Zephyr IV

by Warren Hately

  *

  “FUCK IT. OK, let’s do this thing,” I say with much the same tone as a football coach might to his beleaguered team, down 42-5 with most the last quarter already gone on the clock.

  Elisabeth audibly gulps air, turning away with a juddering, maudlin look as I approach Frost trying not to take in her cat-got-the-cream look of impending ecstasy too closely.

  “Jesus Christ,” I moan once more softly just for the record.

  “Just do it, Joe,” Beth says, not looking.

  I look Frost up and down. My wang betrays me, giving the first tug not exactly of the heart-string variety. And the bitch grins more widely, knowing she’s won.

  I put my hand on the cold flesh of her hip, the high-cut leather briefs just an inch away from her womanhood. And Frost leans into me, cupping a hand around the back of my neck and drawing me down to her demure height, nothing demure in her nature as she lifts her leg to press it alongside mine, forcing her sex against my thigh as a tiny breath of cool air escapes her gently parted lips and my hand circles around to hold her ass, squeezing the marbled flesh adding impetus to her trill of pleasure.

  Frost’s hand slips down to cup my hardening crotch. She purrs at the same time my extra senses perceive a swirling, pending displacement in the air behind me. I turn at the sudden discharge as several dozen cubic feet of air is forced through a pinprick hole and the room wavers as the sounds and smells of a distant space-time pervade our chilly rendezvous and a figure in charcoal-colored armor steps through.

  “Coitus interruptus,” a thin, not unpleasant voice trills as the light fades behind him. “I’m glad I’m in time to stop this madness once and for all.”

  I have never seen the young man before in my life, but the snow white hair and the blue-tinged complexion to his elfin face fill my bowels with dread and my heart with unease. I am glad I don’t have my dick out yet as the hum of concealed and advanced electronics build in the young interloper’s armored gauntlet he points at Frost and me.

  “I’m doing you a favor. Get away from that crazy bitch, dad.”

  Zephyr 12.9 “Beyond Redemption”

  I AM STRUGGLING for words as the powered gauntlet lowers and tiny particles of charged annihilation swarm around the elegant metal fingertips. Confusion reigns and rather than make a scene, I step aside as instructed.

  “Let the people go,” I say.

  The curiously familiar face, a photoshop blend of my smug grin and Frost’s delicate beauty, play across the stranger’s face as he calmly nods his head, assenting to my wishes. I look past him to Beth and nod and she gathers up her Norsk lover and spares me one final pitying, pathetic look before scampering from the room escorting Harald like the survivor of a Zionist marathon kidnapping.

  In those moments my eyes play over the young man’s face, not the actual elfin angle of his ears, the gold phylactery about his forehead patterned more with circuitry than Tolkienesque runes, the chill emanating from him to slowly fog the room like a rival to Frost’s uncontrollable permeations. Silvery blue eyes stare back at me with a touch of kindness mixed in with the pity, not wholly unlike the look most recently on Beth’s face. The moment stretches like sugar candy, and like all good toffee, it’s just bad for you.

  “Oh my god,” Frost moans, rapturous, advancing on the young man without a care for the poorly-concealed particle cannon aimed at her chest. “Is that you, my darling? My son? See Zephyr, I told you we would be parents to a divine race. Isn’t he beautiful?”

  “Stop there or I won’t hesitate to destroy you,” our apparent son says.

  “What’s your name?” I ask as much to quell my own curiosity as calm them down.

  The boy looks to me. “Frostbane. But you called me Tristan.”

  “Tristan?” I gawp.

  “Oh that’s a lovely name,” Frost gushes.

  The boy and I swap frowns, the culprit making herself known. Thankfully she also halts her advances and I fold my arms across my chest, any passion now well and truly departed thanks to this newest mystery.

  “I think you need to explain what’s going on,” I tell him.

  *

  FROSTBANE AKA TRISTAN lowers his arm as the threat goes unabated. I know I am not imagining the added chill factor as he circles the room briefly in his powered get-up, armor not dissimilar but more advanced to the type Vanguard wears clearly weighing a ton despite the youth’s lithe grace, the floor groaning under his weight as he chooses his words carefully.

  “I came to stop you. To stop this.”

  “But darling, why?” Frost asks.

  “I am not your darling. You made me a monster. Your pet. I’ve looked into my heart long and hard. I’ve decided it would be better I wasn’t born at all than be the man you made me.”

  “That’s harsh,” I say deadpan.

  Tristan’s unsettling gaze flicks to me.

  “You didn’t help much.”

  “Hey, I didn’t even know you existed until today.”

  “And she would’ve kept it that way. Never able to conceive again after my delivery, Frost takes me into hiding, raises me on a steady diet of hate.”

  “But killing yourself,” I say, then frown because that’s not quite what he’s doing. “Ceasing to be. That seems a tad extreme.”

  “I am not a son you would be proud of, father.”

  “Er, you . . . uh, seem OK to me.”

  This lame riposte clearly puts me out of favor. The iconic youth folds his arms together with a subtle chiming of the armor.

  “I am a murderer. A killer. An extortionist. A weapon of my mother’s crimes. I don’t deserve to live. My life is a lie. Your future will be better without me.”

  “How is this expected to happen?” I ask.

  Beside me Frost weeps, snot crystalizing no sooner than it blubbers forth as she holds up hands to Tristan as if restrained by an invisible force field. The boy gives only a cold look back, no pun intended.

  “I would ask you to grant me this boon, father. The only gift I’ve ever wanted from you and the only one you will give me.”

  He nods to Frost, a wisp of his fine, some might say sparse collar-length hair flicking over the raised metal collar of his powered armor.

  “Deny the bitch. Tell her no, no matter how many times she threatens you. A life conceived under such pretenses isn’t a life worth living, I can testify to that.”

  “She knows who I am. She has threatened my family.”

  Tristan looks at Frost going to pieces in front of him and he scowls.

  “She won’t threaten you again after this. I revile her. I loathe her. I would scrape myself from her womb if I were able. Anything to never be her son.”

  I’m as blown away by the statement as his impressive grammar. I somehow sense English is a second language and ponder briefly where Frost would run and hide to lick her wounds with a newborn. I have a feeling the information might be of some use soon.

  When I return my gaze to Tristan, he’s watching with that steely gaze and Frost has slumped to her freezing knees in a puddle of ice on the boardroom carpet. I sigh and slowly nod.

  “I think you’re making a mistake,” I say. “The fact you can come to this conclusion shows me you’re not beyond redemption.”

  “I spent a month stranded in the Outer Pleiades, thanks in part to another of this witch’s schemes coming apart and leaving me in the middle,” he answers. “I’m sure of my decision, but you’re not.”

  “How can you say?”

  “Because I’m still here.”

  I stare back. Her stares at me. Stares all around. I realize he’s right. I’m having trouble letting go of this kid I’ve never even known and that part of me who at least likes to think being a dad was something I haven’t always sucked at, at least that part that’s about relating to your child and actually, you know, like giving a shit about them and the things they think, that guy looks back at this rakishly handsome and weird-looking young dude and it brings a tear to my eye, metaphori
cally speaking, to do this strange perverse thing he’s asking me to do.

  Tristan gently smiles.

  “Thank you.”

  “Fuck. You’re serious?”

  “I am.”

  “But we. . . .”

  “You don’t want to know me. Trust me.”

  Again with the handsome smirk.

  Frost blubbers. “Don’t do this, Zephyr. Please. Look at him. He’s perfect.”

  “There’s something you should know,” Tristan adds and I get the sense it’s something even he didn’t think he was going to divulge.

  I nod, slowly becoming calm with my decision. Almost beatific. I smile and raise an eyebrow.

  “Yes?”

  Tristan’s expression hardens.

  “You probably still think John Lennon is your father. He’s not.”

  My aura of Dalai Lama-like calm disappears like I’ve taken a cheap shot in the solar plexus. I gasp, eyes agog.

  “What?”

  “Lennon’s not your father. Another year from now you find out the truth. It’s Strummer. Joe Strummer. He was your father, and he’s still alive.”

  Zephyr 12.10 “Things Turn To Shit”

  I ALMOST DON’T notice Tristan’s decoherence. I’m still rocking out to these latest revelations, sifting through the excreta of a future life I’ll never live to determine the truth of what my unborn and now deceased son has said. Into that shadow space Tristan has traveled and I leave the mourning for now to the blue-tinged MILF beside me weeping and bawling incoherently.

  I am tempted to do the whole hero-in-the-rain thing again standing at the building site of my erstwhile mother’s place in Queens, but I did this once before and it yielded little. If I want to do Catchfire’s ghost justice, I should just get on with finding her killer. This I know. Instead, the wedding of the century beckons.

  I turn back to Frost kneeling beside me and give a frustrated shrug. It’s just her and I now. Feeling my obligations to the community as well as a healthy dose of self-interest, I begrudgingly help the devastated woman to her feet. She feels like a baby bird under my hands, fragile bones at odds with the steely determination to dose herself up with my man-seed.

  Frost turns into me, I dunno, looking for comfort or something, the action not dissimilar to a newborn child’s urge to suckle. I guide her away, mind still spinning, puzzling over the whole sorry conundrum. If Frostbane nee Tristan came back to see us, to confront the moment of his exegesis, how did he do it? Time travel? I can’t shake the conviction it might be tied to the familiarity of his armor. Having something like that at my disposal seems like the only way out of my mess and finding my mother’s killer (notwithstanding the Feebs telling me Catchfire’s body might not be a native to our parallel). As you might imagine, I’m daunted at that prospect given the great time I’ve been having with time travel of late.

  “Zephyr, please,” Frost says, head hanging as her hand clutches my chest.

  “You heard what he said,” I tell her. “Do you understand?”

  “What? The child I’ve always wanted would rather die than be born?”

  She looks up, violet eyes flecked with grief and bitterness in equal measure. The fierceness of her look is like a slap to the face. I slowly nod.

  “Yeah. I get it,” Frost snaps, snuffling, leaning into me. “Oh Zephyr, I –”

  “Hang on,” I say and lift her chin up to look at me looking sternly and admonishingly down at her. “You understand what this means? It’s over. I can’t keep going on like this, you jumping me just to jump my bones. I can’t protect my family. You saw my wife. She doesn’t want a thing to do with me. God help me, Frost, you tell me this is over or I really will have to throw you down an elevator shaft or something.”

  “It’s over, Zephyr. It’s over. All over. Just hold me. Please?”

  She slips into my leather embrace as nimble as a cat. I make a stern face, but that’s about it, as strange and awkward a position as I’ve ever been in, consoling my rapist and the unwitting cause of my unborn child’s suicide.

  Frost’s hand snakes down the concealed zipper to my cockpit, but I snatch her wrist away like a child playing deliberately naughty with the cookie jar. She looks up, those freezing tears replaced by a desperate longing.

  “You have to give it up, Frost.”

  “I know,” she says. “I have. I just want to be close to someone. Please?”

  I turn away, look back again. The old eel gives a twitch. I relent. Sigh.

  “OK, but I’m gonna pull out at the end.”

  *

  SILVER TOWERS. IT truly glitters in the halogen sunset of a city that truly never sleeps. There’s no giant ape climbing the superstructure, but the requisite TV choppers and camera drones encircle the building presaging the grand spectacle. It’s helped along by a huge, not-quite-sure-what-they-were-thinking hologram of two interlocking golden hearts pierced (or more optimistically, pinned together) by the building’s eponymous spire.

  Three-quarters of the way up the building is a semi-concealed landing pad for special visitors like me. A half-dozen security goons stand by with ear pieces and sub-machineguns, but the same sensory apocrypha that adorns the tip of Amadeus Chancel’s architectural phallus like so much penile vejazzling means these mooks knew I was coming a few seconds earlier, so there’s no need for any heavy-handedness. Besides, the platform’s crowded with freaks of a similar feather, more than half the city – hell, half the country’s – masks turned out for the special occasion a painfully long time in the making.

  I nod to one of these dudes and proceed apace, ducking under the lintel and into the big well-appointed lobby of the upper tier function center. Ledge-like glass staircases lead to a mezzanine, the entrance to the Silver Towers nightclub and the wide-open doors to one of the building’s two restaurants, the mezzanine lobby and downstairs with the mingling guests crawling with scantily-clad waitpersons of all variety frankly a little inappropriate for a wedding. Not that that stops me snagging a passing flute of champagne and a quick feed of fois gras. In just a blink of an eye I see Hurricane, Heartstorm, Wicked Lee, Dr Damnation, Iron Guy, Iron Lad, Ironclad, Five Iron, the Human Shield, the Goblin Queen (a dozen red-skinned faerie lasses in tow), Volt, Clever Lassie, Cybertron, Cybernaut, Cyberpsych, Miss Missile, Chamber, Mastodon, Double Jeopardy, Lady Domino, Black Honey, Fortuna, Tapestry, Blink, Buzzkill, Barricade, Bombardier, Blizzard (the Canadian hero, not the Swiss villain), Boniface and Xamantha. That’s not to mention the ordinary celebrities such as Cybil Shepherd, Bret Easton Ellis, Bill Sienkiewicz, Tim Powers, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Cheap Trick, Varg Vikernes, Blake Snyder, Jacques Derrida, Marion Cotillard and Wesley Snipes I glimpse all within a fifteen degree arc of my immediate vision. I nod to Amadeus standing to one side of a bank of elevators constantly disgorging more guests and high five a passing guy in a scale mail bodysuit I later realize is Aquanaut and then the press of super-humanity encourages me through the glittering bowels of the atrium and up the stairs where I can see yet more familiar faces in the crowd.

  First thought? If things turn to shit, this is going to be a massacre.

  Zephyr 12.11 “The Reverse Fairytale”

  TWENTY MINUTES IN and I’m nursing my fifth drink, bracketed in a corner with Manticore, Mastodon (all’s forgiven) and a hot furry chick called Lynx. Every now and then there’s a burp or a bamfing noise as someone teleports in or otherwise arrives by esoteric means, but then a susurrus goes through the crowd, a sort of highly accurate Chinese whispers as word arrives that the groom is about to make his big entrance. I start trying to move for the john, but the diplomacy of the crowd pins me near one of the rails overlooking the atrium from where we can see a ramp not so surreptitiously erected just for the occasion as a deep growling quietens the hubris of my erstwhile comrades for a nanosecond or two, just long enough for the Shining One to guide his custom-built crime-fighting motorcycle up and into the lobby.

  Everyone shrieks with applause, though to give him his due
, I see our host Amadeus tucked away in a niche wincing at the wheels on his polished marble as Paragon does some kind of underwhelming trick and glides to a halt, stepping from the bike like King Arthur returned, the cycle his steed or something, hands over head, that ineffable glow almost invisible beneath the glare of the dozen-odd chandeliers hanging above him, though the sunny, shit-eating grin on Paragon’s face would establish white balance if anyone needed it. To our collective credit, only a few masks and invited guests thrust up smart phones to record the occasion and it doesn’t take a latent knack for psionics to tell Paragon’s just a tad disappointed. As he turns about and about, nursing a stiff one as he drinks in the adulation of the crowd – for God’s sake, you’d think all his princess fantasies are coming true at once – Paragon briefly locks eyes with me and the motherfucker winks and I am chastened to be having such un-Christian thoughts when I remember I’m meant to be making a speech.

  Oh, but it gets worse.

  “There’s my best man,” Paragon says. “Come here, buddy.”

  Yes, I actually look about. I mean, come on, it’s been fucking months, or felt like it anyway, since he invited me to the wedding that’s been put off twice already. You would think even someone with my thick hide would’ve got the message before now if this lug-head intended me to be in any way more than remotely connected to his nuptials. I’m more the stand-in-the-corner-and-eat-all-the-caviar, maybe bang-a-few-bridesmaids or maybe even okay-fuck-it-I’ll-shag-the-bride sort of guy. I might be the best man, but there’s no way I am the best man.

  Paragon seems to think otherwise. I adopt a pained mien.

  “Uh, hello. What?”

  “Put it here, buddy,” Paragon replies, and when I reflexively go to shake his hand, he puts me in a headlock instead and grins, his cheek against mine like maybe we’re about to receive a double cumshot. I elbow him and press away, not sure whether I’m more appalled at the revoltin’ development or simply the easy familiarity of his voice.