Zephyr III Read online

  I swing past the tastefully-accoutered police offices, the pink flamingos missing from its manicured lawns, nothing more unsightly than a man coming in to pay his parking ticket only to find the office hours are now closed.

  And of course by the time I head back to this Seagal character’s hacienda, the whole thing has gone to hell.

  *

  THE TRIUMPH NESTLES into a space between the pink plasterwork and the rotting timber of the less upmarket place next door. Once I’m satisfied the bike can’t be easily seen from the street, I do a bad imitation of Lioness’s scale of the wall. I rue the day I lost my powers, but losing the power to fly, man, that’s the lowest blow of all. Sweating and groaning, I finally get my gloved fingers over the top of the wall and I smart at the broken glass embedded in the concrete and go over as gracefully as I can manage.

  It is a beautiful house, but the grounds look like it’s been a while since anyone swept. A black metal fence surrounds the pool and the water is sludge, millions of leaves from the sparse lawn piled into the water that now croaks with a habitat of its own. More leaves and the odd piece of litter mark the walk to the back door of what I mistake as the house. Instead, it’s just an outbuilding for the pool man or something. As I head around the corner, the estate yields another house, a big barn-like shed, and a stand-alone metal-framed outdoor patio.

  I check my phone, but there’s nothing from Loren. Crouching beside a flowering palm, I text her as quickly as I’m able and a bleep comes from the direction of the patio once the message is sent. The response sends my paranoia tingling, and remaining in a crouch, I sprint from the pool house to the patio and freeze in horror.

  We have only been apart fifteen minutes – evidently long enough for my mother’s murderer to begin what it takes to ruin my life completely.

  I have to freeze just before reaching out my hand. Loren hangs from a chain normally reserved for an outdoor punching bag. She has taken its place. Her hair is loose and covers most her face, slick and red with blood. Her costume is cut from the neck to the knees without much regard to the flesh beneath, which has scored deeply, one long awful line that makes the skin pucker open like a vast pair of lips and the redness pumping from that wound is mirrored in the tears weeping from her eyes as she lifts her head and opens her broken mouth.

  “Baby?”

  There is a high-pitched whine and my only thought is to dive for cover as I wrongly assume the attack is meant for me.

  Wrongly.

  Wrong again.

  Zephyr 8.4 “That Split Second”

  I AM STILL rolling as Loren bursts into flames, the svelte wrists shackled above her head holding her in place as the tasteful outdoor patio becomes a living abattoir and the siren shrieking is my lover as the flames lance up her body and the crackling noise is her delicious curves rupturing in the monstrously accelerated conditions.

  I come up to see a heavyset man in a rubbery black bodysuit, a silver helmet covering his head from just above the mustache, enormous fuck-off silver metal gloves on his hands. Gauntlets. They are not the same. A device of some sort sits astride the wrist of his right glove. A little fin like from a shark’s back is atop the helmet, something art deco in the design. The evil smirk resolves through my adrenal vision.

  “Shame,” Arsenal says. “That’s another one of your bitches I never got to fuck.”

  I launch myself at him, powerlessness forgotten. Arsenal simply melts away, faster than I can possibly be. A super-speedster. The metal fist crosses my jaw instants later and I’m still locked into the vector of momentum from my charge and the blow redirects me into the nearby brickwork that I half-demolish with the forearms thrown up to protect my face. I’m still picking bricks and plaster from my vision when I hear that split-second signal again and I throw myself into cover as the remaining column becomes a burning sepulcher and I shield my eyes from the glare and watch discordantly as Arsenal turns and runs off.

  “No.”

  The urge to gesture with my powers is almost unbearable, but there’s nothing I can do. Her noise has stopped, though there’s something of Hell’s rotisserie about the way Loren’s mangled frame turns slowly on its gyre. Hot fluid of some sort spatters from her body to pool beneath booted feet, arched but not quite able to touch the ground. The air smells like a beach cook-out on a forest fire breeze, a mad scene, just a vignette from some Boschean nightmare.

  I explete for a short while. What do I tell you? The word no has so many meanings and uses and each one of them is null and void as I kneel in the yard and my lover heats my tears until they have dried.

  For a moment I think she is trying to tell me something, so I stand. There’s nothing at hand to cut the chains pinning Loren up and no way to douse the smoking hell that is her final torment in a life whose destruction I have played such a disgustingly large role. But it is only the wind picking up in the canyon and whistling through her ribs, her blackened jaw agape, eyes closed on my guilt and horror in a scene that will plague me for eternity, I hope, otherwise what sort of fucking man am I?

  *

  A NOISE COMES from the huge barn. I mistake it for an engine and in my anger, thinking Seagal is going to escape, I stagger for the sound as the lights come on in the main house and I blindly change course, kicking in the back door like a madman come to collect destiny, throwing away any possible advantage in the hope whatever fate I’ve come to meet is worthy enough to expunge the awful doom meted out on those around me.

  The bungalow is mostly darkness. The lights are on in the kitchen and then a terra cotta-tiled hall, a halogen oblong the open doorway to a trapdoor under the stairs and I am down them in an instant, the baseball bat in my hands and my tears have resumed, dripping on the wooden grip as I remember a night bathed under the glow of the neon beer sign and a girl’s arching back I took so little solace in thinking would be mine forever.

  Arsenal’s laboratory makes Doc Prendergast’s place look like a Buddhist retreat. The benches are covered in hardware and half-finished gadgets, a mechanical alchemist’s lab lit by the countless monitors that people the shelves like votive offerings in some obscure technophile religion, flowering forgotten and obscene on any number of alternate worlds. In my fevered, vengeful state, I don’t think there’s anything that can shock me or give me pause, but then amid the rubbish I am confronted by the image of the FBI agent Vanguard alive and strapped to a work bench in full regalia, the helmet and gauntlets removed, his left hand raw to the bone; and the tendons and exposed metacarpals are a solid indicator of the obvious pain in the unconscious agent’s furrowed surfer-boy brow.

  I would wake him. Ask him what the fuck has happened to the world. Instead, there’s a silver flash and the matricide is behind me, the rubbery black arm at my throat as Arsenal puts me into a choke hold, his knee in the middle of my back.

  “How does it feel now, you chicken-shit fuckin’ pussy asshole?”

  I try to be calm. Then I try just to breathe. Neither are possible.

  Hawkwind’s face and more importantly his training run through my mind, and I do the aikido move that inches his elbow to the left and lets me get my shoulder behind his grappling arm and then I am the one forcing him forward and I get my leg in the way and we go over, except this Seagal motherfucker is some martial arts master as well and the moment my neck is released from his vise-like grip, he has my right arm locked straight out behind my body and it is probably pretty fortunate he elects to ram me face-first into one of the work benches rather than attempt anything more malign. I get free, barely feeling the wreck of my nose, my face a tapestry of fine cuts as I wrench back and swing a fist and Arsenal guides me on so that I crash into another bench at chest height.

  “You’re wreckin’ the joint, you clumsy fuck,” he snaps.

  The silver fist comes out of nowhere, a thunderbolt to the side of my mouth that snaps me into a back-flip over one of the tables. I’m still pulling my shit together as Arsenal retreats up the stairs with another device held two
-handed.

  “Bastard,” I retch and a sliver of tooth falls with the blood I snort out of my nose and I grab the table and practically pull it over trying to charge into pursuit.

  We go up and into the house. A microwave oven bounces off my raised forearms. I have lost my bat, but I take a kitchen knife from its block and it is as sharp as my desire for murder as I follow the fleeing speedster like I am his tattered shadow, my coat flapping open as I leave through the shattered back door and pitch myself to the right as Arsenal fires his heat beam again and the side of the wall sparks and there’s a bang that was meant to be me.

  *

  “ARE YOU EAGER to die, boy?”

  “You should keep running,” I reply, stalking across the lawn littered with tiny black flakes from the burnt wall. “I’m going to cut you to pieces, you crazy motherfucker.”

  “You call me the crazy one?”

  He laughs.

  “You’ve got no reason to be doing this,” I tell him.

  We’re facing off now, me with the carving knife and him in a classic pose, the helmet only adding to the sardonic twist of what little expression’s visible on his lantern-jawed face.

  “Killing you would be a favor,” Arsenal says and chuckles again. “Maybe just before you die, you can wake up to realize the lie we’ve been living. Those fuckers cheated me. You. All of you. You should be cheering me on, you stupid fucking clown.”

  He snaps forward to disarm me and I withdraw my hand just in time. My left hand forms a wedge and I stab it into the side of his neck, but the rim of the helmet thwarts me and I’m still registering the pain in possible broken fingers when he goes low and punches me in the meat of my left thigh. My leg goes numb and I drop to my knee and ward my face as he kicks and I get an arm behind his leg and drive the knife into his stomach, only Arsenal twists so the blade thrusts across the surface of the weird black fabric that covers him.

  A hand behind my skull guides me into the ground and I manage to roll from the grapple, but the knife is forfeit and we get to our feet at the same time, Arsenal’s reactions seemingly no faster than my own despite his apparently augmented speed. The only defense is to attack, so I step in and feint a blow to his face and hammer my left into his ribs, the blow hard enough to lift him from the ground. He replies with a side snap kick as soon as he’s able and I dance away, try to sweep his leg, fail, and throw myself back to avoid an axe-kick into my face.

  As I pick myself up from the lawn a second time, the speedster barrels away across the yard in the direction of the huge garage.

  The lights are on in the big building, making me register how the sun has finally set and taken my hopes for a better life with it. I am panting and getting dangerously tired, limping on the leg still half-dead from where Arsenal attacked me as I lope across a dirt path that may or may not be a driveway to what I take to be a shed or garage.

  The double doors are open. Read: they are left open, inviting me in, luring me on with the whisper-thin promise of vengeance wrapped in deceit.

  Arsenal’s laugh is the trigger.

  Just inside the barn doorway, the shadows falling like huge black Tetris blocks of coarse geometry, I realize I am too late.

  The low-level thrum of energy from the generators that must power his underground experimentation and whatever he has rigged to let him travel the multiverse is a cue to my reptilian brain, but I am too far in, too far gone, and then he throws the lever in what he must think is the final act in this grand set piece.

  A blue sun blazes in the darkness, engulfing me as serpentine whips of electricity disintegrate the air between the two huge vat-like cylinders either side of the shed door.

  The power charges through me like the day I was born, atomizing the cells in my blood, flipping the switch in some unknown quadrant of the brain. The pain is immeasurable, a vast orgasmic birth I couldn’t ever explain without appearing ridiculous.

  Seagal is gone by the time I lift myself steaming from the sawdust floor, the bastard figuring me dead thanks to his booby-trap, I guess. Instead, sparks leak from my eyes and splash on the ground, upon the claws of my hand as I peel the Zorro mask from my skull and stare unseeing through the nimbus of light.

  I don’t know at this point if I am reborn or merely summoned back into life for a few moments more, as if to entertain some unseen, malicious higher power.

  Zephyr 8.5 “Out Of The Bowels Of The Earth”

  PERHAPS IT IS too soon.

  I do not actually have this thought. Instead, I release one inchoate shout and wrap my meaty arms around my torso and hurtle into the sky, smashing a hole insensate in the barn roof as I jet into the lower atmosphere and glare hungrily for any sign of the one who would kill me and those I care about.

  If Arsenal has left a trace, I lack the senses to see it. The traffic beeps past on a distant boulevard and the corrugations of the tasteful neighborhood are alive with up-lit trees and colorful signage. Below, the hacienda is on its way to becoming a miniature volcano as one wall and the structure of the outdoor patio blaze. There are sirens in the distance – police, fire trucks and an ambulance – and their tiny lights appear at the various points of the compass, their wails a stark music, the firefly flicker of their different colors as the converge on the crime scene conveying a harsh operatic beauty. I could flee. I am hovering, graven features no concession to the powerful, contradictory emotions stabbing through me like the strobe of Seagal’s generator. But now I want to tell this story, to make them aware.

  I drop to the ground in the back yard and glance like an exile at the skeletal frame of my lover hanging from the steel frame. In my pocket is a domino mask, a keepsake or lucky token or a sign of hope – I could never decide which – and I slip it on, pressing down on my face an easy excuse to clamp my eyes shut as fresh waves of grief roll through me.

  But simple mourning couldn’t be so easy.

  “Jo-seph. . . .”

  The voice shocks me to my feet and I don’t know what way to stagger even though it’s clear my name has come from Loren.

  I’m caught in that too-afraid-to-know, too-ashamed-to-flee emotional maelstrom and I take step after step towards the dangling charnel shape knowing each one brings me closer to a fresh revelation I’m not sure I can bear, but I am powerless to do otherwise. And then I am close enough to reach out one hand, uncertain if it is safe to even cup the cheek in which one butterscotch eye flicks open with the noise of a butterfly’s wing tearing.

  “Loren?”

  “. . . –seph.”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  I can’t touch her, but I can bring her down from the torturer’s gallows. I hover without thinking and prise apart the chain links, holding the ends to lower Loren onto the pavers. A noise like a punctured football emanates from the thing I still can’t help thinking of as Loren’s corpse.

  “Baby baby. . . .”

  I push the mask back into place as the tears seek to loosen it. Somewhere there is a crashing noise and the first cops fan out across the scene with their sidearms raised, braver than I ever was, eyes agog at the disaster and the sense of imminent risk.

  “Zephyr? Zephyr? Is that you?”

  I look up at some Hispanic kid, LAPD cap in place. I stand and try to man up, nodding, but my face is caught in a living rictus of disbelief and the words struggle to come.

  “I need an ambulance.”

  “You need the fuckin’ Coroner,” another cop says.

  I take him down just by raising my hand. The flash is only a blue spark and then the career cop is twitching a few paces from where Loren lays.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” I say stupidly.

  The young cop backs away, careful not to point the Glock at me, and I ignore him like he’s just some kid wanting an autograph as I turn back to Loren. She’s not moving or saying anything. It’s hard to believe her frame sustains any life. Actually, impossible. I’m still trying to make sense of it when the first paramedics arrive and they push me back, physically
, no thought to their own safety as they get on with the job they are trained to do and I can respect that, so I wander off a few paces and find myself resting my arm across my forehead against one of the palm trees that decorate the front of the property, cops and firemen and others parting around me like I don’t even belong in this scene just as hard as I wish I didn’t.

  *

  IT HITS ME sometime between when the first police arrive and the FBI Blackhawk settles down in the front yard of Seagal’s Californian mansion, but the revelations are like a train derailment and I am kneeling again and I don’t have any lower to go. I just crouch there as the agents crunch across the imported lawn towards me and then stand, waiting for me to act like a costumed hero or something rather than like a victim at any other horrendous crime scene.

  I don’t look up. Counter-point to their expectations. It’s only when the quick response medivac team bustle past with the grotesque thing that was once my girlfriend under plastic wrap on a stretcher that I stagger up and moan something incoherent, only to have a guy with a Star Trek captain haircut and a blue-and-red bodysuit stop me with a hand more than keen to demonstrate its super strength. I take his thumb and the soft pad of his hand between my fingers and twist without even locking eyes and when he kneels in agony, I twist again and release and he drops to the lawn like the proverbial sack and I step over him, only to have the peacock’s partner, a robot, step into my path.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I growl, distracted just enough as the gurney disappears around the pink stucco wall.

  The robot looks like it recently escaped a large furnace. Its metal surface is lumpy and discolored, like molten steel gathered into the form of a man and then cooled rather than carefully contrived via some artifice.