Zephyr 14.6 “Writ Large Across The Skyline”

THE MONKS LET me off on the far side of the disaster zone, but I am on my toes, aware the air is peppered with my latest nemesis writ large across the skyline.

Every bit the fugitive, I am disgorged via some spectral means behind dumpsters like one of the cut-price science fiction action heroes I once so much admired, crouched in the tatters of yet another costume, the bleak day too cold for the week before summer. The city streets resound like a pained animal, horns, breaking glass, women and children crying, alarms going off, the rumbling and thundering noise of heavy vehicles bullying their way through gridlock as I scan the crowd pulsing past the end of the alleyway like corpuscles in a blood stream or if in fact Atlantic City had become just one gigantic theatrical set to represent a human body when under attack from a particularly virulent form of cancer.

However many Titans remain in DC, there’s clearly dozens here as well. The Prime, as they call him, must’ve been a busy boy, but I’m not going to find out any more about that squatting here like a homeless dude looking for somewhere to shit. I fish out my phone as I check both ends of the alley and then the sky overhead, thumbing in the number from the scrunched piece of paper I’m thanking my lucky stars I still possess.

Draven answers on the third ring like someone who’s been anticipating my call.

“You’re not so goddamn flippant now, are you?” he shouts down the line.

“OK, OK, settle down,” I answer tiredly. “We need to meet.”

“Meet? Hey, screw you,” Draven replies. “I warned you and warned you. I’ve been trying to get through to you for the best part of a year to avoid exactly what’s happening now.”

“I’m not perfect, Eric,” I say. “I think I can accept that.”

“Big of you,” he snorts. “Where are you?”

“You remember that building where we met? You think you could meet me there?”

“These guys are everywhere,” Draven answers. “I have to wear a disguise or I’m dead.”

“I think you’re being a little paranoid. Now they’ve hatched their plan, I think they’ve got bigger fish to fry, if I’m not mixing metaphors too much.”

“I’ll take my precautions if it’s all the same to you,” Draven answers. “You don’t have much of a . . . goddamn track record, OK?”

I hang up, not much more to say than that, and contemplate the shamefully unthinkable as pedestrians continue to surge past just yards away from my hidey hole. Those who aren’t running for their lives amid the chaos into which the city’s fallen are quickly throwing themselves into looting efforts with gay abandon, and I exit the alley to hustle across and into a big menswear store where I startle a dozen youths laying into the mannequins with iron bars, clearing the store with nothing more than my eagle eye before I turn to a rack and select a black motorcycle jacket to sling over my ruined costume, then also free a natty knee-length Armani duster I throw over the ensemble to disguise myself as I move through the back of the shop and palm my domino mask and kick open the chained fire escape and step out the back furtively and away.

 

 

IN SUCH WISE I cross the city like an explorer of yesteryear, cataloguing the rare forms of life thrown up by our unique conditions: the looter, the anarchist, the small-time hood, the opportunist burglar, and the amateur rapist (I stop that guy with a single charge, my juices running low, though I have enough rage left that I then pummel him into submission to the cheers of his intended victim). I’d grab a cab, since I am laying low and avoiding flight so as not to give my cover away, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself, skulking like a pederast myself as I move closer and closer to my appointed rendezvous.

Eric Draven is already waiting for me when I finally get to the top, my heavy breathing a mix of fatigue and chewing on a half-dozen lukewarm hot dogs I scooped from an abandoned cart in the street down below. I need the energy, but it doesn’t stop Draven eyeing me like a boss with a thieving employee caught red-handed. For the record, I don’t even bother remonstrating with the doofus as I take up a perch amid the guano and empty drug phials on the shit-coloured rooftop.

“They’re telling the Army and the police to set their weapons aside and there will be roles for them in their new regime,” Draven says, downcast suddenly, bluster and anger gone as I glimpse for the first time the weird residual guilt that comes from him knowing that somehow, somewhere, this disaster stems from something lurking within his DNA more than anything else in the whole crappy scheme of things.

I can sympathise. I offer him a sausage, but he scowls and moves away, frustrated, taking off his glasses for the second time and wiping them and revealing the chiselled profile I have come to dislike so much in recent hours.

“That’s their plan? Some kind of New World Order?” I ask.

“I’m not privy,” Draven shrugs.

“They don’t think the UK, our other allies, they aren’t going to have something to say about this?” I ask.

“You think they will?”

His question gives me pause. Admittedly our brother and sister countries across the globe will care mightily about what’s transpired in the past twenty-four, and not just because of the global shit storm for finance markets, but whether they have power to do anything about it is another question. I can’t fathom these alien interlopers’ thoughts, but it is one thing to have vast armies, fighter planes, nuclear submarines and indeed a nuclear arsenal at your disposal, and quite another to be able to use it with any sort of precision in dealing with what’s otherwise a rebellion from within.

I shake my head and sigh, fancying a cigarette for a moment, but without much conviction. Instead, I move a little closer to the guy at the heart of all this.

“You said, before, they had a hideout?”

“A hideout?” he replies, scornful. “This isn’t your little game of villains and vigilantes any more, Zephyr.”

“You know, the way you talk to me, it’s hard to believe you were once my biggest fan.”

Draven pulls up. “I wasn’t a fan. I –”

“You sure used to hang out trying to get my attention.”

“I wasn’t –”

“Nightclubs and shit?”

“Zephyr, listen to me, you pompous ass, this is serious.”

“I’m only fucking with your head. Relax. Tell me about the old warehouse.”

Draven gives me a long look, then slowly releases his pent up sigh and nods, knowing he’s shit out of any other real choices.

 

 

IN THE INTERESTS of stealth, we help ourselves to a delivery van left with the motor running in the street below, the back looted for the stale loaves of bread once on their way to homeless shelters across Jackson and Grant. It isn’t easy going, driving through congestion with every other motorist convinced its Ragnarok, the sky falling in, but after me getting out to push a few obstacles clear and a pretty one-sided run-in with a group of young toughs who set up their own private enterprise at one particular choke point, we get clear and then it’s just Eric driving and me shooting looks out and up my window as the occasional Titan appears and disappears in the distance. We’re camouflaged among the little people, just ants to these young gods, and for now that suits me fine.

“Tell me about the Prime,” I say, voice more like someone who needs the words to keep him awake than a vital source of intelligence from the one guy who might actually know something useful, whether he knows it or not.

“What’s to say? He’s the one who kicked this whole thing off.”

“You said he had some kind of device?”

“Yeah,” Draven says. “Don’t you have any teammates or . . . friends or something?”

“We got our asses handed to us in DC, bub,” I tell him. “They’re . . . regrouping.”

“Hiding.”

“Laying low,” I concede. “At my instruction. We’ll call for back up when we need it.”

Draven gives an ill-tempered laugh as I reiterate my question about the device.

“You said something about . . . ancient Aborigine tech . . . or something?”

“That’s what he said. A Dreamtime device.”

“Any idea how it works?”

“Nope.”

“Any idea how to trigger it?”

“Nope.”

“Fuck. Any idea how to . . . track him or identify him out of all the others?”

Draven goes to answer in the negative again, but he checks himself, frowning, the look I recognise from my own mirror musings, searching the residual memory for a glimmer or something forgotten but meaningful: usually me trying to remember where I left my keys from the night before and wishing I could call them like I do my phone.

“There might be a way, actually,” Draven says and we slow, taking a corner as a crowd of people watch what look like children fighting. I crane my neck as we pass, but I’m not intervening for anything short of life and death right now.

“Go on,” I prompt him.

“They call him the Prime. You notice many wear that gold headband thing.”

“A phylactery,” I say as much for my own amusement as Eric’s erudition.

“I think you mean diadem,” Draven replies. “A phylactery’s more like an amulet or bracelet or something, isn’t it?”

“No, that’s a periapt,” I say.

“OK, but that’s something else as well,” Draven grudgingly says.

“You were about to say something useful,” I say. “Please do.”

“He wears a different headband,” Draven says. “There’s variation between the costumes depending on the parallel universe they’ve come from, but the others, they’re just wearing circlets, those who wear one at all. I’ve never seen one like his. The Prime’s has a T on it, right smack in the middle.”

“You know I actually got hopeful there for a moment,” I say.

Draven chuckles low despite himself. The van pulls into a disused lot. We’re down near the crumbling waterfront, some of the worst vacants still unreclaimed from the Kirlian years, a real badlands I’ve had more than one occasion to patrol over the years. He points to focus my attention on a stained, gunmetal blue factory weeping bird shit and acid rain from its hundreds of empty windows. Some kind of ancient rusting crane throws its shadow across it, lengthening in time with the setting sun. The whole area smells of wet rats, so I am not exactly filled with glee at the prospect of what I might find therein.

“They took you here?” I ask.

“Once, yeah,” Draven says.

I nod, peeling out of my trench coat as I exit the idling van. I pass it back to him and Draven gives the same awkward embarrassed reassuring look the others gave me before I ventured into the inferno.

Disgusted at the universe at large, I slam the van door shut behind me and stride towards the chain-link fence that sags like a penitent before Golgotha.

Zephyr 14.6 “Writ Large Across The Skyline” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose