Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  Kayla looks as if she approves of this sort of feedback.

  “What’s a category three?” I venture. The woman looks at me like I’m bird crap that just fell on her shoe.

  “Oh,” says Gran, “Gina, Joel,” he waves to the mecha pilots, “you should totally meet MI37. Liaising from the UK and all that. Very chill folks. Very groovy.”

  The woman’s face does not soften. The man nods, albeit grudgingly.

  “Category three is a state-level threat,” he says.

  “State level?” I ask.

  The woman groans as if I pain her.

  “Oh, well, you know,” Gran says. “Like, capable of blowing a hole in the world that’s the size of the average US state.”

  I contemplate that for a moment. That is the level of damage they think Clyde could inflict? Clyde? Bumbling, grinning Clyde?

  Clyde who sent a horde of golems to try and kill us all. Who programmed homicidal tendencies into a military drone.

  Could he do that? Would he?

  “What in the name of hell,” asks Felicity, “is a category one threat then?”

  “Oh,” Gran says. “It sort of goes up, like, geographically. Category two is country size hole. Category one is a continent. Not totally metric or anything, but it sort of gives you a sense of scale and shit.”

  Felicity seems to think about this. “So a nuclear bomb…” she starts.

  “Category four—city wide hole.”

  Holy shit, they have Clyde one category up from a nuke. My sense of reassurance slips. They’re only sending two mecha against that?

  Tabitha chews her lip and looks at the pilots. “Clyde’s going to tear them apart,” she mutters.

  Kayla just nods.

  BORDO PONIENTE LANDFILL

  We stand in the cesspit of humanity. Everything is trash. It defines the landscape. Its fumes infect the air we breathe. It swirls and swills in the trickles of water that flow from nearby cloaca.

  But it is not the scale, nor the stench, nor the sense of the place seeping through the soles of my shoes that makes my gorge rise.

  It is the humanity. It is the women and men and children scurrying through this detritus. They are covered in the stains of filth. It is in their hair, their pores. It is deep beneath their fingernails. I see a boy no more than eight pulling a fistful of rusting metal from a pile of broken bottles. It comes loose with a spray of violent green fluid. He shoves the still dripping mess into a shopping bag, wipes his brow with his polluted fist and blinks the dripping sewage from his eyes.

  “Jesus.”

  Of course, I knew this sort of place exists. We all know. There are the TV documentaries. There are the pleading ads. There are the celebrity spokespeople looking into TV cameras with happy, filthy children perched around them—a cheerful counterpoint to a melancholic face with staring eyes.

  I knew it, but only in my head, not in my gut. And, God, I was not prepared for this.

  Felicity has tied a handkerchief around her face, obscuring her nose and mouth, but she cannot keep the horror out of her eyes. Kayla is doing her best to look impassive and heartless but her eyes track the children and her hands tremble slightly. With one hand, Tabitha clutches her laptop like a talisman. Gran holds the other.

  So… I guess, well, they… Yeah.

  But that’s just something I cannot deal with right now.

  The only ones who look impassive are the CIA pilots, but that’s because they’ve closed the cockpits of their mecha suits and all I can see is blank steel. Bastards probably have air conditioning and perfume dispensers in there.

  “Maybe he picked here,” says Kayla, “because he knew there’s no feckin’ way we’d want to come.”

  “I’ll, like, get the eye in the sky to do another sweep.” Gran manages the sentence before his gag reflex kicks in again. He stifles a heave with his forearm. The bottom of his suit pant legs are turning from black to an ugly shade of purple. He manages to control himself and touches a small plastic bead in his ear.

  “You dudes see anything from up there?”

  The cargo plane that brought us in is doing low sweeps back and forth above the landfill, riding updrafts of rotten air.

  A static-filled voice comes back over my own ear bud. It says something like, “Gffffnshhhhkzzzzshfzzz.”

  “Roger,” says Felicity.

  I look over to her. “You understood that?”

  She shrugs. “I’m fluent in military radio chatter.” She points ahead and to the right. “Might be some sort of structure one click south-east of here.”

  We slog on and through. This place gets worse. The trash piles are deeper, the people thinner—emaciated limbs and desperate eyes. They stare at the hulking mecha with an odd passivity, as if they have been robbed of any sense of wonder.

  “Why would he come here?” I ask Felicity.

  Felicity shrugs. “I’m not sure. But he’s going to have a reason.”

  A reason. That’s what I need Clyde to have for all of this. I look around. “Maybe he wants us to see something…”

  “What shits we are, letting people live like this?” Felicity looks skeptical.

  “Holy shit.” It’s the female mecha pilot’s voice coming through my earpiece. She’s ahead of us, standing on the crest of a dune of plastic drinking bottles, smashed circuitry, and rubber hoses.

  We clamber up beside her and stare down. There is a depression in the field of filth, a shallow bowl perhaps a kilometer in diameter. At its center, its deepest point, there is indeed a structure. A square building, the size of a small family home.

  It’s not exactly the traditional bricks and stucco construction though. The walls are made of cans, mulch, and smashed TVs. The roof is sheets of rusting steel, patchwork tarpaulins. Balding tires, piled high, form columns before a pitch black rectangle of a doorway.

  “It’s a temple,” I say, suddenly recognizing the design. “Like an old Greek temple. Just…” Well, there’s only one way to say it really. “Just made out of shit.”

  “Arrogant fuck,” Tabitha says, and while she is a bit one-note on the whole Clyde issue, it’s hard to parse building a temple to yourself as an act of humility.

  “Still think this is a trap?” I ask.

  “So he’s here.” Tabitha shrugs. “So what? Still a trap.”

  “He puts up anything between us and him,” comments the male pilot, “and we fill it with more holes than Swiss cheese in a mouse hole.”

  “Goddamn, Joel,” comes the woman’s voice. “You are still the worst fucking poet I know.”

  The man’s mecha turns to face hers. One massive fist jabs at her. “I was published, Gina. Goddamn published.”

  You know, one day it would be nice if just someone could conform to a stereotype.

  “How about,” Felicity suggests, “we focus, lock, load, and go in and get the bastard?”

  “Published,” says the pilot as the two mecha stomp down the slope toward the temple of trash. Felicity and Tabitha follow in their wake, while Kayla goes out wide, scouting clockwise along the rim.

  I catch Gran’s arm. He turns to me.

  I’m staring at that little temple. I know Tabitha is seeing it as some pompous gesture, some self-aggrandizing bullshit. But I wonder if there’s more irony and sadness in it than anything else. Maybe it’s less the creation of an arrogant man and more the creation of someone who’s looked around him and thrown his arms up in despair.

  “If there’s a chance,” I say, “to talk to him, to try and bring him back to sanity, let’s do that, OK? Before we shoot him. Let’s see if we can rescue him.” And I know Kayla and Tabitha would disagree with me, hell, maybe even Felicity would, but it still feels like the right thing to do.

  “Sure, dude. Path of non-violence. Groovy shit. I dig you.” Gran nods as if I am the beardiest of yogis.

  He still pulls his gun though.

  That said, so do I.

  23

  We get halfway down the slope toward the temple
and I start to feel like we’ve all been a little paranoid. There are no visible defenses. No zombies whose minds Clyde has overwritten. It’s just dirty, crap, and depressing. And it’s going to take more than melancholy to stop us now.

  “I’m not buying this whole trap thing,” I tell Tabitha. “This is camouflage. Pure and simple.”

  Tabitha rolls her eyes.

  “Arthur has a point,” says Felicity. “We didn’t even notice the structure until we had a plane directly on top of it. No one is looking for anything here.”

  “Have you two never even feckin’ heard of jinxes?” Kayla throws up her hands.

  This is the point at which Clyde should pipe up and tell us that jinxes are actually caused by stress points in the fabric of reality, and are actually geographically driven events, rather than dialogue-driven ones. Or something like that. Except if Clyde did pipe up right now, it would probably be to tell us how exactly he’s going to kill us.

  Instead of any of that, the female pilot says, “We’ve got movement to the east.”

  Which may actually prove that there really are such things as jinxes.

  We all turn. The mechas’ machine gun barrels start to spin, ready to spit death. But there’s nothing. Just one of the many piles of trash collapsing, rumbling down the gentle incline of the slope.

  “It’s nothing,” Gran says. He starts moving again. The others follow.

  But someone… something… disturbed that trash. I keep scanning the rim of the pit.

  The trash keeps tumbling down, picking up speed and mass as it falls. Like a snowball building to an avalanche. The others keep moving, but I take my eyes off the ridge to stare at it.

  Something is wrong with it. Something I cannot put my finger on. But I have learned that waiting to work out exactly what is wrong is usually a fatal error in this profession. Brace for a walloping first, ask questions later.

  “Weapons ready,” I shout to the team.

  “What is it?” Felicity stops and looks at me.

  “I don’t—” And then I do know. I know exactly what is wrong. The trash isn’t falling down the slope. It’s falling on a long diagonal, falling sideways around the pit. It is falling directly toward us.

  “Incoming!” I bellow.

  Too late.

  The sheer size of the trash fall only hits me as it careens through the final hundred yards. It is a crashing wave, a surfer’s wet dream sketched out in rotting vegetables, smashed toasters, and junked coffee pots.

  The barrels of the smaller mecha blaze into life, spitting fire and death. Plastic bags perforate, loose cans spin away. But the mass is not slowed.

  There is an explosive hiss as Gina’s mecha lets loose with a missile from her shoulder. It burns through the air. Closes the distance in seconds.

  And then the trash wave leaps into the air.

  It is a massive, thrashing thing. A tangled mess of tentacles in the lead, a long sleek body tapering away behind.

  It arcs effortlessly, almost absurdly over the missile.

  The rocket smashes into the ground a hundred yards behind the trash monster. The explosion is loud enough to drop me to my knees, hands pressed to my ears. Shrapnel and shit rain down around us.

  The arcing trash monster smashes down to the ground, a second detonation, sending the slope we stand on spilling and slipping all around us. I roll twenty yards downhill before I slam into the remains of a washing machine and stop with a grunt of pain.

  The two mecha spin around.

  “The hell did it go?” Gina’s voice barks.

  “Need a visual!” yells Joel, the male pilot.

  “In a circle!” Felicity snaps. “Now! Facing out. Scan for movement.”

  I scramble into line next to her, jam my gun out at the world, look left, right. She stands behind me, breathing hard.

  “Is Clyde trying to kill us with a giant trash squid?” she asks. She looks as if she genuinely wants me to say no.

  I want to say it too. I really do.

  “I’ve got no visual!” Joel shouts. His mecha has its back to Gina’s. They circle slowly, the rest of us gathered at their feet, trying to match our circling to theirs.

  “Feckin’ jinxing bastard,” Kayla throws in my direction.

  “Trap,” Tabitha adds. “Told you.”

  Because apparently it is just not enough for only a giant trash monster to beat up on me today.

  I open my mouth to refute these accusations.

  The ground beneath me heaves, erupts upward.

  The trash squid bursts from the depths of the refuse, tentacles splayed wide. It embraces Joel’s mecha, engulfs him. Its massive body thrashes up at such speed the pair are carried into the air. They hang for a moment. Then they slam down. The shockwave rocks me.

  Trash tentacles start to tear. The mecha’s guns blaze. I dive to the ground. Colossal shells gouge through the beast’s hide. But it’s like shooting the vegetable golems. No individual part of the beast is important. There’s too much redundancy in the system.

  “Joel!” I hear Gina scream. She points guns, missiles, fists. But the mecha and the beast are too tightly entwined. If she hits one, she hits the other.

  A massive sheet of metal is torn from the mecha with a protesting scream. I hear Joel spit curses through the radio transmitter.

  “Fuck it,” cuts in the woman, and she just dives on them both.

  Massive fists rend and rip. More tentacles erupt upward, smash down with earth shuddering force on the mecha’s back. I hear screams and howls stabbing through my ear bud. I rip the thing out even as I stagger away, trying to get out of range of gunfire, and flailing fists, and squid shrapnel.

  The squid hits a box of ammunition. The explosion lifts me off my feet, dumps me five feet downhill. My ears ring and the world screams.

  “The temple!” I can faintly hear someone yelling. Felicity.

  “Come on, dudes!” Gran runs past, skids to a halt, shoves out a hand, drags me to my feet. “Move!”

  I move.

  A tentacle torn free from the beast’s body flies into the air, rains down in its constituent parts. Milk cartons and hubcaps bounce off my back. Kayla swats a car bumper from the air. Tabitha takes a coke bottle to the forehead and blood starts streaming down her face. Gran stops pulling me and grabs her.

  “The temple!” Felicity is still yelling.

  We tear downhill, away from the epic brawl behind us. That fight is out of our weight class. The temple looms. An ugly black rectangle of an entrance. I was scared of the dark when I was a kid, but then I grew up and learned there weren’t monsters under my bed. Then I joined MI37, and realized there were.

  Still, there’s nowhere else to go. And we came here with a mission.

  And then the ground ripples. And I realize Version 2.0 is not the sort of man who has just one giant trash squid to defend himself. And I have a lot more to be afraid of than the dark.

  24

  The second squid lunges up from the surface of the landfill. Its tentacles flail. I drop to my knees, skid. Unspeakable filth scrapes my skull. The squid is above me, skims over my scalp. A beak of rusty iron shears snaps at me. I feel the wind of them closing.

  Then it is gone, plunging back into the refuse.

  It is smaller than the one currently tearing the mecha apart. Perhaps a third of the size. About twelve feet from tentacle to tail. Still plenty big enough to remove my entrails from their warm, fleshy housing.

  I spin, watch the surface of the landfill boil as the squid squirms away.

  It is not the only disturbance in the surface. One, two, three more.

  “Oh shit.” I am never at my most eloquent in these situations.

  “We’ve got to move!” I yell.

  “Your feckin’ sword!” Kayla yells.

  She’s right. Guns are no good here. I slam the pistol back into its holster, rip the sword from its scabbard on my back. Flame gushes into the already boiling sky.

  “You take Felicity and Tabitha,�
�� I snap to her. “I’ll guard Gran.” As much as I’d like to be the one protecting Felicity, there’s no denying Kayla is the better swordsman. Felicity will be safer with her.

  We push forward as fast as we can, feet slipping and sinking in the loose trash. The temple is tantalizingly close. The ground boils as first one trash squid crosses our path, then another. Tabitha yells as something skirts around the back of her feet.

  This is a hunting pattern. They’re forcing us into a tightly packed group.

  Behind us machine guns roar and metal screams.

  Three roiling shapes hem us in. They spin round us faster and faster, drawing tighter.

  “Where’s the feckin’ fourth one?”

  I realize where the moment Kayla’s question ends. It’s still too late.

  I dive sideways, knock Gran to the floor. I swing wildly with the sword.

  The fourth squid erupts from the ground beneath our feet. I see its tentacles bearing Kayla, Felicity, and Tabitha skywards. I hear the gnashing of its steel trap beak.

  “No!” I bellow.

  I gain my feet as the three other squid rise up out of the surface of the landfill. Tentacles massive and waving. Towering, sunlight glinting off the edges of jagged cans and split steel. And there, above us all, that one leaping, arcing squid. And Kayla stands atop it. Dancing on its lashing tentacles, swords slashing wildly.

  One tentacle falls. Another. Another. And a yell, and a scream. Tabitha plunging back toward earth.

  The squid around me lunge. I whirl my sword in a tight arc, smashing through one tentacle, jarring off another, bouncing, spitting sparks, slamming into the squid’s body. I rip the blade sideways, almost losing it as the beast thrashes. An ungodly scream comes from it, like feedback on a guitar. Its thick tail smashes into me, a bulldozer to the shins, lifting me off the ground. I bellow and howl. And oh, and ow, and fuck that hurts.

  I come down with a crash. Limbs jarred. My sword spills. Kayla is standing over a trash corpse, lacerating metal. Gran is crouched over Tabitha firing desperately to no avail.