Zephyr II

by Warren Hately

  “Thanks for nothing.”

  She stares at me a moment, and wordless, speechless, shakes her head with her mouth open and her domino mask welling with tears and it is too late for me to put my hesitant hand forward, but I do it anyway. And of course she throws me off and storms past.

  I stare at the empty space where she was standing instead of following her back through the club, so when I turn and see Shade there, I’m not entirely prepared for the sisterly hostility.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re pullin’ with my lady-friend there, Zephyr,” she says in her too-contrived Brixton street voice, “but now you pulled the wrong nigga at a bad time-of-the-month.”

  She steps in and grabs me while I innocently protest and next thing I know I’m crashing through brick and plaster and down a concrete emergency stairwell and the landing comes up just in time for me to slam into it with my jaw.

  I flounder like something wet and spineless and come to my knees just in time for Shade to arrive via a massive leap and then a hard left to the side of my temple flips me over. For a blind second I can’t understand the woman’s anger and then suddenly I am boiling over with my own – not just the injustice of this moment, but of everything, angry for my ruined marriage and conceivably dead mother, my screwed-up paternity, custody battles, Tessa’s impenetrable sorrow and misbegotten sons and cunting daughters across the universe. I clamber up with a roar, hands like the Wolfman as I grab at Shade and get her by the throat and her shimmery jacket and ram her hard as a tank into the nearest concrete pillar.

  The breath explodes from the British bint, but she doesn’t give up, meeting my every excess with an enthusiasm I lack the cognition to question. Locked in battle, her forearm under my chin, her other hand at my belt, we dance like Terminators, slamming through a wall and into an underground car park, knees and elbows hammering home. Sleeping automobiles wake as they are pushed squealingly aside, their alarms flickering into life, tires bursting, a restored ‘56 Chevy flipping over when I finally get a hand free and scramble for purchase. I butt my head down hard, connecting with Shade’s temple. If you’ve ever laid into one of those proper old-time porcelain toilets (long story), that’s what this feels like, hard and unremitting as Shade grits her teeth and a trickle of red stuff seeps from her busted, snarling lip. She flips me over and slaps me in mid-air and I hurtle across the lot, rebounding from a concrete pillar only to crash through one of the subterranean barriers blocking access to even greater depths.

  I only just manage to slow my fall onto the underground roadway. It is always night within the underpass. The lights of dozens of oncoming vehicles glare at me as I fall with the rain of concrete to the road’s edge. A black shape descends in a swooping arc and I hold out my palm and lightning lances in a flash of brilliance to little effect other than to turn Shade even blacker still. She lands running, fifteen or so paces away, and by the time she gets to me, she throws herself into the most intensely badass roll I’ve ever seen to come at me low and fast as a freight train, the collision like stormfronts fucking, both of us skittling across the roadway breathless, growling and desperate.

  Cars swerve and honk around us. Miraculously none connect, though there are sparks from vehicles sideswiping each other and horns braying like the warnings of fell preternatural beasts. I’m on my back looking up and Shade grabs a two-ton lump of broken concrete and slams it down where I no longer rest as I roll aside, tug a traffic sign from the curbing and slam it into my assailant with lethal force. Shade makes a noise like a glass bottle exploding and vanishes into the path of a passing heavy tanker. The galloping lorry immediately starts giving up sparks and chunks of tire rubber and clouds of smoke as it slows against its own natural momentum. And as it stops, by its still-functioning headlights, I see Shade stagger out from the truck’s shattered grille, other traffic screeching around her as she lopes back toward me across the debris-strewn underground battlefield.

  She is running rather than flying. I look up to discern a perfect path to egress and I take it, doing the crouch thing as I hurtle up past five flights of submerged parking and twenty more storeys of high-rise, the lights from Transit shining only in my memory as I head for the black space in-between.

  Shade follows, a charcoal dart in the Witching Hour blackness, a carbon-colored Exorcet on my tail.

  *

  WE TWIRL OVER the city, breaking through clouds and catching the first winking suggestion of satellites as we duck and dive like Messerschmitts in a mating ritual. I have speed on her and from time to time I can flip and let loose with an electrical blast, however she is agile even without the same speed, and whether it’s my residual anger or the same kind of pugnacious inability to let go that has dogged me my whole life, there’s such a feeling of inevitability about all this that the best I can do is choose the battle ground. After leading her a merry chase across half the sprawling metropolis, punctuated by bursts of Cockney invective, I descend toward the shadowed bulk of the abandoned historic enclave on Hart Island in the East River.

  I land hard, breath troubled in my lungs knowing Shade is close behind. One look at the pitch black sky tells me nothing and I sprint for the nearest building, the ruins of an historic workhouse once part of the overall living museum before the Kirlian barrage reduced it to steaming chunks in ’84. There sounds a telltale thump behind me and I make the battered wooden barn doors just as a discarded truck engine smashes into my wake.

  “You really want me dead, huh?” I yell over one shoulder as I plunge into the darkness.

  Excuse me if I don’t catch her reply. A moment after the big doors swing closed after me, they explode inward again, shards of wood cutting through the air.

  “Zephyr, you total arse.”

  Shade walks in scrunching her fists into her palms.

  There’s some sort of dicky historic-looking cart or something. As Shade dodges it, I light her up with my counter-attack and she makes a Marx Brothers noise and topples backward with smoke coming from her. To her credit, she rolls out of the metallic jacket and cricks her neck and glares at me across the gloom.

  “Come fight me, tosser,” she says.

  “You don’t take losin’ too good, lady.”

  “Losing? Who’s losing?”

  I indicate her with a nod, in case there’s any doubt. It is dark, but I can discern her expression by the moonlight coming in one course of busted windows, positioned high on the derelict factory wall.

  “I’m happy to call it even,” I say. “It’s not really a good night for me.”

  “Well, you ain’t pushin’ around a little girl any more, are ya?”

  I glare. I want to resist the words, but I can’t.

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “She’s what?”

  “You heard me,” I say, regretting the admission already.

  With all the details leaking about my secret identity, I may as well set up a booth and sell tickets.

  “Is that good enough for you?”

  “Blimey, fella,” Shade says and puts her hands on her hips. “Why’n’t you fuckin’ say so?”

  “You sort of interrupted a father-daughter moment.”

  Shade starts laughing.

  “Explains a lot, actually. Consider your arse-kickin’ compliments of the chef.”

  “Sweetie, I could’ve had you six ways from Sunday, but I’m a gentleman.”

  Shade slowly regains her natural color as the power leaks from her skin. She has a comely smile, but angled toward me and clothed in skepticism, I can’t say I’m pleased to see it.

  “That so?” She slowly and deliberately cracks her knuckles. “Wanna prove it?”

  I say nothing. Shade moves closer, then right in close, and I fold my arms over my chest as she reaches out and puts her hand around my bicep and gently squeezes.

  “What do you say, big man?”

  “I think we’ve both had enough for tonight,” I tell her. “Can I trust you to keep the family secret?”

>   “Windsong? Yeah, she’s just a kid. I knew that. Makes me feel a bit better, tell you the truth, to know she’s not out playing dress-ups with her parents thinkin’ she’s some kid runaway or something.”

  I nod, noting also Shade’s hand remains seemingly glued to my upper arm. I raise an eyebrow, a gesture made possible by my canny mask design, and the black woman gives a throaty laugh.

  “What do you say?”

  “I thought you were a dyke or something?”

  Shade shrugs. “Nothing’s ever as simple as that, is it?”

  “I guess not.”

  She removes the hand, but the unexpected tension remains. Somehow I am able to adopt an easy grin with my cowboy face that has helped me stall for time in some of the toughest situations in my life.

  “Actually, she told me you’d been a hero of hers,” I say and hope that’s not breaking any great confidence. “I don’t know what she told you. . . ?”

  “Asked me advice,” Shade says and shrugs and gives the tiniest fey laugh. “Not sure I’m the best one to ask for anythin’ complicated. You’d know what it’s like, Zeph. Ain’t exactly a straight-forward career, is it?”

  “No.”

  “I was just a kid when I started. Got old real quick – me and the racket.”

  “You look pretty good to me.”

  “Mr Smooth,” Shade says and laughs. “A bit more mellow than when you was hangin’ with the Jacks, eh Zephyr?”

  “All that testosterone. . . .” I say and wave the explanation away.

  The woman nods.

  “So that’s that, then?”

  “I’m getting too old for this shit,” I tell her.

  Shade laughs.

  “Look me up next time you’re in the UK,” she says. “I might be up for another spankin’.”

  I am too startled and aroused to answer. With another wry, superior black woman’s grin, Shade steps through the ruined door and disappears into the sky.

  Her departure lets me unclench. My fists uncurl and as the blood starts to pump through my heart again, there’s only one part of me still rigid. I give another wry grin to the empty workhouse and wander in Shade’s wake, drinking in the cold breeze, the helicopters over the river, the city a dazzling fortress of Schweppervescence and me on the lonely black banks with the dead fish flapping their last in the polluted, silent waters.

  Zephyr 5.3 “Like Tony Danza in Rocky”

  THE PHONE WAKES me from a dream of teaming up with Sly Stallone and Bruce Willis to stage a comeback tour, stadium gigs across the continental US, Van Halen opening for us, me playing intricate lead breaks although me playing guitar in real life more resembles a man trying to choke a small and not particularly compliant dog, and of course that none of the other band members are musicians by trade either should’ve had me ringing alarm bells. I wake instead to the sound of Beyonce’s Sweet Child O’ Mine and realize Tessa’s been fucking with my phone again and I wonder how long time is compressed in dreams that this stupid ringtone could influence the whole damned thing.

  I literally clear the scum from my mouth with one finger, something about the humidity in this place making me wake feeling like an inmate in a Thai prison, not that it’s hot. In fact, the millennial cold of the stone floors and walls only enhances the prison ambience, which makes sense if you accord with Foucault, who could’ve easily found a parallel between the monastic cell and the penitential one.

  “Zephyr, it’s Mayor Pikes’s office.”

  “Ah, the angelic voice of Alison Kirkness if I am not mistaken.”

  “For once, you are not,” the mayor’s PA archly replies. “I am calling on behalf of the mayor, but also Senator Keenan and in fact the United States Government, Zephyr.”

  “Sounds serious. What gives?”

  “We were hoping to book a meeting. It’s serious. I mean, it is serious.”

  “Uh-huh,” I reply, never overly fond of this particular human being. “And I’ve got a lot on myself, so how about a clue?”

  “Senator Keenan only authorized me to say it’s a matter of national security,” Kirkness says.

  “Right. Anything else?”

  “It’s a matter of national priority, Zephyr,” she says stiffly again. “How soon could you be at City Hall?”

  I glance at my non-existent wristwatch. Six-hundred million light globes and all that. My stomach rumbles.

  “Give me an hour.”

  “Faster than a speeding train wreck. Wonderful,” Kirkness sneers and signs off.

  One of these days I really am going to have to discipline that woman.

  It is the first morning – er, make that afternoon – we’ve awoken in the Sentinels citadel as a team. That said, Mastodon and Samurai Girl don’t actually live in the Wallachian Fortress and Smidgeon is only a part-timer. There are Roman-style baths on my floor, or at least there is whenever I think of them, and after a quick dip, I change back into my rancid leathers and drift down to the ready room. It is thankfully empty, with nothing but a half-eaten bowl of muesli on the corner of the glass table to mark that anyone was ever there.

  I’ve been looking forward to a moment alone with the table, actually. After the world’s briefest reconnoiter with Seeker, it’s been all action since being introduced to perhaps the finest example of the Wallachians’ alternate tech.

  My tired hands stroke the glossy surface and conjure half-a-dozen visual feeds you won’t find on an ordinary search of Google Images. I knit my brow and concentrate on my search, reminded by Seeker to vocalize requests to cut through the unconscious background clutter.

  “Show me news from the last twenty-four hours on house fires in Lincoln, Astoria,” I tell the tube.

  The sanitized news footage starts popping up like a montage of Windows error messages, each one a little living light show for my digestion. I press a finger to each in turn and the sound enters my ear somehow, but none of the reports mention retrieval of a body. I don’t know if that means my mother George is still out there. I quiver at the prospect, though I also have to acknowledge what state this means she might be in. And none of that does anything to say what it all means for Maxine – and whether she ever existed at all.

  *

  I AM ABOUT to do an ambient database search when I hear a noise behind me and swivel at the waist as Smidgeon comes in. While he’s in full costume, like me, he somehow manages to convey the sense he’s slept in his clothes after pulling an all-nighter with a handful of Playboy models. I give him the Maori nod and turn back to the table of wonders.

  “Living here’s gonna take some getting used to,” the blue-and-red hero says.

  That’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard him make and I make a sympathetic, approving face and wait patiently to see if he’s going to expound.

  Smidgeon looks around the room and plucks at the domino mask over his eyes. He wears a full cap from the neck up that covers his hair and ears but leaves his face free but for the mask. His chin is lightly stubbled blonde.

  “I’ve just watched four hours of Nic Cage playing Dexter,” Smidgeon says.

  I blink. So much for the supermodels.

  “What?”

  “The Wallachians’ TV,” the shrinking hero says. “Have you checked it out? You’ve got to try it some time. They stream live satellite from over three hundred thousand alternative Earths. It’s fricking crazy.”

  “Nic Cage playing Dexter, huh?” I remark wanly. “That sucks. You know I heard about an Alt Earth once where he was a military dictator.”

  It’s a huge lie of course, taking me back to the little kid I once was in grade school, happy to ad lib huge and entirely made-up stories about my weekends and my dad with a cast of thousands just for the sake of shooting the shit. Not even to fit in, or at least that’s what I, The Boy With Two Mums, believe. That I still do it now should probably bear some looking into, though I resigned myself to being a fibber long ago and haven’t really suffered that badly for it yet. Right?

  “Of the
United States?”

  “Na. Cuba,” I answer.

  “Hmmm. There’s one world where they watch pretty much nothing but live gladiator sports with people like us. You can bet on ‘em too. It’s pretty rad.”

  “Sounds . . . rad.”

  “And The Sarah Connor Chronicles is in its sixth year. And Seinfeld is still going.”

  “I bet it’s crap, though.”

  “Yeah it is,” Smidgeon says.

  We stare at the table a minute.

  “When do you think we’re gonna take our first mission?”

  “Actually, that reminds me of something I’ve gotta do,” I say. “Catch you later, OK?”

  Ol’ Smidge nods like we’ve got ourselves a man-date and I hustle from the room wondering if I am going to yet again confirm every bias the insignificant Alison Kirkness has about me.

  She calls me for a hurry-up when I’m halfway across the city.

  *

  ONCE UPON A time a robot went crazy in City Hall. Looking back, now the memories are almost fond, though it begs the question about where Hermes is holed up these days. Last thing I remember about his shiny ass was he was given a gold makeover thanks to Twilight’s magickal rampage. Hasn’t been seen since. His maker, Doc Prendergast, wasn’t backward about chasing after his science project back then, so it is another in a long line of questions going begging to wonder why all has been so quiet from the old Westchester-based pervert. Then of course there’s his pal Dr Martin Thurson. Even thinking about the name puts me in a fug, Sal Doro’s words a chastisement and an obligation.

  Late or not, I’m determined not to show it. As I thump down outside the venerable-looking dome of the mayor’s office, I thumb through my phone directory until I pull up Synergy’s number. It must be my week for enigmatic and utterly spankable ebony babes. I lumber up the steps like Tony Danza in Rocky.

  “Oh my stars and garters, is this Zephyr? Or have you lost your phone?”

  “Very cute, and just as you’d expect from my favorite Federal hottie,” I grin and try not to take notice of the public servants scattering at my approach.