Zephyr I Read online

  “The civic centre at ten,” she says, tired and doubtful.

  “OK.”

  “OK.”

  She hangs up.

  I’m floating in a foggy cloudbank. With my eyes closed, I put away the cell by touch alone, enjoying the sensation of wet static as it rolls across me with the air. It doesn’t matter about the leather all but insulating my physical shell. The extra senses tied in to my special abilities are alive and well, tickled, in a metaphysical sense at least, by the surrounding saturation.

  “Just a little more. . . .”

  I flex my fists. KABOOM – and thunder rolls away to either side.

  I give a chuckle, knowing the city dwellers will be turning in their beds or glancing out windows at the unexpected weather. More than a few will blame me. The bin men always like a good rain so I lay it on for them. Soon the shower is falling away from me, the impression like hundreds of thousands of tiny parachutists going past falling to their doom. My face and hair are slick. So is the leather. I’m tired still, on some level, but the effort to keep myself aloft is minimal and the clouds shield me from the city and some kind of haven is what I find myself craving right now.

  I should be home, asleep, perhaps even making love to my wife. Possibly both. Tessa sleeps soundly in the flat’s second bedroom, the soft whine of her laptop always a strangely reassuring sound in the dark.

  I conduct the storm like it was an orchestra, flinging my hands wildly and grinning, hair just long enough to be in my eyes when it’s not standing characteristically upright. A peal of thunder rings like the bells of Hell and then a stroke of lightning shudders through the night, my very own electric violin quartet.

  Eventually the music stops. Fades. The clouds dissipate under their own will, depleted, drifting back towards the Atlantic.

  And somewhere in the city it sounds like a building turns over in its sleep, like an uncanny echo of the thunder from before. I drop altitude on instinct and pretty soon pass below the dispersing cover and see a mushroom cloud of brown dust emanating from halfway across downtown.

  Without really thinking about it, I am down and swooping across the city, a black shadow flitting between the taller skyscrapers. The lights that way are still on. Dust roils down the street and now car alarms and others are going off. It’s just after midnight and by rights I should still be at Halogen or maybe partying on at De Lux. I said I would meet Robert Downey there, I suddenly remember.

  It seems like now I have an excuse.

  *

  WHAT I SEE is a building walking towards me.

  It’s the Federal National Bank, Jane Street branch, where I have banked a dozen times or so while in the neighborhood they call Eisenhower these days. It’s a five-storey brownstone full to the brim with offices, just a handful of lights somehow still on, while down below multiple pairs of gigantic earthy legs propel the building ponderously forward.

  I don’t know whether to call them legs or tentacles, but clearly this is nothing alive, or not alive in any real sense because I can see churned-up bricks and slabs of concrete and electrical wiring and broken macadam and random assortments of trash swirling through the huge vats of moving earth supporting the building as it lists wonkily from side to side as it comes down the street. There’s a crater somewhere in the background where the bank used to sit and now for some reason it’s going walkies.

  For a few seconds I just watch. There’s nothing like gathering your thoughts and not getting too stupid with adrenaline. A moment’s foresight is like a thousand hours of hindsight, my old tutor Hawkwind used to say, often before beating the crap out of me.

  As I’m watching the building lurch down the street – and it’s going pretty slowly and the noises it’s making aren’t pretty – the first cop car slides to an awkward halt throwing parti-colored light over everything. The strobe reflects off something in one of the upper floor windows and I glimpse the figure of a man before he darts away from the glass.

  The vibrations and structural damage to the bank alone create a nightmare. Pieces of masonry and drainpipes and marble cladding fall from the upper levels like chunky rain, and all at once, most the windows in the place shatter outwards, glass sparkling like a waterfall of sharpness as it showers down and crunches beneath the myriad stamping stumps moving the bank ever along.

  More movement catches my eye. The woman is blue and wears a black leotard and a black ponytail juts from the back of her head without moving in the least. She comes from some height, probably off one of the neighboring roof-tops, and there’s a moment of inertia when she hits the ground, landing in a crouch, before her own particular physical properties kick in and she’s propelled up and powerfully forward into the air and through an empty second-floor window.

  Her name is Vulcana and I still owe her thirty bucks.

  I see her again about ten seconds later when she flies backwards through one of the last windows with glass still in it, so yeah, in a sense, uh, somewhat rectifying that situation, and since I was just about to go upstairs for a look-see anyway, up I zoom and catch the ungrateful bitch in my arms.

  “Zephyr,” she grunts.

  It’s not a question.

  “Hey ‘Cana, long time no see.”

  “I asked you to never call me that.”

  “Split infinitives,” I tut.

  At her hiss I add, “Sorry.”

  “Fuck,” she aspirates prettily. “This city’s got too many heroes.”

  I deposit her on the roof of a six-storey law firm down the street from the oncoming building. A few more police cruisers arrive, one of them managing to clip another as they haphazardly park. Cops scurry across the road like worker ants, shotguns and flak jackets and 9mm pea-shooters poised. One of them, a cop I recognize, glances up in the direction we’ve gone as Vulcana irritably shakes herself free of my helping hands.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Me? I’m fighting –”

  “I heard there was a wrap party for the new Meg Ryan film on 43rd.”

  “Baby, Meg Ryan hasn’t made a film for –”

  I catch myself on and stare miserably at the back of Vulcana’s blue head. I’m not game to tell her that her vulcanized ponytail has snapped off until she reaches back a hand and swears.

  “Not again. Jesus!”

  “Short hair suits you.”

  After a moment to let her grieve, I ask, “So what have we got in there?”

  Another figure lands on the rooftop and immediately chimes in, “That’s just what I was gonna ask.”

  I look over sans friendliness as Nightwind walks matter-of-factly across the building’s roof with a goofy smile on his otherwise grimly-masked face. I can’t help registering my animosity and it’s annoying to see Vulcana nod tiredly, but without any resistance to the imposter.

  “What are you doing here?” I snap.

  “Isn’t that what she was just asking you?” Nightwind sneers. I can’t help being surprised and he reminds me, “Super hearing, remember?”

  “Super hearing my ass,” I respond. “Dude, you are a fucking loser. Could you please stand aside so the real crime-fighters can deal with this?”

  “Zephyr, what’s your problem?” Vulcana snaps. “Do you always have to be so damned uppity?”

  “Hey, let’s leave the ancient history out of this, OK? At least we have a history. This guy’s a fucking nobody.”

  “Hey,” Vulcana says, her blue face dark in the night. “I’ve seen him on news reports like anyone else.”

  “He’s never done anything!”

  It’s hard not to explode. This is a long-running frustration for me and only made worse by the fact I seem to be the only one onto Nightwind’s ruse. He has a cloak with some kind of thermal fan under it that lets him glide. His inventor dad or the uncle who molested him as a kid probably built it to keep him quiet. That and a few more gizmos are all his tricks, and I’ve never seen him once actually stop a crime. The best he can do is glide down to the footpath when t
he TV cameras turn up.

  “Chill, dude,” Nightwind says.

  He reminds me so much of the smug handsome guys who were going off to college when I was repeating night school in the early years of my career as a fuckwad four-color masturbation fantasy that I almost punch his head in right then and there. At least he has the brains to back right the fuck off as Vulcana puts her hand on my arm. Thankfully for Nightwind, and unlike him, ‘Cana has the heightened strength to actually hold me in place – for a moment, at least.

  “Just forget about it, OK?” she yells into my face. “Like you said, there are bigger problems.”

  She points and my attention comes back just as the roof of the Federal Bank starts past us. I glance over the edge and see the police cars flattened and caked with mud and just generally fucked over in its wake.

  *

  WITHOUT FURTHER ADO I leap off the top of the current building and land on the roof of the bank. Although I can fly and shit, you’d think I would pretty quickly adjust to weird situations like the nausea-inducing way the bank roof seems to be rolling and buckling as the building advances down the street. But I don’t. Almost immediately I fall over, harmlessly of course, but it gives me a good chance to appreciate the view down the street, the lights of twenty-odd cop cars and an equal number of cabs blinking and flickering as their drivers desperately try to reverse them out of the log-jam they’ve created. It’s fortunate the bank moves slow enough that no-one has been caught underneath, though that’s an assumption.

  Fortunate for the guy within, anyway.

  Fissures appear in the roof, but I’m not waiting for them to worsen. On the roof there’s a pillbox with a door I’m powerfully hurling open and then an emergency-lit concrete stairwell. I can’t quite work out how any lights are on, but then that’s not really my main concern. Instead, I smash my way down the stairs, half-running, half-flying. A woman appears, disheveled, hair and blouse loose, spot-lit in the emergency lights like a cave-in survivor.

  “What are you doing here?” I snarl.

  She doesn’t say anything at first, eyeing me up and down like a frightened rabbit.

  “You’re . . . you’re Zephyr?”

  “You’d better hope so, huh?”

  “The bank manager is still inside, Jonas Severin.”

  “He’s doing this?”

  The woman looks at me like I’m deranged, eyes flicking from me to the false lure of escape above.

  “No, it’s some guy. I don’t even think he knew we were here.”

  “yeah, what were you doing here?”

  “. . . working. . . .”

  “Right.”

  I manage to push past her without making any promises and the hallway beyond the door is like the inside of a giant waste-paper basket. I’m reminded of that Monty Python skit about offices as pirate ships. There’s not really any light now and it’s cold inside, enough that my breath steams. I hold out my hand and create a strobe every few seconds to see the way, though that’s pretty lazy since I can read the air pressure and use it like a kind of radar if I want (which, you know, most the time I don’t). I’m yelling out the bank manager’s name though I know it’s not the wisest course of action if I want any element of surprise. I’ve usually found saving people’s lives and sneaking up on the bad guy are mutually exclusive activities, more’s the pity.

  The floor erupts in front of me. For almost three seconds I am in a hell made of equal parts earth and waste paper, with the odd filing cabinet thrown in. I imagine mob accountants have dreams like this. No horses’ heads, though. What appears to be a gigantic fist flails about in front of me, the hole in the floor just wide enough for its wrist.

  “Gigantor? Is that you?”

  For a moment I’m choking with dread that it is Gigantor, even though I’m pretty sure he’s still on ice out at White Nine. A moment later, I realize it’s not a human hand, however large, since like the legs outside, it seem to be made from chunks of rubble and roiling masses of earth, and then I almost wish it was Gigantor, everyone’s favorite English-challenged villain. At the sound of my voice, the fist becomes a hand and it turns towards me flattened out like an enormous radar dish.

  At least it doesn’t turn into a massive ear. That would just be plain creepy.

  I charge up as it comes down, enveloping me, and just as the thing suffocates me like a premature burial I let loose, exploding in electrical fury, vaporizing the thing like a moth in one of those electric bug zappers. It leaves me grinning and sick with the familiar sensation of being momentarily between heartbeats. And then my inner wellness pours into the space left by such a major discharge as I absorb energy again from every movement, the lightest touch of the night breeze coming through the shattered windows across the jumble of office furniture, the friction of the leather costume on my joints, the very movement of the building itself.

  I peer into the hole in the ground and there’s another hole directly below it and then more office. I hear a man’s voice, shrieking profoundly, a thousand times more likely to be our errant bank manager than the earth-controller – unless I have a total nutcase on my hands, which wouldn’t be the first time. I levitate down through the cavity just in time to see a dark shape flit past me with the bank manager in her arms.

  Vulcana.

  Zephyr 1.3 “Days Of Yore”

  WITH MY FAVORITE ex-teammate having pipped me again in the hostage-rescuing stakes, I figure that leaves me with the madman. I yell again, wordlessly this time, since he seemed pretty on top of his game when last I made a noise and this should make him come again. And I’m not wrong. Office dividers fly out of the path of a wall of dirt and boxes of photocopy paper and busted underground cables and suddenly second-hand computers. It’s all I can do to jet out of the way as the mini-avalanche slams past.

  In the vague hope I might be able to track my prey, I jog through the third floor of the bank offices in the wake of the debris, pebbles and grit leaving a path across the carpet like the skid mark of the world’s biggest itchy-assed dog. Then I’m at the row of back windows, saw-toothed with glass now, looking out the back of the building like I’m in a slow-moving car, sienna’d automobiles trampled in the bank’s wake.

  There’s a bunch of cops on the street corner so I jump down from the building and land in a pose in front of them. The policeman I’d seen before, Benjamin De Freitas, comes out of the crowd. I probably know a few hundred cops in the city by now, not that I actually remember all their names or anything, but they remember me and like to think the feeling’s mutual. It’s a good thing. I used to call cops “pigs” and a bunch of other names I’ve recently forgotten, but now I kinda feel like one of them, and I like to entertain the fantasy that that feeling’s mutual. They go out with nothing but their badge and gun (oh and flak jackets, tear gas, pepper spray, those neat batons, yadda yadda yadda) and I have the power of six million light bulbs or whatever the fuck it is.

  I don’t know what I was trying to say there. Kinda drifted off sorry.

  At least they get paid, which is what my wife keeps reminding me.

  “Zephyr, what’s the deal?” De Freitas asks, removing his cap and wiping dust from his forehead.

  “I think my colleague’s freed the bank manager –”

  “What the fuck was the bank manager doing in there? It’s past midnight.”

  “Well I’m just about to go back onto the roof and rescue his secretary, so maybe you’ll get to ask your questions from someone who knows what’s going on, officer. All I know is there’s a person inside with earth-controlling powers. That’s how come your bank’s suddenly sprung legs and decided to go on a little holiday.”

  De Freitas nods grimly like that sort of explanation’s just a walk in the park for him, though he is a beat cop in the world’s biggest city, so perhaps it really is no surprise. He motions weakly across the street, drawing my attention to the first camera crew setting up for a shot. I notice Imogen Davies frantically brushing her hair and hurrying through he
r voice warm-up.

  “You got time to explain that to them, Zeph?”

  “I think I have to stop the bad guy first, right?”

  I don’t let him know I’m sorely tempted. The delectable Miss Davies is the new kid on NBN’s graveyard shift and we haven’t yet had the acquaintance.

  “Well, it’s not like it’s in your contract,” De Freitas says.

  Me and the cops share a nice long laugh and I pat the officer on the shoulder and he stops laughing and looks vaguely disturbed, though the others don’t seem to notice a thing wrong.

  “Let me get back to you on this one.”

  I turn around as Nightwind comes down the rubble-strewn street with the bank manager in tow.

  “What are you doing with him?”

  “Hello?” the cloaked kid replies irritatingly. “Rescuing him?”

  “I saw Vulcana carry him out of there. . . .”

  “Yeah and she asked me to escort him to safety. Big deal, right?”

  I’m just shaking my head as Nightwind actually says, “Oh goody, cameras,” and moves off in the cute reporter’s direction adjusting his cloak and cowl.

  “Bastard.”

  I almost break the sound barrier on my way back to the bank roof. Sure enough, Mr Severin’s mousy secretary crouches up near the air-conditioning, the so-called ground all around her crumbling with the disturbance to the building. Hovering, I offer her a hand, and then float back down to deposit the lady beside her employer, who already has a paramedic fitting him out for a blanket and hot chocolate and a valium suppository.

  “Save some for me, alright?”

  I wink at the cute young blonde medic and she gets all red faced, which you’ve gotta admit is kind of adorable. Very much a Minnesota farm girl, which is right up there in my top ten. Then I shoot back around the front of the building.

  Yes I have a top ten. And yes it may contain more than ten items.

  The bank marches inexorably on. Vulcana watches the front while walking steadily backwards keeping pace with it.

  “What do you think?” I shout from overhead.