Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  76

  The blast sends me sprawling. I slam into something hard and unyielding and in a moment of startling clarity realize that it’s Clyde’s chest. Then something falls on my head and clarity decides to take a short sabbatical.

  I fumble through fog. Lost.

  An ugly hacking noise breaks through the mist. It brings me back to the present. Eventually I identify the noise as my own breathing.

  I pick myself up slowly. My head rings. I put a hand to it and it comes away sticky with blood.

  “Hello?” I yell. My voice sounds tinny in my damaged ears. No one answers.

  The room looks like a bomb went off. I think it probably did. The ceiling has collapsed. A great ragged tear opening up the room, spilling steel struts, twisted machinery, and sagging organic matter. Everywhere I look, things are coated with wall mucus. Smoke and steam billow, occluding my vision.

  “Hello?” I yell again. Then I remember the room of monstrosities we encountered earlier and hold my tongue. I don’t want to attract any undue attention.

  With another momentary flash of clarity I realize that if I collided with Clyde then he is likely to be somewhere nearby. I start searching the floor. Reflective metal catches my eye. I scrabble at the rubble covering it. Clyde’s legs appear. One of them twitches weakly. I heave away a chunk of machinery. It’s heavy, but more pleasant to remove than the unidentifiable wall-organs spilled all over him.

  Someone nudges me while I work and I wheel around grabbing for my gun. But it’s Felicity. My Felicity. Safe. Alive. And my heart leaps. Actually leaps and hits me somewhere in my throat so I can’t breathe for a moment, only gasp. And then I grab her and seize and hug her savagely.

  She stands stiffly. Lets me work through the hug. Lets me realize that she’s not going to respond. I let her go, step back, slightly embarrassed. But she had my back a moment ago. She pointed a gun at Gran on my behalf. This fight is not lost yet.

  She chews her lip. Then, “Come on,” she says through the ringing in my ears. “Let’s get Clyde free.”

  Nothing is certain as we set about the task, but I go about Clyde’s rescue with renewed strength. Within a few minutes we have his torso clear, then finally his head. Its once reflective surface is scarred and dented. There’s something about the damage that suits him. It has, for want of a better word, personality.

  “OK,” Clyde says. “Not to cast aspersions on the people who built this body. It’s taken a machine gun round full in the chest and walked away, and I definitely like that about it. And the whole battery-operated thing is a great boon for a magician. But I do think we are reaching its stress limits. And if Evil-Me is listening I would deeply appreciate not being hit again.”

  I have more practical concerns. “Where’s Tabitha?” And then, because even though he just pointed a gun at me, he did save my life earlier, “Where’s Gran?”

  Felicity points to the tear in the ceiling. The deluge of rubble below reaches up to the tattered hole, making the world’s most horrific ramp and neatly bisecting the room.

  “They were on the other side of that,” she says. “So they’re either still there or they’re buried.”

  “They’re still there,” I say automatically. It’s what I have to think.

  “God. Tabby.” Clyde stares at the rubble. “I mean, I think we should search for her. Make sure she’s OK.”

  “She’s OK,” I say. She has to be. It’s an absurd thing to be certain about here, in this place where everything is designed to kill our species, but she has to be.

  “We should search for her,” Clyde repeats.

  “No.” And Felicity always had the strength for the hard calls. “There’s no time. We have to press on.”

  And do what? We need Tabitha to put the code into Version 2.0. We need her for this plan to work. But she can’t be buried. She can’t be… be… She can’t be under there.

  “We do need to find a way around,” I say. “Find a way to get to her.”

  “Didn’t you say Clyde could do it?” Felicity asks me.

  We both turn to look at Clyde.

  “Well, erm, yes, about that,” Clyde starts. “I figured… Rhetoric and all that. Figured we were all exaggerating slightly on the whole being-able-to-do-it front. Sort of maybe figured that some groundless bravado on my part might help the situation… and, well, it was all poorly conceived now, I see, but I was trying to get them to think something along the lines of ‘resistance is futile.’ And, you know Tabby, always reluctant to let me near a keyboard. And, given the circumstances we’re in, you can sort of understand why, I imagine. Not that me wiping out a species was probably ever on her list of major concerns, poor girl. More of a concern about files in general. I hesitate to use the phrase ‘control-freak,’ but, well, I just did say it and it’s out there now…”

  He’s babbling, pawing at the pile of rubble, shifting a few pieces here and there. But honestly, if anything is under there and it doesn’t have a military-grade steel chassis, then, well, we all know what’s really happened to it.

  “What about this?”

  Clyde and I turn from the rubble to see where Felicity is pointing. And there it is, lying on the ground. Lying out from the rubble.

  Tabitha’s laptop.

  The case is dented, smudged, cracked on one corner. Clyde steps toward it, almost reverently. A priest approaching a holy relic. His hand hovers over it.

  “She doesn’t let go of it,” he says. “Never.” There’s horror in his voice.

  “She does,” Felicity says, “if someone grabs her unexpectedly around the waist and flings her out of harm’s way. Now stop pussy-footing around, grab it, and make sure it works.”

  Clyde picks up the laptop. Something about it looks right. He and the computer share an aesthetic right now. Scrap metal chic.

  He hesitates again. “She would never let me turn it on.”

  I see Felicity’s jaw tighten. “A moment ago she was standing by the side of a man who was pointing a gun at Arthur’s… at one of my agent’s heads.” I don’t call her on the adjustment. I can’t tell if it’s a good or a bad sign. “I don’t give a shit what she’s let you do. We’re here to save the human race, and you need to pull your finger out of your output port and figure out if you can help us do it.”

  Somewhere in the swirl of events I need to work out how I feel about Gran pointing a gun at my head. What I’m going to do if he survived.

  He survived. He has to have survived. Despite it all, I want him to have survived.

  But… After Version 2.0, he and the military are the greatest threat to humanity I can think of.

  And he thinks I am.

  There isn’t a way around this. Nothing neat or simple. If I see him again I’m going to have to fight him in one way or another. Trick him. Trap him. Something.

  Shit. Shit and balls.

  Clyde has the laptop open. The screen, mercifully, blinks to life. Uncracked and whole. Clyde’s fingers move over the keyboard, reluctant at first, then with increasing speed.

  “It’s all here,” he murmurs. “All good to go.”

  There is another boom from deep within the building. “Then we should be too,” Felicity says.

  I look at her. At Clyde. “We’re decided then?” I ask. “Screw the military’s plan? Shoot for the moon?”

  They both nod. And our path is set.

  77

  The most obvious exit is up, so we take it, scrambling up the fallen wreckage and through the tear in the ceiling. While it does involve a certain amount of stepping-on-unspeakable-squishy-things it is distinctly preferable to a sphincter door. I try not to think about the possibility I am squishing Gran and Tabitha’s corpses into a slightly finer grade of pulp.

  The architecture of the rooms above resembles that below. It has two doors, both of the hideous sphincter variety. We pick one, push through.

  As we work our way deeper into the compound, the organic theme is developed, worked and reworked. Subtle noise perme
ates the structure—a low gastric rumble in the corridors. In one place, a wall is lined with slowly waving cilia. Fungal structures intrude into passageways—great yellow brackets, drooping gray stems.

  “I don’t know about you,” says Clyde, “but I have to say I am not at all down with Evil-Me’s sense of aesthetics. I mean, I get that it’s creepy and weird, and that’s great for dissuading folks like you and me, and being all ominous and stuff, but considering he spends way more time here than we do, it seems, ultimately, like an exercise in cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

  I’m not sure what to say to that.

  “Just to highlight,” Clyde adds, “in the face of any upcoming fracas, that we are very different people.”

  I give him an encouraging smile. Felicity just shushes him. Long term, hers is probably the smarter plan.

  TWO CORRIDORS FURTHER ALONG

  Felicity comes to an abrupt halt. She holds up her hand. “Do you hear that?”

  We stop and listen. I don’t.

  “What?”

  She shakes her head, concentrating. “I thought I heard… grunting perhaps.”

  Grunting doesn’t sound awesome. In fact, I can think of no circumstances in which I would want to walk in on anyone who is grunting.

  “Do you have any sense for which way we should be heading?” Clyde asks. Which seems a little late, as we’ve been making our way through these rooms for about five minutes now.

  “The cords in the wall,” I say. I almost think of them as vessels now, though I resist using the word. They branch and bisect, a pattern somewhere between arterial and tree-limb. “They’re getting thicker.” And the chances of Version 2.0 locating himself near the nutritional heart of this place are fifty-fifty at best, but it’s all the navigation I have.

  “Shh,” Felicity hisses again.

  We freeze again. And this time I hear it too. I turn around. “Is it coming from behind us?” I ask. “What is it?”

  “You know, actually,” Clyde jumps in, “not to be presumptuous or anything, but I think I know what that’s reminding us all of.”

  I eye him. “What?”

  “Well,” Clyde says, mulling it over far too slowly for my taste, “to me, it totally sounds like those zombie chaps from back in New York.”

  Oh shit.

  “Damn it, Clyde,” says Felicity.

  “Was I wrong?” he asks. His metal shoulders slump.

  “Opposite,” I tell him.

  “Oh!” For a moment Clyde sounds cheered. And then we get to the implications. “Oh,” he says again.

  “Probably best to start running,” I suggest.

  What we break into is probably best described as an enthusiastic limp at this point, but we all make a valiant effort. In the end it gives us about a ten yard head start.

  Then they come. Lumbering, jerking, staggering, pouring out after us. The walls give way with sickly pops as the zombies push through. They don’t rupture. Rather, polyps bud off, erupt wetly, spew zombies into our path. I can see them thrust themselves against the far side of the walls, transitioning from dull silhouette to looming presence. A sphincter door unleashes more of them, pushing toward us, hands searching.

  It’s an oddly quiet chase. The zombies lack speed and grace, but so do we. We all stumble forward, trying to overcome limbs that have seen better days. There is the guttural clacking of the zombies, my huffing breath, Felicity’s soft cursing, and occasional clank of Clyde bouncing off a protruding piece of wall. That is all.

  I stagger and the zombies gain a yard. One buds from the wall next to me. I feel its fingertips graze my shirt every time my pace falters. Then I put another yard between me and it, struggle to maintain the gap.

  But we cannot get ahead, can only be driven on. We come to a T-junction, turn right. The way is blocked. Left seems like a decent option in retrospect, so I opt for that. And then the zombies are ahead of us, bursting one-by-one from the wall.

  Felicity’s gun barks, takes down one. Takes down another. But then one explodes out of the wall right beside her. It claws at her. She kicks it in the gut. It smacks back against the side of the corridor.

  Something in its neck convulses. Some alien anatomy grafted there. The zombie tilts its head back, the whole thing pivoting back around the jaw, stretching the mouth inhumanly wide. There is a glimpse of blackened teeth and tongue.

  Then something erupts out of the creature’s distended neck, thrusts out between the teeth. A bulbous mushroom stem pointing like a gun from the jaws. It bulges violently.

  Felicity throws herself sideways a moment before the mushroom’s hood erupts. The zombie collapses. Black spores fill the space where it stood.

  78

  Felicity rolls. I grab her arm, help heave her to her feet. Clyde grabs me under the shoulder. Together we drag her free.

  Felicity blinks in surprise. I desperately search her eyes for a sudden blossoming of blackness. For signs of fungal infection. But there are none. She got free in time.

  Then she’s pushing up, yelling at me to get a move on. So I get my move on. But the zombies are closing tighter about us. Another emerges right in front of me. Its neck convulses. I punch it in the throat and it gags violently. Then its neck distends under the force of some internal detonation. Purple blood tinged with black sprays from its lips.

  I just killed someone. Someone I could have saved.

  On. On. Deeper in. Our pursuers a constant presence, constantly closing. We duck down one corridor, another. We wrestle through one sphincter door. More zombies await us.

  Necks bulge. Spores disgorge. Great vomited clouds of them. We duck and weave between them. I try to hold my breath but it is coming too raggedly. Around us the whole structure seems to creak and quiver. Distant explosions wrack the place. The sense of imminent disaster is heavy in the air, like a headwind I need to force my way through.

  Why the hell didn’t I bring a sword? Why the hell didn’t I ask the marines for one? I shoot zombies again, again, again. One more magazine down. Another. I slam the final one home. And it is not enough. A pitiable defense against the numbers opposing us.

  I put my head down, do my best to gain some distance. The others do the same. We race zombies and our own cramping muscles. And somehow we stretch our lead from three yards to ten, to fifteen, to twenty.

  We come to a confluence of tunnels. Three of them fusing together. A massive cord rises in the floor, distorting its surface in a rough curve—some major artery in Clyde’s compound. This has the feeling of something important.

  A few yards down the corridor, emerging from the gloom—a door. An honest-to-goodness door. Not a sphincter, or portal, or cloaca, but a real door. It’s made out of steel. It has rivets.

  I edge ahead of Felicity and Clyde, slam my weight against the door, heave. Nothing happens. Behind us, our lead narrows. Then I realize the door pivots, up and to the side. I tug laterally and the door swings up. I usher Felicity and Clyde through then scurry after them.

  The room beyond is vast. A great hangar of a hall. It lies empty now, but there is a sense of latent heat. As if something vast was just here. Version 2.0’s zombie army perhaps? Something worse?

  “We should get out of here,” I say. The place feels off. I hate to think of the things that could bud through these walls. The last thing we need is some zombie version of the dog we fought in Bryant Park. “I am a huge fan of that plan,” Clyde says. “Willing to start a convention in its honor. PlanCon. Everyone will come. And then immediately leave, I suppose. Thematically that would be the thing to do at least. Maybe not such a great convention actually.”

  “Yes,” Felicity agrees. “You guys move on up ahead.”

  Wait…

  I turn to her, try to read her expression. “All of us,” I say. “All of us move on ahead.”

  Something impacts against the far side of the door.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “This is a natural choke point. This is an easy hold. I can delay them. I can
get you the distance you need.”

  “No.” I shake my head. This is an absolute. Non-negotiable. I do not leave the woman I love behind to die.

  “What happens if I don’t do this, Arthur?” She finally looks me in the eyes. And I see nothing but conviction there. “What happens if we get to those servers? How long could we buy Clyde to do his work? Enough? I don’t think so.”

  I want to argue with her. I want to grab her and just run. But I can’t and I don’t. Already I know she’s right. I know that we couldn’t buy him enough time. But there has to be another way. This can’t be it.

  “Someone has to make a stand here,” Felicity insists. The door starts to pivot open. She lets a zombie get an arm through then slams it closed. The arm is severed with a meaty “chunk,” and proceeds to spray black fluid across the floor. “Someone has to buy you the time you need.”

  “I’ll stay,” I say. “You go with Clyde.” It’s all I can think of, and as soon as the thought comes it’s obvious.

  “No.” Felicity shakes her head, definitive.

  “Why not?” I say. “It makes sense, you’re… you’re…” I attempt to put it into words. “…So much more than me.”

  “No,” she says again.

  “You have to.” Desperation is setting in. Zombies are clamoring at the door.

  “No.” A third time. And then she almost says something else, but she swallows it.

  “You have to let me stay.” I beg her. I beg her with everything I have. “You know how I feel about you. You know I love you. I don’t care what you’ve said. How you feel. I know I should but I don’t. I love you. It’s that simple. So I can’t let you stay here. I can’t let you… you…” I struggle against the word. “I cannot let you die for me. You have to let me stay.”

  I’m almost on my knees. Some godawful parody of a proposal.

  Felicity turns away, turns her back on my words, faces the door. And that’s it, I think. It really is over. She just pointed her gun at Gran because I was one of her team. She’s done with loving me. That’s not a factor in her decisions anymore.