“How’s that feel?” I jeer at her. Not my proudest moment. “Looks like it hurts?”
I sense the disruption of huge wings behind me and swivel as Miss Black comes at me on her black Pegasus. It’s a cool image, but I am too freaked by the prospect of her shadowy power-draining co-rider.
“Annie, you fucking sell-out,” I bawl, knowing there’s not a moment to lose.
The explosion from the chopper distracts us all, but not Stalemate. That motherfucker stays disturbingly on song for a mercenary called in on what I assume to be a short contract. While I’m whipping about, concerned Cusp’s laser beam might’ve actually killed someone – and propelled us from mystery wrongdoers into wanted felons – Stalemate throws his hand wide and a taste like crushed almonds fills my mouth as I scowl and watch Aura and Siren flexing their powers to keep the smoking helicarrier afloat at the same time my own propulsion shits out completely and I succumb to the inexorable groping of Earth’s gravity well.
My powers are gone. Again.
*
FALLING, I USELESSLY flex my muscles, spasming, twitching, scowling and frowning to try and kick my kinetic abilities into gear to get me out of this increasingly terrifying-by-the-moment clusterfuck.
Like the skilled skydiver I guess I inadvertently am, I manage myself out of the flailing chaos and into a controlled plunge towards Mother Earth, throwing looks above me I frankly don’t know if they’re designed to check on the status of my enemies or hope they are on their way to help. What I do get is a glimpse of Windsong’s stupefied manhandling onto Annie Black’s winged pony against the backdrop of the smoke-churning helicarrier levitating under Aura and Siren’s control.
Sunstorm flies past with Vanguard in his arms and still the city rushes up at me.
This is not the first time I’ve found myself in this vomit-inducing predicament without powers in the last couple of years, but it’s not a sensation I’m going to get used to any time soon. Having exhausted my range of spastic facial expressions and the number of times I can think “OK, for real now”, I know I have less than a minute to figure out a solution before I decorate a sidewalk somewhere in what used to be part of New Jersey.
Or maybe not.
Just seconds from the ground, Cusp streaks out of the declining sun and grabs a handful of my costume, just enough that my momentum slows as I hurtle groundwards, the broad skillion roof of some kind of warehouse or factory rising up to meet me. I hear Cusp and it sounds like she’s straining and a quarter-mile from the roof my costume slips between her fingers and I fall again, moments later crashing through the metal sheeting with a percussion loud enough to make Animal from The Muppets proud.
Daylight dies as I carry on through the metal dentata, legs clipping some kind of cast-iron walkway that flips me on my back into the top of a stack of wooden packing crates which explode in fibers at my transgression. The pile barely slows my fall. Pain flares in all quadrants of my body, but before I can truly register the calamity, I’m no longer moving, instead just splayed out unevenly with my ass higher than my head atop of a pile of wreckage and thousands upon thousands of ball bearings each in their own little bubble wraps which don’t defray the pain anywhere near like what you might imagine and I wish.
The slush pile slowly gives way and I manage to slide so I am flat on the oil-stained concrete, dimly registering a few dozen civilians high-tailing it for the flung wide-open exits ablaze with daylight. Pain like I’ve been delivered by forceps from the loins of some ungodly fire giantess flares all along me and it’s only belatedly I even register I’m capable of thought, let alone some semblance of action as Cusp touches down near my unmoving feet.
Stalemate might’ve cancelled my powers, but that’s all, I guess. My homo superior physiognomy remains, just without the power to give it life and true expression. In agony, I start moving only to freeze up amid a riot of agonies, conscious of Cusp pacing slowly beyond me rather than helping me out.
It takes me even longer to register her gentle laughter.
“What . . . the fuck . . . do you think’s . . . so funny?” I gasp.
Her laughter rises a moment before fading away like the tide. Curious isn’t the word, but I rise with struggled difficulty on one elbow to see my lover staring at me with anything but a fond regard.
“I didn’t expect this to happen so soon, but I guess I shouldn’t pass up the opportunity,” she says.
“What are you talking about?” I manage. “Help me up.”
“No, Joe. You lay there a moment more.”
“What?”
I’m as conscious as she must be of distant sirens which are only going to grow louder. Yet Cusp appears unconcerned. In fact, she slowly peels off her mask, letting it hang by its concealed straps under her chin as if it’s just another way to frame that Olympian bosom barely constrained by the vinyl v-neck bustier.
“I thought we were going to have a few more little adventures together before I prised the scales from your eyes,” she says.
“Holland honey, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell her. “My powers –”
“– are fried,” she replies. “I know. All the easier for me to do this.”
“. . . this?”
Again with the throaty laugh I might find sexy another time when it doesn’t sound so fucking sinister. I start struggling to my feet and Cusp takes three steps and plants a size eight stiletto-heeled boot on my chest, pinning me as easily to the concrete as if I were a child.
“Stay right there.”
“What are you . . . doing?”
“I’m sorry to tell you your little friend’s gone.”
“Holland?”
“That’s right,” Cusp replies – only now I’m not speaking with Cusp and it dawns on me that maybe I never was.
My watering eyes hone in on those big blue orbs to discern the unique hue of cruelty within – and the same moment a gentle if insistent white-noise hum starts to build behind my forehead.
“Belle?”
“You guessed it in one,” Matrioshka says in Holland’s dulcet voice.
“You fucking . . . bitch,” I struggle to say. “How long’s it been?”
“Ha . . . since Afghanistan.”
“And . . . why?”
“Why?” Matrioshka/Cusp tilts her head – and quite rightly so. Even I’m uncertain of the real question I’m asking.
“Why did I take her?” Matrioshka muses aloud. “I should think that would be obvious. Why did I bed you? Ha, that should be obvious too. What a delight you were, Zephyr, riding you for my pleasure while feasting on every one of your petty weaknesses and conceits. Oh yes, what a great lover you are. What a masterful man. What a stunning ball of anxieties and neuroses. Delicious. And so hot.”
“What have you done with her?”
Weak as a babe, I fail to dislodge her boot from near my throat.
“Who?”
“Who? Who the fuck do you think I mean?”
“Holland’s gone, Joe.”
“She was getting her memory back,” I say and give a wretched sob, a sound so fucking unnatural and forlorn it even freaks me out until I realize I’m the one giving voice to it.
“She was. . . .” I say, trying to start in on it again. “We were . . . There was a chance –”
“No,” Cusp says cold and simply. “There was no chance.”
Laughs.
“Never was.”
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“I do. I tasted it all, knew it all – the instant before I snuffed her out.”
“Why?”
Cusp looks down at me with that terrible alien gaze so familiar it’s like I’m looking into the face of the girl Matrioshka once was – and in whose face I was too gullible and naïve to discern any trace of the majestic sadist lurking within.
“Why?” she asks, and the beautiful face of a woman I could have loved so easily splits into the most heinous smile imaginable.
“Why? Bec
ause she fought, Zephyr. And so I had to extinguish her – exactly like it is now time to extinguish you.”
Cusp’s booted foot presses harder on my chest, but that’s nothing.
The white pressure behind my eyes builds like a buzzing water-blade in my grey matter and I start to scream.
And then I start to die.
Zephyr 20.8 “Comes Instead The Darkness”
THE LAST THING I see of Cusp is her eyes rolling into the back of her head and her legs giving out as she collapses like a felled deer, the malevolent presence instilling her with life now hell-bent on mine.
I cannot see sufficiently far into the spectrum in which such horrors exist to actually see Matrioshka leap from Holland’s brow like some daughter of Zeus, yet there’s an effervescence to the air that can’t be explained by my watering eyes alone. The blurring pain inside my skull ratchets up a thousand notches and I’m only distantly aware as my shrieking cries fill the warehouse and my bowels fill the costume which accepts me like no one else perhaps ever could.
What happens next is within me.
The mind, it’s a canny thing. I picture it so clearly, the unfolding white wisp of Matrioshka’s spirit funneling like a plume of smoke in reverse, a cheap Hammer Horror vampire film effect as if she curls under the locked and bolted door to the inner sanctum of my mind.
And what an impoverished throne room it is.
The pressure is unbearable. Within me, this once slip of a girl is a leviathan, gargantuan in form and power as she grows and expands and grows and expands, invading the blank mindscape to be the one-and-all, playing me at my own life’s purpose, competing for the chance to be me, the animus that gives this mechanism of flesh and bone life and the logic-defying illusion of spirit.
For a moment – and that moment is brief, friend – I think I can resist. Like with so many other challenges in my life, I fool myself to think this one might be the same, and the seed of my salvation is to be found at the eleventh hour if only serendipity and prudence unite. But that cheap painted surface is annihilated, karmic confidence gone in an instant so swift it’s like it was never there at all. Matrioshka is a tsunami, a tidal wave, Cyclopean, a planetary event, a force of intergalactic nature.
She’s won.
*
SOMEWHERE DEEP DOWN inside myself I retain whatever kernel of truth was writ within the varicose layers of bullshit spun by my once woebegone sire. Fueled by desperation for my literal existence, in those last nanoseconds before the white fire of the Matrioshka holocaust erases me completely, I focus myself into what I imagine is a tiny spark of light and seek egress by any means available.
I am no first-timer when it comes to the intersection of the existential and the spiritual, and I’ve been forcibly enlightened on at least one occasion in recent memory. In that high intensity soul-shrieking moment I make the ultimate Hail Mary pass and leap into the psychic hurricane beyond my own being, vacating the house of my soul at the last instant imaginable.
Beyond, it is terrifying.
I am not seeing the world – the warehouse, the day, the city, my corporeal remains – but look out upon a wasteland of colors, the prosaic world rewritten as pure metaphor, the pragmatic and ideational planes of action clashing together in the one psionic mélange like the Rorschach patterns of rainbow-colored paints squeezed together between glass plates, the very fascia which underlies the structure of what we take to be our planet-borne world. And in that landscape is a rapidly fading but welcoming hue of cooling blue to which I flit, knowing this butterfly-frail existence won’t last a second longer without somewhere to roost.
The spark-that-is-me crosses from one host to another.
Same engine, different driver.
Like a drowning man dragged free spluttering and choking, I sit up in Holland’s body and am on my feet and falling again faster than even Matrioshka can react.
I try to rise a second time only to damn near break an ankle as the ridiculous elevator boots twist sideways with minds of their own I cannot master either and I gasp and stammer and try not to piss myself as the fine white hairs on my slender arms stand on end and the adrenal response is like defibrillation with a car battery, a hank of green hair in my/her mouth as I look back to see me, Zephyr gently chuckling with that same familiar tone and getting slowly to his feet and shooting me the most truculent and sardonic of looks known to man.
“You –”
I freeze at the sound of Cusp’s voice delivering my rebuke.
My sanity snaps back with an elastic twang as I look down myself, disoriented, confused, terrified, and hell, probably even a little aroused as I try to impose sense and order where there is none. Over it all comes the sound of my own jackass laughter as Zephyr flexes and unflexes his fists, all the while looking at me with that cocky expression, head tilted at a jaunty angle, and I can’t even put one foot straight in front of the other to punch the fucker.
“You’re going to pay for this, Belle,” I say huskily.
“Joseph, you surprise me,” Matrioshka-as-me replies. “Hell, I’m impressed.”
Coiled menace, she advances in my body with a serpentine gait, costume absorbing light out of the gloomy air as I only manage to balance precariously in place, cogent to our mutual strife. I am a mess and Zephyr’s powers are down.
The fist catches me in the stomach and I go to my knees prettily, aware of a Zephyr-shaped shadow looming above. Drenched in pathos, all I can do is stretch out one vinyl-clad hand which Zephyr kicks away in disdain before he then mercifully backs off.
“You continue to surprise me, Joe,” Matrioshka says with my voice. “You might just remain interesting yet.”
“If I catch you, I’m gonna kill you.”
“Kill me, you kill yourself,” s/he says.
“I’ll . . . make this right somehow,” I say. “Fuck!”
Overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, I can only get on hands and knees and watch Matrioshka backing away, powers still clearly depleted as she turns and breaks into a jog disappearing into the farther recesses of the deserted warehouse.
Only it doesn’t stay deserted for long.
*
TWO POLICE CRUISERS pull in through the far bank of roller doors, lights blazing and sirens whooping like the souls of madmen prisoned within sorcerous jars. Three cops leap out and two of them tote shotguns and for the fucking life of me I can barely stand on two feet.
“Hold it right there, lady,” the lead cop bawls.
Lady. The hilarious fucking absurdity of my situation descends to nearly suffocate me in a barrage of my own idiot laughter, but it’s gone before it can arise, dry retchingly crushed under the behemoth weight of utter futility.
Yet I didn’t get to be me just by picking it out of the bottom of a cereal packet. The selfsame mindless zest for existence that served me well through twenty years in the superhero business came with me from the old house to the new, and for the moment, I know all I have in front of me is surviving the next five minutes and remaining free before I have to confront any of the greater ontological nightmares into which I am so freshly thrust.
The cops yell a couple more things. They want to know where Zephyr went. They want to know my name. A couple look like they’re curious about my bra size. Meanwhile, I straighten on shaky legs and lift my hands in an imitation of the obedience they crave, barely present as I delve within to explore the psychic triggers of Cusp’s powers that I don’t know now if she ever really understood and I’m sure as fuck I can’t work out within the tight timeframe allotted.
But there is something there – my mental probing leaping back like I’ve disturbed some serpent sleeping at the bottom of the darkened basket of my Being. And I feel its coils wrap around the narrow wrist I must for now call my own, and unlike the light I was hoping to charm forth, forward comes instead the darkness.
*
THE DARKNESS SPRAYS from Cusp’s gloved palm like a living thing, encasing the police in a bizarre, bio-psychic plasm that
wrenches guns from hands and covers faces and sunlight-loving eyes before they can fire. Making a fist gives me a delusion of control as I retract that selfsame darkforce and hurl its trove of goodies in the farthest reaches of the warehouse.
Disarmed, the cops look shocked beyond words, but a fourth cop now leaps from her hiding place to heft a standard issue Glock that barks rounds at me I could trust wouldn’t seriously harm Zephyr, but which I’m pungently more aware could spell my doom if I dare tarry now. Borne from that anti-death wish, I leap into the air and forces propel me into the inner struts of the huge warehouse roof, shrouding myself in a cloak of shadows with another gesture from my svelte right hand.
I do not have a damned clue how these powers work, but I will make them mine even if they kill me – though it already looks like others are lining up to do just that.
Cusp had the minor level heightened strength and resilience common to many energy wielders, and though its nothing like the scale I’m accustomed to, beggars can’t be choosers right now. I punch out a metal pane and then hurriedly do the crouch thing from my perch, invisible coils and helixes beneath me, a gyre of mysteriously élan centrifugal force that shoots me like an arrow from a bow into the dying afternoon light. A pair of Kevlar-clad and helmeted SWAT troopers playing ninja on the rooftop lose their holds at my eruption. In the warehouse itself, the hesitant cops fire a few rounds which fail to track me. I flit away from them nimble as a sparrow at dawn, transferrable skills at play no matter the origin of Cusp’s mysterious powers.
*
FOR TWENTY MINDLESS minutes I shoot across the city, thoughts little more than a swarm of bees in a shaken jar. I think about my previous trajectory – of a lifetime ago now, in some terms – but I’m aghast to think of turning up to Twilight’s abode given my current predicament and my current garb, especially with the history between him, Cusp and me. It might be more than the big lug could handle and more than I can bear, and already I’m as close to the edge of sanity as I may have ever flirted. I can barely function and barely believe the surreal turn of what’s happened to me. Like on remote, my path takes me back to my dot-com offices, me forcing myself through the black plastic curtain like some weirdly realized counter-intuitive metaphor for the unbirthing I wish I could achieve.
Zephyr VI Page 5