The New Hero Volume 2

by ed. Robin D. Laws

  He bangs on the door. After some scuffling around noises from inside, the peephole slides open.

  “What you want, Cripple?”

  “Need to see Longthought.”

  “Everybody needs to see Longthought.”

  “Just let me talk to him, please.”

  “Go away before you attract something.”

  “I brought stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “You don’t do the negotiating.”

  The guardkeep cogitates. “I’ll go get Laws,” he finally says.

  Cripple waits.

  The slot reopens. A squint through cloudy prescription lenses.

  “What kind of stuff?” Cripple recognizes the voice. It’s Laws. Before you talk to Longthought, you have to talk to Laws. He’s as old as Cripple, maybe older. Unlike Cripple he has a gift that justifies his upkeep and protection. To render himself doubly indispensable, he’s wormed his way into an unofficial post as Longthought’s intermediary.

  “Good stuff. Cans.”

  “More specific.”

  “Six cans refried beans. They’re low-fat, but they’re refried beans.”

  “Name brand or off-brand?”

  “Name brand. Let me in and we’ll talk.”

  The door clanks open. Guardkeeps step out with sweeping crossbows. One of them, pointedly, pointed at him.

  Cripple ignores the slight. Hobbles quickly in. He fishes into the frayed pockets of his long wool overcoat. Pulls out the promised stuff.

  Laws examines it, struggling to place them in the right focal length for reading. Like anyone who relies on glasses, he hasn’t had a new prescription since the collapse. He feels the cans for dents.

  He’s gray-haired and shaggy. A scraggly van Dyke surrounds his lips and chin. His eyes are brown, his eyebrows thick and dark and untended. A colorful Hawaiian-style shirt hangs on malnourished shoulders. It’s faded and discolored and threadbare. Old-fashioned Japanese courtesans, drawn in woodblock print style, repeat across the surface of the shirt.

  “So what do you want with Longthought now?”

  “Six cans does not buy me in?”

  “It buys you in to talk to me. Selling me gets you in.”

  “If Longthought could just hear me out, he’d agree.”

  “So sell me and you’ll get your shot.”

  Cripple sells him. Laws nods his head. His Before name is the same as his After name, or so Cripple has heard. He gets to keep it, because it’s a metonym. Cripple still remembers words like metonym.

  Laws leads Cripple down aisles formed by denuded shelving units. They once held lures, boots, flotation vests, boat covers, GPS devices, seats and steering wheels for all-terrain vehicles. He takes Cripple into a storeroom. The smell of sweat and breath tells Cripple that this is where the people of the community live. He thinks he smells bacon and tries not to look desperate.

  Two rangy women, skin leathered by sun, wind and barthesdrift, block their path. The taller, younger, dark-haired one is North, which is short for Magnetic North. The diminutive, older, artificially copper-maned one is Detector.

  Cripple has dealt with them before. He creeps behind Laws.

  North strikes a demanding hip-cocked pose. “Who let him in here?”

  Laws pulls a face. They aren’t the boss of him. “What’s your real question?” He tosses Detector the first of the cans. When her arms are full he offloads the rest on North.

  “He’s not staying,” Detector says.

  “Who said he was?” Laws huffs. Making an impatient show of his patience.

  “Well then,” says North. “Good.”

  They step aside. Laws steers Cripple away from the encampment, down a warren of cardboard boxes. The two plot a circuitous route through the aisles. Like they’re afraid Cripple will watch and remember where the community stores its food.

  “Don’t tell him you paid,” Laws warns.

  “I won’t.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Promise,” says Cripple.

  Laws takes him into an anteroom. Longthought strikes a fencing stance, a wooden sword outstretched. Practicing against an invisible opponent. He wears a ragged karate keikogi stitched from low-thread count bedsheets.

  Everybody says he’s seven feet tall but that’s two to three inches worth of exaggeration. His mutations are highly advanced. Physically Longthought is leaving humanity behind. His skin is rubbery and lemon-rind yellow. A dome of hard cartilage covers the top of his head; its lower edge forms a thick, uniform brow that runs all the way around. His unblinking eyes are four or five inches across. Thick muscles fight each other for space beneath his hide. Imagine an elephant’s foot, cloven in two—that’s what he has on the end of his legs. And of course there’s no mouth in his face. Up close you can see the tiny screen of perforated skin above his chin. But Cripple isn’t that close.

  “Cripple has a sob for you,” says Laws.

  Longthought puts down the wood sword and stands facing Cripple. He isn’t sitting down or anything but even so sinks into a posture of total relaxation.

  Without further pleasantries Laws turns his back and leaves.

  “It’s Smoky,” says Cripple. “My dog. Someone’s got him. It might be the vicks but I’m afraid it’s Dogmeat Drew. Smoky saved my life a bunch of times. Kept watch over me when I slept. Protected me and my stuff. But more important, he was a friend to me. I don’t mind being out there. Or rather, I can understand why that has to be. Why the community figures I can’t pull my overhead. Fine, that’s it, this is the post-world. The companionship of that one creature, who asked nothing from me but a few scraps, kept and keeps me going. I understand reality. I realize permanent harm might have already come to him. But I got to do all I can to rescue him, if he can be rescued. And all I can is coming to you, Longthought. You probably don’t think it’s worth the bother, saving animals, when you can’t even save all the people. It sounds selfish and corny and soft in the head for me to ask. But I got to ask.

  “He looks like a German shepherd except for the coloration, which is gray, like you’d guess from the name. He has green eyes and you can also recognize him from his greeting bark. It’s this yip, like this.” Cripple imitates the bark. “Smoky has a way about him, he can tell the good people from the predators. When he sees you, you’ll get the friendly bark, you can be sure of that.

  “I woke up as they took him in the night. I saw legs, in jeans and sneaks. They were grabbing him up. Putting something over his muzzle—chloroform I’m thinking. There must be places you can still find chloroform. Then they coshed me. When I came to it was daylight. Of course they took all the stuff at my campsite. And of course I have backup caches where I could go to and reclothe and get the—anyway, that’s neither here nor there.

  “I owe him this much, to come here and tell you this, and hope you’ll help.”

  Longthought communicates, as he does, in units of emotional impulse. Signs and signifiers ripple out through barely perceptible shifts of posture and via pheromonal emission. He sends this to Cripple: sympathy, comfort, affirmation. Resolve.

  The towering lemon-skinned man waves for Cripple to follow him. Longthought stops to grab a brown suede duster from an off-kilter chrome coat-rack. Hanging under the coat is a leather belt, to which a pair of scabbards are attached. Longthought buckles this around his waist. From the scabbards jut the curved hilts of Japanese-style short swords. Wakizashi they call them.

  Thus equipped, he goes to Laws’ cubby-hole. The old man sits inches from a flatscreen monitor, typing into his keyboard.

  The Internet doesn’t exist anymore. All servers down. Nothing to power them. The parts purloined and repurposed. Or simply trashed. Yet this is the old writer’s gift: he can still access it. Fitfully, unreliably, but for him it’s there. If he fucking swears at it enough.

  “Unsurprising,” he mutters, when he sees Cripple standing there.

  Laws attaches a wind-up juicepack to the printer. Its cartridg
e filled with a mixture of soot, egg yolk and screech, it rattles up a floor plan. He hands it to Longthought, who studies it.

  “We don’t know where Dogmeat Drew is at, so I’m thinking you wanna start with the vicks,” Laws says. “Everybody knows where they hang out. This floorplan is my guestimate based on the Google Street View of their hideout. Your basic industrial park business unit layout.”

  The area around the mall is filthy with industrial parks.

  “Before,” Laws goes on, “it was a wine agency. There were other adjacent companies, too, but I can’t make out their awnings. Cripple, you think you can see any better?”

  “I don’t see anything on your screen at all,” says Cripple. “In fact I don’t believe your computer’s turned on.”

  “Bullshit,” says Laws.

  Longthought folds up the map and places it in his pocket. As Laws does not need to explain, the image from the Internet won’t take into account reconfigurations that post-date the collapse, whether mundane or from the S-winds. It’s a start, anyway.

  Laws sits impatiently as Longthought beams emotional indicators at him: compassion, fellowship, the altruism impulse. “We’re to take care of him here?”

  Longthought nods.

  “Okay, but not permanently. You get that, right? Not permanently, not without a vote of the full community.”

  Longthought departs. He heads out through the secret exit, which takes him deeper into the mall. Moving through gaps in its shattered plate glass, he steps out of a ransacked athletic shoe outlet. He eases into the food court. A pack of situations catch wind of him. They’re down by the information court, snurfling aimlessly around in search of food scraps. A couple of the bolder ones stride his way, wifebeaters tight against ripped pectorals. All threat and menace, they strut in baggy flowered beach pants.

  They get close enough to see that it’s Longthought. They throw up submissive arms. “Sorry bro,” they say. “No harm, bro.” They turn, preserving the remnants of their collective dignity, and cower behind the info kiosk.

  Longthought exits the former mall. He lopes into the winter air. Somewhere a chainsaw screams. Longthought pays it no mind. It’s not a real chainsaw. It’s an emotional echo, a dreamcatcher of latent unease. In other words, a trap.

  In front of the vick hive, pickups and vans are sloppily parked. Waxy driblets of dried greasonol leak down from their gas caps. Ferocious snarls echo from the back of a white junker SUV. Its roof bears the dents of multiple rolling incidents. Burly vicks drag sheet-metal carrier cages from the truck. Inside, heavily muscled dogs insanely leap. They buck and turn and try to bite the vicks’ gloved fingers. Flat-faced sentries lean against the archway of the HQ’s main door.

  They tense, pushing off from the brick, when they see Longthought coming. The dog handlers gingerly drop their cages. The creatures inside howl and froth.

  The doormen blast on whistles. More vicks pour from the doorways. By the time Longthought reaches them, there’s a good two dozen of them. All the same body morphology: stocky, squat, wide-shouldered. Foreheads slope back. Jaws jut out. Skin tone runs a spectrum from Yaphet Kotto to Elric. The vicks wear hand-painted football jerseys and necklaces made from shredded aluminum cans. They pose and front, brandishing mockguns carved from wood and painted black.

  Longthought approaches. He broadcasts calm, non-confrontation, inquiry.

  A vick appoints himself leader and moves to meet him. “Get out of our heads, lemon man.”

  Longthought emits more calm.

  “Turn around and go back the way you came,” says the vick leader.

  Longthought stands firm.

  “We don’t come to your hidey to fuck with you. Don’t you come to ours to fuck with us.”

  Longthought broadcasts non-fuck-withitude.

  “Your uninvited physical presence here is problem enough, lemon-rind. This is not the Before. There is no public space anymore. Every encroachment outside of your own zone is trespass. You know that.”

  Longthought settles in.

  “Don’t think that we won’t go to combat mode. Because we will, to defend our hidey and the honor of our sport. It ain’t like Before. Don’t you go judging us. These animals weren’t just bred to fight. They were made to fight. They are made of fight. Form and figure. That we celebrate their expression of their Platonic selfhood, that is no business of yours.”

  Longthought transmits an image into their minds: a vision of Smoky, plucked from Cripple’s memories.

  The leader reels back. “I told you not to do that, fucker!”

  Another of the vicks stumbles back into a dog cage. His pant leg gets caught in the latch-bolt. He ducks down in an attempt to free himself. He pulls the cage door open. The beast inside barrels out, scattering the assembled vicks.

  It looks as much like a shrunk-down lion and/or baboon as a pit bull. With bounding leaps it propels itself through the air. It lands on a vick standing at the leader’s right hand, pulling him down to the broken pavement. It digs six-inch canines into the downed vick’s throat.

  The vicks groan in horror. Blood jets all over.

  Longthought bends down to grab the beast. He pulls on its haunches, tearing it from its victim. The frenzied mutation whirls to attack him. It bites down deep on his arm. Its canines pierce his duster and the bleached arm of his bedsheet keikogi. They can’t penetrate his rubbery hide. He wraps his arms around the wildly resisting lionbaboondog. Struggling it into place, he positions it into the crook of his arm. He chokes the fucking thing out. Once limp, he gently lays its unconscious bulk on the tarmac. The dog’s owner runs over to slap a chloroform rag on its lips. He drags the limp beast back into its cage and locks it firm. He locks an angry gaze on the bozo who clumsied it to freedom. The guilty vick backs off, envisioning his future shit-kicking.

  With the dog out of the way, the wounded man’s condition can easily be seen. The jugular gouts open. The guy is flat-out done for.

  Longthought crouches over him. He withdraws his left wakizashi.

  “Whoa whoa whoa,” says the vick spokesman. “If there’s mercy-killing to be done, it’s us who’s gonna do it.”

  Longthought hits him with a punchy wave of disagreement. He’s got it all wrong. That’s not what this is.

  The sword blade glows orange. He plunges it into the wound. It impales the neck. Comes out the other side. The vicks have not yet had time to react when he pulls it back out again, just as quick. The torn throat is whole again. The injured man, already in cardiac arrest, sputters back to life.

  Longthought sheathes his blade.

  He does not attempt to explain. That would require too many abstractions. Longthought has two blades. The sword of killing and the sword of healing. He can’t use the kill-sword until first using the heal-sword. And vice versa. To take a life, he must preserve a life.

  Astonished vicks haul the reviving man into their hidey. Longthought grips his big hand onto the leader’s shoulder. Beams him again with the image of Smoky. Glances significantly to the chloroform rag, lying abandoned in the gravel.

  “You think us sentimental,” tries the spokesman. “You think we value our lives higher than we do our battle-beasts. As if that’s such a big favor, leaving him alive to starve and suffer another day. But if you don’t tell people we’re pussies, if you don’t say this is how you got us to cough up the word, fuckit, I’ll tell you, all right? Because let’s say we don’t want to find out what that other blade does. Let’s say that. Understood?”

  Longthought nods.

  “Okay so yeah we traded the mange you want to Dogmeat Drew. He had one we wanted—a blooder, high fight in him, mangler breeding balls. For some reason he was hot for Cripple’s mutt. Probably as a soup or curry. So don’t get your hopes up. So yeah, Dogmeat Drew. Now leave us be.”

  Longthought: anger, interrogative.

  “I told you who. I’m not comfortable spilling the locale also. Find him yourself.”

  Hand drifts to other blade. The universa
l language.

  “Shitrocks, man. Okay, okay. Construction site. Down Fish Road. Don’t tell it was us who narked. We might need further trade relations with him. Unless you cap him. Tell him whatever you want if you cap him afterwards. Dogmeat’s moderately useful but not to give you an impression vicks give a crap.”

  Longthought turns and goes.

  “Yeah no pleasantries on this side either, Lemonhead!” shouts the vick after him, hands cupped around mouth.

  Longthought trudges down Fish Road. Over its broken swelling pavement. Snow whitens the air. Small bullet flakes from nowhere. These days storms come on faster.

  Snow is a foot deep and squeaking beneath his boot heels by the time he reaches the chainlink surrounding the construction site. It’s surprising that Dogmeat Drew has the pebbles to hidey here. It’s got the haunt on it. This is where the Howler ate those children. Before Longthought ended him.

  Longthought steps through the hole in the fence he made the last time he was here. Every footfall in the complaining snow announces his approach. Clumps of gathering flake cling to the gray sides of a half-finished concrete shell. It thrusts up for four boxy stories. Holes for windows. No roof. Longthought hears scurrying inside.

  He strides in, moving through a narrow doorway. A clattering net drops onto him. He fights it. Sharp edges of tin cans and sharpened tools, attached to the nylon net, are meant to cut and scratch. They don’t do that, but they do confuse the issue. The more Longthought struggles, the more he entangles himself.

  Footsteps pound in the snow outside. The net is a delaying tactic. While he’s stuck in it, Dogmeat is peeling out the back, across a flat expanse.

  Longthought leaves the net on as he pursues. The storm’s fucking up visibility. A few seconds makes the difference between keeping Drew in sight and losing him. Once lost, it could be ages to find him. Too late, assuming Smoky isn’t already stewing in a pot. Longthought barrels on. Leaps over a ceramic conduit. Skids across a pallet of warping lumber.