Zephyr II

by Warren Hately

  “Soon,” I say. “Soon. There’s just a few more things I have to deal with.”

  “Will you tell me about it, when you’re done?” Tessa asks.

  “Maybe,” I reply in a soft voice.

  Tess harrumphs. “Well at least you’re being honest. Love you dad.”

  And she hangs up as I stand, tucking the phone away where I can easily double-check my new flight path.

  Krakatoa awaits.

  Zephyr 6.1 “Impromptu Violent Archaeology”

  ARE YOU STILL following this shit? Wow. I guess the Internets must be slow today. Isn’t that how the kids say it now? I digress, I know. And me digressing, well you should know what that means by now. I never thought I would still be messing with this thing when I first felt compelled to keep a private record, and you, my dear figment of the imagination, for surely I won’t ever have to suffer the indignity of these confessionals being unearthed from their cyber-crypt, well you just keep on with the ride – just as I imagined you would.

  To recap, the island my half-brother Julian laughingly referred to as Krakatoa doesn’t look too destroyed from my aerial vantage. It’s a comma-shaped blob of leftover real estate with a big grey bunker overlooking the southern beach and a few shanty dwellings to the north where the land narrows into a shoal descending to perfect blue water the same temperature as piss. Coming out of Mach 5, it is just after midday and there’s no movement on the island that my limited patience lets me to espy. I head for the bunker, remembering the electronic records the Sentinels’ future tech managed to uncover for the base which included blueprints I neglected to download.

  At ground level, the tilt concrete structure is less supervillain base and more ascetic summer camp. I can tell no one’s been here for a good while and my poster perfect pose of readiness slowly relaxes into a casual stroll as I walk in my tattered dungarees past wire mesh fences ajar, litter cascading from rain-bloated wood doorways, ancient packaging, wind-borne and sea-borne detritus, mummified starfish, a few plastic bottles, a chemical drum, a rusted motorbike, loose bits of sheet metal, a child’s plastic doll whitened and made fragile by years in the sun. In the middle of the main courtyard there is a concrete-edged, dirt-filled elevation perhaps thirty feet by the same, two South-East Asian trees leaning into each other like old friends with their aromatic seed pods littering the sandy ground that spark memories as I pause and collect one of the gooey things, the sap on my fingers and the hint of a smell triggering taste memories I didn’t know were in me. There’s an element of my childhood here, so convincingly present, so tangible in my buried thoughts that I need go no further except that I yearn all the more baldly for more answers. I’m not likely to find John Lennon today, I tell myself with a wry expression rendered sardonic by the domino mask – and perhaps it’s just as well. My father remains on Interpol’s top five. I may have the blood of star-faring interdimensional deities on my suit, but I’m not ready to meet the boss I imagine might inhabit this particular level of the game.

  Above ground, the building has two sides bordering the square produced by the raised tree setting. Like all good Asian building fronts, the normal architecture is sheltered by the battered, sliding screens pulled down on a day like this long ago and never drawn up again. Krakatoa, if that was really the name bandied around, which I doubt, was abandoned by my father and his people, not destroyed. On that account, it appears Cher Zhouwheenne was wrong.

  There are big sheds and out-buildings closer to the beach, and the wire fence sags that way to a paved boulevard, years of sand built up around the foundations. Along its left, these out-houses are made of wood half-destroyed by the elements, but time is yet to hide the efforts made to give these structures the playful seaside feel I barely remember from a time that may well have been physically erased from my thoughts. The parasol umbrellas and small decorative paper fans adorning the cracked white paint of the wooden huts are faded and torn, but the memory is fresh in my childish fingertips of those fans snickering in the monsoonal breeze as strong as the spokes of a bicycle tire, and eliciting much the same response to my frightened investigations.

  I was four, five? Was I born here?

  Today my shoulders are broad, not because the pose suits me in my gore-hardened leathers, but because without them I might weep like the boy I cannot remember being.

  *

  I POKE MY nose into the first open doorway I find in the main building, guided by sense memory alone and the uncanny conviction there are concrete stairs here into the undercroft – only it is a broken industrial-style lift shaft, not stairs. The stairs are a metal job, far across the other side of the factory-like hangar, and I skirt the desiccated corpse of a light plane that rests tilted at an angle since one of its landing struts rusted through and broke, one wing brushing the floor a stairway to heaven for the tropical rats that have covered everything with their spoor.

  I lift my hand and do a pretty good impersonation of a flashbulb, then drop down the thirty-odd feet to the concrete level below.

  The undercroft is divided into cubicles and work stations. The details of exactly what went on here have been erased by the passage of years, and while I can recognize some of the machines and various odds and ends, I doubt the presence of a few sewing machines means the Doomsday Man was running an illegal sweatshop. Hopefully, for the sake of the family name, his ambitions were a bit more astronomical than that. I sift through some of the crap, startled by the amount of sand that has come in and live crabs digging through moldy cardboard boxes full of someone else’s mementos, and after pushing in a few soggy doors I come into the theatre room.

  Perhaps it is the soundproof padding that has kept things in a better state. I blow the dust from the projector and tilt the first canister of film to the nascent light, angling to understand the writing which might as well be cuneiform for all I can tell. Again, the rats have been into things. There’s a hole in the ceiling the size of my torso. And when I retrieve the next canister it springs apart in my hands and flakes of celluloid dribble to the sodden shag carpet. It occurs to me then to examine the film already loaded into the machine, and after a minute’s fumbling, Elisabeth’s exhortations that I was never the handiest of husbands echoing in my ears (but I’ve saved the city a few times), I manage to channel enough power into the thing to get the lights up so that blurry images of kids on bicycles sporting inane grins come into wild focus. I have no idea of the mechanism involved, but the principle of the projector I understand well enough and I move the device back until the focus is crisp despite the sagging colors of the ancient family film.

  The boys and girls ride rings around the public square glimpsed on my arrival. The two trees are just babies, and so too some of the children in the arms of various women onlookers. The camera sweeps over them so fast, careless in its caress and capture of history, that I could damn the filmmaker to oblivion except I can only guess whose hand guides the machine. There are no men, though the women, like the children hooting like monkeys and ringing their bells, are of many different colors, including a lady with just a hint of fish-like scales to her grayish skin.

  The film snaps and changes, the children dressed like refugees from some 1950s communist exploitation film now streaking away from the camera’s point-of-view, their backs bare as they ride down the paved strip to the water and abandon their bikes in such a riotous profusion they do not register there must be more than a dozen bicycles there as the children run joyfully into the ocean. Blurred by time and distance, a red-sailed yacht sits off-shore and I am taken by the image of a pentagon with a stylized eye in the middle, such an occult cliché that I blink and almost imagine it’s a fiction until the white design on red leaps again as if the unknown cameraman sought to capture this amid the remote merriment as a message to me from across time.

  One of the boys looks back and gestures. He is a skinny white kid with short dark hair in oversized shorts, and just for a moment I imagine, despite the flow of probabilities, that this is me as a boy, p
ortending a similarly meaningful exchange happening again through the film. And then I notice almost every second kid, at least among the most reckless chargers-into-the-water, are boys of similar complexion and age, none perhaps older than seven.

  The image sputters and whites out as the last of the tape clears the reel and hisses onto the ground.

  I am bending over to retrieve the precious archive when the intruder hits me from behind hard enough to break the average man’s back and I go hurtling into the lit square of the wall and then into darkness as the cinder blocks give way to further unlit spaces revealed by the brute’s unceremonious and impromptu violent archaeology.

  Zephyr 6.2 “Surprise Vector”

  THE DUST CLEARS yet I’m still not entirely sure what I am looking at. Before much else settles into place, my attacker picks me up bodily and throws me through another cinder-block wall and a burst of electrical fire in my own defense gets me clear just long enough to establish we’re still in the undercroft, three or four walls caved in, the colony’s leftovers strewn to decorate the place like the slums of Calcutta.

  Across from me is a mahogany-skinned man with arms the size of tree trunks and what appears to be random pieces of metal jutting from his skin, extending from the end of his hands into the mother of all Edward Scissorhands-type personal weaponry. His comparatively tiny head is crammed nonsensically into what I first mistake to be one of those things injured dogs wear to stop them scratching. The man’s face is a small, shadowed bruise of negative emotions astride a powerhouse physique of imperfect proportions. He is hunchbacked, his legs withered by comparison to the enormous upper body. Drool collects in the bottom of his pipe-like headwear and spills down his chest, and across the room I slowly notice small pieces of metal trash are attaching themselves to the mutant’s arms and back, none of which seem to leaven his mood.

  I’m about to ask him to explain himself when he launches at me again. This time I have a modicum of warning and we grapple like Greek wrestlers until he somehow gets the better of me and scoops me into his arms and again I am thrown across the room, though I use my powers to minimize the impact now I know where I’m meant to be going. A heavy dose of electricity should slow my assailant down, but instead he lifts those enormous guns above his head and flexes muscles that sound like ropes straining to hold back an eight-hundred pound gorilla – and then he hammers across the room again, actually propelling himself ape-like off his fists and then slashing and slamming down at me. It’s all I can do to kick him back, pushing off with my boots, and then I flick into the air like a nimble Tinkerbell and up through the lift-shaft seeking daylight.

  My misshapen attacker bursts from the ground having taken a more direct route, but he appears right in front of my solid haymaker that sends him on a surprise vector barreling across my childhood playground and into the big storage shed across from the boulevard shelters. It is dark in there despite the sweltering heat of the bright day and rather than try to discern his fate, I check my surroundings to make sure there aren’t other foes afield, whoever they might be.

  But whoever the other fella is, he’s not down for the count. The sound of machine parts and trash crunching resounds across the lot as I scan the other approaches and quickly glance at the sky for good measure. When mystery boy charges out again, I hose him down with an experimental measure of concentrated electrical energy and there’s little surprise to see him shrug it off like a bucket of water. Electro-magnetism of some sort forms part of the basis for his twisted powers, though already I suspect the madman is more sideshow freak than superhuman, and considering the locale, the conclusions feel inevitable.

  I do the crouch thing just as he crashes into my personal space, but he’s fast, despite the baggage, and snags my ankle and throws me like a discarded baseball bat into the foundation of the square rotunda. Concrete and dirt explode off me and I feel one of my teeth chip. There is blood from a nick above my eye that closes almost immediately that it opens, little more than a theatrical signifier to show I’m getting my ass kicked. Thanks for that.

  Ploughing into people at a hell of a pace seems to be the main strategy, and again I go under. This time, our passage leaves a deep furrow in the soil as we collide as far as the first of the wooden beach shacks, and then I seal a hard uppercut that barely contacts any jaw, thanks to the weird helmet ensconcing the madman’s skull, but the diversion lets me get my boots under his chest again and then it’s just a short effort to push him off. In the meanwhile, I yell something barely coherent, asking the bastard to identify himself, but there’s not a lot going on behind those small black eyes. He simply comes back, relentless like a storm, and walks into a powerful left cross and then I lay solid blows up and down his body, smoke coming off my knuckles with the charge of my carrier blast until the broken brute slumps to his knees and I ram one of mine upside his jaw and he twists back, defeated, and lays slumped on the ground with his curiously hideous legs bent beneath him.

  I simply eye the mess. There is the power within me to do something more, but I have no idea who I am dealing with here or his reasons for attacking. Slowly my fist relaxes and my shoulders slump in fatigue.

  The voices behind me should come as more of a surprise.

  “You have shown mercy,” the sonorous choir remark.

  I turn and look at five teenage kids glowing with the power of their own quasi-godhood. Dressed in black. Three girls and two boys. They hold hands like the negative images of a child’s paper people chain. Although young, their expressions are remote and damnably superior. One of the boys looks Asiatic and the girls are Sri Lankan, Amerindian, and a redhead. With their hands held tight they speak with one voice.

  “You have shown mercy, and therefore you shall live, but you must leave our father’s isle.”

  “Father?” I say tiredly. “Great. I guess you’d call this another family reunion.”

  *

  THE FIVE SETS of dispassionate eyes do not flinch. There is no curiosity, no twinge of human warmth or natural response to my comment. As the silence unfolds from my pronouncement, so the leering grin slips from my face.

  “You must leave the island,” the teenagers tell me.

  “I don’t think you guys are hearing what I’m saying,” I reply. “You live here? Your father is my father, too. The, uh, Preacher Man. I came here when I was a kid.”

  I could say more, but I’m starting to sound like Woody Allen again with the stammering explanations, so I choose a stiff upper lip as the better part of discretion.

  “The Torus does not dwell on the island, but within space-time itself,” these self-professed siblings of mine say.

  “The . . . Torus?”

  “We are the Torus.”

  “Right. Silly of me. Sorry.”

  “You must leave the island now.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  As a concession to their humanity, the teens glance among each other. Clearly they have no explanation that would count as logic to me. All the trappings of higher consciousness is there except for the ability to communicate it. Classic nerds.

  “Who’s he?” I ask, pointing to the guy groaning on his back, as if my question solves the social awkwardness of the moment.

  “The Torus monitors Doomsday Island from the nethersphere,” the teenagers chime together again, fobbing off my polite social attempts. “You must depart immediately.”

  Frustrated at this latest ignorance, I feel like the impatient big brother I may well just possibly be. The Asian kid is last in line, and I’m in his face before his resolved alien demeanor can do anything about it. I snap my hand around his slim wrist and pull him free of the others. Just as suddenly, the light emanating from him cuts out completely and as I release my grip, the young guy staggers with disorientation and comes out sounding like a startled surfer dude.

  “Whoa,” he says.

  His dark eyes flick around as if I’m not the most obvious thing they need to find.

  “Who’re you?”


  “Didn’t you hear me just explain? I’m Zephyr. I think we’re related.”

  The boy looks at me and I take a moment to check out the greater part of the sundered Torus, each of whom look surprisingly unfazed by my sudden ejection of one of their members.

  “I’m Woo,” the teenager says. “Sorry, it’s been a long time since I was out of the group.”

  He looks around, the gears and whirs almost audible as he absorbs reality from this new level.

  “You’re hooked up with this Torus thing,” I say without making it sound like much of a question. “You guys are Lennon’s kids too?”

  “Uh, well yeah,” Woo replies. “I’m sorry, I have to rejoin before my connection’s broken.”

  Before the kid can shrug me off and move the three paces he needs to latch back on to the hive mind, I get between them and put my hand to his chest.

  “I need to know what the fuck’s going on here, kid, and I need to find Lennon.”

  The boy’s face becomes a mask. I’m not quite prepared for the staccato “Get off me,” or the painless burst of power that flings me thirty feet across the sand. By the time I’m on my feet again, there are five glowing teenagers hovering once more.

  “The Torus exists to preserve the Continuum,” the eerie chanting voices sound again. “You have shown mercy to our subhuman sibling, and thus you shall live. You must leave Doomsday Island. The island must be empty. If you remain, we shall consider you an agent of the Doomsday Man and destroy you.”

  Ultimatum done, there’s a complete absence of special effects as the air collapses in on where the quintet stood. After a few seconds wasting my steely stare to no avail, I turn my gaze to the so called “subhuman”, and when I look up again, I see a handful of local people, Thais in sarongs and linen shirts watching me nervously from beyond the closest wire fence.