The Wallachians have parked the castle behind a row of porta-potties athwart the dexter quadrant of the stadium parking lot. There is a game on, not tennis, but maybe something equally effete because there are only a few people about, and apart from a handful of security dudes drifting the lot looking for change with their metal detectors, we are alone and unsupervised. We slip in a side door and I follow the lady in white’s delectable behind up a seemingly unending series of stone spiral staircases to a dour corridor with low fires guttering in braziers and I ask, just a little out of breath, how the hell I’m ever going to get used to finding my way around.
“It helps if you keep a firm idea of your destination,” Seeker replies with another of those patented grins.
“What are you saying? That this place responds to intelligent thought?”
“Just any thoughts, even not particularly intelligent ones,” she says.
“I thought it was just, you know, ideational down in the engine room . . . the dungeons,” I say.
We navigate the hallway in a manner not dissimilar to marines on patrol in Fallujah, Ho Chi Minh City, the ruins of Angkor Wat. Seeker directs me to an oaken doorway and it opens just as I reach for the wrought iron handle. Inside, there hides a narrow chamber, a monkish cell with a prison-style bed, a low stone bench and wash table, a wooden stool, HDMI, USB and TV aerial connections along with a triple power station and a built-in universal phone recharger. High on the wall there’s a flatscreen monitor currently tuned to a channel showing nothing but sky.
“Curious mix.”
“Welcome to Hotel Wallachia.”
Seeker has removed the cap and as usual her lustrous long locks make like the prettiest seaweed on the gentlest of Abrolhos tides. There’s a fetching color to her cheeks I fancy isn’t just the freshness of the day or pre-Yule expectation, and I give a grimacing wink when she sits on the edge of the bed to test it. I lay down the box, the housewarming gifts to myself, and then the pack. Amazing how I can travel so light when I’m evicted from the only other life I’ve ever known. But I have vowed not to get maudlin, at least for today.
“The word ‘Spartan’ leaps to mind,” I say. “Still, I appreciate it.”
Seeker nods.
“The brothers will come if you request them,” she says. “They will be able to provide most the assistance you need, though of course you’ll have to remember many of them are observing vows of silence. The abbots will be able to communicate directly.”
“Great.”
“As you were saying, the castle layout responds to unconscious telepathic instruction,” she goes on without even a shrug. “Provided it inconvenience no one, the internal structures are able to re-organize for ease of navigation. It means you won’t have any excuses to be late to round table sessions.”
I grimace again, and not just at the Arthurian reference. It all serves to remind me we’re just thirty-six hours from going live. It’s not exactly stage-fright, but perhaps its evil, insalubrious double.
Seeker falls silent, slowly realizing she is sitting on a bed in a more-than-grown man’s room without a chaperone for possibly the first time in her life. As her cheeks redden and I fail to find even the rudiments of a conversation, the comely woman nods and moves backward to the door like she’s afraid I might pounce on her.
“I’ll, uh, leave you to settle in,” she says.
Once disappeared, I tug the Enercom phone from my pocket and check the charge as I slowly change into my Zephyr rags. The reception is curiously crystal and I get Sal on the third or fourth ring. Something in his tone, arrogant and dismissive as usual, nonetheless fails to dissuade me from a mid-afternoon meet. The story is too good, and this one time, the money’s likewise. I make the time and place and ring off, the grumpy old hack’s irritated, “I was starting to wonder when the fuck you were ever gonna call” barely registering as I consider the strange new course upon which my life’s been set.
After fiddling in my room for a while and setting up the final touches to the new computer, I check in for any news on the house fire. Finding nothing, I go on to the Zephyr noticeboards for a while and resist responding to a half-dozen infuriating remarks from various snot-rags. Bored and a little hungry, I then drift into the corridor and make the mistake of wandering without any fixed destination in mind.
My perambulation turns into the frigging Odyssey, though eventually one of the so called Wallachian abbots takes me by the elbow and guides me into the big, vault-like chamber the New Sentinels will be using as our ready room. It is a stone amphitheater with a long, football-shaped table in the middle, its smoked glass alight in various quadrants with scenes beaming straight from the Internet and news feeds across the world.
Just by glancing at it, I learn British Prime Minister Bowie has been comfortably re-elected, Jerusalem security police have unearthed and obliterated a paramilitary cell intent on milhemet mitzvah (or ‘holy war’), Chinese ethnic Uighars are staging firebomb protests, and students at a classic Finnish conservatorium have led their own protest, playing outlawed nationalist tunes on cellos hooked up to distortion pedals, their performance ending in a baton storm of Russian policemen. Oh, and Milli Vanilli have won their fifth best album Grammy. Love those guys. I crane closer to the footage to see a news feed from Atlantic City showing a dark blue shadow of a man scuttling up the side of a tenement wielding a pair of curved swords – the reporter insists on dubbing him “The Beetle,” which seems a tad unimaginative.
There’s nothing on a house fire in Pierce. In fact, I am beginning to think the news is almost curious in its absence.
I’m so fixated on the table I don’t notice Vulcana sitting in one of the big-backed chairs. Her dark eyes, smudged in their rests, swivel toward me in time to the movement of her seat. Ten more seats crown the table and further back there are more benches abutting other computer gear, the whole thing producing an effect somewhere between Star Trek and In The Name Of The Rose.
“Hi, Connie,” I say and slide into a chair.
I expect the usual abuse about using her real name. Instead, she says nothing.
“Hey, are you OK over there?”
“I’m fine, Zephyr.”
“You sure? You’re sounding a little . . . um, whatever the opposite of illustrious is.”
“Luster-less,” Vulcana answers me like a repetition.
I take a good look at my former teammate, back for another taste of the action despite a close encounter in the autumn that nearly cost her an arm. There are dark rings beneath her dark eyes that mar her sexy Puerto Rican complexion and belie suggestions she’s fit for a return to active duty. Her helm of black hair has grown a few inches since the last time she had an official mishap – seems I was there for that one, too – and the ragged edge cuts across her sloped jaw-line and casts much of her face needlessly into shadow. When her eyes look askance, they seem huge and luminous, despite their darkness. But when they turn back to me, it feels like being stared down by a ghost or perhaps something even worse.
“Are you good for tomorrow night?”
“I’m good, Zephyr,” she says again with all the flatness of the world.
“Sure?”
“I’m tired. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
“How’s the arm?” I ask, pushing it.
Again the black eyes alight on me, leave me thinking about autumn and how it is the true season of death. Things die with the fall. In winter, they’re simply dead.
“I’m fine, Zephyr. Don’t ask me again.”
“Just trying to see if you’re, you know, tight.”
“I’m tight, Zephyr. Tighter’n tight.”
I wink. Here’s a chance to get a real reaction, but she says nothing, merely turns and looks past me like I’m blocking her from watching something far more fascinating. As I ponder my next comment and whether to really aggravate the woman, a bell chimes somewhere within the stone complex and Seeker’s voice rolls out on the ether.
“Team meeting in f
ifteen minutes.”
Almost at once, blue-suited Smidgeon strolls into the room eating a ham sandwich. Another resident of Castle Greyskull, it is fair to note we have barely met. He has the cap and face mask in place as usual, even as little flecks of grated cheese trickle down the front of his blue-and-red costume. I shouldn’t blame him. I wear the mask at all times myself. Yet there’s something paranoid there, present in every action and mannerism, a nervous tic that could be unpleasant in a teammate. We’ve barely spoken three words together and it’s like someone has warned him off me, which surely can’t be a great thing given the undertaking we’ve signed up to. I choose think he is merely being paranoid about his secret identity, but Seeker says to let it rest until the premiere and then some training exercises should break down the walls. The total sucker I am for hardbodies like her, naturally I just nodded my head and complied.
I take my seat, conscious, like I think we all are, that these are positions we could be holding for many years to come.
How wrong we are.
*
THE VIEW HASN’T changed much on the roof of the Jenssen building. Same pigeons doing their funny little walks, browsing through the cigarette butts and each other’s shit. There is a homeless man asleep on one of the flat-bed air con units, exhausted after rockin’ out with his cock out, a mess of broken glass ouzo bottles around him and his pants around his ankles after he passed out trying to have a goodnight tug. The pigeons land on him, periodically mistaking him for a piece of public art here, forty storeys above Mother Earth, but the guano adds a certain pathos even he was missing before.
Sal emerges from the stairwell with his usual put-upon expression, huffing slightly, his doggie bag lunch crumpled in one clammy fist. There’s a newspaper under his arm and it’s sheer hubris if it is his own.
I glanced at a copy of the Post on the way over here, astounded Darkstorm’s alleged disappearance could so quickly bump news about the Bloomingdale’s bombing from the front page. The City States symposium finishes tomorrow, other business successfully pushed from the agenda by the Zionists’ attack, though it’s now more likely to result in a draft statement condemning their violence than any buckling in to demands about segregating Jerusalem. The mad fuckers think something written, probably for a lark, two thousand years ago gives them an unbreakable lease agreement on half the Middle East. The news that Indonesia has elected its most moderate president yet, an Indo-African nobody with a white mother by the name of Barack Obama, has put US relations with the Muslim world at an all-time high. President Obama’s words, as newly-crowned leader of the world’s most heavily-populated Islamic state, point the way to a new détente with his positivist election catchphrase Yes we can. Just like the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, it means the fundamentalist hard copies are just pissing in the wind if they think they can get their way by trying to hold the world to ransom.
Besides, there’s five other Bloomingdale’s.
“Hey Sal,” I remark. “Long time, no see.”
“Yeah,” he says in a grouchy voice. “Where have you been, you fuckin’ idiot?”
“Hey, play nice, Mr Doro, or I might toss you off the roof.”
“Tossing off is about all you’re good for, Zephyr.”
“Jesus, Sal. I don’t feel the love. What gives?”
He pushes the crumpled newssheets into my arms like an unwanted baby, which makes me the convent’s mother superior, I guess. I take them reluctantly, still stung by his remarks. As expected, the headline “Dark hero vanishes” spills across five columns above a blurry picture. I shake the page into some semblance of readable form and then can’t concentrate for more than two or three seconds.
“Can’t you just give me the Cliff’s Notes on this one?”
“I gave you a frickin’ disc full o’ data you shoulda been doin’ somethin’ with, an’ now you want the executive fuckin’ summary?”
Pushing sixty or not, Doro shakes his fist at me like he’s something other than a miserable old hack with nicotine and colostomy problems.
“Sal, you’re not yourself,” I say, trying to be the voice of reason. “What is it?”
“I thought the headline would spell it out for you Zephyr, but maybe I’m wrong,” he says and shuffles across to another aluminum box fixture to park his ass, peeling open the lunch bag and inspecting the contents like a man long unused to thrills.
“Darkstorm’s missing.”
“Yeah. And the Crusader.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Manitou?”
“That . . . white-haired chick?”
“Correct. Ansolom?”
“Ansolom?” I look back at him and peer more closely, the old man’s face suddenly strangely unfamiliar. “Uh, biggish? Grey skin? Strong?”
“Bingo. All missing.”
“Uh-huh. OK?”
“Now, your missing Dr Martin Thurson, remember him?”
“The, uh, guy who was an associate of the science dude who made that robot,” I say. “Hermes,” I add like it might be helpful.
“He’s dead.”
“Hermes?”
“Dr Thurson. Not missing any more, it seems. They had to ID him by DNA,” Sal says.
Finally giving up his interest in the pastrami on rye, he lights a cigarette and waves it at me like it’s his very own little American Indian cleansing ceremony.
“Police turned up his body. Get this: in a fuckin’ cocoon, man. A cocoon, Zephyr. In the old brickworks down on East Street, used to be the Bronx. Johnson, now.”
“Someone killed him?”
“They don’t think so. You’d need to speak to the Feds. They took the body, took over the autopsy,” the old reporter says and shrugs.
I don’t know where he’s getting his info, but I am as confident in it as I would be of my own.
“Whisper I heard was he died of a natural mutation. Guy looked like The Fly or something.”
Doro smokes for a bit. Tired or something, he looks at me.
“There’s things going on, Zephyr. Ordinary folks like me, we got limits. You gotta, you know, take the ball and run with it. I just don’t get the feelin’ any of you super guys is too interested. What’s going on? Clash with your corporate itinerary?”
“Very funny, Sal.”
“Not lookin’ like a joke from where I’m standin’, Zeph.”
I shrug and look away, but Doro is far too experienced with my worst performances, the ones I keep private. He nudges me and lights another cigarette.
“You got something for me?”
“It’s an exclusive,” I mumble.
Then I tell him about the Sentinels launch and Sal promises to cut me a check for ten grand. The reporter can barely get the facts straight, he’s in such a hurry to get back to the newsroom to file tomorrow’s front page. It’s the usual arrangement and he’ll be quoting a source close to the new team, yet he leaves with me feeling my usual war within, the grimy experience of having sold my hole only lessened by the deep and almost completely unconscious conviction it’s all so trivial it barely matters anyway.
Soon it is just me and my silent, bird-poo spattered companion. I roll up a twenty spot and put it in the mouthpiece of the only booze bottle unbroken, and then take to the sky, headed halfway for home before I remember I no longer live there. A device on my phone synchs me to the Wallachian Fortress and I bust a move over downtown, airships dopplered across the horizon with the sunset, and in the end I descend toward the park where today’s portcullis has anchored. Moments later, I’m striding with my heavy footfalls down the slowly more familiar dank stone halls and thinking about my room. And when I get there, the door sliding ajar at my approach, I pull free the mask with the satisfying feeling I can only remember as a kid, finally hooking fingernails under a week-old scab and prising that sucker loose. There are messages on the laptop from the team intranet and direct messages via the new Zephyr Twitter feed my PR guys are maintaining, but I’m too screwed for any of them. I fe
el like a plastic skin of wine after the alcoholics have twisted every last drop free and so I drop onto the bed and kick off my boots and it’s damned lucky I don’t sleep for a month.
Zephyr 4.18 Coda
WELL, YOU KNOW, the big night. Or maybe that should be, the Big Night. Woo-hoo. If that’s not enough feigned enthusiasm for ya, then you can go screw yourself.
Atlantic City has a new super team. A team of young gods. Buyer beware and all that. We’re here to save the day and if you’re not sufficiently grateful, we may just end up trashing the place. You never know. We don’t mean to be, but we’re an unpredictable lot, even us New Sentinels standing up on the media dais in our new-as-new costumes, a score of similarly masked publicity whores in the special audience alongside the red carpet, the slavering cameramen, the girls in tasseled skirts waving pom-poms (my idea), the beer company guy, the car company guy, my phone people, the computer company people, the agents, the gay dudes from my PR firm, Hallory O’Hagan in a skirt split high enough I can almost see her breakfast, a goodly number of security guys, which is a bit of a laugh when you consider the irony, the TV reporters, the corporate guests, the celebrities alongside the celebrity masks, the celebrities who nonsensically came in costumes, Micky Rourke who is eyeing me like an eager prom date, Kate Winslet in a Titanium Girl costume looking eminently fuckable and back to her best at long last, the banking guys basically steamrolling this whole damned thing, and behind and somehow between them all, the dark-cloaked forms of the Wallachians strangely at home in this paradise of confused Hollywood clichés.
Zephyr II Page 13