Yesterday's Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “No,” Clyde agrees with me. “I’m not. I’m a mask.”

  “You’re not.” Felicity is insistent, hissing it through her teeth. “You’re human. Meat. Blood. You have to remember that. God, we spoke about this.”

  I look again at Tabitha in the car, my eyes still watering. And does she know? Has she had this conversation with him? Does she know how far he’s gone?

  “I’m electronic,” Clyde insists. “I am ones and zeroes.”

  “You’re…”

  “My body died. This is someone else’s. I’m like a parasite.”

  And I can’t take my eyes off Tabitha. And she can’t know. She mustn’t know. She’s tougher than nails and twice as sharp but this would break her in two. Does Clyde know that? Does he realize?

  “Could we have picked a better time?” Devon says it sotto voce, but her hushed words are another man’s violent yell. Clyde died. I realize. More than a week ago now. Just none of us realized it. I finally look back at him. It’s like there’s a ghoul or a zombie sitting between Felicity and Aiko. Calm. Unfeeling.

  Except he’s our ghoul. Our zombie.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, trying to reach Clyde, somewhere behind his mask. “You’re right. And it’s been wrong to pretend you’re not a mask. And it’s wrong to make judgments because of who you are.”

  “He’s a dick, Arthur,” Devon says. “No matter what his corporeal state.”

  I’m not sure I have the nerve to insult a man who can overwrite my brain.

  “You’re a member of this team,” I say to Clyde, ignoring Devon. “You’re valued. You’re a friend.” I honestly don’t know if that’s still true. But I think it’s what he needs to hear. And I don’t know what team I’m officially on now, what team any of us are on, but the world has less than thirty minutes and I’m sure as hell not going to spend it trying to establish which circle I can piss in.

  “We’re all a team,” I say. “We need to work together.” I look from Clyde, to Aiko, to Felicity. “Can we work together?” We have to work together.

  Nothing but silence from the peanut gallery. And I’d be the first to admit, this is a little late in the day for me to start a career as a motivational speaker.

  “We’re about to find out,” Devon finally chips in. “We’re here.”

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  As a general rule, if you’re trying to sneak up on someone, I’ve always believed that going about the business with a police siren blaring is a no-no. Maybe not something I should really have to point out, but subtleties like this can get lost in a rush.

  One sneaking faux pas we do manage to avoid: ramming our vehicle through the wall of our target’s house. We settle for violently dispersing our tire rubber over the asphalt and making the suspension cry uncle.

  Devon slews her car round in front of the house. Felicity flings open her door, spills out, gun drawn. She crouches behind the metal door, aiming at the house’s wooden one.

  Kayla is already leaping from Tabitha’s car, sword drawn, as it screeches towards the building’s front door.

  “Be ready!” Felicity shouts, clearly audible through my smashed window. “If this is the right house they’ll already know—”

  There’s a flash of light in one of the windows.

  “Incoming!” Devon yells.

  Electricity spits and crackles twenty yards down the road. A silhouette is just visible in the retinal afterglow. More flashes of light. More figures appearing.

  And then further away. Retreating.

  Holy crap. I picked right.

  “They’re running!” I yell. “They’re making a break for it.”

  More flashes of light. The Russians are fifty yards further down the road.

  “Holy shit,” Aiko says.

  And those Russians sure can move.

  “Floor it!”

  Devon doesn’t need telling twice now. The engine howls, the car spasms. Felicity dives through her open door. We spin out into the road, tires shrieking, and peel after them. Tabitha’s car is inches from our careening path.

  Devon pushes the car to speeds that should be impossible in London. The needle of the speedometer creeps to fifty, to sixty, seventy. And we’re barely keeping up. The Russians are spots of light blinking down the street, jumping fifty yards at a time.

  “My coat pocket,” Devon says to me, without taking her eyes off the road.

  As much as I’d love to be a Dan Brown hero, puzzling out cryptic clues during the middle of a car chase is not exactly my bloody forte.

  “Little more information, please.”

  “Teleporting Russians. Space-time disturbances. Residual pockets of danger.” Devon seems to not have time for her usual loquaciousness. “We hit one, we all get turned into babies and old people. Horrible way to die. In my coat pocket. The device to clear the path.”

  The car hurtles after the Russians. Behind us, Tabitha and the others careen in our wake. I try to envision the myriad pockets of disturbed time and space we are rushing through. I try not to imagine having a fetal arm. To be honest I should have spent two seconds working out what Devon meant by “my pocket” and not wasted all this bloody time.

  I reach in. My fingers tangle with a mess of wires. I pull it out, point the speaker out the window, and press play.

  The street erupts in flame. We barrel into a floating ball of fire. I feel the hairs on the back of my hand blacken and curl.

  More explosions. Little detonations spaced fifty yards apart, sometimes a fizzle, sometimes Krakatoa. We race through their shock waves. One leaves a crater in the street. Our car hurtles through it and I am nearly flipped out the open window. Tabitha chases in our fiery wake.

  People should be running. Should be screaming. Cars should be barreling over each other to escape—a Hollywood ecstasy of panic. But we sail through traffic lights, and there’s no one there to honk us. We fly round a corner, tires leaving a black trail, and there are no pedestrians to scream and cower. The press of traffic that accompanied us to the Russians has abruptly abandoned the streets.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “I’m not certain now is the time to interrogate providence?” Devon snaps, at least as much as anyone is capable of snapping that many syllables.

  “Oh shit,” says Felicity from the back seat.

  “What?” I spin round.

  “Turn off the car!” she waves urgently and inarticulately at Devon’s back.

  “Are you kidding me?” Devon isn’t going to be stopped by anyone.

  Tabitha’s car skids past us, still drifting as I see her wrench her own keys free. The Russians are retreating points of light.

  “Stop the car!” Felicity bellows it at the top of her lungs.

  OK, apparently Devon is going to be stopped by that. Tires squeal, the car pitches, the back wheels give out on us, drift wildly, send us spinning out in a wild circle. We swirl round like a ballerina on the blacktop.

  My phone is buzzing. I stare at it as Devon yanks the keys from the car.

  “Five!” Felicity yells. “Four!”

  It’s Tabitha’s number. I flip open the phone, press it to my ear.

  “His mask! Get off his bloody mask!”

  “Three!” Felicity yells.

  “What on earth—?”

  “Clyde!” Tabitha is still shrieking. “Get it off!”

  “Two!”

  I reach out, grab the edge of Clyde’s mask, wait for him to reach out and stop me. But there’s nothing.

  “One!”

  “The EMP!” Tabitha is shrieking. “Get off—”

  Oh shit. I rip at the mask, not caring if Clyde offers resistance or not.

  “Zero.”

  SEVENTY-SIX

  I expect a crescendo. A symphonic blast of electric wind ripping through the streets of London. I expect a hurricane of newspapers and trash flowing like a tidal wave down the streets.

  It is not the first time Hollywood has lied to me.

  Instead it is like
a great hand coming down, vast and implacable, snuffing London like a candle.

  Everything goes out. Every street lamp, every light in every house, every neon sign. Not a spit or a spark. Just out, off, done. London shut down.

  I’m holding Clyde’s mask. My best friend is in my hand. But is he still in there?

  In the distance I see a flash of light.

  “They’re still going,” Felicity says. “The Russians are still getting goddamn power from somewhere.”

  “Go,” I say. “Start the car. Go now.”

  “It’s always bloody demands with you,” Devon grumbles as she fumbles with the keys.

  “Just go!” I yell at her. There is a chance I’m letting the tension get to me.

  “I’m going,” Devon says, and accelerates at a rate that would make NASA scientists proud. We rocket past Tabitha but a moment later she’s hot in pursuit again.

  I stare at the mask. “Did I get it in time?” I say. This is what was left of him. And it was broken, and breaking my heart, but I need it to be him still.

  “You got it.” Aiko reaches out a hand to me.

  Felicity slaps it away. “Put it on him and we’ll find out.”

  It’s a struggle to get it on his slumped body from my angle.

  “I’ll do it,” Aiko offers.

  “I will,” Felicity demands. She takes the mask, jams it on Clyde’s head.

  Nothing. Nothing.

  He arcs, shudders, and yells. An electronic mess of sounds. And then silence. He stares at us each in turn.

  “Clyde,” I say, “please… just… please never cut it even half that close again.” I smile as best I am able. “Tabitha will remove my balls.”

  Clyde doesn’t respond at first. Then he cocks his head. “Unlikely,” he tells me in a mirthless monotone.

  And it’s never going to be as good to have him back as I hope.

  We scream through London. Shops are a blur. Landmarks are a streak in my vision. The battered police car rattles, almost quivers as the speedometer creeps towards the red. We eat miles like hors d’oeuvres. Behind us I can see Tabitha barreling after us. Malcolm leans from one window, shielding his eyes against the battering winds. A gun is in his spare hand.

  And we’re getting closer.

  The flares of the Russians’ teleportation grow larger, from twinkling sparks, to flashlight rays, to spotlight glows.

  “Batteries,” Clyde says from the back seat. “They must be carrying batteries.”

  I think. “How much power to make a jump?”

  “Assuming they have car batteries?”

  “Sure.” I breathe slowly, trying to keep the adrenaline from pushing frustration into my voice.

  Clyde cocks his head, trembles. “They have enough electricity to power somewhere in the vicinity of three thousand jumps, I’d say.”

  “Can we run them down?”

  “The batteries?”

  “Of course the batteries!” My cool is definitely starting to fray.

  “Many potential definitions of that sentence.” Clyde sounds like he’s trying to impersonate HAL.

  “Let’s go with the obvious one.”

  “Average of fifty-six yards per jump. Average charge…” Clyde mumbles to himself. “Distance… Assuming taking as direct a route as… Avoiding major…” He cocks his head, straightens it. “We’d have to double the number of jumps they need to take. Approximately.”

  I stare at the growing blasts of electrical light racing ahead of us. Double. How do you divert someone who can blink through fifty-plus yards of space?

  Visions of dropping massive cages with hundred-feet-thick walls flash through my head, but being shy of a week, five hundred engineers, and a limitless supply of lead that may not be so helpful.

  “We have to distract them,” I say.

  “You have a plan?” Felicity arches an eyebrow.

  “We have to make them stop and fight us.”

  “Why in God’s name would they do that?” Devon takes a break from trying to choke the life from the steering wheel to sound incredulous.

  But I’m picturing Jasmine again, that little black bag on the riverbank of the Thames. I picture the red glaze that overtook the world.

  “They fight us because we piss them off. They fight us because we make them hurt.”

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  “Get us closer,” I tell Devon.

  “What, in the name of all that is holy, do you think I’m trying to do? This is hardly how I idle down to the shops. I think going one-ten is, in fact, the polar bloody opposite of idling. Though of course if you have an alternate definition, or some spare dictionary upon you—”

  “Faster!” I cut her off.

  To her credit, Devon complies. I grit my teeth. I aim the speaker of the space-time disruptor. Fire flares and dies, rushing past us in whispers of searing air. Tabitha does her best to match our pace. We race down the streets, almost parallel.

  We edge closer. Closer. But I still need to be closer.

  From Tabitha’s car, Malcolm starts firing. Even over the tear of the wind I hear the explosive percussion of each shot. He fires slowly, methodically. Boom. Boom. Boom. He has one hand up almost covering his eyes. The gun is held out like a new-fangled lance, the police cruiser his twenty-first-century steed. Like some knight of old come to save us. Boom. Boom. Boom.

  I count the flashes of light ahead of us now. Seven. I list them off in my head. Urve, Joseph, Ivan, Ekaterina, Leo, Katerina and… the woman in the van, the one who had warned Leo he was going to hurt himself while he beat seven shades of shit out of me. I wonder who she was in the file. Who we missed. I wonder if I’ll ever see her face before one or both of us die.

  Boom. Boom. Boom. Malcolm ducks back into the car, reloads. I turn out of the wind, suck in a tortured breath, hold it, turn back. A Russian blinks into existence, maybe ninety yards away. We close the distance. Eighty yards. Sixty. He vanishes. Reappears, but we’re closer now, on his heels. He’s only eighty-five yards away now. We close. We close. Fifty-five yards. He disappears. Reappears. Sixty yards. Forty. Disappears. Reappears. Fifty yards. OK, it’s on.

  I twist around in my seat. “Clyde, I need you.”

  “How can I help you?” Clyde sounds like an ATM machine.

  I lean out my open window. We’re alongside Tabitha’s car now. The barrel flare of Malcolm’s pistol is almost close enough to warm my ear. It’s like he’s trying to hit air, though, and the Russians know it. We need a broader field of damage. Something they’ll have a harder time avoiding.

  “You remember the lion in Trafalgar Square?” I twist back, yell at Clyde as he leans out the window, wind tearing his lank blond hair into a streaming tail. “The one you chopped in two?”

  “Sinsdale.” Clyde is barely audible above the wind.

  “How big a space can you paint with that bastard?”

  Clyde’s head twists. He ducks back into the car, I follow suit.

  “You want me to create an area that they will teleport into?”

  “Hell yes I do.”

  “That will cause them to be sliced in two.”

  And where does that moral dilemma fit in to Clyde’s shedding of humanity? “That’s kind of the point,” I tell him.

  Clyde nods. He ducks out the window, stretches out a hand, bows his head. I can’t hear the words, but I see the edges of his jaw work. Then a bellow. He sags back into the car, panting. I spin, watch the points of light. Less than fifty yards away. They jump.

  At the leading edge, one spark turns from blue to red. A detonation ahead of the bleeding line of disturbed space-time. A silhouette framed in red and yellow. A silhouette splitting. Two halves of a body peeling away. One up—an almost elegant arc—the other down, tumbling, rolling, ungainly and splayed, two sticks of meats sprayed over the ground. The spinning torso sheds strings of viscera, comes down, collides with the ground. Half of a Russian grinds along the ground. Devon swerves to avoid it.

  Seven flashes of light,
reduced to six.

  Our first Russian down. The violence of the death keeps me from fist pumping though.

  And then ahead of us, six flares are reduced to four. I scan wildly. Where did—

  A blast of blue light to the right. A woman on the hood of Tabitha’s car. I wrestle for my gun.

  And then, another blast of blue. Directly in front of us, filling the windshield, eclipsing the street. I throw up a hand trying to shield my eyes. Too late. Devon flaps ineffectively at the sun shade.

  And then, there, in the fading glare, balanced wildly on top of the car’s hood: the portly, tweed-encased Joseph Punin. Pummelled by wind, he crouches there, face contorted by fury. His space-glove is held way above his head. I can see fresh plates of metal roughly riveted over the old. Something that looks too much like flesh crusted around the edge. Repair work after our last encounter.

  And then the time for appreciating the enemy’s armament is over. Punin slams the glove through the windshield, turns it white with cracks. He tears the glass away in one movement, fills the car with howling wind.

  And if I was looking for a fight, I just found one.

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  Devon screams. The glove comes at her head. I want to go for my sword, but thanks to Clyde, I’m fully aware of how badly I’m positioned for that. Instead I punch at the man’s legs.

  The angle’s wrong, and the wind is wild, and the distance too far, and I just graze his ankle, but Punin is balancing on the hood of a car going over a hundred miles per hour, and sometimes a graze is all it takes.

  He goes down, the blow turned into an ugly flail. His metal fingers punch through the metal of the hood. He drags six inch long tears in the metal. He dangles there, a fish hooked.

  He blinks away. Suddenly gone in a spark of light.

  “Where?” Aiko shouts against the roar of the wind filling the car.

  I stare around. A woman I don’t recognize is clinging to the hood of Tabitha’s car. Malcolm empties a magazine at her.

  A thump from the roof of our car. Five fingers crash down, punch five holes in the car’s ceiling. Aiko yells out.