If you thought Murderboy was creepy, it’s Kid Kaos who’s the real psycho case on their team: Captain Jackass’s pet serial killer, which he keeps on a close emotional leash – except when he lets the leash go pretty long. And when he does, that’s trouble, because the Kid is a natural assassin. He can ghost as well as turn see-through, so you never know where he’s gonna appear.
This time he wobbles back into view directly behind Ash, who stands there in the white body stocking I know his mum probably sewed for him, palms clawed and radiating their own dangerous vibe. Only he doesn’t have a clue about the danger immediately to his rear and the ‘Don and I barely open our mouths before Kid Kaos slots into place, his turn to grab Ash by the skull and twist.
Shit just got real. I guess we got one of theirs so. . . ?
Somehow amid his descent to the hard stones, Ash’s rolling eyes swivel around until they find mine, and then stay locked on me as Kid Kaos ghosts the young hero’s head into the stone floor and leaves it there, buried, fused, the corpse’s back painfully arched, arms splayed. And I swear, a hot white rage starts inside me, but it’s tempered by a tiredness too, that everything has to end like this and that it’s not just Captain Jackass and his crew who have no respect for how things should be, but that it’s life itself that doesn’t respect the conventions of our particular genre. Ash was a nineteen-year-old hero just starting out in the world. He’d moved here from Detroit because he never had anything to do. Now he’s just a hundred-and-eighty pounds of pre-packaged meat going to spoil, or more likely to wind up alongside the guy he killed in some nameless Wallachian garbage dump or swamp or unholy fucking backwater.
I’m tired of the idea of payback, but until something better comes along, that’s the only option I have.
*
SO WE TEAR into them. Kid Kaos fades from view before I can blow a few thousand volts through his chest. Murderboy runs up one wall and vaults, something sticky about his hands as he crosses the ceiling like a monkey and comes down on Mastodon, who promptly throws him halfway across the room.
Prankster pulls another weird-looking gun and fires at me and a net flops out, heavy little balls on the edges as it goes over. I put a scorch mark in the middle of his chest and he flies backward, adding to his bruise collection for today, but in the moment I struggle with the net, Jackass throws up one of his discs over my head and dusty red recycled house bricks pour down in their hundreds. Between the bricks and the dust I go down for a moment.
I’m relieved to see Samurai Girl run around the room at just under Mach. She swings with practiced swipes and cuts Murderboy and Jackass and bounds out of the way as Kid Kaos rematerializes. If I weren’t so angry I’d be amused by the sight of the hockey-masked freak picking up a pair of bricks and disappearing with them again. It’s not so funny when he materializes near Mastodon, phases the brick invisible and leaves it lodged in the big guy’s stomach. The ‘Don twitches and drops as his system goes into shock and it’s really only blind luck that my own short circuit hits the fading assassin before he’s gone completely. Mask and all, Kid Kaos slides about ten feet and remains curled with a smoky residue over his head.
I’m on hyper alert. When a teleport disc appears beside me, I throw myself into it and out the other end, suddenly grappling with the team leader before Jackass headbutts me with the helmet and I feel my nose break, no big deal, the blood running down my face merely unnerving as I blindly grasp his scarred, malignant face with one hand and start to squeeze. I hammer short right jabs into his ribs, feeling them break, and somewhere amid all that the laughter goes out of him and he starts to freak, thrashing wildly, screaming, clawing at my grimace as I ram my knee into his crotch and then make the mistake of hurling him bodily across the room.
He bounces across the stone and comes up with his face bleeding almost as bad as the sword-wound to his side. The Captain spits blood and shakes his head, expression furious.
“You can have this one, Zeph,” he growls. “Next time you won’t be so lucky. I’ll make sure of it.”
I am left to ponder any hidden meanings in this as he throws teleport discs beneath his mates, including the unconscious ones, and they disappear from view at short notice.
I wipe leather across my bleeding face without much satisfaction as Samurai Girl tends to Seeker’s pierced shoulder. Madame Lash isn’t going anywhere and that’s even more terribly true for Ash. Mastodon drops to his knees as well and gives me a nod with his graven face.
“Could do with a few more hit points there, boss,” he says.
I can only nod. “At least this time the little bastard didn’t dump me in the Himalayas when he was finished,” I try and grin and fail.
The silent cowled figures of the Wallachian monks appear through a doorway bearing the now familiar sight of a floating stretcher. I hold up my hands for two more.
“Not so crash hot, huh Zephyr?” Seeker says in a pained voice.
“I guess we weren’t really geared up for that,” I say. “Any idea how the hell they found us here?”
“I’ll have to ask the priests in charge of the cloaking device,” Seeker replies. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
I motion to the dead kid. “Tell it to him.”
“The Wallachians, you know. . . .”
“Keep your fucking priests off him,” I say more harshly than I intend, but the vision in my mind’s eye is compelling and probably not completely inaccurate. “It could’ve been a worse death.”
“Ash might have something different to say to that.”
“I’m not about to find out. Leave it be.”
We exchange knowing looks, hers doe-like, mine taciturn, and Madame Lash gets up in the middle of our exchange and grabs her rig and staggers for the door like a drunk hooker in search of a payphone.
I harrumph.
“I’d better see the lady out.”
And that’s that.
Zephyr 4.4 “Fruit In A Costume”
I’M READING the Post with some disdain, my back to a girder in the otherwise fully translucent diner, trying to kid myself I am flicking through the political and world news sections to get to the sports and not Nate Simon’s Tuesday column. The little fuck has been hinting at the breakdown in my friendship with Twilight for two weeks running now, but he hasn’t even tried to call to verify his information. Thanks to Christ he doesn’t know half as much as he could, even if he’s already spilled twice as much as I’d ever want the average Joe Public to know about how Twilight and I came to blows and sent half the city (actually just Rhode Island) into the Abyss. I am not presently accepting calls from the Mayor’s office for fear they might have some crazy idea about reparations.
Fortunately, the Post reporter has a new bag. Sal Doro covers the big fish (like me, normally), which is why I guess Simon is left speculating on the disappearance of some dude who works the south city and calls himself Crusader. Original. While I have barely heard of this guy before, I don’t think the fact some fruit in a costume fails to stop three daytime robberies and a laundry fire justifies a missing person report. If he’s anything like I was when I was starting out, a really bad zit was enough to keep me low for two weeks at a time.
I flick through this trivia and check the other items. I see Eris has been at her own unique brand of chaos again, hospitalizing a guard at the storage vaults attached to the State Museum of the Americas. Hebrew parahuman Allan Silverman has demanded an invite to an upcoming session of the City States Symposium in Atlantic City with predictable results. Mastodon and Cipher teamed up to smash a Yardie drug den, which begs a far more interesting story given the old man’s pharmaceutical pursuits. An emissary from a parallel earth has apparently left Atlantic City in disgust after being refused entry to the Flyaway. The stock price for most major drug companies took a hit last week following rumors a German sorcerer had eradicated all strains of influenza. Turned out not to be true. Pity. Meanwhile, a villain called Dragonmaster, a Brit, I assume, since I’ve never heard of
him, has come out of the closet to a men’s mag. One look at the scaled leather costume the guy wears and you’ve got to wonder who was left to gasp in surprise at that particular revelation.
Oh, and Windsong has been seen flying formations over Staten Island with a British super, the renowned bisexual beauty Shade. The thirty-something bisexual beauty Shade. I make a note to self and grit my teeth and barely look up at the sweet Minnesotan farm girl delivering my espresso as a pizza delivery guy cutting up the sidewalk outside hits a dude in a suit and his moped goes hissing out-of-control toward a fountain. I snap the newspaper shut and patently ignore the chaos, my hand around the warm mug a pleasure to savor as I fight against the invisible forces that would otherwise suck my mood.
Surprisingly, the gossip pages have absolutely nothing about Seeker’s decision to form a new group of Sentinels. Considering it’s been the talk of the top end of town the whole week past, I find that amazing. Either someone has hushed the city’s reporters, they’re saving it for a special issue, or else Atlantic City’s costumed elite are keeping quiet for one rare moment in their lives, reasons unknown.
Mickey Rourke enters the diner and I sink lower in my chair. I owe him thirty bucks and last time we got wrecked at Halogen I may have told him I’d pay him back with a hand-job. He’s just crazy enough to want to collect just so he can see me squirm.
I snap the paper again to straighten the crooked columns and my phone, sitting on the table with more papers from my agent and my house keys, lights up and displays Seeker’s name.
“Speak of the Devil,” I grin in answer somewhat inappropriately.
“We need to talk.”
“About the Sentinels?”
“. . . yes, about the Sentinels. The New Sentinels.”
I nod and smile to myself.
“Where’ve you got that castle parked?”
The door to the diner swings open and she’s standing there with her phone to her ear in some ridiculous Paula Abdul outfit.
“I brought a ride,” she says. “Come on.”
*
IT IS WEIRD in the cab, the feeling we’re both thoroughly disguised as we play-act in our secret identities. Seeker’s trying pretty hard to show she’s a street-smart and stylish broad, not at all the arch conservative, borderline religious psycho we’ve sometimes considered her during the years. Great jugs an’ all, but any time the old Sentinels tried to have the least bit of fun, either Seeker would blow up in a tirade reminding us of our higher calling, calling us all juveniles, or else she’d go off in a sulk that managed to cast a pall over at least the majority of our worst excesses. So if someone could explain why in the back seat of a yellow cab there’s more sexual tension than my junior high prom, I’d really appreciate it.
“So, uh, it’s Loren, right?”
“It seems like a million years ago, but yeah,” she replies.
“You’re from . . . Atlantic City?”
“Is anyone?”
She gives a breathtaking laugh filled with only half the confidence she’s trying to project. I glare at the cabbie through the rear view mirror and make sure he’s got his eyes on the road.
“My folks were from Willagee, Nebraska. Pa brought us to Atlantic City right after the Kirlians. He was a builder. Made his money in the upgrade.”
“And so it’s here where you . . . ?”
Seeker wrinkles her nose, acknowledging we don’t have the best privacy by giving just a curt nod. Adorable. Fucking hell. I nod to myself and stare out the window and am kinda surprised when she keeps talking.
“I was fourteen,” she says. “The visions came first. Apocalypse. Death from Space. All very sci-fi. I woke up one night re-enacting that scene from Ghostbusters, you know, floating above the bed covers? Our family priest knew a pastor who knew a rabbi who knew a cardinal. I’m sure you can follow what I mean.”
“And from there?”
“Well, to cut a long story short: the Wallachian Brotherhood.”
“The guys in the castle?”
“Yes.”
“The . . . brotherhood?”
“Oh, there’s women too. I never asked about that. . . .”
“And they are, exactly. . . ?”
“A fifteen-hundred-year-old secret society dedicated to keeping the doors closed between our world and the next,” Seeker says in a relaxed voice that does nothing to detract from her measured and careful pronunciation.
“Okay. So they hunt monsters and stuff who sneak through?”
“In the early days, that’s how it began,” she says. “It got complicated once they perfected their own technology on a parallel Earth.”
“And these are the guys who are offering to sponsor the New Sentinels a base?” I ask slowly.
“Well, we’ll need one.”
“I thought Devil Betty. . . ?”
“I don’t know, Joseph. As I said to you before, I’m not that comfortable with the, uh, demonic overtones of that name.”
“So a kid makes a bad wish on a shooting star after listening to too many Marilyn Manson albums.” I shrug. “To paraphrase something I heard recently, just because she used to worship the Devil doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Seeker replies.
“Okay.”
I stare out the window with the patented gaze of one of those small pampered lap dogs rich women like to take with them on trips across town. Through the glass of the taxi window the downtown area flicks past at a haphazard pace. Finally we get stalled in traffic again down near the harbor and for some reason I start chuckling about a joke in an email I got from Nautilus a couple of days back.
“What’s so funny?” Seeker asks.
“It’s nothing.”
“Hmmm. By the way,” she says, “I meant to ask you, have you heard from Darkstorm in the past few days? I can’t get him to answer his cell.”
“Hmmm no,” I reply. “Years ago he used to have this message drop at a laundry in Chi-town. That place secretly run by goblins or elves or whatever the hell it was. You want to stop by there?”
“No,” Seeker replies.
She stares out the window just in time to catch a homeless man introducing two tourists to his dancing chicken act. Loren’s pretty eyes flinch at the sight, making me wonder just how innocent the girl can be, given some of the things we’ve seen in this life.
“I’m sure he’ll turn up in the end,” she says, distracted.
“How’s Vulcana doing, by the way?”
The brightness re-enters Seeker’s eyes.
“Better every day. This is one of the benefits of the Wallachian Fortress I want to talk about with you, Joseph. The Brotherhood’s clerics will have her fighting fit in no time at all.”
“I wonder how Connie feels about that?”
“Why in Heaven would you say that?” Seeker frowns. “Her arm was torn off. I’m sure she’s thrilled to get back to how she was.”
I nod, inner turmoil defused as the frantically eavesdropping cabbie drives us to the rendezvous with the disappearing castle.
It only takes Loren a moment to mindwipe the driver once we’ve parked, and since I’m a little short of change, I offer to pay and catch her up, leaving the disoriented cabbie parked in a tow zone as I scamper to eventually follow the hot brunette in the high-heeled boots disappearing into thin air outside the boarded up walls of the construction site.
Zephyr 4.5 “A Different Kind Of Normal”
I AM DOWNTOWN. The air is chill and the traffic thrums and stalls around me like angry geese, horns going off like in a cavalcade. My arms are full of things a man in my financial situation has no right to afford, but I have a paycheck due from the management company for a bunch of voice-overs I did the previous week and they even paid me to sign a pile of forms I didn’t exactly read. I’m excited but nervous because I feel the change in the air and it’s not just the first flakes of winter snow.
I ignore the incipient fender
benders around me and step over a homeless guy lying in front of the department store asleep with his cock out and the biggest take-away mocha chill latte I have ever seen in my life spilled across the pavement beside him, a rich woman’s small dog lapping unseen at the edge of the puddle with its eyes going wide as it steps into a little of the human sensorium. The black guys at the entrance of the shop eye me like a rival gangsta, which I ignore because, you know, I’m cool with that shit, and I nod on the sly and make up some kind of fucking hand signal for a laugh that makes one wince and the other screw up his face in bewilderment. Oh yeah, and I’ve dropped about fifteen of these tiny little cute pills I found down the back of the couch, gagging on the lint, the pink hearts familiar to me and not actually candy as you might expect. They put a fire in my belly and an iron rod I have to practically strap to the side of my leg as I amble into the big lit-up store, ignoring the more Christmassy decorations with my arms already half-filled with shit I shouldn’t be buying.
I’m moving house soon. That explains the back-of-the-sofa foraging and also why I am not at home at 6pm without a good excuse, no one to cook my dinner or give me the hairy eyeball when I turn up at nine smelling like wood smoke or brine or ectoplasm or Asian pussy with no real explanation to offer to a family who apparently all knew about the ridiculous one-man play my life had become. It just lacked a title. Perhaps, Zephyr the Amazing Doofus. I could think of a dozen things more harsh if it wasn’t for my happy pills and I’ll be frank with you that it’s a nice surprise to get a little holiday from the black mood following me of late.
I’ve only just recovered from finding myself standing somewhere in the middle of the Eighth Century pushing corpses into a swamp with just a handful of unspeaking, black-cowled, so-called priests as my accomplices. As Seeker glibly explained – troublingly so, for someone so spiritual – by the time Ash and the guy from the Jackass crew’s bodies turn up, they’ll have been decayed for centuries and unidentifiable. I thought I read or watched something once about peat bogs actually preserving people better, but I am not going to get into a slanging match with a bunch of Wallachians who don’t actually speak anyway, except among themselves, and even then in low whispers.
Zephyr II Page 3