Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  My body turns on the faucets full force, pours adrenaline into my system. But there is nothing I can fight, nowhere for flight. I have no options.

  I heave again. Achieve nothing again.

  No. This can’t be it. I have fought too much and too hard. I still have to win Felicity back, goddamn it. I try to push, but my arms feel weak. I need oxygen. I try to suck some through the snow but just end up with a mouth full of ice for my troubles.

  Fairly essential physiological systems start yammering in my head. Panic trying to override the system. Some evolutionary alarm siren starts screeching at me to just fix this, to do some ridiculous insane Kurt Russell shit. But there is nothing. Just crushing paralysis.

  I think a rib is going to give. If I’m still conscious at the time then that will really suck.

  And then, abruptly the pressure leaves. And I am aware enough to feel it. That hand moving away. And hope rises in me. A bright golden flower blossoming in my chest.

  I heave.

  I heave.

  Nothing.

  I heave again.

  Nothing.

  I push a final, desperate time, with the last of my will and strength. But even with the golem gone I am buried too deep. The sheer weight of snow is now too much for my oxygen-starved muscles. That is why the golem left. It wasn’t whimsy. It wasn’t a distraction. Its job was simply done.

  I am already dead.

  70

  I work my hands, try to clear space, try to get to my mouth, to find some air. But I can’t feel much now. Everything is numb.

  Felicity. That is my last thought. That I didn’t fix that. Not the disaster we are leaving behind. Not humanity’s tenuous fate. Felicity. That is my regret.

  I push one last time, achieve nothing, lie still.

  At least this is a fairly awesome way to die. Crushed to death by a snow monster. That is a small comfort, I suppose.

  Something brushes my cheek.

  I try to flinch and then realize I can’t. It seems like a minor concern anyway. I’m more bothered by my body’s insistence on trying to breathe. It seems fairly pointless now.

  The same thing pokes my cheek. And seriously. What the hell? In my final moments, is there no damn peace?

  And then it is not just one thing poking me, but five. And then it is a hand. A hand touching me. Human contact. And then the hand claws down my face, tears away snow.

  Air. Freezing, icy air that rushes into my lungs, makes me choke and cough and retch. But air. Breath. Life.

  My body, still trapped, tries to buck, to convulse. Each breath is a frozen knife blade keening into me, but I cannot get enough. I suck at it, slurp it down. More and more. Like an alcoholic left alone among the taps. Air. Life. God.

  The hand is joined by its twin. The pair dig, scrabble, clear more of my face, my shoulders. They grab me, heave. I give half-hearted kicks. And then full-hearted ones, the air catching, the strength coming back to me. My numb limbs feeling a mile away. A distant slow motion thrashing. Coordination not quite mine yet.

  And then the snow releases me. I emerge, sloughing ice, coughing, spluttering still. I curl fetal, shivering—the world’s ugliest, coldest newborn.

  But I am alive. I was saved.

  “Dude! Duuude!” A hand shaking me. A voice calling.

  I uncurl. It seems ungrateful not to. And there is Gran. Gran. Of all people, it is Gran who is leaning over me, who has his face creased with concern.

  “Holy shit, man. Thought I’d gone and, like, lost you there and shit.” He shakes his head. “We’ve got to fucking move, man. This shit is insane.”

  He grabs my arm, heaves. Somehow I find enough resources to comply. I stand up. Around me, marines are desperately digging. Bodies emerge. Some stutter, stagger, and cough. Like me. Others…

  Others just lie dead.

  Gran. Holy shit. Gran. He… Jesus, he saved me.

  I see Tabitha and Felicity hauling Clyde up and out. He keeps thanking them and saying he was quite all right. “Whole not breathing thing was actually quite helpful.”

  Gunfire swirls around us. Muzzle flares shoot stuttering illumination through the icy night. Marines not involved in pulling their compatriots out of the snow stab assault rifles at the empty night, wild panicked looks on their faces.

  Felicity’s eyes flick to me. Stay there for just a moment. And I think she may say something, express some gladness that I am alive. And then she lowers her head. Looks away.

  So, near-death isn’t enough to get her to take me back then. Good to know.

  Well… good might be an overstatement.

  “You cool, man?” Gran says. Part of me is aware it’s not the first time he’s asked.

  Suddenly—and I cannot quite identify the impulse behind it—I grab him and hug him. He fucking saved me. I thought… Jesus… I can’t think about that. I can’t think about Winston. I can’t think about the lives this path has cost so far.

  This isn’t over. I need to get my head back in the game.

  I stagger toward Tabitha, grab her by the shoulders. “Bullets,” I say to her. “Y… Y… You said…” I fight my chattering teeth. “You said th… th… they wouldn’t work. What the h… h… hell will?”

  “Bullets, indeed worth shit,” Tabitha nods. She looks at the marine leader instead of me while she says it. He hears, turns. “Golems,” she says to him. “Need to disrupt the form. With snow, you can’t poke holes. You can’t slice. The body will reform. You need more. Need explosives.”

  The marine leader stares at her for a moment. Then he turns to his bewildered, shivering troops. “Grenade launchers hot!” he barks.

  OK, why the hell have we not been using them before?

  “Move out!” the marine yells. “Close on hostile compound. Go! Go! Go!”

  As we start to move I realize that I am decidedly short on the whole grenade front. Instinctively my eyes snap to Felicity. She is still pointedly not looking at me. And when did it become so hard to ask Felicity for grenades?

  And when exactly did asking Felicity for grenades become a normal part of my life?

  “Erm,” I say. “Do you…”

  She stabs a hand into a pocket, yanks out a black cylinder and shoves it at me. She mumbles something, but it’s lost in another burst of gunfire.

  “What?”

  “Five second fuse.”

  “Thanks.”

  And nothing else. No eye contact. Just take the grenade, and then she jogs away from me, toward the other side of the group.

  Gran claps me on the shoulder. “Ready to blow the living shit out of some spooky magical shit, man?”

  The weight of the grenade suddenly feels very, very good in my hand. I look him straight in the eye. “Hell yes.”

  71

  The marines accelerate, running hard and fast. My arms and legs complain. The stitch in my side bites. My ribs ache. Everything still feels painful and disjointed. But I honestly don’t care because each step gets me this much closer to blowing the living shit out of Version 2.0’s compound.

  This is ending today. One way or another.

  I glance over at Clyde, running parallel to me. Sparks crackle up and down his spine. He holds one hand out in front of him, like an old-school priest warding off the dead. Except the old-school priest’s palm never doubled as a boom-stick.

  The ground ripples to our side. Clyde pivots on his mechanized waist and his shoulder joints rock with the force of the spell. Magic tears into the ground. The ripple goes very still.

  Clyde. Coming with us to kill himself. Some shattered-mirror version of himself. His ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend by his side. I don’t think people get much better than Clyde. He’s been through a world of shit, and he is still the same person, affable and smiling. Still trying to save the day. It’s funny, if all of humanity were as good as Clyde, then I don’t think his evil self would be trying to kill us.

  Suddenly the surface layer of ice before us cracks, shatters, bursts upward. Someth
ing massive rears up. I have the vague impression of a snarling mouth, of vast paws. The thing stretches up, ten, fifteen yards into the sky.

  I fling my grenade. I am not alone.

  They smash into the golem, sink into the snowy mass of it. And then, as it crashes down toward us, they erupt. First one, and then all the others, a rippling wave of destruction, tearing the thing apart, ripping through it until it is nothing but powder on the night wind.

  “Hoo-hah!” the Pacino impersonators yell. We run on.

  Gran runs alongside me. He carries the same rifle as the marines. A fat tube under the barrel emits a short cough, and a moment later a suspicious looking bulge in the ice to our right is a much less suspicious looking crater.

  Gran. The hippy CIA agent. The man who saved me. The man who shot a little girl in Mexico. Who seems to have brought Tabitha comfort in these dark days. Who maybe could have stopped the Agent Orange attack on New York but didn’t. Who nodded when a general told him to write off two hundred million lives. Who saved me.

  And beside him is Tabitha, head down, laptop clutched to her chest. She looks grim at the best of times, but now she has a look of implacable fury. Running toward Version 2.0. And of all the versions, this was the one she knew. The one who was once flesh and blood. The one whose bed she shared. The one she should truly fear, perhaps. But if ever there was a girl who could sublimate fear into hate… Well, maybe Version 2.0 picked the wrong girl to dump.

  The ground suddenly gives way beneath us. A cavern opening up. We plunge down. But the grenade launchers hack up projectiles even as my feet seek purchase. I land in a blizzard of torn apart snow. And whatever meant to trap us down here lies still.

  We scramble up the sloping snow wall. Out onto the frozen waste. Only seventy-five yards to the compound wall now.

  There is one absence in our group. Kayla has not made it here. Not yet at least. Though she must be coming. She would not miss this. This opportunity for violence. Though that paints her too narrowly, I think. She will do the right thing. Sometimes—despite all the violence—I suspect she has the strongest moral compass of us all. She can stare unflinching at what must be done, and do it. Whatever it is. Because she thinks it needs to be done.

  Plus, I suspect, she does not trust us to pull this plan off on our own. Maybe after New York, she’s right.

  The ice erupts to our right. The biggest golem yet. And this one does make a few gestures toward anthropomorphism. It is not as reassuring as I had hoped. Not arms that long, nor fists that big, nor claws that sharp.

  The marines swivel, aim—

  Something massive drops out of the sky. The golem disappears in an explosion of snow and steel.

  A mecha. It stands in the billowing debris of its enemy. Squat, powerful, grey steel bedecked with chains of ammunition and badassery.

  Another mecha lands a few hundred yards away. And another. The cavalry, plummeting from the sky. Because, well, screw subterfuge at this point. We’ve hit the let’s-use-grenades point pretty early on.

  A golem rises behind the mecha nearest us. A jagged spiteful ball of ice shards, smashing up, like a haymaker from Mother Nature.

  The mecha swivels. Massive cannons at the end of titanic arms tear into life. Flame and lead rip through the golem and tear it apart. By the time it connects with the mecha, it’s nothing but collapsing slush.

  Boo and yah.

  We thunder on. Explosions paint the night yellow and red. My ears sing in the warbling upper frequencies that I will never hear again.

  In the flickering light I pick out Felicity at the far side of the group. My Felicity. Or… God, I don’t know where we will stand after all of this, she and I. Is this just temporary, this break? Will she see past this moment? I hope so. God, I hope so. But… Part of me knows she did the right thing. I fucked up in New York. Massively. Monumentally. And I would repeat the mistake over and over and over. I would do it happily. How can we allow that situation to perpetuate?

  A hero sacrifices. And I cannot sacrifice her. And the world needs a hero.

  Maybe Gran can be the world’s hero. Maybe Felicity. Maybe they are stronger than me. I hope they are.

  The wall of one pyramid slopes up massively before us. Steam billows up around us.

  “Prepare for breach!” the marine leader yells. “Johnson, on my—”

  And then our fearless leader yells no more.

  A jagged spike of ice lances up out of the ground, catches him full in the gut. There is an ugly tearing sound, meat being cruelly sheared. The spike rips through him, lifts him bodily off the ground. A tattered strand of intestines, caught on the spike, is torn out the gaping hole in his back, steaming and dropping. The marine gags once, and is still.

  The marines, highly trained killers that they are, pause and blanch.

  Me, well, I almost piss myself.

  More spikes come. And the marines’ instincts kick in. And the grenades fly. And within three seconds the spikes stop. But ten men are dead. Become punctured, bleeding rag dolls.

  Shit. Shit. Version 2.0, you fucking bastard.

  The marines look at each other. The one called Johnson swallows.

  Then his face hardens. “Prepare for breach!” he bellows.

  I wonder if any of them can speak at the lower decibel end of the spectrum. Maybe it’s all the explosions. Maybe he thinks he’s talking at a normal volume.

  Then Johnson leaps into the steam clouds. The whole unit waits. A moment of collective breath holding. Around us the world continues to erupt. I see a mecha go down under a tidal wave of snow and ice. Another is buried up to its waist, arms thrashing as ropy tentacles of ice try to bind it. Another lacks one arm but is still firing. Marines swarm around the machines, guns firing, grenades flying.

  Then Johnson comes flying back, erupting out of the steam. “Fire in the hole!” he bellows.

  The words are barely out of him before the explosion catapults him forward. He skids over the ice. When he comes up, blood is trickling from one ear, but he’s grinning.

  Red light floods through the steam. A bright beam from deep within the pyramid. Spilling out like blood from a wound.

  The marines swarm forward. Pour into the breach.

  The MI37 crew take a moment longer. We stand there, panting, exhausted, flooded with adrenaline, staring into the light. Gran, Tabitha, Clyde, Felicity, and me.

  Then, without a word, but as one, we step forward.

  And we’re in.

  72

  Heat. Pounding, pulsing heat. It comes in waves. Sweat springs out on my skin, soaks into the thick fabric of my Arctic gear.

  We stand in a triangular corridor, tall walls curving up to a blunt point, reminiscent of the building’s overall architecture. Small archways punctuate the corridor’s length every ten yards or so. The walls between are strung with thick horizontal cords that press up against… I cannot quite place the material the walls are made from. It is thick but translucent. Almost like rubber. Red light pulses behind them, rushing down the corridor’s length in waves. I reach out to touch it. Felicity slaps my hand away.

  “Don’t.” She even looks at me for half a second to make sure her point is heard.

  “I don’t mean to be overly graphic,” Clyde says, “but does anyone else happen to feel a little bit like they’re standing in the middle of someone else’s colonoscopy right now?”

  Well, I do now.

  It doesn’t help that the place is swelteringly hot either. I paw at the zipper of my thick fur-lined jacket, then rip off the glove to help me remove it.

  “Venting heat,” Tabitha says. “Version 2.0 is. Funneling it from the servers to here. To dissipate.” She too reaches out to touch the odd rubber walls. Felicity again slaps the offending limb away.

  “Don’t,” she says. “We don’t know—”

  “Just blew a hole in the wall.” Tabitha shakes her head. “Think he knows we’re here.”

  She touches the wall. The substance gives slightly, stretching
out, pushing between the cords that are strung between the arches. She pulls her hand back and makes a face.

  “Gross.”

  It is a remarkably succinct summation of the place. I would have gone with fetid, close, and oddly clammy. But the brevity is not as strong in me.

  “This way.” Gran ignores us and points down the corridor. The backs of the marines are visible as they march forward.

  “I don’t mean to be a bother,” Clyde says as we head in the direction indicated, “but I think it’s probably worth mentioning, well… maybe this is just self-interest and if so, I hope you pardon the intrusion. As I stated up front, my desire for the bothering thing… not huge. But I did want to at least point out that I’m going to start experiencing some major malfunctions in approximately the next ninety seconds if we don’t get somewhere cooler. My fan is about to crack an axle as it is.”

  As we have survived snow and ice monsters, I am not going to see us go a man down due to bad air conditioning. “Clyde,” I say, “punch us a hole through that wall.”

  “What?” Felicity says, looking at me like I’m insane. “No.” At least she’s looking at me.

  “Look,” I say, “I’m field lead. I don’t want to watch Clyde’s more important electrical parts melt. We need to get out of here.”

  “Thanks, Arthur,” says Clyde. “I appreciate that.”

  “Dudes,” Gran says, “we, like, really need to stick with the marines.”

  “We leave that wall standing,” Felicity insists. “If you want to get shitty about rank, I’m the director of MI37. Your boss.” The red in her cheeks isn’t just because of the heat, I think.

  “Look, dudes.” Gran puts up his hands. “Technically I’m in charge of both of you on this one, and we really do need to, like, stick with the dudes with the grenades and dubious political beliefs about violence.”

  “About forty-five seconds,” Clyde says. “Not to add undue stress to the situation.”

  “Shoot the damn wall,” I tell him.

  “Arthur!” Felicity snaps.

  “Dude?”

  “Sorry,” Clyde mutters. Then the muttering makes less sense. “Melfor cal eltear mor kel lethar.” And then his arm bucks, and the wall quakes.