Zephyr IV

by Warren Hately

  ZEPHYR Volume 4

  Warren Hately

  Copyright 2013 Warren Hately

  It's 2013 on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The place is Atlantic City: a sweeping longitudinal metropolis rebuilt following widespread devastation in 1984. Superhumans are not only real, they're human. All too human, as Nietzsche would say.

  “… like superheroes in the world of American Psycho …” @wereviking

  For more about Zephyr or its author, visit warrenhately.com for musings about post-literary writing and Sturgeon’s law – updated most weeks.

  Contact the author at wereviking @ hotmail.com, follow @wereviking or visit warrenhately.com for more.

  Cover art by Alfredo Torres

  @spacechipAT

  redharvestportfolio.tumblr.com

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Zephyr 12.1 “Oblique Parallel”

  The storyline resumes from the action of Zephyr III, Chapter 10.14 with Zephyr’s journey to the parallel dystopia governed by The Twelve.

  AS REALISATION CRASHES on top of mounting reality, I move away from the podium that should house a wormhole generator, my fingers clawed into my increasingly unruly hair, a look of guarded horror unmatched by the pensive expressions on Titania and Olga’s faces.

  What dampens my mood for the better is seeing the two women nervously eying each other off, Titania submissive, her even taller offsider with an air of rebuke as her lover slinks back towards her.

  “I wasn’t going to go,” Titania says. “I promise.”

  I can hear the conviction in her voice, but I’m not so sure about Olga. Her Nordic profile slowly cracks like a time lapse of an iceberg’s collapse, warmth the culprit as you’d expect as she finds like any of us, it’s hard to resist the waves of charisma washing off the other woman. They fold into a clinch that leaves me even more on the outer than before as I turn back to the dirty, blood-scrawled characters of my erstwhile father’s message to me on departure.

  “Fucking hell.”

  It’s about the most intelligent thing I can say at this point.

  We are still regrouping from the shock of having my escape route pulled out from under us when a half-dozen lackeys in shock armor, shiny black face-plated helmets and Lego guns come barreling into the room. With a dismissive wave I electrocute them so they form a puzzling pool of men, some kind of richly significant unspoken semiotic for the two powerhouse part-time lesbians to step over daintily as we make our way back from Spectra’s obsidian chamber of disappointment.

  “You should believe her, you know,” I say to Olga.

  The Danish woman shrugs. “It’s hard not to.”

  “I know. But I didn’t really think she’d come.”

  Titania gives a fey smile.

  “I’ve made a life here. Apocalyptic. Chaotic. Still a life.”

  She twines her fingers through Olga’s big mitt and they look so ridiculously happy amid the ruins of the conference room that frankly it’s all a bit too hard for me to swallow.

  My sour look’s been a long time coming. Jane’s face crumples.

  “What will you do now?” she asks.

  “I’m not sure I can just make lemonade like you two,” I say back. Shrug. “This isn’t my home. My home, my stupid world, it’s still too fresh. If we’re lucky The Twelve have handled the Matrioshka problem –”

  The women hiss, reminding me I’m not meant to say that name. I shrug again.

  “If that’s the case – and it’s a big if – then I can rest easier knowing at least we did some good here and it’s right for me to move on.”

  “We did good, handsome?” Olga frowns. “Tell me. What did we do?”

  I have to reflect a moment on another Red Monolith dying on my watch. It’s a forcible effort to rewind back through recent memories to eke out evidence of my ambit claims.

  Into the awkward gap stumbles a skinny old Japanese man carrying a janitor’s bucket and a broom. His missing teeth gape in the bluish glow of his Twelve-ordained slave collar. He gawks at us.

  “Ah . . . you, superheroes?”

  I almost laugh at the naïve comment, but Titania and then Olga turn toward him as serious as if he was a president.

  “What is it?”

  “Helicopter crash make fire in Asakusa Corporation building. Rebels with rocket, yes? Spectra dead. Riots starting. People trapped.”

  There’s an air of resignation that would read as fatalism at any other moment – or maybe that’s me – as the pair turn back to me and the hole in the wall beyond us.

  “Until you figure it out, there’s a world here that needs heroes. See?” Titania says. “Not everyone has forgotten how it used to be.”

  I shrug, too morose and listless to really have the energy to answer, about as much enthusiasm as if they asked me to eat 50 hard-boiled eggs. The women sense my apathy and move to the breach, the old janitor just watching, and as they whip through the exit tracing the doppler of emergency sirens I feel a familiar but forgotten pulse at the back of my belt and pull the Enercom phone free.

  It’s one of the few advantages of my constantly recharging electro-magnetic field that the cell never goes flat. All the same, I’m as surprised as anyone to hear it playing It’s Raining Men (reset) so far across the cosmos from home.

  I flip the phone open, frowning.

  “Uh, yeah?”

  There’s nary a crackle as Tessa’s voice comes through loud and clear.

  “Tell me you’ve called a lawyer, dad. What’s this I hear about you assaulting Negator?”

  *

  I HAVE A grimace like a gay porn star as the pennies start to drop and I understand Tessa’s calling from the Wallachians’ multiverse-travelling fortress. The first bloom of real hope struggles up like a drowning man to break the surface of my spiritual inertia.

  “Honey? Are you alright?” I bark down the phone like a madman.

  “I should be the one asking you that, except I’m not sure I care anymore, dad,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for you to check in with me for days. What’s going on?”

  I move away from the rent in the skyscraper wall like it’s just a momentary inconvenience, Titania and Olga rapidly becoming blips in the distance. Despite Tessa’s surly tone, I hoist an ear-to-ear grin. I wouldn’t be surprised if a gust of wind caught my face like a sail, throwing me from the building.

  “God, I’ve got so much to tell you,” I say. “I’ll explain everything. You’re with the Sentinels?”

  “Yeah?”

  She says it hesitantly, like maybe I’m about to ask her to do her chores. That would be a first.

  “Baby, I need a lift. Can you come and get me? I’m trapped in an oblique parallel.”

  “Jesus, dad.”

  She sounds shittier than she should. I can hear the huffing and puffing as she works her way back around to being reasonable.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Honey, can you curb the cursing please? It’s really complicated. Right now I need a lift, a shower, something to eat, and a change of underwear … And not necessarily in that order.”

  “Great. That really is more information than I need to know.”

  “I love you, Tessa.”

  “Daddy, I’ve got my mask on. It’s Windsong.”

  “You’re gonna come, right?”

  “Yeah . . . Fuck, I can’t believe I’m doing this. I’ll have to speak to the others. Vulcana’s sort of calling the shots around here these days. She’s the only one the monks’ll listen to after you killed Seeker – Shit!”

  She catches herself in the accusation too late. The grin slides from my face like it’s Teflon-coated. A cartoon cream p
ie now more like the kind of cream pie you’d find trawling the Internet with image safe search unlocked.

  “I didn’t kill Candace, honey. That . . . that really hurts me.”

  “I know you didn’t, dad. I’m sorry. It’s sort of a meme.”

  Even in darkness I can think of a quip, though I don’t have the will to deliver it. I sigh loudly – loud enough so she can hear it on the other side of the space-time membrane – and reiterate my gentle plea for assistance.

  I am sitting like an ersatz Batman, crouched on the jagged lip of the hole in the scenery when there’s a familiar displacement behind me and the ghostly drawbridge lowers, just a short single female figure silhouetted by the light to greet me.

  Zephyr 12.2 “Oral History”

  IT’S BEEN A while, but the labyrinthine walls of the mad monks’ fortress remain eerily familiar as I step from the shower that appears practically the moment I step aboard, some subtle indicator as if from the castle itself at just how rank I’ve become. I couldn’t give a shit (not any more, anyway). A fresh white towel is streaked with soot marks and Tessa’s electric shaver she uses on her hair downstairs has done the job up top and I am borderline trim, taut and terrific once more. I meet her in her new leathery Windsong garb at the exit as another doorway appears and Tessa leads me through into a creamy white chamber part-living room and part-infirmary. There’s a bed, a widescreen TV on the pale wall, and an Ikea table for my few remaining things. God alone knows whatever happened to the room I once had myself in here.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks.

  “I dunno. How do I look?” I ask and raise my arms, nothing but the towel about my waist.

  “You always seem to do alright.”

  She says it in that downbeat way I know is meant to elicit guilt and god damn it she is right because it does.

  “You look really good, dad. Always do.”

  I scratch my bulging tricep, even leaner than ever thanks to the past week’s diet-and-death regime. The bruises are fading rapidly. Tessa’s latest costume is perhaps unconsciously similar to mine, the leather a dusty grey, no moniker but a swirling black design on her chest that the TVs won’t pick up, but she’s too young still to understand that. She is a chunky, curvy, increasingly muscular-looking bundle packed into her five-foot-two frame which I feel I should apologize to her about, obviously somehow the grandmother’s genetics sneaking through despite my potted and sometimes querulous family tree. I barely notice when she produces a fresh set of my leather uniform, the gold zed now too gaudy a bangle in my post-Titania funk.

  For the first time I wonder if my mood is a kind of withdrawal symptom from not being around Titania and her magnetic personality (and great ass). Yet it’s not her who my mind keeps turning back to. My guilt about Loren knows no bounds. I don’t know what else to say.

  “I had this replicated for you. Something to wear.”

  “OK, thanks,” I say.

  A monk comes in, faceless in the hooded cowl. He makes a pretty poor stewardess as he deposits a tray with covered bowls and two Cokes in an Asiatic font on the bedside table, seemingly glaring at me before he withdraws. I smile weakly and crack one of the drinks, practically inhaling the chemicals and nutrients direct into my body rather than simply drinking. Then I crumple the can and nod to the costume as Tessa dunks it on the bed.

  “I should leave you be,” she says.

  “No. Stay. Hang on.”

  I can’t resist lifting the lid on one of the pots and scoop the sandwich up. It looks like a hamburger designed by Japanese archaeologists from the year 3000 with only the oral history and fossil evidence to guide them. It’s still gloriously fat-soaked carbohydrates for my starved system and I start wolfing it down as Tessa hovers in the door frame, tousled hair midway down her back now as she looks at me with what I once thought were my other grandmother’s eyes. Now I know this is a lie, like so much else that seemed solid and has now, as Marx would’ve put it, melted into air.

  *

  SHE IS STILL a minor, but Tessa regards me from thickly-coated mascara lashes, her chiseled cheekbones at odds with her wide, still sometimes babyish face that I guess is always going to be like that on account of her compact, wide-hipped physiognomy. Surrounded by tall and leggy, some might say skeletal action heroes, I don’t know if it burns her or not. Given her persuasions with which I am all too familiar – and far more intimately than any father really should be – I wouldn’t be surprised if she has worked her way through half their beds already, although I don’t know how she does this since her mother’s banned her from superheroing on school nights, and as her unspoken tone suggests, the issue of custody remains a pressing one. Obviously today’s young dykes don’t have the same taboos against make-up and skin-tight leather as they did in days of yore. I don’t know if Tessa as Windsong is liberated and Old New York chic or just in the queue for exploitation like all the rest of them – and thus, as her dad, whether I’m ultimately to blame.

  “Thanks for the costume,” I tell my one and only.

  I lick my fingers and pick up the zip-across jacket, the bolted-on gold emblem gently chiming off my inadvertent fingernail. I look down a moment, my vague reflection swimming on the shimmering metal, and into that gap of sorrow I imagine an ocean of tears might fall were I to let it. Instead, I softly growl and prise the brassy zed from the leather and toss it into a corner where it clangs and Tessa’s lukewarm fug vanishes instantly as she stands up straight and puts her hands to her hips.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You had it like that only a month or so ago. Before you lost your powers.”

  I am reminded of that. It seems like an age since I’ve been back in the air just doing the friendly neighborhood superhero thing, but of course there was a seemingly timeless chasm in which my entire life fell in a hole thanks to Spectra and her thuggish little minions. Again my thoughts turn to Loren and I snap them back from the brink like some master magician almost showing the rabbit is nothing more than a particularly well-greased sock puppet.

  “Things have changed since then.”

  “I know it mustn’t’ve been easy to see the world go to hell,” Tessa says in the kind of voice one reserves for gently trying to make an uncomfortable point by ceding just a little common ground first. Ah, here it comes: “Everyone’s been going through tough times. Me included. It’s like there’s some kind of thing at the moment.”

  “I did speak to a lawyer,” I say sincerely, even though I am strangling the truth more than a little.

  The burst of hope in her eyes is more reward than I deserve.

  “Really?”

  “It’s going to be a slow process.”

  Almost a girl again, Tessa flops down on the bunk beside me and sinks her forehead into my shoulder. I put an arm about her and she gives a single sob, though there’s no actual tears. I think she stopped needing me for that further back than I realized. My only consolation was I lasted longer than her mother.

  “You OK?” I ask.

  “Oh it’s your turn, is it?”

  She laughs shrewdly and stands, smoothing back her desultory hair in one of those practiced sultry moves that terrifies any parent.

  “I’m fine, dad. Things are OK, really. Mom’s stressing me out. Vulcana’s being a bitch. I really hope you can make some headway with mom’s lawyers. It’s still freaking me out. I mean, England?”

  “How’s your school work?”

  She stares at me a moment like an Alzheimer’s victim, the meaning of the word forgotten until she snaps into a quick smile, not quite pulling the wool over my eyes that that part of her life’s probably already on the scrap heap. As I recall, the fees are paid up till halfway through the next century thanks to my dead mother’s estate.

  “It’s cool. Don’t worry. I’m just keeping my options open, OK?”

  “Like college?”

  “What, you’re going to pay?”

  “There
are these things called scholarships, you know.”

  “Oh yeah,” Tessa says and gives a gutsy laugh. “I’ll go for the varsity, you know. They must have a fee-free program for ass-kicking?”

  She pouts, turns, a kewpie doll for a moment. Still my little girl.

  “Don’t get too hung up on college just because you never got to go, dad.”

  “I didn’t go to college because I spent seven nights a week dressing up in spandex,” I say more gruffly than I should. Also shouldn’t mention the word spandex, which dates me a little as Tessa’s fey smirk says.

  Zephyr 12.3 “Body Issues”

  “YOU HAVE TO get dressed for the wedding, anyway,” Tessa says a short time later and stands again and passes me the heavy leathers now with a few empty rivets down the front. “Your sense of timing for once is impeccable, at least if you’re Paragon and Jocelyn.”

  “Lady Macbeth?”

  “Sheesh, dad. No one’s called her that for a year now. It’s their wedding tonight.”

  I can only blink and mumble, more ready to sleep for a week than I am to trip the light fatalistic. I tell her as much and her golden look sours.

  “Oh come on,” she says.

  “Honey, I’m sure you don’t need a date that bad that you’re going to press gang me into going.”

  “Oh I don’t,” she says, surprised that I’d even suggest it. “I thought you were one of the guests of honor? Paragon said as much on morning TV.”

  “Really?” I sound about fourteen and born only last week, the love child of Ashton Kutcher and Jim Carrey fitted with an artificial womb.

  “Really.”

  ` Tessa laughs and flits back to the doorway. She hovers there a moment.

  “Your powers are really back?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’m glad. You had me freaked for a while there. I mean, what would the world be like with no Zephyr?”