No Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  Between us and them—a hundred or more of their magic-twisted creatures. And I think I know where the staff of this place have gone. Overalls are stretched and splayed over pulsing slabs of muscle, are wrapped in ragged strands around mutated limbs, around arms become thick and branching, arms that end in flapping tentacles, in snapping claws, in groups of hands, around legs that end in hooves, in thin wiry tendrils, in vast splaying roots of flesh, in circular pods with a hundred toes waving in some unknowable pattern, around necks topped with overgrown baby heads, with ape-heads, with Neanderthal heads, heads with lizard skin, with eight arachnid eyes, with fractal insect eyes, necks topped by skulls crushed and whole. An impossible number of people with impossible forms.

  Surrounding them, surrounding us, the arching walls of the cooling tower have been plastered with paper. Every inch of the concrete has been covered. The Progeny even taped them to the railing of walkway we’re standing on. They’re scattered on the floor grills, blown about by the wafting steam, caught around the legs of the field of monsters before us. Pink paper. The same image printed on it, over, and over, and over.

  It’s a black-and-white picture of a young girl’s head. Half her head. Half is whole, anyway. One whole eye staring out from the field of pink. The other half is crushed almost beyond recognition. A mess of bone fragments and blood. It’s a head I’ve seen before. But when I saw it last it was propped between the shoulders of a monstrously transformed student. And Kayla saw it even before that, saw it on top of her sister’s shoulders when she lifted the rolling pin back up.

  It’s everywhere. It’s an overwhelming experience even for me.

  “Shiiiiiiiiii—” The word hisses out of Tabitha, never quite managing to reach the “t.”

  I look to Kayla. She stands perfectly still, unflinching.

  “Kayla,” I say. Then again, louder. “Kayla!”

  “Hello, Arthur.” Olsted’s voice booms across the room. “Tabitha. Director Shaw.”

  The monsters stir, a rumble of breath, half-muttered roars of pain or rage.

  “Kayla!” I shake her by the shoulder. It’s like pushing on a tree stump. Her jaw is working slightly. I can’t make out the words.

  “Welcome to our little show.” Olsted smiles, gives a little bow, the perfect circus ringmaster. “It’s going to be one hell of a night.”

  A little too much emphasis on “hell” for my liking. I put my hands over Kayla’s eyes and bellow her name into her ear. A soft moan seems to well up from deep inside her.

  “What do you think we’ve been doing inside that skull there, Arthur, my lad?” booms Olsted, his voice bouncing off the circular wall, coming at me from all directions. “Why do we keep throwing ourselves at Kayla? We do hold on in her head for a second or two, you know. Our children do have a moment with her before they go on. Enough to strengthen a couple of neurological links, weaken others. Strengthen a response to an image, for example.” He grins, showing each one of his little yellow teeth. “No matter her will, she cannot take seeing her sister’s face. She’s quite lost to you.”

  “We need to get out of here.” Shaw’s voice, low and urgent.

  “No shit.” Tabitha.

  “We can’t leave Kayla.” Me. I almost surprise myself. But we need her. We really do. This won’t go our way without her.

  “But,” Olsted carries on, “I’m not here to wag my chin all night. There are celebrations to be had. Games to play. Little mice to chase.” He throws his head back to stare at the sky. “A panoply of delights.”

  The monsters are restless now. They shift on their feet, leaving eddies in the steam that drifts above their heads.

  “Now, Arthur,” Tabitha hisses.

  “We can’t leave her,” I say again. But they’re right too. We can’t stay here. We’re screwed if we stay here. This is a trap.

  “Let the dance begin,” howls Olsted.

  The monsters move. A great surging of limbs. They bay, and howl, and scream, and shout.

  “Go!” Shaw yells.

  I grab Kayla around the waist, hoist her bodily into the air. She’s stiff as a board, still muttering, “Already dead. She was already dead. Not me. She was—”

  I stagger around. I can already hear feet smashing down the walkway.

  Behind us a monstrous hand is heaving a monstrous body up over the railing.

  I totter backward. Shaw is yelling something. Tabitha’s feet beat a fast tattoo down the stairs. I smack Kayla into the doorframe and we spin around. Out in the cold night air, I smash into another railing. I can see a vast clawed hand emerging from the steam. Kayla’s body pitches forward over the railing and it’s a thirty-foot drop to earth. The air seems to vibrate with inhuman growls. A body follows the fist emerging from the steam. I grab desperately at Kayla, but my hands are shaking. Shaw yells. Tabitha yells. I snag Kayla’s collar, lose my footing. Then something massive brushes my back. A fingertip, a knuckle, something—and my feet go, and Kayla falls, still stiff as a store mannequin, and I fall, pivoting around her body until we crash to the ground far too far below.

  51

  I bite gravel as Tabitha and Shaw hit the last step of the stairs. My lip bursts open and I taste dirt and blood. The stiff weight of Kayla’s body slams into my back driving my head down even as I try to raise it. Then someone has my hand, is pulling me up. Shaw. I struggle to help her, to find my feet. Tabitha is next to me, shoving Kayla’s rigid form into shadows.

  “No time!” Shaw yells, still pulling me away. I rip my hand out of hers, drop to my knees, grab the pistol, and then all three of us are tearing pell-mell away from the tower as monstrosity after monstrosity bursts out after us.

  For a moment it’s just my feet, and my heartbeat, and my fear—all thundering in my ears. The gravel shifts beneath my feet, and it’s almost like I’m flying. Footsteps barely finding traction, but I’m going so fast I can’t even fall. And behind me, I know, the monsters are gaining.

  “Not to the car,” Shaw says. “Don’t lead them to Ephie.”

  Part of me hates her for that. For pulling the hope out from under my feet. But part of me admires her. Because she’s right. Because it’s the right thing to do. Hell, it’s the heroic thing to do. It’s what Kurt bloody Russell would do. Because right now, Ephie is about the only hope we have. An ace it could take years to pull out of the hole. But if she buys it, well then the world has really bought it.

  We break left, and I skid, turn half on my feet, half on my hands, like a motorcyclist taking a corner at speed, and then somehow I’m back upright and moving again. There is a baying behind me. Like wolves. Like hounds. Like something gone horribly bloody wrong. Like tonight.

  Of course the cooling tower was a trap. They’ve planned all of this for years. And they knew we would come. So they planned for us. And they pulled us into that place—a powder keg primed to blow Kayla’s mind. And while we’ve escaped, now our biggest gun is down, and we’re about thirty seconds from becoming canapés.

  Wait. Scratch that. Four seconds.

  More monsters from the left. Blindsiding us. I rediscover the pistol in my hand. Raise it. Fire point blank into something wide and snapping and terrible. The muzzle flare supplements the moonlight. Strobe-flash glimpses of the thing that’s trying to kill me today reeling away. And I wish I hadn’t seen it after all. I can feel its blood trickling down my face. But there’s no time.

  Shaw uses the shotgun to blow open a door, and I follow her. Behind us, something smashes a hole larger than the doorway, like something from a cartoon, except when a cartoon character does it I don’t have the urge to soil my pants.

  Focus. It’s easy for my mind to wander away right now, to pretend this isn’t happening. To just react. But I need to focus. Because I need to go—

  —right! Right! Duck! Under a swinging fist that comes out of nowhere. And then Shaw is pulling me left, through another door. And I glimpse more things pouring down a corridor toward us. I fire my pistol with my eyes shut. I don’t want a
closer look. I hear screams, and caws, and howls. Another entrance, this building has too many entrances.

  “Another building,” I say.

  “I know,” Shaw breathes.

  “They knew we were coming,” I say.

  “I know,” she says.

  “Clyde wasn’t with them,” Tabitha says, her speech punctuated by great inhalations.

  “Too much talking,” Shaw says.

  “Ophelia was there,” I say. And there’s something in that. They weren’t afraid to show us Ophelia. She was part of the trap. Part of the bait.

  But they didn’t show us Clyde.

  Why would they hide Clyde?

  “They’re not summoning the Feeders in from the cooling tower,” I say.

  Shaw’s shotgun booms and we kick through another door.

  “What?” Tabitha’s voice.

  “Clyde,” I say. “They’re using Clyde. We need to find Clyde.”

  “We need to not die,” says Shaw. She looses more shells into the night. I catch flashes of things falling away. I see blood from a long gash on her cheek. I’ve no idea where it came from.

  “There!” Tabitha points to the vast bulk of the power station’s main body. “Lose them in there.”

  Boom. Shaw blows another lock away. My foot hits the door. Kicking it in.

  The door doesn’t move. I bellow. My foot throbs with pain. I see the hinges. The door doesn’t open the way I’m trying to kick it.

  Then the door blows outward, torn from those offending hinges. Something massive and shadowy advances out into the night. Something that’s been waiting for us and for this moment.

  52

  It’s Tabitha who kills it. Her pistol barks and a bullet catches it in the eye. A chunk of its skull ricochets off the doorframe. Then we’re over the tumbling corpse and looking onto a staircase leading down. Colossal machinery pulses to our right. We hug the wall to the left. Roars bounce up. Strange echoes that make it impossible to place things.

  “Electricity,” I pant. “Clyde will be where there’s electricity.”

  “In a bloody power station,” Tabitha points out.

  “The generator.” Shaw nods. “We need a map of this maze.”

  Down we go.

  And then stop.

  Because the monsters are coming up. We all open fire. A cacophony of gunshots and howls. Glimpses of beaks, and teeth, and claws. We back up the stairs. Until Tabitha screams.

  It’s a sound that sluices through my head despite all the other noise. Shaw and I both spin. We see the hand on her shoulder. The hand as thick as her waist. Massive, craggy nails, biting into Tabitha’s flesh. Blood welling up. Her face twisted and horrified. Tattoos fading against her abruptly pale skin.

  And then she’s not there. She’s just a scream fading into the distance. The creature just flings her away. Like a rag doll.

  It’s huge. Fucking gargantuan. Its head is the same size as my chest. Its chest is as big as my car.

  “Oh crap.” You would think I’d have come up with some better last words by now.

  The creature pulls back its fist.

  Shaw’s arm is abruptly about my waist, and for a moment I think how odd a moment this is to hug me, and I think that there are worse ways to go, and then she pulls me over the edge of the stairs and I’m falling again, and I think that maybe there aren’t worse ways after all.

  53

  The fall doesn’t knock me unconscious, but I wish it did. We sit there groaning as seconds and chances tick by us. I make it to my feet first. Help Shaw to hers. I can’t see Tabitha.

  There’s another door. I try the handle. It opens. We’ve lost Shaw’s shotgun in the fall. Supporting each other, like contestants in the world’s most horrific three-legged race, we stumble back out into a space we don’t want to be in. We stumble back out into the open.

  “Balls,” I try to say, but mostly just spray blood from my busted lips.

  Beside me, Shaw nods.

  The space before us is oddly open and quiet. Cooling towers to the left of us. Buildings stretch away in front and to the right. Behind us I can hear monsters roaring at each other. The call and response of bellow and bark.

  “Tabitha,” I manage to say.

  “Clyde,” Shaw’s voice is a whisper. “Focus on Clyde. He’s the priority.”

  And it’s a cold truth, but I don’t think Shaw shies from those. There’s something admirable in the focus. We’re here to get this thing done.

  Suddenly the night air shudders. The ground shudders. The whole of reality pulses. Shaw and I pause in our shuffling run. Everything is still. Not a sound behind or before us. And it’s almost as if we imagined everything. As if it was all a dream. As if we are Dreamers, waking up from long somnambulism.

  Then part of the power station explodes.

  Concrete and bricks rain down from the building before us. They spatter down on the gravel. Too far away to hit us. Close enough for us to simply stand and stare as lightning arcs its way in reverse up into the heavens.

  Bright and white and unfading. First one bolt then another joins it, twisting around the first. Then a third strand. Then a fourth. They dance around each other, out through a hole punched in the roof of the power station. More strands of lightning lance upwards. The illuminated clouds twist around them—a distant whirlwind. The strands of lightning are knotting together, forming one massive beam that sputters and crackles. The air smells of ozone. All the hairs on my body stand on end.

  “Found him,” I say.

  Then, from deep inside the heart of the power station, whatever is left of Clyde brings a Feeder through.

  54

  It comes. Down out of the sky it comes. And then it is the sky. It is everything. Horizon to horizon is eclipsed, the night sky obliterated by its presence, by the simple weight of its shadow.

  “Oh,” I start, but I never make it to the expletive. The sound drags out of me, a long hollow thing. “Ohhhhhh...”

  It’s like a landscape. It’s like another world hanging above my head. And that would be easier, if that was just it, if the Feeder were just some chunk of rock, no matter how alien, if it were dead and dry. Even if it was coming down, coming to crush us all—I think that would be better.

  But it’s alive. It’s a thing. A he, she, or it. It has eyes. It has a million bloody eyes. I can see them rolling in sockets the size of lakes, of shopping malls. Yellow irises, purple irises, orange, and gold. Pupils like black holes. I can see scales, and crags, and cliffs of skin. I can see veins like rivers. I can see organs the size of cathedrals pulsing beneath translucent pieces of exoskeleton, or chitin, or some other alien shit. It’s got bloody tentacles. It goes on forever. And it doesn’t end.

  The air around me ripples, shifts. The smell of ozone is stronger now. It’s a sour taste at the back of my throat. Every hair on my head is standing up straight. Every hair on Shaw’s head next to me. It should be comical. This should be a great laugh, a real knee-slapper.

  And something in me wants to laugh. Wants to laugh and not stop. And weep, and scream, and dance, and dance, and dance, and sing songs of praise. Part of me wants to strip naked and rejoice. Part of me wants to dig, to dig and never stop, to bury myself in the earth’s core. Part of me wants to start scratching the flesh from my bones, to get the gaze of it out of me. Part of me wants to claw out my eyes. Part of me wants to claw out Shaw’s, to take them for myself. Part of me... Part of me... Part of me...

  I can feel madness hammering in the door, begging to be let in. Madness can take the pain away, the abomination of the thing away, it can take away the impossibility made possible. If I’m crazy I don’t have to be here anymore. Leave an answering machine on for reality. I’ll get back to you when I can...

  My throat is completely dry, my attempt to swallow just a dry clicking sound. It all seems so futile now. So bloody pointless. Everything we’ve done so small and stupid.

  Tendrils descend, like those from a Progeny’s mouth, but so... so..
. so much more, so much bigger. Jesus. They’re, just, just...

  And still I can feel my mind slipping, like a car missing the gears, an ugly crunching sound. And perhaps madness has made it in after all, has said “screw it” to the door, loaded up Shaw’s shotgun and come on in, all guns blazing.

  But madness doesn’t come. It remains a dream, wishful thinking. Because it’s not me losing a grip on reality, it’s reality itself losing grip. The world is changing right in front of me, permitting this monstrosity, this untruth.

  Beside me, Shaw puts what I cannot into words.

  “Oh fuck,” she says.

  55

  We start running. There’s nowhere to run. The Feeder is everything. It is the sky, and the sky is falling. But we run, because that’s all that evolution has left us with. This is our option.

  We run. Run toward the beam of lightning, toward Clyde; run toward the hope that we can undo this, toward the impossibility that it is not too late. And above our heads is proof of the impossible—surely it’s time we had a little for ourselves. Surely. If there’s a God...

  And there’s a God all right. It’s just he’s floating above my head munching on parts of Essex.

  There’s an incredible pressure from above as we stagger forward. As if the atmosphere itself has grown denser, the air we’re pushing through a greater barrier. Gravity seems weaker. My feet scrape over the ground, barely making enough contact to propel me forward. Smaller chunks of rubble are rising into the air. Tiny electric shocks race up my legs each time my feet make contact with the ground.