Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  A plan. We do need one of those. A distraction, perhaps. Something to draw the zombies away…

  Then a voice breaks the silence. “What the bloody hell are you doing here?”

  We freeze. All of us. The axe lies still in Tess’s hands. I don’t even roll my eyeballs to look.

  “Oh this is bloody par for the course, this is.” A broad cockney whisper comes from somewhere above my head. “Pretend I don’t even exist. I see how it is. Fuckin’ charming.”

  Oh holy hell…

  “Winston?” I ask, incredulous. I slide my eyes upwards. We’re hiding at the base of a broad, leafy… I actually have no idea what sort of tree Winston might be.

  “Oh acknowledge me, he does. Thank the heavens for small bloody favors. Just rescue all your bloody arses out of Golem-fest 2015 and then do I get a bloody thank you, or do you all piss off out the window with nary a backwards glance? I think we all know the fucking answer to that, don’t we now?”

  I have a thousand questions. Where? How? Why? But of all of them the most pertinent seems to be, “Is this really the time?”

  “Nice to see you bloody too, mate.” Winston sniffs disdainfully. How he sniffs I couldn’t say, but sniff he does.

  Gran is looking around bewildered. “Do you dudes hear that or am I having a really inappropriately timed flashback?”

  Tess is more to the point. “What the hell is going on?” she hisses.

  “Shh!” hisses Felicity. “All of you!”

  We all snap our gaze to the zombies crowding the lawn. A few have stirred, uprooted perhaps, but none appear to be getting any closer.

  “Those bloody pillocks?” Winston snorts. “Don’t make me laugh. They’re dumb enough to have their own fucking reality show, they are.”

  “What,” Tess repeats, “the hell is going on?”

  “Winston,” I say to her. “Animated tree. Friend of ours.”

  From her expression, I don’t think this helps.

  “Friend, he says,” Winston scoffs. “Could have bloody fooled me. Discover me in a madman’s lab. I save your crispy pork rasher, and then… Oh wait, I’m shipped off to another lab and nobody cares to come see how much sap was spilled in the fight. Don’t know why I bloody bother.”

  Do other people who save the world from supernatural threats have this sort of conversation inches from fields of zombies, or is it just me?

  “I am sorry, Winston,” I say. He probably deserves it. If not at this exact bloody moment.

  Winston hesitates, then sniffs again. “Well then,” he says. “You know. Apology accepted then.” Another pause. “You fucker.”

  Kayla chuckles.

  “It is just lovely to see you again, Winston,” says Clyde.

  Winston starts violently, seeming to realize Clyde is present for the first time. “Bloody hell!” he says, then tries to disguise it as a rustle of branches. “You!”

  A few feet away a zombie says, “Urk,” but then goes back to bumping into things.

  “I mean…” Winston continues, “is that… you? Him?” A branch rustles and then points accusingly at Clyde.

  “Oh,” says Clyde. “Of course. Should explain. Not Evil-Me. Me-me. If that makes sense. Probably doesn’t. No wonder people are opposed to cloning. I mean, moral objections aside, the pronoun situation is a disaster.”

  Tess is itching at her axe handle.

  “This is Clyde 2.1,” I explain hastily. “Completely different from Clyde 2.0.”

  “Well, not completely,” Clyde points out.

  “Not helping.”

  Tess fixes me with a dead-eyed stare. “I swear,” she says, “I am not a violent woman, but you have a lot of explaining to do if you don’t want me to keep on swinging after the zombies have fallen down.” Her words stab out at me from behind gritted teeth.

  I suddenly see this all from her point of view. We’re the CIA. The man. The bad guy from a thousand Hollywood spectacles. And she… She’s Kurt Russell. The woman alone in the city gone mad struggling for survival, for sanity. Screwed over and fighting for survival. She’s the heroine. We’re the guys that promise aid but turn out to be responsible for everything.

  Trying to be the hero may be too much of a reach on this particular escapade. Maybe I should just settle for not being an asshole.

  I open my mouth. “Look,” I start.

  “Well,” Winston cuts me off, “if you’re going to get into it make it quick, because we really should do whatever the hell it is you guys are doing before the dog comes back.”

  Why does everyone do this to me? It would be nice to have just one conversation without a bombshell being dropped.

  I tear my gaze away from Tess’s slightly murderous one and look up at the tree line. “What dog, Winston?”

  “Oh.” Winston sounds surprised. “Well, you’ve seen the giant animals, right?”

  Oh shit.

  “We saw rats,” says Clyde with undue enthusiasm. “Pretty impressive stuff. Not that many species can actually survive gigantism. Despite the whole dinosaur thing, most lizards just wouldn’t survive being blown up that way, for example. The physics of their anatomy is all off. Goes back to the whole dinosaurs being more closely related to birds thing, actually. But—”

  “Giant dogs?” I wrestle the conversation back toward a point.

  “Just one. Sort of reason I’m hiding out here. Didn’t really want to get involved in a game of fetch. Though if that thing comes and marks its territory on me, it’s going to lose a nut. When it let loose at the other corner of the park I think it drowned a zombie. Horrible way to go. At least it would be if you weren’t a zombie, I suppose. Maybe zombies are into it. Look like a bunch of kinky bastards.” There is a rustle as if a leafy head is being shaken. “Brain eating and such. Weird.”

  OK. A field of zombies and a giant dog. Totally manageable. Totally…

  I turn to Felicity. “What the hell is our plan?”

  “Oh wait,” says Winston, before she can answer, “you can go ahead and explain now. The dog is back.”

  Shit and… No. Just shit.

  I peer for a glimpse of the creature, but my vantage point is significantly less elevated than Winston’s. There are just leaves and blades of grass, and tree trunks.

  And then I catch a glimpse of it.

  Jesus.

  Its muzzle hangs about four stories off the ground. Its eyes hit the fifth story. Its flanks—matted, scratched, and filthy—streak back for a hundred yards or more. It pads down the length of the park, foot falls making the trees shake.

  “Just so you know, I am totally not trembling,” I hear Winston mutter as his branches rattle together. “Trick of perspective.”

  “Holy crap sticks, dudes,” I hear Gran mutter.

  “A Rottweiler,” I hear Felicity groan. “It just had to be a Rottweiler.”

  “You should have seen it take out the German Shepherd,” Winston whispers down. “That shit was just impressive.”

  “Sweet,” Kayla breathes.

  A giant, killer Rottweiler. Of course. Just… of course.

  OK. I force my mind to stop freaking out and think back. We’ve dealt with big monsters before. And we have Clyde with us. Clyde is our version of mobile artillery.

  I turn to him. “You can still do magic, right? Even though you’re a robot. Or you’re in a robot. I don’t know.”

  Tess looks like I just broke something inside of her. “Magic?” she says.

  “Yes, should be able to,” Clyde says to me. Then to Tess, “It’s pretty cool actually. You see there are parallel dimensions—”

  I cut him off before he does any permanent damage to Tess’s frontal lobe. “I swear,” I say, “I will explain all of this to you once we’ve investigated, destroyed, and whatevered that mushroom. I swear.”

  Tess looks like she’s debating between her desire to kill us all and her desire to imitate a sane person for another ten minutes or so. Fortunately for me the latter wins.

  “Tabby.” Clyd
e turns his head, then stops, looking I think more at Gran than his former girlfriend. “Sorry,” he corrects. “Tabitha. My bad. I’m not even used to being Robocop’s skinny nerd brother, let alone this whole decreased familiarity because I’m a clone thing. Work in progress. Apologies. Memories of other versions of myself and all that. Confusing. You’d think if you had a computer for a brain you’d be able to do some parallel processing or something. Or maybe you wouldn’t expect that. I’m not sure about the whole computer thing. More your forte, really. Which takes me back to my point, which was about spells, and databases, and all that stuff. Any chance you could feed me a couple in a pinch?”

  Tabitha looks down from him to her laptop, up to Gran. She repeats the triangle.

  “Whatever,” she mutters eventually.

  “Fantastic,” Clyde says. And he sounds like he genuinely means it. And was there some hidden warmth in Tabitha’s grunt? Clyde was always far more sensitive to the nuances of her moodiness than I was.

  “All right,” I say to him. “So can you make the dog hurt?”

  “That’s never going to fly with the animal safety folk,” Clyde says.

  “It is kind of ungroovy,” Gran agrees.

  Good Lord. Do I really have to point this stuff out? “It’s a giant killer beast of doom that will kill us all with its jaws of killing. If it just wants to play catch then I apologize for not trying to rub its belly first, but just on the vague off chance it wants to use us as particularly bloody chew toys, can we please be prepared to throttle it with its own intestines?”

  “Nice,” Felicity says quietly in my ear. I suppress an ill-timed grin.

  “I’m not sure I know an exact spell for that,” Clyde says.

  “Bit specific,” Winston agrees.

  “Well, stick in the same thematic area at least,” I say, desperately hanging onto the last fraying edges of my sanity. “Look, the plan here—and I do want to emphasize that we are all following this plan so we can get to some fairly important world-saving—is to get the dog mad, get it to attack the zombies, let them fight it out, and then come in and take down the significantly weakened dog, which, let’s face it, would otherwise kick our arses.”

  “Speak for your feckin’ self,” Kayla says.

  I turn to her, a little bit of a snap to my movements. “Right now,” I say, “I’m not sure you’d win a fight with gravity. I think you should dial back your expectations a touch.”

  This doesn’t endear me exactly, but it does buy a moment for everyone to just digest the plan.

  “Solid,” Felicity says eventually. “Clyde, light that Rottweiler up like it’s a birthday cake.”

  “Dude,” Winston says, and I think he’s addressing me. “No idea you liked a taste of the crazy. Nice.”

  “I am right here,” Felicity points out while I splutter for a suitable defense. “And I am more than capable of taking that axe to you.”

  “Jesus.” Winston sounds offended. “Just trying to give your HR violation a compliment. No need to get shirty.”

  “Wait, am I setting the dog on fire now or in a bit?” Clyde asks.

  I look at Gran. “Do Area 51 operations ever run like this?”

  He shakes his head, looking as bewildered as I feel.

  I turn to Clyde. “Yes,” I say. “Light it up.”

  Clyde inclines his head to Tabitha. “Tabitha, you remember when I first learned magic and almost burned down MI37’s entire library?”

  Tabitha nods minimally. “Mini Chernobyl,” she says.

  “That spell, please.”

  48

  “Gorleck mal forlak cal urkur.” Blue lines of electricity crackle up and down Clyde’s spine. “Beshat mel tekor.” His voice booms. Zombie heads snap in our direction.

  As far as incognito things go, this is not exactly in the top tier.

  “Ifllem muerto,” Clyde bellows, and with that all concerns about the zombies’ attention are pushed roughly aside.

  A colossal spark… no, that word is not adequate… A massive beam of electricity—something only barely shy of being a full-grade lightning bolt—arcs out of Clyde’s palm. He flies backwards, crashes into Winston’s trunk. Both of them let out a yell.

  And then their cries are ruthlessly and comprehensively drowned by the titanic howl of pain from across the park.

  For a moment there is just sound. Input from every other sense is obliterated. An animal shriek loud enough to have physical presence. The air vibrates around me. The ground shakes. Windows smash before and behind us. Something massive slams into concrete, into walls, into trees.

  The zombies come alive as one. They lurch away from us, toward the sound, ricocheting off their poorly coordinated brethren. They get one step, two.

  Then it comes. Smashing through the trees on the far side of the park, close to the library. A shower of branches and raging, gnashing teeth.

  One of the Rottweiler’s flanks flames and smokes where Clyde’s spell impacted. It bays at the zombies. Phlegm flies massively from its mouth. It swings its head down, gathers a great fungus-filled mouthful. Its jaws slam down. Limbs and skulls spill loose. Black blood stains the greenery in great spraying arcs.

  Then the zombies attack. A mass of them rush the dog’s paws. One foreleg rips through a stream of oncomers. I see more than one head detonate under the force of the blow. But at the back of the beast zombies clamp on to the massive feet. The Rottweiler howls again, bucks, tries to kick, but its red blood flows with the black.

  I’ve heard it said that it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog, but when the dog is the size of your average four-bedroom abode I’d argue that the point is moot. Any which way, the Rottweiler is far from down.

  It hacks, mashes, chomps. The zombies swarm, climb, and tear.

  Felicity rips her eyes away for long enough to give me an appreciative nod. “That worked even better than I thought it—”

  “The mushroom!” Tess yells. “The damn mushroom!”

  We all turn and stare. And the fight is sliding sideways across the park. The Rottweiler is thrashing around, tearing at the zombies trying to clamber up its legs. And as it whirls it’s getting closer and closer to the mushroom we’re here to investigate. In a moment it’s going to ride right over it and our whole mission objective will be mashed to a pulp.

  “Oh shit.” As much fun as it is to be surrounded by a bloodbath, it would be nice if it didn’t crap all over our plans. “Clyde!” I yell. “Blow a hole in that damn dog’s face. Save the mushroom!”

  “Wait,” Clyde says, “protect the mushroom or hit the—”

  “Oh you dithering bastard.” The curse booms from above Clyde’s head. Suddenly half our cover takes off across the park at a flat out sprint.

  “Fuck it!” Winston’s battle cry echoes in his wake.

  He covers the distance in a flat sprint. Zombies splatter beneath his feet, limbs crushed in wet black splatters. He lowers something approximating a shoulder and slams it into the Rottweiler’s side.

  The flaming, frothing, chomping dog bucks, howls. Winston drives his feet into the ground. Great strips of sod and turf fly into the air. Zombies leap at Winston, start clawing up his legs.

  “Piss off you buggers!” Winston heaves again, the Rottweiler gives ground, sprawling across the park.

  The zombies lurch on top of the sprawling pair. For a moment the park is just a writhing pack of sodden, purple-tinged bodies.

  Jesus. My friend is under that.

  The Rottweiler comes up first. Barking, gnashing, mouth full of bodies. Humanity’s leftovers become a main course.

  A bark-clad arm follows the dog, punches up, sends zombies scattering. It clamps around the dog’s muzzle and Winston heaves himself up, spilling bodies as he rises.

  The Rottweiler twists, lunges, and savage jaws duck under Winston’s arm, and clamp around his trunk.

  “Oh fuck me sideways!”

  Muscles bulging, the Rottweiler hefts Winsto
n off the ground. It holds him aloft, ignores the zombies hanging from its flanks, tearing at its skin. It shakes its head savagely back and forth.

  “Mommmmyyyyy!!!” Winston’s wail warbles through the air.

  “He’s too close,” Clyde is mumbling. “I can’t get just the dog.”

  My table leg feels stupid and useless in my sweaty hand.

  And then Winston is airborne, released and flying. A tree become a twig, sailing up and away.

  And then down. Crashing and smashing. Soil cresting before him like a breaking wave. Bodies flying before him. Skidding across the park, crashing inevitably towards the mushroom.

  No. No.

  “Do I…?” Clyde is breathless, Winston’s screeching form reflected in his chrome faceplate.

  “Runaway tree!” Gran yells. “Stop him, dude!”

  Clyde plants his back leg. A spark flares up his spine. The smell of ozone fills the air.

  “No!” I put a hand on Clyde’s shoulder. The last thing I want is to have Winston blown into splinters just to save a pissing mushroom. I know heroes are meant to make sacrifices, but I’m not making one as stupid as that.

  So we stand and watch as Winston bears down on the mushroom.

  With a great rumble of earth, he comes to rest. Broken, bedraggled, covered in zombies, and still a yard clear of our prize. The mushroom stands untouched.

  Beside me, Felicity lets out a whistle of breath.

  “Close call, man.” Gran is shaking his head. And he doesn’t know Winston. Has no connection to him, so I can’t really judge him for the decision he would have made.

  “We have to get out there,” I say instead. “We have to help him.”

  “Now you’re feckin’ talking.” Kayla heaves herself to slightly unsteady feet.

  Tess has a slightly different opinion. “Are you insane?” she asks. I have a sneaking suspicion she’s already made up her mind on that one.

  There again, so have I.

  I break cover and run. A zombie spins as I emerge, lunges. My table leg connects with its cranium, and the thing goes down in a wet bloody splatter.

  “In your feckin’ eye!” I hear Kayla shout behind me. There is the damp detonation of skewered cranium.