Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “Shut the goddamn motherfucking hell up!” the General almost screeches. The room quakes with his anger. He screws his face up in concentration, points to me, and looks at Gran. “Control him,” he whispers. When he opens his eyes, he seems to have regained some level of control. His point switches to Tabitha. “Heat, you said heat. Heat would fuck him up.”

  Tabitha shrugs, unfazed by the theatrics.

  The General whirls. “Thermal devices. On his location. We melt his ass and watch it sink to the bottom of the ocean. Then we’ll nuke him next week.” He nods to himself, apparently satisfied. “Now someone get me an ETA on a strike force. And someone else get this English prick out of my face.”

  I am really starting to not like this man. And, hell, maybe this is all my fault. But it’s not my fault alone. I take a step toward him.

  Gran’s hand stops me. He puts it square in my chest.

  “What do you want to do, dude? Piss him off more?” Gran looks at me, imploring.

  And he’s right, I realize. Neither yelling nor kicking nor screaming is going to change anything. I need a new angle of attack. I give Gran a quick nod, and beat a tactical withdrawal for now.

  OUTSIDE THE CONTROL ROOM

  The door closes and I can’t contain myself any more. “Nuke the Arctic? Melt a great hole in it? Drop defoliant on New York? What if we win this fight…” I shake my head. “I mean, what about when we win this fight?” It’s important to maintain the right attitude. “I mean, we’re becoming the very shits Version 2.0 claimed we are.”

  Yes, Arthur, that’s the right attitude.

  Felicity puts a hand on my arm. “We need to talk,” she says. She still looks pained.

  “I know!” I sweep my arm around the group. “We have to turn this shit around. Obviously we can’t just grab the General by the horns and turn his head, but—”

  “No.” Felicity shakes her head. “You and me. We need to talk.” She looks to Gran. “Where can…” She shakes her head. The pained look is back but doubled now. “Somewhere private. Please.”

  SOMEWHERE PRIVATE

  A few moments later, Gran is closing a door on us. Felicity and I stand in another of the small gray rooms we seem to spend so much of our lives in these days. The dull chipped table and windowless walls almost look familiar. Just a beaten up space that no one cares much about. Give the room a white board and I wouldn’t be able to tell it apart from any other place on earth.

  I step closer to Felicity. I’m still worried about her. About the fall. Her concussion.

  “You OK?”

  She grimaces. “Not really.”

  “But you’ve got a plan? A way we can turn this around?” Felicity is the smartest, most sensible woman I know. If she’s got something, then I know it’s going to work.

  “No, Arthur,” she says. “I don’t.”

  That catches me off stride. I pull my eyebrows down, trying to figure out what angle she’s working.

  “I need to sit down,” she says, and pulls out a plastic chair, slumps into it. She puts her head on the table. “I feel like shit, Arthur,” she says. “I do. But… Fuck.” She pulls her head up. “We have to talk.”

  “About what?” I feel like I should know this. Like this is something I should have seen coming.

  “New York. The Empire State Building.”

  I close my eyes. Something rolls over deep in my gut. She’s right. Of course she’s right. But time is slipping away. There will be time for recriminations and debriefs later. We need to focus on forward motion.

  “We can still pull things back,” I say. “We can still hack Version 2.0’s network. Maybe now we know his central location it will work out even better.”

  She looks up, her brown eyes looking big in her pale face. “Did you believe that when you came after me? Did you honestly think it would all work out fine when you abandoned Tabitha and Gran?”

  “I didn’t abandon…” I start. It’s a knee jerk defensive action. And her eyebrows bounce up. Because she’s too smart for that bullshit. Even concussed. And I owe her more honesty than that, even if I don’t want to be honest to myself.

  We look at each other for a long time.

  “You would have died if I didn’t come after you.” That’s what I have. All I have.

  She nods. She knows it’s true.

  “Don’t for a moment think I am not grateful for that,” she says. “That I don’t love you for that. That I didn’t want you to. I was screaming for you to come and save me. And when you did…” She shakes her head. “God.” The smile on her face almost breaks my heart. “You jumped out of the Empire State Building for me. You mad bastard.”

  “For you,” I say. And that’s it. That’s my excuse. All I have. Her. It was for her.

  And that seems to be what breaks the smile. “I know,” she says, face crumbling. “I know. God, I know. But it can’t be for me, Arthur. It can’t. It’s too big.” She’s starting to cry. “It’s too much. Eighteen million people.” She swallows hard. “Eighteen fucking million people, Arthur.” She shakes her head. “They’re dead. Even if this mad plan of yours works and we can unprogram the rest of the country. Even if that happens, eighteen million people in New York are dead and gone. Because… Because…”

  She whoops in air, trying to keep enough control to carry on speaking. “Do you know what Agent Orange does to people, Arthur? What it does to the land they live on? For generations. And we let that happen. We made that decision.” She puts her head in her hands. “You made that decision.” And she can’t suppress the sob any longer. “For me.”

  I stand there. And I want to hold her. I want to protect her from this sadness. This guilt. But I can’t. It’s me. It’s me she needs protecting from.

  “I…” I start. But is there an excuse? There is no General in this room for me to blame, to shout and rail against. I just have to face my own culpability, the simple honesty of her accusation.

  “I wasn’t strong enough,” I say. Because that’s it, in the end. The simple truth. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t.” I realize there are tears in my eyes too. “I couldn’t, Felicity.” I take a step toward her, but can’t take the next one. Too much confusion and hurt are in my chest.

  “I know.” She sits up, wipes her eyes, smears mascara. “I would have done the same thing.”

  And I find a smile somewhere for that. She has given me that.

  She shakes her head. “That doesn’t make it right, Arthur. That doesn’t make it good. I understand what you did, and… God, I forgive it. If it needs forgiving. I don’t know.” She holds her head.

  “So, there’s no problem—” I start.

  “Of course there’s a fucking problem, Arthur! Eighteen million people are dead!” The vehemence in her voice seems to catch us both by surprise. “I swore, Arthur. I swore to stop this. And I didn’t. So I don’t forgive me. I was too weak. I exploited a weakness I knew was in you. I screamed for help. I shouldn’t have, but I did. And I can’t forgive that.”

  “That’s an impossible standard,” I protest. And I believe I’m right. “You can’t blame yourself for being human.” I hold my hands out to her. “And it’s going to be OK.” I don’t know if it’s an empty promise or not, but it’s all I have. It’s hope. And that’s enough for me. That’s always enough. It’s at the core of us, of the good in us. “We’ll make it better. We’ll fix everything.”

  She’s shaking her head. “No,” she says, blunt and hard. “We can’t. It’s already done. Eighteen million lives. For mine. That’s done. It can never be undone.” She looks me straight in the eye. “I let my sister down eighteen million times.” Her voice sounds stretched, raw. She lets her gaze fall, seems to be unable to look at anything. She curls up on herself, recedes into the confines of her own arms.

  “This can’t…” she says from the depths of her sleeves. “I can’t…” And then, “We can’t…”

  “I love you,” I say. Those three words that I wanted to say as we fell down the
Empire State Building. The ones I had no breath for. I say it now. To stop this. This sensation of the ground giving way beneath me. I cannot have it give way.

  I am not strong enough.

  “Fuck, Arthur.” She slams her fist down again. “No. No.” She closes her eyes. “I know you do. I know. And I love you. But that’s not enough now. Not here. There can be no more saving damsels in distress. The stakes are too fucking big. We’ve screwed over a whole city for this idea of ‘us.’ Let’s not screw over a whole country.”

  And I get it then. What she’s saying. Why we’re here. I understand completely. But I cannot accept it. No more than I can accept that I killed eighteen million people.

  “We can’t keep doing this, Arthur,” she says. “We can’t be together. We have to end this. Whatever is between us. We have to.”

  “No,” I say. “No, this is a bullshit reason. We didn’t call in the planes. We didn’t drop any chemicals. That was not us.”

  “Winston’s dead.”

  She wields the fact at me like a weapon. And I almost go down on one knee.

  “One of our own.” She twists the knife. In her own side as much as in mine. “Our friend. Someone we swore to protect. We caused him to die. You and me.”

  “No,” I say. But there’s no strength to the word.

  “Winston’s dead,” she repeats. “Because of me. Because I screamed at you for help.”

  “No.”

  But yes.

  “We’re over,” she says. “I am ending us. For our own good. For the world’s good. For the sakes of our friends. This is at an end.”

  But no. No. I can’t let this go. Not after everything we have survived. Everything we have fought. After surviving a fucking fall off the Empire State Building. After fighting zombies in midair. This? We end here?

  “Just because we break up won’t stop me from loving you. From caring for you. From wanting to save you.”

  The words break against her like the tide against a rock. As surely as my heart breaks. As if it dropped eighty stories and hit the New York sidewalk.

  “If the moment comes,” she says, and she seems to have some degree of control now. The tears are over. Her skin is pale, and her cheeks red, and make-up is smeared down her cheeks, but she is in control. “If you need to decide again between me and the greater good, think back on this moment. Think back on the pain I am causing you here and now. And then make your decision.”

  She pushes out the chair, stands, moves to the door, and walks away.

  And then it is my turn to sob.

  66

  Time passes. I don’t bother paying attention to how much. Eventually the door opens behind me.

  Part of me leaps. Felicity, it must be Felicity.

  But it’s not.

  “Well, you look a bit of a feckin’ pussy right now, don’t you?”

  “Go away,” I tell Kayla, with a degree of force that suggests that I have lost the will to live.

  “You want to start another fight, you best be willing to stab me one more time.” She hobbles toward me. Her scabbard strikes the floor—an extra footstep. She sits heavily beside me.

  I look up, pull my head out of my arms. She leans back, regarding me, her long red bangs almost in her eyes.

  “Felicity?” she asks. Not unkindly. Not combative. Not mocking. Just a simple question.

  And I can’t say it. I can’t hear the truth now. I can’t hear, “yes,” so I just look away.

  “Feck,” Kayla says.

  “Yeah,” I manage. That is a truth I can get behind.

  We sit in silence. Not a companionable one. It’s just the only way I think either of us knows right now.

  “You’re meant to tell me she’ll come back,” I manage after a while. A phrase hanging between humor and accusation.

  “Feck, man.” Kayla shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. Seems like a bit of a minor feckin’ problem compared to all this other shit, you know?”

  I don’t have the energy to be outraged or offended. I just look at her. Et tu, Brute?

  “Feck.” She shakes her head. “Not like that. You know me, Arthur. I don’t do all this compassion bullshit. Shit feckin’ sucks for you right now. It’s going to keep on sucking. But at least Shaw’s alive. Plenty of folk you can’t say that about these days. That seems like the bigger feckin’ problem to me. And I appreciate that none of this perspective shit really feckin’ helps, but what the feck else do you want from me?”

  I don’t say anything. There’s nothing really to say. She’s right. She can’t do anything. A piece of nihilistic philosophy from her lips to my ears.

  “This won’t make you feel better either,” she says, “but time really does heal. Tomorrow this won’t hurt so much. And then less the day after. And it’ll be too slow. And it’s a shitty truth, really, but it is a truth. And that’s the closest you’re getting for sympathy from me, and probably more than you feckin’ deserve, you enormous feckin’ pussy.”

  I nod again. Someone could tell me I’ve won the lottery now and I’d just nod. A self-imposed numbness. Because it is easier.

  The door opens again. “Is everything OK? I don’t mean to interrupt… Well, I have interrupted, so I suppose I do mean to. Kind of hard to deny the intent behind an activity that is only really designed to do one thing. So, starting over I do mean to interrupt, but I hope it doesn’t interfere with some deep heartfelt moment or interrupt some epiphanic juncture…”

  I catch motion in the corner of my eye. Kayla’s hand slowly inching toward her sword. And Kayla’s patience does not extend as far as Clyde’s preambles. I manage to drag myself out of the mire of my own head long enough to save everyone from decapitation. At least I still have the power to save some lives.

  “Felicity is done with…” I struggle for a word. “Us. Me and her.” I can’t carry on. I submerge back into the depths of my gloom.

  “Oh, God,” Clyde says. “That’s not the best news on the face of the planet. Though considering the face of the planet these days, I suppose, it’s actually not the worst. Not that that helps of course. Sorry. Should be carrying on, telling you how over-rated the whole plural pronoun business is. How the love of a good woman is something for romantics and dead poets, and that you and I are stern men of action, and we save worlds, and that women will throw themselves at us, and we’ll have different ones every night. And not once think about that long lost embrace of the one woman that we thought maybe we could perhaps spend the rest of our lives with. That we felt really understood and—”

  “Not feckin’ helping,” Kayla points out.

  “Oh, God,” Clyde says in a small voice. And suddenly he is sitting at the table next to me, his head as far down as my own.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Going to be a bit despondent for a bit.”

  “Oh,” I hear Kayla moan. “This is feckin’ perfect. Any more feckin’ pussies in this room and I could start selling feckin’ kittens.”

  Clyde looks up at me. “Sorry,” he says, “bit self-absorbed and everything.”

  “Same here,” I manage.

  “Can we skip to the bit where you two grow your feckin’ balls back?” Kayla asks.

  Clyde ignores Kayla. His head reflects my own misery back at me. “Just wait until she starts dating a CIA agent named after your maternal grandparent. That’s the really spectacular part.”

  Kayla looks at us both in mild disgust. “Are you seriously going to make me play Dear feckin’ Debbie, here?”

  Neither of us seem to have an answer.

  “Dear feckin’ Debbie,” Kayla spits at us. “My girlfriend fecked off and appears to have taken my balls with her. What the feck do I do?” Another scathing glance. “Dear No-dicks. Grow a feckin’ pair. Love feckin’ Debbie.”

  I close my eyes. “Seriously. This happened to me about an hour ago. I think this is a reasonable mourning period.”

  Kayla looks genuinely astonished at this utterance. “Do you remember what the
feck is going on out there?” she says. “That hundreds of millions of feckin’ people have been turned into mushroom zombies or some feckin’ shit by his broken feckin’ twin feck?” She nods at Clyde. “No you do not have a feckin’ hour to be a whingy feck. Prioritize your shit, Arthur Wallace, afore I come and feckin’ prioritize it for you.”

  Part of me wonders if this is meant to be a pep talk. I decide against it. It feels like it resembles a beating too closely.

  “They’re just going to blow him up,” I say. “Or melt him. Or something. It’s over apparently. Thanks for the cooperation, we’ll take it from here. That sort of bollocks.” And some of the anger at that does leak through the numbness.

  “Hmm.” Kayla pantomimes musing for my benefit. “You know what might help solve that problem?” She cocks her head to one side. “Oh yes, I remember now. A pair of feckin’ balls.”

  Clyde finally bridles at this. Which is a rare enough occurrence to be notable. “You know,” he says. “Anatomically speaking, this is a robot body which is built without any sort of genitalia, and so any sort of insufficiency in the gonad region is not exactly—”

  “Shut the feck up,” Kayla tells him.

  So he does.

  She stares at him. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously what?” He sounds as confused as I feel.

  “I tell you to shut the feck up and you do? That’s it? That’s your whole feckin’ defense mechanism? Haven’t you saved the feckin’ world or something?”

  Clyde and I exchange a look.

  “Well,” I concede. “We did do that a few times.”

  Clyde nods. “I remember that.”

  “So why the feck would either of you shut up when someone tells you to?”

  “Well,” I say, “you do have a history of stabbing people…”

  She throws up her hands then winces and drops the left one with another wince. “So do feckin’ you.” She rubs the top of her stomach. She shakes her head. “At this feckin’ point, if someone starts to play the dick swinging game with you, you don’t curl up and take it, you get yours out and you beat them about the head and neck a few times.”