Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  The air comes alive with bullets. Desperately, I roll back the way I came, toward the shelter of the mecha’s corpse.

  Bullets slam into the steel frame. I keep my head down, try to piece together the action from noise alone. From the ricochets I can tell the marines are moving. How long will it take one of them to circle round? I listen for sparks, for mumbled gibberish, for a sign that Clyde is still standing. I listen for Tabitha coming for my blood.

  The mecha looms above me. The massive suit of weaponized armor. And… God, I don’t want to look up at the corpse hanging in the cage above me. I don’t want to look at what I’ve done.

  But there’s a chance the mecha is a solution to my on-the-verge-of-being-killed problem. If I used the buzz saw as some kind of shield, maybe I could herd the remaining marines out of here. Like I’m some sort of massive mechanized sheep dog or something.

  It’s not the best plan, but it’s pretty much my only one. I risk a glance up at Gran. His head lolls at the sort of unnatural angle only permitted by a partially severed neck. Blood slowly oozes out of the wound. Which means his heart has stopped.

  Bile splashes against the back of my throat. I swallow hard, wincing as acid scores my tonsils.

  Jesus. What have I done?

  But I know exactly what I’ve done. I made a choice. About what sort of person I am. About what I’m doing here. About my level of commitment.

  I killed Gran for my plan. I can’t be squeamish now.

  I lever myself up, trying to be careful about the angles between me and the still shooting marines. I look at the straps holding Gran’s body in. If I can get over the basic horror of moving Gran, they shouldn’t be too complicated. Then I glance at the controls.

  Oh balls…

  It looks like an aircraft’s flight deck got a videogame controller drunk and knocked it up behind the bike sheds. A bulging swarm of dials and buttons, joysticks and toggles. I have about as much hope of mastering it as I do of becoming impervious to bullets.

  Which means I’m down one plan, and back at zero again.

  Bullets hit the steel frame. From a new angle. The marines are moving to flank me. “Clyde!” I yell.

  “Happy to be of assistance as soon as I lay my hands on some jumper cables.”

  Crap sticks.

  “Kayla?”

  “Feck off.”

  Plans do indeed appear to be sparse on the ground. I consider yelling Tabitha’s name but in the shadow of her boyfriend’s corpse that might be considered pushing it right now.

  Then another feature of the cockpit draws my eye. Small black cylinders. LED read-outs.

  Gran’s thermic charges.

  I glance back at the mecha controls. But no, they still don’t make sense. And honestly, I’m more likely to get a handle on demolitions before I am on advanced robotics.

  I grab one of the thermic charges, examine it. The LED read-out is a timer. Three unlabeled buttons sit below it. Can’t be that hard. I try one of them. The timer grows bright.

  00:00:50:00.

  There seem to be too many numbers, but… erm… I need to get it down from fifty minutes, I guess. I press another one. The numbers flicker and jump.

  00:00:30:00.

  I go back to the first button.

  00:01:00:00.

  What the hell? What sort of mad logic… Back to the second button.

  00:00:40:00.

  OK, this makes no sense. I press the third button just for kicks.

  The numbers spring to life. A dizzying blur of LED. The final two are nothing but a transitional glow, moving too fast to be read. The forty speed counts down to thirty.

  What the hell?

  The numbers keep on screaming downwards. Not slowing. Not measuring minutes. Thirty becomes twenty in the blink of an eye.

  Down to twenty.

  Seconds? Forty meant four seconds? Who the hell measures time that way? Who has numbers for hundredths and thousandths of seconds? What sort of insane bomb-making psychotic, CIA, bastard… There is no time to aim. Only to fling it wildly, desperately away. A mad hooked shot around the frame of the mecha. I snatch my hand away.

  There is time to hear the oof of whoever the bomb hits, and then to think, shit, they got really close.

  Then it detonates.

  87

  A solid wall of heat. It slams into me like the palm of God. I crash back, impact against the flat blade of the mecha’s saw, still embedded in the wall.

  My head rings. My vision blurs as my eyes go into separate orbits. I blink, stagger. There is shouting and shooting. The sound of gunfire moving.

  Away?

  What happened…?

  A marine. A marine had snuck up on the mecha. Must have been less than ten yards from me when I threw the bomb. Just dumb luck that I hit him.

  Jesus. The bomb hit him.

  God, I am trying to not kill people here. I think I just atomized one of them. Jesus…

  The sound of gunfire stabilizes. Gains a new source. I can hear where they are. Further away now. Holy crap. That worked. I drove them back.

  If I can just keep pushing them back… Push them back and not vaporize them… I grab another charge from the mecha’s case. I press the first button.

  00:00:50:00.

  Is that five seconds? That doesn’t make any sense. Then it should be a five and not a fifty… Bloody military nonsense.

  Screw it. I press the middle button. The numbers spring to life. I fling the bomb as high and as hard as I can. To the marines’ left. Try to get them to move back toward the rip in the wall they entered through.

  The bomb is not exactly aerodynamic. Still I get some decent distance on it. I hear it clunk and roll. I risk a glimpse under the mecha’s saw arm.

  It goes off like a firework. A blistering star of fire arcing through the room. I see the air quake at the heat ripple. See it tearing through bundles of wires. Tearing toward me.

  In the movies, people duck away from explosions. They out-run fireballs. Movies are way better than real life.

  The shockwave slams into me. It’s worse than the first one. I feel the heat rip over me, through me. Feel the impact of it in my gut. Taste blood. I fly backwards. And thank God that 2.0 made these walls spongy. I am cushioned between arterial cords, then the elasticity snaps forward, slamming me face first into the ground.

  Cries. Yells. Gunfire. Running feet.

  I pick myself up, dribbling blood. I think I may have knocked a tooth loose. Some dull, numbed part of me wonders if I can get it fixed while I’m still in the US. Avoid NHS dental care. That said, I just blew up at least one marine, so the chances of the US being a very fun place for me after this are slim enough to make Kate Moss look chubby.

  Marines. I am throwing bombs at marines. What the hell am I doing? These men are just following orders. Goddamn shitty orders.

  I risk another look. The room is a disaster. It looks like… well, it looks like a bomb went off in it. Which it did.

  Bundles of wires hang in tattered rags. Plastic bubbles around copper. The floor and walls are scorched. Fires flicker, spit greasy smoke into the sky.

  The marines hunker around the rip through which they entered the room. A bristling mass of weaponry and scorched machismo.

  I grab another thermic charge, prime it, throw. I have no interest in seeing how accurate I am this time. I just hunker down and wait for the detonation. It comes early and seems, to my damaged ears, to be located higher up. The marines shot it in midair? The concussive explosion rips through the air around me. The mecha at least offers some protection.

  The heat in the room is sweltering. I don’t know how these charges work, but when they go, they really do belch out heat. I can hear creaking and tearing from above. The sound of something giving way. Shouts and cries.

  “Move!”

  “Fall back!”

  “Oh shit!”

  And still I hunker and wait. After a few moments I risk a glimpse. The devastation is markedly worse. Someth
ing that lies between infrastructure and internal organs sag from the ceiling. Fluid pulses down into the room. It hits fires and steam mixes with the smoke.

  But the marines… The marines… I can’t see the marines.

  “Can we leave now?” It’s Clyde’s voice.

  And I think we have to. I grab the fourth and final charge from the mecha, scramble toward his voice.

  “You see an exit?” I call.

  “Great big feckin’ hole in the wall next to you.” Kayla’s voice is close.

  I hesitate, glance over my shoulder. That does indeed look like an exit.

  Kayla emerges from behind a pile of smouldering wires. Her shirt is smoking and noticeably more tattered than when we entered the room.

  “What about Felicity?” It’s my first response. It shouldn’t be. I should be asking how Kayla is. If she’s injured. But I don’t care about that as much as I do about Felicity.

  Let me not have hit her. Let her still be OK. Let the bandage have held. Please. Please.

  Kayla rolls her eyes. “Feckin’ priorities,” she mutters.

  Clyde staggers out of smoke toward me. He looks like he’s barely functioning. Sparks spit out of tears in his joints. His once mirror-shining head is just a smudge of scorched metal. One leg is bent and grates with each step.

  And Tabitha. He is supporting Tabitha.

  God, what do I say? What can I possibly say to make this right?

  It’s not even right. What a fucked up fantasy the idea of doing right was. It was just necessary. But how the hell do I explain that?

  But Tabitha doesn’t even look at me. It’s as if I don’t exist. She just walks forward, eyes staring, fixed on the mecha. She is bleeding from a gash along her close-cropped scalp. Clyde helps her past me and she doesn’t even blink as I interrupt her field of vision. Her eyes just glide over me.

  Kayla takes off at speed. Possibly Mach one. We move toward the tear. She makes it back as we push between the torn skin between the rooms. Felicity is on her shoulders.

  “Is she—” I start.

  “I’m not bothering carrying round a feckin’ dead woman.” Kayla muscles past me through the tear.

  I can hear the marines shouting back at their own makeshift entryway. The rally is coming soon. I need to seal this exit.

  I eye the last thermic charge. We may need it up ahead. But… God, I don’t think we can go much further. Might as well shore up the distance we’ve managed so far. I manage to wrestle the timer for what looks like ten seconds, chuck it fifty yards or so away, turn, and push my way out of the room.

  88

  The shockwave hits the wall behind me at the exact moment Tabitha’s fist hits my jaw.

  She unslings her arm from around Clyde’s shoulder, pulls it back, and slugs me. She strikes up, compensating for the height difference, catches me under the jaw. Me and the wall both quake. The wall doesn’t go down. I do.

  Then she’s on me. Hitting, kicking, biting, scraping. I should defend myself, should push her away, but I just killed her boyfriend. It doesn’t seem right to defend myself. I deserve this.

  Someone grabs her, pulls her off me. Kayla, I see, as one of my eyes starts to swell. I’d love to put something cold on it, but everyone else here seems to be in the middle of melting something.

  “Get yourself under feckin’ control,” Kayla hisses at Tabitha.

  “Killed him! Bastard killed him!”

  I slowly pick myself up. I don’t really feel like it, but there’s nothing much else left to do. Tabitha stares at me vindictively. All I can do is nod.

  “Did you not feckin’ see him chasing Arthur around with a big feckin’ chainsaw hand? If it’d been me, he’d have been lucky if I just stopped at shooting him the once. Be wearing his feckin’ testicles as a necklace right now, I would.”

  I wish I could tell if Kayla just had a really dark sense of humor or if she really was borderline psychotic.

  “What the fuck happened?” Tabitha spits at me. “What about your bullshit speeches? What about being better than that?” She wipes at her eyes so fiercely it’s almost a clawing motion. “Can’t you go a fucking month without killing a boyfriend of mine?”

  Fuck. Fuck. God, and she’s right. What the hell sort of person have I become? When I shot Clyde—when all this started, I suppose—Tabitha had just started dating him. Admittedly he’d been possessed by evil aliens, but… I shot him.

  A line from Macbeth comes to me. “I am now so steeped in blood, t’would be easier to carry on than to turn back.” Something like that anyway. Is that who I’ve become?

  Except I never did like that play. Too much fate and fatalism. Macbeth never seemed to really want to buck the tide. He just took the path of least resistance, and gave into the embrace of tyranny. Isn’t fighting that impetus the whole thing I’m fighting for? Wasn’t that why I shot Gran? Or at least some less pretentious version of that?

  “He was going to doom us all,” I say. “I didn’t want to do it. God, I didn’t want to. But he was going to throw humanity away. And we can save them.”

  I don’t know if the big picture will really mean anything against something so brutally personal, but it’s all I have.

  “Yeah,” Kayla says. “That and the feckin’ thing with the chainsaw.”

  Tabitha stalks toward me. She looks down at the laptop in her hands, at my head. And then she swings it back like a cricket bat, ready to knock me for six.

  There is an ugly grinding noise, and the blow never comes. I stop wincing long enough to see that Clyde has caught Tabitha’s arm.

  “What would you have done, Tabby?” he says. “In Arthur’s place?”

  She pulls against his restraint, and I hear his elbow joint crunch in a decidedly unpretty way. But she doesn’t break free. She glares at me again, still murderous. “Given in!” she shouts. At both of us, I think. “Been less of a stubborn fucking arsehole.”

  Clyde stays there, holding her. His voice is low and calm, like the ocean without a breeze. Something intimately human in those mechanical words. “Would you really?”

  “Fuck off!” Tabitha suddenly turns from me, from him, pulls hard, breaks away. Clyde’s arm coughs out sparks, drops limp. She claws at her eyes again.

  “Shouldn’t have done it,” she says. “He shouldn’t have done it.”

  “I know,” I say. “But—”

  “Not you!” she snaps. She whirls. Fire white hot in her black eyes. “Him. Gran. Shouldn’t have done it. Didn’t think…” She pushes a hand over her scalp savagely. It comes away red with the blood of the cut there. “When he pointed the gun at you… Bluster. I fucking assumed bluster. Fucking idiot. Me. Him. You.” She claws more blood from her hair. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. The words seem so little against the deed.

  “Shut the fuck up.” Tabitha agrees with me.

  “It’s done.” Kayla steps between us, Felicity still on her shoulder. Felicity slowly dying on her shoulder. “So shut the feck up and move on. Deal with this bullshit later. When there’s time for consequences.”

  And that makes a certain amount of sense, but, “No.” I shake my head. There has to be an accounting for actions. That’s part of this too. Part of being worth saving.

  I step toward Tabitha. Into the heat of her rage. “I am sorry,” I say again. Only words, but they need to be said. “I didn’t want to shoot him. If I could have seen a way out of it, then I wouldn’t have. If I was a better person, perhaps. But the stakes are what they are. And it’s not all my fault. But it is some. I accept that. I acknowledge that. I want you to know that I understand it. That I will make amends when I can. In any way I can. I can’t make this right. I can only make it seem less pointless. And I will if I can. I promise you that.” I look her right in the eyes. “It’s all I can promise. But I mean it.”

  We are locked there for a moment. Her grief meeting mine. The heat of hers, the numb chill of mine. But Felicity is there. Right there. Reminding me
of why I am here, of everything that I am trying to do. And in the end it is Tabitha who looks away.

  “Fuck,” she says.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Say it again,” she says without looking back. “Once more. Dare you.”

  I shut up. And take a second. Just one. Just to take stock. The mental and physical inventory. And it’s not good. We’re in the middle of some slowly collapsing biological horror house, which is quite possibly sinking into the Arctic Ocean. All of us have been beaten to within an inch of our lives—possibly closer—and pushed way outside of our moral comfort zones. We’re traumatized, exhausted, and about five seconds from giving out. And as far as I can tell we have still done piss all to save the world.

  I look around me. Another dark, fetid little room. It smells vaguely of offal. And I’m sad I know what offal smells like.

  But there is a bundle of wires. And it is fatter than anything that was in the room beyond. It snakes away from us. So there is still a trail to follow.

  I take a breath, as deep as my battered lungs will allow. “OK,” I say. “Honestly, as ridiculous as it is to say, nothing has changed. The plan is the same. We find Version 2.0, we find his servers. We take them, get into them, Clyde puts in Tabitha’s code, and we hijack the wireless signal.” I look over to Tabitha. “You do still have the wireless box, don’t you?”

  Tabitha reaches down to something hanging from her belt.

  “Wait.” It’s Kayla. She holds up her hand and stares at me. “That is your plan? Feckin’ still? Revising the feckin’ thing didn’t cross your feckin’ mind?” She looks incredulous. “That’s what I’ve been feckin’ fighting for?”

  I stare back at her. She has caught me completely off guard. How can she not know this? I think back to when she rejoined us. And she missed… But… I look back at the gash in the wall behind me, sealed now with rubble.

  “Those people…” I say. “You killed… You fought…”

  “Yeah,” she almost shouts. “Because I thought you had some sort of better feckin’ plan. Some sort of reasonable feckin’ idea how to get a feckin’ handle on this feckin’ shit of a feckin’ mission, you feckin’ dumb feck. I mean, are you feckin’ shittin’ me?”