Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  It takes me a moment but… that’s a death threat. Right there. And it shouldn’t be a shock from a man—a thing?—that tried to kill me a few days ago, but… God.

  “How’s the sword thing working out by the way?” he asks me conversationally.

  “Wouldn’t judge you if you feckin’ showed him,” Kayla says. And, God, for just that moment, I am tempted.

  We all just stand there. Even Felicity with her gun still pointed at his back. Her hands are shaking, I see.

  All just standing here…

  “We’re still here,” I say. “He’s still keeping us here.”

  “Shit,” Felicity curses.

  “Let’s move.” I wave my pistol toward the door we originally came through. “Come on.”

  Gran turns the door handle. Pushes. Doesn’t get through.

  “Locked,” he says. He looks confused. “I didn’t…”

  “Not a problem,” Kayla informs him.

  Her fist flies out. The door shudders, the metal bends slightly… but it does not fall.

  Kayla stares at her fist, at the door, looks confused.

  “DARPA has been working on these very cool locking mechanisms recently,” Mercurio comments.

  Kayla crosses the room in less time than it takes to draw breath. Her fist is up.

  “No!” Felicity snaps.

  Kayla pauses.

  “Not unconscious,” Felicity says. “Not that way. We need to get in there and see what Clyde’s done to him. We can’t risk damaging his brain.”

  “Could I just chop out his tongue?” I get the feeling Kayla is all done joking.

  “Later,” I say. “We need to be moving.”

  Of course our exits are limited at this point. In fact we’re down to just one. The door at the far end of the lab. The one what’s-left-of-Mercurio entered through. The one I’m guessing he wants us to go through.

  Bugger it. I start moving toward the door. “Tabitha,” I say, “get us a blueprint. Chart us a course.”

  She doesn’t respond for a moment. Just stares at Mercurio. Works her jaw. Her eyes are very bright and very wet. But she doesn’t blink. Just stares. Mercurio smiles at her.

  She flings her gaze away from him so hard I fear she’ll do herself harm. But then her fingers start to fly across the keyboard.

  With Felicity and Kayla at my side, I push the far door open, and get ready for the trap to spring.

  17

  “Oh man,” says a voice, “you have got to be having a laugh.”

  I freeze. My eyes scan the room. I’m looking into the laboratory’s arboretum—standing around three times as tall as the lab at my back. A cluster of tall trees is surrounded by an ugly tangle of bushes. A distant glass dome lets gray light sluice down.

  I scan left. Right. Nobody. And yet somebody with a pronounced cockney accent is talking.

  Cockney? Wait. This is New Jersey. What the hell is…

  “Arthur, mate. Over here!”

  And then one of the trees waves at me.

  One of the trees.

  I only know one talking tree, but it still takes a moment for all the pennies to line up and drop.

  “Winston?” I say.

  Winston is… God, how do I explain Winston? Back when Clyde was a regular person, with regular goals that didn’t involve killing me and my co-workers or taking over the minds of American botanists, he created Winston. Literally created. Because Winston was a golem, a created man, a creature crafted entirely out of books that Clyde had found lying around the Bodleian Library. Into these Clyde invested an animating force from another reality. And its name was Winston.

  Then Winston hung around in the Bodleian, eating shwarma, and scanning for rogue spell books. And that was pretty much that.

  Except then we had to take Winston to London, and the time-traveling Russians, who I know I’ve mentioned before, got involved and turned back the clock on the books that made up Winston. And all those books were made of paper, and paper used to be trees. So Winston became an animating force inside a tree. “Ent,” was his word. The last I saw Winston he was being kept in a basement beneath MI6’s London headquarters, essentially because he couldn’t shut up.

  Winston, it should be mentioned, has a rather unique personality.

  “You keep following me around like this,” Winston says, his bark-crusted face breaking into a grin, “I might begin to think you’ve gone gay for me.” The wooden whorls that form his eyes bulge knowingly. Then he winks. “Hello, Felicity, love,” he says. “Totally didn’t see you there.”

  “What the hell is going on?” she says. Not unreasonably. I make way for her to come through the door.

  “Winston’s here,” I say. It’s obvious, but I’m still trying to get over the fact that Clyde’s mind is here in another man’s hijacked body. This additional reunion seems a little much.

  “The hell?” Tabitha asks, again not unreasonably.

  “You know,” Winston comments, “you are not taking the grandeur of this reunion in exactly the spirit I might have hoped.”

  At this point Kayla, Gran, and the handcuffed Mercurio–Clyde hybrid muscle their way into the room. More confusion, and cursing follows.

  “You know what?” Winston finally breaks out. “Hang the bloody lot of you anyway. I was happy here without you. I’m special here, I am. I’m appreciated. There’s not many tree-men about, you know? Course you don’t. You don’t care for nobody but yourselves. I’m rare and unique. I have lovely foliage. Him.” He thrusts a branch at Mercurio. “He cares about me. He wants to know about me. I like him.”

  Which at least gives the chaos some direction. “Dude,” Gran says, “this guy?”

  “Course that bloody guy, whoever-you-are. Don’t recognize you. Maybe being a tree is messing with my memory. I don’t know. But him—Doctor Mercurio, who you, by the way, appear to be treating without the due respect a genuine tree-lover really deserves.”

  His eyes flick left. “Not a tree-lover like that, by the way. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

  Kayla groans. Winston carries on regardless.

  “He requested me to be sent here from London special, he did. Flew me over on a military jet. Used hydroponics to keep me alive on the trip over, they did. Very fancy. Hippy bollocks of course, but very fancy.”

  I try to take this all in. Mercurio requested Winston to come here. Mercurio who researches turning vegetation into weaponry. Had Clyde overwritten Mercurio’s mind when the good doctor did that? Or was it happenstance? I don’t know. I can’t know right now. But what about Winston would interest either of them? And what about Mercurio interested Clyde?

  Is this another delaying tactic? My paranoia is starting to sky rocket. Too much is happening on too short a timeline. Why does me being off balance always seem to coincide with terribly bad things happening to the world?

  Kayla is circling the room looking for the best exit. Tabitha is shouting random blueprint information at her. Gran is orbiting Tabitha and Mercurio like a worried parent. Felicity is trying to keep her gun aimed at Mercurio but Gran keeps getting in the way. Mercurio is smiling like a Cheshire cat getting a blowjob.

  I stare up at Winston. Winston the talking tree. His mouth is a cracked hole in the trunk. His arms have leaves. And yet he is somehow the center of calm in this scene.

  “Why did he want you?” I manage to ask through the clamor of chaos. “Why specifically?”

  “Well, his research, mate,” says Winston, calming down now someone seems to want to pay attention to him again.

  “And what’s his research about?”

  “Oh, it’s those things,” Winston says. “What’s the word? Mad about them he is.”

  “What bloody word?” I ask. Adrenaline overwhelms my civility.

  “Steady on, mate. Steady on. Don’t get shirty.”

  If my blood pressure gets any higher I think my nose is going to erupt like Vesuvius. The next conversation I have with Winston, I’m going to bring a chainsaw.


  “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” Winston says. “Not that I have one, but you get my meaning. God,” he laughs. “Stupid of me to forget it. I am one.”

  “Tree?” I say, increasingly desperate. Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it in my gut like a lead weight. This is all too much coincidence.

  “No.”

  “Asshole?”

  “Fuck off, mate,” Winston says with relative geniality. “Oh wait, that’s it. Golem. He’s mad about golems.”

  “Doors are locked,” Kayla shouts from the far side of the trees. “All of them. The fecks.”

  “Oh, I can fix that,” says Mercurio.

  Felicity jabs him in the side of the head with her gun barrel. “You don’t—”

  And then comes an audible click from every single door. The sort of click one associates with a lock coming undone.

  “Oh shit,” Felicity breathes.

  And then the golems start to pour in.

  18

  It’s a swarm. A biblical plague of them. Ugly misshapen things. Bulbous limbs. Lumpy irregular heads. Their legs whirl in wild uncoordinated arcs, dragging and tearing them forwards.

  Version 2.0’s golems. His army.

  They are made of vegetables, fruit, gourds. Vines twist between cantaloupes and bunches of grapes. Branches hew together into a neck where a bunch of bananas perch lopsidedly. Pineapple fists. Pumpkin chests.

  It should be comical. These stupid, poorly rendered things coming towards us. But there is such desperate fury in their mad scramble. Such a willingness to tear their compatriots apart just so they can get a little closer to us, a little closer to ripping us limb from limb, that I can find no humor in their approach.

  To be honest, they’re terrifying.

  Pistols crackle to life. The air fills with lead traveling at very terminal velocities. Fruit pulps. Seeds and peel spray. Concave curves become convex. Juice splatters.

  The golems do not slow for even an instant.

  The bullets punch through the golems easily, but without effect. Their trajectories are useless pinpricks as our assailants tear toward us. Their impact is too small.

  I wish Felicity had brought her shotgun. But it is back in Gran’s incognito camper van. Not far away, only too far. I wish that someone wasn’t going to have to explain to my parents that I was beaten to death by a fruit salad.

  I look down at my pistol—suddenly a useless little thing. I jam it back into the shoulder holster and brace as the horde descends.

  My shoulder holster.

  My shoulder holster hanging too high and too far forward.

  Because of the great bloody flaming sword strapped to my goddamn back.

  I whip it out in a great sweeping arc. And I know to put my right foot just there. Pivot my hip just like that.

  I cleave a vegetable man through the midriff. He falls in two separate halves. My blade carries on, buries itself in the leafy torso. The smell of burned spinach fills the air.

  Kayla dances through my field of vision. No salad was ever chopped finer. With one hand she drags Mercurio behind her.

  With a roar, Winston wades into the fray. He towers over the golems. His fists plow great trenches through the oncoming masses. And maybe Version 2.0 was gone from MI37 just long enough to forget exactly how we bring the goddamn pain.

  The golems keep coming, though. Keep jamming themselves with greater and greater ferocity through the open doorways. A creature made almost entirely of pineapples comes in low, tackles me around the waist. I bring the hilt of my sword down on its neck, dislodge something vital. The thing falls apart, takes me down with it. I lie in its sweet smelling corpse.

  Then something grabs my sword arm, wrenches at it. I bellow and heave, but the thing has a vicious grip. I swing a fist at the mass of vegetation assaulting me and something pulps beneath it.

  This has absolutely no seeming effect. Only the most massive of trauma seems to slow these things. I punch again but my sword arm is still pinned.

  I can see more coming at me, ducking under Winston’s flailing arm.

  Shit.

  Then, with a yell that would curdle blood, Felicity appears. Leaping through the air, mouth open, hair flying. Felicity Shaw, Amazon warrior. Gun in her hand.

  She collides with the golem’s back, clings there, unshakeable. Her mouth is open in a mad war cry. Her pistol comes down, again, again. She’s using it like a club. A mad rodeo rider caving in her steed’s skull.

  The golem shudders suddenly and the pressure releases.

  Three more golems are almost on me. I wrench up my sword arm with a yell, rising on shaking knees. The blade whips by Felicity’s head with a roar of flame, slams into fleshy bodies. The golems spill to the ground.

  More are clambering up Winston’s body, tearing at his bark and branches. I can smell his sap mixing with the scent of mashed berries and crushed cabbage. He claws at his body, to free himself of them, but his limbs are blunt and awkward.

  “Goddamn little fruit salad bastards!” he bellows.

  Gran is back to back with Tabitha. She swats golems’ heads with her laptop. I see one go down and think that the Lancashire cricket club maybe missed out on a star batswoman.

  The attacks continue though, relentless and unremitting. Gran has grabbed a branch from somewhere and bludgeons away as best as possible, but the pair are on the verge of being overwhelmed.

  “On me!” Gran yells. “Dudes! On me!”

  I tear a flaming hole through the crowd toward him. Vegetable bodies sizzle, spit, and collapse. Kayla churns a path from the opposite direction, her blade a blur. Mercurio stumbles, dragged along in her wake.

  The golems are still coming, still filling the room as fast as we can empty it. How many of these bastards did 2.0 make?

  Winston still smashes away at the center of the room. A limb skids over my head. A flying body almost sends Kayla sprawling. He’s as much a threat to us as he is to the golems.

  “I wouldn’t even bloody deign to put blue cheese dressing on you!” he bellows.

  “We’ve got to bail, dudes!” Gran yells and bludgeons at the same time, beating one golem down then another. Kayla reaches over him, skewers a bulbous cabbage head. I slash the hand off a cauliflower man about to seize Tabitha’s throat.

  “On three—” he yells.

  But wait. “Where’s Felicity?” In the crush of things I have lost track of her.

  Then I see her. She stands just inside the sweep of Winston’s arms, waist deep in vegetable matter, beating golems back with the butt of her gun. Pistol whipping reality back into line. Her face is matted with fruit juice and blood. Her skin is split above her eye.

  I don’t even think, just go for her. And in that lacuna of thought, my sword comes alive. It twists, leaps, jumps. My sword dances. My blood sings in my ears—a full-throated heavy metal roar. The sword’s flame whips from red to blue. I sear a gaping hole through the vegetable men. Arms, legs, and leafy guts leap flaming into the air as I make my way toward the woman I love.

  She stops as I hack my way to her.

  “Holy crap,” she says.

  I’m panting, barely aware of what’s going on.

  “You OK?” I manage.

  “Been worse.” Considering the circumstances, that’s actually quite the statement.

  Another wave descends on us, and for a moment the pleasantries are put on hold. I hack madly at the oncoming assailants. Something smashes against my forehead, sends me to my knees, but I manage to get my blade through its guts.

  “The others?” Felicity says as Winston’s flailing buys us a moment of calm. She’s sporting a slash above the other eye now.

  I glance back across the seething floor. Kayla, Mercurio, Gran, and Tabitha have been pushed back against the wall. Tabitha has switched from offense to defense. She holds up her laptop to fend off blows, its case cracked and bent. Gran’s branch has snapped and he’s using it as a particularly ineffective flail. Kayla is the only thing keeping t
hem alive and Mercurio keeps trying to get in her way. She elbows him hard in the nose and he staggers back, nose pouring blood.

  “Shit,” seems to pretty much sum up the situation.

  “You take point,” Felicity tells me.

  I do, carving a path forward as best I can.

  “Get off me you dietary disasters!” Winston yells somewhere above me. “Fucking root vegetables. You’re just jealous of my stature!”

  I make it back to the group. Blood is getting in my eye. My arms ache from the weight of the sword. Assuming we make it out of this, I need to find out about Kayla’s workout regimen.

  “The hell?” Tabitha snaps at me. “Teamwork?”

  “Dude,” Gran says, with significantly less venom, although he is busy stabbing an eggplant with the stump of his stick, “need to stick together. You know?”

  “I was,” I pant, trying to duck a blow and catching it on my shoulder instead. “Was sticking Felicity back to us.”

  “Can we feckin’ go yet?” Kayla asks.

  We make our move. Tired and ragged, Kayla dragging Mercurio by his collar. My sword slashes are increasingly wild. The golems keep on and on, mindlessly swinging for us. This has become a war of attrition.

  If only Clyde was here. Clyde the original. Clyde my friend. Blasting holes through the crowd, instead of sending it to kill us.

  “Fuck!” Tabitha howls. And then she’s down. A rogue thing of vines and grapes seizing her by the ankles. Then they’re on her, beating, clawing.

  Gran and I both start smashing away. My sword flickers back and forth. His broken branch stabs and skewers. I’m terrified I’ll accidentally gut Tabitha, but the other option is to let the bad guys do it. By the time we beat the crowd back, her head is lolling.

  God, don’t let her be dead. Don’t let her be…

  “Still breathing,” yells Gran, slinging her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.

  I straighten. And then there is half a forest lunging at me. Something of brambles and thorns. The loosest approximation of a fist plunging at my head. I try to get my sword up, but all I have time to do is gasp.