Zephyr III

by Warren Hately

  “Yeah, well, fellas like that, they’re what I guess you would call a necessary evil,” Simonson says.

  The expression doesn’t sit well on his face, but I guess you’re due a bit of unease after a lifetime of confronting problems with a giant can of whip-ass.

  “Fairly unpleasant, actually.”

  “Fairly unpleasant, but what, necessary?” I repeat back to him.

  The former hero waves his hand a bit.

  “It’s some of that ‘the enemy of my enemy’ horse-shit,” he says. “Keeping in with the Freak keeps Mentor and his many goons off our backs. And that’s what we need right now.”

  “You’ve got something going on here, but frankly I don’t know what the hell it is,” I say with more of the unaccustomed confession.

  It makes “Walt” laugh and then he checks his watch.

  “Well, you’re almost right on time for a demonstration, so let’s walk.”

  I fall into step and we wade back into the chaos that is the disembarkation of the catamaran. I get a closer look at some of these boxes, seeing tinned peas, industrial packs of cornflakes, tinned milk, sugar, toilet paper . . . the list goes on.

  “How are we doing, Harvard?” Walt calls to someone, a guy with a face like a brown smear with teeth.

  “Just got the haberdashery,” the guy replies.

  “OK, good job.”

  When I look more closely at the stacks of boxes, I realize it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense that so much effort has gone to unloading them from the boat, carting them through the warehouse, and then just to leave them in the middle of the pier. After a few seconds’ idleness, the air starts to shimmer and I take a step back, proceeded by Sentinel’s vaguely amused chuckle, and the whole scene shifts and I see a shopfront, a light post, a fire hydrant, sealed tarmac where wooden planks formerly stood, and in the middle a skinny, vaguely albino figure in a white singlet, fur-lined pimp’s jacket and under that a red hooded blazer. He tosses away the stub of a cigarillo and big mirrorshades hide the enormous black eyes otherwise lurking in that face.

  “Fuck, I know this guy,” I remark.

  The mutant villain formerly known imaginatively as Warp saunters across and he and Walt Simonson shake hands. This is obviously not the first time they’ve met. There’s something conversational about the exchange and I just stand and stare for a few seconds before closing in for a better look.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  Walt has accepted one of Warp’s thin cigars and he indicates the incongruous section of warped space, a temporary Moebius strip in space-time caused by the bluish-tinged albino’s ability. Warp is from early in my career, though he doesn’t look to have aged much. When he removes the goggles I blanch, it looks like someone has upturned two spoonfuls of black caviar where his eyes should be, though like the multi-faceted eyes of an insect I understand in a sense each of the tiny black jewels are actually eyes themselves. Getting the thousand-mile stare from those babies is an uncomfortable experience, but I can get my freak on as good as anybody, dodgy eyewear notwithstanding, so I puff out my chest and thrust out my chin and a few sparks crackle off my fingertips.

  “Danny here is just helping us make a delivery,” Walt says calmingly.

  “A delivery?”

  “To Jokertown,” the erstwhile villain says in a thin, reedy voice.

  “Jokertown?”

  “Yeah, you read them books?”

  “Um, no?”

  Warp – or Danny – gestures obliquely to the old man.

  “You wanna show him the show?”

  “That’s what I was hopin’ for, Danny, if you’d be so kind.”

  The mutant takes a toke on the cigar and sizes up the situation and shrugs. He then nods and motions Walt and I to follow him back into the middle of the space, wherever it is from, crudely inserted into where the pier previously stood.

  “Should be fine by now,” Warp says. “We got Superboy helping.”

  “Great,” Walt says.

  Danny snaps the sheriff’s glasses back into place and looks at me.

  “Hold on to your lunch.”

  *

  AT THE PSIONIC mutant’s direction, time and space which were raveled now swiftly unravel and there’s a silent ripping sensation and I know what Warp means because it is awfully tempting to puke and possibly even crap myself right then and there. Instead, I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. It’s something Chamber taught us, back in the early days of the first Sentinels, yeah gee there’s that name again – influential much? – and the Tin Man’s wisdom remains as valid today because if you can’t see the thing that makes you sick, and if you’re distracted at the moment you’re meant to be disoriented, and if it passes quickly enough, then you pretty much miss most the ill effects.

  When things revert to how they’re meant to be we are standing further in the ruins of downtown Manhattan and fuck me if it isn’t Christmas because all the lights are on.

  The sun has barely set behind the skyscrapers of Atlantic City, but that’s enough to bring on the darkness. Yet here we are, against all logic and common knowledge, standing in a busy-looking inner city street with shopfronts and people milling about left, right and center. Only they aren’t normal people. The cold weather gives most an excuse to hide the worst excesses of their mutanthood, but close to us there is a guy with a seal’s proboscis and beside him a girl with red skin and yellow eyes. Further back from the scene Warp has translocated in space-time, there’s a big pile of packing crates and forklift trolleys and in the middle of a bunch of industrious-looking muties is a guy with the body of a first-rate brick, clad in a red-and-yellow spandex top. The only thing off is his head, which is a gelatinous green slab with eyes like floating currents and dozens of tiny mandibles dripping slobber down the front of his tee.

  “That’s Superboy,” Sentinel says to me on the quiet.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Like I’ve said, with mutants you’ve got to forget what you’ve read in the comics. Ninety-nine per cent of muties are disgusting, socially disfigured or quasi-reptilian freaks. It’s rare that ones like Mentor or my new pal Warp here have genuine superpowers as well as their disfigurements. And the so-called Superboy, the name a cruel parody, seems to be another. Clearly he has the body of a Jovean Adonis, super-strength, invulnerability, the works. The head, though, looks like an upturned can of silly putty. And I quickly establish he has the brains to match. A kind-looking old black mutant, eyes like a baby harp seal, cajoles the goo-brained oaf back to the packing crates and Superboy scoops up a pallet with seemingly no effort at all. He and the old man, from which tiny pieces seem to be constantly breaking off to leave a trail of rusty black crumbs behind, shuffle off in the same direction where others are taking individual boxes from the Guardians Without Borders delivery.

  “Okay, so what gives here?” I ask our curious benefactor.

  “Civilization,” Sentinel says. “A chance for these folks to regain some of what they lost when they quit the twenty-first century and were forced to start living like rats in a sewer.”

  “A hell of a sewer,” I remark.

  The old man scowls.

  “This is their chance to make a society on their own terms. No one’s normal here . . . and so they’re all normal.”

  “And when someone wises up to the fact there’s late-night shopping going on in the ruins of Old Manhattan?”

  “We aim to come out, before that happens.”

  “Come out?” I reply, admittedly astonished.

  “That’s right. And then we apply for statehood. The fifty-first state of the United States of America. Mutant Manhattan.”

  Zephyr 11.9 (Flashback) “Strung Up”

  THINGS ARE LOOKING pretty peachy there for about, oh, I’d say three-point-eight-three seconds, and then a funny feeling starts to come over me. Not sure how I’d describe it and frankly, given the fuckstorm-apocalypse that follows, lingering on a Merchant Ivory outline of whether my fingers
start tingling or my ball-sac retracts first is rather beside the point. Next thing I know it feels like a bunch of white supremacists have hooded me from behind as something – or yeah, I should say someone (and you should know who) – slips into the driver’s seat left all warm and toasty by my recently vacated mind.

  Mentor leaves me with a ticket to the corporate box of my own self-destruction as he quickly accesses my nicely recovering power reserves and sends a harsh wave of defocused electrical energy cutting through the nearby crowds. Like I was lecturing just before, funky features or not, most these muties are basically ordinary folks when it comes to things like armor class and hit points and my power attack is too much, it sobers me to recall. A man with a Father Christmas beard and uselessly glowing green eyes is at ground zero to the assault and looks like a baked potato public artwork seconds later. A mutant woman with long slimy tendrils for hair joins the spasms. A man with a charcoal complexion carrying a toddler in a trendy baby carrier is also hit and killed, the child unscathed. A dwarven figure eyeing the Guardians supplies is fried too. A woman, maybe I should say two women, given the heads, is thrown into the security mesh of an old shop window and crucified there by the current. My fingers lower, smoke curling off them as a grin-not-my-own making carves itself across my face.

  Sentinel might be retired, but he’s over the momentary shock and ready to rumble in microseconds. His fist clangs into my mug and I fly helplessly back, rebounding off a streetlamp that bends in my wake as I then smash through the masonry of the corner store and roll across the tattered bitumen. I don’t know if it’s the feedback loop or not, but I get the sense of Mentor’s control loosening for a moment and manage to scream out a strangle, “No!” before my throat constricts and I jet to my feet, opening up another torrent at Sentinel.

  The old guy braces for the attack, the clothes burning off him, but again the crowd behind isn’t so lucky. A woman and her kid using Sentinel for cover are spared, but three other mutants not yet fled for cover are cactus. Death tally so far about eight and counting.

  With charred cloth sloughing off him, Sentinel’s handsome face clenches into a look of pure rage and he powers into me. There’s a noise like a thunderclap and he drives us straight across the street and into another shopfront. Kaboom! Add any other comic book superlatives you like. He’s raining blows on me faster than Mentor has the wits to parry and the pain sinking through the layers of my suppressed neural cortex play no small part in me spluttering like a goldfish slipped from its tank. I manage to get a hand up – actually catch one of Sentinel’s size thirteen fists in my palm – and cough out something sufficiently intelligible that the old man lets up for a second. I look up, blood streaming from my crushed nose and mashed lips, a clicky feeling in my jaw, teeth loosened, and see a reflection of myself being weighed up in those once-soulful eyes.

  “It was Mentor,” I moan. “Not me.”

  *

  SENTINEL LETS ME sit up amid the pulverized brick and plaster of what used to be a shoe store more than thirty-five years previous. I hawk blood, snot and dust from my leaking orifices and catch a few looks at the horror scene out on the street, the residents of Mutant Manhattan have their own rolling disaster moment far from the prying eyes of any would-be interested media. Grief – and worse, guilt – choke me and the look on Sentinel’s face only make me feel worse.

  Begrudgingly – and I sense the solid desire to keep punching me – Sentinel offers me a hand to my feet. It’s too much for the old guy to apologize though, and I don’t blame him. He sniffs at my fashionably blood-stained costume and shrugs.

  “You thinkin’ he was in you the whole time?”

  “Jesus,” I gasp. “I dunno. I’m so sorry –”

  “Save it,” Sentinel snaps. He indicates outside with his thumb. “Save it for them.”

  But I don’t think I can face them and the look on my face tells that story plain and true. Those few cauterized glares that find their way to me swell with hurt and I weakly pick off my tattered duds, dusting off my leathers and try not to weep, though I am paradoxically at the same time ashamed at just how quickly my equilibrium returns. Maybe it’s another, as yet unquantified component of my superhuman healing power, I darkly muse.

  “You’d better skedaddle,” Sentinel says. “Could be a mob scene soon. Lynch mob, in fact.”

  I curse, the four-letter word like a relic of yesteryear despite Sentinel’s raised eyebrow. I can almost literally hear myself crashing down the ladder of his expectations and I step aside, slump-shouldered, averting my gaze from the hostile and simply grief-stricken recriminations of the growing throng.

  “I’m gonna kill Mentor for this.”

  I nod once to Sentinel and vault into the air, leaving him with the quite wrong-headed impression I am probably joking.

  *

  MY OWN ANGER and self-loathing drives me in a tight, but wild spiral hurtling over the jagged ruins of Manhattan like a time traveler, the otherwise advanced, redeveloped cosmopolis of Atlantic City throwing not-exactly-embracing arms around the Hudson. The old Big Apple is more a shriveled raisin, a rotten apple forgotten in the thick carpet at the corner of the living room.

  In the clouds I am better able to gather my thoughts and this is what saves me from a near-suicidal plunge into Mentor’s headquarters on a one-man spree attack. As Mentor has already shown, he can play me like a jukebox – and that’s from afar. If he burrowed into my cerebrum like some psionic broke Mexican smuggled across the Jokertown border, then on his home turf I would be veritable clay under his control – and mayhap an even more dangerous weapon.

  So for the time being I quit Manhattan, but I’m determined it won’t be for long. It’s true this whole sorry little episode could be behind me in a nanosecond and no one would be the wiser to the massacre that bears my signature. It’s not exactly for the most ethical reasons that I can’t let it rest that way. Personal heroics be damned, this is more about histrionics. My fucking bruised ego is feeling far too savaged for me to let these sleeping dogs lie – die, perhaps, but not lie.

  It’s by the light of this cold-burning candle of fury that my mind lights on a particularly twisted idea that gets me grinning again. Knowing what I can do to aid and abet my vision of Mentor strung up by his cojones, I dart back in the vicinity of the old waterfront.

  Zephyr 11.10 (Flashback) “Public Nuisance”

  DAYBREAK, AND I am listening to the splintering crash of bad guys getting beat up. One flies through a window with the operatic quality only breaking glass can manage, hitting the sidewalk like a bag of shit and bones, the grunt escaping the goon’s breath, a tooth breaking, skidding on his own blood. Bloodshot eyes roll up in a head adorned with safety pin earrings, the Illuminati symbol tattooed on the idiot’s forehead. His buddy follows him a moment later to exactly the same results.

  Streethawk steps through the broken aperture to cop an eyeful of me lounging all insouciant and shit against the waning light of the streetlamp. The crusty old poofter’s Mohawk shows signs of the long night’s war against crime. Plasters bandage his knuckles and the bridge of his nose like he’s escaped from an Adam Ant tribute band. He only stares at me, battlefield glare at odds with the once sullen good looks broken by a lifetime’s boxer’s antics. As the second thug goes to stand, I Tase him good and proper and the mook pukes, doubled over, and Streethawk floors him with a solid kick.

  “Oh my stars and garters,” Streethawk says in his ironic, utterly deadpan voice.

  His face gives another sniff of complete disinterest as he saunters towards me.

  “What brings you to my alleyway, Zephyr?”

  “Just getting a taste of your world. I tried a public toilet, but. . . .”

  “Cute. What do you want?”

  “A hand.”

  Streethawk harrumphs, but there’s a smirk in there somewhere.

  “A hand? Hand is extra.”

  “Well I was going to say I wanted to borrow your ear for a minute, but thought you
might get the wrong idea. There I go again.”

  “Cut to the chase, Zephyr.”

  “Gary someone. I’m looking for him. Animal Boy.”

  “Animal Boy? Shit. Is he still alive?”

  “He was last time I saw him – despite the temptation to make it otherwise,” I reply. “Besides, he’s not Animal Boy any more.”

  “Yeah, he’d be pushing on a bit.”

  Streethawk looks around. One of the goons gets up and starts to crawl and then collapses flat-out again. The ‘hawk only grunts a laugh and motions for me to follow.

  We stroll out of the alley into the pending crime scene that is the Van Buren waterfront. The world-weary crowds stare leeringly at us as we walk past a broken down Cineplex, a row of porn shops, a pawnbrokers, a gun shop, a dollar junk shop and cross past the authentic-looking Vietnamese place, the waiters in traditional knee-length white rubber boots hosing out the tile floor.

  Down near the docks, the rust-hulled tankers moon us along with the passing gulls. Streethawk takes a deep chug of sullen air and stretches, looking around. The knee-length acid-wash denim jacket somehow looks less gay than you might expect on his wiry fighter’s frame. He catches my eye like he’s caught me scoping out his action and his smirk flashes a chipped tough.

  “You’re one tough faggot, ‘hawk,” I say before sense gets the better of me.

  “I’m too tired to put you through the motions, Zephyr, so relax. I wanted to put you in casualty, you’d be there already.”

  “Haughty little bitch though, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t make me change my mind,” he says.

  “Gary?”

  “Gary Spade. I’ve got the feelers out. Started while we was walkin’.”

  “I figured as much. What now?”

  “What I’m wonderin’ is what you’re gonna do for me?”

  “Jesus,” I remark. “Is that why we’re down at the waterfront?”