Zephyr II

by Warren Hately

  “Just like someone should’ve gone after Samurai Girl, you mean?” I add.

  There is an audible intake of their collective breath, but when the abuse comes, I don’t expect it to be from Nightwind, who’s not even a member of the team.

  “Jesus Zephyr,” he growls in his unfamiliar voice. “You’re such a goddamned coward. You don’t even deserve to lead this team.”

  *

  I HAVE TO restrain myself, or at least that’s what I think for a moment until I am true to myself and the reality is I really just want to get the hell out of here with the minimum fuss, no matter what ass-wipes like Nightwind want to say. I raise an eyebrow not lost on the other members of the squad despite my ever-present black domino and Nightwind, his black rubber face-mask in his hand, pulls back his hood to reveal a frustrated and angry face.

  At first I think I am looking at a double of myself, the sweat pasting back dark gingery-brown hair and clinging to a few days’ stubble. But the intense blue eyes aren’t mine and the complexion, made sickly by the rubber costume, won’t leap back into health like my own wind-burnished visage. I think for a moment I know this face from elsewhere, some bit-part actor in a film I may or may not have caught late at night on the wall-hugging couch of my old apartment, Elisabeth snoring in the bedroom with a pussy full of cum, the flatscreen on low and dialed to pay-per-view we could never afford.

  “Who the fuck are you, buddy, to say anything about anything?” I say to him.

  I look at the photo in my hand and then angrily back at the demasked Nightwind, his blue eyes boring into my skull. My posture tenses and I put the photo on the table to better prepare myself, for all the world like a man about to whoop ass.

  “You’re a coward, Zephyr. Don’t try and pose like a big man. You’re not gonna thrash me.”

  “I’m not sure what makes you so confident,” I reply in a cool voice.

  “Because you’re lazy . . . and you just want out.”

  Nightwind’s comment isn’t what I expected and quite apart from the fact he’s pretty much completely on the money, I have no idea where the dude’s getting his intel. It’s not like I’m above beating the crap out of him here and now, just because I can, so long as the Wallachians and my little gal pals don’t get in the way. But he’s right that I’m in no mood for picking a fight. That little part of me that retains a sense of wrongness about my last tirade doesn’t have the energy for this nonsense and it’s possible to say I don’t take most of these people serious enough to even need to thrash them.

  “Sounds like you know all there is to know,” I reply tersely. “I didn’t realize you were such a big fan.”

  “Once was, believe it or not,” Nightwind says.

  I am guessing that was about fourteen million years ago.

  “Yeah, well, it’s hard to grow up, kid.”

  Nightwind looks at the other guys. There’s no way Vulcana is going to come back, but Smidgeon and Mastodon have different breeds of the same incensed expression on their faces. The ‘Don’s flowing moustaches are flecked with grey and his dark eyes are furrowed beneath caveman brows.

  “When did you turn into such an asshole?” he asks me.

  I shake my head in reply.

  “Jeez, ‘Don. That’s rich coming from you. You’re lucky you’re even still on the team. You were meant to be a reserve except Annie Black sold out to the Feds.”

  Mastodon’s shocked look isn’t exactly the payoff my nasty competitive streak promised. I avoid his eyes and ignore Brasseye, who’s pretty much just a spectator in all this, and glance instead at Smidgeon and then Seeker, costume-less as I guess she is likely to be hereafter.

  “This missing passenger plane isn’t going to find itself, gentlemen,” the robot says at last.

  The other heroes look lost for words and action. Loren has since relinquished her hold and I drop my eyes to the ancient team photograph on the almond-shaped glass table, aware there’s probably some postmodern intertextual shit going on with one team under scrutiny while another one collapses around me. Instead, my gaze focuses on a dark-haired woman at the left of the front row, her arm in a comradely pose around the shoulders of a guy apparently called Fortress, according to the liner notes.

  “We’re better than this sort of bickering, Zephyr,” Smidgeon says. “Seeker said it and no one doubts your experience. You can still come with us if you want.”

  I pick up the photo and turn it over.

  The woman’s name is Spectra. The granulation of the photo makes it impossible to tell and she has a very 60s-style spiked face mask like numerous heroines once wore. The lavish black hair and the willowy uniform give nothing away, but in my gut I know I am again looking at the Demoness.

  Funny how she evades the eye like that.

  “Zephyr,” Mastodon says. “People are missing. Coast Guard registered a series of purple flashes.”

  Admittedly, I barely hear him.

  “No, you go,” I say, and start from the room with my mind locked on the photograph in my hand. “There’s someone I’ve got to see.”

  It strikes me where I should be: seeking answers to this whole thing. The Isle of White, where the Beatles had their home and where one of them, the Visionary, still dwells.

  As I pass Nightwind, he declines to move aside and I shoulder him back easily enough and continue through the door. I am barely a few paces away, destination already set in my head, as my teammates contemplate the sudden thinning of their ranks.

  Zephyr 6.9 “A Seasoned Adventurer”

  IT IS NIGHT above the dark and surging grey Atlantic, the womb of oceans as I descend through the pelting rain to the bleak island, the one-time famous base strangely antiquated after twenty, thirty years away from public scrutiny. The castle and lighthouse at the other end of the rocky scarp near the established township throw a feeble glow over my immediate horizon, but there aren’t even emergency lights over the razor-wire fences of the Beatles’ enclosure.

  I land with water gushing off me, the prison-like door in the huge white plaster stone wall as good a point of entry as any. As I walk towards it, the metal door cracks open and light like from a naked globe spills out to frame a tall, well-groomed and inimitably sad-looking gentleman in butler’s attire.

  “Please come out of the weather, Master Zephyr. If you had sent notice of your arrival we could have turned on the meteorological systems.”

  I nod curtly and squeeze past the plum-speaking servant, not entirely successful in keeping my moisture to myself.

  “I am Ames, if it pleases you, sir – Master McCartney’s chief aide.”

  “How’d you know I was coming? Radar?”

  “Master McCartney insists on the very best security,” the butler says. “It may not look it to speak of it, sir, but the Beatles Sanctum is equipped with state-of-the-art systems.”

  “From which decade?”

  The butler turns his face away in a clear sign of displeasure. I can live with it. I’ve offended people I actually care about recently enough.

  “This way, please. Mr McCartney is just getting changed to greet you.”

  “He doesn’t have to do anything special on my behalf,” I say. “I’ve just got a few questions.”

  “Believe me, sir,” the butler says in a rare moment of candor. “He most definitely does.”

  There is something of the submarine to the whole set-up. I am reminded of Julian Lennon’s observatory, except where that was elegant and expensive, this place is pure boiler room. There have been concessions to human comfort over the years, though there’s a palpable sense of much of the upholstery being ripped up and sold off in later years, like I’m inspecting just the shell of what was once the headquarters of the greatest superhero team on Earth. Now and then on the industrial walls there are alcoves with dusty trophies and framed photographs, casting my mind back to the Avenger’s lair, but while both needed a good spring clean, there’s more than the neglect of years at work here. If I didn’t know better, I’d s
ay the place was being cannibalized.

  We go up metal stairs and into a big round chamber and the man in the middle of the practically unlit space is perhaps one of the biggest human beings I have seen in my life. With effort, he has squeezed into the pants and jacket that once made the Beatles so iconic, but McCartney’s girth has long since escaped the confines of mere mortal clothes.

  I suspect his waistline went some time not long after his eyes. It is truly sad and pathetic to see the scarred, fleshy face casting about like a robotic chicken until our heavy footfalls on the metal floor alert him to our arrival.

  “Ames,” Visionary says in a voice that sounds like it’s choking on itself. “I can’t find the fucking gizmo-whatsit. Can you see it? Fucking eyes.”

  I wouldn’t have a clue to what he’s referring, so I demur to the butler, who steps like a seasoned adventurer into the middle of the trash-cluttered chamber and removes a huge goggle-like device with a heavy metal cable from a long desk housing snowed-over computer monitors. I recognize various approaches through the storm rendered as slow motion camera tracks and then turn back to McCartney as he slips the cybernetics into place.

  “That’s better,” he says and burps and tiredly eases his bulk onto a tiny swivel chair near a bunch of other screens, at least one of which shows a website for amputee women. “Who are you? That American lad?”

  “I’m Zephyr,” I say as straight as I can manage, uncomfortable to be looking back into the insectoid gaze.

  “John Lennon was my father.”

  *

  THE VISIONARY STARES at me through his computerized vision for long moments and swallows his own belch and looks away, fumbling among the rubbish on the nearby counter to find a cigarette.

  “You and all the others.”

  “I’ve only found out about that recently.”

  “Poor cunt. What do you want? Money? There isn’t none.”

  “I’m not after money,” I say cautiously.

  Paul McCartney lights the cigarette and coughs professionally, like a concession to the role he’s playing, and then he waves the smoke at me.

  “Not very impressive, am I?”

  “That’s, um, not for me to judge. . . .”

  “Fuck, that’s weak even for you, Zephyr.”

  I say nothing at his suggestion perhaps he’s more familiar with my oeuvre than he at first let on. And McCartney puffs away for more than a minute, using his undoubtedly expensive optics to scroll through another monitor that might be email and might be the contents of an FTP server. Hell, it could well be midget porn, for all I know.

  “What do you want, then?” he asks finally. “If you’re looking for John, I don’t know how to find him. I’d say follow the trail of pussy, but that trail’s probably a bit stale. Who was your mum?”

  “Catchfire.”

  “Catchfire? Never heard of her.”

  Beneath him, I gather. And in his words I hear my own dismissal of various actresses and TV reporters I’ve nonetheless been happy enough to nail over the years.

  “I want to ask you about these guys.”

  Without making it too homo-erotic, I pull the sweat-stained photograph from my jacket, rise, and place it on the counter near his ashtray.

  McCartney looks down at the image for a long while. With the silver box of the optics over his face, for all I know he has gone to sleep as the cigarette burns to a withered ghost of itself between his baby-fat fingers. Then he drops the butt onto the metal grille and grinds it into an extinction of glowing sparks beneath what appears to be a slightly chewed slipper.

  “Who are they?” he asks, mesmerized.

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” I reply and confess to a mild disappointment despite my hunch paying off. “I’ve had one of the most sophisticated computer systems in the world hunting for info on these guys and all its hit is an apparent absence of data – places where there should be information, only its missing.”

  “A cover-up,” the fat man says. “That’ll be John, then. Find them and the trail will lead to him. He was always a sneaky bastard. Sneaky about fucking everything. Turn your back on a bint and he’d be shaggin’ her. Didn’t matter back when we was drowning in the cunts, but it’s been a while between drinks now for some of us.”

  I fail to commiserate and the silence unfurls like the penile fronds of some exotic Arctic fern, gruesome and suggestive and cold. McCartney hawks something up and fails to eject it properly from his mouth and the loogie just hangs from his stubbled chins until the butler comes over with a hankie to delicately clean up.

  “Wipes my arse too, if I ask him, Ames does,” McCartney laughs.

  “If sir insists on a diet exclusively of butter chicken burritos and fetish porn, such will become increasingly the case,” the butler says drily and backs off with the square of cotton like something instinct tells him he can’t hock on eBay.

  “Cunt.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  McCartney does that unpleasant swallowing-his-burp thing again and lurches from the swivel chair, sending it reeling crazily across the wire grille floor as he crashes over into an adjacent row of monitors and begins slapping at keyboards like a big angry bear trying to work a Mars Bar dispenser.

  “He’s in there, though. And his bitch.”

  “Ono?”

  “That’s right. But we know where she is, don’t we, Ames?”

  “We have indeed maintained a close watch on ‘the bitch’ for the day of our grand revenge, sir.”

  Ames raises his eyebrow at me in a gesture unseen unless the metal goggles give the former Beatle eyes in the back of his head.

  McCartney keeps banging keys until a nearby printer spits out a single page. The overweight former hero waves at it me with a clear air of exhaustion, effectively telling me to help myself. Ames, the only one of us with any composure left, pulls the sheet from the printer and makes no effort to hide his own double-check before he sighs tightly and hands it to me.

  It’s an address for the thirtieth floor of the Paladin Corporation building in Tokyo.

  Zephyr 6.10 “Occam’s Razor”

  I LEAVE WITH the Visionary’s good wishes and McCartney’s blasted countenance on my mind as I take to the air. I do not know what happened to him, and it is more than ironic that a man knighted for his services to freedom and battling infamy should be left disabled by the very powers used to win such acclaim. Although Paul went along for the ride to India with the rest of the team, we never heard anything about his powers developing beyond the cosmic-level eyebeams that were his namesake. Now I have to presume those powers are gone along with his sight, leaving the crippled, pathetically twisted figure I have just witnessed scratching his asscrack with a disposable lighter. It seems wallowing in past glories is not a unique peccadillo among my kind – a lesson for the future.

  For now, I don’t know where I am going, but it’s not straight to Tokyo. I’m just not ready.

  An hour later and I am off one of those streets you get on the Monopoly board, if you’re playing the proper version, and not the stupid 90s one where there’s the Ill Centurion’s Power Cave and the Sentinels Tower and Black Jack’s Sewer Lair and what have you. The air smells like turpentine and pussy and I am pressing through the crowds with gorgeous Eurotrash girls grinding their asses into my thigh and skinny British celebrity girls making out with each other in the alcoves beneath where a DJ with a fake afro and goggle glasses plays endless second rate Australian pop singers like Delta Goodrem and Tina Arena and Dannii Minogue and Guy Sebastian, only he cuts them like a crystal meth dealer with black Norwegian darkwave trance and spasmodic trip-hop so the vibe is like the last few seconds of a young girl’s life as we succumb to a vast socio-cultural accident that masquerades as the best of London’s nightlife.

  The club is called Blitzen and Shade waits for me at the top of one of the risers in a pleated miniskirt and clingy black mesh vest and her hair has been electrocuted for the occasion above her devilish smile, her skin surp
risingly pale under the warbling UV lights, her teeth and the whites of her eyes like manifestations from beyond as she holds one of two martini glasses out to me and raises it in a toast I am meant to claim. I step up beside her with plenty of body contact and she smiles like a ninja cat and we drink as several other minor grade British supers break around us like fractals and Shade nips my ear when she leans over to speak.

  “I thought you’d got lost,” she says in that bewitching accent of hers.

  “Once-upon-a-time I thought you would’ve liked that.”

  “Let history lie, Zephyr,” she says and finishes her drink. “Tonight, we dance.”

  I’m not much of a dancer, but I like to watch, and Shade backs slowly into a crowd heavily populated with French mutantes who have come over on the Euro-shuttle for the evening and because anything that goes against the norm is in vogue in France at the moment, as the minutes trickle by the club becomes like a menagerie of weird human sculptures, black girls with tails, a boy with needles growing all over, a woman with the bones on the outside of her skin, an oiled, well-muscled black guy with a peroxide Mohawk and eyes in his teats and another dancer with black dots covering his moon-white skin that I am certain I see peeling off onto the carpet as he begins to sweat and reveal he’s really just some kind of poseur I later glimpse engaging in choke sex with the bouncers out the front of the club. Certainly none of the dancers seem to have any useful abilities (apart from the guy with the forked tongue who disappears into the bathroom with a pair of cosplay twins I swear I have seen before back in Atlantic City), but we are hardly exercising our powers as I follow Shade with my eyes and she pretends not to notice and moves her ass precisely how she knows it’s impossible to miss, pulling her vest tight enough I’m in little doubt about her intentions as she practically brings herself to the cusp of orgasm against the corner of a protruding sound stack. I am momentarily distracted by a big, lantern-jawed dude with Gallic good looks who pushes by and looks my way, once, like a Terminator on the prowl, but then he’s engulfed by the increasingly rhythmic tide of dancing flesh around us, the girls and the B-grade heroes and the mutantes and Shade all whirling before my gaze into some extraterrestrial paradigm that remains sexy even as it resembles something close to the Asimovian definition of alien life. At some point I have my back against the wall and Shade is dry-humping my thigh and asking me if I am game for a rematch, her wicked grin in place, and I make some vague inquiry about her sexuality after years of rumors and remembering this is the woman I warned my daughter off, but Shade’s only answer is to run her tongue from my ear to the edge of my leather collar and later I have three fingers in her cunt and she is eating me and the stars are dropping from the sky and I can’t actually remember ingesting anything that could get me this high, and the walls of Shade’s apartment are covered in a surprising amount of superhero paraphernalia too and my vision blurs to a narrow tunnel as she urges me onto her from behind and all I can see is various bobbing faces, people from old newsreels staring on with mild disapproval, and the sense of some enormous sphincter having me in its embrace as I give a shuddering yell and lightning crackles spastically across the suite and Shade laughs, her skin black as night and hard enough that it is like I am fucking a pile of bricks with just the one incredible soft, slick, slender spot to sink myself into.