ZEPHYR Volume 1
Warren Hately
Copyright 2012 Warren Hately
It’s 2013 on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The place is Atlantic City: a sweeping longitudinal metropolis rebuilt following widespread devastation in 1984. Superhumans are not only real, they’re human. All too human, as Nietzsche would say.
“… like superheroes in the world of American Psycho …” @wereviking
For more about Zephyr or its author, visit warrenhately.com for musings about post-literary writing and Sturgeon’s law – updated most weeks.
Contact the author at wereviking @ hotmail.com, follow @wereviking or visit warrenhately.com for more.
Cover art by Alfredo Torres
@spacechipAT
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All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Zephyr 1.1 “Bright Red Zed”
FOR A MAN with the power of six-hundred thousand light bulbs or whatever the fuck the advert says, I am feeling kinda wrecked as I stumble up the steps at Halogen, fingers clawing into Red Monolith’s designer cloak as we make a show of laughing and clowning good-naturedly for the cameras. Actresses swirl around us like blowflies on a dead cow, minor grade, firm-bodied, their post-operative breasts stacked and racked as beautifully as the season’s evening wear can hope to provide for, and it isn’t like I am slapping them away. It’s times like these – which means yeah, pretty much every time I stumble into Halogen or the Flyaway or Silver Tower, or sneak in through the back at Transit or Aubergine – that I think about Elisabeth. Funny how someone you love so much can seem like such a nuisance. I blame it on my inner child, knowing she would as well.
Inside, Darkstorm is talking to Lady Macbeth and I wonder what the hell a villainess is doing in here and whether I should kick up a stink, but actually I’m craning my head above the crowd wondering if Twilight has made a show. I see Black Honey talking to Demi Moore and Tony Sabato Jr, and Eric Clapton goes past and high fives me and then immediately makes a face aghast like he mistook me for someone else. I quickly turn my shoulder on Black Honey, knowing if she’s here, her other low-level pals won’t be far away.
I can’t see Twilight anywhere, though the club is pretty packed and it seems like either the pounding music renders me instantly deaf or there’s something else beneath it, the music and its accompanying vibrations somehow beneath us, subterranean and foul, and I brush past Lady Macbeth and she makes a face at me, baring her teeth, and I’m just thinking “fuck it” I might power up and slug her one and be done with it when Red Monolith appears, grabbing me by the wrist and pretty much ignoring the latent static charge he gets in return.
“Hey man,” he grins in that stupid surfer voice of his. “Ease off the Lady, Zeph. Haven’t you heard? The Lady turned.”
I look again at the tall blonde, fairly graceful despite her age, and realize the snarling thing is her attempt at playing the coquette. She winks at me as I transfer my gaze with difficulty between her magnetic blue eyes and the dark sheen of Red Monolith’s visor.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Lady Macbeth leans in and does this weird wiggly dance and starts talking like she’s a stunt double for one of the bigger girls from the Supremes, which again, maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake, I realize eventually it’s basically all just a performance for my benefit.
“Ain’t you heard, Mr Zephyr? I’m turned,” the old witch says.
“Turned?”
“Apparently Think-Tank fucked up,” Monolith shrugs. “Get Lady to tell you about it.”
I wince because even under the seven-foot-tall hero’s red-and-black motorcycle helmet I can tell he’s making wildly suggestive motions with his eyebrows, not to mention nudging me, and even if her brain molecules are still recovering from being re-organized by one of my old enemies, the Lady gets the drift and gives a look of discomfort, finding someone she knows in the crowd and departing. On reflex I turn to check out her ass and I have to concede she’s in pretty good shape. The split-leg black evening gown helps. Lady Macbeth hails down Antonio Banderas like he’s a taxi or something, but the sneaky bastard turns and pretty quickly opens his arms for the grope. It’s not like she’s a mass murderer or anything, so I guess it’s fairly easy to forgive and forget. Especially for actors.
“Have you seen Twilight?”
“What’s that?”
Red Monolith leans in and offers me the side of his head like I might speak right into his ear. Resisting the urge to pull off his helmet if not his head and throw it across the room, I calmly repeat myself more loudly.
“Oh no, I have no idea.”
“OK.”
“Beer?”
“Stoli,” I reply.
I’m not going to the bar tonight after an incident the previous week that I can only remember in flashbacks. I also don’t have any money. I could flash fry an automatic teller or yank one of the damn things out of the fucking wall, but for some reason I have not. Yet. I’m one of the good guys. It’s a mantra for me. It’s worked so far. It also helps me not forget.
The press and push of the crowd is a little sickening. The air’s moist like we are in the presence of a giant fourth-dimensional armpit, though I know the smell, if I’m not imagining it, comes mostly from the carpeted floor. I’ve been here in the daytime – woken up in a corner, in fact – and it’s not one of the prettiest sights.
I retain the curious conviction that if I keep looking long enough I might find Twilight, so I move along under the awning beneath the DJ booth and nod hello to the guy from Ned and Stacy and one of the Ramones and a girl called Constance who I saved once from a burning tenement, which she has used ever since as her excuse to get into exclusive clubs like these. It is possible that after saving her, Constance gave me a blowjob, but since I was out of my skull on horse tranquilizers at the time I can’t really recall. She says hi, does a little wave. I pull my hard face, eyes far away as I shoulder past her like a man with an important engagement – like I have to return some videos or something.
*
RED MONOLITH FINDS me lurking like a sex offender beside the doors to the girls’ toilets. He passes me the cold bottle and I drink half the thing straight off, knowing there’s no way in hell my constitution will allow me to do something as unhelpful as get drunk. Tired as I am, thanks to a police station siege, an overturned fuel carrier, a weakened bridge in Old Brooklyn, and two separate corner store hold-ups today, I can practically feel the little bubbles of sweet liquor pounced on by my hyper-charged enzymes and converted immediately into latent energy, incorporated into the living battery that is my endocrine system – “recruited to the cause,” as I sometimes think about it.
I don’t like to think about it that way, I just do.
I upend my bottle and when Monolith asks “Another?” I nod and he laughs, producing a second Stoli with a flourish from under his legionnaire’s cape.
“Oh so that’s why you wear that thing? Are you sure Calvin approves?”
“No, man. Come on Zephyr, you know I just wanna be like you.”
I take a quick glance to see if he’s joking and of course he is.
“Like me?” I motion obliquely. The leather bodysuit fits like the proverbial glove, a bright red zee like a lightning bolt in the middle of my chest descending to the buckle. “I gave up that spandex shit years ago.”
“I liked your old costume man, seriously,” Red Monolith says.
I frown because now I think he’s being honest. Yet I know if I give in to it, the joke’ll still be on me somehow. I glance away and take in his helmeted head two or three times and wonder suddenly how the hell it is I am able to read his
expression given his face is covered by a ballistic carbon shield.
“You know the Red Monolith and the old Zephyr, man, we were like color co-ordinated,” he says.
“My costume was red and white,” I answer. “You’re red and black . . . and you’ve got those yellow panels.”
Monolith motions under his armpits. The actor who used to be known as Tom Cruise walks past holding hands with Richard Gere. A dreadlocked kid raises an eyebrow at us and I make a spark leap from my finger so that he goes away. Fucking drug dealers – never around when we need one, and pulling Uzis on us when we do. On a good day I might bust him. On a better day I’d find he was carrying something that might actually get me high.
“I’m thinking about gettin’ rid of the yellow panels, man,” Monolith says, bringing me back to the dingy reality of the club at its zenith.
“Really? Man, you should.” I try not to sound so earnest, but it comes out of me in a rush like I’ve spent every waking hour chewing nails over Red Monolith’s costume, so I give up completely, hoping he’ll read my reaction as irony as I add, “I’ve been wanting to say something for ages, but I didn’t know how to bring it up.”
“Zephyr, man,” Monolith answers earnestly. “We’re friends, aren’t we? You saved me from Doctor Octopus, remember?”
“Doctor Octopus is a comic book character. I’ve told you that a hundred times. It was Doctor Nefarious, OK?”
“Nefarious, OK,” Monolith half-chants to himself. “Then why did he have those mechanical arms?”
“I don’t know.” I sigh, swearing beneath my breath and looking away.
Drew Barrymore and her girlfriend emerge from the toilets and I know they’re big fans so I hide as quick as I can, leaving Red Monolith’s bulk as a distraction. Then, sipping my Stoli, I scan the room again wondering if Twilight has arrived while Monolith was talking shit. There’s no sign, no trace. I flex my fingers and a crackle of static emanates across the room, one in five girls feeling a gentle shock, nipples hardening, hair standing up on arms. Demi Moore looks my way and I shake my head, and Black Honey, her new costume or at least her outfit for the night made of shiny PVC instead of the usual black leather, glares at me like she could make something of it. We both know her heightened agility and acrobatics won’t mean shit the day I decide to cram thirty thousand volts of lightning up her ass. I do the sparking eyes thing, which even I have to admit looks extra cool with the domino mask, and Honey quickly looks away. I notice David Hasselhoff and the moment he sees me he flinches like a beaten dog and scurries out of sight – as well he should.
The guy comes out of nowhere, all Clark Kent with his slicked black hair, lantern jaw and wire-frame glasses. He has the nerdy dress code down pat too. I can’t imagine how he even got in here.
“Uh, Mr Zephyr?”
“I know it’s hard when you’re dealing with someone with one name, but it’s just Zephyr, kid,” and I throw off the hand he tries put on my arm.
“I’ve got to speak to you.”
I look over my shoulder and I can’t see Twilight anywhere and I’m thinking that if he’s stayed home, maybe he made the right call. I should be at home too, but if I was Twilight, with a sixteen-bedroom mansion on an island far away, I’d definitely skip Halogen if there was something better on offer.
“I’m not buying, sorry.”
I turn my back on the kid and start away and I am totally unprepared for him to grab me by the shoulder and try to turn me around. I resist the urge to flash-fry his balls and whirl back, my practiced badass look made supreme in the leather bodysuit, all the static in the air congealing in my hair which is already standing up.
“Get your fucking hands off me.”
“But, I . . . need to speak to a hero.”
The young guy’s face is kind of lame and he’s as embarrassed as I am, knowing he nearly said the line from that song. I gesture around.
“The club’s full of ‘em. Knock yourself out.”
And I know he’s going to tell me that there’s no-one like me, that Paragon and Stiletto and Black Honey and even Red Monolith can’t match the legendary Zephyr, and he’s right, but suddenly I just don’t want to be there unless I can be drunk, and I can’t be drunk because it’s years since I even tried, playing skal with two cases of mixers and pissing like a racehorse as a result. So I just walk. The kid follows. I’m calling him a kid because he’s so clean shaven, but I’m thirty-five and in superhero years that makes me his grandpa. And he can follow all he likes because the moment I hit the chain and Leonardo inclines his shiny black head at me and parts the rope, I do the crouch thing and disappear with a whoosh into the sky.
Zephyr 1.2 “Going Walkies”
THE SKY IS a grey curtain like a cataract across the stars. Thanks to me. Free-floating eight-hundred storeys above the tarmac chaos below, there’s nothing like it for fleeing your troubles – and I should know. The heavens are a frequent refuge of mine, even if the irony stinks. I can’t get any closer to heaven than the rest of you.
The cityscape is like a science fiction artist’s wet dream, at least by the light of the three-quarter moon. Superheroes have sure left their mark on this city and given the government more than a few excuses to redecorate, but the botched Kirlian Invasion of ’84 destroyed so much of New York’s infrastructure the city as it was known could never be the same again. With the millions already quarantined and evacuated for fear of contact with our aggressive spectral invaders, a major, once-in-a-century rebuilding effort seemed so logical even Congress couldn’t say no. Thus Atlantic City – the world’s great megalopolis and magnetic north for every costumed loony in creation – was born.
The architects wanted to include Manhattan instead of leaving it in ruins, the tunnels choked with the dead unable to get through the gridlock on that fateful first day when the skies rained an army of living light beams clad in powered armor. The president himself convinced the architects to make their mark on destiny regardless, gathering a team of designers with a budget never seen in the history of modern development. Legend also has it an inner cabal of architects, in the face of such a vast rebuild, watched Fritz Lang’s Metropolis no less than twenty times and tried to raise Frank Lloyd-Wright with a Ouija board with mixed success.
Astoria where I grew up as a child still exists, though no one calls it that any more. Likewise bits and pieces of the old cities here and there. In the Bronx, there’s The Bubble: a twelve-block radius of rundown tenements and historic brownstones preserved by the superhero Infinity at the moment of his death. People can still come and go from the force field-protected museum piece. Infinity was one of Captain Atom’s successors from the 70s New Breed team. It was just light he was trying to keep out, given that’s what the Kirlians were made from. Hence the dome looks like a giant black half-marble, especially on a night like this, and I’m just close enough to be able to make it out, dopplered in architecture with the new Planetarium, the needle of the Silver Tower begging for my attention close by.
The mayor of this vast domain is Roland Pykes. Good old gutless Roland – or at least his PA Alison Kirkness – knows how to irritate me better than almost anyone, and that includes Phantasmagor, Crescendo, Think-Tank and the Ill Centurion combined. You’d think I’d get used to it, being a hero on call, but that’s not really one of my virtues.
If I was able to answer my new Blackberry as quickly as my old phone, I wouldn’t have half the problems I do, but the damned thing comes with It’s Raining Men as the ringtone and I haven’t figured out how to change it yet. I’d get Tessa to do it for me, my darling technopath – that’s a joke, she’s normal, I hope for her sake – except the whole secret identity thing would be kind of hard to explain while she’s fiddling with Zephyr’s red lightning bolt-emblazoned cell phone. Kind of a giveaway.
The phone is sponsored by Enercom and slips into the back of my hidden belt compartment, nestled there right along with a brace of condoms, an emergency cigarette, a phial of special painkillers, a
nd usually the idea is to have a $100 bill except I spent mine when Tess needed money for the school excursion I’d forgotten to pay last week.
“Mr Pykes,” I respond in my best gravelled voice.
The reception is good even with all the turbulence I’ve created, shunting air molecules around creating a narrow storm-front.
“Hi Zephyr, this is Alison Kirkness here.”
“You’re up late, Ali.”
“Still getting things together for this ceremony tomorrow morning.” The reply is as taut as those long legs of hers. “Mayor Pykes asked me to give you a ring and, uh, you know, just make sure we’re all on the same page still?”
“Ceremony?”
I run through a mental catalogue – the closest thing I have for a diary. Elisabeth is in the downtown office, Tessa has school by quarter-to-nine, I promised to clean cat puke (not ours) out of my wife’s car. No ceremonies leap to mind and I’m paranoid enough to believe the mayor’s office could be messing with my brain. I spent a month once convinced I was a sexual abuse survivor named Valerie (thanks Mentor), so I’ve learnt to keep a skeptical view of reality.
“The Hermes Foundation ceremony?” Miss Kirkness prompts.
“Hermes Foundation? The porn guys?”
“That’s the Eros Foundation, I think you’ll find.”
“Look, I’m sorry Ali,” I reply and only just manage to mean it, “but I don’t remember any mention of a ceremony.”
“Well it’s not like you have a regular mailing address we can send you the invitation. We have to rely on your memory instead.”
“Sounds like that’s a pain for you,” I mutter.
No reply.
“Well, sorry to keep you in a job, Miss Kirkness. Just tell me the when and where and I’ll make it.”
Zephyr I Page 1