Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth

by Stephen Graham Jones

  MY HERO

  Vigilante Man woke with a start: someone needed him. He grinned and straightened his mask, pushed off from the foot of his bed to the open window, his cape sweeping behind him. Below, the lights of the city shimmered in the heat. A siren wailed, a dog howled, a movie-bound couple skirted the dark corner of a street only to walk into the headlights of a delivery van. You can’t save them all. Vigilante Man had learned this long ago. You can’t save them from themselves.

  He leaned forward onto the sill, tilting his head for the voice that had called his name, trying to separate it from the gunshots and screeching tires and for a moment he heard it—a whimpering, a last breath, of someone cornered and alone, not knowing who else to call, what other name to say—but then a gloved hand muffled it. It had been coming from the bowery, though. Always the bowery.

  Elastic Man’s stomping ground.

  It would be so easy to let him handle it.

  But what if it was the Exacerbator again?

  Vigilante Man shook his head no, please, and looked to the phone on his nightstand. All it would take would be one call to see if the hospital had been broken into again, or out of. If the Exacerbator were free to wreak his special brand of havoc, bring the city to its knees. Last time had almost been too much, and the time before, and the time before. And Captain Impossible had even been around then.

  Vigilante Man closed his eyes behind his mask, lowered his head. He was so tired. The closet behind him was filled with the carefully folded clothes of his alter-ego Evan Boanerges, ace accountant, and nights like these it would be so easy to slip into the white undershirt and faded boxers, wait for the alarm to wake him, then ride the bus to work. But then a paper would blow up against his trouser leg on the way into the office and he’d see the crime, the decay, the rampant destruction, and he’d look to the sky like everyone else. And what if that was Sherry down there anyway, backed into a corner of the bowery not even Elastic Man could squeeze into?

  Vigilante Man clutched his cape—kevlar, because not all superheroes are bulletproof—and raised one leg to the sill then thought better of it, took Evan Boanerges’ keys instead, locking the apartment door behind him, riding the elevator down with an old woman holding her dog. The dog growled at him. He stared straight forward at the row of buttons.

  There was no theme music as Evan Boanerges entered the office the next morning, the pocket of his shirt lined with pencils like he was an engineer. It was part of the disguise.

  His cubicle was third from the left, by the window. The special compartment of his briefcase held this month’s issue of Rescue Beaver, the comic he liked to quietly make fun of during the lull before lunch when he made himself take a break from his projects, so he wouldn’t get too far ahead of his coworkers. He didn’t want to make them look bad. It wasn’t their fault they needed calculators and deodorant.

  In the false bottom of the drawer devoted to the last five years’ tax codes was a back-up mask, just in case. His old one, with the elastic strap that always took a wad of hair with it.

  At nine o’clock Boy Plunder showed up, the new temp. He had hidden pockets all over his body, shaped like staplers and hole-punches and tape dispensers. Evan Boanerges stared at him and Boy Plunder stared back. If he only knew.

  Evan Boanerges crunched numbers for an hour, and then hunched over Rescue Beaver before it was really time: Sherry wasn’t here yet, and she hadn’t called in. Evan flipped through the pages humorlessly, Rescue Beaver’s trademark taunts and obligatory tail-slaps suddenly banal and crude, his mask a mockery of heroism.

  In the break room all the talk was about Morton in Special Accounts. Vanessa from Human Resources had seen his last health insurance claim, and he had some syndrome: Ehlers-Danlos. She said it with a question mark and a whisper and then looked to Evan. Evan pretended to be carefully preparing his coffee, though. The glass door at the front of the Hawkins & Daniels suite opened but it still wasn’t Sherry.

  Where was she?

  Three cubicles over, Boy Plunder pocketed an electric pencil sharpener, his back to the office, his reflection caught in the observation window which looked out onto the whole city. The window was why Evan had turned down other jobs, better offers. Up here he was a guardian.

  He held his steaming coffee to his lips and turned his back on Vanessa, but then Mr. Sharpes’ wide frame filled the door and everybody’s backs straightened.

  His eyes were gleaming with managerial fury, the fist of his right hand clenching and unclenching.

  Evan avoided eye contact, because, even in this suit, with this bearing, this posture, still, there was something of the carriage of Vigilante Man there. Of rights to be wronged; of duty. Everything he stood for, Mr. Sharpes stood against, and for a moment Evan saw in his boss—from the knees down, at least—a similarly hidden identity, and then followed the three piece up to the leering grin, the bald head. Mr. Sharpes ran his hand through the hair he didn’t have, told Vanessa to continue, not to stop on his account.

  Vanessa swallowed and explained: Ehlers-Danlos syndrome simply meant you had too much collagen in your skin and bones. In extreme cases it could make a person rubbery. People with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome didn’t break their bones, they bent them.

  Evan winced, grimaced, grinned displeasure. He had known about Morton Collander’s secret identity for months already. It was obvious: what kind of a name was Collander, anyway? But he was young, unlearned. Still slugging it out in the bowery every night, like one hero could ever make a difference there. Evan envied him his youth, though. How he always bounced back.

  “It’s nothing,” he assured Vanessa, his coffee sloshing over the foam lip of his cup, onto his fingers. He pretended it hurt so they wouldn’t suspect him as well. So they wouldn’t find anything suspicious in his file.

  Mr. Sharpes laughed.

  It was his first time back in the office since his vacation. He had a tan six weeks deep.

  “Saw your girl last night,” he said, shifting the attention to Evan.

  “My . . . my girl?” Evan asked, no eye contact.

  Mr. Sharpes grinned: he was back all right. Stronger than ever.

  “You know the one,” he said, tracing her shape in the air like he’d actually felt it, “Sherry. The venerable Ms. Tombs.”

  Evan’s cup exploded all over the front of his white shirt, and Vanessa laughed, and her friend laughed, and Mr. Sharpes shook his head and walked around the mess to the refrigerator.

  For the days when Captain Impossible had been on patrol.

  When Evan returned to his cubicle Boy Plunder was up to his armpits in a drawer.

  “Lose something?” Evan asked, a Rescue Beaver line.

  Boy Plunder smiled, nodded to Evan’s pants.

  “Wet yourself, boss?” he said, and in the instant Evan looked down—something Vigilante Man never would have done, as his tights were stain resistant, designed to wick even the slightest hint of moisture away—in the instant Evan looked down, Boy Plunder lowered his face to his waiting hand.

  When he looked up he was wearing the old mask. The hair-pulling mask.

  “No,” Evan said, “don’t, you can’t, my secret ident—” but Boy Plunder was already up and over the side of the cubicle and running down the walkway throwing papers behind him.

  Vigilante Man gave chase as Evan Boanerges, running only as fast as a non-heroic man could run in restrictive slacks and slick-soled shoes. He had to catch him, though. They flashed past the break room, the copy machine, and in the bend between the receptionist desk and the waiting room where no one had a clear view, Vigilante Man turned on the speed, sent Evan Boanerges airborne, so that he was able to hug his arms around Boy Plunder’s thighs. They crashed to the tile floor together, sliding on the elbows of Evan Boanerges’ suit to the front door and against it, even as it opened on the legs and feet and calves and person of Sherry Tombs. Her coffee was dripping from the hem of her skirt. She whimpered in a way Evan knew.

  “You, you . .
.” she said, Boy Plunder peering up at her through the eyes of the mask, and then held her clean hand over her lip, trying to stifle a laugh. “Evan,” she managed to say at last, trying to help him up, Boy Plunder slipping out the door with contraband staplers and three-ring binders, “Evan, you saved me”—still not laughing—“again,” and even though there were real tears in her eyes of some kind, Vigilante Man knew better.

  It was simple: the Sherry that Evan knew had been replaced by a lookalike, a doppelganger, an automaton. The Exacerbator had wasted no time, as usual. What had he done with the real Sherry last night, though?

  Vigilante Man peeled Evan Boanerges off and rolled himself on, snugging the cape on last. It was supposed to be fireproof, even capable of allowing him to glide short distances—say, from building to building—but flame-throwing hoods weren’t quite as common as they were in Rescue Beaver—Evan snickered: comic books—and the need to move from building top to building top was only felt by the young, like Elastic Man and Kid Bonzai, the new college kid in Collections. And Boy Plunder, probably, depending on how weighed down with loot he was.

  Vigilante Man sat on the foot of his bed again and thought about Sherry, the pivotal role she played in his life. How someday he would explain to her that he loved her not out of some misguided sense of protection—though the Exacerbator did make it seem that way—but because in the break room she always unscrewed the bottle from the lid instead of the lid from the bottle; because if she could get away with it, she’d wear control top hose under her bikini and then frolic in the surf, the water beading down her nylon legs. Because he needed someone to tell him to be careful and then send him out anyway and turn fast away from the window, already biting her index finger.

  He would find her. He would stand at the window all night if he had to, but he would find her.

  At three o’clock there was a knock at the door, and Vigilante Man crossed the living room of ace accountant Evan Boanerges, knocked back. The secret knock took a full minute and a half, but in the third series of the left hand diminutions the caller faltered, unsure—Boy Plunder!—and Vigilante Man slammed the door back to give chase.

  The hall was empty but that meant nothing.

  Vigilante Man reeled down the paisley carpet to the closing elevator and dived for it, his gloved hand forcing the twin doors open.

  It was just the old woman again, with her dog. She pushed the down button and held it, waiting for him to stand.

  Her and the dog both raised their lips at him.

  “You shouldn’t be out in your pajamas,” she said around the tenth floor, and Evan closed his eyes and told her to just please shut up please, would she? and when the doors opened Vigilante Man was racing across the lobby, out into the night again, the doorman whispering a slight go get em, big guy, which is all any good hero really needs.

  HOW BILLY HANSON DESTROYED THE PLANET EARTH, AND EVERYONE ON IT

  He wouldn’t say this later, because he’d be dead along with everyone else, blasted into a cloud of comparatively warm ash swirling around in what had been Earth’s orbital plane, but it wasn’t his fault. Really. Or, if there was any fault, it was that he was human in the first place, a species built specifically, it would seem, to push buttons clearly marked DON’T PUSH, a species that had only evolved in the first place because it kept reaching up to that next level of the beach instead of being satisfied with where it already was.

  Given the chance, of course, Billy Hanson might have blamed the political situation of the lab he was with on a three-year grant, a political situation which was purely typical of any money-driven research setting, and beneath mentioning here except to say that there was the usual amount of pressure to collect some data, which could then be cribbed down into a prospectus for an article, dropped into whatever mailbox was marked for the latest pickup.

  So, yes, had he had the luxury of time, Billy Hanson might have tried to shift the blame from himself, say it was the lab’s fault, the same way he used to blame his older sister for grape juice he’d just spilled on the beige carpet, but, at the same time, had he not destroyed the Earth that fine June evening, then of course all the acclaim would have been his and his alone.

  Because, almost on accident, he’d finally done it.

  Not scheduled some prime observatory time—that had been scheduled for months, by some process Billy assumed involved darts—but decided, half on a whim, to let the computer cycle the telescope through one of its lighter diagnostic routines, which involved settling its crosshairs on some arbitrarily-chosen but rigorously-mapped set of coordinates, so it could fine tune itself, compensate for continental drift, smog, and all the rest of the usual variables, then hum and mutter to itself in binary for a while, finally give Billy the greenlight to redirect.

  Which, to his credit, Billy Hanson almost did, thereby saving the Earth and everyone on it.

  Except—and this is where the political situation of the lab he was working with comes into play—instead of automatically redirecting, Billy first did a manual check of the computer’s date and time, as that was what was going to get stamped onto each image he was about to record. Last week, either as a joke or to maliciously corrupt everyone else’s data (the latter, surely), some joker who’d pulled an early AM shift had set the date back enough years that the days and month-numbers still matched up, meaning nobody caught it for about thirty-six hours.

  Luckily, nothing Billy had recorded that night was going into an article.

  But that was just luck.

  So, to be thorough—in a hostile environment, paranoia was just survival—Billy tabbed down to the clock, and, in doing so, happened to glance at the coordinates the telescope had already focused on.

  It wasn’t one of the naked-eye clusters.

  Billy thought it was a joke, at first. Another joke.

  It had to be.

  But his face, it was so hot. And his heart, there in his chest. And he was even crying a little.

  He had been right.

  To back up a little: eight years ago, Billy Hanson had been halfway through his first post-doc gig, and, following the advice of his dissertation director, was already sketching out a series of questions which he could then narrow down into a legitimate research proposal. The key of it, his director said, was that he had to come up with something revolutionary, or at least revolutionary sounding. Because all those boards of directors, they wanted to be discovering the next big thing. Failing that, however, at least give them the promise of a valiant, newsworthy effort, with a data set that could possibly be recycled, even, so long as their foundation’s name was still attached to it.

  So Billy gave it to them.

  His idea was that, if gravitational lensing was a real thing, allowing starlight to bend around bodies of significant-enough mass—and it was real, thank you—then shouldn’t it also be possible to somehow focus through a ‘web’ or ‘network’ or ‘crystalline arrangement’ of stellar bodies, such that you were looking down the ‘corridor’ of their combined gravity, a sweet spot maybe just a few centimeters wide but infinitely deep, where the combined, equalized ‘pull’ would essentially be opening up a hole in space, maybe even time? What could you see then?

  That was how he’d ended his proposal: What could we see then?

  The headlines would be along the lines of “Mankind Looks for God,” and have Billy’s picture under it somewhere, smiling just mischievously enough to usher in another age, where the scientists could again be celebrities.

  His project didn’t even make the first cut, though, and no new age dawned, or took him for its darling, its media child. As his director said, Billy’d made the cardinal mistake: proposed a project which required no labwork, allowed no empirical results. Instead, all he needed was a pencil, some paper, and a brain. The right brain, granted, but still—the board didn’t think their money would be best spent on a thought-experiment, one that could only ever be proven over the course of a million years, so, the next season, Billy and a colle
ague had a new, only slightly revolutionary proposal to submit, and he filed his Spatial Tunneling Debacle (as his director called it) into the bottom drawer, waited for the math to come.

  Instead of the math, though, what Billy got that balmy night in June was proof, the kind that can be written to a digital image file.

  And, because he was still in diagnostic mode, what he was seeing was beyond question, was untampered with, and, even better, whatever magical conduit of stars had lined up around his coordinates, to focus his series of lenses some exponential amount farther away than humans had ever even dreamed, they were each being recorded as well. So this would be a repeatable thing. If not physically, then at least in simulation. Let other people do the math, now; Billy Hanson already had the pictures.

  It was all so overpowering that he didn’t even bother to wipe the tear from his right cheek. He wasn’t aware of it, really. Like a child, he was just smiling with wonder, leaning in as if to touch the screen.

  On some as-yet unnamed planet an untold numbers of light-years away, a form of life wholly alien to him was sitting at what was probably a table, in what might be just another backyard.

  As near as Billy could tell, this ‘alien’ was just staring straight ahead. For all Billy knew, though, this—this whatever-it-was, it was telepathically communing with its species, or gestating a litter of young, or turning to stone like it did every third year when the solar flares came, or using some of its complicated neck apparatus to filter the methane from its air, or whatever it breathed, if it even breathed.

  It wasn’t quite bipedal either, Billy didn’t think, but did seem to be bilateral. From where Billy was looking, anyway.