Zephyr IV

by Warren Hately

  “Yeah,” Negator says thoughtfully from one side. “How are we going to do that exactly, by the way?”

  “I’ll get to that,” I say, waving him off for now as I refocus my laser beam attention on the computer list on the director’s screen. “This isn’t going to be easy, OK? Now that I see who else might be at our disposal, I’m thinking we need to go big.”

  “This isn’t a . . . baseball card collection, Mr Zephyr.”

  “It’s just Zephyr. Please.”

  “We are in charge of incarcerating these very dangerous individuals –”

  “Hey! The fucking city’s crawling with dangerous individuals right now. The whole goddamn country. Right, Negs?”

  “Straight up.”

  “You want to do this for your country or what?” I ask the doc, not really believing my own rhetoric even if I do underestimate its power.

  Tchaikorvski buckles and turns back to tapping at his screen with a dark look he lacks the courage to aim at any of us.

  “Who else were you thinking?” he asks. “We can only unthaw four prisoners at a time.”

  I move closer over his shoulder, breathing down the back of his collar like a math teacher with a hard-on.

  “Just keep scrolling.”

  *

  THE PROCESS ISN’T as quick as I’d like it to be. In the next few hours Negator manages to find some sleep and I sweet talk the nurse into opening up the cafeteria for me and the other staff who’ve been pretty much helping themselves anyway. Pretty soon the grill’s fired up and the air smells of eggs and bacon and I hold greasy court with a dozen-odd security staff hanging on my every word as I name-drop faster than a speeding bullet and they lap it up like I lap up the protein and fats going straight to my internal combustion engine.

  A frazzled-looking Dr Tchaikorvski appears some time around dawn and leads me through the labyrinth to an observation theatre where I can look down, marveling at the creations science has wrought for me like a kid with a backstage pass to Santa’s secret workshop in Hell.

  Ill Centurion.

  Crescendo.

  Tragedian.

  Raveness.

  Yes, Raveness. Dangerous, I know, looking down on her pale, supine, powerfully-built figure. She is the first of them to crack her eyes open, barely able to move as a thousand paralysis-inducing probes stimulate her atrophied muscles back to life.

  Tchaikorvski looks side on at me, checking I am resolute. I nod, giving a grin even I don’t really feel as the back catalogue of atrocities some of these guys have committed do pirouettes through my mind. I snatch up a needle gun and crack open the door poised above the narrow clinical white staircase down into the thawing chamber.

  I hand the gun to Tchaikorvski before we enter the room.

  “Give each of them a shot from this,” I say.

  “Why? There’s nothing in it.”

  “You want these guys running loose once they’re able to walk, able to fly?”

  Gulping, eyes as big as spotlights, Tchaikorvski nods and stammers and takes the thing like it’s a baby porcupine. I slam through into the waking-up chamber and Raveness and Crescendo snap their heads my way.

  I grin back, discreetly nodding to the director who moves first to the still unconscious Tragedian and quickly depresses the hypo. He moves to Raveness, who twitches, frightening him, but she’s still got an hour or more to go before we have to worry about safety. Tchaikorvski guns her thigh and moves to Ill Centurion, regally deposed in repose, a strangely normal sight without the helmet and armor, jet black hair grown long in his five or more years on ice, combed back by the nurse from his square pallid beardless face.

  “Easy,” I say to Raveness, frothing growl is like a subsonic hum in the room reminiscent of a dentist’s surgery.

  The feral, black-haired woman rests back, not surrendering so much as dismissing me as a threat, which is highly ironic, not to say I’m not a tad relieved.

  Tragedian is a hairless white figure, more like a corpse than a man in the surgical smock. I have no idea how long he’s been down for. He opens lidless-looking blue eyes that stare at me, the drugs suppressing his powers evaporating so that his mind control probe only plays at the edge of my awareness.

  Across from him, Crescendo’s huge chest works like a bellows on the slab, his preternaturally dense arms and legs nearly confounding the very wires that are meant to revive him. Without his mask he’s a scary sight: sort of half-man, half-python, though there’s actually nothing reptilian about his genetic structure as far as any of us are aware, just the deformity that comes with being a natural sound controller. Eyes as dark and unguessable as distant galaxies find mine and he leers, almost grinning at me.

  “How long have I been out?” he half-whispers hoarsely.

  I have no idea, turning to Tchaikorvski for confirmation. The doc looks uncomfortably away, murmuring the answer under his breath.

  I look back at Crescendo.

  “Three years.”

  “Good to breathe real air again,” he says, almost pleased with himself, the gratitude in his beastly mien a ruse. “This is real, right?”

  “You’re not in the simulation,” Tchaikorvski says.

  Crescendo nods. His big head thumps against the table. He looks at the ceiling.

  “Then what do you want?”

  “He’s here for our help,” Ill Centurion says, tone ominous.

  I flick a glance at Tchaikorvski, who shakes his head.

  “It doesn’t take a telepath to know there’s special circumstances for you reviving us here, Zephyr,” Ill Crescendo says.

  “Then you have to know this is pretty serious,” I say, also knowing the time has come to make my sales pitch and see if I can grease through this trap with nothing but spit and charisma.

  “The trouble that’s come for us has come for all of you too,” I tell them. “It’s time to fight for something you’ve always valued: your own asses.”

  *

  SO I LAY it on them. The whole shebang. Of course, my version of events is pretty skewed towards encouraging them to think my way about the incursion into our parallel and what that means for dudes like them who want to be the ones who control the world, not a bunch of Nancies from another version of Earth. It’s true that the Titans will seek them out just as they’ve sought out many heroes. If it wasn’t for the Wallachians fending scores of our best known and most public protectors to safety, I fear there would be many famous names we would simply never hear from again.

  “One mission?” Ill Centurion asks.

  Sitting up, he is every bit the dominating creature I’m used to in armored form. The long thinning black hair somehow suits him as he casts his superlative glare over me and then Negator when the reformed villain joins me in a show of solidarity.

  “One mission,” I say. “And then you go free.”

  “What?”

  It’s Tchaikorvski who blurts this out. Negator escorts him from the room to looks of misgivings and approval, playing into my shell game con, me the maverick who might plausibly defraud the system like this for greater gain.

  “How are we to trust you, Zephyr?” Ill Centurion asks.

  “You don’t have to trust me.”

  “I will just make him my puppet and then we walk out of here, friends,” Tragedian says.

  “Not so fast. That injection the doc gave you was White Nine nanites. If you try to turn on me or foul up this mission, they’ll kick in and you’ll go back to sleep no matter where you are. If we’re in the middle of the shit at the time, well, I won’t be able to vouch for you.”

  “Nanites, Zephyr?”

  Ill Centurion’s eyes bore holes into me. I look around, my handsome grin a skeleton’s smile I cement in place as I scan over the others, each one a psychopath about six stages worse than the next. My gaze settles on Raveness looking every part the beauty on steroids. A wicked smile plays at the edge of her mouth and when she gets my attention for a fraction longer than expected, she licks her lips
and chuckles as I look elsewhere.

  “You heard me, Centurion. Your gear’s waiting for you. Your powers should come back inside the next hour. Do this one job that’s in your own best interests. Flex those muscles you’ve been dreaming about. This is sanctioned chaos, any means necessary. And once we’re done, you’re gone.”

  “You will try and detain us or betray us by some means,” he says.

  “You know that,” I say and nod. “Or, I expect you to expect that. I’m not too focused on our history right now. I told you already, there’s no other heroes out there waiting to bring you in. Do this job and we’ll decode the nanites, deactivate them or whatever, and then you’re free.”

  Raveness chuckles again. “He’s lying about the nanites.”

  “Of course he is,” Ill Centurion replies casually, voice gravid as always, theatrical, almost admirably Shakespearean. “What else is Zephyr to do?”

  “My powers are coming,” Crescendo says and he takes a deep breath, humming, the room, anything not strapped down starting to dance on the spot.

  But Ill Centurion shakes his head.

  “No. We take up this task willingly.” Over his colleagues’ surprised replies, the older villain continues. “Zephyr is right. These are intruders to our world.”

  “Whatever happened to ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’?” Tragedian asks.

  “It remains true,” the Centurion says, eyes locked on mine as he smirks, the first real show of any emotion made weirder when the guy actually fucking winks at me. “But sometimes, you get to choose your enemies.”

  Zephyr 14.13 “Rogues Gallery”

  IT’S ONLY WHEN the four of them are kitted out once more in their garish costumes that I stop for a moment to really question what the fuck I’m doing. You know, for a guy with the power of x-number of light bulbs or whatever it is, that doesn’t mean I always have the brightest ideas.

  Ill Centurion’s armor adds six inches on him and that doesn’t include the ceremetal coxcomb adorning his stylized Greco-Roman powered plate. The dusk-colored cloak – so reminiscent of the Crimson Cowl that I often wondered if they had the same tailor – sways gently with each step from his pneumatic boots as he hefts the fey-bladed power spear unearthed from the White Nine catacombs in a move that makes even me question whether they should really store the bad guys’ gear in the same place they entomb the villains themselves.

  Raveness wears a fetching skin-tight blood-red body stocking, hands bare, feet clad in someone’s black leather fuck-me boots looted from an employee locker. Tragedian wears his ragged cloak and moth-eaten, dust-covered theatre costume out of storage from when he was interred, and Crescendo as seemingly happy to be back in his reddish costume as he is to be following the Ill Centurion’s orders. I trust him about as much as I trust a Doberman on LSD.

  Negator is with us, making this a party of six, but I have just one more little stop to make. With a quick phone call in my wake, I explain the location to Ill Centurion in a tone that makes it clear I’ll let him play leader provided he sticks to the overall game plan – except for this once.

  “Think of it as a little test,” I say to him. “We’re the ones who’ve got to step into your teleportation field. Trust has to cut both ways.”

  “Technically, the trust is only one-sided, at present,” the masked maniac calmly replies.

  “OK well, fuck, earn my trust in you.”

  I can practically hear the Centurion suck his teeth in disdain beneath the helm. A discreet nod is about all I’m gonna get. Negator sidles up next to me with a concerned look. I’m about ready to tell him to take off the mask because his expressions have become disconcertingly transparent to me, secret identities be damned.

  “What’s going on?” he hisses.

  “Be cool. Stay badass, OK? That’s what we need here.”

  I look back over my assembled goon squad.

  “We’re not playing by the rules any more.”

  Appeased, Negator nods and backs off and I give the location to Ill Centurion, noting a moment’s hesitation I will take as surprise, then a moment later he taps his spear on the ground and Tchaikorvsky watches as every mite and crumb and follicle of dust the cleaners never reached leap to levitate into the air as a circle of expanding force caresses our molecules and we are whisked away from the sterile prison’s confines.

  *

  THE ROOFTOP IS under attack from an early afternoon breeze. I disengage from Ill Centurion’s space-time warp with the deflating realization my chance to catch some zees has departed along with the previous night. Day is galloping along like a horse without a rider – a pale horse, I fear.

  As the villains break formation, Crescendo sucking in great lungfuls of air, Raveness sniffing the air like the wild escapee she is, Hallory O’Hagan and a guy wearing a tweed jacket and a nervous look come out from hiding behind the rooftop elevator unit. Hallory takes in the famous faces and pauses mid-step, eyes rounding on me, face fetchingly drawn pale, accentuating her already accentuated red hair as she eyeballs me and conveys by feminine telepathy alone the ludicrousness of my situation.

  “What am I meant to do?” I ask by way of her silent rebuke. Tsk. “You got him?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “He’s just getting into the costume.”

  “This the egghead?”

  Hallory nods at my reference to her bald companion.

  “Your Doc Prendergast didn’t return my calls. I just got this weird buzzing noise from his machine. This is Professor Ben Kingsley. He’s ex-NASA. Should be able to tell you everything you were after.”

  Hallory backs away, leaving the jittery-looking professor to brush a hand over his bald dome as he shoots looks at the rogues gallery of uber-bad guys sprung to life. I step in front of him, literally occluding his view so he can focus.

  “Appreciate you comin’ up here like this, Prof,” I say. “Did Hallory talk to you at all about. . . ?”

  “Yes. Yes,” the scientist says and points, drawing my attention to the moderate-sized tripod-mounted telescope on the far corner of the roof. “It’s angled on the international space station’s general location right now. The visibility could be better for you, but –”

  “Na, that’s fine,” I say and turn back to Ill Centurion standing on the spot with the ominous noise of his suit’s respiratory system all deliberately Darth Vader and shit.

  “That telescope’ll help you home in on our location,” I tell him.

  Centurion nods like it’s just any other day and wanders over that way trailed by Crescendo, all disconcertingly puppy-like and whatnot.

  Walking back, I nod to the egg-head, basically dismissing him unless this plan has more wrinkles than I can imagine, and I find Hallory trying to cheer up my boy around the other side of the fire escape.

  “Are you sure about this, Zephyr?” Hallory asks.

  She steps back to reveal the Pal-mart Punisher.

  *

  “I SAID I was going to get you some publicity and tell me, hon, if this isn’t better than some fitted-up street combat with me pretending to be El Diablo or something.”

  “El Diablo, that’s the name you chose?”

  “Um . . . no comment.”

  I turn to the kid, a respectably six-four slab of muscle in the most atrociously designed costume you’ve ever seen. Bandoliers criss-cross his chest and Pal-mart logos adorn his biceps. A mask not unlike the type you’d normally see on a sex offender covers his face, and given he’s hyperventilating at the moment, it’s not a good look and probably not great for his health either.

  “Hey buddy. How’re we doing?”

  “I don’t know about this, Mr Zephyr,” he says. Australian accent.

  “Seriously, drop the ‘mister’, OK?”

  “I don’t think I’m up to this,” the Predator, er, Punisher says.

  “I don’t know how you thought this was going to go when you signed the consent form and took Pal-mart’s moulah, pal, but the time is nigh. Get your shit together
because we’re rolling out of here before these devils know we’re coming.”

  “I didn’t sign up to be going on any missions with . . . supervillains.”

  “Jesus, man. Villains are people too.”

  “They’re bad guys!”

  “At least they’re not fucking sell-outs. What happened to you?”

  The young guy stammers, then pulls off his mask to reveal one of those tawny-haired, ridiculously handsome faces guys who end up with super powers so often have – at least in the comic books or after a few rounds of Photoshop.

  Fucking Australians.

  “I can’t do this,” he says, starting to blubber.

  I look at the young guy long and hard. He’s maybe 25, bigger and better looking than me, but right now I know he’s just a kid still. I know what he needs – and I know I’m not it.

  “You can do this,” I answer him softly.

  “I can’t. I can’t. I gave up before because my girlfriend –”

  “You are going to do this. Should I get Tragedian over here to explain it to you?”

  The Punisher gulps. Looks at me. Slowly puts the mask back on. I nod approvingly, about as close to a father figure as this poor prick’s going to get today.

  “What’s with the bandoliers? You don’t have a gun.”

  “I . . . have no idea,” he says.

  “You raised that already?”

  “I did.”

  “OK. Let’s go.”

  And practically leading him by the arm, I nod to Hallory and Prof Kingsley and we move back across the rooftop and to the villains waiting to come into my huddle.

  Zephyr 14.14 “Cold Darkness”

  THE SENSATION OF dislocating space-time is worse over longer distances, and coming out of the fuggy Atlantic City atmosphere and into the compressed clinical treated air of the international space station doesn’t improve things. We are in a foil-lined corridor, no visits from Kevin McCloud out here in the cold darkness of space, just a view out an unsurprisingly rare pressurized porthole at a sight that might make a lesser man crap his pants, our watery blue globe peeking out the edge, a few thousand miles of airless space in between us.