Yesterday's Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “Timbeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrr!!!”

  And gravity finally wins. And Winston comes down.

  NINETEEN

  “Move!” I haul hard on Clyde. He is a sack of skin and bones. Branches fight me.

  Winston hits the treeline.

  The world shudders. Explosions drum against my sternum. Noise eclipses my senses. Everything is shattering and cracking and creaking. Everything is falling apart. My face is full of leaves and tree.

  Somewhere, between my heartbeats, silence returns. Only the whistle of damaged nerve endings in my ear and the heave of my breath to listen to. I am pinned in branches. They give way one by one. I half collapse, half slither to the floor.

  Clyde has been thrown to the very edge of the trees. He’s still unconscious. Missed the whole thing. Lucky bastard.

  He better just be bloody unconscious. I do not want to have that conversation with Tabitha.

  “Bastards,” says a basso cockney voice. “Bastards made me a bloody treeman.”

  Winston’s voice. Winston is still alive, still here. His form’s changed, violently and unmistakably, but the animating force that is Winston is still invested in it.

  No breach of contract. So no death. So Clyde is definitely still alive.

  Well thank God for that.

  I bend down, start heaving my friend up. Aiko emerges from a nearby thicket. Her clothes are torn and blood from a cut on her forehead is matted in her eyebrows.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let me help you with him.”

  “You OK?” I ask as we pull Clyde free of the trees.

  “Not really.” She shakes her head. Then she lets go of Clyde. I stagger against the sudden increase in weight.

  “Shit.” Aiko sits down hard. “This is twice in one week. Normally the worst I have to deal with is a six-year-old calling me a poopyhead.” She starts to cry.

  “Oh Aiko.” A voice from behind me. I turn, and Jasmine and Malcolm are emerging from the trees. Jasmine’s headphones have been mangled. Malcolm hobbles, a deep gash in one leg. Jasmine pulls ahead of him, goes to Aiko, wraps her in an embrace. And shit. Aiko really is a first-grade teacher. Jasmine really is just a teenager. And if I’m what passes for a professional, I can only imagine how much of a toll this takes on an amateur, enthusiastic or otherwise.

  Felicity can say what she likes about the Weekenders, but these guys have my vote of confidence any day of the week.

  I look over at Malcolm. He shrugs. There’s no trauma on his face. Stoic, maybe a little nonplussed by Aiko and Jasmine. He has to have been military or something. Balls of steel.

  As he approaches, something catches his eye. He peers and looks behind a smashed bookcase. He blanches. And if there’s something that makes a man as hardened as Malcolm turn pale, why do I have the sudden urge to look?

  But look I do.

  Oh Jesus.

  My guts heave. I choke down bile.

  A bloody mess of skin and bone. A mangled red silhouette, limbs horribly distorted. Metal mashed into the mess of bone.

  The Russian woman. The one who electrocuted me. The one Winston stepped on.

  “Jesus,” I say again. I close my eyes but the image remains. I close them harder.

  “Arthur.”

  Winston calls my name and I look up.

  “Arthur, look what they did to me, man.”

  Winston is struggling up out of the trees. I stare at him. All of him. Twenty-five feet or more, towering and tottering. His face is inscribed in bark, knots for eyes, a twisted crack in the wood for a mouth. Leaves burst in an ugly mop above the half-hewn face. His legs are ivy-strewn trunks and his arms are branches. One foot is blackened and charred, leaking sap, leaving sticky glistening footprints tinged with red.

  “What they do to me, Arthur, man?”

  “They turned you into a tree, Winston,” is about as much as I can manage. But I think he had that bit figured out.

  He shakes his head. A few twigs tumble around him.

  “It’s time magic.”

  Winston and I look over. It’s Aiko, rubbing tears from her cheeks with the back of a fist. She swallows, re-establishes control. “Same as with the T-Rex. Turn back the clock. The books, the shelving—all wood. So they go back to being trees. There’ll be other stuff too. Statues back to rocks, that sort of thing.”

  “No…” a new voice cuts in, then dissolves into coughing. We all spin, looking. Malcolm yanks out his improbable-looking pistol again.

  “No such thing as time magic.”

  “Clyde!” I run to him, skid down on my knees. Another cough wracks his body.

  “Yeah,” I hear Winston rumble. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. No psychological trauma suffered here.”

  “Shit,” I say to Clyde, eloquent as ever. “I was worried about you.”

  “No need,” Clyde says. He reaches up a trembling fist and taps the mask. “Flash memory, I think. Very durable.”

  I laugh. Clyde doesn’t. I’m not sure if it’s not a joke, or if it’s just not as funny as he thought it was going to be.

  “Time. Magic,” Aiko says again, emphasizing each word.

  Clyde shakes his head but doesn’t sit up.

  I don’t blame him. My head’s spinning and I was conscious the whole time. Time magic. Magic that looks like time magic. Chernobyl. Bomb threats. Stolen meteors. It’s like someone cut lines out of a newspaper and scattered them in front of us.

  Admittedly it’d probably have to be the Fortean Times. But still…

  Chernobyl is the connection. It has to be. But Chernobyl is broken, a mistake. But if that’s a false lead, why did two Russians just turn the British Museum Reading Room into a nature reserve to get their hands on our documents about it?

  I look down at Clyde. “I just don’t understand how the bomb is involved,” I say.

  Clyde starts shaking his head again.

  Jasmine looks over at me. “Oh my God, did you just say bomb?”

  “Maybe, you know, ixnae on the omb-bae,” Clyde says, but he’s ten seconds and fifteen years too late for that to be relevant.

  Crap.

  Aiko looks over at me. “A bomb?” she says. “There’s a bloody bomb involved in this?”

  “No,” I say. “Not at all.” I just can’t generate enough effort to make the lie convincing.

  Aiko shakes her head.

  A shudder runs down Clyde’s body. “Just sent an instant message to Tabby,” he says. “She says you’re an idiot.”

  Instant-messaging. With his brain. I shudder almost as hard as he did.

  “Tell her to stop flirting with me,” I say. “It’s inappropriate.” Here’s hoping passive aggressiveness plays better than straight up aggressiveness.

  “Wait.” Clyde holds up a hand. “Shaw’s hijacking the conversation.”

  Oh God, there’s going to be a debrief. And that prick Coleman is going to be there. I wonder how many sick days MI37 gives me.

  “Shaw says, and I’m sure in a very loving, tender way, that you’re an idiot too,” I smile at that, “and that we need to haul our collective arse back home pronto.”

  “Shit and balls.” This is by far my worst trip to the library since my mother caught me with an inappropriate tome during the years of my puberty.

  Slowly, painfully, I clamber back to my feet. I offer Clyde a hand and haul him up.

  “So that’s it?” Aiko has her hands on her hips. “You guys bugger off and leave us here?”

  It does seem a bit callous now she puts it that way. “How about I say thank you first?”

  Clyde harrumphs. Aiko smiles. I prefer the latter.

  “Look,” I say—and surely some kind of concession has to be made here; we can’t keep pretending these guys aren’t helping us—“I’ll talk to people back at the office. There’s got to be some way we can work together on this.” Aiko doesn’t look so convinced, and, to be honest, I’m not either so I decide to throw a bone. “And yes,” I say, “there is a bomb. And, yes, we were l
ooking up Chernobyl.”

  “Arthur!” Clyde explodes.

  “Oh what.” I turn to face him, because, seriously now, what part of that did they not already know? “Next time you’re conscious through a fight you can tell me who deserves to know what, OK?” It doesn’t sound as placatory as I was hoping it might. “Without them we wouldn’t have arses for Felicity to kick.”

  Clyde’s blank mask gives me nothing. No sympathy, no condemnation, no understanding. Eventually he says, “Felicity?”

  “Shaw,” I say.

  “Oh.” He nods.

  There’s a sound from the door. All of us turn. All of us point guns.

  A short man with a pinched gray face wearing blue overalls shoves open a door, pushing aside the remains of a bookcase and peers at us. He sees the guns. “Oh Jesus bloody Christ.” He puts a palm to his brow.

  I look to Clyde but he doesn’t see my look to return it.

  “Excuse me,” I say, lowering the gun, “but who—”

  “What in the name of all that is holy are you still even doing here?” The man throws up his hands, then finally forces his way into the room. “Jesus, they expect me to…” He shakes his head. “You understand the situation, right? You’re aware right? You’re undercover.” He points to Clyde and me. “Hush-hush.” He pushes his hands through his hair, leaving visible grooves. “There are coppers on the way, funders on the phone, librarians trying to upload crap to YouTube, hackers in the email.” He kicks a book. “I’m trying to run a bloody cleanup operation here.”

  He stares at us. We stare back. My life was just threatened by trees. This seems like an odd moment for a scolding.

  “Scarper!” he yells at us.

  “Who are you?” I ask. Because I still haven’t quite got that bit straight.

  The man slaps a hand to his forehead. “Unappreciated that’s what it is. You chaps all bugger about blowing stuff up and never really think about the man sticking it all back together.” He walks up to me. He comes up to my chin. He screws his face up even more so that it more closely resembles a drill bit than I thought was humanly possible. His stiletto of a nose does not help the impression.

  He thrusts a hand at me then retracts it before I have time to take it. “Ogden Beauvielle, cleanup operations. Don’t really have time for this, but I know that people who get guns are apparently just oh so important, and I’m just a little cog does bloody vital work that everyone is utterly dependent on. No need for anyone to have mentioned me.”

  “You work for us?” Surely a sixth member of MI37 would have come up. I look to Clyde, but he just shrugs.

  The little man abruptly drops to his knees. I stare at him, nonplussed. “Please.” He clutches my knees. “Leave. Just leave. Bugger off. Fly away. I don’t care. But if Shaw has to get you out of Scotland Yard’s nick then it’ll be your hide as well as mine.”

  I take a step away, shaking him from my legs. But it does sound like he knows Felicity.

  “You do the cleanup for us?” I ask, still trying to work it all out.

  “Oh God.” The little man drops his head. “I’m begging you. Just walk out the door. Please. Leave. Leave. Leave.”

  “Leaves? You talking about me?” The trees rustle. With a crack of branches, Winston sits up.

  “Oh,” I hear the little man moan. “Oh bugger. Oh that’s just bloody typical that is. Bloody typical.”

  In the end, I suppose, it’s always a little bit reassuring to know someone’s job is worse than yours.

  TWENTY

  An hour later

  “Come on,” I say to Clyde, “out with it.” For a man without a face, he certainly can pout.

  He maintains the silence that’s lasted through the London suburbs and halfway round the M25 ring road. The Mini’s wheels thrum over potholes. A chirpy woman on Radio Four tells us that rain is coming, and it’s going to stay until sometime around the apocalypse.

  I turn the radio off.

  “Talk to me, Clyde,” I say. “We’re on the same side, remember. Team members. Friends.”

  Clyde nods his head. Once. Twice.

  “Arthur,” he says eventually, “I completely understand, you know, full three hundred and sixty degree perspective on the subject, and I know you’re trying to do the right thing…”

  There’s a “but” heading towards me like a jack-knifing truck.

  “But there are things you don’t know.”

  “Such as?” I’m caught between defiance and trepidation. This is going to be about the Weekenders, I know, and I think MI37’s official attitude so far has been unfair. But Clyde is not a person who naturally tends towards chewing others out, so if he feels the need to speak up, there’s the serious possibility that I’ve taken a misstep somewhere.

  Clyde sighs and switches into a slower lane. “The Weekenders,” he says, “have existed in some variety since the seventies. Obviously not the same folks we saw today. That would be absurd. Or the product of some sort of phenomenal skin cream. And, well, most experimental thaumaturgists through history have been men. Not an observation on gender that, just testament to a biased system. But yes, crinkly old men—not big on the whole magic skin cream research as far as I’m aware. But, basically, what I’m getting at is that only that Malcolm chap has been doing this Weekending thing for any length of time, and that only dates back to the millennium according to records.” He gives a little shiver on the word “records.” I think he’s pulling this data from somewhere.

  “Anyway, going back to my whole, you know, point, the original seventies group was founded by some folk who didn’t make it all the way through the vetting process for MI37. The Magical Arms Race was heating up, and our side was recruiting with a certain… well, I don’t want to speak ill of people who aren’t here to defend themselves, though, I mean, that does put certain unrealistic limitations on speaking ill of people. Because, really, some people deserve it whether they’re present or not. I mean, take Hitler, for example. Not that I’m trying to compare anyone in MI37 to Hitler, just trying to say that maybe if you’re recruiting people to become participants in a clandestine cold war, then maybe an anyone-will-do attitude isn’t a solid strategy. And so they basically let some ill-equipped people find out too much before cutting them loose. And some individuals are of a disposition—and this isn’t a criticism, just an observation—but once certain people know a little bit about the certain sort of stuff we deal with, well they certainly won’t give up on it.

  “Anyway, these folk had all failed the vetting for, and this is important, I think, for a reason. It wasn’t just, you know, random capriciousness. Significant factor in the universe though it may be. But there were reasons. And those reasons, well it’s why we don’t know anyone who was on that original Weekenders team. They’re not in the fight any more. Not because they stopped believing. Not because they got tired. They died, Arthur. They were killed. Not metaphorically, or in a manner of speaking, or as an exaggeration. It’s just, this is a dangerous job. I know you know that. I’m not trying to speak down to you. I mean in a literal sense, yes, given my height, I am speaking down, but now I’ve gone back to colloquialisms and idioms and all that. And, what I’m trying to say is that the people in the Weekenders, they’re not right for this sort of work. It kills them.

  “And—and this is really my point, Arthur, I’m getting there in the end—every time, every single time they’ve been involved in an MI37 operation, one of our people has died too.”

  He takes his eyes off the road, looks straight at me. I can feel the gaze through the mask. “They kill us, Arthur,” he says. “They don’t mean to. They have the best of intentions. But they mess up. And they die. And we die. So the only decent thing to do, the only right thing to do, and that’s why I started this whole thing by saying you’re a good chap, a chap trying to do the right thing, but the only thing to do is to try and stop them.”

  Finally he falls silent. He stares at the road. After a minute’s silence he puts the radio back on.
Someone talking about the best way to baste a turkey.

  They die.

  We die.

  I don’t want to die. I don’t want anyone to die. But—and I’m probably going to regret this… But I’ve never in my life trusted absolute statements. In this world, it seems to me, there is nothing that is totally certain. Especially these days, when reality seems to break every five seconds.

  “Look,” I say, “you’re telling me Aiko, Jasmine, Malcolm—they’re all brand-new Weekenders, pretty much.” I suspect I sound like I’m grabbing at straws. Maybe I am. “So how do we know working with these ones is going to kill us? It’s a generalization. It doesn’t take the individuals into account.”

  What pass for Clyde’s eyes leave the road again.

  “The individuals?” he says. He sounds slightly incredulous. “Arthur, I mean, again, not to condescend, but that girl Jasmine, she’s seventeen years old. She’s not been to school since she was thirteen. Malcolm West—”

  Another tremor in his arm, I note.

  “—was dishonorably discharged from the military, and then was kicked out of Blackwater in disgrace. You know how messed up you have to be for Blackwater to declare you a disgrace?”

  I do have to concede the straws are beginning to get a little harder to grab now.

  “What about Aiko?” I say. Of all of them, it seems hard to object to her.

  Another violent shiver from Clyde. “Honestly? I’m surprised they let her near children.”

  “What?” Are we talking about the same woman?

  “She’s a total conspiracy theory nut. And, well, I realize ‘nut’ is a pejorative term, and maybe I should be more understanding, but she logs an average of sixty hours a week on internet forums and chat rooms talking about how JFK and Elvis are the same person.”

  “Oh.” Not the most reassuring things to hear. And, well, Clyde does have a case against them. A good case even. Might even hold up in court.

  But it’s not like MI37 is made up of the most balanced people either. And they helped save my life. Clyde’s life too. So I remain that obstinate juror demanding a smoking gun.