It’s not all doom and gloom and hell, we’ve really only had one day where the city called out the snow sweepers. The kids are still filling (new) Central Park without enough to toboggan, it’s never too cold for an ice-cold Coke – they’re considering me for a new ad campaign so I am practicing my smile a lot and trying to look carefree – and the cold weather also means less street battles as a few of the more sensible bad guys decide to holiday somewhere warm and return to conquering the world when the weather improves.
Being a child of this weird megalopolis I love it all, and it’s only the fact that cold weather means the inevitability of Christmas that some of the shine comes off my enthusiasm.
It’s not like I have a lot to cheer about. For some godforsaken reason I am yet to quit my apartment and hand it over to my seemingly forever angry and increasingly estranged wife and our darling progeny, the superhuman prodigy you’d know best as Windsong. Beth has full custody, having threatened to gang up with her lawyer pals and cut off visiting rights altogether unless I agreed. She’s shitting in her LeCroix of Paris stockings that any time we spend together, Tessa and I are going to play dress ups and plan her future crime-fighting career. Funny that I was married to this woman for seventeen years and she can’t understand I don’t want our daughter dragged into this crazy life any more than she does.
The bigger problem remains Tessa. I guess saving the city from Ras Algethi on her first outing has somewhat gone to her head. Sure, we hardly talk about anything else on our walks, coffees at Gonzo’s, lunches at Ribaldi or Piccolo or that theme sandwich bar in SBSCC Tower where the waiters dress as mime artists and beatniks. God forbid we should discuss why her loving parents of fifteen years are seeking divorce. I’m really only learning now just how filled my little girl’s head is with this costumed, larger-than-life world – she who, among so much of the world, I thought I knew so well.
The diehard fans have discerned and may well even be pleased to know I have embarked on a minor costume redesign. The identical leather ensembles do little to change the previous version except my insignia is no longer red but gold. My publicist’s idea. I hear more from the disgruntled guy who maintains my online forum than the public relations queers I have allowed to siphon off ten per cent of my income, even from the marketing deals I made before I hired them (unlike Miss O’Hagan, I was fully aware just how little I was drawing in). Nonetheless, when the Enercom phone flashes, or buzzes I should say, if it’s Hallory I always pick up. What the hell. Technically, I am single again and maybe it’s my inner Irishman craving a redhead.
*
SEEKER’S INVISIBLE FORTRESS has the crazy acoustics like you’d expect from any thousand-year-old castle. The frustration in my voice bounces vibrantly off the walls, coming back to us just in time to blend with the sound of my boredom as I throw down the clipboard with doodle marks all over the page, my micro tantrum getting pretty much no one’s attention as Seeker and Mastodon stand in the enormous, austere chamber power-tripping on the three flunkies before them.
“Try-outs have barely started and we’re already down to these nobodies?” I say more loudly this time.
If at first you don’t succeed and all of that.
Mastodon turns and gives me his best badass scowl, but I know he’s just playing school captain because he thinks he might get into Seeker’s pants with his responsible older superhero act. He didn’t spend three years on the same team with her as I did. No one’s going there. The frigging Pope’s not getting any pussy from Seeker. Well you know, of course he’s not, but you know what I mean. If anyone was going to score with our perfect preacher, maybe he’d be the guy to do it. Or maybe not. Hell, this is a lifelong habit of mine, speaking with no real good idea of what I’m gonna say next.
The new kids on the block are Ash, a white kid in a kimono called Samurai Girl, and believe it or not, a dominatrix who speaks in the third person named Madame Lash. I’m not sure she’s got the whole “hero” thing down yet. I could tell from the moment she walked into the room that Mastodon wanted her on the team. Only thing we haven’t told Mastodon yet is that we’re only offering him a Reserve position. It’s not the age. It’s more that Seeker’s not too comfortable with the old boy’s pharmaceutical interests and the faceless Wallachian monks who prowl the corridors down here stop and flatten themselves against the walls when Mastodon goes past. Perhaps it’s just those fucking horn things jutting out from his collar, but I doubt it.
As my last outburst resounds from the walls, the teenager with the Asian sword appears in my face – a good trick, since I can still see her across the room out of the corner of my eye – and waggles her finger before slapping me and disappearing again.
“What the –?”
“Show some respect, mister,” she says.
“How about you earn some?”
“Easy, people,” Mastodon adds in the folksy tone he’s adopted for the evening.
“Hey, ‘Don, give me a frigging break here,” I start to say only to get cut abruptly by a hand signal from my offsider and nominal co-captain Seeker.
“Everyone please try and remain calm,” Seeker says. “Zephyr, I know you’re impatient to finalize the roster, but please. We have a lot of people interested in the new team and I want to give everyone who applies the courtesy of a real try-out.”
“Madame Lash thanks you, Seeker,” Madame Lash says and scowls at me.
“Hey lady,” I add, ignoring Seeker’s ongoing implications. “I’ve never even heard of you before, so don’t go giving me all that ‘tude, OK?”
“Jesus, you are like twice the asshole Madame Lash has heard,” the corset queen replies.
“Heh heh, sounds like she’s got you pegged, Zeph.”
“No seriously, ‘Don,” I say. “Don’t you think we’re going to have a little problem with a bondage fetish on the team? And in this place, don’t you think that’s a bit bizarre?”
“You’re in all that leather and you’re sayin’ I have a fetish? Madame Lash finds that rich.”
“Zephyr,” Seeker warns.
“Jeez guys, can’t we all chill?” the bald guy Ash says.
His face is a mask of warring emotions.
“I was really pumped about these auditions, but now I’m not so sure. Shit.”
He sounds like he’s gonna cry.
“Okay, okay,” I say and put up my hands, and a little of the heat goes out of the room, but even though I am grinning at them, I feel like a total ass because there’s no way I’m letting this one go, even if the others think I’ve suddenly learnt a little diplomacy.
“Just tell me what your powers are, Lash baby, and I’ll relax.”
“Powers?” she says and blinks.
“Yeah,” I reply. “We all see the whip and that’s awesome. Ditto the cleavage. Very nice. But what can you do?”
The others look like they want to voice a protest – Seeker looks like she wants to boil me alive – except for the fact it’s a pretty good question and Madame Lash is a more than a touch slow to answer.
“We already had to kick Madrigal out of here, so, like, you know, we need to know who you are and what you do, since you don’t have a reputation of your own to trade in,” I say slowly, a wiseguy despite trying to be even-handed. “How else are we gonna know you’re not some plant, you know, a Cheese agent or something?”
“Cheese agent?” Samurai Girl frowns.
“K.A.A.S., you know, the uh European um, death to parahumans mob?” Mastodon shrugs.
“Kaas is Dutch for cheese,” I take my turn to say. “It’s an old joke.”
“I’ll have to remember that.”
Eyes swivel back to Madame Lash looking increasingly infuriated.
“If you’re not interested in the power of my lash, then perhaps Madame Lash should take it elsewhere,” she cries and pulls the handle of the whip from her belt and unrolls the sucker and gives it a whopping great crack. Mastodon flinches and grins.
That’s my cue for anoth
er one-liner, but instead, the air above our heads sizzles with a faintly familiar noise and then a handful of costumed figures sporting enormous grins start dropping through. I recognize the leader of the cohort almost straight away, as well as the figure beside him, and I’m on my feet quicker’n you could shit.
“Well well,” I say loud enough to make sure my colleagues hear clearly. “If it isn’t Captain Jackass. It’s been a long time, pal. I see you brought your boyfriend.”
I gesture to the crouched figure in the black body stocking, a hockey mask on his face: Kid Kaos.
“Got some new friends too though, huh?”
“Just like you, Zephyr,” the madman says and giggles and steps forward, only the jaw of his scarred face visible beneath the spray-painted gridiron helmet he wears. “We heard you was havin’ a party. Can’t do that without inviting the Kaos Krew, Mister Zephyr! You know what I always say: you bring the babes, I’ll bring the raging boners!”
As if on cue, Jackass’s allies scatter at his gesture as another one of his portals opens up over the young trio in the middle of the room and through the hole in space-time pour a few hundred pounds of decomposing crap including bones and a decaying treacle that may or may not be dog food. Ash immediately drops to his hands and knees and starts puking, while Samurai Girl uses super-speed to evade – and Madame Lash just gets the fuck out of the way like any sensible person would.
Jackass is one of the guys who gives the supers world a bad name. With no real agenda except proving himself above the law and out for his own brand of retarded laughs, the self-styled captain exists just to piss into the wind for heroes everywhere. He adamantly refuses to play ball with some of the standard expectations of the genre, including clear distinctions between good guys and bad. He doesn’t want to take over the world – just make the rest of us look like assholes.
I open up with an electrical attack, but the captain teleports out of the way and the charge hits his long-time accomplice instead. Kid Kaos kicks out wildly and lands on his back twitching like a frog in a biology experiment.
Jackass pops up from another black energy disc just inches behind Seeker, leaning his diseased chin on her shoulder and tilting his head playfully.
“Silly me,” he yodels. “I’ve introduced myself, but not my friends.”
He sinks back through the portal before Seeker can properly turn and nail him, and moments later the caped fuckwit reappears on the far side of the room, his companions around him.
“Guys,” he says, “meet Zephyr and his little team. We’re inviting ourselves over to play, but I’m sure they won’t mind. They look like sports. And Zephyr, these are my new recruits: Murderboy.”
A preppy-looking but nonetheless Emo kid runs fingerless-gloved fingers through his dyed black comb-over and turns abruptly, striking a deliberate mock model’s pose.
“Prankster.”
Stockier than any of the others, this guy wears a Kevlar vest and heavy skate armor. A slim backpack that may or may not be a parachute, and an ordnance belt with a variety of grenades and canisters jingles musically at his deliberately bad dance moves.
“And The Drill.”
The fifth member of the team also wears a helmet, though it’s like the one Red Monolith wore, complete with a tinted face visor. The Drill pulls a pair of power drills from holsters at his sides and crosses them over his chest in a clear imitation of the skull and crossbones. The bastard then levitates into the air, head touching the ceiling some forty feet up just to show us he’s got powers in his own right.
“Well gosh, Captain,” I say and do my own fake chuckle. “Shame you didn’t let us know you were coming. Now we’re just gonna have to kick your ass!”
I give a roar and blaze with energy that throws the room into an electric blue focus as I launch from the floor and power straight towards my grinning nemesis.
Sure, I know that wasn’t the wittiest line in history, but this is no comic book. I hate this guy, hate everything he has ever done and hate nothing so much as the total disdain he has for how we do things here on my patch – and by that I mean the whole of Atlantic City. So once again, it’s my turn to hand this guy his asshole and show him how to wear it as a hat.
I figure it’ll be a good training exercise for the kids.
Zephyr 4.3 “Beneath The Metal Rain”
IT TAKES MASTODON a second or so to realize we really are going to have a rumble. Then he does his foot-stamping trick and if things were quieter you’d hear the leather straps of his chest harness strain with the stretch as he swells from just over six foot to a little over nine. Now his shoulders are the size of Christmas hams and his mutton chops loom about the size of small cats duct-taped to the side of his grinning, leering face.
“Alright Zephyr, this is more like it.”
“Take it easy, Lemmy,” I say as I hurtle across the chamber. “Don’t break anything.”
By that I mean anything of his own, of course. I’m quite happy for him to hand these guys their heads and we’ll just bury the corpses wherever the Wallachians suggest. Across the room I see Ash dragging himself away from the mound of disgustingness he’s only really added to, while the chick with the whip and the chick with the sword seem intent on looking scenic rather than helpful.
I crash into the space previously occupied by Captain Jackass. In my wake, another portal opens overhead and I should’ve seen this one coming, knowing this motherfucker plans ahead for these sorts of things as metal shopping cart after metal shopping cart start plunging down onto me and into the room. There’s something awkwardly painful about being hit by raining metal trolleys I think the madman kens only too well. Even for me, as the first one rebounds from my forearms, head and knee simultaneously, it’s more than just my ego taking a battering.
Pouring on a bit of super-speed, I manage to get out from beneath the metal rain, but Seeker and the Don aren’t so lucky. It’s only that I manage to wing Jackass with another lightning bolt that the portal sucks closed and the damned things stop coming. Moments later on the other side of the room, there’s another sizzling noise, and through a hole no bigger than my fist, a shower of golf balls pour into the room. Ash and Madame Lash – there’s a good rhyming couple for you – go down on their butts and its only by the grace of her rubber-band teleporting trick that Samurai Girl gets to bitch-slap Jackass and force the latest wormhole closed as well.
“Nice moves!” I yell. “Now watch your back.”
The dude calling himself The Drill flies straight for Seeker, but there’s nothing I can do for her right now as the one with the kneepads unhooks goodies from his belt-pack and tosses ‘em at me in the center of the room. The first one is little more than a firecracker and then the next thing I know there’s tear gas flooding across the scene and I have to cover my nose and mouth with my hand and squint to get a good sense of his location. Perhaps Prankster has superhuman powers of regeneration to back up his gimmicks. If not, he may have a problem eating with anything other than a straw or perhaps a wet nurse after my tightly-clenched left connects with the side of his jaw and introduces him to the hard stone floor.
Madame Lash does something lame with her whip. I suspect she’s trying to create a vortex to disperse the gas, which is a sweet idea except for Murderboy leaping from one wall to another and finally landing on her back and sinking his teeth into the side of her neck. To her credit, powers or none, the lady freaks out just fine enough to fling the weird-ass villain over her shoulder in a practiced judo move. Just as Emo-boi rights himself, she does a reverse spinning kick that sends him across the room and into the aforementioned pile of shopping trolleys.
I am distracted by a right cross to my jaw. Spinning about, I can’t see anyone, and then fingers tap me on the shoulder, and like a total cad, I flip about and yet another punch snaps across my jaw. Their saving grace is there’s no superhuman strength in the blows. Across the chamber I see the so-called captain give a little wave and then, through one of his teleport discs, his foot
comes through and tries to get me in the jewels. No dice. I grab the good captain’s ankle and channel more than a handful of volts back through the portal. If he doesn’t shit himself, I’ll be astonished.
The hole in space collapses taking his errant limbs with it.
Time to get things moving.
Through the tear-gas haze, Ash appears like a homeless man to grab The Drill either side of his helmet. The bad guy has put a few holes in Seeker’s shoulder and she lies on the floor looking uncharacteristically limp. It doesn’t matter. Ash is pissed. His fully unleashed power is lethal. The Drill’s head disintegrates into a hissing pile of white-hot dust and the helmet kind of falls apart as the silica of the dead bad guy’s skull and tissue pour from the front vent like sand from a broken hourglass. The still very rubbery and real headless body plops onto the floor next to Seeker, who screams shrilly, thereby drawing almost every eye in the room to the scene.
Mastodon has been maced by Prankster. Samurai Girl has lines of drool hanging from her chin, two canisters of tear gas still gushing nearby. Madame Lash has lost her whip. She has a black eye and bleeds heavily from a neck bite and another to one of her breasts, which has slipped free from her heavy corset. I direct a quick zap toward her assailant and the hair-dyed freak cartwheels away with the sort of noise I’d expect a cat to make.
“Time to finish up, ‘Don!” I yell with my eyes streaming, half-squeezed shut.
I almost stumble over The Drill’s corpse, shielding supine Seeker with my body as Prankster and then Jackass circle. I’m trying to do the math and it won’t add up and that’s when I belatedly realize we’re missing someone.
“Okay, where’s the other fucker?”
Zephyr II Page 2