Zem Zips

Zem zipped, exultant, through Las Vegas. He laughed out loud as he went, driving off the rain and making it scatter.

It would be hard to say just how he traveled. He felt as light as he had ten months earlier when he walked through McCarren International Airport, arriving in town after all the millennia alone and in darkness.

But this time, he wasn’t walking.

He wasn’t flying, either, as he’d done in the jet coming here, or as a bird more times than he could count in earlier years (Leda, for one, had never again looked a swan straight in the eye again,.) And he wasn’t riding in a cab driven by a talkative driver, or past all the hordes of tourists on the Strip in Magnolia’s hot and sticky limo.

He was... going. He swung among the elements. He burst through the rain as if it were a bead curtain, and left it swinging and tangling its strands into knots as he passed. He crushed a path in the desert air, soaking up the sluicing rain as greedily as a sponge left over from whichever aeon had seen this desert valley filled with an inland sea. The dark made way for him, and the jiggling neon and chaser light waves broke apart to go around. The night bowed submissively out of his way and he laughed at it, reveling in his own aggression.

He laughed.

This was worthy existence. Human beings had no clue.

A hero. He’d come out here to find a hero, someone gullible enough to jump at the chance to serve him, but also strong and able enough to be useful. It wasn’t just about finding Venus, as he’d screamed at Magnolia. That was only the beginning.

Champions had been so easy, in the old days. They practically lined up, begged for opportunities to risk their lives. You couldn’t help but have an army of heroes attending you, if you were a god in ancient times. But now... He sighed. A tiny crackle of light escaped and shot like a spent ember across the sidewalk into an ornamental fountain and sizzled there. The water from the fountain splashed and played with itself, too stupid to know it wasn’t the main attraction while this storm was on.

Zem turned, and raindrops sprayed away from him. They bounced off him, leaping out in all directions. Obedient minions, raindrops. He smiled. He prepared to go again. But which way? Where should he begin the hunt—

He paused. He squinted, more or less. He saw, far down the Strip to the south, another figure sluicing rain. Not a human. A ghostly shape, only given substance by the water sheeting through the air. An absence, so to speak, within the elements.

He stared harder. He might as well give the figure a try. Who knew what he might find, on the one rainy night of the year in Las Vegas, as the Age of Humanity wound down? History was in the making. Maybe this meeting would be historic.

He went with increasing speed.

NEXT POST: STRANGE BEDFELLOWS #1 (Monday 1/18)