“He’s invisible. And inaudible. It’s a psychic thing.”
“Who is he?” Twilight asks.
“A British . . . super.”
Twilight scans the air in the wrong spot, scowling suspiciously.
“Why doesn’t he come out where we can all see?”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “It’s complicated.”
“Yo, Zephyr! Check it!” Ali cat-calls from above. “Is you wiv us? I know what you is finkin’, aiiight? But here it is: dis bother’s your chance to see da Beatles, you know, like ‘live in concert,’ yo?”
“Sorry Twilight,” I say in mounting frustration. “I’ve gotta go.”
“Go where?”
I look up.
“Good question.”
The DJ puts his big-ass headphones back in place and smiles, nodding to himself with whatever dub groove he’s hearing. He clicks his fingers.
“Africa.”
“Great.”
He says that annoying word of his meant to confirm my agreement to whatever the hell he and George Harrison and Sting have planned. And then the world converts into a different set of dimensions – one where reality is corridor shaped and has the world’s most powerful vacuum cleaner at the other end.
I immediately speed away from Twilight and the fanboys and Tony Azzurro’s gruesome death scene and the still-trembling buildings to cross some kind of vast and inexplicable void – not so much teleported as fellated through time and space to where a harsh desert sun pounds unblinkingly down on an ocean of yellow sand and the sun-bleached bones of people’s skeletons that litter the ground in abundance.
I look for Twilight just to confirm he’s really gone. DJ Ali is nowhere in the sky any more and the sun’s so bright that with my eyes, still open to the Atlantic City night, I’m damned if I would be able to see him up there anyway. Instead, my scalded sight is drawn to a small and crisp white-and-yellow figure dashing from one structure to another in the small African village at the bottom of the sand-colored slope.
If the source of the worldquake is here, I can’t see a thing. In preparedness, I clench my fists, reassured by my powers as sparks run over my knuckles. My heart’s pounding, otherwise I might have the sense to use those limited extra senses my abilities provide. In the absence of a strategy, I lift over the village as DJ Ali looks up as my shadow crosses him.
“Respect.”
“What the hell is going on?” I shout. “Where are the others?”
“Oh yeah,” the wannabe Rasta says and snaps his fingers once more. “I forgot.”
There’s no chance for me to inquire. Instead, the world lurches either one-eighty degrees or folds into seventeen new dimensions as night returns to the African plateau through the jagged slit of a space-time vagina dentata yawning vast and obnoxious over our heads. You would think this would be a hard thing to miss – you can see stars blinking beyond the ruptured dimensional veil, and perhaps weird flying things dwarfed by the vast alien presence currently squeezing its way into our universe – and likewise St George and Sting, the former flying through the air in his customary white suit, the later hovering above a nearby dune in the lotus position. Clearly our errant DJ’s informational capabilities are the source of a greater explanation I am neither sure I could ever process nor am I likely now to live to see delivered.
The death of galaxies is above us.
I do not have a name for the thing and I do not want to know one, though I am aware others have at least sought to try. Its nightmarish form, which I could really only fail to describe, seeks to devour worlds upon end and yet, like some merely quasi-imagined doom, its center-point somehow appears to be here, today, in this desert, its fangs and suckers and claws and vestigial mouths all part of a devolved apex which is more violent geometry or peripatetic memory than an actual organism. Whatever it hopes to achieve, if such alien minds are even able to conceive of the universe in this way, it begins here, now, and suddenly I understand exactly the stakes Sting and George Harrison tried previously to describe. And it makes the latex-clad peacocking of me and my fellow New Sentinels less than a joke by comparison.
Zephyr 5.15 “Tactical Error”
“ZEPHYR! MOVE IT!”
I barely register the woman’s voice. I’m too struck dumb by the alien horror above me and its slick, gynaecological rain of parasitic lifeforms that are amok on the prehistoric plain, death to whoever lived here before, their lives an unquiet sacrifice, I am certain, to kick this cosmic interlude into action.
Shade slams into me doing just under Mach, confident I guess because of our recent dog-fight that I can take it as she jets through and physically moves me from the path of some gigantic rampaging appendage big enough to shatter skyscrapers. I am reminded, absurdly, of X-Wing fighters circling mechanical legs with metal grapnels, and then Shade and I slam into the side of a dune three or four miles away with a detonation of sand spraying into the air.
The handsome Englishwoman is pitch black. I guess the hard light of the sub-Saharan climate suits somebody.
“Gotta think quicker’n that, matey,” she says, and her white teeth somehow convey the amusement her charcoal demeanor cannot.
“I’m sorry,” I respond breathlessly and wave my hand at the thing.
Even here, we have barely moved from the killing radius of the star-creature. It is a wonder we have the practically lifeless desert in which to fight this thing, and I only learn later that this, too, is thanks to the intervention of my erstwhile friends. Harrison, probably the world’s most powerful living telekinetic, threw the mad, murderous thing off its initial target – Paris.
Shade gives me her black hand and hoists me up. I perceive the merest sliver of whiteness and St George passes by, waving encouragingly.
“Good to see you Zephyr,” he cries. “Might need all hands on deck for this one.”
He’s gone before I can reply. There is a noise, strong enough to deafen cities, that sounds like a thousand assholes letting loose at once. A gout of ichor vast enough to drown a village like the one already sundered pours from the air and to the ground, and at least some of the dozens of weird horned, spiked, clawed, rubbery proboscised creatures teeming across the yellow sand terrain are sucked into the ensuing mudslide and removed from sight.
“Like the man said. All hands,” Shade says.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“Not sure,” the Englishwoman says. “Never even knew these guys existed. So much for the Jacks, eh? Anyway, I’m jacked of the Jacks, as you Yanks might say.”
“Problems?”
“Superheroes. You know. Bad as fucking models.”
For a moment I misunderstand her grammar and my aborted reply almost trips me. Then I remember we’re caught in insanity-threatening peril and its possibly us between the void and the end of the Earth. Again, as St George would say.
*
“RIGHT,” I MUTTER and crunch my knuckles into my opposite palm as if it might do us any good. “Who the fuck is this guy?”
“I don’t think its name was made for human mouths,” Shade replies.
“Norwegian, is it?”
If Shade raises an eyebrow, I can’t tell. I wave her off.
“Plan of attack?”
“That’d be nice,” she says. “As far as I understand, the DJ bloke is suppressing whatever natural effect the alien environment beyond the void is having on our world.”
We risk another look front-on at the galactic terror, or more properly the space around it.
“What, like alien gasses and crap like that?”
“No,” Shade says with a distracted shake of her stiffly-coiffured head. “That’s more than just your everyday rent in time and space. You’re talking about over-the-border alien physics. Non-Classical principles that challenge the fundamentals of our universe. Let those take hold and you can forget gravity, mass, velocity. It all just becomes alien porridge, or whatever the hell these blokes follow over there.”
I lo
ok at one of the star-god’s myriad eyes.
“Heh. ‘Blokes’.”
“You know what I mean.”
We watch as the beyond-enormous thing re-orients itself, a minor sand-storm around its base obscuring the impossibility of tentacles and limbs and bus-sized genitalia upon which the monster balances.
The cosmic disturbance has fallen foul of the local weather gods, at least, and they sing their song across my sensorium as a purple-headed thundercloud intrudes on what remains of the ordinary sky. But when there is a flash, moments later, it’s not a weather pattern but Sting, somewhere now on the other side of the celestial intruder, using his famed powers now grown to thankfully cosmic proportions themselves.
“That’s a pretty easy handle on the theoretical principles you’ve got there, honey,” I remark to Shade.
“I’m reading physics and quantum mathematics at Harvard in my spare time,” she says with a glibness that can only mean the truth.
She turns and winks at me, the gesture visible only by the sudden occlusion of her eye.
“Don’t be fooled by the Dickensian patois, mate.”
“Sheesh, I don’t even understand what that means, but you’re on,” I reply, her exuberance as well as her accent contagious. “Do you fancy having a go at kicking alien monster god ass, or what?”
“Ordinarily I’d vote for ‘Or what’,” Shade replies. “Today, I don’t think we’ve got any choice.”
Counter-point to our assertions, a wave of bizarre, quasi-reptilian bipeds with eyes on the end of their lolling tongues come rushing up the dune embankment and I step forward to flash fry the first few of them before Shade starts laying in with her by-now diamond-hard karate chops. The air’s filled with a symphony of slaughter as alien beastie goo ruptures and flies, spattering us in ectoplasm and mucus like some bizarre New Year’s Eve club party gone wrong.
Shade grabs the last of the things by its serrated sideways jaws and twists and forces the whole monstrosity down until its pseudo-life ends in a gasped series of crackles.
“Way to go.”
“Only way to go,” Shade says. “Afraid to say that was just warmin’ up. You ready to go the whole hog?”
I glance up at ‘the hog’ in question again and nod, swallowing with difficulty. I have the perverse wish to know its name and think of my erstwhile buddy Twilight and our recent discussion about demons from space. Whatever we are facing now makes Hariss as-Sama seem almost pedestrian. While I have danced around the edges of such cosmogeny half my career, like the man on the sidewalk who chooses not to stare up at the skyscrapers in the city towering over him for fear of vertigo, I’ve resisted peering into these depths too closely.
Now we’ll see if that was a tactical error.
Zephyr 5.16 “Just The End Of The World”
SHADE AND I fire like rockets into the middle stratosphere. The planetary irruption tracks us, shoots out enormous pseudopods covered in oozing spikes to hunt us down. Flying almost like we’ve co-ordinated it, I slap Shade on her rock-hard rear and fall into her wake, letting the autonomous feelers lock onto her and race straight into the path of my electrical blast. The creature’s fronds sizzle open and fall away and we arc halfway around the thing, taking in the sort of recon of its cavities and fissures like normally you’d study in a landscape – just not one standing up and walking around
One of its many suggestive ventricles burst open as we pass, and emerging from the gloop is an array of huge, bat-like missiles that look as if they were grown in a giant petri dish in a secret lab at Boeing. As they free themselves from the afterbirth, the wings snap out to reveal serrated edges and bio-chemical burners in the tails, evolved, I suspect, just to account for Shade and I, which mean the fuckers do a pretty mean job of keeping up. I dive and swoop and Shade and I go our separate ways, more than one objective for the Cyclopean deity at least, and I lure three of the flying nightmares into a quick electrical death, consigning them back to the nothing from whence they came while two more remain doggedly locked on my ass.
I swoop low across the terrain. As we near the burnt-out village again, the creatures suddenly lose all complexity and they crash out of the sky strangely spastic, disappearing amid their own sand burials as DJ Ali sticks his head out from behind a wreck of wattle and daub architecture.
“Wassup?”
“A trick of yours, I gather?” I motion to the disappeared bat-things.
“Yo, easy mon,” Ali says and rubs his knuckles on the shiny front of his shimmery merchandise. “’s hard to fly when you is ain’t knowin’ which way’s up or down.”
“Information.”
“Is me bitches,” the Brit super replies.
“Mate,” I say in inverted commas, “I don’t buy this act of yours, so you don’t have to keep trying so hard. You British fucks are showing me a thing or two. No need for theatrics.”
“British? What, me is Jamaican, yo.”
I wipe a hand across my sweating brow and let it go.
“We need a strategy for taking this bastard down.”
“Respect. You think me is havin’ a laugh? I gots me bung-hole hangin’ out jus’ keepin’ dis batty boy in his cage.”
“Can’t you make the information blackout . . . fatal?” I ask.
The caricature gives a nervous shake of his capped head and for the first time I catch a glimpse beyond his psychotic visage to the ordinary mental patient behind – one who is rapidly losing hold of the situation at hand.
State-side, we call that strike one. Time to try one of the others.
I break the too-fragile contact and scan the increasingly end-of-the-world landscape. There’s another flash, less bright than before, and a visible concussive wave repels a concentrated assault by the alien’s tentacles. Sting is at the center of it, hands raised, head down as if he is surveying the scene by senses other than eyes alone. I make a quick decision and speed into the air again, insectoid flyers crackling off me dead in the collision between their haste and my own.
In the transit between my old position and the new, I can’t help marvel at the truly gargantuan bulk of the intruder. All those old Lovecraftian clichés don’t really do the trick, however hard they try. Up close, it’s easy to forget you’re viewing an individual life form, between the scale of the creature and teeming thousands of parasitic entities either sliding from within the beast or circling like midges around it. And of course, on the sort of scale we’re talking about, some of the parasites are as big as cars, gelatinous shapes full of evil intent, sadism etched on every serrated limb, groping tentacle or razor-sharp spine. Behind them, what I’d loosely call the alien’s torso looks like an organic high-rise, vaguely cylindrical and rotating as it changes its focus between the flying St George and Sting’s levitating yogi routine.
The Shirtless One greets me telepathically as I draw near.
“Zephyr,” he says. “Glad you could make it. What do you think of our operation now?”
I draw up, hovering in the thunderstorm air before him. White incandescence seems to come from within, like his bones are glowing beneath his skin. It is suggestive of life, power, a cosmic attachment to the very principles of the universe to which our alien visitor seems the antithesis. If ever I had doubts in my career about some of my allies, on this occasion – like the nine years we endured of World War Two – it is a clear-cut division between the good and the evil.
“I see I’m not the only recruit,” I tell him.
“No, but you might be our most useful.”
I eye the living mountain a moment and turn back to Sting.
“Howso?”
“You have the right attributes to be a powerhouse, Zephyr. If only we had started your education sooner,” he says.
“Well, I’m here now. And we need to stop this fucking thing.”
“Easy, chap. I know.”
Sting smiles uneasily, the bones in his face not letting him present anything other than the picture of Aryan good looks. Yet even I am no
t blind to the grim undertones.
“So, what?” I say.
“Just a moment,” Sting says. “He’s coming again.”
And indeed he is.
*
GEORGE HARRISON’S HARRYING efforts have obviously bored the monster. Again it turns to the other opponent, and for blind seconds, Sting and I battle against a storm of organic contagion squirted from deep within the entity’s cavernous form. Instinctively, we know better than to breathe, together lighting up the sky like a pair of allied thunder gods, like Olympians or something as we incinerate the bio-chemical attack and then have to fight our way free of a few dozen obscene attackers of a much bigger variety, their bodies like enormous double-jointed hands, nightmarish insect wings buzzing invisibly like chopper blades and rending the air with their foul betrayal of the naïve physics of our world.
It strikes me the creatures are getting more powerful and if we’re having this much trouble with the godling’s minions then we are probably pretty much fucked. Sting has obviously maintained some manner of telepathic bridge and when I half-speak, half-think my observation, he tells me to go make sure the DJ is still in the fight.
“I know you think he’s a fool,” Sting tells me, “but he’s the only one really keeping these buggers in their place. If Ali falls, we ‘aven’t got a hope in hell.”
It’s a grim prospect, the fate of the world resting on a guy who spends most of his free time drawing dongs on pictures in the newspaper. I nod, barely voicing my obedience, and drop from the sky like Mickey Rourke in Mission: Impossible, the air thick with a broiling soup of alien gizzards raining around me from Sting’s counter-attack.
Once on terra firma, I use a rare burst of super-speed to cross the terrain, my thoughts still stuck in the chaos I’ve just escaped, and most importantly, dwelling on Sting’s cautionary tale. If it is true I could be more than I am, I fancy it’ll take a school of psychiatrists to eke out why every fiber of my being screams against such a scenario.
Zephyr II Page 22