Zephyr IV

by Warren Hately

  “This better not be a ghost,” Sal’s grumpy-ass voice comes back up the line.

  “I’m alive and well,” I say glibly. “And I need a favor.”

  “Oh-oh, what is it? Need me to bang some models for you or somethin’?”

  “You wish. No, I –”

  “Yes I do. I do wish.”

  “OK settle, Sal. I got a proposition for you with what you might call ‘mutual benefits’.”

  “Those benefits include nubile young models coked out of their minds on proximity to you?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “OK,” Sal says, sounding instantly another few levels less interested. “Pitch me.”

  So I tell him the plan. I need a photographer at the old shipyards site ready to give press coverage to a hot young heroine on the town. That momentarily piques his interest, but as the details spill out of me like diarrhea from a snot-nosed kid, Sal’s graveled whine deepens once more.

  “I’ll do you one better, Zephyr, but there’s no payday in this for you.”

  “I’m on points for this one,” I tell him. “What’s one better?”

  “If this was the housing crisis or drug gangs or city corruption, I might have a hard time, but since the Post is now in the superhero business almost full-time, mere mention of a drop of lycra and I can conjure a chopper at less than an hour’s notice.”

  “A chopper? Really? For a photographer.”

  “We’ll stream it off our site,” Sal says like the very idea he’s spruiking appalls him, and therefore like he’s offending himself. “Web hits, you know … It’s a complicated business. Not sure I understand it all myself, but the guys above me, you could hang a clothes iron off those boners.”

  “I don’t need that mental image right now,” I say.

  Giving Sal the location, I disconnect with vague uneasiness not much different to the disquiet that’s been troubling me since the day I was born.

  And then the Human Tornado takes to the sky.

  *

  THE COLD DAY has turned clear on us. A brittle and near indescribable blue sky throws its arms across the city like a well-meaning uncle, its compliment just all the more underscoring our shortcomings. The grandiose and at times rushed redesign of huge city precincts thirty years ago gave improper consideration to future planning and the once-in-a-century opportunity it truly was to position the eastern seaboard for the 21st century, and the inevitable bureaucratic circus and shysters taking advantage of the gaps in red tape mean many of the obelisks built to service all our future needs are now starting to show the signs of their hurried creation. Like roaches scuttling, the architectural skin of the city puts up a good show in weak light, a little Vaseline on the lens, but this day is too perfect, much more than Atlantic City can either deserve or actually handle.

  The sagging waterfront is somehow more honest in its cataclysmic depression.

  The huge Baltic shipyard-looking edifice still wears its redeveloper’s signage like a cheap tart on a red light street, but the signs are more a wolf in sheep’s clothing than painted allure.

  I land athwart the vast, slightly dented roof of faded blue tin sheeting, disturbing gulls the size of peacocks in their roosts. Amid the beating of frantic wings I scan the scenery, no immediate sign of Bellwether. It is mid-afternoon, the sun, rekindled in all its finery, beats off the aluminum-flensed gargantua of the shopping precincts further up from the river mouth, causing me to raise one hand as a shield as I discern the not-so-distant heartbeat of a chopper’s thrumming blades and smile to myself in grim satisfaction at another con well done.

  “Stay where you are, evil-doer!” a feminine voice calls from my six.

  Still grinning, trying to channel a little more villainy into it, I turn to admire Belle hovering a few dozen paces off, a yard or two into the air above the roof. She looks slightly more like a kid playing dress up with one of Gumbel’s bedroom curtains press-ganged to play the part of a cloak in her somewhat pedestrian get-up, if I can use that term to describe the costume of a person flying two-hundred feet above ground.

  For the merest instant we share a knowing mutual self-amusement that I banish with an iron frown, hand moving into a theatrical pose as I scan away to the looming gnat of the news helicopter.

  “Leave me be, Bellwether!”

  Belle’s telepathic lasso surrounds me in that instant as we had trained. Making the action more authentic, I barely have to work to restrain my shots as I send a pummeling fist out to drive compressed air her way, mimicking the weather controller for what I have often been mistaken. Having more than telegraphed the punch, it’s hard to feign surprise as Belle twirls out of the way of what’s admittedly a pretty weak counter-attack. She swoops in and body checks me with a noise like old trash can lids smashing together as I propel her in turn away.

  “Tag! You’re it,” she cries.

  I glimpse the chopper in position now a quarter-mile off. Chances are their cameras are zoomed to the max and getting everything, if not sound, so I snarl for the admiring public and throw out a net of electrical force dissembled to less resemble my powers, but of course Belle easily escapes those clutches.

  She scoots around, me tracking her with a look I have to strangle so that I appear battle-prepared and less like a doting parent as she comes back and down at me like a wrestler from TV, slamming her foot hard into the metal roof at the same time she punches me to give some kind of impression we are actually doing this for real.

  Like I said, the kid’s got some degree of augmentation common to parahumans even with mostly psionic abilities. Her foot doesn’t just clang into the sheeting causing reverberation. It smashes out that panel and creates a cascading effect as the aging metalwork gives up its flagging fight against entropy with a sigh and collapses wholesale.

  Bellwether is grinning in my face, fist curled in a twist of the red fabric as the roof caves in and she gleefully rides it down like a surfer.

  Our descent banishes daylight. We crash down in the ambient gloom, and away from the chopper’s prying eyes, Bellwether unhands me and gives me a look as if to ask how-am-I-doing-so-far?

  “I think the idea is to put on a show, isn’t it?” I ask in a caged whisper. “A bit hard to do from down here.”

  I try to match her wry grin, but when my eyes focus I see Belle staring off past my shoulder with a look of confusion.

  Intuitively I turn as well, momentarily unable to explain the light sparkling from a huge wall of bleeping electronics, the parti-colored machine a curious mix of space age machinery and jerry-rigged appliances I have a strong feeling should be more familiar than it is. A figure – a figure with a slightly mottled gait – moves in front of the big contraption, and I turn quickly and grasp my young companion by the shoulder.

  “Go! Now!”

  Of course she wants an explanation, and of course by then it is too late.

  Zephyr 15.8 “Blue Apocalypse”

  STING AND HIS crew obviously didn’t do the thorough clean-up job we all thought. The cyborg Titan who I should’ve considered might still be lurking now charges towards us at speed, metal arm raised so he can hammer down at the moment of arrival uncannily like how Belle attacked just moments before. I block the piledriver on my crossed forearms with a grunt and hope that by standing my ground, I’ve bought Belle a few vital moments. Instead, she furrows her brow, war paint a non sequitur as she conjures her telepathic might to little or no effect.

  “I can’t affect him,” Bellwether yells. “It’s like he . . . has no brain!”

  I resist the snicker, grabbing Titan by the shiny metal limb and hooking my other hand around the back of his head, trying to change my leverage, my stance, to get one up on him. As we struggle, I can hear the advanced hydraulics at work in his artificial arm and leg, but before I can get too interested in the science – and hey, I’ve barely had a nanosecond to consider what the fuck this Titan That John West Rejects is still doing here or what he’s building – he gives an almighty grunt and p
lants his face into mine.

  “You are known to me,” he says stentoriously.

  “No shit,” I reply, having forgotten already that I’m not me.

  I get an arm loose. Cross a left to Titan’s jaw that feels like punching a battleship. He sinks his metal fingertips into the eye-holes of my Tornado helm, rips it off and away, returning his spotlight grin to me, my other arm now trapped, pincered under his armpit. I punch him with the free hand about six times before he catches it with his metal hand, kung fu grip crushing my wrist. I try not to squirm. Hell, try not to squeal. It’s at about this point Bellwether gets behind him, puts a forearm lock around his throat and levers him back sufficiently that he quits humiliating me, turns, and backhands her so hard she flies halfway across the old factory.

  “Hey!” I yell. “Leave her alone.”

  It’s a daft line, but at least it’s genuine. Like an orchestra conductor, no pun intended, but I light him up good and proper, only finishing when the Titan keels over backwards like a broken robot and goes crashing to the hard dusty chipped and oil-stained concrete floor.

  Pulling off the red tunic so I am Zephyr once more, I zoom across the warehouse to where Belle props herself up on one elbow with a wry grimace, twinkle still in her eye despite the trickle of blood she rubs away from her lip with the back of one hand.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Behind you.”

  I nod, anticipating this. I saw close hand with the Prime just how hard they make these Titans and if this one’s got replacement parts, it’s probably more a reflection of his tenacity than anything else could be.

  Sure enough the big guy comes barreling towards us again, launching into a full-on charge at about six yards distant. Like a matador or something, I steer him away with a wall of unbalanced air particles, just enough so that he hits the wind shear instead of me. Titan goes crashing into an ungodly amount of dust-and-oil sticky machine parts from before the Kirlians hit town and in moments I glimpse the telltale threat of his red-limned gaze as his head swings up angrily like a demonic meerkat and heat beams probe across our position.

  I push Bellwether flat. Then, knowing how deadly accurate and persistent those headlamps can be, I grab her by the ruff of her cloak and take to the air, spinning as complex a flight path as I can manage between the girders of the roof structure and the sheer difficulty of lugging Belle with me.

  In moments, a bigger section of the metal superstructure crashes down, molten beams glowing red from Titan’s laser beam dissection. The daylight comes in with it, the air cruddy with particles, a century’s trapped residue suddenly airborne. The looming chopper angles on the huge calamity like a surgical mosquito, some futuristic drone perforce to inspect the architectural carcass and we three leaping gnats like infections among the ruins. I can practically sense the zoom lens getting into rapid focus and imagine maybe someone on board wondering where the hell the guy in red went.

  I can’t worry about that now. Side by side, Belle and I go running up the debris to the remaining roofscape, Titan jetting up after us and lancing our tails with timed shots from the eye heaters.

  Splitting up, I veer up and away, coming back down at the guy thinking about advice I read on the internet of all places: punch first and punch hard. I guess I’ve blown the element of surprise, but I’m hoping one thing I’ve shown through my nigh on twenty-year career is this Joe doesn’t give up easy.

  I crash into Titan bodily. We go tumbling, clattering and twisting down through the dust-heavy ruins to the ground floor again, shafts of sunlight around us like heavenly pillars through punctures in the ceiling. Titan gets up first and I slam my fist upside of his weathered jaw. He has the good graces to go flying backward this time and I follow up, doing the Jesus Christ pose and summoning another electrical blast to hopefully put him down for good this time.

  He gets the eye blast off first.

  It takes me in the middle of the chest, as much a force beam as a red hot needle as thick as my arm punching into my soul, throwing me back into the rubble deflated and momentarily defeated. In the fog of pain I am surprised to see my costume knitting back together around the gaping hole despite my very real and excruciating agony.

  Titan vaults into the air and down on me before I can really move. His feet smash into me, the rubble on which I’m reclined caving in like Titan’s trying to plant me underground. My right hand snakes out, clutches him by the metal ankle, and discharge throws him in a howling backward arch, steam curling off him as he lets out something, not a scream exactly, but a cross between a cat’s meow played through a pitch shifter and amplified a thousand per cent.

  I am too battered to give Titan the disdainful flick I want. I push him off me. The cyborg clatters down the pile of destroyed girders and twisted metal sheeting, bricks, old machine parts, twisting and turning over until he comes to rest with his feet still in the air. I scan the skyline, the chopper catching all of it, and like a vain fool I force an Errol Flynn grin across a face that feels gripped by rigor mortis, wondering where the fuck Belle disappeared to.

  *

  THE CHOPPER’S BEATING rotor sounds disorientingly above. I touch my temple, fingers coming back with dark traces of oozing blood. Belle flits down from what looks like a hurried discussion with the reporter inside the cabin, a terse but reassuring look on my companion’s face as she lands beside me and puts a steadying hand under my armpit.

  “You took a beating there,” she says without rancor or judgment.

  “Me? Check out the other guy.”

  Belle looks too somber for anything but sympathy, but even that expression flatlines when we turn to look at Titan and see him sliding to the bottom of the wreckage and getting stiffly to his feet once more.

  “Plan’s not really going too well, is it?” I mutter.

  Wiping muck from my jaw, I leap down to where Titan rested a moment before, watching as the cyborg jogs across to this huge incomprehensible machine of his. It looks like a World War Two-era naval mine writ large: a huge semi-spherical dome covered in nods and small blinking indicators, big enough, I realize belatedly, to house a chamber within.

  “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “He’s trying to find the others,” I say, going on no more than intuition.

  I shoot Belle a wearying look, the news chopper still over her shoulder above.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “You came to my rescue,” she says. “Tornado took off.”

  “I hope they swallow that,” I say, knowing the internet fanboys will scrutinize the similarities in my pants and boots and quash that theory pretty much immediately, though like most things on the internet, consistent denial will eventually drive it off into the realm of urban legend and conspiracy where eventually no one will know, even the principals in time having forgotten the original facts.

  Electronic noises emit from Titan’s dream chamber. Belle follows me as we run across the warehouse floor and under the shelter of the remaining roof above, factory plunging us back into shadows. Halfway to the mystery dome, Titan emerges from a metal slit in the side carting the biggest gun I’ve ever seen in my life, the metal of the multiple chambers along its length near-identical to that of his artificial limbs.

  “Holy shit!” Belle cries.

  “Get to cover.”

  Titan swings the weapon around and a blue apocalypse shoots from the gaping barrel of the device.

  Belle and I fly separate ways and the beam desiccates the air between us and obliterates a section of the distant wall.

  I come down at too close quarters for Titan to wield the weapon to much use. I club it away with my forearm, krav maga strikes first to disable the weapon, then pin-pointing as much of my force as possible driving elbows and forearms into Titan’s ribs, the side of his face, and upside his head.

  He pushes me away. The gun clatters loose. A tiny lick of his oiled-back jet black hair curls over his forehead, those cold eyes set in the
graveled face intent on murder.

  “What are you so fucking angry about?” I yell at him in frustration. “You were the one who sold the Prime out?”

  “Gamesmanship,” the Titan clone answers in a voice that belies none of his rage. “I erred, it would appear. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, as the bard wrote.”

  I scowl at the cyborg, just a momentary impasse as Belle edges into my periphery, cleverly circling us at the far left side of Titan’s contraption.

  A snarling sort of smile starts to play on my lips as I think maybe we’ve got this bastard cornered, and then just as I turn my focus back to the leviathan before me, I register the slightest movement behind Belle.

  A silver nitrate image like a ghost in a negative.

  Arsenal.

  Zephyr 15.9 “Out Of The Shadows”

  I SCREAM LIKE a panicked housewife, no thought to my own dignity or even safety as I abandon the stalemate with Titan to warn the woman I have dubbed Bellwether out of the crossfire.

  The girl frowns, twisting about and going into a defensive pose like we drilled as Arsenal clarifies out of the shadows, a nightmare of sparkling appliances and coiled menace. There is a serpentine quality to the burly intruder far beyond what one might expect from a disgruntled man aged about sixty. As he moves, I realize there’s some manner of distortion rippling the air around him, aiding and abetting his advancement, throwing my barometric extra sensory perception into a buzzing alarm.

  Titan clearly neither knows nor cares what the interloper’s arrival means. He dives for the big cannon, meaning idiot me has to leave his back exposed to rocket across the crumbling courtyard and collect Belle in a tackle that would make even the hardiest wide receiver’s eyes water, a little feminine grunt of displacement shooting out of the girl as we narrowly miss Arsenal’s signature invisible incendiary attack. A patch of concrete floor erupts in flames amid a high frequency squeal and I’m still too busy skidding and trying to protect mine and Bellwether’s faces to do aught but watch as Arsenal and Titan round their weapons on our wake together.