No Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  Swann sighs, chews her tongue. “We can’t find the guy, Olsted. We found what we think is his daughter. Dead. Nasty gunshot wound to the top of the head. No one else.” She pauses. “Lot of scrap metal too.” She scrunches her face, confused.

  God. The girl. The girl I shot. I shot a girl. A Progeny But... still. No, I can’t think like that. The Progeny killed a girl. I killed a Progeny.

  “You’re looking awful guilty all of a sudden, Boss.” Swann isn’t smiling.

  Oh piss. God, I just want to tell her. I just want her to know. And then she can judge me crazy. And then she can think I’m spinning her some bullshit. And then she can write me off as an asshole. And then she can never speak to me again.

  Actually, no, I don’t want to tell her.

  Hello, rock. Hello, hard place.

  The thing is there’s no solution to this case for her. There is no way to explain it calmly and rationally. A wizard and an alien-possessed magic cat had a fight. That’s what happened. I don’t even know if the Oxford police force has jurisdiction over alien-possessed magic cats.

  I hum. I hah. I keep looking at Swann. I keep on not telling her anything.

  “Jesus Christ, Boss. Grow a pair!”

  The words explode out of Swann with a violence I never expected from her. She looks at my shocked expression.

  “What?” she says. “I mean, seriously? You don’t see where I’m coming from. Jesus, Boss. Ever since you took this job... It’s like they gave you a badge and took your balls. You used to... You were a good cop, Arthur. You were large and in fucking charge. You were the boss. And look at you now. I mean, just tell me to fuck off or tell me what you know. Have an opinion for longer than six seconds. Be the fucking boss.” She presses her hands to her temples. “Jesus, I used to think you...” She shook her head. “And look at you now.”

  And there’s something there. Something beneath the surface of our friendship.

  “What?” I say. “You used to think what about me?” And don’t let me have blown something I didn’t even know was there.

  Swann is staring at her feet. I want to reach out to her but—

  “Tell me to fuck off or tell me what you know.” She repeats it.

  I can’t do either of those things. I have to do one of those things.

  I wish I knew magic. I wish I were Clyde with hidden answers stitched into my skin. Or Kayla—something more or less than human. Because the answers aren’t something I can tell. They’re something I need to show. And I have no way to show her.

  “F—” I say, but that’s as far as I can get. How can I tell her to go away?

  “Olsted—” I start. “He—” She won’t believe me.

  Nothing. I say nothing.

  Swann looks up. “Fuck off, Boss,” she says. She turns away.

  “Wait, Swann. Sergeant. Alison.” Every name I have for her. And she responds to none of them. “Please, I—”

  “Talk to me when you have an answer. Because this is bloody pathetic.”

  “Alison. Alison, please.” But my voice just echoes around her, doesn’t touch her. I watch her go, listen to the click of her heels on the road as she walks away.

  She gets to the corner and I pray she just turns around, just gives a hint of a second chance.

  She pauses. I pause breathing.

  And then something comes running from the cross street. Someone. He’s dressed in white, long blond hair billowing out behind him. Almost impossibly thin arms and legs—slender and elegant. There is an amazing grace to his movements. He’s almost beautiful at this distance. Going a hell of a clip, too. Fast as a bloody bicyclist. Faster.

  The runner collides with Swann. His arm does. It snags her, and she flies through the air. That impossibly thin arm caught around her waist. I hear her yell of surprise, of anger, then it cuts off as her head snaps abruptly sideways.

  The runner doesn’t miss a beat, a step. He just keeps going. Tugs Swann out of sight.

  I stand for a moment trying to work out if I saw what I just saw, if what just happened was real. And then I wonder what the hell I’m doing standing around when reality has been so thoroughly bloody breached for so bloody long. Someone’s just abducted Alison in front of my eyes and I’m bloody standing here.

  I move. Get in my car. Turn the keys. Floor the gas. And I pursue.

  21

  The runner is already two full streets away when I round the corner. He’s going a ridiculous speed. Impossible. Inhuman.

  Progeny. It has to be. Or something they made. Or Olsted made. Something with a spell. Magic and aliens. Just my bloody luck.

  I accelerate hard, hit a speed bump, hear the bottom of my car scrape against it then I rebound up and smack my head against the roof. Disorientated, it takes me another moment to find the runner.

  Goddamn Oxford traffic.

  There are cars just swirling round in aimless traffic circles. There are traffic lights every six feet. Stop signs. Random protrusions of concrete blocking the road.

  The runner is going to beat me. He’s pulling away, Swann flapping like a rag doll in his arms.

  “Shit!” The word bounces emptily around inside my car.

  The runner turns a corner and without really thinking I punch the accelerator, slam over the median of the traffic circle with a scream of horns and brakes, and pull into oncoming traffic. I slalom between cyclists and cars. People yell, gesticulate, curse, but I leave it all behind. I reach the corner and crank on the wheel. My suspension groans, tires squeal, and various electronics ping angrily at me as I violate the manufacturer’s parameters in a variety of new and exciting ways. The runner is still two blocks away, and a bus is turning into the space between me and him.

  I am pleased to say that I do, at least, think twice before mounting the sidewalk. I still do it. I crash through a trashcan in a burst of litter. My car lurches violently. I flirt with the curb like a ham-fisted schoolboy on a first date. Women and children run. So do men, for that matter. But I gain on the bastard.

  It’s down to a block between us and I have to plunge back into traffic. The car twists and I skew wide up on the other pavement. People are running. Somewhere I can hear sirens. Friends of mine—probably the ones from Olsted’s place. I stamp my foot on the accelerator, pop the clutch, listen to the wheels spin, and swing back into pursuit.

  My heart thunders, my palms sweat, the wheel is slipping in my grip. Part of my head is yammering at the impossibility of the runner’s speed but the rest of me is screaming at that part to shut up and let me focus on driving.

  We head back up Cowley. Long and straight, finally free of traffic, of traffic calming measures. Finally I can make a decent run at the bastard. I floor it. My needle heads toward sixty, seventy, eighty. Still the bastard is in front of me. His feet are a blur. Swann’s head snaps up and down. She must be unconscious.

  This is a dream. A nightmare. Nothing seems real. I swerve across lanes. One hand is on the horn as long as I can keep it.

  Then the runner jags left into a construction site. I’m going to miss the turn. I’m going to overshoot them.

  I yank on the handbrake.

  Kurt Russell movies really are bollocks.

  The car screams. The tires scream, then think, “sod it,” and just give up. The car flips, first up on its side, careening madly sideways on two wheels and then goes into a full barrel roll. I’m thrown sideways. The airbag explodes from the wheel and slams into one of my cheeks, twisting my neck violently. The world is a blur, a vortex, snapping me round, round. The sky dances about me, caught in a breakneck tango with the earth. Metallic thunder booms.

  Then silence. A gentle creaking. The car rocks back and forth on its roof. I am dangling upside down, my seatbelt doing a decent job of crushing the life from me.

  After a minute I manage to get the shaking in my arm to calm down enough so that I can unbuckle myself. I drop awkwardly, smack painfully into the crumpled fabric of the roof. The car window is smashed and I crawl out ont
o the rough asphalt. Pebbles push into my skin. I can smell my own sweat. It’s in my eyes, thickening my eyebrows. My breathing is ragged.

  I use the car to pull myself up. I’m looking at the construction site. I know this place. I’ve been here. I’ve been stabbed here.

  I know where Alison is.

  The sirens grow closer as I start to run.

  22

  They’re waiting for me on the top floor. The police tape blocking off the stairway has been ripped in two. I look for blood on the steps and there is none. Doesn’t calm me down. I’m about two heartbeats away from cardiac meltdown.

  I’m expecting just the two of them. The runner and Swann. Looks like I hit the jackpot, though.

  The runner is there. A tall man, slender to the point of starvation, his whole body strangely elongated, almost stretched. Piano-player’s fingers, hangdog eyes perched either side of a roman nose. His blond hair stretches to his shoulder blades. Long bangs sweep over porcelain-pale skin. Bastard hasn’t even broken a sweat.

  Beside him, another man stands, holding Alison’s unconscious body—

  “Olsted,” I say.

  “Not exactly.” He smiles back. He is not like he was last night, when I was in the apartment with him. He stands taller, more confident. He’s not tired. He smiles a lot more.

  Progeny. When Alison said they found a lot of scrap metal in the apartment the night before I assumed Olsted had won. But the Progeny didn’t need that body to win. It won Olsted’s body.

  The two Progeny aren’t alone. Around them—I count quickly—five, six, seven creatures that were once human. Now they’re something like the student we fought. Twisted by magic into something vast and monstrous— faces pulsing with overgrown veins leer out from between colossal shoulders; arms as thick as tree trunks; fists big enough to make my balls retract into my body.

  One has devolved further than the others. His eyes are insectile, fractured. One arm dissolves at the elbow into tentacle-like reams of flesh. His legs end in elephantine paws, feet fully gone. He leers at me, a lolling tongue six feet long or more spilling from a mouth like a gash in his skin.

  “You really are a lifesaver,” says Olsted, the thing that was once Olsted. “I mean, I should have realized myself that capping the little girl was the best way to crack the old man’s nut—” he taps his own head “—but there you were to point the way.” He shakes his head. “I was just about ready to give up the ghost and just infect your friend, but it’s not like we don’t already have eyes in MI37.”

  He’s not looking at me as he says the last. Drops it in like bait and just lets me react. And I have no idea if he’s lying or not, but it’s way too far off-topic for me to care right now.

  “Give me Alison,” I say

  The Olsted-thing looks to the runner, who shrugs mutely.

  “You’re not even a little bit curious?” he says. “Is it the lovely goth girl just dying to sink her claws into young Clyde? Is it Shaw? The ice queen? Is that why she’s such a fucking horrible leader? Is it Kayla? Ah, Kayla. Not quite human is she? What she does? And how does she do that? How does my friend here run the way he does? Something else at the wheel, perhaps. Someone not concerned with the limits of your pathetic species’ bodies?”

  “Give me Alison!” I scream. Every nerve in me is scraped raw. I cannot have this friendly fireside chat. I do not care about the end of the world. Just the end of my world. The end of my friend. Everyone in MI37 could be Progeny for all I care right now.

  Olsted sighs. “All business, is it? Well, I must disabuse you of a misunderstanding.” He stops there, seems to lose interest, looks over at the runner and rolls his eyes.

  “I’ll kill you,” I say. Quietly. Because I mean it. I actually mean it. In cold blood. Whenever. Wherever. “If you don’t give her to me, I’ll kill you.” No matter what is between us. No matter how many monsters.

  “There you go again,” says Olsted. “I mean, what on Earth makes you think I’m going to give her back?”

  “What,” I hiss through teeth clenched so tight I can hear them grating in the gums, “do you want?”

  “Ah!” Olsted claps his hands. “We reach the very nubbin of the misunderstanding, the very beating heart of it.” He smiles broadly, no humor in it, just a baring of teeth.

  “I’m warning you, you bastard.”

  “Of what exactly?” Olsted spreads his hands. “How do you think you can harm me? What weapon do you have? What forces to support you?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  Behind him the once-men shift their weight, alien muscles bulging in exaggerated poses. Reality punches in at the edges of my fear, my fury. What can I really expect to achieve?

  “What,” I say again, “do you want?”

  “Ah yes.” Olsted claps once more. “The misunderstanding. You seem to believe Alison here is a bargaining chip. That she has value. She is not. She does not. She is a demonstration.”

  Something is off here. Even through the adrenaline-fueled hatred I can feel it. Something greasy in my stomach. Something slipping away from me.

  “A demonstration of what?” I ask.

  And just like that he snaps her neck.

  23

  It is like falling through ice into a river. A moment of blinding, almost unbelievable pain—something systemic, a pain that seems intense enough to cause pain itself. And then numb. Nothing. Sensation robbed from me. Yet inside me, some buried pressure building, the need for air, for what has been taken, slowly increasing until it occupies all space.

  Olsted drops Alison’s broken body. It falls heavily to earth. All its grace is gone. Just meat and bones smacking onto concrete.

  “A demonstration—” Olsted is speaking and his words come to me from a great distance filtering through my numbed neurons “—of how little we are scared of you, of how futile your achievements are. We are not afraid of you, Agent Wallace. We are not afraid of MI37. But you, all of you, should be very afraid of us.

  “We walk among you, Agent Wallace,” Olsted says, “very close, very quiet, and you never know when you’re going to piss us off.”

  “You won’t walk so feckin’ far without your feckin’ legs.”

  I didn’t hear Kayla come up the stairs behind me. I can’t think where she has come from. I don’t truly care. It just means that this is her problem now. The violence is all her problem. I can just stare at Swann’s fallen, broken body, at the terrible awkward angle of her neck, and just collapse in on myself, on what I have lost.

  I have lost a friend. I have lost the chance to ever tell her the truth of things.

  Kayla moves like liquid fire. She burns across the distance between me and the Progeny. Her blade is out, is up. But the monstrous things are moving in, closing the distance, slow and clumsy as they are compared to Kayla, but massive and close. They form a wall of flesh around Olsted sealing him off.

  She is dwarfed before them, waist-height on some. She does not pause, does not hesitate. The pattern of her limbs goes on. She dances up one’s outstretched fist, the blade trailing behind her, scoring a spitting wound of pus and blood as the skin and muscle peel from the bone. She jumps sideways, using the sword to lever off another, plunging it in and out of his chest as her feet beat a path across its abdomen, its pectorals. Then she is up and on its shoulder as it falls forward, and she balls up, rolls down its toppling corpse, blade out to one side, churning through the flesh of yet another creature, and she has breached their defense and stands before Olsted.

  Except Olsted is gone. The runner has him, cradled as a babe in those thin arms, and together they are hurtling down some pylon wire, a tightrope act in fast forward. And then, one of the four remaining creatures plunges a fist the size of a TV at Kayla and she has to pirouette sideways to avoid the blow, then brings her blade crashing down, smashing through sinew and bone to sever the fist so it rolls away like some incongruous boulder invading this construction yard.

  The monster geysers blood, dropp
ing to its knees, howling. Kayla turns back to the wire. Olsted and the runner are on the ground now, a hundred yards or more away. The remaining three monsters smash at Kayla. She dances up their swinging limbs, stands astride the swaying head of one, almost casually reaches out and slits the throats of the other two, then brings the sword down, point first. The skull shatters. The sword sinks to its hilt. The thing falls to its knees. As it does Kayla pulls out the sword, wipes the blade clean on the taut purple skin of the creature’s skull. Two quick swipes and then she steps free as it finally crashes to earth.

  She looks to the pylon wire, to the earth beyond. There is no sign of Olsted, of the runner. They are gone. We are alone.

  I have made it to Alison’s body. Crawled on my hands and knees. I have her head in my lap. I am a mess of snot and tears. I can never tell her now. Never tell her anything. All the things to come that I’ll never tell her about.

  I think Kayla is going to say something. She works her jaw, her tongue coming out, licking her lips once, twice. She looks away from me.

  She seems barely human to me there. Gore splattered across her face, soaking her sleeves to the elbows, staining her jeans. There is a piece of shattered bone sticking from one shoe. I wonder if perhaps she will kill me too, if perhaps she cannot stop herself.

  “Feck,” she says, and then she jumps from the side of the building, and only Alison and I remain.

  24

  Shaw finds us before the police do. They are milling around the crashed car and the construction site. Uniformed officers are phoning up construction companies worried about entering partially-constructed buildings. They are an ocean of buzzing activity, of static and nonsense, of insignificance.