Zephyr III Read online

  ZEPHYR Volume 3

  Warren Hately

  Copyright 2013 Warren Hately

  It’s 2013 on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The place is Atlantic City: a sweeping longitudinal metropolis rebuilt following widespread devastation in 1984. Superhumans are not only real, they’re human. All too human, as Nietzsche would say.

  “… like superheroes in the world of American Psycho …” @wereviking

  For more about Zephyr or its author, visit warrenhately.com for musings about post-literary writing and Sturgeon’s law – updated most weeks.

  Contact the author at wereviking @ hotmail.com, follow @wereviking or visit warrenhately.com for more.

  Cover art by Alfredo Torres

  @spacechipAT

  redharvestportfolio.tumblr.com

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Zephyr 8.1 “Not Dead But Dreaming”

  INTERESTINGLY, THE POLICE presence we’ve had to consider most the way across the country virtually disappears at the Louisiana border. Lioness and I coast down deserted freeways where rusted-out car bodies remain from the disaster of five years previous. Businesses from before the hurricane and horrific floods vie with new roadside stalls that flourish like mushrooms, giving the approach to New Orleans a third world feel. The dark eyes of the mostly black populace follow us with vacant intent as we enter the city, life as normal tinged with urban decay and squalor, the smell of rot, a pall of grey across everything, the skies overhead a disastrous semiotic – a commentary on the present state of affairs.

  We tour the collapsed levies and the halted relief effort, huge earthmoving machines like monsters from Greek mythology turned to stone, not dead but dreaming in the muddy fields. By unvoiced consent we return to civilization such as we know it and pass billboards proclaiming the end date for projects yet to even commence, last term’s politicians riddled with bullet holes.

  A metallic guy lands in a crouch by the road ahead of us, dull sunlight glinting off his hard angles as I slew the Triumph to a stop and keep the engine running, nervous without my powers by the obvious challenge such a person could bring. He stands slowly and motions us forward and although I don’t recognize him, he puts his hands on his hips in as unthreatening a pose as someone like him could probably manage.

  “Yo,” he says in a deep local accent. “I’m Steel Falcon. Our people spotted you near the water. Who you be?”

  “This is Lioness,” I say slowly. “I’m the Devil’s Advocate.”

  “Uh-huh,” the other man says. “And whatchoo doin’ here?”

  “Looking for Hawkwind. You’ve seen him?”

  The metal dude gives me his death stare for two or three seconds and then breaks the link.

  “Yeah, man. Follow me. I’ll take you to the Hawk.”

  *

  THE WAREHOUSE HAS young black men and one or two whites guarding it with assault rifles and bulletproof vests marked POLICE. Inside, on concrete wet in places from holes in the broken tin roof, forklifts are parked near giant stacks of hard-taped cardboard boxes. There are some tables nearby and a few men and women of less military guise man laptops and clipboards, inventorying the operation as from somewhere the beep of a truck reversing cuts across their efficient chatter.

  Loren and I ride in feeling about as appropriate as circus clowns bounding from a Morris Minor, though I’m relieved to see another costumed figure, a huge bear of a man in a tattered cloak and quasi-medieval leggings.

  Just as quickly I’m horrified to realize the man is Hawkwind, my one-time mentor.

  The mask is gone. He sees us ride in and I have to assume I’m a stranger to him, only rivulets of black in his grey beard, the changed face ringing through the years since we saw each other last. Unlike some, I was probably not the most beloved of my mentor. It could be said this is a greater indicator of my character in general, but I am deaf to that. He helped lift up a gawky, unstreetwise kid who probably would’ve got himself killed without a few basic combat moves and learning the stupid Viking creed the old man always swore by. And though there’s no recognition in his eyes, curiously revealed to me in full detail after all these years, it’s true a pang of some sort goes through me so that by the time I have wheeled the bike to a halt, I feel the need to distance myself from the gaudily-accoutered woman astride the tail pipe, like the prodigal son coming home for Thanksgiving with the town whore in tow.

  Steel Falcon has flown. He slams down ahead of us and walks briskly to where Hawkwind stands juggling supply cartons as easily as cigarette packs. The old man nods, slides a hand in fingerless gloves back over his frizzy ponytail and walks towards us.

  “I’m the Hawk,” he says in the voice of a graveled New Yorker of old. “No one’s called me Hawkwind for ten years or more, so who are you really?”

  I’m off the bike. Loren’s in the background, hands clasped together as she ponders her place in this melodrama. And I peel off the bandanna and end up displaying a stupid, embarrassed grin, sixteen again despite my girth.

  “It’s me, pops. Joe.”

  “Zephyr,” he says and frowns and puts one hand on his hip. “Zephyr.”

  “Yeah. Well, no. Not at the moment.”

  “What’s with this get-up? Last I saw, you were favoring gold.”

  “Let’s just say I ran into a few problems,” I reply and look around. “Can we talk?”

  “You gonna introduce your girlfriend or are you always this rude?”

  I laugh uneasily and my eyes flick over the familiar brown-colored scale armor straining at the old guy’s chest, arms and belly. He still radiates the strength that once made him famous, but I can’t imagine him gliding anywhere, and his cape has seen better days. It looks like he sleeps in it. It’s stained in a dozen places and ragged towards the floor. Something of his years in Washington rubbed off on him, perhaps.

  “Uh, sure. Hawkwind, this is my partner, Lioness.”

  Loren steps forward and mumbles something about being pleased to meet him and lies about how much I’ve told her. The old man’s gaze is borderline lascivious and for the first time I interrogate my unconscious reluctance to even expose Loren to him. Just as quickly though, the Hawk, as he calls himself now, leads us through a miniature canyon of packing boxes to a card table and a few benches displaying a coffee machine, a bar fridge, a few other things that scream “office” despite the open-air scenario.

  “Take a seat,” he says and walks to the fridge and pops the mouthpiece on a gallon of milk he promptly starts necking.

  Loren pauses uneasily and I surrender myself to a folding chair, knees apart in a show of ease I suspect only renders me more juvenile.

  “Must be a pretty big deal for you to track me down here,” he says.

  Loren coughs.

  “I’ll just be with the bike.” And she withdraws.

  Hawkwind eyes her departure and raises thick eyebrows at me, Lancelot gone to seed after years in the wilderness.

  “Cute girl. What happened to the love of your life?”

  “She left me.”

  “Took her time.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “So you’ve lost your powers,” he says.

  I stand as an expression of my surprise, but the big man doesn’t flinch and barely moves from the table he’s leaning against.

  “How did you hear that?”

  “You’re only telling me now,” the Hawk says and strains fingers through his beard. “You changed your name, though. Your look. Said you ran into some problems. What else could it be?”

  “Shit. I forgot I could never fool you.”

  “And I ain’t even touched you yet,” he says with a smirk.

 
; My head drops and then I sit again, tired, almost wishing he would. Hawkwind’s signature trick is kinaesthetic telepathy. Once the rapport’s established he can tell if you’re lying and your emotional state, not to mention kick your ass as he predicts every move as your body contemplates it. Fortunately, the touch wears off after a couple of hours, but during that time it feels like he knows you as well as you know yourself.

  Never occurred to me I’d miss that feeling.

  Gay, huh?

  Zephyr 8.2 “Halfway There”

  “SO WHAT DO you want me for?” Hawkwind asks.

  “I don’t really know what to tell you,” I say.

  “You rode a fuck of a long way for someone without a clue.”

  He raises one of those powerful eyebrows again and I sag, head in my hands at the card table.

  “Sorry. Things have been so fucking chaotic, such a mess, since things fell apart with Elisabeth. I don’t even know how to explain it. And then this bitch zapped my powers and I think I quit the team I was on and cost Loren her powers too.”

  “Who’s Loren?”

  “Lioness.”

  “She’s got no powers either?”

  He sounds incredulous.

  “What the hell are you kids thinking? Remember:

  “Away from his arms, in the open field

  “A man should fare not afoot;

  “For never he knows when the need for a spear

  “Shall arise on the distant road.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say and lift my head only to shake it, face tingling from my own fierce ministrations. “We might not have powers, but we’re hardly powerless. You taught me that, remember?”

  “And I see you’re carrying a baseball bat,” he says and perhaps grins.

  “And I’m carrying a baseball bat. It’s not a spear, but probably just as well.”

  “Tell me what’s happened,” Hawkwind says finally, voice calm.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Get on with it, or get the fuck out,” he sighs. “I’m busy.”

  I swallow my pride and think about where to start.

  “Apparently the Doomsday Man is my father. No one knows where he’s gone since they released him from prison more than 10 years ago. Hell, no one can even explain to me why they released him. I thought he tried to wire up half the latent psychics in the northern hemisphere to one big telepathic super-computer or something.

  “Anyway,” I say and sigh. “If that wasn’t bad enough, it seems like his old squeeze Spectra, Yoko Ono, is a shape-shifter whose been pretending to be my mother since God knows when. My other mom, the one who gave birth to me, was secretly Catchfire, and she went with Lennon to some freaky island commune where he tried to start a parahuman master race. I don’t know what went wrong, but my mom and Titanium Girl took their kids and fled and my mom was hiding out until I stumbled on the truth and then all hell broke loose and it looks like some guy, this fucking assassin, must’ve been watching our house or something because he killed my mum just as easily as these other people he’s also killed.”

  I wipe my nose, privately astounded to realize tears are now streaming down my cheeks. I shoot a glance at Hawkwind, otherwise unable to look at him while I offload. The old guy simply stands impassive with his hairy arms crossed over his gut and his ankles crossed. The old wing-heel boots are gone, I notice, frayed steel-capped work boots on his feet instead.

  “Who are the other people?”

  “That’s where it gets really weird,” I say, and when I catch his double-take I laugh and nod and hold up a hand to show I’m being heavy with the irony here.

  “As far as I can figure it, there used to be a sort of global superhero team, The Twelve, they called themselves, and the Preacher Man and Spectra were with them until one day they somehow convinced the others to give up their powers and their identities and . . . well, fuck me if I really know how they did it.

  “A guy who died last month called Tom Hilfiger told the police they somehow collapsed their reality into another parallel and everyone was supposed to get new lives. They were all success stories, but none of them had powers, nothing like what they’d been. But Hilfiger could remember bits and pieces even though they’d said he wouldn’t and he started tracking the others down because he was so fucking rich he could do anything he liked.

  “This guy, Arsenal, he used to be one of them. He’s the killer. Some Californian karate instructor now. He killed Hilfiger and that fucking horror writer Stephen King, too, he used to be one of them, and now he’s killed my . . . my mother. My birth mother. Fuck.”

  I wipe away the boogers and Hawkwind just keeps staring until I look up and he makes a half-chewed noise and stands properly.

  “And how’s dressing up as the B&D Tooth Fairy helping you with that, handsome?”

  *

  “I JUST DON’T understand why he killed her,” I say weakly. “I don’t even understand how it was possible. And why now? And why this other guy too? If he was going to kill him, you’d think he would do it back when the fucking guy was acting like a madman and talking to the police.”

  “You sound like you’re over-thinking this one again,” the Hawk says.

  The words take me back in years and I halt in the middle of my vain efforts to justify myself and hang my head and choke on the unborn laughter and nod.

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you remember this one? ‘A slave takes his revenge at once; a coward never’.”

  “I remember it,” I tell him. “What do you mean by that exactly: that I’m a coward?”

  “I’m only recounting the wisdom of my ancestors – a wonderfully practical people. It’s up to you to decide how you fit that saying.”

  “Maybe your saying is bullshit.”

  “Well, you’re here. The guy who killed your mother, you’re telling me, is on the west coast. Seems to me like you’re halfway there.”

  “But my . . . my fucking powers.”

  “‘No powers, but not powerless,’ you said.”

  Rather than reply and convey my frustration, I look away into the nearest bank of cardboard boxes stamped Guardians Without Borders.

  “What did you hope I would tell you? How to reclaim your powers?”

  “You were never very fucking nice to me,” I say and don’t even bother to mask the petulant tone I know is there.

  “I’ve trained many young crime-fighters. It’s what I did, before I found my new calling.”

  “I knew I was just one of a bunch. Nightfighter, Wendigo, Bearcat, Black Jester. . . .”

  “Black Jester turned to crime,” Hawkwind says.

  “You still seemed to like him more than me.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re saying. We weren’t close? I trained you. I wasn’t your father, Joseph.”

  I stand up.

  “You think I wanted a father figure? Gee, a kid grows up with two fucking dykes playing house and you think it never occurred to me I was lacking in the father figure department? Hawk, you trained me. You helped make me what I was. You’re my mentor, man, like it or not. That means you owe it to me!”

  “Owe what?”

  “Just . . . just tell me what to fucking do,” I say and let the anger wash out. “I don’t know what I’m doing. My life’s a mess. If I keep on like this without my powers, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

  “You have your life,” Hawkwind says. “You have a good woman.”

  “I don’t know it means anything.”

  “Then go and avenge your mother, you fucking baby.”

  I nod – teeth gritted and still standing – and make a fist I don’t know what I’m going to do with.

  “Right. Thanks. And fuck you.”

  I stride from the room and barely refrain from punching a stack of boxes that would probably just snap my wrist. Loren leaps up in surprise from resting on the pillion and I toss her the keys.

  “Start her up. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”


  And before anyone can see my shame I slide on the Zorro mask and sling my ass over the seat and put my hand on Loren’s hip and the lights come on as the bike roars into life and we burn rubber through the shipping container-wide doors and within an hour we’re on Route 401 headed for California.

  Zephyr 8.3 “Gone To Hell”

  IT IS MID-AFTERNOON by the time we arrive in Los Feliz. The Triumph saunters up the wide streets brimming with lawns and climatically-inappropriate trees, the motorbike’s mix of strength and lazy exhaust a semaphore for our own. Loren holds my hips in a gentle clinch as we ignore the slumbering commuters gawping from their car windows as we cruise past, ascending the cityscape, the GPS on the Enercom phone guiding us ever on.

  Eventually I pull the bike up at an intersection. The huge, fortress-like Spanish homes guard their swimming pools and their secrets, the occasional kept woman peering with evident boredom from a balcony or an upper storey bedroom. The sun is lowering itself into the Pacific like a woman uncertain of the temperature and I can feel Loren’s fragrant breath on the sweat on the back of my neck.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  “This guy is some kind of sworn deputy or something. I’m wondering if he’s at his house or at the station,” I reply.

  Lioness slips from the back of the Triumph like a shadow. She gestures at the big stucco gatehouse of the mansion across from us, the tiers of tiled roof all but concealed by palms and the high pink wall.

  “This is his place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll slip in and scout for signs of life if you swing past the station,” Loren says. “I’ll call you if I spot him.”

  And she winks at me, holding up her own pert little mobile phone.

  I pat her on her leather rear as she jogs off and across the street and a passing Delorean slows so the Hispanic guys can leer, vacating the scene before witnessing Loren’s deft illegality as she parkours up and over the wall. I nod to myself, foolishly well pleased, and gun the Triumph that starts forward of its own volition back on the course like some delusion of a knightly charger vaulting onward to our mutual destiny.