Broken Hero

by Jonathan Wood

Without warning, a massive crash reverberates throughout the pub.

  The fist that is about to beat the literal snot out of me hesitates. Despite the imminent danger of my situation I twist around as best as I am able, trying to determine who was responsible. Was it Ephie? I have rather lost track of her in the fight. I still can’t see her.

  I look for Clyde. Did he unleash his spell, send someone spinning across the floor? But there is Tabitha still with her head locked between torso and elbow. But she’s not moving either.

  Another crash. The walls visibly vibrate. Dust erupts from between the floorboards in narrow plumes. Several pictures fall from the walls. A pint glass tumbles from a table edge, shatters.

  Kayla is holding onto the bartender’s rather bloody head. She shrugs at me, then smacks him into the bar again. He groans, but the thud is nowhere near the gravity of whatever just shook the pub.

  Still clenched in my attacker’s large fist, I reach out a hand toward her. “Stop th—” I start.

  I don’t finish.

  The floor of the bar erupts. A monumental explosion of wood and cement and steel. Pipes and wires, unmoored, slam around the room. I am thrown from my attacker’s grasp, over a table, crash backwards, as something emerges.

  At first I can’t really make it out. My vision is shaky, and I’m half upside down, and whatever is at the explosion’s heart is obscured by billowing dust and dirt. One of the men from the bar is yelling, deep baritone bellows of fear. A bare wire is snapping and crackling across the floor. I can hear water gushing out of a pipe, down into the basement.

  And there, beneath that, another sound. Something mechanical. An irregular ticking, a grinding like rusty metal on rusty metal. An angry whir. It makes me think of a thousand grandfather clocks all quietly breaking down at the same time.

  And then the dust clears.

  The man bellowing stops so short, it’s like his legs have been taken off at the knees.

  It is massive, hulking, vaguely humanoid but hewn in shades of copper and bronze. Vast curving sheets of metal define its hunched shoulders, its barrel-thick arms. Fists the size of arm chairs but with little of the implied comfort, press dented steel fingers into the floor. Its chest is a massive mesh of exposed gears, all twitching and whirling.

  It stands. The gears scream. A piercing metallic cry for help. Perched between the massive shoulders, a vaguely insectile head swings back and forth. It is all round glassy eyes and broad chattering mouth. Key-like teeth piston up and down and it emits an odd string of harsh syllables. “Da va ga sca, shna, gick.”

  It shudders, then with abrupt and terrifying speed slams its fist into a wall that looks like it probably enjoys the responsibility of some important weight-bearing duties. Bricks turn to dust.

  “Da sha va!” it howls.

  The man starts bellowing in terror again, twice as loud and twice as fast, whimpering hyperventilations making an odd backbeat.

  And you know how you can be fairly certain that the agency retreat has gone awry? When the giant mechanical robot smashes through the floor and starts to destroy everything in sight. That is exactly when.

  2

  All in all, it seems to me like a good moment to be upright. I heave myself back over the table, find my feet. I even go the whole hog and pull my gun.

  The man who was, moments ago, considering a little light reconstructive surgery to my face via the medium of his fist, backs into me hard.

  “Would you mind?” I ask.

  He spins, fists up, sees the gun, and decides to cower instead.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Then I start shooting.

  I’m not even the first one to that party. Felicity has assumed a shooter’s stance, feet squared, gun held out in front of her in both hands. She empties a magazine into the mechanical robot’s churning guts. Things ping and whine, metal screams.

  I have a worse angle. My shots smash against its massive shoulder, denting metal. They achieve little else.

  “Ma da ga ma!” the robot yells, and it starts to move.

  Its first step leaves a crater in the floor. The second almost punches a new hole into the basement. By the third it’s starting to accelerate beyond human speeds.

  It’s heading for Felicity.

  She flings herself aside, rolls over the shrapnel-laden floor, ripping her suit, hair whipping around her face. The robot’s massive foot plows into the floor inches from her, then she is gone from its path. It crashes into a wall, sends plasterboard spraying across the room.

  “Damak ma shnek!” it bellows as it turns.

  “Clyde!” is my response.

  Magic is a subtle and nuanced tool. With near infinite realities to reach into, magicians have a near infinite array of tools with which they can carefully manipulate the situation to their advantage. Typically Clyde goes for something that resembles hitting things with a large invisible hammer.

  “Meshrat al kaltak,” Clyde gibbers as nonsensically as the robot. Then he flings his arms forward. One of the robot’s vast, round shoulders abruptly becomes its vast, crumpled, and vaguely rectangular shoulder.

  Technically, I believe, Clyde is summoning the kinetic energy from a reality where a lot of things are traveling very fast all the time, but it still definitely looks like he’s hitting things with a large invisible hammer.

  “Da ga ba!” the robot howls and starts to accelerate again. The arm below its injured shoulder hangs limp. The other one whirls around in perfect circles, for all the world like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Assuming, of course, that the toddler in question is ten feet tall and made of metal.

  I keep firing. My bullets keep cracking off the metal plates down the robot’s flanks. The ricochets are barely audible over the destruction wrought by its titanic footsteps.

  Kayla flings herself over the pub’s bar, slides across the floor toward the robot’s wildly flying legs. She ducks smoothly beneath its dangling arm. Her sword lances out, smashes into a seam between two metal plates on its leg. She leaps, heaves on the sword. The blade bends violently. Then with an enormous crack, two rivets fly across the room like bullets. They smash through the bar, shred bottles, embed themselves in the wall. A metal plate catapults out from the leg at a forty-five degree angle to the rivets. It skims past the nose of one of the men from the bar, embeds itself in the ceiling with a concussive blast of plaster dust.

  Kayla flies free, curled up on herself, an angry Scottish pinball. She smashes into a wall, but somehow has her feet beneath her, even if beneath her is at a distinct right angle to its usual position. Her legs bunch, and she springs back into the fray, executing another perfect tumble in midair, landing with a grace that would make Olympic gymnasts proud.

  For all this finesse, the robot continues to blunder on in much the same way a steam roller would if someone hit it with a pea shooter. Another important-looking column is turned to matchsticks. Men dive left and right. The robot buries itself into a second wall with a scream of “Shna ka vich!”

  I pivot around, try to angle a shot at the exposed mechanics of its foot. I find myself abruptly shoulder to shoulder with Felicity. Our guns point out in parallel.

  “I’m going to go with: what the fuck?” I tell her.

  She shrugs and lets off five shots in rapid succession. They ping off the metal plating.

  “No clue,” she says. “Shoot first. Questions later.”

  As much as that is the tactic of movie villains since 1945, it does seem like sound advice. I keep firing while the robot extracts its head from the wall and shakes it free of debris. Above it the ceiling creaks ominously. I do a quick tally of beams and internal walls.

  “We’ve got to get it outside!” I shout.

  “Yeah,” Kayla says. She’s holding her sword like a javelin. “You feckin’ do that.”

  She launches her sword. It sails across the room, a steel lightning bolt, smashes into the mechanics she exposed in the robot’s leg.

  The robot goes to take a step. There
is a hideous grinding sound. It strains. And then the sword flies free with a burst of bronze cogs, tumbling end over end, until it too is buried in the bar. It lands about an inch from the head of the dazed bartender.

  “We’ve got to clear the civilians!” That thought probably should have occurred to me before one of them was almost forced into doing a unicorn impression.

  “Would you shut the feck up and start killing that feckin’ thing!”

  The robot takes a grinding step forward. Its damaged foot digs a trench through the floorboards. Its injured arm dangles. Its uninjured one smashes another important-looking support column. I could swear the ceiling is starting to sag.

  “Everybody out!” I yell.

  “Did I not just say—” Kayla starts, but this latest suggestion is a popular one. She is half-bowled over by a fleeing man, somehow still hanging onto his pint.

  Across the room another man lets out a loud, “Ooph!” and drops to the floor with his hands buried between his thighs. It’s the man who had Tabitha in a headlock. He seems to have recovered enough of his senses to let her go. Her knee is still raised after delivering a powerful blow to his genitals.

  “I said save them!” I snap. “Not engage in family planning!”

  I try to move toward the man but there’s a careening robot screaming “Da shek! Da shnek!” between me and him so that plan has to be put on hold.

  “Kayla,” Felicity snaps, “listen to Arthur and get that idiot out of here!”

  “Oh, because you totally don’t feckin’ need me.” Kayla, I think, is still out of sorts after her conversation with Ephie.

  “Clyde,” I say. “Hit the robot again.”

  Clyde mutters. His arms fly outward. The robot staggers back, good arm pinwheeling afresh as it tries to stay on its one working foot.

  “Feckin’ point taken,” Kayla grumbles, then blurs into motion, darting between staggering feet, and snatching up both the man and Tabitha.

  “Hands! Remove!” Tabitha yells. Kayla ignores her as she bodily drags her toward the door.

  The robot recovers itself, props its head against a thick wooden beam. “Nell vick shnigh!” Now it’s not worrying about the whole balance thing, it seems to be taking stock of its surroundings more. The insectile eyes flicker back and forth across the room. It lowers its head, hunches its shoulders, stalks one stumbling step forward.

  “Again, Clyde!”

  “Right on it.” Clyde is edging around the quivering walls of the pub, one hand wafting away clouds of plaster dust. “Totally hearing you and about to make my move. Never worry. It’s just I’m trying to get line of sight on his foot. Sort of want to make every spell count. Want to do that always, of course. Not suggesting frivolous spellcasting is my usual modus operandi. Very focused at all times. Professional at work. It’s just Elkman’s Push is hell on battery life.”

  “Nar bin gest!” The robot snatches a length of fallen timber from the floor and starts swishing it back and forth. A table sails toward a wall, lands minus three of its legs. Pint glasses become well-batted grenades.

  “How many batteries do you have left?” I duck under a tangle of fallen wiring. I want to get close enough so that I have a decent chance of shooting the robot in an eye, but not so close that I get turned into a cricket ball by that stick it’s wielding.

  “There’s a slim chance that I’m down to three AAs and a nine volt.”

  I pause in my approach to allow my incredulity to have its full moment. “That’s it?” That is less of a magical armament and more of a massive blow to my chances of surviving long enough to watch the six o’clock news.

  “Well, in my, you know, defense… And well, hindsight benefitting from the acuity of vision that it does, in retrospect this may resemble a phrase my mother was always fond of saying: assumptions make an ass out of both you and me. Though, mostly I think she meant me. As you probably will. Not an unfair call, I suspect. But as I was saying, I was rather assuming that the afternoon would involve more of a quiet pint and less of a battle to the death, and that affected my packing plans.”

  Which is about as catty as Clyde gets. What’s more he has a point. I peer back at the exposed electrical wiring I just ducked beneath. “Can that help you?”

  Clyde’s eyebrows pop up and he grins.

  “See,” Felicity says between potshots at the robot’s head, “that’s why I made you field lead.”

  If I wasn’t busy avoiding being beaten to death it would be quite a cool moment. As it is, the robot’s bat smashes into the ground one foot to my left. Splinters stitch a path up my leg as the beam’s end impacts on the floorboards.

  I snap off a shot, see it raise sparks off the robot’s bronze skull, and then I’m ducking and rolling as the robot sweeps the beam sideways, slamming it into my shoulder and making the world explode in pain.

  Somewhere distant, I hear Felicity yell. The pings of ricochets. A few dull clunks as other shots land home, bury themselves in gearwork.

  My shoulder feels like it took a bullet. I stumble to my feet. My hands are shaking. The white blaze of adrenaline stumbling over the abrupt agony. I can see the robot raising the beam above my head.

  I kick forward, propel myself toward its legs. I haven’t much momentum, but it’s enough to dodge the blow. I fly between its splayed feet, crash to the ground, land on my injured shoulder, and bellow in pain. I roll over, staring up at the robot’s back, trying to clutch at the injury.

  From beyond the robot, a roar from Clyde. A sound like a generator blowing.

  “—al kaltak!”

  And then a great rending of metal.

  Clyde has hit the exposed wires. Has hit a bigger power source. So he can tear a bigger hole into another reality. The robot scrabbles to stay upright, fighting its injured foot. The sound of gears crunching, metal ripping and twisting fills the world. It’s the sound of victory. Except I’m lying beneath the thing. Or, as some might describe it, right in the spot where it will land and squash me like a particularly juicy, human-shaped grape.

  I try to get my limbs all working together, try to scramble on all fours, but it’s difficult when one of the four is out of commission, and another is preoccupied with trying to keep that one safe. It is ungainly, and decidedly ineffective. The robot stumbles back a step. I feel its thigh strike my back, propel me forward. I half trip, half sprawl over a fallen chair. And then I’m down, on my back, staring as the massive machine teeters over me.

  I empty a clip at it. Anything I can do to tip its balance away from me. My bullets slam into its midriff.

  Maybe that’s what makes the machine take a step to the side. Maybe it’s capricious chance. I don’t particularly give a shit. The fact is, it steps back, past me, and I don’t become pâté.

  Instead yet another column takes the hit. I feel like we’re running out of them. From the ceiling’s groan, it seems to agree with me.

  I get my breath back long enough to expel it. “We have to get out of here.”

  “Noted!” Felicity is hustling. Clyde is on the move too, heading to the far wall, circling around toward the door.

  I scan the devastation. Wood fragments and glass shards. Exposed wiring and pipes. Plaster dust and broken picture frames. But everyone’s out. No one’s dead yet.

  Oh shit.

  At the bar, the one part of the pub still mostly intact: the bartender. Goddamn, Kayla. I knew she was hitting him too hard. He’s still slumped there, staring at where her sword landed near his head. His eyes aren’t focused.

  “One civilian still in the building!”

  I lunge forward, away from Felicity and Clyde, away from the pub’s door, and the safety of the sky not falling on my head. The ceiling groans again. Then it screams. The opposite corner of the room gives way. A great tearing crash as the contents of the room above deposit themselves on the floor. Wooden beams and brickwork spill loose. A glimpse of the sun shines through the torn-down wall, diffuse through the dust.

  “Arthur!” Felici
ty yells.

  “Almost there! Go!” I yell without looking. I make it to the bartender, grab him, heave.

  He doesn’t move.

  I heave again. He slides six inches down the bar, his head knocks into the flat of Kayla’s blade, still embedded there. He’s dead weight at the end of my arm. And apparently, when he’s dead, he’s going to weigh a shit-ton.

  “Come on, you bastard!” Bizarrely, yelling that doesn’t make him weigh less.

  To my left, there is the sound of metal doing something it shouldn’t.

  I turn, look, wish I hadn’t. The robot is up. Or mostly up. The leg Kayla injured is now an ugly twisted mess. The shoulder Clyde injured now ends in a ragged stump of broken metal, hemorrhaging black oil and something blue that could be antifreeze. Its chest is horribly ravaged—the bronze sheet that covered it contorted, half buried in the gears. I hear them scraping against the tattered metal, the grinding of axles bent well out of true. Half of its bronze skull cap has been torn away exposing chittering gears behind the wide insectile eyes.

  In its remaining hand, it still holds the wooden beam. And its eyes are fixed on me.

  “Oh crap.”

  Over the protests of my injured shoulder, I grab the bartender with both hands.

  The robot lurches forward, an ugly half-hop.

  I heave on the bartender. My shoulder screams. To keep it company, I do too.

  The robot hops again. It raises its fist, its wooden beam.

  Behind it more of the ceiling gives way. A creeping roar of descending debris, slowly filling the room.

  With a bellow, I stop hauling the bartender toward the door and reverse direction. I slam into him, putting my good shoulder into his midriff. It’s like running into a cow. At least, I assume it is. I’ve done some weird stuff because of this job but never that.

  My face is buried in the bartender’s side. The world around me is just noise. It doesn’t sound good.

  Then the bartender starts to move, sliding. Then his shoulders and head are off the bar, and he’s falling down, collapsing onto the floor. I sit down hard. I look up.

  I stare into the robot’s glass eyes.