No Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “Don’t make me pull rank, Sergeant.” That sounded cooler in my head. In the real world it’s just a bit harsh. And I’m still not convinced I should really be in charge of anyone, but I think the irony of that is lost because I really am in charge of people, and Swann’s face just goes sour.

  “I think you just did,” she says.

  Another noise above us. And I don’t want a fight here, now. I don’t want her to be pissed at me. I don’t want... I don’t want to lose this collar.

  So I head up. A man alone. With each step the thunder of my heart grows. With each step I slow, I crouch lower. By the time I get to the top of the stairs my eyes barely make it above the final riser.

  The roof’s not been done yet and it’s colder up here, the wind blowing stronger. A few stars manage to shine through the glow of Oxford’s streetlamps. I don’t need the flashlight to see.

  Outlined by moonlight, a figure crouches down by a pile of electrical cable. He’s dressed smartly—dark suit, a navy-blue tie that flaps in the wind. There’s an incongruous red toolbox on the ground next to him. His back is to me. I can’t see what he’s doing. But he can’t see me either.

  I tighten my grip on the baton. Tighten it further. It feels like either the steel or my knuckles are going to have to give out. My teeth are clamped down so hard I hear a filling creak. I can make out each bump and crevice in the concrete beneath my hand. I hear the rasp my fingertips make as I move them, getting ready to push myself up into a stand. I hear the movement of my ribs as I fill my lungs to shout.

  Then—

  —where the hell did she come from?

  A woman—five foot six, maybe a little shorter, hair loose and flapping; she’s wearing a large, red, flannel shirt, scuffed jeans. Her back is to me as well. She’s moving silently. Walking toward the man in the suit. And she’s got a sword.

  A real bloody sword.

  It’s about three feet long, the blade shining white in reflected moonlight, curved slightly, balanced lightly in her hand. She lets the tip fall, brush the ground. It scrapes, fires off pale blue sparks.

  The man at the wires hears it, stands up fast, turns around, sees her. He takes a few steps, out into the center of the room.

  I want to shout, to yell, to move, to do some-bloody-thing. But I stay there crouched, silent, paralyzed. Just waiting for it. Just like the man in the suit waits. And if I could just curse under my breath, some whispered litany of obscenity, if I could just turn away, do anything, if I could just exhale, get rid of this pregnant breath caught bloated inside me... But I just crouch and I just watch.

  She’s about a yard from him. A blade’s length away. He stands, both hands held out, but low, loose, already defeated. She still has the blade by her side. They are both as silent as I am.

  Then the woman jumps. It’s so fast I barely see it. But she’s abruptly airborne, abruptly up and to the man’s right, twisting in the air, her arm moving, and Jesus, Joseph, Mary, anybody, it’s so fast I can barely make it out, there’s barely even a blur. One moment her arm is still down, and then it’s up. Straight and high. She seems suspended for a moment, everything hanging still. I know what’s going to come next. I just know. But still when it does, oh God, oh Jesus.

  She snaps the blade down. Again I miss the motion itself, only see the aftermath, the arm pointed down, the blade red and slick. Part of the man’s skull is in the air, flipping over and over. The tips of his ears tumble down to the ground, like discarded earrings. But there is something else, something more.

  White beads burst from the wound, like translucent pearls, like giant fish eggs, each one half an inch across or more. They shimmer and shine, lit by some inner luminescence. They spray out like the seeds blown from a dandelion. And in the center, thrashing in what is left of the man’s head...

  My gorge rises. I taste bile.

  It is something like a maggot, something like a caterpillar, except it is the breadth and length of my forearm. It’s the same translucent white as the giant pearls sifting down through the air around it. It seems to flicker just as they do. I can see through it, can see the awful sheer wound surrounding it, can see the blood spraying through the space it seems to occupy. It has a mouth like a beak, a dirty yellow color, and all around are tendrils, string-thick tentacles that thrash through the air as its segmented body bucks back and forth, back and forth in what is left of the man’s skull.

  Jesus.

  I... Jesus... Maybe the victim isn’t the only one losing his mind here.

  Still, it’s the sight of that thing, that inhuman, alien thing writhing as the body slumps to the floor, it’s the way it and the pearls simply wink out of existence that finally loosens the breath caught in my chest. I exhale, a great screaming, braying exhalation of fear, and horror, and sheer bloody outrage that such a thing could exist let alone occur before my eyes.

  I breathe in but it doesn’t catch, and I whoop out a noisy spray of breath again. The woman looks up. I hear Swann below me. She’s starting to move, but she might as well be on the other side of the world.

  I try to stand up. I jerk spastically. I can’t quite bring everything online, can’t quite get my shit together. The woman with the sword crosses the roof. It seems to only take her an instant. Even her speed is terrifying.

  I try to look at her face. Some part of me that is autopiloting the role of policeman in these final moments tries to jot down the details. Long bangs, so I can barely see her eyes. Long nose. Long cheeks. Sallow too. An underfed look. The red flannel shirt flaps loosely over a dark green tank top.

  And the sword. The brilliant white sword.

  And then the tip is gone from sight. All I see is my chest, and red, and the blade sticking from my chest, and red, and that is where the tip is, right in there, right inside of me, and red, and Jesus I never thought I could hurt like this, and red, and red, and black, and red, and black, and black, and black.

  2

  THEN AND WHEN AND IN-BETWEEN

  An alleyway. Dirt-strewn. Trash-spattered. And I think I must have fallen down, must have landed badly, because everything hurts. My chest hurts. Jesus, it feels like I’m splitting in two, starting right there, right between my ribs. And how did I get here?

  Behind me I hear a rustle of movement, like a thousand petticoats all moving out of sync, yet together. And then...

  ...black

  NOW

  The first thing I’m really aware of, that is really solid and true to me as I come out of the morphine dream, is the beeping. Even before the red vagueness of my closed eyelids. It’s something like an alarm clock. I want it to stop, before it reels me fully out of sleep. I reach for the clock, to flip the damn thing off—

  —and then the pain.

  My eyes snap open with a gasp, my chest fills with air and the pain comes again, sharper. I go to gasp again but catch myself, the air coming in a thin sucking whistle instead.

  “Ow,” I say. “Oh balls, ow.” Not quite up there with Shelley or Yeats, I’ll admit, but honesty is a virtue, as my mum always taught me.

  “Ah,” says a woman’s voice I don’t recognize. “Finally.”

  The room comes into focus slowly. I want to blink it in faster but I’m afraid that’ll bring the pain back somehow, so I let it come at its own pace.

  At first all I see is the shadow of the voice’s owner, then the outline of her, then the dark swathe of her hair contrasting with the whiteness of her skin, and then finally her features.

  She is very close to having a pretty face. But there’s a hardness to her that seems reluctant to lapse and let her cross the boundary into simple prettiness. She has a structured look, everything ordered. Her hair is carefully clipped into place. Her suit is straight edges and diagonal lines. Fashionable without being flashy, but without looking comfortable either. She seems a rather severe woman. The sort who’d play a nun in a movie and hit your knuckles with a ruler.

  Reflexively I clench my fists to hide the fingers. Then I rather wish I ha
dn’t because that hurts too.

  “Detective Arthur Wallace?” she asks.

  I go to answer but it turns out that my mouth is rather dryer than I thought and so my tongue does some ungainly flopping until the woman fetches me a glass of water.

  “Yes,” I finally manage, though I suspect she might have forgotten the original question by this point.

  “You suffered a punctured lung,” she states without preamble.

  “Oh,” I say, and then sit back as the memories pick themselves up off the floor of my mind and organize themselves like some kind of automated jigsaw. Vignettes assemble out of order, slowly taking their place in the whole. I remember the pain. I remember the blade. I remember being stabbed. The whole thing takes me a while, but I’m beginning to suspect I might be a little higher on the morphine than I originally thought.

  Finally, I conclude with, “Bollocks.”

  The woman clears her throat. “Yes.”

  And then, another jigsaw piece floating up out of the miasma. “Swann,” I say. “Sergeant Alison Swann. What happened to her?”

  “No need to worry, Detective,” says the woman. “Sergeant Swann went quite unharmed. Your attacker is reported to have jumped off the side of the building.”

  “Jumped off... We were... How many stories?”

  “Five,” says the woman, “according to Sergeant Swann.” She shrugs. “She lost track of your attacker after that, more concerned with your well-being than making the arrest it seems.”

  The arrest... the victim... The victim. I see it again. I see what was in his head. The maggot, worm, thing... I see the impossibility of it all. The reality. I close my eyes.

  “Oh shit...” I moan, passing up another opportunity for eloquence.

  “Detective Wallace?” The woman sounds concerned, which is decent of her.

  A decent woman. A nice businesslike woman, in a nice businesslike suit, in a nice businesslike hospital. And how exactly am I meant to tell her than I saw a monster in a man’s head? An alien?

  Stress. It was just stress.

  “Nothing.” I shake my head and wish I hadn’t. The world feels loose, wobbly.

  “Do you feel up to talking, Detective Wallace?”

  I look at her. I imagine a worm, a maggot, an alien in her skull. Another bad idea while on morphine. I close my eyes.

  “Not really,” I say.

  “Later then,” she says.

  I close my eyes, hear her footsteps. The door opens.

  “Wait,” I say. Because I’m reviewing the conversation and I realize she told me that the killer escaped. So I still have to get my man. My woman.

  “How long until I’m up and about, Doctor?”

  She cocks her head on one side. “I have no idea. I’m not your doctor, Detective.” There’s a very thin smile on her face. And then she’s gone, and I think that’s pretty weird right there. But then I sink into sleep and morphine demonstrates that when it comes to weird, it has my visitor rather outclassed.

  THE NEXT DAY

  The quality of visitor I receive definitely picks up the next day. Swann comes in just as my doctor is about to leave. She stops him in the doorway.

  “How is he?” she asks, favoring the doctor, a tall Kenyan, with a dazzling smile. He returns it, possibly at even greater wattage.

  “You’re disregarding eyewitness testimony,” I point out. Only slightly jealous of the smiling match playing out before me.

  “Men’s stab wounds are like the fish they claim to catch,” she tells me. “They keep on getting bigger and bigger.”

  “He’s much better,” the doctor says. “Even took a short walk to the bathroom.”

  Which is true, but not really a heroic feat of endurance. But in the absence of genocidal terrorists threatening the hospital, chances to prove my fortitude have been a bit thin on the ground.

  Once she’s seated by the bed, Swann checks that the doctor is definitely gone. “When I was a kid all my doctors were giant gangly blokes with sunken cheeks and narrow teeth. You get all the luck.” She pauses, tugs at a strand of hair. “Well, aside from the being stabbed thing.”

  “Silver lining to every cloud,” I say

  “Plus,” she says, “this cloud rains chocolates,” and she holds out a small wrapped present. Which is incredibly nice of her, and genuinely sweet, and really is a silver lining, and I’m about to tell her she shouldn’t have when she tells me she didn’t.

  “Boys and girls at the station had a whip round,” she says.

  “Very decent of you all,” I say, though my enthusiasm is about as punctured as my lung. But that’s an ungrateful thought, so I attempt a more genuine smile, and ask, “How’s the case going?”

  “Well,” a small smile plays around the corners of her mouth, “we do have an eyewitness.”

  “Wait... we... you... you mean... we...” I spray words around the room, taking out innocent bystanders with my abrupt enthusiasm. “This is huge! This is enormous! This is like the Godzilla of breaks. It’s the sort of break that destroys large chunks of Tokyo!” I stop, take stock, try and gain perspective. Punctured lung and all that. “Who is it?” I ask, unable to stop one toe from tapping.

  “You, Boss.”

  My toe ceases its tapping. I take a mental step backwards. “I’m going to blame the painkillers for me being slow on this one,” I say, “but can you run that by me one more time?”

  “He stabbed you, Boss. Stuck a sword in you. He must have been close. You must have seen something.”

  A sword. I saw a sword. I saw it going into my body. Blood and black. Black vision. White blade.

  I blink, rub my eyes. Memories—a nice place to visit but not necessarily somewhere you’d like to live.

  “She,” I say, attempting the whole stiff upper lip thing. “Not a he, a she.”

  “See!” Swann shifts from her hospital standard-issue chair to the corner of my bed. “We’re making headway already.”

  “Yeah.” I smile but I... No. I don’t want to go back there, I find. The girl, the sword. The thing... My moment of madness. I’m not a reliable witness.

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember much else,” I say.

  “Come on,” she says, “what do we always tell the witnesses?”

  “A pack of lies,” I say. Which is true.

  “You remember more than you think,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. But it’s hard to express that that’s what really scares me. I don’t want to remember any more.

  “You’re going to bust this thing wide open,” she says and she pats my hand.

  It’s an odd moment. Something between affection and condescension. I think I might be blushing. Then she’s blushing. We stare at each other. I think maybe this is what it would be like if one of us suddenly grew an extra head and it started spouting profanities.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “Quite all right,” I manage, and then we disengage the offending body parts and then suddenly her phone goes off and equally suddenly there’s an emergency involving blood work and contamination, and missing paperwork, and all sorts, so she doesn’t even get to hang up before she’s waving goodbye, so I’m left alone with some chocolates and the desire to eat them until I feel nauseous.

  Five minutes later I’m still thinking about the hand pat far more than is either healthy or reasonable. It’s almost a relief when Ms. “You-suffered-a-punctured-lung” walks in again.

  Turns out that’s not her real name.

  “Felicity Shaw,” she says and sticks out a hand. Her suit is paler today but no less severe. “You look like you’re feeling a little bit better, Detective.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “Fresh air and exercise. Drugs and doctors. All that.”

  She doesn’t smile. I think Swann would have smiled at that. Which I hope makes me funny and not Swann a woman with a terrible sense of humor. Could go either way on that one, though.

  “I’d like to ask you some questions about what exactly happened the n
ight you were injured,” Shaw says, because Shaw is serious and businesslike.

  Which is fine, of course, except I don’t even want to talk about what happened to someone who thinks I’m funny, let alone to someone who thinks I’m juvenile.

  “I don’t suppose you have some ID?” I say, which is a dodge that’s been thrown in my face enough times that I feel it’s only fair I should get to use it.

  That does elicit a smile from Shaw. Except I wasn’t trying to be funny. Something is off here, and I don’t know which one of us it is.

  Shaw reaches into her pocket, pulls out a card. “Felicity Shaw, director of Military Intelligence, Section Thirty-seven.”

  “MI37?” I sound incredulous because I am. MI5, yes. MI6, I’m with you. And if logic persists in military intelligence, though I’m not sure it does, you could probably convince me over time about MI1, 2, 3, and 4. But MI37? Really?

  “Yes, Detective,” Shaw says. “MI37. We are a reality We certainly don’t advertise our existence the way MI5 and 6 do, but that just means the politics of intimidation are not useful in our arena. It doesn’t mean we’re not real. We are real, Detective Wallace, as real as the consequences you’ll face if you discuss this conversation with anyone else.”

  I take the ID card from her. It has her face, though maybe five years younger, from before she tipped over into forty, and she has shorter hair and longer bangs. But it’s her picture, and it’s her name, and her title, and it does look terribly official, but I have to say I wouldn’t know a military intelligence ID badge if one approached me at a party and offered to show me a good time.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I just don’t know...”

  Felicity Shaw nods, which is a better reception than I’d anticipated. “Your cynicism stands you well,” she says. She looks away from me, out of the window. “Still, I’m surprised to find you with such a mindset after all you’ve seen.”

  It’s the conversational equivalent of slapping me about the face. I sit up straight as a bolt, stare at her, while she continues to study the window. “What are you talking about?” I ask her. But I know exactly what she’s talking about.