DEEPER IN THE abyss that is the dimensional travellers’ old lair, Titan shows me the abandoned control room in which the Prime briefed his hand-picked elite on their strategy for taking overAmericaand later the world.

Feeling every inch the reject he appears to be, the big guy stands in the door of the sewage-stinking bunker, moving aside to let me enter, my eyes drinking in the diagrams and maps drawn directly upon the cinderblock with pieces of broken charcoal that litter the floor from another time when the city’s homeless used the place for sleepovers.

I look back to express my surprise and gratitude to Titan only to see he’s gone.

And at once I realise the clock is ticking.

“Holy shit,” I mutter, turning back to the expose writ upon the walls. “I guess here’s the time where it’s good to have a team around you, just slink to the back of the room and let the smart guys figure out what the fuck to do.”

Naming the devil, however, doesn’t make him appear. The etchings remain as cryptic as they first appeared and after long minutes spent poring over each fine detail, I am only marginally further along in my understanding of what the Prime intended. Things aren’t helped by the more than conveniently liberal use of Latin in some of the sketches. Still none the wiser, I dig the Enercom phone from my waistband and do what every person under pressure has done before me.

I phone a friend.

Do not ask me how I retain Dr Prendergast’s number, but thank to fuck the crazy mad scientist answers on the second ring, breathless tone like that old Upright Citizens’ Brigade skit about the dude with more cell phones than friends.

“Yo, Dr Frankenstein, it’s Zephyr. I have a problem.”

“It sounds like we all have a problem, Zephyr. What can I do for you?”

“Thanks for being chipper,” I tell him. “How’s your Latin?”

ABOUT TEN MINUTES later I understand the nuts and bolts of the Prime’s plan.

It’s not much of a plan as far as plans go, but hey, at the end of the day these are still supervillains we’re talking about, so no one should be surprised. No. But the important thing is I know where he’s gonna be and where I might have the best chance of getting my hands on this Moonstone thing.

In space.

Yep, as annoying as that’s going to be, the Prime’s big plan is once he has our country’s civil powers cowed and the public more or less adhering to his plan for he and his fellow Titans to form a new elite aristocratic ruling class in North America, he himself will retire to the international space station and prepare the next phase of his plan to a) track down and recruit even more copies of himself, and b) bring the rest of the world under his control. It didn’t really occur to me that these guys can survive extended bouts with zero oxygen and gravity, unlike myself, so therefore looking off-world was as good an option as anything else.

I’m not sure how much time my host Titan is giving me to figure out the ruse and get some plan of action underway, but even though he’s given me a chance to throw a spanner into the works, I know he’s not going to roll over and play, I dunno how he would put it, like yonder mastiff ‘pon which my foamy loins break, or some such.

“You don’t have some sort of means to get to the international space station, do you doc?” I ask into the phone.

“Well you know, ever since the disaster with my master work, I have mostly focused on the potential of certain . . . mental technologies. . . .”

“Right,” I say, unhelpful. “Thanks for your help, doc.”

I disconnect, sensitive to the noises outside, and exit the claustrophobic old control room and out into the huge work area, no sign of the cyborg Titan anywhere.

Within moments I am back in the van with Draven, who sits up looking sleepy with the night now upon us. The orangey glow of nearby security lights spill down on our alleyway as my chauffeur eyes me expectantly. I’m not sure what to tell him.

“We need to steal a space shuttle,” I say.

Draven actually grins like I’m joking, but that quickly wears off as he sees the awkward self-acknowledgement that lets him know sadly this is legit.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you there,” he says weakly.

“Yeah, I know, boss. Just drop me off somewhere downtown.”

CONTRARY TO MY earlier stated plan, I flip the phone open once I find my way through the eerily deserted streets of Van Buren and into an ensconced doorway from where I can watch the metal fire escape to my old digs. I have come to this point more by muscle memory and faded habit than because it’s any part of a useful plan, and there’s no reward for me doing so, the warehouse being as deserted as the last time I was here, and a quiet, possibly despicable part of me is glad for it. It’s not the night for trying to reconcile with Loren, nor save her from whatever prosaic hell she has fallen into. Instead, I dial the number for my daughter’s cell and listen as the signal disintegrates into a weird cacophony of blips and echoing bleeps.

I can only pray to gods I don’t believe in that Tessa is safe. I told the Wallachians to get our fugitive heroes to safety and not return until they were recovered, knowing there’s something untoward about the eldritch technology at their means, but inadvertently perhaps my orders could be interpreted as an open-ended permission to play hooky from the costume-and-capes game.

The streets are inordinately quiet, even here in the cesspool where I’d expect a variety of new fauna to thrive in the petri dish of our new rulers’ command. Power abhors a vacuum, as they say, and there’s not a cop or an Army patrol as far as the eye can see, yet the streets still glistening from a twilight shower look as peaceful as they’ve ever been. Its only the sound of distant explosions like thunder beyond the silhouette of the inner city that bemuses my conviction that somehow everyone has had the good sense to stay home and snuggle with someone important tonight, if they’re lucky enough to have one.

The non-signal means calling for back-up’s out.

Pondering this, I eye the bleakness of space invisible through the benighted pollution of the city, wondering at the man-made colossus orbiting beyond and what illusion of mastery it gives the Prime, in other words, to what degree the symbolism of his achievement drives him in the doing of it. My fist clenches – in anger at him, imagined up there upon his throne, and also frustration at how alone I am – and a single taxi cruises past and the driver crouches to scan me and sees the look on my face and frets and hits the gas and drives off and leaves me alone with my thoughts.

Zephyr 14.8 “Naming The Devil” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose