I wake for one brief moment in the middle of the Atlantic false dawn and a nearby framed poster swims into view and I lift my head, alerted from a dream where somebody was calling my name in a childish sing-song and it’s like I think the three men in the poster have something urgent to say: the guy draped in the British flag, the hairy bloke with the moustache in the purple suit, and the balding one with big mutton chops dressed like scientist, lab coat over a fawn suit, a gizmo staff redolent with mysterious tech in his hand like some steampunk shaman. And then Shade’s soft arm slides across me and pulls me down again and we sleep until the light becomes intolerable, slinking in from the east to show the rotting industrial docks through the wide bay windows of the trendy flat. And then she presses a button and the industrial blast doors slide down sending the room into darkness and us back into that lovely carnal place.
*
LATER, AND I am eating marmite on crumpets and not quite sure I am enjoying the experience except Melanie doesn’t have much else in her refrigerator but half-a-case of viognier, and inexplicably, a pair of frilly women’s lingerie briefs a size smaller than she wears.
Shade is Amazonian in her nudity, though after a while I think my lingering gaze unnerves even her and she comes back from the shower wearing black leggings and a shapeless chainmail top by Michael Kors, her wet and heavy hair hanging midway between her shoulder blades, a pound of silver around her left wrist. I’m making the best of my lack of clothes, just wearing the leather pants from my costume with the smell resembling the cow it once was, though I compensate with a feral grin and one of the open wine bottles.
“Sounds like you’ve got everything you need,” Shade says, getting back to our conversation as she poises herself on one of the tall designer stools at the kitchen counter. “What’s the delay?”
“I’m just not sure what I am walking into. Or what to say.”
“I don’t remember much about him, John Lennon,” Shade says.
“Join the club.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Look,” I tell her and open my palms. “This is the way all the evidence is pointing. Occam’s Razor and all that.”
“Yeah, right,” Shade replies absently, like she’s forgotten she confessed to reading quantum maths and astrophysics and was just the black bimbo as she’s been portrayed.
“If what you said about Julian’s true, it sounds to me like you better get yourself back there, don’t you think?” she asks a minute later. “Let me know if you need some back-up.”
“Speaking of back-up,” I say. “You’ve been thinking about Sting’s offer?”
Shade nods. Her wry, handsome grin reveals her self-doubts as well as her excitement at the idea of moving up a rung in the superhero world, though perhaps it means her exploits will maybe never be known.
“Hard to say no. I’m not sure what the Jacks’ll say.”
“Seems to me you’ve got to think about what Shade wants, not what they want.”
We’re still smiling at our own cleverness when there is an infinitesimal buzz from Shade’s security system and the roof above the kitchen explodes in a shower of concrete chunks and plaster, the stylish white apartment a building site in instants.
Shade does a neat backwards cartwheel that brings her alongside me and I stand with my fists illuminated as the dust clears and the intruders reveal themselves.
Their identities, unexpected as they are, shock us into momentary silence.
Zephyr 6.11 “Large As Life And Twice As Ugly”
“THE JACKS,” SHADE says as the figures become clear through the haze of the shattered apartment.
There are four of them. Four men. Big men. Lionheart I know, having caroused with him on plenty of occasions – so much so he winces when he sees I’m here and the bloodlust, whatever it is that’s driving them to gatecrash Shade’s place, retreats a bit, and he can eye his companions with fresh perspective. Or perhaps I’m imagining things. The other three – Iron John, Bull and The Unicorn – loom large as life and twice as ugly.
“What the fuck’s going on here?” I manage to yelp as I stuff my feet into my boots.
“If it isn’t the boys’ club,” Shade says with admirable swagger.
“Well we came to find one little bitch and found two instead,” Iron John says.
The voice sounds characteristically metallic through the steel-colored armor, the stylistic rivets and exposed seams that scream Industrial Age and a nod to Britain’s steam era revolution.
“Not that it makes it any harder,” Bull says.
He’s a huge muscular red-hued guy, a real-life minotaur except it’s only his bottom half that end in hooves and a swishy little tail. His face screams pub brawler on steroids, his receding hairline plaited into an eighteenth century pony tail.
Unicorn says nothing. He wears a clean white uniform with a stylized black chess piece on the chest, but with a horn protruding from the classical horse-head silhouette of the knight. His big gloves are the same black, and a dark-hued visor covers the face of his full head mask. Years ago it was “The Lion and The Unicorn” when that made sense, the emblematic duo ensorcelled by ancient powers to guard Britain from invaders. His partner, though, died, in bloody circumstances that left The Unicorn mute, and he had since been unmasked and spent a period in high-profile rehab before returning to the Union Jacks around the time the previous incarnation of the Sentinels was crumbling. Of the foursome, he’s the only one I haven’t met before, and therefore perhaps the most dangerous.
“What is this, Mel?” I ask sideways.
Shade shrugs.
“Wanna tell us, boys?” she calls. Then to me: “They’re angry about something.”
“You’ve made us look like fools,” Bull grunts.
“You don’t take responsibility for that?” Shade fires back.
“The Palace has cut back our budget and Protector’s gone off again,” Iron John practically sniffs, though it is steam that creeps from the curlicue vents either side of his armored neck.
“You need to learn to keep your fucking trap shut, you dirty black bint,” Bull says and comes stomping down the steps and at us.
“I guess they think they’ve got me,” Shade says quickly. “Away from the sun and all that.”
I nod.
“I guess they can think again.”
I extend my arms and do the flashbulb thing. Bull clutches his eyes and roars, more noise than any man has a right to make. Iron John and The Unicorn don’t noticeably react, but Lionheart averts his gaze in keeping with his lack of appetite for this venture. Shade, God bless her, is now a grinning, jet-black enigma with her white eyes and bared teeth showing her glee.
“Let’s just I may or may not’ve sold my story to the Daily Mail once I quit the team,” she says to me and gives a fierce war-cry and then smashes into Bull with the sound of a train crash.
She and the big hairy-legged bastard disappear back through the kitchen.
“Come on, lads,” I say in the wake of their debris. “You’re bigger than this, aren’t you?”
I try and assay their reactions, but Lionheart’s the only one with an actual face, the maroon domino mask on his David Beckham mug, his hand nervously tugging at the fringe of fake lion’s mane around his shoulders.
“I’m sorry about this, Zephyr,” he says. “You’re a good bloke. This is just a bit o’ housekeeping. What the fuck are you doin’ here, anyway? I thought she only shagged models – you know, female ones.”
There’s a bad taste creeping up the back of my throat as the sounds from Shade’s slugfest carry to us. I shake my head and start rolling my bare shoulders.
“I guess if there were any real men around, that might’ve changed,” I tell him.
And then the question as old and inevitable as time itself.
“So which one of you cunts are first?”
*
IRON JOHN’S PRETTY fast for someone masquerading as steam-era tech, once he’s done with the a
tmospheric hissing and clanking. He must weigh a ton, though, and yet he jumps down in front of me as eager as a geek after the latest model iPhone, and before he can bring those enormous power gauntlets around I slap my hands against his chest and unleash a torrential charge of electricity that upends him and sends him back through three walls and into the daylight, the noise of the port outside and the distant traffic and lapping water and startled other residents mingling into the one stretched sound-bite.
As I understand it, the Unicorn’s powers revolve around bio-energy, the air seeming to bubble around his black gloves as he thrusts his hands out at me and a sickening, uncomfortable feeling threatens to crush my ribs as the strength goes from my legs and I just manage to open my palm as I fall back and a minor spark sizzles into him and breaks the otherworldly barrage. I roll back, feeling the chunks of plaster and masonry across my bare back as I stand in time for Lionheart to land in front of me and try his best at a kick to my face. I block, stand properly, palm off a fist to my chin, and elbow block his uppercut and then my forehead smashes down into my old ally’s teeth and chin and as he sags, and I respond with an uppercut of my own that lifts him from the ground and drops him into the wreckage of the kitchen scant feet away.
Bull storms through like some runaway semi-trailer, hitting no one and taking out the rear bedroom wall, though the move appears deliberate, so I am frightened for a moment that I can’t see Shade, but I have other things to worry about as The Unicorn does some gay-looking cartwheels and lands before me like something from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers and just as quickly I slap him upside the head and he is gone. There’s a splash and the next few seconds I dive away from the rotisserie of Iron John’s lasers, the carpet and walls hissing as they’re pierced and I am hit once or twice in the legs before I get through the hole overlooking the water and dive in to escape.
The Thames tastes like a sewer and I jet through the torpid sludge fast enough that when I break from the surface, flying, I am over the other side of the quickly-becoming-devalued apartment, landing behind Iron John where lay hands on him again, my fists clasped together as I deliver the haymaker that sends him clattering through the rest of the apartment and then a crucial support pillar goes and tons of roof and cement pile in and Shade appears and grabs my hand and we take to the air – only Iron John can fly – and a few hundred feet up we twirl in each other’s loose hands and eye the destruction wide-eyed and panting.
“What a fucking mess,” the Englishwoman gasps.
“Are you alright?”
“Bastard kicked me in the box, didn’t he!”
“Fuck. Are you going down again?”
“Na,” she says. “Leave ‘em to it. I knew they’d be pissed, but that’s a bit much.”
“What exactly did you say about them in this article, then?”
“Oh, not much,” Shade says, despite grinning openly. “You don’t pal around with a bunch of supers without learning a few nasty secrets. I guess I may’ve let a few slip.”
“Like?”
“Oh, I dunno . . . Bull’s thing for Japanese hookers, Iron John’s second family stashed away in the 1400s, Unicorn’s erection problems. . . .”
“How do you know about his erections?”
Shade just looks at me and laughs and gently pushes me away even though we’re hovering in the air.
“It’s all just a bit of fun, right Zephyr – you know that, right?”
“Yeah, sure,” I reply perhaps a bit too hurriedly. “I was just, you know, surprised. You’ve got something of a reputation.”
Shade smiles knowingly, but she looks away. The dust rises from her place like from a factory fire.
“A carefully crafted one at that, so you’d best fly on to do what you have to do, me lad. Alright?”
She says the last word like she’s the female DJ Ali or something. I nod, a new sick feeling in my chest as I tumble back into contemplation of the things I had so suddenly forgotten: the Demoness, my missing father, and of course then Loren. As the first of the news helicopters start to arrive I nod to Shade once more and gently touch her arm.
“I’ll be off, then,” I say in a crap mimicry of her speech. “I think I left the top of my costume down there, so I’ll just grab that and I’ll be seeing you, OK?”
Shade makes an effort to brighten her smile.
“Thanks for a hot night, tiger. It gets cold around here.”
“I guess it’s cold always being in the shade,” I smirk.
She smirks back and we’re OK, though I’m not sure what I am really feeling – apart from like a card again – the smell of Shade mingling with the stench of battle and my own morning breath and the memory of Loren probably still curled up in the Atlantic dark on my cum-stained sheets.
I nod tightly and sigh and drop quickly to the level of the destruction. The quartet from the Union Jacks have some kind of advanced hover vehicle thing parked in silent mode just near the edge of the stylized wharf and the apartment complex they’ve helped destroy and Bull helps the others load into it and I guess they’re hoping to make a getaway before the press arrive. The big red-faced bruiser looks back at me and grins so fiercely, trying to telescope the expression for my benefit, I guess, that I genuinely can’t tell whether he’s actually angry or just some punch-drunk, overpowered fuckwit caught in a perpetual cycle of destruction and release. I guess you could say the same for me, though I like to think I have a higher purpose now.
I find the leather jacket beneath the remains of the bed and shake it clean and slip it on. Through the hole in the wall I can see water police approaching along the muddy scarp of the Thames and once more discretion is the better part of valor and I step back briskly through the gaping hole made by Bull’s mad charge and do the crouch thing and I’m away.
Zephyr 6.12 “The Harlequin Breeze”
I HEAD BACK into darkness. It’s a nice metaphor, I know, but also the truth as I circumnavigate the globe and strike the terminator, into the literal twilight zone, and the words in my head spark associations and I wonder how the mad queer big bastard is getting on since last we tersely met. Such thoughts are a distraction from the stomach-gnawing intensity of what I aim to uncover, and while flying at a thousand miles per hour is no time to pull the printed sheet from the Visionary’s lair out of my belt, in my mind I picture the laser-inked finality contained in that one fragile sheet and imagine the secret history of my own future may as well be written thereupon as well, for all the good it would do me, the invisible ink of the unknown as intangible as statues hiding inside marble blocks just waiting for their creators to summon them into public life.
My trajectory takes me back across the storm-battered Atlantic and then my own dearly beloved reconstructed city and its only then I consider, had I gone the other way, I could’ve been flying into the future with the dawning day rather than this filmic dissolve, the length of the journey much the same, but the timbre of the symbols more life-affirming and positive one way than the other.
I realize it was my unconscious compulsion to stop in at headquarters, such as it is these days with me alienated from the team whose leadership I have also managed to decapitate on one fell swoop. And yet that compulsion to stop over is more than the wish for a shower or to appease my nagging guilt with she-who-was-Seeker. Again, it is more of that dangerous trepidation and vacillation that could see me shirk this confrontation for another thousand years if I’m not careful.
California sleeps beneath me as these thoughts pirouette through my mind in the silent hours of flying across the hard suburbanized mesa and then over the ocean, dropping low to create a furrow in the waves that sends spray fifty feet in the air and earns me a few honks from late evening trawler men making their way back to their home bays. And then the golden Pacific, and the sun appears like a hallucination in the sky as the darkness burns away and the dolphins flip and play in the water beneath me and the tiny islands in the middle of nowhere look so idyllic, American hardware and the odd cadaver
moldering in their jungles, rust and compost for diverse ecosystems I can barely imagine.
I correct my course north for Japan as I cross the international dateline and suddenly it is tomorrow and I think – or perhaps I pray – that maybe I chose the right metaphor after all.
*
THE SPRAWLING SPIRES of the unsleeping city, Tokyo, glisten like wet and alien things in the sempiternal morning of Japan, the country known as the Land of the Rising Sun for good reason. The metropolis reflects back on itself in stainless steel and glass, advanced hovercraft mixing with traditional dirigibles and commuter planes landing at the central airport. The air is thick with whirring communications bots, off about their errands as common as the blenders of the Twentieth Century here in Japan.
Zephyr II Page 29