Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  In some ways it’s comforting to let Clyde’s patter wash over me, even if it’s filtered through this filter of Xerox weirdness. At least it’s not a murderous ramble. That said, I would rather like to get to the point before Version 2.0 brings the apocalypse upon us.

  “So 2.0 is wrong, and I can rest easy sending him to hell?” I check.

  “I don’t know,” says 2.2, in a less reassuring way than I’d hoped. “Evil-Me might be spot on the money. And he is a terribly smart seeming chap. And I think he may have exceeded my hardware limitations. Parallel processing up the doodad, I rather think. But that regardless, it takes some hefty cahones to just dictate that you’ve found the spot-on perfect science and know all there is to know, full stop. Rather antithetical to the old investigative spirit, that is.”

  “So we might still be the good guys?” It’s sad that it all keeps coming back to that. But it is nice to think you’re fighting on the side of the angels even in a world where the angels have all had their wings clipped.

  “There’s a chance,” 2.2 concedes.

  “Fifty-fifty?” I venture.

  Clyde pulls a face, his glasses wobbling on his beaky nose. “Well…” he hedges, “Version 2.0 is a supercomputer genius type.”

  “Twenty-five percent chance we’re the good guys?” I have a sinking feeling in my chest.

  “Yeah,” says 2.2, employing his rather disastrous version of a poker-face, “twenty-five sounds very reasonable.”

  “Fifteen?” I am so crestfallen, I think I shall have to pick my crest up off the floor and dust it off.

  “I’d feel very comfortable saying there’s a ten percent chance we’re not going to doom the world by fighting Evil-Me,” Clyde tells me with a far wider smile than should ever be used when delivering those sorts of odds.

  I close the laptop and fail to feel better about anything.

  AREA 51 GYMNASIUM

  Apparently my little workouts with Kayla have started to attract an audience. A small gaggle of men and women in labcoats stand at one corner of the room staring as we face off against each other. I half expect to see someone waving betting slips. If that does start up, I could probably turn having my arse kicked into a rather profitable sideline.

  Normally I’d be disinclined to perform in front of an audience, but after seeing a girl shot in front of me and my chat with 2.2, I need to blow some steam off.

  “Talk,” Kayla says, then comes at me like a lightning bolt.

  I just about get my blade up, but the blow pushes me six skidding feet back over the gray plastic floor and leaves my arms numb to the elbows.

  There is a brief smattering of applause from the crowd.

  Kayla charges me again. I dodge to the side this time. Kayla skids to a halt beside me. There is more polite applause. Which is nice. Then Kayla sweeps my legs out. The applause turns to giggles. Which is less nice.

  “Need to keep moving,” she says as I pick my sorry self up off the floor.

  “Thanks,” I say, without really meaning it. “That’s—” I cut myself off with a savage lunge at her midriff.

  She bats my sword away and I stagger past her. She puts the boot into my arse as I go, just to let me know what she thinks of that.

  I come at her hard and fast then. Screw words. I concentrate on breathing, on footwork, on my grip. Keep the blade under control. Quick, sharp brutality. Feeling the burn in my arms and my chest. Trying to sink into the information in my head, to drown in it.

  Kayla parries every blow. But I drive her back. Slowly but surely.

  Finally she smashes my blade away. My arms ring to their shoulders. “What the feck are you fighting, Arthur?”

  I stare at her, panting. “What?”

  “Are we here to feck around? Or to learn shit so you can save people from evil bastards?”

  I stare at her, confused at the sudden anger. “What are you talking about?”

  “If you’re here, you’re here to fight me. But you’re not fighting me. So get it out. Talk about it or whatever it is the feck you do, and let’s get back to business.”

  I am acutely aware of the audience behind me.

  Kayla stands in the ready stance. “Come on, you feck,” she says.

  I shake my head. Take a pose… Then hesitate before coming full ready.

  “He shot a girl,” I say.

  Kayla comes at me, whether I’m ready or not. “Course he did,” she says, beating me back over the ground she’d given. “She was a feckin’ shell of a thing, possessed by an evil feck. What else would you do?”

  “Save her.” I manage to get some firm footing behind me and hold off the advance. “Debug her brain.”

  “Say that’s even feckin’ possible,” Kayla says, as she weaves around me, searching for a way through my guard, “then you have a wee girl dependent on the CIA for health and home. How the feck does that story have a happy ending?”

  She comes in low and hard. I leap the blade, but lack the grace to land in an Errol Flynn-esque backflip. Instead I come down and catch the flat of Kayla’s blade with my arse. It sends me reeling, but I’m still together enough to hear the crowd’s, “Ooooh.”

  “Killing little girls, possessed or no,” I say, “hardly strikes me as your average good guy behavior.”

  “Who the feck said anything about being good guys?” Kayla comes at me even as I finally find my feet beneath me. Her blows are short, sharp, and savage. “Good guys are comic books and popcorn movies. They’re feckin’ fake. We don’t do the right thing, Arthur. We do the necessary thing. How the feck have you not figured that out yet?”

  I parry, parry, riposte, spot the opening, and step in under her guard.

  Her fist catches me hard in the balls.

  I go down as neatly as if she’d fileted me. Bones become rubber. Muscles giving up in one ugly squeak of mashed masculinity.

  She looks at me lying on the ground. “We do what’s necessary to win, Arthur. That’s it.” She shrugs. “Now get up.”

  It takes a while. And it is done gingerly.

  Kayla gets in the ready pose. I get in the please-don’t-hit-me-in-the-balls-again pose. To call it defensive is possibly not as accurate as calling it close-to-fetal.

  “Gran was right to shoot her,” Kayla says to me. “Right feckin’ thing.”

  “But…” I manage. I take a breath.

  “But he said we’d talk.”

  “How the feck would talk help?” And she comes at me.

  There is no mercy here. I can’t track the blade. It’s all I can do to guess where the next blow will be and jam my sword at the interceding space. My arms sing with pain as Kayla batters me about the room.

  “Dead little girl. With your dead friend feckin’ her in the head. And it’s not even your dead friend. Just a feckin’ copy of a copy. Not even the real deal. As real as he gets now. So there’s not even any point to the talk.”

  “We could’ve saved her,” I pant. “We can save him.”

  “What?”

  Kayla actually stops. Stops and stares at me. “Are you feckin’ gone in the head?”

  I stand there panting, barely able to stand, sweat pouring off me. My blade flickers and gouts flame.

  “We can save him,” I insist. “We can talk him out of this. We can get through to him. He’s Clyde.”

  “You,” Kayla says, and her sword travels so fast it’s invisible. Somehow, operating on an instinct I didn’t know I had, I meet the blow. It smashes me sideways across the room.

  Kayla is there to meet me. Already swinging.

  “Stupid.”

  Another blow, reeling back in the other direction, arms screaming in pain.

  “Dumb.”

  Her blow meets me. My defense is so weak I have no idea how I’m hanging onto the blade.

  “Feck.”

  Somehow, from some deep, deep, poorly-conceived-of well of knowledge, I manage to parry the blow. I don’t stagger. Don’t reel. I parry and stand.

  “He has to die
.” Kayla hacks at me. “Be done with. Or he’ll kill us. And you’ll stand there and let him. Like you almost let Tabitha die. Twice now. To save what you think is the right thing to save. The good guy thing. Not the necessary thing.” She looks me in the eye. “You don’t fight for love. For a friend. You fight for humanity. You kill Clyde. Plain as feckin’ day.”

  “No.” Grunting, panting, I smash back at her. The flame of my blade flickers blue. I whip it faster and harder. I exist in a halo of flame. Kayla and I smash together and away. An angry, intricate dance of aggression. Both of us on the edge of control.

  “We fight for more than that. Otherwise we are Version 2.0. What we fight for defines us. We fight for what’s good because that’s what gives us the right to fight.”

  “Truth, justice, and the American feckin’ way? You’ve been abroad too feckin’ long.” Kayla’s sword falls in hammer blows. Beating me to my knees.

  So I kick her in one of hers.

  She stumbles.

  “No,” I say. “Nothing that grand. Hope.” I smash at her, at her one-armed guard. “Hope of being better people.” Smash. “Hope of a better future.” Smash. Hell, ten percent is still a chance. Smash.

  She finally beats away my blade, comes up, blade rising. I duck, spin, stab.

  There is the feel of my sword hitting something thick and meaty.

  Something starts to sizzle and burn.

  I stare.

  “Oh,” Kayla says.

  And there she is. She is right in front of me. Her mouth is a small circle. Her eyes are wide, mirroring the shape. There is my sword. Skewering her straight through her gut.

  She drops her sword. It lands with a sharp clatter on the smooth, shiny floor.

  “Oh feck.”

  And she collapses.

  29

  “Kayla!”

  Mine is not the only scream. Behind me people mill and shriek.

  I rush to her. She lies there, my sword sticking right through her. The point is jutting out of her back forcing her to lie at an angle on the floor. She is punctured through the upper left of her abdomen. The liver. Fuck. Fuck. Oh fuck. I’ve killed Kayla.

  My first instinct is to rip the sword free, but then some half-remembered piece of information from an Oxford PD first aid course makes me hesitate before removing the object from a puncture wound. Something about causing the wound to bleed. And perhaps the sword is cauterizing the wound even as we speak. Though is that a good thing? This needs to heal. God, this has to heal.

  I can’t have killed Kayla. I can’t. She can’t die. She’s Kayla. She’s a bloody superwoman. You can’t kill Superwoman. That’s written in the Comic Books Code, right? And, God, this is real. This is real. Of all the unreal shit I have to deal with… this is real.

  “Help!” I scream. “Help!”

  One wall of the gym, massive and obliterating, comes to life as a monitor. Clyde’s face eclipses everything. “On it, Arthur. Already alerted folk. Already on their way.”

  “Medic!” I scream. The Clyde version’s words aren’t sticking. Clyde. The bad guy. Except I’m the one who’s gone and killed Kayla. Jesus. I’ve… No. She can’t be dead.

  “They’re on their way, Arthur.” Clyde’s voice is soft and soothing. But my knees are in a pool of Kayla’s blood. And that’s not soothing at all.

  I pick up Kayla’s head, cradle it. Reality is a gear that I cannot engage. I try to remember first aid. Press the sides of the wound together. The heat of the blade makes it too hot, but I try anyway. I can smell my flesh singeing along with hers. And it seems such a small, paltry gesture.

  “Paramedics here in five, four…”

  “Step away! Step away!”

  I don’t. I can’t. Until a white-suited paramedic physically hauls me off the body.

  I watch as they do their work. Felicity comes. Tabitha and Gran too. They watch. Felicity puts her hands on my shoulders and knows enough to not ask me yet. To just let me stare in shellshocked horror as they rip the sword out. As they slam bandages to cover the gush of blood. As they fix the oxygen mask and hustle her out of the room.

  LATER, BUT STILL TOO SOON

  Once I regain the power of speech, they take me to a room and they talk to me. Kensington, the little pompous liaison; then a small business-like woman who reminds me vaguely of Felicity, except she pretends to be more friendly and is actually less so. Whether it’s counseling or an interrogation, I can’t really tell.

  “Will she be all right?” I ask over and over again. And no one tells me, not the woman; not Kensington, though he makes sure to let me know that this sort of thing never normally happens here, and then looks at me as if I am a house guest who just took a crap on his Oriental throw-rug; and neither does the genuine nurse who probes and prods at me; nobody until Gran comes in, and looks at me, and says, with uttermost gravity, “Dude.”

  “Is she OK?” I ask again.

  “She’ll be OK, man. Righteously tough cookie. Like a post-apocalyptic Twinkie.”

  “Twinkie?”

  Gran looks at me. “You guys had an empire the sun never set on and no Twinkies. History makes no sense to me, man. None at all.” He shrugs. “It’s just candy, dude. Candy that’s resilient like a cockroach.”

  I think that the British Empire may have been wise to leave behind any type of confection that can be compared to a cockroach.

  And then what Gran said hits me through the barriers of emotional numbness I’ve been building up while waiting for this moment.

  “Wait,” I say. “You said she’s going to be OK?”

  Gran nods. “Totally, man. We have like top grade medical folk here. Creepy good, actually.” He shakes his head at some memory he is kind enough to not share.

  “Thank God.” I sink my head into my hands.

  “Dude,” he says, sitting down across the table from me. “May not be the moment, but it’s, like, pretty epic that you could actually stab her in a fight.”

  I close my eyes. Epic is not exactly the word I would have picked. But now my immediate concerns for Kayla’s safety are fading, I have a chance to think of other implications of this moment.

  I stabbed Kayla.

  In a fight.

  I beat her.

  Except that can’t be right. She must have let me. Or been not really trying.

  But I remember those last moments. When we started to lose control. Started to just go at it.

  And I beat her.

  “What happened, man?” Gran asks.

  I’ve gone over it enough times now that it comes out almost by rote. “We’ve been practicing swordfighting,” I say. “She makes me talk so that I can be… I don’t know. To get stuff out of the thinking bit of my brain and into the instinct bit. So we were talking about Clyde, and we disagreed. And things got heated. But, God, I swear I wasn’t trying to stab her. I didn’t think I could stab her. She’s Kayla. She’s not someone you can beat.” I put my head in my hands. “I really just wanted to win the argument.”

  “Training accident,” Gran says. He nods sagely.

  “What?” I look up from the gray tabletop.

  “It’s a training accident, dude.” Gran shrugs. “They happen, man. They suck, but they happen.”

  I remember Kayla lying on the floor. Being beside her, my knees sticky with her blood. And I am not sure I can be so wholly dismissive.

  “I just wanted her to see that there might be hope. That we might still be able to resolve all this.” I don’t know why I’m still explaining. Gran has accepted what I’ve had to say. Except I’m not sure he really understands.

  I remember Gran shooting the little girl.

  “I didn’t want to hurt her.” I try to put every ounce of conviction I have into those words. So he hears them. “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t even want to hurt Clyde 2.0. I want a peaceful resolution.”

  “Dude,” Gran nods. Like I’m the TV preacher, and he’s the middle-aged woman with a phone and a credit card. “If we can talk th
is thing out, I will be the first one to pull out the hacky sack. All over that shit, man. I hear you.”

  He smiles. Warm and friendly. Just a nice hippy in a CIA suit. “Look, man. This was a shitty thing to happen. But it’s no one’s fault. And I know you want to beat yourself up, but you’re not the bad guy here. We got enough of those already, right? We’re all on the same side, man. All fighting to save the world—”

  “Humanity,” I say.

  Gran gives me a quizzical look. “Version 2.0 is fighting to save the world. We’re fighting to save humanity.”

  Gran blinks at me. “Dude,” he says. And I think he’ll say more, but he leaves it at that, and instead says, “Look, man, Felicity is waiting outside for you. Has been for about two hours. Why don’t you just go chill with her, shake this thing off, and we’ll all come back tomorrow and be groovy as balls. Sound good?”

  “Yes,” I say after a moment. Felicity. Chilling. That genuinely does sound about as good as things will get under these circumstances. Everything except the bit where we’re groovy as balls, actually. I don’t ever want things to be that. Yuck.

  30

  A NEW MORNING

  I wake up with Felicity’s arm draped over me. The alarm clock reads six thirty in the morning. Time to wake up. Time to go back to all this.

  I close my eyes again and stay in bed.

  Ten minutes later, Felicity stirs. She retrieves her arm, rubs her mouth, her eyes, blinks slowly at me a few times.

  “You feeling better?” she says, voice still heavy with sleep.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Liar.”

  “I will be.”

  “Liar.”

  She rolls from her side to her back, blinks at the ceiling a few times, then stretches. I hear joints popping. She rolls back to me, pushes my hair out of my eyes.

  “You’re not meant to be happy about it, Arthur. Just to be able to deal with it.”

  I close my eyes, wonder if I can go back to sleep for a bit. “I can do that,” I say.

  “Can you start now then?”