Zephyr I Page 12

  People in the streets are in crisis mode. Traffic stalls, half of downtown in gridlock, police cruisers with their loud hailers on full volume, frustrated by their inability to spread the word. I glimpse Red Monolith and Chamber in the distance, hanging like statues in the air over the city, rebroadcasting the public address system which booms instructions for people to act sensibly and stay indoors.

  I head toward the plaza. The ground is furred with a carpet of creepy-crawlies. It’s distressing to see a number of corpses among the insects, halfway to being picked clean by millipedes and flies and cockroaches already. As I descend, the huge swarm pours across my path and for a moment I’m blind, thankfully not psychotically disturbed by the sensation of hundreds of bugs filling my ears and nose. I can’t imagine how Elisabeth would fare if she were here beside me.

  I’m glad she and Tessa are at home, though suddenly I reflect on our argument and whether it is latent psychic ability or not, I tug my phone free of my belt pocket and, after exhibiting a mild electrical field that seems to deter all the bugs except for the moths and butterflies, I climb to a higher altitude where I can drop the EM cloak and actually get good enough reception to call.

  Barking my question, it takes Elisabeth a moment to confirm my worst fear.

  “Shit, how did you know? I thought she was in there studying.”

  “Why would a girl who’s suspended from school waste her time studying?”

  “She’s fourteen, Joe. She’s still going to have exams this year.”

  “She’s fourteen, Beth,” I bark back. “Do you think she’s thinking about that?”

  I snap the phone away. I’m Zephyr. It’s my turn to be haughty and superior. Although People’s Plaza seems to be holding court for the whole insect kingdom, there’s no sign of a reason why. I buzz the crowd and then start for Astrid’s house.

  Despite the temptation to just do the sprint at a few times the speed of sound, civic duty or the pathetic looks of frustration on the cops’ faces or perhaps the TV news choppers circling through the insect haze make me slow along the way across the boroughs to flip abandoned cars out of the way for the various emergency vehicles trying their best to power through the maze known as Atlantic City. Cops wave, beep horns, gesture cheerfully with unholstered sidearms as I do their work for them. Once clear of downtown, I accelerate and climb, buzzing Chamber hovering in mid-space with barely a “How ya doing?”

  Tessa’s plump pal is the only survivor of a pair of west coast stockbrokers relocated to the east after their previous trading company collapsed. Bankruptcy never looked so good as I angle in on the tower building that’s become Astrid’s prison since their very own personalized edition of Look Who’s Coming To Dinner came down on them as well. Hard to believe someone, me, who thinks he’s pretty close to his only child, couldn’t see this happening. Worse to think her best friend in the world lives across town in such fancy digs and I don’t know the actual apartment number.

  *

  WIPING INSECTS FROM my mouth, I punch a finger at the buzzer for Astrid’s apartment manager. An elderly man in a blue suit comes to the glass doors and signs for me to desist. I get the drift: they’re sticking to what the TV and radio stations are now advising constantly, which is to stay indoors and keep everything shut up tighter than a bug’s butt. My fist clenches and crackles in frustration and the doorman’s eyes widen and I try to make a sarcastic face to suggest that, yeah, right, I’m Zephyr, I’m hardly about to go kicking his door down. Problem is that’s exactly what I want to do. It’s only indecision that saves me as bugs swirl and whip in the surrounding air.

  At first I think there’s a storm coming in. Then I realize the street’s gradually becoming more clear as the wind scours the bugs free from everything except the crevices in which some of them are managing to lurk. It’s too complicated to gesture back at the doorman and I give up when the guy in the blue-and-white bodysuit lands in the middle of the street across from me.

  “Hey, Zephyr, what’s up? You’re not trying to get under cover, are you?”

  Sky Blue walks across the asphalt as unselfconsciously as George Michael in his old video clips, not in the slightest bit fazed by an outfit that will become so ridiculous only in hindsight. Sky Blue looks like a super-powered cyclist escaped from the Berlin Mardi Gras. The mask covers his entire head and reveals nothing but a clean-shaved chin and slightly pug nose. His eye holes are filtered and somehow shaped like a yin-yang symbol. I give belated acknowledgment with the jut of my jaw.

  “That’s some kind of joke, right?”

  I come back at him quick because I don’t really feel like feeding this turkey with the juicy details of my private life.

  “Yeah, man. Of course.”

  “You don’t know me well enough to joke, pal, so just shut your pie-hole.”

  “Jesus, you really are an asshole, aren’t you?” he remarks.

  “That’s what they say, is it?”

  Sky Blue holds his tongue at this point and before it can become a costumed freak convention, I do the crouch thing and jettison upward. Powder Blue follows, and next thing we alight on the top of the Helides Building. The statue of the Greek billionaire is covered in wasps and ants until Sky Blue touches down and a stark wind brushes the rooftop clear.

  “So, wind powers, right?”

  “Yeah. No weather control like yours, though.”

  I turn away. “I don’t control the weather.”

  “What the hell do you think’s going on?”

  “Well, it’s not normal.” I know how lame this sounds so I follow up, “I’ll call Twilight, see if there’s anything on his supernatural radar.”

  “Could it be . . . mutants?” Sky Blue asks.

  With my phone out, I pause long enough to give the guy a grimace like he just came down in the last insect-laden shower.

  “Mutants? How? Name me a mutant who can do anything more severe than resemble, I don’t know, an overcooked hot dog, and then we might consider it.”

  “There’s Crosswind –”

  I hold up a finger. “He’s an anomaly.”

  The phone goes through to Twilight’s voice mail, but he calls back almost immediately.

  “Zephyr. You need a number for an exterminator?”

  “This bug thing, is it on your, you know, radar?”

  Twilight sounds groggy when he answers.

  “It’s . . . hard to tell. Hard to explain to you, too. It’s like there’s . . . magickal disturbance. It’s been troubling me for a few weeks, actually.”

  “Is that how you got trapped –?”

  “We don’t talk about that,” he snaps.

  “OK. Well I’m downtown, if you have any bright ideas. See you later.”

  I slip the cell away and Sky Blue and I spend a long minute with our hands on hips, nodding seriously and grimacing down at the city below.

  That’s when we see him.

  Striding down the middle of 81st Street, a shade over six-foot and shirtless despite the chilly day, the man has long dark hair well past his shoulders and seems to be wearing a cloth-of-gold robe and black silk pajama pants. I nod to Sky Blue, making sure he’s got a good look.

  “I’m going down.”

  “I’ll be right behind you,” the newcomer says.

  Zephyr 2.3 “A Storm Of Thousands”

  TOUCHING DOWN IN the middle of the street suddenly feels a lot like abandoning all tactical advantage. Time and again I remind myself not to do things like this. As Sky Blue alights behind me, I wonder I should’ve sent him down first, but then I have no idea if he really knows what he’s doing. Could be another Nightwind, for all I know.

  The guy in the silk PJs stops nonchalantly in the middle of the street. A few bugs crawl across his broad, naked chest, and there are butterflies like a little girl’s fantasy as clips in his unbridled hair.

  The eyes, though, look dead. His gold robe hangs off one shoulder and I can see tattoos peeking out from beneath the fabric. It’s impossible t
o really say, but there’s the sense the insect clouds are thicker around this guy and his deadpan demeanor reinforces that this doesn’t bode well.

  “I’m Zephyr,” I say loudly, thumbing my chest.

  “And I,” the long-haired man replies in a voice Shakespearean actors would kill to possess, “am the Creeping Death.”

  Sky Blue breaks with protocol by coming alongside me and holds his palm out at the obvious madman.

  “If you’re the one behind this insect plague, you can stop it right there.”

  As if he has never seen his right hand before, the man lifts up his fingers and peers at them. Emotion fills his face for the first time, a sense of wonder, bemused marvel, as his fist is quickly covered in alighting insects, predominantly bees and wasps, that soon make a thick glove to his elbow.

  “I think that about answers your question,” I mutter.

  Almost as an afterthought, the crazy man, this Creeping Death, flings his insect collection at us. It’s misleading, since so few suddenly become a storm of thousands. I reflexively crouch and light up, wasps and flying ants and hornets and cabbage moths – all with carnivorous intents and purposes on my flesh – crackle and vanish in a whiff of unpleasant-smelling smoke.

  Sky Blue’s response is a vortex of wind that swirls the bugs and fliers around us like suds in a carwash, though I notice him hopping away scowling and barking, those few who snuck through digging in their pinching mandibles and giving it to him with all their tiny might.

  As I straighten, I hearken to the sense of something bearing down on us, and I look up just in time to spot the robot, Hermes, seemingly even more silvery and polished than before, come down on Creeping Death with his enormous fists clutched together in a pile-driver blow that never lands. With the same sense of impending doom as myself, the long-haired crazy cranes his neck back, and as Hermes arrives, a solid dome comprised of insects materializes between attacker and target. It beggars credibility to think even a million close-packed bugs could do such a thing, but Hermes makes a faint metallic rebounding noise and vanishes through the front window of a fashion shop twenty yards away.

  “At him!” I yell, and because I’m not feeling terribly charitable, the lightning bolt springing from my hand isn’t a gentle one.

  *

  I’M PLEASED TO see Creeping Death buckle, crumpling backwards with a pall of blackened insect husks falling around him. They bounce in their hundreds on the concrete like a ton of burnt popcorn.

  My senses crackle with the way Sky Blue’s playing havoc with the air pressure, buffeting our target with wave after wave of compressed wind for unknown purpose, ignorant to my sensitivities or the way my own powers work. Across the street, the seven-foot form of Hermes emerges from the windowless shop-front, a woman’s blouse stuck in the join between his shoulder and arm.

  “Are you gonna behave yourself this time?” I call.

  “Zephyr,” the stentorian robot replies, “I need to explain. . . .”

  “Not now you don’t.”

  Creeping Death rolls over and stands. The gold robe is gone. He makes a fist and waves brutally and the sun’s momentarily blacked out by insects. I’ve risen no more than a few feet off the ground before I am swamped in a tidal wave of chitinous life, hundreds of pounds of creepy-crawlies overwhelming my precious personal space and very nearly my lungs.

  I make like a human bug zapper, which gets me a little leeway once again. Sky Blue isn’t so fortunate, rolling around on the ground with his pretty costume in shreds, not the slightest sign of insulation or Kevlar to protect him. He bleeds from a thousand bites and will need medical evacuation if, as I suspect, half the insects are bees.

  Yet Hermes is immune. He charges forward like the heavyweight he is, lumbering, not as smooth as I’d expect a state-of-the-art droid to be. I find I’m relieved, not that it humanizes him or anything. He and Creeping Death go into a tussle, a beard and sleeves of insects hanging from our opponent and seemingly lending him enormous strength. Although Hermes wins the slapping contest – Creeping Death rebounds off a parked SUV’s windshield and goes over the top before righting himself on the pavement – our foe emerges with the upper hand as a new wave of insects sweep down the street, jostling parked cars and crumpling windows, basically collecting Hermes and sweeping him halfway down the block.

  An armored limousine, jet black, appears at the other end of the street. Mastodon steps out in full costume, grins and waves to me, and Paragon and the self-styled “dark telepath” Nocturne emerge from the rear as well. No sign of Lady Macbeth, thank Christ. Mastodon does his signature stamp – we always teased him that he should’ve been known as The Bull – and in a couple of heartbeats swells in size from just over six foot to a little under nine, adding more than the expected amount of meat in the process. Giving an inchoate roar, Mastodon charges down the street and to avoid him needing an industrial-size tube of Tiger Balm, I lance another charge at Creeping Death, though it falls short at his feet.

  The two men collide with a sound like hams fighting. Creeping Death knows he’s in the shit now. Mastodon lands a few exquisite punches, and rather than wondering what the old dude is doing here, I wonder why he ever retired. He dodges a lazy right swing and clocks the insect freak’s long jaw. I hover, thinking about whether I can safely rush Sky Blue to the paramedics. Hermes comes overhead, white-hot exhaust gushing from his boots. Paragon and Nocturne hang back, one glowing with his perpetual light bulb force-field, the other shrouded by her blue-black robes.

  Nocturne’s voice appears in mine and presumably all of our minds.

  “I cannot get a thing from him,” she says, rich Creole accent carried even by telepathy. “It’s like I am not connecting with a human mind.”

  I point at Sky Blue and yell for Paragon to drag him to safety. Only a few bugs land in my mouth as I call. Mastodon suddenly hurtles through the air and the swirling cloud of bugs getting thicker and thicker with each instant. I’m staggered to see them manifest in a wave of force that slaps the already airborne veteran clear down the block, careening off the side of Astrid’s parents’ building and hitting a parked car that immediately starts up with its alarm.

  Moving forward, the bug-storm becomes intense. Electricity flickering up my body sees me shedding insects like black dandruff on a scale unimaginable, yet seems to do little to the overall population. I shoot a glance at Hermes and he seems frozen to the spot, batting like a real person at the thousands of insects buzzing around him, his shiny armor splattered with more goo than an amateur porn queen.

  So it falls to me to take the battle to our beetle-brained friend. Ladybirds and centipedes and earwigs carom off me as I swing a punch, but the vortex of insects around the madman is so intense it seems to thicken in anticipation to each blow, completely ruining my momentum even with my enhanced strength battling the tide. I try a few unpredictable attacks and Creeping Death, to give him the honor of the moniker, holds his hands out in front of himself like a kung fu master, eyes just slits, and every thrust and kick slows in the airborne tide of insects biting at me.

  This goes on for a while. I’m batting blind. Eventually I punch a lightning bolt into his chest. A shield of flying ants and hornets materializes before my gesture and when the dust clears, the villain rises up over me, suspended, unbelievably, by several hundred pounds of insects clinging to his back, arms and legs, all seemingly working with one mind. Once I clue in to realizing it’s not Sky Blue’s wind powers sounding shrilly in my ears any more, I have to accept the air is filled with the sound of a million insect wings beating as one.

  “Hermes, what the fuck is going on, man?” I bark.

  “Insects have . . . filled my sensors. I am blind.”

  “Great. Nocturne, how’s the Don?”

  “Resuming consciousness,” her liquid tones fill my mind.

  “Any luck with our friend?”

  “I hate to say it,” she projects, “but his mind isn’t dissimilar to the insects themselves. I can’t . .
. his thoughts shift too quickly, and they’re too alien for me.”

  Creeping Death is true to his name: he’s not exactly breaking the sound barrier as he lifts, turning vaguely in the direction of the People’s Plaza.

  Zephyr 2.4 “Like A Monarch of Antiquity”

  “LET’S FOLLOW HIM for a bit,” I tell Nocturne the moment I’m close enough to be heard without yelling.

  I don’t know how she keeps the bugs off her, but she does. Her perfume, perhaps – exquisite, but strong. I don’t know if it’s the cowl concealing half her face or not, but she’s always been my favorite black female hero, even though she’s flaked out on more than one occasion in the past and has a bad rep among some of the old guard for her moral panics. I know that’s pretty damning, but she’s got killer pins and looks all sexy and seventeenth century under that Little Red Riding Hood cowl. In my books, this more than makes up for leaving Grasshopper and Black Honey in the doo-doo every now and then.

  Paragon drags Sky Blue into Mastodon’s limo and they slam the doors and the car takes off for the nearest hospital as the owner himself comes limping towards us.

  “Headache?”

  Mastodon produces a tiny canister and shakes free a few pills, swallowing them with a grimace.

  “That boy threw me good. I thought I was doin’ well.”

  “You were,” I reply. “The bug thing, his powers, seem out of all proportion.”

  “What’s the plan?” the old man asks.

  I scan around in case there’s any late arrivals, but judging by the faint and not-so-distant alarms ringing around the place, plenty of the city’s other supers have probably got their hands full already.

  “First thing,” I say. “Nocturne, honey, tell me you can keep a trace on this guy even if you can’t get inside his head.”