I KNOW THERE’S more goons upstairs, but figure they can come to me if they want to get fried that badly. With the initial sugar rush of taking out the living room, I’m literally starting to think about my lack-of-stealth approach when there’s a structural groaning noise overhead and I look up to see cracks racing across the ceiling and then an honest-to-fuck elephant crashes down across from me.
Gary rolls in the plaster and detritus and stands awkwardly. He’s gone Asian for the occasion, presumably to give bad guys less ear to hang onto when trying to deal with his unique brand of stampede attack. Me personally, I prefer the hippopotamus, a far more lethal African who also shits like a wood-chipper, a fine spray of the stuff everywhere. Messy.
The elephant turns and looks at me with a sarcastic eyebrow lift. I resist the urge to Tase him. As an elephant, Gary’s far more sympathetic. I motion to the two-foot wide doorway ahead of me instead.
“After you, stealth bomber.”
As the elephant shuffles around the room, ears wiggling, dislodging more dust and pieces of crap, I note the possibly deceased form of another juggalo in the rubble where he landed. I wince. Gary’s been doing his “attack formation delta,” which basically means flying unnoticed as a bat until over his target and then turning into a much bigger and gnarlier animal about fifty feet in the air. It also magically creates lawsuits. I think Gary’s in a place where he no longer cares. Me, I figure it’s not my problem.
The elephant evaporates in a swirl of grey mist and Gary rolls briefly nude across the scene, throwing himself forward like the primate he instantly resembles. When he turns back, he’s a silverback gorilla with a touch of ginger in his genes. Can’t shake it, I guess. The Ginger Ninja. I think briefly about trying to sell Gary on the name and realize it’s probably not the time. The guy with the pair of Glocks making like he’s Tupac back in action adds to the distraction.
“Hey motherfu –”
Gary turns whip-fast and his gorilla fist sends the clown into the door frame and on into Never Never Land.
“The ape’s back in action,” Gary grunts in a much deeper and slightly occluded voice.
“No monkeyin’ around,” I add with a certain droll enthusiasm.
“Gorillas aren’t –”
“Fuck off, you douche. I know that.”
Beyond the door lies an apartment stairwell, the concrete littered and stained from a few years’ neglect and illicit drug traffic. I peer that way and nod my approval for the gorilla to go ahead. Gary gives a grunt and pees near my boots, probably a more effective way of getting me to take the lead than I’d really want to admit. Snarling still, I start up the stairs vaguely wondering why I should be bothering with the roof.
I turn back to explete this to my erstwhile teammate and there’s a sudden rush and pain across my kidneys. I clutch myself and lose my position on the stairs, thuddering down the concrete as someone who resembles the green Power Ranger cartwheels over the railing and lands a series of kicks against Gary’s head and shoulders. The ape catapults back into the crime scene we’d just departed, leaving me to dry-heave in all the dust and hairballs and crap as I try to light the prancing little fucker up, who I have to assume is Raptor.
He’s quick. Caged lightning crackles over the iron rail and attaches itself to an ancient light fitting that explodes, raining sparks and toxic gases over the scene like fairyland fireworks. Raptor himself is a blur, faceless wearing the helmet that brought me here. A small but iron-hard fist catches me upside the head, strong enough that my skull bounces back off the stairwell wall in a puff of plaster dust.
“Fucker!”
Again I try the blitzkrieg attack, unaware as Gary throws himself like a hairy human (or should that be primate) cannonball back into the stairwell and directly into harm’s way. He makes a noise like a microwave burrito might if it had a soul. The lightning makes his hair stand on end that would ordinarily have me doubled over in laughter if I weren’t so fucking perturbed by the super-fast little green-skinned snot-rag who backflips over me, slashing me across the cheek in the process.
I turn, pouring on what little superspeed I have left, and throw my whole fist and shoulder into a building-wrecking punch that catches the little queef in the middle of the chest and slams him into the cinder-block wall. There’s a crunching noise – several crunching noises in rapid succession, in fact – and with a wheezy dollop, Raptor slides down the wall to the ground and his liquid metal helmet peels open and shrinks down until it is just a metal band about his throat.
Reptilian eyes look at me. Hell, reptilian everything looks at me. I not so much sense as smell Gary lumbering in from behind as Raptor catches me in that yellow-eyed gaze of his.
“Watch out!” Gary yodels.
I move aside (frankly it’s more out of irritation with Gary crowding me than any effort at self-preservation) as Raptor hawks a foul-looking loogie that strikes Gary fair in the middle of the face.
I growl and go to backhand him, but the third nailed hand attached to the elastic reptile tail I hadn’t yet noticed catches me by the wrist and next thing I know I’m push-pulled into another intimate moment with the masonry. I spit plaster and chips of concrete from my bleeding mouth as Raptor turns upside down and scales the wall and I only just manage to grab him in time by the tail.
“Not so fast!”
I yank and Raptor yowls and comes crashing to the ground, turning whip-fast and delivering a series of kung fu kicks to my legs and stomach that level me, but I retain my grip, Raptor twisting and rolling over me until he’s straddling my chest and he makes that disgusting noise again and fwoopt. I try not to inhale, eyes squeezed shut as I thrust out my other hand and my aim is true, grabbing Raptor by the collar and pulling hard enough that the metal band comes free.
It’s just as well. It’s only a second or two more before the acid kicks in.
Zephyr 11.13 (Flashback) “A Creature of the Old World”
LOOKING BACK, APART from it making me super-vulnerable to further attacks, if I could bottle Raptor’s spit I think I could put on a pretty good party for the superhero fraternity. As I’ve whined a thousand times, there’s a lot of quality drugs and most the booze on the planet that has zero effect on me. Not so for Raptor’s throaty little home brew, which barely entered my system before I throw myself headlong into joining Gary in a crazy, all-out mindfuck of a session.
That gangster crib becomes our demented playpen. We howl, minds bouncing off the blood-spattered, dented walls, those juggalos who can drag themselves out of there doing so in fine order. I can’t say Gary and I bond. God knows, it’s a unique experience. Raptor’s toxins wrap their gnarly little fingers around our brain-stems and squeeze – squeeze like a motherfucker – but in the end, Gary is Gary and I’m me. It is daylight when I come to, sprawled beneath a bullet-riddled grand piano I can’t remember even seeing under a painter’s tarp in one of the side rooms, one of my boots missing, pants stinking of sweat and Gary’s piss. The interloper himself is long gone. I find my boot in another room, a smiley face painted in some departed ho’s lipstick on the toe. My mouth feels like I’ve had the builders in. My eyes are glued shut in what I hope is just the drug-induced sleep deprivation.
And I have the helmet.
The metal band fixes about my throat like a bad-ass dog collar.
Now I am ready for two things: kicking ass and taking names.
First things first, though – breakfast.
I wash my face and armpits in a bathroom ripped straight from a Bosnian war movie. The cuts are now scabs on my face. I have a tiny packet of KAAS healing cream in my so-called utility belt and I dab it on, pulling all those faces most of us won’t admit to making in the mirror and probably looking more like the Indian from the Village People than the tough-guy superhero the world knows and … well, that some love.
The gang hang-out is quiet as a tomb. I guess I’ll never know what Raptor’s deal was or why he feared a psychic intruder. I don’t think Menagerie Man and
I could be mistaken for that. There’s a pile of what look like animal droppings on the living room floor that I’ll take as Gary’s farewell. He confessed to me in those bleary hopeless hours that he could only function sexually while in animal form. Poor bastard, but I hope he keeps his distance.
I move to the shattered fire escape and out, squinting against the daylight brightness of the city, life in full swing, the distant zoo noises of taxicabs, ambulances dopplering, traffic, people engaged in life and commerce.
Up in the air, a freezing rain paints a different picture. The city seems calm and ordered, a facsimile, more like a cheap tourist painting than the real thing. Disheveled as I am, when I drop to a Mickey Ds in Grant and gorge myself on a lunch and two breakfasts, the stunned and disarmingly coquettish young girls at the counter refusing to give me the bill, and I feel as much a part of the city as I ever have. I sit eating, wolfing the ammonia-rich carbs down with only my reflection and the muted teenagerly giggles for company, trying not to make too much of a serious study of the scarred and stunted-looking shade staring back at me from the faux polished obsidian.
“What the fuck would you know?” I mutter to myself.
I burp. Napkin off. Drain my Coke.
It’s hammer-time.
I finger the neck-band and the sinewy metal snaps into place over my face, oddly permeable to my eyesight. Fast food bubbling in the metabolic cauldron of my engine room, I gun from the restaurant and into the sky, angling like a mad scientist’s misguided latest effort for the ruins of Old New York.
*
OLD PORRIDGE STOCKINGS already said he was staying at the Rosencrantz. If Central Park and environs is controlled by Freakasaurus, then Mentor is a creature of the old world, which means the southern tip of neglected yonder ruins. I thump down in Battery Park, the sphere gone, the carcass of a small jet liner jutting from the ground like an artwork in its place across from the crumbling edifice of the ye olde hotel.
An eight-limbed mutant skitters spider-like from within the wreck. Ropes and great stands of treacly webbing hang everywhere from the wreck’s undercarriage. I open my palm and there’s a flash and the creature goes down without a cry.
I start striding for the hotel and a brute the size and color of a small brownstone comes lumbering from a nap under a nearby elm. I turn him into the wreckage of the jet liner and he disappears amid the clanging chaos and I look about for more attackers, but there are none.
I am dead to the susurrus harp-string plucking of Mentor on my mind. All I can sense is the growing assembly of mutants gathering on the periphery of the park. They agglomerate on the available scenery, dozens of the bastards, a veritable freakshow, one glowing uselessly like a light bulb, another shaking in and out of focus, a half-faced man-child with two left arms and two left legs growling from the pit of his throat as the more adventurous and zealous of Mentor’s followers advance in a broad flotilla around me.
A girl with hyena muttonchops steps forward and gives a twitchy performance as Mentor overtakes her.
“Prithee, Zephyr, how can I convenience you?” he asks in her voice.
“I’ve brought a message,” I say, trusting the helm to shield my lie.
“From?”
“You know from who.”
“Then what is it?” he asks in that stuttering girl-voice.
“No.” I say. “In person.”
The hyena-girl gives a glottal laugh.
“It behooves me to treat anything you might say with skepticism, Zephyr,” Mentor replies. “Here is good enough.”
I scowl, frustrated, and send a lightning bolt point-blank into her chest. Not a big one, as far as electrocution goes, but not one you’d be putting your hand up to taste in a hurry. The hyena-girl yowls and flips away and there’s a palpable sense of the lost connection to their psychic overlord as the mutant rabble bristle in the bulwarks of the tattered park.
“Shit,” I mutter, angry at my crestfallen response to such an abjectly futile strategy.
Then I clench my fists as Mentor’s wolf-pack starts to converge.
Zephyr 11.14 (Flashback) “Disharmonic Orchestra”
THE TOUGH ONES lead the charge: the brownstone, a guy with the complexion of old tires, a woman with flaming hair and brass knuckles, a kid with nails growing from his red-hued arms, a brawny guy indistinct from a regular Joe except for the whitish mucus leaking from his eyes and a big-ass combat knife with studded grip in his fist. I karate chop the girl and the nailed boy with hard strikes designed to disable them. It works. The Michelin man bounces away when I swing my doubled-up fists into his chest, fighting off the grapple from Mr Brownstone. I headbutt backwards into him, the resulting noise like breaking crockery. There’s vague pain under my armpit at the knife strike. I turn and pincer-grip the weeping man’s throat, lifting him from the ground and tossing him into the shadows beneath the crashed jet liner.
I punch the brownstone guy hard to the accompaniment of more feral growls. Something crucial inside the huge guy snaps and he goes down making a strangely effeminate gurgling noise. Unfortunately, he’s replaced by the rubber-coated dude, literally bounding back from the latest defeat, trying to wrap me up with big grey-black hands until I light up like a Christmas tree to the satisfying smell of scorched tire.
He wilts away and the next wave attacks: six or seven men and women, the most dangerous a rhino-horned obese woman, huge horny talons like sharpened hooves she swings at me in big clumsy roundhouses. I blast her back with some spare current, deflect a baseball bat, deliver a quick combo to a guy with six eyes and lipstick, then throw off the rest in one concerted effort.
“Mentor!” I yell.
The girl with flaming hair struggles up. Her and a guy with a katana attack me. I’m distracted, eyes lancing over the angry mob looking for angles, knowing I am no Mentor and not about to go massacring these people as much as I want to threaten such, hoping I can flush him from his hole.
The stakes are pretty grim. I hit the guy with the sword with a devastating elbow strike probably harder than is safe. He groans, spitting teeth. As he slumps, I put a toe into his chest and send his flailing, unconscious body into three more mutants sitting on the fence when it comes to throwing themselves at me. The girl with the lava for hair yelps as I backhand her, my chest heaving in frustration.
“Mentor!” I bellow, now sounding like a wounded if not deranged bull.
A little guy leaps at me. I barely look. Fry him. He peels away like he’s made of leaves.
There’s a warm wind and I look up. A figure. Stocky. Familiar.
Sentinel.
*
THE OLD MAN thumps down in a buckling of concrete, pulling aside his suit jacket and shirt to reveal the same rippling bulk made famous in yesteryear before costumers invented latex and heroes wore suits more like circus outfits than the shiny rigs we know today. Wearing just a t-shirt and slacks, the greying-at-the-temples Sentinel glowers at me with eyes not his own.
“You seem to forget I called you here,” Mentor-Sentinel says.
“I don’t forget anything – including the innocent people you killed.”
“Mutants, you mean, Zephyr.”
“Don’t tell me what I mean,” I answer back. “People. If you think less of them because they’re mutants, well, I can’t tell you how many shades of fucked up that is, you being you and all.”
Sentinel rolls his bullish shoulders. It’s been years since he’s really scrapped, but Mentor and me, not quite such a long time ago. Mentor’s pulled this trick on me before, but never with a powerhouse like Sentinel. Age doesn’t look to have wearied him. I’m replete with genuine hesitation. I swallow hard as the big guy circles me. The costume and mask are long gone, but the intimidation factor is still there in that graven face even knowing the man inside is probably screaming in frustration, if he’s conscious of the experience at all. It is to him that I narrow my gaze and look back apologetically.
“OK. Let’s do this.”
“I
am ready,” Mentor says.
I know he’s feeling drunk on the power of Sentinel’s body. I aim to use that to my advantage. He’s got all the strength, but none of the skill. He’s a master class psion, not a streetfighter like me.
All the same, he puts his head down and charges forward. I dance aside, slapping him with a low order charge he rightly shrugs off.
Surprisingly quick, Sentinel whips about and swings a powerful left roundhouse I barely evade, leaning back, the breeze of the missed punch brushing my teeth. I reply with a quick one-two-three-four body blows that lack the leverage to really make an impact. I hear the satisfying grunts as Mentor registers the blows, harmless as they might seem. He thrusts forward and headbutts me hard, my nose exploding again to a bright disharmonic orchestra of pain, not a move I’d ever expect from Sentinel, and I lance back as he gives me the hard stare, not quite able to access the eye beams on instant command that I have a split second to be somewhere else before the heat rays shoot out and the crashed jetliner is split in half off in the distance behind us.
I land on Sentinel from behind with doubled up fists. The knock-on effect sends him crashing across the rank overgrown lawn. Clods of turf fly in the air as he grounds himself and hurtles back, spinning like a top as he torpedoes towards me and I meet him with a perfect switch-hitter, my left like the fist of God across his jaw that sends him flying out of the park and into the choked-up, dust-covered wrecks of once-magnificent street cars lining the closest boulevard. I am up and in the air in a moment, keen to follow up on my homer.
Only dented cars greet my arrival. There’s a surge of mutant humanity (mutanity, I think) behind me as they follow their man, but Mentor-in-Sentinel’s-clothing appears gone.
“Yoo-hoo!”
I look up to see the curious picture of Sentinel clinging to the third-floor façade of the closest building and then I’m awash in boiling microwave radiation. I can only power straight up into the sky to avoid the deadly wash as cars catch fire in my wake.
Zephyr III Page 23