Zephyr III

by Warren Hately

  Even he sounds hushed, considerate, thoughtful.

  “But you came looking for the Tank, right?”

  “A-yup.”

  “Well, the Tank is in the tank.” He gives a brief laugh.

  “Yeah. So I see.”

  I look at my guide then and adopt a contemplative mien.

  “I guess this doesn’t exactly constitute you guys fitting him out for a rebuild.”

  “Oh, we got the rest of the shit through here,” Freakasaurus says and gestures up another slope going off to the left, more light creating a nimbus around another drape and I follow, shooting a wary glance over my shoulder at the man in the tank as his head lolls and nothing of the villain I have known and hated presents itself to my eye, though I am in no doubt that it’s him. No doubt at all.

  The spectacle beyond the curtain confirms it. I cannot guess what purpose such a grand chamber once held to this theatre of live nocturnal amusements, but the metal walkway of the circumference now approaches an amphitheater of sorts where the workers have laid down their tools forever. In the middle of a bunch of broken packing crates and rusty tools and glass bottles and swathes of rags and an old fire hydrant and spare car tires and discarded LPG cylinders is an enormous, battle-scarred black metal carapace about the size of a Sherman tank without the turret on top. Of course, Think-Tank’s battle armor, or whatever it is we’re calling this, isn’t in the best condition. Under the winking lights I can see the dents along its black-painted surface. Nonetheless, it is a fearsome thing, iron and malevolent. Athwart the top is a black maw, the connection for the cybernetics of the villain’s lower body. Without him in place there is something Gigeresque and mechanically sphincter-like about the hole which is inevitably menacing. I would no more put a foot in there than any other part of my anatomy. In fact, even looking at the damned thing gives me an urge to vomit and I look away, ignoring the fact my leathery tour guide appears to be laughing at me. Then again, he hasn’t had some of the confrontations I have had with this mad fuck. Although I’ve never uncovered evidence of anything beyond ordinary rocket science, there is something blasphemous and ill and sorcerous about the tank’s amour, especially without him in it, yelling delirious commands, intent on taking over the world or at least wrecking everyone living in it. It is hard to explain. And if Freakasaurus smirks because he thinks this is the occasion for seeing me weakened, then he really has no bloody idea.

  I give the contraption a final dismissive wave.

  “You should destroy it.”

  “Is that what you think?” the freak replies.

  “Yes,” I say. “If you have any normal moral fiber left in you.”

  “Heh, that’s just what the old guy said.”

  I give the tall mutant the eyeball for a moment or so.

  “What old guy?”

  “Dude from the bad old days,” Freakasaurus replies. “He’s the one who’s behind all this.”

  “This?”

  Freakasaurus motions.

  “The reason I’m not ripping your arms off and doing unpleasant things to your wounds.”

  We let that one pass and I point to the ceiling, ostensibly the exit, and by silent contract we move through the rest of the building and out into the rear lot, an ancient New York Post Office van tipped on its side and marred by scorch marks. I have a sense of many more figures than I can see silently retracting into the late shadows of the day. It is a rare occasion that I let me extra-sensory barometric awareness leak out and gently detect the spaces where displaced air suggest lifeforms. I assume these are yet more of the dinosaur’s Sideshow Peeps and for the moment I have nothing really to worry about.

  Now we have something passing for fresh air around us, I signal yet another halt.

  “So you’re gonna have to tell me how you came by this, uh, situation here.”

  “With the Tank?”

  “And the whole, er, as you said, ripping arms off and whatnot.”

  I make an appropriately vague gesture.

  “Like I said, comes down to the old dude. Mr Boy Scout himself.”

  “Old man have a name?”

  “Sure,” Freakasaurus shrugs. “Sentinel.”

  Zephyr 11.7 (Flashback) “In Obscurity”

  WHEN THE COMICS industry finally started to clue in on the whole costumed crime-fighter thing they were a little late and a little flat. Their early contributions didn’t exactly fire the public imaginations. The Batman was a pretty limp-wristed competitor when you had folks like Jack Fury and Mistress Snow duking it out on prime-time black-and-white TV. When Sentinel came along, I guess some bright spark got the idea to nab the details while he was still slugging away in obscurity so that by the time the Nazi-smashing superman was coming into his own, he already had a legion of fans who knew him through the purloined identity of his comic book. As things so often do in this industry, when push came to shove, all that did was open the door for the lawyers to come in. The funny book publishers were legally required to change the name and origins of their darling creation to distinguish him from the legitimate copyright of the Sentinel, whose likeness they had infringed. And that’s how we got Superman, folks. The rest is history, at least on this world.

  And of course the Sentinel’s been missing presumed dead for twenty years. I say this to the Freak, who just shrugs those big scaly guns of his and pouts and twists in his leather lingerie and the darkness continues with its weirdly peopled susurrus.

  “Explain to me the Think-Tank thing at least,” I say.

  “Mother-fucker turned up in one of the sewers,” my host replies. “Looked just like you saw him now. Half-dead. Hell, only half of him. We already had a peace with your old man Sentinel and the shit him and his people are pulling down at the wharf, but I guess old Ironsides figured we needed a sweetener.”

  “A sweetener? How so?”

  “Well, one of the things we agreed to do was keep your stinky pen-pal Mentor out of the area, you know, especially durin’ the settin’ up stage.”

  “Well, I don’t know, but go on anyway,” I say.

  “Sentinel just shows up again in the middle of the park one day with your old-time nemesis there, gives him to me and explains how to rig up the aqualung you just seen,” Freakasaurus explains. “Dude says where the Tank is, armor’s sure to follow. If Mentor thinks we’ve got Think-Tank on our side, there’s no way he’s gonna cross the park – and that means leavin’ Sentinel and his Peeps alone.”

  “OK, you’re telling me the Sentinel has set up in Manhattan?” I ask just to be sure. “What the hell is he doing?”

  “You wanna know that, you’ve got to talk to the man himself.”

  “At the wharves, you say?”

  “That’s right, sister.”

  I give the tall mutant a once-over once again and frown.

  “Hard to believe you’re playing into his hands like this, no matter what you say.”

  “Sentinel?” Freakasaurus expels dismissiveness through slitted nostrils. “He’s not doin’ a thing to me. It’s your man Mentor who’s got the shits on.”

  “How come?”

  But the talking dinosaur just laughs, jutting that helluva jawbone out at me with a wry grimace.

  “You go see for yourself. All the explaining you need all in one spot.”

  “And . . . we’re cool?”

  “Boyfriend, we’re a long way from cool,” Freakasaurus laughs. “Just remember the Stingers.”

  Smarting from my lack of a smackdown confrontation, I grudgingly leave the park, taking to the air and twisting hard to veer for the solemn and abandoned piers to the west.

  *

  IT ALL LOOKS quiet. I am picking pieces of scorched leather from my tattered costume as I walk from one moldering, decaying warehouse to another, my belligerence and cynicism doing the yin-yang thing as I start wondering just how hard Freakasaurus might’ve been pulling my chain. The only thing I can’t escape – apart from a Stinger missile, today, apparently – is the inevitable conclu
sion I emerged relatively unscathed from the Sideshow and there’s gotta be a reason for that.

  At the fourth pier I stand around frustratedly long enough to get a whiff of fresh boat oil and I walk with increasing suspicion down the quay to the first of a row of big sheds which ripples and dissolves as I pierce their illusion.

  The thirty-odd dudes in overalls and a handful more in mook costumes cradling rifles must’ve been doing their damnedest to hold their collective breath while I was about my perambulation. There’s an air of relief as I walk inside the range of the hologram projector and my eyes widen in alarm at the set-up, a classic supervillain out-station, though none of the armed guards react as I would expect them to if this were the case.

  A stentorian tone rings out across the pier.

  “OK, hold it right there.”

  I turn to the dispiriting sight of a guy in a fawn-colored suit with a clipboard bearing down on me from the direction of the nearest hangar, neither he nor it anywhere near as dilapidated as the illusion would otherwise suggest. Since it is bureaucracy rather than bullets hurtling toward me, I decide to give a moment’s lenience and await the next with steely-jawed determination.

  “Well done,” the guy in the suit says. “Hope you’re proud of yourself, studmuffin. You just compromised a ten million dollar operation.”

  “And you are?”

  “Rich Hennessy, Guardians Without Borders.”

  The suit reaches handshake distance, at which point I know he’s at his most dangerous. A disarming smile bleaches through the gravel interlocution and I glimpse the sticker on the back of his stationery showing the same icon as the breast pockets of the guards and the other loafers: a globe in the palm of a stylized glove. Hennessy himself is a drowned rat of a man, sleek hair and prehensile nose something mole-like despite good tailoring and a voice well-suited to speaking in public. His grip is good – too good – and I know there’s a less-than-subtle message in that non-verbal exchange.

  “Guardians Without Borders?”

  “We followed the French model. You know? Medecins sans Frontieres?”

  “Yeah sure,” I reply. “Why didn’t you go for Global Guardians? Catchier.”

  “Actually that name was copyright,” Hennessy replies. “Doesn’t matter anyway.”

  We exchange puzzled looks for a moment as I try to recall where I am meant to have heard that moniker before. Hennessy, the foreman or whatever he is, gives me a pained smile and asks, “You’re Zephyr, right?” in a voice that can’t help but betray he knows full well who I am – as I would expect.

  “Yeah,” I shrug. “You wanna tell me what gives? Either you’ve got a secret you’re burning to tell me or otherwise you’ve gotta go pee. I came here looking for the Sentinel.”

  “Oh right, so you know,” Hennessy replies. “Yeah, right. Yeah. I used to be known as Bison. Remember me? I dropped out of public life about five years ago.”

  I stare at this dude for a few seconds more before blocks of memory fall in place like a game of Tetris.

  “Didn’t you use to be, like, red and shit?”

  “I have an alternate form,” Hennessy explains.

  “Still got it?”

  “Last time I checked.”

  “You still got a good grip,” I say, trying to tease him out.

  Hennessy shrugs.

  “I have a fair bit of strength in my residual form. Like I said, as Bison, there’s a lot more where that came from, but thanks to the Guardians I can honestly say it’s a good while since I needed to use it.”

  Around us the men on the wharf have gone back to what they were doing before I came along. There’s a big-ass catamaran pulled in to the rear of one of the warehouses and between it and the main building and the front of the pier there’s a steady stream of worker ants and just a handful of machinegun-toting flunkies with respirators at ease around their necks and something of a holiday atmosphere compared to some of these sorts of operations I’ve come across in the past, most of them run by bad guys with the whole secret island/submerged missile silo/underwater cave-headquarters thing happening. I note among the unloading there’s a sole heavily-built guy with a blonde braid hanging down his back, uniform coveralls peeled back to reveal the physique of a Martian god. He juggles a pallet of deliveries at a time, making light work of it for the guys running forklifts in and around the depot.

  “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.”