Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  For a moment we stand there, waiting for the zombies to come our way, but none do.

  “OK,” I say when it becomes apparent nobody in the immediate vicinity wants to eat my brains. “Gran, you and I take point. Felicity, you OK taking the rear?” She nods, and I am glad Winston isn’t here to snicker. “Kayla, you keep Tabitha and Clyde safe in the middle.” That’s as polite a way as I can think of to relegate her to less vital tasks. “Tabitha,” I say, “what are we looking for?”

  “Security room. Elevator controls will be there.”

  Gran and I slip toward the far end of the lobby. It branches in a T-junction. He goes left, I go right. We pause at our respective corners, then on a nod, both snap around.

  I stare down an empty corridor. The most deadly thing I can see is a spider plant large enough that it has burst open an office door.

  “Clear,” Gran calls.

  “Ditto.”

  Clyde’s metal footsteps echo off the marble floor, drowning out the others. Tabitha slips behind the security desk and starts rifling through papers. In the distance I think I can hear Winston yelling. Which means he’s still upright. Maybe I should have sent Gran to help him.

  “Little tense, this, isn’t it?” Clyde says.

  “Little.”

  “You know, though,” he says, “I do sort of enjoy it. I mean, obviously, horrible awful circumstances, that I would give anything to not have. Humanity ending is a bit on the godawful end of pretty much any scale I can think of. But, well, when I first started doing all this, the whippersnapper years and all that, well, field operations were mostly about trying to not soil my underwear. Obviously some anatomical changes have made that less likely an outcome, but, well… I mean, I don’t want to go down the whole self-aggrandizing hard-bitten agent route, because, well, you know, lack of plausibility and all that. But, well, I’m concerned I’ve sort of started to think of this as fun.”

  Part of me would love to ask him what the hell he’s talking about. To say that’s a really messed up way to see things. Except, God, he’s right. At least in part. I’m terrified, and probably generating more ulcers than any gastroenterologist would recommend, but there is a part of me too, that feels the bite of the adrenaline, and wants to take all these bastards down.

  “Totally, man,” Gran says from across the hall. “Fucked up job, right?”

  I actually laugh at that.

  “Feckin’ nancies.” Kayla seems unimpressed. But Felicity runs an affectionate hand down my spine.

  “Seriously.” Tabitha looks up from the desk. “Less male bonding bullshit. More letting me concentrate.”

  We go back to tense silence. I preferred the bonding bullshit.

  A moment later, Tabitha puts her head up again. “Got it. Door location. Door code.” She heads in Gran’s direction. “Idiots,” she adds for good measure. Hopefully she’s talking about the guards.

  Two corridors later and we’re outside a door that used to be for employees only. Some office plants have ignored that. One ficus in particular has rendered the door code obsolete, ramming a branch through the lock.

  “OK,” I say, “we go in, Clyde hacks in, gets in control of the elevators, and we go up. Agreed?”

  “One hundred percent groovy, man.”

  “And,” Kayla adds with maybe more glee than I’d like right now, “I get to stab him if he feckin’ twitches wrong.”

  “I don’t mean to complain,” Clyde says, “and I totally get where the trust issues are coming from, and I don’t judge at all, and I really don’t mean to question Kayla’s judgment—she’s proven herself an excellent field agent again and again, and I personally have always been a fan of her creative uses for violence, but I was wondering if maybe, perhaps we could upgrade from the whole twitch thing. Making me a little nervous.”

  “Just get on with it,” Felicity says.

  As suggestions go, it’s a good one, so I open the door—

  —and a zombie tries to eat my face.

  It lunges at me, coming from nowhere. Or from immediately behind the door where it was waiting for an idiot like me, I suppose. But figuring that out seems like a less important issue than fending the damn thing off as its fingers wrap around my cheeks—cold and clammy and pushing painfully into my skin—and its jaws open and—

  Its head explodes.

  Bone, and blood, and brain matter pebble dash my cheeks. I reel back, still trying to fend off an attacker who isn’t there. I hit the corridor’s far wall, and the blow to the back of the head lets me realize I am still in possession of all my various component parts.

  Felicity stands in the middle of the corridor, arms extended, gun still pointed at the doorway. Smoke spirals up from the barrel. I realize I can’t really hear out of my right ear anymore.

  Felicity holsters the gun and rolls her shoulders. “Nobody eats my boyfriend’s face,” she says, and heads into the room.

  56

  FIVE MINUTES LATER

  “You’re sure you’re OK?”

  Clyde just lets his mirror-polished face reflect mine back at him. He is too polite to say, “Yes, mum,” but not by much. I think there’s a chance that the near-face-eating incident has rendered me a bit of a nag.

  Still, I point to the spare walkie-talkie Gran has given Kayla. “Remember,” I say to her. “Constant contact.”

  “Not above feckin’ stabbing you,” Kayla comments. She glowers from beside a swollen succulent, sword gripped in one hand, the other still leaning on her scabbard.

  “Come on,” Felicity says from the doorway. “Clock’s ticking.”

  And it is, damnit. We’re almost fifteen minutes into our hour-long window. That’s less than thirty seconds a floor. I hope it’s a fast elevator.

  We find it. The doors peel open smoothly. And I have to concede that the inner child in me is way too excited to run my fingers down every button on the massive panel beside the door.

  Floors two through twenty are clear. So are twenty to thirty. Up to forty and still nothing. I watch the seconds tick by. The doors glide open. We stare at empty corridors. They glide shut. We jerk back into motion. Seconds turn into minutes.

  “He’s going to be at the top,” I say. “The bastard is going to be at the top.”

  “Then we’ll get him there,” Felicity says. “We’ll have time.”

  I glance at my watch. I am less confident. Because once we finally find the floor it’s more than likely that we’ll have an ocean of zombies to wade through.

  I wonder how Winston is doing.

  After another six floors I ask, “Should we check in with Kayla and Clyde?”

  The doors glide open and shut.

  “Trust them,” Felicity says. She looks over at Tabitha. “We have to.”

  I nod. Swallow. I need to calm down. Take a breath. “Thank you,” I say to her.

  “What for?”

  “Shooting that zombie in the face.”

  “He was trying to kill you.” She shrugs. “It seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “Well.” It’s my turn to shrug. “I appreciate it. You have my back.”

  “You’ve got mine.”

  I grin.

  Tabitha clears her throat.

  Gran gets the hint. “So,” he says, interrupting us before we become nauseating, “we got, like, you know, some sort of plan thing going on for when we get to zombieville?”

  Fortunately it had crossed my mind. Unfortunately what I came up with was… “Well,” I say, “I realize it’s not exactly nuanced, but I was going to go with kill everything we see.”

  Gran nods. “I dig, man.”

  “I think I might…” Felicity starts. She begins to dig around in her handbag. “In the CIA cache…” she says and trails off again. “Yes.” She smiles, a warm tight little smile that I find equal parts terrifying and sexy. “Speaking of nuanced.” She pulls two matte black metal spheres out of the bag. “Incendiary grenades.”

  Gran whistles. “Holy shit.”
/>   I feel my brow furrow almost of its own accord. “But…” I start, “won’t it be hard to hack into the servers while we’re being cooked medium-well?”

  Felicity reaches out and takes the walkie-talkie from Gran. “Clyde,” she says into it, “talk to me about your control of the sprinkler system.”

  57

  The seventy-eighth floor. The doors glide open. The doors glide shut. The incendiary grenades clank as Felicity works them in her hand like Chinese worry balls.

  The seventy-ninth floor. The doors glide open. The doors glide shut. The incendiary grenades clank.

  The eightieth floor. The doors glide open—

  We have repeated this so many times, I have become numb. Corridors. Corridors. Corridors. The doors are sliding closed before I register what I see.

  I see… I see… Jesus, there’s tons of them. The hallway is clogged with them. Office doors are open. They spill in and out of rooms. Some stand stock still. Most mill around, aimless, angry.

  Gran and I stick our hands out to block the closing doors at the same moment. We all stand and stare.

  Branches block the windows. Neon strip lights are infested with algae. The light is poor and stained green. The place stinks of bodies, sweat, and rot.

  Slowly, Felicity raises the walkie-talkie to her mouth. She presses the transmit button with a small click of static. We all flinch. But the zombies haven’t noticed us yet. Not yet.

  “Clyde,” Felicity whispers. “The eightieth floor. We’ve found them. Get ready with the sprinklers.”

  Jesus. Joseph. Mary. Anybody. Buddha. Allah. Somebody. The adrenaline and the fear thunder in me. But a little part of me remembers what Clyde said down in the lobby.

  I’m concerned I’ve sort of started to think of this as fun.

  “OK,” I say. “We know how this goes.” My heart is beating hard in my throat. Tabitha looks like she wants to find another exit from this elevator. I can’t blame her.

  “You dudes are fucking crazy,” Gran says. “You know that, right?”

  Felicity hands him the walkie-talkie and shifts the grenades so she’s holding one in each hand. “It’s going to be completely—”

  She is cut off by an electronic squeal. The elevator. At first I think it’s sabotage, think that somewhere below Kayla is plunging her sword in Clyde’s body.

  But no. No, it is more mundane than that. More stupid. We pressed every button in the elevator. It has places to go. We’re holding it up. And it wants us to know.

  And now we know. It’s just we’re not the only ones.

  Every head turns. Every head. Black eyes. Purple eyes. Red eyes where the fungus has caused something horrific to rupture. All of them turn. To face us.

  A noise like a hurricane through a dead forest. A dry rattle sweeping toward us, gaining volume. The throats of the zombies clattering to life. A sound of greeting perhaps. Or relief, maybe, that the long wait is over. Or maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just all they have left. That ugly clacking sound. Maybe that’s all Version 2.0 left them with.

  “Oh shit.”

  Then they come.

  The flare of my muzzle is bright in the dark corridor. The boom of Gran’s gun, deafening. The tight corridors make it easy to hit something. Bullets tear through bodies. Overpressurized heads detonate. The corridor is filled with noise and blood.

  “Fire in the hole!”

  The first grenade arcs our heads. Some zombies track its progress, necks craning. Maybe somewhere in what is left of their minds they know what is happening, what is going to happen.

  I just keep on firing.

  A second grenade flies after the first.

  A zombie lunges, ducks, comes up only a few feet in front of me. I shove my gun into her face, pull the trigger. Her brains blow out the back of her head with such violence the zombie behind her goes down too.

  The grenades disappear into the crowd. Uncaring, they surge towards us.

  Gran kicks an encroaching zombie in the gut. His shot clips its cheek. Its head detonates. The bullet ricochets off exploding fragments of skull, skews into the neck of another zombie. It sits down gagging blood.

  It doesn’t matter. There is no way to overcome this many opponents. They are legion. Our bullets are not. The sheer weight of them bears down on us.

  The first grenade detonates.

  It is like dawn. Like the birth of the sun. It is outside of my experience. The whole world seeming to slow to a crawl so I can watch this one thing, can focus my full attention onto this moment of conception. A ball of light and heat expanding out. Its surface roiling, bubbling with rage and the desperate need to consume.

  The fireball engulfs body after body. It hits the limits of the corridor and keeps on going, becomes a roaring, raging wall of hate. I see pieces of zombie blown forward on the cresting tide of its force. Disembodied arms, legs, heads. A mist of red stains the yellow-white flare of death.

  The blast of the first grenade consumes the second. A second sun. Struggling and wrestling against its elder sibling. The pair of them churning down the corridor. Ripping through the bodies.

  Inside the confines of the besieged elevator, I fling myself sideways, away from the door. Opposite me, Gran mirrors my movements with a synchronicity that Olympic swimming teams would envy. With one graceful movement we both slam headlong into the elevator’s wall. A tongue of white flame licks the air between us, caresses the elevator’s far wall. I can smell my hair burning, can feel the moisture in my eyes evaporating.

  Holy…

  And then it’s done. Sunset. The cataclysm over. I cling to the floor, gasping, sucking for air, the oxygen momentarily gone to feed the fire god that lived among us.

  Felicity sits next to me, a slightly startled, almost starry-eyed expression on her face.

  Slowly we take each other’s hands, stand up. The elevator doors ping and start to slide closed. I jam my hand in the way and they retreat. I stand. I stare.

  It is like a scene from the Old Testament. The hell that Bible-thumpers scream about from TV screens. Flame and misery. Body parts crisping on the floor. Smoke churns, fiery red licks in between swirling clouds.

  “Now…” Felicity’s voice is breathy and hoarse. She coughs. But she keeps on staring at the scene of destruction. “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

  Gran has another phrase in mind. “Holy shit balls.”

  As impressive as the destruction is, there is the whole death from smoke exhalation thing to worry about. I grab the walkie-talkie from Gran. “Clyde!” I yell into it. “Sprinklers! Now!”

  “On it!” the reply comes back. A moment later water rains down. Flames hiss and spit. Steam mixes with smoke. I cough and splutter and try to see.

  “Come on,” I say. We can’t see shit, but that means whoever is left here can’t see us either, and I’ll take that for now. I grab Felicity’s hand and pull.

  Under Clyde’s direction, the sprinklers become our guide. He paints our path in steam, opens corridors in walls of fire. We scuttle forward quick and tight, soaked to the bone by the raining water, steaming slightly as behind us, flames eat the rooms. Eat hungrily. Eat fast.

  We figured without the foliage, I realize. Leaves and wood burn furiously. We’re barely staying ahead of the fire. And we have to stay ahead. We have to find the server room fast. That cannot burn. As good as she is with computers, Tabitha can’t do anything with melted slag.

  “Can you slow this thing down?” I yell into the walkie-talkie.

  Smoke is starting to overwhelm everything. It’s hard to see, to breathe. Clyde says something back but I can’t make it out over Tabitha’s coughing.

  There are too many pathways before us. Too many possibilities. Flame and steam and places where the fire has not yet touched.

  Gran spins. “Shit,” he says. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  I hear bodies moving to the left. The gurgling rattle of zombie speak. I point right. “This way.”

  “Haven’t we
been—?” Felicity starts.

  “This way!” I grab her arm, pull. We barrel down a water-soaked corridor. I pass a doorway filled with flames. I need more of that between me and the zombies. More fire. But I need to be ahead of it too. I need…

  “The hell are we?” Tabitha peers into another flaming room.

  An arm lunges out at her.

  Blackened fingers snag on black cloth. A flaming fist seizing her tank top.

  Tabitha flails back, drags the zombie with her, out into the corridor. It is a ruin, skin cracked and bleeding. I hear the crackle of fat cooking. Smell it. My gorge doesn’t really rise—it straps on a jetpack and heads for the stars.

  The zombie leers at Tabitha. Its lips have burned away. Blackened teeth splay wide. Its tongue is a charred stump.

  Gran’s gun barks. The arm clutching Tabitha bursts apart. Blood sprays. The severed hand falls away. Grease and ash smear over crumpled fabric. Gran fires again, again, into the body. It collapses.

  Tabitha is breathing hard. Panicked, panting breath. “Through,” she gasps. “The fire. It.”

  And then another. And another. They come out of the doorways. On fire. They come toward us. One collapses as it staggers toward us. Literally comes apart and collapses. Its arm falls off, then a leg. It goes down. Another one’s head blows. But they come on. More and more of them, filling the corridor.

  They’re on fire. Lethally on fire. And they come on. They don’t care.

  They don’t care.

  I try to grasp that. Try to hold onto it. They don’t care.

  Jesus, Clyde. Jesus. You took that from them?

  Maybe I shouldn’t be shocked. He’s trying to kill an entire species. My species. But this mindless self-destruction. This absence of the desire for self-preservation. It’s another step further over the edge. Another part of the horror that I just can’t comprehend.

  But there’s no time to process it. There’s only here and now. And there is way more here and now right at this moment than I usually like to deal with.