Zephyr 1.1 “Bright Red Zed”

FOR A MAN with the power of six-hundred thousand light bulbs, or whatever the fuck the advert says, I am feeling kinda wrecked as I stumble up the steps at Halogen, fingers clawing into Red Monolith’s designer cloak as we make a show of laughing and clowning good-naturedly for the cameras. Actresses swirl around us like blowflies on a dead cow, minor grade, firm-bodied, their post-operative breasts stacked and racked as beautifully as the season’s evening wear can hope to provide for, and it isn’t like I am slapping them away. It’s times like these, which means yeah, pretty much every time I stumble into Halogen or the Flyaway or Silver Tower, or sneak in through the back at Transit or Aubergine, that I think about Elisabeth. Funny how someone you love so much can seem like such a nuisance. I blame it on my inner child, knowing she would as well.

            Inside, Darkstorm is talking to Lady Macbeth and I wonder what the fuck a villainess is doing in here and whether I should kick up a stink, but actually I’m craning my head above the crowd wondering whether Twilight has made a show. I see Black Honey talking to Demi Moore and Tony Sabato Jr and Eric Clapton goes past and high fives me and then immediately makes a face aghast he mistook me for someone else. I quickly turn my shoulder on Black Honey, knowing if she’s here then her other low-level pals won’t be far away.

            I can’t see Twilight anywhere, though the club is pretty packed and my ears must be blocked or something because it seems like either the pounding music has rendered me instantly deaf or else I’m hearing something else beneath it, because the music and its accompanying vibrations seem somehow relegated, or somewhat, and I brush past Lady Macbeth and she makes a face at me, bares her teeth, and I’m just about to power up and slug her one when Red Monolith is there, grabbing me by the wrist and pretty much ignoring the latent static charge he receives.

            “Hey man,” Monolith grins in that stupid surfer voice of his. “Ease off the Lady, Zeph. Haven’t you heard? The Lady turned.”

            I look at the tall blonde again, fairly graceful despite her age, and realise the snarling thing is her attempt at playing the coquette. She’s winking at me and I transfer my gaze with difficulty between her magnetic blue eyes and the dark sheen of Red Monolith’s visor.

            “What the fuck are you talking about?”

            Lady Macbeth leans in and does this weird wiggly dance and then starts talking in the voice of a black woman, which again, maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake, I realise eventually is totally a performance for my benefit.

            “Ain’t you heard, Mr Zephyr? I’m turned.”

            “Turned?”

            “Apparently Think-Tank fucked up,” Monolith shrugs. “Get Lady to tell you about it.”

            I wince because even under the seven-foot-tall hero’s red-and-black motorcycle helmet I can tell he’s making wildly suggestive motions with his eyebrows and he’s nudging me too and even if her brain molecules are still recovering from being reorganised by one of my old enemies, the Lady still gets the drift and makes an uncomfortable face, finding someone she knows in the crowd and immediately disappearing. On reflex I turn to check out her ass and I have to concede she’s in pretty good shape. The split-leg black evening gown helps. She hails down Antonio Banderas like he’s a taxi or something, but the sneaky bastard turns and pretty quickly opens his arms for a hug. It’s not like she’s a mass murderer or anything so I guess it’s fairly easy to forgive and forget. Especially for actors.

            “Man, have you seen Twilight?”

            “What’s that?” Red Monolith leans in and offers me the side of his head like I might speak right into his ear. Resisting the urge to pull his helmet if not his head clean off and throw it away, I calmly repeat myself more loudly.

            “Oh no, man, I have no idea.”

            “Okay.”

            “Beer?”

            “Stoli,” I reply.

            I’m not going to the bar tonight after an incident the previous week that I can only remember in flashbacks. I also don’t have any money. I could flash fry an automatic teller or yank one of the damn things out of the fucking wall, but for some reason I have not. Yet. I’m one of the good guys. It’s a mantra for me. It’s worked so far. It also helps me not forget.

            The press and push of the crowd is a little sickening. The air’s moist like we are in the presence of a giant fourth-dimensional armpit, though I know the smell, if I’m not imagining it, comes mostly from the carpet on the floor. I’ve been here in the daytime – woken up in a corner, in fact – and it’s not one of the prettiest sights ever seen.

            I retain the curious conviction if I keep looking long enough I might find Twilight, so I move along under the awning beneath the DJ booth and nod hello to the guy from Ned and Stacy and one of the Ramones and a girl called Constance who I saved once from a burning tenement, which she has used ever since as her excuse to get into exclusive clubs like these. It is possible that after saving her she gave me a blowjob, but since I was out of my skull on horse tranquilisers at the time I can’t really recall. She says hi, does a little wave. I pull my hard face, my eyes far away as I shoulder past her like a man with an important engagement.

 

 

 

RED MONOLITH FINDS me lurking like a sex offender beside the doors to the girls’ toilets. He passes me the cold bottle and I drink half the thing straight off, knowing there’s no way in hell my constitution will allow me to do something as unhelpful as get drunk. Tired as I am, thanks to a police station siege, an overturned fuel carrier, a weakened bridge in Old Brooklyn and two separate corner store hold-ups today, I can practically feel the little bubbles of sweet liquor pounced on by my hyper-charged enzymes and converted immediately to latent energy, incorporated into the living battery that is my endocrine system – “recruited to the cause,” as I sometimes think about it. I don’t like to think about it that way, I just do.

            I upend my bottle and when Monolith asks “Another?” I nod and he laughs, producing a second Stoli with a flourish from under his legionnaire’s cape.

            “Oh so that’s why you wear that thing? Are you sure Calvin approves?”

            “No, man. Come on Zephyr, you know I just wanna be like you.”

            I take a quick glance to see if he’s joking and of course he is.

            “Like me?” I motion obliquely. The leather bodysuit fits like the proverbial glove, a bright red zed like a lightning bolt in the middle of my chest and descending to the buckle. “I gave up that shit years ago.”

            “I liked your old costume man, seriously,” Red Monolith says and I frown because now I think he’s being honest. If I give in to it, the joke will still be on me, somehow. I glance away and take in his helmeted face two or three times and wonder suddenly how the hell it is I am able to read his expression given his face is covered by a ballistic carbon shield.

            “You know the Red Monolith and the old Zephyr, man, we’re like colour co-ordinated.”

            “My costume was red and white. You’re red and black . . . and you’ve got those yellow panels.”

            Monolith motions under his armpits. The actor who used to be Tom Cruise walks past holding hands with Richard Gere. A dreadlocked kid raises an eyebrow at us and I make a spark leap from my finger so that he goes away. Fucking drug dealers, never around when you need one and always pulling Uzis on us when we do. On a good day I might bust him. On a better day I’d find he was carrying something that might actually get me high.

            “I’m thinking about gettin’ rid of the yellow panels, man.”

            “Really? Man, you should.” I try not to sound so earnest, but it comes out of me in a rush like I’ve spent every waking hour chewing nails over Red Monolith’s costume so I give up, hoping he’ll read my reaction as irony and I add, “I’ve been wanting to say something for ages, but I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

            “Zephyr, man,” Monolith answers earnestly. “We’re friends, man. Aren’t we? You saved me from Doctor Octopus, remember?”

            “Doctor Octopus is a comic book character, I’ve told you that a hundred times. It was Doctor Nefarious, okay?”

            “Nefarious, okay,” Monolith half-chants to himself. “Then why did he have those mechanical arms?”

            “I don’t know.”

            I sigh, swear beneath my breath and look away.

            Drew Barrymore and her girlfriend emerge from the toilets and I know they’re big fans so I drop back as quick as I can, leaving Red Monolith’s bulk as a distraction. Then, sipping Stoli, I scan the room again wondering if Twilight has arrived while Monolith was talking shit. There’s no sign, no trace. I flex my gloved fingers and a crackle of static emanates across the room, one in five girls feeling a gentle shock, nipples hardening, hair standing up on arms. Demi Moore looks my way and I shake my head and Black Honey, her new costume or at least her outfit for the night made of shiny PVC instead of the usual black leather, glares at me like she could make something of it. We both know her heightened agility and acrobatics won’t mean shit the day I decide to cram thirty thousand volts of lightning up her rear end. I do the sparking eyes thing, which even I have to admit looks extra cool with the domino mask, and Honey quickly looks away. At that moment I notice David Hasselhoff and the moment he sees me he flinches like a beaten dog and scurries out of sight.

            The guy comes out of nowhere, all Clark Kent with his slicked black hair, lantern jaw and wire-frame glasses. He has the nerdy dress code too. I don’t know why they let him in here.

            “Uh, Mr Zephyr?”

            “I know it’s hard when you’re dealing with someone with one name but it’s just Zephyr, kid,” and I throw off the hand he dares try put on my arm.

            “I’ve got to speak to you.”

            I look over my shoulder and I can’t see Twilight anywhere and I’m thinking that if he’s stayed home, maybe he made the right call. I should be at home too, but if I was Twilight, with a sixteen-bedroom mansion on the bay, I’d definitely skip Halogen tonight.

            “I’m not buying, sorry.”

            I turn my back on the kid and start away and I am totally unprepared for him to grab me by the shoulder and try to turn me around. I resist the urge to flash-fry his balls and whirl back, my practised badass look made supreme in the leather bodysuit, all the static in the air congealing in my hair which is standing straight up.

            “Get your fucking hands off me.”

            “But, I . . . need to speak to a hero.”

            The kid’s face is kind of lame and he’s as embarrassed as I am, knowing he nearly said the line from that song. I gesture around.

            “The club’s full of ‘em. Knock yourself out.”

            And I know he’s going to tell me that there’s no-one like me, that Paragon and Stiletto and Black Honey and even Red Monolith can’t match the legendary Zephyr, and he’s right, but suddenly I just don’t want to be there unless I can be drunk and I can’t be drunk because it’s been years since I even tried, playing skal with two cases of mixers and pissing like a racehorse as a result. So I just walk. The kid follows. I’m calling him a kid because he’s so clean shaven, but I’m thirty-five and in superhero years that makes me his grandpa. And he can follow all he likes because the moment I hit the chain and Leonardo inclines his shiny black head at me and parts the rope, I do the crouch thing and disappear with a whoosh into the sky.

Zephyr 4.6 “A Tarantino Moment”

MY REVERIE EVAPORATES at the chirrup of the Zephyr phone. I snatch it quickly from my belt, but otherwise remain defeated in my rickety office chair.
            “What is it?”
            “Is that Zephyr? It’s Hallory O’Hagan from MMI.”
            “Oh, Hallory, Christ, hello. Sorry. I was expecting someone else,” I lie.
            “That’s cool. Where are you now?” she asks in her ever-effervescent voice.
            “I’m, uh, actually outside some bad guys’ lair right as we speak.” I grin, pained, the expression unpleasant. “Talk about a Tarantino moment.”
            Hallory titters. “I guess it seems like a silly time to want to discuss figurines with you.”
            “Hey, I get fanboys wanting to talk about my figurine all the time.”
            “Well it’s definitely time we revamped your line. It’s been, what, ten years?”
            “Sure.” I shrug. “Those plastic fuckers last forever.”
            “Okay,” Hallory replies with enough trepidation that even I can discern it. “Did you manage to talk about the line of dolls with the other Sentinels?”
            “New Sentinels,” I correct her. I’m pretty sure I blew the rights to the old team name in a poker game, though it is equally possible it was Mastodon who walked out with the winner, taking with him the keys to Omeganaut’s Omegamobile (which he later crashed and sank in the bottom of the Bay) and the rights to Aquanaut’s first-born child. Boy was that a night.
            “Look,” I tell the hot redhead on the other end of the phone, “it’s still a little premature to discuss this. We haven’t actually finalised the team.”
            “Really? I thought we were booking media for the launch next Friday?”
            “Well, yeah. . . .”
            “I might have some interesting feedback for you, then,” Miss O’Hagan continues unperturbed. “Focus groups have thrown up a few names you might want to consider.”
            “For my . . . team?”
            “Well for the action figures, but yeah I guess they need to be on the team too so we can licence them, right?” she responds.
            “Okay,” I shrug, uncomfortable yet intrigued. “Who?”
            “Shade, for starters.”
            “Shade’s, like, British. From London.”
            “We’re getting some very good numbers for her at the moment, and beside you’ll need ethnic diversity, right?”
            “So they tell me.”
            “What about Paragon and Jocelyn?”
            “Jesus,” I hiss. “I don’t think so.”
            “Why not?” Hallory asks. “Have you even heard the figures they’re talking for wedding pictures?”
            “Let’s keep going down the list.”
            “Cusp? I don’t even know who that is.”
            “I’m working on it. Next?”
            “Okay. Red Monolith.”
            “He’s, uh . . . he’s dead.”
            “Okay well that’s not happening then. Do you think we could acquire a licence from his estate? Sort of a, ‘friend of the New Sentinels’ angle?”
            “Jesus, lady, I don’t know,” I stagger a sigh. “I’m beginning to think you could get a licence to kill if one really existed.”
            “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says and I can practically hear her purring down the phone. She is so mine.
            “Do you actually have any suggestions I can use?” I ask.
            “Okay. Well how about Nocturne? If you can’t go with Shade, Nocturne’s another good coloured option.”
            “I don’t think we call them ‘coloured’ any more,” I remark.
            “I’ve got another idea, not sure what you’ll think about it.”
            I scratch at my mask and realise I am still not wearing one. “Go on.”
            “The groups were indicating boys from eight all the way through to thirty-five were pretty keen on a modular, kind of transforming robot sort of guy,” Hallory says and barely drops pace as she continues on with the spiel. “I’ve had production mock up a few costumes and the copy guys have suggested a few names: Contraption Man? Mr Roboto? Rocketman?”
            “But I don’t know any . . . transforming robots . . . I don’t think.”
            “I guess that’s the point,” Hallory says. “You could think of it like meeting your obligations to equally represent minorities on the team. Have you asked yourself, do you have the machine world covered?”
            “Honey, I don’t think the machines have a lobby group we need to worry about, unless they’re armed. . . .” I think briefly at this juncture about Think Tank. “Next thing you’ll be making suggestions for a fucking superhero with Down’s Syndrome or something. It’s not happening, okay?”
            “Zephyr, the numbers are really good.”
            “I’m sure they are,” I say.
            She waits a beat. “Even for a disabled person, we’re getting feedback that there’s a lot of angles as far as accessories go, there’s even a synergy between the robot guy.”
            “There is no robot guy!”
            “Only because you’re being so negative about it.”
            “Christ, Hallory,” I say, sounding spent. “You know I love you and everything, but you have to listen to what you’re saying here. The two members of my team you’re most interested in don’t exist, and maybe they’re having an affair together? The robot guy and the girl with mechanical legs?”
            “It’s not a bad idea.”
            “I’m hanging up now. I’ll fax you the final roster when I get the licences signed off.”
            A gravid silence hangs between us. I don’t know if I’m sympathetic just because I want to get into her pants, but I feel guilty about chewing Hallory out and there’s nothing but embarrassed, possibly sullen vibes emanating back down the phone line.
            “I’d green light the Red Monolith toy, though,” I say reluctantly. “He would’ve liked that.”
            “Cool,” Miss O’Hagan comes back. “I’ll courier you over some new concept art. Where should I, uh, do that?”
            “No concept art,” I snap. “He wore red and black, with yellow panels under his arms. And a motorbike helmet, damn it.”
            I snap the phone shut and jam it back into its purse hard. I am fuming with anger and yet mostly I’m just annoyed at myself. I consider annihilating the TV and instead exercise just a modicum of control, giving it enough spark to power it on. The widescreen resolves into a picture of British actors picketing the skyscraper where the Union Jacks have their base. Seeker’s vanishing fortress is certainly a better deal than a headquarters where even a bunch of freakin’ thespianoids can manage to find you. As the small crowds wave their placards, Protector himself appears – the third British super to bear that name – and tries to settle the crowd with an inaudible speech that soon turns to violence. It’s not a good look as he jets through the crowd bowling women and policemen over, bottles smashing the glass façade of the building lobby. I reflect on an image of his teammate Lionheart, last time he was in Atlantic City, with a beard of puke dribbling from his chin into some stripper’s lap.
            I glare at the screen throughout a twelve-minute commercial break, promos for American Hero, Celebrity Heroes, Heroes: Where Are They Now, You Can Be A Hero, Heroes Unlimited, Arena Heroes, Down And Out In Atlantic City and London and a cooking show with some raven-haired British bint who eyes the camera insouciantly and looks like she’s licking up cum as she devours a mess of chocolate cake and cream on a child’s-sized spoon.
            A newsbreak live from the NBN chopper shows some ridiculously buff dude with black hair and a gold cape fucking around the top of the Silver Tower, seemingly inspecting the array of antennae and digital receivers. NBN splices in some of the free-to-air feed Chancel himself provides, giving a fish-eye lensed view of the stranger up close, a furrow to his otherwise fine, completely unfamiliar features.
            It’s enough for me. I’m angry and already dressed. I press my mask into place and stomp through to the wallspace and the open window and basically throw myself out and plunge into the glimmering dusk.

 

IT’S ONLY A couple of seconds across the city at the speed I’m travelling. Golden Boy hears me coming and turns as I use the concrete ledge as a brake and snarl, “Who the fuck are you?” as the news copter whirrs around for a new angle.|
            The other guy has about half-a-foot on me, which isn’t anything unusual as I’ve explained before, I’m just ordinary height. He has shoulders like a bull, black hair in a sort of Imperial Roman cast, a gold circlet around his brows matched by the cape and little sandals. His arms and legs are bare, the rest of him in a clinging reddish blouse, thick belt and trunks.|
            “A spiritu fornicationis, Domine, libera nos,” he chuckles. “This-a question, it is rhetorica, no?”
            “What?”
            The foreigner smiles and next thing I know there is immense pain in my chest as eye-beams lance through me. I lose all strength and drop from the air – not a good thing when we’re about forty floors from the ground – and it is only rebounding off the hard concrete ledge that jolts me back into awareness long enough to grab for a hand-hold. Meanwhile the dude in the cape gives a final once-over to the audio-visual apparatus on the outside of the tower, glances at me and then rockets heavenward.
            I’m a ruin. I only just manage to roll onto the ledge and lay there for long seconds with the smell of my own cooked bacon filling the air, even with the competing cross-winds. The news helicopter turns around and a megaphoned voice booms my name a few times before I manage to sit up and, gasping, actually trying not to break into tears of embarrassed, pained frustration, I probe the wound to my chest in disbelief.
            “Who the hell was that?”
            The leather is scorched and peeling and basically destroyed. Likewise for the top-most layers of my skin and pectoral muscle. It hurts like a bastard and if it wasn’t for my own persistent physiognomy I’d be winging my way to the ER right now. All I know is I need to get somewhere private and strip down. Victim of my own adventures as I have been so many times these past years, I am a veteran at this routine and manage to get to my feet without much more than wincing. I remember once seeing a Canadian hero called Manowar do the same thing after a few of Cogito’s goons triple-teamed us with some of these industrial lasers he’d whipped into weapons. Poor bastard didn’t realise he’d been nearly cut in half by the beams and stood only to watch his intestines and liver pour onto the ground. I think somehow he lived, though he’s been institutionalised ever since. I guess you don’t adjust easy to seeing your insides in the dirt.
            I give the chopper a little wave and a wan smile and shrug, oh well, for the cameras. I have to shake myself off a moment to ascertain that my powers haven’t deserted me completely and then I do the crouch thing and pretty much abscond from the whole disaster, avoiding the news loops for the next two days that show me getting my arse handed to me from pretty much every angle Amadeus Chancel could provide.
            Everyone’s happy enough to lend their own little comments to my performance, but they don’t even think to ask who the hell was my opponent. The only time anyone even thinks to address the matter – and to add insult to injury, it’s Nightwind – the panellists just shrug their shoulders and move on to the next schmuck.
            From my sickbed, with the wound healing nicely, I scrub Chancellor’s name from the ‘potentials’ list and work the phone, whittling down the final candidates via conference call as the big night comes ever closer.

Zephyr 4.5 “A Different Kind Of Normal”

I AM DOWNTOWN. The air is chill and the traffic thrums and stalls around me like angry geese, horns going off in a cavalcade. My arms are full of things a man in my financial situation has no right to afford, but I have a cheque due from the management company for a bunch of voice-overs I did the previous week and they even paid me to sign a pile of forms I didn’t exactly read. I’m excited but nervous because I feel the change in the air and it’s not just the first flakes of winter snow.
            I ignore the incipient fender benders around me and step over a homeless guy lying in front of the department store asleep with his cock out and the biggest take-away mocha chill latte I have ever seen in my life spilled across the pavement beside him, a rich woman’s small dog lapping unseen at the edge of the puddle with its eyes going wide as it steps into a little of the human sensorium. The black guys at the entrance of the shop eye me like a rival gangsta, which I ignore because, you know, I’m cool with that shit, and I nod on the sly and make up some kind of fucking hand signal for a laugh that makes one wince and the other screw up his face in bewilderment. Oh yeah, and I have dropped about fifteen of these tiny little cute pills I found down the back of the couch, gagging on the lint, the pink hearts familiar to me and not actually candy as you might expect. They give me a fire in my belly and an iron rod I have to practically strap to the side of my leg as I amble into the big lit-up store, ignoring the more Christmassy decorations with my arms already half-filled with shit I shouldn’t be buying.
            I’m moving house soon. That explains the back-of-the-sofa foraging and also why I am not at home at 6pm without a good excuse, no-one to cook my dinner or give me the hairy eyeball when I turn up at nine smelling like woodsmoke or brine or ectoplasm or Asian pussy with no real explanation to offer to a family who apparently all knew about the ridiculous one-man play my life had become. It just lacked a title. Perhaps, Zephyr the Amazing Doofus. I could think of a dozen things more harsh if it wasn’t for my happy pills and I’ll be frank with you that it’s a nice surprise to get a little holiday from the black mood that has been following me of late.
            I have only just recovered from finding myself standing somewhere in the middle of the Eighth Century pushing corpses into a swamp with just a handful of unspeaking, black-cowled so-called priests as my accomplices. As Seeker glibly explained – troublingly so for someone who is practically a born-again-Christian – by the time Ash and the guy from the Jackass crew’s bodies turn up, they’ll have been decayed for centuries and unidentifiable. I thought I read or watched something once about peat bogs actually preserving people better, but I am not going to get into a slanging match with a bunch of Wallachians who don’t actually speak anyway, except among themselves, and even then in low whispers.
            I am buying the essentials: clean underwear, rewritable DVDs, disposable razors, cue tips, a new hairbrush, toothbrush, shoe brush, boot polish and five cans of leather refresher that makes the emo chick behind the counter raise her heavily-pierced eyebrow, an effort by itself, and she laughs gently and makes some joke about me having a fetish and because I’m a little high I just nod and leer and say, “Yes, Veronica, and that is not all I can do,” and successfully creep her out. If I had my mask on she would so be mine. I dig the purple highlights in her hair, the chalky face, the pubescent cleavage straining at the secretarial white button-up blouse the shop makes her wear. I think of Cusp and my daughter Tessa simultaneously and it’s not the most comfortable sensation I’ve had all week.
            In front of a display of the latest holo-projection TVs my Zephyr phone starts blurping and I look over my shoulder, knowing already I am going to risk it despite the mild shopping turbulence around me. I pile my things onto the carpeted step beneath one of the TVs that is showing news footage of the Pope setting down in Newark and whoever it is on the other end of the phone, I cannot hear a fucking word they are saying. I cut the line and realise I have five text messages, three of them from Seeker about “team business,” one from the guy who still manages my web forum and one from Streethawk, of all people, asking if the rumours are true that we’re putting together a new squad. Sorry Bruce, no homos allowed, is what I think to myself and then catch myself on the television suddenly, brows crinkled as I ponder how exactly I turned out to be such a homophobic beeotch given my upbringing – and it’s disorienting trying to work out why I can see myself on the holoscreen until I realise a salesman is demonstrating a handicam to a bunch of East China tourists who look like they have never seen an electric light let alone a DVD camera.
            The phone rings again. I put my finger in my other ear. It’s the guy from the web forum again, I can’t remember his name for the moment as he’s telling me something about an irate fan who keeps demanding he pass on a message about the end of the world. I give a good laugh – it’s not easy being Zephyr on the phone when I’m not in costume and I’m surrounded by other people – and I tell my little helper not to worry about it and I have a pretty good idea who it is. This is a lie, of course, but I am not about to go sweating the psychiatric foibles of every loser who finds himself at contactzephyr.com.nu(.)
            On the regular televisions I see shaky footage of a guy in a wrestling suit straining like someone with a blocked ass and then he swells and blisters and grows to about the size of a small elephant and goes all red and angry-looking and the words COALFACE appears as the surface of his body blackens and cracks open like the mantle of a volcano and I have to admit to myself, that’s one nasty-looking motherfucker, and that’s why I am glad it appears to be just a TV show. I pick up my purchases and decide to go buzz the perfume section and see about buying an early birthday present for Tessa, marvelling at my uncurtailed freedom and wondering where exactly it is that I am going to sleep once Beth settles on a date for taking back the apartment.

 

THE PHONE IS ringing while I take a dump and it’s not just my sullen alpha waves that mean I don’t move a muscle, letting it drone on and on and on, my thoughts a thousand miles away and the sky outside filling up with black ink.
            Eventually the phone is quiet. I shower, do my “ablutions,” which is a term I guess writers of Stoker’s era used to avoid describing the messy business I clean off my knuckles with tissue paper the consistency of gauze wrap as I sigh, filled with discontentedness, and then stand at the wide bank of apartment windows gazing across the cityscape as night descends like an inexpertly hung stage curtain, staggering down unevenly but eventually consuming the whole thing in darkness until the audience, uncomfortable in their seats, shift and wonder what purpose this development, how does the staging match the set design in bringing forward the central themes of the piece, assuming an author somewhere, intentionality, a coherent structure, the inevitability of climax and resolution, only to find the circus has moved on and run off with the price of their admission.
            My life, for the moment, lacks all of these details. When I go to dress, half-a-quart of milk gurgling in my stomach and a vague craving for Swedish meatballs unconquered, I realise my costume smells like a homeless man’s trolley. The comparative luxury of my situation affords me a clean outfit and the almost Japanese ritual of the process of costuming myself in leather and turning the old suit inside out and hanging it to air in the wallspace obscures the central fact I now have few reasons to dress like an ordinary person, that without those silently knowing figures so recently extracted from my life I am one hundred per cent superhero on call without much else to show for my existence.
            While I might long for a different kind of normal, the feeling of familiarity and safety brought by my leather encasement is a comfort I might find hard to describe if I had to, if there was anyone else with which to share my thoughts except you, my phantasmal darling. Briefly I think of Cusp, Seeker, Vulcana, Devil Betty, handicam footage of my daughter and Shade turning pirouettes at mach over the Silver Tower. While I admit I am feeling sorry for myself, and it might be the comedown from self-medication making it such a drag, the tomb of the apartment and the desecration of my sacred private life revealed by the bare refrigerator, strewn magazines and empty pizza boxes underlines the reality beneath my funk. I am no has been when I am Zephyr, yet even slumping on the sofa and staring at the disconnected television and I am already moving imperceptibly back toward being that person who, in a parallel life, declined to climb the maddening tower and went on to live a plain, inglorious and altogether unremarkable life. Perhaps I would’ve been happier. Perhaps I could’ve kept Beth, though it’s questionable I could’ve wooed her in the first place without my lightning trick and incredible strength to seduce the girl she so quickly ceased to be upon our graduation. More likely I would’ve met some girl behind the desk of a pharmacy, a library, a video store, raised a brood of weird-looking children and continued on through ignominy to the anonymity of death.
            Oh God.
            In the bathroom I contemplate my face in the mirror, my mask gone. Whatever fate awaited me – presuming the intersection of my life with that lightning bolt was anything other than fated – the very fact of my existence is underwritten by my paternity. Electrical storm or no, whatever else, they tell me I am John Lennon’s son. The Preacher Man. Yet we look nothing alike. Or, almost nothing alike, unless there’s something I’m missing.
           There is an iconic image of Lennon from the Summer Rebellion. I move through the apartment to my computer in the wallspace, many of my things in boxes in preparation for the move. Excel spreadsheets from Sal Doro’s disc about the Azzurro Corporation is open from my half-hearted review of the web of complex company structures and asset holdings that one of Sal’s journo colleagues had inexplicably to hand. It is quickly minimised as I pull up Firefox and perform an image search to get the picture I am after. It’s just a few seconds between this and that and then my alleged father’s face is staring out at me, the Preacher Man bearded and cross-legged in a white linen robe with heavy beads around his neck, floating in the air over the writhing hordes of protesters and London bobbies with Perspex shields and grimaces marring their moustachioed faces. He has one hand raised above him and the word “stop” nascent on his lips. Distracted that moment by a cameraman, perhaps an inherited trait after all, he turns his face sixty degrees towards the viewer and unintentional immortality. Put that in your cosmic peace pipe and smoke it, grandpa.
            I’m eating at my parents’ place tomorrow night. All will be revealed, I suppose.
            I sigh and wish I had a cigarette and my eyes drift down the initial table of thumbnails from the internet search and suddenly I find myself looking at quite a different, but nonetheless familiar face.
            My half-brother, Julian.

Zephyr 4.4 “A Bad Wish On A Shooting Star”

I AM READING the Post with some disdain, my back to a girder in the otherwise fully translucent diner, trying to kid myself that I am flicking through the political and world news sections to get to the sports and not Nate Simon’s Tuesday column. The little fuck has been hinting at the breakdown in my friendship with Twilight for two weeks running now, but he hasn’t even tried to call to verify his information. Thanks to Christ he doesn’t know half as much as he could, even if he’s already spilled twice as much as I’d ever want the average Joe Public to know about how Twilight and I came to blows and sent half the city (actually just Rhode Island) into the Abyss. I am not presently accepting calls from the Mayor’s office for fear they might have some crazy idea about reparations.
            Fortunately the Post reporter has a new bag. Sal Doro covers the big fish (like me, normally), which is why I guess Simon is left speculating on the disappearance of some dude who works the south city and calls himself Crusader. Original. While I have barely heard of this guy before, I don’t think the fact some fruit in a costume fails to stop three daytime robberies and a laundry fire justifies a missing person report. If he’s anything like I was when I was starting out, a really bad zit was enough to keep me low for two weeks at a time.
            I flick through this trivia and check the other items. I see Eris has been at her own unique brand of chaos again, hospitalising a guard at the storage vaults attached to the State Museum of the Americas. Hebrew parahuman Allan Silverman has demanded an invite to an upcoming session of the City States Symposium in Atlantic City with predictable results. Mastodon and Cipher have teamed up to smash a Yardie drug den, which begs a far more interesting story given the old man’s pharmaceutical pursuits. An emissary from a parallel earth has apparently left Atlantic City in disgust after being refused entry to the Flyaway. The stock price for most major drug companies took a hit last week following rumours a German sorcerer had eradicated all strains of influenza. Turned out not to be true. Pity. Meanwhile a villain called Dragonmaster, a Brit, I assume, since I’ve never heard of him, has come out of the closet to a men’s mag. One look at the scaled leather costume the guy wears and you’ve got to wonder who was left to gasp in surprise at that particular revelation.
            Oh, and Windsong has been seen flying formations over Staten Island with a British super, the renowned bisexual beauty Shade. The thirty-something bisexual beauty Shade. I make a note to self and grit my teeth and barely look up at the sweet Minnesotan farm girl who delivers my espresso as a pizza delivery guy cutting up the sidewalk outside hits a dude in a suit and his moped goes hissing out-of-control toward a fountain. I snap the newspaper shut and patently ignore the chaos, my hand around the warm mug a pleasure to savour as I fight against the invisible forces that would otherwise suck my mood.
            Surprisingly the gossip pages have absolutely nothing about Seeker’s decision to form a new group of Sentinels. Considering it’s been the talk of the top end of town the whole week past, I find that amazing. Either someone has hushed the city’s reporters, they’re saving it for a special issue, or else Atlantic City’s costumed elite are keeping quiet for one rare moment in their lives, reasons unknown.
            Mickey Rourke enters the diner and I sink lower in my chair. I owe him thirty bucks and last time we got wrecked at Halogen I may have told him I’d pay him back with a hand-job. He’s just crazy enough to want to collect just so he can see me squirm. A disturbing individual.
            I snap the paper again to straighten the crooked columns and my phone, sitting on the table with more papers from my agent and my house keys, lights up and displays Seeker’s name.
            “Speak of the Devil,” I grin in answer somewhat inappropriately.
            “We need to talk.”
            “About the Sentinels?”
            “. . . yes, about the Sentinels. The New Sentinels.”
            I nod and smile to myself. “Where’ve you got that castle parked?”
            The door to the diner swings open and she is standing there with her phone to her ear in that ridiculous Paula Abdul outfit.
            “I brought a ride,” she says. “Come on.”

 

IT IS WEIRD in the cab, the feeling we’re both thoroughly disguised as we play-act in our secret identities. Seeker’s trying pretty hard to show she’s a street-smart and stylish broad, not at all the arch conservative, borderline religious psycho we’ve sometimes considered her over the years. Great jugs an’ all, but any time the old Sentinels tried to have the least bit of fun, either Seeker would blow up in a tirade reminding us of our higher calling, calling us all juveniles, or else she would go off in a sulk that managed to cast a pall over at least the majority of our worst excesses. Now if someone could explain to me why in the back seat of a yellow cab there’s more sexual tension than my junior high prom, I’d really appreciate it.
            “So, uh, it’s Loren, right?”
            “It seems like a million years ago, but yeah,” she replies.
            “You’re from . . . Atlantic City?”
            “Is anyone?”
            She gives a breathtaking laugh filled with only half the confidence she’s trying to project. I glare at the cabbie through the rear view mirror and make sure he’s got his eyes on the road.
            “My folks were from Willagee, Nebraska. Pa brought us to Atlantic City right after the Kirlians. He was a builder. Made his money in the upgrade.”
            “And so it’s here where you . . . ?”
            Seeker wrinkles her nose, acknowledging we don’t have the best privacy by giving just a curt nod. Adorable. Fucking hell. I nod to myself and stare out the window and am kinda surprised when she keeps talking.
            “I was fourteen,” she says. “The visions came first. Apocalypse. Death from Space. All very sci-fi. I woke up one night re-enacting that scene from Ghostbusters, you know, floating above the bed covers? Our family priest knew a pastor who knew a rabbi who knew a cardinal. I’m sure you can follow what I mean.”
            “And from there?”
            “Well, to cut a long story short: the Wallachian Brotherhood.”
            “The guys in the castle?” I ask.
            “Yes.”
            “The brotherhood.”
            “Oh, there’s women too. I never asked about that. . . .”
            “And they are, exactly. . . ?”
            “A fifteen-hundred-year-old secret society dedicated to keeping the doors closed between our world and the next,” Seeker says in a relaxed voice that does nothing to detract from her measured and careful pronunciation.
            “Okay. So they hunt monsters and stuff who sneak through?”
            “In the early days, that’s how it began,” she says. “It got complicated once they perfected their own technology on a parallel earth.”
            “And these are the guys who are offering to sponsor the New Sentinels a base?” I ask slowly.
            “Well we’ll need one.”
            “I thought Devil Betty. . . ?”
            “I don’t know, Joseph. As I said to you before, I’m not that comfortable with the, uh, demonic overtones of that name.”
            “So a kid makes a bad wish on a shooting star after listening to too many Marilyn Manson albums.” I shrug. “To paraphrase something I heard recently, just because she used to worship the Devil doesn’t necessarily make her a bad person.”
            “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” Seeker replies.
            “Okay.”
            I stare out the window with the patented gaze of one of those small pampered lap dogs rich women like to take with them on trips across town. Through the glass of the taxi window the downtown area flicks past at a haphazard pace. Finally we get stalled in traffic again down near the harbour and for some reason I start chuckling about a joke in an email I got from Nautilus a couple of days back.
            “What’s so funny?” Seeker asks.
            “It’s nothing.”
            “Hmmm. By the way,” she says, “I meant to ask you, have you heard from Darkstorm in the past few days? I can’t get him to answer his cell.”
            “Hmmm no,” I reply. “Years ago he used to have this message drop at a laundry in Chi-town. That place secretly run by goblins or elves or whatever the hell it was. You want to stop by there?”
            “No,” Seeker replies. She stares out the window now, just in time to catch a homeless man introducing two tourists to his dancing chicken act. Loren’s pretty eyes flinch at the sight, making me wonder just how innocent can the girl be given some of the things we’ve seen in this life.
            “I’m sure he’ll turn up in the end,” she says, distracted.
            “How’s Vulcana doing, by the way?”
            The brightness re-enters Seeker’s eyes.
            “Better every day. This is one of the benefits of the Wallachian Fortress I want to talk about with you, Joseph. The Brotherhood’s clerics will have her fighting fit in no time at all.”
            “I wonder how Connie feels about that?”
            “Why in Heaven would you say that?” Seeker frowns. “Her arm was off. I’m sure she’s thrilled to get back to how she was.”
            I nod, inner turmoil defused as the frantically eavesdropping cabbie drives us to the rendezvous with the disappearing castle.
            It only takes Loren a moment to mindwipe the driver once we’ve parked, and since I’m a little short of change, I offer to pay and catch her up, leaving the disoriented cabbie parked in a tow zone as I scamper to eventually follow the hot brunette in the high-heeled boots disappearing into thin air outside the boarded up walls of the construction site.

Zephyr 4.3 “Beneath the Metal Rain”

IT TAKES MASTODON a second or so to realise we really are going to have a rumble. Then he does his foot-stamping trick and if things were quieter you’d hear the leather straps of his chest harness strain with the stretch as he swells from just over six foot to a little over nine. Now his shoulders are the size of Christmas hams and his mutton chops loom about the size of small cats duct-taped to the side of his grinning, leering face.
            “Alright Zephyr, this is more like it.”
            “Take it easy, old man,” I say as I hurtle across the chamber. “Don’t break anything.”
            By that I mean anything of his own, of course. I’m quite happy for him to hand these guys their heads and we’ll just bury the corpses wherever the Wallachians suggest. Across the room I see Ash dragging himself away from the mound of disgustingness he has helped create, while the chick with the whip and the chick with the sword seem intent on looking scenic rather than helpful.
            I crash into the space previously occupied by Captain Jackass. In my wake another portal opens overhead and I should’ve seen this one coming, knowing this motherfucker plans ahead for all these sorts of things as metal shopping cart after metal shopping cart suddenly start plunging toward me and into the room. There’s something awkwardly painful about being hit by raining metal trolleys that I think the madman understands only too well. Even for me, as the first one rebounds from my forearms, head and knee simultaneously, it’s more than just my ego taking a battering.
            Pouring on a bit of super-speed, I manage to get out from beneath the metal rain, but Seeker and the Don aren’t so lucky. It’s only that I manage to wing Jackass with another lightning bolt that the portal sucks closed and the damned things stop coming. Moments later on the other side of the room there’s another sizzling noise and, through a hole no bigger than my fist, a shower of golf balls pour into the room. Ash and Madame Lash – there’s a good rhyming couple for you – go down on their arses and its only by the grace of her rubber-band teleporting trick that Samurai Girl gets to bitch-slap Jackass and force the latest wormhole closed as well.
            “Nice moves!” I yell. “Now watch your back.”
            The dude calling himself The Drill flies straight for Seeker, but there’s nothing I can do for her right now as the one with the kneepads starts unhooking goodies from his belt-pack and tossing them at me in the centre of the room. The first one is little more than a firecracker and then the next thing I know there’s tear gas flooding across the scene and I have to cover my nose and mouth with my hand and squint to get a good sense of his location. Perhaps Prankster has superhuman powers of regeneration to back up his gimmicks. If not, he may have a problem eating with anything other than a straw or perhaps a wet nurse after my tightly-clenched left connects with the side of his jaw and introduces him to the hard stone floor.
            Madame Lash does something lame with her whip. I suspect she’s trying to create a vortex to disperse the gas, which is a sweet idea except for Murderboy leaping from one wall to another and finally landing on her back and sinking his teeth into the side of her neck. To her credit, powers or none, the lady freaks out just fine enough to fling the weird-ass villain over her shoulder in a practised judo move. Just as emo-boi rights himself, she does a reverse spinning kick that sends him across the room and into the aforementioned pile of shopping trolleys.
            I am distracted by a right cross to my jaw. Spinning about, I can’t see anyone, and then fingers tap me on the shoulder and, like a total cad, I flip about and yet another punch snaps across my jaw. Their saving grace is there’s no superhuman strength in the blows. Across the chamber I see the so-called  captain give a little wave and then, through one of his teleport discs, his foot comes through and tries to get me in the jewels. No dice. I grab the good captain’s ankle and channel more than a handful of volts back through the portal. If he hasn’t fouled himself, I’d be surprised. The hole in space collapses taking his errant limbs with it.
            Time to get things moving.
            Through the tear-gas haze, Ash appears like a homeless man to grab The Drill either side of his helmet. The bad guy has put a few holes in Seeker’s shoulder and she’s laying on the floor looking uncharacteristically limp. It doesn’t matter. Ash is pissed. His fully unleashed power is lethal. The Drill’s head disintegrates into a hissing pile of white-hot dust and the helmet kind of falls apart as the silica of the dead bad guy’s skull and tissue pour from the front vent like sand from a broken hourglass. The still very rubbery and real headless body plops onto the floor next to Seeker, who screams shrilly, thereby drawing almost every eye in the room to the scene.
            Mastodon has been maced by Prankster. Samurai Girl has lines of drool hanging from her chin, two canisters of tear gas still gushing nearby. Madame Lash has lost her whip. She has a black eye and is bleeding heavily from a neck bite and another to one of her breasts, which has slipped free from her heavy corset. I direct a quick zap toward her assailant and the hair-dyed freak cartwheels away with the sort of noise I’d expect a cat to make.
            “Time to finish up, Don!” I yell with my eyes streaming, half-squeezed shut.
            I almost stumble over The Drill’s corpse, shield Seeker with my body as Prankster and then Jackass circle. I’m trying to do the maths and it won’t add up and that’s when I belatedly realise we’re missing someone.
            “Okay, where’s the other fucker?”
            If you thought Murderboy was creepy, it’s Kid Kaos who is the real psycho case on their team: Captain Jackass’s pet serial killer, which he keeps on a close emotional leash – except when he lets the leash go pretty long. And when he does, that’s trouble, because the Kid is a natural assassin. He can ghost as well as turn see-through, so you never know where he’s gonna appear.
            This time he wobbles back into view directly behind Ash, who is standing there in the white bodystocking I know his mum probably sewed for him, palms clawed and radiating their own dangerous vibe. Only he doesn’t have a clue about the danger immediately to his rear and the Don and I barely open our mouths before Kid Kaos slots into place, his turn to grab Ash by the skull and twist.
            Somehow amid his descent to the hard stones, Ash’s rolling eyes swivel around until they find mine; and they stay locked on me as Kid Kaos ghosts the young hero’s head into the stone floor and leaves it there, buried, fused, the corpse’s back painfully arched, arms splayed. And I swear, a hot white rage is building up inside me, but it’s tempered by a tiredness too, that everything has to end like this and that it’s not just Captain Jackass and his crew who have no respect for how things should be, but that it’s life itself that doesn’t respect the conventions of our particular genre. Ash was a nineteen-year-old hero just starting out in the world. He’d moved here from Detroit because he never had anything to do. Now he’s just a hundred-and-eighty pounds of pre-packaged meat going to spoil, or more likely wind up alongside the guy he killed in some nameless Wallachian garbage dump or swamp or unholy fucking backwater. I’m tired with the idea of payback, but until something better comes along, that’s the only option I have.

 

SO WE TEAR into them. Kid Kaos fades from view before I can blow a few thousand volts through his chest. Murderboy runs up one wall and vaults, something sticky about his hands as he crosses the ceiling like a monkey and comes down on Mastodon, who promptly throws him halfway across the room.
            Prankster pulls another weird-looking gun and fires at me and a net flops out, heavy little balls on the edges as it goes over. I put a scorch mark in the middle of his chest and he goes backward, adding to his bruise collection for today, but in the moment I struggle with the net, Jackass throws up one of his discs over my head and dusty red recycled house bricks suddenly pour down in their hundreds. Between the bricks and the dust I go down for a moment.
            I am relieved to see Samurai Girl run at just under mach around the room. She swings with practised swipes and cuts Murderboy and Jackass and bounds out of the way as Kid Kaos rematerialises. If I weren’t so angry I’d be amused by the sight of the hockey-masked freak picking up a pair of bricks and disappearing with them again. It’s not so funny when he materialises near Mastodon, phases the brick invisible and leaves it lodged in the big guy’s stomach. The Don twitches and drops as his system goes into shock and it’s really only blind luck that my own short circuit hits the fading assassin before he’s gone completely. Mask and all, Kid Kaos slides about ten feet and remains curled with a smoky residue overhead.
            I’m on hyper alert. When a teleport disc appears beside me, I throw myself into it and out the other end, grappling suddenly with the team leader before Jackass headbutts me with the helmet and I feel my nose break, no big deal, the blood running down my face unnerving as I blindly grasp his scarred, malignant face and start to squeeze. At the same time I hammer short right jabs into his ribs, feeling them break, and somewhere amid all that the laughter goes out of him and he begins to freak, thrashing wildly, screaming, clawing at my grimace as I ram my knee into his crotch and then make the mistake of hurling him bodily across the room.
            He bounces across the stone and comes up with his face bleeding almost as bad as the sword-wound to his side. Captain Jackass spits blood and shakes his head, face a mask of fury.
            “You can have this one, Zeph. Next time you won’t be so lucky. I’ll make sure of it.”
            I am left to ponder any hidden meanings in this as he throws teleport discs underneath his mates, including the unconscious ones, and they disappear in short notice from view.
            I wipe leather across my bleeding face without much satisfaction as Samurai Girl tends to Seeker’s pierced shoulder. Madame Lash isn’t going anywhere and that’s even more terribly true for Ash. Mastodon drops to his knees as well and gives me a nod with his grave face.
            “Could do with a few more hit points there, boss,” he says.
            I can only nod. “At least this time the little bastard didn’t dump me in the Himalayas when he was finished,” I try and grin and fail.
            The silent cowled figures of the Wallachian monks appear through a distant doorway bearing the now familiar sight of a floating stretcher. I hold up my hands for two more.
            “Not so crash hot, huh Zephyr?” Seeker says in a pained voice.
            “I guess we weren’t really geared up for that,” I say. “Any idea how the hell they found us here?”
            “I’ll have to ask the priests in charge of the cloaking device,” Seeker replies. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
            I motion to the dead kid. “Tell it to him.”
            “The Wallachians, you know. . . .”
            “Keep your fucking priests off him,” I say more harshly than I intend, but the vision in my mind’s eye is compelling and probably not completely inaccurate. “It could’ve been a worse death.”
            “Ash might have something different to say to that,” she says.
            “I’m not about to find out. Leave it be.”
            We exchange knowing looks, hers doe-like, mine taciturn, and Madame Lash gets up in the middle of our exchange and grabs her rig and staggers for the door like a drunk hooker in search of a payphone.
            I harrumph. “I’d better see the lady out.”
            And that’s that.

Zephyr 4.2 “Standard Expectations of the Genre”

THE CHANGE IS coming to Atlantic City, and at last those of us who spend our times in costumes and masks posing for the cameras and occasionally getting our heads kicked in before them can relax, knowing at least now, as the first snow comes, it is not because the harbinger of some alien god is preparing to walk onto the set and begin throwing cars and buildings around with gay abandon. It’s simply getting cold. Winter is yet to arrive, but here in the northernmost quadrants of the city that buried the ghosts of old New York, that first touch of frost seems to be coming earlier and earlier each year no matter what the boffins say about global warming. You can see and feel it on the streets. The cops spend more time blowing on their coffees than tackling the crime rate, the hookers have taken to wearing coats and the homeless people are drawing even less attention from the upwardly mobile than usual as the weather soaks into their weary metabolisms and those at the fatal ends of the population curve simply don’t move any more as the snow starts stacking up around them, the result being an unexpected burial with Miracle On 41^st Street trappings.
            It’s not all doom and gloom and hell we’ve really only had one day where the city called out the snow sweepers. The kids are still filling (new) Central Park without enough to toboggan, it’s never too cold for an ice-cold Coke – they’re considering me for a new ad campaign so I am practising my smile a lot and trying to look carefree – and the cold weather also means less street battles as a few of the more sensible bad guys decide to holiday somewhere warm and return to conquering the world when the weather improves.
            Being a child of this weird megalopolis I love it all, and it’s only the fact that cold weather means the inevitability of Christmas that some of the shine comes off my enthusiasm.
            It’s not like I have a lot to cheer about. For some godforsaken reason I am yet to quit my apartment and hand it over to my seemingly forever angry and increasingly estranged wife and our darling progeny, the superhuman prodigy you’d know best as Windsong. Beth has full custody, having threatened to gang up with her lawyer pals and cut off visiting rights altogether unless I agreed. She’s shitting in her LeCroix of Paris stockings that any time we spend together, Tessa and I are going to play dress ups and plan her future crime-fighting career. Funny that I was married to this woman for seventeen years and she can’t understand I don’t want our daughter dragged into this crazy life any more than she does.
            The bigger problem remains Tessa. I guess saving the city from Ras Algethi on her first outing has somewhat gone to her head. Sure we hardly talk about anything else on our walks, coffees at Gonzo’s, lunches at Ribaldi or Piccolo or that theme sandwich bar in SBSCC Tower where the waiters dress as mime artists and beatniks. God forbid we should discuss why her loving parents of fifteen years are seeking divorce. However I’m really only just learning now how filled with this costumed, larger-than-life world my little girl’s head is – she who, among so much of the world, I thought I knew so well.
            The diehard fans have discerned and may well even be pleased to know I have embarked on a minor costume redesign. The identical leather ensembles do little to change the previous version except my insignia is no longer red but gold. My publicist’s idea. I hear more from the disgruntled guy who maintains my online forum than the public relations queers I have allowed to siphon off ten per cent of my income, even from the marketing deals I made before I hired them (unlike Miss O’Hagan, I was fully aware just how little I was drawing in). Nonetheless when the Enercom phone flashes, or buzzes I should say, if it’s Hallory O’Hagan I always pick up. What the hell. Technically I am single again and its my inner Irishman craving a redhead.

 

SEEKER’S INVISIBLE FORTRESS has the crazy acoustics like you’d expect from any thousand-year-old castle. The frustration in my voice bounces vibrantly off the walls, coming back to us just in time to blend with the sound of my boredom as I throw down the clipboard with doodle marks all over the page, my micro tantrum getting pretty much no-one’s attention as Seeker and Mastodon stand in the enormous, austere chamber power-tripping on the three flunkies before them.
            “Try-outs have barely started and we’re already down to these nobodies?” I say more loudly this time.
            If at first you don’t succeed and all of that.
            Mastodon turns and gives me his best badass scowl, but I know he’s just playing school captain because he thinks he might get into Seeker’s pants with his responsible older superhero act. He didn’t spend three years on the same team with her as I did. No-one’s going there. The frigging Pope’s not getting any pussy from Seeker. Well you know, of course he’s not, but you know what I mean. If anyone was going to score with our perfect preacher and resident Cheerleader for Christ, maybe he’d be the guy to do it. Or maybe not. Hell, this is a lifelong habit of mine, speaking with no real good idea of what I’m gonna say next.
            The new kids on the block are Ash, a white kid in a kimono called Samurai Girl and, believe it or not, a dominatrix who speaks in the third person named Madame Lash. I’m not sure she’s got the whole ‘hero’ thing down yet. I could tell from the moment she walked into the room that Mastodon wanted her on the team. Only thing we haven’t told Mastodon yet is that we’re only offering him a Reserve position. It’s not the age. It’s more that Seeker’s not too comfortable with the old boy’s pharmaceutical interests and the faceless Wallachian monks who prowl the corridors down here stop and flatten themselves against the walls when Mastodon goes past. Perhaps its just those fucking horn things jutting out from his collar, but I doubt it.
            As my last outburst resounds from the walls, the teenager with the Asian sword suddenly appears in my face – a good trick, since I can still see her across the room out of the corner of my eye – and waggles her finger before slapping me and disappearing again.
            “What the –?”
            “Show some respect, mister,” she says.
            “How about you earn some?”
            “Easy, people,” Mastodon adds in the folksy tone he has assumed for the evening.
            “Hey, ‘Don, give me a frigging break here,” I start to say only to get cut abruptly by a hand signal from my offsider and nominal co-captain Seeker.
            “Everyone please try and remain calm,” Seeker says. “Zephyr, I know you’re impatient to finalise the roster, but please. We have a lot of people interested in the new team and I want to give everyone who applies the courtesy of a real try-out.”
            “Madame Lash thanks you, Seeker,” Madame Lash says and scowls at me.
            “Hey lady,” I add, ignoring Seeker’s ongoing implications. “I’ve never even heard of you before, so don’t go giving me all that ‘tude, okay?”
            “Jesus, you are like twice the arsehole Madame Lash has heard,” the corset queen replies.
            “Heh heh, sounds like she’s got you pegged, Zeph.”
            “No seriously, ‘Don,” I say. “Don’t you think we’re going to have a little problem with a bondage fetish on the team? And in this place, don’t you think that’s a bit bizarre?”
            “You’re in all that leather and you’re sayin’ I have a fetish? Madame Lash finds that rich.”
            “Zephyr,” Seeker warns.
            “Jeez guys, can’t we all chill?” the bald guy Ash says. His face is a mask of warring emotions. “I was really pumped about these auditions, but now I’m not so sure. Shit.” He sounds like he’s gonna cry.
            “Okay, okay,” I say and put up my hands and a little of the heat goes out of the room, but even though I am grinning I feel like a total ass because there’s no way I am letting this one go, even if the others think I’ve suddenly learnt a little diplomacy. “Just tell me what your powers are, Lash baby, and I’ll relax.”
            “Powers?” she says and blinks.
            “Yeah,” I reply. “We all see the whip and that’s awesome. Ditto the cleavage. Very nice. But what can you do?”
            The others look like they want to voice a protest – Seeker looks like she wants to boil me alive – except for the fact it’s a pretty good question and Madame Lash is a bit slow to answer.
            “We already had to kick Madrigal out of here, so, like, you know, we need to know who you are and what you do, since you don’t have a reputation of your own to trade in,” I say slowly, a wiseguy despite trying to be even-handed. “How else are we gonna know you’re not some plant, you know, a Cheese agent or something?”
            “Cheese agent?” Samurai Girl frowns.
            “K.A.A.S., you know, the uh European um, death to parahumans mob?” Mastodon shrugs.
            “Kaas is Dutch for cheese,” I take my turn to say. “It’s an old joke.”
            “I’ll have to remember that.”
            Eyes swivel back to Madame Lash looking increasingly infuriated.
            “If you’re not interested in the power of my lash, then perhaps Madame Lash should take it elsewhere,” she cries and pulls the handle of the whip from her belt and unrolls the sucker and gives it a whopping great crack. Mastodon flinches and grins.
            That’s my cue for another one-liner, but instead, the air above our heads sizzles with a faintly familiar noise and then a handful of costumed figures sporting enormous grins start dropping through. I recognise the leader of the cohort almost straight away, as well as the figure beside him, and I’m on my feet quicker’n you could shit.
            “Well well,” I say loud enough to make sure my colleagues hear clearly. “If it isn’t Captain Jackass. It’s been a long time, pal. I see you brought your boyfriend.” I gesture to the crouched figure in the black bodystocking, a hockey mask on his face: Kid Kaos. “Got some new friends too though, huh?”
            “Just like you, Zephyr,” the madman says and giggles and steps forward, only the jaw of his scarred face visible beneath the spray-painted gridiron helmet he wears. “We heard you was havin’ a party. Can’t do that without inviting the Kaos Krew, Mister Zephyr! You know what I always say: you bring the babes, I’ll bring the raging boners!”
            As if on cue Jackass’s allies scatter at his gesture as another one of his portals opens up over the young trio in the middle of the room and through the hole in space-time pour a few hundred pounds of decomposing crap including bones and a decaying treacle that may or may not be dog food. Ash immediately drops to his hands and knees and starts puking, while Samurai Girl uses super-speed to evade and Madame Lash just gets the fuck out of the way like any sensible person would.
            Jackass is one of the guys who gives the supers world a bad name. With no real agenda except proving himself above the law and out for his own brand of retarded laughs, the self-styled captain exists just to piss into the wind for heroes everywhere. He adamantly refuses to play ball with some of the standard expectations of the genre, including clear distinctions between good guys and bad. He doesn’t want to take over the world – just make the rest of us look like arseholes.
            I open up with an electrical attack, but the captain teleports out of the way and the charge hits his long-time accomplice instead. Kid Kaos kicks out wildly and lands on his back twitching like a frog in a biology experiment.
            Jackass pops up from another black energy disc just inches behind Seeker, leaning his diseased chin on her shoulder and tilting his head playfully.
            “Silly me,” he yodels. “I’ve introduced myself, but not my friends.”
            He sinks back through the portal before Seeker can properly turn and nail him, and moments later the caped fuckwit reappears on the far side of the room, his companions around him.
            “Guys,” he says, “meet Zephyr and his little team. We’re inviting ourselves over to play, but I’m sure they won’t mind. They look like sports. And Zephyr, these are my new recruits: Murderboy.”
            A preppy-looking but nonetheless Emo kid runs fingerless-gloved fingers through his dyed black comb-over and turns abruptly, striking a deliberate mock model’s pose.
            “Prankster.”
            Stockier than any of the others, this guy wears a kevlar vest and heavy skate armour. A slim backpack that may or may not be a parachute and an ordinance belt with a variety of grenades and canisters jingles musically at his deliberately bad dance moves.
            “And The Drill.”
            The fifth member of the team also wears a helmet, though its like the one Red Monolith wore, complete with a tinted face visor. He pulls a pair of power drills from holsters at his sides and crosses them over his chest in a clear imitation of the skull and crossbones. The bastard then levitates into the air, head touching the ceiling some forty feet up just to show us he’s got powers in his own right.
            “Well gosh, Captain,” I say and do my own fake chuckle. “Shame you didn’t let us know you were coming. Now we’re just gonna have to kick your ass!”
            I give a roar and blaze with energy that throws the room into an electric blue focus as I launch from the floor and power straight towards my grinning nemesis.
            Sure I know that wasn’t the wittiest line in history, but this is no comic book. I hate this guy, hate everything he has ever done and hate nothing so much as the total disdain he has for how we do things here on my patch – and by that I mean the whole of Atlantic City. So once again, it’s my turn to hand this guy his asshole and show him how to wear it as a hat.
            I figure it’ll be a good training exercise for the kids.

Zephyr 4.1 “Hatching”

IT IS NOVEMBER 6^th, 1971. The footage is drab, so unlike the era, the shifting, turbulent crowds, the thrashing of the desperate as they choke London’s streets and their faces are a riot of the worst emotions. Anything you might care to name – horror, terror, fear, grief, anger – is stamped indelibly in the grain of the historical recording. Yet watching it, all I can think is, fuck, that’s my dad, that’s my dad and watch on in disbelief as the cavalry arrives in a psychedelic wash of lights that break like soap bubbles over the crowd.
            The four of them appear in a wave, Starkey in those terrible elastic pants he had to wear, all of them in their matching blue marching band jackets, the closest thing they ever had to a uniform since they grew out their awful fucking 60s hair, a long way from the leather-jacketed young hoods they had first been. In seconds the Wolfman transforms, hirsute top half practically hanging out of his sleeves and the open top, a feral grin on his face as he leaps from the tableau before St George has even lowered his arms from the teleport that brought them from their secret base on the Isle of White.
            Within a year, Ringo will be dead, but that doesn’t trouble him obviously as he powers through the crowd on all fours, people throwing themselves like the Red Sea out of his loping path. There had been a terrible mood in Britain that winter with the miners’ strikes and the government’s debt default and the renewed IRA bombings and the Manchester rail disaster and, like meat left in the sun, the public rage stayed cold and hard all winter and then boiled over once the warm weather arrived and the Beatles, along with the other loose change of British superdom found themselves at the front again, advocating violent social change as if by accident. And the Summer Rebellion was born, an inevitable expression of the twisted logic of metahumanity which, if not destroying them, would at least ruin any hope for the way things could’ve been.
            In the footage you can hardly see my dad’s face for the radiant smile and those stupid little glasses he wore. I can’t see that I really look anything like him. He lifts his hand to the cheering crowd as Paul shoulders past with what seems to be a look of unrestrained menace. George already has the moustache he wears today, whenever that was the last time I saw him on the news, anyway, and he and John lift from the ground and float towards where the wall of British policemen in their Saturday morning cartoon helmets are being slaughtered.
            No one seems to even remember the Spiders from Mars – Bowie’s term, if I recall. And even fewer remember what they were called until Bowie’s song came along. All anyone knew was these dark evil fuckers from outer space had been hatching inside members of Parliament for a lot longer than anyone would care to admit and it wasn’t until the Preacher, my dad, stumbled across their alien thought-waves that their conspiracy came unstuck. How much of the country’s woes at that time were down to their influence, no one could really tell. And even after the events of November 6, the people weren’t in much of a forgiving mood. The fact the ruling elite could even be vulnerable to such a threat inspired the fury of the common people, like their masters’ weakness was just a new form of an ages old betrayal.
            Ironically the news crews couldn’t get close to the action. The crowds and the retreating police, hopelessly under-armed to face such threats, carrying their dead and injured like from a terrorist attack and crying and moaning and bleeding and stoppering their wounds with little more than their handkerchiefs, they all blocked the path to the burning street where the Spiders were finally routed. There is little to see of the well-upholstered members of parliament with their heads burst open directing desperate and powerful attacks. There are white balance-destroying flashes of red as McCartney unleashes his eyebeams and another bang, the crowd reacting like a single flinching organism as a car explodes, but otherwise the cameraman’s testimony blurs softly in and out as he plays at the far extremes of his focal range.
            If you sit through the whole thing, eventually there’s this enormous ragged cheer and an hour later, a victorious procession as the four of them are carried on the crowd’s shoulders under the shadow of Big Ben, huge grins on their comfortably adored faces. I don’t have the patience for that sort of thing and my back is aching from sitting hunched at the computer and I switch off Youtube to spare my download limit and call up the web archive instead with the grainy Leibovitz photos from autumn 1972 – their last photo shoot as a powers team, taken for Rolling Stone.
            Outside the panorama windows, the city is quiet. I call it that even when I can hear the odd car horn, a distant siren, a drunk guy retching his heart out in the alley down the side. This is as close as the city ever comes to being at peace, four o’clock in the morning and the weather turning cold and sunrise still effectively a long way off and me without a cold woman to warm my bed or a child to do the same for my heart. Instead it is just me and Wikipedia as my hand trawls over the mouse sensor and the facts flick by.
            He wrote two books: one just before they went to India and one in ‘74, after the Wolfman died. And he fathered one child the world knew about. I guess I should call him my half-brother, Julian, but I can’t help wondering how many more half-brothers I have out there.
            It is a while before I realise I have closed my eyes, unconsciously asleep. That’s the mixed curse of total freedom in the postmodern. In track pants and a Starbucks tee, I stumble as far as the settee and let the darkness wash over me.
In the early premonitions of my sleep, I see myself as a baby, lifted up into the arms of a strange man with a hoary beard and small round glasses that reflect my innocent curiosity and mirror his own.

 

THERE IS SOMETHING appropriate about the bass throb of the wind turbines as my daughter and I land like two refugees from the postmodern astride the same Newfoundland coast on which mad Viking explorers once fumbled their colonisation so badly. Like the thirty-odd unit wind farm, we are on this squall-battered peninsula for the elevation and the isolation. And like the turbines, we are far enough from civilisation that not even the most vocal civic association could object to what we propose.
            Far to the north the land turns dark green with fir and spruce and I expect there are concrete barricades eventually as the crumbling Canadian highways head like a thwarted destiny to No-Man’s Land, the rusting watch-towers with their big-breasted, shaven-headed, woollen pullover’d guards forever on duty protecting the tiny principality from the patriarchal threats of the outside world. A cruel joke and a living irony in one breath. The pun on their name is a testament to what so many costumed freaks like myself discover: you can choose a dandy title (in the late 70s, the separatists declared they were Wimminsland), but the newspapers will ultimately decide whether or not it takes. Some grumpy sub-editor, or perhaps a legion of them, their ire multiplied, eyeing the gap in the headline or the cadence of some inferior cub reporter’s sentence and deciding to rewrite the course of history in a clatter of keystrokes.
            Here on this pulsing scarp we are safe from any threat and small enough not to present one on the separatists’ Cuban-supplied radar. If there are blobs, they do not tell the story of a father simply trying to do the best thing by his child.
            Windsong is a name the media have taken to with a fury. In her mask and vandalised leather jacket, Tessa is as much a stranger as any teenage daughter could ever be, the disaffected teenager par excellence. Yet she has a knowing wink for me and flushed cheeks that belie great expectations. We are both of us “leathered up,” as she put it, spare civvies in a Dulce & Gabana shoulder bag her mother bought as a surreptitious divorce present, a way of letting Tessa know things were only looking up with the deadweight dad out of the picture. I have mine stashed in the flat panel of the back of my jacket. The screwed-on plates of the stylised zed, now in gold, on advice from my new publicist, mist over with the cold, but I don’t feel it and Tessa tells me it’s the same for her. We are built to withstand such lesser things. We are in our environment.
            “You know, when I was a child –”
            “A child who knew I was Zephyr,” I say.
            “Yes,” Windsong slowly exhales. “When I was a child, when I was eight or something, I went through a long patch thinking you were gonna leave us.”
            “You must find this ironic.”
            “Dad,” she fumes.
            “Let’s practise,” I reply. “Zephyr, remember?”
            “Okay.”
            “Why did you think I was going to leave?” I relent and ask. “Because I was Zephyr?”
            “No,” Windsong replies. “You know I said it was never a conscious thing, understanding you were Zephyr. It’s only the past few years, you know, that I was hiding from mum that I knew.”
            “Just as well,” I say. “Being a kid, knowing that sort of thing? I dunno.” In my head I imagine a quick thousand-odd scenarios where my secret ID could’ve been compromised. Most of them are during the school Christmas concert.
            “It’s not a good thing,” I say at last. “A kid could spent their life worrying I wouldn’t come home, some of the things I’ve done.”
            Windsong bites her lip and says nothing. A light breeze stirs and I know it is my baby weather-controller testing out her powers, flexing her muscles, so to speak, now we are far away from prying eyes. My other super sense – the one attuned to my role as a parent – tells me I have stifled whatever point she was trying to make. I snap my mouth shut and contemplate for perhaps the hundredth time this morning that having a split life really is more than just a very obvious metaphor. I fear what a psychiatrist would think, observing that I could be such very different people with and without the mask. Tessa desperately needs training if she is going to persist in flying out her bedroom window at night looking to thwart bad guys. So ironic that we’re finally here, it’s Zephyr-her-dad she needs more than anything.
            So I peel off the mask. The spirit gum leaves gunky pores, but no actual telltale residue. If there’s someone gunning for me with a telephoto lens then I’m about fucked, right about now, though in all likelihood its just us and the seals down on the rocks. The air is cold enough it seems to congeal in the swirls and eddies Tessa makes rise up from the damp and silent earth, brief glimpses of shapes appearing and disappearing in the mist.
            “Is that you doing that?”
            “Yeah,” she says, seemingly as astounded as I. “Never tried before. Hell, I don’t even think I’ve been out in the cold like this with my, you know, powers before. I just wondered if it could be done and, well, there you are.”
            “Not sure it has a combat application,” I grin.
            She looks up and notices for the first time I have demasked. Her face contorts with caution, but she says nothing.
            “You were going to tell me why you worried I would leave,” I say softly.
            “Because of me.” The voice is small, the gaze turned away. Tessa removes her own mask and dabs at a sudden tear that has come from nowhere.
            “You?” I give half a laugh of surprise, confusion, affection. “You? Baby, half the things I did, back in those days at least, I did because of you. I wanted my little girl to be proud. It was one of the frustrations of my life that I couldn’t share this with you. I’m glad those days are behind us.”
            “Even if it means I have powers?”
            “Yeah,” I shrug, surrendering to the observation.
            I’m still not thrilled to see Tessa going into the wrong side of the family business. Judging by the chauffeured town car that comes and drops her off for her twice weekly visit, my wife Beth made the better call when it comes to professions. We shared an interest in the law initially – her as a student and later practitioner, and me as a guy who dresses up in gaudy outfits and beats on villains – and that wore thin over time.
            Windsong replaces her mask the same way I do – it’s one of mine, after all – two fingers pressing it in place either side of her brow. The transformation into young adult is miraculously complete. Last time I glimpsed her on the NBN news I instinctively checked out her cans, her stocky childhood legs fast thinning out and hope not for any starvation diet. Although I am in good health – miraculously so, given the events of the past month – my own obsolescence is dawning on me the more I am confronted by my replacement.
            “I used to think you would resent me,” Windsong says at last. The words tumble free in a rush that I recognise from my own habits, it’s a sudden confession. Her face is turned away so I can’t see if her masked eyes still water.
            “Why?”
            “Well you’ve got to admit it, dad,” she says and gives a throaty laugh, wiping her face with the back of her fingerless gloves. (They’re a little bit Young Madonna, but I don’t have the heart to tell her. Kids will be kids and I can recall stomping around for a year in Maxine’s high heels pretending to be Gene Simmons at one stage, though admittedly I was a lot younger than fifteen). “No one could blame you if you had masculinity issues.”
            “Really?” I say, like this is a revelation to me.
            “Well, take a quick check: you grew up thinking your father was a gay sperm donor and you were raised by two dykes. You knocked up your childhood sweetheart when she was, what, eighteen? And rather than be the bread-winner, because of the whole costume thing, it was mum who went on to graduate law school and bring in the income. I thought one day you would be looking after me and something would happen, some urgent call, and you just wouldn’t come back. Like I just didn’t matter.”
            There’s silence for a moment, but not for long. It’s not like me to let such feelings linger.
            “And did I?”
            “No,” and she laughs softly, a commiseratory sound. “No, you always did.”
            “Better still, babe, there were plenty of times the police scanner went off and we couldn’t get a sitter or it wasn’t your day at kindy and I just watched it on the news. I just left it, let guys like Mastodon and the Wavemaster and Aquanaut and, that other guy, the guy with the fucking horns. . . .”
            “Capricorn.”
            “Ha, you know your shit, don’t you?”
            Windsong laughs. “Put your mask on old man. You sound like Zephyr again.”|
            As I comply, I give a wry smile and watch Windsong roll her arms around like she has any idea of what a warm-up is. We flew here from Atlantic City and I clocked her top speed at just under four hundred mph. Not a dash on mine. Still not a warm-up, to my mind.
            “So are you ready to get this show on the road?”
            “Yep,” she nods, and starts pulling back her hair from her heart-shaped face. “Combat training 101. That’s what I want, Zephyr.”
            “No, honey, that’s what you need,” I reply. “I saw you trash that jewellery store heist on CNN on Tuesday. That guy with the crowbar almost had you.”
            Her face pales as she realises she’s been busted.
            “You . . . saw that?”
            “I sure did,” I say without much of the amusement I feel. “You’re lucky I didn’t tell your mother.”
            “She’d only blame my visits with you.”
            “Exactly,” I say back. “Why do you think it’s our secret?”
            “Thanks, dad,” Windsong says through lowered lashes in the true tones of the abashed teenager she is. “I appreciate it.”
            “You owe me,” I reply. “And payback starts here.”
            She looks up. There’s fire and determination in her eyes, though unfortunately not a whiff of experience. I make a slow lunge with my hand lit up like a birthday cake and rather than defend herself, Tessa just wrinkles up that cute snub nose of hers and I think she’s about to say “Dad!” in her best irritable teenager voice. And then she’s launching backward courtesy of a significant but low voltage shock.
            Windsong lands fifteen feet away and doesn’t move. The idiocy of my grin drips steadily off my face until, with concern, I hurry forward to check I haven’t hurt her too badly.
            And walk straight into her attack.

Joseph 1.12 (coda)

IT IS A little over a week later. A week in which I have contemplated taking my own life almost every hour of every day. This is something beyond depression. The distasteful irony of my existence confronts me in the very act of even thinking and I lay in bed or on the floor unable to eat or move or even distract myself to survive. All I want is to be released, yet it can come only by my own hand, and I am so frozen into inaction that in the end I guess it saves my life.
            Suffice to say Nathan Simon probably does not have a job any more.
            On the tenth day I manage to pull on ordinary clothes and go into the street, all the basic sustenance from the apartment exhausted. I’ve even methodically eaten a jar of Dutch mayonnaise before acknowledging I will have to leave this strange nobody’s sanctuary. In the street, the cold air pricks at my skin and the odd passing car and the rustle of autumn leaves seem incredibly loud. I am not wearing any of my costume, which remains pooled in Simon’s bathroom reeking of sweat and urine after my return from Hell.
            In the best tradition of madmen everywhere, I am not properly dressed for the changing weather. I have on Armani socks, Rei des Bruges burgundy loafers, a Ralph Lauren silver-patterned pin-striped long-sleeved shirt, open, no tie, and worn tucked unevenly into olive grey hiking slacks from the Gap. It is cold and if I wasn’t so handsome, even with my russet stubble, then perhaps I would attract more looks or questions from the occasional policeman I pass as I wander eventually all the way into Jefferson and New Times Square. The electronic billboards pulse with alien life overhead, completing my sense of an hallucinatory terrain and me actively in search of Godot or something, because there is no rationale to my erratic quest.
            Perhaps it was the bustle of life all around me that I sought. Hard to believe. A bunch of cyclists in the colours of the Swedish flag pour through the square and traffic stops and there are two more cops patrolling on horses being followed by half-a-dozen starving dogs and a man wearing a sandwich board, ringing a bell and spruiking Gunga Diner. A homeless man wearing the same shirt as me comes over and then takes one look in my eyes and thinks better of it, backtracking, I think he is going to offer me money until I turn because I hear my named called and some pretty girl is standing too close to me, smiling, her perfect post-operative nose screwing up as she talks without pause because secretly I have broken her heart. The only compensation is that she doesn’t know right now, if I was wearing the alien suit, I would be tempted to send my hand buzzing into her chest to retrieve her heart and eat it like a particularly sloppy taco. Her speech doesn’t let up until the three-minute mark, when I am staring over her shoulder at a white plastic shopping bag that is floating randomly in the wind and must, I think, be the source of real beauty in this world, me unaware that I am living out what has now become a film-maker’s cliché. The girl prods me in the chest with a manicured fingertip and asks me, “Nate? Nathan? Aren’t you listening to me? Don’t you remember? It’s me. Miranda.”
            I glance back to her and really, she has such fascinating eyes, they are green in a way I have never seen, like someone has stomped on one of those old-fashioned green glass Coke bottles and set the shards in concentric rings around her coal-black irises.
            “Miranda?” I say slowly and realise my voice might imply that I am on ketamine or otherwise playing at only a few frames per second.
            I am about to struggle through an actual conversation when one of the enormous glowing LCD adverts I have been absorbing unconsciously switches images to reveal a stylish, space-age running shoe, and behind it is a pulsing symbol. The symbol itself isn’t that important to the advertisement, but to me, including the blonde hammering away with her finger in my chest, it suddenly erases the whole world.
            I know this symbol. Or glyph. I call them glyphs, the alien kanji that appear in the visor, some of which trigger suit functions and others that do things I am yet to discover. Nathan Simon and I share that in common, an incomplete reckoning of the suit’s wider operations; and these days I guess I am trying to embrace the parts of me Nate and I share in common, holding on to less and less of my false former world. My memories don’t make me me, I have been forced to learn.
           Seeing the symbol there on the side of the building with a futuristic running shoe in front of it causes my mouth to yawn open and Miranda, who has more or less incorrectly deduced that I’m on a bender, gives me a push in the chest with disgust and walks away, her hackles raised not so much by me ignoring her as the miles-wide shit-eating grin transfixing me as I stare up at the screen and the viridescent glow bathes me like daylight from an alien sun.
            There is a mystery here. And a purpose.
            I have driven Zephyr mad, and Nightwind can be no more, but perhaps there remains some crucial guiding reason why I cannot give in yet, why I must forge on, why death remains such a bad idea, and salvation, a myth, might find in catharsis its equal. I can only hope so.
            The chilli dog vendor parks right in front of me and goes around to the rear of his cart, fussing with the urn and banging water from a set of tongs. The food smells good and I’m ravenous.
            “Hey, pal. What’ll it be?”
            “Two, please. Two. And something to drink.” I fumble in my pocket and extract a miraculous twenty. It looks like it’s been through the wash with my pants. I pawn it over to the man and push away his attempts to give me change. I just want the food, now.
            “Hey thanks for the tip,” the vendor says. He’s a big man, ursine in a Dom DeLuise kind of way, which includes the cap. “My name’s Tony.”
            “Tony?” I smile the smile of a man who knows it suits him. “My name is Joseph.”
            “Good on you, Joey,” he says. “You see me around again, you want anything, you just let me know.”
            He taps his tongs again and salutes me with them, then turns to greet a Japanese man with an attaché case under his arm. I put the cold can of soda in my top pocket, making my shirt hang open like some kind of well-tailored vivisection, and I am grinning like a lunatic as the crowds pass around me and I wolf down the hotdogs, which taste like something illicit, Olympian.

Joseph 1.11 “Utter the Lie”

WE ARE SUMMONED back to reality by Hermes’ head bouncing like a discarded chamber pot into the middle of our huddle. Twilight is naked from the waist up, now, and he’s doubled over with his big clawed palms on his thighs and he looks up from beneath his horns and his nostrils flare and I imagine cars colliding and skyscrapers plunging in on themselves and my mother-in-law’s cooking. All kinds of calamity are writ upon that evil-aligned brow, yet none of it stops Seeker expressing her opinion.
            “Unless Zephyr can explain more about what occurred, I can only guess this artefact he mentioned caused some kind of intra-dimensional schism,” Seeker says.
            “Intra-dimensional . . . schism?” asks Manticore.
            “Oh man, that was a perfectly good robot,” Chamber moans.
            “Maybe you can use him for parts,” I say.
            “Hey,” Chamber retorts, strangely offended. “Same as you and the dead gay dude over there.” And he cocks a big metal thumb to leave me in no doubt about who he means. I swallow the retort because something about Zephyr’s appalling behaviour makes me want to keep my distance from all the cat-calling.
            “Whatever, dude.”
            “Are one of you little fairies gonna come over and play?” Twilight calls.
            “You’re lookin’ a bit tired over there, chief,” Zephyr replies. “Take a number and wait your frigging turn!”
            The Horned One hurls a few of those gobbets of fire of his and we scatter like a bunch of ants. Zephyr attempts to deep fry Twilight’s behind without much success. The black wings beat and demon-boy lifts into the air over our heads, the ceiling as I crank my neck backwards lacking definition to the point of possibly being an N-dimensional space. As we’re in Twilight’s domain here, I guess if he hasn’t imagined it then it doesn’t exist. He doesn’t appear to be a man with much time or thought for ceilings, right about now.
            “Hold on!” I yell.
            I move directly beneath Twilight. Seeker, Chamber and Manticore check themselves, awaiting a hint of my game plan, perhaps.
            Twilight thumps hard into the ground before me, something of the Minotaur about him with those horns, though he lacks the bull-nose piercing. He sneers. And he reaches out a big impressive hand and clasps me by the throat. I key the thumb pad and instantly phase, pulling the ghost trick, stepping aside and resolidifying across from him.
            “Well well,” Twilight replies.
            “I want to do a deal,” I practically hiss.
            “Oh?” For a big brute of a guy, Twilight does a fair turn as an Agatha Christie villain. “How so?”
            “I want to go back,” I say.
            “Back?”
            “This isn’t what I wanted,” I say quickly, aware of the disbelieving and betrayed expressions of those around me. “I can’t believe this is what I chose.”
            The evil one sniffs, relishing his role. He’s a natural.
            “Oh, I believe you did,” he says. “Sorry pal. It’s a done deal.”
            “No,” I again reply in haste. “No it can’t be. What if I give you Zephyr?”
            “What do you mean?”
            “What if I . . . get rid of him for you?” I look across the space to where Zephyr stands, at the back of us all, a sneering, put-out look scratched into his handsome, unfamiliar mug.
            “Hahaha,” Twilight replies. “You stupid man. You don’t even understand, do you?”
            The swift backhand flings me thirty feet away in a direction I’ve yet to traverse in this strange primeval dreamscape. I sit up quickly and put my hand to my mask, the taste of blood in my mouth blossoming like a hit of some rare vintage wine.
            “I’m Zephyr,” I say, and if I’m honest here, my voice is trembling.
            “I don’t think so, bub,” the costumed Zephyr says as he pushes himself forward through the milling troops who don’t look too inclined to defend me right at this moment.
            “He’s right, you know,” Twilight grins at me, practically drinking in my pain as he actually puts his hand on Zephyr’s leather shoulder – a move the other hero nonsensically allows.
            “No no, I remember it all,” I tell them. “I remember things that haven’t even happened to you here, you asshole. You’re a pale imitation.” Blood is running down my chin, diluted with tears that make my visor view foggy.
            “And why is that, do you think?” Twilight asks, again with the laughter.
            I tilt my head, unable to frame an answer, which only sends him into restrained paroxysms, obviously, at my plight. My trembling moves to bona fide shaking and I clench my fists and squeeze Nate Simon’s too-perfect teeth together hard enough I think the enamel is about to bust off and still my old friend and nemesis laughs at me.
            “You stupid little man,” he says again, voice low like a drag queen, “but I shouldn’t even call you that. You’re not a man. Not a man at all, are you? No. You’re the tailings of a man. What’s the opposite of afterbirth? An afterthought, perhaps.
            “No of course Zephyr here hasn’t had the same experiences as you’ve had, because he’s not from the same place as you, is he?” Twilight says, almost bawling as his voice rises to a shrieking intensity that sees the others, all of them except for an almost equally confused-looking Zephyr, drop back with caution.
            I stammer something worthless, nothing in it except a few scattered pronouns. I could die, and feel like I will.
            “He’s not you,” Twilight says with sudden quietness. “Never was.” Again with the impish smile, worsened by the absence of eyes.
            “Do you get it yet?”
            “No,” I say, and the admission feels like I’m surrendering to an execution.

 

“YOU’RE NOT ZEPHYR, man,” Twilight says.
            “You never were. I didn’t do all this for your sake, I did it for his! He is Zephyr. You are the bits we had to pull free so that he could live. You are the leftovers, you pathetic whimpering fuck. And I had to find somewhere in this God-forsaken multiverse where you could go. And ‘Lo, it was here.”
            It feels like a series of weights drop in my mind. Of course I had reasoned long ago that I must be living in a parallel universe, a distant realm to my own. Too many things didn’t fit. And Zephyr himself, here, had a different history than in my own world. Yet the realisation had never quite sunk in, and now with that realisation came a train of logic that threatened to run me down.
            “Wh-what did you call me?” I eventually ask.
            “Hmmm, which bit?” Twilight laughs. “The afterthought? Tailings? The leftovers?”
            I don’t even think about it. Insanity beckons.
            “Fuck you.”
            He’s close. Close by and laughing. And though he sees I am attacking him as my mask conceals the fierce grimace of my saturated and humiliated face, he’s not concerned. I don’t even know if he should be, but then I am not really thinking. I’m just reacting in rage and in shame as I grab him by the shoulder and by the waist, as if the intent was some infernal coupling. Yet all I do is ram myself forward against him, my forehead crashing down toward his chin.
            I’m relatively practised with the glyph by now. I acknowledge it with my mind and target it with my eye. And turn into a human blender.
            For the merest instant, Twilight screams. It’s not a pleasant noise, even for one such as myself, intent on the monster’s death. I have no idea, as Seeker will suggest later, that in only some ways was this ever Twilight at all. It is his body, at least. And the demon, his bane, has access to his mind. And I have just as thoroughly killed him as if I had bound the real Twilight to a chair in his mansion and put an orichalcum bullet in his head.
            The disintegration is not total. In a way, this is a good thing. It lets me know he hasn’t just somehow vanished, though really there is far too much mess to ever believe that and most of it is over me. The horns and the top of his head and one forearm and his opposite foot are all that remain by the time I have fallen to my knees, through him, to embrace the floor, keening like some religious madman garbed in black, covered in gore and babbling in Aramaic.
            As it runs off me, the bloody treacle spreads in an ever-widening pool.
            I look up and into Zephyr’s horrified face. There’s a few flecks of red on his otherwise chalk-white face, the black domino mask framing startled eyes.
            Manticore blasphemes and staggers back with his hand over his mouth, but he keeps it together. Chamber’s not as successful from what I can hear and that’s got to be a hell of a job for the cleaners from inside that armour and face-plate. When my eyes finally alight on Seeker she is surprisingly helping Streethawk to his feet, though her honey-brown eyes are locked on me in much the same manner as a mother set to protect her children from a dangerous dog. Streethawk gives a wracking cough and I know at least he is hardly paying any attention to anything except his own resurrection, which is a gift of his so-called perfectly evolved nervous system helped on by more than a little of Seeker’s mojo.
            “You bastard,” Zephyr says softly. “You were going to sell me out, you fucking rat.”
            I taste my answer, but don’t give it. If I was wearing the Zephyr mask, I know how I would react – combining bluster with sheer bullshit to stumble my way through, a charming, incompetent rogue who always pulls through just when you need him to; and who, because of his skill and charm and sheer power, ultimately you would want to believe or you would have to believe, or if you couldn’t do either, the crap people swallow and the way this universe just seems to be wired against you would mean you still had to accept it because you are on the outside and on the inside, where it counts, for all my shit I am still a king.
            I could do this now, though in truth I feel it’s not within me. For the first time in my life, perhaps, but certainly now, I could no more utter the lie that it was all part of the plan or just a joke or a strategy to lure our enemy into a false sense of security – which it so obviously did – because there is no inner compulsion for me to do so. And therein lies the truth of what Twilight said, because simply standing there and letting Zephyr’s eyes turn cold and his fists curl and the possibility of a thrashing loom, that is certainly not how once I would’ve reacted.
            The change – ceasing to be myself – was so sudden I didn’t even notice it happen. I could keep standing and asserting that I am the same person because I exist in a continuity, albeit a strange one involving a kink in the thread of space-time, of uninterrupted experience and memory, fading in detail the further back we go to the moment I was born. The same goes for everyone. However it is different for me. Thanks to Twilight and my own duplicity, or my duplicity as Zephyr in some far-off parallel world, I was sent skipping like a stone across the lake of time.
            But it wasn’t me who chose. I am still reasoning all this through. It was him. Zephyr. He cast me off like a snake skin, like a second-hand suit, and I took his memories with him. However that’s not to say I was a complete person. The leftovers, Twilight said. Badly spliced, but stitched nonetheless to a psyche close to my own. And with memory in the driver’s seat I allowed myself to think I was the very person who rejected me and all my baggage and difficult choices, rather than accept that I am someone almost entirely new.
            Many, many thoughts like these – and not many of them in such coherent alignment – flit through my mind as I stand staring at Zephyr and saying nothing as I wait to see if he will attack me and instead he puts his hand to his temple and looks woozy and he backs away, eyes flicking nervously once to me, like I might take my chance at a killing blow, and as Seeker closes in radiating motherly calm, he gives me one more, exceptionally savage glare and then he turns and leaps into the sky and angles hard away into the ether that is even now dissolving without Twilight’s mind to provide the focus.
            “I’m alive,” I hear Streethawk say to someone, or anyone, as it turns out. “That means we won, right?”
            “Yeah no thanks to you, man,” Chamber says.
            I glance around at them all and know all they see is an alien visage, the visor incapable of empathy, sympathy, camaraderie. When my attention settles on Seeker, she alone is able to withstand me, and with apparent ease.
            “You destroyed him in the end after all,” she says.
            “The demon?” I say, not really seeking confirmation.
            “No,” she replies. “You said you wanted to kill Zephyr, and you have.”
            “Oh?” The laugh sounds metallic through the visor. “How do you figure that?”
            “The demon,” she replies. “Where is the demon?”
            “That’s who I killed,” I say.
            “No,” Seeker says. “No, his body, you destroyed. All you did was free him.”
            “Free him?” Manticore moans from nearby.
            “Zephyr’s gone,” she says. She looks mortified. “He’s dead. The demon has him. He must have, by now. Why else would he go?”
            I feel I could offer an explanation here, but realise No, that’s not really my style either.

Zephyr 3.12 (coda)

“THE GIRL DID good, hey Zeph?” someone asks.
            A few elbows nudge me, hands pat my shoulders. My costume is in rags and I am glad for it.
            “Yeah,” I say weakly. “She was . . . amazing.”
            They are crowding her, and my little girl looks like she’s just won every fourteen-year-old’s lottery. The heroes of Atlantic City surround her and she is one of them, perhaps the best of them. A shining new hope.
            It is Twilight who pulls me back. Once I recognise who he is I give a patient leer and my uneasiness should be stronger than it is, so I perform as I am accustomed and he ignores it as is his wont.
            “Give the girl some room,” the big blonde hero says in his deepest voice. “They’ll get bored in a few minutes and then you can get her out of here.”
            “You know?”
            “It’s a reflection on these idiots that they don’t put two-and-two together.”
            “Probably just as well.”
            Falconer and Chancellor are there at the front. I can’t be entirely sure my daughter isn’t flirting with Miss Black, which just weirds me out. Treesinger is plucking his lute and grinning foolishly and the black guy in gold lamé looks my way and winks, setting me with a feeling of deep unease. Manticore is there as well, along with Chamber and Mastodon, who I think is smoking a thick joint and Paragon spooning standing up with Lady Macbeth and I am reminded for one cold sad moment that Red Monolith will no longer be dancing from foot to impatient foot waiting for Mastodon to finish his deep inhalations, warning not to “do the Bogart” on that joint.
            The other costumes are so distracted by the drama before them that they somehow don’t cotton on to the gravid animal noises coming from another of the ambulances near where Windsong and Synergy so recently evacuated. I give Twilight a surprisingly comrade-like pat on the shoulder with a look that suggests “I’ll be back, but see you later if I’m not,” and then I trot over to the row of ambulances and shoot a curious glance at one of the paramedics who looks like a woman on a mission as she runs over to some cops nearby to get them to start clearing a path through the debris.
            Seeker is providing the field hospital a muted radiance as she stands, her face a mask of concern, watching a civilian and three more ambulance officers tending to Constance Da Silva. Better known to the world as the former Sentinel Vulcana, she is thrashing on a blood-stained trolley while others struggle to keep her in place. Vulcana is muttering, over and over, words I barely absorb as my eyes remain locked on the jagged stump of her arm.
            “I can’t hold it, I can’t, I can’t hold it, oh God. . . .”
            And just like that a flush goes through the blue-skinned woman and she’s just an ordinary woman, the sweating, dying sort, and the freaked-out ambos stab the dark with their wild eyes and the doctor looks at me and says something he has to repeat to get me to understand.
            “This woman needs to get to a hospital five minutes ago.”
            I nod. “Right.” This is the part where I take the wounded heroine in my arms – I don’t know what we do about the severed arm – and fly in desperation to the hospital and where the city’s finest surgeons perform the night’s real miracle. Except Connie is a weeping, thrashing mess, and there’s blood everywhere as a rubber tourniquet comes loose.
            “Oh shit . . . shit,” the doctor gapes.
            “She has to come with me,” Seeker says and gently thrusts me aside. In her hand there is some small weird device. She gestures and perhaps it is telepathy that instructs me to bring the trolley. So I push Connie free of the desperate paramedics as Seeker goes ahead of us, walking toward the end of the ruined street and the river beyond, something like the keyless entry for a sports car in her hand.
            “This way. Come on.”
            There’s a subsonic beep and the crowds, attentive now, gasp as an enormous stone castle materialises into wobbly view in a move so implausibly real that only the very dodgiest of 1980s special effects could capture it.
            “What the fuck?”
            Seeker turns.
            “Zephyr, we have much to talk about. I’ll call you.”
            With that, she takes the handles of the gurney from my fingers and starts pushing it up a vague slope that I suddenly realise is a drawbridge; and then Seeker, with Vulcana, is disappearing into the enormous black skull face of the strange ancient castle and after the vaguely intangible wooden bridge has drawn up once more, the whole thing fades like a spectral vision with the dawn. Dawn, however, is still in fact some time away.
            The supers chat animatedly about this for a while, circling like we’ve licensed an open-air nightclub just for freaks, small groups forming and reforming amid the emergency crews and the traumatised paramedics and the tired cops and the surly city council crews arriving in their yellow vehicles to start making head or tail of this mess, the international journalists filing for their prime time slots despite the hour, the autograph hunters back at the cordons calling for their favourite masks like there couldn’t be anything more important in the world.
            When the cool air does start to glow with the first sign of day, a number of us make arrangements to catch up at the Silver Tower later on, drinks on Amadeus, and while Tessa fields a few invites half-heartedly, I know she is cluing in to the fact that this is the part where reality has to step back in and there’s no way on earth she’s going to be going with Cipher to the new Terminator series wrap party or the opening of a new restaurant called Crayons across town with Miss Black; and I have to ask myself if it is a school night until I remember we haven’t actually worked out the school arrangements yet, with George and Max offering to pay for the frigging Academy, much to Elisabeth’s chagrin.
            I am like a statue or something, a grinning, wry, admittedly exhausted homage to dads everywhere in my tattered red-and-white suit, Vulcana’s blood dappling my shredded cape as I wait through the lessening crowds until Windsong daintily treads my way in her expensive-looking boots. I don’t care if the dawn sweepers or the displaced homeless people or Nigel the Troll or the last psychotic fans are watching as I sling an arm around my daughter’s shoulder and we walk through the trampled wasteland where an hour or so previous an imaginary castle touched down or where, an hour previous to that, we vanquished the earthly incarnation of a living star, or something like it.
            Windsong and I get to the river and I admit it feels not only good to be alive, but there’s a resonance of Old New York here as the grey clouds scud across the horizon and the city begins waking up, the smell of rotting garbage and fresh-ground coffee mingling into one heady mix as we inhale the brisk freshness of the breeze that lifts Tessa’s hair trailing and coiling like a scarf and my cloak flaps backwards like the flag I guess these things were made to imitate.
            “That was one crazy night,” I say at long last, it almost being a profane thing to intrude on the meditative silence of daybreak and the weird intimacy of us being in costume together.
            “Tell me it’s not always going to be like that,” Tessa replies.
            “No,” I say and turn so she knows it’s serious. “It won’t be. Take it from me, you just got pretty much all the good bits without too much of the shit. I’d consider retirement.”
            After a moment I let the grin break through and it conjures a levity in Tessa’s face I haven’t often seen, masked or otherwise, and we briefly hold hands and she squeezes my fingers and I concede she has a hell of a grip for a fourteen-year-old girl.
            “I love you, dad.”
            “Yes, baby. I love you too . . . Windsong.”
            Tessa gives a giddy laugh, every inch the teenager.
            By osmosis we agree not to discuss all the shit things, not the least being my imminent divorce. Instead Windsong adjusts her mask and winks at me and punches me in the shoulder and shoots up into the sky and I just stand there, watching for a moment as my daughter ascends in a blurry arc across the city where a bridge once stood, and then I do the crouch thing and, well, for a guy with the power of however many fucking light bulbs it’s meant to be, I don’t think I’m gonna catch her. Not today. Or at least not if I don’t want to spoil the moment.

Joseph 1.10 “Thunder Inside A Barrel”

IT’S A TWO-page splash as Chamber and Hermes open up and Twilight leaps like the Wolfman at Seeker, battering her aside, raking with newfound talons. Zephyr slams into him, blue sparks dancing around his body, and they pile into and through one of the nearest stone pillars.
            I look at Streethawk. The dude doesn’t look too good. I’m just done registering that when the ‘hawk keels over from his studied kneeling posture and goes into some kind of seizure. I scamper over calling to Seeker, but she’s out cold as well. Manticore and I converge on the body as it goes still and we kneel and exchange wordless stares as the tumult continues around us.
            “Is there anything you can. . . ?”
            “No, man,” Manticore says helplessly.
            Our eyes return to the body as Streethawk gives one more nervous kick and it is too noisy to hear the death rattle, otherwise I am damned sure we would.
            I crab-walk across to Seeker. She’s breathing steadily, which I can confirm in the best way possible as I admire those perfectly-formed lungs for a moment, their outer expression in her totally cowabunga girl-flesh pressing against the torn white lycra, genuine claw marks down her side exposing succulent tanned flesh with her usual gentle glow. I don’t know why there is no blood, as Twilight’s clearly savaged her and she’s not known for her invulnerability. I recall one of the mid-model Crimson Cowls knocking Seeker out once when his kung fu kick failed and a boot came off, catching the heroine unawares. Possibly it was cracking her skull on a plinth on the way down, but Aquanaut and I rode her on that one for weeks.
            Oh those were the days.
            Or were they? I dunno. Already my past life is acquiring an illusory quality which the present surrealism only contributes to undermine. For what it’s worth, and my own minimal contribution, I am standing shoulder-to-shoulder again with brave comrades, yet my life as a Sentinel is receding like a black cab getting the fuck out of Dodge.
            “A little help over here!”
            Zephyr’s call succeeds in arresting my gaze a moment before the leather-clad know-it-all flies bodily, not of his own free will, through the air and lands hard on the stone steps before us. He rolls over, plaster dust masking the cuts and bruises to his face and hands.
            “The guy fights like a tomcat,” he gasps, struggling to one knee. “What’s up with that?”
            No-one answers because the brief pause is replaced by the sound of Twilight roaring like a mad WWF wrestler and throwing himself from the top of the stage toward Zephyr again. Just as the demonic shadow looms over us all, Hermes comes from nowhere like a veritable Buick and tackles Twilight in mid-air. The two of them go crashing down like a pair of tanks fucking, more plaster and Fuller’s earth exploding into the air like the shockwave from a small atom bomb.
            “Jesus,” I remark. “Look at that guy go!”
            Sure enough, the tussling twosome exchange solid punches without either giving in. Each time one of Twilight’s big fits carom into the robot there’s a sound like thunder inside a barrel. I’m frankly astonished either of them can keep it up.
            “All power to ‘em,” Zephyr says and hawks up blood along with his Queens drawl.
            “And all the better for us,” he says. “Gives us time for you to explain exactly what the heck’s goin’ on here, Nightwind.”
            I feel the others’ eyes palpably descend on me and I gulp.
            “Okay,” I say, “but this is gonna sound weird.” 

 

IN A RUSH of words, I explain to Zephyr that I used to be him. That we are the child of two mothers, I had thought, conceived by in vitro means, our father an unknown family friend who perhaps carried a latent gene triggered, in our adolescence, by a stupid prank atop a wind turbine in the face of a growing thunderstorm. While his slack face betrays little reaction I hurry on, telling him how after years of listening to my complaints, billionaire playboy and dark magic philanthropist Twilight decided to take pity on me, conceiving some harebrained scheme and offering me the chance to somehow cosmically pare down my existence to a single strain, a straight line, I hoped, that hurt no-one, least of all my daughter and the mother of my child.
            Zephyr actually slaps himself lightly to put some life back into his face. Then he lets out a long and slightly exaggerated sigh, grins painfully, and turns to include the spectators in his remarks.
            “I hope none of you folks are taking this dude too seriously,” he says. “That was the single biggest load of horse-shit since, I dunno, the stable boy put the moves on Mr Ed.”
            “You sure, homes?” Chamber asks. I can practically hear the sceptical frown, though it is directed at my former alter ego. “Man sounds like he knows a heap o’ your shit, motherfucker.”
            “I don’t fucking think so, homes,” Zephyr comes back. “I mean, sure, there’s some similarities. I’m not saying what. But there’s no way I have children. None that I know about. And that’s the same for a wife. I mean, seriously?”
            “You married Elisabeth O’Shaughnessy. From high school. Remember?”
            “Never heard of the bitch.”
            I pale, and not just because he’s insulted my wife. It’s because I believe him. It’s a real WTF moment for both of us.
            “Okay,” I say slowly. “You tell me what the hell’s going on here. Twilight had you captive.”
            “Listen up, Ass-wind,” my doppelganger sneers.
            “No, Zephyr,” a voice comes – and it belongs to Seeker.
            She walks slowly in her well-ventilated suit to where we’ve gathered, shoulders turned to the ruckus between demon and robot.
            “Man’s got a point,” Chamber says.
            “It’s critical we know what transpired here,” Seeker says. “Clearly, Zephyr, you were at the genesis of this disaster. You have to tell us what happened.”
            The tough guy looks at us like we just spoiled the end of his favourite film. He tugs at his leathers fiercely and growls.
            “We had a falling out,” he says.
            “That’s it?” Manticore says from the side.
            “That’s the Twitter version,” Zephyr shrugs. “So what? Somehow in the crush I mighta fucked up one of his little magic amulets or something.” He looks at us a moment, then something in his gaze drifts. “Dude went ape-shit, said I’d doomed us both.”
            “As I suspected,” Seeker says. Her sense of self-superiority isn’t undermined at all by being dressed in head-to-toe white lycra that is slowly coming apart. “Twilight is as much a victim in this as the rest.”
            “He doesn’t look like a victim,” I say softly.
            “Why the fight?” Manticore asks Zephyr, but he just shrugs.
            “None of your goddamn business.”
            “Shit, he really is as bad as people say, isn’t he?”
            I hold my former self in my narrowed gaze.
            “Worse.”
            And that’s about when I conceive that the only solution to my woes may be to kill him.