Yesterday's Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  Coleman turns to the collected MI6 agents. “Arrest them.”

  For a moment we just stand there. I don’t think any of us know what else to do. The EMP is going to go off. The Chronometer is going to be exposed. We are just totally screwed.

  An agent steps towards Felicity. He looks apologetic, still deferential. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m going to have to ask you—”

  And no. Just no.

  My fist whips out and shuts him up. He staggers back, falls, lands in a tangled heap. Coleman’s jaw drops.

  “Oh hell yes,” Aiko says from behind me.

  If only one bold move of defiance could somehow cancel out the mass of armed agents whose friend I just punched.

  “Time for us to move,” I suggest.

  “Kayla! Clyde!” Felicity barks. “Cover our exit.”

  Kayla’s sword is out in less time than in takes Coleman to think of shitting himself. Clyde’s body gives a violent ripple, and every screen on every computer in the room goes blank. With trembling fingers he eases a battery up under his mask. Not to be outdone I pull out the flaming sword. Shock and goddamn awe.

  The MI6 agents look very upset. But now they also look nervous as hell.

  “What are you waiting for?” Coleman froths. “Get them!”Despite their nervousness, more than one of them pulls a gun.

  “Tactical retreat,” Felicity mutters.

  Clyde stretches out a hand, mutters to himself. This time it’s not him who shudders but the reality around him. A great invisible tidal wave of force sweeps through the room and smashes into Coleman’s operations center. Papers, laptops, and agents fly like dice rattled in a shaker. Coleman is barreled over, arms flapping like his bright red tie.

  And then the bullets come.

  “Faster tactical withdrawal!”

  That, apparently, is the fancy technical language for, “flee.”

  We turn and hoof it. Shouts, barked orders, and bullets careen after us. We spin down one passageway and then another. We thunder past men talking quickly into walkie-talkies, tear away from doorways blocked by gaggles of anxious-looking civil servants.

  “Arthur,” Felicity says to me between pants. “Sword. Fire.” She nods at the ceiling.

  “What?”

  “Alarms. Sprinklers.” She pants again. “Set off.”

  I stare at the flaming sword still clutched in my hand, stare up at the ceiling. Every ten yards, a little gray nozzle perches between strip lights. I catch on, raise my sword. And I bring the rain.

  We’re splashing through puddles as we reach the exit. The lobby is full of milling sodden people. Security guards try to form a line but anxious men with half-drowned laptops keep pushing past. The place is a mad turmoil of panicking humanity. Behind us, the shouts are getting louder.

  “Clyde!” Felicity yells. “A hole!”

  He stretches out his hand and makes one. Personnel fly like bowling pins. I wave my sword around as imposingly as possible.

  One guard fires. Kayla’s sword whips out and there is the whine of a ricochet.

  Oh, that trick I am going to have to learn.

  Then we’re out. Through the opening, through the doors, down the steps. The police cars still sit there. Policemen stand about looking confused. We race toward them.

  “Ma’am,” says an officer, holding out his hand to stop Felicity.

  Out whips her fist. Down goes the officer. His partner yells, but only until the pommel of Kayla’s sword cracks his skull.

  “In!” Felicity yells at us. “Drive!”

  There’s a mad scramble for the cars. I still have the list of Russian safe house locations in my pocket so I dive for a driver’s door, but Tabitha ducks in front of me.

  I spin around, seize the door on the next car. Devon is sitting behind the wheel with a look of panic on her face.

  “I don’t really drive,” she says.

  “Accelerator. Floor. Now!” I so would have made an awesome driving instructor.

  Behind me, people are still scrabbling into the seats. A door slams.

  “Now!” a voice yells. Felicity. I spin round. There’s something about the fact she chose the same car as me. Something that might be trust. That maybe could be something more.

  Felicity sits in the back seat. Next to Clyde. And then… Aiko.

  Oh, this is going to be a terrible race to save the world.

  Devon pops the clutch, slams her foot to the floor. Wheels spin. Devon gives us all intimate feel for the g-forces available in a standard-issue police car.

  By the expression on her face, I think Devon rather likes the experience. So at least one person in this car is grinning.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  In my pocket, my phone buzzes. Screeching down the waterfront doesn’t seem like the best time to take a call. Then Tabitha pulls alongside us, gesticulating wildly with her phone.

  Side by side the cars peel down the road. Devon is letting out a keening yell of excitement and terror. Cars lean on their horns and spin out of our way.

  I fish for my phone and smell something ugly. The flaming sword is melting its way through the passenger door. I somehow wrestle it away and settle for plunging it through the window. Shatter-proof glass, shatters, spills in our wake. A thousand glittering glass beads flash with reflected firelight.

  My phone continues buzzing. Tabitha continues gesticulating. Just more angrily.

  Devon swerves. A car whines past, clips our wing mirror. I introduce my head to the doorframe. I come up, head ringing.

  I make another attempt to flip open the phone. Instead I drop it, curse, wrestle with the scabbard; almost neuter myself; set myself on fire; pat it out; finally slot the sword away; and then beat my head rhythmically against the glove compartment while I try and get my phone back.

  Finally I grab it, take the call.

  “We’re going,” Tabitha snaps. “Where?”

  I pull the list from my pocket. I stare. Six addresses. I look at my watch. 5:17 pm.

  “Address,” Tabitha demands, steering violently away to avoid a motorbike’s kamikaze run. I think the bike’s rider was covering her eyes.

  “Give me a minute.”

  “Reality. Not having enough time left to spare you a minute.”

  Devon slams us up onto the sidewalk. A trash can explodes over the windshield. I get to really regret having shattered the window.

  Six addresses. Scattered across London. Think. I need to think.

  We put the message in the East London Advertiser. That makes two of the addresses more likely. The first place they hit was the Natural History Museum. They’re going to target Big Ben.

  I really wish my sense for London’s geography was better.

  If I pick wrong…

  If I pick wrong then we’re going to need to get to Big Ben really fast.

  “35 Redman’s Road,” I say. And then I pray I’m right.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  The car hurtles round a corner. Our suspension creaks. Our tires scream almost as loud as the pedestrians.

  “I don’t want to be a pain in the whole gluteal region,” Devon says, grimacing over the rim of the steering wheel. “But I actually have no clue how to get to anywhere in London.”

  “Next left,” Felicity says from the back seat. “Then a right.”

  I glance over my shoulder, look at her. She’s sitting, perched forward on her seat. Jaw set. Eyes ablaze.

  She looks such a tremendous badass.

  “I just…” I start. “When you…” Both Felicity and Aiko look up at me. And that’s not helping. “Thank you,” I say to Felicity. “For what you said to Coleman. When you said he’d picked wrong. I… That was nice.”

  Felicity glances over my shoulder at the road. Devon slings us into a sliding, trembling skid. Then Felicity reaches out, touches my hand. “How about we save the world, then have the make-up sex. OK?”

  And despite it all, despite the peril, and the terror, and the absurdity of my role in trying to save the
world, despite Aiko being right bloody there, God do I smile. Big enough to split my face and hurt my cheeks.

  I turn to Devon. “Whatever you do,” I say to her, “please do not crash.” I suddenly find I have way too much to live for.

  “Additional pressure is not absolutely the most helpful thing right now, Arthur.” Devon attempts to force the car into a pirouette around a traffic circle. She settles for mostly just smashing through it.

  A few yards behind us, Tabitha pinballs her cop car off a bus bench and a streetlamp.

  “So,” Aiko’s voice comes from behind me like a blade. “You two back together then?”

  And really? Really now?

  “Too much talking!” Devon tries to pilot the car but we’ve taken the opportunity to leave the ground. We sail past agape tourists. We land. The suspension crunches. The police siren fights through several awkward octaves. I seek to extract my head from the car’s roof.

  “I believe so,” Felicity answers Aiko.

  I seek to extract my head faster.

  “Did we ever, I mean, officially,” I say, attempting to inject levity into the disaster yawning wide in the back seat, “actually officially break up?”

  Clyde twitches his head at that one. Either the internet is getting to him or even he can see what an abysmal attempt to rescue myself that is.

  “I did assume that when you screamed, ‘I quit,’ at me, you weren’t only talking about the job.” Felicity glances at me, and then at Aiko.

  “Is there,” Devon shrieks, “the slightest possibility of any of you considering that I found a polite but forceful way to tell you all to shut the hell up?”

  “I did assume,” Aiko says, ignoring Devon and my desperate need to live through the next minute, “that after Kiev you’d broken up.”

  We bounce off a curb. Horns howl in our wake. Tabitha sends her car shooting past us and levels a trash can.

  “What,” Felicity’s voice does the icicle thing that makes my spine seem to seize up, “happened in Kiev?”

  “Nothing happened in Kiev!” I throw up my hands as best the car roof and g-forces will allow.

  “Counting the kiss?”

  Oh God. I was really hoping she wouldn’t bring that up.

  “If someone doesn’t stop trying to organize Arthur’s sex life and tell me which turn to take next the world is going to end!” Devon snaps.

  I have to say, it’s not often I hear that.

  “Right in a hundred and fifty yards,” Clyde intones.

  Felicity, perhaps in deference to Devon’s request for silence, simply stares at me with all the powers of unholy hell itself.

  I wonder if it’s possible to get into Tabitha’s car at these sort of speeds. Hang out with Kayla and Malcolm for a while.

  “I didn’t…” I start. “She… me…” I close my eyes. And I thought we were past this. I thought all the personal crap was dealt with. I thought we were going to save the world. “She kissed me. Nothing happened.”

  Absolute silence. Like the void of space. Like traveling beyond the event horizon.

  “There,” Devon says, “much better. Much appreciated.”

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Devon plows on through London’s streets. Traffic peels away from us, screeching. The only noise from our car is the thrum of the tires over the blacktop. Devon noses past Tabitha. Tabitha noses back.

  Clyde breaks the silence. “What is our plan of action for when we arrive?”

  Nobody else seems to want to answer, so I open my mouth and wait for someone to jump down it. When the coast seems clear, I say, “Guns blazing is pretty much the full extent of it.” I think it’s safe to assume the time for subtlety is over.

  “And what about Coleman?” His voice is utterly emotionless. Which, for once, seems to be the best option, considering the range of alternatives available at this particular emotional buffet.

  He’s right too. Coleman could be after us.

  “As long as we take care of the Russians then that’s all that matters,” I say. I don’t have time to come up with contingencies

  “I could have changed his mind,” Clyde says quietly.

  “He seemed pretty set on the whole screwing us and everything else up plan,” I say. It’s a little late for the rehash I feel.

  “I could have,” Clyde insists.

  “No.” Felicity looks over at him sharply. “Remember what Tabitha said. What we all said.”

  I risk a glance at Felicity’s face. She looks concerned.

  “About what?” I’m confused now.

  “Look,” Devon says, “I don’t want to be the proverbial broken record, but when exactly did we decide it was OK to start distracting me again?”

  “Next left,” Felicity snaps at her.

  “I simply worked out how to reverse the upload I did to move my consciousness from my body into the mask. A download process.”

  And wait… That doesn’t… “You can invade people’s heads via a wireless connection?” I try to imagine the repercussions of that simple statement. It’s… That’s bad. The sort of bad that fuels CIA conspiracy theories. The sort of bad that causes people to wear tin foil hats. Jesus… Clyde almost has more powers than bloody Superman at this point.

  “But it’s morally wrong, though, isn’t it Clyde.” Felicity has the sort of smile you wear while you talk the crazy man into putting down the gun. “We discussed that. With Tabitha.”

  She pulls out her phone. “We can discuss it with her now.”

  “Not discussed. You stated,” Clyde says.

  I try to be happy that there’s finally some emotion in that last speech. Except sulkiness isn’t the right one.

  I glance over at Tabitha in her car. Kayla and Malcolm both sit ramrod straight in the back seat. The former grips her sword, the latter his enormous revolver. Tabitha stares at her phone, glances at us, swerves around a pedestrian, then gives us the finger.

  “Can you use that sword?” Clyde asks me abruptly.

  Devon slams the car into a hard turn. The wheels scream and screech.

  “What?” I don’t know why Clyde is asking me this. I don’t know why he’s addressing it after talking about mind-raping people. I don’t know if I want to talk to him at all.

  “Your sword,” he speaks louder. “Are you any good with it?”

  “Erm…” I say.

  “He’s terrible,” Devon says, nerves apparently winning over verbosity as she struggles to keep the car out of a storefront.

  “See.” Clyde turns to Felicity. “It can be useful.”

  Oh God.

  “No!” Felicity barks. Her hand snaps out at him, through space, reaching, reaching… never arriving. She seems to slow halfway through the motion. I watch her half-head of hair flicking, the ripple of motion. I watch the expression of fear build muscle by muscle. The car’s desperate lurch becomes a swampy slide. Everything feels slushy and awkward, time wrapped in molasses.

  And then pain. Pain moving with all the speed the world has lost. Expanding. Blooming. And I’m trying to grab my head, to stop the pain from exploding beyond the confines of my skull, trying to hold it all together, but I’m so slow. Everything is slow. Everything except the pain. And the world shrinks to a pinpoint. And all I can see is Clyde’s mask. And I look for a smile, for something cruel or kind, for anything. But there’s nothing. Just wood and blankness. And then the pain is too much, and there’s nothing at all.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  If my head is a cake of baked pain, then the car’s police siren is the knife. A pulsing wave of auditory agony that cuts through the pleasures of unconsciousness.

  “There,” Clyde says, “all done.”

  “What the fuck did you do to my head?” I scream, except it comes out more as a grunt and a gob of spit. And there is a lot of shouting and name-calling, and I’m not sure I’m really heard.

  I open my eyes. I wish I hadn’t. The world slaloms back and forth in front of me. It is full of screaming people and endangered p
edestrians. The back of another police car looms too close.

  “What the fuck did you do to me?”

  I achieve audibility. Everyone turns.

  “I helped.” Clyde does not sound as defensive as I feel he should. “With the sword.”

  “We talked about this!” Felicity has her fists balled, knuckles white, arm half-cocked. “This is not a fucking gray area!”

  “Are you OK?” Aiko stares at me, face pale. “Is your head OK?”

  “I helped.” Clyde is insistent.

  “With giving me fucking migraines?” I would love to give Clyde the benefit of the doubt but he ran out of that about one mind-raping ago.

  “The sword.” Clyde sounds slightly hurt. “So you can use it.”

  “What?” Maybe it’s the blinding pain, but I am not getting a clear read on his reasons.

  “I downloaded information,” Clyde says. “Into your brain. On swords. On how to use them. A lot of styles. You know how to riposte now.”

  “I don’t even know what—” and then I stop. Because I do know what a riposte is. I know how to execute one. I know how to look for one. I know tell-tale signs. I know how to string them together. I know different sword types and grips that will facilitate styles that rely heavily upon the riposte. I am a virtual sodding encyclopedia on ripostes.

  “Oh my God.”

  “You’re welcome,” Clyde says.

  Except am I? Should I thank him? My brain was just violated in a massive and monstrous way.

  “I suppose that does sound helpful,” Devon says from the driver’s seat. “Minus the blinding pain. Do you know anything about driving?”

  “Do not encourage him!” Felicity barks.

  Useful. God, is that really the word?

  I look at Clyde, the world swaying and swerving behind his head as Devon fishtails round another corner.

  “You’re not human,” I say. I don’t mean to. I’m disoriented, and head-fucked, and trying to come to terms with too many things, and it’s an accident. But I say it. And I mean it.