The woman punched him hard in the face, her suit-boosted strength a match for his own. His head rocked back. His left eye watered; he suspected his cheekbone was cracked.
He returned the favor and found their ablative tachyon gel didn’t extend to their masks. She staggered, stunned.
Grappling with her, he managed to dig his fingers under the bulky housing on her forearm, and wrenched off the panel in a spitting fury of sparks. The operative abruptly plunged out of synch. Like her gun, she froze in mid-motion, stuck at an impossible off-balance angle.
Another shot missed taking Turncoat’s head off by inches. He could even smell the chronite particles, that familiar and hateful nose-stinging whiff like ozone and burnt sugar. The beam hit the hologram display generator instead, where Exemplar’s logo had paused mid-revolution like a solid sheet of color.
Some of the others opened up with a wild carelessness. Turncoat seized his new opponent and whirled, dragging the hapless operative into the path of their beams. The man’s back arched, a shriek tearing from his throat as the disruption wreaked havoc on his suit.
Then he saw one of them, a member of the second team, closing in on a different target.
He wasn’t their primary objective, after all.
He was the one they were going to pin with the blame.
Again.
~~~
So fast, it happened so fast, everything, and she didn’t understand. Before she’d so much as begun to catch her breath, Turncoat vanished before her very eyes. A tornado of frantic action, strobe-light rushing madness, seemed to be going on all around her.
In less than five seconds, several things occurred so close to simultaneously they might as well have been.
Pyromelter’s sculpture zigzagged with fracturing fissures and exploded in a showering hail of glass. A strange-looking gun flew out of nowhere. A woman in a techy silver bodysuit hit the floor, some broken component smoking on her forearm. Exemplar’s logo winked out as the hologram projector blew up. A man, in an identical bodysuit, flopped at Epitome’s feet with his head twisted backwards on his spine.
Just as suddenly, Turncoat was there again! Right in front of her, out of nowhere. Reaching for her, sweeping his arm and coat like a dark cape.
She reacted immediately.
Immediately wasn’t fast enough.
As he pulled her against him – his grip was like iron cables, techlonium bands – and as she swung her elbow at his throat, the whole world disintegrated.
Meaningless sound rushed and raced.
Everything blurred.
Speed and vertigo.
Falling.
Velocity.
Then came a jarring, solid whack…a jolt to mind and body and senses alike...and reality was there again.
Her elbow finished its swing. But that dizzying sensation, that speeding blur of vertigo and velocity, threw her off just enough that she didn’t strike his larynx with full crushing accuracy or strength.
It was, however, enough to make him release her. Or fail to hold on as she wrenched away. Epitome stumbled a few headlong steps and managed not to faceplant. She spun on the balls of her feet, whipping out her stun-baton and snapping it to full extension in a single well-practiced maneuver.
Turncoat wasn’t attacking. He was in a crouch, elbows on knees, head hanging and breath coming in ragged, gasping coughs. He’d pulled down his half-mask, letting it drape against his collar.
And they weren’t in Memorial Hall.
It was an alleyway around them, some grimy trash-strewn alley. Miles from where they’d been. Miles, in the blink of an eye.
Teleportation? Translocation?
Which weren’t supposed to be possible. She knew the theories. She knew the limitations. Even Ex hadn’t been able to do anything like that.
She hefted the baton. It should have been thrumming with stun-force, but was dead in her hand, an inert stick. Her earbud should have been abuzz with the usual scanner and heroband chatter, but it sat silent. Her communicator was out. Everything electronic seemed to have spontaneously given up, after that…that…whatever it was.
“What did you do?”
“Saved your life.”
“What?”
He raised his head to look at her. He was…younger than she’d expected, though that shouldn’t have been surprising. Not if he, too, had been involved with Project Hourglass. Younger, but his eyes were old. Old, and weary, and filled with their own shadows.
“SHARD set you up. They were going to kill you. Add to the tragedy; make it look like my fault. Get more funding, more power. Just like they’ve always done.”
“You killed...”
“No. I didn’t.”
Epitome stared at him for a long, long moment. He held her gaze with a forthrightness she hadn’t seen since…Exemplar.
“He was my friend,” Turncoat said. His voice had strengthened, his wounds already healing at an accelerated pace. “If either of us is going to survive, if we’re going to avenge him and stop SHARD, we’ll need each other’s help.”
THE MAN WHO FED THE FOXES
Phil Sloman
Paul Wilson sat alert on the decking, peering into the gloom.
Even if the sun had been high in the sky rather than cresting the horizon, as it currently was, there wouldn’t be much to see: an overgrown garden in need of an industrial lawnmower and a team of willing volunteers.
At the end stood a broken greenhouse, barely five years old yet virtually forgotten, the glass fractured and smeared the colour of pond scum by a colony of algae. Two abandoned compost bins nestled beside it, like giant salt and pepper shakers, overflowing and surrounded by flowering weeds.
His borders, which had been so immaculate in a former life, flourishing with begonias, tulips and carefully cultivated roses, were now clogged with bindweed, nettles and dandelions.
His lawn had once been his pride and joy, manicured to the millimetre, but that was in the past when his friends used to joke you could have played crown green bowls on it. Not that his friends visited any more.
Paul was a mimicry of his garden; shabby, unkempt, in need of attention. A scarecrow man, broken and forgotten. His shirt, stained with last night’s dinner, was fraying at the seams, struggling to contain his middle aged spread, his jeans more holes than fabric, the denim pale and faded.
His hair, once a uniform short back and sides, now hung lankly in a mix of browns and greys against his shoulders, blending with his beard which claimed home to the yellowed, crusted yolk from his morning’s fried egg sandwich.
Not that any of it mattered much in the great scheme of things. If nature wanted to claim his garden then let her, it had been hers to begin with anyway. And his friends. Well, if they didn’t want him then he certainly didn’t want them and that suited him fine. Just fine. He had other things to occupy his time.
Paul dragged his blanket closer, warding off the chill as the summer air cooled around him, the tartan pattern ruffling as he struggled to get comfortable. Cheap plastic creaked and cracked in protest, the chair complaining beneath his weight, but it held, ready to see out another night.
On the lawn, less than ten feet away, a haze of flies squabbled around the meat. They did so most nights. He always placed it there, never nearer, never further, carefully positioned as to be far enough from the decking but close enough to give him a clear view.
The cloud performed a little dance: fly, land, suck and twirl, fly, land, suck and twirl, repeated like a miniature troop of Morris men performing for the crowds. Except there was only Paul who watched on, struggling to keep track of their flights in the worsening light. The offering wasn’t for them but it didn’t matter. There was plenty more meat to be had.
Next to the meat was a bowl of milk, curdled in the heat of the day, a viscous skin crusting its surface. The letters D O G were embossed on the brown glazed ceramic, though it had been years since they had owned any pets.
The bowl had belonged to Shandy, a canine
substitute for the children they never had, not that they would have ever admitted such a thing to themselves. Shandy had been gone for nearly a decade (they never said dead, always gone) and Paul couldn’t bring himself to replace him.
It seemed such a callous act of betrayal. She had asked Paul a hundred times to throw the bowl out and threatened on more than one occasion to do it herself. She had said that about a lot of things but he always ignored her, always loathe to throw anything away, a hoarder then and a hoarder still, but the one thing he hadn’t been able to keep hold of was her.
So now he sat here alone of an evening, every evening, watching and waiting for the foxes to come. But none came that night.
~~~
The last ‘friend’ to visit was Rachel Gladstone, all full of concern and nosiness. That had been six months ago, long before the foxes.
~~~
Ding dong.
He jumped; it had been so long since anyone had rung his door.
Paul waited.
Whoever it was might go away.
He was comfortably cocooned in his living room, nursing a glass of cheap Rioja, soothing the world away. He had sat in the exact same way for several weeks now, huddled into his armchair for hours on end.
There was routine to his life, a routine he liked. Get up, wash (optional), throw on some clothes and face the trials and tribulations of the day all delivered through his television set.
Now and again he might be as bold as to attempt a jigsaw, something classic depicting battles from the Napoleonic era, officers in blood stained uniforms barking out orders whilst grand explosions ballooned in the background.
He enjoyed the banality of it all, the simplicity, there were no grey areas, no ambiguity, either the piece fitted or it did not. And when the last piece was down he could settle back with his wine for company.
Ding dong.
Sit and wait them out.
There was his answer.
No one could be that concerned about him.
Probably one of those Jehovah’s come to spread the good word. There had been enough good words from friends in the past months; not one of them changed anything, not one of them stopped the tears from soaking his pillow every night. He took another sip of wine, enjoying the numbing feeling creeping across his forehead. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something twitch. A silhouette at the window.
Bugger. He should have hidden. Slunk behind the sofa out of sight. Maybe they hadn’t seen him. It was dark in here and they could mistake him for a pile of dirty laundry abandoned for later.
Tap, tap, tap.
The sound of knuckles rapping against his windowpanes.
And waving.
There was waving now, definitely in his direction.
“Paul, Paul, yoo-hoo, it’s Rachel,” the words were muffled as they came through the glass, like someone shouting through a towel.
He inwardly shuddered. Rachel, Rachel Gladstone, Rachel bloody Gladstone.
A local snoop with nothing better in her life than to live through the lives of others. She reminded him of a parasite, a bloated leech which kept sucking and sucking until it eventually fell off. But she never did. This was the third time she had visited since Amelia had gone. He knew from past experience he would have to let her in.
The tenacious bloody leech.
“My god, you look terrible,” the first words from her mouth as he opened the door.
Rachel bloody Gladstone. As delicate with her words as ever. He was inclined to slam the door in her puffy little face right there and then but he knew it would cause more aggravation in the long run. Get more people poking their nose in where it wasn’t wanted. He smiled sweetly and stood aside.
“How lovely to see you, Rachel,” (lie), “won’t you come in?”
She didn’t wait for a second invitation, shoving her way past him, her sensible shoes trailing mud across the threshold from the soil beneath his front window. In her hand was a hessian bag, the word Waitrose emblazoned on the side to show the world what a good person she was, one who thought about the environment by not needlessly wasting plastic carriers. It sagged in the middle like its owner.
“Now, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve brought you some...oh.”
Paul knew what had stopped her mid-sentence; he could smell the snobbery wafting off her in waves. He could hear the sound of the cogs whirring in her elitist skull full of its airs and graces, judging the disarray which was his house. He shut the door and followed her into the living room.
“Some what, Rachel?” He kept his tone flat, not caring what she had brought with her. He wanted her in and out, and anything which sped that up was fine by him.
“Some, um,” she stepped over a pair of discarded pizza boxes and shuffled towards the armchair. That had been Amelia’s chair when she lived here. It wasn’t anymore. Now it housed a mountain of circulars, fallen through the letterbox and dumped there unopened, a nest of false promises to improve one’s life. One day Paul would get around to throwing them away. One day.
“Some…?” Paul ventured. He picked up his abandoned wine glass and filled it, disinclined to offer Rachel any.
“Some dinner.” She dipped into her bag, flourishing a Tupperware container filled with something which resembled a casserole or stew. Her gaze fell back to the pizza boxes. “Though I see you seem to be looking after yourself…,” she sucked at her teeth, searching for the right word, “…admirably.”
That wrinkle of the nose as she finished her sentence. He had forgotten about the wrinkle.
God, how he hated the wrinkle.
Paul sipped his wine, draining a third of the glass before it left his lips.
“Thank you. Very kind. If you could leave it on the side.”
“Paul?”
Oh God, she’s perching. She’s actually bloody perching.
The Tupperware disappeared back into the bag as she cleared a space on the arm of the sofa, sending an avalanche of junk mail crashing to the floor. She ignored this and carried on; after all, it wasn’t as if she was making the place anymore untidy then it already was.
Paul took another swig of his wine and topped up his glass.
“Paul, I’m worried about you. You haven’t been the same since, um, you know, since Amelia.”
How would you bloody well know what I was like in the first place? Stupid woman.
He simply stared.
“And, well, I said to myself, Rachel I said, you need to go round there and let that poor man know he’s not alone. Show him he has someone to talk to.”
Someone to leech off him, you mean.
Another sip. Just a small one.
“So, Paul, how long has it been since, since….Amelia and him?”
There it was. There was the rub. This was the blood money she wanted for her homemade casserole.
To hear about him.
Her.
Them.
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
Him, had been his one-time best friend, or so he had thought at the time. Rhys Davis. God, he wished to this day he had never set eyes on him. Paul had met Rhys at The Griffin’s pub quiz. Rhys, new to the area, had sauntered over, asking if he could join Paul and Amelia at their table.
“Room for one more?” was how he had phrased it with his oh so easy-going Welsh tones.
Paul hadn’t been keen but Amelia had insisted. To Paul’s surprise they had hit it off, especially when Rhys got the round in, and before long Rhys became a regular feature round their house, popping round to help with the DIY and Paul would return the favour, helping Rhys with his garden.
Amelia had welcomed the new friendship, saying it was good to see Paul smiling again. Things were good. Amelia was more ‘friendly’ than she had been in years; she had even stopped nagging him about his ‘ways’ as she called them, the hoarding and the clutter; unfinished puzzles covering any vacant surface in the house.
Things were good indeed.
Paul had come home early one ev
ening. He had been at the garden centre for more fertiliser to feed the tomatoes in the greenhouse. Last year’s batch had been a poor show and he was determined to give the current crop a fighting chance.
He had caught Rhys and Amelia en flagrante; that was the term the foreigners used, wasn’t it?
His best friend and his wife of thirty years playing ‘hide the proverbial sausage’ in their marital bed.
There had been words, plenty of words, though he couldn’t remember many of them. He had blacked out from the stress. He had always been bad at confrontations. Even as a child he would shy away from arguments, quick to anger and quick to flee, running away to hide in the corner until the red mist cleared and the bad words faded into the ether.
When he came to, dried tears tracks streaked across his cheeks, there was no sign of the pair of them and Amelia’s clothes were gone.
For the first few days he stayed at home, waiting patiently for Amelia to tell him she had made a mistake, for her to settle her slight frame down on the sofa and beg for his forgiveness (and he knew he would give it).
He busied himself with the garden, potting on his tomatoes, keeping the lawn trim, even tidying away the clutter ready for her return.
But she never came back. He tried phoning her mobile with no success. Always to voicemail. Then one day he received a text out of the blue saying to forget about her and that was that.
Nothing more.
As word spread across the neighbourhood, he realised he had been the last to know about the affair. Those friends of his who dared to show their faces all used phrases like ‘I half suspected as much,’ or ‘it was inevitable in the end, really.’ So he hid away, like in his childhood.
Giving up on his garden and his friends. And no one came to visit him anymore, which he liked.
Until today.
“I think you should, Paul. I think you should talk about it. It will be helpful, don’t you think?”
“No. No I don’t think it would.” He surprised himself by speaking out loud. If Rachel heard the anger in his words she ignored it.
“Paul,” she murmured; that tone of mock concern stretched over two syllables. The sofa arm creaked as she rose, reaching over to put her arm on his wrist, the touch of a leech sensing sustenance. “Paul, sit down and let’s talk about things.”
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