Zephyr VI

by Warren Hately

  The water upstairs is still working. I grab a shower and use a bunch of expensive clothes as towels until I can lever my sexy, battered and bruised body back into its jerry-rigged work clothes. I’m so hungry I could eat my own barf, and in the kitchen I luckily find chocolate biscuits and crack open a soda, guzzling the thing in record time and helping myself to another from the warm supply under the kitchen sink. As the sugars fizzle less perceptibly than normal within me, I test my right hand and watch darkness slowly build around it. Unlike before, now as I wiggle my fingers, the darkness becomes wisps banished by the growing radiance of my hand. The glow is no more akin to light than it is to the color red, and yet its brightness intensifies to the point where I narrow my own eyes.

  “Groovy.”

  Still belching ten minutes later, I lope out of the house like any ordinary intruder. I dare say there are families and couples ensconced in the homes around me, but the autumnal daylight shows roaming metrosexuals have been through here in fair number in recent times. An SUV’s tipped over down the block and more than a few pickets are staved in along various fences. I walk as much for the reawakening as to actually go anywhere, thoughts and strategies and dead ends somersaulting through my head as I take in a house gently burning, visible from the next corner, and at the next a black man hanging by his neck from a light pole down the way with a sign around his neck I can’t read at this distance. Any reinvigoration I might’ve felt quickly vanishes as cellular revulsion fills my throat with stomach juices. I continue warily on.

  It is not quite a week since I stepped in another body through a hole in space-time to give aid to the city of my birth in a moment of profound distress. And that is a hell of a lot more than three square meals ago. A chopper scuttling past overhead is really the only thing to tell me right now that people still live on the earth, given the trees and the crowded, affluent streets corralling my vision. I see tumbleweeds of newspaper, smoke in the air and drifting ash and roaming dogs and one-armed men staggering off in the whispery distance, and vehicle crashes so long abandoned they look like public art. As the streets open and I move through the hour to the commercial corner of the arcology, I see a jarring sight as the skyline of the eastern city hovers into view.

  Several of the bigger skyscrapers are now entirely ablaze. The fire in the Jensen Building looks perhaps a few days old now, yet the molten superstructure is still not at point of collapse, dozens of inner blazes banded together rather than any one monstrous act. An oily smear like from an artist’s failed canvas blankets the far horizon, the sun already lowering towards its nocturnal demise. I lift into the air, light-borne by gyres of darkness, mind spinning as my ascent brings the devastation of the city into ever greater levels of detail.

  There is a big part of me that isn’t actually that good at the whole superhero thing. I know you might be shocked to think about me that way given what a powerful impression I must’ve left on you by now, but I’m not a man blessed with superhuman levels of patience, and there’s a few aspects of the crime-fighting caper more easily solved with blazing fists than more intricate means. What I’m saying is, the mental cog-work feels a little rusty as my mind struggles to fathom and to actually cogitate what chain of events has exactly transpired here, for this is no uncanny consequence of the initial attack that led me here from Afghanistan, which feels a thousand years distant despite the fact I barely remember sleeping betwixt then and now, and yes that includes the half-day nap from which I’ve just exhumed myself.

  The burning Jensen Building is like a beacon. Up high, the sun is goldening, tawny through scudding cloud banks and lacking menace like a bully frightened by the dark as indeed the sun must be as it loses grip on its zenith and sinks and fades away and a lambent breeze plucks at my tattered costume, eyes that are not mine scanning across the expanse of Atlantic City gripped by pre-organized chaos, this staged disaster, a deliberate sabotage of the world’s biggest if not greatest if not most foolhardy city.

  For who? For what? For why?

  The absence of far too many answers threatens to swamp me, but for once I do not sink into that total dejection common to personality types along my quadrant of the spectrum. Instead, I breathe deeper, a soporific calm underscored by my residual awareness of the unidentified life-force trapped under the same skin – a force which breathes far more deeply than me and at levels of consciousness I can barely contemplate.

  And I am too afraid for surrender.

  *

  RIDING UP ABOVE the city, the slow monochromization of the aerial view precedes me like an augury as I take in the distant sounds and signs of the life that remains within the broad inner city. Gunshots rip out close by and then a loud but tinny-sounding bang. I swoop that way, coming upon box carton streets, sagging fencing between vacant alleyways, the few neighborhood shops just burnt-out gutters now, abandoned clothes and packaging trampled into the street commandeered by the burnt wreck of a classic Buick.

  Three green-armored figures in fatigues bunker inside an abandoned laundromat, the fourth member behind the charnel automobile disguised by his combat helmet, chromatic visor somehow not concealing the sense of a battle-weary gaze as he hefts a wicked-looking automatic of some description.

  The terrorists trade fire with a cavalcade of equally battle-stained cops advancing along either side of the road using natural cover like only experienced men know how, several more of their number moving behind a bullet-pitted police cruiser literally duct-taped all over with Perspex riot shields. These cops are men who have learnt on the job during the past week and it hasn’t been an easy lesson. I can read it on their faces with a glance. One of them has a short-barreled grenade launcher, and as I move above them, my shadow unnoticed in the gathering gloom, a silver bauble skitters into the laundromat and explodes, taking out the three closest targets.

  Flinching, the lone survivor turns to run and that’s when I swoop.

  Like a hawk on a hare, I carry the squirming, potentially suicidal assassin to a twelfth-floor roof, swiftly beyond the cops’ reach to maybe a mile away and where I quickly pat the cuffed man down, punching him a few times in the ribs to abolish any last minute resistance, undoing the fasteners on his bulletproof vest to see it lined with packages of high explosives studded with ball bearings. I throw the booby-trap away and remove the terrorist’s helmet so that a riot of henna’d dreadlocks flop out like so many flaccid cocks, a woman’s dark face with a tribal tattoo around her left eye glaring at me with zealous rage, hands immobilized by Cusp’s superior grip, snarling, as if she’ll bite if I draw too close.

  “Who are you?” I snap, not for the first time frustrated at the feminine lilt undercutting the inherent threat in my tone.

  “Fuck you, bitch,” the woman answers me back.

  Perhaps she might say more, but I plough a fist into her midriff and she doubles over coughing and dry retching. I then release her, suicide vest thrown far aside, and the woman drops to the dirty rooftop painting the dust and pigeon droppings with strings of puke.

  “I’m only asking one more time before I throw you off the roof,” I say.

  “You won’t do that.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “No,” she replies. “Which one are you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Naw,” she says and spits. “Look at you, some white bitch in leather like it makes you tough or something –”

  I edit her hate speech with another haymaker. This time she goes down and stays down, doing that drawn out airless gasp thing that has my inner feminist deeply conflicted.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” I say to her calmly. At least Holland’s voice is good for that. “I want to know who you work for and what the plan is.”

  The woman squeezes out another “fuck you” before dry retching some more.

  I see red, scooping her up and dragging her to the edge of the roof.

  We’re a dozen floors above pavement, the column of soot and ashes rising from the city’
s wounds framing the far architectural horizon.

  “I don’t know how many people you’ve killed, but it’s enough that I don’t have any qualms about what happens to you,” I snarl at her.

  “I’m not telling you shit.”

  “You talk pretty tough,” I say. “I guess I’m a white bitch who gets off in leather just like you’re a righteous black woman with some equally pre-ordained role you feel obliged to play. What a drag. We’re more than this, you and me. But I am not playing games. Drop the fucking act and tell me who you work for. I want to know what’s behind all this.”

  “I don’t work for no one. . . .”

  “But you’re part of a group.”

  The terrorist gives a gruff look and clams up. Even dragging her right to the dangling edge of the precipice doesn’t move her – which shouldn’t surprise me from someone going into action wearing a suicide vest.

  I shake my head, hand still holding her shirt in my fist.

  “There’s something about this that isn’t right,” I say. “You look like you should be baking chia seed muffins, not fighting a guerrilla war.”

  “For freedom,” the woman says.

  And something about that giddy remark makes me snap and God help me, I throw her off the building.

  Zephyr 21.8 “True Identity”

  ALTHOUGH IT’S DONE in anger, I fully intend to swoop down and pluck the falling woman from midair and drag her back to the rooftop for one final chance of confessional, the whole routine like a live theatre version of Russian roulette. Cusp has the strength to haul the woman out over the drop one-handed, so that’s what I do, discarding her like a sack of unwanted trash.

  Only . . . at the point where I should be diving after her and pouring on a burst of speed, I find my eyes locked on the falling woman silently, gracefully plunging groundwards, twisting as the wind whistles past her limbs on their way to her deadly rendezvous with the ground.

  And I do nothing.

  At this distance the details are unclear, but she hits the pavement like a bag of cement and the spray sets off the alarm of an ash-covered sedan parked nearby. And I just stand with one foot on the roof’s edge looking down with Cusp’s masked face unmoving as I gingerly contemplate my own inaction and feel where exhaustion has worn smooth my capacity for remorse.

  The wind picks up, carrying with it a trace of moisture, friction I once would’ve welcomed as Zephyr. Now as Cusp I shiver and gently cross my bare arms, angling my face so the breeze clears long hanks of greenish hair away from me, strands caught in my mouth the most alien and bizarre of sensations.

  At this point I am on the edge of my own collapse as the woman’s death somehow reminds me of everything I myself have lost – not least of it my own body and its powers – going right back to the deep unleavened sorrow I’ve been carting around with me these many months. I sink into it like a warm bed and feel the cloying dull embrace of a vast depression.

  And then a huge bomb goes off a dozen miles away.

  The head offices of the Bank of America goes up in a dull roar. No sooner does the whole thirty-five-floor structure start to buckle than similar detonations go off in the block around it, the building’s grand collapse almost soundless within the competing furor. The roar of the building falling down and more explosions and wailing sirens and ghostly screams and the bellowing of thermals between the high rises builds to a terrific, epic crescendo, and I lift and rise into that cyclonic fury, conjuring this still unknown power beneath me to return to my prior course more determined than ever to uncover what the flying fuck is going on here.

  *

  NORTH, AND THE barrio comes into view through the haze filtering the morning. A sense of ceasefire hangs over the lower buildings, the stuttering of a sub-machine gun nearby heralding my arrival.

  The streets are nearly empty. A few cars bear the marks of nights now long past spent in riot, and the sidewalks glitter with broken glass and the smell of gasoline bombs. Many windows are broken in the apartments overlooking major thoroughfares, boarded up like the businesses also rendered mere ghosts of their former selves by the citywide collapse.

  Outside Loren’s street, three homeboys with red bandanas across their faces guard the entry to the units, AK-47s in their grasps. Dark glasses render them as anonymous as the thick jackets they wear against the cold, but at my approach they saunter out from behind their self-made barricade, enticed by the hot blonde despite the costume displaying her/my obvious allusions to grandeur.

  “Hey chica,” one guy leers, a walking cliché, as beholden to his cultural narrative as the she-hadist I just left looking messy on the city sidewalk.

  “What’re you doing here, baby?” another catcalls.

  “You talk like that to the Seeker, do you?”

  They’re nonsensically stunned at this for some reason, and one nods to the third member, who darts back inside. The clay man Ricky exits the hovel clutching a Glock with an extended mag, no sign of his Glow-induced powers present. His queer gaze slides over me with only surprise and none of the sleaze to which I’m rapidly becoming accustomed.

  “You’re looking for Seeker?”

  “That’s right, Ricky.”

  “I’m sorry?” he replies. “Do I know you?”

  “Just take me to Loren.”

  Ricky pauses and looks at me and for one giddy moment I think he’s somehow going to make this unbelievable intuitive leap and guess my true identity, but then his dark eyes flick away with disinterest and doused curiosity and he nods, rolling one shoulder for me to follow.

  *

  INSIDE, I SUSPECT Sarah Connor is in charge of the relief effort. The once almost bucolic peace of the inner city slum is banished by the urban refugees choking its corridors and various rooms, the apartments overflowing with women and children, many of them in distress, the majority from non-Anglo backgrounds, the air humid with spicy cooking and the twang of intermingling accents and children’s piss.

  Among them move armed men and more than a few younger women, the red bandanas some badge of office. Following Ricky’s wake, I squeeze past a masked woman with glowing sea-blue eyes, a shimmering displacement field emanating from her dusky skin.

  “How’s that Glow supply treating you?” I call in Ricky’s wake.

  “You know an awful lot about our operation for someone I ain’t never met before,” he says over his shoulder as we ascend familiar stairs and he nods to a muscle-bound guard toting an M-60.

  “I know a thing or two,” I tell him.

  On the next level, someone with a hammer or maybe just super strength has knocked down a few walls to provide a bigger marshalling area, powdered brick still clinging to the ancient carpet. Loren stands in the middle looking as winsome and beautiful as I remember, her hair doing its spectral dance, an otherworldly aura spilling off her very Being like a candle at work within, curvaceous figure just a lamp for that light. Ricky whispers in her ear, distracting my former lover from addressing a four-man cadre of gunmen examining sketches on a whiteboard. Loren’s honeyed eyes flick my way and she hands Ricky a sharpie and moves through to me, our conversation rendered semi-inaudible by the close press of the crowds flowing in and out of the room.

  “Enrique said you wanted to speak to me,” she says. “You’re Cusp, right?”

  “Sort of,” I say. “This is awkward. Can we go somewhere private?”

  Loren frowns, examining me afresh. Her powers are in place and I should’ve guessed I couldn’t conceal this ruse from someone whose extrasensory abilities are almost as vague and extraordinary as my own, however much they might be on a completely different register.

  “Joe?”

  “I told you this was awkward,” I tell her.

  Loren looks at me aghast for a long moment, then throws her arms around me with a great racking sob.

  “Jesus! I thought you were dead,” she says. “The Undernet’s reporting you MIA.”

  “Undernet?”

  “The uh . . . It’s just s
prung up,” Loren says. “It’s all we have now. Sort of like an . . . an eighteenth century internet or something.”

  It is a weird moment, and increasingly those around us clue in on the lesbo vibe of Loren’s hand resting on Cusp’s taller, but equally silky smooth bare shoulder, eyes brimming with emotion I don’t recall being so forthcoming during our last encounter, unless maybe when she thought I was going to score her another hit of the power-giving drug she now has on personal supply.

  “Do you have somewhere private?” I prompt her again.

  “Yeah, this way. Come on,” she says. “We still have your old room.”

  “Great.”

  *

  SO ONLY A few seconds later, Loren firmly shuts the door on the outside rabble and I tiredly sink my leather-clad behind onto the ratty cot on which I convalesced another battered body not so long ago.

  “Jesus Joe, what the hell happened?”

  Pointedly, Loren looks me up and down with an expression caught between shock, puzzlement, admiration and a dose of bemusement thrown in for good measure.

  “I mean, look at you,” she adds while I’m still mustering my narrative. “You’re gorgeous.”

  “So are you,” I say softly, for indeed she is, but my words come like a fetid breeze that turns her glowing expression into one of forbearance.

  “It’s the Glow,” she says. “You have seen me –”

  “You are beautiful to me,” I say, not sure it’s the truth. “Always.”

  “Are you sure that’s not her talking? Bringing out your sensitive side?”

  “I don’t think that’s possible –”

  “Oh, welcome to the world of female hormones, buddy,” she says and laughs, wiping away one of these odd tears of hers, eyes sparkling through the Seeker effect like a living shrine weeping diamonds.

  “Hormones? I haven’t even thought about that.”

  “Where is she . . . where are you in her cycle?”

  “Jesus Christ, Loren. . . .”