True to Sting’s fears, I have to tear apart half-a-dozen African huts, grey-flanked monster carcasses everywhere, to find DJ Ali curled in a corner clutching his cap, his trendy sportswear stained with piss and alien blood. I’m breathing heavily, about as subtle as a truck-load of drag queens, and when I try to gently rouse him, I reflect that I probably shouldn’t be surprised if it’s a natural response for a self-proclaimed infopath to scramble my brain’s ability to regulate my blood flow, body temperature and breathing.
I take one look into the frightened parahuman’s eyes as the darkness streams in and perhaps he says something, an apology, as my legs turn to water and it all goes black.
*
I WAKE IN the DJ’s putrid lap. Ali G is no more. In his place is a terrified middle-class Englishman, the faux junglist accent replaced by a stammering, hiccupping, terror-filled soliloquy as his surprisingly delicate hand strokes my hair.
“. . . Jesus, mate, I’m so sorry. So sorry. I don’t know how this happened. Please breathe. Please. Oh Jesus fuck, did I do this?”
I get up as quickly as I can. A headache about the scale of the late Eighteen Century makes my vision fade in and out as I confirm we’re in the same shitty-assed hut as before. Somehow without the cap and red-tinted goggles, DJ Ali looks like a completely different person. His vaguely ethnic ‘fro has escaped confinement and bears a slight center part. The eyes below are warm and brown and ooze panic.
With a gesture I hush the monologue.
“You’re alright, pal. Do you know where you are?”
“I’ve got not bloody idea, mate. Is this . . . is this Africa?”
“See? You’re not as out of it as you feared.”
“Africa?” the Englishman repeats before clutching his face. “Oh God, this is like some bad fucking dream. You’re Zephyr, aren’t you?”
“That’s right. And you?”
“My name’s Sascha,” the pants-suited former hero replies. “I’m . . . I’m a long way from home, mister.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I say. “What happened?”
The Englishman shakes his head.
“I don’t know. I just . . . there are these things. They were bloody everywhere. I think . . . I think he took care of them. I ran in here, thought there was somewhere I could hide.”
“You nearly killed me,” I say with surprisingly little bitterness.
“I’m sorry. I really don’t know what’s going on.”
I shake my head and I don’t really want to play the gruff gunnery sergeant in this particular movie, but I can’t help myself as I deliver the inevitable line.
“Nothing, pal. Just the end of the world.”
Zephyr 5.17 “Psychic Surgery”
I LEAVE SASCHA clutching himself in the hut and almost immediately there’s a blur of movement and St George lands in front of me. There are big green stains all over his white suit and his plum-colored tie is askew.
“Gordon’s holding the interloper at bay for now, but basic physics are falling down. Where’s Ali?”
I indicate with my thumb.
“Nowhere to be found. Some bloke called Sascha’s in there, though.”
“Oh Christ,” Harrison says and the bleakness chills me to the core, underscoring yet again just how important the whimpering ninny in the tracksuit is to our survival.
“What are we gonna do?” I ask, hardly able to believe some of the words coming from my mouth today.
Most my life I’ve been the A-list actor and suddenly I’m just the bit part in someone else’s movie, wringing my hands and hoping for a solution. This isn’t me.
“Sascha’s emotionally fragile,” St George says. “His powers only work in his constructed persona. The real Sascha Cohen . . . well, I’m not quite sure how it happened. Sting has been working on him gradually, trying to get into his neural architecture when his guard’s down to start fixing some of the problems. There’s some deep trauma. Only trouble is, when you’re the single greatest controller of information on the Earth, that means you’re almost practically immune to telepathy unless you want it.”
Harrison sighs with the force of his last few words and I look unblinkingly at the pitch-black sky behind him as the star creature slowly lumbers west. I have no idea what is in that direction. Sting is just a speck of energy almost lost amid the dark spectacle of eldritch enormity. With a grunt, Shade lands behind us and comes forward looking shaky.
“The sun’s not getting through,” she says and I register for the first time how dangerously normal she looks.
The sleeve of her jacket is gone and she’s so covered in a crust of mud-like slime that I suspect she’s been inside the horror, trying to fight it from within – and without much luck.
George pulls a fob-watch from his jacket and peers at it.
“There’s a few hours of daylight left,” he says drily. “I’d put this down to the inter-dimensional effect. Pretty soon we’re going to start losing oxygen, gravity, maybe even linear time itself.”
“Fuckin’ hell,” Shade says.
“This thing’s already set off earthquakes across half the globe,” I say, adding my own particular gloom to the conversation. “God knows how many dead.”
Harrison nods. “It’s the same old story, Zephyr. What we tried to tell you earlier this month. It’s down to us and it always will be. Not much point calling in the SAS.”
I glance at the receding back of the monstrosity.
“No.”
St George steps away with a finger in his ear like a man receiving an important phone call.
“Sting’s coming,” he says. “Bringing him in.”
Space-time makes a squelchy noise and the missing Brit, staggeringly like at the end of a long run, appears from thin air and practically collides with me. He grasps my shoulder and gives another of his toothy, handsome, world-weary grins.
“Bloody hell, Zephyr,” he says and smiles and pats my leather shoulder. “Talk about a hairy one.”
“You said I had potential,” I tell him, our faces close, my determination to snatch a bigger part for myself in this script apparent in my uncharacteristic seriousness.
“That’s right,” he replies between breaths. “You’ve got the firepower. The right spread of initial abilities, as the boffins might say.”
I recall the FBI scientist’s reference to my mother’s domain and nod.
“And you’re a telepath, right? You’ve been trying to fix Sascha for months.”
“Years,” Sting replies. “Nearly five years.”
“But he’s been fighting you,” I say. “I won’t.”
“I don’t know that it’s as simple as all that,” George Harrison says from the side.
“By training, I mean meditation and the search for Agartha, Zephyr,” Sting says, a mirror to my own hard-set expression. “I don’t know if there’s any cheats for that.”
“No,” I say and nod like everything so far has been perfectly reasonable. “But I’m not asking for enlightenment. If you can get into my head, you can unshackle whatever mental blocks are holding me back. Whatever they are. And even if it’s a one-off – call it hypnotism, call it mind control – we might be able to trigger something strong enough to beat this thing.
“Remember,” I tell them. “I’m the son of the Preacher Man.”
*
IT IS HARD to recall the experience for you. Certainly there’s next to no memory of whatever psychic surgery Sting performs. At the level of the unconscious there are few concrete signposts for meaning to attach itself, and so I can only really explain that for five or so minutes I feel like I am trying to birth a baby horse through my left eye socket. Any other description would be pure metaphor or fiction, though the others will later tell me I nearly electrocuted Shade as she pinned me by the shoulders to the floor of the dirty hut.
Likewise, for the minutes needed to defeat the alien god-beast, it isn’t really me who emerges from the telepathic crucible to do battle. Anything
superfluous to the flow of power in my veins is momentarily suppressed, dead, non-existent. The me who steps from the flattened village as if from a dream is the unbridled Id, the genetic godhead who controls my powers, the me of my fantasies not beholden to fears, limits, fallibility, and other such previously concrete laws of my inner universe.
The African breeze caresses my aura as I suck the very life from the world and convert it to raw power. I barely think it and the world leaps to my command. I don’t simply fly. I became the thunderbolt. Like Shade before me, I tear a path straight through the star-creature, but my wake is far more devastating to the godling, as evidenced by a pained bellow that shakes the blank savannah with a psychic echo that leaves springboks and gazelles dead for a hundred miles in every direction.
In that moment I discover just how wrong it is to ratify the creature as a god. In the dimension from whence this horror has shambled, it is little more than a squamous amoeba, a coherent virulence, a crawling terraformer the true powers of that dissonant universe has sent across to erase all life and prepare the way for their own metaphysical invasion. If people in ancient times kenned to the existence of such things and named them thus and worshipped them as gods, then such is the folly of immature minds. In truth, the powers behind such disastrous offspring are so vast and incoherent and between-the-cracks of what simplistic consciousness can perceive that it isn’t even really possible to posit them as entities in any way that has or forever will make sense to members of the human race. All that matters is the star-creature is their herald and can be killed. The rest, I hope – or patently don’t hope, as my mindless rage sends power coruscating from every pore of my skin – will fall into place once the threat had been banished forever.
Amid the chaos and slaughter, I fail to see the convoy of Range Rovers throwing up dust across the desert plain. The feeble chatter of the cultists’ automatic weapons don’t even register as I seize great chunks of the beast and incinerate them in my grasp. It is Shade and St George who throw their shadows over the mad bastards who conjured all this and exercise fatal judgement for the greater good of the world. Harrison gestures and the lead vehicle makes a noise like whales mating and becomes a fireball, shards of broken wreckage tangling the others and drawing them into a deadly wake.
I understand that I face the bastard child of a vastly alien cosmic consciousness, but at first I don’t connect what exactly the deaths of its summoners means for our universe.
I am literally up to my neck in alien foulness, teeth set in a fierce grimace, the blackened husks of dozens upon dozens of the menacing symbiotes trickling like empty machinegun casings from a thousand yards high in the air, and it is only when the star-creature again makes a sickening noise that perforates bowels at a hundred paces that I glean that the Classical laws of our side of the barrier have triumphed and the monster is now not only vulnerable, but thoroughly mortal. And then my sense of vengeance truly kicks in and it is not until twenty minutes or so later, with a sun-blackened Shade by my side, that the thing manages to lay a glove on me – a backwards whack with a tusk-encrusted tentacle that flings me to near the Zambian border – that I relax long enough to appreciate the menace is near to its end and we have won the battle despite the severity of the tide.
From my sudden vantage I watch as the mile-high invader sloughs to one side and begins to fall. Two minutes later, the force of its collision with the earth is the last register for the worldquake that will consume the media in the coming days, although so little of the true tale will ever be told.
The dust cloud is like something from the apocalypse. When it begins to clear at ground level, there they are, Shade and Sting and George Harrison and the DJ, walking toward me like the Magnificent Seven short a few. Sting has that damnable self-satisfied grin, his close-cropped hair chalk white with the fallout, and Shade’s smile is one of the sweetest photographic negatives I’ve ever seen. Harrison is evidently pleased despite the ruined suit, and DJ Ali stands off to one side trying not to look like a man who recently shat himself. He gives a vague hand gesture with one gold-covered appendage, eye-wear firmly back in place as he says, “Boo-ya,” and kindly leaves it at that.
“All in one piece again?” I say to Sting and try not to wink to meaningfully.
“It’s just a patch-up job, mate. Field work,” he says. “Same could be said for you. Worn off already?”
“I guess my brain’s not ready to be completely ironed out yet,” I reply.
Shade comes up and throws an arm around my shoulders.
“You can almost hear all the mental defects and phobias falling back into place,” she grins. “It must be like Victoria Station in there.”
I would say something, but I am lost. My stomach growls inaudibly, and I have to keep adjusting my stance for fear my legs will give out completely.
“Nice work, Zephyr,” St George says and leans across and offers me his hand.
“Thanks.”
The word comes easily and I realize I am in danger of grinning like a loon and completely blowing my reputation with these people.
“Problem sorted then? I’ll be off.”
“Do you want me to send you home?” the former Beatle asks.
“Na,” I say and shrug, smiling, hoping my high school geography will be good enough to do the trick.
“You’ll, uh, think about our offer then, Zeph?” Sting asks. “Obviously, we make a pretty good team.”
“Oi,” Shade says with a laugh. “Don’t forget me.”
“How could we,” Sting says with more than a touch of the politician about him.
His eyes never leave mine, something predatory about him despite the kindness.
“I’ve got a lot to sort out,” I say to him. “Leave it with me.”
“OK.”
“Oh, and next time you’ve got a world-shattering catastrophe?”
“Yeah?”
“Leave you out of it?” St George says.
“No,” I reply. “Just send me the co-ordinates. If I want to get sucked on a bad trip through space-time, I’ll watch some old Eddie Murphy films.”
Everyone laughs except for Shade and I fling myself into the air with difficulty and orient myself towards what I hope is home.
Zephyr 5.18 Coda
I SORTA CRAP out over Central America and find a beach, lying flat out near some tropical cantina as the sun sets and the fireflies come out and then a nice lady comes down to find out what the white guy in leather pants is doing passed out in the sand. I think she spends at least ten minutes thinking I am Russell Brand, but we manage to communicate by sign language that I need a few stiff drinks and still without the benefit of language we end up at her house going at it like, I dunno, words fail me, though the expression “wild hyenas” springs to mind, however unflattering the connotations may be.
It is morning again by the time I wake to the Latino sun banging against the window blinds and the woman, the owner of the beach café, it turns out, is dressing primly for work. She smiles and says something, el Zepharo or what sounds close to it, and she departs and leaves me with a wry smile, nursing my boner and thinking of home and the enormity of what I’ve just done – that’s not saving the cosmos from gibbering alien deities, but sleeping with a woman who isn’t my wife, out of wedlock as it were. Yeah, I know you might feel there’s nothing particularly new to this sort of behavior, but there’s an intrinsic difference now that I’m actually on my lonesome once more and it feels mostly bad rather than good, the euphoria of fucking slowly draining from me like the blood from my cock as I try to soberly address the reality in which I’m once again mired.
I don’t know the name of the town. Still in my hero get-up, I wander down to the beachfront and snag a copy of the local daily. My Spanish isn’t so great, but the pictures and numbers tell their own story. They are putting the death toll at 20,000 in North America. Other continents haven’t fared so well. The Australians are practically untouched, again. It was breakfast-time or something
and they were all out jogging, or so CNN would have us believe. The Chinese are saying nix about their own casualties and the French are in mourning for Le Tour Eiffel. I hear Pisa went as well, but later I confirm this is just a hoax, though don’t tell me how the damned thing manages to survive.
My heart is drifting in the direction of Atlantic City once more, but my thoughts, my boiler-room unconscious, hammers on the pipes to remind me of a dozen recent conversations. Almost unwittingly I check my phone and confirm the co-ordinates to the island remain within.
Sitting in my hand, the phone comes alive to draw me back from my sudden contemplativeness.
“Daddy? Where are you?”
I smile, the proud father for a moment before memory and reality kick in their mean double act.
“I’m on a mission somewhere,” I tell her, technically the truth. “I couldn’t tell you where.”
“I haven’t heard from you since things went crazy.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I was right in the middle of ‘things’.”
“Figured you were,” Tessa aka Windsong says. “Are you OK?”
“Fine. You survived? And your mom?”
“She’s back at work already. There’s gonna be mucho damages claims, I bet,” my daughter replies. “I was helping out your gang, actually.”
“My gang?”
“I think they think you’ve forgotten them too, so it doesn’t surprise me,” she says. “I mean the Sentinels. We mopped up the harbor after the tsunami hit.”
“Shit. Was it bad?”
“Just the bodies. . . .”
“Bodies you can learn to handle,” I say, probably sounding without much sympathy, but as always my heart is in my mouth for my girl when I think of the risks she’s exposed to.
Tessa nods back down the line without much conviction and I tally up yet another reason to feel like a jerk today.
“When are you coming back?” she asks.
Out to sea, a tanker chugs along on its vector to an unseen port. The gulls hover like hang-gliders in the air above me as the hour creeps towards noon.
Zephyr II Page 23