Zephyr IV

by Warren Hately

I sense Streethawk palpably shift down from Defcon Four. He sniffles, glancing around and past me. A lone cab goes past, slowing for an instant in case we need a ride until the Uzbek refugee inside catches a glimpse of us and guns away.

  I turn and walk back up the street and Streethawk follows.

  *

  WE’VE GONE A block before I remember I’m meant to be more of an asshole. I flick a look over my shoulder as I find the next pedestrian laneway between shoulder-to-shoulder townhouses.

  “You been waiting to follow me into a dark alleyway a long time, ‘Hawk?”

  “Not the first time I seen you in a dark alley, Zeph. Or you forgot about the whole Devil’s Advocate thing?”

  I sniff and I sense as much as see his grimace.

  “Got your groove back, I see,” the ‘Hawk remarks. “Nice to know.”

  “Got my mojo back, but I damn near lost everything else,” I say.

  We stop in the alley. A kid wisely thinks otherwise about coming down on his five-speed. I don’t know the point of going on any further. I only forge ahead to the mouth of a cul-de-sac because of the suburban claustrophobia gripping me.

  “You wanna tell me what’s going on?” Streethawk asks. “‘Cos this is a new one to me. Cities, they get hurt, they grow pretty tough, you know? Civil works, demolitions, I mean fuck, planes goin’ into buildings an’ shit, they let you know like they been love-tapped. This was woman-in-birth-type hollers. I came as fast as I could.”

  “No pun intended.”

  “Fuck you, Zeph,” Streethawk says as calmly as asking the time of day. “Ain’t no coincidence you’re here an’ all. You know something, so spit. I don’t mind beatin’ it out of you.”

  “You and what army?” I quip.

  “Don’t get funny with me, fella. I get you down, I’ll take you to fucking brown-town just so you ain’t got nothin’ to joke about next time we meet.”

  I sigh again, knowing he probably means most of what he’s saying.

  “Well fuck, I could do with an ally right about now,” I say.

  “I think I’m being targeted by an extra-dimensional intelligence known to some as the Editors. I don’t know shit about ‘em, though. The info I’ve gathered so far tells me they live in Subspace, whichever subset of the universe that is, and I know they were in cahoots with the Doomsday Man at one point in time or maybe the other way around.”

  “Lennon?” Streethawk drawls and spits. “I heard he’s your father or something?”

  “Where the fuck’d you hear that? I thought it was true for a while, but no. You heard of a guy called Strummer?”

  “Drummer?”

  “Strummer.”

  “Strummer?” Streethawk looks put out. “What the fuck’s wrong with you, Zeph? Last time you were askin’ me about some cat called Elvis. Obviously, we don’t float in the same circles. I can’t toss lightning bolts or do anything fancy like you. The city talks and I listen. It’s as simple as that.”

  “You call that simple?”

  I’d chuckle, but I feel fucked. I cast my eyes around as the suburban purgatory and yearn for a simpler time and place, one that involved a nightcap and somewhere cool and dry to sleep. The air is plucking at my moth-eaten sleeveless black tee, the anarchist-style zed fading to the point of illegibility.

  “So what do we do? And why you?”

  “If I had the answers, I’d be about my business dealing with it,” I say.

  I catch Streethawk’s skeptical look. I’m about to say more when I glimpse something fast-moving and black, right about the same moment Streethawk’s hackles rise and he turns, sweep kicking empty air at a spectacularly correct moment.

  His booted heel connects with the dark, cartwheeling figure and the attacker crashes backwards as its silver-bladed sword clatters to the ground.

  Of all the fucking things this moment didn’t need right now, its ninjas.

  Zephyr 13.4 “A Moment Of Clarity”

  THERE ARE MORE than a dozen of them, converging fast. I barely have time to splay out my hands and explode with sparks before four or five of them are on me, but fortune proves this is a fairly viable defense as the closest ones hiss and buck, sizzling on the ground with their mechanical parts malfunctioning.

  Streethawk punches one across the jaw and I hear the small bones in his hand fracture. He growls, too macho to yelp in pain that would make any ordinary man cry.

  “They’re robots,” he hisses.

  I catch an arm clutching a sharpened sai and twist, wrenching the whole limb free of the black-shrouded torso in a churning of clockwork. The almost musical destruction of the thing takes me by surprise as I realize my electrical display magnetized the first wave of attackers – a far more “deadly” consequence for these automata without electronic parts I might otherwise scramble.

  “Clockwork!” I yell back in my most helpful sit-rep.

  The next few moments we are fighting. I won’t say for our lives, though with a broken hand, Streethawk has to bust a few tricky moves to keep himself from getting skewered. Me, I grab one of these mechanoid bozos by the face and crush it, hurling the mass into the next two attackers, then putting my boot into the chest of a fourth. The metal ninja flies into a fence and tries to figure out how to come right back at me with a broken hip-socket. In the meantime, I flash-fry two more with direct zaps and block a ninjato strike to my forearm, replying with a “force” push that sends one to be decapitated by its fellow and the other into Streethawk, who executes a clever wrist capture judo throw that leverages the robot over his shoulder so its back is broken by its own momentum.

  In a dozen more heartbeats we’re surrounded by so much black gift-wrapped scrap metal it makes me wonder at the mastermind behind all this.

  “The Clockwork King?” Streethawk asks, breathing hard and bent double.

  I nod, say, “Looks like his style. Are there any more?” and peer about.

  “That wasn’t enough?”

  “Oh, enough for me, I’m just surprised he didn’t send more. He should know better.”

  “What’s his beef with you?” the ‘Hawk asks. “Fuck, Zephyr. You got a lot of enemies.”

  “I thought maybe he was after you, hence just a dozen of these clowns.”

  Streethawk and I face off, no longer best buddies once more.

  Streethawk quits his combat readiness pose to sift through the detritus for clues as I discreetly pick a booger and make like there’s something interesting on the ground to wipe it clean.

  I’m still kneeling there when Sting, St George and their merry gang materialize in a flash of light behind me.

  *

  “JESUS H CHRIST,” I manage with a certain world-weary fatigue as I straighten and turn. The sunburst fades to show the two heavy hitters with Shade, Dj Ali and the Visionary. I don’t know what’s brought McCartney back into the fold and the corpulent look of imminent death suggested by bags beneath his eyes thick as bin-liners tell me he’s not sure either. In fact, standing next to Sting, McCartney has the shackled-to-a-madman look I’ve come to recognize from the faces of my own teammates in times gone by.

  The lag is really hitting me. I either need to sleep or refuel again fast. I lift my hooded gaze to meet Sting’s impervious look of mutual self-admiration.

  “Zephyr. How’s it going, chap?”

  “How does it look?” I ask.

  “What have you and your little friend been up to?”

  “I’d fuck him,” Streethawk says to me as an aside, completely unperturbed by Sting’s implied insult, which is more than I can say for Sting, whose eyes widen at the quip.

  I can’t help grinning despite myself. I nod to St George, wince a smile at Shade and wonder why she keeps going back to these guys time and time again, then briefly my eyes settle on the Visionary, but McCartney’s deadly robotirc gaze picks over the nearby salvage like he’s wondering what he can get for it down Portobello Road.

  “Sting, what do you want? I’m knackered. I don’t have time for a
ny more banter.”

  “You said you were still making your mind up,” he says.

  “I got the feeling it was too late.”

  “Too late indeed, son,” St George says from one side.

  “So? Don’t tell me you’re here to make a ruckus. I’ve got bigger problems.”

  “So I can see,” Sting says. “Didn’t you used to have a house around here?”

  “My sole surviving asset. Gone, I suppose.”

  I taste that a moment, morose.

  “If you’re not with us, mate, then we’re going to have to assume you’re an imminent threat,” Sting says calmly. “You seem to’ve attracted the unwanted advances of an extra-dimensional omega-level threat.”

  “You’re just making that up –”

  “And if I’m right, it’s not that long into the distant past that one of your own colleagues described you as the Antichrist, Zephyr,” Sting finishes.

  I glance at DJ Ali, the infopath the likely informant on what could’ve only been a private rebuke from Twilight to myself. I scowl. Ali looks elsewhere, whistling softly.

  “You want to take me on?” I say, half-threatening, half just seeking a moment of clarity. “Do you remember what I’m capable . . . of what I’m capable? Fuck.”

  So much for Beth’s compliment on my grammar.

  Sting sneers. “Do you remember what we can do? Last chance, Zephyr.”

  He steps forward, a nimbus of light about his chiaroscuro features, the skeleton-glowing-from-within thing perturbing despite it radiating good health and power.

  I study the hand like it’s a museum piece. Sting’s confident beaming grin falters and it takes us both by surprise that I’m not willing to shake. He withdraws it even as it curls into a fist.

  “Zephyr –”

  “I’m sorry. I’m happy to continue our arrangement, but I’ve seen what happens when guys like us try to form some kind of authority over everyone else. I know there can’t be many more people who’ve quipped that line about a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ as much as me, but at the coalface, even I’m not willing to do it. I’ve seen this world scarred by plans like yours, and fuck, you were there man, or what was left of you.”

  I expand my gaze to St George and Shade watching.

  “All of you,” I say, shuddering briefly at remembering these three like evil mannequins under Matrioshka’s control.

  “It’s on record that we offered,” St George says.

  “You had your chance, Zephyr,” Sting adds.

  Shade meets my gaze. I sense disappointment and uncertainty. I’m a connoisseur of such tinged regrets mixed with aged oak, a hint of citrus and cinnamon with walnut characters on the palate.

  They retreat into the rising sun of St George’s vast telekinetic-teleportational prowess and in a thumping flash depart.

  Streethawk is still there, brawler’s arms folded over his impassive chest. Unfazed, he turns his streetwise look on me with a snigger.

  “Nice friend you got there. Ready to kick some ass?”

  “Who were you thinking?”

  “Extra-dimensional threat, they called it,” he says.

  I look at the empty space where the super-sleuths were standing. Somewhere close by a dog howls, other dogs picking up the scent adumbrating the passage of an ambulance in the distance. I can smell the day starting to decline already and I am still without a bed. A warm late spring rain starts to spatter the tired bitumen and Streethawk senses my unpleasantness, face clenching into a frown as he reappraises my depth of commitment or lack thereof.

  “What do you say, Zephyr? Partners?”

  “No, man. No,” I say and sigh more than I really need to, an unspoken semiotic. “I can’t go chasing this down the rabbit hole right now, I’ve –”

  “These beings have taken your home. Isn’t this tied into how you lost your powers an’ shit?”

  “I dunno. I dunno,” I answer him. “I’m tired, man. I have to find a lawyer, do the right thing by my kid. Sort my shit out. Find my mother’s killer. Find my father. Find the man who claims to be my father, probably still thinks he really is. . . .”

  “You’ve got some complicated shit goin’ on. I’m surprised anyone can follow it.”

  “You know how it is, ‘Hawk. Folks only want to know about the action. The inner struggle’s not as sexy when you’ve got the attention span of a spaniel with a hard-on.”

  I grin at my own remark only to see life imitating art. Streethawk crouches with his fingers splayed on the sidewalk, head tilted in that familiar urban rapport thing he does. He stands, civility departing him.

  “Problem?”

  “Just some crackheads breaking into a gun shop six blocks over. I’m gone.”

  I nod. Without so much as a by-your-leave, Streethawk sprints off in his gym boots, vaulting a back fence and disappearing from view. I yawn tightly into my fist and check again to confirm I’m broke and pull my Enercom phone instead.

  I thumb in the number, tell the receptionist I don’t care if she’s busy with another client. Hallory can meet me on the roof for all I care, but I’m coming.

  I lift off, angling downturn, meditating on the many meanings of the name I chose for myself so many years ago.

  Zephyr 13.5 “A Ghostly Voice From The Recent Past”

  MY OWN WORDS coming back to bite me in the fanny, I am met by the delectable Miss O’Hagan on the rooftop, the nervous-looking redhead smoking and clutching herself as a chill develops, the sun slinking off like a retarded stepchild behind the jagged rooflines beyond. Long syrupy shadows the color of bubblegum slushies drape the zigzagging roofscape of air conditioners and exhaust ducts, Hallory monitored by a camera on a pole and some Croatian guy in a Men In Black suit he thinks must make him look more imposing than he really is.

  “Zephyr. Sorry about this. I’m in-between conference calls. Penelope said you sounded urgent. What is it?”

  “I need Pete Liebenthal.”

  “The lawyer? Uh-uh,” Hallory quickly says, stamping on the smoke like it’s a cockroach and quickly lighting up another. “We’re still carrying the bill from last time.”

  “Jesus, lady. I thought I was an investment for your firm?”

  “You might’ve noticed you’ve not exactly been a PR coup in the past year, Zephyr. I mean. . . .” She motions at me, up and down like she has a hand vacuum.

  I ken her thinking, me trying to make a go of it with my best Vanilla Ice sneer as if the look is deliberate, but the truth is I’m just a guy in a top that more resembles a lizard rag than a legitimate costume.

  “I’m on the frontlines here, Hallory,” I say. “I’m not your shopping mall media appearance, electronics endorsing, comic book spin-off, reality TV-type costumed clown. Where I fly, people are killed and sometimes they even die.”

  “That doesn’t make sense –”

  “Shoosh. None of it makes sense. I’m long-term value for you. I’ve been around longer than most and I’ve racked up a bit of mileage, I know that. Right now I’m deep in the middle of some shit that’d make your head explode if I even could explain it to you. I need a cash advance and I need a bigger, nastier lawyer than anything my wife can throw at me. You said Liebenthal’s the best. Hell, he might even like the challenge.”

  “The challenge?” Hallory chuckles. “That’s an awesome speech, Zephyr, but it shows you don’t know about lawyers much. They’re not in it for the growth experience. It’s purely billable hours with these guys, plus any residuals and earned media they can get.”

  “So I’ll earn him some media. What does he want? A logo on my friggin’ uniform?”

  “I’m not sure where it would fit on that.”

  “Maybe on the seat of my pants,” I fire back.

  “Well if you want to sell your rear end, I can suggest some clients for you.”

  I start to laugh and realize Hallory’s face is making neither the requisite bowed movements of the mouth or the hearty guffaws I would hope might accompany such a remark. My
own gaiety departs, face falling into a gravid watchoo-talkin’-‘bout-Willis expression as the sunset winks out completely and the Croatian goon makes a gentle coughing noise in the least subtle wrapping-up signal possible.

  “Zephyr, I just don’t have access to the sort of resources you’re asking about,” Hallory says and gently takes my forearm, smoothing her hand over the coarse hairs much like Paris Hilton about to jack off her favorite little dog. “You need to bring in some business before we can extend the credit line further. I’m not the gal at the top, however much you might put me there. I’ve got bosses too –”

  “I thought you ran this agency?”

  “Hell no. I’ve got eyes on me from places even you haven’t been – and places you wouldn’t want to go. Trust me. And I do want to help you, Zeph. Hell, you know I’ve got a soft spot for you. Please don’t make any gross puns,” she quickly inserts. Pats my arm again. An amiable, hell, collegial smile that is sickening to see up close on such a hot lady. Again with the frigging arm-pats. “There are people in those circles – I’m talking elite high society, places you can’t even begin to guess at – they would pay handsomely just for some time with you in the room. Attend a few parties. Put your head in the door. Not literally, obviously!” The fake laughter. “And if the opportunity were to present itself for you to make a little extra with a few special . . . assignments on the side, well, that would help out right now, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’m not even sure I’m really hearing you,” I say stoically.

  “You’d need to clean yourself up. Are you interested? I could spot you maybe . . . A few hundred? You need a night at the Mercator or something?”

  “I don’t have anywhere to go, Hallory. What are you suggesting?”

  “You need to get back on your feet, Zephyr. You’ve got the best heart and you don’t even know it. But somewhere along the way you got sucked in by the whole hero-thing and forgot you need to live too, and that means having a life. Do you understand?”

  “I understand you seem to be suggesting me using my status as some kind of male prostitute’s a much better course of action for me than saving the world from the next extra-celestial manifestation, if I’m hearing you right. . . .”