There’s something ancient in the postmodern design, harkening back to the days of simple pagodas and temples. But the apex is also the hovercraft landing bay and we head towards it unerringly, our scarred Lennon-Christ at the lead.
We touch down, but there is a thought that won’t leave me.
“America. What is it like?”
“Does it matter?” Preacher asks.
“Europe is a glowing wasteland. It seems Japan is thriving. Russia? America?”
Lennon stares at me a moment. I don’t need to hear his words for my heart to sink.
“America was the first to fall,” he says. “Darkbane took it. Los Angeles became his orgy pit. The madness spread from there. Now it’s just . . . dead. The rebels engineered a virus. It was suicide, but, well, I think by then even suicide was a kind of freedom.”
“And this Darkbane?”
“Under Matrioshka’s spell.”
“Good,” I say tensely. “I hope we meet him.”
“No. No you don’t.”
Preacher strides to a terminal point and a cube of glass beeps and slides open for us. Onyx steps light up as Lennon leads the way down and I foolishly follow.
It descends only a short distance. Spectra likes a height from which she can command. The architecture reminds me of the other Japanese conference room where I encountered such spectacular failure, though it’s more like something from Tron, black smoked glass, embedded strips of glowing zircon light, a long elliptical table with tall black thrones in leather and chrome. The darkness seems to congeal at one end and there appears the woman I would give my own heart to kill, and she looks . . . strangely beautiful.
Perhaps it’s just another of her tricks, but Ono steps from the table with her long black hair swaying like carbon fiber, a sheaf of black swords one moment, a dark, moving waterfall the next. She wears a black leather bodysuit with the shoulders bare, a single silver line tracing straight up one boot and disappearing beneath her breast. Although she’s not tall, her angular features lend an imposing quality backed up by the aura of her command.
“Darling,” she says in her stilted voice.
Preacher is a child in love. He crosses the room, almost at a trot. They embrace and then Lennon steps aside as if to introduce me.
“Zephyr,” he says.
“Preacher tells me you have a way out of here,” I say with effort.
“Yes,” she says.
“You’d better show us soon. Matrioshka’s coming.”
A quiver of fear disrupts the meditative stillness of her face and she glances to her lover, who nods, somber. Sorrowful.
And inside my skull, my father re-awakens.
Okay, Joe. Now. Now’s the time. Give me control. This should just take an instant.
*
I BARELY THINK. It’s a common excuse of mine, I know. That unfamiliar mental unclenching is all it takes for Lennon to slither from the unknowing, unconscious back lot of my mind and into the cushy leather bucket seat, fingers playing like an expert over the controls.
And then he leaps head-first through the windshield.
Just as quickly as I lost it, I gain control. I’m back into the thick of the action by default, my mind free and empty and clear. It’s like a cure for the headache I never knew I had.
Preacher writhes and screams on the floor, hands formed into claws to his face, though he doesn’t add any further to the scarification. Spectra stands poised at the invisible exit she has conjured in the onyx wall, a look of confusion, concern and – if I’m right – just a tiny mix of apprehension and disgust.
On the floor, Lennon whips about like a reject from The Exorcist and then flips from a crouch to standing, snapping out the arms of his mangy mottled suit and checking the fold on his collar. He barely glances my way.
“Sorry, Joey-lad.”
I barely have the chance to blink. “What the fuck?”
My father the fugitive moves slowly towards Spectra, hands by his sides like a wino seeking compassion.
“And I’m sorry to you too, Yoko-me-love.”
The Japanese woman’s austere face melts into a look of passion and then I feel the psychic blowback as he opens the full gauge of his mental attack on her and she crumples to the ground with a sound any other dead hooker might make.
“Fuck,” I say and only then realize it’s me speaking.
“Dad? Pops? What the fuck are you doing?”
The Preacher Man turns about and tugs on his lapels. A smile, not exactly pleased with himself, flares across his scarred face.
“What do you think about the duds, Joe? Not bad, eh?”
“The clothes, or the . . . body you stole?”
“It’s better than the one I left behind.”
“Really?”
“Different. This me has greater physical power. It all stems from how the psychics have been channeled, I guess.”
“Why did you kill her, dad?”
“What Joe, you care?”
“Fuck. I’m not a murderer.”
“No? You should look inside yourself, lad. But this isn’t murder, Joe,” Lennon replies with a straight face. “This is pre-emptive self-preservation.”
“A fancy name for cold-blooded killing if you ask me.”
As I am standing there, waiting for the other shoe to drop and for my father to tell me I’m also collateral damage in his fight for life, Spectra stands up behind him with telltale white light leaking from her eye sockets.
“Oh-oh.”
“What?” he asks.
Then there’s a noise like the heat death of the universe and more sickly light fills the boardroom and I know for a fact it’s time to bend over, because here it comes again.
Zephyr 10.11 “Erased”
STING, FORTRESS AND Ottoman step through the shimmering rift and their handler isn’t far behind. Like Spectra, the three newcomers radiate with the soulless glow of Matrioshka’s possession. I was pretty sure I’d killed my erstwhile teammate, but Sting’s hanging in there despite scorch marks to his chest and face. Even with his soulless eyes, there’s a cast of accusation to his tilt-headed glare.
Spectra is closest. Her shadowstuff limbs form into a flechette nightmare as she comes in, swinging punches with black fists like an orgy of carving knives. I block the first attack and feel the fiber-thin lacerations across my forearm and I yelp in surprise and back off and Fortress rushes forward ahead of the pack. Preacher Man conveniently ducks out of the way and it’s up to me to meet the blocky battering ram head on, hands clutching his head and shoulders to steer him like a train wreck into and through the nearest wall.
“Need some help over here pops!” I yell.
I Taser Spectra as a sort of visual punctuation to the statement, but my father backs away in his purloined, rakishly dressed body.
“Sorry, Joe. This is survival too.”
“You fucker,” I gasp in astonishment.
The Russian-speaking Ottoman charges at me, swinging punches and stomping with his big boots, taking my rabbit punches in the ribs without even flinching. This is what I’d expect from a possessed drone, but beating the other guy to a pulp amounts to strategy when you’re a brawler like me. I don’t know how many of these evil muppets Matrioshka can keep moving at once with her funky remote hive-mind mind control, but I’m having trouble even keeping my eye on them all as they circle me, curiously ignoring Lennon as he backs to the back of the room.
Ottoman has me pinned. Sting and Spectra hover. Fortress opens up with that milky white glare of his and I throw myself aside as it evaporates a wide bank of the skyscraper windows, the wall now a yawning opening with air sucking at us at a great height.
I see my father move to the entrance.
“Sorry, Joe,” he yells.
“Thanks for fuck-all, pal,” I yodel back.
He points at the back of the boardroom where bulb-headed Matrioshka has sidled through N-space like a regal nightmare, broad collar like a platter for her skull with it
s maniac vibrant grin throbbing at me like a migraine.
“I can’t protect you from her now, Joey. Run.”
He moves and it’s like he’s sucked from the building, gone in an instant.
And that means it’s now entirely down to me.
*
WHATEVER PAUSE FOR dramatics the Matrioshka drones were giving us, their patience is at an end. I barely move aside as Ottoman comes in with the elbow strikes and boot-stomps. I charge up my fists and put my hands to his chest like a defibrillator from Hell, and the Turk emits a satisfyingly unwitting shriek as he’s ejected from the building after my dad.
I only just manage to turn in time to avoid Fortress. He’s nearly ten-foot tall by this point, shoulders on him like a buffalo. I block a swing at my head that would turn me into Rain Man and I wrap my own grip around him and we tussle, I’d be loath to call it wrestling, him with all the advantages except the sheer mad-as-fuck desperation of a man who knows all too clearly what the price of failure means.
Fortress, like the others, is just a latex glove for Matrioshka’s fist, and in her hands the other members of The Twelve are blunter instruments than they really should be. I’m finally able to lever him off me with a hand upside his craggy jaw, foam spattering me like a German porno. With a mighty effort, I twist around and we go spinning, Fortress with his head back like a child on a swing-set, and together go crashing into another internal wall, through pipes and cables and marble veneers. His grip loosens for a fraction of a second and I push him off me, staggering off-balance in the wide reception area on the other side of the boardroom doors which promptly smash open with Spectra and Sting coming forward, Matrioshka floating behind. I’m mindful of my fugitive father’s words and terrified the moment Matrioshka decides to try a more direct approach in suppressing me.
In my hand is a metal bar, twisted slightly, but nearly ten-feet long. I dance with it, swinging with all my might and slightly astonished to see Spectra doesn’t even flinch to protect herself as it slams across the side of her head. There’s a sickening crack – more of a crunch, really – and when the pipe slides free, her face is caved-in to one side, an eye gone, but the same glistening madness radiates from her face as before.
“I don’t know what you want,” I grunt at Matrioshka.
Take him, she says, a mental force of nature.
Sting hovers forward, arms wide, and his neurological attack lashes me with indescribable pain. There’s very little of it I can simply absorb, more psionic than electric, and after I’ve dropped to my knees, he jogs forward and grabs me by the hair, tilting, lifting me up, and a good back-hander sends me down the long marble hallway and into two enormous Japanese ceramic urns that shatter like something funereal, dark earth like from a grave spreading across the scene from which I can only weakly pick myself up, face down, eyes raised to glare across the intervening yards at the dark, neurotic animateur of the whole affair. A sick sickle grin alights her face, eyes like vortices, whirlpools, maelstroms, sewers.
“Shit.”
I abandon strategy and perhaps the witch queen is so unprepared for such a straight-forward attack that my radiant electrical blast takes her by surprise. There’s a noise like numerous cats in pain. I can sympathize. Sting drops like he’s taken a head-shot and Spectra goes over on her ass as well. Only Fortress stands unfazed, costume a blackened mess as he gains yet more inches on me in every sense imaginable.
I move for a door, no real sense of where I’m going, and just as quick sense Fortress about to unload again, and it takes every iota of my limited acrobatics to throw myself clear as the dizzying whiteness burns through the concrete stairwell beyond, admitting yet more daylight and the ill-conceived plans of pigeons fluttering through the sudden vent in the skyscraper wall.
Spectra throws herself at me like a hell-cat and after I go down with the surprise of her weight, I ram an elbow into the other side of her head and neck a few times and jostle around, turning on her like a Mexican wrestler, one arm under her chin and stabbing fingers in sheer desperation into the small of her back.
She is not a big woman and whatever her deal was before Matrioshka took over her pan-fried cerebellum, it didn’t extend to the sort of heightened physiognomy you could say I enjoy. My fingers are like tensile steel compared to her in that moment and before I can think better of what I am doing, they curl around the first crap they find and then I am tearing her spine from her back by the thick lumber vertebrae, blood and Tourette-like profanities ejaculating from her mouth as I peel it back to midway up her back and her legs go floppy and the only thing keeping her standing is my arm under her jaw and the grip around her spine.
I let go.
I am weak on my feet and I figure if Matrioshka’s going to take me out now, I might as well savor the meagre satisfaction of killing at least one of the Spectras in this crazy fucking multiverse. Blood drips like syrup from my fist. In the rubble-strewn thirty yards of corridor between the witch queen and me, Sting and Fortress stand ready to do their mistress’s bidding. Instead, I grin.
One last move.
I can almost feel the mental vice settling around me as I channel every reserve of strength into propelling myself through the open cavity of the skyscraper’s outer wall. I close my eyes, piloting on hope alone, and in second accelerate so fast across the Tokyo skyline that whatever fetters Matrioshka hoped to throw on me are erased by the physical distance I manage, travelling at just under Mach 8. I leave a waterfall of glittering shards in my wake as if the high-rises of this despotic Tokyo are crying for all the pain they have witnessed, but perhaps that’s a tad too poetic. I am just a man barreling for the horizon as fast as my nature will allow, left not so much with the relief at emerging from the crucible with my life intact again as at the bitter memory of the worst kind of betrayal.
Next time I see my father, he’s a dead man.
Zephyr 10.12 “Angel With A Compass”
I ALMOST LITERALLY crash in the forest somewhere north of Vladivostok, the land like it’s under the spell of a nuclear winter. Thick drifts of ash cover the ground as far as the eye can see, vast slopes of the shit, intangible and grey. But the trees rise from its weird desert, spindly but alive, the foliage a victim more to the time of year than any disaster I can imagine.
I’m effectively camouflaged in my black leathers streaked with soot, dust coating my bare arms only adding to my haggard, pale face. I’m so weak I simply lie on a bank with the trees raising their arms over me, moving from one side to the other as the irritation drives me until night starts to fall and something gives way inside and I sit up, noticing the ocean from my perch with a half-moon shining off the serrated wave-tops many miles away.
“Fuck.”
It is cold, but not cold enough for me to really feel it. After a while I stand with the assistance of the nearest tree and I taste the night air, tongue tingling like a French kiss with a battery, wondering what radiation or desperate bacterium or immuno-virus might be floating towards me in this apocalyptic terrain. Either I will live or I will perish. I’m too shattered to really think about it. I know I need food and proper sleep if I am going to fly again, so for a little while I simply pick my way between the charcoal-colored boles, not so weak as I appear, but feeling every inch the infant as the land slopes towards the sea and I see lights other than the moonstruck waves glittering back at me.
The town is like something from fervid Y2K imaginings of the previous century. Most the buildings are abandoned, but there are dim lights winking from blanketed windows and doorways in the town center where wrecked cars line the streets with more than a touch of method to their madness. A giant fire-blackened bus with Cyrillic markings blocks a major intersection, dwarfed by eight-storey tenements pock-marked by ancient artillery fire. There is movement in the bus as I shamble down the street, but my flagrant disregard for the red laser sights dancing like randy fireflies across my chest must enchant the hidden sentinels, for they appear from the bus and a nearby sunken concr
ete stairwell, swaddled in thick clothes and night-vision goggles to let me pass into their inner domain.
I can’t speak their language, but the men and women who appear surround me like I’m a holy man, their touches gentle as if they have evidence at last for the awful, titanic cosmology that has ruined their lives. For all that, I am led into one of the basements and allowed to rest on a blanket-swathed divan, a jug of something hot and spicy for me to drink before I simply sigh and give up the ghost and think fucking good luck to them if they want to try and slit my throat while I’m asleep.
Next thing I know it’s daybreak and I’m surrounded by gently snoring sleepers, united in the strange intimacy of surrendering to our most bizarre of natural instincts.
The light comes like a fugitive itself into the room, squeezing through the few gaps in the barricades thrown up in defense of the survivors’ sanctuary. The men, women – even the children – sleep with sub-machineguns and rocket launchers nearby. A little girl with hair so bright red I think it’s a head wound sleeps with a battle-scarred cabbage patch doll and an Uzi 9mm, a cupid’s face with her tresses the only splash of color in what’s otherwise a greyscale scene.
A gruff-looking but not unhandsome woman wearing a rolled-up wool balaclava and mittens comes over and crouches before me once she sees I’m awake. Worn over layers of other clothing, her t-shirt reads WAKE ME UP BEFORE YOU GO-GO and I smile slightly at the recognition.
“Who are you?” she whispers in a thick accent.
“Zephyr,” I say. “I’m Zephyr.”
The woman nods. “Resistance?”
If I thought I grinned before, now I am cackling madly as I nod.
“That’s right, lady. Me and my army of one.”
*
THERE DOESN’T SEEM much point in conversation. I’ve already exhausted my keeper’s supply of malformed English, so I stretch and gesture feebly for food and she just looks at me like any other nightclub hook-up, a sneer of discrimination mingled with the not entirely vanquished curiosity to be so close to one of the cursed super-beings who have run these people’s whole universe off-course.
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