While amazing, it’s unsurprising the man gets up. He has an alien god as his engine, after all. Waves of ice build up on him like body armor and on the short march back to us, he fends off diving attacks from Red Monolith and Falconer. Then it’s Twilight and I, two-on-one, fighting side-by-side deflecting attacks and trying to land a few, the face of the madman up close slack and inanimate beneath the freezing nimbus. The cold is so intense at ground zero I have genuine concerns I can’t keep this up. I feel like Amundsen at the South Pole or something, or at least that’s what I imagine. Then I manage to put my hand against the bad guy’s chest as Twilight twists his forearms away and I channel the power supply of a medium-sized town into the bastard, and to my surprise, he abruptly explodes into a thousand frozen chunks flying backward at a hundred miles per hour.
“Oh fuck.”
I look at Twilight and he’s equally aghast, though it’s worse for him because he’s still holding the dead guy’s forearms, hands attached. We look at each other for a moment and despite everything else, on the wave of hope this latest development brings, we can’t help cracking up in laughter all of a sudden, and I fall to my knees in hysterics as Twilight jabbers something about having disarmed the threat, which of course only makes it worse.
Seeker and Miss Black approach cautiously. I note that behind them comes Paragon and Jocelyn. Between Paragon, Seeker and the searchlights of the police and news choppers, it’s as bright as day, and for the sake of decorum, Twilight quickly divests himself of the grisly evidence and I stand, one handy aspect of the old uniform being the cape with which to dry my eyes.
“I wouldn’t celebrate just yet,” Miss Black says without any certainty.
Seeker also looks around as if hardwired to fear the worst. The bad guy’s remains aren’t moving, though in time they will defrost into an unpleasant sludge. I catch Jocelyn’s eye and she gives me a secretarial grin and says, “Hey there Zephyr. I really missed the old threads. What happened to your suit?”
Fortunately I don’t have to answer. Instead, the ice and the snowdrifts and the wind all start circling around us, conspiring to a center-point where a diffident mass takes shape. Within moments it solidifies. It accrues more and more ice with each passing second, elements of debris, tatters of newspaper and Styrofoam and plastic bags and Chinese take-away cartons and cigarette butts and all the city’s other rubbish massing into that Herculean form so that it raises two mighty and enormous white ice-encrusted fists to the sky, but from the knees down, it is the grey sludge of a rush hour sidewalk the morning after a good fall.
“What the hell is that?” I gasp.
“An elemental,” Twilight says tiredly. “An elemental unrestrained.”
“Which means?” Paragon asks, glowing gently.
“A god,” Jocelyn says, and I swear she’s still smiling, gleeful no doubt to see how us schmucks are gonna deal with this one. “A god on a rampage.”
“On a rampage and in his element,” Seeker adds.
*
ONCE THE THING has grown to twenty-five feet tall, it grabs a pair of sedans and smashes them together like a gladiator with a sword on shield. Glass rains down on it like confetti, shards sticking to it just to add to the danger. It doesn’t even bother to throw the wrecked cars at us.
The heroes spread out. For some reason Twilight remains with me.
“Once it’s free of its physical host, there’s no telling what it could do,” he says.
“Jesus,” I sigh, our plight made all the worse knowing we’re on a live feed and they might even have mikes strong enough to pick up our deliberations. “Shame we don’t have the lens any more, huh?”
“I guess it’s probably best that we don’t, if you consider what happened last time,” Twilight says.
“Yeah.”
Cue awkward silence. Motes of ice cartwheel slowly past and I start wishing the snow creature would attack.
“I’m sorry, Zephyr,” Twilight suddenly says. “Sorry. And I was wrong.”
“Well, Jesus. . . .” I stammer.
I can’t look him in the eye. We’re nearly three hundred feet into the air by now and of all the things I am worried about right now, radar microphones are prime on my list.
“It’s something I’ll have to dwell on to truly understand,” Twilight continues. “But I want you to know that I will be meditating on it. To understand where I crossed the line.”
“That’s . . . great, Twilight.”
“You know what Nietzsche said,” he replies.
“Hmmm, that thing about bank managers being the bane of society?”
“No, I was referring to the ‘stare into the abyss,’ you know, his ‘hunting monsters’ kind of stuff.”
“Oh.”
We stare down at the ice demon for a few seconds. It keeps accumulating snow and ice and it occurs to me if we don’t start kicking this thing’s tail soon, it’s going to be a hundred feet tall. Yet there’s still too many things nibbling at me.
“So let me get this straight,” I say finally, turning to Twilight. “You agreed to be the Antichrist?”
“Well . . . yeah. To stand in for him. Not him, of course. It’s not the Antichrist.”
“Oh sure,” I say, clueless.
“I mean, there’s no such thing. I agreed to accept an ancient title, a bane,” Twilight shrugs. “I guess I was young, I didn’t really think I was ever gonna get called on it.”
“All for the sake of a little power?”
“For the sake of a lot of power, believe me,” he says.
Sensing my admonishment, Twilight adds, “Hey, not all of us can manage to get struck by lightning.”
I grunt and turn slightly away.
“Yeah. Well I learnt a bit more about that too lately.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” I shrug. “I figure the lightning may have been the trigger, but not the cause.”
“How’s that?”
“Apparently my old man had powers too,” I practically mutter.
“Oh yeah? How does that work?”
“Sheesh Twilight, have we got an alien god to beat on or what?”
Twilight shrugs.
“Hey, I was just fucken asking. Trying to show a little brotherly concern.”
“Brotherly. Fuck. And this from the guy who –”
The big guy snaps. “We don’t talk about that. Not. Any. More.”
And I sigh. “OK. Maybe we don’t . . . Maybe that’s how we do this.”
And I sigh again, and now the creature is in a blind range as those with distance attacks open up, ice and steam spewing out of the thing, but ultimately making very little impact as the riven fissures seal themselves almost at once.
“Let’s do this, before it does us.”
“Not much of a battle cry, but you’re on.”
*
IT’S A BIG ask. As we throw ourselves at the blizzard beast, it accumulates caped heroes like flies on a peach. Wave after wave of attacks are repelled or outright ignored. At some point, I take one of the creature’s fists right in the smacker, and after rebounding from a pylon, find myself in a pool of shadows where the arc lights can’t find me.
Vulcana is there. Her arm is off. The blue of her transformed flesh disappears in the conflicting light and she looks like a silent movie star with her short, dark, stylishly-trimmed hair. I can tell she’s trying hard not to totally freak.
“You remember that guy who teamed up with the Laughter Boys? Called himself Eliminator?” she asks shakily.
I smile as I come back from the edge of blacking out.
“Crap name.”
Vulcana titters. I grin and nod at her arm.
“What are you gonna do about that?”
“Rambo would melt the ends and stick them back together,” she replies, tired-sounding rather than panicked now. “I’m not sure that’s going to work for me.”
“Hurt much?”
“Not like this,” she says and gulps. “I’m worried ‘bout,
you know, when I turn back.”
I nod uselessly.
“I’ll see what Seeker can do. She’s fixed me up before.”
After hesitating, I gingerly pat her shoulder. Twice in one day. Vulcana doesn’t look up.
I’m glad to return to the fight, though as I stagger back into the open, I watch the raging white beast hammer Twilight into a row of nearby stores approaching the bridge and then it snatches Chancellor from the air. I fear for Amadeus – that is, until a wave of rippling force transforms the creature’s arm to slush and the armored figure flits free. I acknowledge green-haired Cipher with a curt nod, and it’s a shame he can’t fly, because the Winter King’s new groove quickly reforms the slush into a massive, twisted fist and brings it down and across. Cipher disappears like last week’s newspaper.
I glimpse Cusp. She’s actually flying. How the fuck is that even possible?
I channel another blast of electricity into the beast’s core. It lumbers over toward a few other heroes who’ve come too close – Treesinger and Nocturne and Omeganaut and a guy dressed like Robin Hood and a black guy in gold lame and a dude who looks like a giant stack of twigs with arms and legs – and they run away, except the wooden guy, he’s called Susurrus apparently, I recall as I watch him get flattened. Another figure comes up beside me who I don’t immediately recognize because I don’t expect to be shoulder-to-shoulder with a villain. His name is Manticore and last time I heard he moved in the same circles as Frost and Gravitas and Thunderbird, whoring himself out to the Calabrese.
“We need a better strategy,” the long-haired mercenary shouts into my ear. “This thing shrugs off surface damage and its core seems all but impervious.”
“You blast shit, right?” I snap. “So join in. There’s enough to go round.”
Manticore shakes his head.
“My attacks are psionic. I can’t locate a coherent mind in there.”
I glance around. That would explain Nocturne’s uselessness and the number of psychic heroes like Miss Black and Seeker hanging back, unable to do much more than shout encouragements. Jackanape keeps making fool rushes in, gesturing wildly and seeming unable to comprehend that his powers, whatever exactly they are – I think I said that already – that they don’t hold any sway over the monster. Someone later explains that the barefoot, trench-coated madman can disturb mental activity as well as memories, but it’s his super-strength and acrobatics that save him from the clobbering of a lifetime.
So I have to concede Manticore is right. I release another discharge, vaporizing a chunk of icy torso that will refill its freezing lattice within seconds.
“Yeah, this isn’t working.”
“Someone said this is a demon?” Manticore asks. “I’m not sure what that means.”
“It’s all relative, or at least that’s what I’m learning,” I say, then do a double-take. “What the fuck are you here for, anyway? Nobody’s paying you.”
The guy wears a domino mask and has too much bare chest for my liking. He looks hurt by my suggestion all the same.
“I . . . the city needs help,” he says weakly.
And I look up and away.
“Amen to that.”
Twilight lands beside us. The left side of his costume is missing, the leg holding on by fibers alone. He only looks better, more majestic for it. Gay, huh?
“What’s the plan, man?”
“He’s your pal,” I say. “Bright ideas?”
“The pregnant chick says we need to immobilize him and dig out the manifestation,” Twilight says. “There should be a slug or something, on this side of the Barrier.”
I frown, remembering the eerie serpent they dug from the carcass of the demon-god who possessed Twilight, and then I catch myself on.
“Who’s pregnant?”
Twilight clicks his fingers and gestures absently. In that direction there’s only the few – what I call super-bystanders – able to watch crimes unfold in a single bound, and then the dark suggestion of the retreating police line.
“What, Jocelyn?”
“I thought that was Lady Macbeth? You know, Overlord’s squeeze.”
Manticore follows Twilight’s gaze. “She’s called Jocelyn, now.”
He catches my look and shrugs, embarrassed.
“So I was watching Oprah? Who cares? I was eating lunch.”
“So we need to whittle him down a bit more. . . .”
I actually stroke my chin before the beginnings of a strategy start falling into place. I impress myself as I pass for the closest thing we have to a general. I click my fingers, but it’s really just to get into character.
“Sun Man! Chamber! Chancellor! Start blowing up those cars!”
There’s a lot of stalled traffic, police cars, even a fire truck that hasn’t yet been flung around by the rampaging figure. A good amount of those wrecks now lie to the beast’s rear. Dutifully, the three nominated heroes get to work and it’s only a moment later that the first of the fuel tanks go up with a loud and satisfying kaboom.
“OK,” I say, motioning forward and following the direction with my own footsteps. “Bring in the Supermen.”
Mastodon, Twilight, Red Monolith and I hit the thing at once. Twilight’s fists are ablaze with a familiar viridescent naphtha. The storm demon makes a sizzling noise, steam pissing everywhere, and a sound like kittens being euthanized unwillingly fills the air as we manage to wrench one of its arm loose. Twilight takes the enormous severed limb and prods the beast back with it.
“This is what you’re thinking?” he calls.
We have the elemental backing into the car fires and water pours like sweat from its back, pooling and refreezing and melting again on the ruined bridge.
“Keep going!” I yell so all can hear. “There’s a thing in there, like a snake.”
Quick as a snake itself, the monster snatches out with its one remaining hand – a hand just big enough to grab Red Monolith by his helmeted head.
The crushing noise is like glaciers grinding together as we, the assembled, shriek and focus on the enormous stony wrist, Falconer and Susurrus and Jackanape and Paragon pitching in to do their level best and being rewarded with nothing as Monolith gives a twitch, standing on his booted tip-toes as if that might save his life, and black blood runs in enormous treacle smears down his costume and over his famous yellow side panels.
The monster releases him with the universal disdain such creatures share for the recently dead. Red Monolith’s helmet looks like a hammer-smashed snail, mind-numbingly narrow and flat and broken and wrong.
“Oh God, oh God,” I mutter, looking around for who would say such a stupid thing.
Twilight drags me out of the way as the thing stomps down, Chamber ‘ports in and peppers the creature with superheated light, and Darkstorm vanishes part of the creature’s leg into shadowspace.
It’s not enough.
The blizzard beast topples over briefly, scrambling, and bats Jackanape away so hard the guy vanishes like he can teleport. Jackanape’s later uncovered in the rubble of a record store and spends six weeks in a medically-induced coma.
I can hear the tensile cables of the bridge snapping and collapsing behind us and Lynx, still wet and licking herself from an earlier swim in the freezing waters, yowls and leaps to safety. Then, where the bridge joins the roadway again, there’s now just a black chasm, and without thinking, a couple of us gang up on the monster and Twilight comes in with a mint condition ’62 Dodge he has somehow acquired and we ram the fucking monster back into that abyss.
As it hits the debris-filled water, the river crackles with sudden ice as it freezes solid and I start to weep.
Zephyr 3.10 “On The Edge Of The Abyss”
THERE’S CHAOS AS we regroup and the alien god scrambles at the jagged bank, its black earth, torn pipes, exposed cabling and shattered concrete an effective ladder for it to slowly work its way up.
Tessa, which is to say Windsong, lands beside me and helps me to my feet. I had no i
dea I was sitting on the road, head in my hands, with Red Monolith’s practically headless corpse just yards away.
“What are you doing?” I ask, mindful of the devastation. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Let me help,” she replies. “I’ve seen everything. I can feel what this guy does, we’re . . . we’re both weather controllers. Everything he does tugs at my mind, my . . . senses.”
I stare at her without anything to say for long enough that even my daughter is creeped out. Thankfully, she is my daughter, and for some reason not prone to dismiss me outright. She places a tentative hand on my arm, my costume torn to the shoulder.
We don’t evade scrutiny for long. Soon Twilight, Seeker, Miss Black, Paragon and frigging Jocelyn are jostling around us, and it soon gets even worse since it appears the FBI field team landed some time back when my dope-smoking friend Monolith was still alive, and Vanguard, silent and grim, and also Synergy arrive, the latter demanding to know what’s going on.
“This is . . . Windsong,” I say weakly. “She says she knows something about the creature.”
With all eyes on her, Tessa doesn’t blanch.
“I can feel what he does,” Windsong replies. “Controlling the air, the currents. I think I could shut him down – shut down that aspect of him.”
The heroes are speechless for a moment. Only Twilight’s gaze moves speculatively between Windsong and I. There’s a noise in the distance as the earth if torn frozen asunder. As one of the only duly deputized Federal agents present, Synergy seems determined to take charge or at least appear to be doing something. She puts her hand on Windsong’s shoulder like she has no idea she’s technically dealing with a minor and squeezes encouragingly.
“You know what I do, Zephyr,” Synergy says. “If she says she can do this, then with me boosting her, we can maybe give the rest of you a shot.”
I look at my darling girl, and sure I’m proud, but damn it, I never expected to be flung into a situation like this – and judging by the panicked look on her face beneath the mask, even she’s finding the learning curve more than she can chew.
Zephyr I Page 28