The New Hero Volume 2

by ed. Robin D. Laws

  Dogmeat Drew is a sideswiping dark blur in the whiteout ahead. Longthought speeds up, pouring strength into his leg muscles. Drew makes the mistake of turning his head back to look. Loses ground. Longthought topples onto him. Lands on him with a thumping and a grunt from each man. Dogmeat Drew gets the wind knocked out of him. Is cut by the shrapnel he tied to his own net. Longthought wrestles off the net. Rolls it up. Wraps it around Dogmeat’s wrists, then his ankles, then brings the two loops together in a crude hog-tie. Drew squawls, face-first in the snow. He tries to kick, drawing the net tighter around him.

  “I din’t do nuthin’!” he whines.

  Longthought makes him see Smoky. Makes him see the chloroforming rag, the hands of the vick who captured him.

  “I swear to bones I din’t eat that dog!”

  Longthought beams him skepticism. Impatience with his bullshit.

  “No no seriously I din’t I din’t. Those vicks. Those damn vicks gave me up. Freakin degenerates is what they are. They are devo. D-E-V-O.”

  Longthought balls his fists.

  “No no I only acted as a broker in this arrangement. I got no investment here. No reason to be hurt. And besides, what do you care about Cripple or Cripple’s dog? Your community red-lined him. Wouldn’t let him in. That makes him fair game, don’t it? Ouch!

  “Okay okay, I gave the dog to some new guy. Doesn’t even have a metaname yet. Said his name was Anderson. Though maybe that is a metaname. An actor who played the boss of the Six Million Dollar Man reference. Also the guy who played MacGyver, a reference to that maybe.

  “Why did he have a jones for the dog? How do I know? What am I, a wiki? All I know is it wasn’t fighting and it wasn’t eating.

  “Where is he? Don’t you know? He’s in your own freakin’ mall, lemon-head. I mean, Longthought! Oww, don’t! He’s set up in the bad end. Yes, that’s right. Deep in the freakin Baby-Mart. Among the montags. So he’s got to have powerful essence. True mojo, for them to leave him alone. No, to rally around him as his guardkeeps. You don’t pack that kinda mojo, do you, rinder boy? No disrespect.”

  Longthought lets go of him. He rolls in the snow, wriggling against his bonds. Longthought draws a wakizashi. He slices Dogmeat free. Heads back north.

  Dogmeat Drew calls after him: “You don’t got to do it. Whatever you promised Cripple, you didn’t say you’d descend into a montag den for him.” He gets to his feet. “Hold up and listen to me, lemon-head! I don’t like you. You get into my shit. Every time we meet, I get humiliated. But don’t go get yourself wiped, lemon-head. We need you around here. Do you hear me? You’re a stabilizing influence!”

  Longthought crosses a berm littered with shattered cars and then the charred foundations of a drywall warehouse. He stalks across the roadway to a field thick with Chinese sumac saplings. In a few years, if it keeps going like this, all of Vaughan will be a forest of the things. Tree of heaven, they call it.

  Between the snow and the chin-high forest, it’s picky going. He hops a fake-rustic wall made of bricks meant to look like stone. He’s into the parking lot.

  Around the entrance to Baby-Mart montags lurk and growl. They bend at the waist, weighed down by pendulous pseudo-implants. Their eyes glow red. Hard nails glint and sparkle. Matted peroxide hair cascades over long, slack-jawed faces. The drool of lost fame-dreams drops from airbrushed lips.

  Amidst them are others of like ilk: lohans, kardashians, even a few of older resonance: a zadora, an angelyne, a pair of headless mansfields. The glam-slammers, the body-image victims, hungry and vengeful.

  This won’t be cakes and ale, but going through the mall would be more dangerous still. For every guardian here, there are three inside. Plus the traps and the reality bends. The hanging chains and the cascades of water dripping from nowhere.

  Through overturned vehicles Longthought creeps. They smell him in the air. The montags fan out through the labyrinth of wreckage. A bikinied specimen launches herself frothing upon him. He leaves swords sheathed. He lets her hit, twists, uses the impact to direct her into the side of an immolated Hyundai. She gasps and goes down, but now a dozen of her sisters mob around him. He clambers awkwardly onto a half-ton’s wheel-less chassis. He leaps down, running. They follow, shrieking murderously. Maenads, he thinks, footnoting when he should be fucking fleeing.

  He gets to a swathe of cleared pavement near the Baby-Mart entrance. Surprises them by whirling, holding his ground. Clotheslines one. Kicks another into a crumpled garbage bin. He takes their blows as they crowd around him. Longthought lets their savagery build. He turns from the hardest of the hits. Claws rake him. His coat shreds. He waits opportunistically, until they tangle into one another. Takes them out when they’re distracted. He punches with all of his strength. With the heel of his hand, he drives montag noses up into montag skulls. They can take it. They’ll collapse, then regenerate. The idea behind them is too numinous, too resilient, to allow them to die. Not while Barthes winds swirl.

  Longthought falls to his knees. There are too many of them. He takes a kick to the jaw. Another, another. One has climbed on his back, is trying to drive pointed forefingers into his eyes. He flips her onto her back, crunches a boot into her throat. The eruption of savagery earns him a moment to reposition. Then the flurry of attacks resumes. Under the pounding, his vision ripples.

  He sees the dog. Smoky. It’s not the same memory he got from Wyatt Moler, the so-called Cripple. This image is blurrier, fresher, current. A self-image from within, as a person pictures himself. The dog is inside. Communicating. In his mind’s ear, Longthought hears the friendly yip Cripple spoke of. Determination surges through him. He rises. Shrugs off the kicks, the punches, the clawings. His fists become precision missiles. They fly to throats and temples. Montags fall. Lohans scatter.

  Like retail greeters more shuffling montags await him at the Baby-Mart foyer. Seeing him spacked in their sisters’ the blood, they rear back. He explodes through them, paying a toll in further clawings.

  The store is mold, wet, gloom. Fluorescents erratically flicker. Lohan puke slicks the floor. The brown dust of broken acoustic ceiling tiles lies like sawdust on every surface. Baby monitors, long stripped of their batteries, cough and crackle all the same.

  Canine whimpering beckons him from the second-floor office. Longthought thunders past strollers, over bassinets, down aisles still stocked with jumpers and pacifiers. He mounts the steps. A kardashian springs at him from a stockroom. Longthought seizes it by the shoulders and hurls it to the sales floor below. Its spine snaps. It crawls on its broken back, meeping forgotten catch-phrases, seeking a sheltered place to regenerate.

  Longthought kicks down the door. Screws fly from ripped-out hinges. Instinct, or something in the dog’s low keening, warns him to duck. A bullet from a gun—an actual bullet from an actual gun—ricochets off the metal-shod door.

  Furling up like a wave, Longthought smacks the shooter in the jaw. The attacker’s finger clicks the trigger. Nothing more in the cylinder. Longthought roundhouses the gunman. He skids across the polished floor of an office-turned-laboratory.

  One light source illuminates the room: a 42” plasma screen. Grass-green reflections play across the slumped, stunned figure. Nothing about him indicates mojo. Fiftyish, balding, the drooping face of a formerly well-fed man who’s learned starvation. The vestiges of a double chin still hang around his jaw. Dots of stubble darken his cheeks. He wears a drab business suit, dress shirt, black unpatterned tie, scuffed up leather shoes.

  Anderson, thinks Longthought.

  “You don’t know what you’re interfering with, mutant,” the dazed man mumbles.

  The screen shows blurry scenes from Before, hazily intercut like an experimental film. A lawnmower across a lawn. Hopping birds on a sidewalk. Fall leaves piled by a curb. A brick house with brightly painted porch. A yellow-brown shape on a tiled floor—part of a dropped muffin, maybe? Sound effects are eerie sharp but also in some odd way distorted. There’s a faint hiss where you mi
ght expect music.

  HDMI cables lead from the back of the plasma to a reconfigured streaming media box. Its guts lie open, alligator clips and naked copper wire fed through its chips and circuit board. These in turn lead to a nearby table, and to Smoky.

  Anderson has restrained the crying dog, wrapping it in a blanket and encircling that in duct-tape. More rolls of tape pin the blanket to the table. The top of the dog’s skull sits in a glass jar filled with alcohol. The wires from the media box terminate in a network of pins jutting from the animal’s exposed brain.

  Longthought goes to free the dog.

  “You can’t do that,” says Anderson.

  Longthought directs the feeling of query at him.

  The man responds as if not noticing the strangeness of Longthought’s communication. “You’ll destroy everything. No one likes to see that happen to a dog. God knows I sure don’t. But it’s our only way back, don’t you see? Please don’t touch that. I’m on the verge of breaking through.”

  Longthought hesitates.

  The dog regards him pleadingly.

  Hands held in surrender, Anderson slowly rises. “Catastrophic climate change. Starvation of the phyto-planktons. Bio-engineered pandemic. The closing of the antibiotic window. When I was younger, global thermonuclear war. An asteroid hit, even. These were the end times we anticipated. A semiotic apocalypse? Who was ready for that? No one. The rebellion of signs and signifiers. The vengeful outbreak of a poisoned collective unconscious. You’re Longthought, aren’t you?”

  His captor nods.

  “I thought of contacting you, but then learned the trick of achieving dominance over the montags. And others besides. I can save us all. Retrieve the essential data from reality’s corrupted hard drive. Reboot. Return us to those days. Halcyon. That was a word I never used in a sentence, Before.” He gestures to the screen.

  A family now sits on the porch. They drink lemonades. A boy in the foreground sets up a sprinkler to water the lawn.

  “We can’t remember it straight. We’re all mutated up here.” Anderson points to his temple. “The animals may be altered elsewhere, but not in their minds. From their memories, we can get a clean enough reality read to…well, I haven’t got to that part yet. First we get the clean read, then we figure out the reboot. An exercise of collective will, I’m thinking. Something ritual or ceremonial? The key is, we have to get the clean read. This dog remembers the old times pure, purer than anyone sapient can possibly hope to. It’s special, high-functioning, keen senses. There will be others like it, which you and I must collect. The data must be extracted. Then we can have it all back. Safe homes. Abundant food. Medicine, surgery. So many other vital technologies. And with it, yes, perhaps the vapid insanities of celebrity culture, too. Fun things. Video games, espresso on a Sunday morning, an evening at the symphony. We can get it all back. All of it, I promise you.”

  Longthought takes his memory of Anderson from a few seconds ago, pointing to his head and saying everyone is mutated there. He beams that image into Anderson’s mind.

  Anderson seems puzzled. “You’re asking me what?”

  Longthought repeats it.

  “How can I know I’m not crazy, like I’m saying everyone else is? Is that it?”

  Longthought nods.

  “I can’t be crazy. We have to be able to get back. We were bad, but we weren’t that bad. We don’t deserve this, none of us.” His sentence slams to a stammering halt.

  Longthought ponders. He looks at the dog. He takes his image of the dog, the pins in his brain, the pain he’s in. This image he scatters into a hundred duplicates and telepaths into Anderson’s head.

  Anderson comes nearer, excitement rising in his voice. “Yes yes we’ll have to do it to many more dogs. Which we’ll have to carefully find. Perhaps breed for this purpose. But that would take too long. The important thing I said already. We can get back!”

  Longthought beams him cartoon images. A bull. A plus sign. A curled and steaming turd.

  He draws his sword. His other sword. Its blade glows red. He flicks it across the top of Anderson’s hand. Barely breaking the surface of his wrinkled skin.

  Anderson drops dead at his feet.

  In the echoing distance, montags wail.

  He plucks the pins and wires from the dog’s brain. Fishes the top of its skull from the jar. As best he can, he fits the skull piece back in place.

  He draws his first sword, his most important sword, and plunges it through the top of the skull and into Smoky’s damaged brain. The wakizashi glows orange. It heals the wounded animal, fusing his skull back shut.

  Longthought wraps the dog in a blanket—a different blanket—and carries it out of the lab and down to the retail floor. Montags, kardashians, lohans and headless mansfields circle. He projects his rage at them. He projects his memory of Smoky’s pain. Clutching their foreheads, they shuffle back, making way. Longthought takes Smoky out of the Baby-Mart.

  He returns the dog to Cripple, who waits back in the mall’s good end. The dog leaps up on his master’s legs as if nothing has happened. Tears fill the old man’s red eyes.

  The community has gathered around him. They view the old man’s happiness with closed and hardened faces.

  Laws claps a hand on Longthought’s shoulder—a difficult reach. “Shame he can’t stay with us. That he has to go right back out to where he got ambushed. But hey, the community voted. And you and I were in the minority.”

  Longthought beams an image to everyone. A community meeting. With slumped and guilty shoulders they convene. No way they’re going to reverse themselves, to let a dead weight like Cripple eat through their larder. They appreciate the sentiment of it, and are grateful for all that Longthought does for them. But in the end, this is a democracy. Not many of those out there, but that’s what this is. One person, one vote. Longthought gets no more votes than anyone else. Carries no more weight.

  Speakers speak, according to their modified rules of order. Laws presents Longthought’s case for him, to the extent that he can intuit what it is. He throws in a few arguments of his own to sweeten the pot. After he repeats the pros, North and Detector team up to give the cons. Community members nod sagely as they speak.

  When Longthought gets up, they’re surprised. They sit back on their metal folding chairs, ready for what he gave them last time: feelings of fellowship, compassion, mutuality.

  This time he beams at them another image: an image of him, framed in the doorway, his body dark against the light of a rare bright day. In the image, he abandons them, trudging off alone toward the violet horizon.

  “You can’t…” says North.

  “That’s blackmail,” manages Detector.

  Longthought nods.

  Laws keeps a smart ass look off his face, mostly. He asks if anyone else wishes to speak. They don’t, so the vote is called.

  This time Cripple is accepted, by a solid majority.

  Laws goes to break the news to him. North and Detector follow along, to lay on the old man the community’s rules and conditions. They heavily stress the probationary period.

  Longthought leans down to scratch Smoky behind the ears.

  They’re gonna need that fucking dog.

  Footsteps in Limbo

  John Scott Tynes

  When Satan fell, he was accompanied by a host of angels who likewise had raged against God. God threw them down into Hell. He chained them to the shore of a lake of fire where they struggled and cried.

  Professor died alone, resolute, eyes dry, his heart a cold stone. He lay slumped in a chair and dragged razors down his thick wrists. His blood pooled at his feet. A chill set into his flesh. His eyes grew dull and distant. The room became dim.

  Professor did not believe God existed at all. He was wrong.

  He was sure that neither Heaven nor Hell awaited his miserable soul. He was right.

  Jaclyn was on the slope. The steep incline in the heart of the city’s downtown was dotted with people trudging up or qu
ick-stepping down. The art museum was nearby, dominated by a giant animated iron silhouette of a man raising and lowering a hammer, turning the street into an anvil. The people passed directly through Jaclyn without taking notice. Their mouths moved without a sound. Their feet fell silently on the pavement. Jaclyn was dead and this was Limbo and the only noises she ever heard here were in her memories. It was late afternoon and the sun should have been warm, but she couldn’t feel it. This is your world, Professor, she thought. Not mine.

  Jaclyn stood short, a little stocky, about thirty-five. She’d had black hair when she lived but now her projected sense of self had the light brown hair that came to the fore whenever she hadn’t dyed it for a while. Her eyes were narrow and crinkled at the corners when she smiled. No one had ever really noticed that about her—or much of anything else.

  Then Terrance blinked and was there. She felt his presence before she saw him. “Jaclyn,” he said, in a soul’s mimicry of audible speech. The soft bubble of his essence trembled with fear, pressing up uncomfortably against her own rigid, opaque being. Her soul briefly caressed his, smoothing its surface like a cat’s fur. It was a social thing you did here. He settled slightly.

  Terrance stood a block uphill, a thin older man in baggy clothes whose white hair was little more than a fringe around a bare dome. He wasn’t yet very precise when he blinked. Jaclyn moved near him. Proximity was only marginally relevant to a soul’s speech but their humanity still demanded it.

  “I found someone. Cut down. It felt like Jason. It was near his locus.”

  “Take me there.”

  Terrance’s being rippled. He didn’t want to go back.

  “Let’s get Professor. He’ll know what to do.”

  Her essence glowed with warmth briefly, lessening the chill he felt. Below the warmth she had an unbending will.

  “Take me there. Now.”

  They blinked.

  Jason took an overdose of sleeping pills. His marriage of forty years ended three years ago and he’d lost his home. He lived in a broken-down car near a park when he found the pill bottle. Saturated with fortified wine, he’d taken them all. His last thought was of a dog he’d had as a boy. When he stirred next, he was in Limbo.