Zephyr 14.5 “The Perlocutionary Effect”
MY INSTRUCTIONS BOIL down to getting everyone else the hell out of Dodge as I hurriedly snap my fingers, hoping those around me will just follow the plan a little better than Tessa. Syzygy hangs at my elbow like she’s just found a father figure and isn’t letting go, but the determined look on my face and the evidently stark doom into which I’m about to walk give even she pause, and I glance back to basically see them all hanging back and wishing me luck. I nod to Chamber and Volt, the nominal leaders of the party in my wake.
“Get everyone you can to the fortress and get out of here, got it?”
They nod and I throw myself out of the windows and up and across the city as fast as I can under the blanket of the Titans’ creepy robot-like army, the flying phalanx of about two hundred generally identical superhumans descending on the grounds around the Capitol building.
I never knew my daughter had such a strong interest in politics, let alone a warm humanitarian streak for the lowest species known to mankind.
Giving my best inner banzai shriek, I hit Mach and jostle several Titans in my wake as I smash through their formation to crash down and into the flaming wreck of our once iconic landmark. Beyond the half-doused flames and Neo-Classical wreckage I see a huddle of grimy men and women in suits hanging back as Windsong, Paragon and Coalface wage war against a dozen-odd Titans. Seeing Paragon there, still all maudlin and damned-near suicidal-looking as he exorcises his personal demons in the crucible of battle, I am not exactly filled with optimism, but I come behind one of the Titans and grab a length of jagged twisted iron from a pile of rubble and slash it across the guy’s lower back hard enough to what you’d call disembowelling the guy, if only he were facing the other way around. Instead, the Titan sinks to his knees with a girlish shriek and clutches the pumping, gushing wound at his kidneys, and I throw him by the hair into two of his fellows before tasering a fourth, blocking another one’s attempt to grapple me as I fly up, then straight down again with a piledriver punch at just the right angle to the top of the guy’s skull to avoid demolishing my hand while managing to grind his face into the sodden brickwork beneath his feet. I backhand another one, or hell, maybe one of the same ones I’ve already attacked, pour lightning into the next one closest, and shoulder-barge my way forward until I’m alongside Tessa.
“I warned you about this!” I yell.
Sheer panic’s etched on her lovely face. It pains me – sends an existential trill through the ragged black nicotine stain-coloured flag that is my soul – to see my daughter clutched in the skeletal grip of what looks like Death’s winning hand.
“Fuck you!” I yell, obviously not at her, and hit hyperdrive mode as hard as I can, machine-gunning electrical attacks that drop every second one of these motherfuckers, perturbed as I am that more and more of them arrive every moment.
Somewhere amid this turbulence Coalface disappears from view and Paragon, damned near invincible biodynamic gold force field glowing, staggers away from us with about five Titans trying to pin him down. Tessa and I are back-to-back as she kicks and karate chops and basically forgets her training as the lone female Titan I’ve seen clutches her by the hair in an utter bitch move and tries swinging her around until I put my powered-up fist through her jaw, the smell of burnt hair my only reward as Tessa yowls and the back of my costume tears away from me as I evade another two Titans’ grasps.
“Let’s go!” I bawl.
“What about them?” Tessa yells back, probably meaning the Capitol civilians, the very same who’ve now either fled, disappeared from view, or been buried alive like human detritus amid our struggle.
My answer is a growl as I wrap my arms around Tessa and do the crouch thing, taking out a corner of the missing roof as we rocket skywards and clear of the immediate red-and-gold throng.
Impossibly, the Wallachian Fortress still hovers above us.
Up close, Tessa’s sooty, tear-stricken face blazes with hope amid the terror as the chance for our escape is confirmed and I bite my lip, hoping against hope this isn’t one of those to good-to-be-true deals.
Which of course it is.
LIKE A VISION of burning Olympus, I realise there’s something wrong with this picture at about the same moment a telepathic scream cuts through the ether with the sound of Manticore suddenly discovering a greater range to his psionic abilities, spurred on by his agony at the metaphoric point of a sword.
Tessa and I hove toward the open drawbridge, flashes and flares going off inside to confirm the New Sentinels’ flying headquarters has been invaded.
I barely slow upon entry, hyper-acute senses taking in Mastodon wrestling with two Titans, a costumed hero I don’t even recognise kneeling nearby as he tries to stop the blood pumping from his torn-off arm, Chamber opening up with rapid flashes of his chest beam across the way, Silhouette just a black flicker as she ducks and dodges through a vanguard of attackers I scatter like skittles as I crash land in my arrival.
The moment I am up, one of the Titans grabs me and I clutch his wrist and twist it, about to actually get somewhere before I am smothered from behind by hands grasping me until there’s an electrical flash and they fall away, my view unimpeded by my daughter with both hands outstretched and the wide-eyed look of a first-time murderess on her face, though a quick glance tells me nothing so useful has been achieved.
I blast one of the guys holding onto the ‘Don and the other one takes a sickening elbow strike in the face before he is picked up and bodily hurled out the drawbridge gate. Breathing heavily, Mastodon turns cumbersomely about.
“Where are the others?” I yell at him.
“Inside,” he answers and stops to vomit what appears to be huge clots of internal haemorrhaging. The ‘Don points, clicking his fingers, distracted like he’s just an average drunken office worker emptying his guts into a gutter instead of perhaps a mortally stricken mask. “Inside. They’re everywhere.”
“Get us out of here!” I yell, hoping the effort as well as the psychic acoustics of the fortress will ken to my meaning as I tear down the closest white-panelled corridor and immediately come on two Titans basically fist-fucking Manticore, his handsome face a jellied mess.
I grab the first Titan and smash him face-first into the nearest wall, but the second one is onto me just as fast and I go down on my back, him doing the reverse cowboy and leaving me to clutch his red cape and strangle him with it, victim to the same poor design that made me ditch my red-and-white lycra get-up more than ten years back.
I get free in time to take several kicks to the face, then manage to catch the offending boot and channel my weakening energy supply into the dude, a hand still full of the other guy’s costume, pulling him back off Manticore and slowly wrestling my arms around his neck by main force alone, pressing down, a lot like suffocating a panther with a pillow as I force the Titan’s face down into the floor. I’m about to deliver the coup de grace when a heat beam comes out of nowhere and knocks me twenty yards back, twisting and flopping like the proverbial fish out of water as I glimpse the corridor literally choked with clone Titans coming in the other direction.
I break and run.
“Windsong!” I yell, again hoping against hope my words or at least the perlocutionary effect of them will carry to my daughter who I’ve unwittingly abandoned.
The corridors of the Wallachian Fortress unfold around me like the petals of some vast white flower of confusing biology, so much so that within moments it is just me half-running, half-scooting across the polished floor with nothing in my ear except the sound of my own labouring breathing and quite a few f-words.
I stop. The wall in front of me sphincters open to reveal a trio of Wallachian monks standing about a riot of crystalline rods emerging at different angles from a nest of otherworldly technology I can only guess is the heart of the fortress, the so-called ideational drive.
The trio turn and silently regard me, egg-bald, ancient-looking vultures, one with apparent cracks like of a desert creek-bed. The lead one tilts his head slightly and for the first time I’m truly confronted by the alien nature of our weird chaperones.
I gesture to the crystal controls. “That’s a bit low budget sci fi, isn’t it?”
“The ideational drive is however you perceive it to be,” the monk not so much says as thinks at me.
My breathing slows as I experience a moment of lucid clarity, thoughts of the chaos and death and destruction I’ve left behind – even my daughter’s peril – brushed aside.
“Why do you do this?” I ask. “Who are you?”
“We serve the Design,” the monk replies matter-of-fact.
“What Design?”
“That of the cosmos.”
“Na,” I answer him like a disbelieving drunk at a quiz night. “You’re talking some predetermination hokum? No way. It’s way more complex than that.”
“You are correct, as ever, Antichrist,” the monk replies. “The universal paradox is pregnant with its contrary.”
“Don’t call me that,” I mutter.
The monks bow their heads in assent. I ask the only question that really matters.
“You’re on our side?”
“We serve the Design, of which your people are a concentric component.”
I nod, not really getting anything other than the basic gist, which proves enough.
“Then do what you have to to protect them,” I say. “Expel the invaders and take my people to safety and keep them safe, until they are ready to return.”
The monks bow their heads. The lead one asks, “And you, Antichrist?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“It is a designation, not a literal truth,” the monk says, patient, waiting.
I can’t help my expression being truculent at that moment, juggling exhaustion with relief as I nod, raised hand hovering before me a signifier of my own surrender to the unknown.
“Drop me off somewhere away from here, then get gone,” I say.
The monks nod and the room closes down, shrinking in on me like a slow motion nightmare, a white dream, the feeling of space-time being voided from the bowels of the vast Wallachian enterprise as unnerving as it is an affirmation of our survival.
Zephyr 14.5 “The Perlocutionary Effect” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose
