My colleagues stand looking stupefied in ponderment as more and more emergency crews pour into the area. The cop from before jogs up to me, emboldened by my earlier humanitarianism.
“We could do with some help,” he says. “Just found a pocket of commuters trapped under heavy rubble.”
I nod and follow him like a sleepwalker to do my civic duty, conscious as Cusp and Twilight face off unchaperoned behind me in my wake.
*
LATER – IT IS nearly dawn or something, following an exhaustive and depressing night toiling amid the ruins of the ACSX under the halogen lights of the emergency personnel who surround and support us – the first media are let past the police barricades, rushing into the wreckage like white blood cells fighting an infection, except maybe they are more like the AIDS virus, forgetting they have now become one of the very ailments they originally sought to combat. With the pinkish haze of morning not too far off and the toll of my transglobal adventures weighing on me, I look to my fellows, Twilight already long departed following a spat with Portal, the latter apparently having teleported Infernus to Italy before they got the chance to clash. Cusp gives me a weary smile, a fetching streak of soot on one cheek, while Stiletto, Portal and Vorstellung simply look like their souls slunk off to bed several hours ago and left their bodies behind.
“I’m fucked,” I proudly announce, moving clear of the swing of boom mikes as the TV crews hone in on our vector. “I can’t even remember the last time I slept and my body still feels like it’s in Afghanistan. I’m going home.”
The others wave me off, but Cusp hovers close. Too much for me to maybe hope for, I let her linger, inviting any smidgeon of interest from the comely, curvy blonde. She catches my fey smirk and shrugs.
“It’s all coming back to you?” I ask.
“What?”
“You said you remembered who you are.”
“Oh,” she says and nods. “Yeah.”
“You got a home to go to?”
“The one you’re thinking of probably isn’t there anymore,” she answers. “And the one I had more recently was a temporary fix at best.”
“Plenty of space at my place.”
“Zephyr,” Cusp says and shakes her head. I don’t like the thrust of her sisterly tone and my masked face shows it, which elicits a more devilish grin from Holland.
“I’m going,” I say to her. “Coming or not?”
“OK. Lead the way.”
So we vault into the sunrise, caught by the cameras as just two more fickle creatures of the night making their exit.
*
NOT SURE WHAT I expect to happen next or even what I’m hoping for, but there’s no easy rapport between Cusp and I. She has been a lot of different women in my life, from sex puppet to woman scorned, and taking her home to see my etchings isn’t exactly a transparent move on my behalf.
On the far side of Atlantic City it is quiet, here among the rooftops of the still awakening office towers, and from my aerie athwart the deserted dot-com offices, full daylight manifests beyond windows I have mostly taped up with black bin-liners. Cusp checks over my meagre lodgings with her arms folded, all the poise of a nervous college girl on her first time in a guys’ dorm as I exhume the contents of the bar fridge and start whipping up a disorientating feast of hotdogs, scrambled eggs, flapjacks, crème caramel, pop tarts, toast, tinned spaghetti and by-the-carton eggnog. Cusp sits demurely among the unique cuisine as I pass her a fork, my etiquette nearly eroded by hunger as I start scooping portions into a laminate bowl, eating in a way I’m not entirely proud about, desperate for the sustenance after so much exertion and so many hours awake.
Cusp picks at a chocolate pop tart, breaking off the corner and watching me with her wide yet somehow perpetually narrowed blue eyes.
“What’s your move from here?”
“If I had a handle on Killswitch or Infernus, I don’t know –”
“Ha, that’s not what I meant,” she says and takes a nibble. “Seems like your urges are at war within.”
Uncomfortable, I ask, “Define ‘urges’.”
“You would really make the effort to track those guys down?”
I let the ball pass to the keeper and nod, conversation back on track.
“If I could, hell yeah,” I say and pause to bite through an over-ambitious mouthful, dropping half a frank back into my bowl while trying to cover the maneuver – which is to say my face – with one hand.
“They took out the fucking Stock Exchange, for chrissakes, and Christ knows the death toll,” I say. “I can’t understand why they’d do such a thing.”
“Yeah, I wondered about that,” Cusp says. “You have a TV?”
I switch on the flat screen and we eat in silence as the local broadcast breathlessly recounts the events of the night we’ve just lived. The tape along the bottom of the screen informs us of everyday calamities happening live around the world, but its rolling coverage for the disaster in Atlantic City, with the score – which is to say the body count – put at 63 and climbing. I am admittedly nonplussed by the low number, and it’s not like the mild death toll puts dampeners on my fury, in the grand scheme of things I acknowledge surprise and maybe even a touch of pride that our intervention might’ve kept the fatalities from being worse.
There’s still no clue about what Killswitch and his crew were after, however.
I lift my gaze from the running commentary to study Cusp’s profile as she sips eggnog from a chipped dot-com coffee mug and her eyes briefly meet mine.
“What?” she says.
“I was thinking about Matrioshka and Lennon, and whether they survived the mountain coming down,” I say. “Matrioshka liked pop tarts too.”
Cusp snorts. “How do you know that? Don’t tell me: you bedded her too.”
“No, I never did,” I say, trying to keep the wistfulness from my voice.
“Not for lack of trying, I bet.”
I shrug. The coverage returns to the live feed of the disaster relief efforts now under the full cascade of morning light, the news chopper’s shadow hovering like a spinning crucifix over the crime scene writ large. Just as quickly, the screen turns to snow. Frowning, Cusp switches the remote on and off again without results.
“Try CNN.”
She switches several channels, but it’s the same on every one. Static. Not even the hint of a broadcast.
“Strange,” Cusp says.
I give an enormous yawn, looking back to her still scrying my face for denouement.
“I’m hitting the hay. There’s a few sofas out there beyond those dividers,” I tell her. “Of course, plenty of room in my bed too.”
“I bet,” Cusp says.
“Fat lot of good it’d do me anyway,” I say. “I’m all shagged out as it is.”
And true to my word I wipe crumbs from my lips and slouch towards respite confident that the world of television – like everything else in this ghastly shadow existence – will be in place on the morrow no matter what I do or don’t do about it.
Zephyr 20.5 “Hills And Valleys”
HOURS LATER, I wake to the press of a warm body alongside me. And in my sleep-startled state, I take in the hills and valleys of Cusp’s sheet-covered silhouette and briefly marvel at my own powers as the sleep-drunk beauty slides closer and I turn into her, erection probing her navel as something like a deep, dark chuckle emerges like startled birds from the cave of her mouth and her arm slides under my neck and we kiss.
If I thought to ask a question, to query my strange new surroundings, to ask for some guide to navigate this unfamiliar terrain, Cusp hushes me with a literal finger to my lips before sliding infinitesimally lower and biting gently into my throat, and after a moment’s pause to judge whether I should panic or fear attack, I settle back and let her slowly vampirize me, the throat-sucking turning into a straddle, the woman a vision, a goddess astride me, nothing of the succubus about her except for the intent as she rises from the middle of my sheets like the Lady o
f the Lake, hair a waterfall of starlight as the fluorescence of the city plays much diluted within the blacked-out office space behind us; and I let my hands express my will, long held desires and forgotten memories taking action as I clasp Holland’s wide hips, curvature a challenge at the best of times to conventional superhero garb, something more fulsome yet lissome than when we fucked like animals in the bathrooms of the Silver Towers or Crayons or Aubergine or Transit or fuck-knows-where-it-was a thousand years ago. The green hair might be gone, but soon I am reacquainted with the honeyed taste of her as she moves astride to sink fingers into my skull, grinding her sex into my face as I am suffocated by the soundtrack of her muffled moans, gasping, pleasantly water-boarded by the trickling of her cunt, my face masked in musk, tongue thrust deep as I make my whole face like a sex organ desperate to please her, to convince her of the rightness of this choice, convinced at the same time I can have little effect on how things play out here, that tragi-comic unconfidence lurking behind the gates of all our souls as we play naked in every sense except with our eyes which we close to guard against true vulnerability no matter what our orifices allow, our eyes not windows to our souls, but truly passageways to which we can admit few fellow travelers in this journey bookended by birth and nothingness. As Holland cums, something akin to an overwhelming sadness bursts in me and it’s all I can do not to collapse with it, to lay back in the bed with my soul-crushing aloneness never more underscored than at this peak of intimacy that often feels – even here, even now with this goddess in rapture before me – like a shallow observance of some higher rite that primitive creatures like me have long used as a semaphore for a reality our blackened souls can barely conceive, let alone articulate. And into that empty space rushes almost every face that ever mattered to me, so that when Holland comes down from her high, face aglow with post-coital luminescence conjured like a magician’s trick, I barely respond to her touch until I make myself the statue I wish to appear, reliably rock hard as I’m expected to be, face etched into a sardonic and unfeeling grin that reflects the bastardry of which I’m imagined capable. And I tip her on her side, sliding her scissored legs apart and then embedding myself as deeply as I can go, knowing I should be sated by the satin feel of our loins locking, the glaze of her wetness mirrored by the gentle sheen on her skin as I watch those magnificent breasts sway in time with my thrusts. Whether I bring this doom upon myself in my imaginings or otherwise, my performance is always part chess and part second guessing the shadow puppets. After cycling through the requisite positions and variations on technique, I return my cock to the nest between her thighs and focus myself like an automaton, quiet desperation in the effort to keep distractions and dark thoughts that might kill my momentum at bay as I hurtle towards orgasm along the tunnel of Holland’s fevered sighs.
And finish at last I do. Collapsing beside her intertwined in twisted sheets, Cusp’s graceful fingertips stroke my forehead and pluck meditatively at my sweat-damp hair, my cheek against her heaving breast, heartbeat fluttering like a double-kick drum as I feel her caress somehow so much more soothing than our recently completed carnal gymnastics. At once I sense her contemplative mood and I lay as close to unmoving as I am able, readjusting for comfort as I gently take in the feel and smell and taste of her delicate skin.
“That was a surprise,” I say, and would say more except she interrupts me.
“Shh, Joe,” she says. “Let me enjoy the moment.”
And so we return to our slumber.
*
DIMLY THE SOUND of the city in distress disturbs our rest, not just police sirens, but the long low preternatural lowing of emergency response horns blowing through the morning of the night we have slept right through, a bleak day outside, light filtered like through a dirty milk glass. I sit up with that alcoholic feeling common to being so wrung out and jetlagged, circadian rhythms shot to hell, face perhaps a gruesome sight as I pinch my eyes against the dull glare gleaming through gaps in the black plastic, aware of the hazy form of Cusp standing naked looking outside the high-rise through one of those aforementioned breaks.
If you’ve been playing along at home, you know they might as well go ahead and invent a drinking game for each time Zephyr thinks he might finally have some kind of inner peace with a woman only to then have it all turn to shit, but right at this moment I have no idea about the dark days coming. I adopt a goofy smug grin Holland can’t see with her back turned, then slip into my boxers and pad up behind her, impervious to the mood presaged by stiff shoulders I only notice as I touch her softly to have her flinch away.
“What is it?”
“The TV’s still out,” she says, pointing to the set I didn’t notice showing snow before. “There’s something not right. The city sounds . . . ill.”
“You sound like Streethawk.”
“Seriously, Joe. Listen.”
And so directed to the gossiping of sirens, I nod, face taking a more serious mien as I acknowledge the apparent gravity of the situation. The view itself yields little: from this height the concrete canyons of Atlantic City are as impersonal as they are remote. On the other hand, the emergency klaxons are unrelenting. Panicked.
Holland dresses and we eat quietly, the memory of our coupling not so much dismissed by the new mood as held in abeyance. I can only project onto Cusp what she might be thinking at this point – not that it has ever stopped me with anyone – but I fancy we each contemplate the course of our lives from this point forward, and never more importantly the options for the very next step.
“We should do a patrol,” I say.
“Patrol?”
“Like the old days.”
“Shouldn’t we be looking for Killswitch and his cronies?”
“Maybe,” I say and shrug. “You tell me where to start and I will.”
“You’re the man of experience here,” Cusp says. “I thought you might have some kind of technique for this kind of thing.”
“Experience, technique,” I say and shoot her a wistful smirk. “Your mind still stuck a few hours back?”
Holland chuckles and shakes her head and looks away.
“No.”
“Now you have your memory back, did you work out how you got powers?”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“Your powers,” I say unhelpfully. “I never understood how you got them.”
“I don’t understand,” she says. “I was new to the scene when I fell in with Twilight and that whole . . . scene. You know the story from there.”
“What, you were actually a mask? With powers?”
“What did you think, Zephyr? That Twilight just chose some random hottie and dyed her hair green and ordered her a costume and. . . ?”
She trails off before having to list the unpalatable stuff – stuff like my pal the antihero using sorcery to possess her like a meat puppet so he could fuck me and God knows who else on the sly.
“Sorry,” I say. “I guess that’s exactly what I thought, though spelling it aloud like that, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Precisely.”
“So what happened to the green hair?”
Cusp just shrugs. She stands from the table wearing a frayed hotel bathrobe I’ve been carting about with my things since the day Elisabeth kicked me out of the apartment. It looks better on Holland – especially the parts where it barely contains her – but the pouty blonde scans the meagre trappings and gives an effete sigh.
“You liked it?” she asks.
“The hair? Yeah.”
She nods, gestures, there’s a flash, and suddenly her hair is a similar if not identical hue as conforms to my memories. I must be grinning broadly at this point because Holland fixes me with her most arch look and tuts like I’m a naughty school boy in need of paddling, which frankly I would be up for, but at once she struts about five steps from the eating area to the boudoir, divests herself of the old robe, and resumes suiting up. Left to its own devices, my mirth dries up and it’s only a fe
w seconds later I clamber back into the stillsuit, checking it over for bullet holes, and moments later we are alight over the city once more.
*
FROM TWO THOUSAND feet the chaos is ever more obvious. Phones are down, and as we perform an overhead circuit, the grid gives out as well. Traffic chokes the main avenues of downtown in a gridlock unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Police man control points because their patrol cars are as useless as all the other vehicles, just horses and motorbikes able to thread their way through the snarling maelstrom. Otherwise, it is still an ordinary day, by which I mean businesses are open, soldiering on without power, and many of the high rise floors we pass have workers in them, however little most of them are probably achieving lit by nothing except natural daylight, computers mercifully dead. The feeling of humanity being three meals away from the war of all against all has never felt so real.
“What do we do?” Cusp asks, floating beside me. “We’re just two people.”
I nod, lost for answers myself. The crowd noise below operates at a steady buzz, strangely crystalline without the myriad competing background sounds of everyday postmodernity, just thousands upon thousands of pedestrians forced out of their natural environment and sharing their freak-out with others of their kind and similar temperament. A chopper chugs between the double-glazed towers a couple of blocks away, a camera crew dangling from the open aperture, and I am struck by the absurdity of their mission given the networks apparently collapsed long before the ability to broadcast went completely out the window as well.
“I wish I could tell whether this was confined to Atlantic City or further afield, but with the phones down. . . .”
“You fly fast,” Cusp says. “You want to go scout it?”
“I could,” I say. “I could reach Canada in thirty minutes going full mach. I’m not sure that’s the priority, though.”
Zephyr VI Page 3