SO I’M BACK to square one.

Outside Twilight’s digs the Atlantic breeze picks up and I find myself all solitary and brooding and shit as the gulls ease out overhead, hanging over me like weird Chinese lanterns or Halloween decorations or more like some cosmic child’s mobile that is meant to pacify me as I cogitate on this latest mess of mine, alone in a thankless universe without even the sympathy of Twilight’s hard-bitten security minders as they swap anecdotes and cigarette smoke sotto voce and eye me nervelessly, waiting for me to get the hell out of there and leave them to their empty intertextual gangsterism, the sky glowering with lambent rainfall I have little urge to push aside as I angle back, twisting to look along the distant blinking coast and the road back to the seaboard-sprawling city that is my prison as much as my home and I fear will one day become my tomb.

With a begrudging little wave I spring into the air and in moments am going flat-strap across the ocean again, the whole Moses-and-the-Red-Sea thing as I hit hyperflight and suck a few gulls or maybe they are cormorants into my wake, me grinning gleefully like the killjoy I am, a petty revenge for their years of mocking cries as I scud across the wavelets, buzz a trawler ignorant of the chaos among their landlubber kin, then wing west and cross the urban sprawl to the north of what used to be Rhode Island until it was consumed by the reclamation sprawl of a revitalised post-1984 Atlantic City.

Believe me, I’m conscious of my predicament and aware that with the city, if not the country under siege, my very appearance in the flight path is a risk, but it’s hard to think however many score Titans there are trying to throw their net over Atlantic City that there’s enough of them to keep track on a pesky minnow like me.

As often appears to be the case, I’m dead wrong.

I PICK UP my bogey near Montauk, something burning there tempting me in for a closer look until I see it is a deep sea liner crashed and aflame on the shore, a spawn of communication antennae quivering as fire consumes the ocean-goer’s carapace, no emergency crews in sight, but also no one in obvious danger, just this weird juxtaposition of land and sea, the ship burning merrily, the air sooty with fluorocarbons, ghost-lit, haunted-looking bystanders further down the beach filming the scene with iPhones and camcorders.

The Titan drops out of the cloud cover and, frowning to myself, I hit the accelerator hoping I might be able to ditch him as I weave through the smog and break the sound barrier and barely notice the second Titan coming on a vector from overland.

He crosses me like an aerial hockey check, an elbow and knee slamming across me and sending me spinning at about eight-hundred miles per hour, a whirling disorientation that nearly has me blacking out as I clutch my jaw and reassure myself it’s not broken as I tumble to the ground below and pull out of the fatal dive a hundred feet above the wood-shingled roofs of the old holiday homes along the sea shore, more civilians out in the balmy summer’s evening gawping in wonder as I correct course, avoid taking out a picturesque small coastal holiday town church steeple, and throw a stream of lightning blind in my wake like a fighter pilot throwing flares to put off heatseeking missiles.

Red eyebeams track my wake, but I am a fucking ballerina here, cavorting, twisting, thinking not again as the lasers cut through a parked car that promptly explodes in a chorus of alarms, power lines that crash down spewing sparks, civilians running from a corner store carrying packaged liquor, obviously the end of the world not occasion enough to refrain from the demon drink as the twin Titans follow, razing suburbia in my wake as I crash against a metal fence, pick myself up and hurl myself with abandon back into the sky in a desperate bid to get away from the built-up neighbourhood, a feeling like night descending in the middle of the day, my arcing into the sky like a comet reversed. The terrible twos follow, not realising I could pour on speed – speed, admittedly, I fear they can match – to get away, and instead I head across the water, playing possum, shooting anxious looks back that hopefully look even more theatrical than I intend them, me the lure, them the prey.

Before I can spring any ruse, theoretical or otherwise, a third Titan comes hurtling in a nimbus of energy across the darkening city and I realise these motherfuckers have been herding me like the cat I am. I turn tail once more, dosing the closest Titan good and proper. He drops from the sky and his little gal pal takes off after him to save him from the fall. For a moment at least it’s just me and the new arrival, a blue tint to his costume I ain’t seen before, not that I care. There’s a seedy grin on the interloper’s face that makes me think he’s gonna try to fuck me if he gets me down, so as if I need any more motivation, I whip about breakneck fast and my left crosses his face and sends him flipping away, though I am too hopeful to think that might be that.

The other two Titans emerge from below, the one I zapped with a dark look I meet with a fuck-you grin. Hovering, I throw my hands wide, a Vaudeville moment as electricity courses between my fingers.

A noise, a harsh bellowing, builds off to the right for just a second. My smile vanishes, but not as fast as the others’ as a dark figure smashes through our formation, taking out the saviour Titan before zooming back around to reveal my old nemesis Negator in full regalia, the face mask covering his rigid leer, the corners of the eye-mask rising up like some perverse crown either side of his brows, a signifier of demonic horns, the imperious scowl I have seen so many other times, but which I now see turned on these red-and-gold fools.

“Thought you could do with a hand, Zephyr,” Negator says.

“No shit?”

Negator doesn’t have time to answer. The blue-tinted Titan busts a move which I know he’s about to regret. Negator can be one deadly motherfucker. His powers almost left him no option but villainy. Here, they are the perfect expression of our biosphere’s rejection of these otherworldly intruders. A dazzling electric blue glow erupts from Negator’s clasped-together fists and cuts right through the Titan’s chest, disintegrating the bulk of his torso and leaving just arms and legs to rain down on the uncaring ocean below.

The Titan’s comrades freak. My own grin is as wretched as theirs, though I embrace it, pure triumphalism that perhaps saves at least one of them from a fated death as I swing in, executing powerful short body blows up and down the one I zapped’s torso, him blocking a couple of strikes, but too befuddled or otherwise fucked up to fend off clubbing blows to his face and ribs. Although we’re hovering hundreds of yards above the pulverising sea, I abort my rain of terror to clutch him bodily, putting my boots in his chest before I let go, propelling him away.

The Titan takes off, not even a final backward glance for the clone who saved him moments ago. I look across to see the remaining Titan caught in a headlock, Negator fiercely grinning, eyes finding mine in the overcast conditions, the glow of the city far away and below like a Faerie realm from up here.

“What do you say, Zephyr? Arrest him?”

“There’s no prison for these motherfuckers,” I say.

Negator nods. The spectral blue energy washes around him and the trapped Titan screams giddily, honest-to-god boots kicking in panic as his upper body vaporises, the rest falling like a desiccated husk into the dark churning nothingness below.

My own words about prison pluck over my cerebral cortex, but I file those inklings for now as Negator brushes charcoal molecules from the black spandex of his arms, long gloves somehow immune to his own destructive powers.

“Thanks for the assist,” I say. “But I had this.”

“Sure you did,” Negator says after the slightest hesitation, his chance to play the asshole, unlike mine, lost to the moment. “I wanted to help.”

I nod. “And I’m glad you did.”

Zephyr 14.10 “Killjoy” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose