“No?” Friedrich sounds more curious than annoyed.
“No,” Hermann grunts, arm creaking down. The gap between my skull and imminent death becomes noticeably narrower. I scramble backwards.
Even as his right arm is crushed, Hermann twists and smashes his left fist into the side of Friedrich’s skull. “You are a liar!” He lands a blow. “You are death!” Another. “You are betrayal.” Another blow. “And I will fight you until I fall.”
“Then you shall fall.”
Friedrich lands a massive backhand across Hermann’s midriff. The Uhrwerkmänn sails over my head, lands with an epic crash.
And that’s it, that’s the moment.
It’s on.
Friedrich’s troops fall upon the cowering Uhrwerkmänner. Many go down, hunkering. Metal hands clutched over metal skulls. Friedrich’s troops grab them. Like so many neanderthals claiming their brides, they drag them across the floor by legs and arms.
Other Uhrwerkmänner turn and simply flee as fast as they can. Not many make it far. Their own limbs betray them. Decaying gearwork makes them slow. They limp, and they hobble, and they are brought down.
And a number simply surrender. Hold up their hands, bow their heads, and start marching to the beat of Friedrich’s drum.
And a few, just a few, stand and fight.
It doesn’t go well for them.
I see one Uhrwerkmänn, ten feet of bronze and steel, land a titanic blow. A steel chest plate buckles beneath his fist. Gears burst from its edges spilling glittering onto the floor. Friedrich’s footsoldier stumbles back, grabbing at his gut. Oil spurts rhythmically from its mouth. The Uhrwerkmänn raises a fist in victory.
Three of Friedrich’s men pile on to him. Their fists rise and fall, a steady rhythmic pounding. One of them stands, heaves on something, twists. The Uhrwerkmänn’s victorious arm is ripped from its socket. Friedrich’s man starts to whale on the Uhrwerkmänn, using the limb like a massive flail.
“To me!” I yell to MI37. “To me!”
The place is chaos, and we are barely even bystanders. The scale of this fight is beyond us.
Someone probably should have mentioned that to Kayla.
She ignores me utterly. Sword out, she flies at one of Friedrich’s Uhrwerkmänner. Her sword lands in a hip joint, and she twists like a gymnast, hoisting her whole body six feet up into the air, standing upside down on her hands, clenched on the sword’s hilt. Her legs smoothly wrap around the Uhrwerkmänn’s neck and she pivots her body up, sword wrenching free through pneumatic tubing that whips and curls in the aftermath. She uses her momentum, spinning around the Uhrwerkmänn’s neck, until she sits astride its shoulders. She leans back, hanging upside down for a moment. Her sword lies along the length of her body. Then her stomach muscles flex and she sits bolt upright, the sword blade finding the joint at the base of the Uhrwerkmänn’s skull, driving home, until it bursts out from beneath its chin.
The Uhrwerkmänn stumbles forward a step, then crashes to its knees. Kayla rips her sword free and rolls down its back as it falls face first into the dirt.
OK, so maybe we are still in this fight.
Tabitha and Clyde are with me. Felicity and Hannah too.
“Here,” says Felicity, “catch.” She reaches into a jacket pocket, tosses me a matte black cylinder.
I catch it, stare. “Is that a grenade?”
Felicity nods. Her penchant for carrying grenades with her at all times is beginning to worry me. I mean… does she take them to the supermarket? Is she ready for facing down an enemy emplacement somewhere in the frozen goods aisle?
Hannah looks at Felicity expectantly.
Felicity grimaces. “I’m really sorry. I only have two.”
Hannah shakes her head, somewhere between resignation and disbelief. “Fucking typical.”
I scan for Friedrich. There’s a bastard who could really use a combustible suppository. Something to shift that rod out of his arse.
He’s halfway across the room. Volk… the Uhrwerkgerät tucked under his arm. And that’s not good. We need that back.
I take off at speed. Around me, massive bodies smash and crash against each other. I dart left, right, trying to keep on as straight a course as possible, trying to gain on the massive Uhrwerkmänn. But with legs three times as long as mine, he doesn’t even have to try to outpace me.
Two Uhrwerkmänner stumble into my path. I twist between the legs of one, bouncing off one limb, twisting to avoid being crushed by the other as it scissors back, the body above rocking back under the impact of a hammer-blow punch to its jaw. Then the legs of the second Uhrwerkmänn block my path. I plunge right. The first Uhrwerkmänn sweeps the leg. I hurdle its oncoming limb, land, glance up to see the second Uhrwerkmänn has been less nimble. It totters above me.
I dive to the ground, duck, roll. The Uhrwerkmänn lands two inches behind me. Dust kicked up from its fall covers me. I scramble to my feet hacking and choking.
I see Friedrich. He’s at the stairs, ducking into darkness, still far too far ahead of me. I dig deep, try to find another gear.
I hit the stairs, my feet pounding. But by now other Uhrwerkmänner are ahead of me. One of Friedrich’s soldiers has an Uhrwerkmänn by the foot and is dragging him up step by step. The body crashes up and down, filling the corridor with sound. I make time, reach the fallen Uhrwerkmänn. I jump, land on its broad chest, keep running. I launch myself at the captor’s arm. I land hard, my chin bouncing off steel.
Damnit, Kayla makes this shit look easy.
The Uhrwerkmänn senses my arrival. It’s probably the way I slammed into his arm. He looks down at me, grunts. He drops the leg he’s dragging, pulls back his arm. I wrap my legs around the limb, trying to hang on. Then I realize that he’s about to smash me into the wall of the stairs and see how much of me he can leave there.
I let go. Above my head his arm slams into the wall. I lie on the floor and hurt for a moment. The Uhrwerkmänn looks down at me, roars.
Well, hell, it wasn’t like I was going to catch up with Friedrich anyway.
I lob the grenade up, a soft underhand toss from a lying position. It’s a good thing I played cricket in school. The grenade hits the back of the thing’s metal throat.
A hard flat bang decapitates it.
The shockwave slams me harder into the floor. My spine gets all intimate with a number of my organs. The world goes out of focus for a while.
By the time I make it to my feet, the fight is over. Hermann and the non-psychotic members of the Uhrwerkmänner race have definitely lost.
If they looked halfway to the grave before, now the Uhrwerkmänner look like it’s only their necks that are still poking out from the soil. On the other hand, that’s considerably better than a large number of their friends.
I pick my way between mechanical body parts. Felicity, Clyde, Tabitha, Kayla, and Hannah stand in a small knot near the ruins of the amphitheater. Kayla is soaked in oil from head to foot. An all-singing, all-dancing, all-murdering silhouette. For a moment I flash back to the future echo and my step falters. But we’ve misstepped enough in the past few days. Time is increasingly of the essence. And there’s no room for me to stumble anymore.
But the promise of that figure. It’s more real than ever now.
God… Felicity… She had so much staked on this… this… supposed victory. God, that word almost makes me laugh. This was supposed to be a victory. Jesus.
They watch me come, all of them. A silence that grows more oppressive as I approach. Some surreal tableau. Man and machine and the furniture of defeat.
“Why?”
It’s Hermann who breaks the silence when I am still twenty yards away. I stop, not understanding the question, quirk my head to one side.
“Why have you come back?” he asks. His voice is flat, uninflected. He sounds more machine now than ever. That spark of animation knocked askew in the fight.
And still I don’t understand.
“What further indignity d
o you have to wreak upon us?”
What? Seriously? I tap my chest, just to be sure. “Me?”
For a moment Hermann is utterly still. Utterly silent. I fear the spark of life may have been snuffed out entirely.
“YES! YOU!” The words explode out of him. He is barely able to contain the rage of them. He hurls his body into them, arms thrashing. “All of this! You bring the Uhrwerkgerät to our door! You hand it to Friedrich. You end us. You end our hope. All of it is you!” He sags, staring at me, the energy trickling out of him. “What do you have left to do? Tell me.” He straightens, finds the energy to scream once more. “TELL ME!”
But again… really? I tap my chest for a second time. “Definitely me you’re talking about?”
He takes a step toward me. I see Felicity reaching for her shoulder holster. Kayla is pulling out her sword once more. But I’ve survived worse than Hermann’s anger.
“You’re sure it’s me you’re yelling at and not your betraying, backstabbing, shit of a friend who sold you up the fucking river? You sure you want to accuse the only fucking help you have left?” Hermann isn’t the only one who can get in touch with his inner bloody rage. I gave blood for this fucking machine. Repeatedly. I am sick of his shit.
Hermann isn’t cowed. “You are the ones who turned him into the bomb. Into the end of hope. It was you who promised a solution.” Hermann spits. His pilot light flicks to life. Flaming oil splashes down, no more than a few yards to my left. “Lies! All of it lies!”
“That wasn’t even me!” The injustice of it probably shouldn’t sting. And I certainly don’t want to take his finger of blame and point it squarely at Clyde and Tabitha. But come on. I was the one actually trying to be the voice of reason here.
“Still you lie!” Hermann yells. “You cannot stop. You are full of lies! It spills from you.”
The Uhrwerkmänner peanut bloody gallery offer no bloody commentary on this. They seem content with standing around looking shell-shocked. Though, to be fair about three-quarters of their buddies were either just killed, kidnapped, or coerced into defection.
“We covered the bit where we’re your only allies, right?” I mention.
Hermann laughs. “Our allies? You think we want your help?”
“I think,” Kayla interjects, “that you might want to watch your feckin’ tone.”
Hermann looks down at her. At every oil-soaked inch of her. Clyde hoists a fistful of batteries out of one pocket. And just for a moment we look like a bunch of people you do not want to fuck with.
“Get out,” Hermann spits. “You are not welcome here. We do not wish for allies such as you.”
I just stare at him for a moment. Because… just, really? It seems so absurd. And I get that we screwed up here. I get that the Uhrwerkgerät is our fault. But the fact that they even had something to screw up was because of us. And if they want to clear this up, they will need us. When there were four times their number they were already monstrously screwed. The odds did not improve for them today.
“Get out,” Hermann repeats. And there’s no fight left in him. But he won’t beg either. The pride hasn’t been beaten out of him yet. So he just repeats the words, in the same flat tones that we started. “Get out.”
I throw my hands up. “I just…” I look at Felicity. I’ve seen her in better moods.
“Come on,” she says. She’s holding a tight rein on everything. The tension is clear in her voice.
I shrug, turn on my heel, and walk away.
46
We’re almost back at the abandoned factory before I trust myself to speak again. We’ve trudged along the tunnel in utter silence. Tabitha has stalked well ahead of the main group; Clyde, far behind. Felicity has a thousand yard stare. I fear it’s going to leave a crater when she crashes back to earth.
But I can’t keep my incredulity bottled up any more. “Me?” I say. “Us? He accused us? Friedrich was right there going through the A to Z how of Volk had screwed us all over, and his takeaway message is that we’re to blame?”
Getting it off my chest doesn’t even really make me feel better.
“What the hell else was he supposed to do?” Felicity’s words fly out like a lash. I almost wince at the blow.
“What?” I manage.
“We made the goddamn bomb in front of them. Friedrich has been searching for it, and it didn’t exist until we made it for him. Us. Of course he goddamn blames us. We’re to blame.” Red spots mar her cheeks. Her gaze stabs violently around the group. Tabitha. Clyde. And then lingering on Hannah. Hannah whose report will, without a doubt, damn us.
And finally Felicity’s gaze comes to rest on me.
“This was meant to sort everything out. This goddamn bomb is meant to kill you.”
She says it as if it’s somehow my fault.
“I was the one person saying maybe we should hold off and double check,” I protest. “That was me.”
For not the first time in the world, the technically accurate answer is not the correct one. But what should I do? Tell her it’s going to be OK? I haven’t had the luxury of that conviction for a long time. Tell her that the universe is probably going to end before Hannah has a chance to sink us? I can’t say I’m wholly convinced that would help.
While I try to figure it out, Felicity’s rage moves on. “And you damn two,” she says, simultaneously trying to cast her ire both to the front and the back of the group. “You bloody attest to me that you have this sorted out. And then this? Because Tabitha’s goddamn panty liner is dry a few days too long? That’s why the world is ending?”
Jesus. I’m not even convinced Kayla would go that far. Maybe this is what the inevitability of death is. The joy of living without consequences. Short-term solutions are suddenly applicable to every problem.
“I know.”
It’s not the response I expected. It’s not even the person I expected to respond. It’s Tabitha, standing at the front of the group. Not bristling with rage. Not ready for the fight. But small, and bitter, and wretched. And I would have thought that if any of us wanted the world to end it would be her.
But her confession, whatever motivates it, seems to take the wind out of Felicity’s sails. Her rage sags.
“Let’s just get out of here. Work out what the hell we do next.”
Kayla uppercuts the substantial amount of machinery that blocks our exit out of the way, and slowly we drag ourselves out of the bowels of our defeat.
TWO HOURS LATER. ON THE ROAD
Felicity was uninterested in giving the other members of MI37 a lift back to Oxford. Instead, they ride with Kayla. Which must be fun. Not that sitting, staring at the rain hitting the windscreen, and listening to some interminable dirge on Radio Three is actually a barrel of giggling schoolchildren.
Finally, thankfully, Felicity punches the stereo off. In fact, she punches it so hard the little LCD display cracks. She doesn’t seem to care.
It strikes me that this is the moment when the boyfriend says something comforting.
“It’s going to be—” I start.
“If you say ‘all right’ you’re going the same way as the stereo.”
I nod. “Fair point.”
Tires thrum. Rain drums. I start to miss the radio.
“We need a plan,” I say finally. “We just need to work out how to move forward. That’ll put things in perspective.”
“In perspective?” There’s a hollow shock in Felicity’s voice. “You’re going to die.”
Well, that’s one way to derail a conversation. Just deliver a punch to my keenest fears as directly and harshly as possible.
“Yeah,” I manage eventually. “The whole it-being-prophesied-by-the-universe-in-a-way-that-is-so-profound-it-echoes-forward-in-time thing sort of brought that home to me.”
Ahead of us, a stream of braking cars paints the rain running down the windscreen a violent crimson.
“But… But… But…” Felicity is unusually hesitant. I look up from my hands in my lap,
realize she’s crying. Tears run down her face, pulling her mascara south.
The cracks in me, in my head, my heart, go just a little deeper.
“But we were meant to fix it,” she says. “Like we always do. And everything we did… everything we went through… Except it’s still going to happen. It’s still going to fucking happen.”
“Yeah,” I nod. And I should have more than that, but I don’t. I am hollow. And in the absence of words I should reach out to her, comfort her. But I can’t even do that. I am paralyzed by the weight of it.
“There’s no way to move forward,” she says, utterly desolate, utterly remorseless in her grief. “It’s all pointless.”
The cars continue to brake. We grind to a slow, slow halt. She sits there, like a paper doll the world has crushed up and thrown away.
I turn my gaze to stare out at the sodden world. “Remember back in September?” I say. “We went to that new Italian place. It was a really sunny day after all that rain so we decided to walk. But it was halfway across Oxford. And then I spilled the meatballs down my shirt. I mean, just completely. I don’t think I could have got more on me if I’d tried. And you would not let us call a cab, despite the fact you were laughing so hard you could barely walk.”
“Yes,” Felicity says, her voice salt-lake-bed flat. “I remember.”
“I was so happy then,” I say. “I remember thinking, this is perfect. I don’t ever want anything to change. I want it to be like this forever.”
Felicity nods. Almost imperceptibly.
“It’s all fucking changed,” I say.
A long silence after that. I don’t really have anything to add. Apparently Felicity doesn’t either. Maybe there is nothing. It’s just a fact. Inevitability.
“You want to know something stupid?” Felicity says as the traffic suddenly lurches back into motion.
I almost manage a smile. “Sure.”
“Tomorrow’s our one-year anniversary.”
Oh Jesus. That is… I don’t know. It is galvanizing enough to make me finally reach out and squeeze her leg. She reaches one hand down from the steering wheel to squeeze my hand back, then replaces it.
Broken Hero Page 27
