Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  They stumble over each other toward us. Not a full-on zombie shuffle, but it definitely has uncoordinated undertones. Haste marred by lack of coordination. One of them grabs the corner of the table and hauls itself toward us at stuttering speed.

  No. This can’t be happening. These are just people who work here. They…

  Felicity’s gun snaps out another four shots. Their heads go pop, pop, pop. One woman staggers left and takes the bullet in the shoulder. She spins around then stumbles toward us. Her blond hair is hanging limply on her head. Her roots are getting darker by the second.

  “I look after my own,” I hear Felicity whisper.

  Bang. She fires again. Catches the woman in the temple. The woman drops with half her head missing.

  Gran doubles over and is quite noisily sick.

  I stare around the room. Five bodies. In a matter of seconds. We just killed five people. I felt shitty yesterday because I injured Kayla. And these people… Jesus, they were just… normal people. Seconds ago. And now they’re dead. They were infected for less than thirty seconds. And we… Felicity… Shit.

  There are more sounds from beyond the room. Grunting angry noises. Screams. Yells. Barks of command. No gunfire yet. But it’s going to come. I know it will.

  How many people are going to die today? All of us. That’s Clyde’s plan.

  All of humanity. To save the world.

  And maybe he is right. Maybe that’s the way it has to be in the long run. But I can’t stand around and watch it.

  “We have to get out there. We have to help people evacuate.”

  I don’t wait for anyone to acknowledge me. It’s not even a command that demands compliance. It’s a statement of fact. A statement of who we are. In this moment of crisis I have no doubt about that. This is what has to be done. The big picture is going to have to just sit down for a while, kick off its shoes, and fucking wait.

  And then, as soon as I take my first step toward the room’s door, it slams shut.

  “I’m sorry,” says a familiar voice. “I’m afraid we can’t let you leave just yet, Arthur.”

  No. No. No.

  I turn slowly, stare.

  I stare at the versions.

  33

  “Clyde?” I say.

  But of course it’s Clyde. I can see it’s Clyde. Just not the version I thought it was.

  Tabitha clutches her laptop like a talisman and moans. Gran crosses to her, wiping vomit from his mouth.

  “Hello, Arthur,” the versions say in perfect unison.

  My mind races. This place is firewalled, lacks wireless, and should generally be completely impregnable. “How the hell did you get in?”

  “Well…” Another of the Clyde versions smiles, “you brought me here, Arthur.”

  “Mercurio,” says the second version. “Traps within traps. One to hide the other.”

  Mercurio? I try to think. Was there something in his brain… When they scanned him.

  “Files,” Tabitha moans. “The fucking files.”

  “I overwrote your versions’ software the moment they plugged into the first hard drive you recovered from Mercurio’s office.”

  “Sorry,” says another, with an apologetic shrug.

  Oh God. He’s here. And he’s apologizing to me. Apologizing that he’s going to try to kill me again. “You have to stop this,” I say. It’s all I can think to say.

  “Why?” The corrupted Clyde versions look genuinely confused. “I’m pretty sure I explained all this to you. I sat through the whole debrief about it. I mean, I don’t mean to criticize, I really don’t—it’s not a very noble thing to do, especially under these current circumstances—but you really do need to pay more attention. That was the whole point of Mexico, to explain it all to you. Well, that and buy time to hack into the security countermeasures installed in this place. They really are quite amazing.”

  Outside I hear a dull thudding sound, speeding up to a blur of continuous pounding.

  Gunfire.

  Very large caliber gunfire.

  “Oh no.” Gran has his head in his hands.

  I look at him. “What is it?”

  “Arthur,” says Clyde before Gran can reply. “I appreciate that given our different perspectives, you may not be able to appreciate the true awesomeness of this now, but, seriously, their security countermeasures include wall-mounted machine gun turrets. It’s crazy cool.”

  Oh God. He’s butchering people out there.

  “Felicity,” I say, fighting the need to hyperventilate. “The door.”

  “On it.” She takes aim. The whine of the ricochet is almost lost in the sound of the shot, but we all see the neat bullet hole appear in the wall the Clydes are occupying.

  “DARPA doors,” one Clyde comments.

  “You have to stop,” I parrot. It’s still all I can think to say. “You have to. Now.”

  “How about I wait about ten minutes and then stop,” says one Clyde.

  The guns continue to thunder. In ten minutes no one out there will be alive.

  Felicity shoots again. Another ricochet punches a hole in the screen. Why the piss did I leave my sword back in the room?

  Because I stabbed Kayla yesterday.

  Thank God they shipped her off site.

  There has to be a way out of here. I stare at the blank room. The locked door. The bodies on the floor. They’re rotting away at incredible speed, purple fungus eating away at them. There is no way out.

  “Let us out,” I say. It’s an unlikely option, but it expends few enough resources that it’s worth a shot I suppose.

  “It’s not a good place to be out there, right now,” says one Clyde. “You’re better off in here.”

  “What are you going to do with us?” Gran asks.

  “Well…” The Clydes look at each other, a little sheepish. “Kill you,” admits one.

  “We did say it’s a better place to be, right now,” says the third Clyde, rather lamely.

  My mind is still reeling. Trying to process this abrupt shift in fortunes. And why are we separated from the rest of Area 51? Is Version 2.0’s regard for our skills so high that he doesn’t want us to get out of here? That doesn’t seem entirely likely.

  “You don’t want to kill us,” I say. I look at them. And I see it’s true. “You don’t want to at all.”

  Clyde shrugs. “I know that, Arthur. I just have to.”

  “Why?” I demand. “Who’s forcing you?”

  The Clydes shake their collective heads. “You know no one’s forcing me, Arthur. I have a choice before me. Kill the species that was once my own plus my friends, or kill all species plus my friends. Neither option is exactly what I would call fantabulous, but those are the ones I have. And I’ve chosen. And I am firm in my choice.”

  “So kill me,” I demand.

  “Wouldn’t encourage him, dude,” Gran suggests.

  “Arthur…” Felicity is clearly less confident about this path than I am.

  “Keep on the door,” I tell her, not looking back.

  “I’ll kill you last,” says Clyde. “Of everyone in this building, you’ll live the longest. That’s the best I can promise to you.”

  “We’re going to stop you,” I say. It’s mindless, groundless optimism, but it feels like I’ve found a weak point and I press on it as hard as I can.

  “You can’t,” a Clyde says.

  “We will.”

  “And what if you did?” a Clyde asks. “What then? You’d just be condemning the world to its end.”

  “I can’t believe that,” I say. “I can’t believe there’s no hope at all.”

  “It’s maths!” shouts one. And now this is the second time I have seen Clyde lose his cool. Something about this issue has burrowed deep beneath his skin. His body goes very rigid. His cheeks are bright spots on his face. “It’s not hocus-pocus, Arthur. It’s not imaginary. It’s just maths. And it’s going to happen.”

  “You cannot know that,” I say. “Not for certain. N
othing is inevitable.”

  The fury on the Clyde’s face burns hotter. Burns brighter. The other two step away, step out of existence. It is just this one. This angry projected man, with his fists clenched, and his teeth bared.

  “I am,” he says.

  And then the screen goes blank.

  34

  There’s silence in the room for a moment.

  Gran goes ahead and breaks it. “Holy hell, dudes.”

  Tabitha stands up shakily and wraps an arm around him. “Totally gone,” she says, staring at the screen.

  I can’t tell if she’s talking about the versions, or their minds, or Clyde in general. And then I realize that this means there’s nothing left. The versions were the last remnants of him. And they’re gone. Clyde is dead.

  Except he’s alive. And he wants us dead.

  I can’t sort it out in my head. The truth of it all. How I feel about it. There’s not time for that. I need to focus on here and now.

  “The door?” I ask Felicity.

  “I don’t know how many times I can almost kill us all with ricochets before you accept it’s not going to open,” she says.

  I close my eyes. Try to find a center that will hold. The stench of the rapidly rotting bodies doesn’t help. I can hear gunfire and screams swirling outside.

  A hundred feet below surface level. A door that’s sealed and impenetrable. And we need a way out. The center isn’t holding.

  I open my eyes. I’m staring at one of the bullet holes Felicity accidentally shot in the wall. I could have sworn I started out facing the door. The sense of vertigo—

  Staring at one of the bullet holes in…

  “The wall,” I say.

  “What?” Tabitha looks at me as if I may be as far gone as Version 2.0.

  “Bullet holes,” I say. “In it. The door is impenetrable, but the wall isn’t. We can make holes in it.”

  Gran grins. “The air ducts, man. We find them, we can crawl through them. Get out of here.”

  “Exactly.” I turn to Tabitha. “Can you get us the blueprints for this place?”

  I’m still getting the you’re-funny-in-the-head look. I mirror it.

  “Blueprints,” she says. “On local server?”

  “Yes.”

  “On local server infected by 2.0?”

  Oh shit. She goes online and we lose our one electronic resource. And we still don’t get the blueprints.

  “OK,” I concede. “No blueprints.” I press my hands to my forehead. Think, Arthur. Think. How do we find the ducts?

  Felicity points her gun and shoots. Fourteen trigger pulls, as she turns in a slow, controlled circle. Fourteen holes in the plastic-steel walls.

  “Thought that might get us started,” she says.

  It strikes me that Felicity’s penchant for casual violence may have been previously masked by Kayla’s presence.

  Gran paces the room, putting his hand to each hole. At the sixth he says, “I got cold air, dudes.”

  Which means it’s time to make that hole bigger. Felicity’s pistol isn’t much use for that, and I have the feeling we should be conserving ammunition. This is where we could really use Kayla with her sword skills. In the meantime, I have to improvise.

  “Flip the table,” I say to Gran.

  “What?”

  “He told you to flip the table,” Felicity snaps.

  Gran blinks then does as he’s told.

  “You better have a bloody plan,” Felicity says, quieter.

  “Getting there.”

  The table legs are long, straight, metal. Perfect. At least they would be if they weren’t bolted to the tabletop. Then I remember.

  “Multi-tool,” I say to Tabitha. The tool she was using to pick away at her laptop while she was sitting in the hospital bed being bandaged.

  “Break it and you’re a dead man,” she says as she hands it to me.

  I quickly unbolt the table leg, heft the thing, and slam it into the bullet hole.

  The hole isn’t large, but by the fifth blow, I’ve widened it enough to get the table leg in. Then it’s just a case of levering the thing back and forth. Gran comes and helps me and together we see-saw the thing up and down widening the hole, tearing at the metal.

  It is not fast work. And how long did 2.0 give us? Ten minutes? Perhaps. If the Area 51 employees take a long time to kill. God. I try not to think about that.

  It must have been at least five minutes. The hole Gran and I have widened must be about a foot in diameter now. Not big enough.

  “Get me another table leg,” I say to Tabitha. She must be feeling desperate because she just complies.

  Thirty seconds later, there’s another table leg in my hand and I start battering at the hole. It’s a little like wielding a short, badly balanced sword, I realize. Nothing you’d really want in a fight, but I know the right strokes to use to apply pressure and widen the hole.

  Another minute and the air duct lies exposed, running vertically through the wall. A gaping hole offers access.

  “Up or down?” asks Gran.

  “Is up viable?” I ask. “Because if it is, that’s the way to the exit, I believe. Going down feels like working our way deeper into the problem.”

  “I’ll give it a shot.” Gran ducks into the hole, just the lower half of his legs still sticking into the room. Then he bunches his knees and jumps. His feet kick, once, twice, and then are hauled out of sight.

  “There’s a lip,” he says. “Not too bad a jump.”

  “Come on then.”

  I give Tabitha a boost first. She’s nearly a foot shorter than Gran and me. I hear her breath of relief as Gran’s hand clasps hers and she’s hauled out of sight.

  Now it’s just Felicity and me in the room. Kensington and the other scientists are just purple stains on the floor. She kisses me hard on the lips.

  “We’re going to be OK,” she says. I think it’s for both our benefits. “We’re going to keep finding solutions. We’re going to fix this.”

  I nod. “Never give up hope.” She kisses me before I give her a boost up.

  Then, for a moment, it is just me in the room, in the scene of our most recent failure. Perhaps things can only get better now. Perhaps.

  I tuck the table leg into a belt loop and follow Felicity up into darkness.

  35

  The air duct is tight and narrow. It also smells a lot of Felicity’s shoes. That, admittedly, may be because they’re six inches from my nose. For all her positive features, Felicity Shaw has yet to develop rose-scented sweat.

  As daring escapes go, this one is a little bit heavy on continually banging my elbows and knees and a little light on going faster than speeds that would make a snail scoff. We shuffle forward, Felicity occasionally asking Tabitha to refrain from kicking her in the face.

  “You know where we are?” I call forward to Gran. As the elbow banging hasn’t attracted the attention of any Clyde zombies yet, I go ahead and assume they’re not going to be bothered by the occasional shout.

  “Not spent that much time in here,” Gran calls back, “so, you know, me and the layout not one hundred percent simpatico, but, like, above where we were.”

  It occurs to me that maybe Tabitha is serially attracted to the lexically challenged.

  Another thought occurs. “You know those security countermeasures Version 2.0 mentioned?” I say. “Are any of those in the ventilation system?”

  “Erm…” Gran says. “Not really my department, dude.”

  “Would make sense,” Tabitha says with what strikes me as way too much matter-of-factness. Especially as the main security countermeasures we know about so far involve very large bullets.

  “What sort of countermeasure exactly might make sense to you?” Felicity asks. She at least sounds appropriately concerned.

  “Noise sensors. Motion sensors. Heat sensors. Thermal imaging. Pressure sensors.”

  Which is a nice way of saying we’re screwed. Except, “Wouldn’t we have set somethi
ng like that off by now?”

  “Depends. Spacing. Paranoia levels. Not near a point of ingress so—”

  Suddenly the duct is flooded with very red light.

  “So, like, about this far apart?” Gran asks.

  Oh balls.

  “We need an exit!” I shout in a startling display of stating the obvious.

  Felicity’s gun is very, very loud in the tight space.

  “Probably, like, not quite a big enough hole,” Gran says.

  “Working on it!” she snaps. The gun goes off again. My ears start ringing like they’re the phone and I’m the lazy secretary. There’s banging and crunching from up ahead.

  The red light intensifies, darkens. I have the feeling it might be getting hotter in here.

  “Kick!” Felicity shouts, presumably to Tabitha. Then, “Not me, you idiot!”

  More banging. More crashing. A worrying hissing sound.

  “Some sort of green gas heading toward me,” Gran says as if commenting on the overcrowding at a local beach.

  The gun fires again.

  “My fucking foot!” Tabitha yells.

  The only reply is more banging, and then a tearing sound, and then, a yell, and a scream, and the duct tilts, and suddenly my face is plowing into Felicity’s boots, and I am scrabbling at the walls, but they are smooth as steel and blank, and the seam is too narrow to grab, and I am falling.

  My face breaks my fall.

  My face breaks.

  My nose is a smear of pain across my face. Blood, hot and wet all over my face. I come up on my hands, grunting and spitting. My teeth hurt. How the hell is that possible?

  “Move! Now!” It’s Felicity. Her voice cutting through my pain.

  I blink. Where the hell am I? It turns out to be a corridor. Above us, an ugly tear mars the smooth wall. The duct spills out of splayed plastic.

  And filling the corridor…

  “Clyde zombies,” Gran says, “at, you know, top of the clock. Big and little hand… Oh, fuck it dude.” He opens fire.

  Six Clyde zombies stumble toward us, slowed by poorly coordinated limbs. Their jerking progress looks like it should be slow, but they close the distance with surprising speed. Their gums are pulled back in rictus smiles. Their throats work, a dry clacking noise.