Halfheroes

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  Daniel tried to clarify his meaning. "It means I'll get there when I get there."

  Abos looked confused again. Daniel often forgot that he wasn't talking to a human being. Moments like this reminded him. Whatever Abos was, despite sharing human DNA with George, Cressida, and Station scientist Roger Sullivan, she definitely wasn't the tall, athletic-looking black woman she appeared to be. He spoke again before she could say anything.

  "As soon as I can, okay?"

  Abos stepped into the forest. Seconds later, Daniel saw her helmet appear just above the trees. It was early evening—Daniel had made sure his appointment at the clinic was their last of the day—but still hours before sunset. He tried not to blink, determined not to miss the moment she left. Her head dropped into the foliage below. He kept his eyes fixed on the spot he had last seen her and was rewarded by a glimpse of Abos heading upwards at just under the speed of sound. A sonic boom would draw attention. Her progress was still stunningly fast. It registered in Daniel's brain as a grey smudge between the tops of the trees and the base of the clouds, like a scratch on the lens of his eye that faded in seconds.

  Certain she had gone, he undid his belt, popped his trouser button, and put his hand inside his pants, groaning with relief as he gently scratched his throbbing groin.

  It was a long ride with a sore crotch.

  Daniel picked his way through the M25 rush hour traffic. He was travelling clockwise, despite knowing it would add a few minutes to the trip. If he had turned east instead of west when getting on to the motorway, he would have had to take Dartford Tunnel. Daniel didn't like being underground these days. Not if he had a choice.

  At least he could make progress even when cars, vans, and lorries had slowed to a crawl. Within forty-five minutes of leaving the Surrey lay-by, he had flicked on his indicator and swung the Yamaha's nose north onto the M11.

  He thought about his early days at Station when he found out he wasn't the only child of his superhero father, The Deterrent. Abos had been a busy boy. The number of pregnancies he had left behind during his two-year spree in the limelight was still unknown, but it may have been hundreds. Most of Abos's children hadn't survived puberty. Daniel's own offspring had fared even worse. His DNA had been used to create monsters.

  Hence the vasectomy. He wanted no more of fatherhood. The decision had been an easy one. Maybe, just maybe, he would have a normal relationship one day. This operation made things simpler.

  Daniel had bought a farmhouse in Cornwall, only a few miles away from the cottage he'd stayed in after destroying Station. George had left him enough money for many lifetimes. She'd also left instructions on how to contact her criminal connections, allowing him to create multiple false identities for himself and Abos.

  No one but the conspiracy theorists believed The Deterrent was alive anymore, and information concerning Daniel's continuing existence was buried along with the rest of Station's secrets. They were off the grid, invisible.

  Daniel made his first stop near Stansted Airport, watching the planes come and go as he sipped coffee and surreptitiously scratched his balls. He felt a strange distance between himself and the other travellers. He knew he should feel closer to his fellow-humans than he did to Abos. But he didn't. If he hadn't developed powers, he might have been one of these weary travellers. That tired-looking dad with baby sick on his shoulder. That businessman scribbling figures on a notepad for his bored colleague. What about the teacher in charge of those teenagers, having a sneaky cigarette himself? Any of those lives might have been Daniel's.

  He wondered what they made of him. He looked forbidding, unapproachable. Daniel carried himself in a way designed to discourage curiosity, walking with a bodybuilder's froggish gait, keeping his head don, avoiding eye contact unless it was necessary, keeping conversations to a minimum. His bulk was intimidating enough to put people off. As he looked around, he saw people look hastily away.

  Good luck finding a girlfriend if everyone is scared of you.

  Just as the thought entered his mind, he glanced at a group of nuns at one of he tables. One of them was looking at him. A pretty face, younger than he'd expected. Blue eyes. She smiled at him, an open, unfeigned, happy smile from one human being to another. He smiled back, the chasm between himself and everyone else closing a little.

  Yeah. You've still got it, Daniel. You could pull a nun.

  He laughed at the thought. The pretty nun chuckled to herself before nodding at him and turning back to her companions.

  He didn't wonder at the sense of kinship. The nun had decided not to have children, too. There were differences, of course. Daniel doubted the nun had previous children who were murderous, genetically modified half-breeds. Also, the nun's childlessness was due to celibacy. Daniel, once the bruising had faded, hoped to be as un-celibate as possible.

  He got back on the road, heading north-east.

  The traffic thinned the further he went. He stopped once more, in Norwich, grabbing a sandwich and eating it standing by his bike. By the time he set out on the final leg of the journey, the sun was down, the roads were twisting, and his bollocks were healing nicely.

  7

  A brief summer shower came and went as he reached Cromer, fat droplets sizzling on the Yamaha's exhaust. Daniel pushed up his visor. As he negotiated the cars in the town centre, he caught the first salt-tang smell of the sea. He slowed to walking speed to let a group of giggling women cross drunkenly in front of him.

  Daniel left the bike on the Esplanade and walked towards the pier. There was no need to call Abos. He could see her from a few hundred yards away, staring out at the black, rumbling sea. As if aware of him, she turned and waved. He waved back and quickened his pace.

  Abos met him halfway, and they walked along the cliff path, heading south-east.

  "Ever heard of Black Shuck?"

  Daniel shook his head, dropping his customary bodybuilder's walk to keep up with Abos.

  "It's a local legend, hundreds of years old. A huge dog, with eyes like flaming coals. It appeared in churches, along roadsides, and in fields, terrorising people."

  "A dog?"

  Daniel had stopped walking. Abos turned and beckoned him on without slowing. Daniel broke into a jog to catch up.

  "Seriously? We're here for a dog?"

  "You have accepted me as both male and female."

  "Yeah, true, but... human. You're human. Well, not human, but, um..."

  Daniel was quick to see the flaws in his own reasoning. Finding out Abos was not confined to a single gender should have warned him off lazy reasoning.

  "Any species?" he said. "You could be any species at all?"

  Abos turned onto a narrow path leading down to the beach. It was fully dark now, the moon obscured by clouds.

  "Yes, any species. In theory. As long as the requisite amount of genetic material is provided."

  Abos's voice was faint. Daniel realised he had slowed down, and couldn't even see the path, let alone his companion.

  "Shit."

  Daniel stepped forward and missed the path completely. He fell about fifteen feet, landing on his side in the sand with a wumph, which sent half a dozen of Cromer's famous residents scuttling sideways for cover as fast as their claws could take them.

  He stood up and brushed sand from his clothes. "Should have just done that in the first place. Quicker."

  Abos loomed out of the darkness. "Are you all right? It's this way."

  Daniel followed, the sea a constant murmur on his left.

  "How much genetic material do you need?" When Abos had first taken on human form, the catalyst had been the blood from a broken nose. Which was how much, exactly? Daniel had never thought about it. Half a cup? A tablespoon? When he had brought Abos back, he had used ten millilitres of George's blood to start the process.

  "I don't know. When I'm dormant, I have no awareness."

  "Tell me about this dog, then - Black Shack?"

  "Shuck. The first recorded sighting was in the sixteent
h century when it appeared in two Suffolk churches during a storm. They thought it had come from hell. There are dozens of other sightings from every other generation, right up to the present day."

  "And it's supposed to be knocking about around here somewhere? In Cromer?"

  "Well, the legend confines it to East Anglia. But dogs don't live for hundreds of years."

  "Even giant dogs from hell?"

  Abos considered the question, falling into one of her familiar silences.

  "I was being facetious," said Daniel.

  "Oh. Okay."

  She had come to a stop in front of a crumbling piece of land, which looked like every other crumbing piece of land. Rocky, sandy, grassed over in places. She turned back to Daniel.

  "In my first body, I was over a foot taller than Roger Sullivan, the scientist whose DNA started my awakening. When I came back using Cressida's blood, I was much taller than her, which is also the case with my current form."

  Daniel had only ever seen George in a wheelchair, or—after her death—in bed, but he knew she hadn't been close to six feet, unlike the woman standing beside him.

  "The process that forms my bodies also improves on the original. So I searched for accounts of humans, or any other creatures, that were bigger than average. Black Shuck was just one of many possibilities."

  Abos was staring at one spot on the beach. Daniel could see nothing unusual about it.

  "The sightings were far more regular during one period in the late nineteenth century. During that time, a few differences to earlier accounts drew my attention. The Black Shuck they described only appeared in a small geographical area. And one detail, mentioned in five separate accounts, was the most telling of all."

  Alongside an improvement in vocabulary, Abos seemed to have developed a propensity to build dramatic tension. At least, that was Daniel's thought until Abos turned away, leaving her story unfinished. He stepped forward and tapped her on the arm.

  "What detail?"

  Abos didn't respond. Although he was inured to her long silences, they could still be frustrating.

  "You said one detail was the most telling. What was it?"

  Abos brought her attention away from the rocks and back to Daniel.

  "Oh. The eyes. All accounts say they glowed. But between eighteen eighty-four and eighteen ninety-seven, they didn't glow like coals. They were described as being more like lanterns, or candles, or even, in one case, stars. But they all agreed on one thing: the colour."

  "Gold?"

  "Gold."

  With impeccable timing, a gap appeared between clouds, and moonlight illuminated the scene. Among the pebbles on the beach, Daniel noticed at least a dozen, small, perfectly round, white stones. He supposed it was some natural phenomenon.

  Abos held a hand towards the rock face and, with a loud crack that sent a few dozing gulls wheeling upwards, a fissure appeared, widening quickly. It opened to a gap about two feet wide and four feet high. Inside was thick, impenetrable blackness.

  "Here," said Abos, shrugging off her rucksack and placing it on the sand. Reaching inside, she took out a thick plastic sheet. Each side was dotted with metal eyelets threaded through with a cord.

  "How can you be so sure?"

  Abos smoothed the plastic sheet flat onto the beach. A light gust of wind threatened to lift the corners, so she weighed them down with stones.

  "The Cromer Black Shuck was shot by a retired Colonel called Alfred Smythe. His account was in the local paper. He claimed he had shot the animal, and it had fallen from the cliffs. As he couldn't produce a body, he was dismissed as delusional. His insistence that the tide must have taken the body was laughed at, judging by the letters page the following week."

  "You think the body didn't disappear."

  "I came here yesterday afternoon. I know it didn't."

  "How?"

  "I could sense it when I got close. Like being tickled by a blade of grass. So soft, so easy to miss. But once I got within about half a mile, it was unmistakable."

  Abos took off her jacket. She reached into the hole, stretching into the gap she had created.

  "Why didn't you do this yesterday? Why now?"

  "I wanted you to be here."

  A movement caught his eye, and Daniel looked at Abos's arm. As he stared, a dark, headless snake crept along her skin, followed by another, then a third. The snakes stopped moving when they reached the material of her T-shirt, but others joined them, sliding over the bodies of their fellows. Abos's arm was soon thick with a slowly moving mass of slime.

  She stood up. Her arm was covered, her hand now concealed behind a shapeless, writhing mitten. All colours were rendered in the blues, greys, and blacks of night, but Daniel didn't need light to know the slime was the colour of mushy peas.

  Abos place her hand on the plastic sheet and the slime moved down her flesh, becoming a pool. When her arm was completely revealed, she folded the corners of the sheet together and pulled the cord tight to form a sack.

  Daniel said the first thing that came into his head.

  "Wow. Much better than using a tea urn."

  He followed Abos back up the cliff path, still talking.

  "I mean, the urn wasn't a bad idea. It did the job, right? But this is great. Watertight, well, slime-tight, portable... I mean, you can fold it up when you're not using it. Brilliant! I should have thought of it. Lugging that tea urn halfway across London with a broken wrist. I'm babbling, aren't I?"

  They were at the top of the cliffs. Now that the moon was out, Daniel could see a golf course, the nearest hole about twenty yards from the cliff edge.

  He remembered the strange round white stones on the beach.

  "Golf balls," he said.

  Abos looked concerned. "Are they still hurting?"

  It took Daniel a few seconds to work out what she was referring to.

  "Actually, they feel fine." They did, too. He hadn't scratched for at least thirty minutes.

  Abos put her helmet back on.

  "I'll see you back at the house," she said.

  Daniel did a quick mental calculation.

  "I'll stay at a hotel tonight. It's a fair ride to Cornwall. Might not get back until tomorrow evening. Woah!"

  He looked down at the golf course. They were hovering about a hundred feet above it.

  "You're supposed to ask first."

  "Sorry. I want to get it back home. Fast."

  Her excitement was easy to understand. Daniel supposed that, if he were the only human being alive, finding a companion of his own species might be a pretty big moment.

  "Okay," he said. "Don't forget the Yammy."

  They started to drift over the town, back towards the pier.

  "We'll need to make a stop, anyway," said Abos.

  "A stop? Why?"

  "We need blood."

  8

  Abos set Daniel and the bike down on top of the Shard, a striking glass tower dominating the London skyline. There was a good practical reason for this - if a man, a woman, and a motorbike needed to descend from the sky without being spotted, choosing the highest point in the city as a landing site gave them decent odds of getting away with it.

  Abos dropped from the top of the Shard and headed for the Thames, landing in deep shadows under one of the city's more anonymous bridges. The streetlamp nearby had been smashed, and there were discarded syringes on the concrete. Drug pushers waited in doorways and in cars with darkened windows, while thin, tired-looking girls in short skirts and heels waited for customers.

  Abos kept her helmet on and walked briskly out of the darkness, crossing the street and heading towards the lights of a nearby hospital. Someone hissed an invitation from one of the darkened cars, but didn't pursue it when she ignored them.

  The hospital was as well-lit as the riverside had been dark, and cars and ambulances kept up a steady stream of traffic at the entrance. Dockfields was a training hospital with a blood storage facility. George's contacts had provided a list of instituti
ons across the country with blueprints showing the location of stored blood in each. Dockfields was one of the busiest.

  Abos kept her helmet on, flicking up the visor to show half her face. She held her rucksack in front of her as if she were getting ready to hand it to someone. She walked into the main entrance, looked up at the signs, then turned left past the desk towards Pathology.

  The nearest receptionist called after Abos.

  "Hey! Can I help you?"

  "Blood," said Abos without slowing, holding up the rucksack. The receptionist took in the leathers, helmet and sense of urgency projected by the tall woman, assumed she was a courier, and waved her on before returning to her call.

  Because Abos struggled with deception, she had spoken the truth. She was there for blood.

  The fridges were full in the Blood Issue Room, and Abos went straight to the door bearing that day's date. She took the first pack she found, then grabbed another two, hoping the next trips she made would be as successful as the search for Black Shuck. She put them in the rucksack, turned around, and saw a shocked older woman in a white coat standing in the open doorway.

  "What on earth do you think you're doing?"

  Abos spoke without guile.

  "I need blood."

  The woman went straight for the walkie-talkie on her belt.

  "I need Security at the Blood Issue room now. And call the police."

  There was only one door, and the woman was blocking it. Abos ran straight towards her. For a moment, it looked like she would stand her ground, but once it was clear the leather-clad female wasn't stopping, the woman flattened herself against the wall and let Abos pass.

  At the end of a long corridor was a fire escape. Abos headed towards it, keeping her speed down to a human level while she knew she was being watched by cameras. She heard running steps from around the corner at the end of the corridor and knew she wouldn't make it without a confrontation.

  She changed course and ducked into another corridor, which had doors leading off either side. There was no exit at the end of it.