Cusp’s costume is now a slightly more respectful leather dominatrix look with leather pants and boots beneath the deeply v-necked vinyl corset, arms bare except for a single leather bracelet I found at the back of Tessa’s cupboard behind her six vibrators and a dusty copy of Hustler I’m pretty sure used to be mine from about six years ago.
I flick Syzygy a look, her curiosity I hope more than sated.
“Well?”
“Good luck, Tessa’s new mommy,” she says with a wry laugh.
“Hmmm, I hadn’t thought about it that way,” I admit. “You’re not coming?”
“I’m gonna hold down the fort a little longer here.”
“Your girlfriend – my daughter – is in FBI custody,” I say.
“All the more reason for us to not be out on those streets,” Syzygy says. “We’ll get disappeared too.”
“The city needs us?”
“You think?”
“Don’t get all Gen-Y or whatever the hell generation you are,” I say.
“I don’t know, Zephyr. The city seems to get along pretty much whatever we do. A bit like the planet, you know?”
“That’s your philosophy?”
Syzygy shrugs.
“Sounds like a cop-out to me,” I tell her. “Madmen – and women – can have a riot out there, and it takes people like us to hold that line.”
“What, madmen and women like us?”
Now it’s my turn to shrug.
“I find your studied indifference wearing a little thin,” I tell her.
I move from the bedroom back into the living room and the ubiquitous open window to the fire escape, even as it occurs to me it is snowing outside and melted water dribbles in onto the floor. I can practically taste Syzygy’s angst as she follows, teeth nibbling at otherwise well-groomed fingers in a show of nerves.
“Zephyr . . . Cusp . . . Wait.”
I look at her: really just a slip of a girl, not even with my daughter’s curves to mask her youth and innocence, however tough her bedroom talk.
“What is it?”
“I’m afraid,” she says.
“Yeah. I get that.”
“You’re afraid too, right?”
“Naw,” I say and shrug and tap Cusp’s pretty temple. “I’ve been whacked around a few too many times for that.”
Syzygy gives a nervous laugh at my bravado and takes a few baby steps forward with her own coltish legs, arms wrapped about herself.
“OK, what do I do?”
“Go back, and find out what the hell the outside world is doing,” I tell her. “And if you can find a way to rig some communication so these things aren’t dead,” and I waggle Holland’s cell, inanimate these past few days, “then maybe we can co-ordinate some kind of action.”
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know what.”
“I thought if I said yes, that meant I was coming with you?”
“No,” I tell her. “I’ve got to catch up with a few friends and see what other help might still be out there. Good luck.”
I step to the window frame, again curiously unaffected by the cold, launching into the dawn and accelerating before any passing onlooker might glimpse me.
From there, it is straight to the nearest tall rooftop, where I alight with the sunrise throwing candy-colored beams across the city which almost looks beautiful if it weren’t for the smoke churning from the north-east and the sound of emergency sirens warbling like sparrows awakening with the day.
I take a deep breath and slowly chant “Roxanne” and hope this time it works.
Zephyr 21.1 “The Bloody Disaster”
THE ERUPTION OF red light that flowers from St George’s teleport rivals the very sunrise as he and a battered-looking Sting step onto the Atlantic City rooftop. At first they barely pay me (as Cusp) any mind, scanning about as the sunburst fades, and however flattering I find the weak morning, at that moment they look more like a pair of haggard old men searching for the WC than world-class supers.
“Where the hell is –?” Sting starts to say, but he cuts short at my awkward wave.
“Right here. It’s me. I was the one who called you.”
Sting immediately scans me with his high beams, facing blooming as he detects the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“Zephyr?” he says with his customary skull-faced scowl. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Atlantic City’s in trouble,” I say.
“Might not be the only one,” George pipes in.
“And none of us are orphans today, Zephyr,” Sting says. “We’re all stuck in catch-up mode cleaning up after this bloody disaster in Afghanistan.”
“The bloody disaster I helped avert,” I say, momentarily less fond of the crisp and highly feminine tone with which my words spring.
The two men stare at me speechless once more, then Sting is the first to shake it off. I notice Harrison’s eyes go to my boobs and I cross my arms and give him a “really?” look that only makes the old perv laugh.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Sting cuts in, “but I can’t have any of it. Not right now. Sorry Zephyr. You’re on your own.”
“What? I –”
“You should know the score,” he continues as if he’s already accepted my femininity and decided to plough on no matter what the good damsel might have to say.
“We offered you a spot on our roster,” he lectures me. “World-beaters. Just for episodes like this. But that fucking dad of yours fried half my friends’ brains and scattered the rest to the four corners of the globe – not to mention three of my mundane employees, he just burnt their minds out entirely like . . . like ticks – and there’s still the matter of those bloody creepy crawlies he was palling up with.”
“What about them?”
“Those fucking bugs are still on the loose, Zephyr,” Sting says. “We’ve got to keep this contained, and until we do, that’s my priority.”
“But Atlantic City –”
“That’s what you’re for,” he says, then adds with an unkind sneer: “Princess.”
“Fine. You interrupt me again like that I’m going to kick your balls in,” I tell him.
They ignore the sledge and St George gives a tremulous sniff.
“Not to mention we’re knackered,” the older hero says. “Been putting out spot fires for two days. Whisperer’s in a coma and we still can’t find Ali.”
“Shit,” I sigh. “You’re saying I’m on my own.”
“Atlantic City’s blacked out to the world,” Sting tells me. “I don’t know what’s happened, or what’s happened to you, Zephyr, but it’s bad mojo.”
“And what’s the rest of the world doing about it?” I ask.
St George laughs. “I think they see it as an ‘American problem’.”
“Charming.”
The two English veterans shrug, very much the personification of their country’s apparent disdain, and with a final glance back at my cleavage, they disappear into the red aurora of Harrison’s trans-Atlantic warp and vanish.
Fuckers.
*
HEADING NORTH FOR Loren’s barrio is like crossing a war zone. I’m guessing it’s been four days now the city has been frozen incommunicado, and though the rioters look fairly well fed, the old adage about civilization being three meals away from anarchy has never seemed more true.
That said, the distant freeways of the outer suburbs remain choked with the exodus from Atlantic City. Gunshots rattle over my flight path like Chinese firecrackers. Random acts of savagery are not my purview for now – it’s hard to ignore with looters en masse charging out of electronics stores, unwise to the irony of their predicament given the city’s got no juice to power those fancy gadgets – but crossing the rebuilt Avenue of the Americas, my blue-eyed gaze is drawn by new sprawling bouts of gunfire, and curiosity and self-preservation hone me in on the farrago of police and SWAT vehicles blocking off an inner city intersection, more than twenty lawmen firing with e
verything they’ve got at several scorched and burning vehicles riddled like Swiss cheese. A half-dozen familiar-looking green-suited, ballistic-armored types crouch in cover, reloading and checking their vectors with quasi-military precision, armed to the teeth and in no apparent hurry as they seemingly defend the smoke-churning lobby of a nearby high-rise into which someone has thoughtfully driven one of the city’s garbage trucks.
What the fuck is going on here, you might ask.
A wiser head than mine might also move on, leaving the authorities to their job as I imagine Syzygy sees it, but dead and wounded cops already decorate those streets. I believe it’s within me to make a difference between life and death, so I drop from my vantage, drawing deep within the still unknown crevasse of what feels like Holland’s borrowed unconscious, trying to prise out the wellspring of these fabulous powers on the one hand similar and yet so completely different to my own.
In that way the mind interacts with the parahuman body, I try to intuit the pathways to Cusp’s light control abilities and instead get lost within a maze built from the blurry grey walls of some misunderstanding I can’t yet fully fathom. The only thing that’s clear – as I plunge from the sky and the very first of these militant gunmen note my impending arrival – is somehow those powers remain out of reach to me. And thus I make a fist of my right hand and – like some preordained cliché – dig deep into the dark side to shroud myself in a comet-like shield of inky black protoplasm which allows me to sweep down and low and through, scattering five of the six surviving hoods like nine-pins.
The bullets cease at my intrusion as dozens of eyes land on me landing at the far side of the firefight, whipping about to take in the crashed dump truck, the dozens of frantic cops, the smoking wreck of a minivan, the riddled taxis, the visor-masked faces of the majority of the gunmen picking themselves up off the street. It’s like the cops genuinely don’t know if I’m one of them, which is insult enough and a testament to the collective testosterone when one of them wolf whistles from the convenient anonymity of the police barricade.
The most immediate threat is the one guy I didn’t scatter with my cannonball attack. He pops up from a crouch off to one side, the only gunman alone behind the wreckage left by the garbage truck’s wake. The snub-nosed SMG is similar to the ones in the initial attack on the ACSX and I am still triangulating the clues with what might look like a disregard for my personal safety as the goon hefts the weapon and starts sputtering those weird heavy rounds my way, but it is only a few balletic steps for me to spin, more graceful in Cusp’s body than I could ever hope to be in my own, and with short and powerful knife-hand strikes I deflect the weapon, chop the asswipe across the throat and take his legs out from beneath him.
The remaining three hopeless cases lift their guns, but the police seize the advantage and two are knocked off their feet by rapid fire converging from multiple angles, their armor protecting them from death but not indignity as burly-looking SWAT guys rush in with plastic restraints. As for the last mook, I swivel about and open my palm at him from twenty paces, firing globular darkness that envelops his head. Dodging blind fire, I jog in and try a tried and trusted Zephyr-style combo of body blows up his torso, but Cusp’s fists lacks the same oomph and the Kevlar shields the guy, so in the end I wrench his gun arm back and behind his shoulder and quickly cantilever his body in a jiu-jitsu capture that handily shatters the entire joint. The masked gunman gives a scream like some primeval goddess in childbirth and a short sharp chop to the throat silences him – or at least leaves him sputtering and choking on the asphalt as another cop arrives with those nifty disposable cuffs.
And then I slowly note the police guns trained on me.
Zephyr 21.2 “Weaponized Physics”
“YOU GUYS ARE kidding me, right?” I say to the eight or so hard-bitten police advancing with their handguns and M14s drawn.
There’s no immediate answer. Feeling my way through the moment as blindly as if it were me affected by these powers, I put my hands on my hips in what I hope is an alluring posture, though I probably just somehow look like someone’s mom trying to play hooker for dad’s shitty fantasies, even though Cusp is admittedly smokingly fucking hot, so my spastification of her body language is barely a hindrance.
The forces surrounding me lick their lips in hesitation and angry arousal, but not a single barrel lowers. Several step closer. The SWAT guys continue to round up the mystery gunmen and one or two of the heavily-armored officers clearly feel brave enough that they start to close in on me with those disposable shackles.
“Hold on, guys,” I say with my palms up non-threateningly. “What is this even about? What’s your orders? Do you even know who I am?”
Their replies come back as a panoply.
“Not important.”
“You’re Devil Wing, right?”
“Naw, she’s Flashlight.”
“Ain’t she Cyclona or . . . Memphis Belle or . . . fuck it.”
“Orders from the top, missy,” one old chauvinist with a gay porn moustache barks at me and steps clear of the rest. “It doesn’t matter what we might think. Order says to round all you costumed fruitcakes up for questioning.”
“But why?”
“Why?” He only laughs.
“I just mean, you know, there’s a citywide communications outage and you’re not questioning the orders you’re receiving?” I say back to him.
“There’s pretty good reasons, missy,” the cop replies. “White Nine’s down. Every one of you clowns is a suspect.”
The revelation feels like a kick in the stomach.
But nothing like what happens next.
*
BEHIND US, THE last of the gunmen being wrestled into cuffs wriggles free of his handlers. My eyes are drawn to the frantic yells of surprise, caught between what I can do to help versus whatever avenue this distraction offers for me to get the flying fuck out of here. In one horrible instant I take in the unmasked gunman spinning free, tattoos up the sides of his neck, the sides of his scalp razor-cut to stubble. A gloved hand grasps what looks terrifyingly like a rip cord dangling from beneath its opposite armpit and then the goon yells.
“Freedom!”
He explodes like a firecracker packed with meat.
The greying cop next to him clutches his own now red-painted face with a panicked clamor, staggering away helped by his pals who screech things about the cop’s eyes being gone that sure as fuck aren’t going to help him remain calm until he can get professional medical treatment. I kid you not, the spot where the suicidal gunman stood is literally just a pair of stumps with boots attached, a burst bag of paint effect drunk under the influence of chaos theory snaking out on the scorched pavement around them.
Someone, not me, yells, “The truck!” And sagely, everyone including yours truly starts surging back as fast as we can go, no one game to test whether those dreadful fears are right or if sudden death is imminent as the cops help their buddies and manhandle the remaining five prisoners back as fast as they’ll go from the shattered arcade entrance of the big building I see now belongs to one of the city’s biggest insurance companies, one of the gunmen falling to his feet and staying there as we try to get clear.
I’m still helping slower-moving fuckwads over the hoods of the barricaded police vehicles when the dump truck packed with tons of fertilizer explodes.
If it makes a noise, I couldn’t tell you. We are close to the eye of the cyclone as the explosive vortex opens and Hell comes stampeding into Atlantic City. Several of the blockaded cruisers are flipped, transformed into deadly, two-ton projectiles as the detonation of the terrorists’ device wipes out the foundations of the Emerson International building and debris and chunky shrapnel rains sideways pitting men against the incomprehensible laws of weaponized physics.
Worse, the annihilation has barely finished its business when an enormous creaking groan unlike anything I’ve heard in my life erupts from the bowels of the skyscraper as storey upon storey of con
crete starts to concertina down – you could almost say gracefully, despite what little I can see of it through the dusty haze as me and everyone else still alive desperately flee yet further away again from its impending killing radius. There is nothing to describe the feeling of the collapse taking forever and also practically no time at all, the rumbling as much coming up through the shaking ground upon which it pours as from the desiccated structural avalanche. Huge blocks of rubble pound past me and I push a SWAT officer down behind a blackened taxi and dive on top of another two cops leaping into the cover of the building on the opposite corner and then a tsunami of black dirt and smoky debris gushes past, obliterating the cruel morning light.
And then the fucking thing collapses on top of me.
With the almost literal weight of the world upon me, I try not to panic as the cataclysmic colossus of the unburdened skyscraper ploughs down, darkness engulfing me, my arms thrown up and possibly my breakfast as I unwittingly collide with a huge slab or perhaps I should more rightly say it collides with me, my thoughts going about Mach 6 as I mentally compare how much less resilient I feel to having buildings dropped on me than when I was Zephyr. My rational mind bubbles over in one inchoate shriek that I feel safe sacrificing to the shitstorm of carnage as the day vanishes, dust and debris and other flying crap pelting me, threatening to suffocate me, as if a quicker and more immediate death isn’t so much more likely.
Yet somehow I retain my feet. Legs braced, and with arms above my green-tousled head, I feel the huge concrete slab as strangely weightless. With shockingly little effort I manage one step and then another, borrowed boots staggering up an impromptu staircase of rubble, tons upon tons of dead skyscraper in my arms, nothing much making sense right at the moment as I keep my imperiled momentum and try hard not to think too much in case I break the spell as I take a few more steps, the effortlessness starting to give way as if succumbing to the logic of my own barely grasped thoughts.
At that moment, a splinter of grey-flensed daylight appears ahead, casting the reality of this physical feat into stark relief, several cops’ dust-painted faces gawping in astonishment sheltering under me as I heft the huge, almost submarine-sized section of external wall off and to one side, whereupon it immediately breaks into a Mandelbrot cascade of concrete chunks and I can drop to Cusp’s shapely if scuffed leather-clad knees and drink in my own amazement to be alive, gloveless hands upended in my lap as I stare down, not quite able to really understand how I’ve done what I’ve done.
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