No Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  I’ve never really been in a fistfight. Except Clyde back at Olsted’s perhaps. Not that I’m sure I’d count that. Still, the punch lands square. Slams into the jawbone, snapping the head sideways. My fist throbs, so I punt the bastard between the legs. Not very sporting of me, but neither is infecting the brains of someone else, if you ask me. And anyway, I promised Alison, promised myself, I’m fighting to win this one.

  The thing goes down. Good to see that still hurts as much if you’re an alien. I put the boot in. Once. Twice. Thr—

  It catches my foot. Twists. I go down. Not as graceful as Kayla by far. Then it’s on me. Tooth and nail. Fingers burying themselves in the soft skin of my cheek. Clawing at me. One in my mouth and I bite down hard. Blood in my mouth. More blood. The Progeny is trying to grapple me, but the blood of the monster makes me slippery and I wriggle from its grasp. One hand grabs my foot. I stamp down into its face. Again. Again. It releases me. I struggle to stand.

  Then it tackles me low, and I’m down again. My head smacks dirt, and the world loses focus. I turn, groggy. Something hits my chest and the wind bursts out of me. I lie wheezing, coughing, trying to make sense of things, like why there is grass pressed on my cheek instead of beneath my feet.

  I work out which way is up and look there. The driver is standing above me. He’s holding a very large rock over his head. I have enough sense to know where he’s aiming. I try to roll but can’t get my limbs to work. The Progeny kneels, one leg on either side of me, the massive rock still suspended above his head.

  Kayla comes from nowhere. Some sort of kick and the Progeny is flying—literally flying—through the air. Six, seven yards. He’d go further if it weren’t for the vertical slab of rock.

  The Progeny’s head caves. Caught between the rock he held and the rock he hits. Cracks like a coconut in a vice.

  Eggs fly out. Tiny beads of infection, of infestation. They cover the area. I scramble backwards as they shower down to earth. Kayla is away.

  “Look out!” someone is yelling. “Look out!” I look in the direction of the voice. Clyde has Tabitha in his arms, is shoving her away from the cloud. He leaps after her.

  Then a massive fist obscures my view. I duck under the swing, roll beneath colossal hoofed legs. Kayla is on the thing’s back, hacking at its spinal column. I can see bare vertebrae as the thing falls. I look for Olsted, for the runner. I don’t see them. I pray Kayla has ended them. The pilot is still there. He and Clyde are going at it tooth and nail.

  Then Clyde says something and the man flies away. Slams to the earth. Clyde is chasing after him, bellowing words in a language time was meant to forget. The pilot’s body is tossed like a rag doll. Back toward Kayla. She swings her sword. The man’s head comes undone.

  More eggs. In the sky like a cloud. Clyde running toward them. He collapses. Lets his feet buckle under him. Rolls under the cloud. Kicks out his legs and jumps away

  “Shit!” he’s cursing. “Shit!”

  I look around. Dead bodies everywhere. Chunks of flesh and shards of bone. No sign of Olsted or the runner. Cowardice proving the better part of valor and all that.

  “Clyde!” I call. He is still cursing. He looks at me, hollow-eyed. “Are you all right? Did they get you?” Not the swords. The eggs. I don’t think they got him. He was free and clear. “Are you all right?” I say again, insistent.

  He looks at me as if I’m insane. “Tabby,” he says. “They stabbed Tabby.”

  And if Tabby’s still his main concern, I’m pretty sure he’s fine.

  We move toward where Tabitha has fallen. Kayla is already there, which surprises me. She’s as drenched in blood as I am.

  “Shouldn’t touch her,” she says to me. “Clean up.” And she’s right. The last thing Tabby needs is some hideous bloody disease I’m a vector for.

  She doesn’t talk to Clyde. He’s not as bad as us. Only spattered, not soaked. And he wouldn’t listen to us anyway. He’s pulling off his shirt, balling it up, pressing it to the wound. He cradles Tabitha’s head in his lap.

  She’s just about conscious, muttering something. She and Clyde talk back and forth with words I can’t catch.

  “I’ll clean up,” I say. “Get the first-aid kit.” No one listens to me.

  33

  HALF AN HOUR LATER

  Clyde is still raging. He paces back and forth, around and around Tabitha. She’s stabilized almost more than he has.

  I pick up the satellite phone, dial Shaw. Explain as best as I can. Another disaster. I wait for the reprimands to start.

  “A mole,” she says, instead. Her voice is flat, carefully controlled. “They knew where you were. We’ve got a mole.”

  Again I hear Olsted’s voice. The Progeny’s voice. “We walk among you.” He wasn’t lying. And he was here to prove a point.

  She isn’t what you think she is.

  Two times Kayla has failed to kill Olsted now. Two times the runner has escaped.

  Or Tabitha. It could be Tabitha. Sure, she’s wounded. But it’s not fatal. The runner could have killed her easily, but he chose not to. Could it all be subterfuge?

  And Shaw. Shaw sitting out of danger. Shaw, perfectly placed to tell them where we were. It doesn’t feel like Shaw. But... but...

  But I can’t collect evidence without caving in someone’s skull. At the very least I can’t conduct it without a forensic team. Without time. And MI37 doesn’t have either of those things.

  Clyde is still yelling in the background. Something in him has snapped. He’s spitting and frothing, alternately indignant and murderous. Curse words I didn’t know he knew keep issuing from his mouth.

  “What do we do?” I ask. Because I don’t know. I’m all out of ideas. I’m all out. Just done for a while.

  “Sit tight,” Shaw says, “I’ll send another plane.”

  “About the mole?” I say. “What do we do about the mole?”

  A pause.

  “You have the grimoire, don’t you?” she says.

  “Still do,” I say. I’m sitting on it. Keeping it safe. “Clyde wants to use it,” I say. “Now. Wants to evict them all from reality.”

  “Can it do what Olsted’s book promised it could?”

  And it’s tempting, very tempting. Read the grimoire, cast the spell, screw the Progeny. Man, I want those bastards screwed. Very, very badly. And it’s probably worse for Shaw, Clyde, Tabitha, Kayla, for all of them except the mole... Jesus... But they’ve been doing this for so long. They must have seen more loss than me. But with everything so close, I don’t want to screw this up because we rushed things.

  Because we involved someone we shouldn’t have trusted...

  “We need more time,” I say.

  “You’ve got some time,” Shaw says. “A plane won’t be there until tomorrow morning now. That’s the best I can do. Have Clyde read the book.”

  “He’ll cast the first thing he finds if he thinks it’ll help.”

  “So be the boss. Be in control. Do what I recruited you to do. Take charge.” There’s a beat. “You can do it.” Another pause, and I get the feeling neither of us are entirely comfortable with her assuming the role of pep rally leader. “Look,” she says, “this was a win for us. We got the book. For the second time we got the book. Two straight-up confrontations with the Progeny and we won.”

  Three. Three confrontations. And one we lost. Swann lost. I lost Swann. But I don’t say that, because this isn’t the time for that. Still, a voice still mutters in the back of my head, She’s not what you think she is.

  But when I hang up, I give Clyde the book.

  “About goddamn time,” he says. It still sounds wrong coming from his mouth. Like he’s breaking character.

  Propped up against a rock nearby, Tabitha, dosed on morphine, smiles.

  EIGHT MORE HOURS LATER

  Night has fallen when Clyde has his eureka moment. He slams the book shut with a look of grim satisfaction. “Got the bastards,” he says.

  Tabitha, unconscio
us now, but still stable as best I can tell, stirs, but doesn’t wake up. Kayla, sitting away from the campfire she set up, walks over.

  “What’s it say?” I ask.

  “It says we get rid of them.” Clyde has a tight little smile. “Ta-ta, you little bastards. Don’t let the door hit you in the arse.”

  It seems unlikely that’s the exact wording. “What are the specifics, though?” I ask. “This is too big to do blind. We have to be in charge of this. We have to do it right.”

  “Look.” Clyde is impatient. “I can’t tell you the exact wording. Tabitha is the language expert, but if you hadn’t noticed, she’s kind of in a bad way right now.”

  He is oddly focused in his passion. And I think about the cloud of eggs again, but it wouldn’t make sense for a Progeny to take Clyde over and then act out of character so violently. The change in him feels more genuine for being so pronounced.

  “I’d noticed, Clyde.” I keep my voice soft, even. Clyde still feels like the one person I can trust. He can’t lose the plot on me.

  “Look,” he says, pushing his hands through his hair, “I don’t, I admit, understand every last word, but I get the basic gist of the thing. And no, I don’t understand every last nuance either, but I get the big picture. I really do, Arthur. I understand this as much as I need to cast the spell, as much as I need to know casting it is a good idea.”

  “So give me the big picture.” I still keep my voice low, even. “I want to make this deal. I want the Progeny to hurt. I want Alison avenged. But I want it done right. I have to know we’re doing what we think we’re doing.”

  “It summons a force, all right?” Clyde says. “I don’t know the name of it. I can’t make out the word. Some colloquial phrase or something. But the force, it’s a... a sort of cipher. A cipher to reality. It gives you access to all the layers that make up our composite reality.” A thought strikes him. “You remember the Dreamers?”

  I’ve heard the word but it’s lost under so many layers of crazy that I’m forced to just shrug.

  “You remember—this reality is made up of more than one reality. It’s a composite reality. And the people who decide which realities make up the composite are the Dreamers. They decide what’s in and what’s out.”

  “Yeah.” I nod. Not because it makes sense but because it is at the very least familiar.

  “This force, this power the spell summons, it gives you the powers of a Dreamer. It’s as if the caster is a Dreamer.”

  Clyde—this version of Clyde—with the powers of a Dreamer. An angry, vengeful, lovelorn man with the power to rewrite reality. I... No. Tabitha has to be all right before I let Clyde cast that spell.

  “We should wait,” I say. “Sleep on it. Get someone else here on this, make sure we’ve got everything right.”

  “Come on!” Clyde’s shout is out of place in the peace of this place. “We can do this now. We can end this now. We can get the Progeny out of here. We can stop them from hurting anyone else. Not Tabby again. We can stop them from doing what they did to Alison to anyone else. Come on, Arthur, please. See this from where I’m standing. I don’t want to see Tabby go the way Alison did. I don’t want to see anyone go that way.” He shakes his head. “Not Tabby.”

  Oh Alison. Alison. God, I want to let him do it too. It’s a head–heart thing. And I know, I know, I should go with my head. We should wait. We should know.

  But—

  But—

  And on the other hand—

  Jesus Christ, Boss. Grow a pair. Swann’s voice echoing from beyond the grave. Pick something. Shaw telling me to be the boss.

  I look at Clyde. He’s looking at me, imploring. And don’t I have to trust Clyde? Just to stay totally out of the paranoid zone. Don’t I have to trust someone?

  “Oh shit and balls,” I say. “It’s not like things have gone any better when we planned them out ahead of time.”

  He almost hugs me. He almost hugs Tabitha. For a second I think he even contemplates hugging Kayla. I try to get a read on her, on how she sees this. And if she is Progeny, and if she thinks this plan will work then we are surely dead men. And if she is Progeny and she is letting us do this, then we’ve got this wrong, and well... we’re dead men again. In fact, blanket statement—if Kayla is Progeny we’re all pretty much completely screwed. Me, Clyde, the rest of humanity.

  I still can’t think of what to do about that. I need some way to lock her up the way that Progeny did back in Oxford. I need to talk to Shaw about that.

  A day, that’s what I need. A day. Just one. To get my head straight.

  Clyde is raiding his backpack, pulling out a dynamo or something. And this could buy us time. This could make all this go away. Surely we have to try it.

  I put my head in my hands. I don’t know. I don’t know what the right thing is anymore. I’ve lost my way.

  Have an opinion for longer than six seconds.

  It’s what Swann told me to do, so I do it.

  “We shouldn’t be interrupted,” Clyde says, handing Kayla the dynamo, “so I think it’s OK to use this. Just, whatever you do, don’t stop cranking the handle until I tell you to.”

  Kayla takes it without giving any hint of acknowledgment.

  “What about me?” I ask.

  “Surplus to requirements, really,” says Clyde, but he’s not looking. He’s too busy stabbing his various chakras with his various needles. “Just sit back, and watch the fireworks.”

  Fireworks. I can’t help but feel we could use a night without fireworks. I wish Swann had given me some words of wisdom for if I picked something, and I picked wrong.

  34

  “Fer terrum. Ex locum. Venum um terrum cum veritem. Lom vienne. Mok retrem.”

  Clyde has his head bowed and he’s floating a good foot off the ground. The wires leading from the dynamo are neon blue lines stretching through the darkness of the night. Kayla cranks the dynamo steadily, mechanically. I pace around and around the pair, occasionally pausing by Tabitha as she slumbers on. Clyde has been chanting for almost over an hour, incanting the same words over and over and over.

  Nothing much has happened except for the floating. There have been no fireworks. Part of me is relieved. Part of me is bitterly disappointed.

  But then, as I keep walking, I wonder if perhaps something is happening after all. Slowly but very surely. There is a familiar sense of pressure, of the air thickening. The aura that surrounded the book upon its plinth. It’s not a pleasant feeling. The air is almost greasy about me. A nauseating pressure in my gut, as if someone cinched my belt too tight after a heavy meal.

  And then something else too. At first I think it’s dawn coming, but then I look at my watch and realize it’s not even midnight. Not even the witching hour yet. Instead, the glow of the wires seems to be spreading. Or... it’s hard to put my finger on it. It’s as if part of the night is getting paler. As if someone is pressing an enormous finger against the sky, stretching it out. And still Clyde drones on. And still the pressure grows. And still the sky grows paler—a patch almost as wide as the clearing we’re in, but not quite, so that I can see a ring of real night at the edge of the place.

  The sky is definitely glowing now. It’s not daylight, though. It’s more like a fluorescent spotlight shining through blurred black glass. Clyde’s speech is growing guttural, the consonants harder, the vowels swallowed, until it sounds like he’s barely human.

  And then reality tears.

  It’s not dramatic. It’s not fireworks. But finally the great invisible finger pushes through. A hole opens in the sky. I can see the ragged edges of our reality hanging around it, tiny white tatters curled up against the blackness of our reality’s night.

  The space beyond... I expected stars I suppose. Not that this is the sort of thing you expect. But, well... I’d expected stars.

  Instead the space beyond glows darkly—a blackness that illuminates, that somehow shines.

  Clyde falls to earth, panting hard. Slowly Kayla lets the
dynamo die. The lines of neon leading to Clyde’s body fade and go out.

  We stand there in the half-gloom all looking up.

  “What now?” I ask.

  “Now it comes,” Clyde says.

  Suddenly I realize I’m wrong. I have to be wrong. Clyde is the traitor, is the one I should never have trusted. And by allowing this moment, I have screwed over the world. “It” is the Feeder, vast and implacable. I’ve screwed us all.

  And then “it” turns out to be a ladder.

  We stare, almost overwhelmed by the sheer amount of underwhelming the ladder radiates. It’s wooden, old. Something my grandfather would have owned. It pops out of the darkness, the base of it landing at Clyde’s feet with a loud thud.

  I start to laugh. I can’t help it. It’s all too absurd. It’s all too pitiably disastrous. This can’t help us. There’s no way this can help us. Clyde looks at the ladder as if it just broke his heart.

  And then a leg.

  Out of the bright blackness, a leg. A foot upon the highest rung of the ladder. And then a second leg. Which I suppose is natural, except there’s nothing natural at all about two legs appearing out of nowhere, high above you in the Peruvian sky. Still, two legs are a reassuringly mundane number of limbs.

  A body follows. A man dressed in coat and tails, a top hat balanced upon his head. He climbs down hand over hand. Then another figure follows him. A woman making her awkward way down, feet sprouting from the crinoline of a large ball gown. Then another. Then another. Ten, fifteen, twenty... more and more climbing down the ladder, out of one reality and into ours. All of them dressed as if they’ve escaped from a Victorian-themed costumed ball for the fabulously wealthy. And all of them, I see, have their eyes shut.

  As they get closer, massing out from the ladder, it feels like there’s something else wrong, or odd, or different. And then I notice their breathing. A shuddering susurration in the air. All of them breathing slowly, regularly, together. Their heads bob loosely on their shoulders.

  “They’re asleep,” I say, suddenly realizing as the first one touches the ground. “All of them. They’re asleep.”