“We were hit as hard as anyone, I think.” Felicity steps forward before my exasperation can step in it. “Hi,” she says, extending a hand. “I’m Felicity Shaw, head of Britain’s MI37.”
“MI37?” Paul’s brows furrow.
“You know what? Just let it go.” Tess flaps one hand at Paul and extends the other to Felicity. “Patrolman Tess Ramirez. Not exactly good to meet you.” She grimaces.
Felicity nods. “I hear that. But to answer your question. We were dealing with a major incursion of the…” she hesitates over the nomenclature, “infected uptown. Since then we’ve just been trying to get to the radio tower in the Empire State Building. This is the first of these mushrooms we’ve seen.”
“Shit, man,” says Paul, finally finding some trust, it seems. “They’re all over down here. One every ten blocks or so.”
“They release the heads,” says Tess.
“The heads?” I ask. Because… well, because she said, “They release the heads.”
Tess cocks her own. “Seriously?” she says. “You ain’t seen them?”
“This really is the first we’ve come across,” Felicity says.
Tess opens her mouth to answer when beside her, the mushroom convulses. A great spasm rushes up the length of its thick stem.
“Oh shit!” Paul yells. “It’s going to blow again!”
Tess seizes Felicity and me by the arms, starts to drag us away. Paul seems about to grab Kayla and do the same, but then her look makes him check himself. “Move!” he barks. She complies. Tabitha, Gran, and Clyde waste no time doing the same.
Clearly this is the moment to duck and run, but I can’t help but stare over my shoulder as I do. Something is happening to the mushroom’s hood. Something is peeling open and back. The smell of foul meat fills the air. Tabitha covers her mouth as she and Gran duck down on the opposite side of the street.
“Back!” Felicity barks at me.
It’s good advice so I take it. Nothing good can come out of a mushroom so wide that Jerry Springer would have to airlift it off a couch. I scramble behind a car where Felicity and Clyde are hunkered beside Tess.
“Lock and load,” mutters Felicity, hunkered down beside me. She pulls out her pistol once more.
“No.” Tess bats the gun down. “Not a good idea.”
I want to ask more but movement from the mushroom distracts me. From its splayed open heart something white, almost spherical starts to rise. I narrow my eyes, try to focus. Something like… hair? A fur ball? And then more. The white hair giving way to something smoother. Some of the hair parting to reveal… an ear? Eyes?
A face. It’s a face rising up out of the flower.
And I recognize the face.
“Oh my,” Clyde 2.1 says into my ear.
“You hid that narcissistic streak well,” I tell him.
It’s Clyde’s disembodied head floating up out of the mushroom’s core. And not just one, but another, and another. A great field of floating Clyde heads, each one completely white as if carved from chalk.
And they’re all talking. Every single one of them jabbering at the same time.
“…well if you consider…”
“…allowing for thaumato-radioactive delay…”
“…rate of decay…”
“…terrible wrongs…”
The heads are bulbous, distorted at the temple. They drift up slowly. Ten, twenty, thirty of them. And still they come. They float up toward the sliver of sky peering down between the skyscrapers.
“The name of fuck,” I hear Tabitha say from across the street. “What in the—?”
“Is that propaganda?” Felicity asks, brows furrowed.
And could that be it? Does Clyde honestly think that he can talk humanity into committing species suicide?
“Let’s just shoot them,” Gran says. Loud enough for us all.
“No!” Tess and Paul yell in unison. But their cry comes at the exact same moment as Gran fires off his first shot.
To be honest, I still don’t understand why they’re objecting.
Then a Clyde head detonates.
It does not pop, does not deflate. It detonates. A tear of sound louder than the gunshot itself. White pulp flies over the street. Something that might have been a jaw bone embeds itself in the floor two feet from me.
And the spores. The cloud of black spores flooding out, filling the sky above.
46
Paul lets loose an obscenity, staggers back.
The cloud is massive. The width of the block. A vast sphere of night collapsing down on us.
We run. Heads down, into the wind, a full-on panicked scramble. Feet kicking over loose stones and leaves. Tripping on vines, hauling on hanging creepers. Anything to get away.
One foot goes out from under me. My balance waves goodbye and flees ahead of me. I kick with my trailing leg, with my last moments of verticality, try to get as much momentum into my collapse as I can. I leave the ground.
Felicity’s arm clamps around mine. She heaves, hurling me forward in a crashing, spinning roll. My head smacks against fractured tarmac, again, again.
I lie, pant, bleed a little, and wait to see if I’m free.
When enough limbs are under my control, I pick my head up. A black blanket is settling, not a foot from me. I scramble back, but the spores aren’t spreading anymore.
There’s yelling. I force my eyes to focus, to search for Felicity.
Some peripheral part of me knows I’ve ignored three people before my eyes rest on her. But in this moment, I honestly don’t care about them.
I find her, and just before the moment when our eyes lock there is one of absolute paralyzing fear. Because I am sure there are not going to be the warm welcoming pools of brown, waiting there, just obliterating black.
But they are her eyes. Eyes that relax as the same fear ebbs out of her. The breath I take is deep and shaking.
That fear accounted for, the people still screaming become a more pressing concern.
I scan the scene. Tabitha and Gran lie sprawled, twisted, and somehow tangled in each other. His arm over her head, protective. And that’s a good solid thing to see right there.
There is Clyde, standing tall, proud, and silver. There’s perhaps an extra dent in his frame, but otherwise he seems unharmed.
Kayla lies on the ground at his feet, hand clamped on her midriff. Not as fantastic to see, but her eyes are full of pain, not the desire to nosh on our gray matter, so that’s at least a partial win.
Which leaves…
Tess. Tess standing at the edge of the pool of black that has settled on this street. Tess standing there screaming. Screaming at…
Paul stands there. His hips are cocked to one side, almost to the point of overbalancing. His body skews in the other direction, his head back toward his raised shoulder—an awkward zig-zag of a pose. His arms hang lose. And his eyes. Oh God, his eyes.
He opens his mouth. And the fungus hasn’t filled him yet. Hasn’t ruined him completely, but his tongue is black as a coal miner’s lung.
“Ugck,” he clacks at Tess. “Garrr-fgg.”
He steps forward. One horribly ruined step, lurching and sagging.
His movement seems to galvanize something in Tess, she scrambles back away. Whirls around. Sees Gran and Tabitha disentangling themselves.
“You!” She points at Gran. “You stupid fuck!” She’s pointing at him with her gun.
“I said not to do it!” she screams. “I told you to fucking wait!” There are tears rolling down her face now.
Gran has his arms out wide. Tabitha is blinking. I think she took a blow to the head.
Behind Tess, Paul lets out a rumbling, “Gggrrrck,” and staggers another step toward her.
“He… he…” I start, picking myself off the floor. I want to say that Gran didn’t know, but the horror and the abruptness of everything is mixing with my own blows and everything takes longer than it should.
“Graaack.” Another lurch from
Paul.
“What happened?” Gran is saying. “I don’t know… What happened?”
“Tess!” I manage to yell, because now Paul is starting to get very close, and I don’t think it’s co-workerly affection he wants to express.
“You dumb stupid fuck!” Tess is still having trouble moving past her rage issues. I stumble toward her. Maybe my actions can beat my words in the race toward meaning.
And then Clyde is there. Standing between Tess and Gran’s prone form. Between the gun and the man dating the woman he loves.
“I’m terribly sorry to interrupt,” he says, “not polite of me at all, and we’ve already made a pretty bad impression, I think, but I did just want to mention that I think that zombie is about to eat your brains.” He points.
Tess blinks for a moment, and then spins. The barrel of her gun is inches from Paul’s open mouth. His hands reach for her.
She doesn’t even hesitate. Just pulls the trigger.
His head bursts apart, spraying her with blood and black fungus. He drops instantly, puppet strings cut.
There is a moment, just a moment, of utter stillness. Tess caught in her pose, gun still held. Clyde passive behind her. Kayla still focused on her wound. Felicity open-mouthed. Gran and Tabitha lying down, staring, barely comprehending. Paul’s suddenly headless corpse dead on the ground.
And then the fight is blown clear out of Tess. As surely as if someone put a bullet in its over-pressurized brains. She drops her gun. Drops to her knees. Sobs start to wrack her.
Clyde steps forward, he puts a metal hand on her shoulder. “Sorry about that,” he says. “Just thought you should know.”
WITH THE SUN SETTING
A little while later, Felicity and I stand next to the deflated corpse of the once-giant mushroom. It is rotting rapidly back into the ground, and I have my hand pressed firmly to my nose. I have been in the presence of two-week-old corpses that smelled better than this.
“This is part of it,” she says. “His contingency plan.”
“Yes,” I say, because that’s all I want to say. I don’t want to go into the cold implacable mind that came up with these things, this way of mopping up humanity’s survivors.
“We should study it,” I say instead. “Maybe we can learn more about what Clyde 2.0 is—”
“Talk about feckin’ optimism. It’s rotting into the feckin’ ground.” Kayla hobbles up to us, leaning heavily on her scabbard.
“Jesus,” I say. “Are you OK?”
She shrugs. “Tore a few stitches or some shit. I’m fine.”
Felicity shakes her head, puts her arm around me, squeezes briefly, then turns to Kayla. “I have needle and thread. Come on. Lie down and I’ll fix it.”
Kayla rolls her eyes but complies. Felicity starts unwrapping the bandages.
“There’s got to be something we can learn from this,” I say, turning back to the mushroom. Partly, I have to admit, so I don’t have to stare at Kayla’s wound again.
The mushroom keeps on rotting, crumbling away before my eyes until it is barely there.
“He’s covering his tracks,” Felicity says glancing over.
That seems unfortunately accurate. But maybe there is hope in that. If he is covering his tracks, that means there are tracks to follow out there.
I nod in the direction of the policewoman, Tess, who is sitting on the opposite side of the street to Tabitha and Gran. Clyde stands near her, a silent sentinel. “They said there were others.” Then I correct myself. “She said there are.” I don’t really want to think about Paul.
God, we killed him. Not directly perhaps. But as good as. We’re meant to be the good guys. The folk who save the world. And… Shit. Just look at this place.
“You’re right.” Felicity pulls me out of the oblivion of self-recrimination. Keeps me moving. “We’ll have to find them, check them out. It’s a good thought.”
“Should we ask her now?”
Felicity just looks at me.
“In the morning then.”
Felicity scans the buildings lining the street. “Kayla needs to rest.” Kayla makes an annoyed noise. “We all need to rest,” Felicity continues. “We need to find somewhere safe for the night.”
“There are rats the size of small trucks,” I point out.
Felicity shrugs. “Relatively safe.”
SOMEWHERE RELATIVELY SAFE
The brownstone appears to be fairly structurally sound. At least, it should hold up as long as we don’t lean too hard on any load-bearing walls.
Inside, we find a kitchen that’s almost intact. There are still plates on the table. One chair is knocked over, but everything else is still standing as it was.
“Mary Celeste, much?” Gran says. Not even Tabitha laughs.
We hunker down in a nearby living room. Spider plants from the mantelpiece have taken over a quarter of the space but they’re not visibly growing so we don’t appear to be in imminent danger. Clyde offers to take watch, as he doesn’t need to sleep.
Gran rustles up a campfire and we sit around it, a five-pointed star. The two couples—Felicity and I and Gran and Tabitha—make the star’s base too heavy. Tess, Kayla, and Clyde are islands unto themselves. Nobody talks much. I scoop cold baked beans out of a can I found in a cupboard.
“Tomorrow then,” I say when it seems like continued silence will be even more uncomfortable than breaking it. “Empire State Building. Radio tower. But before that,” I nod at Tess, “Bryant Park.” That’s the closest location that she knows for sure has a mushroom. At least it had one last time she was there. Hopefully it hasn’t released its payload yet, and we can take a look at the thing.
“We’ll need new axes, I guess,” I say. Tess dropped hers back at the mushroom and didn’t seem to feel like going back for it.
“Shut up,” she tells me. Not looking at me. “Just shut up.”
I swallow hard. Lick my lips. Felicity puts a hand on my thigh. She shakes her head gently. I leave it alone.
Gran doesn’t though. “Look, dude,” he says, “I swear I really didn’t know. I’m sorry.” He leans toward the fire we’ve lit. His face is drawn tight. “I didn’t know.”
“Feckin’ pillock,” Kayla says. There doesn’t seem to be much rancor to it though.
Tess doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t even seem to register that he’s spoken. After a moment she pulls a blanket we recovered from the bedroom tight around her and curls up.
A few minutes later, Felicity and I do the same. I curl around her, holding her, letting the smell of her hair fill my nose. She holds my hand over her heart and squeezes.
“You’re worrying again,” she whispers.
“Our whole point of existence,” I whisper back, “is to stop the world from ending because of magic, or aliens, or just weird shit. It ended today. I think that’s reason to worry.”
There’s a long pause. “I’ve got to say it’s going to hurt your performance review.”
I wrestle the laugh back down into my gut. I don’t think that would fly well with this crowd. “This isn’t funny,” I manage after a moment.
“I know.” Felicity is suddenly somber. “But it’s that or scream. And I don’t want to scream, Arthur. I want to fight. I want to get back what was taken from us.”
What was taken from us? I do the tally. There’s a city in ruins out there. Maybe a country. Millions of minds overwritten by magicodigital fungus.
“You think we can do that?” I ask.
“I think we have to try.”
And she’s right. Of course she’s right. But… “You still think we’re the good guys?” I say.
Her grip on my hands loosens. “You look out there, and you think that maybe Clyde was right?” There’s incredulity in her voice.
“No,” I whisper back. “Of course not. Version 2.0 is a monster. But… what we’ve done. Today. We killed hundreds of people today. Even if they were infected. Wasn’t that monstrous too?”
I try not to think about Paul.
About his black staring eyes…
Felicity suddenly redoubles her grip, grinds my fingers together, almost painfully. “Arthur, I honestly don’t give a shit if we’re good or bad. I just see what we have to do. And we have to end this. The sooner the better. Before it gets worse. We have to.”
And that is my Felicity. Single-minded. Focused. Cutting through bullshit like Kayla cuts through skulls. And I don’t have much to say after that.
But the thoughts keep rattling in my head, and it takes me a long time to fall asleep.
47
BRYANT PARK
I lie in low shrubbery trying to keep my breath shallow and my crotch free of the spikier plants.
“Well,” Felicity breathes, lying next to me, “this is not exactly what we were hoping for.”
Bryant Park—sitting just a handful of blocks from where we slept—is a broad rectangle of grass surrounded by tall trees and abundant ground cover. The east end abuts the imposing bulk of the New York Public Library. The other sides are bordered by a moat of road followed by towering skyscrapers. In the park’s center sprouts the mushroom. It is fat and bloated. Grass has grown wild and rampant around it, a foot high at least, spotted through with hundreds of wildflowers and thistles.
And zombies. It’s probably worth mentioning the zombies.
“There’s, like, a crap ton of them,” Gran whispers. It’s not an exact count, but I think he’s about as accurate as we need to be.
They stand there, arms spread, heads tilted back, staring up at the scrim of clouds covering the sky. A few stumble awkwardly about, bumping into each other and grumbling in their ugly guttural tongue.
“The hell we get to that thing?” Tabitha stares at the mushroom.
“Violence,” Kayla suggests.
Tess lies to one side of me. Mostly, I suspect, because it’s as far as she can get from Gran. She doesn’t say a word, just keeps working and reworking her grip on the fire axe we found in the brownstone’s stairwell. I worry she takes Kayla more seriously than is deserved.
“It’s OK,” I say to her. “We’ll make our move. We’ll have our pound of flesh… fungus… whatever. Just let us work out the plan then you can go all lumberjack on them.”
Anti-Hero Page 25
