THANKFULLY TESSA AT least understands my predicament and after a chance to grab my meagre things and catch up a little more and eat another meal at the Wallachians’ expense, I manage to get the castle to materialise on the outskirts of old Buffalo.

The crime-riddled slum of Adams is no different than when I visited last, except the turning season has blanched the crumbling edifices of urban neglect, roads quite literally choked with garbage, broken bricks, fallen telephone poles, twisted street signs, bottles, crushed concrete blocks, the waste to a degree that it’s difficult to posit this is still America as the half-empty buildings scowl down on me, a leatherine intruder, a will-o-the-wisp in their ghetto. It feels like snow is falling or should be falling, but its not. A fine grit floats in the air, smoky from the ruined buildings. And as the Wallachian Fortress vanishes into memory, I feel eyes hidden in the rubble track over me with all the warm comfort of a laser sight.

I growl, low in my chest, pulling the leather jacket tight to my front as I storm across the broken lot to where three battered but souped-up looking vehicles are crookedly parked like extras from The Road Warrior. Music – a curious and entirely unpleasant mash-up of gangsta rap and German industrial they call rapecore – oozes across the otherwise lifeless plaza from the low buttressed grilles erected over the sunken pock-marked concrete shop fronts and units the local gang has taken as their own, layers upon layers of clan tags scrawled in paint over the walls testament to the years in which these parasites have been making life a presumable living hell for those around them.

Like all good gang hideouts, the front door is three inch-thick metal and festooned with cameras. I wave my hand like a magician, electromagnetic signature erasing anything that might be recorded at the same time as I neuter the electronics themselves. One good kick and the door buckles in, flying off its hinges as fast as aHong Kongstunt double. It takes out the big slobbery fat guy just rising from his camp chair behind and to one side of the door, the Uzi in his lap disappearing into the shadows with the scuttling rats as I duck low and step through into the paint-scrawled hallway, one guttering light bulb nude in its socket overhead throwing a disarmingly theatrical strobe over my sudden violence as I veer left, two young dudes in a mix of sports and paramilitary gear leaping up to draw their sidearms as I growl again and dose them good and proper with hot current. My right hand comes up as a bigger version of the first two bangers barrels into the room from an internal doorway, street-sweeper shotgun coming into play, but he eats another long discharge and goes down, clattering, face catching the back of a chair identical to the one from my cell in the Wallachian castle.

Perhaps I didn’t use enough charge on one of the first two guys because he manages to sit up, spluttering, reclining in a pool of his own urine as he stares up at me open-mouthed, voice shrill as he yells, “Z-Zephyr? But you’re meant to be a superhero!”

“I am a fucking superhero,” I snarl back and kneel just enough so that I am not in the guy’s piss, slamming my fist under his jaw to hurl him across the room and smashing into a crappy-looking bookcase full of jewel cases that crash down on him. He doesn’t say anything after that and I stand, chest heaving as I realise the far reaching enormity of the anger I yet again feel welling deep within my soul.

Just randomly I start overturning the furniture, a series of DVD-copying personal computers crashing in the tumult as I literally try to oust these human cockroaches from wherever their hiding.

The staggering impact of automatic gunfire in the middle of my back tells me I’ve had success. Without even looking I throw off a wave of electrical force, less a blast than an expressed billowing of magnetised current that engulfs the frighteningly young guy with the Belgian sub-machinegun aimed at me, giving him the St Vitus Dance before he falls amid his friends and defecates loudly. I lope over, snatching the gun from his grasp and snapping it in half on the second try, hurling the pieces against the fractured reinforced glass windows abutting the shuttered grilles, mindful of other predators circling my location.

I find the next one in the hallway off the back door. The guy is lurking there with a cut-down shotgun I catch in one hand, forcing it into the wall beside him even as it goes off, backhanding him with little more force than a wet fish, just wanting him to feel the indignity of my attack instead of passing out straight away like the others. But it’s too much for me. What repose I might’ve felt evaporates like rain water in a heatwave as the gangsta looks up with his bloody teeth and his hey-what’d-I-do look. I punch him hard in the face till something snaps, then realise I am still keeping him upright with the shotgun handle under the crook of his arm, so I drop both, stepping over him like the dog shit that he is as I enter the back room, more daylight streaming in through big empty broken windows that exit onto an internal courtyard in the housing complex now a ghost tower thanks to these clowns.

“Why are you targeting us?” a young Latino kid with a duster jacket and a Colt Python asks me, caught in the act of resistance and going to water straight away.

“The people here are doing it tough enough without insects like you coming and sucking the life out of them,” I say in a response barely audible through my clenched teeth. “Been through here last time with my head in my ass, thought I was doing something more important. Realise there’s nothing more important than this. Making a difference.”

The kid tosses the gun on the floor. Puts up his hands. Backs away to the doorless doorway. Clearly preparing to run. I just watch him doing it, something burning out in me. I stand over what passes for a kitchen table in the slum, a sports bag with $20 bags of heroin in the middle along with what you’d call a riot of medication if they were pills, but instead its bullets of all make and calibre all over the table top I overturn after just a moment’s quiet contemplation.

The guy crouched behind the table leaps up, trying to swing his Uzi into my chest. I slap it from his grip. Grab him by the shirt-front. Lift my fist as he freezes up. Drive my knee into his gut instead. He goes down and I up-end the sports bag onto him, shaking the bag like emptying trash.

“I’m coming back and next time I’m not going to be in a good mood like today,” I tell him. “Don’t be here when I do. Move on.”

The guy scurries away with cartoon stink lines emanating from his ass, leaving me with just the sound of the groaning wind as it date-rapes the derelict premises amid the sound of distant sirens, the lonely cry of what I first think is a child and then come to recognise as the noise of cats mating in the trash-strewn rear court of the ghetto building. Like probing a tooth with my tongue, I stop for a moment, drug lab kitchen for all intents and purposes my own private cathedral as I contemplate the rage within, wondering if there’s any left.

Oh yes.

FAIR TO SAY I am more than adequately able to cool off by the time I land on Twilight’s island, but the truth is I just don’t want to. Call it hubris or madness or hell, petulance for all I care. I want to express my anger. I want the world and those who’ve angered me to know and understand.

Brave souls that they are, Twilight’s security detail drop back at my approach. I guess in their defence they can say I’ve been here before and not tried to tear their boss a new asshole on every visit, so fair enough they give me a free pass this time. When I kick in the side door and start bellowing like a heartbroken Tony Danza in Rocky, they really should come running with their weapons drawn, but instead remain curiously absent as I stride in through the billiards room and into Twilight’s library, probing every corner and recess like I have heat beams of my own, no sign of the big guy; instead a cute, dark-skinned maid or perhaps she’s just another trollop in a costume hightailing it out of there as I clear the main entrance, the huge showy lobby, the self-aggrandizing wopdom of it all, me vaulting up the marble staircase to the upper landing like a guy who can’t fly, Twilight’s name again and again coming from my lips.

“Hell’s bells, Zephyr. Keep it down.”

Athwart the landing now, I turn to see the big lug himself emerge tousle-haired from one of the doorways at the far end.

“It’s 2pm,” I say, almost as surprised as Twilight that I know the time.

“That your excuse for kicking my door in, or was that breaking glass related to something else on my personal property?”

“Hey, fuck you and your personal property. What’s this?” I say and throw my open palm at him, for all the world sounding like Twilight’s dead mother or something, scolding him for yet another way-late start.

“I don’t think you get to lecture me about healthy livin’, Zeph. You should get going.”

“I came to you for help,” I say. Plaintive. “We were overrun. Dire straits. And you were banging hoes. What’s up with that? I know I’m bad, Twilight, but when are you going to . . . grow the fuck up?”

“Are you serious?”

I stop. Ease out my tightly-held breath. Contemplate what he’s saying when he says that to me, reflecting me back in the mirror of my conscience.

“Fuck.”

“You owe me a new door.”

I sit down on the top step.

“C’mon,” Twilight says and walks over, slapping me on the shoulder. “Let’s try and get you drunk.”

Zephyr 15.3 “The Turning Season” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose