Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “He doesn’t look good,” Kayla objects. “Looks like a dented piece of feckin’ shit.”

  Clyde shrugs. “Not to be completely disparaging, and with the greatest deference both to you and kitchen appliances everywhere, but that seems a little like the pot calling the kettle a dented piece of shit.”

  Kayla actually cracks a smile at that.

  Felicity finishes rifling through the shelves and kneels beside Kayla. “Come on,” she says. “Let me change those bandages and you tell us what happened.”

  “I’m telling you, the bandages are feckin’ fine.”

  Felicity arches an eyebrow. “You are about five minutes from septic shock. Now let me change the bandages because I don’t have the energy to carry you.”

  And that is what passes for delicacy in MI37.

  Kayla complies grudgingly. She leans forward, hoists her gown to expose her midriff.

  “Shipped me off to a hospital, they did,” she says as Felicity begins to unwind the bandage. “Don’t remember that much of it, I have to say. Blood loss and the like.” She flicks a look in my direction. I attempt to sink into the collapsed shelves of rotting produce. “But there was a doctor with a nice wee bum. I remember that bit.”

  Tabitha rolls her eyes at that detail, but I also see her slide her hand slightly too far down Gran’s back. His eyebrows pop up a moment later.

  “Anyway, that was mostly it. Lights out a few more times. Came round in a bed, feeling drugged and stupid. Took me about five minutes after all the zombie shit started before I realized I weren’t just high as feck.” She shrugs. “Then I legged it.”

  Gran, who is, of all of us, the least used to Kayla’s particular suite of ass-kicking powers, starts forward at that. Well, either that, or Tabitha just grabbed another sensitive part of his anatomy, but I decide to hope it’s the conversation. “Just legged it?” Gran says. “What about the wound? Your sword?”

  “Oh,” Kayla shakes her head. “I didn’t let the fecks have my sword. Some prick nurse tried to take it off me. Had to chop his finger off before he’d give up on it.”

  “Kayla!” Felicity rocks back from where she’s undoing the final strands of bandage. She sounds outraged.

  “He was in a feckin’ hospital,” Kayla says. “Best place to do it.”

  Felicity shakes her head. I swear I hear her muttering, “Ambassadors of our nation.”

  Personally I’m glad it was just his finger.

  Felicity pulls away the final pieces of the bandage, and we all get a good look at the damage I did. There is a lot of inhaling and gasping. The wound, it has to be conceded, does not look pretty. Black stitches stand out in angry red skin, puffy and tender looking. The inflamed skin stretches out long claws over her midriff and around to her back.

  “Jesus, Kayla,” I hear Felicity say.

  “Only a flesh wound,” Kayla flips back. “Bit of antibiotic and it’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll go find something to disinfect it,” I suggest.

  “Better be eighty feckin’ proof at least,” Kayla tells me. Of all of us she seems the least fazed by the state of the wound. But no matter what face she puts on it, that thing isn’t healthy.

  I scrounge around the store. After a minute I discover a mostly full bottle of vodka from beneath the cashier’s counter. I guess that can be a stressful job.

  Meanwhile, Kayla has been encouraged to continue with her tale.

  “Went to cut my way out of the hospital. Took a while. Zombie horde, giant feckin’ wound and all that. Didn’t go totally as planned. Bit of fleeing involved towards the end, ’cept I’m shit at fleeing at the moment. Ended up in basement. Feckers had gone and cornered me. But then the rats came in and sort of devoured the feckin’ lot of them. And I figured I was a bit knackered by then, so instead of killing them there, I’d just try and fix myself to one’s fur or shit, hitch a ride, and murder the feckers later. But I fell off before I got to that. And here you feckers are. Worked out pretty feckin’ well, I think.”

  I hand Felicity the vodka bottle. If that’s Kayla’s idea of things going well, I’d hate to see a bad day.

  “Fifty-fifty?” Felicity asks Kayla.

  Kayla shrugs. “Better be thirty-seventy, given how shit’s going.”

  I have no idea what this means, until Felicity unscrews the bottle cap, hands it to Kayla, and she promptly chugs a third of the bottle.

  “Jesus,” Gran breathes.

  “Ah, feck off,” Kayla says with a belch. “In the Highlands we call this baby’s mouthwash.” She hands the bottle back to Felicity. “Hit me.”

  Felicity upends the bottle and pours it over the wound.

  Another collective inhalation. Even Clyde makes a noise, and he doesn’t need to breathe. Personally I had thought delicate dabbing might be involved. This is baptism by liquid fire. I almost expect to see the skin bubble and boil.

  Kayla grimaces. “Stings a bit,” she comments. Then she blacks out.

  44

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER

  Clean, bandaged, and still belligerent, Kayla refuses the offer of a stretcher. Or as she puts it, “Quit talking your feckin’ shite.”

  Having reached this impasse in negotiations, we throw our hands up and head back out into the street. Kayla looks at me and then Felicity. “So,” she says, “what’s the feckin’ plan?”

  “Make contact with any survivors using the radio tower in the Empire State Building,” I say. “Then head for one of the tunnels under the river. Over on the…” I glance at Gran. “West side.”

  He nods.

  “Into New Jersey,” Felicity continues. “Regroup with other survivors.”

  “Go find 2.0, rip off his balls,” Tabitha adds.

  “Yeah,” Kayla nods, “but,” she looks around at the devastated city, “what about this feckin’ mess?”

  There is a bit of a pause at that. Because honestly our plan hasn’t got that far. There’s been all this scrambling for our lives that seems to have got in the way.

  “Erm…” I say.

  Kayla looks incredulous.

  Felicity seems to take a little offense at this. “The city is in ruins,” she points out. “Humanity has been largely replaced by soft squishy fungus people. And now there are giant animals running around. Regrouping with a larger force is the first step in ensuring the safety of our people.”

  Kayla squints at Felicity. “Our people?” She nods at the building. “What the feck about these people? Isn’t humanity our people now?”

  Wait, did Kayla just… did she take the moral high ground? Her idea of a relaxing afternoon is stabbing people to death.

  “We can’t do anything for anybody if we’re dead,” Felicity points out with a certain brutality.

  I am in the worrying position of agreeing with both women. However, I am only in love with one of them.

  “Look,” I say. “Felicity’s right. We need to regroup. To fix a plan we need information that we just don’t have at this point. We have no concept of the big picture.”

  Kayla nods at Tabitha and Clyde. “Them two can’t figure this feckin’ thing out?” She seems genuinely surprised.

  “We could give it the old college try, I’m sure.” Clyde plugs the conversational gap. “Though what exactly a college try is and how it differentiates itself from other kinds of trying, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe there’s more drinking and mistakes involved. Would be if it’s like my college tries. Or perhaps if the students were all rugby players it would be a sort of victorious and violent try. I’m not really sure. In retrospect, maybe I’ll just stick to a regular sort of trying if that’s OK.”

  I decide to side-step a pun about how trying Clyde is, and just go straight to, “OK then.” Then I take a moment to work out what I’m OK about.

  “So,” I hazard a guess, “can we really undo any of this? Can we get rid of these plants?”

  Tabitha’s look straddles the previously undiscovered land that exists between dubious and scathing.
<
br />   “What about this zombie thing,” I ask. “Can we fix that?”

  “Theoretically,” Tabitha says.

  “Really?” Clyde’s surprise beats out my own in the race to vocalization. “I was sure you were going to give him the finger there. Completely convinced. Would have bet money on it actually.”

  Tabitha gives Clyde the finger. I’m still more focused on the bit where she said, “theoretically,” though.

  “We can really undo it?” I ask her.

  “Really theoretically.” Tabitha looks at me as if it’s a stupid question. It probably was. “Remember Mercurio?”

  “Whatever happened to the wee feck?” Kayla asks.

  “His brain,” Tabitha says. “We took Version 2.0 out. Left taffy behind.”

  “It wasn’t an unmitigated success,” I confess.

  “Like I said. Theoretical solution,” Tabitha emphasizes. “Not practical. Not yet. But… give the code a good debug…”

  I think about that. And what if we could get it to work? That would be huge. That would mean the liberation of millions. Hundreds of millions. More? God, I hope Clyde’s reach hasn’t extended that far.

  Then my mind hits a snag. “What about the fungus?” I say. I’ve seen brains furry with the stuff. I don’t think we can just deprogram that.

  “Tricky,” Tabitha says. “Best bet is same spore delivery system. Co-opt. Reverse engineer people.”

  It takes me a moment to process that: the idea that now we need to make our own weaponized fungus to un-fungus people.

  “That sounds…” I start and then stop, not sure what it sounds like.

  “Theoretical.” Clyde completes my sentence for me.

  Tabitha gives him the finger again.

  I move on. “Is there a way to move from theory to practice? Can we really save these people?”

  Tabitha’s face does not give me confidence. Or it gives me even less confidence than usual. “Maybe.” She shrugs. “Enough time. Enough lucky breaks.”

  I almost laugh at that. Here in this desolation. Lucky breaks.

  “Sounds like a feckin’ plan to me,” Kayla says into the silence. “Better one than you guys had.”

  “Part one of Tabitha’s plan,” Felicity points out, “still needs to be getting the hell out of here. Getting to somewhere where we can really hash this code out. Make sure it works.”

  Still Kayla’s addition to our future plan is important, I feel. The hope is slim, but it is there now. We have charted a path to it. Toward victory.

  We pick up the pace, cross Fiftieth Street. Just sixteen more blocks.

  45

  We’ve not gone far when Clyde stops suddenly in the street. “What’s that?” He points over everyone’s heads, down Forty-eighth Street. We all turn to stare.

  Really the answer isn’t so hard. It’s a mushroom. Clyde probably could have worked that out on his own. Except… Well, it’s a mushroom that’s eight feet tall. The fat hood droops, brown flesh sagging in thick swaths. It’s at least as wide as the fluted stem is tall, lending the whole fungal apparatus a squat appearance.

  Two figures are at its base, dressed in blue uniforms. They both hold large axes and are swinging away, wreaking merry havoc on the thing’s spreading stem.

  “Policemen?” Gran asks.

  And he’s right. It’s two of New York’s finest.

  “Is what they’re doing totally safe?” Clyde asks.

  I can’t believe it is.

  “We should stop them,” I say. “Before…” But I’m not sure before exactly what. Only that it is almost certainly going to be very bad indeed.

  “Priorities?” Tabitha says. “Anyone? This is all white knight and shit but: saving humanity to do.”

  Gran nods, an unhappy resignation on his face.

  It’s likely they have a point, but I can’t agree with it. We don’t have any idea how many people are left. Any life seems precious at this point. So I shake my head. “We save those guys from themselves.”

  “Agreed.” Felicity nods.

  We make our way down the street, though Tabitha and Gran hesitate before they follow. Kayla leans on her sword as if it’s a cane. The scabbard clicks against the remnants of the tarmac.

  We’re about halfway to the über-mushroom when the cops spot us. One looks up, drops his axe and puts his hand on the holster at his waist.

  “Stop there and back away,” he barks. He’s a guy around my height, maybe got a few years on me. His face is narrow and hard. “It’s for your own safety.”

  His partner looks up, still holding her axe. She’s a solidly built Latino woman. Sweat stands out on her cheeks and forehead. “Holy shit,” she says. “Is that a robot?”

  The male cop considers this. “’Bout the least fucked up thing I’ve seen today,” he says finally. “Keep swinging. You guys keep walking. Not to be an asshole but this shit ain’t safe, and most of the people I seen today ain’t safe. I don’t want this to get ugly.”

  I hold up my hands immediately. Old cowboy-at-gunpoint style. “We’re looking to help,” I say. “I think you underestimate how dangerous that is.”

  The cop with the axe looks at us. “I think you underestimate how shitty a day we’re having,” she snaps. “Now back the fuck up.”

  I guess it’s just an off day for everyone.

  “Dudes…” It’s Gran who follows me into the minefield. “I am going to reach into my pocket, like, really, totally slowly, and I’m going to pull out an ID. I am all CIA and shit, and this is all going to be cool.”

  The cops exchange a glance. “Are you shitting me?” the man asks.

  Gran is reaching. I can see the man’s fingers playing on the holster at his side, but he hasn’t undone the snap holding the gun in place yet. I think he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t want this to get ugly.

  Gran keeps up the slow motion act. His card is produced. “I’m going to throw my ID to you dudes,” he says, and does so. The man kicks it to the woman who puts down her axe and picks it up.

  “Says CIA,” she says.

  “Legit?” asks her partner.

  “Honestly?” She shrugs. “I wouldn’t know a CIA ID if it started dating my sister. But I figure they’ve got to be piss hard to forge. Would have to be fucking stupid to do that too.”

  “He seem that smart to you?” The male cop looks dubiously at Gran.

  “If it helps I have an ID from British intelligence,” I say. “We’re liaising with the CIA on this.”

  The man looks dubious.

  The woman shrugs. “They do have a robot, Paul. I mean… you know.”

  The man’s hand remains on his holster for a moment. Then he sags, the breath and adrenaline running out of him so fast I think he’s sprung a leak.

  “Oh thank fuck,” he says. He bends down, hands on knees, still sagging. It takes him a moment and some seeming effort but he gets his head up enough to look at us. “What the fuck is going on?”

  Policeman Paul, it seems, has found a higher authority and is seeking permission to freak the hell out. Whatever professionalism was holding him together, it is now on the verge of cracking. He doesn’t have to be strong for this conversation anymore.

  But if he cracks… God, these are not ideal conditions for putting the pieces back together.

  “It’s a terrorist attack,” I say. Calm, slow, matter-of-fact. The way I delivered bad news to parents back when I worked in the murder squad. “They’ve got the first strike in, but we’re regrouping. We’re—”

  “Terrorist attack?” The cop looks at me like I’m a nutcase. “There are fucking plant people! What the fuck are fucking terrorists—”

  “Paul! Paul!” The woman drops her axe and steps up to him, puts her hand on his shoulder. “It’s OK.”

  He puts his head in his hands. “Shit, Tess. I got my sister out on the Island…”

  “I know. I know.” She pats his back. “I got James and the kids out there too. We’re going to get there. We’re going
to fix this. That’s what these guys are telling us. It’s going to be fixed.”

  The guy, Paul, takes some deep breaths. Tries to find somewhere calm left inside him.

  “God,” Clyde buzzes behind me. “I did this? I…” He trails off.

  And, while it is good to have some version of Clyde back, I do wish he had better timing.

  “The fuck did you say?” Paul snaps upright, hand back on his gun. He wrenches it free. “Who did this?” He jabs the gun at Clyde. “You did this?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Kayla start to move. I almost see Paul’s life expectancy like a frail thread about to be cut short. And there are nanoseconds to act.

  I hate the instincts that make me do it, but I step between Clyde and the gun. I hear Felicity draw in her breath. But I’m saying, “Not him. It wasn’t him,” and not giving myself time to dwell on my own life expectancy.

  Kayla’s hand hovers on the hilt of the sword.

  “He said…” Paul looks suspicious.

  “It’s really complicated, and involves cloned software, and serious identity issues,” I say. “And it is by far the least weird part of all this. Just know this machine is not your enemy. He’s actually one of our big hopes for fixing this mess.”

  There is suspicious silence. The atmosphere is probably not helped by Clyde saying, “Really? Thanks, Arthur. That’s a really nice thing for you to say.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  The woman, Tess, puts her hand on Paul’s and moves his away from the gun. “Come on,” she says. “We’re all on the same side here.”

  After a moment, the gun goes back in the holster, and Kayla’s sword blade slides back into its scabbard, and we’re back to a less fraught atmosphere again. “So,” I nod at the mushroom, “what the hell is this thing?”

  She looks at me, eyebrows arched in surprise. “You don’t know? Didn’t you just say you guys were in charge?”

  Seriously? I feel I’ve been slapped by enough weird shit today that I should be exempt from dealing with people’s trust issues at this point.