Zephyr IV Page 2

  “It’s an interesting possibility I keep being tempted to explore,” I say in what’s meant to be a pithy reply, but sounds instead like one of those pathetically teenaged suicide threats. Her expression curdles appropriately and I shrug.

  “I’m not going anywhere, hon. Absolutely going nowhere.”

  I try to smile, but the truth stings.

  “Well, you’d better be going somewhere. At least tonight.”

  She pats the door frame to depart.

  “Hold on,” I say, looking up. “Where’s the top I had before?”

  “The t-shirt without sleeves? God dad. Probably in the trash. It was full of holes.”

  “I know. I want it,” I say.

  Tessa stares at me a moment and simply nods, her eyes closing up to whatever it is she might really be thinking.

  “Sure thing, dad. Whatever you want.”

  *

  I FIND HER again in the common room, thankfully free from the other members of her squad. Last time, I recall the Sentinels and I didn’t exactly part on good terms. They reformed around me, after all, and I dumped on them pretty quick. I eye the black glass table with thinly-veiled covetousness and then up again as a familiar face bounds into the room.

  Shade.

  “Hey,” I say and smile and the smile drips off me once more as there’s a look that flits between the brassy English woman and my daughter that hints that she’s sure as shit not here to see me. I frown, cocking my head on an angle like dogs do and quizzing Tessa with a please explain.

  “Uh, Mel’s my date to the wedding.”

  First off, I’m surprised Windsong’s even got an invite, but apparently she’s still rocking out on that “girl who saved Atlantic City” thing from the year before.

  I turn back to Shade and recall we’ve tussled over this before.

  “You remember that she’s my daughter, right?”

  “Uh, yeah. But we knew each other before,” Shade says in her cockney tones.

  “Before what?” Tessa asks.

  I can only look back at Shade and fold my arms and sort of say, “Go on, you explain that,” and that’s enough for Tessa, whose face explodes at the revelation.

  “What? You and Shade? Are you kidding me?”

  She looks at the other woman before I can frame any sensible reply.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t think it really . . . really mattered … that I didn’t really . . . really think . . . and sort of forgot,” Shade finishes weakly and shrugs.

  “Jesus Christ,” Tessa retorts.

  She flicks her eyes at me.

  “Superheroes. Honestly. Can’t you keep it in your pants five minutes, dad?”

  “Isn’t there, like, a 20-year age gap between you two anyway –”

  “Oh really what does that matter?” Shade laughs.

  “Jeez, dad. Get with the program. I can control the weather. Mel could probably kick your ass.”

  “Could not.”

  “We’re hardly normal,” Tessa says, finishing her point.

  I chew this over, not quite able to swallow my sudden irritation as I look back at Shade and see she’s gone jet black on me again.

  “Do you need round two?” she asks.

  “If you remember how round one ended, I don’t think that’s really appropriate to the moment, do you?” I reply.

  “You have to ruin everything!”

  Tessa bursts into tears and scoops up an armload of magazines, several of which spill onto the ready room floor as she hurries past me and from the room.

  I move like I might be of any sort of rational help to her in this moment, bending to retrieve a copy of SuperScene. It has a chiseled, computer-animated image of Paragon’s head on the front. A break-out photo shows a fairly unflattering rear view of Tessa as Windsong putting some handcuffed fuckwit into the back of a police van. The kick-line reads, “Chubby honey: Inside our newest hero’s body issues.”

  I crumple the magazine in my fist and torch it and look back to see Shade has already gone after her.

  Zephyr 12.4 “Angel Of Disease”

  WITH WINDSONG NOT speaking to me, I track down one of the hooded flunkeys and get dropped off down near the old neighborhood. I should be checking in on what the hell’s happened to my mother’s place, but the complaint letters go to only one address and the truth is I have been having a hard time keeping Loren from my thoughts.

  The fortress – or at least the part needed to get me back on terra firma – materializes in an alleyway between a pawn shop and a porn shop down near the waterfront and I tug the travel-stained sleeveless tee into place beneath the open leather jacket and emerge into late late afternoon traffic no more than five blocks from the warehouse. I am in the air before anyone can even really register an icon of Atlantic City walks among them and as I drop out of the lowering sun into the grungy lane beside the Vietnamese restaurant, I zip the jacket over my graffiti-style logo and hope nobody notices I’m just another leather-boy, albeit wearing a domino mask, in this district already suspicious for S&M types.

  I start up the metal fire escape that is our front door and almost collide at once with a weedy-looking guy with a Dirty Sanchez moustache, little more than a shit-stain above his lip as he blinks at me, sweaty even with summer a ways off yet, and pushes on down the clattering stairs.

  I frown, momentary inertia confusing my resolve as my concern and curiosity overcome the distinctly bad feeling I have about the errant visitor. The door above is open and I came hoping Loren had naturally come back here to live. Now I’m not so sure.

  “Hello?”

  I push the door in further, unimpressed but not really surprised at the aura of dishabille inside the apartment. The bed is in the living room, crumpled and often slept in and in that regards, completely unremarkable, likewise the tattered couch with its naked springs peeking through the ugly 70s wool upholstery. I’m also not really shocked by the empty take-away food containers, some of them possibly museum pieces from our time together in our bespoke love nest, back in the days before my rebirth meant Loren’s death – metaphorically if not figuratively.

  What I’m not cool with is the gentle moan followed by a giddy laugh coming from the next room. You could barely swing a cat in here, so it’s only a couple of my amped-up steps into the kitchen and the inextricably positioned naked toilet bowl opposite the junk-strewn formica table. My heart is in my mouth to see Loren there, slumped beside the porcelain with a curious smile smeared across her bruised-looking face. One skinny arm rests across the toilet along with strands of her once lustrous hair. Her other hands sits in her lap. She wears wet-kneed pajama pants and a pink singlet. A hypodermic needle jets from her mainline.

  “Loren.”

  My voice is all soap opera tremolo as I swoop in and pick her up. She’s lighter than ever, bones hollow as a bird’s. Her curves are gone. She is all ribcage and sharp hips, but this is nothing new to me. I saw her like that in the aftermath of Candace’s death in the hospital at White Nine. Up close and in my arms once more, it’s still a shocking revelation. Tears course down my face and dapple her closed, sunken eyelids as I swing her back into the bedroom and lay her down, the needle plucked, examined for drug traces and thrown into a corner.

  Hearing her name barely rouses her, but Loren’s eyes open as she gives a gooey smile at the bed’s soft embrace. Her honey-colored eyes flicker open and see me and there’s a strange wrestling of emotions filtered through the treacle of whatever drugs are in her system. I can only hope that was her dealer, whoever he was who just left. The other options are too grim and tawdry to contemplate and yet again I am left as a man wondering what the hell reverse Midas touch I have with the women in my life.

  *

  IT’S ONLY BEEN a week or so since she was released. The descent into drugs, however steep, is recent. I pray this new addiction can be exorcised.

  “I’m sorry,” Loren says sleepily.

  There is genuine angst in her
voice, suffocating beneath her self-inflicted syndrome.

  “I missed the shine, Joey. The sparkle. I don’t glow any more. I need to get the glow back.”

  “Your powers?” I understand the logic, yet I can barely comprehend.

  “You don’t understand what it’s like. . . .” she says, the voice like a creature with a twenty-year habit.

  “Actually I do. Don’t you remember? I lost mine too.”

  “Not the powers,” she says softly. “You got yours back. He killed me.”

  I swallow hard. Nod. A hand on her brow. She lacks the strength to sit up and I’m not expecting her to. I would lie down beside her, but my dear darling perfect voluptuous angel has a sickly smell, replaced in our bed by some kind of succubus, an interloper, a harpy, an angel of disease.

  “What have you taken?” I ask in that actorly voice so familiar to viewers of daytime soaps.

  Loren only blinks, sleepy again with the wash-up. She smiles, looks up at me, for just a moment the glimmer of her former self, the incandescent beauty I failed to actually fall in love with, despite the best wishes and desires of millions of hot-blooded superhero watchers. But in just a moment this rugged, sharp-hipped creature is back in my bed and she turns her profile to me, a demon’s skull beneath a goddess’s skin stretched taut like the wing of a bat over delicate bones.

  Unconscious, Loren doesn’t witness my tears and therefore doesn’t have to guess I am crying more for myself than I ever have for her.

  Zephyr 12.5 “Black Leather Shadow”

  I FIND AN ATM and miraculously there’s some cash there. I return under cover of early twilight gloom to the apartment and stash a fold of twenties under Loren’s pillow and leave a note, paralytic with procrastination over what to actually write until I manage to tell her I’ll be back, my lack of conviction perhaps evident in the shaky pen-strokes, the tawdry scrap of admonishment punctuated with empty-looking cross-hatches only children would call kisses. Then I slip from the loft like a sex offender, every bit as grim-faced and frostbitten as the man I glimpsed on my arrival, me his black leather shadow as the lights of the city snap on haphazardly around me.

  I glut myself with a slice or six and a Coke slushie, then coffee from a take-away cart as I sip the fuel in front of a bank of pawn shop windows displaying TV coverage of Paragon and Jocelyn’s fast-impending nuptials. I blink in a punch-drunk stupor as my own headshot briefly flashes by, an arrogant, jaw-upturned stock photo from an earlier time as the voiceover promises I’ll be making a speech in just a few hours ladies and gentlemen, at Atlantic City’s wedding of the century live from Silver Towers.

  At least now I know where I’m meant to be, whatever earlier plans the idiot couple had obviously shelved in favor of the Chancellor’s high-rise fortress of inglorious vanity. The distant whine of choppers buzzing the skyline hint at a fervor only just warming up and with a long night ahead. I sigh, the smell of my acid-eaten sleeveless costume evident even to myself, a paradox against the shine of newly-replicated leather courtesy of the Wallachians’ infernal machines.

  “There you are, Zephyr!” a jaunty voice rings out, less familiar than the tone suggests it ought to be.

  I turn and glimpse a grey-clad man a decade my junior standing atop the discount sip-n-buy across the street, three red-brick storeys overhead. Even my best narrowed gaze doesn’t mysteriously unfurl the man’s identity as he holds his hands up and apart and a faint red glow emanates from his fingertips.

  “You don’t remember me?” he catcalls.

  “Sorry, pal. I’ve been in and out a bit. Remind me?”

  Passing pedestrians give us a wide berth, the rolling-eyed look of cows sensing imminent slaughter the sixth sense most city residents have evolved to possess these days, wary to the vibe of an imminent super-powered smackdown.

  The other guy drops from the roofline with a heavy crunch, buckling sidewalk pavers as he moves across the briefly empty street, gaining bulk and glowing more darkly with each step.

  “I’m Helix. We tussled before,” he grins somewhat handsomely, not that I’m a good judge of such things. “Mistake I made was trying to take you on with your own powers. I’ve been rubbing shoulders with the New Atlanteans. Heard of ‘em?”

  His grey leathers start to smolder and crack, flakes breaking off to reveal the glowing black charcoal mass I recognize from the newcomer hero Coalface, though the New Atlanteans team moniker remains unknown to me. I shake my head.

  “What about a friendly rematch?” Helix says.

  “Friendly rematch? What the fuck are you on about?”

  The other guy gives a genuinely bewildered grimace.

  “What? You know.”

  “No. Really, I don’t.”

  “It’s like a time-honored thing. You know, superheroes. . . .” he says and shrugs.

  Like a socially awkward kid trying to fit in at a new school, Helix lunges forward and swings a right-handed haymaker that I step aside as sizzling heat unfolds from his purloined powers. Although the punch missed, I slap aside the offending limb like a troublesome fly.

  “Like I said, Helix, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Helix grins, something lug-headed in his gaze, retarded, autistic, determined. And then it dawns on me, emblazoned in my furious frown.

  “You’re not a hero, you fucking idiot. You’re a villain.”

  *

  HELIX GIVES A double-take and steps back, but it’s only a momentary reprieve.

  “Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?”

  “This isn’t how heroes behave, you moron,” I say and push him back with a hand that touches nothing, projecting a buckled-up wave of electrically-agitated and compressed air particles.

  “Naw,” Helix replies goofily. “I seen it all the time and in the comic books too. You guys are always slugging it out.”

  “Not by choice.”

  Undeterred, Helix grimace-grins again and flexes and seems to bulk out just a little more, though he has nothing on the real Coalface who’s almost the literal definition of a brick, oven-fresh as the case may be.

  I skip aside as Helix weighs in, swinging several powerful haymakers that connect with nothing.

  “Hey,” I snap, and club him over the side of the ear with a quick discharge of sparks. “You keep tagging me. Yes, I remember you now. That’s not how we do it. You want to be a hero? You want to roll like me? Go find someone in trouble and do some good, you fucking meathead.”

  But Helix isn’t listening. Lost to finesse, he barges in to grab me about the midriff, but for once I am wise to the attack and jet into the air just enough to turn and kick him in the back of the head, propelling him on and into the pawn shop windows that crash with waves of breaking glass, the noise of a dozen televisions spilling amid the cacophony onto the street as the metal security grille buckles and shakes to the chaotic tune.

  Helix turns, the stupid fuck actually enjoying himself now and putting to bed my fears this might just be an honest misunderstanding. The glow of his red-limned eyes reinforces the sadist’s pleasure he imagines might result from us taking this to the next level.

  It’s enough for me. I snap. A timeless quantity of unhappy camper pours out through the repression-cage in the base of my skull as I literally see red as Helix doubles back towards me and I lower to the street, cars now banking up behind a wise taxi holding off from driving through the middle of our encounter.

  I bat Helix’s outstretched paws aside and deliver twin hard elbow strikes to the side of his head, battering his ear, following with a solid left uppercut that jets him from the ground and onto the bonnet of a parked car. A row of alarms start up as the panicked taxi driver next to the squawking target vehicles starts beeping and looking frantically behind himself at the other motorists in the queue as he tries to back up.

  Helix wrenches the front end of the damaged car free from the rest of the wreck and hurls it at me, but I dodge aside, juiced up and ready to do some damage of my own as I zoom in su
per-fast and unleash hell in the form of a dozen swift body blows up and down Helix’s mimicked torso, the noise like ancient Greek urns going under the wrecking ball. Helix himself only makes a strangled “Oif!” like a comic book himself, which I punctuate with a wicked ka-bam across the jaw that sends him spinning like a top over the roofs of the stalled cars and disintegrating the corner brickwork of the pawn shop.

  I am perversely pleased to see him struggle up from around the shards of brick that almost seem to mock him like a destitute semiotic, the honks of reversing cars fading as the traffic gets the hell out of Dodge. Coalface doesn’t have any distance attack and neither does Helix, and exploiting this, as I stalk towards him like the ghost of pissed off vigilantes past, I dose him good and proper with a thick stream of current. He gives off smoke and crumples to one knee, holding a hand in the air as if it might halt me by effort of will alone.

  I dunno. I guess I am still pretty angry and pent-up about Loren. As I reach where Helix crouches, I pick him up with a massive grunt and throw him across the street to rebound from a light pole and into the side of another brick building. He makes a dent in the wall and cracks down hard on the sidewalk and only just manages to look up as I take a big flying leap and come down on him with both boots, driving him along the buckled slabs with only an old-fashioned fire hydrant to arrest his passage. Disappointingly, the hydrant tilts, but doesn’t break. Helix looks up, stammering, the cloak of his borrowed powers slipping from him as he lapses into unconsciousness.

  I give a snap look around at onlookers banked up on the far side of the street, phone cameras flashing, and a second later I jet high into the air and turn, an awesome beast of anger and self-loathing headed for a reunion with a room full of the last people I really want to see.

  Zephyr 12.6 “What Happens Next”

  CONTRADICTORY MOTHERFUCKER THAT I am, amid my woe and anguish about Loren two things occur to me at once: Zephyr’s credibility is going to be up shit creek if I turn up to Paragon and Jocelyn’s wedding dateless, and I also have a deep cellular craving to see Holland aka Cusp again.