Zephyr VI

by Warren Hately

  Portal’s sizzling green doorway erupts into our universe and the man in question appears like a drowned rat. Gallons of sea water spill out before he looks at me doggedly, face haggard and dripping beneath the padded visor and goggles.

  “Ready in ten seconds,” he says and ducks back into the portal as a wave breaks and kelp and water splashes through, splattering on the dusty British rooftop as the doorway seals itself shut.

  I meet Shade’s eyes, then Loren’s.

  “You’ve got this, Joe,” Seeker says.

  I turn to Shade as a line forms and Enigma and Mr Magnificent and Golden and Iron John and Gorilla Man and Sentinel and everyone else step forward and then another green doorway ensorcels open and I wait a moment, but there’s no water coming and no immediate sign of Portal.

  “What are you waiting for, Joe?” Shade extolls me. “Don’t freeze! Go!”

  The indignity of the comment cuts, but now’s not the time for argument. I bull forward at the green gateway and fly through.

  Zephyr 23.1 “Into The Great Green Beyond”

  WITH ALL THE glee of amateur phlebotomists, I lead us into the great green beyond with a girlish swagger I no longer notice. Now there is only a limbic sense of my dissociated state, and thus that hardwired reptilian reflex is much reduced in the egoic scream of my cerebellum still caught wondering where my true body resides, Cusp’s wearily grinning face an outward mask, in this sense maybe not too much more than a fleshly robotic simulacrum betraying nothing of the yet more layers upon layers of my inhabited persona . . . and my dark, cave-dwelling demon slithers wetly in the mirk in the most shadow-throned realms of my unconscious.

  What I’m telling you is I’m in a neither-Zephyr-nor-Cusp mental state, entirely present in the moment of rushing headlong forward into what would send an ordinary rational Being into immediate rebellion. It’s like I actually absorbed something during my Lennon-as-Sting sojourn in auld Afghanistan. Fully ready-to-hand, the passage between Portal’s Green Realms is nary a flicker, my next coherent thoughts focused solely on the metallic subterranea and industrial mood lighting of Earthsong’s alleged submarine.

  Right in front of me stands a startled-looking sailor or soldier or terrorist or I don’t know what he is, a mildly handsome, brown-skinned polyethnic social justice warrior-gone-bad. He clutches something like an Ak-47 but bigger, and that’s reason enough for me to clock him with a solid left jab that drops him on his ass, only I introduce my knee to his face on the way down. Just to keep him settled, I then kneel prettily and deliver a hard knife-hand strike to the side of his neck to leave him spasming between the bulkheads of the cramped interior as I take in his most immediate companion just inside the next open pressurized doorway, my moves so swift and my vengeance so clearly awesome that he’s still stuck in the act of expressing his astonishment instead of yelling that the terrorists’ submarine bad guy lair’s been breached. Leaving my first dance partner behind, I continue my crouch, throwing it into a lunge as I make for and through the door as the zealot only then thinks to try and throw the fucking thing shut. It’s way too late for that. I rebound through, one palm outstretched to steady my ingress as I storm the next section and I can hear and almost feel my fellow invaders pouring through behind me. One sharp elbow and a swiveling kick and the second baddie’s on his knees groaning for his momma.

  At first I don’t actually register the screams. I’m way too focused on the opponent before me, who takes a palm strike to his upper sternum that sends him into the whole gang of Kevlar’d dudes just behind him. FNORD. I am through them like an eel, like an oil slick, like ink in water as I crouch again, this time delivering a nasty downwards strike into the third guard with my darkness-encrusted fist, his unhelmeted skull rebounding off the steel floor and thus wise ushering in unconsciousness.

  Ahead of me is another wheel-sealed door, but Shade bounds past, black as the plague and twice as deadly, so I have a moment to veer back and I’m shocked to see Gorilla Man bound past with a terrified yowl and then actual blood flicks into my eyes and when I clear them I see the beautiful girl Golden clutching the stump of her missing arm. Blood hisses between her fingers like we’re in a Chinese horror movie and I look around trying to comprehend this moment of space-time, let alone how such an injury could’ve happened – and that’s about when my deafened ears take in all the other wild shrieking.

  “They’re in here with us!”

  I can’t locate the source of it, though somehow I know it is Portal’s strangled cry, and then the flickering green rift at the other end of the chamber vanishes, which really only draws my attention to the Enigma laying in Mr Magnificent’s arms, something nonsensical about his sudden inside-outside biology as the pair of them stare in shocked fascination at the veteran hero’s innards sprayed outwards from his ruptured abdomen like shit from a rhino’s ass, a volcano of gory torment busting from his torso in a tangle of ruinous intestines and other gunk which barely coheres into anything understandable – and in that half-instant before I scan back to the Enigma, his eyes are closed, and I think maybe the masked hero cradling him is whispering something, but I’m still distracted by the chaos in-between, yelling instinctively for Shade like it was never OK to yell for my mother at the moment some infernal blur hisses past me and I dodge for dear life.

  The phrase “they’re in here with us” doesn’t bode at all well, and among the carnage to the rear of the sub I spot two more cadavers in Earthsong’s customary bandit olive and green, garnished with gizzards and gore not just by Enigma and Golden, but the two hapless submariners themselves, disemboweled as a matching pair felled in the first moments of our deadly intruder’s loosening amongst us.

  Grunting and thumps sound, but there’s no immediate sign of Shade beyond the next doorway. Also with us this side of the sundered gate are Sentinel, Iron John and Gorilla Man, though when I swing back in his direction I see something like what you might imagine if I said a figure glimpsed in a blizzard who lifts the transformed gorilla by the throat as easily as a child, something spectral, non-corporeal, or not entirely real about him and the arm he plunges into the ape hero’s bulging costume-clad chest. The green-and-purple of Gorilla-Man’s uniform vanishes in a vomit of its inner workings as the ape makes a noise like an organic balloon might with the wind let out of it, and as the sigh breaks, the spell is broken or whatever and Gorilla Man transforms into his normal dead self which the flickering figure discards like a rich kid with last year’s now broken toy.

  “What the fuck is that?” I bawl and admit to being quite startled into paralysis.

  Sentinel charges past me with Iron John close behind, the not-quite steampunk avenger knocking me to the deck with his rough transit.

  From that vantage I watch with a terrifying feeling of finality as the entity maneuvers, almost seeming to teleport from one spot to another constantly out of reach like a flickering, see-through flame.

  I haul myself up as Sentinel swings a dozen times and misses, aiming each blow at an opponent who might as well be imaginary, he’s so consistently not there. I likewise see Iron John try to circle for advantage in the difficult terrain and despite his armor’s many functions, the Brit super hesitates like some guilty bed-wetter.

  “It’s one of those possessed villains! The Omega!” I yell, hoping my deductive intel might be of some use.

  “I can’t lay a mitt on him,” Sentinel snarls.

  As if making a case for pride, the vanishing blur re-appears alongside the veteran strongman, a face melting into view grinning like a mortician with a hard-on.

  “Shit.”

  There’s a horrible buzzing sound made worse by having every kid’s Saturday morning TV idol let loose with a scream channeling a noise like an alien world peopled entirely by retarded babies giving birth to each other. It is literally a gut-wrenching sound, the bone-saw tone of Sentinel’s impossibly invulnerable hide giving way under the monster’s onslaught. Sentinel’s shriek is short-lived though as he gets his hands
on his attacker and applies a vise-hold strong enough to stop a battleship in harbor. Over his own agony and the sound of the blur’s own screams, he hisses a command to Iron John.

  “Give it everything you’ve got!”

  The old man’s insides dangle from his torn-open guts like they too refuse to give in, Sentinel crucifying the possessed Blur in his grasp.

  Swept up in it all, I have to clasp a bulkhead to steady my balance, clamping down against the rising tide of my inner demon clawing its way into my driver’s seat like a whole person trying to birth themselves from my gut via my throat. I see Shade coming back through the far side of the submarine getting her first proper glimpse of what’s going on – and I throw up my hand as our eyes lock and I yell for her to get to cover.

  As Sentinel wills it, Iron John does as told.

  In the close proximity it’s like we simply explode.

  And next thing we are in a hell of fire and water.

  *

  THE CONCUSSION ALONE is enough to kill whichever mere ideology-soaked mortals were still alive on the good ship Earthsong. I don’t know if I survive on my own merits or thanks to the thing which possesses me or sometimes I it. Without even getting a chance to find the lady in command of the sub, I’m caught up in the detonation as something goes monstrously wrong with Iron John’s suit and the resulting fusion breaches the submarine hull.

  Often, saying “words fail to convey” is a cop-out, but I don’t even know if I am entirely conscious nor even actually completely alive through the many intermittent parts that seem to make up the broken reel of the next few minutes that leaves me clutching on to a huge fucking section of the outside of the submarine’s hull as it rights itself in the water off the old waterfront where Loren and I once lived. My ears are deaf if not bleeding and I am catastrophically aware of only my own near consciousness, the sky and sea warbling in and out of focus in some disastrous play with each other, or I think that’s what’s going on until the slow moments spill on long enough for me to grasp the whole side of this metallic deck is on its way to turning vertical before it capsizes and sinks into the Hudson forever.

  The aft section of the sub continues to lift and lift out of the water as it dances towards its demise like the very metal glacier it has now become. I soar on it above the water level and have to hang on to random handholds to stop myself falling in utter disorientation into the water below which now teems with all manner of debris, not the least of it thirty or more bodies among which I imagine are men whom I never would’ve chosen as teammates who still sacrificed themselves for the greater good.

  But not Iron John. That was just a fuck-up. Or I gotta presume so.

  We tussled once and I got a sense of maybe I hadn’t seen him at full capacity and maybe I was glad for that. He’s unlikely to be hydrodynamic, so I cease scanning the debris field for him, my wandering, slightly shattered gaze falling on Shade slow-lapping it to the water’s edge.

  Bleak relief washes through me.

  “Shade!”

  The Brit super stops in the water, as exhausted as me and now almost as pale as she orients herself to see me waving one arm from my perch a hundred feet in the air. Shade tiredly motions me down.

  “Fly!” I yell. “To the shore. Meet me there!”

  I can barely hear her reply, but her angry-looking gesticulation focuses my gaze on what I’d missed before: a green-canopied power boat speeding away from us and headed for the trendy-tacky shopping arcade piers.

  I curse and check myself and can already feel the iron cathedral of the sub’s carcass commencing its date with entropy, so I gather my resolve and test the still waters of my unconscious and take a deep breath and think briefly about where my body might be now as I launch myself from this aerie and manage to thrust myself out into the air in a slow arc taking me after the fleeing goons in the boat.

  Passing over Shade, I catch her gesture for me to go after them without her.

  “I was coming back to tell you some got away,” Shade yells at me and nearly goes under water. “And then what the fuck happened?”

  There’s no time to answer except give an empathic nod I don’t entirely feel as I coast onwards with my trajectory for the small craft, a lone gunman in the back with an Uzi, a black scarf and goggles concealing his features.

  The new risk refires my aching powers and I up the ante, hurtling like a hurricane towards and above the ship before the lone goon can track me with the Uzi. Bullets flick past in my lazy wake and then I am over the top of the vessel and landing less gracefully than I’d like on its front bit, whatever you call that thing. More automatic gunfire expletes into the night and I vault up with a little centrifugal lift and come down hard again as the power boat completely misses wherever it was meant to be going and the side grazes a huge concrete pylon as we pass from the open water and into the underdark of the post-Reconstruction Van Buren waterfront, the boat only instants later slamming on the shallower water. The gunman in the back flips out, vanishing as he cries out in surprise, while the boat itself continues on to crash into the base of one of the many huge sloping concrete foundations of the gigantic architecture above.

  The boat’s pilot smashes on the rocks like a ragdoll, but the other passenger flits nimbly up the slope in a familiar flash of court jester bells and green-and-red threads.

  “Madrigal!” I yell and swoop.

  I manage a pretty damned tight parabola only to have the fucker whip out his blaster and point back at me as he skips up the huge concrete plinths. I veer sideways just as quick and the energy bolt flits away into the labyrinthine waters. By the time I correct myself, the villain-for-hire clambers through an access hatch in a metal walkway in the daylight far above.

  “I said catch ‘em, not kill ‘em,” Shade heckles from behind me.

  Emerging from the water, she shakes off her arms and points above us.

  “Up there?” I say. “It’s Madrigal. He must be part of Earthsong’s crew supplied by Baroness.”

  “Who and what?”

  “Didn’t I explain any of this stuff to you?”

  “As unlikely as it sounds, no,” Shade says and ascends to pass me, flying for the metal hatchway with me on her tail.

  “I guess we had a lot of rushed conversations.”

  “And not that many of ‘em,” Shade replies.

  “Sorry.”

  I catch myself staring at her like this is a deeper conversation than we should really be having right now. Shade breaks off seemingly unaware and takes point through the metal trapdoor, which screeches open to reveal a metal mesh-reinforced platform along the service access for the ten-years-new boardwalk complex that hovers along this part of the Hudson like a magician’s trick, the glittery discount malls and cheap amusements tarnished by days of rioting and abuse. Glass litters everywhere the eye can see, sharp and shiny enough I fear splinters just looking at it all. Sure enough, Madrigal jogs steadily away across the boardwalk to the crashed-open canyon entrance of one gigantic glass cathedral to spiritus oeconomicus. A sign dangling askew above declares it “Fashion Zentraal”.

  “In,” I grunt at Shade.

  “What the fuck happened back there, Cusp?”

  I decline the bait of my assumed moniker and eloquently shrug.

  “I don’t know I can say for sure, but it went to shit,” I tell her.

  “You can say that again.”

  “I wouldn’t dare waste your time, my dear,” I smirk and for the first time in a while realize I am not ol’ Zephyr, making my corny-sexist-sexy banter come off skewiff. “I think one of those Omega fuckers jumped us out of hyperspace or whatevs. I guess Portal was right. What did you see?”

  As I ask her this, by mutual consent we swoop into the damaged atrium of the mall, the architectural equivalent of a smoker’s lung. Everything is tattered and destroyed by mob violence. Articles of fashionwear that clearly didn’t pass muster with the looters of yesterdays-gone-by carpet the gloomy, unlit avenues. Madrigal doesn’t have
much option but to hie for the bowels of the complex praying to the quiet spirits of evasion. He’s not a flier and he knows he’s fucked in a fair fight.

  “The door snapped shut and Portal was long gone,” Shade says as we pad forward like a couple from a Benetton advertisement who lost their adopted baby somewhere in the mall amid a natural disaster. “I don’t know what the fuck happened. And what happened to the . . . guy? The . . . thing who attacked us?”

  “I don’t know,” I say slowly, contemplative as I reconnoiter the path through overturned clothes racks and broken flats and flimsy partitions and broken mirrors and clothes-strewn pathways through the urban terrain like a multi-classed ranger/fashion model. “All I know is it took Iron John taking out a nuclear submarine to stop him. And I don’t think anyone else survived.”

  “And it did stop him?”

  “Barring evidence to the contrary.”

  “Heavy,” Shade says.

  “A-yup.”

  I am too exhausted for anything else but trite sentiments. I push a row of damaged shelving aside as we press on, following what I believe to be the sound of receding footfalls. But of course it’s Madrigal playing tricks on us.

  Zephyr 23.2 “The Rush To Embrace Pragmatism”

  THE NEXT THING I know, Shade and I are surrounded. Hideous hissing, yowling black eel-faced, nightmare-mouthed worms rise around us like living shadows, a sinister taffy conceived of equal parts darkness and dreamstuff.

  Tiny dagger fangs sink into Cusp’s ankle, but it’s me who feels the pain. And it’s me who shrieks and leaps back and kicks away, launching into the air the same moment rational logic tells me what just happened isn’t possible. Just to be safe, I strafe the area with a concussive battery of flash bulbs I frankly didn’t realize I had in me, the hormones triggered by perceived imminent death putting the speedball shot in my coffee I didn’t know I needed. My instinctive counter-attack isn’t super-considerate of Shade, who manages to save her eyesight by slapping her palms over her face, leaving me in charge as she crouches defensively among the writhing, carnivorous black pudding snakes all around her which my attack exposes for the clever illusions they are – and likewise exposes Madrigal crouched at an overturned wooden rostra, jangly fucking court jester-like headgear a little weather-stained, but somehow still in place atop his dimple-chinned mug.