Zephyr 3.5 “Afterlife 101″
IT OCCURS TO me I am once more in my erstwhile colleague’s domain as the sky fills in above me with stone and the wretched flaming column becomes the warm glow of some dungeon-like theatre set. There’s a stone throne large enough to fit a small giant and Twilight stands from it looking every inch the demonic messiah he may very well be.
“You continue to fight it, Zephyr.”
The words come out of his mouth the moment I have landed heavily on the flagstones before him. I don’t know where the chittering horde of space monkeys went, but we feel deeply, claustrophobically underground now.
Twilight has no eyeballs. Sheer incandescence ghosts from his orbits as a kind of steam, phosphor burning within him. Gigantic horns stem away from his swollen brow. He still has the mask and the costume. Its grey chest turns imperceptibly black on the way to each of his extremities. The only thing different is the black cloak, which rises behind him now in the form of two enormous dragon’s wings. And its not just the eyes, there’s a radiance to his face that makes it kind of hard to look at. I swallow uneasily.
“Minutes ago I was being torn to shreds by carnivorous ants,” I reply.
“Just as you expected.” He grins, well, demonically, and makes his dentist proud.
“Right, so I am making all this up,” I grunt, gesture around and give an unfortunately effete harrumph.
“Not any longer. You’re in my world now.”
“Cute,” I say. “Better the devil you know, hey?”
“That might turn out to be less true than you might’ve thought,” Twilight replies.
“My best friend is the Antichrist. Fuck me. I can see the headline now.”
| “Just because I worship the Devil doesn’t make me a bad person.”
He delivers the line in a flat monotone and I have to give it to him, in there somewhere there’s a bone for me if I wanted to take it. I do, but I don’t.
“Afterlife 101 tells me your Satan and mine may not be the same thing,” I reply.
“Very good, Zephyr. You’re learning. There’s hope for you yet.”
“What, to survive?” I ask.
“No,” Twilight explains. “Just to learn something, before I send you on to your next life.”
While his response demands something witty, the well’s dry – as dry as my mouth. At this moment I would happily drink a cup of my own pee or possibly someone else’s. Perhaps it’s just as well neither materialise. Despite my complete lack of optimism, I plan to survive this, and this hasn’t exactly been my best day as it stands so far.
“You seem to be suggesting the road ends here,” I say finally.
“I wouldn’t want to disappoint you.”
“Is this more of the ‘creating the world of my expectations’? Because, if so, you know, I’m happy to be disappointed. I’m not really one of these guys who has to be right no matter what.”
A shadow of a smile plays across the face of my friend, at once so familiar and yet so remote; and I am reminded of yet more lines of spurious logic from the beautiful Seeker, the only one really able to comprehend this place. I’m just fluffing it.
“Problem is, Twilight,” I begin again, “we have a mutual problem.”
The big guy gestures royally around. “I don’t see any problem. Not for me.”
“Actually, yeah,” I say. “You’re not really Twilight . . . and you’re holding on to a friend of mine.”
“And that’s a problem?” The demon gives a rich laugh.
“Yeah actually, it is.”
I jolt suddenly to the side and unfurl my palm and for the briefest speck there’s a glowing white-blue light there and then I explode the air, creating a confusion of whiteness that most mortal eyes, including my own, can’t really bear. Fortunately for me I already have my lids clenched and my face turned away. Twilight, or the full demonic force in possession of him, howls like what I imagine people do – crowd and victim – during crucifixions. As the phosphor swirl fades, his glowing eyes remain sightless and it’s nothing for me to unleash my most powerful electrical attack yet.
This is not the sort of thing I’d normally do in the real world, with people and buildings and God knows who else lumbering perhaps accidentally into the way. Here I don’t have any compunction to hold back and the lightshow goes from the vigour of its first attack into an ongoing channel of pure energy as I sink every inch of my being into frying the shit out of my one-time best pal, hero and mentor, hoping that somehow in doing so I will still have the chance to reclaim him in the end. And if I fail and Twilight dies by my hand, if I have anywhere near half-a-handle on this affair so far, then perhaps in his own next incarnation Twilight might eventually come to understand and forgive.
Problem is, giving it my all eventually turns out to be a somewhat less impressive feat than I need it to be. I gasp like a man at the end of an unexpectedly long and probably illicit orgasm and drop gasping to my knees, clouds of steam billowing across the curious scarp that Twilight’s demon lover conjured; and the throne, Twilight, pretty much everything is gone, a blackened, sand-blasted stump on an under-lit stage.
The stump twitches. It moves, unfolding slowly as the form of a man who, like a sleeper not wishing to wake, rolls onto his back and gives a mighty groan. He is at rest for no more than two seconds – two seconds during which I judge the arrival of Seeker and a handful of others into our intimate quasi-lit arena. Then the figure sits up, skin blackened, just the glowing white eyes to give the masked face definition. And as the fingers of his fist clench, I’m sure I can see burnt flesh peeling away.
“Twilight?” I call weakly.
The bull-horned figure shakes his head slowly and tuts, but the answer is relatively simple.
“No.”
I HAVE BUT a second to glance around and work out who my reinforcements are: Seeker, the giant robot Hermes, his accidental nemesis Chamber, Streethawk, crouched like we might shoo him away, and Grasshopper, a young kid who I’ve never even spoken to before. I am grateful to them, one and all, though still I have too much pride for that to show on my face. Instead I cast a welcoming grimace toward them. Streethawk waves like we’re at a gamers’ convention rather than some kind of metaphoric Hell and of them all, it’s Seeker who appears to have the most serious and tactical view of the situation.
She sidesteps around Chamber’s lumbering armour while the rest of us are still drinking in the scene and our places in it, the charred form of Twilight thinking through his options before us. Then just as suddenly, Seeker rushes straight for our host and flings her arms and hands wide.
“The Light of Truth!” she yells.
The sizzling light-storm isn’t anywhere near as brilliant as I expected. My studied flinch turns out quite unnecessary. If I were to guess anything, I’d say we were witness to a lightshow from another dimension, visible to our human eyes only by dint of the souls Seeker would tell us we have within.
The cone of light banishes the image I have superposed upon Twilight. Gone is the char-grilled superhero playboy. In his place stands a slavering, six-armed monstrosity with an obscene nexus of erect cocks where normally one would do the job. While mildly broiled, its skin is more the texture of meat with the skin torn off, and decidedly reptilian towards its head, which is pure Hollywood with its alligator smile, jaguar teeth, four slitted eyes and equine silhouette, the bull’s horns notwithstanding.
“So that’s what you look like, huh?”
Grasshopper yells, “Imposter!” and springs forward, God bless him, the first of us to screw our courage to the sticking point or place or whatever it is the Bard wrote, and it’s unfortunate for him that the demonoid moves faster than probably Twilight himself, and a damned sight quicker than Grasshopper. It grabs the green-clad hero by the head and gives a sudden sharp twist.
Chamber’s particle cannon is too late to stop the murder. The demon leaps away, the wrenched-off head still in its hands as Grasshopper’s sinewy body drops to his knees like a pole-axed Jedi.
I acknowledge I am feeling too remote for these events. It’s too many hours strung out on violent emotions. Too many hours with my body in pain. Nonetheless, with what little flicker of energy I have left, I fire some sparks the creature’s way in a token show for the death of a fellow mask.
Undeterred by the murder of a mere human, the Classical robot Hermes thunders in, grabbing one of the demon’s six arms and then smashing his enormous metal fist into the beast’s head so many times that I begin to cheer, Chamber firing into the creature’s legs, Seeker hovering in the air over the scene like the ghost of a former Sports Illustrated beauty. Streethawk scrambles around behind them on all fours, and while I know he’s planning something, I also know he’s giving himself a lot of time to do it.
Twilight’s shadow-self, or whatever it is we’re calling this thing now, headbutts Hermes with sudden ferocity and turns around his grip, now snatching up the robot with multiplex arms and hoisting him in the air over his head. The creature yowls like the God of Cats in heat and shimmering energy pours through him and into poor Hermes, the experience sufficiently graphic that even I can sympathise as the robot shudders and judders before the demonoid crouches and hurls the whole weighty effort about thirty yards away. Hermes crashes to the ground and doesn’t look in any hurry to start moving. I also note he’s no longer silver, but a strangely iridescent gold, from the end of his sculpted toes to the helmet of curls that laminate the back of his head.
“This isn’t going so well,” I growl loud enough for the troops to hear.
The monster jumps, sailing through the air toward Chamber, and as it jumps, it slaps one and then two pairs of hands together. When those meaty palms collide, the result is an energy blast of some sort. We don’t get to find out just how devastating they can be because Chamber motors aside, peppering the creature’s ribs with white-hot bolts of his own. When the six-armed killer twirls to give chase, Chamber sickeningly folds in on himself and disappears through the slot in his chest, reappearing just feet away from me and leaving the Twilight-imposter surprisingly bewildered for a creature that has otherwise shown such sophistication so far – or sophistication at least as far as Antichrists go.
“Bright ideas?” Chamber asks.
I give a curt nod, though nothing occurs to me until I actually start speaking.
“With all those cocks, you’ve gotta think about kicking him in the balls. . . .”
“This is the great Zephyr’s strategy?”
I look at the metal-headed techno-hero for a long moment and realise all at once that this is not the same man who has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me in more than a dozen battles and on strange, alien worlds. The explanation will have to wait for another time.
“That’s right.”
I clasp my hand on his shoulder like in the days of old it turns out we never shared.
“Take me in there, Tin Man. Close.”
And the shuddering blackness overwhelms us.
AS PLANNED, WE appear immediately behind and to one side of the hyperventilating horror.
I roll clear like a good old-fashioned action hero and the bastard is big enough that I can basically slide halfway between his legs before bringing my boot up and into the deadly nerve plexus that comes with having the sort of genitalia only Angels – and their Hellish counterparts – dare have.
For added effect I channel a few more volts through my boot. I am satisfied to see the creature crumple, though I have to move aside or risk the damned thing falling on top of me.
At that moment Streethawk leaps from wherever he’s been laying low, a spinning axe kick, I have to give it to him, performed with stunning precision, taking out half of the demonoid’s teeth along the left-hand side. The creature rasps and makes a play for the denim-clad hero, but however it is his powers work, Streethawk looks like he’s the only one of us who really has the monster’s number. Up against six arms and two horns, he weaves like a man with a black belt in Vogue, snapping into a variety of postures that are conveniently just not within reach of the numerous attacks that try and land on him. In-between these, he retaliates with a few low blows of his own, I rabbit punch the sucker from the back and Chamber finishes the encounter by hauling in a five-tonne slab of stone and bringing it down on the fucker’s head.
Astonishingly, it goes down. Seeker lands nearby and starts swathing the curled form in her ambient glow, her hands moving over the creature from afar in such a way that I first think the silly tart is trying to heal him. She’s got the sort of look one pulls drying hands under the heater in a gas station toilet, calm but vaguely impatient, and I have to pull my eyes away from the spectacle to glean that she’s actually talking.
“What?”
“What became of the talisman that began this calamity?”
“Talisman?”
“Twilight pledged part of himself, vouchsafed for demonic power. It would have been something he carefully protected,” she says.
“Hmmm, not carefully enough.”
“You know it?”
“It was like a crystal ball,” I say. “He called it his . . . heart-stone.”
“That’s right. And where is it now?”
“Ruined,” I reply. “It broke. Breaking it is what began all this.”
“Only because the borders of the world were forced out of alignment in the first place,” Seeker says, and immediately I picture the natty amulet.
With Twilight down for the count, we’re no longer in a dungeon. Again, as far as I’m concerned, we’re on the set of Terminator Seven and any moment now those fruit bats from Hell are going to start breaking out from the ground.
“What’s the matter, Zephyr?” Seeker asks.
“What do you see?”
“Around us? Zephyr, these eyes were born to pierce the Veil. I understand that yours would not be so effective.”
I scan the scene some more. Chamber appears to be tending to Hermes,. Ineffectually, it would seem. Neither of them look concerned about the erratic stack of skulls and white thigh-bones immediately beside them.
I am not sure how else to do it, so I narrow my eyes and clench my ring-piece and grit my teeth and almost mutter that line from the Wizard Of Oz. When I open my eyes we’re all in the same positions, but now we are in the ruins of Twilight’s mansion.
“Something like this?” I ask Seeker.
I am surprised to see a warm smile break across her face. “Something like it. More to the rear, perhaps.”
“No,” I mutter, scouring the rubble now. “If I imagine it all, let it be to our advantage. It should be around here somewhere. . . .”
A minute passes as I sort through the smouldering books and half-melted DVD cases and priceless furniture reduced to matchsticks and loose snooker balls and then under a slat of wood I retrieve the roiling red lens, the metal frame melted and re-formed in an ugly, distorted shape.
“In here,” I say, tiredness washing over me.
“We need assistance,” Seeker says.
She calls to Chamber, who drops Hermes’ lifeless arm and comes over. After just a moment’s parley the suited hero nods and activates his N-space transporter, disappearing in on himself in that unusual way that once seemed so normal.
“Can we do this?” I ask.
Seeker walks over, picking with surprising daintiness through the ruins.
“I think so. Yes.”
“And Twilight?”
“As long as yonder creature doesn’t wake.”
I nod. “My department then.” I look over to where Streethawk is sitting on a block of stone cross-legged, gaze over his shoulder at where Hermes was laying just seconds before. The one-time silver sentinel is nowhere to be seen.
“I’ll need your help?” I tell him.
“Sure.”
“Where did the robot go?”
“Beats me,” Streethawk says and shrugs.
It’s just a short while later that Chamber returns with Miss Black and, of all people, Jocelyn aka Lady Macbeth. I roll my eyes, but Seeker approaches me and places her hand gently on my shoulder.
“I am sorry about Paul. He was a good man.”
“Who?”
“Grasshopper,” she says.
I slowly sigh.
“It’s not like the fucking comics, is it?”
My back is to her now and so I can’t see her face, but her voice sounds strange in reply.
“Not always, Zephyr, no. Not always.”
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