Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “Winston!” I yell.

  He stirs. Massive, mighty, and fallen.

  “Ohh…” He sits up, clutching at the part of his trunk where his head resides. “I haven’t felt this shitty since I discovered Jägerbombs…” His branches hang snapped and broken. Bark has been flayed from him, raw wood is split open, sap leaking.

  “Holy shit,” I say, then get distracted by the need to beat down another zombie who seems to think I’d make an excellent early morning snack. When I come back up from dissuading him, I am splattered and panting. “Are you OK?” I ask Winston, finishing the thought.

  Winston blinks. Whorls of wood contracting and expanding in an expanse of bark. “Well, you know, the good part about being a tree is you’re tough as fuck.” He stands up, claps two branches together. “All right then, Fido, come on if you think you’re hard enough.”

  Behind me I hear gunshots, shouts. I spin around. The zombies have discovered our little group. Gran, Felicity, and Tess have their guns drawn. Felicity snipes skulls with calm efficiency. Clyde jams out a hand. A zombie flies away. It lands in pieces.

  A little way from them Kayla leans on a stick she must have found. Her other hand dispatches steel death to any zombie foolish enough to wander within a yard’s radius of her post.

  Winston continues to stride away from me, and while I like his attitude, I’m not as keen on his odds.

  Beyond him the Rottweiler is busy thinning the zombie herd. The dog’s in a pretty sorry state, but I think I know the ultimate winner of that fight. Which means when this is all over, if Winston ends up as matchsticks, the rest of us are going to have a seriously pissed off giant dog to put down.

  I look down at the table leg in my hand. It is a bent and battered piece of aluminum. And it is not really going to be much help in the long haul.

  Immobile she may be, but Kayla isn’t going to give me her sword. And it’s too much, I know, to ask for some kind soul to have left one lying around. But something pointy, at this very moment, would not go amiss.

  I take rapid inventory of the park. Stalks of grass, bits of broken off Winston, enormous clods of earth thrown up by Winston’s epic power slide.

  Bits of broken off Winston it is then.

  I grab a broken branch about four feet long, the last foot of which is one wickedly sharp splinter. It’s not perfect, and the balance is for shit, but it definitely will do some damage.

  I start after Winston and twenty yards later, get to try out its effectiveness.

  A blank-eyed woman, apparently sick of being used as a chew toy, comes at me wielding her own chewed off arm as a club. Well, I assume it’s her arm. Maybe it’s not. I don’t really have time to look for telling details while I’m ducking a violent swing of tattered muscle and bone.

  I parry the second blow but the zombie’s improvised club pivots at the elbow, around my stick, and gristle smashes into my cheekbone. I go down, blind from equal parts severed arm juice and sheer horror. I come back up hard, and with an edge of panic pounding through my blood stream.

  My pointy stick skewers the woman, bursts something squishy and previously vital, then exits via the region of her spinal cord.

  For an extra bonus she stops hitting me.

  It isn’t a flaming sword, but I am beginning to become attached to my pointy stick already.

  Three punctured bodies later, I catch up to Winston.

  “Pick me up,” I tell him.

  “What? Like I’m a mid-combat taxi service to you now?”

  “Pick me up,” I say, “and get me on that dog’s head.” I shake the stick at him.

  Winston’s wooden face creases. “Mate,” he says, “is that like, part of me?”

  Oh. That is… I think back to the woman beating me with her own arm. Not exactly a comfortable moment.

  “Sorry,” I try.

  “Fucking savage.” But Winston’s hand comes down and I go back up with it. He perches me in the branches above his head.

  “You got a plan with that?” Winston strides through the battlefield. Corpses squish beneath his falling feet.

  “Stab it in its brains.”

  “Not exactly General Patton, are you?”

  That seems a little unnecessary. “What exactly was your plan?”

  Winston shrugs, causing me to bounce up and down. “Punch it in the face.”

  “Hello,” I say, “I’m the kettle, you must be the pot.”

  “Oh, just shut your face and nut up.”

  The Rottweiler is close now. It’s bleeding hard. The fire on its flank is out, but the wound is weeping blood and other fluids of an even less appealing nature. Zombies are on its back, ripping through fur and flesh. It’s panting, and limping, but its jaws keep going down and keep coming up full. Blood and phlegm spill over its muzzle.

  The Rottweiler shifts its head, sees Winston coming, growls. It’s a noise that vibrates in my gut and loosens my bowels. Where the hell do I come up with these stupid, stupid plans?

  Winston lunges. I’m thrown back against his limbs, then borne forward by branches and momentum.

  His body and the dog’s collide, their bodies smashing into each other. Winston grinding his shoulder against that weeping wound. All those broken branches. The Rottweiler howls.

  I fly.

  I leave the nest of branches, slam through twigs. Rottweiler hide slams into my face, thick, musty, and tasting like dried blood.

  And then, as soon as I make contact, I am slipping away, careening down the dog’s side. Gravity makes me its bitch. I grasp at fistfuls of thick fur, lose my purchase, gain it, lose it again. I grasp desperately, wonder why the hell I haven’t let go of my stick yet. Then my arm wrenches in its socket. I wait for my grip to give way but I hang on.

  My fall arrested, my feet swing forty feet above the ground. I concentrate on not dropping my stick or soiling my underwear.

  Come on, Arthur. You’ve been through worse than this.

  And while that’s true, it still doesn’t make going through this any easier. I need to engage my other hand if I’m going to haul myself up, but if I do that then I drop my stick and this all becomes pointless.

  I hear a growl from beneath me. I risk another glimpse down.

  Between my dangling feet, comes a zombie’s head.

  It’s clinging to the dog’s underbelly, hands and feet wrapped in the dog’s fur, hanging upside down, but coming up, toward me.

  Jesus. It’s not even lunch time and the list of bad things my day has contained is beginning to get ridiculous.

  I jab down at the intruding face, but my leverage is for shit, and while being hit in the face probably isn’t pleasant for my friendly neighborhood zombie, it’s not enough to dislodge him.

  God, I need to get out of this asshole of a situation.

  I prod again, with similar results. I think I heard somewhere that expecting different results from the same action is the definition of madness. As I need no help in going over that particular ledge, I decide to change tactics. Fighting isn’t working. The other option provided by adrenaline is flight.

  There’s also another place I can jam my pointy stick.

  With as much force as I can, I ram it into the dog’s side. It slides in a full foot. With all that’s going on, the Rottweiler doesn’t seem to register the flesh wound. Which is nice because the lack of flinching gives me the chance to seize the stick with both hands and heave. The wound I’ve created emits an ugly wet, slurping sound. But I’m up, bracing my elbows, then my gut, then a foot on the slowly slipping wood. I balance, precarious and on the verge of toppling for a moment, before I grasp more fur, and let that take my weight.

  I reach down, start fishing for the stick, pull it out, and repeat the process. Which gives me a good view of the zombie as it realizes its next meal is retreating, and increases its pace toward me. I get the stick free, jam it into the dog’s side above my head again. Grab, haul.

  The zombie approaches. And trust my luck to finally find one who’s
worked out how to get its coordination back. The bastard can move.

  Now that my stick is occupied, I have to settle for kicking the zombie in the face every time it gets too close. It’s even less effective than stabbing at it.

  A clammy hand seizes my leg. I kick, but the zombie is really not at all about letting go of things. My grip on my stick is put to the test and apparently I should have studied harder.

  Shit and—

  Then Winston punches the dog in the face.

  49

  My entire world vibrates. I thrash about on my branch. The zombie on my ankle falls away. More undead fall from above. The Weather Girls would be happy. It’s finally raining men.

  One zombie crashes into my shoulder. Suddenly I’m hanging by one hand. The dog reels. I flap and fly. I grab at anything I can.

  Winston’s next punch lands. The world lurches again. I go from midair to eating Rottweiler hide. Zombies fall about me. The dog howls. I kick at fur, feet skidding and skittering. My hands grab uselessly.

  “Not so fucking yappy now, are you, you miserable poodle-fucker.”

  Winston is still keeping it classy.

  Somehow I find purchase. Fistfuls of fur in my hands. I heave myself in the direction that appears to be up at that moment, drag my stick with me. And finally the ground is flat beneath me. In the moment between blows I am able to recognize that I sit astride the dog’s spine. The knobs of its vertebrae rise and fall like small hills.

  Another punch. Apparently Winston is not someone you chew up and toss halfway across a park if you want to preserve your dental work.

  For a moment this all seems rather stupid. This idea of rescuing Winston. Of being the X-wing sneaking into the chink in the Death Star’s armor. In the distance, beyond the Rottweiler’s head I can see Winston pulling back his fist.

  Then the dog lunges. Brutally, savagely, jaws slamming down. I hear wood crack.

  “Shit!” Winston’s eye whorls go wide.

  Ahead of me, the dog starts to shake its head. Winston rattles and cracks.

  OK. Rescuing is back on the menu. Gingerly, I clamber to my feet.

  Unfortunately this idea is not exclusively mine. Every single Clyde zombie that has survived Winston’s hammer blows is sharing it with me.

  The world starts to blur. The stuttering snapshot images of adrenaline and head trauma. I try to find my footing on the dog’s back. Things grab at me. Blood runs down my cheek. Pain. My shoulders ache from the continual thrust of the stick. The resistance of bodies. The sound of wood on skin.

  And then I run out of dog. I stand stupidly for a moment staring at empty space, trying to work out where the thing has gone. And then it registers. I’m standing between its ears. There’s blood all over me. Other things. Worse things. I’m trying not to think about them.

  Winston is directly in front of me. Screaming. Yelling. Cursing. Probably cursing. I can’t quite tell. My head is ringing too hard. I can hear something guttural behind me, coming closer. Something I haven’t killed yet.

  There is a wasteland of dead below me. I can see my friends, Felicity, Clyde, Gran, Kayla—all of them. I can see them in a tight knot at the edge of the park. I can see the bodies spread out before them. A crescent of the dead. This is a massacre, a madness.

  Clyde did this. Version 2.0 did this. Made us do this. He made us monsters today.

  A monster on the back of a monster. And I just want this to end.

  Beneath me, a foot away, one great brown eye narrows in the Rottweiler’s skull. It focuses on Winston’s face.

  I bunch the aching muscles of my arms.

  The dog opens its jaws wide. The stink of its breath fills the air. I feel the whole of its body prepare for the launch.

  I plunge my stick down into that great brown eye.

  The dog’s jaws, prepared to snap shut, spasm. Then they let fly with a howl of absolute rage and pain. I am so close to the sound my vision blurs. But I plunge the stick deeper. I dig deep into the socket. Gouge for the nerve, for a way deeper in.

  The dog bucks. I lose my footing, but I am almost up to my elbows in the creature’s deflating eyeball. I dangle from its face. Sticky fluid gushes over me. Jaws snap and grind beneath my feet. I brace them against the monster’s jaw bone, and then suddenly I go from elbow deep to shoulder deep.

  Gore washes over me in a flood. I am soaked in it. Gagging and spitting. And I am so disgusted and horrified, that I almost don’t realize the ground is rushing up to greet me. I almost don’t realize that the dog is falling dead to the floor.

  50

  It’s Felicity who makes it to me first. Felicity, gore-soaked hair plastered to her head, cheeks white with exhaustion, hands hidden beneath a thick smear of sweat and blood. She has never looked more beautiful.

  She kneels beside me, pushes my hair back, examines the tears in my skin. “You,” she says, and then stops and shakes her head. “You are a silly, stupid bastard.”

  Not exactly where I hoped this was going. A David and Goliath metaphor perhaps. Maybe a passing reference to bravery and daring.

  “Killed it,” I offer in my defense.

  She leans down, kisses my forehead. But when she comes up there is a slightly accusatory look in her eye. “You almost killed yourself.”

  To be fair, that is very close to being true.

  She leans in close, her eyes only inches from mine. “Arthur, it is essential that we all get out of here alive.” There’s an edge to her voice. Not hysterical, but maybe thinking about checking out houses in that neighborhood. “I can’t protect you if you fling yourself at every single…” She shakes her head. “God knows if we’re going to fight giant Rottweilers again. But you know what I mean.” She takes my head in both her hands. “I look after my own, but you have to help me on that. Especially you.”

  She kisses me again. Her lips pressed against mine. Pressed there despite all the crap I’ve been rinsed in recently. An almost desperate kiss.

  “Minor misjudgment,” I offer up in terms of reassurance. The slight sheen in Felicity’s eyes makes me think I could have done a better job. But that’s tricky when head trauma is making the world look like it’s been covered by Vaseline.

  “I thought…” Felicity pauses, looks away, starts again. “We said that for this, for us to work… we have to trust each other. You can’t betray that trust. You can’t climb up a giant bloody dog covered in zombies and try and kill it with a stick. You just can’t.”

  I think about that. “Sounds silly when you say it.”

  Her face contorts. Amusement, anger, passion, pain. “You,” she says, and then she discards words and just holds me.

  After a minute or so, someone clears their throat. Felicity pulls away. I sit up. The world spins a little, but overall I’m feeling a little more clear-headed. Gran, Tabitha, Kayla, and Clyde stand around us. We seem short on people.

  I take quick mental inventory. “Winston,” I identify one missing person. The one that started this whole dog and pointy stick show. “How’s Winston doing?”

  “He’s…” Clyde starts.

  “Shitty,” Winston finishes. I turn, stare. He leans against the bloody flank of the dog’s gargantuan corpse. Most of his branches are broken—either snapped clean off or hanging at awkward angles.

  He holds out one arm. Bark hangs off it in swaths. “How the fuck am I meant to photosynthesize like this?” he asks. “I’m going to be knackered for fucking weeks like this. And the TV is bound to be shitty this side of the pissing apocalypse.”

  Alive. He’s alive.

  Slowly, and with considerable help from Felicity, I get to my feet.

  “Wait,” I say, another thought hitting me. And right now I’m sensitive to even those sorts of blows. “Where’s Tess?”

  No one meets my eye.

  Oh. Oh no. Oh shit.

  “No,” I say. “No.” But no one backs me up on that. I stumble away from the group, as poorly coordinated as one of Clyde’s zombies.

 
; “Don’t,” Felicity puts a hand on my shoulder, and even that weight almost floors me. But I pull away.

  Because… no. No. We are not sacrificing people here. We are saving humanity. Because… because… Fuck! Fuck it! Fuck Clyde! Because we are humanity. We’re a fucking species. We’re part of the damn biosphere or whatever the hell it is he’s trying to save. He’s not saving the world, he’s changing it. Maybe. I don’t know. I just know that I am here to save people. People like Tess. And, God, I didn’t know her, really. And I have seen other people die. People I was closer to. But… fuck. Fuck. I was going to explain to her. I had promised her. How the hell can I deliver on that now?

  And then, there she is. Lying in the long grass. Flat on her back. Legs and arms splayed. Like a child making a snow angel.

  “It’s not your fault.” Felicity has caught up with me. I am probably not that hard to catch up with right now. “You literally could not have done anything more.”

  “I…” I start. But what could I have done? I could have stayed by her. Saved her. And then what would happen to Winston? Wouldn’t I just be mourning someone else?

  “Fuck!” I scream it at the sky. At the treetops that shouldn’t be there. At this new world that Clyde has forced upon us in a monstrous attack of ego and self-righteousness.

  “Make it count.” Felicity is still talking. “That’s all you can do. When we lose someone. When someone sacrifices themselves for you. All you can do is make it count. Make it fuel you. Go forward from here.”

  Maybe once, back when I first started at MI37, I would have thought her heartless, but I hear the compassion in her words now. The sorrow. And the truth. Felicity is as right as ever.

  Make it count. I stand in a city park become jungle surrounded by rapidly decaying dead bodies. Make that count. Jesus.

  “The mushroom,” I say. “We… We have to…” It’s hard to get the words out still. I am too full of emotions. Thought and speech are abstractions I can’t achieve yet, I’m stuck in something more primal.

  Felicity understands though. “Kayla, Clyde, Gran,” she calls, “dissect that damn thing.” She puts a hand on my shoulder, guides me toward the mushroom.