Zephyr VI

by Warren Hately

  At first logic refuses to accept the subway train is coming. I know there’s been a tac-nuke or something go off at the nearby interchange, so the idea of a carriage travelling this way seems downright crazy.

  And worse, I can’t see a driver.

  “Shit.”

  *

  I TURN BACK as fast as I can, which is fortunately plenty fast – but I forget about the debris field and run straight into chunks of concrete rendered nearly invisible by the light conditions, little more than a vague luminosity from the hole above. The breath leaves my body with the impact and I scramble free just as the subway train hammers into that very same minefield of rubble, the screaming, screeching, clattering crash of the train suddenly meeting its irresistibly immovable force a flowering of chaos behind me as I light down the tunnel and round the bend, vaguely aware of Killswitch following above like a deadly Tinkerbell.

  The light increases as I traverse the turn in the tracks, but a fresh case of disorientation grips me as I flit out into a well-lit underground subway station, the platforms on either side choked with hundreds upon hundreds of surface dwellers clearly hiding out from the nightmare above. Suit-clad wage slaves gape at me, some more than a little thrown off by my own obvious failure to be immediately superheroic as I scan about, unsure of where I am with all the underground navigation, the signage identifying it as Concourse, the stop for the museum precinct.

  “Shit,” I mutter yet again, not yet alighted and already wheeling about for fear of drawing my wannabe Angel of Death into such an easy killing ground.

  Killswitch is right behind me. I throw a shower of sparks into his face and body check him as he covers his head and shoulders out of the natural instinct for self-preservation. I push him away in that blind moment and then I fly past, forgetting my earlier clamor about being the pursuer. Again Killswitch wheels about, my speed advantage reduced by the dark confines and wreckage all around, steering past the violently derailed subway train, flitting past fluoro-lit carriages I’m relieved to see are without passengers. I throw a few cursory evasion maneuvers moments before the obligatory palm blasts flit past me, then I glimpse an emergency-lit stairwell and rocket up it, slamming through a flimsy metal door and out into the marvelously crisp early evening air.

  Zephyr 20.3 “The Lady Snarls”

  I SCATTER A bunch of startled cops as I zoom out of the subway engineering door and into a street crammed with flashing cruisers, a huge-ass fire truck barricading the way to the yards-distant Stock Exchange.

  Rebounding from the now dented door of one of our city’s finest, I look up to see Killswitch emerge from the doorway behind me like some shade risen from the Classical Underworld, glowing fists poised over his head. God bless ‘em, the cops surrounding me open fire with Glocks and shotguns and suddenly Killswitch has second thoughts about crashing this party. He abruptly turns tail and wings it in the direction of the Antiquities Museum.

  I wave my thanks and do the crouch thing and get after him.

  In mid-air pursuit, again from behind, I latch hands on the sneaky fucker, clapping palms upon his shoulders as I clinch and twist, the two of us in a different sort of unnatural congress as our trajectory nosedives and the next thing I know we blitz through a sandstone balustrade and floor-to-ceiling window to go caroming into a Napoleonic war room display, maps and glass cabinets and costumed mannequins, the whole nine yards, Killswitch skidding to a halt on the marble floor, chest heaving as he glowers back at me before peeling himself upright, gauntlets clicking back to bare his entire blue-glowing forearms, power levels clearly depleted as he summons a charge and unleashes on me.

  Pain or exhaustion makes his aim predictable. I duck right out of the way, rolling into the next exhibit room where I listen to the collateral damage from the villain’s blast, then I swagger back into frame as Killswitch re-suits and simply stands there staring at me with deathly intent.

  “You want to tell me what the score is here?”

  “You’re not doing this to me,” he replies. “I’m not telling you shit, Zephyr.”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing hitting the Stock Exchange?” I say, circling and causing Killswitch to likewise circumnavigate the room.

  “You can’t steal stocks,” I tell him. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “You don’t understand anything,” the villain says.

  I pause. “That’s not what you were doing, right? Tell me.”

  Killswitch says nothing. I feel deep laughter welling within.

  “You cannot be fucking serious,” I say. “Introduction to Economics 101, shit-heel. Stock trades these days are nothing more than electronic receipts – like a fucking email. Did you think you were going for a big score?”

  “We are doing more than just plundering the Stock Exchange Zephyr, but if nothing else comes from today, killing you will do me just fine.”

  “I might give you a chance, but first tell me why you hit the Wall Street subway?” I say. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s a quarter mile away.”

  Again Killswitch tries for mysterious with the silence, but hits only borderline irritating instead. He sees me shaking my head and it doesn’t sit easily, the ridicule coming from a hated enemy.

  His gauntlets click open as he lifts his hands, but I jet right in close as the twin blasts take out a section of exterior wall. My tight arc ends with my left hammering across his jaw, Killswitch hitting one of those huge Dutch master-y looking paintings from the era, neatly caving it in and the wall behind him with it as he crunches through into another room.

  At once I go to follow, walking into his twin blasts that blow me back and into and through a huge taxidermied Napoleonic general on a horse (the horse is stuffed, the dude’s a mannequin), and as I pick pieces of crap off me and scramble to my feet, I hear Killswitch’s metallic footfalls clattering away as he runs, maybe low on juice, through the deserted museum.

  I give chase, following him out onto an epic elevated concourse, atrium museum roof above us showing only refracted lights from the city and the distant fires, statues and shit on plinths ahead like cover in a designer battlefield. I start after my foe, puzzling at why those artworks and antiquities before me explode like crockery beneath the nonsensical chatter of machine-gun fire, but then I discern a trio of armor-clad goons advancing in tactical formation on my six in Killswitch’s wake.

  How and why these guys are working together might be a mystery for another time.

  Dipping right, I slip into the recess provided by a locked security door. The heavy rounds tear plaster and shards of plywood from the hollow wall. The left-most goon appears on a triangulation, aiming to zero me, but I flick open my hand and Taser the prick good and hard so he goes down with an epic case of the St Vitus dance. I then plunge back into the hail of gunfire, stray rounds clipping me and ripping strips from my stillsuit which furiously repairs itself even as I weather the storm, momentum punished by the goons’ bullets, my other hand coming up to explode blinding sparks, my left hand swinging around in a fist to lash current into the next guy I see, Killswitch swiveling two hundred yards down the walkway hoping to witness my doom, but my masked face is alight with the feral glow of victory – a victory torn away from me by a shadow that streaks out of nowhere, tackling me around the waist in an explosion of familiar perfume as she propels me back into the flimsy wall we smash through together, skidding and sliding quite unlike the young Liam Neeson in Risky Business as we come to rest against a towering installation of two Native American hunters learning the hard way about the early Vikings’ proclivities for direct negotiation.

  A gnarly tangle of black hair and sinew growls femininely and I elbow my way clear to confirm Raveness rising from our clinch, an evil smirk on her strangely handsome, decidedly frightening visage.

  “Ness?”

  “Put yer dukes up, Zephyr,” she growls low.

  I back away, nudging the nearby plinth which promptly craps mannequins all over the floor. I scoop up the Vik
ing’s Danish axe and hold it one-handed like I’m fucking Harry Potter or something.

  “What’s going on?” I ask the villainess.

  Clearly our semi-recent history doesn’t mean squat and I’m not sure why it should. Raveness circles me like the killing machine she is and I swallow nervously, not sure I really have it in me following my tête-à-tête with Killswitch.

  “I thought I left more of an impression than that,” I say to her.

  She smirks. “You do impressions?”

  She stops as if that might change the whole dealio – and I stop as well, caught in the embarrassing double-take of looking like I have walked right into the trap when I haven’t, just struggling to change gears with the psychopathic villainess’s sadistic and erratic sense of humor as fast-paced as the rest of her is.

  “OK. Well, we were in a tough spot off-world with the Prime and your other punk friends,” I say and shrug like our one-off tryst didn’t mean much to me either. “I guess back in the world, we play by the old rules.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re on about as usual Zephyr, but there’s never any rules with me hon’,” she says – and steps back as the three goons catch up and hose me with gunfire.

  *

  IT’S NOT PRETTY. The guns can’t kill me, but that doesn’t mean they don’t hurt like a motherfucker and tear my costume to shreds at the same time. Like a pack-rape by hornets, I end up crouching covering my head and vitals until the weapons’ storm fades, the weird heavy duty plastic cartridges of the strange weapons tinkling and scrunching on the ground. My suit desperately tries to restore my dignity as I straighten, readjusting the mask as I throw a spark into two of the gunmen – and Raveness only laughs, knowing what I’m about and clearly not giving a shit about what happens to them either.

  The third guy sees which way the wind is blowing and takes a hike and for me, discretion is the better part of valor as I try to carry off like it’s just my pride wounded and I don’t feel like one of the guys from Big Bang Theory worked over by a posse of rednecks.

  “You ready?” I ask Raveness.

  “Always.”

  She spreads her serrated fingers wide and throws herself at me, but true to the lady’s own word, there’s no rules in this affair. I melt aside and club her with the Viking axe, the handle snapping as I send Raveness ploughing off at right angles and into an interactive display of Pilgrims showing off their tomfoolery to natives frozen in permanently astonished, and in one thankful case, slightly skeptical expressions.

  Knowing she’s not down for the count, I leg it back onto the main concourse, clearly not as quick as I think I am as Raveness again tackles me from behind and I now see for the first time the left balustrade is actually a glass railing protecting ordinary citizens from the plunge to the main lobby twenty yards below. I twist about as we fall and slide on the polished surface still entirely unlike Liam Neeson, the canny bitch’s face up close grinning and showing how she fully expects me to use my powers to avert this crisis to our mutual advantage, and fuck me if it doesn’t all go past too fast for me to wrest any leverage as I slap at her face, trying to get a grip to turn her about so at least she can cushion my fall. Instead, like the most predictable sack of shit on the planet, I break our momentum with a burst of pressure, though the impact is still enough to cause my teeth to clack together like a bear trap.

  I push Raveness off me like a bum forcing his way out a filthy skip at dawn, the deadly woman spinning about to rake me with her claws. Instead, I punch her hard in the face up close, putting her on her literal ass as I scan about wary of unseen gunmen sneaking up invisible in the shadows cast by the flickering lighting and the various booths, public seating, book displays, statues, low-hanging signs, ticket stalls, divider walls, coat room signs, bollards, public artworks and postmodern sculptures dotting the museum’s downstairs plaza.

  Further across, structural walls of glass cubes blaze with a God almighty flash, then tumble inwards as another of those huge explosions somewhere unsettlingly close rock the whole precinct and the floor shakes and I stagger back, grabbing hold of a bronzed sculpture made from broken motorcycles as Raveness snaps to her feet with a cat’s grace, feral grin unbroken.

  “And that’s my cue to skedaddle,” she says.

  I’m about to fire a rejoinder about how exactly she plans to make her escape when Killswitch swoops from above, spectral energy unspooling from his retracted booties, and while I’m still gaping like some drug-fucked bukkake actress/victim, the villain scoops Raveness under her arms and they flit away through the colossal rent in the museum wall.

  “Next time you’re a dead man, Zephyr,” Killswitch yells.

  He pours on the speed to guarantee himself the last word, but I’m speechless anyway, taking in the growing crescendo of sirens muffling the dozens of screams and the phosphor glow now providing a new light source for the night.

  “What the fuck was that?” I mutter aloud.

  But they don’t call him Fallout for nothing.

  Zephyr 20.4 “Sleepwalker”

  THE STOCK EXCHANGE is gone.

  My heart is in my mouth as I scramble through the wreckage like any other desperate bystander, pushing through the first shocked and ash-streaked civilians to get a clear view of where the main bulk of the building no longer stands. Instead, a viridescent fog churns from the building’s shell, just the stumps of its exterior walls still standing, the neighboring architecture bizarrely intact minus a few hundred windows or so.

  That doesn’t mean there’s not carnage. Rubble and twisted metal choke the street along with those expensive European vehicles now littering the avenue like just so many empty candy wrappers. And police on the scene are already doing the unsung heroes’ work of dragging the dead and dying from that devastation. The cries of the wounded caterwaul in the night, perversely reminiscent of dogs howling in sympathy with the passing sirens. I stop to help an anguished-looking young officer with a teenage boy clutching the stump of his bleeding arm and I stop to cauterize the wound, and as the cop looks at me with near biblical awe and the boy gapes at me through a miasma of his own tears, I am struck by the savage wish to mercy kill him and then the cop and then nearly everyone else in my vicinity, myself included, as I drink in the awful devastation wrought by my own kind tonight in the name of a scheme I struggle to believe could truly be as idiotic as it appears.

  My halo must dim a little or something, because the cop lowers his gaze with a solemn thank you and the boy passes out, and I straighten, setting my resolute chin as I hear my name called out from up ahead.

  Cusp picks her way through the rubble with a fetching number of rips to her already implausibly designed costume. On reflex, I give myself the once over and am as astonished as always to see this creepy fucking outfit nearly completely repaired. Behind Cusp trudges Stiletto and then two Legion clones carry their unconscious and bleeding master between themselves.

  “You’re OK?” I say to Cusp, quickly catching Stiletto’s gaze so I can nod her over yonder in the direction of the wounded as Cusp nods her OKness back to me.

  I lift the unconscious boy over to Stiletto.

  “Get him to an ambulance,” I tell her, then close on Holland.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “I see you survived, Zephyr,” she says. “You’ve got nine lives or something.”

  “What the hell happened in there?”

  “Fallout,” she says simply.

  “Christ,” I say somberly. “How many. . . ?”

  “Inside? Hopefully none,” Cusp says. “As far as we could tell most the people fled to the subway the moment these guys turned up. Anyone still inside though, they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “But why would they blow the fucking place up?”

  “We couldn’t even work out what they were doing here,” Cusp says. “It was Fallout, Madrigal and some Asian chick with a katana.”

  “Madrigal?” I say, boggling at the last time I can even remem
ber seeing that guy, which was actually him being dragged out of Silver Towers or Crayons or Aubergine or Transit or fuck-knows-where-else by security for allegedly putting his cock in some two-bit actress’s drink. Then the rest of what Cusp said filters through to me and I screw up my photogenic brow.

  “An Asian chick with a katana?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Powers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like, she made copies of herself?”

  “Yes,” Cusp nods. “Not real copies, though.” She nods in Legion’s direction as if to underline the distinction. Not copies that can actually get killed.

  “Yeah I know her. Ruse.”

  One of the Lennon kids. I guess it was inevitable some of them got into business for themselves with the whole Yoko Ono clan mother thing going to hell.

  My brow further crinkles at the thought of business, playing back images in my mind of the goons we unmasked on first arrival. Not your average rent-a-mook – or not in my experience, anyway.

  There’s a thump behind us as Twilight lands dusting ash and soot from his cloak as he peers around with a vague expression of dissatisfaction – about what, I may never know, since his worries are the least of mine right now.

  “How did you go?” I ask him. “We’ve IDed Killswitch, Raveness, Fallout, and a girl called Ruse. You?”

  “Infernus,” Twilight says, the name explaining the disdain.

  “Infernus and Raveness in the same crew again?” I frown, tilting my head like my brain is one of those puzzles where you have to get the ball-bearing in the right slot to win, and like always, I just don’t have the patience.

  “Whaffuck? This isn’t like them. They’re –”

  “Mercenaries,” Twilight says.

  “Yeah.” I nod. “Exactamundo.”

  “What are they even doing here?” Cusps asks.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I had a week to explain it,” I say and shake my head. “In a nutshell, I think they were trying to rob the share market, but there’s something fishy still about their way of going about it.”