m just in snoozy land, though this time it feels a little different.

  Light from a naked bulb clicks on and I’m in an interview room in bad need of a celebrity makeover. Nothing has been washed down here in a zillion years and there’s a corpse in a natty little suit sitting propped across from me in a 50s-style chair.

  On closer inspection, the blue suit is a marching band uniform cut high beneath the ribs, and the cadaver, sitting upright, wears small round glasses. A wig of hair sits atop his skull. The eyes are awake, alive, watching me, though a layer of almost volcanic dust coats the figure itself, suggesting there’s been no movement in ages.

  “Joseph.”

  “Dad?”

  “Something’s happened,” the corpse says, though when I look again I realize this isn’t some mummy, but simply a very, very old man. He watches me through the glasses and as I fail to respond, the ancient mottled skin relaxes and a hint of color comes into his face.

  “They’re . . . reaming my mind,” I say.

  “Who?”

  “It’s the FBI. Parahuman Affairs.”

  Lennon lifts his arm and slowly moves his wrist, curls and uncurls his fingers and lays his hand back in his lap and when I lift my gaze to his face again, he’s no more than a youngish 60.

  “You’re looking good,” I say.

  “I think this is what I’ve been waiting for,” he says.

  The Liverpool accent is familiar and at one and the same time strange, exotic.

  “Been here so long I think part of me’s slipped away, yeah. Can’t remember.”

  “What did you do?”

  He blinks, lifts a hand and removes the glasses. Sixty now. Maybe fifty-five. It’s hard to tell. His hair has relaxed, the heavy bowl haircut starting to grow unruly.

  “We were under attack,” he says disjointedly.

  “Who?”

  “I can’t remember. The far sensor, she tipped us off. There’d been hints. Synchronicities. We didn’t know nothing about the Editors till it was too late.”

  “Editors?” I blink for a moment, the lucidity of the dream a pulsing color scheme even if the light is the color of sick and bile is the color of the walls. I’m momentarily crestfallen to think I was going
to get a proper understanding and instead the old man is raving bat-shit insane.

  “That’s what we call them,” Lennon says. “Called them, I should say. Live in subspace. Extra-dimensional. The other me, he found them on one of his wanders. Meditating.”

  He pronounces the -g on the end, which would normally annoy me, but instead I’m all ears, holding the illusion of my breath in case I miss anything else in his speech.

  “I thought it was you who did the meditating,” I say.

  “Not like he did. Wanted to rule the world. Different, that.”

  “Not like you?”

  “We just wanted to be loved, Joe. Loved. Adored. Stupid, I know, but we did good.”

  There comes a heavy thump on the door and when I look down, for the first time I see traces of water seeping beneath the moldering gap at the bottom. Then the thump comes again, louder. The door shakes in its frame.

  “She’s coming,” Lennon says.

  “Who?”

  “Your telepath.”

  “I think you need to tell me about the Editors,” I say.

  So he does.

  *

  I CAN’T GIVE you any pope-in-the-pool moment other than we’re sitting in a tepid dream space unknown to Ikea, a million-year-old police station where something big and ugly is slowly splitting the soaked chipboard door apart. And the man they tell me is my father slowly unburdens himself after an eternity trapped inside my head.

  That’s right. My head. Right in here. God knows some of the shit he’s witnessed over the years. I hope he liked Pamela Anderson as much as I did because I sort of went through a phase there, you know, before the Botox and the third boob job and the monkey sex. Or maybe that was just in my parallel.

  “I hitched a ride on you, Joey-me-lad. I hope it’s alright.”

  “When?”

  “August 16, 1977.”

  “OK,” I say. My mind is racing. I was three years old. “Where?”

  “The island. You know it. You’ve been there.”

  Lennon laughs, not a day over fifty now. The door thumps again. The intruder beats against it like a great heart, the force as well as the timing rhythmic, insistent.