“Oops, sorry. I was thinking out loud.” With even less conviction, I add, “I’m . . . I’m gay.”
“Uh-huh,” the woman says. “I’m not.”
“Yep. Cool. Sorry.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt you, but nobody here has been able to help. But maybe you’d prefer I leave you alone?”
“Don’t mind me,” I say. “What’s the problem?”
“My name is B-Belinda.”
“B-Belinda?”
“N-no, Belinda. Sorry. I’m . . . My life’s upside down.”
“I think that’s true for everyone.”
“No, not like that. I think I used to be one of you. A mask.”
I study the woman a moment, mentally superimposing a range of masks and head gear to trigger recognition, but nothing works.
“How do you figure that?” I ask her.
“I received a letter, more than a year ago,” she says, and actually digs the much-handled slip of paper out of the leather carryall she wears over one shoulder of her dirty, once expensive cashmere sweater.
“Who is it from?”
“No one I’ve ever met,” she says. “His name was Tom Hilfiger. He says he used to be a superhero called –”
“Avenger.”
The woman stops cold and looks at me with snowflakes falling upon her lightly freckled face, a thick scarf still with twigs caught in it from wherever she slept the night before. Her head turns to the side and she frowns.
“How on earth did you know that and what else can you tell me so I can be sure I’m not going crazy?”
*
I RECOUNT AS much as I’ve ever been able to piece together in the investigation stretching back the past few years in this thing I call my life. The Doomsday Man left the Demoness Yoko Ono running some kind of faulty or decaying observe-and-protect psionic software when he went to jump parallels during the big merger or edit he and she instigated against their fellow members of The Twelve, which I guess was part of some plan Lennon had to win the trust of the subspace-dwelling Editors – or at least access to their power. The equally powerful Lennon he sought to overlay by merging parallel universes instead fled his body a moment before the apocalypse by hiding in the mind of me, the young child of one of the women he was seeing, and who he also assumed was the mother of me as one of his many, many potentially superhuman offspring. In this other parallel there was some kind of resistance movement, led by renegade supers including the 101ers, and it was them I am really only guessing helped get a bunch of people get out before history overwrote them at the quantum level. In following years, Lennon’s erstwhile nemeses in The Twelve found themselves unwittingly trapped in the comfort of affluent new lives (all of them except for Steve Seagal, anyway), but during those years, Tom Hilfiger somehow grew dissatisfied with the life of the billionaire industrialist he’d inherited when he agreed to Lennon’s big edit – or maybe there was some kink in the system that meant after a while, he started to remember his former life, like a kind of reverse Alzheimer’s. Or maybe there’s some other trigger I’m yet to discover. But when Tommy started using his fortune to track down off-world proof of his past life as science hero Avenger, it triggered the tripwire on Ono’s defense mechanism. Either her accomplice Seagal was part of the plan all along or she went and woke him on her own initiative, but the killer Arsenal was her weapon of choice since her own greatest powers work best behind the scenes. Arsenal did Spectra’s dirty work and the only thing that makes sense, if I can call it that, is they started off around the country tracking down and wiping out the other members of The Twelve so no one could go unravelling the dearly departed Doomsday Man’s plan – what was presumably his old plan, since it doesn’t look like he ever came running back. The Lennon I’ve been dealing with all along – and the one whom I thought legitimately was my dad, until my own now never-to-be-born son Frostbite told me otherwise – was the one who piggybacked on me for thirty years or more. As I understand it, and unless I have one of these steps wrong, the Lennon who was the true arch-nemesis of this piece is the Doomsday Man who emerged from that edit, built himself a harem and a utopian island, but hasn’t been conclusively sighted since the 80s. And I don’t understand why.
If the Lennon who was once inside me masterminded Afghanistan, as I believe he did – and I pray to a God I know does not exist that Matrioshka did at least destroy him before setting her sights on pulling my life apart – he isn’t the one who triggered the big Edit. But he somehow made contact with the Doomsday Man’s Editors or at least their servitors, but I don’t know how or why or any of the other fairly crucial specifics. One could assume subspace-dwelling, interdimensional entities are going to trade across a million parallels, but that old adage about assume “making an ASS of U and ME” remains as pertinent as ever.
“So I’m one of the names on Arsenal’s to-do list?” this Belinda Carlisle woman asks me towards the sputtering end of my soliloquy.
“Yes, but I stopped him before he got to you. There’s only a few of you left. What was your code name?”
“Mr Hilfiger said it was Tempest.”
“Weather-controller?”
“No. In my dreams . . . which are increasingly more lucid and vivid . . . I feel like I can control things, like I have this force with my mind?”
“You probably do,” I say. “The splice between the two parallels would have been between realms of similar plasticity.”
“I don’t . . . what does that mean? How do you know so much?”
“Experience.”
“You don’t look a day older than twenty-five.”
“Plasticity means the amount mankind . . . humankind . . . influences reality in its particular parallel. At the ideational level. Reality is a sort of feedback loop, I guess you could say, a living semiotic: reality and the cogent minds who perceive it influencing each other’s shape. Not every alternate world operates on the same laws as you and me. Or actually they do, just at decreasingly plastic levels. The physics in some parallels at the edge of the continuum are totally fixed. If you can believe it, there’s millions of versions of our world that are far more primitive and prosaic. Some don’t even have superheroes.”
Miss Carlisle just gives me a look. I can tell she’s still having trouble coming to terms with the relief that she hasn’t been snared into some madman’s fantasy – except of course that is the very thing that has happened.
“A world without superheroes,” Belinda says. “Maybe then we could be safe.”
“It’s not the heroes you have to worry about.”
“What, The Twelve you just told me about, they weren’t heroes once?”
“It’s . . . complicated.”
“But the killers are dead, so I am safe?”
“Arsenal is dead.”
“And the other one, you called her Demoness?”
“Spectra. She is . . . I believe she’s beyond danger now.”
“She certainly would be if she was dead.”
“Everyone’s a critic,” I say to her. “What life did you get?”
“Pardon me?”
“If you were one of The Twelve, you got a swanky ID. What do you do?”
“I’m just a mom.”
I want to say “Aw, you’re not just a mom,” but frankly I can’t be fucked, and besides, I can’t see any kids hanging around her, so I don’t want to exhume any unintended grief. I make a vague noise and wonder whether overdue fees for a bunch of Vanilla Ice and Genesis live DVDs I rented will continue accruing during this holocaust. Belinda watches me curiously as I go through a few shades of distraction, and then she makes a somewhat adorable throat-clearing noise and starts up again.
“Can you tell me – because this is what I was looking for in the first place – do you know anyone who could help me remember more? Of my . . . other life?”
“I know plenty of people. You might’ve noticed right now we’re scattered to the winds a little, though. The city’s in bad shape. You copied all that?�
�
“Two nights ago I slept under the Hellgate Bridge while I listened to those sick idiots hunting through the streets above us for the captives they released. It was like cats with mice. All night.”
“OK. Nice story,” I say. “We’re going in there to take them out.”
“Good. I’m coming with you.”
“Oh no you’re not,” I tell her.
The fiery redhead just grins like I’m sure she’s been doing her whole life, living up to the cliché as we are most of us wont to do.
“No one tells me what I can and can’t do.”
“Good, because I wasn’t telling.”
She takes my right cross like a novice, sinking to the ground almost too fast for me to catch, then I drag her unconscious into the warehouse and its animal stink as the gentle snowfall outside turns to sleet.
The others pile in after me and I am a little embarrassed at how little explaining I have to do for why I cold-cocked that woman and then stashed her body like a witch hoarding food for winter cooking. The freezing rain pounds down on the ancient warehouse roof above us and Seeker approaches me while the other masks form a rough group and I also rapidly adapt to the apart new norms for woman-on-woman violence.
“Coalface is hiding something,” Loren says.
“He’s injured.”
Seeker nods. Together, we approach the big figure standing as far away from the others as he can while maintaining the illusion of being part of the group.
“Coalface, what’s going on?” I call to him as we close the distance.
“Waiting . . . for your plan,” he says.
“What happened to you out there?”
The man-mountain just watches us a moment, dark and baleful and difficult to read. I am kind of surprised when he actually answers.
“The one called . . . Ansolom,” he says, big lungs struggling like a bellows to power each syllable in Coalface’s rasping baritone. “He . . . got me. Hurt me.”
“Ansolom?” This is another familiar name, but my inattention to fine detail is finally catching up on me. I wish Tessa were here, then desperately unwish such a foolish thing, hoping for the present she is safe in custody – until such a time as I can do something about that problem, too. At least now I’m a girl I have lipstick for writing my next to-do list.
“Where are you hurt?” Seeker asks, though I can tell she is scanning Coalface already.
“You’ve never been hurt before.”
I say it quietly. It’s as much a whispered thought as anything else. Seeker halts. And Coalface turns his head which looks like some kid’s shitty fifth grade art project except the blackened clay remains red hot. Emotion somehow glows in those eyes, a warmth that tells me how close I burn to the truth.
“No internal injuries,” Seeker says quietly as her scan concludes.
“No,” I say. “He’s not hurt. He’s scared.”
And it’s about then Coalface starts to cry.
“I hope that armor’s good with heat,” I say to her.
“Why?”
“I think Coalface needs a hug.”
And I gently nudge Seeker forward as the big guy goes to bits. He drops to his knees with a massive crunch and ceases cradling his right side armor, which is cracked and broken from the recent encounter with the enemy’s heavy hitter. Seeker looks at me, the beautiful woman I once knew now restored to a very different life, something equally otherworldly if not inhuman in her expression filtered through the blue frieze of her light visor. She quietly kneels in commune with our resident brick and I back off as the rain overhead does the same, and silently I wish for a chocolate pop tart and remember Matrioshka likes them as well.
Zephyr 22.5 “Defender Of The Manifest Eschatologosphere”
SO FOR ONCE the plucky Ms Belinda Carlisle gets a lesson in “no” meaning no as the rest of us advance into the night across the peninsula of the abandoned public park. The battle-scarred Queens Museum glitters with black magic, nothing glamorous about it as we soar in from the ether – me, Seeker, Sentinel, Lionheart, the Enigma, Maxtor, and last and certainly not the quietest, Mistress Snow. I have reluctantly left Coalface guarding the fort as well as the traumatized, quasi-squamous Legion triplets.
There’s a palpable aura that we are in occupied territory. I can’t sense even a squirrel in the trees we fly over. Although it is night, we can see clearly enough by a brightening moon that not a soul stirs in the deserted streets around us, the parkway a tomb for abandoned vehicles. Despite the proximity of the bones of old New York so close by in the river behind us, it is quaint, almost borderline astonishing to see so many lo-fi residences and once healthy stores arrayed in row after row, untrammeled like some child’s ambitious play area made from old cereal boxes and left to gather dust in a gloomy place. To think humanity could once live in such fine order in the shadow of a teeming, sprawling metropolis beggars belief when confronted by the post-Ragnarok certainty of Atlantic City as it now stands.
There are so many places these self-appointed hunters could be hiding that I feel momentarily overwhelmed by how I’m going to make good on this one. It is precisely the wrong moment for world-weariness to wash over me, so I fight it by clenching my jaw and trying not to think about Holland’s frequent need to pee which I have apparently inherited.
We fly or haul each other like a bedraggled band of geese, survivors of this holocaust beyond our comprehension. Lionheart on point. Sentinel is across from me in the middle of the vee, Mistress Frost curled in his arms like the feline she fancies herself, I think, to be. Seeker carries the lightweight Enigma – who I later find, through his agent, prefers the spelling eNiGmA (like there is any way on earth I am going to allow that shit) if I am going to “use his likeness in publications”. (Wh-a-at?)
“OK Cusp, you asked for this. Now where to?” Sentinel cat-calls.
I gotta admit I’m somewhat surprised we haven’t already been jumped on the approach to the villains’ alleged lair, which was what I was half-heartedly relying on to deflect exactly this dilemma of leadership. I glower back at my unwanted comrades and quietly wish Negator was here, except I’m pretty sure he’d try to bang me regardless.
The cops said these Omega doodads were “praying” to the Unisphere. In the absence of anything else making sense, I take the lead and wing my way in its direction with my little ducks angling on behind, and in just seconds the shiny sculpture hoves into view, gorgeous and idealistic as a piece of art, but transmogrified now into something entirely different.
*
IT IS AN enormous cage. Fire clouds the sky around it, and enormous spears fashioned from the goal posts of the nearby stadium offer even more places from which human figures can hang, impaled or otherwise crucified on charnel display before the flickering lights and the still-moving captives imprisoned in the ten storey-high globe, its metals darkened, the continents and the spaces in-between created for the 1965 World Fair now a blasphemous inversion of its original theme of international peace through cultural understanding.
The keening of the captives somehow does sound like singing. The cops were right about that at least – it was not the bad guys, but their prey, seventy or eighty people somehow imprisoned in the big metal structure augmented by hundreds of yards of pilfered razor wire. Their voices interact with the metal or perhaps it is something wrong with space-time that it instantly raises those adorable hackles of mine once more. I notice an actual guillotine on the stained concrete surrounding the giant plinth, the night conspiring to obscure the details of the mess amid which it reigns.
We have too great an urgency to plot and strategise. I land in a hard crouch adjacent to the executioner’s stand and scour for enemy targets as my accomplices descend about me.
“Sentinel!” I hear a ragged voice cry from the direction of the cage.
There is a silent moment, those trapped within taking a collective breath and sharing but one thought before action turns them into a dolorous choir, a giant, emergent gasp whi
ch transforms into more ragged screeching and cheering as the watchword for superheroics appears front and center before them. To his credit, Sentinel goes straight for the closest metal bars with his hands extended with such obvious intent that he looks more like a storyboard for this moment than the man himself – and it is in exactly that pose that he bursts into flame, the wash of malignant fire bursting out of the darkness on the far side of the enormous sphere now looming overhead like a grisly torturer’s cathedral, more dead bodies lashed by wire to the struts and structure of the awful thing – and not all of them entirely dead, I notice, either.
I crouch close to one side as Sentinel takes it right in the ass, practically vanishing in the ardent inferno, the force greater than any mere mortal pyrokinetic. And in moments after that thought – registering Sentinel’s curled and blackened form tumbling past me in a Catherine Wheel of sparks and flames – my battlefield intuition is confirmed in the appearance of the enemy, some creature out of a lost culture’s Hell, an entity formed of pure violence without any true corporeal shell.
Manitou.
It’s been many years. I thought her long gone. We tussled back in my red-and-white years, when I was unconsciously self-conscious of the hang of my cape in the same way musicians constantly fuck with their long hair.
Manitou started out as a Native American rights activist with mystical backing, but her actions in the late 70s and 1980s landed her on the FBI’s most wanted list when Carter was still dismantling McCarthy’s Parahuman Affairs Bureau and no one yet trusted masks in law enforcement roles. Anyone who fought Manitou knew she had an ungodly amount of power at her disposal, no pun intended, since the origins of that power were always assumed to be the supernatural force after which she was named, but the woman herself always struck me as fairly balanced given the fugitive status put on her by the government of the day.
Yet what we see here is nothing like that person. This is Fury unrestrained. She bowls through us like a ghost in a Chinese horror movie, except her gliding wire-fu passage is a hurricane of deadly fire, and Maxtor, Lionheart and the Enigma only get to safety by the skins of their teeth, while Mistress Snow invokes her element in a freezing sphere that is instantly extinguished – but not without saving her life first.
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