Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  Cords snap. Rubber tears. Fluid spills. A great gush of warm mucus splashes out of the hole Clyde has punched in the wall. It soaks through my clothes, warm and clammy. Tabitha is almost bowled over, hoisting her laptop above her head in the last moments. Thick ropes of the fluid drain down from her elbows as it runs down the corridor.

  “Fucking gross.” She spits and the wall mucus sprays from her mouth.

  “What the hell?” Felicity stares at her ruined clothes.

  Still, despite the vileness of it all, Clyde has made a conveniently man-sized hole in the wall. He’s the first to step through into the darkness beyond. “Oh, that is so much better.”

  “Dude.” Gran throws his arms up at me. “The whole marines thing. Organized strike and shit, man.” He gives me the kicked puppy eyes. “I’m responsible for you guys.”

  Felicity isn’t bothering with reprimanding me. She just looks pissed. And that hurts. Way more than betraying Gran’s trust regardless of whether he saved my life or not.

  “We’re not going a man down on this,” I say. I look directly at Felicity. “We protect our own.”

  She looks away. And I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t mean to get angry. That doesn’t help my cause. But it is done. I need all this done. I need this over so I can concentrate on trying to fix my life.

  Gran shakes his head “Fucked up, man.”

  Tabitha gives me a thumbs-up. “Way to go, team player.”

  “Well,” Clyde calls from the other side of the wall, “I, for one, really appreciated it. Not to discount other people’s opinions. Totally valid. But the whole staying alive thing is a big motivator for me.”

  “Seriously,” Gran says. “We can’t go that way, dude. The marines are that way.” More pointing ensues.

  “What?” I ask. “We’re going to have Clyde punch holes in the wall every minute or so?”

  I do not want to follow the marines. I want to get the hell away from and ahead of them. I want to get somewhere where I can talk Tabitha into ignoring her boyfriend and his superior officers, and into hijacking this mission so we can fix things properly. But it’s probably not time to mention that bit.

  “I could actually do that,” Clyde says. “The punching holes in walls thing. I charged the battery on this body way up, I’ve got power to spare.”

  Not helping.

  “What the hell we still doing here?” Tabitha asks. “Marines that way.” She points.

  It’s three against two. Democracy is not on my side. So, in at least one way, it is sort of a good thing that Clyde chooses that moment to say, “Oh shit.”

  “What the hell?”

  From through the tear in the wall there is a crunch and a bang. As of something very hard hitting something like Clyde with a great deal of force.

  I don’t waste any time. I plunge in after Clyde. I know an opportunity when I see one. And, also, you know, less mercenary things, like going to save my friend.

  And then I sort of wish I hadn’t.

  Some… thing stands over Clyde. An abomination. A patchwork nightmare.

  The room we’ve broken into is dark and noticeably cooler. There is light, but it’s as if a miser is in charge of the bulbs, only willing to let a few dark blue rays slip through his fingers. I can just make out Clyde’s body on the floor, reflective highlights picked out like stars in a night sky.

  Above him, the thing moves. Massive and pendulous. I can’t see all of it. Just what the patchy light picks out for me. And part of me wishes there was no light at all. So that my imagination could supply me with more mundane horrors.

  A leg. I concentrate on the leg. A goat’s perhaps? A deer’s? But it’s too small, too frail for the quivering bulk above. For the… Jesus. I close my eyes a moment. Try to unsee things—

  —a scab of scales, of scars, hair bursting between in ragged tufts. Nails skewing from raw flesh. Muscle beneath translucent skin. A cluster of eyeballs, some red, some weeping. And the teeth, the teeth. God, the teeth—

  It growls at me. A sound more felt than heard. A rumble in my gut. The bass line to night terrors.

  “Oh shit.”

  It moves. I move. My hand flying to my gun, snapping out.

  It’s less than a foot away when I start firing. I get two shots off. I see, as if in slow motion, the spray of blood, the massive gush of fluids as if the thing’s contents are under pressure, as if I hit some massive boil.

  Then it hits me. And in the battle of beast versus firearm, this isn’t even vaguely fair.

  I sail through the air, collide with the wall. Sag.

  It advances.

  Where are the others? I think. Where are the cavalry? And: We really should have stuck with those marines.

  Saliva trickles down from the thing’s mouth… mouths… it trails up my leg. If I hadn’t already soaked them in vile wall phlegm I might be upset about it. But I’m being preoccupied by the imminent death thing.

  My fingers aren’t working terribly well, but I manage to get a halfway decent grip on the pistol.

  The beast growls and I almost drop the gun. But I get a second hand on the damn thing and opt for shooting it in the face instead.

  It doesn’t seem to care much.

  And then, there they are, the cavalry. I knew they’d remember me in the end. Felicity firing her pistol, Gran letting fly with the assault rifle. And that seems to attract its attention.

  It seems to attract a lot of things’ attention.

  Something scuttles past me. The clack of limbs on a hard floor. And then Felicity is screaming and flinging something away. And I can just catch glimpses of the things crawling down the walls, over the floor, in the crackle of muzzle flashes. I fire. I fire. I fire. I empty a magazine into the room, try to ignore the sounds the impacts make. The crunch of shells. The wet slap of something akin to and yet not quite flesh. The splash of fluids. The room stinks of gunpowder and offal.

  I crawl toward Clyde’s fallen body. Around me the madness goes on. On and on. The big thing falls, its gut opening up and then more things scratch, and crawl, and tear out from its deflating corpse, scrabble toward us, barking and baaing, screeching and cawing.

  “Fall back!” Felicity yells, and she is right. So very right. But the hole through which we have come is blocked off now. Something viscous oozes out of the broken cords, filling the space with a tough gelatin surface. While I claw and tear uselessly at it, Felicity empties another magazine.

  “Shit.” I am reduced to curse words and sweating. Something comes out of nowhere, out of shadow and a depraved mind. A midnight horror of tentacles and teeth. It flies up over Clyde’s unconscious form. My bullets catch it in midair and it detonates in a spray of foul-smelling fluid that stings my cheeks. I drop to the ground gagging.

  “Fall back!” Felicity yells again, but she’s not the only one who doesn’t seem to know where to fall back to.

  “Felicity!” I yell at her. “You still have any incendiary grenades?”

  In the muzzle flash of her pistol I see her brow furrow.

  “Again?” Gran asks me. “Really?”

  “We need light.”

  “And an incendiary grenade is your answer? Dude!”

  “We need to clear this room.” Felicity’s pistol re-enters its holster.

  “Fucking nutzoid bullshit.” Tabitha is caving in the head of some unspeakable horror with her laptop. I don’t know if she’s talking about the situation or our way out of it.

  “Last one,” says Felicity staring rather forlornly at the grenade in her palm.

  I reach down, grab Clyde under the shoulders. “Help me!”

  Gran shakes his head. “We have to move, man. We can’t. He’s too heavy.”

  I heave, and damn, he is right. Clyde is not exactly light. I won’t leave him behind, though. “Please!” I beg.

  But Gran is backing away, pushing Tabitha behind him. Something comes down from the ceiling at the pair of them. A mouth on a tentacle. Spines or teeth or… Tabitha’s lapt
op blunts its jab. Gran’s shot severs the stem. The mouth drops gnashing to the floor, while the stalk it was mounted on pours blood in a thick stream.

  “Fire in the hole!” I don’t think Felicity is really warning anyone. Just a little prayer to the gods of pyromania.

  One whole wall of the room seems to detach itself. An arcing fist of gristle and bone. Meat wallpaper.

  I heave on Clyde. Heave. He scrapes heavily on the floor.

  Then Felicity is next to me, grabbing one arm, pulling with me.

  “We protect our own,” she says.

  And the room bursts into light.

  73

  Flame envelops the creatures skittering across the floor, swallows the ones clambering along the ceiling, and cooks the ones on the wall to a fine medium-well crisp.

  It also gets what’s left of my eyebrows, I think.

  In the sudden whitewash of light—there is the door. Right bloody there. A sheet of metal embedded into the flesh of the wall just a yard from Tabitha and Gran. I point, shout, yell. Gran understands, turns, heaves open the exit.

  Something wraps around my leg. Something muscular and slimy in just the opposite of my favorite combination. I kick. It heaves. I lose my grip on Clyde. For a moment I hear Felicity scream. And even as I prepare to join in, part of me thinks, well, at least she screamed. At least she cared enough to do that.

  And perhaps it’s that thought that gives me the strength to kick free, to scramble desperately to my feet, to stamp on that fucking tentacle as it snakes toward me once more. Stamp again, again, again. Until the tentacle doesn’t end in reaching flesh, but in flat, mashed meat paste.

  Whatever it is that the tentacle belongs to, whatever it is that is howling in the darkness—I don’t hang around to find out. I just run. I grab Clyde’s arm, and I pull.

  Gran and Tabitha are holding the door. Flames race after us, licking and cackling.

  We spill through, my legs tangling with Clyde’s frame.

  Tabitha slams the door, but it bounces open again. Flames spit through the opening.

  I stare in horror. And then I see Clyde’s legs. Clyde’s legs are blocking the door. I heave one last breathless time. My arms scream at me. But Clyde moves.

  “Now!” I scream. “Shut it now!”

  Tabitha slams the door home, just as something massive collides with its far side. It scrabbles madly against the metal, but the door doesn’t give. The scrabbling dies away and hell is shut out for just a little longer.

  ONCE EVERYONE IS FEELING A LITTLE MORE SANE

  “USB stick,” Tabitha says. She jiggles something inside Clyde’s head. “That’s all. Came loose.” She flips a panel closed and tightens a screw with a practiced twist of her multi-tool.

  “Oh my stars and garters!” Clyde sits up with a yell, and scrambles backwards. Then he stares around at us. He becomes very still. “Did I just say that out loud?”

  “Garters?” I ask.

  Clyde turns his head away. “Boot-up term,” he attempts. No one buys it.

  Gran is behind us pacing back and forth. Tabitha steps away from Clyde and goes to him.

  “You OK?” I ask.

  He turns and looks at me, and for a moment I think he’s going to actually snap at me. Something we are doing is actually cutting through his permanently relaxed attitude. Then he exhales hard.

  “We need to get moving, man. Do the whole melting thing and get out of Dodge. This place is messing with my calm, you know? Leaving the marines. Scary monsters. I just want to plant my thermic charges and get this mission done before this Version 2.0 dude does any more harm. You dig?”

  Do I dig? Well…

  “Are you really totally fine with just melting Version 2.0 and dropping him to the bottom of the ocean?” I say.

  Everyone looks at me. I feel like the bad apple spoiling the whole bunch. “No,” I shake my head. “I don’t mean we should save him or rescue him or any of that. I kind of got over that when he killed most of everybody. But back in New York, we had a chance to do something better.” Felicity is already looking away. My stomach churns. “And I know,” I say, and God I hope they can hear how heartfelt this is, “I know it was my fault we failed there. But do we seriously not even have to try here?”

  Gran looks pained. He opens his mouth.

  “Fucking liability.” Tabitha cuts him off. Her finger stabs at me. “You are. Fucking forget about long shots. Put your head down. Do the plan. Save what’s left.”

  I look around the room. Clyde has turned his head away as if avoiding anyone’s eye, but I’m pretty sure that’s because he doesn’t want to publicly disagree with Tabitha. Gran does the shrugging for him. And Felicity… I don’t know. I just don’t know.

  “Let’s move,” Gran says, deciding to ignore my outburst. “Come on.”

  That’s normally my line. But Gran is in charge. That’s what we were told. His is the mind I need to change. If he goes, then Tabitha will follow, I think.

  And Felicity… Well, if I get Gran and Tabitha it will be four to one at worst, and the democracy thing could work out there.

  We move through the room, looking for an exit. The light is blue, not red, but it pulses the same way the light in the outer corridor did. And the walls are the same—gelatinous, translucent, shot through with slightly organic cords. Peristaltic waves run down the cords, the wall bulging with them.

  “Is this place… alive?” I ask.

  Gran ignores me, keeps moving. Tabitha sticks to his side. Felicity is still only talking to me when she absolutely has to reprimand me. But Clyde turns. “Not to cut you off,” he says. “Totally into the celebrating of individuality through the expression of unique thoughts and all that sort of thing. Open communication is the foundation of any endeavor. All of that. Really means a lot to me, but, you know, on the other hand, I was really trying to not think about that.”

  Which seems fair enough. Except now I really wish I wasn’t covered in wall mucus. How long does that stuff take to dry anyway?

  At the far end of the room is a puckering in the wall absent of cords. It is for lack of a better word a…

  “Sphincter,” Gran says. If his nose wrinkled up any further it would be between his eyebrows.

  Clyde snickers. “Sorry,” he says immediately. “Completely immature response.”

  I look around for another exit. For another steel door. There is none. Just the…

  … sphincter.

  We have to push through it. We have to. There is no other way. And right after destroying two-thirds of humanity, this may be the worst thing Version 2.0 has done.

  We all hesitate. “Fine,” I say, because I always seem to be the one who says these sorts of things, and I might as well give in to the gravity of group roles now, “I’ll go first.”

  I push through. It is unspeakably awful. There is nothing else I want to say about it.

  The room beyond is, again, vaguely organic. The architecture remains slightly too gelatinous for comfort. Here, though, the biological is mixed with the mechanical. Or, is… punctured by it. Thick bundles of electric wires spear up through the floor and twist toward great hulking machines. Some of these are nothing more than dull steel boxes. Others, though, have a delicacy that suggests complex lab equipment.

  At the center of the room is one that looks to me like a torture device designed by H.R. Giger. The central component is a large fluid-filled sac punctured at many, many points by thin spider-like limbs. Inside the sac the limbs end in fine, sharp-looking needles. They glisten slightly in the dull blue light. The limbs themselves arch back away from the sac to connect with a more utilitarian looking metal box. The box is as punctured as the sac but this time by electrical wires and tubes of a more biological nature. They emerge from the floor to penetrate its sides.

  Clyde steps toward it with a low murmur. He reaches out a hand, and touches the sac. The side dimples slightly under the pressure of his hand. He almost strokes it.

  “What is it?” I ask him.


  “Shit.” It’s Tabitha from behind me.

  “What is it?” I repeat.

  “Can’t have this,” Tabitha says. “He can’t.” She shakes her head. “This is future tech. Impossible now. No.” She shakes her head again. “No.”

  “Is there a problem here?” Felicity is all business, gun drawn, expression stern.

  “It’s a printer,” Clyde says. Somehow despite the lack of breath in him, his voice sounds breathy. “A 3D printer.”

  That triggers a few neurons in the old gray matter. 3D printers. Machines capable of receiving a three-dimensional blueprint and printing the object. Layer after layer building up. The mechanics of it escape me, but as I understand, while they are not exactly commonplace, they are a practically realizable technology. Which begs the question, why is Tabitha freaking out about it?

  Then Clyde supplies the answer.

  “Except, well, it’s a biological 3D printer.”

  Now that I haven’t heard of. But the implications are plain enough.

  “He’s printing life forms?” My voice heads for the higher octaves. Maybe it thinks its feet are going to get less soaked by the creepy up there.

  “Monsters,” Tabitha says. “Back there.” She thumbs over her shoulder at the room we just firebombed. “From here.” She points to the machine.

  This has gone from mad science into genuine horror movie. In the Kurt Russell oeuvre, this is the The Thing and I never watched that bloody film.

  Clyde turns to me. Fully to me. Like I’m the only person in the room. “This can build bodies,” he says. “Not just monsters. It can build…” He can’t quite say it. Not all of it. Something is choking him up. But I can’t quite follow.

  “What?”

  “Good spot,” Gran says. “Like, never would have caught that myself.” He puts his assault rifle to his shoulder.

  “No!” Clyde screams, but it’s already too late.

  Gran opens up, full rip. Bullets tear through the sac, fluid sprays wildly, the arms snap and sever, the metal box tears apart, cables and cords whip and snap away.