I have stopped posting to this site while real life writing projects take priority. There is more to come and already written, but the process that leads to these pages needs to be followed properly. If you want to ensure Zephyr resumes in the coming weeks, please feel free to leave some comments to show your thoughts on the story so far. It would help my motivation enormously. Thanks. W.
IT MAY HAVE been a long while since I last saw footage or photos of the Sentinel in action, but even without his fighting gear on there’s no misunderstanding as the gent with the gently greying temples appears to one side and nods, significantly, once, and Hennessy snaps his jaw shut.
“Seems like a perfectly reasonable request to me, Rich,” Sentinel says in his light Texan drawl. “How about you give Zephyr an’ me a few minutes and I’ll catch up with you first thing tomorrow?”
Hennessy’s eyes go from the man in the doorway to the clipboard and then to his wristwatch. It’s after five and whatever arrangement the dockworkers have, it clearly doesn’t extend to the suits – apart from the Sentinel, of course.
“Uh, sure thing, Walt. I’ll, uh, I’ll catch up with you for our 9am.”
“Absolutely.”
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WHEN THE COMICS industry finally started to clue in on the whole costumed crime-fighter thing they were a little late and a little flat. Their early contributions didn’t exactly fire the public imaginations. The Batman was a pretty limp-wristed competitor when you had folks like Jack Fury and Mistress Snow duking it out on prime-time black-and-white TV. When Sentinel came along, I guess some bright spark got the idea to nab the details while he was still slugging away in obscurity so that by the time the Nazi-smashing superman was coming into his own, he already had a legion of fans who knew him through the purloined identity of his comic book. As things so often do in this industry, when push came to shove, all that did was open the door for the lawyers to come in. The funny book publishers were legally required to change the name and origins of their darling creation to distinguish him from the legitimate copyright of the Sentinel, whose likeness they had infringed. And that’s how we got Superman, folks. The rest is history, at least on this world.
And of course the Sentinel’s been missing presumed dead for twenty years. I say this to the Freak, who just shrugs those big scaly guns of his and pouts and twists in his leather lingerie and the darkness continues with its weird peopled susurrus.
“Explain to me the Think-Tank thing at least,” I say.
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THE DEVESTATED ARCHITECTURE of the park looms in the sinking light like some deserted, war-torn fairground. The moist air is rank and gloomy, coalescing in a visible haze that catches the late afternoon sunlight like a stain. We move through scenes shrouded by silhouettes and dirty sheets, every now and then more Peeps popping up to open improvised barricades or unbolt hidden doorways, allowing us to descend – and for them to lead me – further into their dark and diseased domain. It smells like an abattoir long abandoned, though I think this indicates nothing about the recentness of any killings.
Beyond a log wall there is the faded and curtailed wreckage of a summer pavilion. Charcoalised skeletons have been strung up like party decorations on barbed wire around it. A single big mutant with a .50 Barrett sniper rifle and a head like a sack of rotting eggs steps down from the terraced steps and flicks back a scarf almost negligently. The malice in the air is palpable, downright visible as we move into the old Zoo precinct, through battered, twisted gates and down a concrete slope lined with kitchen litter and ancient bones. The skull of what I perceive to be an elephant, tusks intact, has been positioned above the door of a low, flat structure, most of the letters missing from the sign for the nocturnal house.
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“HANG ON A minute,” I call, hands on fists a sure-fire signifier I’m not going anywhere right away.
Mentor’s pet mutie turns slowly, no ballet dancer, and then he comes back to within speaking distance. He tilts his head at me like a particularly intelligent dog and it’s a moment or two more before he comments.
“Is there a . . . problem, Zephyr?”
“Damn straight,” I tell him. “How far away are you?”
“Well, fly, if you must, dear boy,” the big figure muses. “I didn’t realise you were so impatient. I am in the Rosencrantz. Do you know it?”
“Only the finest,” I say drily. “That hotel is going to be your tomb, porridge-man. I didn’t ask for you to slow down because I’m breathing like a little girl. I don’t trust you, Mentor. Not as far as I can see you, anyway. I’m not ever forgiving you for some of the shit you’ve pulled on me.”
“How is dear Valerie?” the oaken figure laughs. “Do you think of her? Think you are her?”
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I SOAR ACROSS the city on an endorphin high, the wind tugging at my grin enough to eventually make me give in, twirling and dive-bombing traffic like a rookie in a cape and bright red jockey shorts outside my long johns. I dodge the E! chopper and emit an electro-magnetic burst astride the Silver Tower that will put poor Chancel’s sensorium in a twist for half-an-hour or so, and a dent in that steady revenue he draws from having all those high-tech gadgets in the building’s crown and glory. Then I wing my way over the water and to Manhattan.
The ruined island city looks like a movie set, all shattered skyscrapers and rusty girders, except the last time someone tried to use the place for a movie even the great purple patriot Everyman couldn’t defend the crew from mutant night attacks. In the end it was cheaper and almost as effective to film in Reno. Hard to believe our city fathers ever approved the decision to simply put the jewel in New York’s crown into the dustbin of history, but ’84 was a hell of a year and the recovery bill alone was in the gazillions. The giant coastal barricades with their immortal orange placards are an eyesore beyond all proportion, but I guess it’s not many New Yorkers who get the view I do when I head this way.
And so in the shadows of our great new metropolis, a cancer flourishes. Continue reading
ARE YOU GOING to be able to pull this off, fuck-face, or are you after a trip back onto the ice?” I ask.
Negator scowls and adjusts his cape and the energy leaking from his gloves dissipates.
“I spent a decade trying to steal a better life and now I have nothing to show for it but this ridiculous fucking costume, Zephyr,” the villain says in a low voice. “The difference between me and you is I am standing here dressed like a prize fucking turkey because I have a goal in sight. You’re still here because it’s the only way you can get your rocks off.”
I laugh at that and ignore him. “They’re paying you for this gig?”
“Straight up. Ten grand,” he says. “My agent thinks he can get me a touring show. I just need to remind the public what a badass I was.”
“Without landing back in prison.”
“Relax, Zephyr,” he sneers. “You’re the one who taught me crime doesn’t pay, correct? Now we’re both in showbiz.”
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MY PUBLICIST CALLS at 10am sharp. This is one of delectable Miss O’Hagan’s mid-level handlers called Janice. Janice is kind of bossy. And flat-chested. It’s fair to say we haven’t got off to a good start and now she’s telling me I’m in danger of running late.
It is kinda hard to hear her over the sirens of the crime scene and I pull an aggrieved face at the guys loitering at the open doors of the cruisers and they catch themselves on and it’s only a few seconds before I can make do just with a finger in my ear. The crowds lining the hasty cordon keep calling out as I wander back and forth trying to find a sweet spot in the phone reception and I am distracted as hell by what I take to be a lady-boy or something in high heels and seriously unshaven legs who keeps trying to flash me his/her/its titties, as concealed by a late 90s commemorative Zephyr & the Jersey Ferry t-shirt.
“Why aren’t you at the studio?” Janice growls down the line.
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THERE’S SOMETHING THAT hasn’t been quite right for almost a week and I am damned if I can put my finger on it. For a guy who can do all the things I can, the whole hurling lightning bolt, flipping over cars deal, the irony is I can wake up as sore and angsty as the next pussycat. It takes me a couple of days to realise my nights haven’t been what they were, and it’s a few days more before I ping to the fact this isn’t just abnormal, but bordering on the highly frigging unlikely.
I start my search over a bowl of weetabix, the silent kitchen a rebuke, the smell of stale milk and aged linoleum my only company. In my Diehard singlet and toothpaste-striped pyjama pants I hulk over the innocent bowl and methodically consume the fuel my body demands, thinking about the different times my metabolism has crapped out on me and all the while trying not to let on I am sensitive to a pin dropping, or maybe close to it, as I cast the net of my attention wide across my soon-to-be ex-apartment.
There is a spy here. Somewhere, close by and lurking. I know it.
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BLINK AND YOU’D miss it, as Warp says himself. One moment we are escaping the charnel landscape north of Vladivostok, the next we are in the hectic streets of postmodern Ginza, the obelisks of Nipponese commerce and slavery towering over us. It is just before the onset of night, all the neon slinking out like prostitutes too early for their red light shifts, a crush of salarimen and other commuters marching along the bleeping avenues awash with signs and enticements.
I am shocked to see half the people wear odd metal collars, most blinking with blue lights, but other with different colours signifying God-knows-what. The wearers have the look of the enthralled and I don’t just mean the Gruen transfer typical to the dizzying bombardment of conflicting signals. Clearly Spectra and her cohort in the Twelve had their own means for keeping the populace under control and it sure explains how Tokyo remains a thriving metropolis compared to what little else I’ve seen in this devastated world.
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